Flight of the Falcon Read online

Ryde

  Prefecture VIII

  The Republic of the Sphere

  24 June 3134

  Malvina Hazen descended upon Ryde like a plague from ancient prophecy.

  Although the voyage from the jump points was only eleven days, that was too much for the impatient Galaxy Commander, who took the risk of employing a pirate point five days out—and like her sibkin won her gamble. Upon arriving in-system and before launching her DropShips, Malvina convened her officers in the briefing amphitheater inboard her flag JumpShip, La Vie en Rose, captured from the Davion contingent of the then-Federated Commonwealth in the last century and renamed; Malvina had insisted upon restoring its original name, and as a ristar got her wish, especially since Khan Jana Pryde could not care less what they called their ships so long as they won.

  Naked, Malvina stood before her subcommanders. She held her slender white arms above her head, cut them with her great-bladed fighting knife—carefully, so as to avoid damage to muscle, nerve and tendon—and let the blood stream over her silver pale hair, down her face, to spatter her breasts and shoulders and run in twining networks down her flat domed belly.

  In a ringing voice she promised: so it would be with all who stood in the path of the Falcons’ return to the Inner Sphere. She would bathe in their blood.

  Her Gyrfalcons screamed themselves hoarse in an orgy of approbation.

  She broadcast the ceremony live to Ryde, so they could see in full tridee what Fate had in store for them.

  In the glare of a bright but distant yellow-white sun, her DropShips descended through thin, sulfurous atmosphere to land at strategic locations on the world’s three continents. She herself led her First Falcon Striker Cluster in a drop on the vital Water Pure complex, which provided drinkable water to the cold, dry world’s populace and lay near the capital Heaven’s Gate on the southerly continent Kale. Her command ship came down inside the wire, its landing jacks digging deep into the pavement of its parking lot, vehicles and cement melted into a bubbling cauldron by its drive jets.

  Her Gyrs sprang forth ready for battle. Ryde’s defenders did not disappoint her. Most of the strongpoints erected during the Succession Wars, when the chemical-rich planet had changed hands frequently between Houses Steiner and Kurita, had been stripped of armament and allowed to fall into desuetude after The Republic’s rise. The fort near the water-purification plant had not. It was not the prize an invader would seek the planet for—but it was unmistakably key to possession of the planet itself. The peace of The Republic notwithstanding, the Ryde authorities had kept the plant carefully guarded.

  The Republic Ryde Militia strongpoint lay near the facility but several kilometers outside its confines, sprawled on a yellow plain not far from the capital. By dropping audaciously into the facility itself Malvina put the militia in the position of having to invade its own industrial complex to dislodge the Falcons. However, the Corridan IV-based Water Pure Industries, wealthy and powerful, owed both wealth and power—especially on Ryde itself—in no small part to this very plant. It maintained a large and comprehensively trained security detachment of its own, equipped with VTOLs, armored vehicles, armored infantry equipped with Gnome power suits based upon the older Elemental design, and even a Hatchetman BattleMech; WPI gave protecting its precious plant precedence over Devlin Stone’s desire to eliminate ’Mechs from private hands. As reliant as anyone else on the planet upon the steady stream of purified water flowing from the facility, successions of Governors had done nothing to pressure the corporation into scrapping the machine.

  While Gyrfalcon aerospace fighters drew networks of white contrail against mauve sky, dueling in the stratosphere with Ryde fighters, Malvina herself burst forth from the landing ship’s bay in her huge, hawk-headed Shrike, ornamental wings extended, followed by an Elemental swarm. Ten ’Mechs emerged after hers. A Star of five immediately set off to the south to counter any thrusts by the Defense Force regulars. The rest, supported by the Elementals in their super-sized power armor, strode off at once into the Cubist jungle of pipes and giant tanks after their commander, leaving the Galaxy’s vehicles, VTOLs, and unpowered infantry to sort themselves out.

  It was not that Malvina disdained the combined-arms paradigm dominant in modern war; like her brother she had earned ristar status and Galaxy command by successfully leading troops in battle as well as by her sheer prowess as a MechWarrior—and her force-of-nature ferocity. Battles were not won without understanding how to fight vehicles and infantry in concert with BattleMechs; and battles she had won. What made her plunge right in was her sheer bloodlust, her desire for the hunt, especially in the wake of the frustrations of Chaffee. She had gone to extremes to instill the same yarak—the bird of prey’s eagerness for the hunt—in her Gyrfalcons.

