Prologue:
1812 Overture

HE.12106.02.18, Fars Province, 1.9 Miles West of Ghalat

Fifty human lives fit into the space between two heartbeats.
Or at least that's how long it takes to wipe them out.

Calliope Tanova hasn't exactly been paying attention, cause the march through the endless, ever same highlands of southern Iran has been mind-numbingly boring and gruelingly exhausting, and she's cast her mind as far away as she is able, deep into the vacuous, winding labyrinth of her own head, and into distant, barely coherent worlds of her own making.

Six and a half hours, since the column had left FOB-Calea, which was really a rather lofty name for a cave with a pile of sensors and point defenses. Six and a half hours of forced march along a mountain road, bone dry and bleached pale by the heat, sheer rock face on one side and a drop into the valley on the other. A wasteland so dour, she can't imagine how anyone can live here.
She's not even sure how people could have lived here a century or two prior, when there had still been some groundwater, allegedly. So many rocks and so much awful, burning sun, it makes Calliope grateful for her position in the formation.
Six and a half hours, directly behind the Assault Crawler, staring at the enormous machine's ass, for no other reason than the Captain doesn't trust her, so she doesn't have to take point. She's grateful for that too. Because the plumes of exhaust, superheated coolant vapors and burnt air spewing from the back of the creeping fortress have all but enveloped her for most of the day, and that's as much shade and reprieve from the relentless, thousandfold reflected brightness, as anyone gets out here.
Because the oscillating red and orange hues of the exhaust panels at the back of the Crawler have something downright hypnotic. When she stares long enough, she can see shapes dancing. Figures. And that's not exactly a telenovela, but it's as close to entertainment as she gets out here, if she doesn't make it up herself.
Especially since no one in Task Force h619 will chat with her on the comms.
She could still listen, sure, but that just makes her feel even lonelier. From the neglect and the mostly unspoken rejection and from frustration, because so very often, when she tries to listen to them, she barely understands half of what they are talking about, and it makes her uneasy, being confronted with all the things between sky and ground that she doesn't know.
Besides, angry soldiers, slowly being parboiled in their uniforms, their hard-suits and their vehicles are hardly poets for the most part, and she has only so much tolerance for the ever-same, unimaginative, gruff griping and machismo, before she just zones out and the words decay into white noise.
Of course, there is someone that she could have called.
Most likely, she'd even get an answer.
But she won't.
She has some pride, doesn't she?
Calling her Handler, just for the sake of company, just because she feels lost and alone, that would be too much. That would be an admission, and she will not surrender that easily.
Besides, something, something radio discipline.

But most of all Calliope is grateful she's not the one taking point because it saves her life today.
And electric whizz. Distant, high pitched thunder. Dull and ringing echoes of the sonic boom.
Just as the Crawler rounds a corner of the winding mountain path. Smouldering red flares bloom along the front, and all that cutting edge armor plating, all the carefully synthesized polymer and reactive armor systems and painstakingly calculated sloping angles, it all means jack shit, when it comes down to it, the one moment where it really should have.
The shot of the rail-cannon punches right through it all, in a fraction of the time it takes for electrical signals to trigger the reactive armor.
And in a blinding flash that dances across her sun-tortured retinas, the squat, thirty meter long, state of the art vehicle's insides turn into a spalling scrap hell. Just fire, plasma and polymer shrapnel now. With the force of the explosion, the seventeen crew and the platoon and a half of dismounts inside probably turn into vapor before they know they've been hit.
Shame that.
There is some vestige of humanity inside Calliope, that recognizes she should feel distress at the sudden end of so many of her ostensible comrades. She couldn't say why.
And feels absolutely nothing.
The orange glow of the crawler's exhaust ports turns into a flood. All that explosive force, contained within the enduring superstructure of the armored form, has nowhere to go but backwards, where the shell is weakest.
Right towards her.

What should be an instant drags into an eternity.
Time itself coagulates to amber.
That's the adrenaline hitting her, she understands that, even if she's still a little confounded sometimes, at how profoundly altered her stress responses have become under the neuro-chemical guidance of the Lupercarl Program. Or she assumes that much anyway. Maybe she has always been this way.
She couldn't say.
The first few moments when it surges, and a roiling cocktail of highly concentrated chemicals floods her brain, the world truly comes close to grinding to a halt. Time stops, and her neurons fire off a frenzy. She's learned to ride it. Use that initial wave, use the breathing room to assess the situation.
Pick a course of action.
Sort of.

