Flight of the Falcon

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 heshould 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 leastsomething about any given subject.

To her surprise Master Sergeant McCorkle nodded. “Aye, I have. But it’s not awho, 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 herHatchetman 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 anAtlas 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 signSkye 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 anAtlas’ 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’sPack 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 werealready in chaos, reeling from the catastrophic trap and isolated from the rest of thedesant, 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. “Youhave to, Joop! This is supposed to be a spoiling attack, dammit. It’s intended to break up a Falcon advance. But Malvina’snot 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 yousee? I can’t send troops to support youMake 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 wasadvance . 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 workedenough

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.