Blood of the Isle

by Loren L. Coleman

  “Ne-eed some he-elp he-errre,” Jasek stuttered into the voice-activated mic as he was thrown repeatedly against his safety harness. He wrenched on the controls to keep his BattleMech balanced.

  The gyroscope screamed a high-pitched protest, but with Jasek’s aid the Templar held to its feet.

  All along the fire-struck road his Stormhammers broke free of the forest. Gillickie exploded through a burning thicket like some fire demon come for vengeance. His autocannon pounded hot metal into the Vulture’s side. Kicking in the Storm Raider’s myomer accelerated signal circuitry, Gillickie pounded up the road at 130 kilometers per hour, mace held above his head, ready to smash. The Joust tanks clawed their way through more slowly, with a few Fenrirs clinging to their tops like giant armored fleas.

  The Sylph battle armor had arced up too high to stop the Storm Raider. Instead, they fell onto the Joust tanks, trading weapons fire with the Fenrirs and ripping at the tank’s armor and treads.

  Jasek ignored the scuffle, staggering forward over the missile-savaged road. His sensors rang new alarms as a Shadow Hawk IIC led another pair of Skandas over the crest of a distant hill, but they were too far away to worry about now.

  The Vulture had to be dealt with before it got off another devastating round. Dropping crosshairs over its outline, his PPC smashed armor into shards and spatters. Lasers worried its right side. Two of his four missiles corkscrewed in to smash at the Vulture’s shoulder and head.

  The Vulture limped out from behind its cover of boulders, gray smoke seeping out of several joints. Lasers stabbed out again, this time drawing in on the advancing Storm Raider. Large red lances from each arm and smaller daggers from the paired microlasers in its center torso.

  Only one of the large lasers hit, slicing away armor from the Storm Raider’s chest, barely slowing it.

  A poor second showing. Even against the forest fire, the Vulture’s thermal profile stood out as a desperate blaze. Risking all on the earlier, savage strike, the Clan ’Mech had overheated itself, impairing its ability to move, to return fire.

  Gillickie attacked it again with his autocannon, then gave it an overhead smashing blow from his BattleMech’s hand-held mace. The mace staved in one of the Vulture’s missile launchers. His second, cross-body blow drove one of the microlasers back into the torso cavity, and on Jasek’s imaging screen a heat spike carved a blue-white streak over the Vulture’s profile. Damage to the BattleMech’s shielding reactor.

  Light autocannon fire and some ineffectual laser shots peppered the back of Jasek’s Templar as a Skanda and two Kite reconnaissance vehicles flashed by, on their way up the road at better than one hundred kilometers per hour.

  Jasek checked an auxiliary monitor—his rear-facing camera—and saw Three-lance finishing off two armored tanks. One of his JES carriers was overturned and burning, with infantry giving the missile cruiser a wide berth. His second carrier launched a spread of missiles up and over his position, showering warheads over the fleeing vehicles as they raced between Jasek’s position and that of the crippled Vulture.

  One Kite took an unlucky hit, spilling air out of its ruined skirting. It swerved right, dug its forward fender into the road, and then tumbled into a death roll that ended when its fusion engine exploded in a golden ball of fire.

  The Vulture followed a moment later with a much quieter death. It staggered and stumbled as Jasek and the two Joust tanks added their firepower to Gillickie’s autocannon.

  Another PPC from the Templar and it went down, having lost its right leg at the knee.

  The Vulture wrenched itself up on one side, and its canopy blew away as the MechWarrior inside ejected from his stricken machine. The fiery blast under the ejection seat rocketed him above the sequoias, barely; then a large para-foil spread overhead. With a choice of mountainside or road, both in the control of the Stormhammers, or a burning forest, the Clan warrior chose to take his chances. He wheeled over and ran with the wind, into the building forest fire.

  “Crash and burn,” Jasek muttered, watching him disappear into a dark curtain of rising smoke.

  The Jade Falcons had created the problem. Jasek felt no compunction wishing them the worst of it.

  “Hammer, Three-lance. Backfield is secure.” A pause. “One Jess is down. Light damage all around.”

  “Two-lance,” Gillickie called out, panting heavily, “The Sylphs have dodged back into the forest and good riddance to weary company.” Even his Storm Raider looked tired, dragging its mace at its side. “I have a crippled Joust and two dead Fenrirs. And a bum knee.” He limped the mace-wielding ’Mech up the road. “Our friends have turned back.”

