Baggett nodded, then followed the Colonel to the entrance, tapping his gauntleted hand against the carbon fiber and alloy wall. It would take a good sized nuke, or a very fast moving kinetic, to breach the wall of this bunker that had been assembled from prefab parts. It had taken the engineers an hour to put it together, another hour for the nanites to bind the sections into a unified whole of three meter thick armor. It had taken a little time to put a covering of earth over the bunker, all the while using the most advanced tech to hide the construction from enemy observation.
It would have been safer to observe the battle from within the bunker, looking through the eyes and sensors of the combat troops. The governing tradition of the Imperial military was that the officers shared, as much as possible, the same dangers. It was not expected that a field grade officer or above would move forward with the battle line. It was expected that any officer in the battle area would only take advantage of the safety of their own armor and the terrain they could shelter behind. Of course, the damned Division commander is safe and sound on one of the assault ships, out of range of anything the enemy ground forces might have. He amended that thought as he recalled that there were still shore batteries on the surface, waiting for their moment to get a hit in on an Imperial ship. But still, the ground units were at much more risk at this moment, here and now.
The pair passed a heavy tank, one of the battalion assigned to the brigade. A thousand tons of armor, weapons and energy generating reactors, it looked invincible. Baggett knew it was anything but. Anything that could be built could be destroyed. And the tougher it was, the more resources an enemy would put into discovering how to defeat it. This one was sitting hull down, only its turret sticking up above the hill it sheltered behind. A hundred meters to its right was yet another of the massive vehicles.
Baggett tapped into his sensor suite, and met a wall of static. The interlinked systems of his own soldiers and machines let him know where they were. But the static across all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum blocked the sight of the enemy sensors. The problem was, so did the jamming equipment of the enemy block his own sensors. There were some gaps in their coverage, giving him glimpses of their dispositions. Partly because of the better tech of the humans. Partly because of the glimpse the sensors of the ships in orbit gave the ground forces. Not much more than a glimpse, but still enough to get a general idea of the enemy’s dispositions.
The sun was starting to come up, only discernable by the lightening of the terrain around them through the dust. Dawn was a good time to attack for both sides. For the Fenri because the day loving humans were at physiological ebb at that time. For the humans because the nocturnal Fenri were getting sleepy as the light of day returned. It was hoped by the humans that they would catch the enemy in an attack that they could smash quickly, killing most of them in the open. Good theory, thought Baggett. Only time would tell if theory was any damned good. The fire started to come in at that moment, partially confirming the validity of that theory.
“Now,” called Dagni over the com, at the same instant the timer ticked down to zero.
The main gun of the nearby tank cracked as its mag rail sent a hundred kilo shell downrange at twenty thousand meters a second. The mass of the tank rocked slightly as its grabber units absorbed the recoil, and the round struck its target, an enemy armored vehicle, before the sonic crack even sounded to the observing officers. The turret of the enemy vehicle twisted into the air in a ball of fire as it absorbed the energy of the strike.
From multiple firebases within a couple of hundred kilometers rounds came roaring over to arc down over the enemy positions. Beam weapons reached out from the ground, blasting over half the rounds out of the air. The combination of jamming and dust allowed the rest to get through, to throw gouts of dirt into the air as they struck. Most were in the half kiloton range, and the bright flashes of the mininukes flared through the dust.
Moments later another volley of time on target came through, then another. Most didn’t make it to targets, though enough did to make the shoots worthwhile. And seeing the counter fire made the General more than happy. Any weapon aimed at the artillery was one not aimed at his people.
“Incoming,” shouted a voice over the com, as hundreds of red dots appeared on Baggett’s HUD, arcing down onto his brigade positions. The tanks took them under fire first, their turret laser crosses and hull mounted autocannon blasted one shell after another. Specialized anti-air batteries opened a moment later, along with the firepower of the heavy weapons’ suits.
The ground rumbled underfoot as the Fleet took advantage of the new targets that had been unmasked when the enemy artillery fired. Mushroom clouds reached into the atmosphere from twenty to a hundred kilometers away, and the incoming fire slacked off considerably. Next the kinetic rounds came down on the enemy infantry positions, almost knocking the General off of his feet.
“Forward,” yelled Dagni into the com, then she moved toward the front with the long strides of her suit, her command team falling in around her. Baggett waited for a moment, until some more troopers fell in on him, then followed, keeping a good fifty meters between himself and his subordinate. The tanks rose up on their grabbers and started forward, while the infantry troopers bounded from their positions and formed up a platoon around each behemoth.
Artillery rounds continued to fall ahead, a rolling barrage that led the forward edge of the advance by a good fifty meters. Sporadic fire continued to fall on the humans, here and there making a kill, but the orbital bombardment had taken the heart out of the enemy artillery.
Ground fire began to strike the leading troops. Particle beams and mag rifle pellets, they mostly either bounced from the tough armor or did minimal damage. It took several hits for a pellet weapon, or a sustained strike of a particle beam, to penetrate heavy battle armor. The troopers under fire were moving too quick, using the available cover, to allow that to happen, with the exception of isolated cases. They fired back at any target that presented itself, mostly with the same result, as the Fenri were also encased in tough heavy armor suits.
