StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I actually originally wrote the first draft of this story after reading The Road to Hell, but after doing some research into the universe I found it couldn't possibly work (most damagingly, the TGG-verse has no US).
Still, I thought the race and storyline I came up with somewhat interesting (if the Scythians were a bit cheesy, admittedly) so I was reluctant to abandon it.
After an abortive attempt to shoehorn it into my own personal uni, which didn't work as well as I'd hoped, I mostly gave up on it for a while. Then a while ago I got to playing around with it in my head and I said screw it, I'll just write the way I originally concieved, and since I'll totally screw up the TGG-verse out of any semblance of recognition anyway, I might as well make it my own uni.

Note: the British Empire is still mostly Steve's creations, he gets credit for them, as are several other TGG-verse nations which will be briefly mentioned.
The Scythians, though basically my own creation, are also somewhat influenced by the Amazons in Road to Hell and 55 Days in Kalunda. If I've used somebody's nation without giving them credit please PM me and let me know.

CHAPTER 1

USNOD Killiman, Killiman, Outer Reaches, March 19th 2517

Killiman was the kind of planet you generally found in the roughly three thousand light year circle the Brits had dubbed the Outer Reaches. It was one of the furthest colonies established pre-Collapse. Records of its colonization were lost in the Collapse, but it had originally been a frozen moon of a gas giant orbiting a hot blue-white star too short-lived to have allowed life to evolve naturally. At some point greenhouse gas injection had been carried out, oceans and a suitably thick atmosphere had been melted out of its ice sheets, and life had been introduced. When the Collapse came it actually did fairly well, managing to hang on to at least basic, simple technology. Most of the planets in the Outer Reaches had been settled by refugees from the Last War and the fast-spreading bioweapons that had destroyed pretty much all higher life on Earth; they’d usually just been running to any place remotely capable of supporting life and most of those planets had been down to sticks and flint within a generation. Killiman managed on its own for the first odd century or so, until a British scout cruiser entered the system at which point… not much changed at all. The planet was too poor in resources to make a profitable acquisition for the British Empire. Aside from the odd visit by Markinite Raiders things went OK… until Killiman found itself an Scythian rearward naval base. Things went south from there, until they found themselves caught in the crossfire when the Americans took the base. The fishing villages stretched along the rocky Western Coast were only now being rebuilt; potholes from artillery strikes smoothed over, napalm-burned debris cleared away, charred, mutilated, and radiation-poisoned bodies buried. Here a dead Scythian Diana tank rested over the crushed remains of a fisherman’s shack, its long 88 mm railgun still raised defiantly at American MBTs that had long since moved on. There the barely recognizable remains of an American Eagle fighter rested in a scrubby meadow, at the end of a long bare trail of its own making. There a seaside cliff had acquired a new shape where an American bomber-launched heavy tac nuke had obliterated a theatre-shielded Scythian fighter base, which just happened to be right next to a small town.

So in fishing towns along the coast heads went up nervously as the Dakota Skytrain cutter sliced through Killiman’s atmosphere. Scythian fighters had patrolled the skies before, and American fighters did so now, but the men and women of Killiman had learned good reason to fear sonic booms. They told you there was a good probability bombs were about to start dropping on your head. The bombing had stopped a month ago, but it was an understandable nervous habit, and all along the rocky coast men, women, and children breathed little sighs of relief that yes, it really was just a civilian cutter.

The Skytrain descended through the streaky high-clouds of Killiman’s atmosphere and towards the Scythian naval base, now adapted to serve the USN instead. Where Athenas and Tiamats once rested Iowas and South Dakotas did now. Even from the air it was obvious something big was going down. Boxy, businesslike transports waited on the tarmac, their jaws gaping to receive tanks, armored vehicles, heavy equipment, supplies, and men. The launch pads were full of warships; little missile ships and destroyers, cruisers and battlecruisers snarling with weaponry, half-kilometer long battleships that towered over the surrounding towns like grey mountains. All of them were being fueled and loaded with missiles and shells. Ground crews crawled over their hulls checking for weak points and faults.

The Skytrain hit its landing thrusters and gently set down on a small landing pad toward the edge of the immense tarmac. A few curious ratings turned to watch. Some of them recognized General Andrews as he was escorted to a jeep and driven across the tarmac to the Army barracks. There he disembarked and walked into the mess hall.

The mess hall was a big prefab. The kind that could be found on half a thousand Army bases all over the American-held planets of the Outer Reaches. American and Scythian designs didn’t differ that much. They were, after all, both human nations; their tech had only had a few centuries to diverge, and most of that had been spent trying to regain what had been lost in the Collapse. The benches and tables were uncomfortable to most of the GIs who now packed the mess, having been designed with an on-average smaller soldier in mind, and the Scythians seemed to consider climate control an expendable luxury, but that was about it.

General Andrews coughed and turned to the projectionist. The projectionist nodded: it was all set up. He turned on the projector. General Andrews entered a neural command and instantly a picture of a planet sprang into view. It was obviously Earthlike: green-brown continents, blue oceans, and white cloud. Two moons were visible, and it orbited a binary system of two yellow-white stars. A third, distant red dwarf component to the solar system could also be seen.

“Men and women of the United States Army” Andrews began. “I know you all must know something big’s going to happen soon. And you’re looking at it.” Andrews gestured at the image. “I give you the planet Turin. This planet isn’t like Killiman or Tarawa or Malden or Howland or Cranston or most of the others you’ve been to. Turin is a fully populated, fully industrialized world. It’s got hundreds of millions of people on it. And the Scythians occupy it. Been occupying it for more than fifteen years now. It was one of their first conquests. Well, that’s not going on much longer.”

The projection shifted. Now it showed a starfield. At Andrews’ neural command two star systems were highlighted: Turin and Killiman. At a second command more systems were highlighted behind Killiman: Howland, Malden, Tarawa, Solomon, and Indra VIII. “As you can see” Andrews continued “we’ve got five lines of advance converging on Turin here, and we’ve got fresh troops coming in from the States too. This is going to be the biggest operation of the war so far. As I said Turin is a fully industrialized world, and loosing it is gonna be a big fat kick in the stomach for the Scythians. After all, they’re a bunch of Outer Reachers taking on the finest Army and Navy and the most productive economy in the goddarn galaxy; Heaven knows they need all the industrial capacity they can get!” there were a few scattered laughs and cheers at this. “But that’s not the best part. The best part is Turin is only around two hundred light years from Scythia itself. That means when we take it we’ll have a base close enough for our battleships to reach their bloody homeworld!”

This time the room exploded in cheers as the GIs pieced together what that meant. If Turin was taken – then the end of the war was in sight! Maybe, just maybe, they could go home again. If not this year then maybe next year. Sure it would take time to build up strength to actually invade Scythia. These GIs had fought Scythian clonetroopers through the stinking jungles of Malden, Tarawa, Solomon, and Indra VIII: they knew how fanatical their enemies were and that they weren’t the type to cry uncle easy. But they’d beaten them on those planets, and they’d beat them on Turin and eventually on Scythia too. And besides, if Scythia could be attacked directly it opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Ships could raid it. Carriers could be slipped into the Scythia system and deploy fighter wings to do untold damage. Missile boats could take up commerce raiding, strangling the Scythian’s trade with the NPA and NSSU and cutting their flow of arms even as nukes were dropped on their cities to gut their industry. By the time the GIs were sent in a determined raiding campaign with space superiority could reduce a planet like Scythia to starvation. The NPA had shown it worked in their war with the French Empire.

General Andrews waited a few minutes for the cheering to die down. “So, now that you know how important this campaign is… it’s time to go find the Sallies and kick them in the balls! The fleet departs in one week, as soon as the latest reinforcements from America arrive.”

CHAPTER 2

Turin Skywatch, Nova Catalina, Turin, June 2nd 2517

The Skywatch technician yawned and picked at her nail for what had to be the five hundredth time. The one on her index finger had broken earlier that night and she wished she had a nail clipper with her so she could trim it into something more presentable than the job her teeth had done. She checked the clock and saw that it was twelve-thirty in the morning. Turin’s days were a bit on the long side, at twenty-nine and a half hours. Less than halfway through a shift lengthened to accommodate the longer local day.

An alarm chimed on her computer, making her jump. She reached out with her neural interface and information appeared on the screen. The orbital sats had detected an energy signature consistent with the warp drive of a Yankee vessel decelerating through the outer system. Probably another scout cruiser snooping around. Or it could just be a commercial transport which happened to have a US-built warp core. She keyed in a channel with her partner.

“Zelda, I have a possible bogey at coordinates X15, Y25, Z-4. Do you confirm?”

“Confirm” the reply came. “Let’s see… no commercial flights due at this time or from that vector, but of course that doesn’t mean much. It does come from the general direction of America.” When under warp a ship was totally blind, so navigation was pretty hairy and ETAs could rarely be narrowed down to a precision of less than a few days. “Call the Super?”

“Yeah” the technician punched in another command. “Lieutenant, I’ve got a possible hostile coming in at X15, Y25, Z-4. Shall I check it out?”

“Adjusting satellite gain now” another voice came over the comm. At the beckoning of another technician a tracking satellite shifted from its usual pan-scan observation of its sector of sky and focused in on those coordinates. Its data was fed back down into the Skywatch computers, and within seconds it had been interpreted and flashed on the watch technician’s screen.

“Holy Goddess!” the watch officer gasped. The technician sat, staring openmouthed at the immense cluster of drive signatures that blazed in the screen like a crowded constellation.

The Yankees were coming.


Governor General’s Headquarters, Nova Catalina, Turin, June 2nd 2517

The suns wouldn’t begin to brighten the sky for many hours yet. Many of the brass in Governor General Geller’s conference room had come here after being rudely awakened by personal secretaries or alarms, and quite a few were still squinting against the bright light in the room, rubbing their eyes, and otherwise showing signs that they’d much rather be lying down at this hour. Governor General Geller shared that sentiment. She wasn’t tired really, but it would be nice to return to that warm, cozy darkness where the Great Campaign hadn’t turned into an unmitigated disaster and a giant American fleet hadn’t just been detected heading straight for her.

“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news” Governor General Geller looked over the faces of the assembled officers. Some of them were resentful of being woken up and rushed down here in the middle of the night, some had that look of fearful curiosity on their faces, but most were expecting. They all knew how badly the war was going, they knew that with Killiman in American hands the Yanks were only one long warp jump away from Turin, and they weren’t blind to the implications of the fact that Turin in turn was only one warp jump from Scythia itself, and a fairly important world to the war effort to top that off. They’d watched the Yankee advance crash its way through planet after planet, pushing inexorberably toward Scythia.

“As of twelve thirty-six tonight our Skywatch picked up an American-style warp signature entering our system. At first they thought it might just be another scout cruiser poking around, but when they turned the spotter satellite for a closer look they got this.” Geller gestured at the projector screen behind her and entered a neural command into the projector. Immediately a false-color picture sprang into being, showing the stars of the galaxy viewed through an EM telescope. A giant blue stain occupied the center of the picture: the EM signature of hundreds of warp drives seen from a distance.

“There is some good news” Geller said. “They’re still decelerating. Skywatch estimates that when they fold their warp fields they’ll be a good fraction of an AU from Turin. They’ll have to assemble their fleet and cross that distance with conventional drives, meaning that altogether we’ll have a good three to four days, about, before they’re in missile range of Turin. We were lucky, to an extent, their warp trajectory could just as easily have taken them much closer in, and we’d have much less time to prepare.”

“Some luck” somebody muttered dubiously.

“Are there any estimates yet on the size and composition of this fleet?” Admiral Alvera asked. She was in command of the naval forces the Scythians maintained in the Turin system. Governor General Geller was pleased to have her here: she wasn’t the most personable of women but she was a highly effective commander known for efficiently and ruthlessly dismantling enemy forces, even ones that outmatched her numerically. Age was difficult to estimate in this era of antigerone therapies, but the age spots on her hands and lines around her mouth said she was probably close to if not past a hundred.

“We have, but they’re – of course- crude and-“

“Just give me the best you’ve got” Admiral Alvera interrupted.

“Commander Larissa?” the Governor General gestured for the commander of the Skywatch to stand. Commander Larissa got up, looking a little intimidated to be in the presence of so much high level brass, and cleared her throat.

“Well – uh” she began skittishly. “Uh – well – OK, first of all there are between fifty and a hundred ships with civilian drive signatures. They stand out right away; civilian drives look very different from military ones. Now we’ve managed to get some limited pictures with the orbital scopes. A few of these are tenders, oilers, milk cows, hospital ships, the usual. What you’d expect to accompany a big fleet like this. But most of them are these.” A picture appeared on the projector; a snapshot of one of the approaching enemy ships captured by an orbiting telescope and computer-enhanced to show detail. It showed a flotilla of identical medium-sized blocky, graceless ships. “These are Valdez class freighters; under the circumstances it’s almost certain they’re troopships. Based on the amount we think we’re looking at an army of between four and five million soldiers, depending on their exact composition. Probably closer to five, maybe even more.”

There was silence around the room for a few moments as the officers digested that. The Scythians had considered about 1.5 million soldiers adequate to hold Turin, although with the Yankees getting closer they’d recently increased it to 2.5 million. Even by the best estimate, they were looking at a two to one numerical disadvantage. And it wouldn’t help that the Yankees had much better heavy armor, and would have space superiority…

“As for their naval assets” Commander Larissa went on. “We estimate between fifty and seventy-five cruisers, a few hundred assorted destroyers and missile boats, another fifty to seventy-five carriers, and-“ she stopped for a minute and took a deep breath. “And thirty-five battleships Admiral.”

“Shit” hissed General Leary, the head of the Army divisions stationed on Turin. After the disastrous defeat at Caliban the Scythian Navy had less than fifty battleships left, and most of those had been called back to Scythia. Conserved for the eventual defense of the homeworld, although the Navy would never admit that. Turin, like most colonies, had been more-or-less hung out to dry, with only thirteen battleships currently in-system. If the Scythians were outnumbered on the ground they would be totally dominated in space. Even a career Army woman could see that.

Thirteen battleships against thirty-five Geller thought to herself, her mind playing with the figure like one might play with a scab. Three of which are bloody ironclads the Navy’s dragged out of mothballs. And no possibility of reinforcements by this point… not that the Navy would send any anyway. Cruisers and battlecruisers might be the workhorses of a fleet, and fighters and missile boats could do plenty of damage, but as every wet behind the ears Crewer knew it was battleships that really mattered in a fleet engagement. If you had bad odds at the upper end of your tonnage scale… well, it was still possible to win, but you’d have to be pretty damn creative.

“Admiral Alvera…?” Governor General Geller asked, not really sure what exactly she wanted to ask anyway.

“I have to admit I don’t like those odds” Admiral Alvera said. “I’d be an idiot if I didn’t. I’m not going to lie to you. I can’t promise anything. But I’ll do what I can. If nothing else I intend to give them a real messy bloody nose before I go down.”

