Like this one. They raced up on either side of a retreating Joust, the tracked tank straining along with obvious engine difficulty. Black, oily smoke trailed out of several gaping rents in the tank’s armor. Battlesuit damage.

From earlier trade-offs with Tassa, Raul knew she would leave him to finish off the wounded vehicle. Her lasers spat out scarlet spikes which worried the ground to one side of the Joust, herding it closer to Raul’s Legionnaire. The Joust’s turret swung over as the tank tried to bully its way past the militia BattleMech, lancing out with its large lasers but missing. The ruby beam scorched a line of black glass into the ground at Raul’s feet.

Cautious of his ammunition reserves, Raul spent two short bursts into the damaged side of the Joust. A tongue of fire licked out from the blackened rent—an orange flame spitting more fuel-tinged smoke into the air. The tank trailed to a stop, and Raul lifted his crosshairs away in search of a new target.

“You’re getting soft,” Tassa accused him. “If they get that fire under control and then put a laser into your back, you will wish you had finished them.”

Raul’s vision blurred, and he blinked some moisture back into his eyes. “You haven’t noticed that we attracted a small retinue behind us?” he asked. Of course, Tassa’s head’s up display might not be fully conversant with Republic Identify Friend-Foe transponders, but her sensors should have picked up the two VVI Rangers and the double-squad of Cavalier battlesuit infantry following in their wake of dust.

“Honestly, no. If they are not hostiles, I tend to overlook lesser forces. And I do not trust my back to anyone but a MechWarrior. Sometimes, not even to them.”

There it was again; a veiled—not contempt, but a lack of consideration—for conventional forces. Somewhere, Tassa must have been burned badly. “Learn that on Dieron?” he asked.

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“Not easily, no. I’ve been told by… on good authority that I have a determined stubborn streak.” By his fiancée. A guilty start shook Raul. Why hadn’t he simply admitted that it was Jessica who often told him that?

Tassa took a moment out to pop her lasers off at some Hauberk infantry. The battlesuit troopers had tried to come at her from over a small rise. Her lasers burnt one into a desiccated shell, drove the rest back. “Stubborn does not work with me. When the answer is no, it stays no.”

Was she just talking about her adventures on Dieron? “The answer hasn’t been ‘no’ yet, now has it?” Was he?

“No. Not yet. Though if you do not get around to asking the right—Raul!”

Too late, her warning came. Sensors screamed at him as an enemy targeting system locked on, their high-pitched wail piercing his ears like the autocannon rounds which made short work of his right-side armor. Raul wrestled with his control sticks, fighting to keep his balance as the Jagatai OmniFighter screamed overhead at less than one hundred meters off the ground. A cyclone of dirt and debris blasted up behind its wake, pelting Raul’s cockpit.

A second OmniFighter, higher and slower than the first, spent two ruby beams toward Tassa. She throttled into a reverse walk, pulling out of its line of fire, and managed to clip its tail assembly with one of her PPCs before it thundered by after its lead.

Kicking his left leg out into a wide-bodied stance, Raul barely managed to hold the fifty tons of metal and myomer upright. The Legionnaire bent far over toward its right, holding a precarious balance. Slowly, Raul straightened back up.

“You all right?”

His ears rang with the echoes of sensors alarms and the hammering reports of one hundred twenty millimeter ammo chewing into his armor. He tasted blood, and then realized from a throbbing ache that he’d bitten the inside of his cheek. Which was the least he deserved from flirting during a firefight. Idiot.

“Yeah. I’ll live.” He checked the wireframe, and tested out what he saw there by trying to flex the Legionnaire’s right knee. “That’s it for my right knee joint, though. It’s fused.” Which would cost him about ten klicks on his top speed. “I’m going nowhere fast.”

“Well how about you get turned around to the north,” Tassa said casually, “because those fighters are looping back around.”

It was true. The fighters had left the range factor on his HUD, but were still caught on an auxiliary sensor display circling at five klicks. Tassa moved to place herself in line, with Raul between her and the fighters’ return path.

“Tassa, what are you doing? You don’t put yourself in the path of a strafing run. You attack from the oblique so it’s harder for the pilot to target you.”

“It’s harder for you to target them, too,” she said with a curt tone. “If you really don’t think I know what I’m doing, step aside.”

Raul considered it. Everything in his training and the prickly hairs standing up on the back of his neck told him to avoid the fighter’s pass. His targeting system would allow him to get one shot off at the Jagatai as it flashed by overhead, but his rotary autocannon couldn’t match the OmniFighter’s firepower. Not unless he held into the trigger and emptied his ammunition bins in one long burst.

“I think I’m good to go,” he said, sounding braver than he felt.

No time for better than that, though. The Jagatai were already back.

The lead craft came in low again, hugging Achernar like an old friend. The tail of dirt sucked up into its backwash stood out several klicks away, which gave Raul all of three seconds to magnify for aerial targets and set his crosshairs into the OmniFighter’s approximate path. At the last possible second, he shuffle-stepped to one side and squeezed into his trigger, held it.

Behind him, framed on his rear monitor, Tassa Kay’s Ryoken rocketed up and forward into the air on its jump jets.

It was a maneuver—two maneuvers, really—caught on various gun-cam videos that Raul would end up watching over and over again once back at the base. Everyone had a piece of the exchange, but only the long-sniper squad of Cavaliers—rushing up from the backfield after dealing with the Joust’s crew—caught the entire thing.

Raul stepping aside of the main strafing path just as the ground opened up in a new, hideous rent of damage that drew a line right between his old footprints.

Tassa Kay hovering her Ryoken in the air almost right over Raul’s Legionnaire.

His Legionnaire cutting apart the air with hot, lethal metal, hammering several hundred fifty-millimeter slugs into the nose of the Jagatai and peeling away several layers of its thick armor plating.

Her Ryoken, stabbing out with lasers and particle cannon. The lasers actually burned in along the fuselage underbody, doing little more than scorching pristine armor. Her PPCs, however, struck into the Jagatai’s already-bloodied nose. Both beams fused into one hard-hitting punch, washing blue-white crackling energy over the forward third of the OmniFighter.

The combined damage might have been enough to penetrate to something vital. Raul wasn’t so certain. Sensors blinded by the particle discharge and canopy no doubt awash in a white sheet of energy, it looked to Raul as if the Steel Wolf pilot attempted to quickly turn out of the firestorm, banking away hard to port.

At one hundred meters over the hard, unyielding earth, a pilot did nothing quick or hard. Not without consequences.

Air bled away beneath the wings and the Jagatai’s nose dipped just enough. The OmniFighter jinked away on a tight, horizontal loop, drifted down, and then clipped its wing on the same small rise behind which the Hauberk infantry had hidden. In slow replay, Raul would see the OmniFighter turn three complete somersaults in the air, shedding pieces and parts in a storm of falling metal.