Flight of the Falcon

by Victor Milán

  It was Aleks Hazen’s intention to give maximum battle experience to his ground forces rather than his fighters and DropShips. But everyone in his Galaxy fought under orders to protect the landing ships at all costs. All the resources the expeditionary force possessed were none too great for the awesome task confronting it. Combat DropShips, like other military assets, had been reduced in number throughout the Inner Sphere through the intercession of Devlin Stone. The invaders could not rely on replacing the vital craft from isorla, the Clan term for plunder.

  Allison starport’s day-to-day defense was in the charge of a company of local militia, infantry armed primarily with slug-throwing assault rifles and armored with battle-dress blouses. Few even wore helmets, affecting instead jaunty teal berets or olive drab boonie hats. At any one time, one platoon was deployed in active patrols around the perimeter and among the ships and structures, one was on standby in the central terminal structure, and one stood down in the attached barracks. In practice that meant that most of the platoon in the terminal was asleep, many of the one officially in barracks away on leave.

  Once upon a time the port had boasted substantial defenses: missile pits, great lasers and particle-beam cannon. These had been disassembled decades before in the Inner Sphere-wide euphoria over The Republic’s swords-into-plowshares policy. To maintain such pre-Republic defenses, it was generally held, if not frequently put into words, was tantamount to inviting the bad old times back.

  So the heavy defensive weaponry was long gone. And the bad times came back in trumps: a trey of stars, three Jade Falcon DropShips riding sunfire.

  Of the troops on foot and vehicle patrol around the port, some simply hid, or scaled the fence and ran away across the fields to hide in the transient suburbs which sprang up nearby during the sixty-two-year calm spells between bouts of catastrophic weather. The rest, most of them, turned to meet the invaders.

  Even before the Union C–class vessel had settled its forty-seven hundred tons on its landing jacks on the pavement and the last flames had quit flickering above the blast-pit rim, sally ports opened and the bulky man-shapes of Elementals in Clan battle armor suits sailed out on the impulses of their jump jets. They fanned out around the vessel as muzzle flashes sparked from militiamen lying in the grass around the apron or crouching beside parked service vehicles. A few laser rifles stabbed ruby beams toward the leaping squat figures on the ship.

  A point of aerospace fighters streaked past low and subsonic to the north of the main terminal. Flame blossomed as they strafed and rocketed the barracks.

  The Elementals struck ground twenty meters or so beyond the ovoid DropShip’s splayed landing jacks, bounded into the air again. Ramps had descended to the pavement. BattleMechs now began to clump down behind them, a dozen, more.

  At sight of the metal behemoths, some vaguely manlike, some not at all, many more of the militia threw down their weapons and fled. Everybody knew what ’Mechs were—the tri-vid adventures were full of them. Which was the problem: they were terrifying potencies, monsters from another age. Most people of The Republic of the Sphere had never seen more than one or two in person in all their lives. Now, confronted with what to them was a stupefying profusion of the giant killing machines, many simply panicked.

  The Elementals descended toward the ragged lines of prone riflemen. Liquid flame gushed from the arms of their armor. The militia troops became torches, to rise and run screaming, leaving footsteps of flame dying slowly behind them in the dew-moist morning grass.

  Other power-armored giants unleashed rockets from launchers rising to either side of their heads like grotesque shoulder padding. The heavy short-range missiles shattered stacked cargo crates and the bodies of troops firing from their shelter. One cargo mule rose several meters in the air upon a speed-growing stalk of smoke flowered scarlet in flame, then toppled back to the pavement.

  From a fen outside the perimeter wire a huge flock of waterfowl rose into the sky on two-meter wingspans. They streamed away from the port like a cloud of white crosses.

  With the BattleMechs laying down a base of fire the Elementals moved onward, pursuing fleeing foes or rooting them out from among the buildings nearest the ship. Vehicles and unpowered infantry were streaming down the ramps now, spreading out in turn to secure the vast facility.

  The battle for the spaceport was over. Only the killing went on.

  “We cannot do that!”

