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“Ok… just three more steps and….”

ka-BOOM!

The sound was deafening, as almost a full ton of SRM ammunition, salvaged from the last batch of mechs foolish enough to attack the settlement were triggered by the makeshift detonator in his hands, triggering a massive fireball under the foot of a…

“Cheetah, I think they call ‘em” he said to the scared looking kid who was still dusting himself off. Even at a hundred meters away, the dust from the explosion covered everything.

“Um, I think it’s a panther sir.” The embarrassed kid said sotto voce. One does not correct “the old man” unless one is quite sure that they are right, and even then they think twice.

“Panther, huh?” He spat in the direction of the now legless mech and the crater it now inhabited, face down and half buried. “What ever cat it is, it sure seems to have nine lives. That… Stinger?” He looked at his partner, who just nodded, still embarrassed at having to correct “the old man”. The old man smiled and continued “That Stinger just evaporated like a fresh case of beer after a re-supply run. Lets go see if this pilot’s unlucky enough to have survived”

They crossed the clearing at a leisurely pace. The Panther battlemech obviously wasn’t going anywhere, and it’s mate, the hunchback the “old man” had recognized from his old days fighting the Cappies, was still mired in the mud in the river three kilometers to the south. Besides, Mary and her crew could handle that one just fine. It was that rouge Vulcan out there that had him worried. That was a mech specifically designed to deal with infantry, and professional infantry at that. Not the miners and townsfolk he’d managed to assemble into a makeshift defense force. Their luck had held out for three of these little “incursions” so far, but this fourth was by far the biggest and most organized. If the combine cared enough to send a combined force of a lance of mechs and APC’s then they wanted this place a lot more than the Fed Suns did. Hell, Spitsberg didn’t even rate a garrison of regulars with laser rifles, let alone the mechs it would to retake this planet from whatever the hell the Dracs would send next.

“They want our Germanium mine that goddamned bad, they can have it.” He said with disgust. “…But not today.”

They reached the mech just in time to see the thing shudder and start to flop back and forth in place.

“Doesn’t realize those legs are gone, huh? Either he’s a rookie, or the damage display is cracked up. Or both… Either way, he ought to catch on real quick.”

He said this as he reached into the golfbag the kid was carrying. In it was his set of clubs, a few balls, some tees, and a Mossberg 550 Defender. It was an antique, complete with the pistol-grip and folding stock. He usually used it to scare off the native bird-things that seemed to think his balls were particularly tasty eggs to be devoured on sight. Today he was going to use it for it’s original purpose.

The hatch opened and a small-framed pilot emerged, pausing just long enough to notice the forty-year “old” man and his apprentice standing five meters above him at the mouth of the crater. The old man had a weapon pointed at him and the child couldn’t look less interested in the entire affair. The pilot froze, knowing himself outmatched in this situation, his gun stil strapped to his ankle. The older man had a strange look in his eyes as he began to speak.

“Under article five of the Aries Convention, War Crimes, your direct field commander and by extension you yourself, are guilty of the specific crimes of: One… Endangering civilians in a military action. Two… The specific targeting of civilians and their infrastructure. And three… Atrocities committed during an illegal occupation.”

His eyes, strangely cold during this part of the speech, seemed to tear up at that last point. He paused and continued “The penalties for any one of these for an enlisted man ranges from ten plus years in prison for non-contributing enablers all the way up to Death for any directly involved in the planning or execution of such acts”

The pilot let out an almost imperceptible sigh of relief at this one, He had no idea what this crazy Gaijin was talking about on the subject of atrocities. His company had landed here looking for the pirate band (or probably bands) that had been targeting mining colonies on both sides of the treaty line and threatening to spark another war with the cursed Davions before the Coordinator was ready for it. This one seemed to be a stickler for the rules. Probably military. Intel said none was stationed here, due to the fact the quote “germanium” mine still had yet to pull enough of the ore out of the godforsaken ground in a sufficiently decent grade to even support it’s cost of operation yet. Hell, the next re-supply expidition wasn’t supposed to be scheduled for another two years, this place was so godforsaken. Obviously Intel was wrong. This place had a garrison of well-trained infantry skilled in the use of explosives.

Oh well, He was a Mechwarrior, one of the rarest of citizens, even in the great Draconis Combine. His mech was still salvageable, and he was worth a lot more as a Ransom than as a corpse. Surely this Gaijin knew that. The Gaijin motioned to a radio set the kid had set at the feet of the older man.

“We wiped out the first few waves of your little group, just got the APC’s back at Diggers Pass with a landslide. Funny thing how those landslides don’t kill ya, they just burry you alive. Let you suffocate under meter after meter of earth and rock. Not a quick way to die… Hell, in a confined space like an APC, you might even have enough air to last, oh I’d say a few days.” He paused at that, tilted his head to the side in a funny way, pondered it some more and chuckled a laugh that seemed to the Combine pilot to be anything but one born of humor.

“Yeah, you get to hold out hope just long enough to realize you’re gonna die. Long enough to see the reaper coming for you. See, I want that. I want each and every one of you sons of bitches to see the end coming. Just like my little Charleene.”

At that he pulled the trigger. The shocked Combine pilot had no chance to even ponder the last second before several of the marble sized pellets pierced his skull and reverberated against the back of his Neurohelmet. The other pellets either scattered as they were deflected harmlessly by the armored surface of the helmate, or embedded themselves into his likewise un-armored chest.

“I wanted you to see the reaper too..”

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

He paused and considered the corpse beneath him. It was entirely unlikely that this particular pilot had nothing to do with the unit of Dracs that had come through that first time. The unit that had come in and claimed the mine as theirs. The unit that had claimed that they would let the Colonists live in exchange for the germanium. The unit that hadn’t been satisfied with the meager “take” of their entire years output. The unit that had almost flattened the entire settlement before they left.

That had been three years ago, right after the last Re-supply run by the Federated Shipping Company. They had even thought it was the dropship coming back. After all, it was only a few weeks later, perhaps the Dropship had developed some kind of trouble, or the Jumpship had moved on, spooked by the rumors of pirates that had been floating around lately. They’d picked it up on approach by the huge contrail it left on reentry. They’d been rushed, but somehow Charlene had managed to pull everything together on an hours notice. They’d even set up a welcoming committee, complete with picnic table. he’d been out in the mines, looking at another core sample. Fred, the Seismics expert had assured him that this time they wouldn’t be spoofed by Pyrite deposits, this was the good stuff. He was right. The mine was going to pay off after all, and more than they could have ever hoped.

He was just pulling into town, just getting ready to yell the good news to his wife of sixteen years, a wife who had supported him throughout his military career, a wife who had supported his harebrained expedition into the Davion backwaters, and a wife who had been there at his side, through thick and through thin, right up until the end. When some Draconis Combine Mechwarrior wanted to use the cluster of well-wishers she was leading towards the ship as proof of their intentions. She, and everyone around her died from the collapse of the town hall as the Combine Centurion Battlemech tore into the building with it’s massive autocannon and felled debris on the horrified crowd below. They could even hear the screams of those buried alive, but the Combine soldiers had refused to allow them to rescue their fellow colonists until they had made it abundantly clear that there was no hidden store of Germanium, and then the bastards had taken out their aggression on the rest of the town, leveling every building in site and firing on anyone too slow to scatter into the rubble. After they’d taken off, the survivors had to try to piece themselves back together.

