Decision at Thunder Rift

by William H. Keith

  The target was a tank farm, four rows of squat, massively armored storage tanks at the far side of the port. The Stinger's laser probed the base of one of the tanks, searching for weakness. The blue flash of a particle beam lanced out from a DropShip and caught the Stinger in its glare. Lori noted with approval that the Stingtr's pilot, Yarin, one of Grayson's Trell recruits, held his fire steady on the stubborn armor of the tank. She targeted her Locust's laser on the same spot, adding her own weapon's white fury to where the armor was softening, to where the network of pipes and conduits for fuel transfer were melting.

  Those tanks held liquid hydrogen, reaction mass for the fusion impulse drives of the DropShips that called at the port. In two seconds, the valves at the tank's base slagged down, vaporizing hydrogen gushed out into the cold air, and the explosion sent a fireball mushrooming into the sky. The shock knocked Yarin's Stinger to its knees, and Lori fought the Locust's controls to keep her machine on its feet. The impact of the blast was a palpable blow, savage and deafening. The fireball climbed higher, devouring the sky. Its light illuminated the whole area, while flaming chunks of white hot metal rained onto the field and clinked across the Locust's hull.

  "That's it," Lori said. "They'll have the cavalry out any moment now! Fall back! Fall back!"

  * * * *

  The diversion Grayson prayed for came as a shout from a soldier by the doors. "Hey! They're attacking the port!"

  Discipline broke as soldiers turned in their ranks, craning their necks at the laser fire starkly visible against the darkened expanse of the spaceport below Mount Gayal. Several astechs ran out onto the parade ground to get a better look.

  Grayson knew it was now or never.

  Starting up the ladder of the gantry, he kept his eyes fixed on the Shadow Hawk's head. His greatest fear was what would happen if the Hawk was fully powered up and ready and the pilot should spot him halfway up. When Grayson had reached the 'Mech's waist, the pilot removed his helmet and stood in the cockpit, stretching up to see past the bulk of the 'Mech's chest to the battle outside. Grayson climbed faster then to the Hawk's chest. He was level with it when a vibration in the gantry attracted the pilot's attention. He looked down, eyes widening. At the same instant, there was a shout from the deck eight meters below. "Hey! You up there! What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  Grayson had been spotted. Above him, the pilot reaching for his sidearm.

  29

  Grayson climbed faster, scrambling out onto the narrow framework of the scaffolding walkway that ran across the bulge of the 'Mech's chest, just below the cockpit. The Mech Warrior had his pistol out, aimed at Grayson's head.

  "Drop that gun!" The man's voice was shrill, and a bit unsteady.

  Grayson dropped his rifle, which clattered on the scaffolding. Then, he began unfastening the buckles that held his powerpack straps in place.

  "This is restricted up here, fella," the warrior said. "No one comes up here but Techs and..."

  The last buckle slipped open, and Grayson brought the heavy laser backpack up and around in front of him like a shield. He rushed the MechWarrior, and the scaffolding jumped and rattled under his boots. The pilot fired once, his shot missing both shield and Grayson as he fell backward into the cockpit

  Grayson threw the bulky power unit, catching the pilot in the chest. Then Grayson was on top of him, wrestling for the gun as his feet scrabbled for a firm grip on the slick surface of the 'Mech's upper chest armor. The two men grappled for a moment, the powerpack with the rifle dangling from its cable getting between them in the scramble. The pilot stood up, his pistol still in hand. Grayson lashed out with his foot, caught the MechWarrior on the knee, then watched as the man toppled over and fell backward with a shriek and the clatter of metal scaffolding.

  The stammer of an assault rifle echoed through the Bay, and bullets whined and cracked past Grayson's head. He stooped and retrieved his rifle, checked the power, then snapped off three quick shots at the soldiers advancing toward the ladder. The laser fired with a warm hum. The bolts of coherent light were invisible, but two of the soldiers below crumpled to the deck with their uniforms smoldering.

