40

Eastern slopes of the Bloodstone Range

Rockspire Mountains, Northwind

June, 3133; local summer

The first light of the rising sun touched the eastern foothills of the Bloodstones with a wash of pink. Colonel Michael Griffin awakened at the change in the light; he’d finally caught an hour or so of sleep along toward dawn, wrapped in a sleeping bag on a cot set up by the foot of his Koshi. If the Steel Wolves’ attack came under cover of night, he didn’t intend to waste his time running for the ’Mech in the dark. He hadn’t really expected to be awakened instead by the sky above him paling toward daylight, and the sound of reveille playing over the encampment’s speakers.

“Tea, sir?”

His aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Owain Jones, approached the cot with a steaming mug in either hand. Griffin sat up, accepted one of the mugs, and drank gratefully of the strong, heavily sweetened contents.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“You’re welcome, Colonel.” The early summer mornings at this elevation were chillier than those back at base. Jones—another warm-climate native, like Griffin himself—had his hands wrapped around the mug for warmth as he drank. “So the Wolves didn’t come in the night, after all.”

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant. Now that it’s daylight, they’ll be on the move for sure.”

“For what we are about to receive,” said Jones, “may the Lord make us truly thankful. How do you rate our chances of stopping them?”

“We don’t have to stop them. Just hold them.”

“For how long?”

“Until I tell you it’s been long enough,” Griffin said, and handed back the empty mug.

Lieutenant Jones faded away toward the mess tent, leaving Griffin thoughtful. He had time, he estimated, for catching a quick breakfast and tending to those early-morning personal chores that couldn’t be handled gracefully in the cockpit of a ’Mech. Then he would have to make an address to the troops. He couldn’t say much more to them than he had to Lieutenant Jones, but everyone would expect him to say something, even if they mocked his words later in private. Morale would suffer if he didn’t behave as expected.

After that, there would be nothing to do but climb into the Koshi and wait.

Two hours later, he was still waiting. The ’Mech, with its height of eye, gave him a good view of the plain and of the disposition of his forces, a view augmented by the symbolic map display projected in the Koshi’s cockpit.

Nothing showed up yet on actual visual, but the map display was already providing useful information. The scouts’ reports on the Wolf armor put their last confirmed location far back down the main road leading through the pass: On the display, the armored column showed up as a series of solid red lines. Their assumed position—dotted red lines showing where the column might currently be, given the known top speed of the reported units—was considerably closer.

Nearer still on the projected maps were the blue lines of Griffin’s own units, a few of them actually visible from the cockpit of his ’Mech. The bulk of them showed up only on the map, either because they occupied positions outside his line of sight or because they were concealed or under cover.

He could have wished for a better mix of units; what he had, while the best that the Countess and the Paladin could spare from organizing the main defenses, was far too light for his taste—mostly infantry, trained but unseasoned in combat. For support, he had self-propelled artillery in the center, missile-launchers on the flanks, and himself, in the Koshi.

The range of their weapons was marked out in pale blue on the map display, and their maximum sensor range in blue of an even paler shade. At some point the advancing pale pink of the assumed Steel Wolf formation—a formidable force, even if the scouts’ reports had been exaggerated by a factor of ten—would intersect with the pale blue. The resulting purple areas would show the locations of possible attack.

Then the sensors would make contact…

“Sir,” Lieutenant Jones’s voice came over the Koshi’s communications system. “Reply to your message to headquarters. The Prefect says, ‘Buy me time.’”

“There’s only one place today that’s selling it,” Griffin said. He looked again at the map, keying up the names of the units forming the heavy blue line that blocked egress from the mountains into the open plains that lay to the north of the capital city. “And I know what coin we have to use.”

“Nobody’s ever said that Highlanders don’t know the value of money,” Jones said. “If we have to pay, we’ll drive a hard bargain first.”

“Rest assured, Lieutenant, I’ll pinch every penny. But for now, it’s a waiting game.”

He ran down the weapons systems in his Koshi. Short-range missiles in the right arm, systems green. Check. Ammo full. Short-range missiles, left arm, systems green. Check. Ammo full. Active probe and target acquisition. Check, and check. Jump jets, ready, on line. Cooling max. Reactor in hot standby. Confirmed—everything was good to go.

With that taken care of, he began pacing along the defensive line that he had drawn up earlier, checking the lines of sight. With nothing but short-range missiles on board, he didn’t dare use the Koshi to take on the tank killers that the Wolves had in the lead. The ’Mech’s armor was good, but a lucky shot could still take it out… a lucky shot that would be more likely if the enemy could shoot at will without fearing countering fire.

He paced back to where a rocky outcropping shielded him from the front, and where his line of sight into the valley put everything within view in his range.

“Pass to all units,” he said on the command circuit. “We’re going dark. No active sensors. No electromagnetic communications from here out. Passive means only. Make the bastards guess where we are.”

“Why? What are you planning?” Jones asked.

“They’ll get here and we’ll fight them, whether they come early or late,” Griffin explained. “But why advertise where we are exactly? They can detect our sensors twice as far as our sensors will show us where they are. If they don’t know where we are, they’ll have to advance more slowly because we could be anywhere.”

“Right,” Jones said. “Well, I’ll stick close by you when the action turns hot.”

“You do that,” Griffin told him.

Lieutenant Jones was in a BE701 Joust tank, the better to keep enemy infantry off of Griffin’s ’Mech. A single trooper couldn’t do much against one of the big fighting machines—but infantry never came singly, that was the problem. They came in squads and platoons and companies, and enough of them in one place could swarm over even the biggest ’Mech like a cloud of maddened insects.

“Stay close,” Griffin said, “but stay behind me. Lots of stuff is going to be flying out the front, and I don’t want you to get in the way.”

“No worries there,” Jones said.

The light blue area on the display map faded back as the Highlanders’ active sensors switched off, leaving Griffin with still more unknown ground to fret about. The pale pink of the projected Wolf advance inched forward.

Time crawled by.

Griffin checked the chronometer in the ’Mech’s cockpit repeatedly, when he wasn’t scanning the land and the sky. The sun was well up by now, although clouds still lowered above the mountain peaks. More clouds gathered on the horizon behind him to the south and east—the bad weather that Meteorology had been predicting for some days now, though it wasn’t likely to arrive in time to interfere with his plans for the day.

On the map display, the pink mist of the Wolves’ possible position by now had met the blue mist of the Highlanders’ passive sensor range, and in some places had even met the darker blue of weapons range. Still, there were no contact reports.