Fortress Republic, page 2
part #18 of BattleTech : Mechwarrior Dark Age Series
“Jules!” Callandre Kell again. This time with far less polish. “Verdammt! Guard-one is down.”
“Pushing forward now,” a second voice promised, static bursting around every word. Faint. Another woman. “Rendezvous in two minutes.”
Too soon! Julian shook his head, fighting off the numbing blackness that threatened to roll over him. Something about the timing of their assault . . . tried to remember . . .
It was a blur, but he knew there was a problem if Lady Zou pushed forward too far, too fast.
“Still . . . here.”
His mouth was pasty-dry and tasted of blood at the back of his throat. His tongue throbbed where he’d bitten it. Every joint and muscle ached. He levered the Templar’s arms beneath him, careful as both limbs ended in weapon barrels, not hands, fighting his way back to his feet. Getting into a four-point crouch.
The Catapult continued to hammer at him with its autocannon, the stream of slugs pounding around his shoulders with deep, ringing peals.
“Still alive,” he told his warriors. If barely. “Keep to the plan.”
Then the next salvo of missiles fell over him, and the world disappeared in a halo of fire and smoke and smoldering rubble.
But Julian was in a more stable position to ride out the missile barrage this time: ’Mech crouched down on one knee, both arms pinned against the ground. The Catapult’s missiles hammered in hard and heavy, bursting across his back and down his left side. The JES crawler, already taking savage counterfire from the Kinnol MBTs as well as the Hauberk’s LRM packs, had less luck, rushing its follow-up salvo and spreading more damage over the tortured landscape than actually fell on Julian’s position.
Hanging forward in his harness, swallowing against the taste of fresh blood, Julian did not fight the tremors but instead rode through them. He checked his heads-up display and saw Callandre Kell racing back towards him at the head of a scattered column of armor, leading the charge in her SM1 Destroyer. Two of Julian’s MechWarriors, both in Centurions, had been left behind, but not by far. With a lance of heavier armor, they fought a rearguard action against the advancing loyalists.
Worse news on his HUD was the cluster of golden, glowing icons moving forward out of the west, at the far reach of his sensors and on the other side of the enemy line. His tactical computer tagged the lead machine as a fifty-five ton Griffin, which belonged to the Republic Knight, Lady Ariana Zou. Zou’s push over the Urals from Vorkuta had started this latest running battle, heading off the retreating loyalists while Julian threw his Guards up the Obs from Berzovo to form an anvil against her hammer.
It had worked, trapping the loyalist force between them.
Except Lady Zou’s rush to defend the Davion champion threatened to wrench the trap back open or, worse, deliver herself into the teeth of the enemy. Her push speared into the loyalist gut, throwing the enemy line into disarray. But a full lance of enemy ’Mechs and a good number of armored vehicles now curled back in her direction. They would isolate and cut her command to pieces.
And The Republic and Federated Suns both had lost too many good men and women of late.
“Don’t think about it,” Julian whispered. Careful of his voice-activated mic. “Not now.”
Action was the best therapy. He pressed forward with both arms and levered his Templar back to its feet while blossoms of fire still walked across its back and shoulders. Leaving the remaining JES carrier to his Kinnol tanks and his advancing infantry squads, he throttled into a forward walk and pulled his crosshairs over the Catapult’s boxy outline.
Not waiting for a hard lock, trusting his own instincts as well as the advanced targeting computer to make any fine-tuned adjustments, he snap-fired one of his PPCs. The lance of particle energies drilled in over the Catapult’s right side, slashing armor from ferro-titanium bones.
Pushing his heat curve, he toggled and triggered his second PPC right after, this time cutting heavily across the other BattleMech’s left leg.
Four. . .three. . .two. . .
Julian shoved his throttle forward, timing the next wave of missiles nearly to the second. Pushing his Templar up to its maximum speed of sixty-five kilometers per hour just as the crawler spread out a third, wide spread of LRMs, he ran out from beneath the umbrella and slashed two more particle cannon streams across the Catapult’s profile.
