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Still partly open, the Bay door froze in place.
Grayson turned and strode for the opening. Men scattered before his feet, most throwing away their guns and fleeing without looking back, a pitiful few standing their ground to blaze away at the thundering 'Mech with assault rifles and pistols. Grayson ignored them, increasing speed as he moved away from the Castle. The laser and missile batteries mounted around the wall packed more than enough firepower to bring the Shadow Hawkdown. His only hope was that the weapons were not yet ma
He didn't dare cut in the 'Mech's jump jets for the descent from the parade field. After piloting the Locust,the Shadow Hawkfelt wildly different — huge, massive, and clumsy, as though he were attempting to walk with lead weights strapped to hands and feet and torso. It would not take long to get used to the heavier 'Mech, but Grayson was not about to risk any tricky maneuvers until he had the machine thoroughly broken to harness.
The terrain below the parade ground was broken and rough, gouged by erosion gullies and made treacherous by loose stones and gravel spills. Grayson found he had begun his descent further north than he'd intended. To the south, toward the lights of Sarghad, the slope was gentler, flat enough for hovercraft and solid enough to support ru
He opened his combat frequencies, and got a rasp of static and a rapidly speaking voice in his helmet phones.
". . . freighter DropShip, demanding immediate clearance!"
"DropShip Alpha, this is tower. We have an emergency on the field and must deny your request for clearance."
"You idiots, it's the emergency I'm trying to avoid! Look... Captain Yorunabi, ISF has given me orders to launch immediately. Do you read me?"
Grayson strained to catch the words, which were fuzzed by static. As these were electronic transmissions and not voices, he couldn't tell if the speaker was Tor or not. But he knew Lori would not have launched the attack on the port unless she had had word from Captain tor that the DropShip was secure.
When they'd made their plans, they'd not known the DropShip's launch schedule, and could only guess from the preparations around its base that it was ready to lift. DropShips were not loaded with their liquid hydrogen reaction mass until just before launch. The H had an unfortunate tendency to diffuse through unshielded tanks if it were left sitting for more than a very few hours. It was generally cheaper and more efficient to store the fuel elsewhere, and load it aboard just before burn time.
That was how they knew the DropShip was nearing launch time when they'd seen the astech teams fueling it, but they hadn't known how close it was. Rather than have Tor and his squad risk detection by sitting in a secretly captured DropShip for hours — possibly a standard day or more — the attack was pla
The DropShip pilot's frantic request was according to plan, but Grayson wondered about the presence of an ISF Captain aboard. Was that Tor's bluff? Or had something gone terribly wrong?
"Alpha, this is the tower. You have clearance for immediate launch."
If it was a bluff, it had worked. A flare of light spread across the still-darkened field, and the Invidious'DropShip rose on a flickering pillar of white fire, moving slowly at first, then accelerating at what must have been a bone-cracking three Gs into the pearly sky.
If Tor's assault had failed somehow, there was not a thing in the universe that could be done about it now.
Grayson switched frequencies, and found the battle cha
"Lancer One, this is Grayson." They'd not arranged radio codes, because Grayson hadn't expected to be coming out of the Castle in a BattleMech.
There was a pause. "Grayson? This is Lori."
"Lori! I've liberated us a Shadow Hawk.I'm on my way down the slope toward you. Any opposition?"
"Heavy fire from the ships, as expected. Their ‘Mechs are not ma
"Right. Stick with the plan. I'll see you at the rendezvous!"
Fire and shattered earth rose around him as missiles from the Castle sought across the rocky ground for the lumbering Shadow Hawk.Twice Grayson turned, dropped the autoca
On the plain below, he could make out the specks of three BattleMechs retiring north toward the mountains, shielded from the grounded DropShips by the ruin of a liquid hydrogen tank. And in the sky above, a brilliant star moved rapidly toward the lightening east, trailing a white contrail plume. Success or failure?
He would learn soon enough. For now, the plan required radio silence with the spacecraft, and the pretense that Tor's part of the plan had worked perfectly.
If it had not, success would turn to failure in two short days.
* * * *
JumpShips were ungainly beasts, restricted by their design and by physics to slow and extremely gentle maneuvers about that invisible abstraction in space known as a jump point. Jump points were areas spa
Energy for the jump came from the vessel's jump sail, a disk of metal fabric less than a millimeter thick and up to a kilometer wide that captured and transmitted the light and particulate radiation from a star to shipboard storage cells. Designed to absorb every photon of every wavelength that fell upon it, jump sails were black — a black so profound that an old pilots' joke told of space appearing white in comparison.
Though complex in the details of operation, the basic simplicity of jump point transitions had given men the stars. Even though the war-torn civilization of the Successor States could no longer build new vessels in any quantity, ships continued to ply the lanes between stellar jump points. The Invidiouswas at least three centuries old, her drive guide laid in during the years just before the Succession Wars.
No one knew how long the power core of a starship would remain charged and vital. It was a question that troubled the philosophers and warlords of every world in the Human sphere.
A JumpShip's reliance on the jump points and on the huge yet delicate black jump sails meant that no ship could travel far from the point at which it entered a planetary system. The sails had to be unfurled for considerable periods of time to soak up the energy necessary for a jump, and the dust and meteoric debris that littered the orbital plane of every star could shred a sail within a few passages. Though some ships had secondary drive systems that allowed them to maneuver through a system with their sails furled, most JumpShips remained at the jump point, using their DropShips as shuttles between starship and world.
This posed another problem, however. At the jump points of any star, that star's gravity is still very much in evidence. A ship in orbit around a star would not fall, of course, but it would not remain near the jump point either. Rather, it would follow its orbital path around the star and eventually through the dust-laden plane of the system. For this reason, JumpShips mount ion or plasma/fusion stationkeeping thrusters. These provide a steady, gentle thrust carefully calculated to precisely counter the pull of the star, and to maintain the spread of the jump sail at the same time. A starship parked at a star's jump point is positioned with its prow aimed outsystem and the sail spread perhaps ten kilometers aft, between the star and the ship. The stationkeeping thrusters are angled aft and outboard, so that their streams of charged particles will not damage the fragile sail.