A Call to Arms

by Loren L. Coleman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Call to Arms

  A Roc Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 WizKids, LLC, by Loren L. Coleman

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 0-7865-4151-2

  A ROC BOOK®

  Roc Books first published by The Roc Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ROC and the “R” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: August, 2003

  For Janna Silverstein, who immersed herself in the BattleTech universe and helped make a good book better.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing this novel came as something of a relief. It proved to me (and others) that BattleTech would continue. From the uncertain times when FASA first announced that it would close its doors until now, there was always that fear that the novel Endgame would indeed be the proverbial “it.” Finis. Rest in print.

  It’s so great to see that you can’t keep a good universe down. BattleTech’s saga will continue under the MechWarrior title, and it is important to me to note that this novel, A Call To Arms, would never have happened without contributions from the following:

  Jordan and Dawne Weisman, Mort Weisman, and Maya Smith, for their support and hard work behind the scenes at WizKids Games. Also Sharon and Mike Mulvihill, Pam, Scott, and others who continue to help take the company and its various universes to new heights.

  My agent, Don Maass, who worked very hard with the new company. My editor, Janna Silverstein, who worked very hard with an opinionated author.

  Michael Stackpole, who’s always available for brainstorming or answering the odd question and who dispenses his hard-won advice freely. And special thanks to Randall and Tara Bills—Randall for his continued support and friendship, and Tara, for putting up with the two of us in the same room.

  Also I’d like to thank Oystein Tvedten, again, for the very cool maps, and Bones, Warner, Chris, and Herb, for their direct contributions.

  Love to my family, Heather, Talon, Conner, and Alexia. Your support is still what makes this all worthwhile.

  Of course, I have to mention Rumor, Ranger, and Chaos, who help lower my stress level just when I need a good lap-warmer, and then keep me from getting complacent just when I need a hairball on my chair. And now there is the dog, Loki, who still can’t figure out why the other three don’t want to play. They’re cats! Leave them alone.

  Prolog

  (Two Years Before the Blackout)

  Program 12: Highlake Basin

  Achernar

  Prefecture IV, The Republic

  26 October 3130

  Sporadic artillery cr-umped along Raul Ortega’s rearward flank: twenty-pounders. They stomped large craters through the crusted, cracked-mud surface of Achernar’s Highlake Basin, scuffed blackened earth and embers of burning grasses into the air, and occasionally kicked over an infantry position, forcing survivors to scurry like armored ants reforming injured lines.

  Those bright, orange-tipped flashes shattered the deepening twilight and cast brief shadows forward of Raul’s Legionnaire as he stalked the fifty-ton BattleMech into the no-man’s-land separating his forces from Charal DePriest’s. From three stories up, his cockpit placed as a head on the humanoid-style war machine, Raul stared out through a ferroglass shield to study the battlefield. Armored vehicles drove and dodged through the killing zone, their autocannons and machine guns stitching the air with white-hot tracers. Ruby laserfire splashed armor into molten puddles. Flights of missiles arced up on fiery plumes, falling over into hard-hitting showers that blasted into the ancient lakebed and ripped open armor and flesh where they found it.

  Two gutted APV’s, both of them Charal’s, burned at the edge of the dry lake basin, roiling black, greasy smoke into a charcoal sky.

  He felt a loose smile—the one Major Blaire called Raul’s kay-det grin—creep over his face. Those two vehicles didn’t make up for his lost Marksman, a blackened husk left at the foot of the Taibek Hills, but with a bit of luck Charal would have failed to deploy her own battlesuit infantry and that would put the other MechWarrior-cadet at a disadvantage.

  After two hours in the hot seat, muscles strained and sore and his hands sweat-slick on the simulator’s well-worn controls, Raul didn’t mind asking for a touch of luck.

  “Charlie-one through six: advance and engage,” Raul commanded his carefully hoarded infantry. The Cavalier-suited warriors leapt out of hiding from jagged-edged craters or spilled from his two Saxon transports. A few bounded up on thrusters. Most swarmed forward in short, erratic sprints. Raul could hope that one squad might actually make a battlefield capture, but if nothing else, he decided, they would draw fire away from him.

  It wasn’t soon enough, though. A particle projector cannon scorched the air just over his Legionnaire’s left shoulder. Raul ducked away reflexively. He stutter-stepped his BattleMech several cautious paces to the right where a JES Tactical Missile Carrier fell under his sights, branded in enemy-red on the head’s up display.

  He checked his ammunition reserves in a glance—down, but not critically low—and set his crosshairs over the Jessie’s dark outline. The Legionnaire’s targeting computer painted a shadow-reticle to the right of the hovercraft, adjusting for relative motion. Raul corrected his aim, swinging over the BattleMech’s arm to lead the JES Carrier by several meters, and then pulled into his only weapons trigger.

