IWTTD Chpt 5

==If We Turn To Dust - Chapter 5 -==
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<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
===Laying Siege to the Fortress===
KURITA HOHIRO-JO, SOUTH NANTURO
VEGA, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
AUGUST 27TH, 3027
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The 'Star Castles' were the Combine's plan for how to secure itself against the threat of invasion by the Federated Suns' resurgent legions. After absorbing the former Capellan Confederation Armed Forces as the Sian Division, they'd had better than half-again the Combine's strength in battlemechs alone, and a higher proportion of support troops. The Armed Forces of the Federated Suns' aerospace arm, in particular, was literally twice the size of the Draconis Combine Admiralty's.
 
But for all of that, and for the now Sphere-wide trend of supplementing battlemech regiments with multiple regiments of other troops, no Successor State had a large enough military to station full Field Action Forces - or Supported Battlemech Regiments, or Regimental Combat Teams, or whatever term was chosen - in defense of every single planet, much less to assign full invasion forces to each of them. A large, sweeping invasion, that changed the border by more than a world here, a world there, would require formations to land, win, and then move on with the real resistance shattered in their wake. Raising the infantry regiments to hold and secure and stabilize the populace afterwards was trivial enough that only the Lyran Commonwealth and Free Worlds League even counted it as a military duty, rather than civilian police work…
 
Except that, if that world had a buried complex of hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and a small city's worth of hardened bunkers, stuffed with supplies to support years of fighting and insurgency, or to make an otherwise hopelessly outnumbered defending mech and armor force immune to being swarmed to death… Police forces wouldn't be enough. The front-line brigade tasked to take the world would have to stay, possibly pinned for a counterstroke or at least delayed for months or years.
 
A thousand years in the future from the earliest world I remembered, and hydrocarbons were still in use for fuel. Hydrogen fuel cells had a high power-to-weight ratio, but scaled up to heavy equipment levels they needed high-standard, high-tolerance gear to maintain and refuel safely, because their fuel supply was a pressurized gas - or a cryogenic cold enough to kill or cripple with a splash. Even in the Commonwealth, with its superior and rapidly improving civilian industrial complex, there were many applications where their advantages just weren't worth dealing with the hassle.
 
As a world that had been terraformed from lifelessness, Vega didn't have natural petrochemical deposits, but the raw elements of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon were everywhere, and with fusion reactors to feed energy into the processes, the planet's great industrial heartland supported a thriving synthetic fuel complex. Dozens of plants took in raw bulk and atmosphere and cooked it into various 'tanes for use all across Vega.
 
Kurita Hohiro the Mad's namesake fortress had been built with three main access routes and several dozen smaller ones, or so sonics and ground-penetrating radar informed us. The small tunnels would be enough to send out guerilla forces, but only the larger ones could move battlemechs quickly enough to support a proper sally against the forces we had in place. Parking a brigade on top of each exit sealed the Legions of Vega into their redoubt as thoroughly as a cork, after the losses they'd already taken…
 
And a couple of days round trip and a regiment of infantry with a tank battalion for backup was more than enough to confiscate thousands of barrels of hydrocarbons and the tanker trucks to move them. As they arrived, we combined them with the additives we'd brought along aboard the Havhingsten for this very moment, chemicals designed for the creation of inferno gel. Without the plasticizing agent that made the stuff cling, though, it still poured like water, flooding the traps and filters of the fortress's air intakes and doubtless collecting in pools, fouling its storm drains and probably water supply as well.
 
Unlike the Star League's Castles Brian, the Combine had not designed their Seishiro to be entirely independent of outside air, just filtered to a fair-thee-well. When the hell-brew went up, it'd suck all the oxygen from the fortress's air long before fire or smoke inhalation could kill the inhabitants.
 
"Will we demand their surrender again?" Generalmajor Rabenstrange asked, standing with me and Generalmajor Byers as we watched our brigades' engineering specialists work to empty the last tanker truck.
 
I sighed. "No," I said. "They've seen what we're doing, smelled the fumes. They know what's coming, and they've known that they could avoid it at any point with nothing but the right word."
 
I hesitated, thinking of the way the men and women trapped in that hole in the ground would scream, suffocate, burn. "Just light it." I said.
 
A guilty part of me was glad when that was interrupted by one of Rabenstrange's' staff turning to shout that the Legions were sallying. We'd three-quarters expected it, given how little they had to lose and the way they'd die otherwise, and while I hated the fact that at least some of our own people were going to die stopping the breakout no matter how well we did… At least this meant fewer people burning alive.
 
I looked at both of them. "Okay," I said. "Tasking for the Long Toms - see if they can collapse those exits. As large a push as this has to be, we're not going to take it on just one brigade - Rabenstrange, you'll be taking lead while Byers and I are on our way back to our command posts.
 
She, for her part, was practically dancing in place to get out the door and mount up, which looked ridiculous on a woman her age.
 
"I have command." he said formally, then tossed a casual salute and headed for his map table. Byers and I traded a glance, then bolted for our rides.
 
