But the intruder, smiling blandly, was already sliding toward him like oil over water.
Close: too close.
Weston Heights
15 August 3134
Malvina Hazen still clung to life, if barely, when her sibkin, ignoring the shrill warnings of the radiation counter in his cooling vest, tenderly extracted her from the wreckage of her cockpit.
The enemy had already vanished back among the shattered apartment buildings. Aleks’ Zetas had secured the open ground. Lead elements of Turkina Keshik had come up as well; their Solahma and Eyrie infantry had begun probing into the built-up area.
A Turkina’s Beak VTOL touched down to dust the badly injured Galaxy Commander off to the Turkina Keshik landing zone. Aleks stooped to lay his sister gently on the stretcher. The blood that wrapped her body like a net came mostly, he had ascertained, from superficial cuts by flying fragments. But blood ran from her mouth, a bad sign, and herShrike ’s cockpit had been full of toxic gases, products of burning or heat-induced outgassing from internal components.
He knelt beside her, gazing down at her lovely and curiously peaceful face—as if this were the first true ease she had known in years, if not her life. Her pink, fever-flushed forehead already bloomed with
bruise-like petechiae, produced by radiation-sundered capillaries. In themselves, he knew, they signified little: they were temporary, and could be produced by minor exposure not otherwise harmful.
He brushed a stray lock of hair, its near-white pallor sullied by oil and char, from her forehead. Then he stood and signed for the medical techs to take her aboard the helo. It lifted in a swirl of dust.
“Let us go,” Aleks radioed his companions, once back in White Lily’s cockpit. “Time to finish this.”
New London
15 August 3134
“—fighting moved into the western suburbs of New London,” the impersonal news-voice said from the speakers of the burly Harley-Indian-Messerschmitt motorcycle. “Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner has vowed to turn the invaders back before they reach the city proper. ...”
Ten blocks away from the chief minister’s house the average-sized man put down a booted leather-clad leg as he swung the 1800-cc bike to a stop. The streets here were deserted. People were staying home, trusting to their Duke.
More fools they.
The man sat upright in the saddle and pushed his shades down his nose. A chill breeze blew snow in his face, and a choking stink of smoke. To the west a column of brownish-white smoke rose from a base that seemed as wide as a small city in itself. Its lower portion was lit from within by an unhealthy pallid-orange light, with flares like parti-colored lightning adding their hues at random intervals. The battle sounds had grown to a sussurating growl.
“It’s no concern of yours,” he said to himself. “Your job here’s done.”
As if in reply, a column of orange sparks shot into the air like an immense Roman candle. It was clearly closer than the smoke column. The crump and crackle of the serial blasts reached him far sooner than he wanted to hear them.
The news said the roads to the spaceport northeast of town, on the north shore of Thames Bay, were jammed up tight: it was why he had the radio on. So he told himself. If there was transport available off-world it could lift without concern: the JFs had left no ships in space near Skye to intercept them.
Nor were Falcon aerospace fighters a concern, although interlaced contrails and the occasional black smudge where one rocket jock had gotten lucky and another’s luck had all run out scored the sky high to the southwest. The New London spaceport was guarded so densely by heavy weapons and air-defense batteries that not even Falcon fighters cared to test it. Clanners abhorred waste, after all.
Of course, if any bottoms were lifting offworld, passage inboard them would be at a mad premium. But getting onto or off planets despite all obstacles was a specialty of the man on the big Elsie bike, which grumbled on idle as if eager to be off again.
It was far easier than, say, impersonating anaccountant . Even a forensic one. He suspected his superiors were deliberately tormenting him with his latest cover.
Then again, they’d have long since liquidated him, if he weren’t one of their top field operators.
“And much too professional,” he said aloud, “to let personal attachments get in the way.
“And then again,” he said as the raps of more explosions reached his ears, louder and sharper and from close enough by that he got a little after-ring of high-frequency harmonics in his ears, and even thought he felt a puff of dynamic overpressure on his face, “then again, the Falcon invasion threatens the whole Inner Sphere. Let them get their toehold here and their wholeTouman will follow—and how long will it take every holdout Crusader crazy and young glory hound from all the damned Clans to join the march toward the center, after that?
