If We Turn To Dust
- Chapter 4 -[]
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Lyran's Assault on Vega[]
ROHRS DESERT, SOUTH NANTURO
VEGA, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
AUGUST 14TH, 3027
The effort to gain control of the water reserves the Combine had assembled for their forward airbases was ultimately a failure. All of the base garrisons - we learned after the fact that they'd been drawn not from the Legions of Vega proper but from local militias, all of their equipment built and all of their people trained on world - had managed in one way or another to destroy their storage tanks. It hadn't saved them, or done any real damage to our forces, but it cost time, time that we could ill afford.
We had to spend a full day essentially stopped in place and spread across hundreds of square kilometers of desert, because while we did have all the water we needed in storage in orbit, in drop-ready tanks that could easily be deployed and then slid into a ballistic course for us by the Havhingsten's generous small craft contingent… Well, the accuracy of those drops was going up with practice, experience, and ongoing tweaks to the hardware, but in the end we had three of the two dozen drops land outside our perimeter, no matter all that we'd done to make sure we were ready for them.
Stopping for that long meant that, when we moved again, it was more cautiously. Spy cameras in orbit - safely aboard armored dropships, rather than mere vulnerable satellites! - told us that both of the Legions we were facing were now on the south side of the sea that had separated them. That, in turn, changed the way we had to advance. Before, we'd been advancing at the next best thing to a dead run, covering over fifteen hundred kilometers in the space of about two days, secure in the knowledge that the best ambush Theodore Kurita could manage would consist of only one of his Supported Battlemech Regiments.
And any of our brigades could handle that long enough for the other two columns to come in support.
But with Natasha Kerensky's people now available to support his, Kurita could manage up to two-to-one odds in an ambush, and that required more caution - closer coordination, more and more intensive scouting, and just plain generally moving slower. Sooner or later my people were going to pin them into their prepared fortresses, the Seishiro, but a lot of different things could happen on the way there. The devil was in the proverbial details.
For instance, we were approaching the biggest single choke point of our campaign, short of the landing itself.
The eastern half of the continent of South Nanturo, unlike the western with its intricately desiccated plateaus and aging mountain ranges, was almost entirely a single drainage basin. Given Vega's dry climate in this geological epoch, even the central stream of that basin was no more than a muddy fouled trickle, compared to the area it drained, but that hadn't always been so - and even before terraforming and human settlement had come to the world, that river had been working for a long time. The canyon wasn't as deep as the Colorado's on Earth, but it was far longer and more extensive, running east to west almost from the mountains to the coast, and in most places, it was nearly as steep.
From our landing site, there were a few options for crossing that gorge, and while the one I had picked wasn't the most direct, it had several other qualifications to recommend it. It had a bridge, which if we could keep it intact would offer easy passage to our hovercraft, and it also had a military grade road switchbacking down one side of the canyon walls and up the other for if that failed - and the slope of the rock walls themselves, in one or two places, was mild enough that our non-hovercraft assets, the tracklayers and the battlemechs, could just scale them the hard way. If slowly and with great care.
It was the best option we were going to find, which was naturally as obvious to the defenders as it was to us. That was the reason I expected keeping the bridge intact to be a real challenge - blowing it to slow us down and force us into the vulnerable low ground of the canyon floor was too obvious a move.
The first step of my countermove - did it count as that while I was the one on the offense? - was equally obvious, and necessary no matter what I did. Each Field Action Force had on its books three separate scouting battalions. One was part of the battlemech regiment - two companies of jump-capable mechs with top speeds around a hundred kilometers per hour, and another company of also-jump-ready ones good for eighty-five or so - and the other two were elite jump infantry, mounted on VTOLs and attached to the artillery.
In the final version of the LCAF we were trying to build, all of a brigade's infantry, scout and line alike, would be equipped with light power armor, but the amount of the stuff we'd had time to build before kicking off this operation wouldn't go nearly that far. Most of the brigades involved in the operation had only a couple companies of "Pals", but Vega was one of the high-priority targets, where three brigades went after two Combine formations. Like Wolf on Dieron and the others commanding those strikes, I had enough suits for all of my scouts, if not my line troopers.
