Tactics of Duty Read online

  But the two rebel 'Mechs had made a critical mistake. They'd seen Alex's 'Mech go down, then turned their backs on him to hammer at the newcomer, believing him out of the fight for good.

  With the Archer on its feet once more, Alex guided it forward, moving in behind the Vindicator, bringing his 'Mech's huge fists together and swinging them, hard, the blow connecting with the back of the Vindie's head and flame-blasted shoulders.

  Metal shrieked protest and gave. The shock of the impact nearly dropped Alex's 'Mech a second time, but somehow he kept his feet as the Vindicator lurched forward, the back of its head smashed in, sparks leaping from severed power leads like swarming fireflies. Its pilot was probably dead before the big machine crashed face-down in the dust.

  The Shadow Hawk slammed a last handful of explosive rounds into the WLF-2; a spent magazine cassette spun clear of the autocannon's breach, and the heavy weapon fell silent. Still standing in a literal hail of fire, Clay continued to loose bolt after bolt of laser energy into his remaining opponent.

  But he was badly outmatched in weaponry now. The Hawk outmassed the Wolfhound by twenty tons, but the WLF-2 mounted three Defiance B3M medium lasers in its chest, and the Cyclops XII large laser in its arm alone outmatched Clay's single operational weapon.

  With the Vindicator down, Alex pivoted toward the Wolfhound, his targeting cross hairs centering on the machine's back where its armor was weakest. As he triggered a barrage, the WLF's rear-mounted Defiance laser opened up in reply, striking the Archer's right arm.

  Alex's heat monitor showed his 'Mech's heat off the scale, and his computer was once again advising him to eject. Ignoring the computer's voice and alphanumerics, he kept firing, aiming for the ball-and-socket-mounted barrel of the WLF's rear laser, and then, as the weapon vanished in a white-hot flare of vaporizing metal, he walked the fire up the enemy 'Mech's back.

  "Alex!" came Davis Clay's cry over the tactical link. "Alex! I'm burning!"

  "Punch out!" Alex yelled back. The Wolfhound was trying to turn to bring its full battery of front-mounted laser weaponry to bear on the Archer, but Alex kept the ARC-4M moving, circling the damaged WLF as quickly as it could turn. An explosion tore access panels from the Wolfhound's side, sending them dancing and spinning across the wreckage-littered floor of the arroyo.

  "Alex! Help me!"

  But Alex was too far gone in the blood-lust of battle. The Wolfhound filled his vision, his mind, its flame-wreathed form shimmering beneath the lash of his lasers as he moved closer. Slowly, reluctantly, the other 'Mech collapsed, dropping to its knees. Smoke was curling from seams and openings as sparks jittered and flashed in the shadowy, wire-packed recesses revealed by the blown panels. Abruptly, a curved sheath of armor slid back on the machine's sloping head; there was a flash, and then the Wolfhound's pilot was rocketing clear of the open cockpit, his seat trailing a column of yellow-white flame. The WLF-2 balanced there for a moment; then, as the pilot's chute opened, another internal explosion pitched it to the ground with a ragged crash.

  Only then did Alex turn to check on Davis....

  The Shadow Hawk was on fire, with black, oily smoke spilling from a crater in the 'Mech's chest just below the cockpit spaces, and orange flames licking about the machine's upper torso. "Davis!"

  He started toward his Mead's Shadow Hawk just as a fireball blossomed from the 'Mech's interior, and the right arm spun clear, trailing smoke from its half-molten stump. The fire spread. Alex couldn't be sure what was burning; possibly the Hawk's power plant had ruptured and ignited the tungsten-steel struts and internal bracings. Even steel will burn when the temperature is high enough....

  "Davis!" he yelled. "Punch out! Punch out, damn it! Punch out!"

  The only reply was a shrill scream of raw agony, ragged in his neurohelmet headset.

  In seconds, Alex reached the Hawk, which stood immobile now, burning furiously. His own heat was still high, and this close to that inferno it would go higher still, but he ignored it, trying to figure out some way to stifle the flames, to rescue his friend.

