A Bonfire of Worlds

by Steven Mohan Jr.

  ComStar Secret Research Facility Omega One

  Patricia Harwell stared up into the blue sky, wondering how everything had managed to go so suddenly and totally wrong. As usual there was one word that served to explain every facet of the disaster.

  Tucker.

  Buhl stood next to her, his body rigid, his breathing heavy, his round face turned to the sky. He had at least as much to lose as she did—probably more.

  "Demon Flight has isolated the shuttle," reported Demi- Precentor Dakota Hansen, the senior aerospace officer on-planet. Hansen was a tall, fiftyish man of European stock. He wore a headset in his thinning brown hair that connected him to the base's control nexus. He pointed up at the world's silver ring. "I think you can see laser fire."

  Yes. Patricia saw red sparks dance in the sky, like embers leaping from a campfire on a cool fall night.

  "We want them alive," Buhl bellowed. He was flushed. He did not look well.

  "Y-yes sir," stammered Hansen. "The Shivas' lasers are set to low power, warning shots only."

  Buhl's poisonous gaze rested on the man for another ten seconds before he turned to look back up at the sky without a word.

  He's like a reactor that's about to lose containment, thought Patricia. Whoever is standing near him is going to vanish in a flash of light. But not me.

  Oh, no. Not me.

  Suddenly a pinprick of white light, nova bright, flashed in the world's sky.

  "What is that?" snapped Buhl. "What the hell is that?"

  For a moment Hansen's mouth worked, but no sound came out. He licked his lips. "Demon Two reports that Demon One collided with the shuttle." "What?" snarled Buhl. "What about survivors?"

  Hansen swallowed and shook his head.

  Buhl rounded on Patricia. "How could you have let this happen?" he asked in a low, menacing voice.

  Patricia's smile was cold. "Don't even try, Precentor. It wasn't me who assigned Tucker to the care of Sandra Whitfield. And you should know, I have collected every order regarding my brother's security arrangements, all backed up in several locations."

  If Buhl was going to save himself by sacrificing someone to Brian May, it would have to be someone else, because it was not going to be her.

  Buhl stared at her, a muscle in his cheek pulsing as he worked his jaw. Then he turned and stalked off. There was nothing he could say or do to her and he knew it.

  Patricia looked up at the sky, where the nova of her brother's death had already faded to nothing. She shook her head. "Too easy," she whispered.

  "It must be hard—" started Hansen, a note of maudlin sympathy in his voice.

  "It's not that," Patricia snarled. Her eyes found the silver arc of debris bisecting the blue sky. "It's just that Luyten is a world where the garbage tends to hang around."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Excalibur-class DropShip Himmelstor

  Wolf-Occupied Uhuru,

  Bolan Military Province Lyran Commonwealth

  2 July 3140

  The Excalibur-class DropShip bucked and shuddered as Uhuru fought her descent. The air itself tore at Himmelstor's thick hide, shaking the mighty vessel, buffeting her with gale-force winds, and finally shrieking in frustration as the DropShip slipped away.

  Wreathed in fire, Himmelstor fell.

  Even deep in the heart of Heaven's Gate, it was a rough ride down. Jasek Kelswa-Steiner sat in the DropShip's Combat Information Center, strapped in as securely as if he'd been in his Templar. He had one of the eight seats with an unobstructed view of Combat's massive holotank.

  He knew he didn't rate it: during this phase of the assault, Leutnant Kommodore Deborah Becker, the spaceborne commander was the task force's final authority. Still, Jasek's people were fighting and dying out there.

  He couldn't not watch.

  The holotank was a 3-D realtime schematic of the desperate battle being waged outside Himmelstor's hull. Jasek's blue

  DropShips dove forthe hard deck, while Wolf fighters marked in crimson harried them, screaming in for an attack, then turning swallow-quick and screaming away. Golden lines of weapons fire slashed between the combatants. Ground fire rose from the earth and battered the task force like upside-down rain.

  Jasek glanced at Becker, a small, fiftyish woman, who wore her brown hair long and didn't bother hiding the fact that it was streaked with gray. He marveled that anyone could follow the chaos spilling through holotank.

