Elidere
Part 12
19th Galedon Regulars Planetfall + 17 Days.
They had chased them all the way back to Scarborough, which ultimately hadn't been good for the smoldering town. The combine had already put the town to the torch, or started to, but having been forced back to it had only made things worse. He wondered if the DCA officers would attempt to lift off... if they tried could they manage to get off world.
"Commander I am processing your combat uplink now standby." Tristan told him as he neared the uplink. The armor they had carefully shepherded, no pun intended, had been intended to be sprung on an enemy force that shouldn't have been expecting it. That and to hit a fresh enemy force still in the process of deploying.
The combine was supposed to have been coming here. "Thank you Tristan."
"Of course Commander. The ISF attache appears to have ordered the redeployment of forces we are presently seeing."
"Do you have him on scopes?"
"No commander, I expect his BattleMaster was caught up in the artillery strike on enemy positions. Whether he was KIA in the resulting strikes I cannot ascertain. His orders to redeploy the regimental reserves though appears to have been issued contentiously."
"But the DCA officers obeyed it." He pointed out, but he wasn't strictly speaking surprised they had obeyed the order. It would have been great if after the asshole's signature had disappeared in the storm of steel that had fallen they had decided to just cut their losses... but no such luck
"Indeed."
Gene eased his Marauder around the burned out remains of a barn and a two storey farmhouse. He was looking for something to vent his frustration on, but the enemy mechs were slagged. An ER PPC had the same damage potential as his standards but even though they ran hotter they extended his range envelope to a distance well in excess of anyone thinking of trying to shoot back at him. "Where are they now?"
A territorial map expounded from the uplink red lines falling back from the town towards the DropShips. He wondered if the enemy were going to run, even as he ordered a projection of enemy combat losses. They had gutted the battalion. Its ASF units had been by all indication caught on the ground when the artillery had come down, which was of course very nice to hear.
1
st Battalion 19
th Regiment was a Battalion in name only. If Tristan's readings were accurate there was nothing left of them to form any kind of detachment that would be useful in combat as a unit.
"Do I have permission to proceed with fire missions on the enemy dropships?" The AI inquired in a sanguine tone.
"Affirmative." He gave the authorization and watched as the drone artillery platforms chirped acknowledgement to his command. That left them the pivot and sweep overland... or rather that was the maneuver that the enemy would be expecting. "Do we have casualty assessments for the camp?"
"Minimal. The directive to withdraw personnel into the Star League Civil Defense facilities was completed. Mister Ford accounts for approximately eighty wounded, and approximately a dozen personnel dead among the infantry." The men who hadn't been shielded by the combined anti air envelope of Baffins and Sam Houston.
A part of him as he continued to dance the Marauder around the debris was that he should have been extending the Combine the courtesy to allow them to quit the field. That as knights they should act in accordance with the spirit of the long defunct Ares Convention. That he should be the bigger man and let the combine make for their JumpShips...
His Marauder's 'Thompson gun' tracked over the delimbed enemy mech as its machine gun ammunition cooked off from where it had been sitting in a smoking ruin of a building. Gene rubbed his eyes as he dismissed the reminder from the software as he safed the autocannon to file his evaluation report to the long dead Colonel Thompson at Hegemony R&D.
Bahar's Mongoose, and Hanzo in the Cicada appeared around the curve with a pair of vehicles in tow. They hadn't found anything either. Not that they had been expecting to. He felt the tentative return through the mind machine interface as his scopes picked up the Wolverine, and Dervish bringing up the duke's aid parties. They were escorting militia, first responders and volunteers to try and sort out the damage.
"They're done in." Cameron declared without preamble, his face in the hologram obscured by the ugly modern neurohelmet, "The Duke wants you to come back to the city so we can coordinate dealing with the other." He maneuvered around the shattered remains of a firestarter that had allowed Abner's Atlas II... well there wasn't much left of the machine's hollowed out internals.
He considered Cameron's report that the Duke's apparently repeated very expensive phone calls to Robinson had apparently yielded some results. Or at least he was being allowed to have conversations with the reign duke of the Sandoval dynasty... which meant he was bouncing off two fucking HPG stations to get there. ComStar must have been making a lot of money off House Makios... Gene didn't even want to think about it. Not that the duke was so spend crazy or worried he was talking about insisting to the precentor to hold the line open and wait... Makios seemed to have more money than sense, but had at least that much sense. "Bahar take armor command go reinforce and dig in."
