Flight of the Falcon Page 25

  The trap, fiendish as it was, had not devoured Trinary Alpha whole: several heavier vehicles and almost all the foot-sloggers, lagging behind the ’Mechs and scout cars, had survived. But all of its ’Mechs, and every vehicle and warrior who had descended into the mine, were a total write-off.

  She was only glad Cedric had bid right down to cutdown: the hell pit would easily have swallowed a Cluster whole, conceivably all her Galaxy. Sadly, the youthful MechWarrior was as far beyond her gratitude as her retribution for losing his command in the blink of an eye.

  “Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,” said a voice in her neurohelmet, relayed from White Reaper, now grounded in a draw seven hundred meters behind her to keep it safe from debris cast out by unceasing secondary explosions. “This is Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, Supreme Commander of this expedition. You are to hold in place until the rest of our ships touch down. You are permitted to fire on any enemies detected within range, but I order you neither to advance nor withdraw until I give the order for the planned general advance.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She refused to acknowledge the deliberate provocation of Malthus’ suggesting she might withdraw. He was nothing to her, no more than a bellycrawler now.

  All that mattered to her was the ambition, burning in her belly like her lovely ’Mechs and warriors in the smoking crater glowing like a wound in the placid green countryside. That and her desire to avenge herself upon the slithering Spheroids.

  She would fight now as she had agreed, obedient to Malthus’ commands.

  But once battle and world were won and the bellycrawlers beaten, no force in the universe would stop her taking her revenge. Not Malthus’ orders. Not the words of the Founder, centuries in the grave.

  Not even, indeed, her loved and hated brother.

  31

  Weston Heights

  Suburb West of New London

  Skye

  15 August 3134

  As Tara Campbell walked out of the dawn toward the joint operational command post, set up on the green lawn in front of the red brick main building of a Tharkad Synod Lutheran seminary on a long bluff in the western New London suburb of Weston, the Seventh Skye Militia pipers set up a festive, earsplitting skirl.

  “ ‘Garryowen,” ’ she said, forcing a smile. Still, the catchy melody and the lively enthusiasm with which it was emitted helped nudge her mind out of brooding over the orders she had just given—sending hundreds of men and women to die.

  “By the way, Master Sergeant—you wouldn’t happen to’ve learned who Garry Owen was, have you?”

  She had spent comparatively little time with Seventh people herself, and what she had had been too full for peripheral questions. None of the Duke’s military staff knew. Not even Paul Laveau knew; he was unfamiliar with the song, he said. Which vaguely and quite irrationally disappointed her: while there was no good reason he should know, the knowledge of human history and culture he had unobtrusively shown her was so wide-ranging and deep that she had come to expect him to know at least something about any given subject.

  To her surprise Master Sergeant McCorkle nodded. “Aye, I have. But it’s not a who, Countess. ‘Garryowen’ means Owen’s Garden. A district, so I’m told by these Skye heathen, of Dublin back on Old Terra.”

  The bluff around the seminary building, which was trimmed in white with a white portico, was alive with quietly purposeful activity. Particularly around the somewhat bulbous Mobile Command vehicle, beyond which her Hatchetman awaited her, parked on the immaculately tended grass fifty meters away. Heads kept turning to the west where a pillar of smoke rose high into the gray-blue sky. It thrilled Tara’s heart with both triumph and trepidation.

  “ ‘And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of smoke, to lead them the way,” ’ the Master Sergeant quoted softly.

  “ ‘The Lord is a man of war,” ’ she quoted back to him. “Amen.”

  She smiled. It was not a gentle expression. “At least we’ve drawn first blood, haven’t we, Top?”

  His answering smile was startlingly bright in the gloom. “Aye, Countess, that we have.”

  They heard the thuttering of a helicopter rotor, and then a Skye attack VTOL swept in a low half-circle overhead. As it drifted away and up into the sky to hover protectively, the chop of its blade gave way to the clank and thud of a big BattleMech walking the street below. In a moment an Atlas lumbered up the hill.

  “Skye Alpha comes to grace us with his presence, it appears,” McCorkle said.

