Part XL - Section 2 of 2----------
Even more so than most light aerospace fighters, light battlemechs like the twenty-ton
Locust,
Wasp and
Stinger tearing around on the ground far below the aerial dogfight relied upon their speed for protection, not their armour. As such if forced into a pitched battle they would keeping moving as fast as they could, almost as if the life of the mechwarrior in the cockpit depended upon it, which of course it did.
In the chair of a
slightly upgraded LCT-1V
Locust, the original armour plate had been replaced by ferro-fibrous and switching out the machine-guns for lighter clan-tech ones freed up half a ton that was then devoted to a concealed flamer, mechwarrior Dave Robertson was moving at nearly 130kph as he looked for a potential enemy target he might actually be able to handle, or at least annoy enough to draw its attention from someone else that wasn't so hard to hit.
The problem with that approach was, of course, that while going at maximum speed meant you
were much more difficult to hit, it was also much more difficult to hit
back. This intrinsic problem was amplified by the fact that the weapons mounted on a light mech tended to be incapable of the sort of one-punch knockout that was possible for something like a heavy mech carrying a gauss-rifle or massive AC/20 autocannon. Light mechs had to nibble the enemy to death, one tiny bite of armour plate at a time until something mechanically critical underneath was exposed, and if you weren't even hitting a high percentage of your shots anyway because you were running around like a lunatic, then chewing up anything that
wasn't another thinly-skinned light mech like yourself was like trying to consume a cauldron of soup with a teaspoon.
I need to remember not to skip dinner before a battle, Dave Robertson thought to himself as he dodged autocannon fire from a pirate
Centurion, a machine he had never seen before in real life, the metaphors in my internal monologue are all about eating today, he realised firing back with his single medium laser before veering away to avoid getting lit up by a
JagerMech that had taken a sudden interest in him.
These guys sure do have an interesting mix of machines, Robertson considered. It wasn't even that they were a motley collection of various salvaged battlefield scrap, you wouldn't really expect any kind of uniformity from a band of periphery pirates even one this size, the curious thing was that their eclectic collection of battlemechs all seemed to be in pretty good condition.
If he had known at the time that he was facing the Black Warriors, formerly a mercenary regiment who had been given the job of training replacement personnel for the SLDF during the Amaris War it would have made a lot more sense. Aleksandr Kerensky had needed new recruits who could operate most, if not all, of the machines in SLDF service and this had resulted in the Black Warriors being assigned a wide selection of machines for that purpose, including some of the less common or more modern types. Add in what they had later captured from raiding worlds in the Free Worlds League, an occasionally the Lyran Commonwealth, and their extremely varied TO&E made a lot of sense.
As Robertson turned and put some fire into the flank of a pirate
Rifleman that had been near the
Jaegermech, presumably they were part of an air-defence lance, it was all too obvious that what the other side lacked in numbers they made up for in the average weight of their machines. The company of
Manticore tanks on his side that were just now arriving and throwing their firepower into the fray helped a lot but they would have been much more of a decisive factor in a long-range engagement rather than a messy, close-in brawl, their PPC and particularly their LRM launcher being sub-optimal for this kind of battle.
Although lighter and more compact than a standard LRM launcher the Improved LRM system shared its big flaw of having an effective minimum range. It was an indirect fire weapon that launched salvoes off in a ballistic arc and that meant at certain ranges it just wouldn't depress enough to hit something right in front of it. A volley of LRM's passing harmlessly right over an enemy target might look spectacular, it would and leave them wreathed in smoke from all those vapour trails, but it wasn't all that
useful.
The Particle Projector Cannon also had a minimum range, though that was pretty much point-blank by comparison being half that of the LRM, which being due to the need to protect the machines own electrical systems from the PPC hitting something closer than ninety metres away. The lightning that seemed to crackle around a PPC beam wasn't just an amusing light-show, it was absolute hell on electronics if you didn't try and mitigate the problem.
That was another reason why the SLDF had always liked to use mixed companies of
Manticore and
Von Luckner tanks by preference, the former combat vehicle wasn't good at brawling up close, the latter absolutely rocked at it.
