To this day, I'm not sure why the pirates decided to come to Lordinax. Blake knows... well, we're not supposed to swear by Blake any more, but old habits die hard. Anyway, Blake or no, anyone could see that Lordinax didn't have anything worth raiding it for. Like the other five planets in the Lothian League, it's an icy ball of rock out on the very edge of inhabited space. Any of our neighbors—what used to be the Illyrian Palatinate, the Marian Hegemony, and the Circinus Federation, back before Confed—would have netted them richer loot. However, those sectors all bordered on the Free Worlds League, and, since the Lords'd gotten themselves mixed up in a Free Worlds civil war—Dame Humphreys'd finally gone and done it—those sectors had something we didn't... I mean, besides anything worth raiding for. They had Confed troops.
Well, we were Confed troops, too, technically... but the border sectors had the heavy hitters, the Legions that served on the line. We're talking regiments of heavy mechs driven by former mercs who'd been doing it since long before there was a Confederation. It was primarily because of them that Confed even existed.
Us, on the other hand, we were the First (and only) Lothian Regulars. Garrison troops for a sector out of jump range of any enemy House. We had a mixed battalion, spread out across six planets. Lordinax's portion of it was a lance of light mechs and some ground-pounders.
Going from most to least useless, there was Amanda Sutton's Stinger and Will Glassman's Wasp. Mandy and Will were both raw recruits... never driven anything bigger than a snowcat before they joined up. 'Course, at twenty tons apiece, their machines weren't much bigger than a snowcat, and I've seen snowcats that were better armed...
Next there was my Jenner. Nearly twice the size of the tin-can twins, with four times the firepower, better armor, and faster to boot. Got wicked hot in that cockpit, though, even in 40-below weather. And I want to know what idiot it was that decided it would be a good idea to hang the cockpit out in front of the mech where it'd be easy for the bad guys to shoot it off... and that was if I didn't do it first. The Jenner's missile rack is mounted directly behind and just slightly above the head. I flinch every time I fire the thing... always expecting to catch one of my own SRMs in the back of the neck. I'm better with the lasers, anyway... the workmech I got my piloting experience in had cutting lasers on it, so I know how to use 'em.
Then there's the boss. Sergeant-Major Ed Vaden's Trebuchet was the only one of the lot that your average Steiner officer'd even be willing to consider a mech, and Ed was the only one of us with real combat experience. He'd been a mercenary before, with our previous garrison force, an outfit called Smith's Stompers, but had fallen in love with a local girl and chosen to stay in the League when Confed didn't renew the Stompers' contract. He'd formerly driven a Catapult that belonged to the Stompers, and was still getting used to the Trebuchet's lack of jump jets—and Cats are chicken-walkers, too, while the Trebuchet has regular legs, which I'm sure didn't help his driving any. He could land a flight of LRMs on a target half a klick away with disgusting regularity, though.
Oh, yeah, and then there was the infantry. "Ground-pounder" is not really the proper term for them, I suppose, because they were airborne troops. Had those cute little jump packs they'd use to flit around everywhere, and an Iroquois chopper that ferried them around. They'd jump out of the thing and fire up their jets in mid-air. Crazy, really, but they're infantry, what do you expect? Anyone who'd go out to fight battlemechs with nothing but a laser rifle and a jump pack has got to be a couple rounds short of a full magazine, if you know what I mean. The leader of this pack of lunatics was a lady by the name of Sergeant Quibrera. Her given name was Adelie, but even Ed, who technically outranked her, called her "Sergeant", very respectfully. You never want to offend anyone who's played lasers at twenty paces with a battlemech and walked away afterwards. She had more combat experience than any of us because, unlike our mech force, our infantry predated Confed. The Sergeant had been toting a laser rifle since she was a teenager. The fact that she was still alive at the ripe old age of 25 said something.
One fine winter's day—they're all winter's days on Lordinax—Ed and I were hanging out in the rec room getting in some time at the fuzball table. Ed's really bad at fuzball, but he owed me a game after whipping me at darts the night before. I'd just driven the ball into the back of his goal with a resounding crack, making the score 6–1, when the incoming call alert in the adjacent comm center sounded.
Ed and I stuck our heads through the comm center door to hear, "Leopard Den, this is Leopard Three. Come in, Leopard Den. This is Leopard Three. Leopard Den, please respond."
