by Victor Milán
She turned to take in the others with her declaration: ‘‘Into our hands! The surat Jana was right, I’ll give her that: every death diminishes the strength we must have for the Great Crusade to come. Every death but hers!’’
‘‘Excellency,’’ Malthus said, finishing the somewhat laborious process of getting all the way back to his feet: he was heavier than a Clan warrior customarily got, as well as older, and thanks to accumulated stress and damage his knees were not all they once had been. ‘‘You take much for granted.’’
She faced him with a look of surprise that her blue eyes mocked, laughing. ‘‘You do not think I intend to lose, do you?’’
‘‘Jana Pryde is a most formidable MechWarrior," he said. He deliberately omitted the honorific to which Jana Pryde was, if only pro forma, still entitled. ‘‘She has the strength of desperation to aid her.’’
‘‘I am no weakling as a MechWarrior. And I have my Destiny to aid me.’’
Malthus bowed. ‘‘As you say, my Khan.’’
But as his gaze broke from hers he wondered: Does arrogance rule her now? That can be fatal, faced with the warrior I know Jana Pryde to be.
Fleetingly he wondered what he would say to Khan Jana Pryde should she prevail. And smiled.
Judging by our intelligence reports from Sudeten, he thought, she would appear in need of an advisor.
30
The Casts
Hammarr Commercial Spaceport, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 April 3136
‘‘Save yourself, boy!’’ commanded von Texeira as Rorion tugged his arm. ‘‘Go!’’
Rorion Klimt ignored him.
‘‘As your overlord I command you: leave me!’’
‘‘La, la, la-la, la,’’ Rorion grunted in time to his pulls. ‘‘I’m not listening.’’
A curved section of cement ceiling had landed on von Texeira, pinning him from the hips down. Miraculously, nothing seemed broken, for he felt no stabbing pain. Or perhaps my spine is gone in the lumbar region, and with it feeling. . . .
Von Texeira could sense what Rorion clearly ignored: the nearness of the giant metal foot that had come down through the rear of the house. A huge shape loomed against the painfully blue sky. Maybe he thinks he has no chance, he thought.
A brilliant blue-green flash filled von Texeira’s eyes, momentarily washing away his vision. A tremendous crack stabbed his eardrums. He closed sightless eyes and commended his soul to God.
... He became aware of a strange floating lightness in his lower body. Icy air laved his face. He was being carried, impossibly, on Rorion’s back. He remembered, vaguely, that lasers had a way of shattering cement with special vehemence—and realized his prosthetic leg must somehow have propped up the fallen cement slab, prevented it from crushing his hips or good leg.
It did not explain why they had yet to be killed by the BattleMech that had crushed the house.
A rough purplish blur in front of his eyes unfocused by shock became the stuccoed front wall of the courtyard. Then he was falling as his aide dumped him unceremoniously over.
He struck the sidewalk heavily. Now pain came in force: it seemed as if red-heated spikes were hammered into his real thighbone, his hip, his belly.
Lying on his back he blinked at the sky and groaned. Getting dropped onto cement from a meter and a half in the air had done his internal injuries no good. But the calculating part of his brain that had kept him calm in angry boardrooms—and alive under fire—for more than three decades had kicked in. The boy has in mind keeping me alive long enough for internal injuries to kill me, he realized.
It was a daunting task. He heard Rorion shout, trying to attract the MechWarrior’s attention. A big laser crack again. A section of wall seven meters from him burst outward to a spasm of cyan light.
Over the top of the low wall he saw the distinctive flat-headed shape of a Dasher. It was the smallest possible BattleMech, a mere twenty tons, one not commonly favored by Clan Jade Falcon. It might as well have been a hundred-ton Atlas, though, pitted against Rorion and his handgun.
Von Texeira’s aide had dodged behind the parked van. He popped out now, fired three quick shots at the Dasher’s viewscreen. In response a short-range missile spurted from the launcher in the ’Mech’s right arm. Rorion dove away as the truck rode upward on a blast that turned to a pillar of orange flame as the fuel tank blew. The van tipped to the side and fell in the midst of the street with a terrific bang and spraying of glass, like something from a Davion spy-action holovid.
