IWTTD Chpt 10

If We Turn To Dust

- Chapter 10 -

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<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>

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Light from the Heavens

FIFTH MILITARY CORRIDOR, TAHLWYN VALLEY
DIERON, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
NOVEMBER 12TH, 3027

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Outside Sweet Memory's cockpit glass, it was dawn. Dieron, the star, wasn't visible yet, still hidden behind the ridgelines that framed the Tahlwyn Valley, but the sky was frozen golden and dark blue with its light, a few scattered high clouds blazing as their altitude gave them a better angle, and equally scattered lower ones dark against the luminous background. The screens inside the cockpit showed just how much activity was going on around me - battlemechs and armored vehicles coming to life all across the dozens of miles of frontage that crossed the Tahlwyn Valley as the 19th Arturan Guards and my own mercenaries and feudal levies swung out of bivouacs and bunkers and began to rumble forwards…

But through the window, the morning was calm.

Calm, at least, until Sweet Memory obeyed the brush of my booted toes against its pedals and stood, leaning to one side to get one foot under its seventy tons and then lunging to its feet in one smooth motion that snapped the restraint lines of the camouflage netting like a man walking through a spiderweb.

Noton's Rifleman, Ghost Story, shed the piled leaf cover and ghillie panels that had been its camouflage like a man standing up from under a snowbank, raining fragments down on all sides. I couldn't see either of the other mechs in the lance, since they'd been placed in the rear of the lance, but the additional detail their sensors added to the battle net was obvious on those screens.

The biome around us was what I thought of as Californian; yellow-green quillar fields, yellow-brown grasses and undergrowth not as dead as they seemed despite the summer drought, and looming over them, the dark green of conifer needles.

The Arcturan Guards were headed northeast, straight at Natasha Kerensky's 14th Legion of Vega and the odds and ends of surviving flotsam that had accrued to them since they arrived at the Cauldron of Dieron. Our course was due north, towards the road and pass that led up to the Caanane Valley where Sophitia's battalion had been cut off, weeks before.

The thought made the fear that I'd been determinedly sitting on since reading that terse note scratch at the walls of its prison again. I kicked it in the face to tumble it back down in its hole, and focused on stepping Sweet Memory over a battered gravel side road.

We thundered through a windbreak of pines and out onto another expanse of growing quillar, and then another. It was about ten minutes, when I checked the clock after the fact, before we rolled into range of some of the surviving infantry, left behind as rearguard when the 'valuable' mechwarriors pulled out.

They announced themselves with a volley of shoulder-launched missiles from all across the trench we were approaching, a thready curtain of contrails that failed to lock onto the first available target - me - and went to a random scatter, only a handful of lucky examples stumbling blind into my armor or sweeping their infrared seekers across the rest of my lance.

I picked out two of the bunker roofs showing on the rear side of their trench and put a PPC bolt into each of them; one blew apart as stored missiles cooked off, and I pushed Sweet Memory into a full run. In the rear monitor, Ghost Story fell back, LRMs hissing off of its upper weapon mounts and arching overhead to come down scattered along the line of the trench. Minakshi swung Thief's Respite out to the left and Rora Motochika pushed his own Agincourt out to my right, covering my flanks in a way that frankly, I didn't spend enough time and effort appreciating.

A few of the missileers managed to reload and fire again before we reached it, and they concentrated their fire on the two advancing mechs they could get a lock on. The vivid red-orange blossoms of inferno gel burst and clung across both flanking machines, smoke and sparks trailing behind them as they ran, and did, of course, nothing at all to slow them.

Each of us aimed at one of the advancing points of the zigzagging trench, and as we started to pass over, slowed. The men in those trenches took what cover they could, pressing themselves against the near walls, and… It didn't help.

The Battlemaster's left arm swept back and forth as Minakshi swept a hellstorm of fire up and down the exposed length of her section of trench, while the Archer - which Motochika had had modified to paired machine guns to each arm in trade for its rear lasers and half a ton of armor when he had it refitted for freezers - swept its own limbs wide and drowned a wide swathe in bullets. Sweet Memory's computer drew a similar line under the commands I sent through my neurohelmet, beam directors on its pulse lasers raking their strobing beams across the area I was facing.

None of us had hesitated.

I looked away from the results, and we pushed on. Even if the survivors of that could pull themselves together enough to do more than just surrender, they'd lost the numbers to even slow down the conventional forces following us.

Okha Missile Tank

I fell back from point and took a moment to check on the progress of the evolution, and found that our experience had been pretty typical. Other places people were running into dug-in Ohkas rather than just infantry, but Okhas… Weren't enough to stop a determined push, not without some kind of stiffener or a large numerical advantage, and with the Arkab Legion gone, the only mech force left to back them up was Kerensky's - and our armor, which had seen much less attrition over the campaign, actually had them outnumbered.

My command lance had gotten off light for the price of our own encounter, but the only Lyrans who were paying more than lost armor for theirs were the truly unlucky.

As much as the valley bottom looked flat on a topographic map, on the ground it was less so, gently rolling up into low ridges and then back down to bottomland where alluvial fans had been mostly eroded or were starting to form. From the top of each rise I could see the flicker and flash of energy weapon fire ahead of us and off into the distance to left and right, before it vanished again into sloping fields and windbreak treelines.

I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up, an itching feeling telling me that there was another shoe waiting for a chance to drop, and at first I expected it to be a company or more of tanks dug into the reverse slope at the crest of one of those hills - mostly hidden behind the earth itself, with only their pre-sighted turrets poking up to take shots at our highlighted mechs at close range.

And then, thundering across one low field, instinct or some other inchoate warning yanked my gaze - and my sights - up.

"All units," I snapped, without any decision to do so, "Starlight! I say again, Warning Starlight, Starlight, Starlight!"

Rifleman Heavy 'Mech

Gray Noton didn't have whatever was warning me, but he fired first anyway. The man was that damned good at his business. Each autocannon burst, each laser, each flight of missiles lifting away from his Rifleman found a different target, taking a six-plane bite out of the formation of air-breathing fighters rocketing overhead at shockingly low altitude. A bird went down to Minakshi's particle blast, another vanished in a storm of missiles from Rora, and without time to consider that it might be a bad idea I split my own fire three ways, one PPC to one bird and the short-range battery at the last.

I got away with it, sort of. Sunburn heat broke out all across my body as the reactor labored to meet my needs, like sticking an arm in an oven, but one PPC cored straight through a fighter's cockpit and two of the lasers sheared a second's wings off as neatly as you please.

