The BattleMaster kept coming and as the minutes piled one on another, Nelson began to believe he might actually survive. He tried to call out to Bronson, but the mountains broke up radio transmissions. This he really didn’t mind because it also meant his foe couldn’t inflict couplets on him. He had to wonder about his foe and his odd Christmas tradition of shooting and looting to celebrate the holiday. It must make sense to him.
Nelson realized he didn’t want to know how it made sense.
He continued to duck and dodge and retreat halfway up into the mountains when he discovered he’d made a tactical error. His retreat had taken him into a narrow draw with sheer sides. While one jump could carry him to a plateau on the south side, another would not be enough to get him out. He was also certain the BattleMaster’s pilot wasn’t going to let him jump behind him again for another shot at his back. By the time he discovered his mistake, he was too far in to get back out, and the BattleMaster appeared to seal the entrance and his fate.
“You can’t run. You can’t hide. Now this battle, we’ll decide.” The BattleMaster advanced slowly, coming straight up the middle of the draw. “Bad you’re not. Take your best shot.”
A million thoughts flashed through Nelson’s mind. He could shoot, and might get lucky, but the odds were against it. Memories of exercises, of winter drills on Tharkad, of watching children play in snow and even the long treks he’d taken on skis across glaciers came to him. If I had that hangar door, I might be able to snowboard right past that monster, just the way kids used to escape parents on holiday.
Something sparked in the back of his mind, so he hit the jump jets and soared to the plateau. He landed and turned around, his ’Mech’s left shoulder striking the rock wall behind him. Nelson looked down, and began to track his crosshair toward the BattleMaster, which had resumed its advance. Clean shot. So tempting, but this isn’t a day to give into temptation.
“Nice escape try, but why? Even so high, you’re just going to die.”
Nelson shook his head. “Why the poetry? It’s horrible.”
Mock surprise ran through Nick’s voice. “I thought it was festive. And it’s not that bad.”
“Yes, it is. Just like your aim.”
“Let’s hear you do better.”
“Hear, no.” Nelson shifted his aim point and raised the ’Mech’s large laser. “See, you bet.”
Nelson triggered the weapon and slashed the beam right to left, up through the darkness. Its verdant light illuminated the low grey clouds so heavily laden with snow. It pierced them and vanished, vaporized snowflakes drifting back up to condense again and fall.
“How cute, how quaint, a signal light. But there will be no help for you tonight.” The BattleMaster’s PPC came up and the charging coils began to glow. “On that ledge, you have an edge, but one hit and it’s a long fall.”
“I may fall, but not tonight.” Nelson brought the Phoenix Hawk down into a crouch and inched back, letting the ledge shield as much of him as possible. The BattleMaster stepped back, lengthening the range, but improving his angle. Nelson would survive Nick’s poor marksmanship for one or two bursts, then Nick would get the idea of slashing away at the rock. Once that was undercut, Nelson and the ‘Hawk would come down in a ’Mech avalanche.
Fortunately, Nick never got the chance to figure out what he had to do to bring Nelson down. Even in his cockpit, with the wind howling and snow swirling, the low rumble came to Nelson. It grew, becoming equal parts tactile and auditory. It took a couple seconds more for Nick to get its full effect, sheltered as he was down in the draw.
And by the time he did, time had run out for him.
Having grown up in an arid region that never had much of a winter, Nelson Geist had had a lot of things to learn about winter and snow. Tharkad had plenty of both, and instructors at the Nagelring went to great pains to guarantee their cadets weren’t going to fall prey to stupid things. He learned about frostbite and winter survival. He learned how to ski, both downhill and cross-country, and how to snowshoe. He even learned how to climb mountains in the winter and learned about the special dangers of generous snowfalls.
His large laser had cut through the clouds and burned into the mass of snow much higher up in the mountains. New snow over old created a fragile structure supporting a lot of weight. When the laser melted into that layer of old snow, the structure collapsed and with it came a lot of snow.