... he was going to go deal with any command level issues. If Bard intended to protest that he thought better of it, but more likely he didn't' intend to do any such thing to begin. The Baffins was the problem. The Sam Houston could take off and fly to the starport if it came to that, but the Union was a spheroid dropship. In a non hostile situation it would have been different... but it trying to take off in this clusterfuck... no. It was an unacceptable risk... and while the Star League era rail transports could in theory handle the weight of a dropship there was no apparatus to load it or offload it. They couldn't move the Baffins right now.
Tristan's connection stabilized across the command's hud projecting the condition. Flagging the recovery of Hegemony equipment to prevent it from following into unauthorized hands appeared, but he had expected that. There would be questions raised if they didn't, "Do you have equipment to handle recovery?"
"For debris in general, yes. However that doesn't preclude parts and scrap being left behind."
Gene doubted that they'd be able to bring bay personnel from the Sam Houston in, certainly not quickly. The flagging came with casualties presently sustained, which were better than what the Hegemony's projected attrition had made assumptions on facing rebellious member states with Star League era weaponry and training, even considering rebel SLDF troops. The problem was of course that those casualties were something that could have been easily replaced in the age of the Hegemony not exactly the case in 3017 centuries after the downfall of the Star League.
"If I may make recommendations on loading the Triumph?" Inventory screens appeared. Ammunition was surprisingly not something to be concerned with. "Battle plans for the relief of Castle Vandenburg," approaches, landing sites joined it on Ander's Moon.
The AI was giddy if that was the appropriate description at being able to do its standard function, but they were getting ahead of themselves. There was a battalion in front of them to deal with.
The holographic representation of the continental landmass shifted, and he paused the shifting terrain as directional arrows appeared from the subterranean access lines. In any prolonged engagement it would probably be a matter of time before the enemy noticed there had to be some kind of infrastructure moving the units around underground. This wouldn't have been unusual in the Star League era, and on a more built up world in the present day people might have suspected it, but Elidere had taken a pounding through the succession wars so they had the advantage of surprise for now.
--
Kotaro reached to touch his jaw. It wasn't broken at least, and if he thought there was anyway that they might survive this cursed planet then he'd have lamented the trip to the dentist... but that seemed unlikely. It was best to be realistic at times like this. He had considered that Samsonov might have betrayed them into this trap, but more like the 19
th Galedon had been destroyed by the vagaries of fate.
Even if they managed to survive this battle it would be impossible to hope for the honor of the coordinator's garden. As the regiment's ISF liason he had been prepared to relieve Samsonov, and of his head, if this had been treachery... but for good or ill that didn't seem to have been the case. Samsonov-shosho had admittedly well died as a mech warrior should... much as Kotaro loathed putting that in writing.
Their initial suspicions had been this was a unit of the Davion Guards. The lack of air support had eliminated the Second Davion Guards even before they had started to piece together what units the enemy had in the field. That had still left them with the possibility of facing the Fourth or the Heavy Guards.
A cheer rose from the lips of the crowd as one of the duke's portable holographic projectors, no doubt dragged out from storage somewhere showed the hulking form a white gray painted Marauder scything down Combine Light Mechs as the armor, in similar paint, kept others at bay in the chaotic frenzy. Another BattleRom clip changed this time to show an Atlas but Kotaro turned away and stepped forward to the beckoning robed man.
ComStar's professions of neutrality was a disgusting farce, Kotaro knew if he wasn't careful the giddy robes might well attempt to waylay him and turn him over to the planetary authorities... and he couldn't allow that. He had a final duty to the dragon before he could die. Someone had to know how wrong all of this had went...
That was why he was in a tweed suit and a jumper pulled over it. He had changed clothes in order to blend in... not that with the swarm of refugees fleeing the battle it had been hard to do. He had blended in easily. It only served as a reminder that the planetary populace, weren't the real enemy just peasants looking to exult in the proximity to victory won by warriors. The real victory was being won by mercenaries, which was galling to his pride. He rubbed his jaw again and handed his travel papers to the Robe.
