Binding Force

by Loren L. Coleman

  Aris planned to join them on the battlefield.

  The fourth level of the parking garage was actually the roof, a flat open expanse save for the thin concrete wall that ran all around its edge. None of the nearby buildings were quite so high except the one just across the alley, which presented a brick face and billboard for a locally produced soft drink. Aris turned the car around, so that it faced back down the ramp.

  He smashed the car’s dome light with his elbow, wincing as a piece of the glass bulb jabbed him through his light jacket, then opened the door and got out. Nothing seemed amiss. He strained his hearing, trying to detect the telltale thundering footfalls of approaching BattleMechs. He heard only the usual noises of a city at night, including a few horns honking in the distance. Late-night stragglers on their way home perhaps.

  Or maybe some more midnight shoppers waiting for the bargains to start.

  Aris grabbed one of his cocktail creations and set about preparing the car. He opened the trunk and jammed a small piece of the broom handle into the hinge to prop it open, then used duct tape to hold it in place. Then he pulled out the cloth stopper and splashed half of the foul-smelling and sticky liquid onto the tires and the underside of the vehicle’s gas tank. Then he shoved the cloth back into the bottle and left it resting in the trunk. The last thing he did was remove the gas cap and leave it on the ground. Aris glanced around again. He listened. Nothing. Now all he could do was wait and hope he’d done enough.

  He didn’t have to wait long. It wasn’t five minutes before he heard a distant crunch of concrete cracking under the weight of a BattleMech’s foot. It was part of a Mech-Warrior’s training in House Hiritsu to know what could announce an approach. Stepping on sidewalks was always a sure giveaway. Done deliberately here, Aris was sure. This was a diversionary attack. They wanted to alert the city to their presence and pull BattleMech patrols away from the ’Mech yards. They don’t know that the patrol is already here.

  As if to underscore Aris’ thoughts, there came another crashing sound. This time of glass and brick as a ’Mech kicked in a building wall. Bells rang in the distance, like a bank alarm. Li Wynn and his friends ought to like that, Aris thought as he finally located the direction of the noise. Coming straight down the street, only two blocks away, a Huron Warrior stepped intentionally on a parked car. The squeal and snapping of bending metal and crushed glass echoed down the street.

  Raven Clearwater, Aris thought, or Lynn Trahn. They were the Huron Warrior pilots in his company. Whichever it was, one of them was heading directly down the street and into the ambush. Just before it reached the intersection, the ’Mech would pass the alley mouth and the waiting Hermes II.

  Where a moment before Aris seemed to have all the time in the world, now it was a race where seconds could count. He jumped back into the car and rolled it down the ramp to the third level, then sought out the longest run he could find that pointed him at the Hermes’ head. Most of the other vehicles in the parking garage were on the first level, so Aris was able to squeeze into the southeast corner and point Kyle’s car almost directly northwest for a full run across the floor. He took his four full cocktail surprises and set them well away from the path of the car, close to the west wall, and then returned and smashed the half-full one into the rear of the trunk.

  Now Aris could hear each footfall as the 50-ton Hiritsu ’Mech made its way down the street. Every few seconds it paused to do some deliberate damage to a nearby building or vehicle. Aris checked that the tires had been straightened, and then liberally applied duct tape to the car’s steering mechanism. He taped the wheel to the dash, and wrapped the roll of tape several turns around the pivoting point on the column. Hurrying, he ran around the car, setting the tires, gas tank, and trunk on fire with the disposable lighter.

  Sitting on the edge of the seat, holding the car door open with one foot, Aris put the car in gear and checked his alignment as the vehicle began to move forward. Then he jammed the broken broom stick down onto the accelerator and fixed the other end against the car’s seat so it held the gas pedal to the floor. The car leaped ahead, and Aris had no time for last-minute corrections. He threw himself out of the car.

