The Price of Glory

by William H. Keith

  Javil stormed his way hand-over-hand to the podium at the center of the bridge where his private seat and control consoles were located. Senior Lieutenant Yolan Flynn, his Exec, unbelted from the seat and drifted aside to make room for the Captain.

  "We miss something coming in?"

  "My God, Flynn, I don't know how they expect us to manage!" He strapped himself down and began punching numbers into the console. Working carefully and with the accuracy of long experience, he coded the bridge computer to relay a playback of the deep radar tracks to his central console screen. "Children!" he muttered. "They're sending us half-trained, slug-brained, thumb-chewing children, and they expect us to fight wars! Bah!"

  "Things are getting pretty thin back at reppledep. What have you got?"

  Javil leaned forward, studying the paired tracks as they arrowed in low above the cloud-hooded face of the planet.

  "Two DropShips. Not ours . . . not merchants. Here, Flynn. What do you make of this?"

  The radar screen showed white-on-green traceries, two blips racing in across the broken surface of the planet. Clouds appeared as vague ghosts, close against the uneven ground. The blips slowed sharply, generating a cascade of computer analysis in tiny, tightly written characters that spoke of changing vectors, or mass and speed and direction.

  "They're ducking into those storm clouds."

  "Right. Immediately after the Lancelot challenged them."

  "Hostiles, then? We were told there wasn't any chance that hostile warships would arrive in the middle of the operation."

  "We were told a lot of things." Javil's voice was sour. He manipulated controls, speeding things forward. While he advanced the record, the Assagai had moved forward on her orbit around Helm, and the twin blips were barely visible, settling to the surface a few kilometers west of the village of Durandel. He began comparing the radar image on the record with stored radar views taken of the surface on previous sweeps.

  "That settles it, Flynn. They're grounding right outside the town all the fuss is about."

  "Interesting."

  "It's a damned sight more than interesting." Javil bent over the readings for a moment. "Hah! Got it! I've got them spotted relative to that mountain range to the south, and to Durandel itself. That'll pinpoint them—right to the mark, or close enough!"

  "But they'll have been down for hours!"

  "True . . . true . . . But a DropShip! Ah! That is a prize, Flynn. One worth fighting for! And here we've got two of them cold, with a small army on the surface already, plus AeroSpace Fighters and some DropShips of our own." He looked up at his Exec. "Open a line to the Colonel for me."

  The Exec glanced at the bridge chronometer. "Aye aye. Captain. He's over the horizon now, but we can hit him with a relay off Comsat Twelve." Lieutenant Flynn used his throat mike to contact the Assagai's communications department.

  It would take long minutes for Javil's request to reach his superiors aboard the Rapacious at the system's zenith jump point, and more time again for a reply to make its way back to Helm. While he waited, he decided to get things moving. As the ranks of naval Captain and MechForce Colonel were approximately equivalent and their areas of authority did not overlap, he could not pass orders on to the Colonel in charge of surface operations on Helm, but he could pass the news on in a friendly and unofficial fashion. Javil rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. This was big! After relaying the orders to ComDep, Flynn looked back up at Javil. "Captain? What about that JumpShip?"

  "I doubt that there's much we can do. If it's hostile, it'll be jumping soon. It would surely be gone by the time we could get ships out there. So, we'll ignore the JumpShip for now, though I want the Rapacious notified and I want a twenty-four-hour watch put on it from here. I want to know the instant that JumpShip does anything out there. Got me?"

  "Yessir." The Exec touched his earpiece, listening. "ComDep has the Colonel on the line for you, Captain."

  "Good." Javil adjusted his own earpiece, then touched a control on his console. "Colonel Langsdorf? Captain Javil here. Fine . . . fine ... no problem. But we do have some news. We've picked up a pair of targets for you, over closer to Durandel. Move fast, and you just might catch yourself a real prize!"