That made them a little less vulnerable to heavy weapons and nearly immune to lesser infantry gear, so I could be a bit bolder about how I used them. I'd aimed my approach at the shortest-distance crossing, as at least an attempt at faking Kurita's deployments out, and then sent the Pals ahead to seize the bridge and disarm any demolitions on it while the main force changed direction and accelerated to what passed for a sprint - fifty kph, the top speed of our assault elements and most of our logistical vehicles.
That left the Pals as the most forward, vulnerable element, stuck in place for the Combine to hammer with whatever they could find and apply, for ten hours or so. They weren't unsupported, of course - we had control of the air, and our aerospace fighter regiments could operate as close air support essentially unhindered. That was important, because the Pals were the only unit in the LCAF inventory where our version of the Star League's Target Acquisition Gear had been fully rolled out - in larger formations and operations, more coordinated than this one, their role was as much to call fire from Arrow Homing Missiles as it was to locate the enemy.
The Voulges were far out of range to support them in the accustomed fashion, but a guidance package that would fit in an Arrow would fit in a gravity bomb, too, and the wings of fighters stacked up overhead were carrying plenty enough of those.
For the first couple of hours, they didn't even really need them. Kurita had assigned two of Kerensky's infantry regiments to secure the bridge, probably reasoning that without any organic transport assets they were too limited in their mobility to keep up with a response force, but he hadn't kept any of the armored assets with them. Without even so much as an Ohka's missile battery in support, and with no real idea what they were dealing with, the Combine infantry made one serious attempt to swarm the Pals under - and then fell back quickly, because even for a Draconis Combine formation built for attrition and human wave attacks, the losses were unsustainable.
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Ohka Missile Tank
But more was coming.
There's been a great deal of ink spilled since that battle about my choice to keep the hovercraft in company with the main body. In retrospect and hindsight, they could have made it to the bridge and crossed before Takashi's 2nd Legion of Vega was in a position to block them. With the latter being an all but pure Ohka force, the hover elements would have been able to control their side of the equation, and do a lot to complicate the Legion's assaults on the infantry positions around the end of the bridge.
I'm biased, of course, but I tend to divide the accounts and analyses into two categories. The historians and actual military scientists look at the information we had on that day, and conclude that the concern that we'd missed a booby trap or bomb somewhere in the bridge was a reasonable one. They might or might not think that the risk was justified at the time, but they understood it was a risk.
And the armchair generals just decided I was stupid for not sending them.
Now, in retrospect, and knowing what happened, I agree that we probably would've been better off rushing them ahead, because the only explosives that had been installed were obvious and easily disarmed. By the time the hovers could have caught up, all of that was taken care of. But there were at least a couple of dozen ways that a prepared defender could have trapped the bridge that we wouldn't have been able to check so quickly - there was no damned way to know that it was safe, and feeding the hovers across one or two at a time would have been slow enough to waste the speed advantage. To get them across in a useful timeframe they'd need to be sent nearly bumper to bumper, packed in tightly enough that having the bridge blown out from under them would take out entire companies in one go.
It just wasn't worth it.
'But why,' I hear you ask in the ear of imagination, 'bother sending the Pals ahead at all, in that case? Why expose them that way?'
Well, because the important thing about the site wasn't the bridge at all, but the older roads that snaked and switchbacked their way up and down the two walls of the canyon. That didn't mean that the slope there wasn't enough to be militarily significant, that it wouldn't be a nightmare to try and climb into the teeth of determined opposition. Technology made that less of a problem than it had been in the days when all our men would be using their own legs and getting exhausted in the process; it didn't make it no problem.
So, to stop that happening, we dropped our airmobile element on the far side, and to make their job easier, we did it at a point before Kurita and his people had any of the clues they needed to see what we were up to.
What we'd expected was an extended period of fencing and feeling out, a gradually increasing series of pinpricks from Combine scouting efforts, so that they could know how the Pals were deployed.
What we got was hair-raising hours of dead silence, and then everything happened all at once. Three regiments of Ohkas roared out of the desert at their full top speed, their passage concealed under a veil of dust blowing ahead in the eastbound wind. Even as the first wave of airstrikes started to go in against them they skidded to a halt, letting the two regiments of infantry clinging to their hulls scramble off while two battalions of 'mechs took point and waded in to give them a few minutes of cover.
