BattleTechnology's readers will remember Scheat V from our last issue, where Captain Sinclair MacCray described his experiences in a combat drop on that world in 3026. Lt. Morgan Falk, Fire Lance Leader, Company B, Daggers of Death mercenary regiment This year, in late August, Davion forces staged yet another raid on that embattled and inhospitable Kurita border world. In this issue, part of this latest struggle for Scheat V is revealed through the eyes of one of the planet's Kuritan defenders. Fire stabbed and slashed through smoke and churning clouds of dust. Another missile volley smashed into terrain already tortured by the rain of high explosive death. "Hold the line!" Captain Rodgers' cry was urgent and shrill on our tactical comlines. "Dagger Bs, rally! Rally!" We'd been separated from the Captain by a sudden rush by the Davion bastards as we were trying to fall back to our DropShip. The raid on Galtor III had gone wrong from the very start. Iannamico had died under the caress of a PPC beam early on. Shroyer was down. We wouldn't find out until after it was all over that that last laser blast at close range had penetrated his Thunderbolts cockpit screens and all but burned his eyes out of their sockets. We'd held as long as we could, but fresh Davion forces and our own losses brought our line to the breaking point. Lieutenant Falk had given the order for his lance to start pulling back... and then the whole line was folding. A pair of Davion Archers had opened up on the Captain. Falk reported seeing the Captain's Dragon go down, its legs shattered by a dozen solid missile hits, but he kept his lance moving towards the DropShips. With Davion forces surging around our flank, there wasn't a great deal more that he could do. Our Intel people decided later the Davions must have figured the Captain's 'Mech was our Company leader and marked him down, throwing a wall of BattleMechs into the wedge they'd driven between Rodgers' Dragon and the rest of US. So why did I take the initiative and lead the counterattack? God, I've wondered that often enough myself. Our attack could have failed... it should have failed, but maybe it succeeded simply because the Davions thought they had us on the run and weren't looking for anything as foolhardy as an allout attack. I gathered what was left of my own Recon Lance, yelled over the taccom for everyone else in range to join me, and charged. The Davion thrust wavered, then melted back. The field was thick with smoke, and it could be they thought we were the vanguard of a regiment or two of reinforcements. We pushed through to the Captain's last reported position, wondering if we were in time. Almost... almost we weren't. We lumbered into that battle-torn meadow and surprised a Davion Marauder hammering away at Captain Rodgers' downed Dragon with one massively armored, ponderous forearm. That Davion MechWarrior took one look at the Kurita cavalry thundering down on him and turned from his prey. Cummings' Centurion had moved into the lead. I'd watched, helpless, as the Marauder leveled both forearms and triggered a double volley of PPC and laser fire which savaged the Centurion's torso and head. I opened up with my Panther's PPC. There was a wild firefight, my half dozen 'Mechs exchanging rapid-fire shots with the hulking Marauder, and then the Marauder had turned and fled and we were left in possession of that war-torn meadow. The Davion thrust was halted long enough for us to dig Rodgers out of his shattered Dragon. Or most of him. We had to leave his legs behind in the wreckage. The word from the ship's Doc going out was that even brand new legs weren't going to heal what had happened to the Captain's mind. There hadn't been enough left of Cummings to retrieve from the splintered and fire-ravaged Centurion. It was maybe a week later that the word came down from on high. I was being promoted to take the Captain's place...and the Daggers were heading for Hell-Scheat V for the uninitiated. Which explains how I came to be in command of Company B. Except it doesn't, not really. You see, Lieutenant Morgan Falk was next in line for the company's lead spot, not me. The Daggers of Death is a short regiment -- two twelve-'Mech companies under the command of Colonel Joab Keen. The Colonel runs Company A, "Dagger A," and, until he put in his down payment on a farm, Captain Rodgers ran Company B. Lieutenant Falk was Lance Leader for Dagger B's Fire Lance, while I ran the Recon Lance. Now the way seniority works in most 'Mech Companies, a new lieutenant gets his first taste of operational command in the Recon Lance, then gets promoted from there to Fire Lance. After spending some time in the Fire Lance, he's ready to move up to the Command Lance, where he gets to run both his own lance and the entire company. That was the theory, at any rate, but it rarely works out that way. No military unit can depend entirely on combat losses to dictate promotions; there's no quicker way I know to erode a team's morale. Besides, not everyone who can boss a lance of four 'Mechs has what it takes to run the whole company. I figured that's why Colonel Keen decided to bypass Falk and give the company to me. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with Falk's performance. He was a good Fire Lance leader, and a good MechWarrior... but it had been his order to his lance to fall back which had led to the general retreat on Galtor III. Maybe the fact that / ordered the counterattack instead of him had something to do with it. Maybe. Of course, if my impromptu charge had gotten itself mangled, Falk would have been the hero, and I, if I'd lived, could have been shot for errant stupidity. Did success make me right, and Morgan wrong? Not likely! God, I wonder how many command decisions throughout history have been shaped by luck, pure and simple? Right or wrong, I was the B Company boss before we set down on Scheat V. Scheat V Right: "Not one of our 'Mechs didn't have holed armor, disabled weapons, or other battle damage that needed to be righted before we went into action again." The fifth planet of Beta Pegasi is better known to the people who've been there as Hell. Its sun is a huge, bloated old red giant with the habit of throwing cosmic tantrums just when the astronomer-types think they've got him figured out. The planet is hot... and gets lots hotter when Scheat goes active. I've seen Hell's shallow, south polar seas steam in that searing heat, and war or no war, operations pretty well shut down when that happens. Believe me, BattleMechs do not go abroad when the temperature is 800 C. in the shade! Scheat V had been a BattleMech playground before. The Federated Suns dropped in just last year as a part of their so called Operation: Galahad "war games," and were soundly trounced and sent packing. For reasons known best to Hanse Davion's command staff, his Galahad '27 included a repeat of last year's performance. Why did they try it again? Hey, don't ask me. When we heard that a Davion strike force had materialized out of JumpSpace and was accelerating towards Hell, I was a brand-new Captain, fresh-promoted to the suddenly-vacant command slot of my company, scrambling to get replacements and spares for my company's 'Mechs. Believe me, when you're pulling together a combat-weary 'Mech team, you don't have the time or the energy to analyze the addled motives of Federated Suns politicians! It took all I had to get the Dagger-Bs thinking like soldiers again. We'd been beaten on Galtor III, no two ways about it. Morale was nonexistent, our esprit de corps a joke. Six of the regiment's 24 MechWarriors were dead or out of action, and not one of our 'Mechs didn't have holed armor, disabled weapons, or other battle damage that needed to be righted before we went into action again. And old "Jolly Rodgers" had always manifested sheer magic when it came to getting parts and spares out of the Draco regulars. All of us were numb after the Captain got taken out, but maybe that was what affected us the worst. You see, the Daggers are a mercenary team. Yes, the stories you hear about mercs working for House Kurita are true, mostly. There haven't been many merc units which have prospered working for the Dracs--just Wolf's Dragoons, and maybe a couple of others I can think of. The Daggers were recruited from Kurita worlds, so we haven't had to face the normal and understandable Kurita suspicion of outsiders... but we've still had to face the reluctance of Kurita military commanders to employ mercenary units alongside their regular line regiments... or to equip and supply them. As a result, the Daggers had been short of supplies and short of replacements and very short of funds for the better part of a year even before we were mustered in for the raid on Galtor III. Now, here we were on Scheat V, our 'Mechs falling to pieces, one company four men short and the other down by two... and the one guy who'd always been able to sweet-talk some Draco supply officer or other into coming through with what we needed was gone. We had no replacements, either. Right: Kurita TDR-5S Thunderbolt at Hill 091, Scheat V The Colonel bumped me up