Louis Shalako
The convergence of Highway 2 and Highway 17 meant a
real bottleneck for the Unfriendly columns. First, they had to get past the
biggest hills they’d encountered thus far, hills on each side of the notch
where the road went up…
The Unfriendly column on Highway 17 was clearly
coordinating with the column on Highway 2.
They had made an effort to properly time it, both
columns setting off shortly before dawn, with their battery of heavy artillery
now in position. They were still towing some lighter weapons.
Unopposed, they would arrive at the junction more or
less at the same time, even with the clearing of certain obstacles. A
two-pronged attack, converging on a point.
Drone Two, currently piloted by a trooper named Jimmy
Dakota, was reporting that the Joshuas, still on their flatbeds, were now right
up to the front of the column. A pair of Samsons were deployed at the rear.
They were, in fact, a good kilometre behind the main column. They were
traveling with one six-by truck, clearly meant for infantry support in the
rearguard actions which they were anticipating going by this development. They
had a proper scout car and a half a dozen of the ubiquitous olive drab pickup
trucks, each capable of carrying a handful of troops and some light weapons.
The Unfriendlies were getting smarter.
The people in the Command Centre were watching in
fascination, everything from the satellite feeds and all other sources, which
included a map as well as real-time video in pretty good colour and detail. The
only thing missing here was quality sound, but they had cameras with their
cheap little microphones, vibration-sensors, and roadside radar and other
detector units out all over the place.
“Unfriendly Battery A is firing, Colonel.”
“Roger that, thank you.” Having been off for eight
hours, the staff were all strangers to her, and yet they sure as hell knew all
about her.
She took a good look. Battery A, one more red icon on
the battle-board.
Again, she thought of McMurdo’s sick little video. A
sour grin crossed her face. The truth was, they all knew a little too much
about one another by this time in a deployment. She had, after all, read many
if not all of their files—as situations came up, as names and assignments came
up.
The military life didn’t promise a whole lot of
personal privacy to begin with.
They watched as the top of Hill 114-A lit up, smoke
and fire billowed, and at ground level, the explosions were right there. One or
two cameras were either out of action or had been blown into positions where
they could do no good—face down in the dirt, perhaps. Sooner or later, the
enemy must stumble across a camera, or, say a motion-detector, and in a very
short time, they’d figure out what it was.
After that, they would try to hack it—and the first
one, would explode, taking out at least one enemy tech. That would be one real
steep learning curve, an expensive one. She had no doubt the units could
eventually be hacked or cracked. As long as you were real careful—
They waited as the enemy deployed.
On the map, less than two kilometres down the road, it
appeared the Joshua tanks were finally down off the trucks.
They’d been fueled and stores had been put aboard. It
all seemed to take one hell of a lot of time, the tension rising with every
minute that passed. Beginning to move, it looked like they’d be leading the
column. Dona wasn’t too sure of what her expectations had been, but the enemy
was using the classic wedge, with one company forward, and two flanking
companies back. They had this on both sides of the road, where there were open
fields and the pastures, some of which were still green with good old Terran
grass. At the company level, it was one platoon out front, and two more
flanking, right out of one very old book.
With four or five platoons to the
company, the same at battalion or regiment level, they were keeping an
estimated twenty-five to forty percent in reserve.
Interestingly, the Guards were behind the regular,
short-term recruits—a classic case of putting the cannon fodder out front where
it belonged, soaking up bullets meant for more valuable troops. They were there
for discipline as well, the unspoken threat being that retreat was not an
option, or they might even be fired upon by their own troops. It had happened
before and it could happen again.
There was one low split-rail fence, some wire fences,
and some brush along a creek, and other than that, no cover at all. The
infantry had been deployed as far forward as possible, just inside their own
treeline. It was a classic start-line. Just out of range of Confederation
small-arms fire and clearly intended to swamp any defenses.
At the base of the hill, the trees and rock faces
began, and this would be an entirely different kettle of fish. They seemed to
be waiting for the Joshuas to come up, although there were a couple of Samsons
with them and the small four-bys with their heavy machine guns. A pair of them
sat out in the open, at the base of the hill.
Bait, attempting to draw fire. Her people were smarter
than that. No searching fire for her people.
Even the snipers had their orders to keep it quiet.
Nothing less than a sergeant was worth that one precious shot. It had to be
assumed that the enemy had a few snipers out there of their own, on overwatch, and her people knew enough to
keep their beaks down until the action actually began.
It was a bare five degrees C and fairly dark under the
overcast…
With a light rain coming down, just crossing seven or
eight hundred metres of ploughed field would be difficult enough for people on
foot. Every inch of it swept by her people and the sensors and the machine
guns. At that point, they would be in tangled bush and the boulder-gardens at
the base of the slopes. The cover would be better, but it would still be slow
going.
This was where the small, anti-personnel mines began.
The problem with fields and pasture of course, was
that this meant settlement, farmsteads and cabins and barns and livestock.
They’d done their best to get everyone out—
Fire erupted from the ground. There was a short pause
and then the targets became apparent.
