Fortress Republic, page 18
part #18 of BattleTech : Mechwarrior Dark Age Series
A Spider stepped in front of the Joust then, blocking the camera. The Joust rolled back twenty meters.
In time to catch the after-mod Centurion facing right at the camera. The square-faced scutum was emblazoned with the emblems of McCarron’s Armored Cavalry and House Liao, as well as a swirled yin-yang symbol painted over its chest, quite obvious as the ’Mech swung its shield aside to fire a right-torso heavy laser. The deep, burnt-orange hue carved the front off a foolhardy Condor. LRMs erupted out of a chest-mounted launcher, spreading more smoke and shrapnel around the field. They drove the Spider back and sent the Joust fleeing backward as well, as the Centurion’s battle-axe rose and fell, rose and fell, finishing the job against the Condor. Like a vengeful (Asian) god come to claim its . . .
A god!
“Back that up!” Caleb ordered, sitting forward suddenly as a bolt of lightning fired off in the back of his mind. He set his glass down hard on the center of Faust’s chess set, slopping some of the smoke-filled brandy over the edge. Jabbed a finger at the screen. “That ’Mech. The Centurion. Bring it up again!”
It wouldn’t be. It couldn’t.
Faust worked the controls, slipping the video image back several frames to find the BattleMech in a full-on display. The yin-yang symbol, wreathed in an open hand. House Liao’s triangular crest. The MAC’s armored knight.
A mistake!
Brevet-Colonel Hedges cleared his throat. Smiled. “That is a ’Mech of McCarron’s Armored Cavalry.”
Oh, but it was also so much more. Caleb stared at the custom paint, the Asian logo that would have meant so much more on a world like Solaris VII where even the name of Cenotaph Stables was often enough to tip the bookmakers into laying off action.
“That,” Caleb said, correcting the garrison commander, “is Yen-lo-wang.”
She was here!
Danai Liao-Centrella.
19
With a great deal of pomp and ceremony, Senator and Viscount Conner Rhys-Monroe took leave of Markab in command of a healthy contingent of armed forces. The tearful farewell was the scene of several rousing speeches, and one violent demonstrator who threw a bottle of kerosene.
—Kent Clarke, Action News at Eleven, Markab, 6 August 3135
Ronel
Republic of the Sphere
26 August 3135
Wide, low-profile buildings stretched through the riverside industrial sector of Dargo City, making for a maze of wide, twisting streets and several alleys dead-ending into loading docks and utility service areas. They were blocked occasionally by a stalled tractor-trailer truck, or fallen roadway that had bridged one of the many dark-water sloughs and had never been meant to hold up under the weight of large BattleMechs. Smoke piled into the sky from different areas: several gutted vehicles roiling with greasy flames; a stretch of green belt bordering the sector; a lumber warehouse, with enough treated wood set aflame to keep burning for days.
Here, a company of Dragon’s Fury militia chose to make a stand rather than give up another of Ronel’s larger cities.
Here, Conner Monroe intended to teach them their error in another lesson they could take to Katana Tormark and, if it became necessary, all the way back to House Kurita.
VTOLs buzzed down the low urban canyons, a pair of Cavalry attack helicopters skating by on either side of Conner’s Rifleman as he pressed forward, leading a push for the local docks. Armored infantry scurried around his feet—Infiltrators mostly, leap-frogging forward to lay down suppressing laser fire against the enemy Hauberk—followed by their paired Hasek mechanized combat vehicles, which provided devastating fire support with their Johnston particle projector cannons. The vehicles ran their heat curves to dangerous levels, flashing arcs of manmade lightning again and again into the enemy line.
A single Defiance Industries Schmitt tank struggled at Conner’s side, grinding forward on broken, left-side tracks while it added its two Mydron rotaries to the loyalists’ firepower. Two JES II strategic missile carriers rolled up behind, flanked by Goblin APCs.
