“Rats. We can’t really climb up there in our mechs either. Well, he won’t get that far on foot.” Sven commented. “Even if he does, where’s he gon’na go? It’ll take him two days to hike back to civilization from way out here.”
“Hai.” Jake interjected. “What about your jump jets. Can’t you jump the embankment?”
“What? Oh yah! I forgot about that. Give me a minute.”
Hai stepped closer to the embankment and keyed his jump jets, launching his mech up and over the two story embankment. After a hard landing and steadying his mech, Hai took a look around with his Infra Red sensors. “I don’t see anything on thermals, guys. He’s bugged out. The forest is just a few hundred meters away, if he ran in there I’ll never spot him.”
“We need to head back to the base anyway. I’m starving.” Dan was thinking about food again. “Can we head back now and let the Local Guard track him down?”
Ariel chimed into the discussion, “Hey guys. I can tell the Local Guard the mech pilot is on the loose on foot. Bjorn is most of the way back to base, why don’t you guys come back in and we’ll have some lunch ready for you.”
Jake was hungry too, “Wow, I forgot all about it. I didn’t even get any breakfast. My stomach is growling at me.”
“OK, home it is!” Sven pivoted his Rifleman and started walking back towards home. The other guys started to follow suit, along with Ben who had been strangely silent during the last part of the battle. Ben was having memory flashbacks to long forgotten days in the field as a military pilot. Hai was not far behind, staying with the two Demolisher tanks.
Jake breathed a deep sigh as the mechs made their way back across the grassy plain, he knew a lot of men had died today. Bad men, but men just the same. Jake plodded along following Bjorn and Sven as they headed back towards the ridge bypassing the ranch. Victory felt good, but it didn’t feel quite like he thought it would, but then the day wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 21 “Mopping Up” –––––––––––––––––––
There was a lot of smoke and debris surrounding the dropship which Jake could see if he zoomed in as they jogged their mechs north back towards the base. His lance was about two kilometers to the west as they passed the ranch. Sven wanted to keep contact with the Local Guard to a minimum, the Local Guard Commander didn’t need to know the Styx Strikers were just a bunch of teenagers. Jake could see the Local Guard troops were approaching the dropship from the west. The troops were spread out and were flushing the pirates in towards the dropship using a collection of heavily armed troops and armored vehicles from Port Canaveral. The aerospace fighters were hovering around the far side keeping the pirates from bolting off into the countryside, but a few individuals were trying to escape despite their best efforts. The heaviest armed pirates had set up a perimeter defense out in front of the dropship, using a few of the damaged vehicles as cover. Their heavy guns weren’t of much use against the armored vehicles, though.
Ariel called up the guys on the radio link, “Hey Sven. The Local Guard Commander wants to talk to you guys. Do you want me to patch him in?”
“Uhhhh. Maybe Ben had better talk to him instead. My voice will give us away.”
“I can take care of it Sven.” Ben said. “You guys stay on comm channel 1 and feed me information if I need it. What frequency is he on, Ariel?”
“Uhmmmm, he’s on 754.7 megahertz, but I can patch him in on comm channel 3. Select channel 3 on your radio.”
“Guard Commander, this is the Styx Strikers Lance Leader, Commander Jones. Go ahead.”
“This is Colonel Rakes, commander of the Local Guard task force from Port Canaveral. Nice to see you men out and about this fine morning.”
“Yes sir, it certainly is, sir.
“Central Command sent us a special comm package via satellite a few hours ago and said they had your team tasked to interdict a pirate raid going on right in our backyard. I didn’t know you guys even existed until two hours ago. Where the blazes did you come from anyway?”
“That’s classified Colonel.”
“I thought as much. It sure is nice to know you were available this morning. We don’t have anything big enough stationed here to take on four pirate mechs. We do have a couple of smaller four legged assault pieces with us, though. We were trying to get a few mechs transferred here after the last raid, but the red tape has us all tied up in knots. Nobody wants to let any mechs go from their own areas. I guess somebody else took care of that issue for us.”
“Yes sir. We’re glad to be of service. Is there anything else we can do for you Colonel? We’re heading back to base now, we kind of missed breakfast earlier this morning.”
“No, we’ve got this. We can take it from here. You run along and get something to eat, you’ve earned it. Your team has already done us a huge service this morning. I’m assuming you were successful in running down that last mech?”
“Yes sir, we were. The mech pilot got away, though. You might send out a notice to all of the settlers in the area to watch out for him. He’s bound to show up in the next few days. He’s probably armed.”
“I’ll do that. We may have a few other pirates who have slipped away from the dropship as well. Once we interrogate some of the pirates I’m expecting to find out where their base is. If we need mech support, can we count on your lance to give us a hand?”
Picture Pack: Ground Support Troops
“I think that can be arranged, sir. I’ll have to clear it with Central Command.”
“Good, that’s all I needed to hear. Well, I need to get back to business, Commander. We’ll talk again later.”
“Salvage rights” Sven added in over the private comm channel. “We need the salvage to pay for repairs to our mechs.”
“One more thing, Colonel” Ben added. “We want the salvage rights to the pirate mechs and the dropship. We need to repair our mechs and the salvage will go a long way to covering the bill.”
“Roger. You’ve earned it, Commander. The salvage rights are yours. Over and out.”
Sven’s team speeded back up to a light jog now that they were done talking to the Local Guard Commander, they were approaching the southern end of the black rock ridge and were about to start transiting up the sandy strip again. The footing was a bit unsure on sections of the sand and the guys had to concentrate more on their piloting.
After a few minutes of jogging along in the warm morning sunshine, Jake’s thoughts turned back to what Sven had suggested. “Salvage?” Jake asked. “You mean like in the Mechwarrior tm sim we play at home?”
“Exactly” Sven answered back. “Bjorn and I got pretty shot up today, and you and Ben aren’t much better off. How else are we going to get spare parts?”
“That’s brilliant, Sven. How do you propose we pull it off, though?”
“Well… Dan, doesn’t your Dad’s massive exploration truck still run?”
“Giagantor? Most of it. And parts of it I don’t know. We need to fire up the hydraulic plant and check to see what needs fixing. It hasn’t been moved in almost a year, the only part we have up right now is the fusion reactor.”
“That sounds like a job for the Styx Strikers to me.” Sven interjected enthusiastically. He was getting excited about taking on a new project, especially if it meant they’d get to play with some big machinery. “We can use the mechs to load stuff into the big truck, and use it to move the stuff back to where we can work on it. We need to make some grippers for the mechs, though. Jake, you need to dig around in the databases for the fabricators. See if you can find us a design for a mech gripper in there.”
“Hey, that sounds cool. I can handle that.” Jake was getting interested now too, he’d get to make something useful on the fabricators, something more interesting than a simple gun mount.
“Guys,” Ben interrupted. “You’re going to need a lot of help if we’re going to salvage the pirate mechs, and it’s going to take a pretty large crew to
take apart that dropship.”
“Yah, we know.” Sven replied casually. “We’ll figure it out. My Dad will help us and so will Dan’s. We can handle it.”
“And if I know your Dad, he’ll enlist me right from the start. Thanks a lot guys.” Ben said sarcastically. “Just what I needed, more work to do.”
The guys all laughed at that comment. Jake turned his attention to the horizon, which was lit up by the sunrise with a golden glow. Off in the distance to the west he could just see where the desert sands began, the edge of the Al Barasque Desert. It appeared as a strip of golden color, shimmering in the brightness of the rising sun, beaconing like a siren of old. Thinking to himself, Across that desert lies the nearest map point where the next mech base is located. I wonder what we’ll find there? he pondered. He hoped Giagantor would be easy to fix, because he had another expedition in mind for it… Now, if we can just talk Dan’s father into letting us take it, we’ll be off exploring in no time!
