Patiently, he went over it all again. “You will defend against the Highlanders coming in from the west to the minimum. You will shoot to miss. On receiving any kind of fire at all, you will pull back and open a corridor.”

“What about our contract?” his segundo asked.

“Under our contract,” Farrell said, “we’ve been ordered to secure the roads out of Tara against the Highlander forces in the city, and not to fight against the Steel Wolves unless or until the Steel Wolves first attack us. There’s nothing either in our orders or in our contract that says what we should do about any other forces that might decide to join in on the action—which leaves that decision up to me. And I say that our contract never covered being caught between the upper and the nether millstones with the Highlanders turning the mill.”

“It’s not going to look good, though.”

“That’s crap and you know it,” Farrell said. “Trooper for trooper and ’Mech for ’Mech, our happy bunch of heavily armed misfits are as tough and as brave and as nasty as any Northwind Highlander or Steel Wolf Clansman in The Republic of The Sphere. But anybody wanting us to hold out to the last man has to say so up front and make the contract worth it for our next of kin, and our current employer didn’t. No shame to him, either; there aren’t many employers out there who’ll go that far.”

“Bannson would,” said his segundo.

“Which is why we’d do it for Bannson if he paid us to,” Farrell agreed. “But that’s for another contract and another war. Right now, we’re working on fulfilling this one without getting chewed to bits in the process.”

He looked around at his commanders. “Are we all singing off of the same sheet of music now? Good. Then here’s the deal: We’ll give the Highlanders an impressive show. I want to hear explosions and I want to see fireworks. But I do not want casualties—no casualties among our troops, and minimal among the others. Let them know they’ve been in a fight, but no more than that. Am I making myself clear?”

“We don’t let the Highlanders inside the city out,” his segundo summarized. “But if the Highlanders outside the city happen to force a corridor… well, that has nothing to do with us, and what they decide to do with it is their business.”

“That’s the general idea,” Farrell said. “Now we’re going to go out and apply it. Carry on.”

The meeting dispersed, and Jack Farrell turned away to where his Jupiter was waiting. He climbed up the access ladder to the cockpit. His primary employer had left him a great deal of discretion in dealing with his current contract holder, and he hoped that he was exercising it sufficiently now.

Once in the cockpit, he donned the cooling vest and neurohelmet and brought the hundred-ton Jupiter rumbling to life. Then he turned its ponderous footsteps onto the road heading west, to see for himself what was approaching.

47

Mercenary and Highlander Positions

Various Roads Out of Tara

Northwind

February 3134; local winter

“Contact,” said the observer for the mercenary rocket battery.

The mercs currently blocking the roads out of Tara had received some strange orders in their time, and the ones they fought under now were stranger than most. But they’d learned to trust Jack Farrell’s one eye when it came to looking out for the main chance, and they obeyed. Not without questioning—that wasn’t in their nature—but they obeyed.

“Where away?” said the sergeant in charge of the battery.

“Looks like a light armored truck, mounted laser, hull down past that rise.”

“Got it,” the sergeant said.

A moment later the observer asked, “Inform Jack yet?”

“Yeah, just passed it back.”

“Okay… I see one, two, three squads, jump armor, with flamers. They’re doing squad rushes.”

“We’ll let ’em know we spotted ’em,” the sergeant said. To the crew of the rocket battery, he said, “Short-range missile. Two pairs, aim two short, two long.”

“Missiles away,” said the leader of the battery crew.

With trails of white smoke, the missiles arched up and out. The laser tracked them. One exploded in midair, then a second, a third just above the ground, the fourth—one set to go long—impacted out of sight.

“Tubes expended,” said the battery crew leader.

“Fall back,” the sergeant said. “That’ll slow ’em some.”

“General,” Lieutenant Owain Jones reported over the command circuit. He’d had to leave behind the Joust tank in which he usually shadowed Griffin’s Koshi, and was riding in a Fox armored car. “We’re meeting resistance.”

“How much, and where?” Griffin asked.

“So far, it’s light. No KIAs on our side. Our troopers are returning fire.”

“Do not slow down,” Griffin ordered. True to his own words, he kept his ’Mech striding onward in the direction of the city as he spoke. “Not for any reason. The line we’re facing will not be thinner at any time. If we don’t punch through now, we won’t punch through at all.”

“I’ll pass the word along.”

“Good. Has anyone got comms with the Countess?”

“We had a brief contact earlier,” Jones said. “There was a parley, but it didn’t go anywhere. The forces in the city are bracing for a Steel Wolf push.”

“What about the units we’re encountering here?”

“Mercs,” said Jones. “They’ve got the Countess and her people pinned, but nobody seems to know if they’re going to coordinate an attack with the Wolves or not.”

“If we have anything to say about it,” Griffin said, “then the answer is ‘not’.”

Ahead smoke was rising. Griffin headed that way. The Koshi swiveled its head from side to side as he advanced at a lope to provide some heavier support than the infantry could manage on their own. He found a squad hunched behind a wall, with small arms fire coming in overhead—deadly stuff for the unarmored infantry, but nothing that would trouble him.

He stepped around the corner and laid down a spread of missiles in the direction the fire was coming from. The front of a building exploded into rubble.

“Move out!” Griffin commanded, then sprinted forward himself. “Move it up, people. Open a hole, and form a perimeter, north and south.”

“We have a Condor, grid nine-one-four.”

“I’m on it,” Griffin said. “Now I want some speed here. Punch through!”

One-Eyed Jack Farrell sat atop his Jupiter–not inside the cockpit, but under the open sky, perched on the ’Mech’s shoulder and using its great height as a vantage point for observation. He wore a set of communications headphones, with a wire trailing back into the ’Mech’s interior.

“Roger that,” he said over the headphones’ audio pickup. “One Koshi. Any other Mechs?”

He paused to listen. “Right, let it past. If I want it, it’ll be mine.”

From far off to the north of where he was perched, looking out over the nearby buildings from atop his thirty-meter mount, Jack could hear the crump of explosions. Trails of smoke and the exhaust of missiles drew white lines against the blue winter sky.

“Very well,” he said over the audio pickup. “Yes, open a corridor. I’ll be along shortly.”

He took off the headset, rolled up the cable, and slipped into the Jupiter through the entry hatch. Once inside, in the seat with vest and helmet, with the ’Mech’s electronics fired up, he called back to his ground comms station.

“There’s a Highland officer doing perimeter patrol over to our east,” he said. “Riding a Pack Hunter. Get in touch with her.”

“That’ll be tough.”

“That’s okay,” Farrell said. “I trust you.”

He fired up the reactor and set off, with the Jupiter’s slow, deliberate pace, to the north.