by Victor Milán
Bleeding smoke from its destroyed double-rocket rack, the hovertank turned away. Erik Chistu was amazed to see the unmistakable flaming horse-head badge painted on its hull. The news of Hell’s Horses involvement had slipped from his awareness; he had a mind poorly suited to hold more than one thought at a time.
Before he could finish his prey a spread of short-range missiles slammed into it, ripping open its whole port side. A moment later the strobe of a medium pulse laser probed through the great rent in the Scimitar’s armor. Flame vomited reply.
As the hovertank began to roll to its right the cockpit canopy popped open. A figure clambered out, a long brown tail of hair streaming behind its head. Chistu just had time to register the khaki-clad form as female. Then the driver was thrown free as the doomed Scimitar struck a boulder and bounced in the air. She fell ahead and to the right of her tumbling craft. A moment later it landed on its back on top of her and skidded forward thirty meters, striking sparks from rocks in passing, before coming to rest and being engulfed in orange flame and black smoke.
‘‘Hell’s Horses!’’ Chistu exclaimed, as if discovering the fact for the first time.
He opened his general freq. ‘‘All who fight alongside our enemy are our enemies. They are no less befoulers of our true Clan blood! Crush all without mercy!’’
Rockets exploded all around Chistu’s BattleMech as he continued to advance. Beams slashed past and overhead, or gashed glowing-glass gouges in sand. He absently registered the sledgehammer bangs of long-range missiles striking his armor; the relatively light warheads had small effect. His electronics sizzled and squealed and the hair rose on his nape as a particle beam kissed the upper curve of his left shoulder-housing. It glowed momentarily yellow, cooling at once to cherry red, but the glancing strike did no real damage.
Wrecked vehicles blazed to both sides. Most bore the Horses badge or the green Horus-eye of the Falcon stravags , he saw with satisfaction. Even as he took a quick look around the developing battlefield he saw a renegade Fire Falcon’s pointed snout unfold and the ejector seat jet clear with the MechWarrior as the 25-ton BattleMech’s mutant-chick profile was torn apart by its short-range missile magazines exploding. As the bloodfoul’s chute deployed, Chistu exulted to see laser beams stabbing for it from all directions. Steam puffed as two converged briefly on it. When the smoldering figure dropped to the dust several hundred meters south of the Night Gyr, Chistu saw his infantry drop from the two-gun turret of a huge, eight-wheeled D1 Schmitt heavy tank and run forward to make sure of the deviate with their laser rifles.
But the enemy’s slashing attacks took a toll of their own. A Vau Eyrie bounced past Chistu’s ’Mech at its peculiar prancing gait, firing a spread of advanced tactical missiles at a target Chistu couldn’t see. A streak-guided SRM swarm rained down from its left, shattering its hip-actuator. Its wingtip hit the ground and flipped the 35-ton machine onto its front, crushing its beaklike cockpit into the hardpan.
Movement snapped Chistu’s gaze to his left. A Hellhound attacked. The two blue eyes denoting Malvina’s personal retinue of fanatics, the self-proclaimed Eyes of the Falcon who had accompanied her back from Skye, glared insanely from the front slopes of its chest armor against an unmistakable Jade Falcon camo pattern in locally appropriate shades of pink and gray. A green Horus eye was painted on one concave shin shield, the Falcon ensign on the other. Chistu gritted his teeth to see Turkina’s likeness so defiled.
Ruby light stuttered from the large pulse laser clutched in the Hellhound’s right hand. Fired at a dead run over broken ground, the burst missed Chistu’s Night Gyr. This was no slash-and-dash caracole; ignoring the 25-ton weight disparity in their ’Mechs as single-mindedly as he did the massive spread of Arrow IV missiles exploding in a curtain of red dust and rocks not fifty yards behind his running BattleMech, the renegade Falcon steered straight toward Erik Chistu.
‘‘If you want death, defiler, I am happy to oblige!’’ he snarled. He tipped his 75-ton machine into the controlled fall of a tailbone-slamming full-speed dash at his foe.
A green flash filled the cockpit. Although the viewscreen scattered enough of the high-energy coherent light to prevent the Galaxy commander’s being blinded, Chistu blinked momentarily at huge magenta blobs of afterimage. A medium laser, fired from well beyond effective range, had illuminated his cockpit dead-on.
