"I hope you like it," said Oscar nervously.

The pilots hadn't spoken for almost a minute. The only sounds were clattering utensils and chewing. It was intensely unnerving for Oscar. If they'd been yelling and screaming about how he was a waste of the ship's precious oxygen, at least it would have settled things. This way, he was twisting in uncertainty.

"It's official," Blake said at last. "We have to space him."

He started, jolted backwards, fear racing down his spine. "It's that bad?"

"No," Blake said, the corner of her mouth twitching up in a denied smile, "it's that eventually you'll leave, and then we'll be back to Weiss' starvation diet, and that'll be really hard after this."

Oscar felt like he might melt into a puddle from sheer relief. "So… you like it?"

"It's pretty freakin' tasty," said Yang through a mouthful.

Shooting a scathing look at Yang for her abominable manners, Weiss chipped in, "The reason you haven't heard us talking is that we were too busy eating. We're not like that for food we hate."

"Thanks," said Oscar, and with the weight of expectations lifted from him, he managed a fluttering smile.

He noticed Ruby looking at him appraisingly. "You know," she said, "I've been wondering. How long do you have to stay with ComStar after you join up?"

"I… don't know," said Oscar. Now that he thought about it, he hadn't really heard about people leaving ComStar, and ComStar hadn't ever talked about retirement plans or pensions. It was possible that, once you were inducted into ComStar's brotherhood, you were part of it for life… one way or another.

Well, that was suddenly alarming.

"Why do you ask?" he said, trying to hide how unsettled he felt.

Ruby nonchalantly looked back to her dinner. "Just trying to gauge what it'd take to hire you away."

"No," said Weiss definitively. "If we're buying cheap ingredients because they're cheap, we're not going to cancel out all those savings by hiring a cook."

"He wouldn't just be a cook," said Ruby. "He can maintain our comms gear—like, who better to do it than an actual ComStar person?! And I'm sure we'd find other uses for him, too."

"Other uses," repeated Oscar, and he felt his mood buoyed up by the comradery of the moment. "Planning out my whole future, are we?"

"I'd say I'm keeping the door open," said Ruby. "If you ever get bored with techno-mysticism and stuff."

"You may have noticed," said Yang, draping an arm over the back of her chair, "but sis kinda collects people."

"Woah, hey," said Ruby, "that makes it sound super-sinister!"

"Okay, how about this: you operate a mercenary dropship that doubles as a halfway house for runaways and strays."

Weiss and Blake looked self-conscious at this; both studied their dinner.

"And not just the pilots," Yang went on. "The rest of the crew, too. Maria, Smith, half the techs… I could go on. I'm just saying," she said, looking back at Oscar, "that picking up a lost and starry-eyed ex-ComStar kid would be right on brand for you."

"The galaxy is kind of broken these days," said Ruby, her gaze falling a little. "The least we can do is help each other find our way through it, you know?"

"We do know," said Weiss, and her voice was warmer than Oscar had ever heard it.

It made him half-chuckle. "You know, with you being so determined to make the galaxy a better place, maybe we're asking the wrong question."

Ruby looked intrigued. "So, what's the right question?"

"We've got it backwards," said Oscar. "What would it take to get you into ComStar robes?"

The room dissolved into laughter. Oscar laughed, too, half in sympathy, half in nervousness.

"I'm not working for ComStar," Ruby said gently.

"Well, you're taking a mission from it now," pointed out Oscar.

"Touch."

"Touché," corrected Weiss.

"Whatever. Point is, I'm not joining ComStar."

"Why not?" said Oscar gamely. "ComStar's mech forces just guard ComStar installations, so you wouldn't be pulled into committing war crimes. You'd be protecting communications—wouldn't that make things better? And you want to preserve Crescent Rose. What better way to preserve it than being on defense, guarding the one organization in the galaxy that has the parts you need?"

"You're not a bad salesman," Weiss said, "but ComStar would have to do a lot better than that."

Yang's grin was mischievous. "You just think Ruby would look hot in robes."

Oscar blushed and looked down. "I swear that had nothing to do with it!"

"Ha! So you do think that!"

Ruby smiled generously. "I'll think about it."

"Will you, though?" said Blake.

Ruby gave her an annoyed glance and her mouth was open to rebut when the screen lit up.

Incoming Transmission.

