CHAPTER 4

Review Corner:

The Colonel: Agreed. It is in their statement of work, but still, it's wrong.

Ulquiorra9000: I like tanks and VTOLs. They are weak compared to mechs but they are cheap, and that's their strong point.


Ashio, Ashio Prefecture,
Dieron Military District,
Draconis Combine,
January 13, 3074

The convoy was still 5 kilometers removed from the dustoff site, but the flat plain held nothing from six Overlord dropships as they touched down in a cloud of dust, pebbles, and dead plants. Eight legs, each as thick as an Atlas, sprawled out to stabilize the dropships. Bay doors rumbled open and ramps rolled out like reptile tongues inviting insects to land and go into their bellies. It was a sight of relief, knowing that the umbrella of protection from six Overlords would turn the mercenaries back to where they came from.

Unfortunately, the mercenaries knew it too.

"This is Oscar Blue Seven," the dropships called. "Be advised, you have hostiles coming your way. Six heavy and assault battlemechs cutting you off from dustoff. One of them is carrying a Thumper Cannon. They want blood."

"Oscar Blue Seven, this is Hawk Alpha. We need fusillade," Tsagoi picked up the signal.

"Negative Hawk Alpha, you are out of range. Make it to Sector 44-1, fusillade is ready at your disposal."

"Acknowledge," Tsagoi's Pillager jogged away from the convoy. "Delta-Six Red, make your best speed to dustoff! Hawk Lance, move out and draw fire! You too, Heishi Noloty!"

"Yes Sir," Noloty moved her mech to the flat plain, presenting herself as the bigger – and more imminent – threat for the mercenaries. With her heavy-hitting weapons out of commission, she knew she was pushing her luck against heavy and assault battlemechs. But she shouldn't have gone this far with a battlemech that was otherwise a bane to many mechwarriors before her. Her time was overdue, and so was the Sagittaire's. If she didn't survive this fight, at least she died defending something she believed in.

Soon half a dozen heat signatures appeared on her screen. She spotted a Highlander, a Wakazashi, a Longbow, a Catapult, a Rifleman, and a mech she had never seen before. It sported a short, stout Thumper Cannon on its back, supported by 2 ballistic cannons on each arm and 2 medium lasers on each shoulder. The Sagittaire's computer failed to identify that mech. The closest it could come to was a Night Star, which had similar profile but completely different loadout.

"What… the… hell… is that?" Noloty mumbled, vainly scrolling through the database of mechs.

Unable to identify the artillery mech, Noloty set her Sagittaire in a collision course with it in an attempt to stop it from using its artillery cannon on the convoy. The artillery mech didn't flinch, but Noloty's general chat channel blinked.

"Step aside, Boy," the speaker came alive with a gruff voice. "My fight is not with you."

Instead Noloty fired her PPC, as close to the cockpit as possible. It felt so raw, so uncouth, so un-Bushido, to strike an unsuspecting opponent. But this was not the time for chivalry. Her only concern was the thousands of civilians behind her, defenseless against the mech's artillery cannon. The mercenaries had been hitting civilians, so they did not deserve honor.

The artillery mech buckled, then rose to bring its guns to bear.


In his many years of mercenary career, this was the first time Dultom got bitch-slapped for sparing a life. His Bull Shark could – and had – cripple an assault battlemech in one well-placed alpha strike. That Sagittaire was no different. One shot to the thin crevasse between its wide body and its gatling-laden pseudo-arm would have separated the shoulder from its chest, and the Sagittaire would've toppled to the opposite side. But killing a small fish didn't amuse him. He wanted to kill the big fish and let the little fish go. And for that, he almost lost his head.

The nerve of the Sagittaire mechwarrior.

"You're asking for it, you little shit!" Dultom loaded his Thumper Cannon with a scattershot round. The stubby cannon roared, lobbing the shell in a rainbow trajectory. The shell casing split midair, giving way to multitudinous high-explosive submunitions that poured on the Sagittaire. But before the first submunition hit the mark, the Sagittaire jetted its way out, clearing the blast radius with a maneuver common to light and medium mechs.

