Justin narrowed his eyes. “That is a flaw with the Maskirovka.”
Shang nodded and sipped his champagne. “That oversight was corrected in later reports, which are quite flattering concerning your abilities and strengths.” Shang reached in to a narrow pocket set in the Feicui’s far door. He drew from it an envelope and passed it to Justin.
Justin drained his glass and set it down before accepting the packet. His name had been calligraphed across the front of the envelope. Flipping it over, he saw that it was sealed shut with the chop of the Ministry of Social Education. Justin broke the seal and opened it.
Inside were a host of documents. What caught his eye first was a pair of passports bearing his picture and signature, though one claimed he was a Thomas Yuan, not Justin Xiang. In addition to the passports, he poured two full sets of documents into his lap. There were identification papers, credit chips, and full transcripts of education and societal functions for both himself and this Thomas Yuan.
Justin frowned. “I don’t understand…” He shook his head, which suddenly felt as though it was stuffed with cotton. He blinked his eyes twice, then watched everything blur beyond recognition.
He looked up. “What did you do to the drink? Why?”
Tsen Shang chuckled. “The drink was drugged. I took another drug to counteract its effects before you entered the vehicle.”
Though Shang easily blocked Justin’s clumsy punch, the look on his face showed that the speed of Justin’s strike, even in his drugged state, surprised him. He pushed the MechWarrior back into the seat as though the other man were weightless.
Justin’s world faded from view, though he struggled valiantly to retain consciousness. As he drifted under the anesthetic’s influence, Shang’s voice came to him like a shout echoing through a very long tunnel.
“Fear not, son of Quintus Allard, I follow the orders of those who believe you much too valuable to kill…”
Chapter 56
STYX
DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT
DRACONIS COMBINE
26 MAY 3027
Dan found himself nodding as Patrick Kell finished his radioed explanation of the situation. “Don’t worry, Dan. Nor you, either, Salome. The hour the Draconians gave us has gotten the Archon-Designate up and away. We’ve just got to buy a little more time.”
Salome’s voice warbled a bit as Dan’s computer reconstructed the scrambled transmission. “We still attack?”
“Affirmative.” Patrick’s voice dropped to a grim bass. “I’ll give you a signal when to initiate the attack.”
Dan frowned. I don’t like the sound of that. “What signal?”
“You’ll know it. Kell out.”
Patrick’s voice faded, but Dan’s unease did not. Is it just that Kurita ’Mech you can’t identify, or is it something more?
Dan scowled as he spoke. “What do you think, Salome? I don’t like this anonymous signal business.” He glanced over and saw a yellow light blinking on his console.
Salome’s sigh survived the computer scrambling. “Patrick’s the boss. And that gives him the right to be secretive. Time’s almost up.”
“I know. I think the Kurita commander is trying to reach me. Pass the plan of attack on to the others while I stall him.”
“Roger.”
Dan switched his radio over to the frequency that the Kuritans had used before. “Sho-sa Niiro, you wished to reach me?”
The Draconian voice was almost apologetic. “Hai, Captain Allard. You realize the time is almost up.”
Dan moved his Valkyrie to where he could see Tarukito’s Panther. A slight bow of the ’Mech’s head acknowledged Dan, who returned the gesture before answering. “I am afraid my people have not found the Archon-Designate in the hour you gave us. This was no surprise, for we believe she is safely on Tharkad. But if you wish to give us more time…”
Tarukito selected his words carefully before answering. “I would have thought, given the reputation of the Kell Hounds, that you would not let all these people die just to play word games. I…”
Tarukito’s words died in a hiss of ion static. One of the Panthers nearest the magnetically warded bay opening jerked and danced as though trapped in an invisible cyclone. Autocannon shells snapped the Panther’s back like a dry stick, then touched off the SRMs housed in its breast. The thunderous explosion blasted Panther parts throughout the ship bay. Limbs whirled through the air to batter other Panthers, and an orange fireball curled up from the empty space that the destroyed ’Mech had occupied.
The brilliant flames curled in on themselves, then suddenly evaporated, as though by some magic. Standing where the Panther had stood, a Victor materialized from within the fire and smoke. It pointed its stubby right arm at another Panther as its autocannon consumed a second Kurita ’Mech with a voracious storm of metal.