That'd be Will. I think he wants to be a secret agent when he grows up. He and Mandy were out on what we optimistically termed a "patrol". It would've been more accurately called "mech driving practice", I think.
Ed picked up the mike and replied, "This is Ed. What've you got?"
"Leopard Four and I have spotted an atmospheric anomaly."
Ed looked at me and mouthed the words, "'Atmospheric anomaly'?"
"Okay. Amanda, you there?" he added, aloud.
"Yeah, this is, uh, Leopard Four. It looks like a dropship contrail to me."
Ed dived into the pile of paper on the comm desk, muttering obscenities under his breath as he shuffled through them. He came up with a packet of papers and tossed them at me, saying, "Here, check to see if we had any scheduled incoming today."
As I began flipping through the drop schedule, Ed flipped the mike back on and said, "Okay, what's your position? And what do you estimate the 'anomaly's' position and direction as?"
Will reeled off a set of coordinates, then added, "The anomaly's west of us, about halfway up the sky, headed west by southwest."
Ed cleared the drink cans off the chart table with a sweep of his arm, then trailed one finger across the map and the other down until they met. "Okay, I've got you at about ten klicks west of the compound. Joe, you find anything?"
"Eh? No," I replied, chucking the schedule back onto the desk. "We got a Mule coming in next week, nothing else."
"On max magnification, I can just make out a silhouette," Mandy said. "I think it's a Leopard class. Might be the little Marik fighter though, whatsitcalled... Cheetah. Got those narrow blocky wings."
"Okay. I want you guys to keep an eye on it, see where it lands. Do not, under any circumstances, engage it, until... Sergeant!" Ed yelled. Then, to an infantry trooper passing by the door, "Renford! Go find the Sergeant, tell her I need her here now. And I'm going to need you guys suited up and ready to fly."
He turned back to the mike. "As I was saying, do not engage any enemy until either Joe or Sergeant Quibrera gets there. At that point, they will be in command. Follow their orders."
Ed took a deep breath, then turned to me. "Joe, I want you to go fire up your Jenner. Tell the techs to get my mech warmed up, too, then head out after the kids. You're faster than they are; you shouldn't have any problems catching up. I'll be along as soon as I can get there. Try to avoid combat until I get there, but don't let the bad guys hit any civilian targets. The mine holding, here," he indicated a spot on the map, "is the nearest, I think."
When I got to the mech bay, my Jenner was already hot. The techs were busy pulling the support gantries away from the ungainly 35-ton machine, leaving only the one catwalk across to the cockpit attached. The rest of the tech crew was swarming over the back of the Trebuchet, doing something to what appeared to be the ammo bays.
The senior tech, a big dark beefy guy by the name of Griswold, swung into step beside me as I crossed the ferrocrete of the staging area. "One of Quibrera's batch"—Griz jerked a thumb back over his shoulder, towards the Iroquois that squatted on its pad at the end of the bay, rotors slowly twirling—"said that you were going to need your machine. We got it warmed up and ready to roll. Ammo bay's full of war-shots."
"Great, now I've got live missiles to shoot myself in the back of the head with," I muttered.
Griz chuckled. "Can't happen. The odds of the head being jerked upwards far enough to get hit in the fraction of a second the missiles take to get clear of it are astronomically low. Maybe if some assault mech gave you a good uppercut just as you fired, it'd happen. Missiles wouldn't've armed yet, though, and the armor's sloped nice, so they'd probably just bounce up into the face of whatever just punched you. If you're getting punched in the head by an assault, you've got bigger problems to worry about, anyway."
"That's reassuring," I said, not really feeling reassured.
"Yeah. Well, anyway, the Trebuchet's warm, too... we're just getting its missiles ready. The thing's got too damn many of 'em."
"How 'bout the kids? Do they have live ammo?" I asked, suddenly worried.
"Yeah," Griz replied. "S.O.P. for patrols, even if they are as half-assed as the ones we run."
"Well, that's something."
We'd reached the base of the scaffolding that surrounded my Jenner by that point. As I climbed into the little cage that passed for an elevator, Griz clapped me on the shoulder and said, "Good luck. Try to bring it back in one piece. Remember, I gotta fix it."
"Wouldn't want to make your day difficult by getting my ass shot off," I replied, and mashed the "UP" button.
