The first round blew a large chunk of rock away from the boulder the shooter was using for cover and the resulting storm of shrapnel spooked them. When he stood to change position, Jada’s second round caught him squarely in the chest and sent his body sailing off the ledge and down into the canyon. She wasn’t sure if the round had punched through his armor, though it mattered little, as the fall was certainly a lethal one. The fact that the shooter had allowed her to flush him out with a single shot indicated that while they were acceptably armed and armored, the enemy were certainly low-rent gunslingers and a far cry from the professional mercenaries that were about to descend upon them.
A second explosion erupted back and to the left as Mors fired his rocket. Moments later, Ranec’s machine gun opened up on a shooter on the far wall of the canyon.
It seemed that the Basepholon forces understood something of strategy and had identified this canyon as a prime avenue for approach by any would-be attackers. However, recon data indicated that there were five such canyons leading towards the facility, following the natural, however bizarre, ebb and flow of the landscape. Likely, that was why there was such a large ink-rock deposit in that spot as the facility was poised just above the place where all of the canyons converged. Most of the rest of the canyons were likely to be similarly protected, though as of yet, the resistance was modest at best.
As if to argue Jada’s musings, the ATVs rounded a corner and found themselves facing a machine gun nest perched atop a pre-fabricated barricade. Without hesitation, Jada strafed the barricade with gunfire as Poe hit the accelerator and cut sharply to the left.
As the ATV sped at a steep angle towards the barricade, Poe thumbed his smoke, and from the back of the vehicle, several canisters blew open and began belching forth clouds of thick purple smoke.
Jada’s swift reaction on the trigger had suppressed the enemy for several precious seconds, and by the time the gunner on the barricade managed to start firing, the ATV had all but clogged the canyon with smoke. The gunner attempted to track Poe’s ATV with fire, but the vehicle was nearly clear of the field of fire as the merc reached the far wall and was enveloped in smoke.
Without a clear target, the gunner and several riflemen began firing blindly into the purple chaos. A number of rounds found their mark upon vehicle and body armor, but were turned away by the superior technology.
Seconds later, rockets streaked out of the smoke from launchers wielded by Ranec and Mors to slam into the barricade. Their hits were precise, with Ranec taking out the machine gun nest and Mors blasting a hole through the barricade. Jada, like the others, had toggled her HUD to thermal, and was using her mounted weapon to pick off shooters one by one.
The gunslingers hadn’t caught on to the fact that the Dire Swords could see through the smoke, and that it was their muzzle flares that gave them away. Berg and Strega’s ATVs sped forward as their gunners racked their tubes while Poe and Jada kept the pressure on the barricades with her mounted weapon.
“We’re through!” said Ranec in the comm-bead moments later, and Poe steered the ATV past the smoke and through the hole Mors had made with his rocket.
When they cleared the barricade, Jada saw that it had indeed been a pre-fabricated mobile barricade, complete with a gun nest mount and several catwalks that led to firing steps. The sentries, now dead or dying, had one large supply container just behind the barricade that likely doubled as their sleeping quarters in between shifts.
Berg and Strega had already continued hurtling down the canyon towards the facility that loomed ever closer. Jada stood up while she drew her sidearm once more, then turned to aim it behind her. Just as she suspected, two gunslingers emerged from the container, neither in armor and looking disheveled from being awakened so rudely. They had their rifles up and began to fire just as Jada did the same. Their fire raked across the ATV, though as before, the rounds were deflected by the superior grade of the vehicle’s armor. Jada’s shots pounded into the unarmored bodies of the two gunslingers and sent them spinning away in a wash of blood as the heavy magnum rounds tore into them.
“Good catch,” nodded Poe as he sped up to follow the other vehicles that were already engaged in a firefight with another machine gun nest. They took out another anti-air battery, while Jada returned to her seat. “I took that for supply only.”
“It’s probably been awhile since you were a cheap grunt,” smiled Jada as she gripped the machine gun and began scanning for targets as the giant smoke stacks grew closer and closer. “I can still relate.”
Moments later, their ATV joined with the others at the mouth of the canyon, and Jada was able to see the ink-rock facility for the first time. It was a massive complex, made from pre-fabricated interlocking pieces that could be hauled through the void and put together planetside. Such facilities were meant to be temporary, and in many ways were designed for just this sort of rapid extraction mission. Usually, they were built and then abandoned once the resources being reaped were exhausted since the cost of salvaging such a facility was usually not worth the thin profit margin, whereas a more permanent structure would be a prime haul.
In all her years as a salvage marine, Jada had never once been ordered to scrap a pre-fab, though there had been at least two occasions where she and the other Reapers had been ordered to ‘forcibly relocate’ squatters simply because they were trespassing.
The workers and warriors of Basepholon were trespassing, though they had come ready to fight about the particulars. Around the series of rectangular buildings that comprised the compound, there were more pre-fab barricades, dotted with gun nests, and Jada could see many dozens of gunslingers scrambling about the compound.
Members of the Merchants Militant called the unlicensed freelancers ‘gunslingers’ less as a way of insulting them than to differentiate between themselves and the freelance soldiers. Without any sort of quality control or contracting oversight, there was no guarantee of integrity or effectiveness when one hired a gunslinger. However, the assurances of Merchant Militant contractors made them prohibitively expensive for many of the smaller companies and individual ventures, and so the gunslingers never lacked for work.
As Jada watched them hastily prepare to defend themselves against the Dire Swords, she was certain that to underestimate the gunslingers was a mistake. They were no less eager to survive the coming battle, and she herself recalled what it had been like being outgunned by elite mercs.
“Dropships en route, ETA two minutes,” came the voice of Womack across the comm-bead. “Let’s soften them up before the hammer drops.”
The three ATVs sped forward as each of the gunners shouldered the last of their tube launchers. Jada took deep breaths as she steadied herself in spite of the steep angle of approach while the ATV raced down the mouth of the canyon and directly towards the front of the complex.
There was no available cover as the canyons all emptied into a wide basin over which the compound was built. Any number of snipers, gunners, and cannons could be directed at them. It was because of these sorts of chaotic and seemingly insane tactics that the Dire Swords earned their reputation. There was about to be so much action on the ground that it was unlikely anyone in that compound would notice the dropships descending from the stratosphere.