I scrambled up my ladder and dropped into the comfy, breathable fabric of Marauder No. 2's control couch, snatching the neurohelmet off of its rack and dropping it onto my head. 
<{"I am the king of honor, gold, and glory."}> the automatic system said, its synthetic voice hitting the song's pitches perfectly while somehow managing to sound almost completely tuneless.
 
"But every king must also die." I sang back, and hit the toggle to confirm a full boot-up as the cockpit canopy started to hiss closed.
 
<{"Reactor, Online. Sensors, Online. Weapons Systems, Online. All Functioning Systems, Nominal."}> the computer declared as No. 2 heaved under me and came to its feet.
 
Having all three of us brigade commanders in the same place for a face-to-face at this point hadn't seemed like a great risk. Some, yes, of course, but not a large one. A large single-point breakout was a good plan for Kurita and his people, but it was one that would have been better attempted earlier, while the detached forces we'd sent to gather those thousands of tons of hydrocarbons had been away intimidating refinery workers and making sure that no fanatics torched them en route. It wouldn't have been much of an advantage, but it would have been something.
 
The breakout we'd expected instead would have been small parties erupting out of every possible exit at once and scattering in widely dispersed directions, trying to break past our blocking forces and get out into the countryside, where they could hope to use their experience with the terrain and its nooks and crannies to break contact entirely, starting a guerilla campaign that could be stretched out for months or years. Doing a big breakout now bought the Combine the worst of both worlds.
 
Meanwhile, meeting in person meant that if Kurita had just been putting off his surrender call, Byers, Rabenstrange, and I could present a united front and use that psychological advantage in discussing any terms. Again, not a big difference, but enough of one to want to run with.
 
Oh, well. We did have a plan for what to do in this case, and it was brutally simple. Since their assault meant that we knew where the Combine was putting all of their force, we just turned our own other blocking forces around and rushed them to hit the forming melee from the rear flanks while the brigade that was right on top staged a fighting retreat to bleed them. The artillery parks and command posts would have enough of their own guard forces to beat off anything the Combine freed from the main fight, and the odds of a larger force finding me or Byers and our lances while we were in motion between posts were… low.
 
So of course that was what happened.
 
The Combine had built their fortress under a blasted desert plain, but the area hadn't always been like that. Once, before the start of the Third Succession War, this entire region had been a productive agricultural area. Only, because it was the freakin' Draconis Combine, they hadn't bothered to do the ecological and soil and aquifer maintenance work to keep up with the inevitable depletion of nutrients and ground water left behind by their irrigation projects. When the Star League and its support infrastructure had fallen apart, the fate of what had been Vega's breadbasket was sealed.
 
We had - even the modern Combine had - the tools to fix that; fertilizer plants, fusion-powered pumping and filtration stations to draw and process needed water from an ocean that wasn't that far away, really, but the Combine's obsession with combat and the offense and the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery had sucked away every C-Bill and other resource that might have been used to do it.
 
In a way, it was a perfect metaphor for the Combine as a whole: Fanatical soldiers in a bare-fanged military base, squatting at the center of a desolate wasteland that was scattered with the relics of better times like abandoned 1950s diners along Route 66.
 
From the outside, the building looked like nothing but an abandoned barn, a parking area for combines and tractors and other equipment, rusting tin on a ramshackle frame. The way the huge sliding doors slammed open put the lie to that, just as much as the start of the ramp leading down behind them.
 
"Mother fucker." I declared, No. 2's massive feet skidding trenches in the alkaline dust as seventy five tons tried to reverse direction inside two strides.
 
A blunt black nose emerged from the open doors, windows glittering from the mech's cockpit, and a splash of red just below.
Kerensky hurdled out of the tunnel at a dead run, her Catapult's torso twisting sharply to bring both PPCs to bear not on me, but on Molton's far lighter Sentinel, both blasts landing within a yard or two of each other on the same armored panel. The usual scattering lightshow of vaporized armor started to spread - then gained fuller color and fill as one of the rampaging particle beams found his autocannon's magazine and blew that compartment, and all its structure, and the arm and weapon they supported, clean off and apart.
Molton staggered, started to accelerate and fight his way back into balance enough to hit his jump jets - and then went down as the Thunderbolt following Kerensky turned its full short-ranged battery onto his already damaged mech.
 
I sent my snap-shots scorching past the sixty-five tonner, connecting with enough of the autocannon burst despite my hurry to trace a trail of craters up its left torso towards the obviously wrecked drum-rack for its long-range missiles - unrepaired damage from the canyon clash earlier in the campaign.
 
Reyes' own first salvo was only a little slower to land on the same target, his own missiles pouring down across the Combine mech's chest and legs in a tide of off-white smoke. A blaze of blue out of the corner of my peripheral vision and one of my side-monitors was James opening up on Kerensky herself with her Battlemaster's full array of five-centimeter lasers, their visible-light tracers saturating the vision even as the infrared of the main beams boiled and sublimated red-hot trenches out of the armor of Kerensky's Catapult even as she twisted frantically to keep the heating time of any given point - and therefore, the burn-through - to a minimum.
 
