Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
- Chapter 61 -[]
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"It would not be far from the truth to call their drills bloodless battles, their battles bloody drills."
Flavius Josephus, 'The Jewish War', 75 CE
The Brutal warfare being waged on the Plains[]
Outskirts of Amaris City – Von Strang's World – 2844
If you were to ask a layman to suggest what the most humane weapon developed by mankind was it was likely that very few would suggest the flamethrower but ironically you could make a very good case for that being the case.
Clearly setting people on fire was not a nice thing to do, and being the one actually set alight would monumentally suck, but if used in the correct manner flamethrowers, or rather the threat of them, can win battles without the need to actually harm anyone at all.
Harm them physically that is, the long-term psychological damage that might still be incurred was another matter.
It all came down to the flamethrower, or the modern flamer, being so pants-wettingly terrifying that it could readily induce an soldier that was so brave that in other circumstances they would willingly take on a lance of assault mechs armed only with a sharp stick to immediately turn tail and run.
Evolutionary psychologists would suggest that it was because fear of fire grabs you firmly by your distant furry ancestors, and when hundreds of millions of years of deeply embedded instinct come up against the higher functions of the human brain, those being the parts capable of reason and self-control that evolved far more recently, instinct puts reason in a choke-hold and takes over.
As early as the Second World War on Terra it was discovered that you could easily get the occupants of an enemy dug-out or pill-box to vacate it by rolling up to it in a tank carrying a flamethrower and sending out a massive jet of burning fuel, not directly at the position but right beside it so those inside could not only see and hear the flame but actually feel the heat coming off it.
Most people took the hint, it wasn't exactly a subtle threat after all, and what tended to happen immediately was the waving of a white flag or the sight of the bunker inhabitants fleeing out the back in a state of utter panic.
If they were made of sterner stuff than most, or were dumb as rocks, they would stay in place and the next burst of flame would be played all over the bunker. Burning fuel would then enter through the gun slits and make them re-think their decision not to give up for the split second before they found themselves either on fire or gasping for oxygen. Either way they would no longer be capable of objectively considering their life choices up until that valuable teaching moment, valuable for other people that is, not for them, it was a bit late at that point for them.
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Hussar Light 'Mech
The flamers carried by battlemechs didn't work in quite the same way as twentieth century flamethrowers, instead of burning petrochemicals they projected a jet of superheated plasma, one which was hot enough to melt lead at close range, but they were equally as horrifying.
If Mitch Johnson and his fellow mercenaries had been wondering till now why Franklin's people had brought along so many Hussar light mechs. Sure they were great scouts, and were maybe okay for hit-and-run tactics using their speed and that ER Large Laser to dictate the engagement, but they weren't normally good for much else.
It all made a lot more sense when he watched them moving up to clear bunkers and trenches however, the Blackhearts having moved up to take advantage of the gap in the minefield the flail and dozer blade equipped SLDF tanks had opened up. It looked like Niops had added flamers to all their Hussar lights for anti-infantry work and for clearing out entrenched positions and pillboxes.
Striding along, sending out jets of flame as they stomped through the increasing shattered defense lines, the ungainly looking hunched-forward Hussar, with its funny little arm arrangement at the front, certainly looked a great deal more intimidating, and a lot less goofy, when they were breathing fire.
Mixed in with Talon lights as support, fast, punchy little mechs mounting ERPPC's, and with the occasional Mongoose, the Hussar mechs looked to be doing good work in getting Von Strang's soldiers to reconsider their loyalty to their Liege Lord, flamers will do that. Johnson was also gratified that the Niops people weren't the psychopathic type who didn't bother with warning blasts to induce surrender before immolating anyone. The Blackhearts were known to use flamers as well, most units did, but only an ****** used them nonchalantly like they would less horrific weapons.
If some ground-pounder son-of-a-bitch had just fired an Inferno Missile at your mech then you were free to incinerate the guy without a second thought of course, that was just them receiving their just desserts for playing with fire first.
During the Amaris War the Rim Worlds Republic had responded to criticism of their wholesale use of flamers and Inferno Missiles by saying the SLDF used them too. This was true, however it skipped over the way they were used.
The likes of Gunthar Von Strang and Antilos Legos seemingly revelled in the use of Firestarter mechs and Ignis tanks against civilians as well as military targets, and they certainly didn't used to bother much with warning shots. For that matter the SLDF wasn't the one that came up with the WTH-0 model Whitworth medium mech, the so-called 'Warcrime Whitworth', developed expressly for the purpose of quickly and efficiently burning down cities. One of those could now be found in a museum on Niops VII after being captured from the Blood Rain supposedly, it wasn't a machine that the Niops SLDF or militia had any desire to press into service themselves, unlike captured Jackrabbit lights for example, the very name of the WTH-0 was a curse.
