Captain Bishop bit her lip against a reply. The offer was a generous one by mercenary standards, and if Farrell didn’t realize how much of an insult it was by her own, now was not the time to teach him. She stalked back to her Pack Hunter in stiff-shouldered silence.
“Don’t forget what I said,” Farrell stood and called after her. She paused with her foot on the bottom rung of the ’Mech’s access ladder and looked back at him as he continued. “We can always use sharp kids.
“At least, we shouldn’t be fighting each other,” he added. “I could use a few more like you.”
Then he sat again, and redealt his cards.
Captain Bishop ascended the ladder to the Pack Hunter’s cockpit and spun the hatch closed. As quickly as she could, she put back on the cooling vest and neurohelmet and ran through the primary and secondary security sequences. She had to get back to the city as fast as she could and break the bad news to the Countess.
She pushed her Pack Hunter up into the upper range of its speed, keeping it near a hundred kilometers per hour as she took it in great loping strides toward the northeast, where the Highlander line was being pressed. She hadn’t used much ammo so far this morning, and her temperature level was fine. She turned to the battle circuit, looking for a place where the timely arrival of a Mech might make a difference.
The amount of radio traffic near the waterworks sounded like things were getting hot down there. She altered her course more to the east, then keyed up a call to the Countess.
“My lady, I have news that’s best delivered face-to-face. Where shall we meet?”
No answer came back over the link.
42
Fort Barrett
Kearney
Northwind
February 3134; dry season
General Griffin paced through his temporary headquarters at Fort Barrett, his aide, Lieutenant Owain Jones, by his side.
“I liked fighting on other people’s worlds more than I’m enjoying fighting on this one,” Griffin said. “And when it’s all over, I’m going to declare it a priority to make damned sure we have enough heavy-lift capacity to carry our ’Mechs and armor around without DropShips.”
“That’s a great project for next year,” Jones said. “As it is, we’ve got everything that’ll fly all the way to Tara with a soldier on board commandeered. The troops are embarking right now, and Fort Barrett’s commander is complaining that we’re stripping the continent of defenses.”
“If he keeps on complaining,” Griffin said, “you can tell him from me that if we don’t take everything we can from Kearney, we won’t have a world to defend, let alone a continent.”
Griffin came to his quarters—a cot walled off with temporary dividers behind a set of file cabinets, since Fort Barrett’s visiting officers’ quarters was currently as overcrowded as everything else—and pulled his own combat pack out from under the cot.
“Where do you have my ’Mech?” he asked Jones.
“Leaving from south of Benderville by heavy-lift VTOL,” Jones said. “It should get to the landing zone before you do. And I took the liberty of dispatching a holding force to Castle Northwind. They’re already airborne.”
“Good job. But that’ll signal the Wolves that we’re on the move, so we have to get the rest of this show on the road too. We don’t have enough airfields between Tara and the mountains to land everyone, and I don’t want to scatter my forces. We’ll deal with it as it happens. Give the order to saddle up and ride.”
43
Tyson and Varney ’Mech Factory
Northwest Sector
Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
Prefect Tara Campbell and her Hatchetman were prowling the grounds of the Tyson and Varney ’Mech Factory industrial park, hunting ’Mechs.
The Steel Wolves had almost as few of them as the Highlanders did, she was sure of it. Ever since Devlin Stone’s reforms had taken most of the individually or family owned ’Mechs out of the picture, full-scale BattleMechs had been uncommon and difficult to obtain. Battlefield seizure was always a workable method—she’d gotten a report of one Wolf ’Mech captured only this morning. The explosives that took it out of action had damaged it too badly for the Highlanders to get any immediate use out of it, but perhaps something could be done with it later.
If, she thought, there was a later.
