Battletech Legends: The Gray Death Legion Trilogy: BattleTech Legends Box Set #1 by William H. Keith

Author:William H. Keith [Keith, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2019-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Union-Class DropShip Xao entered Verthandi’s atmosphere balanced atop a pillar of pulsing white fire. In recent days, the Xao had been engaged in orbital reconnaissance, a landing and retrieval operation to shuffle two platoons of infantry from their outpost at the edge of Vrieshaven back to the capital at Regis, and a supply run to Verthandi-Alpha and back. The ship had made the flight back with a unit detached from Admiral Kodo’s command and assigned to special detached duty under Colonel Kevlavic’s personal command.

Draconis Elite Strike Team 4 was typical of DEST forces used extensively throughout the Draconis Combine, and was similar in concept to the elite commando units of other major Houses of the Successor States. Hand-picked from veteran units, put through rigorous physical and mental training courses that passed less than 5 percent of those selected, DEST unit personnel learned to use weapons ranging from Mk XXI blazers and poison-coated throwing stars to the plastic tip of a disposable stylus or their bare hands. They could make high altitude-low opening parachute drops from twenty kilometers up, swim for kilometers underwater using oxygen rebreather apparatus, scale sheer cliffs using special climbing gear, and penetrate the most closely guarded security zone with a bewildering array of miniaturized electronic lockpicks and scanners. Most could also pilot BattleMechs, and had the codebreaking and electronic skills to penetrate a locked ’Mech’s security systems.

DEST 4 had been assigned to Nagumo’s command as a support element, but so far had spent the campaign in their barracks on Verthandi-Alpha. DEST special forces were too valuable to risk on anything other than important, easily identified tactical targets, and there are few of those in any guerrilla war.

Now, however, DEST 4 had a target.

The Xao burned through Verthandi’s stratosphere at a flat angle, shedding speed and heat in the roiling wake of its passage. For precisely thirty seconds, the ship’s drives cut off and the spherical craft arrowed powerlessly through thin air. Two by two, silvery bubbles dropped from it, punching through the turbulence of the craft’s shockwaves and toward the cloud-mottled green and blue of Verthandi’s polar basin, 15,000 meters below. After falling another kilometer, the bubbles split like ripe melons. They disgorged heavily armed and armored men who uncurled from the fetal positions they’d held inside their aluminum prisons and spread black-clad arms and legs to the stiffening wind of their fall. Above and behind them, the Xao’s drives throbbed to life again, her passage marked by her white contrail of heated air against the icy blue.

In free fall, the commando team used computer-linked visor displays to lock onto a pinpoint target that was hidden by clouds, but calculated by triangulation from three navigational satellites in space above them. Those satellites painted the clouds above the target with laser beams invisible to the naked eye, but made visible by the electronics of the helmet visors. Steering with arched backs and outstretched limbs, the commando team assembled in rough aerial formation and drifted in the direction of the target.

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