GblaRCS Chpt 60

Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
- Chapter 60 -

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"Epic flail"

Text painted on the side of a Von Luckner Tank exhibited in the Niops Museum of Military History - 2900 CE

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The Assault of Amaris City

Plain of the Rim Worlds Republic – Von Strang's World – 2844

Wide open, lacking much in the way of vegetation until you neared Amaris City, stretching out before you to the horizon and flat as a pancake this would be beautiful ground on which to fight the archetypal set-piece battle, Franklin thought to himself looking out of the cockpit of his Cyclops, it was just a crying shame that Karl Von Strang wasn't nearly stupid enough to sally out from his capital to fight one alas.

Mitch Johnson's written report regarding his personal impressions of the baron, along with his analysis of the sections of the capital and its defenses he had been able to examine first-hand, had made for interesting reading and had led to Hallis modifying his initial battleplan for storming the city. Von Strang was apparently not stupid, even if some of his grandiose plans to bring back the Republic did objectively cross the line into delusion given his demographic weakness, tiny industrial base and woefully inadequate logistical potential.

Johnson's evaluation of the man included such descriptors as 'insightful', 'surprisingly well-educated and well-informed' and 'ruthless and despotic without being certifiably crazy or utterly blind to his own limitations' which placed Karl Von Strang firmly among the upper echelon of contemporary tyrants ruling bandit kingdoms.

True, given that the competition for the title of least deranged periphery autocrat included such notables as the bloodthirsty maniac currently going by the title 'Duke of Tortuga', or the various vicious warlords fighting over Antallos, simply not being completely out of his gourd meant that Karl Von Strang was readily able to qualify as an above average despot. Since it was usually better to overestimate your foe than to underestimate him however, Hallis wisely opted to take a cautious approach to the situation and on that basis arranged his forces as if they were taking on the line regiments of a Great House, not just some jumped-up pirates.

Rifleman Heavy 'Mech

Hallis placed three battalions of SLDF Battlemechs in the center of the line as they advanced across the plain, with the single battalion from Bolton's Rangers on the right and the heavier of the two mech battalions from the Blackhearts' on the right, the rest of the Blackhearts Battlemech strength, plus their fairly large complement of mechanized infantry, following them as a reserve.

Longbow Assault 'Mech

With the fourth battlemech battalion hailing from Niops being a composite unit that included most of the SLDF's Rifleman air-defense, Archer and Longbow fire-support mechs, along with a token company from the NAM, Hallis placed them in the center just behind the main line mixed in with the two companies of tanks and the infantry APCs that had been landed by the Triumph.

Following on behind to the rear were the Thor self-propelled guns and the Vali missile carriers of the artillery along with their support vehicles, the Vali batteries pulling trailers of additional ammunition behind them because experience showed you could never have too many Arrow IV missiles.

As the brigade stomped or rolled its way across the plain Hallis ordered his reconnaissance companies forward to scout the ground ahead of them. Training exercises back on Niops VII had indicated that while the Guardian ECM and Beagle Active Probe equipped HSR-250-Dn Hussar was truly exceptional at scouting it worked best when deployed alongside other machines such as the Talon which were able to quickly come to support it when necessary and had more punch.

Somewhat annoyingly to those of the Clan Wolverine persuasion the same exercises also clearly indicated that having a number of Mongoose lights mixed in also paid dividends because as a command mech it could coordinate the units more effectively. General Romanov told Hallis he needed to order his people to suck it up and use the things regardless of the name, which he did thinking it was a very good thing it wasn't called a Widowmaker instead because that would have been an absolute deal-breaker.

Hussar Light 'Mech firing it's ER Large Laser

Thanks to secure line-of-sight only tightbeam communication utilizing heavy encryption it wasn't considered necessary to maintain particularly strict radio silence and unable not to comment on what he thought were all the HSR-200-Db's out there Colonel Daniel Bolton signaled the Brigadier-General about it.

