by Victor Milán
“We’re wizards,” said Tom Cross, the thin restless one.
“Wizards?” she echoed.
She cast a quick glance toward Paul. She had spent a lot of time with him both on and off duty the last few weeks, with a great deal of encouragement from her aide, who claimed she needed to get more recreation. TB gave the word peculiar emphasis.
Remembering a time not so long ago when a working relationship had turned into something more, and the catastrophic effects of that, Tara C. had held back. Despite that, she had found herself falling into fast friendship with Paul Laveau. His tireless work within the Palace showed he was as dedicated as she. He was also warm, wise and he made her laugh as no one she could remember had been able to do since her childhood—an ability she did not precisely look for in an accountant.
“Effects wizards,” said the broad, blond Rich.
“As in movies,” said the tall and lanky Street. His horns were clever prosthetics. She hoped. “Although I wouldn’t exactly want to limit your conception of what’s meant by wizards.”
Tara turned to Paul, trying not to let her disappointment show. He had promised her more than mere diversion in bringing her here tonight. She had dared hope . . . she wasn’t sure what, really. But for something real, some tangible help for her increasing inward desperation.
“I’m delighted to meet you all,” she said with practiced brightness. “But I’m afraid it’s soldiers I need now, and tanks and BattleMechs, more than wizards.”
“Another way to think of us,” Street said, “is as masters of illusion.”
“Nice disguise, Countess,” Cross said. “Of course, I made you the moment you walked in the door. Of course. But not bad. For an amateur.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do actual soldiers for you,” J. D. Rich said, “or tanks or BattleMechs. But are you sure you can’t make use of appearing to have a whole lot more than you do?”
She turned to look at him intently.
New London
Skye
17 July 3134
There was nothing unusual about Tara Campbell’s face and voice blanketing the airwaves of Skye. Nor was it odd she should be appearing as part of a recruiting drive, especially under the present emergency. She’d begun starring on recruiting posters as a child.
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 against Clan Jade Falcon.
“Join me—join the Forlorn Hope!”
Duke Gregory practically self-destructed.
“Himmelsfahrtkommando?” he roared. It was the term Tara used in her German-language vidcasts. It meant, trip to Heaven detachment.
He upset the two-hundred-kilogram blood-oak desk in his office as if it were a toy and booted his personal desk-comp through a two-hundred-year-old leaded glass window into a cobbled courtyard two stories below. It narrowly missed the Minister of Health.
Yet when his howling rage had spent itself he laughed. “If the pretty little Countess is eager to throw away her life for Skye,” he told his aides as they crept timidly out of the woodwork, “who am I to argue? At that, it might even shame some of our homegrown quibblers and carpers and special pleaders into piping down!”
Prefect Della Brown wanted to publicly censure Tara Campbell. She believed it all a publicity stunt. She also feared it sent a “negative message.”
Planetary Legate Stanford Eckard resisted. If it was a “publicity stunt,” it was one publicizing the threat to Skye—which, as rumors filtered into the system with JumpShips, of Jade Falcon attacks on Seginus, Glengarry and Izar, was becoming increasingly real to the people of Skye as well as its defenders. And after all, he observed, in any kind of honesty, the Countess had far greater experience than either of them at either publicity or war.
But in the end it was not Eckard’s calm and reasoned arguments that caused Prefect Brown to swallow her resentment-born distrust of the glamorous offworld Countess, nor brought a smile to the scarred and pensive lips of Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner.
It was the response by the people of Skye, who turned out in unprecedented numbers in answer to Tara’s call, and joined the Forlorn Hope.
23
Clayton (suburb of Gray Valley City) Zebebelgenubi
Prefecture IX
The Republic of the Sphere
24 July 3134
The redbrick steeple of St. Alban’s church crumpled as it was pierced by the red lance of a large laser. It toppled onto the green below, the bells of its ancient mechanical clock jangling crazily. Watching it above the narrow pitched roofs and treetops of the houses on the next block, Captain Thomas Kaiser of the Republic Zebebelgenubi Militia felt as if it was his own heart slumping to ruin inside his rib cage.
He heard a rattle of heavy machine-gun fire as Clan infantry probed the infantry positions guarding his prize: a JESII strategic missile carrier, so fresh from the nearby Joint Equipment Systems factory in Gray Valley that it lacked a coat of paint. While the ninety-five-ton half-track self-propelled long-range missile launch vehicle lacked the extreme range of an Arrow IV or Sniper, its stupendous eighty-rocket volley gave it as great an offensive punch as any system on the modern battlefield. Using spotters, it was capable of delivering thunderous indirect fire on call. With its line-of-sight Artemis IV fire-control system it could maul a Jupiter with a single salvo.
In exchange, it was virtually without defenses, lacking armor, defensive weaponry, or speed. An enterprising infantryman could neutralize it with the pry bar needed to crack open the cockpit and hit the gunner in the head. So Captain Kaiser’s mixed, understrength company of infantry and vehicles was solely devoted to shielding the giant belching beast.
