Throttling into a forward run, Raul pushed his Legionnaire ahead at better than one hundred kilometers per hour. Charal was already backpedaling, realizing her exposed position, but not soon enough. Sporadic fire from her rotary autocannon pecked and pockmarked his armor, hammering away barely a ton of protection from his Legionnaire’s lower legs and torso.

“Lance 701,” he called for the quad of Jousts that had held off the SM1 Destroyers earlier, “detach from Delta.” He’d need them to help put Charal down quickly. “Advance at flank speed, engage enemy Legionnaire.”

At the Jousts’ eighty-six kph top speed, Raul left the tracked vehicles behind quickly. They only needed to reach a fair distance, though, to bring their missile racks and extended-range lasers against her ’Mech, or, if need be, any of the supporting armor Charal had left to her.

As if realizing her error, and that she would never get free in time, Charal DePriest waited with two armored vehicles pulled in at her flanks. The computer tagged them as VV1 Rangers, anti-infantry vehicles—hardly the forces one would draw on to hold off a BattleMech.

Caution whispered at the back of Raul’s mind and he slowed his pace, throttling down to seventy kph, buying himself crucial seconds. A MechWarrior did not push a losing position, not a MechWarrior trained under Major Isaac Blaire. ’Mechs were too rare—too expensive—to risk them with a cavalier attitude. Raul had taken hits on his evals for that, and to see Charal suddenly hold the line when everything he saw would have him screaming run gave him a long pause.

But there was nothing new to see. Her flanking forces had yet to break free of his two-pronged assault, and except for the VV1’s she had a single Scimitar combat hovercraft and what now looked like a squad of Purifier armored infantry.

Not enough. Not nearly enough against his quad of Jousts, and Charal knew it. She had something else in mind.

He learned what a moment later.

“Alpha group. Enemy has disengaged.”

The report sounded too good to be true, that Charal was abandoning the battlefield, especially when Beta and Delta echoed the same situation a split-second later. Then the first flight of LRMs saturated the dead lakebed around his position, geysering earth and blackened rock into the air. A dozen scattered missiles slammed into his BattleMech’s upper body, blasting away armor. The explosions echoed into his cockpit, filling his ears with a stuttering roar.

Raul’s alarms screamed from multiple targeting system locks. Other than Charal’s small trio, the nearest vehicle was still nearly a half kilometer away—a JES Strategic Missile Carrier packing along its four racks of long-ranged missiles. Big Jess launched a second, full spread of missiles just before it exploded under the concentrated fire of what looked like Raul’s entire Beta formation.

Charal’s armored forces had disengaged all right. They were completely disregarding Raul’s troops, falling back through his lines no matter the cost to rendezvous on her position and concentrate on one single target: Raul’s Legionnaire.

She had pulled him right into a massive trap!

“Alpha, Beta, Delta, defend my position!” Raul’s voice held a frantic edge to it, one he never would have used in command of real troops. “Lance 701, full assault on enemy Legionnaire.”

Their lasers were already stabbing out at the ’Mech as Charal advanced now behind a makeshift screen of the two Rangers and Scimitar. Purifier battlesuit troops leapt forward on tiny jets, and on Raul’s far right one of the SM1 ’Mech-killers broke free and sped into the killing ground after him as well.

Missiles churned up the lakebed again. Several rained down on his Legionnaire’s shoulders, caused him to stumble forward while Charal’s rotary pummeled him with fifty-mil rounds. Her autocannon slugs struck all over his armor like hundreds of tiny hammers, each one tolling a death knell.

Raul ran through the storm of hot metal, blinking away the tracers’ ghostly afterimage and keeping his finger down on the firing stud of his own rotary autocannon. His only salvation was to take her down first. Take her down, and then mop up her computer-controlled forces as his armored vehicles hit them point-blank from behind. His stream of non-stop autocannon fire cut through her BattleMech’s right arm but failed to make it deep enough into her side to silence the rotary.

A Cavalier battlesuit trooper leapt for her, but she smashed it out of the air with a backhanded swat. One of Raul’s Jousts cut a molten wound directly over the reactor shielding of Charal’s Legionnaire, and on his thermal imaging screen her heat level blossomed to a critical level, but not enough to slow down her rapid-cycling barrages.

A second of Charal’s JES Strategics lumbered into range—on Raul’s left this time—launching flight after flight of missiles, which hammered down around him until the entire planet of Achernar appeared to be shaking itself apart. Charal held up her deadly, cutting assault from the front while the Rangers split apart and, with the Scimitar, hit him on three sides simultaneously. An inferno of laser fire and the Rangers’ stinging miniguns hammered into him, shaking the massive BattleMech beyond the capability of its gyroscope or its pilot to compensate.

Raul had time for one last burst of fire from his autocannon. Then he stumbled. He fell first to his knees, sliding along in a pose of subjugation, then facedown into the earth, the impact rattling his teeth together. The ferroglass shield caved in, its digital picture dropping out large shards that would—in a real battle—ricochet through the cockpit on dangerous, even deadly, paths.

He tasted blood, and his vision swam through a murky haze. Fighting for his final hold on consciousness, Raul levered one of the Legionnaire’s arms beneath it and pushed against the planet. His shattered cockpit shield scraped free of the baked mud, he looked up over one of the speeding Rangers to see Charal also fighting her way back to her feet. His final burst had cut into her gyro housing, knocking the leviathan over but not out.

“Still… time…” Raul told himself, fighting to get his legs under him. His bitten tongue throbbed with each word.

The fury of missiles and autocannon fire had abated, the calm at the eye of a storm. He heard a light scrabbling, like steel-toed mice nesting inside his Legionnaire’s armor, and worry stabbed up from the dark memories of his training but it took an extra moment for the source to register. The Purifiers! Charal’s infantry had crawled up from the ground, hooking footholds into his joints and ruined armor, searching for deep wounds to tear into or—worse—his cockpit hatch.

Raul’s heads-up display blinked and stuttered, occasionally wiped itself with gray-snow static, but it looked as if two of his Jousts were now out of commission. Through his shattered ferroglass shield he saw a ruby lance slice deep into Charal’s left leg. It did not keep her from pulling back to a solid stance. The simulator’s speakers banged a deep, metal echo into his ears—the sound of infantry on his outer hatch. Swallowing against the taste of blood, and his own worry of failure, Raul braced himself up into a three-point crouch and drew his targeting crosshairs over the center of Charal’s ’Mech. His targeting computer locked onto a bleeding-thermal wound, the reticle burning a golden bull’s-eye over her reactor.

Gambling for one last shot, Raul thumbed the firing stud.

And the simulator’s screens went blank.

No video image of Highlake Basin. No enemy ’Mech or vehicles. No friendlies, either. He wanted to believe that his final shot had gone off and burst through her reactor shielding, tried to talk himself into it, but as a hand slapped the simulator’s outside shell and began to crank open the heavy door, he knew. His ears still ringing from the loud sound effects of battle, Raul heard the cheers and clapping of the RTC cadet corps, saluting the victor and the newest Mech Warrior in Achernar’s militia.