“You are right, Sho-sa Niiro,” Patrick Kell growled over the radio. “The Kell Hounds would never let these people die. The Archon-Designate is already off world and headed for our JumpShip. We’re here to cut off your retreat.”
Patrick, what the hell are you doing? Fighting the shock of Patrick’s appearance, Dan snapped his radio over to the tactical frequency. “Move it, Kell Hounds! Hit them hard! Patrick’s in the Victor.” Dan dropped the crosshairs of his LRM battery onto a Panther; then stabbed the fire control with furious vengeance.
The missiles arced away and blasted into the target, tattooing the Panther’s right arm with fiery explosions. As the missiles peeled off sheets of molten ceramics, the arm was laid bare. The Valkyrie’s medium laser lanced out and stabbed through the same arm. The blood-red beam sawed the limb off at the elbow, sending the PPC crashing to the ferrocrete deck.
“Dan, I’ve got an equipment malfunction!” Austin Brand’s voice filled Dan’s neurohelmet. “Targeting computer is screwy!”
“Cat, cover Brand. Austin, what’s wrong?”
Fear rode through Brand’s reply. “I get no read on the Victor.”
Dan glanced at the Victor. He watched a half-dozen PPC bolts streak from Panthers all around the massive assault ’Mech, but none of them hit their target. They’re too close. That’s why they’re missing. Even as the logical side of his brain offered that explanation, he rejected it immediately. I’ve got no thermal image of that monster, he realized suddenly. It’s just like Morgan on Mallory’s World!
Dan swept his crosshairs past the Victor as he sighted another Panther. He ignored the queasy feeling rising in him—for the crosshairs had not acknowledged the Victor as a target—and triggered another flight of missiles at a Panther. These caught the Kurita ’Mech in the knees and forced it to stumble forward.
Two more flights of missiles slammed into that Panther from Fitzhugh’s Catapult, cloaking the enemy ’Mech in red, orange, and yellow smoke and fire. As the fire collapsed into a dense black smoke, it drifted away like a ghost, leaving a broken, lifeless Panther in its wake.
Other Panthers now turned from the Victor to face the attacking Kell Hounds. Dan dodged a quartet of incoming SRMs, then spotted the Warhammer stalking back toward the Victor. It moved with a fluid grace that only one in a thousand MechWarriors could impart to such a massive machine. I know I’ve seen that ’Mech before. But where?
Cat Wilson’s Panther appeared at Dan’s right. He triggered a shot that lanced out and smashed into a Kurita ’Mech’s head. The azure energy lance blasted armor from the Panther like a storm tearing shingles from a house. The Panther shuddered, then stumbled. The MechWarrior inside, exhibiting incredible skill, twisted the ’Mech so that it would fall on its back, then punched out.
Dan turned and shouted a warning. “Lasker, Panther at nine o’clock!”
As Lasker’s Panther spun back, it caught the PPC blast on its left arm instead of the weak back armor, but that did little good. The PPC bolt rippled up the arm and dropped melted armor in steaming clumps onto the ferrocrete deck. Lasker launched a flight of SRMs at the enemy Panther, but her haste had sent them
wide of their target.
Beyond her, Diane McWilliams’s Panther reeled beneath the impact of enemy LRM barrages. Two sets of five missiles each plowed furrows through her ’Mech’s breast armor. Eight more missiles scythed into the metal left leg and shattered the armor on its thigh.
Twisted around by the blasts, McWilliams faced the Crusader that had attacked her Panther. She sent a bolt of blue lightning slicing into its chest, but it barely dented the thick armor over the ’Mech’s heart. In reply, the Crusader sent two more flights of LRMs.
“No, Diane, no! You’re not in your Rifleman. Punch out.” Helplessly, Dan watched the missile smash into McWilliam’s Panther as the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach told him what his sensors calmly presented as damage factors. The LRMs had ripped off the ’Mech’s left arm and sent it skittering across the ferrocrete deck. More missiles then exploited the gaps previously blasted into the Panther’s chest. They scattered the remaining armor, then crushed the Panther’s heart. The ’Mech exploded like a supernova.
“Fitzhugh, take that Crusader! Now!” Dan swung his missile crosshairs beyond the Crusader and slid them over toward the Warhammer’s back. Let’s open you up!
