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Chapter 32 - Time Enough For A Cat -
- Victoria II 1: Getting Boots to the Ground -[]
Suspicious LZ[]
Dropship Mauna Kea
En Route to Honore's Rest, Victoria
Capellan Confederation
January 9th, 3029
Perspective of Kamea Arano, High Lady of the Reach
There was something awe-inspiring about going 'down the well' on a combat drop. The feeling of thrust fighting gravity, the scream of the dropper burning just so gently against the atmosphere and gravity, the shake of the ship through my Atlas and into me; it all spoke volumes of the experience. Panzyr, Coromodir, Itrom. Now, Victoria could be added to my mech's growing list of planets it had seen, the Atlas' baleful eyes glaring at the door in my cradle that stopped us from going forth.

Atlas II Assault 'Mech
The way down was silent. No ASF harassment, nothing on the few scopes that could see through our intermittent plasma sheath, not even any ground fire.
Rapping quietly on an old wooden panel I'd installed in the cockpit for this purpose, I resisted thinking the thoughts that would summon the enemy.
"Alright everyone, stick to the plan," I called out over coms as the doors to my Fortress started opening, and our top-cover flight of ASF cruised around. "We're here to secure the plateau, so make sure to clear out of the dropships double-time."
Nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. I was getting downright nervous, until someone called out 'Contact!' and the situation was handled with a mess of Infernos. Of course, a solid two minutes later an infantry platoon determined it had been a random goat herder, but y'know, not all good news was enemy action.
As I walked my Atlas over out of the landing zone, though, something about that goat herder stuck in my mind. I could figure it out in a bit, though. Well, I could deal with that later, as I pulled up my unit command software and made sure all my company leaders were plugged into my battlenet. I wasn't really comfortable handling anything larger than a battalion yet, so Nyan, Lucifer, and I had hashed out a plan. I would take the landing site with my battalion of mechs from the 3rd Auregian Hussars- whom had donated their other functional battalion to taking the in-between worlds on our way here- then once the site was secure I would put down the 51st Auregian Artillery Regiment.
The 51st, alias the Snowlords, were one of the units I'd stood up to cover Artu; and it showed. Equipped with towed Snipers and Long Toms, they'd be the fast response fires that would hold the plateau while we prepared to sally on the train stations. After they were dug in, we'd be essentially impossible to dig out which meant it was time to start bringing in the armor and infantry for our push.
That damn goat-herder was stuck on the back of my mind again, and I didn't like it. Firing up my ground-to-orbit comms, I called Argo up. "This is Arano, can I get patched through to Intel?"
A moment, two clicks, and then: >>"This is Harvest Blades Intel, copy. What's the issue?"<<
"Something's bugging me," I grumbled. "One of our guys wasted a goat herder shortly after we landed."
>>"That's odd,"<< Intel agreed. >>"This planet shouldn't really have any goats. There's no grass."<<
It clicked for both of us then. "That was a picket!" we yelled, and I nearly kicked my console. "Look get the word out, make sure the ASFs are ready, I think we're gonna have incoming!" I snapped, moving to groundside channels. "All units, we may have whacked a picket. Check your spacing and start moving towards the edge of the plateau."

Stinger Light Recon 'Mech
The first mech to reach the edge of the plateau, Sgt. Theodore, was a Stinger with a blatantly-against-regs red eagle on the side of his faceplate. "I'm not seeing anything, guys-"
His words were stopped by the snap-CRACK! of demolitions charges, and the edge of the plateau caved out from under him. Fortunately, he managed to flare his jump jets, just in time for a pair of houses in the village to fall down- were those guns?
Yes, said the PPCs on field turrets. Yes they were. Fortunately, we were at the ragged bloody edge of their range, so far out most of the bolts dissipated before they got to us, but it was nerve-wracking to see the spray of long lightning sailing over our heads every so often.
<("Dropship Hā'upu to Arano: we're coming in with the first load of the 51st now. Are we good to begin descent?")>
"This is Arano, we are not engaged. You are good for landing."
