First Interlude: Establishing Air Superiority the hard way.

Joel Chase, who had once been tagged with the unlikely sobriquet of 'Bunny' and had been forced to endure it ever since, carefully lifted his right hand from the control stick to briefly stretch it before once more replacing it. "Anything yet?"

Sitting in the lower front seat of the AV-13 Orca Vectored Thrust Aerial Craft the gunner/systems operator of Nomad-Four, Sergeant Eric 'Lucky' Dyce rolled his eyes as he completed the latest passive sensor sweep. "Nada, Buns," he told his backseater.

"Damn it, this is where Quicksilver said they were."

"Maybe they moved."

"Stunning observation, Lucky," Bunny said. "Maybe I should write a memo to the Colonel." He flexed his hand again, this time without lifting it from the control stick. "This doesn't feel right."

"Maybe I should be the one writing that memo, sir," Lucky retorted. "There is nothing radiating out there. We haven't over-flown anything that the optics has decided was out of place. Maybe there really is nothing out there."

"There doesn't need to be anything out there," Bunny retorted. "For all we know they could be tracking us from orbit with an old-fashioned telescope. No need for revealing radar or other active sensors. They could just be biding their time before pouncing on us like wolves on some unsuspecting deer."

"You have a nasty and suspicious mind, sir," Lucky said.

"And that's enough sirring from you, sergeant," Bunny retorted.

"Of course, Sir Bunny, Duke of Hopsalot, Count of the Cabbage Patch, Baron—"

"Nomad-one, Nomad-ten, request permission to initiate search pattern gamma."

"Took Dandy long enough," Bunny muttered.

Oscar 'Dandy' Whittingham in Nomad-ten was the commander of the five RV-23 Delphis VTACs in 'N' Nomad Troop, 4th Squadron, 3d Cavalry Regiment. His vertols were spread out across the front of Nomad Troop's advance, and mirrored by 'O' Outlaw Troop's Delphises. Bunny, in Nomad-four, was on the far left flank of the two air-attack troops, and one of only four vertols armed for an escort mission rather than ground-attack.

"Could be he fell asleep," Lucky said.

Bunny didn't get a chance to reply as Captain Mason 'Jar' Jarowski responded to Nomad-ten's request.

"Negative, Dandy, I want you to—"

"Bandits, Nomad-Five, five o'clock high, forty kilometers."

"Lucky, reconfigure for air-to-air," Bunny said, twisting in his seat and bringing up a monitor to try and find the approaching fighters as he listened to Nomad-one try to sort out the sudden mess.

"Understood. Nomad, Outlaw, slow circle right to…310 on course for tri-city agri-plex. Standby to break by elements."

"Nomad-Three, Four," Bunny said, using an element com-frequency (actually a specific encryption package) that let him and his element leader communicate clearly while still allowing them to listen to the Troop push. "I have lead, Vixen."

"Copy."

Bunny nodded in satisfaction at the agreement. It wasn't an offer made because he sought glory or an early death—although both seemed imminent—and nor was he trying to usurp his wing-leader's authority. It came down to the simple fact that he was armed for aerial attack, and the only other Orca that was so armed were Pacman and Wizard in Nomad-eight near the middle of the combined Nomad/Outlaw formation.

Well…him and two Outlaws, but they didn't count and were even further out of position to cover him than -eight was.

All of the rest of the Orca gunships had solid shot in their gun magazines and pulse lasers tuned for slower pulse-repetition and heavier power throughput used for ground-attack, rather than the faster-cycling and lighter-hitting settings for an aerial engagement. Their ground-attack ordnance was similarly heavy on bombs and ground-attack rockets than air-to-air missiles. In that situation it made more sense for him to take lead and have Nomad-three cover him, where an enemy fighter might hold position as he tried to kill Bunny and give Vixen enough time for her solid-shot and slower-firing lasers to make him pay for it.

"ECM is on standby," Lucky reported. "Chaff and flare dispenser to automatic, track-breakers to automatic. What about the anti-SAM ordnance?"

Bunny hesitated. As part of his escort roles some of the tonnage of ordnance he could carry had been devoted to suppressing and killing enemy air-defenses. Most of it was useless against aerospace fighters. "Jettison the cluster bombs, set rocket-fusing to proximity." Unlike the heavy rockets carried by the ground-strike Orcas, his light-weight rockets were intended to air-burst, the better to have a chance of damaging delicate surface-to-air missiles and their mobile launchers and radar units. "Go active on the ECM as soon as we break. Enemy status?"

"Looks like…twenty birds mixed in two flights. Dissimilar birds, Bunny, I'm looking at six distinct airframes. From the mix of radar and EM profiles I'm guessing they have multiple variants of each."

A graphic out-line of a fighter appeared on a secondary monitor by Bunny's left hand.

"This one has a variant that, from the mag-signature, has a pair of gauss rifles mounted in it. They both hang out with squadron deuce. Both squadrons have a two-bird element with ECM in it."

Both enemy squadrons continued to close and Bunny knew what his troop commander was trying to do, even if he didn't like it. A vertol had a lot of advantages over a helicopter and was far more maneuverable than any aerospace fighter, at least in atmosphere. In a close-range dogfight where maneuverability and fast shooting became more important, they had an edge. If the enemy resorted to high-speed deflection passes they'd be cut to shreds. The woofies were clearly unfamiliar with vertols, and so Jarowski was doing his best to encourage them to get in close. For the same reason he'd chosen to slowly circle towards the agri-plex where the tall buildings could provide terrain for the more agile vertols to work in. Terrain that was otherwise lacking in the low rolling plains they were currently flying over.

"Talk to me about the ECM birds, Lucky."

The graphic changed. "Awful lot crammed into the nose, looks like this is an autocannon," one of the four muzzles emerging from the nose of the aerospace fighter flashed. "Five or ten-rating, probably, and this looks an awful lot like the muzzle for a PPC though the cowling is weird, it looks like an ER-profile but this bulge shouldn't be there. This," a third muzzle flashed, along with a pair in each wing.

"Medium pulse lasers," Bunny said. "No way to tell how they're configured?"

