Aleks and Malthus stared at one another. Launching was not scheduled to begin for two more hours. “If that confounded woman proves mewrong for having kept her in command,” Malthus said in a voice like pebbles in a crusher, “rest assured that I will do what you would not!”
Hemphill Mine West of New London Skye
15 August 3134
White Reaperfell through thin high overcast toward Skye, to a point ten kilometers west-northwest of New London. Strapped into the crash harness of herShrike —more tightly than she had been for yesterday’s duel with her accursed sibling—Malvina watched the planet hurtle at them through vision blocks slaved to the DropShip’s hull- mounted video pickups.
Well, she was showing Aleks and thatsurat Malthus that, defeated in Trial or not, she hadnot bowed the neck. And she was about to show her Gyrfalcons and indeed the wholedesant that she was still fit to be ristar and Galaxy Commander.
While Malthus’ ship had descended over the North Pole for the duel, the other DropShips began orbiting Skye. They duly swept the surface with their potent sensor arrays: telescopes, infrared, side-looking and oblique radar, magnetic and gravitic anomaly detectors. Naturally, they devoted especial attention to the next day’s chosen battleground.
And they had struck pure palladium: a shallow kilometer-wide bowl gouged from the Holyrood Hills twenty kilometers northwest of New London and almost due north of thedesant DropShips’ agreed-upon landing zone. It was an open-pit copper mine, permitted by Skye’s stringent environmental laws on a guarantee that once the ore played out, the land would be returned to its previous formation and reseeded, a technique used with success across human space. Unfortunately, it had been idled not by the playing-out of the vein, but by the Blakist Jihad. Since then—analyst-techs drew the information from a commercially available database of Republican worlds purchased from a Lyran trader in the Falcon OZ during invasion planning—schemes had alternately been mounted to reopen or reclaim the mine. Despite both The Republic’s economic boom and its emphasis on environmental protection, neither had quite come to pass.
Now, it seemed, Duke Gregory had found use for it at last: pulling a fast one.
A gypsy camp had sprung up in the big bowl, now itself grown green with years. It featured the usual array of “caravans”—the interstellar nomads’ colorfully painted transport, wheeled and ground-effect—and pavilions, as well as evidence of long-term settlement in the form of shacks and larger structures of plywood and plastic sheeting, with corrugated metal roofs.
The encampment had, according to intel analysis, probably sprung up in the last few days—weeks at most. The crafty Spheroids plainly hoped the combination of metal roofs, ludicrous variegated vehicles—probably hulks towed over from a nearby scrapyard—and the metal ore yet in the ground would baffle orbiting Clan detectors. In their haste, they forgot one thing: the neutron emissions of idling fusion bottles for what appeared to be the equivalent of a pre-Republican company of at least twelve BattleMechs. Malvina’s techs believed the ’Mechs were augmented by a lance of armored vehicles and, from analysis of several freestanding figures draped in brightly patterned cloth, perhaps a lance of IndustrialMechs as well.
Had they sallied forth to take the Falcons in flank as they advanced from their specified landing zone, a force that size might have dealt a staggering blow. Had it bided its time, waited until the attack had rolled away out of range, and charged for the landed DropShips, it might have caused pure catastrophe, albeit at the cost of its own nearcertain destruction under the spacecrafts’ powerful defensive batteries. A company, even of rare BattleMechs, was no large price to pay for even one DropShip, and they might well take out more.
But ifthey were the ones surprised. . . .
Not six hundred meters away, a sixty-ton FalconVisigoth swept by, bleeding smoke, its armored sides sparking with hits from a barracuda-shoal of three Skye aerospace fighters. A PPC bolt took out its starboard engine. It pitched forward and exploded in a yellow fireball.
A moment later a pursuing RepublicanSholagar came apart as two medium pulse lasers and a large laser from theOverlord -class DropShip made it the apex of a deadly tetrahedron of light.
Malvina emitted a triumphant cry as the other two enemy fighters sheared off and streaked away. It was echoed by her MechWarriors, waiting like her in their steel and synthetic cocoons for battle. A thirty-five- tonSholagar was a poor exchange for a heavy Clan fighter in all truth: but she wanted to keep their passions focused onvictory .
