Conflict: The Pythan War, Invasion

by DK Williamson

  Cruz nodded, then looked at the transit gate crewman. “Frisco it is.”

  The crewman nodded. “I’ll notify the gate crew.”

  When the man left, Cruz looked at his commander with a smile. “These guys are something, sir. Hanging their asses out gathering rocks with old beat up gear, but they do it. You know they have operations with jump holes all over the rock field. I caught a glimpse of a chart, some of them are out in the partition zone.”

  White scowled, then smiled and glanced upward. “We’re at war, so it doesn’t really matter now.”

  When the gathering of ships departed, Buford led the way, the first into the transit gate and onward to the Frisco system. The jump was on the money. Buford’s navigation team quickly ascertained their position and awaited the arrival of the other vehicles.

  Coalition Space Forces were present, three Dragoon class missile carriers and accompanying forces.

  Lieutenant Alonzo’s voice buzzed in Major White’s headset. “Sir, message traffic from DMC-395 Sabine. They confirm our identity via IFF signal. They requested authentication, which I broadcast. Sabine requests coms with Commander, Buford.”

  “Patch them through.”

  “Buck? This is Colonel Briggs. Not that I’m unhappy to see you, but how the hell did you get here?”

  White smiled. He had served under Briggs twice in his time in service and considered him a mentor and friend.

  “Gerox Mining Combine jump hole, sir.” Buck keyed some commands on his console. “Pythans took Jasbar, we took it back and brought as many citizens out as we could. They’ll be dropping in shortly. Data concerning the action on its way. The Winslow was destroyed.”

  “Where do you intend on leading the civilians, Buck?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “You could leave them here, but the Pythans will be back. Prouste system is also facing attack, but if you want to get those folks clear, take them through Prouste and on to Daley, it is secure.”

  “We’ll do that, sir. What’s the situation? We’ve been out of the loop for awhile.”

  “Short version, we got caught with our drawers around our ankles and the Pythans had their way with us for awhile. We’ve stopped them for the time being. There’s been fighting in Dina, Conway, Regent, Bradshaw, Prouste, Frisco, and Dodge. Those are the disputed systems, and we’re holding for now.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice, sir.”

  “The feeling’s mutual, Buck. We’re going to need guys that are willing to put their helmet into the spine of an opponent if we want to turn this thing around.”

  Fourteen minutes after Buford arrived, Gila River, the last of the seven vehicles to jump from the Gerox station, arrived in the system.

  White looked to Master Sergeant Cruz. “Margin of error?”

  “Well under standard average margin, sir. Much better than average actually.”

  “Must be luck. A cobbled together piece of miner junk couldn’t possibly do as well as a Coalition gate costing a king’s ransom, right?”

  Cruz smiled. “Certainly, sir. Luck… yeah, gotta be.”

  Several hours later, the seven vehicles had reformed and moved into the navigation lane headed for the Prouste system.

  As they exited the lane some time later, sensors made it clear a battle raged in the system. White directed the other six ships in his group to make for the next navigation lane and head for the Daley System.

  White’s console showed him the situation: near the exit of the navigation lane that led from the Caine system was where the fight was. It had been going on for some time based on the wreckage that littered space and the somewhat ragged formations of the two forces.

  A pair of small Pythan vehicles streaked away from the fracas on a course for the navigation gate to Daley.

  “Alonzo, send to the Command and Control Vehicle that we are engaging the two Pythan patrol vehicles. Advise them of our ordnance situation and that we have civilians on board.”

  Alonzo acknowledged.

  “Blakely, give me an intercept course that will allow us to utilize our missiles and get us in mag gun range. We’ll see how hard they can hit.”

  “On it, sir,”

  “Tortelli, target one of the Pythans with the remaining missiles and stand by with mag guns.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  Buford turned to port and closed with the enemy.

  “Sir, missiles are ready. Target is lead Pythan,” Tortelli said.

