Flight of the Falcon

23

Clayton (suburb of Gray Valley City)Zebebelgenubi

Prefecture IX

The Republic of the Sphere

24 July 3134

The redbrick steeple of St. Alban’s church crumpled as it was pierced by the red lance of a large laser. It toppled onto the green below, the bells of its ancient mechanical clock jangling crazily. Watching it above the narrow pitched roofs and treetops of the houses on the next block, Captain Thomas Kaiser of the Republic Zebebelgenubi Militia felt as if it was his own heart slumping to ruin inside his rib cage.

He heard a rattle of heavy machine-gun fire as Clan infantry probed the infantry positions guarding his prize: a JESII strategic missile carrier, so fresh from the nearby Joint Equipment Systems factory in Gray Valley that it lacked a coat of paint. While the ninety-five-ton half-track self-propelled long-range missile launch vehicle lacked the extreme range of an Arrow IV or Sniper, its stupendous eighty-rocket volley gave it as great an offensive punch as any system on the modern battlefield. Using spotters, it was capable of delivering thunderous indirect fire on call. With its line-of-sight Artemis IV fire-control system it could maul aJupiter with a single salvo.

In exchange, it was virtually without defenses, lacking armor, defensive weaponry, or speed. An enterprising infantryman could neutralize it with the pry bar needed to crack open the cockpit and hit the gunner in the head. So Captain Kaiser’s mixed, understrength company of infantry and vehicles was solely devoted to shielding the giant belching beast.

“Blue Eye Four, Blue Eye Four,” he said into his headset mike, “this is Blue Six, do you read?” A crackle of high-energy atmospherics was his only answer Another observation post gone.

Zebebelgenubi was a brutally dry world, most of its water having been cracked into component hydrogen and oxygen by the high ultraviolet content of its Class A3 primary. Up here, in the lower reaches of the mountains of the northern-hemisphere continent of Gastagne, the watershed allowed Gray Valley City and suburbs such as this one, Clayton, enough irrigation to maintain a semblance of greenery, using tree and ground cover species selected or gene-engineered for low water usage. One thing even the residents of the Valley seldom saw was a completely clouded-over sky.

They had total overcast tonight: dark and ominous and flickering with lightning. Except it wasn’t clouds.

It was smoke. The smell of burning stung the middle-aged captain’s eyes and clawed the lining of his throat. Of burning wood, and plastics, and paper, and petroleum fractions. And the barbecue smell of human bodies. The whole sky to the west, where the JES factory lay, was the lurid red of an open wound.

The devils had entered the system, not through a conventional jump point forty days’ space flight from the planet itself, but from a pirate point a mere six days out. Only the chance of a comet-hunting amateur astronomer on the southern continent of Valius spotting their DropShips in his photographs a mere three days out gave the planet’s defenders any warning at all. Not that it had mattered much—since the invaders possessed the unassailable initiative granted by their ability to land anywhere on the planet they desired.

Even before eye-hurting blue drive flames appeared in the velvet early-evening sky right overhead, the local news had reported landings elsewhere on the planet: particularly at the primary spaceport at Nantucket, on the neighboring continent of Wurscht, which had apparently been seized after a brief, incredibly ferocious fight. Then all communications from Nantucket ceased—and the single DropShip appeared over the heads of the inhabitants of Gray Valley and the Joint Equipment Systems workers.

Communications had gone expeditiously to hell. First Kaiser got word the plant itself had mostly fallen. Then he started losing command layers overhead; not five minutes before Battalion had fallen off the air. He was on his own now.

Scanning the channels, his headset remotely controlling the powerful commo rig in his command vehicle, Kaiser had struck a Clan frequency. They broadcast in the clear, but not in words. Rather a series of shrill cries and whistles, emulating birds of prey on the hunt.

That sound frightened him more than anything in forty-five years of life. He quickly changed the freq.

His soldiers had punished the invaders, making them pay: his own launcher had already loosed a dozen salvos hissing into the night, toward targets called out by forward OPs. The smoke clouds above, low as they hung, seemed a domed ceiling supported by groined arches of crisscrossing missile trails. Even as Kaiser stood on the street with his HQ platoon around him, trying to get someone,anyone , to call new targets for his own captive monster to service, he heard another dragon roar, glanced up to see blazing blue-white comets passing overhead, trailing tentacles of white smoke that seemed faintly luminous against the dull, overarching gray.

Right to left they passed. Meaning:they’ve already flanked us to the south.

The captain had received countless reports of enemy vehicles ablaze, enemy ’Mechs exploding. Although his prior direct experience of war, against the CapCons, lay almost two decades in the past, Captain Kaiser knew to discount most of that as an adrenalized form of wishful thinking. Still: one thing the defenders could do was put alot of metal downrange hot, and they had done so.

