Into the Arena

It had been half an hour now, and the Pilot decided it was time to move. Slowly, cautiously, he edged his slender walker out of the underground carpark.

The Pilot moved the walker up to the top of the main ramp and extended its scanners, making sure his coast was clear before he moved. There was nothing up there; a few birds were flying overhead, but there was no sign of the Sidewinder that had chased him across three suburbs of the city. The Pilot did a second scan, just in case it had been wrong; the results were the same. Reassured, the Pilot eased his Walker out of the carpark and set off down the street.

The Pilot’s walker was an old MSM-04 Lance, built to act as a scout for a much larger force. It had been heavily modified, with its original armament of three machineguns replaced by a missile rack, gauss cannon and. As a result, his Lance was a curiosity. A scout walker with guns meant for walkers twice its size? Bound to stand out in a crowd, that was for sure.

But still, the pilot thought. You got to have the best to win.

The pilot continued to push the Lance down the street. It had originally been a highway at some point, but that had changed at some point in the past. The asphalt was dusty and strewn with loose pieces of debris; glass, chunks of concrete and the odd scrap of metal lay sporadically around. Cars were there, too, and the pilot made sure that he didn’t step on any or knock them with the walker’s feet as he moved past.

The pilot glanced down at a large truck nearby, causing the Lance’s “head” -the section containing the cockpit and weapon control systems - to swivel on its leg mountings and point directly at its target. The truck’s trailer was detached and sitting on the sidewalk, the side emblazoned with a logo for some old company that was long since gone. The pilot briefly switched on the heat scanners and looked over the truck, just in case any Rats were inside, and when he found none he resumed course.

The Rats on this occasion - No, no, they’re called Footmen, the pilot reminded himself - had been using Lamprey mines with an EMP device attached. The pilot had just barely managed to speed up so that the Lampreys hit the building to the Lance’s left, leaving him in complete control of his robot.

So it was always better to be safe than sorry.

Ahead of the Lance, the empty buildings were lowering in height. The skyscrapers surrounding the pilot were blocking his radio and communications equipment, making them emit a harsh buzz of static whenever he tried to use them. As he moved forward the static faded out, and when he got to the buildings that were only just higher than the head of the Lance, the static cut out completely. Taking the opportunity, the pilot started up his commlink to the rest of his group.

‘Captain Mendoza, this is Carlyle, Lance-03,’ he said into his headset. Waiting for a response, the pilot glanced around at the surrounding buildings with unease. Many of them had broken windows and were boarded up; the Rats – Footmen - could set up their weapons behind the windows and have an easy shot. After all, Lances weren’t the smallest or sleekest walkers, and if a Lamprey even caught the edge of one of its armour plates-

‘Lance-03, this is Captain Mendoza,’ said the voice over the pilot’s headset, and he jumped. ‘It’s good to hear from you again. I thought that the Rangers had got you.’

‘Not yet, Captain,’ replied the pilot with a chuckle. ‘This Lance isn’t down yet.’

Captain Mendoza let out a chuckle as well. ‘I was guessing as much. They would’ve announced if you had been taken down already. What’s your current position?’

The pilot briefly checked his navigation node. It fluttered with static for a moment before appearing clearly. He was on the outskirts of the city, at grid F-20.

‘I’m inside grid F-20, Captain,’ he reported.

‘Good. That isn’t too far off,’ Captain Mendoza said. ‘We’re currently in grid D-10. If you boost over the apartment blocks, you should get back to us-’

There was no warning. Just the shrill whistle of a slug flying past the Lance’s head, quickly followed by a sharp crack as the slug buried itself inside the lower corner of one of the apartment blocks. That was quickly followed by a massive cloud of dust and smoke billowing out into the street as the corner of the building exploded.

The pilot swore, pivoted the walker around... and the Lance was hit in the left wing by a second slug!

The Lance rocked violently, the display screens inside the cockpit flickering and going dark before switching back on. Frantically, trying to keep a cool head, the pilot set the Lance into a run and turned the corner where the building had been hit. He did a quick check of the walker’s diagnostics and noted with dismay that the left wing was completely dead. That knocked out his one advantage in a fight against a superior walker: the Gauss cannon.

Somewhat ironically, his Gauss cannon was of the same type that had just hit him.

Still moving the Lance forward while keeping the head facing its tail, the pilot waited for something to show up... and when it did, he felt his heart freeze.

Not one but two Sidewinders were hopping over the roofs of the apartment blocks, coming for him. Well over two metres taller than the pilot’s Lance and a hell of a lot faster and more manoeuvrable, Sidewinders were the perfect tool for hunting down under-armed Lances.

