"Steer the car," Alex said, shaking his head. "Good God, you talked a merc into giving up his laser with a bluff!"
"It's good t' have you on our side, Major," Allyn said. Her eyes were bright. "James, I think we should take them to see the General tonight."
"Ah, but lassie," McCall said. "I'm afraid we might hae a bit of a scheduling problem. We cannae go wi' you tonight."
"Why?" Alex asked. "What are we doing instead?"
"Why, we're payin' a wee visit on our friends oop there in the Citadel tonight."
James looked confused. "But, you said you'd be coming back with the Gray Death and with BattleMechs. Are you saying your people are already here?"
"We heard nothin' about it," Allyn said. "Are they very far?"
"Is sixty light years very far?" Alex asked. "But—"
"Weel, noo, lass, I didn't exactly say the Legion was here then, did I?"
"Another bluff!" Allyn said, laughing.
"Just a bit of a wee diversion," McCall replied. "A word or two a' misdirection can aye work wonders sometimes."
"That's why he insisted on letting Folker go," Alex said. "Back at the Citadel, they'll be thinking in terms of incoming DropShips and BattleMech deployments. Major Folker may put an HPG call in to Tharkad, asking for instructions. They'll be checking on whether the Legion has left Glengarry yet and on when it might be arriving."
"Aye. All of which means they won't be expectin' the likes of us t' be puttin' in another appearance tonight. We'll go just as soon as it's full dark."
"But ... do you have BattleMechs?" James asked.
"Here?"
"You'll need 'Mechs to take on that army up there," Allytt said. "I can't tell you exactly how many troops he has, but we've seen at least four kinds of 'Mechs."
"Aye," McCall said. "We've seen the Wasp and the Locust."
"Locust? Which one is that?"
"Tha' wee 'Mech keepin' watch over you in that room back there, while you were gettin' cold feet," McCall told her. "What else does he have?"
"I don't really know the different types, just by the look of them," James said. "I've heard of something called an UrbanMech, however."
"And a Commando" Allyn added. "I've heard the General talking about a 'Mech called a Commando."
"Are there more than one of any of these?"
"I think so," Allyn told him. "But we really don't know much in the way of numbers."
"Aye," McCall said. "We should be able t' get a better idea tonight, lad."
"But how?" James asked. "They've got at least four BattleMechs up there and plenty of other defenses besides. How can the two of you fight all of that?"
"Alex an' I will get along just fine," McCall told him. "All we need is t' swing by the cargo storage vault at the spaceport."
"What have you got there?" Allyn asked. "BattleMechs?"
"Not 'Mechs," Alex told her. "But something almost as good."
"Aye," McCall added. "We'll need t' pick up our wee bairns "
14
Slopes of Mount Alba
Caledonia, Skye March
Federated Commonwealth
2145 hours, 1 April 3057
"You'd better not come any closer," Alex said. "They'll have sensors up there that can pick you out of the night if you do."
"I wish we could come with you!" Allyn said, her voice low and fierce.
Alex turned to face her, aware of the hiss and whine of servomotors as his combat armor shifted position. With the visual sensors set to project IR imagery, Allyn appeared through his visor as a woman-shaped smear of color, all warm oranges and yellows in her face and torso and upper thighs, shading to cooler greens and blues at her extremities. Projecting alphanumerics on the right side of his visor, a HUD data feed told him she was .42 meter away at a bearing of 142 absolute, massing 58 kilos and carrying a fully charged laser rifle. The scanners were sensitive enough at this range to pick up the steady throb of her heart in her chest, echoed by the warm flutter of her pulse at her throat.
"I know, Allyn," Alex said. His voice, picked up by the suit's electronics and relayed to an external speaker, had an odd, metallic quality to it. He used his tongue to shift the HUD imaging to normal lighting; the colored smear gave way to Allyn's face, streaked with camouflage paint, her eyes showing her worry. "But the Major and I will stand a better chance if we go in alone." He rapped carballoy-clad knuckles against the side of his suit, eliciting a metallic clank. "In these."
