Fighting Uphill

Chapter 1 – Welcome to the Inner Sphere

12 February 3006

Chesterton V

Capellan Confederation

The bolt of superheated plasma streaked past Natasha's cockpit, seemingly bare meters from her face. Natasha imagined that she could feel the the plasma's heat baking her face, but no, that was only her imagination. Her cockpit glass was intact and properly insulating her from external heat, and sufficient time had passed since Natasha had last fired her Marauder's weapons that it was cool as could be expected while its fusion engine was running.

With a curse, Natasha twisted her Marauder's torso and fired her lasers and autocannon down the street at the elusive little surat that had shot at her. The range was long, and she glimpsed a blur disappearing around a corner building before her fingers had even finished pulling the triggers. As a result, the lasers and autocannon shells wasted themselves on far corner building.

Natasha's MAD-3R Marauder with its twin PPCs and medium light autocannon was armed mostly for long ranged fighting. That meant city fighting was not its strength, but Natasha wasn't the one who had decided that it was a good idea to place a lance of Arrow IV artillery units in an urban area full of buildings just tall enough to hide mechs behind them. Natasha and her lance had been detailed by their battalion commander to put a stop to the annoying artillery bombardment as the rest of their battalion fought a battalion of Marion's Highlanders.

Natasha had sent the rest of her lance ahead to take care of the artillery while she personally took care of the one remaining guard mech of their escort lance. After all, a mech in their rear could turn a victory into a defeat if it could get shots at Natasha's lance's rear armor unopposed. Hence, Natasha had chosen to play rear guard, trusting in her supreme gunnery and mech handling skills to net her an easy kill.

The kill was turning out to be less than easy though. Not only did the terrain not favor her, Natasha's opponent was equipped with ECM and some kind of active camouflage system that the Capellans seem to have on half their mechs. As a result, Natasha wasn't even sure what her opponent was piloting, having only glimpsed them a few times, and seeing only a transparent visual distortion each time.

Natasha pushed her Marauder into a run towards the intersection where the plasma shot had come from. As she reached the corner, she twisted her Marauder's torso again so that she would be already be aiming right down the next street as soon as she rounded the corner.

Another plasma bolt shot at Natasha as she stepped into the corner, striking her Marauder's left torso and burning through the already weakened armor. Alarms flashed, screaming at Natasha about the damage to the Marauder's internal structure, but Natasha ignored it. The autocannon's ammo bin stored in that section hadn't been hit and exploded and that was all that mattered at the moment.

At the same time Natasha's Marauder was being hit, Natasha had spotted where the shot had come from. Laying her crosshairs on the origin point, Natasha triggered both of her PPCs and the autocannon, firing one after the other in rapid sequence. Unfortunately her targeting system could not actually see the enemy mech and as a result did not properly converge the aim point of her weapons. Two shots pulverized a building short of the target. The third blew out the face of the building beyond her target. And infuriatingly, Natasha's target vanished behind yet another corner.

Heated air flooded into Natasha's cockpit as her mech barely avoided automatic shutdown from overheating. Natasha's heat meter had gone well into the red and stopped climbing only just shy of the automatic shutdown mark. If Natasha had fired her weapons simultaneously instead of sequentially in order to give the Marauder's heat sinks at least a little time to deal with the heat build up, she was sure she would have pushed the heat high enough to trigger the shut down. Not only did the Marauder have to deal with the heat from its own weapons, that plasma weapon had dumped a great deal of additional heat into Natasha's mech as well.

Plasma weapons were just one of the many surprises the Wolf's Dragoons had discovered when they had arrived in the Inner Sphere. They had expected weapons technology to advance since their ancestors had left the Inner Sphere, and they had been right. But they had expected Inner Sphere weapons to advance along the same lines as the Clans had done. Instead, the Inner Sphere had shot off on a different path, using some Star League technology, but also inventing a good many others that the Star League and Clans had never had while putting new spins on the older technology.

Natasha didn't know why this was, but she was sure it had a great deal to do with the fact that the Inner Sphere fought in ways completely different from the Clans. Like this little near-invisible surat that Natasha was hunting.

Natasha strolled her mech forward at a languid pace, getting out of the intersection while letting her mech vent all the built up heat and letting herself think. Letting her enemy lead her by the nose was a losing proposition, especially now that she had breached armor. Natasha should call the rest of her lance back, but that artillery lance really needed to be taken care of as soon as possible. And in any case, it would be extremely embarrassing if Natasha could not beat an Inner Sphere mechwarrior one on one, superior technology or not.

A red blip appeared on Natasha's tactical map display. Like Natasha, someone else on the other side of the city block was dumping a lot of heat into the atmosphere. Of course, Natasha realized, energy weapons generate a lot of heat, and this plasma weapon would be no different. That invisibility system had to prevent the release of waste heat too fast in order to prevent an enemy targeting systems from locking on to the source of the heat plume.

Natasha's enemy must think they were safe to get rid of their built up heat because they would be done before Natasha's Marauder could run around the block and bring her weapons to bear on them. But that only applied if Natasha ran around the block instead of say... through it.

The block was a long rectangle. And there was this convenient alley wide enough for Natasha's Marauder to pass through. Well, it was wide enough if Natasha did not mind scraping the sides of the buildings flanking the alley. Which she did not. After all, Natasha was not the one who had decided city fighting was a good idea after all.

Natasha's Marauder burst onto the next street with an exploding shower of masonry. Natasha's target still had its active camouflage on despite venting heat, but the range was short this time and Natasha didn't even wait for targeting system to decide if it could see the other mech or not. After all, she was Natasha Kerensky of Clan Wolf, the best warrior the Clans had ever produced. At this short range, Natasha aimed her weapons manually at her enemy's light distorting silhouette that she could clearly see.

Natasha fired her left arm PPC and laser first. Both struck, causing explosions of vaporized and molten metal. The damage caused her target's active camouflage to finally fail, giving Natasha her first clear look at her enemy.

An Urbanmech? Natasha thought in disbelief as her right arm's weapons came to bear. She had been fighting an Urbanmech this entire time?

Natasha's surprise had been complete. Her first strike had nailed the Urbanmech in the back, blowing through its rear armor and savaging its internals. The follow up blasts also struck it in the back before the Urbanmech could finish turning to face Natasha, causing a secondary heat spike as the engine was struck. The Urbanmech's pilot ejected as their mech slumped to the street.

It was a shame the Inner Sphere had no bondsman tradition, Natasha thought as the pilot's parachute deployed. This mechwarrior had given a Natasha a good fight despite using a mech that massed less than half her own. Natasha would have liked to keep him for the Dragoons.

"Black Widow to Lance," Natasha transmitted over her Lance channel as she turned her mech away. "I have taken care of my playmate. What is your status?"

"We have engaged the Liao artillery lance," came back the reply. "You will not believe this; they are all Urbanmechs!"