BattleTech: Front Lines: BattleCorps Anthology, Volume 6, page 11
She nodded, absentmindedly.
“There’s more, though,” he went on. “Hauptmann Reffo has seconded your commission as a cadet, and has offered you a spot in what’s left of the Academy battalion, if you want it.” She started, and slowly turned to him. “Once we get back, of course. I told him I’d tell you.”
“What do you think I should do, sir?”
Without answering, he walked over to her and took a couple of carrots out of her hand. Turning to the fence, he walked down to a waiting mount and fed it one of the vegetables.
“It depends on what you want. The Archon won’t let the Falcons hold Coventry forever, it’s simply too important. So, assuming you survive until the Alliance finally wins, what do you want to do? Reffo’s offer, even if they don’t rebuild the Academy, will give you legitimacy if all you’re looking for is a way to stay in the seat and keep piloting ’Mechs. If you join the Academy battalion, you’ll eventually get commissioned into the LAAF proper and assigned to a line unit.”
“What if I want to stay on Coventry?” she asked in a low voice.
“Then stay in the militia. Buried this deep in the Alliance, odds are you won’t see much combat, if any. But you’ll have a home here, in a unit that knows and trusts you. It all depends on what you want.”
The silence stretched for a long moment before he quietly said, “Melissa told me about the promise ring. Did Leutnant Grant thoroughly explain what it means?”
She nodded, as she slowly raised her left hand to examine the dull gray band and Celtic symbol barely visible in the early morning light. “He did. And MechWarrior Melissa, your…fiancée,” she said, stumbling on the unfamiliar word, “talked to me at length about it. I find some of the ideas very different, almost repugnant.”
“Yet you accepted the ring.”
She dropped the hand and nodded, her chin up, her face a portrait of stubborn pride. “I am learning that ‘different’ is not necessarily ‘bad.’ This ring is a promise of trust, of commitment in another, and loyalty between friends. All honorable emotions. I do not understand all of your culture, but I am coming to believe there is more I can learn. That I can become more than what I am.”
She stared at him intently. “What do you think I should do, sir?” she repeated, challenge in her voice. “Can I be something more, or am I only a MechWarrior?”
He walked back toward her and handed her the remaining carrots. “If all you were and could be was a MechWarrior, then you wouldn’t give a damn about feeding the boomers every morning.”
* * *
NORTH OF GLEN MOHR
COVENTRY
COVENTRY PROVINCE
LYRAN ALLIANCE
22 MAY 3058
RAYMOND CLIMBED down from his Hollander, moving more by instinct than sight in the quickly-disappearing dusk light. Reaching the ground, he shrugged on his cloak against the night chill, and headed toward the field table where his lance was waiting.
Walking up to the table, he nodded to Hauptmann Howard. “Nice of you to swing by, Greg. Just like old times.”
The taller man smiled as he shook Raymond’s hand. “New prisoners from the Glen Mohr attack. Since your technique worked before, I thought I’d let you take lead again.”
Raymond nodded. With only two Stars of Falcon troops in town, Raymond’s lance had created a diversion on the west side of the city that had drawn off the enemy ’Mechs, leaving the vessel berths and port facility itself only guarded by two points of Elementals. The diggers had then swooped in and quickly overwhelmed the defenders, striking hard before disappearing back into the forest. Setting most of a wooded ridge line on fire to discourage pursuit on their side of the city, Raymond was fairly certain he’d met Leinerton’s intent of being highly visible.
Someone in the Falcon hierarchy, Tallara had confidently assured him, would swiftly recognize his lance’s MO and would send enemy reinforcements to hunt them down, taking a little pressure off Leinterton. Raymond had replied by teaching his young cadet a proverb about being “careful what you wish for.”
Looking past the Hauptmann, he saw a column of troops heading toward the table, led by Sigmund. The former Elemental had a neutral expression on his face as he ordered his squad to halt and line up the three large prisoners. “How’s he been working out for you?”
“Sigmund? He’s amazing. Utterly fearless. Smart. I’d love a whole battalion just like him. How’s your pup?”