Despite such an impressive backing, Conner’s forces should have been outmatched. Should have been. The Dragon’s Fury Vulture and Warhammer IIC could easily have tipped the balance between the two sides. With six extended-range lasers between them, they dealt out serious hurt of their own, probing back with hot, crimson lances. Hauberk heavy infantry broke from a nearby parking lot into the shadow of some warehouses, joined by a squad of Elemental-style troopers. Two Shoden assault tanks and a large array of fast-attack vehicles. Demons. Shandra reconnaissance cars. VV1 Rangers. Half a dozen Pegasus hovercraft and a pack of hoverbikes.
“Pushovers!” Conner yelled, careless of the voice-activated mic built into his heavy neurohelmet. Letting his voice carry to each and every warrior under his command.
The unit’s common frequency carried back a rousing cheer, broken only by a new crackle of static as the Haseks lit off another pair of hellish particle streams.
It quickly fell back to the curt, commonplace chatter of the battlefield. Still, he heard a surge of fresh confidence among the voices of his men and women. And that, he knew, was making all the difference.
The Dragon’s Fury contingent was losing Dargo City because they felt defeated. Harried and harassed the entire day, as Conner fed mercenaries into the grinder as a way of flushing out enemy concentrations and absorbing the kind of losses a unit could rarely afford to take. Mercs, though, he could afford. What could not be repaired could be rented fresh from Ruchbah, or possibly Towne.
If men wanted to put a price on their lives, that was their business. His was taking Ronel as swiftly and solidly as possible.
Then let Subhar Usuha stand on the evidence and challenge him.
The local garrison held a choke point between two large facilities: a chemical plant and what looked like a fenced, secure warehousing district. The chemical plant was an exaggerated single story. Across the long, flat roof and a good half klick to the other side Conner saw his two mercenary Pack Hunters still chasing down the Griffin they’d cut from the Fury’s line. Behind the enemy position, the terrain opened up to a long, paved riverbank. Docks. And water.
All of which disappeared in a sudden, billowing cloud of gray exhaust as the Vulture turned, hunkered down, and let fly with all four of its LRM launchers. Four-score warheads, rising on fiery trails, jumped up and over the no-man’s-land to cascade down in a lethal rain of fire and smoke and scorched asphalt that flew through the air like shrapnel.
Conner welcomed the assault. Laughed at it. Throttled forward into its rough embrace, wrestling against his control sticks and working the steering pedals to sidestep and duck aside and charge on a sudden oblique. Then he turned and ran straight at them. His Rifleman responded to his easy touch with the fury of a machine with something to prove. Weathering the dozen missiles that actually slammed into it. Shrugging aside the loss of armor.
Spearing its arms straight forward, never giving up the offensive.
Two late warheads corkscrewed in on gray contrails, caught the side of the Rifleman’s cockpit and erupted in two deafening explosions. They smashed Conner’s ferroglass shield on the left-hand side, blowing razor-sharp shards through the cockpit. The impact shook him hard against his restraint harness.
He felt a sharp stinging in his arm, his shoulder. And a pinch, just below the lower edge of his neurohelmet.
No time to worry about it. With a half-twist against the force of the blow, Conner swung the BattleMech’s upper torso around just enough to hold target lock as he ripped into the Vulture with both rotary autocannons in long, devastating blasts. Long tongues of flame licked out from the rapid-spinning barrels, spitting out overlapping cascades of fifty-millimeter slugs tipped in depleted uranium for real ’Mech-stopping power. One cannon walked a series of pits and deep gouges up the Vulture’s left flank. The other crossed from shoulder to shoulder, tearing away armor, smashing it beneath the shower of hot metal and raining shards and splinters down into the street.
Several webbed cracks starred the Vulture’s ferroglass shield, and Conner knew he’d given the other Mech Warrior something to think about as well.
“Sierra-one! Sierra-one is crippled.” Their worry overrode the background calls for med-pickups, for flanking support. “We’re stuck!”
The Schmitt had not weathered the storm of warheads as well as the others, its left-side tracks finally blowing out completely. Now it was not much more than a stationary pill box, but one with quite a bit of firepower still at its disposal.
Conner traded a light pull from both RACs against the sudden charge of one Shoden. The tank took superficial wounds as ATMs hammered up the sides of both legs and carved away at the assault vehicle’s armor. He retreated a single step, planting one leg firmly behind him, and did a quick check of his own wounds.