"Check it," said Ruby, and the pilots moved their chairs around to free Oscar to get to the screen.

"Oh," he said after a few moments. His smile was audible. "My master came through. It's more data on the target."

"Alright, ladies… and gentleman," Ruby said, correcting herself with a glance at Oscar. "It's time to commit or bug out, and either way we'll need a plan. Let's see what we've got."

The planning session began with disappointment. Knocking out the exterior dishes would not be enough to satisfy the contract. According to Ozpin, those dishes were one of the cheapest parts of the entire facility. ComStar even had a standing budget to replace dishes at all their facilities. While very few organizations deliberately attacked ComStar, with the amount of munitions that got tossed around the galaxy on a daily basis, well, accidents happened.

The upshot was that Ozpin required the destruction of the HPG itself to satisfy the contract. Anything else was generically replaceable and could fit within the site's existing budget. The HPG was a precious resource, its operations were a jealously guarded secret, and it was the most expensive component by far. Nothing justified its loss, and a ComStar facility without one had no reason to exist.

"Of course, he didn't point out that the HPG is the most sacred part of the whole installation, too," said Blake. "You know, the part the zealots there will be most upset we're after?"

"On the plus side," said Yang, "he's giving us leeway to trash as much of the rest of the base as we've got the appetite and time for. 'Additional damage will further increase the costs of repairing the base and make it harder to justify doing so,'" she said in a crude imitation of Ozpin's voice.

"That's a plus side?" said Blake.

"It can be."

"So long as he's not asking us to hurt the people there," said Ruby, scanning through the documents with a scrupulous eye.

"The opposite, in fact," said Weiss, who read more quickly than the rest of them. "According to this, maybe only one or two people at the base know what the Grim Queen is using it for, and we're not going after them. Ozpin doesn't want the Grim Queen to know someone was on to her."

"Right," said Ruby. "Smash the base, spare the civvies. Can do."

They worked through the information Ozpin had brought them, adding it to what they already knew, putting together a picture of the base's security measures, its patrol patterns, what seams might exist in its defenses. They asked occasional questions of Oscar, who did his best but was sorely out of his depth. Even with this new ream of information, the one thing they most craved still eluded them.

"He still can't tell us what mechs are actually there," said Weiss in frustration. "How can we plan around nothing?"

"We usually don't know exactly what mechs we'll be facing ahead of time," said Ruby reasonably. "This isn't that strange."

"Maybe, but we usually have a narrower range of possibilities than this, and we can do more to keep it from turning into a slugfest. Do you realize that the high end of that estimate could put us up against four heavy mechs at once? Plus the turrets and supporting armor. We're good, but that's a steep hill to climb."

"So let's see what we can do to even the odds," Yang said gamely.

For hours they picked their way through the data, came up with and discarded dozens of ideas on how to approach this operation, all while struggling with the fact that they would have to defeat what was likely to be a substantially deadlier force to finish the mission.

And all the while, the distance between the Huntress and their target crept inexorably towards zero.

"One more time," said Ruby.

The other pilots groaned, but Weiss began speaking all the same. "The Huntress enters atmosphere near the southern pole, then follows the main continent north until one thousand klicks from the target. By that point it will have transitioned to low level terrain following up to a distance of 150 klicks. At that range, the base's sensors are powerful enough to pick up our dropship even at low altitudes, but mechs can still hide using the local terrain features."

Blake took over. "We park the Huntress and make our mech approach at cruising speed. That should keep our thermal, seismic, and aural signatures to reasonably low levels. We can use the hoodoos to help conceal us until we're sixteen klicks out."

"The perimeter is swept by VTOLs at radii from thirty to forty klicks every hour," said Yang, using the generic term for helicopters and hovercraft, "and more frequently if something smells fishy. Because ComStar works its VTOLs so hard, there's usually at least two out of the six that are grounded for maintenance, but with this being a new base, we can't count on there being more than one out of action."

"The VTOLs check in regularly during their sweeps," said Ruby, "and we can expect the base to go on alert if the VTOLs vanish from their screens or don't check in on time. There'll be at least a little delay, though. If we time it right, we'll take out the VTOL patrol before they can identify us while we're thirty klicks out or less. At max speed, we can cover the remaining thirty klicks in twenty minutes. Assuming a five-minute reaction time for the base to go on alert, that gives them fifteen minutes to scramble before we're in weapons range."