“Blue Eye Four, Blue Eye Four,” he said into his headset mike, “this is Blue Six, do you read?” A crackle of high-energy atmospherics was his only answer. Another observation post gone.
Zebebelgenubi was a brutally dry world, most of its water having been cracked into component hydrogen and oxygen by the high ultraviolet content of its Class A3 primary. Up here, in the lower reaches of the mountains of the northern-hemisphere continent of Gastagne, the watershed allowed Gray Valley City and suburbs such as this one, Clayton, enough irrigation to maintain a semblance of greenery, using tree and ground cover species selected or gene-engineered for low water usage. One thing even the residents of the Valley seldom saw was a completely clouded-over sky.
They had total overcast tonight: dark and ominous and flickering with lightning. Except it wasn’t clouds.
It was smoke. The smell of burning stung the middle-aged captain’s eyes and clawed the lining of his throat. Of burning wood, and plastics, and paper, and petroleum fractions. And the barbecue smell of human bodies. The whole sky to the west, where the JES factory lay, was the lurid red of an open wound.
The devils had entered the system, not through a conventional jump point forty days’ space flight from the planet itself, but from a pirate point a mere six days out. Only the chance of a comet-hunting amateur astronomer on the southern continent of Va
lius spotting their DropShips in his photographs a mere three days out gave the planet’s defenders any warning at all. Not that it had mattered much—since the invaders possessed the unassailable initiative granted by their ability to land anywhere on the planet they desired.
Even before eye-hurting blue drive flames appeared in the velvet early-evening sky right overhead, the local news had reported landings elsewhere on the planet: particularly at the primary spaceport at Nantucket, on the neighboring continent of Wurscht, which had apparently been seized after a brief, incredibly ferocious fight. Then all communications from Nantucket ceased—and the single DropShip appeared over the heads of the inhabitants of Gray Valley and the Joint Equipment Systems workers.
Communications had gone expeditiously to hell. First Kaiser got word the plant itself had mostly fallen. Then he started losing command layers overhead; not five minutes before Battalion had fallen off the air. He was on his own now.
Scanning the channels, his headset remotely controlling the powerful commo rig in his command vehicle, Kaiser had struck a Clan frequency. They broadcast in the clear, but not in words. Rather a series of shrill cries and whistles, emulating birds of prey on the hunt.
That sound frightened him more than anything in forty-five years of life. He quickly changed the freq.
His soldiers had punished the invaders, making them pay: his own launcher had already loosed a dozen salvos hissing into the night, toward targets called out by forward OPs. The smoke clouds above, low as they hung, seemed a domed ceiling supported by groined arches of crisscrossing missile trails. Even as Kaiser stood on the street with his HQ platoon around him, trying to get someone, anyone, to call new targets for his own captive monster to service, he heard another dragon roar, glanced up to see blazing blue-white comets passing overhead, trailing tentacles of white smoke that seemed faintly luminous against the dull, overarching gray.
Right to left they passed. Meaning: they’ve already flanked us to the south.
The captain had received countless reports of enemy vehicles ablaze, enemy ’Mechs exploding. Although his prior direct experience of war, against the CapCons, lay almost two decades in the past, Captain Kaiser knew to discount most of that as an adrenalized form of wishful thinking. Still: one thing the defenders could do was put a lot of metal downrange hot, and they had done so.
But the Clansmen shared one trait in common with their totem bird: terrifying speed. They charged hard and fast without apparent regard for their own losses. That meant it was hard to catch them with indirect arty fire, impossible to keep them in its beaten zone. Even their unpowered infantry, vulnerable to his own infantrymen’s mostly chemical-projectile rifles, seemed to have one speed—a tireless flat-out run, screaming shrill bird cries as they charged and killed and died.
The crosswise LRM volley convinced him even as he sensed an increase in the battle-thunder from ahead, just over a round hill. “All units,” he commanded on the general command freq, “fall back to B-1.” Although Battalion had expressly forbidden it, he had chosen and disseminated fallback lines of resistance. He had never faced real Clanners hot from the by-god Occupation Zone, but he had been raised on books and trivids of the first invasion.
He heard cries of alarm from his own infantry in their hardpoints in homes and businesses and lying-up behind the walls of gardens lovingly tended in defiance of the dry and unforgiving climate—and now soon to wither under artificial flame: “We’re hitting them but they won’t stop! Look out, look out—satchel ch—”
Silence, quickly replaced by more warnings—and screams. A ball of yellow flame suddenly rolled into the sky from the hill’s far side, right up the street. One of his tanks was gone, like that.
He turned and ran toward his own command vehicle, a wheeled eighty-ton DI Schmitt assault tank. His legs were transmuted to lead by the gut-shot realization: it’s already too late.
He heard fresh outcries, in naked ears not headset this time: “Elementals!”
He glanced over his shoulder to see the squat armored figures with their horned-looking helmets, springing into view above the housetops up the block like malignant insects, backlit by the great burning they and their kinsmen had left in their wake.
And then something rose above the rooftops and chimneys like a moon. A great, metal-gleaming bird shape, complete with improbable outspread wings.
