BattleTech Beyond Electrodrome: Mechwire Traps

Tunes to set the mood

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And now, on with the show.

Rigged

Something about the lights down here.

Eye-snatching pulsations of spastic color, a neon deluge, a noxious catastrophe of eager advertisements, thrumming and blazing forth from broken plastic frames set high above the streets, casting shadows so hard and black they might have been obsidian axe blades.

Stick an arm out of the shadow. Now you see me.

Pull it back in. Now you don’t.

The luminal voids were perfect.

Perfect but for a little glowering ember of orange light.

Carlton calmly drew the cigarette smoke into his lungs, felt it fill him with a spirit like fire. The earth shook faintly, but his hands did not. He had been out into the Sprawl too many times to still get the shakes. He had seen too many friends, acquaintances, and strangers die.

It builds a callus.

They were criminals, for sure. But laws don’t dictate what is righteous or not. That’s decided between men and men alone. It was “illegal” for Ol’ Stuart Rose to walk the Leisure Strips naked, for example. Fair enough. Debatable righteousness. But fair enough. Stu died a few weeks, charred to the core when Hale Caesar raked his platoon with pulse lasers. Too bad. The man knew jokes.

It was also "illegal” to hold debt of greater than 2,000 C-Bills to a Circinian Casino for longer than a month. The hole got deeper the louder he prayed. Every bet, every single bet, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…, please, God, let me win! He had prayed. Let me get that money back, please god let me get that money back so Sarah and the kids don’t...

God works in mysterious ways.

That or the fucker is deaf.

Another deep drag on his cigarette and its tiny predator eye burned bright. The redfang-laced smoke pushed deeper into his lungs, into his being. He slowed his breathing, deep breaths of fire, like forge billows fanning the coals, heating the steel, from black to orange to a white-hot weapon. The pounding grew louder, driving up through the soles of his boots. Big Boy was coming.

Carlton toggled the display in his hand and a dim varicolored screen fed him a status update before going dim again. Battery at 78%. 3 meter mass detection trigger active. System armed.

His eyes followed the thin wire leading from his hand unit, weaving through the rubble like any one of the countless streets of this oversized, dissolving favela. The wire ran into a series of heavy battery packs, stacked together like oversized library books. From this tumulus emerged a thicker power conduit, snaking up a concrete pillar to disappear into fat cable that was wrapped loosely around the column. The cable was clad in a drab, filthy shroud of cloth and appeared like a shabby, molting serpent. It lurked in the darkness above like a patient hunter. A great length of the serpent cascaded back down to the ground and ran out through a shattered gap in the wall, diving and disappearing into the rubble between Carlton’s Cobalt Squad and Starfish Squad’s concealed position on the other side of the street.

Inside that innocuous sheath of cloth there lurked a deadly creature, a strand of myomer as thick as a man’s arm, waiting…waiting…

The proximity trigger would trip at three meters and discharge the batteries, jolting the myomer tripwire to life with a storm of energy. It would snap tight in an instant, a thin line of treachery connecting his anchor point to the concrete support piling across the street, just in time to bite into Big Boy’s legs and spill it over into the street.

And that’s when the real fun would begin.

They had drilled on this. Once they’re down, any pre-existing hole gets a rocket. Prioritize proximal joints to maximize efficiency: who gives a fuck about the ankle if the hip’s blown out? Laser rifles to keep the heat on as the sappers run in and plant charges. Disable the bastards before they had a chance to pick themselves up. And if all that fails, drown the fuckers in inferno grenades.

Once the smoke and debris settled, they’d be looking a dismembered giant, a torso in the dirt, an oversized chicken nugget. But they had trained with simunitions, and the practice Mech hadn’t fought back. Hadn’t been fucking Big Boy. Some of the boys of Starfish and of Cobalt had actual experience with a mechwire takedown, but Carlton had seen men more seasoned than these attempt the same maneuver, men mowed down in the chaos, ground to red paste like glutted mosquitos.

He tossed his cigarette away, gritted his teeth, and cued his throat mic.

“Thirty meters and closing, boys. Weapons hot and stay clear of the wire.”

Mechwire Trap Kits

Below are rules for mechwire trap kits, a new piece of infantry equipment that I feel likely already already exists in the BattleTech universe that needed only a little encouragement to be embodied in the intangible yet omnipotent Word.

Note: yes, I realize that mechwire traps are a very dangerous tool to put into the hands of the humble infantryman. If they can drag a behemoth down in the streets and dismember it before it has a chance to stand back up, what chance does a mech stand in urban combat?

Its a fair question, and makes a player reconsider the strategies and tactics of urban pacification via BattleMech.

Honestly though, if we love that world, if we love that canon, we also understand that the only reason that Mechs are the so-called “Kings of the Battlefield”, its because they are clad in hardened plot armor, and the infantry units in the fiction and lore only ever stand knee-high to a Grasshopper. Not just figuratively, but literally (not even literally, though).

Mike Tyson was heavyweight champion because he was undisputable. He was king because he fought the best the world had to offer and defeated them.

If Mechs are really as almighty as the fiction states, lets start giving them better challenges, better stories, grittier foes, deadlier conflicts. A rifle behind every blade of grass, a mechwire trap lurking in every alleyway.

V.3

And there ya have it.

I know the horse is dead already, and I’ve been kicking it all morning, but let me offer an olive branch here: with BattleTech: Beyond Electrodrome, while its CLEAR that I’m crushing on the underdog infantry units, don’t go thinking that I’m not cooking a huge number of far nastier responses for anti-infantry work.

From double-barreled gas cannons that can be used to project toroidal clouds of anything from tear gas to nerve agents to fuel-air explosive slurry, all the way to “ambush cans”, anti-infantry melee weapons, and liquid hallucinogen ammo for fluid guns.

So say nothing of the anti-mech harpoons, the dreaded Meshuggah, and the revised sponsorship tables.

Good things a’comin’!