The last PPC hit its target's left wing and blew it off in a cloud of fragments, throwing the Kaiten into a falling spiral that its pilot could do nothing to abate or resist. As it vanished out of my view behind me, more fire started to rise from the formations around us, ripping through the now scattered and evading Combine airstrike with desperate intensity as every single weapon on our side turned to killing them right now.

More fell and shattered, and more. The fighter I'd hit took a second or so to fall below the crest of the hill behind me, in my rear monitor, as my guns cooled and recharged for a second salvo and I looked and felt for the next most dangerous target.

And Jerry Akuma, Warlord of Dieron, said… Let there be light.

It seemed as though the entire sky went black, and the ground in front of and around me transformed into a hard-edged, impossibly stark black and white relief. Overhead, the remaining fighters were points of impossible brilliance, painful to look at, and I flinched away, automatically closing my eyes.

The polarization layers built into my cockpit glass were enough to save my vision and life from weapons-grade laser fire, and they did the same for the backflash of a nuclear detonation only a couple of kilometers away - but at that kind of intensity, some things shone through anyway, particularly the aircraft that were high enough to be in a direct line-of-sight to the blast that had come from the fighter I shot down.

Starlight, for the fire at the heart of every sun, was the warning code for incoming nuclear weapons.

A moment later the pressure wave washed over me and knocked Sweet Memory forwards off of its feet; the seventy ton 'mech took a moment to fall even so and reflex programmed into me and its computers alike brought the long cannon arms out to catch our fall. Which of course had far too much chance of damaging them, but first, instinct didn't care, and second, even if it had that would have still been preferable to the smashing that an unbroken fall would have caused.

It was, as usual, like being in a crashing car - and then every electronic system aboard cut out, leaving me in pitch black, accompanied only by the ringing in my ears from the almighty bang that had cut right through cockpit isolation and neurohelmet alike.

I reached out to hit the reset - missed, because I wasn't in Marauder No. 2 any more and Warhammers had that in a different place - swore and felt for the right switch. While ambient heat started to bleed through from the environment and warm the cockpit up by degrees.

Fortunately, it was designed to be found in the dark and so was shaped like nothing else in the cockpit. I flipped the cover off and hit the Hard Start button.

<{"A skyhole here, the sun's let in."}> the rebooting computer prompted.

Very fucking funny, universe, I thought, and said, "It melts the ice, it melts my skin."

Sweet Memory came back to life in a rush of cool air from the cockpit vents. <{""Reactor, Online. Sensors, Online. Weapons systems, Online. Short range missile ammunition, at, ninety, three percent. Rear center armor at, forty, percent. Rear right armor at, thirty, percent. Rear left armor at-"}>

I let Bitching Betty keep up her report while I hauled the Warhammer back to its feet and looked around. Minakshi's Battlemaster had only dropped to one knee under the impact, benefiting from its greater mass, while Motochika's Archer was still laid out. Noton had somehow managed to keep his feet despite being ten tons lighter than any of us and was tracking his guns in a vast circle as he reoriented. All of them looked about as crispy as I felt.

I left him to it and checked on the wider status of things; two bombs had gone off in that strike, one behind me - obviously - and another right on top of the Arcturans' point company… Which, given that they'd just been hitting real resistance, meant that that nuclear strike had killed about three times as many Combine units as Lyran ones. Which might be the pilot's fault or might be the commander's, depending if the carrying fighter had also been going down at the time.

Closer to home… "Hammer, Blackwing," I sent.

"Hammer here," came the reply, barely recognizable through the distortion and static. "Good, you're alive."

"So far. Losses?"

"My panzers are no longer combat effective," he said bluntly. "And the hovers are worse. Repairable, mostly, but it'll be days. With what that second blast did to the Snakes, the Arcturans will be able to push hard as soon as they've got themselves sorted out again. I'm peeling my mechs off and attaching them to yours; if Carlisle and Dessau push, they'll catch up to you by the time you reach the pass. Push up into Caanane and do the final sweep there; with three battalions and your command company, Kerensky's 14th Vega will keep withdrawing rather than testing you, and there's not enough left of the Snake conventionals to matter at this point."

I considered that plan; it could work, and work well. But… "No cover while you're doing your repairs?"

"Suzuki's people were further from ground zero and still have some mobility. I'll consolidate them; you and the rest of the mechs won't need the support. The Snakes will have bigger problems."

I wasn't sure I agreed with that assessment, but I'd given Hammer the command authority… And it gave me an excuse to go with my emotional priorities rather than trying to second guess if those were wise.

"Understood. On my way. Blackwing, out." I let him cut the line, which he did without comment, and turned my attention to swinging a regiment of battlemechs into motion to arrive at the same place at the same time, more or less.

I got maybe halfway through what I'd planned to say - which was, fortunately, enough to get them where we needed to be, just not without confusion - when the incoming communication light pinged again. I summed up what had been intended to be a much longer plan with, "When we get to the pass, Frenchie's people-" Major Dessau's Night Heat had two companies, one light and one medium, "-have point, then Farmer,-" Lu Clair and the battalion of Chameleons he'd brought from "-then me, then Viper-" the battlemech battalion of Hammer's Slammers, under the entirely too serpentine Joachim von Steuben, "-and Railman in rearguard." Carlisle and his lightweight 'mech company. "If you get there too early for your position, wait. Nutcracker, out."

Then I could pick up from… Huh.

"Nutcracker, Old Dog Actual," Jaime Wolf's voice said. "I… Given the availability of your insight, I would like to request your endorsement to limit my Case Revelation response to Category Three."

Case Revelation was the section of Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces Doctrine that dealt with nuclear and other strategic weapons. Category One assumed the broad availability of strategic weapons of our own, Category Two that there were only a handful on hand, and Category Three called for making a point about what the Commonwealth considered unacceptable conduct using only ground troops and their normal support.

"Give your reasoning, please," I said, over the objections of my inner what-the-fuck.

"A wide scale bombardment of Combine positions in the wake of the depletion of the majority of D-C-M-S airbreathing delivery assets would offer relatively limited advantages compared to the potential for civilian casualties. Our ground forces are more than enough to rout the remaining assets given time and patience," Wolf replied. "There is no need to resort to that kind of - of barbarity."

I rather thought he was being overconfident about the tactical situation, but frankly, that barely counted as an also-ran. I took a breath, held it as Sweet Memory shouldered through a treeline still burning sullenly from the nuclear flash, half splintered and blown over by the shockwave, then let it out again when I was something like calm.

"The primary factor in nuclear response is not and never has been tactical," I said. "It is always strategic. It is not about what is destroyed directly, it is about what could be, what will be done in response. If the Draconis Combine's successor states, or the Free Worlds League, are permitted the delusion that their nuclear strikes will go unanswered, they will use them freely. "The longer that goes on, the harder it will be to dissuade them afterwards, and the more civilians and soldiers on both sides will die.

