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Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

"...you." There was a sharp boot-stamp behind Sanders, loud enough to pull him from his duty. "Your sidearm, now."

The mechanic hadn't even stopped his work for the fight in the distance. He was old enough, most of those years being service one way or another, to have seen and participated in enough fights of this caliber that it no longer excited him. Truth be told, it only annoyed him by this point. Some spirit of adventure had left him by this point. Turning around, he saw Ingrid, her neck in a brace that cupped up to her frazzled hair. Her eyes were red and she was already holding out her hand like an expectant parent - somehow, Sanders knew that this Mechwarrior never enjoyed much of anything in the first place.

Even with the anger in her head already evident, he remained calm from fatigue. A night of slow work on the heat sinks had left him in a zen state of slow work, and slow realization. "Ma'am...you probably should just let them work it out."

"There is nothing to work out," she spat back, hand wringing the air in front of her. "I can't stop their issues with a sword, so I need your pistol." Something about how serious she was came out when she offered out-of-the-blue that "You cooperate and I'll clear the drinking debt between us, just tell me where it is!"

That was enough to get him to listen. He was going to regret it, but if anyone asked, Mechwarrior Daschke had stolen it. Not like anyone was around to contend with this, as everyone who cared was paying attention to the fight! He turned back to the fine assembly of tubes that made up the Ostroc's centuries-old coolant system, pointing his wrench back over his head in a vague direction. "My cot over there, ma'am. Under the mags. Don't look at them." Ingrid stomped away without any thanks. He looked from the corner of his vision as she carefully got down on her knees, bonked her neck brace on the metal of the bedframe, and swore in German when she saw what he was talking about.

And then he got back to work.
----
The Marauder that served as a backdrop for the violence was nothing compared to the terror that manifested itself, not too late after Ziska and Marit had joined in the combat. Three shots went out and they weren't even pointed upward; just a few feet above their collective heads, landing in a pile of junk behind them and sending a small avalanche of refuse metal downward. Standing on top of one of the machine gun ammunition crates was Ingrid, her recovery from her whiplash still ongoing but hardly an impediment to acting as the military police that Rivers sought so dearly.

If the bullets didn't get their attention, hopefully her shrill voice would. "DROP IT!" Her borrowed gun was now pointed directly at the helmeted head of one of the tank crew. "LISTEN, YOU LICE! IF I SEE KNUCKLES TOUCH A JAW OR RIBCAGE ONE MORE TIME, SO HELP ME GOD, I'LL MAKE A LATE ADDITION TO THE AFTER-ACTION CASUALTY REPORT!"

The fighters of the Green Knights had fought machines of death as a matter of standard course, they had already survived firefights on foot since their time on Espia had started...but did one mildly unhinged Lyran woman with a gun strike fear in their hearts where others couldn't succeed?

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

Ingrid could've kept going. She could've pushed her 'mech to the limit, thrown caution to the wind and...most likely would have burnt up to a
walking cinder. This machine wasn't made to go hot. The heat sinks had been in operation longer than some nation states in the Sphere, and
firing past the safe limit was a great way to make them fail. She could have fired as if she had twice the amount of available medium lasers but did not. The opened cavity of the Hunchback was an opportunity, one that Ingrid was glad to have refused: one burst of missiles hit the wound and, in less than a second, the machine in front of her burst into a brilliant fireball. Ammo explosions can be scary to sit next to, but with a gun that big? It was practically a bomb in and of itself.

Not that the Duchess minded. She smiled, leaned forward in her seat and immediately called out on the comms, "Yes, like that, Alleycat! Right through!" Unbecoming of a knightly one like her, but everything about this engagement was. She continued stepping back carefully, and for her trouble got the worst of it.

There were flashes from the Crusader's lasers, but none as bright as the brief flash that consumed her vision. Ingrid's Ostroc stopped dead for a moment, mid-backpedal, as its pilot lost consciousness for a second - she came to quickly, awakened by the sound of something jingling in her cockpit.