"I don't suppose you can tell me where the hell you found so many Royal Hussars, Sir?" he queried on a private channel. He doubted they were actually making them themselves, so Niops finding a big cache of the things seemed the most likely source. After all, if you could build a manufacturing line for Royal Battlemechs why would you go with the Hussar of all things?

"We've been breeding them" Franklin replied. "The difficulty is working out which ones are male and which are female" he replied. "We tried it with the Atlas as well but unfortunately those things are the Giant Panda Bears of mechs" he continued deadpan. "The shame of it is the Jagermech breeds like rabbits but who the hell wants one of those?" he asked rhetorically, audibly stifling laughter.

Bolton rolled his eyes. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that Sam Tyson's observation after having worked for them for years that trying to get a straight answer out of Niops was an exercise in futility. It wasn't just the obfuscation that rankled, it was that most of them seemed to revel in doing so in a comedic or sarcastic fashion.

The rumor was ComStar absolutely hated their guts, and given the utter seriousness and air of self-importance in the manner by which those weirdos conducted themselves it was easy to see why.

The Niops Association was arguably the most well-meaning, idealistic and optimistic power of the modern era. They were also however clearly intent on attaining the title of the undisputed champion smartasses of the known galaxy and Bolton was not alone in suspecting that wasn't just because they wanted to keep their secrets with an epic disinformation campaign, they had clearly started to enjoy acting like this.

From Brigadier-General Franklin himself to the lowliest trainee assistant technician they could all be relied upon to pick up the ball and run with it. The off-handed remarks in the chow-line about the vast fleets of Caspar drones the Association had squirreled away, or that the biotechnology company founded on Niops VI by 'House Frankenstein-Moreau' after relocating from Frobisher was close to success in their super-soldier program, really started to grate after a while.

All that said, Dan Bolton had to concede that taking up a contract with the Niops Association and this operation in particular was a dream come true for himself and most of his mercenary company. Deeply proud of their origins as a Star League regiment the battlemechs of Bolton's Rangers still proudly bore the Cameron Star and the insignia of the 208th Hussars, and by retaining SLDF olive-drab as their paint-scheme it was almost as if the regiment had come home as they marched alongside the battalions from the 295th who were painted up the same way.

Bolton had grown up being told stories of serving the SLDF against Amaris by his parents and other veterans of the war. Unlike the messy politics of the Succession Wars it had sounded like a fairytale, good versus evil with good triumphing at the end as the 208th fighting alongside Aleksandr Kerensky himself brought the Usurper Stefan Amaris low.

Much of what happened after Kerensky personally executed Amaris was a complete shit-show of course, there being a distinct absence of 'happily ever after' at the end of the fairytale. On the other hand even if Snow White didn't get to marry the handsome prince at the end the kingdom was still better off if the evil queen had nonetheless been deposed and executed right?

Not that Prince Charming had ever seemed much of a good catch as far as Dan Bolton was concerned. The guy's apparent thing for comatose chicks was more than a little disturbing, and made you wonder if his usual approach to picking up girls was to produce a slightly damp silk handkerchief and to politely ask them in a refined accent, 'Does this smell like chloroform to you perchance, My Lady?'

Old fairytales with somewhat dubious undertones notwithstanding, for Bolton's Rangers to be taking the field to help overthrow the heir to the loathsome Gunthar Von Strang, while storming a city literally, and shamelessly named after Stefan Amaris himself, was well worth how much of a pain-in-the-ass the journey to get there had been. The pay itself wasn't fantastic, but the opportunity to make his predecessors in the regiment proud of him while simultaneously getting to lay his hands on some of all that fancy lostech hardware Niops boasted in excess more than made up for it.

