NOW JESUS WAS AN ONLY SON...
On reflection, the most astonishing thing about the Tortuga operation was how quickly we got hustled out after the shooting stopped. Two weeks after Trevaline was dead, infantry regiments meant to relieve and replace us were landing - which, given that the Tortuga Dominion was literally four jumps and at least as many weeks from anywhere remotely civilized, meant that they’d been in motion long before AFFS command would have had any idea how the operation turned out.
Still, they’d apparently been right about that call, and we packed up and headed on our way to Mentasta, a planet I’d never heard of in any other context. Looking it up in an atlas, though, was… suggestive.
It was one jump from St. Ives.
That planet, meanwhile, was the number four mech producer in the Capellan Confederation as well as the largest source that state’s light and medium aerospace fighters. And a regional capital. And a military training academy. And the personal seat of one of the most stable, and thus most capable, living members of the Liao family.
It seemed… Unlikely that we’d be brought into the area without at least some chance of taking a crack at it, and reading up on previous campaigns there made me dread the job.
The larger and more populous of St. Ives two continents, Liaoning, had in some ancient epoch been the site of a truly colossal volcanic trap eruption. More than eighty percent of the area of a landmass larger than Earth’s Eurasia was covered in a single mass of basalt up to half a kilometer thick. The rock underlying that hard-weathering volcanic stone varied… but much of it, even most of it, had been well-aged limestone, already riddled with caves and sinkholes, which the fresh lava had filled in before it cooled.
When the patient work of water resumed and eroded the rest of the limestone, it had left behind immense, almost-dry cavern systems, with dozens of chambers large enough to hold entire cities, their roofs supported by the basalt columns left where the long-ago sinkholes had been filled.
The settlers of St. Ives had reinforced the most stable caves and filled them with their world’s industry, leaving the surface to parks and residences; invading the place meant going into the caves to root out the garrisons and claim the factories… or spending years, even decades on a constant watch for sallies and raids while you tried and probably failed to locate and block every entrance so you could starve them or choke the flow of materials to the factories enough to put an end to parts and replacements.
Requesting records of the Federated Suns’ fights on the world from the garrisons we passed on our way to station illuminated just how hard a job rooting them out would be. The good news, such as it was, had edges of its own - all of the factories had at least one and usually several access points and passages large enough to admit battlemechs, and the need to keep using them themselves meant that the Liao defenders had never collapsed any of those.
Davion Military Intelligence thought that it had never been planned or prepared for, possibly to short-circuit any cases of Excessive Initiative and partly because the deadfall traps, shooting galleries, and so on were thought to be more than enough protection.
If the latter was the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces’ logic, they’d proven right to date. The factories had never fallen, even when invaders ran rampant on the surface above.
“...If they do send us down there, this is gonna be really gruesome,” I mumbled.
Sophitia, curled up as the large spoon, made an irritated noise, and grumbled something to the effect of ‘aren’t you going to sleep?’ in German.
“I said I was gonna finish this report, didn’t I?” I replied, trying to focus so I could do that and stop keeping her up.
She huffed against my neck and gathered her English again. “What’s ‘down there’?”
“The big military targets on Saint Ives are underground. Imagine having to fight through a version of Ishiyama as long as Solaris City is across, but with entire regiments stuffed into it.”
“...Ah,” she said. The warren of twists, traps, and switchbacks known as Ishiyama, the Draconis Combine sponsored entry on the rolls of Solaris’s Class Six gladiatorial arenas, was notoriously a nightmare for the fighters condemned to suffer there. I knew that Soph had fought there more often than most, and done very well, but she’d spoken of the place with loathing. “And the arena control teams aren’t even pretending to be neutral.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The FedRats have tried before, and every time they’ve found out the hard way over again that they had to go real slow, testing every meter of ground for traps, mines, and hidden firing ports. Which meant that the defenders could cycle fresh mechs in against them whenever they wanted, and make a push if they thought they had a shot at generating some attrition. Slow, painful, and bloody the whole way.”
She was silent for several seconds, then said, “If I write down the idea I just got, will you turn the light out and go to sleep?”
Well, I sure didn’t have any real ideas. “Yeah?” I said, and my back cooled down, exposed again to the air, as she rolled away towards her own computer pad.
I saved my place in my reading and set it in the rack built into my side’s little table, turned that light out, and rolled over to watch Sophitia write. Not that it took long; even with her hunt-and-peck typing style she had it down in only a few more seconds, letting her repeat the ritual.
“I love you,” I told her in the dark.
“Sleep, you sap,” she replied, but there was a laugh in her voice.
We did.
We were somewhere around Belaire when the drugs started to take hold…
OK, not really.
We were in the Belaire system, waiting through the charge time at the Nadir point, but there were no actual drugs involved. This detail’s important to note, because several of the techs involved in the project were wearing poorly concealed ‘What are the higher ups smoking?’ expressions as we watched the first Banshee to finish its refit straighten and step carefully out of its cubicle and onto the main handling deck.
All of the original guns were gone, the PPC and head laser had had medium lasers wired in place, and the armor was visibly bulked up by the additions made - and the new hardpoints on the forearms. The pilot walked forward into the carefully cleared and safed space, reached down, and picked up the gear meant to go into those hardpoints.
Watching from up in the traffic control booth that overlooked the deck, I could hear one of the techs monitoring the evolution say, “Looks like the Battlemaster code did its job. We’ve got a good lock-in.”
“Wait until it starts swinging,” another skeptic replied.
And the mech did start swinging; it had to. We needed to know how the stresses and strains and timing worked in this configuration to be able to program the simulators with it. There wasn’t room for a live fire test of any grade, and walking and running revisions would mean needing to send it along with the next supply runs, but the simple stand-and-swing we did have room for would be enough to get started on the process.
For a while, things seemed to be going well.
Then, with a screech of tearing metal and a colossal bang, twelve tons of fast moving metal smashed into the floor a mechlength away from the Banshee, bounced once in a spray of shattered fragments, and skidded the rest of the way to the edge of the loading bay to slam into the wall right under the monitor stand.
Once the swearing had died down, along with my heartrate, I turned to Doctor Raven and said, “Reinforce the mounts?”
He hmphed and chewed on his mustache for a moment. “I still think we could work out a better way of mounting them than this, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. We’ll do the math and figure out how much we need.”
A pause, then he warned me, “It’ll compromise the armor, some.”
I shrugged. “Needs must prevail when the devil drives. I want them to be swappable, given how much fire we’ll need them to take.”
He nodded. “I’d say remove the lasers, since they won’t be doing any good, but…”
“The pilots’d rebel if we tried,” I agreed. The row that’d been had over pulling the PPCs had been epic already. “The tanks went better?”
Another nod. “We worked out a modular way of doing it, given how many different launcher types we had, but that was doable. No problems.”
That mod was for our SturmFeur assault tanks. The standard Sturmfeur had a couple of infantry-clearing machine guns and two twenty-tube LRM launchers - one set up for indirect fire only, fixed forward from the rear hull, and the other in a turret that gave it both direct and indirect options. We’d pulled the turret LRMs and put in eighteen tubes of SRMs, in various combinations depending on the actual launchers we had available.
If we’d planned to leave them like that, that’d be setting ourselves up for a logistical nightmare, of course, but we weren’t and wouldn’t - once this campaign was over, or if we had a long enough break and the word was that it wasn’t St. Ives, we’d pull them and put the LRMs back in.
And if there wasn’t a break, well, we wouldn’t be able to use them as durable LRM support the way they were originally designed, but they still wouldn’t be bad tanks. Eighteen short-range missiles was a shedload of pain to back up the remaining long-range ones with.
Raven went on, “The evaluation we’ve been doing on the Stalkers, on the other hand, not so much. We can pull the LRM rack easy enough, and add the armor, but putting heat sinks in will be a lot more involved. We could probably put another SRM pack in, but-”
“We’ve already run through most of the spares on the Sturmfeurs,” I finished, and shrugged. “OK, we’ll run those stock, then.”
He checked something off on his pad, then glanced out the windows at the efforts to clean up after the mishap - the crews had emerged from the hiding places they’d picked while the Banshee was moving around. “Probably for the best,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of right now,” I admitted. “I’ve got a meeting with Doctor Tiber, but that shouldn’t be anything for you.”
That got a snort of amusement. “Right. I’ll go down and get back to work then,” he said, and did just that.
“Is this another Come to Jesus talk, like Clair got?” Io Sasagawa asked, coming into my office and seeing my face.
I sighed. “No? Maybe, sort of? You won’t think it’s good news, but you’re not fired or anything.”
She knew me well enough by now to not bother asking permission to sit down in front of my desk - the same chair Hanse Davion had used, now that I thought of it. “Don’t talk around it, then,” she said.
I tapped the folder of printout sitting on my desk. “Doctor Tiber brought this to me,” I said. “It’s - well, it’s ninety percent medicalese I can’t follow, cardiac vesication this and arterial decay that, but the upside is…”
I could see her knuckles, laced in her lap, go white, and her jaw tense. “I’m grounded?” she asked.
“Against my better judgement, no,” I said. “Long story short, he was saying six months of Lightning ops before ‘notable risk’ of something happening in flight… and adding another six months to that for every half-G of maximum acceleration you took off of them.”
She didn’t meet my eyes, looking away to the side. It was weird seeing a woman who could have been my mother look that teenager-guilty.
“What we will be doing is transferring your bird to Callisto,” I went on, “and moving you into one of the Chippewas.”
The stock Lyran Chippewa heavy attack fighter was a deathtrap on account of its terminal undersupply of armor, and badly undercooled besides. The Federated Suns’ standardized refit of the platform pulled two of its four 8cm lasers in favor of their weight in armor, and solved both problems in one pass.
Passing her ancestral fighter down to her daughter and moving her into the better protected heavy would make it harder for the enemy to kill my fighter CO, and - since the Chippewa was that mentioned half-a-G slower at both half and full burn - extend her flying career that little bit more.
Sasagawa thought that over, then nodded. “Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me too fast,” I said. “I told him to schedule you for a monthly recheck, and he will have full authority to ground you on the spot if one of them comes up ugly. We can afford to have you running things from a desk on the Grendel more than we can afford you having a heart attack in the middle of an operation.”