"Which is one reason that we strike at night," said Weiss. "Anything we can do to slow that initial reaction and get their forces to wake up slowly and piecemeal is an advantage. If we get there promptly, there should only be two, maybe three mechs active, along with one to two tanks and the turrets."

Blake again. "Weiss uses her LRMs to harass turrets at different points along the base's perimeter. Because she's firing at fixed locations and she doesn't need to acquire locks, just firing off of dead reckoning at preset coordinates, we can extend the range of her missiles far beyond the typical max. We're not counting on Weiss to destroy the turrets, just to confuse the defenders about which direction we're coming from."

Yang leaned forward to deliver the close. "As we approach, we'll use the last rise to gain a little elevation advantage for Ruby's Gauss rifle and our jumps. Ruby can take out a turret with a single shot if she hits it right, and Weiss and Blake can get another with their Large Lasers, hopefully before either turret can automatically engage. After that, we'll use our usual small unit tactics, knocking out the small fries first and then dog piling the heavier stuff as it comes online."

Ruby nodded as the recitation came to its end. "That's about the shape of it," she said.

"It all makes sense, I suppose," said Weiss dubiously. "Having a plan makes me feel better, but this still feels like we're tempting fate."

"Is there something we missed?" said Ruby.

"Exit strategy?" said Blake.

"We disengage and run back to the Huntress if we can, or use our normal duress code to call the Huntress in for an emergency pickup if we need it," said Ruby. "The usual."

"And we're sure whatever local or native forces are here won't get involved?" said Yang. "Things could get pretty crazy if they join the fun."

"Not quickly," said Blake. "Normally, local governments have to plead and bribe their way to get an HPG installed on their planet. This was an unsolicited ComStar proposal, and the locals are poor enough they almost don't know what to do with it. Judging from the size of the settlements, whatever defenses the locals have can't be much, and they won't be integrated with ComStar. We should have some time before they ride to the rescue."

"Even when they get their act together," said Weiss, "ComStar built this facility almost two hundred kilometers away from the nearest settlement—close enough to travel to, but not close enough to be convenient. It'll take a while for anything heavier than a VTOL to cover that distance and complicate our lives."

"So we've got a little time to linger, but not that much," said Yang.

"Right. The plan depends on speed and firepower."

"Good thing we have both," said Ruby. "Alright, we've got the plan down. Blake, Weiss, program the simulator so we can start doing run-throughs of the mission. Yang, check with Smith and make sure the mechs are on track. We'll want to be armed and ready twenty-four hours before planetfall."

"Roger that," said Yang.

"That includes repainting our mechs to generic colors for deniability."

Yang mimed wiping away a tear. "I know."

"And I'll finalize our approach with Maria and make sure our nav data is loaded into our mechs' computers. We're good to go."

Unusually, the Rowdies didn't immediately and purposefully disperse. They all seemed to linger in place, though whether that was out of uncertainty, hesitancy, or apprehension was unclear, and probably varied by lady.

Ruby sensed this, in no small part because she was feeling many of those things herself. It left a void in the room, and Ruby could not abide a void. "I know this seems way sketchier than our usual jobs," she said. "I know it seems a lot riskier than our usual jobs. I get all that.

"But this is what we do, isn't it? We're at our best when we're doing things other people think we can't do. We can't sustain centuries-old machines with care and elbow grease. We can't resist a stifling patriarchy. We can't make the voices of the Periphery heard in the Inner Sphere. We can't take on enemies out of our league.

"Except we can," said Ruby with a crooked smile. "And there's nothing in the world as satisfying as proving it.

"So we'll do what Rose's Rowdies always do. We protect each other. We have each other's backs. And we do the right thing. Because the last thing the galaxy needs is another catastrophic war. So if there are any ghost armies out there, I'm canceling their invitations. They can find some other civilization to annoy, but they can't have this one!"

The other pilots nodded as their expressions changed. It didn't take much to shift the mood sometimes, especially with as quality a crew as Ruby had lucked into.

It was funny. She could ease everyone else's doubts, but not her own.

"Alright then," she said, hoping dearly that her own nerves stayed below the surface, "let's get to work."

Four days packed with simulator runs later, the Huntress entered atmosphere.

