STAND AMONG THE ONES THAT LIVE...
I didn’t usually bother to put on the full femme fatale. Among other reasons, swinging my hips that much started making unfamiliar muscle groups complain, it took what felt like three times as long as just doing whatever-it-was, and for the most part the men around me were more useful thinking with their brains rather than their testicles.
But this wasn’t the most part.
As head of the Eridani Light Horse, Brevet-General Reinbach Kerston was the most powerful man on the entire planet of Hoff. When he threw a party, it was by definition a significant occasion for any native Hoffian - particularly if they were, wanted to seem, or wanted to become the kind of influential local that an otherwise-independent outside ruler would be wise to court.
The local glitterati had exchanged several small fortunes and not a few feuds to obtain invitations, and I wouldn’t’ve been surprised to learn that at some point murder had been done for the sake of same.
But there was a list of people whose invitations were guaranteed. The ranking House Davion representative, whose degree of cousinship to the main-line Davions I’d never caught but whose main job was to negotiate new merc contracts. Comstar’s Precentor Hoff - who, thankfully, had declined to attend. A handful of the richest and most powerful natives, first and foremost His Grace, Bradley Cheel, Duke of Hoff...
And every other merc commander who happened to be on-planet, including me.
So, the ELH’s 3016 New Year’s Ball was tailor-made for networking, and for making an impression. All a good reason to put my best foot forward.
None of that was why I’d let the inner vamp loose.
That was in honor of my date.
Her leaning down to help me out of the limo didn’t expose anything; her sleek, blood-red dress had a halter design that rose all the way to her neck in front. She was wearing only a minimum of makeup - Mechwarrior’s habit; if you’ve never sweated mascara into your eyes, count your blessings - and her only jewelry was a pair of ruby stud earrings, but from the rate of camera flashes from the sides of the red carpet, I was far short of the only one who thought she was outshining the flashy invitees dripping in sapphires and topaz.
“I told you,” I murmured, leaning on her hand just enough to make the offer feel appreciated. “Fashion can vary all it likes, but style is forever.”
...OK, no, while the heels I had on made my calves look bitchin’, they were pretty tall. I actually did end up needing her help for balance to get out of the limo without incident. I’d picked my dress, the matte-est black I could find, for a hemline that slashed up from next to one ankle to above the other knee, and at the range we were at I could see her eyes dart from there up to the one-shoulder neckline.
Success.
She flushed when she realized I’d caught her looking, and I grinned and tucked a hand into her elbow as we walked up the wide, shallow steps.
Once we were into the ballroom, I could see the points where the space’s bones filtered out from under the decoration - the removed movable walls that would have turned it into a series of largeish conference rooms, the temporary nature of the tables and bandstand, and the like.
“I’m impressed,” I murmured to Sophitia. “They went all out.”
They really had. The decorations gussying the rather plain basic space up were top grade. It looked like about a kilometer’s worth of shimmering silk had been hung in place of simple crepe paper, for instance. You could probably have bought a light ‘mech for the combined price of what was on display in the room. I wondered if they were rented, or if the Eridani Light Horse kept a container’s worth of Fancy Party Stuff in storage and brought them out at need.
She gave me a sidelong look, then looked around the room. “...I guess the decorations are nice? But… I feel like I’m back at Prom.”
“I thought that’s what all fancy parties felt like?” I said, ‘innocently’, then giggled at her sidelong look. The only other time I’d seen her so horrified was when she found out just how lousy my gunnery was. “No, seriously, in the end any ballroom’s just a big open space. Quality’s in the decorations and the canapes.” I glanced over at the buffet speculatively.
Sophitia groaned. “Where do you put it all?” she asked, but started us moving towards the table anyway.
As though she didn’t know; she exercised just as hard as I did. I flexed the arm that didn’t have a sleeve playfully. “More meat for the guns,” I said.
Anyway. The snacks were excellent, aside from my discovery of a truly foul pastry thing made of black sludge and lies. The crust had looked so good…
Sophitia had been dragged away by a couple of fans when Major Berin caught up to me. Berin’s Beasts were firmly in the ‘midrange’ of merc units; a battlemech company, seven of them lights, with a lance of Hetzer assault guns for backup rather than aerospace support. They had their own modified Union class and seemed to be doing pretty all right for themselves.
He offered a handshake; a bit of a knuckle-crusher, but it felt perfunctory, like habit rather than a challenge, and he smiled when I twisted my hand out of the vise. “So, mind if I ask a prying question?” he said. His accent sounded… Andurien, maybe?
I smiled up at him, and used the excuse of a gracious kind of ‘go ahead’ wave to take a step back so that my neck wouldn’t be at such an angle. Stupid tall people. “Go ahead.”
“Did you bring her-” he nodded in the direction of the Champion Holding Court, “-to show off that you had her skills, or to show off that homo-friendly recruiting schtick you’ve been setting up?”
I shrugged, trying to bury my irritation. “A little from Column A, a little from Column B,” I said.
…It didn’t work. “And more than either, Column C, it got me the most gorgeous date here,” I added, and smiled with as many teeth as I could.
An expression that actually gained some humor at the way he started unconsciously sidling away, though I was pretty sure that that was because of Teh Gey Cooties rather than because of any concerns about my doing him a violence.
“Uh, right,” he said awkwardly, and cleared his throat before he plunged ahead into, “So, yeah, before I stuck my foot in my mouth-”
Well, the self-awareness made me feel more charitably towards him, at least. I wondered if it was an intentional bit of de-escalation on his part.
“-I was leading up to ask about a thing I’d heard, that you were looking to trade some of your people with other units.”
“Your homosexuals for my homophobes, yeah,” I said. “You’ve got somebody in mind?”
“...Yeah,” he said, looking a little nettled. “I… I’ve got a brother-sister team of mechwarriors, and the brother’s… with one of my techs. Thing is, they’ve got a family mech that I’d be losing, too, our heaviest.”
“And you’re willing to trade them away over their bedroom games?” I said, and shook my head. “Well, OK, your loss.”
“Yeah, so, I was thinking we set up to trade the mechs, too-”
I made a slashing gesture. “Nada, no. Not a straight trade, anyway. They decide to walk the next day and I’m down a mech and up a creek without a paddle? No thanks.”
“-and put the price of whatever you send my way down as a lien on their Atlas,” he finished, rushing a little.
A lien? That… could work, probably. An Atlas would be a funny fit for the unit; everything we already had was faster, and finding 400 MW fusion plants to let it keep pace would be impossibly expensive as well as nigh-impossible, and eating all its weapon space besides. So, weird as it sounded, the particular kind of mech involved made the deal less appealing…
“How much have you talked it over with your people?”
“It was their idea,” he admitted.
...But not impossibly so. I extended my hand to shake again. “I think we have an agreement in principle,” I said. “Bring them and their paperwork by our business office, say, this coming Thursday?” Our regular shuttle flights between base and planetary capital were on Wednesdays. “And I’ll have my CFO and department heads there and we can work out the details.”
He checked his memory. “About noon?” he suggested, and I was nodding and about to agree out loud when, halfway across the ballroom, an alarm screeched.
We both looked, and saw an older man in SLDF uniform - Brevet-General Kerston himself - pulling his com out of an inner pocket of his jacket. Another com went off in a different part of the room, and a third, and twice that many people were already reaching for theirs when my bodice went VRRRRN and I had to grit my teeth.
Vibrate mode was substantially less pleasant than I’d counted on when I stashed my com down there.
Don’t look at me in that tone of voice; there was literally no place else in my dress that had room for the thing, and fuck dealing with a purse.
I turned around for nominal discretion’s sake and fished it out while Berin was still figuring out what was going on, reading the little single-line text display. God, I missed smartphones. Future of the eighties, as always, go fuck yourself.
Any humor in that thought vanished as I read the tickertape: JUMPSHIP ARRIVED NADIR POINT MONOLITH CLASS NO CIVILIAN SCHEDULED LIKELY COMBINE INVASION
“‘They might have passed a very pleasant evening, had shit not gotten real,’” I muttered, once the initial shock wore off, and keyed an acknowledgement in while I looked up at Berin. “Combine Monolith just jumped in,” I told him, and nodded as his expression changed away from puzzlement and into understanding. “So, I’m going to go collect my date then have a talk with our friendly neighborhood Davion.”
“What are all the calls about?” Sophitia asked, when I had made my way back to her side.
“Invading jumpship, probably,” I summed up, “Where’s… crap, Something-or-other-Davion?”
“Sanromea-Davion,” she corrected with an eyeroll, and pointed at the cluster of people on the far side of the canape tables. “Over there.”
“Right, thanks,” I said, and leaned up to kiss her on the cheek before I kicked my heels off and - being honest - scurried over to and under the buffet.
No, literally, under. I ducked down and sidestepped twice to pop up on the other side, startling the older woman who’d been waiting her turn in the crowd and crush of presumable merc commanders gathered around the man with the ability and reason to give them money.
Give us money.
Sanromea-Davion was wearing his dress uniform. The Armed Forces of the Federated Suns were fairly practical, in a Rambo-ish way, when it came to duty gear, but their dress uniform was… Something.
High cavalry boots - no spurs, apparently he wasn’t a Mechwarrior? - under creased pants, and a short fitted jacket with a rank epaulette on the right shoulder, silver braid over tan. One broad stripe, one narrow, I thought that that was Major; seemed about right, he was a Greater Davion, but fairly young…
But the left shoulder, the entire left half of the jacket, was covered in a polished natural-yellow leather rayed… thing, like the left half of a simplified FedSuns sunburst had been folded over the top of his shoulder. Embroidered lines radiated out across the right half of the jacket from the points of the rays.
I had to admit that it was a heck of a striking statement, but damn was that weird.
“What are you all coming out of the woodwork now for?” he wondered, looking at me as I put one hand on the canape table for balance while I put my shoes back on. His voice was lighter than I expected, a tenor rather than the kind of rumbly tone that would’ve matched the rest of him; under the slow metabolism that rounded his face under the beard and challenged his tailoring, he was a big, obviously muscular man.
“Your people haven’t got the word to you, yet?” I asked right back. “Monolith-class jumpship at the nadir jump point, just arrived. We’re not on a trade route big enough to see a civilian one, which probably means the Combine has come calling.” I grinned and tapped one toe on the ground to re-seat my shoe properly. “Seller’s market for defensive contracts, right?”
His left hand dropped down to a pocket that his dress uniform didn’t have, and I could see him bite back the urge to swear for a moment before he took a breath, let it out, and said, “Right. You-” he pointed at an otherwise anonymous man in the middle of the crowd, “-were here first, let’s start this over from the top.”
“Yes, Leutnant-Colonel,” his first target said in a Lyran accent you could have cut with the proverbial chainsaw.
That was what broad-narrow meant; Leftenant Colonel. Yes, they actually spelled it that way; ‘Lieutenant’ would have been too traditional, or something.
I settled in to wait my turn as Sophitia finished walking the long way around. “I asked one of the servers to find some pens and paper for us to take notes with,” she confided.
I grinned. “You’re a wonder,” I told her.
Any doubt that it had been the Combine incoming was long gone, along with doubts about their objectives. An invasion would have brought an Overlord and several cargo dropships, probably along with some conventional backup, and a resource raid - AKA an official pirating expedition - would have done the same, but this force had arrived on nine Union class.
They were just here to break things.
Their choice of where to land said what.
