Kaz felt annoyed before she bit into her ration bar, and the experience of eating didn’t improve her attitude. Despite promises that they’d be hunting vampires, the 1st Recon-Armor Platoon had been saddled with yet another patrol. The military’s unofficial motto of “hurry up and wait” rang true, but there was at least some hope of real action.

  Reynolds had been tapped to meet with Arty and his staff to go over the final details for a proper vampire hunt, so she was without him. It ground on Kaz that they’d been gathered for a “big important mission” - to kill or capture a fang in East Malithovia - but it had been weeks and all they’d done were patrols, training, maintenance, and listening to speeches.

  “Eyes up,” Lieutenant Anton Jordan said on a private channel to Kaz, and she refocused her energies away from her annoyance at her command structure. She had let her mind wander and she needed to be in the moment. The area they had been assigned to patrol that day was in the direction of the frontline of the conflict. A thick fog had rolled in, though the omni-present rain was only spitting now and then.

  “I’m with you,” she replied, grateful for the heads up. This patrol was as bad as the last ones they’d been on but this time she was in her Perth. Ostensibly this was a shakedown mission to ensure everyone and everything was working up to snuff. They’d left Yevhen at home because it was an early morning patrol and he got testy in even dim daylight.

  “How’s it handling?” Jordan asked conversationally. The Lieutenant had seemed to be all business so this attempt to break the ice was a welcome one for Kaz.

  “Well, for the granddaddy of all Arcadian mechs, it’s not so bad. Little stiff, but since it looks like Frankenstein’s monster, I think it gets a pass,” Kaz replied, running her fingers through her short hair to get it out of her eyes. Stiff was an understatement; her Perth was a 30-meter-tall blocky monstrosity of a mech, a lumbering humanoid figure that looked like it had been made entirely out of polygons. They’d painted it a dull purple with black splotches to break up its silhouette - the proper camo for their dim overcast and rainy world.

  “Well, I pity whoever decides to run into us today with that thing on our side,” Jordan replied with about as much of a smile as she’d ever heard in his voice. The truth was that the small patrol of two Mackays, a HOG, and her Perth had to slow down to match the lumbering gait of her mech, but no one was saying that part out loud.

  “Well, if they throw any tanks at us, I’ll be sure to vaporize them,” Kaz replied, but just then, the sensors picked something up. They’d identified the hum of an engine approaching - an ill-tuned or damaged one, by the sounds of it.

  “Jordan. I got something on sensors. Approaching from the northeast,” Kaz said as she tried to get a better look. Her suit detached one of its two small observation drones, which autonomously buzzed off towards the signal.

  “We have it too,” Jordan replied. “Looks like a single vehi- contact.” The Lieutenant interrupted himself with one flat yet urgent word.

  The sounds of a mini-CIWS spitting out a thousand rounds a second cut through the air and Kaz’s drone went offline, having seen nothing but the fog before it went down.

  “I’m picking up a single vehicle, possibly a car or truck, followed by something bigger,” a soldier from the HOG quickly reported. “It was masked until it fired.”

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  Jordan’s raptor-like Mackay opened fire with one of its arm-mounted 30mm autocannons, putting rounds through the fog into the unknown target. Even in her Perth, Kaz could feel the “thud” of each shot as it fired. In response, two missiles lit up the fog and raced towards Lieutenant Jordan’s mech. The CIWS on all three mechs in the squad suddenly roared to life and spit out a wall of lead that punched through the hard shell of the missiles and detonated them mid-air. Kaz gave a silent prayer of thanks to whatever eggheads had designed their integrated defense network to allow their mechs to work so effortlessly when attacked.

  “Picking up a small spider-mech. Probably Mithrian... yes. Nabokov class,” the soldier from the HOG said as an SUV, damaged and smoking, rumbled through the fog - a white flag waving from the driver's side window. The “flag” looked more like an undershirt or maybe scraps from a bedsheet, but it was a sure sign of surrender. Kaz could see it on her long-range sensors as it rolled down a gentle hill, and only then could she truly make out the Nabokov-class mech. It was like a six-legged mechanical spider with a small rocket pod on its central platform and a mini-CIWS for drone defense. It was small, even by the standards of a mech, about the size of a tank or infantry fighting vehicle. They were normally autonomous or remotely controlled, though Kaz had been told they had piloted ones in Mithris for non-military use.

