tactics: they would want a force out front to pin Aleks’ troops in place, or flanking would mean little.
“MechWarrior Mordechai,” Aleks directed, “attack as ordered.”
With red sand cascading from its flanks, Mordechai’sSpirit erupted from cover, weapons flaming. At the same time the waiting Falcon hovercraft rose up amidst hurricanes of swirling dust to lunge at the flankers to their left in a smashing attack. MechWarrior Nina’sEyrie joined them, as planned.
With his infantry out front, in good cover with overlapping fields of fire should the Alkaidian foot seek to advance, Aleks was left to handle the right-hand flanking force with the aid of his squat-armored Elementals.
It was not an even fight. Nor a long one.
Ryde
Prefecture VIII
The Republic of the Sphere
24 June 3134
Malvina Hazen descended upon Ryde like a plague from ancient prophecy.
Although the voyage from the jump points was only eleven days, that was too much for the impatient Galaxy Commander, who took the risk of employing a pirate point five days out—and like her sibkin won her gamble. Upon arriving in-system and before launching her DropShips, Malvina convened her officers in the briefing amphitheater inboard her flag JumpShip,Za Vie en Rose , captured from the Davion contingent of the then-Federated Commonwealth in the last century and renamed; Malvina had insisted upon restoring its original name, and as a ristar got her wish, especially since Khan Jana Pryde could not care less what they called their ships so long as theywon .
Naked, Malvina stood before her subcommanders. She held her slender white arms above her head, cut them with her great-bladed fighting knife—carefully, so as to avoid damage to muscle, nerve and tendon—and let the blood stream over her silver pale hair, down her face, to spatter her breasts and shoulders and run in twining networks down her flat domed belly.
In a ringing voice she promised: so it would be with all who stood in the path of the Falcons’ return to the Inner Sphere. She would bathe in their blood.
Her Gyrfalcons screamed themselves hoarse in an orgy of approbation.
She broadcast the ceremony live to Ryde, so they could see in full tridee what Fate had in store for them.
In the glare of a bright but distant yellow-white sun, her DropShips descended through thin, sulfurous atmosphere to land at strategic locations on the world’s three continents. She herself led her First Falcon Striker Cluster in a drop on the vital Water Pure complex, which provided drinkable water to the cold, dry world’s populace and lay near the capital Heaven’s Gate on the southerly continent Kale. Her command ship came down inside the wire, its landing jacks digging deep into the pavement of its parking lot, vehicles and cement melted into a bubbling cauldron by its drive jets.
Her Gyrs sprang forth ready for battle. Ryde’s defenders did not disappoint her. Most of the strongpoints erected during the Succession Wars, when the chemical-rich planet had changed hands frequently between Houses Steiner and Kurita, had been stripped of armament and allowed to fall into desuetude after The Republic’s rise. The fort near the water-purification plant had not. It was not the prize an invader would seek the planet/or —but it was unmistakably key to possession of the planet itself. The peace of The Republic notwithstanding, the Ryde authorities had kept the plant carefully guarded.
The Republic Ryde Militia strongpoint lay near the facility but several kilometers outside its confines, sprawled on a yellow plain not far from the capital. By dropping audaciously into the facility itself Malvina put the militia in the position of having to invade its own industrial complex to dislodge the Falcons. However, the Corridan IV-based Water Pure Industries, wealthy and powerful, owed both wealth and power—especially on Ryde itself—in no small part to this very plant. It maintained a large and comprehensively trained security detachment of its own, equipped with VTOLs, armored vehicles, armored infantry equipped with Gnome power suits based upon the older Elemental design, and even a Hatchetman BattleMech; WPI gave protecting its precious plant precedence over Devlin Stone’s desire to eliminate ’Mechs from private hands. As reliant as anyone else on the planet upon the steady stream of purified water flowing from the facility, successions of Governors had done nothing to pressure the corporation into scrapping the machine.
