The War for Profit Series Omnibus

by Gideon Fleisher

  Galen said, “Thank you for your astute observations. The reason I called you all here is to announce our movement. Flight and a few other supporting activities will remain here, but the bulk of this task force will move to the town of Cherry Fork. It is a small city located northeast of the mountain range. It is equipped with a space port and has a medium space shield. The space guns nearby are in a position to harass a Mosh landing, and it also sits astride several key junctures of road, rail and river transport. Eventually, the Mosh will have to seize that town or else pack up and go back where they came from. But our initial mission there is not defense.

  “From Cherry Fork, we’ll be in a position to attack the flank of the Mosh during their initial breakout through the mountains east of the Skeleton desert. I do know the Mandarins have three armored divisions prepared to attack into that desert and I hope they do well. My heart goes out to them. But in all seriousness, I doubt they’ll do much more than delay the Mosh by a few days. They’ll be beyond the reach of friendly air support and the Mosh space fleet will be able to target them directly. Not an enviable position.”

  The Stallion Battalion commander said, “Where are these Mandarin armored divisions and under what circumstance will they be committed to attack into the Skeleton desert?”

  Galen said, “They are held in reserve, parked eighty kilometers southeast of Cherry Fork. They will move only when ordered to by the Supreme Commander, the order sent directly from the High Command to the commander of that armored corps. So to answer your thinly veiled question, no, you can not spearhead that attack and no, you can’t even move in to cover their withdrawal. No. We are separate from all that. Independent.”

  “Yessir.” The Stallion Battalion commander leaned back in his chair.

  The fires support officer said, “Then what is our overall operational mandate?”

  Galen said, “Mobile defense. We’ll look for opportunities to inflict casualties on the enemy while conserving our forces. Holding the line is not our problem. That’s for the Mandarin regulars. We have the authority to maneuver independently and conduct our own offensive operations without approval from the High Command. Our contract is with the office of the Chancellor of the governing body of Mandarin, the legislature. If the High Command asks me nicely to help them out with something, and it doesn’t interfere with our obligations to the Chancellor, then sure, we might get involved in joint operations with their government troops. However, we won’t be tossed out there as speed bumps by leaders who are focused on strategic matters and don’t possess our high degree of tactical expertise. Any more questions?”

  “Certainly,” said a Marine Rifle Battalion commander. “Will we have a chance to fight?”

  Galen smiled. “Yes you will. But be patient. It’s my job to get you into battles you can win. I have faced the Mosh before and I know how to hurt them. I promise all of you this: you will come out of this with considerable bragging rights. What I can’t promise any of you is an overall victory by Mandarin over the Mosh. I can win battles, not wars.”

  Colonel Baek said, “We have an extraction plan but it only works if we do enough damage to the Mosh. Let them know they’ve been in a fight, let them know they are better off letting us go when the time comes. So we are not fighting for nothing. Weaken the Mosh enough now and it goes a long way toward convincing the Confederation to return and re-take this planet.”

  Galen said, “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s a war right in front of us and we are eager to get down to some serious fighting. I understand that, I understand that is why you Marines put yourselves along side my mercenaries. Our next step is our move to Cherry Fork. Movement will commence tomorrow night and I expect us to be camped out near Cherry Fork by the end of this week.”

  Colonel Baek stood. “Dismissed.”

  The leaders left the conference room. Galen went to his office and sat at his desk and brought up schematics of Mosh armored vehicles. He knew them by heart but just liked refreshing his memory. Then his personal communicator buzzed a message from flight ops, “Your drop ship is here.”

  Galen sent back, “Be right there.”

  Galen left by the commander’s entrance and walked across the quadrangle to the pedestrian gate of the marshalling yard and made his way past all the Capellan Marine vehicles parked in it. He stepped through the vehicle gate onto the tarmac, looked both ways, removed his head gear and walked quickly across it. His command drop ship was parked at the base of the auxiliary control tower with its cargo ramp lowered. Galen walked up the ramp and was met by the co-pilot.

