Decision at Thunder Rift

by William H. Keith

  "Silence on the commline!" Lori snapped. "They're just regrouping." She could see the movement of men and 'Mechs through the air clearing much farther down the slope, perhaps two kilometers away. By the way they were deploying across the ravine, she could tell they had no intention of returning to the port. The Lancers were in a good defensive position, but it would not take long for a determined push by overwhelming numbers to climb back up the ravine and overwhelm them.

  "Come on Gray," she said with unexpected fervor. "Stow that antenna, and then get the hell up here."

  She turned her eyes to a monitor that looked up the hill toward the vapor-wreathed opening of the Rift two kilometers behind her. Through her mikes, she could hear the muted thunder of its waterfall. Their three 'Mechs and the hovercraft defenders were rapidly running out of room to run.

  31

  Tor let the computer direct a last correcting burn that reduced the DropShip's closing speed to just over a meter per second. The freighter Invidious was large on the bridge screen images from aft, under the DropShip's tubes.

  Like most JumpShips, the old freighter was built around the needle-slim dagger of a central drive core. Those clean lines were broken, however, by an unsightly clutter of cargo modules, the stubby, rounded prow of the pressurized crew section, the off-center bulge of the Invidious' second DropShip still strapped to the aft cargo compartment, and the menacing, misshapen blisters of the ship's meteor defense particle cannon and lasers. Tor's practiced eyes searched for signs of damage or incompetence, but found none. The stationkeeping drive appeared to be functioning, though the only sign of that was the LED traceries on the DropShip's console instruments registering a magnetic flux. All the same, he had calculated this path to keep the DropShip well clear of those particle streams, which, even at a thrust measured in thousandths of a G, could kill.

  Aft, far aft of the freighter, the red disk of Trell now appeared as a crescent of light caught in a black circle that seemed to be devouring the star. It was an artificial eclipse, Tor knew, brought on by the Invidious' jump sail ten kilometers aft

  There was a burst of field-induced static from the bridge speakers, and then a man's voice speaking. "DropShip on vector four-five, reduce speed to point five meter per sec, over."

  Tor touched a button, fed a correction into his computer console. There was another, almost imperceptible nudge. "Complied, freighter."

  He'd kept ship-to-ship chatter to an absolute minimum on the approach for fear of giving something away. So far there had been no challenge, no order to change course or kill vector. The freighter's deck watch must be satisfied with the DropShip's IFF broadcast

  The last sliver of Trell sun was swallowed by the black jump sail, and the DropShip plunged into shadow. The hull of the freighter was only a few hundred meters distant now, masked in shadow, but outlined by the glimmer and steady-paced blinks of acquisition and running lights. A green beacon pulsed at the screen's crosshair-marked center, where docking latches were blossoming open to receive the DropShip stern to.

  Tor touched a console key, and a flashing red light appeared on the screen well off to one side, against the backdrop of stars. That was the Kurita warship's location, 12,000 kilometers away. There was still no transmission, no indication that anyone suspected anything was wrong.

  He opened the ship's intercom. "All hands... stand by. I'm going to tell them who we are."

  The freighter normally carried a crew of fifteen. Three of the original crew had gone with Tor to Trellwan and died there. The memory was still an anguish of guilt in Tor. He did not know how many of the remaining twelve of his crew were still alive aboard the Invidious, though it was unlikely — or so he prayed — that so many trained starship hands would be casually wasted.

  A bigger question was how many guards might be standing watch over the ship. Tor couldn't even guess at that, though conditions would be pretty cramped with more than ten or twelve passengers.

  He glanced at the screen, which was recording time. It read 55 hours, 30 minutes exactly, with the seconds flickering away to the right of those numbers.

  There were a number of ways to attack a JumpShip in space. If it was unsupported, there were several positions a DropShip could take that would threaten the vessel — aft of the jump sail, for example, or close forward of the stationkeeping drives, assuming the defensive weapons had been neutralized.

