In the meantime, Torrent advanced. And with him, drawn in his wake like filings to a lodestone, came the Steel Wolf line.
Fighting side by side with Tassa now, their BattleMechs facing different directions as each concentrated on a different enemy, Raul checked his head’s up display and saw that the two of them formed the point of a new, thin wedge. Squeezed in between the Swordsworn and Steel Wolves, Tassa sniped at Erik Sandoval while Raul held up under Torrent’s determined assault. Only a slender line of militia forces connected them back to the spaceport’s northwest corner. It was time.
Such orders should be given with dramatic presentation. Some kind of timeless oration that would stand up to history. Or so Raul had once thought. Now it was with a strange mixture of relief and disappointment that he opened up a channel and simply said, “Tassa. Now.”
Like a steeply pitched tent with its supporting prop yanked out from beneath it, the militia wedge folded back in on itself as Raul and Tassa herded scurrying infantry and wounded vehicles before them. Raul opened up his general channel. “Retrograde maneuver,” he ordered. Colonel Blaire seconded the command, and began handing out the secondary assignments, which would pull the entire militia force back into a strong, secure fist.
The idea was to swing the Swordsworn and Steel Wolf line into close proximity. One errant missile, a laser stabbed in at their former enemies: it wouldn’t take much. But first they had to maneuver into close range.
Tassa was the first one to notice. “Raul. It’s not working.”
Raul rocked back three hurried steps as Torrent sliced a small laser beam across the shield protecting the Jupiter’s cockpit. Molten ferroglass streaked down and recrystalized. Raul blinked to clear his vision of the ghost image temporarily burned into his retina. “Give it time.”
As the militia continued to fall back, too often leaving a body or the fire-gutted shell of another vehicle behind, the Swordsworn and Steel Wolves were drawn forward, ever closer to each other. At the base of the collapsing formation, in fact, retreating soldiers reinforced each side, spreading the wings out in a north-south push that shoved the factions into three wedges of an asymmetrical pie.
The Steel Wolves were still the largest, but it was the militia who fought on two fronts. So far.
“Ortega…” Blaire’s warning growled in Raul’s ears.
Someone else not privy to the officer’s worries noticed yet another problem. “The Wolves are getting up aerospace fighters.”
That was true. With the militia finally pushed completely away from the taxiing strip, a squadron of four fightercraft rolled out from beneath the protective wings of the Triumph–class DropShip. Once in the air, with daylight to gauge their strafing runs, the Steel Wolves would heap more misery onto the militia’s plate.
“VTOLs!” Raul knew he was sending good men and women to their deaths, but knew as well that Achernar wasn’t quite done demanding its sacrifice. “Forward and harass the fighters. Buy us time.” Two Yellow Jackets and the one remaining Cyrano thundered forward. The Cyrano never made it over the enemy formation, swatted down by a Catapult’s multiple missile barrages.
Still the Swordsworn and Steel Wolves pressed in, close to fighting side-by-side now and hardly acknowledging each other’s presence. An SM1 nipped in and cut a leg from their ForestryMech, sending it crashing to the tarmac. Diago cut in on the senior officers channel. “Raul, maybe we should think about—”
“It’ll work,” Raul promised, cutting him off. “Give it time.” He dropped crosshairs over the Tundra Wolf’s outline, lashing out with PPCs and running another ton of molten armor over the field ferrocrete. It had to work. Achernar was out of choices, and out of time.
River’s End/San Marino Spaceport
Achernar
Erik Sandoval-Groell had nearly given up on the Legionnaire, counting it and the rest of the raiding party as lost once it cleared the capital’s southeast industrial sector ahead of him.
On a private channel Erik railed at Michael Eus, who had set the entrapment the way he saw fit rather than as Erik had directed. The operations manager had many hidden talents, and even more hidden loyalties, but military planning did not rate highly among them. He had tried to close the net with slower-moving, tracked vehicles, thinking that their heavier armor would mitigate any losses. Even a first-year cadet understood that one used fast-response craft to pin an enemy in place, then rolled in the heavy guns to obliterate them.
Erik’s rage was short-lived, however, the heat draining from his face when he gained the city’s edge and found his forces holding off repeated attempts by the Legionnaire to regain the capital. Adding his own autocannon into the defensive enfilade, the young noble concentrated on the Legionnaire or one of the modified IndustrialMechs whenever possible. After he personally laid out the converted LoaderMech, his crosshairs found no other target than the Legionnaire.
As that BattleMech pulled back from the city, joining the rest of the militia force on the outskirts of the San Marino landing field, Erik cautiously followed rather than be denied his due after the treacherous attempt. Between his Swordsworn’s carefully laid fire patterns and the brute-force cascade of firepower spreading out from the Steel Wolves, slowly they hammered the Republic’s wedge flat and then caved it in. Likely they could have continued on until little was left of the Achernar militia but memories and a ready garrison post for Swordsworn forces to occupy.
Might have, in fact, except for a daring Shandra scout vehicle that shied too close onto Erik’s flank in trying to avoid a passing Yellow Jacket gunship.
With casual need, Erik ordered up a pair of hoverbikes to birddog the Shandra, run it off. Light weapons fire stitched dark holes in its side armor, and was returned with interest as twin, ten-millimeter gatlings burned one driver from the hoverbike’s seat.
Setting his jaw, teeth grinding together at the death of another Swordsworn warrior, Erik felt the warm flush return as he leveled his powerful Imperator autocannon at the Shandra and shattered its rear drive train with a long, deadly burst of hot metal.
And Erik might have let it go at that. He had not wanted to waste a precious amount of his dwindling ammunition supply on the Shandra, except that it had demanded some response from him as their leader and—when necessary—avenger.
He tensed when the alarms wailed their warning blast only seconds before the missiles hit all around his position. A half dozen smashed into the side of his Hatchetman’s elongated head, rocking it to one side like a prizefighter caught by a series of left hooks. The cockpit shook violently, body-checking Erik against his harness straps until a seam ripped and Erik slid half out of his command couch.
Neurofeedback works two ways: for the MechWarrior, when he can use his own sense of balance to help a stressed gyroscope; against him, when any personal dizziness or faulted equilibrium is translated into a signal that is then used to alter the gyro’s normal function.
Erik’s vision swam and his gut clenched up as the Hatchetman toppled over. He heard the shouts of alarm on the comms system, could imagine his warriors turning quickly to his aid, and opened his mouth to countermand their likely actions.