  Now she unhooded them and let them fly.

  Although a range of jagged mountains, source of the plant’s raw material, stood near, the morning was warm. Ryde’s sun stood high in the sky. It was already hot in Malvina’s cockpit as she settled her ’Mech down just beyond a hash of white-gleaming pipes two meters through.

  Gunfire flashed in her peripheral vision. Heat-blooms of chemical propellant ballooned in her IR display. A fire team of WPI security troops was engaging her with conventional projectile rifles. And somewhat more: she felt a tiny shudder ripple through Black Rose’s ninety-five tons of mass as the shaped charge warhead of a light anti-armor rocket spent itself on the armored housing of her left hip actuator.

  A subconscious glance at her internal status displays confirmed what she already knew: the rocket had left a hot spot and dug a slight crater in the armor.

  She laughed as she destroyed the unarmored infantry with a burst of flechette rounds from the heavy autocannon twinned in the Shrike’s left arm.

  Around her men and women hunted others, killed, died. The shrieks of unarmored infantry soldiers caught by Elemental flamers shrilled in her audio pickups like the cries of startled seabirds—on a world that had seas, and birds. Explosions boomed and crackled and cannon cracked on all sides.

  Not all the dying was being done by one side. A Point of Elementals leapt into the sky like giant fleas to attack a group of light armored vehicles with their short-range missile launchers. A Crow scout chopper appeared abruptly from behind a huge, yellow-painted tank as if falling up. Its lasers flared scarlet, tumbling two giant warriors from the sky. A third power suit exploded as first its right-hand launcher and then its flamer fuel were ignited by the beam’s hot kiss. The other two Elementals ducked for safety behind a spatter of missiles that missed. Then a PPC bolt from somewhere behind Malvina blew the VTOL into a black cloud raining yellow fire.

  In her ears rang the raptor cries of her MechWarriors outside the plant striking south. The planetary militia, forewarned, had reacted to her landing with exemplary quickness. It was killing them. With their own vehicles, infantry clinging to armored backs and flanks, trailing after, the five Gyrfalcon BattleMechs charged at full speed through the defenders’ advancing armor, slashing, slaying, more like diamond sharks ripping through shoals of ice cod in the chill, inhospitable waters of Strana Mechty than Jade Falcons stooping on prey.

  The metal tangle all around made gibberish of Malvina’s magnetic anomaly detector. She didn’t know the Hatchetman was there until it suddenly lunged from behind a three-story cinder-block pumping station. Its huge depleted uranium hatchet, the size of a house wall, swung toward her cockpit in a desperate all-or-nothing shot for the one target that might permit the forty-five-ton ’Mech to take down her twice-as-heavy and more behemoth.

  But Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen had senses keen and reflexes quick even for a Clan Mech Warrior. Although she could read the display strip beneath the low, wide windscreen that compressed the whole three-sixty view around her machine as readily as her natural vision, it was her peripheral sight that showed the heavy blade flashing in the glare of the distant primary. She folded her ’Mech’s right knee, pivoting clockwise in a flash.

 
Just missing the Shrike’s head, the great blade smashed into the extended-range medium laser set in Black Rose’s left shoulder. White smoke gouted from it like arterial spray. Malvina’s board lit with red lights and warnings shrilled. It had been a good stroke, a vicious one.

  But not enough. Far from that.

  She swung her machine’s torso back the other way. The hatchet had sunk deep into the Shrike’s torso and stuck fast. The Rydian jock managed to wrench it free, and then the two autocannon that made up Black Rose’s left arm blasted the codpiece-like armored housing protecting the Hatchetman’s groin area and slammed it back into the pump house. The wall cracked and sagged.

  With commendable speed, the Hatchetman pushed off from the crumpled wall with its elbows and jumped straight up. Malvina followed. The humanoid ’Mech with the odd Parasaurolophus-like head, with its long back-sweeping crest, could climb away from her spiky monster; even wizard Clan design could only do so much with a ninety-five-ton machine.

