The comm sprang to life again, still mostly static, but his techs were already finding a way around the jam. Buried in the sea of white noise were three distinct words: “Here they come!”
Jonah drew a deep breath and steadied his own voice before activating his ’Mech’s external speakers so that all of Echo Company could hear.
“Stand fast,” he ordered, his voice firm and clear—an illusion, but a convincing one. “Report enemy force and weapons.”
A moment later the trees overhead exploded in a world of flame as a pack of missiles slammed into his position.
“Counterbattery!” Jonah ordered.
The mortar section started sliding rounds down the tubes. Each round left the tube with a whump! and a puff of thin smoke. The man with the flamethrower was gone, either dead or moved forward, Jonah didn’t know. The soldier who’d been helping the man earlier was still in view and unhurt.
The command comm radio was dead again, rejammed by House Ma-Tzu Kai. Whining white noise filled Jonah’s ears, but he left it on in case someone managed to get a message through. Meanwhile, all of the Stinger’s position scopes went to solid red, leaving all of the unit symbols in the heads-up display frozen where they’d been at last report. Jonah had no new information coming in, no extrapolation based on current positions, nothing.
A current-generation BattleMech in good repair could have stood up to an electronic assault on this scale, but his used and—at least until the militia took possession of it—badly maintained Stinger couldn’t, and neither could the equipment of the men under his command. They’d have to fight blind and deaf.
But that’s what they’d drilled for. This was a militia unit, after all, and as such they had become accustomed to getting the short end of the stick when it came to equipment. They’d been working on backup measures for some of the most common failures and deficiencies since Jonah had taken command. He knew how to get at least part of their hearing back.
Jonah keyed the ’Mech’s exterior speakers. “String wire,” he ordered a nearby sergeant. “I want field phones.”
The sergeant saluted and trotted off. Echo Company of the First Kyrkbacken Militia might be reduced to communicating via the equivalent of tin cans and string, but at least they would not be silenced.
A trooper on a Shandra scout vehicle slid into the clearing through a whirl of dust and fallen leaves. He dismounted at the foot of the Stinger and saluted, then picked up a bullhorn hanging from the Shandra’s controls.
“Sir,” he said over the hailer. “First and Third squads report combined arms assault, infantry backed by hovers. Holding their own. Request ammo resupply.”
“Lead me to them,” Jonah replied over the exterior mike.
“Sir.”
The trooper remounted his vehicle and turned it in place. Jonah followed.
He could pick up the noise of small-arms fire as they moved ahead, the telltale sound of men using their weapons carefully: a single shot, a group of three, another single shot, no one going full auto and burning up a full box of ammunition in a second or two. Such a deliberate rhythm meant that the troopers doing the shooting were seriously low on ammo; and if Jonah could tell as much just by listening, that meant the House Ma-Tzu Kai troopers knew it too.
Jonah spoke to the scout on his vehicle. “Radio HQ,” he ordered. “Message: ‘Ammunition resupply and reinforcement urgently required.’”
“Sir,” the scout said, and turned away, throttling up as his vehicle sped uphill.
Jonah heard more small-arms fire coming from the edge of a gully ahead. He flipped on his cockpit screen’s visual enhancement in order to pull in IR-spectrum light. With its aid, he could see the House Ma-Tzu Kai hovercraft screened by brush on the far side, bringing its missiles to bear on his own dug-in troops.
He sent a beam from the Stinger’s medium laser downrange at the hovercraft. The vehicle dipped and slewed sideways as the beam hit; then it withdrew, pulling back out of sight behind a rise.
The hover’s retreat didn’t give the Kyrkbacken Militia any time to catch their breaths. The Ma-Tzu Kai troopers continued to press the attack, and a tank thrashed forward through the trees to the left of the retreating hover.
Jonah swiveled his joystick to raise his right arm in a sweeping motion, hosing down the advancing line of Ma-Tzu Kai troops with the Stinger’s medium laser. The troopers went to ground, taking cover in the tall grass and underbrush wherever they could. The tank ground to a halt, its progress blocked by a larger tree. It jerked back, turned to pass the obstacle, just as a Kyrkbacken Militia missile salvo slammed into its thin side armor. The vehicle froze in place, a large smoke ring puffing upward from the open hatch on its top.
A voice from the ground shouted, “They’re falling back!” It was the squad’s sergeant, back from his earlier errand.
“Let them go,” Jonah said.
He looked at his ammo readouts. One single-shot missile pack—the Stinger should have carried two, but the second pack had turned out, upon inspection, to be empty, and none of the militia’s repeated requests for replacement ammo had borne fruit—with fifteen missiles onboard. After that, he’d be down to nothing but the medium laser, plus whatever morale effect twenty tons of steel could provide.
A signals team arrived with a field connection. Finally, he thought. The team plugged into the jack at the left heel of Jonah’s ’Mech, and a signal reappeared on the position plotting indicator.
The news it gave him wasn’t good. Only about a third of the troopers that he’d started with this morning were still on the line. The rest were lost, passed beyond the limits of his effective command. Or dead.
“All units,” he said over the external link. “Report!”
One by one the remnants of his company came up.
“First squad, fifty percent effective, down to personal ammo packs.”
“Second squad, no heavy weapons left. Ten percent casualties.”
“Third squad. In place, on line, and ready.”
Then a silence.
Into the quiet, Jonah said, “Fourth squad?”
No reply.
“Fifth squad?”
“Fifth squad, in place, antivehicle minefield… here they come again!”
The signals crew unplugged the field connection from the foot of Jonah’s ’Mech, setting him free to take the Stinger off toward Fifth squad’s location at an ungainly lope. The Fifth, with Sergeant Turk in charge, was Jonah’s rock. They held down the farthest-left position on the flank, the absolute end of The Republic’s extended battle line, and the Ma-Tzu Kai forces would be concentrating on them.
An antitank mine exploded from the open ground to Jonah’s front, letting him know that he’d arrived at the Fifth’s location. He brought his ’Mech to a halt and let a trooper plug him into the Militia’s makeshift field phone net.
“Fifth squad, report.”
“We got hit by an SM1 with a couple of squads of infantry for support,” came Sergeant Turk’s reply. The field phones had a peculiar echoing sound, and the sergeant’s voice was whispering and distant in Jonah’s ears. “An AT mine screwed up the Smiley’s hoverjets, but the gun turret is still in play. We can stop the infantry if we can suppress the turret, or we can suppress the turret if we can stop the infantry. But we can’t do both at once with what we’ve got left.”
“Mortars, grid posit 132082,” Jonah said. “Anti-infantry.”