“Roger that,” he said over the headphones’ audio pickup. “One Koshi. Any other Mechs?”
He paused to listen. “Right, let it past. If I want it, it’ll be mine.”
From far off to the north of where he was perched, looking out over the nearby buildings from atop his thirty-meter mount, Jack could hear the crump of explosions. Trails of smoke and the exhaust of missiles drew white lines against the blue winter sky.
“Very well,” he said over the audio pickup. “Yes, open a corridor. I’ll be along shortly.”
He took off the headset, rolled up the cable, and slipped into the Jupiter through the entry hatch. Once inside, in the seat with vest and helmet, with the ’Mech’s electronics fired up, he called back to his ground comms station.
“There’s a Highland officer doing perimeter patrol over to our east,” he said. “Riding a Pack Hunter. Get in touch with her.”
“That’ll be tough.”
“That’s okay,” Farrell said. “I trust you.”
He fired up the reactor and set off, with the Jupiter’s slow, deliberate pace, to the north.
Captain Tara Bishop looked down from the cockpit of her Pack Hunter at the man in front of her. He was dressed in a mercenary’s uniform, with a white flag—she thought, upon closer inspection, that it might be somebody’s T-shirt—hanging from a stick he was holding above his head. Two Highland troopers had him at rifle point. They were both standing well back from him, staying out of each other’s lines of fire, as well as keeping out of hers.
“You say you have a message?” she said. “Let’s hear it.”
“One thirty-six dot two,” the man said. Her ’Mech’s external mike picked it up.
“What’s that mean?” she demanded.
She had no patience at the moment for cryptic statements—she was tired and cranky, and the day that had started out badly had not gotten any better as it wore on. The parley with Anastasia Kerensky had been an almost unmitigated disaster—“almost,” because it did succeed in wasting the Steel Wolves’ time, but disastrous all the same. The Countess of Northwind had broken the link in a state of incandescent fury, white to the lips and cursing Anastasia Kerensky in terms that Bishop hadn’t suspected that she knew.
The man shrugged. “I don’t know. I was asked to carry that message to you. That’s all.”
“Take him to the rear,” Bishop ordered. As the Northwind troopers marched him off, she pondered for a moment, then dialled a frequency into her ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit: 136.2.
“Radio check,” she said.
“Hello,” came back a male voice. She’s heard that speaker before, at the mercenary encampment, and on the DropShip Pegasus before that: Jack Farrell.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“How do you feel about cutting the cards?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You against me,” Farrell said. “Your ’Mech to mine.”
“A Jupiter against a Pack Hunter?” Captain Bishop struggled between fear and skepticism. A match like that was straight out of the tales of the old days, when ’Mechs ruled the battlefield and Warriors took and answered challenges that settled the fate of worlds. It was also one-sided to the point of suicide; a Jupiter outmassed a Pack Hunter by seventy tons, and it carried more and heavier long-range weapons. There was no safety for the smaller, lighter ’Mech either in grappling or in standing off and shooting; the Pack Hunter’s only advantages lay in heat efficiency and speed. “Why the hell should I?”
“Because if you win, I’ll let you live.”
“I’m living fine right now.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Farrell said. “You, and the Countess, and all your troopers. There’s a relief column coming from the west. I can let them through, or cut them off. I can let you out with them—fight another day, you know? Or I can bottle the lot of you up together for Wolf meat.”
Oh, but that was tempting. Even if it meant her death—but she was probably going to die in the city anyway, if the Highlanders stayed pinned between the mercs and the Steel Wolves. This was a chance to buy safety for everyone, and to buy it not with gritty, squalid street fighting against infantry and thin-skinned light armor, but with a death duel against the biggest and most deadly of ’Mechs. Too good, almost, to be true. . . .
“Why should I believe you?” she asked.
“We’ve played cards. My word is my bond.”
“So we have”—and we both cheated, she thought, and we both know it—“and so is mine. Let me talk with the Countess.”