"Answering decisively, now, is the low-collateral option, General. A conclusion whose origins I know you have been briefed on, and which has been endorsed from the highest levels. If you do not wish to tender your resignation immediately you will execute a Category One response to the Ryuken strikes we've seen - subsection seven is fine, as long as you do it. You may have this order in writing if you wish."

That was less calm than I'd intended.

"...That will not be necessary, Your Grace," Wolf said, sounding both a bit shaken and coldly angry under his professionalism. "I will issue the orders for a military-asset-only bombardment immediately."

"Good," I bit out in return. "Nutcracker out."

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Dropping off the Goods

High Orbit

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Far overhead, in a geostationary orbit, LCDS Jormugandr's cargo bay doors yawned open. Coded keys, turned in locks on the ship's bridge, completed the transmissions that had prepared the largest single block of loading pallets remaining in that cavernous space. Their computers woke and twitched them out into open space on precisely programmed RCS thrusters.

There was something darkly amusing, later, in watching recordings of the spacesuited loading crews ducking away as each pallet passed, instinct telling the men to get out of the way of twenty tons and more of mass moving under its own power despite how low the actual relative velocities were.

At that point.

Out in space, the pallets popped apart, explosive bolts sending their walls and frames tumbling away from the fighter-sized drums that had been held inside.

Five minutes after I'd snapped at Wolf, the first wave of Bluefins was on its way. They killed three kilometers per second of orbital velocity in the space of a minute - then started to fall.

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Rant of a Mad Man

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The Combine broadcast came as my command company paused at the base of the ridge, the entrance of the pass visible as what the part of my mind that had grown up in West Virginia found a positively homey hollow - and an equally homey series of switchbacks rising above and behind it.

The shot composition was typically Combine - a static scene shot from well away from its subject, in this case a man in red kimono with black dragon motifs, kneeling in seiza, backed by a positively gigantic rendition of the crest of the Draconis Combine. Behind, and to his right, was…

Well. I knew what I looked like on purely electronic cameras, which meant that I knew that another Phantom was in that room. Deduction, and the hairs on the back of my neck, said that it was probably Yorinaga Kurita.

//"Fools and barbarians,"\\ said the man the camera could see clearly, and though the framing made his features too small to recognize, the voice was Jerry Akuma's. //"Know that I, Jerry Kurita, now reign as Dragon over the Draconis Combine, and as the only rightful sovereign of all Mankind!"\\

Hooo boy. Demon Boy had lost it.

He spent what felt like most of an hour and was probably closer to ten minutes going over the temerity and insult of every time 'mere barbarians' had dared to thwart the Combine's Glorious Destiny.

I didn't dare turn him off entirely, but I turned most of my attention to the map plot and watching Carlisle's Commandos' progress to take up their spot in the vanguard, but when he finally got to the point of delivering the actual threats, my attention snapped back.

//"At my command every loyal soul upon these worlds in right order shall turn against the barbarous invaders! Every man shall meet you in battle, every woman you lay with shall slit your throat in your rest! Every child shall steal through your defenses with grenades in hand! Your-"\\ he sneered, //"-'conquest' shall bring you no victory, shall leave you to know no peace save to slay every soul - and then you shall take possession of only the ashes left by the Dragon's Flaming Sword!"\\

//"And no, NO! Do not think that the strength of the Dragon's Claws remains merely that! For too long the weaklings who held this throne before me have lacked the vision, the will to fully exert the power in our limbs! Their weakness, their mercy has restrained the strength to shatter worlds! Wasted it on mere merchants and trade, and the indulgence of sullying the swords of honorable samurai with the unclean blood of the blasphemers and the nits they spawn."\\

For a moment, I didn't realize what he was talking about, though his attitude was more than enough on its own to produce a sinking sensation - and then the revelation hit.

The greatest single energy release in the history of the Inner Sphere had come during the Second Succession War when an outbound assault dropship had amended its course to perform a passing lightning strike on an inbound invasion force - and then one side or another had misjudged their evasions and turned a flashing past through the invaders' formation into a head-on collision at a chillingly ludicrous velocity…

And every dropship, down to the pettiest Buccaneer or Leopard, had the potential to recreate that incident on the surface of any planet its commander chose, so long as he was willing to sacrifice life, crew, and ship and build speed all the way into a system rather than making the mid-trip turnover that had been expected for a thousand years.

The greatest single victory of sanity in the collective madness of the Succession Wars was that that had never been done deliberately. All of the six Successor States had done their very best to make certain that that atrocity - that one, lone act of destruction out of all the thousands possible and accomplished - had remained too much, remained unthinkable, heresy, tabu.

//"No more. Even now, by my will and word, ships of the Draconis Combine Admiralty are en route to the worlds of those who defy me to strike with all the power at my command and shatter them for all time! Woe to you held in thrall by those who presume to claim that righteous authority which is mine alone! The Fangs of the Dragon shall devour your worlds and all you love, shall-"\\

The camera caught only a blur of motion and the spray of blood, the flash of a steel blade in the studio lighting. Reconstruction and written accounts, for most, or at that place and time, my own intuition, told what those signs added up to.

Seated in seiza behind the warlord who had usurped the name of his family, Yorinaga Kurita had, in hearing Jerry Akuma's plan to 'reverse the Combine's fortunes' for what both men's aides would later swear was the first time, found in the cancerous mess of the Draconis Combine's Dictum Honorium some scrap of real honor.

He drew the longer of the blades worn at his side and killed the Warlord of Dieron in the same motion, a rising cut that entered below the ribs on Akuma's left side and sheared him completely in half in a line that crossed his right shoulder.

The shocked cameramen and producers cut away quickly, but not before the clatter of automatic weapons fire converged on Kurita and killed him, in turn, where he still knelt.

His body just barely had time to fade fully into the camera's view before the transmission cut off.

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Wrangling with Deranged Widow

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Forty minutes after the Bluefins launched, you could see them in the blue early-daytime sky, streaks of light plunging downwards as the velocity of each missile left a trail of tormented and outraged air in its wake. Friction's abrasion would destroy each missile quickly, despite the protective coatings built into them, and equally would bleed speed off even faster - having fallen so far through vacuum, they were far beyond terminal velocity once they'd reached atmosphere.

The main body of each missile had been carefully shaped to retain the maximum possible velocity through this stage, lightweight handling shells blowing away off of the core as it fell. All the way back at the beginning of their flights, reaction control thrusters had given each missile a carefully measured spin, and barely a second before they made their final impacts, explosive bolts fired in stages, peeling successive onion-like layers of the falling impactor away like the tungsten darts that they were, three rings scattering into a spreading pattern around the still-intact core of the missile's one-shot drive.