“I’m fifty-nine years old,” she admitted. “This isn’t a surprise, it’s just… I’d hoped I’d have longer.”
“Don’t we all?”
I like cold weather, but Mentasta was ridiculous. The average temperature at the equator was about -2 C, and the place only had what liquid water it did thanks to the geothermal cycle pushed by tidal forces. Like Sol’s Europa, it was a gas giant moon trapped between its primary and other major satellites. Tidelocked to the planet, its local day was a brutal thirteen standard ones, which pushed the native life into microseasons of noontime summer and the brutal frost and snows of midnight. The oxygen cycle ran on antifreeze as much as sunlight - algal blooms tinted the snows green-black during the day and died off again at night, providing the literal breathing space that Earth and most other worlds got from their oceans.
The local population lived in arcologies and domes, massive, insulated structures built from materials that were at least resistant to the collosal freeze-thaw cycle, and the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns had their own tower block on the outskirts of the artificial mountain range that served as the world’s capital city.
At the heart of that block, grim faced men with foxhead badges on their uniforms didn’t quite go so far as to strip-search me before waving admittance to the vault-doored room beyond.
I was the last to arrive, and I looked around at the other four permitted into the obvious security safe zone. Marshal Corrida Larcher, commanding the Davion Assault Guards Regimental Combat Team. Colonel Todd Revons, ditto the 1st FedSuns Armored Cavalry, who were just a mech regiment. Commander Till Solih, AKA Morgan Kell in a funny hat, who ran the unit’s second brigade while I handled the first.
And one more man, also wearing the fox-face of Davion Military Intelligence to go with his Colonel’s rank, who I hadn’t met. Nametag said Kaidanevsky.
Instinctively, I checked the wall clock behind him. I wasn’t actually late, so I just went to the last empty place at the table and sat down.
“Ladies, Gentleman,” Kaidanevsky said, “This will be your primary operational briefing for the upcoming offensive operation. I am obligated to remind you all that all of the information covered here is covered under relevant secrecy codes and subject to the full penalty of law. Please sign the relevant forms now.”
I didn’t have a reference for how common that kind of thing was, but from the expressions of the other three COs, the answer was ‘not very’. In their various ways, they all looked like they scented something big in the wind.
I looked down and started reading the legalese. When I had signed and looked up, they were all looking at me. I guess that made sense; Larcher and Revons would be familiar with these forms, and Solih would only need to compare them to the ones his native LCAF used, so I was the only one who’d need to read through properly.
Kaidanevsky collected the forms and put them in a folder, then turned on the overhead projector - exactly the same kind that Younger-Me remembered from his childhood - and clicked the room lights down to Dim.
I couldn’t keep from letting out a sigh of relieved tension.
Marshal Larcher was grimmer. “St. Ives,” she said.
“The planet of St. Ives is a Capellan Confederation regional capital world, currently home to the full strength of the 1st St. Ives Lancers and one battalion of the 2nd; a second battalion of that unit is currently en route and will be in place by the time we land,” Kaidanevsky said. “Additional forces include three aerospace wings, eight battalions of armor, and an estimated fifty regiments-”
Revons drew his breath in between his teeth.
“-of exceedingly low quality infantry. The full details will be available, but twenty of those infantry regiments have been issued no more than ten percent of their weapons as of our last report.”
I looked down and made a note on the pad of scratch paper provided.
“Primary strategic targets on St. Ives are subterranean,” Kaidanevsky went on, adding an overlay sheet onto his map and then using a laser pointer to hilight features. “All of them were constructed in improved natural caverns, and the approaches are limited to say the least. Two battlemech-sized tunnels control access to the Ceres Metals facility, which produces Blackjack and Vindicator battlemechs. Four lead to HildCo’s Victor plant. Three, and a vertical access shaft, lead to the Warhammer and Longbow lines at Starcorps’ reserve. Mujika and Tengo Aerospace share a facility, here, with only a single access point available to us, which produces Thrush and Transit aerospace fighters.
“Subterranean heavy rail lines link all four production sites, permitting defending forces to be repositioned at least as quickly as any breakthroughs can be exploited, and all of the access tunnels have been fully developed with defensive choke points, firing loops, and traps.
“Based on shipping patterns and historical data, we believe that the plants can maintain full production without resupply from the surface for two standard months, or provide spares and repair services for at least three years.”
In other words, we’d have to take the place the hard way rather than by starving it.
“The General Staff’s plan for this operation calls for a two-phase assault, with battlemech assets making a ground landing, roughly here-” the pointer circled, “-to secure the spaceport.”
The lead time getting the FedSuns Armored Cav on station had been long enough for them to bring their own jumpships, but the Assault Guards had been rushed into place with a haste that Marshal Larcher couldn’t hide her unease with. Concentrating five hundred battlemechs into just thirteen Overlord-class dropships was more eggs in fewer baskets than she was comfortable with, and the fact that both AFFS formations’ infantry assets would be riding into a combat zone in just four Monarch-class civilian people-haulers had her all but in hives.
I tried to be understanding, no matter how much I wanted to scream at her that this idiocy was why her country was so short on jump carriage.
The upside of those ‘reckless risks’, though, was that thirteen Overlords, plus four Fortresses, plus five Monarchs, plus ten Triumphs, plus three Triumph CVs in two configurations made for a total of thirty-five collars worth of jumpship needed. My share of the captures at Tortuga meant that the unit had twenty-seven of those already… And the Armored Cav had arrived at Mentasta docked to a Star Lord of their own, six more collars. We’d only needed to pull one more Merchant-class from the AFFS pool to be completely ready to roll.
I was sure that there’d been a lot of kvetching and bureaucratic battle done over pulling together the Overlords and other heavies needed, but fortunately, that wasn’t my - or any of ours - problem.
Our problems? Bah. Grammar.
Speaking of problems, the first one was getting to the ground in one piece. My campaign to get that job put under Sasagawa’s authority had been interrupted by the word that our Go Date had been moved up to right goddamn now. When the Capellan fighters defending St. Ives sprang their attack - right at the point of maximum stress and risk during reentry, of course, to maximize their chances of bringing down one or more dropships - they did it without the good word making one person, any person, the air boss.
Without that central control, our own fighters were meeting the Capellan attack in three separate independent formations. I’d worried, all the way up to the moment itself, that that lack of coordination would be deadly. Opening a tiny gap in a dropship’s armor in orbit or low atmosphere was an annoyance; opening that same gap when the demons of friction and velocity were clawing madly for any vulnerability they could find could easily be fatal.
For the FedSuns dropship Tariana du Lac, carrying my own 8th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, it was fatal.
On my screen the Overlord burst apart in a flower of flaming shards, incongruously like a fireworks display. The mixed squadron of Capellan Lightning and Transit fighters that had killed it arrowed past - then started to evade frantically a moment too late as the broad flying wing shapes of Chippewa attack fighters stooped down on them from above and unloaded their own firepower through the outraged upper atmosphere of St. Ives.
Further away, the Thrush lightfighters that had drawn the bulk of our own fighter cover away were paying the price, even their prodigious speed unable to escape the enormous energy advantage incumbed in a de-orbiting craft, and the crossfire from the dropships’ guns and the few squadrons that had stayed behind on close escort was rapidly melting away the attackers they’d bought an opening for.
Under and around me, the Hecate pitched and heeled, and the crushing pressure of g-forces intensified - then eased sharply. Alarmed, I flipped the camera feeds to our immediate area, and saw the mixed squadron of attack and heavy fighters arc around as the maneuver denied them their targets - and then the controlled roll the dropship’s pilot had put her into tracked the thrust line of her big fusion drives across their course.
The energy and intensity required to push a ninety-seven hundred ton spacecraft up to two and a half standard gravities was enormous. Spaceport landing pads were cermacrete, as enduring as diamond, because nothing else would stand up to the heat involved in a dropship landing. As the fighters crossed directly ‘behind’ the rolling Overlord, our pilot blipped that monster drive for less than a second, and two of the Capellan fighters simply evaporated.
Another lost control, tumbled, and ripped apart as aerodynamic forces exceeded even the generous limits of thirty-first century armor and structure. Another still, one of the two Transgressor heavies with their batteries of lasers, evaded in the wrong direction and fell into a crossfire of destruction from the Hecate’s own guns; it was still mostly in one piece as it winged over and started to spin the tens of thousands of meters to earth, and the pilot might yet save the ship, but it was out of the fight.
The last two Capellans got away from that engagement, breaking off as slowing ships breached down into thicker air. I tried to hang onto my lunch, and to my stomach, as the Hecate rolled back into line and onto profile, now well down and ahead of the rest of the slowing force. The giant on my chest came back as the drive came back up, making up for its silent time before the ground equaled out the difference in a hurry.
Fortunately, we made it.
Unfortunately, the next wave of very angry Capellan gentlemen were waiting for us.
My command company was the last off the dropship, so we had two companies formed up and ready when the first tanks of the Capellan column crested the low berm that separated the spaceport proper from the reserves of farmland surrounding it. They were a heavy company, Bulldogs and Manticores and one Pike, of all things, boring straight in at us in the vain hope of catching a break and hitting us while we were disorganized.
Which was, of course, why we’d unloaded a company at a time and had them move away and get ready, rather than milling around our grounded ride in a mass.
That frontal assault was also meant to give cover to the lance of other vehicles racing through the smallish grove of trees a few hundred meters to the east of us, but with said trees rapidly burning to ash after the Hecate’s drive had set them to the torch, it was easy enough to pick them out. One turreted Von Luckner… and three boxy tracked vehicles easily recognizable as SRM carriers.
The Von Luckner, with its 165mm autocannon, would be bad enough if it managed to get in close. The missile carriers...
My turn at the doors and ramp came; I pushed the throttle open and bolted out of the waiting bay in at least as much of a hurry as anybody else, and said over the local line, “Clubs, you have the main element, Jokers form on me for the flankers.”
“Flankers?” asked one voice. The name escaped me, but he was the commander of the second company of the line force off Hecate, and he obviously had no idea what I was talking about.
“Don’t take too long, Boss, but we’ll handle it,” said the woman who had the first company.
