Flight of the Falcon

30

Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus ’ Cabin Jade Falcon Naval Reserve DropShipBec deCorbin Orbiting Skye 15 August 3134

“What do you mean?” Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen demanded. He was not smiling now.

Bec Malthus turned away to look at a white-swirled blue arc of Skye, rotating beneath them. It was an image on a screen inset in the bulkhead of his cabin; as a ship of war, theBec de Corbin needed its hull integrity too badly to allow actual viewports in the living quarters. “I mean precisely what I said. Savor the occasion, boy.”

He glanced back at the taller, younger man from beneath bushy brows. “I will not relieve Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen of command of the Delta Galaxy. Did you seriously anticipate that I would?”

Aleks breathed heavily and his cheeks were flushed. “Yes. She fought to vindicate the Mongol position. She lost.”

Neither Malvina nor her BattleMech had been seriously injured. Her right shoulder had been dislocated, and she had sat in furious, white-lipped silence as a couple of Turkina Keshik warriors yanked it back into place—as theBec de Corbin rose back up through a still-contested sky, and a twisting dogfight that eventually claimed seven Falcon aerospace fighters and a dozen Skye craft. Only three aerospace warriors had successfully ejected from their stricken machines, and they had been left behind for the Republicans to recover. The Falcon would be back to reclaim them, soon enough.

“She fought to vindicate the decision of thekurultai, ” Malthus corrected. “She fought as Clan champion, not as herself. Come, you know this: you learned it in the creche, everybody does. You beat her in a Trial of Refusal, in which you were the refuser, not she. You did not best her in a Trial of Position for command of the Gyrfalcons—which Khan Jana Pryde has forbidden, and so do I.” He did not bother to state what, in Clan terms, was obvious: that if Aleks did not want his sister in command of the Gyrfalcons, he should have killed her when he had the chance.

“Malvina has become obsessed with her Mongol cult. You have seen what it has done to her—heard

her profane the Founder himself! She lost to me. The Mongols are discredited. And she, by allowing fanaticism to overcome her, has unfit herself to command a Galaxy of the Jade FalconTouman !”

Eyes curving slits, head tipped to the side, Bec Malthus asked, “Are you sure your true motivation is not vengeance upon your sister? That you have not allowed this matter to become personal?”

Aleks Hazen’s eyes flared. His big handsome face went gray. He seemed at once to grow taller—and Beckett Malthus wondered, for one of very, very few times in a lifetime spent playing others, if this one he had notoverplayed .

“All that I am, all that I do, is in the service of the Jade Falcon and humanity—true to the Founder’s vision,” Aleks said in a low, clotted voice. “Beyond Clan Jade Falcon Ihave nothing ‘personal’.”

Malthus made himself smile a false smile, nod and gesture approvingly. It was an easy thing for him to do: he had done it so many times. He would’ve patted Aleks’ great, boulder-hard shoulder, except that to lay a hand on a Clan warrior without invitation, even one such as Aleksandr Hazen, was necessarily to die on the spot.

“Just so, lad: so you do,” Malthus said in tones like warmed syrup. “And now service to the Falcon means subsuming your own desires—let us call them judgments, shall we?—to the greater good of Turkina. The coming battle is the climax: all rides upon it. Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen is far too valuable an asset to withhold from this fight.”

Aleks paced to the curved outer bulkhead and slammed his fist against it. Then he pressed it to the metal and laid his forehead against it. “She will never honor the Trial’s outcome.”

Malthus came up behind him. Lightly. “Do not be so melodramatic, lad. Rejoice: you are about to reap the victory you have done more than any except your sibkin to win! It is a deed which will resound through the Remembrance as long as our people have tongues and ears.”

“Shewill throw victory away with a terrible crime, which will raise all humanity’s hands against us.”

“Then defeat her again! Subdue Skye quickly, using your humane techniques. Allow her no scope by succeeding. If not—”

He shrugged expressively.

“Are you so eager, then, to try Malvina’s Mongol ways here on Skye?” Aleks asked.

“I am eager to win. If you suspect I may hang back so that the fighting goes poorly, to create a pretext to remove Malvina’s hood and fly her free to slay to her bloodthirsty little heart’s content, you suspect quite wrongly, boy. It ismy head which failure will forfeit.”

Aleks pushed off from the bulkhead. He started to say something, but a cursor blinking alive on the viewscreen and an almost-simultaneous buzz from Malthus’ intercom stilled him.

“Galaxy Commander, bridge,” a voice said from the bulkhead. “Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen’s DropShip White Reaperhas departed orbit on a landing trajectory.”

Aleks and Malthus stared at one another. Launching was not scheduled to begin for two more hours. “If that confounded woman proves mewrong for having kept her in command,” Malthus said in a voice like pebbles in a crusher, “rest assured that I will do what you would not!”