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Whitworth Medium 'Mech
Presumably they had found the weight for the flamer by removing some armor, Johnson reasoned watching as a squad of enemy infantry that had been manning a trench waved a white flag at a Hussar looming over them. At least that was a non-totally-insane option if you were lucky enough to operate the upgraded HSR-200-Db 'Royal' model with its five-and-half tons of Ferro-Fibrous plate, rather than the distinctly fragile original 200-D, but he might have gone another way himself.
Inside the Hussar, Mitch Johnson was currently checking out from a distance, mechwarrior Craig Gao was wishing that they hadn't dismounted the pair of arm-mounted machine-guns his HSR-250-Dn would usually mount for dealing with infantry in addition to the flamer. While it would raise fewer questions as to how Niops had managed to fit that much extra firepower into the machine, being able to rattle off a burst from an MG to keep the POW's honest would have come in handy right now.
Hopefully merely the threat of the flamer would be enough until some friendly infantry arrived to take them off his hands, there was supposedly a APC full of grunts from the Blackhearts enroute, but he prayed none of the prisoners were stupid enough to make a break for it, or worse commit perfidy by throwing a concealed grenade at him or something, because he really didn't want to char-broil these poor bastards.
According to intelligence the better educated and more loyalist elements of the local military could all be found in the so-called 'Guard Division', which was nowhere near as large as its title made it out to be, in fact even with the militia levees included Karl Von Strang could barely raise a brigade.
The conscripted peasants that formed the bulk of the opposition were trained and drilled just enough to be able to perform relatively basic military skills such as load and fire a rifle, throw grenades, load a shell into the breech of a cannon, and maybe use a shoulder-launched SRM. They were perfectly capable of manning a trench or pillbox that was protected by mines and barbed wire and some of them had proven surprisingly adept at using low-tech recoilless anti-tank guns and mortars to engage the lead elements of the brigade attacking them as they got into range.
What they were not however was disciplined, experienced or professional enough to handle it too well when their reward for managing to blow some of the armor off an approaching mech or tank was an absolute shitstorm of autocannon, LRM, directed-energy weapon and the occasional Gauss Rifle slug coming back the other way.
Pundits less versed in military matters might assume that the swiftness of the collapse of the line of defense between the Plain of the Rim Worlds Republic and Amaris City indicated that they were a half-assed sham of a well-designed system of fortifications manned by incompetent officers leading ill-trained rabble, but Mitch Johnson would contend otherwise.
Quickly taking out the larger bunkers without laser guided bombs would have been a task in itself for a less well-equipped force than Franklin had at his disposal. Moreover, the minefields and anti-tank ditches were well placed and if the enemy artillery hadn't been suppressed by counter-battery fire the holes ploughed through them by the flail and bulldozer tanks would have been a choke-point ripe to get shellacked by barrages of high-explosive shells as soon as any units tried to push through. As for the enemy troops, the fact that many of them were still putting up a fight indicated they weren't hopelessly inept, although they clearly lacked the numbers to fully man every position, and under other circumstances with artillery and air support, and without LGBs, Copperheads and whatever crashing down on their heavy weapon emplacements then cracking their lines would have represented a very different problem.
For one thing, with large-caliber anti-tank guns acting as overwatch you wouldn't be seeing thinly-armored light mechs so casually strolling towards trenches full of infantry in order to scare the crap out of them with massive plumes of fire.
Regarding the people on his own side, as well as noting with interest the flamers carried by the Hussar lights being used by the Niops people, Mitch Johnson would also have to give them ten-out-of-ten for just how fast they reacted to new threats, how well they fired on the move, and their frankly nearly eerie ability to quickly and ruthlessly concentrate their fire in order to deal with the appearance of a sudden threat.
Occasionally a hitherto ignored, or occasionally well-camouflaged and until then unspotted, pillbox or gun-pit would open up with whatever weaponry it housed, a burst from a heavy machine-gun, a few rounds from an automatic grenade launcher, a shell from a recoilless cannon or whatever being fired at the nearest SLDF unit. As soon as that happened it seemed like every tank and mech with line-of-sight would immediately fire back, delivering a deluge of suppressive and/or destructive fire to silence the enemy position.
A large caliber coup de grâce delivered by an AC/20 just to make sure it stayed silent tended to follow, unless the occupants came out waving a white flag that is, the whole brief episode likely dissuading the people in the next bunker trying their luck as well.
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Cyclops Assault Command 'Mech
All those command mechs that were sprinkled into the SLDF formations was certainly a factor in how smooth and coordinated they were, certainly a lot slicker than the Taurian regiments that Mitch Johnson had the most experience of watching in action. Even putting aside Brigadier-General Franklin calling the shots from his Cyclops, not to mention the Mongoose lights directing their scout companies, the Niops formations were practically awash with Wolverine mediums, Marauder and Black Knight heavies and Highlander assaults, all presumably leading their own associated units.