I glanced off to my left and saw Sophitia’s Aspis leap from the top of the ramp next to mine, feather its jets, and touch down gently rather than slamming as it should have after that stunt.
She was such bullshit.
SRM carriers weren’t un-armored, but they were far from well-protected, and they matched that with a battery of missiles that was hard to call anything but godawful. Our converted SturmFeurs had eighteen tubes; an SRM carrier had sixty, which was enough to cripple or mission kill a heavy mech in one salvo or make a light evaporate entirely.
So, I picked one of them and let loose, ignoring the Von Luckner. The autocannon burst raked across the flat side of the launcher box that dominated the top of the vehicle’s hull; the PPC that hit smashed a glowing crater out of the hull’s bow glacis armor.
‘Very Angry’ or not, the SRM carrier’s crew weren’t inclined to stick around for the followup to that. The vehicle skidded to a halt on locked treads, and, zoomed in, I saw a humanoid figure bail out the top of it even before it had stopped moving. A burning forest wasn’t a terribly safe place to be, but it was better than being inside one of Quikscam’s Finest when it was already taking fire.
I zoomed back out as the last two members of the carrier’s crew followed suit, just in time to catch the muzzle flash from the Fortress grounded a couple kilometers further east, its integrated 240mm howitzer already in action. I couldn’t see which ship it was, or what it was firing at, but that was all right. The amount of cover fire we had would only increase as the artillery batteries in the Fortresses’ armor bays unloaded, and unless the Capellans had stationed their entire defending force at the spaceport, we had the numbers to do the job even without that.
Long range missiles hissed overhead, launched from the fire support mechs of my command company - Reyes’ Crusader, the Lorin twins’ Dervish and Trebuchet, and Hamilton’s Dragon - and fell around one of the other carrier tracks. Less bright or less quick thinking than the crew of the first one, nobody bailed out of it, and a moment later it brewed up as Sophitia’s laser punched through the ragged remnants of its armor and set off the chain reaction of missile ammo.
The last SRM carrier picked the nearest target - that being me - and fired on the move, its low-slung profile seeming to vanish in a cloud of sparks and great banks of smoke. I could see the moment when the missiles left their automatic launch profile and the primitive circuits of their thermal seeker heads tried to acquire the inevitable furnace of an operating battlemech… and failed. If they’d seen me, they would have turned as a body and the cloud of them would have started to bunch up. Instead, the differences in their manufacture and spin began to spread them apart in a random cloud, an area saturation effect rather than an aimed salvo.
I stomped on the brakes and swerved to get out of as much of that as I could; even if targeting systems couldn’t see me, untargeted fire addressed To Whom It May Concern could get delivered just as easily as ever.
It worked, more or less. Only three out of that storm of missiles actually hit, drumming against Marauder No. 2’s previously-pristine armor.
I fired back, and by some miracle, managed to both PPCs into the same armor frame. The beams smashed straight through the crawler’s bow armor and flashed the entire magazine alight at once. The explosion was impressive.
The Von Luckner had a go next, not at me but at Sophitia. I could see the last shell of its cannon burst reflect off of Aspis’s shield in a spray of shattering armor fragments, but she had hit the jump jets at the same moment and twisted over its missiles with an ease that I knew was deceptive.
Such bullshit.
Large lasers fired, Davion gold, raking across the heavy tank’s bow and turret, and the paired flashes of Kohler’s Warhammer adding its bit. I set my own crosshairs - then paused as the hatches popped open and human figures started to dive out, one, two…
The last three didn’t make it out of the way before the LRM barrage, already launched, came down. I grimaced and cut the magnification, then glanced around to see how the rest of the area was faring. The other two companies aboard the Hecate were making good practice of the swarm of Vedettes that had come to back the heavy tanks up, but those same beefy tanks were still holding.
“OK, Jokers, swing left and pile in,” I said, and ignored my own advice by flashing the strategic display up. Several flying companies were already en route to support the one Fortress being attacked by a mech battalion, and two more companies were headed to back up the Overlord being hit the same way. Another six dropships - two Fortresses and four Overlords - had been hit by a tank battalion each, and were doing various levels of fine. Which, even accounting for the need to leave bodyguard companies for the landed dropships, meant that we had several battalions worth of troops free to move in support.
And they’d have plenty of time to do it, since we’d loaded the biggest and nastiest companies the Assault Guards - already famously one of the biggest and nastiest formations in the Inner Sphere - onto the Fortresses. I wasn’t prepared to say that a determined battalion of lighter mechs, or even tanks, couldn’t beat an elite assault company, but they’d take time to do so, time the number of potential reinforcements flying around wouldn’t give them.
A thought brought up the carats that indicated the other command companies; Revons was with the relief column moving towards the mech-embattled Fortress, Solih and Larcher were unengaged. Good enough, they’d pick up the slack while I was stuck fighting.
I closed the map just in time to see a Vedette taking aim at me - and to feel the shudder and banging as the burst of 80mm fire hit. I started evading properly again, and fired back, only hitting with one PPC this time. The tank had already taken damage, so that one shot was enough to blow away the armored skirts protecting one side’s tracks and carry on to fuse the road wheels, immobilizing the thing for good.
I stayed on target, and the crew stayed aboard. It was the wrong choice for them; the days when I had serious trouble hitting a stationary target were long gone, and two PPC blasts were enough to rip the tank’s entire turret off.
A scavenged kill off of a Manticore that hadn’t gotten the hint after somebody else in the scrum ripped it up, and that was all the company or so that was left of our greeting party wanted; they bugged out in a hurry, and since most of the survivors were Vedettes and faster than anything but my command company’s scout lance - of Locusts - we let them.
I checked the map again; the only tank/Overlord action still going was the one closest to me, and by the display both sides were at about fifty percent casualties. I opened a comline. “Silvereye, Joker. Think your people at Site 8 would like a couple companies of backup? We’re clear at 9, over.”
“Joker, Silvereye,” Marshal Larcher’s voice replied. “It would be over by the time you got there. Don’t bother, we’ve got Tinker and Dealer unloaded to support them, over.”
“Phase two it is, then, over,” I said.
“Affirmative. Silvereye actual, out.”
Phase Two was the one where everybody shuffled around to deal with the fact that modern Inner Sphere deployment doctrine, with its separate command lances and companies for built-in reserve and leadership bodyguard duties, had grown past the straightforward ‘battalion equals three companies’ logic that the Overlord was designed for. I took my command company and the 1st Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment over to Site 10, the Ise, leaving 1/2/1 there and picking up all of 3rd Battalion… and headed with them to rendezvous with the company or so of elite FedSuns infantry that had unloaded from the Fortress-class Loch Lomond.
Those guys were the ones that the entire show was riding on. We didn’t necessarily need to have access to the flight control computers and radars of the spaceport, this was a military operation with the rough-field trained pilots that implied…
But it’d be easier, safer, better to have the spaceport’s own systems to guide the aerodynes in, rather than just keeping them from jamming us. Blowing the emitters up would work as a backup plan, but better to take control of them.
And for that we needed the infantry. Battlemechs, after all, wouldn’t fit indoors.
Getting the infantry to that destination would require escorting them, for a couple of reasons. First, while the Capellan regiments that had tried to hit us while we were disorganized from landing had been beaten off and handled roughly, they were still out there and could easily pounce on a column of relatively light armored personnel carriers. Second, the reason we’d landed outside the spaceport reservation was that it was copiously equipped with defensive turrets both anti-air and anti-surface, which would do much the same job.
The turrets started locking on as soon as we crested the dike. None of them fired right away; the spaceport’s defenses were designed to concentrate everything on protecting the repair and control facilities, rather than the pads and aprons and hangars around the edges. It wasn’t unreasonable; if there had been an outer perimeter we’d just have landed outside its reach and then concentrated to punch through.
As it was…
“All right,” I said over the line to the rest of the waiting column, “Are you getting the feed?”
Most of the people on that channel were just getting it for informational purposes. But the three or four pilots driving mechs that had been with us the entire time - that is, mechs pulled from the Free Worlds League shipment sent out before the technological crash that followed the Second Succession War.
The modern production we’d been sent from Defiance after Helm was easier to keep running at spec, but those specifications were enough cruder that they could only barely count as the same machines as in an earlier age. The Archers and Flashmen got attention tones to let their pilots know I’d picked up hostile targets. The Marauder and couple of Centurions integrated No. 2’s full sensor feed into their own…
Which meant that shortly, I could hear one of them reading off, “Gold, Club One-Seven, adjust fire, over…”
I tuned that out and concentrated on keeping my movements more or less random. This was less dangerous than it seemed; the range I could usefully observe fall of shot at was substantially more than the anti-ground reach of any weapon the turrets were likely to mount.
Of course, if we were wrong about that, and there were class-two autocannon mounts there, they’d be completely dependent on computer support to hit an evading target at what was already extreme range.
A semi-relevant digression: Standard Armor composites are mechanically weird. They’re a lot more resistant to single big kinetic hits than the game rules make them seem, but they get that ability thanks to polymer layers in between the anti-energy ablatives that act sort of like non-Newtonian fluids under impact - that is, when you hit them, they bleed off the energy of that hit by temporarily crystalizing. So, to make a hole, you either need to whack them so hard that they can’t take all the energy and either shatter or rip from their mountings (like a gauss rifle), or you need to hit them a lot of times in rapid succession.
And thus, burst-fire autocannon, which do just that. And why old-fashioned single-shot tank guns had become obsolete. And, for that matter, one of the factors that originally drove the adoption of the Itano Circus model for missile launchers.
The obvious complication, though, is that cannons have recoil, and the bigger and more powerful the autocannon, the harder it gets to correct that recoil mid-burst. Single-shot firing modes were technologically possible, as I understood it, and every now and again some bright spark dusted them off again, but even the most robust mechanical system designed to slam around multi-hundred-kilo magazine blocs got cranky when you started messing with the weight it expected - and too light could be as bad as too heavy.
So, those combined were why lighter autocannons had longer effective ranges, and why larger ones didn’t just step their fire down.