Since they had set down well beyond artillery range of the city, nobody wanted to be subjected to a barrage of high explosive while unloading a force that included lightly-armoured vehicles and ammunition trailers for obvious reasons, it was going to be a while before they had advanced far enough to see action. This had given Bolton some time to enviously look over at more of the machines Niops was bringing to the fight while they marched, and all those Gauss rRifle and ERPPC equipped mechs dripping with double-heat-sinks and ferro-fibrous armor were giving him the warm fuzzies.

The fact they hadn't used up their inventory of late Star League era equipment during the bloody slog of the First Succession War showed in the way they put together units as well. Once the brigade got moving Brigadier Franklin had dispatched a mixed company of medium mechs to each flank to act as a screening force, that wasn't in itself particularly noteworthy but the lance of FLS-8K Flashman heavies he added to each company to beef up their firepower was.

Despite the SLDF having fielded the FLS-8K in vast numbers they were barely encountered in the Inner Sphere these days, partially because the factory where they were originally produced had been blown to hell decades ago but mostly because if they broke down you just couldn't get the XL engines they needed anymore. The raison d'etre of the 8K model of the Flashman was that thanks to its 375XL engine it was fast for a heavy, able to conduct quick, rapid flanking maneuvers that other seventy-five tonners like the Marauder or Black Knight simply couldn't. It was also, unlike its peers, able to keep up with most medium mechs which meant you could sprinkle a few in with your Griffin, Dervish and Wolverine mechs without slowing them down and therefore hamstringing their tactical flexibility which is exactly what Brigadier Franklin had done.

Flashman Heavy 'Mech in combat

The FLS-8K wasn't a machine that could go toe-to-toe in a slugging match with other heavies, that XL engine made it fast but also meant it couldn't soak up the punishment they could, but used properly in the manner the SLDF had intended it was a proven winner.

Niops seemingly had a good number of them in service too, hardly that much of a surprise given that some SLDF divisions had ended up fielding entire battalions of the things once it was learned that three dozen speedy 'Flashbulbs' suddenly appearing on the oppositions flank, each one carrying a trio of large lasers and five mediums, tended to have a very detrimental influence on enemy morale.

Breaking Bolton away from his thoughts a Lighting hover-vehicle being driven at breakneck speed, randomly jinking and changing direction as it went, tore past his Awesome and hurtling onwards started weaving across the plain.

Awesome Assault 'Mech

If it wasn't for all the aerials sticking out of the thing, and the distinctive radar array mounted on the back, Bolton would have assumed the driver was some kind of maniac but it was clearly some kind of artillery support vehicle. To be precise the Lightning was carting around a powerful counter-battery-radar, a system that allowed it to detect incoming long range artillery fire, calculate where it had been fired from, and then pass on those coordinates to friendly artillery so they could return the favor.

The downside of being the people actually operating a counter-battery radar was that the extremely powerful radio emissions it put out could be detected by the other side, allowing them to potentially triangulate on your position and drop more shells right on top of you.

Or at least they could if you were silly enough to stay still and let them, and the crew of the Lightning were clearly well aware that if you were screaming out, 'I'm right here, kill me' into the electromagnetic ether then not making yourself any more of an easy target than was necessary to do the job was just good policy.

Inside the Lightning, sitting in the passenger seat in front of the radar display screen, Second-Lieutenant Charlene Hammerick was glad she had remembered to put in her mouthguard because if not she might have bitten off her tongue by now. Her driver seemed to have taken his orders to make sure the vehicle was as hard a target as it could possibly be as an invitation to drive it like he was a competing in an off-road rally championship while having some kind of seizure and simultaneously popping the 'Go Pills' fighter pilots liked to chew on.

Usually riding in a hover-vehicle meant a smooth ride compared to a wheeled vehicle going the same speed, but that wasn't really the case when you kept randomly accelerating and decelerating while swerving from side-to-side.

Serving in the artillery was supposed to be a lot more chill than this, Hammerick thought to herself, recalling the stories the founder of her bloodname told of fighting battles while leisurely eating sandwiches. Choosing to follow in the footsteps of Colonel Daniel Hammerick, her mentor and genetically at least the closest thing she had to a father, had led to her eschewing a career as a mechwarrior or a fighter-pilot that most of the other kits from Zeta sibko had joyfully embraced for the life of a gunner.