Slowly, painfully, two dropships came down from the sky. They were my only real heavy military lifters- an Excalibur, and a refitted-to-hell-and-back Overlord. If I could see their reactor plumes, we were in good hands-

Overlord Class MechCarrier DropShip landing
"Contact, bearing 295-" one of the other Stingers yelled out, before being cut off by the sound of explosions. Turning to face the threat, I hissed as I saw the plumes of rock and dust thrown up. Long Toms. Fuck!
"Alpha, company- get those guns silenced!" I snapped, sending the lightest element out first. "Bravo, Charlie, disperse and prepare for contact!"
"What's our expected angle?" someone called, and I winced. I didn't know. Even if I didn't, though, I could figure it out.
"Kamea to Argo, requesting top cover," I said, moving into a steady walk so I'd be harder to hit.
"Wilco, launching the first wave."
Good. That was handled, and Alpha Company was hauling ass for those guns. As another two salvos fell and then the sound stopped, I grinned. If they had to stop that quickly, it implied they were using towed guns- and I had a battery of self-propelled Snipers on that Excalibur.
"Alpha, hound those guns and make a good screen," I belted out. "Bravo, you're still all jump-capable, right?"
"Afirm," Captain Rita of Bravo Company called back.
"Good. Get off the plateau, I think there's gonna be something up in the village bearing 065," I ordered, trusting my gut. There was nothing to the north, but we'd had turrets in the south, artillery in the west, and there was bound to be something in the east. If I could get ahead of it, then that would put me in position for later. It didn't matter too terribly much, though, because the Excalibur was down- and out of it ran my Snipers. Captain Joaquim needed no orders; he was familiar with how he was used. Far more important were the mechs that poured out: not combat machines, but industrial ones.
I might be chronically short on combat pilots, but on walking shovel operators? Not so much! With years of practice at work on Panzyr and Coromidir showing their stuff, the Arano Mech Engineers got to work rolling out lines of Marston Mats and spreading quick-set concrete. It took an hour to set, but once it was I could land Leopards on it a dozen times before they ate it alive. More importantly, Nyan's infantry and Battle Armor were all tied up on Leopards: tools I dearly wanted on the field as soon as possible to hold the plateau so my mechs could move freely.
While the engineers got to work and Bravo made their way down the hill, I kept a weather eye on everything- at least until the air support from Argo showed up, and I got a chilling call-in.
(("Major Arano, this is Comet Flight, we're detecting an inbound train from the north. Looks like a flatbed hauler, and we're getting tracked by what feels like a Partisan. We can't engage."))
"Shoot me the coordinates, I'll batch it to my Snipers," I replied, cool as a cucumber. As they read the digits off and I fed them down the chain, I breathed in and out. We were doing fine. Everything was going fine.
I didn't like it. "Alpha company, come in."
Static.
"Alpha company, come in."
More static. Fuck. They were probably engaged, then, and local EWAR levels were thick enough to block comms. Alpha Company only had one Phoenix Hawk, and if that was in trouble it would make sense they didn't have a mech with the signal power to get in contact with us. Fine. If they couldn't call me, I'd just get closer until I could call them. "Bravo company, on me! Looks like Alpha's gotten into some shit, and we'll need to bail them out! Charlie, stay choked up on the plateau; 51st, call me when we've got the Long Tom's unloaded!"
(("I'll do you one better,")) Col. Reynard of the 51st said with a chuckle. (("Our first vehicles out will be the Loa."))
My mind stuttered to a stop even as my hands and feet slowly brought my Atlas down the plateau, joining up with the nippy mediums of my Bravo Company. "We're using the Loa this early? Are you sure?"
"We built that to counterbattery Long Toms. You're going out to kill some Long Toms. Seems reasonable to me, boss."
"Your regiment, your call," I replied, focusing as I slowly brought my Atlas from a walk to a run, and from a run to a dead sprint. "Just remember we only have two hundred rounds for 'em."
"With the size of the booms they make? Two hundred is more than enough."
