A Call to Arms Read online

  But there was nothing new to see. Her flanking forces had yet to break free of his two-pronged assault, and except for the VV1’s she had a single Scimitar combat hovercraft and what now looked like a squad of Purifier armored infantry.

  Not enough. Not nearly enough against his quad of Jousts, and Charal knew it. She had something else in mind.

  He learned what a moment later.

  “Alpha group. Enemy has disengaged.”

  The report sounded too good to be true, that Charal was abandoning the battlefield, especially when Beta and Delta echoed the same situation a split-second later. Then the first flight of LRMs saturated the dead lakebed around his position, geysering earth and blackened rock into the air. A dozen scattered missiles slammed into his BattleMech’s upper body, blasting away armor. The explosions echoed into his cockpit, filling his ears with a stuttering roar.

  Raul’s alarms screamed from multiple targeting system locks. Other than Charal’s small trio, the nearest vehicle was still nearly a half kilometer away—a JES Strategic Missile Carrier packing along its four racks of long-ranged missiles. Big Jess launched a second, full spread of missiles just before it exploded under the concentrated fire of what looked like Raul’s entire Beta formation.

  Charal’s armored forces had disengaged all right. They were completely disregarding Raul’s troops, falling back through his lines no matter the cost to rendezvous on her position and concentrate on one single target: Raul’s Legionnaire.

  She had pulled him right into a massive trap!

  “Alpha, Beta, Delta, defend my position!” Raul’s voice held a frantic edge to it, one he never would have used in command of real troops. “Lance 701, full assault on enemy Legionnaire.”

  Their lasers were already stabbing out at the ’Mech as Charal advanced now behind a makeshift screen of the two Rangers and Scimitar. Purifier battlesuit troops leapt forward on tiny jets, and on Raul’s far right one of the SM1 ’Mech-killers broke free and sped into the killing ground after him as well.

  Missiles churned up the lakebed again. Several rained down on his Legionnaire’s shoulders, caused him to stumble forward while Charal’s rotary pummeled him with fifty-mil rounds. Her autocannon slugs struck all over his armor like hundreds of tiny hammers, each one tolling a death knell.

  Raul ran through the storm of hot metal, blinking away the tracers’ ghostly afterimage and keeping his finger down on the firing stud of his own rotary autocannon. His only salvation was to take her down first. Take her down, and then mop up her computer-controlled forces as his armored vehicles hit them point-blank from behind. His stream of non-stop autocannon fire cut through her BattleMech’s right arm but failed to make it deep enough into her side to silence the rotary.

  A Cavalier battlesuit trooper leapt for her, but she smashed it out of the air with a backhanded swat. One of Raul’s Jousts cut a molten wound directly over the reactor shielding of Charal’s Legionnaire, and on his thermal imaging screen her heat level blossomed to a critical level, but not enough to slow down her rapid-cycling barrages.

  A second of Charal’s JES Strategics lumbered into range—on Raul’s left this time—launching flight after flight of missiles, which hammered down around him until the entire planet of Achernar appeared to be shaking itself apart. Charal held up her deadly, cutting assault from the front while the Rangers split apart and, with the Scimitar, hit him on three sides simultaneously. An inferno of laser fire and the Rangers’ stinging miniguns hammered into him, shaking the massive BattleMech beyond the capability of its gyroscope or its pilot to compensate.

  Raul had time for one last burst of fire from his autocannon. Then he stumbled. He fell first to his knees, sliding along in a pose of subjugation, then facedown into the earth, the impact rattling his teeth together. The ferroglass shield caved in, its digital picture dropping out large shards that would—in a real battle—ricochet through the cockpit on dangerous, even deadly, paths.

  He tasted blood, and his vision swam through a murky haze. Fighting for his final hold on consciousness, Raul levered one of the Legionnaire’s arms beneath it and pushed against the planet. His shattered cockpit shield scraped free of the baked mud, he looked up over one of the speeding Rangers to see Charal also fighting her way back to her feet. His final burst had cut into her gyro housing, knocking the leviathan over but not out.

  “Still . . . time . . .” Raul told himself, fighting to get his legs under him. His bitten tongue throbbed with each word.

