“Disregard that order.” The plans had finally worked their way over to Erik Sandoval. “Achernar militia, hold your line and prepare for a joint offensive.”

Long past caring for Erik Sandoval’s tactics, Raul keyed open a channel to answer for himself. “We’ve seen your brand of joint offensives, Sandoval. And it’s the last time we walk into one without reading the fine print.” He rocked forward on his foot throttles, stepping out into a crisp march to the west, out from under the Steel Wolf sword, exposing the Swordsworn line.

“Captain Ortega, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m ceding Star Colonel Torrent the San Marino spaceport. I would suggest you do the same.” There would be hell to pay with Colonel Blaire. At least Clark Diago was willing to follow his lead, for now. The militia’s western flank had drawn itself into a skirmish line to protect the retreating middle. “The militia is withdrawing,” Raul said.

“And leaving you to the Wolves.”

Brightwater River Control Facility

Achernar

12 March 3133

Strapped into one of many passenger seats inside the older Trooper-class VTOL, Raul Ortega labored to breathe shallow. The wide passenger compartment smelled its twenty years as an infantry carrier, tainted with rancid sweat and aviation fuel fumes. His seat had lost most of its thin padding years before, with only a few remaining strips held together with duct tape or stapled into the rigid plastic seat. Trying to ignore the knots pressing into his legs and lower back, Raul twisted around to stare out through a copper-tinted window as the infantry carrier thundered up the Rio Sangria.

The reddish, mud-colored waters still ran high as mountain rainfall continued to pour down into the lowlands, but was hardly in danger of flooding so long as the Brightwater River Control Facility remained in Republic hands. A system of locks and sluice gates, the Brightwater facility could, for brief periods, dam up the river completely or channel excess water into one of many old dry washes. From above the facility, he could see that water was indeed being diverted into two older arroyos. The VTOL followed the larger of the two runoff channels, banking southwest and leaving the river course a moment later to run out over yesterday’s battlefield.

From five hundred feet, the area did not look so bad. Some scorched desert grasses and a few charred husks that had once been vehicles or a military-modified IndustrialMech. As the ’copter settled, however, more of the personal cost became clear. He saw the pieces and parts of other machines, scattered leavings after salvage crews had worked the field over for whatever useful equipment they could find. Raul also counted better than two dozen armored battlesuits littering the area like the molted cicada husks, each one a potential fatality.

Three M.A.S.H. tents covered makeshift triage, surgery, and hospital care areas. Corpsmen loaded two stretchers onto a small chopper, which rushed them airborne even as the Trooper hit the ground and an infantryman rolled back two large doors so that Raul could jump down.

Jogging over to the hospital tent, Raul slowed only once as he passed the blackened and severed arm of a BattleMech. It was from Tassa’s Ryoken. He had already seen the laser-blasted wreckage hauled back by a recovery crew, missing its arm and showing a tangle of twisted scrap where its gyroscope stabilizer had once been housed. He mentally tagged the severed limb to be recovered. With some hard work, it might be reconditioned and reattached.

There would certainly be no ordering a new one up from stores. Not for a Ryoken.

There would be no ordering up a new MechWarrior, either, which was why Colonel Blaire had dispatched Raul first thing this morning. With Charal DePriest dead, the closest thing that the militia had to another back-up was Captain Norgales—Legate Stempres’s man. Any others were barely capable of handling a Legionnaire. Raul might be able to handle the powerful Ryoken II design, leaving his ’Mech to a lesser pilot, but he didn’t want it.

He wanted Tassa Kay back.

The hospital tent smelled of old canvas and the strong disinfectants used to keep wounds clean. Several dozen men and women still waited for evac back to River’s End. Blood-soaked bandages and elevated casts gave Raul a close-up look at the cost of this ongoing struggle. He caught whiff of a septic wound—a latrine scent at which he wrinkled his nose—and stood aside as two bulky civilians who looked more like construction workers than corpsmen helped a nurse hustle one of their patients from this tent and likely back to field surgery.

Raul waited for the door to swing shut, then began walking the long rows again, studying faces—when he could—and reading names from charts clipped to the end of the cots. Near the end of the first row he glanced ahead, saw Tassa lying back on white sheets with an IV stuck into her arm and a compress taped to the side of her head. A physician bent over her. A civilian physician, checking vitals and then straightening up to stare down in question. Raul’s breath hitched.

It was Jessica.

Raul had already been feeling at odds with what had happened the other night with Tassa Kay. His conversation with Janella Lakewood was forcing him to reevaluate many things, in fact. His liaison with Tassa had been all passion and need and proximity. Not solid emotion and certainly not love. In the holovids, the ones Raul had loved so much while dreaming of a post within Achernar’s militia, romantic trysts were part of a Mech Warrior’s due. “Because tomorrow we may die,” and other such trite excuses. But this was real life, and real people got hurt both on and off the battlefield. Any decision, or lack thereof, could cost lives, ruin equipment, and shatter relationships.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, not really meaning to speak out loud. He wasn’t even certain to whom he was apologizing just then. Charal, for failing to protect her. Jessica, for how things had turned out. Or Tassa, who had fought and bled for a world that wasn’t even hers to defend.

Jessica was the one to hear him. She glanced up with a guilty start, then quickly darkened to a brooding hostility when she saw who stood nearby. “Well,” she said, and a lot of judgment weighted down her words. “We’ve been here before.”

It was a lot like their first meeting—over the bed of a military patient. Raul could even feel the old arguments warming up in the mental bay where he stored those weapons. Raul swallowed dryly, fighting the tightness in his throat. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m being a doctor, Raul.” She stood slowly, showing fatigue and stiff joints, then walked over to the foot of Tassa’s bed where they could talk more quietly. “Between Brightwater and San Marino yesterday, apparently you swamped the militia’s medical capability and they called in several civilian auxiliaries to help out here, where the fighting was over and danger was low.”

Raul saw the dark circles under her eyes, and could only imagine how little sleep she had gotten since the previous day. Or the previous week. “I’m glad. These are good people, and they needed your help.”

“What they need is transport back to River’s End. We’ve ferried them out two at a time all night, and at this rate we won’t have everyone back until late tomorrow.”

“I came in a Trooper.” Raul saw her frown of concentration, guessed at her question. “Infantry carrier. Seats twenty-eight. You could lay half a dozen out in stretchers and take any of the wounded who can ride in a sitting position.”

“Only right, I guess, considering that the military put them here.”