BattleTech by Phaedra Weldon

Author:Phaedra Weldon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2013-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

7 kilometers from Landing Zone Joshua

Romulus, Outreach

Word of Blake Protectorate

21 March 3068

The first sign they had of the approaching unit was the sounds of weapons fire. Thomas was in the lead position this time, with Sarah and Lily pushed out on the flanks another two hundred meters to give their corridor a full half-kilometer of depth. His computer tagged the high-energy discharge of a PPC and drew a caret in his HUD.

“Contact front!” he cried, and slammed his throttle forward. It wasn’t perhaps the most proper action, but every one of his Starmates was faster than he was. They would keep up. His sensors drank in fragmentary information, drawing outlines around red hostiles and gray unknowns and then erasing and redrawing them as the lines of sight and sensor rose and fell. Thomas ignored them; he was headed in the right direction.

The first Blakist unit he saw was a heavy White Flame. It staggered into view from beneath a shallow rise. Thomas raised his weapons, but didn’t fire. The reason for the White Flame’s stagger wasn’t obvious. It was damaged, of course, and both its paint job and its transponder declared it Word of Blake Militia, but it should have been training its large pulse laser on Thomas’ ’Mech. Instead it was crabbing around, looking for all the world like a giant angular dog with an itch on its back. Then the light shifted, and Thomas saw.

A trio of black-and-red Elemental battlesuits tore at the armor over the White Flame’s spine with their lasers. While he watched one of them levered a large plate up and held it. Its two mates stuck the stubby muzzles of their heavy weapon gauntlets inside and fired. One of the troopers must have been a flamer: black smoke and flames immediately enveloped all three of them. The White Flame arched its back and fell as internal explosions blew bulges in its armor.

“Friendlies forward,” Thomas radioed.

One of the three Elementals climbed free of the White Flame’s wreckage and stood, hunched over, on the ground. Thomas was struck by how much the three-meter suit looked like a man struggling to catch his breath. He castigated himself almost immediately—of course that’s what it looked like, because that’s what it was.

The Elemental straightened and half-turned, but turned back when he must have seen Thomas’ Orion IIC. He was about four hundred meters away, which meant he might as well have been next door considering the bulk of a seventy-five ton ’Mech and the optics of an Elemental battlesuit. The infantryman regarded him for a moment, then raised his small-laser arm in salute and leapt into the air, back the way he’d come and out of sight. Of the other two Elementals, there was no sign.

Star Commander Julie’s Stormcrow stopped next to Thomas’ Orion IIC. “Report,” she said.

“Dragoons Elementals,” he told her. She could see the burning White Flame for herself. “I saw three—at least one moved back into the fight.”

The Stormcrow started moving immediately. “Then we had better join, quiaff?”

Thomas grinned.

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