"You thought!When I want a goddamned junior lieutenant who can think,I'll goddamned well commission my wristcomp! Or a cockroach down in the galley! Good God, between the two of you, you idiots don't have the brains of a Kalidasan mosslug! You're not here to think! You're here to watch your radar screens and sing out when you see something—anything! Do I make myself clear?"

"Yessir!" The two chimed in chorus.

"Another goddamned ass-brained malf like that and I'll put the pair of you out the airlock! Now back to your posts! And nexttime you see something that just might be an enemy ship slipping in to blow us all away to hell, sing out!"

Javil stormed his way hand-over-hand to the podium at the center of the bridge where his private seat and control consoles were located. Senior Lieutenant Yolan Flynn, his Exec, unbelted from the seat and drifted aside to make room for the Captain.

"We miss something coming in?"

"My God, Flynn, I don't know how they expect us to manage!" He strapped himself down and began punching numbers into the console. Working carefully and with the accuracy of long experience, he coded the bridge computer to relay a playback of the deep radar tracks to his central console screen. "Children!"he muttered. "They're sending us half-trained, slug-brained, thumb-chewing children, and they expect us to fight wars! Bah!"

"Things are getting pretty thin back at reppledep. What have you got?"

Javil leaned forward, studying the paired tracks as they arrowed in low above the cloud-hooded face of the planet.

"Two DropShips. Not ours . . . not merchants. Here, Flynn. What do you make of this?"

The radar screen showed white-on-green traceries, two blips racing in across the broken surface of the planet. Clouds appeared as vague ghosts, close against the uneven ground. The blips slowed sharply, generating a cascade of computer analysis in tiny, tightly written characters that spoke of changing vectors, or mass and speed and direction.

"They're ducking into those storm clouds."

"Right. Immediately after the Lancelotchallenged them."

"Hostiles, then? We were told there wasn't any chance that hostile warships would arrive in the middle of the operation."

"We were told a lot of things." Javil's voice was sour. He manipulated controls, speeding things forward. While he advanced the record, the Assagaihad moved forward on her orbit around Helm, and the twin blips were barely visible, settling to the surface a few kilometers west of the village of Durandel. He began comparing the radar image on the record with stored radar views taken of the surface on previous sweeps.

"That settles it, Flynn. They're grounding right outside the town all the fuss is about."

"Interesting."

"It's a damned sight more than interesting." Javil bent over the readings for a moment. "Hah! Got it! I've got them spotted relative to that mountain range to the south, and to Durandel itself. That'll pinpoint them—right to the mark, or close enough!"

"But they'll have been down for hours!"

"True . . . true . . . But a DropShip! Ah! That isa prize, Flynn. One worth fighting for! And here we've got two of them cold, with a small army on the surface already, plus AeroSpace Fighters and some DropShips of our own." He looked up at his Exec. "Open a line to the Colonel for me."

The Exec glanced at the bridge chronometer. "Aye aye. Captain. He's over the horizon now, but we can hit him with a relay off Comsat Twelve." Lieutenant Flynn used his throat mike to contact the Assagai'scommunications department.

It would take long minutes for Javil's request to reach his superiors aboard the Rapaciousat the system's zenith jump point, and more time again for a reply to make its way back to Helm. While he waited, he decided to get things moving. As the ranks of naval Captain and MechForce Colonel were approximately equivalent and their areas of authority did not overlap, he could not pass orders on to the Colonel in charge of surface operations on Helm, but he couldpass the news on in a friendly and unofficial fashion. Javil rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. This was big!After relaying the orders to ComDep, Flynn looked back up at Javil. "Captain? What about that JumpShip?"

"I doubt that there's much we can do. If it's hostile, it'll be jumping soon. It would surely be gone by the time we could get ships out there. So, we'll ignore the JumpShip for now, though I want the Rapaciousnotified and I want a twenty-four-hour watch put on it from here. I want to know the instant that JumpShip does anythingout there. Got me?"

"Yessir." The Exec touched his earpiece, listening. "ComDep has the Colonel on the line for you, Captain."

"Good." Javil adjusted his own earpiece, then touched a control on his console. "Colonel Langsdorf? Captain Javil here. Fine . . . fine ... no problem. But we dohave some news. We've picked up a pair of targets for you, over closer to Durandel. Move fast, and you just might catch yourself a real prize!"

6

Until now, Captain Ramage had been happy with his life. Fourteen standard years, he had been a senior NCO in the militia of a Lyran Commonwealth world called Trellwan, where he had honed his combat skills leading ground infantry against raiders and pirates from the Periphery, the distant, vast reaches of space beyond the so-called "civilized" worlds of the Inner Sphere. He was good at what he did, and the young mercenary warrior hired by the Trellwanese to create a BattleMech force to combat an invasion by the Draconis Combine had recognized it. The mercenary had drawn heavily on Ramage's talents, particularly in special forces techniques for using common infantrymen to bring down BattleMechs. When a world had no 'Mechs of its own, it was up to these ordinary troopers, armed with flamer, skimmer-mounted laser, or satchel charge explosives to defend his people from the predations of the 20- to 100-ton armor-clad monsters that dominated the modern battlefield.

The young mercenary's name was Grayson Death Carlyle, and when he left Trellwan after successfully completing his mission, Ramage chose to go with him.

Ramage's talents had once again been invaluable during Grayson's campaign with the rebels on Verthandi. Armed with only a few battered, captured BattleMechs and AgroMechs jury-rigged with machine guns, the rebel forces had fought the Kurita occupying forces to a standstill, while House Steiner stepped in to guarantee Verthandi's semi-autonomy. It had been Ramage who had trained those ragged ground troops, Ramage who had led them in raid after raid that killed at least ten of the Kurita 'Mechs, and damaged many more.

Ramage had tried his best to retain the rank of sergeant, even when, for all practical purposes, he carried a captain's authority in command of a full infantry company. "The men wouldn't know what to do if they couldn't come grouse to Old Sergeant Ram," he had told Grayson on more than one occasion. When a Captain's commission had come his way despite his protests, Lori Kalmar had pointed out, "The time'll come when you have to rub some fresh-face lieutenant's nose in it . . . Captain.You'd better have the rank to back it up!"

Ramage's leadership technique could best be described as tough, but he was no less hard on himself. Known only by his single Trellwanese name, or affectionately as "Ram," he had earned both the respect and love of the troops under his command.