If Darwin shared Anastasia’s regret for lost time he was not letting it show, anymore than she herself was. He paused the regulation two paces off, saluted, and said, “Galaxy Commander. The tanks and artillery are landed and ready. We await your orders.”
“Excellent,” said Anastasia.
She pointed to the display on the map table. A red line snaked through the mountains and out into the plains on the other side.
“Carve me a road,” she said, “from here to Tara. The remaining infantry and the ’Mechs will follow as soon as they can—but you will have the responsibility of taking the lead. Go through the mountains and secure an assembly area for us on the plains north of Tara.”
“Yes, Galaxy Commander,” Darwin said. He saluted again and turned to go.
“Wait,” Anastasia said. He halted, and she came around the table to stand next to him. Letting her accent slide downward into Tassa Kay’s casual but friendly imprecision, she added, “Just one thing more.”
Darwin turned back. “And that would be—”
“This,” she said.
She took his face between her hands and kissed him deeply. Her left hand was still wrapped in a pressure bandage, a souvenir of her fight with Kal Radick, and her fingers felt stiff against the soft flesh of Darwin’s cheek.
“When this campaign is over,” she told him, “I am going to take over the Prefect’s quarters—lock, stock, and pretty tartan sashes. And I am going to want somebody special to help me with staking my claim to the bed. So do not get killed if you can help it.”
She released him then, and he stepped back.
“You certainly believe in incentives, Galaxy Commander,” he said, and saluted once again before turning to leave the tent.
She watched, still smiling, as he strode over to the tank column assembly area and climbed to the top of his Condor tank.
“Warriors!” he called. His voice carried over the din of steel on steel and all the other sounds of DropShips unloading. “We have been given the honor of taking point on this operation. We drive east and south. Your orders are simple: find the Highlanders; engage them; destroy them. Speed is what Galaxy Commander Kerensky requires of us, and we will give it to her. Mount up. Follow me.”
With that he dropped inside the turret of the tank. The mighty engines thundered to life, and the fifty-ton vehicle spun in place, its hoverjets working to point the tank’s nose toward the jagged mountains looming gray blue on the horizon. From where she stood in the command tent, Anastasia could hear Darwin’s voice coming over the tank’s external speaker system: “On my command. Forward. Stand by. Execute.”
At the command “execute,” the hoverjets on the lead tank, and on the others drawn up behind it, impelled the vehicles into forward motion. The column of tanks and artillery headed eastward toward the distant mountains, quickly coming up to speed and eating up the ground at over sixty-five kilometers per hour—a spear, thought Anastasia Kerensky, cast to pierce the very heart of Northwind.
27
Eastern slopes of the Bloodstone Range
Rockspire Mountains, Northwind
June, 3133; local summer
The Northwind infantry was on the road again for the second time in as many weeks. The first time had proved to be a matter of “hurry up and wait.” Will Elliot and his comrades had come tumbling out of their barracks in the pre-dawn hours at their Sergeants’ urgings, collected their weapons and equipment, and hastened onto transports—only to find themselves cooling their heels several hours later in holding camps that were, presumably, closer to where somebody in charge believed that the front lines might eventually be.
This time, Will thought, matters appeared more serious. Word had spread even before reveille that the Steel Wolves’ DropShips had come down somewhere on the far side of the Rockspires, and nobody was foolish enough to think that the Wolves were going to stay where they’d landed. The encampment had boiled over into organized chaos at the news, and by breakfast time the mess tents were full of speculation. Will hadn’t heard anything official yet, but it didn’t take an old soldier to know that if the Wolves were down on Northwind then somebody would be going out to stop them.
He left the mess tent with his belly full of the comfort that came from hot tea and oatmeal porridge, and paused a moment to sniff the morning air. Here in the midst of the Highlanders’ encampment in the Rockspire foothills, scents of fuel and torn earth predominated, but behind it all he could smell rain coming—not today, and probably not tomorrow, but before three days were out for sure. And if fighting in bad weather was anywhere near as bad as simply hiking and camping in it could sometimes be, then Highlanders and Wolves alike were in for an uncomfortable time.
