With Decompression, BattleTechnology continues its series of personal narratives by veteran BattleMech warriors. 'Mech combat on airless worlds is a common occurrence--quite common, in fact, though news reporting generally passes over such engagements in favor of more dramatic or climactic battles on more important-and populated-worlds. The fact remains that there are thousands of airless worlds and worldlets throughout the Inner Sphere, barren, utterly inhospitable places important because of their location athwart some vital trade lane, or because of the resources of metals or hydrocarbons or ice which they harbor, or simply because someone has built a base or outpost there and somone else finds a moment's strategic importance in knocking that base down. Decompression is a personal narrative by Lieutenant Vincent McCabe, Fire Lance Leaderof Company B, First Battalion, of the Star Warriors mercenary BattleMech regiment, currently under contract to House Steiner. A recent participant in a raid on the airless moon of a Kurita-held planet in the Rasalhague District, he is in an excellent position to describe the tactics, hazards, and experiences of BattleMech forces engaged in such an environment. This is Lt. McCabe's first contribution to BattleTechnology. Decompression We were maintaining radio silence, even though Gordo didn't have an ionosphere which might have bounced our signals over the horizon. If the Dracs had had even an inkling that we were where we were, itwould be all up... and Void alone knew how many Kurita spacecraft and relay stations and DropShips might be on our line-of-sight, snooping for just such a party as ours. It wasn't the radio which worried me, though, it was our color. Sure, sure, it's always tough to paint a 10- or 12-meter-tall BattleMech in any kind of a camouflage scheme that'll cut down on the thing's silhouette, no matter where you are... but we're talking high visibility here. All six 'Mechs in our strike group had been painted bright, bright silver, and as we started our long, loping trot across one of Gordo's black, empty maria, I felt about as inconspicuous as a BattleMech at a social cocktail party. Or a big, fat beetle crawling across a dinner plate. Our half-company strikeforce had been drawn from the two top companies of the Star Warriors. When the Steiner command needed an elite strikeforce to hit the Kurita C3 hidden on Gordo, they went and hired the best. The Warriors are mercenaries, the best. We've been in 27 major actions and Void only knows how many skirmishes, holding actions, and the like. Mostly we'd been working for Hanse Davion, but Colonel Christie had taken a short-term contract from Katrina Steiner, and so late 3027found us in the Ramsau System, a long, long way from help. You've heard of Ramsau? The planet is Ramsau III, a pleasant enough place if you like large, cold deserts, ice across half the planet, and a day six times longer than it ought to be. There's a growing season there, but the crops aren't anything humans would care to eat... and Earth-type crops don't do well when the nights are 70 hours long. That means every bite to eat has to be shipped in... or else grown in huge, underground hydroponics facilities with artificial lighting. So why did the Steiners want to hit such an uninviting place? Well, they didn't tell us all the details, of course, but it was easy enough to tell that the Steiners were figuring on making a move against Kurita, and that the move would be some time soon. The Lyran news media was full of patriotic fervor... bits on how they should take back what the Draco Combine had taken from them, how we all must pull together, and all that. Tensions had been up all along the border ever since a former Steiner planet called Verthandi tried to kick its Draco masters out, and the usual raids and counter-raids and saber-rattlings had been on the increase ever since. So, with a big push coming, the word was out that mercenaries were needed, especially elite groups. The Steiner brass decided that what was needed was a deep penetration raid, something to really shake the Dracs and make them start looking nervously over their shoulders all up and down the Kurita-Steiner frontier. Nervous troops can be rattled easily... and maybe the Kurita command would start trying to spread their people around in the hopes of covering everything. Spread them thin enough, and the Steiner push might have a chance of making real headway when it came. As for the reason why they chose Ramsau in particular, well, look at it this way. Destroy the food production facilities on that one planet, and the Kurita command would have to make an unpalatable choice: tie up dozens of Jump- and DropShips ferrying in food and equipment to repair the hydroponics farms, or let the people starve and face the unrest that would cause on every Kurita planet from Dieron to Rasalhague. Whatever the propagandists say about the Drac bosses on Luthien, they weren't about to write off the population of a whole planet. A population of ten million was far too large to pack up and move on short notice, but