The martyr son-of-a-Blakist was still taking on all-comers.
Grinding his teeth together, Torrent rocked his throttles forward and advanced. Drawing his targeting crosshairs in a line across the Jupiter’s shoulders, he counted his thundering heartbeats until the reticle burned the flashed a golden tone of targeting lock and then waited a second more until he could steady the shot with a confident touch on the controls.
He would show the Knight-Errant’s foolishness in disregarding Torrent as a worthy adversary. Steel Wolf or Republic Knight. One of them would die trying.
Raul Ortega caught on to the Knight-Errant’s plan from the start. By keeping Raul’s Legionnaire in close, and always dividing his fire, he acted as a lodestone, drawing Torrent in and making certain the Steel Wolf remained focused exclusively on the Jupiter even while Powers was free to whittle away at the enemy defenses.
Long-range jousting caught the enemy Maxim APC in a series of devastating scourges, left it dead or dying far in the Steel Wolf backfield. The AC-toting AgroMechs were a threat, flanking the tight Republic force, but Powers let them come, always adding a brace of missiles here, or a scouring pull from his autocannons there. Waiting. Waiting for Torrent to make his move.
And then he unleashed hell.
Too late. Raul knew it, and was certain that Powers had known it even beforehand. Powers had warned Raul, after all, that Torrent was out for blood. If the fire-gutted Jessie wasn’t proof of that, the star colonel’s pincer-charge confirmed it.
Raul bit back any further warnings, inhaled deeply against the steel-band grip around his chest, and worked his rotary autocannon in a series of long and short pulls to hammer one of the AgroMechs into submission. The surviving hovercraft missile carrier had slid around behind the Torrent’s Marksman, threatening its slightly weaker rear armor and trying to pull it away while their Saxon APC dropped Purifier infantry in a skirmish line around the AgroMech.
He was looking away when Kyle Powers’ Jupiter stumbled to one knee.
He turned back in time to watch Sir Kyle Powers die.
Not two hundred meters distant through the gray downpour, Star Colonel Torrent’s Tundra Wolf towered over the kneeling outline of Kyle Powers’ Jupiter. Raul watched as the Knight Errant divided his fire in three directions, a stunning display of BattleMech command but dangerous—so dangerous—point blank with the Tundra Wolf. Raul pulled back around his own weapons, coming to Powers’s aid despite the Knight’s earlier orders. His Legionnaire swiveled at the waist. His right-arm laser had barely acquired targeting lock when Torrent proved just how deadly he could be. Even at a distance and through the curtains of rain, Raul saw the glowing wound of a laser-cut slicing from the Jupiter’s chest up into—and through—the ferroglass canopy… which was all that stood between a MechWarrior and a closed-casket service.
Raul knew a moment of hope—a moment of denial—when the Jupiter shifted as if adjusting its weight to stand back up. A trick of the rain. The great machine twisted around on its knee, showing him the horrible, red-wealed scar that now ruined the cockpit. Then it pitched forward and slammed facedown into the desert mud. He knew that Powers was dead. Knew it in the same way he felt the Sphere Knight enter a room—down in his gut. This time it was a hollow feeling, the loss of something Raul had come to rely on in recent days. The sinking sensation as he realized that the entire battle—the expectations of a watching planet—had just settled on his own shoulders.
“Down! Jove is down!” A frantic call from the JES carrier’s crew shook Raul from his stunned lethargy. “Captain… Captain Ortega, we’ve lost Sir Powers.”
They had. But Raul would not let them lose Achernar in the same battle.
Before he had even considered a proper tactical response, the Mech Warrior pulled into his primary triggers. Medium lasers stabbed ruby knives into the Tundra Wolf’s side while his overhead rotary spent a long, lethal stream of fifty-mil slugs hammering into the Tundra Wolf. The autocannon roared out hundreds of rounds. Two hundred. Three. Four, five, six…
And jammed. Pressed too hard too fast, the spinning barrels locked up with a grinding screech of metal against metal.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Raul cursed himself silently as the Tundra Wolf shook off his desperate attack and swiveled around to come at him over the ruined Jupiter. The BattleMech stalked forward like a predator in search of prey, slow and with malicious intent. Its large laser sliced in at Raul’s Legionnaire, splashing armor off of his right arm. An earth-shaking spread of fifteen separate missiles pummeled Raul’s ’Mech and the surrounding desert floor. Two individual warheads slammed in on either side of his cockpit, like a one-two punch, shaking Raul against his harness and leaving behind the taste of blood from a bitten lip.
To add injury to Raul’s insult, the AgroMech opened up behind him to drill through his back armor. He stumbled forward, recovering just in time to save himself from a three-story drop to the desert floor.
Reactor alarms spoke their general discontent into the cacophony of sirens and audio alerts as the stream of hot metal chipped away at the engine’s physical shielding. Failsafes threatened to dump a dampening field over the fusion chamber, but Raul slapped at the override to keep his ’Mech up and fighting. He turned to present fresh armor against the converted AgroMech, and worked to clear his jammed weapon.
“Purifiers, get control of that Agro. Jessie-one, worry the Wolf.”
Throwing a hovercraft against the Tundra Wolf would not have been Raul’s first choice, but he had to buy himself a few critical seconds. He worked the ammunition dump on the autocannon, clearing the jammed breach. Status lights blinked from red back to green as he stood up under another withering assault, again from both sides as the remaining AgroMech and the Tundra Wolf worked him over with autocannon and missiles.
Then the AgroMech went down with half a dozen Purifier battlesuits clinging to its back, ripping through armor and engine, and the tactical carrier launched a full spread of short-range missiles into the Tundra Wolf’s face.
They bought Raul the extra few seconds he needed to set his feet firmly beneath him, pulling his targeting crosshairs over the Tundra Wolf’s blocky outline.
Short pull. Long pull. This time Raul varied the way he ate into his ammunition reserves, careful of the weapon’s needs. When he needed to rest the rotary, he chopped at the tall BattleMech with his trio of lasers. Between the damaged shielding and his nonstop fire, temperatures in the cockpit climbed slowly but steadily through the yellow band and into the red. And all the while Star Colonel Torrent worked him over with more missiles, and more. A pair of medium lasers. Missiles…
Torrent had lost his large laser!
The realization slapped Raul back into a semblance of coherent thought. He had not been weighing his chances, or worrying about what the best strategic opportunity might be. In those first moments after the fall of Sir Powers, all Raul could think of were Tassa’s earlier words. They wouldn’t fail. They couldn’t. He understood her better now. Kyle Powers had drawn a line in the sand—right here. And right here was where Raul had unconsciously decided to hold that line until he broke under Torrent’s guns.