IWTTD Chpt 2

==If We Turn To Dust - Chapter 2 -==
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===Task Force briefing===
LYRAN DROPSHIP LEUTNANT REGINALD STATHAM, ZENITH POINT
BAXTER, FEDERATION OF SKYE, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
JULY 19th, 3027
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The two-hundred-meter long cables that had played out between the separated halves of the jumpship’s drop collars meant that the Fortress serving as my command ship had artificial gravity aboard, or close enough. That meant that everyone in the conference room was actually sitting around the cramped table, rather than floating in a loose formation that only mimicked that.
 
“For anyone who wasn’t able to work it out on their own,” I said, rapping on the table with my knuckles for attention, “this meeting is the last before the actual offensive. A short command circuit is waiting to take those of you whose forces are in other systems back to your people. We are scheduled to move in twenty-four hours from seven minutes ago.”
 
Somehow I felt like it was inevitable that we’d been late to start. There was always something.
 
The heads of eight different brigades looked back at me, in a broad and complex mix of excitement, confidence, and unavoidable nerves. And dislike, in two cases, but frankly their prejudices weren’t my problem as long as they’d obey - and I wouldn’t be controlling either of them directly.
 
“Our targets are the 2nd and 14th Legions of Vega, stationed on Vega, the 36th Dieron Regulars, stationed on Shionoha, the 11th Benjamin Regulars, stationed on Buckminster, and the 6th Benjamin Regulars, stationed on Camlann.
 
“Predictably, the 11th Lyran Guards and 2nd Winfields will join the 5th Rift Regulars on Vega. The 20th Lyran Guards and 7th Lyran Regulars will be tasked against Buckminster. The 10th Skye Rangers and 7th Arcturan Guards will strike Camlann. And the 4th Lyran Foreign Legion and 15th Lyran Regulars will be assigned to hit Shionoha.”
 
I used a dry-erase marker to circle the target worlds on the map behind me, then added arrows along the jump courses. Predictable was right; Baxter, where we were and where the 11th Guards, 2nd Winfield, and 5th Rift were waiting, was the only Lyran world in jump range of Vega.
 
I capped the marker and turned back to face the table. “My phrasing of targets is precise. Acquiring the worlds we’ll be striking at is at best a tertiary objective. Our first and foremost objective is to destroy the DCMS units assigned to our sector; not to savage or defeat, not to force into retreat - destroy. Accordingly, if your targets attempt to lift and evade, you are authorized to immediately follow suit and pursue them through one jump.
 
“The limitation on pursuit distance is based on a calculation of Combine command and control loops, not your own supplies; the odds of Luthien ordering an escalation to nuclear strikes are unacceptably high at this time.”
 
“‘At this time’,” Generalmajor Durandina Kim, the CO of the 4th Lyran Foreign Legion, repeated speculatively. She fully lived up to the cliches already formed around the LFL, both in professionalism, skill, and colorful background and language, and looked like exactly what she was - a former pirate who’d been a ranking officer in Circinus’s Black Warriors, all the way down to the central casting cybereye. Despite her thuggish looks, she had a high, sweet voice and in training had impressed me as one of the sharpest of my COs.
 
“‘At this time,’” I confirmed. “When the time will be right will depend on our secondary objectives. At the top level, these are to gain general experience with operations at the largest scale and to gain experimental data on the use of the new doctrines and equipment in the field.”
 
“Now they want experimental data?” a man’s voice grumbled, just quietly enough that I couldn’t immediately identify the speaker.
 
“We already know we’re running the engine on gasoline; now we’re working out the right richness,” I said, smiling in a way that was meant to be the opposite of unthreateningly encouraging further debate on the topic. The Cult of the Mechwarrior was alive and well in the LCAF’s more conservative echelons, despite Katrina’s best efforts. “To that end, you’ve all been provided with empty field library cores. Run your combat recorders and any and all other data you generate into them in real time; if you have to go radio-silent, update the the instant you can afterwards. The General Staff will go over all of it after the fact to evaluate what changes are needed. If you find yourself forced to retreat, the record cores go out first.”
 
Some of the nods were unhappy, but none of them were hesitant. Good enough. “Obviously, you’ll want to keep notes for your own after-action reports, in addition, and encourage the same from your people.
 
“All of this also implies keeping your people alive. You know that production rates for hardware have been increasing. General Staff - and political authority - are very confident that that will continue. If you have to choose between spending lives or equipment, spend the gear. The bad old days are over; we can replace it.”
 
