The Price of Glory

by William H. Keith

  Graff released the body and climbed across into the driver's seat. The ignition was still on, the turbine fans purring with disengaged power. He had to get away, had to! He would be running a risk trying to bolt through the perimeter, but he knew how weak the Legion forces were. There were only three BattleMechs along the entire west perimeter of the convoy, and they were widely spaced. If he sent the hovercraft racing into the night at top speed, he would catch them all by surprise, especially as they seemed to be occupied with some problem up ahead. He might escape into the night-before they even realized what was happening!

  Graff was actually more worried about what Rachan would do to him if the ComStar agent ever learned how much Graff had told Carlyle. Somehow, Rachan did not strike him as being the most forgiving of men. Efficient, yes. Ruthless . . . yes. Forgiving . . .

  He engaged the plenum fans and guided the hovercraft in a tight, in-place spin, facing west. The night beckoned. He opened the thrust vents and felt the skimmer race forward. Behind, over the whine of his vehicle, he heard a shout, then a gunshot. By then, he was enfolded in darkness as the wind whipped his hair, and wild laughter burst from his throat. He was free!

  Graff knew couldn't go back to Helmport, for Garth and Rachan would be there soon. They might even be on the ground already! No, there was another place Graff could go, and the warning he would bring might put Rachan in a more forgiving mood.

  As soon as he was well clear of the convoy, he swung the hovercraft's nose toward the north.

  BOOK III

  26

  The day was still new when the Gray Death Legion found the dry bed of the former eastern half of the Vermillion River, and followed it toward the Nagayan Mountains. There had been an hour's pause on the prairie when Grayson and King had rejoined the column. That had also given their hard-pressed 'Mechs and vehicles a chance to cool, while Grayson explained to the group commanders the results of his negotiations with Ricol.

  They had help! Strange and unexpected help, it was true, but help! Among most of the people of the Legion, there was some measure of distrust for warriors of the Draconis Combine, but few hated Kurita's soldiers with the same passion that had driven Grayson Carlyle for so long. A warrior fought side by side with his comrades. The foe might be Kurita regulars one time, a pirate raiding force the next, but most one-on-one combat with the enemy was faceless, impersonal. That made it possible to accept that the faceless foe might become a trusted comrade, at least for a time. Most of the Legion members also trusted Grayson enough to believe that there was good reason for such an unexpected about-face.

  Grayson explained that Duke Ricol had dispatched a force of ninety of his troops east toward Cleft Valley. It was possible that the landing of Garth's DropShips had delayed or interfered with that movement, but it was also likely that Ricol would take advantage of any confusion caused by Garth's arrival to move his troops out of Helm-down. He asked for volunteers to form a strike force that would turn around and head north once more. A rendezvous point had been selected in the hills south of Cleft Valley; Ricol's and the Legion's assault teams would join together, attempt to surprise the Marik guards in the valley, and then free the Legion's DropShips. The strike would have to be carefully timed and executed, Grayson told them, because Garth would not likely keep the Dropships prisoners alive beyond tomorrow. By daylight, the Marik command would know that the Legion had not risen to the bait left at Cleft Valley. Lord Garth could easily issue new orders concerning the DropShips and their occupants once he was on the ground at Helmdown.

  The rescue would have to take place tonight, or the Deimos, the Phobos, and the Legion prisoners aboard were lost forever.

  Again, there was no shortage of volunteers. The MechWarriors of A Company had to stay with the convoy, and Grayson refused Gomez DeVillar's request to accompany the rescue strike team because he would probably be needed to open the door to the Star League cache. The trainees of B Company volunteered to go, of course, and Grayson accepted them. Tracy Kent insisted on going, and Grayson agreed to that, too, knowing how worried she had been about the loss of her Phoenix Hawk. Fifty of the Regiment's infantry were also accepted, with the entire force under the command of Lieutenant Dulaney, the highest-ranking infantry officer that Grayson had. Sergeant Burns would accompany him as senior NCO.