  "Adler Flight, target the Visigoths, I'll get-"

  "This is Eclipse. I hold Wolf Union at One One Six, five eight klicks, moving in fast."

  "This is Sierra Charlie," said Becker. "Desig Union, Bogie Four Seven. Adler Four and Five break from fur ball and harass the Union. Let her know we see her."

  "Wilco," barked the pilot in Adler Four.

  Jasek grunted as a pocket of wicked turbulence suddenly slammed him against his five-point safety restraint, the quick- release digging into his sternum. Then just as quickly the ship smashed him against his seat, punching the air out of his lungs. For a moment the sound of the naval chatter was knocked right out of his brain.

  Then it was back again.

  "Himmelstor, I hold two Jagatai full throttle climb toward your belly, four o'clock low."

  Somewhere below him Jasek heard the shriek of lasers as Himmelstor's gunners desperately tried to hold the marauders off for just a few seconds longer.

  Just a few seconds longer.

  After four days of hell.

  Jasek's task force had jumped into a deep pirate point four days out, hoping for surprise.

  It hadn't quite worked out that way.

  Wolf aerospace had been ready. They had staked out seven key pirate points—leaving the zenith and nadir jump points unguarded. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Wolves still managed to launch a savage attack against Jasek's JumpShip just as she cleared hyperspace, trying to kill the invasion aborning.

  They'd rammed a Mark VII into the Invader and sent a Star of Elementals bounding into space, ripping into the JumpShip's hull with their terrible claws.

  Himmelstor's guns had picked off about half the toads as they leapt toward the JumpShip, sending their broken bodies spinning off into infinity. The Invader's small contingent of marines got a good chunk of the rest, targeting the exposed Clan infantry from the partial cover of an open airlock.

  In all, only six Elementals made it aboard the JumpShip, slightly better than a Point. All the Clanner shock troops were killed, but not before they'd slaughtered half of the Invader's crew and sown panic throughout Jasek's command.

  Meanwhile, the Wolf forces stationed at the other pirate points raced toward Jasek's DropShips. The Wolves fought the task force all the way to the planet, contesting every millimeter of space and sky between the jump point and the LZ, fighting with everything they had.

  Alaric's aerospace forces were true Wolves, concentrating their attacks on the weakest member of the herd, the Eisenhimmel, hitting the little Leopard CV again and again on the long run in, worrying armor and silencing her guns one after another. Iron Sky carried a healthy chunk of Jasek's VTOL force.

  Jasek had to get his force down before the Wolves crushed his assault in the sky.

  "This is Sierra Charlie. Hand-off Bogie Four Seven to Star Chaser. Adler One, vector fighters along Three Four Nine. Target Four Seven's forward armor and lead her into Star Chaser's guns."

  "Jawohl, Sierra Charlie," barked Adler Flight's commander.

  Jasek touched the little screen at his arm, tapped through a few commands and called up video from Himmelstor's external cameras. What he saw was unbroken blue sky. Occasionally something small and gray zipped into the picture and then out again. It was like watching flies on a summer's day.

  Then he saw it. A black dot growing bigger. The Union.

  A bright orange flower opened against the sky. Jasekturned his head back to the holotank just in time to see the icon for Adler Two go dark.

  The Wolf DropShip turned and plunged into the swarm of Eisensturms,
smashing through Adler Flight like an angry lion charging into a pack of hyenas.

  Jasek's mouth went dry. "Becker—"

  "I see it," Becker snapped. "Eisenhimmel, Four Seven is closing, fall back, best speed. Chaser get on that DropShip now."

  Lights danced in the holotank in a delicate ballet of death. Golden lines joined the three DropShips: The Union tearing into the defenseless Eisenhimmel, Chaser desperately trying to save her sister.

  He turned back to the screen in time to see the sky suddenly swallowed by molten orange flame. He didn't have to check the holotank to know which ship had just died.

  Jasek's knuckles whitened as he gripped the arms of his chair.

  Have to get down NOW.

  The Red Desert

  Wolf-Occupied Uhuru, Bolan Military Province

  Lyran Commonwealth

  9 July 3140

  Heat ruled Jasek's world. It shimmered off the long, flat stretch of hardpan held by the Wolves, roiling the air and transforming Elementals into blurry, phantasmal figures. It baked the red rocks that littered the ground at Jasek's back, radiating off buttes and mesas, boiling out of the broken landscape that was the Red Desert.

