Victor Milan - Flight of the Falcon

They reached the nearest approach of the channel to the city walls. Not built as defenses, at least against human threats, the walls here rose almost sheer twenty meters above ground level. Overhead observation on descent had confirmed what Aleks learned from the world’s entry in the Fleet database: that the walls were thirty meters thick at the base, sloping along the backside to ten meters’ width at the top.

A leap from the bottom of the flood-control ditch brought him to the lip between it and the wall. With neither command nor checking to see if the others followed he gathered his ’Mech and jumped to the top of the wall. As he did, he extended the metal wings built onto the back of his hawk-headed BattleMech; they served no purpose but to strike fear in foes and make the statement that Clan Jade Falcon had come. Aleks liked their theatrical touch himself.

A half kilometer to his right rose the control housings for the massive floodgates that blocked the road into Allison City. The leading elements of his mixed Cluster had already battled within a few hundred meters of the gates along the eight-lane highway and the ground to both sides. They had successfully forced passage of the long bridge over the Equanica River and now fought to cross the second bridge, across the flood channel from which Aleks and his strike force had just emerged.

White smoke tentacles reached out toward Aleks’ BattleMech.

Allison City Porrima 3 April 3134

Aleks looked down into the city. A mixed force of armor and unarmored infantry approached the gate from within, supported by a gigantic Ml Marksman tank and aRyoken II BattleMech.

He grinned. A favorite among the Wolves, the seventy-five-ton ’Mech was an old friend. It was a very serious machine, as for that matter was the ninety-five-ton tank. Golden Age of Peace or not, the Archon had provided her suzerainty some real firepower.

“ ’Mech’s mine,” he said over the Binary command channel, and jumped. “Take down the rest. Try not to damage the gatehouses.”

The rocket barrage, fired from both tank and BattleMech, smashed down where theGyrfalcon had briefly stood, sending out great geysers of grayish dirt from the wall’s berm backslope and slabs of cement flying from its top. He shot back with the Ultra autocannon in his ’Mech’s arms. HisGyrfalcon bled heat beautifully; he could run and jump and shoot all day so long as he was judicious in firing his two large extended-range lasers, also arm-mounted.

“Unidentified PorrimanRyoken II pilot,” he broadcast on what, during their descent, had been identified as a general armed-forces channel. “I am Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen of Clan Jade Falcon. I challenge you to single combat.”

A burst of light autocannon fire raked across his ’Mech’s chest armor, rocking it back. The heads-up indicators showed no damage done.

“I am Leutnant Colonel Rahne von Kleist of the Eighth Lyran Guards,” a woman’s voice answered. “You have come a long way to die, Galaxy Commander.”

Aleks roared laughter. Although Allison City had a population of over two million, according to his latest information—updated regularly by Jade Falcon merchants plying the Inner Sphere, and generally quite reliable—unless the Lyrans had a wholly unlooked-for troop concentration on hand, it stood no chance of successfully resisting the Clan assault force disgorged from the three DropShips the Leutnant Colonel, like everyone else across half the southern continent, had seen descend through the thin overcast this morning.

“You have the spirit of a Clanner,” he told her. “Let us see if you fight as well as you talk.”

He lit on the roof edge of a square, solid-looking warehouse across the street which ran along the inside of the wall. As he expected, it began to crumble as soon as the machine’s enormous weight came down on it. He bent theGyr ’s legs and jumped again, letting his jets carry it deeper into the city. A hellstorm of

long-range missiles pulverized the whole southern side of the warehouse in a sparkle of white flashes, raising a great cloud of cement dust. One rocket exploded against the armor plating of his right upper leg, cracking a plate. The medium BattleMech swayed alarmingly, but gyros and his own light touch on the controls held it, kept it from crashing to the ground.

Instead he landed under power in the street in front of the warehouse. Most of the immediate district seemed to be light industrial. The parking lots were mostly bare; either the invaders had beat the morning shift or the civilians had evacuated.

Elementals bounced in crisscrossing patterns like fleas on a dog. Thin pink lines stabbed through dust and smoke as infantry lasers flashed at them. The Marksman tank was concentrating on Folke Jorgensson’ sBlack Hawk, firing its Gauss rifle and medium missile launchers and clearly trying to close within range of its powerful and plentiful Streak SRMs. Jorgensson darted hisHawk up the inner slope of the seawall and back down to the broad street as fleetly as a light ’Mech, twisting its torso to shoot back with the two large lasers mounted in the ’Mech’s body.

TheBlack Hawk staggered as a solid hit from the big Gauss rifle slammed into it, locking up the shoulder actuator for its right arm. At the same time, a threat warning shrilled in the erstwhile Ghost Bear’s ears: the tank was trying to lock him up with its Streak guidance system. Firing his own heavy-missile volley from his immobilized right arm, Jorgensson jumped straight up and then veered for the top of the wall.

The Marksman lost its lock. A lucky hit from Jorgensson’s snap shot smashed the Streak quad rack on the left hand side of the turret. A moment later Magnus Icaza’s old-style Elemental battle armor landed on the tank’s front glacis to the right of the main gun.

The four Bulldog miniguns mounted in two pairs atop the turret blasted him. They chipped the fierce green visage, yellow beak, and buff belly of Turkina, Elizabeth Hazen’s own Jade Falcon, enameled on the armor’s front, began gouging streaks in the durable plate itself. But their impacts failed to dislodge the one-ton suit as Icaza grabbed the barrel of the Lord’s Thunder Gauss rifle with the armor’s right manipulator and bent it upward.

Frantically the Marksman gunner let go with the two sextuple SRM launchers mounted to either side of the now-defunct main weapon in hopes of blasting its tormentor free. But Icaza had already bent his legs and, squatting, wedged himself beneath the useless Gauss-cannon barrel outside both launchers’ arcs of fire. He plunged the manipulator down, tore away the heavy hatch over the driver’s position, and discharged the small laser in his left arm down into the tank. Steam boiled up around him as the energy beam flash-boiled the bodily fluids of the hapless driver within.

Aleks raced toward the broad highway running from the great floodgates. Explosions ripped street and structures as the Lyran armor fired desperately at racing Falcon ’Mechs and Elementals. The impacts of theGyrfalcon ’s feet buckled pavement and jarred up into Aleks’ tailbone. He scarcely noted the punishment, as he barely noticed the heat building in the cockpit. He was inured; this had been his home from an early age. It had been the first environment totally under his control—the first over which he had any degree of control whatever.

Past the end of the warehouse, a Demon wheeled tank was burning in the middle of the highway. The Ryoken II appeared at the corner, silhouetted against the beacon-like yellow flame. Its two twenty-millimeter autocannon chattered from its torso.

Not even Clan Jade Falcon’s most proficient MechWarrior—which Aleks was, after Malvina—had reflexes faster than cannon shells. But Aleks had a seasoned fighter’s cunning; he anticipated both the