The other Catapult of Kerensky's command lance was the next out, flushing its missile racks at the fallen form of Molton's Sentinel even as he got its remaining arm under it and rolled himself into position to rise, before the heavy added a scarlet blaze of laser light to the fusillade. In a corner of my vision, on the monitor showing lance status, Molton's name and armor-status indicator flashed red and then went black.
 
Killed in Action.
Neither the Catapult nor the Thunderbolt paused in their headlong charge to note the fact. They were throttled all the way up, making only the most basic evasions and torso-twisted to fire in passing rather than turning to fight directly. It was clear that they, and the one-armed Enforcer emerging from the false barn, were only interested in breaking away, breaking free and withdrawing.
 
My next salvo, and Reyes, crisscrossed with the Enforcer's. My shots ripped chunks straight out of the medium's notoriously-overkill forward armor, leaving it vulnerable to the followup sandblasting of his missiles. One warhead found its way inside the torso plating and the Combine mech dropped, convulsing spastically for a few seconds as the flywheels in its gyro system tore themselves apart.
 
The Combine mechwarrior, though, got off a shot even as his mech was being battered by our fire. A single burst of 105mm shells lanced out despite the rattling and, guided by the rotted bony hand of Shiro Kurita himself reaching up from the sulfurous depths of hell, found their way not to any of the vast expanse of dusty landscape that should have absorbed the wild burst…
 
But into the cockpit holding my friend.
 
Malin Reyes' Crusader dropped like the proverbial cut-string marionette, even as the automatic monitor repeated the flash-and-black indicator that had marked Molton's death, and just like that, a veteran of seventy years of combat had rolled the dice for the last time.
 
"Mal!" I blurted, unable to help the impulse, and over the audio channel I could hear James, Minakshi, reacting in much the same way.
 
Distracted by my own shock, I didn't see it at the time, but black box recordings I viewed later were brutally explicit about the way Kerensky reacted to Minakshi's confusion. Her Catapult broke into a brief sprint, closing fast through a startled spray of wild, barely-directed laser fire… and then she hit the jump jets, vaulting over Minakshi's Battlemaster and twisting mid-air to land with all of her weapons pointed squarely at the assault mech's vulnerable rear armor. Her PPCs evaporated the paneling over the center and left torso compartments, and then the blood-red lasers slashed out, playing their fire over the ragged remnants… And setting a match to the long-range missile magazine.
 
I could hear Minakshi's pained scream as the rockets cooked off, sending even her massive mech staggering and tumbling to the ground, and her indicator flashed red, then went gray rather than vanishing. Her neurohelmet's systems, after a split-second to reboot, had found her brain in an unconscious state rather than an aware one; the ammo explosion and its feedback had put her out like a light. She'd live, but it was unlikely at best that she'd wake in time to have any more effect on this fight.
Literally half a minute and I was alone. The missile-Catapult and the Thunderbolt were fleeing as fast as their legs would carry them, but Kerensky was turning back towards me. "Scorecard, Joker Actual. I am at-" I glanced at the map coordinates and read them off as Kerensky and I fired at each other. She slipped between my beam blasts and ignored the way the cannon shells sparked off of the upper hull of her mech, and I let an almost-random swerve throw her aim off ahead of me. "I am engaged with Target Wolf; her lance is withdrawing west at best speed, she is rearguard. My lance has two Konrad-Ida-Anton, one Konrad-Otto."
 
I put No. 2 into reverse, walking backwards east and away from the direction I knew Natasha wanted to go… and she followed. "Say time to reinforcement, over."
 
(("Shit,")) the operator from Scorecard, Rabenstrange's command post, hissed without quite closing the line. (("Uh, Joker, Scorecard. Estimated backup ten minutes plus minus five. We've got a lot of fires here, over."))
 
"Scorecard, Joker. They've got a cover op and an actual breakout by lances, at a guess. Do what you can, I'll try and break contact here, over and out."(("Joker, Scorecard. We'll expedite it. Over and out."))
 
And just like that, I was officially on my own.
 
Someone had lit the inferno mix, miles away. A furnace-like tongue of flame erupted from the open throat of the exit tunnel, angling a hundred feet into the air.
 
Kerensky and I fired at almost the same moment, two of the opposing beams actually bending and deflecting wildly as the magnetic fields of the charged particles making them up interacted. My other PPC blast missed, flashing by between her Catapult's legs, but I saw sparks as several shells from the autocannon burst skipped off the side of her torso.
 
An expanding ring and a flash on my armor display told me that the crashing noise - and the wavy, degaussing static flicker from my monitors - was her second PPC striking home against one of No. 2's hips.
 
I twisted the torso one way and steered the other, holding my sights centered on Kerensky as the PPCs' capacitors recharged and the clunka-banga-bang of the reloader pulling a clip from the main magazine and slamming it in place for the autocannon's feed to empty. She fired first, my canopy flashing momentarily black-purple around the hard white bar of the PPC beam two or three meters in front of No. 2's nose as the flash-protection coating saved my vision.
 