  As other troops sought cover, Grayson ducked back into the Shadow Hawk's cockpit. He found the handle and pulled the canopy down into place, then gave it a twist to seat and seal it

  The canopy itself was heavily layered with reflective materials that transformed it into a one-way mirror, an added safety factor that prevented the pilot from being blinded if the cockpit was hit by an enemy laser beam. It darkened the cavern outside somewhat, but Grayson could still make out the scurrying shapes of Combine soldiers.

  Quickly now, he told himself. His hands reached out to flick on row upon row of switches along the consoles to the right and left of his chair. Instrument readings showed his power plant active and full power available, his weapons loaded, armed, and linked to the controls.

  Grayson pulled the neural impulse helmet down on its trailing tangle of wires and feed cables and made it snug against his head. With power on, he cautiously opened the feedback test circuit. First, there was the familiar wash of vertigo as circuits tuned to unfamiliar brainwave patterns fed dissonant patterns back through the nerves of his own inner ears. He found the vernier knobs that adjusted the helmet's tuning, working them back and forth as the dizziness ebbed. Out-of-step traceries on an oscilloscope resolved into a single standing wave, and he knew the Shadow Hawk was now set to his alpha wave patterns.

  He gave the board a last scan. Green... green... all green. His left hand took the conning stick, his right the weapons grip. His foot kicked off the leg locks that held the Hawk braced against the scaffolding, and the machine took a step forward. The gantry scaffolding exploded outward in a cloud of spinning shards and fragments. The 'Mech took another step, dragging twisted strands of aluminum alloy across the deck with a screech of tortured metal.

  The Bay doors were grinding shut. Grayson twisted around, searching. Sure enough, the control booth was there, the stairway back in place. He could see an astech inside the booth, frantically speaking into a microphone. Grayson brought the Hawk's right arm up, bringing the 6 cm laser mounted to the forearm into line. His right hand tightened on the trigger. White fire burst from the booth, which spouted a stream of glass splinters and shattered metal. Half the booth twisted away and fell to the deck, trailing black smoke and a tangle of shredded braces and metal from the stairway.

  Still partly open, the Bay door froze in place.

  Grayson turned and strode for the opening. Men scattered before his feet, most throwing away their guns and fleeing without looking back, a pitiful few standing their ground to blaze away at the thundering 'Mech with assault rifles and pistols. Grayson ignored them, increasing speed as he moved away from the Castle. The laser and missile batteries mounted around the wall packed more than enough firepower to bring the Shadow Hawk down. His only hope was that the weapons were not yet manned and ready.

  He didn't dare cut in the 'Mech's jump jets for the descent from the parade field. After piloting the Locust, the Shadow Hawk felt wildly different — huge, massive, and clumsy, as though he were attempting to walk with lead weights strapped to hands and feet and torso. It would not take long to get used to the heavier 'Mech, but Grayson was not about to risk any tricky maneuvers until he had the machine thoroughly broken to harness.

  The terrain below the parade ground was broken and rough, gouged by erosion gullies and made treacherous by loose stones and gravel spills. Grayson found he had begun his descent further north than he'd intended. To the south, toward the lights of Sarghad, the slope was gentler, flat enough for hovercraft and solid enough to support running 'Mechs.

  He opened his combat frequencies, and got a rasp of static and a rapidly speaking voice in his helmet phones.

  ". . . freighter DropShip, demanding immediate clearance!"

  "DropShip Alpha, this is tower. We have an emergency on the field and must deny your request for clearance."


  "You idiots, it's the emergency I'm trying to avoid! Look... Captain Yorunabi, ISF has given me orders to launch immediately. Do you read me?"

  Grayson strained to catch the words, which were fuzzed by static. As these were electronic transmissions and not voices, he couldn't tell if the speaker was Tor or not. But he knew Lori would not have launched the attack on the port unless she had had word from Captain tor that the DropShip was secure.

  When they'd made their plans, they'd not known the DropShip's launch schedule, and could only guess from the preparations around its base that it was ready to lift. DropShips were not loaded with their liquid hydrogen reaction mass until just before launch. The H had an unfortunate tendency to diffuse through unshielded tanks if it were left sitting for more than a very few hours. It was generally cheaper and more efficient to store the fuel elsewhere, and load it aboard just before burn time.