The Governor General just nodded. She wanted to say something, like “good” or anything, but she couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound weak, discouraging, or melodramatic. What did you say to somebody who just admitted, not in so many words, that your odds of success were virtually nothing? Geller reflected, not for the first time, that the entire war effort had been reduced to a question of giving the Americans a bloody nose before going down. It was a depressing and frightening thought. The Scythians would fight on Turin, and they’d loose. They’d fight hard and well, with as much dedication as human beings could fight, but they were caught in teeth of the unstoppable bulldozer of the US war machine all the same and they were powerless to do any more than slow its progress with their dead bodies. And when Turin was gone there would be nothing between them and Scythia but a few hundred light years of impotent vacuum. And then… millions of Yankee soldiers descending on Scythia, and three out of every four of them male; defiling the sacred homeworld with their very presence if nothing else. It probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad as the frontline soldiers thought it would be; the Governor General was well-educated and traveled enough to know the lurid tales passed down to the rank and file were greatly exaggerated a quarter of the time and outright lies the other three quarters. But still…

“And, we’ve picked up something else of note” Commander Larissa continued. The projection shifted to show another computer-enhanced photograph of the approaching enemy fleet. “We believe this is one of their new Montana class battleships, like the one we encountered in the Trojan Belt and over Andaman. As you can see, it’s a direct descendant of the Iowa but more heavily armed. But you’ll notice this gun turret here, at the back of the gun row.” The picture zoomed in on the identified turret. “Our analysts back on Scythia have been studying these recordings for months now but we couldn’t figure out for the life of us what that thing was. But one of their analysts thinks she’s identified it; she’s seen it before on British warships. We just got the message yesterday. It’s a crude gravity gun.”

Nobody said anything. As usual, it was because what was going through their minds wouldn’t have helped. Gravity guns weren’t particularly powerful, but they went right through shields like they weren’t even there. Didn’t the damn Yankees have enough advantages already? Wasn’t it sufficient that their battleships were faster and more heavily armed and armored, that their tanks were better, that they could field three or four soldiers for every one the Scythians did, and equip them better too? It was enough to make you wonder about converting to Christianity, because there were times when it sure seemed like they had some kind of divine favor!

“You said ‘a crude gravity gun’” Admiral Alvera said. “How far along does the Intelligence Bureau think the Americans are in gravity weapons research?”

Director Martine; the head of the Intelligence Bureau’s division on Turin, spoke up. “So far as we can tell they’ve just barely got it to the point of being able to mount them on their biggest battleships. And – well, just look at the size of the turret. It’s much bigger than the British version, which can be mounted on battlecruisers – let alone the Pakharap versions which they can mount in things as small as fighters. In short, it gives them a little advantage, but not much. I’d still recommend destroying them at extreme range with either missiles or bombers. Preferably bombers.”

“That’s reassuring” Governor General Geller said. “Generally Admiral, where do you peg the odds of success, with this new information?”

Admiral Alvera considered for a moment. “Same as before.”

“And you, General?” Geller turned to General Leary. “If we can’t hold them in space, will we be able to do it on the ground?”

“We’ll be able to hold out for a while” General Leary said. “If we could depend on reinforcements from Scythia then yes, we can. But the Supreme Marshal doesn’t seem to care about the colonies-“

“I’m sure the Supreme Marshal has her reasons!” Director Martine said hotly.

“You’re damn right she has her reasons, she’s saving them for when the Yankees are pounding on the shields of Scythia itself!” General Leary snapped back. Everybody in the room recoiled a little. It was something they all were thinking, but none of them dared to say. “It’s time to face up to fucking reality here ladies! We thought we could beat the weakest of the Great Powers – and we were wrong! It’s as simple as that! Diana’s tits we were idiots to attack Panthalassa! All you had to do was look up America’s population and industrial output, and then look up ours, and it’s plain as day! We thought that just because our cause was right, and we believed in it, it’d somehow magically make the fact that they’re better than us in almost every single fucking quantifiable way magically disappear! They said nothing could stand against our determination, that they couldn’t match our passion… Well how impressed do you think a nuclear missile is by passion?”

Geller felt the need to step in before the room erupted into an argument. “Yes, well, whatever the tangents are General, I asked for your estimate of our success here and now.”

General Leary shrugged. “We can’t win. We might as well accept that. But there’s loosing well and loosing badly, and we can loose well. We can loose well; we can turn Turin into a sink in which America’s blood and equipment will go straight down the drain. We can’t face the US Army’s firepower, especially if they have air and space superiority, which they will very quickly, so we won’t try. There aren’t any jungles to hide in here like there were on Tarawa and Indra VIII, but there are cities. Tell me Governor General, have you ever by any chance heard of a place called Stalingrad?”

Question for the military types here. I've got a tentative ship naming system for the USN, please tell me if this is roughly consistent with the RL USN.

Battleships: states
Cruisers: American historical figures, cities
Carriers: famous battles, admirable qualities (Enterprise etc.)
Destroyers: heroes of the USN
Missile ships: fish and birds

Messdecks, USS Abraham Lincoln, approaching Turin. June 5th 2517

At the moment it was supposed to be breakfast for First Shift and dinner for Third Shift, and the messdecks of the Forrester class cruiser USS Abraham Lincoln was quite full. The meal was bacon and eggs; scrambled or over easy depending on what kind of snot you preferred it to look and pretty much taste like. Most of the ratings were finishing up their plates. A few trickled back to duty. The mess stewards were already busily scraping half-eaten food off the plates and into the big metal garbage bin. The place was a little quieter, a little more tense than usual. This wasn’t going to be just another day of cruising around space. After more than two months at warp and four days moving through the Turin system by conventional drives they were finally slated to reach Turin tonight. The Scythians would try to stop them sometime… and that sometime looked to be today.

“Two lousy months” Crewman Ferrino griped. “Then we finally get here and we gotta wait some more. Just our lousy luck to come out halfway across the lousy system from the planet.”

His companion smirked at him over his coffee cup. “You’d rather be in that turret now?”

Ferrino shrugged. “I don’t like the Sallies taking shots at my ass any more than the next man if that’s what you mean. But it’s gotta be done and I’d just as soon get it over with as soon as possible.”

“Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to kicking their asses” Crewman Frankie said from two seats over. “It’s about time we got some payback for Panthalassa!”

Crewman Young smirked again. “Oh I’d say we got plenty of payback for that. Whatever they did on Panthalassa we did to them about five times over by now. They say once we’ve kicked them off Turin we’ll be able to start launching attacks on Scythia itself!” He frowned as he twirled some slimy egg whites around his fork. “What I don’t get is what the fuck they were thinking attacking Panthalassa in the first place. They’ve gotta have known they couldn’t beat the US. Just no way they could have. Not in a million years.”

Crewman Frankie shrugged. “Who knows what makes the Sallies tick. They’re crazy. I heard whenever some poor dogface gets into their hands… our boys find him a week later with his wang cut off and stuffed down his fucking throat while he was still alive!”

“I heard of that too” Ferrino said. “Think it’s true?”

Young shrugged. “Wouldn’t be too surprised if it happens. Kind of makes you glad when we’re fighting ‘em it’s with a good couple of thousand kilometers of vacuum between them and us, don’t it?”

Frankie nodded. “I heard of one POW camp they liberated on Tarawa where they took every male GI and cracked his nuts. And I don’t mean a nice surgical tube-tying either; I mean they fucking cut their shit off! Like, with a knife or something! You’re right Young; I’d hate to be getting up close and personal with those psychos the way the boys in the Army are.” He reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels as he spoke.

“Can I get one of those?” Young asked.

“Sure” Frankie lent him a cigarette and lit it for him, then lit his own and sucked down the first whiff of smoke. Ferrino dug into his scrambled eggs with mechanical determination. As far as he was concerned the Navy’s idea of eggs was good for interrogating prisoners, not human consumption. Same went for their coffee. The hash browns weren’t half-bad though, if you got a little of them on every fork-full you could usually eat the rest of the crap without noticing how bad it tasted. He was mostly finished when the alarm went off and the Captain’s voice crackled over the PA system.

“This is Captain Minetta speaking! We’ve just gotten notification that the Scythians are launching fighter wings and moving on an intercept course! This ship is now on red alert! All crew to battlestations! And may God be with us all.”

Crewman Young shrugged as he gulped down the last of his coffee and put out his cigarette in the empty cup. “You get what you wish for.”


Bridge of the USS Texas, approaching Turin orbital insertion point

Admiral Stuart Slade looked over the tactical projection projected on the chart table’s computer screen. Turin occupied the center of it, with the two moons and their orbits shown. His own fleet was a constellation of green lights, its path marked by a green line that swung close to Turin and then ended in a circle around the planet. Turin was banded by a red circle; the orbit of the Scythian fleet. But now a new red line emerged from that circle to cross with the projected path of his fleet.

“They’re going to try to cut us off at the orbital insertion point” said Captain Craven; the Texas’s CO.

Admiral Slade nodded. “Yes, I figured they’d try to do something like this. Which, as you’ll remember, is why we took the long route.” Instead of putting the fleet in a simple intercept orbit and then doing one breaking burn close to the planet Slade had his ships gradually shake off their excess inertia by a long series of smaller precision burns. It had taken longer, but it was well worth it. He turned to Captain Craven.

“Check with Admirals Berger and Travis and see to it that all our ships are ready to do their final breaking burns in the next…” he did some quick mental calculations. “Twenty minutes. And tell Admiral Travis I want all his fighters ready to launch by then.”

“Yes sir.” Captain Craven spoke to the Radioman and then turned back to Admiral Slade. “Yes sir, Admiral Berger and Admiral Travis reports they can do it.”

“Admiral Hasley?” Slade asked.

Admiral Hasley; the commander of the Turin Expeditionary Task Force’s battleship element, spoke briefly over his headset comm. “Shouldn’t be a problem sir” he said after a few moments.

“Good” Admiral Slade said. The first Scythian vessels wouldn’t come into missile range until long after they were done with the breaking burns. And after that no more burns would be required; Turin’s gravity would catch them in a nicely stable, albeit wildly elliptical orbit. If there was one thing you didn’t ever want to do it was a breaking burn while making an attack; not only did it leave a ship completely unable to maneuver but it required turning your rear towards the enemy. That meant you turned most of your weapons away from the enemy, because the rear was mostly engine and didn’t have much room for big guns or very many missile launchers. Not to mention that while doing any kind of rocket burn you had to lower your rear shields so the rocket exhaust could escape.

“Put me on with Admirals Travis and Berger” Admiral Slade ordered. “We’re close enough that light lag isn’t an issue and I want to speak them directly.” He waited a few minutes for the Texas’s radioman to connect them. “Your opinions?” he asked after the Radioman gave the thumbs-up signal.

“It looks like they’re going to hit us with everything they have simultaneously, instead of sending their bombers ahead” Admiral Travis said from his place on the bridge of the lead carrier United States. “Which seems weird, because they’ve got a huge deficiency in battleships. If I were them I’d try to take out as many of our battleships as I could with bombers before they got into missile range of my fleet. And… well, the Scythians love roving fighter strikes, it’s not at all like them to keep their bombers in with the rest of the ships. My guess is they are planning on hitting us with bombers first, but they want to maximize the shock effect of the bomber strikes, so they’ll keep the bombers close to the rest of their ships until the very last moment. Then they send them ahead, hit us hard, and while we’re still seeing stars – wham, the rest of their fleet starts hitting us.”

“Recommendations?” Slade asked.

“Not much to be said” Travis said. “Launch all our interceptors and give ‘em hell. I’ve got enough fighters to deal with most of them. With your permission I’m also going to launch our bomber and escort wings. They’re safer off the carriers than on them. Shall I launch an advance bomber strike?”

“Negative” Admiral Slade said. “We go ahead with the original plan. Hit them with everything we’ve got all at once and trust in our massive superiority in just about everything to roll them flat. We’ll do the same as them; send our bombers just a little ahead of our main fleet. As for you, Admiral Berger and Admiral Hasley, it’s SOP. Concentrate your firepower on the battleships, everything else is gravy. Vice Admiral Hawthorne, your battlecruisers are to engage targets of opportunity. Basically gentlemen, it’s by the book as far as this engagement goes. No need to be fancy if you don’t have to; they can’t win this and we and they both know it.”


Air Wing crew quarters, USS Enterprise

As a general rule, a carrier made every other ship in a typical Navy look like the Honolulu Hilton by comparison. Fleet carriers averaged about the same size as cruisers, but with the air wing pilots and all the support crew needed to prep and maintain the fighters piled on top of the regular crew they had compliments closer to a battleship. Throw in the fact that a huge amount of a carrier’s internal volume was taken up by the flight decks and you had a ship where you could barely move without bumping into someone. That had certainly been true of Jim Peterson’s last posting on the Bunker Hill, but the Enterprise was much more pleasant. The Enterprise was a supercarrier, as big as a battleship. It had a much bigger air wing that a typical carrier of course, but also more room to turn around in. Peterson only had to share his quarters with four other pilots, instead of eight like on the Bunker Hill.

He was in the middle of a card game with Jack Leibowitz; a thin, dark-haired Jew from New York. Eddie Jacobs was lounging and drinking Coke like it was about to be banned. As a Mormon he was forbidden coffee, but he evidentially needed some kind of lift. Markover was nowhere to be seen at the moment.

Peterson turned to Jacobs after dealing his hand. “Hey man, you’re going to be pissing like there’s no tomorrow after drinking all that. What if we get attacked now?”

Jacobs shrugged. CSP patrols and long-range bombing missions could last the better part of a day, and flight suits had means of dealing with that problem built in. Peterson went back to his game. That lousy New Yorker had already lightened his wallet by a good week’s pay. The Devil himself must have taught him to play cards.

Peterson was considering his deck when the alarm sounded and the Captain’s voice blared over the PA system. “Attention! We’ll be intercepting the Scythian fleet in just about an hour and a half! All crew to battlestations, all pilots to the flight deck! Deploy all fighters and bombers! Interceptor wings, stand by to repel bomber attacks! Fighter and bomber wings, deploy in standard station keeping formation and prepare to execute antishipping strikes when ordered. And good hunting to you!”

“Just my rotten luck” Peterson said as Leibowitz collected his cards and put them back in their well worn paper box. “This has to happen when I’m loosing to you.”

“Yeah, just remember you owe me” Leibowitz shot back.

“Come on, let’s go” Jacobs said as he raced out the door. “You want to be late?”

“Hell no” Peterson said as he ran after him. “Time to go kick some ass!” He joined the living wave of pilots surging toward the flight underdeck, following Jacob’s back most of the way. He made it to the underdeck in less than a minute, hustled over to his assigned equipment locker, and grabbed his flight suit. Putting it on wasn’t exactly a no brainer, but by now he’d done it so many times he finished in no time and with almost no conscious thought. Jacobs tapped him on the shoulder and Peterson followed him to the pre-flight briefing.

“OK people” Captain Abel said. “All you new people – today’s the day you’ve been training for.” She stopped to take a rubber band out of her pocket and tie her hair back. “Once the carrier’s done with its breaking burn we’re going to launch. You know the drill – your job is to keep the enemy fighters away from the bombers. Don’t leave formation until you get my order. Don’t get fixated trying to kill them, just as long as the bombers get through you’ve done your job.

“This is for all you new people. Remember, you can’t match an Arrow or a Cricket for maneuverability and acceleration, so don’t try. Do not dogfight them. Just hit them from a distance with your missiles. Don’t worry about their PD: an Eagle carries eight missiles, an Arrow carries four. We can afford to pay the ten ton rule, they can’t. Now let’s go kick some Sallie butt for the US of A.”

“Yeah!” Peterson said. He wasn’t the only one expressing that sentiment. The whole Third Wing was raring to go find and Sallie fighter and shove a missile up its tailpipe. They broke up and went to their assigned fighters. They were on the underdeck, meaning the flight deck was above them. The fighters were stored upside down relative to the ship’s artificial gravity field. Peterson’s stomach lurched and flopped as he exited the ship’s gravity field. He ignored it and skillfully rotated his body and got in the cockpit. It still felt weird to him to be hanging apparently upside down like a bat, watching people walk on the deck “below” him and look “up” at him, but feel no pull of gravity whatsoever. He put on his helmet and connected the oxygen and power lines to the fighter’s systems. Immediately his suit came to life, and he breathed a sigh of relief as it started to get cooler. The inactive suit was thick and got pretty hot pretty quick. He jacked into the fighter’s neural interface. He couldn’t feel anything but when he reached out with his mind the checklist came up on the screen and he methodically ran through it, making sure everything was in order.