It wasn't a job that came with all the kudos or the air of the romance that came with driving a big stompy robot or a sleek fighter did of course, they didn't make a lot of war movies where the protagonist spends a lot of time ten kilometers behind the front lines covering their ears, but in reality artillery still ruled the battlefield, as it had for most of the last millennium-and-a-half.

Get a few drinks into him and Daniel Hammerick could always be depended upon to mention that while ilKhan Kerensky looked down upon artillery that in the end it was the development of effective cannon that sounded the death knell of the horse archer armies of the Eurasian Steppe Nicky K seemed to have such a weird fetish about.

Born, or perhaps the correct term was 'decanted' from an Iron Womb in 2819 as the clan's breeding program was put into full swing for the first time Charlotte Hammerick was too young to really remember the Clan Homeworlds, even if she had been born there. She remembered her time spent with the Switchback Fleet somewhat more clearly but Niops was very much the place she thought of as home, that being something that differentiated the Zeta generation onward from the Gamma kits.

Just because she didn't really remember the clans that didn't mean they didn't remember her, or rather her surname name however, and like all the other bloodnamed warriors when away from Niops she used the alias her 'father' did despite its downside in her particular case.

Daniel Hammerick had probably thought it was cute to adopt the nom-de-guerre he did, but he wasn't the one that got landed with the name 'Charley Martel' as a result. It could have been a lot worse though of course. The Ironborn carrying Kirsten Mroczkiewicz genes would never forgive her for the monstrosity of a polysyllabic Polish pseudonym she inflicted upon them.

Originally the Lightning had three crew and a pair of SRM launchers, the launchers were removed to find weight for the radar and additional electronics and the place where the third crewman used to sit was now filled by a very expensive ATOAS (Advanced Trans-Optical Aiming System) and a slightly less exorbitantly priced Inertial Navigation System. Learning how to operate all that gear had taken Charlotte months, and learning how to actually use it to its full potential well over a year on top of that, and it irked her that the Stuka pilots were probably going to crow later about how good they were in delivering 'Warheads to Foreheads' with their toss-bombing runs when the tube artillery she was directing was still by far the most cost-effective and efficient means of dropping high-explosives on people.

The radar screen in front of her lit up and a warning sounded as the system detecting that enemy shells were inbound, arcing through the sky from various enemy batteries situated in and around the city.

They were probably doing it the old-fashioned way with old fashioned guns, Charlotte assumed, hitting the button that would automatically signal a warning of incoming artillery fire to friendly forces.

As per standing orders issued by Khan Hallis, as Charlotte thought of him, in the event of the brigade receiving the unwelcome attention of enemy artillery the various battalions on the move immediately widened their spacing and altered speed in order to make themselves more difficult targets and then those Battlemechs and vehicles so-equipped launched smoke grenades to obscure themselves from enemy spotters.

Obsolescent or not, towed field artillery and howitzers being assigned a fire mission by men with powerful binoculars and optical rangefinders who were likely positioned up on those hills ahead near the city could still ruin your day. They would also need to be dealt with ASAP because even if their accuracy likely left something to be desired they likely made up for that with sheer numbers of guns.

As the first salvo of enemy shells arrived, either 152mm or 155mm caliber judging from the size of the size of the explosions, Charlotte couldn't really say much for their accuracy, but they definitely had plenty of gun-tubes over there. 'Hit the brakes' she ordered once the computer determined that the Lightning itself was not being specifically targeted as yet, despite broadcasting radar emissions like a red flag to a bull. Stopping was more tactically sound under the circumstances than it might first appear, the counter-battery radar worked while used on the move, but it gave considerably more accurate results if you were stationary than when you were tearing along at over 180 km/h. As the hover vehicle metaphorically screeched to a halt the ballistic computer looked at the data being fed into it by the phased array counter-battery radar and the Inertial Navigation System, it quickly calculated the arc the inbound shells were following in order to determined where they were fired from and then provided those coordinates to the ATOAS so it could crunch the numbers.