There's something enthralling about the way that the fiery death in front of her unfurls. An inferno being born, bubbles of plasma bulging forward at the speed of molasses, clawing their way into moments of existence, conquering the air in front of her, devouring it in flowing, teeming reds.
A terrifying, otherworldly beauty, usually the domain of high speed cameras, and looking at it with her bloodshot, naked eyes, Calliope has to fight against the overwhelming impulse to simply stare, to loose herself in the gawking of a sight made precious just by the exalted rarity of it.

If she moves now, dodging the lethal, scorching discharge would be possible.
If she'd been alert instead of lost in the dreary, weightless cotton of her thoughts, it would have been downright trivial.
Just a step or two, pressing into the canyon wall to her left.
Easy.
Of course, if she steps aside, then the molten death cloud will shoot down the column unimpeded. Right now she's not sure what exactly is right behind her. Or how some of the other vehicles in the convoy would take a blast of this kind.
Certainly, there's half a dozen scout technicals in the convoy, and a couple of trucks of emergency goods, and maybe if she'd been paying more attention when they had taken formation this morning, she'd know how far they are, or when the road last took a bend, and who's behind her and in peril.

But she didn't, and the chemical stay of execution won't last forever, so Calliope does the only sensible thing, the only conscionable thing.

Is she going to scold me for this? Or praise me?

Calliope hates the ease with which that thought wafts into her mind. Tries to banish it. Fails.
Chemistry or psychology? Or something else?
No more time to think. She's not very good at that anyhow.
Every muscle in her body pulls taught, as she initiates the motion of pulling her arms together, as she pushes downward to take a knee.
Calliope moves to brace.

There are few things that make Calliope Tanova feel worse than being strapped into the cockpit of a large mech suit.

In her more lucid moments, she likes to think that maybe it's the principle of it, the ethics. Of the war in general, of the Red Spear, of a pilot's existence. She thinks she might have believed that once.
But in truth, it's far more immediate than that. It's just miserable. The stench of oil and coolant and transmission fluids, and the plastic smell of the breathing mask strapped to her face. The heat inside the allegedly temperature controlled cockpit. The constant aching and creaking of a million servos. The electro-static charge in the air, when the Landsberg generator is burning beneath her.
The sheer weight of manually operating a 19 meter tall war machine.

She's suspended in the cockpit, bent over into a hunch, a harness holding up her torso and her helmet, her arms and legs stuck in articulated metal sleeves that correspond to the limbs of her mech. And no matter how many gears and joints and pulleys you build into the exoskeleton, mechs are fucking heavy, hers especially, twisted beast that it is, and moving a mech like this is incredibly exhausting, even for the most trained and in shape pilots.
Marching for hours on end is a sore, Sisyphean nightmare…

But the alternative is even worse.

Calliope's armor is called Tantalus. The Tantalus had begun its life as a SAAB-Thales Nidhöggr Mk. VI-2E, but that had been a little under a decade and three classified upgrade packages ago. Today, most of the Nidhöggr Mk. VI series is no longer serving in its intended shock assault role - too resource intensive, too flimsy and lightweight to last on the modern battlefield. But the Tantalus has been up-armored so many times, there is nothing flimsy left about its lurching, barely humanoid frame.
And by some miracle of engineering it has retained a fair bit of its speed.

Time flows past the boundaries of perception and reasserts itself. Pulled taut by its pilot's desperate effort, the Tantalus goes down on one knee with a thunderous thud that's swallowed up by the explosion. With a sharp clanging that's only audible inside the mech's titanium frame, Calliope brings the armored forearms together, to shield her view-port and the Tantalus' head. Extends her back leg, and the claws of Tantalus' back foot tear into the road and lock into place.

The explosion hits her.

Warning signals flood the empty cavity in front of her, augmented reality displays visible only through her helmet's visor. The temperature inside the cockpit is already miserable, and spikes another couple of degrees. The pressure makes the material around her ache, and forces her to press against the mechanical feedback with all her might, while the sheer impact makes her shake and jostle in her suspension.

And then it's over, and the stream of plasma has passed, most of it vented into the air by the wedge that the Tantalus has formed. The plates on its forearms are red hot and it makes Calliope worry about the reactive armor plating cooking off - but she's still alive.

