TormentedDragon
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“Tess’ Journal – Farpoint Station, second moon of Laurezia. What I’ve feared has come to pass. Garrison duty has turned out to be really, really boring.” She paused here, biting the end of her stylus as she looked at the writing tablet, reading the line she’d just written. She sighed, and put the tip back down to the screen. “And stars, that line makes me think of my cousin. Oh well. It’s still the truth. After all, garrison duty is nothing but tedium – live in the barracks, go out on patrols, maintain equipment, go through the drills. I can’t say I’m not busy, but it’s all busywork. It’s all stuff designed to make sure we stay alert, don’t lose our edge, keep our skills up. All necessary. All as tedious as it was back in basic.”
She paused again, eyes slipping skyward to look at the starry sky. Of course, this sky was always starry – the moon had not been terraformed, and had no atmosphere of its own, so even when Laurezia’s sun was in view you could still see the stars if you looked in the right direction. “When I signed on with the Second Solar I guess I had a rather unrealistic picture of what I’d be doing; surgical strikes, ops deep behind enemy lines, solo missions – I mean, I did train for those. But then, so did everybody else. When you pilot a mech, it’s important not to be limited by your operational training – or I suppose that was the philosophy behind all that. Either way, those missions are more along the lines of spec ops and vanguard forces, and I guess I just didn’t consider that I’d have to make a tour as part of a garrison force.”
She sighed again. She was too darn reasonable, sometimes. “It makes sense, I guess. You don’t want to have a rookie on the front lines, where inexperience can threaten the op. I know I wouldn’t want a green recruit watching my back on a delicate mission, or the like. But (and this is the curious thing about things that are entirely reasonable and sensible) it doesn’t make it any less boring.” Here she put down the tablet, stood up, and stretched, working the lingering ache out of her joints and muscles. The day had been a full one, and in contrast to the claims of tedium, out of the ordinary. She’d gone on her patrol, and halfway through, had found herself struggling to keep her mech from faceplanting in the lunar terrain. From there, it had a been a long, grueling hour’s work to limp it back to base, all the while correcting for balance, something the Bann Sidhe’s own automatic systems were supposed to take care of. She vaguely remembered asking its AI just what the hell the problem was, but it had answered in its usual method of full technical disclosure, which was usually helpful but required you to be able to give your full attention.
Rolling her head around on her shoulders, she yawned, and turned back to her journal. “I suppose part of the problem I’m facing is that, here, tedium is a good thing. Excitement means combat, which means danger, and means that the lives of the people we’re garrisoned here to guard are threatened, or it means lots of annoying, tedious work, such as today’s incident (ref. Maintenance Report T3-BS7.93.01). Seems someone didn’t seal Sidhe’s chassis properly, and now she’s got a knee problem. One good thing came out of it though: Leftenant Rogers was damned impressed I got her back to base in upright fashion, and so were my patrol mates. So, impressed the CO without rubbing my fellow soldiers wrong. I’ll call that a victory.”
* * *
“Well,” she muttered, blinking the sweat away from her eyes, “I suppose I asked for this.” She was in a poor position – isolated, injured, and attempting to evade pursuit. Under the circumstances, she couldn’t help but think about that whiny little journal entry of hers, and scoff at herself yet again – not that she hadn’t done so even as she’d wrote it. “Come on, Tess, you can do this. You’ve patrolled these dunes for the past eight months, you know how they work. They’ve just got their topography charts to work off of.”
It was nigh impossible to actually shake close pursuit in the lunar environment. Sure, ECM and counter ECM and high grade ECM could damp their sensors and screen your presence with in a cacophony of electronic data, but there was nothing you could do about the tracks. With no atmosphere, there was no wind, there was no plant life, there was nothing to wipe away or hide the evidence of the passage of machine or man. Of course this meant that tracks criss-crossed each other and eventually carpeted the landscape, but yours would always be on top. And yours would always carry a heat signature – no atmosphere meant no convection, and no convection meant that heat didn’t have anywhere to go, really, at least not quickly.
With any kind of semi-advanced heat-tracking system, you could not only find recent tracks, but know exactly how old they were. So she couldn’t hope to lose her pursuers. She’d have to either take them out or evade them long enough to lead them into friendlies. That last would be difficult – she was farther away from friendly patrol lines now than she’d been when they’d first encountered the hostiles.
“Alright then, you Reichert bastards, let’s see how you like a proper ambush.” There were larger dunes coming up ahead, ones big enough that, for all its size, not even the Bann Sidhe could see over the top of. They weren’t ideal, but ‘ideal’ was always and ever a pipe dream in field of combat. Putting on an extra turn of speed and making sure her ECM was still doing its level best to deafen every listening system in the area, she took herself around the dune. If they wanted to stick with her they’d have to send at least one unit to follow her tracks exactly, which was what she was banking on.