to Shroyer's Thunderbolt .. because we needed the heavy 'Mech's firepower, and Rodrigo traded his Stinger for my Panther because we needed the 35-tonner's hard-hitting PPC, but that left us with a spare Stinger and no one to drive it. The local Kurita command showed its usual speed, zeal, and efficiency when a merc unit asked for replacements and spares. We were short of everything when we grounded on Scheat V, and without Captain Rodgers to badger the regulars for parts, it didn't look like we were going to be combat-ready any time soon. And it was right about then that we got word that the Davions were in-bound, a minor armada piling on the Gs from Scheat's nadir JumpPoint. Combat-ready? Hell, I would have been delighted to have been able to field a full company of green kids fresh from a military academy, so long as they were eager to go and were piloting intact 'Mechs. After Galtor III, we were neither eager nor intact. My number one headache was Morgan Falk. I called him into my office two days after we'd had word that the Davion fleet was in-bound. We didn't now where on Hell he was going to strike, but prudence dictated we plan for the worst. The Daggers had been assigned to cover Kallair. Kallair is one of the so-called "Seven Cities of Hell," and it has both a major spaceport and a fair-sized industrial facility on the shore of the Polar Sea, so it was a fair bet that we were squatting on one of the raiders' prime targets. "Lieutenant..." I said, keeping my voice carefully neutral. "You've got an attitude problem... and that means I have a problem. I don't like problems... so that's why you're going to talk to me about it." Was the expression in his eye something dark and sullen... or was there something else bothering him? Hell, how was I supposed to know. I'd been with the Daggers less than a year, and I'd never been able to get close to the man. He'd always struck me as the brooding, tragic sort... the kind of MechWarrior who always seems to die young. Maybe that's why I'd never gone out of my way to get to know him, that nagging thought in the back of your mind that if he becomes your friend he's going to wind up dead. But I didn't know what was gnawing at him. "Your training runs have been abominable," I continued. "Your best score on the target range was 42 percent... and your simulator runs have been even worse. Hell, watching you in the field today, it was a wonder you didn't trip your Griffin flat on its face!" "I regret that the Captain is displeased with my performance." He spoke with a flat, expressionless monotone. Was it sarcasm I heard in his parade ground, third person formality? And if it was, how was I to deal with it? "Displeased doesn't quite cover it, Lieutenant." I stood up from behind my desk and came around to stand at his side. "At ease, Lieutenant... at ease, dammit!" He relaxed, marginally, but he wouldn't look me in the eye. An intriguing bit of data, that. When he'd been at attention, his gaze had been riveted to the wall somewhere behind my left shoulder. Now his gaze wandered the floor, my desk top... anywhere but my eyes. "You don't like me, do you?" I was taking a chance, I knew, because if I handled this wrong I would look pretty foolish. And no commander can afford to look foolish in front of the men. His jaw worked for a moment, andthen, at last, his eyes met mine. "It's not that..." "Then what? Do you think you should have been given command of this company, instead of me? Is that it?" "Captain... I..." he stopped, flustered. "Captain, can I speak frankly?" "I wish you would, Lieutenant. That's what I've been trying to get you to do!" His jaw worked again, without result. Then the words burst forth in a rush. 'It's just that I can't take orders from a woman!" That stopped me, stopped me cold. How do you answer something like that? My first thought was to throw him out of the office bodily. But I stepped back, took a breath or two, and managed to swallow the anger. "And what does that have to do with anything?" "I...can't really explain," he said. "It's just not right, somehow..." In twelve years of military service, first as a MechWarrior, later as a Lance Leader, and now as Company Commander, I had never run into an attitude like Morgan Falk's. I searched for the emotions I could sense working behind the young lieutenant's eyes. What did I expect to find there... bitterness? Some deep-seated misogyny, a rabid hatred of women? But all I could detect was dark confusion, and a resentment which might have been directed at the situation he now found himself in more