  His rotary autocannon spit out a long tongue of fire and fifty-mil rounds tipped with depleted uranium. The slugs punched into the hovercraft’s right side missile launcher, chewing through simulated armor as the vehicle slewed sideways. A weakened support arm twisted under the launcher’s weight, buckled, and dropped the boxlike launcher into the full stream of hot, angry metal. Missiles ruptured, their solid fuel boosters catching fire and cooking off several warheads before the tank crew could dump the ruined ammunition, and the launcher disintegrated into a blossom of fire.

  The explosion rocked the hovercraft up on its skirt and spilled away the supporting cushion of air. The Jessie tipped up and over, coming down on the overhead launcher, which discharged in a sympathetic detonation. Armor panels bulged on all sides, then burst apart. A gout of fire shot into the sky, thick and tall, glowing yellow-orange at the center and simply darkening to a nimbus of red wisps at the edge. It looked . . . minimal.

  Fake.

  Raul’s smile slid away. Cheap fire effects always ruined the explosion in his opinion, reminding him that his battle wasn’t exactly real. Fire should dance and cavort, cheering his temporary victory.

  It was one of only a few flaws in the Mark III simulators used by Achernar’s training command. Usually, he lost himself within the simulation without problem. The cockpit swayed with each step his Legionnaire took, hitched hard when a trio of missiles slammed into his left leg, and the simulator threw him forward against the five-point restraining harness ever
y time the BattleMech’s cockpit took a direct hit. It also dumped heat through small vents near his feet when he stressed the fusion reactor. All reinforced the illusion—the lie—that he controlled an actual BattleMech—except for the fire.

  Not that he’d let simplified effects distract him from beating Charal DePriest. Charal had more formal training, raised in a family of long military traditions. Raul pushed forward with determination and a measure of raw talent detected in the academy admissions testing. They had long since left the other cadets far behind. Challenging each other for the number-one spot, academic and practical standings too close to call for several months now, their good-natured rivalry had turned serious. It was more than a game today—more than a routine training procedure in Achernar’s Reserve Training Corps. This was his final exam. Graduation.

  Today’s simulated battle decided who picked up the vaunted billet in Achernar’s militia, commanding one of The Republic’s rare BattleMechs, and who finished a law enforcement degree looking forward to commanding a desk for two years before learning how to write parking citations.

  Enemy icons cluttered Raul’s head’s up display, laser-projected across the upper third of his cockpit’s ferroglass shield. Their short tag lines of information tangled in among IFF codes for his own skirmishers. In his mind, the coded tags resolved into two forces of similar troops, spread out over the dry lake basin. Armored vehicles chewed up the ground with belted treads and knobby tires. Hovercraft glided along with deadly menace like wolves among sheep. If Raul held an edge it was in raw firepower, although Charal DePriest made up for that with superior mobility.

  More than made up for it, in fact, as a green-haloed square on his HUD burst in a flare of emerald light. At a glance he read that a squad of Charal’s hoverbikes had overpowered and destroyed his remaining Demon tank.

  Raul cursed his luck for drawing Program 12, the Highlake Basin, and then cursed himself for not anticipating Charal’s early move out of the Taibek Mountains, the jagged edge of the northwest horizon. Swallowing back the dry, metallic taste of his anger, he dialed in the frequency for his computer-controlled vehicle commanders.

  “Alpha group, spread nor-nor’west. Beta, spread nor’east.”

  These were his two primary battle group formations of heavy armor. By cupping them around Charal’s advance forces, supporting his infantry drive, Raul hoped to fold the enemy into a pincer. If nothing else, he might be able to thin out the middle of the field, allowing him to push through and finally come to grips with his opponent.

  “Delta group,” he called up his reserve line of armored vehicles, holding defensive positions behind him, “shake out into a skirmishing wedge.”

  The HUD’s chaos of icons thinned, but not so much that he would get an easy push through at Charal DePriest. He’d have to fight his way through, which was exactly what Charal wanted of him. The entire confrontation so far, she’d commanded from a support position while he always stalked the forward edge of battle. She waited for him to soften up his defenses on her stinging probes—waited for him to make a mistake. The first Mech Warrior to fall wouldn’t end the scenario, no matter how far ahead he (or she) might be.

  It would give the other commander free reign to leisurely destroy the opposing, computer-generated force down to the last digital man.

  As if summoned by that dark thought, a pair of SM1 Destroyers glided out of the enemy pack, hunting him. Raul pulled back behind the defensive line he’d set with four Joust-701s, counting on the threat of their large lasers to hold back the Sims. He knew better than to close with an SM1’s ’Mech-killing twelve centimeter bore, and Charal knew enough not to challenge an entrenched line. The Sims fell back, their drive fans pushing them on toward better prey, and Raul stalked northwest to mirror the sudden movement of Charal’s Legionnaire.

  She’d make the first mistake, and he’d be there to catch her. He allowed for no other possibility.

  Being a MechWarrior was all Raul had dreamed of as a teen, whether sitting with his father through their seventh screening of an Immortal Warrior holovid or in his school studies of The Republic’s military history. It didn’t matter that there were no longer any wars to fight. To him, the Word of Blake Jihad was ancient history. Devlin Stone’s Reformation and the resulting birth of The Republic of the Sphere had required some fighting, but not much compared to the previous four hundred years of Succession Wars and the Clan invasion. And even Stone’s last battle had been fought nearly two decades before, bringing an end to the Capellan Crusades and peace to the Inner Sphere.

