Chapter 5
March 18, 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 hopeless. 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.
As long as the water treatment plants spread across Gimli and other continents of the planet were threatened, they had to be protected, or over a half of the planet's one billion people didn't have drinkable water. A native form of algae made fifty-nine percent of the water fresh water undrinkable, even against boiling as it withstood temperatures of over one hundred twenty degrees Celsius.
It had to be treated artificially, though there were unconfirmed rumors of a few months of a reserve stashed somewhere circulated throughout the planet's people. It was a hot, sweaty planet for the most part, and a big population boom several decades ago still hadn't quite caught up. Periodic Combine raids like this one made it hard to keep all the existing plants up and running on a regular basis.
"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, feeling the need to chime in frustration, primarily 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 stamped 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. Several large leaves and vines came with her, across her shoulders and, until the top of her arc sent her back to the planet, a large leaf had completely covered her viewscreen, taking away some of the thrill of suddenly bursting out into the daylight.
As the Archon-sized blanket lost its grip and flew away, the view below her was gorgeous. Her brain seemed to make this second of her life last even longer than the last one. Endless rolling green of the various sizes of canopy trees created its own form of hills from this height. It seemed to go on forever, finally running into the sharply jutting Mt. Gimli on the eastern horizon. The trees a few hundred meters in front of her seemed to quake as various forms of human destruction made them shiver and shake. Then the moment passed, and she tasted her breakfast again in the back of her throat as the Hawk made its descent. A random autocannon tracer ricocheted off a tree and went sailing on a lonely and brief journey to claim its title as "highest human made thing in this area for the day."
As she hit the ground, she saw many of her company had already landed and broken into a run. The three Fire Javelins began to take up real estate on her HUD to her left, all part of Chrome's lance. They'd been waiting to make an entrance like this for this for months and hopefully they didn't trip over themselves to get there.
A Firebee-2E crept ahead from her left, zigzagging around smaller trees and doing some impressive parkour over the large roots of the forest floor for a 'mech that wasn't known for having the best "leg strength" in the business.
"I'm climbing out. No ejecting for me. Have fun guys!" Torres' increasingly happy voice over the line as the distance between reinforcements and the two lances that took him down shrank rapidly. His breathing was heavy, and his ribs were likely bruised or even broken from the landing. Emily caught the trace sound of clips coming undone and a small thud of boots hitting parts of the cockpit not built for boots. "Oh. They're starting to run. Dibs on the Griffin if we get it." And the line cut out.
"Finally!" McIntosh sounded like he had a child or something with the excitement in his voice. "Got a hit on the Locust."
"No more falling back. They didn't cross the river. Overtake 'em. Don't let 'em run!" Clothesline was angry that his lancemate was down and they probably weren't going to capture them all since there was almost nothing slowing them down except the river, which they never crossed.
"C'mon mud, do your stuff," said Emily through her teeth, shifting her weight as her Hawk tried to buck her out of her command couch at a full run. The sun poked itself through her viewscreen a few times every second, like an ancient LosTech pulse laser that was just reaching a little too far. She was silently grateful they used a stolen Pegasus from the last fight to blow-dry the ground they were currently running on to ensure they wouldn't get stuck themselves.
"I gotta go, almost lost half my 'mech to that PPC again. These guys can shoot!" Ifrit over comms again.
"McIntosh chasing!"
The blips finally started to turn into actual silhouettes on Emily's HUD as she began to clear the final trees between them. A wide, but shallow river ran across, all the local aquatic life having vacated the area. She went for another taste at her morning meal and stamped the pedals again, hoping there was enough of a running start to get her across in one jump.
The RoughRider vehicles, surprisingly mostly tracked instead of hovers this time, were still near the river, providing cover to the 'mechs who were scattered across the entire length of Emily's viewscreen as she rose and fell onto the far edge of the river, not quite clearing it. Her 'mech's heat dipped slightly at the nice cool bath around her feet but began to get a lot of attention from the RoughRiders as her front arms and chest became riddled with various forms of projectiles and missiles for a moment.
To her left, she spotted the enemy Griffin currently standing still, firing frantically with its PPC. Stuck in the mud? Pleeeease be stuck in the mud please please please she chanted to herself while taking a swing at a nearby Locust and missing. The taunting fire from its machine guns was one of the most embarrassing things a 'mech pilot could ever experience. Ha ha, can't catch me the bird-legged twenty-tonner pilot was no doubt saying.
However, crossfire has a way of taking care of that lateral motion problem. Several from her company, including her two Firebee-2E's in Mother Hen's lance saw the one who signs all the paychecks get attacked, and opened from different directions on the dancing Locust. A combined total of ten SRM's raced after it, as well as two large lasers.