than at me. "I think you had better come up with something more concrete than that," I said after a moment's consideration. "Colonel Keen has placed me in command of the Dagger-Bs. Right or wrong, that's what we have to live with... that's what you have to live with, or you can buy your way out of the regiment right now! Dismissed!" I watched him go with some misgivings. Had I handled it right? It wasn't that I wanted to turn my back on the problem... but I needed time to think about this. But time was not something we had a great deal of. I pushed Falk out of my mind for the rest of that watch, and for the next. All of us were dropping with exhaustion as we worked shift after eight-hour shiftto patch and ready our 'Mechs, with only quick naps and cold sandwiches snatched when we could to keep us going. But the problem would not go away. How could I take a Company into combat with my Fire Lance Leader unwilling to take orders from me? By the time I'd traced the fifth circuit fault in Chu's Orion's right arm servos and given up for lost my own Thunderbolts dead heavy laser charge couplings, I'd made up my mind that Falk was a pettyminded bastard who could never be trusted... not in combat, and not in my Company. The Daggers would have to let Falk go. But when I managed to grab Colonel Keen long enough to tell him, he practically exploded. "Good God, Lieutenant!" he yelled. "Our strength is down by 24 percent, and you want to kick Falk out? What the hell's the matter with you?" Put that way, I had to wonder that myself... but the long hours had brought me to the point that I scarcely cared any more. "The man won't take orders from me," I said. "We could shuffle him into A Company... but there're going to be hurt feelings, and unit morale is bad enough already." "You let me worry about unit morale, Captain," Keen said. He rubbed at his eyes, where black circles showed that he had been working as long and hard as the rest of us... or more so. Colonel Keen was 43 years old, but his hair and beard were already shot with gray. At that moment, the exhaustion in his eyes and the strain in his face made him look 60 at least. I was only then realizing what a burden command responsibility can be. "Look," the Colonel explained. "Even if Falk were a line MechWarrior, I'd have to say no. We need every man we can field. And Falk is an experienced Lance Leader... a good one. I can't afford to lose a man like that!" "Then why didn't you put him in the Company's lead slot?" He gave me a hard look. "Captain, do you think I booted you over his head because I didn't trust him? Hell, no! He's the best Lance Leader I've got! He had your Fire Lance fine-tuned like a concert violin. When Lisa Cummings bought it on Galtor III, it hurt him... hurt him bad. I offered to pull him from the Fire Lance but he said no, that he didn't want to run from his troubles. I concurred." My eyes widened. Had there been a romantic relationship between Falk and Lisa Cummings? And when she had died in that charge that I had ordered... What I had seen in his eyes had been hate, but not hatred of women... hatred of me! "Colonel, I don't think we can risk having Falk in my Company..." Keen exploded. "You can settle your differences with Falk any damn way you please, Captain, but he stays with the Regiment! We can't spare him... and I'll not wreck morale more than it's already wrecked just to spare your feelings!" And that, indisputably, was that. Raiders The Davion raiders came in hot and tight. We heard later that our Aerospace fighters vectored out to meet the incoming DropShips and hit a wall of Federated Suns fighters. While the fighters tangled, the DropShips pushed on, hitting Scheat V's thin atmosphere in flat, shrieking trajectories that carried them around the curve of the planet and out of the line of our fighters' attacks. They dropped 'Mechs at high altitude, but it turned out later that those were diversions. The real attacks came when the DropShips set down at our major spaceports. Davion fighters strafed our ground defense fortresses and bunkers, and freedropped 'Mechs closed in from sides and rear. Then the main Davion forces were on the ground and forming up. The Daggers had been alerted as soon as it was certain that at least two Union-class DropShips were vectoring across the Polar Sea towards Kallair. We scrambled two minutes ahead of their ETA, racing across cratered tarmac from our underground ready room to the armored bunker where our 'Mechs were being prepped for combat. I strapped myself into the cockpit of the old and battered Thunderbolt