by Victor Milán
For a moment there came only silence back. The Supreme Commander followed Aleksandr along the country roads at a deliberate pace. His Keshik scoured out the pockets of resistance left behind by the Zeta’s lightning strike.
It was highly necessary. So Malthus’ official report to his Khan would read.
“Very well,” Malthus said in a neutral voice. “Aff.”
Weston Heights
15 August 3134
“We’re not holding them, your Grace.”
Standing outside watching what seemed a forest of smoke pillars growing off away in the west, it was harder for Tara Campbell to speak those words than to face enemy fire. Will he come back and confirm my deepest fears: that I am perpetually out of my depth, just a pretty actress playing at war?
Instead his voice came rolling back, deep and calm as surf on a pleasant day: “I never expected we actually could keep them from the suburbs, much as I hoped we might. What then, Countess Campbell?”
“We’re getting a bit of a respite. Our units claim Aleks Hazen has bogged down in the built-up fringes west of here. Hit-and-run tactics are hurting them, slowing them down. But I think it’s their own speed that’s really slowed them. All that running up hills and smashing down trees has taken a toll. Our boy badly needs a break to rest his troops, throw some hasty repairs into his ’Mechs and vehicles, stock up on ammo from the transports they’ve got following them.”
A sudden scream of rocket engines made her duck and look rapidly around. An aerospace fighter curved around the seminary, no farther than half a klick away and about the same height above the hilltop, and vanished into the lowering overcast that had taken charge of the sky. One of ours, she realized with relief. The aerial forces had neutralized each other so far: the Jade Falcons had the clear edge in skill, but the defenders had numbers and motivation.
She was painfully aware a single lucky aerospace pilot or even VTOL jock could end her battle before she had a chance to strike a blow on her own account. But then, as a wise old great-aunt had told her once back on Northwind, nobody could promise you’d get through a given day alive in peacetime, much less war. As it was she was already feeling the old agonies that she was alive, when so many had died already, and so hard.
“Beckett Malthus is coming up the road after Aleks,” she radioed the Duke at his command post two kilometers north. “He seems not to be in any hurry. I suspect he’s holding his Keshik out as a reserve, looking to get in on the kill.”
“What about that damned Hazen woman?”
“I’m afraid I’ve told you all the good news I’ve got, Duke Gregory. We did hurt her Gyrfalcons at the mine”—And they massacred my poor Forlorn Hope volunteers!—“but the survivors have snapped back and are on the move. We’re hearing it from our forward units—and one report is all we’re getting from most of them. The Delta Galaxy is coming up on Aleks’ left. And coming fast.”
Among those with whom contact had been lost after a single desperate warning was Lieutenant Colonel Linda Hirschbeck, CO of the Republican Guard.
“They won’t race through built-up areas so easily.”
Tara hesitated. They can’t, she assured herself. It’s not physically possible.
She remembered reading of the superstitious dread the Clans had inspired in her forebears, after the first horrid shock of contact almost a century ago. She felt more than a touch of it now.
“No, your Grace,” she said.
“Then we shall stop them in the suburbs. Skye Alpha, out.”
“God willing,” she said softly, to the empty air.
She looked around at her officers, waiting on her at a discreet distance. “Saddle up, everybody. The Falcons are on the way.”
She forced her mouth to grin. “You didn’t really think we’d get the afternoon off, did you?”
* * *
Malvina Hazen drew in a deep breath, redolent of the sweat that bathed her body, the smell of diesel fuel and scorched lubricant seeping in through the ’Mech’s seals, the smell of the autumn forest that could not quite be dispelled by the others.
“Gyrfalcons—forward!” she screamed.
Black Rose stood up to its full height, strode from the trees, spread its wings and set off down the brushy fore-slope at a spine-jarring run. Vehicles and ’Mechs erupted from the woods to either side of her. Even over the thunder of the massed charge she heard the whistle as her three remaining JESII launchers, parked in a valley clearing behind her, loosed their overwhelming salvos toward the front rank of buildings.
Charging, the Gyrs withheld their fire. No point expending ergs without good marks to aim at. But neither did any fire greet them.
Two hundred forty long-range missiles crashed down among the buildings. Roofs were holed, walls collapsed in cascades of bricks and dust and smoke. Flames reared up, roaring like awakened beasts.
