"Alright, let's run through this one more time", I said. My platoon stood in a single-file line in infront of me down a long corridor.
"We stick to the formation, adapt on the spot and try not to get picked apart by the independent squads," Osei said.
"You sure this is going to work?" I heard a meek voice down the line.
I paused for a moment.
A fatal mistake.
I met their eyes and held their gaze.
"I'll be honest, I have no idea. But at the very least, it's a learning experience for us all. Win or lose, we will be better next week. Stronger, faster, more prepared. Even if we don't win, let's go shake them B-Grade assholes to the core when they realise they are pushed to the absolute limit by a bunch of D and F-Grade trash."
The platoon gave out a cheer in response, though I wasn't sure whether it was more of them hyping themselves up or if my speech actually worked. Either way, I straightened out my posture and looked back over my platoon.
The lighting in the corridor switched off entirely, leaving us in the dark. A split moment later, a red flashing light began to drone, flashing in three-second intervals, and illuminated the hallway in crimson. The platoon went silent as a mechanical voice filled the hallway.
"Game week one commencing. When the light flashes green, enter, find your designated pod, and stand by."
The announcer went quiet again. All I could hear was the heavy breathing of those around me and the gentle whirring of machines beyond the large door.
I sucked in a cool breath, and the flashing ceased, morphing into a solid continuous green. The moment hung for what felt like an eternity; my heart rate flared, and the door began to slide open. The precipice revealed the dark simulation room we were becoming so accustomed to.
Alright, Marcus, this is just what you've been training for a decade for. No pressure, deep breath, and let's do this.
I stepped out into the open ground without hesitation, giving the men and women behind me space to move and breathe.
Like the leader of a flock of birds, take the front and don't look back.
We strode into the open area.
The pods were in their usual places, settled in neat rows. They each flashed an individual name, the platoon and their assigned number within the platoon. What surprised me was that there were fewer pods than usual, with our opponents nowhere in sight.
Too good to share the same room with D-Grade trash, huh?
I let the lie linger in my head, forcing an edge of agitation that I hoped would keep me sharp and in the zone. It took a few seconds for everyone to get into position, and once we did, the light dimmed, only to be replaced by a strobe of unnatural blue light.
The light flickered and swam across the entire room before settling in the centre, combining and densifying into a solid blue block of numbers.
5
4
3
2
1
"Pilots. Mount and sync." A mechanical voice carried itself over the speakers.
The platoon moved quickly, breaking for the pods in a controlled scramble. While we hadn't drilled for the possibility of having to quickly mount up, it made sense for what they were trying to teach us: combat can happen at any time, so you best be prepared to enter the cockpit at a moment's notice. I could almost hear Vance's rough tone as he lambasted our slow response time.
I hauled myself up over the lip of the pod and dropped into the cradle. The lid came down over me with a pneumatic sigh and sealed.
Black. For a moment, there was nothing but my own breathing and the cool press of the contact gel settling against the back of my skull and the base of my spine.
Then the connection began to link. It started at the crown, a cold thread drawing down through me, vertebra by vertebra. The Neural Link Stabilisation passive provided by my framework smoothed the handshake, sanding the lag off the edges.
The dark behind my eyes deepened to a black void, a complete absence of sensory input. The darkness swirled before my consciousness was ripped into being once more, and the world around me began to rebuild itself in a wash of blue.
The previous darkness morphed into an uncanny sight of concrete, rust and grey.
An industrial sprawl stretched out in every direction, processing blocks stacked in uneven tiers, gantries, the leaning skeletons of cargo cranes. Wide loading avenues ran between the structures, open and flat and inviting. Every one of them a kill lane, if you were stupid enough to stand in it. Cover wherever you looked, and clean sightlines almost nowhere.
A goddamn Skirmisher's paradise, of course it is
The cockpit fixed itself around me last, the simulation rendering my hands back onto the controls. The assist layer bloomed across the display in an instant, while there was nothing to calculate, possible firing lanes and a crosshair populated the display. I clicked my teeth and killed the display with a punch to the manual override button.
The guidance peeled away, and the raw feed rushed in to fill the gaps: load, torque, heat, the weight of the machine's limbs reported as a flood of numbers most pilots never had to deal with.
"Link's up," Osei said, flat and even in my ear. "I've got all of you."
I felt the familiar sensation, a tug at the edges of perception, that sixth sense that fed me information of where everyone stood, who was moving and the spacing between us.
"Linking sensory data," Ren called over the comms link.
The link dilated, pushing the awareness further as more information poured into my mind. The temperature, the wind direction and speed. Ren's deviation was something to behold; we had really lucked out to have the triumvirate of Osei, Tomás and Ren all in our backline.
"Contact pattern incoming," Tomás said, with an unnatural calmness. "Park's and my models have put their forward groups dispersing wide. Five elements, four mechs each, one Support cluster hanging back. They'll try to wrap us if we try and beeline for their support."