which had become my command vehicle upon my promotion. It had been Shroyer's 'Mech before he was blinded. The heavy, right arm laser was still out, and that would be a major handicap in the baftleto come, I knew. I snapped the HUD screen down on my neurohelmet and opened the 'Bofts command channel. "Daggers of Death, Company B," I said with a calmness I did not feel. "Muster call! Recon Lance!" "Recon Lance, Sergeant Fellini!" A voice came back. Fellini had been one of my MechWarriors when the Recon Lance had been mine. He'd been given his chance at command with my promotion. He was steady and experienced. If he did okay today, I planned to recommend him for a field commission. "Phoenix Hawk and Panther, check!" His lance was painfully short with lannamico dead and me promoted. "Fire Lance!" "Falk here." His voice was dead, devoid of expression. "Griffin, Dervish, and Orion, check." I checked my displays, noting that both Takai's Crusaderand Lander's Rifleman in my Command Lance were acknowledging ready. We would miss Rodgers' Dragon in the lance today. I wondered if Falk was thinking about missing Cummings' Centurion... or just about missing Lisa Cummings? I opened a command channel to the Colonel. "Company B mustered, ready to go," I reported. "Right." There was a click and a hiss as Keen shifted to the general frequency. His words would carry to every pilot in the regiment. "Attention to orders! Kallair Command reports two enemy reinforced companies down on the field at the spaceport. They are deploying towards the munition factories northeast of the port." I could hear Keen's sigh. "Our orders are to deploy along Hill Oh-Nine-One and hold until relieved. That is all." That is all. A reinforced company usually meant a company carrying an extra lance-usually heavy assault 'Mechs. Two reinforced companies meant-what? Thirty 'Mechs or more... and we were expected to line our eighteen battered 'Mechs up along a ridge and hold until relieved. Or until we were overrun. Hill 091 was not that much of a hillobvious enough when you realize that the "091" designation was a measurement of elevation above sea level in meters. It was nothing but a low, rocky spur straggling down from the mountains towards the sea, with no cover and little to make it a place worth dying for. There was a dense line of tangled forest behind the ridge, but it would be hard for 'Mechs to move through that mess, much less spot or hit targets. The battle would be for the high ground of the hill itself. We almost didn't make it in time. The regiment crested the slope just as the lead Davion 'Mechs hit the other side. One moment we were jolting up the backside of the ridge at a run, and then our targeting displays were lit like an advertising display, and it seemed that there were Davion 'Mechs everywhere. "Daggers, general combat!" Keen yelled over the tac frequency. "Give it to'em, Dagger-Bs!" I echoed him, and triggered a salvo of long-range missiles at a Davion Warhammer that had blundered into my sights. The clash at the top of the hill was as savage as it was brief. We had no time to get into position, no time for anything but snap decisions, hasty targeting, and rapid-volley fire. I was missing the heavy firepower of my Thunderbolt's main laser already. The three medium lasers mounted in my machine's left torso scored again and again, but the hits weren't stopping them, weren't even slowing them. Missiles arced through smoke and dust-clouded sky, smashing and flashing among the invaders. I saw a Davion Trebuchet go down, followed by a firestorm-battered Wasp, but a massive Davion Victor took hit after flaring LRM hit from my Thunderbolt and Colonel Keen's Archer, and the monster only staggered, paused, then pressed onward, shrugging off the multiple hits as though they were nothing more than minor annoyances. Return fire caught the Daggers as they spread across the top of the ridge, silhouetted against the hot and merciless sky. Chu's Orion took a PPC bolt square in the torso, the lightning bolt discharge from the hull fusing sand to glass by his 'Mech's feet, the blast leaving a gaping, smoke-belching crater just below the Orion's cockpit. Rodrigo's Panther was smashed back and down by autocannon fire from a Rifleman. I felt something like a sharp, physical pain as I watched my old Panther go down, flame and smoke and green coolant boiling from a pair of holes in its left side. We Were Losing I held my Thunderbolt in a half crouch on the front slope of the ridge, pumping missiles and laser fire into the advancing enemy. Something slammed