It wasn't that the better comms systems and cockpit tactical displays to be found in those battlemechs intended to be used by unit commanders automatically turned the person sat in the cockpit into Von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu, you still needed the individual in the chair to actually know their trade, but thinning out the fog-of-war a little and being able to issue orders and direct your troops more easily certainly helped.
It was more than that though, Johnson decided, analyzing how they operated. It was if they had been relentlessly, even perhaps obsessively training to fight this way for years on end. The way they singled out a target for at least an entire lance to light up, ideally a whole company, swiftly dealt with it then moved onto the next almost made you think that they regarded any other method as heretical or something.
It would be nigh impossible to know who actually did the most damage or dealt the killing blow if you did it that way, not something that a lot of mechwarriors who were, all too often, fixated on running up a tally of personal kills they could paint on their machine would want.
Asking Brigadier-General Franklin later, mostly tongue-in-cheek, how the Niops SLDF had managed to near utterly purge their usual tendency towards being glory-hounds from their Mechwarriors, the reply he got only raised more serious questions. Being told by Franklin that it, 'Takes about ten-to-fifteen years of rigid discipline and focused training depending on the individual', Johnson's query as to how exactly that worked given that most of the SLDF Mechwarriors on the mission were barely into their mid-twenties, Franklin's rhetorical observation in response that, Maybe the Boy Scouts aren't as hard-core where you come from as they are on Niops? largely failed to satisfy Jonhson's curiosity.
There was a definite air of Niops treating this as a live-fire exercise as well, one in which they wanted to try out a few tactics and weapons, give their people some battle experience and perhaps even experiment a little using various techniques.
After the majority of the various enemy positions in the area that had been equipped with long-range anti-tank guns had been cleared out, a couple of relatively thin-skinned hover-vehicles bearing Niops markings had shot forward to join the leading units of the advance, these being the TAG-equipped Zephyr.
Johnson had expected them to start marking targets for more air-dropped laser-guided-bombs, or perhaps the homing versions of the Arrow IV missile, but as the Zephyr crews started tagging a few specific strong-points for destruction the projectiles that fell from the sky right on top of the targets were clearly artillery shells. The volume of incoming enemy artillery fire had dropped off drastically almost as soon as the counter-battery duel began and was not so intermittent that Franklin must have felt it was safe to pull at least one battery of Thor SPGs off the task of keeping Karl Von Strang's guns off their back.
The shells the Thor SPGs now working in conjunction with the Zephyr spotters were firing were very expensive, very accurate ones, Copperhead guided munitions.
Seriously, where do they get these wonderful toys, Mitch Johnson asked himself as Niops threw irreplaceable lostech at primitive concrete pillboxes?
Admittedly a copperhead shell from a Thor wasn't quite as pricy as an Arrow IV homing missile would have been, so using them to crack open small bunkers wasn't as profligate a tactic as Franklin could have chosen, but as a mercenary with an eye on the financial bottom line it still made Mitch Johnson wince to see so much priceless ordnance being used that way.
Given that this entire operation was likely Niops sending a message to both the Inner Sphere and Near Periphery that it had both the ability to project power a long way from home, and possessed sufficient stockpiles of advanced military hardware that it could afford to waste some of it on the likes of Karl Von Strang, the reasoning to their spendthrift manner was likely calculated in a currency other than, well, currency.
It helped that painting the Von Strang dynasty as pantomime villains, one prime to be put to the sword by the noble hero, was an easy sell. The last remnant of the Star League dispatching troops from an SLDF division, one that was still serving loyally under the Cameron Star having never lowered its colors, all the way to the other side of the Inner Sphere in order to put an end to the last self-professed Amaris loyalists to be found anywhere was pure propaganda gold.
Barring divine intervention, or perhaps diabolic rather, there was no way that Karl Von Strang was going to come out the other side ruling this world. If he did however there was at least one thing he could point to for his own propaganda efforts that being that stubborn-as-hell captain up on that hill yonder, although he had of course referred to himself as 'Lokhagos' Dubaruk.
After being told that if he didn't surrender the hill he was defending it would be obliterated with thermobarics and every other nasty munition the SLDF could throw at it bar tactical nukes, Dubaruk had gotten on the radio and announced he had ordered his men to withdraw from the position via the reverse slope, out of line-of-sight of the advancing Niops ground forces but SLDF observers in the air could nevertheless easily confirm their departure.
He himself however was going to stay on the hill and declared that he would continue to direct artillery fire from up there until he either was blown to hell by aviation or artillery, or else someone came up there personally to shoot it out with him. It was his hill on his planet and he was damned if he was going to let some Inner Sphere bastard take it without a fight, even if he didn't want to get his men killed for nothing.
Now he might have been thinking that the SLDF wasn't going to unleash massive amounts of very expensive ordnance just to kill one guy, especially given that it wasn't like his own artillery was being all that effective by that point anyway, but you just had to respect his balls.
