Flight of the Falcon

13

McCauliffe City Chaffee

Northern Hemisphere 15 May 3134

At about 1000 hours on the first day of Chaffee’s existence as a fiefdom of Clan Jade Falcon, a small group of armed men overpowered civilian security elements at Siegfuhr Airport on the eastern side of McCauliffe, north of the harbor and on the city’s far side from the spaceport. They proceeded to commandeer a Planetlifter Air Transport heavy-lift VSTOL and take off.

Though after the HPG failure interstellar traffic making planetfall on Chaffee had fallen from slight to virtually none, the world had a lot of airports. With a widely scattered populace and a not particularly impressive road network, air travel made a lot of sense even when not an outright necessity. The lucrative offworld hunting trade had served the planet well in this regard, providing sufficient offworld exchange to make air transport affordable, so that few and miserable were the settlements that did not boast at least one VTOL or fixed-wing aircraft, and many families possessed their own.

Off-planet replacement parts were not easy to come by, nor cheap—but relatively poor as it was, Chaffeewas a world, complete, with five hundred million occupants. Who by the very fact of surviving upon the arid, high-gee planet with its contentious wildlife, at the very least sprang from highly resourceful stock. Chaffee had abundant metal deposits, even if large-scale mining had never come to the planet, largely because of its hostile environment (and in later years because of environmental laws enacted to preserve it in relatively pristine hostility). Chaffeeans made their own replacement parts, even if they had to use their own manual mills, lathes and welding rigs in homestead workshops.

The big, jet-powered Planetlifter was fully refueled but only partially loaded with cargo. At Malthus’ order, all civilian air traffic had been grounded immediately upon Sorrentino’s surrender. The backwoods folk enthusiastically ignored the ban, but it was observed scrupulously in the three major cities—under Falcon guns. Later, when things settled, aerospace fighters would fan out on patrol across the whole globe, assisted by DropShips in orbit, to teach the refractory what the Clan expected by way of obedience.

The invaders depended, as they would for the foreseeable future, upon Chaffee law enforcement and its tiny militia to enforce their writ across the planet’s broad surface. Local authorities were obliged to cooperate by terms of their ruler’s lawful surrender. It was possible, however, that the security contingent at Siegfuhr did not resist their assailants as valiantly as they might have.

Scientists and technicians attached to Turkina Keshik manned the main atmospheric and traffic control station at the spaceport. They spotted the unauthorized takeoff on their radar and promptly ordered the aircraft to return to the airport. The command was ignored.

Initially.

Since the vehicle’s own transponder identified it clearly as an unarmed and unarmored civilian transport, and no Falcon sensor saw anything discordant, the controllers were not particularly exercised. They took for granted it was intent on escape to the supercontinent’s mountainous interior. Rather than scrambling the aerospace fighters and combat VTOLs waiting at the spaceport to respond to threats, they passed the word along the chain of command. It was all they could do: the warriors would respond to a warning of danger from good lower-caste Clanners and true, but never to orders.

The hijacked aircraft was, after all, just a big cargo plane; lumbering, with poor maneuverability, easily spotted by radar or, in today’s clear skies, the naked eye, and broadcasting its location to all the world. Whenever a fighter rose up to knock it down would be ample time.

The tower was more preoccupied with the launch ofCaracara, carryingisorla of captured fighting vehicles, and more eagerly awaited, fresh water and food to the orbiting craft. It also carried fourteen Clan troops wounded during the brief assault on McCauliffe. It was scheduled to return with a Supernova Trinary of Solahma infantry to serve as garrison troops. Its ports had been sealed and takeoff alarms begun to blare even as the hijacked Planetlifter took off and tucked in its landing gear.

Under the thrust of its two huge turbines, the partially laden lifter climbed quickly to an altitude of three thousand meters. Then, instead of fleeing to the mountains marching in ever-higher ranks along the peninsula’s spine to the west, it banked steeply and headed east, back over the city.

TheUnion DropShip’s engines shot blue-white fire into the shallow blast pit. The ovoid vessel rose on columns of brilliance into a muddy, pale burgundy sky.

Approaching from the west, the big VSTOL dropped its nose. Its turbines whined at maximum throttle as it dove toward the lifting DropShip.

TheCaracara ’s formidable weapons were fully crewed. But no one expected trouble, not even when the ship’s own radars picked up the Planetlifter. It was a civilian aircraft. The planet had surrendered.

And these werebellycrawlers .

Finally, a ruby volley rippled from the medium pulse lasers that happened to bear on the diving airplane. Its starboard wing was stitched off at the root.

It made no difference. Trailing a hundred-meter plume of yellow fire, the seventy-five tons of aircraft and cargo smashed into theCaracara ’s rounded upper surface at eight hundred kilometers an hour.

