A Call to Arms

by Loren L. Coleman

  If Star Colonel Torrent wanted the HPG, he would come for it in a fight on Erik’s terms, not his own.

  Raul Ortega shifted around in his seat, throwing his own sense of balance behind the Legionnaire’s fifty tons. The BattleMech twisted at the waist, bent forward, and rocked back off the left-side edges of its square-shod feet.

  “Can we expect relief from these strafing runs anytime soon?” The militia had only a pair of Stingrays over the spaceport field, and they were being shoved around like schoolyard children at recess. The one-two punch of ground-fire and aerospace fighters had thrown him off balance twice since Erik Sandoval pulled back his antiaircraft-capable vehicles.

  Clark Diago, anchoring the militia’s attempt to encircle the Steel Wolf flank, was more direct. “Base, Diago. Get us some support out here!”

  Promises and regrets were forwarded by Colonel Blaire himself. Aerospace was still tied up in attempts to divert the Steel Wolf DropShips. “You’re about to get all the cover we have,” he said in clipped tones. “But it won’t be enough.”

  Biting back his response, Raul throttled into a backward walk and put some distance between himself and a pair of M1 Marksmen. The assault tanks rolled past the dismantled corpse of the final Swordsworn WorkMech, working it over with short-range weaponry, just for good measure, before turning their attention forward. Their gauss rifles were too big a threat for Raul to ignore. Switching over to his company’s tactical frequency, he called a missile barrage down on their location.

  Gray tendrils of smoke fell down from the sky, marking the four-score warheads that blasted into armor and ripped through the polished tarmac landing field. Before the smoke cleared, a squad of DI Schmitts pounced, their rotary autocannon blazing with long, sustained rates of fifty-mil fire support. Raul shifted back for a forward run, cutting along behind the Schmitts, adding his own hard-pounding rotary to the assault.

  The Steel Wolf crew rallied quickly—too quickly. With artificial thunderclaps splitting the air, both Marksmen punched rail-accelerated gauss slugs into the lead Schmitt. One carried away a turret missile launcher, ripping it clean off the tank. The second gauss slug impacted over a wheel, smashing it back into the drivetrain and fouling the right-side independent drive mechanism.

  The Schmitt turned in a sharp circle, crippled, unable to withdraw.

  “At them! Hit them now.” Raul drove forward, feeling each of the Legionnaire’s pounding steps at the base of his spine.

  Centering his crosshairs over the Marksman with greater armor fatigue, he burned into it with a hammering cascade of fifty-millimeter slugs tipped with depleted uranium. More missiles rained down on the Steel Wolf position—and more than one flight was returned against Raul’s BattleMech—as the three remaining Schmitts followed their MechWarrior’s lead and drilled deep into the gauss-toting tank.

  Protected by deep armor reserves, the Marksman and its comrade vehicle managed one more volley, completely smashing through the side of the crippled Schmitt, and left it a gutted shell. Then a blistering scourge of laserfire chewed into the wounded Marksman. A burst of flame scattered out of several gaping holes as fuel caught fire, and dark, greasy smoke swirled out to commingle into a dark funeral shroud.

  The remaining Marksman rolled backward into the protection of the Steel Wolf lines, quickly flanked by two advancing Pack Hunters.

  And that was when hell opened up, throwing a long line of fire and destruction into the midst of the exposed Schmitt trio.

  “DropShips! Angels-twelve. Straight up but drifting back.”

  Like Raul needed the warning. His alarm systems had failed to register the DropShip arrival, sensors cluttered up with too many ground targets to worry about overhead threats, but there was no mistaking the fire pattern laid down from above. “Break and run,” he ordered the Schmitts. “Strike Squad Two, evade and escape.”

  Two of the three Schmitts crawled out of the blasted landscape. One of them had plunged into a cratered strip that could only be a collapsed service tunnel. It might have survived, but even so it was out of the battle.

