There is an ancient game that cost me a lot of money in High School before one of my training cadre tech sgts showed me the trick to it. It has variants throughout the inner sphere, sometimes called the shell game, sometimes called “three card monte”. The basics of the game are this, you get shown either a royal card (King or Queen depending on what house you are in and who is on the throne) or a cup with a ball under it, and two more beside that are numbered cards or empty cups. They the operator makes a big show of moving them all around, and you tell yourself how intelligent you are by tracking the cup or card he puts down after showing you the full cup or royal card. You then give him your money as a “bet” that you can and have tracked the right cup or the card he put down.
The problem with the game is that it is rigged. If it is a cup, he palmed the ball, and all three cups are empty. If it is a card, when he showed you the royal card, he palmed it as he placed down a third numbered card. From the time you started tracking, you had already lost. There was no winning card on the table. The trick was done right in front of you, but you were looking in the wrong places. If you want to smuggle a full company of reasonably slow battlemechs into shooting range of far faster battlemechs in the middle of a spaceport with enough weapons to blow your ship out of the sky, a certain amount of trickery is required.
Pinky Politevka and Crewman Domingo Rodgers were our two smallest soldiers. Pinky was a tech specializing in computer systems, both hardware and software. Domingo Rogers was a vehicle crewman who claimed he could drive a planet if you put fans, tracks or treads on it. What they shared in common was they were on the anorexic side of skinny and short with it. A Vindicator Cockpit is not that big, what with the Diverse Optics 18 Medium Laser and its coolant housing taking up what excess headroom a 45 ton mech cockpit had, and they had to sit on our pilots for this shell game to work. You see, this time we were not hiding the fact that we stole the ball from under the cup. We are letting our mark track the ball we remove, never suspecting there was a second ball in place the whole time.
We made a big production of our Vindicators marching somewhat unsteadily down the ramp and moving into neat ranks, kneeling down, placing their manipulatable hand on the ground, and resting the Ceres Armsmasher PPC replacing the right lower arm and hand across the raised knee. This allowed either Pinky or Domingo to climb out of the cockpit, climb down the chains to the knee, and down the hand holds to the ground, leaving an idling Vindicator with a warm reactor and “no pilot” sitting in the middle of a Federated Suns military airbase. Everyone watching, and you could watch it real time from the cameras scattered about the place, or the Manticore heavy tanks sitting at each corner of the space port landing pads, one with a nice sightline on our unloading.
They watched us march all twelve Vindicators out, two by two. Each time they watched Pinky and Domingo get out, and march back to the Overlord. The knew the reactors were hot, as we were waiting for the Federated Suns pilots to march them away, and we were lazy ass mercenaries who could not follow proper shut down procedures. It was fine, because they watched the “mechwarriors” we had march off after parking each machine. The idea they had been sitting on the actual pilots laps while they marched out, and that twelve Capellen mechwariors, no, twelve of the Vindicated, were sitting in their cockpits, locked, cocked and ready to rock never occurred to them.
They saw us drive our four Partisan Air Defense tanks out as security for the “empty mecha” and confirmed that everything was exactly as they expected. Which is of course, how I lost a lot of money on three card monte when I was in high school. It is what you think you know that makes you a sucker. It is the things that were always right in front of you that make an ambush.
The Ashkum Military Academy was a lot better supplied than ours had been. No Stingers and Wasps for our Federats. No they came in a full company. Marching in step at a fully predictable 50kph in obedience to the posted speed limit. Most of the Cadre were in Hanse Davions favorite light mecha, the Valkyrie. 30 tons, a ten tube long range missile launcher in its left breast, and a medium laser replacing its right hand. It had two thirds the armour we had and was both a little faster and jumped a little farther. At long range it was a decent fire support, at close range it had one medium laser and that was about it. Two full lances of Valkryries, the other lance was the senior officers. They drove slightly more impressive (for Davion tastes) rides. The lead was an Assassin, 45 tons, fast as hell, with half the Vindicator’s armour. I don’t know why they call our Vindicators “Jack of all trades, master of none”. The Assassin has the same LRM-5 the stock Vindicator comes with, a short two pack Short range missile launcher, and one medium laser. It sucks at all ranges and risks ammunition explosion almost with every hit. The Vulcan was an odd duck, looking like a scarecrow, it lurched more than walked. Its big gun was an Autocannon 2, like the Jagermech and Blackjack, but it had less to back it up with. A flamer, some machine guns and a pair of medium lasers. It was the longest range machine on the field, but it was walking right up to speaking distance with us, so who cared? The last mecha was a Clint, a machine that was basically a Wasp written large. It had a long range AC-5 replacing its right hand, same range as my PPC and half the damage, and a pair of medium lasers. It was half again faster than my Vindicator, but it had only half the armour. The last was a real threat, a Griffin. 55 tons of nasty, well armoured, fast, with a PPC in one fist and an LRM ten pack on its right shoulder.