“This is Delta 4-2” he said into the radio. “Checklist completed. Everything’s A-OK and I’m ready to go.”

“Confirmed Delta 4-2” the landing officer’s voice said gruffly. “Close canopy and prepare for launch.”

“Closing canopy.” Peterson pushed a button and the fighter’s plexiform canopy slowly lowered over his head. Ventilators whirred. “Standing by.”


Bridge of the USS Texas

“I’m entering the values into the nav computer now” Texas’s Senior Helmsman reported. “Braking burn begins in three minutes.”

Captain Craven went on the PA. “This is the Captain. Breaking burn in three minutes. Secure yourselves and any loose objects. You know the drill.”

“Begin turnaround” Admiral Slade ordered.

“Begin turnaround” Captain Craven echoed. Slade could feel the Texas’s immense mass shift as it swung around, turning its rear toward Turin. The same thing was happening throughout the fleet. Within two minutes every ship had made turnaround.

“Breaking burn in twenty seconds” the Senior Helmsman said.

“Engines ready” the Chief Engineer said.

“Breaking burn in fifteen seconds” Captain Craven repeated into the PA. “Brace yourselves boys.” Admiral Slade quickly snapped on his seatbelt. He could already feel the vibrations in the deck as the Texas’s twelve mighty fusion drives warmed up.

“Get ready” Captain Craven said.

The final ignition was done entirely by computer; orbital adjustment burns needed split-millisecond precision that mere human responses could never have achieved. In the engine room half a kilometer way valves were opened. Fusion drives roared hungrily as tons of inert hydrogen was poured into their throats, mixing with star-hot plasma from Texas’s huge fusion reactors. Some of the ratings gave strangled groans as gee forces shoved them back into their chairs. Slade gasped as his chest was crushed under the weight of more than three gravities. Texas’s burn took longer than most ships; battleships were restricted to fairly low accelerations, and it had a lot of mass, which meant a lot more inertia to get rid of. But, compared to most burns, it was still over fairly quickly. A matter of seconds instead of minutes.

“Admiral Travis” Slade said after catching his breath. “Launch your fighters.”

Hi. I've decided to redo the battle scene, on account of the fact it's been getting kind of sprawly. Epic carnage is fun and all, but when it drags on for more than twenty pages of text in a row I get the feeling it starts to get kind of repetitive and boring, so I'm going to try and tighten it up.

Those who have been following this story (anybody?), sorry about this, I should have the improved version posted in a couple of days.

CHAPTER 3

Bridge of the SNS Morrigan

Admiral Raylene Alvera regarded the tactical projection with a guarded expression. What it showed about matched the preliminary projections from Skywatch: the Scythian fleet was dramatically overmatched. Especially in battleships. Admiral Alvera had thirteen battleships under her command, of which three (the Hecate, the Ki, and the Ashnan) were old mothballed “ironclads”; ships built before the development of modern force shields and relying entirely on point defense, ECM, and thick armor for protection. They’d take damage more easily from railguns and energy weapons, and a single hit with a standard missile would kill one. She had made it a credo of hers never to admit that victory was an impossibility. As a mere Rear Admiral she’d successfully beat an NSSU task force of thirty-five ships with a small rear guard of twelve at the Battle of Barents VI, preventing the NSSU from retaking that planet and cutting off the Scythian advance into Salin. If she could do that the current situation was a piece of cake. Or at least that was what the women under her command thought. She could feel it every time they looked at her. She saw the way they would look at the numbers and readouts on their screens and then look back at her, telling themselves that because she was here those numbers meant nothing.

If only she could convince herself of the same thing.

But Raylene Alvera was also a realist, and this was not Barents VI. The NSSU commander at Barents VI had been an idiot. He hadn’t bothered to send probes to check behind the planet or any of its four moons and he’d used a standard capture maneuver involving a long breaking burn very close to the planet. Alvera had simply kept her ships behind the planet and used a stealth probe communicating with her ships by laser comm. relayed through another stealth probe to track his ships. As soon as they began their breaking burn her ships opened fire with missiles, guided by the stealth probes’ sensor data…

But, unfortunately, whoever was in charge of the American fleet was no idiot. He was doing everything she would have done in his position. He’d sent stealth probes to check out the back of the planet and both its moons. He’d used a complex series of short breaking burns to ease his ships into a path where Turin’s gravity would capture them and hold them in a stable orbit naturally. He was generally doing everything right. He was obviously playing it conservatively; holding his fighters close to his ships were the small and heavy units could support each other instead of sending them out to harass and snipe the enemy fleet from a distance. But in this situation that wasn’t a bad idea. He didn’t need any clever tricks to win, and why gamble units on aggressive tactics when a simple, straightforward approach couldn’t loose?

“We approach standard missile range in three hours” Captain Jordan, the Morrigan’s CO, noted.

Admiral Alvera nodded. “We’ll lock all missile batteries on their battleships. I want you to apply overwhelming firepower to each individual ship. Don’t spread your fire thin; each battlegroups concentrates its fire on one target then moves on to the next when it’s destroyed. I want as many of those battleships as possible dead, as quickly as possible. The faster they die the less missiles they’ll get a chance to fire at us. Get me Admiral Lund.”

After a moment Admiral Lund’s voice came on over Alvera’s headset comm. “Yes, Admiral?”

“Signal your bomber wings to begin their attack run. Tell them to go after the battleships and nothing else. When the last battleship is gone they can engage targets of opportunity – but not before then! Make sure they understand that clearly, they are not to waste nukes or planes on non-critical targets, no matter how tempting it may be! Tell them to match speeds with the enemy fleet so they can keep hitting them after we come into range.”

“Yes Admiral” Lund said. “Our pilots know their duty.”

“Of course they do” Alvera said. “Now give them the signal to attack.”


Bridge of the USS Texas

“Enemy is launching bombers sir” Captain Craven said tightly after receiving a report from the sensor station. “We estimate they’ll be here in a little more than two and a half hours.”

Admiral Slade nodded. “Less than half an hour before they come into missile range. I guessed right. Radio Admiral Travis and tell him to send our bomber wings ahead. I’ll be very interested to see what our Scythian friends think our new bombers.”


Scythian SX-14B “Cricket” escort fighter, two and a half hours later

The Scythian fighters advanced toward the American fleet in a loose gaggle, the escort fighters taking the lead and the flanks while the slower HLS-14 “Lillith” bombers and VD-12 “Callisto” torpedo bombers brought up the center. The Patriarchist fleet sat easily in Captain Hunter’s screen, the slow-moving capital ships wreathed in swarms of fighters. Already the first interceptors were shifting position and moving out to meet her. Already antifighter missile batteries and point defense lasers on those ships were shifting to track her, already force shields were being raised to stave off the bombers’ righteous wrath. She wished her little Cricket could carry bombs. Blasting Patriarchist fighters out of space was all well and good, but… They said every man killed was a woman freed. She could kill a few men with her lasers and missiles, but a bomber could kill a battleship and one of those carried five thousand of the filthy things, give or take the odd couple of thousand slaves or traitors. But, of course, as a cadet she’d scoffed at the idea of flying one of those flying elephants, and her little Cricket didn’t have room for heavy lasers, let alone nukes.

“We’re going to be in the middle of them in a few seconds” she told her pilots. “Remember, no Yankee fighter can match you or your machines, but they do have more firepower and greater numbers. Use your maneuverability. May the goddesses be with you. May your aim be true and your missiles strike hard.”

A warning blared as the first Patriarchist fighters launched their missiles. Three of them were headed toward her. She brought the Cricket’s laser to life and took them out. At this range only one in every three missiles survived to hit its target. But the American F-5000 “Warhawk” interceptor carried eight missiles to the Cricket’s four. They could afford those attrition rates, the Scythians couldn’t. The Scythian formation was already breaking apart, the squadrons and individual fighters beginning to maneuver. Already missiles were striking home and fighters and bombers (mostly fighters) were dying. The Cricket had wonderful maneuverability, but it achieved it at the cost of being very flimsy. When struck, they crumbled like dolls of wet rice paper.

“Do not fire back!” Hunter ordered. “Do not hit back until you are close enough to be certain of a kill!” Plenty of Hunter’s pilots were “virgins” on their first mission, and just sitting there while the enemy shot at you and you technically had the ability to hit back went against every human instinct. They’d been trained to conserve their missiles, but a little reminder couldn’t hurt. She checked her screen and watched the Patriarchist interceptors get closer and closer. Almost…

“Now!” she said. “Engage them!”

She grinned as she broke off and headed toward a Warhawk. The enemy pilot sent a missile at her, but she intercepted it and kept on coming until she was within a few hundred meters. At that range, her missile couldn’t miss. The Patriarchist fighter disintegrated beneath her wrath. She was already seeking a second target. The Warhawk might carry more missiles than a Cricket or an Arrow, but it was a totally mediocre fighter otherwise. The Warhawk interceptor and Starhawk escort were both inferior rip-offs of the British Tomahawk interceptor, and the Tomahawk wasn’t a particularly spectacular fighter itself – the Royal Navy put all its faith in heavy capital ships and spared just enough R&D for fighters to keep them a little ahead of most of the competition. Certainly, there was no way it could match one of the fastest and most sublimely agile fighters in the galaxy!

Of course, it didn’t really have to. The Yankee bastards had brought enough carriers to put four or five fighters into space for every one the Scythians did. Even as Hunter swooped up on a second Warhawk and killed it the Patriarchists battered through her squadrons by sheer numbers and went for the Lillith bombers they were supposed to be protecting. The Lillith carried two heavy lasers and one nose-mounted PD laser and could put up a fair fight at close range, but bombers in general didn’t waste space on missiles. The Patriarchists picked them off from long range.

Captain Hunter blew apart a third fighter and moved in to engage the Warhawks harassing the bombers. “Lieutenant Garner, your squadron, follow me!” she commanded. Garner’s squadron formed up behind her. The Patriarchist fighters became aware of her attack and rotated to face her. They let loose with missiles. A lot of those missiles died in transit, but others hit, and four of Garner’s fighters died. Most of their pilots didn’t even have time to scream; the impacts simply tore their fighters to splinters of ultra-light composite. Captain Hunter felt a stab of something that wasn’t quite envy and wasn’t quite reproach. The Americans were so disgustingly free with their ammunition, throwing it around at the slightest excuse. Their fighter tactics were so lavish, so unthinking, so overly aggressive and wasteful, so… typically male. If a Cricket could carry six or eight missiles her pilots would still have used them with far more finesse. Why couldn’t that kind of firepower be arrayed against the cause of patriarchy instead of for it? But, of course, she wouldn’t give up her Cricket’s maneuverability for anything. It’d just be nice if it could have more than popguns, and didn’t burn like a fucking Roman candle when hit…

There was no time for thinking about there. There was only the Patriarchist fighter right in front of her, already firing again. She sent her fighter into an evasive pattern designed to maximize the effectiveness of her ECM. It saved her life; the confused missile missed her and she took it out with her laser. She didn’t even terminate the beam to rake the Patriarchist fighter with it. The Cricket mounted only a weak PD laser, but she skillfully burned through the other fighter’s ECM and slashed his fuel tank. He ejected moments before his fighter went up in an explosion of commingling hydrogen, oxygen, and other explosive and combustible substances. She frowned as she checked her board. Lieutenant Garner’s entire squadron had been wiped out, with herself and Garner the only survivors, but they’d successfully chased the Warhawks off the Lilliths.

She frowned again when she saw there were two Patriarchist fighter pilots who’d managed to eject. She knew what had to be done and didn’t hesitate much. They might not be men, but then innocents died in wars, and they’d been actively helping the Patriarchist cause, so they were hardly innocents either way.

She had to do a hard reverse burn which was every bit as grueling as most combat maneuvers. But she’d put herself on a course that would intercept them. There they were, drifting helplessly, their radio transmitters blaring a feeble distress call for a rescue pod to home in on. But there would be no help coming. She stabbed first one, then the other, with her laser. That laser might be weak, but it was overkill on thinly protected flesh. One took the beam straight to his chest and his head and torso exploded. The other was blown into two pieces. By the time she made a second reverse burn and rejoined the fight the Lilliths were already swarming around a Patriarchist battleship and pummeling it with their nukes. She watched in satisfaction as the battleship held on for a few minutes, its shields absorbing kilotons of punishment, and then finally staggered like a man shot in the stomach and disintegrated as its force shields failed.


Scythian VD-12 “Callisto” torpedo bomber

“We’re approaching the target” Lieutenant Parkins observed. “There’s a lot of flak up ahead.”

“I see it” Lieutenant Madeline, the bombardier, said. The target was a Patriarchist Iowa class battleship operating in a medium battlegroup. It was protected by two San Francisco class cruisers, one Ticonderoga class fleet carrier, two Corrigidor class escort carriers, four missile boat destroyers, two fighter destroyers, and two PD destroyers. It was a set-up optimized to defend against small capital ships, not fighters. That was good.

“Get your guns ready Niobe, those three carriers can put out a lot of fighters.”

Niobe looked over at the bombardier’s station. “Don’t worry Jen; you’ll get to drop your bombs.”

Madeline recognized it as an attempt to shore her up. Part of her resented it, but she realized she was the least reliable girl on this team. Parkins had been flying VD-12s for more than a year now and Niobe… Shit, Niobe had been at Panthalassa! She’d been with the Navy since the beginning of the war! And she’d been in actions against Markinite Raiders before that! Madeline’s jaw had dropped when she heard that. It was kind of intimidating to working with someone who she knew had infinitely more knowledge and experience than her. And you could tell. She acted as if this was just another day’s work at a factory or a shop, instead of going out there with a good chance of getting turned into space debris. How could the Navy be loosing when it had people like that?

The Patriarchists were showing her one way they thought it could loose. Under sheer weight of numbers. To her the Scythian fighter and bomber wings being sent out had seemed eye-poppingly huge. Well, the… the swarm of Patriarchist fighters they were having to cut their way through put a whole new perspective on that.

The escort fighters peeled off to meet them, but there were so many Patriarchist fighters there was no way they could hold them all off. Some of them rushed right through the escorts and matched speeds with the bombers.

“Fighters, fighters!” Parkins warned. “We’ve got two bogeys coming up on us! I’m going evasive”

“I’ve got it” Lieutenant Niobe said as the bomber began to maneuver. Lieutenant Madeline felt the heavy hand of high-G forces press down on her and twist her spine like a string as the bomber swerved madly. Her gloved hands moved over the control panel and the Callisto’s two heavy lasers and nose mounted PD laser pounded away. “He’s trying to move into our blind spot and… got him! Second bogey has launched two missiles…” Madeline almost jumped out of her skin when she heard that, and it was all she had not to scream. But Niobe sounded so calm it had taken a moment for her to register what she’d said. “One… two taken out. He’s angling for another shot… He’s gone.”

“It’s a good thing you’re such a damn good shot” Parkins commented. “They’re mostly going for the torpedo bombers, our wing’s down to four of them!”

“Three…” Madeline whispered to herself. She knew she’d been lucky but she hadn’t realized she was that lucky. She shivered at the thought of how many hadn’t made it. All those people…

Of course, if she got to drop her huge fifteen megaton bomb on a battleship like she wanted she’d kill many times that many. Five thousand. There was a reason fighters tended to go for torpedo bombers more than regular bombers; they were much more of a threat to capital ships.

