Binding Force

by Loren L. Coleman

  Aris was the only other BattleMech with full view of the road and the machines moving along it. As Ty listened, Aris ran down the line identifying each BattleMech. He assigned each of the five hidden lances to a particular enemy—the more dangerous enemy ’Mechs on the field—ordering concentrated fire until they were brought down. It took less than a minute, and by then the enemy was in perfect position. “Now,” he ordered. “Send the signal to Terry Chan.”

  * * *

  Terry Chan had to give it to Aris. He’d timed their arrival extremely well. As her lance of four topped the levee, they found themselves positioned precisely in the middle of the line where the Kaifeng SMM stopped and the mercenary forces began. The line of enemy BattleMechs stretched over a half kilometer in either direction, with the two nearest machines not forty meters away down the levee’s slope.

  At that moment Terry Chan might have radioed Aris Sung from her Cataphract to congratulate him except that her radio had been fixed only to receive. So she allowed herself a fraction of a second to admire the view and imagine the surprised expression on Karl Bartlett’s otherwise plain face. Then she targeted a nearby Kaifeng JagerMech and thumbed her main trigger. Fifty-millimeter slugs of depleted uranium chewed into the JagerMech, accompanied by a scathing cloud of LB-10X submunitions. Shattered armor plates crashed to the road around the Jag’s feet as Terry Chan claimed first blood.

  To her left and right, the other three Mechs of her lance were also engaging the enemy with equal fury, savaging the JagerMech and a nearby Cicada. Armor melted and ran in some places, flying off as large chunks in others. The Cicada crashed to the ground, losing its left leg, and the Kaifeng line of march was thrown into chaos as more than two dozen ’Mechs tried to react to the sudden and vicious onslaught. Some held their position and brought close-range weapons to bear while others spread out into the field on the other side of the road before turning back to engage.

  Terry Chan and her lancemates triggered another round almost simultaneously. This time she tied her two forward-firing medium lasers into her main TIC and selected the 50mm ultra autocannon to rapid fire, turning the Cataphract’s full fury on the hapless JagerMech.

  I’ll be dead before I run out of ammunition, she thought. Might as well make it a good show. This time her autocannon slugs smashed their way into the Jag’s interior torso structure, followed by nearly half her LB-X submunitions. The JagerMech jerked and stumbled forward. Its left side in ruin, bleeding gray-green coolant and black smoke, it crashed to the road without ever having fired off a shot.

  As the enemy finally began to return fire, Terry fought her control sticks for balance and screamed a challenge into the tight confines of her own cockpit. The violent barrage shook her like a rag doll in her command couch, but she kept the large war machine on its feet through sheer force of will. Damn Aris Sung and Ty Wu Non and the entire Kaifeng SMM! Before she was done, she would show them all what a warrior of House Hiritsu could do.

  * * *

  Aris watched the battle with more empathy for the doomed House warriors than he would have expected. They were his brothers and sisters. Perhaps they had been misled, but that did not change his relation to them. Aris hoped that each one would now acquit him or herself well.

  But he did not order the ’Mechs of the main force forward from their jungle hiding places, which might have saved the isolated lance. The Kaifeng SMM and their bought warriors had been expecting an attack from the river, and Aris had given it to them in the form of Terry Chan and her suicide squad. Now it was his responsibility to make sure their sacrifice was put to the best possible use.

  He watched as Terry Chan finished off the Kaifeng JagerMech just before her Cataphract drew intense counter-fire. At least three fiery PPC streams carved into the 70-ton ’Mech, slashing molten scars across its legs and upper torso. Emerald and ruby laser beams chewed away at her armor until Aris couldn’t see a single spot not running molten steel. Autocannons and several flights of missiles bit out large chunks, severing the Cataphract’s left arm at the elbow. The greenish smoke of burning coolant poured from several gaping holes.

  A flight of nearly twenty long-range missiles struck at the lower legs and feet and tore into the ground around Terry’s battered ’Mech, throwing up a veil of dirt and debris. Aris wouldn’t have thought that any ’Mech could ride out that kind of damage, and looked for the Cataphract to come crashing down any second. Then it stepped through the smoke and the shower of dirt, striding confidently down the side of the levee as it angled toward rear elements of the Kaifeng SMM. The Cataphract trailed wisps of green and gray smoke, and pieces of molten armor continued to slough off like some kind of BattleMech leprosy, but on it came.