For now.

And then everything gets so much worse.
Because now her other stress responses finally arrive, the ones that haven't been altered, at least not while she is in control. The anxiety hits her like a freight train, and when a series of impacts rocks the ridge above, Calliope can't help herself, flinches hard, struggles for cover and Tantalus faithfully mirrors her motions.
Before she knows it, she is pressed against the cliff face, a massive, armored war machine covering for safety. The realization comes too, comprehension, however delayed.
The crew. People whose names she knew, or at least should have known, people whose voices and laughter would not make it back to their ramshackle mess hall. People with lives and futures and some place to go home to.
Vapor and ash on her armor.
And a vacuous empty, where she thinks her sorrow should be.

All around her, hell breaks out. More warning prompts. The sensor array in the Tantalus' antlers is rapidly picking up enemy signatures. Tactical displays, satellite imagery, topographic displays, a rainbow of colors, banished only when Calliope clamps her eyes shut.
With her hands firmly stuck, there is no such recourse for the voices in her headset.
A chorus of soldiers, actual soldiers, men and women trained for battle instead of whatever Calliope is supposed to be, screaming in discordance. Cries of panic, cries of grief, a few voices trying to bark and shout their way to re-impose some semblance of discipline.
More explosions, and rocks raining down them, distant, trickling hail on the Tantalus' armor. Calliope is so hopelessly overwhelmed, she gleans maybe a third of what's being shouted across the column's closed comm frequency, and even less of what her displays are trying to impart.
None of it is good.
A whole line of rail-cannons on the ridge, and a Faisal-Class mech on the road ahead. Explosions behind them, on the road back. Signatures approaching, deep in the cover of the valley. They are surrounded, sitting ducks on the mountainside, and of course today the solar flares are too harsh for any transports to be launched.

They're fucked.
The ambush is well and truly perfect, somebody must have messed up tremendously, for SigInt to miss this danger entirely. But it's them, here and now, that'll pay the price. Some sooner than others. Cause Calliope knows one thing that's coming for sure, and she doesn't have to wait long, before she can hear it over comms. One of the other mech pilots, voice rife with desperate anger and revulsion: "Send the fucking dog over."

It does not take long for more voices to join that chorus.
And Calliope does not know how long she can just ignore them, pretend to not hear.
Tune them out.
She can feel her eyes water, and her visor fog up, shaking in her harness.
Another volley of rail gun slugs tears up the ridge above.
More shrapnel raining down.
Less cover.
Helpless.
She's in command of a fabulous war machine, and she feels so fucking helpless. Her arms and legs are burning from the march, she can barely move, let alone fight, and even if… she's so damn scared, this is too damned much.
But in truth, it's not the enemy she fears, not the guns on the ridge or the explosions sundering the rock. Calliope is scared, because she knows what's coming next, and she's trying to prepare herself, trying to steel herself, trying to choke down the mounting anticipation, trying to prepare some kind of resistance, some kind of argument she can make, but all her thoughts have turned skittish in her skull.

And then she hears a click, and the thoughts are all gone, scurried into the far reaches of her brain.
The click doesn't come from the headset under her helmet.
The sharp, electrifying noise is the indicator that the cochlear implant is active.
A different comm line, speaking all but directly into her brain.
Just hearing the line open is enough for her to stop shaking, for a shiver to run down her spine, for her tears to still in the comfort of certainty. Some part of Calliope knows that this is all wrong, and hates herself for being so pathetically weak, hates her feeble heart, that's beating so much faster all of a sudden, thumping with eagerness.
The moment drags out, no, is being dragged out purpose, water dangled just out of reach of her mind that suddenly feels like it's dying of thirst, and the desperation that tightens her chest has nothing at all to do with the dire tidings of battle outside her mech.

"How are you doing, Pup?"
The woman's voice is just a tinge smokey and effortlessly sensual and the implant feeds it directly into Calliope's mind, each word a breath down the back of her neck, and a shivering reverb down her spine. The concern in the words sounds so earnest, so gentle, so gracious, and Calliope feels so overwhelmed, so scared, so grateful, she's aching to trust, aching to just beg for help.
But she bites her lip.
Tries to shake her head free of the spell.
Tries to fortify herself.
Clear thoughts. Clear thoughts.
There has got to be a way to…

A rattling series of clicks. Switches and buttons unlocking, covers sliding off on the gear-sticks in her hands. That isn't supposed to happen yet. But the whirring underneath her confirms it. The Tantalus is waking up in earnest.
Switching to combat operations. Safeties off, weapons free. But normally that only happens when… She doesn't get the chance to ask before the voice comes back, and stirs her thoughts like an idle finger stirs a cup of water.