Identification was simplified on this battlefield by the disparity in the size of the suits of the combatants. Human suits were big hulking affairs. The Fenri suits, made for beings that stood a little under a meter and a half tall, were little bigger than a large human. There were some very large suits out there as well on the enemy side, mecha, such as the humans gave up a generation before. They were hard hitting, and easy to target, and most were taken out as soon as they revealed themselves.
The human soldiers moved forward in rushes, flying with boot bottoms centimeters above the ground, running, or bouncing, whichever suited their own individual styles. The air was alive with the angry red of particle beams, and the sound was a constant hum like a trillion incensed bees out for revenge. Where beam hit earth splashes of dirt and glass flew into the air. Where they hit what remained of the vegetation on the surface trunks blew apart in clouds of steaming sap and wood splinters, or brush caught on fire.
Suits took multiple hits, almost all of them. They were made to take multiple hits, that was the rationale for their use. Some troopers still dropped off the net, killed by sustained or multiple blasts of neutrons, or heavy weapon rounds. Those good enough, or lucky enough, made it through the fire, while striking down the Fenri soldiers that opposed them. At this point the Fenri had the advantage of terrain, fighting on the defensive. They normally got the first shot. The humans had the advantage of firepower. As soon as a Fenri shot, they had overwhelming incoming fire pinning them down, the lucky ones. Or they were killed before they could draw back behind cover.
Baggett cringed as one of the men to his front went down, a heavy round, thirty millimeter, popping out of the suit back with a splash of gore. He ducked down for a moment, looking for the shooter. He spotted him before anyone else, a lone suit that had been bypassed, and was now in the position of a sniper. Baggett sent off a half dozen twenty millimeter grenades at t
he target while painting it with his sensor suite. The grenades popped off with little damage to the Fenri, who avoided them by sliding back into a hole. He didn’t avoid the three troopers who converged on the hole and tossed grenades in after him. The troopers jumped back as the grenades lifted the enemy suit and the top of the small hill into the air. The Fenri may have survived the launch, their suits were tough as well. He didn’t survive the prolonged exposure to a trio of particle beams that converged on his helmet, reducing it and the alien’s head to vapor.
A tank to the left rang like a bell as a heavy hyper velocity missile struck its turret. That turret started to move with a swift motion toward the enemy gunner, when two more hyper v’s slammed into it near where the first hit. The top hatches of the vehicle flew off as jets of flame blew into the air. Whatever crew were in the turret were dead, of that there was no doubt. Moments later the two people who manned stations in the hull clambered out of the escape hatch. One was hit immediately by a high velocity rifle round that tore through the back of the suit. It did not come out the front, meaning it was bouncing around inside. The tanker fell off the hull and into the dirt, while the other survivor clambered over the hull and dropped to the other side.
“Stay under cover,” ordered Baggett over the com. “Wait until we root out the enemy.”
“Yes, sir,” came back the woman’s voice, as she crouched in her light combat armor by the side of the tank.
The fight went on through the morning. Baggett shook his head in disgust as they ran into enemy strong point after strong point. He had wanted to attack as soon as they had consolidated the landing zone. The Corps Commander had wanted to wait until all three divisions were ready to strike at once. And because of that we have to fight our way through prepared positions that weren’t there yesterday.
At points individual soldiers dropped back and waited for resupply. The suits could run on their internal crystal matrix batteries for a week of normal service, or a day or two of combat. But proton stores and missiles needed to be resupplied. And every soldier was sending scores of explosive weapons an hour into the enemy, fired from their backpack launchers.
Four hours into the attack came a sign that the enemy was stretched to the breaking point. Armed slaves attacked from the flank. Creatures that looked like mammalian spiders, reptiles, even some avians, they were armed but not armored. They came in by the thousands, to be swept away by the heavy firepower of the suits. They broke and ran moments into the attack, just before the Fenri heavy armor struck from the front.
Thousands of the enemy in battle armor came rushing out of the dust, firing all weapons as fast as possible. The humans dropped for cover and returned fire. It was a near thing, and the Fenri penetrated the human lines for five hundred meters before the advance was stopped. Ground attack craft flew overhead at that moment, launched from one of the firebases to the rear. A full squadron of twelve, they dropped forty-eight canisters of submunitions that ripped apart the heart of the enemy attack.
“What’s the holdup?” asked Baggett an hour later, as the attack stopped kilometers from the edge of the city they had come to take.
“Engineers have detected some large objects under the ground ahead, sir, ” said a captain in charge of one of the line companies.
“Better safe than sorry,” agreed the General, remembering how the nuke had really hurt his command on the Lasharan homeworld.
Moments later the engineers came running back, their heavy armor taking them across the ground at a hundred kilometers an hour. “Fire in the hole,” yelled one of the engineers as they moved past the kilometer mark from the objects. There was a flash of fire, followed by an even brighter flash as the buried munition went off.
The ground shook underfoot as a huge wave of earth rose into the sky. In the center was a rising ball of fire that climbed into the sky to become a mushroom cloud.
