Twenty klicks to the east Tara Campbell stood on the peaceful green seminar lawn and listened to them
die.
Countryside West of New London 15 August 3134
Between hills covered in trees to whose branches a few defiant brown and orange leaves clung, and fields of Terran sunflowers tall as Elementals nodding plate-sized autumn-yellow heads in sunlight, Aleksandr Hazen’s Zeta Galaxy advanced at speed.
Time and again lead vehicles, usually speedy Nacon or Fox hovercraft, were blown into brief yellow fireballs by roadside ambushes. These were quickly smashed by heavy fire from BattleMechs and tanks. Surviving ambushers were rooted out by infantry and burned down by Elementals. The columns streaming toward New London slowed but did not stop.
The attack columns only halted when confronted by roadblocks held in force. If these could be expeditiously reduced by tank and ’Mech weapons, indirect bombardment with long-range missiles and VTOL strikes, they were. Otherwise, the Falcons simply veered around them. Their BattleMechs and tracked and hover vehicles moved readily cross-country. So did most of their wheeled AFVs; the ones that broke down were abandoned without thought and left burning.
Behind Aleks, Malvina’s shattered Gyrs followed painfully to his left. Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, Supreme Commander, seemed preoccupied with securing the drop zone, and was releasing his Keshik warriors to follow the advance as planned with the stinginess of a Lyran merchant.
The defenders had one thing the Falcons had no ready answer for: long-range artillery—Snipers, Thumpers, Long Toms—which could dump devastating barrages upon the charging ground forces from ranges far beyond their ability to retaliate. Although a fierce air battle raged, of aerospace fighters and VTOLs, occasionally a Falcon pilot would spot one of the giant, not-very-mobile launchers, stoop on it and destroy it—usually at cost of his or her machine, if not life. Clan aerospace jocks were not Decanted to die in bed, any more than their Elemental or MechWarrior comrades.
All hardly registered on Aleks. For the first time in his life he strode to battle without the fierce, anticipating joy of a Falcon born.
All he cared for wasadvance . He drove his Galaxy not harshly, but relentlessly. So long as Turkina’s Beak Galaxy kept moving forward, he had his best defense against the brutal punishment of Skye artillery. He could outrun the massive barrages with their long flight times, kill such enemy spotters as he could with infantry and fast hovercraft scouts to blind the distant launchers, and change speed and route periodically to keep the highly skilled Republican artillerists from correcting their fire by simply calculating where his troops would be at a given moment and arranging for a few tons of high explosive to meet them.
It did not work perfectly. Aleksandr Hazen had not been raised to expect perfection. It workedenough
He fought his command and his BattleMech with mechanical precision. His Galaxy now functioned as smoothly as a veteran formation: subcommanders and individual warriors used their own initiative, so that he need rarely issue orders. When enemies came within reach of Black Rose’s weapons he killed them with little more thought than he would have given to swatting mosquitoes.
If he could not take pleasure in battle, Aleks would at least take comfort in sheer practice of his craft, the trade to which his entire life was bent.
And then his onslaught ran slam into its first big check: Northwind Fusiliers and Garryowens, dug-in in strength along a system of ridges rising like a wall between the Falcon LZ and New London. With weapons bore-sited in advance to turn every passage through, from road-cut to gully, into a killing ground.
The Zeta charge screamed to a halt—as Long Tom rockets screamed down the sky upon them.
32
Weston Heights Skye
15 August 3134
“We haven’t got a chance!” Panic shrilled from the radio at Tara Campbell, standing in the artificial gloom within her command crawler. “They’re swarming right up and over us! Third Platoon is overrun, and we’ve lost contact with First. Even their infantry runs up hills like bloody mountain goats!”
“Easy, Sergeant Masamoto,” Lieutenant Colonel Hanratty said soothingly. “Don’t let them get behind you. Pull back, lad—you’ve done your job.”
Another voice screamed, “ ’Mech!” from the speaker.
“Jumpin’ right for us,”Masamoto called. “Run for it, boys—dear Lord, thosewings!For the love of A scream. A rising squeal of overheating electronics. Silence.
After a moment in which she died a thousand times, Tara turned away from the faint dust of atmospherics popping from the speaker. “Comments?”
Colonels Ballantrae and Wilson, commanders of the First Kearny and the Fusiliers, stood behind her in the compartment. Tara Bishop hung to the side. Major Hirschbeck was forward at her Republican Guards command post, in woods just west of Weston Heights.
“They bypass us when they’re not outflanking and overrunning us,” Bishop said. “We’re hurting them—hammering them, even if you let the air out of damage reports. But we’re not slowing themdown
Tara’s two regimental commanders might have taken umbrage at a junior officer speaking up so forthrightly, especially with such a grim assessment. But both were seasoned combat veterans. All they did was nod.
Rather than try to hold an unbroken line, Tara had chosen to defend in depth in the forested hills to the west. Her forward forces were spread out, not bunched, positioned so as to support each other, either by immediate fire or rapid maneuver. The concept was analogous to using foam spacers between armor plates to defend against a shaped-charge warhead: the incandescent jet would lose energy and burn out before it could pierce the inner defenses.
To an extent it’s working, she knewJust not so well as we expected.
Not as well as weneededit to.
Western Outskirts of Weston Heights 15 August 3134
The combat-modified ForestryMech, sprayed with gray and tan and green in camouflage blotches, staggered as Aleks’Gyrfalcon, approaching at a run, raked 5-centimeter shells across its lightly armored chest. The thirty-five-ton machine seemed to stagger. Then Aleks triggered his large lasers. Metal plate ran like lava in glowing pink streams. Billowing black smoke, the machine toppled backward into the wreckage of the two-story motel. It had literally walked through the flimsy frame and pasteboard structure moments before, blasting a lightly armored Nacon scout car in its vulnerable rear and exploding it to flames with its 20mm autocannon, then raking a mixed Solahma-Eyrie infantry Point moving cautiously on foot down the blacktopped road.
Chunks of light debris flew away from the motel’s fa9ade, some flaming, as Aleks’ troops opened up on it with small arms and heavy weapons. He suspected it was a pointless expenditure of ammo and energy. Had there been any other enemies lurking in the long structure, they undoubtedly had already faded back into the broken, forested country and the buildings that had begun to encroach upon the right-of-way as the Falcons neared the western edge of the New London suburbs.
The ForestryMech jock had been braver than wise. The Republican defenders had already taught their foes that even ’Mechs and heavy tanks could hide in the cover of the strip-urbs, strike and then fade back before even cat-quick Jade Falcon reflexes could strike back effectively.
And the more ferociously the Zetas lashed back at their ambushers, the more rubble they dropped in their own path. Even ground-effects vehicles could be blocked, and BattleMechs slowed. Nor was rubble or even enemy action all that was slowing the once-irresistible Falcon advance to a mere creep.
Above the strip malls and service stations Aleks could see the pristine pitched roofs of hilly Weston a scant few kilometers to the east. There, he knew, the real battle would begin. He radioed Galaxy