by Victor Milán
Nonetheless it was Malvina herself who first saw danger coming.
She turned her head toward four MechWarriors who approached along the street from the right with brightly colored capes flapping from their shoulders. At the same time a similar group moved in along the steps from the left.
‘‘Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,’’ said the leading MechWarrior on Malvina’s right. He was tall and lean with a scar seaming the left side of his hatchet face and a black Mohawk waving like a plume. ‘‘Your actions have brought disgrace to Clan Jade Falcon. I hereby issue challenge—’’
Malvina’s right hand whipped up and out to the full reach of her arm. In it she held the laser pistol she wore holstered at her narrow waist. It flashed twice.
The challenger’s eyes rolled up to a blue dot in his pale forehead as blackish steam jetted from his ears. His legs folded, and he fell in a heap, shrouded by a black-and-scarlet cloak. The ginger-haired woman who walked to his left also went down, with a hole between eyes bulged from their sockets by fluid and brain matter flash-boiled in the skull behind them.
‘‘Galaxy Commander!’’ exclaimed MechWarrior Paulus, Malvina’s bodyguard nearest her left. ‘‘You have violated the rite of challenge!’’
‘‘Tactical pincers, you surat!’’ she exclaimed, pivoting left and folding over Cynthy in a crouch. ‘‘It’s a trap! Fight.’’
Paulus was staring at her in incomprehension when a burst of submachine-gun fire from Malvina’s left cut him down.
Hunched over with the little girl’s back propped on her knee, Malvina fired as soon as the front sight of her sidearm bore on the dark face of the woman who had shot her escort; she knew the assassins might wear body-armor vests beneath their jumpsuits that would stop a low-wattage hand laser. Her pistol spat a ruby lance. The target jerked and fell.
Her surviving companions reacted to the danger with Jade Falcon speed and fury not reduced for being belated. Her guards and Cynthy’s minders drew sidearms and opened fire. Roaring like a bear, Bec Malthus charged a woman firing an autopistol at Malvina. Malvina felt a tug as a bullet holed her cape. Then the assassin tried to switch aim to the male Galaxy commander.
He hit her in the face with a forearm sweep as he ran past her without slowing. Her neck broke with a sound not much quieter than her firearm’s bark.
As Malthus closed with a shorter but sturdily built male MechWarrior, Lon, the male of Malvina’s elemental pair, drew his battleknife and threw it at one of the two surviving MechWarriors attacking from the right. It struck hilt first but with enough force to cave in the enemy’s ribs; the man went down choking and gagging, his face turning blue. Lon’s female counterpart, Cecily, simply picked up the limp corpse of MechWarrior Paulus and hurled him at the last assailant on that side.
Bec Malthus’ next opponent tried to tackle his legs from under him. Adroitly the larger Galaxy commander sprawled on him, leaning into the attack and simply pushing his foe aside and past. The MechWarrior’s face hit the cement with a crunch and squeal of breaking nose cartilage and splintering teeth. Before he could spring back upright Malthus had drawn his own sidearm and fired a single rapid shot to the back of his tattooed skull. His body convulsed wildly once and then seemed to become half-liquescent and still.
Before Malvina could line up and fire again, her other escorts had blown down the last of the killers approaching from the left.
‘‘Are you all right?’’ Malvina bent her head to ask her ward. Cynthy’s face was pale as Malvina’s own, and the hand that clutched her ragged stuffed bear to her chest showed knuckles almost bursting through whitened skin. But she nodded.
Malvina’s strong legs, the real and the artificial, propelled her crouching toward the long, low ground car that waited at the curb. ‘‘Move!’’ she shouted to her party. ‘‘These stravags are not the last!’’
A treetrunk-sized arm enfolded her from the rear. She was scooped up with Cynthy crying out at being crushed against her ribs, then driven forward and down toward the pavement. As she squirmed and screamed with helpless fury, the elemental who had caught her from behind turned so the vast body fell, not upon the diminutive Galaxy commander and the child, but interposed between them and the street.
The ground car exploded with a cataclysmic roar and a red geyser of flame as two heavy short-range missiles slammed into it. The giant encircling Malvina and Cynthy with its arm uttered a soft grunt and then went limp.