Looking into the sky, you could see the point where they split as each falling line of fire spread out into a dense, rayed cone. Only the furthest shots, the ones aimed for the behind-lines bases the Combine's aerospace and atmospheric fighters flew from, were still single lines when they dipped below the mountains. Even the dense array dedicated to smashing the forces dug in to defend the last unclosed pass to the southwest split just above the horizon.

When each spread landed, they did so all at once, smashing into the earth of Dieron IV in a single broad impact that melded into a massive if non-nuclear explosion. Pavement, even bedrock shattered, shockwaves snapped out, and grass, bushes, trees caught flame from the radiating flashes of heat. To the northeast, along the nearer front line ahead of the Arcturans' advance, I could see smaller mushroom clouds rising to join the still-lingering, wind-tattered remnants of the one left by the earlier nuclear blast and the rising trails of darker smoke from the fires it had set.

(+"Blood and Martyrs."+) one of the Frieslanders swore softly into his open microphone, watching the clouds rise and the shockwaves ripple out. It was hours yet to go until dusk, but the light was already growing ruddier with dust.

Nobody bothered to tell him to clear the channel.

I took my eyes off the spectacle and checked my map. "Frenchie, Nutcracker. It looks like we're ready," I said. "Go ahead and move, over."

~~"...Right. On our way, Nutcracker. Frenchie out,"~~ Dessau replied, sounding like he was latching onto his professionalism with both hands.

BattleMaster Assault 'Mech

Battlemasters, like most mechs with 'hand' mounted guns, had secondary racks that the weapon could be temporarily clipped to to free the digits. Those racks of course didn't have the reinforcement to do more than support the weapon's weight, or the power and targeting hookups to let them be fired even if they'd been oriented correctly for it, but they did let the mechs mounting them, say, use both hands to stabilize and gain extra traction on a slope that was busy disintegrating under eighty-five tons of mass.

The roadway up to the Caanane Valley had been pushed through the best natural pass available, the gentlest terrain on offer. Which was a good thing, because that same road might have been able to support a light mech, or some mediums, without too much protest… But it was not up to handling a heavy or assault. By the time my command lance passed any given point the pavement and base structure were already disintegrating, and what was left after we'd passed couldn't be called anything but wrecked.

In my rear monitor, I could see the Chameleon battalion spreading out onto the slightly steeper slopes above and below the road - because even with the scorching and scattered sullen sparks of incipient wildfire started by the coronas of one or another of the weapons of mass destruction thrown around, they were in better shape. A sinister, smoking foretaste of hell, but firmer ground.

Sweet Memory's foot crunched down and through the road even as I thought that, a hidden culvert weakening the pavement just too much. I swore automatically and without trying to resist; I had my com systems cut out for exactly that reason, after all. I also fought with the controls, trying to heave the Warhammer's weight back off of that foot before it could finish the stumble and go down face first again.

This time, I succeeded, and struggled my way up out of the fresh pothole to slog on. Bad ground, or at least this kind of bad ground, wouldn't even come close to stopping a battlemech, any more than loose earth and gravel would have stopped an infantryman.

A few hundred yards ahead of me, I could see the road curve around a hillside, blocking vision directly ahead or to the left, but on the right I could see a narrow crosswise side-valley framed by high ridges on both sides. There were three of those, each higher than the last, and this was the third and last, the site of a small town that the Night Heat had reported as being completely deserted before they pressed on further.

It was also the line in the sand I'd set myself. When I turned the corner and looked down the low rise at the cluster of a few dozen houses, the school, and the road crew's barn, it was as intimidating as it was relieving to cross that line.

Finally.

I took a breath and let it out as I tramped forwards, then switched my comms to a particular frequency. "Any Agate this net, this is Pyrite. We are your relief; prepare to move as soon as possible. Maintain radio silence at this time. Authentication Wilhelm Ulrich Theodor Ida Otto Quelle. I say again, you are being relieved, be ready to move..."

I repeated the message twice more as the column split itself into two streams to go around the little town…

And then the hair on the back of my neck stood up again, and I stomped on the brakes. Literally, not figuratively; Sweet Memory's feet skidded a little, tearing even bigger divots in the horse pasture I'd been crossing, and the PPC bolts that would have smashed into its right arm if I hadn't just yanked myself out of their mistress's moving iron sights with the unexpected change of speed.

(<"Contact,">) Noton announced onto the tactical net before I could. (<"Combine battlemechs one half kilometer northeast, company-plus strength.">)

At that range, even a heavy battlemech was just a speck, but those shots had to have been done with iron sights. At that range, and with two PPCs both on target, I knew what I'd see even before I finished flicking the zoom up on my right-side monitor.

Catapult Heavy 'Mech, CPT-K2 PPC variant

A jet black Catapult K2, with a flash of scarlet below the cockpit and glittering flashes of ablated armor here and there, battle damage from hard fighting.

"Confirm contacts as the Fourteenth Legion of Vega." I added, then, as the smaller mechs accompanying Natasha Kerensky's started to sweep forward, ordered the Chameleons to sweep up onto the mountain ridge using their jump jets, so they could drop down onto the flank of that advance from above. About two thirds of Steuben's troops didn't have jets, though, so I had them consolidate slightly higher in the pass… and pulled my command company back to the west, falling back while the Legion followed.

A corner of my mind wondered if Kerensky had deliberately set out to lay a trap for me, but I didn't think it likely. More probably, this was another meeting engagement - their route away from the 19th Arcturans going up a secondary pass and then using that side valley to reach the main one that we happened to be trying to use at the same time.

Rotten luck for both sides, and I was honestly surprised that Kerensky had taken the shot she had rather than just fade back and try to climb the slopes the hard way; with the pass's constraints, we hadn't had the usual outriders on our flanks and probably would have missed her.

I considered offering to have both sides break off anyway, then rejected the idea. Even if it had been a good idea to let a couple battalions of Combine mechs go, she wouldn't even have considered it.

Just another thing in the way of what I was here to do.

<("Her again...")> Minakshi muttered on the company net, sounding disgusted and irritated.

Jenner Light 'Mech

"This time, it's not lance on lance." I said, picking a Jenner out of the front edge of the Combine advance and sequencing both PPCs at it. The first beam missed; the second landed along its already-ragged left flank armor and blew straight through, slagging structural beams and incinerating myomers until the only thing holding on the little side turret that served a Jenner in place of arms was the mounting frame for the scraps of armor that covered the top and bottom of the side compartment. Which promptly sheared off in a spray of sparks and crashed to the ground.