  Tara made a face. As he had conceded her operational command of the Skye defense forces, so Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner had granted Tara the call sign Skye Six, Six being a traditional designation for leader. She would not believe he had chosen his own appellation without conscious irony.

  In keeping with his taste for the unexpected, instead of the skull almost invariably painted on the front of an Atlas’ round head, Duke Gregory’s machine sported the snarling face of a grizzly bear, a species long since imported to Skye, where it thrived. The image suggested nothing so much as the forbidding, hirsute visage of the Duke himself: a note of self-deprecating humor that illuminated an unlooked-for aspect of the Duke’s personality.

  A complex man, Tara thought. I’m glad he’s finally decided we’re on the same side.

  But she frowned slightly, and shook her head.

  “I wish he wouldn’t,” she said. “A Falcon aerospace jock or two might just get lucky, and then we’d be without overall command.” She did not mention that Prefect Della Brown and Legate Stanford Eckard were well out of harm’s way in the Lord Governor’s palace in downtown New London; she meant what she said.

  “But he’s here anyway,” she said with a shrug, as Tara Bishop’s Pack Hunter came striding around the corner of the seminary building. “We might as well go make nice so he’ll go back to his own command post where he belongs.”

  Sutton Road

  Approaching the Gyrfalcon Landing Zone

  Hemphill Mine

  15 August 3134

  The Forlorn Hope was on the march.

  That Malvina Hazen had jumped the gun on the planned landing was a bonus for Skye’s defenders. Tara ordered her Hope to engage the Gyrfalcons in hopes of catching them on the advance. That was the fight Tara and her beloved Republic faced this day.

  They came from varied life paths, for various reasons. And in all flavors: English-speakers, German-speakers, Resettlement Program babies, all the mix that made up the populace of a cosmopolitan modern world. Duke Gregory had insisted on a minimum age of twenty, the age of majority on Skye, which Tara agreed with. The oldest known recruit was a female retired teacher and marathon runner who admitted to eighty-seven.

  Each had his or her reason for volunteering to march into the Falcon guns. All shared a single purpose: throw the invaders into disorder, disrupt and weaken them, give the following Militia and Highlander units a chance to crush murderous Malvina in detail before the Turkina Keshik and Zeta Galaxy could come up to support. It was a slim and desperate chance—a forlorn hope.

  It was a beautiful day. Beautiful opportunity awaited the Forlorn Hope: Malvina’s Gyrs were already in chaos, reeling from the catastrophic trap and isolated from the rest of the desant, even now in view, burning its way down the sky to the designated landing zone to the column’s southwest.

  But everything had already gone wrong.

  Weston Heights

  15 August 3134

  “Pull back,” Tara Campbell said fervently into the microphone in her hand. She was patched to the Forlorn Hope’s leader through the mobile command center. “Colonel ter Horst, this is a direct order.”

  “Regrettably,” ter Horst’s voice returned, “I cannot comply, Countess.” He had been a baker yesterday.

  Tara’s lips skinned back from her teeth. Captain Tara Bishop stood by, practically vibrating from her frustrated inability to do anything to help her superior and friend. “You have to, Joop! This is supposed to be a spoiling
attack, dammit. It’s intended to break up a Falcon advance. But Malvina’s not advancing. And you can’t do anything to dug-in Falcons but die in windrows.”

  True to form, Malvina had dived into the Firehouse Gang’s pit trap headfirst. Now, unexpectedly, she showed prudence. Aerial observation revealed she had emplaced her surviving forces southeast of the still-smoking pit in a semicircle bowed toward New London. Behind the line lurked half a dozen JESII launch vehicles.

  “You’re already out of our Long Tom coverage,” Tara radioed. “Turn around and come back. Or just ditch the vehicles where they are and make your way out of the Falcon axis of advance on foot—head your people northeast, toward Cowpens.”

  “We have come too far already—”

  “Don’t you see? I can’t send troops to support you. Make your people stop!”

  “I have so ordered, Countess. But they do not obey. They drive by me when I try to block their road.” She could see his shrug: “What can I do, then, but stay at their head, having brought them so far?”