into my 'Bolt's torso, and chunks of armor shrieked away. I held my position until my last SRMs were expended, then concentrated on firing at the closest Davion 'Mechs with my lasers. The temperature indicators on my control panel were well into the red. This intense a firefight could not last long. Even without the monstrous heat build-up from my useless main laser, my Thunderbolts weaponry was generating far more heat than the old 'Mech's cooling system could handle. The onboard computer flashed warning in letters of green light across a corner of my helmet display: WARNING - HEAT CRITICAL! Thunderbolts have always had a problem with heat build-up in combat--the one flaw in an otherwise magnificent combat machine. Inside the cockpit, the air was stifling, so hot and foul I could scarcely breathe. My sweat-drenched undershirt and briefs clung to my body like a second skin, and yet again I wished that I could afford a coolant vest. My old Panther had gotten plenty hot on occasion, but nothing like this. I wondered which would give out first... me or my 'Mech. Something struck my Thunderbolt a ringing blow to its right side, spinning the 65-ton 'Mech aside like a toy. I righted the machine and scanned, then shifted around to face what my proxindicator showed as the closest target. Right: Davion MAD-3R Marauder at Hill 091, Scheat V A Marauder stood sixty yards away, its heavy-armed PPCs leveled at me. Inside I went cold. Was it the same Marauder that had taken out the Captain on Galtor III? It was possible... if unlikely. The color pattern looked the same, and I never had been able to identify any unit patches or numbers during the confused fight over the Captain's downed Dragon. My short range missile rack was flat empty, and the range too short for my two remaining LRMs. I triggered my lasers, stabbing at the enemy Marauder with a triple beam of light. In answer, the bigger 'Mech fired another PPC bolt, followed by two quick snapshots from his lasers. Each of those ponderous forearms packed both a PPC and a medium laser, leaving me decidedly outgunned. Hit! Charge indicators blanked out trying to read voltages that went beyond their scales. Lightning played across my 'Mech's hull as severed wiring and myomer cables spilled from my 'Bolt's torso. Warning lights flashed across my console, telling of coolant fluid loss, of partial power loss in my left leg, of a fire in my empty LRM storage locker, of a machine gun smashed. Smoke was seeping up into the cockpit now, carrying with it the reek of burning rubber and plastic. "Fall back, Daggers!" I could hear the Colonel's voice through my helmet speakers, chopped by static but still understandable. There was an edge to his voice which suggested desperation... or despair. "Fall back and regroup!" "They're getting around behind us!" Another voice warned. It sounded like Fellini, but I couldn't tell. "Repeat, all Daggers, fall back! General retreat!" The Daggers were pulling back off the hill. But in that moment, the power feed to my 'Mech's left leg failed, and the Thunderbolt went down to one knee with a jarring crash that jerked me forward against my seat restraints. I fought to regain control of my 'Mech. The problem must be a severed power cable in the tangle of wreckage that was the 'Bolt's right torso. If I could bypass it... But the Marauder was not going to give me the chance. It was on me in six striding steps. The inside of my cockpit went dark as the harsh light spilling in through the cockpit was chopped off by the shadow of the monster over me. I struggled with the bypass. There! Power restored! I twisted the 'Boltand staggered to both feet. Before I could come fully upright, a shrieking blast, of sound enfolded me like an ocean wave, leaving my ears ringing through a blank deafness. My 'Mech was on its knees again. The Marauder had swung one armored forearm around and down in a hammer blow which had crumpled my LRM launcher like tinfoil, and driven my Thunderbolt back to its hands and knees. Dust rose, a vast yellow cloud sliced through by moving shafts of shadow as the Marauder moved into position for a second swing. I was on my feet again. The Marauder was to my rear, out of my line of sight, but I saw the movement in the shadows racing through the dust. Right: Desperate 'Mech-to-'Mech combat, Hill 091, Scheat V I twisted hard, throwing my 'Mech's right arm up as a shield. The heavy laser was useless anyway, and it might absorb some of the blow. That blow, when it came, smashed the laser and the arm it was attached to and hurled the Thunderbolt to