  “Fire on your call. Piloting crew, stand by.”

  A few seconds later, Tortelli said, “Firing missiles.”

  Buford shuddered slightly as the last four missiles aboard leapt at the Pythans. Blakely and his crew quickly had Buford locked on course.

  White saw one of his console screens flash with data.

  “Pythans are actively scanning us, Buck,” Captain Jaeger said before Major White could look at the screen. “Deck crew is monitoring for hacking attempts.”

  White smiled briefly as he turned his attention to the tactical displays. One aspect of Jaeger’s job was to shoulder part of the command load, allowing the vehicle commander to focus on the fight. Jaeger was a solid officer and Buck was happy to have him.

  “Missiles are locked on, actively tracking,” Tortelli said. “Unless they have better defensive systems than us, that vehicle is done for, sir. Approximately seventy-five seconds to impact. Firing mag guns.”

  “They’re firing,” a voice said over White’s headset. He looked at his console and saw it was Sergeant Gill, the defensive gun crew chief under Tortelli. “Mag guns slugs coming at us. We’re on it.”

  “Blakely, stand by to go evasive,” White said.

  “Ready, sir,” came the reply.

  “Recommend evasion one, sir,” Gill said.

  “Blakely, do it,” White said.

  The Buford’s crew could feel the vehicle move, a slight shift was all, but enough to evade the slugs speeding their way.

  “One of our missiles is gone,” Tortelli said. “Missiles still tracking, ten seconds.”

  “Impact,” he said moments before the tactical display showed only one remaining opponent.

  A minute later one of Buford’s mag guns scored a hit followed shortly with another.

  “It’s done for, sir,” Jaeger said. “Still relatively intact and tumbling.”

  “I want it in pieces,” White said.

  Another pair of mag gun slugs did the trick.

  “CCV on the horn, sir,” Alonzo said.

  “Put it through.”

  “Buford, this is CCV, Colonel Ping here. Thanks for the assist. Well done. You operate from Carlsbad, correct?”

  “That’s right, sir. Carlsbad, Hector, and Jasbar.”

  “Thought so. How in blazes did you end up here?”

  White told his story.

  “Incredible,” Ping said. “We have reinforcements en route. Recommend you catch up to your charges and go with them to Daley.”

  “Will do, sir. Can the Coalition hold here?”

  “I believe so. We will hold Prouste at all cost. We can lose Frisco if need be, but we can’t afford to have that happen here. I think the Pythans have gone as far as they’ll go for now. It will be a slugging match from here on out. Will broadcast messages to Buford. Relay them to Coalition authorities in Daley. Good luck, Buford.”

  “Blakely, Brooks, we have six vehicles to escort to Daley. See to it we catch them before they reach the nav lane.”

  -(o)-

  Interlude

  The Dina system sat on the edge of the vast asteroid field that bordered Coalition space. Settled less than a decade before the Pythan invasion, the one planet in the system worth the trouble was Courane.

  Offsetting the downside of Courane’s slightly toxic atmosphere was underground mineral wealth, and while conventional colony settlements were not likely to appear, mining towns were.

  Two small mining settlements in the Kurst Valley provided lodgings an
d entertainment for workers from the mining startups in the nearby mountains. Not far away, at the other end of the valley, was a maneuver area and live fire range used by Land Forces units.

  Control of the Dina system was in dispute, and the Land Forces units on the ground were not completely isolated, they had some Space Forces presence above. Would it be enough when the Pythans came calling?

  …

  Dug In Like Armadillos

  CFS Colony World, Courane

  “Let’s make these positions something to be proud of,” our platoon leader, Lieutenant Lumley, said as he paced nervously. He was a shithead, like most officers. He was nervous because there was a general said to be touring the defensive line, and he was more worried about impressing her than whether he’d be alive or not the following morning.