A great squat figure landed with a crack of buckling pavement between her and the blazing car. From the discrete headpiece with the typical Falcon beak she recognized modern Clan battlearmor. She snarled and flashed futile beams against its eyeslits from her laser as the figure raised the flamer that made up its right arm.
A dark-clad figure dove from the left, catching the powersuit in a tackle just above the waist. The mass and momentum of elemental Lon, even unarmored, was enough to momentarily tumble the suit’s gyros. It fell backward with a crash.
Its rear-mounted impeller-jet snapped it back upright at once. But the gene-enhanced Lon possessed panther reflexes despite his immense size. With a liquid agility his armor-encased counterpart could not match, he flowed around behind onto the suit’s shoulders, where the clawed left hand had trouble reaching him. Unable to grip, its talons gouged deep bloody wounds in Lon’s thigh as he systematically began unfastening the clasps that held the helmet in place. Once he removed it he could snap the neck of the elemental inside. . . .
Orange flame speared down from the right. Both unprotected elemental and powersuit were instantly engulfed by a roaring inferno. Elemental Lon reared back bellowing in helpless fury as much as unendurable agony as the blazing chemical mixture seared flesh from his bones. He fell thrashing from the back of the battlearmor, whose occupant tried jumping, blazing like a comet, in a desperate attempt to escape the sticky, clinging fuel slowly roasting him alive.
A second Clan powersuit descended from the sky, the bluish-white flames of its jump jets very bright against the white-scrimmed sky. It aimed its flamer toward Malvina. She saw heat shimmer around its huge maw.
A thunderclap splintered the air. White flashes dazzled from the elemental suit’s breastplate. It cartwheeled backward in the air, only to be transfixed by a green lance of coherent light. It bellyflopped in the middle of the broad avenue and lay still. A moment later a second burst of autocannon fire raked the flame-wreathed battlearmor, shattering and felling it.
Malvina looked left. At the corner of the plaza a pair of Skadi fast-attack VTOLs hung fifteen meters above the ground. Beneath them a Point of elemental armor bounded forward like fleas. The Eye of Horus glowed green on their breastplates.
A Merlin hover-APC wove past them toward the embattled party with a howl of turbines. Malvina writhed from beneath the quiescent bulk of the elemental who had saved her and Cynthy from the ground car explosion. Even before she saw Lon’s doomed attack she knew her rescuer was Cecily: not just from the comparatively slim forearm, twined with the stark tribal-tattoo patterns of enhanced-imaging implants, but from the smell and the general feel of the great lithe-muscled body. Malvina had coupled with both her and Lon; it was her policy with those close to her, to bind them closer.
The exception had always been Bec Malthus. Whatever their relationship was, it did not include sex. Indeed, Malvina’s nominal superior and actual mentor never publicly displayed a libido to speak of.
Malvina came to a crouch and held out her arms. She saw the lance-head splinter of hard plastic from the exploded ground car buried deep in the juncture of Cecily’s neck and powerful shoulder. Cynthy crawled from beneath her arm, stood and carefully if quickly dusted off her teddy bear. Then she came again into Malvina’s arms. Her little face was grave.
In a rising whine of blowers the APC rotated broadside and skidded down the street. Malvina held onto her ward with one arm and her helmet with the other as the vehicle braked fast and dirty by rolling about its long axis to spill a hurricane blast from unde
r its leading-edge skirt. As it settled five meters from Malvina hatches sprang open and five more elemental powersuits sprang out to add their fire to that of their comrades and the Skadis, toward the enemy battlearmor attacking from the east.
‘‘Go!’’ Malvina commanded, waving her arm. MechWarrior June and one of Cynthy’s female nursemaid warriors were also down. The others gaped at her, momentarily dazed by the violent veering of events.
Beckett Malthus moved, clambering rapidly but with a certain dignity into the waiting hovercraft. Malvina’s lips stretched in a half grin of approval and half sneer of contempt. Trust the Crow to see to his self-preservation while others dither, she thought as she followed with Cynthy.
