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"Colonel! Colonel!" He looked up as a Legion trooper burst into the doorway. "Colonel! Come quick!"
Grayson turned from the terminal. The display had remained irritatingly blank when he plugged the memory clip into the slot. He had not even gotten the ordinary map display, and he was begi
"Sir! It's ... the Wall!"
Grayson and Lori both hurried to the door and looked out. Two hundred meters away, men and women were stepping back, looking toward the towering gray monolith of granite that blocked the valley. Grayson could feel a peculiar vibration in the ground through the soles of his boots, and he was aware of small pebbles along the bottom of the dried river jittering and dancing in time to some massive movement of engines or equipment beneath the surface.
The Wall had opened. The section within the grooves that Grayson had noted earlier was sliding back into the rock, exposing a smoothly cut opening in the rock face. When the section had withdrawn into darkness for a depth of two meters, it stopped with an audible thunk.Then there came a grinding of machinery as the rock section slid aside. Ten meters wide, twenty tall, the doorway stood open.
* * *
Hundreds of kilometers to the north, Colonel Julian Langsdorf leaned forward in the cockpit seat of his War-hammer,willing the bulky Marik column to move faster . . . faster! Several 'Mechs had turned back already due to breakdown or overheating problems, but he was determined to press forward at maximum speed, to catch Grayson Carlyle before another 24 hours had passed. The Gray Death Legion had slipped away during the night, had covered far more ground than he had thought would be possible for a convoy that must include hundreds of civilians, technicians, and wounded perso
The man who had identified himself as ComStar Precentor Rachan had explained matters to Langsdorf. Carlyle was searching for the lost League cache, possibly with a good idea of its whereabouts, and he was hoping to seize it before Langsdorf could bring his forces to bear.
Rachan had put Langsdorf in direct command of the entire Marik Expeditionary Force. General Kleider was still en route and would not arrive for several hours yet. Rachan had assured Langsdorf that even when Kleider grounded, the final closing of the trap on the renegade Carlyle and his band was completely under hiscommand.
Carlyle had escaped Langsdorf before, and the man was determined that he could not escape again.
Langsdorf had twenty-seven BattleMechs in his force. His own 12th White Sabers consisted of six 'Mechs, plus a handful of armored hovercraft and some mechanized infantry he had drawn from perimeter duty at the spaceport, all under Major Sigwell Allendry. There were only two 'Mechs left of the small 5th Marik Guards. Both had been incorporated into the 4th Light Assault Group under Captain Maranov, bringing that company to a full twelve 'Mechs. The 7th Light Assault Group under Captain Chu Shi-Lin was understrength with nine 'Mechs, and five of those were 20-ton Stingersor Wasps.
Finally, he had a collection of hover tanks and mechanized infantry of the Marik House Guard under a foppish Lieutenant Colonel named Haverlee. Langsdorf wasn't certain how he would be able to use thatbunch, but he would find something for them to do, one way or the other.
Though his command was a kind of a ragtag throw-together, twenty-seven 'Mechs was a powerful force-almost a full battalion's worth. Meanwhile, reco
Langsdorf was determined to plant explosives and bring down the entire face of the cliff if Carlyle did manage somehow to find a way into the storehouse. Star League weapons would do Carlyle little good in a final, desperate battle in the depths of that mountain.
One way or another, Colonel Grayson Carlyle's hours were numbered!
* * *
Grayson stood inside the old Star League cache. It was difficult to contain his surprise ... or his disappointment.
The towering blackness of the Wall blocked off the light behind him, except for the shaft falling through the open door. The troops and dependents were already filtering in, awed into silence by the size of the hidden chamber. A grating, mechanical sound echoing through the rock-walled chamber a
The chamber was a full fifty meters wide and over twenty meters tall, the rocky ceiling barely visible in the weak beams of hand torches cast this way and that. Ahead, the tu
Yet this whole, vast chamber, obviously once a storehouse that could have held rank upon rank of Battle-Mechs with ease, was completely empty. All that remained was a building similar to the one outside, a chopped-off, flat-topped, four-sided pyramid with a single door. Holding his torch and trying to keep his hand from trembling, Grayson approached the small building. It was probably another engineering shack of some sort.
Was it possible that the cache had not been found in time before Kurita's invitation? That the chamber was still being prepared when word came that Kurita's fleet was materializing at the system's jump points? Perhaps the Star League equipment had been hidden in the city of Freeport, after all. A city is an enormous, complex place. Was it possible that Kurita had missedthe actual hiding place during his search, and that the treasure trove of League artifacts had been destroyed when Freeport was vaporized?
As Grayson entered the small building within the chamber, he knew that it was indeed possible, because this building had nothingwhatsoever to do with a League military storehouse.
27
Rachan looked at each of the faces in turn. These six men with him were Adepts from the hyperpulse generator complex north of the Helmdown spaceport, the highest-ranking ComStar operatives on the planet. They had gathered in this gloomy little basement room of the Helmdown ComStar facility because Rachan was absolutely certain of the security here.
Had Helm been an A-class HPG facility, there would have been another Precentor like himself to manage it. The presence of another Precentor—however awed he might have been by Rachan's credentials—would have complicated matters considerably, for Rachan had taken great liberties with his authority with the hierarchy of the Order. It was entirely possible, even probable,that these six Adepts would all meet with unfortunate accidents within the next few weeks, if all went well in the military operation against Carlyle. ComStar Adepts, by regulations dating back almost to the time of Blake himself, never spent more than a year at any one ComStar station or facility in order to prevent undue familiarity among the various staff members. If six tragic accidents did not somehow occur, then within a year, all six Adepts would have been transferred to six other worlds across the I