literature

26 - Setbacks and Shocks

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Forward Observation Point, SLSC M9V.2016 (Third Planet)
Dark Nebula, Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
14 November 3053

    “So just how much are we getting paid for this, again?”
    Amber rolls her eyes and grins at Rainy’s question. “I’m putting in for a double share,” she fires back. “Just to put up with your moaning.”
    “Huh.” There’s a pause while the Commando turns to watch the first few ’Mechs from the Lodestar and Snow Leopard approaching their position. “Moaning keeps me healthy.”
    “Sure. Then you’re probably gonna live forever, Rainy.”
    The Commando raises its hand and gives Amber the finger.

    The terrain is going to dictate the pace and flow of the fighting. It always does. It’s the very first thing they taught her back at the Academy. Brigitte glances at the map display on her secondary screen as she slows her ’Mech to a gradual halt. It looks as if the Falcons are breaking into two separate groups. The big, heavy machines are aiming to cut across the open ground, which is something she wouldn’t do… not without jump jets to clear those sinkholes.
    The smaller, quicker ’Mechs are skirting the sinkholes, apparently planning to swing in around from the side. Olafsdottír zooms in on the leading machine for a moment, recognising it as an Uller. Clinging to grab-handles on its torso are five Toads in full battle armour. Star Captain Kathleen, I presume.
    “Check in,” she says into her helmet microphone. “Everyone set?”

    “Detach, Zoë,” Kathleen says into her neurohelmet microphone. It is an unnecessary command; Zoë and her Pointmates are already boosting clear on their jets. She turns her attention to the tactical plot.
    “Gerard, do not bunch up so! You make an excellent target for missile fire.”
    Star Commander Gerard replies, but she pays little notice. Her computer is identifying the enemy BattleMechs, and what Kathleen sees is far from encouraging.

    “Mark your targets. Don’t split your fire.”
    Jessie Danvers wonders what it is with the leader of the Norns. Doesn’t she feel even a bit scared?
    She checks her console once again, and misses the first couple of ranging shots from the approaching Falcon ’Mechs. A burst of light autocannon shells falls short of its intended target, chopping ragged holes in the topsoil and sending smoking fragments of muddy clay flying. A large laser blast goes wide.
    “Stand by on missiles… Stand by… Fire!” Tyler’s voice prompts a hail of long-ranged rockets from the Norn BattleMechs ranged to either side of her Banshee. Jessie flicks her HUD over to active and brings up her targeting array. She sights in on an odd-looking medium ’Mech that is loping along on spindly legs.
    Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a flash of flame, and an instant later the Falcon ’Mech is wrenched almost off of its feet. Where it had an autocannon instead of its left arm, there is nothing left behind but torn metal and dangling myomers. Jessie blinks in amazement. What the hell kind of gun is that?
    She starts firing her own PPC and Imperator autocannon, sending shots sailing towards the oncoming Jade Falcons. Sparks fly as high-explosive shells find their mark, ripping a series of craters into the upper hull of the mystery medium BattleMech.

    Glancing between the view through her repaired canopy and the tactical feed at her side, Brigitte Olafsdottír judges the ranges on the incoming ’Mechs. It’s still too far a remove for her pulse laser or autocannon to be of any use.
    “Malky, switch your fire to the Uller. Try to knock it down.”
    “Got it. One sound kicking comin’ up.” Brigitte rolls her eyes at Malky Duncan’s heavy Northwind accent. She can follow Cameron most of the time, but Malky’s dialect is almost impenetrable. Not that it really matters, because a moment later, his Excalibur opens fire on the lightweight OmniMech. A hail of Artemis-guided missiles brackets the racing Uller, forcing the Falcon pilot to jink and weave. A moment later, the Omni is thrown to the ground, actually somersaulting as its right leg is shattered into a thousand flying pieces of broken metal.
    Olafsdottír winces as she imagines what that has got to feel like for the Uller’s pilot.