A word of explanation, as I lost my breath running a hundred tons of death over the gravel desert. Artu was a hellscape of a planet, made moreso by the constant Taurian raiding. Cheap close air support stopped cutting it once they learned that a few ASFs would beat off my even cheaper Conventional Fighters. So, I'd switched to Thumpers and Snipers. Then the Taurians would land too far away, and we couldn't get shots on them as they crept in. Long Toms brought the same general pattern.
So I'd snapped, and talked to Sokoloy. I knew the Harvest Blades couldn't pull technology out of their ass, but it was damn hard to tell that sometimes what with all the magical shit they did. He'd made me a devil's bargain, of course- he wanted ducal holdings, and I'd acquiesced by giving him Heliat, a religious shithole with no real value at all.
What I'd gotten was the weight of a Commando, the length of a telephone pole, and almost as deadly as nukes.
The Class 50 Cruise Missile was, approximately, the same size, weight, and cost as some of the suicide sled interceptors particularly unclever students at the Coromidir War Academy proposed sometimes. The difference was, however, it had a eight ton fuel-air bomb for a warhead. A Long Tom shell had slightly more oomph than an AC/20 hit if it got you directly, but otherwise tended to strip armor like a barrage of five or so medium laser hits; quite literally getting sandblasted by explosive force and shrapnel. A Class 50 Cruise Missile was, roughly, twice as powerful and would strip damn near every place a mech had armor- and more importantly, it could reach out two-thirds again further than the Long Tom.
Of course, there was a catch. Aside from the cost of each missile, the fuel-air bomb warhead lost hitting power fast, even though it had the same effective blast radius as a Long Tom shell. I'd planned to use them for anti-building work, but they'd also been optimized for counterbattery fires. Personally, though, I wished we had the time to finish work on the Class 70 Cruise Missile. Why? Because God was in his Heaven, and if he left we'd send him back, express style.
The thump of my Atlas' feet kept chewing up the kilometers, one at a time, for a very long time. Most mechs had their 'walk' and 'run' speeds that everyone knew by heart. An Atlas could do thirty-something kph in the walk, keeping one foot on the ground at all times. Move the gait to a run, and you could hit fifty-something depending on ammo load and your guts.
I wasn't walking or running. I was sprinting, in a dead out flying heels run that was sending splashes of gravel out like shotgun shells with every step. It only bought me a little extra speed and took every bit of focus I had, but I wasn't loosing ground next to my bodyguard lance at least. My old Kintaro, a well-loved Thud, and most critically a backup Phoenix Hawk were all serving to make sure I stayed nice and safe in my Atlas. Never mind that I was the best pilot of all of us, no, I had to be coddled aggressively so nothing happened to me. A part of me hated it.
A bigger part didn't want my daughter to take the throne now, before I'd finished forging our loose alliance of noble houses into a real nation. I'd live with the bodyguards for now- although I wasn't happy, lowering my speed out of the hell-sprint the last hour had been in so I could get on the comms.
"Everyone, we're entering a jammer field," I called out. "Prepare to lose company-level comms."
Grinning, I checked my MASTER ARM switch, and then warmed everything up. Datalinks were set to my Phoenix Hawk bodyguard, autocannon loaded with slug (mostly because I hadn't managed to bully Nyan or Sokoloy into building me one of those LBX autocannon they'd complained about not having the endo-steel for yet) and lasers ready to fry.
Good thing, too, because our lead lance nearly took out the survivors from Alpha Company; the Valkyries, Locusts, and Javelins making it up battered and bloody. A dispassionate voice in the back of my head noted the missing Stingers and Wasps, but I could handle that later. Here and now, they needed to rally- and thankfully, they weren't having issues falling in behind Captain Rita. Good. Running over, I heard my comms firm up with a 'clack'
"Status report?"
"We managed to scare the guns off, ma'am," an unknown lieutenant from Alpha said. Not Captain FitzWilliam, he probably didn't make it in his Commando. "But they've got a company of armor covering them now, and probably some mechs too. Sending you the location now"
"Good," was my response, uploading the map data into my tactical board. "Time for me to call in the fire support, then."