“We’re coming up on the target now” Parkins warned. “Stand by for evasive.” Already the first antifighter missiles were reaching up from the battleship and its escorts. They were much less of a worry than the fighters had been. The gunners had all the time in the world to intercept them, but still they took their toll. Two torpedo bombers took direct hits.

“We’re in PD range” Parkins announced and began sending the bomber in more furious evasive maneuvers. Madeline was whipped around like a ragdolls as heavy G forces pushed her from one side, then pulled her from another, then reversed again and again. PD lasers stabbed the night to find the last two bombers. They were more of a threat than a missile. They were less powerful and less accurate individually; they were direct-fire weapons and could therefore be thrown off by a combination of evasive maneuvers and heavy ECM, but a battleship could carry more than a hundred of them and they were still lightspeed weapons. One of them found the last other bomber. It was a glancing hit, but it slowed it down just enough for fifty others to bore in on the same target. The bomber was reduced to warm chunks of metal. Other lasers found escort fighters and sent them reeling.

“The fire’s too heavy!” Parkins said, gritting her teeth against the G forces. “Drop the bomb now!”

Lieutenant Madeline quickly entered the targeting profile of the battleship and fired. The bomber shuddered as the fifteen megaton missile released, flew toward the battleship… and was burned by a PD laser.

“Aww shit!” she screeched.

“Not your fault” Parkins said. “I didn’t dare bring this thing close enough to get a solid kill.”

“I wish we could carry two torpedoes, like the British Cyclone” Niobe said. “Then we’d probably have managed a hit.”

The bomber accelerated furiously away from the still living battleship and back into the night. On the decks of the USS Wyoming ratings and officers breathed sighs of relief.

USNAF B-4500 “Marauder” bomber, approaching Turin Defense Force

“We’re coming up on the Sallie fleet” Lieutenant Vasquez reported. She was a small Hispanic woman from one of the planets annexed in the 2431 War with the Latin American Empire. Standing up, she would barely have reached gunner Jack Irvine’s chest, but she was an excellent pilot. Size mattered little when it came to hitting buttons or withstanding heavy G forces.

“Alrighty!” Peter Nickelson; the bombardier, said enthusiastically. “Let’s see what this baby can do!”

“Sallie fighters are coming toward us” Vasquez reportedly tensely. “The Eagles and Starhawks are splitting off to engage.”

“We’ve got a target” Nickelson said. “That battleship over there.” He entered the target profile into the computer. Vasquez checked it and headed towards it.

“We’ve got a fighter on our tail!” Irvine said. “It just potted one of our escorts and it’s gunning right for us!”

“Kill the bitch for us, would you?” Nickelson suggested helpfully.

“Sure thing” Irvine said. He stroked the hard metal of his board. “OK girl, a lot of taxpayer money went into you, don’t disappoint me.”


Scythian SX-14 “Arrow” interceptor

Lieutenant Lydia Jones left the burning Starhawk behind her and set her sights on a big Patriarchist bomber. The Starhawk pilot had been obviously inexperienced. He flew his inferior fighter much too aggressively. He should have held back and tried to hit her with distance missile tactics, but instead he’d let adrenalin take over and tried to close in for the kill. He’d paid for it with his worthless excuse for a life.

The bomber was already trying to hit her with its heavy lasers, but she moved much too quickly. The Arrow was every bit as maneuverable as a Cricket, but without the extra-large fuel tanks needed for an escort fighter it could carry (marginally) better protection and two heavy lasers. The American bomber was some kind of new design, apparently. She flew as close as she could to it and let loose two missiles. The missiles were both hits and they… they… No, it couldn’t be! It wasn’t possible!

The bomber was intact. Those impacts should have fragmented it, but instead it continued to fly on, totally undamaged. Sweat beading under her helmet, she sent the next two missiles into the bomber and slammed it with heavy lasers even as they headed home. They didn’t do anything either.

“What the fuck?” she near-screamed. “I just sent four missiles into it and it didn’t die! Why will it not die?”

“They’re shielded!” one of her squadron mates said, drawing the conclusion a few minutes before her dumbfounded brain could. “I don’t believe it! They’ve got shields!”

“Impossible” Lieutenant Strasser said. “No ship that small can mount a force shield generator!”

“I’m telling you it is!”

“I got one!” someone else piped in. “I had to hit it with all my missiles and then about three times with the heavy lasers, but it died!”

“Sweet merciful Goddess” Strasser muttered. If each and every one of those bombers was going to take five or eight hits to kill…

“It doesn’t matter” First Lieutenant Cho said. “You’ll just have to be five or eight times as accurate.”

Jones sighed as she closed with the bomber. “May sacred Diana guide my hand” she muttered.


USNAF B-4500 “Marauder” bomber

Vasquez sent the bomber into a series of crazy turns to evade the pursuing Arrow’s aim. Lieutenant Irvine bent over his board and let loose with the heavy lasers again.

“A hit!” he shouted. “Got the little bitch! She’d dead!”

Vasquez laughed. “We should be dead. Can you believe we actually just took six hits?”

“Yeah, you’re one lousy pilot” Nickelson said. “You call that evasive maneuvers?”

“Fuck you, bendejo, she said cheerily.

Irvine patted the side of his panel. “Ladies and gentlemen, six billion dollars of taxpayer money has spoken and I like it!”

“Hey, we’re coming up on the target” Vasquez said.

“Alright” Nickelson muttered as he looked into his screen. The target was a carrier battlegroup consisting of one Maureen Dowd class fleet carrier, two Naomi Wolf class escort carriers, two Benevolent class cruisers, and a handful of destroyers of various types. “Target is the Beanie on the left.”

“They’re launching missiles” Vasquez said. “Stand by for evasive.” The bomber began to swerve, and Irvine sent lasers licking out from the three PD gimbals. He liked the new arrangement. It was a nice step up from the older Dragon’s two gimbals, and worlds ahead of the nose-mounted PD laser on Scythian bombers.

“Fighters incoming!” Irvine warned. “They just don’t want to give up, do they?” Already he was swinging his lasers toward the new targets. The escort fighters peeled away to engage. Missiles flew and Sallies died. The Eagle was a truly excellent fighter, with an armament equal to a Warhawk but much greater range. But, inevitably, some of the Sallies managed to get through and in among the bombers.

“They’re going for the torpedo bombers” he noted. “Seem to be mostly ignoring us.” That made sense. They’d seen the Marauder took a lot of firepower to crack, and they didn’t have that kind of firepower. Plus torpedo bombers were more dangerous to capships anyway. Irvine winced as he saw them mostly pass the Avengers and go straight for the older Douglass Devastators. He couldn’t say he blamed them. The Devastator pilots were brave men. They had to be; the Devastator was a lumbering death trap with inadequate PD coverage that couldn’t even get out of its own way. The Sallies had a turkey shoot blowing them out of space in the early days of the war. The Navy was phasing them out and had already stopped ordering any new ones almost two years ago, but with a big war on you couldn’t just take thousands of bombers out of service. They’d apparently happily let death do what the junk yard scrap strippers would have done in peace time.

They were getting close to the cruiser now. It filled Irvine’s screens. Dozens of PD lasers flashed up from its armored hull, seeking him. By now even the Marauder’s three PD guns were hard pressed to keep up with all the missiles being thrown at him. Normally he would have been shouting for Nickelson to drop his load now, but you could get closer in the Marauder than anyone but a suicidal maniac dared to in a normal bomber. He was so close now he and Vasquez simply couldn’t keep the Marauder from being hit. PD lasers scrabbled at the fuselage, making the shields glow like a rainbow where their energy was shunted harmlessly back into space. An antifighter missile hit home. It felt like going over a pothole at high speed, but it didn’t even scratch the paint job. It was an almost addictive feeling to wade through all that AA, to have all that firepower, which should have destroyed you dozens of times over, wash harmlessly off you like water. He had to remind himself that the small force shield generator they’d crammed into the Marauder had definite limits.

“The generator’s starting to overheat” Vasquez said. “Drop your bombs now.”

“Inputting target data” Nickelson said. “Firing solution achieved. Ready to drop… now!”

Nickelson and Irvine both nearly screamed as high-G forces whipped them around like ropes in a tug of war, first in one direction, then in another. Vasquez put the Marauder through a series of intense evasive maneuvers. This was crucial, as the force shields had to be dropped to launch the bombs.

“Bombs away!” Nickelson shouted. Through all the stomach-churning, bone crushing twisting and turning Irvine felt the Marauder shiver six times as it launched its missiles. They joined hundreds of others, coming in so fast the cruiser’s PD never had a chance to intercept. Glaring nuclear explosions bashed away at the shields of the Scythian cruiser Righteous until they were overwhelmed. Energy began to leak through, vaporizing armor, melting jagged holes in the hull. For almost a minute the hull remained, slowly being torn to pieces by energy leakage. Then, one by one, the force shield generators failed. The cruiser flashed away like a cube of butter in a frying pan, leaving only a few slivers of partially melted armor.


USNAF BT-909 “Avenger” torpedo bomber

Behind the gaggle of regular bombers and their escorting fighters went the torpedo bombers and their escorts. There were a few of the blocky Devastators, but most of them were the sleek, lethal BT-909 Avengers. They glided smoothly toward a fleet already reeling from the bomber strikes, toward thinned interceptor formations and capital ships with massive glowing holes punched in their armor belts from partial shield penetrations.

“We’re coming up on the target” Lieutenant Alex Behr said. “It’s an Andrea.”

“Perfect” said Lieutenant Brennan; the Avenger’s bombardier.

“They’ve got a CSP out” Natasha Malinaro; the Avenger’s gunner, warned. “They’re moving out to intercept. Our escorts are moving out to intercept.”

“Hold on, I’m going to do some basic evasive” Behr said. The Avenger lurched and began to zigzag.

“We’re coming up on their missile range” Behr said. “They’re launching missiles!”

“Get me closer!” Brennan demanded. “That missile’l never make it at this distance!”

“Point defense ready” Lieutenant Malinaro said. Lasers slashed out from the Avenger’s two PD gimbals. “We’re clear.”

“Fighter! Fighter!” Lieutenant Malinaro warned. An Arrow had gotten through the escorts and in among the bombers. It immediately went for the formation’s two Douglass Devastators. It easily got their blind spot (they had nose-mounted PD lasers, like Bolos) and blew first one, then the other away. A few moments later a squadron of Eagles descended on the fighters and forced them to break off the attack.

“We’re going in” Behr warned. He offered a silent prayer for the souls of the Devastator pilots, and then sent the Avenger gently forward.

“Careful” Lieutenant Malinaro advised. “The Andrea’s a tough bird.”

Behr nodded. The Sallies didn’t have the resources to build true supercarriers, but the Andrea Dworkin occupied an odd limbo somewhere between that and a fleet carrier. It was a “shielded ironclad”, protected by meters of solid armor as well as force shields, making it ungodly tough. Though not big enough to qualify as a true supercarrier it was much bigger than a fleet carrier, and could haul an absolutely huge fighter compliment. Its armored surface was covered with PD lasers and antifighter launchers, and it had fairly respectable anti-capship weapons too. The big downside to all that was all that mass made it a lumbering pig that could barely get out of its own way. It was lucky to break 20 m/s^2 with its ludicrously undersized engines, and it had all the maneuverability of a morbidly obese couch potato.

It was already trying (and failing) to weave as the Avengers fell toward it. It spat antifighter missiles. PD got most of them, but one of them hit and an Avenger went spinning. Moments later dozens of PD lasers bored into it and it was reduced to molten metal. They were already in PD range, and lasers were stabbing out towards them. Another bomber fell.


SNS Camille Paglia

Alarms blared through the heavy carrier as the Patriarchist bombers closed in. The helmswoman threw it into desperate evasive maneuvers. Unfortunately, for the Camille Paglia desperate evasive maneuvers was sort of like a thousand pound circus freak trying to break dance. The Andrea Dworkin class was slower than many battleships. It was formidably armed, very tough, and could carry an air wing of hundreds of fighters and bombers, but it was so underpowered it had serious issues with taking off from the surface of some high-gravity planets. The engines were already overheating. Deep in the ship’s bowels desperate engineers overrode safety protocols, trying with all their will to coax a few extra m/s^2 out of the drives. Hundreds of automated PD guns spat burning laser death.

“More speed!” the Captain shouted.

“Blow them apart! Now!” the PD chief shouted.

What does it look like I’m trying to do you stupid ninny, Crewer Kaye thought as she tried to penetrate the bombers’ ECM. Their jamming made them look like blurred amoebas on the targeting sensors. The PD chief seemed to forget if one of those torpedo bombers landed a successful hit she wouldn’t be the only one who’d be killed.

“A hit!” she shouted as one of her lasers found its mark. “Patriarchist bomber destroyed!” Now just let me get lucky a couple of more times so I don’t get killed, please. Please!


USNAF BT-909 “Avenger” torpedo bomber

“I’m ready to launch now!” Lieutenant Brennan screamed, trying to fight the careening G-forces that were assaulting his body in order to make some kind of articulate speech. The Avenger was scarily close to the Andrea, and Behr was putting it through one punishing set of maneuvers.

“Entering targeting data! Launching!” he continued. The Avenger shuddered and suddenly it was much lighter in Behr’s hands, the huge weight of the big ten megaton nuke and missile having been detached. For a few moments the missile flew on from pure inertia, then its drive system kicked in. It corkscrewed toward the Camille Paglia on a shining shaft of incandescent plasma. PD lasers shifted desperately to take it out, but it was too late. Just as it struck the force shields its proximity sensors detonated the warhead. The force shields flared blindingly as they tried to deflect the energy, but the ten megaton nuclear detonation ripped through them like a high-rolling semi through a sheet of thin gauze. They did nothing more than blunt its force, and its energy would have obliterated the biggest unshielded battleship hundreds of times over. Once the shields were torn asunder the Camille Paglia’s thick armor gave absolutely no resistance. Most of the ship’s crew didn’t even have time to realize they were being killed; they simply flashed into vapor along with thousands of tons of polycarbon steel. What wasn’t instantly vaporized was still half-melted by the heat and sent flying in a million different directions by the force. There were no survivors; there could be none. When the weltering fireball faded all that remained of the SNS Camille Paglia were a few pieces of twisted and torn metal, some molten globules floating in the vacuum, and a rapidly dissipating cloud of metal and carbon gas.

“WOOOOHOOOOO! BOOOOYYYAAAHHHHH! Fuck you!” Brennan whooped.

“We got ‘em boys” Lieutenant Behr agreed.

“Now let’s get back to the carrier” Lieutenant Malinaro said sensibly. “We can’t do anything more out here.”

“No we can’t.” Behr shook his head wistfully. “I wish we could carry two missiles. Then we could really give those bitches a hiding.”

Natasha Malinaro shrugged. “Maybe they’ll put that in the BT-910. Along with an extra PD laser and a force shield generator like a Marauder’s.”

Behr thought about that for a couple of seconds. “Hell yeah! Let’s see what the Sallies think of that!”

What do you think of the improved battle scene? I tried to tighten it up a bit, think it's better? Opinions so far?

Should get around to writing the main fleet battle in a few days.

Come on damnit, it's a got 150+ views, so I know somebody's looking at it. How am I doing so far?

I don't know about the improved battle scene, but you write great!

A nice, easy flow of events, all tightly seamed together.

Easy on the eyes and it doesn't have that kind of turn-off effects many authors have when they try to write battles, epic or otherwise.