I guess either he didn’t want to wait for the slow speed of his promised Patton tracked heavy tanks, because four Plainsman hovertanks were moving at a sedate pace between the marching mecha, two in front, and two behind the small hover APC that tried not to bounce too much in the air spilling from the skirts of the hovertanks that went before and after them. The troop carriers were barely armoured, barely armed, and barely able to keep stable when the Plainsmen got too close. They just didn’t mass enough to withstand the wind spilling from the lift fans of the big Plainsman hovertanks. In front of the APC and behind the tanks was a venerable Packrat scout car, painted in what I assumed where the Military Academy’s colours, with actual flags flying from staffs at its rear, and the forward SRM-6 had been removed, I assume to support the armoured VIP compartment in which a very angry Lt Colonel Keppler-Smythe and no less than six aides in dress uniforms waited to witness the show of our handing over a dozen mecha, and receiving the right thorough tongue lashing my uncouth mercenary hide no doubt deserved.
The Packrat actually triggered the ambush. They may have pulled the SRM-6 from the Packrat, but it began life as a very dangerous scout car with a reputation for survivability. It was a well earned reputation. I do no know how they selected the training officers in Davion country, but it seemed the training cadre NCO were long service veterans, because the Packrat driver did not think, did not care this was a simple commercial transaction, a quick hand off, signature, and march away your new toys. The Sgt driver heard his Packrat squeal “mine detected” and he put in a hard skew turn and gave the alarm command.
Reactions were, mixed.
One of the Valkyrie pilots hit his jump jets and left the road in a sideways jump that put him on a roof a hundred and fifty meters from the center of the kill sack. The Clint brought his AC-5 up, but he had the weapon safed, so it took him precious seconds to release the regulation required locks on live weapons in urban areas during peacetime operations. This was an operation, but peace ended when the Fedderats dropped on Algol. The rest of the mecha seemed to stop in shock but took no immediate action.
“COMPANY STORE!” I roared into my mic, the voice filter giving me the voice of one Captain Maxwell Lord, and the command word used to initiate the ambush was the term used when a mercenaries employer used economic sabotage to trap the mercenary and slowly drive them into bankruptcy and indentured labour as part of that employers house troops.
What followed was a beautiful dance.
The Overlord opened up on the four Manticore tanks sitting about the airfield with every weapon that would bear. Not all of the weapons would bear, but most did. The tanks, not even at readiness and not buttoned up, did not fare well when the rain of missiles, cannon, laser and PPC fire embraced them. Several crew died before the armour was even breached. That is what happens when you are more afraid of body odour in a poorly ventilated tank than incoming fire.
The four Partisan Air Defense tank had planned on putting four long range AC-5 on each Patton, trying to bury the more heavily armoured and armed tank under a welter of fire and hoping to survive a hit from its heavier AC-10. Since what they got were Plainsman hovertanks with tissue paper armour and out of range of their own SRM-6 packs, what happened was a slaughter. Those pilots with LRM-5 in their Vindicators had all been tasked with taking out the APC with the rookie pilots in it. The next generation of Davion aggressors was getting their cherry popped tonight, and no lube was being offered. Between the exploding ammunition on the Plainsman hovertanks before and behind them, and the howling long range missiles peppering the thinly armed roof of the hover APC, the graduating class of 3028 gained a dozen black sashes of mourning before they knew they didn’t miss the war after all.
Our Vindicators rose and all twelve of us fired on six targets. The Clint and Griffin were our lances targets, the Clint because he reacted first, and the Griffin because his machine was dangerous.