  6

  Until now, Captain Ramage had been happy with his life. Fourteen standard years, he had been a senior NCO in the militia of a Lyran Commonwealth world called Trellwan, where he had honed his combat skills leading ground infantry against raiders and pirates from the Periphery, the distant, vast reaches of space beyond the so-called "civilized" worlds of the Inner Sphere. He was good at what he did, and the young mercenary warrior hired by the Trellwanese to create a BattleMech force to combat an invasion by the Draconis Combine had recognized it. The mercenary had drawn heavily on Ramage's talents, particularly in special forces techniques for using common infantrymen to bring down BattleMechs. When a world had no 'Mechs of its own, it was up to these ordinary troopers, armed with flamer, skimmer-mounted laser, or satchel charge explosives to defend his people from the predations of the 20- to 100-ton armor-clad monsters that dominated the modern battlefield.

  The young mercenary's name was Grayson Death Carlyle, and when he left Trellwan after successfully completing his mission, Ramage chose to go with him.

  Ramage's talents had once again been invaluable during Grayson's campaign with the rebels on Verthandi. Armed with only a few battered, captured BattleMechs and AgroMechs jury-rigged with machine guns, the rebel forces had fought the Kurita occupying forces to a standstill, while House Steiner stepped in to guarantee Verthandi's semi-autonomy. It had been Ramage who had trained those ragged ground troops, Ramage who had led them in raid after raid that killed at least ten of the Kurita 'Mechs, and damaged many more.

  Ramage had tried his best to retain the rank of sergeant, even when, for all practical purposes, he carried a captain's authority in command of a full infantry company. "The men wouldn't know what to do if they couldn't come grouse to Old Sergeant Ram," he had told Grayson on more than one occasion. When a Captain's commission had come his way despite his protests, Lori Kalmar had pointed out, "The time'll come when you have to rub some fresh-face lieutenant's nose in it . . . Captain. You'd better have the rank to back it up!"

  Ramage's leadership technique could best be described as tough, but he was no less hard on himself. Known only by his single Trellwanese name, or affectionately as "Ram," he had earned both the respect and love of the troops under his command.

  "Red Two, what do you have for me?" Ramage was crouched in a hastily dug slit trench in the boulder-strewn woods near the valley where the Legion's two DropShips had come down. Behind him were the foothills of the Aragayan Mountains farther to the north. The communicator earpiece spat static at him, then cleared.

  "Red One, we have incoming 'Mechs!"

  The Lieutenant listening in on a separate headpiece next to Ramage raised his eyebrows. "Ours?"

  "Not a chance, Dulaney," Ramage replied. "Not from that direction. Red Two! Red Two! Give me an ID!"

  "Red One, this is Two! Company strength! We count twelve. Repeat twelve! We see a Warhammer . . . two Archers ... a Thunderbolt . . . and listen, Red One! We see infantry and armored vehicles as well!"

  This was bad, Ramage knew. All the 'Mechs that the Legion patrol had named were heavies, a match or more for any of the 'Mechs in the Gray Death 'Mech Company, and far superior to the four light 'Mechs in the recon lance pulled up alongside the DropShips.

  "Red Two! This is Red One! Mount up and pull back. Keep us posted on their Twenty!"

  More static crackled in their headsets, this time pulsing in a regular, almost hypnotic surge of hiss and pop.

  "They're jamming," Ramage said, removing the headset. "I don't know if our patrol heard or not. But those 'Mechs they spotted are moving our way, and fast!"

  "What does it mean, Ram?"

  "It means they have the DropShips nailed and they're moving in to get 'em!”

  “How long do we have?
"

  Ramage was already studying a map of the area unfolded across his knee. His forefinger marked a point on the map with a smear of mud. "Twenty minutes ... if that. We've got to get word to the Colonel!"

  A quick check proved that all radio bands were clogged with the same melodic surge and hiss of enemy jamming. "Damn, and we don't have fiber optics strung yet, either." That meant no field telephones. He looked up out of the trench. "Runner!"

  A young trooper in a gray-green camouflage smock dropped into the trench next to the two officers. Ramage switched on a recording device built into his wristcomp and hurriedly dictated his report on what Red Two had observed.

  "Situation critical," he concluded. "I strongly urge that main body Gray Death 'Mech company be alerted using jam breaker techniques from DropShips. Estimate infantry and recon lances not sufficient to more than delay approaching forces if hostile."

