ATLANTA DISTRICT, TERRA, SOL SYSTEM
DECEMBER 21, 3050
Quick questioning some of the survivors of the Com Guard unit that had ambushed the Command Keshik had been of more value than those men and women had expected. The medical facilities to keep a subject alive and functional under chemical interrogation were too involved and specialized to fit into MASH units, but Vera knew she wasn’t the only Clan warrior to be astonished at how much mercenary specialists were able to get out of their subjects without ever laying a finger on them, or even while being on the far end of a communication line.
The real specialists, that was. There had been all too many that would have fit right in among the Smoke Jaguars…
She pulled her thoughts off of that line; there were none of them assigned to the Keshik’s, and the overall force was too large for her to root them out alone. She’d have to rely on others, even if she hadn’t had more pressing concerns.
Like the fact that ComStar’s strength on Terra was a full three ‘Armies’, already blooded and battle-hardened by the campaign to reduce the last of the forces the Wolves had slipped to earth.
The same forces the that the Comstar force that had ambushed her had been hunting, before it found a more worthy prize.
“OK,” Consuela said. “Short version is, we’re in the shit.”
Under the circumstances, no one reprimanded her about her language. The forces she’d scouted enveloped the Keshik on three sides. “Looked like we’ve gone this long only ‘cause they were organizing and pulling together from a bunch of hunting teams. No sign of the Wolves, except that the Robes were still hunting them. No sign of MFBs, looks like they’re working out of underground bunkers; I spotted some at this set of waypoints, but if I was laying money down, I’d bet I didn’t get more than about half of them.”
“So,” Vera said, “when we attack, we must be aware of sudden reinforcements.”
“...Attack,” Consuela repeated.
Vera reached for the stylus that went with the relevant display, and traced several different routes. “I do not trust backtracking, not in this situation,” she said. “Aside from the way I begrudge the time it would lose us. Therefore we must break through and past the enveloping forces to link up with the Fifth Provisional Cluster… Here. Given the roads, thus, thus, thus… Our choices are… here, here, and here.”
“We could bunker up, put our backs to a wall until the Cluster comes to us,” Consuela suggested.
Vera knew that her lover could hear the raised eyebrow in the otherwise serious question: “Which wall?”
“...Take one of their bunkers away from them?” was offered in the full knowledge that it was a poor solution.
A warrior from the Keshik’s second star said what everyone was thinking: “Too vulnerable to booby traps.”
“Once we have picked a direction,” Vera went on, “and I intend it leave that decision as late as possible, to allow the situation to develop, we will strike and punch through the immediate enveloping force. Once we are on the far side of the perimeter, a fire mission from artillery will saturate the operational area-” a brush of her fingers clouded over much of the large, sprawling neighborhood they’d be fighting to win free of “-with smoke rounds, permitting us to break contact. This Com Guard force is a mix of assault-weight and infantry units, neither of which can match our pace.”
She paused. “Before anyone asks, breaking through the perimeter in smoke would shorten engagement ranges to a minimum, playing to their advantages in numbers and armor rather than our advantages in range. Questions or input, quiaff?”
“Aff, Galaxy Commander,” said one. “We intend to bypass this force, rather than destroying it?”
“One of the rearguard elements will be tasked with reducing them, on our own terms rather than theirs,” Vera said.
There were no further questions.
ECM suites and quick movement helped them approach the chosen strong-point in the Com Guard lines without early notice. Not, of course, with no notice - in an environment so close, and with so many infantry available, there were more than enough pickets posted to observe a formation of omnimechs on the move… But by the time they rounded the corner onto the avenue their target laager was parked at the end of, there were still men visible climbing onto and into their tanks, even as reactor after reactor came on line.
Vera settled her crosshairs onto the turret of an Alacorn and fired, oblique light sleeting nigh-harmlessly off of and around the protective jacket of the center gauss rifle but boiling away ablative layers on the gun mantlet with ease.
Not enough of them; the big tank fired moments later, the compression-contrails left by its rounds reaching past her Warhawk to the left.
She fired again, burning through into the fighting compartment this time with two sequenced shots, then switching targets to the next greatest threat. Fighting in a state of utter concentration, she was aware of the hits going home against her Warhawk’s armor, but the calculating element at the back of her mind. A large laser, a light autocannon… they weren’t going to stop her, not quickly enough to live. Around her, more fire crisscrossed the space of her peripheral vision, fire noticeably slacker in one direction than the other, and growing more so as units caught mid-start up died or were abandoned by crews more interested in diving for safety than in rolling long odds.
