by Victor Milán
Volatilized steel wisped from the Bellona tank’s front glacis beneath the retina-searing ruby lash of the Black Hawk’s large lasers. The hovercraft tried desperately to back up the slope, its fans raising billows of dust and dried brush around it. A burst of one-hundred-millimeter autocannon fire struck it from Jorgensen’s left, cracking its already-scorched canopy.
The Steiners were shrewd to weight their forces to fast-moving ’Mechs and hovercraft, he thought with his customary calm. Or would have been had we not caught them still in the mountains.
Out of the Trinary of full warriors, augmented by odd lots of solahma replacements, he had been given to defend Chaffee, Jorgensen had three other BattleMechs and six elementals with him. Another ’Mech was on its way. Several vehicles, including a Cardinal full of conventional infantry, had joined the fight.
His vehicles dueled with the Steiner tanks and ’Mechs while the infantry skirmished forward under cover of their fire, supported by his leaping elementals in their powered suits, to root out the Lyran foot soldiers gone to ground. He was glad he kept most of his regulars in McCauliffe, partly to respond in force to threats—and partly to keep them from being picked off in the constant erosive ambushes and attacks the Chaffee woodsmen waged against the occupiers.
Chaffee had no strategic value. The main reason it had survived centuries of war almost unscathed was that it wasn’t worth anything. Its sole industry of size had been tourism: wealthy Spheroids who paid stiff fees to hunt the planet’s intractable wildlife. The collapse of the hyperpulse generator net had put an end to that.
The only reason Clan Jade Falcon held onto Chaffee was that the desant could not afford to relinquish a single world of the tiny foothold it had clawed out of the Inner Sphere.
More LRMs cracked off against the giant trees. It was a serious barrage: a storm of dead needles fell on his Black Hawk like dried rain, dislodged from branches mounting a hundred meters into the sky. Jorgensen’s battle computer had tagged the distant shooter as a Catapult. The 65-ton BattleMech was slow for this lightning raid. Doubtless the Lyrans intended it to hang on the edge of the spaceport, giving long-range support from its big missile racks and light but far-reaching autocannon, while the faster machines raced about releasing hell and havoc. Meanwhile, once roads were left behind, in mountains such as these any BattleMech, no matter how ponderous, moved faster than any conventional vehicle, wheeled, tracked or even hovercraft.
A thin-lipped smile spread across the Star colonel’s long, pale, ascetic’s face, barely dewed with sweat. As the Lyrans discover anew, now that we have caught them.
Across the valley the Bellona had stalled. It had apparently backed into a granite outcrop concealed by dense brush. Its pilot directed the full thrust of its fusion-driven fans downward, attempting to lift the 45-ton machine over the obstacle by brute force. He was having little luck.
Folke Jorgensen’s heat remained well within limits. He speared the trapped tank again and again with both lasers. The trees shook and his cockpit rang with the thunder of yet another long-range missile barrage. It was as if the distant Catapult sought to cut down a tree on top of him. Should one of the forest giants fall on the Black Hawk it would break its back like a lapdog’s. But good luck to the Steiner if he thought his rockets equal to the task in the time he had remaining—
The Bellona exploded as its missile magazine went up.
Star Colonel Folke Jorgensen had been among those in the abandoned expeditionary force who argued that not just Chaffee but the whole salient should be abandoned as untenable. Better to withdraw voluntarily and with honor than be driven back when The Republic, with glacial slowness but also glacial inexorability, mounted its inevitable counterattack in overwhelming force. No price, the malcontents said, was worth paying to keep a handful of trophies for a bloodfoul’s shelf.
Noritomo Helmer refused. Notwithstanding her crimes— or the way she repeatedly humiliated him (and Jorgensen suspected that leaving him in command of the rump occupation was the greatest insult of all)—Malvina Hazen was his rightful superior when she gave him his orders. Duty to Turkina demanded obedience.
So far none of those favoring return to the occupation zone had challenged Helmer. They knew they needed every Jade Falcon they had. They respected Helmer for his courage, not least in standing up to Malvina. And news of Malvina’s latest madness had weakened Helmer’s resolve.