  Craning to one side, looking up past the thick, rotary-linked barrels of his overhead autocannon, Raul found the bright drive flare of a hovering Okinawa-class DropShip as it passed overhead by half a kilometer. The DropShip crew had put a rotating spin on the vessel, and now long beams of gem-brilliant energy lanced down from three weapon ports at a time as lasers and particle cannons mixed into terrifying salvoes. As one port fell out of line-of-sight, another came around to walk new destruction down among the militia line. LRMs fell out at regular intervals, spreading more impersonal death over the ground-bound vehicles.

  And it continued drifting north, toward the militia rear!

  “Support forces, scatter and evade,” Raul ordered, knowing the confusion he was about to unleash in his own backfield. He selected an all-hands channel, one that the Swordsworn would also be monitoring. “DropShips are not—repeat, not—grounding in support of Steel Wolf advance. ’Ware behind!”

  Then a pair of Jagatai aerospace fighters tore over the landing field, cutting down with a mix of autocannon and lasers, and Raul had all he could do to angle out of their strafing line before they yanked the rug out from under his feet again. The Pack Hunters prowled forward, waiting for a single misstep. Their PPCs spat out twin forks of manmade lightning, but they grounded out short of Raul’s Legionnaire.

  As more reports of air-based strikes filtered through the command levels, Raul understood that a low-passing Overlord had ravaged Clark Diago’s position before moving down the militia’s back line and into the hesitant Swordsworn. Sweat burned at the corners of Raul’s eyes. He blinked them clear and twisted his Legionnaire about, watching as the two leviathan vessels lowered themselves on massive drive flares, one to either end of the grounded Kuan Ti. The trapped DropShip made the mistake of firing on the Overlord, one final act of defiance, and suddenly the aerial assault dealt over the militia line looked like a casual wave by comparison.

  The Overlord pounded down at the nose of the civilian-conversion with gauss rifles and enough laser energy to light up the city of River’s End. Although limited in firepower after its military decommissioning, the Kuan Ti still mustered its assault-class autocannons and a heavy missile barrage. Then the Okinawa bit in from behind, trading lasers and PPCs against the civilian vessel’s aft pulse lasers and missiles.

  It was an uneven fight from the beginning, and lasted until the Overlord pounded silent every one of the Kuan Ti’s forward weapon bays.

  About sixty seconds.

  Wary of being caught between the DropShips’ anvil and the hammer of the Steel Wolf advancing force, Raul herded his two remaining Schmitts and a scattered flock of mixed battlesuit infantry back toward their ravaged rearward lines. M.A.S.H. units and a JI 100 recovery vehicle had rolled up from the southwest, making pickup on broken units and fallen comrades. He stomped past a fire-gutted Joust and the twisted wreckage of two broken hoverbikes. One still had hands clamped onto the steering bar, but was missing the rest of the driver. A technician emergency response team fell hard at work over a captured Demon, getting it battle-worthy again and detailing a new crew out of their auxiliary ranks. Raul gave the working ERT a wide berth, swung around to one side of them, and then slammed his throttles down to a full stop. Being hauled up into the embrace of the JI recovery vehicle was Charal DePriest’s converted LoaderMech.

  With Tassa leading a small force in defense of the Brightwater facility, Charal had been called up to help defend the spaceport. Raul had thought to keep her safe, relegated as she was to a support role, even when she followed him into the wedge between the Swordsworn and Steel Wolves. ‘Safe’ was a relative term in a live firefight, though, especially when two DropShips began redefining the battle. Still, there were any number of injuries that even a converted WorkMech could take and the MechWarrior could walk away from. Crippled gyros. Destroyed legs. Ruined engines.

  Charal’s WorkMech was missing its cockpi
t. All that remained was a melted stump of support structure.

  Standing there, his Legionnaire grounded to a dangerous halt while Steel Wolf forces continued to stalk up from the south, Raul became a lodestone to stragglers. Scattered reserves and retreating forward units gathered in around his position, inadvertently creating a strongpoint that worried the advancing Wolves. Sensing a possible counter-thrust, they also slowed, drew together in concentrated ranks. A converted ConstructionMech joined the Pack Hunters, forming the spearpoint on a thrust that would not be long in coming.

  The Swordsworn pressed forward now as well, goaded back into the fight as enemy DropShips landed behind their position. On one of the auxiliary channels, Erik Sandoval recommended—ordered—a full retaliatory strike against the advancing Steel Wolf line. “Bloody them now, and they’ll pull back. DropShips and all.”