The first thing I checked was the distance remaining before my own forces could catch up. By the timing, the Combine had been moving at about seventy kph, while we'd been limited to fifty-five… But seventy was just that little bit too slow. The leading formation, my 5th, had their artillery battalion just in Arrow IV range.
I snapped out the orders that would stop them in place and divert the 5th's assault company for bodyguard duty - and matched the pairing for the other two brigades' own artillery elements. The 2nd's people I told to keep going for another ten minutes, and the 11th for twenty. When they parked I'd have the 5th's artillery park pick up stakes and leapfrog forwards, letting me move them while still keeping most of the tubes ready at any given point.
Then I told the lighter, faster elements, the cavalry mechs and hovertanks, and the line units too, to floor it and move to reinforce the Pals as quickly as they could. They started to separate by types almost immediately, and I took a second or two to kick myself before getting back on the line and organizing them into speed brackets, sixty-five kph units together in one batch, eighty kph ones in another, and so on. So, being busy with that, and with the dust kicked up by the big guns' firing in support of the actual joined battle, I was a long way from being the first to spot the third Combine battalion. One of the tankers caught the flicker of motion on his own monitors - Pattons were designed with external cameras feeding flatscreens that covered just about the entire interior of their turrets and driver's stations, meaning that their crews actually had a better, if simulated, field of view than our mechwarriors did.
They still had direct vision scopes and so on for targeting, and simple mirror vision blocks around each of their hatches, more because of the chance of equipment failure than anything else. Certainly the odds of running into another Phantom weren't high enough to matter.
Anyway. One of the Patton crewmen caught a flicker of motion a few kilometers away, dots appearing against the sky, where jump-jet equipped mechs were scaling the last dozen meters or so out of the side-canyon that they'd used to work their way close all but unobserved.
Most of the new Combine unit bearing down on the artillery - and my command element - were Panthers, with a scattering of other types… But all of them could jump, including the three heavies. A Thunderbolt and an Enforcer, the latter obvious FedSuns salvage, rounded out the lance next to a pair of Catapults, one with the missile racks and one the Kurita model with the PPC barrels in their place. Three of those mechs were in the same desert camo as the rest of the Combine battalion… But the last, the K2 Catapult, was pure black, with a splash of blood red right under the cockpit. Zooming in for a better look was pro-forma; I knew even as I did it that that marking would resolve into an hourglass.
"Marble, Joker," I said absently, as I twitched Marauder No. 2's controls through a test cycle and swung it around to face the threat - letting the artillery commander I was attached to order the rest of us to change fronts. "Visual confirmation on 14th Legion of Vega headhunting detachment, including Kerensky's personal livery. You have the hat while I'm busy."
The artillery crawlers swung into motion as a corner of my mind vaguely heard Generalmajor Byers' acknowledgement to that, throwing up fresh clouds of dun-colored dust of their own as they threw into a beeline away from the oncoming Combine battalion. Panthers and their heavier escorts weren't terribly fast for the most part - the quickest machines there were bugmechs, followed by a single Wolverine - but they were faster than a Halberd or Voulge. Running straight away would delay the mechs' catching up, not prevent it.
Prevention was up to the guard force, and to my command company. I flipped a thought at checking, and No. 2's systems pulled up that Byers had redirected the assault company that had been coming to meet us onto an intercept with the fleeing artillery tanks. Good; having them show up would wreck Kerensky's odds, and that put a hard time limit on how long the fight could last before the clock ran out for her.
Even as the first LRMs reached out, a massively lopsided exchange when only a few of the Combine mechs mounted them at all, a suspicious paranoia itched at the back of my brain. A battalion of mechs against a company of tanks and a company of mechs was a reasonable thing for Kerensky to expect to succeed, but when the average weight on the less numerous side was literally twice that of the other, and they as much artillery to call on as we did, the entire endeavor started to look… dumb.
I didn't have the liveliest opinion of the woman's ethics, but Kerensky wasn't that kind of dumb. She wouldn't be doing this if she didn't think she had an angle.
