Blood of the Isle

by Loren L. Coleman

  A good thing, or the command post would have to be abandoned. Tara turned her Hatchetman enough to see out of a side-view shield. The rock-faced door was just swinging closed. Higher up, with its commanding view over the Thames and the last battlefield of her Forlorn Hope recruits, was the Sutton Road Memorial Park, where she had attended the press event—it seemed like years ago. No one had even suspected the excavation for the HQ, with all the heavy machinery there to smooth out a new parking area and add acres of sculpted grounds. It was her final advantage in this latest battle for Skye.

  “Keep everything dimmed until they’ve passed,” Tara told the prefect as she throttled into a loping run, heading south. “We’ll hit them five kilometers below your position.” While the Jade Falcons still felt safe.

  “Good hunting.”

  They’d need it. Things were already off to a faster start than anyone had planned. The Jade Falcons had surrounded and entered New London quickly, under cover of the EMP-imposed blackout. Six DropShips all told—grounding at the DropPort and in the industrial sector, and even one massive Lion, ninety meters tall and more than seven thousand tons, squatting over what used to be the parade grounds of Sanglamore Academy. Tara had needed no camera to guess the outrage on Malvina Hazen’s face when she found the capital all but deserted of every administrator, business leader, and warrior.

  Confirming that had taken time, precious hours, and by then reports must have been rolling in that her secondary objectives at Roosevelt Island, Miliano, and Corruscat were heavily defended and bloodying Jade Falcon advance teams.

  When the command post finally restored some of their communications, Tara found out that she had guessed right about most places, but not all. Miliano was being held by the grace of God and the tenacity of Alexia Wolf’s Strikers.

  Colonel Petrucci and Anastasia Kerensky still could not be reached.

  And now the first Jade Falcon reinforcements were striking out from the capital, searching for signs of local defenders as they moved on Norfolk and Miliano. They came along a southern valley, following Sutton Road and the Thames in a short column designed more for speedy travel than defense, led by a Warhammer IIC and a lightly armored Koshi. The Warhammer was a real monster, with four extended-range lasers and an SRM four-pack over each shoulder. It caught Tara’s breath in her throat, and nearly choked her on it.

  Tara had her small company spread out in some nearby trees and hunkered down in a dry wash. She hid her Hatchetman as well as she could in a stand of stunted evergreens, her targeting system on passive mode. Hoping to get at least one good shot in on the assault ’Mech before it started ripping apart vehicles.

  The Falcons caught on, but far too late. A pair of venerable Pegasus scout craft on the column flank nearly missed half of Tara’s hidden company. As it was, they had barely enough time to skate in a circle and run out from beneath the missile umbrella that scattered around their position.

  Then a Kelswa assault tank swamped up from a marsh near the river, and its twin Gauss rifles hammered ferrous masses into the side of a straggling APC. The devastating hits crushed in the entire side and rolled the vehicle over, spilling wounded and angry Elementals out like bees shook from a hive. A Hasek MCV rolled clear of the dry wash, dropping Cavalier troopers. Its particle cannon slashed out to rip armor away from the Warhammer’s leg.

  First blood for her Highlanders and for Skye! “Tallyho!” Tara called out, pushing her Hatchetman from the tree line.

  The Jade Falcons had made their first real mistake, treating the area surrounding New London as if it were safe. Their own personal land hold. Tara was here to make them pay for that. As high a price as she was able.

  Miliano Basin

  The Miliano Basin was three-rivers country. Wide stretches of forested hills were cut with sharp valleys in some places and had been hammered down by time into nothing larger than rolling mounds in others. The rivers pushed at their banks with the spring runoff, and in many places flooded lowland bogs. It was an area of fish farms and logging concerns, and a few large agricultural combines.

  And today it was another battlefield.

  The price had run fairly stiff against Alexia Wolf’s Tharkan Strikers. She had held the Jade Falcons back from Miliano, but too often she had been forced to send a crippled ’Mech or vehicle limping toward the rear lines, preserving it for another day. Harder choices forced her to sacrifice machines and men to buy time. To redeploy. To save a larger piece of the Stormhammers who suddenly found themselves in a threatened position. If not for the two elite lances she’d borrowed from the Archon’s Shield, her people would already be in a full rout.

