Tara levered her BattleMech up from the ground. It swayed dangerously. He was right, and he wasn’t, all at the same time. There wasn’t much fight left in McKinnon’s Atlas. Armor was shredded, and damage to the engine shielding was making it a walking bomb, ready to be lit off by one solid core shot. But without her, the Falcons would collapse around Jasek and tear him apart. Hiram Brewster’s Zeus and elements from the Archon’s Shield held Jasek’s immediate left flank. But the Rangers were spread thin on the right, with Tamara Duke’s small Wolfhound holding the integrity of the allied lines in its iron fists. Instead of shielding Tara’s Highlanders from the pressing Falcon advance, the Stormhammers had simply shoved aside the point of the spearhead. It brought some relief, but not enough.
Not while Malvina Hazen continued to stand.
“Live with it,” Tara gasped out. “Going …to stay.”
Damning her heat curve, she cut loose with a savage alpha strike yet again. Her next-to-last Gauss slug took the Shrike in its right arm, snapping it back and spoiling some of its return fire. Her lasers missed wide as the heat stress on her electronics caused a failure in her targeting system. The power draw spiked her reactor’s centerline temperatures, and waste heat bled through her BattleMech’s chest.
Too much. And she was a heartbeat too slow on the override. “Heat safeties engaged,” the synthesized computer voice warned her. “Shutting down.”
“No, no, NO!” Tara slapped again at the override, knowing it would do no good.
Her targeting system winked out, followed by her monitors and the holographic heads-up display.
No targeting reticle. No power draw for lasers.
Her indicators on the reactor’s status slowly levered down to zero as its deep thrum stifled to a whisper, and then nothing.
Even over the thunder of artillery and exploding missiles, the chopped roars of autocannon, she heard the pinging sound of cooling metal. Like seconds of a clock, ticking away, as she waited for heat levels to drop down far enough for a safe start-up. In a dark cockpit, Tara Campbell gripped dead control sticks and stared out through her misted ferroglass shield, into the night, waiting.
Waiting for the end.
When Tara’s Atlas went dark on his HUD, Jasek knew a moment of pure panic that had nothing to do with being a military commander and everything to do with personal worry for Tara Campbell. Thinking the ’Mech had been destroyed, he twisted his control stick against its limit stop and wrenched his Templar around to see.
The machine stood there, frozen and silent.
Powered down on a live battlefield.
Malvina Hazen’s Shrike paused for a long heartbeat, as if considering the dead ’Mech a ploy. Then she drilled long pulls from both of her autocannon into the immobile target. Jasek’s crosshairs swung around far too late to stop her.
At short range, against one hundred tons of standing metal, there was no way for her to miss. If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have taken the head clean off the assault ’Mech. Her rage or her recent fall had shaken such an idea from her, though. Instead, the streams of lethal metal tore into the Atlas’ left arm, shoulder, and chest. It shoved the entire side back at an awkward angle, tipping the machine off-balance. No working gyroscope, no myomer control to shift an arm or bend forward against gravity.
The Atlas fell back in a lazy spin, crashing down onto its already damaged left side.
Which was painful enough to watch. More painful a few seconds later when the Jade Falcons rallied around fresh reinforcements and blistered the Templar with lasers and missiles and hammering autocannon that shook the ’Mech as if it had fallen into a cement mixer. Twisted about, distracted, Jasek felt the Templar start to go over, and worked his arms beneath him as he rode gravity to the ground.
“Jasek!” Tamara Duke’s worry was clear in her voice. “Parkins, forward and shield!”
She sent her exec’s lance up to give him some covering support. Another lance was peeled back to guard the Atlas as well. Jasek pictured it in his mind, and thought about how vulnerable Tamara’s position was with her Wolfhound and a short lance to support it.
There wasn’t a lot he could do about it, though, as he worked the controls to pick his Templar up from the ground. He had more pressing business with the Gyrfalcon that had shoved its way forward, and the fresh Star of mixed vehicles that spread out behind it. There was never any doubt in his mind that Noritomo Helmer had arrived. Even under the green light cast by the hovering flares, he knew this ’Mech. After their run-in on Chaffee, it had come to a rematch on Skye.
But this time Jasek did not stand alone. Vic Parkins stepped up into part of the hole Jasek’s Templar had left, and threw his Kelswa in front of a Falcon Shadow Hawk. Twin Gauss rifles flashed a blue discharge and railed nickel-ferrous masses into the ’Mech’s chest and shoulder.
The other warrior held his ground, and stabbed back with powerful red lances. Add in the fat-bodied ATMs that corkscrewed down at the wide-bodied tank, and Parkins had taken about equal to what he’d dished out.
A line of Stormhammers vehicles staggered forward, some disgorging infantry onto the field. More weapons traded back and forth. More molten composite splashed over the damp ground.
From a half crouch, still trying to get his feet fully beneath him, Jasek traded weapons salvos with the Gyrfalcon. His PPCs lashed out with a furious wash of energy, blasting away armor. Lasers and missiles chopped in afterward, but did little more than carve away more protective plating.
Helmer had the better end of it. His lasers cut like surgical tools, opening up the left side of Jasek’s chest, destroying his targeting computer. Autocannon walked hard-punching slugs from his right knee up across his hip, stripping away more armor, throwing a shake into his gyroscope.
Jasek staggered, nearly fell again.
The intense firefight, point-blank and bloody, was taking its toll faster than anything they had seen in nearly twenty-four hours of combat. A missile barrage scattered several Stormhammers Infiltrators across the ground, lifeless and still. Their Hasek MCV roiled smoke into the air, tinted a sickly brackish green by the overhead flares. In minutes, two Falcon Skandas lay burning and overturned, and the Shadow Hawk had lost an arm thanks to a second Gauss strike in the same shoulder.
Malvina Hazen’s Shrike bulled its way forward, crashing streams of lethal metal into Tamara Duke’s Wolfhound, trying to move it aside. Tamara’s lasers were no match for the assault ’Mech, but she stubbornly refused to budge. She raced to her left, then right, but never once took a step backward.
“Another minute,” Jasek said, being pummeled from three sides while he struck again and again at the Gyrfalcon.
“We’ll hold. Parkins, back to me. Parkins!”
Without his targeting computer, Jasek’s Templar and Helmer’s ’Mech were nearly evenly matched. The Templar’s stronger armor was mostly nonexistent by this point. Helmer was not taking advantage of his greater mobility. They slugged at each other, both running dangerously into the red. Taking a warning from what had happened to Tara, Jasek dialed back on some of his lasers to preserve his heat curve.
As if thinking of the Highlanders’ commander sparked some kind of reaction, the Atlas’ icon warmed back to life on his tactical display.
“Parkins,” Tamara shouted her order. “Acknowledge!”
Jasek blinked sweat from his eyes, ignoring the burn as he quickly collated HUD and tactical monitor.