Digression over - it turned out that the Capellans had put batteries of 60mm autocannon into their turrets, and the tracers were reaching out to say hi. Accounting for that possibility was why I was doing this myself, rather than leaving it to somebody less senior and more expendable. At this range, the defenders needed digital assistance to hit at this range, assistance that Phantom Mech’s bullshit made completely unavailable.
I suspected that the delay between my appearance and the first fire was accounted by the time needed for someone to realize what was happening and send minions running to the turrets themselves to take manual control; on remote, the emplacements wouldn’t have been able to see me at all.
They had to know that that was a mistake, even before the shells started landing. I spared a mental salute for their courage, and a note for No. 2’s computer to take down to make sure they were buried with honors.
The first artillery shells were small flashes, the batteries sighting in with the Assault Guards’ 155mm Thumpers. They missed, for the most part.
I kept dodging. If I stopped, one of the Capellan gunners would lay in on his iron sights and that would sting. No. 2’s armor could take that, for a little while, but I’d rather not, and so would my techs.
Some of the next artillery salvo didn’t miss… And apparently the gunners decided that that was close enough.
Watching thirty Long Tom shells go off at nearly the same instant was impressive, even across the broad front of the near wall of the spaceport’s inner compound. The 240mm shells tore great gaping holes in the wall, shattered the targeted turrets completely, and made a damned good go of smashing through the massive cermacrete pillars that had been built to lift the turrets over the wall and give them a clear field of fire.
Somebody on the open line whistled.
“All right,” I said. “Over the crest. Manchester Four-Eight-” The column’s scout company was drawn from the Armored Cav, “-push ahead and find the next shell.”
What was left of the walls and the design of the spaceport’s central compound would mean that any turrets after this would have much closer ranges to work at, and so there wouldn’t be enough advantage to doing it myself.
The other reason was that, if the defenders were going to make a counterpush, they’d do it as soon as they realized that using artillery against the fixed defenses would let us through those with minimal losses.
My own estimate was that they wouldn’t, they’d pull back underground and probably collapse that tunnel entrance behind them, but that was because I could cheat by using outside context knowledge. Candace Liao had known better than to throw good money after bad under far more coercive conditions than this, and intel was about as certain as they could be that she was on world right now. Which meant that she was running the defense, the CapCon and Liaos being what they were.
I was… half right.
We didn’t see the mechs again, that day. It was fairly obvious that they’d be the first things pulled out, especially once the strike force that we did see showed up, fast hovercraft screaming across the tarmac, LRMs leading the way and falling around the mechs of that flank. It was easy to draw the line of their course and see that they were aiming for the APCs.
“Formation, swing right and engage hovercraft,” I ordered. “Left flank, mind the rearguard. Madrid, keep your heads down.”
Sophitia, being Sophitia, fired first, Aspis’s Star League 8cm laser reaching out and ripping straight through the tinfoil protecting a Capellan Harasser, making the vehicle spill off of its cushion of air and go skidding as her shot destroyed pressure skirt and the engine driving its fans alike.
Additional shots crisscrossed the open pavement, and I took a moment to draw a bead on a racing Saracen and opened up myself. Both of the PPC shots missed, not a surprise at that range and with his speed, but I managed to get the autocannon on target, the first shell caroming off the pavement in front of it and smashing a section of hard rubberized skirt a third the length of the tank free. It pinwheeled up for a moment, then hesitated and was sucked right down on top of the Saracen’s hull, vacuumed into place across several of the fan intakes.
That edge of the hull dipped, the entire machine’s course hooking madly as straight-line inertia, the driver’s controls, and the sparking friction of metal on cermacrete all fought to direct it where they wanted, and I gauged the movement as my guns cooled and the racheting bangs of the loading system pulled another three 105 rounds and the cassette that held them from the main magazine and slammed them into place by the breech.
Thirty-first century combat vehicles, even the kind that ran on internal combustion engines, had power-to-weight ratios that would have been outright fantasy a thousand years before. They had to, to have the spare power to feed battlefield energy weapons. Even though most of the ‘heat sinks’ the Battletech tabletop game had demanded of them were actually capacitors like gauss rifles used, at least in armor mounts, the energy to feed them had to come from somewhere, and in not all that long at all. The standard cycle time between shots was ten seconds, though a well or poorly designed mount and system could do better or worse.
All of which is a fancy way of saying that the Saracen’s driver, once he’d shaken the debris away from his intakes, had the oomph at his fingertips to proceed on his way with a plenum chamber that basically didn’t exist any more, just more slowly.
But he needed to ground and shut the fans down to do that, and I was waiting. Saracens were enough tougher than Harassers that all three big guns didn’t hard-kill the thing, but I could see in the scope that at least two of the fans were wrecked, and the crew didn’t waste any time waiting to see if I was paying attention for the next volley. I saw the hatches pop, and moved on.
Moved to a J. Edgar Hover, much closer than I liked the look of. I reversed, swung around to track it - fired the AC as it reloaded, shells screaming by ahead of the thing. The bobble in its course was the driver visibly requisitioning an immediate change of underthings, which led to a frantic evasion even as its turret swung around to spray a wild fan of green light and missiles in my vague direction.
My second shot, from the left-hand PPC, missed, also ahead of the speeding hovertank, but much closer. If he hadn’t been dodging like his life depended on it (it did), I’d have had him.
The crew clearly knew that. The driver was putting everything, and I mean everything, he could into his evasive maneuvers, and the commander and gunner weren’t even trying to shoot back.
The third shot missed behind them, and I gave in and vented. “Fuck!”
Fortunately for everybody involved, the crew I’d been shooting at had had enough for the day, thank you kindly, and as soon as they were out of weapons range they straightened out and hauled ass.
I looked around. A few of the hovers had broken through the line of firing battlemechs and taken passing potshots at the APCs. One of those was broken and burning, but I could see human figures taking shelter in the lee of the wreck. I risked a couple seconds looking at my map, and then made a call. “Goldenplate, Joker Actual, how many vehicles have we seen and how many confirmed destroyed, over?”
The Assault Guards’ staff headquarters section, still safely aboard one of their assigned Overlords, had enough people to do the beancounting and literally this in their job description.
“Estimate two hundred to two-forty sighted, Joker. Confirmed kills eighty or so, mission kills about the same.” A second’s pause and hesitation, before the intel chick added, “The hovers you’re seeing are probably the only ones of those left, plus maybe another battalion of slow movers, over.”
I watched Aspis reach out and give a Condor’s fan intakes a good whack with the tip of its sword, making the thing spin out, then waited and joined the crossfire that reduced it to wreckage. “Odds that what we’re seeing is the whole rearguard, what wouldn’t be any good in the tunnels, over?”
“Pretty good,” the staffer said, her voice obviously wondering how to phrase ‘don’t get cocky’ to someone this many ranks above her.
“So now’s when they start getting creative,” I concluded before she could find the right words. “Thanks, that’s what I needed. Joker, out.”
They didn’t get creative. Aside from the fact that there were, y’know, actual bullets flying around, the rest of the assault on the spaceport went almost glass-smooth. It was eerie, like an exercise where the proctors had forgotten to throw any curveballs. We took the second and third rings of turrets out the hard way, rolled the infantry in…
And found nothing but a couple battalions of very edgy conscripts. Even just the infantry that had come down on the Fortresses would have been enough, even if they didn’t have battlemechs standing by right outside the buildings ready to pour machine gun fire into strong points.
Give them this, the poor bastards tried anyway. Given that it was the CapCon, I wondered how ‘safe’ the Maskirovka was keeping their families, but that might have been unfair. They broke under fire, they couldn’t shoot for shit, and there was at least one strong point that got blown up by one of its own grenades, but they tried. By the time their survivors were disarmed and taken prisoner, all sign of the heavy forces were completely gone, vanished into the tunnels that led between spaceport and factories.
Quick just-asking-questions interrogations of the pitiably green ‘soldiers’ confirmed that we’d taken out basically half the tanks on the planet, and that the 1st St. Ives Lancers had had a rough day indeed but still had most of their mechs at walking wounded status at worst.
All in all, a better first day than expected!
Night landings weren’t the greatest conditions to bring dropships down in, but they were manageable, especially with the spaceport’s sensor support and field lighting. By dawn, we had all of the armor and infantry regiments on the ground, and recon overflight by ASF had cleared most of our route to the area over the HildCo site, and by noon, we had an armor regiment dug in and settled around each of the known major entrances.
There was no point attempting to be subtle with an opponent who not only knew the ground, but had it wired for sight and sound besides.
The Assault Guards were providing most of the weight for our push - along with my modified units. I wasn’t sure why the FedSuns Armored Cavalry’s Colonel Revons had joined me and Marshall Larcher to stand by and watch while the first assault went in, but I suspect he thought the concept Sophitia had come up with was wild enough to fall into ‘I gotta see this’ territory.
The way he was shaking his head certainly supported that theory. “I cannot believe that I am actually seeing this,” he said.
Larcher’s expression was at least as skeptical. “You really think that this will work,” she said.
“We have a full simulator setup,” I said, “and so far, signs from that point to ‘yes’. We’ve checked every assumption, been conservative, and… Yeah, I think it’ll work. Certainly it works in the programmers’ knockoff of Ishiyama, at least.”
In front of us, the Banshee that would be going into the hole first reached tensed and heaved the twelve-ton slab of pure armor plating up in front of itself with both hands, covered from ankles to head as it advanced. The Assault Guards Atlas in second place shuffled to the side and tucked in, completely covered - from directly ahead - by the fire-shadow of that mobile barrier.
“You do realize what’ll happen if anybody gets around that shield, right?” Revons said.
“Depends how close they are,” I said. “At range, well, if it’s something like an L-ambush, they either run for their lives or die. If it’s in close, a threat just stepping in and around the shield… They’re in arm’s reach of a Banshee. The shields are ejectable, we based the mount off the Battlemaster’s PPC.”
Larcher looked more thoughtful. “...And in the tunnels, anything they face will be either ahead of them, or in arm’s reach.”
“Barring branching,” I agreed. “Now, they’ll still need support to have any damage done, but that’s manageable… And we can replace and repair the shields a lot more easily than, say, a torso section. It won’t make this easy, but I think it’ll give us a chance.”
And in front of us, the first mech lumbered down into the earth of St. Ives.
Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
On reflection, the most astonishing thing about the Tortuga operation was how quickly we got hustled out after the shooting stopped. Two weeks after Trevaline was dead, infantry regiments meant to relieve and replace us were landing - which, given that the Tortuga Dominion was literally four jumps and at least as many weeks from anywhere remotely civilized, meant that they’d been in motion long before AFFS command would have had any idea how the operation turned out.
Still, they’d apparently been right about that call, and we packed up and headed on our way to Mentasta, a planet I’d never heard of in any other context. Looking it up in an atlas, though, was… suggestive.
It was one jump from St. Ives.
That planet, meanwhile, was the number four mech producer in the Capellan Confederation as well as the largest source that state’s light and medium aerospace fighters. And a regional capital. And a military training academy. And the personal seat of one of the most stable, and thus most capable, living members of the Liao family.
It seemed… Unlikely that we’d be brought into the area without at least some chance of taking a crack at it, and reading up on previous campaigns there made me dread the job.
The larger and more populous of St. Ives two continents, Liaoning, had in some ancient epoch been the site of a truly colossal volcanic trap eruption. More than eighty percent of the area of a landmass larger than Earth’s Eurasia was covered in a single mass of basalt up to half a kilometer thick. The rock underlying that hard-weathering volcanic stone varied… but much of it, even most of it, had been well-aged limestone, already riddled with caves and sinkholes, which the fresh lava had filled in before it cooled.
When the patient work of water resumed and eroded the rest of the limestone, it had left behind immense, almost-dry cavern systems, with dozens of chambers large enough to hold entire cities, their roofs supported by the basalt columns left where the long-ago sinkholes had been filled.
The settlers of St. Ives had reinforced the most stable caves and filled them with their world’s industry, leaving the surface to parks and residences; invading the place meant going into the caves to root out the garrisons and claim the factories… or spending years, even decades on a constant watch for sallies and raids while you tried and probably failed to locate and block every entrance so you could starve them or choke the flow of materials to the factories enough to put an end to parts and replacements.
Requesting records of the Federated Suns’ fights on the world from the garrisons we passed on our way to station illuminated just how hard a job rooting them out would be. The good news, such as it was, had edges of its own - all of the factories had at least one and usually several access points and passages large enough to admit battlemechs, and the need to keep using them themselves meant that the Liao defenders had never collapsed any of those.
Davion Military Intelligence thought that it had never been planned or prepared for, possibly to short-circuit any cases of Excessive Initiative and partly because the deadfall traps, shooting galleries, and so on were thought to be more than enough protection.
If the latter was the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces’ logic, they’d proven right to date. The factories had never fallen, even when invaders ran rampant on the surface above.
“...If they do send us down there, this is gonna be really gruesome,” I mumbled.
Sophitia, curled up as the large spoon, made an irritated noise, and grumbled something to the effect of ‘aren’t you going to sleep?’ in German.
“I said I was gonna finish this report, didn’t I?” I replied, trying to focus so I could do that and stop keeping her up.
She huffed against my neck and gathered her English again. “What’s ‘down there’?”
“The big military targets on Saint Ives are underground. Imagine having to fight through a version of Ishiyama as long as Solaris City is across, but with entire regiments stuffed into it.”
“...Ah,” she said. The warren of twists, traps, and switchbacks known as Ishiyama, the Draconis Combine sponsored entry on the rolls of Solaris’s Class Six gladiatorial arenas, was notoriously a nightmare for the fighters condemned to suffer there. I knew that Soph had fought there more often than most, and done very well, but she’d spoken of the place with loathing. “And the arena control teams aren’t even pretending to be neutral.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The FedRats have tried before, and every time they’ve found out the hard way over again that they had to go real slow, testing every meter of ground for traps, mines, and hidden firing ports. Which meant that the defenders could cycle fresh mechs in against them whenever they wanted, and make a push if they thought they had a shot at generating some attrition. Slow, painful, and bloody the whole way.”
She was silent for several seconds, then said, “If I write down the idea I just got, will you turn the light out and go to sleep?”
Well, I sure didn’t have any real ideas. “Yeah?” I said, and my back cooled down, exposed again to the air, as she rolled away towards her own computer pad.
I saved my place in my reading and set it in the rack built into my side’s little table, turned that light out, and rolled over to watch Sophitia write. Not that it took long; even with her hunt-and-peck typing style she had it down in only a few more seconds, letting her repeat the ritual.
“I love you,” I told her in the dark.
“Sleep, you sap,” she replied, but there was a laugh in her voice.
We did.
***
We were somewhere around Belaire when the drugs started to take hold…
OK, not really.
We were in the Belaire system, waiting through the charge time at the Nadir point, but there were no actual drugs involved. This detail’s important to note, because several of the techs involved in the project were wearing poorly concealed ‘What are the higher ups smoking?’ expressions as we watched the first Banshee to finish its refit straighten and step carefully out of its cubicle and onto the main handling deck.
All of the original guns were gone, the PPC and head laser had had medium lasers wired in place, and the armor was visibly bulked up by the additions made - and the new hardpoints on the forearms. The pilot walked forward into the carefully cleared and safed space, reached down, and picked up the gear meant to go into those hardpoints.
Watching from up in the traffic control booth that overlooked the deck, I could hear one of the techs monitoring the evolution say, “Looks like the Battlemaster code did its job. We’ve got a good lock-in.”
“Wait until it starts swinging,” another skeptic replied.
And the mech did start swinging; it had to. We needed to know how the stresses and strains and timing worked in this configuration to be able to program the simulators with it. There wasn’t room for a live fire test of any grade, and walking and running revisions would mean needing to send it along with the next supply runs, but the simple stand-and-swing we did have room for would be enough to get started on the process.
For a while, things seemed to be going well.
Then, with a screech of tearing metal and a colossal bang, twelve tons of fast moving metal smashed into the floor a mechlength away from the Banshee, bounced once in a spray of shattered fragments, and skidded the rest of the way to the edge of the loading bay to slam into the wall right under the monitor stand.
Once the swearing had died down, along with my heartrate, I turned to Doctor Raven and said, “Reinforce the mounts?”
He hmphed and chewed on his mustache for a moment. “I still think we could work out a better way of mounting them than this, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. We’ll do the math and figure out how much we need.”
A pause, then he warned me, “It’ll compromise the armor, some.”
I shrugged. “Needs must prevail when the devil drives. I want them to be swappable, given how much fire we’ll need them to take.”
He nodded. “I’d say remove the lasers, since they won’t be doing any good, but…”
“The pilots’d rebel if we tried,” I agreed. The row that’d been had over pulling the PPCs had been epic already. “The tanks went better?”
Another nod. “We worked out a modular way of doing it, given how many different launcher types we had, but that was doable. No problems.”
That mod was for our SturmFeur assault tanks. The standard Sturmfeur had a couple of infantry-clearing machine guns and two twenty-tube LRM launchers - one set up for indirect fire only, fixed forward from the rear hull, and the other in a turret that gave it both direct and indirect options. We’d pulled the turret LRMs and put in eighteen tubes of SRMs, in various combinations depending on the actual launchers we had available.
If we’d planned to leave them like that, that’d be setting ourselves up for a logistical nightmare, of course, but we weren’t and wouldn’t - once this campaign was over, or if we had a long enough break and the word was that it wasn’t St. Ives, we’d pull them and put the LRMs back in.
And if there wasn’t a break, well, we wouldn’t be able to use them as durable LRM support the way they were originally designed, but they still wouldn’t be bad tanks. Eighteen short-range missiles was a shedload of pain to back up the remaining long-range ones with.
Raven went on, “The evaluation we’ve been doing on the Stalkers, on the other hand, not so much. We can pull the LRM rack easy enough, and add the armor, but putting heat sinks in will be a lot more involved. We could probably put another SRM pack in, but-”
“We’ve already run through most of the spares on the Sturmfeurs,” I finished, and shrugged. “OK, we’ll run those stock, then.”
He checked something off on his pad, then glanced out the windows at the efforts to clean up after the mishap - the crews had emerged from the hiding places they’d picked while the Banshee was moving around. “Probably for the best,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of right now,” I admitted. “I’ve got a meeting with Doctor Tiber, but that shouldn’t be anything for you.”
That got a snort of amusement. “Right. I’ll go down and get back to work then,” he said, and did just that.
***
“Is this another Come to Jesus talk, like Clair got?” Io Sasagawa asked, coming into my office and seeing my face.
I sighed. “No? Maybe, sort of? You won’t think it’s good news, but you’re not fired or anything.”
She knew me well enough by now to not bother asking permission to sit down in front of my desk - the same chair Hanse Davion had used, now that I thought of it. “Don’t talk around it, then,” she said.
I tapped the folder of printout sitting on my desk. “Doctor Tiber brought this to me,” I said. “It’s - well, it’s ninety percent medicalese I can’t follow, cardiac vesication this and arterial decay that, but the upside is…”
I could see her knuckles, laced in her lap, go white, and her jaw tense. “I’m grounded?” she asked.
“Against my better judgement, no,” I said. “Long story short, he was saying six months of Lightning ops before ‘notable risk’ of something happening in flight… and adding another six months to that for every half-G of maximum acceleration you took off of them.”
She didn’t meet my eyes, looking away to the side. It was weird seeing a woman who could have been my mother look that teenager-guilty.
“What we will be doing is transferring your bird to Callisto,” I went on, “and moving you into one of the Chippewas.”
The stock Lyran Chippewa heavy attack fighter was a deathtrap on account of its terminal undersupply of armor, and badly undercooled besides. The Federated Suns’ standardized refit of the platform pulled two of its four 8cm lasers in favor of their weight in armor, and solved both problems in one pass.
Passing her ancestral fighter down to her daughter and moving her into the better protected heavy would make it harder for the enemy to kill my fighter CO, and - since the Chippewa was that mentioned half-a-G slower at both half and full burn - extend her flying career that little bit more.
Sasagawa thought that over, then nodded. “Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me too fast,” I said. “I told him to schedule you for a monthly recheck, and he will have full authority to ground you on the spot if one of them comes up ugly. We can afford to have you running things from a desk on the Grendel more than we can afford you having a heart attack in the middle of an operation.”
