A Silence in the Heavens (24 page)

The ForestryMech was almost upon her, and she upon it. She jumped, cutting in her jets as she rose, and leaped over the top of the ForestryMech, kicking it in the head as she went over. The angular momentum of the combined jump-and-kick nearly tumbled her, but the
Hatchetman
’s gyros held her steady as she landed directly behind the ForestryMech.

Before the Steel Wolf MechWarrior could turn, Tara spun the more agile
Hatchetman
around, and the great metal ax lashed forward and down. The blade cut into the shoulder joint on the ForestryMech’s right side, shearing through the layers and ropes of steel and myomer and rendering its chainsaw useless. The ’Mech still had its autocannon, but if she could stay behind it. . . .

She couldn’t. The Miners were here now, rock cutters raised. Tara turned to her right, to the closest one, and lashed out with the hatchet. The MiningMech stepped back out of reach, then pressed forward again—the MechWarrior was going for Tara’s hatchet arm with his rock cutter, and now it was Tara’s turn to step back. The movement brought her no escape from danger—it took her instead into the range of the second MiningMech, which promptly seized the opportunity to start gnawing away with its rock cutter at the
Hatchetman
’s already damaged left side and arm.

Time to call for assistance. Three on one was all very well, but pride was for fools.

“Paladin Crow, get over here,” Tara said into her ’Mech-to-’Mech comm link. “I’ve got some fresh carrion for you.”

Meanwhile, she had to stay alive and keep fighting. The longer she kept this trio of ’Mechs engaged, the less damage they could do to other Highlander units who couldn’t take the damage. She couldn’t get her hatchet around to strike the nearest MiningMech—she had the other MiningMech coming up behind her, and the ForestryMech on her right side was turning to shoot at her with that little Whirlwind autocannon.

Little autocannon or not, at this distance the ForestryMech couldn’t miss—not when its target was close enough to practice ballroom dancing with—and at such close range the Whirlwind’s ammo would chew through the
Hatchetman
’s Durallex armor as if it wasn’t even there.

Nothing for it, then, but to attack. She turned her ’Mech’s laser against the MiningMech in front of her, switched the targeting on, and aimed for the head and the sensory bundles. She followed up the laser with an ax swing to the right, against the already damaged ForestryMech. This time she aimed low, for a leg, and struck her opponent in the hip. The blade of the hatchet crimped metal in what should have been moving parts—but which wouldn’t be moving any longer.

She brought the hatchet back up to the ready position and jumped again, landing a short distance behind the ForestryMech. She pressed the
Hatchetman
’s left arm against the ForestryMech’s torso and pushed.

With its crippled leg, the ForestryMech couldn’t maintain its balance. It fell, tumbling to the ground beneath the legs of the MiningMech that Tara had just been fighting.

She struck out again with her hatchet, not caring now if the MiningMech’s rock cutter came too close, and hooked the ’Mech’s left arm. The MiningMech had only machine guns in that arm—no threat to a BattleMech. She pulled back on the hatchet arm in the same direction the MiningMech had already been going.

In her
Hatchetman,
she only outweighed the MiningMech by ten tons—little enough, so that she had to use wrestling tricks rather than raw strength to force the other to fall. But fall he did, with his legs entangled in the fallen ForestryMech. Tara leapt up, aided by her jump jets, and brought the
Hatchetman
’s forty-five-ton mass crashing down with both heels in the center of the MiningMech’s back. MiningMech and ForestryMech were reduced to a tangle of crumpled metal that would take repair technicians weeks to sort out and fix.

The second MiningMech had not yet given up the fight, but was pressing in close. Four more short-range missiles fired from its torso. That’s it, Tara said to herself. No more reloads until it gets back to a field armory. The MiningMech only had machine guns now. And she had speed on it.

She checked her heat dials. No, she
didn’t
have speed on it. If she didn’t watch out, before very long she’d be sitting in a ’Mech that was overheated and refusing to move.

But the MiningMech didn’t know that. Tara fired her laser full on into its midtorso.

