The Scorpion Jar

by Jason M. Hardy

  The Republic knew it had to send troops in or risk alienating the government of several border planets, but it also knew it could not risk top-of-the-line troops on what could be a fool’s errand. So it had scraped together a ragtag group of militias, many similar to Jonah’s in composition and experience. This was a group that was supposed to go up against elite Capellan troops and somehow hold them off long enough to get the lost unit safely away from Kurrigan. If they succeeded, the Confederation promised to look the other way on any losses suffered by House Ma-Tzu Kai. If they failed—well, the Capellans would take the position that The Republic had lacked the strength to rescue its own troops.

  Once on Kurrigan, most of the Republican troops were busy trying to root out the Ma-Tzu Kai forces and give the wandering army room to escape. Jonah’s company had been assigned to a backup role, ordered to hold its post and wait. Even in a desperate situation, Jonah thought bitterly, there’s little use for us.

  They sat in the middle of hostile territory and waited. After two weeks on Kurrigan, he and Turk had run out of jokes to tell each other about Rotten Creek. By the end of the first month, his unit had its first fistfight, quickly followed by its first arrest and brief confinement. Jonah’s plans grew more and more detailed, but no orders came through.

  They eventually spent six weeks encamped near Rotten Creek. Somewhere beyond the range of hills that lay to the west, the troopers of House Ma-Tzu Kai and the main Republic force fought and maneuvered and fought again while Rotten Creek remained completely and totally secure.

  Then it came.

  The order that changed Jonah Levin’s life forever arrived with a simple beep. After loading in the day’s encryption keys, Jonah watched the message organize itself from gibberish to coherent orders.

  FIRST KYRKBACKEN ECHO COMPANY PROCEED IMMEDIATELY 45′36″ REINFORCE REPUBLIC FORCES AGAINST MAJOR HOUSE MOBILIZATION

  House Ma-Tzu Kai was on the move. They must have pooled a large force, making The Republic desperate enough to call in all available personnel. The journey to the given coordinates wouldn’t take long, but it would force them to cross mountains and make a steep descent into the wide valley protecting the House troops.

  After months of waiting, constantly wondering when they would be asked to do something, Jonah’s troops were hesitant. When you’re being asked to throw yourself at a larger, better-armed, and better-trained force, boredom suddenly doesn’t look that bad. The drill to break camp, which they’d gone over at least fifty times, proceeded slowly and clumsily.

  Jonah, angry with his whole unit, vented at the first person he found, who happened to be Turk.

  “What the hell are they doing out there? When orders say ‘immediately,’ they don’t mean ‘immediately, or, if not, as soon as you can get yourself together.’ We should be halfway to the blasted meeting point by now!”

  Turk let Jonah vent, then met his anger with calm. “Have you walked through camp?”

  “Walked through camp? No! I’ve been doing my part, prepping the Stinger. There’s not supposed to be a camp any more.”

  “Just walk through. Don’t yell, at least not yet. See how things are going. Just take a quick walk, okay?”

  Jonah was about to retort that the last thing his company needed was one more person wasting time, but it was Turk he was talking to. It wouldn’t hurt to trust him on this.

  The fear in camp was palpable. A drill prepares you for real combat about as much as your first kiss prepares you to be married. The real situation is a whole lot more complicated than the practice.

  The soldiers, Jonah saw, were trying to get their work done, trying to focus, but mental pictures of their own looming death kept wiping everything else away. They weren’t ready.

  Jonah had no idea how to help them. They were right to be scared. He was scared, too, but had managed to bury his fear under the call of duty. He didn’t think he could bury the fear of an entire company.

  He walked through the camp, and his soldiers watched him pass. His mind may have been whirling, reaching for something, anything to help his soldiers, but his face remained calm. Resolute. And as he passed, his troops found another image they could place in their head, one that finally pushed away the hundred images of death. Their commander was calm, and they followed him.

  Within minutes of the completion of his tour of the camp, Echo Company was ready to move.

