Merrick registered something wrong a split second before his computer screamed an alarm. In his helmet came the echoes of alarms going off in the cockpits of the other ’Mechs, and mingled curses from the pilots, but by then Merrick’s Rokurokubi was mired up to its right knee, his internal temp had spiked, and then, when he jerked his eyes from his HUD indicators to his status screens, he knew he was in big trouble, and how.

“What…?” Merrick yanked back on his primary throttle and powered up to backpedal. He heard the rrrr-rrrr of his gyro and the squall of metal grinding against metal, but he wasn’t moving; frac it all, he wasn’t moving…!

“Chikushou!” someone cursed—the Catapult? The Pack Hunter? Whoever it was sounded more pissed-off than anxious. “I’m not getting traction here.”

“Throttle back.” Equally vexed, Merrick wrestled with his throttle. What a nuisance, and no wonder the valley was barren of Fury troops. “There’s got to be firm ground somewhere, just throttle back and we’ll…” He trailed off as his mind raced through a new calculus: No troops, and no firm ground, and I’m pretty heavy… no wonder those kono yaro didn’t hang around…

He’d not turned off his external feed, and now Merrick’s ears pricked with the unmistakable pock-pock-pock of weapons’ fire, and then, just as he moved to slap the feed into silence, a whistling shriek as missiles—the Schmitt, yeah, gotta be…–arced in and boomed against his right chest. The sound nearly cracked his brain in two, and Merrick gasped as the explosion rocked its way into the pit of his stomach, like a punch to the solar plexus. His ’Mech wobbled from its forward-thirty tilt, and Merrick’s vision swam as the scenery skewed, slewed sideways and then he was looking at blue sky and the great yellow ball of Ancha’s sun as he overcompensated, rearing back. Instinctively, he jammed down on the Rokurokubi’s left leg, straightening it ramrod stiff. The Rokurokubi’s seventy-five tons shifted, and then horror bloomed in Merrick’s chest like a black rose, and he was cold and hot and dripping thick, oily sweat—because he was stuck fast now, boyo, no doubt about it, the legs of his ’Mech splayed in a gymnast’s split.

Instantly, his temperature soared; his HUD was alive with winking indicators, pulsing like angry red fireflies; and his cockpit filled with the grinding of actuator assemblies in the Rokurokubi’s knees and ankles. Then he saw them: through a gray haze of weapons’ fire, the Fury’s men bobbing, weaving, darting, boiling along the bluff like termites in the rotted guts of an old log.

The Catapult was left and a little ahead and he saw that the machine was in trouble… no, no, not just trouble. Though its autocannon spit defiant uranium slugs at the bluff and that particular ’Mech was tons lighter than his, the Catapult was mired on its back-canted chicken legs nearly to its gyroscope housing.

Then Merrick saw puffs of smoke out of the corner of his left eye, and his eyes jerked left to right… Incoming! “Look out!” Merrick yelled, and pivoted his torso right in a wild, desperate arc, simultaneously squeezing off a sizzling blue bolt of PPC fire to intercept. But he was too slow; the hissing tongues of missile fire licked empty space, and then there was a series of huge ka-BOOMS Merrick heard, even though his external mike was off, as the missiles scored hits to the Catapult’s right shoulder. The Catapult reeled—and then its twin racks of fifteen missiles ignited. First the right, and then a few milliseconds later the left, and Merrick blinked, the orange-yellow fireballs of exploding munitions searing his brain. The ground shook hard enough to send granite boulders crashing down the bluff. Merrick imagined the high wails of men hurtling to their deaths: some slow as they sank ever deeper into the creeping ring of ooze that sucked at their legs, their arms, and filled their lungs; and others quickly, as their bodies broke open like water balloons, spraying crimson founts of hot blood and ruptured flesh.

And then the concussive force of the multiple blasts slammed into Merrick’s ’Mech. As the machine staggered left, Merrick jerked right, overcompensated, and then felt his ’Mech cant at a weird, absurd angle. He was falling, he was going to…!

No, no, nononononono! Merrick had just enough time to register the world turning on a slow, lazy axis, the sky sliding by to be replaced by a view of the cliff just ahead, and then the Catapult, its torso enveloped in a halo of roiling smoke and fire, and then the rush of black muck toward his face… Merrick screamed, and flexed his right arm, jamming the point of the Rokurokubi’s elbow into the quagmire. His cockpit hovered twenty meters above the bog, and the move bought him time, and that was all.

A muffled WHUMP and Merrick flinched as the Catapult blew apart at its core, like the collapsing heart of a dying sun. Gobbets of molten armor and endosteel rained in a fiery storm, and a piece of the Catapult–Merrick was never sure what—came rushing at Merrick’s canopy, and he flinched, turning away. There was a BANG! The canopy didn’t just crack, or break open like an egg; it imploded. Shards of ferroglass showered over Merrick, and he was helpless to avoid the glittering, jagged edges. He heard the hollow bock-bock-bock of ferroglass banging into his neurohelmet, and then he wished he’d had an older neurohelmet because the skin of his cheeks was flayed open, and he felt the hot spray of blood slick his neck. Glass punched his chest; his cooling vest burst, gray fluid spraying, turning a dirty, noxious slate as it mingled with Merrick’s blood. He screamed as one shard, sharp as a knife and long as a spear, skewered his right shoulder, slicing through red, quivering meat and bone, and pinned him to his pilot’s couch. Pain exploded in his chest, and he let out a long, wailing roar of agony.

The only reason he didn’t die right then and there was because a man’s heart is on the left. Simple as that.

Merrick’s vision sparkled orange, went red and then black as a wave of nausea clogged his throat. Gagging, Merrick tried taking shallow breaths, praying that, God, please, please… But every breath was a fresh agony, and then it was harder to breathe, like trying to stuck air through a straw from thirty meters under and now he tasted something brackish and salty, something sludgy and thick pooling in the floor of his mouth, and he vomited out a spray of bright red blood.

Got the lung. Merrick labored to pull in air. Lung’s been hit, I can’t breathe… He tried not to panic, but he was drowning and suffocating at the same time; he could feel the blood boiling out of his mouth and going down his throat…

You’re going to die right here, right now, if you don’t focus!

Okay, okay; he tried marshaling his addled thoughts, grappling for some mental handhold. His cockpit, yes, his cockpit was breached; the stench of the bog billowed in, mixing with the acrid tang of disintegrating armor and spent munitions. A goddamned piece of ferroglass tacked him to his couch like a note to corkboard. Sounds roared into his breached cockpit; the air was alive with the screams of men, the hollow whump-whump-whump of weapons’ fire. Something very bright, very red cut seams in the air directly over his head, and then he heard fresh screams, caught the unmistakable oily smell of roast meat.

The Pack Hunter. His thoughts were sluggish, slow as molasses on a cold morning. Yes, the Pack Hunter was behind and to the right; it must be directing fire, lasers, at the ridge. But the machine hadn’t moved to flank him so he knew that the Pack Hunter was stuck, too.

Then he heard voices. Somehow the Fury’s men had a way to go in and out of the valley; soon they’d fall upon him, hacking him and his fallen ’Mech to shreds the way holovids always showed cavemen swarming over a fresh kill. He braced himself because, by God, he was a warrior and he’d fight until his last breath…