  He switched off the recorder, then pressed a button and caught the thumbnail-sized mini-clip that popped up from its recess, placed it in a small waterproof canister, and handed the package to the soldier. "This is for Captain Martinez, Lieutenant Thurston, and Lieutenant Roget," he said. "For their ears only . . . and urgent! Report back to me with their reply."

  "Yessir!" The runner scrambled out of the trench and was gone.

  Ramage moved over to where long-range infrared binoculars were mounted on a tripod at the edge of the trench, facing southwest. The land sloped gently in that direction, leading down out of the hills and woods and onto the broad sweep of the North Highland Plains.

  Helmdown was in that direction . . . and the main Marik forces.

  "I wish the Colonel were here now," Ramage said, more to himself than to Lieutenant Dulaney.

  "Can they get a message to him?" Dulaney asked.

  "Eh? Well, the transmitters aboard the DropShips will punch through the jamming, if anything can. And if the Colonel picks up the fringe of the jamming, he might figure out what's happening on his own and high-tail it back here. He's a smart one, that boy."

  But Ramage did not feel as confident as he sounded. Even if Grayson Carlyle immediately force-marched his two lances at top speed back from Durandel, they might arrive in the area of the DropShips at about the same time as the 'Mech force that Red Two had spotted. And after a march like that, Grayson's men would be in poor condition for a fight, especially against an enemy force composed of heavy 'Mechs.

  He adjusted the telephoto zoom on the binoculars, scanning the empty horizon to the southwest. No, things did not look good at all.

  * * *

  Grayson tried again. "Phobos, Phobos, this is Amber, do you copy? Over." He strained against the speakers built into the earphones of his neurohelmet, but could hear only a faint, distant hiss like the heavy surge of an ocean against its shore.

  "Lori, what do you make of it?"

  Across the ruined plaza, Lori's Shadow Hawk paused in its slow and deliberate movements among the rubble, as though the battle machine itself were listening. "It's not natural," was her reply. "Deliberate jamming, Gray. I'm certain of it."

  "That's what I thought, too."

  The horror of finding Durandel deliberately obliterated had left the Legion's MechWarriors in a state of dulled shock. They were finding bodies now, forms crushed beneath fallen rubble or sprawled in laser-seared or trampled gore on the town's ferrocrete walkways. The survivors were emerging, slowly, as word spread that it was the Gray Death Legion's 'Mechs descending like avenging angels on the Marik BattleMechs that had occupied the town. Each survivor had a similar tale. Word had come five days earlier that a force under the command of Lord Garth, Duke of Irian, was landing at the Helmdown starport, that a great victory had been won at Sirius V, that the Gray Death was due some special, spectacular honor.

  Durandel's leaders and Captain Baron, who had been left in command at Helmfast, had gone to Helmdown to talk with the Marik representatives.

  They had never returned.

  On the following day, the BattleMechs of the Hammerstrike Company of the 5th Marik Guards had secured Helmdown and swept into the countryside, seizing strategic crossroads and what few industrial facilities existed around the planetary capital. A clear but incomprehensible radio message had been received at Helmfast: "Your leaders have been declared in rebellion against the legal government of the Free Worlds League. Surrender to your lawful lords, or be destroyed."

  After Captain Baron's disappearance, a young Lieutenant named Fraser had assumed command of the garrison. The recent chain of events had been so odd, so confusing, that it was a real possibility that the Helm invaders were not Lord Garth's people at all, but renegades, enemy raiders, or even the vanguard of some rebellious Marik faction. Helmfast had been given into Fraser's keeping. He would not surrender it without certain knowledge of who his attackers were, or what was the legal status of the Gray Death Legion.

  Helmfast's first line of defenders consisted of the armored vehicles that had been under Baron's command until his disappearance. There was infantry, too, local Helman militia for the most part, called up to serve with the masters of the Durandel landhold. There were also MechWarriors at Durandel, including Lieutenant Gomez DeVillar, a Phoenix Hawk pilot named Kent, and several recruit trainees, but their 'Mechs had been packed aboard the Phobos months before to serve as reserve 'Mechs in Liao space.