  He saluted, “Sir, you’re going to like this.” He pointed at the tank inside. Corporal Wine and Trooper Bier were there, unhooking the tie-downs.

  It was a new tank design, a stolid boxy body over wide, skirted tracks and a domed turret that sloped out to a sharp edge at the gun mantle. Galen said, “What’s the deal?”

  “After we flew to Juventud to drop off noncombatants, we swung by Fairgotten and paid General Sevin a visit, to drop off Pescador and his secret cargo. General Sevin insisted we take this tank on board. It’s for you, a new command tank.” The co-pilot handed Galen a data stick. “Operator’s manual is on here.”

  Galen inserted the data stick into his communicator. The Lion Main Battle Tank, command variant. Galen climbed up over the glacis plate and onto the turret and took his place in the commander’s cupola. Not a cupola really, but a weapons station in a rotating ring recessed into the turret. He sat, consulted the operator’s manual. A wide array of comms and countermeasure gear, advanced optics and sensors. Galen advanced the page and his jaw dropped. The main gun was a class three particle cannon. He put on the comms helmet and hooked up its cord and waited. He heard the sound of Bier and Wine hooking up. The co-pilot ground-guided the tank off the drop boat. Galen said, “Take us to the range, driver. We need to familiarize with this new piece of equipment.”

  Then he keyed comms. “Jasmine Three, this is Jasmine Six, over.”

  It took a minute for Tad to respond. “This is Jasmine Three, over.”

  “Three, I just got a new tank. I need to familiarize. Is there a range open?”

  A long pause. “Table eight is all yours. Have fun.”

  “Oh, I will. Six out.”

  Major Polar and Captain Day stood near the vehicle exit gate of the marshalling yard and watched the Lion tank roll by. They waved, appropriate behavior since they were dressed in civilian clothes. Skimpy outfits really, but Galen wasn’t about to complain. It was a warm day, after all. Galen and his crew rolled past the HQ buildings, past the barracks and motor pools, along the tank trail past the compound’s back gate, onto the gravel road that led out to table eight. A convoy of Hercules tanks passed them going the opposite way, having just concluded their qualification run.

  At the entrance to the range the range control representative climbed up on the Lion tank and gave Galen a task, conditions and standards statement and told Galen to go on through. They entered a narrow gap at the base of two hills and engaged dismount pop-up targets with the coax and cupola rail guns. They moved forward and drove across a three meter trench, up a steep hill and stopped on top to engage targets fifteen kilometers away with the main gun. The first shot from the particle cannon vaporized the target silhouette and blew deep into the small hill behind it. A moment later the superheated material of the hill vaporized and came out the top as a blast of material that was so hot it ignited into a fireball two hundred meters across. The dust cloud rose up and began to take on a mushroom shape.

  “Jasmine Six this is Range Control. Check fire, check fire. This range is not adequate up for that weapon. Power down your weapons and exit the range now.”

  “Roger. Jasmine Six out.”

  Corporal Wine said, “That’s a nice gun.”

  Galen said, “Wine, you think you can control it?”

  “Yessir. I pity the fool who gets in front of me.”

  “As do I. We’ll park this thing right in fron
t of HQ, facing out from the main entrance.”

  “Yessir,” said Bier.

  Galen said, “Bier, this tank okay with you?”

  “It’s a little slow on acceleration and the controls are a bit sluggish but I can make it work.”

  “I have absolute confidence in your abilities.”

  Bier said, “I do like this tank better than the Hercules, sir.”

  “Me too,” said Galen.

  Chapter Seven

  Galen stood on top of his Lion tank and studied the eastern skyline as it brightened a few minutes before sunrise. The clouds were gone and it seemed a bit chilly for mid summer. The thick, humid air clawed at his skin where it was exposed. He looked around at the encampment of his task force. Most was lost in the morning haze, separate camps set up in different areas to make the best use of the terrain for concealment. The entire task force was larger than what most professionals would call a division. Big, certainly, but the Mandarin military had mobilized more than a hundred and fifty four divisions and the Mosh were estimated to have more than three hundred division-size units. It would be a long fight.

