A Call to Arms

by Loren L. Coleman

  A warrior showed no weakness.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Captain Thule Nygren announced over the JumpShip’s 1MC circuit, his gravelly voice echoing through the long, wasp-bodied vessel and likely though each of the four DropShips being carried by the Star Hunter. He spent a glance toward Torrent and the other two Steel Wolf warriors. All three stood on the bridge observation platform, leaning forward with hands locked tight on the upper rail, levering their upper body strength against the JumpShip’s null gravity. He was obviously debating whether or not he should offer them seats again, or perhaps insist that they accept them this time.

  Torrent shook his head ever so slightly, brown eyes hard with resolve. The captain shrugged his own concerns aside.

  “Off by thirty thousand klicks or more,” Star Captain Nikola Demos offered from her place next to Torrent, making a wager on the accuracy of the jump. Her dark hair glistened like the wing feathers of a raven. Her midnight blue eyes glanced between her colonel and Star Commander Yulri. She shuffled forward, hooked her feet under the lower rail, which ran only ten centimeters above the deck. “Anyone care to risk their first take of isorla?” she asked, putting her own battle spoils at risk.

  Captain Nygren made a face at the idea of any Clan warrior, even a Bloodnamed one, making book on his crew’s competence. Torrent saw it, and knew that only decorum kept the man quiet. Nikola, like Torrent, was a Steel Wolf rising star—she in the tactics of armored vehicles, and he a Mech Warrior. It was not wise to come up against a ristar too often, especially on the downhill side of one’s career. It would also be improper for Torrent to accept the wager, but he caught the eye of Star Commander Yulri and gave him a commanding nod.

  “Aff,” Yulri agreed to the wager on Torrent’s behalf. “Done.”

  And the Star Hunter jumped.

  Having stored up massive amounts of energy while laying at the Tigress system zenith, the Odyssey-class JumpShip now poured all it had through the Kearny-Fuchida drive at its core. The KF field burst outward, wrapping itself about the Star Hunter and its DropShip payload, isolating the vessels from time and space as the drive tore a hole through reality and briefly connected two star systems. A JumpShip could leap up to thirty light years at a jump. The entire event lasted only a matter of seconds in real time, during which the vessel was no longer a part of the natural universe. Subjectively, by shipboard time, it was instantaneous. Or it was supposed to be.

  It never felt that way to Torrent. He sensed the Kearny-Fuchida field unfold, rushing up from behind and roiling over his earlier determination. It caught the large man in between breaths, and the dying hiss of his last exhalation echoed inside his ears, falling and rising and then falling again.

  Sweat beaded over Torrent’s shaved head as time stood still around him. Drops fell away, swept forward by the field’s current, spattering against JumpShip’s forward view screen where Tigress’ sun shone as nothing more than an exceptionally bright star. Where each bead of sweat struck it ate away a pinprick of reality. Those added up until great holes of nothingness pockmarked the frozen tableau, and finally Torrent stared forward into a veil of pitch-black.

  Far in the distance, a single point of extremely bright light pierced the abyss. It hung there, motionless for a moment, and then suddenly rushed up at him growing into a blue-white sun far larger than it should be as seen from either a zenith or nadir jump point. Torrent recalled why. For this B-type star, DropShip travel time from a standard jump point would have been somewhere on the order of one hundred days. Not exactly a surprise strike. Fortunately such systems inside The Republic tended to be so exactly modeled, down to the smallest gravity fluctuation, that JumpShips could make fairly safe use of non-standard jump points deep within the system’s gravity well.

  The Star Hunter’s crew had calculated a null gravity point in between the one inhabited planet and its moon, Ahir al Nahr. That would cut reaction time down to twenty-four hours.

  Or so the local defenders would believe.

  Reality snapped back into place with a violent shudder and the metallic groan of the Star Hunter’s gravity-stressed hull. Nikola slumped forward ever so slightly, but straightened up again before anyone besides Torrent likely noticed. Yulri lost his footing and drifted up from the deck, shaking away a sudden attack of vertigo. The JumpShip crew fell to their tasks with a new fury, shifting in between various workstations, confirming the vessel’s position and making the usual round of damage control checks.

