A Call to Arms

by Loren L. Coleman

  “Verify!” he snarled, clutching at his throat mic.

  “Aff,” came an immediate response. “Rapier lead is burning, Rapier lead . . . has crashed.” She paused, as if uncertain how much info her Star Captain was asking for. “Ripper Flight lead is operating solo. Wingman is down.”

  Still, an impressive victory for her codex. Not his. He glanced down at the octagonal data crystal, strapped to his wrist right over the pressure point. Mehta was one of the few pilots he knew who did not wear gloves, preferring to feel the full response of the OmniFighter.

  Star Commander Drake had also reported in with one fighter withdrawn. That was one OmniFighter crippled and one destroyed for three confirmed enemy kills. Seven, if VTOLs and ground vehicles were counted. Not a terrible day’s work. And according to his HUD, the enemy fightercraft had ceded control over the battlefield to Mehta’s force. With the arrival of a second pair of Stingrays, the militia had three fighters and half a dozen VTOLs circling around the battlefield edges like jackals waiting to pounce on a weakened stray. Mehta would not give them that chance.

  “Keep clear skies over the battle, but do not chase down enemy Stingrays. Star Commander Xera, fly high alert and take command as you see fit to throw back any advance.”

  “Aff, sir!” She saw her elevation as a promotion. And it was, of sorts. Drake was the senior Star Commander, but Drake didn’t have a squadron leader under his belt today. “Where will you be?”

  Laren Mehta checked to make certain his wingman was back, holding position off his left wing. He dipped his nose down, and started a long, gliding dive down toward the ground battle.

  “Hunting,” he told her.

  There was other game to be tracked, and just as big as an enemy squadron lead.

  River’s Run Flatlands

  Achernar

  Sweat beaded on Raul’s bare arms and legs, trickled in tiny rivulets down his face, and stung at the corners of his eyes. His breath came in short, burning gasps as his lungs fought to pull oxygen out of the baking air. His reactor levels hovered almost constantly at the border between the yellow caution band and warning red. Only his MechWarrior’s vest, circulating coolant through fifty meters of sewn-in tubing, kept his body core temperature down and prevented heat-induced blackout.

  No time to rest or allow the Legionnaire’s heat levels to relax, Raul ran his ’Mech forward to keep pace with Tassa Kay’s Ryoken. The two of them had pressed further forward than any other Republic unit, in sight of the Agave Dales although there was still no contact with Sandoval’s Swordsworn. Not that they needed him anymore. The Steel Wolves seemed committed to their hit-and-fade strategy, which surrendered any advantage to the two Mech Warriors’ blitzkrieg offensive. All they had to do was keep their eyes open for OmniFighters and targets of opportunity.

  Like this one. They raced up on either side of a retreating Joust, the tracked tank straining along with obvious engine difficulty. Black, oily smoke trailed out of several gaping rents in the tank’s armor. Battlesuit damage.

  From earlier trade-offs with Tassa, Raul knew she would leave him to finish off the wounded vehicle. Her lasers spat out scarlet spikes which worried the ground to one side of the Joust, herding it closer to Raul’s Legionnaire. The Joust’s turret swung over as the tank tried to bully its way past the militia BattleMech, lancing out with its large lasers but missing. The ruby beam scorched a line of black glass into the ground at Raul’s feet.

  Cautious of his ammunition reserves, Raul spent two short bursts into the damaged side of the Joust. A tongue of fire licked out from the blackened rent—an orange flame spitting more fuel-tinged smoke into the air. The tank trailed to a stop, and Raul lifted his crosshairs away in search of a new target.

  “You’re getting soft,” Tassa accused him. “If they get that fire under control and then put a laser into your back, you will wish you had finished them.”

  Raul’s vision blurred, and he blinked some moisture back into his eyes. “You haven’t noticed that we attracted a small retinue behind us?” he asked. Of course, Tassa’s head’s up display might not be fully conversant with Republic Identify Friend-Foe transponders, but her sensors should have picked up the two VVI Rangers and the double-squad of Cavalier battlesuit infantry following in their wake of dust.

  “Honestly, no. If they are not hostiles, I tend to overlook lesser forces. And I do not trust my back to anyone but a MechWarrior. Sometimes, not even to them.”

