Sgt. Golem: Royal Mech Hussar - Stubs Soon!

Tamara watched Angelica and Veronica head out. As Sam and the others started to dig in back in the woods, Tamara and Eva retraced their steps to their own mechs. Tamara’s heart raced. Soon she might be facing off against enemy snipers again.

“Should we take some of this gear off?” Eva asked, looking at the heavy bags festooning her mech.

Tamara shook her head. "No, we don't know how long we're going to be detached. Up here in the mountains, it's easy to get separated, and we don't want to be without blankets and extra fuel."

"Okay," Eva agreed.

"How are you at mountain climbing?"

"I grew up in the mountains, remember?" Eva grinned. “And when I was up at the fort, I’d take him out for a stroll when the weather was nice.” She slapped her mech’s flank. “No problem.”

"Excellent. I'm an open steppe girl myself, but I spent a lot of time in the Caucasus with the Russians."

Tamara checked the last strap. Satisfied it was tight, she turned to Eva and gave her mech a once-over. One strap she yanked down tighter, securing the loose end. “Looks good.”

"Thanks," Eva said.

"Okay, mount up."

Tamara leapt to the shoulder of her mech with a magically enhanced jump. Both mechs straightened up. Tamara turned and led them back the way they had come, down the rough road they’d spent so many painstaking hours climbing in the first place. "I'm pretty sure I saw a better path up here a little way back."

Seventy-five meters or so back, they came to a watercourse. Barely a trickle, and it was filled with large boulders, but the slope was less steep here.

"Alright, let's give this a try." Tamara started making her way up along the edge of the boulder field, alternately using boulders and trees as handholds.

It took a lot of focus to give her mech such complex orders. Pine branches lashed at them, and Tamara shifted behind the head of her mech and dropped down. There was a saddle there and handholds specifically that gave the rider a better, more sheltered seat when her mech was configured for flight.

"Oh, that's pretty handy. I wondered how that worked," Eva called from a few meters back.

Tamara glanced back and was instantly jealous. Eva's mech was having no problem bounding up the slope behind her.

"I usually don't use it unless I'm flying. You don't have as good a view from here when the mech's walking." She looked back forward and peered around the side of the head. "Plus, it's harder to shield with all this metal in my face."

Eva laughed. "So, your robot really can fly, then?"

"Well, it used to. The flight system was damaged back in Poland, and they removed it for me." Alexander and Sergeant Golem had stowed the broken equipment on the hauler after they had removed it from her mech. The flight harness was intended to be detachable, so she had hopes that one day this mech would fly again.

The watercourse wound steeply up the mountain slope. In some places, it opened out and the walking was easy. In others, the rocks were steep, and the trees came right down to their ravine. Tamara had to burn a lot of istota to keep her mech bond strong enough for the complex actions. Being in the saddle helped because she didn't have to think about her own balance as much.

"What kind of gun is that you’re carrying? The smaller one.

Tamara glanced back again. Eva sat on the shoulder of her mech, apparently effortlessly maintaining her seat as it bounded up the slope. She quickly focused back on the task of climbing. Here, the slope was so steep she had to use a couple of trees as ladder rungs to work her mech up.

She was careful not to put all of its weight on any one trunk. Many of the trees creaked ominously, and frequently she unleashed showers of pebbles down below. She almost apologized, but Eva made this climbing look so damn easy Tamara wasn't sorry to make it a little harder for her.

When the going got a little easier, she answered Eva’s question. "It's an anti-mech rifle. It is small, for a mech gun.” Tamara laughed. "It was designed for infantry to fight mechs, It's pretty light for real mech-to-mech fighting. But it's light, and that's good when I'm flying."

"Oh, I see," Eva said.

"But what I really like about it..." Tamara broke off as she ducked under some branches that whipped past her mech's head. There was going to be so much pine sap on this thing it would take her weeks to clean it all off. Maybe Sergeant Golem would assign some privates to punishment detail, helping her wash it. "I can use it myself when I'm dismounted."

The rifle was massive by human soldier standards and was typically used on a tripod by anyone that wasn't a Hussar unit. Or Sergeant Golem, she thought, remembering how he had handled it easily during the battle after they first met. If she burned istota, though, she could manage it.

Today she had the rifle strapped to her mech’s back, but also carried a Polish autocannon, the long-barreled 35mm that she had been using in Budapest. She was rapidly falling in love with that thing. It had the rate of fire of a short-barreled, heavier caliber cannon, like a six-pounder, but the range and accuracy a sniper appreciated. The best of both worlds, she thought.