With the radar indicating a second salvo inbound, more ragged than the first most likely because some crews weren't as fast and well trained as others, Charlotte requested a counter-battery fire mission via radio and pressed a button that told the ATOAS to tell the batteries of Thor Self-Propelled-Guns following behind exactly where they should start shelling once they were set up and ready.

As the second enemy salvo arrived, a few inferno rounds mixed in with the high explosives this time which would have been a bigger deal if any of them had landed anywhere near a friendly tank, APC or mech, Charlotte was starting to get the impression that either a fair proportion of the enemy gun barrels were worn out or they hadn't been properly made in the first place because they had an apparent CEP larger than a ****** football field which offended her professional sensibilities.

You didn't need a direct hit with a sufficiently large caliber shell to ruin a Battlemech's day, a near miss could cause enough damage to cripple a light mech or strip a good chunk of armor off a heavy, but if you couldn't even reliably land your rounds in the same postal code area all you were doing was kicking up dirt or at best occasionally peppering them with shrapnel.

Battletechs and tanks weren't dismounted infantry, the odd sandblasting by shrapnel was something they could ignore.

What they couldn't ignore was that with multiple batteries thumping rounds downrange at them, dozens of guns, eventually they were going to either run out of shells or they were going to get lucky and start achieving hits. Given that the Von Strang family had spent decades laying minefields and digging bunkers and fortification lines it was probably a little too much to hope that they hadn't been stockpiling ammunition as well, so it was best not to count on the former happening first.

You couldn't find shelter or hide on an open plain either. The smoke drifting over the ground made the brigade harder to see and accurately target by artillery spotters but even the thickest of smokescreens was no help if the other side just decided to drop ordnance into it until they started seeing the secondary explosions that indicated success.

No, the answer to Von Strang's artillery was to put it out of action, or at least injure or traumatize their gun-crews to the point where they weren't exactly at their best, hence Charlotte's counter-battery fire-mission request earlier that was already been acted upon.

The Thor SPG had been criticized often over the years. Some people complained that it was overpriced, others that the SLDF should have chosen a tracked design able to deal with a wider range of terrain, but nobody ever said it wasn't a fast and responsive artillery platform that didn't excel at putting shells down range at short notice.

Less than a minute after the fire-mission from the Lightning arrived, and despite the fact they had still been on the move at the time, the Thor batteries were stationary and starting to fire at the coordinates they had been given.

There were considerably fewer gun-tubes on the SLDF side but they were better, more accurate guns crewed by better, more proficient crews, who had been handed more accurately plotted stationary target coordinates.

The Thor SPG's fired two rapid salvos and then quickly relocated to a new position a few hundred metres away, making themselves a harder target for any counter-battery fire that might potentially be heading their way in return. Vosn Strang didn't seem to be using counter-battery radar of his own, but he still had people on the high ground that could always do it the old-fashioned way, and better safe than sorry.

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Message to the lowly Soldier

On a hill overlooking the plain a captain, or rather a 'Lokhagos', who was sticking his head out of a concealed and camouflaged dugout observed the fall of shot as best he could through binoculars. He was directing the heavy guns positioned to the rear via field telephone, correcting the fire, all while hoping that the junior Tetrarch, or Lieutenant, operating the coincidence optical rangefinger from another dugout nearby wasn't quite as much of a drooling idiot as he seemed to be.

The Tetrarch did at least seemed to know where on the gadget to look into, and how to turn the dials on the rangefinder, so he had at least read the manual, but that didn't mean that the numbers he was calling out were actually correct as he sighted on battlemechs in the centre of the enemy formation and called out his range estimates to his superior.

