BattleTech: The Spider Dances: The Proliferation Cycle #6, page 10
McShane nodded. “We can do this,” he murmured.
The ten ’Mechs he’d detected farther afield had just begun to move, no doubt hoping he’d be distracted by the stinging hovertanks and not notice them until they were on him. He oriented the Warlord to face them and tapped a key on his console.
“Prepare to receive ’Mechs,” he ordered, speaking on the MechWarrior channel.
The dust from the hovertanks obscured his vision of the advancing enemy force, but his sensors were able to start cataloguing them. Pack Hunter. Black Hawk. Thor. Hellstar. All powerful ’Mechs, all Omni or at least Clan-designed chassis. A powerful force—more powerful than he usually saw from Combine raiders.
McShane looked at his display and out his canopy, gauging his own troops. The rest of his BattleMechs were maneuvering like he was, not really leaving their positions, but moving around enough to make them more difficult targets. The ForestryMech MODs had clumped into two groups, and each was laying down a curtain of cannon fire whenever a hovertank strayed too close to the line.
At the front of the line, the anvil of his force was as dug in as he could make them with a bare hour’s notice: sixteen main battle tanks, ranging from the battered old DI Morgan to a pair of dilapidated Brutus assault tanks and several Marksman M1s. Infantry was dug in around them, waiting for the enemy to come into range. It was a good line, and with the Condors and SM1s of his reaction force marshaled in his backfield, he could stand against ten OmniMechs and throw them back.
Except that now there were fifteen hostile ’Mechs. McShane frowned, punching up another sort on his secondary monitor. More Omnis. Where the…
Alarms blared as even more red carets appeared on his HUD. Aerial contacts—VTOLs, from the rate of closure. He looked up into the cloud of smoke and dust the Regulators were throwing up in time to see the first wasp-like shape of a Donar gunship appear, rotors tearing great vortices in the smoke.
They were black—blank, on IFF—and moving fast.
They fired.
Thistle’s Pack Hunter fell back, rejoining Hack’s command Star for a moment as Major Chan’s Bravo Star took the lead. The major led from the front, her Black Hawk’s arm-mounted laser batteries firing as she came into range of the heavy armor in the Davy lines. Her lasers played across the thick frontal armor of a Marksman tank, scarring it deeply but not penetrating. The tank’s return fire flickered past her 50-ton Omni, missing cleanly.
Hack switched his gaze to the Davy line. He had to give them some credit—even with fifteen Omnis charging and hovertanks swirling around and a swarm of attack helicopters circling around them, the Feddie troops didn’t break. His comm suite monitored a barked command from Major Chan as the Feddie fire began to land. The Elemental Points clinging to Alpha and Bravo’s OmniMechs let go of their carrying positions and dropped, using their integral jump jets to soften their landing. Hack grunted assent, alone in his cockpit. This close, the armored infantrymen could fend for themselves.
A Dragoons striker company operated as combined-arms team: the OmniMechs—and they were always OmniMechs, since they had to be able to carry a Point of Elementals—were the shock power of the company, while the hovertanks and VTOLS of the cavalry squadrons were the fast-action troops. The Elementals went wherever they were needed, into cities or forests or even open-field battles like this one. Each company included on its TO&E a squadron of aerospace fighters as well, but all the Spider’s Web fighters were over the capital dealing with the militia’s atmospheric wings.
They were not invincible, of course. Hack watched as a gout of ions from the big Warlord in the Davy reserve annihilated one of the Bravo Elementals in a single blast. One moment the armored infantryman had been bounding ahead, the myomer musculature of their battlesuit thrusting them forward, and the next they were a smoking ruin of scattered limbs. The ravening PPC had devoured almost all of the trooper’s chest and helmet armor—and the Dragoon inside.
The range fell quickly, and Hack was forced to concentrate on fighting. His Guillotine shook as a JES carrier lit him up with a full barrage. Only half the machine’s long-range missiles connected, but that was still fifty warheads, and the combined explosion staggered the ’Mech. He jerked his controls, reasserting control over the 70-ton ’Mech’s course, and brought his own weapons to bear on the line.
