A ruby-bright lance speared the Hatchetman, coring through the thinner, rear armor, slicing away at support struts and engine shielding. More waste heat bled into the chest cavity of Tara’s ’Mech, jumping the temperatures already pushing redline.
Worse, supports shifted beneath the weight of her gyro. The forty-five-ton machine shook with a mechanical palsy as the massive stabilizer trembled and rocked out of balance.
Before she could do much more than bring her laser in line with the Condor charging in at her front, the Hatchetman pitched forward, sprawling out in a facedown slide through a field of wildflowers. Shaken so badly that her teeth clacked together hard enough to chip a molar, Tara kept a firm grip on her controls and waited for the nightmare to end.
“Tango-one! She’s down.”
“. . . lost the Countess!”
Comms chatter filtered in through a dark haze. She thought she heard Julian Davion, asking if they needed assistance, urging them forward where the First Davion Guards continued to hold a hard line. Sounded like him. Might have been him. Might have been the actor who played him on trivid.
Which was when she truly realized how close to the cusp of darkness she walked.
Tara shook herself. “Go, go!” Suspended from her harness, hanging above her control console, she urged Gareth and the others forward. “Don’t wait for me!”
All she had time to say as the loyalists drove in at her like wolves sensing blood. Missiles hammered around her, tearing bites out of the ground and out of the Hatchetman’s armor. Lasers slashed. Machine guns picked at the edges of her open wounds, drilling deeper, looking for meat.
Her cockpit was all high-pitched alarms and red warning lights. The BattleMech’s wireframe schematic showed heavy armor loss across her back and down the left side. She’d also scraped a good swath from her machine’s head. Ruptured heat sinks. A damaged laser in her right chest.
The ringing in her ears that had nothing to do with warning alarms.
Blood in her mouth from where she’d bitten the inside of her cheek.
Working the ’Mech’s arms beneath her, Tara shoved with the strength of myomer muscles and picked her machine up from the ground. A Demon raced in at her right side. Bad choice. Propping herself on the war machine’s left arm, she chopped at the vehicle with her titanium hatchet.
Her first blow caved in the forward left side of the tank and broke the nearby wheel right off the axle. The front corner of the Demon chewed down into the ground as the back wheels continued to dig and spray back a long tail of mud in a desperate fan. Raising her hatchet again, this time Tara brought it down through the crew cockpit, leaving it a tangle of steel, ferroglass and flesh. The Demon stopped trying to power forward.
One of the Condors actually tried to sideswipe her arm, thinking to knock her back flat. It bounced off as if striking a reinforced post—which in a way it had—and then all but disintegrated ten seconds later as nearly a score of short-range missiles hammered down over it like Thor’s own hammer.
Gareth Sinclair had come back.
So, in fact, had the Jousts and M1, and about half of their armored column. VV1 Rangers ran off the remaining Demon while their two Cavalry attack VTOLs harried the Condor. Both Jousts opened up against one of the Stingers, ten-packs spreading out flight after flight of LRMs. Lasers slashed through the air. And the M1 Marksman added its own guns into the desperate barrage.
It was enough. The crippled Stinger managed one dying gasp, slicing deep into the Marksman’s side with its own laser, burning through armor and the crew compartment. Then it stumbled and fell. And did not rise again, as Gareth’s Black Hawk did a high-speed run-by with large lasers slicing across the backs of the Stinger’s legs, severing both below the knee.
“Are you going to lay there all day?” he asked, pacing a tight box around the prone Hatchetman.
It was a struggle, returning the unbalanced ’Mech to its feet. Worse when she tried to throttle up for the race to the end of their long-running firefight. The BattleMech swayed like a drunken sergeant, and Tara felt lightheaded with the sauna-like heat of her cockpit and the acrid, ozone scent of fried electronics burning in her sinuses. She finally throttled down to a walking speed, working her control sticks to keep the Hatchetman upright.
Behind them, Cray Stansill’s line powered forward, closing the gap in large strides. Three kilometers. Then two.