  A white scale of dried salt caked Jasek's skin. Sweat stung his eyes. His cockpit was a hellish sauna, an oven. Heat ruled Jasek's world and it was a cruel master.

  Still, he stalked his Templar forward and lashed into a pair of Wolf Demons harrying a Stormhammer Pack Hunter with their lasers. Heat spiked another five scalding degrees in his cockpit. But the two fast tanks turned and raced for the safety of their lines.

  Jasek gritted his teeth and hit them again.

  This battle would not be won by half-measures.

  He glanced at his tactical display. Red and blue icons littered the schematic. The front was a long, shallow "U." The Stormhammers were giving everything they had.

  But they were bending.

  The moment was coming soon when their courage would not be enough and they would break.

  Right now the Wolves were prevailing through sheer numerical superiority. Alaric Wolf was playing to his strengths. That was OK. Jasek had strengths, too.

  By leap-frogging Amity, Alaric had won the opportunity to defend rather than attack. That was a significant tactical advantage. And Alaric's force was bolstered by the garrison units needed to hold the worlds he conquered. So he had numbers.

  What he did not have was time.

  Except for the Stormhammers and a scattering of planetary militias, nothing stood between Alaric and a long march coreward. So how many worlds could he take before the redeployment orders already flashing through Lyran space brought more front-line units to contest his advance? Alaric couldn't afford a long war of attrition.

  For the first week of the battle for Uhuru, Jasek had taunted the Wolf commander with hit-and-run tactics, using the Red Desert as a hidden base. What made the insurgent strategy viable was the total absence of air cover.

  Both Wolf and Lyran aerospace forces had been destroyed in the brutally contested landing. Other than their DropShips, neither side could put anything in the sky. Which meant there was no way to pin down an enemy force that didn't want to be found.

  Which was why Alaric was here now with all his front-line troops and a good chunk of his reserves. Given the chance to finally crush the Stormhammers, he was going to take it.

  Unfortunately for Clan Wolf, that was exactly what Jasek had expected.

  He toggled his common frequency. "Toy Surprise, Storm One. Target Grids One Six through Two Eight and fire for effect. Stormhammers, let's invite the Wolves inside."

  There was a second's hesitation and then Jasek's artillery, hidden in the wasteland behind him, opened up. The barrage started with the whistle of shells, but soon their shrill cry was swallowed by the terrible, rolling concussion of explosions.

  "So you like to play with artillery, do you, Alaric? Jasek whispered. He had seen the New Olympia footage. "Well, I'll give you all the artillery you want."

  Taking advantage of the covering fire, the Stormhammers turned and raced for the cover of the Red Desert, disappearing into hidden passages mapped before the battle.

  Most commanders, faced with the tactical situation Jasek had presented Alaric, would have withdrawn, happy with a draw. Why charge through artillery fire only to find yourself in the Red Desert?

  The desert was winding box canyons and blistering heat. Time and the blazing sun had carved weird towers and arches of hard rock out of the softer sandstone. There was little room to maneuver, and no room to hold a formation. The shattered rock sliced into the max speed of 'Mechs and tracked vehicles. Sheer walls made line-of-sight comms impossible. The heavy concentration of iron ore screwed up magscan, while noontime temperatures pushing forty degrees Celsius turned thermal pictures into a degraded blur.

  Superior numbers counted for little in the Red Desert.

  Faced with this tactical situation, most commanders would have withdrawn. But Alaric Wolf wasn't most commanders. That was something Jasek had learned from the New Olympia footage.

  Alaric would bare his teeth and charge forward.

  Even unto his destruction.

  Stormhammer LZ, Uhuru Autobahn

  Kaptain Eduard Goran of the Himmelstor walked around his massive DropShip, his sharp eyes marking damage and monitoring the work his DC teams had done to repair it. There was no telling when Heaven's Gate would be called into battle again.

  It was late morning, a blush of heat just starting to burn off dawn's residual coolness. Birdsong mingled with the snap- hiss of welding arcs, the whine of hydraulics. All things being equal, Goran preferred the sounds of repair to the sounds of nature.