  There it was again; a veiled—not contempt, but a lack of consideration—for conventional forces. Somewhere, Tassa must have been burned badly. “Learn that on Dieron?” he asked.

  “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “Not easily, no. I’ve been told by . . . on good authority that I have a determined stubborn streak.” By his fiancée. A guilty start shook Raul. Why hadn’t he simply admitted that it was Jessica who often told him that?

  Tassa took a moment out to pop her lasers off at some Hauberk infantry. The battlesuit troopers had tried to come at her from over a small rise. Her lasers burnt one into a desiccated shell, drove the rest back. “Stubborn does not work with me. When the answer is no, it stays no.”

  Was she just talking about her adventures on Dieron? “The answer hasn’t been ‘no’ yet, now has it?” Was he?

  “No. Not yet. Though if you do not get around to asking the right—Raul!”

  Too late, her warning came. Sensors screamed at him as an enemy targeting system locked on, their high-pitched wail piercing his ears like the autocannon rounds which made short work of his right-side armor. Raul wrestled with his control sticks, fighting to keep his balance as the Jagatai OmniFighter screamed overhead at less than one hundred meters off the ground. A cyclone of dirt and debris blasted up behind its wake, pelting Raul’s cockpit.

  A second OmniFighter, higher and slower than the first, spent two ruby beams toward Tassa. She throttled into a reverse walk, pulling out of its line of fire, and managed to clip its tail assembly with one of her PPCs before it thundered by after its lead.

  Kicking his left leg out into a wide-bodied stance, Raul barely managed to hold the fifty tons of metal and myomer upright. The Legionnaire bent far over toward its right, holding a precarious balance. Slowly, Raul straightened back up.

  “You all right?”

  His ears rang with the echoes of sensors alarms and the hammering reports of one hundred twenty millimeter ammo chewing into his armor. He tasted blood, and then realized from a throbbing ache that he’d bitten the inside of his cheek. Which was the least he deserved from flirting during a firefight. Idiot.

  “Yeah. I’ll live.” He checked the wireframe, and tested out what he saw there by trying to flex the Legionnaire’s right knee. “That’s it for my right knee joint, though. It’s fused.” Which would cost him about ten klicks on his top speed. “I’m going nowhere fast.”

  “Well how about you get turned around to the north,” Tassa said casually, “because those fighters are looping back around.”

  It was true. The fighters had left the range factor on his HUD, but were still caught on an auxiliary sensor display circling at five klicks. Tassa moved to place herself in line, with Raul between her and the fighters’ return path.

  “Tassa, what are you doing? You don’t put yourself in the path of a strafing run. You attack from the oblique so it’s harder for the pilot to target you.”

  “It’s harder for you to target them, too,” she said with a curt tone. “If you really don’t think I know what I’m doing, step aside.”

  Raul considered it. Everything in his training and the prickly hairs standing up on the back of his neck told him to avoid the fighter’s pass. His targeting system would allow him to get one shot off at the Jagatai as it flashed by overhead, but his rotary autocannon couldn’t match the OmniFighter’s firepower. Not unless he held into the trigger and emptied his ammunition bins in one long burst.

  “I think I’m good to go,” he said, sounding braver than he felt.
>
  No time for better than that, though. The Jagatai were already back.

  The lead craft came in low again, hugging Achernar like an old friend. The tail of dirt sucked up into its backwash stood out several klicks away, which gave Raul all of three seconds to magnify for aerial targets and set his crosshairs into the OmniFighter’s approximate path. At the last possible second, he shuffle-stepped to one side and squeezed into his trigger, held it.

  Behind him, framed on his rear monitor, Tassa Kay’s Ryoken rocketed up and forward into the air on its jump jets.

  It was a maneuver—two maneuvers, really—caught on various gun-cam videos that Raul would end up watching over and over again once back at the base. Everyone had a piece of the exchange, but only the long-sniper squad of Cavaliers—rushing up from the backfield after dealing with the Joust’s crew—caught the entire thing.

  Raul stepping aside of the main strafing path just as the ground opened up in a new, hideous rent of damage that drew a line right between his old footprints.

  Tassa Kay hovering her Ryoken in the air almost right over Raul’s Legionnaire.

  His Legionnaire cutting apart the air with hot, lethal metal, hammering several hundred fifty-millimeter slugs into the nose of the Jagatai and peeling away several layers of its thick armor plating.