  Captain Nygren ordered the station-keeping drive fired. A dull roar vibrated up through the deckplates and gravity returned at point-two Gs. Yulri sagged back to the deck, getting his feet beneath him.

  Torrent smoothed one broad hand back over his shaven pate, wiping away a light sheen of sweat, which he brushed against the side of his uniform. On the view-screen, the blue-white sun swung out of view as the ship turned. A large, dark body replaced it.

  Achernar.

  “Star Commander Yulri.” Torrent’s deep voice betrayed nothing of his own strained nerves. He swallowed down the dryness in his throat, washing away the memory of the jump. “See after the Lupus.”

  Dismayed by his show of weakness, Yulri nodded at the bridge deck. “Aff, Star Colonel.”

  Nikola waited until the access door was dogged shut after their comrade. “They say that everyone suffers some degree of TDS.” Transit Disorientation Syndrome. Bad cases could not even think about jumping, not unless they wanted to spend several days afterward in sickbay.

  “They would be wrong.” Torrent glanced at the sealed door. “Yulri is of the Carns Bloodname house. They never adapted well to space travel. Inferior genes.”

  “Not like us, quiaff?”

  Torrent remembered her slouch, saw the white-knuckle grip she still held on the observation rail. He smiled, skinning tight lips back from white, white teeth. “Aff,” he agreed. “Not like us.”

  Then, with a show of his own adaptation, Torrent shoved himself off the rail, gliding backward in the low gravity as if falling away from the observation platform. When his rear foot touched the deck he spun lightly and lunged for the door, caught the handhold and reanchored himself in a standing position. He undogged the door with his left hand, sliding back the rocker-bar with one smooth pull. Metal creaked and popped, and the door swung open.

  Before he exited the bridge, however, Torrent first caught Thule Nygren’s attention with an upraised chin. “Captain. What is our exact position?”

  Although Torrent still lacked his own Bloodname, Nygren remained properly respectful to Achernar’s mission commander. Torrent’s victory would also win honor for him and his crew. “We are thirty-seven thousand eight hundred klicks and change inside the orbit of Ahir al Nahr, two point seven degrees above the ecliptic ray drawn between Achernar and its sun.” He could not help the touch of pride, reporting, “We are only eighteen thousand klicks off our intended jump station.” A hairbreadth, considering the large numbers involved in space flight.

  Nikola Demos gave them both a fake smile, taking her lost wager in good form. Torrent laughed, once, loud and deep, sketched a salute to Captain Nygren, and then squeezed through the narrow hatch.

  He was well aware of the stares he drew in his wake—from the bridge personnel, from crewmen he passed in the ship’s corridors—and the hopes and desires which chased after him. His impressive size had little to do with it, though filled out at two hundred ten centimeters he so obviously carried the blood of Elementals, the Clans’ genetically augmented infantry, in his veins. Everyone, even Bloodnamed officers, paid deference to him because of his heritage. Rather than feed his vanity it only fueled his drive to succeed. That, too, was part and parcel to his legacy.

  Torrent was canister-born and sibko-trained, raised in full Clan tradition, and heir to a Kerensky Bloodname.

  His earliest memories were of lessons on his personal history as a child of the iron wombs, and the expectations that went hand-in-fist with being trueborn. Raised in a military crèche, he
excelled in physical training and showed an early disposition for command. His academic training included a great deal of history, learning of others who had come before, being inspired by their accomplishments.

  No other Bloodname legacy carried as much prestige among the trueborn as his. It was General Aleksandr Kerensky who had led his Star League followers from the Inner Sphere so many centuries ago, founding the Clan homeworlds. He and his son, Nicholas, were the great fathers of Clan society. Nicholas used martial law and strict adherence to a eugenics program in his vision to create a great warrior race: Battlesuit infantry of terrifying size, pilots with supernatural instincts, MechWarriors.

