"Climber, this is Skytalker Leader." Grayson's voice was barely audible over the ringing in Ramage's ears, but he was very glad to hear it.
"Climber here! Message away!"
"I copy, Climber. What's your situation?"
The room thundered again. "Not good. The neighbors want to come in and play. We're trapped on the third floor...no way out."
"Try to hold on. Climber. We're in the thick of it out here and can't win through."
"Acknowledged, Skytalker. We'll...hold." There was nothing else to say. The raiders had known that once they were discovered, their chances of rescue were not good. In endless planning sessions, Grayson and the others had argued insistently that Ramage not sacrifice himself. Ramage was equally insistent that he was the logical one—the onlylogical one—to lead it. He couldn't be budged, and Grayson had finally given in.
To transmit their coded message to the Invidious,they needed a deep-space transmitter. The Phoboshad one, but they didn't dare use it. That could have given the enemy positive proof that the ship still existed, as well as a means to triangulate her position. The only alternative had been to—"borrow" was Grayson's word—a Kurita transmitter.
For a long minute, the Ranger commandos looked at one another silently, wondering what was next. Splinters spat and flew as submachine gun fire chewed at the door, then bullets shrieked through the room. Gundberg kicked backward, blood pumping, dead before he hit the floor.
Ramage cursed and levelled his TK at the closed door. The assault rifle bucked and thuttered on full auto, breaching the door in a dozen places and filling the air with more spinning chips and splinters of wood. Someone started screaming on the far side of the door, as more bullets began chewing through the wood from the other side. This blind firefight carried on for another ten seconds, then died away. There were several head-sized holes in the door's wood now. What would be next, Ramage wondered, a grenade or gas? Keeping low, he darted across to a position just beside the barricaded door. Perhaps from there, he could see the approach of someone with a grenade, and do something about it.
There was a noise outside, like the roar of a DropShip launch, and then the lights went dead. As the room became pitch-black, chunks of sound-proofing sprayed down from the ceiling on the defenders, a fifty-centimeter-thick support beam groaned and cracked, and ferrocrete blocks rained down from above. A twenty-kilo chunk landed squarely in the middle of the communications console, shattering glass and plastic and briefly lighting up the dark with a shower of sparks. There'd be no more broadcasting for the raiders, but that worry was behind them now. Looking up in horror, they saw that the
Pantherhad
Another explosion of dust and broken stone, and an armored fist one meter across plunged down the stairway, fingers spreading wide like the legs of some monstrous beast. The gigantic metal fingers closed on a shrieking, kicking flurry of motion that jerked once and went limp in its crushing grasp. Ramage and the others looked away as the mangled body of the Kurita prisoner plopped wetly back to the rubble-strewn floor. The gigantic metal fingers opened again, nighmarish in the dust-choked gloom, searching, groping.
The hand jerked away, shattering more of the ceiling as it withdrew. From outside came the deep-throated stutter of an autocannon, and the blasts and shrieks of rapid-fire, high-explosive mayhem from overhead. The crash of a BattleMech falling to the ground close beside the building was unmistakable, louder than Armaggedon and heavy enough to shiver the com station’s walls yet again. After that, it was very quiet.
The stairs were shattered, and the only way out now was through the door. When they'd heard nothing for several seconds, Ramage and the others pulled the upended table aside and kicked away the ruin of the door. There were three bodies on the platform at the top of the stairs outside and smoke wafting up from below. Rifles ready, the raiders ventured down the steps, two of them supporting their gut-shot comrade.
The second floor was deserted, and another stairway invited. Another floor down, and late afternoon light poured through a partly missing and rubble-choked front wall. Grayson's Shadow Hawkstood outside, not far from the vast metal corpse of the Kurita Panther,now minus its head.
A transport skimmer whined to a stop close by the shattered wall. "Hop in," Grayson's voice said through his ‘Mech's external speaker. "Let’s go home!"
On the battle plain below, the rebel ‘Mechs were already withdrawing, leaving columns of smoke and guttering fires where three enemy ‘Mechs and a half-dozen support vehicles lay in heaps of charred wreckage. Another Loyalist ‘Mech, a Griffin,stood frozen in place, the top of its head blasted open where its pilot had decided to leave the fight with precipitous haste.
Ramage grinned and signalled his troops. "You heard the man! Let's make dust!"
Chapley died during the trip back through the jungle.
27
The elevator door opened on the lowest sub-basement floor, and Nagumo stepped out, light from the overhead fluoros catching the intertwining loops and circled dragons of gold at cuff and collar. Two stiff-faced troopers in full dress flanked him, their hands never far from their holstered automatics.
This level had once been part of the Regis University archives, but when the Kurita-backed new order had come to power, most of the records had been removed to a warehouse just outside the campus walls. A number of the basement rooms had become offices and facilities for what was euphemistically referred to as the "Special Branch". With its walls of ferrocrete and quarried stone block, meters thick in places, the place was perfect for the purpose. The screams of the guests of the Special Branch never penetrated to the upper levels of the building.
Nagumo was tired and harassed by growing worries. Rebel activity had been increasing during the past week, culminating with the raid on the deep-space transmitter just the day before. Instead of being broken after the raid on Fox Island, the damnable rebel movement seemed to be spreading like a cancer, infecting districts, villages, and whole regions that haduntil now been pacified.
Reports were on his desk of rebel attacks on Loyalist and Kurita outposts throughout the Bluesward and Vrieshaven, and even as far west as Scandiahelm. The toll in just this week since Fox Island had been ten ‘Mechs destroyed or put out of commission indefinitely. At this rate, it would be the skeleton of an army that met Duke Ricol in six more days. Six days!
The raid on the transmitter was a particularly harrowing climax. The deep-space tracking system on Verthandi-Alpha had marked the arrival of a JumpShip at the Norn zenith jump point shortly before the raid on the transmitter, had monitored a coded burst-pulsed radio message (which had not yet yielded to Kodo's naval cryptoanalysis department) and had then vanished back into hyperspace. To Nagumo's mind, it could only mean a plea for more mercenary reinforcements.
The mercenaries could not know that he'd been informed of their arrival by his spy network on Galatea. He had immediately dispatched a courier to alert his Galatean network that the jump freighter Invidiousmight be returning to Galatea. Where else close by could they go to recruit more mercs? The Galatean network had Nagumo's personal sanction to do what was necessary to block that ship's mission.
Nagumo could not count on success there. In fact, he had to assume that reinforcements would be arriving. Meanwhile, his grip on Verthandi was slipping. Rebel raids all across the inhabited portion of the planet had forced Kurita troops and ‘Mechs and Loyalist militia to keep to their garrison posts, to travel in convoys, to avoid travelling alone in rural areas. And now, a riot in the streets of the Regis Oldtown district. A riot! It had started as a demonstration—with students chanting "Death to the Dracos". Someone had fired a shot that killed a government militiaman, and then a platoon of Combine infantry had fired into the crowd. There were six dead before the lance of recon ‘Mechs had broken up the mob. Since then, the city had been simmering in sullen resentment.