A large shard of ferroglass stuck into his left bicep, oozing blood but not too badly. Not yet. He brushed a careful hand across his shoulder and lower neck where the neurohelmet did not quite reach. Scraped away more splinters. His fingers came away smeared with blood, which he wiped across the front of his cooling vest.
Nothing he couldn’t live with.
“Sierra-one, suppress those infantry positions near the warehouse. On my mark: Cavalry attack ’copters, clear, Jess-one and two give me full spreads on fast cycle and keep them coming. All other ground forces forward!”
Another hard shake as the Warhammer IIC moved forward to cover his comrade. The enemy ’Mech slashed down Conner’s left side with all four lasers, putting two into his forward leg and carving out the upper leg actuator. Conner spent several hundred rounds in the Warhammer’s direction, just to keep its attention. He toggled for one of his officers, cutting away from the busy chatter on the all-hands circuit.
“Lieutenant Minor? Minor? Blake!”
“Yezzir.” A gunshot voice. Loud and violent. Blake Minor was senior mercenary officer between the two Pack Hunters. “Bit. Busy. Now.”
“Break off, break off. Over the top and on my position. Go!”
A quick toggle, and he was back to the loyalists’ common frequency. Waited. Waited. “Now! Now now NOW!”
The timing could not have come off better. Just as the Vulture threw up a new umbrella of eighty warheads, Conner shoved off his planted leg and into a run, pushing for the Rifleman’s best speed of sixty-five kilometers per hour. Not quite reaching it as his left leg threatened to buckle with each hard plant. Mid-fifties was the best he could do. But it was enough.
With the Goblin APCs bursting forward, taking the point, and infantry scattering out of the way of the Hasek MCVs, most of his force pushed out from beneath the Vulture’s chosen kill zone. Closing hard. Only the Schmitt and both JES carriers were left behind to weather the new storm. And they gave back twice as good as they got, throwing eight-score warheads back at the Dragon’s Fury line.
Wave after wave of LRMs pasted the choke point between the two buildings. A few strayed, cratering large holes in the side of the warehouse, crumbling one wall of the chemical plant. Most fell in a wide line of death across the Dragon’s Fury line. Blackened earth and fresh gravel geysered up on columns of fire and smoke, raining down over the battlefield. Dozens of warheads caved in one side of a Shoden, sent two of its large wheels tumbling off in different directions. Dozens more crashed down the Vulture’s right side and knocked it backward to sprawl across the scarred roadway.
Four hundred meters. Three hundred.
A second barrage of warheads fell across the enemy line in a savage curtain, not quite as effective as the first as the Dragon’s Fury spread out in a loose field. Some retreated back towards the docks. Others scrambled forward to avoid the rain of destruction.
A hoverbike swung out too far and powered right into a Hasek’s PPC blast. It erupted in a ball of fire, tumbled end over end into a small cluster of Hauberk infantry.
Two Pegasus collided with each other and stalled out. One of Conner’s Goblins shifted its track to slide up close. Drop-down ramps flew out, disgorging a squad of lightly armored combat engineers. They swarmed over the stalled craft, slapping shaped charges onto vulnerable points to disable the vehicles if they could not be captured.
“Warriors should realize when they’ve lost,” Conner whispered. He kept the comment to himself as he stepped through a thick wreath of sooty, gray smoke and continued hammering away at the downed Vulture.
Two hundred meters!
The gunpowder stench of cordite and scorched earth was strong. It billowed in through the burst left-side shield in sooty clouds.
His rotary autocannon spinning out rounds, hundreds at a time, Conner drained his ammunition bins down towards empty as he pummeled the still-struggling Vulture. The bulk of the Dragon’s Fury militia fell back, opening out towards the docks where the Warhammer IIC held a new defensive line.
Then Conner’s two Cavalry attack helicopters swarmed in, autocannon blazing as they strafed the enemy units from behind. The ’copters overturned a VV1 Ranger, then chased down a Demon.
And with lightning in their grip came the two Pack Hunters as well. They’d left the slower Griffin behind, running up the far side of the chemical plant and then burning off jump jets to sail high overhead in a long, reaching arc.
