32
Weston Heights Skye
15 August 3134
“We haven’t got a chance!” Panic shrilled from the radio at Tara Campbell, standing in the artificial gloom within her command crawler. “They’re swarming right up and over us! Third Platoon is overrun, and we’ve lost contact with First. Even their infantry runs up hills like bloody mountain goats!”
“Easy, Sergeant Masamoto,” Lieutenant Colonel Hanratty said soothingly. “Don’t let them get behind you. Pull back, lad—you’ve done your job.”
Another voice screamed, “ ’Mech!” from the speaker.
“Jumpin’ right for us,”Masamoto called. “Run for it, boys—dear Lord, thosewings!For the love of A scream. A rising squeal of overheating electronics. Silence.
After a moment in which she died a thousand times, Tara turned away from the faint dust of atmospherics popping from the speaker. “Comments?”
Colonels Ballantrae and Wilson, commanders of the First Kearny and the Fusiliers, stood behind her in the compartment. Tara Bishop hung to the side. Major Hirschbeck was forward at her Republican Guards command post, in woods just west of Weston Heights.
“They bypass us when they’re not outflanking and overrunning us,” Bishop said. “We’re hurting them— hammering them, even if you let the air out of damage reports. But we’re not slowing themdown
Tara’s two regimental commanders might have taken umbrage at a junior officer speaking up so forthrightly, especially with such a grim assessment. But both were seasoned combat veterans. All they did was nod.
Rather than try to hold an unbroken line, Tara had chosen to defend in depth in the forested hills to the west. Her forward forces were spread out, not bunched, positioned so as to support each other, either by immediate fire or rapid maneuver. The concept was analogous to using foam spacers between armor plates to defend against a shaped-charge warhead: the incandescent jet would lose energy and burn out before it could pierce the inner defenses.
To an extent it’s working, she knewJust not so well as we expected.
Not as well as weneededit to.
Western Outskirts of Weston Heights 15 August 3134
The combat-modified ForestryMech, sprayed with gray and tan and green in camouflage blotches, staggered as Aleks’Gyrfalcon, approaching at a run, raked 5-centimeter shells across its lightly armored chest. The thirty-five- ton machine seemed to stagger. Then Aleks triggered his large lasers. Metal plate ran like lava in glowing pink streams. Billowing black smoke, the machine toppled backward into the wreckage of the two-story motel. It had literally walked through the flimsy frame and pasteboard structure moments before, blasting a lightly armored Nacon scout car in its vulnerable rear and exploding it to flames with its 20mm autocannon, then raking a mixed Solahma-Eyrie infantry Point moving cautiously on foot down the blacktopped road.
Chunks of light debris flew away from the motel’s fa9ade, some flaming, as Aleks’ troops opened up on it with small arms and heavy weapons. He suspected it was a pointless expenditure of ammo and energy. Had there been any other enemies lurking in the long structure, they undoubtedly had already faded back into the broken, forested country and the buildings that had begun to encroach upon the right-of-way as the Falcons neared the western edge of the New London suburbs.
The ForestryMech jock had been braver than wise. The Republican defenders had already taught their foes that even ’Mechs and heavy tanks could hide in the cover of the strip-urbs, strike and then fade back before even cat-quick Jade Falcon reflexes could strike back effectively.
And the more ferociously the Zetas lashed back at their ambushers, the more rubble they dropped in their own path. Even ground-effects vehicles could be blocked, and BattleMechs slowed. Nor was rubble or even enemy action all that was slowing the once-irresistible Falcon advance to a mere creep.
Above the strip malls and service stations Aleks could see the pristine pitched roofs of hilly Weston a scant few kilometers to the east. There, he knew, the real battle would begin. He radioed Galaxy
Commander Bec Malthus.
“We must halt,” he said simply. “Quiaff?”
For a moment there came only silence back. The Supreme Commander followed Aleksandr along the country roads at a deliberate pace. His Keshik scoured out the pockets of resistance left behind by the Zeta’s lightning strike.
It was highly necessary. So Malthus’ official report to his Khan would read.
“Very well,” Malthus said in a neutral voice. “Aff. ”
Weston Heights 15 August 3134
“We’re not holding them, your Grace.”
Standing outside watching what seemed a forest of smoke pillars growing off away in the west, it was harder for Tara Campbell to speak those words than to face enemy fire. Will he come back and confirm my deepest fears: that I am perpetually out of my depth, just a pretty actress playing at war?
Instead his voice came rolling back, deep and calm as surf on a pleasant day: “I never expected we actually could keep them from the suburbs, much as I hoped we might. What then, Countess Campbell?”
“We’re getting a bit of a respite. Our units claim Aleks Hazen has bogged down in the built-up fringes west of here. Hit-and-run tactics are hurting them, slowing them down. But I think it’s their own speed that’s really slowed them. All that running up hills and smashing down trees has taken a toll. Our boy badly needs a break to rest his troops, throw some hasty repairs into his ’Mechs and vehicles, stock up on ammo from the transports they’ve got following them.”
A sudden scream of rocket engines made her duck and look rapidly around. An aerospace fighter curved around the seminary, no farther than half a klick away and about the same height above the hilltop, and vanished into the lowering overcast that had taken charge of the sky. One of ours, she realized with relief. The aerial forces had neutralized each other so far: the Jade Falcons had the clear edge in skill, but the defenders had numbers and motivation.
She was painfully aware a single lucky aerospace pilot or even VTOL jock could end her battle before she had a chance to strike a blow on her own account. But then, as a wise old great-aunt had told her once back on Northwind, nobody could promise you’d get through a given day alive in peacetime, much less war. As it was she was already feeling the old agonies that shewas alive, when so many had died already, and so hard.
“Beckett Malthus is coming up the road after Aleks,” she radioed the Duke at his command post two kilometers north. “He seems not to be in any hurry. I suspect he’s holding his Keshik out as a reserve, looking to get in on the kill.”
“What about that damned Hazen woman?”
“I’m afraid I’ve told you all the good news I’ve got, Duke Gregory. We did hurt her Gyrfalcons at the
mine”—And they massacred my poor Forlorn Hope volunteers!—“but the survivors have snapped back and are on the move. We’re hearing it from our forward units—and one report is all we’re getting from most of them. The Delta Galaxy is coming up on Aleks’ left. And coming^st ”
Among those with whom contact had been lost after a single desperate warning was Lieutenant Colonel Linda Hirschbeck, CO of the Republican Guard.
“They won’t race through built-up areas so easily.”
Tara hesitated. They can’t, she assured herself.It’s not physically possible.
She remembered reading of the superstitious dread the Clans had inspired in her forebears, after the first horrid shock of contact almost a century ago. She felt more than a touch of it now.
“No, your Grace,” she said.
“Then we shall stop them in the suburbs. Skye Alpha, out.”
“God willing,” she said softly, to the empty air.
She looked around at her officers, waiting on her at a discreet distance. “Saddle up, everybody. The Falcons are on the way.”