  Elbows tucked in tight, one fist at each temple, Aris rolled as he hit the pavement of the parking garage. The back of his head slammed down harder than he’d intended, taking away a patch of hair and skin and threatening to plunge him into unconsciousness. Aris stopped himself with a flat hand slap against the floor. Shaking off his dizziness, he half-ran half-stumbled over to his four cocktails just as the car smashed through the third level’s safety wall.

  Aris never got to see the direct result of his handiwork. The restraining wall was only a few centimeters thick, meant to take a glancing blow but not a vehicle slamming into it at high speed. The car burst through the wall, and arced out away from the building, dropping directly onto the Hermes II. Aris had aimed for the head, and would have been happy if the car hit the ground within ten meters of the ’Mech. As it was, the car struck it from behind, just above the left hip joint. Shoved slightly off balance, the pilot was just beginning to react when the car struck the alleyway pavement right behind his machine. The gas tank burst, as Aris had hoped it would, and the flames already burning in the trunk and in the tank itself quickly ignited the fuel. The tank exploded, flipping the car back into the air and into the Hermes II yet again. The Hermes didn’t fall exactly, but it did stumble from the alley and drop to one knee in an effort to steady itself.

  Aris lit the cloth stoppers on two of the bottles as the explosion shattered the night and flames leapt skyward from the alley north of the parking garage. Picking the burning bottles up, he ran to the shattered safety wall and looked down. The Hermes II was just picking itself up. Aris sent one cocktail in its direction, and then the second. The first exploded against its shoulder. No real damage—Aris had intended them as markers for House Hiritsu warriors, a warning beacon in the dark night. But then the second shattered against the side of the ’Mech’s head, flames bursting across the cockpit viewport.

  Aris knew that one of the things a MechWarrior most feared was being caught inside a burning ’Mech. It was bad enough to be attacked by a flamer weapon or inferno rockets. But to be threatened by fire from an obvious infantry source?

  When the Hermes II stepped back into the alley, Aris was running before its left arm ever started to come up. The ’Mech carried a 50mm autocannon in its right torso and a medium laser on its right arm. But you didn’t waste weapons like that on unarmored infantry. Fight fire with fire. Its left-arm flamer shot out a jet of plasma-fueled flame, washing over the side of the parking garage and streaming through the open-walled design into the second and third levels.

  Aris felt the rush of heat that preceded the rolling flames that chased him, and dove behind one of the level’s few parked vehicles. He had ruined the Hermes II’s surprise, maybe done a bit of damage to it, and even drawn its first attack. He wasn’t sure what else he could do for the Huron Warrior outside. He curled himself into a ball as the first licks of flame washed over him. He’d better have damn well done enough.

  * * *

  Raven Clearwater staved in the side of a building with another strong kick. For the briefest moment she imagined Terry Chan being inside, and then immediately felt ashamed of her thoughts. She did not care for Terry Chan’s method of command or her disrespectful attitude toward Aris Sung when he was company leader, but that did not give Raven the right to wish harm to another House warrior. She was probably feeling uncharitable simply because Terry had assigned Raven’s lance to the diversionary raid and not Jill McDaniels.

  By normal House doctrine it should have been the most junior officer leading what basically amounted to an ineffective strike. A ruse. But Company Leader Chan had stressed the important timing. Then there was also Company Leader Lindell’s directive that the mission be undertaken by a full lance, and Jill only commanded three ’Mechs. So it really wasn’t anyone’s fault that she was h
ere and not attacking the ’Mech yards. Unless she wanted to blame herself for not being able to protect Company Leader Sung. Arts might have been able to retake the initiative after the ambush at the Jinxiang crossing, and events would be proceeding far differently.

  Now Raven and her lancemates were spread out in a widely spaced line, advancing into the city from the northwest. Thom Lindell had chosen this spot because it was one of the few areas bordering the city that wasn’t primarily residential. No MechWarrior wanted to make war on civilians, and a business district was certain to be fairly abandoned this time of night. And he’d been right. She hadn’t seen a single body yet, and didn’t expect to. Any Tarrahause citizens still in the area would certainly be moving in the other direction just as fast as possible. Hopefully one of them would call in an alert to the city defenders, and soon. She stepped on another car, feeling the slight resistance before the metal twisted and compacted beneath fifty tons of compression.