Raymond looked across the table at Tallara and sighed theatrically. “She has potential.” Melissa poked him in the ribs as Howard chuckled and Tallara rolled her eyes.
“Cadet,” he said, and Tallara rose to her feet. “Convince them to join the cavalry.” She smiled slightly, nodded, and turned on her heel, walking purposefully toward the prisoners.
Stopping about three meters in front of the captive Elementals, she paused for a moment to look over the two men and the lone woman, all three alternating their glances between her and Sigmund. Their eyes locked onto her shoulder as she twisted slightly to show them the Clan Jade Falcon insignia Raymond had allowed her to sew onto her jumpsuit underneath the regimental patch.
“I am Cadet Tallara,” she began, “MechWarrior in the Twenty-second Coventry Province Militia, and I am going to give you three options…”
THE DISCOVERY OF COMMAND
HARPER BRAND
CHASE LOWLANDS
FLETCHER
THE CHAOS MARCH
22 NOVEMBER 3067
AS SOON AS the thundering explosion faded, the sound of sobbing filled Nicole Shelby’s helmet speakers. She gasped in the furnace-hot air of her cockpit, ignoring the alarms clamoring for attention as her BattleMech’s systems caught up with their own damage. Sixty tons of fighting alloys, armor, and weapons trembled with restrained power. Nicole ignored it. Instead, she stared at her HUD, watching flames lick up from the hulk of the Buccaneer she’d just destroyed, and fought to keep from throwing up.
“Someone shut him up,” one of the tankers said on the general push. Nicole didn’t know her name. She hadn’t met everyone in the scratch group of Eleventh Division survivors before the Word column had found them. Black smoke from a burning Grim Reaper obscured the fallen Word of Blake Buccaneer. Nicole looked there. She could pull that MechWarrior’s name out of records, but she didn’t know it now.
Now she never would.
“Who’s senior?” a different voice asked.
I am. Nicole blinked. “I am,” her mouth said. Was she?
“Who’s ‘I’ this time?” one of the infantrymen asked.
“Nicole Shelby,” Nicole said. “Adept.”
“Wonder how long she’ll last,” someone said.
“Long enough,” Nicole said. She blinked again and shook her head. “Any other officers here?” She waited. There was nothing. “Then figure out among you who is senior and get a count. I want type-commander reports in two minutes.”
She keyed her ’Mech’s radio mic off and let go of the Black Hawk KU’s controls. Her breath came in shallow gasps.
Everyone was gone.
Everyone.
The alert had been sudden and too late; by the time she got to her ’Mech, the Word of Blake DropShips had already grounded and were disembarking more Blakist ’Mechs and tanks than she’d thought they even had. It looked like a couple divisions at least, marked with unit identifiers no ROM report had ever catalogued. They had torn into the Eleventh as if the elite Com Guard division was a collection of Sandhurst cadets.
Nicole didn’t remember getting away. She knew she had—she was here, looking at the remains of the last skirmish—but she didn’t remember the details. She would, she knew. It would haunt her dreams and nightmares for as long as she was alive to have them.
But for today…
“Adept,” a voice broke in. Nicole blinked wetness out of her eyes and looked at her HUD. One of the two other surviving Com Guard ’Mechs, a thick-bodied Helios, was signaling her. “Acolyte XIII Shari Manzoni; both myself and Acolyte Osborne are functional.”
Nicole keyed her mic. “Roger,” she said. “Keep an eye out for more Word units while the rest of the Two consolidates.”
The only reply was a double-click of the microphone that broke squelch.
Nicole pretended she could hear the click echo in her cockpit. She couldn’t, of course. It was impossible. But her mind was playing tricks on her. She recognized the experience, knew it from training all of those years ago when the trainers had run the cadets ragged to teach them the experience of exhaustion.
She hadn’t been out of her cockpit for more hours than she could count. She looked around now, and suddenly felt the walls of the small, close compartment closing in. Slapping the quick-release clasp on her chest that secured her restraints, she keyed her mike.
