Almost as if her attack had not taken place, the raider's nose continued to pull out of line. The unbridled thrust pouring through the forward port stressed laser-heated stabilizers in the fighter's body, and warped the metal out of shape. As the aft belly thruster pushed the ship forward, the nose thruster just pushed it away.Like a wax model in unbearable heat, the fighter began to bend in the middle, then the nose snapped off right behind the cockpit. The two halves slammed into each other, crushing the cockpit like an eggshell, then spun off in a ball of twisted metal and fused ceramic armor.

"Val Two, this is Val One. I'm free. Where are you?" Tyra looked anxiously at her scanner. It registered two enemy craft and three friendlies, including herself, but the added heat pouring into her cockpit had temporarily fried whatever circuit painted the identifier tags on the scanner icons. "Who did we lose?"

Another of the enemy craft winked out of existence before Anika answered. "Sorry, Cap. Needed to concentrate there. I have minor damage to a vector thruster, but I'll survive."

"Valkyrie Four reporting. My target is breaking off." Karl Niemi's voice carried no emotion with it. "Sven lost it in the first exchange. He took damage to the cockpit and was in and out thereafter. He did box one in for me and I got him."

Tyra felt a lump rise in her throat. "Damn! He was a good man. How are you doing?"

"I'm leaking fuel, but I should be able to coast to the Bragi.I've plotted a return vector. If I can't land in the bay, I'll punch out. I can't raise the ship, so I'd appreciate it if you'd radio and have a rescue team standing by."

"Roger." Tyra looked down at the frozen image of the black moon and six-legged bear insignia on her secondary monitor. "Anybody know what pirate unit this crest belongs to?"

Giddy with having survived, Anika called out, "Does it matter. They die like other pirates. Whoever they are, we fight them just like we fight everyone else."

Tyra felt her mouth go dry. New pirates in new machines? I think we're in for the fight of our lives.

16

Turtle Bay

Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

30 March 3050

Smoke coiled like oily black ropes against the red dawn sky. Scanning the horizon, Yodama knew it was more than just the heat churning out of his Phoenix Hawk'sfusion reactor that made the sweat pour down his face. First Battalion must be in the fight of its life! If that's the petrochem refinery burning, it means they've fallen back to their final line of defense.He pushed his 'Mech forward, but only with the most powerful sense of doom.

As the disk of the sun appeared over the line of low hills between Shin's forward lance and the First Battalion's last stand, it flooded his infrared scan with white fire and so he shifted sensor modes over to vislight. While the computer was cycling through, a quick flash on magscan made him punch a button and switch the scanners back to magnetic anomaly detection. The computer painted, plain as day, humanoid silhouettes against the background of the vectorgraphic landscape.

Shin stared at the display. Another puzzle. They've given this flank over to infantry in metallic IR-baffling equipment!Shin opened a radio link to Hohiro Kurita. "Sho-sa,I have infantry detected on magscan at 500 meters. We have been anticipated." He keyed a feed of his sensor data over to Hohiro's Grand Dragon.

"Are you certain, Tai-i?" Hohiro's voice was calm, despite the possibility of ambush. "Check the magnification on your scan. Could they be 'Mechs?"

"It's normal, Sho-sa.I would guess they're infantry with Inferno missiles meant to slow us down." Even as he spoke the word, Shin experienced a jolt in the stomach. Inferno rockets, fired from a handheld launcher, exploded in a fiery flood of jellied fuel that clung to a 'Mech like burning honey. Besides making a 'Mech an easier target for heatseeking weapons, Inferno hits spiked the internal temperature of a 'Mech high enough to bake the pilot inside his war machine.

"I think you're right." Hohiro's voice remained confident despite the bizarre nature of the raid. "I'll move the rest of the unit south of that position while you and your lance scatter the infantry. Join us as soon as possible, but be wary. Who knows what other surprises these raiders may have for us."

"Hai,"Shin replied smartly, all the while experiencing the same uneasiness he'd felt at the first staff briefing on the raiders coming in toward Turtle Bay. The raiders had popped in at a "pirate point," an arrival point much closer to the planet than most astronavigators felt safe plotting. They had obviously intended the raid to be a surprise, as it would have been except for an emergency oxygen run by a crew mining the rings. They had spotted the incoming DropShips and tight-beamed a warning to the planet.

That warning, however, had preceded the raiders' own radio message to the surface by only minutes. The raiders identified themselves as the "Smoke Jaguars," a name never previously associated with any Periphery pirate band. They wanted to know how many units the planet offered in defense, and took it easily in stride when told they were facing the Fourteenth Legion of Vega. The raiders then reported their targets and said they were only going to attack with two clusters. Shin didn't know what a cluster was, but their 'Mechs had been ripping the hell out of First Battalion.

He keyed the radio frequency open to the rest of his lance. "Arrow Lance, shift to magscan and drift north-northeast.

We're to harry those infantrymen and drive them back. Be careful. They may have Infernos." As his men acknowledged the order, Shin moved his Phoenix Hawkout to the battalion's left flank. Massive jump jets, looking like a folded pair of wings, clung to the back of the eleven-meter tall 'Mech. The war machine carried a pistol-like large laser in its right hand and each arm mounted a medium laser and a 50-caliber machine gun for anti-personnel use.

Using the joysticks on both arms of the command couch, Shin dropped the crosshairs for his weapons onto two of the hidden raiders. I hate to see 'Mechs warring on infantry, but I can't let my people be broiled alive in their machines. Maybe most of those groundpounders will run if a couple get hit.Swallowing hard, Shin tightened his middle fingers on the firing studs and sent the familiar thrumming of machinegun fire echoing up into the cockpit.

Tracer rounds burned white lines from the weapons to their targets hidden in brush. The magscan in the cockpit scored both volleys as direct hits and shifted the target icon from standing to prone, but Shin was sure some of the brilliant tracer rounds had lanced up and away as though ricocheting from their targets. But that's impossible! Must just have hit some rocks behind them or something. A 50-caliber round will go through any body armor a man can wear.

The other targets glowing like fireflies on his tactical display did not move and run as he had hoped. He swung the crosshairs onto two more human icons and pulled the triggers. Bullets burned into the targets, but one of the two targets seemed to jump away from the stream of projectiles. Leaping up, the icon bounded across the computer-generated landscape like a triple-jumper.

Stunned, Shin glanced back at the first two targets he had hit. Both were back up and bouncing across the battlefield like gazelles. With the same foreboding he'd felt earlier, the MechWarrior snapped his sensors over to magnified vislight. May the Dragon have mercy! What the hell are those things?