A squad of Triarii Scimitars swept in to harass him with missiles. Fire blossomed along both legs as Evan worked his feet loose from the muck. He walked his Ti Ts’ang up onto a rocky bar and set himself in a wide-legged stance. His hovercraft and the HQ’s remaining defenders flocked to Evan’s side, driving back the Scimitars.
“Wedge formation,” Evan ordered, buying time for his House Master. Artillery fire continued to hammer down behind them, walking in closer with every round. “Cavalry, double up on my left. Ijori, thin ranks and envelop on my right.”
A risky call. Evan had little more than a reinforced company to work with. McCarron’s soldiers made for a good anchor on his western flank, but thinning the rest to the east was chancy. They weren’t veterans. They were hardly more than cadets.
They certainly were not an elite Warrior House. Not yet.
“Ijori-five. Jenna. Can you rendezvous?”
Silence answered him and a push by the Zeus occupied him for a moment. Fire and shrapnel swept the center of his line in alternating waves. Evan’s BattleMech dropped to one knee under the barrage, but it stood again.
“Jenna?”
“Evan.” Mai answered him. “Ijori-five is down.”
“Confirm!” Evan snapped at his Master, letting his own feelings get in the way. Not now. Not like this.
“It is confirmed.” Mai showed no more warmth. “We’ve lost a lot of good people already. No news on casualties, or survivors.”
The news cost Evan several seconds, wondering if Jenna might still be alive, thinking about the things he had not gotten a chance to say to her yet. The battle did not wait for him. Greasy smoke from a burning APC hid the Ijori irregulars who moved up quickly, rocket launchers across their shoulders. A pair of Triarii Stingrays slashed across the battlefield, catching the Locust in a broadside salvo of lasers, and a lance of Mk II Scimitars scooted in under that cover and slashed at the Armored Cavalry with lasers and missiles.
One of the Po II heavy tanks turned and snap fired, taking the nose off one Scimitar with a well-placed Gauss slug. The hovercraft dipped nose down into a thin gruel of mud, caught in the Suriwong’s grip, end-overed and then splashed down on its side.
It wasn’t Terrence McCarron, but the shot was certainly worthy of the veteran. Evan glanced at his HUD, checking ID tags. “Cav-six. Can we call on your commander?”
Again it was Mai Uhn Wa who answered, overriding from the command vehicle. “Terrence McCarron is holding, barely, on the eastern edge of the Floods.”
So there was just him. Hahn dead. David finished. Mark Lo separated by the press of battle and Jenna left behind. The Dynasty Guard pressed forward, but slowly, slowly. And now, no Cavalry to the rescue.
Artillery tore a spit off his island, pinging and slamming rocks into the Ti Ts’ang’s lower legs. Evan checked his heat curve and spent half of his lasers at a Demon that tried to edge forward around the base of the same rising slope he’d come over only minutes before. A few vehicles crawled up from the Capellan backfield, but there wouldn’t be much else. Except Legate Ruskoff. He would be coming.
If Evan did not move against him first!
“Ijori-one. We have movement on the enemy line. Your orders?”
Evan watched the red icons shifted, Zeus taking up a spearhead position, flanked by a limping Pack Hunter and a scarred Vindicator. Armor crawled alongside or raced forward on cushions of air. Infantry leapt and ran and clung to the sides of vehicles. Ruskoff feathered most of his forces out to the east as well, matching Evan’s line.
“Ijori-one. What are your orders?”
He saw the maneuver in his mind’s eye. Feint into the eastern enemy, and then drive into the middle with whatever he had left. Sweat beaded on Evan’s brow that had nothing to do with his saunalike cockpit. A flush rose from the back of his neck. This is what Hahn had felt, he knew, in those last moments. All or nothing.
“Ijori-three?”
Mai Uhn Wa also sounded concerned. “Evan?”
Evan bumped his throttle forward, walked his Ti Ts’ang to the end of his little island and straddled the artillery crater. He pulled his crosshairs over the Zeus, and adjusted his grip on the sweat-slick control sticks.
“We charge,” he said. “Everything we have left, for House Ijori.”
