BattleTech MechWarrior Dark Age 05 Truth and Shadows 2003 Page 18

  "General," came the voice over the 'Mech's cockpit speakers. "First battalion is formed.

  Request permission-" "Permission granted," Griffin said, without pausing in his efforts to pull a transport out of the way, off the tarmac, while another, still-laden transport was coming in behind him. "Carry out your orders."

  "Sir."

  The afternoon progressed. Local weather reports were calling the weather fair and mild for February, although Griffin knew that many of his Kearney-acclimated troopers would be feeling the effects of the cold. He, at least, wouldn't have to worry as long as he was working inside his 'Mech. At last the final aircraft was down.

  "What now?" his aide asked him.

  "Set demolition charges," Griffin replied. "No retreat. No spoils for the Wolves if they win.

  We're going east at speed. Inform me of first contact. Nothing else matters."

  He was already taking the Koshi eastward at a fast lope, near enough to red-line to be worrisome if he were the kind to worry. He'd have a chance to let the 'Mech cool down once he reached the head of the column. Until then, his place was up front, and the sooner he got there, the better.

  "Nothing past here but scouts and skirmishers," the colonel in charge said, when Griffin reached the moving collection of odds and ends at the pointy end of the stick.

  The first troops in line had been packed into buses commandeered from the airport for the purpose, and were traveling behind a dump truck with a long-range heavy laser strapped into place on the truck bed with chains and heavy ropes. The colonel himself rode in the front passenger seat of a limousine hovercar requisitioned off the lot at the airport rental company. The hoverlimo's capacious rear seating area had been given over to a complete field communications setup, technician included.

  "We'll be at Tara around dusk," Griffin said. "We're moving fast. Punch a hole through to the Countess, consolidate forces. Then we'll see what she wants to do."

  "You have an opinion on that?" the colonel asked.

  "Fight them."

  "You're not going to get much argument there."

  "Report coming in," said the communications specialist. "Scouts have reached the edges of Tara. Reporting city held against them."

  "Wolves?" Griffin asked. "On this side?"

  "The scouts don't think so. But whoever it is, they've got a Jupiter."

  "Just what I needed to make my day complete," Griffin said. "Carry on."

  The relief column continued to the east.

  "You want us to do what?"

  "You heard me," Jack Farrell said to his second-in-command.

  When the mercenary force's farthest-out pickets had brought in reports of a large force approaching Tara from the west, Farrell had reacted by summoning his officers to a council of war.

  They had gathered at the ad hoc command post he'd set up earlier by the foot of his Jupiter 'Mech, and he had presented them with his decision. The logic of it was taking a while to sink in.

  Patiently, he went over it all again. "You will defend against the Highlanders coming in from the west to the minimum. You will shoot to miss. On receiving any kind of fire at all, you will pull back and open a corridor."

  "What about our contract?" his segundo asked.

  "Under our contract," Farrell said, "we've been ordered to secure the roads out of Tara against the Highlander forces in the city, and not to fight against the Steel Wolves unless or until the Steel Wolves first attack us. There's nothing either in our orders or in our contract that says what we should do about any other forces that might decide to join in on the action-which leaves that decision up to me. And I say that our contract never covered being caught between the upper and the nether millstones with the Highlanders turning the mill."

  "It's not going to look good, though."

  "That's crap and you know it," Farrell said. "Trooper for trooper and 'Mech for 'Mech, our happy bunch of heavily armed misfits are as tough and as brave and as nasty as any Northwind Highlander or Steel Wolf Clansman in The Republic of The Sphere. But anybody wanting us to hold out to the last man has to say so up front and make the contract worth it for our next of kin, and our current employer didn't. No shame to him, either; there aren't many employers out there who'll go that far."

  "Bannson would," said his segundo.

  "Which is why we'd do it for Bannson if he paid us to," Farrell agreed. "But that's for another contract and another war. Right now, we're working on fulfilling this one without getting chewed to bits in the process."