Von Texeira shouted, ‘‘No!’’ But Rorion seemed unhurt, rolling purposefully toward an intact section of the wall around the courtyard, nothing daunted in his hopeless battle with the ’Mech.
The BattleMech stepped forward, birdlike, the left arm with its twin medium lasers poised. The Dasher’s small but potent battery could have simply vaporized the minor obstruction posed by the cement and stucco wall. But the Falcon MechWarrior seemed content to play with his prey.
Heinz-Otto von Texeira gritted his teeth in helpless frustration. Dragging himself to a half-sitting position, propped against the wall, he found his own sidearm and drew it. If this is how it ends, on this cold and heartless world surrounded by our enemies and forsaken by our friends, he thought, then let me die fighting, not lying helpless as a side of beef.
The Dasher approached the section of wall behind which Rorion crouched. It raised one foot, painted to resemble a raptor’s claw, preparing to bring it down on its unseen but trapped quarry.
Green light flared. Von Texeira winced as refracted spears of coherent light seared his eyes. A blue light flashed, then green again.
The Dasher’s rear erupted as the plates blew off the CASE-equipped ammo stowage for its short-range missile racks. It swayed forward, driven by the vented force of ongoing explosions of propellant and warheads. As it began to fall onto the pinned-down Rorion, a steel hand seized it by the housing of its right shoulder-actuator. It was yanked backward to land with the SRMs still cooking off inside.
A small humanoid BattleMech with a curious up-jutting head painted to resemble a jade falcon stood behind the Dasher where it lay half in the wreckage of the Sea Fox factors’ house with flames booming out around it. Von Texeira recognized a Piranha. It pointed its two arms at the fallen ’Mech’s viewscreen and loosed green bolts from medium lasers.
Von Texeira ducked his head to prevent himself from being blinded. The lasers cracked three times. Then silence hit like a slap.
‘‘Rorion!’’ called von Texeira. He coughed on dust and smoke. Spears seemed to pierce his belly. ‘‘How are you, boy?’’
‘‘Alive,’’ called back a voice as husky as his own. ‘‘And astonished by the fact.’’
‘‘Margrave, Rorion,’’ a voice boomed from the victorious BattleMech, ‘‘quit screwing around and come out. We don’t have much time before more of these Slip half-wits turn up looking for you.’’
Heinz-Otto von Texeira stared in amazement at his aide, who lay supine in the gutter with his jacket up over his head.
It was the voice of Master Merchant Senna Rodríguez.
In space the vessels flared and died silently. Their occupants’ cries, if any, went unheard.
Malvina Hazen smiled through her pressure suit’s faceplate at the combat still flaring all around her Black Rose as it hung seemingly suspended a hundred meters above the husk of the Emerald Talon. Jana Pryde had asked for a cease-fire during their trial. Malvina refused. While in strategic terms she was as eager to conserve the fighting resources of Clan Jade Falcon as was the pretender who still styled herself khan, she felt only bleak amusement at each brief nova that marked the death of a MechWarrior or shipman or aerospace pilot. They were all things to her, their deaths no more than the crisping and smoking of ants beneath the rays of a summer sun focused through a child’s magnifying glass.
Although Jade Talon had limped off at a tangent, unwilling to risk confronting the untouch
ed Bucephalus, the fighting still raged unabated around the drifting battleship. The Circle of Equals was a hundred-kilometer exclusion zone, a sphere marked out by transponder beacons, centered on the Talon’s midpoint. By space-war referents, the duel took place in the thick of battle.
The voice of Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus droned in Malvina’s ears. As senior officer present, he presided over the trial. That must rankle Jana Pryde, she thought. It, too, amused her.
A small red sun appeared between the opponents, separated by the length of the great WarShip. Malvina’s heart jumped in happy anticipation. The flare was the signal to commence.
She flew her Shrike forward at full thrust of its jump impellers. Both Black Rose and Jana Pryde’s Turkina, ‘‘Greenfeather,’’ came jump-capable, a rarity among top-end assault BattleMechs. For the space trial, an unusual affair for BattleMechs, each was equipped with strap-on tanks of water to be lased into plasma for reaction mass.
The Turkina’s jets were a white spark. It moved to Malvina’s right and grew, meaning its pilot angled toward her on an oblique approach. She maintained an altitude of about fifty meters above the hull.
