Moreded paused again. “The Red Star is flying from atop my starport?”
“Yes, sir! Do you have any orders, sir? Removing it will be challenging with the dozen-or-so Red Star commandos that currently guard all access points to it, sir.”
“Stand by,” Moreded said, and tapped his comm into silence.
“I apologize, brother,” said Volkova as he did the same to his own comm, “for that interruption. It would seem that several of our advisors wish to aid you in apprehending-”
“Why the futue did your people take down my flag from the spaceport, Volkova?”
“Brother, brother,” Volkova said in a hurt tone, “I am so very sorry if this has caused you stress in any way at all. This is standard procedure for all colonies and world that we assist, to help those who might be tempted to resist the inexorible dialectic of history and…”
“Stow it, ursus irrumator!”
“Brother Moreded, you border on the-”
“Yes, let’s talk about borders, shall we? You people offered help to depose Texas Morgan as Earl from this colony, and in return we’d be allies! Instead, you take actions against me! After I got your troops and equipment in, snuck them past our borders and through our immigration protocols posing as refugees and the rest! Me! I did this, so you could help me become the leader! Now your flag is atop my starport, effectively proclaiming you and your decrepit empire as having annexed my world!”
“And we are so very very grateful, Brother Moreded. Hence our offer of our protection through-”
“No! No! Volkova! That kind’ve twaddle may work when you waltz in and grab some colony of soybean farmers and make them pay tribute, all the while threatening to blast them to atoms from orbit! But here? No! You are not going to turn my colony into some fiefdom of the Red Star, understand? These people have rich resources, but they will literally blow themselves up rather than submit to aspiring tinpot dictators like you! I’m amazed they haven’t already started a counter rebellion after you…”
In the distance, there was a rumble like thunder.
“What- what was that, Brother Moreded? I thought this world did not have storms.”
“They don’t Volkova. Unless I miss my guess, that was the result of your foreign policy knocking on our door.”
#
The ship dropped.
It was slow enough that the panes on the two-inch thick plaxi-glass portholes reddened and seemed to curl a little at the edges. Dallas Morgan looked out the window and then suddenly pivoted, bent over and vomited a third time into the nearby toilet.
Wiping his mouth with his left arm, he flushed his vomitus and, hopefully, most of his visible anxiety with his right. This’ll be a walk in the park, Gareth had assured him, the kind of work we used to call ‘paint-scratching,’ since that’s all that usually happened on these missions. Assuming your intel is good, of course.
And if it isn’t? Dallas had asked.
If it isn’t? Gareth had answered; If it isn’t? If suddenly a Hercules-class mech shows up? A hundred-fifty tonnes of autocannons, laser fire and railguns, firing proj- rounds big enough to light a whole district on fire? Then you get the hell out’ve there. If you have to, eject and leave your mech behind.
I’m not leaving the Galatine.
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Don’t worry about disappointing your pater, Dallas. What do you think he’d rather have, you? Or that hunk of metal? Remember, too: If things go to shit, there’s no shame in leaving. You’re a paid worker, not a soldier defending his home. You’re never being paid enough to die.
Dallas breathed again. He took a sip of water from the tap at the sink and looked at himself in the mirror.
Short dark hair. Stubble of a short beard starting around his chin; in New Avalon, long beards were for men with more authority, and Dallas had some of that, finally. He breathed in, speaking silent words to himself. Words of command, words of warning. He’d been up half the night memorizing the jargon of command, and spent the last week in the dusty, musty sim games with Joker, House, Jue and Anja, after the sims had been pulled out of storage by a few unwilling but grudgingly working crew members.
“We’re ready for this,” Dallas said to his reflection. They’d practiced as a team, using tactics that Gareth would go over with Dallas every day in the early morning.
“Use what we used to call the crescent moon formation,” Gareth had said. “A muslim guy in our unit called it that and it stuck. You get your forces in the shape of a letter ‘C,’ and then all of you fire on the mech who’s at the end of the line, here,” Gareth had said, tapping a stylus with his mechanical hand against a tablet’s glowing picture of blue and red blips . “What you never, ever want to do is let yourself get caught in the middle of a line of mechs that’re firing on you on both sides. I once saw a pilot of a 90-ton mech called a Jotun get felled by a half-dozen ten-ton grasshopper-class mechs with low-powered lasers and proj, all because they knew how to surround and keep hitting the same spot over and over until it broke, and then the mech broke.”