  Her Ryoken, stabbing out with lasers and particle cannon. The lasers actually burned in along the fuselage underbody, doing little more than scorching pristine armor. Her PPCs, however, struck into the Jagatai’s already-bloodied nose. Both beams fused into one hard-hitting punch, washing blue-white crackling energy over the forward third of the OmniFighter.

  The combined damage might have been enough to penetrate to something vital. Raul wasn’t so certain. Sensors blinded by the particle discharge and canopy no doubt awash in a white sheet of energy, it looked to Raul as if the Steel Wolf pilot attempted to quickly turn out of the firestorm, banking away hard to port.

  At one hundred meters over the hard, unyielding earth, a pilot did nothing quick or hard. Not without consequences.

  Air bled away beneath the wings and the Jagatai’s nose dipped just enough. The OmniFighter jinked away on a tight, horizontal loop, drifted down, and then clipped its wing on the same small rise behind which the Hauberk infantry had hidden. In slow replay, Raul would see the OmniFighter turn three complete somersaults in the air, shedding pieces and parts in a storm of falling metal.

  At the battle site, he blinked, and it was all over.

  The lead Jagatai was shredded wreckage spread over several acres of burning earth. The flames burned white for a few seconds, hot enough to consume metal, and then settled back into normal, yellow-orange flames. Raul felt the wave of heat slam into him as his own reactor spiked dangerously high. Shutdown alarms wailed for attention and he slapped the override, preferring to cook himself before being stuck on a battlefield in a dead ’Mech. He did reach back and punch his emergency escape release, as if vacating the cockpit through the manual hatch. The small door blew outward on explosive charges. Forty Celsius air fouled with smoke rushed into the cramped cockpit. Raul had never tasted anything so refreshing.

  Tassa Kay stalked her Ryoken up to his Legionnaire. Her ferroglass canopy had three starred bullet holes in it. Fortunately, they were well wide of her actual command couch. “Now that,” she said calmly, “I did learn on Dieron.”

  Raul coughed against the acrid taste of smoke, found his voice. “Now she starts with the stories.”

  He checked his HUD and all sensors. Nothing. The second Jagatai had broken off its attack run and bugged out. The remaining ground forces had disappeared as if someone had thrown the master switch on an elaborate simulation. Except that there was nothing simulated about this day’s work, and he would never be able to erase it from memory. Not a computer’s. Not his own.

  7

  Circle of Equals

  Highlake Basin

  Achernar

  19 February 3133

  Star Colonel Torrent had dimmed his shipboard office lights, relaxing his eyes after a morning spent sweating under Achernar’s harsh sun. The air remained sluggish and warm, however, with a hint of old mud. The Lupus’s interior climate controls were set to minimum, scrubbing the air it pulled from outside the DropShip but adding only the slightest drop in temperature as Torrent forced his warriors to acclimate.

  Sitting forward in his chair, arms resting on legs and hands clasped in between his knees, Torrent watched with intense concentration as the battlerom played out in three dimensions and vivid color on his holovid desk screen. Pulled from the OmniFighter belonging to Laren Mehta’s wingman, the Star Captain’s Jagatai hovered at the lower edge of the tableau during its furious, and final, nape-of-the-earth run.

  The ground was little more than a beige blur except for where his technicians had cleaned up the image, showing the slow-motion approach of the two BattleMechs. One took to the air on jumpjets while the other sidestepped, both cutting weapons fire across Mehta’s flight path. Torrent stared unblinking as tracers and bright metal shards skipped off the Jagatai’s nose, soon to be engulfed by the converging beams of twin particle cannon. He could almost smell the crackling ozone of PPC discharge as Laren Mehta banked and his craft curled out of the picture.

  To slam into the ground a split-second later.

  Torrent reached forward, hit the video-still and capture controls. The Ryoken hung in the air as if trapped in amber. He reopened his audio report to Steel Wolf Commander and Prefect Kal Radick. “I officially classify Laren Mehta’s death as heroism under fire,” Torrent said, his deep voice adding commentary to the video. “Two BattleMechs pushed our lines back. Star Captain Mehta attacked, and earned a warrior’s end. His codex will reflect this.” And new Steel Wolf sibkos would be born of his DNA. If Torrent owed anything to Laren Mehta, that was enough.

