Текст книги " The Price of Glory"

Автор книги: Уильям Кейт

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"And the Marik troops aren't going to be satisfied if they pick up just a handful of us. I would ... I would ..." He paused, momentarily unable to continue. He was no longer trying only to rally his people. These words came from the core of his own heart and will.

When Grayson found his voice again, it was quiet with certainty. "I would turn myself in to Colonel Langsdorf this afternoon if I thought that act would set the rest of you free. But they aren't going to leave it at that. They've convinced the Inner Sphere that we are murderers, renegades, bloody-handed monsters . . . and they won't be content until we are hunted down and exterminated.

"And even if we could get offworld, past the Marik troops, out of Marik space . . . could we live out there among the stars with the reputation they've branded on us. We are the Legion.Our name, our reputation . . . those are as much a part of who we are as our eyes and hands. If we lose that, as a unit or as individuals, we are crippled!”

He paused again, searching among the faces below him. From the altitude of a Marauder'scockpit, it was hard to read individual expressions. What he could see was Lori almost directly below and in front of him, and she was smiling. McCall was next to her, grinning, too. Sharyl looked grimly determined. Tracy Kent looked drained, pale and expressionless. Khaled appeared as motionless as a statute, and as cold. Clay's face was unreadable as ever, but his hands clenched and unclenched rhythmically at his sides.

"I am not ordering you to stay," Grayson continued. "Any of you, anyof you who want to can go, with no restraint and no bad feelings. As long as Langsdorf has some kind of unified force to chase after, he'll probably leave you alone. Perhaps you can eventually pick up your lives offworld. Perhaps you can find a home for yourself, here. Helm is a good world ... a place for a good life. If that is your choice, I sincerely wish you well.

"But the regiment will not disband!The regimentwill prepare to break camp and move out. Tonight!" Grayson's gaze swept the ranks again. No one moved or spoke. The only sound was the rustle of wind among the leaves of the trees.

"I need volunteers for a special mission tonight, one that will give the rest of the unit a chance to get away. If you're interested, speak with your team leaders. The rest of you . . . you who are staying, pack your things and prepare to move at dark." He paused and swept the group with his eyes once more.

"That is all."

Normally, it would have been up to Ramage to take his cue from Grayson by smartly swinging about-face to give the order to dismiss. With Ramage still unconscious, Grayson did it himself.

" Reg'ment. . . dis . . . MISS!"

There was no movement among the ranks. Not a man or a woman moved in all those ranks upon ranks.

Somewhere, off to Grayson's left, a thin, reedy voice rose in song, trembling, though whether in fear or emotion, Grayson couldn't tell.

Home is the Regiment, across the sea of stars . . .Another voice, a deep bass picked up the tune.

On worlds hot, on worlds cold,

where Warriors tread afar.

Though place of birth and family,

though loved ones all be lost,

Home is the Regiment, across the sea of stars.

 

Then they were all singing it, the entire regiment together, the song buoyed by a surge of emotion that swelled and rose, sweeping the Legion forward, together.

Home is the Regiment, though warriors travel far.

They cannot take our home from us,

our home is where we are!

With brothers under arms we share

a bond that draws us where

Home is the Regiment, across the sea of stars.

Home is the Regiment, the price of glory high.

We stand with brothers at our sides

to pay that price, and die!

The blood of comrades cries to us

long after glory's past:

“Home is the Regiment, across the sea of stars.”

Home is the Regiment, in honor's proud refrain—

blood brothers forged together as

drawn steel quenched in flame!

They stand by us in blood and fire

and share with us the cry:

"Home is the regiment, our family and our own!"

 

Then the song was gone, and there was only the rustle of wind among the leaves. The regiment remained for another full minute, then gradually dissolved, its members breaking away toward the tents, alone or in small groups.

But Grayson knew that the regiment remained.