I stomped on the accelerator, counting on the change in movement profiles to throw off her second shot, and rippled my own return salvo - lightning, beat, brrrt, beat, lightning. No hits, as she managed a sidestepping bobble around the base vector of her charge then hit the jump jets and hopped over the third shot.
 
I hurdled a gully, either a dry creekbed or irrigation canal, and headed for the far side of the exit-barn Kerensky's lance had come out of. No. 2 and her Catapult had the same top speed, and she was skilled enough to push her running gait further than I could. If she wasn't willing to let me go, and by all indications she wasn't, then she could keep up with me. Worse, while like all battlemechs, Marauders could torso twist, the available range of angles was only about two hundred degrees, actually worse than average. The MAD series' original designers had intended to cover the rear arcs with increased ranges of motion from the arms and torso cannon, rather than the overall torso.
 
And yes, yes, I can hear you thinking of the Black Hawk. Some of Wolf's ex-clanners in the Lyran Foreign Legion had confirmed that the old art was wrong and no, it had an ordinary hip setup.
 
Anyway, I had to be very careful about the angles - No. 2's rear armor panels were a lot lighter than its forward ones. The center panel would stop one of her PPCs, once, but the side panels would breach under those big guns on the first hit. Which reminded me…
 
I couldn't dodge around as elegantly as Kerensky did; my evasive maneuvers involved less sidestepping in motion and more of what, in a wheeled vehicle, would be most honestly characterized as wild fishtailing. It was enough, though, that the shot she hit me with before I was behind cover landed on one of my arms rather than the vulnerable rear plates.
 
Once I was behind the barn, I stopped… and flipped my main sensor augment to SEIS.
 
Seismic readouts used sensors in a battlemech's feet to track impacts and noise, resonating through the ground underfoot. Obviously that didn't work too well when you were one of the things thundering across the earth - though for the usual incomprehensible reasons, other people's seismic sensors didn't pick me up any more than radar and infrared scans did - but if you stopped, then your mech's computers could calculate the position of enemy mechs or tracks that were otherwise completely blocked from sight.
 
Like Kerensky was right now.
 
The best option for me would have been - but no, I could see her location ping moving towards the barn, rather than breaking off and leaving like a sane woman. But to get at me, she'd have to come around the barn, putting herself into one of two exactly known positions and vectors for me to send my shots down - and the seismics would tell me which.
 
I watched the display tromp up to just short of visibility - then stop as experience and the hairs on the back of her neck gave Kerensky some kind of warning. I could feel her thinking, plotting.
 
I expected her to either pop out, either wholesale or with just enough of her flank to aim a single PPC, or to go around the other side to try to fake me out. I did not expect that I'd have time to see the impact marker flash once, on top of the building, and look up to see her perched on the barn's roof, guns trained down at me.
 
"Clever girl." I mumbled, not sure at that moment where the reference was even from, and stomped on the gas and hauled on the stick I had slaved to torso twist, trying to get my own guns on target and out of the way . None of my three shots ended up anywhere in her post code, and I had to wrestle hard to keep the shuddering spasms from my own gyro under control as her salvo dug into my armor in a pair of pyrotechnic sprays.
 
She hopped off the top of the building, feathering her jets a little at the bottom to soften the landing, and circled out and away from it; I moved in the opposite direction, at least trying to seem like I was angling to try the same trick again. That left us both time to fire again, trading individual shots back and forth. Kerensky landed her second shot on my right torso, lower than the one I'd already taken on that compartment but still enough to leave only the bottom-most few layers of armor intact. I got a hit of my own, square-bang in the center of her Catapult's main body, and then we were occluded from each other again.
I hauled No. 2 through a reversal in place, half stop-and-accelerate and half hairpin turn, ignoring the splash of flames still erupting from the tunnel mouth as it washed over one arm and charred the paint, and came back around the same corner already laying my guns into a sweep for where I expected her to be - and this time, she was.
 
The first PPC shot, the most hurried, I'd half-expected to miss, and it did. Kerensky hit her jump jets and went over the others, firing a single missed shot from mid-air and running three strides between landing and launching again.
 
I gauged the arc for a moment, then - "Fuck!" - threw myself into a wild evasion, figuratively stomping on the brakes and only barely managing to get myself out from under what would have been a consummate Death From Above.
 
Battlemechs were tough, but they were also very massive, and the Square-Cube Law bit them hard no matter how advanced their construction. Getting goomba stomped by a jet-launched rival was something that no 'mech could laugh off, even if it was an Atlas getting landed on by a Wasp. So, my having managed not to have her land on top of me and ride my squashed mount all the way to the ground was definitely a good thing.
 
On the other hand, the way and place she'd landed left both of us standing, facing each other and essentially at rest, less than two hundred feet apart. I could have hit her with a pistol, much less a battlemech's guns, and vice versa.
 
