the Republicans broke contact and fell back upon their seminary hill, the Keshik warriors stopped to rest and tend their wounds.
So in the end it fell to Aleks’ once-despised Turkina’s Beak, tired but triumphant, to mount the last advance and seize the prize: the planet Skye.
***
Let Bacchus’ sons be not dismayed,
But join with me, each jovial blade—
Come, booze and sing and lend your aid To help me with the chorus.
The man whose name was not, any longer, Paul Laveau was well and trulyin the wind, riding flat out, leaning over the bars of the HIM cruiser and shouting a song into its teeth:
Instead of spa, we’ll drink brown ale And we’ll pay the reckoning on the nail;
For debt no man shall go to jail From Garryowen in glory!”
Okay, he admitted to himself.! lied to Tara when I said I didn’t know “Garryowen.” It was one of only two I told her.
Of course, the other was alittlemore substantial ....
He was so near the fighting now that a misaimed volley of LRMs brought down the facades of two trim brick houses, one yellow, one red, in the center of a cross-street block to his left as he passed. The racket of explosions and collapse could barely be distinguished for the general din.
Ahead of him, just half a kilometer away, he could see the hill with the seminary building on top of it and the Highland command post on the near slope. Just to his right stood Tara’s distinctiveHatchetman , with a bend in the weird tailfin assembly on its head crest. Five other BattleMechs stood or clanked around, getting set to meet the Falcon onslaught.
Much nearer to his left he saw a big Clan ’Mech striding among houses. His face split in a wide grin as he recognized an old friend among hostile strangers: “APhoenix Hawk IIC, by God!” Though the Falcons had it tarted up with that ridiculous hawk head—the wings it had already—they seemed to be sticking on all their new models and upgrades these days.
He stopped the bike, kicked down the stand, dismounted and opened the big panniers beside the rear tire. He removed certain items which he tucked into zippered pockets of his leather jacket and pants. One particular item he tucked, gingerly and not without a silent unbeliever’s prayer, inside the front of his waistband.
Then he remounted, retracted the kickstand, ripped the engine back to life, and sang:
We are the boys that take delight In smashing the Limerick lamps when lighting, And through the streets like scorchers fighting
Tearing all before us.
He rode full-throttle toward thePhoenix Hawk, just as if he knew what he was doing.
Or not.
“Countess,’”Duke Gregory’s gruff voice said, “we’re sorely pressed up here. Can you send us help?”
Tara straightened herHatchetman ’s legs to shoot its shoulder-mounted medium laser over the brow of the hill at a Bellona tank that had nosed forward between two houses to her right to try to get a shot at the seminary defenders. The shot gouged armor from the turret’s front. The hovertank fired its own large laser back, burning another track across the abused sod a few meters down-slope from where Tara’s machine lurked and sniped. It ducked back amid a blast of debris kicked up by its fans.
“Negative, your Grace,” Tara said, crouching again so that she could just peer over the blades of grass on the hilltop. “I’m sorry. But we’re about to get all we can handle here: looks as if they’re massing for a big push. If something breaks I’ll send you all I can as soon as I can, but beyond that I can’t make any promises.”
“Understood,”the Duke said promptly and without rancor. Under the stress of combat he behaved far more reasonably than most times Tara had dealt with him before, at least up until the very last few days.
Not that it was likely to mean much for long. “Here they come!” she heard somebody shout as the Duke signed off, from her external audio pickups, not over the radio net. And ’Mechs and vehicles and Elementals and infantry swarmed out of the battered houses as Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen mounted his attack on the planet Skye’s last line of defense.
“Give ’em hell, Highlanders!” she shouted. Republican ’Mechs and vehicles rushed forward to the crest to pour desperate fire upon the attackers.
Not Paul Laveau sang as he scaled the Phoenix Hawk:
We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors,
The watch knocked down by threes and fours,
Tonight the doctors work their cures.
And tinker up our bruises.
The light ’Mech stood at the rear of what looked like a supermarket, shooting its torso-mounted autocannon over the loading dock at a pair of Demon wheeled tanks. Its pilot, distracted, had not noticed Paul’s approach. Nor was the MechWarrior likely to even dream anyone would be rash enough to climb the machine’s back with a pair of gripper gloves. Paul wondered, briefly, what the Demon drivers made of the sight.
We’ll beat the bailiffs out offun,
We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run We are the boys no man dares dun If he regards a whole skin.
It made him smile: that always was his favorite verse. Even if he couldn’t hear himself over the cannon yammer.
He had his rationalizations well in a row by then. It was not in his employers’ interests for the Falcons to get a grip anywhere in the Inner Sphere, Republic or otherwise. So he was permitted to do his chaotic part to spike their nefarious schemes.
When he reached theHawk ’s shoulder he was slightly breathless from the exertion of swarming up the enemy machine. Weeks of sedentary detective work had told on him. It certainly wasn’t trepidation: his illustrious great-grandmother, Cassie Southern, had taught him the fine points of taking on ’Mechs bare-handed as well aspentjak . Even if, unlike her, he was glad to keep his damned trousers on.
One of the Demons exploded. The other reversed hastily out of sight around a corner. Paul didn’t mind; he had been concerned they’d blast him shooting at thePhoenix Hawk . He sang to himself, scarcely voicing:
Our hearts so stout have got us fame,
For soon ’tis known from whence we came—
He planted his feet on thePhoenix Hawk ’s shoulder, hoping it wouldn’t decide to run anywhere, slapping his left hand against the cockpit armor to anchor himself. He bit the non-adhesive back of the right-hand gauntlet to loosen it from his hand, shook it free, let it drop. His freed hand reached for that which he carried in his waistband.
Where’er we go, they dread the name—
Yanking his left hand free, he used it to punch the rescue bar. The cockpit popped open with a hiss of equalizing air pressure.
The Mech Warrior turned with a look of utter astonishment—
Of Garryowen in glory.
Into the ruby flash of a laser pistol.
Tucking the pistol away again—because you just never knew when one of those might come in handy—Paul swung himself into the cockpit with his butt on the instrument panel. He punched the harness release and tumbled the decapitated body out into the now-cold winter air. A woman. It gave him a qualm, but no more than killing a man. He felt no guilt at taking the life of a Clan warrior, any more than he would a trachazoi pouncing with the intent of eating his brain. But he had resolved never to take killing a human being lightly.
He retrieved the neurohelmet set. Inside the cockpit was a mess. But the squeamishness had been trained out of him long ago, by harsher teachers than his great-grandmother.
At eighty tons theIIC mark ofPhoenix Hawk was the classicHawk on steroids. He was familiar with the basic modularized Clan control systems, and he had trained on simulators of just this model. He could drive it, except—
Like all BattleMechs, thePhoenix Hawk was secured by having its neurohelmet keyed solely to its assigned pilot’s brainwave patterns. It would respond to those patterns and only those unless reprogrammed. Overriding that protective system was an exceedingly difficult, tedious prospect.