She looked down. A single bit of spalled brass sitting between her legs that would've burnt her skin if she tried to grab at it. She looked up. There was a narrow crack in the bulletproof glass, with a menacing hole in it now. She pat at her head...her neurohelmet had a very pronounced dent in it. By god, she had heard about how tough these damn things are, but this was the first time in her career that it had been put to the test. The windscreen had done most of the ablation, sure, but this ancient and bulky thing blocked an .50 BMG round from entering into her skull! Ingrid, after her wits would be collected, resolved to never, ever let this helmet get cycled out for a new one. No matter how streamlined these things got.

Drawing back from that moment of miraculous luck, and trying to ignore the oncoming splitting headache from her brain rattling around in her cranium, Susser Tod was ready to tell her to not test it anymore. Sirens wailed about increasing heat, her engine plainly wasn't working at full capacity, and her machine was going to fall apart if she did anything besides leave. Ingrid's voice came over comms once more, calling "Pulling back! Don't let them get to close to the tankers or retreat; box them in on the bridge!" Of course, given how she was going so slowly, she wouldn't be leaving the bridge yet...

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

Of everything seen in the field during her time in Espia, the loud report of...bodily...functions in the distance actually made Ingrid pause. At first she imagined it the report of high-volume autocannons that, ironically, would come soon afterward. But no, looking at an ejection chair and running the sound by in her head once more gave her what the punchline was supposed to be. She couldn't even be mad. Not to say she enjoyed it, but it was just too juvenile to take as some kind of lofty insult towards their profession. The kind of thing that seven year olds and drunk uncles took as the peak of humor. Perhaps they were drunk. Perhaps Ingrid felt, for a second, that she would be better served that way.

No. That would have to wait. A quiet "I feel sick" in German, to no one in particular, would comfort her in the meantime.

This action didn't leave her too unaware; she saw the Hunchback pull up towards her well ahead of their collision. She fired back into it, carving glowing trails in the metal with lasers, but as she backpedaled there wasn't much she could do to avoid its impact. In fact, it was backpedaling that left her in a bad space to begin with: there was nowhere near the amount of maneuvering room she usually had to work with, for any further back would lead to the chasm. The Ostroc's internal computers worked with her own sense to try and dodge the stocky swing of her opponent's metal boot, but it caught her in the leg still. Her practice kept her stable, but unable to roll with the blow for lack of space, she was left near-stationary.

To Raven she replied, "You keep going, Family Man! Fire on the Hunchback or let me deal with it - he's decided to make himself my problem!" She took a moment to breathe and added, "Tankers," (the best she'd give mere armor pilots), "you have a bit before the next pass, let them take their time coming back! The rest of you, keep it in mind - they'll take whatever's the most open shot."

This was fine. She could work with this. The Hunchback was falling over already, and she didn't even leave him time to process this: one more burst of light that sent her own heat back into troublesome territory raked across his left side, and she saw her moment.

Striking a fellow Mechwarrior while he's down is hardly forbidden under any code, though would she so willingly do so? After all, she was the honorable one here, even if her opponent was lower than human. Maybe it was finally time to get that pistol duel she's always wanted out of an opponent. In the end, she did not offer much in the realm of clemency beyond a brief, calm advisory notice over loudspeaker,

"Hunchback pilot, be a good man and DIE IN THE COCKPIT!"

and the compressing force of the Ostroc's long leg into the same damaged torso. It held the Hunchback down for a moment as it tried to right itself, crumpling the armor underneath. Then, through her connecting lines to the machine's balance, she felt the sudden collapse of internal structure as the Hunchback's chest cavity broke inward following a whine of bending steel.. A good portion of 60,000 kilos of weight went down on one point, and really...it was a quite rewarding feeling. Worth it. "He's broken," she shouted as she her foot slid off the righting enemy, "Land a shot on that left flank!"

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

Though she didn't realize it at the time, Ingrid's thoughts aligned with Jon pretty fittingly: everyone involved needed to pipe down. The only real bite back she gave to the enemy was the Hemingway joke, which was met with the following: "I don't need arms to take yours off as well, you cur!" Truly, what could Honk-Honk do after this? How could he ever recover?