Inside the APC Malvina quickly strapped the girl into a jumpseat, then took the one beside her at a ferroglass port with a firing slit beneath it.
‘‘Welcome aboard, Galaxy Commanders,’’ a voice said from the intercom. It was the voice of Wyndham. Clan medtech had swiftly healed his femur, broken in the successful duel with Galaxy Commander Tristan Fletcher of Clan Hell’s Horses. ‘‘Strap yourselves in. I suspect we are in for a wild ride.’’
As Malvina complied orange glare filled the port across from her, lighting the dim passenger compartment with a brief evil glow. She looked out to see the laser-armed Skadi falling into a broken and blazing pile of wreckage in the street. The characteristic unwinding corkscrew trails of gray exhaust smoke left by short-range missiles hung in the air above the pavement.
"BattleMech!" called MechWarrior Theo.
As the ’Mech pounded past at a pavement-shaking pace two disparate figures emerged from the shelter of the Gothic-arched portal of the Falcon’s Perch. As they did, the larger released its grip upon the upper arm of the smaller.
‘‘I wondered why no one else was leaving,’’ Rorion Klimt said, watching the Uller slam in pursuit of the APC, which appeared to be making for the military spaceport. ‘‘Perhaps they were warned.’’ As usual in the JFOZ he spoke Brazilian Portuguese.
He rubbed his biceps and glared reproachfully at his senior. ‘‘Did you have to hold on so hard?’’
Sometimes even I forget, he thought ruefully, how much of his decadent softness is an act. The older man’s love of luxury and the high life was certainly no pose. As, among other things, a small army of mistresses not just back on Recife but dotted throughout the Inner Sphere could attest. But just as he showed on this sojourn that he could live without the comforts he so enjoyed, Heinz-Otto von Texeira had just shown again the iron that still underlay his flab.
The older man shrugged. ‘‘I wanted to ensure nothing unfortunate came to pass, Rorionzinho,’’ he said mildly.
‘‘I could easily have missed the girl at this range,’’ Rorion hissed. ‘‘You know my aim.’’ He was rated a master at combat pistolcraft. Among other things.
‘‘It’s not that,’’ von Texeira said. ‘‘It’s what you’d have hit.’’
Rorion turned his face to the larger, older man with his eyebrows scaling his forehead in outrage. ‘‘But that was our chance to take the monster out, this self-named Chingis Khan! Surely you don’t play politics now, faced with a threat such as this?’’
‘‘The death of Malvina Hazen would be the greatest gift humanity could receive right now,’’ von Texeira said, his voice a quiet rumble over the gradually dwindling thunder of battle. ‘‘To have her die at the hand of a Spheroid would be the greatest possible catastrophe.’’
Rorion stared at him a moment longer. His own face was drained of color and tight as a drumhead. ‘‘And to have her killed by a Lyran would disrupt certain delicate arrangements the archon has in train, am I right?’’
Von Texeira inclined his huge bushy head and said nothing.
‘‘Very well,’’ Rorion said with quiet bitterness. ‘‘On your head be it.’’
‘‘It always is, my boy,’’ said von Texeira gently. ‘‘It always is.’’
9
The Falcon’s Perch
Hammarr, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
14 September 3135
As Malvina’s escorts slammed the hatches and hurriedly made them fast, the hovercraft lifted off and began to rotate on its vertical axis for a getaway. Through her viewport the Galaxy commander saw the distinctive low, wide shape of an Uller advancing at a prancing trot. As Wyndham turned away from the BattleMech a red light flared from its left arm.
She heard a crack, felt the APC jerk as the beam of the large extended-range laser vaporized a circle of the thin-gauge aligned-crystal steel armor to punch through the flexible skirting beneath. Instantly the timbre of the fans changed as a tornado of air began to bleed out the puncture.
For a moment the injured hovercraft slewed wildly across the street. Even as the green afterimage of the first beam faded from Malvina’s vision another laser shot stabbed for them and missed. It sent up a geyser of shattered asphalt. Malvina’s blue eyes narrowed as a glowing molten globule struck the ferroglass port right before her face and clung like a wasp.