“Ma’am…” This from Generalmajor Johann Bock, who had the 7th Arcturan Guards. He looked worried. “I understand that there are limits to need to know, but do you really think that we can mass-produce fighters or BattleMechs as easily as Pattons?”
 
It was a sincere question. “The pilot plants are already up and running,” I confirmed. “Yes, we can. Yes, we will.”
 
Bock nodded sharply. “Understood, Ma’am. We’ll save the cadre for later, then.” A wave of similar agreement went through the others.
 
“Good,” I said, grinning. “As for tertiary objectives in our area of operations, Tharkad wants to move the border out by one jump, no more. If at any point you have a choice of equally effective means, pick the one that humiliates the enemy more - we want to damage the Combine’s confidence in the DCMS, their confidence in themselves as a society. Finally, for myself and Generalmajors Byers and Rabenstrange, we’ve been asked to headhunt Theodore Kurita himself, for reasons that I hope are obvious.
 
“Two final points I want to call particular attention to before we move on to the intricate details - First, we’ve prepared a set of sealed order contingencies in case of loss of communications. Be ready to go for them in the event of interdiction.”
 
Again, they nodded.
 
“Second, while we’ve calculated an expected command and control loop for nuclear authorizations to come from Luthien, and worked with the assumption that Comstar will provide them priority routing to do it with - We know that the Combine has forward-deployed both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, in ways that they haven’t done since the end of the Second Succession War. There’s a reason we’ve dusted off the anti-nuclear drills - and we’ll need to keep an eye out from day one for any ‘excessive initiative’ on the part of their field commanders.”
 
“They’ve already got the gloves unsnapped,” Bock summed up. “And we need to be ready for them to come off. Ma’am… Are we cleared to know what strategic pressure there is to move now, rather than waiting for them to… ease off of things?”
 
I looked at him for a few moments, then nodded. “There’s two factors I can tell you about.” The third, the need to use the DCMS as a whetstone to have the LCAF beaten into shape before the Clans of Kerensky came calling, whenever that happened, was still burn-before-reading secret.
 
“First, we know that, in February, one of the Combine’s deep raids stumbled over the Fifth Rift, and tipped them off to the fact that we’d built up this border. They’ve reinforced their side by several regiments since then, and we don’t want that process to advance too far before we act. We might start running into fair fights, and that wouldn’t do. The window of opportunity where we have the local superiority for a really successful major offensive is closing.
 
“Second, the Coordinator appointed a new military deputy.”
 
“Minobu Tetsuhara,” said Generalmajor Byers, one of the two who’d be working directly under me. “Previously just a regimental commander.” Despite the apparent dismissal, her tone was thoughtful.
 
“And in the Legion of Vega, which is supposed to be a dead end posting,” I agreed. “But he’s been their most effective raiding commander, including Kerensky. We have an extensive file on him, and with Takashi and the ISF backing him to the hilt, he’ll have free rein to reform and retrain the DCMS. Literally the only good news, from our perspective, is that he actually buys into the honor code rather than using it as a cover for atrocity.”
 
“I remember fighting him once,” announced Generalmajor Mannheim, the 7th Lyran Guards’ CO. “I had a battalion and he had a lance to work with, but damned if he didn’t tie us up in knots and get three of his people out - two of them with working mechs. The name stuck in my mind; he’s clever.”
 
“Ready for another round?” Kim asked him.
 
“Only if I’ve decided to die.” was the answer.
 
“Fortunately,” I said, “we won’t be fighting Tetsuhara directly. He’s on Luthien, and by moving early, there’s at least a chance that we’ll discredit him. Even if we can’t, we want to eliminate formations before he has a chance to take them in hand and make the job much harder.”
 
Understanding rippled back, and I rapped on the table. “All right. Any questions before we move on to details?”
 
Kim raised her hand. “By the sound of it, you’re, we’re, expecting to have ComStar come down on the Combine’s side.”
 
“Yes,” I said simply. “We don’t have a good read on their decision-making to evaluate how they’ll act on it, but they’re definitely no friends of ours. Strategically, penetration by Comstar intelligence assets is more of a concern than Combine ones.”
 
Kim wasn’t the only one to pale a shade or two, but she nodded. “Nothing else from me.” she said, and no one else spoke up.
 