“King, Baker Club Seven. Contact,” I said into my radio line. “Nav Oscar West. One bug mech, probably a Wasp.”
“Clear this channel, Baker Seven. This is scouting reports only,” replied Leftenant Colonel Omar Chandrasekar, and I bit down the urge to argue that just because I wasn’t a scout didn’t mean I was blind. I was pretty sure that our AFFS liaison-slash-commander had been sent to Hoff as a way to shuffle his incompetent ass somewhere the Eridani Light Horse could carry his dead weight, out of the way of actual operations.
Against the 3rd Sword of Light, that was… concerning.
Nav Oscar was the far end of the only bridge for nearly an hour in either direction capable of taking the weight of anything more than the lightest battlemech. The Kitt River was a major one; it had carved a substantial canyon on its way to the sea, and from what we’d seen, the Combine forces were light on jump jets. To get enough force in place to push through the fixed defenses the ELH had set up to protect their dependents, they’d need the bridge, since those same defenses had forced their dropships to come down in the farmland to the west.
Or a bridge. Most of the fighting was shaping to happen fifty klicks to the south of us, where the ELH had set themselves up on the shortest approach between the Combine drop zone and the reservation where their own dependents lived.
The Wasp stuck around for a few seconds more, then ducked back out of sight.
I guess that proved his threat-warning system was working, able to tell him that he’d been painted by at least my targeting gear.
“Dog Club Actual, this is King,” the command channel said. “Divide by lances and move them to the nav points I’m sending you. You’re equipped with scout mechs, fast-movers with jump jets and superior mobility…”
I tuned the rest out, wondering to myself how the fuck I’d ended up trapped in a badly-scripted tutorial level when I was in real life rather than a computer game.
I’d settled in to the haze of frustration and worry that went with that - what if this fuckwit trapped some of my people under the guns of a real push, or any of a dozen other ways for his utter lack of flexibility to get someone or a lot of someones killed - and fielding the private sideband calls from subordinates who were nearly as worried by Chandrasekar as I was.
At least lying through my teeth to reassure them distracted me.
...Where was I taking that? Grammar got away from me. Anyway, right before the 3rd Sword was expected to hit the outer perimeter the Light Horse had set up around the far side of their bridge, I got a call - screens showed it as Very Short-Range Relay, meaning that it had come in via landline and then been linked into our tactical comnet by the headquarters van.
“This is Nebula to Asteroid Actual,” the line said, sounding frustrated and tired. “Please acknowledge.”
Huh what? I flipped the push-to-talk. “Nebula, this is Blackwing. I have you loudness four by clarity five, over.”
Nebula was the call sign of the overall defense command.
“Thank you, Blake,” the operator on the other end muttered, almost certainly forgetting her line was still live. “Blackwing, command wants to know what you can shake loose for a flanking push, because we’ve been trying to talk to your liaison about this and getting nothing but stonewalling and blowoffs. He stopped responding to our last three calls. Even a company’s worth of distraction would work, over.”
“Nebula, we’ve been seeing nothing but the same scout lance for the last hour. I can leave my tracks and infantry here to keep the door shut and give you a battalion, but they’ll probably see us coming… And sadly, my contract says you’ll need to go through Longline.” That being Chandrasekar’s personal call-sign. “Over.”
“Blackwing, hold on this line, please,” Nebula said, her voice full of we’ll-see-about-that.
Well, what better thing did I have to do? I held.
Fortunately, this being a military channel run by actual adults, there was no hold music.
Eventually, the line clicked open again. “Blackwing, this is Nebula Actual.” The new voice was male, deep, and smooth as honey, perfectly trained. Aside from the accent, I was intensely reminded of Patrick Stewart. “Longline has been claiming to face a full strength company with armor support.”
Huh? “This is the first I’ve heard of armor,” I said. “We’ve seen one mech at a time, no more. Jenner, Wasp, and Cicada. No eyes-on, but we’ve also received sensor scatter from what our Warbooks are calling a Charger. There could be more than one of each, but…”
“More likely it’s just a single recon lance.” Nebula Actual - His Grace the Duke of Hoff, Bradley Cheel himself - sounded substantially grimmer than he had during our single brief meeting, at the ill-fated New Year’s party a week before. “Blackwing, attention to orders, per contract of employment Section 2 Subsection 3 Point 17.”
“Attending,” I said, just as crisply as if I weren’t throwing a digital copy of the contract up on my screen to look up just what exactly 2.3.17 was about.
“As Duke of Hoff and ranking available authority of the Federated Suns, I am issuing a direct order to Colonel Asha Blackwing, commanding the Blackwing Military Solutions and Services mercenary regiment. You will take your battlemech battalion and proceed south along the west bank of the Kitt River to strike the Draconis Combine forces now besieging Knightburg in the rear, destroying any scouting or blocking forces that attempt to stand in your way with all speed.” He hesitated a moment. “I will leave the decision between a demonstration attack and a full secondary assault to your discretion, with the comment that just as much as you will depend on the Eridani Light Horse to prosecute the opportunity you will generate, they will be depending on you to create an opening.”
No, that wasn’t intimidating at all. “Punch out any Combine mechs in our way, move south to hit the Sword of Light in the rear soonest. Understood,” I said, and skimmed through the legalese on my screen as quickly as I could to confirm that… Yeah. Holy shit.
“Good. We’ll be waiting when you get here. Nebula Actual, clear.”
I took one deep breath after the line cut out, then made a call to the command truck.
I’d be lying if I claimed the good start was any of my doing. I’d expected the scout lance that had been monitoring us to fall back, hold at long range and shadow us, rather than trying to stop us outright - but when we thundered off the western end of the bridge and through the empty streets of the small town that had grown around it, all four of them popped out of the second cross-street.
Maybe they thought that we’d sent only a single lance after them, or maybe they were hoping to destroy the bridge while we had mechs on it - I don’t know and had no way of knowing, then or now. Whatever they were planning, they’d left it too late.
The Cicada caught it first; Reyes’ Crusader slowed and stumbled from the sixty-kph dead run we were moving at as its entire body seemed to vanish in a wall of contrails, reaching out hungrily for the smaller ‘mech like a monster’s tentacles trying to snatch prey away under the bed. He’d flushed every single missile tube his machine had at what I would bet money was ideal range.
Even before the pall of smoke had faded away, the cloud and street were lit from within.
‘Mech scale lasers delivered their deadly energy outside the range of human vision, at frequencies that the lenses and liquid parts of the eye filtered out and the retina didn’t respond to. If they hadn’t, a single shot would have blinded every eye on the battlefield - an act prohibited by the long-ago Ares Conventions, and kept away from as a gentleman’s agreement ever since. It was a genie no one wanted to deal with, without being useful enough to risk a cycle of retribution for.
Still, having a visual confirmation of your chosen target was useful, so battlemech lasers were also equipped with a tracer function that added a harmless but apparent visual beam. Federated Suns units tended to tune their tracers to a sunny golden yellow; the Combine liked blood red, the Capellan Confederation green, the Free World’s League used violet, and the Lyran Commonwealth favored blue. Most mercenary units matched their current employer, but the ELH still used the SLDF’s pure white.
So, when Reyes fired his 5cm lasers and made the entire cloud of missile smoke flash yellow with scattered light, it wasn’t bright enough to blind me or make my cockpit windows polarize to solid black - but there was still enough energy delivered to finish the coup de grace and drop the forty-ton mech like a stone.
Weiler, in the command lance’s other Marauder, fired next, a more moderate barrage rather than a full alpha strike catching the Jenner and tracking clouds of sparks and molten metal off of its armor. Jenner and Wasp alike both fired back at him, and the Charger started to lean into motion, a parked car, its owner long-ago evacuated, smearing under its planted foot like a man stepping on a chunk of dropped banana.
Sophitia rushed forward, her mech’s feet seeming to skid only inches off of the pavement as howling jump jets launched her almost entirely forward before one toe dipped down delicately and caught against the asphalt, twisting Aspis on three different axes at once to duck under the assault mech’s swinging fist and drive her sword, like an extended lance, deep into ‘golden BB’ gap around its waist’s rotation collar.
The reactor was in there somewhere, and she found it, leaving the Charger slumping like a dropped marionette in her wake. I very much doubted that there was any luck or coincidence involved, and from the way the Wasp pilot turned to track her, he agreed.
I didn’t fire, not wanting to give the game away when I probably couldn’t get enough weapons on-target to put him down immediately. I just pitched Marauder No. 2’s torso down and opened the throttle all the way to EMERGENCY.
Right before the deafening crash, I started to straighten, and twist. “Fuck out the way, bitch!”
Seventy-five tons at eighty kilometers an hour was a hell of an impact; I was again grateful for my cockpit straps, and the Wasp was picked bodily up off its fleet by the slightly-rising vector of the crash and knocked several times its own length down the street to sprawl with its ‘head’ embedded in the side of an abandoned van.
I slowed down back to nominal top speed, but no further, making a beeline for the planned turn south and ignoring what was left of the recon lance behind us. Flashes of yellow and blue-white light, reflecting from that direction, made it clear that the rest of the battalion was firing en passant and hardly needed my help to finish two battered light mechs.
We were under radio silence as we thundered south; if the Sword of Light wasn’t distracted by its battle to break past the Light Horse, they’d certainly have seen us coming in the clouds of dust and debris as hundreds of tons of war machine made a beeline over and through every obstacle in the way, but voices on the radio would have let the unengaged operators on their dropships have a chance to warn them. None of that, though, kept us from listening to the ELH’s own chatter as the 3rd Sword of Light hit their lines.
By the sound of it - and if you weren’t in the middle of it, thirty-first century combat chatter was pretty confusing - the Combine tried to roll right over the Light Horse in their first push, and ending up reeling back with a bloody nose.
Technically, the Eridani Light Horse were a Star League-style Regimental Combat Team, consisting of a relatively small number of sub-regiments, two of them ‘light horse’ formations whose multiple battalions of recon mechs were paired with a heavy armor element, and the third, the one whose rest-and-replenishment cycle had been interrupted by the Combine raid, made up of mechs defined by their high mobility and substantial short range firepower - Strikers.
The 3rd Sword, meanwhile, were a heavy cavalry operation, just like the Combine liked - heavy mechs, about as fast as could be expected. Dragons, Quickdraws, the occasional Ostsol or Ostroc - and backing them up, medium mechs with about the same movement profile, common for other Successor States but otherwise rare in Combine service. Griffins, Wolverines, Shadow Hawks, and the like.
More armor than the Light Horse, and more range, but about the same amount of firepower, and less agility. Overall, the smart money was on the Combine, but not by all that much. The scatter of company and lance strength merc units on planet added in weren’t nothing, but weren’t enough to be decisive on their own. No matter how skilled or experienced their people were individually - and the range was pretty wide - they didn’t have the practice coordinating to stand up to the same numbers of unified enemies… Besides which, the times being what they were, the vast majority of them were lightweight machines that had a distinctly limited battlefield half-life.
My people, meanwhile, had a company of the light scout mechs that striker types had originally been designed to hunt, another company of relatively sluggish long-range snipers, and a company of big, heavy brutes that were well suited to crushing anything they could manage to catch.
Roughly speaking, anyway. All of our snipers were Marauders, all of our brutes were Battlemasters - but there was a lance of Marauders filling out the company with the Battlemasters, Reyes’ Crusader was actually best-used for indirect fire-support, Sophitia’s Aspis was a medium mech take on the ‘brute’ mission role, what they called a trooper… In practice, everything was a mess, and at that, my people were a lot more regular than most formations.