Suddenly Dan’s mouth went dry. The way it moves… It’s stalking the Victor. It couldn’t be… Dan raked his targeting joystick hard to the right, but the crosshairs refused to acknowledge the Warhammer’s existence. Oh, my God! No! NO! He stabbed the radio switch. “Patrick, look out! The Warhammer, it belongs to Yorinaga Kurita!”
The Victor’s head came up and turned to acknowledge the approaching Warhammer. Contemptuously, Patrick pressed the autocannon’s muzzle to the chest of a nearby Panther. Spear points of flame vomited from the gun, cleaving the target from left shoulder to right hip.
The Warhammer raised its twin PPCs to send blue spears of incandescent fire stabbing at Kell’s Victor. One beam scarified the armor over the Victor’s right breast, obliterating the unit crest painted there. The second beam drilled through the armor on the Victor’s middle. Armor chips blasted free on vapor jets, and rained down on the broken Panthers lying at the Victor’s feet.
Dan saw a thermal image flicker over the Victor for a half-second. Even that brief glimpse told him the true damage the bolt had done. Flashing through a chink in the Victor’s armor—probably a weak plate over the wound Ardan Sortek had suffered in it—the PPC had blasted shielding from the ’Mech’s fusion engine.
The Victor was slowly cooking its own pilot.
“No!” Dan set his Valkyrie off at a dead run. Patrick, I won’t let him do this to you!
Dan watched with horror as the Victor ignored the Warhammer. It blasted another Panther into spare parts with its autocannon, then used its SRMs to finish off a wounded Panther. Its medium lasers stabbed out at the Crusader and carved armor from it even as the Draconian ’Mech reeled under an LRM volley from the Catapult.
Four SRMs blasted into the Valkyrie as Dan streaked across the ferrocrete bay. The missiles exploded against his right arm and twisted his ’Mech around with the sheer violence of their assault. Fragments of armor trailed behind him, but a quick glance at the control console told Dan that his medium laser was still working. He used the spin the missile hits had given his ’Mech, and kept on running.
The Warhammer again fired at the Victor, sending both beams lashing across the Victor’s chest. Chunks of armor rode jagged blue spikes of lightning out and away from the assault ’Mech. They crashed smoking to the ferrocrete deck as though the humanoid ’Mech were a medieval knight shedding his breastplate. As the armor fell away it left the Victor’s chest, already burned by the first bolt, open and vulnerable.
Dan saw the PPC bolt out of the corner of his eye, but it was too late to do anything. The turquoise shaft of man-made lightning vaporized the Valkyrie’s right arm. Unbalanced, the Valkyrie began to fall, but Dan pushed off the ferrocrete floor with the ’Mech’s left hand and righted himself. Nothing will stop me.
Dan flipped the cover off a switch on his command console. He snapped the silvery toggle to the left, then punched the round red button glowing to life beneath it.
“Ten seconds to abort sequence,” the computer informed him.
“Negative!” Dan slid his left hand down and armed his command chair’s eject option. “Ejection on verbal.”
The thunder of blood pumping against his ears drowned out the computer’s acknowledgement of his, command. “No, Patrick! No!” he screamed in rage. “You have to fight it!”
As though to prove what might have been, the Victor’s autocannon mauled a Panther huddled in the Warhammer’s shadow. The Warhammer, unimpressed with such bravado, again fired its PPCs at Kell’s assault ’Mech. The forked bolts stabbed deep into the Victor, filling its belly with blue fire, and crushing its heart.
Released from slavery, the dwarf star that had powered the Victor gnawed at its master’s vitals. The radiation detectors on Dan’s command console shot into the red zone immediately, and a heat silhouette whitewashed the Victor. The SRMs stored in its left shoulder ignited in the heat and were soon joined by a rolling series of explosions from what little autocannon ammo still lurked in the Victor.
The Victor’s faceplate exploded outward, but Dan cheered when he saw Patrick’s command chair blast free of his doomed ’Mech. The chair righted itself on tiny jets, but did not rise quickly enough away from the Victor. A horrendous explosion shuddered the assault ’Mech and vomited a gout of fire and shrapnel through the Victor’s open face. It caught the command chair and swatted it down.
