Flight of the Falcon

by Victor Milán

  A Dark And Bloody Crusade . . .

  A Clan Jade Falcon force is en route to eradicate the Steel Wolves—but its true mission is the subjugation of The Republic of the Sphere.

  Constrained by an imposed peace for decades, the Falcons embark on their most spectacular war in generations—and their lust for blood runs hot....

  Siblings Malvina and Aleks are Jade Falcon's best and brightest MechWarriors. Each achieved high command at a young age, and their bond is strong, but so is their rivalry. While Aleks believes warriors should protect the weak, Malvina is obsessed with dark visions of power and glory. If the leader of the Clan is destined to rule the Inner Sphere, then Malvina's first step toward seizing that role for herself is to conquer The Republic...or utterly destroy it.

  On Skye, Tara Campbell faces a major invasion with too few Highlanders to beat it back. Some in the Planetary Council want to negotiate with the invaders to spare Skye the frightful carnage visited on other worlds. Now Tara—The Republic's greatest defender—finds herself fighting dissension at home when unity is needed in the face of Skye's greatest crisis ever....

  Revolution

  There was nothing unusual about Tara Campbell's face and voice blanketing the airwaves of Skye. What was peculiar was the particular kind of service to The Republic she was pushing.

  "Are you willing to trade your life for freedom?" her vibrantly beautiful and charming, yet solemn, face asked from holovid tanks in living rooms and bedrooms and bars in New Glasgow and Donegal.

  "Freedom for your loved ones, freedom for your fellow citizens of Skye, freedom for billions of citizens of The Republic of the Sphere whom you will never even know?" it asked, two stories tall, from cinema screens in New London and Limerick and Sgain Dubh.

  "Will you leave your jobs, your families, the safety of your homes and everyday life," her voice asked from radio speakers on fishing trawlers in the North Sea and scientific stations on the southern polar ice cap, "for nothing but a certainty of danger and an extremely high likelihood of death at the hands of a merciless alien invader?

  "If so," she told laborers at a sheep station in Otero County at the continent's far end, and in break rooms in the mighty Shipil and Cyclops factories, "then join me in fighting for Skye and Clan Jade Falcon.

  "Join me—join the Forlorn Hope!"

  FLIGHT OF THE FALCON

  A BATTLETECH® NOVEL

  Victor Milan

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd. 80 Strand. London WC2R 0RL. England

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  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, June 2004

  10 987654321

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  For the splendiferous Sauer family: Eric, Jeannie, Frank

  and, of course, Michelle.

  Just because.

  An Enlightened One is an arrow aimed at Hell.

  —Japanese proverb

  PART ONE

  Maskirovka

  “A means of securing the combat operations and daily activity of forces; a complex of measures designed to mislead the enemy as to the presence and disposition of forces and various military objects, their condition, combat readiness and operations and also the plans of the commander.”

  —Soviet Military Encyclopaedia, Terra, 1978

  1

  Lyran Commonwealth Chartered JumpShip Faust von Himmel

  Approaching Zenith Jump Point outbound

  Summit

  Lyran Commonwealth

  4 March 3134

  “Three hundred minutes to jump.”

  As the automated warning rang through the bridge of the Lyran Commonwealth-chartered merchant JumpShip Faust von Himmel, the tall, almost spectrally lean black captain turned and nodded to his short, square executive officer.

  “Give the order to begin securing for transition, Herr Sánchez. Alert all DropShips to prepare to depart Summit system in five hours.”

  “Jawohl, Kapitän Grünblum!” The exec gave him a salute like an ax blow, then turned to relay the command to the helmsman sitting at his station. His square-cut beard, white as the first snow of winter on the captain’s homeworld of Ludwigshafen, wagged emphatically to the rhythm of his words.

  The captain smiled behind his own neat beard, in which he had recently, to his chagrin, found a single gray hair. In the thirty-second century such repetition of orders, to a crewwoman clearly in earshot and regarding a procedure the computers would handle by themselves unless a human intervened, might have seemed a quaint relic.

  To an amateur.

  Early on in his twenty-three proud years wearing the midnight black of the Lyran Commonwealth Merchant Marine, Bernhard Grünblum had learned to take nothing of space for granted. It had been crucial to his earning his Master and Commander rating after a nearly unprecedented eight years. It had also enabled him to captain the Faust, her crew—including his wife and three children, although the children were too young to take up shipboard duties yet—and the DropShips they carried like a mother opossum, safely through hundreds of jumps across the Inner Sphere in the five years since he had taken command. Redundant, yes; quaint, never.

  Because space had a hundred thousand ways to kill you; and even though humankind had largely turned its back on galactic exploration, one thing humans kept discovering was brand-new ways to die in the long, cold night among the stars.