  If the DropShip opened fire on the Invidious' weapons blisters, the Union warship would detect the radiations and investigate. If the freighter suffered any damage at all — perhaps a torn sail or an explosion in a weapons pod — the warship would investigate. Or, at the very least, it would try to raise the freighter on a ship-to-ship frequency to find out what was happening.

  Tor had been prepared to try such an attack if their approach had been discovered, but his primary plan was still on schedule so far. He knew that one or more of the ship's officers would meet them at the docking lock. If he and his men moved fast enough, they might be able to storm the ship and take it before the Invidious' deck watch could get off a yell for help.

  Might. If the watch officer was awake and on the ball, he would have at least enough time to get a message off to Trellwan. The warship might pick up a general, nondirectional broadcast, but unless the two ships were in active communication, with the frequency open, it was more likely that the warship wouldn't pick up the message.

  It would take only a little over five and a half minutes for a beamed message to reach the spaceport's ground antenna at Trellwan. From there, a message would instantly go out to the warship, which would be alerted within the five and a half minutes it took a radio signal to travel back from Trellwan to the jump point. That was the greatest danger, and only the Lancers' attack on the spaceport antenna offered a way around iL

  Then again, if the Duke had discovered the deception with the computer manifest, Tor might be met by a squad of marines with drawn guns.

  The computer made a last-minute correctional burn. The DropShip's bridge rang with the clear bell tones and rattling thumps of magnetic grapples swinging home, of docking flanges clamping down to secure the vessel to its berth on the freighter's hull.

  "Docked," he announced over the intercom. "Stand by, boarding party, main ship lock!"

  The next few seconds would spell failure or success.

  * * * *

  As soon as Lori's coded message had reached him, Grayson brought the hidden Shadow Hawk to its feet and began moving along the wadi. He was headed toward a place where the bank had partly collapsed, offering a natural ramp up and out of the gully and onto the flat ground southwest of the port. The port itself was still masked by smoke, but the ground com antenna stabbed up out of the haze two kilometers away. Other shapes were gradually becoming clear — the squat saucer of the control tower, the four parallel rows of liquid hydrogen tanks farther to the east, the grey shapes of the grounded Combine DropShips.

  And 'Mechs. Grayson was getting moving radar images of at least eight of them, though the continuing ECM jamming was scrambling his images and making it impossible to get a hard fix. All the 'Mechs seemed to be moving toward the north end of the field, and none were closer than two kilometers away. From the look of things, the plan seemed to be working.

  A light haze of smoke was drifting across the southwestern perimeter, dispersing before a light northerly breeze. The Shadow Hawk reached the chainlink fence at the port perimeter, and stepped over it to the ferrocrete apron. A hovercraft weapons carrier whined through the smoke a half-kilometer ahead, heading north, but it ignored Grayson.

  He'd been counting on that. Though the Duke's men knew all too well that Grayson had made off with their captured Shadow Hawk two days before, there was still a company of 'Mechs in the area. Any casual observer would most likely assume that the battle-scarred machine moving across the southern edge of the port was friendly. The field officers who would know differently would be at the Castle monitoring combat communications, or in the field piloting
their 'Mechs and with other business on their minds.

  The sounds of continued combat drifted down the rising ground to the north. If the Lancers' three 'Mechs could hold out just long enough for him to destroy the antenna, he could join them by attacking the Combine forces from behind. With surprise and confusion, they might all be able to pull back into the Rift and disengage from the enemy.

  After that, the Lancers would have to make their way through Thunder Rift to a prearranged landing site on the shores of the Grimheld Sea. If Tor was able to recapture the Invidious, one of the freighter's DropShips would meet them at a beacon they planned to set two standard days from now. They would have to abandon their 'Mechs to make the passage through the Rift, because the waterfall had begun in earnest now, making any passage by water impossible. In case of his death, Grayson had hand-drawn maps to help them pick their way through noise-blasted paths to the north opening, then down through rugged terrain to the Sea.

  Once aboard the DropShip, they could make their way to the Invidious, and from there to the nearest Commonwealth outpost Grayson could find. Those of the Lancers who wished to remain could survive for 30 standard days on the supplies the DropShip would leave them, then make their way by hovercraft back to Sarghad as soon as it was dark again.

