...the Sharper the Thorne

[schoon]

Day 5 of the Lumijaa Campaign

Thorne pushed hard on the sticks and the feet of his FU09-FANG frame slewed across the snow. Without conscious thought he adjusted his feet in the stirrups to keep the massive machine balanced. An angry red and grey fireball exploded only meters away, and shrapnel from the near miss spanged off his frame's armor. He brought his frame to a knee, stabilized his weapon, and paused. Despite the subzero temperatures, he shook his head to clear the sweat away from his eyes.

A Conscript class frame, a grenade launcher cradled in its manipulators, rounded the ice-covered rocks only fifty meters away, belatedly bringing the weapon up. Too late.

His first 80mm round blew the hand holding the launcher into a splay of shattered pistons. The second hit the Conscript in the knee, seizing the joint. The pilot had skill, Thorne gave him that. The Conscript didn't fall, and even managed to start limping backwards. His reticle stayed glued to the frame's knee, and put another round through it, sending the lower leg spinning into the snow.

This time the Conscript did fall. Powdery snow puffed up as it impacted with a dull thump. Explosive bolts blew the pilot's hatch clear and a kid barely old enough to fight scrambled from the cockpit. His wide eyes searched wildly for an escape as his breath clouded into the freezing air.

Thorne already had the FU09 on the move, scanning for threats even as he bore down on the disabled Conscript. Its young pilot froze as 30 tonnes of frame bore down upon him. Silly boy, he was playing soldier with the wrong people. Thorne released the frame's grip on it's cannon and used the manipulator to swat the young pilot to one side. He flew a several meters from the force of the blow and landed in a snowbank upslope. Thorne then bought the FU09's foot down on the Conscript with crushing force.

Hydraulic fluid from crushed pistons sprayed into the snow, staining it purple, welds cracked and failed, makeshift armor buckled. It would never walk again.
A proximity alarm suddenly screamed for his attention, two new icons flashing to life on his heads up display.

Well, well, well. Junior had friends.

With agility unexpected from something so large, Thorne sidestepped his frame into the snowbank, crouching to reduce his silhouette, and took aim on the same point where the Conscript had appeared.

In a spray of snow, a Commissar crested the slope 10 meters above his point of aim. Its chain cannon was already firing blind, the pilot hoping that he could walk the weapon on target after clearing the ridge. Even so, his first shots were not far off, and Thorne sprang up out of the snow, moving laterally away from the stitched spray of impacts as he brought his own weapon to bear.

He grimaced in silent frustration as his first round impacted at the Commissar's feet. The chain cannon found its mark, ricocheting off his frontal armor, momentarily crazing his heads up display. He fired blind. The shot exploded off the Commissar's shoulder, spinning the frame and spoiling its pilot's point of aim.

Thorne pounded up the hill, closing the range. He fired another shot, but the Commissar was moving as well. It went wide and exploded against the rock face in a spray of stone and ice. The chain cannon chattered into action again, rounds impacting across his FU09's legs. He ignored the flashing red warnings of pressure loss and placed one last round into the frontal armor of the Commissar as he drew his frame-blade.

The Commissar tried to get clearance for another shot with the chain cannon. Too late again.

The edge of the massive blade shimmered into a bluish heat distortion as the power field energized. Thorne hammered it into the torso of the Commissar, splintering armor in a shower of sparks. Another slashing blow severed something critical and the Commissar fell back against the icy rocks, grey smoke from an electrical fire seeping from its joints.

An explosion blew him sideways, his feet madly working the stirrups to stay upright. The other bogey. His blade arm hung limp, piston fluid running freely dripping off the inert manipulator as he turned, searching for a target.

Another Commissar, camouflaged in grey and white, leveled an anti-frame missile at him. The spent launcher from the first shot lay discarded in the snow beside him. A halo of flame from the base of the missile told Thorne he was too late. It corkscrewed on a white tail as gyro stabilizers activated. He could see the proximity fuse on the warhead in absurd clarity as its terminal boosters fired.

Too late to dodge, he kicked the stirrups and fell forward. The missile adjusted a fraction of a second too late, curving down sharply into a red-black cloud of detonation.

Hanging against his harness, Thorne brought his weapon around one-handed, kicking a knee forward to give clearance off the icy ground. The reticle centered on the Commissar. It discarded the second launcher and drew a large-bored weapon from the mag lock on its thigh. Thorne fired first and the weapon exploded into scrap.

The Commissar rocked back on its pistons, turned, and zig-zagged away. Thorne fired another round, but it burst in the snow. The other pilot was good, and had clearly decided to fight another day. Within seconds, it had disappeared into the snow.

Thorne rocked his frame to its feet and activated the electromagnets for his own mag lock. Weapon stowed, he reached down and picked up the frame-blade that his inert manipulator had dropped to the ground.

"Thorne to C-3."

There was a pause and then a hiss of static. "C-3, standing by."

With his frame-blade stowed, Thorne pulled the 80mm back off of its locks and set his frame moving with a limping stride. "Encountered three bogeys, tally two, no joy on the third." He set his sensor arrays for broad spectrum, wide sweep, slightly distracted by compensating for the limp. "Frame damaged; returning to the Garden."