He was still up there now. Brigadier-General Franklin had a couple of aerospace fighters strafe the hill, telling the stubborn enemy captain it was his final warning on the radio to which Dubaruk responded his desire that Franklin should, 'kindly go attempt parthenogenesis', his exact words.
Dubaruk definitely had guts and was probably good at scrabble too, Colonel Mitch Johnson decided, not that having an unusually large vocabulary on Von Strang's World was nearly as impressive as it would be in other places where being able to read and write wasn't mostly the preserve of the wealthy and powerful few. Scrabble was big in parts of the Taurian Concordat, mainly because they liked to laud it over their supposedly 'more sophisticated' Inner Sphere neighbors that when it came to literacy rates they had the Capellan Confederation, and more importantly the Federated Suns, beat hollow.
Not knowing how Franklin was planning on handling it from here Johnson got on the command frequency and offered to send a few 'specialists' up the hill to deal with the intractable Lokhagos in a less destructive and financially extravagant fashion than carpet-bombing. If it turned out there were more people still concealed up there, or if Dubaruk's people currently abandoning the hill tried to return, the Blackheart squad would call for assistance, otherwise the stubborn hold-out would be removed from the hill in either plastic cuffs or a body bag.
Franklin accepted the proposal and Johnson dispatched a team, requesting a few smoke shells to be thrown at the hill to obscure their approach. If the slopes and the approaches to the hill had still been covered by machine-gun nests, ones likely manned by alert personnel, attempting to get anybody up there would have been unacceptably risky but if he was really alone up there then sneaking up on Dubaruk and knocking the guy on the head was eminently doable for well-trained SpecOps troops.
As an aside, and for some reason Colonel Johnson was unaware of, but idly wondered about occasionally during the long journey back to Niops, Franklin's son in particular found the parthenogenesis line absolutely hysterical, still laughing uproariously about it months later whenever it was brought up.
Methodically securing his flanks, and not wishing to leave any enemy formations still capable of taking the field behind him, Franklin had no intention of rushing his brigade forward to meet Von Strang and his Guard Division. Opting against a rapid, and dramatic, Thunder-Run of concentrated heavy metal into the capital at speed, instead he had his mechwarriors and tankers roll up the defense lines in both directions to expand the breech and while aerospace fighters established an unchallenged CAP above he prepared for a slow, careful advance.
Even with the outer defenses broken, there were still scattered strong-points between them and the city a few kilometers further on, the Von Strang's had some grasp of the principle of defense-in-depth and hadn't created a system that would burst like a balloon once you punched a hole in the outside. Unfortunately for the defenders it seemed like they just didn't have the modern weaponry or numbers of personnel to get the best value out of what was actually a well-designed system of fortifications, more importantly perhaps they were also up against an attacking force that was awash with the sort of high-tech equipment needed to smash through it.
A brigade from the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces trying to do what Niops was would have been beating their head against a wall and would have likely incurred heavy casualties doing so. Indeed, at some point they would have likely either decided to give up and go home or else they would break out the tactical nukes.
Not that the LCAF was averse to absorbing losses of men and particularly materiel, they had an industrial depth the other Successor States could only dream of, it would simply be a case of the rewards for victory being grossly outweighed by the cost in treasure required to achieve them.
Insight into the Enemy[]
Thanks to spending some time talking to Karl Von Strang during his extremely productive undercover mission, an undertaking Brigadier-General Franklin had declared was worth every penny of the bonus payment he was awarding for its success, Mitch Johnson believed had a good handle on the baron's thinking on the matters of maintaining his planet's independence, and more importantly his own position.
Even with the diamond mines conquering Von Strang's World simply wasn't worth how much blood and treasure you would have to expend in order to conquer the place. From Nico Von Strang onwards the core strategic objective of the Barony of Strang had been to balance how much of a pain-in-the-ass they were to House Steiner against how much the Archon was willing to spend to remedy the situation.
A bunch of heavily armed astronomy nerds with delusions of grandeur, access to high-tech weaponry and a credit card with no spending limit turning up instead and throwing priceless lostech at them had never really been considered as a likely scenario.
The return of the Star League Defense Force had been considered as a possibility by Nico Von Strang and his successors, the real one under Aleksandr Kerensky not these mere remnants knocking at the door now, but the firepower Kerensky could bring-to-bear was so overwhelming that it was deemed pointless to plan to resist. Maybe after another couple of hundred years of digging in, with the fortifications expanded in number and linked by underground tunnels they could give even a divisional sized combined arms force a bloody nose, but that was something for a future baron to work on.
Colonel Bolton advocated a more audacious blitzkrieg-like punch right through to Von Strang's Palace to finish this quickly, his Rangers continuing to follow the fast-moving, hard-hitting, go straight-for-the-throat, tactical doctrine of the SLDF Hussar regiment they descended from, but he wasn't in command and Franklin wanted to do this by the numbers.