  A 30-ton Scarabus tried to stand in Chan’s way, its hatchet chopping off more of her BattleMech’s left arm while its lasers probed the rents in her armor, seeking critical internal equipment. The Cataphract batted the light ’Mech aside with a sweeping blow from its right arm as if the smaller machine was nothing more than a nuisance. The Scarabus stumbled to its knees and then sprawled out over the road. Terry turned her lasers and large autocannon on it, switching from cluster ammo to the 180-mm slugs. She then kicked it for good measure. It didn’t get up.

  Aris winced at Terry Chan’s brutal attack against the smaller ’Mech, then looked the battlefield over. All four Hiritsu ’Mechs were still on their feet, though how that was possible Aris couldn’t begin to say. He had wanted to wait for the first warrior to fall, but knew if he didn’t give the order soon the charade would wear thin. He opened a channel on the secure line.

  “Warriors prepare,” he said. One last act to play. “Chan, fall back to the river now,” he ordered, hand hovering near four special switches. He never expected her to do so, but he had to maintain the illusion. “Get out of there.”

  Of course, Terry Chan could not answer. Aris wasn’t really worried that she and her people might try to cause trouble once the battle was joined, but he preferred not to take chances. A flip of a toggle switch on his comm panel and Chan’s pre-recorded answer was transmitted over the frequency. “Negative, we’re going to stay. Bait Lance, press them hard!”

  “Damn,” Aris cursed for the audience. “Infantry forces are to concentrate on fallen ’Mechs and taking prisoners. Hiritsu MechWarriors, have at them.”

  Following his orders, Aris released the safeties imposed on his fusion engine, smiling grimly as it roared to life beneath him. As he coaxed every last bit of speed possible from the 55-ton machine, the Wraith broke from the jungle at better than sixty kilometers per hour and accelerating. To his right and left the jungle seemed to come alive as more than a thousand tons of House Hiritsu BattleMechs broke from cover and charged the enemy’s rear.

  Long-range missiles arced out first, hitting several SMM BattleMechs. The first barrage also included Ty’s, specially designated targets as two Hiritsu machines spread Thunder mines around the road southwest. Three hundred meters or less separated the Hiritsu force from the scattered Kaifeng line, a void that was suddenly filled with beams and darts of coherent light and azure whips of PPC energy. Autocannon slugs and Gauss rounds went unnoticed in the hellishly bright display of energy, but their damage to the Kaifeng force was no less real.

  Reacting to the threat coming from the river, the Kaifeng SMM and the mercenary forces had left their weaker rear armor toward the jungle. They now paid for their reliance on a traitor’s report. Armor plates buckled and shattered like eggshells. Lasers cut deep through the thin protection, while the heavy blue-white lances of PPCs passed easily through armor and cored into internal supports and critical systems. Engines and gyros were burned and blasted out, stealing the life from a BattleMech. In one Archer’s spectacular case, the ammunition storage for both its torso-mounted long-range missile racks were touched off almost simultaneously. The BattleMech effectively ceased to exist, the explosion knocking over a nearby mercenary Enforcer while larger pieces cartwheeled off in bizarre flight patterns.

>   Aris had targeted five ’Mechs for concentrated fire, and within seconds three of those lay in complete ruin. So did Brion Lee’s Apollo, Aris noted, recognizing the hunched-shoulders design of a blackened and broken ’Mech. He reached out and flipped up the protective cover on one of four important toggle switches. Each switch could remote-detonate charges planted on the fusion reactors of the ’Mechs of each member of the suicide squad. Just in case they needed help dying a martyr, Aris was ready to give it to them. He hit the switch now, just to be safe.

  He turned away from the exploding BattleMech, seeking a target. Two of the five ’Mechs he’d judged most dangerous were still functioning, the Atlas and Bartlett’s Blackjack Omni. As the coordinated assault he’d arranged now broke down into several smaller individual matches, Aris lost visual tracking on both. He decided to use the speed and maneuverability of his Wraith to go hunting.

  The battle was not won yet.