  But the lighter ’Mech had not gotten that great a literal jump on Malvina—Clan reflexes again. The pilot aimed another hatchet blow at Malvina’s cockpit. Laughing, with gentle pressure on the attitude jet controls, Malvina pirouetted the vast machine out of its path.

  The massive weapon’s momentum almost toppled the Hatchetman off its drive columns. The pilot managed to keep it upright and airborne, just barely.

  Until with a blast from her 100mm autocannon Malvina blew off one of the Spheroid ’Mech’s Luxor 2/Q jets.

  The Hatchetman fell to the sulfurous hardpan with such force that displaced air rocked the hovering Shrike. The Rose had excellent thermal efficiency, but heat rose quickly in the cockpit, coating Malvina’s near-naked body in instant sweat. The stink of sulfur pressed like thumbs at her nostrils, infiltrating through the cockpit seal or perhaps gaskets aft in the fuselage—she would have words with her tech crew on returning to the ship.

  It was time to come down. An unfamiliar voice spoke in her ear across the general frequency she left open in case the locals found something to say to her.

  “Terms,” it said. A woman’s voice.

  “As if,” Malvina replied. Her taloned right foot came down on the front of the Hatchetman’s sloped head, eliciting a sharp scream, quickly cut off.

  With the Water Pure plant secured, the Ryde planetary government capitulated, even as fighting continued at other Jade Falcon landing sites across the planet. Malvina was almost disappointed. Yet with limited numbers and less time—both needed careful husbanding, for the crowning glory at Skye—she could not afford the luxury of a campaign of any length. She had places to be and people to kill. There had been no choice but to go for the planetary jugular.

  Unlike Chaffee’s, Ryde’s defenders were professionals, thoroughly conventional. When they surrendered it was likely they considered it binding. Yet despite their unconditional surrender, Malvina wanted to ensure that there would be no repetition of the guerrilla campaign that had caused such difficulties on the Lyran world.

  Of a global population of almost 680 million, Malvina’s Gyrfalcons quickly rounded up sixty-eight thousand at random and herded them into confinement areas improvised from sports venues and factory parking areas near the Clusters’ landing sites. Then with local media broadcasting the scene on tridee under threat of Elemental flamers, they proceeded to decimate the captives: making them count down, having every tenth one step forward, driving that tenth portion together and then killing them with machine gun and laser fire—men, women, children.

  Evolution had come to Ryde, Clan style. Or at least that version practiced by Malvina Hazen and her Mongol faction.

  17

  Skye

  Prefecture VIII

  The Republic of the Sphere

  25 June 3134

  An Elemental sat weeping on a rock when Captain Tara Bishop came into the Seventh Skye Militia cantonment beneath a glory of endless blue autumn skies brushed with white wings of cloud.

  Tara B managed not to gape. Instead, she cocked an eyebrow at Master Sergeant Angus McCorkle, who stood awaiting her nearby, just inside the gate with the neatly carved and painted wood sign bearing the legend, “Welcome to the Home of the Garryowen” arched over it. His hands were clasped behind his back, and there was a studied lack of expression on his rugged black face. He was the one bearing the day-by-day brunt of trying to whip the remaining local main-force unit into shape. It had so far not been a happy task, even for as crusty an old top kick as McCorkle.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Lieutenant Padraig took offense at something one of our young gentlefolk said,” McCorkle said. “Captain.”

  “Young gentlefolk” was what the senior noncoms in the regular Highlander regiments, the First Kearny and the Fusiliers, termed officers, mostly lieutenants junior grade, who had enlisted shortly before the first Steel Wolf invasion of Northwind and won quick commissions via plain attrition. While they had displayed outstanding courage, or at least a strong survival streak, to win their promotions, not all were as polished as even a man like McCorkle might prefer: imminent danger had forced Countess Campbell to take what she could get, including half-unlettered backwoodsfolk. Hence the habit of ironically reminding sundry that they were all gentlemen and ladies by order of The Republic’s Senate.

  The air was full of the smell of ripening grain and wood smoke. Off toward the mountains a cloud of migratory birds wheeled, sojourning south before the gathering winter. The flyers were dark against the brilliant blue sky.