the side. The blow kicked me forward against the straps, cutting my body. Then the 'Bolt landed flat on its back, and I was driven back into my pilot's seat so hard the wind was knocked from my lungs. I lay there for a long, long moment's agony, gasping for air and blinking against the glare of light falling through my cockpit window. Through a red haze of pain, I could see the Marauder above me, raising one dented forearm for the kill... Something hit the Davion Marauder low, across its back-angled legs. There was a crash of colliding metal and the Marauder went down, arms and legs flailing. I could hear the continued roar of colliding titans through the battered hull of my Thunderbolt. Somehow I managed to recover my breath... somehow I managed to bring my 'Mech back to its feet, despite the shattered uselessness of its dangling right arm. Falk's Griffin had rushed the Marauder. He had thrown the Griffin's body in a flying block against the bigger 'Mech's legs to bring it down. Now the two struggled in 'Mech-to-'Mech fury in the dust thirty meters away. It was an uneven contest. The Marauder masses 75 tons and outweighs a Griffin by 20 tons. The Griffin's only weapons are an LRM launcher-useless at point blank range-and a PPC carried like a rifle in its right hand. Neither weapon is effective close up, and the only advantage the lighter 'Mech had at all was the fact that it had hands and the Marauder did not. Falk was employing his 'Mech's left hand now, using armored fingers to rip and tear at the Marauder's leg joints. The Marauder brought one arm up and smashed it down across the Griffin's back. The LRM launcher mounted on the Griffin's right shoulder crumpled under the blow and fell away, leaving a ragged scar in the Griffin's shoulder trailing wires. The Marauder raised its arm again. I stumbled forward, trying to land a blow of my own. The Marauder's swing connected with my already damaged right arm and sent me stumbling back. For some reason, the Marauder returned his attention to me and fired twin laser bolts from the ground. One missed, but the second scored hard in the tangled ruin of my 'Mech's right arm. My Thunderbolt lurched to the left as a massive weight fell from the right; my right arm and the ruin of its heavy laser lay smoking on the ground. But Falk was on his feet now, firing his PPC at nearly point-blank range. It's hard to hit from that close with a PPC but the target wasn't moving. White fire seared across the Marauder's back and side. Its autocannon drooped at a crazy angle from the shattered mount on the heavy 'Mech's back. Then Falk's Griffin collided with the Marauder once again. My 'Mech was threatening shutdown. I slapped the manual override and prayed the 'Bolt would hold together just a little while longer. Gambling, I triggered another tripple blast from my medium lasers. The Marauder seemed to shrug off the blast and swung to face me once more. I knew my 'Bolt would not survive another direct hit from that massive weaponry, knew that I was looking down four heat-blackened barrels of death. An explosion blotted away my vision. When I could see again through streaming eyes, I saw that another close-ranged PPC bolt had savaged the Marauder's arm. In that last moment, the Marauder had swung away from me and opened fire with its other arm on Falk's Griffin. That final salvo was too much for his tortured machine. One high, heavy, armored shoulder shield blackened and warped under a ravening laser burst, and then the entire right arm shattered as megajoules of concentrated energy burned through into the smoking ruin of the Griffin's right torso. I could see fires raging inside the Griffin now through rents in the 'Mech's armor, could see other parts glowing with a dull red heat as internal fires consumed the Griffin from within. I thumbed open a taccom frequency. "Morgan! Eject! Punch out!" His 'Mech was going to blow. The Griffin took three stumbling steps towards the Marauder, its remaining arm closing on the Marauder's leg in a deathgrip. "Morgan!" Morgan Falk's Griffin must have had a number of LRMs remaining in his missile storage compartment. The warheads detonated with a blast that ripped both 'Mechs apart, and consumed the ruin with a boiling, seething ball of flame which rose into the sky like some hellish, blossoming flower. They Say We Won I'm not entirely sure what the Davion raiders were trying to prove. I know that the Davion 'Mechs storming Hill 091 broke and ran when their commander's Marauder disintegrated in flame and hurtling fragments. I know Colonel Keen led