  * * *

  Smoke stung Karl Bartlett’s eyes and burned his throat raw. Autocannon fire had glanced the head of his Blackjack, cracking his cockpit open like an oversized egg. Most of his viewscreen remained intact, shielding him from the worst effects of the battlefield such as glare from lasers and the heat wash from his own discharging weapons. But the smoke that leaked in reeked of hot coolant and burning metal and warned him to leave the battlefield.

  He wasn’t about to flee. Not yet. Rage and a thirst for vengeance drove him on. He was looking for the treacherous Terry Chan and dealt harshly with any House Hiritsu warrior who dared interfere with his quest. The smoldering vegetation, smoking, torn-up earth, and the burning hulks of fallen ’Mechs scattered over the area made the search difficult, but Bartlett only blinked the tears from his eyes and pushed on.

  A 75-ton War Dog lurched into view, the smoke from a nearby burning Lineholder wrapping about its long legs like some kind of creeping black jungle vine. The War Dog’s right arm had been half-slagged—by PPC fire, Bartlett thought—ruining its Gauss rifle main weapon. There was nothing wrong with its lasers, though, and ruby darts stitched into the Blackjack’s left leg and worked their way up the left side. They found a rent in the armor, just beneath the Omni’s left breast, and cut away more of the physical shielding surrounding the ’Mech’s fusion engine.

  Temperature in the Blackjack’s cockpit soared as the atomic fire that powered his mighty war machine leaked past the shielding and dumped raw heat into the internal structure. Flames spewed out of the rent in the left torso, licking up around the viewscreen. But Bartlett’s targeting computer had already identified the War Dog as one of the four ’Mechs that had launched the ambush, and he triggered his full spread of weapons without a care for heat buildup.

  The Inner Sphere OmniMech could hold any of four weapon configurations. Bartlett had selected the “C” class configuration, which mounted an LB-X autocannon and a medium laser in each arm. The autocannon were both selected to fire their 80mm slugs of depleted uranium. One spread caught the War Dog in the center torso, the other just to the side of its bulbous cockpit. The lasers merely chewed deeper into an already-ruined right arm, but the hard punches of the autocannons were enough to stop the Dog in its tracks and rock it back several meters.

  It didn’t go down, but the pilot was rattled enough that his or her next salvo of laser fire missed high and to the right. Bartlett grinned savagely, his lips skinning back in a snarl. Heat washed over him in a dizzying wave, pulling his breath from him in a ragged gasp. He ignored the heat monitor, which was edging deep into the red, and selected cluster ammunition for both autocannon. “Time to die,” he whispered.

  The cluster ammo fragmented just after leaving the barrel, but did not have time to spread over a large area. The concentrated spray of flechettes blasted the War Dog across the upper chest and cockpit, some of the submunitions finding their way into the internal structure. The huge machine shuddered and staggered back, almost like a man hit in the chest by a double-barreled shotgun. Bartlett saw a red smear spread across the ’Mech’s large, cracked viewscreen, and then the War Dog was falling backward.

  He did not cheer his victory. He merely accepted it. As his heat levels dropped down out of the critical area to the merely dangerous, he fought to ignore the scent of singed hair and the pain of his heat-blistered knuckles. Peering through the smoke and flame that now belched thickly from his ’Mech’s ruined torso, he walked his Blackjack deeper into the chaos of the battlefield. Always searching.

  29

  Jinxiang River Road

  Tarrahause District, Kaifeng

  Sarna Supremacy, Chaos March

  27 July 3058

  The Cataphract shuddered violently, limbs flailing madly in the air as if suddenly caught in an epileptic seizure. A glance at her ’Mech’s damage schematic confirmed Terry Chan’s fear; its gyro had been shot out.

  “No!” she screamed loud and long, her voice amplified inside the confines of her neurohelmet. She had walked up onto the levee again, scouting for Bartlett, and for a few brief seconds she’d seen his Blackjack stalking the battlefield near where the head of the column had been. But as she came down off the rise, a Kaifeng SMM Gallowglas had slipped in behind her. Its large laser and PPC had flayed off the last of her rear armor and dug deep, wrecking the large gyroscope that was critical in keeping seventy tons of metal upright and moving.