Her trail set, she swiveled the war machine around and reversed the throttle, thankful that she was no longer suffering from knee issues. Its pace a fraction of what it had been before, the titan walked backwards, the massive gatling cannon at the ready. And then, she waited. The seconds stretched into minutes, the sweat got into her eyes again, and she started to wonder just where the hell the pursuit was. Wait, there … movement. Almost at the same time, the computer picked up on it, and painted the approaching mech on her HUD, its sensors analyzing and comparing to data already gathered. It was the Chimera, the same unit that had managed to flank her patrol and cut down Simms with a devastating cannon burst. She grinned, her cannon already spinning, her finger twitching on the trigger.
Just as the mech came into full view, the HUD’s focus shifted, warnings scrolling across the screen to the effect that she was being fired on from a separate angle. She cursed, and punched the throttle, sending her girl backwards at quadruple the pace she’d been moving before. No wonder it had taken so long – they’d sent the Moorcat up the dune. The cock-pit shuddered a bit as the shots impacted on the Sidhe’s shield, and stars was she glad she’d set her shielded side towards the dune. Her finger came down on the trigger, and the battle was joined.
The Bulletstorm’s barrels wasted no time in spitting out its deadly fire – massive slugs large enough to rival shots from a hand-held tankbuster. At speed, and under fire herself, the accuracy of the weapon was not exactly great, evidenced the enormous bursts of lunar dust as the shots impacted the surface of the moon rather than the surface of the mech. Still, it wouldn’t take much – the Chimera was a functional but rather fragile chassis, and she was more concerned with making sure it didn’t get a clear shot on her. She had faith in the Sidhe’s armor, but those cannons had ripped through Simms’ Fenris like it was so much tinfoil, and she had no desire to be on the receiving end of a similar salvo.
With battle joined, the enemy ECM had softened, and the Sidhe was suddenly warning her of a third enemy inbound, coming around the other side of the dune. She grimaced, turning so that her mech was now walking away from the dune, keeping her shield presented to the Moorcat. She had to take this Chimera down, at least, and so she kept up the fire, trusting to her mech’s sensors and her own steady aim to find the target even in the midst of the explosions of dust. And finally, after nearly 35 seconds of sustained fire, she was rewarded with the nearly blinding spars that signified a direct hit. Or, given the sheer rate of fire the Bulletstorm was capable of, six or seven direct hits. There was a scream of tortured electronics across her sensors, and the sudden, tell-tale skybound trail of an ejection system.
She barely had time to register her victory when the HUD started screaming at her again. The Moorcat had switched from its beam weapons, which had proved incapable of penetrating the ray shielding on her shield, to its array of missile weaponry, and that was a much more signifant threat. In a slight panic, she brought the barrel of her cannon to bear, leaving a trail of blasted landscape as it swung across the field, each slug tossing the particulate up into the air for a few fractions of a second before gravity asserted its dominance. With enough slugs, and given the size of each cloud generated, however brief, it had the nice side-effect of playing havoc with most targeting systems.
It did not, however, prevent the Moorcat from getting enough of a lock to send a salvo down towards her. Her own stream of fire quickly caught up with it, exposed as it was on the top of the dune, and as its missiles raced towards her, she saw her slugs tear through its legs, sending the enemy mech toppling to the ground, effectively removing it from combat. She had just enough time to swivel the Sidhe’s torso to the right and draw the left arm over a bit, presenting the shield, front and center, before the missiles hit.
There were explosions. There was fire. There was, above all, a sever rattling of the cockpit that made her grateful for the straps that held her firmly in place, and the helmet that kept her head from whipping about. But at the end of it, she was alive, the Sidhe was functional, and she’d managed to keep it from toppling over despite the repeated concussive blasts. There was damage, of course there was, to the exposed portions of the mech, mainly the legs and the pelvic area, but it wasn’t bad, and it wasn’t at all beyond what was expected in combat. For having eliminated two mechs entirely on her own, she was in damn good shape.
But there was now that third one to deal with, and as both she and Sidhe recovered from the rattling, she reversed throttle again, this time moving to intercept. If she remembered right, the remaining chassis should be a Panther, more of a scout chassis than an actual combat chassis. If it had managed to flank her, she’d have been in trouble, but with its combat partners down, the last mech shouldn’t be a problem.
“Unless, of course,” she muttered, brow furrowed in irritation, “he decides to book it.” Enemy ECM had suddenly gone back to full roar, and based on the last accurate telemetry, the Panther had been starting to head away from her. That made sense, though. The Bann Sidhe was a modified Sentinel model, a full-fledged war chassis, and she’d managed to take out his two mates in quick succession. He’d have to be a right fool to try and take her on alone. “And I’d have to be a right fool to try and chase him,” she sighed, and instead logged in a course for home. She still had a job to do.
< Message edited by TormentedDragon -- 11/3/2011 14:24:07 >
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