  The allure of being a MechWarrior, though, was one that refused to pale, and had become almost legendary with the widespread arms reduction. It spoke to Raul in the reverent way people referred to Devlin Stone’s Knights of the Sphere. With the intense coverage of the gladiator ’Mechs on the game world of Solaris VII. Even in the way his classmates looked at him now; only a cadet and MechWarrior-candidate but, in their minds, a future officer, knight, legate or prefect.

  Raul had promises to keep, and no one was going to stand in the way of that dream. He searched through his cockpit’s ferroglass shield for a new target.

  Charal DePriest found him first.

  A storm of tracers skipped off Raul’s cockpit shield and then drifted down over the Legionnaire’s torso as Charal reached out from long range to walk a line of destruction from head to hip joint. Ferroglass cracked into the legs of two long spiderwebs, barely holding up under the assault. The simulator trembled violently, shaking Raul against his five-point harness—hard enough to leave deep bruises across his shoulders and abdomen. His neurohelmet slammed back against the seat’s headrest, cracking one of the support posts.

  The Legionnaire’s massive gyroscopic stabilizers relied on Raul’s own sense of equilibrium, linked through the pilot’s neurohelmet. Shaken, Raul blinked back a wave of dizziness and the sensation of sudden vertigo as his BattleMech balanced on uncertain footing.

  Recognizing the uneasy sway of his Legionnaire, Raul spread out both of the ’Mech’s arms for balance and throttled into a slower walk to recover the stricken avatar. Icons danced over his HUD, demanding his attention. But Major Blaire had taught them that it was always better to do something immediate and constructive in a live-fire situation than debate overlong on the exact right thing to do. Raul was an attentive student.

  “Alpha group, hard press.” His order might buy him some time if Charal had to deal with a sudden advance.

  His own reticle tracked across the cracked shield, painted by a targeting laser, but for the distance Raul switched over to his infrared monitor and full computer imaging. Charal was on the move, but he bracketed her in a long pull of autocannon fire before ever looking at his HUD for more information. Raul spent several hundred rounds on empty air but several hundred more into the outline of Charal’s Legionnaire. His return fire chipped away armor from its arms and upper chest, rocking it back but not doing enough damage to knock Charal off her feet.

  Static whispered into Raul’s ears as a transmission burst from his computer-controlled subofficers crackled over the speakers built into his neurohelmet. “Alpha group,” the voice identified itself. “We’re through, sir.”

  For a brief second Raul thought that his armor group had decided to desert him. That would be a new twist coming out of the computer’s limited programming. Then, shaking off the last of his dizziness, he caught on that elements of Alpha formation had penetrated to the rearward lines on this flank.

  Raul was behind her!

  His head’s up display painted the same picture as he spent several critical seconds in study. Charal’s brief move forward, coupled with his return push of battlesuit infantry and armor, had opened up the field between them so that both Legionnaires faced off over open ground. Her western flank was in chaos, cut off from their commander by a narrow line of his own troops. She had two . . . looked like three armored vehicles left in the immediate area that might be able to reach her side.

  �
�Beta group, smash forward. Tie them up. Alpha, hold your line. Delta, reinforce Alpha.” Raul rattled off his commands with a confidence born of immediate need. If only he could wait for his reserve infantry in Delta to move up, he might be able to capture Charal’s BattleMech—and wouldn’t that be a fine cap to his RTC record?

  Throttling into a forward run, Raul pushed his Legionnaire ahead at better than one hundred kilometers per hour. Charal was already backpedaling, realizing her exposed position, but not soon enough. Sporadic fire from her rotary autocannon pecked and pockmarked his armor, hammering away barely a ton of protection from his Legionnaire’s lower legs and torso.

  “Lance 701,” he called for the quad of Jousts that had held off the SM1 Destroyers earlier, “detach from Delta.” He’d need them to help put Charal down quickly. “Advance at flank speed, engage enemy Legionnaire.”

  At the Jousts’ eighty-six kph top speed, Raul left the tracked vehicles behind quickly. They only needed to reach a fair distance, though, to bring their missile racks and extended-range lasers against her ’Mech, or, if need be, any of the supporting armor Charal had left to her.

  As if realizing her error, and that she would never get free in time, Charal DePriest waited with two armored vehicles pulled in at her flanks. The computer tagged them as VV1 Rangers, anti-infantry vehicles—hardly the forces one would draw on to hold off a BattleMech.

  Caution whispered at the back of Raul’s mind and he slowed his pace, throttling down to seventy kph, buying himself crucial seconds. A MechWarrior did not push a losing position, not a MechWarrior trained under Major Isaac Blaire. ’Mechs were too rare—too expensive—to risk them with a cavalier attitude. Raul had taken hits on his evals for that, and to see Charal suddenly hold the line when everything he saw would have him screaming run gave him a long pause.