  “I promoted Star Captain Nikola Demos as my second in command,” he informed Radick. “She is senior to any officer on the Stealthy Paw. Also, Mehta’s death created a disciplinary crisis between two pilots, both of whom are positioning themselves to replace the Star Captain. I expect that to be settled within the next few days.” Another commander might have settled the issue by now, but Torrent would wait and see which one had the greater warrior’s heart.

  And of greater concern to the star colonel this moment were the two machines caught in frozen display. “The Legionnaire clearly displays the insignia of Achernar’s Republic Guard. The Ryoken bears no crest. It is more advanced than anything we estimated facing.” He frowned, noting how the Ryoken pilot worked almost seamlessly alongside the militia warriors. “I do not believe this MechWarrior is Swordsworn.”

  A theory Torrent had tested, nonetheless. His two probing attacks toward Hahnsak on the following days had turned up no sign of the Ryoken, nor anything more advanced than Erik Sandoval’s Hatchetman and some converted MiningMechs. Torrent queued up battlerom footage from those probes, set it to spooling into the recorded report.

  “My force can roll over the Swordsworn at any time.” Torrent looked forward to that, given Duke Aaron Sandoval’s position as Kal Radick’s primary competition for control of Prefecture IV. “I am holding off on any major offensive, awaiting the arrival of Knight-Errant Kyle Powers. In the meantime, I will keep a wedge driven between Swordsworn and Republic, and stay open to contact from our lost wolves. Star Colonel Torrent, reporting.”

  He let the final battle footage play out, then cut off the video spool and batched the report into the files set for transmission. In two days a Steel Wolf JumpShip would pass through Achernar’s system, staying just long enough for Torrent to upload reports. Even without the local HPG station, Kal Radick was slowly building his intelligence infrastructure.

  Torrent switched off his desk’s recording equipment and reopened his connection to the DropShip’s communications board. Only a military emergency could interrupt him during a private session. Three low-priority messages queued up on his system, but were shoved aside as
an open line from the Lupus’s bridge pushed through.

  “Star Colonel.” The on-duty bridge officer blinked into existence on Torrent’s holographic screen. “Sir, you’ve an urgent request for your presence at the Stealthy Paw.”

  “From whom?” Torrent asked, irritated over having to ask for such basic information. Ship officers: lazy minds, most of them, as evidenced in the officer’s use of contractions.

  “The request came with Ship’s Captain’s authority. Rachel Grimheald. I’m not certain with whom it originated. I can find out, Star Colonel.”

  Torrent rocked to his feet and leaned over the desk as if ready to pounce through the monitor. “Never mind. I already know. Spend your time learning how to deliver a proper report.”

  He switched off the call with a violent stab at the disconnect. Grabbing up his field jacket and the service cap perched on the edge of his desk, Torrent carried them into the DropShip’s corridor and down to the lower cargo bay in search of transportation. The trip from his Lupus to the DropShip Stealthy Paw was less than four minutes by hovercraft. Torrent did not wait for a driver, coding in his personal override and firing up the lift fans on a Fox armored car, coasting it across the cargo bay, down the extended ramp, and then opening full throttle for the short dash across Highlake Basin’s mud flats.

  Achernar’s sun was just hitting its late afternoon stride, the bright, blue-white star washing out the sky to a pale, pale blue. Nearby, the Tanager Mountains looked more forbidding by the harsh light of day than during the soft twilight by which the DropShips had landed three days ago. Torrent wasn’t used to the bright days yet, especially when being called out of his office. He reached into a utility pack on his belt, pulled out dark-tinted goggles and pulled them over his shaven pate one-handed. Settling the dark glass over his eyes, he returned his attention to driving.

  The three Steel Wolf DropShips formed a triangle around their primary staging area with two kilometers to a side. He reviewed that arrangement every day as he jogged the perimeter for a morning workout. Acceptable, he decided again. The Lupus had followed down their Triumph-class aerodyne, the Wulfstag, waiting until the massive troop carrier ground to a halt using Highlake Basin as a modified landing field. The Stealthy Paw’s arrival completed their defensive perimeter. Plows leveled a very rudimentary runway, and as his OmniFighters returned they coasted into the protective field at the center.