The green hills and autumn yellow fields of Skye rushed up to embrace her like a lover’s arms.
A derelict blacktop parking lot, frost-heavied and weed-grown, provided a superb surface for DropShip landing jacks. Even before the bulge-belted egg of a vessel settled and its drive-flames died away, its bay doors opened and a trio of BattleMechs of the Fifth Battle Cluster sprang into the milky dawn leaking out of the hills to the east, led by young Star Colonel Cedric in aNight Gyr . Cedric had won in barehanded combat both promotion and the twice- vacated command of the Golden Talons, whose emblem, now painted on the BattleMech’s chest armor, was a black shield sporting a pair of golden claws gripping a dead wolf beneath a gold “V.” He had bid low for the honor of neutralizing the imperfectly hidden Skye ’Mech force: his Alpha Trinary with himself in command.
Two more ’Mechs, non-jump-capable, clumped out of the DropShip after him, followed by vehicles and infantry. Isorla had been kind to the Trinary, thanks to Cedric’s zeal.
A JESII strategic missile carrier loosed its full breath-robbing volley of eighty long-range missiles into the open pit, turning it into an instanfaux -volcanic crater of smoke and leaping flame. With captured Shandra and Fox light vehicles racing them, the Golden Talon BattleMechs charged into the decommissioned mine with all weapons flaming.
MechWarrior Silas plunged hisUller into the pit at its full ninety-seven-kph speed, running the machine with big, clanking, jarring steps. The roof blew off a long shed as he pounded past, rust orange, chrome yellow, and gaudy blue panels fluttering like leaves away from a roaring column of orange fire.
Before him through shifting smoke curtains he saw looming a figure like the statue of a man draped in a parachute: a suspected IndustrialMech. He charged it at speed—then braked with a curse as a medium laser cracked right past him. It ate a plate-sized hole in the canopy, brown edged and self-expanding like a cancer as it burned with almost invisibly pallid flame.
Silas reached out with theUller ’s left hand, grabbed the canopy and tore it away. He triggered a pointblank blast from his right-arm LB 5-X autocannon into the middle of aMiningMech modified to
carry a quad SRM launcher and two .50-caliber machine guns to support the house-high rock cutter on its right arm.
Shattered armor splashed from the ’Mech like water from a thrown stone. The ’Mech was already afire from the laser strike.
Silas frowned. The right shoulder and torso were burning lustily, producing clouds of white smoke. Runnels of liquid flame streamed from it, eroding deep canyons in what was supposedly metal plate and mechanism. The central torso region gaped open, bleeding—
Junk. A short cylindrical object slipped out and fell to the ground, and it took Silas’ astonished eyes and brain a full second to recognize it as an electric motor, such as might be used to operate a small water pump. Less identifiable pieces of metallic scrap, rust-smeared and now scorched, dropped thudding to the grass-covered ground.
“These are no ’Mechs!” Silas called on the Trinary frequency, his young voice breaking. “They are p-plywood and foam, filled with scrap metal!”
A new horrific certainty hit him like a rogue asteroid. He opened his mouth to add,It’s a trap!
But just then, two hundred kilograms of liquid-poured pentaglycerine gel filling the QuakerMech’s lower legs detonated in obedience to a distant command.
Standing in a copse of saplings crowning a hilltop sixteen hundred meters south of the mine pit, skinny, intense, brown-moustached Tom Cross lowered the command detonator whose red button he had just thumbed as yellow flame shot a thousand meters in the air. As the mad genius behind most of the actual nuts-and-bolts design of the giant death trap, he had won the right to open the fireworks show. He wore a two-liter cooking pot overturned on his head by way of a helmet, with the handle turned around like the bill of a ballcap.
“Bingo,” said the gangly Seymour Street, stroking his red goatee. He wore his devil horns again. He had been in charge of fabricating the decoy QuakerMechs.
J. D. Rich stroked his blond handlebar mostache with a thumb and nodded judiciously as secondary
