Flight of the Falcon Read online

  Their work was well done: the highways leading from the mall were clogged with fleeing cars. The parking lot, which had not been overfull since this was an early workday afternoon, had largely emptied. Those motorists still stalled in traffic waiting to get out had their attention quickly drawn to the small constellation of blue-white drive stars descending upon them, and fled on foot with commendable alacrity. No one was injured, although numerous vehicles turned molten in puffs of igniting ICE fuel as the Heart sank her landing jacks three meters into blacktop.

  Aleks had achieved the situation military history had taught him was optimum: strategic offensive and tactical defensive. While the balance shifted occasionally with the ebb and flow of doctrine and technology, that was the rest state. He quickly threw out pickets of fast scouts, vehicles and something new, hoverbikes liberated from Alkaid. His Eyrie youngsters loved those. The scouts formed a circling mobile perimeter, augmented by infantry observation posts with powerful sensor gear, to watch for counterattacks as Aleks unshipped his warriors and machines and readied them for action. VTOLs quickly rose to cover them.

  The aircraft reported a regiment on the move from Mount Breighton. The militia had tracked the DropShip’s descent on radar and begun mounting their response before it made planetfall. Meanwhile, Aleks lost a Donar scout VTOL to an air-defense battery, learning that the somewhat smaller force protecting the JumpShip parts plant and the organic security was alert and angry but apparently digging in, making no moves to sally and confront the invaders.

  Aleks’ lean, hard gut told him that would not last, was indeed likely a ruse—but he didn’t care. He had the trust of his Galaxy now, and they his. He would rely on them to carry out his commands as crisply as the veterans of Delta or the elite Turkina Keshik—indeed better, because unlike the “superior” units the once-dezgra Zetas had grown accustomed to subordinating their individual lust for glory to the tactical needs of their Galaxy; and the will of their charismatic commander.

  Leaving his circle of pickets out, reinforcing those to the southwest to cut the likely axis of any advance from the Summer InterStellar Components factory plex, Aleks marched the rest of his Cluster rapidly northeast to meet the defenders speeding down an eight-lane superhighway toward them. Per his custom, he left a tactical command post in the now-abandoned mall, under the powerful armament of Red Heart, in command of an injured MechWarrior.

  Aleks’ force quickly dug in under defilade of low hills flanking the highway. A bridge crossed a creek, now a roaring flood that had already escaped its banks, half a kay in front of his main line of resistance. Hoverbike-borne sappers wired it for destruction, just in case, but he left it intact for now, with his personal coded signal the only thing that would drop the span: he wanted to invite the defenders in at full speed, not slow them down.

  And so they came. Having been alerted by a jump-point observatory to the Jade Falcon emergence, they had made good use of the short three days intervening, even loading big, slow BattleMechs, including Legate Carlos Adler’s personal Centurion and a Legionnaire, fifty tons each, onto flatbed haulers for rapid transport to contest the expected invasion wherever it touched down.

  As Summerite scouts clashed with Falcon pickets, the clouds opened up. The air between clouds and hills became a flickering pixilated ocean, pierced by angry red-tinged lightning. As battles went, it was epic, and many valiant deeds were done—and many men and women on both sides were mangled, crushed, burned, died weeping and rolling in tangles of their own intestines or crying for their mothers. But it was not particularly remarkable: another installment of humanity’s perpetual war with itself.

  Though cliché anciently claims no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, the fight developed much as Aleks anticipated it. With cover and stable firing platforms on his side, his Falcon Assault Guards levied thoroughly professional slaughter on the advancing Summerites: men, vehicles and even ’Mechs. Concentrated fire forced the militia infantry to dismount well outside their effective battle range. Grimly determined, the armored fighting vehicles, BattleMechs and IndustrialMechs forged on.

  Aleks did face one threat none of the desant’s Galaxies had encountered before now: heavy artillery firing over the horizon. Bombardment by Arrow missiles and Thumper and Sniper tube artillery from self-propelled launchers blasted his hasty positions within half a minute of their opening fire, shredding dozens of infantry and even some Elementals in full power armor, several vehicles, including a Sekhmet assault vehicle, and two hovertanks, a fifty-ton Epona Pursuit tank and a forty-five-ton Bellona. A direct hit by an Arrow IV volley blew to pieces an Eyrie, vaporizing MechWarrior Nina, who had been so reluctant to incur dishonor on Alkaid by withdrawing.