Admittedly the smokescreen down there wouldn't be helping matters, and for every shell that fell way short another landed long, so the failure of the artillery to hit anything so far could just be down to the gunners being crap, or the guns themselves, or maybe the quality-control on the ammunition was poor, but regardless of the reason the guns were yet to achieve anything except craters and the occasional messed-up paintjob.

The person the Lokhagos was talking to on the other end of the line was also a Tetrarch, although as a glorified telephone operator it was a task that might well have been assigned to a corporal in other armies. Von Strang's military would have certainly been considered officer-heavy compared to many equivalent forces , the lack of a decent NCO corps requiring a multitude of junior officers to do the jobs that other ranks would typically do elsewhere. While keeping the masses ignorant, and uneducated to the point the majority were illiterate was an effective means of keeping them under control, you paid a price for it. One of the downsides being that you couldn't trust your average peasant conscript with complicated tasks that required them to read an instruction manual or be able to do math.

Just because the sons and daughters of the ruling classes could read did not necessarily mean that they were all capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time however. As with aristocracies elsewhere there were more than a few with the intellectual capacity of a Skatha Ape with learning difficulties, and because the cream of the crop tended to gravitate to assignments with more kudos, such as mechwarrior or fighter-pilot, the dimmest bulbs were often the ones who often wound up in the infantry.

The Lokhagos himself was in the infantry because he had once made the mistake of yawning during a speech being made by the previous Baron Von Strang rather than because he wasn't the sharpest bayonet in the armoury. All it would have taken was a better night's sleep one evening a decade ago and he could have been sat in a mech cockpit right now, instead of standing in a hole, but destiny does like to play her tricks.

Having a reputation that he had his head screwed on right had yet to earn him an overdue promotion to Tagmatarchis, but it did mean he was considered reliable enough to be trusted with an important job, that job being to hold this hill which anchored the main defence line in front of the city.

Given its tactical importance the engineers had spent years fortifying it with dug-outs, trenches and pill boxes placed all over the hill, although the latter weren't as well-constructed as they could have been given a lack of manpower and heavy construction equipment.

Despite sending in formal complaints about the shoddiness of the pillboxes constructed on the hill in the past the Lokhagos had very recently re-thought his position on the matter because the properly-made ones elsewhere were currently in the process of being systemically blown to hell one after the other by the very accurate and very large air-dropped munitions being thrown at them.

While it was certainly not good for his own troop's morale to watch their compatriots in the fortification lines the hill overlooked getting bombed, at least it wasn't them getting systemically sledgehammered, at least not yet, and watching it happen had at least gotten them to keep their damn heads down. Until the explosions started happening all to many of the less-than-professional levies manning the trenches had been treating the whole thing as an adventure, now they weren't.

Those laser-guided bombs hitting the strong-points on the line holding anti-tank guns and other heavier weapons, given their precision they could only be LGB's, were the reason the Lokhagos himself had chosen to vacate the pill box that he would have usually utilized as a Command-Post in favour of a non-descript foxhole. They might have enough bombs to start hitting the crappier less important bunkers after knocking out the AT guns, but nobody was going to waste such an expensive munition on a hole in the ground, albeit one kitted out with a field telephone so it could be used as an alternate CP.

Yelling and the sound of nearby explosions on the other end of the line indicated that the guns of the SLDF wannabes out there were conducting counter-battery missions, as was to be expected the Lokhagos thought to himself, holding the field telephone further away from his head. Radio communications could be jammed, but cheap copper wires buried underground could not, and the entire network of bunkers that surrounded the city were linked by secure landlines.

Quite why the artillery seemed so surprised and panicked by being shelled back the Lokhagos wasn't certain. They must have known it wasn't so much a possibility as a near certainty when up against an enemy more sophisticated and well-equipped than a few pirates surely? Regardless of the reason, judging by what he could hear through the field telephone, and the slackening of the volume of fire landing on, or rather in the rough vicinity of, the enemy, it might well be a while before they regained their wits, found their balls and got their act back together.

