BattleTech : Mechwarrior - Dark Age 02 - A Call to Arms (2003)

by Loren L. Coleman

  The Overlord pounded down at the nose of the civilian-conversion with gauss rifles and enough laser energy to light up the city of River's End. Although limited in firepower after its military decommissioning, the Kuan Ti still mustered its assault-class autocannons and a heavy missile barrage.

  Then the Okinawa bit in from behind, trading lasers and PPCs against the civilian vessel's aft pulse lasers and missiles.

  It was an uneven fight from the beginning, and lasted until the Overlord pounded silent every one of the Kuan Ti's forward weapon bays.

  About sixty seconds.

  Wary of being caught between the DropShips' anvil and the hammer of the Steel Wolf advancing force, Raul herded his two remaining Schmitts and a scattered flock of mixed battlesuit infantry back toward their ravaged rearward lines. M.A.S.H. units and a JI 100 recovery vehicle had rolled up from the southwest, making pickup on broken units and fallen comrades. He stomped past a fire-gutted Joust and the twisted wreckage of two broken hoverbikes. One still had hands clamped onto the steering bar, but was missing the rest of the driver. A technician emergency response team fell hard at work over a captured Demon, getting it battle-worthy again and detailing a new crew out of their auxiliary ranks. Raul gave the working ERT a wide berth, swung around to one side of them, and then slammed his throttles down to a full stop. Being hauled up into the embrace of the JI recovery vehicle was Charal DePriest's converted LoaderMech.

  With Tassa leading a small force in defense of the Brightwater facility, Charal had been called up to help defend the spaceport. Raul had thought to keep her safe, relegated as she was to a support role, even when she followed him into the wedge between the Swordsworn and Steel Wolves. Safe' was a relative term in a live firefight, though, especially when two DropShips began redefining the battle. Still, there were any number of injuries that even a converted WorkMech could take and the MechWarrior could walk away from. Crippled gyros. Destroyed legs. Ruined engines.

  Charal's WorkMech was missing its cockpit. All that remained was a melted stump of support structure.

  Standing there, his Legionnaire grounded to a dangerous halt while Steel Wolf forces continued to stalk up from the south, Raul became a lodestone to stragglers. Scattered reserves and retreating forward units gathered in around his position, inadvertently creating a strongpoint that worried the advancing Wolves. Sensing a possible counter-thrust, they also slowed, drew together in concentrated ranks. A converted ConstructionMech joined the Pack Hunters, forming the spearpoint on a thrust that would not be long in coming.

  The Swordsworn pressed forward now as well, goaded back into the fight as enemy DropShips landed behind their position. On one of the auxiliary channels, Erik Sandoval recommended-ordered-a full retaliatory strike against the advancing Steel Wolf line. "Bloody them now, and they'll pull back.

  DropShips and all."

  His mobile command vehicle lumbered up from the far rear, protected by a pair of JES carriers.

  A pair of Jagatai fightercraft turned in his direction, laying down a long line of fire that swept up and over the Praetorian. Both Jessies belched out thick clouds of proximity-fused missiles, filling the air with heavy flak. The lead Jagatai pulled up so sharply Raul could almost believe the pilot had defied all laws of momentum.

  The second craft was not so skilled, or lucky. It drove through the thickest part of the antiaircraft barrage, bulldozing through the far side with streamers of fire and smoke, a stunted right- side wing, and a lethal roll that pitched him up, over, and into the tarmac.

  "Where was that support five minutes ago?" Raul asked aloud, not caring who heard him over the comm channels. But he knew, he knew.

  Like those Swordsworn "reserve forces" held back within the capital, the JES carriers were being denied to the militia so that the standing guard bore the brunt of the fighting. The perfect Sandoval partnership. So long as Erik's people held the HPG station and could force fighting in the streets before being removed from River's End, the militia operated with its hands tied. The only choice was to cooperate-collaborate . .

  Or give Erik Sandoval exactly what he was asking for: complete responsibility for Achernar.

