"Jerome, take point, but don't step out too far this time. We don't have the speed to come to your rescue today." John said as the Leopard took off, leaving their nce at the second drop location. James's command nce took the main route into the area where the pirates and suspected Star League cache were expected to be.

  "You got it, Boss," Jerome replied, and started up the mountain pass.

  The Dispensables were given a more treacherous route, but with all their mechs being jump capable, they had a better chance of navigating it successfully than the heavier, non-jump capable command nce. In theory, they would be moving mostly above the command nce's route and could provide them with some long-range fire support.

  The meeting the day before ended shortly after the two FedCom agents paid the governor for their services. The pair of them beat a hasty retreat with their tails between their legs, their pride having taken a beating after being outed by John. The governor thanked him profusely for his aid, agreeing with James that he would definitely be a good repcement for him as the CO of the Bckstone Guards.

  James and John returned to the Guards facility afterwards and built a pn of attack on the mountain range. James had also contacted the VTOL contractors on the pnet to find out who had been contacted by the agents, and the man who had turned them down gave them the coordinates to where he had been lit up. Extrapoting from that information, they decided that the pirates were hiding somewhere in these two passes.

  One of the dropships would remain loitering far above the mountain range, providing the Guards with some eyes in the sky. They didn't actually have any other aerospace assets in the guards, and John wasn't ready to reveal the Pelican. He was honestly afraid of losing that asset to the powerful weaponry this world had.

  They had a short meeting with Lucy afterwards, and as John expected, he didn't recognise her as the pirate John had 'killed' and disposed of yesterday. He just welcomed her to the unit and expressed condolences at her situation, warning her not to lose her head when they assaulted the pirates' base. He would normally not have let her join their operation because of her personal proximity to the situation, but since John was vouching for her, he would allow it. He gave John another pointed look, then dismissed them to go get some rest.

  Which led them to an evening of sitting on his patio, chatting for a while about their pasts, before going to bed. She was aghast that he insisted on her taking the bed for herself again while he slept in his recliner, even offering to share the bed or sleep on the chair herself, but he refused. He was happy enough to sleep in the chair.

  Now, they were marching along a fairly narrow mountain pass, searching for signs of the pirates. With Jerome ranging out about a half a mile ahead, Dar about a quarter of a mile behind him, leaving Lucy walking her mech just ahead of his garbage can, which was running at a full sprint of 18 mph. His one consotion was that the mechs' gait was less jarring than Suzy Qs and wouldn't overheat from repeated autocannon and small ser fire.

  "The mineral deposits in this rock are as bad as that canyon was. I am going to have difficulty getting target locks on anything." Dar said across the comms.

  "Do the best you can." He replied, looking at the wall of the cliff they were walking alongside. It looked like this part of the pass was cut out of the side of the mountain a long time ago; the road they were walking on was retively ft and met at a near perfect 90-degree angle at the wall. The cliff on the other side was a sheer drop of about a hundred feet, covered with rubble from ancient rockfalls. He could get the Urbie safely down there if he needed to, but it didn't have the jump power to come back up that high.

  That valley turned into a river running through the mountain range, the cliffs on the far side reaching nearly a thousand feet into the sky. They were exposed up here, but so far, there was nowhere for any enemies to hide.

  They continued deeper into the mountains for several miles, the path winding alongside the cliff face. They had to use their jump jets a few times to pass some more recent rockslides, but otherwise everything was quiet until his radio lit up with a communication from the circling dropship.

  "Go for Bravo 1." He said, using his callsign. Some mechwarriors used callsigns after animal names or other weird things, but the Guards just kept it simple. Which was surprising with people like Freddy around.

  "Bravo 1, Alpha Lance has come under fire. We can't bring them up on comms, but can see weapons fire from up here. Sending you their coordinates."

  "Roger, Bravo 1 out." He replied, then smmed the throttle forward... which it already was.

  God, I hate this mech.

  "Jerome, Dar, move up to point Charlie and see if you can get eyes on the command nce; they are under fire. Provide them with some fire support. We will catch up when we can." He said on his Lances channel.

  "Will do, hon. Jerome says there are a few caves up ahead. He can't see anything in them, but that could be the sensors still pying havoc with his targeting. He was waiting for you two to catch up before exploring them."

  "I'll stick my head in. Be careful, we will probably lose comms once you get much farther away. This whole area almost seems like it was meant to befuddle electronics."

  They continued on, quickly losing sensor contact with both the other light mechs as they sped towards the command nce's position. The Urbie, designed for close combat in a city, had the worst sensor suite of all the mechs in the Guards unit. However, the Bck Jack had probably the best one, and Lucy came over the comms ten minutes ter, reporting she was getting contacts from further down this path.

  "Speed up a bit and check it out. I will be right behind you." John ordered, which she confirmed. He watched as the slow as mosses Bck Jack started to increase the gap between them, disappearing around a bend in the path.

