There was Hauptmann Parkins’ Kelswa, holding a patch of ground with no enemies around it. But the man did not fall back.

Tamara’s Wolfhound–her Eisenfaust—starting to lean his direction, away from Malvina Hazen’s Shrike. But too late. Too late.

And a gold triangle. The identification tag readAS7– K2(TC) . Tara Campbell.

“I might…” Tamara’s voice wandered. She sounded weak, possibly wounded. Her beloved Eisenfaust took numbing hits from the Shrike. One stream cut from shoulder to shoulder, across the face of the Wolfhound. “Parkins… need…”

Jasek throttled forward, slammed himself up against the Gyrfalcon with cannon stripping away armor and myomer flesh. It staggered Helmer, forcing him to step back. The Kelswa assault tank drove forward at his side and shoved aside a smaller Condor, then turned away from Tamara Duke to punch a Gauss slug into the Gyrfalcon’s side. More particle cannon fire splashed out to strip away myomer and cut at supports. The Gyrfalcon’s left chest sagged. Its left arm fell straight and hung down limply at its side.

“Jasek?” Tamara’s voice was soft. Lost.

“No!” Tara’s shout was right there, behind it. “Not her… me!”

The comms chatter pulled Jasek around, away from Helmer. He saw Tara’s Atlas rising, levering itself up on one arm. He saw Tamara Duke in between them, alone, holding position in her Wolfhound.

Not budging an inch as the ninety-five-ton Shrike limped up into her face.

Two gem-bright lasers and several hundred rounds of autocannon fire braced up the Wolfhound, ripping into its chest, its guts. Jasek waited for the Wolfhound’s head to detach and blast away. Maybe the ejection system had been damaged. Maybe Tamara never reached for the lever. Golden fire bled out of several cracks in the ’Mech’s reactor shielding. Then it burned away in a bright, angry flash of plasma as the reactor exploded and the Wolfhound disintegrated into a ball of fusion-fed flames.

The shock wave staggered the Shrike and flipped over a Condor that had skated in at Malvina’s side. It shook the ground worse than any artillery strike. Jasek held to his feet, struggling forward against the wall of flames. There was no need to search the air for an ejection rocket. It wasn’t there.

A heartbeat later, neither was the Shrike. Tara’s final Gauss slug cut into it at the back of its wounded knee, snapping the limb off with a violent twist. The assault machine toppled, and thrashed against the ground as it struggled in vain to right itself.

The Wolfhound, and Tamara Duke, were gone.

What was left of the Stormhammers and Tara Campbell’s Highlanders was in desperate straits. The Rangers appeared thunderstruck, hardly firing at all as they took in what had just happened. The Jade Falcons were rallying to Noritomo Helmer, who held a great advantage as he formed up a new offensive charge. And now Jasek’s timetable—his plan—was shot to hell. Tamara Duke was dead. No telling what was left among the Steel Wolves and Alexia’s Tharkan Strikers. It would be a long, hard fight back toward Miliano.

Or did it have to be? Jasek hadn’t planned for such a drastic and violent disruption, but he could use it. In the same way he had let Clan traditions weigh in on his side on Chaffee, he could let those traditions work for all of them now.

“Hegira,” he transmitted on an open channel. One he knew the Jade Falcons monitored. Limping his Templar into a shuffling turn, facing Noritomo Helmer and the Jade Falcon line, he cut his targeting system and dropped both arms to his side.

“Star Colonel Helmer. I formally request hegira.”

36

DropShip Himmelstor

Miliano

Skye

23 December 3134

Tara Campbell supervised the technicians racking David McKinnon’s Atlas into one of the Himmelstor’s ’Mech bay stalls. She had been able to crawl the assault ’Mech off the battlefield under its own power, and so it fell into the salvage exception granted to Jasek Kelswa-Steiner under his deal with the Jade Falcons. Tara felt good for that, at least. She still had hopes of returning the hundred-ton monster to Sire McKinnon.

Someday.

Turning from the alcove, she dodged around a lifter, its forks stacked high with a pallet of supplies, and went looking for Jasek. The bay was a hive of activity, with people rushing around in this last hour of safety. It smelled of blood and soil and nervous sweat. There was so much left to do. Equipment to store, machines to slot into the crowded bay, and people to find some corner where they could ride out what would hopefully be a short trip.

Skirting the edge of the Excalibur’s cavernous main bay, Tara wove between rows of hoverbikes and then a trio of MASH trucks. The mobile-hospital vehicles had been jammed together to form a small medical center right along the curved outer bulkhead. The wounded had been first priority with Jasek, and he had not bothered to separate out Stormhammers or Highlanders or Steel Wolves. Like the machines crowded into the DropShip, many of the wounded had fought under different crests and insignia but were treated with equal attention.

There would be time enough for sorting out the different commands later, after the evacuation. Tara approved. In fact she approved of much—most, even—of what she’d seen from the landgrave.

When she found him at the foot of the DropShip’s secondary ramp, directing the final stages of traffic as three different lines of vehicles converged and jockeyed for position to be included in the retreat, she nodded at that too. He had triaged them fairly well, bringing up military vehicles and flatbeds piled with the salvage the allied defenders had scraped up. The moving vans and the civilian pickup trucks flooding out of Miliano, carrying parts and materiel unloaded from the Avanti Assemblies plant and warehouses—these Jasek had peeled away to one side where they could be unloaded by hand. Now he simply pulled the last few up after the military line, no time left.

When he saw her, he handed the finale off to a master sergeant. One of her Highlanders, as it turned out. Jasek trotted behind a slow-moving J100 recovery vehicle and joined her at the side of the ramp. “Ten minutes,” he said, glancing at his watch.

Tara looked out into the gray afternoon drizzle. She couldn’t see the Jade Falcon line, holding several kilometers back from the cluster of DropShips. But she could sense them out there. Waiting. “You don’t think Helmer will give us a little room?”

“I wouldn’t want to risk lives on it.”

He paused as a long peal of rolling thunder smashed into the conversation—a fusion drive lighting off. From the side of the covered ramp, the two looked north to find a Union blasting off from where it straddled the highway. The next-to-last vessel. It rose slowly at first, then gained speed. In less than a minute it had lost itself among dark gray clouds.

“Actually, if it was Noritomo Helmer, maybe I would,” he finally admitted. “But I won’t gamble anything on Malvina Hazen.”

Tara nodded. “It still seems too easy. We ask to be allowed to pull back, and they just say okay. Too simple.”

“Nothing’s ever that easy, even if it seems like it to us. The Clans have centuries of effort behind their traditions. Maybe it did work against them this time. But having seen how Helmer kept his force intact in the face of such a long drive, I think they might have the right idea.”

Her agreement was grudging. “Still, they have to know we’ll ready a new line and they will have to come at us again. At Roosevelt Island or Cyclops, Incorporated.”