The Unfriendlies were firing on those positions and
there wouldn’t be much left for people to return to. Houses and barns were
blown to matchwood in pretty short order. One could only wonder at the logic.
They were upping the ante, alienating the locals in a
game where the stakes were already high enough. In classic land warfare, such
positions were often used for observation. The fact was, the Confederation
troops had cameras everywhere, some a lot closer to the road than the house or
the barns. Actual troops were pretty thin on the ground. She had been smart to
keep her people out of there.
Her standing orders insisted on it, and for the most
part, people agreed with her.
Sleep in a vehicle, sleep on the ground. Sleep in a
hollow log. Stay the fuck out of people’s houses. It was succinct.
Hopefully, it was better for everybody. What was
interesting was that the Unfriendlies would absolutely go in there, no
question, risking exposure to boobies and potentially, unexploded ordnance
including their own, UXBs, when there
was nothing there to find. It would also take a few warm bodies off of more
important matters. They’d be looking to assess results and hopefully to recover
a few Confederation corpses for their own propaganda pictures.
And they would be disappointed again—more psychology.
“Okay, here they come.” Three Joshuas, coming over the
top of yonder hill.
Hill 114-A was next, and at this point, the Unfriendly
infantry in the fields got up from their prone positions on the far side of the
valley and started walking. They had their bayonets fixed.
Smoke rounds from the enemy firebase erupted in front
of them and the haze began to drift…
The Joshuas seemed to speed up on the downslope…
There were grey forms flitting through the trees on
either side, guarding against ambush, or intrepid enemies with any sort of
limpet mines or shoulder-launched weapons shooting from the forested areas, up
close and personal. A squad of men followed each tank doggedly, as close to the
tail as they could get, out on the actual road surface.
This was going to be bad—
“Hold fire. Hold fire.”
Vicky’s voice was there in their ears, and views from
individual troopers were there for the asking.
The Joshuas were halfway down the hill, guns trained
on their target hill, and clearly expecting trouble.
What in the hell they expected to fire at was a good
question. But it was clear they were meant for infantry support. Psychological support. Not so much
armour-to-armour—there was nothing really there for them to shoot at.
Not in the classic sense. In her opinion, the things
were almost entirely useless, but the Unfriendlies were still using them. That
was the trouble with having no option but to attack.
You used what you had. You
used what was available. This included the Unfriendly doctrine, all according to intel,
which she had reviewed when she had a minute. Insofar as that was known—
Or suspected. Maybe she was over-analyzing. Maybe the
Unfriendlies had no way of knowing for sure just what the Confederation had to
oppose them. If true, the enemy’s intel
didn’t seem all that impressive, not considering they had been planning an
invasion. They hadn’t just come up with the idea ten days ago and then rushed
into it without any thought.
Perhaps it was a case of just in case.
Her Barker teams were engaging the enemy four-bys and
the Samsons, other vehicles. Hits all over the place—a light vehicle turned and
plummeted over the edge of the road, disappearing into the scrub below. There
were flames and black smoke down there.
That one was dead enough.
With the two enemy columns only a few kilometres apart
as the crow flew, they had a pair of drones zigzagging along, one for each
column. There was another drone hanging back. The third one was apparently
trying to do the work of two, as it was up a good five thousand metres where it
could at least get a look at both situations at once. It could only hold its
cameras on multiple targets for so long, cruising along on its basic course,
before it had to break off, maneuver, and come back around again.
Those gaps in coverage would be taken advantage of.
It was a lot to keep track of—
The other pair of drones were intent on what lay
below, circling around down low, and with all of their sensors going, active
and passive.
***
Hill 163 was, if anything, even higher and more rugged
than 114-A.
This ambush, confronting the Unfriendly forces coming
up from Walzbruch was a real doozie.
Since 114-A was nearest to the junction of Highway 17
and Highway 2, Hill 163 would be given up first. They needed a half-hour or
forty-five minutes head start. Warm-bodied troops would have to time it
carefully, in order to get past the junction before the Unfriendlies took
114-A, and got their artillery and other weapons set up for the next phase of
their attack. The Confederation had x-amount
of time to set up their next ambush although some assets were already emplaced.
All of this was under the eyes of the drones and with
enemy artillery in the vicinity.
The command team watched, listened, and gave orders or
advice, but it was up to the troops on the ground. Just as Command had their
information, full information hopefully, the troops knew what was expected of
them. They had been rehearsing their moves right up until the moment the enemy
showed up. Some of them would be using a couple of available side-roads, which
was a blessing.
For the common trooper, orders were kept to
twenty-five words or less—
If possible. But it kept it simple and everyone knew exactly what they were supposed to do.
Individual troopers were expected to be able to make a
few moves of their own and to recognize when it was necessary to do so. The
most inexperienced had a senior partner and were under orders to stick to them
like crazy-glue.
This enemy column had no tanks, so it was a pair of
Samsons leading the way, with another pair at the back to guard the rear of the
column in what was a new wrinkle for this bunch. The leading Samsons came out
from behind a cloud of black smoke billowing from a less fortunate crew and
machine that had already been destroyed and began to advance.