  Lieutenant Fraser met the Marik BattleMechs on the 66 plains west of Durandel, where the enemy 'Mechs crashed through the defender's line. The militia had remained in Helmfast Castle preparing for a siege, while B Company, the twenty vehicles of the armored company, and the infantry deployed.

  So far, none of the survivors that Grayson interviewed had been able to give a coherent picture of what happened after that. Some reported seeing the Marik Hammerstrike Company deploying beyond Fraser's line. Most of the enemy 'Mechs were lights, but well-handled and well-disciplined. Though low, heavy clouds of drifting smoke tended to obscure what was happening, within thirty minutes, there were Hammerstrike 'Mechs firing into the walls of the castle and prowling through the streets of Durandel. There were reports of panic among the trainees of Company B fighting on foot, of the Marik BattleMechs sweeping like a whirlwind of flame and destruction through the lightly armed vehicles facing them. A doctor found working among row upon row of injured soldiers and civilians at the edge of the village said that he had treated a soldier who reported that a Marik Griffin had crushed Lieutenant Fraser's Vedette light tank under its feet.

  Grayson remembered the young and eager officer. He had not been more than 20 years old, and sported a wiry mustache whose obvious purpose was to make its owner look older. Fraser had joined the Legion, as had so many others, on Galatea. He claimed to have heard so much about the exploits of the Gray Death Legion that it made him want to join. "I want to win some of that glory myself," Fraser had told him.

  Grayson had sat the young Fraser down in that Galatean bar and bought him a drink. Glory was the wrong reason to join the infantry, he'd explained. There was glory, certainly, in the military traditions and the camaraderie, the bravery and the sacrifice of combat. But such glory came only at a price. A steep price.

  Though Fraser's training at a military academy on New Exford had marked him for a commission, he continued to insist that the Legion was for him. He was so determined to wait for an opening among the 'Mech apprentices that he would even give up his Lieutenant's commission. Fraser told Grayson that one day he would be a MechWarrior, a bearer of the true banner of glory. . .

  Grayson had nearly turned him down, but something in the young man's eagerness reminded him of his own green apprenticeship. Fraser had signed the articles that brought him in as a junior lieutenant, and been posted to Baron's armored company, a first step in the long training that might one day lead to piloting a 'Mech. Within a year, he had become a Senior Lieutenant and been entrusted with the authority of Baron's Company Exec.

  And now Fraser was dead. Grayson wondered how much glory the boy had found, in be
ing smashed by the foot of fifty-five tons of armored steel. He may have died a hero, but he had also paid the highest possible price. And the battle had continued on after Fraser's death, as though the young man never existed at all.

  Sergeant Burns, of Ramage's Special Ops force, had witnessed the final action in the town. With the defending force clearly beaten and scattered, the remaining town leaders of Durandel had decided to surrender. After seeing a white flag flying from the town council's office dome, the militia in Helmfast, themselves mostly citizens of Durandel, had followed suit. The gates to Helmfast had been opened, and the Marik conquerors welcomed according to the usages and conventions of war.

  Grayson let his gaze linger on the outcome of those conventions. Not a single building had been left intact. The gates, walls, and turrets of Helmfast Castle had been burned and blasted and torn by laser fire . . . from within. The destruction had been complete and deliberate. While looking at the ruins around him, he pondered these deceptions leading to more deceptions, a twisting of the Conventions that seemed aimed directly at the heart of the Gray Death, and Grayson himself.

  The burden weighed heavily on him now. Had it been his stupidity that had put the Legion in their current position? Or had he been too cockily assured that whatever he faced, he could certainly handle it? Of seven hundred people left at Durandel, his men had found less than four hundred so far, and many of those were injured. The fighting efficiency of his unit would be seriously compromised by the knowledge that many of their wives, husbands, children, or other loved ones were dead, or else hiding in the woods and the mountains, possibly wounded and dying.

  And if the enemy took his DropShips, Grayson and his men would be trapped here on Helm.

  There had been tricks . . . and tricks within tricks.