  “Leutnant-colonel.” It was one of her pathfinders, scouting the back trail to make certain they did not fall back into an enemy trap. “We have the city’s outskirts in view.”

  Coming up against a hard wall, then. Alexia dropped her crosshairs over a distant Koshi and spread two loads of long-range missiles through the air. Her Catapult rocked back under the missile exhaust, then forward as she hunched over.

  The missiles slammed down around the Koshi’s position, driving it back. But not for long. Not when it was joined just outside of her best range by a pair of Skandas and a Thor. All along her thinned line, the Falcons massed in pairs and clumps. They would be coming again. Soon. And the Stormhammers would not be able to stand against them.

  She was realist enough to admit it to herself. The Clans raised practical warriors who spent their lives judging very carefully the subtle win-loss percentages of any battle. Failing her Trial of Position on Arc-Royal had reinforced that skill. There she had fought for herself, and that had not been enough. Here Alexia believed she had found a larger cause, but that did not confer on her aerospace support or a company of heavy armor, which was what she needed.

  “Light forces roll forward, engage, and skirmish. Prepare to fall back on our main line.”

  She sent a practiced glance to her HUD, her tactical maps, and the view outside her cockpit ferroglass. She could buy another hour. Perhaps two—no more than two. “Air support. If you can get those Yellow Jackets back in the air, now is the time.”

  Her VTOLs were the only aerospace forces she had under her command. Or was likely to see. The bulk of Skye’s aerospace corps was working to keep enemy DropShips grounded, to prevent the Falcons from redeploying their forces caught at New London.

  The problem was, they had hoped to trap a lot more than they had.

  It was her own fault as much as anyone’s. She had agreed when Tara Campbell judged Miliano safer from attack than Norfolk or Roosevelt Island. So had GioAvanti, whose family held widespread local interests, and Jasek, who had discussed it with his commanders in meetings before Glengarry and Chaffee. A larger city. More manpower to hold it. Everyone expected the Falcons to spend all their forces against the capital.

  Using a high-atmosphere nuclear detonation to disrupt ground forces? Never. Not in the Clans she’d grown up learning about.

  The Koshi began its run down through the valley that separated the Falcon position from her own, trailed by the Skandas and then the Thor. The lighter ’Mech had exceptional scouting abilities; no doubt it was looking for hidden battlesuit infantry or dug-in tanks. She almost wished she’d tried a trick of that nature. The maybes were piling up. So were the bodies, though, and any unit left in the no-man’s-land out there was not coming home.

  “Forward and engage on my mark,” she ordered.

  Throttling into a stiff, bowlegged walk, she pulled her crosshairs over the Thor. Her plan was to brush through the light machines and try to inflict some heavy damage on the larger ’Mech before being forced to run. It was a good plan. But someone else had it as well.

  Twin streams of high-energy particles slashed out of a blind draw on the Thor’s left, ripping deep wounds along the BattleMech’s side. The machine rocked over on one foot, then teetered back.

  For a second, Alexia wondered how one of her inexperienced warriors had slipped behind the enemy l
ine. And had managed to stay hidden.

  Then she realized that one couldn’t have. If nothing else, she knew she’d not lost track of one man or woman on the field today.

  Another savage assault as PPCs blazed out arcing lashes to flail and strip the Thor of two more tons of armor. This time the seventy-ton machine went down, falling with a crash that Alexia thought she felt half a kilometer away. A Ryoken II stomped into view, its icon lighting up her HUD as it switched to active targeting sensors. That kind of accuracy on passive sensors?

  More icons popped at nearly the same time, identifying Demons and Condors and even an SM1 Destroyer. All tagged with Steel Wolf marks.

  “Not just for breakfast anymore,” a familiar voice crackled over the communications net.

  “Thors?” Alexia asked, perplexed at Anastasia Kerensky’s comment. Surprised at her very appearance on the battlefield. She didn’t waste the happy occurrence, though. Her missiles arced out and fell in desperate waves over the Koshi and the Skandas.