The cage rattled to the top of the gantry, where there was another tech waiting to help me out of the cage and out onto the catwalk on the top of the boom that supported the mech's head. I crossed quickly and without looking down—I'm not afraid of heights, but it's a looong way down from head-height on a mech even as small as the Jenner—to the head of my mech. I glanced back up at the four missile tubes behind me, then lowered myself down through the open hatch into the Jenner's cockpit. I stripped off my shirt, pulled on the cooling vest that hung on a clip by the hatch, and strapped myself into the command chair. I pulled the neurohelmet down from its hook above me and settled it onto my head. A glance at the gauges told me that the reactor and other subsystems had already been brought online, so all I had to do was flip the switch that activated the cockpit systems, and the mech came alive beneath me.
I glanced left, gave a thumbs-up to the tech perched on the gantry, then announced over the mech-bay frequency, "This is Corporal Murray. I have the mech."
The tech returned my signal and began operating the controls to release the Jenner from the last portion of the framework that held it. There was a clunk as the boom unclamped itself from the Jenner's neck, and the mech swayed forward slightly. I felt the motion through my neurohelmet and corrected the Jenner's balance with motions as automatic as my own body's. The boom swung up, away from my machine.
"Murray, this is Traffic Control," Griz's voice came over the com. "Your mech is free. We are opening the main door now."
I edged the big grey and white war machine forward, moving slowly to avoid bumping into the gantry. A bright slit appeared at the bottom of the door in front of me, and slowly grew, a square of light expanding across the floor towards me. As it passed the Jenner's windscreen, I was momentarily blinded by sunlight reflecting off the snow outside. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I moved the Jenner forward at a slow walk, heading out through the four-story-high doorway into the bright winter sunlight. When the frigid outside air hit the mech, its hull began making creaking and pinging noises as it adjusted to the sudden change in temperature. The effect had made me nervous the first few times I'd heard it, but, after six months of semi-regular patrols, I'd gotten used to it.
I checked the map display on the console in front of me, noting the positions of the Stinger and Wasp, visible as two pulsing white spots on the multi-colored contour map. The coloration on the map wasn't terribly appropriate... the real terrain was the stark white of snow, broken occasionally by outcroppings of grey rock and the greyish-green of the hardy native trees, all under a sky that was a blue so pale as to be nearly white itself. I'd had Griz's guys paint the inside of my cockpit a deep, rich red, just so I'd have something to look at that wasn't white.
A quick perusal of the map gave me a route to our light squad's position. A short jog to the south would allow me to cross the creatively named Cold River (it merged with the Ice River further downstream) at a bridge, avoiding the risk of being slowed down by falling through ice possibly not thick enough this early in the winter to support a 35-ton battlemech. From there, I could cut across some nasty rocky country where my jump jets would come in real handy, which would get me to the mouth of a glacier-carved valley that I could follow most of the rest of the way. It looked like I should be catching up with the kids just west of a road that led to the mine holding that Ed had pointed out.
I headed the Jenner towards the bridge, and then fired up the com. "Hey, Will, Mandy, this is Joe, you hear me?"
"This is Leopard Three," Will replied. "I read you loud and clear, Leopard Two."
I wondered briefly if Will would be so eager to use code names if the lance'd been named after something less cool than the Lothian ice leopard, like the Astrokaszi sand toad or something. "Toad Three" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
"Good. I've just left the base. I'm headed your way as fast as the Jenner can go. Let me know if you see anything."
I was halfway up the glacial valley when the Iroquois caught up with me. It circled once, then hailed me.
"Corporal Murray, this is Private Schorr. The Sergeant wants to know if you think it would be better for us to stick with you, or if we should go on ahead and rendezvous with the others."
I blinked in mild surprise that Sergeant Quibrera would be asking for my opinion, then replied, "Go on ahead. The kids need someone with some sense there more than either of us need the other's protection."
"Roger," the Iroquois pilot replied. "We're off."
The chopper completed its circle and tipped its nose down, accelerating up the valley, picking up speed surprisingly quickly for an aircraft as bulky and unwieldly-looking as it was.
Before the Iroquois had cleared the end of the valley, the com crackled to life with Mandy's voice. "I spotted something! It's a mech! A Locust!"
