Village of Abercrombie
Lummatii
Lothian League
Marian Hegemony
The Periphery
3 February, 3150
"Keep to the woods, we'll string them out as long as we can. Put out a lot of fire, as much fire as possible, but keep an eye on your heat." The plan had gone as intended, with what appeared to be the majority of the pirate band heading out in force towards Abercrombie, where the locals made a big deal of staging their mech force. Freyja had a mobile lance, and they had been sniping at the pirates for nearly half an hour, trying to get a feel for what the pirate force consisted of.
As near as she could grasp, there were two pirate lances out hunting them. A heavier lance, led by Raiden Trogg in his Grasshopper was maintaining tight formation, even if the mechwarriors under his command were bucking to be let loose. The lighter lance, a pair of Stingers, a Locust, and a Commando had been trying to bring Freyja's lance out into the open, but with little success. She knew she could crush the pirate lights with her lance, which consisted of Peter Bakker in the family Phoenix Hawk, an Uziel, a Fire Javelin, and Freyja in the -6D Hatchetman that had, up until a few days ago, belonged to warden Connors.
But this was a rag-tag group, with no experience fighting together, and she knew that if she hit too hard on the pirate lights, there was every chance that her lance would get pinned down into a brawl with the heavier pirate reinforcements. All she had to do was keep them busy long enough for the rest of the resistance forces, led by Gunnar Logan in the capital, to overwhelm the pirate rearguard and dropship. Then, they could lead Trogg back to the capital and hit him between both parts of their force.
But Trogg wasn't making that easy. She had to stay engaged enough, but not so deeply engaged that she couldn't get her people out.
She saw the pirate Locust, the boldest of the light lance, emerge from the treeline, sniping at Peter in the Phoenix Hawk. She let her crosshairs hover over the bird-like mechs silhouette for a second, then pressed her thumb down on the trigger that sent all three of her ER Medium lasers lancing out toward the enemy. One struck the locust in it's bulbous torso, but the other two converged on the right leg of the mech just as it was planting to return into the treeline. The lasers were more than enough to burn through the armor and melt the myomer of the leg to slag. The bottom half of the limb spun off, and the mech unceremoniously planted the beak of it's medium laser into the ground.
"Great shooting, Freyja!" She heard Peter shout over the comms.
"I got lucky. We'll need way more of that if we're going to pull this off" she cautioned, as much putting a break on her own optimism as Peter's.
"Look, they're heading for the town!" one of her other mechwarriors called out. Sure enough, the heavier mechs of Troggs lance were bounding toward the town of Abercrombie itself. No doubt he had grown tired of the cat and mouse games and was trying to bring her lance to battle.
Then she heard his voice taunting over an open channel. "Whoever you little shits are, if you planned to stand up to me, you better come do it, before I level this little heap of buildings you call a town."
She brought her Hatchetman up into a run and keyed the mic to her lance. "He's not giving us a choice. We have to hit him hard, then run for the capital."
"If we run off, won't he just level the town?" Peter asked.
"He might. But either way, we don't have enough force to stop him in a stand up fight right now. We've got to draw him back to the rest of our people, and hope that they've subdued his rear guard." She saw Peter fire off a full alpha strike of his lasers as she spoke.
Capital City
Lummatii
Lothian League
Marian Hegemony
The Periphery
3 February, 3150
Gunnar Logan let the chill winter air cool him as he stood in his combat shorts and vest on the embankment that marked the edge of the drop port for the capital city. Behind him, the pirate dropship, a bulbous Union class ship, stood silent. The pirates had been no fools. The forces arrayed against their dropship and reserve units might have been a rag tag collection, but it was a big enough one that it would leave a serious hurting on the ship in any case. Discretion was the better part of valor, and they had stood down with minimal fighting once they realized the odds and had been assured of fair terms.
Off in the distance, a gentle rumble could be heard. It was the sound of battle being carried on the cold, gray air. Somewhere out there, Freyja McCarron was either leading the main pirate force back towards the drop port, or getting cut to pieces in a stand up battle. There was no way to tell which.
"You think it will work?" Clarissa Bakker said as she wiped her brow with a towel. While Ned had returned to the estate, she had insisted on remaining behind and offering her medical skills to the resistance fighters, who were desperately short on such aid. Luckily, casualties in the initial scrap had been light. There were a few deaths, but most of the injuries were easily manageable and she had sent them off to the local hospital.
"It has to," he nodded. "Our comms gear isn't strong enough to punch any kind of signal through to Freyja's people, or from them. The regular news channels will give us a bit of warning when the fight swings back this way, enough time to get mounted up again and ready for them. But we won't have comms with them till they get probably two or three clicks out. We just have to hope."
She patted him on the shoulder. "You know, the scandal vids would have a field day with this if they saw you looking that worried over a girl."
He scoffed. "Everybody thinks they know me. Hell, even she damn near got herself killed because she thought she knew what was in my head."
She squeezed his arm. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that. I know you care about her, and I know how it feels to have to wait to find out if someone is alive or dead. It will work out.
Outskirts of the Capital
Lummatii
Lothian League
Marian Hegemony
The Periphery
3 February, 3150
A lone Hatchetman stood defiantly a few meters out from the tree line, heat venting from it's sinks and from wounds gashed by enemy weapons, a scrap occasionally popping off to mar the pristine snow covered ground. Arrayed in a line across the white field stood a Griffin, a Shadow Hawk, and a Swayback, all centered around a battered Grasshopper.
"We're almost there, we can turn and fight them now." Peter's voice said over the radio.
"We're not close enough, and Stone's Javelin has a limp now. I have to trip them up, or they'll gobble our whole lance up and then hit our reserves piece by piece." Sweat was dripping from her brow, and her hair was now matted and wet with perspiration from the intense heat of the last several hours of combat.
"We can't just leave you to them, we can--" Peter was trying to argue her out of it, but she cut him off.
"You're going to fucking run, and you're going to fucking run now!" She didn't know from where she conjured up the authority she had taken the past several hours, and she was sure it would not float as military discipline, but she was not going to let things fall apart. "Alright, let's end this" she broadcast over an open channel.
"I know who you are now." Trogg's voice came over the general frequency. "You're that little bitch of Ned Bakker's that I plowed around Christmas time. You sound a little different over the radio from when you were begging like a little girl for me to leave you alone" he laughed into the mic.
She gritted her teeth and pulled into a long burst from her rotary autocannon, sending a vicious amount of fire out towards the Grasshopper that mocked her. She kicked her mech up into a run, dodging some but not all of the incoming fire as she barreled her way towards the pirate leader. Her blood boiled, her vision tunneled, and her hearing became little more than a shrill whine as adrenaline coursed through her veins.
It was some time later that she became aware of her hearing returning, as her burning rage slowly subsided. Her mech was on it's knees, the hatchet buried deep into the chest of the dark Grasshopper, staked through the powerful gyroscope that normally kept the enemy war machine on it's feet. Now it lay there before her, silent and unmoving.
Gunnar's Black Knight stood over the scene, showing the scars of battle, but far fewer than Freyja's machine, which seemed held together around her as if only by her sheer will.
"Freyja?! Freyja! It's over." She heard Gunnar's voice in her headset. She looked at her hands, now trembling with the blowback of an adrenaline withdrawal. She stared at the drops of sweat still dripping from her body and landing on the cockpit deck like rain. She started to cry, and then, as the tears burst forth, she passed out.
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