Another hiss. "Acknowledged, Thorne, you're cleared to the Garden."

He'd figured out an abbreviated pace in the stirrups that seemed to minimize the limp. "C-3, get a FLITTER out here to take a closer look. I want to know what they're so interested in protecting..."

[schoon]

The hazy glow of the holo-table turned Thorne's breath into green clouds that misted the snaking green lines of the three-dimensional topographic map. He leaned over the table, a look of bemused consternation on his face.

"There is no pattern, Thorne. You're wasting your time." The voice came from a shadows at the edge of the room. The speaker slowly approached the table as he continued, darkness slowly resolving into a frame jockey's uniform. "They're trying to draw us out, hit and fade, we've both seen it before." The face emerged from the shadow last, as if it were more comfortable there. Vin was a skilled pilot, but strategic thinking had never been his strong point. He shrugged.

Tiny frame icons littered the glowing topology, representing sightings, encounters, and battles, including the results of the last Talon overflight. The Conscripts and Commissars were littered across the table, like discarded toys. The absence of a pattern had to be deliberate. Thorne scowled for a moment before turning away from the table, his own face consumed by welcoming shadows. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly between his teeth.

A third voice entered the command center well before its owner, heralded as much by the smell of coffee - a rarity on a planet with no temperate zone - as by the deep baritone words. "You should listen to Vin for once."

Thorne didn't bother to turn. Carpus, his second in command, filled the room in every sense of the word. He could imagine the massive man ducking his head under the icicles that hung from the rough hewn doorway. It was amazing that he fit in a frame at all. Thorne shook his head, "We know they're tricky; they're trackers after all." He turned back towards the table. Carpus was only wearing a tank top, even in the freezing temperatures. Thorne thumped a heavily muscled shoulder with two fingers. "How do you track a tracker - someone who knows he's being watched?"

Carpus' heavy brows drew together as he scanned the holo-table. Despite his hulking size and lantern jaw, he was wickedly smart, and an excellent strategist. "You don't." he rumbled as he ran a hand over his jaw. "A tracker plans for that."

Thorne stepped up to the table and leaned on the edge. Some of the border details dissolving into static as his hands covered some of the emitters. A feral smile played at the corners of his mouth. "We know it's a plan, and the best laid plans..."

[schoon]

Thorne shivered against the harness and blew into his hands for what seemed like the hundredth time. And waited.

This was the fifth night playing this game, the fifth night of being miserably cold, and it could very well be the fifth night of nothing at all. It was almost enough to make him want to rethink his strategy. Almost.

The Colonials wouldn't be put off by the cold. They called their mish-mash units of Commissars and Conscripts, "Yeti," and truth be told, they'd earned the moniker. They hid in the snow and ice in unheated cockpits with canteens, catheters, and sus-rats, waiting for the right time to strike. The tactics served them well, and had rocked the Unionists on their heels for six seasons, keeping them immobile in their lagers. The Yeti were feared, and they owned the wilds.

That was before Thorne and his Jaegers had arrived. Ironic that the Union was paying him again. He grinned at the thought - necessity makes strange bedfellows.

He'd started aggressive patrolling almost immediately, pushing out from the lagers, gaining the grudging respect of the scattered populace by honoring their culture and treating them with dignity. It was easy for his Jaegers to empathise; they'd been branded rebels by the Union themselves.

A tiny blinking light interrupted his thoughts, absurdly bright in the blacked-out cockpit. He froze, not daring to move lest it frighten the light away.

A minute later it still continued to strobe his instruments with light. That's when Thorne felt the first, almost imperceptible vibration. Synchronized with the blinking light, the dog tags he hung from the emergency hatch release began to quietly clink together, a wind chime in the gentlest of breezes. Still moving slowly, as if the musical zephyr could be startled away, he toggled several breakers. Screens for the main control systems and passive sensor arrays stuttered to life. He hooked his feet into the stirrups, settled one hand around a control stick, placed the other on the fail-safe release for the main breaker, and waited a full ten counts beyond what his rational mind thought reasonable.

"Show time."

The main breaker clicked firmly into position and the cockpit lit up with visuals and read backs. His frame would sand out like a sore thumb to anyone with half a sensor array. Hand back on the stick, he pushed so hard into the stirrups that only his harness kept him from hitting his head on the hatch.

Thorne's FU09 erupted from where it had laid buried in the snow in a geyser of powder and ice. His frame blade and 80mm were already locked in his manipulators, spread out before him. Framed in his sights, shaded blue by the moonlight, was the grey and white Commissar. The 80mm raised of its own accord.

Something slammed into his frame from the windswept slope. He felt his balance going, and went with it rather than fight the momentum of whatever had blindsided him. Thorne hurled the sticks forward and kicked his feet back hard into the stirrups. The FU09 executed a roll through the ice-crusted snow and came back to its feet.

A Conscript with two mauls stood in the shallow pit where Thorne had lain in hiding. It powered over the lip, already swinging one of the mauls as it came. With no time to dodge, Thorne shifted to take the strike on the FANG's pauldron. Zero-spun titanium and ceramic rumpled under the impact, but his balance held, broad feet scraping along the hard-pack snow...