“We have their attention.” Callandre again, reading her own HUD as more loyalists turned from the advance of Lady Zou to drive forward to the aid of their missile-carriers.
Thinking to push through and seize Salekhard? Run hard and hope to lose themselves in the thick woodlands below Gory Putorana?
They would never make it.
Julian’s cockpit was a sauna. Sweat poured off his arms and legs. Burned his lips with a salty taste. His damaged shielding and overuse of the Templar’s particle cannon had driven his heat up to dangerous levels. Every step came with greater difficulty as heat-addled control circuitry slowed the ’Mech. Still he slapped at the shutdown override, wrenched his crosshairs over and again slashed out with both of his primary weapons.
One cut hard across the Catapult’s chest. The other sliced clean through one of its arms, cutting free one of its LRM launchers, which crashed to the permafrost in a ruined, smoking heap.
Then Callandre’s Destroyer skated up fast on its cushion of air, autocannon blazing as the hundred-twenty millimeter gun finished the work Julian had started on the Catapult’s leg, cutting through a titanium femur.
The Catapult toppled over, crashing hard against its remaining arm and burying that limb beneath the full weight of its body. It was not going to get up again.
The loyalist ’Mech Warrior quickly cut his active targeting system, surrendering before any follow-up salvoes took out his fusion reactor or came slashing through his cockpit’s ferroglass shield.
And, left alone on this stretch of the open tundra, the remaining JES carrier did the same before all weapons turned on it next.
A pair of Infiltrator troopers jumped up onto the vehicle’s top and wrenched open a hatch, ordering the tank crew out onto the cold flats.
In a high-speed turn, Callandre Kell spun her SM1 end for end and used the powerful drive fans to brake her headlong flight from the far side of the battlefield. Like most vehicles in Julian’s command, Callandre’s Destroyer was painted with a desert-tan camouflage. Until recently, the Guards had been secreted away in the American southwest, training alongside Republic units. The first step in a budding alliance between House Davion’s Federated Suns and Exarch Levin’s Republic of the Sphere. Called up the week before to help defend Paris against a major Senate offensive, there had been no time to worry over such details as proper camouflage.
No time for most. Julian did notice Callandre had again found some spray paint. Never content with painting out the sunburst-and-sword crest of House Davion, on the side of her Destroyer she’d also filled in a large red triangle. Then, in black, she’d covered it with a “V” shaped hound’s head with red slits for eyes.
Not a Davion insignia. Nor the crest of the Lyran Commonwealth, either.
Kell Hounds. One of the Inner Sphere’s elite mercenary units.
As easily as one should expect from an heir to the Kell name—as well as being a former drill commander of the Nagelring’s elite parade grounds cavalry team—Callandre slipped her assault-designed hovercraft into perfect formation at the side of Julian’s Templar, just as he stepped back down to a casual walk.
“You’re hot,” she said. Her voice had the high-gain strength of their private channel.
“Yeah.” His voice was a dusty croak. “I do look pretty good.”
Though he could imagine how his assault ’Mech showed on her thermal scans. Blazing white, very likely.
“Catch your breath. I’ve got your back.” She actually sounded concerned for him. How touching.
In answer, Julian turned towards the advancing line of loyalist forces. He throttled back into a slow run, then pushed for his best speed. “No rest for the wicked,” he said.
Though he did not specify which of them he meant. He didn’t need to. Seven years since they’d schooled together or seven days, Callandre could still read him.
Of course he’d meant her.
She powered past him in a race for the loyalist line. “You’ll pay for that.”
Probably. But still, “Rein it in, Callandre.” She was getting too far up front.
Julian checked to see that the Kinnol battle tanks had come up off his left side. Now he counted another trio of armored vehicles trailing back on his right. “Dawkins.” Julian’s command was filtered by the communications system and automatically selected for the right channel, putting him in touch with his personal intelligence aide and the mobile HQ that crawled across the permafrost farther afield. “Is our artillery in place?”