But the Steiners were attacking now. Need and honor alike required Folke Jorgensen to go out and fight them.
Ignoring the Catapult’s weight advantage, and the fact that it seriously outgunned his Black Hawk at long range, Jorgensen charged forward out of cover of the woods. A final volley of thirty LRMs crashed down behind him. With an almost human groan and a crack loud enough to be heard above the cacophony of battle, the tree that had stood directly between him and the Lyran BattleMech gave way and fell. Had he stayed, it would have crushed his machine.
Dust geysers and glowing gobbets of earth flash-fused to molten glass spurted from the ridgetop as he returned fire with the two large lasers mounted along the BattleMech’s fuselage. His threat display told him the Steiner was trying to lock him up with his Artemis IV fire-control system. He wanted to make it as hard as possible for the enemy MechWarrior to succeed.
To preserve heat he fired no more laser bolts but raced the big machine full tilt down the mountain in what was as much a barely controlled fall as a run. The impacts of its big three-lobed feet jarred through his tailbone and clashed his jaws together. He put his ’Mech’s right foot on a hump-back boulder in his path and used the thrusting power of that leg’s myomer pseudomuscle to help launch his machine in a jump across the narrow valley.
On the far side several more wrecks blazed, including a Pack Hunter with its right arm and torso-mounted particle cannon torn away and its cockpit a flame-spewing crater. The other Steiner machines vanished over the ridgeline as comrades laid down covering fire. In his HUD Folke Jorgensen saw the green ticks of his own machines surge forward, following his lead.
A bold and dashing Jade Falcon MechWarrior might have jumped straight up at the Catapult, to negate its tremendous range advantage by coming to grips. At close range the Black Hawk’s Streak missiles and hands would give it all the edge over the armless support BattleMech, heavier though it was. But a bold ’Mech jock would also have been painted against the sky by the Catapult’s FCS and blasted off its jump jet drive columns to crash to ruin in the boulder-lined streambed below.
Instead, Jorgensen took a short, fast, flat-trajectory jump straight across to the opposite slope. He hit the ground running. The ridge’s mass now masked him from the Lyran’s potent long-range battery.
The Black Hawk rocked as a heavy short-range missile fired from a man-portable launcher slammed against his right torso, just forward of the ’Mech’s massive coaxially mounted shoulder and hip joints. Red lights flashed on his heads-up display: his right-side laser’s primary control circuit was gone. He ignored both the shot—that was what redundancy was for, and a green light told him a secondary circuit had kicked in—and the grounded infantryman who launched it. With his battle-hardened elementals to back them, he trusted even the green solahma foot soldiers’ fire-and-moving-forward to police up stranded enemy infantry.
In his three-sixty view strip he saw one of his battlesuited giants flipped over in midair by a burst from the Catapult’s twenty-millimeter gun. It dropped straight down into the trickle of stream. As he charged upslope with what in any ’Mech-driver less supremely proficient would be mad recklessness, Jorgensen registered from his eye’s corner that elemental Dot’s tag now flashed yellow. She was no doubt out of the fight, thoroughly stunned and probably sporting broken bones, but telemetry showed she still lived. A good thing, for I can spare no frontline warriors . . .
These Steiners were unusually good, he noted. As the Black Hawk pounded upslope, swerving around a house-sized jut of grey stone, he wondered, Can they possibly think of retaking Chaffee, inst
ead of hitting and running?
No, he decided. They surely had spies slipping in- and out-system to inform them of Jade Falcon strength on Chaffee. The Steiners were too keenly aware of the bottom line to dream of trying to overcome his garrison, small as it was, with a single DropShip-load of attackers.
As he neared the ridge-crest he angled left toward where the Catapult had been firing from, to muddy its targeting solution. His Black Hawk topped the slope at a dead run, over sixty kilometers per hour even uphill, so fast it actually flew several meters into the air.
As the Star colonel half anticipated, the enemy MechWarrior had been shrewd enough to displace the instant the Falcon machine was out of sight. The Catapult backed down the backslope, almost into the forest fifty meters away. Most of its comrades were already lost among the giant trees.