“Probably a hundred kiloton yield,” said the Captain, looking at the fireball through his shielded visor. “Would have taken out a platoon at least, if not a whole company.”
Another mine went off in sympathetic explosion two hundred meters to the right, followed moments later by two more to the left. That would have taken out the better part of two companies. Might not have stopped the attack, but sure would have taken the momentum out of it.
Instead, the energy went out of the enemy defense. In less than fifteen minutes the heavy infantry was at the edge of the city. Or the city ruins, as most of it had been flattened the day before. Now they were in for a different type of fighting, a dirty building to building slugfest. The units stopped for a few minutes to regroup and rearm, while the General met with his assistant brigade commander.
“Good job, Dagni,” he said as he looked over the troops entering the city. “How’d it feel?”
“A little overwhelming at first,” admitted the Colonel. “There was so much more on the HUD. So much more coming over the com. And very little time to think.”
“That’s why you let the subordinate commanders do the thinking. You only interfere when you have to mesh the commands to accomplish something. Or when the subordinate makes a shithead decision. But you did good. I see brigade command in your future.”
“Will you look at that,” said the Colonel, pointing to a line of aliens walking from the city.
There were more of the mammalian spider creatures, ten legs, six with manipulation appendages, two meters tall at the shoulders and covered in a reddish fur. Baggett had met members of the resistance that belonged to that species, and knew they were just superficial morphologically similar to spiders. Their limbs and bodies were actually supported by endoskeletons, and they had well developed four chambered hearts and a trio of lungs. Around them were more of the lizard like creatures, and some large hulking humanoids with heavy scales that didn’t seem to fit any classification scheme the General had ever heard of.
“The slaves, showing no loyalty to their masters,” said Baggett, moving around the Colonel to get a better view. “They’re free now.”
“And if the Fenri take back this planet?”
“Then they’ll find a population of former slaves armed to the teeth.”
The freed slaves moved toward a rallying area five kilometers from the city, where they were provided with species specific food, while representatives of their races spoke with them. Baggett felt good watching that liberation, even as he told himself that many more of the downtrodden would be killed in this battle. The Fenri would use them whenever they could, and wouldn’t really care if they became collateral damage. While his side couldn’t afford to let their presence stop them from hitting the Fenri.
“Hopefully we can keep them….”
Those were the last words out of Dagni’s mouth. The hyper velocity round, not large enough to take out a tank, but plenty big to destroy a suit, hit the Colonel in the right hip, blasting through and severing her leg. With a short scream she fell to the ground, blood gushing from the wound. It was only a short flow, as her body and the suit sealed off the wound.
A pair of particle beams struck Baggett a split second after Dagni was hit. The beams splashed metal from his suit as he dove for cover, one losing lock, the other following him on his path. Fortunately for the soldier the more powerful beam was the one that couldn’t follow him. The lesser beam continued to hit him in the back as he pulled himself behind cover.
“Shit,” he yelled, launching a small drone so he could get a look at the Colonel. His HUD was flashing a schematic of his suit, the damage inflicted by the beams showing up as blinking red. He cursed under his breath as he noted the damage to his com systems. The redundant circuitry would still let him talk to those nearby, but his command functions to the brigade and above were gone.
“You OK, General?” called out a voice on the com. His HUD wouldn’t give him a location, and he knew that the com location feature was also down.
“Protect the Colonel,” he yelled, looking at her crippled form on his HUD from the drone fe
ed. “And get those sons of bitches.” The small particle beam, which had to be a rifle, splashed alloy off of Dagni’s suit on her right shoulder, burning in. The gunner tried to depress it further and ran into shielding earth. The bigger beam, a heavy weapon, blasted a layer of earth off the small rise the General was sheltering behind.
He cursed again as the feed from the drone stopped, an indication that it had been destroyed. He tried to link in with the nearby troopers, who he hoped were going after the enemy, with no success. “Get those sons of bitches,” he yelled again over the voice com. “Get them.”
The ground shook with some explosions, and the particle beam that was trying to get to him cut off. “We got em, sir,” came back a voice over the com. His suit wouldn’t tell him who they were, and he wondered if the cast was a trick to get him to raise his head. Dagni? he thought, realizing that he had to see to her. He rose up, waiting for a beam to come in and strike his helmet. Nothing happened, and he jumped over the berm and into the slight depression that sheltered the Colonel.
Unable to link with her suit, he checked her vitals through a hard line he plugged into her armor. He cursed as he saw that her vitals were flat, then breathed a sigh of relief as he noted that her cryostasis systems had engaged. She’ll be alright, he thought, looking over the physical damage to her suit. She’s going to need a regrowth procedure for her right leg, and possibly the right arm. But she’ll be good as new in no time.
Soldiers were crowding around the senior officers in moments. “We’ll get the Colonel medevac’d, sir,” said a company commander. “You need to get that suit taken care of.”
In five minutes the Colonel was loaded aboard an assault shuttle, along with many other wounded, and lifted into the sky. Baggett headed back to the command bunker with an escort, and turned himself over to the careful ministrations of the support staff. It took several hours to make the needed repairs, while he was jacked into the command circuit through an exterior unit.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 06 - The Day of Battle Page 8