“Don’t take too long. I have a Koshi in my sights right now.”
“Five minutes. Ten at the most.”
“I can shuffle the cards that long,” Farrell said. “Then it’ll be time to cut the deck.”
48
Road out of Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
The Countess of Northwind, Captain Bishop soon discovered, was less than en
thusiastic about Jack Farrell’s proposal.
“Right,” the Countess’s voice said, over the encrypted command circuit in the cockpit of Bishop’s ’Mech. “I’m expected to trade your life for . . . what, exactly?”
“All of Northwind,” Bishop said. Now that she’d made up her own mind, she’d moved from fearful anticipation into a state of calm, if adrenaline-charged, resolve. “And my life isn’t any more valuable to me than the life of the youngest private in the army is to him. Or her. I haven’t checked. At any rate, it’s what we all agreed to when we signed up.”
“If that’s what we all agreed to when we signed up, then I should be the one out there taking on a Jupiter in a light ’Mech, and not you. And you can get back in touch with Farrell and tell him so. If he wants a duel, he can fight my Hatchetman.”
“Sorry, ma’am, but no.” Bishop kept her voice firm. “Only one death wish at a time allowed in this conversation, and I’ve got mine already.”
“Damn it, Captain . . . do you have any idea how hard it is to break in a new aide-de-camp? And you’re one of the best I’ve ever had.”
“Thank you, ma’am. My old colonel said I’d see plenty of action if I served with you. When this war is finished, you can tell him for me that he was right.”
“I can’t talk you out of this?”
“Afraid not, ma’am.”
Over the circuit, Bishop heard a sigh. “Then make the signal,” the Countess of Northwind said. “You have my permission.”
“Thanks,” said Bishop, and retuned her ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit to the frequency she’d used to contact Jack Farrell. “You have a deal,” she said over the radio.
“My deck,” said Farrell. “My shuffle. My cut.”
“I said you had a deal.”
“Then meet me within sight of the DropPort. Me in my Jupiter, you in your Pack Hunter, if you dare.”
“I’ll be there,” she said, and cut the connection. All that was left now was the chatter on the ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit, as the Countess and the Highlander forces within the city prepared to move out and take to the roads heading west.
“. . . Head ’em up and move ’em out” . . . “Leave a line. The sick and wounded” . . . “Automatic and robotic weapons next to the DropPort; don’t let Kerensky know that we’ve gone. . . .”
The first thing that Captain Bishop noticed was the magnetic anomaly detector indicating a bearing of 045 relative with signal increasing. Something metal, something big, approaching from her right front. The next thing that she noticed was the rhythmic shock-waves, also increasing in strength, of a hundred-ton mass approaching at a strolling pace—if a thirty-kilometer-per-hour rate was a stroll. Her instruments detected the shock waves first, but soon it was as if she could feel them through the hull of her Pack Hunter.
Her back was to the DropPort and the Steel Wolves. Ahead of her lay Jack Farrell’s mercenaries. And sandwiched between them—the Highlanders. As long as Captain Bishop kept on fighting, the Hi
ghlanders could keep escaping. The Countess of Northwind had a thin line of sick and injured volunteers, armed with robotic and automatic weapons, creating the illusion of a solid front. Farrell had promised an escape path for the others.
If he wasn’t lying. If he wasn’t carrying out a massive ruse of war, luring all of them to a place where he could disarm or kill the Northwind army.
Nothing for it. She’d made up her mind to meet him here, to fight him here, and . . . she saw the approaching ’Mech, a looming, ponderous giant. Jack Farrell’s Jupiter. Huge. Heavily armored. She doubted that even her particle projector cannon could hurt it.
Well, maybe not from the front. She was fast. He was slow. If that was going to be her only advantage, she’d have to make the most of it.
She’d been daydreaming too long. The alerts in the ’Mech’s cockpit yelped at her, warning that she’d been locked on by hostile fire control. A moment later, a volley of long-range missiles leapt out toward her. Red lights flashed in the cockpit.
