Major Harrison in his SHEV adjusted the chinstrap on his tanker hood. He was sweating hard, but not because of the thick protective uniform he wore. His crew even in this darkness—the vague shapes of their faces illuminated only by the ghastly green glow cast by their control consoles—he could see were being weighed upon heavily by the apprehension of facing an Ogre. It was dead silent as they waited in ambush, amongst the short dales where the Ogre's ground radar might not pick them up.
Everyone at HQ was dumbstruck at the sudden news of the Paneuro Ogre, which came only by chance after it had already stomped across the border, crossing kilometers of friendly territory, killing several small outposts with such efficiency and so little warning that not so much as a squawk reached the ears of the North Defense Command until it was already hours away from Fortress Vancouver. With less than a week's worth of campaigning done since the Maples' Massacre on New Year's, it was appalling just how much progress the rebels had made. The factory-complexes along the northern border all of them remained in loyalist control, the Ogre was impossible to build; that they might have assembled it from prefabricated parts in secret was almost as unbelievable though it remained the most popular theory. Whatever the explanation, it made no difference to his command. HQ ordered him to make a stand, a delaying action to buy time to muster the National Guard's own meager and outdated Ogre units. Those that remained at home were so weak, temperamental and prodigiously under-gunned that they weren't even considered to be worth the transport costs to accompany the forces being committed to the Brazil campaign.
Harrison knew his situation was hopeless, he had already accepted that he was going to die. Defection never once crossed his mind. All he wanted was to hurt that Ogre, he wanted to hurt it so badly that it would never leave this battlefield, even if it cost the lives of every last one of his men.