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Chapter 33 - Time Enough For A Cat -
- Victoria II 2: Dig Greedily, and Dig Deep -[]
Staying Calm Under Pressure[]
Dropship Argo
Cargo Trunks
Victoria, Geosynchronous Orbit
Capellan Confederation
January 10th, 3029
Perspective of Sergeant Julia Nearer-Be-Thou-To-God, 5th Adelherwin Ducal Guard, 2nd Battalion, Foxtrot Company
Standing in formation in the trunk, I looked over my squad and the rest of the platoon with a weather eye. Everyone was dressed to the nines in their Sableye PA(L) suits, everyone's machine guns were polished, and rifles were slung at the shoulder just like they were supposed to be. Excellent. Everyone's duffles were full, and we looked almost like a squadron of robots waiting to board the dropper.
"Hey, Sarge," Moloch, one of my less reverent troopers, asked quietly. "What's the plan for when we get there?"
"Probably holding down the drop site," I replied, checking to make sure the lens on my chest for the Sableye's thermal imager was clear. "We're deploying by Leopard, not by Union, so we don't need to worry about riding vics at least."
At that moment, the light over our heads turned red, and with a practiced motion we all took a half-turn right and two steps into the side of the trunk. Past us, a massive flatbed rolled past, its hazard lights flashing as several pallets of material sat in the bed. Once it was past, the overhead light turned green, and the line shuffled forward into the Leopard that had just finished docking. At the end of the trunk, there was a little rope leading into the Leopard- we'd each grab on, and pull ourselves hand-over-hand to get in. From there, we filed into the dropseat filled bays, throwing our bags between our knees and buckling in.
Everyone had practiced this, moving from Ichlangis to the space station and back, but now it was different. Now, it was dropping into a warzone in a brick not even two thousand tons soaking wet, crammed in with the rest of 2nd Battalion.
Just breathe, Julia. We were going in with a plan.
"2nd Battalion, this is Major Loosvelt," our commanding officer's voice came over the intercom. "We've been tasked with securing the town of Nanjiangkou, which will be serving as our primary railhead. While we've successfully secured the surface of the town with 1st Battalion, but we need to access and secure the underworks in order to control the train line. Echo Company will be doing site security, relieving 1st Battalion, while Foxtrot and Golf begin securing the town. Hotel will be acting as reserves and rotating in as needed. Captains and Lieutenants, brief your troops as needed. Battalion command out."
Running and Gunning[]
When we got to the surface of Victoria, my first thought was of Caina. The air was biting cold, and the sun wasn't yet fully up; leaving the white-and-gray mottled gravel and sand around the tarmac casting deep shadows. In the distance, the plateau the artillery regiment had posted up on was clearly visible, it's shadow a sundial indicating the time until darkness swept this little landing strip.
Of course, poetry could wait, as my suit pinged with a temperature warning. Locking in my rebreather and slamming the faceplate down, I checked the status on everyone else through the tooltip bars in my HUD. "Alright people, let's move!" I snapped, herding my idiots off the tarmac and towards the waiting trucks. Fortunately, they were still following me. Very fortunately, because none of them could read.
Before anyone asked: yes. I had been made a sergeant explicitly because I could read. After all, since I could read, that meant I could read manuals. Once I could read manuals, I could teach people to take care of their kit, and sign paperwork, and ten thousand other things. I might not have been good at it, but I was getting better fast enough that I'd passed the book test to get into the Battle Armor regiments… when a slot opened up. Until then, I was down here in PA(L) herding morons.
"Everyone in the truck," I directed, slapping the back of one marked for 5/2 Adelherwin. Once we were all in, it was off across the rocky desert.
It was almost an hour to Nanjiangkou, with nothing to do but stare out the sides of the canvass-cover truck and talk to the boys- and only one of the boys felt like talking.
"Hey, Sarge," Jezebel (yes, really) asked, looking over the thin 'learning to read' book she had carefully grasped in her vibroclaw. "What's an, uh, 'papa alpha papa alpha yankee alpha' again? It's one of the ones where the same letter doesn't make the same sound every time I think."
"Papaya," I responded. "It's a kind of fruit. Orangey, with the little black sphere seeds? Hoosier likes em."
"Oh, huh. So that's what they're called," Hoosier muttered from where he'd been trying to nap.