Having done their damage the bombers and fighters of the respective fleets headed back to their carriers at the best acceleration they could manage. The carriers hastily lowered shields, opened the armored doors of their bays, and gathered their fighter craft back into themselves. There was more confusion on the Scythian side, which had suffered the loss of twelve carriers to bomber assaults, including the heavy carriers Norah Vincent, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Emma Goldman and, of course, Camille Paglia. Fortunately or unfortunately the Scythian losses in fighters and bombers had been so severe there was room to spare on the remaining carriers. Also destroyed were the battleships Astarte and Isis, along with fifteen cruisers and eleven battlecruisers. Things looked better from the American side. Their losses amounted to the battleships Nebraska, Missouri, Athabasca, California, and Antigua, and about 38% of their strength in bombers and fighters.

“Not bad” Admiral Stuart Slade said as he surveyed the combat reports. “We didn’t exactly kick their butts, but all things considered the exchange ratio is in our favor.” It was certainly a lot better than the early days, when the Scythians had been using their superior maneuverability to fly rings around American pilots.

“Sir, we’re approaching maximum standard missile range of the Sallie fleet” Captain Craven said.

Admiral Slade nodded. “How long?”

“About three minutes sir.”

Admiral Slade nodded again. “Are all ships ready?”

Admiral Hasley looked down at his screen. “All battleships ready sir.”

“Admiral Berger and Admiral Blunt report readiness” Captain Craven said after speaking briefly with one of the radiomen.

“Good” Slade said. “Fire as soon as you enter range, I want to have the first strike advantage. Their battleships and battlecruisers are first priority targets – they have so few battleships you might as well go for the battlecruisers since they can put out just as many missiles and are a lot easier to kill. I also want their Little Nells marked as priority targets – they actually make up the majority of their fleet’s long range firepower.” Little Nell was the US Navy’s slang for the Scythian Ninlil class missile boat, since most Americans found the proper name was a total tongue-twister.

“We’re coming into range” Captain Craven reported tensely.

The American fleet shifted into a staggered line, heavy battlegroups and missile ships on point, carrier groups, troop transports, and support ships at the back. Missile launched in a coordinated salvo. Eighty or a hundred from each battleship and battlecruiser, half that many from each cruiser, and eight from each Swordfish class missile boat, more than six thousand in total. For a second they hung near their ships like baby fish, then their fusion drives engaged and they rocketed toward the Scythian fleet.

The Scythian ships launched counterfire. Almost two thousand sleek and deadly thermonuclear missiles poured forward to intercept the American ships. At this distance it would take more almost six minutes for the missiles to cross the gulf between the two fleets. Even as they moved forward the launchers cycled and a more volleys were launched. The waves of missiles passed through each other and closed in on their targets, proximity detonators primed. PD guns fired.

The American missiles arrived first. Flashes illuminated the void as the surviving missiles detonated. Some were confused by EM jamming and detonated short of their targets. Eight hit missile boats. The Ninlils were sixty year old hand-me-downs from the Nationalist Planetary Alliance Navy; cramped, tiny vessels without artificial gravity, armor, or force shields. A single hit from a standard nuke was grotesque overkill against them. Other missiles zeroed in on the battleships. Hecate and Ki did not survive. That was no surprise to anyone; their naked armor was no match for a 250 kiloton nuclear detonation.

Then it was the Scythians turn as their missiles plowed into the American fleet. The first volley converged on the cruiser Fredrick Douglass and severely overkilled it. The next volley destroyed the battleships Columbia, Oklahoma, and Maine, and the battlecruiser Ulysses S Grant. Even as their companions died the survivors continued to pump missiles into space at a furious rate.


Bridge of the SNS Morrigan

“We’ve lost the Hera Admiral” Captain Jordan reported mournfully.

Admiral Alvera stifled a curse. “How many ships have we lost so far?”

“Five battleships Admiral” Captain Jordan said. “The Eris, the Hera, the Hecate, the Ki, and the Artemis. Plus ten battlecruisers, fourteen cruisers, and almost our entire force of missile ships. That’s not counting our initial losses from bomber strikes.”

Alvera tried not to scowl as she looked down at the tactical chart. She wanted to curse viciously but she also didn’t want to undermine morale – it was weak enough already without the legendary Raylene Alvera displaying signs of being something less than supremely confident. This was becoming a race, and it was one the Patriarchists would win. She had to do something drastic to upset the situation. But what?

She turned to Captain Jordan. “Signal the fleet; tell them to prepare a volley of stealth missiles. I want alternating volleys of standard and stealth missiles from now on.”

“Yes Admiral!” Captain Jordan said with more energy and turned back to the radio station.


New launchers cycled on the Scythian ships. These were bigger and fixed to the hull, not like the rotating box launchers that fired standard missiles. A Tiamat class battleship could put out only sixteen of these at a time, as opposed to eighty standard missiles. Normally they fired capital missiles. When the American spotters saw their launches they were puzzled for a few seconds. The range was too great for capital missiles. Then the missiles winked out of their screens and they understood.

Stealth missiles were similar to capital missiles, carrying a fifteen megaton warhead that could tear through most force shields in one hit. The difference was in their engines. Capital missiles and standard missiles both accelerated continuously until they reached their targets. Stealth missiles on the other hand acted like normal spacecraft; burning their rockets at the beginning and end of their journeys and otherwise coasting forward on their inertia. They were much slower regular or even capital missiles, but they were also harder for PD to lock on to.

Admiral Slade considered the best course of action for the moment. Then, at his order, the American ships engaged their drives in a staggered pattern designed to maintain their formation. Before the first stealth missiles could reach them they shrunk the distance and entered capital missile range.

The engines cut. All the equations for orbital entry would be screwed up by that maneuver, but Navy navigators learned not to complain… too much. The concerns of combat superceded the concerns of fuel efficiency. On the flanks of the American battleships and cruisers capital missile launchers cycled. The first capital missiles were launched and flew toward the Scythian fleet; huge clumsy guppies next to the darting silver minnows of standard missiles. Orders went out in the Scythian fleet and bomb jockeys cycled stealth missiles out of their tubes and capital missiles in. Even as the first capital missile volleys were sent out standard missiles continued to spew forth. Compared to standard missiles capital missiles were almost target practice for the PD gunners… but only one had to get through and even the mightiest battleship was doomed. Only stationary battlestations could mount force shields capable of absorbing their power.

Texas was close now. Near the rear of the massive battleship gravity gun turrets began to track ships of the wall. The huge guns were crude. They had only the power of cruiser guns, but they were as big as capital guns, needing their own dedicated cooling and power systems and dozens of men to tend them. Still, their range was longer than railguns or neutral particle guns, and they went through shields and armor like it was air. Invisible, cold lances of pure force stabbed out into the Scythian battleship Inanna. They punched clear through, leaving holes from one end of the ship to the other. Then the turrets began to rotate slightly, twisting them in Inanna’s guts like knives. New compartments were consigned to the vacuum of space. One beam slashed right through an active fusion reactor, disrupting its containment field and turning and entire engine room into a plasma oven. The Scythian battleship did not flinch aside. It adjusted course slightly so it was heading straight toward Texas and plunged forward.


SNS Inanna

“Damage report!” Captain Starling demanded.

“Those grav guns went right through us, end to end” the Chief Engineer reported. “We’ve lost pressure in fourteen compartments, and Reactor 8 just exploded, the whole engine’s an almost total write-off. I may be able to get a little speed out of it during maneuvers, but it’s useless for burns.”

“Range to target?” Captain Starling asked.

“17,400 kilometers.”

“Close to gun range!”

“Closing to gun range” the helmswoman said. Inanna’s engines rumbled and gee forces pressed – not too hard, but noticeably – on Starling’s chest.

“Range 16,100 kilometers!” the helmswoman snapped off.

“Gun range in four seconds!” the tactical officer said.

“Main batteries! Open fire!”

Inanna’s massive neutral particle gun turrets rotated to bear on Texas. The gun monkeys laid in firing solutions, started up their integral cooling systems, and opened the floodgates that would allow terawatts of raw energy to pour from the thousand ton capacitors into the massive particle accelerators. Blinding lances of energy struck at Texas’s shields, and in the same instant Inanna let loose with its missiles. Hundreds of missiles streaked out toward Texas, and at this range only Texas’s escort of no less than six PD destroyers saved it from utter annihilation. The mighty battleship’s shields buckled beneath the punishing bombardment and thermonuclear detonations washed over its hull, melting the armor and burning off missile launchers, PD gimbals, radio antennae, and sensor arrays. Port Turrets 4, 5, and 6 were reduced to shapeless slag. Massive hull breaches marked where the shields had failed to hold.


USS Texas

“Port row fire control, respond!” the tactical officer shouted into his comm. link. He sighed and turned to Texas’s exec. “Port row fire control is down sir! Turrets 4, 5, 6 do not respond. We’ve lost most of the portside PD lasers and missile launchers.”

“Severe damage to engines 3, 6, 9, and 12. Engines 5, 4, and 11 also damaged, extent unknown.” the Chief Engineer reported. “Cannot achieve speeds higher than 15 m/s^2. Damage control teams are being dispatched.”

“Rotate the ship to bring our undamaged side to bear” Captain Craven said. The deck vibrated as Texas rolled like a beached whale, bringing the intact starboard weapons array to face Inanna. “Return fire!”


Engine Room 11, USS Texas

Crewman Mendoza struggled to steady his lashing high-pressure hose and keep it focused on the flames shooting from one of the ruptured fuel lines. Engine Room 11 looked like something out of Dante’s inferno. The six-story high fusion reactor had toppled halfway over and now lay at a crazy angle like the galaxy’s biggest beer barrel in the process of being drained by the galaxy’s biggest drunk. Gas hydrogen, liquid sodium, and live steam hissed out of hundreds of broken pipes, all of it under high pressure, all of it extremely hazardous. In the process of toppling the reactor had knocked over two steam turbines – themselves each three stories tall – and sent them crashing around like bowling pins. The technicians and engineers tending those turbines were now nearly unrecognizable masses of red pulp on the deck. Engineers and damage control crew scrambled madly about like white ants in their pressure suits, desperately shutting off feed valves and trying to put out fires and keep basic systems alive. Medics tended to men with broken arms and legs and ribs, and sometimes to things that were more twitching masses of broken flesh than men. As if to add a surreal touch the whole scene seemed to be covered with a light dusting of snow; foam from the ship’s automatic fire control systems.

It looked like that particular fire was coming under control when suddenly the entire ship lurched violently as a fresh volley of Sallie missiles went home. The reactor fell further, with a deafening noise of warping and ripping metal, to finally land on its side. Damage control teams scattered as it came down, desperately trying to get out of its way. When it fell it deformed and burst with more earsplitting banging and tongues of hot plasma emerged from the rents. Instantly fuel and coolant spewing from half a hundred freshly ruptured pipes ignited and exploded. The huge engine cowling shifted and rolled against the wall, grinding more than a dozen techs and damage control men to hamburger beneath its five story high bulk. Lamps, live wires, pipes, and pieces of ceiling fell. A pipe from the fire control system narrowly missed Mendoza, landing at his feet with a clang.

Then the gravity went out.

Mendoza screamed as his fire hose suddenly became a highly effective propulsion system and sent him flying twenty meters to slam into the wall with bone-crunching force.


Bridge of the USS Texas

“Evasive action! Turn into the missiles!” roared Captain Craven as the gravity went out.

Texas ponderously turned to face Inanna even as fresh missiles assaulted her force shields. The American battleship now boasted new scars on its starboard flank, although not as bad as the ones on its port flank. Inanna’s capital guns fired again. The mighty particle beam weapons were specifically designed to locally punch through force shields. They slashed into the hull armor, leaving slash marks of hull breaches in Texas. The starboard and ventral grav gun turrets were reduced to wreckage, along with half of the starboard gun batteries. A shot liquefied half a railgun turret on the ventral side. The dorsal grav gun maintained its beam, slashing Inanna repeatedly. Missiles rose from Texas and flew toward Inanna. Point defense stopped most of them, but those that did hit were enough to buckle her shields and leave giant craters on her starboard side. A lucky hit with one of Texas’s capital gun turrets destroyed her bridge.

“Prepare a shot with the spinal gun!” Captain Craven ordered.

“Aye sir!” the tactical officer said.

Deep within Texas’s bowels the spinal gun was prepared for action. It was more powerful than a capital gun by an order of magnitude. A single particle accelerator running from one end of the ship to the other, sheathed in thick shielding, with its own cooling system and independent fusion reactor. As Texas turned its nose toward Inanna the immense weapon was already ready and charged. Enough energy to boil a medium sized lake was focused, collimated, and sent out toward Inanna. The Scythian battleship’s shields failed and the mighty beam punched straight through it from end to end, leaving it crippled. Texas’s turrets rotated and blew apart Inanna’s two Antiope class PD destroyers. In a last desperate act Inanna’s two Hippolyta class missile boat destroyers; the Jean D’Arc and the Hua Mu-Lan, attempted to engage Texas, ramming straight for her. Texas’s escorting Arleigh Burke class destroyer Husband E Kimmel blew Jean D’Arc apart with missiles. Mu-Lan managed to get within 2000 km of Texas and launch two ineffectual missile strikes before being destroyed by one of the battleship’s light 450 mm railguns. Texas’s capital guns rotated and struck Inanna again. The Scythian battleship was left drifting in three separate pieces.


Dorsal Turret 3, USS Abraham Lincoln

“The Lieutenant says to let ‘em have it” the Gun Captain said.

“Alrighty then! Time to rock and roll!” Crewman Frankie exclaimed as he worked the autoloader. The two railguns in Turret 3 turned green in quick succession. “Railgun tubes armed!” Frankie confirmed cheerily.

“Inputting firing solution” Crewman Young said. “Rotating turret to face target.” There was a slight sensation of movement in the gunner’s nest as powerful magnetic motors moved the bulky gun turret. “We are armed and ready, awaiting order to begin firing.”

The Gun Captain waited a few moments until he heard the Lieutenant’s voice in his ear. “Let them have it! All batteries sustained synchronized fire!”

“Fire!” The Gun Captain ordered. “Yes sir!” Crewman Price said. To her went the honor of actually firing the turret’s two 800 mm railguns.

“Reload!” the Gun Captain ordered.

“Reloading” Frankie said.

“Fire!”

The massed batteries of Lincoln fired, and the Scythian cruiser Virtuous died beneath her guns.


The wounded Texas dropped back, the battleships Utah, Nevada, and Sonora moving forward to take point. Missiles burst around them. Neutral particle beams scratched at their shields. The Scythian battleship Sarpanit succumbed to a missile barrage from Nevada and its escorting cruisers Douglass MacArthur and Rochester, but not before taking two American destroyers with it. Sappho engaged Sonora and was destroyed. Ashnan rushed suicidally into the heart of the American fleet under maximum burn, its missile launchers and neutral particle guns and railguns blasting away. It obliterated the American armored cruiser Baltimore in one missile volley. Baltimore dated back to a time when force shields could only be mounted on battleships, and though it had been refitted with a weak force shield generator it was not enough to withstand four nukes detonating against its hull at once. Next it obliterated the more modern cruisers San Diego, San Juan, and Puerto Limon before finally engaging the battleships Virginia and Colorado. By a remarkable stroke of luck Virginia’s missile launchers were cycling and empty at the moment it attacked. Ashnan’s Captain knew that for all practical purposes she commanded a very tough battlecruiser, and her only defense was to kill the enemy quickly. Ashnan blew away Virginia’s destroyer escorts and laid into her with ever weapon that could be brought to bear and Virginia died before she could fire her missiles, although her lesser weapons did Ashnan significant damage. Colorado killed her, but even as the ironclad’s thick armor melted beneath the American battleship’s beams and railgun shells perforated her hull Ashnan fired devastating broadsides into Colorado and left her crippled.

The battle lines crashed together and sailed through each other, the opposing ships passing within mere tens of kilometers of one another. At that range it was simple butchery. Point defense could barely engage. Missile launchers fired and dozens of ships vanished into eye-weltering nuclear fireballs. Battleships and cruisers added their railguns and neutral particle guns to the chorus.