  Surprised by the speed and effectiveness of the enemy arty, Aleks nonetheless had the best counter already in hand: counterattack. He led his Falcons in a charge as the distant artillery churned the muddy soil of their now-vacant positions.

  Drawn out in front of their infantry, the Summerite vehicles and ’Mechs had lost their support. With the non-powered infantry riding on the backs of hovercraft and armored by their speed, and Elementals clinging to the legs and perched on the shoulders of Falcon ’Mechs, Aleks’ warriors engaged the militia with all assets simultaneously.

  The battle lines came together with a crash that momentarily shamed the thunder. Falcon infantry dismounted and close-assaulted Summerite vehicles and ’Mechs with grenades and portable anti-armor weapons. Aleks in his Lily led his machines in slashes through the enemy line, back and forth, as his fast hover-mobile scouts raked the flanks of the gone-to-ground enemy infantry, keeping them out of the fray. With the two mechanized forces intertwined, the Summer heavy artillery was unable to fire effectively for fear of striking their own troops; they were hunted down and neutralized by Falcon VTOLs which, though outnumbered, had already gained local supremacy over the Spheroid air.

  Slipping, sliding, throwing up great waves of mud and chopped vegetation, the foes savaged each other in a vicious dogfight. Aleks’ Gyrfalcon was swarmed by a whole point of Nova Cats in Gnome power armor. They actually tore off the Ultra autocannon mounted on Lily’s left arm before MechWarrior Mordechai in his Spirit and a cadet-crewed Epona hosed them off with lasers and Streak missiles.

  The Ghost Bear abtakha Folke Jorgensson, jumping to his erstwhile master’s aid, was knocked from the sky by a Gauss rifle hit and several long-range missile strikes from Legate Adler’s Centurion. Although his right-arm quad Streak launcher was destroyed and the ammo stowage in his right torso blasted open, and his own left clavicle was broken by his fall, the dour Star Colonel with consummate skill snapped his own fifty-ton machine back upright, staggering the Legate, closing as he thought for the kill, with a Streak barrage from his left arm launcher. It shattered the long range launcher in the Centurion’s right torso and cracked the cockpit, momentarily dazing Adler.

  Jorgensson jumped again, turning in air to light behind the Legate with weapons blazing. Adler tried to turn his ’Mech’s torso to fire back. Jorgensson just orbited him, firing up the Centurion with large lasers and his remaining Streaks, until the Legate’s ’Mech toppled with a shattered hip actuator.

  In moments, a fuming Legate Adler was drawn from his cockpit, shaken but uninjured, by Solahma infantry. Ignoring the pain, the functional loss of one arm, and the diminished status of his firepower, Folke Jorgensson stalked off in search of further prey. Beyond even his thorny Clan-warrior pride, he would never show weakness in front of Falcons.

  Soon Star Colonel Jorgensson took charge of mopping up the now-shattered Summerite combat team as Aleks, blissfully undeterred by the damage to his own machine, turned the Lily around and led a scratch Trinary to engage and defeat the thrust of vehicles and IndustrialMechs supported by infantry from the JumpShip-parts plant he had expected all along.

  At the end of the day, Planetary Governor Minerva Hayne was more than willing to accept Aleksandr Hazen’s generous surrender terms, even though over h
alf of the militia troops defending her capital had not so much as glimpsed the smoke of distant battle for the cloudburst which still raged long after the fighting in the hills was done.

  In the streets of the surrendered city, Aleks celebrated with his warriors, encouraged them in their revelry, smiled, laughed, drank and sang with them. Yet his own triumph tasted of ashes in his mouth.