“Right, then,” I said. “Let’s move on to flight times…”
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===Contested Hot Drop===
LYRAN DROPSHIP LEUTNANT REGINALD STATHAM, LOW ORBIT
VEGA, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
AUGUST 9TH, 3027
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Heinlein once wrote, ‘I always get the shakes before a drop,’ and he wasn’t kidding. Combining the detailed briefings you need for the op after it with furious orbital prep work and the utter helplessness of spending the trip to the ground completely in the hands of your DropShip pilots - or worse, the whims of wind and fate - is hell on the nerves.
 
Strapped into Marauder Number Two’s cockpit, all I could do was watch the displays. I’d left the main lights off; most of the light came from the screens in front of me, and the rest from the ruddy emergency lighting filling the mechbay around us. No. 2 had still been in the factory packaging when I got it; we’d put some hard miles on since then, so by most pilots’ standards the cockpit should have started smelling of fear and old sweat.
 
Frankly, the bleach-y smell from excessive cleaning was preferable, so that was what I had. That, and the lemon from the air freshener twist-tied to the neurohelmet docking rack overhead. Safe behind several layers of vacuum-rated seals, there was no hint to the outraged ozone, the burnt-brake-lining reek of charring armor and the more metallic smell of the Reg Statham’s paint job being ruined by our hot reentry.
The Fortress-class’s six thousand ton bulk shuddered and shivered just like an airliner in turbulence, but the course showing on my plot was rock-steady, the intervals between it and the nearest DropShips - the Triumph carrying the rest of the 5th Rift’s artillery regiment, and the Excalibur and three Overlords that between them carried the mech regiment and most of one of the armor ones - unwavering. All of the ships’ helmsmen had seen service elsewhere, in other units, before they ended up in the forming 5th, and they knew what they were about.
 
Specialties being what they are, I didn’t catch the meaning of the new icons on my repeater display until just before the Reg Statham’s drives kicked all the way up from the safe, leisurely reentry we’d been running to the almost three of emergency-max-plus-drag. Four different sprays of scarlet sparks were racing along over the deserts of South Nanturo at breakneck speeds and treetop altitudes, deep enough in ground clutter to be hidden from the powerful radar sets mounted aboard our DropShips.
 
The Combine had come up with the Kaiten as cheap chaff, but by the standards of the twentieth century they were actually fairly impressive. Nominally fifteen tons, including three tons of fuel and another half a ton of missile ammunition, with a top speed around Mach 1.6, and a thrust-to-weight ratio well over two-to-one. I was pretty sure that the missiles matched up to what a game universe suspiciously similar to what had become my real world would have called Medium Range Missiles.
 
The Commonwealth Navy Konteradmiral in charge of the DropShip flotilla was already calling me. ((“Warden,”)) she said. ((“We were wrong about where their aircraft were based.”))
 
“Yeah,” I agreed. Whether it was practice or how I was sitting, my voice showed the crushing Gs more than hers did. “Will we be back above their ceiling?”
 
((“No,”)) she said. ((“they’ll have time for one pass.”))
 
The operational plans for this had included IF-THEN loops for unexpectedly running into the defending aircraft squadrons. Aborting to orbit was the goal if the DropShips were high enough to reach that unengaged, and aborting to the ground planned for if it happened low enough for the crashes to be made survivable.
 
“Okay,” I said. “Punch us. It’s not what we hoped for, but we have to y-”
 
I’d intended to say ‘Yield to necessity.’ The backup plan for getting hit in the middle, the way we were, was to throw the entire force out of the DropShips and spread out the number of targets.
 
The downside being that it turned our organization into a clusterfuck.
 
The access panel on the drop pod wrapped around Marauder No. 2 slammed shut in front of me as I started to talk, cutting off the sight of my bay’s outer door opening at the same time, and right as I said the Y, the myomer bundles linking my pod to the wall were hit with a massive jolt of electricity from the Reg Statham’s power grid. They contracted instantly, hurling nearly ninety tons of assorted equipment out into space with a horrible screech of dragging metal and enough force to make the existing acceleration seem like I had been giving my wife a lap pillow. The air crushed out of my lungs in one huge bleat.
 
“-YEEEET!” I finished. “Gah! Okay, Konteadmiral Regis, I’ll get out of your hair. Get your people out, and mine’ll handle the rest.”
 
((“We’ll make it. Hals und Beinbruch, Warden! Maxim Station, clear.”))
 