if the Dracs scrambled, they might be able to organize a relief expedition--a fleet to ferry in enough emergency food to keep the people going while they repaired the hydro farms. And man, would that ever put a crimp in the local Combine shipping! Every Jump-capable transport in a 50-light-year radius would have been pressed into service to carry enough food to keep several million people fed for maybe two or three months. A neat plan. The hydroponics farms were clustered together in one area outside Ramsau's lone population center at Sauton. Our forces come down hard, take the spaceport, hold the enemy defenses at bay, and send a team in to wade through the growing vats. Simple, except for one thing. Steiner's intelligence sources reported that Ramsau's defenses were not coordinated from the surface of Ramsau, as you would expect. Every decent defense force needs a C3 -- that's milslang for Command, Control, Communications, and means, to the uninitiated, military headquarters. Usually, a unit's C3 will be hidden someplace safe-in a cave, out in the woods, buried into a command bunker, or whatever. Davion likes to hide his underwater sometimes, if there's a convenient ocean nearby. At Ramsau, things were different. Ramsau III has a single moon... a very large moon quite close to the planet. It's called Gordo, and it's an airless, cratered ball of rock and dust nearly 4,000 kilometers in diameter, less than 140,000 kilometers from Ramsau. At that distance, Gordo circles the planet in something like six days-a hair over 140 hours. The problem is, that large a satellite that close to its primary creates a tidal drag which has been acting like a brake on Ramsau's daily rotation for the past few billion years. Today, Ramsau has a day which is six standard days long. In other words, Ramsau's moon is always suspended over the same spot on the planet; the two are locked in a cosmic embrace, each facing its companion with the same faces eternally turned towards the other. Sauton is located close to the planet's equator. From there, Gordo is alwaysa/ways-suspended in the sky directly overhead, never rising, never setting. And the Kurita C3 base was located on the Ramsau-facing side of Gordo, with the vast, mottled, white-on-blue globe of the planet always half-filling the sky directly overhead. The Set-up Was Ideal From Gordo, the Kurita defense command could keep an eagle eye over everything going on on the surface of Ramsau anywhere on the same hemisphere as Sauton. Nothing could approach Sauton without the Dracs knowing about it. Cloud cover is a rarity in Ramsau's thin air... and Gordo was close enough that the moon's radar arrays could probably have picked up something as small as a BattleMech even at that distance. In any battle on Ramsau's surface, the Kurita defenders would have an overwhelming advantage with their C3 people hanging there, directly overhead, watching and commenting on everything that was going on! Which brings us to the mission assigned the Star Warrior's special strike force, codenamed "Ranger" and consisting of six BattleMechs under the command of old "Crasher Chris" Christie himself. The idea was that Ramsau would get hit by a fullfledged planetary invasion--a full regiment coming in hot in an Overlord and six Union-class DropShips, with three wings of AeroSpace fighters for support and a half dozen Leopards to carry the armor and infantry. A force like that smashing into Ramsau's inner system would be enough to make the Kuritists sit up and take notice! We expected a heavy AeroSpace defense, with a hard battle to win before our 'Mechs and troops could set down on Ramsau's surf ace. The Kurita high command would be so tied up, in fact, that we figured they would never notice one small Leopard-class DropShip making its way in 'way, way off to the side, out of the main battle. That Leopard would be us, reconfigured to carry six light 'Mechs instead of its usual four 'Mechs plus two fighters. Everything went by the numbers, one-two-three. We broke out of JumpSpace at Ramsau System's Nadir Point and realized we'd caught the Dracs napping. There was no guard mounted at the JumpPoints, no fighter patrols, no sign that we'd even been sighted until we picked up their fighters rising to meet us as we backed down on the final leg of our deceleration into orbit. The battle was on, with fighters tangling, our Lucifers and Chippewas going after their Slayers and Shilones. With every electronic eye in the system fastened to that battle, our Leopard's pilot cut power and drive and let our ship drift blind into the shadow of Ramsau's moon. The circumference of a moon as big as Gordo is over 12,500 kilometers. Captain Forrest brought our Leopard down halfway around from the Kurita base, then hedgehopped all the way around to the other side. Hedge-hopped? Wrong word on a world with no air, and a landscape which is all dust and rock, craters and low, gray mountains sand-blasted smooth by a few billion years of micrometeorite impacts. Better say crater-hopped instead. I don't think that Leopard hauled its belly much more than 10 