The avalanche picked up speed as it descended, sweeping rocks and trees along with it. The BattleMaster might well have been one of the largest land war machines ever created by the hand of man, but compared to the titanic forces of nature, it was something of a toy. Snow poured down into the draw in a frozen white flood. It slammed into the ’Mech’s back, pitching it forward and face down. A rock the size of a small hovercar bounced up and off, then snow just buried Nick.
The snow kept coming, filling the draw. Nelson hit the jets as the snow lapped up at the ledge, but was able to land back down there easily. The snow came up to the ‘Hawk’s knees and was packed so solidly he had to kick his way clear to move forward. He sank down to mid-calf with each subsequent step, so he didn’t venture very far.
He switched his scanners over to MagRes and got a clean picture of the BattleMaster laying face down, as if it were floating. Floating at the bottom of a pool. He dropped the crosshairs on the thing’s head and keyed his radio.
“You’re only going to be getting out of there with help. Surrender and I burn you a tunnel to climb out. If you don’t, I burn that tunnel through the cockpit. Answering me in rhyme is the same as not surrendering.”
Nick’s voice came back faint and weak. “If I surrender, you’ll be taking my ’Mech away, won’t you?”
“You’ve been raiding and ruining Christmases for years, and you want me to be sympathetic over your being dispossessed?”
“That would be a no?”
“How right you are, yes sirree!” Nelson smiled. “Your ’Mech’s going to belong to me.”
“My poetry wasn’t that bad.”
“Yes, it was.” Nelson frowned. “You coming out, or do I radio the base and tell them to requisition a body-bag and a new BattleMaster cockpit?”
“Tell them to bring blankets. And brandy.” Resignation flooded through Nick’s voice. “I’m going to want a lot of brandy.”
“You’ve got it. You made the wise choice.” Nelson fought and kept the laughter out of his voice. By the rules of combat, that BattleMaster would be his, which meant he’d get a good assignment in the LCAF. With a ’Mech like that, anything is possible.
“Oh, and Nick?”
“Yeah?”
“Merry Christmas.”
ZEROING IN
A prequel to The Legend of the Jade Phoenix
by Robert Thurston
When Joanna had been very young, her caretakers had worried about her sensitive side. While they believed that a warrior-to-be should have an understanding of what it meant to be a human being, especially one fortunate to belong to the Jade Falcon Clan, they also felt that tender and compassionate emotions interfered with combat skills. Emotions were fine for those who flushed out of training and entered a lesser caste, where some emotional engagement was extremely useful. The scientists, for instance, could not improve Clansmen without some insights into their nature. Artisans needed some feeling to create decorative objects. Technicians had to have a sense of the value of the BattleMech to suit the needs of the warrior and thus had to understand the quirks as well as the traits of the warrior.
The reason Joanna could remember the issue of her sensitivity so well was that she did not have any of it left and could not recall what it had been like. She did not know how she had worked it out, or which life experiences had hardened her, or who was the first to draw her monumental wrath, but now she liked to think of herself as the nastiest warrior in the Jade Falcon Clan. And she was satisfied that many others thought of her that way, too.
Ironhold, Clan Space
&n
bsp; What an exhaust fume of a place, Joanna thought as she entered her new quarters at the Ironhold training camp. A dark cloud seemed to hover in the ceiling shadows of the badly lit room of this bleak barracks. Spartan was all right for barracks but this one outdid others in its sheer drabness. Her cot, stripped down, with a bedroll at its foot, showed a definite sag in its middle, along with bent and nearly broken springs. The damn bed was ancient, the damn room with strips of wood curling off the walls and dirt streaks slashed across a bureau as old-looking as the bed, the damn dirty Jade Falcon flag hanging from an old rusty nail. How long had this portion of the facility gone unused? She’d get her fledglings in here to work at once! Still, it was some welcome for her, the stravag Joanna who was feeling pretty stravag old herself as she dragged her stravag duffel bag through the room’s stravag splintered door.