Anyway, the 3rd Sword of Light, according to the intelligence briefing we’d gotten right before they landed, didn’t have an assault-weight element, and probably precious-few 60kph heavies - which meant that my people were comfortably the heaviest element on the field. Tonnage wasn’t everything - witness the Charger, which was eighty tons but proverbially useless - but an average of ten-to-fifteen tons advantage wasn’t nothing, either.
And, of course, our arrival would take the numeric odds, before losses, from about four-to-three to five-to-three, which could matter a lot, especially since we’d be by far the freshest and least-damaged element on the field.
“Club elements, this is King,” the command channel said in Chandrasekar’s voice. “Report progress and formation cohesion, over.”
I almost put Marauder No. 2 into a ditch in shock. What the fuck? Had that clown managed to forget that we were supposed to be under radio silence? Did the mouthbreathing moron even know what radio silence was?
Hurriedly, I flipped my comm system to LOS/LASER ONLY and patched a RELAY ALL header on, then told my microphone. “All units, Joker Actual. Emphasis - maintain radio silence. Ignore Longline until I say otherwise.”
I hit the SEND button hard enough to momentarily worry I’d broken a nail.
Consciously, I knew that we probably weren’t very likely to manage to actually surprise a veteran formation, but if we got blown because of a busybody meddling idiot only fifteen minutes out I would probably end up needing sat on.
Assuming the Light Horse were able to bail our green asses out, anyway.
Chandrasekar tried to fuck things up a couple more times, sounding increasingly testy, but none of my people broke, and it paid off in spades. I was proud of them.
At the time, I just took the fact that we hit the rear perimeter - a Wolverine whose entire left side had been gutted, and a pair of twenty-tonners - as luck, or at least the monitoring lance we’d run over having gone down too quickly to get a warning sent that we’d broken out into their backfield.
Both of those were wrong. Turned out, I found out later, the officer the Combine had running comms for the 3rd Sword of Light was secretly a MIIO - Federated Suns Ministry of Information, Intelligence, and Operations - plant, put in place more than twenty years ago. He’d been the one who received the garbled warning that our victims had been under attack… And had said nothing.
He’d also had a part in planting the false intelligence that made the Combine think that all three ELH regiments were off-planet and that the only real opposition they’d face would be a scratch force of smaller merc units hired on the spot.
People didn’t call Hanse Davion ‘The Fox’ for his pretty whiskers.
Anyway, during the battle itself, all I knew was that we’d taken the Sword of Light completely by surprise, and I knew it because even as the understrength picket lance was going down in a criss-cross of PPC fire, we could see the spread of an impromptu repair depot behind them exploding into motion like a kicked anthill. More than half a dozen mechs were powered down, either lying down in one pose or another or crouching so cherry-pickers could be lifted up to the loading hatches for their ammo bays, ammo trucks and flatbeds covered in spare armor parked all around them.
One tiny figure was visible against the stream of motion, bolting towards a face-down Griffin with the awkward lump of a neurohelmet carried at the end of one arm and banging against its leg. Another flurry of activity filled the basket of a cherry picker as they tried to stuff all their remaining 80mm ammunition into the magazine of the Dragon they were working on right away.
“Okay, radio silence is over!” I announced on our main channel. “Able, advance in line abreast. Baker, form behind and give fire support. Dog, keep our flanks clear and remember to gang up. Everybody, start with the weakest and work your way up!”
I fired an AC burst at the Dragon I’d noticed; the loading crew flinched as 105mm shells screamed by only a couple meters over their heads and smashed into the upper rear armor. A couple went down, thrashing, as shrapnel caught them, but one of the faster thinkers grabbed at the cherry picker’s control box and moved it away as fast as they could.
Thank god. I waited a second or two longer than I needed to before I followed up with one of my PPCs, touching off the same ammo bin they’d been filling. The Dragon burst apart in orange fire and knocked the moving picker basket over, sending the loading crew tumbling to the ground.
If they were lucky, they’d survive. I hoped so; that wish, and the two seconds of grace, was all I could offer without fucking myself over.
I looked for my next target; motion attracted the eye and the PPC bolt I put into the battered Quickdraw as it stood up was only one of literally a dozen. Mechs are tough but not that tough - it went down again before the movement even finished.
“Blackwing, just exactly what do you think you’re doing?” came over the command line from King, cutting past the hurried back-and-forth between my people.
One of the reasons commanding from the front kind of worked for mechwarriors was that the SLDF had come up with a way to use neurohelmet bandwidth to control their mechs’ communication functions. This had obvious benefits in terms of conveying information within a lance - you could mentally mark a target at the same time you called a warning, painting it for your lancemates’ targeting systems, and also limit the signal to only those allies who needed it rather than spamming another lance ten kilometers away on a general channel - which was why the SLDF had developed the function in the first place.
But it also meant that a junior commander, or a senior one who was still too immature to sit still, could dispense with a lot of the usual paraphernalia of phone banks and messenger sections and at least pretend to run all their own comms themselves.
Anyway, at that point, it let me send the command to have King’s channel routed directly to me rather than continue to broadcast to the entire mech battalion. “Hitting the Combine rear,” I snapped, jockeying the throttle to step over an abandoned armor truck rather than on it. “In combat right now.”
“You can’t possibly have covered fifty kilometers that quickly.”
“Nearly an hour at sixty kay-pee-aitch,” I snarled, and joined the fusillade against a Jenner that had popped out around the hill ahead of us, blocking line of sight to the main battle lines, even as the light mech’s pilot reversed direction in a mad skid and bolted back for cover. “Can, have, did.”
Dumbass.
“You - do you have any idea what kind of risks you’re talking about?” My brain filled ‘you little brat’ in from his tone without the words actually being said.
“Fairly good one. Light Horse’d seen all three Combine battalions regularly in the early fight,” I replied, throttling back a little to hold formation as the Battlemasters advanced in the vanguard. “Nebula’d’ve let us know if they shook one loose or broke contact entirely. Less than a battalion, we’d just run over rather than ‘into’.”
“Of all the cocky, reckless, ill-considered stunts-” Chandrasekar started to vent, before I interrupted him and shut the channel entirely.
“Fuck, contact!”
And contact it was, about a company, company and a half of Combine heavies swinging around the same hill the Jenner had managed to escape past.
I opened fire; just about everyone else did, too. Seeing the way our targets just… weaved out of the way of most of it, I could feel my heart sink. The easy part was very definitely over.
Two Dragons lunged at and then around the Battlemaster - paint scheme looked like Lisa Capet, She Of The Day-Glo Mohawk, who was one of our better mechhandlers - in front of me, laser and autocannon fire playing over its sides as they raced to work around behind it. I picked the more battered of the two and let rip with a PPC again, which missed. The autocannon followup didn’t.
I checked my ammo; about two-thirds, after what I’d spent against the repair laager.
The shudder and blast of missiles landing around me and on my armor made me swear and belatedly dive into my own evasive swerves. Threat response pinpointed the Griffin they’d come from, just in time for me to slam on the brakes - both of Marauder No. 2’s feet dug divots in the ground at the abrupt stop - and throw off the incoming PPC blast to scorch by in front of me with stark flash that was obvious even through the polarized viewports.
A moment’s mental debate didn’t last; I kept firing at the Dragon, this time tagging him with my own PPC shot, and shaped my course closer, figuring to swerve off again once I was in short range.
He and his buddy both left off tormenting Capet and turned towards me. I evaded harder, not that it did much good. My damage displays lit up with armor impacts, as though I couldn’t tell from the hammer and crash of incoming fire. Missiles, autocannon shells, the scarlet blaze of lasers - though both of those missed this time - it was all aimed at me, and I knew that my armor couldn’t keep up with it for long, even if the sheer rush of adrenaline seemed to be keeping me ahead of the balance issues for now.
Yellow flared from above me, harsh and intense, as Sophitia fired mid-air. The way the Dragons had turned towards me meant that combined speeds were eating distance with shocking quickness, and I had to veer off to avoid getting too close. I didn’t fancy my chances of dogfighting veteran pilots like this.
Then the next salvo from the Griffin arrived and the entire point became moot as the berserk gyro made my running steps stutter and sent me tumbling down to measure my mech’s length in the already torn-up cropfield.
“Motherfucker,” I yelled, and started fighting to get back up. If my armor held for long enough, I might be able to avoid being chum in the shark tank… If.
“Hold him for me, would you?” Sophitia’s voice came over the com line, and I looked up as I got my feet under me to see the Capet’s Battlemaster step up behind one of the Dragons and - I swear on God, Blake and Kerensky’s collective morally-bankrupt mass murdering graves, I am not making this up - shove its arms under the smaller heavy’s and lift, pulling the thing into a wrestling hold and immobilizing it for the several seconds it would take the pilot to try kicking backwards.
That was more that enough time for Sophitia to lead Aspis into three steps forward and drive a sword-thrust into the Dragon’s cockpit, then pull free. When the Battlemaster let go, the Combine mech dropped to the ground like the proverbial stringless puppet.
The other Dragon tried to sweep around the two, keeping what it thought was a safe distance, and cut between me and them in the process.
The problem with Marauders is that temptation is always with you. They mount not one but two particle projection cannons, the most massive energy weapons still in production. Manmade lightning at your fingertips. They call to the soul, they hunger, forever yearning to unleash their destruction into every pitiable fool that ever cut you off in traffic.
And if you indulge them too often, the demands they put on your reactor will cook you alive.
But every now and again, the Stars Are Right and circumstance aligns to make that the right choice.
Like, say, a back shot into an enemy heavy at ideal range.
The cannon burst missed low, stitching across the heavily armored panels protecting the hip joints. The lightning bolts, meanwhile, hit squarely against the rear torso armor, just as though I’d planned on it.
Thing is, the side torso bays of a Dragon are full of ammunition and not much else, and while there wasn’t much left of a PPC bolt after boring through their rear armor, there was enough. Everything from the entire left arm to several hundred individual O-rings went every direction as both missile and autocannon magazines cooked off spectacularly.
For the record, no, I didn’t plan for that to happen, it was dumb luck.
I looked up as the smoke started to clear, trying to find that damned Griffin, and not having much luck.
“Hey, I think they’re bugging out,” someone said on the general channel, and once I looked for it, I started feeling like they were right.
“We’ll pursue for now,” I said, and switched channels. “Comet, Asteroid. Sending you our location nav now; We’re seeing a short company withdrawing southwest.”
“Asteroid, this is Comet. Our people are seeing a due-west pull. Looks like they’ve had enough. We’ll pursue them; Actual wants you to drop in to our positions securing Knightburg and hold the door for us.” The Eridani Light Horse dispatcher had an accent that sounded almost but not quite Combine.
“We can do that,” I confirmed. “I can detach my scout company if you’d like a reserve; I figure the slower odds and ends will make up for it on my end.”
“How fresh are they?”
I flipped the command display up. “About State Seven, State Eight,” I said - each ‘state’ representing an averaged ten percent of nominal maximum armor. “The Combine focused on our heavies, they’re closer to Six.”
There was a moment of silence that I guessed was a conversation happening on the other end of a muted line, before Comet came back, “We’ll take them. Voice Channel 9, Encrypt Charlie-4. There’s a Fedrat regular tank company in the line; Sanromea-Davion himself, callsign Sparkle, on Channel 3, encrypt Baker-19.”