The WarShip formed a unique battlefield. Its vast cigar shape was ravaged by beam and blast; white vapors still pooled in craters and drifted off it in feathering wisps. Horrific bombardment had sculpted the hull into almost a sort of strange cityscape, with towers, racks, gantries and buckled plates protruding. They created terrain for the duelists to fight in.
As did the very space around. A space battle generally entailed both sides matching vectors fairly closely. They then could rip and tear at each other continuously, fighter packs whirling in dogfights, instead of exchanging brief furious fire as fleets flashed past one another at cometary closing speeds, followed by hours or days of deceleration, then speeding toward each other again. Accordingly, much wreckage, almost-whole fighters and the odd gutted DropShip, followed the same orbital trajectory through Sudeten system as Emerald Talon herself.
Malvina adjusted course to fly directly toward the point for which her foe made, as if they followed two legs of an angle to its apex. Despite Malvina’s targeting computer, the Turkina had the better of her at range. The Turkina’s two left-arm LB 5-X autocannon had a slight edge in reach over the particle projectors that were Black Rose’s main punch, even at extended range. Greenfeather carried twin PPCs as well, and its shoulders mounted LRM launchers that threw three times the projectiles Malvina’s Longbow 10-rack did.
At closer quarters, the medium lasers on either side of the Shrike’s thrust-beaked head evened the odds somewhat, though Jana Pryde’s firepower was nothing diminished. The Shrike had superior jump jets and surface speed. The double-capacity heat sinks with which Malvina made up the substantial difference in mass and bulk between her PPCs and the hundred-millimeter autocannon and ammo stores they replaced had done much to overcome the significant disparity in heat the two weapons systems generated. Jana Pryde’s ’Mech had double heat sinks as well—and the fifty-millimeter autocannon gave off little heat, whereas Malvina’s medium lasers ran relatively hot. Despite the Turkina’s larger battery, Malvina would have to watch her thermal gauges more closely than did Jana Pryde.
Dancing light announced that Jana Pryde had opened the engagement with her autocannon. The Turkina changed course to head straight for Malvina’s Shrike.
Black Rose carried the better armor, ferro-fibrous as opposed to conventional aligned-crystal steel. But it was only at grips where the Shrike enjoyed a clear offensive advantage: its great three-fingered claw, able to shear or crumple even a Turkina’s thick plate.
Malvina’s heart sang and her blood crackled like current as she flew to met her foe. In a meeting of ’Mechs of identical displacement, advantage went to the superior MechWarrior. She had no doubt it was she.
She fired a particle cannon, intending to see if the blue-white lance, lacking lightning-like ionization effects outside a planet’s atmosphere, might make her opponent flinch. Her heat gauge spiked but promptly dropped. In vacuum, heat radiated more rapidly unless the sun shone directly on them. And they commenced their battle on Emerald Talon ’s ‘‘night’’ side.
Jana Pryde fired again as she closed. A fifty-millimeter shell burst against the right side of Black Rose’s chest. Without conscious thought Malvina worked her jump jet throttles, adjusting thrust to keep her machine’s vast mass upright in relation to the ship—mainly out of habit, since it mattered little enough outside a gravity well. The hit did little more than blister the paint around her rocket ports.
With a flick of downthrust she grounded her ’Mech on the artificial asteroid. A shiver ran through its endosteel skeleton and her tailbone as the talons touched the metal hull. Magnetized pads affixed to the BattleMech’s feet gripped like a spacer’s ship slippers.
Although she had practiced little space combat in her ’Mech, her landing was immaculate.
Jana Pryde’s ’Mech grew as it flew toward her. Malvina laid her crosshairs on the Turkina’s flattened-egg snout, assisted at this long range by her targeting computer. She fired. Yellow sparks arced and metal flash-heated to plasma flew from right beneath her enemy’s cockpit.
31
Jade Falcon Naval Reserve WarShip Emerald Talon
Approaching Sudeten Orbit
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 April 3136
If the current khan of Clan Jade Falcon flinched from the wash of blinding light and heat into her cockpit, she showed no sign. She instantly fired back one of her own arm-mounted PPCs, following it with another autocannon burst. The particle beam struck the Shrike’s left breastplate where it flared winglike in front of the left shoulder housing. Sparks streaked from Malvina’s machine; the plate’s tip glowed white. Heavy cannon shells pounded the big Battle-Mech’s torso.