  I’m Broxton, sergeant, infantry, Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 66th Regiment, 4th Division. We were digging in because we were anticipating a Pythan attack that night. Our battalion was on Courane conducting live fire training exercises when the Pythans dropped in. Word was Coalition Space Forces got caught flat-footed and half-stepping and that’s why we were in the soup.

  Our Troop Transports received orders and wisely took off for safer parts and left us on Courane just in case the Pythans managed to get troops groundside. They did.

  Coalition Space Forces left some lancers in the system to ambush any Pythan space vehicles that came into Dina. They kept the planet between themselves and the nav lane exit and caught the Pythans in the middle of a ground assault. The problem was the Pythan’s landing craft had delivered quite a force before the lancers dropped the troop transports. As always, it was the ground pounders that took it in the teeth and got stuck having to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, the mess was a big one.

  We were a single battalion, that’s five companies. We had some support units to help us, but hardly any of them were worth much in a fight, but lucky us, to even the odds we had a general! She was some logistics command one star sent to oversee part of the exercise who decided to stick around and play soldier. She had held not a single combat command in her career, but somehow she thought it a good idea to take command of the defense of Courane. She waited until war came to visit to try her hand at battle.

  Scuttlebutt said our battalion commander took a humor-and-ignore policy with her. We all hoped that was the case.

  There wasn’t much on the planet. A sour atmosphere, two small towns on a small chunky valley floor, some mining operations, a lot of squat rocky mountains, and some forested land with strange trees. Why the Pythans sent the force they did for such meager pickings didn’t make sense. My guess was their leadership was as stupid as ours.

  We were digging in on a hilltop that covered the approach to the towns. We didn’t know how big the Pythan ground force was, but based on the estimated number of landing craft they put down, we were outnumbered by a large margin, even with the extra support troops.

  Space Forces attacked the Pythan landing craft on the ground from space, then made the claim they had destroyed most of the Pythan ground force. Typical bullshit. Some of our supporting landing craft made some recon passes and found a lot of destroyed Pythan craft, and not a single Pythan body. Our small landing craft fleet lost three birds confirming that their Space Forces comrades above were full of shit.

  Lieutenant Shithead kept pacing, thinking about his career instead of his life and the lives of his platoon members. Most of us didn’t give a damn about his problems, we had fighting positions to construct, and we were doing it the old fashioned way, by hand.

  Digging in goes way back, back to the earliest days of soldiering. The Romans did it many millennia ago when it was thought humans lived on only one planet. You name it: arrows, musket balls, rifle bullets, mag gun rounds, beams, shell fragments or shrapnel, dirt stops it all.

  Digging was a vital skill for a soldier. Given enough time a soldier could build an orbital bombardment proof bunker, give a soldier a few minutes to prepare and he could burrow into the ground like an armadillo. The spectre of death hanging over you will increase your digging speed considerably.

  Bob, my assistant gunner, and I had finished carving out our hole, a thing of beauty to a soldier’s eye. Armpit high. Carved in steps to get higher if needed. Right angle cutouts at each end, Sumps to kick grenades into if we had time, we’d be dead if we didn’t. Dirt excavated from the hole made berms, we left openings for our weapons to cover our designated fields of fire. We would have placed pylar strips in the openings to disrupt beam weapons, but we didn’t know if the Pythans would be employing them and we didn’t have the strips available anyway.

  We cut timbers from nearby trees to support overhead cover. The next step was to put more dirt on there. We were taking a break before undertaking that task when the general showed up with her little entourage. Our lieutenant looked like he couldn’t decide whether to pass out or piss his pants.

  The general wondered why we were digging in at that particular spot. I guess our position stuck out a smidge too far on the diagram for her liking. It’s the lay of the land that dictates where you set up. Combat engineers can fix things right up, but we didn’t have engineers or the time if we did, so we relied on what the hill provided.