“I know, I know,” she said aloud, and put the Pack Hunter into a run toward the Jupiter. She cut to the right, faked left, then halted, braced, and aimed with her micro lasers. Accuracy, she thought, don’t fail me now. At the same time she keyed up the mike and broadcast on frequency 136.2, “Heya, big guy. Happy to see me?”
“Delighted,” came the response. “You know I’m a sucker for a pretty face.”
“Of course you are.” The missiles he’d fired exploded harmlessly, but close enough that the fragments spattered against her ’Mech’s exterior armor. She sprinted forward again, this time at a diagonal. The Jupiter turned to follow. Another battery of missiles sprang from the big ’Mech’s torso-mounted boxes, left and right.
Good, Bishop thought. Keep going like that and you’ll use up your long-range stuff while I’m still out here.
She backtracked. No sense being predictable. Even once the missiles were expended, he’d still be carrying two particle projector cannons to her one.
Missiles incoming. Lasers up. Shoot. Two of the missiles in the battery vaporized as the laser beams hit them. The others went wide, sending shock waves through the air around her but missing the Pack Hunter itself. Either I’m better than I ought to be at dodging those things, Bishop thought, or Jack Farrell is a really lousy shot.
The running and the laser expenditure, however, had sent her heat gauge up a bit. Nothing close yet to redline, but enough to register.
“So that’s your game,” she muttered. “Get me all hot and bothered.”
“And easy pickings,” came the answer over the radio, and she realized that she’d left the private ’Mech-to-’Mech frequency open. “Care to dance?”
Another battery of missiles inbound. She dodged and ran, using her ’Mech’s agility and speed to take her out of the way of the missiles’ ballistic trajectory.
“Don’t go too far!” came Jack’s voice. Even over the scratchy connection, she could tell that he was laughing at her.
“Not much chance of that,” she said. “I’m having a good time right here.”
She set her lasers on continuous fire, and concentrated on her shooting. Then she spotted another battery of missiles inbound and jumped, straight up, at maximum burn. The missiles exploded below her. She landed hard, going down onto one knee.
The Jupiter was continuing its forward stroll. Now its extended-range particle projector cannon started firing—and about damned time, Bishop thought; if I were riding a Jupiter I’d have been chewing up the landscape with my PPC from the moment the enemy came in sight.
The cannon’s hot particles burned a fiery path through the air from Farrell’s ’Mech toward hers. Well, she’d see about that. She ran toward him, bobbing left and right. The particle beam crossed her legs with a thud she could feel. Then she was jumping, taking herself up and over, and coming down feet first with a shouted war cry, making herself into a thirty-ton battering ram heading straight down onto the Jupiter’s head.
“Hey!” Farrell said. “That isn’t in the tactics manual for a Pack Hunter.”
“Neither is surrender,” she said. “At least not in mine.”
She was behind him now, and she set her eight microlasers to firing at a single spot. The spot that she chose was the back of the fighting machine’s left knee. She remembered her old unarmed-combat instructor explaining to the new students, “You can always reach a knee.”
Her own PPC added to the scrum. The Jupiter started to turn. She turned with it, staying behind, working to keep herself out of reach of the weapons mounted on the larger ’Mech’s arms and torso. She could keep this up forever, she thought, jumping and firing and dodging out of reach to fire and jump again, shooting at Farrell until she burned through his armor, or until the heat overloaded him so much that his ’Mech had to shut down to cool off.
She let a brief fantasy cross her mind: the Jupiter frozen, herself dismounting her own ’Mech to walk across and take possession. Hauling Jack Farrell out into the open, maybe killing him, maybe letting him go. Then getting aboard the Jupiter, picking up her Pack Hunter, and walking back to the Countess of Northwind with a fine gift.
Without warning, the Jupiter fell over backwards onto the ground. What? she thought. Gyro error? Overheated in the midst of walking and stumbled over his own feet?