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Wolverine Medium 'Mech
The Wolverine pilot had let himself get a little out in front of the pack, pushing his mech's speed past what the Panthers could keep up with without even realizing it, and eighteen or so separate LRM-using units had all selected him as their target. At extreme range accurate missile fire was more a matter of picking a target area than a target mech, and the contrails salted the earth around the Combine mech. Watching the way the pilot twisted his ride around the worst of it, and the smooth indifference he showed to the way its gyro fought the loss of armor, I knew that this one was a lot better than we were supposed to be seeing from the Legion of Vega.
The PPCs opened up next, salted with the longer-ranged autocannons, and this time the honors were less one-sided. After all, this time the Panthers that made up most of the Combine numbers were in range and free to fire back, and fire back they did. Far from the usual one-on-one approach the Combine favored, each of their lances picked a single target and salvoed particle beam fire into it in tightly cued sequence. One of our Zeus pilots checked his advance for a moment under the hammering, and a Thunderbolt found its shoulder launcher shot away.
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Zeus Assault 'Mech
I picked out my own target and steadied my course for a second, then staggered as two PPC bolts slammed home against my torso armor. "Fucking really, Kerensky?" I muttered, leaving my mike and com lines dead when I said it. I'd known that it was possible for a pilot skilled in the art to place shots by eye alone, if they did a complete override of the usual targeting and safety systems in their mechs, and apparently Natasha had been practicing. She'd just nailed me with two long-range shots using the aim equivalent of pure dead reckoning.
Screw her. I stayed on my original target, getting two shots into the Panther I'd settled on, and by the time Kerensky's PPCs were cool enough to fire again I was in full evasion mode.
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Panther Light 'Mech
I wasn't as good as most of the pilots Kerensky had clearly been hand-training; I couldn't make anybody shooting at me feel like I was weaving between their shots. But I could make their lives harder, make my movements irregular enough that drawing a bead in the first place was an immense pain in the ass. And with my own personal psychic bullshit meaning that they had to do all the work themselves… Well.
Even for a pilot of Natasha Kerensky's grade, that made things hard. She missed both of her next shots.
That was when the next stroke of her plan landed. First one, then a few, then dozens of aircraft popped over the same lip of the canyon that the Combine mechs had come up, flashing towards us and then overhead in a shower of missile contrails that saturated our entire formation… and behind them, smaller, darker dots tumbled free from the undersides of the turbine fighters and seemed to hang in mid-air - which of course really meant that they were falling straight towards us.
They shattered - and then caught fire. Inferno gel poured down across the battlefield, smaller splatters speckling the Combine mechs and while the main fall drenched ours… and the tanks as well.
Even as the crawlers ground to a halt and the coms filled with screams, I could see the plan in my head. Both Combine forces had made their approach through the low ground of the main canyon, keeping them out of sight even from the look-down radars of our aerospace regiments - hidden in the twisting ground clutter of the almost-endless gorge. The only real question was if the order they'd hit us in was intentional, or if they'd wanted it to be the other way around… In the end, the question was moot, though.
Coms to LOCAL/OVRRD… "Stay calm," I said, mostly to the armor boys. "Your tanks can't fight through this, but they can keep you alive. Button up and let it burn out. Reyes-"
Another of Kerensky's PPC bolts hit me, and I waited the second or so for my displays to stop fritzing before I finished, "-you have the arty call. Mechwarriors, we're buying time."
My heat scale was high enough from the clinging crap that I couldn't use my usual three-gun salvo, but I hadn't forgotten learning how to handle No. 2 with single-cell sinks. One PPC was enough to finish opening the Panther's chest armor wide open. The pilot punched the eject even before the shrapnel had finished scattering, and even as he was lifted away the small trails of inferno gel draped across the light mech's shoulders dripped down and found their way into the wound. The SRM magazine went a moment later, ripping apart in a hydrocarbon-rich Hollywood fireball as the detonating rockets' solid fuel spread the inferno gel of their warheads into a fine mist even as it touched them off.
The burning incendiaries coating half of No. 2's hull meant that the heat gauge fell slowly. Not so much from their ability to heat the mech as a whole - hydrocarbons just couldn't compete with the amount of infrared the reactor had been tuned to put out as its primary waste radiation - but from what they did to the radiators and their intakes, not just clogging and blocking them but badly lowering the temperature contrasts they used to pump waste heat out. That said, it was falling, and when it had fallen enough I waited until Kerensky's next salvo had scorched past, then put my own unused right-side beam cannon and the autocannon into firing back.