19

The mobile headquarters rested just off the ferrocrete roadway ten kilometers south of Helmdown, its parabolic antenna trained on an invisible point in the sky above the southern horizon. During the days of the old Star League, mobile headquarters trucks had been built with small but highly efficient fusion power plants beneath their forward cabs. There were probably still a few fusion trucks scattered here and there across the worlds of Man. The majority were like this one, however, its fusion core removed centuries before to replace some light 'Mech's damaged power plant. In its place was a rattling, clanking monster of an aging, twin gas turbine-charged internal combustion diesel. Vent stacks crudely welded along the armor belched volumes of sooty black smoke as the driver gunned the engine. Above the cab, the low turret mounting a single Hesperus B3M medium laser slowly traversed the horizon.

At the rear of the long, heavy, eight-wheeled trailer, a door swung open between a pair of armed sentries standing watch, dropping a shaft of white light into the night and across the gravel on the ground. A lone man in a tattered jacket stepped down the ramp, returned the sentries' salute, stood for a moment staring out into the darkness, then began to walk forward past the trailer. The door closed behind him, chopping off the rectangular pool of light.

A Thunderbolt,brutal scars still marring its right arm and shoulder and the heavy laser mounted along the outer forearm armor plate, turned at the man's motion, then resumed its patrol of the area. An Archerstood guard on the far side of the trailer, silent and unmoving. The air stank with the foul miasma of the diesels, and the night trembled under their heavy rumble.

Grayson lay on his stomach in the dark, his black-painted face and hands and black Special Ops uniform invisible within the shadowy foliage from only a few meters away. A whisper of movement stirred next to him. Lori placed her mouth close to his ear, but her words were scarcely more than a subvocal murmured. "Only two 'Mechs. Six sentries. No patrols."

He nodded, letting her sense the motion in the dark. Their assault force had taken nearly three hours to creep into position at this spot, ringing the huge mobile headquarters van. They had taken special care to make sure that enemy PBIs—ground infantry—had not been deployed as roving patrols and to identify the locations of any sentries with absolute precision. Lori's report meant that the last scout had reported in. Six sentries, two 'Mechs, and no patrols, at least none out at the moment.

It was time to move.

Mobile headquarters vans were frequent fixtures with regiment-sized units, though some regimental commanders, such as Grayson himself, preferred to lead their regiments from the pilot's seat of a BattleMech. Certainly, a mobile headquarters gave a skilled tactical commander a valuable tool in conducting a battle or a campaign. Colonel Langsdorf, it seemed, commanded both ways: from his Warhammerwhen engaged in relatively small, localized actions, or from his headquarters truck when conducting a far-flung, widely dispersed operation. Langsdorf's search for the Gray Death Legion was becoming frantic in its intensity.

Using Davis McCall's D2j tracker patched into an amplifier salvaged in Helmfast's ruins, Gray Death communications Techs had picked up radar signals from a high-speed multiple source rapidly inbound toward Helm. A new, higher volume of radio traffic suggested that Langsdorf's superiors were even now decelerating for a landing on Helm. Perhaps they included Lord Garth himself. If that were true, Langsdorf's activity on the ground could mean a last-ditch attempt to capture or destroy the rest of the Gray Death before the Duke's arrival.

Grayson began to crawl forward, his passage leaving little trace as he crept toward the rear of the van. As per plan, he crawled to a point some twenty meters from the ramp, then froze in position. Around him, behind him, he sensed more than heard the sounds of other raiders moving into position.

Seconds dragged.

Any sudden motion would be detected by the motion sensors of the twin BattleMech guards. Any closer, and the infrared sensors on board the 'Mechs would pick up the raiders, despite the special clothing and paint that helped cut down their body-heat signatures on an IR screen. Scarcely daring to breathe, they waited in the darkness.

Grayson had explained that the raid was necessary, vital, in fact, if the Gray Death Legion was to have a chance of getting away. If they could somehow destroy this mobile headquarters that their scouts had spotted moving south from Helmdown that afternoon, the enemy's pursuit of the Legion could be hopelessly complicated. With luck, they might even catch Langsdorf here, though the Marik Colonel seemed to spend less time in the headquarters truck than he did in the field in his Warhammer.If they could catch him, though, they might be able to bargain with his second-in-command, to win time enough for a fair hearing, or a confrontation with their accusers.

