The snowtroop infantry racing to stay in pace with the remaining AT-DP’s thought the jetpacks an evil. The Mandalorians mocked them, bursting from cover with a jet-scream like an opening ramjet nozzle, hosing indiscriminate blaster and rocket fire. When they dropped, it was always at an angle that discretely placed a half dozen thickly set pine trunks between themselves and the still advancing Imperial column. ‘Cold-bombs’, special plastique mines that required little besides a brief battery spark to detonate, were laid at randomized, lethal intervals in the snow drifts. Some not triggered by plodding troop were remotely signalled, burying any infantry unlucky enough to be downhill from the blast to the waist with packed ice. Mortar positions were erected, fired twice, upended and moved ahead of the Imperial advance in timed intervals. If the Imperial infantry and armour company could be delayed, through attrition or even flinched into pausing, it’d buy time for a relief force.
Then, the consolidated soldiery of the New Mandalorian Army would show them true slaughter.
One jetpack fighter, dressed in a garish menagerie of family colours, leaped and arced high over a copse of burning pines. DT-1963 depressed a control yoke stud; a three-second canon burst led before the Mando, shearing off their helmet, arm, and cooking off their fuel pack. Six-Three and DT-1945 eased off their bike throttles, taking their speeders on a high crisscrossing circuit over the patchy forest canopy. A pair of fighters jetted up and clung gamely to sagging pine tops, trying to wrestle with pistols and wildly swaying timber. Six-Three dashed close, drawing fire, Four-Five following behind on a parallel that chased fire into the enemy’s unguarded spines.
They chased the enemy to the ground. Four-One, a shimmer of black phantom armour a hundred meters up the gradated forest tract, shot one Mandalorian through their hip. They dropped a primed fragmentary grenade across their stomach, reducing themselves and a second jetpack fighter to a screen of misty gore. She shouldered her E-11S, drove fast for the next vantage, and killed again.
Zeta-Lead, Six-Two, and Seven-Nine assaulted from the north-west. The heavy DLT-19D flared in Six-Two’s gloves, sawed another pair of Mandalorians through at the waistline. Seven-Nine paused with the weight of his Smart Rocket launcher, painting a trio abandoning their mortar cannon. Fired. The rocket spun free, whistled through a perfect gap in the pine boughs, hurtled into their flying midst and obliterated the trio mid-air. Anjin coolly picked off a shooter mounted on a hunting blind thirty metres ahead and turned the muzzle on a single fighter holding desperately to cover behind a moss-haired boulder.
“DP-3, check fire, hold pattern,” He prompted over the command link.
“Sir.”
The walker’s solitary heavy chin-gun quieted and cooled. Snowtroopers paused in advancing and dug in to the snow hills, propping up their own weighty armaments, uneasy with the sudden, wintry stillness.
The Mandalorians had engaged the company in running firefights for the better part of a long, torturous hour. One hundred blooded Mando’ade, vetted for service, integrity, and loyalty to the clan writ of Vizla, reduced to a dozen unfortunate stragglers. In the change of a handful of short, ruinous minutes, Squadron Zeta-1 had further strangled their numbers to a single captain. When the DP’s cannon paused, silence like the season’s snow fall descended over the tight clearing. The last jetpacker turned at an inexplicable sense of close company.
Anjin stood near, ten paces away. Disarmed, with the exception of a long commando fighting knife in his grip. The tall spectres of Zeta-One hemmed in at the clearing’s stony edge. He toed a line through the snow. And waited.
“...Name?” The Mandalorian growled through his face-plate. He brusquely unbuckled a set of hip-holsters, piled them with a spent verpine-carbine, and empty ammunition bandoleers.
“You do not need it,” Said Anjin.
“Very well... Nemo. Nemo, I am Horus,” The Mandalorian replied. He drew a stout beskad sword from a shoulder catch.
The duel was short and brutal. Both Anjin and Horus drove forward to take the initiative, meeting in a flurry of kicked snow. Horus’ reach extended with the shorts-sword over Anjin’s combat knife, and he levered it with furious energy. It nicked into the Death Trooper’s forearm guards; its vicious edge, keen like ice, bit through to the skin. Horus stepped away, feinted with a dozen false slides through the air, testing his foe’s guard for the desired opening.
Anjin seemingly gave it to him: a bare angle for his throat. The Captain jousted forward; pierced empty air. Black armour and tinted visor plasteel filled his vision when he turned. A knuckle-plate vibro-shiv extended from Anjin’s left hand and sliced through the side of Horus’ throat, severing the carotid. The blood induced urgency, induced clumsiness. He parried a stroke to his skull, grappled in and locked the length of Horus’ fighting arm until the bones in the hand, wrist, and elbow cinched and broke. Anjin ducked a left-hook, cutting an inch deep furrow across the Mandalorian’s waist that worried more blood. He broke Horus’ knee with a curt stomp, jabbing into the sciatic nerve running up his thigh and groin, and threw his whole weight over his shoulder with a practiced Stava flip.
He knelt and tugged Horus’ still good hand as it clapped at the running carotid sever and snapped the finger bones to pieces with a clench.
“G-Ghh...!”
“See to him,” Anjin breathed. He rose, after wiping his gloves in the snow. Four-One had been poised with a volunteer Troop medic and were kneeling down, servicing combat medicine to obvious wounds.. A small host of ST surrounded the beaten Horus, rifles set to high stun.
Six-Two regarded Zeta Lead’s lashed vambrace. “Even fleas bite, sir.”
“He knew his fighting craft, Six-Two. Wanted to die victorious.” Delta Lead took a small palm-canister from recessed panel in his backpack. Sprayed a thimble of synth-wrap over the clean wound.
“You were better, sir.”
“Yes.” Anjin banished the phantom of a smile behind his helm. He plucked his tongue at the chin-mount controls, and opened a channel to orbital command. “Zeta Lead, Castle Actual. Local elements suppressed. Inform Moff Balfour we’ve his prize, copy. Over.”
[member="Tobias Schmitt"]