As soon as the Black Hawk hit ground Jorgensen turned and accelerated it straight for the enemy BattleMech. The Catapult lashed him with autocannon, the shells bursting in white flashes on his joint-housings and cockpit. A lucky hit starred the front screen ferroglass, but the shells were too small to seriously damage his armor in the brief time he gave his foe. The Lyran ’Mech panic-fired both fifteen-rocket shoulder racks. A couple of missiles hit noisily but to no effect.
Then he was upon his foe. Without hesitation he powered his lighter ’Mech into the heavier. Still desperately backing downhill the Catapult was instantly overbalanced, although the impact crushed Jorgensen’s right-hand laser to uselessness. Jorgensen seized the teetering Catapult’s left leg and the snout of its pointed fuselage with his Black Hawk’s massive hands. Steel buckled in their crushing grasp. He heaved.
The Catapult fell over backward. It hit so hard it bounced. The shock actually lifted his own 50-ton ’Mech perceptibly off the ground.
He had lost his grip when his enemy went over. Now he stepped up and canted his fuselage down to close his ’Mech’s right hand over the fallen machine’s cockpit. ‘‘Yield,’’ he said, keying his radio to a general frequency he knew the LCAF used.
‘‘I yield,’’ a feminine voice replied at once. You could always count on a Steiner for that: no futile shows of resistance.
Behind him his Cardinal hover transport prowled over the ridgeline drawing a vortex of dust behind it. It reported scooping up two Points of his foot. He ordered the solahma to debark and secure the surrendered MechWarrior as he straightened to seek more foes.
None remained in sight. His threat display showed intermittent flickers of red for briefly confirmed enemy units and yellows for probables as the Steiners retreated through the forest. Green indicators showed his other BattleMechs and vehicles coming up with him.
Star Colonel Folke Jorgensen could not but take a Ghost Bear warrior’s grim satisfaction in victory. Yet its savor was tainted by the sheer pointlessness of the action. And by the malign implicit presence of Malvina Hazen.
A siren crowed. His HUD highlighted in red what his eyes showed as a tiny silver speck high and to his right. As his eyes flicked that way it grew winged and double-lobed: a 65-ton Ironsides aerospace fighter. It flashed before him not two hundred meters over the ridgeline. The shock wave of its supersonic passage rocked his BattleMech back on its rear toes and filled his cockpit with thunder as it climbed away to the west.
The message was unmistakable. A rapidly summoned readout on his HUD showed that neither the Steiner fighters nor his own pathetically outnumbered aerospace contingent had done the other much harm. The invaders had not pressed their edge overhead—but they had it.
The Ironsides had flown by much too fast for a firing pass. This time. Star Colonel Folke Jorgensen knew full well if he pursued the withdrawing raiders Lyran fighters would smash his ground units.
It was a simple decision. Jorgensen’s unremitting Ghost Bear tenacity latched itself not to a foe that had already conceded defeat but onto his overriding mission— unwelcome and strategically ludicrous as it was—of holding Chaffee at all costs. He respected Noritomo Helmer too much to imagine the Galaxy commander would send so much as a box of replacement bolts to keep useless Chaffee, hard-pressed as he was to hold more valuable conquests.
‘‘Pursue the Lyrans at walking pace,’’ he ordered. His fighters understood walking pace for a BattleMech. ‘‘Keep them moving in the right direction.’’
It was but a token to keep wily merchants playing warriors honest.
He raised his face to the sky. High up on his viewscreen a dark spot appeared, blotting out the tiny blue disk of Chaffee’s primary in an artificial eclipse: to look at it directly for even a fraction of a second meant temporary blindness. To its right a red reticule indicated the Lyran fighter, its small size indicating the rapidly diminishing threat status his battle computer assigned it.
‘‘Bargained well and done,’’ he murmured. He set his Black Hawk walking deliberately after the pilot’s ground-bound comrades.
27
Harz Mountains, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 April 3136
Khan Jana Pryde was hunting snowstalker in the Harz Mountains, a hundred kilometers southeast of Hammarr, when she got the word.
