Battle of Dieron Part 11
(Spring 3018)
He watched the first machine slam into another bug mech. Hanzo heard Chang as she whooped wholeheartedly again temporarily deafening him over the radio.
"Ha." Her Atlas was out of AC 20 ammo, which as she had opined 'sucked', and had forced her to watch her distance but well, as she commented over the radio, locust pilots were a special kind of mechwarrior. She might have felt bad about throwing the Combine Cadet if the little bastard hadn't floored it and ran up and kicked her mech, but no he had so she'd picked his little bug mech and thrown him one of his friends.
He turned his machine and opened fire spraying inferno munitions at the disoriented mechs. They were long past the possibility of reciprocal dueling as had largely determined Ander's Moon so he felt no issue attacking the Sun Zhang Cadre trying to reinforce the Combine forces. He keyed the Assault mech via las comm, "Bubbles, we're preparing to separate."
"yeah yeah Hanzo I have this."
He nodded silently facing the camera.
He didn't question that. There was a dragoon mech lance under her command but he and Bahar were supposed to facilitate the pass through of the DMM troops through the line and that he meant he needed to retire from the engagement.
The general idea was fairly simple, but it was complex in execution. Their coordinating role would be to route troops from the March Militia through the nav points to insure they didn't bunch up. That way the combine couldn't hit them with artillery, or less likely air strikes. It was also to insure they didn't block other advancing units from the rear, which would include medical personnel as well as resupply.
What the Combine Commander was doing was not honorable, but brazen foolhardiness. Hanzo recognized that it was obviously more appealing to fight beyond the boundaries of a city... indeed the Ares conventions called for avoiding fighting in built up urban areas where possible, but the Combine Commander leading the force opposing them had spread his forces too far out and wasted the lives of the men underneath throwing them away.
--
Gene felt the tug on his mental connection to the machine even as he posted updated orders and data requests. The truth was a more pressing concern in terms of time table... and he wasn't going to be able to ignore.
He pressed a key to swap channels. "Bahar I need a second opinion, the way we have two options, mount a conventional Air Assault, or turn use Elidere's advance to target strategy." he wasn't sure who all was listening but her Mongoose was unpacking the subteranean rail network map pack.
Either way they were going to be forced into an Urban knife fight from the way things were looking... they would need time to load and off load... and of course there was the potential of any remaining combine reserves in the west. Davion thinking was the Combine leadership was spread out, that most likely the Dieron Military District Leadership were probably in Tatsuyama in the north west but that they could be isolated and dug out later. San Martin was the real prize anyway... a prize that the Combine might well be attempting to Nero rather than allow it to fall into Davion hands, and they needed to put a stop to that ASAP.
He wasn't' expect a hasty liaison with one of the pilots the Azami had vouched for. The Griffin Pilot was out of breath and unhappy, but he was fully prepared to take her at her word that the ISF was going to try and burn the city down because that was the general consensus of other sources. The question was still how to get to San Martin as quickly and with as coherent a force as possible. On the other hand the next words out of his mouth weren't exactly the best, "We won't let them torch the city," He assure the Griffin pilot, even though he had no way to be sure that they could actually stop the Kuritans from massacring the populace... but they would damned sure try.
He wasn't surprised when Kiyone volunteered or really... to be more accurate demanded to go along. Fine, that was fine. He qued up a mental command dialogue through the machine... and watched as the data unfurled into a holographic display.
--
They had planned for a quick campaign, and for the potential necessity of needing to withdraw. They had not planned for this kind of speed. They had expected thirty forty days potentially of conflict against the Combine. Engaging and potentially having to rebel combine forces from either the north west or from further east across the desert. They also had not planned for the tempo of operations thus far to consume the volume of shells.
The footage of combat was starting to falter. There were estimated to likely be tiny pockets of battlemechs scattered across the planet... but nothing that couldn't be mopped up. It was no longer the primary concern. The planets defenders were shattered... and without meaningful losses to the Guards, or really for that matter their forces as a whole.