  Tara Campbell squeezed her eyes shut against a hot torrent of tears. She wanted to fall to her knees and cry till she died. I cannot break down, she knew. I’m still in command.

  “Then may God have mercy on all our souls,” she whispered.

  As he desired, Joop ter Horst was first to die. The blue kiss of a particle-projector beam exploded his command vehicle: his own delivery hovertruck in makeshift armor.

  With courage that would have done credit to Knights of the Sphere, the rest of the column turned as one off the hardtop and into the fields to charge the Falcon battle line. They were intent on getting close enough to deliver one good blow with the support weapon—machine gun, laser, or rocket launcher—bolted to every vulnerable vehicle.

  Some succeeded. Some even drew Gyr blood.

  In the horizontal storm of fire with which Malvina Hazen answered them, death came quickly to all, whether their final efforts told or not.

  Twenty klicks to the east Tara Campbell stood on the peaceful green seminar lawn and listened to them die.

  Countryside West of New London

  15 August 3134

  Between hills covered in trees to whose branches a few defiant brown and orange leaves clung, and fields of Terran sunflowers tall as Elementals nodding plate-sized autumn-yellow heads in sunlight, Aleksandr Hazen’s Zeta Galaxy advanced at speed.

  Time and again lead vehicles, usually speedy Nacon or Fox hovercraft, were blown into brief yellow fireballs by roadside ambushes. These were quickly smashed by heavy fire from BattleMechs and tanks. Surviving ambushers were rooted out by infantry and burned down by Elementals. The columns streaming toward New London slowed but did not stop.

  The attack columns only halted when confronted by roadblocks held in force. If these could be expeditiously reduced by tank and ’Mech weapons, indirect bombardment with long-range missiles and VTOL strikes, they were. Otherwise, the Falcons simply veered around them. Their BattleMechs and tracked and hover vehicles moved readily cross-country. So did most of their wheeled AFVs; the ones that broke down were abandoned without thought and left burning.

  Behind Aleks, Malvina’s shattered Gyrs followed painfully to his left. Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, Supreme Commander, seemed preoccupied with securing the drop zone, and was releasing his Keshik warriors to follow the advance as planned with the stinginess of a Lyran merchant.

  The defenders had one thing the Falcons had no ready answer for: long-range artillery—Snipers, Thumpers, Long Toms—which could dump devastating barrages upon the charging ground forces from ranges far beyond their ability to retaliate. Although a fierce air battle raged, of aerospace fighters and VTOLs, occasionally a Falcon pilot would spot one of the giant, not-very-mobile launchers, stoop on it and destroy it—usually at cost of his or her machine, if not life. Clan aerospace jocks were not Decanted to die in bed, any more than their Elemental or MechWarrior comrades.

  All hardly registered on Aleks. For the first time in his life he strode to battle without the fierce, anticipating joy of a Falcon born.

  All he cared for was advance. He drove his Galaxy not harshly, but relentlessly. So long as Turkina’s Beak Galaxy kept moving forward, he had his best defense against the brutal punishment of Skye artillery. He could outrun the massive barrages with their long flight times, kill such enemy spotters as he could with infantry and fast hovercraft scouts to blind the distant launchers, and change speed and route periodically to keep the highly skilled Republican artillerists from correcting their fire by simply calculating where his troops would be at a given moment and arranging for a few tons of high explosive to meet them.

  It did not work perfectly. Aleksandr Hazen had not been raised to expect perfection. It worked enough.

  He fought his command and his BattleMech with mechanical precision. His Galaxy now functioned as smoothly as a veteran formation: subcommanders and individual warriors used their own initiative, so that he need rarely issue orders. When enemies came within reach of Black Rose’s weapons he killed them with little more thought than he would have given to swatting mosquitoes.

  If he could not take pleasure in battle, Aleks would at least take comfort in sheer practice of his craft, the trade to which his entire life was bent.

  And then his onslaught ran slam into its first big check: Northwind Fusiliers and Garryowens, dug-in in strength along a system of ridges rising like a wall between the Falcon LZ and New London. With weapons bore-sited in advance to turn every passage through, from road-cut to gully, into a killing ground.