“And then again—” he sighed—“I’ve always been a romantic fool at heart.”
He turned his fat front tire to the west and all the fuss, and kicked the bike to roaring life.
Weston Heights 15 August 3134
Taking control of the advance, Bec Malthus showed no mean skill as a battle commander. He threw his fresh Turkina Keshik against the Highlanders and militia, driving them briskly back through the houses and schools and shops of Weston. Aleks’ troops followed in echelon left, supporting the Keshik and sending out Elemental patrols to mop up bypassed pockets of resistance.
Shocked by their charismatic leader-goddess’ fall, the Gyrfalcons had cracked right across. If there was one thing Malthus knew, it was Jade Falcon character; if he sent Delta Galaxy into battle again it would snap. Its men and women would hurl themselves shrieking on the nearest foe without thought of defense, not stopping until all were slain. Having at the moment no need for suicide attacks he sent the Gyrs off to the north to guard his flank—mainly to lurk in the woods, where they could assuage their raptor egos sniping at Duke Gregory and serve the authentic function of keeping him from aiding Countess Tara Campbell.
Tara Campbell, for her part, fought as good a withdrawal, maybe, as could be fought. She would have credited her troops, the steely skill of her Highlanders and the Seventh Skye Militia’s fury at the violation of their homes. The Garryowens hungered especially for revenge: their comrades had borne the brunt of the Falcon advance. Both the formerly careless and disreputable locals, now in their glory and fighting like tigers, and certain backwoodsmen from Northwind’s northern continent displayed a startling facility for rapidly improvised and savagely lethal booby traps.
Still, a fighting retreat, no matter how brilliant, is nothing more thanlosing slow . Turkina Keshik was proud, fresh and fearless. The defenders gave them as much as human flesh and Clan could stand, and more. When at last the Republicans broke contact and fell back upon their seminary hill, the Keshik warriors stopped to rest and tend their wounds.
So in the end it fell to Aleks’ once-despised Turkina’s Beak, tired but triumphant, to mount the last advance and seize the prize: the planet Skye.
***
Let Bacchus’ sons be not dismayed,
But join with me, each jovial blade—
Come, booze and sing and lend your aid To help me with the chorus.
The man whose name was not, any longer, Paul Laveau was well and trulyin the wind, riding flat out, leaning over the bars of the HIM cruiser and shouting a song into its teeth:
Instead of spa, we’ll drink brown ale And we’ll pay the reckoning on the nail;
For debt no man shall go to jail From Garryowen in glory!”
Okay, he admitted to himself.! lied to Tara when I said I didn’t know “Garryowen.” It was one of only two I told her.
Of course, the other was alittlemore substantial ....
He was so near the fighting now that a misaimed volley of LRMs brought down the facades of two trim brick houses, one yellow, one red, in the center of a cross-street block to his left as he passed. The racket of explosions and collapse could barely be
distinguished for the general din.
Ahead of him, just half a kilometer away, he could see the hill with the seminary building on top of it and the Highland command post on the near slope. Just to his right stood Tara’s distinctiveHatchetman , with a bend in the weird tailfin assembly on its head crest. Five other BattleMechs stood or clanked around, getting set to meet the Falcon onslaught.
Much nearer to his left he saw a big Clan ’Mech striding among houses. His face split in a wide grin as he recognized an old friend among hostile strangers: “APhoenix Hawk IIC, by God!” Though the Falcons had it tarted up with that ridiculous hawk head—the wings it had already—they seemed to be sticking on all their new models and upgrades these days.
He stopped the bike, kicked down the stand, dismounted and opened the big panniers beside the rear tire. He removed certain items which he tucked into zippered pockets of his leather jacket and pants. One particular item he tucked, gingerly and not without a silent unbeliever’s prayer, inside the front of his waistband.
Then he remounted, retracted the kickstand, ripped the engine back to life, and sang:
We are the boys that take delight In smashing the Limerick lamps when lighting, And through the streets like scorchers fighting
Tearing all before us.
He rode full-throttle toward thePhoenix Hawk, just as if he knew what he was doing.