Without Star League relic guns, it took the rest of the company a little longer to start adding their own firepower - if only because long-range missiles had a flight time. They fell in dribs and drabs, one flight landing on a Wasp, another on a Panther.

A corner of my mind heard a still open radio frequency say, through vicious static, //"---ite,A---- b- ---re, C---i-- -or--- have - ----kin- -leme-- -n th- --ss. -ou --- at r--- of b---g fl---ed!"\\, but being in combat at that moment meant that ninety-five percent of my attention was busy, and the rest didn't have enough processor time to do more than make a note to go back after the furball to see if I could clean it up.

In the meantime, I was firing on the Jenner again, this time landing a hit lower down, almost right on the hip joint. Which fused in place, locking into an immobile mass that would still support the mech's weight, just as it was designed to, but at a hundred kilometers an hour did not allow the range of motion needed to stay upright. Down he went, and I put the other particle blast into the fallen machine.

Warhammer "Sweet Memory" Heavy 'Mech

The fireball of SRM propellant brewing up and out of the blast panels along the Jenner's back made it clear he wasn't getting up again, and I looked for a new target. Minakshi and I picked the same Panther in the same moment, which wasn't surprising given that he'd paused to brace himself and draw a bead - which also made him a much easier target. I couldn't tell which of the three PPC bolts was the one that missed, but the other two didn't, smashing away what remained of his chest armor; the deluge of missiles following the siren song of the Panther's emissions and pouring down across it like rain. A few of the fifteen she'd launched missed; a few more detonated more-or-less harmlessly against surviving scraps of armor panel.

And others found the gyro housing, the reactor capacitors, and the nearly empty magazine for the Panther's own missile launchers, and the mech came apart in a violent concussion of rocket fuel orange and discharge silver.

A moment later, Noton's autocannons sawed the legs physically right off of the Stinger behind it, leaving a sprawling torso to fall to the ground at speed. I kept backing up and looked for a better target; as much as we were backpedaling at speed we couldn't keep the range open past the merge for much longer.

Valkyrie Light 'Mech

There; Valkyrie. I sighted, fired, missed. Ignored the PPC blast that seared by only a few meters over my head, apparently Kerensky was well and truly focused on me. Fired again, this time hitting in the left torso. The Valkyrie was a small mech and had correspondingly limited armor - too little, in fact, to stop a PPC bolt even when, as now, the hit facing had been intact to start with. The Combine pilot kept it on its feet but I could tell that the missile launcher, his main firepower, was burnt out and ruined. Good enough.

I took another look at the distances, the positioning. My command company had about melted an equal number of the fastest light mechs, but they were about to enter the three hundred meter or so range where the short range missiles and medium lasers most of them carried were into their own effective range, and close enough that they could use their speed to effectively move faster crossrange than heavy mechs, if not their pilots, could reliably track. More importantly, the two battalions or so that they'd piled in after us were just about centered on the pass. "Farmer, Viper, now. Command, follow me."

The jamming that had become general moments after Kerensky spotted me would limit that transmission's range, but they were close enough - and we had enough laser relays around - for it to cover the entire force.

Vindicator Medium 'Mech

Sweet Memory leaned under me as I slammed the throttle from full reverse to full forward, and the distance to the onrushing Combine mechs vanished with frightening speed. A Vindicator was slower to react than the others - it had to be a 1AA model, with greater top speed, because a standard 1A Vindicator wasn't any faster than Sweet Memory.

I snapped a shot off of one PPC and didn't mind when I missed, because he was still coming. Rather than the other big gun, I followed it up with the full secondary array, a quartet of medium lasers flaying their way across the Vindicator's front side and laying open both side panels for the SRM followup. No ammo explosion, despite the hot shrapnel slashing through the same compartment as its LRM magazine - I guessed that the Vindicator's pilot had either shot himself dry or dumped what was left rather than risking it on an already weakened area.

The shot from his main gun crashed harmlessly by somewhere to my right, and the twisting I was doing anyway as I advanced spread the random scatter from his facelaser easily across three different armor panels - and then we were right on top of each other, and he realized a second or so too late that I wasn't passing him after all.

There was a terrific jolt of impact and a godawful clanging noise as the end of the bracing jacket that ran the full length of Sweet Memory's right arm, carefully wrapped around the long acceleration ladder of the Donal PPC there, ran into the equally reinforced framing around the Vindicator's cockpit with a combined energy of a hundred and fifteen tons or so going well over a hundred kilometers per hour.

The Warhammer yawed sharply as the force transitioned up the arm into its torso, half-spinning me around one foot, but the smaller Vindicator's feet were snatched out from under it as top half and bottom half were abruptly heading in opposite directions and it could only rotate in place. The medium dropped the rest of the way to the ground with a heavy thud that was ironically quieter than the initial impact, salted with snapping and straining metal.

In the rear monitor, a blaze of blue light showed Minakshi turning her own laser battery on the immobile target, boring through its entire chest in a single six-weapon salvo.

Something nagged at the corner of my mind as another garbled transmission came in, something more than the content of the message itself. "-oin- -- -arn th-- --ld pos----- and kee- ---r h--- down."

The next mech after the Vindicator was Kerensky, thundering forward at a dead run and snapping off two shots as she came. One flashed a few meters to the left of Sweet Memory's left arm - and the other that same few meters to the right of its brother. I swerved out, away from that line, smashing through a tinder-dry but not yet burning conifer, and returned fire, with about the same results she'd had against me.

I spared a glance at the field behind her; the slower elements she'd pulled ahead of were mostly Panthers, with the occasional slow medium - I saw a pair of Hunchbacks, another Vindicator, a handful of Enforcers or Centurions. The Chameleons that were descending down the mountainside at them were faster, and had fresher armor, and while a Hunchback or Enforcer could have marshalled more firepower, it was clear even at that glance that most of them were short or out of ammunition.

The Slammers' battalion had been older mechs, with weaker cooling circuits and less weaponry because of it, but the wait between their hiring and my finally dragging myself free of Terra had given Katrina time to funnel them and the other mercenaries freezers of their own, if not for any kind of extensive refitting - but decreasing the total numbers of a set of components you were replacing anyway, and increasing armor with that same weight, wasn't extensive.

There was a good chance that-

(*("Contact! Rear contact! Armor multiple companies! Assault and light!")*) a feminine voice snapped over the company band - one or the other of the Lorin twins, I'd have needed more of a cue to figure out which.

-("Melanie!")- her sister cried a moment later, which answered that question - and the scarlet inferno of a firing Ontos in the rear monitor told me whose rear.