She jump-jetted over a building—the Tyson and Varney Workers’ Assembly Hall—looking around at the top of her trajectory to see with her own eyes what the map display represented. There. The Steel Wolves had a group of three Fox armored cars in position behind the T&V Spring Bearing Plant. Their missiles would be of limited use here inside a built-up area, but if the fighting ever moved to the open ground outside the city, she’d prefer not to face the speedy little vehicles.
She touched down briefly on the street, then made another jump, this time to the top of the Spring Bearing Plant. A downward swipe of the Hatchetman’s ax, and an eight-meter hole opened up in the roof. She felt a momentary remorse for the destruction she’d just caused, but didn’t let the feeling slow her down. Tyson and Varney could always rebuild their factory later if the Highlanders won this fight; but if the Steel Wolves took over Northwind, the workers at T&V would be building IndustrialMod BattleMechs for Anastasia Kerensky if they were lucky enough to be working at all.
She jumped down through the hole in the roof, into the Spring Bearing Plant.
Dark in here, was her first thought. The plant’s interior lights were all off. She switched her viewscreen display over to infrared. Quiet in here, too.
The steady stream of background radio chatter had ceased, and she realized that the steel in the plant’s walls, and in the huge machines used to press spring bearings, distorted magnetic signatures and degraded communications. Well, her commanders would have to work without direct contact for a while.
The trio of Fox hovercraft that she’d spotted earlier had been located to the east, and that was straight ahead of her. She started off in that direction. The Hatchetman’s jump-jets would be useless in here, and the overhead was low enough that she had to walk the ’Mech down the length of the room in a half-crouch, and there was no way that she’d be able to take it through the doors at the end. She put on more speed and used the ’Mech’s forty-five-ton bulk to go crashing through the wall into the next room.
That was more fun than it probably ought to have been, she thought, just before the infantry group she’d broken in among started hammering. The Gauss rifle rounds went plinking off the ’Mech’s Durallex armor. Then one of the Steel Wolf troopers brought up a shoulder-launched missile, firing it in an enclosed space without regard for the danger the rocket blast presented to him and his mates.
The Hatchetman shuddered around her when the missile hit. Tara lashed out with the ax in her ’Mech’s right hand and the infantry scattered, diving into holes and corridors too small for the Hatchetman to follow them.
Well, that was the way of it. She sprinted for the far wall, striking it with her ax just a moment before impact to make a hole she could squeeze through, and crashed into the newly created opening, dropping and rolling, taking light damage but damage none the less, as she broke through into sunlight.
Three Fox armored cars with Steel Wolf markings waited there, as she’d expected, their armored sides wavering in the hot air from their engine exhaust. By the chewed and battered look of the Foxes’ armored sides, they’d already seen some hard fighting since moving off the DropPort landing field. Their extended-range medium laser cannons glittered menacingly in the morning sun, and Tara knew that both the lasers and the Voelkers 200 machine guns—two of them per Fox, for a total of six—would be on her in a moment. That much burning light and hot metal flying through the air had a chance of disturbing even a Hatchetman, if someone got lucky.
She used her own extended-range laser on the farthest hovercar, and was gratified to see it go up in flames as the beam punched th
rough its armor and struck the vehicle’s power plant. The nearest hovercar was spinning for a getaway, its crew reacting to the sudden appearance of a BattleMech in their midst. She slashed at it with her ax, cutting into the edge of the vehicle. It sank to the ground, the raw metal of its side scraping against the pavement and sending up a shower of bright sparks, shining brighter in her still-running IR view screen.
Putting the Hatchetman into a squat, she worked the ’Mech’s huge left hand under the vehicle’s skirt, and heaved it over onto its side. That one was out of the fight, though not beyond salvage. The remaining armored hovercar was withdrawing from the fight and heading away at top speed.
Tara Campbell used her ’Mech’s jump-jets to leap into the air and gain height-of-eye for a firing position. At the top of the leap, she took aim and cut loose with the laser. The Steel Wolf hovecar exploded, even as it turned and fired its lasers and machine guns both in a hopeless final attack.
