Chapter Nine
Montana Mining Corporation Factory Ship Convoy
Somewhere in the Asteroid Belt
"Harpy! Watch your six!"
Harpy Lady fired her maneuvering thrusters, pivoting in one of the tight turns she was famous for, and blasted an Orichalcos Soldier full in its monstrous face. She fired again, taking off half of the enemy mech's head, then arched her back to flip around into her guardian position along the right phalanx of the vehicles she and the Red-Eyes were shepherding to safety.
"Thanks for the heads-up, Red," she called over the pilot comm. "But call me 'harpy' again, and I'll claw out your optics."
"Love you, too, Harpy Lady."
She snorted, but before she could form a proper retort, a fresh volley of weapons fire demanded her full attention. She swung her gun around, gathered an enemy in her sights, and scored another direct hit, this time on the barrel chest of one of the hulking gray aliens.
"Damned ugly things," she muttered, checking the status of her firearm. The ammunition was low, the graph on her VR display starting to blink into the red. When it went solid, she uttered a low curse, holstered her gun, and summoned her rose-whip from its sheath in her forearm. Thus armed, she turned back to the convoy just in time to spot an Orichalcos Soldier taking aim at her partner. "Red-Eyes! Duck!"
The dragon mech obeyed instantly. Harpy Lady snapped her whip toward the attacking mech, wrapping the end of the whip around its neck and triggering the "thorns," durasteel barbs, which sank into the enemy's neck to hold the whip in place. A massive jolt of electricity shot from the whip into the enemy mech. The mech, almost as tall as the dragon but not as bulky and modeled on an oversized humanoid form, froze as the energy burst overloaded its systems. A final snap of the whip was enough to rip the mech's ugly head clean off its massive body. Leaving her victim resting in pieces, Harpy Lady jetted back toward the column of ships she and the others were protecting.
The remainder of the battle was a furious blur of machines of all colors and sizes, (from the towering Duel Mecha to the relatively diminutive Rescue-and-Retrieval mecha, and the Valkyrie flight in-between), gun-fire, and, when one of the Orichalcos Soldiers got in a lucky shot at the trailing ship in the convoy, a school of old-fashioned escape pods.
This far from a planetary body, the pods were sitting ducks, easy targets for the Orichalcos Soldiers to pick off at leisure. The SSDF mecha quickly intervened, racing to put themselves between the enemy and the escape pods. Rescue mecha, identifiable by their bright red armor and the white crosses prominently displayed on their torsos, began attempting to corral the pods into nets that were hastily deployed for the purpose. When an R-mech's net was full, with two or three pods nestled within, it dashed away from the battlefield to the Maxiframes waiting to retrieve them. There the net was quickly clipped onto the Maxiframe, a transport ship which bore more than a passing resemblance to a skeletonized dragonfly, leaving the R-mech free to hasten back to the battle for another cargo of escape pods.
Just when it was looking as if they had victory in their grasp, with most of the enemy mecha either destroyed or fleeing the battlefield, an Orichalcos Soldier slipped through their defenses and headed straight for the nearest Maxiframe. Over the open comm channel, Harpy Lady heard the Red-Eyes swear as he blasted after the ugly gray machine already opening fire on the hapless escape pods hanging from the exposed framework of the transport vessel.
"Oh, no, you don't!" Red-Eyes shouted, firing at the Orichalcos Soldier. He managed to get its attention, but this one seemed somehow tougher than its compatriots; it seemed to shrug off the attack, barely taking a moment to shoot at him before going back to its primary target -- the escape pods hanging from the metal "spine" of the Maxiframe. It had traded its usual projectile gun for a strange-looking weapon that shot an acid-green energy beam at the rescue ship.
Red-Eyes fired again -- and kept firing, holding down the trigger until the gun overheated and jammed. Cursing wildly, he drew back the massive gun and used it like a club, smashing it into the back of the Orichalcos Soldier's blocky, helmet-shaped head. The gun shattered. Undeterred, Red-Eyes grabbed the enemy mech by its shoulders and fired his own maneuvering jets at full thrust, powering the other mech away from the Maxiframe. The green energy beam cut off as the Orichalcos Soldier was finally forced to deal head-on with its determined opponent.
The two of them grappled, neither able to use their weapons at such close range. The Orichalcos Soldier's blank optics were glowing the same eerie, acid-green color as its energy weapon, but Red-Eyes barely had time to notice before he was thrust back from the other mech. With a roar, he transformed to full dragon-mode…
…Just as the Orichalcos Soldier fired its weapon point-blank into Red-Eyes' face. The sickly green beam enveloped him, washing out his screens in an instant. His instrumentation was going haywire, but Red-Eyes didn't notice, as the green fire of the Orichalcos Soldier's weapon penetrated the dragon's cockpit, plunged into -- and through -- the pilot's body… and vanished.
In space, the Orichalcos Soldier didn't even have time to register Harpy Lady's arrival before she snared it with her rose-whip. She hauled the monster away from Red-Eyes, then flung it straight into the sights of a hovering Valkyrie. The Valkyrie opened fire a split-second later with both of its guns. Combined with the damage the Red-Eyes had already inflicted, it was enough. The Orichalcos Soldier exploded with a satisfying violence.
Harpy Lady nodded her thanks to the Valkyrie, then turned back to the black dragon, which hadn't moved since the green energy beam had struck him. "Red-Eyes? Can you hear me?"
There was no response from the dragon's pilot.
"Red-Eyes Black Dragon! Do you copy?"
Still nothing.
"Joey?" She waited, her heart contracting with a sudden terror when the comm remained silent. "… Joey!"