Dead Man's Hand: Audentes Fortuna Juvat

=Dead Man's Hand: Audentes Fortuna Juvat - By JA Baker=
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Bracken Mountains
Kiamba
Clan Smoke Jaguar Occupation Zone
8 May 3059
"******! ******! ******! ******! ******!" Joker chanted, almost like a mantra, as her Loki erupted from the treeline, followed closely by almost an entire star of Smoke Jaguar Elementals, bouncing and jumping like their common nickname amongst Inner Sphere MechWarriors, Toads.
"OPEN MIKE, BOSS!" Scilicorn warned as he fired a long burst from his autocannon, catching two of the battle suits and blowing holes right through them.
"Continue to pull back in pairs." Joker ordered as she skidded to a halt, her OmniMech's feet digging deep gouges in the soft soil as she turned to face her pursuers, "Don't let them get too close!"
On paper, it had been something big was being planned. The DCMS wanted someone to slip behind the lines and make contact with a number of stay-behind cells set up by the Internal Security Force during the original Clan invasion. Their job was to extract a number of high value individuals for debriefing before...well, they hadn't gone into details...operational security still being a thing. What had been clear was that they'd needed a small, highly mobile team, able to think on their feet and adapt to changes on the ground... and nobody in the DCMS had been available for the job.
Times may have changed, but there was still an unmistakable distrust for mercenaries in the Combine, bordering on outright hatred in some cases. The idea that they needed to bring in an independent unit to carry out such a mission had rubbed more than a few feathers, and it had been made clear that they were not welcome. The only reason they'd taken the job was because, after more than a year on Kowloon, they'd been desperately short on funds, and the DCMS had sweetened the pot by including an official pardon for Aung, allowing him to return to his homeland without the fear of being arrested and executed for his past actions.
Between the payday and the pardon, it was too good an opportunity for them to pass up on.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, the mission came with a few... stipulations. They were going in effectively blind, an understandable security measure, but it did mean that they had very little to go on during the planning phase. Kiamba had been Jaguar territory for almost seven years, and they had proven, time and again, just how much they were capable of in less time. As such, it was imperative that the stay-behind agents, and the intelligence they had gathered, were returned safely before whatever was in the offing could take place. Unfortunately, again in the name of operational security, they'd not been given any name or faces, but simply code-phrases and radio frequencies.
Despite his promised pardon, it had been Aung who had voiced the most concern over the mission. His time in the Legion of Vega had left him with a strong distrust of senior officers. Especially those who were reluctant to change their ways, but rather prone to trying to bend the facts to fit their preconceptions. Just because they needed to hire mercenaries for the mission, didn't mean that they had to like it, and wouldn't be above a little... creative interpretation of orders in the name of honor. If there was a way to get the mission done and kill some dishonorable mercenaries in the process...
Needless to say, the entire unit was on high alert, fully aware that it wouldn't be completely out of character for the DCMS to use mercenaries as unknowing decoys while the real Warriors of the Dragon struck elsewhere.
The mission had gone according to plan at first, and a number of ISF agents had responded to their transmissions, although others were apparently either dead or unable to make contact. Over a number of nights, and across a not inconsiderable area, the agents had met up with the mercenaries, and had been escorted back to the Ante Up to await the return trip to friendly territory. Each had been carefully vented and searched beforehand, it went without saying, and one apparent turncoat had been granted a quick and painless death. None of the mercenaries liked killing someone who wasn't in a position to defend themselves, but they weren't stupid. Anyway, it was a better end than they would have gotten if ISF had gotten their hands on them.
Not that that was much comfort with a dozennightmare fuel drinking, eugenics bread super-soldiers bearing down on them.
Leveling her cross-hairs, Joker unleashed her twin PPC's in a staggered one-two attack, following it up with a brace of SRM's to sow extra confusion. One Elemental took a particle beam to the leg, vaporizing most of the limb, but they continued to drag themselves forward. The second beam missed wide and struck a tree, causing the sap and water inside to flash boil explosively. Not that any of the Jaguars seemed to notice as chunks of wood the size of their arms scythed through the air. Two fired their own SRM's back in return, the Loki's AMS system stating them out of the sky even as Joker returned fire with her machine-guns and flamers.