Beam and bullets together passed harmlessly above her head as she came down from her jump and swatted the overturned second hovercar with the flat of her ax. The blow crushed the body of the vehicle down to a little more than half its former height. Now that one was beyond salvage, too.
Time to leave, she thought. All that bursting through walls had sheared off her ’Mech’s external antennae, reducing comm range and adding static to the reports she could hear. She turned the corner, heading back toward the Highlander lines.
And there, waiting in the alley that ran beside the Spring Bearing Plant, was a Tundra Wolf—seventy-five tons of jump-jetted, laser-fisted, missile-toting nasty, with the ravening silver-metal wolf’s head of the Steel Wolves emblazoned across its torso.
Hatchetman and Tundra Wolf jumped simultaneously and met in the air, ax smashing against armor, then tumbled to the ground. Tara Campbell pressed her ’Mech in close, going for a grappling attack. The medium lasers in the Tundra Wolf’s right arm pressed against the Hatchetman’s torso on the left side, firing hard, burning into her armor. Tara kicked left to push the attacker away, then spun, sweeping her ax around in a desperate attempt to cripple the other ’Mech’s legs.
Then, without warning, the Tundra Wolf was surrounded by a cloud of fire and smoke as a Pack Hunter’s particle projector cannon discharged at close range against its back. The Tundra Wolf jumped away, leaping over Tara’s head—not attacking, but running, heading at speed back to the Steel Wolves’ main force.
“Don’t follow!” came Captain Bishop’s voice over the ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit. “It’s a trick. There isn’t going to be a flank attack.”
“My comms are fuzzy; say again all after ‘It’s a trick’?” Tara Campbell’s heart was pounding loudly in her ears after the exertion of battle and the narrow escape; that, and the damage done to her ’Mech’s communications gear during the recent fighting, made her doubt what she had heard.
“There isn’t going to be a flank attack,” Captain Bishop repeated. “We’ve been sold out. By a goddamned Paladin of the goddamned Sphere, if you can believe it. There isn’t any mercenary support. Farrell and his troops aren’t here to help us—they’re here to kill us.”
“Understood. No flank attack. Thank you, Captain.”
Tara Campbell reached out a hand and switched off the Hatchetman’s radio, cutting the ’Mech-to-’Mech connection before Captain Bishop could reply. She would have to turn the communications gear on again soon—people would be waiting for a word from her, and she was still the leader in charge of their defense, even if the unthinkable had happened and they were all betrayed—but for a few minutes, at least, she could grieve for her own, more personal betrayal inside the privacy of the Hatchetman’s unrevealing metal shell.
44
Field HQ
Northwest Sector
Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
Captain Tara Bishop and the Countess of Northwind approached Colonel Ballantrae’s headquarters, and shut down their ’Mechs. They climbed out and walked, sweaty and weary, into the building.
Captain Bishop once again had reason to be glad that she’d brought along her winter greatcoat. The Countess, without one, would have been shivering inside a minute if one of the junior officers hadn’t rushed to lend her his. Bishop supposed that having people do things like that for you—or maybe just expecting without thinking about it that people would do things like that for you—was one of the perks of being brought up from birth as the future Countess of Northwind.
Not that Captain Bishop would have changed places with Tara Campbell at the moment. There were bad ways and worse ways to have a blossoming romance turn ugly, Bishop supposed, but having your new man abandon not just you, but the entire planet you and he were supposed to be defending—that one set a standard for low behavior that was going to be hard to match. You had to give the Countess credit, though; none of it showed in her face. Any tears she might have shed, had all been shed in the privacy of the Hatchetman’s cockpit, and ’Mechs had no eyes to weep.
“Repair what you can,” the Countess said to Colonel Ballantrae, first thing on entering. “We’ll need to fight again today. Reload. And Captain Bishop has some news.”
Bishop knew a cue when she heard one. “The mercenaries are refusing to join our fight against the Steel Wolves,” she said. “They say that they’re doing it—or rather, not doing it—on the orders of Paladin Crow.”
