Uchita's left hand—the flesh-and-blood one—was trembling, her breath searing in her chest. The familiar blood-lust burned behind her eyes, dulling the pain of her body's long captivity. Her right hand closed around the joystick between her knees. "Got it...Captain."
Her left hand killed her ship's thrust To Uchita's eyes, the other five Thrush fighters of Dagger Squadron appeared to be accelerating past her, away from the planet and into deep space at rapidly increasing speed. This was only an illusion, though, created by the fact that her ship was no longer decelerating at thirty meters per second squared and was now hurtling planetward more quickly than her still-slowing fellows. Machine-precise fingerings of her attitude jets flipped the tail-first Thrush end for end, then steadied the ship while Stein's Folly filled her forward canopy with green and orange splendor.
"Tucker!" Chen's voice screeched over the private circuit She palmed the comm switch, cutting the voice off in mid-threat Let him burn her down...if he could catch her. She was going to kill Davions.
Her heads-up display sprang into sharp illumination in front of her eyes. Red pinpoints of light projected the positions of the approaching Davion fighters, as steadily dwindling decimal numbers recited the closing range.
Kill them, she told herself. Kill them all!
2
Ghostly fingers of radar had first detected the approaching Liao ships, which the Sparrowhawk's tracking computer painted as a ragged circle of five white pinpoints of light on Lieutenant Adam Valasquez's heads-up display. There were other enemy ships further out, he knew—at least three more six-ship squadrons and a small fleet of massive Overlord Class DropShips—but these five were the leaders, the ones charged with opening the way for the landings certain to follow. Their jettisoned fuel tanks had made a blazing display of meteoric fireworks in the chill, twilight skies above Steindown's north pole; he'd seen the images relayed from DESTra's cameras. That they'd been willing to burn that much reaction mass to hump the void between the jump point and Stein's Folly at a crushing three Gs could only mean they were coming to stay, hoping to catch the ground defenses unprepared. Those Overlords farther out carried thirty-six BattleMechs apiece. If they got through...
But the Overlords were someone else's responsibility. Heavy assault fighters still being readied at Steindown's port would be the ones to vector against the Overlords in hopes of burning them down before they could release their deadly cargoes. These five leaders were the targets for Valasquez's squadron. They had to be burned so that they couldn't soften the Davion ground defenses or provide air cover for the BattleMech drop. After they were out of the way, well...
Valasquez rubbed his gloves against his thighs in a futile effort to wipe away the sweat trickling across the palms of his hands. He'd never had a chance at an Overlord. They were big...terrifyingly big, and heavily armed and armored, but...
"Red Flight, this is Red Leader. Steady up, now. We've got 'em right where we want 'em. Just keep cool and stay tight On my command...three...two...one...punch it!"
The squadron of Sparrowhawks cut in their overthrust as one, vectoring for the oncoming Liao ships. There had definitely been six enemy craft—the usual complement of a battle squadron—but now Valasquez read only five. He almost widened his scan, but decided against it for fear of losing the fix on the targets he had. That missing ship...a malfunction, perhaps? A drive failure could leave an aircraft helplessly plunging on into space at the velocity it retained when the drive died. The sixth ship might already have plunged into the skies of the Folly's pole and burned hours ago, following the trajectory of the empty fuel tanks. He spared a thought for the pilot, a passing shudder for the man's terrible death.
At 3.5 Gs, the Davion Sparrowhawks closed on their targets.
* * * *
Uchita had not burned. Three times she had made high-G burns to correct her vector, slowing her ship and clearing the radar-swept line between Dagger Squadron and the outbound Davions.
She was still not in visual range, but her computer had painted wire-frame plan and elevation view diagrams of her targets in green lines on her number two computer screen, while her main screen displayed the enemy squadron's arrowhead formation. The Davion fighters were easily recognizable without computer identification—six stubby Sparrowhawks, the twin lances of their paired Martell medium lasers extending forward like the antennae of some grey, squat insects. Range figures flickered across her heads-up display. Her own trio of Kajuka Type 2 lasers had a maximum effective range of over 50,000 kilometers, but she was determined to hold her attack until the very last possible second. She was at 12,000 kilometers now and closing at 300 klicks per second.