  “The word cannot is not in the Clan Jade Falcon lexicon, Star Captain Mason,” Aleks said affably into the boom microphone of his neurohelmet. He sat in the cockpit of his fifty-five-ton Gyrfalcon BattleMech clad only in shorts over his coolsock. He was totally relaxed. His reservations, strategic as well as moral, about the assault remained in full effect. He had pushed them totally from his consciousness, and was now aware of nothing except happy anticipation of doing what he had literally been bred, raised and trained his whole life to do.

  “Besides,” he continued to the officer commanding his DropShip, descending toward the outskirts of Allison City with atmosphere pounding and shrieking at the hull as if in protest of this violation, “we obviously can. The place I told you to land lies beneath us; we are dropping toward it. All we need do is allow things to take their natural course.”

  “But it is swamp,” the captain protested. “I would not dare even hot-drop you and your ’Mechs into such terrain, Galaxy Commander!”

  By hot-drop he meant dropping the jump-capable ’Mechs of Aleks’ command, which was most of them, from his craft while it remained airborne. He was bold to speak in such a manner. Almost any other Galaxy Commander would have relieved him of command by now and called him out into the bargain. Malvina would probably have popped out of her cockpit, clambered up to the bridge, and put the captain’s brains all over his own bridge viewscreen with her sidearm. The thought made Aleks smile.

  He himself felt no rancor toward Star Captain Mason. Although he had not fought with Mason before—only Magnus Icaza and Folke Jorgensson had accompanied him to Zeta Galaxy—he was satisfied that Mason was a competent, courageous officer. His concern was how best to use his ship in the Falcon’s service, not craven personal safety.

  “I test the mettle of my pilots as much as my Mech Warriors,” Aleks said. “You have landing jacks, Star Captain, quiaff?”

  “Aff.”

  “Use them. Put us down where I have said. Hold us level with jets and gyros while we debark. If you start to sink after, blast free and fly away and land where you please. Only get us off first!”

  “But, Galaxy Commander! If we topple we could all be killed, our equipment lost!”

  Aleks laughed. “We all die sometime, Star Captain. If I am wrong I shall pay the price. Now show me that as a true Falcon’s son you know how to fly—or how to die. Quiaff?”

  Since Porrima was the direct holding of the Archon, ruler of the Lyran Commonwealth, both jump points were watched by remote observation outposts. When the Jade Falcon fleet appeared at the zenith point it curtly informed the station of its ostensible purpose in entering the system: the maskirovka. The station’s commander protested the intrusion briskly.

  Given that it was an unarmed space station with a complement of about twenty confronting a sizable fleet including armed JumpShips, DropShips and a full-on battleship, the sheer bravado of the stationmaster’s reply favorably impressed the Clanners from Star Admiral Dolphus Binetti down. It probably saved the station crew’s lives.

  Shortly after emergence, one of the JumpShips launched a shuttle and a Star of ten aerospace fighters. An underofficer on the Emerald Talon broadcast a “courtesy” call to the station to inform them that this was a training exercise, of no concern to the Porrima authorities nor the station occupants, and, of course, to threaten prompt retribution if the station interfered in any way. Which it palpably could not, thus showcasing Clan Jade Falcon concepts both of courtesy and humor.

  In the course of juking through space, spilling bundles of radar-reflecting aluminum-coa
ted plastic chaff in hopes of evading its pursuers, the shuttle dodged within a hundred meters of the station. The flyby evoked a storm of complaint from the station, which this time was met by bland obduracy, as if Falcon Clanners understood neither English nor German.

  Between their excitement at the reckless near-miss and the war fleet’s infuriating nonresponse, and a good deal of internal commentary on high-handed Clan arrogance, no one heard a thing as ten small rubberized magnets clamped themselves to the hull near the main airlock. Nor did they hear the lock’s outer hatch open and close, nor hear it cycle.

  Their first warning was the slight pressure change as the inner hatch opened. And then it was much too late. The station’s unarmed crew—nominally military, but in fact LCAF technicians who had no weapons nor even instruction in their use beyond a gesture in that direction during basic training—found themselves facing five figures, four gigantic in armor and one dwarfed by them in a standard EVA pressure suit. They also faced three microlasers swapped with flamers—a daft weapon in enclosed quarters—in the arms of three contemporary suits of Clan battle armor, an old-style suit’s small laser, and one pulse-laser pistol gripped in a spacesuit-gauntleted hand.