I brought my PPC to bear as I rose to stand, all three of my Medium Lasers joining the tone of their lock to the sweet sound of my PPC, so I cut loose with everything I had at the Griffin. I hammered his left torso with my PPC, armour exploding off of it as my head mounted medium laser tracked the same target and cut into the exposed layer below the scorch marks. The Griffin unfortunately was massively armoured so even blowing a ton of armour of his left torso didn’t get through all of it. My two center torso lasers tore into the thickest armour of the enemy center torso and his right leg. I felt rather than saw the missiles pass overhead as the pilot ignored his cockpit warning that he was too close for his LRM to have time to arm, acquire target and manoeuvre. They tore the tarmac behind me, but it was a starport pad, so they were just another layer of scorch marks. The heavy PPC must have been taken slightly offline by my hit to his shoulder because it missed my head by enough that my cockpit electronics only flickered. If I had been slower, that shot would have killed me.
I didn’t have time to think about that as Big Billy Wasserman put another PPC whip into the undamaged leg, another medium laser cut to the center torso, a miss between his legs, and another hit into his right torso, not only peeling the last of the torso armour off, but knocking the mecha to the ground.
“Fifi” Teng very coldly put her crosshairs on the Clint and waited for her tone to sound both locks. The Clint got off a shot with his AC-5 which tracked along Fifi’s right arm, and one of his medium lasers burned her left leg, but the second missed. Fifi did not miss. Both her PPC and head mounted Medium laser caught the Clint in the center torso and his heat bloomed as his engine shielding took a hit. Irina Korakova was adjusting to the Vindicator being bigger, slower, and less responsive than her Wasp had been. She had never fought with indirect fire before, so like a lot of us, had swapped her LRM-5 for a pair of medium lasers and an extra heat sink. She was used to medium lasers being her best weapon, and more was better. She cut loose with both chest mounted lasers first, hitting the left and right leg, burning through and weakening the bones of the left leg. Battle ROMs are inconclusive about what got the kill though. Her head mounted laser cored through the open center torso and into the main reactor, but her PPC punched through the undamaged right torso armour and detonated the autocannon ammunition stored there. The explosion killed the pilot and mecha either way.
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At slightly longer ranges, the Valkyries could bring their LRM-10 to bear and a wave of LRM came sailing at our Vindicators, a matching wave of LRM flew back, but only half as many. The Valkyries were in range for their medium lasers, which meant that both sides each gave each other a taste of a medium laser. However the Vindicators had lots more armour, and added a heavy PPC to the mix. After one salvo, two Valkyrie were down and burning, on each flank, and while the Vindicators were scarred, no one’s armour was near breach. The Valkyrie who were farther back were out of medium laser range, but that just left them with a slight advantage in missiles and a real case of bringing a laser to a PPC fight. The Valkyrie pilot who jumped clear of the mix had proven himself the veteran and the danger, so all four PPC targeted him, three hitting, sending the pilot to the Valhalla Valkyries are supposed to bring heroes to. The last Valkyrie proved aggression makes you stupid as he charged forward inside LRM range to fire his medium laser and charge, clearly intending to ram home a physical attack, trading superior speed for superior armour.
Pinky keyed her jump jets and jumped over the over aggressive warrior, and Irina turned slowly and put a PPC round into the Valkyries back, burning through its center torso armour, and blowing the engine to radioactive shrapnel. The pilot blasted free in his ejection seat when the reactor alarm breached, so he would live to make other mistakes.
I charged forward and punted the Griffin pilot, since he brought his cockpit down to boot level. I was up to 64kph when I gave him some chin music, so that was the end of the most heavily armoured enemy. I would have to wipe his entrails off my Vindicators foot later, but that is what power washers were for. Big Billy took one missile and a medium laser from the Assassin, but his return PPC and trio of medium lasers took out the gyro of the mecha as the PPC and one laser combined to eat its center torso. Deprived of its balance, the charging Assassin plowed into the ground at Billy’s feet so he simply burned through both its side rear torsos and its rear center torso with his medium lasers. The mecha exploded, with no angle for the ejection system to deploy.
