The Crab nestled, hidden, in the grove of trees. It crouched, legs folded underneath it, its long torso laid on the ground, arms poised to push it up at a moments notice. It had been white, once, but that had been when the Free Worlds League had still controlled the planet, and the Com Guards had had no reason to hide. Now what remained of the paint job was a murky olive-grey that blended in well with the undergrowth.
The mechs approaching had no such concerns. In typical Confederate fashion, they were each painted a different color, with no regard for the coloration of the local terrain. They don't hide because they don't have to, Adept Cezzerlio thought bitterly. There are too many of them, and they're too well trained, too experienced, and, worst of all, our tech means absolutely fuck-all against them. We started this fight with tech no one else has had access to for three hundred years, and in a mere three years, they've bootstrapped themselves nearly back up to our level. And, worse, they make better use of it than we do. If it was good enough for the Star League, it's good enough for us, but they don't think that way...
The mech on point was a Locust, whose tan-and-brown paint job made at least some concession to the idea of camouflage. It was, however, completely the wrong kind of camo for any terrain within five hundred kilometers. The mechs behind it were worse... the largest of them was a baby-blue Shadow Hawk, which was accompanied by a white-and-green Vindicator. Finally, bringing up the rear was a black-and-red Wasp. There were no Ravens or Mongooses in evidence, and Confed's Pegasus hovercraft couldn't handle the woodlands, so there were likely no active probes accompanying the Confed force, which meant that they were not likely to be able to detect the concealed Comstar mechs before they attacked.
That Vindicator was definitely one of the new ones, Cezzerlio thought. The left side of its torso was too bulky for the old 1R, and there were far too many missile tubes visible. Its heavier missile armament would hardly matter at this range, though, and the other modifications were minimal. He wondered about the others, though... especially the Shadow Hawk. There were several rumors floating around about what Confed had done to the old reliable Shadow Hawk, and all of them were nasty.
Cezzerlio brought the Crab's advanced communications system online and hit the Mercury across the way with a narrow-focus comm laser. "Al, you think you could get detailed scans on the bogies for me? If they're improved models, info on them is worth more than any ambush."
"Can do, sir," the Mercury pilot replied. The scan data on Cezzerlio's displays began filling in as the Mercury's powerful sensor suite switched from passive to active probing. The Locust, which had been picking its way, bird-like, cautiously through the trees, stopped dead. Cezzerlio cursed softly as it began moving again, faster, in a wide searching curve that took it directly towards the Mercury.
Still muttering imprecations at the Confederate mechwarrior piloting the Locust, Cezzerlio checked his tactical display. The Confederate mechs were still a hundred meters short of the spot he'd wanted them in, but it looked like this was the best he was going to get, and if he left it much longer, that damnable Locust was going to trip over the Mercury and blow any chance of pulling any sort of ambush out of this.
He sighed and keyed his mike. "Mousetrap. Mousetrap now."
The Mercury, prepared for that, exploded up out of the gully it was half-buried in in a shower of leaves and dirt. The Locust's weapons stopped their panning across the terrain and locked onto the Mercury, but the Mercury was faster. Lasers stabbed out, and armor incandesced off the Locust's torso. Then the space between the two mechs lit up as the Locust returned fire, tearing into the Mercury with the laser in its chin turret and a brutal array of lasers in each arm. The Mercury came apart like a smashed toy as the Confederate mech's lasers ripped through its ovoid body. The Crab's scans went blank as the mech that was feeding them died.
Blessed Blake, that was only a Locust! Where does a Locust get that kind of firepower?! Cezzerlio thought, shocked.
Even as the Mercury died, though, Cezzerlio's Crab was rising to its feet, and the Sentinel across the way echoed its motions. Cezzerlio sidled sideways, angling for a back shot on the Vindicator, but he knew he wasn't going to get it... the Confederates weren't far enough into the ambush zone. The Crab's claws opened and beams of coherent light stabbed out at the Vindicator, burning stripes across its left side and arm. The Vindicator turned, left arm swinging out. Light danced around the Crab as the Confederate mech opened fire with the pulse laser mounted there. The laser mounted alongside the Vindicator's head came to bear next, and the fire from that one struck home, lightly damaging the Crab's armor. That wasn't all, though... as the Vindicator completed its turn, the gaping muzzle of its Ceres Arms particle cannon cleared its body, and the Confederate triggered it, sending a white-hot blaze of plasma arcing like lightning towards the Crab. It splashed across the Comstar mech's side, the combination of heat and kinetic energy buckling several of the Crab's armor plates.
The high-speed chatter of the Sentinel's autocannon echoed through the woods as Adept Devries opened up on the Shadow Hawk, following up with his missiles and laser. The Shadow Hawk returned fire with the laser mounted on its own forearm, and the damage it wreaked on the smaller Sentinel's light armor seemed all out of proportion to its theoretical power.
Then the two infantry platoons - overstrength squads, really, after two months of attrition - concealed in the bushes opened fire on the two Confederate medium mechs. Their SRMs and lasers punched into the mechs' weak back armor, not penetrating - yet - but certainly giving the Confederates something to think about. Unfortunately, the Confederate lance hadn't been drawn far enough into the ambush zone... the two platoons were almost directly in front of the Wasp that had been on rear guard, rather than behind as planned, and that meant that they were dead. The Wasp was puny, as mechs went - less than half the size of Cezzerlio's Crab - but to infantry, it was still twenty tons of walking death.