While Gyrfalcon aerospace fighters drew networks of white contrail against mauve sky, dueling in the stratosphere with Ryde fighters, Malvina herself burst forth from the landing ship’s bay in her huge, hawk- headedShrike , ornamental wings extended, followed by an Elemental swarm. Ten ’Mechs emerged after hers. A Star of five immediately set off to the south to counter any thrusts by the Defense Force regulars. The rest, supported by the Elementals in their super-sized power armor, strode off at once into the Cubist jungle of pipes and giant tanks after their commander, leaving the Galaxy’s vehicles, VTOLs, and unpowered infantry to sort themselves out.
It was not that Malvina disdained the combined-arms paradigm dominant in modern war; like her brother she had earned ristar status and Galaxy command by successfully leading troops in battle as well as by her sheer prowess as a MechWarrior—and her force-of-nature ferocity. Battles were not won without understanding how to fight vehicles and infantry in concert with BattleMechs; and battles she had won. What made her plunge right in was her sheer bloodlust, her desire for the hunt, especially in the wake of the frustrations of Chaffee. She had gone to extremes to instill the sameyarak —the bird of prey’s eagerness for the hunt—in her Gyrfalcons.
Now she unhooded them and let them fly.
Although a range of jagged mountains, source of the plant’s raw material, stood near, the morning was warm. Ryde’s sun stood high in the sky. It was already hot in Malvina’s cockpit as she settled her ’Mech down just beyond a hash of white-gleaming pipes two meters through.
Gunfire flashed in her peripheral vision. Heat-blooms of chemical propellant ballooned in her IR display. A fire team of WPI security troops was engaging her with conventional projectile rifles. And somewhat more: she felt a tiny shudder ripple through Black Rose’s ninety-five tons of mass as the shaped charge warhead of a light anti- armor rocket spent itself on the armored housing of her left hip actuator.
A subconscious glance at her internal status displays confirmed what she already knew: the rocket had left a hot spot and dug a slight crater in the armor.
She laughed as she destroyed the unarmored infantry with a burst of flechette rounds from the heavy autocannon twinned in theShrike ’s left arm.
Around her men and women hunted others, killed, died. The shrieks of unarmored infantry soldiers caught by Elemental flamers shrilled in her audio pickups like the cries of startled seabirds—on a world that had seas, and birds. Explosions boomed and crackled and cannon cracked on all sides.
Not all the dying was being done by one side. A Point of Elementals leapt into the sky like giant fleas to attack a group of light armored vehicles with their short-range missile launchers. A Crow scout chopper appeared abruptly from behind a huge, yellow-painted tank as if falling up. Its lasers flared scarlet, tumbling two giant warriors from the sky. A third power suit exploded as first its right-hand launcher and
then its flamer fuel were ignited by the beam’s hot kiss. The other two Elementals ducked for safety behind a spatter of missiles that missed. Then a PPC bolt from somewhere behind Malvina blew the VTOL into a black cloud raining yellow fire.
In her ears rang the raptor cries of her MechWarriors outside the plant striking south. The planetary militia, forewarned, had reacted to her landing with exemplary quickness. It was killing them. With their own vehicles, infantry clinging to armored backs and flanks, trailing after, the five Gyrfalcon BattleMechs charged at full speed through the defenders’ advancing armor, slashing, slaying, more like diamond sharks ripping through shoals of ice cod in the chill, inhospitable waters of Strana Mechty than Jade Falcons stooping on prey.
The metal tangle all around made gibberish of Malvina’s magnetic anomaly detector. She didn’t know theHatchetman was there until it suddenly lunged from behind a three-story cinder-block pumping station. Its huge depleted uranium hatchet, the size of a house wall, swung toward her cockpit in a desperate all-or-nothing shot for the one target that might permit the forty-five-ton ’Mech to take down her twice-as-heavy and more behemoth.
But Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen had senses keen and reflexes quick even for a Clan Mech Warrior. Although she could read the display strip beneath the low, wide windscreen that compressed the whole three-sixty view around her machine as readily as her natural vision, it was her peripheral sight that showed the heavy blade