  31

  Prospect Hill, Kurragin

  17 September 3110

  For Jonah Levin, the active part of the campaign on Kurragin ended soon after it began, on a bright autumn day on a wooded hilltop, amid a stand of hardwoods glorious in their red-and-orange autumn foliage. The air, quiet and unmoving before the start of battle, carried the faint sounds of movement from far away. Somewhere downslope, amid the low brush, waited the troopers of House Ma-Tzu Kai.

  Back in The Republic, Devlin Stone had made a ringing speech about the efforts to recover the lost troops, saying no world or individual that had sworn to The Republic of the Sphere need fear abandonment, but should trust The Republic and its member worlds to send aid. Transcripts of the speech eventually trickled their way to Kurrigan, and, reading it, Jonah was both stirred and worried. If the situation turned out well, it would be proof that Stone could back up his desire to watch over every single citizen of The Republic. If it failed, it could show that The Republic was overextended and unable to protect those willing to lay down the most for it. It would be a sign of weakness in a time demanding strength.

  Echo Company had been cut off on its way to the rendezvous. To the north were the other regiments that had accompanied them to Kurragin. To the south were the tired, bedraggled troops they’d come to rescue. In between, and cutting off Jonah from either group, was House Ma-Tzu Kai. And when House Ma-Tzu Kai decided to move, it sure as hell wasn’t going to go against either of the larger groups. It had its eyes set on Prospect Hill, currently occupied by Echo Company.

  Their new orders had come through this morning.

  HOUSE MOVING WEST TOWARD HIGH GROUND OF PROSPECT HILL. HOLD HILL UNTIL BODY OF ARMY MOVES IN. HOLD AT ALL COSTS.

  Jonah turned his attention from the slope outside to the sensor scan in the cockpit of his secondhand Stinger, wishing that his opposition shared his equipment problems. The recon reports, though, showed a well-armed, well-supplied force ahead of them. They had ammunition dumps scattered near Prospect Hill, while Jonah’s Echo Company had only what it carried. If House Ma-Tzu Kai figured out how paper-thin was the opposition they faced on the hill, Jonah and his soldiers were done for.

  Jonah tried to coax a reading out of his ’Mech’s bare-bones display that might give him some idea of the nearby forces, but the Stinger wasn’t helping much; the probability curve on known and unknown units looked bad, and the heads-up display in his ’Mech’s cockpit windows hadn’t been updated recently. Available information on the opposing units was sliding from known green to unknown red all along his section of the line.

  “Dammit,” he muttered. Even the reports from his own troops were fading to pink, then going red as the time-since-update deteriorated. He glanced away from the heads-up display to check again on the real-world terrain outside.

  The view showed him nothing that he hadn’t seen a few minutes before. He stood on a gently wooded hillside. He could make out a mortar section to his right, tubes implanted in hastily dug pits. To his left, an armored trooper with a shoulder-mounted flamethrower leaned against a tree while another soldier worked on the man’s jump jets.

  The spread of the valley below was entirely within Jonah’s field of vision. A well-equipped battalion would be able to hold this spot indefinitely, controlling the entire valley below. That was what House Ma-Tzu Kai intended. That was what Jonah was supposed to stop. If he could hold them off long enough, a door might open for the troops to get past the House battalion and finally get off planet.

  If he failed, Devlin Stone’s promises to The Republic would ring hollow. Tenuous thread
s holding some prefectures together could snap. If Jonah failed, the dream of The Republic might fail as well.

  On the plus side, Jonah thought, if I fail it’s because I’m dead, so I won’t have to witness the aftermath.

  He flicked his comm switch to put something in his mind besides gloom.

  “Sergeant Turk. Any sign of the main army?”

  “Yes, sir!” Relief flooded over Jonah, but Turk’s next words took away that relief. “They’re mired at the river. They’re trying to catch Ma-Tzu Kai’s rear, but they’re not going to make it. Ma-Tzu Kai will get here first.”

  “Roger.” Jonah flicked off the switch.

  He allowed himself one breath—a single intake of air—to feel sorrow. Then he chased it away. This was his hill, he told himself. He would hold. He would bend, he would dodge, he would scamper all over the hilltop, but he would hold.