She'd gotten sloppy about her evasion, focusing too much on aiming at me, and I clipped her with both the lightning blast, along one of the Catapult's dinosaurian legs, and raked the cannon burst up one side of its torso and across the matching PPC mount. I still wasn't used to the new gun, the faster tempo of its shots always made me check for who was shooting at me, but I couldn't say it didn't do the job just as well.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a Panther lunge into SRM range and unleash an alpha strike. Minakshi's Battlemaster barely blinked at either the PPC shot or the scatter of additional inferno gel poured across the chest glacis. She left her own missiles and PPC out of her return salvo, but the lasers played across the smaller mech's chest plating and arms and left it literally staggering. A salvo of LRMs from Reyes' side arched down and crashed across it, and the light went down with a crash I could hear even inside my cockpit.
I was still burning when the autocannon reloaded, and Kerensky seemed to be waiting until she was cool enough for a dual salvo. I didn't wait, firing the gun again and swearing tiredly as she slipped out of my crosshairs at the last second.
A dark flicker overhead resolved into racing motion. I had just a split second to recognize Arrow IV missiles in flight before they started landing in earnest. The even larger detonations of the Long Tom shells had less warning; they came in on a higher trajectory, and you had to be lucky to catch even a hint of their presence before they hit. There was no ranging shot; they rained down in a scatter of detonations that marched randomly across the Combine battalion, and the ground behind and in front of it.
We got lucky and none of them landed on any of our mechs; a real risk with the increased scatter from not doing ranging shots before the main bombardment. I was pretty sure that that risk was worthwhile, and anyway that was the kind of thing I felt comfortable trusting to Reyes' half-century and more of experience.
The Combine reaction was instant - and aggressive. They launched themselves forwards, diving into a closer melee that would turn the scatter of the artillery fire against us, forcing the guns silent again. Kerensky put herself at the front of the charge, and I fired a PPC to meet her. The gel on me was burning out, but I wasn't cooling properly yet.
This time my shot hit, and her salvo in return went half-and-half. I was okay with that; I'd started with more armor than she had, so if Kerensky wanted to keep trading shots, even two-to-one, I could keep dancing until the incendiaries burned out - and after that, I'd be firing half-again as many shots. I might not win, but I definitely wasn't going to lose.
Even as I thought that, Molton landed from a jump ahead and to my left, his Sentinel as always reminding me of a tennis ball balanced on limbs made of popsicle sticks, and turned to bring his autocannon to bear on a Combine Stinger. The flak ammunition his machine carried cut down on his damage output, but Stingers were fragile, and this one had already taken shock damage to its armor from the artillery. Shrapnel from the AA rounds rattled and sparked visibly through the chest cavity, and the machine convulsed and dropped like a broken rag doll as some of the fragments found its gyroscope. Both of its medium lasers fired on the way down, tracing useless scars in the dirt.
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Stinger Light 'Mech
Another crash and sizzle washed over my cockpit as Kerensky landed a shot; both of mine in return missed low as she hit her jump jets and bounded straight backwards. Moments later, the entire Combine force - less a couple of Panthers and most of their bugmechs, which weren't in any shape to go anywhere now - repeated the performance, a classic jump enabled withdrawal under fire.
"We'll push them to the edge of the canyon, then break off," I ordered over the local line.
My company's fire lance, three Archers and their Warhammer bodyguard, concentrated their fire on one of the two Whitworths and shredded it in a single avalanche of missiles, but between the irregularity of jump jet movement and the lengthening range as the Legion mechs spread themselves apart, that was the only hard kill we made before the Combine mechwarriors turned and hopped down out of line of sight.
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Whitworth Medium 'Mech
Kerensky was the last to go, winning her first armor breach on No. 2 and seeing one of her PPCs disabled by my return salvo.
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Warhammer Heavy 'Mech, firing its weapons
I waited several seconds to see if they'd try to pop up and continue the engagement by bunny-hopping, then when they didn't, said, "Reyes, have the Dealers drop some going-away presents in that gorge for them."
"Will do, Boss," the old man replied, and I turned my attention to regaining some idea of the progress of the larger battle.