Daniel Peterson struck with lasers and missiles, flailing about his Tundra Wolf with desperate attacks as a mixture of Dynasty Guard and Ijori warriors sought to rush his position. Infantry scrabbled at his lower legs, trying to gain purchase. Fire wreathed the BattleMech’s upper chest as a new spread of missiles hammered into him, and lasers scourged its back.
No one moved to his aid this time. Lady Kincaid was pinned under heavy fire, and the flanking vehicles turnkeyed to him by Ruskoff had fallen back under Lwellen’s orders. No use throwing good after bad. Wasn’t that what the militia colonel had said in planning?
Daniel had no intention of making it easy.
Kicking aside Fa Shih troopers and a JES tactical carrier, the ex-Paladin cleared his own path toward the relative safety of the allied line. Given a choice, he would have set himself for the western flank where Eve Kincaid wielded two companies of Principes Guards like a surgical tool. For better or worse, he fell in closer to the allied center. There, Colonel Lwellen’s Catapult maneuvered from side to side to avoid the press of Carson Rieves’s assault-weight Yu Huang.
It was a sparring match that only had one conclusion. Nothing stood up under the kind of pounding an assault ’Mech could inflict, except another assault ’Mech. The Dynasty Guard owned every advantage except for the raw determination of Republic forces to hold off a Capellan victory.
“If we had our full numbers massed here, we’d have them.”
But they didn’t. The Republic force had split its strength against “House” Ijori, thinking they had found the Dynasty Guard. How had the Conservatory forces learned of this assault, coordinating their own arrival so well? Daniel could only imagine. An informer? Misinformation leaked through to Legate Ruskoff? Whatever the ruse, it had worked. Now the fall of Ijori was the pivotal point to the entire battle and the very defense of Liao. Break the nascent Warrior House, and The Republic could sweep all forces north against the Dynasty Guard.
Which meant holding the line, here, in the foothills above the Suriwong Floods.
A pair of lasers stabbed into Daniel’s back, bringing him up short of The Republic lines, forcing him to turn and deal with a pair of Demons. His Tactical Missile System automatically selected down to short-range warheads, slamming blossoms of orange fire into the side of one vehicle. His lasers slashed apart one tire and cut through the axle behind it. The fast-attack vehicle slewed over, dug a fender into the soft ground, and rolled into a crashing death.
The other vehicle sped back to the side of an approaching Wasp. Daniel throttled into a slow, backward walk, protecting his thinning rear armor.
Which set him in the no-man’s-land between Republic and Confederation lines, alone, when the warning crackled across communication channels.
“Down! The Legate is down!”
Daniel froze over his controls, earning him a ruined right arm actuator as the Wasp sprinted in, stung at him with lasers and machine guns, and raced away again. He tried to snap fire a return salvo, but the lighter ’Mech’s speed and stealth armor made targeting lock impossible.
At least it got him moving again. He faded back from The Republic line, torn between the battle here and the man who had offered him a hand.
“Zeus is back up,” the report came, but it was no time for breathing easy. “Limping . . . Ti Ts’ang and infantry swarm attacks.” Evan Kurst! “Taking heavy fire. Tā mā dè! They’re all over us.”
The Wasp continued to strike at Daniel, always moving for his flanks. A Demon and a pair of Condors now trailed in its shadow. Daniel fired again, and again. He turned his Tundra Wolf south, then back north again. He had a fairly clear field to the southwest. . . .
“What are you waiting
for, Peterson?” It was Lwellen, still struggling along in the face of the Yu Huang’s deadly assault. “Legate Ruskoff is in trouble. Pull him out, man!”
Lwellen passed other orders as well, detaching VTOL assets and a squad of JES tactical carriers to his command. It wasn’t much, but they would be able to move fast. They came toward him at flank speed, chased by Confederation units split off to prevent any aid from heading south. Sang-shao Rieves did not want reinforcements coming north.
“Go, Daniel.” Lady Kincaid. Her voice sounded strained. She led the Principes Guards forward, driving through a wall of Confederation heavy armor to try and bring some relief to Lwellen. “You won’t make the difference here.”
The Wasp came at him again. Daniel turned into it, preempted its assault by hammering the area with missiles from his XX-rack and ATM launcher. When the stealth-equipped machine staggered out of the destructive rain, he shouldered it aside and left it sprawled over the scarred earth. A pair of Jessies smashed it down again on their way by, slamming a curtain of short-range missiles across its back.
