by Victor Milán
Tara’s neurohelmet crackled with a sudden cloudburst of reports. Already being driven back, the Gyrfalcons now retreated as word of their invincible commander’s fall spread like fire. They went firing, in good order, as befit Clanners. But they went.
Away over the shattered apartment roof-line, a parachute blossomed. Tara Bishop’s zero-altitude ejection system had functioned as designed, and by lucky accident launched her like a mortar round in the direction of safety.
If, of course, she was still alive to be safe. Tara’s heart twinged. So many had died today. But TB was her friend.
“Countess!” a voice cried on the First Kearny net. To her surprise she recognized the voice of Lieutenant Gelb, recently promoted to command of a heavy armor lance.
“More devils! They’re coming out of the woods!”
It was not approved radio discipline, but it worked. Tara looked around to see the muzzle flashes and brilliant colored beams of many heavy weapons, clearly vehicle- and ’Mech-borne, stab out from among the trees. She gave the order to withdraw.
It tasted like the ashes cast up from beneath the feet of the advancing enemy ’Mechs.
33
New London
Skye
15 August 3134
“Excuse me.”
At the softly spoken, almost diffident words the short, round-bellied man with the red muttonchops whirled. He still had a pair of black formal socks, gel-soled for comfort, clutched in a cheese-white hand. He had been on the verge of stuffing them into his valise on top of a hastily packed jumble of clothing and effects.
“Who the blazes are you?” Chief Minister Augustus Solvaig demanded. The fighting to the west was audible as a constant mutter of distant thunder, punctuated by distinct crumps.
“No one,” said the man who had invaded the bedroom of the chief minister’s surprisingly modest bungalow on New London’s northwest side. “Just a fool. A knave, if you like.”
Eyes bugging from his pale, pitted cheeks, Solvaig sized him up. He didn’t look like much, only slightly taller than the chief minister himself, within a centimeter or so of average height for an adult Inner Sphere male. His hair was dark, not long but not particularly short, receding from a widow’s peak. Yet his manner was confident beyond arrogance—beyond even the arrogance of a man who had strolled uninvited into the bedroom of the second most powerful man on Skye. And the black motorcycle leathers he wore were trimmed close to a figure that might have belonged to a professional gymnast, wide across the hips but flat of belly, carrying no slack.
“How did you get in?” Solvaig asked.
“Picked the lock.” He smiled and tipped the shades with the upward-angled half-oval lenses down his nose. His eyes were dark and Asian-shaped.
“And you, Mr. Chief Minister. What might you be doing?”
He waved around at the bedroom. Drawers hung open as if ransacked. Various possessions lay jumbled on the bed.
“Deserting a ship you think might be sinking?” He chuckled and shook his head. “Your pardon, Excellency; I malign you, I know. I should say, rather, that you’re taking advantage of the confusion to depart because your work here is done.”
His smile widened to expose his eyeteeth. “Your real work, that is.”
“Whatever you want,” the minister said, “I can make it worth your while to do nothing more than stand aside and allow me to walk out of here. Very worth your while indeed.”
Then his left hand snapped up from behind him holding a laser pistol. His right still held his socks. He presented the deadly energy gun for a pointblank hip shot as if he knew how to do it.
But the intruder, smiling blandly, was already sliding toward him like oil over water.
Close: too close.
Weston Heights
15 August 3134
Malvina Hazen still clung to life, if barely, when her sibkin, ignoring the shrill warnings of the radiation counter in his cooling vest, tenderly extracted her from the wreckage of her cockpit.
The enemy had already vanished back among the shattered apartment buildings. Aleks’ Zetas had secured the open ground. Lead elements of Turkina Keshik had come up as well; their Solahma and Eyrie infantry had begun probing into the built-up area.