“Right, let me give the orders,” I said. “Asteroid, out.”
“Estimate five minutes to form and get moving. Comet out.”
I flipped channels and let Dog Company know that they’d be keeping up the chase, then switched again. “Sparkle, Asteroid here. I have two heavy companies, State Six, reporting as reinforcement; where do you want us?”
“Asteroid?” was the immediate reply. “Blackwing, the chit with the cleavage? Didn’t you have a full battalion?”
Apparently Sanromea-Davion’s tact went away in battle. “They are very nice,” I agreed, sweet as poison, “And yeah, but the Light Horse are taking my scout company with them for the pursuit.”
“Good call,” he agreed more professionally. “We could use them here, but not as badly. I’m pushing nav points; one company southwest of city center and one northwest. This’ll be temporary, until we can get new armor hung on our lighter elements so they can take over as pickets.”
“We’ll be central to provide a counterpunch after that,” I guessed, as the two markers came live.
“More or less,” he replied.
“I’ll get on it, then. Asteroid, out.”
It was surprisingly hard to break off the pursuit, even though the Combine mechs were already pulled almost entirely out of range - mostly by breaking line of sight behind cover, at this stage. I didn’t intend to let ‘surprisingly hard’ stop me, though, and if there was any grumbling from my people Lu Clair and Toshi Hannah, who had the two companies, didn’t let it reach me.
I was pretty sure that if there had been, at least in Baker Company, I’d’ve heard it. Lack of mechwarriors had meant that I’d had to fold the command lance into Baker to make up the numbers, and in my admittedly limited experience, grumbling tended to happen on the company channel.
Before it had been shot up by the Combine and stepped on and through by the ELH, Knightburg had been a decently nice town. Probably not one I’d ever have wanted to live in - it was open and sprawling in a way that reminded Older-Me’s memories of a smaller Oklahoma City, which had always struck me on visiting as one of the lesser circles of Hell - but moderately prosperous from the combination of grain elevators, barge shipping, and strip-mall stops off the major highway the bridge had been built for. I was pretty sure that it had been completely evacuated, and slightly less so that insurance payouts would… eventually… cover enough of the damage to let the local economy recover.
Anyway, we’d settled in for about ten minutes, just enough time to start getting bored, when things started happening again. Mostly over the radio, at first - an explosion of chatter and swearing from the Light Horse as the Sword of Light doubled back and punched straight through a weak point in their lines, leaving temporary confusion in their wake as the lighter regiment tried to reform and about face.
They were an elite formation; it wouldn’t take long. Usually, the maneuver would have been utterly pointless, but even as it was happening, I could see the flare-around-a-polarized-center signature of fusion torches burning in the sky overhead. They’d launched their dropships in a quick up-and-down ballistic hop, and were now headed beeline for the new landing site.
Sanromea-Davion came onto my line even before the last of the nine Unions had touched down: “Asteroid, Sparkle. Estimated landing site is Nav Mike. Get there, cripple the dropships before the Sword shows up. You’ll be setting the pace; I’m attaching Stardust, Ring, and Crater to back you up.” Smaller merc units, about two companies of light mechs between them - and all in worse repair than my Dog Company. “Assault elements’ll be following.”
“Nav Mike, cripple dropships, two companies support with more coming. Understood. Should I try and pull back if I can pull it off before the Sword arrives?”
“Feel free, but don’t count on it. Get moving. Sparkle, Out.”
We got moving, crashing west with all due haste. I didn’t think we’d pull it off any more than Sanromea-Davion did, but it would be really nice if we could beat the 3rd Sword of Light to our target and be gone before they could properly vent their wrath.
...Yeah, no, we were gonna be in the shit.
Of course, if I’d been able to find any goddamn artillery cadre, it would’ve been moot. Just send a scout lance to report the shot and shell the hell out of them. But as much as precious few units, merc, feudal, or regular, used the stuff, skilled artillerymen were even rarer, and their employers tended to hang onto them like death.
“All right,” I said as the looming domes of the grounded dropships came into view over the windbreak treeline. “They’re sitting targets with plenty of short-range firepower, so everybody stick to long range. Shoot low; we need to strand them, not go for hard kills. And remember to move and jink, because they’ll have plenty of LRMs in the air.”
Going for a long-range sparring match would hinder our own ability to do serious damage, which given the sheer toughness of dropships was already pretty limited, but first, the battle was essentially already won and I wasn’t going to go for extra risks for bonus points, and second, just being out here and shooting was enough to keep the 3rd Sword from escaping. Theoretically, they could load under fire, but it’d be slow and full of risks and most importantly would take long enough for the ELH to finish catching up to them.
I was sweating pretty hard during that fight, for reasons more figurative than the usual oven-heat of a battlemech cockpit. This was a significantly bigger exposure than that first southward charge; then, I’d known via the Eridani exactly where the main Combine force was, and all of my mechs had been essentially fresh, and there’d been backup immediately at hand.
Now, all my support was several minutes behind either me or the enemy, I had no idea when the hammer would fall, and all of my people - aside from Sophitia, who was sexy, sexy bullshit - were showing increasing amounts of armor damage.
Still, unless the Combine were already at their Combat Loss Grouping - the point where armor attrition started reaching critical levels across enough of the unit to trigger a snowball or death spiral effect where each loss increased pressure on survivors who weren’t in any shape to take it - having their two battalions pile on top of mine was going to be…
I tried to stop worrying about it in favor of pouring fire into the dropships, but the worry kept gnawing at me, and in the end, for good reason.
The alarm as my autocannon ammunition reached one quarter - fifteen rounds remaining - came almost simultaneously with the rush and hammer of LRMs that hadn’t come from the dropships’ launchers.
One of those missiles found Marauder No. 2’s right knee joint, which had basically been stripped bare by that point. The joint seized, the leg folded, and being that I wasn’t competent enough to ride that out, down I went.
I was really getting to hate that. Especially the rush of fear that it always brought - and the matching rush as a Jenner in Combine colors landed from a jump-jet leap and turned towards me. Its armor was scorched and scarred and at least one panel on one of its legs had fallen away completely… But all of its weapons looked to still be in working order, and I knew that, immobilized and already damaged as I was, they would really hurt, even before the two buddies I could see following it caught up and added their share of pain.
The splintering crash as the slab prow of a Von Luckner exploded out of the treeline and hit the slight rise of the road I’d fallen half-across did a bit to distract me from my immanent ass-whupping. The fifty-odd KPH of a VNL-K65N’s top speed wasn’t terribly fast, even by tank-or-mech standards, but it was enough for one riding up a ramp - or a bit of sloped ground firm enough to act like one rather than just getting mashed when seventy-five tons of tank hit it at speed - to launch into the air like a more plausible version of the Dukes of Hazzard. I saw at least a meter of clear air under its treads before the thing slammed back down to earth, fishtailed for a second, then powered out by somehow accelerating straight into the legs of that very startled Jenner.
The closing rate wasn’t as fast as when I’d hit that Wasp - had it been only an hour and a half ago - and Jenners were bigger and usually tougher than bug-lights… But this one was already damaged, and their joints made legs relatively vulnerable to damage like being whacked with a very angry heavy tank. Both knees and ankles snapped away under the assault, dropping the dismembered mech-torso on top of the Von Luckner’s armor and sending it tumbling safely away.
The noise and impact had to be at least as colossal as landing from that jump had been, but the tank’s crew worked through any of that admirably and in moments the turret was tracking to bring the big 165mm autocannon mounted there to bear on the other Jenner and core its chest out in a single crushing burst.
Sophitia’s Centurion landing on top of the last one and stabbing down through the thin upper armor even as she rode its collapse out was practically an anticlimax.
“You owe all of us a drink, Mechjock,” came good-naturedly over the short-range line. Apparently I’d been rescued by Sanromea-Davion’s personal ride.
I finished pushing myself up. “I’d throw in a kiss on the cheek, but I think your wife would strangle at least one of us.”
There was a moment of startled silence, then a laugh. “I got divorced years ago,” he said.
“OK,” I agreed. “My girlfriend would stab at least one of us.”
“Not over just one kiss,” Sophitia protested, sounding bubbly and delighted. She’d later tell me that that was the first time I’d publicly called her my girlfriend.
“I won’t push my luck. We’re closing, now. We need all their attention for at least the next minute.”
I glanced at the battalion display. “We won’t have much longer than that in close action.”
“Trust me.” Even as we were talking, the rest of his tank company was lunging forwards, guns roaring.
I flipped to a general channel. “OK, folks, big push time. Follow the treadheads in, and hang on to your hats!”
As casual as I tried to sound about it, it was seriously into pucker time. All I could do was trust that Sanromea-Davion knew something I didn’t, and tuck myself in behind the impromptu assault lance that had formed from the very slowest elements of my fellow mercenaries - an Awesome, a Stalker, and what had to be the shittiest and most rustbucket Atlas in the entire Inner Sphere. With all of that in between me and them, I was hoping that any Combine gunners that decided to look our way would go for the more dangerous, easier-to-hit assault mechs…
And that whatever it was our boss knew was enough to keep us from getting swarmed under.
I sent a PPC bolt and cannon burst - twelve rounds left - in the direction of the target the Awesome picked, and even as all of it missed, hoped that whatever the other shoe was would be able to pull things out for us. Another target, and another, passed and fell - adding my own two cents to the fusillade well after my cannon fell silent, even if most of the actual hits were coming from the others.
The confusion was colossal, but not enough to obscure the fact that the mechs we were firing back at, the ones deliberately drawing our attention, were the most intact of the Combine force - were the ones fighting to cover the retreat of their fellows up and into the Unions’ mechbays. Despite everything, despite a failed mission and what had to have been colossal losses if they weren’t rolling over us entirely, the 3rd Sword of Light were living up to their reputation as their nation’s elite - they were still under discipline, still organized and as coordinated as the situation permitted. If I’d been less busy - being honest, in less of a combat trance - I’d’ve been impressed.
The end of that trance, and the final end of the battle itself, came as a shock as the world through my viewports went first searing white, then polarized black. I could feel shockwaves pummeling my mech, hear the bone-deep roar of thundering fusion torches, as the Combine dropships lit off their drives and bolted upwards with a speed that had to be their full flank thrust, abandoning the ragged company or two of mechs that hadn’t been able to load aboard.
In the shocked relative silence as they lifted away, I came back to myself. My head hurt, my mouth and throat were sandpaper dry. My hair, and ‘piloting suit’, and the lining of my cooling jacket were soaking, dripping wet, and my skin crawled and slimed with the same pouring sweat that had gotten them that way. I realized that I was shockingly thirsty, and that the cockpit was an inferno so miserable it had my flesh trying to crawl into my cooling jacket to hug its icey inner layer.
Reactor core temps were well under the danger zone, but that didn’t make the environment next to them pleasant.
I glanced at the armor displays, mine and the battalion’s alike. There was a lot of red and orange; missing limbs, and five mechs missing entirely. The only company that wasn’t at CLG was Dog, just sweeping back into combat datalink range on the heels of the Eridani Light Horse’s 21st Striker as they bounded and raced forward across the battlefield, descending on the equally battered Combine survivors as entire lances against a single mech.
I put both lasers and a PPC shot into the rear of an enemy Wolverine as it turned to face the new threat - and, after I missed all but one of the laser shots, let Sophitia finish it while I reached for one of the eight-ounce bottles of water I kept netted to one side of my cockpit.
We’d made it.
Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
I didn’t usually bother to put on the full femme fatale. Among other reasons, swinging my hips that much started making unfamiliar muscle groups complain, it took what felt like three times as long as just doing whatever-it-was, and for the most part the men around me were more useful thinking with their brains rather than their testicles.
But this wasn’t the most part.
As head of the Eridani Light Horse, Brevet-General Reinbach Kerston was the most powerful man on the entire planet of Hoff. When he threw a party, it was by definition a significant occasion for any native Hoffian - particularly if they were, wanted to seem, or wanted to become the kind of influential local that an otherwise-independent outside ruler would be wise to court.
The local glitterati had exchanged several small fortunes and not a few feuds to obtain invitations, and I wouldn’t’ve been surprised to learn that at some point murder had been done for the sake of same.
But there was a list of people whose invitations were guaranteed. The ranking House Davion representative, whose degree of cousinship to the main-line Davions I’d never caught but whose main job was to negotiate new merc contracts. Comstar’s Precentor Hoff - who, thankfully, had declined to attend. A handful of the richest and most powerful natives, first and foremost His Grace, Bradley Cheel, Duke of Hoff...
And every other merc commander who happened to be on-planet, including me.
So, the ELH’s 3016 New Year’s Ball was tailor-made for networking, and for making an impression. All a good reason to put my best foot forward.
None of that was why I’d let the inner vamp loose.
That was in honor of my date.
Her leaning down to help me out of the limo didn’t expose anything; her sleek, blood-red dress had a halter design that rose all the way to her neck in front. She was wearing only a minimum of makeup - Mechwarrior’s habit; if you’ve never sweated mascara into your eyes, count your blessings - and her only jewelry was a pair of ruby stud earrings, but from the rate of camera flashes from the sides of the red carpet, I was far short of the only one who thought she was outshining the flashy invitees dripping in sapphires and topaz.
“I told you,” I murmured, leaning on her hand just enough to make the offer feel appreciated. “Fashion can vary all it likes, but style is forever.”
...OK, no, while the heels I had on made my calves look bitchin’, they were pretty tall. I actually did end up needing her help for balance to get out of the limo without incident. I’d picked my dress, the matte-est black I could find, for a hemline that slashed up from next to one ankle to above the other knee, and at the range we were at I could see her eyes dart from there up to the one-shoulder neckline.
Success.
She flushed when she realized I’d caught her looking, and I grinned and tucked a hand into her elbow as we walked up the wide, shallow steps.
Once we were into the ballroom, I could see the points where the space’s bones filtered out from under the decoration - the removed movable walls that would have turned it into a series of largeish conference rooms, the temporary nature of the tables and bandstand, and the like.
“I’m impressed,” I murmured to Sophitia. “They went all out.”
They really had. The decorations gussying the rather plain basic space up were top grade. It looked like about a kilometer’s worth of shimmering silk had been hung in place of simple crepe paper, for instance. You could probably have bought a light ‘mech for the combined price of what was on display in the room. I wondered if they were rented, or if the Eridani Light Horse kept a container’s worth of Fancy Party Stuff in storage and brought them out at need.
She gave me a sidelong look, then looked around the room. “...I guess the decorations are nice? But… I feel like I’m back at Prom.”
“I thought that’s what all fancy parties felt like?” I said, ‘innocently’, then giggled at her sidelong look. The only other time I’d seen her so horrified was when she found out just how lousy my gunnery was. “No, seriously, in the end any ballroom’s just a big open space. Quality’s in the decorations and the canapes.” I glanced over at the buffet speculatively.
Sophitia groaned. “Where do you put it all?” she asked, but started us moving towards the table anyway.
As though she didn’t know; she exercised just as hard as I did. I flexed the arm that didn’t have a sleeve playfully. “More meat for the guns,” I said.
Anyway. The snacks were excellent, aside from my discovery of a truly foul pastry thing made of black sludge and lies. The crust had looked so good…
Sophitia had been dragged away by a couple of fans when Major Berin caught up to me. Berin’s Beasts were firmly in the ‘midrange’ of merc units; a battlemech company, seven of them lights, with a lance of Hetzer assault guns for backup rather than aerospace support. They had their own modified Union class and seemed to be doing pretty all right for themselves.
He offered a handshake; a bit of a knuckle-crusher, but it felt perfunctory, like habit rather than a challenge, and he smiled when I twisted my hand out of the vise. “So, mind if I ask a prying question?” he said. His accent sounded… Andurien, maybe?
I smiled up at him, and used the excuse of a gracious kind of ‘go ahead’ wave to take a step back so that my neck wouldn’t be at such an angle. Stupid tall people. “Go ahead.”
“Did you bring her-” he nodded in the direction of the Champion Holding Court, “-to show off that you had her skills, or to show off that homo-friendly recruiting schtick you’ve been setting up?”
I shrugged, trying to bury my irritation. “A little from Column A, a little from Column B,” I said.
…It didn’t work. “And more than either, Column C, it got me the most gorgeous date here,” I added, and smiled with as many teeth as I could.
An expression that actually gained some humor at the way he started unconsciously sidling away, though I was pretty sure that that was because of Teh Gey Cooties rather than because of any concerns about my doing him a violence.
“Uh, right,” he said awkwardly, and cleared his throat before he plunged ahead into, “So, yeah, before I stuck my foot in my mouth-”
Well, the self-awareness made me feel more charitably towards him, at least. I wondered if it was an intentional bit of de-escalation on his part.
“-I was leading up to ask about a thing I’d heard, that you were looking to trade some of your people with other units.”
“Your homosexuals for my homophobes, yeah,” I said. “You’ve got somebody in mind?”
“...Yeah,” he said, looking a little nettled. “I… I’ve got a brother-sister team of mechwarriors, and the brother’s… with one of my techs. Thing is, they’ve got a family mech that I’d be losing, too, our heaviest.”
“And you’re willing to trade them away over their bedroom games?” I said, and shook my head. “Well, OK, your loss.”
“Yeah, so, I was thinking we set up to trade the mechs, too-”
I made a slashing gesture. “Nada, no. Not a straight trade, anyway. They decide to walk the next day and I’m down a mech and up a creek without a paddle? No thanks.”
“-and put the price of whatever you send my way down as a lien on their Atlas,” he finished, rushing a little.
A lien? That… could work, probably. An Atlas would be a funny fit for the unit; everything we already had was faster, and finding 400 MW fusion plants to let it keep pace would be impossibly expensive as well as nigh-impossible, and eating all its weapon space besides. So, weird as it sounded, the particular kind of mech involved made the deal less appealing…
“How much have you talked it over with your people?”
“It was their idea,” he admitted.
...But not impossibly so. I extended my hand to shake again. “I think we have an agreement in principle,” I said. “Bring them and their paperwork by our business office, say, this coming Thursday?” Our regular shuttle flights between base and planetary capital were on Wednesdays. “And I’ll have my CFO and department heads there and we can work out the details.”
He checked his memory. “About noon?” he suggested, and I was nodding and about to agree out loud when, halfway across the ballroom, an alarm screeched.
We both looked, and saw an older man in SLDF uniform - Brevet-General Kerston himself - pulling his com out of an inner pocket of his jacket. Another com went off in a different part of the room, and a third, and twice that many people were already reaching for theirs when my bodice went VRRRRN and I had to grit my teeth.
Vibrate mode was substantially less pleasant than I’d counted on when I stashed my com down there.
Don’t look at me in that tone of voice; there was literally no place else in my dress that had room for the thing, and fuck dealing with a purse.
I turned around for nominal discretion’s sake and fished it out while Berin was still figuring out what was going on, reading the little single-line text display. God, I missed smartphones. Future of the eighties, as always, go fuck yourself.
Any humor in that thought vanished as I read the tickertape: JUMPSHIP ARRIVED NADIR POINT MONOLITH CLASS NO CIVILIAN SCHEDULED LIKELY COMBINE INVASION
“‘They might have passed a very pleasant evening, had shit not gotten real,’” I muttered, once the initial shock wore off, and keyed an acknowledgement in while I looked up at Berin. “Combine Monolith just jumped in,” I told him, and nodded as his expression changed away from puzzlement and into understanding. “So, I’m going to go collect my date then have a talk with our friendly neighborhood Davion.”
“What are all the calls about?” Sophitia asked, when I had made my way back to her side.
“Invading jumpship, probably,” I summed up, “Where’s… crap, Something-or-other-Davion?”
“Sanromea-Davion,” she corrected with an eyeroll, and pointed at the cluster of people on the far side of the canape tables. “Over there.”
“Right, thanks,” I said, and leaned up to kiss her on the cheek before I kicked my heels off and - being honest - scurried over to and under the buffet.
No, literally, under. I ducked down and sidestepped twice to pop up on the other side, startling the older woman who’d been waiting her turn in the crowd and crush of presumable merc commanders gathered around the man with the ability and reason to give them money.
Give us money.
Sanromea-Davion was wearing his dress uniform. The Armed Forces of the Federated Suns were fairly practical, in a Rambo-ish way, when it came to duty gear, but their dress uniform was… Something.
High cavalry boots - no spurs, apparently he wasn’t a Mechwarrior? - under creased pants, and a short fitted jacket with a rank epaulette on the right shoulder, silver braid over tan. One broad stripe, one narrow, I thought that that was Major; seemed about right, he was a Greater Davion, but fairly young…
But the left shoulder, the entire left half of the jacket, was covered in a polished natural-yellow leather rayed… thing, like the left half of a simplified FedSuns sunburst had been folded over the top of his shoulder. Embroidered lines radiated out across the right half of the jacket from the points of the rays.
I had to admit that it was a heck of a striking statement, but damn was that weird.
“What are you all coming out of the woodwork now for?” he wondered, looking at me as I put one hand on the canape table for balance while I put my shoes back on. His voice was lighter than I expected, a tenor rather than the kind of rumbly tone that would’ve matched the rest of him; under the slow metabolism that rounded his face under the beard and challenged his tailoring, he was a big, obviously muscular man.
“Your people haven’t got the word to you, yet?” I asked right back. “Monolith-class jumpship at the nadir jump point, just arrived. We’re not on a trade route big enough to see a civilian one, which probably means the Combine has come calling.” I grinned and tapped one toe on the ground to re-seat my shoe properly. “Seller’s market for defensive contracts, right?”
His left hand dropped down to a pocket that his dress uniform didn’t have, and I could see him bite back the urge to swear for a moment before he took a breath, let it out, and said, “Right. You-” he pointed at an otherwise anonymous man in the middle of the crowd, “-were here first, let’s start this over from the top.”
“Yes, Leutnant-Colonel,” his first target said in a Lyran accent you could have cut with the proverbial chainsaw.
That was what broad-narrow meant; Leftenant Colonel. Yes, they actually spelled it that way; ‘Lieutenant’ would have been too traditional, or something.
I settled in to wait my turn as Sophitia finished walking the long way around. “I asked one of the servers to find some pens and paper for us to take notes with,” she confided.
I grinned. “You’re a wonder,” I told her.
***
Any doubt that it had been the Combine incoming was long gone, along with doubts about their objectives. An invasion would have brought an Overlord and several cargo dropships, probably along with some conventional backup, and a resource raid - AKA an official pirating expedition - would have done the same, but this force had arrived on nine Union class.
They were just here to break things.
Their choice of where to land said what.
“King, Baker Club Seven. Contact,” I said into my radio line. “Nav Oscar West. One bug mech, probably a Wasp.”
