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/ ”