without overall command.” She did not mention that Prefect Della Brown and Legate Stanford Eckard were well out of harm’s way in the Lord Governor’s palace in downtown New London; she meant what she said.
“But he’s here anyway,” she said with a shrug, as Tara Bishop’sPack Hunter came striding around the corner of the seminary building. “We might as well go make nice so he’ll go back to his own command post where he belongs.”
Sutton Road
Approaching the Gyrfalcon Landing Zone Hemphill Mine 15 August 3134
The Forlorn Hope was on the march.
That Malvina Hazen had jumped the gun on the planned landing was a bonus for Skye’s defenders. Tara ordered her Hope to engage the Gyrfalcons in hopes of catching them on the advance. That was the fight Tara and her beloved Republic faced this day.
They came from varied life paths, for various reasons. And in all flavors: English-speakers, German-speakers, Resettlement Program babies, all the mix that made up the populace of a cosmopolitan modern world. Duke Gregory had insisted on a minimum age of twenty, the age of majority
on Skye, which Tara agreed with. The oldest known recruit was a female retired teacher and marathon runner who admitted to eighty-seven.
Each had his or her reason for volunteering to march into the Falcon guns. All shared a single purpose: throw the invaders into disorder, disrupt and weaken them, give the following Militia and Highlander units a chance to crush murderous Malvina in detail before the Turkina Keshik and Zeta Galaxy could come up to support. It was a slim and desperate chance—a forlorn hope.
It was a beautiful day. Beautiful opportunity awaited the Forlorn Hope: Malvina’s Gyrs werealready in chaos, reeling from the catastrophic trap and isolated from the rest of thedesant, even now in view, burning its way down the sky to the designated landing zone to the column’s southwest.
But everything had already gone wrong.
Weston Heights
15 August 3134
“Pull back,” Tara Campbell said fervently into the microphone in her hand. She was patched to the Forlorn Hope’s leader through the mobile command center. “Colonel ter Horst, this is a direct order.”
“Regrettably,” ter Horst’s voice returned, “I cannot comply, Countess.” He had been a baker yesterday.
Tara’s lips skinned back from her teeth. Captain Tara Bishop stood by, practically vibrating from her frustrated inability to do anything to help her superior and friend. “Youhave to, Joop! This is supposed to be a spoiling attack, dammit. It’s intended to break up a Falcon advance. But Malvina’snot advancing . And you can’t do anything to dug-in Falcons but die in windrows.”
True to form, Malvina had dived into the Firehouse Gang’s pit trap headfirst. Now, unexpectedly, she showed prudence. Aerial observation revealed she had emplaced her surviving forces southeast of the still-smoking pit in a semicircle bowed toward New London. Behind the line lurked half a dozen JESII launch vehicles.
“You’re already out of our Long Tom coverage,” Tara radioed. “Turn around and come back. Or just ditch the vehicles where they are and make your way out of the Falcon axis of advance on foot—head your people northeast, toward Cowpens”
“We have come too far already—”
“Don’t yousee? I can’t send troops to support youMake your people stop! ”
“I have so ordered, Countess. But they do not obey. They drive by me when I try to block their road.” She could see his shrug: “What can I do, then, but stay at their head, having brought them so far?”
Tara Campbell squeezed her eyes shut against a hot torrent of tears. She wanted to fall to her knees and cry till she died.I cannot break down, she knew.I’m still in command.
“Then may God have mercy on all our souls,” she whispered.
As he desired, Joop ter Horst was first to die. The blue kiss of a particle-projector beam exploded his command vehicle: his own delivery hovertruck in makeshift armor.
With courage that would have done credit to Knights of the Sphere, the rest of the column turned as one off the hardtop and into the fields to charge the Falcon battle line. They were intent on getting close enough to deliver one good blow with the support weapon—machine gun, laser, or rocket launcher—bolted to every vulnerable vehicle.
Some succeeded. Some even drew Gyr blood.
In the horizontal storm of fire with which Malvina Hazen answered them, death came quickly to all, whether their final efforts told or not.
Twenty klicks to the east Tara Campbell stood on the peaceful green seminar lawn and listened to them
die.
Countryside West of New London 15 August 3134
Between hills covered in trees to whose branches a few defiant brown and orange leaves clung, and fields of Terran sunflowers tall as Elementals nodding plate-sized autumn-yellow heads in sunlight, Aleksandr Hazen’s Zeta Galaxy advanced at speed.
Time and again lead vehicles, usually speedy Nacon or Fox hovercraft, were blown into brief yellow fireballs by roadside ambushes. These were quickly smashed by heavy fire from BattleMechs and tanks. Surviving ambushers were rooted out by infantry and burned down by Elementals. The columns streaming toward New London slowed but did not stop.
The attack columns only halted when confronted by roadblocks held in force. If these could be expeditiously reduced by tank and ’Mech weapons, indirect bombardment with long-range missiles and VTOL strikes, they were. Otherwise, the Falcons simply veered around them. Their BattleMechs and tracked and hover vehicles moved readily cross-country. So did most of their wheeled AFVs; the ones that broke down were abandoned without thought and left burning.
Behind Aleks, Malvina’s shattered Gyrs followed painfully to his left. Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, Supreme Commander, seemed preoccupied with securing the drop zone, and was releasing his Keshik warriors to follow the advance as planned with the stinginess of a Lyran merchant.
The defenders had one thing the Falcons had no ready answer for: long-range artillery—Snipers, Thumpers, Long Toms—which could dump devastating barrages upon the charging ground forces from ranges far beyond their ability to retaliate. Although a fierce air battle raged, of aerospace fighters and VTOLs, occasionally a Falcon pilot would spot one of the giant, not-very-mobile launchers, stoop on it and destroy it—usually at cost of his or her machine, if not life. Clan aerospace jocks were not Decanted to die in bed, any more than their Elemental or MechWarrior comrades.
All hardly registered on Aleks. For the first time in his life he strode to battle without the fierce, anticipating joy of a Falcon born.
All he cared for wasadvance . He drove his Galaxy not harshly, but relentlessly. So long as Turkina’s Beak Galaxy kept moving forward, he had his best defense against the brutal punishment of Skye artillery. He could outrun the massive barrages with their long flight times, kill such enemy spotters as he could with infantry and fast hovercraft scouts to blind the distant launchers, and change speed and route periodically to keep the highly skilled Republican artillerists from correcting their fire by simply calculating where his troops would be at a given moment and arranging for a few tons of high explosive to meet them.
It did not work perfectly. Aleksandr Hazen had not been raised to expect perfection. It workedenough
He fought his command and his BattleMech with mechanical precision. His Galaxy now functioned as smoothly as a veteran formation: subcommanders and individual warriors used their own initiative, so that he need rarely issue orders. When enemies came within reach of Black Rose’s weapons he killed them with little more thought than he would have given to swatting mosquitoes.
If he could not take pleasure in battle, Aleks would at least take comfort in sheer practice of his craft, the trade to which his entire life was bent.
And then his onslaught ran slam into its first big check: Northwind Fusiliers and Garryowens, dug-in in strength along a system of ridges rising like a wall between the Falcon LZ and New London. With weapons bore- sited in advance to turn every passage through, from road-cut to gully, into a killing ground.
The Zeta charge screamed to a halt—as Long Tom rockets screamed down the sky upon them.
