But the killing blows never came; the river of sound parted on either side and flowed past, and he realized then that the Fury had made a big mistake—because now, even though he was filled with so much pain he wasn’t sure how he was still conscious, and even though every new breath was a fresh agony and he wasn’t sure if he’d drown or suffocate first, he saw something else. Red and jittering, as intermittent as a visual stutter—for an instant, he thought he was blacking out for sure, but then he realized that, by some miracle, his targeting systems were still intact.

His katana blade was useless, its tip aiming for some spot high in the sky, but he still had the PPC married to his ’Mech’s left arm, the one that was still free. This was his best and only weapon, but could he still move it? He sipped in air, gagged. Then, grimacing with pain, he inched the Rokurokubi’s left arm up a fraction, then another… just needed clearance, that was all, just one chance…

Something fizzled in his ear, and then he heard the Pack Hunter’s pilot: “Merrick-san! Merrick, if you hear me, go for the ridge with your PPC, go for the ridge, but low, aim low! Do you copy? Do you…?”

Copy that. Woozy with pain and loss of blood, Merrick took aim—and fired.

Much, much later, when Merrick awoke drugged to the hilt and sprawled in a nest of intravenous lines, with a tube stuck in his chest and another down his throat, he discovered three things. One was that the Pack Hunter hadn’t sunk nearly as far as the Rokurokubi, and so had activated its jump jets at the precise instant that Merrick sent PPC bolts slamming into the bluff. The Pack Hunter’s jets didn’t blow the ’Mech free, but they did boil the bog and the Fury’s men in flashes of superheated plasma so hot that what the jump jets didn’t broil, the steam did.

The second was that Merrick’s PPC blasted a horizontal trench directly beneath the granite-strewn ridge, and the Pack Hunter, catching the movement of the Rokurokubi’s left arm, had let fly a full spread of its eight extended-range microlasers and single PPC at exactly the same moment. The energy weapons’ fire cored into the bluff; the cliff buckled, blew apart; half came sheeting down in a slurry of stone and chunks of earth. An Arrow IV tank hurtled barrel-first into the quagmire; a river of bodies hit the bog; and as some men clutched at handholds, the Pack Hunter’s pilot fried them with lasers to smoking, black, twisted corpses.

And this third: as the Fury retreated toward the distant humps of the Bourges Mountains, the Pack Hunter’s pilot saw men running and others hanging on for dear life to a second Arrow—and a man perching atop a Schmitt, the unmistakable silhouette of a ten-gallon Stetson held high, yippee-kay-ay.

But that was all later. For the time being, Merrick did the only thing he could, given the circumstances. He fainted.

Bourges Mountains along the Dover Coast

3 June 3135

As the hours passed, the sun slanted toward the horizon, and Buck didn’t show, Crawford knew they couldn’t wait any longer. So, nerves jumping with anxiety, they descended a rock-strewn pass corkscrewing between jagged spires of black basalt. Then they waded into a meadow tangled with fronds of browning seagrass, bent nearly horizontal by a strong wind whistling in from the sea just beyond. Then Crawford saw a ribbon of cobalt edging the horizon and knew: They’d made it.

Their luck still had to hold. Just another hour, maybe two, and then he and what was left of his command would load into a DropShip that squatted on a gleaming ribbon of sand beach at the base of a bone-white cliff. They’d leave, take their chances that Sakamoto hadn’t blown their remaining JumpShip to hell and back; and if he had, they’d take their chances out in space, because Crawford would be damned if he came back to Ancha and let his people be slaughtered.

I should never have ordered my men to hold their fire, never. His brain was gummy with fatigue; every step he pushed his battered, scarred Black Knight, he imagined that this, surely, would be the great machine’s last. His body bounced and bumped in his command couch because his shock-dampening systems had been damaged. He felt every bang and jolt down deep in every joint, every bone, like an arthritic. His air-purification system was at half capacity and his cockpit was stuffy; what little clothing he wore—his skivvies, a cooling vest—rancid with sweat.

The Combine had caught him off guard, but he’d followed Katana’s orders to the letter: keep it simple, take a couple of potshots, don’t do any real damage. Only that strategy evaporated as a lance of Combine aerospace fighters and a lance of his men went head to head, and the Combine shot to kill.

After that… well, that they’d gotten away at all was dumb luck; that they’d come so far without a repeat performance was downright miraculous. Crawford’s eyes crawled over the survivors of his tattered unit. Besides the four ’Mechs, he’d scraped together five ragged infantry squads. Those who could, clung to the legs of the ’Mechs; their two people movers were crammed with wounded. He had three Bellona tanks, out of ammo, with two working lasers between the three—and that was it. Oh, yeah, Buck and his men, he couldn’t forget them; but, of course, Buck was a day behind and probably dead.

He’d not heard boo from Magruder on Sadachbia. When his weekly message to her via JumpShip hadn’t arrived, Magruder would’ve sent a reconnaissance mission to see what was going on. But she hadn’t, so either Magruder was fighting for her life, or she was dead. Thinking about her got rage simmering in his gut, and there was one thought that pulsed behind his eyes, like a headache that just wouldn’t go away: Fusilli had been wrong. Crawford didn’t know what that meant. The most reliable of spies could be compromised, and false, misleading information planted. Sakamoto, or Bhatia perhaps, might have been tipped off, and Fusilli fed shit.

But how, when Fusilli was so sure; his sources checked out… it was all too tidy, too damn easy…

He wasn’t aware he’d spoken aloud until a weary voice sounded in his helmet: “Stop, Andre. Let it go.”

Chinn, bless her; she’d fought hard and well. “Thanks, Toni, but…”

“But what?”

“Nothing. I…” He broke off as another voice—male and downright cheery—said: “Crawford, come on in; the water’s fine.”

Crawford bit back a sniping reply. His eyes picked out the unmistakable brilliant emerald-green of the Bounty Hunter’s Marauder II silhouetted against the far horizon, dead ahead. Crawford said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“You told me to make sure the coast was clear. I’ll remind you that I don’t have jump jets, and crawling down to the beach took time. Wouldn’t do to come this far only to have to go back, right? Anyway, the ship’s prepped and ready to go.”

A half hour later, Crawford was looking down at their DropShip, squatting on the beach as foamy waves retreated into the sea. Measho’s Kat was out of missiles, so Crawford ordered him, the wounded and the men on foot down the cliff first. The Bounty Hunter’s Gauss rifle was nearly exhausted, but he still had his two PPCs and lasers. So he, Chinn and Crawford covered the convoy’s rear. Every three seconds, or so it seemed to Crawford, he had Chinn and the Bounty Hunter run long-range scans (his were on the fritz) while he toggled up mag and seismic readings, looking for the telltale signs of troops he was sure would show up at the worst possible moment—when his people were on the path with no cover.

An hour into it, his mag readings jumped, and three seconds after that, Chinn sang out, “Incoming!”