Things were most definitely not going according to plan.
It had all started when they'd made contact with an ROM agent named Aloysius Dillon, supposedly, who had informed them that the Jaguars had been constructing a forwards operation base on Kiamba, hidden in an abandoned copper mine beneath a lake in the Bracken Mountains. If allowed to become fully operational, it would be an almost impossible nut to crack. Fortunately, it was still under construction, and by necessity, the Clanners had been recruiting local laborers to carry out the grunt work, while their own people took care of anything... interesting. While Dillon hadn't been able to gain access to to the restricted sections, he had managed to swipe a set of plans.
The base was certainly impressive: the mine had been abandoned when they'd accidentally hit a magma stream linked to a nearby dormant volcano, but the Jaguar had taken that lemon and made combustible lemons, by turning it I to a geothermal power station that provided the entire complex with a clean, undetectable power supply. The most obvious option was to sabotage the power station somehow, but there was no way of getting close enough without being challenged, and they didn't like their odds at being able to shoot their way in and out again.
SRM's exploded around the Elementals again, only this time, they coated several of them with a viscous, burning liquid. Any person... any sensible, sane person, would have stopped immediately and tried to put the flames out, but the Jaguars didn't even seem to notice, even as one of their numb fell, as the flames found a crack in their armor caused by previous battle damage and cooked them alive inside their armor. Others died when a hail of cluster ammunition, created to sandblast armor off of BattleMechs, hit them like a blast from Satan's own shotgun. Marble sized pellets of depleted uranium smashed into the Elementals at supersonic speeds, shattering their armor before ripping and tearing the flesh underneath and Scilicorn jumped his Wolverine II backwards.
And still the bastards came.
Slamming her hand down on the emergency override, Joker felt a fresh burst of superheated air hit her with near physical force as she fired her ER-PPC's again and again. No one was supposed to be that hard to kill, but the Jaguars were. They had no apparent fear of death, and were driven by an overwhelming desire to pull the bloody and broken mercenaries out of their BattleMechs as trophies. Dead Man's Hand had faced Wolves, Falcons and Ghost Bears, but none had possessed the homicidal ferocity of the Jaguars. Joker wasn't even sure that they were human, given their seemingly single minded desire to kill, even if they had to push aside and step over the broken, twisted and burnt remains of their comrades to do so.
Joker disliked the Clans on general principle, even after learning the truth of her own lineage, but she was growing to actively despise Clan Smoke Jaguar, especially after seeing what they had done to a number of civilian settlement in the name of 'teaching them to respect their betters'. Maybe it was the fact that she'd grown up in an orphanage, but Joker had never liked bullies, and that's exactly what the Jaguars were, in her opinion: bullies. The nuns back at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart had tried to convince her that the only way to deal with a bully was to understand them, and offer forgiveness. Joker had quickly come to the realization that they were full of shit, and that the best way to deal with a bully, in her mind, was to knock their teeth in.
Hence The Plan, or at least the beginning of it: find some way to destroy or at least disable the hidden base, while also making it clear that the locals had absolutely nothing to do with it. This was, unfortunately, far easier said than done, so they had fallen back on the old standby of finding something fragile, packing it with as much high explosives as physically possible, and then blowing it to hell. It was a crude plan, but it remained popular due to the fact that it worked more often than not. Dillion had already located a possible weak spot, a section of tunnel just below the bottom of the lake, but getting to it would require infiltrating one of the more secure parts of the base.
Fortunately, Joker had already been working on plans for getting into Clan facilities, should the need ever arise, and quickly adapted one to their needs.
Using access codes Dillion had also acquired, Joker and Aung had simply walked into the front door, the latter dressed in the duty uniform of a solahma Elemental, while Joker was dressed in the same kind of dull coveralls used by members of the technical and labor casts, complete with a fake, two-stranded Bondcord around her right wrist. A little carefully applied makeup around one eye and a slight limp, and she looked just like the countless other unfortunate individuals they had seen suffering under the yoke of Clan Smoke Jaguar. Convincing Aung to play the part of a typical, freshly arrived Jaguar had been the hard part: while her certainly had the build for it, he lacked the more psychotic tendencies of a Smoke Jaguar warrior, so there was always the risk of him giving himself away by not acting like the biggest dick in the Inner Sphere.