Rainwater flashed into billowing clouds of steam around both of the ’Mechs as it fell onto their external heat sinks. Fog enshrouded them.

“Surrender,” Tara said over the common ’Mech frequency that both the Highlanders and the Steel Wolves used. “You have no choice. You have no weapons.”

“I have this,” a voice came back. The MiningMech raised its rock cutter. “I will have you out of your tin can in a moment, my lady, and feed you to the dogs.”

The speaker was a woman, from the sound of it—a light, high voice, made hoarse with tension. If we’d met under different circumstances, Tara thought, maybe I’d be buying her a beer instead of braining her.

Aloud she said, “You had your chance,” stepped forward, and engaged the
Hatchetman
’s jets for another crushing leap.

The MiningMech broke and ran.

Tara came down, turned to give chase, and abruptly froze as the
Hatchetman
’s self-preservation clicked in, refusing to take any more heat-producing actions until some of the heat already released had a chance to dissipate.

It didn’t matter, though; she wouldn’t go unprotected while her ’Mech recovered. Infantry was coming up—scouts and engineers, wearing the uniforms of Northwind.

My people, Tara thought.

The engineers approached the two fallen Steel Wolf ’Mechs, and placed charges. Then one of the engineers attached demolition blocks around the MiningMech’s entrance hatch.

Another soldier approached Tara. She turned on her outside microphones in time to hear the engineer saying, “Prefect, if you wish, could you call this stubborn bastard over your comms and tell him to come out with his hands up?”

“Yes,” Tara replied on external circuit.

The trooper saluted.

She keyed the mike on the ’Mech common channel, and spoke.

“Steel Wolf, there is no dishonor in surrendering. Your ’Mech is immobilized, and my troops are wiring it for demolition even as we speak. It’s up to you if you’re inside when we blow it up.”

A pause, and then the reply, “You would not.”

“You had your chance,” Tara said.

She addressed the engineers over her external speakers, but made sure that the intra-’Mech link was also open and live.

“I can’t do a thing with him,” Tara said to the engineers, over both circuits. “Destroy the ’Mech. It’s no use to us, it’s damaged already.”

“No, wait!” came the voice of the Steel Wolf. “Will my friend in the ForestryMech and I be harmed if we surrender?”

“I guarantee that you will be treated with all honor,” Tara said.

The rear hatch of the MiningMech opened. A young man emerged, his skimpy MechWarrior shorts and vest soaked with perspiration. The rain caught him and rendered him shivering.

“Take him to the rear. Take them both to the rear,” Tara said. “Before they get hypothermia and die on us.”

She checked her cockpit dials again. The heat was lower. The autoshutdown routine had worked and she could move again. The third ’Mech had gone . . . that way. She prepared to follow.

Before she could make a move, a Fox armored car bearing Northwind insignia approached. A short-range signal crackled over the
Hatchetman
’s inside speakers.

“Prefect—the Paladin needs you, now.”

“I’m on my way,” she replied.

She followed the Fox all the way back to the hill where Ezekiel Crow’s
Blade
was standing and looking out over the field—a mass of rain-sodden ground, half-obscured by mist and drifting smoke, covered with crumpled machinery and the bodies of Wolves and Highlanders alike.

“My lady,” he said over the command circuit as she approached. “Galaxy Commander Kerensky’s ’Mech is disabled and the Wolves are running. I believe the day is ours.”

50

White Horse Bar

City of Tara, Northwind

June, 3133; local summer

D
rinks were on the house in the White Horse Bar—drinks were on the house in every bar in Tara, if you wore a Regimental uniform—and the tri-vid behind the counter was tuned to a news channel showing pictures of the Steel Wolves DropShips lifting from the salt flats beyond the Bloodstones. Will Elliot, who had found himself promoted to Corporal in the aftermath of the battles for Red Ledge Pass and the Plains of Tara, was happy to watch the tri-vid and nurse the same beer he’d purchased at the start of the evening.

Jock Gordon and Lexa McIntosh, to either side of him at the counter, were both well on the way to becoming completely and happily drunk, and somebody was going to have to stay sober enough to see them back to barracks before morning.