Major MacArthur had told his mechwarriors that a priority task was to stop the enemy closing on the
Manticore tanks, this being due not only to the need to make sure they were far enough back from the action to use their weaponry effectively but also because one thing that battlemechs so-equipped
loved to do against tanks was use their jumpjets to leap upwards and land on top of the poor bastards.
Tanks were built tough, but their turrets, and the crews inside them, did not appreciate having fifty-plus tons of weight come suddenly crashing down on top. This was actually a move which MacArthur would have always thought about a lot as he drove a
Highlander which specialised in the tactic, though massing ninety tons and despite that mounting jumpjets which could send it high into the air the
Highlander would do it to
everything, including mechs, and at every possible opportunity.
They called it the 'Highlander Burial' because if the ninety-ton assault jumped on a light mech, for example, it could literally drive it into the ground like a tent-peg.
It was risky for the mech too of course, unless the landing was performed perfectly it could result in serious damage to the jumper as well as the jumpee with the latter potentially toppling over and crashing into the ground
hard, but it remained one of the quickest ways to end a fight and something tank crews rightly feared.
Rolling into what had already become a confused mess of brawling mechs before they arrived the tank company rolled in guns and missiles blazing, Robertson happy to see that the experienced tank crews knew their trade with a whole lance of them throwing everything they had at a pirate
Awesome. The assault mech in question mounted three PPC's, almost as many as the whole lance of tanks between them, but like the
Manticore it was a long-range specialist and unlike them it didn't have a SRM launcher to help it cope a little better with these less-than-ideal combat conditions.
As Robertson kept his
Locust moving, speed was life, he noted other pirate mechs including the
Rifleman he had just shot at quickly coming to the aid of their beleaguered comrade in the
Awesome, indicating that they knew their trade as well.
What they
didn't know was that while a standard
Manticore carried eleven tons of regular armour plate,
these ones had not only been refitted on Niops with superior ferro-fibrous armour, a type that nobody else in the Inner Sphere had been able to manufacture in nearly thirty years, they carried three more tons of it as well.
The tanks weren't the only ones soaking up considerably more incoming fire than they should have been able to take. Most of the SLDF battlemechs had been retrofitted in much the same way, with thicker plates of tougher material which was slowing their descent towards a fateful combat-loss-grouping scenario.
The outnumbered pirates had needed to even the odds, and their best way of doing that was to use their bigger, heavier mechs to knock a few of the smaller, lighter SLDF machines out of the fight quickly. Even if they weren't actually destroyed, a tank or mech stripped of most of its armour would usually seek to pull back from the middle of the action before it was, unless it was one of those 'glorious death' seeking maniacs from the Draconis Combine in the cockpit anyway. Objectively it was a perfectly sound tactic, and their commander's choice of ground synergised very nicely with it as these ranges worked in her favour as well.
The problem for the Black Warriors as the battle continued was that these Niops people just
weren't starting to fall in droves like they
should have been by now. Even the primarily autocannon and missile armed SLDF machines that should have been more heedful of losing armour because of the risk of taking a hit to their ammunition magazines, and subsequently going up like Krakatoa from the resultant internal explosion, seemed far too content to take the hits and keep on firing back.
Unlike the machines belonging to the Black Warriors their firing rate wasn't noticeably dropping off after the first few minutes of frantic action either. Normally, as internal heat levels rose due to waste heat from firing your guns more attention had to be paid to keeping mechs from overheating and potentially shutting down, something that tended to result in battles starting as a crescendo of fire which gradually petered off as cockpits started to get uncomfortably warm and warning lights started to blink.
Watching a
Warhammer that was painted up in regulation SLDF olive drab, one of the small handful of Niops mechs larger than a medium in the fight, deliberately move to take on a larger
Zeus assault, one that the Black Warriors had captured a few years earlier during a raid into the Lyran Commonwealth, something else became quickly apparent to Angelica Cirion. That son-of-a-bitch must be using double-heat-sinks because otherwise it simply wouldn't be able to keep firing at that rate without overheating and shutting down, she realised.