  Grayson gave Dulaney and Burns their specific orders, and watched as the strike force disentangled itself from the convoy and whined off on laboring plenum fans northward into the night.

  Briefly, Grayson considered replacing the 'Mech technician who was piloting his Marauder on the trek, but he quickly thought better of it. Despite his nap while King had piloted the skimmer south from Helmdown, he was still exhausted. As the convoy formed up anew, now minus the vehicles and men and women who had departed, he was curled up again in the skimmer's passenger seat, and fell fast asleep.

  When Grayson awoke at sun-up, he was considerably refreshed, despite the cramps in neck and back. The convoy had made good time. Within two hours, they could see the stark, skeletal remains of Freeport to the east, beneath the orange ball of Helm's sun. Soon after that, they found the dry river bed, and turned west to follow it. The BattleMechs moved with easy, long-paced strides, for the ground was firm and level. Occasionally, the sharpest eyes among them would spot traces of ancient, half-buried ferrocrete roads, and once a soldier kicked over a waist-high mound of dirt to reveal the corrosion-ravaged corpse of a Star League-era floater.

  It was then that Grayson learned that Graff had escaped during the night. It was regrettable, of course, and Grayson wondered momentarily whether or not to dispatch a unit to try to track him down. He quickly realized the futility of that, just as Lori had the night before when deciding to wait till morning to tell Grayson. The plains were broad, the night dark. Even moments after Graff had stolen the hovercraft, he would have easily eluded pursuit.

  Besides, what harm could the man do? Clearly, he wasn't going to return to Helmdown to face Rachan, not after revealing Rachan's plan to Grayson and his officers! If he returned to face Rachan, it would be with a fabricated story that could not hurt the Legion now. No, the convoy would proceed in force. There was nothing to be done about Graff now.

  Fifteen hours after the column first set out from Durandel, the Gray Death Legion stood below the cliff that Grayson had first seen on the satellite map stolen from the Marik mobile headquarters. How much more imposing it was in reality than it had been on a satellite projection!

  The river valley itself was perhaps ten meters wide at that point, a gentle depression lined with sand, gravel, and ancient, water-worn stones. On either side, the walls of the river valley proper rose more sharply, fifty meters high and capped by a blanket of heavy blue-green vegetation.

  As the dry valley curved deeper in among the trees and rocks, there was a point where the valley walls stopped looking like accidents of nature, where even the most skeptical of the Legion's company could look to left and right and see the crisp lines where rock and dirt had been carved from the valley walls, widening the gap for the Wall.

  There was no other name for it. Polished by eons of flowing water, it stood just as carefully shaped and set on end by unknown agencies as it had for the past three centuries. The rain and wind of those intervening centuries had softened the crisp contours of the valley cliffs on either side of the Wall somewhat, but they had not touched the granite structure itself. As Grayson stood before it, letting his hand run across its smooth surface, he could imagine that it had been set in place as a dam across that river valley only yesterday, that the builders themselves might step through some hidden door in that featureless expanse and demand to know what the Legion wanted.

  Two hundred meters from the Wall was the lone building that Grayson had noticed on the modern map projection. Viewed from above, it had presented a curious sight. It looked even stranger up close, a squat, truncated, four-sided pyramid of cast ferrocrete and gray metal. Though it had no windows, an inset door opened inward on si
lent, floating bearings when Grayson set his hand against it. He stepped through quickly, with Lori and King close behind him.

  "An engineering station," DeVillar said from the doorway, as others of the 'Mech company gathered outside. "Set up as an office or a construction headquarters by whoever built . . . that." Since they had arrived, most of the members of the Legion had avoided calling the structure across the river valley by name. Some called it "the Wall," but most referred to it obliquely as "that" or "it." The sheer scope of such an engineering feat had a numbing effect on those who saw it, for it would be impossible to duplicate it with present-day technology.

  Grayson slowly turned, taking in the room. "Could be," he said. "They didn't leave much . . . except for the computer."