“I’m fifty-nine years old,” she admitted. “This isn’t a surprise, it’s just… I’d hoped I’d have longer.”
“Don’t we all?”
***
I like cold weather, but Mentasta was ridiculous. The average temperature at the equator was about -2 C, and the place only had what liquid water it did thanks to the geothermal cycle pushed by tidal forces. Like Sol’s Europa, it was a gas giant moon trapped between its primary and other major satellites. Tidelocked to the planet, its local day was a brutal thirteen standard ones, which pushed the native life into microseasons of noontime summer and the brutal frost and snows of midnight. The oxygen cycle ran on antifreeze as much as sunlight - algal blooms tinted the snows green-black during the day and died off again at night, providing the literal breathing space that Earth and most other worlds got from their oceans.
The local population lived in arcologies and domes, massive, insulated structures built from materials that were at least resistant to the collosal freeze-thaw cycle, and the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns had their own tower block on the outskirts of the artificial mountain range that served as the world’s capital city.
At the heart of that block, grim faced men with foxhead badges on their uniforms didn’t quite go so far as to strip-search me before waving admittance to the vault-doored room beyond.
I was the last to arrive, and I looked around at the other four permitted into the obvious security safe zone. Marshal Corrida Larcher, commanding the Davion Assault Guards Regimental Combat Team. Colonel Todd Revons, ditto the 1st FedSuns Armored Cavalry, who were just a mech regiment. Commander Till Solih, AKA Morgan Kell in a funny hat, who ran the unit’s second brigade while I handled the first.
And one more man, also wearing the fox-face of Davion Military Intelligence to go with his Colonel’s rank, who I hadn’t met. Nametag said Kaidanevsky.
Instinctively, I checked the wall clock behind him. I wasn’t actually late, so I just went to the last empty place at the table and sat down.
“Ladies, Gentleman,” Kaidanevsky said, “This will be your primary operational briefing for the upcoming offensive operation. I am obligated to remind you all that all of the information covered here is covered under relevant secrecy codes and subject to the full penalty of law. Please sign the relevant forms now.”
I didn’t have a reference for how common that kind of thing was, but from the expressions of the other three COs, the answer was ‘not very’. In their various ways, they all looked like they scented something big in the wind.
I looked down and started reading the legalese. When I had signed and looked up, they were all looking at me. I guess that made sense; Larcher and Revons would be familiar with these forms, and Solih would only need to compare them to the ones his native LCAF used, so I was the only one who’d need to read through properly.
Kaidanevsky collected the forms and put them in a folder, then turned on the overhead projector - exactly the same kind that Younger-Me remembered from his childhood - and clicked the room lights down to Dim.
I couldn’t keep from letting out a sigh of relieved tension.
Marshal Larcher was grimmer. “St. Ives,” she said.
“The planet of St. Ives is a Capellan Confederation regional capital world, currently home to the full strength of the 1st St. Ives Lancers and one battalion of the 2nd; a second battalion of that unit is currently en route and will be in place by the time we land,” Kaidanevsky said. “Additional forces include three aerospace wings, eight battalions of armor, and an estimated fifty regiments-”
Revons drew his breath in between his teeth.
“-of exceedingly low quality infantry. The full details will be available, but twenty of those infantry regiments have been issued no more than ten percent of their weapons as of our last report.”
I looked down and made a note on the pad of scratch paper provided.
“Primary strategic targets on St. Ives are subterranean,” Kaidanevsky went on, adding an overlay sheet onto his map and then using a laser pointer to hilight features. “All of them were constructed in improved natural caverns, and the approaches are limited to say the least. Two battlemech-sized tunnels control access to the Ceres Metals facility, which produces Blackjack and Vindicator battlemechs. Four lead to HildCo’s Victor plant. Three, and a vertical access shaft, lead to the Warhammer and Longbow lines at Starcorps’ reserve. Mujika and Tengo Aerospace share a facility, here, with only a single access point available to us, which produces Thrush and Transit aerospace fighters.
“Subterranean heavy rail lines link all four production sites, permitting defending forces to be repositioned at least as quickly as any breakthroughs can be exploited, and all of the access tunnels have been fully developed with defensive choke points, firing loops, and traps.
“Based on shipping patterns and historical data, we believe that the plants can maintain full production without resupply from the surface for two standard months, or provide spares and repair services for at least three years.”
In other words, we’d have to take the place the hard way rather than by starving it.
“The General Staff’s plan for this operation calls for a two-phase assault, with battlemech assets making a ground landing, roughly here-” the pointer circled, “-to secure the spaceport.”
***
The lead time getting the FedSuns Armored Cav on station had been long enough for them to bring their own jumpships, but the Assault Guards had been rushed into place with a haste that Marshal Larcher couldn’t hide her unease with. Concentrating five hundred battlemechs into just thirteen Overlord-class dropships was more eggs in fewer baskets than she was comfortable with, and the fact that both AFFS formations’ infantry assets would be riding into a combat zone in just four Monarch-class civilian people-haulers had her all but in hives.
I tried to be understanding, no matter how much I wanted to scream at her that this idiocy was why her country was so short on jump carriage.
The upside of those ‘reckless risks’, though, was that thirteen Overlords, plus four Fortresses, plus five Monarchs, plus ten Triumphs, plus three Triumph CVs in two configurations made for a total of thirty-five collars worth of jumpship needed. My share of the captures at Tortuga meant that the unit had twenty-seven of those already… And the Armored Cav had arrived at Mentasta docked to a Star Lord of their own, six more collars. We’d only needed to pull one more Merchant-class from the AFFS pool to be completely ready to roll.
I was sure that there’d been a lot of kvetching and bureaucratic battle done over pulling together the Overlords and other heavies needed, but fortunately, that wasn’t my - or any of ours - problem.
Our problems? Bah. Grammar.
Speaking of problems, the first one was getting to the ground in one piece. My campaign to get that job put under Sasagawa’s authority had been interrupted by the word that our Go Date had been moved up to right goddamn now. When the Capellan fighters defending St. Ives sprang their attack - right at the point of maximum stress and risk during reentry, of course, to maximize their chances of bringing down one or more dropships - they did it without the good word making one person, any person, the air boss.
Without that central control, our own fighters were meeting the Capellan attack in three separate independent formations. I’d worried, all the way up to the moment itself, that that lack of coordination would be deadly. Opening a tiny gap in a dropship’s armor in orbit or low atmosphere was an annoyance; opening that same gap when the demons of friction and velocity were clawing madly for any vulnerability they could find could easily be fatal.
For the FedSuns dropship Tariana du Lac, carrying my own 8th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, it was fatal.
On my screen the Overlord burst apart in a flower of flaming shards, incongruously like a fireworks display. The mixed squadron of Capellan Lightning and Transit fighters that had killed it arrowed past - then started to evade frantically a moment too late as the broad flying wing shapes of Chippewa attack fighters stooped down on them from above and unloaded their own firepower through the outraged upper atmosphere of St. Ives.
Further away, the Thrush lightfighters that had drawn the bulk of our own fighter cover away were paying the price, even their prodigious speed unable to escape the enormous energy advantage incumbed in a de-orbiting craft, and the crossfire from the dropships’ guns and the few squadrons that had stayed behind on close escort was rapidly melting away the attackers they’d bought an opening for.
Under and around me, the Hecate pitched and heeled, and the crushing pressure of g-forces intensified - then eased sharply. Alarmed, I flipped the camera feeds to our immediate area, and saw the mixed squadron of attack and heavy fighters arc around as the maneuver denied them their targets - and then the controlled roll the dropship’s pilot had put her into tracked the thrust line of her big fusion drives across their course.
The energy and intensity required to push a ninety-seven hundred ton spacecraft up to two and a half standard gravities was enormous. Spaceport landing pads were cermacrete, as enduring as diamond, because nothing else would stand up to the heat involved in a dropship landing. As the fighters crossed directly ‘behind’ the rolling Overlord, our pilot blipped that monster drive for less than a second, and two of the Capellan fighters simply evaporated.
Another lost control, tumbled, and ripped apart as aerodynamic forces exceeded even the generous limits of thirty-first century armor and structure. Another still, one of the two Transgressor heavies with their batteries of lasers, evaded in the wrong direction and fell into a crossfire of destruction from the Hecate’s own guns; it was still mostly in one piece as it winged over and started to spin the tens of thousands of meters to earth, and the pilot might yet save the ship, but it was out of the fight.
The last two Capellans got away from that engagement, breaking off as slowing ships breached down into thicker air. I tried to hang onto my lunch, and to my stomach, as the Hecate rolled back into line and onto profile, now well down and ahead of the rest of the slowing force. The giant on my chest came back as the drive came back up, making up for its silent time before the ground equaled out the difference in a hurry.
Fortunately, we made it.
Unfortunately, the next wave of very angry Capellan gentlemen were waiting for us.
My command company was the last off the dropship, so we had two companies formed up and ready when the first tanks of the Capellan column crested the low berm that separated the spaceport proper from the reserves of farmland surrounding it. They were a heavy company, Bulldogs and Manticores and one Pike, of all things, boring straight in at us in the vain hope of catching a break and hitting us while we were disorganized.
Which was, of course, why we’d unloaded a company at a time and had them move away and get ready, rather than milling around our grounded ride in a mass.
That frontal assault was also meant to give cover to the lance of other vehicles racing through the smallish grove of trees a few hundred meters to the east of us, but with said trees rapidly burning to ash after the Hecate’s drive had set them to the torch, it was easy enough to pick them out. One turreted Von Luckner… and three boxy tracked vehicles easily recognizable as SRM carriers.
The Von Luckner, with its 165mm autocannon, would be bad enough if it managed to get in close. The missile carriers...
My turn at the doors and ramp came; I pushed the throttle open and bolted out of the waiting bay in at least as much of a hurry as anybody else, and said over the local line, “Clubs, you have the main element, Jokers form on me for the flankers.”
“Flankers?” asked one voice. The name escaped me, but he was the commander of the second company of the line force off Hecate, and he obviously had no idea what I was talking about.
“Don’t take too long, Boss, but we’ll handle it,” said the woman who had the first company.
