by Victor Milán
A moment to bleed heat. Then Malvina accelerated to a run. The Turkina grounded briefly as Malvina swerved around a small shuttlecraft still in its berth. Both ’Mechs fired PPCs, missed.
Before Greenfeather the hangar deck’s rear bulkhead loomed like a dully gleaming cliff of steel. A ’Mech-sized gangway leading aft to a machine shop opened in its base. Malvina knew the shop had been blasted open to space as well. She ground her teeth. She must not escape!
The Turkina leapt again. A PPC beam brushed the Shrike’s left flank. Electronics screamed.
Malvina jumped, throttled her main forward-thrust jets to full. A spread of rockets sparkled off all over the Turkina ’s back. Using her targeting computer, she thrust twin green-laser spears into the rear housing of the left-shoulder LRM rack. Molten metal splashed away.
Expecting her opponent to bolt down the tunnel, Malvina ceased firing. She left her throttles wide open, preventing her heat gauge from dropping. I’ve got you now, she thought, unconsciously flexing the clawed right hand of her ’Mech.
When she overtook her prey, heat would not matter.
But instead of diving into blackness, Jana Pryde declutched her gyros and with a pulse of maneuvering jets pitched the Turkina ninety degrees back, so that it flew feet-first. To brake she fired the powerful main jump jets on her legs.
Greenfeather’s feet hit so hard the enormously strong bulkhead perceptibly flexed. Malvina actually thought her audio pickups caught the ghost of a clang transmitted through the super-thin atmosphere still trapped within the hangar deck.
Flying full-speed, she had no choice but to plunge into the tunnel herself. In her three-sixty vision strip she caught a glimpse of the Turkina, its backward knees flexing deeply to absorb the impact. She hoped its structure might fail as she flashed into the passageway.
She fired the retropaks strapped to the Shrike’s sides. A kiss from Jana Pryde’s PPCs had slagged one of the paired right-hand rockets. Overriding the collective controls, Malvina played the jets individually like a maestro as the machine shop lights sped toward her. Flames lit the passageway in garish flickering blue. If she misjudged by the slimmest sliver she would send Black Rose spinning out of control, bouncing off the steel walls. If she didn’t stop in time, she would slam into the shop’s after bulkhead.
The Shrike flew back into the light. Huge vertical mills hunched to either side like quarter-sized BattleMechs, interspersed with multiaxial machining centers the size and general shape of hovervans. The path ahead was clear almost to the waiting bulkhead.
Malvina dropped her ’Mech’s claws to the deck. They rang, sparked, tore through magnetized plastomer nonskid matting. She applied full downthrust as well as retros. Before her, a lathe with a two-meter-wide chuck stood almost to Black Rose’s knee level.
Shrieking like a damned thing, swerving like a downhill skier under Malvina’s iron control, the great machine came to a stop with its armored shins less than half a meter from the lathes.
Malvina’s whole small body surged in a sigh.
She pivoted the Shrike as quickly as she could, applying subtle downthrust to keep her ’Mech’s feet from losing their magnetic grip on the deck, which they had deeply scored in twin trails leading from the gangway. Crouched, she waited, weapons trained back down the black passage, should Jana Pryde choose to follow.
Nothing occulted the hangar deck glow. The battleship’s metallic asteroid mass hid her enemy totally from her sensors. She had no idea where the Turkina was.
A moment longer she paused, breathing heavily. Her whole body was tightened like a finger on a trigger at the point of breaking. Her mind moved rapidly and methodically, taking stock of the damage her Rose had suffered.
To her annoyance she was sure she had got the worse of it. When she recalled the last stored wireframe schematic of Greenfeather it showed substantial weakening of the upper-right front armor on the Turkina’s fuselage, and a breach with possible systems damage to its left-shoulder LRM launcher. The battle computer did not think she had disabled either particle cannon despite tearing open the arm.
In return, Malvina had lost a couple of maneuver jets and three of ten LRM tubes. Her frontal-torso and right-leg armor had basically turned to lacy filigree: a good hard puff would blow it away, leaving the Shrike’s vitals exposed. One arm-mounted PPC sporadically flickered red in the HUD, indicating only a single control circuit still functioned. And it was shorting unpredictably.