"Nope, no way to even tell if they're pulses though I admit they make more sense on an aerospace fighter than standard models do. But if those are mediums, and I agree, then these suckers are larges," the second muzzle located in each wing root, "and the shrimpy-looking one in the nose is a small. I've got something else built into the leading edge of the wings, could be a brace of cannons, or short-ranged missile launchers."

"Call them launchers," Bunny decided. "Tail guns?"

"Got a couple of bulges in the after wing root, but it's a bad angle. They're probably the housing for the emitter matrix of the ECM gear. At least that's how I'd set it up, but—"

"Nobody asked you," Bunny finished. "What about the rest?"

"No external ordnance, though I suppose they could use an internal bay. None of them are stealth jobs though so I can't see a reason they should do things that way."

"So standard munitions."

"Unless they have something really exotic for their autocannons or missiles," Lucky cautioned. "Energy weapon-heavy for the most part. There are some with a heavy autocannon or missile battery in the nose, but I'm not seeing mirrored wing-mounts for anything other than lasers, particle guns, and short-ranged missiles. What do you want to bet that they have problems with heat burden, Bunny?"

It made sense, given that engagement times by a fighter against a stationary ground target were short, and those against another fighter even shorter still. The air-defense Rifleman battlemech had the same problem for the same reason. But Bunny couldn't see any good way of taking advantage of the possible weakness other than getting shot at.

"No bet," Bunny said. "Any ideas on how we can use it?"

"If only we had some masers…"

Bunny agreed with him. Unfortunately they didn't have any of the experimental energy weapons that could cause heat to rapidly rise in targeted vehicles. "Any other ideas?"

"Get them to shoot at someone else so that they can't when they lock on us?"

"I'm sure everyone else would be very interested in hearing that idea, Lucky."

"Ha, ha, Bunny.

"Ident enemy ECM carrier, designate bandits one and two," Bunny said. The woofie fighters were getting awfully close now and it was time to concentrate on business.

The smile on Lucky's face vanished as he bent over his controls. "Identified," he reported. "Designated bandits one and two."

"Ident, missile-boat and dash-20 gun, same airframe," Bunny continued, scrolling down the estimated list. "Designate bandits three and four."

"Identified. Designated bandits three and four."

"Ident, quad identical airframes. Designate bandits five through eight."

"Identified. Designated five through eight. Designating remaining targets, squadron one, bandits nine and ten. Want to designate squadron two, Bunny?"

"Air-Cav, Nomad-one. Standby."

"No," Bunny told his gunner in a taught voice. He gave the woofies a ten percent increase in range and mentally calculated the time it would take them to intercept, added the time it'd take him to do a wing-over, and then added another twelve seconds at the woofies' present speed and his max without the afterburner. "Vix," he said with forced calm, "on my mark…now!"

"…break!"

The two orders came at nearly the same time, but Bunny had already tilted the stick to the left and at the same time he twisted it and slid it in the same direction as his left hand worked the throttles. His right foot pushed, toe downs, while he shoved with his left heel, toes back. The flight control computer interpreted all of this and pitched him to the left as his VTAC literally stopped in mid air, pivoted on the rear corner of the left wing, and then slammed him back into the seat as he accelerated at full power on a course that was 180º to his previous heading.

"Acquire one." The words were out before he had completed the turn.

"Acquiring…locked," Lucky snapped as the nose ended in a cone-shaped area of space centered on bandit-one that the missiles needed to be launched within if they were going to have a hope of hitting their target. The aft end of the vertol sank with the sudden loss of air-speed.

"Nomad-four, fox-three, fox-three," Bunny reported. A single squeeze of his finger sent two missiles dropping free as their engines ignited and accelerated them toward the enemy fighters as his left hand worked thrust-vector controls. A thumb-flick as they closed and then: "Guns, guns, guns," as they accelerated into the heart of the enemy squadron.

Star Captain Sumner Johns flexed his paw on the stick of his Jagatai aerospace fighter. It wasn't really a paw, of course. When he had lost his right arm in his Trial of Position after the final bondcord had been cut he had had the limb replaced by a prosthetic that had been custom-crafted to resemble a wolf's fore-leg. But in order to properly control his fighter it was necessary that his new limb retain dexterous fingers rather than the proper paw like he had wanted. Still, a paw was what he had wanted, and it was how he continued to think about the hand-analog.

It had been a frustrating war. In fact, it had been a frustrating few years. He did not resent the time spent as bondsman, especially since it now placed him in one of the invading clans sent to purge the Inner Sphere of their decadent corruption, greed, and wastefulness. There was a certain amount of…regret—the world failed to convey the proper emotion but it was the best had come up with—at the amount of time it had taken, but regret was very different from resentment. Nor did he resent the time spent learning to use his paw and proving that he had mastered the prosthetic well enough to still be a warrior—even with Clan medical technology it was not something that all who had shared a similar experience was able to achieve.

He did not resent the time and effort it had taken to scout out the new warriors he had brought into his fighter binary, or to swap out those pilots he could best do without and find those who had the skills and expertise he wanted. In spite of the time it had taken, he was proud of having built and trained what was widely regarded as one of the best fighter trinaries in the clans—not a small feat considering the Cloud Cobras' and Snow Raven's decided preference for aerospace fighters.

What he did resent, and deeply so, was that because of their elite status his binary was often among the first bid away, and saKhan Garth Radick's order barring the 3rd Battle Cluster from combat in the Inner Sphere. Better to have been left behind in the Kerensky Cluster where at least there was a chance of fighting against another clan trying to take advantage of the Khans' absence and that of five front-line galaxies, or the chance to do some counter-raiding of his own. Sitting and watching from orbit as the 341st and 352nd Assault Clusters won victory after victory, their Aerospace Pilots, MechWarriors, and Elementals coming back with victories added to their codexes and battle honors added to their clusters' standards, was well nigh unbearable.

He owed these new-comers a debt. Forcing the saKhan to break his bid so utterly was no small feat, but better yet, it gave one Star Captain Sumner Johns the chance to prove his quality.

Not that his gratitude was going to save them, of course.

A system check came back all green. His LRM rack was loaded, the lasers were charged, and the wing-mounted ERPPCs were warmed up. With almost two minutes remaining before he reached effective range at the leisurely pursuit velocity he had chosen, he glanced at the long-range camera that was slaved to one of the larger of the two enemy fighter classes.

It was an odd sort of design. A blunt egg-shaped nose area was oddly tilted so that the narrow end was set forward and below the main fuselage which tapered from where it joined the upper rear end of the cockpit all the way back to a point. Two pylons mounted an X-form tail assembly with the arms racked curiously up and forward (or down and forward in the case of the lower set). Two nacelles mounted forward of the tail had to be engines, as were the matching pair under the down- and forward-swept wings mounted a third of the way back from the nose. Inverted gull-wing canards mounted on either side of the cockpit-pod, just back from the nose, seemed more for mounting external ordnance than any benefits to the flight profile it may have imparted.

It was an impressive design combining incredible maneuverability from the fundamentally aerodynamically-unstable wings with impressive computer support to keep it in the air. Both features, of course, assumed, that the computer support was capable of wringing every advantage inherent in the airframe and not merely sufficient to keep it aloft. A somewhat safe assumption though. Given the general technological decline of the Inner Sphere since the days of the Star League it would have been next to impossible for any of the House Lordlings to develop and deploy such a design. But clearly there was at least one more player, one that had managed to keep warships in service as more than just a hulk. For someone with access to such technology it might very well have been possible.

Even as he thought this, one of the curious aircraft on the far left of the formation pitched up on its tail and as though it were the focal center of a circle, the rest of the fighter spun around it. It was one of the many familiar ways an aircraft that required a computer to maintain constant control its flight surfaces could die if that flight control was lost.

Only it stopped spinning.

In less time than it took to blink twice the aircraft had complete reversed its course and pitched up to charge at Sumner Johns' awaiting fighter binary.

"Deuce Star, anchor here plus five," Johns said.

His radar warning receiver blared an alert. His head jerked up, summoned by the alarm, as his left hand instinctively shoved the throttle forward until it hit the check-stops before the afterburner. The range was still long, but a sparkle of light on metal and the VR graphic splashed across his HUD indicated a solitary missile rising towards his star.

He dropped a targeting reticule on it, the missile was too fast for PPCs or missiles, but his pulse lasers worked just fine. Large missiles like this had been abandoned centuries before when laser systems finally became efficient enough to bring to the battlefield and Sumner Johns was perfectly content to remind these Spheroids of that little fact.

His lasers refused to lock on.

The velocity of the missile was not enough to spoof the Jagatai's target acquisition and tracking computer, closing velocities in space battles could be much higher. Nor was size the problem, the missile was too big to escape being effectively tracked like standard missiles were and yet too small to have any armor worth mentioning.

It had to be some kind of stealth construction, he decided as he flipped up on his aerospace fighter's right wing and pulled into a dive towards the enemy formation. An extravagant expense for a one-use weapon, especially one so dated. And yet that same stealth coating granted it a fairly good chance of surviving to attack range, and with a missile that size, attack range might be all that was necessary.

The missile streaked past him, angling for the back side of his standard pentagonal formation, either the Scythas of point four, or the Jengiz of point five.

"First Star, break by points and engage at will," Sumner Johns ordered, sparing a glance to make sure that his wingman, Tamm, was still with him as he stooped upon one of the smaller craft.

The craft stopped in mid-air and spun. The fleet-little fighter must use some kind of vectored-thrust array, Johns thought approvingly as it side-slipped out of the path of his missiles. A tap of his left peddle swung his Jagatai's nose slightly as the dewclaw on his paw toggled weapon controls. The targeting reticule flashed green and twin azure bolts momentarily connected the two craft, and then he was past and pulling up into a climbing loop.

On a monitor the small craft sagged as its back broke, then fire flared in the cockpit as the canopy came off a moment before twin chairs rocketed from the crippled fighter.

Johns tossed in a little right stick to throw a victory roll, but at the same time he frowned. So, he thought as on the monitor tracers from the downed craft's partner sparkled after his wingman, the smaller ones are two-seat craft. By and large the Clans did not use such craft, only a few kept them for advanced aerospace fighter training. Even among the Inner Sphere, very few aerospace fighters had two-person crews. That these ones did said something about their intended purpose and the philosophy of their builders, but he was not quite sure what that something was.

"Yeee-haw!" Bunny bellowed as the two formations interpenetrated. Electric blue lightning cut through the air as he pulled out of a barrel roll and cut into a vertical climb before abruptly shifted the vectored thrust controls to 'down' as a swarm of missiles past overhead. The move threw his AV-13 Orca onto its back and he flipped the thrust back to normal and did a half-loop which put him back into proper perspective.

"What the hell, Bunny?" Vixen snarled at him as her gunship flew past. "I'm the leader!"

"Copy."

A moment later his VTAC shuddered and he looked wildly at the damage display only to find that everything was green. His stores display was a different story, and as he watched, icons began dropping away. Bunny took a breath as he realized what Lucky had done. Per his order, Lucky had jettisoned the cluster bombs before the battle was joined, which had lightened the airframe by a not small amount, which would in turn improve speed and maneuverability and also somewhat lessen the chance of taking a lot of unfortunate damage if the exposed ordnance was hit. Also like he had ordered Lucky had retained the short-range rocket pods.

But Bunny had forgotten to give his gunner any orders about the hyper-speed anti-radiation missiles that were used to attack enemy ground-to-air radar. Lucky, on his own initiative, had decided to dump the missiles.

Bunny started to say 'good job', but then the entire cockpit canopy darkened as the plasma exhaust from a quartet of missiles boiled the air in front of us. "Jesus, what the—"

"SEAD, Boss," Lucky said.

Bunny blinked and it took him a moment to realize that Lucky was talking about Suppression of Enemy Air Defense, one of the critical aspects of their escort mission. The ground-attack aspect. "What did you do?" he demanded.

"I reconfigured to home on jamming," Lucky explained.

"I didn't think they could work that way against aerial targets," Bunny commented as he threw the Orca into a sideways S-skid and snapped a couple of rounds off at a fighter that was getting a little too friendly with Vixen's rear end. "Find me bandit one or two."