  When the Clans finally returned, promising themselves that they would bring order to the Inner Sphere, the latter half of that invasion was led by a Kerensky descendent. And during the Jihad, it was Katya Kerensky who found in Devlin Stone a worthy leader to follow, later bringing with her a large slice of Clan Wolf to help form the Republic of the Sphere.

  The descendents of those Clan warriors had kept to their traditions, even inside The Republic. Now Torrent, of the Kerensky Bloodname house, was pledged to help Galaxy Commander Kal Radick bring the Steel Wolves back into the fold of their parent Clan. Such an accomplishment would win Torrent much honor, to be recorded in the military file stored on his codex. That only left the winning of a Bloodname in ritual combat to ensure him a place in the Steel Wolves’ breeding program. His DNA would be selected to raise entire sibkos of cadets, even after his death. The scientists offered him an immortality the kind of which all Clan warriors dreamt.

  And it was time to begin inspiring the next generation of Kerensky descendents.

  The Star Hunter’s docking waist ringed the vessel at midship, a circular corridor that connected each of the vessel’s four docking hardpoints. Torrent approached the open floor hatch, which dropped a ladder down near the Lupus’ gantry, stepped over the access, and then caught hold of the nearby ladder when a familiar face looked up from below his feet. Star Colonel Colton Fetladral blocked his descent.

  “Up on the bridge again?” Fetladral asked. “Harassing our good Captain Nygren?”

  Colton Fetladral owned ten years on Torrent, with mocha-dark skin and ebony hair running toward a premature iron gray at the temples. At thirty-eight Fetladral was old by Clan standards, but his earning a Bloodname and rising to the rank of Star Colonel—commanding one of the three Steel Wolf clusters—had already earned him a place in the breeding programs. Chances were better than good that if anything happened to Kal Radick, Colton Fetladral would rise to command of the Steel Wolves.

  Torrent’s chances were good, and he was coming up fast behind Fetladral.

  “I go where the action is,” Torrent said with a shrug that strained the shoulder seams of his utility uniform. “During a jump, that is on the JumpShip bridge.”

  Fetladral nodded. “And did you win your wager with Star Captain Demos?”

  “Yulri talks too much.”

  “Do not blame him. I pressed. And what warrior should not be proud of his commander, quiaff?” Fetladral moved aside.

  Releasing his hold on the ladder, Torrent dropped down through the final hatch with knees bent to absorb his landing. A hand reached up to him and he caught it, accepting the anchor. Fetladral reigned in his colleague until both men were comfortably braced at the bottom of the ladder. Fetladral wore gray utilities with razor-sharp military creases, same as Torrent, but his were smudged and stained with grease from working with his technicians. Such work was beneath Fetladral’s station, but unavoidable if he wanted to be ready for his part of the coming offensive.

  “So,” the older officer asked again, “did you win?”

  Torrent frowned at his hand, now smudged with the same red grease that Fetladral wore. It smelled of sharp oil and metal. Common packing grease for myomer. “Star Colonel Fetladral. Have you known me to lose?”

  Fetladral’s wolfish smile faltered, reminded of his recent loss to Torrent in the bidding for Achernar. Torrent had pledged to Kal Radick’s plan with fewer resources, by Clan tradition winning him the right to the Steel Wolves’ primary target and first choice among the faction’s military. “As yet I have not, Star Colonel Torrent. This time, however, you may have bid below the cutdown. We shall see who comes home with the better prize.”

  “Colton, did you wait here simply to taunt me?” Dropping the other man’s rank and Bloodname was a precisely calculated insult, paying Fetladral back for doubting Torrent’s bidding. He turned toward the access gantry hatch, five meters down the curving corridor, a large well-lighted opening in the hull of the Star Hunter.

  “No,” Fetladral admitted, nodding an apology as he glided along next to the younger warrior. “I came to wish you victory and honor, Torrent, toward the success of the Steel Wolves.”

  Torrent paused at the gantry hatch, looked down at Fetladral’s outstretched hand. He took it in a firm grip, stronger than a friendly clasp but not quite a test of strength. “Accepted. And appreciated.”

  “Just do not forget to hold to plan,” Fetladral said amicably enough, “or I will see you dead in a circle of equals.”