The LCAF wasn’t a new force; legally, organizationally, historically, there was a clear continuity between the early self-defense forces improvised seven hundred years ago out of the three member state militarizes, and the freshly reforged war machine hurtling towards the surface of Vega VII at nine-point-six-one meters per second per second, less drag. And in the middle of those two historical ends, there was the LCAF that had started the Succession Wars, with almost all the gear and supplies they could ever want.
 
The LCAF of the 3rd Succession War, before Helm, New Dallas, and Artru had exploded in their skies and opened up their universe, had been making do, surviving on the scraps of what was left over. They hadn’t considered following the doctrine from two Wars ago, just because they’d never had the equipment to do it. No one living knew how big a difference that doctrine had made, not in anything more than pure theory, so in planning our current offensives, we’d chosen to follow the doctrine at its most cautious.
 
So, despite the main plan being to land in our Dropships, outside of the Combine’s range of interception, every tank and Battlemech of the invasion force was wrapped and prepped for a full orbital drop, equipped with ablative shells, chaff dispensers, parachutes and retrorockets for the armor and ‘chutes and jump harnesses for the ‘mechs.
 
Kicking us out the doors before they were all the way through reentry would char the insides of our DropShips’ deployment bays, but it also made them lighter by the loss of that cargo weight. It wouldn’t make a great deal of difference in their mass ratios, but every little bit helped.
 
There was a shudder and bang from behind and below me, and then the drop pod’s sections opened and blew away in the slipstream, leaving Vega’s stratosphere all around me. In a normal drop they’d have been almost burned away, rather than intact and providing armor value, but the discharge cue was altitude-locked for safety.
 
The sky was the intense dark blue of really high altitude flight, and the desert landscape was impossibly tiny and intricate far below. Radar, and feedback through my neurohelmet, highlighted the rising contrails behind the Combine attack birds as they arrowed towards me.
 
All around, tumbling curved panels rained down, and Battlemechs spread their limbs for stability like giant armored skydivers. Behind or above us, the first blocky silhouettes of the armor’s drop pallets was starting to fly free of the Dropship’s sides.
 
“‘Did they push you out, did they throw you away?’” I murmured, echoing the next few lines of the lyrical couplet my randomizer had thrown at me as the day’s authorization code.I wasn’t afraid any more, which was probably a bad sign.
 
Certainly it was a bad sign for the Combine pilots, because the third reason for converting to a pod drop was that, by this stage of things, with our mechs at least free falling like this - we were free to use our weapons. Streaks of white PPC fire and intensely-blue laser tracers started to crisscross the field around me, as the mechs falling from DropShips closer to the edges of the formation came into range and opened fire.Barely a couple of seconds later they were in our range.
I still had Malin Reyes and his old-style Crusader with me in my Command Lance, at least. He’d signed with me when I was still just running a one-regiment mercenary outfit, ten years ago on Hoff. Minakshi James, who was a bit shy of twenty-five years old to Reyes’ ninety-plus, was next; Sophitia and I had recruited her off of the streets of Solaris City only a couple years later. She’d bounced between mechs before we finally settled on having her in one of the new-model Battlemasters.
 
The last of my three keepers was Michael Zandanshatar, whose Rifleman was the first to fire at the incoming fighters. He was the second-best Rifleman jockey I’d ever seen work - after Gray Noton, then the Solaris Champion - and he splashed one fighter with a burst of cannon fire, then a second with another from the other arm’s gun only moments later. Matched flights of missiles hissed free of the launchers mounted over those guns and swarmed towards a third aircraft; only one hit, but at the supersonic speeds it was moving at, that was enough to open a gap in its skin and let the windblast peel it like a grape being fed into a salad shooter.The remaining three Combine aircraft bored in anyway, one of them into a carefully bracketed spread of LRMs from Reyes’ launchers. With No. 2 falling splayed like a skydiver, it took a moment’s twisting to reorient and sequence fire at another - PPC, autocannon, then the second PPC.
 
I missed.
 
Minakshi didn’t; her PPC shot caught her own target - not the one I’d shot at - squarely and punched straight through it. The flight of LRMs she’d sent as backup just raced through the fireball.
 
The last survivor twisted and oriented on the biggest threat, the mech that had showed what he’d seen as the most threatening gunnery and the one designed to kill fighters. He got off one volley of missiles before the rest of the lance’s crossfire wiped him away, but that was enough.
 
