Pushing his Ti Ts’ang past ninety kilometers per hour, Evan ate up the ground in large strides. To his left, Hahn’s Destroyer throttled back to keep pace. APCs of Purifier infantry trailed behind. They dashed forward, fired and faded back left or right to whatever cover they picked up in the local scrub. Light autocannon chased after them, ripping into brush and bark, having trouble against the faster machines.

Mai Uhn Wa had picked a good target of opportunity, where Ruskoff’s forces were spread thin in anticipation of reinforcements out of Chang-an. After every pass, the gap widened, and forces at each edge chanced more desperate tactics to hold their line until Governor Pohl’s people arrived.

Once again, Evan’s small contingent fell back, turning aside early as aerospace fighters strafed by, their autocannon ripping long furrows into the hardscrabble ground. He stepped into an artillery-made crater, which threw a hitch into his step. Fortunately, his gyroscope and the neuro-feedback circuit adjusted.

“Evan,” Mai reopened direct comms. “Begin falling back. Slowly. Hold that gap open, but do not punch through.”

“Shiao Mai. With support, we might bring down the reinforcements and split the Republic line wide—”

“You will not engage Governor Pohl’s troops. At any cost, Evan. Fall back.”

Frustration welled up inside Evan, but he acknowledged the order and passed it to his team. They ducked out of the thin stand and fell back before any Republic forces pressed forward to engage. It left Evan with something extremely valuable in combat operations. Time. A moment with no pressing demands, where he could monitor comms and try to pull larger details from the pressing assault.

“Command, Cav-one. Eastern forces are down one Joust.” Score one for the Conservatory.

“Sergeant Hoi is down. Down! His Behemoth overturned on that last artillery barrage.”

Not good. Behemoths could make even a MechWarrior nervous, and Field Sergeant Hoi had been helping crew the second of only two such tanks fielded by the Conservatory. That could not be enough to pull his unit back, though.

“Here they come again. Zeus leading forward, flanked by two Jessies and—”

“—can’t see them. Aerospace fighters chewing up our position. We need VTOL support and a MASH pickup.”

“Lost one Ranger.”

“Two Cavaliers down.

“Someone swing in at grid thirty-six… thirty-seven… Vrebrachney! Southwest side!” That sounded like Whit Greggor. “We’re taking heavy—”

“Alert, alert, alert!” A weaker voice broke into the chatter, making up in intensity what she lacked in volume. Icy dread spiked into Evan’s guts. “We have contact at forward-post Wilco. Two BattleMechs with support. We need help and we need it fast.”

The western picket line. Jenna. The thought of Jen being pummeled by heavy firepower nearly caused Evan to turn his Ti Ts’ang for the Conservatory grounds. He paused at the end of his first retrograde maneuver, ready to push forward again or head full flight to Jenna’s rescue, on Mai’s command. “Identify those ’Mechs,” he ordered, preempting Mai Uhn Wa.

“One Firestarter. One Ryoken II. Principes Guards. Supported by Brutus assault tanks.”

So the Guards had sent Ruskoff support, and with better timing than Governor Pohl’s laggard forces. How many more lances of the white-and-gold were sneaking through Yiling?

“Evan?” Jen Lynn Tang recognized his voice even without a callsign. “Ijori-one, can you assist?”

Nothing. No call from Shiao Mai. No order to press forward, cut for the Conservatory, or simply cease and desist all sideband chatter. Evan hesitated.

“We are falling back under heavy fire,” Jen reported. “Double-V, Demon, down already.”

Leaving Jenna in a modified ForestryMech, with a few armor pieces and some infantry support. Maybe the Locust at forward-November could swing down to assist. Maybe that would leave the northern stretch open for a second Principes attack.

“Ijori-one, can you assist?”

“Evan.” Hahn’s voice blared strong and with a squeal of feedback as he cut in on a private frequency to Evan. “Evan, do we go?”

Damn. Damn Ruskoff for slipping forces through the Chang-an suburbs and Mai Uhn Wa for taking a sudden absence. Whatever the House Master dealt with in the Praetorian, it had better be worth Jenna’s life.

“We don’t,” Evan said on a tight-comms transmission to Hahn. He pivoted his Ti Ts’ang south, ready to push-and-fade once again. He toggled for wideband. “We’re needed here, Wilco. Cannot assist.” He shoved his throttle forward to its stop.

“Copy that.” Jen’s reply was short. “Any advice?”

Evan clenched his teeth hard enough to grind an edge off one molar. Every muscle tense, he nearly wrenched his BattleMech back around. But he did not. He chose this path far too long ago. He either believed in it, or he did not.

He did.

“Stick and fade, Jen. Buy us time.” Not much in the way of advice. “You have your orders.” And Evan had his. For better or worse.

Yiling (Chang-an)

Qinghai Province, Liao

4 August 3134

Viktor Ruskoff powered forward, his eighty-ton Zeus shoving over trees and crushing thick boles underfoot like twigs on a forest carpet. Sweat ran freely, soaking into his cooling vest. His arm muscles ached, and his neck twinged with dull throbs from holding up the bulky neurohelmet for so many hours. Too long sitting at a desk and not enough time at the gym or in the hot seat of a ’Mech.

A light rain pattered down from Liao’s gray skies, streaking his ferroglass canopy with silvered fingers. On the other side of the transparent armor, he watched a new Bellona drive into a tangle of brush and deadwood ahead of him, flushing Fa Shih like a brace of quail.

One of the armored infantrymen rose toward him on jet thrusters, and Ruskoff knocked him from the air with a swipe from the Zeus’s right arm. The broken trooper fell backward and down into a wild thicket. He did not come out again.

“Zeta lead, this is Principes auxiliary.” Captain Danna Shelby, commanding the double-lance loaned to the Legate by Lady Kincaid. “We’re getting stragglers on the Grinder. I hope you aren’t too far behind.”

A Conservatory Thunderbolt slashed across Ruskoff’s path a half kilometer ahead, smashed a light gauss slug into the Zeus’s side before ducking behind a large ’Mech hangar. Ruskoff keyed over to the channel shared between Triarii and Guard. “Two klicks,” he said, gaining one of the damp ferrocrete roadways that crisscrossed the military campus. “You’ll have us on sensors as we strike out from behind these buildings.”

And once Ruskoff’s main task force stormed the campus grounds, leaving the defenders with no more options than to stand, fight and die, he’d have their surrender or he’d have their asses. Then the student uprising would be ended. Everything but the paperwork.

In the last hour, the arrival of Governor Pohl’s forces had finally tipped the balance. The Legate worried at first, when a well-supported Ti Ts’ang moved into the gap he’d planned to push the late arrivals into, but then the Capellans fell back, refusing to exchange fire with Pohl’s “bodyguards.” He mixed Lieutentant Nguyen’s scout lance into their midst, cementing that position.