  For the second time since the jump, Torrent laughed one of his loud, raucous laughs. “I would have it no other way between us. Do not worry. Star Captain Laren Mehta is a loyal executive officer. My forward forces will not break cover for at least another twenty hours.”

  “Your Trojan Horse gambit does not concern me. I only wanted to reinforce the need to hold Achernar’s attention—and anyone else listening in—until the arrival of Sir Kyle Powers.”

  An impediment to Kal Radick’s plans had been the arrival of Kyle Powers, a Knight of the Sphere, on Ronel. It was expected—demanded—that Torrent draw out the fighting in such a manner as to pull Powers’s stabilizing presence from Ronel to Achernar.

  Torrent nodded curtly. “I know Kal Radick’s plan, and will hold to it.”

  “Then your victory will ensure my victory. So again, I will wish you success.” Fetladral clapped Torrent on both shoulders, nodded, and then drifted back down the corridor and toward one of his own two DropShips.

  Torrent watched the other officer’s unhurried retreat, then ducked through the gantry hatch and moved into the Overlord-class DropShip Lupus. Eventually he would command over the DropShip’s atmospheric approach from the bridge, but after his run-in with Fetladral, Torrent found himself turning his feet toward the ship’s main cargo bay. Two decks down he slid along a transship corridor and then drifted through large doublewide doors that led into his primary ’Mech bay. Ten of the walking war avatars waited in their berths—five state-of-the-art designs, including his seventy-five-ton Tundra Wolf, and five industrial machines converted to military use. The empty BattleMech berths had been given over to a full star of his Elementals as a place for the genetically engineered super infantry to store and maintain their powered armor.

  And in Bay Two, five more converted industrial ’Mechs and two stars of armored vehicles. Bay Three held all vehicles: fifteen well-maintained tanks ready for battle.

  And in the Wulfstag, his second DropShip, Torrent brought along another two trinaries of vehicles and a second star of assorted armored infantry.

  Torrent glanced over the smudged stains Fetladral had left on each of his shoulders and smiled a predator’s grin. No word of praise would ever be won from Colton Fetladral without a black look or whispered threat behind it. And as Torrent had said earlier, he would have it no other way between them. Friend and enemy—one came with the other as both men rose in power. The day Colton Fetladral ignored Torrent would either be the day Torrent no longer mattered among the Steel Wolves, or the day he would kill Fetladral.

  With the forces under Torrent’s command for this mission, that day would not be today. He had bid well, earning his place at the forefront of the Steel Wolves’ plans, and even without his forward-deployed screen he believed he had enough strength behind him. Enough to assault, occupy, and finally wrest a
way control of Achernar from the Republic.

  Tomorrow the Steel Wolves would take their first step toward conquering Prefecture IV.

  3

  Timing

  Taibek Mining Corporate Headquarters

  Achernar

  15 February 3133

  Erik Sandoval-Groell stood at the bronze-tinted window of his fifth floor office, listening with perhaps half an ear to Michael Eus’s daily report. A steaming mug of brandy-laced coffee warmed Erik’s hands, his afternoon vice. The spicy aroma filled his nostrils as he breathed deep over the mug, and the brandy taste trailed a comfortable glow down into his gut.

  From Taibek Mining’s Corporate Headquarters Erik looked out over the sleepy mining town of Hahnsak. Below, the streets filled up as the 1600 shift change bled over into what passed locally for close-of-business rush hour. A car might have to wait through two traffic lights. Lifting his gaze past town, past the river and Taibek Mining’s sludge-dumping processing plant, past the rail line which fed down out of the mines themselves, his hard gaze bore into the Taibek foothills which separated Hahnsak, himself, and his growing military force from River’s End.

  “And finally, Phillip Mendosa—he’s your mine manager,” Michael reminded him. “Mendosa forwarded another warning concerning the fall-off in production. With the conversion of so many of our IndustrialMechs, it is impossible to make quota.”

  Erik took a calm sip of his coffee. Brandy knocked off its bitter edge perfectly. “You pulled three more MiningMech’s?” he asked. “One from each shift?”