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“Contact, one Locust –looks like pirates,” Grubb offered as another flight of LRMs blew out the garage that housed one of the company’s Pegasus hovercraft. Grubb blinked away the outline of the blast that was momentarily burned into his retinas. One bright green bolt flew past his Cicada ’s left “wing,” while the other struck it dead center just below the cockpit. It came barreling at him straight on, its spindly legs rapidly closing the distance to where it could fire its medium lasers. A Locust, judging by the silhouette and the tonnage range his radar estimated. Suddenly, a target appeared on Grubb’s sensors. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He needn’t have bothered as more LRMs rained on his outpost’s position, it became clear they were targeting the facilities and not his ‘Mech.
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“Unkown,” Grubb replied, throwing his Cicada into a trot while throttling up and down to throw off any potential attacks. “Get to cover, two-four, help is on the way,” came Cochrane’s calm and commanding voice. A few missiles stuck at his ‘Mech’s long legs, pockmarking the relatively thin armor protecting his 40-ton machine. “This is beta two-four, I’m under attack!” Grubb kicked his Cicada ’s engine to the point where it almost became louder than the fly. The fly in his cockpit was absolutely deafening.īut not as deafening as the sudden, blaring alarm of incoming missiles. So far it was all quiet on the western front, according to captain Cochrane, but Grubb didn’t agree. It didn’t help that garrison duty was the worst sort of contract–hours upon hours of boredom with the smallest chance of intense terror should the planet ever actually be raided by bandits. Grubb swatted at the fly away for the umpteenth time and checked his sensors. Its high-pitched whine somehow managed to drown out the rumbling of his Cicada ’s fusion engine, and unfortunately for Grubb, it had developed a taste for human sweat. The Cochrane’s Cavaliers operated throughout the periphery with all its weird and bothersome wildlife, but Grubb had never experienced a fly as annoying as the kind found on Waypoint.
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There was a fly in corporal Grubb’s cockpit.
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