Decision at Thunder Rift

by William H. Keith

  * * * *

  Grayson was dismayed by the fact that there were no spare parts to repair machines that broke down, little oil to lubricate machinery, and the computer programs used to coordinate schedules and duty rosters and muster lists were hopelessly inadequate. A team detailed to salvage diamond monofilament wire from junked sections of boron nitride armor plate was stalled by a lack of the proper chemicals for the extraction process.

  He grew short on sleep, became impatient, and drove the unit harder. Morale sagged, and five men were placed on report for fighting in one period alone. Seven enlisted men simply walked away from the barracks during another period and never returned. No one stopped them at the door because the man on sentry duty was one of the seven. When troops restricted to the post routinely showed up for work drunk or failed to show at all, Grayson had to detail three of his junior NCOs just to patrol the area for hidden caches of alcohol.

  Then, a new difficulty arose with Lori. If the Lancers were to have any chance of operating against offworld forces, they needed more than the single Locust operational. The first step would be capturing the other Wasp. If necessary, they would have to destroy it and use its head to replace the shattered one on the Wasp now in the Lancers' possession. Lori had been troubled when Grayson had asked her about the man who would likely be piloting the Wasp they intended to capture or kill.

  "Private Enzelman and I were never what you'd call close," she told him. "But he's a Sigurdian, and a long way from home, like me. I... I don't think I can help you to... to kill him."

  The pain in her eyes touched Grayson. Many of her critics still didn't trust Lori's willingness to work for her former enemies, and she was trapped between the need to prove her loyalty and her loyalty to a fellow warrior.

  "I can take you off the project," he said.

  "And go back to that dungeon? That's where your General Adel wants me, you know. Him and Lieutenant Nolem." She shuddered.

  Grayson leaned back, reflecting. "You know, everything depends on our taking that Wasp with its cockpit intact. What we need to do is develop a diversion that will let me get close enough to cripple it without touching its head or your friend Enzelman." He spread his hands. "I can't promise more than that"

  She managed half a smile. "What I'd really like is to get him to come over to the Lancers. The only reason he's fighting for them is that he doesn't know there's an alternative."

  Grayson thought of his five warrior recruits, and nodded gravely. During the practice session earlier that period, one of the men had tripped the Locust over its own feet, and it was only fool's luck that had kept the irreplaceable machine from being badly damaged. Grayson was despairing of any of those five ever taking a 'Mech into combat.

  "Believe me, Lori. I intend to try to do just that. We need 'Mech pilots, and we're not going to grow them ourselves here in Sarghad."

  She'd looked up at him, her eyes shining. "Do you... do you mean that? I mean, that I might con a 'Mech again?"

  Grayson rubbed his eyes. "I can't promise it, not now. But damned if I know where else I can get 'Mech pilots. It takes years of apprenticeship to learn how to con one. Ha! Look at us! Apprentices half our lives, and neither of us had even graduated yet when we found ourselves... here."

  Lori laid her hand on Grayson's arm, a warm and gentle touch. "I'll do whatever has to be done, Gray."

  How had they slipped into a first-name basis? Grayson could not remember. He did know that he felt comfortable with Lori, able to talk to her, to discuss plans, and that he missed her when she was not there. Perhaps their growing friendship had something to do with the fact that they both felt so alone here.

  "Well all do what has to be done," he said. "It's called 'survival.'"

  Two periods later, Lieutenant Nolem filed a report with General Adel on 'subversive elements within the unit.' He named no one, but it was clear he had Lori in mind as the one directly responsible for the unit's poor morale. As the sun rose on a crisp, clear, -20 degree morning on Seconday, the First Trellwan Lancers seemed farther away from being combat ready than ever.

  18

  The Lancers needed combat to draw them together. More importantly, Grayson realized, they needed a victory.

  By the time the red sun had reached its zenith in the clear chill cold of Seconday, the Lancer T.O. & E. showed the two combat platoons as having 40 men each. This force constituted the Ground Strike Unit and had been trained in anti-Mech infantry tactics. How well they would be able to put Grayson's lectures into practice remained to be seen. The astech support platoon now numbered 63, and Tech Sergeant Brooke — under Master Sergeant Lori Kalmar's direction — had both ‘Mechs mechanically sound and operational. The Wasp, however, still lacked a head.

