The Highlanders have a thin line, she thought, and a brittle one. Crack it at any place and it will shatter, leaving the road to Tara open.

“On my command,” she said. “Artillery. Find targets. Lock on. Fire.” And again, “Artillery. Fire.” And a third time, “Artillery. Fire.”

Then, “On my command. Long-range missiles. Fire.”

An overarching curtain of fire, torn and obscured by rain and wind, spread out over the opposing troops in response to her words. Ahead of her, the artillery shells were already detonating, the light of their explosions refracted in the lashing rain.

The rain would be hell on the infantry, Wolf and Highlander alike, but in her ’Mech Anastasia was dry. And the rain would help cool her Ryoken II even as it strode forward.

“Stay close,” she ordered her troops. “Hovercraft, find the ends of their lines. Then swing around behind. Envelop them. I want attacks from the rear. I want attacks wherever you can find them. Forward, guide on me!”

She set the Ryoken II in motion toward the enemy lines, reveling Tassa Kay–like in the knowledge that she was about to do something which few in the Inner Sphere could do better. She was a Kerensky, and for those of her Bloodname, fighting in a BattleMech went gene-code deep. The ’Mech’s skeleton was her skeleton, its armored skin, her skin. After a lifetime’s practice, she needed no more thought to guide seventy-five tons of deadly metal than she needed to walk in boots and leather through the dark streets of Tigress or Dieron or Achernar.

“Galaxy Commander.” The words sounded in her ear. “We are picking up a signal from the Northwind troops. They have it on all frequencies.”

“Patch it through,” she said. Now a smattering of fire was coming her way. Ahead, a tank destroyer behind a camouflage net spouted fire. She targeted it, without pausing to calculate, and sent a Streak in its direction. They would have to move or die.

A babble of rising and falling voices sounded over the cockpit’s speakers.

“What is that?” Anastasia demanded.

“The Highlanders’ signal, Galaxy Commander. They are singing.”

Now that she was listening, she could make out words in the babble. “…if you’ve never been laid on a Saturday night, you’ve never been laid at all!”

“So they are,” she said. “And badly.” Though Tassa Kay remembered that chorus very well, and a Highlander on a boring DropShip transit who had claimed that the song had over five-hundred and fifty-six verses, though he himself could only recall forty-two of them.

He had been wrong. Tassa Kay had counted them one night, and he knew forty-seven, at least when he was drunk. Anastasia wondered if he was out there singing again today.

“The Highlanders are making their location known for us,” she said. “Target them.”

Beside her, a Demon tank stopped abruptly, lurching sidewise on melted and deflating tires as the ammo in its rotary autocannon arced and sparked. The Demon’s hatch sprang open and its crew ran for cover—any second now, the tank’s flamers would catch, and anyone left inside would be caught in the fireball. Anastasia traced back the probable trajectory of the barrage of missiles that had taken out the tank, and put a burst of pulse particles onto the location.

Forward, she thought. Do not outrun the troops, but lead them. The Highlanders have nothing, no hope of resistance, or they would not have been seeking delay.

A line of fire stitched up the Ryoken II’s leg, chewing at the surface layers of metal and myomer—an autocannon, tracking and ranging her. She spun toward the enemy and engaged the Ryoken II’s jump jets, in order to ruin the autocannon’s firing solution.

Hitting the ground running, she sprinted toward the autocannon emplacement—past lasers to left and right, their light scattered by the rain but still burning through; past the mud… no, into the mud that was churning up. She was wading in mud. They’d drawn her into a bog.

She deployed the Ryoken II’s jump jets again, desperately seeking higher ground. Resistance as strong as this could not go on forever. The Highlanders were expending troops at a reckless rate.

“Star Colonel Darwin!” she demanded over the command circuit. “Darwin, report!”

“We are taking heavy fire,” came the reply. “And there is a ’Mech over here… we have not made the ID yet. But we know it is fast, and the engineer says that it must have hell’s own power plant… coordinates twelve-thirty-five-one.”

“I am on my way,” Anastasia said. A ’Mech like that had to belong to the Paladin. “If we are in open rebellion against The Republic, then so be it. Paladins will just have to take their chances.”

48

Plains north of Tara

Northwind

June, 3133; local summer

“That’s something you don’t see every day,” murmured Lexa McIntosh in Will’s ear.

The two of them were sharing a hastily dug foxhole that threatened to fill up with rain before many more hours had passed. The drizzle that had come down intermittently all night was now a steady driving downpour, lashed into sideways sheets by the driving wind. Visibility wasn’t much better than it had been during the night, except when the flashes of lightning lit up the open, rolling landscape.

“What is it?” Will asked.

“One—no, make that three—’Mechs. Crossing the ridge line.”

“I don’t see them.”

“Wait for the next lightning flash… there.”

Will squinted out through the rain. Yes, she was right. Three dark, lumbering shapes were moving out onto the battlefield and toward the Highlander lines.

“Identification,” he said. “We need identification.”

Lexa fumbled in the cargo pocket of her fatigue trousers and pulled out a waterproof flip chart of silhouettes. “Give me a moment to look ’em up, all right?”

“You mean you don’t have them all memorized yet?”

Lexa sneered. “I don’t see you calling out their marks and mods either.”

Will looked over her shoulder as she riffled through the pages of the chart, then looked back toward the Steel Wolf lines. “These look like ForestryMechs,” he said. “Maybe a MiningMech. Look at that big-ass saw.”

“Not too dangerous, then,” Lexa said.

“That’s like saying a rabid bulldog isn’t too dangerous just because it isn’t a rabid lion,” Will said. “And there’s no telling what some of those retrofit jobs might have bolted on them. We ought to report them in.”

Tara Campbell, in the cockpit of her Hatchetman BattleMech, held her position in the center of the Highlanders’ battle line. Her work here would be command and control—and protecting the center of the line against the tanks, heavy artillery, and ’Mechs that Anastasia Kerensky would undoubtedly send against them. Meanwhile, Ezekiel Crow, in his lighter, faster Blade, would be roving the battle from hot spot to hot spot, applying force and speed quickly where it was most needed.

A volley of smoke cylinders from the Highlander artillery discharged their white puffs of smoke in front of the battle line. The smoke was not as effective in the rain and wind as it would have been on a fair-weather battlefield, but every obscuring wisp was a small added advantage for the defenders, increasing the fog of war and making their numbers harder to guess and to target.

“Report,” she said to the command talker over the Hatchetman’s comms. “I want the position of the nearest enemy ’Mechs.”

“Word just in puts three Industrials out by gridposit twenty-one-twenty-three-eight,” the command talker said.

She checked her cockpit map display. Gridposit 21–23–8 was close enough to be a direct threat to the center of the Northwind line. It looked like Anastasia Kerensky wasn’t intending to do things the slow and careful way.