Paired arm-mounted large pulse lasers scattered damage across the forward armor of the Marksman that Major Chan’s ’Mech had already struck. His first shots degraded the armor further, but the second penetrated. Secondary explosions tore the tank’s turret off, throwing it twenty meters into the air before it crashed down behind the now-burning tank.
“You okay, Colonel?” Nina Slade asked.
Hack glanced at his HUD. Her Hellstar was radiating waste heat in infrared, despite the huge array of heat sinks built into the angular ’Mech’s body. He searched the Davion line until he found what he was looking for—a Davy ’Mech sprawled on its back, armor smoking as latent static arced between its limbs. The ’Mech shuddered and scrambled to its feet, but Hack knew the Davy jock knew he’d been kissed. Four Clan-made PPCs made for a serious peck.
Hack grunted into his comm and jerked the Guillotine into an oblique course toward the right flank of the Davy line. Slade and Ramsay stayed with him, weapons ready. Hack let his heat sinks drain off the waste heat his lasers had generated, and he eyed the line.
Alpha’s Donars were strafing the Davy backfield, keeping a clump of a half dozen or so ’Mech MODs busy. The first Dragoons Elementals had reached the line and vaulted the felled timber barricades. Davy infantry—unarmored, for the most part—resisted, but a man with a rifle and body armor is at a significant disadvantage against a warrior encased in ferro-ceramic powered armor with a machine gun or heavy laser in their right gauntlet.
But they fought. Hack found himself admiring the Davy troops—they fought.
Hack turned his ’Mech back toward the center of the line. He opened his mouth, but a sledgehammer struck his Guillotine before he could speak. It was all he could do to keep the ’Mech upright as a second hammer hit moments after the first. He heard Slade call out, but her voice was distant beneath the clamor of alarms.
McShane snarled in satisfaction as his PPCs found the raider Guillotine’s torso. Heavy PPCs were as powerful as any particle projection cannon in use, if shorter-ranged, and nobody—not even an Atlas pilot—would ignore two of them. He angled the Warlord around the wreckage of a burning JES carrier and stepped closer.
The Guillotine wasn’t alone. The hulking Hellstar that had blown Johansson’s Shockwave off its feet was still there, dual-barreled arms coming around. He shouted into his comm. “The Hellstar!”
At his ’Mech’s feet, two teams of SRM infantry rose from concealment and ripple-fired a barrage of fat-bodied missiles. They were at extreme range, and the teams ducked back under cover the instant the missiles left their tubes, but four rounds found their target, blasting divots from the Hellstar’s armor.
Two Brutuses, ahead and to the left, flashed laser fire at the same raider ’Mech. Four beams of ruby-red light flashed against the monster’s leg and torso armor, staggering it. The Linebacker on the Guillotine’s other flank flashed a laser into one of the Brutus’s tracks, popping the heavy tank loose from its treads, but the missile-launcher in the turret still belched fire and scattered a dozen or so missiles against the Hellstar’s armor.
“Keep it on ’em!” McShane screamed.
The recharge indicator for his PPCs flickered green but he held off, still guiding his 80-ton ’Mech closer. The Warlord also mounted a deadly array of lasers, and at this close range he could do more damage with those.
Crosshairs flashed green and then gold and McShane squeezed the trigger, painting the Guillotine in ruby-red light. The ’Mech’s pilot had gotten the machine under control after the beating of the heavy Magna PPCs, but the loss of so much armor from the laser attack made it stumble again. McShane’s teeth pulled back into another triumphant snarl—
—just as the Guillotine’s pilot ducked the ’Mech’s shoulder, took another step, and slammed a PPC shot into the Warlord’s chest. A fusillade of light from a large pulse laser stripped more armor from his left arm, nearly unbalancing him.
“I need some support over here,” he radioed.
“We’re hip-deep in ’em, Colonel,” his captain replied. McShane heard the bam-bam-bam of the SM1 tank destroyer’s big Type-10 cannon firing. “I don’t know if I can break anyone loose to—”
“—damn it, Captain, I’ve got three heavies over here, and they’re pushing into the lines!” McShane backpedaled, putting the two Brutuses he’d just passed between him and the advancing ’Mechs.