We fired at what felt like the same instant, and both of us unloaded everything we had. My cockpit canopy went black, and Marauder No. 2 reeled and shivered under the pounding as Kerensky's beams tore at it. The autocannon went black on my system's display, and the compartment holding it began to flash red as a rampaging beam of stripped protons and electrons blew apart the last of my armor there and began to blowtorch its way across the structural framework supporting the gun mount and feeding it ammunition. Less urgent warnings flashed yellow as the myomer bundles supporting the right arm's motion were attrited and weakened, some but not all parting and the strain on the remainder increasing.
 
I put No. 2 back into motion even before my canopy could start to clear, calling up camera feeds for projection on the Heads Up Displays instead. Not away, not backpedaling - towards her.
 
I led with the weak arm, slamming the impact frame that caged the delicate PPC guide coils right into Kerensky's (figurative) face and physically staggering her Catapult with the impact. Another blow, from the other arm, was better aimed - I could see the spider-web of actual fractures the impact left in her cockpit canopy, even as my own finally faded enough to show the still-glowing trench that one of her short-range lasers had carved across the armor-glass.
 
She hit her jets and threw herself away, firing behind herself as she retreated. I sent shots of my own after her, the right-arm PPC firing barely an instant before its last motivating muscles were melted apart and left the limb to sag at No. 2's side like useless deadweight. That missed, but the left-side shot, my last big gun, didn't - it found its mark on one of her own arms, during the charging-cycle of the particle cannon found there. The combined energy of the two shots flashed back through her gun's capacitors, leaving them to consume themselves in silver fire and split the remaining structure of the K2's stub arm apart like Elmer Fudd's shotgun after Bugs had corked it before firing.
 
Despite that, the corner of my brain responsible for figuring odds calculated that the rest of this fight was, at this rate, not likely to go in my favor. As ragged as Kerensky's Catapult was looking, No. 2 was in no better shape, and she still had her 5-centimeter lasers to add to her remaining PPC, while I had only a 3cm pulse laser and its vastly inferior range to add to mine.
 
So, I took a breath and concocted a plan. With my luck, with the fact that she hadn't disengaged yet, with the rage I felt in every one of her mech's movements, I figured that just punching out would do nothing but have Kerensky try and shoot my ejection seat out of the air. But there was another option, if I could do it right.
 
I angled back the way I had come, holding my thumb on the AMMO PURGE button for several seconds then letting it off as the timing came right for Kerensky to fire again. The purge echoed through No. 2's bones, clung-bang, clung-bang, as the reload clips meant for the now-wrecked autocannon were ejected half a dozen meters straight up out of the port meant for the purpose. If one of her shots - a crashing impact and the usual spastic degauss from my screens lent the thought potency - hit in the wrong time and place while that was happening, then a magazine backflash could still happen easily. So, the key was to eject while she couldn't fire and trigger that.
 
There were the lasers, and I twitched and twisted madly as I reversed back towards the long-abandoned road and the ditch I'd hurdled earlier, one thumb back on the purge button and the other stroking the fire command for my own remaining big gun. That shot missed, and so did the one she sent back in reply. My next shot after that hit, but I barely noticed the fact or where, or the end of the patter and clatter of freed 80mm shells pouring down the Marauder's sloped armor as the magazine emptied out.
 
The important part was that I'd reached where I wanted to be. I arrested my backpedal, as though I'd just noticed that I'd backed up to the edge of a ditch deep and broad enough to swallow a crouching battlemech, and turned quickly in a shuffle that was meant to look like an attempt to adapt, rather than opening up to -
 
Kerensky fired again, and even as I deliberately pushed No. 2 over backwards and sideways and hung onto my controls for dear life as seventy-ish tons of half-wrecked battlemech came crashing down, I let out a huff of relieved breath. The armor had held just long enough.
 
My mech's fall came to a halt in an ugly, tangled sprawl, one that looked unplanned and uncoordinated but left the remaining intact arm laying between Kerensky and my cockpit, and obscured the entire upper surface of the torso's hull from her.
 
I didn't bother waiting for my head to stop spinning from the impact and disorientation; I reached up one handed and yanked sharply on the big red D-handle.
 
Even through the protective covering my neurohelmet gave, the detonation of the explosive bolts drove a spike of pain into my ears, but the cockpit canopy blew away like it had been hooked to a speeding dropship by a line whose slack ran out. I gave one last mental command as I unbuckled, then ripped the helmet off to toss out of the way and as far free of No. 2 as I could - mine was a centuries-old model still better than LCAF new construction, but it was heavy enough to slow me - and vaulted out of my seat and onto the hull just behind the cockpit.
 
Just below. Usually nearly horizontal, now the scarred armor plate was angled steeply downwards, offering just enough resistance to give my exposed thighs a nasty case of road rash but not quite enough to keep me from feeling like I was falling the storey or so to the ground where the rear of No. 2's torso had fetched up. And then I did fall, because I'd overshot my mark a little and the bottom of that slope was hanging cantilevered over a meter or two of empty space.
 