Then they were moving south and west, away from the foothills and back into the Suriwong Floods. A Tian-zong fired gauss slugs at him from long range, missed. The Ijori ’Mech struck out at sixty kilometers per hour in pursuit, but could not even keep up with the Dynasty Guard armor sent by Rieves.
It was a race to see who would reach the southern battle first.
If Viktor Ruskoff could hold on for their arrival.
The Ijori charge had smashed into Ruskoff’s line like a sledgehammer, putting forward every effort to bring down the Planetary Legate. Evan smashed the Zeus’s gauss rifle into useless scrap, and put a deep ax wound into the assault ’Mech’s knee as well. The Zeus went down, and a mix of Purifier and Fa Shih attempted to reach the stricken ’Mech.
Then a savage counterthrust by the militia Vindicator and several Brutus assault tanks drove Evan back. He lost his Purifiers to heavy bombardment by a JES II strategic carrier. The Fa Shih barely made it out ahead of a hunter-killer pack of hoverbikes.
The Capellan force hammered forward again, trying to reach the wounded Zeus. But The Republic defenders had stood up under their first assault. They were better prepared for the second. The third. Artillery fire fell haphazardly now as a see-saw offensive spread forces all across the Suriwong Floods, leaving some vehicles stranded, others burning.
There always seemed to be more, though, as reinforcements on both sides of the line streamed in for Ijori’s last stand.
“Ijori-one, be advised: Dynasty Guard has broken The Republic cordon!”
Not even the unflappable Shiao Mai could hide his excitement. With the Guard finally loose in the Suriwong Floods, Capellan forces tying up Ruskoff’s command had a chance. Mai and House Ijori had a chance. It all came down to time.
Hours, perhaps minutes.
A Republic VTOL, swooping in from far afield, strafed over Evan’s small spit of rocky land. Touching off his jump jets, he rose on streams of plasma and swatted the fragile craft out of the air with his battle-ax.
He landed in a ready crouch, knuckles white as he gripped his control sticks with renewed strength. From The Republic backfield, Ruskoff’s Zeus limped forward once again.
“Hold the line,” Evan reminded them all. His voice tightened. “Hold.”
His Ti Ts’ang’s lasers speared one Republic minigun cycle as it tried to jump between two rocky upcroppings, crisping machine and rider and dropping them into the sluggish waters.
A pair of new Jessies slid around a willow copse, chasing a Cavalry Condor out over deeper water. The Condor took heavy missile strikes against its skirting, foundered and sank.
Then dozens of hard-hitting fists pummeled Evan’s Ti Ts’ang across the head and shoulders, driving it to one knee. A Tundra Wolf crashed out of the nearby willow copse, spreading missiles through the air as if newly restocked. The ATM warheads blossomed new fire around Evan’s position, shaking him violently against his harness, but he held into his seat with a determination born from knowing his attacker.
Daniel Peterson had returned.
36
Burning Cold
The streets of Chang-an have never felt so quiet. Reports concerning the fighting in the Suriwong Floods are mixed. Tensions run high. It feels as if the entire city, the entire planet, is holding its breath. Waiting for the news.
—Station XLDZ, Liao, 15 August 3134
Suriwong Floods
Sarrin Province, Liao
15 August 3134
Missiles hammered into the side of the Ti Ts’ang’s head, ringing in Evan’s ears like the sounding of a deep gong. Shaking him. The straps of his harness bruising his shoulders, across his chest, digging the buckle into his gut.
The saunalike atmosphere of the cockpit dulled his senses and the world swam in front of him. Sweat stung at the corners of his eyes and burned on his lips.
Gravity pulled, dragging him downward with such steadfast force that it felt as if the sixty tons of BattleMech strained in Evan’s muscles. So easy to let go. Sprawl the Ti Ts’ang full out, then labor back up afterwards.
Instead, Evan Kurst straightened in his seat, willing the ten-meter-tall machine to follow him as it came up off one knee. He took a step forward. Another. He walked the machine out of a haze of gray smoke and fire, wading into ankle-deep water and pulling his crosshairs over the Tundra Wolf’s outline. Ruby fire stabbed out into the other ’Mech, splashing armor into a mist of gray droplets.
