Louis Shalako
“Colonel. Report from Team Three. Deneb City.”
Team Three—she had allowed them to slip to the back of
her mind.
“What’s up?”
“Looks like another column forming up.”
“Ah.”
Pictures came up on a large screen in front of the
hot-seat. With a casual hand motion, she let Trooper Harvey sit a little
longer.
Sure enough, one of their scattered cameras had zoomed
in to a scene in the industrial part of town. The largest of several industrial
areas, it was located on the east road leading out of Deneb City. There were
plenty of wide-open spaces, a lot of parking lots and undeveloped land. The
area was strewn with warehouses, vehicle loading-docks, industrial plants and
production facilities, as well as the smaller, spin-off operations necessary to
all such environments.
They must have been using the larger buildings for
storage and keeping the vehicles out of sight.
As they knew from civilian reports as well as their
own observation, the troops were dispersed, having been billeted in hotels all
over town. The Unfriendlies had grabbed up a fair amount of unlet commercial
space. There were also some more temporary quarters, which included rows of
cots and portable office partitions.
City buses had been commandeered, leaving the minimum
to carry on with the more normal, civilian operations, leaving the local bus
schedule severely curtailed.
There were hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand
Unfriendlies housed inside of hangars out at the spaceport. Certain units of
these troops and some smaller contingents had been trucked and bussed to the
present location. That made sense—they wouldn’t be staying, so why assign them
to an expensive hotel room in the centre of town?
This was in the northeastern quadrant of the city, a
few blocks from the highway and attendant access ramps.
There were still kit-bags on the ground. Weapons were
slung in reverse, no magazine, upside down and with bright orange plastic caps
still on the muzzles. Troops milled around, looking a lot like kids on a class
trip in some cases. She watched, they all watched, as some dumbkoft kid almost skipped,
going from one little gaggle to another. It was all just a big adventure to
that one…one big fucking party all the way, maybe.
From the plumes of smoke, the engines had just been
started up as people at the back end slung bags and boxes into the big
six-by-six trucks.
“Activate Mongoose One, please.”
“With pleasure, Colonel.” Harvey had quickly become
her boy.
They were on the same shift, and he had actual combat
experience. Face-to-face, bullet to bullet, and not just in a control room.
Unlike a lot of them.
There was some humorous tone in the voice that pretty
much said it all.
Mongoose One, a rocket battery in the hills above
Deneb City, would be auto-loaded with high-explosive and anti-personnel
rockets.
“Mongoose One, she is hot. She’s ready, all she needs
are the coordinates…” Harvey tapped his keys and possibly being a bit
short-sighted, pulled up the goggs and leaned in to his hard-screen to make
sure there had been no errors. “Looks good, Colonel.”
“Fire at will, Trooper.”
“Launching now, Colonel.” There was the distinctive ‘boink’ noise as he keyed it.
Mongoose One fired three heavy rockets, and then the
tubes were immediately re-loaded and awaiting further orders. “Buh-bye,
motherfuckers.”
Three little orange carets appeared onscreen…tracking
onwards.
There were one or two grins in the background…a head
in the front row turned to look.
She gave him a sharp glance and he reddened, not
meeting her eyes but.
The kid had definitely caught it.
If she didn’t shut them down once in a while, they’d
all be doing it. It was easy to be the cool, comic type when you were winning.
They needed to keep the channels clear, and there were all kinds of
justification if she needed it—which she didn’t. You could not defeat the enemy
if you could not control your own people, in the simplest possible of terms.
Fire teams in the city were in on the loop, as was
anyone else who cared to watch. Gawkers had strict orders to keep their mouths
shut on the circuits if they weren’t directly involved in a situation. Yet it
was also good if people paid attention, and if everyone was fully up-to-date
when they did get an order. It helped them to understand the nature of their
present employments, and for some that would inevitably mean digging latrines
and setting up OPs and roadblocks, and moving around piles of boxes and crates
in warehouses.
There were orders to keep out unless one had actual
business in the Command Centre.
“Ten seconds to impact.” He glanced over, with that
funny little smirk back in place.
There was no keeping this one down—
The missiles were bang-on, as far as anyone could
tell.
The shock waves made instantaneous, expanding bubbles
visible for the briefest of moments.
There were silent flashes. It took some time for the
smoke to clear. Such detonations lifted every bit of dust, every pebble, every
piece of crap on the ground. Small flocks of birds inevitably rose in a panic,
taking some time to settle down again…good old pigeons, wings beating away, in
their white and grey liveries, quite surreal in terms of its visual effect
against the dull, smoky background.
