Chapter 9:
Deadly Embrace
(cont...)

The autocannon’s throaty roar could be heard even in the shielded confines of the cockpit. Connor Sinclair held into the trigger for an exceptionally long burst, risking the slim chance of a weapon jam against eviscerating the enemy ’Mech. The depleted-uranium slugs raked jagged furrows across the back of the Vulture, starting at its left hip and ending just short of the right shoulder. Armor parted like eggshells smashed by a hammer, raining metal shards to the ground as the furious assault chewed deeply into the interior. Golden fire belched out in a tremendous gout as the reactor’s physical shielding simply ceased to exist. The Vulture exploded, its backwash of furious energies melting another half ton of armor from the front of Sinclair’s Thor and driving it back a few paces.

Its companion Shadow Cat fared little better, though it did have time for one final volley. The dual large lasers cut with ruby knives, one of them worrying Sinclair’s short-range missile launcher into a ruined, half-melted mass and the other finishing the star commander’s earlier work by cutting free his right arm at the elbow joint. The Thor lurched to the left, keeping its balance as Sinclair’s neurohelmet fed the lieutenant’s own sense of balance down into the gyro. A light touch on the control stick corrected the final tremor to the machine’s stance.

Then the Sunder’s PPC reached down the range to tear through armor and cripple the Shadow Cat’s gyro. While the Jaguar ’Mech staggered about, the MechWarrior inside had all of a second to stare back into the wide bore of a gauss rifle before the nickel-ferrous slug tore through the head and into the cockpit, smashing it in. It dropped next to the smoking ruins of Sinclair’s victim, out of the fight but definitely salvageable.

"Bloody hell!"

Alerted by her yell, Connor had time to twist the Thor around to see the canopy on Epona’s Shadow Cat blow away. Her command chair rocketed up into the air on a short jet of flame, leaving behind her doomed ’Mech. The enemy Thor had not quite cleared the commando’s reach, and so had faced off against the two lighter machines. It had managed to put a gauss slug directly through Epona’s missile ammunition bin and on into the fusion reactor. The explosion that ripped her OmniMech to pieces followed right on the heels of her safe ejection. The ejected seat deployed a light parafoil at its apex, gliding Epona away from the battlefield for a safe landing.

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