A long line of vehicles interspersed with BattleMechs and Industrials swept forward across the open space, infantry riding the tanks, Elementals on the ’Mechs. A softball field backstop was crushed by a hundred-ton Mars assault vehicle. The gaily painted bleachers splintered beneath the feet of machines that walked like men.
A rumbling-rushing noise commenced, grew, rolled across the sky above Malvina’s head like a giant cannonball in a wooden chute. She screamed in impotent fury as a heavy artillery barrage smashed down behind the ridge. Huge orange fireballs rolled up the sky, trailing black smoke, as her strategic missile carriers blew up beneath the expert Republican counterbattery fire.
Then from the gutted apartment blocs—and where they had fallen, from the buildings behind—a hellstorm of fire gushed out and over the charging Gyrs.
A Bellona that had surged disrespectfully out in advance of Malvina leapt into the air on a column of flame as if its forty-five tons were no more than a stone. Secondary explosions plucked it apart in midair as its stored LRMs and flamer fuel blew.
Cursing, Malvina darted aside to avoid the flaming liquid: the last thing she needed now was excess heat.
She caught some anyway as an autocannon blast opened up the battle armor of the Elemental riding on her left shoulder and spilled fluid fire down the Shrike’s back armor. She slowed to keep her temperature levels under control. She restricted herself to firing measured bursts from her dual 10-centimeter autocannon until the fuel burned itself off.
Fifty meters to her left, MechWarrior Tyrus’ Cougar staggered as a hypersonic nickel-ferrous slug from a BattleMech Gauss rifle took it just to the left and below its protruding cockpit. It fired back with its LRM launchers and the large pulse lasers in its arms. A PPC bolt struck. The right arm fell away in a shower of sparks.
The Falcon ’Mech seemed to erode in sprays of heavy autocannon fire. Laser flashes sublimated armor from it in puffs of vapor. Its left-shoulder LRM storage exploded. Its upper structure wrapped in yellow flames and streaming smoke from every joint, the Cougar fell forward. Tyrus did not eject.
And then the Northwinders charged Malvina.
Out of the rubble, Highlander ’Mechs and vehicles appeared as if materializing and rushed to meet the oncoming Gyrs. From the cover of the ruins, unpowered infantry raked Falcon infantry off the backs of vehicles and shot down their dismounts caught in the open. Elementals sprang to burn them and blast them from their hiding places. VTOLs appeared from the east, skimming the red clay chimney pots of Weston Heights, and clawed the Elementals from the sky with lasers and autocannon.
Falcon helicopters swept in to engage. A furious VTOL dogfight twisted in the sky, slashed across by missile trails and punctuated with gouts of yellow flame.
As above, so below. The lines came together, passed and turned to rend. Falcon and Northwinder ’Mechs blasted smoking chunks from each other at touch range. Armored fighting vehicles circled and shot, engines snarling like rabid wolves. Big Gnome power-armor suits rushed out to strike the smaller Elementals with lasers and short-range missiles—or grapple them. Malvina’s aide-de-camp Star Captain Matthias Pryde crus
hed the driver’s cage of a Fusilier Shandra scout car in his Uller’s right fist.
The Uller reeled as a huge shell from an SM1 tank destroyer shattered its right hip actuator. Another tore away its right-arm LB 5-X autocannon and ammunition box. Then the light BattleMech was knocked to pieces by a long-range missile salvo from both racks of a First Kearny Ryoken II.
“Stravag!” Malvina screamed. As the Uller collapsed like a broken toy, she turned to attack her ADC’s killer. A shadow crossed her cockpit on the left.
Malvina stepped forward with her right foot to turn her ninety-five-ton ’Mech toward it, then flung up the Black Rose’s left arm as something flashed down at her from above.
Impact rocked the Shrike and clacked Malvina’s teeth together hard. An enemy Hatchetman had sunk the depleted-uranium blade of its handheld weapon deep into the barrel of her outer autocannon.
With the Shrike’s three-fingered right claw, Malvina seized the hatchet haft just above where the enemy ’Mech gripped it, yanked it out of her autocannon, and flung both weapon and Hatchetman away together.
