Anywhere
Tamar March
Federated Commonwealth
9 March, 3050




       The choice of battlefield had been a necessity in order to prevent the clanners from following the remnants of the militia attack force, but now, in the narrow confines of the gap, Fiona was less sure of her surroundings than she would have liked. She had taken her mech to the gap, and the rest of the resistance forces had beat a hasty retreat with the time she was buying, but the clanners were slow to make the rendezvous, or at least slower than she was expecting. Thus far they had been nothing but bold and aggressive, and now, there were signs of caution. That was going to work against her.

     Her Wyvern stood in the middle of the gap, which was little more than a plowed road through the steep ridgeline. The walls on both sides were relatively steep, and covered with undergrowth and brush. For the most part, the path looked relatively unused. Her unit hadn't spent enough time on the planet to get to know the terrain beyond maps and charts.

     The timer that she set was steadily counting down from the agreed upon ten minutes, and yet there was no sign of a clan advance. There had been a few trace contacts on the edge of her sensor range, but nothing of significance and nothing that had moved on her position. With the timer nearly up, she contemplated opening a channel to try to goad the clanners into action, but decided against it. She would just have to be patient.

     Thus far, she had won two duels with this unknown enemy, and in both cases she had faced off against an opponent significantly lighter than her own Battlemech's weight. Even those were tough fights. She had no idea what kind of Mech this Star Commander Lovvins would bring. Her mech was battered, but not significantly damaged from her earlier combat. She would win. She had to win. That's all there was to this resistance. Just win the next fight. Sooner or later, help would come.

     As the timer hit zero, she dialed her sensors up to maximum. Her sensors painted five enemy mechs arrayed about a kilometre and a half away, but none of them made any move. She was puzzling this out, when movement caught her eye on the normal vislight display of her cockpit. There was some kind of movement amongst the undergrowth, and despite it being relatively close to her mech, her sensors told her nothing. Was it infantry? Why would they send infantry against a mech?

     Just then, she remembered some of the scattered comms traffic when the Falcons had first attacked. There were rumblings of some kind of super-infantry that were tearing up much of the conventional forces. But they were infantry, how much of a threat could they be?

     As that thought crossed her mind, her systems wailed the tone of a missile lock, and seemingly from every direction, small smoke trails blossomed. Her mech shook under the impact of what felt like a full barrage of SRMs. As she tried to make sense of the tactical situation, a few spears of light lanced from cover, slashing her armor like talons. It was then that she spotted the source of her torment.

     She first spotted the one bounding from cover. It was larger than an infantryman, and oddly shapen, with an almost bulbous chest. But it ran like a man, and shot spears of laser energy from it's right arm as it raced towards her. She triggered her SRM launcher, which sent 6 missiles lashing towards the insect-like attacker. They exploded around him, showering the area with debris and death that would shred an infantry attack.  Yet out of the smoke and chaos, the thing bounded ever closer to her.

      It was not alone. At least three or four more of the little beasts were all scrambling straight for her mech, taking pot shots with their lasers and seemingly oblivious to the danger of charging against a Battlemech. She speared the one in front of her, who had somehow survived her missile volley, with her crosshairs and pulled the trigger for her large laser. The beam struck the little creature square in the chest, and seemed to stagger him for a moment, as the bulbous frontal plate that was his chest absorbed the energy, then he  fell onto his back and lay still.

      She had little time to ponder the idea of these armored bugs that took a large laser to put them down, as her mech was rocked with several thuds. After a few seconds, she realized that the little thuds were the little bugs jumping onto her mech. She learned this as her system began rapidly painting holes in the armor diagram.

     She saw one of the little creatures tearing away at her mech's skin on her left torso. With as much control as she could manage, she worked the controls and brought her mech's right hand around and grabbed the offending enemy. She flung the armored bug away, only to see the thing break it's fall into a roll, and come up into a crouch. Then it poited it's barrel arm at her and snapped off a laser shot that melted armor from her mech's head.

     She had no idea what to do. There was no training for this. Her first instinct was to try to execute a kind of drop and roll, although she worried that the damage she did to her own mech might outweigh whatever these little armored insects were doing. Before she had a chance to test her theory, one of the bugs appeared on her cockpit canopy and began pounding away at the ferro-glass with an ugly claw.

     It took only a few impacts before the creature managed to shatter and carve enough away to make a breach, and once the cockpit was breached, it pulled it's claw arm out and thrust it's laser barrel into the opening. Thinking of nothing else, all Fiona could do was grab the pull handle for her mech's ejection seat and pull with all her might.

     Before the enemy could trigger his laser, the explosive bolts fired, and her command couch rocketed skyward. Well, not quite skyward. The armored enemy must have somehow impacted the ejection sequence, because her command couch thrashed about aimlessly on a far shallower arc than it should have.

     She remembered little of what happened next. One impact, then another, then they all blended together. Darkness, a falling sensation, then an abrupt stop. Then unconsciousness.