  That was how they knew the DropShip was nearing launch time when they'd seen the astech teams fueling it, but they hadn't known how close it was. Rather than have Tor and his squad risk detection by sitting in a secretly captured DropShip for hours — possibly a standard day or more — the attack was planned to give the freighter Captain an excuse to launch at once.

  The DropShip pilot's frantic request was according to plan, but Grayson wondered about the presence of an ISF Captain aboard. Was that Tor's bluff? Or had something gone terribly wrong?

  "Alpha, this is the tower. You have clearance for immediate launch."

  If it was a bluff, it had worked. A flare of light spread across the still-darkened field, and the Invidious' DropShip rose on a flickering pillar of white fire, moving slowly at first, then accelerating at what must have been a bone-cracking three Gs into the pearly sky.

  If Tor's assault had failed somehow, there was not a thing in the universe that could be done about it now.

  Grayson switched frequencies, and found the battle channel he'd assigned the Lancers.

  "Lancer One, this is Grayson." They'd not arranged radio codes, because Grayson hadn't expected to be coming out of the Castle in a BattleMech.

  There was a pause. "Grayson? This is Lori."

  "Lori! I've liberated us a Shadow Hawk. I'm on my way down the slope toward you. Any opposition?"

  "Heavy fire from the ships, as expected. Their ‘Mechs are not manned, and so far they've not been able to scramble any against us. They'll be on us soon, though. Ground troops are moving to set up heavy static weapons on the field."

  "Right. Stick with the plan. I'll see you at the rendezvous!"

  Fire and shattered earth rose around him as missiles from the Castle sought across the rocky ground for the lumbering Shadow Hawk. Twice Grayson turned, dropped the autocannon down across the 'Mech's left shoulder, and opened a rolling barrage of explosive shells against the launchers that were tracking him, but with no noticeable result. The range was already too great for accurate placement of shells or rockets.

  On the plain below, he could make out the specks of three BattleMechs retiring north toward the mountains, shielded from the grounded DropShips by the ruin of a liquid hydrogen tank. And in the sky above, a brilliant star moved rapidly toward the lightening east, trailing a white contrail plume. Success or failure?

  He would learn soon enough. For now, the plan required radio silence with the spacecraft, and the pretense that Tor's part of the plan had worked perfectly.

  If it had not, success would turn to failure in two short days.

  * * * *

  JumpShips were ungainly beasts, restricted by their design and by physics to slow and extremely gentle maneuvers about that invisible abstraction in space known as a jump point. Jump points were areas spanning several tens of thousands of kilometers, depending on the mass of the star that generated them. Every star had two, the zenith point at the star's north pole, the nadir point at the south. These distances varied, of course, depending on the size of the star. With their Kearny-Fuchida drive, JumpShips could maneuver into the point, energize their drive systems, and reappear at the jump point of a star up to 30 light years away.

  Energy for the jump came from the vessel's jump sail, a disk of metal fabric less than a millimeter thick and up to a kilometer wide that captured and transmitted the light and particulate radiation from a star to shipboard storage cells. Designed to absorb every photon of every wavelength that fell upon it, jump sails were black — a black so profound that an old pilots' joke told of space appearing white in comparison.

  Though complex in the details of operation, the basic simplicity of jump point transitions had given men the stars. Even though the war-torn civilization of the Successor States could no longer build new vessels in any quantity, ships continued to ply the lanes between stellar jump points. The Invidious was at least three centuries old, her drive guide laid in during the years just before the Succession Wars.

  No one knew how long the power core of a starship would remain charged and vital. It was a question that troubled the philosophers and warlords of every world in the Human sphere.

  A JumpShip's reliance on the jump points and on the huge yet delicate black jump sails meant that no ship could travel far from the point at which it entered a planetary system. The sails had to be unfurled for considerable periods of time to soak up the energy necessary for a jump, and the dust and meteoric debris that littered the orbital plane of every star could shred a sail within a few passages. Though some ships had secondary drive systems that allowed them to maneuver through a system with their sails furled, most JumpShips remained at the jump point, using their DropShips as shuttles between starship and world.