One laser briefly caught the right leg mid-stride, and one of the missiles happened to land near it, blowing the rear-angled knee apart and sending the Locust into a forward flip, landing upside-down on the riverside, somersaulting with its one good leg until it alsoslammed forward into the silt, getting trapped there.
The pilot, likely dazed, got a nice view of a morning sky while the fight continued around them.
Everyone was practically in the river or across it already from Emily's company, and the tanks looked to be overtaken already. The Locust closest to her, one of two—two? "Count five 'mechs now. Don't chase them too far, there might be more coming," chimed in Clothesline almost reading her mind at the same time. He sounded a lot more nervous than a few seconds ago, suddenly worried more about self-preservation than a big score.
"Mother Hen here. LURMS away on the Wasp. He's stuck next to the Griffin." A distant roar, and within seconds the Wasp pilot ejected before the missiles even hit.The escape pod became the second-highest soaring man-made object of the day. The missiles shoved the Wasp over like a tidal wave of small explosions and kinetic power. Without a pilot and computer in synch to provide commands to keep it stable, it was pushed over on its back, with one leg forced free by the momentum, the other remaining stuck in place. What was left of the left arm broke off next to it on impact. More than half of the missiles went over it, etching various forms of Hen was here into the local vegetation.
Emily switched to her lance frequency while her 'mech picked up speed again and splashed its way out of the shallow water. "Vi, get that pod! I want prisoners!"
"Roger," came the Spider pilot, who broke off ahead of her to go chase the parachute's trajectory.
To Emily's right, the Fire Javelin brothers were taking turns kicking a tracked Vedette tank until the top hatch popped open with hands sticking straight up.
Straight ahead, she saw the other Locust, the Otscout that made the hail mary jump to gut her Jenner, and the only hover tank going at a mad sprint to the east, trying to cover its comrades. She sent a shot from her AC5 at the Locust, hoping for a lucky leg hit, but only blew the tiny paddle of a machine gun arm off its left side. The pilot didn't break stride and kept going out of her range.
She thumped her armrest. These guys know how to drive. If this were an even fight we'd probably all be dead by now.
She switched back to the main company channel. "That's enough for now. Finish up here and get that Griffin and its pilot intact, and let's get the hovers we took in here for dragging salvage. She twisted her torso left to see over five of her own 'mechs surrounding the Griffin, its pilot taking a page from the Wasp's book and was beginning to climb out of his cockpit hatch.
Behind her, a voice from quite far away, barely enough to be picked up from her rear microphones came in.
"I called dibs, Dirk!" Torres showed up on his rear camera from the ground, cupping his hands over his mouth to make sure his "request" at a twenty-ton upgrade to his dead 'mech was heard. He had to be over a hundred meters away and yet was still audible.
She twisted her Hawk towards him, opening up her external speakers. "We'll talk about it later…Bullhorn. Yeah, I like that. Bullhorn. Go get yourself checked out with the doc for now." The tiny picture of a barrel-chested man on her HUD camera put his hands on his hips in thought, shrugged, and turned back towards the bivouac.
Half a wasp if we can find a cockpit for it, some prisoners, some tank and Locust parts, and an almost fully-intact Griffin, for a Jenner, and some armor. I can live with that, if it saved Bullhorn's life too. We're gonna need to find some more medium-sized parts at this rate. She nodded to herself, the neurohelmet bobbing up and down her face due to being a quarter-size too big after the padding inside had conformed. They're coming bigger each time, though. And they seem to know when we're going to frog it. And that Otscout pilot was a God. Thank you, rain, for all that mud upstream.
Then she realized the Griffin wouldn't be combat ready for their fighting style until the ruined jump jets near its feet were cleaned out and repaired. She grimaced at the thought.
"-yy Dirk, how about Coyotes?"Over the command channel, Kang's slightly malfunctioning microphone broke the momentary silence in Emily's ear. She thought about that one a little longer than most names they've suggested over the years. Coyotes were smaller, hunted in packs a lot, and didn't pick fights with prey they couldn't handle. That seemed appropriate, now that she thought about it.
"That's actually…not too bad!"
"I like it." Mother Hen weighed in. Her LRM tubes were still smoking from the last two vollies she shot off in this fight. "We usually suggested things that hunted alone, like a Lynx or Jaguar on back on Terra."
"Or something way too big for our style, like lion n' tigers." Of course Clothesline wanted an opinion on this one. Emily thumped her armrest again. That's it!
She opened her company channel once again. "Hey. My fellow Coyotes, we've got ourselves an official company name. What do you think?
Someone broke into a high-pitched howl, probably Ifrit, and most of the MechWarriors decided to join in. Even Kang with his scratchy microphone.