Raven's request for a shot was overlaid on top of her view of the fight behind her. Wheeling around as she made it across the bridge, she could see the Firestarter and the Crusader off in the distance. Far enough to be safe, and sadly, just as likely to keep running for the moment - they were going to have to work quickly to try and run them down if they were to keep with the Colonel's orders. "God...no, hold on the slide," Ingrid called back to Raven, "we're going to need to try and cripple them before they pull away." To show her intent, back in place, she faced the Hunchback and let it try to kill her before she could kill it. Beams flew, lasers flew quite a bit more than they should, and she could only hope that the enemy's aim was worse than hers.

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

Much of her fire hit, even with the remaining snow on her windows sublimating in the sudden burst of heat and blurring her vision. It wasn't as if there was much to visually discern, just shoot at something that wasn't white didn't look like a rock! Ingrid's body broke out into a sweat immediately, her skin exposed to the suddenly sauna-temperature cockpit and only hidden by the bare cooling jacket. What she found with her initial burst of damage was...

...a still living Firestarter! She swore, looking up at the flickering target status display at the side of the window. Even with additional fire from her lancemates in the hills, the readout on the little shit hadn't recorded so much as a single systems failure. Either it hadn't picked it up yet, or that pilot was luckier than he had any right to be.

Comms chatter started picking up, both from the ever-fluent Family Man up in the hills and from the increasingly talkative enemy forces - she dialed down the volume on her neurohelm's headset a few notches as they just kept going, offering only a clipped "Stop with the alliteration!" back at the Firestarter's pilot. She pulled her 'mech to the north, ignoring the groan of internal structure from the heat.

Maybe it was this maneuver, or the gun being knocked around, that saved her from worse. Beyond the deafening explosion, Ingrid's main warning that something had went wrong was the way her entire mech's torso spun to the left! The force alone was enough to not only send the Ostroc's gait off-balance, but send her into the side of her seat with force! No, she wasn't large enough to fill the seat, even in something as tight as a Battlemech's cockpit!

Pushing aside the digital, calm report of "Left arm: destroyed," Ingrid saved that grief for later as she focused every bit of mental muscle she had into keeping her ship upright. Even through the bursts of napalm stretching across her flanks, everything came down to keeping up! Falling down in the enemy's midst would spell certain death. From an outsider's perspective the Ostroc looked as if it were about to fall on its face for a few seconds, its feet moving faster to try and keep under itself. She even touched her long arm down into the snow for a moment to push against the ground, and with that, she had barely just kept herself in the game.

Unfortunately, with both this and the burden of heat that she had forced upon herself, keeping upright was going to be about all she could do for the moment. Ingrid made her way slowly back to her lancemates' sides, saying "Hold! I'm not there yet!" across personal comms...

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

At some point, the thin hint of wind coming through the blanket of snow wasn't all that she heard. A Battlemech is a loud thing, a weighty block of metal and hissing actuators and clanking feet. One might've ran by her unnoticed, but a lance?

Ingrid's head snapped to attention the moment she heard something that could've possibly sounded out of the normal soundscape, and her hand went into position immediately, hovering over the Ostroc's ignition. With comms blacked out and people waiting for her signal to fire, the only other hint she'd get is if the Fists caught them first. A false start would've ruined the point of this gambit entirely. She waited, and waited a painful amount of time - that noise earlier was the crunch of ice, and with ears trained entirely to it, she recognized it being repeated, and by more than one pair of feet! The enemy had finally arrived, and their engagement was about to begin!

...and Ingrid held.

The sound repeated more, and she could hear the clatter of their feet beyond the crunch. She had to hold.

This surprise's efficacy was predicated entirely on how well Daschke knew her opponent, how they would act, and their machines. They had a Hunchback, flank speed of 64 kmh, and they presented slow targets, possibly only slower with the caution needed to cross a narrow bridge. They wouldn't let a Crusader take point, that'd be a terrible idea if they weren't expecting air support, and the weather in the mountains made that unlikely. The Fists were barbarians, but she had seen the footage they had released enough times to at least understand them as skilled thugs. They were going to move close together to present as little opportunity to cut into their formation as possible. That was textbook 'mech warfare. She's even seen pirates from Circinus understand this, and those people didn't even count as real 'mech jockeys.