  His mobile command vehicle lumbered up from the far rear, protected by a pair of JES carriers. A pair of Jagatai fightercraft turned in his direction, laying down a long line of fire that swept up and over the Praetorian. Both Jessies belched out thick clouds of proximity-fused missiles, filling the air with heavy flak. The lead Jagatai pulled up so sharply Raul could almost believe the pilot had defied all laws of momentum.

  The second craft was not so skilled, or lucky. It drove through the thickest part of the antiaircraft barrage, bulldozing through the far side with streamers of fire and smoke, a stunted right-side wing, and a lethal roll that pitched him up, over, and into the tarmac.

  “Where was that support five minutes ago?” Raul asked aloud, not caring who heard him over the comm channels. But he knew, he knew.

  Like those Swordsworn “reserve forces” held back within the capital, the JES carriers were being denied to the militia so that the standing guard bore the brunt of the fighting. The perfect Sandoval partnership. So long as Erik’s people held the HPG station and could force fighting in the streets before being removed from River’s End, the militia operated with its hands tied. The only choice was to cooperate—collaborate . . .

  Or give Erik Sandoval exactly what he was asking for: complete responsibility for Achernar.

  A trio of missiles slammed into the side of the Legionnaire, cracking into more armor, while the azure lightning-whip of a particle projector cannon snaked past Raul’s left knee and cut into a stalled Fox. The armored car swung around on lift fans and scurried back, like its scampering namesake.

  Swinging around, Raul pegged one of the encroaching Pack Hunters dead center with his crosshairs. A pounding stream of autocannon slugs chipped away at the Hunter’s gyroscope housing, shoving the BattleMech back by several meters and threatening to topple it. It fell back among the building Steel Wolf forces.

  Raul turned back to the waiting militia units, and Charal’s decapitated WorkMech. Do gold . . . good . . . by Achernar. From all their difficult conversations in the last week—difficult only because of her speech impediment—those were the words he remembered. The same ones echoed by Janella Lakewood. But what happened when serving the Republic and serving Achernar conflicted? Was that what the Sphere Knight had meant, telling him to then serve himself?

  Tie goes to the MechWarrior.

  “Captain Ortega?” Diago. According to the HUD, he too had fallen back, stretching the militia line into something more of an abbreviated arc than any serious encirclement. The Steel Wolf forces were knotted up into a thick wedge, with the tip pointed straight at Raul’s position. “Raul? You’ve got about ten seconds to get turned around and ready to meet a full charge.”

  Raul shook his head, feeling more than his neurohelmet weighing down on his shoulders. “Not happening,” he said, voice pitched low. Then, with gathering strength, “No, Clark. Wrap ’em up and back to base. Carry or drag along our wounded equipment as we can. Ruin it rather than leave it for Torrent.”

  He passed the same order down through several channels, making certain that the support forces rallying around his position had a clear idea of the order of retreat. The M.A.S.H. trucks and salvage vehicles led, protected by hovercraft flankers. Raul’s Legionnaire and their heaviest tanks would guard the militia rear. If the Steel Wolves wanted to force a longer battle today, he would make them pay a butcher’s price.

  “Disregard that order.” The plans had finally worked their way over to Erik Sandoval. “Achernar militia, hold your line and prepare for a joint offensive.”

  Long past caring for Erik Sandoval’s tactics, Raul keyed open a channel to answer for himself. “We’ve seen your brand of joint offensives, Sandoval. And it’s the last time we walk into one without reading the fine print.” He rocked forward on his foot throttles, stepping out into a crisp march to the west, out from under the Steel Wolf sword, exposing the Swordsworn line.

  “Captain Ortega, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m ceding Star Colonel Torrent the San Marino spaceport. I would suggest you do the same.” There would be hell to pay with Colonel Blaire. At least Clark Diago was willing to follow his lead, for now. The militia’s western flank had drawn itself into a skirmish line to protect the retreating middle. “The militia is withdrawing,” Raul said.

  “And leaving you to the Wolves.”