“Affirmative, Sire.” Leftenant Todd Dawkins rarely let something so minor as a raging firefight discourage him from formality. To him, Julian was Lord Markeson and cousin of the first prince as much as he was the honorary commander of the First Davion Guards. “Awaiting your command.”
They’d have to wait a moment longer with Lady Zou forcing her way through the loyalist cadre. Julian put them on standby.
Ahead, his Centurions stiffened up their resistance against the loyalists as the rest of the First Davion Guards raced forward to regroup. A second SM1 Destroyer powered in from the side to flank Callandre. Then a third. This last one had a large white star on the back. Major Dwight Hastings of the First Guards. Julian’s man.
But far from blocking her off, they joined in a wedge formation with Callandre at the head.
“Callandre. Hastings. Rein in!”
But he knew better, even as he wasted time on the order. She’d slipped her leash. Again. Dammit. And Hastings had taken as much of Callandre’s showboating as any good line officer could without also catching the bug.
The trio of Destroyers powered right past the Centurions at flank speed, barreling into the enemy line.
Julian swallowed dryly, anticipating a quick and vicious slaughter. He did not give Callandre enough credit to know her business, or the Senate MechWarriors for possessing enough survival instinct to know when to get out of the way. Three Destroyers, each with a twelve-centimeter bore autocannon that could cut the legs out from under an assault ’Mech in one pass, were not to be taken lightly. With the heaviest unit fielded by the loyalists currently a beat-up Legionnaire, most of the enemy quickly scattered away from the Destroyers, not wanting to be first.
Most. Not all.
A thirty-ton Spider was slow lighting off its jump jets. It delayed long enough to slash a scarlet laser across the front of Callandre’s Destroyer and never mind how quickly it raced forward. Armor composite splashed over the ground, burning quickly down to smoking cinders.
Not enough to stop her, though. At point-blank, Callandre ripped a long, deadly burst dead center into the Spider. One of the other SM1s stitched its own autocannon fire into the Spider’s side, while Hastings (Julian thought) also managed a centerline punch.
The Spider’s armor wasn’t about to stop one Destroyer from gutting its torso. Two was overkill. Golden fire shot through the gaping wounds as the fusion reactor burst free, gobbling up any material it could find as fuel. For an instant the Spider glowed bright and dangerous, just as Callandre’s Destroyer shot between its legs and the others raced by on either side. Then it flew apart in an explosion that rocked the entire battlefield and nearly caught the suicidal SM1 in the expanding fireball.
Callandre’s Destroyer trailed smoke and a few bright flames as it raced on. But it was still in one piece. And it had made rendezvous with Lady Zou’s advancing thrust.
In fact, with resistance scattered away from that part of the battlefield, Zou’s Republic warriors had an easy push through the center, leaving the wounded mob of loyalists scattered in their wake.
“Calamity Kell strikes again,” someone said.
Julian smiled, but only because he knew Callandre would be grinding her teeth inside her Destroyer, hearing her old nickname thrown at her yet again.
“If you are done grandstanding,” he said, and toggled back over to an all-hands circuit. “Leftenant Dawkins. Retard distance negative two hundred meters. Shift two points off the centerline of NavSat coordinates two nine zero point one five and point five. Drop the hammer!”
Ariana Zou and Callandre Kell led forward a strong column of ’Mechs and armor, approaching Julian’s position as the order was relayed. The first artillery shells fell to either side of them and smashed into the regrouping loyalists. One heavy payload landed between the feet of a limping Mad Cat III, throwing it back and down, minus a leg. Other shells worried some scattered infantry, and overturned a Demon fast-attack vehicle.
Julian read the battlefield with a practice eye. Saw where the loyalists maintained their best order. “Shift all assets to the eastern zone. Saturate for thirty seconds. Now!”
A moment later, that part of the tundra erupted in a wall of fire and smoke and the detritus of broken machines. It forced the remaining loyalists right where they did not want to go. On a reckless charge into the teeth of a combined Republic-Federated Suns force.
“Remind me never to get on your bad side,” Lady Zou said. She stomped her Griffin up next to Julian’s Templar, helping set their line against the coming charge. “I would hate to see what you do to people you do not like.”