"I've unlocked your weapons, Pup. It's very brave of you, that you want to fight like this. On my screens, it looks like this is going to be a rough one, but I'm right there with you."

A honey drip coo, that sounds utterly sincere to Calliope's ears and she wants to believe it so bad, wants to hear praise, not mockery. It takes her conscious effort to recognize the snare. The taunt.
Because that's the thing, isn't it?
No matter the bravado and bluster and petulant resistance she had managed to display throughout this deployment, and this morning at the FOB… Calliope can't fight like this. On manual, she can barely march, and like this, exhausted and scared out of her wits, she wouldn't even begin to know what to do, other than stumble and flail.
If she tries to fight like this, she'll surely die.
She knows that.
Her Handler knows it too.
And drags the moment out, lets the feigned praise hang, a tantalizing and yet utterly empty pretense of respecting Calliope's decision. Knowing full well that there isn't a real choice at all. So what is even the point in holding out? Why did Calliope ever think it was a good idea to put up a fight? It had seemed so important this morning, and now she can barely remember why.
Now it just seems ridiculous.
Now she just wants…
Help?

"P-please…" the pathetic mewl escapes Calliope's lips all on its own. Not because she wants to. She's not touched the tongue switch inside her mask. But she doesn't need to - the implant is always transmitting. Handler hears everything.

"What is it, Pup? Tell me what you need." Not a question. An order, however clad in gentle, caring silk it might be. Besides, Handler knows the answer, she must. She sounds like she does, but then the Handler always sounds like she knows everything.

She does know everything, doesn't she?

Another barrage thunders overhead, and startles Calliope something fierce, because it's so hard to hold onto her thoughts now, and she just blurts out the impulse she has been trying to keep down: "Help me! Please, I'm sorry Handler, please help me!"

"Oh my poor, scared Pup." comes the prompt answer, and it makes Calliope feel just a little safer, for no other reason than that the cooing in her ear sounds like her Handler genuinely cares. "The battlefield is no place for a gentle, delicate thing like you, is it? Do you want me to make it better? Do you want me to wake you up?"

Waking up. Calliope hates that Handler insists on calling it that. There's something terribly demeaning to the thought. To the implication that the other thing is real, the real her, a creature of the waking world? Because if that's her waking self, then… what does that make Calliope?

But those are silly thoughts, heavy thoughts, complicated and difficult to grasp and she probably couldn't get them off her tongue if she wanted to, and instead she just begs: "Please! Yes! Thank you! Please… wake me up, Handler Sir."

A pang, somewhere deep in her heart. Perhaps a sting of disgust, because isn't she just so path…

"Override sequence 4-2-1-11-3-8."

"Wake up for me."

There is always a sharp cold when the needle of the Link plunges into the port implanted at the back of her skull, where the spine meets the brain. Dangerous tech, because no human can withstand the neural load of being one with a gigantic war machine for long.
No human.

"Five."

But the Handler has said the magic words.
And now she's counting down, guiding her descend. And Calliope knows she will be gone before the link is fully booted up. Well… not gone exactly, but no longer at the forefront. She's already feeling dizzy. Feeling her thoughts and doubts and anxiety and her oh so silly attempts at resistance crumble away, piece by piece, like a sandcastle that has stood proud in spite of its frailty, for a little while.
But now the tide is coming to carry it off.
One. Wave. At. A Time.

"Four."

Calliope is falling, hurling through the absolute stillness of a warm, dark, vast ocean.
In the quiet darkness of the depth, she drops past ghostly, drifting images.
A messy, crowded attic. Home?
A sickly cherry tree in the evening sun. Lonely?
Dozens of images hunched over a keyboard late at night. Purpose?

"Three."

Her spinning, toppling ascend accelerates. Faces now, rather than still images.
Faster and faster and faster, and the faces whizz past, too quick to recognize, or to hear their whispers. Maybe they were never really faces to begin with. Or maybe they have all turned away from her. There's only one face that matters anyway, Handler's face, dark and beautiful and she sees it clearly, right beside her, steady where Calliope is tumbling, watching out, watching over her, always watching.