    Valentine Tyler sets his LRM packs to load a fresh set of warheads, and grins when the battered, broken Sentinel that’s been worked over first by Malky, and now by Jessie, lurches back up onto its feet. A dazzling particle beam slams into the ’Mech’s side, and then there’s a massive explosion.
    Ammo’s been hit, Tyler notes as chunks of Sentinel chassis come sailing out of the fireball of annihilating munitions and rupturing fusion engine. Scratch one Falcon.
    “Horst, send a couple of flights towards those Toads. Let ’em know we can see them.”
    “No problem at all,” Horst says. His Catapult squats down and launches thirty LRMs towards the Elemental troopers. Most of his warheads detonate around them, but a few strike home, blasting pieces of armour from their suits.

    Zoë struggles back onto her feet, and checks her suit’s damage display. She has taken a few scratches, nothing more. Three of her Pointmates are in worse condition though, with a handful of minor breaches from the missile strike. Nothing the HarJel lining cannot deal with, but Zoë is under no illusions about their chances. We cannot win this.
    She crouches, triggers her jets, and leaps seventy metres to land on the immobilised hull of Kathleen’s Kit Fox. From the smoke rising out of the ruined right torso, she can see that the Omni’s engine has suffered major damage. The telemetry feed from Kathleen is completely inoperable... so there is no way to tell if she is alive or dead.
    The Elemental glances at the communications display in her HUD and opens a general channel. “Mercenary commander! I am Star Commander Zoë. I speak for my people. We surrender to you. We will stand down.”
    She is not expecting what happens next.

    “What the fracking hell! Who fired that?”
    The angry demand from Olafsdottír’s Axeman echoes what’s in Jessie’s mind. A hail of LRMs just came streaking in out of nowhere and blasted the Toad leader clean off the broken Uller. The armoured shape is sent tumbling across twenty metres of ground, bouncing heavily and trailing smoke.
    “Wasn’t me,” Tyler says. “Midge? Horst?”
    “Not me. I – wait a second!” Midge’s voice takes on a note of alarm. “It’s that Falcon ’Mech! The Bombardier at three-five-five!”
    She’s right. Jessie zooms in on the heavy missile-boat machine, and sees that it’s storming towards the Toads at full speed, cycling a fresh load of LRMs into its torso launchers.
    “Worthless scum! You should have been killed years ago, Zoë! At least I can put that right…”
    “Shite, he’s gone radge,” says the Excalibur’s pilot. “He’s going tae blow them aw tae fuck!”
    Jessie doesn’t really think about it. “Hit him!” She starts blasting away with her long-ranged guns, and the Excalibur does likewise. Their combined fire slams into the upper torso of the Bombardier, just forward of the right shoulder actuator. A massive section of armour is wiped out in an instant…
    …And an instant later, the Bombardier is wiped out. Everything from the knees upwards is destroyed as its remaining missile stores ignite inside their racks. A black mushroom cloud of smoke billows up from the burning wreckage.
    “I’m glad you’re not shooting at me. That’s all I’m gonna say,” comes Tyler’s voice over her earphones.

    What follows is… anticlimactic.
    The Toad leader – Zoë – picked herself up and ordered the surviving Falcons to stand down. The MechWarriors shut down their weapons, parked their machines, and dismounted.
    Jessie Danvers, huddled up in her ratty cold-weather parka and woollen cap, stands by and watches as a pair of skimmers from the Lodestar approach the battle site. One’s a medical wagon; the other carries a pair of Techs. Both light vehicles make a beeline for the mangled OmniMech. Just beyond the downed Uller are two of the Falcons’ lighter machines, a Wasp and a Clint.
    “You okay?” She looks around. Tyler and the Catapult pilot, Horst ‘Something’, come walking up to join her.
    “Sure. A whole lot better than that asswipe,” she replies, pointing at the smouldering heap of metal that used to be the Bombardier.
    “Y’know, that makes four ’Mechs you’ve taken out today,” Horst points out.
    “Frack off! No way I did.”
    “Horst’s right,” Tyler says. “Captain Shithead over there is the fourth ’Mech. You’re like a one-woman doomsday machine.”
    Jessie shrugs it off. She can’t really believe what they’re telling her, because if she has taken four Falcon ’Mechs down, it would double her total number of BattleMech kills ever.
    “We’ll check the battlerom data later,” Horst is saying. “We’ve got a book running on the ’Mech tonnage we bring down. You’ve probably upset the figures.”
    “A book, huh? I’d want in on that… that’s if I had some kroner to bet with.”
    Tyler tilts his head. “Sign up with us and you’d get regular money. Gotta be better than sitting around here.”