At least he had a few mortar batteries of his own to bring to bear once the enemy got closer, as well as a couple of concealed anti-tank guns and a decent, if not huge, stock of shoulder-launched Inferno missiles. The hill itself was steep enough that it couldn't be easily scaled, and the minefields on the lower slopes would bring any assault to a grinding halt while they tried to clear them making them an easy target.

With another company of men so he could man every firing position, not just some of them, a few more anti-tank guns and mortars and ideally a lance of LRM Carriers as support the Lokhagos was of the opinion he could have thrown back nearly any assault, inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy in the process. As it was, with the men and equipment he did have he was still confident that it wouldn't be his part of the line that collapsed first, and as long as his unit held this ground the approaches to the city were secure.

Just going around the hill, bypassing it on the way towards the city, wasn't tactically sound because the hill wasn't just an ideal position to direct artillery fire from, there also wasn't a mechwarrior or tanker alive that wanted to risk getting shot in the ass. For all the enemy knew there might be hidden batteries of field guns or worse dug-in up here that were only holding their fire because they were waiting for just that kind of perfect target.

The Tetrarch using the range-finder, yelled to catch his attention and when the Lokhagos turned to him to see what the fuss was he could see him pointing and gesticulating at something.

Using his own binoculars, the Lokhagos took a look for himself and noting that as the enemy units approached the first section of the static defence lines that stretched out from the bottom of the hill off into the distance, these being minefields and anti-tank ditches, that their tanks which had previously been following behind the mechs were moving forward to take the lead.

As they moved up the tanks started to take fire from a few small gun positions that watched over the minefields. Light recoilless cannon, mortars and the occasional automatic grenade launcher opening up as the defenders showed they had no intention of giving up without a fight.

You had to admire the spirit of the soldiers way down there, the Lokhagos thought appreciatively for a few moments before dozens of black shapes streaking through the sky arrived above them and suddenly the whole area turned into a massive rippling series of small explosions, like a sea of smoke fire that covered a huge area.

That would be Arrow IV cluster munitions then, the Lokhagos realized with a grimace, the smoke trail left by the missiles as they tore through the air towards their target reminding him of LRM's only much bigger. Lostech my ass, he swore to himself as another volley of the things arrived to add to the mayhem.

Those submunitions might not have enough of a warhead to punch through a half-decently made pillbox but the psychological effect of being underneath all that steel rain, hundreds or even thousands of grenade-sized charges exploding all around you, was bound to throw you off your game.

The tanks rolled closer to the defence line, a number of battlemechs now moving up with them to provide additional fire support if needed, and as they got closer the Lokhagos was able to get a better look.

Von Luckner heavy tanks, a seventy-five ton favourite of the SLDF, and you had to wonder if someone had maybe thought it would be funny to send Von Luckner to fight Von Strang the Lokhagos considered as he noticed something very funny about them.

As they neared the minefields some kind of mechanical contraption fitted to the front of each seemed to unfold and then, once fully deployed, the tanks drove right into the minefields preceded by a massive dust cloud being beaten up from the ground in front of them.

'You've got to love the classics" the Lokhagos muttered to himself as he realized that the enemy had retrofitted mine-flails to the Von Luckner tanks so they could just brute-force their way through rather than mess about with mine-detectors and combat engineers.

The flails would set off most of the mines they hit, and fling others clear out of the way. While being inside those tanks when those mines went off just ahead of them would be 'exciting' to say the least, as long as those Von Luckner crews could carry out their job without being shot at by anti-tank guns and artillery it would only be a matter of time before the line was breeched.

More tanks were rolling up to follow now, as the battlemechs providing cover fire lit up any bunker that tried to do anything about it with barrages of autocannon rounds and LRMs, the explosive ammunition more likely to keep heads down than directed-energy weapons. The newly arrived second group of tanks appeared to be the slightly smaller and less well-armoured Manticore, and although they seemed to lack mine flails they did look to be fitted with bulldozer blades instead.

