“We won, Geoff.” Taggart’s voice over the comm sounded like he was close to tears of relief. “By God, we beat them.”
Geoff hit the all-band transmit key. “Excaliburs,” he said, “you fought like hell today. I owe you all my life. Thank you.” He switched to the DropShip channel. “Carla, you there?”
“Here, Colonel.”
“Send out some squads to capture the surviving Com Guards. Keep the officer prisoners separate from each other. Don’t let them even see each other. That’s key.”
She didn’t question the strange order. “Roger that.”
Geoff let his head slump into his hands. Feeling the pressure finally lift from him, at the end of the hardest day of fighting in his life, he let himself shake with sobs.
Geoff entered the makeshift cell alone. Even handcuffed to a chair, this Blake’s Wrath officer looked imposingly strong. Some kind of body builder.
“Adept St. Jamais,” Geoff said. “Is that right? Cameron St. Jamais?”
The Com Guard nodded, holding his evident fury in check.
“This is your lucky day, Adept. One Com Guard officer will be making the trip back to the Inner Sphere with us. If you cooperate, it could be you.”
St. Jamais was silent.
“We’ll be moving within the line of communication with your JumpShip soon. All I need you to do is lie to them. Tell them the strike force is returning in your DropShips. We’ll take care of the rest. No one on the JumpShip will survive to implicate you, I promise.”
“None of that matters,” said St. Jamais. “The guardians of Blake will catch and kill whoever turns against us.”
“How will they know who that is? Do you know which of your fellow officers survived the fight, and which died in their ‘Mechs?”
Again St. Jamais glared back in silence.
“I respect the plan behind your attack,” said Geoff. “Hire some pirates to play as religious fanatics, draw us deeper into the Periphery so that when your ambush was sprung, no one would know it was ComStar who killed the Excaliburs. It took real skill. I think you have the skills to disappear in the Inner Sphere. Or you could die here, if you prefer.”
“Go to hell, Kenner.”
Geoff chuckled. “Not today.”
One MechWarrior and one surviving DropShip officer ended up volunteering. Geoff decided to maroon the others on the nameless planet. “I can’t order the troops to execute them,” he told John.
Taggart nodded. “Perhaps they’ll be rescued, perhaps not. There’ll be plenty of killing to do on the JumpShip, anyway. There’s no avoiding that.”
Geoff saw the Excalibur infantry leading Adept St. Jamais across the broken battlefield to the holding tent. St. Jamais met his gaze. Geoff could tell he would not forget what happened here.
“Call me a coward,” said Geoff, “but I hope they aren’t rescued.”
The ComStar Star Lord JumpShip loomed outside the viewport now.
Sinclair nodded to Geoff’s inquiring look. “Fire teams are ready at the entryway.”
He pointed to the Com Guard DropShip officer, who opened a channel to the Star Lord. “Ready for final docking sequence.”
The request was acknowledged, and the Fortress, with its crew of Excalibur infantry, settled into the docking ring. Geoff held tight to the arms of his seat as the ship shuddered.
“Mixing atmospheres now,” the Com Guard captive said. His voice was admirably calm. “Airlock checks out A-OK.”
Geoff reclined in his seat and closed his eyes, as if to shut out the world, while the sounds of small arms fire began to echo through the DropShip. One last massacre, and then this battle would be truly over.
BLACK EARTH
On their long journey home, the Excaliburs began calling the captured Com Guard Fortress Mordred, after King Arthur’s legendary enemy. Geoff’s family met him at the bottom of the ship’s ramp when it finally touched down.
He embraced Jake and Dan, then took Nini into his arms.
She looked up at the Fortress. “You keep stealing ships from our old bosses.”
“They keep trying to kill us.”
“How bad was it?”
He didn’t feel capable of describing the horror of the battle. Instead he retreated to statistics. “Nineteen MechWarriors lost, and eleven of Carla’s troopers. Equipment-wise, it was probably a net profit. John’s battalion will need replenishing, but we captured all the Com Guard ‘Mechs that were under repairs, in addition to the ones we salvaged. It’s quite a haul. Pillagers, Cestuses, Royal models… even a Level II unit of Kanga jump tanks. Rumor always said Blake’s Wrath got top-shelf equipment. I guess it was true. The DropShips are all damaged and will need heavy refit, but once that’s done, we’ll have one hell of a transport fleet.”
“And one hell of a target on our backs.”
Geoff shrugged. “No more than before. They tried this ambush plan because it was a way of killing some of us while convincing the survivors that they didn’t do it. They won’t try again unless they think they can get away with it.”
Geoff met Carla Sinclair at the quartermaster’s station, in the shadow of the Mammoth-class DropShip Jakarta, just arrived from Outreach. He wanted her to see the new equipment he’d ordered from Blackwell.
A Marauder II, just unloaded, was slowly lumbering across the pad toward the ‘Mech gantries. The ‘Mech was beautiful, but seeing a Marauder expanded to a third again its normal size seemed to distort Geoff’s sense of scale. He kept having to blink.
“Quite a machine,” said Carla.
Geoff nodded. “They’ve just started selling to other mercenaries, aside from Jamie Wolf’s old friends who’ve had dibs on the design for years. I couldn’t say no.”
“I’m sure they’ll make you proud.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m proud of right now,” said Geoff. He held his hand out to her, palm open so she could see that it held a major’s rank insignia. “You and your troops, Carla. You saved us all.”
She took the insignia. “A major needs a battalion, unless I’m remembering wrong.”
“You’re right. Let me show you what else we picked up from Blackwell Industries.” Geoff led her up a ramp, into one of the Mammoth’s cavernous cargo holds. Flipping on a light, Geoff illuminated a sleek-looking VTOL.
“A Kestrel,” she said. “This is a special forces chopper.”
“Against Blake’s Wrath,” Geoff said, “you proved to me what special forces could do. That’s what your troops are, Carla, and they deserved to be recognized as such. I want to recruit the best infantry in the Sphere. You can drill them in anti-‘Mech attacks. You’ll be first on the ground when we fight, our eyes and ears and our secret knife when we need it. The Trailblazer battalion.”
Sinclair ran a hand over the factory-new armor of the Kestrel VTOL. “It’s a good name for a battalion,” she admitted.