The guys had the mechs re-stowed back into their repair bays and had gathered in the mess hall for lunch in the base. Ariel and Bjorn had some hot sandwiches ready, along with some chips, pickles, potato salad, and a variety of drinks on ice. Everyone was hot and tired, and really hungry after spending all morning out on the battlefield. The mechs had some kind of restorative fluid system where they could supply the warrior inside with something to drink, but none of the guys had spent the time to figure out where the juice went in. Jake was chugging down a liter of fluid trying to re-hydrate, he was so thirsty.
“Man, that tastes good!” he exclaimed between gulps.
“Wow, did you see how Bjorn nailed that Vulture? All the coolant came blasting out the side right before he went super nova! That was so intense!”
Ariel was all smiles. She was quiet and grateful everyone had came back in one piece, especially Bjorn. She was virtually wrapped around his right side interfering with his main eating hand. He wasn’t complaining though, it was nice having such a devoted girl friend. It didn’t hurt that she was drop dead gorgeous to boot.
Jake turned and asked Ariel, “So what happened to Tarra? I thought she’d be here by now.”
“Oh, I finally got through to her. The zipPhones finally came back on a half hour ago. Her house was blacked out by the pirate jammers just like the rest of Port Canaveral. The city finally killed the jammers and got their backup transmitter working, so you can call her now if you’d like to. I told her we were all fine and that I’d drop by her house later, after we get back. We didn’t pick her up last night, so she had no way to get out here. She didn’t even know anything was wrong until after breakfast.”
“Wow, she missed all the action! I would have driven a dirt bike all the way out here by myself, if that’s all I had. No way would I have missed out on all of this. No freakin’ way.” Jake said adamantly.
“Not if you were still asleep, silly.” Ariel smiled at Jake and let go of Bjorn long enough to let him get a drink using his right hand. “I was really worried about you guys.” she said softly.
Ben Jone’s phone went off a minute later. Without looking at the screen to see who it was he answered “Hello, this is Ben.”
“Ben, this is Helmut. Where are you guys? We thought you’d be back at the ranch a long time ago.”
“Oh dang! I forgot. Sorry about that, boss. We were a little busy out here. Uhmmm, we’re having lunch at the military base right now. We’ll be on our way back in a half an hour. We’ll see you in an hour back at the ranch, then we’ll fill you in on everything that happened this morning. It’s been a little crazy around here. You’re not going to believe what happened.”
Bjorn and Sven had both stood up and were waving ‘NO’ at Ben as emphatically as possible. “No, don’t say anything!” Bjorn mouthed at him.
Ben scowled at Bjorn and finished his phone call. “Alright boss, we’ll talk in a bit.” and hung up.
“You guys know we can’t hide this from your father.”
“Yes we can!” Sven pleaded. “If we tell him, the jigs up. We won’t get to drive the mechs any more and they’ll take the base away from us!”
“The jig’s already up. You know the military knows roughly where this base is located. They tracked us all the way back in here. It won’t take them long to figure out your unit doesn’t really exist. Then they’ll be on their way out here to investigate.”
“Yah, but…”
“No buts. The correct way to handle this is to tell your Dad everything. That way he can defend his claim to the base since it’s on his land. This ground is a part of the ranch, deeded to your father when he became a founding settler. By laying claim he can keep the military from occupying it and taking the assets away. Possession is nine tenths of the law. We may need to get a few ranch hands out here to occupy the base full time for awhile to make sure no one else tries to move in.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that sounds OK.” Sven sounded glum, but hopeful. “We do need to get the mechs repaired, and we’re going to need a lot more help.”
“That’s right. Now you’re thinking straight. I’ll fly back to the ranch and pick up your dad, maybe your mom, and bring them out here so we can show them the base and talk to him about what to do next. Then he can decide how to handle informing the Local Guard Commander who you guys really are. Your dad needs to do that before they figure it out on their own and decide to take the mechs away from you.”
“Hmmm. I never thought of that.”