Mitch Johnson's own instincts sided largely with Bolton, the Blackhearts as a special forces orientated regiment believed wholeheartedly in the value of sowing chaos and confusion amongst the enemy, and launched at the right time a rapid, balls-to-the-wall advance against a likely shaken enemy could easily lead to a cascading collapse in their morale and command cohesion. Since Franklin was the one signing off on the paycheques however, he was the one that got to make the final call, so slow-and-steady it was.
Given the nature of some of the terrain nearer the city you could argue that a certain amount of prudence was warranted perhaps, even if you thought Franklin was being more cautious than the tactical situation would suggest was really required. As the flat plain gave way to rockier, more broken ground, much of it crisscrossed by steep-sided valleys ideal for ambushes, even the most gung-ho of commanders would be loath to simply charge ahead heedlessly.
For one thing bringing the sides of those valleys down with demolition charges to block certain routes, or even to bring thousands of tons of rock down right on top of the force attempting to push on through, was all too obvious a tactic.
This was one of those situations where mechs equipped with jump jets really came into their own, so when the brigade got moving again the various light scout mechs leading the way were reinforced by a company of Wolverine, Dervish and Griffin mediums plus several platoons of jump infantry.
Being able to leap small buildings in a single bound did not make jump infantry supermen, in fact because they couldn't carry much in the way of ammunition for support weapons such as light mortars or shoulder-launched SRM's with them they were even less of a threat to armoured units than normal infantry was, but they were extremely mobile and in terrain like this, or in urban warfare, they were a nice trick to have up your sleeve.
Karl Von Strang's own infantry lacked such fancy toys as jet-packs, and they certainly weren't carrying first-rate personal weaponry like the Mauser 960 Assault System that Niops issued their grunts, but it was really the training as much as the equipment that told as the SLDF gradually forced their way through a series of attempted ambuscades and booby traps.
Having a platoon of jump infantry suddenly land behind your carefully laid ambush and start shooting you in the ass, while meanwhile a Dervish jumped up to a high vantage point and starting flinging LRM's at you from an unexpected direction was bad for unit morale. As a result, more than a couple of platoons of illiterate peasant conscripts armed with Inferno launchers who had been lying in wait for a mech to march around a blind corner into view threw down their arms almost immediately.
With both air and long-range artillery support largely unavailable because of the local geography the Dervish in particular was proving a godsend to the advancing columns. Belaying its undeservingly poor reputation as merely the poor man's Archer, it not only brought missile fire down on enemy positions but also lobbed LRM's equipped with smoke-warheads to make life difficult for the men trying to hold the valleys against the SLDF advance. Lacking the various electronic sensors equipped on mechs, or even many of the Infra-Red goggles used by well-equipped troops, Von Strang's infantry were put at a serious disadvantage by the smoke which only served to make their situation even more untenable.
Some of them even mistook the billowing smoke clouds for poison gas and despite having been issued respirators, use of chemical weapons was hardly unheard of during the mass slaughters of the early Succession Wars after all, they lacked enough faith in the gas mask filters to risk it. Stories of nerve agents like mists formed of tiny droplets that only needed to touch your skin to kill you, you didn't even need to breathe the crap in, certainly didn't help matters.
Nico Von Strang, the first baron, had stockpiled some basic chemical weapons decades before, small stocks of mustard and phosgene gas shells for the artillery still in fact existed, but knowing that the Lyran Commonwealth and most everyone else had vast stocks of far superior poison gasses in their inventories, as well nuclear weapons and some real nasties like genetically engineered plagues, the Barony of Strang had no intention of ever using WMD first. Their entire game-plan was predicated on making taking the capital prohibitively costly for an aggressor and Neuroxin, or good old-fashioned GB Sarin and VX, was cheaper than mechs.
Not that the Niops forces currently marching against Karl Von Strang and his regime would need to retaliate in kind, they could simply have their warship crater the whole area with an orbital bombardment that wouldn't even leave behind any nasty radiation or traces of poison gas behind, and Von Strang knew it as he looked over a large map spread over a table displaying the current tactical situation. Small plastic models of tanks and battlemechs were being pushed around the map by a junior officer as updated reports flowed in to headquarters, at least the telephone lines were still working, and it didn't look good to say the least.
Why the hell they had hauled their accursed Terran Hegemony loyalist asses all this way just to beat up on him was still an utter mystery to the ruling baron. Didn't they have better things to do closer to home, he asked himself, trying to remain passive as more and more bad news arrived?
The latest unwelcome intelligence was that proposed counter-attack by a pair of tank companies utilising a secret route through the hills would have to be cancelled because the enemy had begun protecting their flanks by scattering fields of artillery-delivered mines. I mean FASCAM of all things for God's sake! Who still used that anymore?
If it had been the Lyrans hammering at his door it would have at least made some sense. Irritating House Steiner as much as was practically possible, given available resources and the need not to push them too far, was almost as much of the core identity of the Barony of Strang, as was venerating the Rim Worlds Republic and the name of Stefan Amaris, but this was a ridiculous amount of effort for Niops to go to for an act of political symbolism.