Through the muffling cover and through the noise of her thoughts, she heard a second pair. One more and she'd have her guess validated, as much as it could be.

It'd be like this. Firestarter and Hunchback in front, that was no surprise. They required as much ground as possible to keep in range. The Crusader would be behind them...around 60 meters she imagined, the center point to their formation and the anchor which they'd meter their speed on.

She heard the third pair of feet, faintly. Her thumb tensed, but remained arched.

Then it'd have to be the Panther holding the rear as fire support. She wanted to imagine it being the least likely to engage directly, being the slightest bit harder to repair with their distance from the Combine, and deathly weak in melee. That'd be it. FS9, HBK, CRD, PNT. That exact order.

This didn't matter, beyond her choice of immediate target. The question lay solely in their speed...which, imagining the humanoid gait of the Firestarter and her memories of it in pirate hands, she could put that first pair of feet to it with near certainty...and how fast her own 'mech, the venerable Susser Todd, would be able to move from a complete cold start. Four seconds. She just needed to end up within a close enough distance with her second or so of surprise.

Ingrid's world froze for a moment, beyond the growing rumble of the approaching lance. Her hand remained steady.

All of it came down to a rhythm. She'd just enter at the same tempo...

...exactly then.

The engine kicking on pushed a dozen actuators into test-firing and made her mech shudder, a byproduct of safety mechanisms detecting her off-balance pose, and the inside of the cockpit flashed with light as everything came to life in quick succession. Ingrid floored the gas, willing her 'mech through her connection to push itself back into a standing gait as fast as it could, and it all paid with a perfect timing!

From the outsiders' perspective, a bank of freshly avalanched snow shook with unnatural vibrations before falling away entirely, an olive green heavy battlemech appearing from its white hold and heading right onto them!

At about this time, as per the request of someone back at base, the Ostroc's speakers roared with a violent riff as an ancient Terran musical piece blared out at maximum volume. It wasn't Ingrid's taste but she figured it'd help with being distracting.

Her guess of marching order was incorrect in more than one way, the second of sighting she had initially landing on the Panther, but she found her real prize was about where she figured. She lined up everything she had onto the Firestarter, and let loose in a flare of light and heat!

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

Ingrid looked through her cockpit's glass - it seemed as if a blueish cloud had settled directly onto her, tinted in strange ways by the visor on her neurohelm. A layer of thick snow, maybe ten feet deep, lay on top of her Ostroc and held it entirely within its cover. She remembered seeing this view from her window before, though that was an accidental fall and not a thrown-together plan. Not like she'd ever admit to falling on accident in this machine. Every few seconds there'd be some faint thump as another part of the mountain's snowpack, or its unearthed stone fell down on top of her - her heart had stopped skipping a beat when this happened a minute or so ago. If a second avalance were to occur on top of her, well, it'd have to do it fast.

Things were going to get considerably less tranquil in a few moments' time, either way.

At the base of the central peak, Ingrid's mech lay in wait for the trap she had devised. The core of their forces had been assigned their positions back at safer ground - the northernmost ice bridge had been decided to be something that's only traversed when absolutely required, with Daschke urging caution here the most. ("What's more expensive, all the shells you'll miss at range, or having to tow a 'mech out from a hundred-meter-deep canyon in the mountains?") Their plan hinged on keeping the enemy as close as they could, and that meant blowing the southernmost bridge.

Would it be nice if, by a miracle, they were able to shoot it out from underneath the enemy? Let them fall to their deaths?

Well, by Ingrid's standards, that would be a very ignoble death. No, it wouldn't be nice. However, it was still her plan. The rest of the Green Knights had heard it all from her as they arrived, the distinct sound of Ingrid's saber rattling as it hung from her cockpit in the background of the transmission. Lie in wait, blow the southern bridge, take shots at range.

