Despite it all, Grace slowly walked around her map. Done, she called Victoria to climb the steeple stairs and go over the map with her. Grace had a new plan to talk through.
L. J. scowled at the map in front of him. With the Net down and his client unwilling to bring it up for a “minor” thing like the decisive battle for Gleann Mor Valley and maybe this whole stinking planet, L. J. was reduced to pushing pieces of paper around a paper map and hoping the real fighting men and machines were somewhere near where his map table showed them to be.
Once upon a time, say three hundred years back, this planet had a Global Positioning System. But the satellites had worn out, and no one had replaced them. So now Roughriders had to read geodetic ground markers to find out where they were, and report their location over the radio. Even his artillery was reduced to line of sight unless he wanted to waste what little ammo he had. God! And I’ve wanted to command a battalion since I was a kid!
L. J. worried his lower lip as he studied his western flank. He’d finally ordered the platoon guarding his left to advance and make contact with the missing Black and Reds. They’d found them… or what was left of them.
The good news was that the opposition was running. They’d left anything they couldn’t grab, even some of their dead. The bad news was what he’d learned from the damaged ’Mechs left behind. Their armor was good. Their SRMs, from the damage done, were very good. L. J. rubbed his chin. Why had they taken off? He’d only sent a platoon. They could have smashed it. But when the platoon happened on the ambush, the enemy was long gone, not even dust on the horizon of this usually dusty planet.
No, Grace’s troops had found something they considered important enough to make them abandon their own dead. L. J. shook his head. Whoever had taken out the Black and Reds could have charged straight for Allabad. Threaten Allabad, and Santorini would have been screaming for the Roughriders to protect his delicate hide.
L. J. flipped through the file he had of the mercs Grace had signed up. Woman, woman, woman… Hold it. He’d seen that woman before. That was Betty Rose, the maid he’d tried to hire! Betsy Ross, huh? Wonder what her real name is. He glanced down the file on her. Too damn short. He didn’t need Intelligence to tell him this was a false résumé.
He shuffled the file again. Boy: tank driver… No tanks so far. “What have we here?” he said. “Benjork Lone Cat. Bet you’d enjoy taking Field Marshal Fetterman’s thugs down.” L. J. froze. He checked the platoon’s report. Yep, there it was. The big, hulking Atlas was missing. “Not something I want to meet, not with just my little Koshi.” But if they captured the Field Marshal, they captured the Atlas.
Damn; what I’d give for some decent pictures of my left flank. L. J. shook his head. Fighting with no bandwidth was like fighting in one of those ancient wars with the first tanks or knights on horses. “I don’t know shit,” he whispered.
The satellite had just made a pass over the valley. The Chief and the Network Services team had cobbled together a way to take very low-resolution pictures off the overhead coverage. He studied what he had. A major enemy force moving fast up the west road. That road led straight to Falkirk. It also met with a side road that could take you to Kilkenny. That town had a fertilizer plant turning out rockets. If he kept the pressure up, he could be there by late tomorrow. The valley narrowed there. He’d strung his forces across two thirds of the valley for most of the push from Amarillo. Kilkenny looked like a place to concentrate. “Mallary, do you have a moment?” he called.
“Be there in a minute,” she said, then arrived sooner. “Casualty reports, sir.”
“Bad?”
“No. Not if we had the spare parts to fix what’s broken.”
“Deaths?” L. J. asked, suspecting he knew the answer.
“Not a one again today, sir. Two more ’Mechs lost their footpads. Two more tanks are hung up waiting for spare treads. We’ve got three types of tracks on our rigs, sir, and six types of fans. We’ve grounded one of each and are parting them out to keep the others running.”
“But no deaths. Grace has managed to inflict, what, twenty percent casualties and still not kill anyone?”
Mallary provided the exact level of his reduced strength. “Twenty-three percent, sir.”
“She’s trimming us, but not making anyone mad.”
“Maybe the civilian doesn’t have a taste for the jugular.”
L. J. shook his head. “No, I’ve fought that woman. She’d have gladly killed me when I was chasing her up that hill. And she has to have people who’ve lost loved ones to the damn B and Rs.”
“They kill Black and Reds, sir. Come out looking for them.”
“But never came out looking for us. They fight us, careful not to hurt anyone, then run. Give up ground.” L. J. tapped the map. “They run out of ground at Falkirk.”
“So,” he said, making a decision. “Let’s concentrate the battalion at Kilkenny. We can blow that plant and get used to fighting together before we hit Falkirk.”
Mallary eyed the map of the town, measuring the distance between the four scattered companies, and nodded. “We can be there by late tomorrow. Assuming this Grace you’re always talking about doesn’t decide it’s time to fight more and run less.”
“Issue the orders.”
“You are changing the orders,” Ben said as soon as Grace showed him her map laid out in the church steeple.
“I think this is a better plan,” Grace said. Victoria didn’t offer an opinion.
“But you have attritioned him only fifteen, twenty percent.”
“We think we’re over the twenty percent mark,” Grace said, feeling like a schoolgirl who’d done the wrong homework and now had to convince the teacher it was a better idea than the original assignment.
Ben eyed the map table, unblinking, for a long moment. “You assume he will concentrate here,” he said, putting a finger on Kilkenny.
“Yes.”
“And if he does not?”
“We go back to Plan A.”
“Order, counterorder, disorder,” Ben said.
“That’s what I told her when she first showed it to me,” Victoria said.
“And Grace answered you how?” Ben asked his fellow MechWarrior. Grace answered instead.
“He knows we have to fight at Falkirk. He’s watched us fall back from every other roadblock. He’ll expect us to fall back at Kilkenny. We can use that expectation against him.”
“So this is the dream that drives you,” Ben said.
Grace took a deep breath. “Yes, this is the dream that drives me.”
“I will have to tell Danny that we go into battle obedient to your dream. He said he was afraid of mine. We shall see how confident he is in yours.”
Grace just shrugged.
“Well,” Ben said, looking up from the map. “I have a man downstairs you must meet. He strode into battle commanding an Atlas. Powerful machine. Could have—should have—slaughtered our ambush all by itself.”
“Why didn’t he?” Victoria asked.
“This Field Marshal of Special Police thought that listening to one lecture by a MechWarrior would tell him all he needed to know to drive a BattleMech. He left yellow sticky notes on the switches he had to activate when he spun up his ’Mech in the morning.”
“Sticky notes?” Grace said, having a very hard time believing it. “I tried them once to keep track of this or that on a busy day. I’d post them up on the inside of Pirate’s cockpit. The pounding and vibrations around made them fall off.”
“They fell off his board, too. He had all his switches in all the wrong places. He couldn’t have hurt a flea except by stepping on it, and he got so confused when we attacked him that he was moving his hands instead of his feet.”