Rally traded bullets with the Sparos, and the two machines began to dance deadly. The lighter machine kept its forward sensors on her Valkyrie, continuing to backpedal as it charged forward. Rally closed the distance--then--her thrust but a few feet away--the Athenian pilot's verniers engaged at maximum power. It spun off at an oblique angle to her attack, bounced an armless shoulder off of the Valkyrie's chest, and immediately shot off down the forest path at its best speed.
-----
If Rally was steaming alive in her cockpick, Lieutenant Lazarova's blood felt like it had frozen in his veins. Everything had happened so fast that he'd barely had a chance to react before his weapons had been neutralized, and his brain was working overtime to catch up. Beneath his fatigues, he could feel himself breaking out in gooseflesh as he realized how close to death he had just come, and how many times. That first walker who'd come charging in seemed to just be wrecking things--though the word "just" was doing a lot of work, considering Lazarova's job was specifically to stop those things from being wrecked--but the one in his rear camera was a different story.
Still--if his luck over the last few minutes had been abominable, he had at least made the most of a bad situation. Getting away from the ambushers' big, lumbering machines should be doable for his Sparos, and once he raised the rest of the squad, they could handle things while he got to a safe distance.
The Lieutenant grit his teeth and held the throttle down as hard as he could. The Sparos shot forward--then its pilot heard the chime of a comms request.
-----
Albert's throw, by all accounts, should have missed. Oh, the technique had worked well for him so far, and if you were going to do it, then the Daedalus was the machine to make it work. But rockets, while aerodynamic, are not meant to be launched by mechanical means--to say nothing of their mobile platforms.
And yet the rocket truck sailed in an arc through the air, as pretty as any shot thrown on a field. In fact, it sailed right over the Valkyrie--and as the Sparos engaged its thrusters, it shot forward right in time for the vehicle to take between the shoulderblades.
Myrmidon and mobile artillery alike went down, and before either could touch the ground the rockets exploded from the impact. The explosion washed over the front of Rally's machine, pelting the Valkyrie with debris; a cloud of dust and smoke now obscured the path leading out of the base.
-----
Leofric looked back and forth between his displays, expression frantic. His comms request to Lazarov had gone unanswered; now, the status light for the lieutenant's Sparos went from an amber "Damaged" to a red "Unreachable". He punched a button on his comms panel, displaying the other armored elements in the base; even those telltales were now showing far too much red and amber. He could hear the base feed coming in through his headset, as well, and the panicked screams of the soldiers fed his own fear.
"Discretion is the better part of valor," he mumbled to himself, guiding his machine out of the cave's hillside entrance.
-----
Marcus's sensors began honing in on the Chroma reaction they had detected; the signature was growing rapidly in strength, and it wouldn't take him long to spot the jungle canopy rustling--and a flash of white--in the valley below, as something large moved through the trees.
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