Cirion quickly assessed the other Niops machines as best she could, paying particular attention to those like the
Warhammer that were usually thought of as 'under-sinked', unable to dump anywhere near as much waste heat as fast as their weapons generated it, and quickly concluded that the
Warhammer was not an isolated case.
Double Heat Sinks had been getting rarer over time, there were very few factories in the Inner Sphere left that could still make them after so much of the former Terran Hegemony had been blasted to rubble, and the Great Houses carefully husbanded their available supplies. They weren't actually lostech yet, but they were certainly scarce enough that you wouldn't expect to run into an entire battalion of machines that
all seemed to have them.
Bringing the guns of her
Battlemaster assault mech to bear on an
Orion that was hosing its AC/5 autocannon, SRM launcher and lasers at one target, while volleying LRM's at a more distant one , Angelica Cirion opened up with her PPC and massed battery of medium lasers, aiming for the armour above where the internal ammunition stores were situated on the
opposition heavy.
Sitting in the cockpit of the
Orion Jennifer McEvedy winced as a big chunk of her armour plate was scorched off and instantly manoeuvred so that the
Battlemaster wouldn't be able to hit the same place again with their next volley. Her
Orion was no faster than the pirate assault mech so she wouldn't be able to just outpace the thing and get away, but she could at least make the thing work for it.
Thanks to the retrofitting of CASE protection around the ammunition magazines McEvedy didn't have to fear a catastrophic internal explosion that might have scattered both her machine and herself in small chunks over a wide area but that
Battlemaster was still a lot more mech than you would want to duke it out with in an
Orion and she was about to request assistance when a PPC lanced out and caught the
Battlemaster in the flank.
Katrina in her
Griffin medium, too close to the
Battlemaster to use her LRM launcher as well but just her PPC made for a nice distraction.
"Annoying little shit" Cirion growled as the particle-projector-cannon seared armour off her left torso. It wasn't that the
Griffin was really a realistic threat to a
Battlemaster from where it currently was, it was that she couldn't give her full attention to the
Orion if she had to worry about the medium potentially working its way around and put shots into her rear where that PPC would hurt a great deal.
Another enemy medium, this one a
Shadow Hawk, arrived on the scene and opened up on Cirion's
Battlemaster before a volley of SRM's caught it in the chest, these being fired by one of Cirion's lance-mates in a
Crusader who followed it up with their lasers.
The
Shadow Hawk switched targets and fired back at the
Crusader as more mechs arrived on the scene from both sides and the area immediately surrounding Cirion turned into a maelstrom of fire, the enemy mediums and occasional heavy seeming only too willing to go head-to-head with larger machines bearing the skull and crossbones insignia of the Black Warriors.
Anjelica Cirion wasn't inexperienced or inept and she had always been able to keep a clear head under pressure, analysing the situation dispassionately despite being in the middle of a firefight. Logically she wasn't up against
actual SLDF royal mechs, for one thing that
Phoenix Hawk over yonder with the red Cameron Star on it that was shooting at one of her pair of
Ostsol heavies would have a visually very distinct ERPPC instead of a large laser on its right arm if it was an PXH-1b instead of a regular PXH-1. Nevertheless, it very much looked like these Star League stragglers had spent the decades since Kerensky picked up his toys and left upgrading their machines to a sort-of pseudo-royal with DHS replacing the original sinks and, judging by the damage they were soaking up, presumably Ferro-Fibrous armour plate as well.
Cirion wondered if the reason she was finding that so hard to believe was her innate bias against anything so financially extravagant. The Black Warriors were mercenaries and privateers, pirates if you were going to be blunt about it, and they fought battles intending to make a handsome profit from them. Ferro-Fibrous armour
was inarguably superior to regular armour, something like twelve-percent better at absorbing incoming fire per ton if she was remembering correctly, but it cost
twice as much per ton so if your priority was the bottom line on the accounting ledger you just wouldn't use the stuff.
