Victor Milan - Flight of the Falcon

10 - Flight of the Falcon (2004) Synopsis:

PART ONE Maskirovka 1

Mechwarrior - The Dark Ages

2

3

4

5

6

7

PART TWO Desant

8

9

JO

H

M

13

.14

15

16 H 18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

PART THREE Yarak

28

29 .30 .31 .32 .33 .34 .35

About the Author

10 - Flight of the Falcon (2004)

By Victor Milan

Synopsis:

In the tenth novel in the popular MechWarrior series, Clan Jade Falcon returns to destroy the Steel Wolves once and for all. But their true goal is Skye, the capital of the Republic.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Flight of the Falcon

AROC Book / published by arrangement with the author All rights reserved.

Copyright ©2004 byWizKids, LLC

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

For information address:

The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street,New York ,New York10014.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

ISBN:0-7865-5114-3

AROCBOOK®

ROCBooks first published by The ROC Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,New York ,New York10014.

ROCand the “ROC” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

Electronic edition: August, 2004

For the splendiferous Sauer family: Eric, Jeannie, Frank and, of course, Michelle.

Just because.

An Enlightened One is an arrow aimed at Hell.

—Japanese proverb

“A means of securing the combat operations and daily activity of forces; a complex of measures designed to mislead the enemy as to the presence and disposition of forces and various military objects, their condition, combat readiness and operations and also the plans of the commander.”

—Soviet Military Encyclopaedia, Terra, 1978

1

Lyran Commonwealth Chartered JumpShipFaust von Himmel

Approaching Zenith Jump Point outbound

Summit

Lyran Commonwealth 4 March 3134

“Three hundred minutes to jump."

As the automated warning rang through the bridge of the Lyran Commonwealth-chartered merchant JumpShipFaust von Himmel, the tall, almost spectrally lean black captain turned and nodded to his short, square executive officer.

“Give the order to begin securing for transition,Herr Sanchez. Alert all DropShips to prepare to departSummit system in five hours.”

“Jawohl, KapitanGrunblum!” The exec gave him a salute like an ax blow, then turned to relay the command to the helmsman sitting at his station. His square-cut beard, white as the first snow of winter on the captain’s homeworld ofLudwigshafen , wagged emphatically to the rhythm of his words.

The captain smiled behind his own neat beard, in which he had recently, to his chagrin, found a single gray hair. In the thirty-second century such repetition of orders, to a crewwoman clearly in earshot and regarding a procedure the computers would handle by themselves unless a human intervened, might have seemed a quaint relic.

To an amateur.

Early on in his twenty-three proud years wearing themidnight black of the Lyran Commonwealth Merchant Marine, Bernhard Grunblum had learned to take nothing of space for granted. It had been crucial to his earning his Master and Commander rating after a nearly unprecedented eight years. It had also enabled him to captain theFaust , her crew—including his wife and three children, although the children were too young to take up shipboard duties yet—and the DropShips they carried like a mother opossum, safely through hundreds of jumps across the Inner Sphere in the five years since he had taken command.Redundant, yes; quaint, never.

Because space had a hundred thousand ways to kill you; and even though humankind had largely turned its back on galactic exploration, one thing humans kept discovering was brand-new ways to die in the long, cold night among the stars.

Nor had spacefarers merely the mischances and caprices of the universe to fear. Man’s most dangerous threats, as ever, came from other men. Even though he and all his crew had grown up during the era of relative peace imposed upon the Inner Sphere by the will of Devlin Stone and The Republic he had called into being at the core of human-settled space, they still knew what it was to be menaced by human sharks.

And now that interregnum of relative order and safety had ended. War had returned to human space, and with it, all its attendant evils.

The void’s chill seemed to seep into the brightly lit bridge, even as the bridge hummed around him like a finely tuned machine. Of all things he knew,Kapitan Grunblum most hateddisorder . And while the hand of House Steiner—strong and alone, undiluted by a mad attempt to share power with the Davions, as in his grandfather’s day—so far held firm within the Lyran Commonwealth, dark days had been seen already.

He feared his children would see worse.

He shook his head as if to clear it. Ach so,Berni, why cloud your mind with unpleasant thoughts?

The cosmos lies before us, waiting. You have all that any man could desire: a fine ship, prosperous trade routes, and of course Kimiko and our children, Winfried and Tamiko and Taro. Taro, eldest son and pride of a loving father’s heart, soon to be old enough to leave the Faustfor his own midshipman cruise ....

Klaxon blare filled the bridge with a pounding pulse of noise. Grunblum scowled.

“What is it?” he demanded of Leutnant Liu, who had the helm.

Her report was icily professional as always. “Infrared detectors have picked up turbulence indicating an imminent emergence at the jump point, Captain.” And then the merest shadow flicked across that carven-ivory countenance. “Several emergences, sir.”

“Ensign Kohl, bring up video from the sail-mounted cameras on the main viewing screen, if you please.” “Jawohl, Herr Kapitan!”

The sensor station duty officer plied his keyboard. He was a youngster just out of the Merchant Marine Academy on Tharkad. This was his first cruise as a fully commissioned officer of the merchant fleet, although he had put in his time as a middie, of course.

The giant screen that dominated the bridge’s forward bulkhead lit with stars. To Grunblum’s eye it was a reassuring sight; he was as familiar with the constellations lying beyond theSummit jump point as with his own cabin.

A new star appeared. It brightened perceptibly. A JumpShip deploying her kilometer-wide sail to recharge her Kearny-Fuchida drive capacitors for the next jump of her route. Nothing unusual or sinister there.

However: “We’re getting continual preemergence thermal releases, Captain,” Ensign Kohl said. “A half dozen signatures or more.”

Grunblum frowned. In his long career, happenstance multiple emergences were rare. He could recall only one or at most two circumstances in which he had observed more than one vessel appearing at a jump point at nearly the same instant, or even within hours of one another, even before the collapse of the HPG network and the attendant depression of trade as planets turned their attention inward. Unless the JumpShips were traveling together in a fleet. And even though the Lyran economy, characteristically, had begun to rebound more strongly than any other Inner Sphere power’s, why should more than one merchant JumpShip appear here now?