Crack!

Roots snapped next to her, and her mech's right hand shifted. The tree it was holding onto was letting go. A shower of rocks and dirt cascaded past. She desperately shifted her grip, praying the tree under her mech's left hand didn't give way too as she looked for another purchase.

The mech shifted two meters to the left along the sheer face. With a roar and a crackle of breaking branches, the tree shifted and toppled. Its roots had ripped mostly from the mountainside, but the tangle of them caught on boulders and another trunk, and the tree remained there, precariously wedged on the mountainside.

Tamara hung there a moment, panting heavily and waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Her mech dangled precariously from its new purchase as she calmed down.

"Shift more to your left. There's another handhold just a little farther over. Reach for it, and I'll tell you when you're close."

Tamara didn't answer but did as Eva had suggested. Soon, she had her mech back with secure purchase.

"Why don't I go first?" Eva suggested.

"Sure," Tamara said. She didn't trust herself to say more. Her heart still pounded in her chest.

Eva's mech bounded past her with unnerving ease.

"Just don't take a path I can't follow," Tamara called.

After they swapped positions, they made better time. Eva swarmed up the slope like a spider, going from tree to tree with unnerving fluidity. Twice, Tamara had to ask her to slow down, but watching where Eva's mech grabbed and where it put its feet helped Tamara speed up her own pace considerably.

They topped out in the sunlight on a rocky slope that jutted out from the shoulder of the mountain. Here, they had a magnificent view of the surrounding country. The narrow gorge far below was cleanly visible. At this angle, they couldn't see down it, but they had a great view of the clear area in front of it where the road came out and turned. More importantly, they had views of the surrounding hillside. They couldn't see farther up the valley than the gorge itself, but they could see all the slopes and outcroppings that overwatch on the gorge.

"Do we just wait?" Eva asked.

"Now we hold very still and search," Tamara said. "Keep your mech as still as possible."

"What are we looking for?" Eva asked.

"Snipers."

"I thought we were being snipers."

Tamara laughed softly. She didn't take her eyes off the terrain in front of them, continually scanning rocks and trees, looking for the slightest flicker of movement.

"We are, but one of the most important roles of a sniper is to defeat enemy snipers."

"That seems backward somehow."

Gunfire erupted from the valley below. Tamara heard Eva shift.

“Don’t! Don’t look. Keep focused where I told you to look.

Tamara herself kept intently studying an area of rocks on an outcropping to the northeast. If she had been coming over the ridge and trying to set up to cover the gorge entrance below, that would be a vantage point she would consider using. Since it was one of the more obvious ones, she would probably reject it in favor of somewhere else.

"They will do their job down there and we will do ours up here. Only a sniper can think like another sniper. A sniper looks around and sees the terrain and it automatically picks out where they would hide, what points of land have a good field of fire. We know where we would go, and so we know where to look for the enemy."

"Oh," Eva seemed to consider this. "I guess that makes sense. You mean like right here where we are?"

"That's right. We’re on one of the more obvious places for a sniper. That's why we're holding as still as we can. Someone will have a hard time making us out at a distance unless we move. The eye sees movement much better than it sees browns and greens blending in with more browns and greens.” She was also counting on any Russian snipers to be focused on the valley below and not looking for someone even higher than them.

“So that's what you're looking for, other snipers?"

"I'm looking for other positions where a sniper might be. First, I survey the whole area, deciding what the best points are. And then I keep looking at them, studying them carefully so that I can know every rock and shadow."

She was doing this as she said it. Had that shadow been there a moment before? Had she just seen it shift? She continued looking at her chosen rock patch intently. The echoes of gunfire from the valley below had faded away.

"If you study the likely places around, you can keep checking them. If something changes in one, you know there's probably someone there. Then you watch it closer and wait for them to make their move."

There, she was sure of it. A shadow in the rocks. 250 yards ahead and 30 feet lower than them.

"Can you see where I'm looking?" Tamara said softly without turning her head.

"That outcropping across from us?"

"No, slightly lower than that. Do you see that field of boulders on the side of the outcropping towards us?"

"Yes, I see it."

"Now, if you look at the top boulder, the biggest one right there at the top, and work your eyes down, one boulder, two boulder, three, you'll see a big shadowy patch to the left and below it. Can you see that?"

"Yes, I do."

"I want you to keep your eyes on that. Study it carefully."

