Holy crap. Sagi was stunned. The Lucifer’s canopy levered up like the top half of a clamshell, and through his binoculars Sagi picked out two figures clambering onto the smaller wing to port. Must be redesigned to hold two, or one of them made like an accordion; Lucifers only hold one guy. Wind tugged their clothing. The lead figure—the pilot, Sagi assumed—resolved into the contours of a woman. Tall and willowy, she had a determined set to her stride, and now Sagi saw that she also sported the twin swords of the samurai: not in the manner of a low-ranking bushi, but behind and to the side. The second figure, following two steps behind, moved with the great deliberateness of age. Both wore a hooded, ceremonial kariginus, though the woman’s had been modified to a more traditional cloak, clasped at the throat and open to allow her access to her weapons.

The two came to a halt a meter shy of Sagi and the shujin. Neither party said anything. Then, twitching her hood back, the woman reached behind and withdrew her katana with her right hand, using her index finger to secure the guard—a sign of trust. She held the sheathed weapon out in both hands, edge pointing toward her as custom dictated: a signal that she meant no harm.

“Good day, Tai-i,” she said, and even with a storm raging all around, Sagi heard each and every strong, steady word. “I am Katana Tormark, and this is my esteemed companion. Either we are your guests, or your prisoners. The next move is yours.”

23

On the outskirts of Siang, Hoshina, Biham

Prefecture II, Republic of the Sphere

30 May 3135

They would attack from the west and take advantage of the setting sun; a small advantage to be sure but, considering the circumstances, Sir Reginald Eriksson would take whatever he could get and Fortune allowed. But as he guided his Orion into battle, he saw that the air ahead was already fading from azure blue to pewter gray as a late spring storm blew in from the east and ate up the sky.

Eriksson’s booted feet nudged his Orion’s bulk into a steady march upon a rock-strewn slope. The incline was forty-five degrees; his Orion, a centuries’ old relic that’d survived the Jihad, canted forward at its pelvis, lumbering over rock and scree with the dogged determination of a very weary man carrying a very heavy pack. Eriksson was hot and uncomfortable despite the fact that he’d stripped down to a simple cooling vest and skivvies. His old man’s bones felt each and every step of the old ’Mech as seventy-five tons of titanium steel ground rock and earth and sent up gray-white puffs of dust, like smoke. The Orion’s external mikes picked up the squealing groans and pops of small boulders exploding under the ’Mech’s weight. And it had been a long time, decades perhaps, since he’d donned a neurohelmet; the helmet chafed the tender skin of his neck and shoulders.

His lancemates were a sorry lot, a hastily refitted ConstructionMech and two MiningMechs. The hornet yellow ConstructionMech was the heaviest, weighing in at thirty-five tons, and had been outfitted with an autocannon jury-rigged to replace a right titanium claw used for levering blocky concrete into place. The two MiningMechs were much smaller, only twenty tons apiece, and each had a flamer spot-welded to the right arm. Their pilots were brave men—boys, really; none had seen a real battle, and Eriksson’s own memories of his struggles with smugglers were dim with time.

In fifteen minutes, Eriksson’s Orion topped the rise, his fellows pulling up to his right and left. The clouds were closer now, and so heavy that their bellies seemed to graze the earth. A jag of lightning cut a flaming seam in the sky and burned purple afterimages that Eriksson saw when he blinked. But he picked out the DropShip, a bulbous ball that reminded Eriksson of a mushroom, the kind he squeezed to release a cloud of spores. But this particular mushroom was spitting cold blue bolts of PPC fire at two lances of Republic aerospace fighters that bobbed and weaved in the sky over the DropShip like gnats. The air was alive with the stuttering ruby lash of their lasers scorching over Drac infantry and hovertanks released by the DropShip. The scream of missiles and the shrieks of the dying and wounded reverberated through his cockpit, and he toggled off his external mikes with a hand that trembled. A column of black, oily smoke boiled from the gutted skeleton of a Demon medium tank—and all the while the sky flared with lightning and thunder boomed across the valley in a wall of sound he heard even though his Orion was, technically, deaf.

Lightning sparked again, much closer this time because the roll of thunder billowing out of the sky was almost immediate. There was a brief, trembling pause as if the world was holding its breath.

Eriksson brought his targeting systems on line as the first hard drops of rain shattered against his ferroglass canopy with a sound like the rapid fire of a rifle. Then he gave the command: “Attack.”

And it was as if the heavens had been waiting, too, because as Eriksson pushed his Orion into a lumbering run that he felt in every bone, the storm broke. But he had one comfort at least. The engine of his death would not be Katana Tormark.

Dartmoor Valley, Normandy, Ancha

Prefecture III, Republic of the Sphere

2 June 3135

Question: How do you kill a whole passel of ’Mechs?

Answer: Very carefully.

Sho-sa William “Buck” Bruckner had ordered his tanks to get the hell out of Dodge just as soon as they’d churned the peaty swamp that made up the floor of Dartmoor Valley into a lumpy quagmire of black ooze. At intervals, rough-hewn granite boulders jutted out of the tarry sludge, and the air was saturated with the rotted, slightly yeasty and fermented reek of fen vegetation slowly turning to goo. The peat steamed as methane vapors, warmed by putrefaction, hung over the bog in a white, misty veil, and the smell reminded Buck of a cow barn: fetid, warm and ripe.

Buck’s tank company—a DI Schmitt and two Arrow IVs, yeah, some company—was positioned to either side of him on the ridge above, with the Schmitt a quarter klick further on since its range was longer, and Buck was hoping, praying he got a chance to lob some of those armor-piercing missiles where they’d do the most good. Either that, or wait to get stomped into gopher guts.

Buck’s mission was simple enough: buy time. Borrow it, steal it if he had to, but his tanks and people had to square enough time for Crawford and the others to make it to Normandy Beach, where there was a DropShip Crawford had ordered away from their base after their fighters got blown into subatomic particles. It wasn’t that Crawford was a coward; it was one of those live-to-fight-another-day kind of things. Problem was the DropShip was, oh, still thirty-plus klicks away due west, and it was gonna leave them behind if they couldn’t catch up, so Buck figured he’d punched one of those one-way tickets.

Balancing one ooze-slicked boot on a notch worn into a massive granite boulder as big around as three men and two meters tall, Buck snuck a peek around the rock through a pair of digital binoculars. They were still coming: three Draconis Combine BattleMechs almost close enough to touch—a Catapult that, despite its twelve-meter height, resembled a hunchback; a blocky Pack Hunter ; and the leader of the bunch, a towering, heavy ’Mech with a flashing scimitarlike katana married to its right hand and an autocannon slung beneath its left arm. A scarlet banner emblazoned with the black Kurita dragon was attached to a right-angled staff that appeared to be connected to the ’Mech between its “shoulder blades.”