Battlemech and infantry drop pods each had two layers, though they differed. Combat vehicle pods had three. For infantry, there was an ablative shell designed to get them through atmospheric reentry, burning up and protecting them from the heat and friction. Inside that, there was a pressure vessel, a cheap plastic thing originally based off of an emergency rescue bubble, that kept the troopers inside from suffocating or needing an expensive and bulky space suit that they’d need to shed once they were on the ground. Once they were into breathable air, the equivalent of about three thousand meters altitude on Earth, both would be discarded and the troops just treated everything else like an ordinary paratrooper drop.
 
Vehicle pods shared the ablative shell and the pressure sealing, because while any modern combat machine was designed to keep the air pressure inside a touch higher than that outside, because having air flowing out of any gaps was cheaper and easier than sealing them against gas and similar threats. Of course, with even vehicle fusion engines being designed with the assumption of an atmosphere, and the fact that vacuum would to say the least complicate what seals they did have - tanks needed atmosphere just as badly as infantry did.
 
What tanks needed that infantry didn’t was a way to stop dozens of tons of mass from undergoing ‘a terminal lithobraking event’; an eighty-ton Patton could be dropped safely with parachutes, but it took a ridiculously large spread of silk. One-shot rocket thrusters, on the other hand, could be attached to the tank and stop it cold, and relatively gently, for a fraction of the bulk.
 
Importantly, the technology to do so had survived the Succession Wars, in connection with battlemech jump harnesses.
 
See, a Battlemech’s drop pod could be as simple as just wrapping it in an ablative shell, because they came fully sealed to start with. Many mechs had jump-jets, short-duration rockets that compressed reaction mass from the atmosphere and then fired it with their fusion reactor to let them cover dozens or hundreds of meters in a single bound. Naturally, these were also good for stopping long falls… But some, many, mechs didn’t mount jump jets, because for ground-combat purposes they were kind of situational.
 
But jump jets had to be mounted inside their mech’s armor to keep from being shot off, and accounted for in its weight calculations because it would be tromping around the battlefield. If you weren’t expecting to be shot at (much), and you didn’t expect to have to drag them far, what was stopping you from just strapping extra jets to the outside of your mech?
 
Nothing, as it turns out. In fact, it was the standard solution for how to get ground-bound mechs safely to the ground in orbital drops. Add a drag chute to do the stabilization work that a mech’s pilot and gyro managed, and the same solution worked just fine for tanks.
 
That ‘not expecting to get shot at’ thing was what gave the Combine fighters a real threat factor, because until we were on the ground, every harnessed mech in the force - including all four of my command lance - was completely dependent on those unarmored extra jets. Even one missile hitting in the wrong place could leave us with no way to stop our fall.
 
(>“I have a red light,”<) Zandanshatar said, voice tight. (>“Forward left pod is showing no-go. The straps and the other three are still green.”<)
 
))“Hang tight, kid.”(( Reyes said, and I saw his Crusader - lumpy with its own jump harness and falling with arms and legs spread wide - angle over next to Michael’s Rifleman.)) “Right. Pod’s shot, but the straps are good. You’ll make it, just roll at the bottom.”((
 
The order for Zandanshatar to just eject - his personal parachute was more than enough to save his life - hovered at the tip of my tongue as we flashed past four thousand meters. I didn’t give it; I knew there’d be an argument, and there wasn’t time.
 
Reyes tilted himself back and away from the falling Rifleman, and then twisted at the same instant that my safety warnings came up to cue me to do the same.
 
Within a second or two of each other, we were all oriented right and the jets started firing. I felt myself go from freefall to crushed again as the harness fired. All I could do was trust the automatic systems to get the timing right, and to watch Zandanshatar’s Rifleman out of the corner of my eye. My own jets fired intermittently, cutting in and out as they stuttered along their ‘desired profile’.
 
His three were firing constantly, on top of the weird angle he had to be at to keep their thrust balanced.
 
There wasn’t time to worry.
 
I tilted No. 2’s torso back and stretched its legs out - and let the train wreck hit. Dust and dislodged pebbles exploded out as my feet hit the rocky hardpan; warnings screamed and then went silent as the loads on ankles, knees, and hips went all the way up to the redline and then back down again, leaving the Marauder crouched with its reverse-jointed legs bent almost double under it. My cockpit was only a couple meters above the ground, before I stood up again and looked around, checking.
 
Reyes had taken manual control of his harness at the last second, and brought himself to a dead stop a meter or so above the ground and was already stripping the bulky gear off of his Crusader. Minakshi’s Battlemaster was crouched in the classic Superhero Three Point Landing Stance, and looked intact though she hadn’t moved yet.
 