A Turkina’s Beak VTOL touched down to dust the badly injured Galaxy Commander off to the Turkina Keshik landing zone. Aleks stooped to lay his sister gently on the stretcher. The blood that wrapped her body like a net came mostly, he had ascertained, from superficial cuts by flying fragments. But blood ran from her mouth, a bad sign, and her Shrike’s cockpit had been full of toxic gases, products of burning or heat-induced outgassing from internal components.
He knelt beside her, gazing down at her lovely and curiously peaceful face—as if this were the first true ease she had known in years, if not her life. Her pink, fever-flushed forehead already bloomed with bruise-like petechiae, produced by radiation-sundered capillaries. In themselves, he knew, they signified little: they were temporary, and could be produced by minor exposure not otherwise harmful.
He brushed a stray lock of hair, its near-white pallor sullied by oil and char, from her forehead. Then he stood and signed for the medical techs to take her aboard the helo. It lifted in a swirl of dust.
“Let us go,” Aleks radioed his companions, once back in White Lily’s cockpit. “Time to finish this.”
New London
15 August 3134
“—fighting moved into the western suburbs of New London,” the impersonal news-voice said from the speakers of the burly Harley-Indian-Messerschmitt motorcycle. “Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner has vowed to turn the invaders back before they reach the city proper. . . .”
Ten blocks away from the chief minister’s house the average-sized man put down a booted leather-clad leg as he swung the 1800-cc bike to a stop. The streets here were deserted. People were staying home, trusting to their Duke.
More fools they.
The man sat upright in the saddle and pushed his shades down his nose. A chill breeze blew snow in his face, and a choking stink of smoke. To the west a column of brownish-white smoke rose from a base that seemed as wide as a small city in itself. Its lower portion was lit from within by an unhealthy pallid-orange light, with flares like parti-colored lightning adding their hues at random intervals. The battle sounds had grown to a sussurating growl.
“It’s no concern of yours,” he said to himself. “Your job here’s done.”
As if in reply, a column of orange sparks shot into the air like an immense Roman candle. It was clearly closer than the smoke column. The crump and crackle of the serial blasts reached him far sooner than he wanted to hear them.
The news said the roads to the spaceport northeast of town, on the north shore of Thames Bay, were jammed up tight: it was why he had the radio on. So he told himself. If there was transport available off-world it could lift without concern: the JFs had left no ships in space near Skye to intercept them.
Nor were Falcon aerospace fighters a concern, although interlaced contrails and the occasional black smudge where one rocket jock had gotten lucky and another’s luck had all run out scored the sky high to the southwest. The New London spaceport was guarded so densely by heavy weapons and air-defense batteries that not even Falcon fighters cared to test it. Clanners abhorred waste, after all.
Of course, if any bottoms were lifting offworld, passage inboard them would be at a mad premium. But getting onto or off planets despite all obstacles was a specialty of the man on the big Elsie bike, which grumbled on idle as if eager to be off again.
It was far easier than, say, impersonating an accountant. Even a forensic one. He suspected his superiors were deliberately tormenting him with his latest cover.
Then again, they’d have long since liquidated him, if he weren’t one of their top field operators.
“And much too professional,” he said aloud, “to let personal attachments get in the way.
“And then again,” he said as the raps of more ex
plosions reached his ears, louder and sharper and from close enough by that he got a little after-ring of high-frequency harmonics in his ears, and even thought he felt a puff of dynamic overpressure on his face, “then again, the Falcon invasion threatens the whole Inner Sphere. Let them get their toehold here and their whole Touman will follow—and how long will it take every holdout Crusader crazy and young glory hound from all the damned Clans to join the march toward the center, after that?
“And then again—” he sighed—“I’ve always been a romantic fool at heart.”
He turned his fat front tire to the west and all the fuss, and kicked the bike to roaring life.
Weston Heights
15 August 3134
Taking control of the advance, Bec Malthus showed no mean skill as a battle commander. He threw his fresh Turkina Keshik against the Highlanders and militia, driving them briskly back through the houses and schools and shops of Weston. Aleks’ troops followed in echelon left, supporting the Keshik and sending out Elemental patrols to mop up bypassed pockets of resistance.
