All Enemies Foreign and Domestic (Kelly Blake series)

by Smith, Rodney

  * * * * *

  Major Ronald Moore, executive officer for 3rd Battalion, 23rd Infantry of 3rd Brigade, 68th Mechanized Infantry Division, was no stickler for discipline and it was reflected in how his soldiers were sleeping. Most were sleeping next to their vehicles on the open ground, in hopes of a breeze. On this hot muggy night, the vehicles were parked haphazardly, as they had arrived well after dark, due to Major Moore’s map reading skills.

  The battalion supply officer, Captain John Hammett, tried to correct the situation, but Major Moore told him, “The troops are tired. Let them sleep and we’ll make a fresh go at it in the morning.”

  Captain Hammett argued, “Sir, it’s better to be tired and alive rather than rested and dead,” but the Major threatened him with a charge of insubordination if he persisted. Captain Hammett retreated to his transporter and got it squared away, rotating a soldier on the main machine gun and commo watch overnight. He had his soldiers sleep behind the transporter just outside the rear ramp. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was an improvement. He lay awake for a long time, with a feeling of impending disaster.

  The only other leader with any sense of how things should be done was Sergeant First Class Penny Benson, platoon sergeant of the commo platoon. Her people were going to be right and even the Major didn’t mess with her. Her three vehicles were tactically parked facing away from the barrier wall and her people slept between the vehicles. One person on shift was in the main hatch of the center vehicle, manning the machine gun and maintaining watch.

  One other thing the Major had no appreciation for was standing to before dawn. He always thought it foolish, for in his experience the enemy never attacked at dawn. Besides, waking the troops up early made them not like him and that was most important to him, for he felt if they thought of him as their friend, they would work harder for him. He was asleep when a hidden hatch a half block away in an alleyway popped open and 100 shock troops of the 3400 to follow arose out of the ground, scurried around the corner, and attacked the mostly sleeping compound.

  They were over the barrier wall and among them before the gunner in the commo transporter realized what was happening and opened fire. By then, twenty soldiers scattered about in their sleeping bags would never wake up again. The yelling and staccato chatter of the machine gun got everyone up on their feet, some in uniform and weapons at the ready, others in their skivvies or less scrambling to locate their weapons, only to be broken in half in the mandibles of an elite soldier T’Kab. Resistance to the attack was slow to form up. The machine guns on Sergeant First Class Benson’s three tracks and Captain Hammett’s transport were doing a good job of holding back other T’Kab from scaling the wall, but nothing about those inside the compound that were extracting a terrible toll on the troops.

  Captain Hammett and four others dismounted from the transport and counterattacked to the northwest corner of the compound, where several soldiers were besieged, but fighting back. They shot the seven T’Kab that were forcing the soldiers into the corner and added them to his counterattack force. Hammett’s twelve soldiers then swept around the compound with the supply and commo machine guns firing over their heads, killing the T’Kab soldiers as they came upon them in the predawn gloom. Captain Hammett found Major Moore’s mangled body still in his sleeping bag.

  When they had cleared the traffic control point of T’Kab, Captain Hammett organized the fires onto the 3,000 or more T’Kab still coming at them. He got all the machine guns firing to hold the swarm at bay, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up without fire support or reinforcements. He entered fire missions to break up the advancing swarm out beyond the range where machine guns were effective. The battalion mortars first serviced this mission. Plasma rounds landed in the massed T’Kab formation, blasting large holes in the advancing swarm. It made a small difference in the pressure put on them by the front line. Soldiers tossed grenades over the wall to convince the T’Kab to go around and not try to come into the compound, but the grenades only killed a few at a time.

  Captain Hammett requested bombardment support, giving the precedence codeword for “about to be overrun.” 5th Corps artillery from outside the city fired in support, as did guns from the brigade and division, but even with that support the T’Kab found a weak spot in the wall, pushed it over, and were in among them once again. This time the T’Kab got lucky and separated the dismounted soldiers from the protection of their transports. Realizing their advantage, the T’Kab turned on the unprotected troops, including Captain Hammett, and literally crushed them with the weight of their attack.