For the record: Fucking ow.
 
The side of the canal I'd landed in hadn't been maintained in decades, possibly centuries. It was covered in desert brush (thorny) and exposed weathering rocks (pointy) and spits of sand (scrapy). I hit and rolled all the way down, fetching up with a miserable yelp far too long later, and in that pummeled-senseless moment, I could only be grateful for the protective value built into my cooling jacket.
 
Then fear and will forced me into motion again. I hauled myself up onto my feet and sprinted for where the roadway crossed the canal, and ducked involuntarily as the timer I'd used that last command to set on the ejection seat triggered and sent it rocketing off across the landscape. The automatic guidance built into the seat picked up its angle and low altitude and steered upwards, getting its notional payload - IE, supposedly, me - away from any dangerous ground cover it didn't have the sensors to see. After one glance up I kept my eyes on the rock-littered ground of the bottom of the dry canal, and managed not to flinch too much as the entire world went brilliant white, with shadows cast in pure black, light scattered from the man-made lightning of Kerensky's PPCs erasing the ejection seat.
 
I made it into the culvert where the old roadway crossed the canal and slowed, first to a jog and then to a halt, my hands braced on my knees as I gasped for breath. I was out of any visible sight from above, and Kerensky had no other way to find me. Unless she wanted to crouch her mech in the canal to try and peer through ten foot tunnel that would be level with its ankles, I was safe.
 
Or, you know, not. I could hear the thudding of battlemech footsteps as Kerensky walked her mech closer, smell the armor and hear the spitting crash of PPC bolts striking home as she walked up to No. 2 and zeduced it from a potentially repairable hulk to an equal weight of scrap.
 
When she stopped firing and walked towards the road and culvert I was hiding in, I looked back the way I had come… and my heart sank.
 
Or, you know, not. I could hear the thudding of battlemech footsteps as Kerensky walked her mech closer, smell the armor and hear the spitting crash of PPC bolts striking home as she walked up to No. 2 and reduced it from a potentially repairable hulk to an equal weight of scrap.
 
When she stopped firing and walked towards the road and culvert I was hiding in, I looked back the way I had come… and my heart sank.
 
First, my footprints had pressed dark impressions in the pale dried mud, blatantly pointing the way I had come if she happened to look down into the canal, as I was sure she had.
 
Second, and my hand slapping at my hip confirmed it, the slide I'd taken down the side of the canal had partly shredded my sidearm holster along with my arms and legs, and the gun had fallen out.
 
The Catapult's footsteps thundered closer, closer… overhead. Kerensky stopped on the spot where the road crossed the canal, literally on top of the culvert. I expected, at most, for her to jump in place, to collapse it on me - or for her to flush her jump jets into the canal - or for her to move away again and slag the entire area with her weapons.
 
Instead, there was a moment of almost silence, broken only by the rush of air into and through the Catapult's hidden radiators… And then a voice from my handcom.
 
<<"Answer me something, Blackwing.">> Natasha Kerensky said.
 
I'd almost certainly have been better off trying to keep her guessing, but I answered before I could think better of it, clicking my own emergency transmit on. "No promises."
 
<<"Why start with Joshua? Was it just opportunity, or was there a goal, there?">> She sounded too bitter to pass the question off as idly as she was trying to.
 
"...What? I asked, thoroughly baffled.
 
<<"You heard me!">> she snarled.
 
Well, yes, I had, but…
 
"I had absolutely nothing to do with anything involving Anton's Rebellion," I said frankly. "I was on the ass end of Davion space trying to figure out my own shit."
 
I could hear her snort contemptuously. <<"So when did you get so cozy with SAFE? In Lyran service? Were you double-dealing that far back?">>
 
I had to figure that that nonsense was pure dislike talking. "Everything I said about SAFE, and OAI for that matter, was bullshit aimed at convincing Jaime to not drop the Dragoons' Alpha Regiment on my head. Honest answer is, I saw it in a drug trip. How that works, you'd have to ask a Nova Cat, because I've got no clue."
 
<<"You… You decided to destroy my life in a necrosia fit?">> Kerensky shouted, and I could hear a waver in her voice that wanted to be a sob. "You took - took my people from me, my face, my future!" I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to hear her whisper to herself, <<"And now my second love…">>
 
"I decided to stop lostech and save the Inner Sphere!" I snapped back. "That's why I went to Helm, and I calculated that Katrina Steiner was the best person to give it to to accomplish those goals. And yeah, sure, I was the one who told her how your 'bondsman' slave-taking worked. You're the one who decided you'd rather stab your brother-in-law in the back than be abtakha. If you want the author of your woes, find a mirror."
 
<<"Do not slander the sacred rituals of the Clans with that comparison!">> she snarled. <<"The wisdom and courage of the Founder and Great Father are-">>
 
"Horseshit," I interrupted cruelly. "Aleksander Kerensky was responsible for raising Richard Cameron to be a successful ruler for the Star League. He failed. He was responsible for preventing rebellion. He failed. He was responsible for cleaning up after both of those failures, as much as anything Amaris himself did, created the Amaris Empire… and he took his own sweet fucking time about it, didn't he?
 