There had been no shortage of volunteers after Grayson's speech from his Marauderat the Araga River. The problems did not begin until he had begun choosing who would go. He had ruled out any of the MechWarriors, insisting that they were not expendable and that this mission would very likely result in heavy casualties.

But Grayson nevertheless found himself facing a minor mutiny, one led, he suspected, by Lori Kalmar, but enthusiastically supported by David McCall and the other men and women of A Company. They told Grayson bluntly that if he were going to be considered expendable, then they allwere expendable and they allwere going on the raid. It had taken an hour of argument before Grayson would relent. He would lead the dangerous raid, but the warriors of A Company would join him, along with thirty troops chosen from among the ranks of Ramage's Special Ops force.

Now they waited near their target, motionless, soundless, listening to the raucous mixture of shouts and song that carried across the compound even above the rumble of the van's twin diesels.

The Thunderboltseemed to stiffen, its upper torso rotating slightly as it zeroed in on the sound. The heavy 'Mech's left arm came up, zeroing in on the noise, the stubby twin barrels of its paired Voelkers 200 machine guns protruding slightly above the steel-armored wrist. Light spilled from a searchlight mounted above the Thunderbolt'scockpit, glaring into the darkness. Grayson and his comrades were careful not to look at the light or what lay in its beam. They could not afford to ruin their night vision.

Grayson didn't need to look because he knew what the searchlight had caught. Three men wove their way arm-in-arm toward the van. They sang drunkenly at the tops of their voices, and clutched half-empty bottles in hands draped across each other's shoulders.

"Halt!" The amplified voice from theThunderbolt'spilot boomed into the darkness. "Halt where you are!"

"Hey . . . ya wanna drink?" came the reply. The voice was that of Sergeant Burns.

"Aye, ye grand, fell Laddie!" There was no mistaking thatvoice "Ye'll be wantin' jes' a wee li'le drop ae scotch tae warm ye, an' we'd be aye honoredi' . . ."

"What the devil? Captain, you'd better come and ..." The pilot's voice boomed puzzlement before he realized his external speakers were still on. He cut them off. Grayson moved his head slightly. With one eye tightly closed, he risked a look toward the spotlit men.

Sergeant Burns, Sergeant Clay, and MechWarrior Mccall stood side by side, blinking into the light. They were unarmed, were not even wearing knives, but they had on the slightly baggy fatigues common to technical personnel in the military forces of all the Successor States. They were the very image of a trio of astechs who had gone out to share a bottle and then wandered back to camp, roaring drunk and barely able to stand.

The door at the back of the van opened, spilling light onto the gravel once more. Two men stepped down onto the ramp, the light silhouetting them against the brilliance.

Grayson came to his feet, his TK assault rifle held high, his booted feet pounding against the gravel. Lori, Lieutenant Khaled, Mech Warrior Bear, Alard King, and the others in the assault group followed close behind, flying toward the open door.

The two men in the light turned at the sound of running feet. One groped for a holstered weapon. The other gasped and jumped back into the van. The sentries on either side of the door brought their weapons down, but the man drawing his pistol on the ramp partly blocked their fire.

Grayson's TK thuttered as silenced, 3 mm caseless slivers spat from the heavy barrel. One sentry's face vanished in a trio of tiny, searing explosions as soft metal and high explosives impacted in flesh and bone. The man with the pistol shrieked and kicked back as explosive rounds chopped across his chest and arm. The second sentry plunged off the ramp, his submachine gun firing wildly into the night.

Lori's SMG stammered in her hands, picking up the second sentry and spinning him back against the trailer hull. In the same moment, the Thunderboltswung ponderously around to face this new disturbance. A fractional instant later, a small, furiously burning projectile arced from the woods, exploding the air ten meters short of the Thunderbolt.The explosion grew, unfolding in liquid flame that washed across the Thunderbolt'supper hull, Inferno rounds are designed to explode halfway to their target, spraying it with a concentrated fuel mixture that burns at a temperature sufficient to melt alloyed steel. The "drunken technicians—" Clay, McCall, and Burns-had unlocked arms and ran for cover the instant the inferno round shrieked over their heads.