The mine had triggered beneath the Packrat, but the run flat tires allowed it to limp away at half speed. Its rear mounted flamer would be an issue if anyone got close, but when you have a PPC, you actually suck that close. I took my time, and punched the PPC and two of my three medium lasers into it. My accuracy may have suffered in the head laser because I was stumbling a little bit from the Griffin kick, but still, three out of four aren’t too bad. The Packrat exploded, and Hanse Davion needed a new instructor for his precious military Academy. This one failed his mid term rather dismally. In less time than it takes to report, Davion lost his Academy cadre mech company and a decent portion of its graduating class.
Forming up, we moved across the starport to the Phoenix Heavy Industry warehouse, where its stalwart mech guardian force waited for us. A full company of Urbanmechs.
Urbanmechs are something Davion loves and Capellans use as penal duties. Basically an Urban mech looks like a bullet. It technically has legs, but they are stubby and woefully underpowered. It doesn’t have arms. It’s right arm is replaced with an Autocannon-10 and its left arm with a small laser. It has a top speed so slow my Vindicator can lap in twice on a race track every lap. It has armour, but not in the right places. Its legs are massively armoured, but since they barely work, who cares. Its arms can each take a PPC hit as can its center torso, but its side torso where the ammunition is stored, cannot.
There is a trick that Davion loves to use against us. He likes to put his damned Vulcans, Jagermech, and Black Jack, all AC-2 carriers just beyond range of our LRM and PPC, and snipe at us, chipping away at us an eight of a ton of armour at a time. It is frustrating, because our Vindicators are no faster than their mecha, so they can fall back at the same speed we advance, and just slowly chew us apart. Here is the thing, the Urbanmech’s autocannons do the same damage as our PPC, but they have only 80% the range, and we have twice their speed. In the city, the Urbanmech is a decent enough defensive mech, I would argue a Javelin does more damage at three times the speed, but I am not Davion. They love autocannons, I think the only way Hanse Davion could get it up on his wedding night is if Melissa Steiner wore crossed ammunition belts instead of a bra, and pointed a Ryonex Submachine gun at his target zone. The Starport is flat. Like from the great days of the Star League when all things were possible, glassed flat with Naval Grade lasers and particle cannons to it is flat to +/- a millimeter across the whole six kilometer complex. Outside the port building and the two warehouse complexes, only one of which we care about, there is no cover. No terrain. Just slow waddling trash cans waddling like suicidal penguins with switch knives at polar bears with pikes. They would never live to get in range, and this is a whole lot funnier when you are on the polar bear side.
They aren’t cowards. We killed six Urbanmech before one tried to flee. If you are curious, they are even less defended from the rear. I continued to broadcast in clear, in Captain Maxwell Lords stolen voice.
“This is Maxwell Lord of the 9th Illician Lancers, you pass along a message to your high and mighty First Prince Hanse Davion. He may figure to be the next Star Lord of the new Star League by marrying his little Steiner, but that doesn’t give him the right to screw over his mercenaries. We dropped on Algol against what he swore was light resistance, and lot half our force. Then Hanse violated our contract and denied us our salvage rights. Our brothers and sisters died to take that world for him, we earned our pay, we killed those Capellan mecha and now the only thing that thief lets us take from the battlefield are our own dead, and he won’t even pay our transport home?
You tell Hanse Davion this, belike the cost of a jackal’s meal is more than a thief can pay. We’ll get our pay, Davion dog, we’ll carve it from your hide! Now, power down your mecha and walk away, then we let you live. Punch out, and we’ll shoot you from the sky”
As we brought our Prime Movers out to take the four abandoned Urbanmech, my tech looked at me and keyed into his comm pad. “Tell me we aren’t keeping these. We don’t even use tanks this slow!”
I keyed back. “Relax. Move them into the drop chutes in the Overlord, we only need them for the run to orbit!”
He looked confused, but you could forgive him. What I planned was seven kinds of illegal. If I had a nation to shame, I might care, but they stole that, so upon their own heads be it.
We looted the warehouses of Davion War materiel. I defined that very loosely. We took their food, we took ammunition, spare parts, we took their pornography, we took their wet weather gear, their cold weather gear their Holodisk library of the entire Immortal Warrior series, because licencing means we are always two movies behind the rest of the Inner Sphere. If we could have found their pets, we would have taken those, because we did find two full pallets of pet food in their military stores warehouse. Davion is different.
