Flight of the Falcon

by Victor Milán

  “At least they hate you for the right reasons, Countess,” Tara Bishop murmured.

  McCorkle gave her a Look. He had seen her in action in her Pack Hunter, as he had seen their commander in her signature Hatchetman. He knew it was as great a mistake to downcheck Bishop for her attractiveness and often flippant manner as it was to underestimate the Countess herself, as so many did, because of her own cover-girl looks and pixy size. Yet he sometimes had a problem remembering that when Captain Bishop cracked too wise.

  Tara could not help recalling that the one prior time she had seen the bloody-eyed death look of McCorkle’s ancient Terran ancestors, now thankfully faded, come into his eyes was when he looked upon what Anastasia Kerensky had made of Tara-the-city.

  The gates slid open as the hovercar approached. As if that were a signal, the crowd on the highway’s far side broke through the thin cordon of militiamen armed with truncheons and clear curved shields and lunged out onto the pavement. But not, it seemed, to block the car’s path. Rather to fall upon the pro-Steiner mob, who obligingly broke free of their own restraining line and charged to meet them in a fist, boot and sign-swinging melee.

  “Okay,” Tara Bishop said, “I’m confused.”

  “For once I agree with you, Captain,” McCorkle said. “A bad omen, doubtless.”

  Martin was speaking softly for the benefit of the commo set clipped to his right ear. He trembled perilously on the edge of a smile.

  “What’s this about, Captain Martin?” Tara asked.

  He snapped his expression back to a milspec mask before turning it toward her. “These are rival anti-Republicans, Countess,” he said.

  “Why are they dusting it up with the Steiner fans?” Bishop asked.

  “They are remnants of the Free Skye movement that fought for freedom from the Commonwealth, Captain Tara Bishop. These folk are angry because they feel they have exchanged one foreign master for another. They wish us shut of The Republic, but have no desire to be again subjugated by House Steiner.”

  With a whine of turbines that was clearly audible through the hovercar’s polycarbonate dome along with the crowd noise, which was swelling enthusiastically in response to the brawl, a squad of Guard hoverbikes zipped through the opening gates. Tara Campbell gasped. It looked as if the armored and helmeted riders meant to drive full speed right into the battling mob.

  Instead they turned at the last instant, banking their rides, whipping them about, and racing their engines. Great blasts of air spilled out from under their flexible skirts.

  The hoverbikes were comparatively small and light—but their blowers would push them, their riders, and their weaponry along at fifty-four klicks an hour. The force of their wind sent rioters tumbling across the blacktop. The hoverbikes began to perform what Tara recognized as a caracole, like sixteenth century cavalry: advancing, turning, blasting air, moving toward the rear to let the riders behind them have their turn.

  Martin spoke another sotto voce command. A burly six-wheeled, forty-five-ton Ranger infantry fighting vehicle with Ducal Guard flashes rolled out the gate. With the fight blown out of them along with whatever dignity they may have been clinging to, the erstwhile brawlers parted before it, scampering back to their respective mobs. The riot-equipped militia troopies sealed the line behind them, and Martin’s driver steered their own hovercar adroitly out the gates.

  “Very professionally done, Captain,” Tara Campbell made herself say as the little convoy gathered steam toward the skyscrapers of downtown New London. “Please pass my compliments to your people.”

  He nodded. “I will, Countess Tara Campbell. Thank you.”

  He went back to scanning the green hills, now blessedly devoid of demonstrators, rolling by to either side of the road as he passed on Tara’s compliments via his commo headset.

  Casually and discreetly, attracting the attention of neither man, Tara Bishop took hold of her commander’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze.

  Tara Campbell was tempted to flare at her aide. To tell her she was an adult, that she did not need such childish reassurance.

  But she didn’t. Instead she flashed her a quick and vulnerable smile, and mouthed the word, thanks.

  12

  Northern Hemisphere

  Chaffee

  Lyran Commonwealth

  15 May 3134

  Chaffee was easy.

  Just the way the Jade Falcon Watch said it would be. The merchants had muttered veiled warnings, but these were disregarded.

  Chaffee was easy.

  For the first twenty-four hours.