"Two."

As she races toward the ocean surface, the first rays of sunlight drive away the shadowy, empty faces.
The images become more concrete.
A large, comfy, checkered pillow on the floor, in front of an earthen fireplace. Home.
Crawling through the coarse grass. A leash, a gloved hand, gently patting her head. Love.
The Tantalus, standing tall and proud in its hangar bay. Purpose.

"One."

She breaks through the surface of the water, out of the cold, and all the warmth of the cockpit returns as she falls from the heavens, and right through the armor plates painted in hideous desert camo patterns, and back into her own body.
But it's not her own anymore.
Calliope is dreaming, and the Hound is awake.

"Welcome back, my pretty. Are you ready to hunt for me?"

Her breathing mask has contracted, to the point it feels more like a muzzle than a breather. Because waking up is easier with less oxygen. And because this way, a little suction tube next to the air filters can drain liquids from her mask. In case she throws up. Or to take care of the drool running down her chin.
Calliope only snarls and pants in affirmation, too enamored with the sensation of linking with her mech. With a fall that has felt like an eternity and a heartbeat both, and only took a half a second.

"There's not a lot of time left, my pretty." The Handler's voice is still perfectly gentle and polite, even if there is a faint scolding, for all the time Calliope has wasted hesitating, and she would whimper under the sting, but the Handler is still talking, and must not be interrupted: "What do you say, I go and tell the Captain you will have the ridge-line taken in… 45 seconds? You can do that for me, can't you? Hunt for me. Make their guns go quiet."

Of course I can. Anything. Anything you ask. Anything for but a smile and a pat on the head.

"Yes, Handler." It's so hard to think of human words. Calliope loves words, and all the wonderful ways they can be molded to make worlds from dreams and thoughts. Or she thinks she did once.
The Hound has little use for words.
Except those two in particular.
Yes, Handler.
"Go forth. Hunt."
The Hound is off the leash, and there is no time to waste, her superior, her savior, her goddess has made her will known.

With no more than a thought, grips click into place in the mech's palms, that are just her palms now, the Tantalus and the Hound move as one, unity of action and intent, a single racing mind at the helm, signals flowing back and forth through the cable in her neck instead of down her spine.
The ridge line where the guns are deployed is almost a full click out.
Two dozen rail cannons, plus the Faisal.
The Tantalus is fast, but no mech is fast enough to dodge a rail cannon shot. Very few things are armored enough to tank a single hit from that kind of caliber, let a lone twenty. The Nidhöggr class was one of the first series of mechs to be equipped with limited flight modules, but those almost never worked right, and even if they did, they certainly do not output rail gun dodging speeds.
Besides, the Tantalus' wings have been clipped a long time ago.

Instead of flight, it has something much better.
If you don't mind the risk, or the heat, or the pain.
The Hound knows neither fear nor hesitation.

42 seconds.

The Alcubierre-module inside the Tantalus' backplate ignites. Heat warnings explode all over her display.
Space folds with a dull cackle, and every fiber of her being churns and ripples.
A passing shiver and the Tantalus is a few hundred feet in the air, suspended while there is no distance at all between ground and sky, and turns in a pirouette, orients itself in the breathless moment before the space between its cover on the road and the spot in the air will distend again, with her on the other side of it, and gravity can grab a hold of the mech.
The problem with this method of non-motion is that it only works in straight lines.
And that most mech's would immolate when inducing enough reactor fission to fire it twice in a row without time to cool down. Pure insanity. But insanity is what the Tantalus is build for.

41.5 seconds.

Space folds a second time, and the cockpit becomes a boiler room, lit up by flickering warnings of reactor stress and imminent shutdown. The beast that fills Calliope's mind almost entirely, does not care if her flesh bubbles under the thick pilot suit, where-ever metal of the straps' buckles touches her.
The second space folding non-step has taken here right into the middle of the line of carefully concealed gun emplacements, tucked beneath an overhang, covered in tarps and crawling, screaming men.
The Hound is upon her prey.
The Tantalus spreads its arms. The grips in its palms, connected to its core by long cables, are nothing so sophisticated as guns or swords. On pure technicality, and on the shipping manifesto, they aren't even weapons.
They are vents.
Two lines of unstable plasma ignite as gigajoules of pent up heat finally have a path to get away from the insulated guts of the mech. Somewhere between a blade and a whip, focused by an emitter, bright blazing portents of destruction.