Hemphill Mine West of New London Skye

15 August 3134

White Reaperfell through thin high overcast toward Skye, to a point ten kilometers west-northwest of New London. Strapped into the crash harness of herShrike —more tightly than she had been for yesterday’s duel with her accursed sibling—Malvina watched the planet hurtle at them through vision blocks slaved to the DropShip’s hull-mounted video pickups.

Well, she was showing Aleks and thatsurat Malthus that, defeated in Trial or not, she hadnot bowed the neck. And she was about to show her Gyrfalcons and indeed the wholedesant that she was still fit to be ristar and Galaxy Commander.

While Malthus’ ship had descended over the North Pole for the duel, the other DropShips began orbiting Skye. They duly swept the surface with their potent sensor arrays: telescopes, infrared, side-looking and oblique radar, magnetic and gravitic anomaly detectors. Naturally, they devoted especial attention to the next day’s chosen battleground.

And they had struck pure palladium: a shallow kilometer-wide bowl gouged from the Holyrood Hills twenty kilometers northwest of New London and almost due north of thedesant DropShips’ agreed-upon landing zone. It was an open-pit copper mine, permitted by Skye’s stringent environmental laws on a guarantee that once the ore played out, the land would be returned to its previous formation and reseeded, a technique used with success across human space. Unfortunately, it had been idled not by the playing-out of the vein, but by the Blakist Jihad. Since then—analyst-techs drew the information from a commercially available database of Republican worlds purchased from a Lyran trader in the Falcon OZ during invasion planning—schemes had alternately been mounted to reopen or reclaim the mine. Despite both The Republic’s economic boom and its emphasis on environmental protection, neither had quite come to pass.

Now, it seemed, Duke Gregory had found use for it at last: pulling a fast one.

A gypsy camp had sprung up in the big bowl, now itself grown green with years. It featured the usual array of “caravans”—the interstellar nomads’ colorfully painted transport, wheeled and ground-effect—and pavilions, as well as evidence of long-term settlement in the form of shacks and larger structures of plywood and plastic sheeting, with corrugated metal roofs.

The encampment had, according to intel analysis, probably sprung up in the last few days—weeks at most. The crafty Spheroids plainly hoped the combination of metal roofs, ludicrous variegated vehicles—probably hulks towed over from a nearby scrapyard—and the metal ore yet in the ground would baffle orbiting Clan detectors. In their haste, they forgot one thing: the neutron emissions of idling fusion bottles for what appeared to be the equivalent of a pre-Republican company of at least twelve BattleMechs. Malvina’s techs believed the ’Mechs were augmented by a lance of armored vehicles and, from analysis of several freestanding figures draped in brightly patterned cloth, perhaps a lance of IndustrialMechs as well.

Had they sallied forth to take the Falcons in flank as they advanced from their specified landing zone, a force that size might have dealt a staggering blow. Had it bided its time, waited until the attack had rolled away out of range, and charged for the landed DropShips, it might have caused pure catastrophe, albeit at the cost of its own nearcertain destruction under the spacecrafts’ powerful defensive batteries. A company, even of rare BattleMechs, was no large price to pay for even one DropShip, and they might well take out more.

But ifthey were the ones surprised. . . .

Not six hundred meters away, a sixty-ton FalconVisigoth swept by, bleeding smoke, its armored sides sparking with hits from a barracuda-shoal of three Skye aerospace fighters. A PPC bolt took out its starboard engine. It pitched forward and exploded in a yellow fireball.

A moment later a pursuing RepublicanSholagar came apart as two medium pulse lasers and a large laser from theOverlord -class DropShip made it the apex of a deadly tetrahedron of light.

Malvina emitted a triumphant cry as the other two enemy fighters sheared off and streaked away. It was echoed by her MechWarriors, waiting like her in their steel and synthetic cocoons for battle. A thirty-five-tonSholagar was a poor exchange for a heavy Clan fighter in all truth: but she wanted to keep their passions focused onvictory .

The green hills and autumn yellow fields of Skye rushed up to embrace her like a lover’s arms.

A derelict blacktop parking lot, frost-heavied and weed-grown, provided a superb surface for DropShip landing jacks. Even before the bulge-belted egg of a vessel settled and its drive-flames died away, its bay doors opened and a trio of BattleMechs of the Fifth Battle Cluster sprang into the milky dawn leaking out of the hills to the east, led by young Star Colonel Cedric in aNight Gyr . Cedric had won in barehanded combat both promotion and the twice-vacated command of the Golden Talons, whose emblem, now painted on the BattleMech’s chest armor, was a black shield sporting a pair of golden claws gripping a dead wolf beneath a gold “V.” He had bid low for the honor of neutralizing the imperfectly hidden Skye ’Mech force: his Alpha Trinary with himself in command.

Two more ’Mechs, non-jump-capable, clumped out of the DropShip after him, followed by vehicles and infantry. Isorla had been kind to the Trinary, thanks to Cedric’s zeal.