  The Cataphract was going down with no way to prevent it. Her controls weren’t responding and gravity could be very insistent. Terry refused to let it end so easily, though. A warrior of House Hiritsu did not need a BattleMech to be deadly. Aris Sung had proved that many times in the course of his career, and now it was her turn.

  Her cockpit ejection mechanism had been deactivated by Aris Sung, just as her transmitter had. There was nothing Terry Chan could do but ride the large machine down. It fell face-first, but she fought the controls to turn the near-uncontrollable machine so at least it fell onto its side and did not smash her cockpit into the ground.

  The cockpit shook hard in the crash, throwing her against the restraining straps and then back against the seat. When it finally stopped she hit the quick-release to her restraints and climbed shakily from the command couch, throwing her neurohelmet to one side. She had little in the way of offensive weapons in the cockpit except a Sunbeam laser pistol stashed under her seat. She retrieved it and strapped it on.

  The cockpit hatch was located in the back of the Cataphract’s wedge-shaped head. She hit the release and opened it. The caustic smell of the battlefield hit her first. The acrid scent from lasers ionizing the air and metal burning, of smoldering vegetation and scorched earth. The first fat drops of rain were falling from the dark clouds piled overhead, and those that hit Terry Chan’s face and trailed down to her lips tasted of the greasy smoke that rose from the battlefield. She shook her head hard, sweat spraying from her face and hair.

  “Lance Leader Chan,” a voice called out, startling her. She looked down and to her left, toward the ground, and saw four Hiritsu infantrymen crouched behind a small hill her BattleMech’s shoulder had plowed up in its fall. They carried grapple rods and demo charges.

  Terry Chan smiled, offering thanks to the fates, and started to climb down.

  Her Cataphract exploded less than a minute later.

  * * *

  From where he fought near the front of the line, Ty Wu Non could not accurately tell how the battle fared. His Charger, ancient in comparison to most Hiritsu designs but still the best ’Mech he’d ever piloted, currently limped around the field with a destroyed right hip actuator.

  He was hunting for the Atlas that had proved so uncannily accurate with its Gauss rifle. The enemy pilot had hit five in six shots so far. Two of the Gauss slugs had cracked open the Charger’s right leg up to the hip and destroyed the actuator there. Two more had crushed his center torso armor into small pieces that now littered the battlefield. The final egg-shaped slug had slammed into his left torso, shattering armor plates but leaving him with some prote
ction.

  Ty Wu Non’s rear armor had been savaged when the forward-deployed scout lance had returned. The Mercury he’d noticed before and an SMM Battle Hawk had run through the Thunder-mined area near the southwest bend, triggering several of the missile-deployed mines. Their legs had been amputated at the knees and then at the hips, leaving the light ’Mechs rolling through the minefield to be torn apart by even more of the charges. Running slightly behind the first two, a Spider and what looked like a factory-new Jenner had triggered their jump jets and sailed over the dangerous terrain. They landed less than fifty meters behind Ty’s Charger and ripped into his rear armor with a flurry of green and blue medium laser bolts.

  Ty had wasted precious seconds destroying the Jenner, judging it the more dangerous of the two. The Spider had escaped on its jump jets, heading deeper into the battlefield, where Ty hoped it would meet its end. But in the meantime, he’d been forced to weather the Atlas’ sniping Gauss rifle. No more, he decided. He would bring down Leftenant-General Fallon himself.

  Ty pivoted away from an SMM Bandersnatch that was being swarmed by Hiritsu infantry planting charges into its knife-blade hips. It smashed ineffectively at the agile infantrymen with its blocky arms, and Ty Wu Non wrote it off as good as dead.

  The first drops of rain spattered against his viewscreen as he found his quarry, the ’Mech’s death’s head grinning down at a slightly smaller ’Mech that circled it with deadly intent. Aris Sung’s Wraith cut left and then right, rushing in to snipe with his medium and large pulse lasers and then back out before Fallon in her Atlas could get a full lock on him. He used his great speed to dodge from one side or the other to keep the assault ’Mech from bringing to bear its impressive array of weapons. The dance was almost beautiful, an impressive display of skill over raw firepower, and Ty Wu Non felt a sudden stab of pride at having been Aris’ Mentor.