Powered combat armor. The thought didn't much appeal to Alex, but he knew that the power suit might be the technological innovation that would one day end the reign of the BattleMech in ground combat. The old Star League had used various types of PCA, particularly for scouting and as mobile infantry support for the ponderous 'Mech units. The Clans, when they'd first struck the Inner Sphere with unexpected ferocity and dazzling technological superiority, had introduced to warfare something called Elemental armor— man-sized, jump-capable powered suits nearly as tough and as deadly as a 'Mech. There were cases on record of whole swarms of Elementals leaping onto a 'Mech in battle and beginning literally to tear it apart.
During the past few years, though, combat armor had been making an appearance with Inner Sphere forces as well, either manufactured locally with newly rediscovered techniques, or discovered in forgotten Star League arms caches. Few mercenary units could afford the things, but the Gray Death had been lucky enough to acquire a number of Inner Sphere units almost as soon as they'd become available. More recently, the Legion had struck it rich when Major Frye's Third Battalion had uncovered a number of crated, mint-condition Mark XXI Nighthawk suits in an underground Star League cache on Karbala, during a mission across the old Lyran Commonwealth border into the Rasalhague Free Republic. Legion techs had been modifying the technology and had come up with two versions of their own, a combat suit and a lighter, more maneuverable one for scouting. The scout suits were the ones Alex and McCall wore now.
"We'll be waiting, Alex," Allyn told him. "You can count on us!"
"We are."
The Reivers turned out to number at least four or five hundred men and women, though General Ambrose McBee and his officers were reluctant to discuss exact numbers. Alex didn't blame them; they'd already suffered heavy casualties in militia raids and dragnets. Switching his infrared scanners back on, he turned again, searching for McCall's Nighthawk suit. Compared to the dancing flames of infrared radiated by the rebel troops around him, McCall's suit was very nearly invisible. Like Alex's, it emitted almost no heat at low-activity levels, and its armor employed electronic stealth technology similar to that of chameleon suits, constantly monitoring ambient patterns of color, light, and shadow, and adjusting the surface color and apparent texture to match. That didn't make the suits invisible by any means, but it made them very, very hard to spot at a distance or in poor light.
Especially if you weren't expecting them.
"Well, Major," Alex said, walking up to the other suited figure. He used his helmet's sonic transmitter rather than radio; there was too great a chance that radio communications were being monitored from the Citadel. "Do you have the information you need?"
"Enough, I think," McCall replied. "Tha' Citadel's a damn big labyrinth, but a few of the Reivers hae been inside an' oot again. As prisoners, or on one errand or another. Robert was wrong about tha', at least."
"There were those civilians we saw inside this morning."
"Aye. Folks will be folks, nae matter wha'. Turn around. Let's check our power systems again."
"Yes, sir."
Alex and McCall had retrieved the two suits, carefully foam-packed inside two-meter crates labeled "machine parts" and stored in a starport warehouse in New Edinburgh. They'd spent most of the afternoon back at the McCall estate, tuning the units and installing their power cores, checking weapons and program loads, and readying them for combat. Donned like unusually heavy and bulky space suits, the Nighthawks were surprisingly light to wear. Sensors embedded inside the s
uit's legs and arms felt the wearer's movements and responded with a myomer-assisted movement of the same degree. A man in a Nighthawk was not only nearly invisible, he was immensely strong. Both men carried laser rifles and microgrenade launchers, as well as an assortment of munitions. McCall also carried several satchel charges packed with polydetaline and equipped with pullring detonators, as what he referred to jocularly as "lockpicks."
They'd spent long hours going over all their gear before the mission, with the suits' backpack power cells receiving special attention. After McCall had run a final diagnostic check on Alex's unit and declared him fully operational, he turned around and let Alex perform the same service on him.
"You're set," Alex said. "I think it's time we moved out."
"Aye. Tha' it is."