A JESII strategic missile carrier loosed its full breath-robbing volley of eighty long-range missiles into the open pit, turning it into an instanfaux -volcanic crater of smoke and leaping flame. With captured Shandra and Fox light vehicles racing them, the Golden Talon BattleMechs charged into the decommissioned mine with all weapons flaming.

MechWarrior Silas plunged hisUller into the pit at its full ninety-seven-kph speed, running the machine with big, clanking, jarring steps. The roof blew off a long shed as he pounded past, rust orange, chrome yellow, and gaudy blue panels fluttering like leaves away from a roaring column of orange fire.

Before him through shifting smoke curtains he saw looming a figure like the statue of a man draped in a parachute: a suspected IndustrialMech. He charged it at speed—then braked with a curse as a medium laser cracked right past him. It ate a plate-sized hole in the canopy, brown edged and self-expanding like a cancer as it burned with almost invisibly pallid flame.

Silas reached out with theUller ’s left hand, grabbed the canopy and tore it away. He triggered a pointblank blast from his right-arm LB 5-X autocannon into the middle of aMiningMech modified to

carry a quad SRM launcher and two .50-caliber machine guns to support the house-high rock cutter on its right arm.

Shattered armor splashed from the ’Mech like water from a thrown stone. The ’Mech was already afire from the laser strike.

Silas frowned. The right shoulder and torso were burning lustily, producing clouds of white smoke. Runnels of liquid flame streamed from it, eroding deep canyons in what was supposedly metal plate and mechanism. The central torso region gaped open, bleeding—

Junk. A short cylindrical object slipped out and fell to the ground, and it took Silas’ astonished eyes and brain a full second to recognize it as an electric motor, such as might be used to operate a small water pump. Less identifiable pieces of metallic scrap, rust-smeared and now scorched, dropped thudding to the grass-covered ground.

“These are no ’Mechs!” Silas called on the Trinary frequency, his young voice breaking. “They are p-plywood and foam, filled with scrap metal!”

A new horrific certainty hit him like a rogue asteroid. He opened his mouth to add,It’s a trap!

But just then, two hundred kilograms of liquid-poured pentaglycerine gel filling the QuakerMech’s lower legs detonated in obedience to a distant command.

Standing in a copse of saplings crowning a hilltop sixteen hundred meters south of the mine pit, skinny, intense, brown-moustached Tom Cross lowered the command detonator whose red button he had just thumbed as yellow flame shot a thousand meters in the air. As the mad genius behind most of the actual nuts-and-bolts design of the giant death trap, he had won the right to open the fireworks show. He wore a two-liter cooking pot overturned on his head by way of a helmet, with the handle turned around like the bill of a ballcap.

“Bingo,” said the gangly Seymour Street, stroking his red goatee. He wore his devil horns again. He had been in charge of fabricating the decoy QuakerMechs.

J. D. Rich stroked his blond handlebar mostache with a thumb and nodded judiciously as secondary explosions sent bright flashes through what was now an immense pillar of black smoke rising from a guttering red pedestal. “Nice shot,” he admitted. “Clean.”

He was the pyro man, the Master Blaster, who designed and supervised the placing of the charges, augmented by tons of gasoline with some gelling agents mixed in to lend it what Walt Whitman—his favorite ancient poet—termed the quality ofadhesiveness . He had wired the hundreds of charges for remote detonation himself—a demanding, dangerous task.

The drivers of the three Shandra advanced scout vehicles that had carried them here, a corporal and two privates from the First Kearny Highlanders, all young and female, were jumping up and down with their coal-scuttle helmets slipping all over their heads, dancing and weeping and laughing and hugging each other. Cross turned a quizzically cocked eyebrow at them.

“What?” he demanded.

“Itworked! ” Corporal Shannon Hayes exclaimed. “You just wiped out a whole Jade Falcon Trinary all by yourselves!”

Tom Cross frowned in authentic puzzlement. “Of course it worked. It’s a very fine day.”

“You know,” Street said ruminatively, “the environmental-protection people are going to have cats about those vials of radioactive emitters we borrowed from the university to spoof BattleMech fusion-engine signatures.”

“They would,” said wide, blond J. D.

“We should, like, go now, probably, probably,” said Tom Cross, his skinny body seeming to vibrate as he shifted his weight from foot to sneakered foot. He was one of the highest-paid professionals on Skye; his kicks were the cheapest known, imported fruits of Kurita slave labor. “Those Falcons are gonna be pissed.”

“No doubt,” Seymour Street said. “Your occasional flashes of contact with reality never cease to amaze me, Thomas, me boy.”

He turned to the three Northwind troopies, who were starting to giddy down as the truth of the mad SFX genius’ words penetrated their euphoria. Twirling his moustache, which wasn’t really built for it, he said, “Well, ladies? Shall we?”

In the Black Rose’s cockpit, a quarter-kilometer from the mine pit—any closer and her heat-gauge started climbing—Malvina stared into the glaring furnace that was cremating her Golden Talons. Despite the heat her face felt frozen.

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.