“So, you’ve never ridden a horse either, have you?” Kaz asked Reynolds over the comms.

  “You’d be surprised how many things I’ve ridden,” he replied.

  “Well, this Mackay is still busting my ass.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” the Captain said coolly.

  “Well, I still can’t wait for the Perths to get in. Been getting in a bit of sim time and they may walk like Frankenstein’s monster but they’re a comfy ride compared to a jerky mech like this. Don’t know how the scouts put up with it.”

  “Quit your bitching. We’re almost there. We just gotta cross the bridge and we’ll be a klick or two out.”

  “Huh. About that,” Yevhen said into Kaz’s mind.

  “What now?” she replied out loud.

  “Are you talking to your pet or me?” the Captain asked, his tone more sober.

  “So, running water. Can’t cross that. It’s a whole ‘thing’,” Yevhen replied, a little embarrassed.

  “He says he’s afraid of running water,” Kaz replied to the Captain gruffly.

  “I did not!” The indignance in his voice gave Kaz life.

  “Oh, so we gotta drop him off here?” Reynolds laughed.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Alright, switching to unit comms. Zora, patch us through,” he said, and Kaz could hear a digital ‘ding’ before they were merged into the units’ comms. “Alright. Hold up for a second. Kaz needs to drop off her dog so he can take a pee.”

  “He knows I’m a vampire, right? Like a ‘I can rip your head off and drink all your blood’ vampire,” Yevhen asked via spiritual link as he dropped off Kaz’s Mackay.

  “Make sure you get it all out. We’ll be back in a bit, buddy,” Kaz said over the external speakers and Yevhen stood in the darkness of the night next to the small river as the convoy of HOGs and 2 Mackays crossed the wide road bridge over it. His face looked annoyed but it went apoplectic when the HOG carrying the Steel Caps rolled on by, techno-polka blasting just for him.

  “I hope you spill your borscht!” he yelled after them before kicking a rock by the side of the road, “This sucks.”

  “I thought you said you told them to kill the polka? I’m sure the separatists can hear us coming.” Kaz asked the Captain.

  “Yeah, just had Zora cut it off.” Zora was riding shotgun in the Captain’s Mackay and Kaz was glad for her electronic expertise. The command variant of the Mackay had a jumpseat meant for an EW officer, an observer, or a senior officer in the field.

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  “Yes, Captain. They are strenuously filing objections, sir,” Zora said on the channel and both Kaz and Reynolds chortled. The redhead fingered a small necklace nervously; it had a small six pointed star.

  “Well, it’s a pity that this signal interference I suddenly got means I can’t hear them. Please tell them for me that we’re coming up on the building and Kaz and I will be taking positions for overwatch and Lieutenant Kory’s squad will be establishing a premier to seal off this little shanty town.” The area was filled with trailers, cheap prefab houses, a few warehouses, and the whole thing was covered in the patina of war - char, dirt, and rubble. It wasn't a place Kaz wanted to book a vacation in, but it was towns like this in the border region that showed that Arcadian identity was still alive and well.

  “Sir... they are saying, ‘negative, the breach is a go’,” Zora replied as the two Mackays took up positions on the opposite end of the ramshackle little town and Lieutenant Kory’s team began to file out of their HOG as a handful of drones took to the sky.

  “I’m sorry, what? Patch me through to - ” Reynolds started but just then the sound of high energy techno-polka split the night, headlights zeroed in on the building the unit was targeting, and the HOG the Steel Cap squad was piloting barreled straight through the exterior wall. The sounds of collapsing corrugated steel and drywall, polka, and shouting filled the air.

  “Jeezus fuck!” Kaz yelled and scanned the area looking for hostiles or even just civilians. The shouting and panic the Steel Cap squad had caused was immediate and overwhelming. A dozen people, likely awakened from a dead sleep, began to pour out of their houses. “Shock and awe” was one thing, but this was something else.

  Kaz could hear Kory cursing and scrambling to try to get a hold on the security situation. “Is anyone armed?! Detain them!”

  “Are they nuts?!” Reynolds yelled and lit the area up with the flood lights on his Mackay, Kaz following suit a second later; the drones began to move it for a better look. In the building, Kaz could pick up the sound of gunfire.