The Reivers had escorted the two men this far, to a patch of woods on the lower slopes of Mount Alba, about five kilometers from the road that wound up to the bridge across the canyon. They left the Caledonian rebels there, strung out in a rough skirmish line in the woods, and began making their way through the heavy underbrush, climbing steadily toward the unseen Citadel.
They didn't speak; more than likely, there were channel scanners and RF detectors in the area that would pick up even tightly beamed radio signals, and sensitive sound-activated mikes that would pick up human speech. Conversation was not necessary, though. They'd gone over this plan numerous times that afternoon while working on the suits.
The Reivers seemed an unlikely group of rebels—farmers and merchants, most of them, with only a handful who'd ever seen military action. Allyn, for instance, the daughter of a New Edinburgh vintner, worked in a New Edinburgh factory that manufactured AgroMechs—civilian machines that worked Caledonia's farms. James Graham, a bootmaker from a village not far from Dundee, was himself the son of a family that bred fertile neomules. Even the General, who Alex and McCall had met late that afternoon after all, was a pharmacist in what he jokingly called his real life. A big, jolly man almost as given to excess mass as was Wilmarth, Ambrose McBee had admitted to them both over dinner that he'd served only briefly in the military. Years and years before, he'd been a captain with the First Crucis Lancers before returning to Caledonia to serve with the planetary militia, which in those days bore the proud name Caledonian Reivers. Like many other locals, though, he'd resigned his commission not long after Wilmarth was appointed governor some five years ago. There'd been too many changes being made in the old Reivers ... and too many outsiders being brought in to suit Ambrose McBee.
Most worlds maintained their own planetary defense militias, regimental-sized groups of locals who trained and drilled together in addition to any regular or mercenary units that might be stationed on the world with them. Militias tended to be indifferently trained and poorly equipped; inevitably, the best equipment always went to active line units, and there was never enough money to purchase BattleMechs or top-of-the-line weaponry. Even so, more than one raid, even outright planetary invasions, had been repulsed by determined men and women serving in their local militias. The key was that they were locals, fighting on their own soil and for their own homes and families.
During the past five years, however, sweeping changes had been wrought in the Caledonian Reivers. More and more of its members, it seemed, were being imported from off-world, mercenaries ... or had simply been recruited from the sweepings of various spaceports, promised pay and loot in exchange for easy duty. They'd abandoned their traditional colors—the ancient Black Watch tartan—for black and yellow, and eventually had changed even their name. They called themselves the Bloodspillers now and acted more like some vicious urban gang than a military unit. Increasingly arrogant, increasingly violent, they roamed the streets of Caledon's larger cities, extorting, assaulting, raping almost at will. Their excesses had led to the resurrection of the Reivers, but as a kind of secret society that met in a different home each week and kept its weapons buried in hidden caches around the countryside.
Many of the changes in the old Reivers had been introduced by Wilmarth personally. It was said that he'd come from Robinson originally, an oft-fought-over world on the Davion side of the Federated Commonwealth, and it was thought that many of the Bloodspiller officers came from there as well, old friends and cronies of "Wee Willie," as he was derisively called.
There was more to Wilmarth's psychotic behavior than was immediately apparent, Alex thought. The man wielded too much control for someone as obviously mentally unbalanced as he was. Who was the real power behind Caledonia's government now . . . Folker? That hardly seemed likely, though it was clear that the man was controlling—or at least guiding—Caledonia's putative governor. There had to be someone higher on this particular government totem pole, someone who was really calling the shots.
I wonder what Dad would do if he was here? That question had been bothering Alex a lot for the past hours. What he and McCall were about to do was illegal—outrageously, flagrantly so. Yet McCall had summed up Alex's own feelings with a shrug. "Tha' wee struttin' bastard hae put himself above th' law, Alex," he'd said. "We'll be giving him naught but wha' he deserves."
Strangely, the thought of soon going into combat again wasn't bothering Alex at all. He'd thought the very prospect of battle would have him trembling, but the truth was he'd simply been too busy ever since he and McCall had grounded on Caledon to give the matter much thought.
And now was certainly no time to start thinking about it.