Or not.
“Countess,’”Duke Gregory’s gruff voice said, “we’re sorely pressed up here. Can you send us help?”
Tara straightened herHatchetman ’s legs to shoot its shoulder-mounted medium laser over the brow of the hill at a Bellona tank that had nosed forward between two houses to her right to try to get a shot at the seminary defenders. The shot gouged armor from the turret’s front. The hovertank fired its own large laser back, burning another track across the abused sod a few meters down-slope from where Tara’s machine lurked and sniped. It ducked back amid a blast of debris kicked up by its fans.
“Negative, your Grace,” Tara said, crouching again so that she could just peer over the blades of grass on the hilltop. “I’m sorry. But we’re about to get all we can handle here: looks as if they’re massing for a big push. If something breaks I’ll send you all I can as soon as I can, but beyond that I can’t make any promises.”
“Understood,”the Duke said promptly and without rancor. Under the stress of combat he behaved far more reasonably than most times Tara had dealt with him before, at least up until the very last few days.
Not that it was likely to mean much for long. “Here they come!” she heard somebody shout as the Duke signed off, from her external audio pickups, not over the radio net. And ’Mechs and vehicles and Elementals and infantry swarmed out of the battered houses as Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen mounted his attack on the planet Skye’s last line of defense.
“Give ’em hell, Highlanders!” she shouted. Republican ’Mechs and vehicles rushed forward to the crest to pour desperate fire upon the attackers.
Not Paul Laveau sang as he scaled the Phoenix Hawk:
We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors,
The watch knocked down by threes and fours,
Tonight the doctors work their cures.
And tinker up our bruises.
The light ’Mech stood at the rear of what looked like a supermarket, shooting its torso-mounted autocannon over the loading dock at a pair of Demon wheeled tanks. Its pilot, distracted, had not noticed Paul’s approach. Nor was the MechWarrior likely to even dream anyone would be rash enough to climb the machine’s back with a pair of gripper gloves. Paul wondered, briefly, what the Demon drivers made of the sight.
We’ll beat the bailiffs out offun,
We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run We are the boys no man dares dun If he regards a whole skin.
It made him smile: that always was his favorite verse. Even if he couldn’t hear himself over the cannon yammer.
He had his rationalizations well in a row by then. It was not in his employers’ interests for the Falcons to get a grip anywhere in the Inner Sphere, Republic or otherwise. So he was permitted to do his chaotic part to spike their nefarious schemes.
When he reached theHawk ’s shoulder he was slightly breathless from the exertion of swarming up the enemy machine. Weeks of sedentary detective work had told on him. It certainly wasn’t trepidation: his illustrious great-grandmother, Cassie Southern, had taught him the fine points of taking on ’Mechs bare-handed as well aspentjak . Even if, unlike her, he was glad to keep his damned trousers on.
One of the Demons exploded. The other reversed hastily out of sight around a corner. Paul didn’t mind; he had been concerned they’d blast him shooting at thePhoenix Hawk . He sang to himself, scarcely voicing:
Our hearts so stout have got us fame,
For soon ’tis known from whence we came—
He planted his feet on thePhoenix Hawk ’s shoulder, hoping it wouldn’t decide to run anywhere, slapping his left hand against the cockpit armor to anchor himself. He bit the non-adhesive back of the right-hand gauntlet to loosen it from his hand, shook it free, let it drop. His freed hand reached for that which he carried in his waistband.
Where’er we go, they dread the name—
Yanking his left hand free, he used it to punch the rescue bar. The cockpit popped open with a hiss of equalizing air pressure.
The Mech Warrior turned with a look of utter astonishment—
Of Garryowen in glory.
Into the ruby flash of a laser pistol.
Tucking the pistol away again—because you just never knew when one of those might come in handy—Paul swung himself into the cockpit with his butt on the instrument panel. He punched the harness release and tumbled the decapitated body out into the now-cold winter air. A woman. It gave him a qualm, but no more than killing a man. He felt no guilt at taking the life of a Clan warrior, any more than he would a trachazoi pouncing with the intent of eating his brain. But he had resolved never to take killing a human being lightly.
