Surprised by the speed and effectiveness of the enemy arty, Aleks nonetheless had the best counter already in hand.counterattack . He led his Falcons in a charge as the distant artillery churned the muddy soil of their now-vacant positions.
Drawn out in front of their infantry, the Summerite vehicles and ’Mechs had lost their support. With the non-powered infantry riding on the backs of hovercraft and armored by their speed, and Elementals clinging to the legs and perched on the shoulders of Falcon ’Mechs, Aleks’ warriors engaged the militia with all assets simultaneously.
The battle lines came together with a crash that momentarily shamed the thunder. Falcon infantry dismounted and close-assaulted Summerite vehicles and ’Mechs with grenades and portable anti-armor weapons. Aleks in his Lily led his machines in slashes through the enemy line, back and forth, as his fast hover-mobile scouts raked the flanks of the gone-to-ground enemy infantry, keeping them out of the fray. With the two mechanized forces intertwined, the Summer heavy artillery was unable to fire effectively for fear of striking their own troops; they were hunted down and neutralized by Falcon VTOLs which, though outnumbered, had already gained local supremacy over the Spheroid air.
Slipping, sliding, throwing up great waves of mud and chopped vegetation, the foes savaged each other in a vicious dogfight. Aleks’ Gyrfalcon was swarmed by a whole point of Nova Cats in Gnome power armor. They actually tore off the Ultra autocannon mounted on Lily’s left arm before MechWarrior Mordechai in hisSpirit and a cadet-crewed Epona hosed them off with lasers and Streak missiles.
The Ghost Bear abtakha Folke Jorgensson, jumping to his erstwhile master’s aid, was knocked from the sky by a Gauss rifle hit and several long-range missile strikes from Legate Adler’sCenturion . Although his right-arm quad Streak launcher was destroyed and the ammo stowage in his right torso blasted open, and his own left clavicle was broken by his fall, the dour Star Colonel with consummate skill snapped his own fifty-ton machine back upright, staggering the Legate, closing as he thought for the kill, with a Streak barrage from his left arm launcher. It shattered the long range launcher in theCenturion ’s right torso and cracked the cockpit, momentarily dazing Adler.
Jorgensson jumped again, turning in air to light behind the Legate with weapons blazing. Adler tried to turn his ’Mech’s torso to fire back. Jorgensson just orbited him, firing up theCenturion with large lasers and his remaining Streaks, until the Legate’s ’Mech toppled with a shattered hip actuator.
In moments, a fuming Legate Adler was drawn from his cockpit, shaken but uninjured, by Solahma infantry. Ignoring the pain, the functional loss of one arm, and the diminished status of his firepower,
Folke Jorgensson stalked off in search of further prey. Beyond even his thorny Clan-warrior pride, he wouldnever show weakness in front of Falcons.
Soon Star Colonel Jorgensson took charge of mopping up the now-shattered Summerite combat team as Aleks, blissfully undeterred by the damage to his own machine, turned the Lily around and led a scratch Trinary to engage and defeat the thrust of vehicles and IndustrialMechs supported by infantry from the JumpShip-parts plant he had expected all along.
At the end of the day, Planetary Governor Minerva Hayne was more than willing to accept Aleksandr Hazen’s generous surrender terms, even though over half of the militia troops defending her capital had not so much as glimpsed the smoke of distant battle for the cloudburst which still raged long after the fighting in the hills was done.
In the streets of the surrendered city, Aleks celebrated with his warriors, encouraged them in their revelry, smiled, laughed, drank and sang with them. Yet his own triumph tasted of ashes in his mouth.
Almost a hundred of his Zetas had died, including Magnus Icaza’s successor as commander of the Third Falcon Velites, Star Colonel Keith Buhallin, killed by laser infantry after he successfully toppled the SummeriteLegionnaire by ramming it with his Skanda light tank in an apparent attempt to emulate Jorgensson’s feat in seizing a BattleMech. Half again as many lay injured.
Summer had lost three thousand, killed and wounded. To anyone but a Clansman, the victory might have seemed one-sided.
Aleksandr mourned for all those dead and injured, Falcon and Spheroid. Because as always to his heart—that of a knightsans peur and sans reproche such as he had read about as an undersized, perpetually frightened child—a warrior’s highest duty was protection, not destruction. To be sure, he still believed with his whole soul that even carnage such as today’s was justified by its promise: to put an end to such suffering and evil forever. Because one day, tomorrow or in twenty years, Clan Jade Falcon would arrive in force to complete the work he and his fellow Galaxy Commanders had begun.
But it wasjust begun, he knew. That panged him too. For all the butchery and pain this conquest had caused, the greatest spasm of destruction yet awaited: the battle for Skye.
22
Outside New London Skye
17 July 3134
“As I see it, lass,” the handsome young officer with the collar of his Seventh Skye Militia dress tunic artfully undone said in a Skye-Irish brogue well-fueled by Skye-Irish whiskey, “our situation harks back to that confronting the empires of Terra herself, away back in the age of sail a century or two before spaceflight began. And thank you; you’re a blessing to a man.”
The last he said to a diminutive woman with glossy black hair bobbed to bangs across the front and long and unbound in the back, who had handed him a fresh glass. She wore a brief black dress fit to a trim but well-appointed figure and matching heels. Her features were pert and nicely chiseled, her eyes so blue as to be almost indigo. She smiled encouragingly.
He continued, duly encouraged. She was really quite lovely. Even if there was a haunting air of familiarity about her. “Back in those days, the major powers were separated by days and weeks of travel asea, their outposts and colonies by weeks, even months. Intercepting enemies or raiders or even learning of their activities was a matter as much of luck as skill. Rendezvousing or communicating with one’s own far-flung forces was no easier.”
Bodies and conversation ebbed and flowed about them in lazy currents between goosebumped white walls. The party was one of the more or less weekly affairs thrown by film mogul Hilario Gupta, owner of Islands in the Sky Productions, at his house that rambled like a random growth of giant white crystals on a forested hillside overlooking New London and Thames Bay from the north.
“Yet they managed to maintain world-girdling empires,” the officer continued. He was lean and long-jawed and had curly chestnut hair curving down his cheeks as sideburns. A circle of admiring listeners, not exclusively feminine, surrounded him as he stood in one of the somewhat stark rooms of Gupta’s polyhedron palace. “Indeed, they managed to have themselves a set of global wars from the sixteenth or seventeenth century onwards, although they didn’t get ’round to calling them ‘world’ wars until the twentieth; still, only the unprecedented scale of the forces involved distinguished the acknowledged world wars from what had gone before, not their nature.”
While he spread himself generously among his audience, he concentrated a little more on the little stunner in black with the flip bangs. For her part, she seemed to be listening with peculiar intensity. He smiled inwardly, and contemplated potentialities.