"They don't know that, and it was that or drop 'em," Lucky retorted. "I thought I might try getting some use out of them. Got him."

An icon flashed in his heads-up display, and Bunny sent his Orca into a flat turn, cutting the corner on Four. "Vix, I have the lead. Two-points pivot, fighter passing north to south."

"Three," Vixen responded as she slammed the controls to bring her craft into a hover that skidded past his Orca even as he pivoted the nose towards the north.

"I've got it," Lucky reported. "Almost there…locked!"

The enemy fighter had banked into a turn that left its exposed dorsal surface exposed and coherent beams of light lanced out at it, soon joined by more beams from Nomad-Three.

"Four, drop."

Bunny didn't have time to identify it, just grabbed the throttle quadrant and yanked back. The Orca dropped like a rock, the unstable wing geometry threatening to spill them into an unrecoverable tumble. He hit the bypass control on the Vectored Thrust Aerial Craft's hybrid engine, venting plasma directly from the fusion core into the thrusters to pitch the Orca into a nose-first dive.

"Two bandits down, ECM is clear," Lucky reported from the front seat.

"Two?" Bunny asked. With air moving over the wings again Bunny reverted to the hybrid drive system and swung the nose right as he pitched back up. "Three, break right on my mark," he ordered, lining up on a heavy fighter making a run on Vixen.

"HARM," Lucky explained, then added: "Locked."

"Break!"

"Fox two, fox two," Lucky called out, launching on his own initiative as Vixen rolled her Orca onto its right side and dropped like a rock.

Twin missiles flashed past the other vertol in pursuit of the woofie fighter, and Vixen waited until they were past before dropping the tail until she was falling tail-first then, like Bunny, cut in the hybrid thrusters and rose on a vertical plume of plasma. The exhaust from the fusion core splashed across the path of the first fighter's wingman, and its flight straightened slightly as the pilot was forced to rely on instruments, half of which had sensors burned away and his canopy opaqued as it absorbed the plasma energy.

Bunny didn't need Lucky's help to lock his lasers onto the temporarily vulnerable aerospace fighter. It shook, armor splintering and one of the vertical stabilizers sheering off entirely before the craft was able to pull out of effective range. "Which ones were those?"

"Uh…five and six."

"Damn," Bunny said. He'd designated the targets in order for a reason. "Status bandit one and two."

"One's dead, my HARMs, you're welcome. Two is bugging out. You want a vector for a kill?"

"No. Find me bandit three." The heavy gun carried by bandit-three, and the extensive missile array carried by bandit-four, would be absolutely murder to the vertols in close. Bunny had toyed briefly with targeting them first, but decided that the other VTACs needed every scrap of targeting ability they could get, which had necessitated bandits one and two dying first.

"Found him, Bunny. He's on ou—"

His radar warning receiver screamed and Bunny did something that in the future he would never be able to replicate in the simulators. As later analysis would show he started into a tight right turn, the automatic chaff and flare dispenser kicking out decoys behind him in a wide arc as the turn shifted into a pivot that kicked his tail out past where his cockpit had been. This maneuver in and of itself was neither impossible nor instantly fatal. But at this point Bunny, instead of rolling towards his right wing to level out, rolled left and kicked in rudder as he shifted the thrusters to hove.

He ended in a flat, inverted spin being propelled to the ground.

The enemy fighter must have been as surprised at the maneuver as Bunny was because he didn't fire, but Lucky, shrieking at his insane pilot from the forward seat where he could do nothing to save his own life, activated the rocket pods. As direct-fire weapons they were short-ranged, better suited to a kind of indirect aerial artillery and meant to use altitude to stretch their range beyond effective return fire. But the range was short, and Lucky had both pods in sequence-fire, and the turn was regular enough and fast enough that he had three full firing passes before the enemy fighter was out of range.

Somehow—this was the part Bunny was never able to replicate, though he later managed the first part in simulators—he flipped the Orca back onto its belly. Lucky and Vixen were both screaming at him, and the furball was well above them. Far fewer Orca and Delphis VTACs were flying than had been a minute before.

"Status?"

"Engines green," Lucky said, dropping the rocket pods with their few remaining rockets armed in their tubes. It'd make a mess of someone's fields but it would deny the woofies some intelligence anyway. "Two heat, two radar remaining. Lasers green. Cannon down to half. Fuel is yellow. Airframe is hell-if-I-know."

"Nomad-one," Bunny called as Vixen in Nomad-three stopped screaming at him to take a breath.

"One's dead. So is ten," Lucky said. "Outlaw command elements are off the air."

"Fuck." Bunny said distinctly. If they had broken and run for it at the beginning the fighters would have slaughtered them. As it was that was still happening, but the battle had drifted closer to the massive agri-plex. "Nomad. Outlaw. Get low and get fast. Take cover in the agri-plex."

"You don't have the authority for that."

"Everyone else who had it is dead," Bunny retorted.

Sumner Johns pulled his Jagatai into a long inside loop that took him up over the fight so that he could take stock of the situation. They were winning handedly; he had four victories to his credit just by himself. But despite that he was disappointed. The enemy's craft were clearly his unequal in speed or armor, but their drive system—of which he only hoped enough would be recovered from scrap for the Scientist-caste to reverse-engineer—granted them a degree of maneuverability that only the lightest and most maneuverable of omni-fighters, piloted by the very best of truebirth pilot-stock, could hope to achieve in the atmosphere.

On second thought, no, not even a light aerospace fighter could have done the…the only way Johns could think of to describe the maneuver was a back-flip, which was plainly ridiculous.

Most of the enemy, unfortunately, was armed for ground-attack and their reliance on external ordnance left them pitifully armed compared to even the lightest armed omnifighter in his alpha star. Only four of the larger fighters seemed to carry any air-to-air ordnance of note, though the rest had fought no less valiantly for having weapons better suited to ground targets. One of the air-superiority fighters had suffered the misfortune of picking Bew's third point as its first target, and Orstur in alpha-four-two had ripped apart another with his Scytha's ultra-20 autocannon almost before it had had a chance to respond to their attack.

