Her tone had suggested, quite strongly, that anyone who did so object would find herself instantaneously reassigned to thedezgra Zeta Galaxy, plying a wrench with a nice new caste tattoo on her shoulder.
“And anyone,” she had added, lowering her voice, while the female Jade Falcon perched on her shoulder spread its wings in response to a hand-signal, “who harbors reservations about serving with your new comrades of the Turkina Keshik, and acts upon those reservations, shall be cast forth from the nest of Clan Jade Falcon as unworthy and without honor.”
A couple of Bec Malthus’ creatures in the Keshik—the man himself stood behind his Khan’s right shoulder, beaming heartily, a place he had spent her whole public career—had cried out, “Seyla/” pretty smartly at this. It was gilding the lily.
Pretty much everyone in the Clan who doubted that Khan Jana Pryde was capable of doingexactly what she said she would was already dead.
Expecting no serious opposition and eager to blood his Keshik, Malthus dropped hisOverlord C -class command DropShip, theBec de Corbin, carrying his ’Mech force and most of his armor, alongside the Union C -class vesselCaracara with his VTOLs and infantry, directly onto McCauliffe’s small spaceport. He let loose a wing of his aerospace Trinary, the Turkina Fighters, to fly around and blow things up.
It was unnecessary. The small contingent of clerks, customs officials, civilian cops, and technicians on hand fled into the gray dusk at the first sign of attack. The port was deserted by the time the jacks of the two landing craft settled above the blast pits.
Malthus had sent out a Star of his Trinary Delta Elementals with a few machine-gun-armed Nacon armored scout hovercraft to secure the terminal buildings and the hulk of an ancient Inner SphereUnion DropShip that had been blasted off its jacks during some prior conflict and subsequently dragged off the apron by prime movers and dumped. Presumably, it had fallen during the wars of the last century’s latter half, but by its decrepit state and the port’s general air of lassitude and decay it might have lain there since the Star League fell. The Falcons encountered no opposition. Indeed, they encountered no one at alleven the commissary staff had run off into the enclosing fields of low, olive-green ground cover.
Facing no aerial opposition whatever, the canny Galaxy Commander called back his Echo Wing One fighters and grounded them on the apron near the offloading DropShips. No point exposing such rare and precious assets to a lucky shot by a surface-based missile or energy-weapon battery. Instead, Malthus played the game precisely by the relatively new Jade Falcon combined-arms warfare book, leading with vehicles, Elementals and a few light ’Mechs, then transport-mounted infantry, mostly Eyrie fledglings, following all up with heavier armor and BattleMechs. His Solahma warriors secured the spaceport and perimeter and dug in; Malthus was not radical enough to emulate Aleks’ mixed-force experiment, though he recognized it had performed well in limited action.
The city’s defense force consisted of a few light vehicles, a medium tank or two, and a gaggle of light infantry, mainly civilian cops ostensibly stiffened by planetary militia. It mounted a brisk resistance from a strip mall on the city’s outskirts, which itself mostly appeared as derelict as the rusted-outUnion . Although they blew up an infantry-hauling hovertruck looted from the port and inflicted a few casualties on the lightly armored Falcon foot soldiers, they collapsed quickly under the attentions of a single Alpha TrinaryEyrie and a medium Bellona hovertank. Perhaps their initial hardihood sprang from the fact they had no idea what they were getting into—and indeed no idea of just who their assailantswere, although upon grounding Malthus had broadcast an imperious order for the planetary government to surrender.
Several Donar assault helicopters rocketed the mall, and then their lasers and Elemental flamers torched the wreckage. Underlit by lurid orange flames, the invaders advanced through the now-purple evening
gloom as the blue-white pinprick of the sun dropped out of sight behind the mountains to the west.
They encountered sporadic resistance when they entered the city proper. They responded with appropriate enthusiasm.
Not having a military tradition to speak of, the planetary government promptly surrendered.
Aleks’ forces at the seaport of Lazenby, and Malvina’s assault against the inland city of Hamilton on the Yeoh River, both encountered somewhat more determined resistance. They dealt with it briskly, the Turkina’s Beak warriors, proven at Porrima, no less professionally than the Gyrs. In both cities some resistance actually continued after the world’s noble ruler, Duke Oswald Sorrentino, broadcast his surrender to Clan Jade Falcon. Aleks crushed his with a judicious use of overwhelming force, Malvina with carnosaur exuberance.
By the time full night descended upon McCauliffe, the supercontinent’s easternmost city by virtue of its location at the end of its large peninsula, the Falcons were in possession of the world’s three population centers of note, largely intact, and having incurred only nominal losses themselves.
It was not an overly glorious victory, perhaps. But complete.
Or so it seemed.
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.