meters above the moon's surface in that whole six-and-some thousand klick passage. I suppose Draco radar on Ramsau's surface could have spotted us if they'd been looking, but we figured they'd all be looking elsewhere-watching for when our DropShips started their descent approach. Radar stations on Gordo could have seen us... butwe stayed well belowtheir horizon, our approach blocked by the mass of Gordo itself. The horizon on a small body like Gordo is close-real close. From 10 meters up, the horizon is only a bit under seven kilometers away. Captain Forrest crater-hopped us to within 15 kilometers of where Steiner Intelligence had said the Draco base was, then grounded us on the floor of a large, shallow, low-walled crater. The ramps came down, the restrainer clamps snapped free, and our six 'Mechs bounded out onto Gordo's surface. Bounded is the word for it. Gordo pulls about a fifth of a G in surface gravity. It's dangerous to push your speed too far on a worldlet like that, because you have to remember that your BattleMech still masses just what it would in one standard G... even if it doesn't weigh as much. The distinction between mass and weight is confusing for people who haven't had to deal with it. Suffice to say that a BattleMech running full out in .2 G is very hard to stop! It's eerie, piloting a BattleMech across a landscape like that. Motion is smooth, cushioned by the dust and the low-G. Hell, we were all feeling light-headed to begin with, and the low grav adds to that feeling considerably when you can't feel the straps holding you to your chair, or the weight of the neurolhelmet resting across your shoulders! Out through the canopy and displayed across your console screens, the horizon is gray and silver against black, and close enough to touch. With no air between you and those mountains on the horizon, they take on the look of cardboard cutouts, sharp-edged and harsh, and so flat you think someone's going to pull the props out from behind them and they'll fall over flat, ka-whump! Only they wouldn't go ka-whump, of course. No air, no sound. You hear the creak of joints and fittings inside your 'Mech's head as it moves, and the usual rasp of your air supply, the low hum of heat pumps and circulators... but there's not another sound in the universe, and you can get to feeling very much alone. Maybe it was the loneliness that got to me in the end. Feeling lonely when you're trying to sneak up on an unfriendly playmate is not a comforting thing! I wanted to haul my 'Mech over to the pools of black shadow which lay in the light-lee of every boulder, cliff, and mountain wall we passed... haul over and hide because I felt so damned conspicuous. You see, everyone knows that probably the biggest problem a BattleMech faces in combat is heat... and in vacuum that problem is a lot worse. Don't believe the 'Mech drek you hear about the "icy cold of space." That guff is strictly for the space opera holovids... the ones with gorgeous girls wearing fishbowl helmets and not much else for space suits! Hey, you don't believe me? Well, how the hell do you think a vacuum bottle keeps things hot? There is no better insulation in the universe than a bit of hard vacuum, and that means that a spaceship... or a BattleMech on an airless moon... has to pay one hell of a lot of attention to getting rid of excess heat--both what it makes itself and what it soaks up from sunshine undiluted by a few miles of thick, comfortable atmosphere. So our six 'Mechs had been worked over by our Techs before the mission, with armor pulled off in spots to accommodate bigger, heavier heat sinks and special radiator vents. If anyone had cared to look our way with an IR detector, he would have sworn he was being attacked by six giant, two-legged magnesium flares. The other thing we could do was paint our 'Mechs silver. Every surface that would take it had been anodized with an aluminum silver oxide that made us look like great, walking mirrors. The sunlight glared off our 'Mechs like laser fire. At one point as we loped along the surface, my curiosity was nudged by an unusual pale, wavering flicker of light I could see from time to time along the rocks and in the shadows we passed. I was about ready to believe I was seeing some sort of strange electromagnetic display, some phenomena of the local rock chemistry when I guessed the truth. The sunlight reflections from our 'Mechs were splashing across the rocks as we moved like spotlight beams! Anyone who has dreamed he's walking in stark naked on a high-society dinner party knows about how I felt. The mare we were crossing was broad and dark and utterly flat--nothing more than a scattering of big rocks and small craters and a Void-awful expanse of empty in every direction you looked. A rock wall was visible ahead, crawling up above the horizon with every hundred meters we travelled. The Colonel pulled us up with an upraised metal arm when we were maybetwo klicks from thewall and signaled us to disperse in complete silence. The approach formation had been worked out before we grounded, of course, in a half dozen