He allowed himself a glimpse past his rapidly closing foe. Far beyond the Hellhound a Dasher light BattleMech raced from left to right. It was painted shiny black with blazes of brilliant orange trim. It was clearly a Hell’s Horses machine. Although both Malvina Hazen and Beckett Malthus painted their own machines black, flouting camouflage, this was no Jade Falcon aesthetic.
He fired one of the PPCs tandem-mounted in his ’Mech’s left arm. The pseudo-lightning struck an arc-welder spray of sparks from the Hellhound’s left thigh-plate. It left a glowing-edged wound through which the pulsing of the myomer muscle driving the limb was clearly visible.
Recklessly the Hellhound came on. Its big pulse laser stitched the Night Gyr’s chest, making molten armor flow like incandescent blood.
Chistu slowed to a walk. Why add to my heat by running when the bastard comes to me? he thought, not even aware of using a Spheroid epithet. He blasted the oncoming BattleMech with both his PPCs, spiking his thermal load near redline.
The Hellhound’s upper chest erupted in smoke and white embers and secondary static discharges. The heavy machine reeled and actually paused from the jet-recoil effect of a ton of armor sublimating away as vapor in an instant. Then it came on, blasting its foe with the two medium lasers mounted on its torso.
Right below them a hole gaped in the armor. As his heat indicator eased down Chistu fired a normal-cycle burst from his autocannon into the breach. He shouted triumphantly as the smaller machine staggered, almost lost balance.
Chistu triggered a single PPC and charged. This time the bolt blasted away the twin lasers’ lower housing, causing the emplacement to collapse in on itself, sparking. Chistu fired his three medium lasers. The beams deeply scored the scarred and scorched armor.
The Hellhound slammed four short-range rockets from its two double racks into the Night Gyr’s torso, putting its left-side medium laser out of action. The others continued to flash, softening the Hellhound’s left-hand chest armor and making it sag. A double-rate Ultra-autocannon burst punched through the now-plastic plate.
The stored Streak SRMs exploded. Sheets of yellow flame spurted from shoulder and waist as the CASE system’s armor lid blasted free, venting most of the blast and superheated gas out the ’Mech’s back.
As Chistu’s thermal gauges redlined, the two machines collided. Just before impact he turned his torso counterclockwise to slam the lesser BattleMech with the big humped armor housing that shielded his shoulder-actuator. Momentum told. The 50-ton machine fell with almost balletic slowness to the ground. It struck with an impact that Chistu felt in his tailbone with an almost sexual thrill.
Raising a huge foot he smashed it down on the cockpit of the supine BattleMech. Once, twice, three times. As he would stamp upon a noxious insect in the latrines at night.
Another green flash. Sparks fountained from his left shoulder. He looked up from savaging his fallen prey to see that same black-and-orange Dasher, racing left to right beyond the swirling dogfight on the plain. He fired a PPC. But the Dasher was among the fastest of all BattleMechs. Despite superb marksmanship he missed.
Frustrated anger overrode the triumph and vindication he got from stamping the life from a monstrous bloodfoul. But then his ears rang with multiple falcon screams of triumph.
‘‘Galaxy Commander! The surat flee!’’
20
Rakusian Hills
East of Alba, Antares
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
14 December 3135
Galaxy Commander Erik Chistu gazed around the battlefield.
It was true. Past the forest of smoke pillars that marked the
pyres of machines and men, the enemy vehicles had broken off and begun to stream away across the undulant pink hills.
Not all of them: six BattleMechs, a Loki and a mix of medium and light machines, all showing renegade Jade Falcon insignia, stood their ground and fought as Chistu’s Peregrines surrounded them. And more: Chistu saw an Uller, its left shoulder a sparking stub, charge directly at the Vulture piloted by his aide, Star Captain Djala Helmer.
Helmer slammed it with a volley of LRMs and a flickering coruscation of all four arm-mounted pulse lasers. Bleeding smoke and pale flames and vaporized armor plate, the light BattleMech continued its attack. Other weapons reached to slash at it now, from tanks and other BattleMechs. The Uller pitched forward, cartwheeled once, then rolled over and over to settle in a cloud of dust and smoke almost at the Vulture’s two-taloned feet.