  “What’s the call, Jordan?” she asked darkly as she locked both targets. “One or both?”

  There was no way they could tell if the SUV was really what it claimed to be.

  “Just the Nabokov. Fire,” the Lieutenant said and Kaz cleared the lock on the SUV and opened fire on the Nabokov.

  Kaz couldn’t help but picture the Nabokov as David and her Perth as Goliath, though the story would have a very different ending. Perths were bristling with weapons; sporting 4 massive “bombard” cannons” on their chests that could make short work of a small ship. Each arm was equipped with a heavy 120mm cannon that could be disposed of when the ammo elevators on the back of the suit were empty. Pods of micro-missiles and inbuilt micro-CIWS dotted every available square inch of what was left of the hull. To say Kaz had her pick of the litter when it came to tools to deal with the Nabokov would have been an understatement.

  Since she didn’t want to risk destroying the civilian, she lined her right arm’s cannon on the target and punched a hole clean through it a fraction of a second later. The red ring glowed an angry red on her thermal scope as the penetrator round she’d selected impacted the soil behind it, buried itself, and went off. Knowing the Nabokov’s paper-thin armor wouldn’t put up much of a fight against an armor-piercing round, she’d intentionally overpenetrated so there'd be less of a chance of injury to the civilian.

  The Mithrian spider-mech collapsed and went silent as the SUV came ever closer. When it finally arrived, the woman inside shoved both hands out the window to show she was unarmed, opened the door from the outside, and fell to her knees waving the white flag. Near as Kaz could tell, she was saying something in Mithrian. She could have had her Perth run a translation on it, but the boys from the 132nd Light Infantry in the HOG were on her like ants on a cookie, so any translation would have been muddled.

  “She’s claiming to be a journalist, L.T.,” Sgt. Horbach said a minute later. “Says she wants asylum.”

  “Bullshit,” Kaz thought to herself, “she knew what she was signing up for when she decided to be a journalist in Mithris.” But she didn’t say anything out loud. To her, it was like someone signing up to be a chocolate tester at a laxative factory and then being shocked when they inevitably shit their pants. She understood the need to fight back against a corrupt government, but when it was that systemic, ruthless, oppressive, pervasive, and long-lived, it was just stupidity to oppose them. Kaz relented a bit though; there was nobility in the purpose, she guessed, and someone had to stand up to that government. Then again, it was basically suicide and the regime tolerating the occasional tightly controlled dissenting voice ultimately gave a thin veneer of legitimacy to their rule. Kaz shook her head. She’d wanted this shakedown to be uneventful but this would just muddy the water.

  The Nabokov class, named after the Russian-American novelist and poet, is one of the smaller mechs used by Mithris. They are primarily remote-operated vehicles when employed by the military, though paramilitary security forces and construction variants employ a manned control scheme. The Nabokov is considered the workhorse of the Mithrian military, having been mass produced during the last war. They are often employed as guards, scouts, and as support elements for larger formations.

  As platforms, they are about as basic as they come: a central platform with six legs set up three to a side, like many Mithrian mechs, for stable all-terrain movement. The central platform provides a mini-CIWS for protection against drones but, beyond that, they can be outfitted with any number of equipment layouts. Common ones employ rocket pods to attack light and medium armor, smaller caliber autocannons, machine gun arrays for anti-infantry actions, arms for loading and logistical support, mine-clearing apparatuses, mission-specific sensor arrays, cargo hauling assemblies, and even more exotic things like flamethrowers and highly explosive packages that allow them to become suicide drones.

  Their cheap price point, abundance from previous wars, and flexible nature makes them a key element of the Mithrian war machine. However, by modern standards they are regarded as little better than a tank or infantry fighting vehicle. Their armor is lacking and their speed is limited; combined with their lackluster protection against electronic warfare, aging parts, and the lack of complexity on their control feeds, they are considered antiquated. They are effectively a mid-range mech from the last war that survived only because replacing them would be too expensive. Commanders are advised to regard them as a threat, but be aware that they can always throw more at you.