  He looked around at his commanders. "Are we all singing off of the same sheet of music now? Good. Then here's the deal: We'll give the Highlanders an impressive show. I want to hear explosions and I want to see fireworks. But I do not want casualties, no casualties among our troops, and minimal among the others. Let them know they've been in a fight, but no more than that. Am I making myself clear?"

  "We don't let the Highlanders inside the city out," his segundo summarized. "But if the Highlanders outside the city happen to force a corridor . . . well, that has nothing to do with us, and what they decide to do with it is their business."

  "That's the general idea," Farrell said. "Now we're going to go out and apply it. Carry on."

  The meeting dispersed, and Jack Farrell turned away to where his Jupiter was waiting. He climbed up the access ladder to the cockpit. His primary employer had left him a great deal of discretion in dealing with his current contract holder, and he hoped that he was exercising it sufficiently now.

  Once in the cockpit, he donned the cooling vest and neurohelmet and brought the hundred- ton Jupiter rumbling to life. Then he turned its ponderous footsteps onto the road heading west, to see for himself what was approaching.

  47

  Mercenary and Highlander Positions

  Various Roads Out of Tara

  Northwind

  February 3134; local winter

  "Contact," said the observer for the mercenary rocket battery.

  The mercs currently blocking the roads out of Tara had received some strange orders in their time, and the ones they fought under now were stranger than most. But they'd learned to trust Jack Farrell's one eye when it came to looking out for the main chance, and they obeyed. Not without questioning- that wasn't in their nature- but they obeyed.

  "Where away?" said the sergeant in charge of the battery.

  "Looks like a light armored truck, mounted laser, hull down past that rise."

  "Got it," the sergeant said.

  A moment later the observer asked, "Inform Jack yet?"

  "Yeah, just passed it back."

  "Okay . . . I see one, two, three squads, jump armor, with flamers. They're doing squad rushes."

  "We'll let 'em know we spotted 'em," the sergeant said. To the crew of the rocket battery, he said, "Short-range missile. Two pairs, aim two short, two long."

  "Missiles away," said the leader of the battery crew.

  With trails of white smoke, the missiles arched up and out. The laser tracked them. One exploded in midair, then a second, a third just above the ground, the fourth-one set to go long-impacted out of sight.

  "Tubes expended," said the battery crew leader.

  "Fall back," the sergeant said. "That'll slow 'em some."

  "General," Lieutenant Owain Jones reported over the command circuit. He'd had to leave behind the Joust tank in which he usually shadowed Griffin's Koshi, and was riding in a Fox armored car. "We're meeting resistance."

  "How much, and where?" Griffin asked.

  "So far, it's light. No KIAs on our side. Our troopers are returning fire."

  "Do not slow down," Griffin ordered. True to his own words, he kept his 'Mech striding onward in the direction of the city as he spoke. "Not for any reason. The line we're facing will not be thinner at any time. If we don't punch through now, we won't punch through at all."

  "I'll pass the word along."

  "Good. Has anyone got comms with the Countess?"

  "We had a brief contact ear
lier," Jones said. "There was a parley, but it didn't go anywhere.

  The forces in the city are bracing for a Steel Wolf push."

  "What about the units we're encountering here?"

  "Mercs," said Jones. "They've got the Countess and her people pinned, but nobody seems to know if they're going to coordinate an attack with the Wolves or not."

  "If we have anything to say about it," Griffin said, "then the answer is 'not'."

  Ahead smoke was rising. Griffin headed that way. the Koshi swiveled its head from side to side as he advanced at a lope to provide some heavier support than the infantry could manage on their own.

  He found a squad hunched behind a wall, with small arms fire coming in overhead-deadly stuff for the unarmored infantry, but nothing that would trouble him.

  He stepped around the corner and laid down a spread of missiles in the direction the fire was coming from. The front of a building exploded into rubble.

  "Move out!" Griffin commanded, then sprinted forward himself. "Move it up, people. Open a hole, and form a perimeter, north and south."

  "We have a Condor, grid nine-one-four."