Sonora broke through the wall of battle and Morrigan loomed directly ahead as the missiles were spat forth. Some were intercepted by PD lasers. Eighty-six survived to expend themselves against Morrigan’s shields. Admiral Raylene Alvera, the Hero of Barents VI, had just enough time to watch the missiles home in before she died. Almost as an afterthought Sonora’s light railgun turrets rotated and blew apart Morrigan’s twelve destroyer escorts simultaneously.

On the other side of the carnage the last Scythian battleship, Persephone, turned back to face her foes. Railgun holes marred her hull, air streamed from a dozen hull breaches, three of her engines and five of her guns were out of commission, but she still lived and even as the American ships poured fire on her she continued to hit back. Her crew never flinched even as their ship disintegrated around them, killing an astounding six cruisers and two battlecruisers before Persephone fell to massed missile volleys.

With the last serious opposition gone American cruisers, battlecruisers, and missile ships began chasing down the last Scythian survivors. Some ships still fought, but the battle was over.

Well, I'm done with the fleet battle. Hope you guys like it.

CHAPTER 4

Scythian Army Planetary HQ, Nova Catalina, Turin

Lieutenant Freya marched down the rows of still, attention-stiff troopers of the Cohors Amazona; the Amazon Guard. The best trained, best equipped, and most fanatical soldiers of the Scythian Army. Their uniforms were crimson, save for the boots, which were shined to such a lustrous black they were almost like mirrors. Their torsos were covered in black reflex-plastic flak vests. Flak guards also partially protected the legs, arms, and crotch. Long, lethal combat knives and P-55 Vallejo pistols hung from their belts. Dark-grey reflex plastic neural helmets covered their heads, incorporating NFPA manufactured basic sensor and communications suits. Soviet Kalashnikov rifles hung easily over their shoulders; no trashy recycled-aluminum carbines for the Amazon Guard! Golden braid and rank emblems embellished their blood-red collars. The red symbolized the blood of all women taken through the ages by the crimes and wars of the Patriarchists, the blood sacrificed in defense of Scythia and their oppressed sisters still huddling in slavery in the Patriarchist states of the galaxy, and the blood symbolically sacrificed monthly to make the generation of new life possible. All branches of the Scythian military used some red in both dress and field uniforms, but the Navy and the Amazon Guard were the only ones to actually make their field uniforms red. The regular Army and Marines used standard camouflage-pattern field uniforms like most other armies in the galaxy, and wore a band of red cloth around their right arms.

Lieutenant Freya stopped and looked over her platoon. Her left hand touched the hilt of her officer’s sword. It was a thin, light rapier, of superficially passable workmanship although it was really mostly made from recycled tin cans. It would have broken easily on a primitive battlefield. That was no major concern; it was a badge of office rather than a real weapon. She addressed them.

“You are here because you want to be Amazon Guard and because your superiors and our screeners believed you skilled and healthy enough to be Amazon Guard. Now is your chance to prove yourself worthy of the uniforms you wear.” She took out her tin sword and pointed at the pink dawn sky. “Three hundred thousand kilometers above your head are more than five million Patriarchist soldiers. By this time tomorrow, or the day after at the very latest, they will be down here. If they take this planet they will be only one jump away from Scythia itself. Are you going to allow that to happen?”

“NO!” the entire platoon shouted at once, with real passion.

“No, we won’t!” Lieutenant Freya repeated. “Scythia cannot fall, must not fall, will not fall! We owe this to our billions of sisters who still suffer in the dark night of the Patriarchy! We are their only hope! We cannot allow the Patriarchist armies to extinguish the light of liberation and leave them in that darkness forever! We owe a blood debt to every one of them to make sure this does not happen!”

Freya looked fiercely across the ranks of impassive troopers. “You are all that stands between the Patriarchists and Scythia. Your lives, your bodies. So do not hesitate to throw them down between the mother world and the Patriarchist ravagers. They say the Patriarchist armies are like a bulldozer tearing across our space. So throw yourselves before it, stop its passage with your bodies, gum its tracks with your ground flesh, let it slip and sink in a lake of your blood. There is only one way to stop the Patriarchists, and it is through total resistance. We may all die but in the process we will drown them in their own blood, bury them in their own dead. You are all that stands between them and the mother world and you will not for an instant retreat even if it means the death of every last one of you! There is no fall back; there is only fight, advance, and die! Those are your options. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

“YES!’

“If you cannot win, what will you do?”

“FIGHT UNTIL DEATH!”

“If you are trapped in a building surrounded by a hundred times your number in Patriarchists what will you do?”

“FIGHT!”

“And when you run out of ammunition, what will you do?”

“FIGHT WITH OUR KNIVES!”

“And when your knives break?”

“FIGHT WITH OUR HANDS!”

Lieutenant Freya measured out a few centimeters with her fingers. “What will the Patriarchists have to do to take this much ground from you?”

“KILL US ALL!”

“Good!” Lieutenant Freya said. “Now get your gear ready and be ready to head for your allocated muster points. The landings may begin in a matter of hours.”

The Amazon Guard ran to back to their barracks, along the chain-link fence that separated the barracks from the city beyond. As they did so they passed a rifle squad of regular Army mounting a truck. Their cammo uniforms were already full of the dust of Nova Catalina’s unpaved streets, making even the red armbands of sacrifice look dingy. They were simple cammo-pattern reflex-plastic flak jackets, with no other flak guards. Two of them carried Soviet Kalashnikovs with underslung grenade launchers, the rest had only the light, shoddily manufactured recycled-scrap carbines the Scythian factories turned out. The guns were small enough to be strapped to their belts instead of carried over the shoulder like a proper rifle. A few Amazon Guards gave them passing glances of contempt.


“Look at those pretty prissies” Private Yates sneered. “I’d be surprised if any of them have been in a foxhole in their whole lives.”

“Look at those uniforms” Corporal Dennis scoffed. “They might as well just paint a giant bull’s-eye on their helmets and chest plates and be done with it. I could pot one of them from half a mile away if I had a proper rifle.”

Corporal Morris shrugged. She was a big, powerfully built dark-skinned woman. “That was the original uniform of the Scythian Army. Back when we were just another no-rate power like Gilead or New Plymouth. Tradition, I guess. The British Army has regiments that go back to all the way back to the 16th and 17th centuries, way before the Collapse.”

“Britain’s a real nation, not a society founded by a few hundred extreme-fringe lunatics” Sergeant Prentiss commented. Private Alex Stevens almost gulped at the near-blasphemy. The squad sergeant had a degree of cynicism about the Great Crusade and Scythian ambitions in general that was almost shocking. With an attitude like hers it was no wonder she was well past forty and still had yet to get an officer’s crimson braid on her shoulder patches. She always stopped just short of saying something actively seditious… what she’d just said was technically true, although no history textbook writer would put in those terms. Of course, a lot of societies in the Outer Reaches were founded by such “extreme fringe lunatics”. The National Fascist Planetary Alliance and the New Soviet Star Union had originally been founded by extreme fringe lunatics, and now they were Great Powers.

“Come on, fourth squad, let’s go!” the Lieutenant shouted. “We don’t have all day! You wanna be stuck on the highway when the Patriarchists start nuking them!” The women of Stevens’ squad chuckled at the incompetence of the platoon’s machine gun squad. Alex personally felt sorry for the machine gunner. She wasn’t a particularly big woman, and the Soviet-manufacture machine gun was very heavy. Two of her squad mates had to help her drag herself onto the truck with it over her back. Alex winced at the thought of actually marching with that thing, especially now, in the middle of Turin’s long hot summer. The Lieutenant walked over and screamed at the machine gunner for being slow, which was followed by more screaming as the last stragglers dragged themselves and their equipment aboard. The truck’s bed shook as the engine repeatedly failed to catch.

“Wonderful…” Private Darina grumbled and rolled her eyes. She was a small, slim dark-skinned woman. Alex nodded in sympathy. The truck was an American Ford (now there was an irony for you!) appropriated back when the Scythians first took Turin. Judging by how deep into the Outer Reaches Turin was that meant it was probably ten or fifteen years old at the time, and fifteen years had passed since then. But the Army kept it running because it had a wider bed than the Scythian manufacture Ninkasi trucks it usually used. The ancient engine finally caught and the truck started to roll out and join a procession of vehicles. They were mostly trucks and jeeps but also there were also Aella APCs (basically just jeeps with armor plates and an HMG slapped on) and squat support drones, some mounting antiaircraft missiles and others PD lasers to intercept incoming orbit-to-ground and air-to-ground missiles. Four Erinyes MBTs took up positions at the front and rear of the convoy, their 120 mm gas expansion cannons sweeping the road ahead and behind them.

A riflewoman ran ahead to unlock and drag open the gate and the convoy rolled out, the wheels and tracks of the vehicles turning up thick choking clouds of dust. Some of the soldiers coughed, as did some of the civilians on the side of the road. Turin natives on foot and bicycles hurried to get out of their way. Cars had always been virtually unknown here, and were now totally unknown. Aside from the jeeps of the Scythian Army the only cars on the road now were rusted immobile hulks long since stripped for scrap and rubber. Most of the buildings were made of wood or the yellowish local stone. Vendors huckstered produce from carts and shop-fronts. Usually long lines of native men crowded around those stalls. The Scythians wasted no more rations on Turin’s male population than they absolutely had to, so for them trade and charity made the difference between just barely surviving and dying very slowly. Today was different though. The women were mostly staying indoors and most of the men had been press-ganged into building earthworks, barricades, tank traps, and other defenses. The convoy stalled before a line of them dragging pieces of rock and debris into a barricade across one of the city’s main streets under the enthusiastic supervision of several Army women wielding vicious scourges with pieces of sharp metal tied to their ends. The scourges inflicted bloody wounds were they descended, and the overseers were eager for any excuse to use them. The men wore only tattered clothes, the remnants of whatever they’d owned when Turin fell for the most part, and Alex could see that more than a few of them had backs that looked like road maps from all the scars. Rather than the hulking, terrifying monsters Alex had expected they were generally pathetic looking creatures, their physiques running from scrawny to downright emaciated, their heads kept perpetually down. As the convoy rumbled past one of them; a grimy near-skeleton with a ginger beard, looked up with dull black eyes. It was hard to guess his age because Alex wasn’t very familiar with male facial and bodily features, but he looked less than twenty.

“Hey!” one of the other soldiers called out in outrage. “That one looked at me!” she jabbed a finger at the offending youth.

“Don’t worry” one of the overseers called. “He won’t do it again.” Alex winced as she saw the overseer walk over to him, hefting her bloody scourge. Then she almost screamed in shock as the woman drew her combat knife and jammed it deep into his groin. He screamed in shock and agony and blood spurted down his ragged pants. Grinning, she pulled out the knife and stabbed him again, this time in the kidneys. A maximum pain and slow death cut. He fell to the dry ground and groaned and the overseer kicked him against the side of a building, where he continued to twitch pathetically as he bled to death. One of the other men, seeing this, called something in Italian and tried to run over to him. The guards grinned with sadistic glee as they laid into him enthusiastically with their whips; as far as they were concerned these were the most evil beings in the universe and they’d loose no opportunity to punish them for their undoubtedly numerous and horrible crimes. Mercifully whatever was obstructing the convoy’s progress moved aside and they drove away before the scene could finish playing itself out.

Alex felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Private Cho.

“What’s wrong?” Cho asked. “You look sick. Bumpy road getting to you?”

Alex realized she’d been holding a hand in front of her mouth. She removed it and swallowed. “Did you see…?”

“Yeah” Cho said. And she smiled. “Goddamn monkey. This isn’t some Patriarchist world where he can just grab a woman he sees and rape her… Well, he learned his lesson. He learned it good, wouldn’t you say.”

Alex looked at Cho’s smug grin with horror. “All he did was look up!”

Cho shrugged. “You ask me what I don’t get is why we let them live in the first place. We should have done what we did on Kamchatka. Put them all into elimination camps and gassed the lot of them.”

“But…” Kamchatka only had five million people, Turin had more than 150 million. “You’d kill 75 million people?”

Cho shrugged again. “I’d hardly call them people.”

Alex didn’t say anything. She thought she was beginning to understand Sergeant Prentiss’s attitude.


Turin orbital space

With the Scythian fleet gone the Americans moved into low orbit. On the surface hundreds of missiles rose into the night sky from hardened subsurface installations. Great defense lasers fired into the heavens. Hundreds of defense satellites moving in equidistant ball-of-wool orbits of the planet joined them. Most launched missiles. A few stabbed American battleships with high-powered neutral particle guns. At the heart of that defensive pattern Turin’s single orbital fort stirred to life. It was a massive construction, almost two kilometers of guns and missile launchers and battle steel. Thousands of missile launchers and PD guns covered its armored skin. Force shields that could hold off hundreds of megatons of punishment flared to life. Tremendous neutral particle guns, similar in construction to the spinal guns mounted in some battleships but housed in titanic turrets, came to life and speared American ships with ravening lances of energy. Giant defense railguns waited for the Yankees to come closer so that they could add their power to the chorus.

The defense satellites were the first to fall. Many were “one shot” sats, programmed to expend their missile ordinance in a single orgasm of destruction. They were ignored. Neutral particle beams flashed out from the American battleships and swatted neutral particle gun and heavy missile satellites like irritant flies. Standard missiles flew out to engage others. Antimissile satellites came into action and cut some of them down, but in doing so they revealed their positions and were marked for destruction with the next volley. Within a few minutes the orbital defense net of Turin was a torn rag. The battleships shifted their fire to the orbital fort, moving and attacking it with capital missiles. The battleships’ spinal-mounted neutral particle cannons and mass drivers fired. The orbital fort lived and fought as one multi-megaton explosion after another flared against its shields, but in the shields could not hold against so many missiles and in the end they failed and it was consumed. A few more minutes and everything in space was eliminated.

The American ships turned their weapons on the surface.

Thousands of nuclear missiles dropped into Turin’s atmosphere and fell toward its surface like meteors. The battleships’ mass drivers turned from the remains of the orbital fort to the soft blue and yellow and green world quivering expectantly below them. Too clumsy to use against other ships they were tremendously powerful against immobile targets, like planets. Battleships weighing hundreds of thousands of tons shook like autumn leaves as the mass drivers discharged, hurling pieces of solid steel the size of buildings into Turin’s atmosphere at speeds no natural meteorite would have had. On the world below alarms blared and force shields stood ready. The nukes hit first, thermonuclear death blossoming over army bases, air bases, roads, railway terminuses, and anything of strategic value. The only ones spared were those installations situated directly next to population centers. Next came the mass drivers, impacting with more force than any nuke, leaving molten craters where they struck. Turin would enjoy unusually red sunsets for years to come from all the pulverized stone that was being thrown into its atmosphere today.

As the dust cleared from the hellish bombardment the American carriers advanced and released their fighters and bombers. They were joined by the Marine troop transports, which disgorged hundreds of small craft of their own; Marine dropships, each one carrying a single thirteen man squad of US Marines. The swarm of small craft descended toward Turin’s surface like hungry locusts, blazing trails of fire in the sky as they fell. And behind them came the troop transports and their PD destroyers, diving ponderously toward the cities and towns and still-burning bomb craters spread out below them.


American F-5500 “Eagle” fighter, entering Turin’s atmosphere

The dropships and bombers were falling into the high stratosphere now, and the sky was turning purple. Jim Peterson was wingman, with Eddie Jacobs his flight leader. He shrugged to himself. No reason for jealousy; Jacobs was a very good pilot.

