by C H Gideon
The contacts appeared on Xi’s screen, converging on 2nd Company’s position from four different vectors. She quickly noted they were moving too slow to be interceptors, but they were moving far faster than anything else should have been able to manage. They were hugging the deck so closely that only Eclipse’s drone-assisted sensors had detected them, which meant that engaging them would be difficult until both they and Xi’s people had line of sight.
“Bogeys inbound,” Xi called over the P2P, priming Elvira’s SRMs in preparation. “Engage at will. Eclipse, forward target locations to 3rd Company.” She switched to the relay-assisted P2P link between Elvira and Generally, Lieutenant Winters’ mech. “Lieutenant Winters, we’ve got bogeys inbound. Requesting intercept support on indicated targets.”
“On the way, Captain,” Winters acknowledged, and a few seconds later both 2nd and 3rd Company unleashed a swarm of missiles against the inbound hostiles. The missiles gently arced above the Lunar surface before diving down on the enemy.
The missiles struck their targets, scrubbing them from the board and heightening Xi’s alertness.
Solarians weren’t stupid; they had been ruthless and tactically sound in everything they had done thus far. They wouldn’t send sixteen assets from four different points of origin without a high degree of confidence that doing so would yield tangible results.
Then she had a thought that snapped everything into focus
“Marines inbound,” she barked over the battalion-wide while loading Elvira’s dual fifteen-kilo guns with high-explosive shells and forwarding fire packages to the rest of the Legion. “We only hit their drop-wings after they abandoned them. All artillery: load HE shells and fire for effect on designated quadrants. Fire! Fire! Fire!”
The long guns of 2nd and 3rd Company cleared, dropping explosive ordnance into the Lunar surface at the most likely locations of the inbound Solar Marines. Even Roy, who had yet to link up with Winters’ people, sent shells through the air at the indicated targets.
“Sargon,” Xi snapped, loading and clearing her guns as fast as they could cycle. “I need eyes on those fields now!”
“On it,” Sargon acknowledged, and the first of the four approach fields was soon covered by a drone’s video feeds. Xi scanned the field, noting the barest glint of metal before the drone was sniped from the void high above the enemy position. “Contacts confirmed in Quadrant Two,” Sargon reported. “Four Solar Marines on approach from that position. Scanning Quadrants One, Three, and Four…”
Xi’s neural-linkage-enhanced senses suddenly overpowered her cognitive process with the urge to juke. She lurched Elvira to the right as hard as she could, acting on a primal survival instinct that needed no words or reason to take total hold of her faculties. She had no conscious idea why she had done so, but as her senses returned to normal, she felt a severe stabbing pain in her shoulder.
Gas hissed as it escaped through a fresh hole in Elvira’s forward armor, and Xi soon realized there was not just one new hole, but three in her mech’s heavily-armored bow.
“Sneaky fuckers!” she snarled in mixed outrage and approval. She pointedly ignored her wounds while sending HE shells in the direction of the railgun slivers. If she was mortally wounded, she wasn’t about to spend one single solitary moment of her life’s last seconds lamenting her pending demise when she could be clearing her guns on the enemy. If she wasn’t mortally wounded, there was no point in worrying about a fresh scar.
She was rewarded with a nearly perfect strike as an HE shell exploded eight meters from a power-armored Solar Marine. The shrapnel caused severe damage, toppling him long enough for Xi to send an SRM to his location just six kilometers from her position.
Xi’s SRM arrived as the Marine regained his feet and erased him from the board. Xi continued juking, bobbing, and weaving evasively, and her efforts were rewarded by direct hits to Elvira’s upper hull instead of the viewport.
Roy sent a railgun strike into one of the Marines, who Xi realized was jumping high above the surface before firing its own railgun at her and her fellow Jocks’ cockpits. This gave the Solarians an advantageous firing arc, to be sure, but it also left them vulnerable if their locations could be bracketed quickly enough.
Missiles flew from 3rd Company’s long-range launchers, slamming into three more Solar Marines before they could reach the apex of their jumps and cause any more damage. Five of the initial sixteen Marines were now off the board, but the remaining eleven proved every bit as crafty as their Terran counterparts.
