If Evan did not move against him first!
“Ijori-one. We have movement on the enemy line. Your orders?”
Evan watched the red icons shifted, Zeus taking up a spearhead position, flanked by a limping Pack Hunter and a scarred Vindicator. Armor crawled alongside or raced forward on cushions of air. Infantry leapt and ran and clung to the sides of vehicles. Ruskoff feathered most of his forces out to the east as well, matching Evan’s line.
“Ijori-one. What are your orders?”
He saw the maneuver in his mind’s eye. Feint into the eastern enemy, and then drive into the middle with whatever he had left. Sweat beaded on Evan’s brow that had nothing to do with his saunalike cockpit. A flush rose from the back of his neck. This is what Hahn had felt, he knew, in those last moments. All or nothing.
“Ijori-three?”
Mai Uhn Wa also sounded concerned. “Evan?”
Evan bumped his throttle forward, walked his Ti Ts’ang to the end of his little island and straddled the artillery crater. He pulled his crosshairs over the Zeus, and adjusted his grip on the sweat-slick control sticks.
“We charge,” he said. “Everything we have left, for House Ijori.”
Daniel Peterson struck with lasers and missiles, flailing about his Tundra Wolf with desperate attacks as a mixture of Dynasty Guard and Ijori warriors sought to rush his position. Infantry scrabbled at his lower legs, trying to gain purchase. Fire wreathed the BattleMech’s upper chest as a new spread of missiles hammered into him, and lasers scourged its back.
No one moved to his aid this time. Lady Kincaid was pinned under heavy fire, and the flanking vehicles turnkeyed to him by Ruskoff had fallen back under Lwellen’s orders. No use throwing good after bad. Wasn’t that what the militia colonel had said in planning?
Daniel had no intention of making it easy.
Kicking aside Fa Shih troopers and a JES tactical carrier, the ex-Paladin cleared his own path toward the relative safety of the allied line. Given a choice, he would have set himself for the western flank where Eve Kincaid wielded two companies of Principes Guards like a surgical tool. For better or worse, he fell in closer to the allied center. There, Colonel Lwellen’s Catapult maneuvered from side to side to avoid the press of Carson Rieves’s assault-weight Yu Huang.
It was a sparring match that only had one conclusion. Nothing stood up under the kind of pounding an assault ’Mech could inflict, except another assault ’Mech. The Dynasty Guard owned every advantage except for the raw determination of Republic forces to hold off a Capellan victory.
“If we had our full numbers massed here, we’d have them.”
But they didn’t. The Republic force had split its strength against “House” Ijori, thinking they had found the Dynasty Guard. How had the Conservatory forces learned of this assault, coordinating their own arrival so well? Daniel could only imagine. An informer? Misinformation leaked through to Legate Ruskoff? Whatever the ruse, it had worked. Now the fall of Ijori was the pivotal point to the entire battle and the very defense of Liao. Break the nascent Warrior House, and The Republic could sweep all forces north against the Dynasty Guard.
Which meant holding the line, here, in the foothills above the Suriwong Floods.
A pair of lasers stabbed into Daniel’s back, bringing him up short of The Republic lines, forcing him to turn and deal with a pair of Demons. His Tactical Missile System automatically selected down to short-range warheads, slamming blossoms of orange fire into the side of one vehicle. His lasers slashed apart one tire and cut through the axle behind it. The fast-attack vehicle slewed over, dug a fender into the soft ground, and rolled into a crashing death.
The other vehicle sped back to the side of an approaching Wasp. Daniel throttled into a slow, backward walk, protecting his thinning rear armor.
Which set him in the no-man’s-land between Republic and Confederation lines, alone, when the warning crackled across communication channels.
“Down! The Legate is down!”
Daniel froze over his controls, earning him a ruined right arm actuator as the Wasp sprinted in, stung at him with lasers and machine guns, and raced away again. He tried to snap fire a return salvo, but the lighter ’Mech’s speed and stealth armor made targeting lock impossible.
At least it got him moving again. He faded back from The Republic line, torn between the battle here and the man who had offered him a hand.
“Zeus is back up,” the report came, but it was no time for breathing easy. “Limping… Ti Ts’ang and infantry swarm attacks.” Evan Kurst! “Taking heavy fire. Tā mā dè! They’re all over us.”
The Wasp continued to strike at Daniel, always moving for his flanks. A Demon and a pair of Condors now trailed in its shadow. Daniel fired again, and again. He turned his Tundra Wolf south, then back north again. He had a fairly clear field to the southwest…
“What are you waiting for, Peterson?” It was Lwellen, still struggling along in the face of the Yu Huang’s deadly assault. “Legate Ruskoff is in trouble. Pull him out, man!”
Lwellen passed other orders as well, detaching VTOL assets and a squad of JES tactical carriers to his command. It wasn’t much, but they would be able to move fast. They came toward him at flank speed, chased by Confederation units split off to prevent any aid from heading south. Sang-shao Rieves did not want reinforcements coming north.
“Go, Daniel.” Lady Kincaid. Her voice sounded strained. She led the Principes Guards forward, driving through a wall of Confederation heavy armor to try and bring some relief to Lwellen. “You won’t make the difference here.”
The Wasp came at him again. Daniel turned into it, preempted its assault by hammering the area with missiles from his XX-rack and ATM launcher. When the stealth-equipped machine staggered out of the destructive rain, he shouldered it aside and left it sprawled over the scarred earth. A pair of Jessies smashed it down again on their way by, slamming a curtain of short-range missiles across its back.
Then they were moving south and west, away from the foothills and back into the Suriwong Floods. A Tian-zong fired gauss slugs at him from long range, missed. The Ijori ’Mech struck out at sixty kilometers per hour in pursuit, but could not even keep up with the Dynasty Guard armor sent by Rieves.
It was a race to see who would reach the southern battle first.
If Viktor Ruskoff could hold on for their arrival.
The Ijori charge had smashed into Ruskoff’s line like a sledgehammer, putting forward every effort to bring down the Planetary Legate. Evan smashed the Zeus’s gauss rifle into useless scrap, and put a deep ax wound into the assault ’Mech’s knee as well. The Zeus went down, and a mix of Purifier and Fa Shih attempted to reach the stricken ’Mech.
Then a savage counterthrust by the militia Vindicator and several Brutus assault tanks drove Evan back. He lost his Purifiers to heavy bombardment by a JES II strategic carrier. The Fa Shih barely made it out ahead of a hunter-killer pack of hoverbikes.
The Capellan force hammered forward again, trying to reach the wounded Zeus. But The Republic defenders had stood up under their first assault. They were better prepared for the second. The third. Artillery fire fell haphazardly now as a see-saw offensive spread forces all across the Suriwong Floods, leaving some vehicles stranded, others burning.