Fortune, it is often said, favors the bold, and the Jaguars seemed completely oblivious to the concept that anyone would try and infiltrate their super-secret hidden base, especially not dressed as an Elemental. Or maybe they just didn't realize that people that big existed naturally in the Inner Sphere. For whatever reason, once through the security checkpoint, nobody questioned why an Elemental was leading a Bondswoman technician carrying a toolbox through the base. Joker couldn't help but feel sorry for the next poor sod who tried to pull a similar trick, as people tended to investigate massive breaches in security, and plug what holes they found. As such, they would have exactly one chance to get it right, before the Jaguars wised up.
After what seemed like forever, they found the hallway they were looking for. Nobody was about, but the ever present security cameras were an issue, so they had to fall back on a contingency plan: Aung grabbed Joker's wrist, pulling her against his body in a way that would have been considered indecent pretty much anywhere. Then, with an evil grin, he pushed her into a nearby storage room and slammed the door behind them.
Bullets flattened against her cockpit window, and Joker fired back with her medium lasers, staggering an Elemental before sending another flight of SRM's their way, Bitchin' Betty announcing that she was down to only five roads. Fortunately, between the lasers and the four missiles that struck, the Jaguar warrior went down hard, and made no obvious motions indicating that they intended to get back up again, ever. Unfortunately, while she was dealing with that one Elemental, two more managed to catch up with her and started climbing up her legs. Even detonating her anti-personnel pods did little to dissuade them, and lacking lower arms or hands, there was little her Loki could do to dislodge them.
"Hold very still!" Scilicorn advised, and a trio of ER Medium Lasers washed over one of the Jaguar warriors. The deadly beams of light peeled back the armor over its SRM pack, and detonated the reload inside. The explosion rocked the OmniMech, and throwing their companion to the ground, where Joker promptly stepped on them, even as her secondary screen warned of an armor breach over her right hip.
"Pull back." Scilicorn added, firing everything his Wolverine II had, relying on the Clan built double heatsinks to keep him safe from a potentially deadly internal ammunition explosion.
While security in the hallway had been tight, inside the store room was free of any prying eyes. Joker quickly removed the tools from the case she'd been carrying, and removed the false bottom to reveal the shaped charges hidden beneath.
"Well, that was uncomfortable." Aung lamented, even as she started to place the demolition charges on the ceiling.
''
"You really are just a great big Teddy Bear, aren't you?" Joker chuckled, "Only man I've ever met who almost pissed himself while pretending to play grab-ass."
"If my mother ever found I that I'd treated a lady like that, damn the circumstances..." her companion shuddered visibly at the notion.
"You're a mercenary: You are, on occasion, required to kill people for a living." Joker pointed out as she ripped open the front of her stolen uniform to make it look like she'd been forcibly stripped, "What she'd have to say about that?"
"That she'd understand." Aung shrugged, seemingly as confused by the contradiction as anyone, "But that still ain't no excuse to mistreat a lady."
"The Jaguars have been doing a damn sight worse than that." Joker reminded him as she set the timers, "I like to think that Mrs Aung would approve of our little...retribution."
Aung just grunted as he turned towards the door, but Joker grabbed him by the arm.
"Not so fast! You're supposed to be reminding me of my place within Clan Society, remember?" she pointed out, "Wouldn't want them to think you were on a hair trigger, now would we?"
"Now you're just messing with me." Aung sighed, "Ten minutes?"
''
"Should be enough of a show for any prying eyes." Joker nodded, "It still give us time to get top-side before the fireworks."
Apparently, even Smoke Jaguars have their limits, as the remaining Elementals broke off their attack, a few stopping to asses the injured. Joker and Scilicorn let them go in peace: they were soldiers, not murderers, after all. A ten minute forced march through the forest got them to the rally point where Aung and Kelso were waiting, their BattleMechs showing signs of their own encounter with the Clan forces. Once they were sure that they weren't being tracked, they headed along the edge of the valley, Joker keeping a close eye on the timer slowly ticking down on one of her secondary screens.
