She ducked beneath a return salvo of missiles, taking only a handful of them across her back and shoulders. “We do not give them the island,” she told her Rangers, determined not to fall back again. They would keep the bridgehead on this side of the sound, and they’d pluck some Falcons doing it. “We dig in. We hold here.”

She toggled off. But under her breath, she continued.

“And we hope we get some relief forces over this way before the Falcons do.”

26

Sutton Road

Skye

30 November 3134

Tara Campbell sprinted down the short, rough-hewn passageway that led to “the Pen.” Already in combat togs, she simply stripped off the headset she’d been using and tossed it onto a maintenance bench as soon as she burst into the cavernous bay her engineers had secretly dug into the face of the Sutton Road bluff.

Sodium-vapor lights brightened the space, and the roar of internal combustion engines competed with the backwash of lift fans that stirred dirt and loose papers into a cyclone. Two Highlander infantrymen finished sealing up in Cavalier battle armor and boarded a waiting Maxim. Ten vehicles, all crammed in fender to skirt, waited for the camouflaged door to open.

Waited for her.

Her Hatchetman waited as well, crouched just inside the door where the ceiling had been carved high enough to admit the slender BattleMech. Its ax lay against the floor, covered in a light patina of rock dust. The sloping head tilted down at a restful angle. It took Tara all of two minutes to scale the simple handyman’s ladder, button up the cockpit, and pull on her neurohelmet. Leads to the inside of her arms and legs. Coolant line snapped into her vest’s socket. Toggles up. Switch on. The fusion engine thrummed awake, breathing life into the forty-five-ton machine. Her computer flashed for attention, demanding security protocols.

“Tara Campbell. Countess Northwind.” Her voiceprint appeared on the monitor as a jagged sine wave, filled with a few special dips and peaks uniquely hers.

Still, it was possible to fool neurocircuitry and voiceprints. And MechWarriors tended to be just a little bit paranoid when it came to protecting their ride. As a backup measure, the computer’s synthesized voice prompted her for secondary protocol. One wrong word—one anomalous reading in the neurocircuitry—would lock out weapons controls.

Tara adjusted her neurohelmet, wanting good contact with the sensors. She had no time for mistakes. “Manus haec inimica tyrannis.”

Latin. One of the advantages of a classical education.

This hand is hostile to tyrants.

“Where are they?” Tara asked as the main door levered open.

A pair of hoverbikes was first out the door, with the lower edge barely clearing the drivers’ heads. A low-profile Shandra was next, and then two JES missile carriers. Tara crowded into line and duckwalked the tall ’Mech out into the day’s gray light. The balance of her forces followed after.

Della Brown came on the communications line herself. “Still two klicks north along the river. They haven’t got you yet.”

A good thing, or the command post would have to be abandoned. Tara turned her Hatchetman enough to see out of a side-view shield. The rock-faced door was just swinging closed. Higher up, with its commanding view over the Thames and the last battlefield of her Forlorn Hope recruits, was the Sutton Road Memorial Park, where she had attended the press event—it seemed like years ago. No one had even suspected the excavation for the HQ, with all the heavy machinery there to smooth out a new parking area and add acres of sculpted grounds. It was her final advantage in this latest battle for Skye.

“Keep everything dimmed until they’ve passed,” Tara told the prefect as she throttled into a loping run, heading south. “We’ll hit them five kilometers below your position.” While the Jade Falcons still felt safe.

“Good hunting.”

They’d need it. Things were already off to a faster start than anyone had planned. The Jade Falcons had surrounded and entered New London quickly, under cover of the EMP-imposed blackout. Six DropShips all told—grounding at the DropPort and in the industrial sector, and even one massive Lion, ninety meters tall and more than seven thousand tons, squatting over what used to be the parade grounds of Sanglamore Academy. Tara had needed no camera to guess the outrage on Malvina Hazen’s face when she found the capital all but deserted of every administrator, business leader, and warrior.

Confirming that had taken time, precious hours, and by then reports must have been rolling in that her secondary objectives at Roosevelt Island, Miliano, and Corruscat were heavily defended and bloodying Jade Falcon advance teams.

When the command post finally restored some of their communications, Tara found out that she had guessed right about most places, but not all. Miliano was being held by the grace of God and the tenacity of Alexia Wolf’s Strikers.

Colonel Petrucci and Anastasia Kerensky still could not be reached.

And now the first Jade Falcon reinforcements were striking out from the capital, searching for signs of local defenders as they moved on Norfolk and Miliano. They came along a southern valley, following Sutton Road and the Thames in a short column designed more for speedy travel than defense, led by a Warhammer IIC and a lightly armored Koshi. The Warhammer was a real monster, with four extended-range lasers and an SRM four-pack over each shoulder. It caught Tara’s breath in her throat, and nearly choked her on it.

Tara had her small company spread out in some nearby trees and hunkered down in a dry wash. She hid her Hatchetman as well as she could in a stand of stunted evergreens, her targeting system on passive mode. Hoping to get at least one good shot in on the assault ’Mech before it started ripping apart vehicles.

The Falcons caught on, but far too late. A pair of venerable Pegasus scout craft on the column flank nearly missed half of Tara’s hidden company. As it was, they had barely enough time to skate in a circle and run out from beneath the missile umbrella that scattered around their position.

Then a Kelswa assault tank swamped up from a marsh near the river, and its twin Gauss rifles hammered ferrous masses into the side of a straggling APC. The devastating hits crushed in the entire side and rolled the vehicle over, spilling wounded and angry Elementals out like bees shook from a hive. A Hasek MCV rolled clear of the dry wash, dropping Cavalier troopers. Its particle cannon slashed out to rip armor away from the Warhammer’s leg.

First blood for her Highlanders and for Skye! “Tallyho!” Tara called out, pushing her Hatchetman from the tree line.

The Jade Falcons had made their first real mistake, treating the area surrounding New London as if it were safe. Their own personal land hold. Tara was here to make them pay for that. As high a price as she was able.

Miliano Basin

The Miliano Basin was three-rivers country. Wide stretches of forested hills were cut with sharp valleys in some places and had been hammered down by time into nothing larger than rolling mounds in others. The rivers pushed at their banks with the spring runoff, and in many places flooded lowland bogs. It was an area of fish farms and logging concerns, and a few large agricultural combines.

And today it was another battlefield.

The price had run fairly stiff against Alexia Wolf’s Tharkan Strikers. She had held the Jade Falcons back from Miliano, but too often she had been forced to send a crippled ’Mech or vehicle limping toward the rear lines, preserving it for another day. Harder choices forced her to sacrifice machines and men to buy time. To redeploy. To save a larger piece of the Stormhammers who suddenly found themselves in a threatened position. If not for the two elite lances she’d borrowed from the Archon’s Shield, her people would already be in a full rout.