  “Jade Falcons. In the old days, they would never have come back to Skye for a second bite. I guess somewhere along the way they grew a pair.”

  And if Kerensky had been impressive coming at the Falcons with her sensors sidelined, as she drew a new bead on the shaken Thor she showed a true artist’s touch. Her PPCs slashed out in short, accurate cuts, blasting damage in behind each knee actuator and the shoulders as well. In a matter of seconds, she had incapacitated a seventy-ton BattleMech.

  Alexia envied the other woman her skill, but did not let it get in her way. She claimed a Skanda and drove the Koshi into retreat by slamming a half dozen warheads into the side of its head. The Mech Warrior’s ears would still be ringing the next day. Turning, she lent savage support to a pair of Stormhammer VV1 Rangers who had corralled a green-painted Demon between them.

  Another coordinated assault, and the Demon ground to a smoking halt.

  All along her line, machines stomped, rolled, or skated forward. Alexia had no need to tell them to press. They simply did. Lasers sliced angrily back and forth. Autocannon hammered and the lightning of particle cannon struck out with furious insult. In an instant, the battle had shifted in the defenders’ favor.

  Heavier machines rolling up behind the Strikers’ first wave and Steel Wolves on their flank? The Jade Falcon commander knew better than to push a suicidal position. Machines reversed in their tracks, or cut out on long, arcing escape paths. There was no panic. No rout that could be exploited. Chasing them would only open up Alexia’s people to a new counterstrike.

  She was happy enough surviving the day with what was left of her command. Of Jasek’s people.

  “We heard you weren’t interested,” Alexia said, feeling the first drain of battlefield lethargy settling into her aching muscles. “What changed your mind?”

  “Oh, you might be surprised the things I’ve heard in the last few hours. Colonel Petrucci has been yammering reason after reason at me, even while we were under radio silence. But really only one thing he said mattered to me even a little.”

  “What was that?”

  Pause. “It’s something that can wait,” the Steel Wolf leader said, giving nothing away.

  If Kerensky preferred to keep her cards close to her vest, Alexia wasn’t in a position to argue no matter how much the Clan warrior interested her. Besides, she wanted to get back to base camp and see to her wounded and her damaged equipment. There would be more battles, harder battles, and she had to be ready with whatever the Jade Falcons had left to her. It wasn’t much.

  “Fair enough,” she said in agreement. “Bargained well and done.”

  But watching what was left of her Tharkan Strikers limp back toward the city, and how much materiel was being left on the field for the recovery vehicles to salvage, a nagging concern ate away at her confidence. She amended her offer. “Just don’t take too long.”

  Sutton Road

  The Warhammer IIC was the undoing of every tactic Tara Campbell threw at the Clan warriors.

  She matched her Kelswa assault tank against the Jade Falcons’ Schmitt. A Destroyer to chase their Bellona, and hoverbikes to harass the Pegasus. Her Highlanders always held an advantage in speed or armor, and usually in firepower as well. She had the majority of the enemy crews flustered and making mistakes. It wasn’t the kind of matchup you got very often against a Clan opponent, but then, she had prepared fairly well for this kind of engagement.

  What she hadn’t been able to do was keep an assault ’Mech on hand at the Sutton Road command post. Her Hatchetman was no match for the eighty-ton Warhammer, and the other warrior knew it. She couldn’t shake him at all. Worse, he cared less for the warriors under his command than she did for hers. When she tried rushing him with her ax, he ignored everything else around him and pushed her back with large lasers and missiles. When she used her jumping ability to grab some maneuvering room, the Clan MechWarrior simply turned his guns into any of the several vehicle duels going on.

  It tossed all bets to the wind. It kept Tara coming back at the monster time and again, trading armor for time.

  Her company had slowly whittled away at the Falcon column, but without a decisive edge she was starting to lose warriors—Highlanders—to battlefield attrition. Most live bodies had made pickup. But few would be able to escape, thanks to the assault ’Mech’s overcharged engine and a top speed rivaling her own.

  Wrenching on her control sticks, Tara cut back again into the Warhammer’s embrace. Sweat streaked down the sides of her face. She blinked dry, scratchy eyes. Temperatures soared in her cockpit. Destroyed heat sinks. An engine breach. Her poor Hatchetman was quite a mess.