  The small city of Cherry Fork was to his north, on his left as he looked around. Crew shelters and vehicles spread out, a hundred meters between them. Hard to discern under their camouflage netting, the units didn’t show on sensors. Shielded from detection and powered down to standby mode, they were quiet. And the Capellan Marine infantry, detecting them would mean getting close enough to touch them.

  The temporary air field was just a long patch of grass, the Marine assault boats parked at its end, camouflaged and powered down. Galen climbed down off his tank and went to the chuck wagon for a plate of bacon and a cup of hot chocolate. He carried his food into the extension of the Brigade ops track and sat next to Tad. “Morning.”

  “It is.” Tad drank the last of his cocoa and got up and tossed his chow residue in the bag tied to the frame support by the vestibule. He sat back down and said, “It’s looking like the Mosh might land today.”

  Galen said, “Really? After two weeks of nothing, I thought maybe they planned to bore us to death.”

  Tad laughed. “I wish. Time is on our side. We have a whole planet to sustain us indefinitely. The Mandarin stealth boats have the Mosh cut off from their jump point. They need to get this show on the road or they’ll be the ones getting bored to death. Literally.”

  Galen pointed at the battle screen. “What’s that?”

  “The Mosh fleet, coming around the gas giant. Zoomed in on them, the big gray planet is off-screen. But it’s real-time.”

  “And there?”

  Tad said, “That string of fuzzy crap is a flight of bombers. It think it’s all of them, coming in to pound the defenses to the east of the Skeleton Desert.”

  “A big ball-shaped ship came forward of their fleet.”

  Tad said, “Yep. Their battleship.”

  Galen stared. “That’s huge.”

  “Not for long.” Tad zoomed out. The big, gray gas giant planet filled the upper right corner of the screen. “The Mandarin space force is moving to coordinate its attack with their ground-based space guns.”

  Major Koa came in through the vestibule and said, “You all watching the fight?”

  Galen said, “Damn right. Pull up a chair.”

  Koa sat next to Tad and watched the screen. Tad’s comms Chief took his place at the display controller table and searched for feeds from various sensors. Satellites, probes, war ships and fighters. Whatever he could hack.

  The screen showed a Mandarin fleet, a large group of about two hundred space fighters in formation with nine destroyers and a line of sleek, aerodynamic craft behind them. Galen pointed and said, “Interceptors?”

  “Yup,” said Tad.

  “Not any of ours, I hope.”

  “No,” said Koa. “Mandarin has some. About fifty. I think that’s half of them.”

  Galen shrugged. “They should save them for later, to support the ground war.”

  The Mandarin spacecraft stopped, changed formation. A portion of the Mosh fleet moved ahead of the rest, the spherical battleship and two dozen egg-shaped light cruisers, with a dozen boxy-looking space fighters as escorts. The bombers that were making their way toward the planet had an escort of fighters that outnumbered the bombers two to one.

  Laser and particle cannons on the surface of Mandarin fired at the Mosh fleet, the beams hitting the shield of the battleship. The bubble of shielding that protected the ship from energy weapons shimmered and exposed its egg-like shape. Tad said, “That’s some serious shielding to take hits like that.”

  Koa said, “The Mandarin guns are firing through the atmosphere at an acute angle. They have to burn through a lot of air before they get to their target, which cuts their effectiveness by at least eighty percent. Let that battleship get straight overhead and the gun fire jumps to ninety five percent effectiveness.”

  Galen said, “Why are they going after the battleship?”

  Tad shrugged. “Morale?”