Grimly Malvina smiled. Drawing upon the wealth of isorla taken in the battles since leaving Skye, including the enormous bounty of the victory on Antares, her Black Rose had been restored three times. Now she was a wreck again, held together mainly by her mistress’ titanium will.
Hold for me a little longer, girl, she thought. Then you can rest for a long time.
She gathered the massive ’Mech and leapt straight up through the roughly circular hull breach overhead. She used her leg jets’ full upward thrust to pop out like a cork from a bottle, hoping to spoil her enemy’s targeting solution should Jana Pryde be crouched waiting on the outer hull.
Instead she glimpsed the Turkina, blue jets spurting upward from its shoulders, running ponderously away along the hull. It flared blue as it crossed the terminator into the full hot glare of Sudeten’s sun, and vanished.
‘‘Flee, then.’’ For the first time Malvina broke radio silence—although it was unlikely her enemy heard her, unless one of Jana Pryde’s seconds, watching from a craft beyond the Circle of Equals, bounced the message along to her. ‘‘I will catch you, never fear.’’
She fired her own down-jets to kill her upward momentum, so that she hung apparently motionless above the pitted metal planetoid that was the Emerald Talon. Slowly, with a great creaking and groaning of protest through her BattleMech’s tortured structure, she lowered the ornamental wings to full extension.
A pulse of down-jets; a kiss of upthrust. The magnetic pads on her Shrike’s feet engaged the hull with barely a bump. Then firing the down-jets again, she set Black Rose into the fastest run it was capable of, toward the nearest ‘‘horizon.’’
Sudeten’s blue-white star rose fifteen degrees to her right. Malvina had her eyes at soft focus, taking in the totality of multiple sensor inputs and the view through her viewscreen as only a trained and skilled MechWarrior could do, seeking any sign of her foe. She guessed Jana Pryde would have put all the room between herself and her pursuer she could before turning to make a stand.
She could not question Jana Pryde’s prowess as a Mech-Warrior—or her bravery. Despite the taunts she had thrown in her face, Malvina Hazen knew her enemy was very good indeed. Her insults were meant to provoke Jana Pryde, disrupt her normally keen thinking. As they had.
But if Jana Pryde fought with the fantastic skill and icy fury that exemplified the best of a Falcon warrior, she also fought very conventionally. So Malvina reckoned.
Wrongly.
Blue radiance flared from a ripped-open naval autocannon turret scarcely twenty-five meters to her left. The blackness of its shadow hid the crouching Turkina, huge as it was. The gun emplacement’s contorted wreckage masked its ferric mass until Jana Pryde loosed all her weaponry at once in a furious alpha strike.
With steel-spring reflexes Malvina jumped, firing back. Tremendous heat sent her fusion reactor into shutdown as rockets, multiple-fragment LB-X slugs, and high-energy particles ripped open her ’Mech’s left side.
With a screech of metal pushed beyond all limits the Shrike’s left leg came free. The viewscreen’s metal frame glowed red from the heat. It was the only light inside the cockpit as Malvina was slammed around in her five-point harness.
Out of control, the Black Rose fell upward-outward from the WarShip, tumbling over and over into infinite night.
32
Jade Falcon DropShip Bec de Corbin
Approaching Sudeten Orbit
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 April 3136
Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus
felt as if his stomach had gone into free fall. More: he had read somewhere how in Star League times some planets built elevators capable of carrying traffic clear into orbit.
His gut felt as if such an elevator had broken free and was plummeting to catastrophic reentry.
It took all his Jade Falcon will to keep his knees from buckling, though their failure would have no more than made him sway in the microgravity of Bec de Corbin’s bridge.
Manas Amirault raised his fists toward the darkened overhead, threw back his head and voiced a wolf-howl of despair.
Only Cynthy seemed unmoved, standing there with her teddy bear draped limply over her crossed arms, watching her captor and foster mother, the self-proclaimed Khan of All Humanity, plunging into interplanetary space in the shattered wreck of her once-proud BattleMech.
Though grounded, the SM1 bucked its front end clear of the hard-packed hilltop when it fired a burst from its immense main gun. The yellow flame that ballooned from the muzzle and jetted sideways from the brake was almost as big as the hovertank itself.
