Victor Milan - Flight of the Falcon

Between their excitement at the reckless near-miss and the war fleet’s infuriating nonresponse, and a good deal of internal commentary on high-handed Clan arrogance, no one heard a thing as ten small rubberized magnets clamped themselves to the hull near the main airlock. Nor did they hear the lock’s outer hatch open and close, nor hear it cycle.

Their first warning was the slight pressure change as the inner hatch opened. And then it was much too late. The station’s unarmed crew—nominally military, but in fact LCAF technicians who had no weapons nor even instruction in their use beyond a gesture in that direction during basic training—found themselves facing five figures, four gigantic in armor and one dwarfed by them in a standard EVA pressure suit. They also faced three microlasers swapped with flamers—a daft weapon in enclosed quarters—in the arms of three contemporary suits of Clan battle armor, an old-style suit’s small laser, and one pulse-laser pistol gripped in a spacesuit-gauntleted hand.

“I am Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen of Clan Jade Falcon,” the smallest figure, who still loomed over all the observation post’s crew, said in a pleasant and cheerful baritone voice. “You are now my captives.”

And so they were. In part because of the courage shown by their initial challenge, no Falcon challenged Aleks’ mandate that the crew be kept safe under lock down and then released unharmed when the Clanners had no further use for their silence.

After the initial excited reports of the Jade Falcon emergence, all further beamcasts from the station indicated that nothing whatever of interest occurred.

Somehow they omitted to mention when half a dozen DropShips detached themselves from JumpShips and headed for the ecliptic at a one-gee standard burn.

“No opposition, Aleks,” Star Colonel Magnus Icaza’s voice said into Aleks’ earpiece. “I am disappointed in these Porrimans ”

The giant stood in his Elemental battle armor beside theGyrfalcon ’ s right foot on the low, marshy bank of the river. It was the classic armor with head and torso one immovable egg-shaped piece, not the current mark with a helmet that could swivel like a tank turret. When monster Magnus had passed his Elemental Trial of Position on Winfield in the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone, it was determined that none of the modern armor in the armory fit him. The techs had to pull an old outfit out of storage.

“Hmm,” Aleks said, smiling. “I think they will oblige us right enough.”

He called his fifty-five-ton BattleMech “White Lily,” after the personal insignia painted on the front of its left shoulder: a lily gripped in a steel-gauntleted fist. He swiveled the machine’s torso right to point toward a black column of smoke unspooling into the sky from the superhighway, several kilometers south, which led into the walled city. It put behind him the looming egg-shaped mass of the DropShip, which had sunk in almost to the flared Venturi nozzles of the drives in the soft bank. Star Captain Mason had put the ship down without further demur and with exquisite skill.

For his part, Aleks had already forgotten the man’s reluctance. What was this misbegotten raid for, if not to give his men and women the chance to show what they were really made of?

“Our friends in the First Mixed Cluster report some brisk resistance,” Aleks said. He had taken the unorthodox step of combining his Eyrie and Solahma Clusters and then splitting them into mixed formations. The second he had dispatched north to raid the great Heimdal mining complex on Steinerheim, the supercontinent sprawled across the planet’s north pole.

Eyries consisted of youngsters who had yet to prove themselves in battle. The Solahma comprised older warriors who had lost Trials of Position and were deemed no longer fit for front-line service. He felt the youngsters—who as, basically, adolescents were reckless even by Jade Falcon standards—could use the tempering the veterans could provide. And the older warriors might benefit from exposure to youthful eagerness and energy. He had tried similar expedients successfully before, and hoped it would help his green Galaxy with its legacy of disgrace stand up to its first immersion in the combat cauldron.

“The defenders have deployed heavy anti-armor weapons in reasonably good hasty positions,” reported Star Captain Folke Jorgensson, approaching in hisBlack Hawk . Clan Jade Falcon maintained none of the fifty-ton ’Mechs in its BattleMech park. The Ghost Bearabtakha had taken the machine from Clan Wolf even as he himself had earlier been taken from them. “That’s one of our precious few Mars assault vehicles you see burning down there; apparently the Porrimans have mastered the concepts of ambush and rear-aspect shots at heavy armor.”

Aleks’ brow creased briefly. The boxy one-hundred-ton Mars with its massive armor and bristle of heavy weaponry had made up much of the mass of the blow the Mixed Cluster was hurling down the blacktop toward the city’s now-sealed stressed-cement floodgates. Most of the Third Falcon Velites’ BattleMechs and all their own armor, landed from Aleks’ DropShip, were striking south overland to take the highway defenders in the flank.

“They wanted us blooded,” he said in a clouded voice. “Now blooded we are.”

Magnus Icaza clanged his suit’s right arm, the one mounted with a manipulator claw, on the bulging armored housing protecting the right-ankle actuator of Aleks’Gyrfalcon . “We’ll make it up withisorla and more, Aleks, lad.”

“If they have any booty worth the taking—” Jorgensson began.

Magnus Icaza snorted thunderously. “We need no Ghost Bear gloom here, Folke Jorgensson.”

“—or if any survives the taking, my overly sanguine Elemental friend.” Aleks had long learned he could trust the two to banter almost ceaselessly without one ever going for the other’s throat. Magnus, outsized since birth, had enjoyed a situation opposite to runt Aleksandr’s sibko experience: he had been so huge even other Elementals were reluctant to tangle with him. Folke, a perfectionist, shared Aleks’ keen hatred of waste. Nor did he feel, having won his freedom, his BattleMech, and his right to use the Bloodname he had already won in blood in his birth-Clan, that he had anything more to prove. Seven Falcons decanted had taken Jorgensson’s reticence for cowardice since Aleks had severed the last of his bondsman’s cords. Two had actually survived, though one was so badly injured that he had been forced to retire to a Solahma unit and had found an honorable death against Periphery pirates.

Aleks set off straight toward the city, leading a Star of five jump-capable ’Mechs and a Star of twenty-five Elementals—five Points of five warriors each. Shortly they came on a great cement-lined gouge in the earth: a flood-control ditch, meant to channel the catastrophic floods which occurred every sixty-two years away from the city’s walls. Aleks’ DropShip had mapped the channel complex from space; a display of it glowed in the cockpit before him. A path in red led to a point hard beneath the walls themselves.

He led his scratch Binary right into the channel. A trickle of oil-sheened water meandered along its wide bottom. The channel provided his strike force a high-speed route, allowing the machines to move at near the top pace of the slowest BattleMech. It also gave excellent concealment from observation. The channels were twelve meters deep, as required to contain the violent floods of storm season; the BattleMechs could march unseen. To avoid having them leap into view like killer locusts, the Elementals rode clinging to the BattleMechs like baby opossums.

Aleks hoped that by gaining a swift, decisive advantage he could persuade the poor children of Allison City to surrender before he had to kill too many of them.