"Thanks. I thought it was gonna be one of those nasty ones, like Mercedes."
"No problem. You know I don't mind helping with the reading."
"Yeah, but it's nice to hear it," Jezebel said, sighing. "Are we there yet?"
"No," Moloch said with a sigh. "We get there when the truck stops."
"Yay…"
I didn't know what time it was when we finally got to Nanjiangkou, but as we got out of the truck to head over to Lt. Antiope's standard- blue and silver, quartered- I got a glimpse at the village. All I could see were a couple of bunker-like buildings, and all around were piles of vents coming from the ground like demented mushrooms.
A few hand-signals and click-codes got me to notice where the other sergeants were, and we clustered around Antiope carefully. He was chatting on a command channel, before switching to the platoon net quickly.
"Alright everyone, here's the plan," he said, tapping the side of his helmet. "We got a team of Auregian combat engineers out here to blast us a way in. Echo's gonna lead the way in, then us of Foxtrot are going to head south and try to find the main surface access ramp. Once we get to it and pop it open, we can get the APCs down into the town to help us out, while Golf fights their way through the railhead. Questions?"
Naturally, nobody had any questions. I didn't, and I knew the troopers were allergic to asking anything- it wasn't long ago that a nobleman could beat a commoner, and officers were just very small noblemen who hadn't been trusted to tie their own shoes yet. The Lady Wyrm had been changing that, but she was slow and languid until someone figured out how to wave a stack of gold under her nose- and then problems were solved in a fury of blood and lasers.
"No questions, got it. Let's go!" Antiope yelled.
Each company had four platoons, and a command squad; making one hundred people. Each platoon had four squads, three led by sergeants and one led by the lieutenant. Each squad had six troopers, one of whom was the sergeant and another who was the corporal. I had been made the sergeant on the trip over, and had made sure my new squad knew me and accepted me. The dithering thoughts didn't save me from the building that had been seized as a way to get to the underground. With practiced 'clicks' we all turned on our flashlights and uncovered our thermal imagers, and headed in.
The building itself was normal, strangely so. As our flashlights panned over abandoned desks and workstations, a stereo softly played some pop song in Russian in the distance. There were even windows- although that wasn't a good thing, with each one showing up as a blue void on our thermal imagers, and as an endless pit with our flashlight beam. Still, two stories of stairs later, and we were outside the building.
If the surface of Victoria was Caina, then this was Antenora. A false cavern, mayhaps three stories tall, full of buildings and streetlights and little footpaths. Astroturf made patches of false green between areas, while the entire area had a cold, whistling wind about it that tried to cut through our armor.
"Remember, everyone," Antiope said. "We're moving south, if you get lost hold still and just broadcast open signal. We'll find you."
If those words were meant to be reassuring, they weren't. Sticking to the left-hand side of the street like glue, I tried to make sure my squad followed their spacing rules. It was tricky, the urge to bunch up in the darkness a strong one, but I resisted and passed that down to the men and women under me. Antiope was taking point, the fool.
I don't know when I saw it, but the moment I realized our path was blocked by a barricade, I stopped my squad dead. "Lieutenant, this smells like a trap."
"It's an improvised barricade," Antiope said stiffly. "Mallory, get your demo packs out. Julia, overwatch us."
"Yessir."
This was a bad plan. Nobody just built a barricade and then didn't defend it. That didn't make sense! Barricades were to shape the battlefield, so this was a battlefield, it just wasn't one with shooting yet-
-behind me, a burst of rifle fire started shooting out windows. I nearly jumped, turning to look at the offender- Moloch.
"What was that for?" I snapped.
"Couldn't see shit," he explained, before frowning. "Wait- fourth floor, seventh window from right. Does that look warm to you?"
"Yeah," I muttered, as a faint plume of something warm wafted out and up from the window. "Lieutenant! Across the street!"
"One more minute!" Antiope called back.
Antiope's minute lasted eight seconds, and ended with the sounds of Capellan machine-gun fire raking the back of his squad. Moloch's suspicions were proven correct- there were people hiding in that building, and if my guts were right we were about to get pinned in an L-shaped ambush.
"Into the building!" I snapped, spraying my machine gun at the door as I charged in. "Move move move!"