“Time to turn your engines on” First Lieutenant Abel advised.

“Yes ma’am” Peterson said. At this neural command air intakes opened in the Eagle’s belly and thin air rushed into the fusion drives. He drove his nose up against the flaming hypersonic wind and started leveling of. His fighter slowed and the rising temperature curve on his heat shield started to level out.

“We’ve got fighter launches from the surface” Lieutenant Abel said.

“Hey, I thought we were supposed to have blasted all their bases from orbit” Lieutenant Bragg said.

“Negative, the ones next to civilian targets weren’t hit” Abel answered. “No use killing all the people we’re supposed to liberate.”

Lieutenant Bragg muttered something inaudible and signed off.

“I’m leveling out” Jacobs said as they entered lower stratosphere.

“Following. No prob.” Peterson said as he brought his nose in line.

“Enemy fighters coming towards us on ascending vector out of the northeast” Abel advised. “Look to be Harridans.”

Peterson armed his missile launchers. They’d done pretty well against Arrows, but what about against Harridans? He tried to remember what the training manuals said about the Scythian Air Force interceptor. As he remembered it was bigger than an Arrow, longer range, a little slower, and it had only one missile launcher.

“Here they come” Jacobs said. Peterson and Jacobs rolled off to engage the incoming fighter. The Harridans gunned their engines and sped toward the American fighters at their maximum speed of 28,800 kmph. One of them launched a missile and Leibowitz’s fighter was blown out of the air. Peterson didn’t see him eject. He and Jacobs split up to corner one Scythian fighter and strafed it from both directions. Jacobs sent out a missile and blew it apart. Its wingman veered around and tried to engage Jacobs but he dived and the Scythian fighter shot past him. It quickly circled around and came back at him, but the pilot had made the mistake of becoming fixated on a single target. As Jacobs rolled away to evade Peterson came up behind her, got into her blind spot, and blew her away.

“Jacobs, Peterson, help me out here!” Lieutenant Abel called. Peterson looked at his screen and saw that four Sallie fighters had teamed up on her and her wingman. They were trying desperately to evade but the Sallies were on them like stink on a monkey. The Harridan was slower than an Arrow, but it could still jump rings around an Eagle. One of them fired a missile out of its belly-mounted launcher and got Abel’s wingman. His plane fell toward the earth trailing smoke and fire. He was probably cremated instantly; even at the relatively low relative speeds fighters fought at in atmosphere KE missiles packed a lot of energy.

“You take the ones on the right, I’ll take the ones on the left” Jacobs said over tightbeam.

“Gotcha” Peterson said, and they engaged. Peterson flew straight for them while Jacobs made a twisting loop to come back at them from the other side. They loosed their missiles and two Sallies died. The other two tried to evade. Jacobs blew his away instantly. Peterson couldn’t get a lock through the enemy fighter’s ECM. The Sallie tried to drop behind him. He knew that would be fatal; there was no way he’d be able to shake her out of his blind spot. So he waited for her to almost fall behind him and then sent two missiles her way. One of them might miss, but at this range interception was an impossibility and there was no way both would. He banked to see the Sallie fighter go down. Actually, it didn’t even really go down so much as disintegrate. There wasn’t even enough left after the missile hit to properly call it a wreck.

Bragg’s Eagle tumbled out of the sky as the last two Harridans got through to the bombers. They both launched their last missiles at a single Marauder. Its shields failed and it started to loose altitude and fall toward the ocean below. Peterson watched as two crewmen bailed out. He wished them luck, but that turned out to be futile. A PD laser from one of the fighters caught both of them and dismembered them. Severed arms and legs fell into the ocean.

“Bastard!” Peterson grated. The same fighter moved in and raked a Marauder with its lasers. The Marauder fired back and destroyed it. The last one, seeing how well that had worked, engaged an Eagle and destroyed it instead. Lieutenant Abel swooped up at it and blew it apart with a missile.

“That’s all of them” Abel said.

Peterson nodded. They’d lost four fighters, but there were no more Harridans flying. He looked down to see Sticky’s parachute open; a tiny spot of white against the ocean. He knew that this far out into the ocean, on an enemy-held world, her odds of survival were slim but he wished her the best of luck.

They were pulling along at almost eight kilometers per second, and in a few minutes the land was coming up. The dropships dived toward their targets and the bombers and fighters followed to support their landings, and hundreds of SAMs rose to greet them.

I wrote:“Britain’s a real nation, not a society founded by a few hundred extreme-fringe lunatics” Sergeant Prentiss commented.

Yes, that is a homage of to 55 Days in Kalunda. As are the Amazon Guard uniforms; they're basically Kalundan Crimson Guard uniforms altered to better suit a modern army. Yes, I know the cammo scheme sucks. The Amazon Guard are sort of like Sadaam Hussein's "elite" Republican Guard, they think they're elite and they look the part, but if anything the regular Army are better actual soldiers.

Marine dropships burned through atmosphere, drawing green glowing tracks on the screens of radar installations that had survived the bombardment. Hardened SAM batteries, concealed until now, opened up. Mobile SAM drones and even man-portable shoulder launchers joined them, throwing thousands of missiles into the air. The chin-mounted lasers on the dropships and the nose-mounted gimbals on the fighters and bombers fired away, dropping hundreds of missiles. Furious evasive maneuvers and ECM threw off others. A very few survived and hit. Bombers and dropships fell flaming to earth. The bombers retaliated. Small and medium tac nukes and 500 pound bombs filled with high explosive fell away. Mushroom clouds rose over Turin’s surface. Other bombers dropped cluster bombs that broke up just short of the surface, each one releasing dozens of tiny fragmentation and incendiary bombs. Shaped-charge earthquake nukes designed to channel most of their energy into the ground took care of underground installations.

The first dropships skimmed low and hit the dirt at beaches, open plains, depressions, air ports; places that had been tagged as suitable landing zones for the heavy-lift transports that carried the bulk of the troops. Sometimes they quickly secured the area, encountering no resistance. Sometimes they hit defended areas and ground battles ensued. Other dropships fanned out over the immediate surrounding areas and came down on defense bases, air strips, sensor arrays, radio stations, highways, and other critical points. SAMs and automated defense turrets met them. Drop pods crashed to the ground in flames and exploded as their ammunition and fuel cooked off. Machine guns picked off any fleeing survivors. The dropships returned fire with wing-mounted rocket launchers and 20 mm railguns. High-explosive tipped missiles blew apart defense guns, SAM batteries, and vehicles. Hypervelocity railgun rounds and hundred kilowatt lasers tore up light vehicles and infantry, turning women to torn masses of bloody or charred flesh. Doors opened on the dropships and US Marines stormed out. High-flying bombers hammered stubborn outposts, dropping guided cluster missiles into heavy concentrations of enemy infantry, obliterating defense systems with light bombardment missiles and the occasional 500 pound bomb.

From his place on the lead troop carrier General Andrews matched as the landing sites he’d selected turned green one by one. A couple remained red. Several Marine assaults faced unexpectedly firm resistance and could not break the defenders. One was wiped out entirely when it landed in the middle of a Scythian troop concentration six times its size and was robbed of its bomber support by a few last desperately horded Harridan interceptors. But, as usual, General Andrew had ordered more landing zones to be seized than were actually necessary, as he knew some assaults would fail. The mass landings could begin.


Main hold, USS Missoula Victory

Private Peter “Petie” Nelson could feel the rumble in the deck and the slight pull backwards as the troop transport’s engines came to life. A klaxon wailed, signaling that harsh accelerations were imminent. A voice rang out of the Missoula Victory’s PA system and through its crowded hold. “Attention! We’re beginning our descent into Turin’s atmosphere in fifteen minutes. Secure any loose objects and prepare to assume grave-endurance positions.”

A second voice came on. Petie recognized it as Lieutenant General Langley’s. “You heard that boys. We’re going to town this morning. Get everything ready cause we’re going to hit the chop in fifteen minutes. Make sure all your weapons and equipment are in good working order. I want you ready to deploy the instant we hit dirt. Godspeed.”

“About time!” Private Abado said. He was a tall, skinny Italian from New York. “This ship's so tight I was starting to wonder whether I was going to Turin or Gilead.”

“What would anybody there want with you?” Private Lopez asked. She was an imposing, muscular Hispanic woman.

“Well, maybe he hit his head when he got up in the morning or something” Corporal Pablo Sanchez suggested.

“No, you don’t have to worry about that” Private Snow said. He was a big, strapping, blonde fellow from the Midwest. “See, if this was a slave ship, it’d be much more comfortable. You think Gilead whores have to cram in with an entire Corps’ armor and equipment? Trust me, whips, chains, and leather shit take up a lot less space than a Grady!” he laughed loudly at his own joke.

That wasn’t too far from the truth, to be honest. Missoula Victory was a freighter, and in this case the freight was mostly men. Fifty thousand GIs were crammed into it, and all the tanks, armored vehicles, support vehicles, artillery, heavy weapons, recon drones, and other equipment a force of that size could be expected to have attached to it. There was barely room to turn around. And, as you might expect, the galley served indigestible canned beans almost every day.

“If y’all feel claustrophobic y’all can clean your rifles and put your flak guards on” Sergeant Elgars said in her thick Southern accent.

“Aw come on Sarge” Private Adams complained. He was an Iowa farmboy, like Snow, but skinny and with dark hair. “Flak guards get hot after a while and we don’t land for another twenty minutes-“

“You heard the Sergeant” Corporal Kendall snapped. “Abado’s right. As a matter of fact this is a slave ship, and the Sarge’s your master. You signed two year contracts when you volunteered, and they don’t have any mitigating clauses. Now get cracking.”

Petie got his M-105 rifle out of his footlocker and began examining and cleaning it. When he was satisfied that it would pass inspection he began snapping on his flak guards. The reflex-plastic jacket came first, then the arm and leg guards.

“Well, at least it can’t be as bad as Tarawa” Private Cooper said. He was a tall, muscular black man. Looked like he could have been a football player. Petie was surprised he hadn’t ended up being a machine gunner; all the big guys who got signed up usually ended up that way.

Petie shrugged as he clasped on one of his arm guards. He hadn’t been on Tarawa. He’d spent most of the war in a rear-guard posting on Palmyra. “I hear the Sallies are pretty crazy” he said conversationally.

“Like you wouldn’t believe” Corporal Kendall said. “You ever hear of Barker IV.”

“A little” Petie said. “We took it last November, didn’t we? Sometime before Thanksgiving.”

Kendall nodded. “It’s a small planet. Mountainous, cold-temperate climate. Population maybe a couple of tens of million. Originally settled by neo-paganists, Wiccans I think they were called. The Sallies were using it as a forward base. They had less than half a million men on it. We sent a million men to take it, but it wasn’t enough. You know how many men we eventually had to send?”

Petie shook his head. “Nope.”

“Two and a half million. With more than a quarter million dead. And that was with total air and space superiority past the first three days of the campaign.”

“Damn!” Cooper exclaimed.

Corporal Kendall nodded. “That’s right. Forget everything you heard about these guys being a bunch of bozos like the Primitive Zoners on Gilead, who can barely spell battleship let alone build one. They may not have our equipment or our numbers, but don’t let that fool you. You don’t give them any less respect than you would the Brits or the Russians or the Fascists. You do that and you might just find yourself choking on your own amputated family jewels.” Corporal Kendall’s tone darkened for a minute. “Just like Ricky Walter did back on Malden.”

“You’ve really got a way of making the new guys feel welcome, you know that” Private Falkenhorst said as he finished strapping on his own flak guards.

“C’mon guys, you’ve only got another five minutes” Sergeant Elgars said.

Petie finished tightening the straps on his flak guards and assumed the grav-endurance position he’d been trained for; sitting up in the bunk, back facing toward the engine. The bunks weren’t very well designed at all for hard accelerations, but they did have some straps you could secure yourself with. It was better than nothing. The men made their prayers and prepared themselves. Some crossed themselves. Even if the Sallies hadn’t held any defense batteries or fighters in reserve there’d be hundreds of mobile nuclear SAM and ground to orbit missile launchers on the surface. The troop transports would be falling into a hail of fire, and most of them were freighters that didn’t mount so much as a single PD laser of their own. The only dedicated combat transports at Turin were the Marine dropships (which would never kiss hostile atmosphere anyway) and the USS Gator; a lightly armed corsair that had been captured and turned over the to service of the Army, and which’s holds now held GIs rather than bound captives destined for the brothels and harems of half a hundred backwater worlds. Abado’s crack about the Missoula Victory was more prescient than he probably knew.

The transport began to buck and shake as it fell toward Turin. Petie could hear the hypersonic winds lashing against the hull. Quiet at first, and then getting louder and louder as the air got thicker. Gee forces piled on, nowhere near as much as it would have in a warship but enough to make breathing an effort, and the transport bounced and tossed outrageously as its massive bulk crashed through the stratosphere. Petie groaned and tried not to be sick.

As the troop transports descended into the atmosphere the last hidden hardened missile installations fired. The accompanying PD destroyers got most of them. Valdosta Victory exploded, wiping out two entire divisions in an instant. Two missiles struck Gator, but the former corsair had shields and they held. The retaliation was brutal. Mass drivers punched through the atmosphere in the transports’ path and struck the missile installations, throwing up immense clouds of dust and destroying them totally. The transports crashed through the stratosphere and their engines roared, trying to cut their momentum. Nuclear SAMs rose up out of the landscape, from hardened launchers that had been concealed until now and from thousands of vehicle mounts. Bombers and fighters dipped into the atmosphere and showered the surface with earthquake nukes, baby and tac nukes, 500 pound bombs, light bombardment missiles, and cluster bombs. The transports accompanying PD destroyers stopped most of the nukes. Tacoma Victory and Amherst Victory were blow out of the sky. Then the PD destroyers broke away, heading back out into deep space. They would not follow the troop carriers all the way to the surface. This was the point where the transports were most vulnerable, with only fighters as PD escort. Three more vanished in eye-watering fireballs. The men on the rest could only pray and gasp for air as the sluggish ships desperately tried to throw off their inertia.

Petie grunted as the transport bit earth, shook, and finally settled. “Alright!” the General’s voice shouted over the PA system. “Fall out by squads! Move!”

Petie’s platoon was stationed close to Door 3. They immediately stood up and prepared to move out. The door opened and the first rifle squad hustled down the ramp and took up shooting positions by the door. They exchanged signals with the Marines up on a nearby ridge defending the LZ point. Four more squads fell out. Then it was Elgars’ turn.

“Let’s go!” she shouted. “Move! Move! Move!”

Petie hustled down the corridor, the metal grating of the deck ringing under his boots. He ran down the ramp and breathed deeply, savoring fresh open air after more than two months in the steel can of the troop transport. The air had a salty, fishy smell. It was early morning. The sky had two suns, both looking hotter and whiter than the one he was used to, and there was a third and much smaller red star up as well. That would be the system’s red dwarf star. Having more than one sun in the sky didn’t seem weird to him anymore after he’d been stationed on Palmyra. A lot of the GIs goggled at it though. The transport was resting on a long, broad beach. A turbulent grey-green ocean washed against it. It was very different-looking from the flat, clear Great Lake his dad sometimes took him boating on as a kid, or Palmyra’s clear blue tropical sea. Thousands of GIs and support crew and hundreds of Marines swarmed around the beach, setting up defenses. Earthworks were being dug and machine gun nests set up. A perimeter of automatic sentry guns was being established and minefields were being laid. The transport’s main ramp had been lowered and a support crew was directing the disembarkation of combat vehicles. First rolled out the squat, six-wheeled PD drones and mobile force shield generators. The air crackled as the first force shield generators activated, throwing interlocking protective bubbles of energy over the whole area. Next came the AA drones, missiles sticking out of their backs like spines on a razor back. Then came the heavy Grady tanks with their long barreled 75 mm railguns, the self-propelled artillery pieces, the long eight-wheeled Ortega APCs, and finally the jeeps and trucks. Only when the last of them were cleared could the real work begin; dragging out the heavy towed non-mobile equipment like towed artillery pieces and aerial drones.

