“In these mountains that’s not surprising.”

Will and Lexa and Jock lay against a ridge, looking west toward the mountains. A shoulder of hillside that moments before had been bare ground now crawled with figures in Steel Wolf uniforms and battle armor.

“That’s them, isn’t it?” Lexa asked. She took a sight with her laser rifle at one of the figures and shook her head regretfully. “Way out of range yet.”

“Aye, that’s them,” Will said.

“I thought they had heavies with them,” Jock said. “Are you sure we’re looking at the main body?”

“This is the only way through,” Will said. “Let’s go back and tell the Sergeant what we saw. Maybe he’ll let us have our old shelter back.”

“Good plan,” said Lexa. “I like it.”

Jock nodded. “Let’s go.”

The three of them slid backward until the crest line concealed them, then stood and began to trot back to their own lines.

“We’ll probably get shot at by our own people on the way in,” Jock grumbled as they approached the encampment. “Everyone is that nervous.”

“Pessimist,” said Lexa.

Will ignored their byplay. He was still thinking about the enemy soldiers they had seen coming around the side of the mountain. “Who’d have thought the Steel Wolves would try this stunt with nothing but infantry?”

“Nothing but infantry?” Colonel Michael Griffin asked.

“That’s the report,” said Lieutenant Jones over the radio in his Joust tank. “And we have a fix on the location.”

Part of the map in the Koshi’s cockpit display went solid red. The enemy weren’t as far away as Griffin had hoped, but at least they were farther off than he had feared.

“Hold your fire until they’re within half of nominal range,” he ordered. “Then salvo-fire. Plaster the whole front.”

“We don’t have the ammunition to sustain that rate of fire, sir,” Jones cautioned him.

“I know that,” Griffin replied. “And you know that. But the Steel Wolves don’t know that, and I want them to think that they’ve walked into a meat grinder and I’m turning the crank. When they get here, fire as if we were sitting on top of a whole ammunition dump. The only thing worse than running out of ammo is having the enemy think that we’re low on bang juice.”

“Still… nothing but infantry,” Jones commented over his tank radio. “I wonder what that means? Could they be trying to draw us out?”

“Maybe,” said Griffin.

At that moment, a whole armored infantry platoon carrying flamers came jump jetting out of the sky, and Griffin abruptly had his hands full. He jumped downslope to a position beside a stand of trees. The infantry platoon’s flamers might heat him up enough to shut down the power plant—but not soon, not with a Koshi’s superior heat dissipation.

The Koshi’s exterior mikes picked up the sound of the guns on Jones’s tank opening up. Griffin pitied the infantry that had tried to close assault his aide. He jumped again.

He was still in the air when the first shoulder-launched missile hit him. At least the ’Mech’s gyros didn’t tumble, although the missile’s impact spun him around and turned his jump into a stumble-and-fall when he touched down.

“All circuits, go active,” he ordered even as he brought his ’Mech back to its feet. “I want sensors up and radiating.”

The area of blue mist on the cockpit map pushed outward as he complied with his own order. One look at the changed display was enough to reveal a map dotted with red spots, like a face with measles.

“Fire on targets of opportunity,” Griffin said. “But do not advance. Hold in position, even if the enemy falls back.”

If this was a trick, he thought, the Highlanders would not be taken in by it.

Then the world exploded around him—clods of earth flinging up, the stand of trees around him gone to splinters. Someone out there was sure carrying a lethal load for an infantry trooper. He started trotting up the line to where his aide’s Joust was laying down a blanket of fire on the attackers.

A group of Steel Wolf regular infantry scrambled out of the way of Griffin’s passage. They had to know, he thought as he watched them run, that the short-range missiles on the arms of his Koshi were too valuable to waste on unarmored infantry when there soon might be more dangerous prey available—but the arms and legs of twenty-five tons of forged ferro-fiber doing seventy-five kilometers per hour were still terrifying and deadly to a man armored with nothing thicker than his shirt.

43

Eastern Slopes of the Bloodstone Range

Rockspire Mountains, Northwind

June, 3133; local summer

Nicholas Darwin saw the smoke before he could hear the sounds of combat. “Has any of the infantry reported?” he asked.

“We are getting scattered reports,” the communications operator said. “There is at least one ’Mech.”

“Class?”

“Reports range from light to heavy.”

“What kind of resistance?” Darwin asked. “And where is the smoke line on the map?”

“Resistance is definitely heavy,” said the Condor’s sensor operator, and indicated an area on the tank’s battlefield display. “The smoke line is here.”

“Very well.” Darwin opened up the general command circuit. “Draw up a skirmish line, and on my command, volley fire, blind, onto the smoke line. Then advance, taking all targets under fire as they appear.”

Whoever was holding the pass for the Highlanders was good, Darwin reflected as he gave his orders. Now that he had seen the area at the mouth of the pass, he had to admit that he would have chosen the same site himself for a defensive line. So either the enemy commander was very clever, or he and Darwin were both equally stupid. Now that battle was engaged, there was no way to tell except by fighting it out.

“Now,” Darwin said. “Volley.”

With a whoosh and a vapor trail that rolled white across the lines, the missile launchers fired.

“Now—” he started to say again.

“Incoming, sir!”

From the area ahead that had just been their target, a line of arced vapor trails were approaching. Then flowers of fire began to blossom in the air.

“Short-range antitactical defenses up,” Darwin ordered. “Wolves, we are moving forward. Our armor will take anything that does not break the heart.”

The valley had been pretty.

Then the explosions came.

“Our right flank reports heavy pressure,” Lieutenant Jones said, “and they’re low on ammo.”

“I’ll be up there,” Griffin said. “Get a report from the SP guns while I’m away.”

Then he was running, jumping, running again, to the right flank.

He passed dead men and broken machines, but did not stop. Then he was at a scree slope, and the traces of fire, pulses of energy in the air, the dazzle of lasers, and the crump of ordinary kinetic shells, filled his sensors and his inputs.

A Condor hovertank showed up to his left on the cockpit display. He twisted, sent a battery of SRMs at the Condor, then jumped before it could target him. On external comms, he said, “Highlanders! Rally here.”

Infantry emerged from foxholes and from covering terrain. He couldn’t see their expressions from his position high up in the Koshi’s towering frame, but judging from their overall body language and the quickness of their response, they were scared but resolute. Not bad for new, mostly unblooded troops, he thought—and the ones who lived through today would be new and unblooded no longer.

“We’re going to back slowly to the center,” he said, “and then make a fighting retreat. With me.”

As he spoke, he directed another battery of missiles, this one from his right arm, at a sensor trace near the edge of his maximum range. “I’ll cover you, and hold here long enough for you to get away.”