Johns himself had killed the third, although not before it had inflicted severe damage upon his wingman and both Visigoths in second point. He had lost three aerofighters destroyed, including Ostur who had been ripped apart by another of the fighters in retaliation, and two more were limping back to the starport with extensive damage to flight surfaces and in one case, engine core. If it had been anything other than a Jenghiz—except maybe for one of the notoriously rugged Kirghiz—and the pilot any less than one of Sumner Johns' hand-picked and trained, the aerospace fighter would have certainly crashed.

He pitched over the top of the loop and throttled up as he headed for the ground. A gasp, and then a muttered oath was filtered through his helmet's audio system, and he glanced at a monitor to find that the armored dorsal surface of the right wing of his wingman's Jagatai was peeling up and ripping off.

"I can no longer stay with you, Star Captain," Tamm Ch'in, the only other bloodnamed warrior in alpha star, reported formally.

"Can you return it to base?"

"Perhaps…neg. I don't think so." The response was flat with stress.

"Punch out," Johns ordered, forgiving the other warrior his momentary lapse by not drawing attention to it. Nor would he later, when they had all returned to the ground for the mission debriefing.

"Aff," Tamm agreed. The canopy of the crashing omnifighter was jettisoned a moment before the cockpit burst into flames as the powerful rocket under the command coach punched the warrior free of the stricken craft.

Johns tightened his dive, selected another target for himself, and rolled to turn the positive-G dive into a negative-G dive.

Below him, enemy fighters broke off attack runs. Even those trying to evade from his remaining pilots sought to break away from the battle, and were covered by a pair of fighters flying backwards. He adjusted his dive to line up on the remaining air-to-air fighter craft, but there was a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye where none should be.

Sumner John glanced right, then pulled back on his flight control stick as at the same time he snatched back the throttle quadrant so hard he almost pulled it past the engine cut-off stops. A second sweep of his hand deployed flaps, air-breaks, dropped his landing gear, everything he could do to slow his craft as quickly as possible while also performing the hardest break his fighter was capable of while maintaining flight characteristics.

For a moment he didn't think he was going to manage to avoid the Jagatai that was furiously pursuing one of the escaping enemy craft. But then the omnifighter was past with nothing more than a moderately hard thump from impacting the ion-wash from the plasma engines. His computer warned of armor damage to his underside, a loss of ventral and lateral sensor arrays, and possible damage to his left main gear.

Alizon, Johns decided after examining his tactical display to identify the pilot as Alpha-three-two, was in for a very serious discussion concerning who has the right of way. Still, she had been pursuing an enemy and had managed to avoid killing both of them, so perhaps only a moderate tone was in order.

With a short snarl he ran a quick check on the rest of his Jagatai and then shoved his throttles forward again. There were still enemies to kill, and if they wanted to flee he would let them run.

And the Wolves would chase them down and devour them.

"Come on, Vixen, it's time to go," Bunny said, slid-slipping and peppering a fighter with the laser he'd slaved to his controls. Lucky retained the other weapons, although the autocannon down to the dregs of its magazine well.

"You think I don't know that?" the other pilot spat. "Go. I'll cover you."

"Cover me with what?" Bunny asked. "Move it."

"I have seniority here!"

"Then move it, ma'am!" Bunny said sarcastically as Lucky worked his gunnery controls and tried to get a lock with the under-powered defensive lasers in the roots of the tail struts. He could feel his Orca shudder again as someone got in a clean hit, and once more kicked on the burners, shunting more engine plasma directly into the thrusters.

"Gotta go faster, Vix."

"I am," came the strained retort, but Bunny knew it wasn't going to be enough.

"Over the shoulder," he told Lucky.

"Excuse me?"

"We have four missiles left. I want them all gone. Over the shoulder launches."

"The heaters aren't designed for that flight profile," Lucky objected. "There's no telling whether or not they'll be able to lock on by themselves and run an intercept before the woofies blow right past them."

"Shit, use the radar birds only then."

"Tracking…tracking…locked-on, fox three, fox three!" Lucky said, the last six words coming so fast that they were almost one.

Bunny didn't have time to see where the missiles went or what damage they inflicted. They were passing through the boundary area between the residential tracts and the massive inner complex of granaries and slaughter houses, cooking plants and freezing plants, packaging facilities and loading/shipping docks, and all the other bits and pieces of agri-factories that were needed to ship a planet's-worth of food out of its solar system.

"I can't shake them, Four."

"Yes you can, just like I showed you," Bunny snapped back. He dodged past a building that had to be fifty meters high, and briefly toyed with the idea of dropping another two meters or so but decided it wasn't worth the risk of playing tag with what his instruments said—if they were to be believed—were high-voltage power lines. Why anyone would use such an antiquated and dangerous method of power transmission he couldn't begin to fathom.

"Pegasus-two, all units. Mission Complete. Repeat. Mission Com—"

The channel went silent with a grim finality, but Bunny found a little satisfaction in knowing that P Troop had accomplished their mission at least.

"Have you identified the one taking pot-shots at Four?" Bunny asked his gunner.

"Boss?"

"Have you?" Bunny snapped.

"Yeah, why?"

"Lock them up and hold onto something," Bunny said.

"Oh shiiiiiiiaaaaah."

Bunny made another pivot turn, but this time instead of shedding velocity he snapped the thrusters into reverse which left him flying backwards down a relatively narrow lane of increasingly large buildings. "Fox two, fox two," he noted coldly as the two all-aspect heat-seeking missiles dropped free, and a donation of lasers and the last of his autocannon ammunition flashed out at the fighter.

The fighter hesitated in air, clearly unnerved by his strange flight profile. He started to break off, not at all interested in finding out what the clearly insane pilot was going to do next. But lasers were light speed weapons, and at the range they were at, the cannon was effectively the same. Both arrived before the pilot could break off and chipped away at what armor was left on the forward fuselage and wings. Despite the closing speed between the two, the same couldn't be said for the missiles which didn't arrive until after the pilot had started to break off.

The first found a weak spot in the armor. It blasted away what was left and ripped a hole in the underside that would spell doom if the pilot tried to survive an atmosphere reentry, but otherwise didn't manage to accomplish much.