As the charging Keshik drew closer, other tanks advanced to meet them, Ontos and Demolishers lunging to reach their own working ranges under the cover of shoulder-launched SRMs stretching out from the buildings on either side of the avenue, and of the deaths of the last few long-ranged tanks that had been the first targets.
Consuela’s Viper landed on the tracking barrels of a Demolisher’s twin heavy autocannon, crushing them hopelessly out of true and bottoming the tank’s forward suspension out with a jolt, then launched into another soaring leap, hurdling through the torrent of fire erupting from a Rhino missile tank in a halo of smoke and fire as her AMS’s screaming barrels carved a relatively safe path towards her target.
Vera settled all four lasers on the Ontos that was even at that instant hurling itself into a bootlegger turn to follow the fast-moving medium, and erased it. “You will not touch her,” she said, mostly to herself, and then turned her attention to whatever had just hit her own ‘mech.
The end of the fight came, as always with the intense ones, as a surprise.
She sat in her command seat, reaching up to flip open her neurohelmet’s visor and wipe away the sweat that was stinging at her eyelids. “Damage report,” she said, and blinked her vision clear mostly on pure willpower to study her own display - about two thirds green, splotched with the yellow of slight-to-moderate armor damage.
She kept a mental tally as the reports rattled in; most of the omnimechs were about the same or a little better, while three had been targeted by multiple assault tanks and taken a battering. One had even had its leg armor stripped to all but nothing by tide of missiles from the Rhino that Consuela had crushed - the exchange of fire that had prompted her to do so.
“But no one is slowed,” she said. “Form on me in column, damaged elements in center. Break. Support, we will take that smoke now.”
The hissing roar of Arrow IV bodies leaving their racks was audible through the com line. “On the way,” were the words accompanying that sound.
“Move out,” Vera ordered, and pushed her Warhawk up into a run as puffs of light and smoke overhead started marking the dispersion of the submunitions that rained down over them, trailing dense, hot gray fog laced with radar-scattering chaff. Automatically, she flipped her ‘mech’s main display to sonar as the world vanished into the cloud bank, barely able to see the ends of the machine’s arms through her cockpit windows, much less the environment. On the main display, the ground underfoot and the building facades moving past were curtains of static, identifiable as masses if not coherent details.
It was enough for her to navigate by, and for the omnimech’s computer to place its feet.
At sixty kilometers per hour, it couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to race the full length of the smoke cloud she’d ordered, but the time felt dreamlike, eternal, stretching out endlessly. Emerging into the open air was a shock and a relief. “We’re through,” Vera started to say to the rest of the unit as she charged forwards, streamers and contrails of smoke trailing out of caught crannies in her Warhawk’s armor and joints.
Then the Atlas stepped forward out of the side street, reaching out to seize her ‘mech’s arm on one massive battlefist and yank, hauling her smaller machine around and half-off its feet in a scream of metal. “Stravag!” she yelped in pure shock, as the Comstar-white skull mask filled her viewports.
The hundred-ton monster’s assault autocannon thundered, waking screaming alarms in her cockpit and shaking her hard enough to make the restraint straps of her seat bruise shoulders and breasts. She hauled on the controls, trying to swing her free arm around - it was caught in the Atlas’s other hand, leaving them locked together.
The autocannon roared again. The targeting computer display winked out and went black, and more alarms howled as its shells chewed deeper and deeper into her ‘mech’s vitals as she let most of its weight and balance rest on the hands pinning it so she could kick desperately, knowing as she did so that it was almost certainly futile. As soon as that cannon loaded its third cassette of ammunition…
The world flashed blue and green, mingled pulse-laser and particle cannon fire behind her attacker, and she swore again and fought desperately for balance as a red-and-orange-and-black explosion ripped her enemy apart, leaving its dismembered arms hanging from hers like strange fruit.
As the Atlas’s corpse fell away, she could see the attackers that had brought it down from behind - the savaged, nearly stripped wreck of a Dire Wolf, the right half of a battered Warhawk, and a shambling, melted mess that could be identified as a Kingfisher only because any other omnimech that size would have mounted a bulky extra-light engine and be long dead to lost reactor shielding by that point. What little armor on the three machines remained intact was Wolf gray, and hints of keshik silver.
Vera switched her comms to uncoded, line-of-sight. “SaKhan Kerensky, I presume?”
“That’s me, kid,” replied the voice of an older woman, and the Dire Wolf raised one arm in salute.