Part 699: Combat Theater Vote 22 Results

She’d had the Shadow Hawk dream again.

Towering over New St. Andrews’ dunes and desert houses, she’d walked through the market square as if she was just another bargain hunter. She saw through its dozens of cameras, but somehow the panoramic view, the thermal imaging, and magnetic-resonance scanning weren’t overwhelming her. The Shadow Hawk received all that information constantly, it was only the pilot who wasn’t able to process it—and she didn’t have a pilot.

The strange thing was, no one seemed to realize she was a Shadow Hawk, even when a careless step crushed an apple cart and its vendor. The people of New St. Andrews were no strangers to BattleMechs, but this was something else entirely. She’d broadcast a sheepish ‘sorry,’ but no one had paid her any mind. It was a strange sensation, like being a giant in a world of papier-mâché. Inquisitively, she’d turned her arm-mounted laser on the crowd.

That was where she woke up. It was where she’d always woken up.

She’d only piloted a Shadow Hawk once in her life. It’d been a cranky dual-cockpit training model she’d sat in to let the technicians fine-tune her “MechBuddy,” the rather-unimaginative nickname the Republic Army had given the Pilot PA(L) that created a virtual link between her brain activity and the operations of a BattleMech. Piloting that Shadow Hawk had been nothing like her dream, it’d been two hours in a stuffy, unfamiliar cockpit that lacked the basic ergonomics of her Dragoon II.

She rubbed the back of her neck, feeling the unnaturally smooth synthskin patch there. It still felt strange, though she had to admit her neck wasn’t in any way stiff. The jump warning sounded again, more insistently. Ten minutes to hyperspace. More than enough time to make the bridge, not enough time to don her uniform.

It was comforting—in its own irritating way—to be reminded that General Marduk was still an asshole. He resented being placed under the watchful eye of one of the Republic’s Champions, especially one who’d only achieved the rank of Captain before her ascension. Captain Serena Brannigan had little sympathy. The General of the 331st Minnesota Tribe traditionally refused the Champion position. The Wolverines were beholden to themselves first, and to the Republic second.

That was the entire reason she was here. Marduk resented that, too.

She pulled on the ballistic cloth singlet that served as the last line of defense against penetrating shrapnel injuries. The armored Pilot PA(L) meant the Republic didn’t use the shorts and cooling vests of past eras, but the singlet had about the same shape to it and the mechwarrior in her appreciated that. Designed to be as light and flexible as possible to make wearing it under a suit of rigid power armor feasible, ballistic fabrics of various types were common in the Inner Sphere, even if their use had fallen out of favor. More than capable of stopping a bullet, ballistic cloth lacked the rigidity to protect the wearer from a kinetic impact. Bullets and large pieces of shrapnel would still break ribs, but even a little extra protection might be enough to preserve the life of a trained pilot. Life was cheap, BattleMechs were common.

Good training was expensive.

Captain Brannigan was out the cabin door a moment later, pulling herself along the wall handgrips. It would’ve been easy to launch herself towards the bridge like a missile, but in zero gravity a missed handgrip could leave her floating during the jump, and that was as likely to kill her as a drive failure.

“General,” Serena tipped her head as she slipped onto the Roseau's bridge. Marduk nodded in acknowledgement, gesturing to the empty seat beside him. Serena wasn’t even strapped in when she asked, “All the ships are in place?”

“Aye,” he gestured towards the Roseau’s transplex canopy. Even DropShips had cockpit glass, but the Excalibur-class Roseau’s were narrower than those of a typical Union. Not that it mattered much, in the event of an actual space battle they glass was protected by tightly-closed and sealed emergency bulkheads. There was often nothing to really see when two ships exchanged fire in space. Lasers and PPCs were invisible, autocannons and gauss rifle rounds were too small to see, and the smoke trails of missiles dispersed quickly, leaving a smoggy haze in the void. Two ships close enough to attack each other would nonetheless be too distant for their bridge crews to actually see. It took Serena a moment to recognize the faint sliver of a distant JumpShip, without the kilometers-long solar sail deployed, it scarcely seemed longer than the head of a pin.