  Landgrave Kelswa-Steiner had ordered his DropShips down in the middle of the largest road on Uhuru's surface, a twelve- lane ribbon of reinforced ferrocrete that stretched from coast-to-coast. It looked strange seeing the three surviving DropShips lined up along the road, but it was a good choice.

  It was easier to operate on ferrocrete, and the network of arte- rials branching off from the autobahn gave the Stormhammer BattleMechs and vehicles fast access to huge swaths of the continent.

  The only thing Goran didn't like was the forest on either side of the highway, a collection of spruce and fir and some native thing that looked like a spiny palm. Fortunately, the landgrave didn't like having forest at his back any more than Goran did. Kelswa-Steiner had set aside an infantry platoon to patrol the LZ.

  Goran had gone a step further and put together a work detail to cut down trees. So far they had cleared the vegetation north of Himmelstor out to fifty meters.

  Goran still didn't like it.

  He sighed. Somehow the landgrave was always getting him to do things he didn't like. That was just the price of—

  The communicator on his belt crackled.

  He pulled the device from his belt. "Goran."

  The kaptain was greeted by static. He could tell someone was trying to speak, but he couldn't make out any of the words.

  "This is Kaptain Goran. Say again."

  "Crunts par hour osing shun." A roar of static, and then: "- eing ammed."

  Bemused, Goran stared at the device. And then his brain put it together. Being jammed.

  Suddenly his heart was pounding.

  He shifted frequency. "Deck Officer, this is the kaptain. Sound general quarters. Issue immediate recall, and prep for emergency lift."

  He didn't wait for the officer to acknowledge his report before shifting frequencies again. He heard the panicked gonging of the GQ alarm carrying through the still morning air as he sprinted toward the nearest ramp.

  Goran's mind raced through the possibilities. Alaric Wolf was supposed to have hit the landgrave with the majority of his force. But what if that had been a feint? What if he were really after the DropShips?

  "Goran,"snapped Becker from his communicator. "What the devil is going on?"

  "I think—" he began. He never got the chance to finish. A flight of advan
ced tactical missiles rose from the forest, slashing forward in flat trajectories. They zeroed in on his ship (his ship) smashing into a repaired section of the hull, the new armor still pea-green with primer, shattering it all to hell.

  Suddenly the forest blossomed with missiles.

  Himmelstor's guns answered back first, tearing into the forest with lasers and autocannon. But they couldn't see who they were firing at.

  Drop Ships boasted massive firepower, enough to put even BattleMechs to shame. But they were not invincible. What if Alaric had sent his reserves in second-line machines to hit the Stormhammer DropShips? Soften them up so the Wolf DropShips could finish them later. Was that the kind of trade Alaric Wolf might make?

  Ja. After the brutal fight down, it sounded exactly like the kind of trade Alaric Wolf might make.

  Goran made the ramp, stepping into a cavernous bay. A deck hand hurriedly raised the ramp behind him. He raised the communicator. "Recommend emergency lift, Kommodore," Goran barked.

  "The landgrave's orders—" she began.

  "The landgrave's out of comms," answered Goran. "Lifting clears the threat area and preserves tactical flexibility. When the landgrave leaves the Red Desert, we will be able to link up with him."

  Decker made her decision quickly. "Do it."

  "Jawohl, Kommodore," snapped Goran. All around him his hull echoed with the unsettling sound of a hard, punishing rain.

  The Red Desert

  Jasek edged his massive Templar along a wall of sandstone tinted red by iron oxides. The fight in the Red Desert had turned into a deadly game of slow-motion hide- and-seek. Jasek guided his great machine carefully, slowly over uneven rock. His eighty-five ton Templar was a big, bulky machine, barely capable of an earth-shattering sixty-five kph even under the best of conditions. But boy, could it hit.

  He reached the cliff's edge and leaned forward to see-

  Nothing.

  His maps showed this was a box canyon that curled away from its mouth. Something could be hiding behind the wall of red stone. If he went in he might catch a Wolf napping—or someone could slip in behind him and he'd be trapped with his back to a wall while he was hammered by a superior force.