  "I'm on it," Griffin said. "Now I want some speed here. Punch through!" One-Eyed Jack Farrell sat atop his Jupiter -not inside the cockpit, but under the open sky, perched on the 'Mech's shoulder and using its great height as a vantage point for observation. He wore a set of communications headphones, with a wire trailing back into the 'Mech's interior.

  "Roger that," he said over the headphones' audio pickup. "One Koshi. Any other Mechs?"

  He paused to listen. "Right, let it past. If I want it, it'll be mine."

  From far off to the north of where he was perched, looking out over the nearby buildings from atop his thirty-meter mount, Jack could hear the crump of explosions. Trails of smoke and the exhaust of missiles drew white lines against the blue winter sky.

  "Very well," he said over the audio pickup. "Yes, open a corridor. I'll be along shortly."

  He took off the headset, rolled up the cable, and slipped into the Jupiter through the entry hatch.

  Once inside, in the seat with vest and helmet, with the 'Mech's electronics fired up, he called back to his ground comms station.

  "There's a Highland officer doing perimeter patrol over to our east," he said. "Riding a Pack Hunter. Get in touch with her."

  "That'll be tough."

  "That's okay," Farrell said. "I trust you."

  He fired up the reactor and set off, with the Jupiter's slow, deliberate pace, to the north.

  Captain Tara Bishop looked down from the cockpit of her Pack Hunter at the man in front of her. He was dressed in a mercenary's uniform, with a white flag-she thought, upon closer inspection, that it might be somebody's T-shirt-hanging from a stick he was holding above his head. Two Highland troopers had him at rifle point. They were both standing well back from him, staying out of each other's lines of fire, as well as keeping out of hers.

  "You say you have a message?" she said. "Let's hear it."

  "One thirty-six dot two," the man said. Her 'Mech's external mike picked it up.

  "What's that mean?" she demanded.

  She had no patience at the moment for cryptic statements-she was tired and cranky, and the day that had started out badly had not gotten any better as it wore on. The parley with Anastasia Kerensky had been an almost unmitigated disaster- "almost," because it did succeed in wasting the Steel Wolves' time, but disastrous all the same. The Countess of Northwind had broken the link in a state of incandescent fury, white to the lips and cursing Anastasia Kerensky in terms that Bishop hadn't suspected that she knew.

  The man shrugged. "I don't know. I was asked to carry that message to you. That's all."

  "Take him to the rear," Bishop ordered. As the Northwind troopers marched him off, she pondered for a moment, then dialled a frequency into her 'Mech-to-'Mech circuit: 136.2.

  "Radio check," she said.

  "Hello," came back a male voice. She's heard that speaker before, at the mercenary encampment, and on the DropShip Pegasus before that: Jack Farrell.

  "What do you want?" she asked.

  "How do you feel about cutting the cards?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "You against me," Farrell said. "Your 'Mech to mine."

  "A Jupiter against a Pack Hunter?" Captain Bishop struggled between fear and skepticism. A match like that was straight out of the tales of the old days, when 'Mechs ruled the battlefield and Warriors took and answered challenges that settled the fate of worlds. It was also one-sided to the point of suicide; a Jupiter outmassed a Pack Hunter by seventy tons, and it carried more and heavier long-range weapons. There was no safety for the smaller, lighter 'Mech either in grappling or in standing off and shooting; the Pack Hunter's only advantages lay in heat efficiency and speed. "Why the hell should I?"

  "Because if you win, I'll let you live."

  "I'm living fine right now."

  "Ah, ah, ah," Farrell said. "You, and the Countess, and all your troopers. There's a relief column coming from the west. I can let them through, or cut them off. I can let you out with them- fight another day, you know? Or I can bottle the lot of you up together for Wolf meat."

  Oh, but that was tempting. Even if it meant her death- but she was probably going to die in the city anyway, if the Highlanders stayed pinned between the mercs and the Steel Wolves. This was a chance to buy safety for everyone, and to buy it not with gritty, squalid street fighting against infantry and thin-skinned light armor, but with a death duel against the biggest and most deadly of 'Mechs. Too good, almost, to be true. . . .