  It was a not particularly appealing world, hot and relatively dry, orbiting too close for comfort to its white sun. Although possessing some valuable minerals and metal ores, Chaffee had no particular industry; its half-billion population was sufficiently occupied eking out a living from agriculture and keeping at bay the amazingly diverse and contentious fauna. Safaris to hunt the various horrors, from hectare-sized swarms of tiny acid beetles to pack-predating aliosaurs, had been the major source of off-planet income. Like Northwind in the Republic, the hyperpulse implosion had meant economic depression since it basically put an end to casual interstellar tourism.

  The inhabitants of Chaffee endured. They were used to privation simply by dint of getting up every morning.

  The system did retain one feature of marked interest to outsiders. It was a highly convenient jumping-off point for far richer precincts—including Prefecture IX of The Republic of the Sphere.

  It had changed hands repeatedly during both the Federated Commonwealth’s breakup and the Word of Blake Jihad. The contending forces had no interest in staying in the system, and less in straying down to the high-gravity surface of Chaffee itself. They fought, died and passed on, leaving small mark on either the world or its scattered, self-reliant inhabitants.

  But Chaffee’s luck had played out.

  The Jade Falcon desant required a solid foothold in the Inner Sphere. Chaffee’s location made it an excellent prospective base, not just for the invasion of the Prefecture beyond the frontier and the eventual taking of Skye, but for the fervently hoped-for follow-up: a great Crusade by the Jade Falcon Touman, to reclaim sacred Terra and liberate humankind in Kerensky’s holy name.

  Poor, uncomfortable and sparsely settled as it was, Chaffee was anticipated to be relatively easy to seize and likewise to hold. Life was hard on Chaffee. Surely its people could readily see the benefits of adopting Clan ways—and providing fresh Clanners, in time, as well as immediate resupply.

  So it was that Chaffee was chosen as the point at which the maskirovka was stripped away, and the desant began in lethal earnest.

  Chaffee’s proximity point lay an inconvenient twenty-four days out at a standard one-gee acceleration. Jade Falcon merchants had obtained coordinates for a pirate point only five days out. Overruling the objection of his sibkin subordinates, Bec Malthus declined to make use of it.

  The problem with pirate points, aside from finding them in the first place, was that if you tried jumping to them, you didn’t always come out where you intended to. Or maybe at all; whether the vessels that over the centuries had been lost on known pirate-point jumps came out in some other galaxy, some other time, or never anywhere, was a matter of heated debate today among the tiny minority of the scientific-minded who still paid attention to such issues. The Supreme Commander was unwilling to risk having his entire fleet, on whose wings rode all Turkina’s hopes, jump out of Whittington never to be seen again by human eyes. Two later jumps would require the use of pirate points by virtue of totally unsustainable flight times from the proximity points; but these would involve only portions of the expeditionary force, not its entirety.

  Instead, the invaders adopted the expedient of accelerated boosting: three hours at two gravities, three hours at one, then back to two and so on. Although less enervating than the approach Countess Tara had made to their final objective unbeknownst to them, it was a grinding regimen even for Clanners. But vastly less
taxing than a straight two-gee shot would be. And the DropShips’ orbit was calculated so that the final twenty-four hours would be at a benign one gee, allowing the warriors to recover.

  And besides, Chaffee would be a walkover.

  Once more Bec Malthus called for no bidding. Nor did the invaders bother broadcasting a formal challenge to the planetary authorities. With no observation station at either jump point, nor pesky telescopes pointed out normal to the plane ecliptic, Chaffee like Porrima received no advance warning of its peril until drive flames burned nova in its skies, some fourteen days after the fleet emerged into the system.

  A Cluster from each Galaxy was committed to the assault alongside Turkina Keshik. Chaffee’s eastern hemisphere was dominated by a supercontinent named Addisonia, mountainous, and in its northern latitudes temperate and well-forested. Almost all the planet’s cities, such as they were, were located along its northeastern seacoasts. Aleks, leading his second Cluster, and Malvina, leading her first, attacked the two next-largest population centers, cities of eighty-five thousand and fifty thousand, respectively. For the Keshik, itself actually the Turkina Galaxy’s First Cluster, substantially reinforced for the invasion, and for himself, Beckett Malthus claimed the honor of seizing the capital city of McCauliffe on Addisonia’s northeastern peninsula, with its population of just over a million and the planet’s lone spaceport.