  Written out on the unit T.O. & E. chart, it all looked quite impressive, but Grayson knew that even a full battalion with four times as many men — even well-trained and experienced men — would be hard pressed to handle even one attacking 'Mech. And when one of those ‘Mechs was a 75-ton Marauder...

  The heart of any 'Mech unit was the combat Lance — the 'Mechs themselves. Ideally a balance of four 'Mechs working together, sometimes accompanied by an air Lance of aerospace fighters, the unit's 'Mechs were the whole reason for the existence of support combat units. Except for special units, most 'Mech Lances, especially mercenary units, had no ground strike force at all and consisted of 'Mechs and Techs alone. Without 'Mechs, a unit consisting of mere men was practically defenseless.

  And the Lancers had exactly one combat-ready light 'Mech.

  It was a few tens of hours shy of midday Seconday, and the Trellwan Light Lancers were deploying for combat As Grayson had explained to General Varney when he submitted his proposal, "We fight now, and win — or it's all been for nothing."

  There was more than the fighting morale of the Lancers at stake. Grayson needed more than one 'Mech if the Lance was to have any chance at all. And the only way they were going to get another 'Mech was to take one away from the enemy.

  The spaceport north of Sarghad was an unsightly sprawl of gray and white buildings across the otherwise empty countryside. The ground there was largely barren, broken by thick clumps of blue-tufted qykka and patchy swards of blue-green prairie grass. The highway that linked port and city was pocked and rutted by Trellwan's vicious weather cycle, and had been but rarely travelled even before the coming of the bandit raiders.

  Below the road was a chain of arroyos, gulleys carved through the arid ground by repeated Thirday meltwater floods. Grayson had noted this particular wadi during terrain-mapping expeditions when it was Carlyle's Commandos who occupied the Castle some ten kilometers northeast, on the other side of the port It had survived the last series of floods and existed now as a broad, dry channel through the desert, encrusted with frost and ice in the overhangs where the weak sun did not penetrate. In some places, it was fifteen meters deep, with steep slopes of treacherously balanced rock and shifting sand.

  The Locust paced along the floor of the canyon with Grayson at the controls. It felt as though a lifetime had passed since he'd last been strapped into the Mech Warrior's hot seat. As he gripped the controls and leaned into the reassuring weight of the neuro-impulse helmet, he knew how right it was that he'd trained for it half of his life.

  After spending endless standard days at his report-smothered deck in the dim recesses of the city Armory, Grayson felt alive again.

  His hands rested lightly on the weapons controls and maneuver overrides. His electrode-padded and cable-heavy helmet picked up neural impulses relating to routine movement and balance, while a sophisticated computer built into the cockpit seat translated those signals to the 'Mech's four-meter walking stride. The Locust was an extension of his body.

  The popular warrior mythos held that MechWarriors actually became their 'Mechs, that there was a personality transfer from man to machine, that the machines moved and fought because the Mech Warrior's mind was directly controlling them. None of this was true, though c
ertainly the neuro-impulse helmets had been a first promising step toward combat systems doing just that. What the helmet did do was to direct the machine in such routine tasks as maintaining its balance, which left the pilot's mind free to deal with analytical tasks such as sorting out friend from foe and engaging in combat.

  "Striker One, this is Striker Two, do you read?"

  The voice in his helmet speakers was electronically filtered and reproduced, and required practice to understand. Transmissions were beamed on an extremely narrow frequency band in order to penetrate enemy electronic countermeasures and to defy hostile code breakers. Often, such transmissions were made in battlespeech, an artificial coded language known only to the users, but there'd been no time to design and teach one to all who would need to know it. Computer scrambling should make the transmissions intelligible only to the Lancers. At least, that's what Grayson hoped.

  He bit down hard to flex the masseter muscles below and in front of his ears. Sensors in the helmet read the flexing's electrical signature, and opened a channel.

  "Striker Two, this is One. Go."

  "We're in position below the fence. No patrols... no suspicious activity."