It was a bit anti-climactic, in that the vehicles, for
the most part, were all still lined up in three or four rows. There were wisps
of smoke and steam all over. For the most part, the soldiers were still just
lying there, although some were getting up. The fastest-moving ones were
probably lightly wounded…they’d be in a hurry to get help and were at least
still able to do so. Someone was dragging a buddy up off the ground. That one
was hit bad. You could just tell, from the impression of dead weight and that
hanging head. Her guts clenched and her heart sped up. There was always going
to be that emotional wrench, having killed someone on the telly, as a colleague
had once told her.
The thing was,
to remember to breathe properly and to try to sit or stand up straight. To
maintain that mental calmness…a kind of editorial detachment. You had to accept
responsibility.
There was no denial and that somehow made it better…somehow
easier to live with.
Or so the theory went.
There was one big fire where a fuel truck had been
located, still identifiable by its shape and bulk.
So far, no one was fighting the fire, although there
were desperate figures running, pissy little fire-extinguishers in their
hands…sirens would be going off in the background by now.
Someone was dragging
out a hose and struggling with the hydrant. No wrench—no wrench.
Some of them went to ground, crawling under the
vehicles, knowing there could be more missiles. One or two just kept running
towards the open warehouse doors. Two large trucks smouldered, and there was
some other smoke or steam coming from a pair of small scout cars far enough
across the open space that it must have been from a different rocket impact,
armour-piercing projectiles coming down from above. There were bodies,
difficult to identify with any certainty with all the other junk, equipment and
yes, plenty of debris scattered about down there as Harvey zoomed in closer.
“Colonel?”
“Hold fire, Trooper.”
With the enemy drones way out at the end of their
tethers, scouring the roads ahead of the Unfriendly columns, it would take some
time for the Unfriendlies to figure out what had just happened, and with the
barest of information, hopefully longer to locate the source. With good camera
and satellite surveillance of the launch site, the Confederation could put
their short-range, battlefield missiles down anywhere within a
hundred-kilometre radius. Long before anyone got close enough to attempt
neutralizing the battery by road or by foot. With counter-battery fire, it
might be destroyed—but it would still get off a few shots of its own, and not a
single Confederation soldier was at risk. It was just money, in some odd sense.
Money
well spent.
Harvey nodded.
“Estimated casualties, twenty-five, ten killed and
fifteen wounded. Fifty percent of those injured will be seriously. We clearly
have three to five vehicles damaged or destroyed, and probably another dozen
holed. Whether that holds them up for very long, is unknown.” He looked over.
“We’ll see in a minute though.”
“What would you do, Trooper Harvey?”
“If they’re going to do this, then they really ought
to get those people out of there.”
He thought for a second.
“Of course, that was before they knew about the
Mongoose. Still, I’d like to know what the hell else they could do.”
“True. Very true.” The enemy, canceling the plan,
could disperse in town, and the Confederation could still hit their billets.
The gears would be turning over in their heads, and
that was a certainty. They’d be counting missiles just as she was.
Three
for you, and three for me—
How
many more have you got?
When they got out on the road, they could keep a lot
of distance between vehicles, which opened them up to attack by lighter forces,
ambush parties and the like, even as it made missile strikes more difficult. A
tough compromise, with a tendency to drive as quickly as possible…making
surprise by ground-level ambush even easier.
People were trying to get damaged and undamaged
vehicles away from the biggest fires.
There were clearly NCOs, grabbing people,
taking charge, and organizing things down there.
His instincts were pretty good. This was confirmed
within ten minutes as the first of the enemy column, the scene still blazing in
the background, zoomed out of the gates and got out on the highway heading for
the road connection where Highway Seventeen headed off towards Walzbruch and
Roussef. That was the thing about superior numbers, there were always more
where that came from…the Unfriendlies would be much more open to taking a few
casualties.
“Choppers in the air.” They watched as the pair of
helos headed north over the city. “They’ll be looking for that launch site.”
It was difficult to see what else it might be, but
they didn’t launch without some kind of a purpose.
Harvey looked over.
“I wonder if anyone’s aboard.”
“Let’s hope so, trooper.” Especially with a pair of
defensive Sky-Cats at the Mongoose One site, set on full auto, just waiting on
their trailers for a target to appear.
