Prologue

March 18th, 3025

Continent of Gimli

Suk II

Emily looked at the multitude of blips on her own personal HUD's sensors as they started to slip into range. Several friendly blips were also up there as well, slightly closer. From her Shadow Hawk's "hit pit," as the company had taken to calling them, she could see Clothesline's lance dancing with them.

It seemed to be about a lance of various tanks, along with a lance of light and medium 'mechs. The big guns in the RoughRider garrison haven't had a chance to make their way to Emily's playground yet, as any time they started to mobilize away from the water treatment plants, one of the other groups in the Draconis-hired guerilla forces would maneuver towards a plant, forcing the RoughRiders to fall back and protect them.

This left the smaller, lighter forces around the area more open to probing attacks and, as her own company was attempting to do right now, bait-and-capture type engagements. Given the RoughRider garrison was occupied mainly on the threatened plants, it allowed one or two raiding parties to make a move on the more valuable mining operations throughout the planet. At least until the other RoughRiders battalion and whatever other Lyran reinforcements were likely on their way.

Aerospace sweeps came up negative for the most part, as the type of jungle on Suk II they were patrolling was almost entirely unexplored and heavily canopied. The sweltering heat and abundance of reptilian life, some quite large and toothy, made various forms of thermal scanning not worth the trouble. Most of the defending air assets were engaged in more open, more familiar terrain to the north and east, far far away from Emily's company.

The jungle made for some fairly obvious-looking trailblazing, which the RoughRiders had begun to reference to find the source of it—Emily's coveted bivouac sites. So far, they haven't made any major headway. The "gruesome foursome," as some of the company had begun to nickname Emily and her friends, had laid out too many ambushes in the last few days.

"Are they finding God yet?" Emily asked over the command frequency. She waited patiently in her hole alongside the other three lances nearby, all hoping the fruits of their several-days-of-digging would pay off slightly better than the last ambush attempt. All she could see outside her cockpit right now were a few pinholes of heaven that made their way through the piles of broad, deeply-green leaves that typically covered the jungle floor.

"Not yet," came Clothesline's slightly-annoyed voice, busy multitasking the daily-do's of juking his 'mech through thick, caking mud while being shot at, and having to answer to his boss and friend.

"Hijo de puta!" Came the curse from Salvador Torres, Clothesline's Jenner-D pilot. "Can we go now, boss?"

"No, not yet," Clothesline responded to his lancemate. "Once we take a big hit we'll peel off. Dance for now. Make them want it—hoo! That was kinda close."

"I just got PPC'd in the damn shoulder, does that count?" Etrit Hinojosa, with the recent callsign "Ifrit" due to his temper, macho attitude, and the way it just plain sounded good with his first name, was Clothesline's Valkyrie-QF pilot. The last remaining Valk in the company, which probably didn't help his attitude towards survival.

"Affirm. Get back and let us cover you."

"Si!" the friendly blip began closing the distance with Emily's team. The other friendly blips began shaving distance off her sensors, but not much.

"Frogging!" Torres over the comms again, apparently becoming the new center of attention for now.

"Man, I can't to a damn thing this far from them." Lewis Mcintosh, who hadn't been assigned a callsign yet, felt the need to chime in frustration. Mainly because he just had extremely close-in weapons in his Falcon-4N and was obviously feeling a little impotent while his lancemates did most of the shooting at medium-range.

"Start peeling back a little fa—Otscout jumping next to me, light him up!" One of the RoughRider 'mechs, which also included a Griffin, Wasp, and Locust, along with some light and heavy tanks such as a Maxim hover, were mostly keeping together. The Ottie must have gotten a little too big for the pants his 'mech wore, being almost the weight of a medium, and quite mobile, but only had a single medium laser. Now he just surrounded himself.

But it allowed a quick shot on the rear of their Jenner, who had just landed from his own jump and was hardly moving. Which didn't even have enough armor back there to protect against that. It burned through, scoring a piece of the crunchy center of the engine nestled there. Meanwhile, fire from the front, including a few long-range missiles got him in the front, sending him sprawling forward into the dirt. Luckily the momentum didn't send his forward-facing cockpit straight into the ground to be crushed by its own body behind it.

With that, the Otscout immediately jumped away back across the river.

"Ahhhhuuuuuh." A brief pause. Heavy breathing. "Gyro gone. I'm fucked. Just go." Torres sounded like he had made peace with a lot of things then and there.

They're not as close as I wanted, but we don't have a lot of choice at this point. These guys are too good to play around with. Emily hit the controls necessary to bring her 'mech from a low-power state to full and braced for the first jump of the day. "That's all we're gonna get today! Everyone out of the pool! Now!" What felt like the longest second of her life finally passed as her Hawk moaned to life around her.

"Go go go!" She stomped on the pedals and looked up, as a few extra G's pushed the blood out of her face, and the Hawk came crashing through the carefully-laid work of art above her own pit.

The trap was sprung.