What she hadn’t been able to do was keep an assault ’Mech on hand at the Sutton Road command post. Her Hatchetman was no match for the eighty-ton Warhammer, and the other warrior knew it. She couldn’t shake him at all. Worse, he cared less for the warriors under his command than she did for hers. When she tried rushing him with her ax, he ignored everything else around him and pushed her back with large lasers and missiles. When she used her jumping ability to grab some maneuvering room, the Clan MechWarrior simply turned his guns into any of the several vehicle duels going on.

It tossed all bets to the wind. It kept Tara coming back at the monster time and again, trading armor for time.

Her company had slowly whittled away at the Falcon column, but without a decisive edge she was starting to lose warriors—Highlanders—to battlefield attrition. Most live bodies had made pickup. But few would be able to escape, thanks to the assault ’Mech’s overcharged engine and a top speed rivaling her own.

Wrenching on her control sticks, Tara cut back again into the Warhammer’s embrace. Sweat streaked down the sides of her face. She blinked dry, scratchy eyes. Temperatures soared in her cockpit. Destroyed heat sinks. An engine breach. Her poor Hatchetman was quite a mess.

It still handled with showroom-level response, except for a persistent limp. She planted one shovel blade foot, twisted, and ducked. Two lasers crisscrossed overhead. Another ruby lance speared beneath her left arm. One slashed an angry wound across her waist, and the short-bodied warheads of SRMs hammered in behind it to chip away more ceramic composite from her legs, her arms.

Another telltale lit up with warning red. Leg actuator. Her second.

No hope for it, she decided. Her autocannon hammered away at the Warhammer’s chest. A double pulse from her lasers splashed emerald darts from shoulder to hip. It wasn’t enough.

“I’m not getting out of here.”

Her voice-activated mic picked up the statement. Della Brown was all over her in an instant. “You damn well better get out of there. You find a way.”

Tara limped the forty-five-tonner backward, gaining only a temporary respite as the assault machine sensed the ’Mech’s weakness and pushed forward at sixty kilometers per hour.

“I have a gimped leg and a supercharged Warhammer. We’ve hurt them, Della, but we can’t do much more than lose a lot of good people if we don’t find a way to disengage.” She took a deep breath. “Call them home.”

“Not happening, Campbell. You’ll bring them back.”

“Not this time.” Her autocannon belted out the last few hundred rounds of munitions. “Dry. Not good.” She blinked the burn of sweat from her eyes, and focused on the assault ’Mech. Left or right?

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going MIA or even POW. I have two hovercraft left out here, and I’m taking them for extended duty. Bring the crawlers home, Prefect. Out.”

Left or right? Tara throttled forward, hobbling into the waiting weapons of the Warhammer IIC. Her pulse lasers spat out stinging energy. And again. “I want Big D and Jess-two across the Thames now. Disengage and run, run, run! Everyone else, pair up and best paths back to the Pen. Della Brown is taking operational control as of now.”

And she slammed down on her foot pedals, leaning forward with her ax pulled out to her side.

It would be the left.

Her Hatchetman sprang up on jets of golden plasma, diving forward like some alien creature sensing its prey and ready to take a stainless steel bite out of it. Her pulse lasers shredded more armor from the Warhammer, with one of them blistering the composite over its left leg. A good omen, she hoped.

A full-chested Highlander war cry rolled up from deep within, and Tara belted it out as she held the flat-topped jump. Even as the other ’Mech blasted into her with every laser it had. Ruby fire cut hard and cut deep. Two of the lances speared right into her centerline, skewering through what was left of her reactor shielding.

Golden fire ate up at the corner edges of her ferroglass shield. Acrid smoke curled into the cockpit.

With a stumble-caught landing she parked her Hatchetman next to the assault ’Mech and swung down her titanium hatchet with all the force the machine’s myomer muscles could bring.

The blade bit into the Warhammer’s hip. And stuck there.

Alarms clamored for attention, but none so insistent as the wailing siren of a reactor containment failure. The dampening fields were attempting to drop into place. Failing. Heat soared and Tara couldn’t breathe through the thick, caustic smoke. She could hardly see.

She slapped at the control panel, found the handle she needed, depressed the plunger, and twisted for all she was worth.

The violent shudder of explosive bolts firing and a reactor containment failure taking place right under her feet threw Tara hard against her harness. The straps dug painfully into her shoulders and across her chest. Then a growling roar filled her ears, and she assumed she was dead—the fire of a fusion reaction swarming up through her cockpit, burning her alive.

Except that she wasn’t burning.

Wasn’t even as warm as she had been, actually, with cold spring air swirling into the cockpit through what had been ventilation dumps a few seconds before.

The entire elongated head of her Hatchetman had detached, and was now rocketing up and away from the exploding reactor on its escape rocket. The roar of the solid-fuel rocket was horrifyingly loud, and never a more welcome sound. It took her up, far above the golden fireball that had been her BattleMech, above the hapless Warhammer IIC, which was caught in the blast. It pushed her over the Thames River and high enough to get a good view of distant New London.

Then it began to drop, and Tara overrode the autopiloting system to gently nudge it farther across the river where her hovercraft would find her and make pickup.

Her monitor screens were dark. Communications had been stripped down to a short-range emergency transmitter. But she was unharmed, and her people had a chance to make it back to the Pen with their lives.

Too bad her poor Hatchetman had not taken the Warhammer with it. As the ’Mech’s disembodied head drifted in a lazy spiral heading down, she watched through her plasma-scorched shield the Warhammer limping out from a pile of fire and smoke. It was all but dragging its left leg behind it—with a piece of her hatchet still stuck in its hip, it seemed, fused there!—and was going nowhere now but back to New London for repairs.

“Let them wonder about where we came from,” Tara said, her voice rasping out of a raw, smoke-burned throat. “They won’t breathe so easily around New London for a few days at least.” And if she could keep them off-balance, she might buy another week. Maybe two. Enough for Jasek to work whatever magic he was hoping to bring in from the Lyran Commonwealth.

He would be back—of that she had no doubt. He had to come back. Sitting alone in the ruins of her cockpit, remembering the size of the force the enemy had landed with, she could at least admit to herself that the defenders needed Jasek Kelswa-Steiner. She needed him.

Today the Jade Falcons had planted their flag on Skye.

It would take every hand available to pull it back out.