An idea stirred into life at the back of his mind. It had something to do with how the instructors in boot camp had talked about showing initiative, but mostly it came from knowing that he’d driven every road and tramped along every trail in this part of the Rockspires, from the time he was old enough to be let out alone without a keeper.
He spotted his fellow scout/snipers Jock Gordon and Lexa McIntosh coming out of the mess tent and took it for a good omen.
“Hey,” he said. “Jock, Lexa—come with me.”
They joined him, Jock looking amiable and obliging as usual and Lexa—who was not as much of a trusting nature as her larger male companions—looking dubious.
“What’s up?” she asked.
Will gestured toward the looming mountains, their lower slopes given a rosy tint by the early morning sun.
“Those hills are where I grew up,” he said. “I used to earn my living at being somebody who knew his way around them. And now some Wolf Clan bastard thinks he’s going to come through there and take over.”
“I don’t like it either,” Lexa said. “But what’s your point?”
“Point is, we’re scouts. It says so right on our shoulder patches. Jock, do you think you could get us a vehicle—some kind of truck, or one of the Foxes if you can find one?”
“Without orders?” Jock asked dubiously. “Nobody’s said we can—”
“Nobody so far has said that we can’t, either,” Will said. “As long as they don’t, we’re all right. I’m going to find the Sergeant, get the intel, then—”
The high-pitched warble of an announcement tone came over the air, followed by an amplified voice. “All troopers, form ranks, by unit. All troopers…”
“Now’s when they tell us what we can and can’t do,” said Lexa. She sounded disappointed.
“Damn,” Will said. “Company quarters, then, and let’s be sharp about it.”
“Do you still want me to see about that truck?” Jock asked.
Will thought for a moment. “Go ahead. The two of you scrounge whatever you can and meet me at the assembly area. If they tell us we have to sit tight and do nothing, you can always take everything back and say that the Sergeant didn’t want it after all.”
“What Sergeant?”
“The one we’re not asking permission from because he might say no if we did,” Will said.
A sharp gust of wind blew up the loose dirt around him as he spoke. He tasted the earth, his native land. He didn’t need a map of these mountains. If he could get out of camp, he could find the Steel Wolves no matter where they hid.
Feeling disgruntled, he made his way to the scout/sniper assembly area. Master Sergeant Murray was already there, watching the soldiers as they assembled.
“Private Elliot!” he said. “Good to see you. You’re new, but all your instructors say that you’re a promising lad.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Will said. He kept his face blank, a useful skill in dealing with Sergeants, and one that he’d already possessed when he joined the infantry. Maintaining a straight face and keeping his private thoughts private in the company of wealthy, powerful, and frequently stupid wilderness tourists had been part of his job for years. “Thank you.”
“Now here’s the drill,” Murray continued. “Find the Wol
ves. Engage, and report.”
By now Will had been in the infantry long enough to understand that being thought promising by one’s superiors was at best a mixed blessing—even, or perhaps especially, when their ideas coincided with one’s own.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“It’ll have to be enough,” Murray said. “We’re understrength, and we’re spread out all over New Lanark because we couldn’t depend on the Wolves being polite and landing where we wanted them to. Now the first thing we need to know is what exactly we’re up against. Who’s out there, how many of them, where they are, where they’re going. I know you paid attention in boot camp, so you know the drill.”
Good thing the Sergeant doesn’t know what I thought in boot camp, Will thought. Aloud, he said, “I have one of our lads I can send out looking for a vehicle. Is there any extra stuff that I can throw onto it?”
“We don’t have much,” Murray said. “Take what you need, but your main task involves rifles and radios.”
“Got both of those.”