Since that day, there had been regular raids by other forces in Combine paint schemes. They’d been ready though. Even though the facades of the buildings had been rebuilt, they’d been husks. Filled with explosives and wired to blow on command. One thing Miners can do with gusto is rig explosives. They’d bagged the first two groups that way. One, the first, the dropship had limped away. The second, whatever had been in the ship had blown sky high. It was a godsend, as the debris had been useful in rebuilding their little fake town. It took a lot of time, and was quite tedious, but it was a labor borne of both malice and futility. They weren’t going to mine any more. They were going to wait out the storm, and give up on this god forsaken rock. But first they were going to take every goddamned Drac they could with whatever they had.

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

“Mary to Jack”

He paused, how long had he been staring at the corpse? His companion, the Wallace orphan, was just sitting there… Totally un concerned and mnching on a ration-candy bar. He was surprised, supposedly there weren’t any of those left, hadn’t been for months. Unless this kid had just never eaten one of the ones he’d been issued before now. Or he’d pilfered it.

Either way, he’d earned it. Not too many teenagers could haul that sack and help him rig explosives. But that was why he’d used the kid as his caddy even before all hell had broken loose. Before…

“You’re not a teenager…” he said in a quiet voice

“No sir… I’m ten, sir… I’m…sorry?” he looked both confused and hurt by the comment, which had been delivered sharply enough to cut the silence like a knife.

Only ten.

God… He’d forgotten how quickly war ages people. Unconsciously his fingers ran to the scar under his eye, a souvenir of the last war he’d been in. The war that had convinced him to move half way across the innersphere, to a supposedly boring place unworthy of attack. That had driven him… Here.

“MARY… TO… JACK…! ARE… YOU… THERE…!” The radio screamed for his attention yet again.

“I should answer that…”

He moved like an automaton, on full autopilot and picked the handset up. He considered it for a second, as if he’d never seen such a strange device before. He cocked his head to one side and “hmphed” to himself as if the device had done some astounding trick. He blinked twice and shook his head as if to clear it, then depressed the button and spoke in a jovial, if not enthusiastic tone.

“Yes Mary… I’m here… How are things on your end?” His eyes were out of focus, as if gazing into the distance.

The set burst with static, a sure sign of the battery dying. He should have recharged it yesterday. How odd, such a simple thing to remember, and it had totally slipped his mind. It troubled him, but only for a second, as Mary chose that moment to respond.

“It was messy, but we pulled it off. This one might even be salvageable, if we can figure some way to pull it out of this sinkhole.”

A salvageable mech. Now THAT was a good sign. So far they’d been a little too effective in disabling their attackers. It was difficult to retrieve useful weaponry from them. Buried under tens of meters of mud… thrown into water deep enough to make recovery impossible… vaporized by exploding dropships… It was a real hassle.

And it wasn’t like it was a case of casting pearls before swine either. Most of this expedition was made up of ex-soldiers that had answered Jack’s “call of the wild frontier” after the last war. There were expert mechpilots, combat engineers, even an aerospace fighter-jock for their long ago destroyed dropshuttle. All of them fed up with fighting for a government dead set on fighting every other superpower in the universe with no end in sight.

Such naive optimism. He realized now that the way of the universe was that of the bully. Either you were the strongman with the gun, or you were the one under his boot. It all made perfect sense now. It it’s own mad way, the universe finally made sense. He’d seen the light and all it had cost him was his wife, and their unborn child.

“I’ve got some news too. We got another one here, a Panther mech. Well… this cat… he isn’t purring any more. No, I’d say we found another way to skin this cat.”

“This isn’t the time for jokes Jack. Snap out of it and get back here, we still have a Vulcan out there, plus whatever that last mech was. I need you to keep it together.”

“I’m… I’m fine... Really. Now, we need to get ready for the next step.”

Yes, the next step… One Step at a time… That was the way to do things…

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Not too sure where I'm going with this one. Eventualy he's going to get a lance of mechs out of the deal and lead his merry band of psychopaths in a war of retribution against the combine, find out it wasn't even the dracs that leveled his town, but Yakuza renegades looking for an easy score and pretending to be regulars. So then he becomes a pirate hunter.

But Right now I'm having too much fun narating how this Christopher-walken inspired psychopath even gets the mechs in the first place.

Working through some anger and frustration in my own personal life right now. By watching movies and playing megamek. Can ya tell?

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Thanks for the scary glimpse into your mind Chainsaw.

_________________
General Brett "Hitman" Coote S.L.M.H., P.H. w/9 Clusters, S.S.B.
S.L.A.F. (Retired)
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... da-red.gif[/img] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/can-ontario.gif[/img]

Gee with feedback like that how can i NOT continue?

( )

Fudge it, I like the story, and I'm continuing...



“Harako-san, report!”

Nothing but static answered him. He shook his head in disgust.

“What is it now my annoying little punishment from Buddha? Are our radio’s too dirty for your precious royal hands? Or perhaps you’re too busy being nephew to a second cousin of the whatever it is you are to talk to a mere commoner like your commanding officer?” He didn’t dare key his microphone for that comment, as even though his blood was thinned by distance from the throne, he DID have that most sacred of family names, and Cho-sa Ichero Sanchez wasn’t even full blooded Asian.

No, such disrespect to a Kurita, even one as stupid and worthless as his newest Panther pilot could not fail to go unpunished. So he cursed to himself in a curious mix of Spanish and traditional Japanese.

“First I have to prove myself the equal of the best Asian in my class just to get considered for command of a lance, when anyone with any level of skill is leading companies. Then I draw bar-none the worst unit in the entire Combine, one so foul that even the Legion of Vega has separated it from it’s chain of command. Then I get stuck with this perverted buffoon out of some rear-echelon’s idea of sick nepotism. If anyone else had been caught doing what he’d done, they’d be beaten and skinned in the public square. Him, he’s shuffled off to the military, issued a mech that should have gone to someone much more deserving, and handed to ME for “babysitting”. Surely I must have committed some ill in another life to have deserved this, because I cannot think of anything in this one…”

For the fifteenth time today he looked at the bronze Buddha welded to the “dash” of his mechs cockpit. It was against all regulations to have something like that, aside from the safety concerns should it break loose, the state religion was worship to the Coordinator, not that of the teachings of a six thousand year old pudgy bald man of peace.

“Well, at least YOU cannot leave me my friend, I welded your fat ass into place myself. You may be as silent as our worthless friend to the east, but somehow I feel that you are of substantially more value to me.”

The bronze idol said nothing and Ichero turned his attention to the c3 readout display.