  Nor had spacefarers merely the mischances and caprices of the universe to fear. Man’s most dangerous threats, as ever, came from other men. Even though he and all his crew had grown up during the era of relative peace imposed upon the Inner Sphere by the will of De
vlin Stone and The Republic he had called into being at the core of human-settled space, they still knew what it was to be menaced by human sharks.

  And now that interregnum of relative order and safety had ended. War had returned to human space, and with it, all its attendant evils.

  The void’s chill seemed to seep into the brightly lit bridge, even as the bridge hummed around him like a finely tuned machine. Of all things he knew, Kapitän Grünblum most hated disorder. And while the hand of House Steiner—strong and alone, undiluted by a mad attempt to share power with the Davions, as in his grandfather’s day—so far held firm within the Lyran Commonwealth, dark days had been seen already.

  He feared his children would see worse.

  He shook his head as if to clear it. Ach so, Berni, why cloud your mind with unpleasant thoughts? The cosmos lies before us, waiting. You have all that any man could desire: a fine ship, prosperous trade routes, and of course Kimiko and our children, Winfried and Tamiko and Taro. Taro, eldest son and pride of a loving father’s heart, soon to be old enough to leave the Faust for his own midshipman cruise. . . .

  Klaxon blare filled the bridge with a pounding pulse of noise. Grünblum scowled.

  “What is it?” he demanded of Leutnant Liu, who had the helm.

  Her report was icily professional as always. “Infrared detectors have picked up turbulence indicating an imminent emergence at the jump point, Captain.” And then the merest shadow flicked across that carven-ivory countenance. “Several emergences, sir.”

  “Ensign Kohl, bring up video from the sail-mounted cameras on the main viewing screen, if you please.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän!”

  The sensor station duty officer plied his keyboard. He was a youngster just out of the Merchant Marine Academy on Tharkad. This was his first cruise as a fully commissioned officer of the merchant fleet, although he had put in his time as a middie, of course.

  The giant screen that dominated the bridge’s forward bulkhead lit with stars. To Grünblum’s eye it was a reassuring sight; he was as familiar with the constellations lying beyond the Summit jump point as with his own cabin.

  A new star appeared. It brightened perceptibly. A JumpShip deploying her kilometer-wide sail to recharge her Kearny-Fuchida drive capacitors for the next jump of her route. Nothing unusual or sinister there.

  However: “We’re getting continual preemergence thermal releases, Captain,” Ensign Kohl said. “A half dozen signatures or more.”

  Grünblum frowned. In his long career, happenstance multiple emergences were rare. He could recall only one or at most two circumstances in which he had observed more than one vessel appearing at a jump point at nearly the same instant, or even within hours of one another, even before the collapse of the HPG network and the attendant depression of trade as planets turned their attention inward. Unless the JumpShips were traveling together in a fleet. And even though the Lyran economy, characteristically, had begun to rebound more strongly than any other Inner Sphere power’s, why should more than one merchant JumpShip appear here now?

  He hated surprises. The unexpected was disorderly.

  “Bring up the visual gain, Ensign, if you please.”

  Other novas blossomed: one, two, several, a miniature constellation of sails reflecting the light of Summit’s faraway primary. Then all were eclipsed as the bridge computer enlarged the first sail’s image.

  “Himmel Herr Gott sei dank!” the white-bearded exec exclaimed, and crossed himself.

  “A Nightlord,” Ensign Kohl breathed reverently. “The largest of all Clan WarShips. I never dared hope to see one!”

  “The Clans?” somebody repeated with a stutter of dread.

  Captain Grünblum stared, stunned wordless. He himself had no idea whether the youth’s identification was correct. The Inner Sphere possessed few WarShips at all, and no Clan WarShip had been seen in the Sphere since the early days of the Invasion eighty years before. Yet this JumpShip was unmistakably a ship of war, fantastically huge and bristling with heavy-weapons hardpoints. Upon the inner surface of her sail glowed the bird-of-prey and katana emblem that in all the universe of Man meant one thing and one thing only. Clan Jade Falcon had come to Summit, bringing a full-blown fleet of war.

  Jade Falcon Naval Reserve Battleship Emerald Talon

  Summit Jump Point orbit

  4 March 3134

  “It was an aberration that allowed two sibkin to win Bloodnames,” the giant man said in a voice like shifting boulders, as comrades helped him shed a tunic that bore the insignia of a screaming jade falcon with a naked katana clutched in her claws, set against a blue-shadowed planet. “I intend to rectify that error now, Aleksandr so-called Hazen.”