Pummel your way through the minefield, fill up the tank traps with dirt, and just keep on going. It wasn't exactly sophisticated but if you had air supremacy and your artillery was stopping theirs from interfering then why not?

There was no way those tanks were making it up this hill though, the Lokhagos thought to himself with relief, the slope was too steep. This wasn't therefore a disaster by any means, merely a setback, it wasn't like the minefields and ditches down there were the linchpin for the defence of Amaris City, just a means to slow the enemy down. For the enemy to proceed safely they still needed to oust him from this position in order to be able to move forward with their flank and rear secure and the terrain was not in their favour.

"Incoming!" someone yelled and the Lokhagos along with everyone else under his command ducked down as deep into their trenches and foxholes as they could.

If watching somebody else get hit by Arrow IV cluster had been disconcerting the Lokhagos quickly learned that being under it yourself was even worse as it seemed like the whole side of the hill started exploding.

Much larger explosions could be heard amidst the detonation of myriad sub-munitions, Thumper shells? Aerial bombs? Regular Arrow IV missiles perhaps? But it was the damn cluster raining down that was worse. It seemed to go on for an eternity and when it finally ended the Lokhagos gingerly stuck his head back out of his hole to look around.

"Christ" he swore, looking at the cratered moonscape.

"Incoming!" another voice yelled and the Lokhagos dropped down into his foxhole again gritting his teeth as another wave of Arrow IV cluster plastered the hill for what seemed like hours but was likely not even a couple of minutes.

After the submunitions finally stopped falling it became apparent that at least one of the missiles had been filled with leaflets, not HE charges, and as they drifted down one landed close enough for the Lokhagos to reach out and snatch it up.

"If you lay down your arms you will not be harmed. We guarantee that all those who surrender will receive all the rights and protections due to them as Prisoners of War according to the terms of the Ares Conventions" 

Is what it said on one side of the leaflet.

Turning it over it to the other side however the leaflet also said,

"If you don't surrender It'll be Air-Burst Shrapnel, Inferno Bombs, and Fuel-Air-Explosives next. Would Karl Von Strang die for you?" 

Which what it asked rhetorically, which wasn't quite as magnanimous in tone but might sway a few more opinions.

Watching a few of his men also emerging from their trenches to pick up some of the leaflets the Lokhagos frowned. "If those conscripts could read they'd be very upset." he correctly surmised.

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Chapter Notes

• Notes from the Author

  The Niops SLDF is a great believer in artillery, far more so than the clans generally, and they have little or no objection to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The Thor SPG is well suited to counter-battery work (it's accurate, can be aimed and brought into action quickly and can rapidly relocate). Converting a speedy Lightning to carry a counter-battery-radar proved to be a winner during training exercises back on Niops VII.
  
  Charlene Hammerick, AKA Charley Martel continues the traditions of her bloodname by being a gunner. Choosing to serve in the artillery may end up leaving you deaf but when the big guns speak everyone else listens. If they need to be told twice you can always bring up the Vali to repeat yourself with (the Arrow IV system is lostech in the Inner Sphere, by periphery standards it's 'Wrath of an Angry God' level firepower).
  
  Adding a mine flail to a tank in order to deal with minefields doesn't seem to be done much, if at all, in Battletech but it's a great low-tech solution to the problem (if your flail tanks aren't under heavy fire). Bulldozers (or tanks fitted with bulldozer blades) are effective against tank traps too.
  
  The Coincidence Rangefinders being used by Von Strang's troops are also low-tech, but on the plus side they can't be jammed (or electronically detected in use, unlike laser-rangefinders for example).
  
  Von Strang's Guard Division is going to have to come out and play because his static defences aren't holding up as well as he thought they would.
  

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