Getting out of the base had been harder than getting in: some lower level technician had tripped a sensor by accident, and the entire base was on high alert. This was especially worrying, as the security passes Dillion had provided were unlikely to pass anything but the most cursory of checks, given how little time they'd had to prepare them. As such it had been necessary to cause a... distraction, involving two fire extinguishers, an office chair, a length of cable pulled from the back of an unattended computer and a couple of spare detonators. Securing the two CO2 canisters to the chair with the cable, Joker had attached the detonator to the necks and gently pushed it out into the hallway adjacent to the checkpoint.
The pop of the detonators exploding seconds late was lost amid the whooshing sound of escaping gas as the chair spun around and around and around at high speed, filling the air with a thick cloud of white smoke. Tempers, already frayed, reached breaking point, and several gunshots rung out as Jaguar security troops fired seemingly at random. Between the smoke, the weapons fire and conflicting orders being yelled, it was easy enough to slip out through the smoke amid the crowd of startled techs and service staff. Unfortunately, by the time they reached the surface, some semblance of control had been asserted, and someone had yelled at them to stop as they attempted to walk away.
They had, understandably, refused, and then more shots rung out, and they'd started running, headed for the small clearing where the others had been waiting with their BattleMechs, even as the alarms had sounded.
Now free of pursuit, at least for the time being, Dead Man's Hand made their way up the side of a hill to where they had a good view of the mountain underneath which the Jaguars had built their base.
"Seven...six...five...four..." Joker counted down the last few seconds on the timer, "...three...two...one...zero."
Nothing happened.
"Zero plus one, zero plus two, zero plus three." she continued.
"Maybe they found the bombs?" Kelso mused.
It started below the lake: the water seemed to bulge up suddenly, before exploding upwards in a massive column of steam, smoke and debris. It rose over a kilometer straight up, the atmosphere so churned up that massive lightning bolts filled the air, some striking the ground and starting fires. These were soon extinguished when the displaced water started to full back to earth in a deluge. But by then the water in lake had began to funnel into the gaping hole left behind, swirling around like someone had pulled the plug on a drain. A number of hovercraft belonging to the garrison force found themselves swept up an unable to escape, before eventually being dragged down into the maelstrom and destroyed. But it didn't end there, as steam and smoke erupted from a number of hidden vents and fissures in the nearby mountain, only to be quickly replaced by jets of water, as the former contents of the lake followed the path of least resistance. Propelled forward by the pressure of the water still draining from the lake, it burst through the tunnels and chambers of the hidden base, smashing all in its path before returning to the light of day. Massive chunks of the mountain broke free around the jets, tumbling down in a number of massive rock slides that quickly buried the hidden entrance to the complex. Massive trees, uprooted by the rock slide, tumbled and fell like twigs discarded by an unruly child.
Evidently, the water reached the geothermal reactor, as there was low rumble, and suddenly felt water was replaced by steam, the entire mountain singing like an old fashioned kettle on the boil. The entire region shook as the sudden shift in pressure triggered an earthquake, the very ground beneath their feet undulating at random as the very planet itself protested their actions. This only widened the hole in the bottom of the lake, and the remaining water drained away all the quicker for it. Soon, the entire lake was empty, save for a few small puddles amid the mud and debris, the jets of water and steam erupting out of the mountain faltering and eventually dying.
The destruction wasn't over, as between the massive pressure of the water and the subsequent earthquake, the entire mountain jerked as it broke clean in two. A sound like a massive gunshot filled the air, the shock wave knocking over trees that had already been weakened. Almost a third of the mountain crumbled in upon itself as the massive network of tunnels and chambers collapsed in upon themselves, leaving nothing behind but deviation and a cloud of dust and pulverized rock that hung in the air like a storm cloud.
"Well... Shit." Joker mused once her Loki stopped trying to topple over, and she could finally gage the extent of the deviation, "Okay, if anyone asks, we were never here, and we have no idea what happened."
The End
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==Notes==
*Word from the Story's Author; This should hopefully be far shorter than the last one (story). A shout-out to Chris O'Farrell, for reasons that should become apparent towards the end Credit and thanks due to Shrapnel for stating Aung's Archer, shadowdancer for Scilicorns Wolverine and kindalas for Kelso's Shadow Hawk
==External Links==
*Bg.Battletech Forum Posts of the story
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