Getting to the door, I barreled through it with my shoulder, before clenching the 'deploy' lever in my left glove's vibroblade. I was in a Sableye, rifles didn't scare me. Back in training, we'd gotten locked into our suits and liberally sprayed down by rifle-fire multiple times to train us out of the flinch reflexes. Some guy with a kalash wasn't scary anymore- he was just a vibroblade target in the future tense.
Speaking of- four dudes, tight cluster, by the stairs. Jerking my chin up to align my machine gun's targeting receptacle with them, I let rip with a short spray. Now that I was in the lobby of what looked like a bank, I had time to move slower, and take things more carefully with the rest of the squad filing in behind me. That staircase was a good first place to go- Jezebel and Hoosier went up first, while I took the time to snap a rifle grenade onto my near-useless rifle. Why we were expected to be able to use a rifle and a machine gun together, I'll never know. Either way, I was ready to roll- and a quick go-code through my helmet got the squad moving.
As we rolled up the stairs, brief spatters of rifle fire sounded out from the leading pair, catching troops and what I hoped were partisans from their lack of uniforms in the backs and sides. They didn't know we were coming yet, as Hoosier kicked open the door to a floor we could hear machine-gun fire coming from.
Or, we thought they didn't know we were coming, as a SRM slammed out of the now-open door and into Hoosier. The HEAT warhead exploded with a flash, knifing through his Sableye and throwing him back over the railing of the stairs. Jezebel didn't hesitate, though, spraying rifle fire through the hole while Carsen ran through it. He was a quiet boy, barely old enough to have been conscripted, but as his vibroclaw ripped through the shooter I knew age was just a number. We were all killers here, and Moloch followed him to provide cover.
"Hoosier, status!" I snapped.
"Fall toasted my actuators, Sarge!" he snapped back. "That SRM blew out my front plate, too! The suit's toast, I'm fine!"
"Stay down their and keep follow-on forces out then," I ordered. "We're breaking the limb of the ambush."
"Got it!"
With that, I was in the room, scanning. Nothing. No targets. "Antiope?" I called out on the radio. "Come in, Antiope?"
Wearily, a voice got back to me. "Antiope got whacked, this is Staff Sergeant Groom. Half my squad's dead, and the fucking roadblock is still here."
"Groom, this is Sergeant Julia," I said, avoiding my hellacious last name. "I think we can get through the bank and around the roadblock."
"Good, because we're seeing a large thermal signature moving around from the fumes its putting up."
"Groom, Julia, this is Murad," the last unnamed member of my unit said. "I've got visual on it, looks like a Striker."
"Shit," I growled. "Everyone, away from the windows-"
I was too late, as a volley of LRMs hit the building. None of us were hurt, but that salvo had opened up our concrete cover- and the next shot that was inbound were SRMs that landed and bloomed into wreathing sheets of fire. Infernos!
It was every man for himself as we frantically tried to get out of the burn zone, another wave of missiles splashing in to try and cook us alive. We nearly all made it, too- except Murad tripped, and got caught under a rain of the hellbrew of napalm. We could, theoretically, withstand a direct hit from an Inferno if our armor wasn't compromised.
His was- some random bullets, a little shrapnel, just enough room for the fire to slip in. My ventilator kept me from the smell, but as his icon in my HUD shifted from red to black I knew he was gone. Nothing to do for him now.
Piling out the back of the bank into some service alley, we frantically ran down it, through some hasty barricades and smack into the edge of this town's little cavern.
"Left or right?" Carsen asked, voice tense.
My thoughts went back to the Striker. "Right," I decided, and we moved. Naturally, our luck ran out, as we stumbled right into a mess of tents and soldiers- about a company's worth, if I had to make my guess.
Well. That was one way to find the enemy headquarters. "Light 'em up!" I snapped, firing my rifle grenade straight into a tent, where it exploded with a massive bang. After that, it was five machine guns spraying into the area, and hoping against hope the shock of us hitting them would keep them suppressed.
A random burst of small laser fire that ripped Jezebel in half as it burned through her hip actuator and left what was left screaming into her helmet answered that hope with despair. "Back, back!" I snapped, trying to get us away. It wasn't enough, as Hoosier got his last bit of life punched by a spray of machine-gun fire.
"Run!"
I don't know who said it, but we all did it. We'd kicked the hornets nest, and hot on our heels was a hell of a lot of infantry- who, hopefully, had left their heavy weapons home. "Into the store, quick!" I snapped, cutting through a door and guiding Moloch and Carsen in. They'd know we were hiding here, but it would chokepoint them for a minute. A critical one, as I changed the belt in my machine gun and reloaded my rifle.