A shout came from behind them, and the muted-windstorm sound of a hovercraft moving over loose dirt. Will turned and saw Jock Gordon pulling up with a Fox armored car. With its two front-mounted Voelkers 200 machine guns and its Diverse Optics Extended Range Medium Laser, the Fox was an excellent choice for a reconnaissance mission—far better than the toothless cargo truck Will had been expecting.
“I hope you signed a requisition to get that,” Will said, mindful of the presence beside him of Master Sergeant Murray.
“I would have if anybody had been looking,” Jock said.
“I’ll mark it to you,” Murray said. Will thought that the Master Sergeant looked amused. “Don’t worry.”
The Master Sergeant moved on. As soon as Murray was out of earshot, Lexa McIntosh emerged from around the corner of the nearest tent, carrying a heavy particle gun under one arm and dragging behind her a case of demolition charges that had to have weighed almost as much as she did.
“Got room in the Fox for this stuff?” she asked. “It’s all I could find lying about loose.”
“We’ll make room,” Will said. “We might find something that needs blowing up, and be glad that we brought it. Now we have to get going.”
He swung himself onto the Fox’s superstructure. “Mount up,” he said. “Let’s ride.”
28
Red Ledge Pass
Bloodstone Range of the Rockspire Mountains
Northwind
June, 3133; local summer
By late afternoon, the Steel Wolves’ tank column had penetrated the foothills of the Rockspires and had come to a temporary halt at the western end of Red Ledge Pass. So far the day had remained clear and warm, although the sky overhead was dotted with puffs and wisps of cloud in the “fish scales and mare’s tails” pattern that hinted at a coming frontal passage.
In the old days of the HPG network—already taking on the flavor of a lost golden age, even in the minds of those who happily exploited the network’s failure—a commander planning for an invasion could get up-to-date meteorological forecasts for battlefields light-years away from home. That luxury was gone now, possibly forever. Local weather knowledge had become once more the defender’s advantage and the attacker’s weakness.
The Steel Wolves’ column had picked up a major multiple-lane highway running eastward from the salt flats, and had made good speed. Star Colonel Nicholas Darwin guessed that on a normal day, the road would be busy with both long-distance trucking and local traffic. More than once since this morning the column had passed rest stops and fueling stations, but the windows of all the buildings were dark, and the parking lots stood empty.
Clearly, word had spread across the plains even faster than the tank column could form up and deploy: Lock your doors behind you and run—the Wolves are coming through!
The same highway, if the road signs did not lie, continued on through the mountains, although the narrowness of the pass forced it to shrink from four lanes down to two. Darwin stood in the open turret of his Condor tank and looked from the signs to the map display generated by his handheld pad.
The display was based on imaging generated by the Wolves’ own tracking and surveillance hardware during the DropShips’ approach to Northwind, and was therefore reliable. On the other hand, the generated maps didn’t come with route numbers and highway directions and conveniently labeled towns and villages, so there was always some difficulty matching up the terrain-as-marched-through with what the eyes-in-the-sky had reported.
If the locals were bright enough to change around the signposts before they ran away, as they sometimes were, the situation could get even more confusing. Fortunately for Darwin’s tank column, the signpost at the mouth of the pass was a poor candidate for such an act of resistance. The information that this road was National Highway 66, and that it led—by way of the Bloodstone Range Protected Forest Area—to Liddisdale, Harlaugh, and Tara, was carved into the side of a massive red-rock boulder in capital letters twenty centimeters high.
No obliterating that one except with high explosives, Darwin thought in satisfaction. We are definitely on the right road. Now to make it all the way through. Because—he eyed the way in which the two-lane blacktop curved out of sight around a mountain shoulder not long after entering the narrow defile—if I were somebody trying to stop us, this is the sort of terrain I would pick to do it in.
He keyed on the mike for the tank column’s command circuit. “Scouts and skirmishers out!” he ordered.