Crouched behind the haunch of an empty shop scarcely fifty meters away Rorion winced as the cannon’s horrendous overpressure assaulted him. The noise didn’t just threaten to implode his eardrums, blast waves slapped his cheeks like invisible palms and threw grit against his face and hands. And worse, into the face of his patrão, where he lay wrapped in his greatcoat with Rorion’s jacket as a pillow.
Blinking concrete dust from his eyes he hissed over the ringing in his ears, ‘‘Quit mumbling to leave you. It won’t happen.’’
He glanced at the small—if only in a relative sense— BattleMech crouched beside them. ‘‘It’s not as if I must carry your bulk myself, anyway.’’
The older man scowled and shook his head. The tank destroyer fired again at its unseen target, across the northern fringe of the ‘‘civilian’’ spaceport.
‘‘How—how did she get a BattleMech, anyway?’’ he asked when the shock wave passed.
‘‘Don’t you have better things to think about, old man?’’ came the voice from the Piranha’s loudspeakers. Senna Rodríguez had the modulation turned low, so that the two men could just hear her over the ringing in their ears.
‘‘Under the circumstances,’’ Heinz-Otto von Texeira croaked, ‘‘no.’’ His cracked lips grinned briefly before twisting in a grimace.
‘‘I’m broken inside, boy,’’ he told his aide. ‘‘I still don’t feel much, thank the Holy Spirit. But the pain is coming. . . ."
‘‘I didn’t rescue you from that Dasher just to lose you, old man,’’ the voice from the machine said. ‘‘I said I would get you two out of here. And I will. I am Sea Fox.’’
‘‘You told us not to trust Clanners,’’ Rorion said.
In his mind he could see the woman’s grin, lopsided and cynical. ‘‘A contract’s a contract, after all.’’
‘‘So where’’—grimace—‘‘did you come by a BattleMech?" von Texeira persisted.
‘‘I knew where it was stored,’’ the master merchant said, ‘‘having just sold it to the Falcons myself. They currently evaluate the design for a scout and anti-infantry ’Mech.’’
‘‘And it was still keyed to your neural signature?’’ Rorion asked.
A rough-road chuckle emerged from the crouching metal humanoid. ‘‘Of course not. As I told you, I am Sea Fox.’’
‘‘Meaning you built in a back door,’’ Rorion said.
Senna said, ‘‘Uh-oh. Get ready—’’
With no more preamble she picked up both men in her ’Mech’s hands. The steel fingers closed about them with remarkable gentleness; for the first time it registered on Rorion that Rodríguez was a MechWarrior Bloodname. He had assumed that the MechWarrior rubric was a formality in the trade-focused Sea Fox Clan. But their ever-surprising ally was showing herself quite adept when it came to piloting a BattleMech.
Rorion deftly snagged his jacket as his master was lifted free of it. It got cold on this Christ-forgotten world for a hot-blooded Recife boy. . . .
Senna raised up just enough to peer around the curved flank of the building. By craning his neck Rorion could see the SM1 parked where the land dropped away to the landing field.
The ground erupted beneath it in a shattering ripple of explosions. The long-range missile salvo lifted the 50-ton tank destroyer two full meters. The SM1 jerked in midair as a huge ferro-nickel Gauss slug plowed into the starboard cockpit and transverse through the turret root at hypersonic speed. The sonic boom of its arrival was louder than its autocannon.
Stored autocannon ammunition exploded in white flashes that seemed to light the world. The big tank flew to pieces. Senna barely ducked the Piranha back down before metal shards, razor-edged and fast as rifle bullets, cracked overhead and clattered like metal hail against the shop’s ferrocrete wall.
The SM1 was a pyre of orange flame and black smoke when the ’Mech straightened to step around the shop. A Point of five conventional infantry in Falcon-painted full-head helmets crouched along the wall of the next building over. They wore green scarves knotted around their thighs and wrists as improvised recognition badges.
The Point commander shouted and pointed. Her four mates raised their laser rifles to aim at the helplessly dangling Spheroid civilians.
A green flash filled Rorion Klimt’s world. The beam of Senna’s left-arm mounted medium laser barely missed him. It did not miss the Slip Point commander. The whole front of her body simply vanished in the hideous glare of coherent light. She fell backward, arms outflung as if crucified. Her body puffed into yellow flame. She was already a lifeless husk with half her bodily fluids turned to steam.