Shocked by their charismatic leader-goddess’ fall, the Gyrfalcons had cracked right across. If there was one thing Malthus knew, it was Jade Falcon character; if he sent Delta Galaxy into battle again it would snap. Its men and women would hurl themselves shrieking on the nearest foe without thought of defense, not stopping until all were slain. Having at the moment no need for suicide attacks he sent the Gyrs off to the north to guard his flank—mainly to lurk in the woods, where they could assuage their raptor egos sniping at Duke Gregory and serve the authentic function of keeping him from aiding Countess Tara Campbell.
Tara Campbell, for her part, fought as good a withdrawal, maybe, as could be fought. She would have credited her troops, the steely skill of her Highlanders and the Seventh Skye Militia’s fury at the violation of their homes. The Garryowens hungered especially for revenge: their comrades had borne the brunt of the Falcon advance. Both the formerly careless and disreputable locals, now in their glory and fighting like tigers, and certain backwoodsmen from Northwind’s northern continent displayed a startling facility for rapidly improvised and savagely lethal booby traps.
Still, a fighting retreat, no matter how brilliant, is nothing more than losing slow. Turkina Keshik was proud, fresh and fearless. The defenders gave them as much as human flesh and Clan could stand, and more. When at last the Republicans broke contact and fell back upon their seminary hill, the Keshik warriors stopped to rest and tend their wounds.
So in the end it fell to Aleks’ once-despised Turkina’s Beak, tired but triumphant, to mount the last advance and seize the prize: the planet Skye.
* * *
Let Bacchus’ sons be not dismayed,
But join with me, each jovial blade—
Come, booze and sing and lend your aid
To help me with the chorus.
The man whose name was not, any longer, Paul Laveau was well and truly in the wind, riding flat out, leaning over the bars of the HIM cruiser and shouting a song into its teeth:
Instead of spa, we’ll drink brown ale
And we’ll pay the reckoning on the nail;
For debt no man shall go to jail
From Garryowen in glory!”
Okay, he admitted to himself. I lied to Tara when I said I didn’t know “Garryowen.” It was one of only two I told her.
Of course, the other was a little more substantial. . . .
He was so near the fighting now that a misaimed volley of LRMs brought down the facades of two trim brick houses, one yellow, one red, in the center of a cross-street block to his left as he passed. The racket of explosions and collapse could barely be distinguished for the general din.
Ahead of him, just half a kilometer away, he could see the hill with the seminary building on top of it and the Highland command post on the near slope. Just to his right stood Tara’s distinctive Hatchetman, with a bend in the weird tailfin assembly on its head crest. Five other BattleMechs stood or clanked around, getting set to meet the Falcon onslaught.
Much nearer to his left he saw a big Clan ’Mech striding among houses. His face split in a wide grin as he recognized an old friend among hostile strangers: “A Phoenix Hawk IIC, by God!” Though the Falcons had it tarted up with that ridiculous hawk head—the wings it had already—they seemed to be sticking on all their new models and upgrades these days.
He stopped the bike, kicked down the stand, dismounted and opened the big panniers beside the rear tire. He removed certain items which he tucked into zippered pockets of his leather jacket and pants. One particular item he tucked, gingerly and not without a silent unbeliever’s prayer, inside the front of his waistband.
Then he remounted, retracted the kickstand, ripped the engine back to life, and sang:
We are the boys that take delight
In smashing the Limerick lamps when lighting,
And through the streets like scorchers fighting
Tearing all before us.
He rode full-throttle toward the Phoenix Hawk, just as if he knew what he was doing.
Or not.
“Countess,” Duke Gregory’s gruff voice said, “we’re sorely pressed up here. Can you send us help?”