Boy, are you guys in for a surprise, the pilot thought to himself with a smirk. They, obviously, had no idea that this Lance was modified.

The pilot turned his targeting systems to the Sidewinder closest, switched to his right-wing weaponry, and fired.

To the Sidewinder pilots, who thought that they had just picked up on an easy piece of prey, what happened next was a shock. The Lance walker – its legs facing forward, the head facing back – suddenly flipped open its right weapons wing and fired a missile at them!

The forward Sidewinder was too stunned to react. His walker, in mid-flight, with only its visual sensors turned on, was a sitting duck. The missile spat out of its launch tube and shot towards his walker in a beeline, before slamming into the cockpit and detonating. A ball of fire enveloped the head of the walker and it cartwheeled in midair, the boosters switching off as it did so.

Because it was in the middle of a boost, the Sidewinder quickly spun out of control and slammed into the roof of the apartment block on its back, punching through the roof as if it was tinfoil. A few moments later it blasted out the side of the building, tumbling head-over-heels across the street before coming to a stop in a sitting-down position.

The pilot grinned and shifted his target to the second Sidewinder.

The second Sidewinder’s pilot seemed cannier than the first, his walker’s boosters switching off abruptly. It dropped like a stone, disappearing into an alley between two nearby buildings.

The pilot quickly turned the Lance’s head around forward, and activated his boosters, shooting up over the tops of the apartment blocks. He brought the feet forward and cut the boosters just as he reached the roof level, the Lance crunching heavily onto the rooftop. For a moment he was worried that the roof would give way – it sagged heavily as the wide feet of the robot clamped down – but, miraculously, it held-

SCHRACK.

A section of the roof next to the Lance exploded upward and out, debris and chunks of wood shooting upwards, and the pilot quickly dashed away from the hole before it could give in under his walker’s weight. Quickly pivoting the head, he caught the second Sidewinder in his sights and let loose with his autogun. The Sidewinder sidestepped quickly, but to the pilot’s satisfaction several of the heavy shells hit home, blowing off one of the missile pods on the enemy’s shoulder.

The pilot took a quick diagnostic check of the Lance’s systems. The left wing was completely bust, as was his commlink; they’d have to be repaired when he got back to the others.

If he got back to the others-

‘Ah, stop being such a pessimist, will ya?’ the pilot growled to himself. Fatalities? Almost always rare.

There was a quick beep-beep-beep and the Pilot quickly activated the Lance’s boosters. It shot up above the building, narrowly avoiding the three homing missiles that had been heading for it; two immediately died and fell to the ground, harmless, while the other went crazy and buried itself deep into the asphalt before exploding.

The pilot missed that, though; he shuttled back down to the street and began firing his autogun at the approaching Sidewinder.

Chips of cement flew about in a blizzard as the two war machines exchanged fire. The street was quickly blanketed with a thick layer of dust, but the walkers could still target each-other with ease. The pilot hurriedly switched over to infra-red sensors, instantly picking up the Sidewinder’s signature.

While they had a short range and could do nil against magnetic deflectors, the autoguns were heavily effective in combat between light and heavy walkers. That thought flashed through the pilot’s mind as several shells from the Sidewinder’s autogun buried inside the remains of the left wing and exploded. Once again the Lance was rocked about violently, but when the systems came back online the monitors to the pilot’s left didn’t.

They had included the missile controls.

The pilot’s mind screamed at him to do something as more shells found their mark, this time bouncing harmlessly off the head of the Lance. They still shook the cockpit hard, and the pilot’s thinking grew more frantic by the second.

That was when he saw the flares button.

Flares were simple devices, used to draw away missiles from walkers in flight, but in order to get the missiles safely away from their intended target they had to be fired out at high speed. The flare launcher was, basically, a ridiculously powerful compressed air cannon.

Gritting his teeth, the pilot regained the Sidewinder in his targeting recticle and opened the flare launchers.

‘Eat this, you prick,’ he growled, and he fired the flares.

It took the pilot of the Sidewinder a few seconds before he recognised the cluster of burning lights that suddenly shot out of the dust cloud. A split second later the flares impacted with his walker... and passed directly into the Sidewinder’s autogun, mounted on the right arm.

With a great whoomp the ammunition of the autogun went up in a fireball. The autogun’s bullets shot out in all directions, smashing into the asphalt and building walls. The Sidewinder itself careened sideways from the force of the explosion, nearly toppling over before its pilot regained control.

