
“Damn.” Sang-wei Caitlin Ross awoke to the faint sound of metallic groaning, the smell of ozone, and the dancing lights of a control panel. Looking around, she discovered she was still in her Stinger’s command couch. Where normally the cockpit window gave her a spectacular view of the surrounding terrain, right now it showed nothing but sand and charred vegetation. Ignoring a pounding headache, she fired up the fusion engine, which was surprisingly still operational.
Her mech was face-down on the ground, lying on top of its damaged right arm. Testing it, she found it unresponsive. “Great. Face-down in a pile of dirt and I can’t even roll over. May as well see the butcher’s bill then.”
After punching a few keys the diagnostic reports began to roll in. Engine containment field at 45% strength. Right arm unresponsive. Left leg severed at the knee. Rockets depleted. Damage to sensors and life support. Three heat sinks destroyed. Patches of angry red pulsated on the armor integrity diagram, outnumbering the green and yellow. Of course her only remaining weapon, the medium laser, was destroyed along with the arm.
The heavy thump of battlemech footsteps stirred Caitlin from the depressing readouts. With sensors damaged, her mech was as good as blind, so she strained with the left arm to shift the cockpit upward. A pair of battlemech feet, a wasp’s, came into view. Relieved, she realized they were painted in the camouflage pattern of her own unit, the 1st Capellan Defense Force.
The voice of sao-wei Jun Fan, a member of her recon lance and a longtime friend came over the radio. “Glad to see you’re still among the land of the living, sang-wei.” Caitlin was surprised to find the radio still functional. “Well, did we win?” was her weak reply. Jun’s voice beamed with so much pride it threatened to overload the radio speaker. “We ran the Feddie scum off-planet, and we’ve been ordered to return home to Capella for refit & repair.”
Caitlin breathed a heavy sigh of relief. The 1st had been shipped around the Liao Commonality fighting off Davion advances for almost a year. While proud to serve the Capellan Defense Force, the unit was beginning to fray under the stress.
“We took a heavy beating though,” Jun paused. “All the salvage crews are busy with those not so lucky.” Caitlin glanced beyond the wasp’s feet to see sao-wei Millis's battered raven being loaded onto a recovery flatbed, the source of the groaning noise that woke her. “Let me help you up, see if we can get you back to HQ on our own,” he continued.
Cradling the stinger’s torso with his right arm, and clasping its left hand with his own, Jun maneuvered his mech skillfully to help his sang-wei rise. Now off the ground, Caitlin swung her left arm over the wasp’s head, grasping its shoulder. Only now was the full extent of the damage obvious. The stinger’s left leg lay on the ground beneath them; the arm dangled uselessly from the elbow down, only held on by stray myomers and sensor bundles.
It was then that Caitlin remembered the final moments of her fight. She had ordered Fan in his Wasp to scout a ridge to the north as her lance pressed east. A hidden Davion fire lance opened up at point-blank range as they approached. A sentinel and stiletto double-teamed her beleaguered stinger. The stiletto’s lasers savaged her right arm, while the sentinel’s rotary autocannon neatly carved off her left leg at the knee. With only seconds to react Caitlin fired her rockets, but to little effect. The fall threw her head up against the mech’s control panel, and then the world went dark.
Caitlin surveyed the damage on Fan’s wasp. “Looks like you got away relatively clean.” “I saw the battle from the ridgeline. The stiletto was jamming communications, so I ran back out of its range to call for support.” He paused, but then continued, his voice more hesitant. “I didn’t want to leave you, but I knew the regimental command had to be warned. Thank the gods you survived.”
As she rose the rest of the way to her one good leg, arm slung around the wasp’s shoulder, she replied, a tear in her eye. “You did the right thing, Jun.”
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