It was a more violent approach than the pilots were used to. The idea was to not announce their presence by being obviously artificial. They were beyond the reasonable reach of the base's fixed sensors, but as much as they needed to keep the base ignorant of their approach, some extra care was warranted.

Once in atmosphere, the Huntress began its flight towards the ComStar compound. This was one advantage a Leopard-class dropship had over the larger models. A Union-class, for example, carried triple the mechs and quadruple the supplies, while being better armored and much better armed. On the other hand, a Union—being shaped like an egg to ease the stress of atmospheric reentry on such a large ship—was not designed for transit inside an atmosphere. If it needed to fly from place to place on the same planet, it pretty much had to go back up into orbit first and then descend again.

A Leopard, by contrast, was shaped more like a plane, albeit a plane built solely with blocks by someone who might not have heard of planes before. Between the mount of its engines, the small amount of natural lift it generated, and its maneuvering controls, in-atmosphere transit was practical. (Maria, who knew from actual fighters, was of the opinion that the Huntress maneuvered like a brick and stayed airborne only by the brute power of its engines rather than by any aerodynamic design features.)

Per their schedule, Rose's Rowdies took that time to change into their pilot suits, get into their mechs, work through their pre-launch checklists, verify armor and ammo and equipment, and limber up for the hours they were about to spend in the cockpit.

Ruby, doing a last-minute check of the nav plan, was the last to enter the hangar. To her surprise, the first person to greet her was Oscar.

He looked more nervous than Ruby felt, which was saying something. "Hey," he managed, his voice cracking even over that single syllable.

"Hey," Ruby replied with her usual rapier wit.

"This is it, huh?" he said.

"Yep," she said. Her gaze wandered past him, to where her lancemates were making ready, to where techs were pulling away gantries and unhooking power and fluid support to the mechs. They'd be deployment-ready any minute now.

"Good luck," Oscar said.

"Thanks," Ruby said. When Oscar didn't say or do anything else, she cocked her head curiously. "Is that all?"

"It seemed important to say," said Oscar, and despite himself he started wringing his hands together. "With the way you all were talking about how hard this mission is gonna be, I figured you could use all the luck you could get."

"Fair," said Ruby, and she favored him with a smile. "That's sweet of you, Oscar. Actually, I have something to give you, too."

"You do?" he squeaked.

"Yep. Just in case I don't make it back."

He shook in place, eyes darting around nervously, then tilted his head and puckered a little.

Ruby reached into a pocket and pressed a piece of paper into his palm. "Use this code to download the data from my flight recorder."

Oscar stumbled back in surprise. "What?"

Ruby giggled. "My flight recorder. If we fail this mission, I figure Ozpin would want to know how close we got."

Disappointment crushed Oscar beneath its weight. "Oh, right. Ozpin."

She giggled again. "Were you expecting a good-bye kiss?"

A hand nervously scratched at the back of his neck. "Maybe?"

"You've been watching too many holos. See you when I get back." He froze again at those words, and Ruby decided that was as good a time as any to head to Crescent Rose. There was a new smile on her lips and a spring in her step.

The Huntress continued to descend in altitude as it traveled towards its target, the fuel and timeliness savings from high altitude flight less important than settling in to a stealthy posture. Soon the Huntress was in terrain skimming mode. It was a treacherous thing, as the terrain turned increasingly rough. A series of sharp, wave-like ridges were separated by flat desert floors. These gave way to broken plateaus carved up by washed-out gullies and the beds of ephemeral rivers. Maintaining a safe altitude over this mess looked like an ugly challenge. Ruby could imagine how much Maria was swearing at the sluggish controls of the Huntress as they skimmed the surface.

"Stand by," came Maria's annoyed but precise voice. "Signal strength on the base's sensors is in the yellow, so this is as close as I get. Making final descent."

This was it. Ruby wriggled in her command chair, a ball of energy inside her, waiting for release. This part was the worst, all helpless nerves and jangling worries, wondering if they'd planned everything right, wondering if they'd forgotten anything, wondering if there was more to this than they were expecting, wondering if this wasn't some elaborate setup after all and she and her mech after two hundred years of careful stewardship weren't going to end up a smoldering wreck in the bottom of a dry river until someone else realized her mech's corpse had salvageable actuators…

Clang.

"Hangar doors opening," came Smith's slow, low voice over the mech bay's overhead speakers. "Stand clear."