It wasn't like they could logistically support a colony, or even an independent vassal state this many jumps away from where they lived. What were they planning to do? Mount his head on a spike, raise some flags, get drunk at a victory celebration and then just piss off back to Niops?
In the end it probably didn't matter why they were here, what mattered was that they were and that they were beating seven shades out of his militia.
Since his peasant conscripts were only ever intended to wear down an invader by holding as long as they could, softening them up for a counter-attack by the inordinately better trained and equipped professionals of the Guard Division, it wasn't like Karl Von Strang was shocked that their line collapsed when enough pressure was exerted against it. It was how fast it had happened and the failure of his aerospace and artillery to cause meaningful damage to the enemy before the Levée en masse broke that was the problem.
Hopefully the somewhat better trained garrison troops that manned the ring of bunkers that surrounded the city itself would do better, Von Strang considered. More like a full-time gendarmerie than fully-fledged soldiers, they spent most of their time maintaining order and suppressing discontent, rather than training for war, but they were volunteers rather than conscripted rabble, and they were manning heavy weaponry that wouldn't have been considered obsolete before the Age of War.
While many of the anti-tank guns the enemy had encountered until now were primitive single-shot rifled cannon, field pieces of a design the Terran Alliance would have sneered at in its later years, all those defending the city itself were burst-fire autocannon types better suited to dealing with more modern ablative armour. Certainly the flak towers that dotted the city with their mix of dual AC/5 and quad AC/2 anti-aircraft mounts had seemingly done good work in keeping the invaders airpower away and there was no reason to suppose the turrets that surrounded the capital meant to take on ground targets would fair much worse.
Only a few years after the founding of the Barony its founder, Nico Von Strang, had managed to obtain a surprisingly large number of gun turrets for Merkava Mk. VIII tanks from Vannes, a system situated two jumps away where the Rim Worlds Republic had once manufactured armoured vehicles. The people there had uncovered an old cache of partially assembled Merkava tanks not long after the SLDF followed Kerensky out into the void, and although they didn't have the hulls or fusion powerplants to go with the turrets, making the find not nearly as valuable as it would have been otherwise, Nico Von Strang was only too happy to take them off their hands regardless.
Planted atop a sturdy plinth made of reinforced concrete, most of the structure being underground, each of the Merkava turrets ringing the city was armed with an AC/5 autocannon, a coaxial machine-gun and two missile launchers, an LRM-15 and an SRM-6 respectively, that provided them with plenty of firepower. Thanks to being mounted atop a bunker, rather than a tank chassis, they also had a great deal more ammunition at their disposal than they would normally, and with orders to keep firing until the barrel of the autocannon started to melt. The crews operating them were planning to do just that, in part because they were loyal to the Barony, in part because if they didn't the Baron might have them put up against a wall and shot, and finally because they thought that if they surrendered to these supposed SLDF people then they would summarily execute them instead.
The conscripts might be able to argue they had no choice and be spared, but the volunteers manning the flak towers and Merkava turrets weren't quite as fortunate. For all they knew the enemy commanding officer might be more Amos Forlough than he was Aleksandr Kerensky, and even the latter had his moments such as when he had the entire Amaris bloodline eliminated.
Pondering his current predicament Karl Von Strang was wondering if, in retrospect, a policy of less guns and more butter, with the majority of the population getting a bigger slice of the prosperity pie might have paid dividends here. Other the propaganda being forced daily down their throats, and the threats to their families if they didn't, the bulk of his cadre of infantry had little motivation to defend the status quo. Although uneducated, many of them had likely realised that the people at the top were probably far too busy at the moment to devote time and effort towards identifying 'traitors' and then punishing their wives and children for their crime of not throwing away their lives for the glorious Barony of Strang.
If they had more of a stake in society perhaps they might have shown more grit and determination, Karl Von Strang considered, then again maybe not? Perhaps the deluge of laser-guided-bombs and cluster munitions weakening their morale, followed the unpleasant prospect of being incinerated by flamers, had been a little more daunting than the conscripts could cope with? Sitting in a pillbox just waiting until it was your turn to eat an LGB or Arrow IV missile you could do absolutely nothing about was hardly conducive to maintaining a positive attitude.
Things would have likely gone differently if the epically grandiose plans to turn the whole of Amaris City into a Castle Brian-esque fortress, one with all the bunkers and gun turrets linked by underground tunnels sealed with airtight doors where the men could find shelter from enemy bombardment and then reemerge to fight afterwards, had been realised.
That was just a flight-of-fancy of course, Von Strang knew. It would take a society with the population and GDP of the Barony at least another two centuries to entrench itself deeply, but as he prepared to go join his Guard Division for the counter-attack it was pleasant to dream of what might have been if these leftover dregs of the Star League had come calling in the mid Thirty-First Century not the Twenty-Ninth.