And Zandanshatar…
 
I hit the harness ejection and flipped my optical assist to ZOOM x3 while it crashed down around me. The Rifleman was… probably repairable. One of the legs was all but shattered, and the other was bent in a direction that I was pretty sure it shouldn’t be. He’d fallen forward, and the left-arm cannon barrel was bent where it had helped catch his weight.
 
The medical readout sub-menus were pretty involved; I brought his biometrics up by thought, instead. I couldn’t really follow all the details, but the software’s designers had helpfully included summary tabs. He’d make a full recovery with no more than first aid, but wasn’t combat-effective now.
 
I took a couple of seconds to kick myself for not ordering him to eject, and then said, “Zandanshatar, are you awake?”
 
(>“...Yeah,”<) he replied, sounding only halfway so. (>“Sorry. Thought I had it.”<)
 
I cleared the zoom window. “Forget it. Are you, personally, OK to move?”
 
(>“I don’t think running or bending would be smart, but I can hobble.”<)
 
Broken ribs, probably, but if he stayed in his cockpit couch… “James, Reyes, each of you take one side and carry him. I’ll stay on cover.”
 
It had to be that way; their mechs had hands, and No. 2 didn’t.
 
(>“Gently, please.”<) Zandanshatar said, both smiling and hurting by the sound of it.
 
Reyes chuckled as he headed to his position. ((“No promises.”))
 
Despite the banter, he and Minakshi got the wrecked Rifleman gathered up with barely a clatter, and we started towards the rally point, with me spending most of my time and energy on the figurative phone trying to get the inevitable snarls straightened out.
 
When we limped into camp, about midway through the afternoon, no one had seen any sign of Combine ground forces. The air-breathing fighters that had hit us on the way down had been dangerous mostly for the fact that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; their lightly built frames weren’t up to tangling with three regiments of fusion-powered aerospace fighters, and the ones that hadn’t died trying had fled long since.
 
In their wake, fifteen regiments and enough supplies for a few days of fighting were scattered across thousands of square miles of desert, all converging on the bivouac points we’d determined before ever starting the drop. Getting all the troops gathered together to rest safely was the easy part; even the infantry were jump troopers who could easily hitch a ride on any heavier unit that swung by to pick them up - assuming that they weren’t in easy reach of the light APCs that had parachuted down with them.
 
No, the hard part was that most of the supplies hadn’t really been intended to drop with the rest of us. They’d been fitted with airdrop gear just in case, but not full drop pods - and more importantly, not been packed with their transport vehicles.
 
The pallets weren’t fitted with wheels or anything of the sort, but they were made out of some ridiculously tough alloy that would need more than a couple of days dragging sledge-style across the desert to show more than some scratches. The right ropes and tension, to lift the leading edge and keep them from digging in, and our tanks and mechs could pull them around easily enough.
 
Most of the effort I spent that afternoon was swearing at and terrorizing excessively prideful mechwarriors into hauling their share of the gear, and that was made easier by showing a good example.
So the four of us - one crippled mech, two APC carriers, and me slogging along in front of a train of tarpaulined boxes ridden by very amused infantrymen - finally reached the ‘gates’ of the fresh tent city around dusk. The looming shapes of battlemechs and the lower hillocks of combat armor were scattered around the perimeter and worked through the camp, each matched to this tent or that for its crew - where they’d bothered to set them up; I could see dozens of bedrolls stretched out under the open stars. The cranes and gantries of the mobile field bases - hundred ton vehicles built on combat grade chassis that were intended to park side-by-side and create a ground-portable mechbay or equivalent in minutes - were visible in stark silhouette against the yellow-orange horizon.
The infantry pickets scattered all around for kilometers would sleep in their carrier vehicles, and so would the tech crews after their all-nighter; the rest of my people were bedding down for the night, so they’d be ready to move bright and early at first light, without sleep deprivation getting in the way. I was ready to just fall over and go to sleep, too, but of course there was more to do.
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===Plans of Moving Forward===
CAMP ANTON, SOUTH NANTURO
VEGA, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
AUGUST 9TH, 3027
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“Fifteen percent losses is far more than we anticipated for this phase of operations,” Generalmajor Rabenstrange, the commanding officer of the second brigade of Winfield’s Legion, was a short, tubby man with small dark eyes that made him look irresistibly piggish, and with just me and the 11th Lyran Guards’ Generalmajor Byers in the room, he wasn’t restraining the urge to fret. “The pallets can get armor down, but they can’t face an opposing drop, they’re helpless in flight.”
 
