“Can we expect relief from these strafing runs anytime soon?” The militia had only a pair of Stingrays over the spaceport field, and they were being shoved around like schoolyard children at recess. The one-two punch of ground-fire and aerospace fighters had thrown him off balance twice since Erik Sandoval pulled back his antiaircraft-capable vehicles.
Clark Diago, anchoring the militia’s attempt to encircle the Steel Wolf flank, was more direct. “Base, Diago. Get us some support out here!”
Promises and regrets were forwarded by Colonel Blaire himself. Aerospace was still tied up in attempts to divert the Steel Wolf DropShips. “You’re about to get all the cover we have,” he said in clipped tones. “But it won’t be enough.”
Biting back his response, Raul throttled into a backward walk and put some distance between himself and a pair of M1 Marksmen. The assault tanks rolled past the dismantled corpse of the final Swordsworn WorkMech, working it over with short-range weaponry, just for good measure, before turning their attention forward. Their gauss rifles were too big a threat for Raul to ignore. Switching over to his company’s tactical frequency, he called a missile barrage down on their location.
Gray tendrils of smoke fell down from the sky, marking the four-score warheads that blasted into armor and ripped through the polished tarmac landing field. Before the smoke cleared, a squad of DI Schmitts pounced, their rotary autocannon blazing with long, sustained rates of fifty-mil fire support. Raul shifted back for a forward run, cutting along behind the Schmitts, adding his own hard-pounding rotary to the assault.
The Steel Wolf crew rallied quickly—too quickly. With artificial thunderclaps splitting the air, both Marksmen punched rail-accelerated gauss slugs into the lead Schmitt. One carried away a turret missile launcher, ripping it clean off the tank. The second gauss slug impacted over a wheel, smashing it back into the drivetrain and fouling the right-side independent drive mechanism.
The Schmitt turned in a sharp circle, crippled, unable to withdraw.
“At them! Hit them now.” Raul drove forward, feeling each of the Legionnaire’s pounding steps at the base of his spine.
Centering his crosshairs over the Marksman with greater armor fatigue, he burned into it with a hammering cascade of fifty-millimeter slugs tipped with depleted uranium. More missiles rained down on the Steel Wolf position—and more than one flight was returned against Raul’s BattleMech—as the three remaining Schmitts followed their MechWarrior’s lead and drilled deep into the gauss-toting tank.
Protected by deep armor reserves, the Marksman and its comrade vehicle managed one more volley, completely smashing through the side of the crippled Schmitt, and left it a gutted shell. Then a blistering scourge of laserfire chewed into the wounded Marksman. A burst of flame scattered out of several gaping holes as fuel caught fire, and dark, greasy smoke swirled out to commingle into a dark funeral shroud.
The remaining Marksman rolled backward into the protection of the Steel Wolf lines, quickly flanked by two advancing Pack Hunters.
And that was when hell opened up, throwing a long line of fire and destruction into the midst of the exposed Schmitt trio.
“DropShips! Angels-twelve. Straight up but drifting back.”
Like Raul needed the warning. His alarm systems had failed to register the DropShip arrival, sensors cluttered up with too many ground targets to worry about overhead threats, but there was no mistaking the fire pattern laid down from above. “Break and run,” he ordered the Schmitts. “Strike Squad Two, evade and escape.”
Two of the three Schmitts crawled out of the blasted landscape. One of them had plunged into a cratered strip that could only be a collapsed service tunnel. It might have survived, but even so it was out of the battle.
Craning to one side, looking up past the thick, rotary-linked barrels of his overhead autocannon, Raul found the bright drive flare of a hovering Okinawa–class DropShip as it passed overhead by half a kilometer. The DropShip crew had put a rotating spin on the vessel, and now long beams of gem-brilliant energy lanced down from three weapon ports at a time as lasers and particle cannons mixed into terrifying salvoes. As one port fell out of line-of-sight, another came around to walk new destruction down among the militia line. LRMs fell out at regular intervals, spreading more impersonal death over the ground-bound vehicles.
And it continued drifting north, toward the militia rear!
“Support forces, scatter and evade,” Raul ordered, knowing the confusion he was about to unleash in his own backfield. He selected an all-hands channel, one that the Swordsworn would also be monitoring. “DropShips are not—repeat, not–grounding in support of Steel Wolf advance. ’Ware behind!”
Then a pair of Jagatai aerospace fighters tore over the landing field, cutting down with a mix of autocannon and lasers, and Raul had all he could do to angle out of their strafing line before they yanked the rug out from under his feet again. The Pack Hunters prowled forward, waiting for a single misstep. Their PPCs spat out twin forks of manmade lightning, but they grounded out short of Raul’s Legionnaire.
As more reports of air-based strikes filtered through the command levels, Raul understood that a low-passing Overlord had ravaged Clark Diago’s position before moving down the militia’s back line and into the hesitant Swordsworn. Sweat burned at the corners of Raul’s eyes. He blinked them clear and twisted his Legionnaire about, watching as the two leviathan vessels lowered themselves on massive drive flares, one to either end of the grounded Kuan Ti. The trapped DropShip made the mistake of firing on the Overlord, one final act of defiance, and suddenly the aerial assault dealt over the militia line looked like a casual wave by comparison.
The Overlord pounded down at the nose of the civilian-conversion with gauss rifles and enough laser energy to light up the city of River’s End. Although limited in firepower after its military decommissioning, the Kuan Ti still mustered its assault-class autocannons and a heavy missile barrage. Then the Okinawa bit in from behind, trading lasers and PPCs against the civilian vessel’s aft pulse lasers and missiles.
It was an uneven fight from the beginning, and lasted until the Overlord pounded silent every one of the Kuan Ti’s forward weapon bays.
About sixty seconds.
Wary of being caught between the DropShips’ anvil and the hammer of the Steel Wolf advancing force, Raul herded his two remaining Schmitts and a scattered flock of mixed battlesuit infantry back toward their ravaged rearward lines. M.A.S.H. units and a JI 100 recovery vehicle had rolled up from the southwest, making pickup on broken units and fallen comrades. He stomped past a fire-gutted Joust and the twisted wreckage of two broken hoverbikes. One still had hands clamped onto the steering bar, but was missing the rest of the driver. A technician emergency response team fell hard at work over a captured Demon, getting it battle-worthy again and detailing a new crew out of their auxiliary ranks. Raul gave the working ERT a wide berth, swung around to one side of them, and then slammed his throttles down to a full stop. Being hauled up into the embrace of the JI recovery vehicle was Charal DePriest’s converted LoaderMech.
With Tassa leading a small force in defense of the Brightwater facility, Charal had been called up to help defend the spaceport. Raul had thought to keep her safe, relegated as she was to a support role, even when she followed him into the wedge between the Swordsworn and Steel Wolves. ‘Safe’ was a relative term in a live firefight, though, especially when two DropShips began redefining the battle. Still, there were any number of injuries that even a converted WorkMech could take and the MechWarrior could walk away from. Crippled gyros. Destroyed legs. Ruined engines.