In no small part because once the final forces had met there had been the strike ahead of the aircraft coming. She had an incomplete picture of how that had unfolded. She had attempted to parse through the data traffic... but Yvonne wasn't sure it was all there. There were no gaps in transmissions in the time frame, which of course was an anomalous, but perhaps, just perhaps there had been the plan to mass the strike going out with the combine close air support... but if that had been the plan it hadn't been included into the briefings.
The other detail was the steady disappearance of units from the tactical traffic. There were advantages to allowing Mercenary, or even regional commands tactical flexibility in operations. Yvonne knew that organic response times were often the key to defeating Capellan forces in the field. Capellan commanders rarely had the authority or inclination to initiate tactical maneuvers or show initiative without orders due to the Capellan political structure. They rarely could coordinate between service arms not because they were incompetent but because it required running requests up the chain of command in ways that took time.
"Mister Alexander." She greeted the Lyran Heavy Mech pilot as his image solidified. The man's dirty blonde hair was caked with sweat, all the more noticeable for his lost tech neurohelmet. In the background his Merlin was deployed near several alacorn tripple barreled tanks. Further beyond were the lighter single barreled gauss rifle tanks from beneath Bristol.
"The boss, said something about the snakes trying to pull a Nero... I think that means they plan to try burn the city."
She nodded. That wasn't honestly surprising. There were already tentative reports from the forward most Guards Scouts suggesting that ISF personnel were trying to rally citizens into last ditch fight attempts. Dieron had been chosen for a variety of reasons including that such tactics were less likely to succeed. Dieron had been a Hegemony World, and perhaps memories of that had inculcated a different set of ideals that protected the population from the Combine's usual body politic. Attempting to convince untrained citizens to potentially charge infantry with human wave tactics and improvised weapons was unlikely to be successful here.
Unsuccessful in the sense that the population was unlikely to even countenance such an attempt at resistance regardless of the exhortations of the ISF. Not that such attempts were usually all that successful against professional troops anyway.
She had some idea what was going on, part of the units that were being pulled from the rotation were the so called 'omni vehicles' made by Blackwell Industries. The Bandits, hovercraft, were being refitted but that was only a partial explanation. "Yeah, the boss said something about urban assault." Was all the Lyran would... or could admit to. He had no explanation for how they would be launching an urban assault, and her staff's conventional wisdom suggested to cross the intervening distance this was simply a preparatory measure before the march.
Yvonne Davion wasn't sure that was the case at all. Her eyes swept the holographic globe dominated the overlord's command deck.
--
Gene looked at the thermal signatures as the mag tube slowed
These tubes had been intended for rapid redployment of materiel ... for defending troops... and a quick check of his clock told him that in about sixty second the Highland Curaisser infantry bailing out the hover craft were going to deploy from the entryways deep inside the planetary capital's urban administration and behind the ISF's principle innermost urban barricade. Not that that wasn't anything really more serious than lightly armored infantry behind sand bags and machine guns... most of the heavier equipment around their communications gear... which would be their first target.
Once they visually confirmed that there was enough room to start sending hovercraft through they'd send the Bandits into the combine rear echelon and then he and the 'mech company would follow suit.
"Whatever the combine does our priority is civilian safety, secure the urban chokepoints, anchor the MSR the sooner we can link with Davion Guards Infantry," From their RCT, "the sooner we can secure overwhelming material advantage."
His intention was to deploy the Curassier into the urban center take the city's administration hub, the news stations and the university preferably without the Combine getting a distress call out. Ideally be fully deployed before they realized they were here.
He had optical telemetry and sensor returns being piped in from the Terran era surveillance equipment but that was incomplete.
"Breaching."
"GO GO GO." Shouted a platoon sergeant.
Daylight flooded the underground and acoustic signatures though not so much the actual sound followed as highlander infantry breached up and out of the subterranean. The space to clear a bandit to confirmed, and the first of the hovercraft accelerated up and out and then into the streets of San Martin. A second followed and within fifteen minutes Hanzo was pushing his bigger bug mech left while Bahar followed with her Mongoose.
One of the Pillager -D from the Reunification War would have been handy here in this kind of scenario, but they hadn't had time to pull one from the Company's reserves.