  A trio of missiles slammed into the side of the Legionnaire, cracking into more armor, while the azure lightning-whip of a particle projector cannon snaked past Raul's left knee and cut into a stalled Fox. The armored car swung around on lift fans and scurried back, like its scampering namesake.

  Swinging around, Raul pegged one of the encroaching Pack Hunters dead center with his crosshairs. A pounding stream of autocannon slugs chipped away at the Hunter's gyroscope housing, shoving the BattleMech back by several meters and threatening to topple it. It fell back among the building Steel Wolf forces

  Raul turned back to the waiting militia units, and Charal's decapitated WorkMech. Do gold . . good . . . by Achernar. From all their difficult conversations in the last week-difficult only because of her speech impediment-those were the words he remembered. The same ones echoed by Janella Lakewood. But what happened when serving the Republic and serving Achernar conflicted? Was that what the Sphere Knight had meant, telling him to then serve himself?

  Tie goes to the MechWarrior.

  "Captain Ortega?" Diago. According to the HUD, he too had fallen back, stretching the militia line into something more of an abbreviated arc than any serious encirclement. The Steel Wolf forces were knotted up into a thick wedge, with the tip pointed straight at Raul's position. "Raul? You've got about ten seconds to get turned around and ready to meet a full charge."

  Raul shook his head, feeling more than his neurohelmet weighing down on his shoulders. "Not happening," he said, voice pitched low. Then, with gathering strength, "No, Clark. Wrap 'em up and back to base. Carry or drag along our wounded equipment as we can. Ruin it rather than leave it for Torrent."

  He passed the same order down through several channels, making certain that the support forces rallying around his position had a clear idea of the order of retreat. The M.A.S.H. trucks and salvage vehicles led, protected by hovercraft flankers. Raul's Legionnaire and their heaviest tanks would guard the militia rear. If the Steel Wolves wanted to force a longer battle today, he would make them pay a butcher's price.

  "Disregard that order." The plans had finally worked their way over to Erik Sandoval.

  "Achernar militia, hold your line and prepare for a joint offensive."

  Long past caring for Erik Sandoval's tactics, Raul keyed open a channel to answer for himself.

  "We've seen your brand of joint offensives, Sandoval. And it's the last time we walk into one without reading the fine print." He rocked forward on his foot throttles, stepping out into a crisp march to the west, out from under the Steel Wolf sword, exposing the Swordsworn line.

  "Captain Ortega, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

  "I'm ceding Star Colonel Torrent the San Marino spaceport. I would suggest you do the same."

  There would be hell to pay with Colonel Blaire. At least Clark Diago was willing to follow his lead, for now. The militia's western flank had drawn itself into a skirmish line to protect the retreating middle. "The militia is withdrawing," Raul said

  "And leaving you to the Wolves."

  21 - The Hardest Lessons

  Brightwater River Control Facility

  Achernar

  12 March 3133

  Strapped into one of many passenger seats inside the older Trooper-class VTOL, Raul Ortega labored to breathe shallow. The wide passenger compartment smelled its twenty years as an infantry carrier, tainted with rancid sweat and aviation fuel fumes. His seat had lost most of its thin padding years before, with only a few remaining strips held together with duct tape or stapled into the rigid plastic seat. Trying to ignore the knots pressing into his legs and lower back, Raul twisted around to stare out through a copper-tinted window as the infantry carrier thundered up the Rio Sangria.

  The reddish, mud-colored waters still ran high as mountain rainfall continued to pour down
into the lowlands, but was hardly in danger of flooding so long as the Brightwater River Control Facility remained in Republic hands. A system of locks and sluice gates, the Brightwater facility could, for brief periods, dam up the river completely or channel excess water into one of many old dry washes.

  From above the facility, he could see that water was indeed being diverted into two older arroyos. The VTOL followed the larger of the two runoff channels, banking southwest and leaving the river course a moment later to run out over yesterday's battlefield.