Thanks to the need to protect against directed-energy weapons, lasers and PPC's, armour had to be ablative, burning off to dissipate incoming fire. Even autocannon shells and missiles tended to carry HEAP (High Explosive Armour Piercing) warheads rather than other types because they whittled down such armour faster than pure kinetic impact or shaped-charges did. This meant that armour was effectively a consumable item, one that was used up in battle, and Ferro-Fibrous was
expensive.
Even the Star League with its immense military budget had never up-armoured
all its war machines with the superior, but pricier, armour type Cirion knew. But then
they had armed forces so large that they could sacrifice a little quality for quantity.
If you didn't have vast armies, but
did have good technical know-how, weren't planning on feeding your military continually into the grinder like the Successor States and had the money to do it then you
could go all Ferro-Fibrous like Niops apparently had. On the other hand,
holy crap you must
really want to punch above your weight class to take
that approach!
Ferro-fibrous replacing standard plate alone couldn't explain just
how many hits they were taking without being brought down, so they must be enjoying a lot of luck as well and that would inevitably run out at some point, but this was
not how she had wanted or needed the battle to go in the early stages.
It clearly wasn't just luck that was keeping their light mechs in the fray though, Cirion had to concede. This
wasn't good ground for fast-moving machines that being why she chose it, the terrain was uneven and rocky in places as well as being littered with features like ravines and depressions that restricted line-of-sight. Despite that the olive-drab twenty and twenty-five tonners were somehow rushing around like maniacs, dodging incoming fire as they went without tripping or stumbling, all while making an unlikely percentage of their own shots as they went. It wasn't
freakishly skilful piloting, Cirion had known a number of light-mech specialists in her own Black Warriors regiment who could have done it too, it was just odd that they could
all apparently drive their machines so hard and so fast on unsuitable ground.
In any military command there was always a gradient of abilities, a few aces at the top, a few people at the bottom who just barely scraped in, and the majority somewhere in-between. If that rule was also true of Niops then either they had left all their mediocre mech-jocks at home or their average performance was bizarrely higher than could be expected. Again, the latter wasn't
entirely unprecedented for an SLDF unit, the veterans that trained Cirion would occasionally mention with a degree of awe regiments such as the Black Watch who had put their
entire roster through the old Gunslinger Program to hone their skills, not just their elite mechwarriors as was the norm, this resulting in a frankly epic level of battlefield effectiveness, but the 295th Battlemech Division was
not the Black Watch.
They weren't unbeatable either, far from it. Cirion watched as one of her
Victor assaults blew the head right off a Niops
Wolverine with its AC/20, all the fancy ferro-fibrous in the world unable to stop
that happening, and she herself pulverized that annoying
Griffin, the mechwarior inside ejecting after the battery of lasers on Cirion's
Battlemaster scorched off enough armour for its PPC to breach the engine compartment of the medium mech, but her losses were mounting faster than hers and they had more machines to start with.
The crunch-point came when a pair of
Rapier heavy fighters came in on an apparent strafing run, her air-defence lance doing their best to try and ward them off by opening up with their autocannons firing flak shells, only to start taking what seemed to be ERPPC fire from elsewhere in the sky.
The
Rapier heavy fighters had seemingly drawn fire so that other fighters above could get a bead on the
Rifleman and
Jaegermech air-defence mechs and pin them down from beyond the range of their own guns. Accuracy wasn't great at that range, particularly not from a fast-mover in the sky, but it didn't exactly do wonders for the aim of the mechs being plinked at with particle-beam-cannon fire either.
Coming around for a second pass, a real one this time, the
Rapier duo strafed anything in front of their guns that wasn't painted olive-drab and then pulled up, climbing into the sky.
At the same time the SLDF
Highlander avenged the
Wolverine that had gone down earlier to the
Victor by blowing the latter's own head off with its gauss rifle.
By this point broken and fallen mechs littered the landscape, most belonging to the Black Warriors and the situation was continuing to degenerate for Cirion's people. They could take a lot more of the Niops mechwarriors and tankers with them, but they weren't going to get out of here alive if they did.