There were a few laughs of black humor, but not from Julian. Or Callandre either, he noted. Both of them knew that Lady Zou hit close to the truth. Julian did not care for the loyalists, true, but neither did he hate them. Opposed their politics, yes. Would meet them on the battlefield and strip away their ability to make war, certainly. But as champion of the Federated Suns, he was merely exercising the will of his prince and ruler, Harrison Davion.
His prince’s order had been to assist The Republic.
Perhaps the last order Harrison Davion would ever give.
“Let’s finish this,” Julian said. Unable to keep the demons at bay now that they were loose once more in his mind, his tone was short and clipped.
He breathed easier with his Templar’s heat levels having fallen away, but there was still a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the battle. He pulled his crosshairs over the stumbling Legionnaire. A ruined ’Mech leading forward warriors without the sense to realize when they were beaten.
It was his job to explain it in a way they would understand.
“On my mark, silence artillery and all units advance. We hold the line unless and until the loyalists break. Then it’s hunting by pairs. All units respond.”
He waited as Callandre and even Lady Zou had checked in with affirmative votes. Hastings and Dawkins and Montgomery. All lance leaders. All support auxiliaries.
“Now!” he ordered, and throttled his Templar into an easy walk.
The first salvo of concentrated fire knocked the Legionnaire back and put it down hard. Not to rise again. Their second shattered a Behemoth II assault tank, stripping it down to a ruined pile of scrap.
Return fire was light and sporadic.
A moment later, with two more tanks destroyed and a Pack Hunter torn down to spare parts, it was not even that. A very few units fled on wild escape paths across the tundra. Most dropped their active targeting systems and powered down in surrender.
“Not a bad day’s work, Jules.” Callandre cranked her steering vane over and spun her Destroyer through a couple of victory circles. “What do we do now?” she asked.
But with the demands of battle fading, and the questions rising once more, Julian Davion sagged back in his cockpit seat. Reaching forward, he toggled off the comms board, not yet ready to answer. What should they do now?
That was the question. Wasn’t it?
2
That’s the trouble! No one believed he could do it, not that he would. Some great political grandstanding. Slap the nobles around a bit, and why not? But to enforce it by the military, and with no court to redress the conflict?
What is Jonah Levin really about?
—Filmmaker Wendell Stone, on Lawrence King’s Speaking Out, Towne, 12 May 3135
Genève, Terra
Republic of the Sphere
13 June 3135
Exarch Jonah Levin once considered the Chamber of Paladins his final refuge.
Some of that was simple architecture. To his mind, the Chamber possessed a mixture of senatorial grandeur and Arthurian legend. Thick doors of silver ashwood letting onto a tall, domed room. Brightly illuminated. A wide, ferroglass skylight that opened up a large portion of the wall as well. All surrounded by white stone and blue-gray marble, much of it carved in ornate decoration and often inlaid with delicate gold and silver filigree. Stepping across the threshold, guarded from the Hall of Government’s Rotunda by nothing more than velvet ropes, he’d traded the minute cares and worries of the day for loftier goals, walking softly on runners of plush, crimson carpet as he made his way to his place.
As a knight of the Sphere he’d spent many years in the gallery. Large enough to seat several hundred knights, the assembled champions of every Republic world, the gallery seating circled the outside wall on a set of shallow risers.
Elevated to paladin, Jonah had then taken his place at one of the seventeen private stations arranged on the main floor. Here the paladins met, and reported, and worked together (mostly) to support the ideals and tenets as laid down by Devlin Stone, grand architect of The Republic.
Twenty-five years of service. Half his life.
And all of that had changed when his peers elected him to The Republic’s highest post in December.
As the second of Stone’s successors, and the man presiding over The Republic’s darkest hours, he’d known little peace and even less rest since ascending to Exarch. One crisis after another. Until he dreaded setting foot in the Chamber, to hear what his paladins had to report, or suggest. The room would never again be the sanctuary it once was.