The combine had been working for a long time at integrating the communications and sensor data from its units into something that could be shared with superiors in comfortable rear-based positions. It stemmed from their inherent mistrust of their own subordinates. They had reached a limited degree of success, allowing for video feeds and basic sensor data being relayed, but the usefulness of such data was dubious at best. First and foremost the system crammed too much data into a compressed feed. It took huge computers to even make sense of it, let alone sort it out into something easily understood. Current computer technology just couldn’t handle it.

But that didn’t stop the Combine from trying. No, all mechs had to be kept up to date with the latest attempt at LiveFeed technology. Ichero secretly liked the idea, as it gave him the limited ability to “see” what his other units could see, if only while totally stationary and totally focused on the system.

“Lets see that we can see…”

He turned the unit on and switched over to Harako’s frequency. Odd, there was no feed. No, that’s not true, the feed was coming through just fine, but the visible spectrum and camera sensor data was totally blank. Black as night. Switching over to Radar gave him a white screen, as if someone had covered the dome in thick layers of sheet metal.

“Has to be a malfunction.” Easily enough checked, if Harako would just answer his damn radio… He knew what to do, he’d raise Kenada’s Hunchback and have him detour north from the river. That fat slob was late checking in anyway, probably finished his check and climbed out to do a little fishing. Son of a fisherman was always complaining about the foulness of their rations, he wouldn’t miss a chance to…

Odd, Keneda’s Hunchback was giving him a weird reading. Like it was standing on a cliff looking out over… No, a check of the artificial horizon indicator showed him the trugh, the mech wasn’t on a cliff, the mech was on it’s back! And the Radar confirmed it. Why the hell…?

“Keneda, what are you doing? Do you need assistance?”

Stupid of him, with the LiveFeed engaged, his cockpit decrypter was too busy with the signal feed to decrypt voice feeds. That explained the absence of communications from his unit, he hadn’t deactivated it since his last check of them, his entire command could be radioing for him for the last hour and he wouldn’t even have known…

He put the Livefeed into standby and instantly his radio sprang to life.

“… Keneda-san! Harako-san! Ichero-Sama! Is anyone OUT THERE!”

It was Hoshi. He’d forgotten about Hoshi. He was supposed to be playing babysitter for the infantry in his Vulcan, but have been pulled away by some odd readings outside the ravine. Ichero knew they were just sensor ghosts, the last pilot of that mech had reported the same problems, and earned an execution for his troubles by countermanding a superior when he said it hadn’t been repaired. But it was always better to be safe than sorry, so he’d authorized Hoshi to break off and reconnoiter the area… That was almost an hour ago too.

“Problems with the LiveFeed system again. I think I have them fixed, Status report.”

“Sir, there has been a terrible accident, a landslide has buried the infantry company, including the XO!”

Ichero instantly felt the sting of that comment, as a mech pilot he should have rated command of this assignment, but the infantry commander had him outranked, and was pure Japanese blood. So that had ended the discussion.

“An accident? Well dig them out. Oh that’s right, you don’t have arms. Help them pull themselves out as best as you are able, I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

“Sir, you fail to understand. Er… I failed to explain it properly… I apologize for not being more clear, but they are buried under almost thirty meters of earth, the entire side of the ravine just swallowed them up! Their Wideband communications arrays are barely penetrating the earth, and I’m right over them!”

Well that explained why the XO wasn’t the one on the radio getting on his case. This was a disaster of the highest magnitude. For the first time in months he was glad he wasn’t in command. The blame for this would be placed firmly on the XO’s shoulders.

“All units on grid, Please respond.”

“That’s the other problem sir, Kenada-san and Harako-san are not responding to their radio’s. Both reported in as usual, and when you failed to answer continued on mission after reporting your apparent equipment failure to the XO. I was en route to you when…”

“Never mind that now, you say the other mechs are not responding to communications, and over a third of our force is buried alive. This is no accident. We’re under attack.”

“But sir, we have yet to report a single shot fired, and sensor sweeps by the Dropship as we passed overhead failed to detect anything resembling mechs, except for tha area around the mines, and you yourself are between us and there. I agree that there has been a disproportionate level of mishaps, but even so, if there was a battle, surely we’d know it, correct? So how can we be under attack?”

Hoshi was slow to catch on to anything that didn’t fall directly into his training. He was a competent if not particularly bright soldier who had earned assignment to the unit because he had been set up as the fallguy for someone else in his old unit. They managed to pull off a huge theft, and he was left quite literally holding the bag. He was exonerated for the crime, but not for his stupidity, so he was shipped off here. Ichero usually took pity on the lout, but not today.

“Mechwarrior are you questioning the opinions of a superior officer? Because if so, as the current commander of this operation I will see you hung for such insolence”

“No sir I was just…”

Ichero cut him off, he didn’t have time for protocol at this moment. “Silence, you may yet see redemption in my eyes, form up on me at grid GG-90. Be there in fifteen minutes, we’ll form up together and sweep as a team.”

“But what of the XO?”

“Neither of our mechs can dig him out. We’ll see if we can get either of our lost comrades to use their mechs arm-actuators to dig, or if not, we can form a press-gang in that town by the mines. Either way, they aren’t exactly going anywhere, now are they?”

“Yes sir, I’ll just pass the…”

“You will do nothing of the sort. I am instituting a communications blackout on your end, keep the channel open, our friends might try to contact us, and we wouldn’t want to interfere with that…”

“No Sir”

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Mary Gibbs was looking at her handiwork. Standing on the chest of the prone Hunchback mech, she could not help but be reminded of her stint in the AFFS, the Davion Army. Though her mech had been a Javalin, they all operated essentially the same. Little changes here or there, sure… But at their core they all functioned the same way. Pilot sits in a big comfy couch with a huge heavy helmet on that translates his or her brainwaves into pilot data that let the mech move like a human being, rather than come clunky box with legs. Pilot wears as little clothing as possible because the mech is a hot thing to be in, even when you aren’t on a planet as hot as this one. Factor those two things together and you get the urge to drive the damned things with the main hatch propped open, to vent some of the heat. She’d done it herself after a while. It let you hear things better.

Aside from the loud “clumph” noise of mech footfalls, ICE engines and aerofighters made their own loud noises, and most importantly, the very jungle itself had it’s own rhythm. The absence of sound could be just as telling as the presence of it. That had been his mistake. Like her, this guy had come from the type of background that had coddled his bad habit of relying to much on his own senses, and not on the common sense of modern warfare. Sure mechs were kings of the battlefield, but even the king had to watch his back.

“How long before the smoke takes effect?”

“Should be pretty quick, it’s almost as confined in that cockpit as the boxes we keep them in. I’d say another five minutes and we can vacuum the buggers right up” said the man in the mesh covered clothes as he continued to pump smoke into the hatch from the apparatus he was carrying.

“Excellent” She afforded herself a smile. It had been a long shot, the original plan had been to tempt him into opening the hatch with a display of her, shall we say feminine charms, but that risky proposition had proven unnecessary. All they had had to do was figure out what direction he was going in, and hide in canopy of a tree at the right spot. As he’d passed, they both had chucked the 20cm square pieces of the beehive they’d disassembled into the opened hatch. The bees had done the rest.