The day crackled cold. Ice weighed down the branches of the bushes where she sheltered. Crouched haunch-deep in snow, she had stalked to within fifteen meters of the sinuous five-meter-long predator and taken aim with her single-shot fourteen-millimeter handgun when the communicator tingled at her belt. She knew at once what it signified.
But she failed to react. Instead she continued to take up slack on the trigger.
Unaware that it was itself prey, the six-legged monster continued its own stalk of a trio of great curl-horned herbivores with long knotted hair feeding upon the blue-leaved nettle bushes. Its rank smell filled the khan’s nostrils and sinus cavities and made her eyes water. She was joined to it in the timeless space of the hunt. Her mind was focused, compartmentalized; the communicator’s insistent buzzing belonged to another dimension. Another self.
When the handgun fired it took the snowstalker by surprise, as she intended. It bucked and rose. The creature spun. The khan had already seen the spot dark against the snowstalker’s white-and-blue streaked flank. For a moment the creature glared at her with eyes purple beneath protective juts of bone. It gathered itself to leap.
Khan Jana Pryde straightened and stood composed. If I have missed my mark, she thought, then let it take me now and be done.
Instead the ferocious light fled the violet eyes. They glazed. The creature slumped abruptly into the snow as the heart-shot took effect.
The khan sighed. She broke the action of her hunting handgun, slid in a fresh thumb-sized cartridge, holstered the piece. Then she removed the communicator from her belt and opened the channel.
It was time to return to the world of time and space. And the reality in which she, too, was now prey.
‘‘Speak,’’ she said.
The person at the other end did. Jana Pryde listened. Then she gave crisp orders.
Putting the comm unit away, she drew a deep breath. Cold seared her lungs like fire. Will I feel its sting again? she wondered.
She turned toward the east. While her security detail keep its distance when she hunted—at least she could pretend she preyed alone—a fast Skadi VTOL waited in a clearing a handful of kilometers away. It would arrive in seconds.
And then the fight for Sudeten, and the heart and soul of Clan Jade Falcon, would commence.
‘‘Was ist los?’’ asked Heinz-Otto von Texeira, raising his chins from the black fur collar of his greatcoat: What’s going on?
‘‘Sirens,’’ said Rorion Klimt, who walked beside him through The Casts in a heavy padded jacket. His own younger face, normally classically handsome, was creased like a worried hound’s.
The wailing rose and fell, a lost winding sound with a bit of grind, like a self-aware robot lamenting its discovery that it lacked a soul. My, but my mind runs along morbid tracks today, the acting diplomat thought as he
gazed at a speaker horn set atop a hundred-meter tower.
Where he and his aide stood, the road sloped fairly steeply before them, down into a district of workshops and distribution centers. To their left stood a dispensary of some sort, shuttered at this hour. To the right the slope from the crest lay bare but for a few silvery tufts of dead vegetation poking through lumpy two-day-old snow.
‘‘But what can it mean?’’ Rorion asked.
They were not long in finding out. When the siren had wound on for a whole minute a voice crackled suddenly from speakers somewhere nearby. Metallic, masculine. It struck von Texeira’s ears as dispassionate, yet ringing with that certain superciliousness he had come to associate with senior members of Sudeten’s scientist caste, who Senna said did the real work of running the world—and the Clan.
‘‘This is a Class One Emergency,’’ it declared. As it repeated, von Texeira heard echoes from all around: apparently speakers blanketed the city. ‘‘Return at once to assigned mustering points in dormitories and workstations for a televised announcement.’’ It began to cycle through its litany, interspersed with wailing from the giant horns.
‘‘We should perhaps wend our own way home,’’ said von Texeira.
Their domicile had its own holovid stage. Clan Jade Falcon actually ran a broadcast system. It offered four channels: for the laborer masses, exhortations and simple melodramas on the virtue of patient service; technical education and military dramas for technicians; advanced education, scientific news and impenetrable science fiction for the scientists; and for the warriors, lurid adventure yarns, for the most part incredibly cheesy thirty-year-old Liao and Kurita costume melodramas with plenty of wire-work swordplay. The crèches, von Texeira and Rorion understood, had their own internal systems, combining music, pedagogy and cultural indoctrination as part of the Clan’s program of relentlessly meddling in every aspect of its members’ existence.