But the Clansmen shared one trait in common with their totem bird: terrifyingspeed . They charged hard and fast without apparent regard for their own losses. That meant it was hard to catch them with indirect arty fire, impossible to keep them in its beaten zone. Even their unpowered infantry, vulnerable to his own infantrymen’s mostly chemical-projectile rifles, seemed to have one speed—a tireless flat-out run, screaming shrill bird cries as they charged and killed and died.

The crosswise LRM volley convinced him even as he sensed an increase in the battle-thunder from ahead, just over a round hill. “All units,” he commanded on the general command freq, “fall back to B-1” Although Battalion had expressly forbidden it, he had chosen and disseminated fallback lines of resistance. He had never faced real Clanners hot from the by-god Occupation Zone, but he had been raised on books and trivids of the first invasion.

He heard cries of alarm from his own infantry in their hardpoints in homes and businesses and lying-up behind the walls of gardens lovingly tended in defiance of the dry and unforgiving climate—and now soon to wither under artificial flame: “We’re hitting them but they won’t stop! Look out, look out— satchel ch—”

Silence, quickly replaced by more warnings—and screams. A ball of yellow flame suddenly rolled into the sky from the hill’s far side, right up the street. One of his tanks was gone, likethat .

He turned and ran toward his own command vehicle, a wheeled eighty-ton DI Schmitt assault tank. His legs were transmuted to lead by the gut-shot realization:it’s already too late.

He heard fresh outcries, in naked ears not headset this time: “Elementals!”

He glanced over his shoulder to see the squat armored figures with their horned-looking helmets, springing into view above the housetops up the block like malignant insects, backlit by the great burning they and their kinsmen had left in their wake.

And then something rose above the rooftops and chimneys like a moon. A great, metal-gleaming bird shape, complete with improbable outspread wings.

On all sides of him troops darted madly this way and that; and no direction offered more promise than any other. Before him his own Schmitt lit up as if its ammo stocks were exploding, blazing at the jumping enemy ’Mech with everything that could possibly reach it, medium lasers and 50mm rotary autocannon and long-range missiles from the launchers atop the turret. He heard the JESII’s bearings whine as it tried to turn itself to bring its awesome firepower to bear on its monstrous enemy, hoped briefly that the microwave beam of its Artemis system, questing invisibly from within its bubble-mount, wouldn’t inadvertently sweep across him and flash-cook him.

The ’Mech arcing toward him on pillars of white fire was a bizarre mix of man and bird, like a twisted metal statue of the ancient Egyptian god Horus. Its torso lit with flashes like a string of firecrackers as the Schmitt’s autocannon, or someone’s raked it. A laser fountained orange sparks from its heavy left leg.

It could take a lot of that, he feared. He had no idea what it was. But from its sheer size it must weigh eighty-five, ninety tons at least.

Trying to run while staring back over his shoulder at the monster, whose wings now seemed to fill the western sky, he put a boot in a pothole in the road, stumbled, went to hands and knees. Shouting aloud in frustration he scrambled to his feet, oblivious to the pain of sprained ankle and skinned palms and cracked knees, made a final dash for his tank.

Ruby glare dazzled him to left and right. Filled his eyes, his being. Heat enveloped him. He threw up his hands to shield his face. He heard a ripping roar like staccato thunder.

Two heavy autocannon from the descending BattleMech’s arms bracketed him with fire, two medium lasers with sun-hot light lances. All converged on Kaiser’s Schmitt tank.

Its multiton turret was thrust skyward on a piston of yellow-white flame. Much of the tank’s frontal armor plate rushed to meet the captain, riding a wave of shock and fire.

Contemptuously, Malvina Hazen landed with the left foot of her ’Mech, the Black Rose, planted on the burning wreck that had been the heavy tank.

Near her right leg the bloated-bug shape of the strategic missile launcher stopped trying to pivot to kill her as its crew bailed out and ran back down the street. They feared the shrieking death promised by the Elementals, who sent red jets of flame licking forth as they leapt, still a block distant.

Even Malvina could scarcely blame them, for their mighty weapons could no longer help them. The Clanners called that feelingpowless .

But their flight did them little good, except for the agony it spared them dying: Malvina’s Solahma and Eyrie infantry had already secured several houses on this block. They began to harrow the street with their small arms. The fleeing Zeb missile man and woman did a brief neuronic dance as Gauss rifle needles sleeted through them like cosmic rays, then collapsed in shapeless bundles like discarded laundry.