  The man on the opposite surface from the nearly naked mountain of bone and muscle, like him standing with the flexible magnetic soles of ship slippers binding him to the empty cargo bay’s bulkhead, would, in comparison to a normal human, be considered extremely tall and imposingly muscled. His physique was well displayed in the brief trunks, which were all he wore. His skin was olive, tanned rich brown, his hair a shaggy hank of raven’s-wing black, so coarse that it stood off his forehead of its own accord. His face was broad-jawed and handsome as a trivid actor’s.

  He smiled.

  “You are a brave warrior, Star Captain Lopata,” he said, addressing the monster as if it were the huge man who stood at blatant disadvantage. “I salute your courage and your dedication to upholding the traditions of Clan Jade Falcon. Yet you display erroneous beliefs concerning the duties incumbent on a Trueborn warrior. It now becomes my solemn duty to instruct you.”

  The Circle of Equals, a few Bloodnamed mingled among the other warriors, kept the chiseled-in-stone impassivity their ceremonial task required. But the Elemental’s supporters, like him officers of the elite Turkina Keshik, scowled and murmured hotly to one another at the smaller man’s astonishing impudence—though in fact he far outranked a Star Captain. The less numerous contingent backing the commander of Turkina’s Beak, the green Zeta Galaxy, hid smiles behind their fists. All except for a red-bearded man even larger than Aleks Hazen’s opponent—his guffaw made the metal hull ring like crystal.

  Thinking himself mocked, the Elemental Star Captain bellowed like a wounded ghost bear and launched himself into the air. Halfway to his opponent he wrapped himself into a giant ball, prepared to turn and land on his own magnetic-slippered feet.

  A smile still faintly visible on his lips, Aleks stood waiting.

  Three meters away the Elemental starfished open his limbs. Having noted the slight ripple of tension among the great muscles of his bare back, Aleks was already moving, gathering himself and springing away at an angle.

  Lopata landed with a thud that seemed to the onlookers to reverberate through the great starship’s whole fabric.

  The bay was a cube with rounded corners and one rounded surface: the WarShip’s hull itself. Its cavernous depths seemed to suck up light despite additional floods brought in for the duel. Aleks landed agilely on all fours at an angle above his opponent, light as a spider.

  “Flee all you want, little man,” Lopata said. “Disgrace yourself like the chalcas you are. In the end I will do the Falcon the great service of crushing you.”

  He launched himself. Aleks awaited him, crouched and grinning. Before the hurtling giant reached him, he leapt again.

  “Your knowledge of tactics is flawed, my friend,” Aleks said, standing at an angle to the Elemental with hands on hips as the giant raised himself. He had come within a hair of scattering some of his own supporters—thus breaking the sacred Circle and forfeiting the trial.

  That was Aleks Hazen, who loved to ride the razor’s edge.

  “As is your appreciation of the meaning of our class. Not merely our lives but our holy quest and the honor of our Clan depend upon our techs. To bully them is foolish—and unworthy of a warrior, who exists to serve those weaker than he, not the other way around.”

  “Lecture me, will you
?” With startling speed Lopata crouched and shot himself at the normal-sized man like a bolt.

  Aleks stood unmoving. Time seemed to stretch as the Elemental unfolded his huge limbs to catch him, bear him down and crush him. Aleks’ warriors shouted for him to do something.

  Beyond the last instant, or so it seemed, he did. He stepped aside, grabbing the wrist behind a vast outstretched right hand with both of his. And yanked.

  Had he done no more, Lopata would have struck the hull like a flesh meteor, crushing his skull or breaking his monstrous neck. It would have been an acceptable outcome—heroic, even, for a mere MechWarrior facing the apparently impossible odds of bare-handed battle with a mighty Elemental.

  But Aleks tucked the arm into his own chest, partially arresting the giant’s momentum.

  It was not an untrammeled act of mercy. Lopata bellowed as his shoulder was wrenched from its socket. Then the WarShip hit him slam in the back.

  The Elemental’s agonized cry ended in a voiceless gust as all breath was driven from his body. He bounced, floated up again, stunned and inert. Aleks reeled him in, encircled his neck with an arm that looked like a child’s against it and choked out the Star Captain.

  He stood up, stepped back and touched a finger to his brow. “I salute you, Star Captain,” he told the sleeping giant. “Perhaps in future you will treat my technicians with the respect due those without whom the mightiest warrior would be but a mud man waving sticks at the moon. If not—”

  He shrugged his own not-inconsiderable shoulders. Then as his seconds gathered about him like an asteroid swarm drawn to a giant planet, he threw back his head and laughed, as for the sheer joy of living.

  He was Aleksandr Hazen, Bloodnamed, and he was a hero.

  2

  Jade Falcon Naval Reserve Battleship Emerald Talon