Blake Minor’s Hunter cleared the building, landing in a three-point crouch just off the plant’s corner. His extended-range micro lasers worried an infantry emplacement, drove them back from even thinking about a mad, suicidal rush. His PPC slashed at the besieged Warhammer.
His merc companion did not fare as well, coming down too hard and not quite clear of the low-profile chemical plant. The second Pack Hunter crashed through the ceiling, trapping itself a little more than waist-high inside the building. It waded out slowly, kicking its way through several square meters of factory. Still, the particle cannon in its right torso lashed out in a coruscating whip, adding to the Vulture’s misery even as the sixty-ton ’Mech finally climbed back to its feet.
Just in time for Conner to seal its fate.
Running up near point-blank range, he pulled into extra-long cycles on his two rotaries, spinning them to their maximum delivery. One of the autocannons froze up, pushed too hard too fast. But his second punched out with fire and hot metal, digging furious talons into the Vulture’s right side.
The rounds clawed deep, deep through torn armor, into one of the ammunition bins that supplied the shoulder-mounted LRM launchers.
Any ’MechWarrior’s nightmare. The fifty-mill slugs shredding the bin, cracking open fuel cells and slamming at the warhead tips. One spark struck against spilled propellant. A temperamental warhead. One explosion, to spark off a chain reaction of sympathetic detonations that cascaded through the ammunition bin like wildfire through dry grass.
A raging inferno of expanding fire that had nowhere to go. Bulging out one entire side of the stumbling BattleMech, until flames and thick smoke burst through seams, through rents, through rivet holes popped free by the pressure. The Vulture’s cockpit canopy blew away on explosive charges, flipping forward end over end to clear the overhead. Its Mech Warrior shot up into the air on his command seat’s ejection rocket, pushing for as much sky as possible before his parafoil unfolded and gave him a chance to glide to safety.
Not a heartbeat too soon, as the explosion ate away the Vulture from the inside out, crashing through the internal shields protecting the fusion drive, tearing it apart like a child’s toy. Orange, licking flames bled into the hard, golden light of a cascading fusion overload. The atomic fire burst free, gobbling up material for fuel. And the Vulture ceased to exist.
It erupted in one final, destructive blow that shook the ground and hurled flaming scraps for hundreds of meters in all directions.
So close, Conner felt the wash of intense heat slam through his shattered cockpit shield. He breathed deep and choked on the acrid stench of burning metal. A gritty cloud of hot ash and soot wreathed his ’Mech, pouring into his cockpit, jabbing needles into his eyes. As he powered forward, limped through the burning piles that had once been one of the most powerful war machines ever developed, he could only hold his breath and squint through tears of pain.
Walking out of the death grounds on the far side, expecting to see a ready line of Dragon’s Fury warriors wanting vengeance for their lost avatar, Conner blinked his eyes clear in search of a target.
He had none. The Warhammer IIC had turned and raced for the water’s edge. Stepping off the high bank to plunge down into the river’s deep grasp, it waded out towards the main channel where it was soon lost beneath the gentle surface. Speeding across the water to either side, throwing off wide roostertails, were the Pegasii, the hoverbikes, making their getaway in the most direct route possible.
The light vehicles had less of a chance. The slow Shoden assault vehicle, no chance. It didn’t even try, but instead powered down its targeting system in a sign of surrender. A ring of Infiltrators and both Hasek MCVs quickly surrounded it.
The other Dragon’s Fury vehicles broke apart in a chaos of tangled paths, racing north and south along the water’s edge in hopes of escaping the pursuing loyalists. Looking for one of the few bridges they might use to cross the wide river or, if nothing else, to lose themselves in the hills and forests far outside of Dargo City.
Several linked up with the Griffin on the northern run, forming an ad hoc lance that could give Minor’s Pack Hunters some trouble. Conner called off Blake. Ordered him to monitor the enemy’s progress, but if the Griffin kept to the river and exited the city, to let him go.
“That’s good salvage we’re letting walk away,” the mercenary officer said.
Conner rested back in his command chair, breathing easier now that his life support system had cleared at least part of the acrid smoke from his cockpit. “Balance it against the damage your man did to the chem plant, which I’ll cover, and we’ll call it square.”
