Mon April 23 2012

Mon April 23 2072 The communications blackout on the part of the Cal-Guard, while temporary, allowed for enough disorganization for elements of the Japanese Imperial Marines to slip around and complete the encirclement of Barstow. Now a city officially under siege, Bakersfield starts to panic. Jace Gill and his team of Goldenboys have left Petro-Cal and are on the front lines, engaging in fire support of the Cal Guard. None can deny that the Goldenboys are the best unit currently in Bakersfield, but that makes them just 'as good' as the Japanese Akuma. It's going to take a miracle to pull off victory. But there may be a miracle coming together. The Desert Rats ground forces are closing in on the city - and may be able to lift the siege. The California Rangers are marshaling their forces and raiding the interior, forcing Fujiwara to redeploy some of his units to face them. The Mojave Advisory Group is still at large in the JPC, a cause of concern - while Tinman's jail break is causing its own havoc. Rounding out the possible tricks in the hat, is Blindside's resupply convoy, currently barreling for Bakersfield's blockade. Can these disparate forces come together and give Gill the room to breathe? It seems unlikely. But… did you know that Colonel Takai Fujiwara engages high priced 'specialty' call-girls direct from Japan? It's true. Kismet found out - and then undertook a mission to 'replace' the callgirl coming in from the homeland. Only the 'call girl' was a 75 year old. Yeah. Fujiwara likes his women mature. Real mature. Gamely though, Kismet went through with it - making herself up to seem like an octogenarian hooker. Let none of you doubt this womans -dedication- to her craft. Cameras -carefully placed- were rolling as she performed a striptease for the Colonel in his command trailer. As he swilled Saki and called her 'ha ha', she paraded her sagging, wrinkled goods for his enjoyment. No one's sure if she 'went all the way', but one things for certain. His men are laughing at him, due to a 'leak' of the tape by parties hitherto unnamed, but rhyme with 'shizmet'. The Mojave Advisory group. A loose alliance of runners dedicated to sowing terror and destruction behind the lines. Lyric, Valion, Gratch and Draco stand on a low rising hill, looking down into the town of Shafter. Japanese troops are moving through it - the smoking ruins of its water tower a beacon for miles around. You wouldn't think something filled with water could burn quite like that. They mount up in their chenowith-lockheed light strike vehicles - small dune buggies with room for two, no armor or doors, but the ability to take a punishment and run across almost any terrain at top speed. Engines turn over and they head down into town. It's eerily quiet as they move street to street, flanking the Japanese force. The vehicles pull to a stop, sheltered by the fallen tower, still smoldering. It's Lyric who notices her - broken and bleeding, a heap of shattered bones and ruptured organs. Alive, but barely. Valion strides forward, gun lowered, intent on killing the woman who fell from the tower. Grach calls a halt, raising one hand. His point is simple - this woman is paying for whatever crimes she has committed.. and death is to easy a release from the caul of her own pain and suffering. Valion just quirks a brow, but before a serious debate can be had, there is the sound, the unmistakable sound of tons of metal moving in one great machine across treads. A tank. One of Japan's captured Californian M1-G AbraThe M1-G Abrams rattles down the street and Lyric slips out of the Chenowith-lockheed. Rolling into the shadows, she clutches the satchel charge of C-VII military-grade plastic explosives. It's inert in its natural form - you can stomp on it, burn it, electrocute it and it's just really smelly playdoh. Pointless. It's even non-toxic and safe for children. But. She grins, pulling a detonator from her breast pocket, jamming it into the quarter kilo of plastique. Put that detonator in it, and it becomes a weapon of mass amusement. She waits for the machine to rumble past - the men in the tank not seeing her. She slips forward, walking in the tanks shadow, no need to mask her steps. She makes it up to the side of the tank, hidden in its over hang. Ballsy, Lyric. The satchel she shoves into the treads, then runs. No one even sees her as she runs, jumping behind a fence, then not stopping. She does not stop until she hits the other side of town. Halfway there, the satchel explodes, a deafening rumble and a column of black, inky smoke. hams, it may be a hundred years old in its shell, but it's a capable, canny fighting machine with software and electronics upgrades. The group backs up, reversing out of Shafter. That tank. That tank