He switched to wide scan, searching. Where was that other one? Whoever he was, that pilot was damn good. Valasquez had already watched the guy perform maneuvers that should have blasted him into unconsciousness. Was it a man piloting that ship, or some incredibly efficient fighting machine? He fired again—damn! Miss! The battle was becoming a one-on-one duel with this unknown Liao pilot Hit! Hit again! Then a rapid-fire sequence of laser hits scored his port wing, punching through delicate control surfaces and blasting his port Exostar light laser into tattered, twisted wreckage. Warnings keened. Override! Target! Fire! Another hit!
"Red Leader! Red Leader! This is Red Three! Watch your vector, Red Leader!"
Vector? Valasquez checked, blinked, checked again. The battle had carried him toward Stein's Folly. So intent had he been on the grim killing efficiency of the Liao pilot that he'd ignored the dazzling, swollen, cloud-girded sphere of the planet behind him.
"Copy, Red Three." He did some fast calculations, chose a new vector, kicked in his drive...but nothing happened. For a moment, he kept cold panic at bay by resetting his controls and punching the throttle controls again. Still nothing. The intolerable heat overload had shut down his drive. Malfunction lights winked and flickered at him. His ship jolted as another trio of laser bursts stitched into his wounded Sparrowhawkshull.
He palmed thruster controls. Where was the bogie? There! Following him down! He fired his twin Martells. His surviving Exostar was winking a malfunction light at him. Thrushand Sparrowhawktraded fire as the pair of them drifted into the thin upper reaches of the Folly's atmosphere. Desperately, Valasquez used his surviving thrusters to boot his Sparrowhawkover into a nose-high, nose-forward approach. Landing his shot-up bird was going to be tricky. Atmosphere dragged at him, making his ship buck and shudder as he fought to control a sudden, irresistible starboard yaw with savage twists of his control stick. The control surfaces weren't responding, weren't...
Oh, God, no...the control surfaces! He craned his head around, saw smoke and tattered debris whipping aft from the laser-pocked ruin of his port wing. A violent thump marked the departure of what was left of his tail fin. Then the damaged port wing tore free, and the Sparrowhawkbegan tumbling, engulfed in an orange fireball, trailing debris.
Valasquez didn't start screaming until smoke boiled up into the cockpit, and the legs of his pressure suit began melting in the heat.
* * * *
Burn, Davion, burn!Uchita watched the fiery meteor streak across the cloudtops below her with a curiously cold and shuddering emotion that might, remotely, be termed satisfaction. Her own ship's engines were gone, wrecked in that final exchange of fire with the enemy Sparrowhawk.Her craft's thrusters had functioned long enough for her to flatten her trajectory and skip off the Folly's atmosphere like a stone from the surface of a lake. She was receding into space now, her Thrusha battered wreck--power out, engines dead, her cockpit open to vacuum. A strange, numb sensation from the attachments of her mechanical left leg had proven, on examination, to be nothing less than complete amputation. Her hull armor had failed at a critical point, and her left leg was missing below the knee. The heat from that millisecond pulse seemed to have partly melted the fabric of her spacesuit's leg, sealing it against what remained of her plastic knee and thigh, maintaining pressure in her suit. She took grim satisfaction in knowing that that hit would have killed any other pilot. She was the Automaton of Destruction—indestructible.
At least, indestructible if she were rescued. She followed the course of the battle on her screen. Including her kill—her thirteenth, she realized—three of the attacking Sparrowhawkshad been destroyed, the others damaged and scattered. Two Liao fighters had been put out of the fight, her own and Captain Chen's.
The DropShips were already maneuvering toward the atmosphere, as their fighter reserves emerged from cavernous cargo bays and descended to engage rising squadrons of Davion defenders in the atmosphere. The Davions would be at a disadvantage now. Dagger Squadron's thrust had blunted the leading edge of their defenses. The way was open for the Overlordsto drop their readied 'Mechs behind a screen of sheltering fighters.
Her own life, she realized, hung on the outcome of that invasion. Her life support would last for another day, time enough for the invasion to establish a foothold on Stein's Folly—or be repulsed. If the invasion failed, no one would have time for her, locked in her crippled ship, falling stern-first into deep space at well above the planet's ten kilometers per second escape velocity. If it succeeded, she would be rescued by DropShips homing on her automatic radio distress beacon. Her squadron-mates might not like her, but she had proven her worth to them time after time. She would rejoin Dagger Squadron again, would kill again.
Thirteen kills!
With a cool, almost remote sense of mild anticipation, Uchita Tucker watched the invasion ships deploy on her screens.
* * * *
Colonel Pavel Ridzik stood with arms folded across his barrel chest and smiled with grim satisfaction through his red beard. The sky above Steindown was heavily smudged with oily smoke from a dozen burning fuel tanks, warehouses, and shattered BattleMechs. Skeletal shards of blast-ruined buildings poked at the sky from rubble piles still smoldering. The landing field itself was heavily cratered, and shadowed by the vast bulk of the pair of OverlordClass DropShips that had settled their landing jacks deeply into the fragmented ferrocrete. Hatches gaped open beneath the upraised arm-and-katana sword emblems of the Capellan Confederation emblazoned on the curves of those black hulls. BattleMechs—Liao BattleMechs—were still being offloaded from both transports.
In the sharp breeze above the spaceport, the House of Liao flag, inverted green triangle with the raised arm-and-katana against a red field, snapped and cracked. The ground struggle for the port had lasted just fifteen minutes from the time the first Liao Phoenix Hawkhad touched down on flaming jets to the moment the Overlordshad grounded and begun disgorging their reserves. The defenders had thrown down their weapons the moment the Overlordshad grounded, had surrendered or fled into the surrounding countryside. A few had made it
The ground under Ridzik's boots trembled to the tread of a formation of heavy 'Mechs moving off the field. A pair of sixty-ton OSR-2C Ostrocs,the massive, armless, bullet form of a Catapult,and the eighty-five-ton thunder of a BLR-1G BattleMaster,Fire Lance of a Company of House Liao's St. Ives Armored Cavalry, raised dust and thunder as they made their way across the shredded ruin of the facility's security fence and into the grassland beyond. Another BattleMaster,an Archer,and a pair of TBT Trebuchetsfollowed the line infantry 'Mechs, the horse-and-rider emblem of McCarron's Cavalry freshly painted against their green-camouflaged right legs.
Ridzik turned and strode back toward the Administrator's Residence, the low, modern villa that he had made his headquarters at the edge of the field. After the seesaw battle in space, the ground battle had been almost anticlimactic, because the defending 'Mechs had been scattered at key garrison points across the planet.