As the SLDF spearhead broke through into the plateau upon which Amaris City stood Brigadier-General Franklin ordered the town to be surrounded and effectively placed under siege, dispatching his medium mechs on ahead, once again supported by the fast Flashman heavies, to close the circle as quickly as possible.
Assigning parts of the perimeter to Bolton's Rangers and the Blackhearts, and with Hussar lights cautiously sweeping just ahead looking for any more minefields or concealed anti-tank traps, Franklin then ordered his heaviest units forward to punch a hole through into the town itself.
With a tiny population, even the capital city of Niops VII was practically a metropolis by comparison, Amaris City was hardly an example of urban sprawl and it wasn't like they were trying to fight their way into Beijing on Terra, but Franklin still insisted on doing this by the numbers with caution as the watch word of the day.
As the Hussar scouts started taking fire from the first of the Merkava turreted bunkers they pulled back out of range and the methodical process of taking out the turrets began.
A twentieth century General named George S. Patton once declared that, 'Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man', a statement that he might have revised if he had ever been forced by circumstances to force his way into a Castle Brian, but there were certainly an inherent problems with fixed fortifications the most glaring, and obvious, being that they are, by nature, immobile.
If the Merkava turrets had been mounted on top of Merkava hulls, not concrete bunkers, then the way the SLDF dealt with them would have been less simple.
The AC/5 autocannon on the Merkava was considerably outranged by ER PPCs and Gauss Rifles that equipped a fair proportion of the mechs the SLDF had at their disposal so dozens of Marauder, Black Knight, Thug, Highlander and Pillager heavies and assaults just stomped up and started blasting at them from extreme range, picking out a few at a time and putting multiple lances to work against each turret.
The LRM launchers on the turrets did have the range to shoot back, but even if they weren't having to try and engage multiple opponents at once, which they were, Niops once again played the lostech card revealing that they had mounted anti-missile-systems on many of their machines which were now merrily shooting down a proportion of the LRM's before they could hit back.
Unable to retreat for obvious reasons, and with other turrets unable to come help, for the same obvious reason, the ring of Merkava turrets, the city's last line of defence were systematically knocked.
That didn't mean that the SLDF could now just walk in and raise a flag, as the advance began once more they suddenly started taking fire from the flak towers, the leading Thug in the formation getting sandblasted by a quad AC/2 mounting with enough gun depression to shoot down on it from the tower.
After the battle the SLDF later maintained that the wretched towers were the biggest obstacle they had to deal with during the whole operation, they were built to take pretty much anything shot of a tactical nuke right to the face, because of their height they commanded the approaches to their location, and those damn AC/2s just kept on firing.
Eventually hours later under a massive bombardment of very expensive Arrow IV missiles, along with several hits from the remaining stocks of laser-guided-bombs, and even a battery of Thor SPG's being brought up to fire their guns in direct-fire-mode, the flak towers were silenced, but by that time the decisive battle of the campaign had already taken place.
Whatever else you might say about the man Karl Von Strang was no coward, and when the Guard Division of the Barony of Strang sallied out to meet the invader he was with them, sat in the cockpit of his family Battlemaster.
He was also smart enough not to charge at the mass of advanced lostech-rich SLDF heavies and assaults bearing the Red Cameron star with his own generally lighter-weight machines. Noticing that there seemed to be an enemy unit out there closer to his own in terms of average tonnage and weapon loadout he led his men against that group, which turned out to be Bolton's Rangers.
Finding himself with dozens of battlemechs painted up in Rim Worlds Republic colours bearing down on him, all bearing the Death's Head insignia that Gunthar Von Strang's 18th Amaris Chasseurs had used during the Amaris War, Colonel Bolton was so giddy with excitement his voice seemed to go up in pitch when he ordered his battlemechs to meet the 'Amaris scum' head-on.
Being told that reinforcements were on the way by Brigadier Franklin was almost unwelcome news because this was the fight Dan Bolton had always dreamed of, and as the Rangers started exchanging autocannon, laser, missile and PPC fire with Karl Von Strang's elite he suddenly felt the need to repeatedly bellow 'Advance the Cameron Star' and 'Onward the 208th Hussars' to his troops as he realised that this was his moment in the regiment's history.
Amidst the chaos the single lance of Tyson's Troublemakers attached to the Rangers were wading in as only the largest of assault mechs could. The Troublemakers had once been the 23rd Heavy Assault Regiment of the SLDF and Major Sam Tyson at the controls of an Atlas was leading three other assaults against the heaviest enemy lance in the immediate vicinity, singling out an Awesome for his personal attention. Those three PPC's on the Awesome would hurt, but if he could close down the range and put his AC/20 to work he could take the bastard Tyson thought with determination.