The other bloodfoul ’Mechs had been surrounded now. Elementals swarmed over two of them. They were quickly pulled down, in a fashion suggesting more a pack of wild dogs than solitary birds of prey.
Erik Chistu nodded in grim satisfaction. The stravag deserved no better. They had sacrificed all consideration of honor when they rose illegally and in violation of tradition against their rightful khan. Now they were out-caste: lower even than the laborers who cleaned the sewage-treatment vats.
Already the pursuit had begun. His Peregrines’ blood was up; vehicles and BattleMechs rushed in pursuit of the fleeing foes.
Reports streamed to him in voice and data. The battle was huge. His attached Vau Galaxy, augmented to almost twice normal strength, was engaged along its entire front. From monitoring battle reports Chistu’s operations officers, following two kilometers behind his main force in their Tribune headquarters vehicle, told him almost a full-complement Galaxy had faced him.
Now it ran from his warriors like so many cowardly Spheroids.
‘‘All Peregrine forces,’’ he broadcast, ‘‘this is Galaxy Commander Erik Chistu. Pursue and destroy the enemy wherever they run, wherever they hide. Strike with the fury of Turkina Herself, and leave none alive!’’
‘‘They follow in hot pursuit,’’ Manas Amirault reported, ‘‘already strung out over half the distance between where we clashed and your position.’’ Malvina could imagine his slashing, thrilling grin.
But at once his tone turned serious: ‘‘Your folk suffered heavy casualties. Many refused to heed the plan, but threw themselves in the teeth of our enemies.’’
Waiting in the cockpit of her mostly-patched Black Rose, screened behind low hills the color of dried blood, Malvina frowned. But she did not allow herself the luxury of fury. It was not wholly unexpected, Falcons being Falcons. They preferred to break rather than bend; to flee before an enemy, even their very own kin, grated against their every nerve. Perhaps especially to flee their own Clansfolk.
But: ‘‘They gave a good account of themselves, I trust?’’ she asked.
‘‘They died like Clan. So have many invaders.’’
‘‘Excellent.’’ That would stoke the heat of the invaders’ rage to white inferno. What judgment and discretion they had—hardly measurable at the best of times—had certainly evanesced like snow kissed by a heavy laser.
And if the surat I sent with Manas will not follow orders, my orders, she thought, what real loss are they?
Blazing like a meteor it fell, at meteoritic speed. A yellow streak, slanted just off true vertical, struck the valley floor half a kilometer east-southeast of Erik Chistu’s trotting Night Gyr. His battle computer barely had time to register it as a 35-ton Sholagar fighter—one of his own, captured from House Kurita more than eighty years before, kept in Jade Falcon garrison service since.
By almost mathematically impossible bad luck the yellow fireball dead-centered a Kelswa heavy tank. It and the five battlearmored elementals riding its back simply vanished in a funnel-shaped geyser of dirt and smoke. All that remained was a smoking crater.
For all their vaunted adherence to scientific principles the Clans harbored mystic streaks. The Falcons, for once, were about the middle of the pack: less prone to superstition than the Nova Cats, not so scoffingly skeptical as the Sea Foxes. Had the Galaxy commander been of even average Jade Falcon superstitiousness he might have taken the strike as a peculiarly ill omen.
But Erik Chistu was that rarity: a stolid Falcon. Outsiders widely perceived Turkina’s volatile sons and daughters as possessing vastly more imagination than sense. Chistu harbored little of either. The eradication of some of his best assets in an eyeblink only poured coal on the low fires of his anger—which burned most of the time, in the midst of battle or not.
His glacial rise to high rank—for he was the opposite of a ristar—had been driven by a sullen, stubborn tenacity more appropriate to a Ghost Bear than a Falcon. It was widely whispered that his genotype in fact contained substantial DNA from a giftake from a mighty Bear warrior killed in a raid into the JFOZ.
One thing Chistu did not do was attempt to impose his impassivity upon the high-strung raptors under his command. They had the taste of blood and raced after the routed foe as fast as they could. It had cost his outsized Galaxy whatever cohesion it possessed. But even if zellbrigen and single combat were relics of the glorious past, few Clans concerned themselves overmuch with tight formation discipline—and Clan Jade Falcon less than most.