  "Good. Keep alert."

  The assault force's movement up the wadi in broad daylight had been a calculated risk. The raiders had helicopters, and there was no guarantee they didn't also have a military surveillance satellite capable of counting rivets on the Locust's dorsal armor. The Locust was shrouded in folds of camouflage netting, and Grayson was operating the heat sinks at their lowest settings to cut down the 'Mech's IR signature. What the assault team was really counting on was luck. Careful observation of the bandit bases at the port and up Mount Gayal at the Castle suggested that they held the Trell armed forces in very low esteem and were not maintaining a proper watch on the approaches to their encampments.

  "Striker One, this is Three."

  "Three, this is One. Go."

  "No activity at the Castle. I have the Marauder in clear sight It's still parked on the parade field outside the Repair Bay doors."

  "Right, Three. Keep on them."

  The Locust's cockpit was so small that he could touch opposite bulkheads with outstretched arms. The viewscreen formed a 180-degree strip across the front of the tiny room, showing the sharply stratified layers of water-deposited sediments in the walls of the channel outside. Most of the deck was taken up by the pilot's seat and the jungle of cables, consoles, exposed circuits, and instrumentation that kept this small walking mountain moving and fighting.

  Perhaps the dominant feature of the cockpit was the smell, a sharp, sour tang that seemed to emanate from deck, bulkheads, and seat despite scrubbings and liberal dousings with chemical absorbents. The Locust's on-board logs and equipment installation dates showed that this particular 'Mech was over a century old. The distinctive odors of sweat, fear, and battle fury of 40-some pilots had become as much a part of the cockpit as the armor encasing it. The smell was unpleasant, but already fading from Grayson's awareness.

  It was getting warm inside the cockpit. A tiny blower behind Grayson's head struggled with the impossible task of cooling the pressurized space, but before long, it would be unequal to the 'Mech's heat build-up. Grayson had already stripped to briefs and a light tunic of net fabric. Though he was not uncomfortable yet, very soon it would become much worse.

  Grayson looked down through electronic eyes at the troops... his troops, he thought. Their TK assault rifles had come from the armory that was now the Lance's HQ (though the proper forms had never been approved by the Militia supply staff). Grayson had only obtained the weapons because he knew that a thousand of those sleek auto-fire weapons had been given to the Militia by Carlyle's Commandos. The men were bundled against the cold in camo-mottled winter combat jackets and gloves unofficially liberated by Sergeant Ramage from the Guard supply depot across from the Palace.

  He worked his jaw muscles twice, opening a line.

  "Striker Two, this is One. Give me a feed."

  "Right, One. Patch in."

  An image window unrolled across the viewscreen. On the rim of the wadi above him, a scout poked the sensor end of an optical-fiber remote scanner above the edge of the gully. On the image window, Grayson saw the squat shapes of water and fuel tanks, the crosshatching of a mesh-link fence. In the far distance, the humanoid shape of a Wasp moved through shimmering haze. Hot air was rising from the ferrocrete apron, causing the image to boil.

  "That's our target," Grayson said. He opened the channel to Striker Three. "Is the Marauder still staying put?"

  "No alarm, sir. All quiet"

  "It won't be for long. Striker Two!" He could see the tac-force strike leader, Sergeant Ramage, touching the microphone at his throat "Yessir!" Move out! Now!"

  The small body of troops surged up the slope of the wadi, using ropes that had been set from the rim by the scouts. On schedule and according to plan, Platoon A moved toward the spaceport's outer fence.

  Grayson took a deep breath and tasted the sour air of the cramped Locust cockpit. He opened another combat channel. "Striker Four, are you ready?"

  "All set here, Lieutenant." Sergeant Larressen was shouting, the electronically-rendered tones of his voice oddly spaced. He must be yelling above the keening of his HVWCs.

  "We're ready here. Let 'em know you're there.”

  “On our way, sir!"