  The Shadow Hawk and the Skanda. After picking up the retreating vehicles, they had turned back over the crest of the hill, heading forward to link up with the main Jade Falcon line.

  Jasek laid it all out in his head as he throttled into a fast walk, moving his Templar forward at nearly forty kilometers per hour, heading up the hill. “We’re still twenty klicks short of the Highlanders.” At best guess. The Falcons were jamming transmissions. “We have that Shadow Hawk and whatever else is out here trapped between our location and Tamara Duke’s Anvil Lance.” They were five kilometers away. “And she’s caught between the retreating Falcons and their main line.”

  As temperatures fell back to somewhat bearable levels, now that his weapons were cooling, a nervous sweat replaced the heat stress. “Not good,” he said.

  The Jade Falcons had obviously not expected him to push so much force through in a single location. He’d forced them to run too early. Tamara wasn’t ready for such a heavy force.

  And the Falcon machines were faster. He couldn’t catch them in time.

  He blinked over to his private channel to Tamara Duke. “You heard?” he asked the kommandant.

  Her voice was faint, nearly lost in a crackle of static, but there. “We just stopgapped a pair of Skadi VTOLs,” she said, “but another got away. Our secret’s out. Get here quick, Jasek. Damn!” She cut away, dealing with whatever problem had cropped up.

  “Two-lance.” Jasek switched back to his all-hands. “Gillickie. Best speed forward. Take the Hasek and as many Fenrir battlesuits as we have left.”

  The Hasek was slow, plowing its way from the burning forest, but was soon on the road and powering forward. The Storm Raider maintained a good lead on it, managing a kind of limping run that was nowhere near its optimum speed, but it pulled away from Jasek’s Templar regardless.

  “We’ll still be late to the party,” Gillickie said.

  And minutes made a huge difference in such desperate battles. Jasek slowly throttled up to his best running speed. “Just so long as it’s still going on when you get there,” he answered.

  It was. Four minutes spread his forces out in a long, staggered column, and still put him a kilometer shy of Tamara Duke’s position when Leutnant Gillickie spearheaded a relief force into the battle. “Cowabunga!” the young warrior shouted.

  Jasek took that to mean, “Have made contact with the enemy.”

  The fire had not spread this far yet, and the majestic forest had thinned out considerably as the Stormhammers pushed into the old mining country. From a final hillcrest, staring across a long valley quarry, Jasek saw the bright, brief glow of lasers crisscrossing with brutal savagery. Missiles rained down, indiscriminately it seemed, blossoming fireballs over the rocky terrain and occasionally throwing down one of the larger machines that stalked the battlefield.

  Tamara’s Wolfhound was easy to find, streaking back and forth on the far side of the valley, doing her best to prevent the Jade Falcons from opening an easy path through her line. She had three vehicles and a handful of Gnome battle armor left to what had started out as a double lance. One downed ForestryMech. Three stilled tanks—one burning.

  Jasek hoped that the others were salvageable. Skye was going to need his people in top form.

  But just now Tamara and Leutnant Gillickie needed him.

  He found the mace-wie
lding Storm Raider protecting the damaged Hasek on the nearer side of the valley. The Falcons had split their strength, at least for the moment. The Shadow Hawk IIC and two VTOLs pressed forward against Tamara Duke’s position. An Ocelot and a very dangerous Lyran-designed Uziel led armor and infantry forces back in a delaying action against Gillickie.

  “Any . . . time”—rapid panting filled Jasek’s ear—“sir.”

  With the acrobatic moves he was being forced to make just to keep from being pinned and killed, no doubt the young leutnant was exhausted. His Storm Raider crouched, leaped, ran around behind a young stand of alders, then raced forward to snipe at the Uziel while trying to dodge its PPCs.

  Jasek had left his JES behind with a light guard of Cavalier battlesuit infantry, but one of the Joust tanks had managed to keep up. Together, the ’Mech and tank rolled down the shallow slope. Jasek ordered his man to fade back slowly, drawing the Uziel after him, letting it get within range of the stranded Hasek. It was a gamble, tempting the Clanner with a possible kill.