Lexa raised her glass to the image of the departing DropShips. “Good riddance to bad rubbish, and don’t come back!”

“We had them on the run,” Jock said. “Once the aerospace fighters showed up from Halidon, we had them on the run. I still say that we shouldn’t have let them go.”

“The Countess didn’t want to let them go,” Lexa said. She emptied off her drink and gestured at the bartender for another of the same. “She wanted to chase them until they dropped and then cut them up into pieces. That’s what everybody says.”

“Everybody says a lot of things,” said Will. He found it easy to believe that the Countess hadn’t wanted to give up the pursuit—he and Lexa had gotten a good view from their foxhole of her three-on-one melee with the Steel Wolf IndustrialMechs, and the spectacle had left no doubt in his mind that Prefect Tara Campbell could be a brawler when she had to be, but he didn’t think she was the type to become vengeful in victory.

Listen to yourself, he thought. Thinking you know what the Prefect thinks, just because you fought in the same battle as she did. You don’t know anything about her worries, any more than she knows about yours.

He had to admit that he would have been feeling a good deal more vengeful himself toward Anastasia Kerensky and the Steel Wolves if things had turned out only a little worse. Liddisdale had been one of the mountain towns in the path of the enemy’s advance, and the house Will grew up in had sheltered a Highlander missile battery for a few hours, until one of the Steel Wolves’ MiningMechs had taken both house and defenders apart.

Will had heard the news from his mother. Jean Elliot had taken shelter with Old Angus and Robbie Macallan when the fighting started, and was staying in their mountain cabin until Will’s sister in Kildare could make it across the mountains. He hadn’t yet gone back to Liddisdale to look at the wreckage for himself, and wasn’t sure that he wanted to.

The tri-vid news channel changed its picture from shots of departing DropShips to an image of the Fort, followed by a close-up of a dark-haired man in plain clothing. The identification block at the bottom of the tri-vid told the viewers that they were looking at a live image of Paladin Ezekiel Crow.

Will regarded the Paladin’s projected features with mild curiosity. So this was a Paladin of the Sphere—not much to look at, considering that in popular stories all the Paladins were six feet tall and practically glowed with virtue. Ezekiel Crow was just another tired-looking survivor of the Wolves’ invasion, as far as Will could tell.

“Is it true, my lord,” said the voice of an off-camera news reporter, “that you told the Prefect to let the Steel Wolves go?”

Next to Will, Jock Gordon laughed. “Sounds like somebody else was wondering the same things we were.”

“You think you’re bright enough to wonder something new and different?” said Lexa. “Shut up and listen to the man.”

“It’s true that I advised the Prefect to that end,” Crow was saying to the news reporter. “The Steel Wolves may have abandoned their allegiance to The Republic of the Sphere, but they are not yet such bitter enemies that Northwind may not need them some day as friends, and they know well enough who won this fight.

Destroying them would only have given you an enemy who would hate you for generations. Better to let them go, with honor, in the hope of more peaceful days to come.”

“How about the Prefect, my lord? Did she see things the same way, or is it true—as people are saying—that you used your authority to overrule her decision?”

Ezekiel Crow smiled. “I don’t think the people of Northwind know their own Countess very well, if they’re willing to believe that anybody—even a Paladin—could make Tara Campbell do something that she truly didn’t want to do.”

The news reporter’s reply was lost to history, at least as far as Will Elliot was concerned, when Lexa McIntosh gave an approving and earsplitting whoop.

“That’s our Countess!” Lexa shouted. “Here’s to her!”

She drained her drink and sent the empty glass crashing to the floor. In the next breath, Jock Gordon followed her example, and within an instant the White Horse Bar was full of the noise of shouted toasts and breaking glass. Will hesitated only a moment longer, then threw down his own empty glass to mingle with the shards of all the others.

On the tri-vid, unheeded, the news channel went back to images of the Steel Wolf DropShips lifting, one by one.

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.

A Silence in the Heavens

A ROC Book / published by arrangement with the author

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Copyright © 2003 by WizKids, LLC.

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