“Too bad for you, I learned my lesson when some kind of snake thing almost got me. You just weren’t that lucky” She still had a sore spot from where the thing had wrapped itself around her and cracked a rib all those years ago. Luckily her arm could reach the vibroknife. Sadly such an item would have done this one no good. Like using a baseball bat to swat fleas.

“How does it look?” she addressed the kid beneath the mech, floundering around in the waste deep mud poking the mech with a stick.

“No damage I can see, I guess the mud adsorbed the fall…” He paused to look up at the body hanging in the tree above him, its neck twisted at an odd angle by the weight of his body pulling at the helmet’s data cables, stuck as they were in the branches. His face was a mask of nonchalance but his voice told her otherwise. “He… uh, stopped screaming. Does that mean he’s… dead?”

“If the shock from all those stings didn’t kill him, then the fall did. He might have survived if he hadn’t got hung up in that tree branch. Broken neck, several hundred beestings… It makes no difference. Just means I don’t have to kill him myself.”

“Spoken like a true soldier”

She turned around to face him. Jack McDonald, such a common name. At one time it had been hard for her to believe he’d been the captain of an entire company of Shrek PPC carriers. Anyone who’d looked at him would have pegged him as an accountant, a lawyer, anything but a fighter. He’d had such soft eyes…

But not now. Even a blind man could look at him and see the eyes of a killer. Something inside him had snapped, or perhaps it had always been snapped and Charlene had simply found some way to fix it, albeit temporarily. Either way, Jack was no softie now, and even her false bravado at the death of the Draconis Mechwarrior was unmatched by the coldness as he looked up at the corpse in the tree.

“Will that affect the helmet at all, those cables holding him up like that?”

She looked for a second. Then the meaning of what he had said hit her like a ton of bricks. He was totally unconcerned with the death of the human in the tree up there, and regarded it as he would upon opening a door and seeing it was cloudy outside. All he was worried about was the condition of the neurohelmet.

“Uh, no… It’s ok, those cables are made to withstand a beating, and if not then there’s spares in the overhead compartment.”

“Good, because I’m getting the feeling that their friends aren’t going to fall for the same tricks.” He paused, squinted at the body in the tree. “He’s not decorated enough. No pretty metals like the Dracs seem to love so much. The other one with the Panther… he wasn’t anybody either… No, we have an officer out there somewhere and he’s going to be curious why his men have stopped checking in…”

“Well then we’d better get out of here before he comes this way, Can’t take the mech with us, these things are like turtles in the muck. It actually holds them down like glue.”

“I’m aware of that, you told me that before…” He squinted and peered at the body in the tree “That’s why we picked this spot… But I think I have a solution you hadn’t planned on. Tell me… do we have any block and tackle back in the caves?

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Very nice Chainsaw. I take this is set in the post 3030 era.

_________________
General Brett "Hitman" Coote S.L.M.H., P.H. w/9 Clusters, S.S.B.
S.L.A.F. (Retired)
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... da-red.gif[/img] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/can-ontario.gif[/img]

actualy.....

Nope Pre-4th sucession war! (by a few years, i haven't decided)

See. it's not a c3 system like we think of it, more like a one-way videofeed from a reporter in the feild to their home base. I'm trying to explain why something as simple as c3 wasn't made before. The actual broadcasting of the data isn't the problem, it's handeling it. and using 3025 technology... Well it's odd at best to even do that!

The data feed is Visual (camera feeds), Radar, and a limited readout from the pilots HUD. Any one of which can be accessed at a time, but at the cost of having to operate the LiveFeed machine, something that requires a pilots entire attention span. To the point he can't even pilot the mech. And it ties up the Radio, to the point he can't send or recive traffic. It was a peice of my patented Ghettotech(tm) I adapted to a mechwarrior RPG setting. Kind of like the infantry headsets in Aliens. They feed data back to the commander, but not to each other.

Other than that it is a convienient plot device that is going to cause some more headaches later on...

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

He’d have to shave some armor off so the cowlings would match up, but yes… It would work. And it would be quick and easy to implement too, since the Dracs seemed to be just as anal about using the same kinds of actuator hookups for all their mechs as the Davions.

“Probably a hold over from the old ‘League days…” he said out loud. ‘Ok, yeah, have the crawler drag them over….”

The other man, an assistant engineer who used to operate the coresampler back when they were still interested in mining, spoke into the tranciver. Soon the mining crawler would come dragging the requested parts, namely a pair of legs salvaged from a Jenner that had met it’s end when the fusion pile blew sky high, taking most of the rest of it. But then a two-ton wrecking ball to the back had a tendency to do that to a mech’s fusion engine….

Luckily the panther was otherwise intact after it’s fall. A few patches of armor, a slight hack-job on the legs, and this Panther would be good as new. Funny looking as hell, but functional nonetheless. Three hours, tops. Less if these grease monkeys were half as good at spot welding as they’d put on their applications when they’d signed on. He shut down the reactor, hoping to cut the things heat signature. And make it harder to track.

While he was in there he’d also pulled the boards from the pilot system, moved a jumper to “reset” and powered the thing back up. Supposedly Battlemechs were theft proof because their recognition software could identify any unauthorized users. The front end terminal in the cockpit was ostensibly hack-proof (he chuckled to himself at that one. Had he been able to read Japanese he probably could have stumbled his way through it in under an hour) But that didn’t help if the entire master-system located deep in the torso wedged between the gyro and the engine was pulled and reset. It was this master-system that was the beast’s weakness. By flashing it’s Basic Input-Output System, he’d wiped all programming since it’s original factory imprint.

Sure it’d revert to the original BIOS version, which often meant a lot of little headaches, but it also reset the "authorized-user database" and set all the security crap to “input new user” settings. The newly reactivated panther was now dumber than a sack of doorknobs compared to ones with the latest firmware, but it was also a lot friendlier. It wouldn’t use a feedback loop to fry the brain of its next user. And that was worth whatever headaches driving a Mk1Mod0.0.000 Panther might bring.

He wasn’t completely up on his Draconis mechs, so he had only a vauge idea of what those flukes were, but he did know none of them were any danger to the machine or it’s pilots. You see, Master Techs like him remembered little things like that. You never knew when they’d prove useful.