The rest of the crew waited, hugging the mountain while shut down or kept hull-down with intent to give them as much lead time as possible. If the Crimson Fists could cross the bridge before spotting them, everything would be going as smoothly, but she wasn't going to try and bank on the notion of keeping a lance of green-colored armor hidden in the white and black of the mountainside for long. Family Man was given his go-ahead to try scaling the mountain, but to be ready to descend when need be - his long range weaponry wasn't bad, but he would be under-utilized from all the way up there.

She was going to have to be the ambushing force and the bait all in one. They'd get close, cross in front of them, and with God willing, they wouldn't question the snow drift that lay right alongside their path. Getting directly up in close quarters against the enemy wasn't at all safe, but who else would take this spot? The rest of the Green Knights just weren't as sturdy. Additionally, perhaps Ingrid was simply the most suicidal of the group.

A short burst of static preceded an update. One more person would be joining them, not the Warhammer - potentially good if it was something more effective at close range...for the rest of the Knights. Truth be told, there might not be much that's good to look forward to on her end of things. Even the best possible outcome would mean a narrow win on her own right.

Something like fear was with her in the cockpit as she waited. She couldn't do much more than keep staring at the snow in front of her, or uselessly click her saber in and out of its scabbard, or feel the odd way her weight was held in her seat as her Ostroc was frozen in an awkard pose...

...though, her thought did drift to something. She remembered something from long ago, in her days at the LCAF, that an elder statesman of a trainer said to her. The man was in his sixties and he was still riding out in his Griffin near-daily for exercises...

...anyway, what he said was that there was some degree of superstition needed to be a Mechwarrior. Ingrid brushed off that kind of folklore, naturally, but they were already dealing with a miraculous bonding of man and machine. Yhe pilot's mental state was its own influence on how well this connection worked. Little anchors of hope would give them just a little more of an edge, and sometimes that's what you needed. However, for all of those that he brought up as examples throughout the centuries, there was one he insisted was very real.

"Whatever you do, don't look at family photographs right before fighting commences. You're just asking for it at that point, you hear me?"

Maybe Ingrid had forgotten those words or maybe she was intentionally telling narrative-induced fate to piss off, but she looked at a photo held in a crevasse of her cockpit. It was a family photograph, yes, but her attention was focused on one face that remained held in a prison many kilometers from here...

She lingered on that face, but her ears remained alert. All she'd have to wait on was the sound of approaching armor, getting as close to her position as possible...

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

Vagabonds, crows picking at the carrion on the site of war. Ingrid barely held her contempt for the scrappers as the ran out, hooting and hollering. Their services to the Green Knights earned them a stay of indignation, but really - couldn't you show a little circumstance given to the inevitable? Seeing fine machines butchered like, as Ingrid would imagine in her most offensive imitation of that certain low-class drawl, "A right dun-hawm bar'buh'cuh wit' all de fixens, bier's fuh free, yee-haw!" did not endear anyone to you.

This was a minor distraction from the real meat of the matter. Her question was almost redundant, anyway. She understood what was about to happen, and really, there was some small part of her that understood this as necessary. They didn't have the facilities to keep prisoners, their enemies weren't the sort to offer ransom, and they wouldn't have been offered the same clemency. More likely, they'd be tortured until more incriminating soundbites could be pulled out of them.

It still pained her, though. Logically it made sense, but the core principles of her being had yet to come to terms with it.

"I see," she replied to the Colonel, her tone less adamant or icy than one might expect. She didn't seem wholly on-board, but acquiescence would be have to be good enough. "Understood. I won't be particularly kind with them."

Then, she turned her boot about face to look at the rest of the assembled Mechwarriors in the eye, and her shoulders-up back-straight posture suggested that, yes, she was going to speak to them in her position as the Holy Lord of All Honor from whom all martial wisdom flows. And yet, though she certainly tried to sound like she was giving an order, her words were a little less preachy than usual.

