Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who is just going to throw this big icicle
Corporate had projected twelve days to pacify Stavropolous III.
It was month four.
Stavro-III is an icebox hellworld. When the miners stopped loading the space elevator, with a pretty tame list of demands — environmental hazard pay, actually ponying up the full hours they were owed, that kind of thing — corporate sent the standard response: a Loss Prevention carrier with a platoon of marines, two dropships, six medium open-ground theatre mechs.
First problem: the usual corporate over-fitting to a standardised use case. The mechs break down after three hours on the surface; they can't take the cold. The marines have cold-weather gear; it's not remotely specced for a planet where their respirator rigs need cold-hardening against its contents condensing.
Second problem: the miners' gear isn't milspec, but it is cold-specced.
Stavro-III's overall line manager is sending increasingly deranged demands that we Simply Win, Or Else. Meanwhile, half the marines are out, injured; two of the mechs are out, waiting on parts; operations have been limited to one bird in the air at a time, for failsafe reasons; and nerves are running increasingly tense. The guy's Or Else is wearing thinner every time he can't name what he thinks he can actually do to Loss P troops with broken morale.
Sitting in the pilot's couch, I could have missed the whole thing. If I'd been looking out of the front, if I'd been looking at the state-of-the-art fritzing sensors, dutifully reporting no weapon signatures out in the endless snow. Local night, little snowfall, visibility pretty good for Stavro-III.
I don't even know why I glanced out of the cockpit blister's side panel. I nearly didn't register the movement, as our two mechs stomped off the bird's loading ramp to head down the trail, to look for "insurgents"; could just have been falling snow against snow.
It wasn't.
A light mining rig, heavily modified. Painted blue-white, outline broken by a drifting cape of snow-camo ghillie netting. And no weapons signatures.
A blink of the drop bird's running lights gleamed off a long spike of ice. Construction matrix fibres, probably; wetted, compacted, taken outside to freeze. A deadly needle tip; twenty-thirty feet of shaft. The effortless leverage of a mining claw behind the throw.
Our mechs had their backs to it, single file; the rear machine fell, oxy tank skewered by shattered icicle. Precious little evidence, at this point; when the machine thawed out on board the bird, none, just fibres. Everything's made of comax fibre; hell, the mech itself is. It'll pass for debris from the busted tank. Could even be some kind of weird pressure failure from the cold, if nobody saw anything, not an attack at all.
Their pilot clocked me, as their mech turned to slip into the night. I could see the gleam of their eyes inside the miner's cockpit, the hesitation of their rig. All lit up in my transparent bubble, I eased my hands off the sticks, slowly touched the CONSCRIPT patch on my uniform, mimed covering my mouth, then my eyes.
When I took my hands back down, there was nothing out there.