But first they had to drag the torso somewhere where they could work on it in peace. A stupid but functional Panther wasn’t a hell of a lot of good without any freaking legs. That’s what the other Crawler was for…

It was a messy process, but it killed the wait for the crawler. Putting the machine back together and again powering it on and off, he watched for any signs of malfunction. Yep, it worked. But it kept yelling something in Japanese that he couldn’t recognize. Ok, so he couldn’t recognize anything the Cockpit Voice Reader told him, but he had to admit the thing it kept coming back to and repeating sounded pretty damn urgent. He swore at the thing for the last time. “I’ll figure it out back in the caves…”

Forty minutes later, he was riding on top of the crawler as it pulled the torso section behind it. The twenty-five odd tons of mech that were left after the legs had been blown off was a substantially lighter load than the Ore-crawler normally pulled, but those loads were normally on trailers. That made a difference. But the long ride was almost over, they were almost to the older mines. The first ones that had proven to be a bust during the first five months of occupation. They’d been their little home away from home, as their old homes had been blown up and rebuilt as one giant mechtrap. They’d been a godsend on the last raid. The damned Dracs had survived the mechtrap in town and almost broken free. That damned Locust mech had actually outrun the chain of explosives, ran a gauntlet of Dumb-fired LRM’s ar point blank, and only fell when the pilot misjudged a turn and smacked into the one hardened structure left standing in town.

And if he could get a gyro to replace the busted one in it, it’d be fully functional again too…

“That things gonna need one hell of a cleanup and a good paintjob by the time we’re done.” He observed to himself. Behind them, a hover skimmer was darting back and forth using the propwash from its aircushion to smooth out the trail they were leaving. It wasn’t perfect…. Hell the little panther torso was putting a half-meter deep furrow into the earth, but they were zigzagging, and it was good enough to make tracking them harder than it should have been. Which was all they needed, he’d have this thing mobile long before anyone could catch up to them…

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Dang impressive stories here...I like them.

_________________
Medron Pryde - The Great and Terrible
[img]http://faileas.greywolf.googlepages.com/WOTD.png[/img]
[url=http://www.pryderockindustries.com]P.R.I.[/url] - The home of BattleTech programs and files
"I'm gonna Tea Party like its 1776." - Medron Pryde
Who is John Galt?

Ichero was worried. Neither of the other mechs had reported in. It was rapidly going from bad to worse. The Dropship that had carried them in had dusted off and entered orbit, it’s single Aerospace Fighter was assisting it in the hunt for Pirate spacecraft. The problem was that this put them out of range of his standard communications suite. The XO had a satcom widebeam uplink terminal in the APC but it was as useful to them buried under all the rock as two tin cans and a few kilometers of twine.

For not the first time Ichero cursed his fatassed Commander from wanting to command from the comfortable seat of his dropship. The fool’s idiot idea to capture the pirates dropship had cost them an entire ASF as it’s hangar was converted over to carry a lance of APC’s and their infantry.

He had to admit that the commander might have been right about one thing though. This place could be the enemy base camp. He’d discounted it himself, the mining colony was well known to be poorly defended, and in fact was in his opinion probably a good candidate for a pirate strike, had they had anything worth stealing. Having over a third of your force wiped out in one fell swoop and another third suddenly just stop all communications was spooky enough, the fact it seemed to be without a shot fired, or even worse, with shots fired but too quick for the victims to warn the others…

“Sir, we’re coming up on the area of Harako-san’s last transmission. Three hundred meters… Somewhere in that gully over there.”

The words stopped as both realized what they were looking at. The “gully” was an almost perfectly shaped circle. There was no natural explaination for it’s existence, and most alarmingly, it had mech-footprints leading into it. Regular pacings all the way up to it, as if the pilot had not seen it… or it hadn’t been there until after…

“They blew him up! By the Dragon, they blew up Harako!”

Hoshi might be prone to overreact at times, but at this moment he was precisely correct. The bomb crater, it was unmistakably a crater of some sort, had enveloped about a fifty-meter sphere of earth, and vaporized it. It was too deep to see into at this range, so they both closed, Hoshi blathering on hysterically, Ichero a mute mask of determination.

As they closed, he noticed a few other details. The desert sands and hardened earth of this valley were undisturbed except for the tracks left by Harako’s panther. So either whatever killed him was still here, or had come and gone in a method that hadn’t left any tracks on the visible horizon. The Mech apparently was no longer in the crater. An explosion big enough to make that kind of hole in the ground was certainly enough to cripple a light mech like the panther, but there should be more debris. Magnetic scanners detected perhaps three tons of ferrous metals in the area, nowhere near the mass of the missing panther.

Wheels were spinning in his head. No tracks meant an airborne threat. It had to. There was no other explanation. In an environment like this microdesert, very similar to the dusty world he’d called home, you couldn’t move without leaving tracks… No, obviously the attack had come from the air. And the attacker, or more probably attackers had managed to take out poor Harako, and then flew his mech off. His head clicked off possibilities. His mind kept coming back to that of the Karnov Vtol. It was the only craft capable of lifting a panther that could possibly land on the rough sands of this area.

But Karnov’s were unarmed, they were the pickup trucks of the modern military. Sure some pilots added small machineguns to the chassis to drive off infantry attacks at landing zones… But machine guns don’t make craters like this… NO, this was the work of some kind of bomb… But Karnovs didn’t carry bombs, did they? From the little attention he’d bothered to pay the design during the minimal familiarization training he’d had with the Airmobile Logistics corps he never heard the mouthy lowbrow operators mention the ability to carry bombs. No, it was all boring statistics and math on transport capabilities and one operator’s crackpot theories on air assaults by infantry. As if such flashy things had any relevance on a battlefield where mechs were king…

So the pirates obviously had another vehicle to support their Karnov. Too many fighters could carry bombs, not that it mattered… who cared what the airframe was, the worrisome thing was the fact the pirates used bombing tactics… This was unexpected. He had to find Keneda-san quickly, assuming it wasn’t already too late…

Finally reaching the crater, his visual sensors finally made out the outline of a prone figure at the base of the pit… crater… It wasn’t too hard to imagine who the occupant was, as his bloodsplatered and dirty uniform was unmistakable. Even the weird carrion-eating creatures attacking the corpse helped him to identify the body, they had shreds of Combine-green terrycloth on them. With disgust he ordered Hoshi to turn his flamer onto the pack of beasts eating their dead companion. Even a worthless soul such as Harako deserved a final fate better than to end up feeding the beasts on this horrid planet.

The jets of superheated plasma poured forth for almost three minutes, long enough to insure that nothing remained of the body but ash.

“Hoshi, now we will get these bastards…”

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

They’d managed to bring both mechs to the old mineshafts. This was where they’d brought just about everything of use to the remaining colonists. Food, water, salvaged weaponry, and their radio set. They’d been glad that that had survived, because they needed it to contact the resupply ship when it came. For they were nowhere near the old town and the pre-prepared landing strip there.

No, these massive manmade caves were almost thirty kilometers from the site of their town. They’d built the town first, then gone looking for mine sites. It’d been weird, for a few weeks every five years or so, the location of the town was ideal. The dropship would land on the only geologically sound area nearby, and pull up outside town. The rest of time, the town was incontinently located a half days travel away from the mining areas.

It had prompted them to build a second set of domiciles in the caves. Domiciles that were now infinitely more useful than they’d been before the coming of the raiders. Equal parts shelter and armory. The place now had a name too. Den of the Snake eaters.

Occupying a large central equipment storage chamber was the technician. He had assembled everything they could salvage from each of the attacks. They’d gone back through their old trash dumps, salvaged everything they could, and here it all was.