“They’re not the solution we’d hoped for,” I admitted. “But as for today…”
 
“It’s not more than we’d accept to get down with another ops plan,” Byers replied, not quite rolling her eyes. She was tall and bony, old for her rank and looking it - though the impression was more ‘terrifying veteran teacher’ than grandmotherly. “And how many of those paper kites of theirs did they lose doing it?”
 
Despite his earlier words, Rabenstrange cracked a smile. “Enough that against another kind of unit I’d call it worth it,” he said. “But these new Combine brigades are pretty obviously designed around wearing down our strength with expendable units just like those fighters. If they can pull off those loss ratios repeatedly, we’ll be worn to nothing even before they commit their mechs.”
 
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you expect that they will?”
 
“No,” he admitted, “but we have to plan for it just in case.”
 
I nodded. “In that case, we’ll want to start with their airbases, won’t we?”
 
Byers closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat. “They’re threats, they’re potential base points for us, they’ll have potable water supplies to supplement our own, and most of all, they’re on the way to our main objectives.”
 
“If they defend them, we’ll have a fight on our hands,” Rabenstrange warned.
 
“That’s what we came here for,” she replied.
 
“Unless they either held back half their air strength, or decided to station both ground forces with only one air element for cover, I figure they won’t have the numbers to do more than play for time,” I said. “We’ll scout anyway, of course, but it would be stupid for them to try to come to full grips without concentrating first. If this were the Sword of Light, sure, but this is Theodore Kurita and the Legion of Vega. They’ll be looking for ambush opportunities and asymmetric strategy, and save the set pieces for the endgame.”
 
The two brigade commanders traded a look, then nodded in unison.
 
“Fast or slow, then?” Rabenstrange asked. “If they’ve got a ground force at those bases, then we can take it off the field if we move quickly enough, but that would mean limited scouting.”
 
“Fast,” I said. “How soon will you be ready to move?”
 
“Nine hours, give or take,” Byers said.
 
“Seventeen, for me,” Rabenstrange added.
 
I nodded. “And my people are saying twelve. All right. We’ll move out tomorrow morning.”
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===Letter from Afar===
TEMPORARY FIELD BASE 
VEGAS, DIERON DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
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The last thing I did that night was sit down and did the thing I’d been putting off, to my increasing frustration and self-flagellation. I read my letter.
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Ash,
 
Thank you for the photo album from our daughters’ visit on their trip back. It’s a little greedy to want to see more of our girls so soon after the end of their visit with me, but for their sake I’m fine being greedy. Though I’m sorry that this letter won’t reach you as quickly as we might wish, I’ve included the censor-approved photos we took over that week. I’m a bit biased, but I’m particularly fond of the one of Fiona in Aspis’s cockpit. She was excited enough that I bet she told you, but I promised her that, once we were all home, we’d sit down with her and take her through her first simulator run. I still have the program set that Papa came up with for me, at that age, so we should be able to give her a good first experience.
 
It’s strange how big she seems already, and in contrast, how young the men under me all are. Even only taking veterans for the Proud Void, the average age for a mechwarrior in my company is about twenty-two, so after the promotion they actually have started calling me the old lady. I can’t help smiling even as I’m furious at you for sticking the term ‘MILF’ in my head, especially given how many of them keep flirting.
 
It was a bit of a challenge to keep those kids on task and focused at first. I ended up getting more or less urgent advice from several of the old noncoms and the other officers. At least the Oberst wasn’t one of the ones that was angry about it. He had a lot of the same things to say about asserting myself that Doctor Markham did, but he was also pointing out that it was something I owed to my people, because they were depending on me for guidance rather than merely support. Doctor Topolanek agreed, and made the connection that I’d been failing to live up to similar obligations in our lives at home. I’d been thinking as much myself, in that unforgiving way that we both know, so it was good to have some substance to know that it wasn’t just my mood counseling my fears, as well as to have his judgement as a ground point for how much I had missed and how seriously I should take it.
 