"Thank you Mister Thornburg," The balding man hand by the Lyran paperwork.
"I need to make an important call to our office, I know that it is just a matter of expense." As if money were any object to true service. The service fee rate was from a Lyran based Class A HPG station, but it shouldn't have mattered. It was obvious of course that ComStar had been hit as severely as others, records of the ISF from the star league suggested that HPGs should have been much more capable than they were... or at least much more regular. Prices had also increased of course, but money was not an object of concern.
When the Adept started to protest Kotaro felt the urge to yell at the man, but his excuses made sense... of course the Duke would have the money to make such an expensive communique. ComStar was not the Star League it didn't have the resources of the League so it had to stagger messages. The duke was, much as Kotaro had intended, circumventing the queue established.
He spent a good eight hours before they admitted into the sixty acre compound Comstar maintained near the heart of the city, and the ducal palace. It was ridiculous that they had taken a tram that directly connected from the palace to the ComStar facility. At least he could breath something of a sigh of relief. He posted a dozen shorter smaller parcels of information out even though there was no telling when or if they would ever go out... he needed to access an immediate outgoing feed.
The troops on Anders Moon were still fighting. They at least were only fighting provincial backwater warriors. The Regiment's first and third battalions... not that there was anything left of first were lost. The third might yet succeed in crippling the enemy regiment's dropships, but given the volume of artillery being reported that seemed faint. Samsonov's insistence that they could cripple the enemy's mobility and catch them in a pincer had failed... not that he was surprised Kotaro had been skeptical. They had misjudged the readiness of the Highlanders, made all the clearer when those awful earsplitting pipes had interrupted their lines of communication.
--
Ishida contemplated the daisho. They were still working to salvage the Atlas, but the swords had survived their master's death as the armored skull had caved into the shell of the cockpit. Burying the Kuritan general was not really feasible. It wasn't quite so bad as needed to actually hose out the cockpit as he had described for others, but repairing the Mech's head would take work. They would cremate the dead warrior's remains, that was the best they would be able to do.
... assuming they were going to keep it, but it had been dragged from the water's edge by winch. Andre Sutton fidgeted in the clean pressed white shirt, "I wish I'd been there." and that they'd be returning to battle soon, it was obvious... he didn't wish to be here in his finer closers.
"Bahar has our line redeployed." Then, most reassuringly, "Once we find out what the duke wants we will go back out there."
Ishida had returned only because he had been ordered to, and it was a temporary return. Bahar had received word from the JumpShips that they were returning with Davion reinforcements. The message delivered by some Star League marvel called a black box. The Davion defenders, or rather the duke of Robinson's relief expedition had been happy to take a ferry ride aboard the JumpShips returning to Elidere... but they were still weeks out.
"Yeah but how many mechs have you head capped?"
"Pull the BattleRoms," was the reply to the Dervish pilot's question, "I don't keep count."
Captain Alexander snorted. "I think everyone is watching the BattleRoms." He trailed off as they passed a businessman arguing with one of the ComStar acolytes about yet another delay in service. At first Ishida would have been prepared to dismiss the man as perhaps a visiting Lyran, but the man's aura was wrong. He dressed the part certainly, but he carried himself wrong. He felt like a killer, a demeanor of barely contained fury as his eyes saw the swords that flashed with recognition.
The holographic display near them did them no favor, but perhaps the most damning distraction was the duke, and the precentor who were animated in seeing them. Neither the duke, nor the precentor were impressive men. The duke had served in the AFFS of course, but he'd been out at least a decade at least for anything non ceremonial. The man was not totally to seed and his captain of the guards, a big man named Bates, physically threw himself over his charge.
Precentor Gregory Killos wasn't so lucky, and wasn't fast enough to get away.
"You!" The howl of anger wasn't enough to deter the fake salaryman from not processing the duke was outside of his threat radiance, and instead he had grabbed onto the precentor, and yanked him back before he could get free of the grasp.
"Mr Bates, what's happening, I can't see," The duke's muffled report came.
The big man heaved over and shuffled the duke away from the man in the suit trying to survey the crowd while watching the furious man at the same time. "It'll be alright your grace." The pistol that had appeared in Bates's hand looked like a child's toy.