"Is someone there?"

"Yes, at least one, maybe two. I saw one move a moment ago."

"What do we do?"

"We wait for them to make their move."

"Isn't that risky? We just let them take a shot?”

"If we fire blindly, we'll never know if we got them or not. If we shoot into that shadow, they'll know we're here, and they'll move somewhere else. They'll stay under cover from anything in this direction, and then they'll take a shot from somewhere else. No, you never take a shot unless you're absolutely certain of the kill."

"But doesn't that mean that they get the first shot?"

Tamara frowned. "Maybe."

All too often, it did mean letting them take the first shot at her own troops. But the alternative was to let the sniper get away. Then they would live to take many more shots at her own forces. And that wasn't acceptable.

"I want you to move as slow as you can and line up a shot on that location, but don't fire until I give the word."

Tamara focused on her own mech and shifted her own cannon around, easing it down bit by bit so as not to cause a flicker of movement. She knew from experience that even this far away, a mech suddenly changing position would catch the eye of an alert opponent. As her cannon eased down level toward the target, she realized she hadn’t seen Eva’s machine moving.

She looked over with the barest shift of her head and a flick of the eyes. It was moving, but incredibly slowly. The girl had impressive control over it. She almost said that Eva didn't need to move that slowly, but she didn't want her to misunderstand and speed up. Better to be too careful than not careful enough.

Slowly but surely, Eva's cannon came down and held position. She had a Maxim 1 pounder with a shorter barrel than Tamara's gun.

Tamara studied her aim. It was difficult to tell from off to one side, but it looked like it was roughly correct. They would find out soon enough.

Tamara thought she saw the barest hint of movement near that shadow and crack. A moment later, the sound of a rifle rolled down the canyon.

"Take the shot!" she said.

Even as she gave the command, she made a final adjustment to her own aim and commanded her mech to start its trigger squeeze. She always felt herself holding her breath when her mech took a shot, which was silly. Breath control was only critical for a human shooter, not when controlling a mech, even if she was crouched on its shoulder.

Boom, boom! Her own shot came a heartbeat after Eva's. She took a second shot immediately, shifting her aim just a little to bracket the area. If the first shot missed, the second one was going to spray shards of rock all through where the Russian sniper was hiding.

As soon as the second shot was away, Tamara eased smoothly but quickly behind her mech's shoulder and slipped down into the saddle on its back. Then she slid forward and cracked her eyes just barely over its left shoulder.

Dust rose from the boulders, drifting lazily in the still morning air. She watched carefully for a long minute and then another, but there was no sign of movement other than the drift of dust.

"Did we get him?" Eva asked.

"Well, they haven't taken a shot at us, so probably."

"What now? Should we go over and check?"

"Not yet. Patience is the sniper's greatest weapon."

And wait they did, long crawling minutes. For Tamara, this was a well-practiced ritual. She kept her breathing shallow, a relic of training in cold weather where the puffs of vapor from your exhale can give you away.

Eva stayed silent, and Tamara admired her patience. Perhaps they could make a sniper of her. “All right, stay here for a bit. Count to 200 and then follow me. If I draw any shots before you finish, I want you to empty your magazine into those rocks and then get undercover. I'll find you." She thought for a moment. "And if I haven't found you within half an hour, go back down the mountain."

Tamara slipped her mech back into the trees, working their way upslope and then around. The fold of the mountain made a horseshoe that took her around and behind the patch of rocks they'd shot at. She wanted to take her time and let the dictates of stealth set her pace. But the soldiers in the valley had a job to do, and they needed to know this position was clear. So instead, she moved swiftly and she made it in a few minutes.

From above and behind the rocks, she got a closer look at their quarry. A leg and an arm lay sprawled on the stone, sticking out of the shadows. The rest of the body was in the shadows or covered in gravel. Dead, without a doubt.

As she was studying their fallen foe, she caught a flicker of signal light, across the valley in the direction where Angelica and Veronica had gone. The saddle there was tree-clad, and someone, probably Angelica, was signaling from the shadows.

Tamara pulled out her own light gun and made her own report. When she had finished, she put the signal gun away in its small compartment and straightened up. Behind her, a massive mech loomed, and from Tamara’s heart leapt.

It was Eva. How had she snuck up on her so easily? Damn, that mech was scary.

"What now?" Eva asked.

"We'll see." Veronica and Tamara looked back across the valley and waited for orders. Far below, they could see Hungarian and Polish troops clearing bodies away from the road.