  This left Sergeant First Class Benson’s seven remaining commo soldiers, and one or two soldiers in each of the seven other transporters, as the total combat force. Groups of 20 to 30 T’Kab went up to each vehicle and systematically rolled them onto their roofs, except for the commo platoon vehicles, which were parked close enough together to make it impossible to flip them. The T’Kab silenced the machine guns by ripping them out of their mounts and left a few soldiers to guard them. The rest moved on to the next traffic control point.

  * * * * *

  2nd Lieutenant Karen Christopher, Platoon Leader for 2nd Platoon, C Company, 3rd Battalion, 58th Infantry Regiment, of 1st Brigade, 68th Mechanized Infantry Division, was bored. Her thirty-five soldiers manned a roadblock in the southwest corner of the city at the intersection of SW and 7th Street, at least on the grid pattern printed on her pocket tablet’s map. Despite their griping, she kept two of her five transporter commanders in their vehicle’s turrets, scanning for activity. Her track was in the center of the roadblock.

  The three squad leaders and their six infantrymen manned the roadblock on a rotating seven-hour schedule. The special weapons squad emplaced their three combo machine guns at 120 degrees around the perimeters. The Yestepkin combo gun could fire anti-personnel, anti-tank, and high explosive rounds with the twist of a selector knob. A small energy cell could be recharged in 15 minutes and provided 1,000 AP or AT rounds or 300 HP rounds.

  Each transporter was equipped with a medium caliber Yestepkin gun, capable of firing a medium circular beam of two-meter diameter out to 3000 meters. A medium machine gun in the turret was sighted the same as the main gun. A missile launcher was mounted on the rear of the turret, with a missile in the tube and three ready missiles stored in the transporter. The missiles could be fired out to 10,000 meters against armored vehicles or aircraft in a fire and forget mode. Once the target was locked in the scope, it could not evade the missile.

  Lieutenant Christopher had just awakened, when her on-shift squad leader came over called stand to. She pulled on her gear and made a quick tour of the roadblock when she heard it – a metal clank followed by a sound like wind through rustling leaves. On instinct, she had her closest transport commander slew his turret toward the source of the sound.

  She heard him say, “Holy crud! Ma’am, get everyone inside. Bugs! Hundreds of them coming this way.”

  She yelled, “Everyone mount up, now! Get in and button up!”

  All transporters started up and the back ramps closed. She told the gunner to open up on the column of T’Kab coming at them. She had her own transporter fire in support of the 2nd squad transporter she was currently sheltering in. The other squad transporters were forward of their positions, but fired in support of 2nd squad if they had the angle on it.

  Karen called her company commander, who told her it was happening all over the company area. He said the battalion net was filled with similar reports and the advice was to button up and kill as many T’Kab as they could. Several roadblocks were caught in the open and it was not pretty.

  She directed the transporter gunner to find the source of all the bugs. He searched down the street in the direction from which they came and could see where they were boiling up from out of the ground.

  “Got it, ma’am,” he said.

  She patted him on the back. “Put a missile in the hole.” In a heartbeat, a missile was on its way. The gun
ner punched the wire-guided button and took control of the missile. He had the missile climb and then dove it down into the mass of bugs. The second missile exploded in the mouth of the open maintenance access panel and collapsed the tunnel on those coming up from below. The flow of T’Kab ceased and the squad transporters killed all the T’Kab within a 300-meter circle.

  * * * * *

  A T’Kab rushed up to the swarm’s T’Kab queen commander, rubbed antennae with her, and passed her the time code for the attack. She led her soldiers and workers up the tunnel access point and waited near the top, ready to go. When the time hit, she pushed open the hatch. The soldiers surged past her into the early morning dark. The biped mini fortress just down the street was their first target. Her soldiers formed up on the march and advanced with killing in their hearts.