  First Lieutenant Anders Monsen appeared beside Tara Bishop. He was the usual training liaison between the Highlanders and the Seventh. He greeted her warmly, but his boyish face showed deep consternation. “The problem bein’,” he said in his thick Skye Irish brogue, “that one of your snot—that is, a lieutenant junior grade used the term ‘motherless’ quite prominently in poor Paddy’s hearing.”

  Tara shut her eyes.

  The Clans were, to say the least, not popular with the Highlanders—nor any Northwinders, from Countess Tara on down. “Motherless,” a reference to Trueborn Clanners’ in vitro birth, had become a common epithet among soldiers who had seen their home worlds raped and Terra itself defiled by the Steel Wolves. That it had quickly devolved into a general term of abuse, no longer reserved for Clansfolk alone, did not exactly help.

  Thanks to Devlin Stone’s voluntary resettlement program, a number of ethnic Clanners dwelt on Skye. Some held to the Canister; others had completely assimilated, still others practiced natural reproduction yet strictly among their own nominal caste, and termed themselves “Pure-bloods” in defiance of the classic Clan stigmatization of Freebirths. They were overrepresented in the Republic Skye Militia—including Trueborn warriors who were, so the Duke’s counterintelligence services assured them, unswervingly loyal to Skye and The Republic: Ghost Bears, Nova Cats, even a few Wolves and Falcons.

  Whatever else he was, the sobbing man was pure Elemental. On hearing his officer speak he raised a great tear-stained face. “I had a mither,” he said plaintively—in an Irish brogue which, to Tara’s near-horror, was every bit as marked as Monsen’s. “An’ it’s not even a year since she joined the saints.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s Catholic,” Tara said, before she could stop herself.

  “What else might he be, and him a good Bogtrotter?” Monsen asked, perhaps a bit too ingenuously. “You should meet our Padre, Captain Seamus. Two hundred fifty centimeters of faith and fury is he; and wasn’t he free-fighting champion of all Skye when he was just a tad of a seminarian at St. Angela’s? A largish tad, I grant you that, now.”

  What’s worse, Tara thought, is I don’t think he’s pulling my leg. She turned to McCorkle.

  “First Lieutenant Monsen informs me that Lieutenant Padraig is a very valorous man.” He hesitated only momentarily before speaking the last word. “He served with distinction in combat with the Hastati Protectors IX.”

  “It’s only that he’s a sensitive nature to hi
m,” Monsen said. “Sure, he did his stint, won his medals, and home he came to Skye to help till the family farm in County Loguire.”

  Only by dint of superhuman effort did Tara restrain herself from blurting, Hitched to a plow? She hoped his mother had been Elemental as well as his father. If not . . . she shuddered discreetly.

  “And now he’s taken up arms again, in defense of the soil in which his blessed mother’s bones rest,” Monsen said.

  Tara went to stand before the sobbing giant. “Lieutenant Padraig,” she said crisply, “I am Captain Tara Bishop of the First Kearny Highlanders Regiment. I’m also aide-de-camp to Countess Tara Campbell. In the Countess’ name, in the name of the Northwind Highlanders, in the name of The Republic of the Sphere, and on my own behalf, I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for any distress our officer’s thoughtless remark caused you. I am sure that officer meant nothing by it.”

  If only because I damned well hope none of our ninety-day wonders is stupid enough to piss off a full-blooded Elemental in the wild, bottle-baby or not!

  Padraig nodded and dropped his enormous hands. “That’s mighty big of ye, Cap’n,” he said to the woman a third his size without apparent irony.

  “My honor, warrior.” I’m double-damned, she thought fiercely, if I’ll condone trying to impose censorship on our hot-blooded girls and boys. Yet—heart and minds!—we can’t go wounding the sensibilities of loyal soldiers of The Republic with racial slurs, of all bloody things.

  But it was not her decision to make. And then, despite her regard for her commander and the deep personal friendship that had sprung up between them, she grinned from ear to ear at the realization that she could pitch this particular hot potato right into her namesake’s deceptively dainty hands. A terrible thing to do to a friend. Ah, but duty’s a harsh taskmistress. . . .

  She left the lugubrious giant to Monsen’s puppy-dog ministrations and joined McCorkle walking down a company street between tents and plywood shacks. No litter was visible, but the place had a slipshod air. Disreputable, somehow. A few loungers watched them warily. The rest, it seemed, were off somewhere. Hopefully improving their skills, Tara thought.