sweat sessions poring over old ComStar maps and Intel reports. Colonel Christy's Wolverine was in the center, with my Shadow Hawk 90 meters to his right. Feodor Blanski's Griffin was on my right, while Kathy Drake's Centurion was on the Colonel's left. Our two light 'Mechs, O'Hanrahan's Stinger and Lawrence's Commando deployed out ahead and to eitherside, sothatwewere moving towards our objective in a crescent formation half a kilometer across, with the open side towards the enemy. The maneuver was completed with absolute radio silence. The target was still below the horizon, just on the far side of that rock wall, but a Kurita fighter passing overhead might hear us and pass the word to the Draco C1. If what we were attempting was to have any chance of success at all, we had to keep the advantage of surprise. The Colonel signaled, and we started forward again. My mouth was as dry as the dust under my Shadow Hawk's feet looked. Ramsau was overhead, a blue-white crescent with Sauton's lights visible as a golden splotch in the middle of blackness. The rock wall was closer now, and I had the uncanny feeling that there were a few million pairs of eyes along that rim, watching us cross the empty plain. I wanted a drink of water but didn't quite dare. Standard procedure for vacuum operations is to wear your pressure suit tight and sealed. It's uncomfortable... Void, is it uncomfortable! The usual garb inside a BattleMech cockpit besides your neural helmet and sensors is shorts or trunks, a coolant vest, and skin. Most 'Mechs have an air conditioning fitting that can be hooked up to your pressure suit through a valve coupling over your liver; even hooked up like that, sweat pools in your boots until you slosh when you move them, and the suit clings everywhere, sweaty and itchy, like a slimy second skin. You have to leave your helmet off inside the'Mech, of course, since vacuum helmets aren't equipped with neurol helmet circuit rigs. But wearing the pressure suit, at least you have a chance, if you start losing air to hard vacuum, to disconnect from your neurohelmet, haul your pressure helmet out from its rack behind your seat, seal it over your head, and be able to breathe while you wonder if someone's going to start using your now-dead 'Mech for a stationary target. All of this meant I couldn't get a drink of water. Those pressure suits are too close and tight to be equipped with a catheter, and I don't think I'd care to use the thing if my suit had one. As much as I wanted a sip of water from the emergency tank behind my left shoulder, I refrained, figuring it would be a good many hours yet before it would be convenient to unseal my suit for a purge of the ol' organic plumbing. I made do with a stick of chewing gum from my survival kit, and sat there, hands on the control sticks, eyes fastened to the cliff, my jaws working that gum like the cycle extractor on a 120 mm autocannon feed. The Combine people were out there, somewhere. I could feel it... and the dead silence around me was entirely too dead for my peace of mind. The cliff, our immediate objective, was less than 20 meters tall in most places. It was broken and rugged, in places little more than a vast spill of boulders and gravel, but it was not steep. Once we'd scrambled to the top, we should be able to see our objective, a cluster of domes and dish antennas maybe a kilometer beyond the crest of the ridge, Our formation moved on, the ground rising now beneath our metal feet. The thin, soft layer of dust which blankets most of the maria gave way to gravel and loose rocks. We had to watch our footing, but our pace was not slowed. We were perhaps 300 meters from the crest of the ridge. I almost didn't see it when it happened. A flare of light caught Melissa Lawrence's Commando at the far-right tip of our crescent, and it was only by chance that her machine was at the edge of my line of vision, 180 meters off. The second flare of light came an instant later, bracketing Blanski's Griffin in a triple blast that seemed all the more startling for the fact that the explosions were absolutely silent. "Ranger One to all Rangers!" The Colonel was on the tac: net. Radio silence hardly mattered now. "Plan Kilo... execute!" We had a list of possible tactical evolutions, each identified by a code word so that Combine eavesdroppers wouldn't know what we were doing before we did it. Kilo was a simple refuse-the-right advance. Blanski and Lawrence would hold their position, while the rest of our line would swing forward and to the right like a huge gate. White light shattered a rock ten meters to my front. The explosion was silent, but I heard a rattling tic-tic-tic-tic as fragments danced off my cockpit canopy. There must have been other explosions--and some hits on our people--because the tacnet was filled with a babble of voices. O'Hanrahan was reporting fire from his front and a hit to his Stinger's left leg. Feodor Blanski was asking for help-heavy damage to his Griffin's right arm and torso. Colonel Christie was shouting for Kathy Drake to get her Centurion forward, when the magnetic surge