There was a Hunchback Battlemech, in pristine condition, it’s bulky and odd shaped frame dominating the chamber. Cables were strung from it to the Panther chassis which was beginning to take shape on the floor. The legs from the Jenner were set next to the mech, awaiting the final adjustments to fit them to the frame. It was a rush job. He’d hit upon a brilliant idea of letting the Hunchback’s computer diagnose and repair the Panthers. Most technicians worth their salt used the extra data storage space on the Battlemech’s computer to store backups of the data needed by other mechs in the unit. It was a way to insure that the mech could be repaired in the field, even if the technician was forced to repair complicated equipment far from the diagnostics equipment of a mech hangar.

Whoever this Draconis Tech was, he’d done his job right. There was repair data for the Hunchback, the Panther, and the Vulcan. It also let him know what their other opponent was. A Blackjack Draconis Combine modification. One with some weird system called LiveFeed on it. The repair data on it had some weird level of encryption that was obscenely hard to crack, the thechnician didn’t have time to mess with it. The technician’s notes (in Japanese of course) had been unencrypted. Typical mistake for a field techie. They’d proven no problem for the translation program on his noteputer to translate into something he could read. Indeed they were written to be as clear and concise as possible, and yielded some VERY interesting data. The technician didn’t think LiveFeed was feasible. It overwhelmed the commander with data, taxed the computers on the command mech to the max, and forced slaved mechs to feed data through their communications systems thereby making them easily tracked to a suspecting enemy.

He thought about that. If they’d dedicated some other computer to the task rather than relying on the over-taxed Battlecomp, the system might work better. It was a conclusion the Dracs were sure to come to eventually. Hell it only took him ten minutes, it’d take the Dracs a few years tops. They could be stuborn about doing things a certian way when they got their heads set on something. Luckily there were limits on the hardware thet'd make this nearly impossible. If they ever got this thing to work, it would be bad. VERY BAD. But he was less concerned at the moment by this far off possible threat than he was by the very real and imediate fact that LiveFeed system meant that the every move the mech made was broadcast to a receiving unit.

Since it was all software based, there was no way he could pull it out of the hunchback without pulling the plug on the battlecomp. And that meant losing his only source of repair data and device drivers. He couldn’t even move them of fthe Hunchback, as none of his other computers had the necisary space. These files were HUGE. Full design specs, possible weapons configs and the software needed to run them, operationg data for every conceivable environment, and the prerequisite thought-recognicion algorithms for the Neurohelmate. This stuff wasn’t going to fit anywhere he had access to but on the massive CPU of a Battlemech.

So he had to live with the fact that unknown data was being fed through the air to a pair of hostile Battlemechs every time he turned the Hunchback on. Luckily the mineshaft’s trace germanium and other heavy-metal impregnated ores blocked the signal from leaving the caves. But that also meant that should they leave with it, they’d be instantly clued into the location of the mines.

The Panther, obviously, had lost it’s LiveFeed software when he’d reset the primary jumper. It’s lost everything but the data it’d walked off the factory floor with back in… 10 June 2847… Wow, this thing was an oldie. One hundred eighty-odd years old, not as bad as some, he’d personally seen Orions that predated the fall of Starleague three hundred years ago leading mechs intobattle. But still, it humbled him, this mech had already seen more years than he could ever hope to, and with luck would continue to fight long after he was dead and gone. A shiver ran down his spine. This was something deeper than he had the time or inclination to ponder right now. He focused on the getting the other equipment ready.

There was the Locust with the slagged Gyro off to the side propped against a wall. It’s battlecomp was already hard-reset. He’d done that to disable the rescue beacon the pilot had activated. Somehow the blasted thing wouldn’t turn off, a multi frequency shriek that returned every time he reconnected the commo systems. The hard reset had worked, the only other option he’d had wasa five kilo Sledge hammer, and that option had almost been the one used, so frustrated had the technician been.

Asorted scrap parts from the wrecked dropship were here too, medium and small mech classed lasers in various condition, some heatsinks, even an entire head assembly from a Phoenix Hawk, somehow blown clear of the crashed ship. The pilot inside hadn’t survived…

“I believe the phrase the recovery team used was cockpit lined with twenty liters of ‘wadded beef’” he thought to himself with a chuckle. Those recovery guys had a morbid sense of humor, but then again… they’d all lost people close to them in the attacks. So some gallows humor was to be expected.

The old man, He’d fared the worst. All of them were pissed off, some still wracked with grief. Hell, a couple even just took it quietly, walked off and put a bullet in their heads. Not the old man. He seemed to just… Turn off.

The technician was a fan of old fiction. He kept thinking back to the old stories of Pinocchio and Frankenstein’s Monster. Both were odd automatons that played at being human. And neither story ended well for the protagonists. Another shudder went down his spine. He shook his head clear. The old man was fine. Jack had always been weird and distant. That was just his way. He was fine. Hell, he’d lead them into resisting rathat than giving up. He was fine. (he had to be)

“Yeah, he’s fine… I’m fine… we’re all fine… This is just like damned scout camp. All I got to do is finish up here and I get my woodshop badge, my survivalist badge and my guerilla warfare [blanking] badge.” He blinked. No tears... He had a job to do. He sighed and went back to digging through the parts piles for the piece he needed to align that Hip joint…

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Jack sat in the room, staring at the map. It was an old topographical map he’d had done by the dropship on the approach when they’d settled. It was accurate and detailed. It was marked with a number of hash marks and numbers detailing everything needed to run a mining survey. Also, push pins were poked through it in an area to the southwest, a small valley very familiar to him. The pushpins had paper taped to them. One said “Vulcan” the other had marked on it “???”. It worried him to not be sure what that other mech was. Seismograph data indicated it was about the same weight and movement profile as the Vulcan, lending weight to technician Gustov’s Blackjack theory. But it didn’t make sense. A Hunchback, Vulcan, Panther, and Blackjack? That was an odd lance in anyones book. Four APC’s? What was the rest of their force? No dropship he’d ever heard of in the arsenals of any force, let alone the Draconis Combine, carried a payload that matched this units profile. Perhaps a Union, but that still left room for another mech lance or two more vehicle lances. That worried him. Plus the fact hat they’d not yet seen enemy aircraft. A force of this size normally had a handful of ASF’s assigned to keep an eye on things from the sky. That had him worried. Aside from the lush greenery near the wareting holes and rivers, the planet was all open desert savannah and gently rolling hills An eye in the sky could see quite far indeed. That’s why he’d moved his people underground. “Eagles may soar, but Weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines” as the old saying went. He laughed. That held true for moles too. He laughed and laughed. He couldn’t stop himself, if he didn’t laugh, he’d cry again.

“Well, the old man seems to be in a good mood for once,” one of the miners said to another. “Maybe he’s getting better… Maybe he’s not as crazy as they all say. I mean after all, I always have a good chuckle after shotgunning someone and forcing someone else to hang themselves. I mean, murder is one of the best sources of a good chuckle I’ve heard of…”

“He ain’t crazy. The boss is just thourogh. And shut up. You don’t know HOW he’s handling his grief. If it helps him cope, let him blow off some steam.”

