There were definite signs of movement around the target up ahead. Heather wondered exactly how much longer the “don’t shoot” policy was going to work.
She worked her pedals rapidly, spinning her ’Mech around the corner. The Spider was a speedy machine, not a bruiser like the Atlas or a hulking infighter like the Hatchetman, but a lightly armed sprinter designed to get in fast, scout and get out fast. In Heather’s opinion, these qualities made the Spider an excellent model for command and control, since a properly managed battle plan shouldn’t require the commander’s own muscle in order to be effective.
The Fox armored car, the Shandra scout vehicle, and the militia squad’s bikes were all faster than the Spider in the cramped confines of the city streets. Santangelo and Koss peeled out ahead, and Heather scored a laser marker on the front of the building to guide them. The militia troopers stopped in front of the building; Santangelo and Koss, in their vehicles, sped off to take blocking positions.
“Forward by overwatch!” Heather commanded.
The troops moved out. They were good for militia, disciplined and well trained. She made a mental note to look up their regular commander and see that he or she got properly commended when all this was done.
“Command, Shandra scout,” Koss said over the command circuit. “Got a problem on the east face. No way around to the rear. There’s a wall.”
“Back out, take the west side.” She checked her heads-up display. No wall showed on the large-scale map. It looked like Geneva Fire Police and Emergency hadn’t updated their databases recently. That was another thing to bring to somebody’s attention; later, after all of the dust had cleared.
Then the ’Mech’s exterior mikes picked up the sounds of small-arms fire, localized on her heads-up display to the east side of the building. It wasn’t the Sperry-Browning machine guns of the scout car she was hearing, either—it was the heavy crump of armor-piercing ordnance, shoulder-launched penetrators by the sound of them.
“Koss!” she snapped over the command circuit. “Report!”
“Taking fire from my flank,” the junior Knight reported. “Daisy-chain mines behind me. I’m in a sticky place. Request permission to return fire.”
“Negative,” Heather said. “Permission denied. I’m on my way to your location.” Then, over the ’Mech’s external speakers, to the troops, “Entry force, expedite.”
“Roger, understand expedite,” the corporal in charge of the militia squad responded. A moment later, the breaching charge put a hole in the warehouse wall. Heather saw the militia troops entering through the dust on her side-mount screen as she went past at a lope.
Taking advantage of the Spider’s speed, she was around the corner in a moment and saw Koss’ problem. The heavy but inaccurate fire coming from the Shandra’s right—small arms, mostly—wouldn’t interfere with the mission too much. What would interfere was a group of antitank mines, tied together to form a long chain. They’d been hidden in the trash by the side of the road while the Shandra passed by, then triggered when someone tugged the cord and pulled the line of mines across the Shandra’s only available path of retreat. Koss could abandon her vehicle to remove the mines by pulling the rope the other way—but even with her light battle armor, the intensity of the small-arms fire combined with the shoulder-mounted penetrators fired earlier would cut her to ribbons before she’d gone half a dozen steps.
Heather, though, wouldn’t have the same problem. Putting her trust in her armor, she lightly depressed her pedals while pushing the right joystick to extend the ’Mech’s long arm. The Spider squatted and its arm grabbed the end of the rope closest to the building. She pulled back on her stick, the mines came toward her and the way was clear.
“Back up,” she ordered Koss. “Rejoin with Santangelo.”
The Shandra was already accelerating in reverse. Heather laid down a spray of laser fire just over the heads of the people who were shooting at her troops. The line of pulsing light gouged into the brick wall behind the attackers as the water in the mortar flashed to steam. Heather hoped that she wasn’t violating the spirit of the no-engagement rules by making the defenders keep their heads down.
“Any casualties?” she asked over the net.
“Negative,” Koss answered. “Nothing hurt but my pride.”
“You’ll survive. Rejoin, regroup and we’re out of here.”
That was when the defender on the roof of the warehouse behind her shot straight down with a flamer, not aiming for the carapace of the Spider, but for the pile of mines that now lay beside Heather’s feet. Against a Spider’s superior heat efficiency, a single flame attack couldn’t do much. Multiple heavy explosions nearby, on the other hand… if her ’Mech was crippled, the mission could be lost.
Heather hit her pedals hard, taking the Spider straight up, using the jump jets’ full power. A ball of flame from exploding ordnance roared after her.
The leap brought her level with the roof of the building where the man with the flamer stood. The look on his face, she thought, was priceless. He must have thought that thirty tons of angry ’Mech was about to land on top of him. He ran. Heather dropped back down, cushioning her fall with jets, and wheeled her multilegged ’Mech into a sprint out of the alley.
“Fire in the hole!” she heard as she landed, and brown dust and white smoke erupted from the warehouse as the militia squad’s demolition charges did their work.
“All secure, no casualties,” Santangelo reported. “Got a little hot on your side of things?”
“You could say that,” Heather replied. “Someone in Kittery is thinking. That string of mines wasn’t meant for Koss on the Shandra—it was bait for me.”
“It looks like you were a bigger fish than they expected,” Santangelo said. “Next on the list?”
“Next on the list,” she confirmed.
“I’ve got the shortest route outlined on the map.”
“I don’t like that route,” Heather said. “They know where all the warehouses are as well as we do. Better, probably. And by now they for damn sure know where we are. They can figure out where we’re probably going, and they know our quickest path from one site to the next.”
“So what’s our solution?”
“Bypass this next one, hit number five on the list instead, then backtrack to four. Keep ’em guessing.”
“I’m all in favor of that,” agreed Santangelo. “Give me a sec… there. I have location five highlighted, and a couple of possible paths illuminated.”
“Take ’em both. Me and you with the Fox go up one, the militia squad and the Shandra up the other.”
“Splitting your command? That’s what nailed General Custer at the Little Big Horn.”
“That, and five thousand Sioux,” Heather said. “The Kittery Renaissance doesn’t have any five thousand foot soldiers, and we need to keep them guessing. Let’s go.”
“No sign of the intruders,” Hansel reported. “They should have been here by now.”
He had antiarmor missiles aimed down the street in front of the fourth warehouse, with support lasers hidden in the houses along both sides of the street the ’Mech would be forced to come down in order to attack this location. He’d catch the Paladin’s troops in a cross fire and cut them to pieces.
He had to. He’d scrounged pretty much every piece of heavy antiarmor the Kittery Renaissance possessed in order to concentrate it in this spot. Today’s activities weren’t supposed to have involved ’Mechs at all, not until the end, at which point the arrival of a ’Mech would mean that they were supposed to retreat.