The Turkina’s upward-pointing jets pushed her down to the hull. Malvina had already jumped again, in low skimming flight toward a hundred-meter length of deck plate upheaved twenty meters by colossal internal overpressure. She had thoroughly studied holos of the battleship’s damage as Bec de Corbin carried her, along with its master Malthus, Galaxy Commander Manas Amirault, and her ward Cynthy, toward the chosen Circle. She knew of the artificial ridge’s presence—as well as what lay beyond.
Jump jets raised her ‘‘up’’ and over the rearing steel slab as missiles slammed into it, white flashes dancing in her wake. At once she applied downthrust. The ninety-five-ton mass of Black Rose plummeted into a great jagged-toothed pit.
Inside, a hangar deck had been ruptured by the terrific barrage that had buckled the hull. Its cavernous expanse was eerily lit by floods. Chunks of debris drifted among yawning silent bays. Some were the limp forms of technicians. An unlucky few had been caught without pressure suits when the great ship-killing missiles had struck an expanse of hull weakened by naval PPCs.
A man floated past Malvina’s cockpit as she descended, eyes bulging from his face, bloodred from ruptured capillaries. The skin and even the tongue protruding in final surprise were mottled green and black as fluids gradually escaped the cell. In time, vacuum’s relentless pull would draw all water from the corpse, leaving it a desiccated husk like a spider-sucked fly, its jumpsuit and tough sack of skin collapsed inward.
The Rose’s legs flexed as her talons hit the deck. A corner of Malvina’s mouth twisted as she turned and jetted toward a great stanchion standing like a rib inside a whale’s carcass. Unless I misjudge, she thought, Aleksandr and I had our last face-to-face meeting on that observation deck there.
The ferroglass pane between bay and gallery remained intact. Whether pressure remained on the far side she could not tell. For a flash she entertained a vision of the ghostly figures of herself and her brother up there, watching this duel for the fate of Clan Jade Falcon.
It amused her to know he would not be rooting for her. Overhead, the hole in the hull was an irregular pool of blackness, in which floated stars. Jets flamed across the black lake
. Jana Pryde had cannily circled the hole and entered on the far side. With all weapons blazing.
Crouched in what Malvina had expected to be cover as well as concealment, Black Rose rocked to hammer blows from autocannon and rockets. Bathed in PPC-hellglare as a ton of armor flashed into plasma and recoil effect tipped the huge machine sideways, Malvina launched a volley of LRMs and sprang right for her foe. She gambled everything on getting to grips before the Turkina’s tremendous firepower disabled her ’Mech.
But Jana Pryde’s nerve broke first. Or her shrewd tactical mind reckoned her range too short to be sure of stopping the Black Rose before its terrible claw tore her BattleMech open. The Turkina’s jump jets flamed, momentarily washing out the yellow blaze of floodlights. Greenfeather broke to its right, turning on its vertical axis to flee down the great cavern of the hangar deck.
Malvina screamed her frustration. She had fired one of her PPCs, smearing a glowing streak across the upper surface of the Turkina’s egglike fuselage. Between its discharge and the heat dumped into her Shrike by Jana Pryde’s particle cannon, thermal levels had shot perilously near redline. She could not jump again immediately or even risk a chasing shot. Instead, with sweat pouring down face and flanks in the furnace of her cockpit, she must settle for rocking the BattleMech into a walk, its feet clinging magnetically to the deckplate at every step.
Unlike her Shrike, the Turkina could flip its arms to fire backward. This Jana Pryde did, raking Malvina with autocannon fire. Red warnings gleamed in Malvina’s HUD. Fifty-millimeter shells had taken out a pair of launch tubes on her right side. In the wireframe damage display her ’Mech’s whole front seemed to glow amber. Already she could take little more punishment before starting to lose systems wholesale.
Instead of accelerating, she fired a PPC as soon as she dared. It tore open the flex housing of the Turkina’s right elbow joint in a rooster tail of orange sparks, exposing myomer pseudomuscles bunching and relaxing on endosteel armatures.