  The fury of missiles and autocannon fire had abated, the calm at the eye of a storm. He heard a light scrabbling, like steel-toed mice nesting inside his Legionnaire’s armor, and worry stabbed up from the dark memories of his training but it took an extra moment for the source to register. The Purifiers! Charal’s infantry had crawled up from the ground, hooking footholds into his joints and ruined armor, searching for deep wounds to tear into or—worse—his cockpit hatch.

  Raul’s heads-up display blinked and stuttered, occasionally wiped itself with gray-snow static, but it looked as if two of his Jousts were now out of commission. Through his shattered ferroglass shield he saw a ruby lance slice deep into Charal’s left leg. It did not keep her from pulling back to a solid stance. The simulator’s speakers banged a deep, metal echo into his ears—the sound of infantry on his outer hatch. Swallowing against the taste of blood, and his own worry of failure, Raul braced himself up into a three-point crouch and drew his targeting crosshairs over the center of Charal’s ’Mech. His targeting computer locked onto a bleeding-thermal wound, the reticle burning a golden bull’s-eye over her reactor.

  Gambling for one last shot, Raul thumbed the firing stud.

  And the simulator’s screens went blank.

  No video image of Highlake Basin. No enemy ’Mech or vehicles. No friendlies, either. He wanted to believe that his final shot had gone off and burst through her reactor shielding, tried to talk himself into it, but as a hand slapped the simulator’s outside shell and began to crank open the heavy door, he knew. His ears still ringing from the loud sound effects of battle, Raul heard the cheers and clapping of the RTC cadet corps, saluting the victor and the newest Mech Warrior in Achernar’s militia.

  Charal DePriest.

  1

  The Job

  San Marino Spaceport

  Achernar

  11 February 3133

  Customs Security Officer Raul Ortega glanced up from his handheld noteputer, distracted. The spaceport’s underground service area bustled with a sudden burst of frenetic activity that only came with the arrival of a new DropShip to Achernar.

  Dozens of tram-haulers crawled along electric tracks, flatbeds stacked high with colorful plastic crates and large, metal shipping containers stenciled from dozens of different worlds. A trio of LoaderMechs stomped along beside the haulers. The Loaders’ high, hunched shoulders nearly scraped against the tunnel ceiling and the high-pitched whirr of their flywheel batteries stressed toward fingernails-on-slate with each heavy step. On the far outside of the wide corridor moved foot traffic as cargo handlers and shipping agents fought against a flood of able-bodied spacemen heading into River’s End, Achernar’s capital, on shore leave.

  Thick air carried the warm tastes of ozone and sweat and cheap cologne.

  Raul stood just outside the trunk corridor in one of many warehousing routes, waiting in the company of Lord Erik Sandoval-Groell for the industrial parade to pass. The young noble glared at the interruption, arms crossed, one hand tapping an impatient rhythm. “Everything is in order,” Sandoval said loudly, trying to hurry Raul along.

  Erik Sandoval wore an officer’s uniform and the captain’s bars of his honorary rank, both privileges granted him by his uncle, Duke Aaron Sandoval, The Republic’s Lord Governor of Prefecture IV. He shaved the sides of his head for the traditional topknot of a Sandoval dynasty scion, braiding what was left back into a short, dark queue. The youngblood had eyes of heavy amber, which burned softly with an inner fire. Only three o
r four centimeters taller than Raul’s medium one-seventy, he carried the extra height with shoulders back and proud chin thrust forward as if it conveyed some sort of extra superiority.

  “I do have other business to complete today.”

  Apparently Sandoval had conveniently forgotten that he had flagged down Raul’s cart, interrupting the CSO’s call to Docking Pad Seven. Raul wanted to put the short attitude down to the prerogative of an off-world noble, or the frustration of an officer with bureaucracy. Erik Sandoval-Groell was both. But Sandoval had also been on Achernar long enough to allow for some social graces, and his local command was part of the problem with any red tape delays and he damn well knew it.

  Sandoval either wasn’t likable, or simply wasn’t trying to be.

  But Raul nodded politely, returned to the noteputer he cradled in his right hand. He paged down through manifest logs, comparing his noteputer’s glowing green screen to the hardcopy pages Sandoval had pressed on him. He traced a set of serial numbers to three large-class lasers stockpiled in one of the spaceport’s secure warehouses. And there was more. One hundred ten tons of armor composite. Fifteen tons of various munitions. A Mydron eighty-millimeter autocannon.