Doctor Topolanek is very different from Doctor Markham, and of course there was the uneasy element of his being assigned to me making it hard for me to accept his help. He’s less gentle about how he phrases things, more direct and more confrontational. Doctor Markham made it easy to ease myself into… well, things. But Doctor Topolanek believes in facing things directly, in confronting them. At times I think that this has to do with the difference in their positions; Doctor Markham was interested in my ultimate fate, in how completely I could manage what had happened to me. Doctor Topolanek is head psychologist for the entire Proud Rift, and while I don’t doubt that he wishes the best for me and for everyone else under his care, his first duty has to be to our military effectiveness.
I think that that’s, in some ways at least, preferable to too much care.
 
In any case, once the exercises started, the LFL made the point about the need to train seriously for me as well as anyone could have wished. The first real exercise we did against them ended pretty humiliatingly, even for me. There’s not much I can do when there are six good mechwarriors cooperating against me. After that I had a pretty easy time convincing all of the company to stand together and cooperate. Half of them wanted revenge on the Wolves in the next exercise, and the other half were thinking of what the Combine would do, and so was I.
 
I won’t say that we got that revenge, but we did a lot better. I’d showed my people some of the training exercises Papa taught me, and we’d been running through them pretty hard in between the larger-unit ones coming down from above. It was really obvious that the Legion company we were up against for the second joint op hadn’t expected the amount of polishing we’d done, though I suppose that what made it so was the way they changed things up in mid-stream, going from straight-up fighting to weaving in and out. The Major had some pretty sharp things to say about how little we’d done with our own coordination, but at the same time he did that he was taking notes on the training we had done, so I think that overall it was more of a confirmation of the strengths and weaknesses we’d all known to expect from me than it was a failure.
 
That page was splattered with several noticeable tearstains. I was worried for her, of course - I knew when my wife was putting a bright face on things - but I also wondered, with even more worry than that, at the spurt of satisfaction.
 
I didn’t want to feel that. It made me sick to my stomach to think in that way about her, and I wanted to rip the thought out and tie it spreadeagled across one of No. 2’s PPC muzzles.
 
That being physically impossible, I settled for ignoring it.
 
The large-scale exercises went a bit better, in my eyes if not the Oberst’s. We did six brigade-level ones in total, three of one brigade against one other, and then three more with one against the other two. The Proud Void tied one of our ‘solo’ exercises with heavy losses and lost the other, but we made it through both of our team ups without losses that were noticeably worse than the Wolves we were working with. I’ll call that doing well enough. None of the brigades won from the weaker side of the two-on-one exercises, and while we’ve taken lessons on cooperation from being on the other side of those, we managed to avoid any spectacular disasters.
 
Those were reserved for the personal side of things. The largest blessing is that the relationship and all attendant disaster was already underway before I arrived. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but one of the Fire Lance Griffin pilots was running an amateur dominatrix business while being involved with her Hatchetman lancemate. One of her customers, an aerospace Major, went stalker on her and managed to manipulate a different customer into knifing the boyfriend, leaving me with three replacement Mechwarriors and one of the Air Regiment’s wings without a CO.
 
Having the Generalmajor come to have Personally Very Disappointed Talk with your unit after something like that isn’t a good feeling, even if she specifically pulls you and the other new transfers out of line before she starts. She was in a darker and grimmer mood than I think she realized I saw, but she took a moment afterwards to offer a few words of advice if I needed them, and I think my plan to point out the stupidity of trusting an amateur dominatrix at least cheered her up. I’d rather have been spared the memories of having it demonstrated, much less video, given other memories, but the latter at least let me extract some value from it. The amount of embarrassment in having their company commander go over those kinds of records and give critiques of technique and safety has done wonders for convincing them to keep their affairs outside the Void altogether, but I could have done without the reputation as a sexual guru.
 
I can already hear it, you don’t need to say it. Yes, that probably does have something to do with the flirting.
 
As I write these last few lines, we’re aboard our dropships, waiting at the Nadir point of Rigel Kentarus to go to our final destinations. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many jumpships in one place at one time. The crew of the Merchant carrying us says that they believe their ship is the oldest still-operating one in existence, five hundred years old and more. Regimental flag is flying from the Greenseed, and even knowing all the fights you had to get Katrina and Ioto Galactic everything they needed to rebuild the old Rim yards, seeing the first hull christened at our yards still gives me a chill to realize how much jumpship production has increased, and even more so to realize how easily it could have been otherwise.
You deserve a better wife, but I can only be grateful that your judgement in this isn’t quite so good as in most things. I love you, Ash, and I’m sorry for tearing us apart like this, particularly when, in fullest honesty, I’ve come to realize how silly I was that day at home.
 
Until we can meet again,Sophitia
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