<strong>Day 31</strong><br/><br/>“I’m telling you, Mike, I still think this whole set-up is suspicious as hell.” Beth, secure in the cockpit of her mech, watched the short, squat enemy MW as it stood passively one hundred meters in the distance. Her second prelim match was only four minutes from starting.<br/><br/>“Look, you shouldn’t think like that—the prelims are random, it’s just bad luck.”<br/><br/>“Really? My first fight since the public service announcement is against one of the most heavily armed and armored mechs out there—which just happens to be sponsored exclusively by GeneCorp—and the match format seems deliberately designed to play to his strengths and my weaknesses. We’re starting at close range with a tiny area to fight in, and no cover of any kind! I’m basically getting the ‘eberharted’ here.”<br/><br/>“I get your meaning. But even if you were right, you’ve got no choice but to see this through or forfeit.”<br/><br/>“I know. And I’m not giving them the satisfaction.” The battlefield left much to be desired—the two mechs were standing on a high plateau in the desert, each MW casting long shadows against the setting sun. Keeping the combatants from falling off the edge to a fatal drop was an experimental transparent dome. The dome was allegedly capable of resisting all the weapons legal for use on MBF mechs.<br/><br/>Beth saw a signal from her control panel. “Looks like my nemesis is calling, Mike. Talk to you later.” She switched over to the netcom channel.<br/><br/>“Still sure you want to go through with this, bitch?”<br/><br/>“Excuse me?” Beth asked indignantly. “That’s pretty tough talk for a newbie pilot.”<br/><br/>Brett Quinn, the pilot in question, only escalated his hostility. “Thanks to your stupid little stunt, GeneCorp is losing business—a lot of my friends are getting laid off thanks to you.”<br/><br/>“I didn’t force GeneCorp to deceive the public with faulty treatments. For that matter, if they wanted to save jobs in the face of losses, they could have cut executive salaries or stopped sponsoring so many mechs. I’m sorry to hear about your friends’ hardships, but they weren’t caused by me.”<br/><br/>“Shut up! As if you understand hardship in your sheltered little world of photo shoots and fashionable causes. The rest of us mere mortals don’t get to take half a year off from work to sulk if we lose someone!”<br/><br/>Beth shut off her transmitter suddenly, and then spent the rest of her wait time breathing deeply and trying to calm herself.<em>He did that deliberately! He twisted the conversation straight over to Melissa just to rattle my cage!</em>She was not going to let it work—Beth resolved to stay dispassionate, and take down Quinn like any other opponent.<br/><br/>The match started, and Quinn ran straight at Beth, firing wave after wave of missiles. She used her plasma cannons on their defensive mode to shoot down some of the missiles, running quickly to dodge the rest as she returned fire with her railgun. The missiles slammed into the dome behind her, and although it held the frequency of the missiles striking set up sympathetic vibrations the engineers had not planned for. Micro-fractures began forming in the dome, invisible to the naked eye and unknown to the pilots.<br/><br/>As Quinn closed in, Beth was suffering from severely degraded armor due to close proximity explosions, but she had avoided any direct hits and all vital systems were still intact. She switched to rapid-fire mode on the railgun and unloaded perfectly into Quinn’s right knee despite his impressive velocity. She stripped off the armor and blew out the joint completely. Beth ducked and Quinn, who had been trying to knock her against the dome with his superior mass and speed, tripped over her and crashed.<br/><br/>For a fraction of a second it seemed as if the dome would hold, and Quinn’s mech was badly crushed against it. But the finally the fractures gave way. Quinn had lost most of his velocity due to the energy used up to crush his mech and shatter the dome, but he was still sliding toward the drop off the edge of the plateau. With no time to think, Beth jumped at him and grabbed onto his leg. She might have slid right over the edge with him if not for her foot getting caught on a jagged edge of the broken dome.<br/><br/>The two came to a stop, with Quinn hanging completely over the ledge and Beth lying flat on the plateau, arms holding one of the MW’s legs and foot still keeping her wedged in place. Mike was shouting in a panic over the situation, but Beth had to ignore him and turned netcom back on. “Brett, can your cockpit safely eject at this height?” she asked quickly, trying not to shout.<br/><br/>“No, there’s no way! Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck—”<br/><br/>“Listen to me,” she interrupted. “You need to manually climb out of your cockpit, and then climb up the outside of your mech so that you can grab the hand of my mech.”<br/><br/>“Jesus, that’s insane!”<br/><br/>“It’s your only chance! And hurry up—the foot of my mech is caught on a jagged edge of the dome. If the dome gives, we’ll both plummet.”<br/><br/>To his credit, Quinn did not delay any longer. Fortunately the exterior of his mech had a lot of rough edges and technician’s handholds. It was a tense minute, but finally Quinn climbed up and got on top of the hand of the<em>Lissa</em>. She then released her grip on Quinn’s mech, which fell and exploded far below upon impact with the desert.<br/><br/>“Beth, I’ve been watching the whole thing on the cameras!” Mike finally said to her over satcom. “What were you thinking—you’d be dead right now, if the<em>Lissa’s</em>foot hadn’t been caught like that.”<br/><br/>“I didn’t really have time to think,” she admitted. The rush of adrenaline passed, leaving Beth shaking from her near death experience. “I think I’m going to need a few days off after this,” she added meekly.