She selected one of the six targets, and locked it into her targeting computer. Behind the black reflective mask of her flight helmet visor, her lips wer drawn back in a wild rictus that she thought was a smile. Kill them!
* * * *
Space combat tended to be a drawn-out affair of maneuver and countermaneuver, punctuated by brief periods of fire-shrieking fury and fear. Lasers, PPCs, and long-ranged missiles can deliver damage across respectable ranges, but target acquisition and targeting technologies were no longer able to cope with the ranges and velocities involved. Extensive weapon firing caused ships already heated by maneuver to overheat faster than the heat pumps could handle. Expert pilots had learned to wait until they were within a few thousand kilometers to open fire, trading the slim chance of multiple, long-ranged hits for the certainty of hits at close range during rapid passes.
Red Flight and Dagger Squadron interpenetrated, then-respective velocities on opposite vectors adding to a passing velocity of over 500 kps. At such speeds, human reactions dragged too slowly to select targets or to plot vectors. Under computer control, four Sparrowhawks concentrated their fire on one Thrush. Armor on the broad, oval disk of the fighter's wing flared white where invisible beams of coherent light scored successive hits, wreathing the Thrush in a mist of rapidly condensing droplets of molten alloy. Return fire scored hull armor and left molten slashes across fuselage and wing.
Valasquez flipped his fighter end for end and slammed his thrust control forward. Savage deceleration bucked and sang through his stubby ship, but he continued to fire at the Liao ships now receding against the green and orange disk of the Folly's sun. Another hit!
He'd had only a fractional instant's glimpse of his enemy before they'd passed out of visual range, but that view had confirmed his computer's ID of five, tight-grouped TR-7s. A combat readout flickered across one of his computer screens. At least two of the Liao ships were hurt enough to degrade their performance. He identified those two to his squadron as optimum targets, then cut in a short burst of overthrust that hammered him against his seat. For an agonizing moment, Valasquez thought the Liao TR-7s were going to ignore Red Squadron and race them for the atmosphere of Stein's Folly, but the traceries on his HUD proved otherwise. All five ships were decelerating as savagely as he was, using their maneuvering thrusters to swing them around and bring them into line for another pass. He noted that four had paired off in wingman formation, but that the fifth was alone.
Valasquez gave a long, hooting rebel yell as he lined up all four of his little ship's lasers on the lead Thrush, and triggered a rapid burst of invisible bolts of light that stitched across the target's nose and wing.
* * * *
Uchita's battlelust had grown as her instruments described to her the opening rounds of the battle. There was no indication that she had been detected. She watched one of the Sparrowhawk fighters open fire on Captain Chen's Thrush. Gently she eased her stick forward, letting her fingers caress the target acquisition controls under her unfeeling right hand. Her vector had already been set as her target accelerated, she dropped into line behind him, so close she could see his drive flare as a brilliant, diamond-sharp beacon star through the soft illumination of her HUD.
Fire! Fire!
* * * *
Alarms screeched in Valasquez's helmet speakers as his
instrument display lit up with red trouble lights. He was hit!
"Red Leader, this is Red Five. Y'got one on your tail!"
"I see him, Red Five! I've got some damage here..." Damage control reports flashed across a screen. Uh oh...his starboard control surfaces were really fouled. It was a good thing he wouldn't need those until he hit atmosphere again. He'd worry about that later. His threat indicator flashed purple.
"The bogie's closing, Red Leader! Break left! Break left!"
His hand played across thruster controls. The maneuverable little Sparrowhawk flipped end-over and decelerated sharply as he swung onto a new vector. Warnings shrieked at him, and he cut them off. A combat spacecraft's most serious problem was heat build-up—heat from engines, from laser fire, from enemy hits. Each maneuver he made was making the temperature problem worse, but there was no way to shed waste heat now.