On all sides of him troops darted madly this way and that; and no direction offered more promise than any other. Before him his own Schmitt lit up as if its ammo stocks were exploding, blazing at the jumping enemy ’Mech with everything that could possibly reach it, medium lasers and 50mm rotary autocannon and long-range missiles from the launchers atop the turret. He heard the JESII’s bearings whine as it tried to turn itself to bring its awesome firepower to bear on its monstrous enemy, hoped briefly that the microwave beam of its Artemis system, questing invisibly from within its bubble-mount, wouldn’t inadvertently sweep across him and flash-cook him.
The ’Mech arcing toward him on pillars of white fire was a bizarre mix of man and bird, like a twisted metal statue of the ancient Egyptian god Horus. Its torso lit with flashes like a string of firecrackers as the Schmitt’s autocannon, or someone’s raked it. A laser fountained orange sparks from its heavy left leg.
It could take a lot of that, he feared. He had no idea what it was. But from its sheer size it must weigh eighty-five, ninety tons at least.
Trying to run while staring back over his shoulder at the monster, whose wings now seemed to fill the western sky, he put a boot in a pothole in the road, stumbled, went to hands and knees. Shouting aloud in frustration he scrambled to his feet, oblivious to the pain of sprained ankle and skinned palms and cracked knees, made a final dash for his tank.
Ruby glare dazzled him to left and right. Filled his eyes, his being. Heat enveloped him. He threw up his hands to shield his face. He heard a ripping roar like staccato thunder.
Two heavy autocannon from the descending BattleMech’s arms bracketed him with fire, two medium lasers with sun-hot light lances. All converged on Kaiser’s Schmitt tank.
Its multiton turret was thrust skyward on a piston of yellow-white flame. Much of the tank’s frontal armor plate rushed to meet the captain, riding a wave of shock and fire.
Contemptuously, Malvina Hazen landed with the left foot of her ’Mech, the Black Rose, planted on the burning wreck that had been the heavy tank.
Near her right leg the bloated-bug shape of the strategic missile launcher stopped trying to pivot to kill her as its crew bailed out and ran back down the street. They feared the shrieking death promised by the Elementals, who sent red jets of flame licking forth as they leapt, still a block distant.
Even Malvina could scarcely blame them, for their mighty weapons could no longer help them. The Clanners called that feeling powless.
But their flight did them little good, except for the agony it spared them dying: Malvina’s Solahma and Eyrie infantry had already secured several houses on this block. They began to harrow the street with their small arms. The fleeing Zeb missile man and woman did a brief neuronic dance as Gauss rifle needles sleeted through them like cosmic rays, then collapsed in shapeless bundles like discarded laundry.
Malvina laughed out loud.
She heard the Falcon calls in her own headset. They were code, a special Jade Falcon hunting language, which they could send in clear without fear of their enemies comprehending—while lighting flames of terror in listening enemies’ hearts. It was a system—and tradition—invented by Malvina herself. It not only bound her Gyrs more closely to one another, a cohesion not even the toplofty Turkina Keshik shared, it bound her raptors more tightly to her.
That was important to Malvina Hazen. She had strategies and plans of a scope undreamed, not just by her sibkin but by Khan Jana Pryde herself.
“Forward, my Gyrfalcons!” she cried. “Slay all who oppose you. This world is ours!”
To her right a knot of Zeb troopers bolted from t
he porch of a narrow gray-brick house in loose-jointed panic, desperate to escape the flamer of an Elemental who had just walked her power suit through the wall into their sanctum. Lasers stabbed them and they fell, smoking and steaming. A Sekhmet assault vehicle rolled over the hill, crushing a private land car under its right tread.
To them she left the mopping up, and jumped.
They took her at her word, her Gyrfalcons. Too well.
She got what she wanted: one glorious battle against stiff opposition, which her troops nonetheless could overwhelm at speed with pure ferocious skill. And this was done.
She did not, for once, wish to win by indiscriminate terror. Zebebelgenubi’s population was small, consisting disproportionately of extremely skilled workers, at the JES plant and other industries of prime strategic import. She recognized the indigenous laborers as assets valuable in themselves—and almost as difficult to replace as veteran warriors. She had no desire to risk slaughtering them. Indeed, once she taught the world a stiff lesson in the new reality by grinding its forces into bloody mud, she was tempted to follow her brother’s weak-livered strategy of accommodating the local laborers, at least to an extent. Not abusing them overtly, say.
The matter was ripped from her hands.
Her Gyrs’ blood ran boiling hot, flash-heated by their massacre of Militia troops and the not inconsiderable casualties the Zeb soldiers had dealt them. When they broke through the last defenses into Gray Valley City itself, they ran amok. They rampaged through the streets devastating at random, killing every living thing that crossed their sights. From the MechWarriors in their giant striding engines of destruction to the vehicle crews to Elementals to the fledglings and old warriors on foot, they gave themselves over to an ecstasy of annihilation.
Malvina ordered them to halt. She was ignored. They had already disregarded her very explicit orders issued before the landing. Now not even the secret language of shrieks and whistles she had taught them availed her. She raged and cursed and threatened, to no effect.