  "Davis!"

  The screaming stopped. There was a long and death-still silence, punctuated by the roar of flames, the hum of Alex's instruments, the shrill ping of overheated metal.

  "Davis! Do you read me? Come in!"

  Or, rather, the outward screams, the screams coming to Alex over his taclink, had stopped.

  But he could hear them still in his mind, going on and on and on....

  1

  The Residence, Dunkeld

  Glengarry, Skye March

  Federated Commonwealth

  0275 Hours, 10 March 3057

  With a shout to rival the screams echoing in his mind, Alexander Carlyle came full awake. He was sitting upright in bed ... in his bed, in his quarters within the Residence, the ancient, hilltop structure that the Legion had converted to a planetary defense facility and home base fortress. His sheets were soaked, his naked body coated with a clammy sheen of sweat. Trembling, he slumped back onto his pillow, eyes wide and staring up into the darkness. Sleep, he knew from past experience, would not return to him anytime soon, nor did he relish the thought of the dreams that were certain to return.

  "Computer!" he called into the darkness. "Lights!"

  Obediently, the wallscreen displays came up, illuminating the room. Decorated in Glengarry's early colonial period, the bare, ferrocrete walls were covered over with thin vidscreen panels that could show real-time imagery from high atop the castle ramparts, or any desired recvid in the base archives. At the moment, they played a simple, mindless light show of interpenetrating shapes and colors, a design in greens and blues by Tomo, the twenty-fifth century New Edinburgh master, that was intended to be restful.

  To Alex, it felt as though he were trapped underwater, that at any moment he would drown. "Computer," he said. "Normal lighting."

  The Tomo designs faded away to a soft, warm light, balanced to match the normal daytime illumination of Glengarry's orange sun. Swinging his legs out of the bed, Alex rose and padded barefoot across the room to the master terminal. "Computer, voice connect, MedTech Jamison," he said, sliding into the chair. "Negative vid."

  A window opened in the portion of the vidscreen above the terminal, but it remained blank save for the word "Connecting" flashing on and off. The flashing went on for some time, longer than Alex had expected, before the word was replaced with a new legend. "Connection established. Negative vid."

  "What is it?" came a woman's voice over the room's speaker system. Her tone was brusque and not a little annoyed.

  "Ellen?" Alex asked. "Alex. Did I wake you?"

  There was a moment's pause. "It's oh-two-seventy local and you ask me if you woke me up?"

  "Sorry. I ... I thought you had the duty tonight."

  "Watson's on tonight." The annoyance faded somewhat, swallowed in the sound of a yawn. "What's the matter? The dream again?"

  "I can't sleep, Ellen." Slowly, almost unwillingly, Alex looked down at his hands. They were still shaking, a faint, barely perceptible trembling that was completely beyond his control. "I'm having trouble sleeping," he finished, unhappy with his lame response.

  "I'll be right down."

  "No, listen. Patch me through to Watson. I'm really sorry I woke you up."

  "I'm up. I'm up. Ten minutes to get some clothes on."

  The screen's legend shifted to "Transmission ended."

  Rising from the chair, Alex glanced down at himself. One year after Halidon, four months after the savage and desperate guerrilla campaign that had followed, and his torso was still so lean and stringy that he could count his ribs.

  He decided he'd better put something on as well. Being a MedTech, Ellen Jamison wasn't prudish about male nudity, but Alex didn't want her to think he'd rousted her out of bed in the middle of the night for anything more than a chemical sedative. A word to the computer unfolded his closet access, and a few moments later he was wearing a jumpsuit, dark gray and short-sleeved, with the gray-on
-red skull emblem of the Gray Death Legion.

  The dream ...

  Again ...

  The Glengarry campaign had begun over a year ago, with the revolt of Skye separatists against the Federated Commonwealth. Colonel Grayson Death Carlyle, Alex's celebrated father, had passed temporary command of the Gray Death Legion to his son, with orders to keep the peace on the FedCom world of Glengarry.