  The Zeta charge screamed to a halt—as Long Tom rockets screamed down the sky upon them.

  32

  Weston Heights

  Skye

  15 August 3134

  “We haven’t got a chance!” Panic shrilled from the radio at Tara Campbell, standing in the artificial gloom within her command crawler. “They’re swarming right up and over us! Third Platoon is overrun, and we’ve lost contact with First. Even their infantry runs up hills like bloody mountain goats!”

  “Easy, Sergeant Masamoto,” Lieutenant Colonel Hanratty said soothingly. “Don’t let them get behind you. Pull back, lad—you’ve done your job.”

  Another voice screamed, “’Mech!” from the speaker.

  “Jumpin’ right for us,” Masamoto called. “Run for it, boys—dear Lord, those wings! For the love of—”

  A scream. A rising squeal of overheating electronics. Silence.

  After a moment in which she died a thousand times, Tara turned away from the faint dust of atmospherics popping from the speaker. “Comments?”

  Colonels Ballantrae and Wilson, commanders of the First Kearny and the Fusiliers, stood behind her in the compartment. Tara Bishop hung to the side. Major Hirschbeck was forward at her Republican Guards command post, in woods just west of Weston Heights.

  “They bypass us when they’re not outflanking and overrunning us,” Bishop said. “We’re hurting them—hammering them, even if you let the air out of damage reports. But we’re not slowing them down.”

  Tara’s two regimental commanders might have taken umbrage at a junior officer speaking up so forthrightly, especially with such a grim assessment. But both were seasoned combat veterans. All they did was nod.

  Rather than try to hold an unbroken line, Tara had chosen to defend in depth in the forested hills to the west. Her forward forces were spread out, not bunched, positioned so as to support each other, either by immediate fire or rapid maneuver. The concept was analogous to using foam spacers between armor plates to defend against a shaped-charge warhead: the incandescent jet would lose energy and burn out before it could pierce the inner defenses.

  To an extent it’s working, she knew. Just not so well as we expected.

  Not as well as we needed it to.

  Western Outskirts of Weston Heights

  15 August 3134

  The combat-modified ForestryMech, sprayed with gray and tan and green in camouflage blotches, stag
gered as Aleks’ Gyrfalcon, approaching at a run, raked 5-centimeter shells across its lightly armored chest. The thirty-five-ton machine seemed to stagger. Then Aleks triggered his large lasers. Metal plate ran like lava in glowing pink streams. Billowing black smoke, the machine toppled backward into the wreckage of the two-story motel. It had literally walked through the flimsy frame and pasteboard structure moments before, blasting a lightly armored Nacon scout car in its vulnerable rear and exploding it to flames with its 20mm autocannon, then raking a mixed Solahma-Eyrie infantry Point moving cautiously on foot down the blacktopped road.

  Chunks of light debris flew away from the motel’s façade, some flaming, as Aleks’ troops opened up on it with small arms and heavy weapons. He suspected it was a pointless expenditure of ammo and energy. Had there been any other enemies lurking in the long structure, they undoubtedly had already faded back into the broken, forested country and the buildings that had begun to encroach upon the right-of-way as the Falcons neared the western edge of the New London suburbs.

  The ForestryMech jock had been braver than wise. The Republican defenders had already taught their foes that even ’Mechs and heavy tanks could hide in the cover of the strip-urbs, strike and then fade back before even cat-quick Jade Falcon reflexes could strike back effectively.

  And the more ferociously the Zetas lashed back at their ambushers, the more rubble they dropped in their own path. Even ground-effects vehicles could be blocked, and BattleMechs slowed. Nor was rubble or even enemy action all that was slowing the once-irresistible Falcon advance to a mere creep.

  Above the strip malls and service stations Aleks could see the pristine pitched roofs of hilly Weston a scant few kilometers to the east. There, he knew, the real battle would begin. He radioed Galaxy Commander Bec Malthus.

  “We must halt,” he said simply. “Quiaff?”