“Ijori-one,” Mai broke in over the communications band. “Enemy converging on your position.”
“Let them come,” he croaked. He drove his heat up another degree, firing a full spread of lasers.
Daniel Peterson answered with his own energy weapons, carving deeply. Then Evan’s ’Mech rocked to the side as Ruskoff’s Zeus slammed a PPC into the Ti Ts’ang’s shoulder. And another. Armor flashed into a molten, fiery mist and ran in quick flashfloods of melted composite. It dripped to the ground or resolidified in waxy gray sheets along the Ti Ts’ang’s skirted waist.
Computer estimates painted his damage schematic nearly black from head to foot. He had a few tons of armor clinging to his ’Mech, but not much more than that. He’d lost three heat sinks, and the scorching heat baking his lower legs could only mean a breach in his engine shielding. In short, Evan’s machine was a walking skeleton.
Swallowing dryly, wishing for even the smallest taste of the Floods that surrounded him, Evan coaxed life into his throat. “Not much longer now, Shiao Mai.”
If the House Master agreed, it did not show in his voice. “Cavalry-five, forward and flank,” Mai Wa ordered, wheeling the last of the heavy armor around in a pincer maneuver. “Scout lance, fall back. Infantry, ground and hold.”
The Armored Cavalry drove back Peterson’s Tundra Wolf, hammering into his side with heavy-hitting Gauss slugs. Artillery tore into one Regulator, smashing it beneath the muddied waters, but Mai kept the remaining tanks on Peterson until his retreat formed a new break in The Republic line. But not for long. Into that split limped the Zeus, with a pack of hoverbikes clinging protectively to its shadow.
The Zeus came on steadily, with the kind of determination only an assault ’Mech carried with it.
“Evan,” Mai commanded, “you are under orders. Not to die until I tell you.”
Another PPC slammed into Evan’s left side, drilling deep. Some of the hoverbikes throttled forward, ready to engage. Evan’s lasers crippled one, and sent another running.
He checked his HUD. One Condor. A handful of Fa Shih. A stripped-down Ti Ts’ang. They weren’t going to stop Ruskoff’s Zeus. But he was under orders.
Two hundred meters. Another PPC blast stabbed him low in the torso, carving into his gyroscope housing. The Ti Ts’ang folded over as if gut punched. It wavered on unsteady legs. Evan strained against his controls, contorting his body to give the gyro-struck ’Mech some additional force of balance. While he was doubled over, another PPC stre
am missed high, and a new brace of warheads from Peterson’s Tundra Wolf slammed into his back, one of the few places he still had good armor.
Slowly . . . slowly Evan straightened back up again.
He scoured armor from the Zeus with every laser left him. One fifty. Throttling into a hobbling, backward walk, he fast-cycled his lasers and chewed into the assault machine again. The Zeus didn’t look too much better than Evan’s Capellan design, but it was still an assault ’Mech. You didn’t stop that kind of momentum with a few lasers.
A Scimitar raced by on Evan’s left, heading past to worry the Cavalry’s backfield. Two hoverbikes slewed over the water like pond skippers, firing at some scattered Fa Shih infantry.
The Fa Shih!
Evan saw Mai’s plan even as the Master of House Ijori put the final pieces into play. “Infantry, forward and swarm. Evan, hold off that Tundra!”
As Fa Shih broke from the ground, rising on fiery jets, Evan saw the Tundra Wolf throw itself forward into the embrace of McCarron’s heavy armor. Ruskoff recognized the danger as well, but too late. The Ijori Condor powered forward to smash into Ruskoff’s hoverbike squad, spitting missiles out in a furious assault. The center of the battlefield erupted into new chaos as infantry, armor and ’Mechs all came together in a tangle of weapons.
Evan had one last act left to him. Slamming down on his foot pedals, he launched his Ti Ts’ang on an uneven, wobbling flight that arced above Peterson’s next missile barrage, over a deeper channel of the Suriwong, and then right back down into the muddy clay. Planting himself between Peterson and Ruskoff.
“Be ready,” Ruskoff had warned Daniel. The collapse of the Ijori line had looked imminent, despite Evan Kurst’s refusal to simply go down under scathing weapons fire. “Be ready to push forward.”
By Temptations and by War Page 29