Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who swears by the “Pile Bunker Kabedon”
It happens fast. The convoy is winding through the ruined city, equally covered by hollow buildings and hampered by the lack of visibility; two crawltrucks hauling containers of Earth tech-relics, and the hired guns of a mech troupe to see them to Checkpoint Abbadon and the overwhelming overwatch of a corporate blinkship. The deal conducted in utmost secrecy. The transfer low profile. The most dangerous part of the trip the long, exposed crawl across the wastes between city and checkpoint.
This route was plotted no more than six hours ago, and yet the flash of colour, the spiking energy readings of mech quickboots, screamed precision ambush with not enough warning to prevent Thorn-of-the-Rose slamming backward into ancient concrete, rebar shearing like harp strings inside it. She's boxed in by the heavier machine that's right in her face, pile bunker slammed into the wall — harmlessly, deliberately harmlessly, forming a neat triangle apex where the base is described by her mech's sensor head and shoulder hardpoint spike rack.
Familiar troupe colours.
"De Selle," she says, moving her machine's limbs just enough to test basic functionality. She can, she has worked battlefields in mechs with hip ball shears and spiral-fractured arm spars that couldn't take weapon recoil. She's won battlefields in broken mechs. The thing to do is to work out early what you've lost, not be taken by surprise when trying something your machine can no longer do. Surprise kills.
"Thorn-of-the-Rose," de Selle says, over shortbeam, in her breathless-sounding husk.
Surprise kills; but this one, conspicuously, hasn't. Weapon fire is flashing in the street — she can't quite see, not from this angle, not from within the cupped hollow of this antique ruin, with another machine in her line of sight. But tacdata and simple sense tells her it's suppressing fire, that they were taken too much by surprise to field adequate resistance, that they'e just being pinned down while—
There. The frame-resonating whistle of a container-lifter, piloted straight out of the sky to snatch the cargo.
She could unload the spike-rack. Laughably outside its minimum effective range, and too close to detonate any payload; but a simple shower of kinetic impacts could drive de Selle off her, punch through her machine's hull, do some damage—
The pile bunker is driven into in the wall. She is denied mobility by no more than a lack of leverage and manoeuvring space to push her machine upright off the sagging concrete. They had the drop enough to simply open fire, surgical, enough to drop every machine in Thorn-of-the-Rose's troupe — for a minute, or until maintenance, or for good. Machines, or pilots.
This choice is, she knows, deliberate. She doesn't fire.
"Just doing whatever this week's job is," de Selle says.
"Likewise."
"Not the ideal way I'd like you under me."
It almost surprises a laugh out of her, and it shows in her voice, she thinks: "...Likewise."
There's some loud mechanical clattering, and with relentless, practised precision, the lifters are changing pitch, howling back upward into the sky with their stolen load, her mech buzzing around her with the vibrations.
"Maybe some other time, Thorn-of-the-Rose," de Selle says, and her machine steps back, one, two; dodges out of the neat frame of the wrecked building with a flare of jump jets. There's a second or two that would be perfect for Thorn-of-the-Rose to spike it, smart javelins accelerated out of their pods, not even reaching self-prop ignition before they shatteringly impacted.
The large, easy, central target would, of course, be de Selle's cockpit.
She doesn't fire.
Thorn-of-the-Rose's after-action report will simply have to blame the speed and smoothness of her rival's moves.