Cezzerlio winced as the Wasp raised its arm and began pumping laser fire into the nearer of the two infantry positions, following that up with missiles from the launcher embedded in the center of its chest. Though he knew he should be concentrating on the Vindicator, Cezzerlio couldn't just let the Wasp butcher the infantry - two dozen men and women under his command, whose only protection was being a lower priority threat than anything else on the field. So he needed to reorganize the Wasp's priorities a little.
He backed the Crab up two steps, pivoting it to face the Wasp. The Crab's lasers flashed out again, and firepower that would barely scratch a Vindicator was much nastier to the lightly armored Wasp. One laser missed, but the other caught it in the left shoulder, blasting the joint apart. The severed arm tumbled to the ground beside the Confed mech. There, that ought to get his attention, Cezzerlio thought.
It did. The Wasp turned away from the infantry even as they switched targets and began lobbing missiles at it. The laser in its remaining hand came up to fire at the Crab, narrowly missing. A high pitched beeping from Cezzerlio's battle computer told him that he was being painted by a Streak targeting system. The Shadow Hawk was still occupied with the Sentinel, the Vindicator had only LRMs, the Locust looked to be carrying pure laser armament, which meant that it was the Wasp with the Streaks, which made it an upgraded model. All that flashed through the adept's head in the moment between the Streak lock-on and the missiles themselves leaving the Wasp's launcher. With the targeting lock, the Streak missiles must have found their target, but Cezzerlio didn't notice, because the Vindicator chose that moment to hammer him with the PPC again.
The Wasp left the ground in a flare of jump jets before Cezzerlio could hit it again, so he swung his Crab's lasers back towards the Vindicator. He fired both arm lasers and the smaller laser mounted along the axis of his mech's torso, and they all struck home on the Vindicator's stocky body. One of them found its way through the already-damaged armor plate and drilled straight through the LRM launcher's magazine. The two hundred and forty anti-mech warheads stored in that magazine exploded in an almost instantaneous chain reaction as the laser dumped megajoules of heat energy into them. The Vindicator's ammunition storage system functioned as designed, however. The tremendous force of the explosion was not contained, but channeled, blowing the back armor off the Confederate mech and roiling out into an impressive fireball, but leaving the vital parts of the mech untouched. The Vindicator was driven to its knees by the explosion, but almost immediately began staggering back to its feet, a process made more difficult by the fact that its left arm now hung useless at its side, still intact, but with the control lines from the main body of the mech severed by the ammunition explosion.
The Crab's battle computer informed Cezzerlio that the Wasp was targeting him for its SRMs again, but he wasn't even certain where it had landed and didn't have time to look. That vicious little Locust had circled around and was approaching him from the left, and the Vindicator had almost regained its feet. Cezzerlio fired his left arm laser at the Locust, missing, but maybe encouraging it to keep its head down, and the other at the Vindicator, striking it in the hip as it stood. The PPC belched plasma again, but it missed, for a pleasant change.
"Blake's curse on this damnable thing!" Adept Devries' voice came over the com. "The autocannon jammed, and the rest of this piece of junk isn't holding together very well. I'm getting out of here while I still can."
He fitted actions to words, the Sentinel turning away from the Shadow Hawk and bolting for the deep woods. Cezzerlio took a moment to look at those two mechs, and was surprised. He hadn't realized until just then how much of a beating the 'Hawk had been giving the smaller mech, and just how little the Sentinel had been hurting it in return. The Sentinels had always been weak in the armor department, but Shadow Hawks had never been anything to write home about as far as firepower went, either.
This one was, though. As the Sentinel ran, the gun on the 'Hawk's forearm tracked it, and the laser speared out, severing the left arm - and the useless autocannon - from the Comstar mech's body. Devries staggered, but continued to run. As the range opened, the Shadow Hawk's shoulder-mounted gun - which had been in its stored position for the entire battle, long barrel pointed at the sky - pivoted down into firing position. There was no firing noise, no muzzle flash, but the 'Hawk's left shoulder was kicked back by silent recoil, and the Sentinel came apart, its torso ripped cleanly in half. Then the sharp crack of a projectile smashing the sound barrier echoed over the battlefield as the Sentinel tumbled to the ground.
Gauss rifle, Cezzerlio realized. Shit. How in Blake's name did they get a damned Gauss onto that thing? He didn't have long to contemplate it, though... he had other things to worry about, like the Locust that had gotten into firing position and opened up on him with that insane array of lasers. They were targeted low, and the Crab's left leg, already weakened by the Vindicator's PPC, gave way as the lasers burned through armor and structural components. Despite Cezzerlio's best efforts, the Crab overbalanced and plowed into the ground in a shower of dirt and bark. He tasted blood in his mouth, but pushed it to the back of his mind to worry about later. He was too busy fighting his controls, trying to coax his crippled mech into a position where he could bring at least one of his lasers to bear on the Confederate mechs surrounding him.
"This is Ensign Julia Lisseau of the Chasseurs à Cheval, commander of this little ad-hoc lance," a pleasant female voice came from the Shadow Hawk's external speakers. "If you're considering further resistance, you might want to know that I have my Gauss rifle pointed straight at your head, and it's a little difficult to swallow a hundred-kilo cannonball at Mach twelve. Also, the subcommander, here," - the Shadow Hawk jerked its left thumb towards the Vindicator - "is a little unhappy with the mess you made of his mech, so if you don't want me to let him at you, I'd suggest shutting your mech down and climbing out of the cockpit real slow."
After a moment, Lisseau added, "And if you're considering pulling something heroic and blowing your fusion core to keep the secrets of your technology from falling into our unenlightened hands, you might want to take a second look at our rides and think about whether keeping that three-hundred-year-old piece of junk you're driving away from us is really worth your life."