  His right foot almost started tapping, and Jonah couldn’t tell if it was nerves or excitement. He stilled it and waited.

  Static hissed over his ’Mech’s command circuit, and white fuzz ate at the edge of his position-plotting scopes. Wonderful, he thought. They’ve set up jammers. It can’t be long now.

  His cockpit suddenly grew ten degrees warmer, and he told himself it was from a splash of sunlight creeping over his ’Mech. His palms grew slick, but the grips of the ’Mech’s controls held them in place. Sweat trickled down his forehead, down his neck, down his chest and legs. He cleared his throat, and it cracked with dryness.

  The comm sprang to life again, still mostly static, but his techs were already finding a way around the jam. Buried in the sea of white noise were three distinct words: “Here they come!”

  Jonah drew a deep breath and steadied his own voice before activating his ’Mech’s external speakers so that all of Echo Company could hear.

  “Stand fast,” he ordered, his voice firm and clear—an illusion, but a convincing one. “Report enemy force and weapons.”

  A moment later the trees overhead exploded in a world of flame as a pack of missiles slammed into his position.

  “Counterbattery!” Jonah ordered.

  The mortar section started sliding rounds down the tubes. Each round left the tube with a whump! and a puff of thin smoke. The man with the flamethrower was gone, either dead or moved forward, Jonah didn’t know. The soldier who’d been helping the man earlier was still in view and unhurt.

  The command comm radio was dead again, rejammed by House Ma-Tzu Kai. Whining white noise filled Jonah’s ears, but he left it on in case someone managed to get a message through. Meanwhile, all of the Stinger’s position scopes went to solid red, leaving all of the unit symbols in the heads-up display frozen where they’d been at last report. Jonah had no new information coming in, no extrapolation based on current positions, nothing.

  A current-generation BattleMech in good repair could have stood up to an electronic assault on this scale, but his used and—at least until the militia took possession of it—badly maintained Stinger couldn’t, and neither could the equipment of the men under his command. They’d have to fight blind and deaf.

  But that’s what they’d drilled for. This was a militia unit, after all, and as such they had become accustomed to getting the short end of the stick when it came to equipment. They’d been working on backup measures for some of the most common failures and deficiencies since Jonah had taken command. He knew how to get at least part of their hearing back.

  Jonah keyed the ’Mech’s exterior speakers. “String wire,” he ordered a nearby sergeant. “I want field phones.”

  The sergeant saluted and trotted off. Echo Company of the First Kyrkbacken Militia might be reduced to communicating via the equivalent of tin cans and string, but at least they would not be silenced.

  A trooper on a Shandra scout vehicle slid into the clearing through a whirl of dust and fallen leaves. He dismounted at the foot of the Stinger and saluted, then picked up a bullhorn hanging from the Shandra’s controls.

  “Sir,” he said over the hailer. “First and Third squads report combined arms assault, infantry backed by hovers. Holding their own. Request ammo resupply.”

  “Lead me to them,” Jonah replied over the exterior mike.

  “Sir.”

  The trooper remounted his vehicle and turned it in place. Jonah followed.

  He could pick up the noise of small-arms fire as they moved ahead, the telltale sound of men using their weapons carefully: a single shot, a group of three, another single shot, no one going full auto and burning up a full box of ammunition in a second or two. Such a deliberate rhythm meant that the troopers doing the shooting were seriously low on ammo; and if Jonah could tell as much just by listening, that meant the House Ma-Tzu Kai troopers knew it too.

  Jonah spoke to the scout on his vehicle. “Radio HQ,” he ordered. “Message: ‘Ammunition resupply and reinforcement urgently required.” ’

  “Sir,” the scout said, and turned away, throttling up as his vehicle sped uphill.

  Jonah heard more small-arms fire coming from the edge of a gully ahead. He flipped on his cockpit screen’s visual enhancement in order to pull in IR-spectrum light. With its aid, he could see the House Ma-Tzu Kai hovercraft screened by brush on the far side, bringing its missiles to bear on his own dug-in troops.

