"YOU FUCKERS ARE GOING TO PAY FOR THAT!" Karl screamed over the radio, and, unfortunately, did not panic.
Instead, he pushed his boosters to maximum, no longer caring about moving as a group. His rifle raised, and we threw our mechs in every direction, scattering.
He'd lost some sensors, yes, but he hadn't lost all of them. What little sights he had was still enough for the FCS to work.
He targeted the one closest to him first. The assault rifle barked, a stream of bullets making their way to it. Our shields were in place, but they weren't exactly the best possible designs.
The bullets hit, and the shield groaned as it was punched into, cracking and bending with each one of the unfortunately tightly grouped shots. It failed at some point on the seventh, and several more were able to penetrate the armour of the mech that had been hiding behind it.
The damage was severe, but fortunately not enough to destroy it completely before the MT was able to pass behind a building and get some real cover.
Karl didn't bother to keep shooting it. He switched targets with a speed that spoke of long experience, this time aiming towards the most exposed of my mechs.
I did my best to angle the shield before he relocked and started firing again. For the most part, it worked, spreading out shot grouping and providing a better deflection angle, but the shield still looked remarkably thin by the time he had emptied the magazine.
The two Light MTs behind him caught up, spreading just wide enough to keep the Heavy MT most of the way between them and the rest of my squad. Both, however, wasted no time in picking targets, the missile MT immediately locking on to the one that had been damaged by the linear rifle, while the assault rifle MT picked a different target still trying to get into cover.
The missiles made short work of the shield, already damaged as it was, and then promptly blew up the MT behind it as well, bringing me down another mech. The assault rifle was of a significantly lower calibre than the Heavy MT's, at least, and so didn't manage to break the shield before my guns finished cooling down.
Those two got two bolts each, and both went down in flames. The Heavy MT received the other four shots, three of mine aimed at more of its sensors, reducing it nearly blind, while Ezra's shot poked a hole clean through its rifle's autoloader.
That was another chunk of the danger it posed removed, but unfortunately, not all of it.
The Heavy MT finished closing the distance, and even with what few eyes it had left, it could still find targets. The MT closest to it, already damaged by its assault rifle, was the unfortunate victim this time; the left hand raised, moving sideways, and then swung.
A blade of light carved through the MT's cover, what was left of the MT's shield, and then the MT itself, splitting it apart from hip to shoulder with a single, diagonal swipe.
Laser blades. Very dangerous.
Such power did come at a cost, though, and in this case that cost was the sheer heat it generated. It wasn't going to be activating again too soon, and with the autoloader ruined, it was most defenceless-
There was a hiss of smoke, and the gun was purged from the body completely. The arm pulled back as its boosters fired, and it went straight for the next closest mech; Ezra's.
Ezra braced the shield just as it swung forwards with a closed fist, a thunderous clang ringing out as the shield was nearly snapped in half from the sheer power and weight behind it. The Light MT was flung backwards, fortunately in one piece, but certainly not in a good condition; the Attitude Control System immediately making an attempt to stabilise the mech.
It stayed upright, at least, but it was wide open to further attacks for the next few seconds, and the Heavy MT was already moving forwards to follow up.
That was less than ideal, but everything was in place to end the battle shortly.
"He-Hey! Signatures are showing behind us?!"
"WHAT?!"
The maintenance drones had finally arrived, and there were enough of them grouped up together that I was reasonably confident they could deal with the remaining MTs over on that side.
After all, there were only twelve of them, and all of them were on the wrong side of the cover.
They had just about finished turning around when the drones launched themselves out of the tunnels and passages, scattering as best they could. I needed to get rid of them all, but there were orders of priority here; by far the largest threats to the swarm were the missile launchers, and the assault rifles were immediately afterwards.
The maintenance drones wasted no time; unleashing a rave party of lasers on the unfortunate MTs in front of them. The missile carrying ones went down before they got a chance to fire, and most of the assault rifle carrying ones did too, but I wasn't able to get them all before they could start to return fire.
Bullets went right back to the drones, and, being made of what may as well have been paper mache in comparison to the MTs, were promptly destroyed by them. My choice of targets were limiting the casualties, but I was definitely taking some losses regardless.
On the opposite side of the field, the Heavy MT simply crashed directly into Ezra's MT, just about pancaking it as one hundred and eighty-something tons of metal smashed into the much smaller mech. It stayed operational, barely, and got caught on the armour, speared through on loose bits of plate.
My lasers finished cycling again, and I fired three shots at all of its remaining sensors, wiping out every last bit of its sight. The last few shots dug straight into frontal armour, weakening it.
It spun, wildly, laser blade flashing and only just missing another MT, passing close enough that the coating of the armour bubbled with heat. Karl shouted, the word 'No' repeated multiple times, before Ezra recovered.