The brief break in the attack gave the Lance pilot all the time he needed. He quickly opened fire with his own autogun – shattering one of the servos in the Sidewinder’s right leg, effectively crippling it – and then spun around and stomped off, trying to put as much distance between his walker and the Sidewinder. A missile shot towards the Lance, but the pilot managed to weave out of the way; the missile shot over the Lance and passed into the side of a building just up ahead, detonating the fourth floor and showering the walker with heavy chunks of rubble as it lumbered past.

A second missile came swerving at the Lance, but this time the pilot managed to pull sideways into a street junction. The missile curved, making an attempt to follow the walker in, but its angle was too sharp and it smashed into the road. A five metre bulge lifted up from the asphalt, followed by a small plume of dust.

Leaning back in his seat, the pilot let out a relieved breath. That was when he heard it: Thomp-Thomp-Thomp.

The sound of the Lance’s footfalls were loud in the pilot’s ears, every step shaking he and the cockpit. Bringing up a diagnostic screen, he swore. Part of the walker’s suspension had been knocked out in the attack. Now the pilot stood a very good risk of wearing out the Lance’s leg assembly if he moved to fast, and he had to slow it down to cut off the vibration through the hull.

Slowly, gradually, the cockpit went level again, though the constant footfalls of the walker’s feet still reverberated through the interior. Taking a sharp turn, the pilot eased his walker in between an office building and a fairly decrepit-looking apartment block-

The right-hand side of the Lance’s head detonated. A chunk of the armour bracing within the cockpit was spat out of its housing, swinging across the cockpit and nearly taking the pilot’s head off at the shoulders before embedding into the port control panel. Sparks shot out and the pilot raised his hands to shield his face... and the power died.

Ohshitohshitohshit, the pilot said mentally. He glanced around, ignoring the sparks, and the red emergency lights switched on.

‘...ah, great,’ he said.

He was out.

His Lance was completely crippled.

He was done for.

x-x-x

The first Sidewinder, the one nearly destroyed after being hit by a missile and falling through a building, limped toward its prize.

The Lance, the troublesome little Lance who had taken out the Sidewinder’s partner, was leaning against the decrepit apartment block. Sparks spat out of its right wing in a stream, bouncing against the uneven floor of the alleyway below. The thing had been barely capable of shooting, let alone walking when the Sidewinder had managed to knock out the central control circuits with an autogun blast.

Finally, after three hours of pursuit and a vicious battle, the Sidewinder had won.

Approaching from the front, the Sidewinder pilot came to a stop. He set the walker to park, locking the legs in place, and entered the code to open the cockpit doors. As part of the cockpit’s underside snapped open, the Sidewinder pilot set up a general broadcasting beacon, and then dropped down. The footholds that ran down the inner part of the walker’s leg made the journey to the ground much easier than a direct fall.

As he approached the Lance, its pilot – slightly cut from the damage to the cockpit, his confidence bruised, but otherwise unhurt – clambered down his own walker’s leg, the journey much more difficult than the Sidewinder’s due to the angle. The Sidewinder pilot stopped, waiting, as the Lance pilot dusted himself off and walked over.

He was grinning.

‘Looks like you finally got me this time,’ said the Lance pilot. The Sidewinder pilot just grinned and shrugged.

‘It’s only got to do with luck,’ he said. ‘I’m lucky you didn’t knock me out after you hit me with the missile, really. If you’d hung around and fired a few more, you would’ve won.’

The Lance pilot just grinned, crossing his arms. ‘Gotta keep your eyes open and watch for every window of opportunity, eh?’

‘I guess so.’

The two sat down, facing the south-east. The silhouettes of the repair barges, news crews and camera ‘bots were visible against the sky, moving in over the Arena. The pilots, the both of them, could already imagine the newscasts for the game: a shock win for the Callister Sidewinders! The two newest and least-experienced members of the team working together to take down a far superior pilot to them, in a far faster walker! Could a rematch possibly be in quick order?

The Lance pilot just smiled to himself, his mind quickly switching to something completely different. He had to get a few more upgrades for his Lance, which would undergo a near-total repair job; perhaps a Hyperion missile instead of a Razorhead? And then there was the question of the next battle, too, which was scheduled for two days from then.

Oh well, the Lance pilot thought to himself. It was all just a game in the end. Fatalities, after all, were rare in the city arena.

But you still had to be the best to win.

x-x-x

A.N.: Hello all! Just wanted to say thanks for reading the story (unless of course you just skipped to the bottom of the page, of course) and, if you have the time, to please leave a review.

Cheers;
~Dawley