Having demoted herself to a turret for the remainder of the mission, Marit did the only thing she could and aimed at the bend the train would have to round to approach the dam, cursing her luck. She shouldn’t have stopped, that was the crux of the problem. Though she had been standing in the river before and managed to move afterward, what gives? She’d been standing a lot closer to the dam, where the river had to have been altered to build the dam itself. It was probably paved with just a thin layer of silt over it, enough to slip and slide a little, meaning she hadn’t noticed any difference over the unmodified riverbed, but not enough to get stuck in. And when she moved further away, there was nothing stopping Archie from sinking deep into it once she stopped moving, the momentum of the 70 ton - 64 ton given her liberal use of the LRM launchers - machine being enough to yank the feet out of the mud and the ‘Mech didn’t have enough time to sink as deep while he was moving. In hindsight she could’ve seen that coming. At least the empty missile racks made Archie a bit less top-heavy. As Jon’s Marauder walked by, Marit’s mind drifted far across the stars into Davion space, where - as far as she knew - her mother was now saddling a similar BattleMech and briefly wondered what, if any, modifications they'd made to it.

[color=76D0FF]”You’re gonna have to explain that to me, Family Man, I’ve never even learned how to swim, much less stood in the sea.”[/color] She replied on the lance channel, as somewhere along the line, she decided that swimming was a useless skill. After all, the parachute had a dinghy attached to it and you couldn't swim in the shower. She knew he meant well and couldn't have known, but those instructions were wholly alien to her.
[color=76D0FF]”And I am cool. That's why I went into the river in the first place.”[/color] Since it had little effect on whether she would live or die in the next 10 minutes, being stuck didn't worry her that much. Even if retreat was called, she couldn't have outran a nuke anyway and if Archie fell down, the cockpit was still sealed and the riverbed evidently soft, so the worst thing she could see happening were bruises and whiplash.

Switching to thermal like the others, now guided by the heat of previous strikes against the self-professed doom snake, Marit let her lasers do the talking as she thought about recovery. Where were the tow points for when the maniacs were dealt with? Bottom of the pelvis - underwater, of course. Lower back - facing away from dry land. Up top - too high up, even higher than shoulders. Looked like Archie would just have to grab a tow rope and hope pulling that high up wouldn’t topple him, that’d be just a cherry on top of an already embarrassing cake.

…She didn’t have any tow cables. When the Colonel would review the CVR tapes, he’d get a lovely sampling of Swedish curses. Could she get [i]one[/i] break today?