  Almost a hundred of his Zetas had died, including Magnus Icaza’s successor as commander of the Third Falcon Velites, Star Colonel Keith Buhallin, killed by laser infantry after he successfully toppled the Summerite Legionnaire by ramming it with his Skanda light tank in an apparent attempt to emulate Jorgensson’s feat in seizing a BattleMech. Half again as many lay injured.

  Summer had lost three thousand, killed and wounded. To anyone but a Clansman, the victory might have seemed one-sided.

  Aleksandr mourned for all those dead and injured, Falcon and Spheroid. Because as always to his heart—that of a knight sans peur and sans reproche such as he had read about as an undersized, perpetually frightened child—a warrior’s highest duty was protection, not destruction. To be sure, he still believed with his whole soul that even carnage such as today’s was justified by its promise: to put an end to such suffering and evil forever. Because one day, tomorrow or in twenty years, Clan Jade Falcon would arrive in force to complete the work he and his fellow Galaxy Commanders had begun.

  But it was just begun, he knew. That panged him too. For all the butchery and pain this conquest had caused, the greatest spasm of destruction yet awaited: the battle for Skye.

  22

  Outside New London

  Skye

  17 July 3134

  “As I see it, lass,” the handsome young officer with the collar of his Seventh Skye Militia dress tunic artfully undone said in a Skye-Irish brogue well-fueled by Skye-Irish whiskey, “our situation harks back to that confronting the empires of Terra herself, away back in the age of sail a century or two before spaceflight began. And thank you; you’re a blessing to a man.”

  The last he said to a diminutive woman with glossy black hair bobbed to bangs across the front and long and unbound in the back, who had handed him a fresh glass. She wore a brief black dress fit to a trim but well-appointed figure and matching heels. Her features were pert and nicely chiseled, her eyes so blue as to be almost indigo. She smiled encouragingly.

  He continued, duly encouraged. She was really quite lovely. Even if there was a haunting air of familiarity about her. “Back in those days, the major powers were separated by days and weeks of travel asea, their outposts and colonies by weeks, even months. Intercepting enemies or raiders or even learning of their activities was a matter as much of luck as skill. Rendezvousing or communicating with one’s own far-flung forces was no easier.”

  Bodies and conversation ebbed and flowed about them in lazy currents between goosebumped white walls. The party was one of the more or less weekly affairs thrown by film mogul Hilario Gupta, owner of Islands in the Sky Productions, at his house that rambled like a random growth of giant white crystals on a forested hillside overlooking New London and Thames Bay from the north.

  “Yet they managed to maintain world-girdling empires,” the officer continued. He was lean and long-jawed and had curly chestnut hair curving down his cheeks as sideburns. A circle of admiring listeners, not exclusively feminine, surrounded him as he stood in one of the somewhat stark rooms of Gupta’s polyhedron palace. “Indeed, they managed to have themselves a set of global wars from the sixteenth or seventeenth century onwards, although they didn’t get ’round to calling them ‘world’ wars until the twentieth; still, only the unprecedented scale of the forces involved distinguished the acknowledged world wars from what had gone before, not their nature.”

  While he spread himself generously among his audience, he concentrated a little more on the little stunner in black with the flip bangs. For her part, she seemed to be listening with peculiar intensity. He smiled inwardly, and contemplated potentialities.

  Another woman, a more than acceptable blonde, asked what was being done to protect Skye. “Well, we’re training quite intensively with these newcomers from The Republic,” he allowed, “helping them get up to speed on conditions on Skye, don’tcha know?”

  “I’ll bet it’s a real pleasure training under that commander of theirs, if you know what I mean,” commented a noted New Glasgow bon vivant and gossip columnist from the fringe.

  The officer generously decided not to squash the plump, bearded poseur. He had written complimentary things about the Seventh. Which was none too common. “She’s easy enough on the eyes, to be sure, now,” he said casually. “But don’t be fooled: under that glamorous exterior beats a heart as chill as that of any Kirk divine. They’re as stiff-necked as our local Scots, now, this Northwind lot; only a trifle more rustic and rough about the edges. Sassenach at heart, they are.”

  A man had sidled up to the group. He wore a loose, color-swirled smock over white duck trousers and deck shoes. He was nondescript except for a head of slightly receding dark hair and Asian eyes. He leaned in and spoke to the black-haired woman, whose attentive smile had grown a trifle glassy.