“Clear this channel, Baker Seven. This is scouting reports only,” replied Leftenant Colonel Omar Chandrasekar, and I bit down the urge to argue that just because I wasn’t a scout didn’t mean I was blind. I was pretty sure that our AFFS liaison-slash-commander had been sent to Hoff as a way to shuffle his incompetent ass somewhere the Eridani Light Horse could carry his dead weight, out of the way of actual operations.
Against the 3rd Sword of Light, that was… concerning.
Nav Oscar was the far end of the only bridge for nearly an hour in either direction capable of taking the weight of anything more than the lightest battlemech. The Kitt River was a major one; it had carved a substantial canyon on its way to the sea, and from what we’d seen, the Combine forces were light on jump jets. To get enough force in place to push through the fixed defenses the ELH had set up to protect their dependents, they’d need the bridge, since those same defenses had forced their dropships to come down in the farmland to the west.
Or a bridge. Most of the fighting was shaping to happen fifty klicks to the south of us, where the ELH had set themselves up on the shortest approach between the Combine drop zone and the reservation where their own dependents lived.
The Wasp stuck around for a few seconds more, then ducked back out of sight.
I guess that proved his threat-warning system was working, able to tell him that he’d been painted by at least my targeting gear.
“Dog Club Actual, this is King,” the command channel said. “Divide by lances and move them to the nav points I’m sending you. You’re equipped with scout mechs, fast-movers with jump jets and superior mobility…”
I tuned the rest out, wondering to myself how the fuck I’d ended up trapped in a badly-scripted tutorial level when I was in real life rather than a computer game.
I’d settled in to the haze of frustration and worry that went with that - what if this fuckwit trapped some of my people under the guns of a real push, or any of a dozen other ways for his utter lack of flexibility to get someone or a lot of someones killed - and fielding the private sideband calls from subordinates who were nearly as worried by Chandrasekar as I was.
At least lying through my teeth to reassure them distracted me.
...Where was I taking that? Grammar got away from me. Anyway, right before the 3rd Sword was expected to hit the outer perimeter the Light Horse had set up around the far side of their bridge, I got a call - screens showed it as Very Short-Range Relay, meaning that it had come in via landline and then been linked into our tactical comnet by the headquarters van.
“This is Nebula to Asteroid Actual,” the line said, sounding frustrated and tired. “Please acknowledge.”
Huh what? I flipped the push-to-talk. “Nebula, this is Blackwing. I have you loudness four by clarity five, over.”
Nebula was the call sign of the overall defense command.
“Thank you, Blake,” the operator on the other end muttered, almost certainly forgetting her line was still live. “Blackwing, command wants to know what you can shake loose for a flanking push, because we’ve been trying to talk to your liaison about this and getting nothing but stonewalling and blowoffs. He stopped responding to our last three calls. Even a company’s worth of distraction would work, over.”
“Nebula, we’ve been seeing nothing but the same scout lance for the last hour. I can leave my tracks and infantry here to keep the door shut and give you a battalion, but they’ll probably see us coming… And sadly, my contract says you’ll need to go through Longline.” That being Chandrasekar’s personal call-sign. “Over.”
“Blackwing, hold on this line, please,” Nebula said, her voice full of we’ll-see-about-that.
Well, what better thing did I have to do? I held.
Fortunately, this being a military channel run by actual adults, there was no hold music.
Eventually, the line clicked open again. “Blackwing, this is Nebula Actual.” The new voice was male, deep, and smooth as honey, perfectly trained. Aside from the accent, I was intensely reminded of Patrick Stewart. “Longline has been claiming to face a full strength company with armor support.”
Huh? “This is the first I’ve heard of armor,” I said. “We’ve seen one mech at a time, no more. Jenner, Wasp, and Cicada. No eyes-on, but we’ve also received sensor scatter from what our Warbooks are calling a Charger. There could be more than one of each, but…”
“More likely it’s just a single recon lance.” Nebula Actual - His Grace the Duke of Hoff, Bradley Cheel himself - sounded substantially grimmer than he had during our single brief meeting, at the ill-fated New Year’s party a week before. “Blackwing, attention to orders, per contract of employment Section 2 Subsection 3 Point 17.”
“Attending,” I said, just as crisply as if I weren’t throwing a digital copy of the contract up on my screen to look up just what exactly 2.3.17 was about.
“As Duke of Hoff and ranking available authority of the Federated Suns, I am issuing a direct order to Colonel Asha Blackwing, commanding the Blackwing Military Solutions and Services mercenary regiment. You will take your battlemech battalion and proceed south along the west bank of the Kitt River to strike the Draconis Combine forces now besieging Knightburg in the rear, destroying any scouting or blocking forces that attempt to stand in your way with all speed.” He hesitated a moment. “I will leave the decision between a demonstration attack and a full secondary assault to your discretion, with the comment that just as much as you will depend on the Eridani Light Horse to prosecute the opportunity you will generate, they will be depending on you to create an opening.”
No, that wasn’t intimidating at all. “Punch out any Combine mechs in our way, move south to hit the Sword of Light in the rear soonest. Understood,” I said, and skimmed through the legalese on my screen as quickly as I could to confirm that… Yeah. Holy shit.
“Good. We’ll be waiting when you get here. Nebula Actual, clear.”
I took one deep breath after the line cut out, then made a call to the command truck.
***
I’d be lying if I claimed the good start was any of my doing. I’d expected the scout lance that had been monitoring us to fall back, hold at long range and shadow us, rather than trying to stop us outright - but when we thundered off the western end of the bridge and through the empty streets of the small town that had grown around it, all four of them popped out of the second cross-street.
Maybe they thought that we’d sent only a single lance after them, or maybe they were hoping to destroy the bridge while we had mechs on it - I don’t know and had no way of knowing, then or now. Whatever they were planning, they’d left it too late.
The Cicada caught it first; Reyes’ Crusader slowed and stumbled from the sixty-kph dead run we were moving at as its entire body seemed to vanish in a wall of contrails, reaching out hungrily for the smaller ‘mech like a monster’s tentacles trying to snatch prey away under the bed. He’d flushed every single missile tube his machine had at what I would bet money was ideal range.
Even before the pall of smoke had faded away, the cloud and street were lit from within.
‘Mech scale lasers delivered their deadly energy outside the range of human vision, at frequencies that the lenses and liquid parts of the eye filtered out and the retina didn’t respond to. If they hadn’t, a single shot would have blinded every eye on the battlefield - an act prohibited by the long-ago Ares Conventions, and kept away from as a gentleman’s agreement ever since. It was a genie no one wanted to deal with, without being useful enough to risk a cycle of retribution for.
Still, having a visual confirmation of your chosen target was useful, so battlemech lasers were also equipped with a tracer function that added a harmless but apparent visual beam. Federated Suns units tended to tune their tracers to a sunny golden yellow; the Combine liked blood red, the Capellan Confederation green, the Free World’s League used violet, and the Lyran Commonwealth favored blue. Most mercenary units matched their current employer, but the ELH still used the SLDF’s pure white.
So, when Reyes fired his 5cm lasers and made the entire cloud of missile smoke flash yellow with scattered light, it wasn’t bright enough to blind me or make my cockpit windows polarize to solid black - but there was still enough energy delivered to finish the coup de grace and drop the forty-ton mech like a stone.
Weiler, in the command lance’s other Marauder, fired next, a more moderate barrage rather than a full alpha strike catching the Jenner and tracking clouds of sparks and molten metal off of its armor. Jenner and Wasp alike both fired back at him, and the Charger started to lean into motion, a parked car, its owner long-ago evacuated, smearing under its planted foot like a man stepping on a chunk of dropped banana.
Sophitia rushed forward, her mech’s feet seeming to skid only inches off of the pavement as howling jump jets launched her almost entirely forward before one toe dipped down delicately and caught against the asphalt, twisting Aspis on three different axes at once to duck under the assault mech’s swinging fist and drive her sword, like an extended lance, deep into ‘golden BB’ gap around its waist’s rotation collar.
The reactor was in there somewhere, and she found it, leaving the Charger slumping like a dropped marionette in her wake. I very much doubted that there was any luck or coincidence involved, and from the way the Wasp pilot turned to track her, he agreed.
I didn’t fire, not wanting to give the game away when I probably couldn’t get enough weapons on-target to put him down immediately. I just pitched Marauder No. 2’s torso down and opened the throttle all the way to EMERGENCY.
Right before the deafening crash, I started to straighten, and twist. “Fuck out the way, bitch!”
Seventy-five tons at eighty kilometers an hour was a hell of an impact; I was again grateful for my cockpit straps, and the Wasp was picked bodily up off its fleet by the slightly-rising vector of the crash and knocked several times its own length down the street to sprawl with its ‘head’ embedded in the side of an abandoned van.
I slowed down back to nominal top speed, but no further, making a beeline for the planned turn south and ignoring what was left of the recon lance behind us. Flashes of yellow and blue-white light, reflecting from that direction, made it clear that the rest of the battalion was firing en passant and hardly needed my help to finish two battered light mechs.
We were under radio silence as we thundered south; if the Sword of Light wasn’t distracted by its battle to break past the Light Horse, they’d certainly have seen us coming in the clouds of dust and debris as hundreds of tons of war machine made a beeline over and through every obstacle in the way, but voices on the radio would have let the unengaged operators on their dropships have a chance to warn them. None of that, though, kept us from listening to the ELH’s own chatter as the 3rd Sword of Light hit their lines.
By the sound of it - and if you weren’t in the middle of it, thirty-first century combat chatter was pretty confusing - the Combine tried to roll right over the Light Horse in their first push, and ending up reeling back with a bloody nose.
Technically, the Eridani Light Horse were a Star League-style Regimental Combat Team, consisting of a relatively small number of sub-regiments, two of them ‘light horse’ formations whose multiple battalions of recon mechs were paired with a heavy armor element, and the third, the one whose rest-and-replenishment cycle had been interrupted by the Combine raid, made up of mechs defined by their high mobility and substantial short range firepower - Strikers.
The 3rd Sword, meanwhile, were a heavy cavalry operation, just like the Combine liked - heavy mechs, about as fast as could be expected. Dragons, Quickdraws, the occasional Ostsol or Ostroc - and backing them up, medium mechs with about the same movement profile, common for other Successor States but otherwise rare in Combine service. Griffins, Wolverines, Shadow Hawks, and the like.
More armor than the Light Horse, and more range, but about the same amount of firepower, and less agility. Overall, the smart money was on the Combine, but not by all that much. The scatter of company and lance strength merc units on planet added in weren’t nothing, but weren’t enough to be decisive on their own. No matter how skilled or experienced their people were individually - and the range was pretty wide - they didn’t have the practice coordinating to stand up to the same numbers of unified enemies… Besides which, the times being what they were, the vast majority of them were lightweight machines that had a distinctly limited battlefield half-life.
My people, meanwhile, had a company of the light scout mechs that striker types had originally been designed to hunt, another company of relatively sluggish long-range snipers, and a company of big, heavy brutes that were well suited to crushing anything they could manage to catch.
Roughly speaking, anyway. All of our snipers were Marauders, all of our brutes were Battlemasters - but there was a lance of Marauders filling out the company with the Battlemasters, Reyes’ Crusader was actually best-used for indirect fire-support, Sophitia’s Aspis was a medium mech take on the ‘brute’ mission role, what they called a trooper… In practice, everything was a mess, and at that, my people were a lot more regular than most formations.