The second missile nearly missed, having locked onto the plasma exhaust rather than the fighter itself. It detonated in proximity mode, and by that time the fighter and nearly passed out of the danger zone. What few pieces of shrapnel hit the aerospace fighter had used up most of their momentum and were safely deflected. All, that is, but one.

A solitary metal fragment, not much larger than the palm of a person's hand, found the hole torn in the underside of the fighter. It rattled around, bouncing off structural members, the housing of a weapon pod, part of the avionics. With its last bit of momentum it came to rest near one of the auxiliary feeds for the fusion plant just as the pilot throttled up into the accelerating climb that was his best option for clearing the street quickly. With its last amount of momentum and edge of the metal caught the feed-line.

It wasn't a big tear, little more than a pin-prick really, and the auxiliary feed was normally pressurized with argon. A detected leak would lock down the feed permanently. If the same happened while the feed was pressurized with hydrogen the flight computer would still have locked it down, and increased the flow down the other feed (there were always at least two in operation to provide redundancy for just such a situation) until another auxiliary took over, or the pilot was forced to disengage.

But the leak was so small and came even while the throttle was advanced—which dumped more fuel into the engine—and enough battle damage had already been taken, that the computer decided that the slight loss in thrust was due to damage in the thruster-assemblies of which there was already a good deal. Since in atmosphere the throttle was tied to airspeed rather than acceleration, the computer simply dumped in a little more fuel to make up the difference and flashed a message to its pilot that it had taken more engine damage, probably to the thruster-assembly. In any case the fusion plant's temperature and pressure remained nominal which allayed fears of an engine breach.

But in the center of the fighter, hydrogen seeped out. As long as the fighter was inverted it escaped harmlessly into the atmosphere, but when the pilot leveled out it began to collect across the top of the fighter's internal spaces.

In the end it the aerospace fighter's death came from an arcing spark that originated in the system of lights that were used by warship landing crews to judge closing velocities.

"—that they can fly backwards!"

Sumner Johns grinned at the consternation at the other pilot's voice. He had tried to hard to challenge them, something had started to become challenging in the last few months, that he had missed being challenged and surprised himself. Enemy fighters that could fly backwards were certainly both.

The Clans had few vessels capable of such feats in the atmosphere, and what few they did were experimental craft used to explore the physics of very high angles of attack, and their effect upon computers, weapons, and man. Many considered craft capable of such things little more than stunts. Fun to fly, perhaps, but not really war-machines.

Trust the Inner Sphere to not know something and make a weapon out of it.

He laughed.

"Wolfman," Alizon continued, her tone still professionally outraged, but also excited in the way only a pilot presented with a new fighter capable of untold wonders of speed and ability could manage. "Do you know where w—"

The channel went abruptly dead as overhead as Alizon's seventy-tone Jagatai blew apart.

John's pulled back slightly on the throttle, allowing the enemy to once more open the range as his head turned to watch scraps of aerospace fighter glinting in the sunlight as they headed for the ground.

"Beta Star closing on your order."

Sumner Johns blinked, shook his head, and once more focused on the fleeing enemy fighters. He couldn't remember calling in his second star.

"Oh, shit," Bunny said.

"Stunning observation, sir, mind if we get out of here?" Lucky asked.

For once Bunny didn't respond to the use of his rank inside the vertol, something he was usually quick to warn his gunner against.

"Yeah, I think I'm with you on this one," he said, putting the Orca into a more sedate spin, what with the open range, than his last one had been. A glance at the radar plot told him that whoever was on the other side was bringing in the second squadron that had been happy to loiter up above and observe. It also told him something else.

"Vix, why the fuck are you slowing down?"

"Language, Four."

"Sentiment remains, Three," Bunny shot back.

"I decided to wait for you."

"Yeah? Well next time, don't!"

"You see those grain silos up ahead?"

Bunny scowled and the distinctly narrow path ahead of him. They had left the residential areas well behind and were now passing up a major thoroughfare with massive agri-factories on either side. "You mean the double-row of two-hundred meter tall cylinders up ahead? Yeah, I see them."

"When we get to them, break left."

Like that was going to go over well, Bunny thought, but before he could reply a new voice spoke on the com.

"Outlaw, Thunder God, maintain present speed and heading."

"Thunder God?" Bunny asked out-loud. Then, "oh." Pause. "Oooh." He grinned.

"Copy that, Thunder God," Vixen replied.

"Thunder God, Bunny?" Lucky asked.

"Zeus," Bunny said. "Zeus was the god of thunder." He could see the helmeted head of his gunner slowly nod in understanding.

Thunder God was the official callsign of the 3d's air defense company, which was equipped with ZSU-77-2 Zeus Self-Propelled Artillery, Air Defense. The tracks were, like many of the Cav's equipment, technically on the Terran Hegemony experimental weapons list, but after nearly fourteen years of war all the gear still in used had more than proved itself. In that same decade and a half the Zeus tracks had proved themselves so well that even many in the Brave Rifles—who really should have known better—knew the air defense company better by the name Zeus than they did by the unit's official callsign.

"Lucky," Bunny said quickly. "Send them everything we have on those fighters. Do it quickly."

On the street ahead and below turrets indexed. Leopards—Laser Point Defense System—were activated and missile-defense was set to 'auto'. Datalinks were established, making sure that the soon-to-appear shot pattern was consistent to avoid 'clumping' in some areas while others were left untouched. Radar and ECM emitters were warmed and readied. Electrically-driven barrels were rotated up to speed. Targeting computers were brought up and cross-linked. Lieutenant Hilda Makepeace reflected on the irony of her name and chosen profession, as she did every time before a fight.

"Download from Nomad-four. It's sensor profiles of enemy fighters!"

"Analysis!" Makepeace snapped.

There wasn't time for a full and complete analysis. Those units suspected to have ECM and gauss cannons were given higher priority—one because of their effects on the datalink and effectiveness of targeting system, the other because of the range and power they had—missile units were given a lower priority, trusting to the LPDSes and ECM to blunt the worst of it. There wasn't time to sort out which of the others had the heaviest autocannon or energy-weapon armament.