Pale flame and black smoke unfurled across half a klick of cerulean sky. Despite its mass and velocity, despite breaching the DropShip’s armor and inundating compartments and gangways aft of the bridge with blazing jet fuel, the suicide plane failed to cripple the tough assault craft.

It did, however, tumble it off its drive-thrust columns, dramatically enough that gyros and Clan-rapid work with attitude jets by Binetti’s naval crew still failed to prevent catastrophic return to the blast pit.

The resultant explosions rockedBec de Corbin on her landing jacks, destroyed seven of her weapons emplacements, and lit the whole side facing the wreck with burning fuel. The combustion did no additional damage to the armored DropShip, designed to resist high-speed atmospheric re-entry temperatures.

The blast and spreading inferno did envelop an Elemental, five Solahma infantry, and an unknown number of indigenous civilian laborers pressed into service unloading supplies from theBec , as well as the supplies themselves. Three VTOLs were kicked across the blacktop by the dynamic overpressure; one smashed into the central administrative structure. All three were destroyed by fire, as were many spaceport service vehicles. Two aerospace fighters were damaged by blast and splashed with liquid fire, but rapid action by stood-down pilots and groundcrew technicians saved them.

As for the passengers and crew inboard theCaracara, it was fervently hoped among their comrades that none survived the shock and explosion of crashing into the pit. Nothing but fused lumps remained of them or the cargo when the inferno was finally beaten down.

In white fury, Malthus ordered Duke Oswald—across a table from whom he sat negotiating administration of the captured world when word of the disaster reached him—executed with his family on planetwide tri-vid. It was a standard technique from the unwritten Clan handbook on pacification of conquered worlds, and far from unknown among the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere. It was also a blood-rare exhibition of emotion for Beckett Malthus.

The response was not what the handbook said it would be. Either the planetaries were roused to vengeful fury at the murder of their noble rulers; or they thought good riddance. Or possibly both. What they were not waschastened .

Within two hours a truck bomb shattered civilian police headquarters in Lazenby. Shortly after that, reports of casualties from sniping began to filter in.

Lacking a military tradition to speak of, Chaffee had quickly folded under assault from two complete Galaxies and a reinforced Cluster.

Lacking a military tradition to speak of, Chaffee’s widely scattered residents did not feel bound by any surrender so-called “authorities” claimed to make in their names.

The aliosaur would have been a fearful sight, even to a mighty Jade Falcon MechWarrior, had it not

been piteous. The darkness did not hide its grievous injuries: missing its hook-taloned right forelimb, scaly hide charred and blistered. It limped, dragging a stump of tail along the cinder-strewn ground, drawing a line of blood behind it that glowed black in the corpse-blue shine of the gibbous moon Grissom.

Its intent upon approaching the tall, unarmored man who stood with his heavy black hair blowing in the stinking breeze was unguessable.

With a firecracker crackling, a spray of pulse-laser bolts caught it in the back, pale yet brilliant pink in the darkness. The creature squalled, threw its head back, and collapsed. Its single remaining eye fixed reproachfully on Aleksandr Hazen as it slowly glazed.

“Did you ever meet anything you did not kill?” he asked the small, slim, night-clad figure who approached from behind the ruined beast, reholstering its sidearm.

“There is you, my brother,” Malvina Hazen said with a sweet, angular smile. Cinders and fragments of charred wood beams crunched beneath her soles.

He waved a hand at the blackness, greater than the night, that stretched out along the ground for kilometers to all sides of them. “This is all that remains of Hamilton. One stone scarcely stands upon another. Not one thing remains alive—now”

Malvina paused to push over a heat-glazed stub of brick wall, perhaps a meter long and half that high, with a boot’s armored toe. “Unforgivable sloppiness on my people’s part,” she said, “unacceptable in a Gyrfalcon. I expressly directed thatno stone be left upon another. And that hapless raptor, which I presume wandered into town scavenging for food and got caught in the overkill, had best be the only multicellular organism left living, or all my field officers from Star Commander up will soon be exercising their rights ofsurkai/ ”

“This was deliberate?” Aleks asked. A hot ember flake from one of an uncountable number of fires still guttering low in the devastation lit on his cheek to cling and sting like an acid beetle. He made no acknowledgment, neither flinched nor moved to brush it off.

“It takes a lot of work to utterly level a city, complete with fifty thousand inhabitants,” Malvina said. “How do you imagine it might have been done by accident?”

He lowered his head and shook it as if it weighed a hundred kilos. “Why?”