Anyway, the 3rd Sword of Light, according to the intelligence briefing we’d gotten right before they landed, didn’t have an assault-weight element, and probably precious-few 60kph heavies - which meant that my people were comfortably the heaviest element on the field. Tonnage wasn’t everything - witness the Charger, which was eighty tons but proverbially useless - but an average of ten-to-fifteen tons advantage wasn’t nothing, either.
And, of course, our arrival would take the numeric odds, before losses, from about four-to-three to five-to-three, which could matter a lot, especially since we’d be by far the freshest and least-damaged element on the field.
“Club elements, this is King,” the command channel said in Chandrasekar’s voice. “Report progress and formation cohesion, over.”
I almost put Marauder No. 2 into a ditch in shock. What the fuck? Had that clown managed to forget that we were supposed to be under radio silence? Did the mouthbreathing moron even know what radio silence was?
Hurriedly, I flipped my comm system to LOS/LASER ONLY and patched a RELAY ALL header on, then told my microphone. “All units, Joker Actual. Emphasis - maintain radio silence. Ignore Longline until I say otherwise.”
I hit the SEND button hard enough to momentarily worry I’d broken a nail.
Consciously, I knew that we probably weren’t very likely to manage to actually surprise a veteran formation, but if we got blown because of a busybody meddling idiot only fifteen minutes out I would probably end up needing sat on.
Assuming the Light Horse were able to bail our green asses out, anyway.
Chandrasekar tried to fuck things up a couple more times, sounding increasingly testy, but none of my people broke, and it paid off in spades. I was proud of them.
At the time, I just took the fact that we hit the rear perimeter - a Wolverine whose entire left side had been gutted, and a pair of twenty-tonners - as luck, or at least the monitoring lance we’d run over having gone down too quickly to get a warning sent that we’d broken out into their backfield.
Both of those were wrong. Turned out, I found out later, the officer the Combine had running comms for the 3rd Sword of Light was secretly a MIIO - Federated Suns Ministry of Information, Intelligence, and Operations - plant, put in place more than twenty years ago. He’d been the one who received the garbled warning that our victims had been under attack… And had said nothing.
He’d also had a part in planting the false intelligence that made the Combine think that all three ELH regiments were off-planet and that the only real opposition they’d face would be a scratch force of smaller merc units hired on the spot.
People didn’t call Hanse Davion ‘The Fox’ for his pretty whiskers.
Anyway, during the battle itself, all I knew was that we’d taken the Sword of Light completely by surprise, and I knew it because even as the understrength picket lance was going down in a criss-cross of PPC fire, we could see the spread of an impromptu repair depot behind them exploding into motion like a kicked anthill. More than half a dozen mechs were powered down, either lying down in one pose or another or crouching so cherry-pickers could be lifted up to the loading hatches for their ammo bays, ammo trucks and flatbeds covered in spare armor parked all around them.
One tiny figure was visible against the stream of motion, bolting towards a face-down Griffin with the awkward lump of a neurohelmet carried at the end of one arm and banging against its leg. Another flurry of activity filled the basket of a cherry picker as they tried to stuff all their remaining 80mm ammunition into the magazine of the Dragon they were working on right away.
“Okay, radio silence is over!” I announced on our main channel. “Able, advance in line abreast. Baker, form behind and give fire support. Dog, keep our flanks clear and remember to gang up. Everybody, start with the weakest and work your way up!”
I fired an AC burst at the Dragon I’d noticed; the loading crew flinched as 105mm shells screamed by only a couple meters over their heads and smashed into the upper rear armor. A couple went down, thrashing, as shrapnel caught them, but one of the faster thinkers grabbed at the cherry picker’s control box and moved it away as fast as they could.
Thank god. I waited a second or two longer than I needed to before I followed up with one of my PPCs, touching off the same ammo bin they’d been filling. The Dragon burst apart in orange fire and knocked the moving picker basket over, sending the loading crew tumbling to the ground.
If they were lucky, they’d survive. I hoped so; that wish, and the two seconds of grace, was all I could offer without fucking myself over.
I looked for my next target; motion attracted the eye and the PPC bolt I put into the battered Quickdraw as it stood up was only one of literally a dozen. Mechs are tough but not that tough - it went down again before the movement even finished.
“Blackwing, just exactly what do you think you’re doing?” came over the command line from King, cutting past the hurried back-and-forth between my people.
One of the reasons commanding from the front kind of worked for mechwarriors was that the SLDF had come up with a way to use neurohelmet bandwidth to control their mechs’ communication functions. This had obvious benefits in terms of conveying information within a lance - you could mentally mark a target at the same time you called a warning, painting it for your lancemates’ targeting systems, and also limit the signal to only those allies who needed it rather than spamming another lance ten kilometers away on a general channel - which was why the SLDF had developed the function in the first place.
But it also meant that a junior commander, or a senior one who was still too immature to sit still, could dispense with a lot of the usual paraphernalia of phone banks and messenger sections and at least pretend to run all their own comms themselves.
Anyway, at that point, it let me send the command to have King’s channel routed directly to me rather than continue to broadcast to the entire mech battalion. “Hitting the Combine rear,” I snapped, jockeying the throttle to step over an abandoned armor truck rather than on it. “In combat right now.”
“You can’t possibly have covered fifty kilometers that quickly.”
“Nearly an hour at sixty kay-pee-aitch,” I snarled, and joined the fusillade against a Jenner that had popped out around the hill ahead of us, blocking line of sight to the main battle lines, even as the light mech’s pilot reversed direction in a mad skid and bolted back for cover. “Can, have, did.”
Dumbass.
“You - do you have any idea what kind of risks you’re talking about?” My brain filled ‘you little brat’ in from his tone without the words actually being said.
“Fairly good one. Light Horse’d seen all three Combine battalions regularly in the early fight,” I replied, throttling back a little to hold formation as the Battlemasters advanced in the vanguard. “Nebula’d’ve let us know if they shook one loose or broke contact entirely. Less than a battalion, we’d just run over rather than ‘into’.”
“Of all the cocky, reckless, ill-considered stunts-” Chandrasekar started to vent, before I interrupted him and shut the channel entirely.
“Fuck, contact!”
And contact it was, about a company, company and a half of Combine heavies swinging around the same hill the Jenner had managed to escape past.
I opened fire; just about everyone else did, too. Seeing the way our targets just… weaved out of the way of most of it, I could feel my heart sink. The easy part was very definitely over.
Two Dragons lunged at and then around the Battlemaster - paint scheme looked like Lisa Capet, She Of The Day-Glo Mohawk, who was one of our better mechhandlers - in front of me, laser and autocannon fire playing over its sides as they raced to work around behind it. I picked the more battered of the two and let rip with a PPC again, which missed. The autocannon followup didn’t.
I checked my ammo; about two-thirds, after what I’d spent against the repair laager.
The shudder and blast of missiles landing around me and on my armor made me swear and belatedly dive into my own evasive swerves. Threat response pinpointed the Griffin they’d come from, just in time for me to slam on the brakes - both of Marauder No. 2’s feet dug divots in the ground at the abrupt stop - and throw off the incoming PPC blast to scorch by in front of me with stark flash that was obvious even through the polarized viewports.
A moment’s mental debate didn’t last; I kept firing at the Dragon, this time tagging him with my own PPC shot, and shaped my course closer, figuring to swerve off again once I was in short range.
He and his buddy both left off tormenting Capet and turned towards me. I evaded harder, not that it did much good. My damage displays lit up with armor impacts, as though I couldn’t tell from the hammer and crash of incoming fire. Missiles, autocannon shells, the scarlet blaze of lasers - though both of those missed this time - it was all aimed at me, and I knew that my armor couldn’t keep up with it for long, even if the sheer rush of adrenaline seemed to be keeping me ahead of the balance issues for now.
Yellow flared from above me, harsh and intense, as Sophitia fired mid-air. The way the Dragons had turned towards me meant that combined speeds were eating distance with shocking quickness, and I had to veer off to avoid getting too close. I didn’t fancy my chances of dogfighting veteran pilots like this.
Then the next salvo from the Griffin arrived and the entire point became moot as the berserk gyro made my running steps stutter and sent me tumbling down to measure my mech’s length in the already torn-up cropfield.
“Motherfucker,” I yelled, and started fighting to get back up. If my armor held for long enough, I might be able to avoid being chum in the shark tank… If.
“Hold him for me, would you?” Sophitia’s voice came over the com line, and I looked up as I got my feet under me to see the Capet’s Battlemaster step up behind one of the Dragons and - I swear on God, Blake and Kerensky’s collective morally-bankrupt mass murdering graves, I am not making this up - shove its arms under the smaller heavy’s and lift, pulling the thing into a wrestling hold and immobilizing it for the several seconds it would take the pilot to try kicking backwards.
That was more that enough time for Sophitia to lead Aspis into three steps forward and drive a sword-thrust into the Dragon’s cockpit, then pull free. When the Battlemaster let go, the Combine mech dropped to the ground like the proverbial stringless puppet.
The other Dragon tried to sweep around the two, keeping what it thought was a safe distance, and cut between me and them in the process.
The problem with Marauders is that temptation is always with you. They mount not one but two particle projection cannons, the most massive energy weapons still in production. Manmade lightning at your fingertips. They call to the soul, they hunger, forever yearning to unleash their destruction into every pitiable fool that ever cut you off in traffic.
And if you indulge them too often, the demands they put on your reactor will cook you alive.
But every now and again, the Stars Are Right and circumstance aligns to make that the right choice.
Like, say, a back shot into an enemy heavy at ideal range.
The cannon burst missed low, stitching across the heavily armored panels protecting the hip joints. The lightning bolts, meanwhile, hit squarely against the rear torso armor, just as though I’d planned on it.
Thing is, the side torso bays of a Dragon are full of ammunition and not much else, and while there wasn’t much left of a PPC bolt after boring through their rear armor, there was enough. Everything from the entire left arm to several hundred individual O-rings went every direction as both missile and autocannon magazines cooked off spectacularly.
For the record, no, I didn’t plan for that to happen, it was dumb luck.
I looked up as the smoke started to clear, trying to find that damned Griffin, and not having much luck.
“Hey, I think they’re bugging out,” someone said on the general channel, and once I looked for it, I started feeling like they were right.
“We’ll pursue for now,” I said, and switched channels. “Comet, Asteroid. Sending you our location nav now; We’re seeing a short company withdrawing southwest.”
“Asteroid, this is Comet. Our people are seeing a due-west pull. Looks like they’ve had enough. We’ll pursue them; Actual wants you to drop in to our positions securing Knightburg and hold the door for us.” The Eridani Light Horse dispatcher had an accent that sounded almost but not quite Combine.
“We can do that,” I confirmed. “I can detach my scout company if you’d like a reserve; I figure the slower odds and ends will make up for it on my end.”
“How fresh are they?”
I flipped the command display up. “About State Seven, State Eight,” I said - each ‘state’ representing an averaged ten percent of nominal maximum armor. “The Combine focused on our heavies, they’re closer to Six.”
There was a moment of silence that I guessed was a conversation happening on the other end of a muted line, before Comet came back, “We’ll take them. Voice Channel 9, Encrypt Charlie-4. There’s a Fedrat regular tank company in the line; Sanromea-Davion himself, callsign Sparkle, on Channel 3, encrypt Baker-19.”
