With more BattleMechs sliding up in their direction, the two Guardsmen might have made a bad end of it if not for the mercenaries. The Vindicator and a Blackjack also painted with the Bengal pelt suddenly turned in their direction and sprinted inside the Caesar’s line of retreat. They savaged the Rommel, blasting one set of armored treads clean off and freezing the turret inside a ruined track. Then they turned up from the Lamprey, and came at the Caesar from behind while Kelly pushed forward to catch the RCT machine in a pincer.
The seventy-ton machine held on for a few long heartbeats, then broke for the DropShip in a circuitous path that avoided the scattered Thunders and left the slower mercenaries behind. All of the RCT machines fell back, heading for the final ramp.
The scattered mercenaries, with two of their small number out of position now, let them go. Within moments the DropShip had buttoned up and was blasting itself clear of Gan Singh.
Kelly Van Lou watched it rise into the air, soon losing itself behind a white tuft of clouds. Her breath came short and sharp, and had nothing to do with the hot, humid air in her cockpit. It had everything to do with the hollow pit deep in her gut. If the Donegal Guards could turn on each other, she wondered, what was left for the now-estranged Lyran Alliance and Federated Commonwealth?
As if in answer to her silent question, her communications board lit up on an unsecured channel. “We picked up some garbled transmissions.” The accented voice from before. The Vindicator’s MechWarrior. With a moment to weigh it, he sounded Slavic. Maybe a native of Gan Singh. Maybe not.
“There may be a DropShip set down on the northern coast of Pandora. Near the city of Myros. The last DropShip on Gan Singh,” he said tiredly as the remnant mercenaries gathered near their position.
Of course it was. That was the nature of battle and politics, after all. Always one more chance. If you were smart or lucky, or both at the same time. “Working together for this one might be in our common good,” Kelly said, then waited for Roland to make the final call.
“It’s a ten hour push,” he said slowly. “We can do it without sleep if you can.”
“Sounds like a plan.” The Vindicator turned away to the northwest, and struck out with a determined stride.
Roland switched over to a secure frequency. One reserved for Third Donegal Guards, Seventh Company. Maybe the last time they’d use it. “Did they just become one of ours?” he asked. “Or did we become one of theirs?”
“Right now,” Kelley answered, “I think we all belong to Pandora. And Gan Singh.” She pushed into an easy walk, keeping pace with the limping Penetrator as she switched back to a common frequency. “Maybe it’s time to see what’s left on this world,” she said.
“What we have to work with.”
DAMAGE CONTROL
by Ilsa J. Bick
Scorpius Planus, Thuban
Bolan Province
Lyran Alliance
9 September 3064
There was a muffled roar as heavy cannon fire punched the sky, like the distant growl of thunder. An instant later, the floor of the medical Quonset twitched and jumped under her boots, and Dr. Elizabeth Trainer felt her heart slam into her throat. A steely talon of panic dug into her chest and she clutched at the edges of the chair where she sat. Relax. They’re still more than twenty klicks away. She dragged in a deep, calming breath, and instantly regretted it. The Quonset’s cooling units were going full blast, but the air was heavy with ash and the stench of rancid sweat, rotten eggs, and something sweet and burnt. It reminded Trainer of pork roasted on a spit, drizzling juices into sputtering flames that licked along the meat.
But she knew the smell wasn’t pork.
The front lines were to the east, on the black basalt expanse of the Scorpion Plains that spread around the base of Scorpius Mons, Thuban’s highest volcano. The Plains—a vast, ruined landscape of lava hummocks—were riddled with steam plumes and sulfur vents. And that’s where the soldiers and BattleMechs of the Twenty-Third Arcturan Guard were fighting and dying in a battle against their brothers, the warriors of the Eleventh Arcturan Guard. It was a battle that Trainer could smell and hear and feel but, mercifully, not see because she was so afraid that Jonathan might be there, in the thick of it.
Oh, God, please keep him safe…
A man’s voice—tremulous and very frightened—cut into her thoughts. “I… I don’t know what happened. It was as if I’d been airdropped into hell.”
Trainer blinked back to attention. The MechWarrior was perched on the edge of a cot, his head bowed. His right knee jiggled up and down like a piston. Trainer sat on a chair she’d pulled around to the captain’s cot. There were no offices in the Quonset, and so a psychiatrist had to make do. Now, she crossed her right leg over her left, and clasped her hands over her knees. “I know it’s hard, Captain Stanton,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could even though she felt a slick of clammy perspiration along the back of her neck. “But you’ll be better off if you talk about it. I know that talking makes it more real…”
“Christ, yes,” said Stanton, jerking his face up in a sudden, spastic movement. His eyes locked onto hers. His eyes were very blue, like Jonathan’s: the color of sky on a cloudless afternoon. But that’s where the resemblance ended.
Stanton had been found, unresponsive and nearly catatonic, in the cockpit of his Zeus, a kilometer from their unit. Medications—not many, because she wanted him lucid—had relaxed him, and he was looking a little more… human. Not like the frightened animal they’d found. Still, there were purple smudges