I glanced off to my left and saw Sophitia’s Aspis leap from the top of the ramp next to mine, feather its jets, and touch down gently rather than slamming as it should have after that stunt.
She was such bullshit.
SRM carriers weren’t un-armored, but they were far from well-protected, and they matched that with a battery of missiles that was hard to call anything but godawful. Our converted SturmFeurs had eighteen tubes; an SRM carrier had sixty, which was enough to cripple or mission kill a heavy mech in one salvo or make a light evaporate entirely.
So, I picked one of them and let loose, ignoring the Von Luckner. The autocannon burst raked across the flat side of the launcher box that dominated the top of the vehicle’s hull; the PPC that hit smashed a glowing crater out of the hull’s bow glacis armor.
‘Very Angry’ or not, the SRM carrier’s crew weren’t inclined to stick around for the followup to that. The vehicle skidded to a halt on locked treads, and, zoomed in, I saw a humanoid figure bail out the top of it even before it had stopped moving. A burning forest wasn’t a terribly safe place to be, but it was better than being inside one of Quikscam’s Finest when it was already taking fire.
I zoomed back out as the last two members of the carrier’s crew followed suit, just in time to catch the muzzle flash from the Fortress grounded a couple kilometers further east, its integrated 240mm howitzer already in action. I couldn’t see which ship it was, or what it was firing at, but that was all right. The amount of cover fire we had would only increase as the artillery batteries in the Fortresses’ armor bays unloaded, and unless the Capellans had stationed their entire defending force at the spaceport, we had the numbers to do the job even without that.
Long range missiles hissed overhead, launched from the fire support mechs of my command company - Reyes’ Crusader, the Lorin twins’ Dervish and Trebuchet, and Hamilton’s Dragon - and fell around one of the other carrier tracks. Less bright or less quick thinking than the crew of the first one, nobody bailed out of it, and a moment later it brewed up as Sophitia’s laser punched through the ragged remnants of its armor and set off the chain reaction of missile ammo.
The last SRM carrier picked the nearest target - that being me - and fired on the move, its low-slung profile seeming to vanish in a cloud of sparks and great banks of smoke. I could see the moment when the missiles left their automatic launch profile and the primitive circuits of their thermal seeker heads tried to acquire the inevitable furnace of an operating battlemech… and failed. If they’d seen me, they would have turned as a body and the cloud of them would have started to bunch up. Instead, the differences in their manufacture and spin began to spread them apart in a random cloud, an area saturation effect rather than an aimed salvo.
I stomped on the brakes and swerved to get out of as much of that as I could; even if targeting systems couldn’t see me, untargeted fire addressed To Whom It May Concern could get delivered just as easily as ever.
It worked, more or less. Only three out of that storm of missiles actually hit, drumming against Marauder No. 2’s previously-pristine armor.
I fired back, and by some miracle, managed to both PPCs into the same armor frame. The beams smashed straight through the crawler’s bow armor and flashed the entire magazine alight at once. The explosion was impressive.
The Von Luckner had a go next, not at me but at Sophitia. I could see the last shell of its cannon burst reflect off of Aspis’s shield in a spray of shattering armor fragments, but she had hit the jump jets at the same moment and twisted over its missiles with an ease that I knew was deceptive.
Such bullshit.
Large lasers fired, Davion gold, raking across the heavy tank’s bow and turret, and the paired flashes of Kohler’s Warhammer adding its bit. I set my own crosshairs - then paused as the hatches popped open and human figures started to dive out, one, two…
The last three didn’t make it out of the way before the LRM barrage, already launched, came down. I grimaced and cut the magnification, then glanced around to see how the rest of the area was faring. The other two companies aboard the Hecate were making good practice of the swarm of Vedettes that had come to back the heavy tanks up, but those same beefy tanks were still holding.
“OK, Jokers, swing left and pile in,” I said, and ignored my own advice by flashing the strategic display up. Several flying companies were already en route to support the one Fortress being attacked by a mech battalion, and two more companies were headed to back up the Overlord being hit the same way. Another six dropships - two Fortresses and four Overlords - had been hit by a tank battalion each, and were doing various levels of fine. Which, even accounting for the need to leave bodyguard companies for the landed dropships, meant that we had several battalions worth of troops free to move in support.
And they’d have plenty of time to do it, since we’d loaded the biggest and nastiest companies the Assault Guards - already famously one of the biggest and nastiest formations in the Inner Sphere - onto the Fortresses. I wasn’t prepared to say that a determined battalion of lighter mechs, or even tanks, couldn’t beat an elite assault company, but they’d take time to do so, time the number of potential reinforcements flying around wouldn’t give them.
A thought brought up the carats that indicated the other command companies; Revons was with the relief column moving towards the mech-embattled Fortress, Solih and Larcher were unengaged. Good enough, they’d pick up the slack while I was stuck fighting.
I closed the map just in time to see a Vedette taking aim at me - and to feel the shudder and banging as the burst of 80mm fire hit. I started evading properly again, and fired back, only hitting with one PPC this time. The tank had already taken damage, so that one shot was enough to blow away the armored skirts protecting one side’s tracks and carry on to fuse the road wheels, immobilizing the thing for good.
I stayed on target, and the crew stayed aboard. It was the wrong choice for them; the days when I had serious trouble hitting a stationary target were long gone, and two PPC blasts were enough to rip the tank’s entire turret off.
A scavenged kill off of a Manticore that hadn’t gotten the hint after somebody else in the scrum ripped it up, and that was all the company or so that was left of our greeting party wanted; they bugged out in a hurry, and since most of the survivors were Vedettes and faster than anything but my command company’s scout lance - of Locusts - we let them.
I checked the map again; the only tank/Overlord action still going was the one closest to me, and by the display both sides were at about fifty percent casualties. I opened a comline. “Silvereye, Joker. Think your people at Site 8 would like a couple companies of backup? We’re clear at 9, over.”
“Joker, Silvereye,” Marshal Larcher’s voice replied. “It would be over by the time you got there. Don’t bother, we’ve got Tinker and Dealer unloaded to support them, over.”
“Phase two it is, then, over,” I said.
“Affirmative. Silvereye actual, out.”
Phase Two was the one where everybody shuffled around to deal with the fact that modern Inner Sphere deployment doctrine, with its separate command lances and companies for built-in reserve and leadership bodyguard duties, had grown past the straightforward ‘battalion equals three companies’ logic that the Overlord was designed for. I took my command company and the 1st Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment over to Site 10, the Ise, leaving 1/2/1 there and picking up all of 3rd Battalion… and headed with them to rendezvous with the company or so of elite FedSuns infantry that had unloaded from the Fortress-class Loch Lomond.
Those guys were the ones that the entire show was riding on. We didn’t necessarily need to have access to the flight control computers and radars of the spaceport, this was a military operation with the rough-field trained pilots that implied…
But it’d be easier, safer, better to have the spaceport’s own systems to guide the aerodynes in, rather than just keeping them from jamming us. Blowing the emitters up would work as a backup plan, but better to take control of them.
And for that we needed the infantry. Battlemechs, after all, wouldn’t fit indoors.
Getting the infantry to that destination would require escorting them, for a couple of reasons. First, while the Capellan regiments that had tried to hit us while we were disorganized from landing had been beaten off and handled roughly, they were still out there and could easily pounce on a column of relatively light armored personnel carriers. Second, the reason we’d landed outside the spaceport reservation was that it was copiously equipped with defensive turrets both anti-air and anti-surface, which would do much the same job.
The turrets started locking on as soon as we crested the dike. None of them fired right away; the spaceport’s defenses were designed to concentrate everything on protecting the repair and control facilities, rather than the pads and aprons and hangars around the edges. It wasn’t unreasonable; if there had been an outer perimeter we’d just have landed outside its reach and then concentrated to punch through.
As it was…
“All right,” I said over the line to the rest of the waiting column, “Are you getting the feed?”
Most of the people on that channel were just getting it for informational purposes. But the three or four pilots driving mechs that had been with us the entire time - that is, mechs pulled from the Free Worlds League shipment sent out before the technological crash that followed the Second Succession War.
The modern production we’d been sent from Defiance after Helm was easier to keep running at spec, but those specifications were enough cruder that they could only barely count as the same machines as in an earlier age. The Archers and Flashmen got attention tones to let their pilots know I’d picked up hostile targets. The Marauder and couple of Centurions integrated No. 2’s full sensor feed into their own…
Which meant that shortly, I could hear one of them reading off, “Gold, Club One-Seven, adjust fire, over…”
I tuned that out and concentrated on keeping my movements more or less random. This was less dangerous than it seemed; the range I could usefully observe fall of shot at was substantially more than the anti-ground reach of any weapon the turrets were likely to mount.
Of course, if we were wrong about that, and there were class-two autocannon mounts there, they’d be completely dependent on computer support to hit an evading target at what was already extreme range.
A semi-relevant digression: Standard Armor composites are mechanically weird. They’re a lot more resistant to single big kinetic hits than the game rules make them seem, but they get that ability thanks to polymer layers in between the anti-energy ablatives that act sort of like non-Newtonian fluids under impact - that is, when you hit them, they bleed off the energy of that hit by temporarily crystalizing. So, to make a hole, you either need to whack them so hard that they can’t take all the energy and either shatter or rip from their mountings (like a gauss rifle), or you need to hit them a lot of times in rapid succession.
And thus, burst-fire autocannon, which do just that. And why old-fashioned single-shot tank guns had become obsolete. And, for that matter, one of the factors that originally drove the adoption of the Itano Circus model for missile launchers.
The obvious complication, though, is that cannons have recoil, and the bigger and more powerful the autocannon, the harder it gets to correct that recoil mid-burst. Single-shot firing modes were technologically possible, as I understood it, and every now and again some bright spark dusted them off again, but even the most robust mechanical system designed to slam around multi-hundred-kilo magazine blocs got cranky when you started messing with the weight it expected - and too light could be as bad as too heavy.
So, those combined were why lighter autocannons had longer effective ranges, and why larger ones didn’t just step their fire down.
Digression over - it turned out that the Capellans had put batteries of 60mm autocannon into their turrets, and the tracers were reaching out to say hi. Accounting for that possibility was why I was doing this myself, rather than leaving it to somebody less senior and more expendable. At this range, the defenders needed digital assistance to hit at this range, assistance that Phantom Mech’s bullshit made completely unavailable.