“All ships are in position and report readiness. I saw no point in delay.”

Serena didn’t argue, there was no purpose to it. Instead, she took a jab at Marduk’s ego. “And the Legion?”

Marduk kept his expression carefully neutral. Marduk didn’t like the Legion, there weren’t many but there were just enough to give Serena a little muscle if she needed it. “The Legion’s battalion has been separated as per President Amaris’s orders. You know this.”

“I thought they were,” Serena agreed. “But you woke me, so I needed to double check.”

He sighed, his face falling for just a moment. Turnabout was fair play, but that didn’t mean the Clan-descendant had to like it. Before either could utter another word, the Helmsman cut in.

“JumpShip Sioux Falls has finished the final charging sequence. All drives fully charged, they are sending to all ships: jump in ten, nine, eight, seven—”

“JumpShip Odessa reports a drive failure, they’re abort—”



***************************************



Serena hadn’t had time to eat anything before the jump. That had probably been for the best, the stream of stomach acid that her body decided needed to be on the far side of the Roseau’s bridge was by far the smallest and least offensive of the stream of disgusting projectiles currently splattering against the transplex canopy windows. To say she felt wretched would have been an understatement: she felt like a poorly-microwaved burrito, at once chilled to the bone while her skin felt like it was close to melting off. The stimulant injector in her neck kicked in to force her mind back to focused lucidity.

She took stock of the situation in an instant. Marduk hung unconscious in his restraints, and the rest of the un-augmented Minnesotans did likewise. She elbowed him in the ribs, drawing a grunt that proved he was alive but utterly failing to wake him. The Sioux Falls’ jump drive, normally a faintly audible hum transmitted via vibrations through the docking collar that held the Roseau in place, had fallen completely silent. She called up a diagnostic on one of the chair’s displays, and queried the JumpShip’s computer. The drive was simply gone, leaving an empty husk of a vessel. They wouldn’t be taking the Sioux Falls home with them.

Serena called up the Sioux Falls’ sensor feed. Capturing local ships to make the trip home was the job of the power armored trooper carriers massed on the JumpShip St. Cloud. A few BattleArmor units had been dispersed to other ships, just in case, but if the St. Cloud had vanished without a trace—a real concern—they might be stuck, which meant they were dead in the long term. Fortunately, the St. Cloud appeared bright and clear. Only the Odessa and Montevideo were missing. She already knew the Odessa aborted, but if the Montevideo’s drive failed they could’ve wound up anywhere. Or nowhere.

She hoped the ship’s computer had simply defaulted to the thirty light-year jump into an uninhabited star system as planned, but there were worse ways to go than firing your component sub-atomic particles towards the galactic core. A failed jump was a quicker death than most.

The Odessa and Montevideo had both been on opposite ends of the flotilla, and each had carried one of the DropShips containing the Legion. That left her only the one company aboard the Sioux Falls. For a moment she stared at Marduk’s unconscious face as waves of paranoia rampaged through her conscious mind, but those faded as the stimulant injector gave her a second dose. Jump Psychosis was a real worry, especially when her body still probably thought it should be unconscious.

With no immediate threats on the Sioux Falls’ sensors, Serena simply did her duty, setting the fleet’s DropShips to auto target anything lacking a Republic IFF. Only then did she wipe her mouth, and settle in to wait for the Minnesotans to recover.

Marduk, she suspected, would certainly resent that she’d woken before he did.



The Map




331st Royal BattleMech Division (Clan Wolverine)


OpForce
Clan Coyote Beta Galaxy, 67th Assault Cluster, Command Supernova


Primary Objectives
- Defeat all Clan BattleMechs (0/10)

Secondary Objectives
- Defeat all Clan BattleAmor (0/5)



Pilot List
AAAAA! Real Muenster
Cascade Jones
painedforever
chktshadeclaw
paragon1
Defiance Industries
Keru (Passed, holding for player availability)
Sair

Alternates
Lemniscate Blue
LeschNyhan
Affi
the JJ