"Command company, head east at best speed," I said, and dumped the short-range battery in Kerensky's general direction with less than my usual focus. "Close action." Keeping our back armor mostly ahead of the Ontos and the pair of Demolishers tanks I could see with it.

Kerensky was wheeling around; I sent a PPC shot her way and, just like before, didn't check to see if I'd hit. "Carter," I ordered, before my brain could catch up to why, "Call artillery. All incendiaries."

<<"Let us have an end to this, Asha.">> Kerensky said, her words overlapping with his acknowledgement. <<"An end to chasing each other and burning our lives. A circle of equals to bury our debts and hatreds.">>

Despite what she was saying, she hit her jump jets and lunged towards me, rising until her Catapult's clawed feet were almost at cockpit level. I swerved again, throwing one arm up as I sidestepped and slamming it sideways into those ankles. Natasha Kerensky was one of only two or three mechwarriors I knew of who could have recovered in the second or so it took her to land, but she did it.

On the channel I'd stopped paying attention to, more static came, and what, re-listening later, I could barely recognize as a different voice. ("--ll bo--, -y ance----- wou-- -ry i- ---me i- - -et a --mra-- -- -ff on - -oolh---y ---st w-----t hel--ng. FO---- -E!")

That was all right; I'd expected her to. I twisted the pedals, stopping and then reversing the turn in my course, and spun into a full torso twist facing her side as she landed - she'd thrown her right arm out and twisted herself, I was staring right down the barrel of a PPC - I ducked and fired in the same instant, lasers slashing across the ground behind her and burning tracks across her leg armor while a couple of missiles dumbfired into the arm and flank - her beam crashed across the top-side panel of my left torso, making my view from the cockpit strobe dark purple and fade back in as we both threw our throttles open and broke off.

"Crazy Lady, as ever, I ain't even here for you," I told her, deliberately driving the contractions for the sake of irritation. "But seein' as you're thoroughly in my way, let's do this dance."

We spiraled out, exchanging ineffectual fire along with words. <<"But I am here for you, Asha.">> Kerensky said. At the time, I just thought the intimacy was weird; later I'd figure out that she had given up on acknowledging last names as a thing that existed outside of Bloodnames - which of course, I didn't have. >>"The home that made me, I will never see again… The home I came here with will never know me again… And the home I have come to is in flames around me.">>

"So one out of three is all my fault, Crazy Lady?" I asked, snapping a PPC shot past her on the right and only barely missing the followup as she didn't jink quite as much the other way as I wanted.

She laughed, and it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. <<"You are alive and in the now.">> she said. <<"So you, I can kill.">>

Well. I suppose that that made more sense than the rant she'd thrown at me on Vega, at least. Not sense-sense, but angry-fighty-person sense, something I could acknowledge seeing from others repeatedly rather than being blindsided by. "So you feel stupid and contagious," I replied automatically. "Fine. Here we are now, entertain us."

Kerensky's Catapult lashed out with an alpha strike, both of the lasers and one PPC missing and the last weapon scoring on the armor of my right leg. <<"I am not a joke!">> she hissed…

A moment before the Hunchback that had been rushing at Motochika ducked around his Archer, under a too-late reflexive grab of one arm, and cut loose at my own rear arc with everything he had.

Hunchback Medium 'Mech

I don't know whether or not it counts as lucky that it was a Swayback. Eight medium lasers was more firepower than a standard Hunchback's Class Twenty autocannon, and not by a little, but between the nuke and Kerensky, Sweet Memory would at least have lost a limb if a 200 kilogram shell connected anywhere - there just wasn't enough armor to soak it. With my psychic bullshit interfering with his targeting, the Swayback's pilot had to resort to saturating my general vicinity with beams, and only about a third of that energy connected to do anything…

But that saturation spread the resulting pain around, including onto panels that were already weakened by nuclear sideflash, and the Warhammer shuddered under me as an alarming metal-on-metal screech started up, and a yellow light came on on my panel. I hadn't lost my gyroscope and its stabilizing influence on my mech, but that barrage had gotten a piece of it, and there was no telling how long it would keep running.

<<"I am merely your death, your punishment.">> Kerensky continued, as the Hunchback vanished from my rear monitor in exactly the kind of blur you'd expect of an eighty-five-ton assault mech physically tackling a medium thirty-five tons lighter.

-("NO you don't!")- Minakshi snarled as she started to literally pummel her target into scrap.

<<"And I bring you the vengeance of all those you have wronged!">> Kerensky finished, unbothered, since she couldn't hear the company channel Minakshi had spoken on.

Just like she couldn't hear the static-hashed line from the Arcturan Guards' artillery park, and what it had just announced.

"And I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE!" I shouted back at her, happy to take advantage of the split seconds of hesitation as she tried to figure out what in all the worlds I was talking about. "AND I BRING YOU - FIRE!"

Overhead, all at once and all up and down the little side valley our two regiments were fighting through in a tight, swirling scrum, falling dots of shadow sparked into light, like broken glass on a parking lot catching the sunlight as you drove past. Those sparks were the bursting charges that distributed the inferno compounds - powder, not gel, for stability reasons - filling the artillery cannon shells and Arrow missile warheads across the greatest possible area as they fell, spreading out like falling fireworks… even as that falling haze sparked and caught and turned into a vast, enveloping rain of fire that settled over the valley like a falling blanket.

<<"No.">> Kerensky said, full of determination and cold horror. We both fired at the same instant, seconds before the falling flames veiled us from each other. Both of my PPC shots landed on her left arm, blasting apart the remaining armor there and grounding out through the delicate wiring in a way that turned it into a seven-ton blunt instrument - and she agreed, jettisoning the limb even before the melted and burned out myomers meant to aim it had finished slumping under their own dead weight.

Her shot did less damage to me, for once - my left leg wouldn't stand up to another hit of any sort higher than the calf, but there was just enough armor left to keep the flames out.

I didn't stick around, repositioning at a dead run as I looked through my displays to figure out what had been happening while Kerensky was monopolizing my attention.

Kerensky's Legion of Vega troops had been giving a good if desperate accounting of themselves, but most of them were dead. The way the Combine had traditionally supplied them meant that more than half of their mechs had been twenty-ton 'bug' lights, which were desperately frail at the best of times, and most of the rest were Panthers, which weren't a lot tougher. Dessau and Carlisle's troops were mounted similarly, but with Lu's people in Chameleons and Steuben's in a mix of mediums and fast heavies, our own lights didn't have to take point the way the Vegans did, and they'd suffered a lot less from it.