  Another thirty seconds or so ter, she came across the comms again, the sounds of her 25mm autocannons barking in the background. "Contact. Two light mechs, a Panther and a Jenner. Engaging."

  "Coming up behind you. ETA thirty seconds." He said, leaning forward as if he could will this mech to move faster. There were a lot of variants of both of those mechs, but the Jenner was almost always a short to mid-range harasser, while the Panther would sit at long ranges and pelt mechs with its PPC. The Bck Jack could handle a Panther easily enough; the lighter mechs' thinner armour would probably fail before the Bck Jacks, but if the Jenner got inside the Bck Jack's optimal range, it would be over for the medium mech. The only saving grace would be the ck of area here for either of the lighter mechs to manoeuvre.

  However, point-bnk range was the UrbanMechs happy pce. Even a powerhouse like a Jenner wouldn't be able to do a lot of damage to him before he put a hole straight through the mech.

  Coaxing his mech to move faster, he rounded the bend and had to sm the throttle back, narrowly avoiding the Jenner as it nded after jumping over the Bck Jack. It was facing away from him, taking aim at the Bck Jack's thinner rear armour.

  "Well, that was unexpected." He said, thumbing the trigger. His Autocannon exploded in fire as a burst of ten High Explosive Armour Piercing (HEAP) rounds shot out of the barrel, smming directly into the rear centre torso of the Jenner. The rounds tore deep into the lightly armoured mech, one cracking the reactor housing and causing the mech to burst into fmes. The mech's head detached as the automatic systems ejected the pilot, sending the pirate flying somewhere into the ravine below.

  Damn, talk about serving itself up on a silver ptter. Guess their sensors couldn't see me either.

  "Jenner down," He called across the radio, stepping around the fallen Jenner. The whole mech was bzing now, the ruptured reactor spewing nuclear fire throughout its internals. "Move up! It's gonna cook off its ammo."

  "Roger!" She replied, still walking fire up and down the Panther. The pair of them were trading fire at nearly six hundred yards, the Panther hiding in the entrance of the cave Dar mentioned. The 25mm cannons kept chipping away at both the mech and its cover, while the return fire collided with the chest of the slow moving Bck Jack, sgging some of its torso armour.

  They had moved a couple of hundred feet when an explosion happened behind them, the SRM ammo in the Jenner cooking off in its magazine as John had predicted. The vibrations shook John enough that his mech nearly stumbled, but he managed to keep himself upright. An earthshaking groan followed as part of the cliff face colpsed, burying the path in hundreds of tons of rock and nearly reaching his mech.

  "Keep moving," He said, trying to line up a shot on the Panther. It was too far away to get a target lock with all the interference his sensors were getting, but he could manually aim it. He stepped to the side of Lucy, closer to the edge of the pass, and stopped. He ignored the PPC fire that the Panther was still worrying her with, and with some small adjustments, he took his shot. The HEAP rounds nded, smming into the corner of the wall it was hiding behind, destroying that part of the cover and continuing into the mech's torso. Its armour managed to block most of the damage, but its torso was now riddled with holes from the salvo.

  Lucy took advantage of the situation, adding her own cannon fire along with shots from her two medium sers. Most of her shots smmed into its right side, melting the remaining armour and nearly severing the right arm with the PPC from the mech. The limb hung loosely, the weapon system now unpowered. The SRM missile system it had was not in range from where it was hiding. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, the pirate disappeared into the cave.

  John held his aim on that spot as his autocannon reloaded, just in case it popped its head out again, but it seemed that the Panther pilot had given up for the day. "You good?" He asked Lucy, unable to see her mech's status on the UrbanMech primitive screens or even the front of her mech from his position.

  Everything else sucks about the Urbie, but it has it where it counts.

  "Well, nothing broke through, but I don't have much armour left. I swear, whoever is piloting that Panther managed to hit every single spot on the front of my mech." She replied, giving him a sitrep. "Do we follow him?"

  "One sec, let's see if I can get the dropship on comms again." He said, not wanting to disappear into that cave without knowing how the rest of his nce was doing first.

  "Overwatch, Bravo 1. Can you read me?" He said on a different channel.

  "Go for Overwatch."

  John filled them in on their battle and got an update on the command nces now finished battle with a bunch of turrets. He told them his intention to go underground and passed them orders for Dar and Jerome, then closed the channel. "Let's go, they will rey the orders to the rest of the nce to join with the command nce. They have the jump range to be able to do that."

  They made their way over to the cave. Under closer inspection, the opening looked more like worked stone than a natural formation, the ceilings easily high enough to clear the Bck Jack's head. John moved to the front; the untouched Urbie was clearly the better choice for any close-quarters combat they might encounter in a cave.

  He hadn't taken more than a dozen steps inside before he needed to switch his IR cameras on, the sunlight not reaching very far into the ominously dark cavern. Under the green glow of the monitor in front of him, traces of red and yellow could be seen from where the Panther had retreated, giving him a path to follow. The pair of them marched forward, the darkness swallowing any trace of the two lumbering war machines.