“Back on,” she said, still fighting the rough handling. “Back on the grid.”
“Good to hear.” It was Julian Davion. “We could use the help.”
Tara wasn’t certain how much help they could be. A crippled Hatchetman and an armor-stripped Black Hawk, leading in a ragged short company of vehicles and infantry?
With a solid loyalist force chasing right up their ass, ready to slam into the back of Julian’s First Guards?
Coming up on one kilometer distance, the Republic force had just made sight of the eastern bridge below Chateau-Thierry. Not close enough to see the fighting further upriver, though by the thunder of weapons fire and the rising smoke from burning woods, burning vehicles, she guessed the main battle to be just up around the river’s far turn. A long kilometer. Maybe two.
Too far.
“We’ll need every one of you to make this work,” Julian said when she informed him.
Tara read her HUD again, and the strategic map she had loaded up on an auxiliary monitor. Estimated the distance, and the remaining time. “Can’t do it. We’ll never make your line.”
“Don’t need to.”
“How do you figure?”
His answer was a moment of silence. Toggling over to his personal channels. Checking with intelligence officers, or rallying troops to throw her direction. As if he had forces to spare. Point-eight klicks! Tara turned back to face Stansill’s approaching line. Gareth Sinclair did not bother to urge her onward. She simply hauled in their column, spreading it in a two-line set behind her. He limped the Black Hawk up to her side. They continued walking backward, grabbing every meter they could. The rain continued to trickle down.
“So close,” she said on a tight-channel transmission.
Coming up on half a kilometer.
Then the skies really opened and rained down streaks of fire, gouging the earth all along the front of Cray Stansill’s charge. Trees splintered into matchsticks and blackened dirt geysered up into the air. A hoverbike at the forward edge of Stansill’s line simply disappeared. A JES carrier overturned as a gout of fire and smoke erupted beneath it.
Whatever artillery Julian Davion had been using to support the Guards, he’d turned it back to buy some time for the others! The distant positions spent their munitions supply in a sprint, hammering the open ground full of deadly barrages that continued on, and on. Firing for deterrence rather than effect.
It stopped Cray Stansill cold, pulling his line back until he could mass for a more coordinated strike.
“Never bet against a Davion,” a new voice chimed in on an unsecured frequency. Female. Mocking. “They’ve been waging war since before it was fashionable.”
“Impressive.” But it wasn’t enough. Tara saw that Gareth had already turned his Black Hawk around, herding the armored line back another two hundred meters. Three hundred. She continued to pace her Hatchetman back one methodical step at a time, never taking her eyes off the enemy’s forward units. Seconds. Seconds only.
“Got anything else in your bag of tricks?” she asked.
Julian was apparently in no mood to disappoint.
“Watch this,” he said. And there was silence on the channels again. For about thirty seconds.
As artillery dropped hard and heavy on Cray Stansill’s position, Conner Rhys-Monroe slammed a fist into the side of a nearby access panel, rattling the metal and taking his frustrations out on his equipment. Every time! Every probing attack cut off and sent back reeling. Every major push blunted. Each flanking attempt running foul of artillery or the fast-response units of the First Davion Guards.
Conner was frustrated, but at least he was beyond his surprise at finding a Federated Suns force fielded on Terra, and the anger that had consumed him while listening to a third of his assault getting torn up by two paladins and a handful of green militia. He was! Not even panicked news of the assault into Germany, driving the other senators to flight, had made an impact on him. Those were the fortunes of war, and if nothing else, The Republic had taught him how to accept such setbacks. Hadn’t it?
New plans were now in place. Fallback positions, as well as reevaluated goals. A knight did not surrender to a broken strategy. A knight shifted tactics on the fly, wrestled with the conditions as presented, always searching, always hungry, for victory.
Except that Julian Davion appeared to have taken many of the same classes. Of an age with Conner he might be, but the prince’s champion did not hold an empty title.
Like senator?
Another frustrated bash, then hand back on the Rifleman’s throttle. He could not afford to think about such things. Not in the field.