He retrieved the neurohelmet set. Inside the cockpit was a mess. But the squeamishness had been trained out of him long ago, by harsher teachers than his great-grandmother.
At eighty tons theIIC mark ofPhoenix Hawk was the classicHawk on steroids. He was familiar with the basic modularized Clan control systems, and he had trained on simulators of just this model. He could drive it, except—
Like all BattleMechs, thePhoenix Hawk was secured by having its neurohelmet keyed solely to its assigned pilot’s brainwave patterns. It would respond to those patterns and only those unless reprogrammed. Overriding that protective system was an exceedingly difficult, tedious prospect.
From a pants pocket he took a device molded of off-white plastic, just smaller than his hand with fingers pressed together. He slid into the pilot’s couch and pressed the device against the inside of the neurohelmet. He pressed a contact pad on the white plastic object. A red light appeared.
’Jacking a BattleMech was highly tediousunless one’s employer provided one an exceedingly specialized, rare and classified piece of equipment. Then it wasn’t much challenge at all.
But it did take time. He forced himself to refamiliarize hands and feet with the analogue controls. It was not the return of the Demon or its friends that troubled him.
It was whether he’d get control of the purloined assault ’Mech in time to do any good. Because he could see from his vantage point that the final assault had begun in earnest. And things didnot look good for the home team.
“Skye Six, this is Skye Prime,”said the command post operator in Tara Campbell’s headset. Despite being crouched down fighting for her life, the Countess felt a stab of pride: the commo tech managed to maintain professional steadiness in her voice, despite the fact that her own existence was now measured by how long it took one of Aleks Hazen’s furiously attacking Zetas to cross the crest of the hill and take a shot at the fat, flimsily armored command crawler. The way things were on the hill, it woul
d not be long. “Message incoming for you.”
For a momentTara ’s eyes were dazzled as some kind of warhead flashed nova right above her cockpit. The windscreen pitted but did not crack.
“I’m a little busy for chat, Skye Prime,” she radioed back, trying to blink away maroon dirigibles of afterimage. Had it been Duke Gregory on the horn he would have come in directly on the exclusive high-command push.
“Sender identifies herself as Galaxy Commander Anastasia Kerensky, commanding the Steel Wolves,”the voice said. It seemed to waver slightly.
34
WestonHeights
Skye
15 August 3134
The wholeworld seemed to waver around Countess Tara Campbell. “What?” she shouted.
“New London spaceport traffic control reports a force of unidentified DropShips approaching Skye on a trajectory that will bring them into atmosphere moving west above Thames Bay, Six.”
Just when I thought things couldn’tpossiblyget worse, Tara thought. “Put her on, Skye Prime.”
A moment; the white noise background subtly shifted value. Then a low, silken voice: “—Kerensky calling. Have you decided to pull your thumb out of your—”
“This is Countess Tara Campbell,”Tara broke in crisply. “So you’ve come to join in feasting on Skye’s corpse, have you? Are you the Steel Jackals, now, to feast on Falcon leavings? You’ve been skulking long enou—”
“Softly, softly.”The insufferable bitch actuallychuckled . “Is that any way to talk to your prospective savior, Countess, dear?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Kerensky? I don’t have much time—”
“No. You don’t. So listen fast and decide faster. We’re here for one thing: to drink Jade Falcon blood. My terms: amnesty— ”
“Never!”
“Shut up andhearme, little Countess! Amnesty for me and my people while we remain in Skye system. Also what isorlawe can grab from the Falcons. And afterwards—any generosity The Republic might care to extend will be appreciated.”
The Falcons had surged halfway up the slope in a maelstrom of noise and dust and flame: a dozen BattleMechs, untold vehicles riding turf-tearing treads or blasts of driven air, endangering the unpowered Clan infantry running flat out among them, as Elementals bounded in and out of the scrum. In its midst waded Aleks Hazen’s ’Mech, outrun by Zeta warriors who had lunged impatiently in front of him at his command to charge. He withheld his own fire, clearly saving himself for Tara Campbell.
Flight of the Falcon (battletech - mechwarrior - dark age 10) Page 27