The Uller lurched into a full run, closing for the kill. The surviving Skadi darted past, interposing its horsefly shape between the hovercraft and the 30-ton killing machine. A burst of multiple projectile rounds from the light LB-X autocannon mounted in the BattleMech’s right arm shattered its cockpit screen and one ducted rotor, and dropped it to the street, where it whoomped into yellow flame.
Then Wyndham had control of his damaged machine and was accelerating away from the attacking ’Mech. The hovercraft bucked as if in a spastic gallop, banging its rear skirt armor off the pavement at intervals as air bled out. The fans, driven by the full bore of the turbine engines, reinflated the plenum chamber as soon as its stern touched down, lifting the rear and starting the cycle over.
The hit had erased much or all of the APC’s considerable speed advantage over the Uller. Another laser beam dazzled a line across the port by Malvina’s head as the ’Mech fired and missed high and right.
Malvina might have pressed her face to the ferroglass and possibly have been able to watch their pursuer. She chose not to submit herself to the indignity. What will happen , she thought, will happen.
She felt calm, although she knew it was a sort of surface effect, bobbing atop a sea of rage that surged and seethed beneath. She glanced at Malthus, seated across the way. His long, saturnine face was impassive. It seemed that he regarded her with a trace more than his usual smugness despite their plight. She burned to ask him how the Mongol force had arrived just in time to rescue them, but the scream of overloaded turbines and the semi-rhythmic banging and screeching of metal on pavement precluded intelligible conversation.
An ear-endangering rattle like hail striking a metal roof announced a glancing hit from shotgun-like LB-X rounds. Malvina was thrown abruptly sideways in her seat as Wyndham broke the APC left as if it were a Bashkir with a Shilone on its six.
With a clang the hovercraft caromed off a steel light post, which fell across the boxy machine and screeched down its back. Wyndham was already veering right.
Malvina felt her hands ball into fists. Even the prosthetic: it sent feedback directly into the nerves of her arm. Fortunately it also possessed cutouts that would prevent it damaging itself by clenching too tightly.
She fought the desire to strike out against those around her, her surroundings. They dared to attack her. To destroy her followers. To endanger her toy.
The latter particularly infuriated her. She did not truly know what she felt for the Inner Sphere child she had adopted. But it was definitely proprietary—and included savage determination to protect the small, strange creature.
Right now she could not.
She looked up to see Malthus’ eyes upon her. ‘‘Powless in all truth,’’ she snarled.
A slam. A grinding roar filled the compartment as the hovercraft scraped along the cement front of a building on the north side of Turkina’s Path. Orange sparks streaked past Malvina’s port like fi
reflies on speed. The passenger-compartment deck ran with blood, dark, almost purplish in the light from the viewports. Warrior Sondra, Cynthy’s remaining attendant, had not strapped herself down in time. Wyndham’s wild maneuvering had tossed her around the cabin and broken her like a doll.
Another screaming careen to the left. Bec Malthus spoke into his personal communicator, calm as if he sat in his study with a goblet of the Lyran brandy that was one of his few vices—which Malvina Hazen knew well he cultivated in part so that he would be seen to have vices, and thus seem less threatening to potential rivals and foes. Cynthy sat rigid and white as an alabaster statue, with tears streaming down her face and dripping on her stuffed bear’s head. Yet she did not cry out, and Malvina astonished herself by feeling a stab of pride.
Out a left-hand viewport she caught a glimpse of the Uller pistoning in pursuit but a hundred meters behind. Wyndham fought his boxy transport hovercraft with immaculate skill. Although his gyrations had killed Sondra, Malvina knew they were all that had kept the rest of them alive.
So far. But the Uller slowly gained. It would be only seconds before the BattleMech got close enough to lock its Streak missiles onto the vehicle. Or simply holed the skirt with another lucky laser hit, making its destruction inevitable. And there might be more assassins, Malvina thought.
Wyndham banged the craft off another building. Dust knocked loose by multiple impacts filled the interior. The Merlin rattled as if it were coming apart around them. A jet of wind cut at Malvina’s face like a cold blowtorch. The APC really was breaking up. . . .