The odds were the helos were being piloted from the
ground, but one never knew—one just never knew. On the ground, they couldn’t
watch everything at once. From space, there was a huge amount of information to
digest, although points of interest had been marked. Deneb City was just too
big a target. The space-borne cameras saw everything of course, but she only
had so many people to look at the pictures. Software could only accurately
analyze so much, so fast.
Fuck.
There was only so much time in the day—only so much bandwidth in any system.
So far, it had been one hell of a busy day and it
wasn’t even noon yet. If only her stomach would loosen up. If only she could
get a proper sleep.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a proper
bowel movement. It was all black, grape-sized marbles lately. She just hadn’t
been eating enough.
If only someone would say something funny.
“Good work, Harvey.”
“We aim too, please, Ma’am.” An old bathroom
joke—adapted.
“As long as you remember to put the seat down.” That’s all I care.
This time she let them have their little snickers.
***
The Unfriendlies on Highway 17 had been doing some
thinking. When dawn broke, their feverish activity of the night before was
fully revealed to satellite and drone reconnaissance.
The nearest camera was
two kilometres up the road, with intervening hills in the way.
They’d set up a battery of their big guns. There were
nine guns in total. With a few small patrol vehicles and at least a platoon of
infantry, one or two light machine-gun nests for defense, they were clearly
intended to support the Unfriendly advance up the road. With their range, they
could soak any hillside, any cut or gap, any location that looked likely to
provide an ambush position to the Confederation troops. With this terrain,
they’d be firing at a high angle, which reduced the potential range somewhat,
in order to drop things down on people’s heads most effectively. Call it twenty
thousand metres, twenty-k, and that was just a guess.
This implied rapid
movement of the battery at fairly short intervals. This meant another target to
track, and another set of opportunities for surprise. If nothing else, the
forward column would pause when they ran out of range and they had to move the
guns forward. Beautiful.
Another whole
set of delays. McMurdo and his staff would be attempting to surprise the
Confederation. This was merely one more example of their thinking…in that
sense, it was fairly conventional.
The thing with firebases was their vulnerability—
It was another small division of forces.
The column, minus a few trucks and trailers, moved out
about eight a.m., giving a fresh drone time to come up from Deneb City. Dona
and others had wondered when they would think to set up an advanced base for
drones—there were long stretches of relatively straight road, with one or two
small buildings and sheds handy, more than sufficient to handle a drone or two
and a flight crew, some small security detail. Hanging weapons and bombs on a
drone sapped the range, and the Unfriendly drones already appeared to be
working at their maximum range in the case of the Walzbruch operation.
As for the Confederation, they’d noted a few good
places along the way, and if the opportunity arose, Dona intended to do just
that. The difference was that the Confederation had the support of the locals,
whereas the Unfriendlies clearly knew they did not. The very small team
required for the Unfriendlies to operate a drone or two would be expensive in
that it would take at least a platoon, better yet, a couple of platoons, to
protect them.
The Confederation already had a drone base set up
forty kilometres up the road to Ryanville. It had its own air defense battery,
and about a dozen troops involved in the whole operation. With the days getting
shorter, transit times would be reduced to a minimum. With the days getting
shorter, the Unfriendlies would be trying to jam as much into a day as they
could, assuming a preference for day-time operations. Even so, sooner or later
they might try a night assault. With little going on at night, the enemy
night-time drone operations had been relatively routine, basically just keeping
the thing up there and watching over their formations as they slept. Since the
Confederation wasn’t attacking, there
really hadn’t been much to see.
Certainly the Guards were capable of night-time
operations, even if the conscripts weren’t.
This was just outside the range of heavy artillery in
Roussef or more likely the road junction where Highway 2 from Walzbruch met
Highway 17 coming up from Deneb City. This position seemed the more logical.
The junction was a few kilometres out of town to the east, connected by what
was called the Walzbruch Line.
“Colonel Graham.”
Dona became aware of the voice with a bit of a start.
Had she been asleep? Oh, shit.
“What’s up, Trooper?”
The young woman, one of several dedicated to watching
the drone and satellite feeds, was looking at her, goggs up on her forehead.
“They’re loading the guns at Point B.” This was their
name for the overnight bivouac area used by the Unfriendlies on the road to
Roussef.
As long as they were setting up a firebase, why not
land a drone there? But there was more to it, of course. The artillery position
would undoubtedly be moving on, always trying to be in a position to support
the Unfriendly column. As forces converged on the way up from Walzbruch as
well, at some point they would be in position to support either force or both
at once. This might have been in the enemy’s original plan, it probably was in
fact.