The first squad that kicked in the door got mulched, but the second was smart enough to throw grenades in to try and soften us up. Grabbing Moloch and Carsen, I just dragged them for the back, the grenades wrecking havoc and sending more junk flying about the store to mask our escape.
That pattern repeated itself, again and again. We'd hide somewhere- a store, some back-street garbage pile, behind dumpsters and skips, even once in the burned-out wreckage of a tank. A squad of soldiers would come out, and get gunned down with machine-gun fire. The rest of the platoon would harry us out with grenades and blind fire from heavy weapons, the odd SRM notwithstanding. Still, we were making our way north when my time ran out. Someone had a sniper rifle and was in the right place at the right time to put a half-inch of carbide penetrator into my hip assembly, blowing clean through my armor and me.
Once the mandatory cursing was done and the auto-injector hit me up with morphine, I winced. This was- this was bad.
"Shit, sarge, we gotta help!" Moloch snapped. "Where's your medkit?"
"Shoulder pocket," I replied, barely senate through the pain shock. "Just… hide me… run north…"
"This dumpster should do," Carsen muttered, opening it to reveal a few trashcans. "On three, Moloch."
Lifting me up, the two hucked all four hundred kilos of me in, before shutting the door. "I hope you make it, boss," Moloch said. "Time to run."
"Good luck," I called back, before keying off my radio and digging around in the medkit. Grabbing the injectable bandage, I manually keyed in my armor's lock system to hold me still, and got out a spent casing that'd lodged in my elbow a while ago to put between my teeth. This was going to hurt.
Once I put the injector in and pulled, the pain spasm nearly knocked me into the side of the dumpster, and did knock me out cold. I don't remember anything after that.
Like How their Handing things in the Field[]
Dropship Argo
CIC Annex
Victoria, Geosynch Orbit
Capellan Confederation
January 10th, 3029
Perspective of Lt. Gen. Tam Gallowglass
Yawning, I watched the status reports tick around as every company and battalion sent composite reports to the wall of desks that made up the real brains of the CIC, who then collimated it into happy little charts for me to stare at and wonder how much the green bars lied.
Sucking down the last of my coffee, I sighed. "Adjunct, do we have more coffee?"
"No, sir," my adjunct said, sighing. "It's still brewing. Just like last time you asked."
"Good god, can't we make that thing go any faster?" I wondered.
"No, Sir, it's a Star League relic."
"No wonder they set the Inner Sphere on fire when they died," I groaned. "Everyone finally got a good cup of joe to fuel their ambition, and then fwoosh! Like gasoline on a match."
That earned me a snort at least. "If you think so, sir."
Suddenly, one of the green lines turned orange, then red. "CIC, who's on 5th Adelherwin Foot?" I asked openly, before hitting the manual refresh button on the holotable to find them. "I'm pretty sure a unit shouldn't be hitting redline on combat effectiveness while still in the green for manning."
Holotable
"Sir, I can get that," someone called out from their console through the phones. Man, I loved having headphones for my cat-ears here. "They were supposed to use a battalion to take Nanjiangkou, but it ended up sucking up the entire regiment. They're exhausted, sir, and took a lot of junior officer casualties, so they're disorganized too. I recommend a three day downcycle to repair gear and reorg."
"I'll do what I can, but we're still landing troops," I replied, sighing. "Only ten percent casualties, though?"
"Reading through the reports, sir, it seemed most squads got caught in ambushes that generated a casualty two in three times, then they pulled back and scoured the area. There's a few outliers, like the one that hit a battalion command center and opened up the west frontage, but it's been pretty reliably units getting whacked in the face and opening up."
"A unit got to an HQ?"
"Some very lost soldiers did, yes, Sir. They're all being ported up to the Argo's medical bays now."
"Good to know, thank you. You're dismissed to station, and I'll need to hand out medals for that sort of bravery."
With that done, I turned to my adjunct carefully. "Mark down whoever's on the 5th Adelherwin, and greenlight them for promotion. They did good."
"Yes, sir. Also, the coffee is done."
I smiled. "Excellent. C'mon, we've got to go get some before Mersies finds out where I hid her two liter coffee jug."
"Of course, sir."
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