“Can you fly me back home on your way?” Ariel asked. “I need to check in with my parents and tell them what’s happened. I called my mom and she’s really worried. I kind of flew off in the middle of the night last night without any explanation.”
“Sure, I can drop you off. Anyone else?”
The rest of the guys were busy eating and didn’t have too much to say on the topic. They were just hoping it wasn’t all over, now that the cat was getting out of the bag where the mechs were concerned. Dan, Zane and Hai shook their heads ‘no’. They weren’t in any hurry to get back home, not after all of the excitement of taking out the pirates. They wanted to stay as long as possible and bask in the glory of victory for awhile.
“I recorded most of the battle in the Command Center if you guys want to go watch it again on the monitors…” Ariel cooed in Bjorn’s ear as she got up to leave with Ben.
“Whoh, you did what?” Bjorn queried with a surprised look on his face. “Come on guys! We’ve got a battle to watch!”
The guys had a great time in the Command Center, watching the battle from every angle possible. Some of the shots were really impressive on the big screen in the Command Center. Hai even managed to locate the moment when the pirate crawled out the side of the Loki and scrambled up the embankment and got away. Now they had a photo to send to the Local Guard Commander to add to his escapee message, an all points bulletin on the escaping pirates. The pirate looked big, mean, tattooed, and sunburned in the photo. It didn’t look like he had more than a small belt pack of supplies and what looked like a small sidearm on him as he scrambled up and over the hill in the video.
About an hour later Ben radioed in from the tunnel entrance, he had both Helmut and Glory Langer with him, and Ariel’s father Jacque Touchard as well. Jake and the guys paused the video playback and headed down towards the mech bay to meet their guests. Just as Jake reached the bottom steps of the stairwell Ben drove in through the open hanger door in one of the sand rails and came to an abrupt stop near the base of the stairs.
Mr. Langer hopped out and strode over to Bjorn and Sven with a big grin on his face and grabbed the two of them in a big bear hug. “Hey guys! I hear you’ve been busy this morning! Wow, would you look at those machines!” Helmut turned and glanced around the bay at the massive battle mechs. “Alright, Bjorn. Which one is yours?”
Bjorn pointed to the end of the bay at the largest mech, the MadCat Mk II. “That one’s mine.”
‘Holy cow! Look at the size
of that thing. It’s over three stories tall! You drove that thing into battle? I’m impressed. Sven, which one was yours?”
“That one over there, the Rifleman.”
“&^%$&^%$! No wonder you guys weren’t very excited when we put the guns on the farm mech. Look at the size of the guns on that thing! Those suckers are ten times the size of the pop guns on the mech back at the ranch.”
Aunt Glory held back a bit, she wasn’t as thrilled with the news as her husband was. She gave Sven a hug and scolded him, “Young man, you’re not supposed to keep secrets like this from your parents. I about had a heart attack when I heard you boys were out fighting the pirates in these, these… huge monstrosities!” She looked up at the mechs and was appalled at all of the damage she saw on the huge war machines. The mechs the guys had used had large sections of slagged armor, scorch marks, pits and blackened areas where weapons fire had struck the mechs, and she could see where a number of the weapons themselves had taken heavy damage. Even the air in the mech bay smelled of scorched metal and burnt cordite from the guns.
“I’ve watched you boys play on that simulator downstairs at home. I had no idea it would lead to this. Jake, which mech is yours?” Uncle Helmut asked.
“I drive the Vulture over there.” Jake said, pointing proudly up at the massive missile mech. “I lost half of my weapons in the battle with the biggest pirate mech, the Loki.” Jake added. “But we stuck together and took ‘em out one by one. Bjorn is our Lance Leader.”
Uncle Helmut grinned and winked at Jake. “I’ll bet you guys make a great team in the field. I wish I could have seen you guys in action.”
“You can!” Sven belted out. “We have it all on video, Ariel recorded the whole thing! Come on up to our Command Center and we’ll show you!” Sven grabbed his dad’s arm and started dragging him towards the stairs.
The Styx Strikers Page 26