  Changes in the Falcon military, ultimately mandated by economic and political pressures brought about by the Military Materiel Redemption Program, colloquially known as the BattleMech Buyback, of the cursed Devlin Stone, had been reflected in the Keshik’s structure. Two new nominal Trinaries had been added years back: Foxtrot, granted the nickname Turkina Lightning and consisting of three Stars of VTOLs, and Gamma, primarily armored vehicles, known semiofficially as Turkina’s Hammer and in-unit as the Gamma Hammas. The slurred pronunciation was affected to display the unanswerable superiority of anyone serving in the Keshik, hand-picked as they had been by Khan Jana Pryde—somewhat defensively, of course, since true old-school Invasion-era Falcons would have sneered at mere armored fighting vehicles being included in the Keshik.

  They would have molted on the spot at what had been done specifically for the desant: Khan Jana Pryde had decreed two further Trinaries, an Eyrie and even more heretical, a Solahma—and worst of all, in both cases mechanized infantry. She had convened an assembly of every Keshik warrior to announce her mandate. Since everyone in Turkina Keshik served at the Khan’s pleasure—granted, that could be said of virtually everyone of any import in all Clan Jade Falcon, except perhaps the Loremaster, whose position was supposed to be above politics—she could issue such a fiat. And make it stick: “Any warrior,” she declared, “who believes his or her honor fatally impugned by serving alongside your new comrades has my permission to accept reassignment elsewhere.”

  Her tone had suggested, quite strongly, that anyone who did so object would find herself instantaneously reassigned to the dezgra Zeta Galaxy, plying a wrench with a nice new caste tattoo on her shoulder.

  “And anyone,” she had added, lowering her voice, while the female Jade Falcon perched on her shoulder spread its wings in response to a hand-signal, “who harbors reservations about serving with your new comrades of the Turkina Keshik, and acts upon those reservations, shall be cast forth from the nest of Clan Jade Falcon as unworthy and without honor.”

  A couple of Bec Malthus’ creatures in the Keshik—the man himself stood behind his Khan’s right shoulder, beaming heartily, a place he had spent her whole public career—had cried out, “Seyla!” pretty smartly at this. It was gilding the lily.

  Pretty much everyone in the Clan who doubted that Khan Jana Pryde was capable of doing exactly what she said she would was already dead.

  Expecting no serious opposition and eager to blood his Keshik, Malthus dropped his Overlord C–class command DropShip, the Bec de Corbin, carrying his ’Mech force and most of his armor, alongside the Union C–class vessel Caracara with his VTOLs and infantry, directly onto McCauliffe’s small spaceport. He let loose a wing of his aerospace Trinary, the Turkina Fighters, to fly around and blow things up.

  It was unnecessary. The small contingent of clerks, customs officials, civilian cops, and technicians on hand fled into the gray dusk at the first sign of attack. The port was deserted by the time the jacks of the two landing craft settled above the blast pits.

  Malthus had sent out a Star of his Trinary Delta Elementals with a few machine-gun-armed Nacon armored scout hovercraft to secure the terminal buildings and the hulk of an ancient Inner Sphere Union DropShip that had been blasted off its jacks during some prior conflict and subsequently dragged off the apron by prime movers and dumped. Presumably, it had fallen during the wars of the last century’s latter half, but by its decrepit state and the port’s general air of lassitude and decay it might have lain there since the Star League fell. The Falcons encountered no opposition. Indeed, they encountered no one at all: even the commissary staff had run off into the enclosing fields of low, olive-green ground cover.

  Facing no aerial opposition whatever, the canny Galaxy Commander called back his Echo Wing One fighters and grounded them on the apron near the offloading DropShips. No point exposing such rare and precious assets to a lucky shot by a surface-based missile or energy-weapon battery. Instead, Malthus played the game precisely by the relatively new Jade Falcon combined-arms warfare book, leading with vehicles, Elementals and a few light ’Mechs, then transport-mounted infantry, mostly Eyrie fledglings, following all up with heavier armor and BattleMechs. His Solahma warriors secured the spaceport and perimeter and dug in; Malthus was not radical enough to emulate Aleks’ mixed-force experiment, though he recognized it had performed well in limited action.