Even as I opened my mouth to respond, Will exclaimed, "Tank just came around the hill! It's in range!" then, "Dammit! I missed. Hovertank of some kind. Shot an autocannon at me. He missed too."
"Okay, okay, back the hell out of there," I instructed them. "I'm close, Quibrera's close, give us time to get there."
"We're trying," Mandy replied, "we're trying. I don't think we can, they're faster than we are... Look out behind you!" Her warning came simultaneously with Will's, shouting the exact same words. I reflexively checked my own rear quarter before realizing that they were talking to each other.
"Missed him. He blew the crap out of my arm," Will reported. "That turret's full of lasers." He added, after a brief momentary pause, "I've got green lights on all systems, though."
"I'm okay. Couldn't get a bead, but I ducked too fast for him," Mandy reported, talking over Will's last few words.
"I've got you two in sight," the Iroquois pilot reported. "I'm going to try to give you some cover with my machine gun until I can find a safe spot to drop the infantry."
"I think I got..." Mandy's transmission was overlaid with the sound of firing jump jets. "Oof. A back-shot on the tank. Damn, turret goes all the way 'round, doesn't it? Got him, though. Come here, you little hovering bastard, take this!"
"Nice punt, too bad you missed," Will replied.
"Haven't seen you hit anything yet," Mandy shot back. "I'm cutting north, there's some trees and stuff there."
"Good idea, I'm with you," Will agreed.
"I see another one," Schorr announced. "Looks like an APC. It's unloading infantry. I'm looking for a clear zone so the Sergeant can jump. Her crew can handle that lot."
By this point I had reached the end of the valley, where the steep walls to either side deteriorated into clusters of low hills. The mouth of the valley was littered with head-sized boulders. Battlemech-head-sized boulders...
I looped northward, weaving between the hills, towards where my sensors and map screen told me the fight was.
"I found a drop zone, but the APC's harassing me. Someone want to get it off me?" Schorr requested.
"I'm coming," Mandy replied, the roar of firing jump jets washing through the background. "Will, can you handle the Locust?"
"I'm on him," Will stated, to the accompaniment of laser fire. After a moment, he added, "Um, I've got a Wasp incoming, and another APC."
"I've got them," I informed them, as I guided my mech into a gap between two hills and spotted the Wasp—an unfamiliar black and white one, not Will's arctic-camo machine—and the two tanks on the road that lead south to the mine. The APC was a small hover model, painted a green forest camo completely inappropriate for our snowy terrain, and the other tank I recognized as a Condor, like the one Sergeant Underwood, commander of the Regulars' hovertank lance (then stationed on Lummati, I think), commanded.
The Wasp spotted me and darted across the road towards me. I tracked him with my lasers, waiting for a good shot, but just as I was ready to fire, he ducked behind the slope of the hill. I weaved slightly to the right to get cover myself as he came up with his laser leveled in my direction. The Condor came to a stop by the road and began firing lasers and autocannon northward, in the direction the APC was moving.
I moved around the hill towards the Wasp, giving him no choice but to flee or stand and face my guns. He jumped, arcing backwards on flaring jets to land on the slope of another hill to the north. I followed, cutting across the shoulder of the hill. The gulley between the two hills was lightly wooded, and I saw a spot where a low rise, waist-high on a mech, sheltered a small grove of trees. It'd be a perfect sniper spot, if the terrain around it was more open and if the Jenner was any good at all at sniping.
I took cover there anyway. The Condor accelerated again, making a slow turn in my direction and buzzing past the hillock I stood behind, firing its turret weaponry at me as it passed. It all missed, lasers striking the mound in front of me and autocannon shells bursting among the trees around me, but it was enough to convince me that the hovertank was a bigger threat than the Wasp. I pivoted in its direction and fired all of my lasers at once. I'd misjudged the distance between my Jenner and the hill, and both right-arm weapons fired directly into the hillside, flash-boiling two long swathes of snow into steam. One of the left-arm lasers was a clean miss, but the Condor drove straight into the beam of the other, which carved a charred stripe across its nose. I gasped as the temperature in my cockpit jumped, despite the life support system sucking in frigid air from outside, but triggered the SRMs anyway. Four missiles screamed overhead, clearing my cockpit by mere feet, and streaked across the gap between my mech and the hovertank. At least two exploded against the side of the tank, the others struck the ground before it.