The night on the north side of the trailer also lit up as a second inferno round bathed the Archerin living flame.

Between twin fountains of radiance, Grayson and the others raced up the ramp.

The door at the end of the van was closing; once closed, there would be no way to open it without heavy cutting tools or a 'Mech's laser, neither of which they had at the moment. More even than the Marik officers inside the headquarters van, time was their enemy now. Grayson ran faster. The door, swinging shut, fouled on one of the bodies at the top of the ramp, giving Grayson the instant he needed to plunge through into the lighted interior.

A sergeant rose from a communications console, a pistol already in his hand. Two communications technicians sat behind him, their faces frozen in fear. At the far end of the narrow, instrument-crowded room, a Marik officer was heading for the massive steel door that led to the forward chamber of the van.

Grayson's TK bucked and hissed again, spraying the room with death and destruction. The sergeant pitched back into a console, smoke and blood boiling from the pulsing hole in his chest. Grayson was past him before he fell, was past the technicians before they could even react. The Marik officer at the far end of the van was opening the steel-armored hatch there. If he got through and sealed it, the raiders would be isolated in this rear portion of the trailer. Yet, if there was a chance to capture the van's inner sanctum, this was it.

The Marik officer stepped through, the door closing behind him. Still running, Grayson swung his TK over his head and hurled it spinning end for end down the length of the room. It clattered across the low sill between the two chambers, and the heavy door smashed down on it. Plastic splintered and the massive sound suppressor barrel bent, but the door jammed open. An instant later, he was at the door, hauling back on it with his bare hands. King was beside him, adding his strength to the effort. The door cleared the smashed rifle, then swung open.

Gunfire barked from the inner chamber. Lori's submachine gun fired past King and Grayson, shell casings from her weapon ringing against consoles and across the waffle-molded steel deck. Then Bear pushed past her, his own submachine gun looking like a toy in one of his massive hands.

"Gray!" Grayson had not heard such shock and surprise in Lori's voice before. He squeezed past the half-open door and joined Lori and Bear inside the inner room.

It was a smaller room than the rear part of the headquarters, with fewer instruments. A planning and conference table dominated one end. On three bulkheads, there were wall-sized, fully-color, satellite-projection computer displays showing the entire area from north of the Aragayan Mountains to the Vermillion Plains beyond the Nagayan Mountains in the south, and from the Gro-don Sea to the west to the Dead Sea Flats to the east. Computer terminals glowed, their screens crowded with words. A Marik Lieutenant lay sprawled on the floor, cut down by Lori's gunfire.

Lori stood there above the body now, her gun leveled on a second officer cowering against the far wall of the room. Grayson knew from the uniform that this was the man he had first seen outside, and whom he had chased back through the trailer. His eyes widened in shocked recognition.

"Graff!"

"Don't . . . kill me! Carlyle! Don't kill me! I'm valuable to you!"

Bear reached one massive first forward and easily plucked Graff from the deck as though he were a bundle of rags.

"Don't hurt him," Grayson said. "Bring him!"

King and Khaled were in the outer room with a half-dozen of Ramage's Special Ops people. Grayson recognized Janice Taylor under layers of camouflage paint. Lieutenant DeVillar and a Legion infantry-man came through the door, each lugging three canvas satchels. Each satchel held ten kilos of plastic explosives and a set of fulminate of mercury detonators.

Grayson gestured at the two technicians who still sat in their chairs, their fingers carefully interlaced on the tops of their heads. "You Techs," Grayson said. "Out!

If you stop running any time in the next five minutes, you're dead!" The two squeezed past the Legion troops, their hands still above their heads. Grayson heard their booted feet break into a run as soon as they touched the metal ramp outside.

"O.K. Everybody out except the explosives people! Bear! You take Graff! Mind the 'Mechs outside!"

DeVillar was already placing each satchel of explosives where it would do the most good, and running long wires clipped to the fuses from bag to bag. The man had been a mining engineer long before becoming the commander of the Gray Death's B Company, and professed to know something about explosives. This, Grayson had told him, was his chance to prove it.