from a PPC hit blasted the tacnet with static. And I couldn't even see where the fire was coming from! Then my cockpit blanked out in a glare of white fire. There was noise this time, too, a gut-wrenching whoom that hammered at my ears as something hard and heavy smashed my Shadow Hawk square in its chest. I triggered the autocannon off my shoulder, spraying rounds blindly towards the ridge crest in front of me. As my vision cleared in the after-dazzle of the bolt that had hit me, I could see geysering spouts of grey dust erupting along the crest where my AC shells were exploding. There! My fire had flushed something... a Dragon by the squat, blunt-nosed shape of it. The Draco 60-tonner scuttled to my left and turned. I could see a ripple of fire across its snout as it cut loose with a volley of long-range missiles. Then the geysers of smoke and dust were falling around me as I rolled my Shadow Hawk right. A missile struck my left arm, high up on the shoulder, and an instant later two more struck home on my 'Mech's left torso. I triggered my autocannon again, tracking the Dragon as it began backing down below the ridge crest, then brought up my right arm and flashed my Martell laser at him. Then the target was gone, but I caught a glimpse of tiny, glittering flecks of metal settling slowly against the black sky above the ridge. I'd hit him! I urged my Shadow Hawk forward, My evasion to the right had put some distance between me and Colonel Christie. I could see the Colonel's Wolverine maybe 120 meters to my left and ahead, making its way through a tumble-down of house-sized boulders. Then I spotted the bunker. Void... what infernal luck had led the Dracs to plant a perimeter bunker there, there, of all places? Were they so sure an attack would come from that direction, across the flat and empty mare? Or had they so ringed and fortified their C3 that we would have stumbled into one of the things no matter which way we'd come? We'll never know... but I would give my Hawk's left arm and a year's supply of AC ammo to have a quiet word with the Steiner Intel bastards who located the Kurita C3 post with such precision... and completely missed the fact that it was so well-guarded! The bunker was hard to see-poured ferrocrete painted to look like the surrounding rocks. I saw the movement of a snubnosed weapon but didn't recognize it for what it was until it lit up blue and fire blossomed off the Colonel's Wolverine. Colonel Christie was firing back, autocannon and missile fire smashing at the bunker only ninety meters from his position. Dust rose above the moon's surface in a blanketing cloud. Laser and PPC bolts were visible now as they carved through the dust, lightning made visible, arrows and great, stabbing spears of brilliant light lancing across that stark landscape. "Rangers, all Rangers! This is Ranger One! I'm hit... bunker at triple zero, range one hundred, my position! Heavy laser and a PPC!" There was another burst of light and the hiss-snap of static. I swung to my left, angling towards the Colonel and the Draco bunker. At 120 meters' range, I thought I could lay enough fire on that gun emplacement to give the Colonel a chance to back away. "Ranger One, Ranger Three!" I yelled into the tac net. "Covering coming down!" The targeting brackets on my cockpit HUD closed in on the heat source my computer said was the narrow fire slit of the hidden bunker. Autocannon fire smashed and flashed across rock and ferrocrete. The sound of the gun transmitted itself through the hull of my 'Mech as a dull "thumpthumpthump." Sunlight sparked off chips of rock spinning off into space as rapid-fire violence rained onto the emplacement. I added burst upon measured burst from my right arm's laser and loosed a pair of Holly SRMs from my head racks for good measure. For a moment the gun emplacement was obscured by dust and flying debris. The explosion of a PPC burst against my front armor picked me up and flung me back with the force of a head-on collision. Heavy laser fire played off my 'Mech's torso, as a dozen red lights winked on across my cockpit display. I was slammed back against my seat by the force of the blast, then jerked violently forward as a second double blast smashed my 'Mech back another step, then slammed to the left as the machine lost its footing and tumbled over backwards. My restraining straps kept me in my seat, but the belts cut into my shoulders even through the material of my suit, and the thunder of my fall left my ears ringing. A big, flashing red light at the bottom of my HUD shrieked for attention. My Shadow Hawk was overheating, and my computer was threatening a shutdown. My Hawk had picked up plenty of heat already in the trot across that barren mare. My extravagant display of firepower against the Dragon and then against the bunker had driven my heat load all the way to critical. Four solid hits from those heavy Drac weapons had been enough to force me into the shutdown range. I slapped my hand down on the override. I couldn't let my Hawk quit on me now! My neurohelmet transmitted the sense of my 'Mech's position... flat