Intrigued, Dultom pumped his UAC5 shells. The depleted-uranium rounds pierced the Sagittaire's armor and carved new gorges next to those which were already there from its previous fight. He pressed the attack with his LB10X shotgun. The Sagittaire wobbled. Its left torso bled fire. Smoke billowed from a bad gash. A sadistic smile sprung on his lips as he fired the other LB10X cannon. But the Sagittaire recovered quicker than anticipated, and turned hard left to blunt the scattershot munitions with its right arm. Dultom powered his mech to get into range, then fired his medium laser quartet, aimed at the Sagittaire's damaged left torso. But the Sagittaire blasted its jets and glided backward, dodging Dultom's perfectly-aimed laser beams by a mere centimeter.

Who are you? Dultom winced. That maneuver was not revolutionary. He had seen it, and he knew how to beat it. He just didn't expect it from an assault Kuritan battlemech. His UAC5 trackers turned green, and he let them rip. The Sagittaire sidestepped the attack, but Dultom anticipated the maneuver. He fired his Thumper Cannon a little to the right, painting it with submunitions, catching the Sagittaire off guard. But just like before, the Sagittaire took to the sky, and slammed home another particle shot straight at the Bull Shark's midsection.

Dultom gritted his teeth. His heat gauge shot up halfway to shut down temperature, and his radar screen went haywire. The Sagittaire put up a fight he never thought it was capable of. There was no hunting now; the Sagittaire was his target. He put his Bull Shark in a high-speed circular motion then trained all his weapons at the Sagittaire. He cycled through his ballistic weapons, putting pressure on the Sagittaire while keeping the heat under control.


With the battlemechs holding the Marauders at bay, the convoy managed to reach the dustoff site.

"This is Delta-Six Red, we're not taking any vehicles!" Oblivia yelled on the speaker. "Dismount and board the dropships on foot!"

The vehicles stopped around and in between the dropships. Civilians and armed troops jumped out of the vehicles and sprinted up the ramps. Some jerks just had to make things more complicated than it should be, and forced their vehicles up the ramps, creating a massive confusion on the narrow paths. Yelling and shoving led to shot firing, but Oblivia's crews quickly restored order before traffic broke into anarchy.

"Hawk Lance, this is Delta-Six Red, we got them in. Dustoff commence in 2 minutes!"

"Acknowledge, Delta," Tsagoi replied. "Hawk Lance, disengage and go to the dustoff site! Dropship command, we need cover fire!"

"Roger that, Hawk Alpha, bring them within our weapon range and they will suffer Overlords!"

"Sir, we are in the cusp of crushing the mercenary's backbone!" Gregoro came in griping. "Five minutes and we'll leave the Markham's Marauders leaderless!"

"You stay for five minutes and you'll stay here for months!" Tsagoi snarled. "Disengage and go to the dropship!"

"Yes Sir!" Gregoro replied with dissent in his voice.


Noloty had been locked in a circle of death but no one did it better than this artillery mech. Its execution left her little room to counterattack. She tried to engage the same maneuver but the ballistics threw her targeting system off the grid. Armor shards flew in every direction with each blast. She realigned her crosshair but a stream of UAC5 rounds exploded in her right torso, pushing the snout of the Sagittaire a few degree to the left. The ring of the blasts echoed in her ears, drawn only by the annoying damage report.

Attempting to break the lock Noloty cycled through her lasers. Two strands jabbed the artillery mech's left torso, turning armor plating into sizzling goop. Noloty aligned her crosshair with the glowing blotch but the artillery mech outshot her. The Thumper Cannon barked, firing an armor-piercing round in an almost-straight-line trajectory. It hammered the Sagittaire's right torso. Noloty yelped as the impact sent her head crashing onto the console. Her neurohelmet visor cracked, and her ribs throbbed. She reared the joystick, twisting it left to face the artillery mech, only to see four muzzle flashes. The next few seconds were hovering between fantasy and reality. She felt like she was falling into a dark pit with no ending in sight.

Somehow she managed to summon more energy than she knew remained. She cleared her vision, and her heart sank when she was looking at the black sky through the windshield. The Sagittaire was lying on its back. Groaning, she manipulated the joystick to pull her mech up, but the 95-ton war machine slumped on its back every time. Rivulets of sweat ran down her cheek as she assessed the damage report for something she already knew yet too afraid to acknowledge. The Sagittaire's gyro was shot to bits.

