Torrance, Fall Present, 3067.
Despite being surrounded by hundreds of other pedestrians, Kieran McGavin walked alone, keeping his thoughts to himself. A loud chime sounded from the public address system and a soothing female voice had announced the latest train having just arrived but he did not even notice it. Vast mosaics of tranquil scenes had been carefully laid along the cavernous walls of the underground station of Kiverson City so many centuries ago that it seemed more like a backdrop for a Byzantine church than a subway but still he paid it no mind.
Even with the climate controlled air-conditioning system that maintained a steady temperature that was installed back during the tranquil days of the first Star League gave him no comfort. Pain and indifference left a frosty chill in his air. Kieran occasionally saw couples with entwined hands, smiling and laughing as they passed him by and that made him all the more bitter. Would he himself ever find happiness? It was a basic human need yet it was so truly fleeting, so lamentably out of reach.
Just a week ago, he thought he had nearly achieved it. During the party held at the Terenson Estate, Natasha Kerensky had at last opened up to him after so many months since she reconstituted the Black Widow Company. Kieran was but an orphan doing his best and scraping along, trying to take care of his younger brother Duncan. After his older sister Megan was killed by the rampage of the terrible Beast of Ishiyama just over a year ago, he felt so lost then, so alone. He had been driven to the depths of despair at that point and he thought that nothing could have been worse than that. Yet now, he seemed to once again relive the depths of his past.
Kieran sighed as he passed by a girl his age, strumming an old wooden guitar and wearing beat up denims and a patchwork t-shirt that signified her bohemian wanderings. There was a worn-out old hat beside her, its brim upturned so as to catch an occasional penny from a not too indifferent passerby. He pulled out the last of his C-Bills and threw the whole wad into the hat. She immediately stopped picking at the strings and stared at him, an incredulous look in her blue eyes, as if she wasn't sure whether to thank him for the momentous donation or to curse him for placing fake bills into her hat. Kieran smiled faintly, then he turned his head and walked away. At least he made somebody happy tonight.
With his hair slightly ruffled by the sudden swoosh of another incoming MAGLEV subway car, Kieran decided to get on this one. It would be the commuter train heading for the nearby city of Grover. At least he could spend the rest of the night at the station there, for Grover had a large ticketing terminal, with many benches where he could just sleep on all night. He didn't want to go back to their barracks on the outskirts of Kiverson City for a while; it hurt him too much to stay there.
Ever since the Black Widow had met a mysterious young man that she discovered at that party, she seemed to ignore all her other duties. Every waking hour she now spent with him. Kieran had felt an overriding sense of loss when she focused all her attention on him, one Joshua Pennington. It seemed that Pennington was the case officer in the Federated Suns intelligence apparatus that alerted them to the machinations of the White Hand terrorist network. It seemed to have been love at first sight, thought Kieran. Was he now beginning to feel the bitter pangs of jealousy? Was all of his current angst just a smokescreen for his envy of Pennington? Why didn't he make the move and declare his love for Natasha when he had so many chances before?
As he sat on the plastic seats while the MAGLEV train began to hum as it was staring to move, Kieran began to analyze the situation. No, he would not have ever made any move on Natasha anyway, he accepted her as a mentor and guardian and he felt that it would have been enough. But now that someone else had gotten her affections, he began to doubt himself. It was so convenient for historians to look at past events with the hindsight of the present, but because it was all unfolding in front of him, he hated it. But there was perhaps something else. It was that the whole affair between the Black Widow and Pennington all seemed too convenient, too planned. That was what bothered him.
Kieran continued to brood on these thoughts as the train carried him into the nearby city of Grover.
Several hundred kilometers away, similar thoughts had plagued the back of Ethan Lafitte's mind as he sat in his makeshift office in the base. Being the Senior Technician of the Black Widow Company made Ethan privy to each and everyone's problems. He acted as a kind of psychiatrist for the unit, always lending his knowledge and experience to the others. He was a former soldier after all, and that helped a lot.
Earlier that morning, he had a talk with one of his junior techs, Kieran McGavin. The youth confided in him about his suspicions with the Federated Suns Intelligence officer who seemed to be spending a lot of off-duty time with their commander, Natasha Kerensky. At first Ethan just laughed it off and told Kieran that it was just a natural inclination to jealousy, for he knew how much the boy loved Natasha and looked up to her as both older sister and guardian. He thought that Kieran had nothing more than an adolescent crush on the Black Widow and those feelings were put to the test when she started seeing another. At first it all seemed as simple as that.
But Ethan also considered himself an amateur historian. He had a love of the past and pivotal events that had shaped humanity for the last five thousand years. The old soldier always felt that the key to unlocking the problems of the present lay with the past. And it was the past that had begun to bother him.
When he was first introduced to Joshua Pennington, Ethan thought he was a bright and charming young man, but something had picked the back of his mind the moment he saw his face. It was as if he had seen him before, not in person but he might have read about him before, Joshua had a face that seemed to have come out of a history book. Ethan wasn't quite sure but he seemed to remind him of someone.
It was that thought that had bothered him and so Ethan was spending the late hours of the night in his office. When all the other techs had decided to call it a day and returned to their quarters, Ethan had decided to wrestle with the thing that was bothering him, even if it took all night to do it. His desk was cluttered with spare parts for BattleMechs and technical manuals were strewn about haphazardly so that it took him nearly half an hour to find the jack port on the nearby wall after rummaging through the assorted stuff so that he could uplink his noteputer to the interweb. As the Senior Tech, Ethan had priority and pass codes in order to link up with the intelligence databases of both the Star League and the Federated Suns. He even had friends in Wolf's Dragoons who had given him pass codes with which to uplink to Wolfnet if necessary.