Up and down the column, armored troopers dismounted from the tracked or hover vehicles they’d been riding on. Having them proceed on foot would slow the column’s pace considerably, but not nearly as much as it would be slowed if it got surprised by an enemy force and had no infantry out to meet the attack.
“We are going to have to keep up a smart pace if we’re going to force the passage,” the second in command of the column observed to Darwin over the private circuit. Star Captain Greer had lost out to Darwin in the Trial of Position aboard Lupus, and had a tendency to be stiff about it from time to time. “Sir.”
“I am aware of that,” Darwin replied sharply. Greer could nourish his hurt feelings about having lost his Trial to a freeborn local half-breed on his own time. They were on Anastasia Kerensky’s time now, and would not waste it. “But if it comes down to a choice between getting caught in the pass by nightfall and getting caught in the pass by the Highlanders—we will take our chances with the night, quaiff?”
“Aff,” said Star Captain Greer. “Local sunset in two hours, sir.”
“We will be running dark, with the sensors in high gain,” Darwin said. “We have all done it a hundred times, and tonight is no different. Just like a drill, only with live fire.”
“Sir.” There was a brief pause; then Star Captain Greer spoke again over the command circuit. “All units report maps received and laid in, and the track set. On your command.”
“Forward,” Darwin said. “Pass to task group: ‘Condition Red, weapons tight.’”
“Condition red, weapons tight, aye,” Greer replied. “Moving out.”
Engines roaring and rumbling back into life, the tank column growled forward into the mouth of the pass.
29
Western slopes of the Bloodstone Range
Rockspire Mountains, Northwind
June, 3133; local summer
In her command tent on the salt flats, Anastasia Kerensky gave the map table one last look. The yellow blips that represented Nicholas Darwin’s armored column had moved some distance away from the symbols for the grounded ships. The hour was midafternoon, and the tank column was now at the pass.
It was time to set the main column into motion.
Anastasia left the map table to continue blinking and updating its display in solitude, and went out of the command tent. Her faithful Ryoken II ’Mech stood nearby, freshly repaired and repainted after the hard fighting on Achernar. She climbed the ladder up tw
elve meters to the Ryoken’s cockpit, entered and dogged the hatch behind her. With a well-practiced motion, she swung the activation bar down into a locked position and felt the fusion power plant rumble to life. Maneuvering herself in the small space, she settled into the ’Mech’s command couch and strapped herself in. The controls that surrounded her were familiar extensions of her own body: footpedals for direction control and walking, throttle for speed, pressure-operated forearm joysticks for moving and twisting the torso, control for Ryoken II’s giant hands and for bringing her weapons to bear. Above all else was the neurohelmet that interfaced her brain and the ’Mech’s gyroscope and musculature. Once she’d secured her helmet in place, she touched the control panel and recited her voice-identification code. The computer confirmed her identity and welcomed her home.
One quick glance confirmed weapons’ status: all green. The customized short-range six packs on the Ryoken’s shoulders were Anastasia’s preference over the standard LRM 15s. The ’Mech’s torso bristled with medium lasers and, just below at the waist, PPCs, loaded and ready. The jump jets she’d added looked good as well. All was right; she expected no less.
She keyed on the speaker that would carry her voice to the various elements of her command.
“All units ready?”
“Ready, Galaxy Commander,” came the reply over her helmet, from the most senior of the Star Colonels—Marks, it was, after the fiasco on Quentin had led to Ulan’s disgrace. Like sound in a seashell, a rippling murmur of echoes ran around the circuit: ready… ready… readyreadyready… ready.
“I am leaving behind a strong defense with the DropShips,” she said. “There is no shame in it; we will need the ships for Terra itself soon enough. Everyone else, follow me.”
She wheeled her ’Mech around, pointing it toward the Rockspire Mountains and the pass through which Nicholas Darwin’s troops should even now be heading. The Ryoken swung into motion easily, its great feet shifting, its armored hips twisting. She raised her hands as she sat in the cockpit, and the ’Mech’s huge arms stretched skyward.
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