No longer leaping up from cover, the Marines seemed content to dash hither and thither as the storm of Terran artillery rained down on them with devastating effect. Two more Solar Marines were scrubbed in the span of ten seconds before Xi felt the pit of her stomach fall away.
They’re smarter than this, she thought, keying the mic and preparing to issue a warning to 3rd Company.
It turned out she was too late.
“Taking fire!” Lieutenant Winters declared as a fresh batch of twelve Solar Marine icons appeared on the tactical grid less than a kilometer from Generally’s position at the head of 3rd Company. Both Yekop and Ybmug, identical humanoid Sorcerer-class Tactical-grade mechs, were killed in the opening seconds as precision railgun fire and anti-material rockets streaked from the Marines’ bunkers. Yekop was reduced to a mostly-blackened hulk by enemy ordnance while the pristine white-hulled Ybmug fell ponderously to the regolith, where its interior was wracked by rapid-fire ammo cookoffs.
Preacher and Huang Zhong, the longest-ranged mechs in 3rd Company, suffered sniper fire to their cockpits that knocked Huang Zhong out of the fight long enough for a swarm of Solarian microrockets to exploit the hole in the durable alloy window and hulk the mech by killing its Jock and destroying its nerve center.
Even Lieutenant Winters’ mech Generally was struck by a precise headshot that seemed to have killed 3rd Company’s CO.
Then it was the Legion’s turn.
Roy sent railgun bolts into the Marines’ previously-concealed bunkers, killing two Solar Marines before they could find cover. Preacher sent eight SRMs at the Solarians, and while five were sniped by counter-fire authored by nearby pop-ups, the other three each claimed a Solar Marine with direct hits at the SRM equivalent of point-blank range.
The bizarrely-named Indestructible-Mega-Titan Thunder-God Cid, a towering humanoid mech with a torso comprised almost entirely of missile launchers, vented Terran fury at the Solarian ambushers with a swarm of thirty-two SRMs. Each missile was aimed at a different target, some of those seemingly random points on the Lunar surface. But they were soon revealed to be pop-ups and, in one case, a fortified bunker that Cid had somehow identified when even Eclipse’s high-powered sensors had failed to discover it.
Only three Solarian Marines surrounding 3rd Company survived Cid’s vengeance, and while they fought valiantly, it was only a matter of moments before they would fall.
The entire 3rd Company exchange to that point had lasted eight seconds, but those eight seconds had cost the Legion at least three mechs; possibly four, if Generally was indeed out of the fight. By any measure, eleven power-armored Solar Marines in exchange for three or four Terran mechs was a Terran victory.
But the Legion couldn’t afford to play the attrition game. Luna One probably had hundreds (if not thousands) of Marines scattered across the vast facility. They had been extraordinarily lucky not to have encountered heavier resistance to this point, and still Xi had led her people into one ambush after another, each of which had cost Terran lives.
With that sobering thought in her mind, Xi watched with satisfaction as Cleaver, Mjolnir, and Cave Troll launched four plasma bolts at the remaining Solarians in their quadrant. Bracketing three Marines with their coordinated overlapping fire, the ultra-heavy-hitters of 2nd Company incinerated all three hostiles in a raging inferno that quickly dissipated into the void of space.
Eclipse sent a flight of four SRMs at a pair of isolated Marines. The first somehow
managed to snipe both missiles targeting him with arm-mounted anti-personnel slug-throwers. The second Marine also shot one Terran SRM, but the other missile slipped inside his guard and vaporized the power-armored warrior.
A quick check of the board showed that between 2nd and 3rd Company’s positions, only six Solar Marines remained. Terran artillery fire converged on their positions with deadly precision, slowly but surely taking them out. As the second of the final six fell to Terran fire, Roy’s P2P link went dead.
Xi felt a moment of unrelenting, overwhelming dread at the thought of Colonel Jenkins falling to enemy fire. “No!” she seethed, locking onto the Marines nearest Roy’s position and sending HE shells into them. “That’ll teach you to turn your backs on me, jack-holes!” she yelled triumphantly as one of her shells downed a hostile Marine and the other caused its target to zigzag evasively far faster than any human should be able to move, even with power-armor.
