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.
31
Weston Heights
Suburb West of New London
Skye
15 August 3134
As Tara Campbell walked out of the dawn toward the joint operational command post, set up on the green lawn in front of the red brick main building of a Tharkad Synod Lutheran seminary on a long bluff in the western New London suburb of Weston, the Seventh Skye Militia pipers set up a festive, earsplitting skirl.