A laser slashed the top half off a tree in front of me, drawing my attention back to the Wasp that had fired it. As I turned back that way, I saw a Locust, painted a completely useless desert camo, round the hill the Wasp was perched on.
Just then, the noises of battle coming from the other side of the hill were punctuated with an explosion. "Woohoo! Got one!" Mandy cried. "One shot through the back armor'll do for these little hovers."
"I hit the other with my missiles, but it's still up," Will responded.
"The Sergeant's jumping," the Iroquois pilot put in. "Can you keep the other APC off them?"
"No problem," Mandy replied, confidently.
The Locust trotted towards me with the odd bouncing gait common to the chicken-leg mechs. I looked at him, at the Condor, which had looped around and was coming back for another pass, at the Wasp on the hill, then down at my temperature gauges, and decided that it would be a good idea to clear out until my mech cooled off a little. I wheeled right and burst out of the grove of trees as quickly as I could make the Jenner go. It responded sluggishly at first, overheating systems laboring, but regained its usual agility as its temperature dropped.
As I looped northward around the east side of the hill, the Sergeant's voice came over the com. "We're under fire... I thought someone was going to take care of this damn APC."
"I'm on him," Mandy replied. "They move too fast, it slipped right by me."
Her Stinger moved into sight as she spoke, skirting the edge of a hill in front of me at a quick trot. Will's Wasp left a grove of trees to my right in a burst of flaming jump jets, arcing over the road to land next to Mandy.
Mandy had come to halt in a light wooded area, and leveled her laser at a target I couldn't see behind the hill. She fired, and a fireball lit the back side of the hill.
"Daamn..." Will murmured.
"Told you they blow up nice," Mandy said.
"I've got a group of enemy infantry moving across an open area here," Schorr announced. "I'm moving in to strafe." I heard the chatter of the Iroquois's chin-mounted chain gun over the last sentence.
"We see 'em," Quibrera responded. "There are a few still moving." A moment later, she added, "Make that 'were a few still moving'. These new rifles have some nice range on them."
The bright line of a laser slashed through the air in front of me. I glanced towards its origin and saw the pirate Locust pacing me, a couple dozen meters behind and to my left. The muzzles of the machine guns in its stubby arms lit up, spraying hot lead in my direction. The Jenner rocked slightly, and the damage control displays told me that the Locust's guns had lightly damaged the back side of my mech's right arm. I slowed a little, ducking and turning towards the other mech. I wasn't able to get a clear shot with my right-side weapons, and my mech was still too warm to fire them anyway, but I triggered both of my left-arm lasers as my targeting indicator crossed the smaller mech. One laser missed, but the other punched a hole clean through the Locust's left arm. It twisted around to dangle at an odd angle, the gun still pointed forward, but flopping around strangely.
My mech had cooled back down to near normal levels, and its speed came back up proportionately. I put that speed to good use, pushing the machine to its maximum. The Locust sped up to keep pace with me, angling to get a good shot at me despite its bouncy gait and damaged arm. When I drew alongside the copse of trees Will had recently vacated, I suddenly slammed the Jenner to a near-halt, pivoting towards the woods. The Locust overshot and had to loop back around towards me, which gave me time to make it to the cover of the trees. The Locust's laser fired and missed. I returned the favor with three of my lasers... the mech was still too warm to use them all. Just as I fired, my mech was jolted by something, causing all three shots to go astray. I turned my mech to see what had hit me, and the top half of a largish tree, the trunk still smoldering where the Locust's laser had charred it, finished its trip to the ground in a rush of leaves and a cloud of powdery snow.
"Corporal, we need some help here," Will said.
Something in his tone immediately grabbed my attention. "What's the problem?" I asked.
"We've got two more mechs coming. Big ones."
I pictured Warhammers and was considering panic when Mandy added, "It's a Hermes, and a, uh..."
"Firestarter," Sergeant Quibrera put in, flatly.
I was a little relieved, but not very. Neither of those mechs were what could be classified as major threats—though, from the Sergeant's tone, the Firestarter was probably the last mech she wanted to see... an attitude which made quite a bit of sense, considering its antipersonnel-heavy weapons load. They both outclassed our 20-tonners, but I'd take either of them on one-on-one in my Jenner with a reasonable expectation of winning.
Only problem was, it wasn't one-on-one, it was four-on-three, five if you counted the Condor.