The Solar Marines’ explosive movements were rocket-assisted, much like their Terran counterparts’, but the gee forces of these Solarians’ movements should have been enough to render even a neural-linkage-equipped human unconscious. Here they were, though, hopping, strafing, and sprinting with as much maneuverability and acceleration as void fighters in pitched dogfights. They were able to avoid fully half the inbound SRMs that they didn’t snipe as a result of their insane maneuverability, which had spared many of them from counterfire in the engagement’s opening seconds.
Unfortunately for the Solarians, the Metal Legion had overwhelming firepower and knew how to use it. One by one, the last remaining Solar Marines were eliminated without killing another Terran or significantly damaging any more Terran hardware.
As a final act of defiance, the last two Solarian Marines improbably punctured Mjolnir’s robust armor and compromised its fusion core. The mech died in a five-kiloton explosion, cratering the Lunar surface but thankfully failing to cause serious damage to the nearby Cave Troll.
Xi breathed a sigh of relief when Roy stirred to life, moving at a sprint from its previous position before slowing and altering course to rendezvous with 3rd Company.
Colonel Jenkins’ voice came over the command channel. “Dragon Brigade, this is Roy. Continue moving and forward status updates.”
She heard a rare note of tension in Jenkins’ voice, and Xi immediately recognized it for what it was: the effects of a hasty neural link-up. It would take Roy’s neural linkage system several minutes to deliver the necessary cocktail of drugs to smooth out the link between man and machine, during which time Jenkins would feel like every nerve in his body was taking a sub-zero bath in acid.
That Colonel Jenkins had assumed direct control over Roy meant that Chaps, the mech’s long-time pilot, was down and probably dead from Solarian sniper fire.
Xi directed Elvira and the rest of 2nd Company to resume the march before finally allowing herself to look down at her injured shoulder, the results of which had covered her chest and arm with a thin film of blood. The neural linkage had already administered coagulants and painkillers, but she would need help to close the wound.
“Gordon?” she called over her shoulder. “I need a hand up here.”
“Give me a minute, Captain,” he replied tersely, prompting her to check his status with Elvira’s internal cameras. Her eyes bulged when she saw that he was wrapping his right arm with a bandage. The floor of the rear compartment was covered in coolant, and she quickly reviewed Elvira’s damage control logs to discover the source of the leak.
Her eyes widened in alarm when she realized that the tungsten bolt that had gone clean through her upper chest had improbably ricocheted off Deep Currents’ enviropod, leaving barely a scratch on the miniature Vorr vehicle. The tungsten sliver had then pierced one of Elvira’s main coolant lines, which Gordon had immediately worked to seal. The burns to his arm had resulted from his quick thinking, which preserved most of the system’s coolant reserves at the cost of Gordon’s flesh.
Shutting down the coolant system would have been not only dangerous but caused even more of the precious material to escape the system. By slamming an auto-welding patch on the burst pipe, Gordon had closed the hole less than five seconds after it had been caused.
Gordon emerged into the cockpit with a first aid kit in hand. He winced at seeing how much blood Xi had lost before pouring coagulant powder into her wound. “The pale-faced look doesn’t become you, Captain.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” she quipped, gritting her teeth and yelping as the coagulant powder caused her entire upper chest to flare with pain. He carefully cut her ruined pilot’s suit away from her shoulder, taking obvious care not to expose her breast as he did so. She snorted, reached up, and ripped the garment down to expose everything he needed to see. “Don’t tell me you haven’t already looked in the showers!” She smirked as he flushed appropriately.
“I’d be a liar if I said that and something less than a man if I hadn’t peeked, but holes and being covered in blood is a bit of a turn-off,” he admitted, maintaining his focus while examining the wound. He prodded it with forceps, digging a bit of melted flight suit out before pressing the self-sealing bandage against her chest with enough pressure to make her wince again. “It missed your heart by about five centimeters, Captain, and pierced your lung,” he said grimly as he produced an emergency chest tube kit. “We can’t have that lung collapsing, now can we?”