on its back. Somehow I rolled the machine to the side and brought it to its knees. I could see the gun emplacement straight ahead, both ugly barrels drawing down on me. The fire-blackened throats of those weapons looked like cavernous mouths, gaping death at me... Polarization of my canopy and my neurohelmet visor saved my eyes when that heavy laser fired again, but the bolt washed across my canopy with a burst that blacked out my vision for a moment. I fired back, blindly, cutting loose everything I had. Words painted themselves across my HUD, warning again of shutdown. Again I slapped the override... and felt sick horror as I saw the override refused! My Hawk was cycling down its power plant, shutting itself off! Then there was another shock as my Shadow Hawk collided with something big and heavy, and the cockpit swung wildly to the right. I'm still not sure how much time passed after that. I know I swam up out of a warm and groggy muzziness, know I first became aware as I tasted salt and felt the wet drip of blood from my nose and cheek underneath my neurohelmet. For a moment I couldn't hear a thing, so loud was the ringing in my ears. Then other sounds penetrated my dull awareness... a rasping, whistling hiss, and the keening whoop-whoop-whoop of my cockpit's depressurization alarm. Panic dragged at my breath, clutched at my guts. My cockpit had been breached, my air was spilling out into space. Instinctively I grabbed for my pressure helmet with one hand, while the other began fumbling with the release catch for my neurohelmet. Movement Made Me Pause The Kurita Dragon was scarcely 30 meters away, moving from right to left across my line of sight. I could see the bunker in the distance beyond, a gaping crater now where the firing slit had been before. Had I hit the bunker as it had fired its last volley at me... or had one of my comrades finished it a moment later? There was no way of knowing... but it was clear that the emplacement's destruction had saved my life. My 'Mech had tumbled back into a sitting position, its back up against a large boulder. If the emplacement had kept firing, it would have hammered my Shadow Hawk to pieces in much less time than it would have taken the air leak to kill me! Another Kurita 'Mech appeared... a 35-ton Panther. Both 'Mechs were picking their way down the slope past the blasted emplacement, and both were ignoring me. Well, why not? My Hawk must have been down and motionless for some time now, and the ruin the emplacement's weapons had dealt to my front torso armor must look like a fatal hit. Hell, it might still be a fatal hit! My instrumentation showed severe damage in a dozen places, my left arm actuators completely dead, my power plant shut down by the computer in firm denial of my last override attempt. And the alarm kept up its shriek of death and doom, mingled with the thinning hiss of escaping air. Already it was difficult to breathe. I redoubled my attempt to free the neurohelmet. There was nothing for it now but to pull on my pressure helmet before it was too late. The 'Mech's on-board survival pack would keep me alive for another few hours, anyway. I would surrender to the Kurita salvage crews when they came for my 'Mech. Maybe I would live... ransomed back to the Warriors. Or maybe I would die of suffocation before anyone came to get me. I paused again, listening to the whistle of air. This wasn't right... not like this, not now. Those two enemy 'Mechs were so close I could almost touch them. To give up without struggling, without fighting back... If I pulled off my neurohelmet and replaced it with my pressure gear, that would be it, so far as my Shadow Hawk was concerned. There would be no way to power the 'Mech up, no way to move or fight it. I could blow the head escape hatch and crawl out, or could sit in the dark, airless cockpit, but either way, my Shadow Hawk would be a useless, 55-ton pile of dead metal. But if I left my neurohelmet on, I'd be dead in another few minutes from loss of air. I couldn't see where the cockpit leak was, but it was funneling my air out into space at an appalling rate. The air tasted mighty thin already. I couldn't tell if it was thin air or panic that was making me gasp, making my chest heave and fight against the restraining straps, but either way I didn't have long to live unless I acted fast. Idea! There was a waste receptacle on the left side of my seat, a little pouch for cramming incidental bits of garbage. I fished through the pouch now, and brought out the scraps of paper from the stick of chewing gum I'd opened earlier. With trembling, fumbling fingers, I tore the scraps of paper and tinfoil into tiny pieces, then flicked them from the palm of my hand into the air. They spun and whirled in front of my helmet visor, then began moving on eddying currents of air, fluttering and spiraling towards my right. There! Like an arrow, they lined up on a hole in my cabin's pressure wall, smaller than my little finger and almost hidden by the twisted bundles of wiring and conduit piping which decorated the interior walls of my 'Mech's head. I could have searched for an hour and not found it, but the rush of air through that hole was blasting those scraps of paper into the wall and out into space. It was frightening how close I'd come to death from that tiny hole. A fragment, possibly a piece of my own armor exploding out from one of the emplacement's hits on me, had blasted through my head armor like a high-velocity armor piercing shell. The fragment could easily have penetrated my own head as well. As it was, the solution was easy. I opened my neurohelmet visor, reached into my mouth, and extracted the blood-soggy wad of chewing gum which was still resting there, between my teeth and my cheek. I shoved wiring bundles aside and pressed the gum against the hole. I felt a moment's alarm as the soft blob began to disappear into the hole, but then it caught and held, as I worked to smear it out across the puckered metal surface around the breach. It was working! The alarm cut itself off as the pressure loss stopped. The metal was icy cold, and the gum was becoming brittle even as I worked with it. Space may not be cold, but things left in shadow on the surface of an airless moon can become quite cold. My Shadow Hawk had fallen back into the black pool of shadow cast by the boulder I was leaning against. I realized as I worked that during the time I had been out of it, the heat from my ShadowHawk must have bled out into the frigid, shadowed boulder in a process as efficient as any heat sink. I tested my notion a moment later when I refastened the neurohelmet and closed my hands on the Shadow Hawk's controls. Power throbbed, and the Hawk came to life again. My console displays lit up with a disconcerting number of red lights outnumbering the green, but my power and weapons systems were intact. Intact! I could still fight. I cast a glance at my make-shift patch job and prayed that it would hold. A hole like that meant the metal around it was weakened. Another jolt, even the movement of my BattleMech, could open the hole or jar loose the chewing gum plug, and I would begin bleeding atmosphere again. I looked up, searching for the Kurita 'Mechs. There they were, haloed in light from a laser's blast. Colonel Christie's Wolverine was there, down and badly damaged, but still fighting as the two Kurita 'Mechs moved in close. Their backs were towards me. I didn't bother bringing my Hawk to its feet. I opened fire with autocannon and laser together, targeting on the Dragon a hundred meters in front of me. Explosions flashed and danced across the Dragon's back, a solid, clean hit! I checked my display, noted my head SRMs were dead, cursed and fired my two main weapons again. The autocannon chewed into gaps and craters already opened up by my first volley. The laser hit wiring and plumbing exposed to raw space, and an explosion of vapor and fragments erupted outwards in a glittering, silent cascade. The Dragon tried to turn, but its feet twisted and it went down on its knees, just as a third autocannon burst chopped into its back. The Panther had turned already and was firing wildly at me with its right arm PPC, but the bolt went wide and arced lightning across a boulder to my right. The Dragon down, I shifted targets. Autocannon and laser firing together, I walked fire across the Panther's torso and arm. Fragments rained in slow motion across Gordo's dusty surface. The Panther staggered as though clubbed from behind. Autocannon fire caught it from a different direction, spinning it around in a silent dance of destruction. The Colonel had caught the Panther in his sights, and our crossfire had the hapless 'Mech balanced between two ragged streams of fire, a puppet suspended on twin strings of death. The Dragon was on its feet again. I switched from the Panther to the Dragon and hit it with another laser bolt. A cloud of sparkling, silvery motes was growing about the heavy 'Mech's head. For a moment I thought its pilot was deploying an anti-laser aerosol, a silvery fog to scatter laser beams, but then I realized that what I was seeing was ice crystals, freezing out of the airwhich was rushing out of the Dragon's cockpit into space. The Dragon froze in mid-turn, the big autocannon which was its right arm pointed in my direction... but the expected and dreaded burst of fire never came. Instead, I could make out motion of some sort in the 'Mech's canopy. I boosted my console screen's magnification, zooming in on the target. I could see the Kurita 'Mech's canopy clearly now. The transparency was dark, too dark for me to see inside, but I could make out the long, wildly thrashing shapes of two arms, hands twisted into fists, pounding against the canopy from the inside. Once, for an instance, I glimpsed a face against the transparency, mouth gaping in unheard screams, eyes starting from their sockets... The cloud of ice crystals around the shattered head grew. The thrashing grew slower, then stopped entirely. I had my Shadow Hawk standing by then. I'd had an idea of trying to help... but there was no time to do anything. Didn't the Dragon's pilot have a helmet? Had it been damaged? Or had