Countryside Near Belgorod

Terra

Prefecture X

April 3134; local spring

Tara Campbell turned back to the work at hand, dodging and shooting and watching the red line climb on her heat readout. Ezekiel Crow had to be heating up too by now, didn’t he? She couldn’t count on it. He was a canny MechWarrior—she hadn’t forgotten how he had lured Anastasia Kerensky’s Ryoken II into the path of the lightning, back on Northwind—and by now he undoubtedly had reason to want her dead.

“Two missile batteries on-line.” Captain Bishop spoke in Tara’s earphones. “Coordinates laid in for fire. A walking barrage, stopping fifty meters from Crow on all sides. All you have to do is give the word.”

“Crow,” Tara said on the all-frequency channel. “Stand where you are.”

“I prefer not to, Countess.”

“I suggest it only for your own safety,” she said.

“Thank you for your concern, Countess. But I’ll see to that myself.”

Tara switched over to the command frequency. “On my signal. Stand by, execute.”

“Missiles away,” Bishop replied.

From two batteries of JES II Strategic Missile Carriers, a hundred long-range missiles launched from each vehicle. They rose up on pillars of fire, white smoke trailing. They passed the tops of their arcs. They fell. The first landed a kilometer from Crow. The air between him and Tara Campbell became suddenly thick with flying clods of earth, obscuring the two fighters from one another.

“What is this?” Crow demanded over the all-frequencies circuit. “We agreed to single combat, not an ambush!”

“You’re a fine one to talk about keeping to the spirit of the law,” Tara snapped back. The earth trembled under her feet as the missile barrage continued, the huge impacts sending up geysers of mud and dirt, shot through with flame and roiling smoke. “No one has targeted you—and no one will, except for me. You’ll be safe if you stand fast. This is merely in honor of keeping you from running away. You have a habit of running away, Daniel Peterson.”

As suddenly as the assault had begun, it ended. Tara was gratified to see that the missiles had plowed up the earth around Crow’s Blade into overlapping craters, some of them already filling with muddy water.

“Now, Paladin, you have my permission to move.”

Tara fired her jump jets, blasting a hundred and twenty meters forward. Rounds from the Blade’s autocannon took her as she jumped, nearly tumbling her in midair. She fired back with her lasers, not daring to risk the recoil of her own autocannon without being anchored on solid ground.

As soon as she touched down, she started to sink. Heedless of the heat buildup, she triggered the jump jets again to pull herself out of the mud and into another leap. Only a few jumps more, and she’d be joining Ezekiel Crow inside the small circle of untouched ground.

Crow tried to escape through the mud field. At the Blade’s first step, he started to sink. He pulled back from the mire and started hosing the autocannon onto her. The Mydron spun and flared, spitting flame. It went dark, and then the second ammo bin came on-line.

Tara continued leaping forward. She stopped firing her lasers. She couldn’t afford any more heat buildup. She’d need to be careful once in the ring—one wrong move, one unlucky break, and her ’Mech’s autoshutdown might engage, leaving her vulnerable to anything Crow wanted to do to her.

One last jump, and she touched down half a dozen meters from the solid ground of the untouched sector. Rather than risk another jump, she walked the rest of the distance, surprised in spite of everything by how quickly the Hatchetman started to sink, and by how far below the ground’s surface the layer of mud extended. Ankle-level—knee-level—the mud was nearly up to the Hatchetman’s thighs by the time she stepped out of the final crater.

“Now, Crow,” she said, and brought her autocannon to bear on him.

He’d been firing steadily as she approached; he must be low by now. She lined him up in her sights, and her Imperator Ultra-10 spat fire and steel at the Blade. Crow’s ’Mech staggered as the rounds took it. He dodged, the shells followed. At this range he didn’t have time to calculate where they were coming from and step aside.

Tara’s autocannon spun to silence, its ammo exhausted. She glanced at her temperature gauge. She might risk it… she took a step in Crow’s direction.

“Why don’t you run away now,” she said, taunting him. “I’m coming for you, Ezekiel.”

The Blade was definitely staggering. It had taken damage. Taken hits. The two lasers in its right arm weren’t damaged, though. They came up and locked onto the Hatchetman’s instrument-sensor cluster.

That was a waste of time and power, Tara thought. What she was going to do didn’t require either sensors or instruments.

The Hatchetman’s remote targeting computer went dark. She took another step. Its magnetic anomaly detector went off-line. She didn’t care. She could see out through the front view ports if she had to. All she needed to do now was keep on moving forward.

“Come and wrestle with me, Ezekiel,” she said. “You always enjoyed that. You said that I was the best, remember?”

No answer.

Tara raised the ax at the end of the Hatchetman’s right arm—the weapon that gave the ’Mech its name and made it such a terrible opponent in hand-to-hand fights.

She brought it down.

She felt the impact in her own arm as it struck, and felt the housing of the Blade being driven down. One of the Blade’s legs broke. She swung again.

The great expended-uranium-edged hatchet rose and fell, slicing through the layers of ferro-fibrous armor into the interior of Ezekiel Crow’s ’Mech. Black smoke poured out. She struck again.

This time a spark blossomed in the crevice she had made in the Blade’s hull. As she pulled her hatchet back the spark burst into a flame, then flared up with the brilliant white light of burning magnesium. She stepped backward, forced away by the glare as the ’Mech spat out a cascade of sparks and a fire too brilliant to look at with unshielded eyes.

“Countess! Countess!” Captain Bishop’s voice was sounding in Tara’s ears.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Get out of there. Get to our lines. Please. Now.”

“What—why?”

“It’s the Steel Wolves,” Bishop said. “The whole line. They’re moving. They’re advancing. They’re attacking. Now.”

Tara looked at the sea of mud around her.

“I’m afraid I’m not moving anywhere right now, Captain. I can’t fire my jump jets and expect to do anything more than freeze up.”

“Then stand fast, ma’am. I’ll be there directly.”

Over the command circuit, she heard Bishop start giving orders to her subordinate troops: “On my command, in column of divisions, forward. Condition red. Weapons free. Stand by, execute.”

On Tara’s sensor readout she could see rank after rank of soldiers, artillery, and tanks coming from the Highland side. Rank after rank, wave after wave, moving in her direction, as orderly as if they were on a parade field.

But that was nothing compared to what she saw on her forward sensors, a mass of men and ’Mechs and armor that made her own force seem puny.

The Steel Wolves were attacking at speed.