Theoretically, I could have taken over again immediately, and I did let Byers know that my skirmish had been resolved, but a lot of different things could have happened in the couple minutes that all my attention had been on my own fight. If I tried to give orders without getting caught back up, I could easily fuck things up for my people by sending them hither and yon without the proper context. So, the first step of taking control was keeping my big fat mouth shut and listening until I was up to speed again.
On the local level, we hung tight where we were until the recovery vehicles - for the entire force, all three brigades, we had… eighteen, which on reflection was one of the things that was holy shit going to have to go on the 'fix this' list - could show up and load up the deadlined Pattons. Which wasn't all of them; a couple had somehow stayed moving through the fight, even if I'd been too busy to pay much attention to them, and four more were damaged in ways that their crews were able to make good on the spot. So, 'only' a third of all the recovery vehicles we had were needed to deal with half of a single company.
The main force of mechs and tanks hadn't paused, and in fact Byers had split them into cross-brigade component forces by speed; I could see the track of the assault companies consolidating into a single smashing battalion, and the way the faster mechs had already formed into a slightly short regiment and started to race ahead, with the hovercraft all around them.
I could also see why she'd made the change; at the same time Kerensky had popped up out of the canyon, several regiments - at least three, maybe as many as six - of popcorn tanks had lunged off of a paved road through more subtle low ground and waded into the dug in Pals.Their missiles weren't accurate enough to hit small targets like that on purpose, but they sent enough around addressed 'To Whom It May Concern' that the casualty rates were wince-worthy. The assault had been more or less beaten back in a few furious minutes, but the drop rate for the stacked aerospace support's ordinance had been astonishing.
That one assault had cleared three quarters of the bombs we had waiting, and while that freed up the fighters carrying them for either resupply or other duties - the air-breathers that Kerensky had used in her strike had been chased down by a couple squadrons of Seydlitzes, for instance - it meant that the next try the Combine made would need to be either met with hard force or the artillery. And, while they'd taken fairly significant casualties in that push, the Combine had more than enough left over to try again several times.
Byers had sped the reinforcements up to try and have something in place to provide that needed measure of hard force, and suspended my rolling artillery support to try and get all three gun battalions as close as possible, to shorten their shell flight times before the next wave.
It probably wasn't what I would have done, but that didn't make it the wrong thing to do. Certainly, if it was wrong, it wasn't wrong enough to be worth changing things around in midstream. I let it ride - let Byers ride in control of the battle, even once I was ready to take over again if need be.
One of the things I was here to do was help evaluate whether she and Rabenstrange were ready for further promotion, ready to handle entire operations like the invasion of Vega unsupervised. 'Trial by fire', even a supervised one, was a crude way of testing that and neither I nor Katrina nor anyone else involved liked the potential consequences of a major error, but it would answer the question as decisively as anything we could do… And the real world awarded no points for elegance.
Byers felt the same way about the bridge as I did, so she sent the hovercraft screaming their way down the switchback road that had preceded its construction, and when the jump-capable mechs started to arrive she had them hop straight down the canyon sides. A handful fell and skidded a few dozen meters before their pilots could recover - usually by starting a fresh jump - but not least to my own surprise, only one took more than minor armor scrapes in the process, a broken ankle actuator. By the time the hovercraft had finished forming up single-file and flowing down the roadway, the 'Mechs had caught up, descended, and reformed at the bottom.
The next assault on the topside positions arrived more or less at the same time that my command post was setting up, right next door to the 5th's artillery battalion on the rim of the canyon, overlooking both the crossing and the bridge. So I had a good view of the trap closing.
It started with puffs of smoke sparking along the far wall of the canyon, just as the first of the slow procession of hovercraft had finished taking their careful way around the rising switchbacks. More were strung out all along the road as penetrator rounds landed obliquely on the practically hidden reverse slope. I could hear Byers snapping orders for counterbattery even as the first rumble of noise and motion vibrated up through Marauder No. 2's planted feet. That seismic thunder moved faster, became noticeable sooner than the din through Vega's open air, and sooner than the visible motion.