And the Tantalus begins to dance, and to twirl, and to reap.

The first, big, sweeping motion sends fire through half the emplacements, burns camo netting, melts barrels, incinerates men and munitions. Expensive munitions. Because a rail cannon can fire a rock and make it devastating, but rocks don't cook off if you sweep them with heat, and the firing line is suddenly rocked by a series of secondary explosions.
Which turns the overhang they've hidden in, and the teeming trench works they have dug into the bone dry ground into a manmade hell of plasma and shrapnel, a fiery chaos that no one and nothing can hope to survive.
Except for the Tantalus, twisting and turning amid the inferno of her own design, dancing on clawed, crooked raptor legs. Thanks to the biofeedback of the Control Link, Calliope can feel it all. The heat of the blaze, and the rain of rock and metal, each impact a pin prick on her own skin.
It's not real of course.
Nothing is actually pressing on her body. Just signals flooding her brain. The kind of signals that drive most mech pilots insane, after a couple of tours. But to Calliope they are so terribly distant, because she's floating in cotton, a banished a mile deep inside her own head.
And the beast does not care.
The beast knows pain well enough to cast it aside.
The Hound cares only about killing in its mistress' name.

24 seconds.

Uniforms, she realizes, with detached curiosity, as her left plasma whip crashes down on the southern most gun, and she can see a number of men break from the trench and sprint toward a concealed vehicle of some kind. League uniforms, and not in terrible repair. Regulars. Who shouldn't be this far north.
Their valiant attempt at a retreat gets them nothing but to burn tired, when her right whip sweeps down.

Quiet.
The guns are quiet now, stilled from memory but for the cackling of flames and the continuous cook-offs. All except one. The worst one.
The Faisal.
The anchor at the northern end of the line, and the foe that blew up the Crawler most likely.
Of all the stocky old second gen mechs, the Faisal class are some of the biggest and bulkiest and it's silhouette is little more than a giant steel wedge on two legs, with two stout, gun toting climbing arms and two enormous cannon arrays on its shoulders. The behemoth is still turning to face her.
It stands squat, on short limbs and still a good five or six meters taller than the Tantalus, even counting its antlers. It's also three times as wide, and outweighs her by at least seventy tons. Maybe more.

22 seconds.

The Faisal is on the other end of the plateau, and there's not a single place that something the size of the Tantalus could take cover here. There is also not a snowball's chance in hell that she could withstand it, if the Faisal's guns unload on her.
Her reactor has not cooled down anywhere near enough to permit her another fold-step.
But all of that bulk is a blessing for Calliope.
League pilots usually learn on deployment, sent out with the bares of training, and they rarely last longer than two or three serious battles, so few of them move with any real grace, or the certainty that comes from truly knowing your machine inside out. But even with the best pilot, a machine this substantial would still have the turning speed of a glacier.
And there's a place that its guns can't reach, simply because of how far they extend.
Right in front of it.

The Hound snarls.
Calliope can feel her jaw contort, hears her panting, feels spittle wet her lips at the excitement of another.
The Tantalus leans low, its shape far more animal than humanoid, and falls into a mad dash.
Thought and action in one.
Violence made manifest, kicking up a trail of sundered earth and broken sandstone on its sprint.
No hesitation, no fear as the gigantic artillery mech shifts on the slope to meet her, turning in slow motion, trying to bring all of its firepower to bear.

13 seconds.

Tantalus leaps the last thirty meters, hurls itself into the air, launches both of its whips forward. A clean, perfect X across the rumbling titan's front, heat alone effortlessly rending outdated armor plating and whatever this lot had bolted on for extra protection.
Too fucking slow.

A bit more than a quarter mile in nine seconds is blisteringly fast for a mech in dead sprint, but it's been slow enough, that the Faisal has had time to turn. And its enormous wedge bulkhead is essentially just an giant, armored crumple zone, meant to deflect much more substantial weaponry than her whips.
Three, four seconds faster and the plasma might have burned the flank, the batteries or the ammo banks. Like this, her attack is utterly inconsequential.
And the Tantalus has not lost any of its reckless momentum.