"Reprioritizing fire-mission…go!"

"Set system to automatic," Makepeace said. "Transmitters to automatic."

"All systems go."

"Consent lights on, engagement on automatic. Targeting computer has control."

Makepeace nodded once.

"Engage!"

Sumner Johns grinned, then frowned, as a flurry of challenges came so fast that the overlapped and made themselves almost indecipherable. None of them were really proper in the Clan sense with a rank and name and unit and position in that unit and what fighter type or mech was being used, followed by a challenge, usually with some sort of insult, addressed to another specific war-machine. Instead it was little more than a unit call-sign Thunder God-Three-One through Three-Four, followed by a reference to a position that they were attacking.

The grin came at the idea of more enemy fighters to face. The frown from the way the message was addressed and the fact that he was pretty sure that the fighters he had engaged used only one position number, not two. A moment of thought was enough for him to realize that they were designating fighters in beta star. They were had refrained from using the aerospace fighter's proper names, of course, since there was no way they could have known them. In their absence they had simply counted them from south to north and leading fighter to trailing.

There was something else, though. Something about how the fighters were positioned…

His blood went cold.

The ZSU-77-2 took its three-letter designator from an ancient weapon system designed for much the same purpose. That acronym was lost in history, but the casual name assigned to it by the pilots who might have to face it had survived the millennium since its introduction more or less intact.

The version used by the Brave Rifles, in addition to its ECM gear and LPDS, had, in a turret, two six-barreled rotary autocannons. While these cannons could not use the semi-combustible case munitions that nearly every other unit vertol, armor, and mech alike, used, it carried over ten tons of ammunition for them. Specially formulated ammunition. Ammunition that fired like standard, but via a combination time/proximity fuse, would burst into a cloud of shrapnel in mid-air.

Sumner Johns had caught on, but a moment too late. A wall of steel splinters appeared in the air ahead of four fighters, spread out enough so that no matter how their pilots maneuvered they couldn't avoid getting hit. Those same patterns conveniently over-lapped in the relatively narrow confines, and those four fighters were not the only ones sharing the airspace.

The range was forced to close still further, and then the Zeuses revealed their second deadly surprise.

It was called Scorpion, more for a convenient handle than an alphanumeric designation and not any particular allusions from its flight profile. Scorpion was a moderate-ranged surface-to-air missile with a multi-mode seeker, a SRM-standard warhead, and could be fitted in three, six, and eight-packs. Each Zeus had two six-pack launchers, and carried three tons of ammunition—thirty rounds—exclusive of those that were pre-loaded in the launchers.

"Blow through!" Johns ordered. "Engaged units go vertical."

It was not a particularly good move, but it would give separation between the two and that would allow him to get his remaining pilots clear. Get them clear so that they could plot how to remove this unpleasant surprise….

January, 3050

The view, Sumner Johns decided, was pleasant enough. It failed to live up to the stories and the images in the holo-dramas that were enjoyed by the laborer caste, but after so long spent in space it felt good to stand via real gravity again.

"Enjoying the view, Star Captain?"

Johns turned to find Ulric Kerensky standing behind him. "It is pleasant enough, Khan," he replied. He was not at all sure how he felt about the other warrior, and it bothered him.

On one hand Ulric was widely regarded as the leader of the so-called 'warden' movement, an ideological mindset that one Sumner Johns found mealy-mouthed at best, and rank cowardice at worst. But Ulric nobody could find Ulric mealy-mouthed and even fewer could doubt the Khan's courage and skill.

On the other, Ulric Kerensky had devised a plan that, warden or no, would put Clan Wolf far in advance of any other in the invasion. It was an audacious plan. A cunning plan. Cunning like a wolf. A plan that required the close cooperation and coordination of not just warriors, but also merchants to run JumpShips behind enemy lines, and technicians and laborers to emplace the requisite supply caches without any warriors for protection if they were discovered.

It was the kind of plan that Clan Blood Spirit, his former Clan, should have come up with. Blood Spirit, esprit de corps, all the parts working together sharing the same risks and the same glories. It was the kind of plan they should have been able to come up with, been able to execute even better than the wolves. But he knew it was the last plan they would have come up with had Clan Wolf's and Clan Blood Spirit's positions been reversed, and it was a bitter gall to see everything they could have been but were not.

Deciding that he had to say something and that it really was not proper for a warrior who was abtahka to be thinking about his former clan in such a way, he shifted slightly. "Is there anything I can do for you, my Khan?"

"What do you think?" Ulric asked him, gesturing towards the window.

There were so many ways to answer that question. "I think the saKhan would have been…wiser—" one had to be polite after all "—to have left us, that is to say the 3rd Battle Cluster—back in the Kerensky Cluster and swap it for another cluster he felt would be useful in battle."

"So that you could hunt bandits and raiders, Star Captain?" Ulric asked wryly.

Sumner frowned, "hunting bandits is no great honor, Khan. But it is some honor."

Ulric gave him an unreadable expression. "Grant me three years, Star Captain, grant me three mayhap four on the outside, and I will guarantee that you will have had more than enough honor to satisfy you…if you are still alive to be satisfied."

"As you say, Khan, but three years is a long time," Sumner said. "It seems that all I have done for the last two years is sit." He referred to the months spent in the hospital after his Trial of Position and the further months spent learning to use his prosthetic.

"In the cockpit perhaps," Ulric acknowledged. "We both know that you have developed one of the most intensive training programs among units in the entire invasion."

Sumner bowed slightly in acknowledgement.

"I will want a copy of your training syllabi later, perhaps I shall see it implemented in its entirety in Alpha Galaxy, if not the entire Clan."

"I will just have to develop a better one then, Khan."

Ulric laughed. "Humor, that is good. Now tell me what you think."

"Khan?"

Ulric did not speak for some minutes.

"What is the truth?" he asked.

Sumner looked at him askance.

"What is the truth, Star Captain," Ulric said, then went on. "The truth is that each Clan has its own version of the Truth. And that each of those truths is part of the Truth that the Great Father and the Founder left us. No Clan has sole custody of the Truth. If it had been the desire of the Founder that we should all share the Truth he would have made only one Clan. Instead he made twenty so that each might explore portions that that Truth. Abtahka is just one of the ways he made it so that parts of different Truths could be examined and shared.