"So we don't play their initial trap," I said. "Vanguard, hold centre. Flanking, with me, Nobody moves until Osei calls it. And NOBODY chases."
"Copy," Miller grunted. Even through the comms, I could hear him itching to move.
I took a brief moment to look at my mech while the squads moved into positions. The Vanguard moved into a central brick; two flanking squads, one led by me and the other by Jin, and at the back of the formation, Osei, Tomás, Ren and Osei's support staff.
In the lull of the moment, I looked down at the cockpit and flexed the artificial muscle that threaded the frame. I went for a traditional striker; in my left hand I bore a large shotgun, with my right hand wielding an oversized gauntlet specialised in punching.
The ace up my sleeve, the deliverer of Ether Strike.
My thoughts were cut short as a quiet beeping began to echo across my pod. Five clusters of red dots bled across a tactical map that flared in the bottom right of my heads-up display; they moved in a line at first, dispersing wider and wider as though they were trying to set up a net.
Across the mapping, I could see the red dots moving throughout the avenues, fast and low, skimming the cover. They were doing a good job, as no one had visual confirmation of any enemy pilots.
"They're coming, maintain positioning. First contact will be probes. Front line Vanguard, shields up. Flanking prepare evasive manoeuvres."
A mental tug at my mind confirmed that Miller, Osei and the fireteam leaders flagged up in understanding. I nodded to myself once before readying myself.
The enemy settled into a staggered line, with a couple of them only a dozen meters away from open firing lanes. We had positioned ourselves in the centre of a heavily covered boulevard, bunkering up using vehicles, debris and rubble as environmental cover.
The first shots came from a direction we didn't originally anticipate, straight ahead, an initial artillery barrage from what had to be the support element — despite what initial intelligence had suggested.
"Centre—" The word was half out of me before I'd finished thinking it, but Miller had already seen it. His Vanguard wheeled as one body, the whole front rank pivoting to face the oncoming fire, dropping into a brace. The Vanguard's shields snapped up and overlapped until they were a single wall of plated death.
The salvo hit it a half-second later.
I felt it through the link before the sound reached me, a stuttering pressure that ran down the rank like a hand dragged across piano keys, every impact landing somewhere on the overlapping line. Slugs the size of my forearm hammered into the shields and burst into sparks, the front rank rocked on their heels, digging in and refusing to move. The wall held.
"Holding," Miller grunted over the link. "That's all they've got?"
"Then make them regret it." I dropped my own reticle onto the avenue and prepared.
As the initial salvo came, the dots on the map began to move. They had pinned our front line with artillery, and we were left to accept the oncoming squads that had now begun to appear across two avenues that provided direct firing lanes to both us and to them.
But thankfully, they had mistimed it; four red signatures slid out of the rusty haze on the left avenue, standing at the far end of it. Instantly, I felt Ren's deviation pulse through my consciousness as data of the firing lane and angles mapped themselves out in my mind's eye.
I flared my intent over the link Osei had provided before opening my communications link to all units within the platoon.
"All guns. That lane. Bury it."
Vanguard's heavies opened up over the top of the shield wall, the recoil of them shoving the whole rank back a half-step with every cycle, and my Flanking element swung our lighter cannons onto the same line, and for a handful of seconds the avenue stopped being an avenue at all.
The buildings went down first. The same rounds that had splashed harmlessly off our shields armour now tore through ferrocrete like it was wet cardboard, sheeting whole facades off the processing blocks on either side, stitching a gantry into halves so it came down in a long shriek of folding steel, punching the leg clean out from under a cargo crane so the skeletal thing groaned, leaned, and toppled across the mouth of the lane in a slow avalanche of girders. Pulverised concrete boiled up in a wall of grey dust that swallowed the avenue whole.
I poured inaccurate shotgun fire into the dust where the four red signatures had been.
But across the map, my sensors had reported back that only one of the four had been taken down. The firing lane was quickly becoming less of a lane and more of an obstruction. Worst of it, the now weakened squad didn't stand and take more fire through the obstructed lane, and instead they peeled off beyond the precipice and for a moment, the avenue went quiet.
Where there had been a street, there was a canyon now. Rubble heaped two storeys high, smoke standing motionless in the dead air, a single severed power line whipping sparks across the ruin. The processing blocks that had framed the lane were gutted and open to the sky.
All of that ammunition spent and we'd only taken down one of their fighters, but a new victory condition had presented itself. Yes, this was a skirmisher's paradise, but we had the power to change the environment to one that suited ours.
There it is, Marcus. That's the trap, and they just showed it to you for free.
But this plan came with drawbacks; they'd let us shoot at them all day if we were stupid enough to expend all our ammunition. Every round spent trying to chase them down meant a scratch on their plates and wasted resources.
So let's sink into their game plan, they want us to chase and waste ammunition. Then let's change, flip the board and play a different game entirely.
"Cease fire on the lanes," I paused for a moment. "Tomás run a quick model prediction on a destroyed city, one where we refuse to allow them their cover."