I suspected that the delay between my appearance and the first fire was accounted by the time needed for someone to realize what was happening and send minions running to the turrets themselves to take manual control; on remote, the emplacements wouldn’t have been able to see me at all.
They had to know that that was a mistake, even before the shells started landing. I spared a mental salute for their courage, and a note for No. 2’s computer to take down to make sure they were buried with honors.
The first artillery shells were small flashes, the batteries sighting in with the Assault Guards’ 155mm Thumpers. They missed, for the most part.
I kept dodging. If I stopped, one of the Capellan gunners would lay in on his iron sights and that would sting. No. 2’s armor could take that, for a little while, but I’d rather not, and so would my techs.
Some of the next artillery salvo didn’t miss… And apparently the gunners decided that that was close enough.
Watching thirty Long Tom shells go off at nearly the same instant was impressive, even across the broad front of the near wall of the spaceport’s inner compound. The 240mm shells tore great gaping holes in the wall, shattered the targeted turrets completely, and made a damned good go of smashing through the massive cermacrete pillars that had been built to lift the turrets over the wall and give them a clear field of fire.
Somebody on the open line whistled.
“All right,” I said. “Over the crest. Manchester Four-Eight-” The column’s scout company was drawn from the Armored Cav, “-push ahead and find the next shell.”
What was left of the walls and the design of the spaceport’s central compound would mean that any turrets after this would have much closer ranges to work at, and so there wouldn’t be enough advantage to doing it myself.
The other reason was that, if the defenders were going to make a counterpush, they’d do it as soon as they realized that using artillery against the fixed defenses would let us through those with minimal losses.
My own estimate was that they wouldn’t, they’d pull back underground and probably collapse that tunnel entrance behind them, but that was because I could cheat by using outside context knowledge. Candace Liao had known better than to throw good money after bad under far more coercive conditions than this, and intel was about as certain as they could be that she was on world right now. Which meant that she was running the defense, the CapCon and Liaos being what they were.
I was… half right.
We didn’t see the mechs again, that day. It was fairly obvious that they’d be the first things pulled out, especially once the strike force that we did see showed up, fast hovercraft screaming across the tarmac, LRMs leading the way and falling around the mechs of that flank. It was easy to draw the line of their course and see that they were aiming for the APCs.
“Formation, swing right and engage hovercraft,” I ordered. “Left flank, mind the rearguard. Madrid, keep your heads down.”
Sophitia, being Sophitia, fired first, Aspis’s Star League 8cm laser reaching out and ripping straight through the tinfoil protecting a Capellan Harasser, making the vehicle spill off of its cushion of air and go skidding as her shot destroyed pressure skirt and the engine driving its fans alike.
Additional shots crisscrossed the open pavement, and I took a moment to draw a bead on a racing Saracen and opened up myself. Both of the PPC shots missed, not a surprise at that range and with his speed, but I managed to get the autocannon on target, the first shell caroming off the pavement in front of it and smashing a section of hard rubberized skirt a third the length of the tank free. It pinwheeled up for a moment, then hesitated and was sucked right down on top of the Saracen’s hull, vacuumed into place across several of the fan intakes.
That edge of the hull dipped, the entire machine’s course hooking madly as straight-line inertia, the driver’s controls, and the sparking friction of metal on cermacrete all fought to direct it where they wanted, and I gauged the movement as my guns cooled and the racheting bangs of the loading system pulled another three 105 rounds and the cassette that held them from the main magazine and slammed them into place by the breech.
Thirty-first century combat vehicles, even the kind that ran on internal combustion engines, had power-to-weight ratios that would have been outright fantasy a thousand years before. They had to, to have the spare power to feed battlefield energy weapons. Even though most of the ‘heat sinks’ the Battletech tabletop game had demanded of them were actually capacitors like gauss rifles used, at least in armor mounts, the energy to feed them had to come from somewhere, and in not all that long at all. The standard cycle time between shots was ten seconds, though a well or poorly designed mount and system could do better or worse.
All of which is a fancy way of saying that the Saracen’s driver, once he’d shaken the debris away from his intakes, had the oomph at his fingertips to proceed on his way with a plenum chamber that basically didn’t exist any more, just more slowly.
But he needed to ground and shut the fans down to do that, and I was waiting. Saracens were enough tougher than Harassers that all three big guns didn’t hard-kill the thing, but I could see in the scope that at least two of the fans were wrecked, and the crew didn’t waste any time waiting to see if I was paying attention for the next volley. I saw the hatches pop, and moved on.
Moved to a J. Edgar Hover, much closer than I liked the look of. I reversed, swung around to track it - fired the AC as it reloaded, shells screaming by ahead of the thing. The bobble in its course was the driver visibly requisitioning an immediate change of underthings, which led to a frantic evasion even as its turret swung around to spray a wild fan of green light and missiles in my vague direction.
My second shot, from the left-hand PPC, missed, also ahead of the speeding hovertank, but much closer. If he hadn’t been dodging like his life depended on it (it did), I’d have had him.
The crew clearly knew that. The driver was putting everything, and I mean everything, he could into his evasive maneuvers, and the commander and gunner weren’t even trying to shoot back.
The third shot missed behind them, and I gave in and vented. “Fuck!”
Fortunately for everybody involved, the crew I’d been shooting at had had enough for the day, thank you kindly, and as soon as they were out of weapons range they straightened out and hauled ass.
I looked around. A few of the hovers had broken through the line of firing battlemechs and taken passing potshots at the APCs. One of those was broken and burning, but I could see human figures taking shelter in the lee of the wreck. I risked a couple seconds looking at my map, and then made a call. “Goldenplate, Joker Actual, how many vehicles have we seen and how many confirmed destroyed, over?”
The Assault Guards’ staff headquarters section, still safely aboard one of their assigned Overlords, had enough people to do the beancounting and literally this in their job description.
“Estimate two hundred to two-forty sighted, Joker. Confirmed kills eighty or so, mission kills about the same.” A second’s pause and hesitation, before the intel chick added, “The hovers you’re seeing are probably the only ones of those left, plus maybe another battalion of slow movers, over.”
I watched Aspis reach out and give a Condor’s fan intakes a good whack with the tip of its sword, making the thing spin out, then waited and joined the crossfire that reduced it to wreckage. “Odds that what we’re seeing is the whole rearguard, what wouldn’t be any good in the tunnels, over?”
“Pretty good,” the staffer said, her voice obviously wondering how to phrase ‘don’t get cocky’ to someone this many ranks above her.
“So now’s when they start getting creative,” I concluded before she could find the right words. “Thanks, that’s what I needed. Joker, out.”
***
They didn’t get creative. Aside from the fact that there were, y’know, actual bullets flying around, the rest of the assault on the spaceport went almost glass-smooth. It was eerie, like an exercise where the proctors had forgotten to throw any curveballs. We took the second and third rings of turrets out the hard way, rolled the infantry in…
And found nothing but a couple battalions of very edgy conscripts. Even just the infantry that had come down on the Fortresses would have been enough, even if they didn’t have battlemechs standing by right outside the buildings ready to pour machine gun fire into strong points.
Give them this, the poor bastards tried anyway. Given that it was the CapCon, I wondered how ‘safe’ the Maskirovka was keeping their families, but that might have been unfair. They broke under fire, they couldn’t shoot for shit, and there was at least one strong point that got blown up by one of its own grenades, but they tried. By the time their survivors were disarmed and taken prisoner, all sign of the heavy forces were completely gone, vanished into the tunnels that led between spaceport and factories.
Quick just-asking-questions interrogations of the pitiably green ‘soldiers’ confirmed that we’d taken out basically half the tanks on the planet, and that the 1st St. Ives Lancers had had a rough day indeed but still had most of their mechs at walking wounded status at worst.
All in all, a better first day than expected!
Night landings weren’t the greatest conditions to bring dropships down in, but they were manageable, especially with the spaceport’s sensor support and field lighting. By dawn, we had all of the armor and infantry regiments on the ground, and recon overflight by ASF had cleared most of our route to the area over the HildCo site, and by noon, we had an armor regiment dug in and settled around each of the known major entrances.
There was no point attempting to be subtle with an opponent who not only knew the ground, but had it wired for sight and sound besides.
The Assault Guards were providing most of the weight for our push - along with my modified units. I wasn’t sure why the FedSuns Armored Cavalry’s Colonel Revons had joined me and Marshall Larcher to stand by and watch while the first assault went in, but I suspect he thought the concept Sophitia had come up with was wild enough to fall into ‘I gotta see this’ territory.
The way he was shaking his head certainly supported that theory. “I cannot believe that I am actually seeing this,” he said.
Larcher’s expression was at least as skeptical. “You really think that this will work,” she said.
“We have a full simulator setup,” I said, “and so far, signs from that point to ‘yes’. We’ve checked every assumption, been conservative, and… Yeah, I think it’ll work. Certainly it works in the programmers’ knockoff of Ishiyama, at least.”
In front of us, the Banshee that would be going into the hole first reached tensed and heaved the twelve-ton slab of pure armor plating up in front of itself with both hands, covered from ankles to head as it advanced. The Assault Guards Atlas in second place shuffled to the side and tucked in, completely covered - from directly ahead - by the fire-shadow of that mobile barrier.
“You do realize what’ll happen if anybody gets around that shield, right?” Revons said.
“Depends how close they are,” I said. “At range, well, if it’s something like an L-ambush, they either run for their lives or die. If it’s in close, a threat just stepping in and around the shield… They’re in arm’s reach of a Banshee. The shields are ejectable, we based the mount off the Battlemaster’s PPC.”
Larcher looked more thoughtful. “...And in the tunnels, anything they face will be either ahead of them, or in arm’s reach.”
“Barring branching,” I agreed. “Now, they’ll still need support to have any damage done, but that’s manageable… And we can replace and repair the shields a lot more easily than, say, a torso section. It won’t make this easy, but I think it’ll give us a chance.”
And in front of us, the first mech lumbered down into the earth of St. Ives.
...AND LOVE HIS ONLY CONCEPT...