“New plan,” she said. “Meeting on the ground. MechWarriors to stay mounted and monitor. Everyone else, rally where I can find you.”
She had to get outside, even if it was just a minute.
BY THE TIME Nicole got down from her cockpit, a crowd had formed around the open hatch of a Centipede scout car. The hovertank was down on its skirts, fans quiet, but the power was on, and she heard the squelch and static pops of open long range commo clearly.
“Any contact?” she asked.
Faces turned toward her. Men and women both—dirty and clean, infantrymen and tankers. All of them had the same expression of senseless desperation, of a will to keep moving that had been beaten into them by military experience, but no direction for it.
Nicole recognized it because she felt it herself. She was tired, so tired—but something inside her wouldn’t let her give up.
“Nothing,” the Centipede’s driver said. A narrow lane opened in the group of people, so that Nicole could see the driver and he could see her. He was in his mid-thirties, maybe a few years older than her, and he was tired, too. Bags shadowed beneath his eyes. His skin was pale and damp with half-dried sweat.
“You’ve tried all the divisional bands?” Nicole asked.
The driver’s expressions hardened. “Of course.”
“Of course, Adept,” Nicole said. She waited.
“Of course, Adept,” the driver said.
“Your name?”
“Snelling, ma’am,” the driver said. He ducked his chin in a halfhearted salute and then turned back to his console. “There’s some traffic, sure. All the civvie bands are full of chatter. I can hear encrypted traffic I don’t have the cyphers for—”
“You had the current codes when we left?” Nicole asked, but her tired mind reminded her that was a stupid question even as she said it. A scout car’s computer would be updated as a matter of course. The chances that the Centipede’s files were out of date were about equal to the chance that old Jerome Blake himself was going to climb out of his 300-year-old crypt, hale and hearty.
Snelling’s expression told her he recognized both the question and the following thought that had gone through her mind. He only glanced at her, but it was enough.
“So it’s Word traffic,” Nicole said.
Snelling nodded without looking at her. “Most like, yes.”
Nicole looked at the others. “Anyone else have comms with the rest of the division?” She gave the blank stares a moment and then sighed. “Okay. We need to keep moving—if our comms are down and theirs are up, we can assume they know where we are.”
“Take them some time to get up here from Royce,” a short, black-haired woman said. She nodded when Nicole met her stare. “Acolyte Flynn, ma’am. I’m TC for that beast.” She pointed over Nicole’s shoulder at a battered Brutus assault tank. Two of the tank’s crewmen were up and working with pry bars on a kinked section of the drive track. Nicole heard them grunting from a dozen meters away.
“If they come from Royce, yes,” Nicole said. “What if they’re closer?”
“Then we’re dead.”
Nicole looked away from the tank at the angry tone. The man who’d spoken wore the undersuit of a powered armor infantryman. He’d slid on soft boots and had a submachine gun slung across his chest.
“You got a name, trooper?” Nicole asked.
“Bjorn Helton,” the infantryman said.
Nicole waited, but there was no “ma’am” or “adept” coming. She bit back the frown that wanted to come out and crossed her arms instead. It felt like weights were attached to her wrists, she was so tired. All she wanted to do just then was walk away from this group and find a stream, somewhere in the woods, where she could peel off this disgusting bodysuit and scrub the salt and sweat out of her armpits and her belly and from beneath her breasts. She was amazed she didn’t make a crackling noise when she walked, she felt so dirty. So tired.
But she knew without thinking that she couldn’t do that.
Even though she wanted to.
Instead, she gestured with one hand. “And?”
“And what?”
“And if they’re closer, and we’re dead?”
Helton frowned. “Then we die.”
“Right.” Nicole dropped her arms and rolled her head around on her shoulders. “No point in thinking about that. Okay…”
She paused, just for a second, giving the whole group a moment to grab the opportunity if they wanted it, but none of them did. Inside her head, she felt a moment’s glory at the success, fleeting as it was.