“What else?” Dallas had asked. They weren’t even likely to see an actual mech on this mis- this drop is what Gareth kept calling it. But it’d be good to know everything that could go wrong, and how to counter it.
“When your crew is targeting a mech, you’ll want to keep your eyes on the rest of the enemy. Most mech crews are trained to line up, like this, and keep stepping forward while firing. That’s why the cresent moon is so effective; most haven’t ever seen it before, and once they do see it in action, they’re usually dead a few minutes later.”
“They won’t stop walking in a line, even if they start losing mechs?”
“No, especially if they’re military. From any world. It’s ingrained in most of them to keep to the plan, to obey orders, even when the guy next to them drops in a screaming, stealing heap of metal and plasteel. Mercs like us are the dangerous ones, because we’re trained to adapt and improvise based on experience and watching the other guys screw up and die. ”
“No wonder this life pays so well.”
“Don’t get cocky. If your enemy gets close enough, they’ll rush their opponents and start bashing them with their metal fists, kicks, sometimes even using their jump-jets to do some bug-stompin’-”
“Bug stomping?”
“Heh. Smaller mechs, Dallas, in the ten-to-twenty ton range? They’re usually named after local insects. Fleas, Crickets, Grasshoppers. When a hundred ton Jotun class mech blasts fifty feet in the air and lands on one o’those little guys? Bug stompin,’ splat!” Gareth brought his fleshy fist up and splayed his fist out on the table for emphasis.
“Sounds useful.”
“Good for the vids, or to finish a fight. Don’t begin a fight with it, though. One little move off when you land, and you’re as vulnerable as a weightlifting athlete trying to balance himself on a bocce-ball.”
Dallas replayed the lesson in his head over and over again, along with all the others. What to do if the mission- no,the drop went bad, especially if the intel turned out to be ‘non-factual,’ as had happened to Gareth when their unit were surprised by forces three times the size and number of units they were told to expect.
“You turn, you run, you withdraw. Some folks’ll let you go, happy to call it a win. Most pirates aren’t too bright, in the end, so they’ll pursue. Most ships have mounted turrets to give you cover fire while you re-board if that happens, but right now we don’t.”
“And if they withdraw?”
“If they withdraw. Easiest way to look at it, Dallas? Look at your mission. If your mission is defense, let ‘em run. But your mission is destruction, if you’re there to wipe out pirates who’ve burned a town to the ground, you fulfill the contract, plain and simple.”
“Even if they surrender?”
“A pirate only surrenders to buy himself time, so he can get a chance to stab you in the back or escape from prison and keep killing those weaker than him. Others? You have to make the call. Easiest thing, if you can, is to just shoot out the legs of the mech once it falls. It won’t get back up and won’t be a threat to anyone.”
“And won’t the pilot kill me in my sleep later on?”
“The quadrant’s a big place, Dallas. Ninety percent of people never leave the planet they’re born on. You piss off some Coalition fighter? He might swear an oath to take you out to the fourth generation. You show mercy to a Corporate mech-jockey? That’s complicated. Some’ll see it as a debt they’ll owe you someday, others’ll take it as an insult. All depends on the culture of their unit and where they came from, or both. But your average merc or military fighter just wants to make it home, and they’ll be happy with that. Show mercy, and more often than not you’ll never see shade nor shadow of them again.”
Back in the peasant, Dallas looked at his reflection. He breathed deep, ran his hand over the slowly growing stubble on his chin, then turned and walked through the door behind him.
His crew, Anja with her red hair pulled back into a tail, House with his hobnail boots and brown vest covering an otherwise bare and very sizable chest, Joker looking uncharacteristically serious and Yue adjusting her tech-glasses over her dark pageboy haircut.
A motley crew, Dallas thought, recalling some piece of text a long-ago tutor had held under his nose years ago, but multi-talented and likely very useful. If only I can command them right...
#
...TO BE CONTINUED....