"And at the end, he was still responsible for leading the Star League Defense Force to protect the trillions of citizens that the League still had… and he didn't even try. Aleksander Kerensky was a broken old man who died running away like a little bitch."
 
In all honesty, I didn't give a fuck about what General Kerensky might or might not have done or felt. By the standards of the SLDF commanders, he was a shining paladin, but that was as faint as praise got. But I knew that his many times greats granddaughter Natasha would care about his reputation… and the madder she got, the more likely she was to make a mistake and stick around long enough for my backup to arrive
 
It wasn't a safe strategy, since I had only my bare hands and she had a battlemech, but hell, I didn't exactly have any better options.
 
I kept talking. "And while we're on the subject, let's do talk about Kerensky the Lesser. Little Nicky, psychopath extraordinaire. Run away from his papa's fuckup, is that a theme? Come back, fight the battles, win the war… and then wad up everything he had to have learned in the process, drop it down a hole, and take a shit on it. You know the truth as well as I do, what the bidding system really does. One lance versus one lance, and you get maybe a single mech back at the end? Seven lost - or a lance versus a company, and that's four lost?"
 
"Bidding doesn't minimize casualties, death, maiming, suffering, it maximizes them. And he damned well fucking knew it. That was the point, after all. You couldn't have glorious battle for his amusement if nobody was dying. And if his victims aren't fighting for him, they have to be suffering some other way - Caste systems weren't something the SLDF ever stood for, you know."
 
"And even with every bit of brainwashing and leverage he could pull off, he couldn't get it quite to stick… So what does he do? False flags the biggest atrocity he can come up with and pins it on whoever won't play ball. You know he had a lot better access to nukes than the Wolverines ever did, right?"
 
That did it. Kerensky shrieked in wordless rage, and I could hear the sound of grinding gravel overhead as her Catapult lunged into motion. Dust drifted down from the ceiling once, twice, three times as she stomped on the roadway over my culvert. Somehow, it didn't collapse, and I scuttled backwards away from the near end as she walked over it and her mech's feet appeared in the little circle of daylight I'd come from.
 
It was the right instinct to follow; I closed my eyes and flinched away as the brutal flash of two PPC bolts landed right at that end. Searing heat prickled my exposed skin, instant sunburn all across my legs, arms, neck and face, with stabbing spikes where flying fulgurite shards had been blasted free to draw blood. I kept moving, half blind and half deaf, as she fired again and again and one final time… then sat up carefully just in time to see the rush of flame and sand as she fired her jump jets to leave the canal and head on her way.
 
I threw my arm up to cover my eyes against the grit, and heard something heavier, caught in the blast, whistle by my head.
 
A moment later, something else heavier caught me just below the ribs, as the oven-hot dust storm started to die down.
 
I looked down at the piece of rebar that had transfixed me, ballistic-weave coolant jacket and all, and could only choke out one word before consciousness went pif.
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===Victory tastes like Ashes===
KURITA HOHIRO-JO, SOUTH NANTURO
VEGA, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
AUGUST 21ST, 3027
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The next time I woke up properly lucid, I was in a bed, one that hummed and shivered in the unmistakable half-subliminal way that came with being aboard a dropship under way… and one in a tearing hurry, by the fact that I could instantly tell we were burning at more than the standard ten meters per second squared.
 
"We lost?" I muttered incredulously.
 
"No," Minakshi James said. I looked over and found her sitting, neatly uniformed, in the visitor's chair by my bed. "We lost Generalmajor Byers and a lot of damage, but Vega is the Commonwealth's. The Combine got somewhere between one and a half and two 'mech battalions out, but Kurita himself is confirmed killed in action. Other than the Generalmajor, our casualties were light."
 
I closed my eyes. "And Mal and Molton," I said.
 
She was silent for a couple seconds. "Yeah," she said weakly.
 
I opened my eyes again, but didn't try to push myself up; I could feel the painkillers dulling it, but my side was warning me that that wouldn't be a good idea. "OK," I said. "We're in flight, and Rabenstrange has Vega. What else?"
 
"Interdiction," Minakshi said.
 
Comstar officially held only a single star system, Sol, with a single first-class world in Terra and two third-tier ones in Venus and Mars. The Comstar Guards and Militia - the Com Guards - were widely regarded as barely more than a planetary defense force, and their ground forces would have been hard pressed to stop a single LCAF brigade, let alone even a fraction of what was in motion across the Draconis Combine's border.
 
But Comstar, and Comstar alone, had for centuries been the only group with the knowledge to operate and maintain the hyperpulse generators that were the primary means of sending information between the stars. Daily scheduled transmissions moved faster than any jumpship, if slower than a command circuit relaying dropships or radio between waiting charged jumpships, and were vital to the lifeblood of any interstellar military or economy.
 