Where was the bogie? There! He fired, a snap shot without a lock, but he was certain he'd scored at least one hit. Red Five was closing on the bogie now, angling for a shot A momentary brilliance flaring about the target showed Red Five had hit Good!
Then there were more Liao fighters, two of them in tight wing formation. "Red Five, watch yourself, starboard quarter high!" His own heat overload warning lights were flashing balefully in time to a raucous buzz in his helmet phones, but he slapped the override again and triggered invisible fire from all four lasers.
"Red Leader, this is Five!" Dugan's voice was high-pitched, the youngster's battlepitch distorting his words. "The bogie's flipped again! Watch your..." At that moment Red Five exploded in white light, the silent burst punctuated by the shriek of static in Valasquez's helmet phones.
The laser fire shredded his tail stabilizer and pocked craters in the armor over his engines. He fired his thrusters to flip an undamaged flank of his Sparrowhawk into the attacker's line of fire. Sluggish! She wasn't reacting fast enough! Metal vapor exploded into space.
He tracked a target, firing paired medium and light lasers with grim determination. His target began tumbling, its disk shape shredded and hacked by repeated bits, its thrusters silenced. Valasquez's course and speed were close enough to that of the target that he was able to fire volley after volley into the wreckage. Finally, he was rewarded by a flash that consumed the crippled Thrush in a dazzling gout of light. A kill! But his computer marked that kill as the Liao flight's leader, not the mystery ship that had attacked him from behind.
He switched to wide scan, searching. Where was that other one? Whoever he was, that pilot was damn good. Valasquez had already watched the guy perform maneuvers that should have blasted him into unconsciousness. Was it a man piloting that ship, or some incredibly efficient fighting machine? He fired again—damn! Miss! The battle was becoming a one-on-one duel with this unknown Liao pilot Hit! Hit again! Then a rapid-fire sequence of laser hits scored his port wing, punching through delicate control surfaces and blasting his port Exostar light laser into tattered, twisted wreckage. Warnings keened. Override! Target! Fire! Another hit!
"Red Leader! Red Leader! This is Red Three! Watch your vector, Red Leader!"
Vector? Valasquez checked, blinked, checked again. The battle had carried him toward Stein's Folly. So intent had he been on the grim killing efficiency of the Liao pilot that he'd ignored the dazzling, swollen, cloud-girded sphere of the planet behind him.
"Copy, Red Three." He did some fast calculations, chose a new vector, kicked in his drive...but nothing happened. For a moment, he kept cold panic at bay by resetting his controls and punching the throttle controls again. Still nothing. The intolerable heat overload had shut down his drive. Malfunction lights winked and flickered at him. His ship jolted as another trio of laser bursts stitched into his wounded Sparrowhawks hull.
He palmed thruster controls. Where was the bogie? There! Following him down! He fired his twin Martells. His surviving Exostar was winking a malfunction light at him. Thrush and Sparrowhawk traded fire as the pair of them drifted into the thin upper reaches of the Folly's atmosphere. Desperately, Valasquez used his surviving thrusters to boot his Sparrowhawk over into a nose-high, nose-forward approach. Landing his shot-up bird was going to be tricky. Atmosphere dragged at him, making his ship buck and shudder as he fought to control a sudden, irresistible starboard yaw with savage twists of his control stick. The control surfaces weren't responding, weren't...
Oh, God, no...the control surfaces! He craned his head around, saw smoke and tattered debris whipping aft from the laser-pocked ruin of his port wing. A violent thump marked the departure of what was left of his tail fin. Then the damaged port wing tore free, and the Sparrowhawk began tumbling, engulfed in an orange fireball, trailing debris.
Valasquez didn't start screaming until smoke boiled up into the cockpit, and the legs of his pressure suit began melting in the heat.