  “It’s all restricted-access.” He paged back up the list of serial numbers. “Why do you need all this?”

  “I need it because I have the permits which say that I can have it. I only require your local release.” Reminded that he did, in fact, require local release, Sandoval relented somewhat. “I’m leading my people into the Tanager Testing Range on a live-fire exercise.”

  His people.

  Nausea clutched lightly at Raul’s insides, and he worked to keep his revulsion from showing inside his dark, near-black eyes. Sandoval meant the Swordsworn, one of several factions that had cropped up in the Republic since the Blackout. The Swordsworn openly swore their fealty to Erik’s uncle, believing that Exarch Redburn had abandoned Prefecture IV in his worries for other sectors within The Republic of the Sphere. Erik Sandoval wore his loyalty brazenly with the small patch sewn over his uniform’s left breast pocket—a longsword cleaving across planetary dawn. The thought of The Republic breaking down into “us” and “them,” into his people and Raul’s people, left a sour taste at the back of Raul’s throat that he hadn’t known since attending Charal DePriest’s commissioning ceremony two years back.

  A sarcastic reply would have gone a long way to clearing his palate, scoring cheap points off the visiting noble. It might also have been a solid step toward that new career his fiancée occasionally asked after.

  A LoaderMech swung out of its lane, saving Raul from a heated reply by barging through a gap in pedestrian traffic in an attempt to cut the corner and move ahead of a slower-moving tram. It carried a flanged barrel in its forked pincers, swaying dangerously close to the two men as it tried to squeeze in between them and the pair of electric carts parked nearby. Raul stiff-armed Sandoval back into the wall—perhaps a bit rougher than he needed to—then yanked off his black service cap, using it to flag down the LoaderMech’s driver.

  The LoaderMech rocked to a halt in midstep. A look of guilt flashed over the Loader driver’s face as he identified the silver badge sewn onto the right front pocket of Raul’s black uniform, quite clearly a Customs Security Officer. There was no chance for conversation, not with the driver encased in ferroglass and plugged against the high-pitched whine of the Loader’s flywheel-battery conversion. He offered Raul a sheepish shrug and cocky grin, the half-serious apology of a man who knew the worst Raul could do was take down the Loader’s serial and generate a letter of warning.

  Raul waved the man through with a frustrated slash, standing aside as the bulky Loader finally squeezed past and still made it ahead of the tram. The distraction had given him the moment he’d needed to regain his composure. He tucked his hat brim into his belt at the small of his back, combed his curly, dark hair back with long fingers, and turned again to Erik Sandoval-Groell.

  “My apologies, Lord Sandoval.” Raul smoothed the words over, meaning them about as much as the LoaderMech driver had meant his guilty shrug. Perhaps a little more. Eric Sandoval wasn’t the enemy. “I’ll get someone on your request right away,” he said, performing some quick input into his noteputer.

  The young noble straightened his uniform, glaring. “Your supervisor told me that you would handle this.” Sandoval’s tone somehow carried the full weight of his authority as well as that of Raul’s boss. “Personally.”

  A tight smile strained at the corners of Raul’s mouth. “Personally,” he agreed, resigning himself to another twelve-hour day. He fought to keep the irritation from coloring his dark brown eyes any blacker. “If you will send some men to”—he checked his screen—“warehouse alcove one-twelve, I’ll meet them there as soon as I’m done with my emergency call to Docking Pad Seven. All right?”

  The pinched expression on Sandoval’s face didn’t say it was all right. But it was hard to argue when Raul had basically conceded the point and had played an “emergency” trump.

  “I’ll send some of my people over,” Sandoval promised. “I’ll also be talking to Superintendent Rossiter, you may be certain.”

  Raul snagged his service cap from the small of his back and tugged it on smartly. He nodded a respectful salute to Erik Sandoval-Groell. “Sir,” he said, skimping a bit on the title but maintaining a professional manner even when his inner sense of decorum agreed that Sandoval deserved little more than flat competency.