The frame supporting her Sentinel broke away, and the platform on which it stood began to rotate, so that instead of Crescent Rose facing inwards towards the center of the mech bay, it was facing outwards, towards the Huntress' deployment doors. Said doors were rising out of the way, leaving her a clear egress. All around her, the same was happening with her lance.

Ruby ran through the final checklist. "Reactor… online. Comms… online. Sensors… online. Weapons… online. All systems nominal."

She tapped her radio. "MechWarriors, sound off."

Their voices rattled off to her in well-practiced routine. "Weiss Schnee, cavalry, all systems green."

"Blake Belladonna, electronic warfare and skirmisher, all systems green."

"Yang Xiao Long, brawler, hot to trot!"

"And this is Ruby Rose," she said as everything simplified and the world fell into place around her. Everything suddenly made sense, and the next step was the most obvious thing in the world. "Sniper and command, all systems green."

Her hands settled on her controls. Power thrummed through them, like she could feel Crescent Rose's fusion engine energizing her fingers.

The last moment before launch was the worst. The first moment of launch was the best.

She smiled.

"Rose's Rowdies, mission start."

The Rowdies formed up single file with Yang in the lead. It was their usual formation for moving cross country. Yang's Dragon and Weiss' Griffin were the slowest mechs of the four, though both had above-average speed as mechs went, so they needed to set the pace. The Dragon also had the thickest armor of the four, and so would be most resistant to any surprises they ran into along the way.

Yang had her full forward lights on to give her maximum visibility ahead, while those behind used fewer and dimmer lights, trusting to follow the path that Yang blazed. Anything that could help them maintain stealth would be worth it with the stakes this high.

It made for a surreal trip through the pitch-black night. This planet had no moon, and even the stars were obscured by more clouds than Yang would've expected in a desert. It was like being back on board the Huntress in its simulator, where everything ahead of her was like she was on mission but looking upwards showed her bulkhead.

She ran her machine at its cruising speed of 53 KPH, well below its maximum, but at a comfortable cross-country pace. Faster would generate much more heat and noise, and that tradeoff wasn't worth it. It meant it would take almost two full hours to get into position for their attack, but they'd planned for that, had wanted it, in fact.

It was slightly before midnight local time. They were scheduled to strike in the small hours of the morning, the worst possible time for the awareness and wakefulness of the site's defenders. Their estimate of a five-minute response time was a conservative one. It could easily be worse. Yang wasn't sure how long it would take her to go from dead asleep to combat ready, dressed, in her pilot's seat, and running through her Dragon's startup checklist, but she had a sneaking suspicion it was more than five minutes.

She was sure it'd take Weiss half an hour or more; the woman slept like the dead.

Ruby could probably do it in thirty seconds.

Yang didn't devote much of her brain to these musings, because most of her attention was occupied by piloting through this mess. The terrain was wretched, a maze of elevated and eroded rock. "The path of least resistance" was a relative term. In some places, the dry riverbeds were full of loose rock that shifted under her mech's feet and required a firm grip on her controls to keep steady. She almost envied Weiss and Blake their jump jets. What a luxury those were for dealing with this kind of broken ground.

Jump jets were also the opposite of stealthy, so she might not have used them even if she'd had them, but still.

The strangest features of the terrain were weirdly thin pillars of rock that stood isolated or in small groups seemingly at random along their way. The shortest came up to the Dragon's knees; the tallest loomed over her head. All of them looked like solid rock, though how such pillars had gotten into open space was a mystery to Yang. For all she knew other mechs had stepped into this area and shut down and been covered in rock. It would explain their size, at least.

"What's with the rocks?" she asked her lance over the radio, its power dialed down to the absolute minimum to only reach a few dozen meters in all directions—another concession to stealth.

"You mean the hoodoos?" said Weiss.

That was a word Yang recognized from their mission brief, though it took a while to remember where from. Yeah, that was it, from the description of the terrain they'd face and what would protect them from the base's sensors. She guided the lance around another of the pillars, watching it go down her right side as they moved. "Oh, so the big columns of rock are hoodoos. Good to know."

"What did you think a hoodoo was?"

"I don't know, I guess I figured it'd be obvious," said Yang. "Seriously, though, what's their deal? They kinda give me the creeps."

"I assure you that they are thoroughly mundane. There's no black magic associated with them."