Fighting valiantly to the last man in a glorious defeat surrounded by the corpses of the foe may sound romantic but that wasn't really what the Black Warriors were ever about. Fortunately the Cirion family had always planned for what to do if an operation went spectacularly sideways like this one had, a contingency plan that relied upon the fact that they weren't your typical pirate band.
"This is Major Anjelica Cirion offering my surrender and that of my unit to the commanding officer of the Niops forces on Illyria" she signalled on multiple frequencies. "In order to save lives on both sides I request a cessation of hostilities."
"
You had your chance to surrender before the battle, pirate" came the immediate response.
"We are not pirates" Cirion replied. "We are the armed forces of the Circinus Federation conducting a pre-emptive strike against the Illyrian Palatinate on the orders of my government" she announced. "If we lay down our arms we insist we are taken as prisoners of war with the customary protections afforded by the Ares Convention and the other rules and customs of war. I have official documentation with me to prove my claim and you can verify our identity with the government on Circinus who will confirm sending us on this mission."
A long pause at the other end of the line indicated her opposite number was thinking about it. "
Bullshit" they said eventually.
"If I'm lying you can still hang me as a pirate" Cirion pointed out. "I also insist that you not turn me over to the Illyrian militia, we're
your prisoners not theirs."
"
This had better not be some kind of ****** trick because if it is you'll wish you died in battle, trust me.
With the proviso that if this is a ruse I'll put the rope around your neck personally I accept your surrender."
"Of course I trust you, you're the SLDF" Cirion replied smirking. Dad back home was going to be
really pissed off about this monumental ******, but he'd get over it, and the current president was well aware of the deal her grandfather had done with his predecessor whereby the government of Circinus would go along with the cover story for a raid gone all to crap.
Actually their 'just-in-case' pre-planned cover story for this particular mission was better than most, being at least
vaguely plausible. It wasn't what you'd call
convincing, but hopefully it was at least good enough to spare her the hangman's noose.
When he heard it later as Cirion formally handed over her sidearm Major Robert MacArthur described the cover-story as 'bullshit', that quickly becoming his word of the day, but it wasn't quite bullshit enough for him to not decide that this was a problem for someone higher up the chain of command than him to deal with.
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Note from the Author:The Royal and/or 'Early-Clan' versions of the Tomahawk and Rapier are considerably better than the standard models. If the Sparrowhawk pilot had any idea there was a fighter with an ERPPC on his tail they wouldn't have played with them like they did.Ferro-Fibrous armour became lostech in the Inner Sphere in around 2810. It was superior to standard armour (about 12% more effective per ton at absorbing damage) but cost twice as much meaning that it doesn't make good sense financially if you're trying to maintain a very large military (or are trying to turn a profit by raiding). Niops uses a lot of Ferro-Fibrous (quality over quantity) in their machines and since a lot of their Improved Weaponry is lighter and more compact than normal they can also carry a greater weight of it.Double-Heat-Sinks (DHS) mean that a mech can keep firing for longer without overheating. They're not actually lostech by 2839 but they're increasingly rare and you certainly wouldn't expect to see them retofitted universally to machines that didn't have them originally. A rolling program of upgrades since they arrived at Niops in 2827 (weapons first, then armour and heatsinks as manufacturing was spun up) means that an awful lot of SLDF machines can dish it out and take it to a excessive degree.
Cirion actually chose her ground very well and there was no way she could have known that her opposition were a bunch of genetically-engineered freaks piloting mechs that were pseudo-royals armed with weaponry that she didn't know existed. For example, autocannon and LRM armed machines such as the Orion and Shadow Hawk save so much weight on weaponry (thanks to the lightweight 'Improved' gear) that they carry far more armour than anyone would expect. Meanwhile a Warhammer with DHS to deal with all the heat generated by its PPC's is a very different beast than a regular Warhammer (plus the Improved PPC is a ton lighter so you can up-armour it too).