  The city’s defense force consisted of a few light vehicles, a medium tank or two, and a gaggle of light infantry, mainly civilian cops ostensibly stiffened by planetary militia. It mounted a brisk resistance from a strip mall on the city’s outskirts, which itself mostly appeared as derelict as the rusted-out Union. Although they blew up an infantry-hauling hovertruck looted from the port and inflicted a few casualties on the lightly armored Falcon foot soldiers, they collapsed quickly under the attentions of a single Alpha Trinary Eyrie and a medium Bellona hovertank. Perhaps their initial hardihood sprang from the fact they had no idea what they were getting into—and indeed no idea of just who their assailants were, although upon grounding Malthus had broadcast an imperious order for the planetary government to surrender.

  Several Donar assault helicopters rocketed the mall, and then their lasers and Elemental flamers torched the wreckage. Underlit by lurid orange flames, the invaders advanced through the now-purple evening gloom as the blue-white pinprick of the sun dropped out of sight behind the mountains to the west.

  They encountered sporadic resistance when they entered the city proper. They responded with appropriate enthusiasm.

  Not having a military tradition to speak of, the planetary government promptly surrendered.

  Aleks’ forces at the seaport of Lazenby, and Malvina’s assault against the inland city of Hamilton on the Yeoh River, both encountered somewhat more determined resistance. They dealt with it briskly, the Turkina’s Beak warriors, proven at Porrima, no less professionally than the Gyrs. In both cities some resistance actually continued after the world’s noble ruler, Duke Oswald Sorrentino, broadcast his surrender to Clan Jade Falcon. Aleks crushed his with a judicious use of overwhelming force, Malvina with carnosaur exuberance.

  By the time full night descended upon McCauliffe, the supercontinent’s easternmost city by virtue of its location at the end of its large peninsula, the Falcons were in possession of the world’s three population centers of note, largely intact, and having incurred only nominal losses themselves.

  It was not an overly glorious victory, perhaps. But complete.

  Or so it seemed.

  13

  McCauliffe City

  Chaffee

>   Northern Hemisphere

  15 May 3134

  At about 1000 hours on the first day of Chaffee’s existence as a fiefdom of Clan Jade Falcon, a small group of armed men overpowered civilian security elements at Siegfuhr Airport on the eastern side of McCauliffe, north of the harbor and on the city’s far side from the spaceport. They proceeded to commandeer a Planetlifter Air Transport heavy-lift VSTOL and take off.

  Though after the HPG failure interstellar traffic making planetfall on Chaffee had fallen from slight to virtually none, the world had a lot of airports. With a widely scattered populace and a not particularly impressive road network, air travel made a lot of sense even when not an outright necessity. The lucrative offworld hunting trade had served the planet well in this regard, providing sufficient offworld exchange to make air transport affordable, so that few and miserable were the settlements that did not boast at least one VTOL or fixed-wing aircraft, and many families possessed their own.

  Off-planet replacement parts were not easy to come by, nor cheap—but relatively poor as it was, Chaffee was a world, complete, with five hundred million occupants. Who by the very fact of surviving upon the arid, high-gee planet with its contentious wildlife, at the very least sprang from highly resourceful stock. Chaffee had abundant metal deposits, even if large-scale mining had never come to the planet, largely because of its hostile environment (and in later years because of environmental laws enacted to preserve it in relatively pristine hostility). Chaffeeans made their own replacement parts, even if they had to use their own manual mills, lathes and welding rigs in homestead workshops.

  The big, jet-powered Planetlifter was fully refueled but only partially loaded with cargo. At Malthus’ order, all civilian air traffic had been grounded immediately upon Sorrentino’s surrender. The backwoods folk enthusiastically ignored the ban, but it was observed scrupulously in the three major cities—under Falcon guns. Later, when things settled, aerospace fighters would fan out on patrol across the whole globe, assisted by DropShips in orbit, to teach the refractory what the Clan expected by way of obedience.