"Gee, thanks," snarked Yang, although the reassurance did mean something, and she relaxed just a bit.

"Most of the rock here is soft, soft enough to erode rapidly even under rainfall. But where there are patches of hard rock, those patches can provide shelter to the layers of soft rock beneath."

"Like an umbrella," said Ruby.

"Yes, I suppose," said Weiss, who sounded taken aback at Ruby's insight. Yang laughed at the notion that Weiss had never thought of it like an umbrella and was kicking herself about it now. "The point is, the rest of the rock erodes away, but the area with a cap is protected, and as the rest vanishes the protected area forms a column. After millions of years of this you end up with a hoodoo, standing alone in an area that used to be a plateau."

"How do you know so much about this?" said Blake.

"My family was a mining family, remember? I know so much about rocks. I probably know more about rocks than I do about any other topic, including piloting Battlemechs."

Yang whistled. "I didn't know that before, but I promise I won't take it for granite now."

There was a deep silence as Yang imagined the other pilots groaning without transmitting. Delicious.

"No puns on mission," said Ruby after a spell. "That's not a new rule."

"Yes ma'am," said Yang, although she was feeling far more pleased with herself than she was chastened. "At least I get why we're making our approach from this direction now. There isn't a sensor suite out there that could make sense of us moving in between all this crap."

"Hoodoos," Weiss said again.

"You-doos," Yang thought but didn't say. She was proud of her restraint.

That little burst of conversation was the last for a while as the kilometers ticked away. Yang, alert as she was, didn't mind it. This was another way they were lucky: there was a mismatch between galactic time and local time. The Rowdies' bodies were on galactic time, so this was midafternoon as far as they were concerned, darkness notwithstanding. They weren't tired, definitely not the way the locals would be.

And that was how you beat the odds, Yang thought. You took every advantage you could get, worked every angle, and once you'd stacked as many advantages as you could, you stepped into the biggest swing you could manage.

Blake gave periodic updates on what her ECM was detecting. All the clutter helped keep the Rowdies from being too exposed to the base's sensors, but that effect was fading the closer they got. As they approached the plateau the base sat upon, they would hug the bottom of the plateau and use its sensor shadow to get close before rising for their final approach. With any luck, they would first appear on the base's screens only ten klicks and seven minutes out.

Assuming that they weren't caught by the patrol.

They were in the window now for when the patrol might find them. There was plenty of uncertainty there. They knew what standard ComStar doctrine said about how often the patrols ran and at what distance from the base, but not the direction this base ran its patrols, clockwise or counterclockwise, nor the patrol's schedule.

With infinite time, they might have cased the base and gotten a better feel for its security posture, but their time was not infinite. The longer they spent operating here, the greater the odds of being detected and blowing the whole op. Even more importantly, they had an appointment to keep with their JumpShip, and its schedule was non-negotiable.

So they'd taken a stab and chosen a time. It was possible they'd be getting through the area right after a patrol passed, which would let them get almost all the way to the base before the next patrol came around. It was possible they'd be spotted forty clicks out and be left with an agonizing half an hour to cover the remaining distance while the base scrambled its defenses. More likely was the middle course, which they'd used in their planning numbers: detection twenty minutes out, giving ten to fifteen minutes for the base to scramble before the shooting started.

It was nerve-wracking for Yang because she would be the last to know the patrol was there. All the Rowdies were in passive sensors mode, which reduced how far away they could be detected, but which also hurt their own detection ranges and—especially—detection accuracy. Only Blake's more sophisticated ECM suite could get good data on enemies while passive, and even that assumed that those enemies were banging away with their own active sensors. A patrol probably would be, but "probably" was doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The patrol could be seen, but Yang wasn't looking. Her role as pathfinder compelled her to put all focus on the ground ahead of her, leading the way for the lance, and she had no attention to spare to scan the skies for a potential enemy. The Rowdies had a standard breakdown to cover for this, with Weiss monitoring the right side of the formation, Ruby watching their left, and Blake giving all-around coverage with her ECM.

Only Yang's absolute trust in her lance kept her from being a ball of nerves at the prospect of being spotted. She had a job to do, and so did they, and she trusted them to do theirs just as they trusted her to do hers. It was a precious thing, that trust, and in situations like this it was a warm blanket.

