Descent into Mayhem

CHAPTER SIX - FIRST BLOOD

"Looks like it's going to be one of those missions, boss," he remarked as the stick-figures beside the trucks began to raise a communications antenna.

"Moose, Deadhand, standby. I will establish a link with Ebony Tower," she declared.

Whatever his misgivings, Deadhand nevertheless opened his tactical eye and focused it on the clearing. Each vehicle had appeared to carry a driver and two workers and, factoring in the buggy, that put about fifty eight civvies on site. The vehicles were parked as neatly as beer bottles upon a wooden fence.

"Any chance of taking prisoners, boss?" Deadhand inquired.

It took a while for her to answer, and when she did her voice had steel in it.

"Moose, suppression operation initiates at the end of this minute. You will launch an EDI streaker at the vehicles and initiate frequency jamming. You will set pulsed laser platform for anti-personnel and neutralize all indigenous persons. Deadhand, you will set your platform to anti-material and kill the vehicles' engine blocks. Avoid the fuel tanks, we don't want to send out any smoke signals. You will then join us in anti-personnel activities. All fleeing civilians are valid targets. Those who refrain from flight and are cooperative are to be taken prisoner. Inform if you copy, over."

There was a long pause as they digested the communication, and fifteen seconds before the end of that minute both grudgingly copied it.

Deadhand cursed as he set his weapon to intermediate strength and shouldered it. He cursed again as his scope roved over the excited civilians, before resting his reticule on a vehicle's principal heat source. It was the stationary buggy; any fool would want to neutralize it first.

The moment the mission clock added another minute to its elapsed time, a missile streaked up over the treetops and then swerved aggressively towards the parked trucks. It detonated at a respectable height above its targets, the report insignificant compared to the electromagnetic pulse it produced. As soon as Deadhand's sensors detected the pulse, he fired upon the buggy and the engine incandesced and disintegrated, the vehicle doing a jumpy half-turn before abruptly bursting into flames. Fat smoke billowed from the wreckage, obscuring the trucks behind it and rising into the sky.

Oh, hell no, he thought.

He immediately directed his platform to the left and began to fire upon the vehicles' engines one at a time, striving to destroy as many as possible before any more could become cloaked in smoke. Fifteen trucks were soon neutralized, but the rest became obscured and civilians began to run towards them.

"Deadhand, you dummkopf, shift your position and kill those vehicles!" Lippard snapped over the comm.

The Suit pilot leaned forwards and took off at speed, footpads colliding against the earth as the shouts in the clearing began to turn into screams. The cracks of low-powered pulse weapons suddenly increased in frequency, and Deadhand became aware that Lippard had changed her platform's settings to automatic fire. He maneuvered out of the trees and pounded into the clearing, and the civilians wailed at his appearance as if the day of reckoning had arrived. Ignoring the scurrying figures, he moved to his left, trying to gain line-of-sight with the intact vehicles. The smoke enveloped them, however, and so he straddled the trail from the east and began to close the distance. The remaining mobile Suits came into view, Lippard's unit striding and firing at the fleeing natives while Moose kept his distance, picking targets off from the plantation's other side.

A shuddering truck leapt through the smoke and sped towards him, and without further thought Deadhand opened fire. The vehicle promptly gained entertainment value, swerving brusquely before it collided against the opposite side of the trail's drainage ditch, and it then caught fire as pulse after pulse of lasered light disintegrated its front compartment and the people inside it. He fired one shot too many and the beam struck a panel above the fuel deposit, sending a shower of sparks through it. Flames enveloped the vehicle and set the nearest trees alight.