His rifle, the only one not on cooldown, was promptly jammed into the holes we'd made in the armour. He overcharged his shot, something that would damage the gun and burn out a few of its capacitors, but considering the mech as a whole was already wrecked, that didn't matter.
He fired while the Heavy MT was flailing. Light flashed underneath the internals, and something cooked off, the Heavy MT exploding into flames as it crashed to the ground, Ezra's MT destroyed alongside it.
The last enemy died on the opposite side of the field only a few seconds later, collapsing as it was perforated with a dozen laser bolts.
For a few seconds, there was silence.
"Well." Ezra spoke. "That went well."
I checked our forces. We were down several mechs, though the ones we still had were at minimal-to-no damage. Twelve of the maintenance drones had been popped by the return fire of their MTs, though anything not dead hadn't been hit at all.
"Yeah." I said. "That did go well." MTs outnumbered two to one, a Heavy MT on the field, and we'd traded four MTs and a fifth of our maintenance drones for all of theirs.
It could have gone a hell of a lot worse. It was a testament to RRI's technology that it could still stand up to such odds, and a sign of how effective we were for piloting in order to actually exploit that advantage.
"Grab some drones." I said. "We'll need their supplies to recover as quickly as we can. We also need to check whatever data we can recover from their mechs."
"We're going to be busy for the next few days."
It took several hours to clean everything up outside. I had to pull some trolleys over to pick up and haul all the broken mechs back to my setup.
Moving the Heavy MT alone took quite a bit of effort.
Still, it was done, and after that, we had to decide what to do with most of the MTs.
For the most part, they were unrecoverable. The legs and arms on nearly all of them were in good condition, but we'd been aiming for torsos.
The internals were fucked. I could assemble maybe two fully functional torsos between all the wreckage, and that was a 'maybe' because I didn't completely trust the look of one of the cockpits that had remained mostly intact when the mechs had cooked off.
None of that mattered anyway, because cockpits were for Humans. We needed a different interface. For my own MTs, I could get about half a functional mech out of the wreckage.
Aside from that, though, all the pilots were dead. No surprise there; for MTs, if you didn't eject, then torso-based destruction of MTs had something like a 98% chance of death. That was with bullets. Explosives, lasers, plasma, electroweapons... those were even less kind.
Computers were a bit more hardened in this day and age than unaugmented pilots, but a decent chunk of them had still been destroyed throughout the battle. We had managed to recover some data, though.
Turns out the Walruses that came here were meant to link up with several other Doser groups in one of the Grids that 097 was connected to. It was an unusual move, extremely so.
Doser gangs, as a rule, did not tend to mingle. Some might have worse or better relationships with other gangs, but fundamentally, every Doser was out for their own pleasure, seeking the high of the coveted Coral. They stole Coral from everywhere they could, from each other, from the RLF, from BAWS, even from the PCA if they could get away with it.
I'd chosen this region because it was quiet and low in Coral. Few had a reason to come here, with no civilians to draw the RLF, and no Coral to draw the Dosers.
Just a few weeks ago, though? The PCA had smashed an RLF base, and opened a civilian region to Doser raids in the process. Several of the opportunistic fucks had already conducted some raids, and now a bunch of groups had enough Coral to get high for months to come.
Drug addicts or not, most of them weren't complete morons. They knew very well that the RLF was going to launch reprisals when they finished recovering from the face punch that the PCA had given them, so they'd gone ahead and fled.
Where had they gone, then?
Why, into places nobody was looking at. Places far enough away from the RLF that it would give them warning to get out if they came.
Of course, they hadn't done that silently, either. Plenty of other Dosers had noticed when some groups had up and moved so suddenly, and most had figured out the details of why. Tempted, in turn, by the prospects of Coral and other resources that their rivals had made off with, many Doser gangs had grouped up together to form temporary alliances in order to make a shot at the Coral so they could take it for themselves.
Now they were all coming here, to southwestern Belius.
This quiet region was about to become a war zone.
As if all that wasn't enough, the Walruses had sent messages ahead to let their would-be 'allies' know they were coming. They'd sent a message that they were on the way to 097. They sent another when they were halfway here. They had not sent a message on arrival.
I couldn't pretend they were fine, either, because the comms equipment they'd been using, which had their authentication and proof of identity, had been slagged during the battle.
They would notice sooner or later when the Walruses didn't report in. Since 097 was meant to be an escape route for them, they would come and check it out sooner or later.
I had a couple of days, at best, in order to get my shit together and get ready for some more Dosers. Since they were likely to bring a significantly bigger force... Well, it would be a bad time, to say the least, if I'd had nothing but other MTs and maintenance drones.
I was going to have to devote everything to the AC, let the MTs and Drones fall to the wayside. If I couldn't get it ready, I wasn't going to be able to survive here.
Still, I did think I could do it.
It was just going to be a pretty tight margin.