“I don’t know dude,” the other said, “I for one don’t like the idea of anyone who finds murder funny”

“Murder? Or self defense?” the first said with a growl

“Thorough? Or Sadistic?” he whispered back.

The two wandered off, continuing their conversation quietly. One did not question the actions of the boss too loudly. After all, he’d saved them… Hadn’t he?

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Mary Gibbs was busy herself. She already knew she was the most qualified person to drive the Hunchback. But now she had to select from the survivors who would drive the other mech, should they ever get it operational. Of the seventy-five colonists still alive, six had had some level of Mechwarrior training. Seven including herself, she said. Gods the stress was getting to her. She prided herself on being detail oriented, but this was nuts. Most of these people hadn’t been in the military for two decades, how were they going to fight the Draconis [blanking] Combine?

“Focus Mary, Focus” she told herself.

Seven mechwarriors. The rest were former technicians, infantry, vehicle operators, or the significant others of people who’d fit those above descriptions. Ten of those were children.

Sixty-five people with two mechs against all comers. It was madness, but then again it’d been sixty-eight and no mechs when they’d started out. Two suicides and a single combat casualty. During a war, that’d be called “acceptable losses”. What the hell was so acceptable?

She sighed and put her head in her hands.

That had been why she’d mustered out. After her own near-death experience, she’s gained a profound new value for her own lives and those of the ones she served with. The command was very understanding. They just told her to go, all she had to do was leave her mech behind. It’d been an easy choice at the time. Her Javalin hadn’t been a family mech, like so many others in the Davion army. It was Government property. Just one she’d been assigned to by the AFFS with when her scores on that Vagabond School had indicated she’d been an exemplary Mechwarrior candidate and her overjoyed parents had shipped her off to New Avalon for training. Just like she’d been, from the moment she signed on, up until the “unfit for duty” medical discharge that’d kept her from getting a respectable job anywhere else.

So much for benign purposes from a generous government. She knew now the Vagabonds were there to find the talent in the Davion Backwaters and siphon it to the war machine. She’d experienced it first hand, and it sickened her.

“Focus Mary, Focus” she told herself again…

Ok, so they had 6 candidates for one mech. Three were dismissed out of hand, too old. Sure some pilots could still drive well into their sixties, but why tempt fate. That left three possibilities.

Doug Praolini, a light mech jock who’d been mustered out when his Spider had been cannibalized for parts and he’d assaulted a superior officer and the tech responsible.

He was lucky. Most people’d be thrown in prison for such an offense, but a renowned sharpshooter with a good war record? No that’d be public relations fiasco. So they’d drummed him out quietly.

Deke Tanner was an older hand, but he had experience with assault and heavy chassis mechs. Archer, Warhammer, Awsome. The kinds of mechs other warriors have nightmares about. His knowledge of light mech tactics was limited. He knew more about swatting them than driving them.

No, Deke would be the best choice for an Atlas, if they had one, but this Panther would be wasted on him…

Saul Serentino was out of the question. He was an excellent mech pilot, but no. He couldn’t follow orders, especially from her. It would be different if they had a few more mechs. Saul could go off and do his own thing, but with just two… No, She needed someone who knew when to be a team player.

Her mind made up, she gathered herself and made her way towards Jack’s office.

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Looking good so far Chainsaw. I will read the rest when I get home from work tonight.

_________________
General Brett "Hitman" Coote S.L.M.H., P.H. w/9 Clusters, S.S.B.
S.L.A.F. (Retired)
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... da-red.gif[/img] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/can-ontario.gif[/img]

Ichero’s mind was racing. The enemy had to be hiding, the dropship had not seen any signs of mech activity, that much had been reported to him. But what had not been reported was anything concerning aerospace assets. Had the ship even bothered to scan for them?

He swore to himself, there could be a squadron of fighters here and he’s have no clue. Not that it’d take much more than one. Blackjacks and Vulcans weren’t designed for anti-air fire any more than Panthers or Hunchbacks. What he really needed was a Rifleman, or even better, one of those damnedable Jagermechs that the Davions seemed to love so much. Yes, with one of those he could swat an aircraft from the sky without any effort at all. The image of a pirate ASF coming under withering autocannon fire from a rifleman he was piloting brought a smile to his face in spite of himself. It was no secret he despised the mech he had been assigned. He had no faith in either the inferior Blackjack, nor the balky and unwieldy Livefeed system which Buddha seemed fit to burden him with. I think that in my next life I should like to return as something with little uses for such mundane and trivial things as technology and war. Something free… like a bird.

He had another thought, the bastard Kuritas likened themselves to the great dragon of the universe. The dragon itself had but one mortal enemy that could kill it, a little yellow bird. After so many years of fearing the dragon, he smiled at the thought of being the bird.

“Ichero-Sama, what do we do now?”

Hoshi. Why did it have to that slow-witted fool that survived? Ichero would much rather have had Keneda and his hunchback, or even that mouthy bastard Harako and his panther, if just to avoid the overwhelming aura of stupidity coming from his subordinate. He’d been burdened by stupid subordinates almost as long as he’d been in the service. His performance reviews always called into question his leadership skills, but he knew differently. It was all nepotism. He wasn’t hereditary Japanese, and therefore was inferior. Well here with him was a prime example of what was wrong with the combine, and he was tired of it.

“Well, Mechwarrior Hoshi Mitisumura, what do YOU think we had best do? Hmmm? Our infantry, communications equipment and even our senior officer on planet are all buried under tens of meters of earth and rock. Our only mechs capable of digging them out have either disappeared or been bombed into scrap metal. Our dropship isn’t due to pick us up for three more days, and now I have to cope with incessant whining while I’m trying to figure out our next step. What do YOU think the answer is?”

Hoshi’s response was silence, it was just what he wanted to hear. Of course just as he was realizing this, Hoshi decided to answer.

“I guess I should allow you silence, I apologize sir”

Ichero was livid, but decided to waste no further time. Moving to mute his radio he was horrified to see that it was still set to broadbandwidth settings and unencrypted. Anyone and everyone on the entire planet could have been listening in. He’d set it to that looking to reach Keneda, and forgotten to switch it back. And that fool Hoshi hadn’t corrected him. Quickly setting the radio back to the secure-net settings he chided himself. Such a simple mistake, how many others was he making and not realizing.



Gustov was still working on the hip joint when the sounds of yelling in Japanese blared out of the cockpit in the Panther. At first he thought it was the Panther’s cockpit battle computer swearing at him again, but the bursts of static quickly dismissed that. This was radio traffic. Apparently someone named “Bakka” or someone wanting to talk to “Bakka”. He shrugged his shoulders, no one here spoke Japanese, and the translation programs he had were only for text, not voice. Whoever this “Bakka” guy was, him and “Basura” were getting their names called an awful lot. Putting the finishing touches, he popped the seal into place and signaled the Assistant tech to flood the actuator with thirty weight oil. The specs called for some oddball blend, but the closest on hand was standard thirty. He was reasonably sure it’d work like a charm, or at least not damage the joint too much…

With a sigh, he shrugged his shoulders. For better or worse their lanky-looking panther was going to either work or not work in fifteen minutes, as soon as the oil had properly seeped into the joint. Either way he’d done what he could. In the meantime it was time to pass that last tidbit onto Jack.