* * * *
Burn, Davion, burn! Uchita watched the fiery meteor streak across the cloudtops below her with a curiously cold and shuddering emotion that might, remotely, be termed satisfaction. Her own ship's engines were gone, wrecked in that final exchange of fire with the enemy Sparrowhawk. Her craft's thrusters had functioned long enough for her to flatten her trajectory and skip off the Folly's atmosphere like a stone from the surface of a lake. She was receding into space now, her Thrush a battered wreck--power out, engines dead, her cockpit open to vacuum. A strange, numb sensation from the attachments of her mechanical left leg had proven, on examination, to be nothing less than complete amputation. Her hull armor had failed at a critical point, and her left leg was missing below the knee. The heat from that millisecond pulse seemed to have partly melted the fabric of her spacesuit's leg, sealing it against what remained of her plastic knee and thigh, maintaining pressure in her suit. She took grim satisfaction in knowing that that hit would have killed any other pilot. She was the Automaton of Destruction—indestructible.
At least, indestructible if she were rescued. She followed the course of the battle on her screen. Including her kill—her thirteenth, she realized—three of the attacking Sparrowhawks had been destroyed, the others damaged and scattered. Two Liao fighters had been put out of the fight, her own and Captain Chen's.
The DropShips were already maneuvering toward the atmosphere, as their fighter reserves emerged from cavernous cargo bays and descended to engage rising squadrons of Davion defenders in the atmosphere. The Davions would be at a disadvantage now. Dagger Squadron's thrust had blunted the leading edge of their defenses. The way was open for the Overlords to drop their readied 'Mechs behind a screen of sheltering fighters.
Her own life, she realized, hung on the outcome of that invasion. Her life support would last for another day, time enough for the invasion to establish a foothold on Stein's Folly—or be repulsed. If the invasion failed, no one would have time for her, locked in her crippled ship, falling stern-first into deep space at well above the planet's ten kilometers per second escape velocity. If it succeeded, she would be rescued by DropShips homing on her automatic radio distress beacon. Her squadron-mates might not like her, but she had proven her worth to them time after time. She would rejoin Dagger Squadron again, would kill again.
Thirteen kills!
With a cool, almost remote sense of mild anticipation, Uchita Tucker watched the invasion ships deploy on her screens.
* * * *
Colonel Pavel Ridzik stood with arms folded across his barrel chest and smiled with grim satisfaction through his red beard. The sky above Steindown was heavily smudged with oily smoke from a dozen burning fuel tanks, warehouses, and shattered BattleMechs. Skeletal shards of blast-ruined buildings poked at the sky from rubble piles still smoldering. The landing field itself was heavily cratered, and shadowed by the vast bulk of the pair of Overlord Class DropShips that had settled their landing jacks deeply into the fragmented ferrocrete. Hatches gaped open beneath the upraised arm-and-katana sword emblems of the Capellan Confederation emblazoned on the curves of those black hulls. BattleMechs—Liao BattleMechs—
were still being offloaded from both transports.
In the sharp breeze above the spaceport, the House of Liao flag, inverted green triangle with the raised arm-and-katana against a red field, snapped and cracked. The ground struggle for the port had lasted just fifteen minutes from the time the first Liao Phoenix Hawk had touched down on flaming jets to the moment the Overlords had grounded and begun disgorging their reserves. The defenders had thrown down their weapons the moment the Overlords had grounded, had surrendered or fled into the surrounding countryside. A few had made it
The ground under Ridzik's boots trembled to the tread of a formation of heavy 'Mechs moving off the field. A pair of sixty-ton OSR-2C Ostrocs, the massive, armless, bullet form of a Catapult, and the eighty-five-ton thunder of a BLR-1G BattleMaster, Fire Lance of a Company of House Liao's St. Ives Armored Cavalry, raised dust and thunder as they made their way across the shredded ruin of the facility's security fence and into the grassland beyond. Another BattleMaster, an Archer, and a pair of TBT Trebuchets followed the line infantry 'Mechs, the horse-and-rider emblem of McCarron's Cavalry freshly painted against their green-camouflaged right legs.
Ridzik turned and strode back toward the Administrator's Residence, the low, modern villa that he had made his headquarters at the edge of the field. After the seesaw battle in space, the ground battle had been almost anticlimactic, because the defending 'Mechs had been scattered at key garrison points across the planet.
The sword and the dagger Page 2
