“Are you going to lay there all day?” he asked, pacing a tight box around the prone Hatchetman.

It was a struggle, returning the unbalanced ’Mech to its feet. Worse when she tried to throttle up for the race to the end of their long-running firefight. The BattleMech swayed like a drunken sergeant, and Tara felt lightheaded with the sauna-like heat of her cockpit and the acrid, ozone scent of fried electronics burning in her sinuses. She finally throttled down to a walking speed, working her control sticks to keep the Hatchetman upright.

Behind them, Cray Stansill’s line powered forward, closing the gap in large strides. Three kilometers. Then two.

“Back on,” she said, still fighting the rough handling. “Back on the grid.”

“Good to hear.” It was Julian Davion. “We could use the help.”

Tara wasn’t certain how much help they could be. A crippled Hatchetman and an armor-stripped Black Hawk, leading in a ragged short company of vehicles and infantry?

With a solid loyalist force chasing right up their ass, ready to slam into the back of Julian’s First Guards?

Coming up on one kilometer distance, the Republic force had just made sight of the eastern bridge below Chateau-Thierry. Not close enough to see the fighting further upriver, though by the thunder of weapons fire and the rising smoke from burning woods, burning vehicles, she guessed the main battle to be just up around the river’s far turn. A long kilometer. Maybe two.

Too far.

“We’ll need every one of you to make this work,” Julian said when she informed him.

Tara read her HUD again, and the strategic map she had loaded up on an auxiliary monitor. Estimated the distance, and the remaining time. “Can’t do it. We’ll never make your line.”

“Don’t need to.”

“How do you figure?”

His answer was a moment of silence. Toggling over to his personal channels. Checking with intelligence officers, or rallying troops to throw her direction. As if he had forces to spare. Point-eight klicks! Tara turned back to face Stansill’s approaching line. Gareth Sinclair did not bother to urge her onward. She simply hauled in their column, spreading it in a two-line set behind her. He limped the Black Hawk up to her side. They continued walking backward, grabbing every meter they could. The rain continued to trickle down.

“So close,” she said on a tight-channel transmission.

Coming up on half a kilometer.

Then the skies really opened and rained down streaks of fire, gouging the earth all along the front of Cray Stansill’s charge. Trees splintered into matchsticks and blackened dirt geysered up into the air. A hoverbike at the forward edge of Stansill’s line simply disappeared. A JES carrier overturned as a gout of fire and smoke erupted beneath it.

Whatever artillery Julian Davion had been using to support the Guards, he’d turned it back to buy some time for the others! The distant positions spent their munitions supply in a sprint, hammering the open ground full of deadly barrages that continued on, and on. Firing for deterrence rather than effect.

It stopped Cray Stansill cold, pulling his line back until he could mass for a more coordinated strike.

“Never bet against a Davion,” a new voice chimed in on an unsecured frequency. Female. Mocking. “They’ve been waging war since before it was fashionable.”

“Impressive.” But it wasn’t enough. Tara saw that Gareth had already turned his Black Hawk around, herding the armored line back another two hundred meters. Three hundred. She continued to pace her Hatchetman back one methodical step at a time, never taking her eyes off the enemy’s forward units. Seconds. Seconds only.

“Got anything else in your bag of tricks?” she asked.

Julian was apparently in no mood to disappoint.

“Watch this,” he said. And there was silence on the channels again. For about thirty seconds.

As artillery dropped hard and heavy on Cray Stansill’s position, Conner Rhys-Monroe slammed a fist into the side of a nearby access panel, rattling the metal and taking his frustrations out on his equipment. Every time! Every probing attack cut off and sent back reeling. Every major push blunted. Each flanking attempt running foul of artillery or the fast-response units of the First Davion Guards.

Julian Davion steadily sold off pieces of his unit, but he was getting a seller’s-market price for them.

Conner was frustrated, but at least he was beyond his surprise at finding a Federated Suns force fielded on Terra, and the anger that had consumed him while listening to a third of his assault getting torn up by two paladins and a handful of green militia. He was! Not even panicked news of the assault into Germany, driving the other senators to flight, had made an impact on him. Those were the fortunes of war, and if nothing else, The Republic had taught him how to accept such setbacks. Hadn’t it?

New plans were now in place. Fallback positions, as well as reevaluated goals. A knight did not surrender to a broken strategy. A knight shifted tactics on the fly, wrestled with the conditions as presented, always searching, always hungry, for victory.

Except that Julian Davion appeared to have taken many of the same classes. Of an age with Conner he might be, but the prince’s champion did not hold an empty title.

Like senator?

Another frustrated bash, then hand back on the Rifleman’s throttle. He could not afford to think about such things. Not in the field.

Instead, during a brief lull that settled over the hot-fire zone, he concentrated on wheeling a trio of Demons around the Guards’ flank and repositioning his Paladin Defense Systems to blast the hell out of Julian’s line.

He also spared a Kinnol main battle tank for Avellar’s rendition of Horatio-at-the-bridge—the other black hole in his tactical plan.

One paladin—one!—had stopgapped his attempts to swing flanking forces through Chateau-Thierry. Maya Avellar’s Vulture had fallen twice already, and both times had struggled back to its feet, laying waste to any force that tried to fly across the river, or challenge it for possession of the western bridge. Not many knights Conner knew could have stood up under that kind of punishment.

This attempt faired no better. The Kinnol rolled up onto the bridge, under cover by Jesses on the rain-churned water. Avellar’s Vulture ignored the hovercraft for a moment, concentrating lasers and flight after flight of missiles on the main battle tank. A single PPC, even supported by a Delta Dart ten-pack, was no fair trade in firepower.

It cost the Vulture more armor. A few heat sinks, it seemed, as gray-green coolant burst from new ruptures in the chest. But Conner was forced to pull the Kinnol back before Maya scrapped it into a seventy-ton roadblock.

Magnificent bitch!

Something new on his HUD. Several Guard units had edged back to the treeline, or just inside. Possibly readying a move around his position. Checking his flank, Conner wheeled a Schmitt out against a pair of Pegasus scout craft—but didn’t see anything more threatening building.

Taking advantage of what appeared to be a Davion fallback maneuver, he stomped forward to haul crosshairs over the outline of a fleeing Destroyer. It threw back a curtain of mist, shattered rain drops. It was also the one with the V-shaped design scrawled next to the crest of the Federated Suns, deviling his line for the last half hour. Always where the fighting was thickest. Always with that damnable assault-grade autocannon blazing away.

Almost as bad as, if not worse than, the Templar’s accuracy.

The angle, the Destroyer’s speed—the best Conner could get was a flashing-gold reticle. Partial lock. He reckoned it by dead-eye sight, then pulled into his rotary autocannon, winding up the rotating barrels and pitching a hail of hot metal after the hovercraft. His right-arm cannon jammed on an ammunition misfeed. His left-arm rotary cut a deadly swath. Running from nose to tail on the Destroyer, he zeroed in on the rear propulsion fans.