"Mike Moscoe - BattleTech - MechWarrior - Dark Age 09 - Patriot's Stand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moscoe Mike)

still held on, and green where Terran plants were slowly replacing them. In the spring air, the yellow of
Scotch broom outlined the road from the south and sprang up in patches elsewhere. The mountains of the
Cragnorm Range, only ten or fifteen klicks away, showed Scotch broom as well as the purple of heather.
Behind Grace, the foothills of the Galty Range would show the same hues if she twisted in her cockpit to
look. Instead she glanced north, up the valley to where the gray of Falkirk’s stone buildings stood in the lee
of Wilson Crag. Around the cliff were the large green circles of irrigated land, growing the Terran wheat,
corn, barley, and oats that were sold outside the valley. Small gardens adjoining the houses provided all the
vegetables the inhabitants needed. Falkirk was comfortably independent—or had been last week.

Now Falkirk needed help, so two days ago Grace sent out a call to all the small holdings in the mountains
and towns beyond. She was more than grateful for the signs of digging beside the road in front of where she
stood. Yesterday Chato Bluewater had led in two dozen Navajos from the White River Valley, on the other
side of the still snow-capped Hebrides Range. Now they were working on a defense strategy that Chato had
assured Grace would work, although she wasn’t sure what it was.

Yesterday, while Pirate was in the shop having the Gatling rigged, the Navajo, aided by anyone willing to
pitch in, had dug, strung line, and done other strange things. Grace watched and scratched her head. “How
do you stop a ’Mech with a rope?” she called out.
Chato smiled softly at the question. “You fight the white man’s way. We’ll follow the warpath with the spirit
of Coyote. Let’s see whose path the MechWarriors wish they hadn’t crossed.”

Grace had never heard him use words like “white man” before. Then again, she’d never been on the
“warpath” with him. A bit uncomfortable, she answered with “They’re not warriors, just raiders. And I’m not
a white man, I’m a Scotch-Irish woman.”

“You are the mayor of Falkirk. That’s enough to make you a white man to me,” Chato said.

He laughed as Grace shot back, “Only on Thursday evenings during the town meetings.”

But Chato quickly grew serious. “You are the one these hardheaded miners accept as their war leader. Put
on war paint, Chief, and let’s see how good your braves are.”

Grace made grumbling noises at him—she’d never worn makeup in her life. With her creamy complexion set
off by flaming red hair, she didn’t really need it.

“Dust on the horizon.” The voice of Dan McLeod snapped her back to attention. He was in his AgroMech,
to her left, his machine listing a bit with the weight of the field burner now hanging from its left arm. Normally,
the burner was used to clear native vegetation to prepare a field for Terran crops. Now the burner was
equipped with a high-speed pump, and the hump of a two-kiloliter feed tank towered over Dan’s open
cockpit. Grace had heard that BattleMechs tended to heat up in combat. Dan’s burner would help that
along, big time.

Grace turned her binoculars south and leaned far forward. In the cockpit, Pirate’s gyros protested her
off-balance weight adding to the new front armor. Grace dropped her right hand back into the cockpit and
used the joystick to edge the drill bit on Pirate’s right arm out to balance her against the fifteen-meter-tall
granite pinnacle she was hiding behind.

She returned her attention to the main road. Yep, she could see a dust cloud out there now. The road was
straight, generally five klicks or more from the mountains, but below Grace a dry ravine forced it closer to the
foothills. A spring gully-washer would have put the road under three meters of raging water, but there hadn’t