“Somebody’s in for it.”
She ignored the comment and the murmur that went
through the room, with an undertone of calm humour evident. They were still
confident—and confidence was everything.
The column ground its way up the first hill, and down
the other side. The Confederation, not anticipating their sudden halt, had been
unable to return. To get too close was to risk sonic or even detection by the
good old human ear, assuming the enemy had thrown out patrols in a simple
security measure.
The red dots on the satellite view didn’t lie, they
had gone at least three kilometres up the road and up to a half or
three-quarters of a kilometre into the bush before apparently deciding there
were no threats in the vicinity. The truth was, there weren’t. They’d kept a
line of pickets out three hundred metres, all night long, in a thin perimeter.
The ground was good there, fairly level and open fields, with no impassable
swamps for an enemy to hide in. Enemy troops had apparently searched several
nearby farmhouses.
Finding nothing, they had left the civvies unmolested.
Still playing nice with the locals for the most part.
The next hill was right there, and the enemy column,
with Roussef still a good hundred kilometres up the road, seemed to be speeding
along pretty well. At the top of the next hill, they halted. Ahead, a small
bridge had been taken out over another small creek, and they could probably see
that from there, if the drone hadn’t already…time to bring up the engineers
again.
There was a brief pause, and then the guns fired,
instantly detectable from high in space and visibly through the camera of Drone
One, operating from its new base up the road.
The third hilltop exploded in fire and smoke. There
were a total of maybe twenty rounds fired.
They would be firing by coordinates, at this short
range, at a high angle. With no targets on site, and consequently no real
feedback, the smart-rounds would fall more or less as predicted…and no good
pictures would be coming back. Reconnaissance-by-fire.
Getting no results and no response, the Unfriendly
column, commanded by a person identified as a Colonel Joseph Smith and with
supporting elements under Major Hubbard, dashed across the valley.
Pulling off the road, they waited with guns elevated.
Truckloads of men and equipment. They watched in fascination, assessing the
enemy’s ability. Literally, timing it, just how long it took for them to build
a small bridge. They had a small bulldozer, driven down off a hauler, and the
bridgework was sectional. More brawn than brains to set that one up…a few had
plunged into the waters, swimming across to work the other bank. There must
have been a hundred men swarming all over it, for a creek that was barely ten
metres wide at water level, although the gully itself was substantial.
After forty minutes or so, with people still working
on the bridge, the first of the enemy column was climbing up the other side and
pausing again. The next valley was about two kilometres wide, all choked with
brush and cut by winding streams, with a few small meadows along the roadside…there
was a house and a barn, presumably one small homesteader and his family…a
couple of vehicles out front. And nothing.
Just nothing.
Zooming in, there was the impression of moving objects
in the front yard…was it possible that those would be chickens? Geese, or
goats, or something like that? But the distance was too much for the camera.
The big guns spat smoke and fire, the big rounds
momentarily visible from behind, with the Confederation drone hovering there in
the sun and in behind the enemy battery.
The fourth hilltop erupted, trees, dirt and rock
shattering and flying all over the place in the sudden onslaught. Still, the
farmhouse slept, or so it seemed, although the animals seemed to have
scattered.
“Okay, here they go—”
But there was more happening elsewhere, and they still
had a few tricks up their sleeves.
Every shell the enemy fired at barren
hilltops depleted their ammunition, both on hand and ultimately, down the road
in Deneb City. This might help to account for the new column, which appeared to
be almost as large as the initial one. Then there was the small convoy of fuel
trucks and some other technical vehicles—a couple of mobile bridge-building
teams were coming along by the looks of it. The enemy would have to send a
follow-up to the Walzbruch occupation force as well—
Right now her focus must be on Highway 17. This was
the big threat. Everything else was just a sideshow.
Sergeant Kelly was just a couple of kilometres up the
road, and he had a surprise or two waiting for that little contingent.
(End of part twenty-four.)
Previous
Episodes.
Images.
Image One. Confederation Public Communications Office.
Image Two. CPCO.
Image Three. Denebola-Seven Defense Force.
Image Four. CPCO.
Image Five. Interstellar News Service.
Image Six. Higgins.
Image Seven. Public Domain.
Image Eight. Collection of Louis Shalako.
Yeah. If you guys fuckin’ want, you
can grab some of my books and stories over fuckin’ here at iTunes.
Helo:
By Venkat Mangudi - IAF LCH chopping up the air, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56538829