Malvina’s head was encased in a somewhat bulbous Jade Falcon field helmet; neither was dressed for the cockpit of a ’Mech. In the moonlight her expression of puzzlement was unmistakable. And at least seemingly authentic.

“To end resistance, of course,” she said, hauteur and sarcasm gone from her voice. “To stop the killing.”

He waved his hands about him. All was a black plain as far as the eye could see, to the mountains on one side and the sea upon the other. “The whole city isgone . Scrubbed from the face of Chaffee. The river scummed over with ash and grime and ... and the grease of melted bodies for ten kilometers downstream! How could youdo that?”

She shrugged. “It took but a day to accomplish. But my command DropShip White Reaper added its firepower, which expedited things considerably. We might have used orbital strike, but I would have had to trouble the Supreme Commander for clearance.”

She smiled again. “Besides, my people needed the practice.”

“That is not what I meant,” he said hoarsely.

“I know that. I was only seeking to save you embarrassment. As you may remember, I have long shielded my brother, the only companion of my childhood, from harm. And now when there is none in the universe who can touch him, I seek to save him from the only one who can.”

She reached up to touch his cheek with gauntleted fingertips. “Yourself.”

His hand snapped up as if to smash hers away. At the last millisecond it slowed. The great hand that enfolded her slim wrist and removed her touch from his leather-brown cheek did so as if she were spun of gossamer.

She ripped it free, whirled from him, stormed away three paces. The brief black cape of her not-quite-regulation dress uniform fluttered about her shoulders.

“Do you care nothing for our people?” she snapped. “Our warriors struck down from coward’s cover? Let me tell you of these Freebirths. Within the cities most of them carry arms, even technicians and laborers—not that these bellycrawling mongrels make such distinction.”

At the uttering of the word “bellycrawlef’ Aleks’ lower left eyelid twitched. He said nothing.

“Outside the cities theyall have firearms—and all know how to use them. And not just small arms. The Zeus heavy rifle is considered suitable to be left with minor children when parents are compelled to leave them unattended at their homesteads. The parents carry super-powerful laser rifles in their vehicles for defense against the larger local beasts. And for hunting or protection from some of the local fauna, nothing less than portable short-range missile launchers or even particle-projector cannon are required.”

Aleks nodded reluctant concurrence. “I understand. I have lost three Elementals in the last two days, all sniped from over two kilometers’ distance. Not even our ballistic radars can pick us out the snipers—who run away as soon as they see their targets fall through their scopes.”

She turned to face him. She seemed in control of herself again; her voice was almost light. Almost taunting. “And you have taken retribution.”

He grimaced, shrugged. Nodded slowly. “We must. We cannot permit the people of a conquered world to defy us. Especially when all our plans hinge upon pacifying Chaffee and using it as a base.”

“To liberate the Inner Sphere,” she said. “Precisely.”

She drew near him again. He did not draw back, but neither did he show sign of softening. “Do you not care about your precious belly—precious Spheroids? The ones we are on Crusade to save from their venal leaders—and themselves?” she asked.

He turned away. “These folk are masterless even forstravag ,” she said to his wedge-shaped back. The word was a term of abuse for Freeborn. “They have no honor.”

“Perhaps they have much honor,” Aleks said. “While they strike from ambush like cowards, even as you say, the ones we catch fight until death. The ones we capture commit suicide—or contrive escape.”

She faced him again. Her eyes glittered like silver coins in the moonlight. “Those whose honor is only for themselves have no true honor,” she said. “But you make my case, Aleksandr. They will not honor their leaders’ surrender. They refuse to surrender themselves. What can we do but to hunt them down one by one and kill them, then?”

He spread his great hands in a gesture of helplessness. Something caught Malvina’s eye; she half-turned.

A skull, discolored, partially charred, with blackened wisps of tissue clinging to it, but its smooth dome gleaming with organic oils. A small skull. A child’s skull.

“We can show them what resistance will cost, not just them, but their loved ones,” she asked, “with one single punishment so terrible”—she stepped forward and crushed the tiny skull beneath her bootheel—“that it will be felt in the most remote corners of this burdensome world.”

His upper lip had peeled back from white teeth. “This is where your Mongol-worship leads.”

She took off her helmet, unpinned her hair, shook it free in a cascade like moonlight itself that fell past her shoulders. “This is where the path of true compassion leads. I submit, brother dear, that I have saved lives by what I have done here. Theirs as well as ours.”

The face he turned to her was twisted like a rag. “Is this what is demanded of a warrior, a protector of the lesser and the weak?” he asked, in a voice as if an Elemental’s manipulator were crushing his throat, and flapped a hand like broken wing. “Is thishonor? ”

“Victory for Clan Jade Falcon,” she said, “is honor.” And walked away.