Old? How old? I have forgotten. I should be dead by now, felled in heroic combat. Or at least alive with a Bloodname. The Bloodname can come. It has to! She recalled when she had been young, twelve or thirteen (an eternity ago) when she had been a trainee herself—so eager, so determined, so certain. She had been the top trainee in her sibko, scoring high on every test, pummeling and flooring all the others in fights. In those days she had been cool, delivering blows with a smile, quite unlike the angry, sometimes furious warrior she was now.
Still, the two others in her sibko who had eventually won their Trials and become Mechwarriors along with Joanna had been less skillful than she, and yet they had advanced further. One had earned a Bloodname and the other would have, but for her valiant defense of a mountain encampment, holding back enemy ’Mechs while the encampment behind her emptied of valuable scientists who had escaped in time, just before she had been blasted to smithereens by a lucky shot; even then she had gotten a line in the Falcon Remembrance.
I need my chance. And how in a field of walking corpses like this Ironhold training camp am I going to get it?
She took a few steps into the room. The floor creaked. Not just creaked, groaned.
Flipping open the bedroll, she flung its mattress onto the squeaking bedsprings and sat down on it. She tossed the duffel bag to the head of the bed, then put her own head into her hands.
She had never felt this empty before. Angry, yes, but not empty. It was as if she had been flung out of a waste chute and, instead of ending in the vacuum of space, had arrived here.
I should probably make the best of it. I should just buy into what Ter Roshak just told me at his briefing. Talk about walking corpses. He is the prime example.
“Training sibkos may not be as exciting as staring down a ’Mech with only one PPC in operation,” he had said, as he rubbed his prosthetic hand with his good hand almost absentmindedly, “but you know what the manual says—it is just as important to the Clan as combat duty, quiaff? These kestrels are the future of the Clan. Few of them will succeed, not even enough to fill the vacancies available in Stars and elsewhere. But at least we know, if we do our job right, we will be sending out warriors so skilled that they will keep the Jade Falcon tradition the best and fiercest of all the Clans.”
He almost mumbled the speech. It was clearly one he gave to every new falconer, and some of it did not sound sincere, but maybe he had been right. Being a falconer was not the worst designation among Clan warriors, it just did not satisfy a real warrior, one who needed to slice a Dire Wolf in half with well-placed shots.
She sighed and began taking items out of her duffel bag. The few clothes—fatigues, field caps, old boots whose cracks were hidden by a thick coat of leather treatment—she carried to the bureau and deposited casually in drawers. Reaching into the duffel bag again, she felt her lock-box. Stupid savashri. No reason to lock up anything in this. Carefully lifting the box out of the bag, she put it down on the bed and retrieved her keys from her jacket pocket. Maneuvering the key into the lock, she held it still for a moment, then—with graceful wrist action—she snapped the key to the right and the box sprung open with a click that sent some flakes of rust on the spring flying.
Inside were the few mementos she had chosen to carry from place to place. It was her ritual to examine them on the first day at each new assignment. The items would not have drawn much interest from a casual observer, most of whom might have classified these apparently unexceptional things as junk.
She reached into the box and ran her index finger through the stuff. A picture emerged and she picked it up. It was that old holographic picture of Lyonor. Joanna did not remember Lyonor looking so happy any other time, although she did have an unfortunate cheerful strain in her personality. Her small body was erect in her characteristic pride, her crisp uniform was highlighted in a fiercely bright morning sun that, in the way she stood, cast her shadow in a long stretched silhouette behind her. Because of her thinness the shadow’s lines appeared to point at a distant high mountain. What in hell was the name of that mountain? For that matter, what was the name of that damn planet?
Walking with the picture to the dirty barracks window next to the cot, she looked out through its smudged panes at the training field beyond. In the distance a falconer leaned toward a pair of trainees and was clearly barking at them, probably telling them what a bunch of inept eyasses they were. It was a pleasant sight, reminding her of the first and only time she and Lyonor had fought. It was not long before the taking of this picture on some other godforsaken planet.