Less than I'd expected on both sides, honestly. None of the Combine troops would have made it off of Vega if they hadn't been good pilots, and good survivors. I'd expected them to have taken great chunks out of everyone tangling with them - if nothing else, their Panthers had about the biggest guns anybody in the Inner Sphere had ever managed to shove into a light mech - but they just didn't have the weight to match up to larger machines...

But on the other hand, while they had taken the worse of the conflict so far, the Vegans who'd made it far enough to face us were mostly still alive, so perhaps they hadn't done so badly after all.

The swirling inferno that the time-on-target barrage had turned the valley into did two things; first, it fouled sensor readings and sightlines, pushing the engagement into closer ranges where larger mechs' greater firepower and armor would be more telling… And second, and more important, the increased ambient temperature interfered with battlemech cooling, since as much as forest fires or inferno gel were cooler than fusion reactors could get, the thermal loops were very much optimized for 'normal human conditions'.

There was a fairly hard limit on just how much of a thermal load could filter into a mech for a given external temperature, and the limit for a major fire was about half-again as much as the minimal loops inherent in the Combine's old mechs' fusion reactors could dissipate at all…

And only three-quarters what our mechs' double-capacity loops could handle.

Even in the heavier weights, like Kerensky and I, where extra stages were included in the overall loop up to double or triple what was built into a standard fusion reactor, we could hardly operate freely in this environment... But we could do so much more than they could that it was still a huge advantage.

-("We have more incoming!")- The voice was obviously one of the Lorin twins, but the message header that came along with it only said PASSENGER. Obviously Mara had picked up her sister after she'd bailed out. -("Battlemechs, looks like up to a battalion!")-

"Ah," I said to myself, turning as my sensors picked up a hint of Kerensky in the shifting tide of smoke and flame that made visibility a myth, "there's the other shoe." She broke out into evasion as I locked my active scan onto her, since her mech's inability to detect me in specific did nothing to change its ability to recognize and warn her that they were being painted by someone's targeting radar.

I left the big guns alone and let her have the backup battery, four lasers and the SRM launcher, with a bit less accuracy than usual for hurry's sake - then cut the sensors back to passive and floored the accelerator, relocating, leaving her to try and pick my location out of the confusion with eye alone.

The gyro whined and rattled.

My computers couldn't make out visual markers in the hellscape any more than I could, but they could 'hear' the emissions of active scanners and communications systems and compare them to listings of all the makes and models and combinations programmed into its warbook, and what they were saying was a mix of bugs, oddballs… and older-model Chameleons.

The Locust that blasted out of a passing curtain of flame and skidded to a halt explained that, and where they'd come from - white, with a square device of a rising sun in yellow and orange.

The sigil of the Sun Zhang Mechwarrior Academy; this extra force, probably left half to block our lost lambs from working their way free, half to serve as reserves, were the survivors of the other unit that had originally been stationed on Dieron.

My heat gauge hadn't quite recovered from my shot at Kerensky, but it was cool enough; I fed him another short range salvo, the laser beams ripping visible slashes straight through the armor along his flank and arm turret, and two missile warheads finding their way inside to shatter vital components.

A flicker of motion in the cockpit made me flick the zoom on. The girl heaved her bad-old-days neurohelmet - a full chest-and-shoulders yoke with a fixed bucket on top like a 19th century diving apparatus - the rest of the way off and tried to shift to reach for something, with the arm that wasn't visibly broken.

Which was also the one that was on the bottom, as she laid half strapped in on her side.

A half formed thought brought my left arm, and its PPC, up to bear on her. She looked back into the muzzle, and though she didn't know it, into the camera I had on her.

I knew what Combine training, conditioning, indoctrination were like. An absolute willingness, even eagerness for death in the Service Of The Dragon. A commitment that the warrior's own capture was nothing but an opportunity to die honorably by murdering medical personnel, rear line workers, even civilians if they were available. A determination, if that chance wasn't offered, to die before being of any use whatsoever.

And yet.

In that moment, there was nothing in her eyes but fear and pain.

I sighed and opened a com link, at this range even the choking smoke not enough to impede the directional laser. "Are you going to be stupid?" I asked.

"I… I am dead either way, Ken-sama." I knew she wasn't, I could see that she wasn't, but damned if she didn't sound Fiona's age, and the vague address of 'Lady Fist' didn't help. I could see her take a breath to brace herself. "But… I want to live."

I stared at her image for a moment, then sighed at my own idiocy, moving the cannon aside, and hit the 'relax' function on my seat restraints, then reached up and behind me to one of the two survival kits fixed to the rear side-walls of my cockpit. "Then live," I said, and leaned Sweet Memory down in spite of the gyro's protests until my cockpit was only a few meters above hers.

Then I took a deep breath and cracked the cockpit seal.

Even by the standards of a mechwarrior the outside air was like a dragon's breath, searing hot and reeking of woodsmoke and fouler things. The sound of the fire, without the cocoon of sonic isolation, was an endless, hammering crackle-ROAR that was nearly as much of an assault on the senses.

I tossed the kit carefully, despite the distraction and the urge to hurry, and it smacked into the surviving armor plating less than a meter from the broken Locust's cockpit - and, fitted with the same kind of triggerable electromagnet as a satchel charge, stuck there.

When my canopy had swung closed again and the fans kicked up to a scream to fix the air quality, I said into the line, "That has a survival bubble in it. It should be able to stand up to… even this. I want your word that whoever finds you in it won't regret that, either with their life or their nightmares."

I could see her nod. "You… you have my-" she whispered - and then the sound was blotted out by a scream of static and the sizzling crash and elecronic hash of a PPC hit.

<<"YOU CAN'T RUN FROM ME!">> Kerensky roared into her communicator and her external speakers alike, and I straightened sharply, swapping to NEUROASSIST to step over the Locust…

The screech underneath me stopped abruptly, replaced by a crash and a bang-bang-bang while Sweet Memory shivered and shuddered. My controls went berserk, and I threw both cannon-arms out for balance, gouging the earth, as the mech tried to buck itself prone and crush the wrecked Locust flat underneath.

The red light on my panel was frankly unneeded. Either too much operating time while damaged or the sudden movement had been too much for the damaged gyroscope, and it had just shaken itself apart in a most final fashion.

My throat was dry as I switched the controls to FULL SLAVE and carefully straightened, fighting my way upright with no help from the machine or its computers at all. "Any available, this is Nutcracker. I am immoble and engaged with-"

A Thunderbolt in Vegan colors - the same one from that last fight on Vega? - shouldered its way out of the flames and opened fire, medium lasers burning deep into what was left of my torso glacis.

"-two heavy mechs at the uploaded nav point. Requesting assistance… out."