The other 'token' participant in this operation, a company of the Niops Association Militia under the command of Captain Carmichael hadn't really expected to end up in the thick of it but they found themselves pulled into the fight because they were the next closest formation. Fortunately what they mostly lacked in experience, Carmichael himself was the only one who had actually fought in a battle before, they made up for in firepower thanks to the NAM always having favoured the Highlander and the Black Knight, types that had benefitted from the advanced Clan Wolverine technology the SLDF had brought to Niops.
Thanks to stripping out the original gauss rifle and LRM 20 for the lighter 'Improved' versions the Highlander with Carmichael at the controls was better armoured than the original, it was also blessed with CASE to stop an internal ammunition or capacitor explosion from blowing him to pieces and finally he had an Artemis IV FCS to improve the accuracy of his missiles. Confident in his machine, and pretty sure that his troops would put up a decent fight, Carmichael noticed that there was a mixed force of enemy tanks slowly closing in to reinforce Von Strang's mechs and he ordered his company to move to intercept.
Inside one of the tanks Tetrarch Marc Spillar would have happily traded his left kidney right now for a faster machine as the lumbering Burke he was commanding slowly ambled towards the fight. With a top speed of not much more than thirty kilometres-per-hour the only thing blitzkrieg about the Burke was that the trio of PPCs spewed manmade lighting and Spillar had assumed that if he ever got into a battle in the thing it would be the enemy coming to him.
The oft-told told in the Guard Division was that the Burke was the only combat vehicle in their inventory which could lose a race to one of the stationary Merkava turrets and it seemed even less funny now than normally as a force of enemy mechs suddenly arrived and started firing at him.
All those times he yearned for action while suffering through tedious duty shifts of manning the monitoring station at Guard HQ looking out for inbound JumpShips had clearly bitten him on the ass, Spillar decided glumly, looking back with fondness at when that ass was just occupying a chair in front of a vid-screen while he read a book.
Despite being usually considered a long-range weapon by contemporary standards the regular PPC used by the Burke simply didn't have the reach of the ER PPC and bolts from those, along with Gauss Rifle slugs, started heading Spillar's way in large numbers. Although he could fling a few LRM's back at them in retaliation that only resulted in a larger number of more accurate missiles heading in the opposite direction which was no improvement to his situation.
Spillar couldn't even close the distance so he could bring his undeniably powerful battery of PPC's to bear. Even a plodding ninety-ton behemoth like the Highlander could easily outpace a Burke and the opposition clearly weren't stupid enough to cooperate and make it a fair fight by remaining still.
Putting Gauss Rifle slugs downrange, hoping to blast a nice chunk off a Burke he could take home as a souvenir, it occurred to Jason Carmichael that this engagement would also certainly see him getting that promotion to Major he was angling for, assuming he didn't stupidly get any of his people killed anyway. To be honest all that hard training over the years, and the time he spent going through the Gunslinger Program, seemed like an utter waste because this was like shooting fish in a barrel he decided as the NAM company shot the poor unfortunate tanks to pieces.
It was still a lot more fun than the start of Carmichael's military career had been though, manning the monitoring station on Niops VII looking out for inbound jumpships, and he did get to end the fight with the tanks in some style by using his jumpjets to inflict an impromptu 'Highlander Burial' on the last one.
Jason Carmichael never got to meet Marc Spillar in person, but he did squash him flat when the former's ninety-ton assault mech jumped on top of the latter's seventy-five ton tank.
Meanwhile the Guard Division had initially put up a decent fight against Bolton's Rangers but when SLDF reinforcements arrived, initially Talon lights with ERPPC's and then mediums and Flashman heavies, it all started to fall apart fast for Karl Von Strang.
To his chagrin Khan Franklin Hallis of Clan Wolverine himself never got to fire a single shot in anger, he had harboured a faint hope that he might be there to finish Von Strang off personally, but by the time his Cyclops arrived on the scene a rampaging mob of Thug battlemechs which got there first, being reasonably fast by assault mech standards, was already in the process of mopping up.
He did get to kick open the oversized doors to the baron's palace in his mech once the ****** flak towers were finally silenced, Daniel Bolton insisting on being there to record it happening for the Ranger's archives. That was pretty satisfying, Hallis thought happily as dozens of SLDF and Blackhearts infantry poured past his battlemech to secure the palace.
Chapter Notes[]
- Notes from the Author
- Amaris City is not as heavily fortified in 2844 as it would be in canon when Clan Jade Falcon took it (with difficulty) two centuries later but Karl Von Strang is still pretty well dug-in, if not for the technological gap it wouldn't have gone so easily for the SLDF and their mercenary allies. It's noted in the Jade Falcon sourcebook, when it talks about their campaign on Von Strang's World, that Amaris City was defended by multiple gun turrets, these being Merkava VIII turrets obtained from Vannes is fanon (but makes sense).
Gigantic Flak Towers akin to those built by Nazi Germany seems to fit the aesthetic somehow, they really are tough nuts to crack.
Hope people liked all the in-jokes, references etc. Now for the aftermath.