It was how Erik would build warriors. He’d let the two larger factions battle each other, saving his troops for later.

“I’ve learned the hazards of jumping in too soon,” Erik whispered to his cockpit, hearing his words echo in the tight confines of his neurohelmet. As his uncle admonished, this time Erik would exercise greater patience. He’d wait, and plan, and train his drivers into true soldiers. And then, he’d strike.

With any luck, the other factions would bloody themselves up so badly that when the smoke cleared, Erik would remain the uncontested commander on Achernar. Without a shot fired.

He laughed. It was a pleasant fiction, and whiled away the time as Erik pulled his forces further from the main battle.

River’s Run Flatlands

Achernar

16 February 3133

Raul Ortega used the dry riverbed as a natural bypass, able to move from one side of the Republic’s strung-out battle line to another. Opening skirmishes and strafing runs by the overhead Steel Wolf OmniFighters had already cost him a damaged knee actuator. Throttling the Legionnaire up to a fast walk, favoring the right leg, Raul curled around tall stands of Ponderosa Pine and thorny monkey trees that weren’t much better than very large cacti. A pair of hoverbikes abandoned the dead riverbank, following his lead, flying off the drop and kicking up a large cloud of dirt and debris in their wake.

“Ortega on the way,” he said in an encouraging voice, willing the recovery team to hold out.

“Whatever you can do, do it fast,” came a clipped, no-nonsense response.

Raul nodded to the empty cockpit, swallowed painfully, mouth parched from breathing the dry cockpit air. He tasted flatland dust and wondered just for a moment how wise it had been to rechannel the river away from Highlake Basin on a shorter path to River’s End. Only five kilometers north of the military base, once-grassy plains had become a virtual dustbowl in the last thirty years. Except for summer storms, the River’s Run Flats wouldn’t see much moisture until late autumn. With temperatures outside peaking at forty Celsius, that made for a miserable battlefield.

Pivoting into the final river bend, the Legionnaire’s feet nearly skidding out from beneath Raul on old hardpan and river rock, he judged the timing about right and turned into the steep bank. Flange-formed feet dug at the side of the river. Raul bent forward at the waist, throwing the ’Mech’s center of gravity forward as his neurohelmet transferred his own sense of equilibrium down into the stressed gyroscopic stabilizers. The Legionnaire actually fell uphill, arms out to catch the upper lip of the riverbank.

Raul pulled himself out of the riverbed just as the hoverbikes chose a likely looking slope of their own and jumped the bank to either side of him. Working his footpedals and control sticks, he stumbled back up into a flat-out run and toward the beleaguered recovery team.

He couldn’t fault the fix-it team for trying to salvage the Behemoth II after it took crippling damage to its drive train—an assault tank was no easy piece of technology to abandon on the field. He could have asked for a more defendable position, however. The isolated crew sat out in the open with their JI 100 recovery vehicle cowering behind the stranded Behemoth. Steel Wolf forces pressed in from two sides, sniping from long range at the fix-it team, kept off them only by Tassa Kay’s Ryoken and the frantic racing of twin Condors which worked hard to guard both flanks at once.

Erik Sandoval was supposed to have closed in on this side of the battlefield by now. Obviously he was running late.

“Ortega has the right side,” Raul offered, his Legionnaire limping forward at a still-respectable ninety kph.

“Tassa has the left.” The Ryoken turned in a graceful, predatory leap even as she warned him, jetting up and over the Behemoth on fiery streams of plasma. The Condors gravitated to her as if drawn by a titan’s lodestone.

Raul kept the hoverbikes. “You corral them, I rope them.” The fast hovercraft sprinted out ahead of him, already worrying a lumbering JES Strategic Missile Carrier with their twin laser system.

If the JES crew thought they had time to deal with the hoverbikes and escape, they misjudged the speed of a Legionnaire. Raul stabbed his targeting crosshairs directly over the back hatch, exhaled an extra-long second waiting for his targeting computer, then remembered that Charal had either ripped it out or had it removed intentionally. Instead he carried a trio of medium lasers to supplement his rotary autocannon.

He pulled into his main trigger, holding it down as the overhead rotary chewed through several hundred rounds of high-explosive ammunition. Charge-loaded slugs blasted into the back of the JES Carrier, cratering large holes through its armor and feeding even more damage into the vulnerable crew quarters. The entire vehicle shuddered, swung around at an awkward angle, and then ground to a halt, dead on the plains.

It didn’t hit Raul for another dozen steps that he had just executed a Republic-born military crew. He throttled off, slowing to a walk as he stared at the gutted carrier.

“Head’s up,” Tassa warned him. “Here they come again.”

Twin lines of autocannon fire chewed up the flatlands ahead of him as two bone-white Jagatai skimmed the flatlands, strafing arrows at Raul’s Legionnaire. He sidestepped out of the obvious damage path, but one of the pilots reacted on instincts and lightning-fast reflexes. The tail end of one Jagatai slewed around, correcting its aim. The craft thundered by overhead, and for a second Raul believed he was safe. Then the pilot flared wing flaps and pulled the OmniFighter’s nose toward the heavens, angling his tail down at the Legionnaire’s back and spraying a mix of laserfire from his aft-mounted weapons.

The blood-red lance burned the ground off to one side, but bright emerald darts from a pulse laser stung all up and down Raul’s backside. Armor ran down his BattleMech’s legs and splashed into the dirt, smoking small craters into the flats.

Raul felt heat radiating up through the cockpit deck even before he checked his wireframe damage schematic and saw that he’d lost a good chunk of physical shielding around his fusion reactor. Temperature levels had jumped up to yellow-band equivalent, and now just about anything Raul did with the ’Mech, including an easy walk, would begin to bake him alive.

He suddenly felt a touch less sympathy for the Steel Wolf crew in the Big Jess, seeing how close he had come to a fiery death of his own.

“Unless you’re in full shutdown, how about an assist?”

Tassa Kay’s sarcasm cut through Raul’s brief seconds of reflection, snapping him back to the here and now. He checked his HUD, deciphering the code of icons and IFF tags, saw that Tassa’s Ryoken was herding a pair of Demon medium tanks around the far side of the stranded Behemoth. Both vehicles slid around into full view, saw the waiting Legionnaire, and then cut sharply out toward the middle of the flats and the safety of their own lines.

Raul reached out for one of them with a few long-range bursts from his RAC. Both missed, chewing up the ground just behind the lead vehicle. Tassa was not going to be denied so easily. Twisting her ’Mech’s torso further to the left, she bracketed in the rear vehicle with her twin PPCs. The particle cannons spent incredible power into two hellish streams of blue-white energy.

One cut across the front of the rear Demon, a literal shot across the bow.

The second PPC smacked into the tank broadside.