And jammed. Pressed too hard too fast, the spinning barrels locked up with a grinding screech of metal against metal.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Raul cursed himself silently as the Tundra Wolf shook off his desperate attack and swiveled around to come at him over the ruined Jupiter. The BattleMech stalked forward like a predator in search of prey, slow and with malicious intent. Its large laser sliced in at Raul’s Legionnaire, splashing armor off of his right arm. An earth-shaking spread of fifteen separate missiles pummeled Raul’s ’Mech and the surrounding desert floor. Two individual warheads slammed in on either side of his cockpit, like a one-two punch, shaking Raul against his harness and leaving behind the taste of blood from a bitten lip.

To add injury to Raul’s insult, the AgroMech opened up behind him to drill through his back armor. He stumbled forward, recovering just in time to save himself from a three-story drop to the desert floor.

Reactor alarms spoke their general discontent into the cacophony of sirens and audio alerts as the stream of hot metal chipped away at the engine’s physical shielding. Failsafes threatened to dump a dampening field over the fusion chamber, but Raul slapped at the override to keep his ’Mech up and fighting. He turned to present fresh armor against the converted AgroMech, and worked to clear his jammed weapon.

“Purifiers, get control of that Agro. Jessie-one, worry the Wolf.”

Throwing a hovercraft against the Tundra Wolf would not have been Raul’s first choice, but he had to buy himself a few critical seconds. He worked the ammunition dump on the autocannon, clearing the jammed breach. Status lights blinked from red back to green as he stood up under another withering assault, again from both sides as the remaining AgroMech and the Tundra Wolf worked him over with autocannon and missiles.

Then the AgroMech went down with half a dozen Purifier battlesuits clinging to its back, ripping through armor and engine, and the tactical carrier launched a full spread of short-range missiles into the Tundra Wolf’s face.

They bought Raul the extra few seconds he needed to set his feet firmly beneath him, pulling his targeting crosshairs over the Tundra Wolf’s blocky outline.

Short pull. Long pull. This time Raul varied the way he ate into his ammunition reserves, careful of the weapon’s needs. When he needed to rest the rotary, he chopped at the tall BattleMech with his trio of lasers. Between the damaged shielding and his nonstop fire, temperatures in the cockpit climbed slowly but steadily through the yellow band and into the red. And all the while Star Colonel Torrent worked him over with more missiles, and more. A pair of medium lasers. Missiles…

Torrent had lost his large laser!

The realization slapped Raul back into a semblance of coherent thought. He had not been weighing his chances, or worrying about what the best strategic opportunity might be. In those first moments after the fall of Sir Powers, all Raul could think of were Tassa’s earlier words. They wouldn’t fail. They couldn’t. He understood her better now. Kyle Powers had drawn a line in the sand—right here. And right here was where Raul had unconsciously decided to hold that line until he broke under Torrent’s guns.

But now he glanced more frequently between his targeting and a readout on the star colonel’s ’Mech. One of his autocannon salvoes had crippled the laser, and both shoulder launchers looked to be off-line as well. Also, Kyle Powers had done a number on the Tundra Wolf’s armor before falling to its weapons. Raul counted three deep rents in the upper chest, one of them glowing with the golden hue of the BattleMech’s internal fires.

The Legionnaire stood up under all the abuse Torrent could give it. Another glancing blow to the cockpit. Left arm chewed down to a twisted, skeletal stump, right leg fused into little better than a BattleMech peg leg. Sweat poured down his face, stinging at the corners of his eyes, his lips. Every gasp for breath pulled hot coals down into his lungs. He outlasted the Jessie as it finally grounded out after a series of hammering gauss slugs from the M1 Marksman. He ordered his own Purifiers after the tank, intent on capturing it for the Standing Guard, but never once took his eyes off the rock-steady Wolf. The desert shook with natural thunder, and the rain beat down hard enough to drum a deafening roll over his head and shoulders. The Legionnaire’s ruined right leg trembled beneath Raul, threatening to give out at any second, but he held his BattleMech up, squinted through the pouring rainfall, spat out another set of ruby darts and then lashed out again with an extra-long pull from his autocannon. If Torrent wanted him, he’d have to be willing to trade ’Mechs. Maybe trade lives. It was a decision Raul was ready to make.

Star Colonel Torrent, apparently, was not.

The Tundra Wolf took an actual step backward, then another. Then, with a violent lurch that seemed able to convey the star colonel’s anger as well as his frustration, the seventy-five-ton BattleMech showed Raul its back, high-stepping over the Jupiter’s stilled legs and then kicking in with its MASC equipment to put immediate distance between the two MechWarriors.

His finger already crimped around the trigger, pulling it back into the control stick grip, Raul hammered another several hundred rounds into the back of the Tundra Wolf, but against fresh armor there was no real chance to harm it. The M1 Marksman drove in between the two, guarding the star colonel’s flank. Raul called off the infantry, ready to save lives now that Torrent had bowed out of the challenge.

Now that Kyle Powers and at least one armor crew had already paid the highest price for the Republic’s pyrrhic victory.

“Raul? Hey, Ortega!” Tassa’s voice, filled with a healthy amount of respect and enthusiasm. “You did it. Do not ask me how, but you actually backed off Star Colonel Torrent.”

Breathing shallow, trying to pull oxygen out of the cockpit’s reactor-baked air, Raul slumped back into his chair and let the automatic safeguards shut down his reactor. Panel lights died, leaving him one red-tinted backup and the rain-dampened gray which filtered through his ferroglass shield. Drenched in sweat, utterly spent, his arm felt like dead weight as he tied his comms system into the battery reserves.

“Torrent got what he wanted,” he said, voice cracking. Raul swallowed dryly, tasting blood from his bitten lip. “I just denied him the trophy.” And ran the cost up on the Steel Wolf commander as well, with one converted WorkMech destroyed and another captured.

“Take the victories you can get, Raul. There is not much more to a MechWarrior’s life.”

Raul nodded to the darkened cockpit, his neurohelmet pressing down with insufferable weight against his shoulders. Kyle Powers had put a similarly low price on his own life with the way he had fought the battle, and Raul couldn’t help but believe that the Republic had lost more than it gained this day.

“But there should be, Tassa.” He stared out into the rain. “There should be.”