“I’ve got four, sir,” the captain snapped.
“I only need—” McShane stopped. The captain was a good officer. If he said he didn’t have troops to send, he didn’t. McShane was too deeply involved in his own battle to keep track of the whole engagement. A glance at his tactical screen showed red and blue icons intermixed all across the area where the two highways met.
“Six, out,” he sent.
He’d just have to do this himself.
Hack swallowed bloody spit and pushed the Guillotine after the retreating Warlord. He’d bitten his lip when the second PPC hit, but a little blood was nothing compared to the armor the Warlord’s attack had scoured from the Guillotine. Nearly three tons were gone, two of them in less than three seconds. Slade’s Hellstar had been hit almost as badly.
“How are we doing?” he asked Ramsay while he checked on the Guillotine’s status. A wireframe schematic showed several yellow spots where the ’Mech’s armor had been seriously damaged, but no red scars were flashing yet to show where it had been breached.
“It’s a brawl, sir,” Ramsay replied.
“Well, let’s get in there, then.”
Smoke blew across the field, driven by both the hovertanks’ fans and the VTOLs’ rotors. The Warlord disappeared behind a wall of it, and Hack looked for other targets. He was inside the Davy lines, past the felled tree trunks. He nearly turned the Guillotine’s ankle when he found a stump. The ’Mech had crushed it flat, of course, but the momentary resistance had been enough to stress the actuator housing on his right ankle.
A Davy Condor hovertank came blasting down a lane cleared in the barricades. Flame spat from the barrel of its autocannon as the ’Mech slammed shells into the Guillotine’s still-thick torso armor. Hack twisted the ’Mech at the waist and squeezed a secondary trigger. Six short-range missiles burst out, chasing the air-cushion vehicle. Two fell short, blasting green, smoky geysers in the soil behind the Davy tank. The other four connected, one punching through the tank’s skirts and destroying a drive fan. The tank skidded, its turret spinning wildly as it slid on its bearings.
Slade’s Hellstar burped a pair of PPC blasts at the immobile Brutus that had targeted Hack a minute ago. The tank’s crew was still inside, cranking missiles out of the launchers as fast as they would reload. Slade’s blast immolated them as the tank exploded into flames.
A ForestryMech MOD staggered out of the smoke in front of Hack and he snapped the Guillotine’s arm up, ready to fire, but a blue crosshatch appeared on his HUD. He lifted his finger away and watched a Dragoons Elemental use their battle claw to tear away the sheet armor protecting the MOD’s pilot. There was a flicker of laser light, and then the Elemental leapt away on plasma jets as the ForestryMech collapsed.
Lieutenant Thistle’s Pack Hunter fell out of the sky, jets flaming like a larger version of the Elemental suit. The ’Mech crouched as it landed, its torso-mounted PPC tracking a Davy SM1. The bulbous hovertank banked and spun, trying to use its drive fan to turn at too high a speed. The maw of its cannon belched fire even as Thistle’s PPC flickered actinic blue.
Her PPC struck the tank destroyer amidships, blasting through what was left of its armor and crushing the Type-10 Ultra-class autocannon. The tank exploded into a ball of flaming wreckage that skidded for a dozen meters before stopping.
The SM1’s final burst tore the Pack Hunter’s left leg off at the knee. Thistle collapsed out of her crouch, using her slender ’Mech’s arms to catch herself before she went fully to the ground, but Hack saw armor deform and then pop free from her wrist actuators as she did so.
“You okay?” he radioed.
The Pack Hunter fired again, using its hands to support itself. Her target was obscured from Hack’s view by the smoke, but a secondary explosion ballooned out of the miasma. Hack grinned—even without a leg, Thistle was still in the fight.
Now to see to the rest of them.
It was time to go.
McShane looked at his chronometer, unwilling to believe it had only been four minutes since the hovertanks had rushed his line. He stalked the Warlord past the wreckage of an SM1 tank destroyer and eyed the insignia still visible on a section of flame-blackened hull. The captain wouldn’t be reporting in ever again.