  It still handled with showroom-level response, except for a persistent limp. She planted one shovel blade foot, twisted, and ducked. Two lasers crisscrossed overhead. Another ruby lance speared beneath her left arm. One slashed an angry wound across her waist, and the short-bodied warheads of SRMs hammered in behind it to chip away more ceramic composite from her legs, her arms.

  Another telltale lit up with warning red. Leg actuator. Her second.

  No hope for it, she decided. Her autocannon hammered away at the Warhammer’s chest. A double pulse from her lasers splashed emerald darts from shoulder to hip. It wasn’t enough.

  “I’m not getting out of here.”

  Her voice-activated mic picked up the statement. Della Brown was all over her in an instant. “You damn well better get out of there. You find a way.”

  Tara limped the forty-five-tonner backward, gaining only a temporary respite as the assault machine sensed the ’Mech’s weakness and pushed forward at sixty kilometers per hour.

  “I have a gimped leg and a supercharged Warhammer. We’ve hurt them, Della, but we can’t do much more than lose a lot of good people if we don’t find a way to disengage.” She took a deep breath. “Call them home.”

  “Not happening, Campbell. You’ll bring them back.”

  “Not this time.” Her autocannon belted out the last few hundred rounds of munitions. “Dry. Not good.” She blinked the burn of sweat from her eyes, and focused on the assault ’Mech. Left or right?

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going MIA or even POW. I have two hovercraft left out here, and I’m taking them for extended duty. Bring the crawlers home, Prefect. Out.”

  Left or right? Tara throttled forward, hobbling into the waiting weapons of the Warhammer IIC. Her pulse lasers spat out stinging energy. And again. “I want Big D and Jess-two across the Thames now. Disengage and run, run, run! Everyone else, pair up and best paths back to the Pen. Della Brown is taking operational control as of now.”

  And she slammed down on her foot pedals, leaning forward with her ax pulled out to her side.

  It would be the left.

  Her Hatchetman sprang up on jets of golden plasma, diving forward like some alien creature sensing its prey and ready to take a stainless steel bite out of it. Her pulse lasers shredded more armor from the Warhammer, with one of them blisteri
ng the composite over its left leg. A good omen, she hoped.

  A full-chested Highlander war cry rolled up from deep within, and Tara belted it out as she held the flat-topped jump. Even as the other ’Mech blasted into her with every laser it had. Ruby fire cut hard and cut deep. Two of the lances speared right into her centerline, skewering through what was left of her reactor shielding.

  Golden fire ate up at the corner edges of her ferroglass shield. Acrid smoke curled into the cockpit.

  With a stumble-caught landing she parked her Hatchetman next to the assault ’Mech and swung down her titanium hatchet with all the force the machine’s myomer muscles could bring.

  The blade bit into the Warhammer’s hip. And stuck there.

  Alarms clamored for attention, but none so insistent as the wailing siren of a reactor containment failure. The dampening fields were attempting to drop into place. Failing. Heat soared and Tara couldn’t breathe through the thick, caustic smoke. She could hardly see.

  She slapped at the control panel, found the handle she needed, depressed the plunger, and twisted for all she was worth.

  The violent shudder of explosive bolts firing and a reactor containment failure taking place right under her feet threw Tara hard against her harness. The straps dug painfully into her shoulders and across her chest. Then a growling roar filled her ears, and she assumed she was dead—the fire of a fusion reaction swarming up through her cockpit, burning her alive.

  Except that she wasn’t burning.

  Wasn’t even as warm as she had been, actually, with cold spring air swirling into the cockpit through what had been ventilation dumps a few seconds before.

  The entire elongated head of her Hatchetman had detached, and was now rocketing up and away from the exploding reactor on its escape rocket. The roar of the solid-fuel rocket was horrifyingly loud, and never a more welcome sound. It took her up, far above the golden fireball that had been her BattleMech, above the hapless Warhammer IIC, which was caught in the blast. It pushed her over the Thames River and high enough to get a good view of distant New London.