So on they trudged at cruising speed, ears pricked up for any communications from anyone else, Yang's eyes on the ground while her lance scanned the sky, and every step that took them closer to the base without being found was a precious gift.

It wasn't silence, not with fifty-something-ton war machines pounding over the broken terrain, with every few steps causing rocks to tumble down into the low-lying areas. But those steady footfalls were the only sound, which took on a droning monotony after a time and which could hypnotize a person into unawareness if it was the only sound that existed. Yang would've loved for there to be more conversation, even about something as banal as hoodoos, but the closer they got to the base the more dangerous that became. Even without a formal order directing it, they still killed all unnecessary chatter.

Then, as they passed the 25-kilometer mark, she did hear a voice. Blake's, coming over the radio with signal strength at an absolute minimum. "Intermittent contact, bearing 320."

With them heading north, that put the contact ahead and to their left. If this was the patrol, then it was coming at a counter-clockwise direction from the base, but Blake didn't say it was, and she would if she had enough data. Intermittent, she'd said. Was that because the contact was far away and dipping in and out of range, or something more dangerous?

Confirmation came seconds later. "320 is classified VTOL, scan-listen pattern."

Yang swore and her grip on her controls tightened. Scan-listen meant toggling between active and passive sensors, mixing up how far away you could detect potential enemies and, crucially, how far away they could detect you. It required a lot more attention to detail than just setting everything once and blasting away the whole flight, which meant that these patrols were taken seriously.

That was why the VTOL had been intermittent before: it would appear on Blake's screen when it was active, then vanish when it went passive.

But if it had been toggling like that, and it took Blake time to nail its pattern and confirm the target, and it was getting close all the while…

"Slowing to thirty," Yang announced, and she killed her running lights. Slowing down even further was the only safe thing to do if she could barely see while piloting around. Hopefully she wasn't too late; hopefully the VTOL hadn't already seen her lights and reported the anomaly to base.

No way to know.

On she moved, almost unbearably slow for a Battlemech in a combat scenario, staring straight forward as she ground her teeth to dust, wondering, wondering, wondering…

Boom.

The report of a weapon shattered the monotony of the lance's footfalls; almost instantly there was a burst of orange light ahead and to Yang's left. The light faded almost as quickly as it had come, and a distant crashing sound followed after a second or two.

"Sorry," came Ruby's voice, which sounded like a cringe. "Reflex."

So Ruby had shot the moment she caught sight of the VTOL, not trying to weigh their likelihood of getting caught or evading, not trying to ration her sorely limited supply of Gauss ammo—just an automatic response.

This was starting off just great, wasn't it?

"Full throttle," Yang announced. Whether the VTOL had reported them or not, it would be missed before long, and even if the base didn't go to full alert it would start waking up, so stealth had served its purpose. On went her running lights, though she kept her sensors on passive for now. "Full speed approach."

Her Dragon's mighty mechanical legs started pumping, pushing the sixty-ton machine to a speed some forty-tonners would have envied. The trip transformed from a brisk cross-country stroll to something resembling a slalom course. The hoodoos, having once been a curiosity, were now a hazard.

Didn't matter. Speed mattered.

Yang checked her navigation. They were about twenty-five klicks out—not the best-case scenario, but better than they'd hoped. At top speed, that put her about fifteen minutes from extreme weapons range, a little less before Weiss could start her LRM harassment.

If the base was sleepy and the watch officer wasn't on their game, the Rowdies would be able to catch most of these clowns with their pants down.

The waiting was over. The action had come. Yang rushed to meet it.

To be continued...

Mech nerdness: in real life, jamming doesn't prevent detection. The opposite, in fact; jamming announces your presence! Jamming prevents targeting.

Imagine you're looking for someone at night, and that someone shines a flashlight in your eyes. You know they're there, you just can't see them accurately, or really look in that direction. Jamming works the same way: by throwing high-intensity radio waves at the offending search radar, you overpower any return the radar would get from its own emissions, effectively whiting out your bearing and maybe a few degrees around you. But all that noise is a declaration that you're there all the same.

That's why Blake isn't jamming with her ECM here. It would announce to the base the Rowdies are coming, when hitting the base while it's at low readiness is the essence of the plan. On the other hand, a necessary prelude to jamming is detection and classification of adversary radars, and that's super useful even when you're not jamming.