“Right, let me give the orders,” I said. “Asteroid, out.”
“Estimate five minutes to form and get moving. Comet out.”
I flipped channels and let Dog Company know that they’d be keeping up the chase, then switched again. “Sparkle, Asteroid here. I have two heavy companies, State Six, reporting as reinforcement; where do you want us?”
“Asteroid?” was the immediate reply. “Blackwing, the chit with the cleavage? Didn’t you have a full battalion?”
Apparently Sanromea-Davion’s tact went away in battle. “They are very nice,” I agreed, sweet as poison, “And yeah, but the Light Horse are taking my scout company with them for the pursuit.”
“Good call,” he agreed more professionally. “We could use them here, but not as badly. I’m pushing nav points; one company southwest of city center and one northwest. This’ll be temporary, until we can get new armor hung on our lighter elements so they can take over as pickets.”
“We’ll be central to provide a counterpunch after that,” I guessed, as the two markers came live.
“More or less,” he replied.
“I’ll get on it, then. Asteroid, out.”
It was surprisingly hard to break off the pursuit, even though the Combine mechs were already pulled almost entirely out of range - mostly by breaking line of sight behind cover, at this stage. I didn’t intend to let ‘surprisingly hard’ stop me, though, and if there was any grumbling from my people Lu Clair and Toshi Hannah, who had the two companies, didn’t let it reach me.
I was pretty sure that if there had been, at least in Baker Company, I’d’ve heard it. Lack of mechwarriors had meant that I’d had to fold the command lance into Baker to make up the numbers, and in my admittedly limited experience, grumbling tended to happen on the company channel.
Before it had been shot up by the Combine and stepped on and through by the ELH, Knightburg had been a decently nice town. Probably not one I’d ever have wanted to live in - it was open and sprawling in a way that reminded Older-Me’s memories of a smaller Oklahoma City, which had always struck me on visiting as one of the lesser circles of Hell - but moderately prosperous from the combination of grain elevators, barge shipping, and strip-mall stops off the major highway the bridge had been built for. I was pretty sure that it had been completely evacuated, and slightly less so that insurance payouts would… eventually… cover enough of the damage to let the local economy recover.
Anyway, we’d settled in for about ten minutes, just enough time to start getting bored, when things started happening again. Mostly over the radio, at first - an explosion of chatter and swearing from the Light Horse as the Sword of Light doubled back and punched straight through a weak point in their lines, leaving temporary confusion in their wake as the lighter regiment tried to reform and about face.
They were an elite formation; it wouldn’t take long. Usually, the maneuver would have been utterly pointless, but even as it was happening, I could see the flare-around-a-polarized-center signature of fusion torches burning in the sky overhead. They’d launched their dropships in a quick up-and-down ballistic hop, and were now headed beeline for the new landing site.
Sanromea-Davion came onto my line even before the last of the nine Unions had touched down: “Asteroid, Sparkle. Estimated landing site is Nav Mike. Get there, cripple the dropships before the Sword shows up. You’ll be setting the pace; I’m attaching Stardust, Ring, and Crater to back you up.” Smaller merc units, about two companies of light mechs between them - and all in worse repair than my Dog Company. “Assault elements’ll be following.”
“Nav Mike, cripple dropships, two companies support with more coming. Understood. Should I try and pull back if I can pull it off before the Sword arrives?”
“Feel free, but don’t count on it. Get moving. Sparkle, Out.”
We got moving, crashing west with all due haste. I didn’t think we’d pull it off any more than Sanromea-Davion did, but it would be really nice if we could beat the 3rd Sword of Light to our target and be gone before they could properly vent their wrath.
...Yeah, no, we were gonna be in the shit.
Of course, if I’d been able to find any goddamn artillery cadre, it would’ve been moot. Just send a scout lance to report the shot and shell the hell out of them. But as much as precious few units, merc, feudal, or regular, used the stuff, skilled artillerymen were even rarer, and their employers tended to hang onto them like death.
“All right,” I said as the looming domes of the grounded dropships came into view over the windbreak treeline. “They’re sitting targets with plenty of short-range firepower, so everybody stick to long range. Shoot low; we need to strand them, not go for hard kills. And remember to move and jink, because they’ll have plenty of LRMs in the air.”
Going for a long-range sparring match would hinder our own ability to do serious damage, which given the sheer toughness of dropships was already pretty limited, but first, the battle was essentially already won and I wasn’t going to go for extra risks for bonus points, and second, just being out here and shooting was enough to keep the 3rd Sword from escaping. Theoretically, they could load under fire, but it’d be slow and full of risks and most importantly would take long enough for the ELH to finish catching up to them.
I was sweating pretty hard during that fight, for reasons more figurative than the usual oven-heat of a battlemech cockpit. This was a significantly bigger exposure than that first southward charge; then, I’d known via the Eridani exactly where the main Combine force was, and all of my mechs had been essentially fresh, and there’d been backup immediately at hand.
Now, all my support was several minutes behind either me or the enemy, I had no idea when the hammer would fall, and all of my people - aside from Sophitia, who was sexy, sexy bullshit - were showing increasing amounts of armor damage.
Still, unless the Combine were already at their Combat Loss Grouping - the point where armor attrition started reaching critical levels across enough of the unit to trigger a snowball or death spiral effect where each loss increased pressure on survivors who weren’t in any shape to take it - having their two battalions pile on top of mine was going to be…
I tried to stop worrying about it in favor of pouring fire into the dropships, but the worry kept gnawing at me, and in the end, for good reason.
The alarm as my autocannon ammunition reached one quarter - fifteen rounds remaining - came almost simultaneously with the rush and hammer of LRMs that hadn’t come from the dropships’ launchers.
One of those missiles found Marauder No. 2’s right knee joint, which had basically been stripped bare by that point. The joint seized, the leg folded, and being that I wasn’t competent enough to ride that out, down I went.
I was really getting to hate that. Especially the rush of fear that it always brought - and the matching rush as a Jenner in Combine colors landed from a jump-jet leap and turned towards me. Its armor was scorched and scarred and at least one panel on one of its legs had fallen away completely… But all of its weapons looked to still be in working order, and I knew that, immobilized and already damaged as I was, they would really hurt, even before the two buddies I could see following it caught up and added their share of pain.
The splintering crash as the slab prow of a Von Luckner exploded out of the treeline and hit the slight rise of the road I’d fallen half-across did a bit to distract me from my immanent ass-whupping. The fifty-odd KPH of a VNL-K65N’s top speed wasn’t terribly fast, even by tank-or-mech standards, but it was enough for one riding up a ramp - or a bit of sloped ground firm enough to act like one rather than just getting mashed when seventy-five tons of tank hit it at speed - to launch into the air like a more plausible version of the Dukes of Hazzard. I saw at least a meter of clear air under its treads before the thing slammed back down to earth, fishtailed for a second, then powered out by somehow accelerating straight into the legs of that very startled Jenner.
The closing rate wasn’t as fast as when I’d hit that Wasp - had it been only an hour and a half ago - and Jenners were bigger and usually tougher than bug-lights… But this one was already damaged, and their joints made legs relatively vulnerable to damage like being whacked with a very angry heavy tank. Both knees and ankles snapped away under the assault, dropping the dismembered mech-torso on top of the Von Luckner’s armor and sending it tumbling safely away.
The noise and impact had to be at least as colossal as landing from that jump had been, but the tank’s crew worked through any of that admirably and in moments the turret was tracking to bring the big 165mm autocannon mounted there to bear on the other Jenner and core its chest out in a single crushing burst.
Sophitia’s Centurion landing on top of the last one and stabbing down through the thin upper armor even as she rode its collapse out was practically an anticlimax.
“You owe all of us a drink, Mechjock,” came good-naturedly over the short-range line. Apparently I’d been rescued by Sanromea-Davion’s personal ride.
I finished pushing myself up. “I’d throw in a kiss on the cheek, but I think your wife would strangle at least one of us.”
There was a moment of startled silence, then a laugh. “I got divorced years ago,” he said.
“OK,” I agreed. “My girlfriend would stab at least one of us.”
“Not over just one kiss,” Sophitia protested, sounding bubbly and delighted. She’d later tell me that that was the first time I’d publicly called her my girlfriend.
“I won’t push my luck. We’re closing, now. We need all their attention for at least the next minute.”
I glanced at the battalion display. “We won’t have much longer than that in close action.”
“Trust me.” Even as we were talking, the rest of his tank company was lunging forwards, guns roaring.
I flipped to a general channel. “OK, folks, big push time. Follow the treadheads in, and hang on to your hats!”
As casual as I tried to sound about it, it was seriously into pucker time. All I could do was trust that Sanromea-Davion knew something I didn’t, and tuck myself in behind the impromptu assault lance that had formed from the very slowest elements of my fellow mercenaries - an Awesome, a Stalker, and what had to be the shittiest and most rustbucket Atlas in the entire Inner Sphere. With all of that in between me and them, I was hoping that any Combine gunners that decided to look our way would go for the more dangerous, easier-to-hit assault mechs…
And that whatever it was our boss knew was enough to keep us from getting swarmed under.
I sent a PPC bolt and cannon burst - twelve rounds left - in the direction of the target the Awesome picked, and even as all of it missed, hoped that whatever the other shoe was would be able to pull things out for us. Another target, and another, passed and fell - adding my own two cents to the fusillade well after my cannon fell silent, even if most of the actual hits were coming from the others.
The confusion was colossal, but not enough to obscure the fact that the mechs we were firing back at, the ones deliberately drawing our attention, were the most intact of the Combine force - were the ones fighting to cover the retreat of their fellows up and into the Unions’ mechbays. Despite everything, despite a failed mission and what had to have been colossal losses if they weren’t rolling over us entirely, the 3rd Sword of Light were living up to their reputation as their nation’s elite - they were still under discipline, still organized and as coordinated as the situation permitted. If I’d been less busy - being honest, in less of a combat trance - I’d’ve been impressed.
The end of that trance, and the final end of the battle itself, came as a shock as the world through my viewports went first searing white, then polarized black. I could feel shockwaves pummeling my mech, hear the bone-deep roar of thundering fusion torches, as the Combine dropships lit off their drives and bolted upwards with a speed that had to be their full flank thrust, abandoning the ragged company or two of mechs that hadn’t been able to load aboard.
In the shocked relative silence as they lifted away, I came back to myself. My head hurt, my mouth and throat were sandpaper dry. My hair, and ‘piloting suit’, and the lining of my cooling jacket were soaking, dripping wet, and my skin crawled and slimed with the same pouring sweat that had gotten them that way. I realized that I was shockingly thirsty, and that the cockpit was an inferno so miserable it had my flesh trying to crawl into my cooling jacket to hug its icey inner layer.
Reactor core temps were well under the danger zone, but that didn’t make the environment next to them pleasant.
I glanced at the armor displays, mine and the battalion’s alike. There was a lot of red and orange; missing limbs, and five mechs missing entirely. The only company that wasn’t at CLG was Dog, just sweeping back into combat datalink range on the heels of the Eridani Light Horse’s 21st Striker as they bounded and raced forward across the battlefield, descending on the equally battered Combine survivors as entire lances against a single mech.
I put both lasers and a PPC shot into the rear of an enemy Wolverine as it turned to face the new threat - and, after I missed all but one of the laser shots, let Sophitia finish it while I reached for one of the eight-ounce bottles of water I kept netted to one side of my cockpit.
We’d made it.
...IN LONELY INDECISION...