a lucky shot by a surface-based missile or energy-weapon battery. Instead, Malthus played the game precisely by the relatively new Jade Falcon combined-arms warfare book, leading with vehicles, Elementals and a few light ’Mechs, then transport-mounted infantry, mostly Eyrie fledglings, following all up with heavier armor and BattleMechs. His Solahma warriors secured the spaceport and perimeter and dug in; Malthus was not radical enough to emulate Aleks’ mixed-force experiment, though he recognized it had performed well in limited action.
The city’s defense force consisted of a few light vehicles, a medium tank or two, and a gaggle of light infantry, mainly civilian cops ostensibly stiffened by planetary militia. It mounted a brisk resistance from a strip mall on the city’s outskirts, which itself mostly appeared as derelict as the rusted-outUnion . Although they blew up an infantry-hauling hovertruck looted from the port and inflicted a few casualties on the lightly armored Falcon foot soldiers, they collapsed quickly under the attentions of a single Alpha TrinaryEyrie and a medium Bellona hovertank. Perhaps their initial hardihood sprang from the fact they had no idea what they were getting into—and indeed no idea of just who their assailantswere, although upon grounding Malthus had broadcast an imperious order for the planetary government to surrender.
Several Donar assault helicopters rocketed the mall, and then their lasers and Elemental flamers torched the wreckage. Underlit by lurid orange flames, the invaders advanced through the now-purple evening
gloom as the blue-white pinprick of the sun dropped out of sight behind the mountains to the west.
They encountered sporadic resistance when they entered the city proper. They responded with appropriate enthusiasm.
Not having a military tradition to speak of, the planetary government promptly surrendered.
Aleks’ forces at the seaport of Lazenby, and Malvina’s assault against the inland city of Hamilton on the Yeoh River, both encountered somewhat more determined resistance. They dealt with it briskly, the Turkina’s Beak warriors, proven at Porrima, no less professionally than the Gyrs. In both cities some resistance actually continued after the world’s noble ruler, Duke Oswald Sorrentino, broadcast his surrender to Clan Jade Falcon. Aleks crushed his with a judicious use of overwhelming force, Malvina with carnosaur exuberance.
By the time full night descended upon McCauliffe, the supercontinent’s easternmost city by virtue of its location at the end of its large peninsula, the Falcons were in possession of the world’s three population centers of note, largely intact, and having incurred only nominal losses themselves.
It was not an overly glorious victory, perhaps. But complete.
Or so it seemed.
13
McCauliffe City Chaffee
Northern Hemisphere 15 May 3134
At about 1000 hours on the first day of Chaffee’s existence as a fiefdom of Clan Jade Falcon, a small group of armed men overpowered civilian security elements at Siegfuhr Airport on the eastern side of McCauliffe, north of the harbor and on the city’s far side from the spaceport. They proceeded to commandeer a Planetlifter Air Transport heavy-lift VSTOL and take off.
Though after the HPG failure interstellar traffic making planetfall on Chaffee had fallen from slight to virtually none, the world had a lot of airports. With a widely scattered populace and a not particularly impressive road network, air travel made a lot of sense even when not an outright necessity. The lucrative offworld hunting trade had served the planet well in this regard, providing sufficient offworld exchange to make air transport affordable, so that few and miserable were the settlements that did not boast at least one VTOL or fixed-wing aircraft, and many families possessed their own.
Off-planet replacement parts were not easy to come by, nor cheap—but relatively poor as it was, Chaffeewas a world, complete, with five hundred million occupants. Who by the very fact of surviving upon the arid, high-gee planet with its contentious wildlife, at the very least sprang from highly resourceful stock. Chaffee had abundant metal deposits, even if large-scale mining had never come to the planet, largely because of its hostile environment (and in later years because of environmental laws enacted to preserve it in relatively pristine hostility). Chaffeeans made their own replacement parts, even if they had to use their own manual mills, lathes and welding rigs in homestead workshops.
The big, jet-powered Planetlifter was fully refueled but only partially loaded with cargo. At Malthus’ order, all civilian air traffic had been grounded immediately upon Sorrentino’s surrender. The backwoods folk enthusiastically ignored the ban, but it was observed scrupulously in the three major cities—under Falcon guns. Later, when things settled, aerospace fighters would fan out on patrol across the whole globe, assisted by DropShips in orbit, to teach the refractory what the Clan expected by way of obedience.
The invaders depended, as they would for the foreseeable future, upon Chaffee law enforcement and its tiny militia to enforce their writ across the planet’s broad surface. Local authorities were obliged to cooperate by terms of their ruler’s lawful surrender. It was possible, however, that the security contingent at Siegfuhr did not resist their assailants as valiantly as they might have.
Scientists and technicians attached to Turkina Keshik manned the main atmospheric and traffic control station at the spaceport. They spotted the unauthorized takeoff on their radar and promptly ordered the aircraft to return to the airport. The command was ignored.
Initially.
Since the vehicle’s own transponder identified it clearly as an unarmed and unarmored civilian transport, and no Falcon sensor saw anything discordant, the controllers were not particularly exercised. They took for granted it was intent on escape to the supercontinent’s mountainous interior. Rather than scrambling the aerospace fighters and combat VTOLs waiting at the spaceport to respond to threats, they passed the word along the chain of command. It was all they could do: the warriors would respond to a warning of danger from good lower-caste Clanners and true, but never to orders.
The hijacked aircraft was, after all, just a big cargo plane; lumbering, with poor maneuverability, easily spotted by radar or, in today’s clear skies, the naked eye, and broadcasting its location to all the world. Whenever a fighter rose up to knock it down would be ample time.
The tower was more preoccupied with the launch ofCaracara, carryingisorla of captured fighting vehicles, and more eagerly awaited, fresh water and food to the orbiting craft. It also carried fourteen Clan troops wounded during the brief assault on McCauliffe. It was scheduled to return with a Supernova Trinary of Solahma infantry to serve as garrison troops. Its ports had been sealed and takeoff alarms begun to blare even as the hijacked Planetlifter took off and tucked in its landing gear.
Under the thrust of its two huge turbines, the partially laden lifter climbed quickly to an altitude of three thousand meters. Then, instead of fleeing to the mountains marching in ever-higher ranks along the peninsula’s spine to the west, it banked steeply and headed east, back over the city.
TheUnion DropShip’s engines shot blue-white fire into the shallow blast pit. The ovoid vessel rose on columns of brilliance into a muddy, pale burgundy sky.
Approaching from the west, the big VSTOL dropped its nose. Its turbines whined at maximum throttle as it dove toward the lifting DropShip.
TheCaracara ’s formidable weapons were fully crewed. But no one expected trouble, not even when the ship’s own radars picked up the Planetlifter. It was a civilian aircraft. The planet had surrendered.
And these werebellycrawlers .
Finally, a ruby volley rippled from the medium pulse lasers that happened to bear on the diving airplane. Its starboard wing was stitched off at the root.
It made no difference. Trailing a hundred-meter plume of yellow fire, the seventy-five tons of aircraft and cargo smashed into theCaracara ’s rounded upper surface at eight hundred kilometers an hour.
Pale flame and black smoke unfurled across half a klick of cerulean sky. Despite its mass and velocity, despite breaching the DropShip’s armor and inundating compartments and gangways aft of the bridge with blazing jet fuel, the suicide plane failed to cripple the tough assault craft.