  And there they would wait, with the promise that Grayson would return again with a Commonwealth force large enough to smash the Combine invaders.

  Grayson tore his mind away from the plan. Looking at it overall, he saw too many assumptions and premises and outright guesses, and too many little details that could so easily go wrong. He remembered another of Kai Griffith's maxims. "If something can go wrong," the Weapons Master had said, "it will. Keep your planning simple, because the plan's certain to get a lot more complicated in practice than you thought it'd be."

  Grayson didn't see how he could have simplified it any further. With so few 'Mechs against so many, only a complex plan gave him the options and flexibility he needed.

  He triggered a switch marked HUD on his console, and the green targeting bullseye and characters of his heads-up display snapped on at eye level. He centered the antenna mast in the target circle, and read the range as 850 meters. Then he made a weapons check. The autocannon was still at rest, but fully loaded and ready to be brought into action. His forearm medium laser was charged and ready, and the missile launchers — a battery of LRMs set into the 'Mech's left torso and a pair of twin-tube SRMs mounted on either side of its head — were on line, loaded, and showed a display of green lights on his weapons board.

  All set. He pushed the con stick forward, urging the Shadow Hawk into a lumbering trot toward the antenna.

  When the missile caught his Hawk squarely in the back, it took Grayson completely by surprise.

  32

  Tor arrived hand-over-hand at the docking lock, where he took a holstered vibroblade from one of his men and tied it to his thigh while the soldier strapped the powerpack across his shoulders. The fourteen Lancers who had volunteered for this mission were already there, still dressed in their Royal Guards green and carrying everything from long, keen-edged boarding knives and vibroblades to laser rifles and tranq guns. Half the prisoners they'd found aboard the DropShip were there too, armed with improvised weapons and a savage determination. In the lock area's dim lighting, all their faces were pale as they clung to the lock's handholds in the dreamy weightlessness of zero-G.

  Tor's eyes picked out General Varney. "Prisoners all secure, sir?"

  Varney's eyes twinkled. "Secure, Captain. Aft hold, and chained to their seats. There was a bit of a problem with the ISF fellow, so I had to put him out. Again."

  "Good." Tor caught his lip between his teeth. "But, General..."

  "Don't say it son," Varney broke in, seeming to read Tor's mind. "You're in command here, but I AM going along." His knuckles worked along the haft of the heavy-bladed knife he held.

  Tor paused, then nodded. If he'd learned one thing about the military, it was that you don't argue with generals. "Okay, men. Remember now, don't get trigger-happy. It may still be my crew running that ship under guard, or they may even have been enlisted by these bastards. God knows what they've been told, but we'll need them to crew the ship.

  "Remember, too, that our acceleration isn't going to make any difference here. When you kick into the center of a room, it'll take you two minutes to fall to the deck. You throw a punch, and it'll throw you right back. Watch yourselves! Questions? No? All right, here goes!"

  The outer airlock door slid open, and they found themselves looking through the open hatch of the Invidious at a trio of armed, black-uniformed officers standing in the freighter's docking lock.

  "Hey! What's all this?" shouted an infantry officer in a Captain's uniform. The next moment, he was hit by the hurtling body of one of the Lancers, and the two were scuffled in a pinwheel of arms and legs across the cargo lock and into a far bulkhead.

  General Varney crowded in ahead of the rest. Slashing out and up with his boarding knife, he caught a Combine army lieutenant low in his gut, laying the man open in a weightless spray of blood.

  Tor launched himself at the third Combine trooper, but the dying lieutenant spun into his path in a welter of blood and thrashing limbs. Tor caught a glimpse of the officer — a major, he thought — vanishing through the cargo lock hatch and into the passageway beyond. Damn!

  "After him!" he called out. "Get him!"

  The boarding party swam through the lock and spilled into the main passageway. Tor had to orient the men so that they were heading foreward in the direction of the bridge. The faint acceleration of the Invidious stationkeeping drive was just enough to create the impression that they were indeed swimming up through an endless tunnel. At its far end, Tor caught a flicker of movement.

