Vera's ability to run the cold equations like that makes her, by Clan standards, a pretty fair strategist - or rather, a logistician.
Unfortunately, she's still not all that much of a tactician.
SUSQUEHANNA, FREE RASALHAGUE REPUBLIC
MARCH 18, 3050
“Freebirth!”
The curse came over the com with no identification or elaboration, but the pilot who’d spotted the ambush continued, “Armor, right ahead! Half-trinary!”
Automatically, instinctively, the mechs of the Keshik began to swerve, splitting apart to complicate the enemy’s firing solutions, but even with the active probes she’d ordered all of them to fit, the warning came too late. The low hillock that the Locust pilot had hurdled had full-sized, adult trees going out of it, and real earth and leaf-litter, and all the other things every other patch of forest floor in the sparse woods had, but even the most sophisticated sensor systems available hadn’t been enough to spot the company of heavy vehicles underlying the camouflage.
Each lance of four tanks picked a single omnimech as its target. The three Executioners leading the Keshik after its irritating prey vanished into a wall of short-range missiles. The propellant mix the Inner Sphere used was less sophisticated than the Clans’, and left an ugly veil of grey smoke in its wake, but the screen with her radar on it showed the massive assault ‘mechs going down like an aerowarrior struck by an Elemental.
Another wave of missiles, less accurate at their longer range, arrived a moment later, deluging down over the Executioner and the Gargoyle right behind the leaders. The Executioner’s marker on her strategic display went black as abruptly as its three brothers’ had, but the Gargoyle just shifted to the flashing red of critical damage. “Galaxy Commander,” the pilot reported, “I have no armor and critical hits in all body sections.”
“Withdraw immediately,” she ordered, even as she and the rest of the remaining ten poured fire into the suddenly revealed company in their midst, a concentration of fire that erased the lightly armored units in seconds.
A Timber Wolf and another Executioner staggered and fell under a second flood of long-range missiles, both pilots alive but swearing furiously at the armor breaches that had let individual missiles slip in to wreck critical components. Eight omnimechs shifted their fire to the distant missile carriers whose attack had pinpointed their equally-cunning hides, and only two of the dozen vehicles survived long enough to fire a third time, doing no significant damage to their target.
Spark-plug and targeting emissions pinpointed another two companies of vehicles coming alive in the ‘rough ground’ ahead in the pass, along with the neutrino emissions of eight activating fusion plants.
The tale was one of disaster. Twenty-four light tanks were no real threat, even to the eight ‘mechs she had left, but her warbook called the remaining twelve an even mix of Pattons, Manticores…
...and Demolishers.
More neutrino emissions, and rising heat signatures, from the upper slopes surrounding the pass - behind the Keshik - told where to find the rest of the ‘mech company that taunting voice had belonged to.
“Demolishers first,” she ordered, aware that even if they won this was about to be a very costly fight. “Then the Scorpions, then the Manticores. Morn, come with me to keep the ‘mechs busy.”
“Aff,” the mechwarrior she’d named acknowledged, peeling off next to her as she turned to the side and began to pound back towards the second jaw of the ambush.
“Galaxy Commander, Support Star here. We have FASCAM rounds loaded. If you pull back and we drop the mines behind you…” came over her comline, and only the need to manage her ‘mech’s controls kept her from slapping herself in the forehead.
“Aff, thank you, Support. Break. Keshik, abort previous - pull back and break contact. Support will be covering our withdrawal with artillery fire.”
“Galaxy Commander,” one of the surviving warriors of the unit burst out, “We cannot let these freebirths beat us!”
“Our mission is to scout,” she pointed out, ignoring the drumming of light autocannon fire against the side of her torso she’d turned towards the pursuing vehicles to keep her Warhawk’s vulnerable back armor away from their guns. “To gain knowledge of our foe. I would say that we have gained the knowledge that he is clever, resourceful, and possesses entirely too many tanks. We will be back when we have re-armed.”
One of the other warriors laughed incredulously, even as he started to fire on the mechs closing in from the sides. Vera fired, too, the brief, intense bursts of the pulse lasers in her leading arm boring straight through the light armor protecting the leading Clint’s reactor and sending the light medium tumbling to skid face-first down the slope as the safeties cut its power.
Others fell, too, but as they did they poured their fire into the vulnerable rear armor that the Ghost Bear warriors had turned away from the vehicles that were rumbling in their wake. Worse, they concentrated their fire. Inaccurate as it was, below even what the vehicles were managing, that concentration and the vulnerability of the points they were targeting were telling, and another Timber Wolf fell, twitching spastically as its internal gyroscope failed.
Fortunately, it was the last ‘mech they lost, with the ambushing company’s lighter machines quickly falling under the firepower turned against them, and the Arrow IV carrier bodies roaring in close overhead to burst behind them in a shower of anti-armor submunitions that lay in their wake like a field of pre-space caltrops, filling the relatively level ground of the bottom of the pass and forcing their pursuers to break off or risk damage to their vulnerable tracks.
A thought struck her. “Support,” she ordered, “once you have the near end of the pass blocked, I want you to seal the far end, as well.”
“Aff, Galaxy Commander.”
“That will trap them for us,” her second - her current second; the executive officer had been aboard one of the fallen Executioners - exulted. “Every one of these filthy dishonorable bandits will be-”
“Bondsmen,” she interrupted.
There was a moment of silence, and then he spoke again, intense and quietly angry. “Galaxy Commander, you cannot be serious. These Dark Caste have spit upon everything that we stand for!”
“No,” one of the other pilots in the unit disagreed, “I think that I see it. They have fooled us, even humiliated us, but they have not risked civilian lives, nor caused the unnecessary destruction the Martial Code was created to prevent. That we allowed ourselves to be led into such an ambush is no one’s fault but our own.”
“Aff,” Vera agreed. “We should have seen this coming - and there will be more like it in the future. We will need the tactical skill they have shown this day.”