At this point the automatic and robotic weapons came
into play. With the Confederation artillery limited to relatively short-range
pack howitzers, it was important in fighting a rear-guard action, to leave
robotic systems to cover their tail on the way out. It bought them some time.
They watched as one of the laser-cannons engaged. The
enemy Samson, trying to save itself, began firing off smoke and turning, bolted
up into a gap in the brush along that section of roadway…
They were hoping to get those guns out, and only three
were anywhere near the hill itself.
Even so, it took time to hook them up, and
the road to Ryanville was very vulnerable—this was the downside of the
bottleneck ambush.
Your
own forces also had to get out of the bottleneck.
On almost any other planet, anything really populated,
there would have been more side-roads, alternate ways of getting from one place
to another.
Not here.
Two hills leading up to 163 had a double-reverse
ambush, automated. Those weapons were still firing, taking the enemy column
from both ends as they raced up and down the road, ignoring hits, ignoring
casualties. Perhaps they were hoping to kill or capture some live troops, which
would be good propaganda for them at this point. Both of the hilltops in
question were being blanketed in heavy Unfriendly artillery fire, and the
drones hung in the sky, directing fire toward targets identified by flash and
flame.
A direct hit on a big six-by truck, and it looked like
being another bloodbath. The rest of the enemy troops dismounted, forming up
alongside the road, which was lined with black spruce, interspersed with
tangled thickets of deciduous and native species. Split-rail fences lined the
road on the northeast side, a cheap way of keeping the hogs in the woods and
off of the road…wood was plentiful enough.
There was no way to use the dispersed formations of
the school-books. Not in thick brush cut with precipitous gorges, sometimes
also fenced at the lip. It was all they could do to keep low, spaced out five
or ten metres apart, and use the vehicles, and more importantly, smoke and
return fire to keep them alive. Belly down, on hands and knees, down in the
ditch, it would appear that they were advancing. Where else were they going to
go. They were soldiers, their officers were with them, and they were there to
fight. When one of the automatic machine guns had a good firing solution, it
could hit what it saw, or what the forward cameras saw if the trajectory was
clear. Arching fire. It was a series of rapid calculations, all automatic. At
that point, anyone not hit went to ground and returned fire, desperately trying
to take out the Confederation weapon so they could make forward progress. From
time immemorial, like infantry everywhere, more than anything, they relied on
armour and artillery support. After that it was support from the air. In a
really big, set-piece battle, they’d be relying on support from space.
Space-based support was Dona’s biggest nightmare.
They had the Samsons and other vehicles, they had the
artillery, but it was armed aerial support that was lacking. The Confederation
guns and mortars were firing from the best cover they could find.
In the interest of surprise, they’d waited until the
last possible moment. They sure as hell weren’t going to be there for very
long.
They were firing from prepared positions, on high
ground, using overlapping fields of fire, at an enemy that must expose
themselves if they were to accomplish their mission.
Confederation troops, on hand for a frontal defence
for the first time since the conflict began, would make individualistic
choices, and this alone made it a different ball-game from the one the
Unfriendlies had been playing up until now. They were in good holes, beautiful holes.
Dona had only to check individual troopers, one or two
of whom were blazing noisily away at nothing visible—robotic guns, with their
laser, micro-millimetric radar, remote cams, optical and infrared sensors,
didn’t do that nearly so much. These were people with eyes and brains, and they
knew that some Unfriendlies had just
gone into those bushes, that culvert, or hidden behind that little rise where a
shoulder-fired grenade might just do the most good. They had minds and
imagination where the machines only had recognition systems.
Two
clips, properly aimed, the first one semi-automatic fire, (please), and then
get the hell out—
That
was the most basic order.
Also. That way, there was no talk of rationing
ammunition.
And once again, the Unfriendlies were using up time,
precious time, while they shouted back and forth on the communications net.
“Looking good, Colonel. At the rate they’re going,
they won’t take that before dark.”
“Roger that, Ted. Bring up Corporal Twon for me, will
you?”
With Major Chan in charge of the hill defense, it was
time for Dona to move on to the next picture.
(End of part thirty.)
Previous
Episodes.
Part One.
Part Two.
Part Three.
Part Four.
Part Five.
Part Six.
Part Seven.
Part Eight.
Part Nine.
Part Ten.
Part Eleven.
Part Twelve.
Part Thirteen.
Part Fourteen.
Part Fifteen.
Part Sixteen.
Part Seventeen.
Part Eighteen.
Part Nineteen.
Part Twenty.
Part Twenty-One.
Part Twenty-Two.
Part Twenty-Three.
Part Twenty-Four.
Part Twenty-Five
Part Twenty-Six.
Part Twenty-Seven.
Part Twenty-Eight
Part Twenty-Nine
Images.
Image One. Confederation Public Communications Office.
Image Two. CPCO.
Image Three. CPCO.
Image Four. Ryanville Daily News.
Image Five. CPCO.
Image Six. The Organization.
Image Seven. Collection of Louis Shalako.
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