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Gotta love those guys

_________________
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have-Rush Limbaugh
For more from Rush go here: www.rushlimbaugh.com
Still crazy after all these years.
Force of nature : :
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/flag-us.gif[/img]
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... chigan.gif[/img]

Doug Praolini considered the neurohelmet on the desk in front of him. It had small dents and scratches where it’s previous owner had suffered a close in trauma with several dozen grams of buckshot. The thing reeked of the bleach used to remove the brain matter from the internal padding. He looked at the red and black Combine insignia on it, and pondered it’s previous owner.

Used equipment was nothing new to him. Since the fall of Starleague the five houses had been living of the carrion quite well. They’d picked it’s corpse clean, and kept reusing whatever scraps they could find in their petty struggles. The fact it’s previous owner might not have been completely removed from the equipment before it was reissued though… That was new. For him at least.

No, while he’d seen TriVee’s of action movie stars pulling guns off of corpses and using them, of Hero’s stealing enemy mechs and driving them against all odds, they never seemed to mention the peculiar stench that only dead humans possess. They never seem to show them having to deal with THAT.

He had a soft spot in his heart for such field stripping of battlefield causalities. He’d been a seventh generation Davion Guardsman in his Spider mech, When his family machine had been slagged by lucky PPC hits from a Laio Warhammer he’d gone to appeal it’s destruction. When he returned with authorization to attempt to repair it, he found his commander had already dismantled it. He was offered another machine, but it wasn’t what he wanted. That was his family mech, for better or worse it, and the current scion of the Praolini bloodline at the time, had served faithfully. He’d snapped.

Now they wanted him to pick up and drive another mech, one that not only had been taken in such a violent fashion, but one with which he had little familiarity. Not that anybody had any experience driving THIS kind of mech… Praolini just shook his head. It wasn’t like they had a lot of choice in the matter. They needed someone to pilot the mech, and Mary was pretty adamant it was gonna be him.

“Ok”, he thought to himself, “We can play it that way. I just have to take care of something first.” He picked up the helmet and walked over to the equipment shop. There was still some spraypaint left. That would take care of the Dragon Logo, and the smell…



Ichero and Hoshi were proceeding towards the last known location of the Hunchback at a fairly decent clip. Ichero had decided to loop around to the north to avoid being caught in the open. There were caves, ravines, and wooded areas to shelter him. Without knowing it he’d also opted to walk right through the back yard of the colonists. Had he been focused on looking earthward rather than skyward he would have noticed the Panther’s drag marks that had been poorly disguised by the Hover skiff. As it was he barely paid the terrain any attention, save to be sure there was always adequate cover for him to dive into should the phantom pirate ASF show itself. The nature of a battle that neither side was expecting was shaping up in a way neither could have forseen.

_________________
Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

“Are you COMPLETELY certian?”

The Seismologist just nodded his head before continuing, “Yes sir, Mr McDonald… See back here where the sounds of those footfalls got all muffled? That’s from them hitting Silicate, You know… Sand? There’s only one place three kilometers from here with that much sand in the stratum. And they’re getting closer. I’d be able to give you a better picture if these things were designed for what we’re using them for, but I’m doing the best I can.”

It was sad but true. Their Seismic set was designed to get deep readings from directly below the sensors, they had put the sensors on an incline and were attempting to get readings from a wider and shallower area. The display was having a hard time making sense of it, especially since it kept trying to run earthquake subroutines in a vain attempt to classify the odd sounds of the mech footfalls in geological terms. Triangulation was right out the window now too, as perversely the closer the mechs got the harder it was for the set to lock in. But one thing was clear, the enemy was following the trail of the Panther. It was too close to be a coincidence.

“Damn, If we’d just had a little more time…”

“We have had a lot more than we should have already. In any event, we’re as ready as can be expected. The Hunchback has been reconfigured for it’s new user… ‘Cho-sa Mary’ and Gustov has patched together something resembling a Panther. We’ve got them out gunned, but they’ve got the speed advantage.”

Jack pondered that for a second. “Then we give them a fight where speed is meaningless. We ambush them. Go get Doug I need him to…”

“I’m right here sir”

Both turned around to look at Doug Praolini, standing before them in a loose fitting black jumpsuit, with a shiny black with crimson flames Neurohelmet affixed to his head. The paint was still tacky, not having completely dried. The effect was impressive, it looked like the flames actually moved…

“What are we sitting around here for?”

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Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

I like this it looks more like the two forces are going to blunder into each other rather than find each other as a result of intentional search.

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Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have-Rush Limbaugh
For more from Rush go here: www.rushlimbaugh.com
Still crazy after all these years.
Force of nature : :
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/flag-us.gif[/img]
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... chigan.gif[/img]

Looks like theres gon'a be a shoot out Tex.

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General Brett "Hitman" Coote S.L.M.H., P.H. w/9 Clusters, S.S.B.
S.L.A.F. (Retired)
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... da-red.gif[/img] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/can-ontario.gif[/img]

Yeah, one I hope to finish BEFORE i make my trip down to florida, but i dunno, i'm not feeling the dialog. The battle itself was fought using Megamek a few weeks ago. The outcome suprised even me.

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Big Nick, the Chainsaw Assassin
[i]Making Bad News Worse since 1980[/i]
[b]What... There's only ONE of you?[/b]

Really? It sounds like its going to be good then.

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General Brett "Hitman" Coote S.L.M.H., P.H. w/9 Clusters, S.S.B.
S.L.A.F. (Retired)
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... da-red.gif[/img] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/can-ontario.gif[/img]

Nice nice nice...I'm saving these guys to word file as you go.

When you're done, I think I'll push them all up at once...hehehe

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Medron Pryde - The Great and Terrible
[img]http://faileas.greywolf.googlepages.com/WOTD.png[/img]
[url=http://www.pryderockindustries.com]P.R.I.[/url] - The home of BattleTech programs and files
"I'm gonna Tea Party like its 1776." - Medron Pryde
Who is John Galt?

Everyone, repeat after me:
WE WANT MORE!

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[i]You know what they say, don't you? About how us MechWarriors are the modern knights errant, how warfare has become civilized now that we have to abide by conventions and rules of war. Don't believe it.[/i]

[url=http://www.mekwars.org][u]MekWars[/u][/url]

after me:
WE WANT MORE!

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typos and spelling-mistakes are property of the finder. english is not my mother-tongue.

If you had more then it would have been OK to bump a 44 month old thread...

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[b]When life gives you lemons, throw them back and ask for cookies.[/b]
[url]http://210darryl.wordpress.com/[/url]
[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/flag-us.gif[/img] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/flag-ireland.gif[/img]