  Command? Yeah, right. With old-time 'Mech vets like Davis McCall, Hassan Ali Khaled, and Charles Bear in the unit, his stint as regimental commander had been more of a training simulation, with a whole company of instructors to grade his performance.

  Unlike those of a simulation, though, the battles, the suffering, and the deaths had been all too real. At Halidon, the Legion had suffered a sharp and bitter defeat. Alex's charge against the vanguard of the rebel pursuers at Ryco Pass was credited with saving the Legion, but at a terrible personal price for Alex. And after that, seven long months of guerrilla warfare, of hit-and-run strikes against the rebel forces who'd occupied Glengarry's population centers. In particular, there'd been a bitter campaign against the enemy's supply lines, concentrating on Glengarry's maglev network.

  But where the rebels had access to the factories and machine shops and other high-tech privileges of power, each loss the Legion suffered was irretrievable. Fresh recruits had dwindled to a trickle as the rebel government had tightened its grip on Glengarry's civilian population. New 'Mechs and the parts to keep the old ones running were scavenged from battlefields ... or the Legion had done without. It had been the most bitter and unrelenting of all types of warfare, a guerrilla conflict that the rebels would win if they could bring the Legion to bay, just once forcing a stand-up fight....

  It had been, from start to finish, an assignment seemingly calculated to test the young Carlyle's performance under pressure and his ability to accept the responsibility that went with command.

  "You have a responsibility to your people, to the men and women who look to you for leadership." So spoke the normally taciturn Charles Bear, just before Killiecrankie Pass, and the concluding action of the long Glengarry campaign. Bear, a legend within the mercenary community, was a third-generation Mech Warrior from Tau Ceti II who, like McCall and Khaled, had been among the first to join Alex's father almost thirty years ago, when the Gray Death Legion was first being organized. He'd been in secluded retirement on Glengarry, until he'd heard about the desperate straits the Legion was in. His appearance at Killiecrankie, and in particular the morale boost generated simply through his unexpected arrival, just might have been what turned the tide at last in the Legion's favor. Responsibility.

  Yeah, it had been Alex's responsibility that Davis Clay had died horribly, trapped in the cockpit of his burning Shadow Hawk at Halidon. It had been his responsibility that Hassan Ali Khaled had been badly wounded at the fight in Lochabar Forest, six months later.

  Hell, it had been his responsibility, from first to last, that the Gray Death Legion had suffered over sixty percent casualties on Glengarry by the time his father had finally arrived to lift the siege and rescue him.

  Sixty percent casualties ...

  It was a grim and bloody statistic, and not one that spoke well of his handling of the campaign. It was all the worse, in Alex's opinion, that somehow or other he'd been painted as a hero, the man who'd held the Legion together and kept the Fourth Skye Guard rebels off balance until the relief force could arrive. Truthfully, the rebels had been in nearly as bad a shape as the Gray Death by the time the balance of the Legion's "Old Guard" and the famous Northwind Highlanders had arrived. Alex's campaign against the maglev lines had been remarkably successful.

  But at what a horrible, at what a damnable cost. Alex knew well what the people who called him the "Hero of Glengarry" did not—that Bear and Khaled and the other old-timers of the Legion had propped him up in his command and covered his mistakes, that he was not ready for the pressures of that command and probably never would be.

  A chime sounded.

  "Enter."

  Ellen Jamison was a tough, attractive brunette, a skilled MedTech, one of the recruits who'd joined Alex's fugitive forces during the rebellion. She'd started out visiting Alex's men at their hideout in the heavily forested Glencoe Highlands, bringing antibiotics and bandages, and treating the more serious injuries with a portable medkit. After rebels had killed her husband and eight-year-old son and burned her home, she'd signed on with the Legion permanently.

  One section of the vidscreen wall slid open and she walked through. In one hand she carried a slender circlet of black plastic, the kind designed to be worn around the head, with a hand-controller attached by wires. "So. Restless night?"