Besides, the fight was won. He knew. All his warriors knew. What remained was the joyous chore of slaughter.
He might still have taken warning when a cloud of enemy VTOLs suddenly rose up from behind the line of hills that marched across the eastern horizon and swarmed out of the vast swollen crimson face of rising Antares to meet his own aircraft. But he knew the rebels were defeated. This could only be a desperate attempt to cover the flight of their ground forces, presumably back to their DropShips and hoped-for escape from this planet and, of course, bloody vengeance. It would be his great pleasure to crush those hopes as he had crushed the bones of the Hellhound MechWarrior.
Galaxy Commander Erik Chistu had in the course of a long and reasonably illustrious career been wrong before. It was a major reason his un-Falconlike habit of grinding persistence had served him so well. He would not, however, often be wrong again.
When the first fast scout vehicles and Dashers of the pursuing Vau Galaxy crested the first line of the Rakusian Hills and found themselves confronted not by the rear armor of fleeing hovercraft and tanks, but a phalanx of big BattleMechs and AFVs, they thought no more of it than the fact that their own air cover had been abruptly peeled away, left behind in a twisting dogfight with enemy VTOLs. They were victorious; they had broken their enemy like whipped curs. So they simply charged, brave green-and-black pennons whipping from their antennas.
Awaiting them, Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen ordered the countercharge as if singing a victory hymn.
The fast Peregrine light BattleMechs and vehicles were crushed beneath a metal tsunami of rebel medium, heavy, and assault tanks and BattleMechs. Unlike Clan warriors of yore the neo-Mongols did not scruple to combine fire. Rather they did whatever they could to destroy their enemies as expeditiously as possible, ganging up, ramming, literally rolling over their lighter foes. They screamed their glee as they slew. Then the heavy-metal tide rolled on.
The Rakusian Hills were redder than the surrounding soil because of massive iron-ore concentrations in their rocks. Though they lay conveniently near Alba, the deposits had been little exploited, either by the Lyrans or their Jade Falcon successors. When the Star League founders built the subterranean base, they preferred to use asteroid metal, founded and forged in orbit with optimal efficiency. Antares’ vaguely habitable world didn’t actually make anything; little reason existed to hold it, save for the vague prestige and the fact that it was, after all, an inhabited world in space conquered by Jade Falcon. Once Turkina’s talons closed on something, She did not like to let go.
For the Golden Ordun it was, literally, simply, a place to stand.
With hematite veins
fouling the Peregrines’ magnetic anomaly detectors, and adequate overhead surveillance denied them, it was easy for Malvina and Manas to hide their heavy hitters. And wait for the mangudai to bring their enemy, disorganized and hopelessly scattered, to them.
To die.
The majority of his lighter, faster machines were already smoldering derelicts when the onrushing battle line collided with the leading ranks of Chistu’s heavies. These had not dispersed as widely as the lightweights, simply by virtue of being slower. At the rebels’ sudden onslaught they began to clump, the front runners slowing, the rear catching up.
Somewhere in the furthest recess of his mind his subconscious dinned warning of impending disaster. But Erik Chistu was Jade Falcon. He knew one way: all-out attack. He would live and die by that.
And so he did.
Even before her transformation into . . . whatever it was she had become, and was becoming . . . Malvina never shared the doctrinaire Clan distaste for tactics, especially traps and ruses. Winning served the Falcon best; in this she and her beloved sibkin Aleks had always been in perfect agreement. At least until her notion of the means of winning expanded to encompass mass terror as a tactic . . .
Mad as she knew herself, defiantly, to be, she was still a supremely capable commander as well as an unmatched MechWarrior. The military expert part of her mind knew too well that for all the proficiency of the battle-hardened veterans she had brought back with her from the Inner Sphere, warrior for warrior she enjoyed no superiority over Chistu.
Nor had she any advantage in battle machines. Despite getting chased off Graus, her Mongol Omega Galaxy had experienced few materiel losses. They actually got away with more than they arrived with, for they had already appropriated not just fresh-built BattleMechs and vehicles but a huge stock of replacement parts, already loaded into their DropShips for future conquest, when the balloon went up.