The underbrush ahead thinned out. Moments later, Alex emerged from the woods a few meters from the edge of the canyon. Directly ahead and fifty meters away, the walls of the Citadel rose like shiny black cliffs from the far edge of the chasm. The bridge and the road from the city were to the right; McCall's scout suit stood motionless to Alex's left, almost impossible to pick out from the foliage and weatherworn rock around it. Scanning the upper reaches of the Citadel walls, Alex could see the heat glow of several sentries moving along the ramparts.
McCall raised one armored hand, giving a cumbersome thumbs-up. Alex returned the gesture, men crouched, tensing his upper leg muscles and keying a release inside his left gauntlet to initiate his jump sequence.
Then he jumped, the movement translated by the suit's electronics into a soaring leap that carried him out over the edge of the cliff. An instant later, his jump jets kicked in, sending blasts of superheated air shrieking from ducted vents on either side of his backpack. Seconds later, he grounded on the top of the rampart, dropping into a crouch with his laser ready. McCall alighted on top of the wall twenty meters away, then lightly jumped down to the parapet walkway beneath. The shriek of his jets had almost certainly alerted the sentries, but unless the Citadel's defenses were a lot better than Alex and McCall gave them credit for, chances were good that they'd made it unobserved.
Yellow patches of color shifted across Alex's HUD; soldiers were hurrying along the rampart, coming toward them. Swiftly, he leaped off the top of the rampart, then again onto a lower parapet overlooking the inner courtyard. Lights inside the compound cast pools of white radiance across the wide, ferrocrete pavement, but the shadows on the parapets above were night black and impenetrable, save by IR electronics.
"What was that?" someone said nearby, the words picked up by Alex's external mikes. "Hey! What's goin' on out there?"
"Ah, probably the wind," another voice replied.
Seconds later, the two speakers walked past within two meters of the spot where Alex was standing, pressed back against a black ferrocrete wall, neither of the men so much as glancing in his direction. Even if he'd not been wearing the scout suit, Alex thought, they probably wouldn't have seen him. The bright lights of the inner courtyard would have ruined their night vision.
"All right, Alex," McCall said softly, using his suit's external sound speaker rather than radio. "I'd best be makin' my move."
"Roger that," Alex replied. "Good luck!"
He never saw or heard McCall's departure.
Alex found a spot on
the inner rampart walkway where he had a good view of the inner courtyard, and settled down to wait.
* * *
McCall had switched his visor HUD from IR to normal, with enhanced low-light imaging to allow him to see better in the night and had quickly found what he was looking for. A young Reiver who'd worked in the Citadel for several months had told him about the door, which bypassed the main entrance to the Citadel's inner keep. Tucked away in a corner of the keep wall just below the second tallest of the building's multiple towers, it led to the kitchen area; the Residence staff used it to bring in supplies to the food-storage lockers. The door was kept locked, and McCall was tempted to use one of his high-explosive lockpicks, but there was a quieter way. With his enhanced musculature, he easily yanked the cover off an electronic access panel nearby, jacked in several wires from a power-feed controller on his suit's belt, and cycled through several tens of thousands of binary bit combinations in mere seconds, until the proper code was transmitted and the door quietly slid open.
A guard stood inside, his assault rifle slung over his shoulder. McCall's armored fist slashed forward faster than a striking snake, splintering the man's jaw and crashing his windpipe in a single, near-silent blow. Lowering the corpse to the floor, McCall then palmed the control that slid the door shut behind him. So far, so good.
The trick was to see how far he could penetrate the facility before the alarm was sounded. Perhaps as many as a thousand people lived in the Citadel or in the barracks that ringed the courtyard surrounding the keep—including the several hundred soldiers who comprised the Bloodspiller Militia. Sooner or later he would be spotted, but until then he had the descriptions of the Citadel's inner twistings provided to him by people who'd worked there. This passageway sloped down beneath the center of the keep and emerged in the kitchen; a side passage, however, would take him through a supply room, bypassing areas where civilians were likely to be working.
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