Sometime during our looting I heard a blast of autocannon fire, and was briefly concerned. Two wings of Guardian conventional fighters had tried to make runs at us, but the Partisan air defense tanks each boasted four radar guided AC-5, any one of which could blast those almost unarmoured planes to scrap long before they got to short range missile range. It would have been more productive for the Davion commander to shoot the pilots himself, that would have spared the aircraft and whatever part of their fair city the burning wreckage and undetonated SRM-6 one shot landed in.
The only Aerospace fighters left on world were on the other continent, and were a long way out of range of our fight. We packed up our stolen goods, sent our formal complaint of Mercenary Contract Violation to Com Star’s Mercenary Review Board, packed up our dropship after we had not only filled our tanks with fuel, but took on bunkered Helium to recharge our Jumpship. Our mission half complete we blasted to orbit.
As our Overlord traded weapon fire with a wing of suicidal Sparrowhawks that tried to pit their medium and small lasers against whole banks of PPC, large lasers, heavy and light autocannon and swarms of LRM, we clung tightly to our cockpit seats as the drop deployment hatches sawed open at the edge of atmosphere and the jump ejection system launched four bullet shaped 30 ton Urbanmech, still half full of autocannon ammunition and with live nuclear fusion plants, and dropped them at the Phoenix Industries Industrial complex. For the record, while the Urbanmech is almost utterly useless as a battlemech, it can barely walk, has no arms to speak of, and is shaped rather like a suppository. As a suppository, or as a bomb, it is particularly gifted.
They dropped from our hull and tumbled without a pilot to guide them. I know Davion’s like gestures like strapping captives to mecha and kicking them into rivers, but Capellan’s don’t waste salvage mecha to kill pilots. We use them to kill whole factories. If you wonder what the impact energy is of an Urbanmech, I would be hard pressed to give you accurate numbers. I will say, it is visible from orbit. The Urbanmech is a top heavy roughly bullet shape made of super dense advanced armour composites that resist atmospheric friction for a treat. The Urbanmech’s stumpy excuse for legs don’t have the range to flop enough to really affect things, and the two arms are fixed mounts for the AC-10 and small laser, and neither have the air resistance to alter much, nor the freedom of movement to flop.
Granted the Phoenix Heavy Industries complex is huge, and we gave Captain Xi Beng complete control over our exit path so Winter Moonrise would have the best chance for our bombing run, but in all fairness we would have accepted one hit as a win. We got two, one of them on the main assembly plant, and by the grace of our ancestors, one of the Urbanmechs hit the engine assembly plant, itself behind advanced air defenses and huge berms of earth to prevent any catastrophic damage from any nuclear events should their be a problem in the nuclear assembly plant. A 30ton Urbanmech doing its imitation of a dinosaur killer asteroid is enough to cause such a catastrophic event.
I have no idea how much damage was done by the Urbanmech that hit the main assembly plant, or am I all that sure what the two that hit inside the nearby industrial centers did, but I do know that the nuclear fireball that raced us to the sky from the nuclear reactor plant made certain that Hanse Davion would not be enjoying any more Lenox 60 fusion engines for his Urbanmech or Omni 150 for his Valkyries, at least for the rest of this war. In a way, this may have been the first use of an Urbanmech to make an strategic change in war across an entire front. It would not be enough to stop the juggernaut, but it would bleed him. Enough cuts like this and he would have no choice but to slow, or stop short of his objectives.
It is probable that Hanse Davion’s inner circle knows we were not the 9th Illician lancers. It is possible Com Star will see through the ruse, but it is also possible that for political reasons they will choose not to. Duke Michael Hasek will definitely turn this into Hanse Davion losing control of his hired dogs inside his own Capellan March on a world he was denied the right to station his own troops to defend, and where were Hanses precious Blue Star Irregulars when their contract world was being raided.
Frankly, I gave a 70% chance that within a year Hanse Davion MIIO has us positively identified as the ones who broke the Ares Convention and dropped Urbanmech on his factory from orbit. I give about a 20% he can ever afford to admit it. Either way, Davion will know he has another war on his hands, one his careful plots and plans, his bought treachery and precious technological tricks won’t help him with. There is still overwhelming firepower and a hundred thousand to one numerical advantage, but space is vast, communication is slow, and he has more dangerous foes closer to hand.