The Perfect Warrior

This was a submission prepared for the Battletech Pride Anthology 2024 that ended up being too long for inclusion.  Sometimes the story takes on a life of its own, irrespective of word limits!

Part I

Southern Expanse, Cameron Continent
Strana Mechty, Kerensky Cluster
May 3049

The biting cold of Strana Mechty's frigid Antarctic wastes seeped into every crevice of the warrior's thick hide overcoat. A thin puddle of ice-water clung uncomfortably in the small of his back, refusing to depart downward or come to some semblance of body temperature thermal equilibrium. Star Captain Farn Jorgensson ignored this discomfort and instead concentrated on remaining completely still. His frigidly numb hands gripped his weapon tightly. He made no attempt to stave off the biting cold, focusing solely on suppressing the reflex to shiver.

Everything was still. The morning sky was heavily overcast, and the air was flecked with fine, wind-tossed particulate shards of ice and snow. The only sounds for hundreds of kilometers were a low rumble of frozen precipitation blowing across the sub-zero plain, scouring the snow and Strana Mechty's arctic-acclimated trees, and a distant bass note of shifting pack ice moaning.

Scattered around his dugout, the rest of Farn's team likewise lay in wait, concealed behind layout blinds formed of packed snow. Being the smallest warrior—the sole aerospace pilot amongst MechWarriors and Elementals—Farn had volunteered to maneuver close to the target ahead of the group: a deadly place to be, should he be discovered too soon. It had taken him all night to slowly, achingly, slide across the ice. He had reckoned the distance traveled using a long piece of string laid out behind him as he slipped through the darkness. Once at the estimated point, he had excavated a shallow hole in the snow, just deep enough to squat in and secret himself. The hole was dug by hand: he was not issued with a trowel, but, even if he had been, a metal tool would have been far too noisy. They had come too close to make such a lethal mistake now.

In the long shadows of dawn, his quarry was as perfectly hidden as he. Buried under layers of ice and snow, its true form was practically invisible. Even knowing exactly where to look from barely three meters away, Farn could not discern it. Only from a height some distance back could the telltale signs be distinguished. The specter of being so close to such terrible danger with no sign as to what lurked just below filled him with awful dread and a deep respect for the foe.

The tranquility of the frozen desert was broken by a single metallic clang ringing out from the direction of the party leader. Metal spears rung together: signal for the attack.

One of the group's dogs sprinted across the ice towards him in a flurry of barking and kicked-up snow. The thickly-furred animal—descended from ancient Siberian hunting dogs—dashed and leapt and wove, turning and wheeling about, all while running at a full tilt. Its seemingly random path was not happenstance: the dogs were rigorously trained to run a meandering pattern, creating maximum disturbance without slowing. The reason was simple: the trainers wished the dogs to survive.

When the moment came, it arrived with instant ferocity. The entire world around Farn erupted like a subterranean explosion into the sky. The ghost bear was enormous—something close to five meters tall. Native to Strana Mechty, the monster strongly resembled but dwarfed the polar bears of old Earth. It was one thing to intellectually know the size of such a creature, but entirely another to stand an arm's length away. Farn had sorely misjudged the closeness of his approach: he could make out individual hollow fibers of the bear's pelt and smell its distinctive sea spray odor. A lifetime of discipline battled Farn's all-too-human urge to flee from such overwhelming primal danger. The dog fled back to its handlers, but Farn did not move.