It was a trick she’d learned in OCS from a grizzled old mercenary training sergeant. There was no point in worrying about things outside your control. None. You could fixate on something and think about it and fret over it and it would still happen. The sun always rose. The tax bill always came. And the acolyte always—always—had a bad idea.
Okay—the sergeant may have invented that last one. Nicole shook her thoughts back to the present. “Let’s get organized. Tankers—who’s senior?”
A couple of the troopers looked at each other, made little head gestures, then nodded. Snelling raised his hand. “You’re in charge of wheels, fans, and tracks,” Nicole told him. “Get me a readiness report ten minutes after we finish here.” He nodded.
“Okay.” Nicole looked at Helton. “You in charge of your people?” Helton shook his head and pointed to a solid-built woman standing next to him. “Her,” he said.
Nicole looked at her. “Her?”
“Acolyte Alex Slocum, ma’am,” Slocum said. She had short-cut brown hair and brown eyes, and her skin was tan enough that Nicole could tell she spent a lot of time outside her armor. Like Helton, she wore the bodysuit and a billed cap, with a suppressed AX-22 across her chest. Nicole wanted to ask what she did with a full-size assault rifle while she was in armor, but didn’t. It didn’t matter.
“How many effectives you got, Slocum?”
“Three squads, ma’am.”
“All armored?”
“All but four,” Slocum said. “A squad of security was riding shotgun on the tech blower; four of them survived the ambush. They’re helping with the salvage and recovery while we’re here talking.”
Nicole heard the unsaid rebuke in her voice. There were people unaccounted for in the vehicles destroyed during the skirmish—pilots stuck in jammed cockpits, or vehicle crewman fighting warped hatches. Wounded infantrymen.
She nodded. “You need anything we can give you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Keep one squad here with you,” Nicole told her. “We need to plan. The rest of your people, out in the recovery zone. Security or salvage, their judgment.”
“Roger,” Slocum said. She looked at Helton and jerked her chin. He and a half-dozen others ducked their chins and stepped out of the group. Nicole watched them go, mind blank for a blessed second, then blinked and shook herself again.
What else? she wanted to ask, but knew she couldn’t. She was in charge, of all things. She couldn’t afford to show too much uncertainty. Questions to reveal details, of course. No brainer. But she had to show theses people she had a plan—even when she didn’t.
“Let’s focus on getting ready to move for now,” she told the group. She looked at Flynn and the other tankers. “Get back to your tracks. Get Snelling your mobility info, ammunition status, stuff like that.”
Flynn and the others nodded and stepped away. That left only Nicole, Snelling still sitting in his cockpit, and an older, white-haired paunchy man in the gray jumpsuit of a Com Guard technician. He stared at her.
“Help you?” she asked.
“Technician Heywood Alvin, Adept,” the old man said. “I’m the senior tech left.”
“Shelby,” she said shortly. “Shouldn’t you be out with the salvage teams, Alvin?”
Alvin nodded. His neck folded like an accordion when he did it. Nicole’s eyes fixated on it in her exhaustion. He looked like one of the cape toads from back home. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you knew about Stonehenge, ma’am.”
“Stonehenge?” All Nicole could think of was the ruins near Sandhurst on Terra.
“In Royce, ma’am.”
“There are ruins in Royce?”
Alvin smiled. “The supply ship, ma’am. Landed two days ago? On the circuit from Epsilon Indii?”
“Right—that Stonehenge.” Movement made Nicole look past Alvin at Snelling, who had twisted around and was staring at her. When she looked at him, he raised his eyebrows in question. “What about it?”
“I was on the comms when he came this way, ma’am,” Alvin said. “It didn’t lift when the attack started.” Nicole stared at him. He frowned and gestured at the sky. “It’s been clear the last two nights? If it had boosted we’d have seen the drive plume, day or night. Royce isn’t that far. It could still be there, sitting on the pad. If the Word hasn’t penetrated our networks yet, they may not have noticed it.”
Snelling twisted around in his seat. Nicole watched his fingers work his console, but she looked away. She looked at Alvin. “That’s good information, Technician.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