“Do it.” She nodded, and he tore away some more of her uniform to expose the ideal patch of ribcage for the chest tube. The needle felt like a mere pinprick, which suggested her body was filled with more painkillers than she had previously thought. Painkillers dulled reflexes, even when counteracted by stimulants, which meant Elvira would be less than a hundred percent going forward.
“All done,” Gordon declared, grabbing a second self-adhering bandage and doing a surprisingly decent job of patching her ruined flight suit back together and restoring some semblance of modesty.
“Deep Currents?” Xi asked over her shoulder.
“I am here,” the Vorr replied serenely.
“Are you all right?”
“I am,” Deep Currents assured her.
“Sorry about the bumpy ride,” Xi deadpanned. “One way or another, it’ll all be over soon.”
“Of that, I have no doubt,” the Vorr replied matter of factly, filling Xi with an unwanted sense of foreboding.
After two minutes of active linkage, Roy’s neural systems finally began regulating Jenkins’ nervous system to the point that he no longer had tunnel vision. A few seconds after that, he thought he could feel his individual limbs again rather than an all-consuming burning, crushing sensation.
“That’s better.” He grunted, blinking away the intense agony he had endured after initiating the hasty link. He looked down regretfully at Chaps’ body on the deck beside the bloody pilot’s chair that Jenkins now occupied. “Sorry, Chaps,” Jenkins said sincerely, having unceremoniously thrown his Jock’s remains out of the chair and onto the cabin’s deck.
The Legion’s status reports trickled in as the battered companies resumed their trek to the transceiver array. Jenkins knew that however bad their losses had been during the latest attack, they could have been much, much worse if the Solarians had wanted to hit them for maximum effect.
Instead, the Solar Marines had opted to take sniper shots at the Legion’s pilots, placing greater priority on the Terran command vehicles. Xi had suffered a total of four sniper shots to her cockpit during the engagement thus far, while Roy had been struck three times.
Roy’s cockpit was in the heart of the vehicle, not the head like most of the Armor Corps’ mechs, which only served to make the Solarians’ accuracy that much more impressive.
Generally, 3rd Company’s command vehicle, had also suffered direct hits to its cockpit. While it had fortunately failed to kill Lieutenant Winters, he was out of the fight, in critical condition with multiple chest wounds.
Even Xi had been nearly killed b
y a heart shot, but her extraordinary reflexes seemed to have played a major part in saving her life. With a hefty dose of painkillers and some effective first aid, it was probable that she could stay on the line long enough to complete the op.
In the latest tally, the Legion’s battle-ready surface forces now consisted of just eleven mechs: Elvira, Eclipse, Wolverine, Cave Troll, Generally, Cleaver, Osiris Risen, Preacher, Sam Kolt, Indestructible-Mega-Titan Thunder-God Cid, and Roy.
“Almost there,” Jenkins muttered as the transceiver array drew steadily nearer and he raised Generally over the comm. “3rd Company, in light of Lieutenant Winters’ injuries, I’m assuming command.”
“Glad to hear it, Colonel,” replied the other mech’s Wrench-turned-Jock, a young woman named Quinn who had earned rave reviews from Lieutenant Ford during her time aboard Forktail as its Monkey. She was piloting Generally on manual since she lacked the neural implants, but her aptitudes suggested she would be capable of operating the vehicle at seventy percent effectiveness.
“Rendezvous at the indicated coordinates,” Jenkins ordered. “How’s your CO, Quinn?”
“He’s unconscious, sir,” she replied, her voice taut but clear. “I think… I think he’ll pull through, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“He’d want you focused on your screens and the mission, Chief,” Jenkins told her firmly. “I know it’s hard when he’s lying there, but you need to put him out of your mind. You already did everything you could for him, and if I know Winters, he’d come back to haunt you if you screwed up his company’s performance scores. He’d rather die than have a blemish on his immaculate record.”
Quinn gave a nervous laugh. “Thank you, Colonel. I won’t let you down. Or him.”
“I know you won’t,” Jenkins replied, projecting only slightly greater confidence than he felt. “Just ease back and let the autopilot do the heavy lifting, Generally.”
“Copy that, sir,” Quinn acknowledged, her voice firmer than before.