  Eric Sandoval returned to his cart and shifted it into gear, leaving Raul free to climb back into his own battery powered vehicle. Merging into the trunk corridor, Raul steered carefully around pedestrian and LoaderMech traffic and tried to set aside his frustrations. He didn’t worry too much about what his boss would say. Carl Rossiter was a reasonable man stuck with an unreasonable job these days, and Raul’s call to Pad Seven was an emergency—of sorts—in the manner that it came directly from the office of Achernar’s military legate, Brion Stempres. If it came down to who deserved Raul’s attention first, the CSO would bank on Achernar’s ranking military officer, Stempres’ friendship with the Sandovals notwithstanding.

  The drive to Pad Seven wasn’t so long that Raul had time to worry after Erik Sandoval or whatever critiques he might bring to his supervisor, so instead he lost himself in an old Customs game, reading the shipping stencil prefixes on large containers and trying to identify the world from which they came. Many of them were easy, shipped in from other worlds in Prefecture IV: Tikonov and Tigress, Rio, Yangtze, and Ronel. Others tested his knowledge. M3A was Mara, of The Republic’s Prefecture III. Denebola, D9B8, was actually the governing capital of Prefecture VIII but a rare trading partner with Achernar. He pegged another container originating from VIII, SM8, but couldn’t place it between Syrma or Summer. He filed a mental note to look it up later.

  True challenges came from outside The Republic, of course. Centered at the core of the Inner Sphere, with mankind’s birthworld of Terra cradled in its middle, The Republic had long enjoyed decent trading relations with most other major powers: House Kurita’s Draconis Combine, the mercantile Sea Foxes. In the few months before the Blackout, the Senate’s new Free Trade Agreement had opened up a floodgate of shipping coming in from the hundreds of worlds belonging to the Lyran Commonwealth. Even now the gauntlet crest of House Steiner was not an uncommon sight in the service corridors. And here was a prefix from deep inside the balkanized Free Worlds League. And there . . .

  The sword-and-sunburst crest of House Davion’s Federated Suns. A device very similar to the one adopted by Aaron Sandoval and the Swordsworn.

  So much for the game.

  That the Swordsworn insignia borrowed so heavily from the Davion crest was not surprising. The Sandoval dynasty had deep roots in the Federated Suns, with other family lines still governing many worlds along the Davion-Kurita border. Aaron Sandoval came from a long tradition of powerful rulers, most of them jealous of their own position and ready to defend
it, their worlds, and nation with armies under their complete domination.

  It was because of such military-political dynasties, in fact, that the legendary Star League fell and the Inner Sphere suffered through three hundred years of Succession Wars, the Clan invasion, and then the Word of Blake Jihad. Abolishing such violent nationalism was the very reason behind Devlin Stone’s creation of The Republic of the Sphere. His incentives inspired large measures of the population to relocate until many Republic worlds held a mixture of races and cultures, blending them together, easing the tensions of old rivalries. His plan worked.

  For two generations.

  Raul swerved his cart out of traffic at Docking Pad Three, catching sight of a black Customs Security uniform and the harried face of CSO Palos Montgomery near the wide-open, and empty, bay. Officer Palos stood before a small crowd of dockhands and suits—union reps, was Raul’s guess—holding back their questions and outbursts with upraised hands.

  Setting the brake on his cart but leaving it idling, Raul waved Palos over. His friend’s normally gaunt face looked positively drawn and haggard today, and his green eyes were bloodshot from long hours.

  Palos held himself up on the cart’s battery compartment cover. “Thanks, Raul. I needed a break from that.”

  “Shouldn’t you be coming off night shift?”

  His friend laughed, a weak chuckle that died prematurely. “Oh, yeah. I’m looking at sixteen hours today, but what you gonna do?”

  What indeed? The Blackout caused by the crash of nearly every Hyperpulse Generator in The Republic—perhaps over the entire Inner Sphere—had left each world isolated as they had never been in the long history of Humanity’s spread among the stars. Customs was just one agency being forced to pick up the slack, and no amount of overtime was going to appease a population discovering its fear of the dark.

  “What’s the problem?” Raul asked, nodding his commiseration. “Where’s the DropShip that was due on Pad Three?” By his memory, that vessel should have been down yesterday. But there was something from his morning brief . . . “Is it still having . . . drive failure?”