  At the last moment, the Uziel hesitated. But the Ocelot took the bait, thinking it could slip in and out again with its superior speed before the Templar made it into range. Jasek surprised it by goosing just a touch more speed out of his machine and relying on his targeting computer to make corrections to his wild, long-range snapshot.

  His PPC’s lightning strike twisted and snaked in an eye-blinding arc, slashing downrange to blast into the Ocelot’s right leg. The light ’Mech stumbled, sprawling over the quarry floor with a baseball slide that struck flinty sparks from the ground.

  “Hammer that Ocelot,” Jasek ordered. “Burn it!”

  But the Clan ’Mech still had serious teeth. Dragging itself back to a standing crouch, the Ocelot used its heavy laser to slash dark orange energy at the advancing Storm Raider. Gillickie broke away quickly, his left torso exposed right down through to his gyro housing. Jasek’s next PPC shot missed wide to the right.

  “There they go!” the young leutnant warned Tamara.

  The Uziel’s Mech Warrior had recognized in time that the Stormhammer reinforcements would be only the first of several arrivals, eventually swinging the battle against the Falcons. Rallying what was left of his armor contingent, he led a quick feint-and-flee maneuver that pushed right in behind the Shadow Hawk. The Falcons’ Ocelot wasn’t far behind, and with its leg damage still moved faster than Jasek’s Templar.

  “Let them pass, Tamara.” His call went out quick and commanding. “We’ll pick up their trail further along. Get out of their way!”

  She did, for a moment, falling back and to the side. Her beloved Eisenfaust looked beaten and scarred, but still moved with a kind of lupine grace not often seen in a mechanical battle machine.

  It was with that same grace that she charged back into the Falcons’ line of march, bounding forward with a determined stride and her laser flaring ruby bright. It brought the Shadow Hawk up short. The Falcon pilot had not expected this, his machine outmassing the Wolfhound by twenty tons, backed by a solid line of ’Mechs and armor.

  A trio of lasers flashed out, burning new wounds into the Wolfhound’s side.

  Tamara’s bite was less savage but still painful as her arm-mounted laser drilled directly into the Shadow Hawk’s centerline. Jasek doubted the Clan machine could stand up to another coring hit like that.

  But then neither could his warrior. “Tamara, what the hell do you think you’re doing? I said get out of their way.”

  Static crackled in his ear. Then, “That would be . . . a poor host,” she said, just as the first Highlander tank—a Bellona—bulled its way into the valley from the far pass.

  Followed by a Condor, a second Bellona, and then a limping Pack Hunter.

  A modified MiningMech and a pair of M1 Marksmen protected the flanks of a Legionnaire. A line of ten . . . twelve Gray Death battlesuit infantry and a MASH truck brought up a staggered rear.

  Jasek would have been surprised if the Highlanders had five tons of armor to spread among their entire line. These machines looked like hell, limping, slapping broken treads against the ground, trailing smoke from too many engines. But they formed a battle line with disciplined precision behind Tamara Duke. The Pack Hunter sprint-wobbled forward to add its PPC to her large laser, throwing a scathing assault against the Shadow Hawk.

  The Falcons had had enough. The Shadow Hawk and Uziel took to the air on jets of golden plasma, leaping far afield and then racing up the side of the nearby valley wall, where they could lose themselves in the foothills. The armor broke and ran in half a dozen different directions, most of them bending around to the west and the subjective safety of the forest fire and its blanket of smoke.

  The Ocelot never stood a chance. Sensing its weakness, Tamara pounced forward, driving it back into the weapons of Gillickie’s Storm Raider. Lasers flashed, cutting deep and certain. Another severed leg. Another Mech Warrior punching out on his ejection seat.

  Another salvageable ’Mech.

  Jasek slapped his armrest in celebration, then throttled back to an easy walk. His throat parched from fluid loss, he swallowed dryly and toggled in a free-security channel. “We didn’t expect to see you this far down the mountainside,” he said.

  The Legionnaire saluted, raising its hand in the general direction of its low-slung head. “Falcon chatter told us that a relief force had landed. It cost us, but we regrouped and punched through for your landing beacon.”

  Landing beacon? The landgrave looked up into the sky, saw the curls of black smoke rolling heavenward from the forest fire. His mood took a darker turn. “Ah, that. Not quite what we had in mind, of course.”

  The Highlander’s voice sounded dog-tired and bruised. “Just so long as there’s a DropShip or two on the other end of that smoke.”

