explosions sent bright flashes through what was now an immense pillar of black smoke rising from a guttering red pedestal. “Nice shot,” he admitted. “Clean.”
He was the pyro man, the Master Blaster, who designed and supervised the placing of the charges, augmented by tons of gasoline with some gelling agents mixed in to lend it what Walt Whitman—his favorite ancient poet—termed the quality ofadhesiveness . He had wired the hundreds of charges for remote detonation himself—a demanding, dangerous task.
The drivers of the three Shandra advanced scout vehicles that had carried them here, a corporal and two privates from the First Kearny Highlanders, all young and female, were jumping up and down with their coal-scuttle helmets slipping all over their heads, dancing and weeping and laughing and hugging each other. Cross turned a quizzically cocked eyebrow at them.
“What?” he demanded.
“Itworked! ” Corporal Shannon Hayes exclaimed. “You just wiped out a whole Jade Falcon Trinary all by yourselves!”
Tom Cross frowned in authentic puzzlement. “Of course it worked. It’s a very fine day.”
“You know,” Street said ruminatively, “the environmental-protection people are going to have cats about those vials of radioactive emitters we borrowed from the university to spoof BattleMech fusion-engine signatures.”
“They would,” said wide, blond J. D.
“We should, like, go now, probably, probably,” said Tom Cross, his skinny body seeming to vibrate as he shifted his weight from foot to sneakered foot. He was one of the highest-paid professionals on Skye; his kicks were the cheapest known, imported fruits of Kurita slave labor. “Those Falcons are gonna be pissed.”
“No doubt,” Seymour Street said. “Your occasional flashes of contact with reality never cease to amaze me, Thomas, me boy.”
He turned to the three Northwind troopies, who were starting to giddy down as the truth of the mad SFX genius’ words penetrated their euphoria. Twirling his moustache, which wasn’t really built for it, he said, “Well, ladies? Shall we?”
In the Black Rose’s cockpit, a quarter-kilometer from the mine pit—any closer and her heat-gauge started climbing—Malvina stared into the glaring furnace that was cremating her Golden Talons. Despite the heat her face felt frozen.
The trap, fiendish as it was, had not devoured Trinary Alpha whole: several heavier vehicles and almost all the foot-sloggers, lagging behind the ’Mechs and scout cars, had survived. But all of its ’Mechs, and every vehicle and warrior who had descended into the mine, were a total write-off.
She was only glad Cedric had bid right down to cutdown: the hell pit would easily have swallowed a Cluster whole, conceivably all her Galaxy. Sadly, the youthful MechWarrior was as far beyond her gratitude as her retribution for losing his command in the blink of an eye.
“Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,”said a voice in her neurohelmet, relayed from White Reaper, now grounded in a draw seven hundred meters behind her to keep it safe from debris cast out by unceasing secondary explosions. “This is Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, Supreme Commander of this expedition. You are to hold in place until the rest of our ships touch down. You are permitted to fire on any enemies detected within range, but I order you neither to advance nor withdraw until I give the order for the planned general advance.”
“Yes,” she said.
She refused to acknowledge the deliberate provocation of Malthus’ suggesting she might withdraw. He was nothing to her, no more than a bellycrawler now.
All that mattered to her was the ambition, burning in her belly like her lovely ’Mechs and warriors in the smoking crater glowing like a wound in the placid green countryside. That and her desire to avenge herself upon the slithering Spheroids.
She would fight now as she had agreed, obedient to Malthus’ commands.
But once battle and world were won and the bellycrawlers beaten, no force in the universe would stop her taking her revenge. Not Malthus’ orders. Not the words of the Founder, centuries in the grave.
Not even, indeed, her loved and hated brother.
31
Weston Heights
Suburb West of New London
Skye
15 August 3134
As Tara Campbell walked out of the dawn toward the joint operational command post, set up on the green lawn in front of the red brick main building of a Tharkad Synod Lutheran seminary on a long bluff in the western New London suburb of Weston, the Seventh Skye Militia pipers set up a festive, earsplitting skirl.
“ ‘Garryowen,” ’ she said, forcing a smile. Still, the catchy melody and the lively enthusiasm with which it was emitted helped nudge her mind out of brooding over the orders she had just given—sending hundreds of men and women to die.
“By the way, Master Sergeant—you wouldn’t happen to’ve learned who Garry Owen was, have you?”
She had spent comparatively little time with Seventh people herself, and what she had had been too full for peripheral questions. None of the Duke’s military staff knew. Not even Paul Laveau knew; he was unfamiliar with the song, he said. Which vaguely and quite irrationally disappointed her: while there was no good reason heshould know, the knowledge of human history and culture he had unobtrusively shown her was so wide-ranging and deep that she had come to expect him to know at leastsomething about any given subject.
To her surprise Master Sergeant McCorkle nodded. “Aye, I have. But it’s not awho, Countess. ‘Garryowen’ means Owen’s Garden. A district, so I’m told by these Skye heathen, of Dublin back on Old Terra.”
The bluff around the seminary building, which was trimmed in white with a white portico, was alive with quietly purposeful activity. Particularly around the somewhat bulbous Mobile Command vehicle, beyond which herHatchetman awaited her, parked on the immaculately tended grass fifty meters away. Heads kept turning to the west where a pillar of smoke rose high into the gray-blue sky. It thrilled Tara’s heart with both triumph and trepidation.
“ ‘And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of smoke, to lead them the way,” ’ the Master Sergeant quoted softly.
“ ‘The Lord is a man of war,” ’ she quoted back to him. “Amen.”
She smiled. It was not a gentle expression. “At least we’ve drawn first blood, haven’t we, Top?”
His answering smile was startlingly bright in the gloom. “Aye, Countess, that we have.”
They heard the thuttering of a helicopter rotor, and then a Skye attack VTOL swept in a low half-circle overhead. As it drifted away and up into the sky to hover protectively, the chop of its blade gave way to the clank and thud of a big BattleMech walking the street below. In a moment anAtlas lumbered up the hill.
“Skye Alpha comes to grace us with his presence, it appears,” McCorkle said.
Tara made a face. As he had conceded her operational command of the Skye defense forces, so Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner had granted Tara the call signSkye Six, Six being a traditional designation for leader . She would not believe he had chosen his own appellation without conscious irony.
In keeping with his taste for the unexpected, instead of the skull almost invariably painted on the front of anAtlas’ round head, Duke Gregory’s machine sported the snarling face of a grizzly bear, a species long since imported to Skye, where it thrived. The image suggested nothing so much as the forbidding, hirsute visage of the Duke himself: a note of self-deprecating humor that illuminated an unlooked-for aspect of the Duke’s personality.
A complex man, Tara thought.I’m glad he’s finally decided we’re on the same side.
But she frowned slightly, and shook her head.
“I wish he wouldn’t,” she said. “A Falcon aerospace jock or two might just get lucky, and then we’d be
