"Believe me, Lori. I intend to try to do just that. We need 'Mech pilots, and we're not going to grow them ourselves here in Sarghad."
She'd looked up at him, her eyes shining. "Do you... do you mean that? I mean, that I might con a 'Mech again?"
Grayson rubbed his eyes. "I can't promise it, not now. But damned if I know where else I can get 'Mech pilots. It takes years of apprenticeship to learn how to con one. Ha! Look at us! Apprentices half our lives, and neither of us had even graduated yet when we found ourselves... here."
Lori laid her hand on Grayson's arm, a warm and gentle touch. "I'll do whatever has to be done, Gray."
How had they slipped into a first-name basis? Grayson could not remember. He did know that he felt comfortable with Lori, able to talk to her, to discuss plans, and that he missed her when she was not there. Perhaps their growing friendship had something to do with the fact that they both felt so alone here.
"Well all do what has to be done," he said. "It's called 'survival.'"
Two periods later, Lieutenant Nolem filed a report with General Adel on 'subversive elements within the unit.' He named no one, but it was clear he had Lori in mind as the one directly responsible for the unit's poor morale. As the sun rose on a crisp, clear, -20 degree morning on Seconday, the First Trellwan Lancers seemed farther away from being combat ready than ever.
18
The Lancers needed combat to draw them together. More importantly, Grayson realized, they needed a victory.
By the time the red sun had reached its zenith in the clear chill cold of Seconday, the Lancer T.O. & E. showed the two combat platoons as having 40 men each. This force constituted the Ground Strike Unit and had been trained in anti-Mech infantry tactics. How well they would be able to put Grayson's lectures into practice remained to be seen. The astech support platoon now numbered 63, and Tech Sergeant Brooke — under Master Sergeant Lori Kalmar's direction — had both ‘Mechs mechanically sound and operational. The Wasp,however, still lacked a head.
Written out on the unit T.O. & E. chart, it all looked quite impressive, but Grayson knew that even a full battalion with four times as many men — even well-trained and experienced men — would be hard pressed to handle even one attacking 'Mech. And when one of those ‘Mechs was a 75-ton Marauder...
The heart of any 'Mech unit was the combat Lance — the 'Mechs themselves. Ideally a balance of four 'Mechs working together, sometimes accompanied by an air Lance of aerospace fighters, the unit's 'Mechs were the whole reason for the existence of support combat units. Except for special units, most 'Mech Lances, especially mercenary units, had no ground strike force at all and consisted of 'Mechs and Techs alone. Without 'Mechs, a unit consisting of mere men was practically defenseless.
And the Lancers had exactly one combat-ready light 'Mech.
It was a few tens of hours shy of midday Seconday, and the Trellwan Light Lancers were deploying for combat As Grayson had explained to General Varney when he submitted his proposal, "We fight now, and win — or it's all been for nothing."
There was more than the fighting morale of the Lancers at stake. Grayson needed more than one 'Mech if the Lance was to have any chance at all. And the only way they were going to get another 'Mech was to take one away from the enemy.
The spaceport north of Sarghad was an unsightly sprawl of gray and white buildings across the otherwise empty countryside. The ground there was largely barren, broken by thick clumps of blue-tufted qykka and patchy swards of blue-green prairie grass. The highway that linked port and city was pocked and rutted by Trellwan's vicious weather cycle, and had been but rarely travelled even before the coming of the bandit raiders.
Below the road was a chain of arroyos, gulleys carved through the arid ground by repeated Thirday meltwater floods. Grayson had noted this particular wadi during terrain-mapping expeditions when it was Carlyle's Commandos who occupied the Castle some ten kilometers northeast, on the other side of the port It had survived the last series of floods and existed now as a broad, dry channel through the desert, encrusted with frost and ice in the overhangs where the weak sun did not penetrate. In some places, it was fifteen meters deep, with steep slopes of treacherously balanced rock and shifting sand.
The Locustpaced along the floor of the canyon with Grayson at the controls. It felt as though a lifetime had passed since he'd last been strapped into the Mech Warrior's hot seat. As he gripped the controls and leaned into the reassuring weight of the neuro-impulse helmet, he knew how right it was that he'd trained for it half of his life.
After spending endless standard days at his report-smothered deck in the dim recesses of the city Armory, Grayson felt alive again.
His hands rested lightly on the weapons controls and maneuver overrides. His electrode-padded and cable-heavy helmet picked up neural impulses relating to routine movement and balance, while a sophisticated computer built into the cockpit seat translated those signals to the 'Mech's four-meter walking stride. The Locustwas an extension of his body.
The popular warrior mythos held that MechWarriors actually became their 'Mechs, that there was a personality transfer from man to machine, that the machines moved and fought because the Mech Warrior's mind was directly controlling them. None of this was true, though certainly the neuro-impulse helmets had been a first promising step toward combat systems doing just that. What the helmet did do was to direct the machine in such routine tasks as maintaining its balance, which left the pilot's mind free to deal with analytical tasks such as sorting out friend from foe and engaging in combat.
"Striker One, this is Striker Two, do you read?"
The voice in his helmet speakers was electronically filtered and reproduced, and required practice to understand. Transmissions were beamed on an extremely narrow frequency band in order to penetrate enemy electronic countermeasures and to defy hostile code breakers. Often, such transmissions were made in battlespeech, an artificial coded language known only to the users, but there'd been no time to design and teach one to all who would need to know it. Computer scrambling should make the transmissions intelligible only to the Lancers. At least, that's what Grayson hoped.
He bit down hard to flex the masseter muscles below and in front of his ears. Sensors in the helmet read the flexing's electrical signature, and opened a channel.
"Striker Two, this is One. Go."
"We're in position below the fence. No patrols... no suspicious activity."
"Good. Keep alert."
The assault force's movement up the wadi in broad daylight had been a calculated risk. The raiders had helicopters, and there was no guarantee they didn't also have a military surveillance satellite capable of counting rivets on the Locust'sdorsal armor. The Locustwas shrouded in folds of camouflage netting, and Grayson was operating the heat sinks at their lowest settings to cut down the 'Mech's IR signature. What the assault team was really counting on was luck. Careful observation of the bandit bases at the port and up Mount Gayal at the Castle suggested that they held the Trell armed forces in very low esteem and were not maintaining a proper watch on the approaches to their encampments.