A long burst of machine gun fire sounded distantly from outside, followed by the keening hiss of 'Mech laser fire. The inferno rounds fired at the two 'Mechs would not be enough to disable them. The hope was that the clinging, liquid fire would distract the pilots for the few moments that Grayson's raiders needed to complete their mission. Precious seconds had been lost already, chasing and catching Graff. But if they could get himback to camp, it would be worth it!

The hollow thunk of bullets striking armor rang through the van. Within seconds, the two 'Mechs would have their fires under control, and the Legion people firing infernos at them would be out of ammo. Marik infantry must be in the area already. They had to go now!

Grayson hurried to the van's forward room. Time to go or not, something was nagging him about the map display he had seen there. He studied the maps for several long seconds. The Legion had no up-to-date satellite scans of the area, had nothing, in fact, but old hardcopy maps of the land south of Durandel to the Nagayan Mountains. His hope was to force-march the Legion by night, starting the following night, travelling across the Dead Sea Flats and reaching the Nagayan Mountains before sun-up. In the Nagayans, they might be able to elude their pursuers a while longer, for the land there was broken with wild, forested stretches, isolated glacial valleys, and rugged passes. If they could confound their pursuers by destroying this mobile headquarters, then make the trip in a single night, they just might be able to buy some time.

A current satellite scan, complete with computer enhancement, would help.

Reaching a decision, Grayson sat down at one of the terminals. He was skilled with computers ever since his days as a teenaged apprentice with his father's mercenary company. The computer was an Omnistar 4000, a standard-military issue type that took both keyboard and voice input. He had worked with them often before, and so he sat down and rapidly began to type.

"Colonel!" DeVillar's voice came from the next room. "Colonel! She's ready to blow!"

"Don't light her off yet," Grayson said, still typing furiously.

The Lieutenant stuck his head through the inner door. "Colonel, we've got to go now!"

Grayson punched a final key, then waited. The map projections on the wall screens winked off, plunging the room into complete darkness except for the glow from the terminal displays. A slotted box nearby bleeped, and a narrow memory clip rose from the slot with a slight whir.

"Right!" Grayson grabbed the clip and turned to face DeVillar. "Let's go!"

Grayson left the van first. DeVillar pulled the igniter ring on one of the satchels, and followed.

Outside the Thunderboltburned furiously against the night. Gunfire lanced among the trees, and here and there, the still, bloodied forms of dead men sprawled in the wierdly flickering light of the flames. The Archerhad doused the fires that had fallen on it, and was now sweeping the woods with laser fire, the beams blue-white and sun-brilliant in the darkness. Perhaps its pilot did not realize that Legion troopers had broken into the headquarters van, for the 'Mech's back was to the van and its pilot was directing his fire toward the woods to the north, in the direction from which the inferno rounds had come.

The Thunderboltstill burned, the fire roaring across its already damaged right arm and shoulder, flaring hotter and brighter as each move force-fed the flaming fuel with more oxygen. In the woods to the south, Legion troops fired with machine guns and small arms, plinking useless rounds against that thick-armored hide in an effort to distract its attention away from the trailer close beside it.

It almost worked. The gunfire from the woods ceased when Grayson and DeVillar burst from the rear of the van. The Thunderboltthrashed around to its left, then paused as its pilot caught sight of two men racing through the half-light away from the headquarters. From the corner of his eye, Grayson caught a glimpse of the left arm coming up, caught sight of those twin barrels embedded in the armor above the battle machine's wrist.

Then the Thunderbolt'spaired machine guns were firing, licking the air around them with tracers that danced and wavered into the woods ahead. Grayson and DeVillar threw themselves face down as the Thunderboltdescended on them from behind. Grayson rolled over, looking up at death. The Thunderbolt'sfire was almost out now, and there were no more inferno rounds coming in. Bullets whanged and keened off the armor from the south as soldiers tried futilely to turn the machine. It took another step, towering into the night, machine guns levelling for a second, final burst.