“All Able units,” he said, “this is Able Six.” He stopped, distracted as a flight of missiles screamed past his cockpit canopy without connecting. “The signal is Jericho.” He swallowed bile as he said it, but there was nothing else to be done. “I say again: Jericho.”
Jericho was the code word for a rout. In the operational plans it was termed “independent withdrawal under fire,” but McShane knew it was a rout. It was the signal for every militia unit to disengage and make best time away from the battle. Run away, in other words.
While they still could.
“Make for Ashoka,” he continued.
“But sir—” a voice began.
“I know, son,” McShane said. “I’ll see you there.”
McShane turned the Warlord back to the south. There was little chance he was going to get away, not when eighty tons of assault ’Mech barely passed fifty kph and the Regulators could do three times that.
I can hold them while the others get away.
As if summoned, one of the raider hovertanks sped toward him. The Gauss rifle in the Regulator’s turret flashed, but the slug crushed a furrow in the ground before skipping between the Warlord’s legs and disappearing behind him. McShane brought his arms up and squeezed his trigger.
Both heavy PPCs took the Regulator in the bow, devouring the armor quickly and destroying the frame beneath it. McShane imagined the tankers’ expressions as the bulkheads in front of them went from warm to vaporized in a fraction of a second but didn’t linger. The tank came apart in smoke and flame. The heavy turret skidded to a stop barely a meter in front of the Warlord’s foot. He crushed it with an offhanded step as he moved forward.
His radio faithfully transmitted the signals as militiamen made a break for the highway. The first to go were the hovertanks, whose speed allowed them to retreat quickly and get away. The wheeled tanks were next, those that weren’t blocked by felled trees or immobilized by damage. A couple APCs sped past the Warlord’s feet, treads churning at the earth while infantrymen clung to the outside.
The heavy main battle tanks didn’t move. Technically they were violating orders, but McShane didn’t say anything. They weren’t any faster than his Warlord. They weren’t getting away either.
A pair of ForestryMech MODs stepped up beside him. “We’re slower than you are, sir,” one of the pilots beamed.
“Glad to have you,” McShane replied.
Wind picked up and started to clear the smoke from the field. The sounds of combat slowed, although there was no stillness. McShane’s externals picked up the screams of wounded men and the pounding of ammunition gang-firing in destroyed vehicles. His HUD painted more red icons in front of him.
The Guillotine stepped out of the smoke, stopped.
McShane studied the machine. It was black, flat-black, with red trim, but it didn’t wear any unit insignia. The Warlord’s sensors queried it, but no IFF returned. Not regular Dracs, then. Maybe not even Dracs at all.
“Do we surrender?” a tanker asked. The Warlord’s comm painted a disabled Challenger tank as the sending unit. Both its tracks had been disabled but the gunner, at least, was still in his turret.
“If we do that, they’ll just go around us and chase down those that got away,” McShane said.
He was oddly calm. He’d been a soldier for forty years, lucky enough to be a MechWarrior in Harrison Davion’s service when the Republic and its proponents were making ’Mechs more and more rare. He hadn’t expected to meet his end here, on a world not even officially Davion, against an enemy he couldn’t even put a name to.
“So we—” the tanker began, but McShane saw movement.
A pair of Regulator tanks zipped out of the rapidly clearing smoke a hundred meters to the Guillotine’s left. They saw the waiting Davion troops and angled farther away but didn’t slow down. McShane jerked his controls, snapped the Warlord’s right arm up, and fired. His shot missed, but the tanks didn’t stop.
The Challenger crew fired, a long rolling burst that slammed high-explosives into the Guillotine’s left leg. The ForestryMech MODs fired as well, adding their weight to the fray. More raider ’Mechs appeared and returned fire.
So we die, McShane finished.
Hack cursed and snap-fired his lasers into the Challenger’s forward hull. The tank’s cannon fell silent, but the damage had been done. The whole Feddie line erupted into fire, and his Dragoons returned it.
So much for getting them to surrender.
“Major Chan,” he said. “Make sure the Donars are harassing that column that gets away. I don’t want them decisively engaged, but if the couple that make it to the capital are scared to death, that’s just fine.”