  The Mandarin fighters darted ahead and fired on the battleship, ignoring the other craft. A full third of the fighters were picked off by defensive fires from the Mosh, with the one dozen Mosh fighters in pursuit as they ran out and turned back toward the battleship for a second run. The ground fire sent another volley at the battleship and the Mandarin destroyers fired as well, the shield of the battleship shrinking; finally its shields collapsed. Laser and particle gun beams tore at its hull. Ground lasers cut into it with sustained beams while blasts of laser bolts from the destroyers punched holes. Particle cannon shots made bright green splashes on the hull of the battleship.

  The return fires of the battleship tore through one Mandarin destroyer after the other, each in turn, slowly and methodically. The Mosh light cruisers and fighters were picking off the Mandarin fighters. Less than half remained. The last of the Mandarin destroyers burst apart.

  Then the Mandarin interceptors made a run on the battleship, targeting its flank. The battleship rolled to expose fresh hull to the attacking interceptors, but the Interceptors kept up with the rotation and poured twenty millimeter rail gun fire into the hull breaches. The last interceptor launched a bomb into a hull breach and peeled off at top speed. The other six surviving interceptors followed. The Mosh battle ship shuddered and its rear third split apart from its forward section. The rear part bulged and then burst. The forward section began to tumble slowly, end over end.

  The surviving Mandarin space fighters and interceptors fled to link up with the main body of the Mandarin fleet, safely waiting on the other side of the planet Mandarin. Eight Mandarin stealth boats suddenly appeared, their images shimmering into solidity behind each of the Mosh light cruisers. The stealth boats fired, the Mosh light cruisers vented atmosphere and their escape pods popped out. The stealth boats shimmered out of view. The forward Mosh group was now just four fighters and one light cruiser. They moved back to join their main fleet.

  Galen said, “Well, they got what they wanted. They took out that battleship.”

  Koa said, “Brilliantly suicidal.”

  Galen smiled and said, “I think I get it! The battleship could detect their stealth boats, so they had to get rid of it first.”

  Tad nodded, pointed at the screen. “The Mosh bombers are moving down.”

  The space-fighter escorts turned away. The Mosh bombers spread out in eight V formations of twelve bombers each. They turned nose down and dove into the atmosphere right above the skeleton desert. They leveled off at fifteen hundred meters altitude and slowed to below the speed of sound. The V formations lined up side to side and then the Vs straightened. The bombers approached the mountains in a long, ragged line and gradually came closer to the ground. They flew independently now, each with its own specific target. Ground fire from the mountains met them, disabled a couple. But the bombers struck their targets, the hardened positions of the Mandarin defenders.

  Jasmine Panzer Brigade interceptors met the bombers
head-on, each of the twenty four interceptors destroying a bomber. The bombers pointed their noses straight up and accelerated, left the atmosphere. The Interceptors returned to their base.

  Thirty Mosh heavy cruisers moved into position and bombarded the mountain range. They dropped their shields to fire their particle cannons, ignored the return fire from the Mandarin space guns of Cherry Fork. The ground-based laser and particle cannons managed to damage most of the heavy cruisers, destroyed two of them. One drifted gradually, the other fell into the atmosphere and became a ball of flame that broke apart into thousands of smaller bits of flaming debris. The Mosh heavy cruisers withdrew while Mosh landing boats dropped in to fly across the Southwestern Sea, came in low and fast to land on the Skeleton Desert.

  Galen said, “That answers that question.”

  Tad said, “What question?”

  Galen said, “Where they’ll land. They landed toward the southern end of the desert. High Command thought they’d land in the north end.”

  Tad said, “The defenses aren’t as strong in the south and it’ll take longer for the Mandarin armor to counterattack.”

  The defenders in the mountains still made a fight of it. They managed to destroy some landing boats before they got on the ground, spewed grazing fire across the desert at extreme range. The Mosh were able to disgorge from their landing boats and organize under direct fire, their greater numbers overwhelming. Soon they had armored vehicles in position to return fire. Over the next hour, fires from Mandarin defenders were met by Mosh tank fire. The Mosh maneuvered up to the mountains and destroyed the defensive positions, cleared out any resistance that could fire on the desert.