  He sent a beam from the Stinger’s medium laser downrange at the hovercraft. The vehicle dipped and slewed sideways as the beam hit; then it withdrew, pulling back out of sight behind a rise.

  The hover’s retreat didn’t give the Kyrkbacken Militia any time to catch their breaths. The Ma-Tzu Kai troopers continued to press the attack, and a tank thrashed forward through the trees to the left of the retreating hover.

  Jonah swiveled his joystick to raise his right arm in a sweeping motion, hosing down the advancing line of Ma-Tzu Kai troops with the Stinger’s medium laser. The troopers went to ground, taking cover in the tall grass and underbrush wherever they could. The tank ground to a halt, its progress blocked by a larger tree. It jerked back, turned to pass the obstacle, just as a Kyrkbacken Militia missile salvo slammed into its thin side armor. The vehicle froze in place, a large smoke ring puffing upward from the open hatch on its top.

  A voice from the ground shouted, “They’re falling back!” It was the squad’s sergeant, back from his earlier errand.

  “Let them go,” Jonah said.

  He looked at his ammo readouts. One single-shot missile pack—the Stinger should have carried two, but the second pack had turned out, upon inspection, to be empty, and none of the militia’s repeated requests for replacement ammo had borne fruit—with fifteen missiles onboard. After that, he’d be down to nothing but the medium laser, plus whatever morale effect twenty tons of steel could provide.

  A signals team arrived with a field connection. Finally, he thought. The team plugged into the jack at the left heel of Jonah’s ’Mech, and a signal reappeared on the position plotting indicator.

  The news it gave him wasn’t good. Only about a third of the troopers that he’d started with this morning were still on the line. The rest were lost, passed beyond the limits of his effective command. Or dead.

  “All units,” he said over the external link. “Report!”

  One by one the remnants of his company came up.

  “First squad, fifty percent effective, down to personal ammo packs.”

  “Second squad, no heavy weapons left. Ten percent casualties.”

  “Third squad. In place, on line, and ready.”

  Then a silence.

  Into the quiet, Jonah said, “Fourth squad?”

  No reply.

  “Fifth squad?”

  “Fifth squad, in place, antivehicle minefield . . . here they come again!”

  The signals crew unplugged the field connection from the foot of Jonah’s ’Mech, setting him free to take the Stinger off toward Fifth squad’s location at an ungainly lope. The Fifth, with Sergeant Turk in charge, was Jonah’s rock. They held down the farthest-left po
sition on the flank, the absolute end of The Republic’s extended battle line, and the Ma-Tzu Kai forces would be concentrating on them.

  An antitank mine exploded from the open ground to Jonah’s front, letting him know that he’d arrived at the Fifth’s location. He brought his ’Mech to a halt and let a trooper plug him into the Militia’s makeshift field phone net.

  “Fifth squad, report.”

  “We got hit by an SM1 with a couple of squads of infantry for support,” came Sergeant Turk’s reply. The field phones had a peculiar echoing sound, and the sergeant’s voice was whispering and distant in Jonah’s ears. “An AT mine screwed up the Smiley’s hoverjets, but the gun turret is still in play. We can stop the infantry if we can suppress the turret, or we can suppress the turret if we can stop the infantry. But we can’t do both at once with what we’ve got left.”

  “Mortars, grid posit 132082,” Jonah said. “Anti-infantry.”

  “We have two salvos left, nothing more,” the mortar section commander said.

  “Then fire two salvos.” To Sergeant Turk, Jonah said, “I’ll suppress the infantry. You take out the tank. I’m almost out of ammunition.”

  The first of the mortar bombs arrived, landing in a flash and a flurry of earth mixed with broken trees. Jonah brought the Stinger striding forward, breaking the field phone connection again, and brought his ’Mech’s lone remaining missile pack to bear on the target.

  Enhanced visual, he thought. There they are.

  He launched the missiles.

  One missile pack, fifteen missiles—that was all that he had, but he’d made the Ma-Tzu Kai infantry keep their heads down for long enough. Now the SM1 was on fire, its main gun pointing crookedly skyward, and the troopers who had been guarding it were scattered and running back, away from the Republic lines.