  From five hundred feet, the area did not look so bad. Some scorched desert grasses and a few charred husks that had once been vehicles or a military-modified IndustrialMech. As the 'copter settled, however, more of the personal cost became clear. He saw the pieces and parts of other machines, scattered leavings after salvage crews had worked the field over for whatever useful equipment they could find. Raul also counted better than two dozen armored battlesuits littering the area like the molted cicada husks, each one a potential fatality.

  Three M.A.S.H. tents covered makeshift triage, surgery, and hospital care areas. Corpsmen loaded two stretchers onto a small chopper, which rushed them airborne even as the Trooper hit the ground and an infantryman rolled back two large doors so that Raul could jump down.

  Jogging over to the hospital tent, Raul slowed only once as he passed the blackened and severed arm of a BattleMech. It was from Tassa's Ryoken. He had already seen the laser-blasted wreckage hauled back by a recovery crew, missing its arm and showing a tangle of twisted scrap where its gyroscope stabilizer had once been housed. He mentally tagged the severed limb to be recovered. With some hard work, it might be reconditioned and reattached.

  There would certainly be no ordering a new one up from stores. Not for a Ryoken.

  There would be no ordering up a new MechWarrior, either, which was why Colonel Blaire had dispatched Raul first thing this morning. With Charal DePriest dead, the closest thing that the militia had to another back-up was Captain Norgales-Legate Stempres's man. Any others were barely capable of handling a Legionnaire. Raul might be able to handle the powerful Ryoken II design, leaving his 'Mech to a lesser pilot, but he didn't want it.

  He wanted Tassa Kay back.

  The hospital tent smelled of old canvas and the strong disinfectants used to keep wounds clean.

  Several dozen men and women still waited for evac back to River's End. Blood-soaked bandages and elevated casts gave Raul a close-up look at the cost of this ongoing struggle. He caught whiff of a septic wound-a latrine scent at which he wrinkled his nose-and stood aside as two bulky civilians who looked more like construction workers than corpsmen helped a nurse hustle one of their patients from this tent and likely back to field surgery.

  Raul waited for the door to swing shut, then began walking the long rows again, studying faces- when he could-and reading names from charts clipped to the end of the cots. Near the end of the first row he glanced ahead, saw Tassa lying back on white sheets with an IV stuck into her arm and a compress taped to the side of her head. A physician bent over her. A civilian physician, checking vitals and then straightening up to stare down in question. Raul's breath hitched.

  It was Jessica.

  Raul had already been feeling at odds with what had happened the other night with Tassa Kay.

  His conversation with Janella Lakewood was forcing him to reevaluate many things, in fact. His liaison with Tassa had been all passion and need and proximity. Not solid emotion and certainly not love. In the holovids, the ones Raul had loved so much while dreaming of a post within Achernar's militia, romantic trysts were part of a Mech Warrior's due. "Because tomorrow we may die," and other such trite excuses. But this was real life, and real people got hurt both on and off the battlefield. Any decision, or lack thereof, could cost lives, ruin equipment, and shatter relationships.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered, not really meaning to speak out loud. He wasn't even certain to whom he was apologizing just then. Charal, for failing to protect her. Jessica, for how things had turned out. Or Tassa, who had fought and bled for a world that wasn't even hers to defend.

  Jessica was the one to hear him. She glanced up with a guilty start, then quickly darkened to a brooding hostility when she saw who stood nearby. "Well," she said, and a lot of judgment weighted down her words. "We've been here before."

  It was a lot like their first meeting-over the bed of a military patient. Raul could even feel the old arguments warming up in the mental bay where he stored those weapons. Raul swallowed dryly, fighting the tightness in his throat. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  "I'm being a doctor, Raul." She stood slowly, showing fatigue and stiff joints, then walked over to the foot of Tassa's bed where they could talk more quietly. "Between Brightwater and San Marino yesterday, apparently you swamped the militia's medical capability and they called in several civilian auxiliaries to help out here, where the fighting was over and danger was low."