Tara Campbell braced as best she could as her Hatchetman hurtled backward. It landed on its posterior on bare ground with a thudding crash. It slid several meters before stopping.
A few flakes of snow had begun to drift lazily from the sky.
A few red flickers on her display indicated minor damage from the impact. Nothing that would affect performance. Likewise her own status: she guessed some bruises on rump and ribs.
That would change quickly if the monstrous winged BattleMech turning ponderously toward her actually brought its weapons to bear. With all her superb skill, Tara scrambled the Hatchetman to its feet.
She did not know what the monster was. Not even the master merchant’s voluminous info-dump had contained much data on newer Jade Falcon BattleMech types. She knew—could see—it was an assault ’Mech, and at the high end of that weight range. More importantly, she knew from reports from prior worlds on the Falcon hit list that this was the machine of none other than Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen. The stylized black rose insignia confirmed it.
Brutal, confused swirl though it was, the battle was clearly going the way of Tara’s mixed force of Highlanders and Garryowens. The defending troops had employed an ancient trick of waiting for the assault they knew was coming from the woods in buildings just behind the outermost ones. The apartment blocs shattered by the last salvos of Malvina’s looted JESIIs had been utterly empty.
Then Tara’s troops had rushed forward to catch the Gyrfalcons in the open with all the fury of their fire. Tara had not ordered the countercharge; she presumed her soldiers were overcome with impatience to avenge their brothers and sisters who had been so systematically stamped out by the advancing Falcons, and eagerness to show that Clanners were no more mettlesome than Northwinders and Skye-folk. She felt some of that as well—which was why she had not tried to halt it.
And it seemed the chance for the killing stroke against the Gyrfalcons, to whom Tara’s people had dealt the second bone-breaking blow of the day. Then the Countess spotted the tall, winged BattleMech striding through the smoke and dust and decided to stake all on a kill shot of her own.
Unfortunately, Malvina had sensed the hatchet descending and blocked it from crushing her in her cockpit. Now it was she who would put an end to Tara Campbell, if Tara did not take quick, decisive action.
Raising the hatchet, Tara charged.
Wide-eyed, Malvina Hazen watched the enemy machine attack a BattleMech more than twice its mass with its ridiculous, primitive hand weapon cocked. It was an act of mad courage she would expect from a Falcon, not a bellycrawler.
But based on ice-cold calculation: the Spheroid’s sole chance of survival was getting too close for Malvina to use Black Rose’s weapons—and the hatchet could disable even her far larger ’Mech with a single shrewd or lucky stroke.
The attack’s sheer unexpectedness gave Malvina no scope for maneuver, skilled as she was. All she could do was grab the hatchet-haft again as that blade expanded toward her viewscreen. She cocked the Shrike’s left elbow back and swung the arm toward the Hatchetman, intending to press the muzzle of her remaining autocannon to the lesser ’Mech’s chest and blast it into smoking chunks with hundred-millimeter shells.
But the Hatchetman wrapped its manipulator-tipped left arm over and around the Shrike’s right upper arm, hugging itself against the Shrike’s right side. It was outside the arc of Malvina’s long-range missiles, not that she could use them at touch range, below and to the side of where her shoulder-mounted lasers could reach. And to Malvina’s sudden, tooth-grinding fury, the machine was also too close to bring her autocannon into play: the muzzles just clanked impotently against the Hatchetman’s side armor.
Then her mood broke like a glass rod. She laughed. “Very well, Countess Tara Campbell,” she said aloud. For she also had recognized her opponent: by the signature machine with its Highlander emblem of armored fist upholding a sword by its bare blade, and the odd swatches of blue-green plaid painted on its armor. And also by the enemy MechWarrior’s un-Spheroid-like prowess and bravery.
She put her ’Mech’s right arm over the other’s back. Squeezed. “If you will not let me shoot you, I will crush you!”
The cockpit filled with blue glare.
Listening to the creak of crumpling armor plate and watching the red lights blinking in her display that warned of the Hatchetman’s structure beginning to fail under the awful, inexorable pressure, even as her mind clicked through a list of possible options of what to do next—nothing promising, here—Tara Campbell had a flash in which to wonder if she’d done the right thing by opting to tackle a BattleMech that had to be nearly a hundred tons with her forty-five-ton Hatchetman.
