Esther von Greifenberg knew that this was the critical moment.
She'd been taking a hammering through the whole duel. Isaac Teng's Vindicator was the same mass as her 'Mech, but it had far superior armour and firepower. Almost every shot from the Ceres Arms Extended Range PPC had struck home, peeling armour away from the frame of the spindly-limbed Hatchetman.
She'd scored a few hits spraying fire across the Capelllan machine with the antiquated Defiance Killer autocannon and even landing a few hits with the medium lasers, but nothing that had penetrated Teng's protection. He seemed not to have even noticed.
Sweat was pouring off Esther. She'd had to take a brief moment behind cover to snatch a mouthful of tepid water from one of the sports bottles crammed into webbing around her cockpit or she'd probably be critically dehydrated by now. As it was, the absorbant padding beneath her was probably going to need replacement. The stink was indescribable.
Normally the Hatchetman's heatsinks would have prevented any serious heat-build up. However not only had Esther had one removed months ago, to fit modern ammunition storage into the salvaged HCT-3F, but she was running at only sixty percent dissipation. The thermometer display was yellow - an improvement from the earlier red. Three times, as Teng forced the pace of the battle - wisely refusing to close into the reach of the axe gripped in the Hatchetman's right fist - Esther had taken the risk of over-riding the safeties on her fusion reactor, accepting the very real risk of overheated autocannon cartridges detonating in their magazine, tearing the left side of the BattleMech apart.
The celluar storage would have limited the damage, but without ammuntion for the autocannon she'd be reduced to the lasers - assuming their control feeds weren't severed by the explosion.
It didn't matter now.
Teng had made his mistake - backpedalling around a jutting stone slab that she was using for cover, he was barely a hundred metres away and his attempt to outflank her meant that he was at just the right angle.
The Capellan did his best to stop her: missiles and lasers did nothing but the ER PPC tore away the armour of the Hatchetman's right leg and for a terrible instant Esther felt the 'Mech begin to spin out of control as one of the jump jet vents fused closed. She was turning anyway and without that thruster to provide countering force she'd miss her landing - something sure to be disasterous for her.
Afterwards, Esther could never have said whether it was instinct or blind luck that had her finger close around one of the triggers on her control sticks. The Defiance Killer spat armour-piercing shells wildly into the air, the recoil just barely enough to keep the forty-five tons of Battlemech on roughly the right path.
She'd only have one attempt at this. Teng was already trying to overcome the more than forty kph momentum of his Vindicator, trying to break off.
Everything hung on one decision.
Esther exhaled slowly as the Hatchetman's feet descended past the shoulders of the Vindicator and then she jerked her arm savagely around inside the waldo mechanism that dominated the right hand side of her cockpit, muscles screaming as she forced them against the multiple-gravities that the breaking power of the remaining jumpjets were imposing.
The hatchet from which her Mech took its name - three tons of carefully crafted alloys, powered by the advanced myomers that Esther had kept well inside their optimal temperature bracket - missed the optimal cut: directly down into the domed skull of the Vindicator and through Teng's cockpit.
What it managed was almost as good: the barely sharpened edge struck the other 'Mech's shoulder and tore through the weaker armour that protected the rear of the joint before sheering through layer after layer of the shielding that kept the enormous temperatures of the fusion reactor from contact with the outside world.
The air that came into sudden contact with the inner elements was superheated, converting it to plasma that vented in the distinctive silver explosion that mechwarriors had feared for half a thousand years.
Esther's Hatchetman staggered backwards as she brought the gyro under control.
Isaac Teng baked inside his cockpit and Esther von Greifenburg cursed as she saw millions of C-bills of potential salvage gutted.