he simply panicked and tried to claw his way through solid armored transplas when his air started blasting into space? I felt a thin, cold flutter across my heart. That could have been me... My radio was out, but Colonel Christie gestured his intent clearly enough as I helped his battered Wolverine to its feet. Retreat I remember being furious at the time, feeling tempted to ignore the order and push on to the objective... but training and discipline and common sense took over in time. I realized later that retreat was by then the only option open to us. The Kurita forces had been waiting for us. The gun emplacement would have spotted us while we were still five klicks out across the mare, giving the Combine forces time to move into position. We'd lost Feodor, his Griffin savaged by crossfire from the Dragon and the emplacement... and O'Hanrahan was wounded, his Stinger badly shot up by a scrap he'd had with a pair of Kurita light 'Mechs. We had to leave Feodor in the wreckage of his Griffin and double-time back across the mare. We'd destroyed two enemy 'Mechs and damaged two others, as well as knocked out the gun emplacement... but our surprise had been lost. How many 'Mechs remained up there above that rockwall? How many more emplacements? Even if we'd managed to destroy every Kurita 'Mech on Gordo already, how long would it be before Kurita DropShips summoned by the C3 the moment we'd been sighted showed up with a company or two of reinforcements? Or a squadron of Slayers or Shilones? We spent that whole, long run back across the mare with that horrible prickle between your shoulder blades that has you convinced an enemy fighter is going to come winging down out of your six at any moment, lasers and missile launchers blazing. No, the mission had been blown the instant that gun emplacement fired at us. We were lucky the five of us made it back to Captain Forrest's Leopard, lucky we were able to lift without being attacked by Kurita fighters. And by the time we were in space again, we'd had the word for a general retreat. The Combine's defenses over Ramsau were just too strong. To press the attack down to the surface with space controlled by enemy fighters--and watched by the Gordo C3 post--would have been to invite utter and complete disaster. I learned a thing or two, though. I learned something about the thin edge of chance in battle, where Intel's failure and the location of one gun emplacement made the difference between victory and defeat. I learned something about my own mortality when I saw that Dragon pilot die... while my better than 4-million Cb Shadow Hawk--and my own life--were saved by a wad of chewing gum. But maybe the lesson that drove itself home the hardest was a reevaluation of us, and of war. Man's constant warfare takes on cosmic proportions, sometimes. This war has gone on year after year for centuries, shows no sign of ever ending, has ravaged thousands of worlds, turned men into either animals or corpses by the billions... Void around us, it's brought us to the point where we can casually contemplate a raid designed to threaten ten million people with starvation and think of it as a stroke of strategic brilliance! And yet the Universe remains the coldest, deadliest, most implacable enemy of all. I remember the sight of those thrashing arms against the cockpit transparency of the dying Dragon still, late nights, when I awake from a nightmare streaming sweat. What was it that changed me? A moment before, I had been trying to kill a nameless, faceless man or woman who had been trying to kill me first. An instant later, I was watching that person die... and dragging my 'Mech to its feet to help. Maybe then I realized that my enemy wasn't that helpless, dying pilot, but the universe that was strangling him with the implacable ruthlessness of physics. Facing men like myself in BattleMechs is one thing. Facing the cold and dark and unrelenting universe is something quite different. Never have I felt so vulnerable as when I sat there, encased within the mightiest war machine ever devised by Man, listening to my approaching death. Or when I realized that a piece of chewing gum was all that stood between life and a horrible, gasping extinction. The universe, it seems, is not impressed by Man's prowess in war or by his ability to build incredible weapons of destruction. Chewing gum? Perhaps, in the long run, Man's one advantage of the universe isnot his inventions-but his inventiveness. Editor's Note: 'MechWarriors interested in simulating BattleTech combat in vacuum environments are directed to Optional Rules Variant 0103-B-BattleMech Combat In Vacuum-found on page 51 of this issue of Battle Technology. Future issues of BattleTechnology will extend the range of environments possible for BattleTech encounters, including worlds with extreme temperatures and worlds with poisonous or corrosive atmospheres. Back to BattleTechnology 3 Table of Contents Back to BattleTechnology List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1988 by Pacific Rim Publishing. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com