Time to get fancy. She darted forward, swinging the ponderous bulk of her Pack Hunter into a thirty-ton handstand, and from there into a somersault. She ended by sitting athwart the chest of the fallen Jupiter, its arms pinned to its sides by the knees of her ’Mech.
With her knees pinning the Jupiter’s arms so that its deadly autocannon couldn’t come into play, provided she could keep him down long enough given that he had a seventy-ton weight advantage . . . she switched to the Highlanders’ general frequency and called, “Get me a squad with boarding tools out here pronto!”
Then she switched back to the private ’Mech-to-’Mech frequency, even as she leaned forward so that the lasers on her chest pointed directly into the viewscreens of Farrell’s cockpit.
“Surrender, Farrell?” she whispered. She flipped the lasers on, a brief pulse, a warning. His faceplate glowed crimson with the effect. Her ’Mech’s powerful gripping hands were pressing down on his shoulders. “Or I’ll make you do dreadful things.”
He kicked up with his legs, both at once, trying to buck her off. She rode him, sliding down to press the Jupiter’s hips to the pavement while still keeping his shoulders under the Pack Hunter’s hands.
“Naughty,” she said. She flipped on the lasers again—a bit longer burn this time—and gave him a brief burst from her PPC. “I can get angry.”
“I’m not worried,” Jack said. He didn’t sound worried, either.
“Then let’s cut for it.”
“Let’s.”
He rolled to the left. She was under him now, and he was pressing her down. She felt the hot blast of his extended range PPC firing, the particles boiling chips off of the concrete beside her face.
He’s playing with me, damn it, she thought. You’d think he wanted that one to miss!
“Enough,” she said. She reached up with her arms and pulled him in close, firing her cannon and all her lasers with their apertures pressed against his armor. She fired them continuously until she felt the Jupiter’s body stiffen in her grip, the big ’Mech’s inferior heat dissipation unable to keep up with the energy release.
The Jupiter relaxed its grip and fell off her to her left with the sort of ground-shaking concussion that only a hundred-ton heavy could make, and lay on its back unmoving. Bishop rolled to her right, got one of the Pack Hunter’s knees under its torso, and pushed herself up to a standing position.
“Do you surrender?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he replied. “My troops are heading here right now.”
“How many more of the Highlanders are there left to get through the lines?”
“Just yourself,” he said, “and those stalwart lads with the can op
eners, if they get here in time. The rest of your people ran away as if they were experts. And you’re in no condition right now to take on the whole of my mercenary force.”
“I took you on,” she pointed out.
“True,” he said. “But you had functioning weapons then. Now you have melted steel all over the fronts of your lasers. They won’t fire. And your cannon doesn’t look very good either. So what’ll it be? Do you want to be captured, or run?”
“I still beat you,” Bishop said.
“Yes, yes,” Farrell agreed. “We cut the cards and you turned up the jack of spades, just like you did before.”
“Just like I did bef—Damn it, Jack Farrell, you threw this fight!”
“Bright girl. You figured it out. Now I’m about to give the order to close the corridor. So get moving.”
Bishop ran. The infantry squad with its boarding tools saw her coming toward them, and turned and ran as well. At over a hundred kilometers an hour, she didn’t take long to reach her lines, on the other side of the city from the DropPort.
The whole way there, Jack Farrell laughed in her headset.
49
Castle Northwind
Rockspire Mountains
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
Will Elliot had seen plenty of pictures of Castle Northwind in his life. The massive gray stone structure was a popular subject for posters and for glossy pictorial volumes about the scenic glories of beautiful Northwind. The tourists he’d used to guide through the northern Rockspires had often been quite put out to learn that the photogenic castle they’d come so far to see was set in the middle of a large expanse of private land and wasn’t available to gawkers. He’d certainly never expected to find himself sitting at a table in the castle’s lesser hall, drinking tea with the company Captain and his fellow Sergeants and waiting for word from the Countess.
Truth and Shadows Page 19
