So long as the militia soaked up the balance of any casualties, it hardly mattered to the Swordsworn or to Erik.

“Sir!” A call for him, drifting forward from the command deck. “Lord Sandoval, we have those updates.”

Rather than abandon the observation deck, Erik slipped into the vacant gunner’s seat and tucked the comms headset up into his right ear. “Gunner’s channel seven,” he yelled back, dialing himself over to the correct frequency. “Report.”

“DropShips.” The aerospace monitor was first in queue. “They’ve completed a turn at apogee. Without a secondary course correction, they will drop right on top of the spaceport in less than ten minutes.”

A metallic dryness crept into Erik’s mouth. So the big push was for the spaceport. Or at least, that was what the Steel Wolves wanted them to believe. “Do we have intel on the Brightwater raid?” he asked, wanting confirmation.

The Brightwater river control facility stood halfway between River’s End and the Tanager Mountains. The Steel Wolves had targeted it once already, and been rebuffed. This morning’s raid had looked to be a stronger push, led by Star Colonel Torrent himself. Despite the facility’s importance—able to force a drought on River’s End or, during high rains, possibly flooding the city by opening sluice gates—Erik had let the militia handle it. Cautious of his position, the smaller on-planet force but in control of the capital itself, he had to allow attrition to work in his favor.

Another staff sergeant waited with the news. “All indications are that the raid was diversionary. MechWarrior Kay is down. May be dead. Before she fell, she reported back that several of the APCs were empty, and what they first pinged as armored tanks were actually convoy trucks.”

Erik had followed Tassa Kay’s efforts on Achernar’s behalf with something akin to jealousy. Piloting an impressive ’Mech, successfully inserting herself into the Republic’s order of battle, she was the wild card of which he could never be certain. If she was indeed down and out, then he was well rid of her.

But what mattered now was this battle, and how to handle the incoming DropShips. The vessels represented a significant amount of firepower, and even with the militia’s help and his own reserves he doubted they could be stopped. “I need a run-down on all available forces. Give me units and numbers.” He wanted his own terminal, and was half-tempted to walk back to the command deck and appropriate one.

Then he realized he had one, right in front of him.

Listening to the follow-up reports with only half an ear, Erik strapped himself into the gunner’s place, firing up all sensor bands and targeting consoles. A laser-painted HUD leapt up onto the ferroglass shield, drawing icons in gold, neural blue, and enemy red. What he saw gave him no more information than an aide could have fed him on the command deck, but it felt better. He read the battle with a practiced eye, gauging strength, calculating odds off the cuff and coming up far short.

Shaking his head, Erik once again gave way to caution and the certainty of his current position within River’s End. “Operations. Begin to stagger back some of our stronger units. I want one of our converted Miners limping off the battlefield in minutes. Make a good show of it. Have a unit press forward on the attack, and then fall back the second they draw any hard resistance. Prepare for full evacuation on my command.”

If Star Colonel Torrent wanted the HPG, he would come for it in a fight on Erik’s terms, not his own.

Raul Ortega shifted around in his seat, throwing his own sense of balance behind the Legionnaire’s fifty tons. The BattleMech twisted at the waist, bent forward, and rocked back off the left-side edges of its square-shod feet.

“Can we expect relief from these strafing runs anytime soon?” The militia had only a pair of Stingrays over the spaceport field, and they were being shoved around like schoolyard children at recess. The one-two punch of ground-fire and aerospace fighters had thrown him off balance twice since Erik Sandoval pulled back his antiaircraft-capable vehicles.

Clark Diago, anchoring the militia’s attempt to encircle the Steel Wolf flank, was more direct. “Base, Diago. Get us some support out here!”

Promises and regrets were forwarded by Colonel Blaire himself. Aerospace was still tied up in attempts to divert the Steel Wolf DropShips. “You’re about to get all the cover we have,” he said in clipped tones. “But it won’t be enough.”

Biting back his response, Raul throttled into a backward walk and put some distance between himself and a pair of M1 Marksmen. The assault tanks rolled past the dismantled corpse of the final Swordsworn WorkMech, working it over with short-range weaponry, just for good measure, before turning their attention forward. Their gauss rifles were too big a threat for Raul to ignore. Switching over to his company’s tactical frequency, he called a missile barrage down on their location.

Gray tendrils of smoke fell down from the sky, marking the four-score warheads that blasted into armor and ripped through the polished tarmac landing field. Before the smoke cleared, a squad of DI Schmitts pounced, their rotary autocannon blazing with long, sustained rates of fifty-mil fire support. Raul shifted back for a forward run, cutting along behind the Schmitts, adding his own hard-pounding rotary to the assault.

The Steel Wolf crew rallied quickly—too quickly. With artificial thunderclaps splitting the air, both Marksmen punched rail-accelerated gauss slugs into the lead Schmitt. One carried away a turret missile launcher, ripping it clean off the tank. The second gauss slug impacted over a wheel, smashing it back into the drivetrain and fouling the right-side independent drive mechanism.

The Schmitt turned in a sharp circle, crippled, unable to withdraw.

“At them! Hit them now.” Raul drove forward, feeling each of the Legionnaire’s pounding steps at the base of his spine.

Centering his crosshairs over the Marksman with greater armor fatigue, he burned into it with a hammering cascade of fifty-millimeter slugs tipped with depleted uranium. More missiles rained down on the Steel Wolf position—and more than one flight was returned against Raul’s BattleMech—as the three remaining Schmitts followed their MechWarrior’s lead and drilled deep into the gauss-toting tank.

Protected by deep armor reserves, the Marksman and its comrade vehicle managed one more volley, completely smashing through the side of the crippled Schmitt, and left it a gutted shell. Then a blistering scourge of laserfire chewed into the wounded Marksman. A burst of flame scattered out of several gaping holes as fuel caught fire, and dark, greasy smoke swirled out to commingle into a dark funeral shroud.

The remaining Marksman rolled backward into the protection of the Steel Wolf lines, quickly flanked by two advancing Pack Hunters.

And that was when hell opened up, throwing a long line of fire and destruction into the midst of the exposed Schmitt trio.

“DropShips! Angels-twelve. Straight up but drifting back.”

Like Raul needed the warning. His alarm systems had failed to register the DropShip arrival, sensors cluttered up with too many ground targets to worry about overhead threats, but there was no mistaking the fire pattern laid down from above. “Break and run,” he ordered the Schmitts. “Strike Squad Two, evade and escape.”

Two of the three Schmitts crawled out of the blasted landscape. One of them had plunged into a cratered strip that could only be a collapsed service tunnel. It might have survived, but even so it was out of the battle.

Craning to one side, looking up past the thick, rotary-linked barrels of his overhead autocannon, Raul found the bright drive flare of a hovering Okinawa–class DropShip as it passed overhead by half a kilometer. The DropShip crew had put a rotating spin on the vessel, and now long beams of gem-brilliant energy lanced down from three weapon ports at a time as lasers and particle cannons mixed into terrifying salvoes. As one port fell out of line-of-sight, another came around to walk new destruction down among the militia line. LRMs fell out at regular intervals, spreading more impersonal death over the ground-bound vehicles.