The photo
Lyonor had lovely eyes. Everybody said so, even though it was unlike Jade Falcon warriors to make a compliment about any physical feature. Something about the eyes—their near violet color, perhaps, or maybe the question that always seemed to be expressed in them—easily drew compliments from the toughest and meanest warriors. It had not escaped Joanna’s attention that nobody ever said anything about her eyes.
Now Lyonor’s lovely eyes were wide in fright. Joanna’s outburst, over her drawing back from killing one of the freeborns that were part of the refresher exercise that Jade Falcon warriors went through routinely, had unnerved Lyonor.
“Your autocannon was so close to his cockpit, almost touching it. You could have split that filthy freebirth apart and saved his ’Mech for later exercises. Instead, what do you do, eyas? You walk your Summoner back a step, slice off his ’Mech’s legs and allow him to eject while you blasted his ’Mech into too many puzzle pieces to put back together. The stravag freebirth walks away and you get points off, and the unit loses the practice trial because of it, along with wasting a ’Mech. That was damn stupid, Lyonor. I was ready to pick you off myself.”
Lyonor’s dejection almost touched Joanna’s sympathy. “I know,” she said. “But I knew that freeborn. We drank together on another exercise just a week ago.”
“I do not care if you took him into your arms and gave the wretched piece of trash the only good time of his life. I do not care if you admired his humor or thought he was the most admirable example of a freeborn you have ever met or he revealed himself to be to be a trueborn in disguise. You had to kill the surat. That is the point. You had to draw blood.”
“Joanna, it was only an exercise, a—”
Joanna became enraged.
“Only an exercise? We learn by doing! And we acquire victories through skill. Or perhaps you do not think victories important? By the Founder, how do you expect to ever win a Bloodname with thinking like that?”
“I will win a Bloodname in my own time, Joanna. Or I will fail gloriously in the attempt. I do not have to breathe for it every minute of every day as you do. What is important—”
“Do not tell me what is important, eyas. I know what is important, quiaff? I tell you what is important. Got it?”
“Neg, I do not get it. I want a Bloodname, yes, but a bloodname is an honor, not a battle medal. You do not just earn it for what you do, you earn it for what you are. You—”
“What? What kind of kestrel droppings is that? You’re saying there is some sort of ethics in Bloodnaming? You’re saying—”
Lyonor put her hands to her ears. “Please do not throw contractions at me, Joanna. You know I cannot stand that.”
“Yes? Well, maybe you’re—you are cutting things too fine. If an occasional contraction makes you hold your ears, maybe you are not meant to be a Bloodnamed warrior.
“Shut up, Joanna. I will get my Bloodname. You can bet on it. And I will get it soon, not when I am as old as you and ready to pack it in.”
Joanna hit her with a backhanded fist across her cheek. Blood began to flow from the slash she had created along Lyonor’s cheek. Lyonor reeled backward, then rushed at Joanna, screaming like a falcon descending on its prey. Although Joanna was able to reduce the impact of Lyonor’s charge by dodging sideways, Lyonor slammed into her shoulder and spun her around. She stumbled. As she fell, she cursed herself for what it looked like. She did not like being seen as clumsy, although she knew that sometimes she was.
Bending down and placing her hand on the ground to steady herself, she regained her footing, did a purposeful spin, and came up with her head against Lyonor’s chin. The blow was so hard that it seemed to rattle the teeth inside Lyonor’s head. Arms flailing, and growling with the characteristic rumbling explosion of the Jade Falcon attack cry, the two sprung at each other, each showing a readiness to kill in their eyes.
Their fight went on for a long while and both combatants were bruised and scarred for some time afterwards. When each could not lift her arms any longer and their legs were too unsteady, they still flung weak blows at each other. One thing could always be said about Lyonor: she could not be intimidated. She would fight to the last, and this time was no exception.
After they were no longer able to fight, there was no immediate reconciliation. Instead, they went back to attacking each other with words. The argument between the two of them went on for hours, and only total exhaustion ended it.
BattleTech Page 14