"We're being jammed, though!"
I laughed. "You're being jammed. Here's the thing about an Atlas, though."
With a few switch-clicks, I could feel the satellite dish come to life on my head, and my face matched my ride's skullish grin. "It's not just our guns that are big."
"Argo intel desk," our topside friends said as my mech finished its handshake protocol. <<"We read you, Arano.">>
"We're under a jamming effect, and would like a localization on the jammer. It's heavy enough we can't communicate back to the LZ firebase, so can you relay a call for fires?"
<<"We can do that, yes.">>
"Excellent," I said, clicking out a generic 'fall back' order to everyone through my keyboard. "We're going to back out of jammer range, and I'm squirting you the coordinates for the counterbattery fire mission now."
<<"Should we batch the counter-jammer mission to the same unit?">>
"Yeah, they'll know what to do," I replied. "I gotta direct units, though, but this line should stay open. Arano, out."
<<"Argo Intel confirms, triangulating and batching fire missions. Good work, Argo out.">>
With that, I quickly explained the plan- back up a few grid squares, and wait for the artillery to come down.
"Lady Arano," Rita said, nervous. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"
"Probably. More artillery is rarely an issue."
Not a minute later, the sonic screams of the cruise missiles flying past, barely a hundred meters off the deck, rattled my teeth to show their passing. "Alright, about-face!" I snapped. "They're gonna get hit soon-"
Of course my timing was foul, as the missiles exploding into massive sunburst fireballs interrupting me. Four massive thermobaric warheads going off would do it to anyone, especially since one of them clearly landed smack on the jammer judging by the wash of electronic noise coming through my comms.
"Alright, everyone!" I yelled on broadband. "This is the largest local force concentration they've got! They've got a vic company, we've got half a damn battalion! Time to kick some ass!"
"For the Sword of Restoration!" someone cheered back, and we started moving in. I was finally free of leading, that burden heavier than a mountain. Now, time for my Atlas to dance with the feathers.
What Kamea Up Too?[]
Dropship Argo
CIC Annex
Victoria, Geosynch Orbit
Capellan Confederation
January 9th, 3029
Perspective of Lt. Gen. Tam Gallowglass
"Anyone have eyes on how Kamea's doing?" I asked idly, looking over the half-dozen charts, ouija boards, and threat assessments sitting in piles around me. Taking a sip of coffee, I grumbled theatrically at our ASF wing commander's report: due to a packing fuckup, most of our external carriage ordnance was buried in the munitions bay underneath, roughly speaking, three thousand tons of Long Tom, Sniper, and Arrow IV ammunition. Getting it unloaded would mean getting it unpacked, and getting it unpacked meant getting it out one of our three docking collars- all of which were full of Leopards at the moment, who were getting the 5th Adelherwin ready to deploy groundside.
"She's cleared out the immediate area of the LZ, and her artillery regiment is unloading according to schedule," Sokoloy called out, having decided that he'd like to play chief staffer this operation. "There was some resistance, about a company of militia tanks and a bit of mercenary artillery, but nothing serious."
"Good. When she calls in that the tarmac is up, start rolling the 5th Adelherwin down," I said imperiously, taking another sip of coffee. "What's the timeline on getting a Union or two in there?"
"Kamea's engineers think the ground can take it, but the backwash means it'll be vehicles-only. We'd be irradiating a lot of gravel and flinging it about."
"Damn. Well, she landed the engineering company, she can use 'em," I grunted. "Until then, we need to get some of the droppers she took over in queue to start offloading to: I want to delay the Argo's cargo-handling as a choke point as long as we can."
"Got it. I'll let you know if anything changes."
"Good. Until then, I need to dump this coffee," I said, gesturing at my cup, "and maybe get a sandwich. It's gonna be a long day."
Chapter Notes[]
- Author's Chapter Notes
- I'll be doing some new point of view stuff with this, tell me if you enjoy it. We'll certainly be seeing some new faces take the narrative hotseat
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