As he entered the pass codes, Ethan immediately began to scan the personnel files of some of the staff with FedSuns MI-5, the local counter-intelligence bureau. As he searched for Pennington's file, his noteputer went offline several times and slowed down to a crawl but he eventually was able to access them. The records seemed innocuous enough, there didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Ethan leaned back on his swivel chair and rubbed his eyes. It was nearly midnight now and still he had not gotten anywhere. Was it just a false suspicion?
After getting up and stretching his tired arms, he went over and activated the coffee perculator. A few minutes later, with a steaming cup of coffee beside him on his desk, Ethan sat down again and began to think as he massaged his tired temples. The entire office had its lights shut down already and the only illumination was of his noteputer's monitor screen; the effect cast eerie shadows along the walls. Just as he was about to doze off into slumberland, Ethan sat up with a jerk. With rapid keystrokes, the retired MechWarrior surfed over to Wolfnet's historical database. As he began to go through the historical records of the first Black Widow Company, he was sure he was getting close. The answer was there; he could feel it.
When he finally got to the historical picture galleries of the Dragoon personnel, he knew he was getting warmer. But it wasn't until he actually got to the personal dossiers of the Dragoon's command personnel that he finally sat back in shock. Staring back at him from the monitor was one of the few known official portraits of Joshua Wolf, the long-dead brother of the Dragoon's legendary commander, Jaime Wolf.
Ethan was stunned as he stared at the virtual portrait. The resemblance was so uncanny that Joshua Pennington was practically a mirror image of the long dead co-leader of the Dragoons. But how could it be? How could a man that had clearly died be alive again? Was it all nothing but a coincidence or was there something more sinister at work here?
He never once bothered to ask Natasha were she was truly from. All he knew of her was that she was the greatest soldier that he had ever seen in all his years of being in war and that she had a supernatural resemblance to the original Black Widow. He had once thought that it was all a trick of plastic surgery and that Natasha was nothing more than an admirer of the original but with this new revelation, the floodgates of history opened up all around him, drowning him in possibilities and unnatural congruencies.
Ethan picked up his hand communicator from his desk and dialed Kieran's number. As it kept ringing, he hoped that the boy would answer. After all, if there was anyone who spent more time with Natasha than anyone else, it was Kieran. As the rings eventually stopped and a voice prompt for Kieran's messaging service went active, Ethan made his decision.
"Kieran, this is Ethan Laffite." Ethan spoke into the message server, hoping that Kieran would play it back as soon as possible. "Call me back as soon as you can. You were right about Joshua Pennington."
As soon as he hung up, Ethan immediately began to dial the Monk's number, he would have preferred letting Jimmy Clavell know about it first but the fool was probably spending a drunken night at Kiverson City's red-light district again, it would be better to call him in the morning when he was sober. Right after the first ring tone, Ethan's communicator went static.
Ethan placed the comm. unit on his desk and started to rummage around for his toolkit. Perhaps the battery died, he thought. That little distraction left him completely unprepared as a garrote was slipped around his throat.
The former veteran of the AFFC immediately let out a cry as the noose became tighter and tighter. The garrote was made of industrial strength piano wire and the increasingly sharp pain on his throat made it very difficult to speak and then later to breath as he began to black out from the pain. Ethan tried to struggle by whipping his arms around to try to get at the assailant but the man behind him was very strong as he drove down onto Ethan's back, using his full weight and keeping Ethan's face pinned down on top of the table.
With a last desperate gasp, Ethan tried to grab a hold of a pen or a screwdriver, anything to use as a stabbing weapon to try to get the assailant to at least loosen the iron vise around his throat or just to even distract him for the sharp pain was becoming too unbearable. As the technical manuals and the noteputer fell off his desk with a loud crash and his arms thrashed around to find a weapon to use, the assailant kept at it.
Ethan was at last able to get a hold of something but as he tried to grip it, he just couldn't find the strength as he finally blacked out from the pain and the surrounding darkness overwhelmed him. He wanted to fight on but his tired old body finally let him down. Within a few minutes, his form stopped twitching and bile began to ooze from his open mouth as his eyes went totally white.
Joshua kept breathing heavily as he unwrapped the garrote from the dead man's throat and placed it back within the folds of his black clothing. He was lucky, in the last time that he had been in the temporary base of the Black Widows with Natasha, he made it a point of habit to place a Trojan program as well as a trace link on their interweb uplinks just in case someone began to probe too closely into his personal files. When someone did in fact began a scan of his records, the tracer program automatically pinpointed the location for him and he proceeded with all haste to eliminate the source. With luck, he would make it back to his quarters so as not to wake the sleeping Natasha who was sharing his bed with him this very night.
As Joshua began to move the corpse in order to dispose of it, he couldn't help thinking that he could have killed the Black Widow at any time. For the past week, he had a multitude of chances but even then he just couldn't seem to bring himself to do it. Was the phenomenon beginning to have an effect on his mental conditioning? He hoped not. It was obvious that time was running out for him. He needed to perform the hit tomorrow or otherwise he wouldn't get another chance. The Black Widow Company was one of the units chosen to safeguard the delegations in the upcoming Star League conference in Tharkad, less than a month away. He needed to do something quickly.