  Then came the explosion just up the street, not sixty meters ahead. A single, rolling cloud of flame blossomed up from behind one of the buildings to her left. Shadows danced in the street, cast by the unsteady light of the fire in an alleyway. So close did the explosion follow her crushing the car that for a second her brain tried to form some kind of connection.

  Then her sensors screamed a shrill alert. There was more than dancing shadows in the street. Her targeting and tracking system locked onto a BattleMech that had stumbled halfway out of the alley. Just enough for her magscan to pick it up and her computer to identify it as a Hermes II. Splashes of fire suddenly blossomed on the other ’Mech’s left shoulder and head, and the 40-ton machine straightened and turned its attention to a building that bordered the alley. Looked like a parking garage to Raven. She brought up the Gauss rifle that was her right arm and leveled it at the Hermes II’s back.

  Raven didn’t have time to think about how this ’Mech had arrived on the scene so quickly. That it had approached so close was not unusual, not in an urban setting where the buildings would block visual sensors and foul up the ones like magscan. At that moment she only knew that the enemy was before her and it was the will of her superiors that she engage and hold this area of the city for as long as possible. The golden target reticule on her main screen floated over the enemy ’Mech. She pulled back on her main trigger, and then also brushed one of her thumb triggers to fire her medium pulse laser as well.

  The Gauss rifle’s capacitors discharged, creating an incredibly strong magnetic field that accelerated a slug of nickel-iron metal. The silvery ball caught the Hermes II in the left rear torso, cracking and shattering armor plates all along the broad back of the ’Mech as if they were brittle eggshells. The slug chewed through the entire left torso, crushing the ’Mech’s foamed-titanium bones until the entire left side sagged in on itself. The pulse laser continued the job, its red pulsing beam slicing through what was left of the center torso armor and stabbing into the physical shielding that surrounded the fusion engine at the BattleMech’s heart.

  The Hermes II rocked forward as if shoved, but its fall was broken by the parking garage. Before Raven’s weapons could cycle for another shot, the enemy ’Mech stepped deeper into the alley and out of her line of sight.

  She grinned savagely. The Hermes II was hurting. If the pilot was smart, he would try to slip away down the alley. But Raven had no intention of letting him off so easily. She cranked her Warrior up to full walking speed that brought it quickly to the mouth of the alley. “This is Support Leader to Support units,” she said, clearing a channel to her lancemates. “Have made contact with the enemy. Converge on my location. Damn!”

  The Hermes II’s right-arm medium laser caught her in the head, splashing emerald light across her cockpit viewscreen and momentarily dazzling her vision. Fortunately it wasn’t enough to penetrate. Raven operated more by instinct and the memory of what she had just seen outside her ’Mech and triggered off a burst from the Warrior’s left-arm large laser.

  She blinked away the spots swimming in front of her eyes. The Hermes II was crouched back within the alley, trying to find some cover behind a delivery truck that had been left there. The alley dead-ended thirty meters behind it, which explained its lack of an escape attempt. Scorched pavement and a hole cored through the cab of the truck told her where her laser shot had hit.

  Ah, but we both know the painful truth, she thought, bringing the extended-range large laser to bear on the enemy ’Mech again. The ruby beam lanced into its exposed right leg, flaying off armor in molten pieces. The Hermes stores all its autocannon munitions in the left torso, which my first Gauss shot must have ruined. You’re out of ammo, my friend.

  The return fire from the Hermes II’s right-arm medium laser was a pitiful comeback. Raven waited for her laser to cycle and fired it again, this time with the medium pulse in accompaniment. There was no sense wasting Gauss ammo on such an easy target. The medium carved into the right torso, while the large burrowed into the center and burned off a half ton of armor.