  The fire from the bipeds was withering and stymied the T’Kab advance. More soldiers were dying from the effective fire than were coming up from below. A brief lull in the fire gave them a chance to push up more soldiers. The queen stood over the hole, encouraging soldiers to move faster, when the first missile hit the opening. The queen and several score soldiers died in the missile strike. The second missile collapsed the opening on those below working their way up, sealing the tunnel.

  * * * * *

  Captain Lewis Dane was not so lucky at the intersection of L and 17th street. The hatch popped open in the middle of his roadblock. He had just enough time to warn his soldiers before he was crushed in the mandibles of one of the first soldiers to rise up out of the ground. Sergeant Amy Furst was lucky enough to be in her transport’s turret when the T’Kab emerged. She slewed the turret to the opening and fired high caliber charge after high caliber charge into the hatch, until she piled so many T’Kab soldier bodies in the tunnel that others below were unable to crawl up through them. She jumped out, struggled with the hatch, finally pushing it closed. She then had her driver park her transport on top of it. She took charge of her position, all her seniors having been killed in the initial assault, and beat back seven more assaults, with no more loss of life. After the battle, she was awarded the Silver Galaxy with Battle Star.

  * * * * *

  One queen came up in the central square with her 3500 soldier swarm, and was immediately cut to pieces by the combined fire of both division command posts. None of the 3500 soldiers made it to the wire surrounding the two headquarters. As the system’s star got higher in the sky, AG-122s and the Marine AG-155s roamed the city streets, cutting up large groups of T’Kab searching for fresh targets or desecrating bodies in overcome roadblocks.

  The AG-155, with its quadruple heavy Yestepkin machine guns in the nose, was better for strafing runs, until the AG-122 pilots learned to switch the tank killer gun to plasma projectiles. Three plasma projectiles fired from pop-up position could clear an entire city block in short order.

  The AG-122’s strength was in using its sensors to find open hatches to the underground barracks and dropping time delayed plasma bombs from the hover. The first such drop resulted in a crater thirty meters wide where the opening used to be and no way for the survivors below to climb out, if there were any survivors below.

  * * * * *

  Angie was ordered to send her two squadrons of A-76s to be based at the capital’s spaceport to support 5th Corps. The A-76s dropped plasma bombs on massed swarms of soldier T’Kab, predominately in the southeast quadrant, where surprise was particularly effective in the pre-dawn hours. Multiple swarms were coalescing into an unstoppable force on the ground. Roadblock after roadblock was overrun, as thousands of the T’Kab joined together to clear out the humans. After moving a division’s people and equipment out, the entire southeast quadrant was saturated with plasma bombs. Bombardment frigates in space kept up the fires, while the A-76s rearmed and reloaded. Many a traffic control point was saved from being overrun by Angie’s A-76s.

  The A-76s helped in other ways. One aviator even became an ace by shooting down a queen and her entourage as they flew away from the city to the southwest. Others acted as spotters for artillery and for bombardment ships in orbit. Some became good enough with the laser target identifier to put the bombardment plasma round into the hole. Many a T’Kab swarm was trapped below the surface with no way to find their way to the surface through the maze of concrete service tunnels. Those same tunnels blocked their ability to dig up to the surface.

  * * * * *

  By sunset on the first day, the T’Kab had taken back roughly one-third of the city. The humans had suffered 152 killed, 66 wounded seriously enough to require evacuation to one of the carriers’ medical facilities, and twelve were sent through the ring to the nearest Galactic Republic first tier world. Lieutenant General Tsien prepared a counterattack to break up the T’Kab uprising and regain the lost ground.

  The following morning, the 16th Armored Division, after moving into position overnight, assaulted westward into the city just before dawn. Their mission was to split one-third of the T’Kab from the main body in a day. It took three. There were so many T’Kab fighting to the death that they could not be killed according to the plan’s timetable.