No! Dan looked away from the dying Victor, and despite the tears of anger and pain blurring his vision, he centered the Warhammer’s broad back in his viewplate. You son of a bitch! I’ll give you payback! Dan hit his jump jets and rolled the Valkyrie’s head 180 degrees. “Eject!”
Explosive bolts blasted the Valkyrie’s canopy away. Unbearable heat filled the cockpit as rockets ignited behind the command chair. G forces smashed Dan back against his command chair as the rockets catapulted him out of the ’Mech. The computer reported “All systems go,” but because of the Valkyrie’s angle of flight, the command chair’s foot clipped the ’Mech’s chin and sent Dan spinning out of control.
The one-armed light ’Mech crashed into the Warhammer’s broad back amid a din of screaming metal and snapping ceramic armor plates. The Warhammer stumbled forward two steps and dropped to one knee as it tried to shake itself free of the Valkyrie. It twisted to the right, but the effort proved fruitless. The Valkyrie’s left arm had hooked over the Warhammer’s left shoulder and was now jammed between the ’Mech’s head and the spotlight on its shoulder.
Suddenly, the destruct mechanism that Dan had armed exploded deep within the Valkyrie, touching off a chain reaction in the LRM magazine. Pressed chest to back against the Warhammer, the Valkyrie’s missiles blew through the light ’Mech’s thinly armored chest and clawed explosively into the Warhammer’s spine. The Warhammer arched its back as though in agony, then burst at the waist.
The gyrojets on Dan’s command chair flared to life and whirled the Warhammer out of his vision. They straightened his flight and propelled him toward a safe landing zone at the far end of the battlefield. As the chair jetted along, however, the magnetic fields holding the Bifrost aloft knocked the gyros out of phase.
Dan’s chair crashed hard to the deck. It skipped and rolled along, still aided by the chair’s jets, then smashed into a ferrocrete wall. Rebounding once, it then headed in toward the wall again. Half-torn out of the chair’s protective grasp, Dan screamed as his shoulder slammed into the wall. He heard something grind and snap, then a wave of black pain washed over him and dragged Dan down into unconsciousness.
As a doctor from the Silver Eagle tightened the sling strap running around Dan’s chest, pain shot through his left ann. “Dammit, Doctor,” he said angrily, ignoring the pain. “Let me go see him!”
The doctor frowned. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Dan swallowed a
gainst the lump in his throat. “I don’t care, you bastard. Let me go.” He jerked away and stood. A wave of vertigo hammered him, but he fought against it. He stalked over to where they had cordoned off a small cubicle with rope and sheets hung between two Kell Hound Panthers. Dan pushed his way through the opening and bit back tears.
Patrick Kell smiled at him weakly, his face ashen. Salome and Cat stood on the other side of the cot. “Glad to see you up, Dan.” Kell’s words were punctuated by pain-induced gasps and grimaces. “Knew they wouldn’t keep you down long.”
Dan jerked his head back in the direction from which he’d come. “They’re ready for you now, Patrick.”
The leader of the Kell Hounds shook his head, but forced a smile to his cracked lips. “Triage,” he said. “I’m too messed up inside to survive, Dan. I can feel it. Let them save others.” Agony molded Kell’s face into a mask of torment, but he choked back the moans of pain. Patrick looked toward Salome. “Continue your report.”
“The Kurita forces retreated to their DropShip and returned to their JumpShips. They knew that they could not catch the Mac or the Cucamulus before they jumped out, which our ships will do in twenty hours.”
Dan turned as the curtains behind him shot open. Melissa Steiner dashed through and dropped to her knees beside the cot. She grabbed Patrick’s left hand in hers and squeezed hard. “You can’t die!” she whispered hoarsely. Following close behind her was Clovis, who stopped at the foot of the cot. Andrew Redburn, bandages wrapped around his chest and arms, closed the curtains and stood guard at the opening.
Patrick lifted his right hand away from the bloody chest wound, which had reopened during the battle, and brushed away Melissa’s tears. “No crying now, cousin. Can’t have the Archon-Designate crying for a mercenary, can we? Don’t want Takashi thinking you’ve got a soft spot.” He gritted his teeth as another wave of pain seized him.
Warrior: En Garde (The Warrior Trilogy, Book One): BattleTech Legends, #57 Page 38