  “I am Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen of Clan Jade Falcon,” the smallest figure, who still loomed over all the observation post’s crew, said in a pleasant and cheerful baritone voice. “You are now my captives.”

  And so they were. In part because of the courage shown by their initial challenge, no Falcon challenged Aleks’ mandate that the crew be kept safe under lock down and then released unharmed when the Clanners had no further use for their silence.

  After the initial excited reports of the Jade Falcon emergence, all further beamcasts from the station indicated that nothing whatever of interest occurred.

  Somehow they omitted to mention when half a dozen DropShips detached themselves from JumpShips and headed for the ecliptic at a one-gee standard burn.

  “No opposition, Aleks,” Star Colonel Magnus Icaza’s voice said into Aleks’ earpiece. “I am disappointed in these Porrimans.”

  The giant stood in his Elemental battle armor beside the Gyrfalcon’s right foot on the low, marshy bank of the river. It was the classic armor with head and torso one immovable egg-shaped piece, not the current mark with a helmet that could swivel like a tank turret. When monster Magnus had passed his Elemental Trial of Position on Winfield in the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone, it was determined that none of the modern armor in the armory fit him. The techs had to pull an old outfit out of storage.

  “Hmm,” Aleks said, smiling. “I think they will oblige us right enough.”

  He called his fifty-five-ton BattleMech “White Lily,” after the personal insignia painted on the front of its left shoulder: a lily gripped in a steel-gauntleted fist. He swiveled the machine’s torso right to point toward a black column of smoke unspooling into the sky from the superhighway, several kilometers south, which led into the walled city. It put behind him the looming egg-shaped mass of the DropShip, which had sunk in almost to the flared Venturi nozzles of the drives in the soft bank. Star Captain Mason had put the ship down without further demur and with exquisite skill.

  For his part, Aleks had already forgotten the man’s reluctance. What was this misbegotten raid for, if not to give his men and women the chance to show what they were really made of?

  “Our friends in the First Mixed Cluster report some brisk resistance,” Aleks said. He had taken the unorthodox step of combining his Eyrie and Solahma Clusters and then splitting them into mixed formations. The second he had dispatched north to raid the great Heimdal mining complex on Steinerheim, the supercontinent sprawled across the planet’s north pole.

  Eyries consisted of youngsters who had yet to prove themselves in battle. The Solahma comprised older warriors who had lost Trials of Position and were deemed no longer fit for front-line service. He felt the youngsters—who as, basically, adolescents were reckless even by Jade Falcon standards—could use the tempering the veterans could provide. And the older warriors might benefit from exposure to youthful eagerness and energy. He had tried similar expedients successfully before, and hoped it would help his green Galaxy with its legacy of disgrace stand up to its first immersion in the combat cauldron.

  “The defenders have deployed heavy anti-armor weapons in reasonably good hasty positions,” reported Star Captain Folke Jorgensson, approaching in his Black Hawk. Clan Jade Falcon maintained none of the fifty-ton ’Mechs in its BattleMech park. The Ghost Bear abtakha had taken the machine from Clan Wolf even as he himself had earlier been taken from them. “That’s one of our precious few Mars assault vehicles you see burning down there; apparently the Porrimans have mastered the concepts of ambush and rear-aspect shots at heavy armor.”

  Aleks’ brow creased briefly. The boxy one-hundred-ton Mars with its massive armor and bristle of heavy weaponry had made up much of the mass of the blow the Mixed Cluster was hurling down the blacktop toward the city’s now-sealed stressed-cement floodgates. Most of the Third Falcon Velites’ BattleMechs and all their own armor, landed from Aleks’ DropShip, were striking south overland to take the highway defenders in the flank.

  “They wanted us blooded,” he said in a clouded voice. “Now blooded we are.”

  Magnus Icaza clanged his suit’s right arm, the one mounted with a manipulator claw, on the bulging armored housing protecting the right-ankle actuator of Aleks’ Gyrfalcon. “We’ll make it up with isorla and more, Aleks, lad.”