  The 20th Armored attacked northward and split off another third of the T’Kab and had similar difficulties. The two divisions turned outward and eliminated two-thirds of the threat. They turned inward and together eliminated the remaining third. After a week, the threat in this city was eliminated. Even though the city was occupied, T’Kab worker drones and queens started returning to the city, doing their best to ignore the bipeds. By four days, enough workers and others returned to bring a semblance of T’Kab normalcy to the city. No one could determine where they had been hiding.

  * * * * *

  The behemoths returned with 30th Mobile Corps, landing them and their supplies at the spaceport to the east of the second city over a week. 30th Corps garrisoned the second city and patrolled the surrounding area. Fifth Corps and the 8th Marine Expeditionary Force continued marching along the route towards the next main city.

  With the return of the large ships, the Reserve Fleet Queen Commander had her sign. She gave the order to attack.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The five Behemoths were lined up in orbit, by pure chance, in build order. The Behemoth was first in line and Colossus was last. Commander Gibbons laughed over the rumor that no more were built because they ran out of big thing names to call them. The Colossus was last to come out of rebuild just before deployment and had the latest weaponry. It had the full suite of bombardment, anti-ship, anti-missile, and anti-fighter weaponry. The Behemoth was not as well equipped, but still had plenty of punch.

  The four carriers made broad sweeping orbits of the system’s star instead of the planet and were evenly spaced around the ecliptic. The Behemoths and the Fleet assault landing groups were in the crowded planetary orbit. Commander Gibbons left the observatory and made his way to the CIC. Now that the soldiers were gone, and they were out of corps to transport, he guessed they would be going back and picking up individual divisions if more were needed. He wondered why they were still here. They all should have gone back through the gate to free up orbit space. Between them and their escorts and the assault landing groups, there wasn’t much orbit space left.

  * * * * *

  Angie was expecting her A-76s back shortly. She felt naked without her attack craft to back up her fighters. There was always a chance a T’Kab fleet would arrive after being out of communications in FTL travel and not know the Fleet was there. If they dropped in the wrong place, it could be hazardous for both parties. She reviewed her patrol plan for tomorrow and liked what she saw. Her operations office was starting to gel. She approved the plan and was about to turn in, when she saw her first A-76s joining the pattern to land. She saw they were loaded with medium killers on their wing pylons and in their rotary launchers. The anti-ship missiles had been mistakenly delivered planetside instead of up here.

  The A-76s landed and taxied over to the ammo handling spots where the missiles
were to be offloaded and loaded into the ammo storage compartments. The surface ground crews had loaded the rounds as if it was for a strike mission instead of for transport.

  Since each A-76 could carry 12 missiles, there were 288 missiles to be offloaded, and the handling equipment was malfunctioning every hour or so ever since they loaded the latest software upgrade. The aviators shook hands with their crew chiefs and left the ships in their capable hands. After several hours and no success getting the ammo loading mechanism to work they gave up. There could be worse things than A-76s on the flight deck with live munitions ready to fire.

  * * * * *

  The queen commander waited for her ships to get in position before she gave the final order that might win the war. If she could knock down their mini-ship launching ships by 50% or more, she could have a major victory. The difficulty was in the fact that they were all spread out and surrounded by very capable escorts and a cloud of their mini-ships.

  Her destroyer/frigate group should be dropping out of FTL any second now. The task force hit their marks beautifully. They appeared at sub-light just in front of the big ships in orbit around the planet.

  * * * * *

  Alarms rang out all over the CIC and very excited people started yelling and talking over each other. Commander Gibbons realized he was the senior man in CIC and took charge.

  “AT EASE! Everyone calm down, and report one at a time in proper sequence. Defensive missiles, get ready to fire a salvo. Defensive guns, stand by.”

  He keyed his communicator and said, “Captain to the CIC.”