  "Why should I believe you?" she asked.

  "We've played cards. My word is my bond."

  "So we have" -and we both cheated, she thought, and we both know it- "and so is mine. Let me talk with the Countess."

  "Don't take too long. I have a Koshi in my sights right now."

  "Five minutes. Ten at the most."

  "I can shuffle the cards that long," Farrell said. "Then it'll be time to cut the deck."

  48

  Road out of Tara

  Northwind

  February 3134; local winter

  The Countess of Northwind, Captain Bishop soon discovered, was less than enthusiastic about Jack Farrell's proposal.

  "Right," the Countess's voice said, over the encrypted command circuit in the cockpit of Bishop's 'Mech. "I'm expected to trade your life for . . . what, exactly?"

  "All of Northwind," Bishop said. Now that she'd made up her own mind, she'd moved from fearful anticipation into a state of calm, if adrenaline-charged, resolve. "And my life isn't any more valuable to me than the life of the youngest private in the army is to him. Or her. I haven't checked. At any rate, it's what we all agreed to when we signed up."

  "If that's what we all agreed to when we signed up, then I should be the one out there taking on a Jupiter in a light 'Mech, and not you. And you can get back in touch with Farrell and tell him so. If he wants a duel, he can fight my Hatchetman."

  "Sorry, ma'am, but no." Bishop kept her voice firm. "Only one death wish at a time allowed in this conversation, and I've got mine already."

  "Damn it, Captain . . . do you have any idea how hard it is to break in a new aide-de-camp? And you're one of the best I've ever had."

  "Thank you, ma'am. My old colonel said I'd see plenty of action if I served with you. When this war is finished, you can tell him for me that he was right."

  "I can't talk you out of this?"

  "Afraid not, ma'am."

  Over the circuit, Bishop heard a sigh. "Then make the signal," the Countess of Northwind said.

  "You have my permission."

  "Thanks," said Bishop, and retuned her 'Mech-to-'Mech circuit to the frequency she'd used to contact Jack Farrell. "You have a deal," she said over the radio.

  "My deck," said Farrell. "My shuffle. My cut."

  "I said you had a deal."

  "Then meet me within sight of the DropPort. Me
in my Jupiter, you in your Pack Hunter, if you dare."

  "I'll be there," she said, and cut the connection. All that was left now was the chatter on the 'Mech-to-'Mech circuit, as the Countess and the Highlander forces within the city prepared to move out and take to the roads heading west.

  ". . . Head 'em up and move 'em out" . . . "Leave a line. The sick and wounded" . . .

  "Automatic and robotic weapons next to the DropPort; don't let Kerensky know that we've gone. . . ."

  The first thing that Captain Bishop noticed was the magnetic anomaly detector indicating a bearing of 045 relative with signal increasing. Something metal, something big, approaching from her right front. The next thing that she noticed was the rhythmic shock-waves, also increasing in strength, of a hundred-ton mass approaching at a strolling pace-if a thirty-kilometer-per-hour rate was a stroll.

  Her instruments detected the shock waves first, but soon it was as if she could feel them through the hull of her Pack Hunter.

  Her back was to the DropPort and the Steel Wolves. Ahead of her lay Jack Farrell's mercenaries. And sandwiched between them-the Highlanders. As long as Captain Bishop kept on fighting, the Highlanders could keep escaping. The Countess of Northwind had a thin line of sick and injured volunteers, armed with robotic and automatic weapons, creating the illusion of a solid front.

  Farrell had promised an escape path for the others.

  If he wasn't lying. If he wasn't carrying out a massive ruse of war, luring all of them to a place where he could disarm or kill the Northwind army.

  Nothing for it. She'd made up her mind to meet him here, to fight him here, and . . . she saw the approaching 'Mech, a looming, ponderous giant. Jack Farrell's Jupiter. Huge. Heavily armored. She doubted that even her particle projector cannon could hurt it.

  Well, maybe not from the front. She was fast. He was slow. If that was going to be her only advantage, she'd have to make the most of it.