  Though roomy enough to have stored a number of vehicles or large crates of machinery, which DeVillar suggested might have been the case, the one-room building was empty except for a table with built-in computer terminal and screen. The table was coated with a thick layer of dust, as was the floor and even the walls.

  "You mean the engineers who built it worked here during the construction? Used the computer for their calculations, that sort of thing?"

  "Seems likely," King said. He was examining the back of the computer. "Gods, how well they built things back then! This is the same sort of computer as up at Helmfast, but it has its own internal power cells, near as I can tell. You could turn it on right now . . . and it would probably work."

  Grayson reached his hand out toward the keyboard, hesitated, then turned away. "Lieutenant DeVillar, let's take a look at that Wall. If we have to open it, I want to do it soon. Garth will be here soon, and I don't like camping in a blind alley like this. It would be too easy to catch us with no way out!"

  A close examination of the wall confirmed Devillar's earlier appraisal. The granite block appeared to have been balanced on end, then anchored to the opposite sides of the valley escarpments with struts or bolts on the inside. Plastic explosive charges set at the upper corners of the Wall would shatter those struts, sending the wall falling outward, opening the way over the rubble to the storehouse in the tunnel that would be revealed on the far side.

  While DeVillar and a pair of Techs clambered along the escarpments looking for places to implant their explosives, Grayson studied the face of the Wall itself. The smoothness appeared to be completely natural, the result of millennia of action by running water. There was one element of the Wall that was not natural. In two places, some twenty meters apart, Grayson found vertical grooves in the rock. They appeared to go straight up the face of the Wall for perhaps twenty meters, then turned toward each other, outlining a huge rectangle in the center of the stone.

  A door? The groove was so narrow that Grayson could not force his knife point between the two sections of rock, but it was deep enough that even with a hand torch, he could not see how deeply it cut into the stone. If it were a door, there would have to be a key of some kind. What that key was, Grayson hadn't a clue.

  His hand communicator bleeped. He took it from its belt hanger and opened the channel.

  "Carlyle."

  "Aye, Colonel, it's McCall. Ah go' a wee bit a' fell news."

  "Bad news? What is it?"

  "Ah'm trackit a large force ... a vurra large force, to the north and travelin' south, fast!"

  "You're tracking by their radio transmissions?"

  "Aye ... ah can ae' hear 'em chatterin' away at one another. Multiple signals ... all in code ... ah dinnae ken how many targets! Sair . . . usually ah' cannae track it tha' beasties across sae far a stretch. If ah'm tracking them noo . . . it's because there's ae' a great, great many a' them."

  "Anything about our DropShips?" The strike force should have attacked the DropShips before dawn, though with the communications blackout Grayson had imposed on the entire force, there was no way to know whether the attempt had succeeded or failed.

  "No, sair. No' a worrd."

  "Right. As of now, you're our tracker. Keep on them. And let me know if you hear anything about the strike force." McCall's Rifleman had the best long-range sensors and tracking gear of any 'Mech in his command. It made sense for him to be responsible for watching the enemy force's approach.

  Now that the Marik DropShips he had seen the night before had landed, the Marik 'Mech forces aboard would have been very busy indeed unloading their equipment and joining up with Langsdorf's forces already on the planet. The Marik DropShips still in orbit would have spotted the Legion force not long after sun-up, however, and possibly long before that if they had the correct and functioning technology for identifying 'Mechs from orbit in the dark.

  Whatever their technology, it was certain that Garth's people knew precisely where the Legion was now, and they had to be on their way. He wondered if they had some inkling that Grayson already knew where the Star League cache was, that he was already preparing to blast his way in.

  DeVillar began to gather his explosives.

  * * *

  Duke Garth entered the room, smiling. "All is in readiness, Precentor. The 15th Marik Militia is already moving. What is left of the 12th White Sabers and the 5th Marik Guards have joined with the House Marik Guard elements we have here. They are ready to move on my command!"