Tara straightened her Hatchetman’s legs to shoot its shoulder-mounted medium laser over the brow of the hill at a Bellona tank that had nosed forward between two houses to her right to try to get a shot at the seminary defenders. The shot gouged armor from the turret’s front. The hovertank fired its own large laser back, burning another track across the abused sod a few meters down-slope from where Tara’s machine lurked and sniped. It ducked back amid a blast of debris kicked up by its fans.
“Negative, your Grace,” Tara said, crouching again so that she could just peer over the blades of grass on the hilltop. “I’m sorry. But we’re about to get all we can handle here: looks as if they’re massing for a big push. If something breaks I’ll send you all I can as soon as I can, but beyond that I can’t make any promises.”
“Understood,” the Duke said promptly and without rancor. Under the stress of combat he behaved far more reasonably than most times Tara had dealt with him before, at least up until the very last few days.
Not that it was likely to mean much for long. “Here they come!” she heard somebody shout as the Duke signed off, from her external audio pickups, not over the radio net. And ’Mechs and vehicles and Elementals and infantry swarmed out of the battered houses as Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen mounted his attack on the planet Skye’s last line of defense.
“Give ’em hell, Highlanders!” she shouted. Republican ’Mechs and vehicles rushed forward to the crest to pour desperate fire upon the attackers.
Not Paul Laveau sang as he scaled the Phoenix Hawk:
We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors,
The watch knocked down by threes and fours,
Tonight the doctors work their cures.
And tinker up our bruises.
The light ’Mech stood at the rear of what looked like a supermarket, shooting its torso-mounted autocannon over the loading dock at a pair of Demon wheeled tanks. Its pilot, distracted, had not noticed Paul’s approach. Nor was the MechWarrior likely to even dream anyone would be rash enough to climb the machine’s back with a pair of gripper gloves. Paul wondered, briefly, what the Demon drivers made of the sight.
We’ll beat the bailiffs out of fun,
We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run
We are the boys no man dares dun
If he regards a whole skin.
It made him smile: that always was his favorite verse. Even if he couldn’t hear himself over the cannon yammer.
He had his rationalizations well in a row by then. It was not in his employers’ interests for the Falcons to get a grip anywhere in the Inner Sphere, Republic or otherwise. So he was permitted to do his chaotic part to spike their nefarious schemes.
When he reached the Hawk’s shoulder he was slightly breathless from the exer
tion of swarming up the enemy machine. Weeks of sedentary detective work had told on him. It certainly wasn’t trepidation: his illustrious great-grandmother, Cassie Southern, had taught him the fine points of taking on ’Mechs bare-handed as well as pentjak. Even if, unlike her, he was glad to keep his damned trousers on.
One of the Demons exploded. The other reversed hastily out of sight around a corner. Paul didn’t mind; he had been concerned they’d blast him shooting at the Phoenix Hawk. He sang to himself, scarcely voicing:
Our hearts so stout have got us fame,
For soon ’tis known from whence we came—
He planted his feet on the Phoenix Hawk’s shoulder, hoping it wouldn’t decide to run anywhere, slapping his left hand against the cockpit armor to anchor himself. He bit the non-adhesive back of the right-hand gauntlet to loosen it from his hand, shook it free, let it drop. His freed hand reached for that which he carried in his waistband.
Where’er we go, they dread the name—
Yanking his left hand free, he used it to punch the rescue bar. The cockpit popped open with a hiss of equalizing air pressure.
The Mech Warrior turned with a look of utter astonishment—
Of Garryowen in glory.
Into the ruby flash of a laser pistol.
Tucking the pistol away again—because you just never knew when one of those might come in handy—Paul swung himself into the cockpit with his butt on the instrument panel. He punched the harness release and tumbled the decapitated body out into the now-cold winter air. A woman. It gave him a qualm, but no more than killing a man. He felt no guilt at taking the life of a Clan warrior, any more than he would a trachazoi pouncing with the intent of eating his brain. But he had resolved never to take killing a human being lightly.