The answer still seemed yes. Reports indicated Malvina’s hawk-headed monstrosity was unusually fast for a ’Mech its size. Unfortunately, the Hatchetman was slow for a ’Mech of its size. And while the Falcon’s arsenal was nothing special for an assault ’Mech—what one might expect from a heavy, or even a really burly medium—it was more than sufficient to shred Tara and her ride in seconds if given the chance. Even though Tara was sure she’d taken out at least one of those big Ultra autocannon with her first chop. Mostly.
With an almost musical but nonetheless alarming sound, the armor housing over her left-shoulder actuator began to buckle. Getting tight, here, she told herself. She considered punching out, but wasn’t sure the ejector would do anything more than blast her right into Malvina’s BattleMech. She realized she was humming the Seventh theme, “Garryowen,” tunelessly through clenched teeth. . . .
Blue light surrounded her. She raised her close-cropped head to see the Falcon ’Mech’s head haloed in blue radiance.
“Is this a private dance, TC,” Tara Bishop’s voice said over her radio, “or can I cut in?”
Malvina uttered a wordless falcon-shriek of pure rage. She had been so engrossed in the not-unpleasurable task of crushing Tara Campbell to death that she had neglected to watch her three-sixty vision strip. Now an enemy Pack Hunter stood but meters behind her.
The Spheroid machine was two-thirds the man of the inconsiderable Hatchetman, a bug, to be swatted with little thought. But it was a bug with a deadly sting: a Ripper Series A1 extended-range particle projector cannon. Which it was currently blasting into the back of the Shrike’s head.
A fast hunter-killer, the Spheroid lightweight was more built around the PPC than mounted with it. It still could not sustain continuous firing without its internal heat soaring until emergency overrides shut down its fusion plant. The MechWarrior evidently didn’t care, but was gambling all on this single throw.
Where do the bellycrawlers get such warriors? Malvina wondered. She did care. The heat in her cockpit was rapidly becoming more than even she could tolerate.
Still clutching the Hatchetman in a literal death grip, she pivoted Black Rose’s torso counterclockwise, dragging the forty-five-ton machine as a man migh
t a clinging child. At the same time, she opened out with her right arm. She could shoot this puny interloper with her remaining 10- centimeter gun, and if that—or thermal buildup—did not knock it out of action she could quickly follow with lasers and LRMs.
The hideous blue glare inside the cockpit winked out as the tip of her left wing momentarily cut the particle beam.
She smiled. To kill two such redoubtable warriors, one the renowned Tara Campbell, within seconds of each other should merit several stanzas in the Jade Falcon Remembrance. Not to mention securing the conquest of Skye at a stroke. . . .
At once Tara Campbell knew what her aide and friend was doing: Alpha Strike. She had the PPC locked on and would fire it until shutdown. And she was in trouble even before Malvina brought her autocannon to bear. Tara saw at least two Gyrfalcon ’Mechs making for the little machine, firing as they ran.
“TB,” she called, “behind you! Break off now!”
Silence answered. Tara quit holding onto the enemy BattleMech’s arm. Instead she put her hand on the jump-jet housing beneath its right wing and pushed. The odd Parasaurolophus-like crest sweeping back from her Hatchetman’s head bent upwards in the middle. But she writhed free.
Tara Bishop’s beam went out. Her Pack Hunter blazed like a torch on Tara Campbell’s infrared display from the terrible heat that had closed down its systems.
“Tara, punch out!” The Countess ordered desperately as streams of ’Mech weapons fire converged on the inert machine.
Malvina fired her autocannon. The Pack Hunter was knocked backward by explosions.
Tara turned to bring her own 10-centimeter cannon to bear. Her Hatchetman rocked back to the recoil of an ultrafast burst.
The Black Rose’s beaked cockpit exploded into black smoke and red sparks. The winged great ’Mech crashed to earth like a building collapsing.
As the Pack Hunter fell the top of its head blew off. Tara Bishop ejected.
Tara Campbell turned to strike the enemies who had savaged her friend. They were already back-walking, shooting this way and that at Republican mobile forces beginning to converge on them.