  Precentor Rachan turned slowly, his face a mask of black fury. Garth stopped when he saw it, knowing that something was terribly wrong. The Precentor sat at a small tactical battlefield computer, an orbital photographic map projection displayed in color on the screen.

  "Your command? Your command?"

  "Precentor . . . what . . . ?"

  "I suggested that we would need AeroSpace Fighters in case we had to search for Carlyle, but you said they could not be spared from Irian! I told you that we should have landed our ships to the south, near the ruins of Free-port, in hopes of catching Carlyle if his force moved toward the Nagayan Mountains! You refused, telling me that landing at a spaceport at night was safer than on open ground! I told you ... I insisted that you set your 'Mechs moving without delay the moment we had grounded, and you found one trivial delay after another, until now the day is almost half gone, and now, only now, are you are ready to set out!"

  "Precentor ... I was not aware of any rush ..."

  "You fool! You bloody, malfing fool! Look at this!"

  Garth looked past Rachan to the computer display. In the center of the map was a miniature galaxy of light pinpoints gathered along what looked like a satellite photograph of a dried river bank. A huge, vertical cliff caught the direct light of the morning sun.

  "You see them, Garth? That is the Gray Death Legion enhanced by infrared light . . . Several hundred troops, several hundred civilians, a number of vehicles . . . and at least eight BattleMechs. There is a Marauder there. That will be Carlyle."

  "You've found them? Where . . . ?"

  "Camped by a dry river valley, close against the Nagayan Mountains, 500 kilometers south of here."

  "Well, he's stolen a march, but he'll be slowed, crossing those mountains. There are mountain passes, of course, but travel through them will be difficult. We can still catch him ..."

  Rachan pointed to the cliff and explained slowly, as though speaking with a not-too-bright child. "You see that, Garth? See it? It is a cliff. A sheer, straight, vertical cliff. It looks perfectly natural, does it not? And yet, can you imagine a soldier of Grayson Carlyle's proven battle skill camping in such a place, with no line of retreat . . . no way out should we come down on him from the north or east? No . . . you wouldn't see that, because you are too dim-witted to perceive a trap when you face one! There can be only one reason why Carlyle and his people are camped there . . . only one!" Rachan paused and pounded the table viciously as he spat out, "He has found the Star League cache!"

  "Found the . . . but how? How? You told me your ComStar researchers had studied the records for years, looking for some clue."

  "I don't know, Garth." The Precentor chewed at his lip as he studied the computer projection. "Maybe something h
e found at Helmfast. Maybe blind, stupid luck. But now . . . now, looking at where he is, the artificiality of his surroundings is obvious!"

  Garth looked closely. "What do you mean? I see a cliff . . . big rocks ..."

  "You see what you expect to see. What you don't see is why the river that carved out that valley flowed directly into a sheer, blank rock wall . . . and then vanished!"

  "You mean that cliff ..."

  "Is a doorway of some sort. It almost certainly leads to what we've been searching for for so long, and Carlyle is about to get it!"

  "What's he waiting for?"

  "A key, I should imagine. He needs to figure out how to get in."

  "And if he finds it?" Garth's face worked uncertainly. "Suppose he turns the weapons inside against us!"

  Rachan snorted. "Nonsense. Not in the time he has! Any 'Mechs stored there will not have their weapons mounted, will not be stocked with ammunition. It would take time to power up their reactors."

  "Then what's the problem?"

  "If he gets in, he will seek to bargain with us." Rachan shook his head, his face set in grim lines. "It is the only thing he can do . . . give us what we want, in exchange for his life and the life of his troops. What he can't know is that we can outlast him. However deep that storehouse is buried, however large it may be, the Gray Death Legion cannot hope to survive in there for long without food and fresh water. Water they may find, if there are underground springs or streams there, but their food problem is going to become critical very soon. There will be no hunting inside the caverns, and his provisions must be running low by now, with that many people to feed."