  It had taken a direct appeal to King Jeverid to free up much of the equipment the Lancers needed, including eight battered but serviceable hovercraft weapons carriers, five-man machines like those he had seen and ridden in the battle in Sarghad. Three of them mounted auto cannons, and one a combat laser. Two more carried short-range Skorpiad anti-armor missiles, while the rest carried anti-personnel heavy machine guns. This small armada was no

  match for the entire enemy 'Mech force. With luck, though, they might knock out one or more of the light 'Mechs in open battle. Grayson had decided that the chance was so slim that the entire convoy would better serve as a decoy force. They were racing across the desert east of the spaceport now, their fans churning up plumes of dust visible for tens of kilometers.

  "Lieutenant! This is Striker Two!"

  "Go ahead, Two." Grayson paced the Locust along the gully as he spoke. There was a place farther along where the slope was less steep than the spot where the ground assault force had scrambled up. On his viewscreen, the layered red and ocher strata of the arroyo's wall lurched and tilted as the Locust strode along its gravel floor.

  "There're two... repeat TWO 'Mechs at the port. They're together..."

  "Feed me."

  The image window opened, and Grayson saw that the Wasp had been joined by a second light 'Mech. It was difficult to see through the churning telephoto view, but the second appeared to be a Stinger. The pair of 20-ton scout 'Mechs were striding rapidly across the apron to the east.

  "Striker Four, this is One."

  "Go... ahead... One." Larressen must be screaming against the roar of the plenum fans in the weapons carriers' bellies. The transmission carried none of the background noise, but the sergeant's words were paced by the effort of shouting them.

  "You've been seen. Two 'Mechs... I say again... two light ‘Mechs headed your way."

  "We... copy... One!"

  "Striker Two... feed me range figures."

  Red numbers sprang into sharp relief across the image window, ticking off range and azimuth readings as the target 'Mechs moved. The two 'Mechs were three kilometers off, moving across Grayson's line-of-sight at an angle that would bring them closer to the Locust's position.

  Grayson waited, sweltering in the rising heat. If it were this bad now...

  He checked the Locust's controls one last time. His left hand gripped the con stick that emerged from the left arm of his chair and swung on jointed sliders across his lap. His right fingers closed on a black plastic D-grip on the chair's right arm. Slight movements on the grip moved the Locust's laser cannon up, down, back and forth, and th
e red button resting under his thumb triggered it. His indicators showed all systems running hot, combat-ready.

  Doubt had begun to plague him as he sat in his too warm cockpit. Attacking one of the two enemy strongholds in broad daylight, with one 'Mech and half-trained men, that had to be a recipe for suicide. Grayson pushed the doubt aside, struggled to ignore it. So much depended on surprise. If they succeeded in winning surprise, the raid should succeed. It WOULD succeed. If not... He pushed doubt aside again, harder this time. The plan will work! It HAS to!

  He fished in a webbing pouch at the side of the cockpit chair, and brought out a filmy, blue length of soft cloth. Mara had given it to him the period before they'd left. "I've read how the Knights of Old Earth carried their lady's favors into battle," she'd said.

  Mara had handed him a piece of the gown she had worn at the reception. "You could carry this."

  Grayson looked at the scrap of material for several seconds, then made his decision. Practicality over romance, he thought. Mara would understand. He used the cloth to wipe away the layer of perspiration that had beaded over his forehead and upper lip.

  Watching the readouts on the target 'Mechs, he saw that the range had decreased. A quick consultation with the Locust's on-board computer showed that if the enemy 'Mechs held their course and speed, they would be at their closest point and moving away from Grayson's position just... about... NOW!

  Grayson's hand pressed the Locust's control stick forward, and the 'Mech leaned forward, one armored bird's foot clawing at the soft sand slope before it. The machine lurched and seemed to stumble slightly, then Grayson heard the whine of protesting servos as the 'Mech's computer drew on his sense of balance and struggled to remain upright.

  One giant foot found purchase, and the other foot lifted. The 'Mech's head lurched above the rim of the canyon. Now he saw the scene directly throught the Locust's sensors on the 180-screen. He struggled with the stick, willing the machine up and forward. One flat, four-clawed foot cleared the edge, the flanges spilling sand, and then the Locust was up and onto the hard, flat desert surface. The Locust's bird-like form leaned forward and its spindly legs swung up, forward, and down with shifting, mechanical movements.