  Raul saw the dark circles under her eyes, and could only imagine how little sleep she had gotten since the previous day. Or the previous week. "I'm glad. These are good people, and they needed your help."

  "What they need is transport back to River's End. We've ferried them out two at a time all night, and at this rate we won't have everyone back until late tomorrow."

  "I came in a Trooper." Raul saw her frown of concentration, guessed at her question. "Infantry carrier. Seats twenty-eight. You could lay half a dozen out in stretchers and take any of the wounded who can ride in a sitting position."

  "Only right, I guess, considering that the military put them here."

  "I didn't come out here to fight with you, Jess."

  "Why not? Fighting is what's caused all of this, isn't it? More battle and bloodshed. The natural order of things. Right?"

  "That's not what I believe, and you know it." Raul stepped up closer, lowering his voice into a harsh whisper only for Jessica. "Though maybe you'd rather we just hand over Achernar to the first tyrant to challenge our Exarch."

  "No, I wouldn't," she said with a violent stomp of one foot.

  She looked as if she wanted to slap him again. Or maybe deliver a good sharp kick to the shins.

  Raul had never seen Jessica looking so completely angry and yet at a loss for a target: her short, pounding breaths, the way she bit down hard enough into her lower lip that she'd leave marks, the little shake of her head. It had only started to occur to him that she was actually angry about the situation, and herself, before she admitted it openly.

  "You don't know how difficult it is to accept that one of the core beliefs you've held for so long doesn't measure up when challenged, Raul. I watch the news footage, I go out to the sites on civilian volunteer parties. Then I hear the pundits spouting knee-jerk opinions and going on about how they'd run things if they were in charge-and you know what? I find myself arguing your side of the discussion."

  He started to say something, thought to comfort her, but she held up a hand. "Let me finish."

  She glanced around at the wounded. At Tassa. "I believe that war is evil. I have to, Raul. But in the last few weeks, I have also forced myself to realize that you-and the Republic Guard-did not bring war to Achernar. The Steel Wolves did that. The Swordsworn did that. And we can't simply sit back and allow one military action after another to roll over our world unchecked. So we need soldiers. And we need citizens with a vested interest in The Republic, who can hopefully affect non-violent changes to prevent this fromever happening again."

  Raul had never heard such capitulation in Jessica's voice. Raising the white flag. And right when he was about to tell her . . . "Ah, hell, Jess. You lay all that out, and here I was ready to concede the entire argument to you. I don't know that I ever wanted this for the right reasons. So maybe we were both wrong."

  Her eyes held enough anguish for them both. Still, she offered bravely, "Or maybe we were both right. A little." Then she glanced between Raul and Tassa, her professional demeanor taking cha
rge and erecting a shield over the breach she had allowed in her defenses. "She's going to be all right. Mild concussion and hairline collarbone fracture. I have her resting on a sedative just now." She swept her gaze over nearby patients. "Most of them are resting, with the really critical cases already flown down to River's End. Your helicopter will help move the rest out today."

  Which was a decision Raul needed her help in making. "I'd like to talk to you about where you'll take them."

  Jessica frowned. "If your militia hospital can't handle the load, I'll take them back to R.E.G."

  River's End General.

  "I'm not certain that's such a safe place for them anymore. Erik Sandoval has men keeping tabs on the hospital now, and with the Steel Wolves in control of the San Marino, it's only a matter of time before they push for the city itself."

  A touch of fire leapt back into Jessica's weary blue eyes at the thought of military intrusion at her hospital. She licked her lips, then asked Raul, "You have another idea?"

  "That's what I want to ask you. The Trooper has a good range on it and it can refuel on the other side of the Taibeks if necessary. Where else can you take them? Take them, and hide them?"

  "Hide them?"

  He exhaled in a long breath. "I don't want Sandoval to get wind of how many soldiers we return to active duty in the next few days. And for those who need longer to heal, it would be best if they were far out of the way in case we lose Achernar and have to go underground. If you can, I'd like you to classify many of them as deceased or critically wounded."