  This posed another problem, however. At the jump points of any star, that star's gravity is still very much in evidence. A ship in orbit around a star would not fall, of course, but it would not remain near the jump point either. Rather, it would follow its orbital path around the star and eventually through the dust-laden plane of the system. For this reason, JumpShips mount ion or plasma/fusion stationkeeping thrusters. These provide a steady, gentle thrust carefully calculated to precisely counter the pull of the star, and to maintain the spread of the jump sail at the same time. A starship parked at a star's jump point is positioned with its prow aimed outsystem and the sail spread perhaps ten kilometers aft, between the star and the ship. The stationkeeping thrusters are angled aft and outboard, so that their streams of charged particles will not damage the fragile sail.

  Needless to say, starships parked at a jump point could scarcely maneuver at all, for any lateral acceleration would distort, then shred the sail fabric. There were several starship-to-starship battles on record, ponderous affairs that had taken weeks of maneuvering to complete. Generally, when ship-to-ship combat was called for, heavily armed and maneuverable DropShips, or lighter, faster, and more maneuverable aerospace fighters were used. JumpShips are armed as a matter of course (including radar-directed lasers to defend against meteors), but a single DropShip provides enough threat against any unsupported ship that a ship captain would usually surrender immediately rather than risk damage to his precious, irreplaceable vessel.

  It was a fascinating problem in space combat tactics, Tor decided. He had never paid much attention to space tactics, though any freighter captain knew enough to enable him to counter the maneuvers of a possibly hostile starship at an unfamiliar jump point. His problem here was to approach the Invidious without giving away the fact that the DropShip was no longer under the control of the same people. There might be passwords or approach codes that he knew nothing about, though a search of the DropShip's operations programs revealed no new computer codes in the docking sequence. It looked as though the pirates had left everything as they'd found it. Tor could only hope that that was the case.

  The tactical complication for this mission was the Draconis Combine JumpShip parked 12,000 kilometers from the Invidious. While this distance was great enough to keep either vessel's stationkeeping thrusters from damaging the other's sail, twelve thousand kilometers
was practically next door, by space navigation standards.

  Tor could feel that other ship out there. It was too distant to show optically, but he could visualize it. He was certain that the warship was the same one that had stopped him en route from Sigurd to Trellwan in the first place. If it picked up even a hint that something was wrong aboard the freighter, a pair of Union Class DropShips — or worse, a flight of aerospace fighters — could be positioned off the Invidious' sail within 30 minutes.

  This particular hijacking had to be carried out with complete secrecy, or it would end almost before it had begun. Grayson and Tor had worked out the details in their walk on the shores of Thunder Rift's lake. The key to the plan was the knowledge that each JumpShip would have its directional antenna centered on Trellwan, but they almost certainly would not have them aimed at one another. Two ships at stationkeeping by a jump point, particularly a military vessel and a warship, would have little to say to one another, though the warship would keep the freighter under observation as a matter of course. An attacker like Tor would be able to tell if the Invidious were talking with the warship, but not if her crew were in communication with the port — and through them, with the Combine ship.

  Tor's problems would begin if the Invidious' crew was able to alert the spaceport to the fact that he was boarding their ship. The spaceport would alert the warship, and the warship would have armed DropShips alongside almost at once. That warning would also spell trouble for Grayson on Trellwan. He was planning another raid on the port, and word that the freighter had been captured would put the spaceport defenses on their guard. That might make the attack impossible, or worse, lead it into an ambush.

  It was for this reason that Tor's mission was coordinated so precisely with Grayson's forces on Trellwan. The Lancers would be in position to attack the spaceport at the same time Tor's DropShip approached the Invidious. The ground attack's first target would be the spaceport control tower, which housed the communications relays to the commnet dish antenna that could warn the enemy warship of the assault on the Invidious.