She’d been daydreaming too long. The alerts in the ’Mech’s cockpit yelped at her, warning that she’d been locked on by hostile fire control. A moment later, a volley of long-range missiles leapt out toward her. Red lights flashed in the cockpit.
“I know, I know,” she said aloud, and put the Pack Hunter into a run toward the Jupiter. She cut to the right, faked left, then halted, braced, and aimed with her micro lasers. Accuracy, she thought, don’t fail me now. At the same time she keyed up the mike and broadcast on frequency 136.2, “Heya, big guy. Happy to see me?”
“Delighted,” came the response. “You know I’m a sucker for a pretty face.”
“Of course you are.” The missiles he’d fired exploded harmlessly, but close enough that the fragments spattered against her ’Mech’s exterior armor. She sprinted forward again, this time at a diagonal. The Jupiter turned to follow. Another battery of missiles sprang from the big ’Mech’s torso-mounted boxes, left and right.
Good, Bishop thought. Keep going like that and you’ll use up your long-range stuff while I’m still out here.
She backtracked. No sense being predictable. Even once the missiles were expended, he’d still be carrying two particle projector cannons to her one.
Missiles incoming. Lasers up. Shoot. Two of the missiles in the battery vaporized as the laser beams hit them. The others went wide, sending shock waves through the air around her but missing the Pack Hunter itself. Either I’m better than I ought to be at dodging those things, Bishop thought, or Jack Farrell is a really lousy shot.
The running and the laser expenditure, however, had sent her heat gauge up a bit. Nothing close yet to redline, but enough to register.
“So that’s your game,” she muttered. “Get me all hot and bothered.”
“And easy pickings,” came the answer over the radio, and she realized that she’d left the private ’Mech-to-’Mech frequency open. “Care to dance?”
Another battery of missiles inbound. She dodged and ran, using her ’Mech’s agility and speed to take her out of the way of the missiles’ ballistic trajectory.
“Don’t go too far!” came Jack’s voice. Even over the scratchy connection, she could tell that he was laughing at her.
“Not much chance of that,” she said. “I’m having a good time right here.”
She set her lasers on continuous fire, and concentrated on her shooting. Then she spotted another battery of missiles inbound and jumped, straight up, at maximum burn. The missiles exploded below her. She landed hard, going down onto one knee.
The Jupiter was continuing its forward stroll. Now its extended-range particle projector cannon started firing—and about damned time, Bishop thought; if I were riding a Jupiter I’d have been chewing up the landscape with my PPC from the moment the enemy came in sight.
The cannon’s hot particles burned a fiery path through the air from Farrell’s ’Mech toward hers. Well, she’d see about that. She ran toward him, bobbing left and right. The particle beam crossed her legs with a thud she could feel. Then she was jumping, taking herself up and over, and coming down feet first with a shouted war cry, making herself into a thirty-ton battering ram heading straight down onto the Jupiter’s head.
“Hey!” Farrell said. “That isn’t in the tactics manual for a Pack Hunter.”
“Neither is surrender,” she said. “At least not in mine.”
She was behind him now, and she set her eight microlasers to firing at a single spot. The spot that she chose was the back of the fighting machine’s left knee. She remembered her old unarmed-combat instructor explaining to the new students, “You can always reach a knee.”
Her own PPC added to the scrum. The Jupiter started to turn. She turned with it, staying behind, working to keep herself out of reach of the weapons mounted on the larger ’Mech’s arms and torso. She could keep this up forever, she thought, jumping and firing and dodging out of reach to fire and jump again, shooting at Farrell until she burned through his armor, or until the heat overloaded him so much that his ’Mech had to shut down to cool off.
She let a brief fantasy cross her mind: the Jupiter frozen, herself dismounting her own ’Mech to walk across and take possession. Hauling Jack Farrell out into the open, maybe killing him, maybe letting him go. Then getting aboard the Jupiter, picking up her Pack Hunter, and walking back to the Countess of Northwind with a fine gift.
Without warning, the Jupiter fell over backwards onto the ground. What? she thought. Gyro error? Overheated in the midst of walking and stumbled over his own feet?
Time to get fancy. She darted forward, swinging the ponderous bulk of her Pack Hunter into a thirty-ton handstand, and from there into a somersault. She ended by sitting athwart the chest of the fallen Jupiter, its arms pinned to its sides by the knees of her ’Mech.
With her knees pinning the Jupiter’s arms so that its deadly autocannon couldn’t come into play, provided she could keep him down long enough given that he had a seventy-ton weight advantage… she switched to the Highlanders’ general frequency and called, “Get me a squad with boarding tools out here pronto!”
Then she switched back to the private ’Mech-to-’Mech frequency, even as she leaned forward so that the lasers on her chest pointed directly into the viewscreens of Farrell’s cockpit.
“Surrender, Farrell?” she whispered. She flipped the lasers on, a brief pulse, a warning. His faceplate glowed crimson with the effect. Her ’Mech’s powerful gripping hands were pressing down on his shoulders. “Or I’ll make you do dreadful things.”
He kicked up with his legs, both at once, trying to buck her off. She rode him, sliding down to press the Jupiter’s hips to the pavement while still keeping his shoulders under the Pack Hunter’s hands.
“Naughty,” she said. She flipped on the lasers again—a bit longer burn this time—and gave him a brief burst from her PPC. “I can get angry.”
“I’m not worried,” Jack said. He didn’t sound worried, either.
“Then let’s cut for it.”
“Let’s.”
He rolled to the left. She was under him now, and he was pressing her down. She felt the hot blast of his extended range PPC firing, the particles boiling chips off of the concrete beside her face.
He’s playing with me, damn it, she thought. You’d think he wanted that one to miss!
“Enough,” she said. She reached up with her arms and pulled him in close, firing her cannon and all her lasers with their apertures pressed against his armor. She fired them continuously until she felt the Jupiter’s body stiffen in her grip, the big ’Mech’s inferior heat dissipation unable to keep up with the energy release.
The Jupiter relaxed its grip and fell off her to her left with the sort of ground-shaking concussion that only a hundred-ton heavy could make, and lay on its back unmoving. Bishop rolled to her right, got one of the Pack Hunter’s knees under its torso, and pushed herself up to a standing position.
“Do you surrender?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he replied. “My troops are heading here right now.”
“How many more of the Highlanders are there left to get through the lines?”
“Just yourself,” he said, “and those stalwart lads with the can openers, if they get here in time. The rest of your people ran away as if they were experts. And you’re in no condition right now to take on the whole of my mercenary force.”