  “If they have any booty worth the taking—” Jorgensson began.

  Magnus Icaza snorted thunderously. “We need no Ghost Bear gloom here, Folke Jorgensson.”

  “—or if any survives the taking, my overly sanguine Elemental friend.” Aleks had long learned he could trust the two to banter almost ceaselessly without one ever going for the other’s throat. Magnus, outsized since birth, had enjoyed a situation opposite to runt Aleksandr’s sibko experience: he had been so huge even other Elementals were reluctant to tangle with him. Folke, a perfectionist, shared Aleks’ keen hatred of waste. Nor did he feel, having won his freedom, his BattleMech, and his right to use the Bloodname he had already won in blood in his birth-Clan, that he had anything more to prove. Seven Falcons decanted had taken Jorgensson’s reticence for cowardice since Aleks had severed the last of his bondsman’s cords. Two had actually survived, though one was so badly injured that he had been forced to retire to a Solahma unit and had found an honorable death against Periphery pirates.

  Aleks set off straight toward the city, leading a Star of five jump-capable ’Mechs and a Star of twenty-five Elementals—five Points of five warriors each. Shortly they came on a great cement-lined gouge in the earth: a flood-control ditch, meant to channel the catastrophic floods which occurred every sixty-two years away from the city’s walls. Aleks’ DropShip had mapped the channel complex from space; a display of it glowed in the cockpit before him. A path in red led to a point hard beneath the walls themselves.

  He led his scratch Binary right into the channel. A trickle of oil-sheened water meandered along its wide bottom. The channel provided his strike force a high-speed route, allowing the machines to move at near the top pace of the slowest BattleMech. It also gave excellent concealment from observation. The channels were twelve meters deep, as required to contain the violent floods of storm season; the BattleMechs could march unseen. To avoid having them leap into view like killer locusts, the Elementals rode clinging to the BattleMechs like baby opossums.

  Aleks hoped that by gaining a swift, decisive advantage he could persuade the poor children of Allison City to surrender before he had to kill too many of them.

  They reached the nearest approach of the channel to the city walls. Not built as defenses, at least against human threats, the walls here rose almost sheer twenty meters above ground level. Overhead observation on descent had confirmed what Aleks learned from the world’s entry in the Fleet database: that the walls were thirty meters thick at
the base, sloping along the backside to ten meters’ width at the top.

  A leap from the bottom of the flood-control ditch brought him to the lip between it and the wall. With neither command nor checking to see if the others followed he gathered his ’Mech and jumped to the top of the wall. As he did, he extended the metal wings built onto the back of his hawk-headed BattleMech; they served no purpose but to strike fear in foes and make the statement that Clan Jade Falcon had come. Aleks liked their theatrical touch himself.

  A half kilometer to his right rose the control housings for the massive floodgates that blocked the road into Allison City. The leading elements of his mixed Cluster had already battled within a few hundred meters of the gates along the eight-lane highway and the ground to both sides. They had successfully forced passage of the long bridge over the Equanica River and now fought to cross the second bridge, across the flood channel from which Aleks and his strike force had just emerged.

  White smoke tentacles reached out toward Aleks’ BattleMech.

  7

  Allison City

  Porrima

  3 April 3134

  Aleks looked down into the city. A mixed force of armor and unarmored infantry approached the gate from within, supported by a gigantic M1 Marksman tank and a Ryoken II BattleMech.

  He grinned. A favorite among the Wolves, the seventy-five-ton ’Mech was an old friend. It was a very serious machine, as for that matter was the ninety-five-ton tank. Golden Age of Peace or not, the Archon had provided her suzerainty some real firepower.

  “ ’Mech’s mine,” he said over the Binary command channel, and jumped. “Take down the rest. Try not to damage the gatehouses.”

  The rocket barrage, fired from both tank and BattleMech, smashed down where the Gyrfalcon had briefly stood, sending out great geysers of grayish dirt from the wall’s berm backslope and slabs of cement flying from its top. He shot back with the Ultra autocannon in his ’Mech’s arms. His Gyrfalcon bled heat beautifully; he could run and jump and shoot all day so long as he was judicious in firing his two large extended-range lasers, also arm-mounted.