The Countess added, thin-lipped, “Which raises the question: Where is Crow?”
“I’ve been asking that same thing ever since you left,” Ballantrae said. “I have a sighting from very early this morning, the blocking force in the center. He passed through the lines toward the DropPort, in his Blade. He hasn’t come back or been seen since.”
“So he’s gone over to the Steel Wolves,” Captain Bishop said. “Who’d have thought it?”
Ballantrae shook his head. “Maybe. Or maybe not. A civilian DropShip lifted from the port around forty-five minutes later.”
The Countess of Northwind’s lips curled back in a snarl. “Running away. Leaving us to our fate, after first making sure that we couldn’t win.”
“It’s always possible that he left Northwind in order to bring help,” Bishop said, in the interest of fairness. “With the HPG net down, we can’t just send out a message calling for aid. Somebody has to go look for it in person.”
“Stop making excuses for the man,” the Countess said. “You yourself told me that he’d ordered Farrell’s men to fight against us.”
“We don’t know for certain that he gave those orders,” Bishop said. “Just that Jack Farrell said he did.”
“And Ezekiel Crow hired Jack Farrell. The mercenaries were his idea from the beginning.”
“The devil take him, then,” said Colonel Ballantrae. “Him and The Republic of the Sphere. If this is how they treat their friends, we’re better off without both of them.”
“Northwind against all?” The Countess’s voice was bitter. “What makes us better than the Steel Wolves then?”
“Damn,” said the Colonel, with feeling.
“We’re going to catch up with Ezekiel Crow,” the Countess promised. “When we do, he and I will discuss the matter. And after our discussion, there’ll be need for only one cup and saucer at teatime.” She drew a deep breath, and Captain Bishop could sense her resolve to consider the subject closed. “On to other matters, then. What about General Griffin?”
“He’s signaled that he’s rolling,” Colonel Ballantrae said. “With everything that he’s got, or at least, everything that he can send.”
“How much?”
“Without the gear that’s too heavy for air transport—not enough for a pitched battle against the mercs and the Wolves, out in the open.”
“Not enough to save the city, then,” the Countess said. “But enough to break us out, maybe, and let us hole up in the Rockspires until the Highlanders offworld can launch a counterattack.”
“Any report
s yet of attacks from Farrell’s mercs?” Bishop asked Colonel Ballantrae.
The Colonel shook his head. “That’s a negative.”
“When will Griffin be here?” the Countess asked.
“Twelve hours.”
“I once asked him for a day,” she said. “Now it’s time for me to give him that day back.”
“What do you mean?” Bishop asked.
“I’m going to talk to Anastasia Kerensky, woman to woman,” the Countess said. “Send her the message. Ask for a parley.”
45
Steel Wolf Field HQ
Tara DropPort
Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
So far, Ian Murchison had spent the battle for Tara in the sick bay on Anastasia Kerensky’s DropShip, talking shop with the Steel Wolf medics to keep his mind off what was going down outside, and helping with the casualties as they came in. That much, at least, he could do without a conflict of loyalties—injured flesh was injured flesh, no matter which side it belonged to. So far, casualties had been light. The Steel Wolf medics didn’t say, but Murchison understood enough to know that this meant only that the big push into the city was yet to come.
He was assisting a Steel Wolf medic named Barden in the messy job of inserting a tube into a sucking chest wound when Anastasia Kerensky strode into the sickbay. He didn’t register her appearance until they had finished punching through the patient’s chest wall and inserting the tube. Then he looked up and saw her standing in the doorway, her arms crossed, glaring at them impatiently.
Barden sketched a salute—not even a Steel Wolf Clansman was foolish enough to give the full thing when his latex-gloved hand was still slick with blood and other bodily substances. Murchison, for his part, gave the curt but respectful nod he’d come around to using in lieu of anything more formal and military.
Truth and Shadows Page 17