The two mechs collide with enough force to strain material physics, and it's only by the grace of the Hounds superhuman reflexes, that the Tantalus gets its legs underneath itself, clawed feet slicing into the armor wedge with a terrible screech, and the inverted knee and ankle joints absorb some of the shock that ripple's through the superstructure.

The impact is still brutal, the aching of polymer and metal a deafening echo through the mountain range.

A human pilot might have passed out just from getting jostled like this.
The suspension straps help a little, but her limbs are stuck in metal, and just from being thrown around, Calliope is pretty sure she dislocates some limb or another.
But that doesn't matter right now, and neither do the system damage alarms flaring up in augmented reality, nor the displays that disappear in a flash because some of Tantalus' electronics have failed or sensors have been knocked out of alignment.

It doesn't matter to Calliope, because she's watching from a million miles away, floating in liquid amber, and nothing matters to her in this state. It doesn't matter to the Hound, because the only thing she's worried about is disappointing her Handler, and pain only ever serves to fuel the beast's blood thirst.

11 seconds.

The Faisal is still in motion. The tactically sound thing would be to disengage. Get to the hulking foe's back. Find the gaps between its legs and backplates, where the factory models are vulnerable. But there's not been factory fresh Faisals since the strato-bombing of Jubail, and this one has clearly been modified and up-armored.
Besides, no telling how long that will take, especially with both of Tantalus' claw feet stuck, firmly lodged in the larger mech's front armor.
And if it takes too long, then the Hound's failure might make a liar of her Handler, who has promised Captain Davout that the enemy position will be wiped out with haste. That thought frightens the beast so utterly, even Calliope, so far separated from her own consciousness, feels the anxious sting in her heart.

So the only way is forward.

The slashed cross of smoldering steel is right in front of her.
A thought makes the generator flare into the red once more. Both of the Tantalus' hands let go of the sputtering emitters and dig into the edges of the scars it has cut.
Hesitation is defeat.
Hesitation is for the weak.
Hesitate, and she'll disappoint Handler.
Besides, hesitation is for people.

With all the violence that the pull of its arm and leg hydraulics and its spinal servos can produce at maximum energy output, the Tantalus bashes its head against the foe. The point of its snout, that always looks more canine than dragon to Calliope, hammers right into the point where the two scars intersect, where the armor is weakened. Where here efforts pull and rip and tear to widen the gap.
More than the shock, it's the biofeedback of headbutting a hundred and forty ton metal monster that rocks her with enough concussive force that even the impervious, relentless Hound gets dizzy for the smallest fraction of a second.
But with a metal wail, the plate gives, just a little, until the snout gets stuck.

9 seconds.

Hound is reeling, but she is still awake enough to send the command.
No matter how much it looks like an antlered wolf, no matter its severed wings, Nidhöggr is a dragon.
The Tantalus is a dragon.
The tip of its snout unfurls.
The third plasma emitter ignites.
This one is a weapon, its nozzle lined with accelerator spouts.
With the tip wrenched past its outer shell, the Faisal's tender insides have no resistance to offer to a fire breath, hotter than the boiling point of steel.
Cables melt. Servos disintegrate. Munition storages burn up before they can even detonate. The reactor shielding begins to whither, and the much weaker cockpit insulation means less than nothing.
The Faisal's pilot is ash before he has time to send a prayer to his god.

5 seconds.

The guns are still, its prey is slaughtered. And Hound howls in and jeers in battle-drunk triumph, drool running down the inside of the breathing mask.
Handler has given her an order, and the order is fulfilled.
Handler will be proud of her hunting dog.
Not a single other thing in the world matters.
Not the hundreds of lives wiped out in a murderous blaze. Not the injuries that the exuberant creature has inflicted on her own, no, on Calliope's body. Not the largely self-inflicted beating that the Tantalus has taken, that'll take precious time to repair, and certainly will not serve to make Calliope any more popular with the engineering corps.

No, right now the beast is too exhilarated by her victory to care that the Faisal, its insides hollowed out by smoldering inferno, has ceased to move on the sharp slope. That it has begun to tilt backwards, with nothing left to hold it up, and a steep canyon looming at its back.
Or that the Tantalus is still quite stuck to the hollow carcass of the much heavier mech, listing more and more, pulling them both toward the abyss.

Fuck.