  "Sergeant Yee! Pick him off with your laser!"

  The trooper triggered his weapon, the beam faintly visible as a red thread flickering up the corridor, but the major slipped through a hatch an instant before the shot fired. Damn again! Tor thought, as the boarding party continued up the passageway. The alert would certainly go out now. From here on, it was all going to be up to Grayson and his Lancers on Trellwan.

  * * * *

  The explosion at his back knocked Grayson's Shadow Hawk to its hands and knees. He hung against the cockpit seat's straps, stabbing wildly at control switches beneath bank upon bank of suddenly flashing indicator lights. Damage did not seem severe, but it looked like the jump jets in the Hawk's massive backpack had been put out of action. He was also getting ominous readings from the backpack environmental support system.

  Grayson hauled back on the controls, and let his natural sense of balance guide the computer-controlled gyro and balance systems. Pulling itself up, the Hawk stood and turned to face its attacker.

  A Crusader in red and black livery stood there at a range of 220 meters. Grayson knew that color pattern. He'd seen it before, on a computer data listing. The Crusader was Lord Harimandir Singh's 'Mech.

  A console data display gave a rundown of the Crusader's stats. The massively armed and armored beast weighed 65 tons, its design sacrificing speed and maneuverability for weaponry. Grayson scanned the list of weapons: medium lasers, machine guns, and LRM launchers in each arm, and SRM launchers set into the armor plate of each leg. The machine's forearms were grotesquely swollen to accommodate the strap-on packs of weaponry. It raised both arms, and strode toward Grayson like a nightmarish sleepwalker.

  Adrenalin sang in Grayson's blood. He dropped the autocannon across his left shoulder, and triggered a long, rolling burst of hellfire, then snapped the Hawk's right arm up to discharge three lightning-quick bolts of coherent light. Flame and minor debris splattered from the Crusader's head and shoulders. A row of craters stitched across its chest, rupturing armor plate and leaving a ragged scar along one shoulder.

  Grayson was moving before he could register the extent of damage. As he plunged clumsily across the ferrocrete in a bone-jarring shoulder roll, m
ore laser fire and missiles screamed through the air where the Hawk had been standing an instant before. Grayson brought his machine to its feet with a salvo of SRM fire that rang and echoed in the confines of his cockpit as the head-mounted tubes loosed their fury in smoke and noise. Wires and charred metal dangled from a tear in the Crusader's upper left arm, and an oil leak in its lower torso gave the curiuous impression of thick, black blood running down the scarred armor.

  Tubes mounted along the Crusader's hips belched fire. At this range, Grayson did not have time to react before a pair of SRMs slammed into the Hawk's torso. The ear protectors in his helmet saved him from the worst of the noise, but the shriek of tearing metal and high explosives hit Grayson's head with as much force as the shock of the blast itself.

  He knew that maneuverability was his single advantage over the Crusader, and he had to use it. Charging the Crusader at top speed, the Shadow Hawk angled across the enemy 'Mech's line of fire to work his way around to the side. The Crusader pivoted on its left leg, tracking him with its right arm laser.

  Grayson took the laser bolt high on the Hawk's right arm, at the pauldron shield. Planting the 'Mech's left foot solidly, he whirled to the right. The Shadow Hawk's left arm smashed with staggering impact into the Crusader's right shoulder from behind, sending the heavier 'Mech spinning forward in a wild effort to regain its balance. Now Grayson had the Hawk's laser up and tracking. He fired two bolts into the Crusader's back and side as it fell, then followed with a salvo of SRMs that struck home in a tight cluster of high-explosive mayhem.

  Grayson checked the screen showing elapsed time. Fifty-five hours, thirty-three minutes. If the Invidious' stationkeeping crew had managed to get a message out, it would arrive in two more minutes. He had to destroy that antenna first

  Stepping past the Crusader, he broke into a lumbering run. Singh's machine — if that was Singh — appeared damaged, but was certainly not destroyed. It was possible that the pilot had been stunned by the missile salvo, or possibly by the fall itself. Grayson thought he would have time to destroy the tower, then return for a final showdown.