is going to have a bad day. The M1-G Abrams rattles down the street and Lyric slips out of the Chenowith-lockheed. Rolling into the shadows, she clutches the satchel charge of C-VII military-grade plastic explosives. It's inert in its natural form - you can stomp on it, burn it, electrocute it and it's just really smelly playdoh. Pointless. It's even non-toxic and safe for children. But. She grins, pulling a detonator from her breast pocket, jamming it into the quarter kilo of plastique. Put that detonator in it, and it becomes a weapon of mass amusement. She waits for the machine to rumble past - the men in the tank not seeing her. She slips forward, walking in the tanks shadow, no need to mask her steps. She makes it up to the side of the tank, hidden in its over hang. Ballsy, Lyric. The satchel she shoves into the treads, then runs. No one even sees her as she runs, jumping behind a fence, then not stopping. She does not stop until she hits the other side of town. Halfway there, the satchel explodes, a deafening rumble and a column of black, inky smoke. Up near Fresno… "Looks like we got us a convoy." People throughout the train of trucks had been making that joke for hours during the trouble-free run down 99, but as the run on Bakersfield itself gets nearer and nearer, people are starting to quiet down. Tinman and his crew took down a nice score, and it's BSyde who's been tapped to deliver it. The dwarf showed his mettle to the Rangers, and trying to run the Japanese blockade is suicide, so he's the perfect man for it: not important enough that he'll be missed when he gets blown to hell, but possessed of a slim chance of success. So it's him leading the convoy, and a convoy it is. Aside from his own Leviathan, leading the pack, he's got the faithful Scabbard big rig following along behind him, laden with munitions. Behind it, three battered Cal Guard trucks come rumbling along, stuffed to the gills, driven by convalescents. The heavy hitters, though? They're up in Leviathan with BSyde. Mustang. Fairplay. Spot. Serious, serious mojo. Hopefully, they won't be needed. But as they near the lines, nobody's really thinking that's going to be the case. Wyvern is a decent driver. At the wheel of a LSV, she glances over as Lyric dives into the vehicle, offering a grin. She hits reverse, then spins the tires. Gravel flies up just as a chirp comes from her scanner. A glance up while she maneuvers tells her all she needs to know. "Get down." "What?" Asks Lyric, confused. What comes next is an awesome bit of driving, in which Wyvern uses peripheral awareness to dance the vehicle between buildings and other cover. A thunderclap - and a building to the right explodes. "What the hell was THAT?" Shouts Lyric, eyes wide. "Your new friend, the tank! It's following us home!" And indeed, though she knocked the tank off-track with the satchel charge, she did not destroy it - and the automatic retracking system had it back on the go in the time it took Lyric to run to the meet-point. Charging full ahead at 60 miles an hour, the massive tank is bearing down on them, smashing through the obstacles that Wyvern must dance around. The BSyde convoy passes its first whiff of real danger without getting blown to hell. A flight of three Protectorate assault choppers, waiting for target vectoring, passes within five miles, but their ground-scan radar never picks up the quintet of heavy vehicles making its way down the highway thanks to BSyde's alacrity with the ECM spoofing. Oil Junction. That's another matter entirely. That's where the Protectorate attack, pushing up from the northwest, has really started to dig in, establish cordons. It's part of the noose looking to strangle Bakersfield to death. And as the convoy rolls through the town, shelled clean of its defenders by Protectorate artillery the day before, it's way, way too quiet. Wyvern can't shake that damn tank off her ass. She tries - oh how she tries in her fast little dune buggy, to shake the massive tank that barrels after her. The main cannon swivels to orient on her - tracking on the move like only the Abrhams can. But then, the whine of an engine and then in comes Valion's LSV. It leaps from behind a dirt ramp, all dukes-of-hazzard as he stiff-arms the wheel. The man driving the dune buggy draws his M1911. It's not a tank. It's a 45 Caliber hand gun named for the year it was first produced. Designed by the daddy of all gun designers, John M. Browning of machine-gun fame, the pistol never ever jams and has been in continuous production and service for over a hundred and 160 years. It is the most popular firearm on the planet, eclipsing the AK-47 somewhere in the late 2020s. At the top of the jump, with dirt and gravel trailing behind his tires, Valion lets of a pair of