  The Hermes II pilot seemed to realize his situation at last. It couldn’t jump, had no avenue of escape, and obviously couldn’t survive trading shots with a fully functional Huron Warrior. The pilot brought the ’Mech to its feet and started off at a run down the alley and then immediately swerved into the side of the parking garage, thinking to burrow his way through the structure and escape out the other side. But the open-air garage looked less sturdy than it actually was, and the Hermes II bounced off the wall and back into the center of the alley.

  Raven caught it on the rebound, hammering the center torso again with her large laser. The pilot had apparently damaged the front of his machine in the failed attempt to smash through the garage, because now the ruby beam easily sliced through armor and penetrated into the BattleMech’s interior. Structural supports were cut away, and the beam bored into the ’Mech’s gyro. The Hermes II dropped like an unstrung puppet, arms and legs flailing.

  The pilot tried to regain his feet at once. A big mistake. As Raven watched, the hapless ’Mech rose to its knees and then crashed back down on its already mangled left side. Another attempt rolled it onto its back. Raven added to the pilot’s misery by slicing another half-ton of armor off the Hermes II’s left leg. On its third attempt to stand the ’Mech fell back onto its left side again, this time knocking an internal support loose, which skewered the remains of the ’Mech’s gyro.

  There was no further movement after that, and the Hermes II shut down its engine.

  Raven backed her Warrior out into the street. Her grin had faded. Watching a ’Mech die so ingloriously was never something to laugh at. It reminded any MechWarrior that battle was a lot more than glory or even survival. She checked to be sure her commline was still open.

  “Count one Hermes II down and out,” she said softly, in warning. “Be wary of his buddies.”

  Movement caught her eye then. Through her viewscreen. A dark shadow raced along the western edge of the parking garage, heading for the nearby intersection. The shadow moved low to the ground and in starts. From shrub to lamppost to parked vehicle. Good standard infantry tactics, Raven thought, recognizing the drill from her own days in the Hiritsu conventional forces. She selected her medium laser, the smallest thing she had for what Mech Warriors referred to as “crowd control.”

  The dark-clothed figure darted to another parked vehicle, moving away from Raven and toward the intersection. Probably trying to regroup with friends, and doesn’t think I’ll notice him. Raven floated the golden targeting reticule over the car behind which the figure was hiding. She was easing into the shot when the figure fled cover and crossed the street.

  There were several ways to cross open ground in the middle of combat conditions, none of them good. Usually, it was just get across as fast as you can. But some were acceptable, providing you had some friendly fire support. And that the fire support could tell you from the enemy. House Hiritsu had solved that problem by some simple choreographing of open ground
movement. There was a standard way you approached a hostile building, or covered a retreat, or moved while under fire. There were even several hand signals, so infantry could communicate with the MechWarriors without having to rely on comm systems.

  There was also a set procedure for crossing neutral ground in front of one of your own BattleMechs. House infantrymen were to cross crouched over keeping their weapon hand tucked in—to show they were no threat—and the other hand held about knee level and parallel to the ground. That was the “crossing clear” signal.

  And a very surprised Raven Clearwater was watching the dark figure do exactly that.

  18

  Tarrahause

  Tarrahause District, Kaifeng

  Sarna Supremacy, Chaos March

  23 July 3058

  Aris slipped over the low concrete wall and crouched down next to some shrubs growing around the perimeter of the parking garage. The leaves were aromatic, like the eucalyptus trees common to Randar, burning his throat and making his eyes water. He moved over to a car parked along the street and paused there, his back against the rear tire, to catch his breath.

  The Hermes II’s flames had passed over him for the most part, shielded from the worst of it by the vehicle he’d been hiding behind. Singed hair was the only damage to speak of. Aris collected his remaining two molotov cocktails, and quickly made his way to the parking garage’s ground level. He’d lost his footing on the ramp when the Hermes pilot slammed his ’Mech into the garage, trying to burrow through. One bottle had slipped from his grasp, shattering against the concrete ramp and splashing a bit of the homemade napalm against his right pants leg. Once on the ground level, it had been a short run to the west-side concrete wall.