Instead, during a brief lull that settled over the hot-fire zone, he concentrated on wheeling a trio of Demons around the Guards’ flank and repositioning his Paladin Defense Systems to blast the hell out of Julian’s line.
He also spared a Kinnol main battle tank for Avellar’s rendition of Horatio-at-the-bridge—the other black hole in his tactical plan.
One paladin—one!—had stopgapped his attempts to swing flanking forces through Chateau-Thierry. Maya Avellar’s Vulture had fallen twice already, and both times had struggled back to its feet, laying waste to any force that tried to fly across the river, or challenge it for possession of the western bridge. Not many knights Conner knew could have stood up under that kind of punishment.
This attempt faired no better. The Kinnol rolled up onto the bridge, under cover by Jesses on the rain-churned water. Avellar’s Vulture ignored the hovercraft for a moment, concentrating lasers and flight after flight of missiles on the main battle tank. A single PPC, even supported by a Delta Dart ten-pack, was no fair trade in firepower.
It cost the Vulture more armor. A few heat sinks, it seemed, as gray-green coolant burst from new ruptures in the chest. But Conner was forced to pull the Kinnol back before Maya scrapped it into a seventy-ton roadblock.
Magnificent bitch!
Something new on his HUD. Several Guard units had edged back to the treeline, or just inside. Possibly readying a move around his position. Checking his flank, Conner wheeled a Schmitt out against a pair of Pegasus scout craft—but didn’t see anything more threatening building.
Taking advantage of what appeared to be a Davion fallback maneuver, he stomped forward to haul crosshairs over the outline of a fleeing Destroyer. It threw back a curtain of mist, shattered rain drops. It was also the one with the V-shaped design scrawled next to the crest of the Federated Suns, deviling his line for the last half hour. Always where the fighting was thickest. Always with that damnable assault-grade autocannon blazing away.
Almost as bad as, if not worse than, the Templar’s accuracy.
The angle, the Destroyer’s speed—the best Conner could get was a flashing-gold reticle. Partial lock. He reckoned it by dead-eye sight, then pulled into his rotary autocannon, winding up the rotating barrels and pitching a hail of hot metal after the hovercraft. His right-arm cannon jammed on an ammunition misfeed. His left-arm rotary cut a deadly swath. Running from nose to tail on the Destroyer, he zeroed in on the rear propulsion fans.
Only to have the Destroyer cut out the props and crank over its steering rudders, skimming around in an end-for-end flip that spread the damage out over more surface area, preventing any kind of penetration.
Worse, the end-for-end also pointed its own autocannon back the way of some pursuing Scimitars. The hard-pounding assault weapon chewed off the front of one lift skirt, spilling the craft nose-down into the earth and flipping it into a death roll that tumbled and tossed the high-speed hovercraft until it rolled itself out into the river.
“Why isn’t that tank crew on our side?” he asked no one in particular, clearing his feed jam.
And in case the hovercraft powered into a stop to reverse its path, Conner edged his Rifleman further out, treading over artillery craters and places where molten armor still smoldered against charred earth. The SM1 continued to skate backwards on its cushion of air, just out of reach. Drawing him after.
Which put him near the front of a scrambled line when suddenly the entire Davion force turned and wheeled into a stand of willow and poplar and tall, skinny alder.
He watched an Enforcer shoulder aside some of the younger growth, snapping the slender trunks in greenstick fractures to create a path for the following Praetorian command crawler. A set of Fox armored cars chose more careful routes, worried for their precious lift fans, but most armored vehicles crashed into the brush and forest with equal abandon.
Julian Davion’s Templar splashed through muck and water near the river’s edge, leading its own path of retreat and already with a fifteen, twenty second jump. Conner watched as the Destroyer he’d been chasing after snapped about end-for-end again, and powered in a long, sweeping curve that finally spread it out over the river with another SM1 and a JES hover-carrier.
The last men off the field were Cavalier battle armor. Racing for the forest’s cover, having missed hitching a ride on any of the APCs.