  “By the scent of blood on the wind, it smells like I’m missing some fun...” Yevhen sent to Kaz.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she growled back at him, knowing that he’d somehow hear her. She could see the infantry tackling people and zip-tying their hands, but even they seemed unnerved by the sudden crash.

  “Be advised, I am suppressing signals in this area. I just detected an attempt to detonate an explosive. It was using a known signal for a common Mithrian explosive. Lieutenant Mazur, please move 10 meters east to avoid potential damage if it goes off accidentally,” Zora said calmly over the unit channel before a buried explosive was highlighted on Kaz’s screen.

  Kaz quickly repositioned. “Want me to take it out, Captain?”

  “No, leave that for the cleanup team. We have our hands full here,” he replied. Just then, the Steel Cap team frog-marched a line of three people out of the building. They were bleeding from a few superficial wounds and covered in dust from when the Caps drove a truck through their wall, but otherwise they looked relatively unharmed. They were followed by the Steel Caps themselves in their grey and black uniforms with silver piping around their collars and matching epaulets on their shoulders. They looked like they were in a dress uniform even while in the field, though Kaz knew they had some armor integrated into their uniforms.

  “Outstanding work, Zora,” Reynolds said on the unit comms, though he could have said it to her personally as she was in his cockpit. Everyone watched as the partisans, their weapons, and the cache of bomb-making equipment was unloaded from the building. The squad’s drones hummed about, recording everything for later.

  They were not the sort of people Kaz thought would be “insurgents” and doubts sprung up in her heart: there were people who looked like office workers, a teenager or two, and a plump old woman. One in particular caught her eye, a lanky man in his mid-twenties with round glasses, a fierce expression and a bit of blood trickling from his hairline. Had the intel been wrong? Were these just innocent Arcadians caught in some big misunderstanding? Or were these people selected for their innocuous appearance and trained by Mithris?

  “Sir. Permission to speak freely?” Zora asked meekly over the unit comms, snapping Kaz out of her thoughts.

  “Granted, Zora.”

  “I don’t even think polka is Arcadian, sir.”

  “When planning engagements in the last world war there was kind of an axiom, an escalation of force continuum that looked something like: human - tank - mech - fang - Hellhound.

  A mech with a halfway decent pilot can take out a tank or infantry fighting vehicle, squad and all. That was the original intended function.

  A fang, even without a Hellhound, can slaughter a platoon of soldiers or a dozen tanks. They’ll normally win a fight one-on-one with a mech but it’s a tossup, because fangs are better at soft targets than hard armor and mechs are a bit slow compared to a fang.

  If a fang has a Hellhound, however? All bets are off. They are normally thrown at hard targets like military bases or even assigned to take out small cities by themselves. They can cause some serious damage and I’ve heard it likened to the effects of a tactical missile strike. A dozen mechs working in concert could take one down or a full tank company (~14 vehicles) might have a prayer. They are hard and fast targets, easy to miss and hard to pin down. If piloted by an experienced vampire they are used aggressively to strike hard at weak points in lines and make breakthroughs. No single other thing on a battlefield can handle one one-on-one so Hellhounds will try to avoid mass combats where they can be overwhelmed.

  Aircraft and guided munitions can also be used to overwhelm a hound, but that’s a costly endeavor and assumes you have air superiority. A smart commander provides assets to support a Hellhound they deploy so they can do their bloody work. Anti-air assets and SHORAD were often deployed near them (or any mech formation) and setting up an air defense network in the theater was key before deploying anything.

  While I was lucky and never fought a “Strix”, when we were debriefed on them, our command told them to regard them as “twice as deadly”. Having seen a Hellhound or two at a distance (never up close, thank the saints), I can’t even fathom what that would be like. The bit of video we studied shows them “dancing” or moving almost like they were made of some kind of liquid. Given a hound? I shudder to think. The prevailing wisdom is that, in a hound, a strix would be like an aircraft carrier or maybe even an aircraft carrier strike group? There were only two or three we knew of and they were regarded as too dangerous to try to work with. We mostly just got out of their way, appreciated it when they showed up on our side, and cursed our luck if they showed up on the other.

  -Excerpt from “The Modern Mechanized Armor Playbook”

  by Col. Omar Sykes