"Get up!" Noloty strained, pulling her joystick as hard as she could. "Get up, Hamlet! Get up get up get up!" She used the UAC10 to prop the Sagittaire up, but even then she couldn't stabilize her mech enough to get a clear shot at the incoming artillery mech. Running out of options, she fired her jets, taking the Sagittaire sprawling in the air some 50 meters before tumbling in teeth-rattling crash. Her vision tunneled into a black spot as the crash squeezed the air out of her lung.

Catching her breath, Noloty weighed her options. There were no vehicles or chemical containers to create smokescreen like those at Lyran planet. She was completely exposed on a plain meadow. But the dropships were within a click away, and she knew the firepower of an Overlord. She didn't know if her Sagittaire still had the juice – and the luck – to carry her within the gun range of the Overlords, but it was her only option.

The ballistic rain dropped on the Sagittaire, rubbing salt to injuries. Noloty tilted her mech as far as the joints allowed and fired everything she got. None of her shots connected, but her lasers were close enough to force the artillery mech to flinch. She used the precious seconds to catapult her mech backward, flying half a hundred meters and crashed again. Whatever was left on her mech, she used it to bring the artillery mech closer to the Overlords, hoping that it was too preoccupied to realize it had gone within the dropship's firing range.


At this point of the fight, most mechwarriors would've punched out or surrender. It was anticlimactic, that despite the promising start, the Sagittaire had nothing left to offer after just a few shots. The fact that it was still kicking, jumping, and firing its weapons in futility made Dultom cross. He had seen a few of this kind of mechwarrior, and they were either really brave or really stupid. Most of the time really stupid. Brave and stupid are separated by a thin line anyway.

Dultom charged the downed Sagittaire with all intentions to end the fight. He waited until it propelled itself backward, like squids swimming away from predators. As soon as it crashed, he unleashed a hailstorm of ballistics, reducing the Sagittaire into a smoking, smoldering heap of metal. It was still kicking, trying to escape, but the myomer bundles had been shredded by his last volley, the FedSun-made mech could only writhe on the ground. Dultom wondered if he should just leave it like that. But the mech put up a valiant yet vain fight, and it deserved a proper mech death.

Then suddenly his proximity alert screamed, followed by a cloud of missiles sweeping across the field. Dultom could only hang on to his seat as the missile storm flayed the Bull Shark, stripping it from whatever armor plating remained after the fight with the Sagittaire. His damage report screen went livid, screaming at him with fervor that his mech lost 90-percent of protection, and a hit at any part of its body would result in critical damage. No mechs had that many missiles, and Dultom realized that he had gone too close to the dropship row.

That was the reason the Sagittaire kept jumping. It was trying to lure the Bull Shark into the Overlords' shooting range. And Dultom walked right into the trap. It made him mad, that a seemingly inexperienced mechwarrior in a dying mech managed to trick him. His fingers rubbed his alpha strike button, ready to send the Sagittaire into oblivion, but he knew he betted too much on that shot. He knew only had one stunt to pull: to shoot, or to run for his life. As much as he wanted to punish the Sagittaire, he settled for his life.

"Well played, Soldier," Dultom sent his message on general frequency, unsure if the Sagittaire mechwarrior received it. "I look forward to our next fight, without the encumbrance of dropships."


Inside his mangled cockpit, Noloty let out a dry chuckle. "Eat that, sonofabitch!" she watched amusedly as the artillery mech turned around and left the vicinity.

As it disappeared from radar, the Pillager and the gold-trimmed Banshee arrived. They hooked their arms under the Sagittaire's 'armpit' then heaved it up, forcing it to stand on its legs.

"What the hell were you thinking, taking on Dultom Markham by yourself?" Tsagoi groused.

"I don't know who that is, Sir. My computer failed to ID the mech."

"We need to upgrade your database. We'll do it on the way out. But you should've told me what you were doing. I should've taken those shots, not you."

"That's alright, Sir, I'm just glad to fight for DCMS," Noloty let out a breath of relief. "The civilians, Sir?"

"Save and sound. Let's get out of here."

The Pillager and the Banshee dragged the Sagittaire up the ramp into one of the Overlords. They were the last mechs getting into the dropship before the Overlords took to the sky.