shots. The shots would do nothing to that tank - they could do nothing to that tank. But to the soldier exposed, manning the top-mounted 50 caliber (browning made!) machine gun, those two bullets are a bad day in the making. With a sort of marksmanship that comes only with the best of the best, the two bullets shatter through the soldier's goggles and rattle around in his skull after making doors out of his eyes. He slumps over, dead, the 50cal now unmanned as Valion's buggy slams back to earth. "Did you see that drek?" Asks Valion of Grach." "Whoa." Says Grach. BSyde's convoy has been forced off 99 by an ominous-looking roadblock, coaxed onto the eerily silent (and much tighter) streets of the city itself. As they come round a corner, the silence in Oil Junction's broken by the crack of a heavy anti-material rifle. The Japanese sniper had a head-on shot, and he was going for the vehicle in the lead - Leviathan - but the heavy, engine block-destroying slug goes high, passing over Leviathan, over Scabbard, and thunking solidly through the hood of the first Guard truck. It dies almost instantly with an agonized shriek of metal, forcing the vehicle to an immediate halt, and blocking the progress of those behind it. BSyde's jacked out and out the door of his Leviathan almost instantly - without those three trucks, this run's little more than a vanity exercise. He has to get them up, and get them moving. Mustang's with him, already starting to bark orders at the Guard drivers, who already look like they're thinking strongly about ditching their charges and legging it. And nobody could blame them. This? This is a perfect ambush spot. Playfair and Spot are already doing their thing, seeking out the opposition in the astral. Their report's not going to be good. Picking up the coms, Grach switches to VOX. "Wyvern! Valion! Here's what we're going to do. Valion, I want you to lead the tank left, into Oil Junction! Dodge, duck, dive and dodge. Wyvern! When we come around to the outskirts, I want you to cut across his front… Lyric, thats where you throw another satchel charge to get his attention. When that goes off, we break left, you break right. He'll come down the center. Lyric, Valion, you'll knock the tops off two of those oil wells here on the map, and we'll lead the tank right into the spray. A little Grand Dragon ATM later… and we've got a goddamn tank fricassee." And that, they say, is exactly how it happened. The tank roared right into the trap, egged on, spurred on by the tight knit coordination of the Mojave Advisory Group. The right tactics, the right situation, the right plan. The two vehicles of the MAG roar off down the road - skirting a battle underway involving what looks like a convoy of trucks. "Sucks to be those guys." Mutters Valion, as the team heads deeper into town. Heavy autofire rains down from the surrounding buildings on the convoy trapped in Oil Junction. Two platoons from the Third Battalion of the Zennyo Ryuo have the picket duty here, supported by a half-squadron of the Noppera-bo's light tanks, and they're doing everything they can to kill every last member of BSyde's crew as the dwarf works furiously to patch up an engine block with little more than spit and hardcopy porn. Miraculously, nothing's exploded yet. Though maybe it's not so miraculous after all. Seriously outnumbered, seriously outgunned, the three Awakened runners BSyde took along to ride shotgun are showing exactly what kind of pain they can dish out. Mustang has marshaled them and the drivers into what little cover the rubble offers and, trusty Manhunters in hand, she's slapping fresh mags like a mad woman. Every bullet kills. Every. Last. One. Impossible at this range. Impossible for anyone. Mustang? She makes it look easy. Spot's a dervish. There's no other word for it. The dwarf's a spell-slinging madman, and just as many Protectorate soldiers are going down under the barrel of his shotgun as they are from the astral flares of his stunbolts. He's running the ragged, pathetically small defensive line BSyde's convoy has established, and what he lacks in precision he makes up for in ferocity. Don't piss off dwarves. Ever. They're the perfect height to buckshot your nuts. And Fairplay? He's not exactly a slouch, either. His fire elemental, Bob, is currently throwing a sniper team out of their nest high up in the Allison Energy building, letting them burn all the way to the ground. Just as BSyde slams the hood shut and shouts that they're good to go, the first of the Japanese tanks rumbles around the corner up the road. It doesn't know what it's walking into. A raised palm, a muttered word, and a wall of invisible force hits it, hard enough to knock it right over like a toy. Fairplay, looking drained, humps it back to Leviathan.