The Sea Fox-built scout BattleMech sported no fewer than six miniguns along either side of its armored torso. These roared, belching long pale-blue and yellow flames. Their awesome muzzle blasts buffeted Rorion as he flailed at his own head with his jacket, trying to put out hair set alight by the Piranha’s laser.
The four Falcon foot soldiers were hosed backward by the ferocious close-range blasts. They fell in pink clouds, leaving great shockingly-bright scarlet smears on the wall behind them.
For a moment all was silent. Probably: all Rorion could hear through the ringing in his ears, now of cathedral-bell majesty, was a tiny musical tinkle as the last arcs of empty brass casings, glittering in the morning sun, fell into ankle-deep pools at the BattleMech’s back and sides.
Stomach roiling to the smells of human insides spilled or flash-cooked, stronger even than the stink of his now mostly extinguished hair, Rorion looked around. The monster that had so summarily snuffed the tank destroyer and its two-man crew from existence lumbered straight toward them, up the hill from marshy flats north of the commercial spaceport. Huge explosions, possibly from Arrow IV bombardment missiles, made tall earth-fountains a quarter kilometer behind it.
‘‘Santa merda!’’ Rorion exclaimed. ‘‘Where’d they get an Atlas?’’
‘‘Isorla,’’ Senna said, ducking between the buildings and peering gingerly around. Rorion winced at the fresh sonic assault from her external speakers: she didn’t bother keeping the gain down now. ‘‘Probably from you Steiners. The Jade Falcons don’t favor them because they’re such waddle-butts. They probably kept this one back for homeworld defense.’’
Rather than the somewhat trite skull with which MechWarriors had bedizened the Atlas’ face, whose shape did strongly suggest it, since the 100-ton BattleMech had first rumbled off the Star League lines half a millennium before, the huge round head was painted in the likeness of Turkina herself. Its blocky upper torso was buff-colored like a jade falcon’s breast, the shoulder armatures like emerald feathers. Even at this range—closer than Rorion found comfortable—it was a surprisingly detailed and beautiful paint job.
Gleaming green-paint feathers suddenly blackened, blistered, burned off in a twist of smoke as a blue beam struck the BattleMech repeatedly from its right. The Atlas turned to launch a spread of LRMs at a black-and-gre
en painted Vulture. Elementals leaping like fleas loosed short-range missiles at the steel titan.
‘‘Who are these people?’’ Rorion asked, as the Piranha turned away into the building’s cover.
‘‘No idea,’’ said Senna. ‘‘The footsloggers I hit were Slips: that’s what the green bandannas meant. Evidently they haven’t had a chance to paint their faction badges on their machines.’’
‘‘Who’s fighting whom?’’
Senna paused to peer around the far end of the cement half cylinder. ‘‘Slips and Jesses. Loremaster Buhalin, bless her pointed little head, sent her goons to arrest her rivals— not just troll in you two and murder my boys in the process. ’’ Bitterness sizzled in her words. ‘‘So to help defend Sudeten against Malvina’s locusts she started a civil war. I guess that’s the reason for the old expression.’’
She set the Piranha into a purposeful stride. Away from the spaceport, Rorion noted, with mingled relief and alarm. How are we getting off this damned planet?
‘‘What old expression?’’ he asked.
‘‘Jade Falcons are stupid.’’
‘‘That’s pithy.’’
He could sense her shrug. ‘‘What do you expect? We’re Clan. Kerensky in His wisdom didn’t have his scientists breed for wit.’’
‘‘Where are we going?’’
‘‘Away.’’
‘‘I can see that.’’ He looked at his senior. Von Texeira hung limp in the BattleMech’s grip, apparently unconscious. I hope only unconscious, he thought.
‘‘We have to get the chefe to medical care.’’
‘‘Not at the spaceport,’’ Senna said. ‘‘It’s shaping up to be a main event. No surprise, I suppose, but I hoped we’d get to my shuttle before fighting overran the port. Not happening.’’
‘‘But what will we do?’’
‘‘Plan B.’’
‘‘Plan B?’’
‘‘Trust me,’’ Senna said.
With deft blue pulses of her maneuvering retros Khan Jana Pryde braked her massive Turkina. It approached a vast free-floating chunk of wreckage. It appeared to be the front half of a military aerodyne DropShip, probably parted from the stern when its power-plant containment failed. It was too distorted to identify the design.