"So I will settle, for right now, you telling me what Truth the Blood Spirits hold."

Sumner inclined his head. "What are the Blood Spirits," he said. "My bond-holder posed this question to me about Clan Wolf and I spent the better part of a year answering it, Khan."

Ulric nodded.

"Simply," Sumner continued, "Clan Blood Spirit is about oneness. All are part of the whole. The laborers our muscles, the scientists our brain, the warriors our two fists. All train together, even the laborers receive rudimentary military training, because it binds us together. Elan, esprit de corp. Blood Spirit is. It is inside of us, who we are. There are…echoes of it inside Clan Wolf—inside all Clans I suspect. It is in the way warriors in the same unit walk together, hold themselves. As though we go around saying 'this is who we are, there is no one better'."

"Good answer," Ulric said. "Now I shall share a Truth with you, one that Clan Blood Spirit forgot."

Sumner Johns frowned slightly as he regarded his Khan.

"Clan Blood Spirit forgot that innovation did not die with the Founder. It still holds to the same table of organization the Founder set up, without the use of novas of mechanized battle armor infantry, though neither OmniMech nor elemental existed before he died. Of all the Clans it is among the most rigorous at holding to zelbrigen when on the offensive. And yet, on the defensive, that fails to hold true."

Sumner stilled. What his former Clan did in the defense of its homeworld was well-known, but it was not talked about.

"You innovated," Ulric said. "Despite all of your former Clan's failure to perceive that Truth."

"You would have made an excellent Loremaster, sir," Sumner said, not quite believing he had the audacity to say it.

"I doubt it," Ulric said, "But I see your point. You see, Star Captain, it is not just you have been posting these difficult questions to. I have been asking them of most of Clan Wolf's abtahka, asking about different ways of seeing things. There is one I would have consulted, but she is no longer a Wolf, I am not sure what Clan she is in, actually. So what I want from you, is for you to tell me, what you think our two biggest problems are. They can be us as Clan Wolf, or regarding the entire invasion, I do not care."

Sumner Johns regarded him levelly for a moment, then turned back to the window. "I have two concerns, and yes, the affect all of the Clans present. First, aside from the Blood Spirits and Hells Horses, the Clans do not think highly of conventional forces. Blood Spirit knows that tanks are cheap compared to 'mechs. Inexpensive, and the Inner Sphere is vast, and the Great Father said 'there is a quality in quantity that is oftentimes forgot.'"

"He was quoting another man, but I take your point," Ulric said. "So you think they can swarm us with armor?"

"There are…advantages to armor," Sumner said. "It is not as large a target and is a more stable firing platform than a 'mech. But since we do not use much armor, most in the invasion save those who have experience against Clans Blood Spirit and Hells Horses—or are abtahka from them—have no experience fighting armor. It is a weakness. Whether or not the spheroids can figure it out and develop something to attack that weakness I do not know."

Ulric nodded slowly. "And the second?"

"And the second are the people living on the worlds we liberate," Sumner Johns said. "As long as we can show them that our ways are superior over living under the corrupt Successor Lordlings, all shall be well. If we cannot convince them we shall have those who oppose us in our rear. Perhaps they shall oppose us violently, which in turn we shall suppress with violence."

"The matter will escalate," Ulric said.

"Yes," Sumner said. "The one thing we, the Clans, can not afford is for the people of the Inner Sphere to decide that life under the Lordlings is better than the life that will be offered by the Star League Remade. It need only happen once, by one Clan on one planet, to turn all the people of the Inner Sphere against us. I do not think there are enough clusters in all the Clans to garrison the entire Inner Sphere if it comes to that."

Ulric nodded. "In this I agree. You have received my orders of the planets we conquer?"

"I have," Sumner said, keeping the mental frown at his Khan's choice of words off his face. "It seemed logical and well thought out to me."

"Good," Ulric said. "Now, about combat vehicles, is there anything else you can think of that you think I should know?"

"Not particularly," Sumner said. "Different kinds have different advantages, and in Blood Spirit, when I interacted with ground units it was to support them. I do recall reading once, however, that a ground combat vehicle is…

Present

…far simpler to modify to create a machine with a singular purpose than a 'mech is.

Sumner Johns recalled these words in an eye-blink. True enough they hadn't really encountered any before now, but being the first to discover this particular unpleasant surprise was an honor he could have well done without.

"Bravo-Four-Two is hit." Rena's voice was cool and collected.

Bravo-Four element had been in Jengiz, the same as Alpha-Five, and Sumner made a mental note that the enemy liked to target ECM-equipped units first. It was not much as far as patterns went, but it was something.

"They have violated zellbrigen, Beta Star engage!"

Sumner Johns wanted to order his pilots to belay that order, but it was too late. They would be able to rightfully claim that Rena and the other fighters to take damage that had not been challenged, had been damaged by deliberately flying through their fire. It would have been simple enough for them to have avoided being damaged by breaking off so that the units challenged could fight.

Garth Radick, he thought, would be unlikely to accept that explanation, but the Khan was a different matter, and both sides' battleroms would reveal the truth.

The enemy missile launchers had been pointing nearly vertical and were reloaded by the time his fighter binary passed by overhead. There was not enough time from the time Leo Leroux gave the command to the time they passed overhead for all of the pilots to get targeting solutions. More of the explosive-shrapnel ate at their tail armor, launchers flashed and four dozen more missiles came charging after them. The one saving grace was that the fire was spread out rather than concentrated on just four aerospace fighters.

He managed to only lose three more fighters, two from the small group that had initially been challenged, but the rest had all been badly damaged. It would take days, even with the modular systems of the OmniFighters, for the technicians to make good all the damage.

Enough. He had destroyed two of the enemy fighter squadrons, and gathered tactical data about three new enemy systems, including an air-defense tank.

"Break off," he ordered. "All units reform ten kilometers north-west, angels 5."

"Looks like they're breaking off."

"Looks like, Lucky," Bunny agreed softly. "Bravo Zulu, Thunder God, Nomad Three and Four are buying the beer."