Ishida's pulled the stainless autopistol at his belt, and wasn't the only one. Within the span of breaths they were in a standoff as a semi circle of men with a differing pistols of various makes stood there as the man in the suit dug his hold out pistol into the precentor's collar. If it had been a knife, Hanzo would have been confident he could have killed the salaryman without too much worry. The gun though, that might go off if he took the shot.
Bard Cameron was facing a similar problem as he levelled his Howdah Auto Magnum, and pushed Andre Sutton further back. The Dervish pilot was the only one in the group who had come to see what the duke had wanted of them without a pistol.
Septim knew he had no shot, not really an avid pistol enthusiast to begin with he had kept the LCAF standard issue sidearm for officers out of familiarity and in recognition he knew how to clean it. Even at ten feet he knew there was no way he'd have a shot he'd have been willing to take... and it was doubtful they could expect anyone else. ComStar security was for dealing with drunks and distraught people not armed madmen.
Kotaro snorted furiously, and bit his lip. He wasn't close enough. He'd hoped to grab the duke, maybe they could have salvaged things. In theory he could still drag the Precentor backwards. He wasn't close enough to be sure he could hit any of the men in front of him, not with squirming robed man who outweighed him by six Kan, or maybe about fifty pounds. The holdout pistol wouldn't care, not at this range, the shot to the neck would kill him if made too much trouble. If he dragged the man backwards though he could force him to let him access the HPG and make him send the encoded signal.
His actions would be disavowed of course if the Davions or ComStar ever connected him to the ISF but they'd never take him alive, and he'd have completed his mission. Someone would be able to provide warning and knowledge to the dragon of this failure, and the destruction of the 19
th sooner rather than later.
"Let him go."
They were fanning out. Looking for a shot, and minimizing the threat he posed to them as a group. The kilted man and the Lyran had no shot. There was no way the Davion would risk using his hand cannon, and the lyran's whole posture and movement told Kotaro enough about his confidence. The duke's bodyguard's priority was protecting his master. That left the man carrying General Samsonov's daisho, and the Mercenary Commander.
"Now see here sir, if you put the gun down, and let gregory go we will let you go, we will put you on the first dropship off the planet, you can go back to the combine." The Duke declared. "Isn't that right Gregory?" Kotaro scowled as the Precentor swallowed against the muzzle of the gun nodding. "this isn't necessary."
Kotaro would have laughed at their weakness, but it was good. It was a distraction he could use. The duke's bodyguard would focus on keep his master out of harms way and that meant he could focus on t he two men who were real threats. He dragged the Precentor further backwards.
"I don't,"
"No, no, don't do that. Please let Gregory go." The duke begged, and the Precentor was struggling more to avoid being pulled back further... but the further he was the less-
The last thing Kotaro Tanida realized was that the pistol in the major's hand was a laser pistol. His thoughts that it must have been a hold out model given its small size, and that he was safe now from it terminated in a red flash that ended his life as the recoiless light speed weapon fired.
The result was most of his head vanishing, boiling away, and dropping him backwards like a puppet with his strings cut.
Gene slid the Terran Hegemony issued compact laser pistol, approved in the 2760s, back into the dress uniform's synth letter holster, making a mental note to thank Tristan for mentioning it was in the outpost's armory.
"A crack shot, I say." Not really, since lack of recoil and a two pound trigger press really made it a matter of putting the dot on the target, but he didn't interrupt the Makios dynast as the duke and his guardsman went to check on the precentor. "Good heavens are you quite alright Gregory, I was so worried about you man."
"Precentor."
"Commander." The head of station nodded.
Gene bent down to peal the handgun out of the man's hand and handed it to Hanzo behind him, before rifling through the man's pockets. "This looks technical." He muttered pulling a cylinder out of a pocket, "Looks like it plugs into a terminal," Gene shook his head. Looked like big thumb drive, but no obvious data reel or something.
"Oh heavens look at the time, we'll be late, we'll be late." The duke exclaimed, "Robinson, Duke Sandoval will be calling."
... ah that explained it.
--
Commentary: Ok tuesday I will be putting up the triumph star port bit that is set in the early part of Part 11, we will talk about that then, its nominally canon as it will be going up, so I probably won't be spoilering it but its also not touching on everything that was going to be covered.