  21

  The Hardest Lessons

  Brightwater River Control Facility

  Achernar

  12 March 3133

  Strapped into one of many passenger seats inside the older Trooper-class VTOL, Raul Ortega labored to breathe shallow. The wide passenger compartment smelled its twenty years as an infantry carrier, tainted with rancid sweat and aviation fuel fumes. His seat had lost most of its thin padding years before, with only a few remaining strips held together with duct tape or stapled into the rigid plastic seat. Trying to ignore the knots pressing into his legs and lower back, Raul twisted around to stare out through a copper-tinted window as the infantry carrier thundered up the Rio Sangria.

  The reddish, mud-colored waters still ran high as mountain rainfall continued to pour down into the lowlands, but was hardly in danger of flooding so long as the Brightwater River Control Facility remained in Republic hands. A system of locks and sluice gates, the Brightwater facility could, for brief periods, dam up the river completely or channel excess water into one of many old dry washes. From above the facility, he could see that water was indeed being diverted into two older arroyos. The VTOL followed the larger of the two runoff channels, banking southwest and leaving the river course a moment later to run out over yesterday’s battlefield.

  From five hundred feet, the area did not look so bad. Some scorched desert grasses and a few charred husks that had once been vehicles or a military-modified IndustrialMech. As the ’copter settled, however, more of the personal cost became clear. He saw the pieces and parts of other machines, scattered leavings after salvage crews had worked the field over for whatever useful equipment they could find. Raul also counted better than two dozen armored battlesuits littering the area like the molted cicada husks, each one a potential fatality.

  Three M.A.S.H. tents covered makeshift triage, surgery, and hospital care areas. Corpsmen loaded two stretchers onto a small chopper, which rushed them airborne even as the Trooper hit the ground and an infantryman rolled back two large doors so that Raul could jump down.

  Jogging over to the hospital tent, Raul slowed only once as he passed the blackened and severed arm of a BattleMech. It was from Tassa’s Ryoken. He had already seen the laser-blasted wreckage hauled back by a recovery crew, missing its arm and showing a tangle of twisted scrap where its gyroscope stabilizer had once been housed. He mentally tagged the severed limb to be recovered. With some hard work, it might be reconditioned and reattached.

  There would certainly be no ordering a new one up from stores. Not for a Ryoken.

  There would be no ordering up a new MechWarrior, either, which was why Colonel Blaire had dispatched Raul first thing this morning. With Charal DePriest dead, the closest thing that the militia had to another back-up
was Captain Norgales—Legate Stempres’s man. Any others were barely capable of handling a Legionnaire. Raul might be able to handle the powerful Ryoken II design, leaving his ’Mech to a lesser pilot, but he didn’t want it.

  He wanted Tassa Kay back.

  The hospital tent smelled of old canvas and the strong disinfectants used to keep wounds clean. Several dozen men and women still waited for evac back to River’s End. Blood-soaked bandages and elevated casts gave Raul a close-up look at the cost of this ongoing struggle. He caught whiff of a septic wound—a latrine scent at which he wrinkled his nose—and stood aside as two bulky civilians who looked more like construction workers than corpsmen helped a nurse hustle one of their patients from this tent and likely back to field surgery.

  Raul waited for the door to swing shut, then began walking the long rows again, studying faces—when he could—and reading names from charts clipped to the end of the cots. Near the end of the first row he glanced ahead, saw Tassa lying back on white sheets with an IV stuck into her arm and a compress taped to the side of her head. A physician bent over her. A civilian physician, checking vitals and then straightening up to stare down in question. Raul’s breath hitched.

  It was Jessica.

  Raul had already been feeling at odds with what had happened the other night with Tassa Kay. His conversation with Janella Lakewood was forcing him to reevaluate many things, in fact. His liaison with Tassa had been all passion and need and proximity. Not solid emotion and certainly not love. In the holovids, the ones Raul had loved so much while dreaming of a post within Achernar’s militia, romantic trysts were part of a Mech Warrior’s due. “Because tomorrow we may die,” and other such trite excuses. But this was real life, and real people got hurt both on and off the battlefield. Any decision, or lack thereof, could cost lives, ruin equipment, and shatter relationships.