  “Pardon me, friend,” the militia officer said, “but the lass is with me.”

  The interloper smiled. It was a friendly smile, disarming in its charm. Yet there was something behind it that chilled like liquid nitrogen. “Not anymore,” he said lightly.

  The woman nodded at the young raconteur, smiled radiantly, and rose to slip away with the newcomer.

  Standing on the deck in the light of Luna, Skye’s single moon, Tara ran her fingers through her long, luxuriant, spurious hair. It felt strange to have long hair again. She enjoyed the sensation, but was glad she could be done with it when this was over. It was about the way she felt about acquaintances’ children: she loved to coo over them, and cuddle them and give way to rushes of maternal warmth. Then hand them back to their parents.

  The young Limerick rake had a keen sense of history; her education had been comprehensive enough that she recognized the essential accuracy of his tales. Nor could she argue with his comparing Terra’s age of sail to the post–HPG Inner Sphere. Although she wasn’t as ready to endorse certain other of his observations. . . .

  Another small contingent of troops had trickled in, of her own elite First Kearny, from facing down the Dracs—and the Dragon’s Fury, led by Tara’s own mentor, Duchess Katana Tormark—on Sadalbary on the frontier, where once upon a day young Tara had first won a name for herself as something other than a pretty little poster girl, and so well-mannered. Grim battle-hardened veterans they were, though they made it clear they felt it was they, not the less-seasoned troops who had fought with Tara against the Steel Wolves, had something to prove: for guilt chewed them, that they had not been able to fight for their home world themselves. They brought with them three BattleMechs, an Arbalest, a Panther and a powerful Tundra Wolf.

  If only we had had them on Northwind, she thought, soldiers and machines. . . .

  She stopped the thought. She had dedicated her life to fighting for the great experiment which was The Republic. She could not allow herself to begrudge the sacrifices her home world had made for the cause.

  Or would.

  They had come from the other end of The Republic, carried by a virtual command circuit: a chain of JumpShips which, upon jumping into a system, could pass cargo and passengers along to another vessel waiting with capacitors fully charged, so that it could make the next hyperspatial jump without delay. In this case it was as much happenstance as planning, hence the “virtual.” Under Devlin Stone’s reforms, The Republic had cut back on military starships as well as BattleMechs, and the current Exarch was reluctant to press civilian hulls into service, in which Tara concurred. A combination of purpose-stationed Republican JumpShips and cooperative civilian craft had, however, enabled recall orders to reach this lot of Highlanders, and they themselves to get here, in a blindingly short time, given the en
ormous distance they had to traverse.

  Yet their coming brought as much ill news as good, because it was only by unreasonable good fortune they reached Skye in such good time—or at all. Such conditions would seldom recur. Tara would be lucky to have half her Highlanders here before the invaders, based on any kind of reasonable projections as to when the Falcons might strike.

  She sighed, drinking in a breeze tangy with the scent of mountain conifers and crisp with coming autumn. Then she shivered, although it was not chill.

  “The Falcons have loaded their expedition up with all the ’Mechs they can spare,” Master Merchant Senna had told them. “We believe they carry about a fifth as many by proportion as their ancestors did a century ago. You do the math.”

  Tara could. She had. She might match them in BattleMechs—in six months or more.

  “Tara.” It was Paul in his loud shirt, stepping out onto the deck behind her.

  She turned. With the accountant came three men, each less likely than the next: a wiry man just taller than Tara, with intense dark eyes and a brown moustache, who seemed to vibrate with excess energy; a mobile wall of blond-bearded man; and an immensely tall and skeletally lean man with a shaven skull, gargoyle-sharp face and dark red goatee, who seemed to have short horns sprouting from his forehead.

  “These are the lot I told you about,” Paul Laveau said. “Countess Tara Campbell, I’d like you to meet the Firehouse Gang: Tom Cross, J. D. Rich, and Seymour Street.”

  “I’m charmed,” Tara said, laughing. “Firehouse Gang?”