“You’re not Clan right now,” he reminded her. “You’re not even Lyran, despite your birth on Arc-Royal. You’re a Stormhammer. That means you go where we go. And I’m going to use the best resources I have to accomplish any mission. No favorites. No calling dibs.”

Alexia shrugged away his hands. “Dibs?” she asked.

“Never mind. I’m simply asking you to trust me, Alexia. I haven’t let you down yet, have I?”

“Not yet.” She stood, turned to look at him with a coy smile. “But there might be a first time. Maybe you need some more practice?”

Jasek laughed. “We’re on a mission, Leutnant-colonel Wolf.”

Her frown was only half serious. That was the rule they had set down for themselves. One of the rules, anyway, and hardly the most important one. “It is not because she is here, is it?”

“You know better.”

“I suppose I do.” She sighed. “I’m going to get cleaned up before we meet with the duke and the others, then.” Alexia stepped into him, hands coming to his chest as she leaned up to deliver a quick, biting nip on the edge of his strong chin. Then she pushed him back, stepping around him for the door. “You might regret all your rules and discipline some day.”

The Stormhammers’ leader nodded, already circling around to the far side of his desk, studying the map once again. “So you keep saying,” he needled.

“Ha.” Her laugh pulled his gaze up from the map. “Wolves are territorial creatures, but I’m not staying with you forever, Jasek. I told you that before.”

“You did,” he agreed. Her threatening to leave, to continue her geis, was a standing joke between them. “But I might leave you first,” he reminded her. His usual return volley.

The smile she left him with, playful and just a little bit dangerous, told him exactly how likely she thought that was.

8

Hagendaz Mountain Range

Zebebelgenubi

24 September 3134

Jasek Kelswa-Steiner charged through a wall of flames, then ducked his Templar behind a massive tree trunk big enough to hide the eighty-five-ton machine. Autocannon fire and lasers chased after him. One line of bullets tore deeply through the sequoia’s bark, splintering and shredding the wood beneath. Red lances of energy cut deeper, burning dark scars into the bole.

Leaning back, Jasek extended his left arm and blasted a pursuing team of Elementals with his functioning PPC. The white arc of lightning chewed one battlesuit trooper into a twisted hunk of ruined metal and man.

The others scattered, leaping for brush, for branches. Two disappeared back into the flames, trusting their armored suits to protect them. Jasek saw one infantryman use his arm-mounted laser to encourage the fire, stoking it with short, scarlet blasts.

Senseless ruin. The Jade Falcons would rather see Zebebelgenubi burned down around them than surrender any fight.

Borrowing time from the besieged Highlanders, Jasek had led his people up from the coast through the old-growth forest rather than along cleared ridges where the Falcons would see them coming. The Clanners had tripped to it too early, though. A line of medium and heavy machines was waiting for Jasek as he tried to break out of the forest, spearheading the drive. They pushed him back under cover of the titanic trees, and then deliberately set fire to the forest in several locations in an attempt to shake up his lines.

Now the fire raged over several square kilometers, choking the mighty forest with a noose of thick, black smoke. Flames chased through the treetops of the giant sequoias, whipped from crown to crown by gusting winds.

Ash and glowing orange embers rained down from above in hellish curtains.

But the real damage and the real risk was closer to the ground, where stunted pines and hemlocks and scrub brush tangled with ivy and wisteria—all tinder-dry thanks to several weeks of arid winter—burned in a true inferno that drove temperatures into dangerous levels and eventually set fire to the massive trees. Even with one PPC out of commission, Jasek’s heat scale climbed. Sweat burned at the corners of his eyes, and the sharp scent of greenwood smoke could not be completely filtered out by his life-support systems.

“Such a waste,” he whispered aloud.

Then his communications gear crackled to life, shouting static into his ear before parting to reveal Tamara Duke’s voice. “Hammer, Anvil is in place,” she said.

About time.

Jasek glanced to his upper right to activate his vision-reflex systems and blinked over to his all-hands circuit. “Two-lance, Three-lance, move up on my position now. Flankers, envelop and hold!”

Throttling forward into a moderate walk, Jasek wrenched his control stick over to twist the Templar into a sideways lean as he moved from cover. Laser fire stuttered through the tree breaks, gouging wounds into the side of his ’Mech, and molten composite splashed over the ground. He saw nothing through the smoke and flames. Thermal imaging was useless and magscan nearly so. But his targeting computer found something out there it liked, drawing brackets around a glowing icon on his heads-up display.

Jasek levered his left arm forward again and blasted through the fires with his particle cannon. No way to tell if he’d hit something or not.

Behind him, a second Stormhammers ’Mech—Leutnant Gillickie’s Storm Raider–ran up under his covering fire. Gillickie brought a pair of Jousts and a Hasek mechanized combat vehicle with him, the Hasek’s Fenrir infantry already deployed and running on all fours to keep pace with the tracked tanks.

On his right, Jasek caught glimpses through the flames of Three-lance pulling even with him, saw the flash and smoke of missile launch as their JES carriers spread a destructive umbrella out ahead.

“Good to go,” he decided, cutting a path straight into the fires ahead. He tied his lasers and TharHes four-pack SRM into his secondary trigger, readying them.

A pair of Elementals leaped at him in the flame, arm lasers probing for weak spots. Jasek cored through one with his pair of medium lasers. The other he simply swatted from the air.

Temperatures soared. Fire licked up from below while burning embers swirled into his face and struck sparks against the ferroglass shield. Autocannon fire pecked and pocked his BattleMech’s legs, ringing with distant hammer peals.

Then he was through.

A tangle of burning, low-hanging branches shattered over the Templar’s head as Jasek stepped out onto an old backwoods road—all hard-packed dirt and gravel. A Skanda light tank spun around only fifty meters away, autocannon tracking in to hammer more damage into Jasek’s right side. There were four more vehicles spread farther along the road. To his left, the road twisted up a rocky hill. A green-painted Vulture nested among some moss-covered boulders. Sylph battle armor sprang out from around the sixty-ton ’Mech, like its mechanized young taking to flight.

Sparing a handful of seconds to hammer the Skanda with lasers and missiles, driving it back, Jasek clenched his teeth and tensed for the Vulture’s ground-shaking assault.

It did not disappoint. The Clan ’Mech all but disappeared behind a curtain of exhaust smoke as it staggered out four full spreads of strategic missiles. As the warheads rained down with bone-jarring force, pummeling the eighty-five-ton machine, a pair of red-tinted lasers sliced out from the smoke and carved angry wounds down the Templar’s left arm and leg.

“Ne-eed some he-elp he-errre,” Jasek stuttered into the voice-activated mic as he was thrown repeatedly against his safety harness. He wrenched on the controls to keep his BattleMech balanced.