Malvina laughed out loud.

She heard the Falcon calls in her own headset. They were code, a special Jade Falcon hunting language, which they could send in clear without fear of their enemies comprehending—while lighting flames of terror in listening enemies’ hearts. It was a system—and tradition—invented by Malvina herself. It not only bound her Gyrs more closely to one another, a cohesion not even the toplofty Turkina Keshik shared, it bound her raptors more tightly toher .

That was important to Malvina Hazen. She had strategies and plans of a scope undreamed, not just by her sibkin but by Khan Jana Pryde herself.

“Forward, my Gyrfalcons!” she cried. “Slay all who oppose you. This world is ours!”

To her right a knot of Zeb troopers bolted from the porch of a narrow gray-brick house in loose-jointed panic, desperate to escape the flamer of an Elemental who had just walked her power suit through the wall into their sanctum. Lasers stabbed them and they fell, smoking and steaming. A Sekhmet assault vehicle rolled over the hill, crushing a private land car under its right tread.

To them she left the mopping up, and jumped.

They took her at her word, her Gyrfalcons. Too well.

She got what she wanted: one glorious battle against stiff opposition, which her troops nonetheless could overwhelm at speed with pure ferocious skill. And this was done.

She did not, for once, wish to win by indiscriminate terror. Zebebelgenubi’s population was small, consisting disproportionately of extremely skilled workers, at the JES plant and other industries of prime strategic import. She recognized the indigenous laborers as assets valuable in themselves—and almost as difficult to replace as veteran warriors. She had no desire to risk slaughtering them. Indeed, once she taught the world a stiff lesson in the new reality by grinding its forces into bloody mud, she was tempted to follow her brother’s weak-livered strategy of accommodating the local laborers, at least to an extent. Not abusing them overtly, say.

The matter was ripped from her hands.

Her Gyrs’ blood ran boiling hot, flash-heated by their massacre of Militia troops and the not inconsiderable casualties the Zeb soldiers had dealt them. When they broke through the last defenses into Gray Valley City itself, they ran amok. They rampaged through the streets devastating at random, killing every living thing that crossed their sights. From the MechWarriors in their giant striding engines of destruction to the vehicle crews to Elementals to the fledglings and old warriors on foot, they gave themselves over to an ecstasy of annihilation.

Malvina ordered them to halt. She was ignored. They had already disregarded her very explicit orders issued before the landing. Now not even the secret language of shrieks and whistles she had taught them availed her. She raged and cursed and threatened, to no effect.

They stopped, in the end, when they got tired.

She halted herShrike at the edge of a vast paved expanse and dismounted. She stripped off her sweat-sodden vest and trunks, and then the mesh coolsock they all wore like some priestly undergarment. The night air evaporated the sweat from her body, bringing blessed coolness, although it had a gritty quality, and each caress brought a hundred tiny impacts.

Naked, pale, tiny, unarmed and alone, she walked slowly forward, the cement hard and warm with day’s heat beneath bare soles, between the burned and brittle skeletons of trees, and the fallen statues, and the bodies. There were a great many bodies. Flies crawled on them, huge things with brilliant chrome yellow bellies that seemed to glow like sparks. The stench was not yet bad, nor had the bodies begun to bloat despite the heat; aridity made decomposition slow.

Besides, it was hard to smell anything over the reek of conflagration.

Returning to obedience, at least for the moment, her troops had followed her summons to assemble in a great central square. Around them the city burned like a pyre. No patrols roved the streets, because the streets were an impassable hell of heaped rubble and howling flame. No troops secured any perimeter, because even ten thousand corpses posed little threat to a Jade Falcon Cluster. Even the infantry were too weary now to raise their weapons, the MechWarriors wilted and dehydrated in oven-hot cockpits. Spent like fired cartridges.

Except their eyes, which smoldered still with bloodlust and defiance.

She looked into those eyes and saw mirrored—herself.

It was the crux.

She stopped before them and raised her hands above her head.

“Falcons!” she cried. Her words were thrown forward over her own shoulder, made huge by the loudspeakers mounted in the Black Rose, kneeling in vast metal supplication behind her.

Her Gyrfalcons stared sullenly at her. They did not know what to expect. Of her or of themselves.

“I salute you,” she declared. “We are what humans were meant to be. We are humanity perfected by its own hand. We are the Future; we are Destiny.

“My brother Galaxy Commander has said we have no right to slaughter the Spheroids like beasts. And he is correct.

“It is not our right to hunt the lesser like the Falcons that we are. It is not our privilege.

“It is our duty.”

And she had them, then, forever; and the night rang with their screams of salutation, and of worship.