"When it comes time and you find it inevitable, give them a fine death. They're dogs, and the same couldn't be expected of them, but even miserable street-curs like these Mechwarriors have some unconscious aspiration to being staghounds. That is to say," her posture loosened up slightly, "do not be sloppy. Show that you're better than them in the killing blow, even more so than the rest of the engagement. You hear?"

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

The Colonel's subtle marker of tension was mirrored by the Duchess, who had gripped the haft of her sabre with enough power to leave her hand frozen in that grip for a while once she realized what had happened. It had been a tense time, between the nukes and the violence committed for no better reason than to dishonor them. The stress would even get to the greatest and most level-headed of them...let alone Ingrid.

She had barely slept the night over. The tension that built up just behind her forehead made her walk out and practice her sword technique against posts outside of the base for hours, both to relieve that stress and with knowledge that, as unlikely as it was, she could be called to stab someone in the coming days. Maybe 70 minutes of passing out was all that she was operating on, boosted by coffee, and several other things that she hadn't taken the time to inspect before downing.

Ingrid's eyebrow twitched. She'd have to pack some more of those stimulants along for the upcoming excursion - hopefully they won't react badly when stored in the sauna heat of a cockpit.

The assignment was...simple. Sometimes complexity meant new ways to make errors and botch it all, but this time it just meant that there was less to leverage. There was no gambit to distract them or have someone act as a harrier for reinforcements or even a retreat planned, just a few seconds of ambush and one way to potentially spite them if everything else goes poorly.

Ingrid relished the opportunity to fight as a Mechwarrior again. She did not look forward to the losses on their side.

When all was said and done, in lieu of questions, an ultimatum was given. A terse silence settled among them before Ingrid spoke to the Colonel.

"...we're to deny them the right to retreat and kill them in their cockpits. Right, Colonel?"

You could imagine Ingrid shouting and stamping her foot, her continued chivalric fantasies driving her to openly rebel against this directive. However, she simply asked with grave seriousness and a composed stare - not "How dare you", but "Do I understand you fully?"

Mechwarrior: Disposable Heroes

That she got a "Your concerns are valid, Daschke" out of the Colonel at all was a small moral victory. This didn't amount to anything else, though. Her expresion carried with it a growing sense of disappointment in the Colonel's response that she did not hide as he continued, working out a plan of minimal engagement. Engagement, nonetheless.

"Very practical, sir," was her clipped response. Practicality in the face of...well, many things, but she personally imagined it as self-preservation.

She could feel eyes on the back of her strained neck after she spoke up. Some of the others did not find her concerns founded - not news at all. Did they think she was stupid, or simply deluded? She did turn around to face them, sharp eyes scanning theirs in turn, but she wasn't ready to confront anyone in specific.

"If anyone disagrees with me wholly, then you are welcome to take it up with me in private," she said before turning away from the group. This was something she wouldn't bend on, and something she hoped she could make others understand.

...some part of her imagined being a guard for this weapon. That she would eschew sleeping in the same cots as the others and lay next to a nuclear warhead every night, sword kept close to her chest, and she would inevitably cut down anyone who tried to infiltrate and steal the abominable weapon.

There was one concern. She knew otherwise, with her rich upbringing entailing a good education, that sitting next to a disarmed nuclear weapon wasn't seriously going to irradiate her. The danger existed but she probably was worse off sitting in a junkyard filled with the broken shells of fusion reactors anyway.

Nevertheless, fear doesn't have to be rational to be acted upon. And she feared that damn thing.

She instead resolved to run through anyone who worked Ziska up to trying to steal the bomb for a joke.

Yeah.

Ingrid retired soon after she worked through this. Her night would be spent training with the sword against anyone who would take her, her own shadow if need be, as she prepared for this seeming inevitability. All the while, she was keen to explain her view of Nui Awa to Marit after being approached.

To her, it was a city that had seen its best years well before any of them had arrived. Its populace in decline and paranoid, she advised that the sensible approach to espionage - blending in with confidence - would be better made with a touch of looking over your shoulder.

Also the alcohol they served was better than she expected.