Neither took long, though. The entire slope sagged, the stony ground rippling and buckling as it started to flow downwards, tumbling the hovertanks on it like dice made of eggshell, and crushing them just as easily in the process. The tactical net was filled with swearing and cries of horror, and even as I watched I could hear myself snapping orders - and Byers and Rabenstrange joined in a moment later - to keep support going for the Pals as at the same time Kurita massed what seemed at the time like every Ohka on the planet and threw them straight into a headlong assault.
It's funny what your brain picks out to recall. I can still remember the dark specks flying off of the bridge as it began to collapse, one end of the long arch undermined by the avalanche. Not ejected debris, but power-armored troops who'd been looking for mines or traps jumping free, so that their jump jets could let them land safely away from any falling I-beams.
The fast mech companies' commanders didn't consult with higher command before they acted, the lights charging forward even before the avalanche finished to start search and rescue efforts, and the mediums leapfrogging up the canyon walls at a scramble to give some relief to the infantry. I decided it was a good idea, and had them concentrate for a sweep north along the rear of the Combine advance rather than pelting in in individual companies that could get chopped up by larger masses of tanks.
I caught a glimpse of Rabenstrange's Zeus - an older model that had been an heirloom in his family, rather than a new build machine, easily picked out by the drum launcher for its missiles rather than the external box - sliding down the near side of the canyon, one of the first of our groundbound heavier machines to rush down but by no means the last.
That stunt had to be shredding their leg and rear armor, but under the circumstances I couldn't say it was the wrong choice. It might not be the right one, either, but not wrong.
A proximity warning shrilled, and I guided No. 2 through a careful step back to clear the path of the ammo truck as it raced up to the artillery tracks at a speed that was frankly hazardous. The guns didn't even slow their firing, but spare crewmembers popped out of the hatches and jumped onto the crawlers' back decks to open the ammunition loading doors.
Despite that, I could hear Byers on the command line, warning the Pals' CO that the current rate of artillery support fire wasn't sustainable, and his reply that that same fire was the only thing keeping his men alive. The instant he paused, I asked, "Gawain, Joker. Can your people pick up the slack with direct fire?"
The senior of our three aerospace regiments' commanders replied. "Joker, Gawain. If Spyglass can put the rest of the TAG rounds on their air defense units, yes. We can do it."
"Gawain, Spyglass. We've got most of 'em already, but yeah, we can take out most of what's left." He didn't bother saying that it could only be 'most', that a perfect clean sweep was impossible. We all knew that already.
"Do it." Byers and I said in unconscious unison.
It did it.
By the end of the day, we'd all but completely broken six of the nine or so regiments of armor the Combine had remaining on world, wrecked almost all of their artillery, and given both battlemech regiments a thumping that they'd remember even if most of the damage would be repairable. More importantly, we were on the north side of the canyon and free to maneuver there.
That didn't make the cost less painful, just determined that in the end, the battle was a strategic victory.
The butcher's bill was sobering even in light of what we'd gained. The power-armored troops who'd had to hold while the rest of us struggled up the wrecked slope had only taken a third of their number as fatalities, and another third would probably never fight again even if they lived… But their gear was almost all downchecked. We'd lost almost all of our hovercraft; maybe one company hadn't been on the slope or in the way of the avalanche, and another one or two might be cobbled together from the wreckage.
Crew fatalities were even higher than the infantry's.
The jump jet equipped mechs, the ones that had been able to scale the canyon wall in time to make a difference as more than an 'eventually' threat, had taken a real battering on armor and components alike, but most of them would be repairable, if not before the end I hoped to bring to this campaign.
Proportionally, the aerospace elements had less damage but more fatalities - sudden changes in the shape of a wing's armor plating, like a new crater, could easily cause a roll or spin that would take hundreds of meters of altitude to recover from. In a ground strike or strafing profile, where there were only dozens of meters for a pilot to work with, one hit could smear a multi-million c-bill fighter across several kilometers of desert with ease.
The surviving Combine forces were all faster than ours, and they were heading cross-country on a beeline for the southern of Vega's two fortresses, the Seishiro. We'd do a resupply drop once we had the canyon out of the error radius, and then…
And then.
Civil Conversation between Warriors[]
KURITA HOHIRO-JO, SOUTH NANTURO
VEGA, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
AUGUST 21ST, 3027
"The tea is excellent," Theodore Kurita said, lowering his cup back to its saucer. "but your reputation is not that of a woman who would arrange this meeting for mere courtesy's sake."
