BattleTech Legends: Sword and Fire by Thomas S. Gressman

Author:Thomas S. Gressman
Language: eng
Format: mobi

“There it is,” Ryan whispered in Talon Sergeant Raiko’s ear.

Under normal circumstances, it would have taken the DEST teams less than a day to walk from the landing zone to their current position just north of Mount Szabo. But nothing the Draconis Elite Strike Teams did could be described as normal. Moving unseen through hostile territory was a painstaking, dangerous process. At Ryan’s order, the rate of travel had been set at only a few kilometers a night. Every hundred meters or so, the commandos would hunker down in loose defensive formation, watching and listening for any signs of a potential threat to their mission’s security.

The going was dreadfully slow, but the trade-off of stealth and secrecy was worth it. As a result, it had taken the strike force three nights to reach their objective. Now, the need for a tight noise discipline was even greater. Not more than three hundred meters away loomed Mount Szabo, the huge granite block that housed the Smoke Jaguars’ primary command communications and control installation, as well as Ryan’s primary objective, the control center for Huntress’ space-defense system.

“How do you read it, Sergeant?”

Raiko clapped a pair of electronic binoculars to his unvisored eyes and studied the scene before him for a long time. Ryan knew from long association that though Raiko enjoyed the added protection and strength of the Kage suits, the senior noncom didn’t trust them completely. Instead, he preferred to use older, more proven technology, especially when it came to reconnaissance. Thus, Raiko always insisted on packing along an old-fashioned pair of electronic binoculars.

After carefully surveying the mountain and the surrounding area, Raiko passed the binoculars to his commander. “Take a look.”

Pressing the eyepieces to his face, Ryan adjusted the instrument until he had a sharp, clear image. The mountain was exactly as Trent had described it; a bleak, almost forbidding sight. From their position, beneath a creeper-shrouded fallen tree northwest of Szabo, they could see little of the facility buried deep in the rock. A three-meter-high fence topped with razor wire and broken by a single gate surrounded what appeared to be the only entrance to the base. Two armored Elementals stood guard at the gate. It was too far to tell for certain, but Ryan suspected that the rest of the Point, and possibly a few more besides, were stationed just inside the massive, gray-painted steel doors set into the living rock of the mountain itself. Anyone trying to force his way into the command center would quickly find himself on the losing end of what promised to be a brief, but very bloody fight.

Beyond the bulk of the mountain, Ryan could see reflected on the undersides of the dark, sky-obscuring clouds the glare of the symbol of Clan Smoke Jaguar, which was carved into the mountain’s southeast face. Just beyond the mountain, the ever-present, low-hanging storm clouds were lit with an orange glow. Ryan knew that the faint, ugly luminescence came from the streetlights of Lootera, the planetary capital and the seat of Smoke Jaguar power.

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