  "I guess so." Alex nodded toward the device in her hand. "What's that?"

  "Electronic sedative." She held it up for his inspection. "Modulates your alpha waves and passes the neural messages that lower adrenaline production, ease muscular tension, and generally help you relax."

  He frowned. "I was hoping for something a little stronger."

  "What, pills? You know my feelings about that."

  Ellen was notorious for her dislike of any chemical cure even remotely addictive, physically or psychologically. "Well—"

  "Or sex? I can't help you there, I'm afraid."

  "I didn't mean—"

  "Oh, it's not that you're unattractive," she continued in a matter-of-fact tone as she unwrapped the wiring to the headset. She gestured for him to lie back on his bed. "Quite the contrary, in fact. But it wouldn't do to flaunt a relationship like that in front of the men and women of your command."

  "I'm not interested in sex, MedTech," Alex said bluntly. "I just want to get some sleep."

  "This is the ticket, then." Standing by his bed, she slipped the circlet over his head and made some adjustments to the fittings. "Though I wonder ... How's Caitlin these days?"

  "Caitlin? What does she have to do with it?"

  "You said you weren't interested in sex. I was wondering whether that was a symptom of your depression or if you'd had a fight with Caitlin."

  "Depression?" He shook his head. Conversations with Ellen Jamison tended to be jerky, confused exchanges. The lady had a lightning-quick mind that could jump and veer unpredictably. "What depression?"

  She was closely studying the readouts on the hand contrailer and making subtle adjustments to a rheostat knob. Alex could feel the tingle of a current flowing through contacts in the circlet. "A thousand years ago," she told him, "you likely would have been diagnosed as suffering from shell shock or combat fatigue. 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,' or 'PTSD,' was the clinical term for the condition. It means you've seen too much, suffered too much, and your mind is telling you to curl up in a tight little ball and let the universe go to hell."

  "I thought that was cowardice." Alex was surprised at how bitter the words sounded in his own ears.

  "That too. Combat does terrible things to a person. Especially if he lets himself feel too much. It can turn a strong man into an emotional cripple. It can knock every prop of decency and social protocol out from under you and leave you unable to trust or believe in anyone, not even those closest to you. It can make you withdraw so completely from reality that everybody else thinks you're a coward ... or catatonic. Modern-day warfare, especially—in spite of all the conventions and the courtly formalities—will chew up a man's soul in no time at all. I think that's because it pits frail, unprotected human beings against twelve-meter BattleMechs. Man against killer machine, you know? Only the man doesn't have a prayer of survival, not unless he's part machine himself."

  The circlet was humming softly now, though Alex found himself unable to concentrate on the sound. He was feeling more relaxed, yet sleep was the last thing on his mind.

  Sleep was where the nightmares awaited him, and he couldn't face that. Not yet.

  "You're saying I should be more like a machine? Lose my emotions? My feelings?"

  "Of course not. But you might have to do some har
d self-evaluation about whether or not you're cut out to be a MechWarrior. Even heroes have to retire sometime."

  "Heroes." The single, sharp word was almost a curse, an indictment of the events that had placed him where he was.

  "You're the Hero of Glengarry. Or had you forgotten?"

  "No. I remember. All too well. I'm finding it kind of hard to live up to the role."

  "Nothing surprising there."

  "It wasn't me that held the Legion together during the campaign, Ellen. You know that. You were there."

  "Seems to me you did all right."

  "Seems to me I was being propped up by Major McCall and most of the other old-timers in the regiment. Half the time I never even knew what I was doing."

  "I'm not a military person, Alex. I wouldn't know a flank march from a flank steak, well done. But it seems to me that any good military commander is going to rely on his more experienced subordinates for advice ... and maybe even to jerk his tail out of the fire once in a while. You held the Legion together until the relief force arrived."

  "Until my father arrived, you mean." Storming out of the sky at Inverurie ... DropShips laden with fresh 'Mechs. And how the survivors of the Legion had gone wild at the sight, knowing that the Carlyle had returned!