Conner had followed slowly, worried for a trap, still set to an easy walk as he had tracked after the Destroyer. It didn’t occur to him for several long seconds that Julian was actually pulling completely away.
It was another four or five before he realized why.
“Advance! All units, flank speed and follow!”
Too late. The feeling settled down inside the pit of his stomach, like freezing-cold glass. Too late.
The First Davion Guards massed only a bit lighter than his own force, but what he gained in raw firepower, they made up in mobility. By the time his people had made the far treeline, Cray Stansill was already yelling for assistance. Artillery support. Aerospace.
Except Conner had given up his aerospace fighter cover two hours before, flinging them back into Germany, into Spain. Spreading some of that wealth for Asia and the Americas as well. He ordered his Paladin Artillery Defense to shift position, again, calling fresh coordinates back to the distant positions. But it would take several slow minutes. The kind of time Stansill did not have.
Two strengthened companies slammed into the tall woods behind the Davion line. A few light tanks reported infantry ambushes, swarmed by Cavalier and Infiltrators. But not many. Not nearly enough to convince Conner that it had all been a ruse. Ordering his people forward, charging his Rifleman through the thinning stands, he crashed through the far side, onto a new riverbank where the Marne had turned back southward, and saw the devastation drawn out before him.
Julian Davion’s entire First Guard had abandoned cover and a firm operations line to join Campbell and Sinclair with all haste, and now moved forward under cover of artillery fire to steamroll Stansill’s entire field.
Throwing all their weight at the lesser half of the loyalist assault!
Shame burned on Conner’s face even as rage trembled in his muscles. He felt the urge to cut his force loose: best speed forward and save the day! But wars were not fought on emotions. They were fought, and won, and sometimes stalemated for another day, by cold, rational thought and the precision application of skill.
Too late, his knight’s training was returning. Too late he was beginning to see that the entire campaign on Terra had been doomed from the start. Whether the other senators had seen that, and used him, or trusted in Conner’s own righteous fire to make up the difference, it no longer mattered.
What mattered now was salvaging something—anything!—from this setback.
Because it was only a setback unless he ha
nded Julian Davion the prize.
“Field Two, form on me,” he ordered calmly. “BattleMechs spread two and two to either side. Heavy vehicles backing a light skirmish line. Advance on my pace.”
And he kicked his Rifleman into a steady walk, already dialing for the channel he had never wanted to use.
The cooling rainfall meant nothing to Julian, trapped in a blazing cockpit. Heat rose by ticks and jumps as the Templar’s reactor spiked again, and again, driving temperatures well past any safety limits, deep into the red.
He gasped for breath. His vision swam with heat stroke and burning sweat. There was no looking for the shutdown override. He simply slapped at it every thirty seconds or so, cutting out the safety interlocks, keeping his ’Mech alive and commanding the field as his troops set about their massacre.
Which is what it was. A massacre. Based on the Federated Suns’ strategy that said, with two able enemies, concentrate force in one direction and unite disparate forces for (hopefully) a sound victory.
It didn’t go off without problems, though. The First Guards lost one of their own Centurions to a combination of enemy luck and friendly fire when an artillery barrage landed too close, and a JES carrier got off half its load before both machines crashed beneath a roiling ball of fire and smoke. The MechWarrior punched out, dragging his parafoil toward a distant MASH truck. The Jess was not so lucky.
After that, the next ten minutes belonged to the First Davion Guards and a strong company of Republic troops. Conner Rhys-Monroe handed it to them, advancing his line in a slow, steadfast manner. At the time, Julian considered it a setup to the knock-out blow yet to fall. A temporary period of grace.
And the allied forces would make good on it.
Gareth Sinclair teamed up with Callandre Kell to bring down the Catapult, then Callandre spun herself away from the main line to chase after a fleeing Stinger, which ran itself right out over the river. The twenty-ton ’Mech had no intention of facing down an assault-class weapon. It lit off jump jets, sailed out over deep water, and quite intentionally belly flopped into the Marne, going where no hovercraft could follow.
Sword of Sedition Page 31
