A fast hunter-killer, the Spheroid lightweight was more built around the PPC than mounted with it. It still could not sustain continuous firing without its internal heat soaring until emergency overrides shut down its fusion plant. The MechWarrior evidently didn’t care, but was gambling all on this single throw.
Where do the bellycrawlers get such warriors?Malvina wondered. Shedid care. The heat in her cockpit was rapidly becoming more than even she could tolerate.
Still clutching theHatchetman in a literal death grip, she pivoted Black Rose’s torso counterclockwise, dragging the forty-five-ton machine as a man might a clinging child. At the same time, she opened out with her right arm. She could shoot this puny interloper with her remaining 10- centimeter gun, and if that—or thermal buildup—did not knock it out of action she could quickly follow with lasers and LRMs.
The hideous blue glare inside the cockpit winked out as the tip of her left wing momentarily cut the particle beam.
She smiled. To kill two such redoubtable warriors, one the renowned Tara Campbell, within seconds of each other should merit several stanzas in the Jade Falcon Remembrance. Not to mention securing the conquest of Skye at a stroke. . . .
At once Tara Campbell knew what her aide and friend was doing:Alpha Strike . She had the PPC locked on and would fire it until shutdown. And she was in trouble even before Malvina brought her autocannon to bear. Tara saw at least two Gyrfalcon ’Mechs making for the little machine, firing as they ran.
“TB,” she called, “behind you! Break off now!”
Silence answered. Tara quit holding onto the enemy BattleMech’s arm. Instead she put her hand on the jump-jet housing beneath its right wing and pushed. The oddParasaurolophus -like crest sweeping back from herHatchetman’s head bent upwards in the middle. But she writhed free.
Tara Bishop’s beam went out. HerPack Hunter blazed like a torch on Tara Campbell’s infrared display from the terrible heat that had closed down its systems.
“Tara, punch out!” The Countess ordered desperately as streams of ’Mech weapons fire converged on the inert machine.
Malvina fired her autocannon. ThePack Hunter was knocked backward by explosions.
Tara turned to bring her own 10-centimeter cannon to bear. HerHatchetman rocked back to the recoil of an ultrafast burst.
The Black Rose’s beaked cockpit exploded into black smoke and red sparks. The winged great ’Mech crashed to earth like a building collapsing.
As thePack Hunter fell the top of its head blew off. Tara Bishop ejected.
Tara Campbell turned to strike the enemies who had savaged her friend. They were already back-walking, shooting this way and that at Republican mobile forces beginning to converge on them.
Tara’s neurohelmet crackled with a sudden cloudburst of reports. Already being driven back, the Gyrfalcons now retreated as word of their invincible commander’s fall spread like fire. They went firing, in good order, as befit Clanners. But they went.
Away over the shattered apartment roof-line, a parachute blossomed. Tara Bishop’s zero-altitude ejection system had functioned as designed, and by lucky accident launched her like a mortar round in the direction of safety.
If, of course, she was still alive tobe safe. Tara’s heart twinged. So many had died today. But TB was her friend.
“Countess!”a voice cried on the First Kearny net. To her surprise she recognized the voice of Lieutenant Gelb, recently promoted to command of a heavy armor lance.
“More devils! They’re coming out of the woods!”
It was not approved radio discipline, but it worked. Tara looked around to see the muzzle flashes and brilliant colored beams of many heavy weapons, clearly vehicle- and ’Mech-borne, stab out from among the trees. She gave the order to withdraw.
It tasted like the ashes cast up from beneath the feet of the advancing enemy ’Mechs.
33
New London Skye
15 August 3134
“Excuse me.”
At the softly spoken, almost diffident words the short, round-bellied man with the red muttonchops whirled. He still had a pair of black formal socks, gel-soled for comfort, clutched in a cheese-white hand. He had been on the verge of stuffing them into his valise on top of a hastily packed jumble of clothing and effects.
“Who the blazes are you?” Chief Minister Augustus Solvaig demanded. The fighting to the west was audible as a constant mutter of distant thunder, punctuated by distinctcrumps .
“No one,” said the man who had invaded the bedroom of the chief minister’s surprisingly modest bungalow on New London’s northwest side. “Just a fool. A knave, if you like.”
Eyes bugging from his pale, pitted cheeks, Solvaig sized him up. He didn’t look like much, only slightly taller than the chief minister himself, within a centimeter or so of average height for an adult Inner Sphere
male. His hair was dark, not long but not particularly short, receding from a widow’s peak. Yet his manner was confident beyond arrogance—beyond even the arrogance of a man who had strolled uninvited into the bedroom of the second most powerful man on Skye. And the black motorcycle leathers he wore were trimmed close to a figure that might have belonged to a professional gymnast, wide across the hips but flat of belly, carrying no slack.
“How did you get in?” Solvaig asked.
“Picked the lock.” He smiled and tipped the shades with the upward-angled half-oval lenses down his nose. His eyes were dark and Asian-shaped.
“And you, Mr. Chief Minister. What might you be doing?”
He waved around at the bedroom. Drawers hung open as if ransacked. Various possessions lay jumbled on the bed.
“Deserting a ship you think might be sinking?” He chuckled and shook his head. “Your pardon, Excellency; I malign you, I know. I should say, rather, that you’re taking advantage of the confusion to depart because your work here is done.”
His smile widened to expose his eyeteeth. “Your real work, that is.”
“Whatever you want,” the minister said, “I can make it worth your while to do nothing more than stand aside and allow me to walk out of here. Very worth your while indeed.”
Then his left hand snapped up from behind him holding a laser pistol. His right still held his socks. He presented the deadly energy gun for a pointblank hip shot as if he knew how to do it.
But the intruder, smiling blandly, was already sliding toward him like oil over water.
Close: too close.
Weston Heights
15 August 3134
Malvina Hazen still clung to life, if barely, when her sibkin, ignoring the shrill warnings of the radiation counter in his cooling vest, tenderly extracted her from the wreckage of her cockpit.
The enemy had already vanished back among the shattered apartment buildings. Aleks’ Zetas had secured the open ground. Lead elements of Turkina Keshik had come up as well; their Solahma and Eyrie infantry had begun probing into the built-up area.
A Turkina’s Beak VTOL touched down to dust the badly injured Galaxy Commander off to the Turkina Keshik landing zone. Aleks stooped to lay his sister gently on the stretcher. The blood that wrapped her body like a net came mostly, he had ascertained, from superficial cuts by flying fragments. But blood ran from her mouth, a bad sign, and herShrike ’s cockpit had been full of toxic gases, products of burning or heat-induced outgassing from internal components.
He knelt beside her, gazing down at her lovely and curiously peaceful face—as if this were the first true ease she had known in years, if not her life. Her pink, fever-flushed forehead already bloomed with