Then a new strafing run slammed into the building.

Plaster fell out of the ceiling, raining down thick dust and adding premature gray to Raul’s dark hair. He shifted to an active, tactical channel. Heard the report of a wounded enemy fightercraft as base assets finally responded to the attack. “Two VTOLs just crippled an enemy fighter,” he reported. “It’s trailing smoke but still airborne. One VTOL destroyed, one crippled.” He relayed more estimates of damage and enemy strength as they came in.

“Colonel, we have a MechWarrior down!” the comms tech shouted.

Blaire was beyond surprise or even anger. “Ah don’t even have a MechWarrior in the field yet,” he complained.

“She was on the monorail when it took the hit. They medvaced her to the hospital.”

“You’re just full of good news,” Blaire told the comms tech. “Who is it?”

“MechWarrior DePriest.”

Charal. Not just a random name but someone Raul knew—had known well—was already a victim of the violence. This was getting very real very fast. Raul yanked the headset mic back from his mouth. “Is she all right?”

“Unknown,” the tech told him, then stuttered a quick apology to Colonel Blaire. “No news on her status,” he told the CO.

“Who’s my ready-alert standby this watch and where’s his post?”

Caught up in the moment, trying to juggle three incoming calls and follow the room’s conversation and layout of the building battle all at once, Raul was caught unawares. Blaire’s tactical officer consulted a duty roster on his noteputer, then glanced up sharply. “Sir, it’s Lieutenant Ortega.”

Raul snapped his head around so fast, he tweaked a muscle in his neck. That was right, though. Every second shift he stood in as a back-up MechWarrior or field officer.

Blaire caught him staring. “Ah got to spell it out for you, Lieutenant? Grab some togs, grab a jeep, and grab your ass out to the hangar. Move it!”

Except for nearly slipping in the puddle of spilled coffee next to his desk, Raul couldn’t remember touching the floor as he fled the control center for the long hall outside. His footsteps echoed hollowly in the near-empty corridor, reminding him of distant artillery fire. Tunnel vision focused him on the door at the end of the hall, and it wasn’t until he cracked that and saw daylight that he even remembered the headset he was still wearing. He yanked it off and clipped it to his belt, blinking the bright day out of his eyes and looking around for a vehicle to flag down.

Blaire’s comms tech already had a jeep pulling up and a corporal waving at him, yelling that he should move it or lose it.

On his sprint to the jeep, Raul saw three enemy aerospace fighters flash by to the south on high-speed runs. He clambered into the vehicle, which started with a desperate lunge to get where it was going before a passing pilot decided it made a nice stationary target.

They raced east, toward the BattleMech hangars. Ahead of him, just taking to the air, Raul saw the Yellow Jacket that Blaire had called for Tassa Kay. She would be on the field as well. He might never hear about Dieron, he suddenly realized. And as a strafing fighter tore up the road in front of them with its nose-mounted autocannon, Raul quickly came to realize something more important about live combat.

He might never hear about anything again. Ever.

Jagatai Aerospace Fighter

Over Achernar

Prefecture IV, The Republic

16 February 3133

Star Captain Laren Mehta thumbed the firing stud on his joystick. The twelve-centimeter assault cannon mounted into the nose of his Jagatai OmniFighter spat out a long tongue of flame and several hundred rounds of angry metal, laying down a storm of fire that tore through yet another line of monorail tracks. Earth and stone and splinters of metal struts exploded into the air. Then, with a thunderclap of displaced air and the roar of his Zeon 280 engines, Mehta’s Jagatai flashed overhead like some vengeful spirit in search of a new sacrifice.

Already he had claimed a Demon armored vehicle and a very foolish Cyrano pilot who thought the VTOL’s pitiful armor and single large laser could match up against his seventy-ton OmniFighter with its full array of heavy weaponry. Earlier he’d almost caught a Yellow Jacket gunship, until it ditched him by flying low between buildings. One close-in encounter with a JES missile carrier had already convinced him of the danger in chasing VTOLs into ambushes.

Rolling his Jagatai off of its original line of attack and then pulling straight back on the stick, he rocketed up for a bird’s eye view of the base. Behind him, Mehta’s wingman checked his maneuver. Leaving off their nape-of-the-earth runs, they thundered out over the northern stretch, leveled off, and cruised back in for an overview.

When Star Colonel Torrent had approached Mehta with this mission, launching this surprise first strike against Achernar, the Star Captain had resisted. Even when his rank and part in the plans guaranteed him the position of second-in-command, Laren Mehta only saw that he would be second to an un-Bloodnamed warrior; one who wanted to deploy the fightercraft on a ground-strafing assault meant to buy conventional forces a free ride to the planet’s surface.

Kal Radick convinced Mehta of the merits concerning both sore spots. Torrent’s position was easier for the pilot to accommodate, as the MechWarrior officer had twice turned down opportunities to compete for a Bloodname. Such was not unknown among the Clans as young ristars waited for a Bloodname with a long and valiant heritage. Mehta’s own Bloodname had been owned by less than two dozen warriors. Twenty-one, to be exact, dating back to the formation of the Clans some three hundred years before.

With that kind of pedigree, Laren Mehta was destined for leadership.

Which was Prefect Radick’s second argument. As the forward officer, claiming first blood from the enemy, Mehta demonstrated his independence from Torrent. No one was ordering him or his pilots to bomb civilian targets or strafe aerospace craft on the ground. Strategic damage against the base was a necessity, of course. But other than knocking the monorail out of commission and inflicting some basic structural damage, Mehta and his fighters were free to engage targets of opportunity as they presented themselves.

No one would remember the need for their Trojan Horse gambit. Radick promised that Laren Mehta’s codex would reflect only his command independence. For Clan warriors a codex—containing an accounting of their career victories and failures—meant everything.

“Stealthy Paw to Star Captain Mehta. Touchdown complete.” Their DropShip, setting down in the hills northeast of the base. “Ground forces are breaking through. We have sightings on enemy forces both south and several klicks north.”

So Colonel Blaire had finally rallied a response to the Steel Wolf assault. North… could that be the Swordsworn? If Erik Sandoval had force-marched his people over the Taibek Hills, it very well could be.

Mehta squeezed at his throat mic. “Ripper Flight, pull back and cover our brethren around the Stealthy Paw. Blood Flight, link up with Star Commander Orvits and guide them north. Form a shield at our backs, intercept the Swordsworn if they break two klicks.”

No need to respond, Mehta’s flight leaders signified their acceptance of his orders with double-clicks that briefly broke the channel’s background static. Mehta pushed his own craft over and dove for the northeast, his own flight, Fang, making a straight-arrow approach over the River’s Run Flatlands toward the twenty-story plume of smoke and steam that he knew hid the Okinawa–class DropShip. Then he saw the enemy ground forces, led by a dark-painted Legionnaire, and curved down on a soft spiral to come at it from an oblique angle.