She jumped down through the hole in the roof, into the Spring Bearing Plant.

Dark in here, was her first thought. The plant’s interior lights were all off. She switched her viewscreen display over to infrared. Quiet in here, too.

The steady stream of background radio chatter had ceased, and she realized that the steel in the plant’s walls, and in the huge machines used to press spring bearings, distorted magnetic signatures and degraded communications. Well, her commanders would have to work without direct contact for a while.

The trio of Fox hovercraft that she’d spotted earlier had been located to the east, and that was straight ahead of her. She started off in that direction. The Hatchetman’s jump-jets would be useless in here, and the overhead was low enough that she had to walk the ’Mech down the length of the room in a half-crouch, and there was no way that she’d be able to take it through the doors at the end. She put on more speed and used the ’Mech’s forty-five-ton bulk to go crashing through the wall into the next room.

That was more fun than it probably ought to have been, she thought, just before the infantry group she’d broken in among started hammering. The Gauss rifle rounds went plinking off the ’Mech’s Durallex armor. Then one of the Steel Wolf troopers brought up a shoulder-launched missile, firing it in an enclosed space without regard for the danger the rocket blast presented to him and his mates.

The Hatchetman shuddered around her when the missile hit. Tara lashed out with the ax in her ’Mech’s right hand and the infantry scattered, diving into holes and corridors too small for the Hatchetman to follow them.

Well, that was the way of it. She sprinted for the far wall, striking it with her ax just a moment before impact to make a hole she could squeeze through, and crashed into the newly created opening, dropping and rolling, taking light damage but damage none the less, as she broke through into sunlight.

Three Fox armored cars with Steel Wolf markings waited there, as she’d expected, their armored sides wavering in the hot air from their engine exhaust. By the chewed and battered look of the Foxes’ armored sides, they’d already seen some hard fighting since moving off the DropPort landing field. Their extended-range medium laser cannons glittered menacingly in the morning sun, and Tara knew that both the lasers and the Voelkers 200 machine guns—two of them per Fox, for a total of six—would be on her in a moment. That much burning light and hot metal flying through the air had a chance of disturbing even a Hatchetman, if someone got lucky.

She used her own extended-range laser on the farthest hovercar, and was gratified to see it go up in flames as the beam punched through its armor and struck the vehicle’s power plant. The nearest hovercar was spinning for a getaway, its crew reacting to the sudden appearance of a BattleMech in their midst. She slashed at it with her ax, cutting into the edge of the vehicle. It sank to the ground, the raw metal of its side scraping against the pavement and sending up a shower of bright sparks, shining brighter in her still-running IR view screen.

Putting the Hatchetman into a squat, she worked the ’Mech’s huge left hand under the vehicle’s skirt, and heaved it over onto its side. That one was out of the fight, though not beyond salvage. The remaining armored hovercar was withdrawing from the fight and heading away at top speed.

Tara Campbell used her ’Mech’s jump-jets to leap into the air and gain height-of-eye for a firing position. At the top of the leap, she took aim and cut loose with the laser. The Steel Wolf hovecar exploded, even as it turned and fired its lasers and machine guns both in a hopeless final attack.

Beam and bullets together passed harmlessly above her head as she came down from her jump and swatted the overturned second hovercar with the flat of her ax. The blow crushed the body of the vehicle down to a little more than half its former height. Now that one was beyond salvage, too.

Time to leave, she thought. All that bursting through walls had sheared off her ’Mech’s external antennae, reducing comm range and adding static to the reports she could hear. She turned the corner, heading back toward the Highlander lines.

And there, waiting in the alley that ran beside the Spring Bearing Plant, was a Tundra Wolf–seventy-five tons of jump-jetted, laser-fisted, missile-toting nasty, with the ravening silver-metal wolf’s head of the Steel Wolves emblazoned across its torso.

Hatchetman and Tundra Wolf jumped simultaneously and met in the air, ax smashing against armor, then tumbled to the ground. Tara Campbell pressed her ’Mech in close, going for a grappling attack. The medium lasers in the Tundra Wolf’s right arm pressed against the Hatchetman’s torso on the left side, firing hard, burning into her armor. Tara kicked left to push the attacker away, then spun, sweeping her ax around in a desperate attempt to cripple the other ’Mech’s legs.

Then, without warning, the Tundra Wolf was surrounded by a cloud of fire and smoke as a Pack Hunter’s particle projector cannon discharged at close range against its back. The Tundra Wolf jumped away, leaping over Tara’s head—not attacking, but running, heading at speed back to the Steel Wolves’ main force.

“Don’t follow!” came Captain Bishop’s voice over the ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit. “It’s a trick. There isn’t going to be a flank attack.”

“My comms are fuzzy; say again all after ‘It’s a trick’?” Tara Campbell’s heart was pounding loudly in her ears after the exertion of battle and the narrow escape; that, and the damage done to her ’Mech’s communications gear during the recent fighting, made her doubt what she had heard.

“There isn’t going to be a flank attack,” Captain Bishop repeated. “We’ve been sold out. By a goddamned Paladin of the goddamned Sphere, if you can believe it. There isn’t any mercenary support. Farrell and his troops aren’t here to help us—they’re here to kill us.”

“Understood. No flank attack. Thank you, Captain.”

Tara Campbell reached out a hand and switched off the Hatchetman’s radio, cutting the ’Mech-to-’Mech connection before Captain Bishop could reply. She would have to turn the communications gear on again soon—people would be waiting for a word from her, and she was still the leader in charge of their defense, even if the unthinkable had happened and they were all betrayed—but for a few minutes, at least, she could grieve for her own, more personal betrayal inside the privacy of the Hatchetman’s unrevealing metal shell.

44

Field HQ

Northwest Sector

Tara

Northwind

February 3134; local winter

Captain Tara Bishop and the Countess of Northwind approached Colonel Ballantrae’s headquarters, and shut down their ’Mechs. They climbed out and walked, sweaty and weary, into the building.

Captain Bishop once again had reason to be glad that she’d brought along her winter greatcoat. The Countess, without one, would have been shivering inside a minute if one of the junior officers hadn’t rushed to lend her his. Bishop supposed that having people do things like that for you—or maybe just expecting without thinking about it that people would do things like that for you—was one of the perks of being brought up from birth as the future Countess of Northwind.

Not that Captain Bishop would have changed places with Tara Campbell at the moment. There were bad ways and worse ways to have a blossoming romance turn ugly, Bishop supposed, but having your new man abandon not just you, but the entire planet you and he were supposed to be defending—that one set a standard for low behavior that was going to be hard to match. You had to give the Countess credit, though; none of it showed in her face. Any tears she might have shed, had all been shed in the privacy of the Hatchetman’s cockpit, and ’Mechs had no eyes to weep.