  “And a JumpShip,” Jasek promised. “Twenty-eight light-years to Skye, all the medical attention your people need, and, if reports are still accurate, your Countess Tara Cambell.”

  He smiled. “Compliments of the Stormhammers.”

  9

  When newly acquired states have been accustomed to living freely under their own laws, there are three ways to hold them securely: [second], by establishing dominion and ruling them in person.

  The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli

  The Acropolis

  Tairngoth, Glengarry

  26 September 3134

  The Acropolis was a testament to Clan engineering. Sitting in the passenger seat of a VV1 Ranger, ignoring the cold silence radiating from the driver, Noritomo Helmer recognized the dome-and-towers configuration from its silhouette while five kilometers away. Though it was no doubt constructed in a matter of days from prefabricated pieces brought by the Falcons to Glengarry, an instant stronghold, there was a permanence about it now in the way it crouched at the edge of the deep canyon overlooking Loch Tay.

  The twisting, switchback road they traveled wound down toward the canyon’s edge, past new guard towers and old rockslides clumped with purple-blooming heather and dwarf Scotch pines. A Shrike stood solitary sentinel at the final checkpoint, the ninety-five-ton monster tracking the Ranger with heavy-class autocannon and a disdainful air in the way the pilot never turned completely toward the open-air vehicle.

  The driver transmitted clearance codes, and they were through.

  Beautiful land, Noritomo judged, keeping an eye on the approaching complex but unable to ignore the rugged beauty rolling past him. Crisp, knife-edged mountains surrounded him, slicing at the sapphire blue sky. Everything was verdant and sweet-smelling, if low growing because of the rocky soil. Worlds like this were what had brought the Jade Falcons back to the Inner Sphere from the severe Clan home worlds nearly a century before, more tempting, in Noritomo’s opinion, than the promise of battle.

  Of course, Malvina Hazen would argue that point. Then again, she also would likely argue his point if it meant a better fight and the possibility of greater honor.

  The Ranger pulled to a stop in front of the
complex. The large dome, easily one hundred meters across, was the color of wet basalt, all shiny and gray black. Offices. Strategic centers. Training and medical facilities. Ground-hugging barracks capable of sleeping their entire army flanked the dome, and from the south side of each rose up magnificent, slender towers that housed communications arrays, radar and satellite uplinks, and hidden weapons emplacements.

  “She is waiting,” the driver told him.

  Noritomo pegged him as second-line armor crew, to draw escort duty. It did nothing to deflate the driver’s superior air, however. He had a swagger and a sneering attitude that the Star colonel was finding all too common among the local garrison troops. Including the way he practically genuflected when speaking of capital-H Her.

  “Our leader who art immortal,” Noritomo mouthed, lips framing the words but without sound, “hallowed be thy name.”

  Malvina.

  It wasn’t hard to find her. A sentry-aide at the dome’s main doors nodded to him and said, “Dojo.”

  Training facilities. Left at the main intersection and up one flight of bolted-together metal stairs. Down to the end of the corridor. Noritomo kept his hands clenched into tight fists, his fingernails gouging into his palms, as he steeled himself for the meeting. Hearing the sounds of sparring, he stepped through an open door—careful of the thin mats—and waited quietly behind Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus and a white-coated doctor while Malvina Hazen finished her sparring match.

  She faced another MechWarrior, a man, each of them stripped down to shorts and a tight-fitting shirt. Malvina’s opponent was tall and roped with wiry muscle, and moved with a feral grace. He slid in low and fast, coming at her injured side, hands reaching, but was deflected by a swift jab toward his temple.

  He ducked away, back on his guard. Malvina Hazen glared after him, furious.

  Noritomo took the opportunity to study his immediate commander. Malvina had had a dangerous beauty before. Hard-bodied and intense, she had blond hair and brilliant blue eyes. She’d lost a measure of that on Skye, along with Aleksandr. Pulled from the ruin of her BattleMech, by all accounts Noritomo had heard, she had been more dead than alive. He believed it. Her bionic eye could hardly be distinguished from her natural one, but the scar that creased her brow and curled in toward her mouth remained. Her right arm and right leg were an obsidian black. No vanity involved here. These were prosthetics, and Malvina obviously wanted no part in disguising them to resemble her true limbs.