  The platoon sergeant and I picked that spot. He could see the land like I did. A good soldier knows the ground. Farmers know the ground because their livelihood depends on it. Soldiers know it because their lives depend on it. A fold in the land that puts you in defilade, a tiny rise or a shallow depression can be the difference between living and dying, but you have to know the ground.

  A soldier needs the same eye to identify and place fighting positions. In the most basic sense, it’s just a bunch of holes, but there’s a science behind it, an art. A defensive perimeter takes planning, a survey of the land will tell an experienced trooper what he needs to know. Positions must support one another, there must be interlocking fire, sectors of responsibility for fire, layers of defenses and obstacles to overcome before the enemy can get to you. They must be forced to pay a price to be able to kill you, and if you charge enough, they’ll walk away from the deal, if they lived to be able to walk away.

  We were right in the middle of the battalion’s line. Our little spot on the hill was some prime real estate for a defender. It was a bit down from the crest so we couldn’t be silhouetted in any light. The ground would funnel attackers into a few narrowed approaches, without a single defilade available to them. From the approach side it looked like a fair route up, but once you got up the hill you realized you were in trouble. If we had time to get ourselves fully prepared, we knew the price of admission into our part of the defensive line would be terribly high.

  Our general didn’t like it. Her command screen showed a layout that was ragged and ugly when viewed from overhead, but to anyone in the know, it was as deadly and defensible as the hill would allow. Only a fool or a combat engineer can argue with a hill, and the fool can never win. Our general was no engineer.

  I sat at the edge of our hole and sipped water from my canteen as I listened to the general whine about how untidy it all seemed, especially our platoon’s bulge in the middle of the line. I would bet she used the word ‘jutted’ half a dozen times.

  Ten meters on the other side of the gaggle of officers, in the hole nearest mine, was Corporal Shiner who was doing the same thing I was, resting between stints of digging. She mimicked the act of dropping a mortar round into a tube and mouthed a silent boom. I knew what her imaginary target was, the gaggle of officers. I chuckled and picked up my entrenching tool by its polymer handle and pondered how much damage it might inflict on an idiot’s head, general or otherwise.

  The general must have heard my laugh because she walked over to my position, followed by her entourage.

  “Did I say something funny, sergeant?” she asked. I could see Betsy Shiner stifling a laugh.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” I replied, still sitting on the side of my hole. “I wasn’t list
ening. I thought you were talking to the lieutenant.”

  “I was,” she said with a scowl. “What was so funny then?”

  “Not really funny, but I was thinking about what a foul task it would be to dig this platoon out of this position. I pity the Pythans, ma’am.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Of course she didn’t.

  “The hill has given us some fine natural killing zones, ma’am. The lay of the land here works in our favor. You might say the hill is on our side.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped. She looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language to her. I suppose I was. I was speaking grunt.

  In the small interval of silence one of her group, a major, saw a chance to brown nose.

  “Why don’t you stand and salute, soldier?” he said as sternly as he could manage.

  I glared at the guy. “I could, major, but I was under the impression we were in a combat zone. Saluting is a primo way to get somebody shot, especially a general,” I said glancing at her. “Gatherings of officers with bright and shiny rank insignia is another way to draw fire... sir,” I said flatly. “One sniper out there...” I trailed off pointing down the hill, then grinned.

  “Enough,” the general said. “It’s too late to fix this, we’ll just have to make do.”

  She looked around for a few seconds, then led her little group to the next platoon.

  When she was out of earshot, Lieutenant Piss-his-pants turned and glared at me. “Why would you talk to the general that way, Sergeant Broxton?”

  “I don’t get you, sir. I spoke to her like I do with you.”

  “I don’t think she is used to being addressed in such a manner.”

  “Probably not, LT. I don’t think she’s been around real soldiers much.”

  He glared again. “I need to have my command position placed up there,” he said pointing up the hill.

  I knew what he was getting at, and sure as hell wasn’t happy about it. “Yes you do, LT. Sundown’s not that far off.”

  He sighed. “I need you to get that done.”