"It costs nothing to be polite." I said, as a hot desert wind blasted across the hardpan that surrounded the camps my people had set up on top of the buried Combine fortress's upper works. "But no, not merely so. The laws and customs of war require me to inform you that I have the means in hand to reduce your works, and accordingly that I require your surrender, Sir."
His sang-froid frazzled just a little bit, insulted fury sparking in his eyes. "Do you honestly expect that to work? That samurai of the Dragon would simply lay down their arms?"
"Not in the slightest," I admitted. "But I am a Blackwing, bred to peace. Making the attempt does not jeopardize the lives of my own men, and so I am obligated to try. So. You don't have enough strength to defeat me in the open, and rather than attempt a losing battle you've withdrawn into this subterranean fortress of yours. If this means you are penned inside your defenses, you've chosen to accept that as the price of drawing matters out. You hope, not unreasonably, that settling into siege will allow you to sally on advantageous terms and inflict a favorable rate of exchange in the resulting attritional conflict."
"I could not possibly say." he demurred.
"And of course," I said, just as though he hadn't spoken, "you are rightly quite certain that if I come in after you, you can make me pay far more than this place is worth. But your mistake is that this is not Saint Ives. There is nothing buried here that I need to preserve. The only victory the Legion of Vega can win for the Combine is one of honor… And we both know what reward you will be offered for that service. Contempt, scorn, and abuse."
Kurita was silent for a long moment. "A samurai is judged by the quality of his service, not the quality of his master," he said, quietly enough that I was genuinely unsure if I was meant to hear.
"Dying here will not serve your nation." I said. "I've seen little news of other worlds since arriving, but I know the plan for this operation. How many of your Hojo Kidousensha Rentai have already been lost, and how many more aren't any better off than you are? I'll tell you plainly that the price of your ransoms may be more than the Combine will accept, but I swear to you that it's the best chance I see of you doing your country any good."
Theodore Kurita was silent, and sipped his tea while he thought. I, in turn, waited patiently, and sipped mine. I wasn't a great tea fan, but this was a high enough quality that even I didn't mind it.
Eventually, he sighed and said, "No. I honor the offer-" Oddly, I believed him. "-but no. If you would have this place, you must come and take it."
I sighed. "As you wish. You have one local day to reconsider, or to settle your affairs. By all means, though, finish your tea first."
Correspondence[]
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Ash,
I'm dashing this down in a hurry. Four RCTs' worth of jumpships have arrived in system, including three Monoliths. We've been told to expect all of them to be Combine reinforcements, which explains why the Sword of Light were willing to withdraw on the ground rather than fleeing the system or fighting to the death. They were buying time for their relief to arrive.
Since the day of our drop, my company has lost another, and I wish that there had been time to grieve properly. We've been fighting in lightning raids on both sides, with a lot of marching and maneuvering that sparks into sharp, intense firefights then breaks apart again. Both sides have been bleeding, and given the numbers we probably have been having the advantage more often… but they know the terrain far better, and that advantage has kept any hint of decision out of our reach.
By the time this letter leaves orbit, the operation will already be complete, so I can tell you that the Jormugandr is scheduled to drop all of her cargo that she has reentry shells for the day after tomorrow. Our efforts in the meantime will be focused on confiscating enough civilian trucks to move at least some of it, to keep ourselves supplied until our own reinforcements can come.
I hate it when they cry, and I've seen far too many tears in the eyes of those vehicles' owners or caretakers. In some ways, the employees are worse than the business owners. There's an enormous gap between the small operators and the enormous noble-owned businesses, but the former have the thin hope of placing a claim on what passes for the Combine's insurance industry. The paid drivers and mechanics only know that they'll be punished for losing the vehicles entrusted to them, no matter the circumstances.
Regardless, once the drops are complete the Jormugandr will leave orbit and eventually the system, with the Muginn squadron as her escorts. Even knowing that the Asima Brigham has made all of her repairs good, I'll be finding that a relief.
For ourselves, I intend to live to see you again - but destiny can have its own plans, as we both know. If the worst should happen, cherish my memory, as I've cherished every moment with you, and then move on. Tell our daughters that I love them, and know that.
I love you, Ash.
Until we meet again,
Sophitia
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