It was an advantage that Comstar guarded fanatically and wielded ruthlessly. Interdiction - a suspension of the message service Comstar provided for the other Successor States - could and had brought interstellar empires of hundreds of worlds to their knees, more than once.
 
And that was only the public side.
 
"Ah," I said. "When, and how long have I been out?"
 
"Officially, the Interdiction started August twenty-seventh. They're saying that it was because of our attack on the Vega hyperpulse generator compound," Minakshi said.
 
"I know Rabenstrange isn't that dumb," I said. And I knew twice over that nothing like that had happened before I was injured.
 
"We didn't have anything anywhere near them," she agreed. "It's September third, now. We've been under way for six days."
 
"About a month to the jump point," I said, with little relish. One point five G was exhilarating for the first twenty four hours or so, and after that it rapidly escalated to a torture. I was told that, for people living on high-mass worlds, the feeling passed after about six months.
 
"A little less," she said, then smiled, trying to tease but clearly not really feeling it yet. She'd been at least as close to Reyes as I had, looking up to him as an apprentice would - or a daughter. "You'd be recovering that long anyway."
 
"Huh?" I asked.
 
"They did take your kidney out, after all."
 
I blinked. "Huh," I said, in a different tone. "Where the rebar hit?" It had been about the right area.
 
"Yes," she said, as the compartment's hatch creaked open and a military nurse about twice my and Minakshi's combined ages came in to start checking me over now that I was awake to respond.
 
Suffice to say that that wasn't a pleasant process.
 
When it was done, the nurse shooed Minakshi out to let me rest and finish eating what passed for my first meal in days… and to read my mail.
 
The distance between Vega and its jump points meant that ours had been the very last of the initial wave of assaults to land, even if the actual fighting once that happened had been, to put it lightly, short and sharp. So, overall, the reports that had filed through the alternate channels after the Interdiction were enough to get a fairly complete picture of the results of the first phase of the offensive.
 
Overall, the LCAF had put fifty Feldeinsatzkräfte and five large mercenary formations into motion against thirty of the Combine's Hojo Kidousensha Rentai.
 
Eleven of the latter had gotten away somewhere in shouting distance of intact, and nine had been savaged nearly as badly as Kerensky's Fourteenth Legion of Vega - reduced to a state where any serious fighting would break their ability to recover… And ten had been annihilated, reduced to no more than a handful of individuals or lances running from the hounds on their heels.
 
Seventeen of our own brigades were battered enough to need pulled back from the front line, a number of them with heavier casualties than the invasion of Vega had taken under my command - though none had lost entire formations the way my fuckup at the canyon had led to. With one brigade pulled from a nearby portion of the border with the Free Worlds League to reinforce the ever-increasing clusterfuck at Dieron, we had thirty-nine full strength or nearly-so brigades in Combine space.
 
It'd be an exaggeration to say that, in the military sphere, everything was coming up Commonwealth, but signs were promising.
 
For the more directed things… A brief note from central command confirming that I'd be meeting Katrina on… Summer? Huh. I filed that away for later consideration, presuming that Katrina herself would explain everything then.
 
An actual envelope, addressed to me in… Malin Reyes' handwriting. A short note, fairly generic… and, folded around it…
 
I, Malin Reyes, being of sound mind and body but hazardous profession, do hereby set down this, my last will and testament. Lacking any living heir of my bloodline, I leave my estate of Orca Island on Finmark, and its associated accounts, for the establishment of a school for enlisted Mechwarriors and its training grounds, along with my diaries and memoirs collected thereon. To my protege, Minakshi James, I leave my remaining personal effects and mementos. Finally, to my adoptive granddaughter, Fiona Blackwing, I leave my Crusader battlemech. May it serve her as well as it has me.
 
Well, huh. I… wouldn't have anticipated that. I'd known that he and Fi got along, but not… that they were that close. He'd have to have expected Sophitia's Aegis and my Marauder No. 2 to go to Odelia and Clair, given this… Well, it would still be close enough. I'd have to replace No. 2 sooner or later.
 
Smiling despite the fresh grief, I turned to the last note, which was another bit of Black Box teletype.
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ORIG: LCDS JORMUGANDR BREAK DIERON ORBIT
DEST: LCDS LEUTNANT REGINALD STATHAM BREAK INTRANS VEGA BREAK GNLT BLACKWING A 
MSG BEGINS I REGRET TO INFORM YOU AS LISTED NEXT OF KIN THAT LEUTNANT SOPHITIA BLACKWING-BRAUN HAS BEEN LISTED MISSING IN ACTION EFFECTIVE SEPTEMBER 1 BREAK 3027 STOP LT BLACKWING-BRAUNS UNIT WAS CUT OFF BY LANDING DRACONIS COMBINE FORCES AND RADIO CONTACT WAS LOST ONE WEEK PRIOR STOP ASHA BREAK WE WILL SEND WORD WHEN WE KNOW MORE STOP SHE IS A GREAT WARRIOR BREAK DO NOT LOSE HOPE STOP SIGNED GNLT JAIME WOLF MSG ENDS.
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