    “There,” Angelica says as she trips the emergency release on the Uller’s crew hatch. She swings the armoured door up and away to allow Adele access. With the Omni tipped over on its side, getting the pilot out is going to be tricky.
    “Got a pulse,” Adele Crayford says a moment later. She checks for bone breaks or visible wounds. The semi-conscious Falcon stirs and groans, fumbling with the cracked faceplate on her neurohelmet. Her left arm doesn’t seem to be working properly.
    Gotta get a sleeve on it, Adele decides. Probably cracked the radius… “Hold still a minute,” she tells the groggy MechWarrior. “You’re injured.”
    The Falcon manages a nod before she passes out again.
    “Pass me the blue bag, would you?” Adele looks back out through the hatch to Angelica.
    “Aff. Here you are.” The Tech hands the trauma-kit satchel in to Adele. “Shall I get the backboard?”
    “Yeah. I think we can move her.” Adele opens the side pocket of the bag and fishes out a preserving sleeve. “Just got to secure her arm first.”
    “Understood.” The former Smoke Jaguar climbs down to the ground and jogs back over to their parked skimmer. By the time she returns with the backboard, Adele has inflated the sleeve around the Falcon’s forearm and removed her damaged neurohelmet. Putting the injured arm in a temporary sling has to wait until the patient’s out of the safety harness and on the ground outside.
    Adele notices the speculative expression Angelica has got as she eyeballs the ruined OmniMech. “You figuring that maybe you could fix this thing?”
    The Tech blinks and turns her gaze back to Adele. “Maybe. It depends on how badly the engine was hit… and if we can find a replacement leg for it.”
    “Well, give me a hand here. Once we get her loaded onto the skimmer, you can come and look this pile of junk over at your leisure.”

    Brigitte Olafsdottír fights down an involuntary shudder as the Toad trooper straightens up from checking on its damaged comrades. There’s a hiss as the suit’s pressure seals disengage and the ‘helmet’ – actually more of a lid – swings up to expose the operator’s face.
    I can’t get the idea that they’re monsters out of my head, she realises as she gets her first good look at Star Commander Zoë. The Elemental’s skin tone is a few shades darker than Brigitte’s own, and her strong features exhibit her African ancestry.
    “You are the commander, Brigitte, quiaff?”
    Brigitte nods. “I am. You’re Zoë, correct? That was you who ordered your people to stand down?”
    “Aff. I have to thank you.”
    “What for?”
    Zoë raises her arm – the one equipped with a three-fingered, powered claw – and points at the burnt-out wreck of the Bombardier. “For killing Gerard. You saved my Pointmates and I. Gerard would not have stopped until he killed us all.”
    Brigitte brushes it aside. “Don’t thank me. I wasn’t the one who shot him.” She regards the Falcon for a moment, wondering if she ought to take a step back. Craning her neck to look the woman in the eye is going to be awkward. “Can you take that suit off?”
    “Out here? Aff, but it would be difficult… and we have no clothing suitable for this climate. It would be better aboard the Iron Tower.”
    “Your DropShip? The one that’s landed north of here? I’d have thought it would have lifted by now.”
    Zoë shakes her head. “Neg. When I told the rest of Binary Bravo to stand down, I transmitted the same order to the DropShip’s captain. The Iron Tower, like the rest of us, is yours now.”
    “Oh.” It doesn’t sound remotely smart, but it’s all Brigitte can think of to say.
     The unexpected is what usually kills you on the battlefield...
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DBrentOGara's avatar
"Oh."

...well, it is better to remain laconic and be thought a great wit, than to open one's mouth and dispel any such notions. :nod:

Such a fun fight! I really like Jessie, and it's wonderful to finally see a Clanner lose it and get a little crazy... and then get blown to hell! :heart: