Bongo-TauKat

The sun shone into the cockpit through tinted glass casting stark shadows across my helmet's visor. Beyond it, meters above the ground I watched as other battlemechs pulled up short next to a natural arch of stone and felled trees. I was alive again. We had dropped onto Slewis with a contract given to us by the provisional government. The Belt Pirates, a cobbled together coalition of bandits and ex-mechwarriors, were getting too brazen with planetary raids. Hire a pirate to stop a pirate. When I first joined the Brethren I told them I had my own machine. They thought I meant the scrap heap of a Cataphract that I was using in arena matches

The last thing I wanted to do was go out like this. Despite all of the emptiness and disdain I had for my existence under it all I want to be the one pulling myself up a spear shaft for one last stab at the enemy. Ironic as it was I was hoping for something more “clan like”. Instead I was getting the “pool of your own blood and someone else's beer” end. ' The barrel of the pistol wavered but never enough to give me and advantage. My legs were a tangle under me. Blood flowed freely into my eye from the gash over it. He stood to the outside of my reach with a triumphant sneer on his grizzled face. The actinic line of

I remember my first fight. I got my ass kicked, hard. It wasn't fair by any standard. All of them, I forget the numbers, hit me at once. I never even got the first shot in. Later the instructors at the training camp taught us how to win a brawl. Correction, how to win a fight, or a circle of equals, or other nice clean contest with rules and guidelines. Complete and utter bullshit if you asked me. Take right now. Those idiots were not going to wait around for long. The first drunken fool was the first to gather up his courage and break what they thought was tension by rushing in to kill a clansman. Problem was he was now one on one and th

I turned my head towards the hand, not quite looking at it's owner but catching his form clearly in the corner of my eye. He wavered at first making me think that I had taken more than my fair share of the stale beer in front of me. They the picture formed and it was the figure that swayed. His grip was firm and was more for his benefit in keeping his haggard self from falling in on the bar. “Yoush” it slurred “Yoush that clanner they are talking abouch, the one fin the urena”. Yep, this was going to be another night of yucks and hysterics for me. I pivoted slowly hoping to dissuade the drunken man from listing me a

I was never one of them. From the first memories of those fights of fledgeling warrior spirit with my sibkin, I was always the kid that no one wanted on their side. It wasn't because of my lack of fighting skills or my ferocity that they assumed. I just thought they were a bunch of worthless gits. Gits, now there's a loan word. Loan words were usually taken by the bandits that survived our raids and clans that respected us. As if to burn the fact in my head as well as deed I found myself liking it. A dying pirate that I had given water to as we sat next to our crumpled mechs had called me that before spitting a mouthful of blood and spray