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[Hoaggie]

It was a game the clans like to play, putting captured Inner Sphere pilots in outdated mechs and sending them against their rookies so they could observe our tactics first hand. When they did it to us the first time I thought I was dreaming, but the nightmare was far too real. We must have been drugged because the last thing I remembered was drifting off in my cell. Without any preamble I was waking up in an already powered mech. I found myself in what appeared to be in a deep, dry, wadi network, the walls of the canyons were sun-bleached clay; the sky was thickly overcast and hung ominously close.

I must have been the last to wake up, because as my senses cleared I could hear calm voices reporting contact. I realized I knew the voices, they were my cell mates, I throttled up my mech to full and reported my status. The mech I was driving appeared to be a Hunchback variant, but the configuration was unfamiliar and there was no time to figure out what it was. The controls were close enough to standard, but sleek and battered by years of wear and tear, some of the displays were either not powered or non-functional, the most alarmingly missing were the sensor and damage displays. The functioning monitors only further served to disquiet me, they displayed a language I did not recognize, and weapons I could only guess at.

The sounds of explosions and flash of lasers in the sky guided me through the twists and turns of the wadi towards the combat. As I closed the distance, the voices of my lance mates were silenced one by one. When I arrived at the fray it was to alarmingly calm calls for assistance and status updates of the last friendly mech still operating. I rounded the final bend in the wadi to a sight of one sided annihilation; two friendly mechs were laying in shallow smoking craters, the other was a battered looking Spider, using his jump jets to frantically dodge the enemy fire around corners and over piles of debris. I engaged his pursuer with all of my weapons, partly to figure out what they were, mostly in a desperate bid to kill him and not face and unknown number of enemy alone. It appeared that I had two lasers on each arm, and some type of close range missile launchers on each torso next to the cockpit.

Realizing I was trying to save him, the Spider circled a small hill and drew his pursuer directly into my line of fire. The enemy was directly behind him, I fired my missile banks directly at the Spider, he saw it coming and dodged, allowing them to impact directly into the enemy mech, staggering it. As the smoke cleared I got a look at the mech for the first time, it was smaller than mine and a model I had never seen, it’s cockpit oddly centered in its chest. I fired my odd sounding lasers again and again at the cockpit, going for a kill shot, but it charged directly at me.

What I assumed were heat warning blared and flashed in my cockpit, as the mech closed within spitting distance, I guessed its path, it was ignoring me, going for the kill on my teammate. I shot my left arm out catching it and spinning me half way around with his arrested momentum, we were face to face, the only thing holding me up was my grip on his right shoulder. I hit what I hoped was the shutdown override button and fired my missiles point blank. The flash was blinding and the explosion deafening, but through my blurred vision I could see that his armor was somehow still intact. I drew my right fist back and pivoted, then slammed the fingers of my fist into the edged of this cockpit glass, shattering it in a killing blow. I closed the hand actuator and withdrew a fist full of destroyed components and the broken remains of a pilot. Keeping the hand locked in a fist, I returned it to the default position at my side, still clutching its grim trophy. I heard a cry of dismay and frustration, quickly followed by a horrific impact of weapons against armor.

I turned to see the friendly mech disintegrating in a shower of sparks and molten metal, on the far side of him I saw them. Four other mechs, the rest of the dead pilot’s star, I had just enough time for my mind to recognize the front profile of two Warhawks and a Diashi before they changed their focused fire to me. I turned, hoping I could maneuver into cover, but before I knew it my mech’s gyro was destroyed, the impact of my fall jarred through my entire body. Smoke filled the cockpit. My fingers could not work the emergency release of my harness, as the blackness engulfed me I realized the assault mechs must have been watching the entire time.