the charge which swept the last of the raiders off the hill and saved the Kallair munitions factory. Falk was dead, of course. He had been the real hero, the one who'd made the lone 'Mech charge against the Davion commander's Marauder and saved the day... not to mention the life of his Company Commander. I spent some time afterwards going through Morgan Falk's personnel files, and made a discovery. After his comment about not wanting to take orders from a woman, I'd had him pegged as an arrogant bastard with some sort of twisty inner hatred of women. When I learned that he'd been close to Lisa Cummings, I figured he must just hate me. I was wrong on both counts. It's not often spoken of, but the Successor States are not a single, uniform human culture. What's more, the Draconis Combine is not the single, monolithic culture Draco politicians like to insist it is, standing strong and firm against the lesser human cultures which are assailing it. Think a moment! The Draconis Combine encompasses over five hundred inhabited worlds, worlds as different as Luthien and Thule, or Wheel and Asgard. While the overall culture is patterned on the ancient Japanese of old Terra, the people who populate those half thousand worlds are as diverse and varied as the peoples of Earth, with ways and customs and philosophies that have been shaped and reshaped by centuries of adaptation and struggles to survive in environments ranging from the icy lee of Thule's mountain glaciers to the fever-ridden swamps of Dehgolan. If the range of human cultures has diminished somewhat through space travel and interstellar communication relays, it has resulted in some surprises as well, where an isolated people has clung to old ways and old traditions which other people might find odd. Morgan Falk was from Unity, a world not far from Pesht or from Luthien itself. Unity was settled early in the Terran exodus by fundamentalist religious dissenters who had almost vanished by the 31 sl century, but who had left their mark on the culture of Unity in countless ways. To the Unities' way of thinking, women were to be carefully sheltered and protected. That notion may have had less to do with the dissenters' religious ideas than with the fact that men outnumbered women 10 to 1 in the early planetary colony. The result was that women stayed in the home. The thought that they should risk their lives exploring a hostile world-or in front-line combat-was completely unthinkable, and that fact became part of the background of every person born and raised on Unity. Did that notion make Morgan Falk less of asoldier? It certainly brought anew element of struggle into his life. It must have been hard for him to overcome his personal feelings when he left his world and saw women undergoing aerospace raids on border worlds, women serving as MechWarriors, women carrying rifles in front-line combat infantry units. Quite likely, he didn't know why he felt the way he did that day I questioned him in my office. He just knew that there was something terribly, tragically wrong about a woman leading a BattleMech company. As Captain Rodgers had only recently proven, the position of Company Commander is a hazardous one... far more hazardous than serving as a line trooper or an ordinary MechWarrior. Once the enemy knows you're giving the orders, they come gunning for you. We take the full equality of the sexes for granted today. A woman has the same right to fight-and die-for her world or cause or people as a man. But Morgan Falk opened my eyes to a new idea... the idea that a woman, because she is a woman, is someone to be protected, to be kept out of harm's way, to be cherished and sheltered. Someone to die for, if need be, to protect them. I can imagine dying for a comrade, for a friend... for a lover... But to die for a man, simply because he is a man? It is a strange thought, one which convinces me that the most alien creature in this Galaxy we've yet encountered is ourselves. And yet, the idea is an old one, I know. Ancient cultures accepted the idea of chivalry towards women as a matter of course. Useless. Baffling. And totally alien to the way most of us think today. And yet, sometimes I wonder how much of our humanity we've lost in century upon bloody, grinding century of war. I wonder. Would a citizen of Earth a thousand years past even recognize us as human? Back to BattleTechnology 2 Table of Contents Back to BattleTechnology List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1987 by Pacific Rim Publishing. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com