So be it; I still had some armor… and the cooling to use it. Kerensky was in worse shape, but…

I torso twisted and unloaded the lasers and missiles into the Thunderbolt, estimating that I had a better chance of his not being able to slip around my fire the way Kerensky could.

<<"Is it a familiar choice? Taking who you can with you? How does it taste?">> Kerensky cooed into the line, which was frankly more disturbing than the rage.

A Catapult, the basic missile model, appeared next, and I could see it pause and steady as its pilot made ready to add his own barrage while his lancemates cooled as much as they could in the fire…

Catapult Heavy 'Mech

Then came apart as weapons fire, flying missiles and cannon and laser tracers both in Steiner Blue poured in from both directions.

I blinked, my attention forcibly widened to include the friendly battle-net rather than just the immediacy of what I could see; the missiles had come from Motochika and Minakshi, the cannonfire from Noton. From the other direction…

The damage readout that went with the shredded, armless wreck that had once been a Wolverine was terrifying, its armor almost stripped and nothing left of either of its outboard torso compartments, but the pilot feinted forwards, firing the head-turreted laser that was his only remaining weapon and distracting what little attention the Catapult pilot had left after being blindsided twice over while a Griffin - with intact left arm, the one that didn't have any weapons on it - sidled close and kicked a foot against the back of the Catapult's own, then heaved to knock the larger machine backwards and to the ground.

Even as the Thunderbolt turned towards where both of them were starting to put the boot in on their opponent, a third medium rushed out of the smoke moving faster and far more smoothly than any mech should have been in the hellscape. Which only made sense for the real world's first mech equipped with thermally activated triple-strength myomers, direct from the Federated Suns' New Avalon Institute of Science.

Poleaxe BattleMech

Despite the name, the Poleaxe's signature weapon looked more like a quarterstaff or Japanese kanabo than it did a warhammer, but if Morgan Hasek-Davion - it had to be him, only one Poleaxe had even been sent to Dieron - was slowed down by having only half as many hands as it was meant for, it didn't show. His blow landed on the Thunderbolt's left shoulder from behind; the missile launcher simply disintegrated, while the entire matching arm came free and went spinning to the ground dozens of meters away with enough force to bounce when it landed.

<<"No, no, nonono-">> I could hear Kerensky snarling, and alarms wailed as she fired at me again. My right arm went black on the display, though from the lack of lurch and shifting weight she hadn't cut it free entirely, just crippled myomers or control links or both, and the brilliant flash as her remaining PPC found the missile launcher and blew it away was obvious.

"GET AWAY FROM MY WIFE!")

My heart stopped, hearing that new voice.

I was looking right at Kerensky as the deafening crash of a landing Death From Above cut through the battle and the forest fire and my cockpit insulation alike. The Catapult twisted and went down to one reverse knee under the blow, then kept turning and shoved with its remaining stub cannon-barrel arm. The mech that had landed on top of it tumbled off, landed on the burning field with an actual shoulder roll, then popped back to its feet as smoothly as any fighter I'd even seen in the competition ring and brought its sword up for a split second - then lunged.

Aspis had seen better days; its shield and left forearm were missing. I could see that the right ankle at least had been all but completely immobilized, and despite everything I was instantly more afraid for Sophitia than for myself.

Kerensky's heat scale was nowhere near back to safe yet; I'd have known it even without the fact that she was showing up on infrared even in the mess we had. She let loose with both of her lasers, but left the big gun out this time. Soph fired back, blue crisscrossing with red, and bored in directly at the Catapult despite the fifteen-ton weight difference - then sideslipped at the last second as Natasha, no fool, made a damned good bid at using just that to squish her flat.

The sword stabbed upwards sharply as she passed under the swinging arm, its point, unblunted, spearing into the actuator's moving parts and leaving it slumping behind her as she passed, turned - caught an instant mule-kick squarely on Aspis's main chestplate, which cracked visibly and began to crumble away even as she rolled with the blow.

Sophitia lit her own jump jets as she almost fell out of the way of the next strike, a jet-assisted, wheeling kick as Kerensky lifted off and spun in place to face her again - skidding into an easy sidestep that turned into a rising cut at the Catapult's forward mounted cockpit.

Kerensky twisted around that, catching the blow on relatively thick and fresh flank armor, then fired again, uselessly as Sophitia twisted easily through and around the streams of light, distributing them almost harmlessly across even what little battered armor remained to her.

I could hear both of them breathing harshly into open lines as they circled each other wordlessly - then lunged forwards, each twisting to ready their next strike…

This time it was Kerensky that feinted, sidestepping and then accelerating, breaking past Aspis and towards me, firing again as she came.

I took a deep, centering breath to focus, settled my crosshairs squarely in center of mass…

("I said-") Sophitia's voice filtered through my focus again.

And as I breathed out and started to tense for firing, Aspis landed on top of the Catapult for a second time, damaged leg and whole flexing to absorb the impact and hold position on top of a bucking, rounded surface that might as well have been as slick as ice… with its arm raised high overhead, sword held in a reverse grip.

"-get away from her!"

And then it plunged down, spearing through the damned ejection hatch like an icepick and impaling the Catapult's nose section in the process. I couldn't see the blood, but the way the heavy mech went from charging and fighting to a tumbling rag doll in an instant couldn't have been more explicit - the strike had killed pilot and control computers in one.

Even as that machine went down, the other Catapult had kicked one of its tormentors away and managed to get its feet under itself again, heaving upright - and then falling again as Hasek-Davion's club obliterated one of its knees.

The Thunderbolt…

I tracked its line of fire as it finished rising and lurched into motion, cutting in front of me, to where Sophitia was picking herself up after rolling off of Kerensky's falling mech.

I still had my crosshairs, and I let them settle on its exposed back armor as its course showed just a sliver while it tracked her, and then, firestorm or not, I hit every active trigger I had left at once. That killed gyro and reactor in one salvo I could tell from its instant, drunken tumble, though I hadn't realized how close it had come to me, and to-

I braced both feet, twisted, punched with the surviving arm, and the fall that had been about to drop the Thunderbolt onto the silver bubble of a surrendered pilot's survival bubble was redirected into harmless ash.

When I looked up from fighting to regain my unassisted balance, I could feel Sophitia's eyes on me from where Aspis stood.

There were ten thousand things I needed to say, apologies and recriminations and gratitude and betrayal, but it was so, so easy to pick the most important one. The only important one. "I love you," I said.

"I love you, too." Sophitia whispered back, and by the sound of it, she was grinning - and crying - just as much as I was.

It didn't matter if there was nothing around us but ash, just like it wouldn't matter if we turned to dust. I'd seen her dancing in the ruins and known I loved her just as much as ever - and that if she hadn't felt the same, she'd never have come.

---

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