Suddenly his helmet comm. tickled his neural transceiver. He was getting a call. He turned it on. It was an all points bulletin.

“This is Lieutenant General Langley. We’ve just received word that the Sallies have counterattacked and Landing Zone Salem is under heavy assault. We’re one of the closest to them. We will move out within the day. All units are to execute the necessary preparations.”


USS Lucinda Victory, near Alleppa, Turin

The command center for the Turin invasion force was, annoyingly enough, located in the afterdecks of the USS Lucinda Victory. It was unseemly for a general in the universe’s best army to have to command his forces from inside a requisitioned merchantman transport, but that was life. On the plus side it was very convenient, he had access to the communications facilities of a starship, and this was probably the safest place on the planet now the AM and AA systems were up.

“We’ve secured the area around the ship” Lieutenant General Copper reported, handing General Andrews a report in a coffee-black hand. “Most landing zones are secure. We’ve lost eight troop transports; six to surface-to-orbit and surface-to-air fire, and two were nuked at their landing sites. Altogether our casualties so far come out to approximately four hundred thousand men. In addition, the Sallies are pursuing a vigorous counterattack against Landing Zone Salem, near Alleppa. We have a quarter of a million men bottled up there, surrounded by what we estimate to be over half a million Sallies. They came down right in the middle of a densely defended area. Generals McKenna and Henley have already diverted forces to assist. Other than that, all transports report areas secure, except Lieutenant General Carmichael’s Corps, they’re having some trouble with snipers but nothing serious.”

Andrews shook his head. “It won’t be enough. Order Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Armies to Landing Zone Salem. Along with the Corps Henley can spare it’ll give us a nice margin of superiority and we should be able to break them out.”

“Ninth and Tenth Armies were supposed to press the attack on Alleppa” General Copper reminded him.

General Andrews shook his head. “If Landing Zone Salem gets wiped out that whole front collapses. The half million we lost in landings were bad enough, I’m not loosing another two hundred and fifty thousand and surrendering the initiative in that entire area for weeks if not months to come.”

“Yes sir” General Copper said. “I’ll radio the United States and tell Admiral Travis to send bombers. I get the feeling they’re going to need all the air cover they can get.”

CHAPTER 5

Landing Site of the USS Missoula Victory, Grand Banks

“Come on, let’s go” Lieutenant Coffee called as the platoon’s machine gunner threw his piece onto the truck. “Hey, careful with that thing” his Sergeant admonished him as he climbed onto the truck’s bed.

“That everybody?” Coffee said to himself. He walked over to the driver’s compartment, the bed heaving under his steps, and tapped the window. The truck’s engine purred, barely audible, and it started moving.

It was afternoon now, or maybe noon, he hadn’t quite gotten adjusted to length of the day. It was hot as hell. He was used to that. In summer in Wisconsin the air often got so hot and wet it was like a tangible presence pushing down on you. Palmyra had been like that, only worse. It was a jungle moon of a gas giant planet, with days and nights lasting weeks, and the days got hot. Daytime there was like the worst Wisconsin summer, only even worse, and the shade brought no relief. Compared to that Turin wasn’t so bad so far. It was a dry heat, which was good. There was nothing worse than moving around in full battle dress in wet heat.

Four straining, sweating support crew passed dragging a 150 mm towed artillery piece. Petie watched as they wrestled it forward and attached it to the truck directly behind his. His truck idled as more such last-minute operations were performed. Finally the convoy formed up and began to move. A good part of it was trucks of course, but there were also lots and lots of jeeps, tanks, APCs, and self-propelled artillery. PD and AA drones waited to shoot down anything unfriendly that moved into their line of sight. Automated mobile force shield generators were staggered throughout the column to form a series of interlocking bubbles of protection. Four minesweeper drones, looking like some crazy cross between a tank and a steamroller, took up positions at the head of the convoy.

“How much longer are they gonna be?” Cooper griped. “’Cause if it’s gonna be much longer I gotta hit the head.”

“Just another couple of minutes, I think” Corporal Kendall answered. “Ah, here we go.” The truck started up again and the convoy was moving forward. It rolled along the beaches, tires and tracks sinking deep into soft sand. They passed the defensive perimeter with its lines of foxholes, machine gun nests, and sentry guns and moved through a “safe” corridor in the mine field that had been laid. Further up ahead there were a few “one-shot” artillery pieces; small-caliber automated mortars programmed to fire away on a radio signal. It was still unfinished, but it wasn’t bad for less than a day. The Corps’ twenty thousand support personnel had worked their asses off to get it up.

“There supposed to be a road up ahead or something?” Private Adams asked.

Corporal Kendall nodded his head. “Recon says so.”

After a while the cliffs that towered over the beach dropped away and they were driving through flat land. They passed a town that had already been secured by the Marines and then turned inward, down an unpaved highway. Flat fields rolled away on either side of the road. It reminded Petie a lot of home.

There was a sonic boom and something flew overhead. The AA drones fired and it started tumbling out of the sky.

“Shit!” Lieutenant Coffee said. “That was a recon drone. They’ve seen us, they know what we’re up to. And we’re in enemy territory now.”


US 27th Infantry Division, Landing Zone Salem

“Harpy!” Sergeant Ender shouted. “Take cover!”

“Ah shit” Private Esperanzo cursed as he rolled under the inadequate cover of some wood boxes. He cursed again when one of them fell over and showered him with the salted corpses of some kind of small squid-like creature. As the men of Ender’s squad ducked behind whatever cover they could the Scythian LS-12 “Harpy” ground attack craft flew low over their heads. It fired into the denser blocks of men further back. 20 mm autocannons roared and tore chunks of flesh off men. A missile flew out and blew up a Grady. Somebody returned fire with a shoulder-fired SAM. An explosion tore a side and a wing off the Harpy. For a minute it hovered, tipping drunkenly, then it slid to earth and fell with a crunch of compacting metal. An instant later its ammo and fuel brewed up and it exploded, to hearty cheers from the men of 2nd and 3rd Platoons.

“That’s the least of our problems” Corporal Greene pointed out. Erinyes MBTs and Aella APCs were moving through the narrow, unpaved streets of the farming town the Fourth Battalion had hunkered down in. They were coming straight toward him, escorted by infantry, often knocking off pieces of buildings where the streets were too narrow. Machine gun bullets banged off their armored fronts. Two men from the rocket squad ducked out of a partially ruined building, one of them carrying a rocket launcher. He kneeled and aimed at the lead Erinyes while his buddy tried to load the thing. They weren’t fast enough. The Sallie tank’s machine gun blazed and they both fell. Two more men rushed out to finish the job but they weren’t fast enough either. The machine gun cut them down before they even got to the rocket launcher. Another man ran out to retrieve the launcher and they got him too.

“We gotta fall back!” Private Garcia observed. “We can’t hold them without tank support!”

Sergeant Ender nodded. “Fall back twenty meters!” The men of his squad began to work their way back to the edge of the town, skipping between one point of cover and another. The other rifle squad joined them, leaving the machine gun squad in the forward position. The machine gunner quickly started to fold up his piece. The tanks’ guns spoke and four men collapsed. One of them, Private Little, was still alive. He started trying to crawl back to the American line. Ender could only look on in horror as the driver deliberately veered out of her way to run him over. Private Little saw what she was doing and started frantically trying to drag himself out of the way, but he didn’t have the strength. Ender watched, sickened, as the tank went right over his legs with a horrible crunch. Private Little yowled in pain and fear as he looked down at the stumps where his legs had been. The tank backed up a little. He started trying to pull himself away again and this time it ran over his chest with another grotesque snapping and crunching sound. Ender saw some of his men turning green at the sight. His own rough, calloused hands curled around his assault rifle. Gunning down a wounded man would have been bad enough, but this… The Sallies just didn’t respect basic human life at all. They shot the wounded, tortured captives for the sheer thrill of it, thought of medics as nice target practice… Ender would have dearly loved to have gotten his hands on the driver of that tank but the Americans, badly outnumbered and bottled in a shrinking LZ point, could do nothing but retreat for the moment.

Something fell from the sky and there was an earsplitting noise. For a second Sergeant Ender was too shocked to fully register what had happened. Whatever it was it had thrown up a lot of dust. He coughed as the particles swirled around his nose and were drawn into his lungs with every breath. The dust made it impossible to see what was going on for a little while. When it finally lifted Ender saw that three of the Erinyes tanks had been crippled. One of them had been blown to pieces. He blinked, and then glanced upward to see a squadron of Marauders and Eagles blazing streaks of flame through the sky as they moved through the stratosphere at hypersonic speeds. They circled back and there was another, much more violent explosion. The ground shook, a hot wind blasted, and a mushroom cloud rose into being on the horizon. Fifteen thousand cheers went up as the bombers, their work done, flew back over the American lines and gave a salute roll.


33rd Infantry Division

“WOOOHOOOO!” Private Snow whupped as a series of mushroom clouds rose on the horizon. “Eat plutonium, bitches!”

“Yeah, I just hope the wind aint blowing our way” Private Abado said. “You come home and six months later your dick drops off…”

“Y’all morons keep y’ heads down now” Sergeant Elgars growled.

“Look, the mechanized units are beginning to spread out” Petie observed.

LZ Salem was on the eastern edge of a landmass called the Oranto Peninsula. More than six hundred thousand men were converging on it from the west, north, and south. They were only a handful of kilometers from the Sallie lines now. This part of the planet seemed to be mostly flat fields with some hills. Good tank country. The tanks and APCs were already leaving the convoys and spreading out into the fields, forming a solid noose around the Sallie positions. Behind them the self-propelled artillery pieces raised their guns and began to fire. Self propelled gunners shuddered and quaked beneath their own recoil, but kept moving. Guided missiles flew up from trucks and rocket artillery vehicles to hit command centers, heavy troop concentrations, supply depots, and anything else worth singling out for destruction. Even a few tac nukes were fired, punching giant holes in the Scythian lines. The bombers continued to give their support from the air, dropping bombardment missiles on anything of value and giving direct air support to the embattled troops trapped inside the LZ. Now the tanks and swift mechanized infantry were closing in.

“I just hope they leave a few for us” Private Snow said. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette but a glare from Corporal Sanchez made him think better of it.


5th Mechanized Battalion, 24th Mechanized Division

“Alright! We move!” Sergeant King shouted. “Get ready you meatheads! Get your gear prepped! Move!”

Private Jarvis slapped a clip into his M-105, lowered his sensor goggles, and stood ready. Machine gun bullets pinged off the sides of the Ortega APCs. Its own machine gun answered back, maybe with better results, maybe not. Jarvis had no real way of knowing. Then there was a sizzling crack as the Ortega’s neutral particle cannon went off. It screeched to a halt, nearly knocking the men out of their seats. Then it seemed to turn and back up more slowly. More machine gun bullets pinged off its sides. The neutral particle gun answered back.

The door of the APC dropped open and the men began to flood out. Machine gun fire dropped the first two men out, the rest rolled on the ground and found cover. Jarvis looked around. He was in a field of some sort, face pressed close to mud that smiled like shit. Was probably fertilized with shit. He could see the crazily tilted remains of a US Marine dropship in the distance. Closer at hand was the still burning remains of a Sallie APC. It ran off a power cell, so there was no fuel to explode, but the HMG’s ammo was cooking off and spraying bullets at odd intervals. One of the doors was open and four dead Sallies lay by it, killed by the Ortega’s machine gun fire. Jarvis smirked in contempt at the Sallie APC. It was really nothing more than an ordinary jeep with some armor plates welded on for basic protection. The only weapon it mounted was an HMG, and that was hand operated, meaning the gunner had to sit in a ridiculously exposed position with nothing but a thin gun shield for protection. Well, what could you expect of some no-count Outer Reach nutsos? They obviously lacked the resources to build proper heavy iron. After all, who the hell used chemical-propelled shells in tank cannons in this day and age? Then again, their other MBT was pretty decent, but it was really just an outdated NFPA Tiger 2850 with a new paint job…

Jarvis’s musings on the total crushing superiority of American equipment were rudely interrupted by a pair of Sallies trying to shoot his ass off. He shot at them but missed. They fell low to the ground. Sergeant King motioned the squad forward. Jarvis started to crawl. A tank rolled past him. He hoped nobody ran him over when he was half-hidden in the tall wheat. The tank fired and an Erinyes MBT in the distance died. Then another Sallie tank returned fire. This one was a Diana, with its powerful 88 mm railgun, and the American tank splintered. Hatches opened and the crew started to jump out. A Sallie machine gun chewed, killing two of them and wounding the third in the leg.

“I want that machine gun nest taken out” the Lieutenant said. Jarvis watched as a second tank rotated its turret toward the Diana and fired. The Grady’s 75 mm gun was a little weaker, but it did the job. Jarvis kept crawling toward the Sallie machine gun nest, staying low in the waving grain so they wouldn’t see him.

“I got it” Private Breckenridge said over the radio. Jarvis glimpsed a grenade flying through the air. “It’s dead.”

More machine gun nests up on a nearby ridge fired. Jarvis heard Corporal Murphy groaned as bullets thudded into him. Then the rocket launcher on one of the Gradys fired and the two machine gun nests died.

“We’ve cleared the area” the Lieutenant said. “Continue the advance.”


27th Infantry Division, Landing Zone Salem

Sergeant Ender gestured for the two men dragging the Platoon’s machine gun to move faster. They were all that was left of the machine gun squad. The two men dropped the heavy gun gratefully at the edge of the field. One of them quickly snapped out the bipod while the other shoved in the ammo. The machine gun chattered and six fleeing Sallies dropped dead. A moment later the living ones dropped, trying to take cover amid the wheat. The village behind Ender was now a charnel house of burning Sallie vehicles. More wrecks littered the fields beyond, blown apart by the bombers while trying to get away.

Sergeant Ender was surprised to see two tanks crest the horizon. Those two were then followed by a whole line of tanks, as far as the eye could see. He had a nasty moment of panic when he thought they were Dianas, but then he recognized the vehicles next to them as American Ortega APCs.

“We broke out!” he whooped. “We broke out! Hah!”


Governor General’s Office, Nova Catalina, midnight local time

General Andrea Leary entered the Governor General’s office a few seconds after Lieutenant General Athena. She scowled a little at finding the head of the Amazon Guard contingent on Turin here. The Amazon Guard didn’t think well of the regular Army and the feeling was mutual. As far as they were concerned the regular Army was nothing but “weekend warriors”; factory workers and farmers and waitresses whose devotion to the Great Crusade was contained in a draft notice and a paycheck rather than in their hearts. General Leary found their tendency to think of themselves as the greatest thing since artificial insemination very irritating, especially as they venerated what she thought were some aspects of Scythian military indoctrination that needed to go. They expected their girls to die to the last rather than sacrifice an inch of ground, which was all very well and good in principle but in practice meant they had no idea how to carry out a proper fighting retreat, and skilled women and valuable equipment that might have been valuable in later battles was squandered in heroic but pointless last stands. If such attitudes had been less common General Leary was sure the war would have gone much better. Well, thankfully, they were nicely helping out natural selection with their choice of uniforms… It grated Andrea Leary to know that these strutting fools got all the best equipment while her own forces had to make do with inadequate armor and cheap, short-range carbines.

She quashed her burning resentment as General Antiope; head of the Scythian Air Force on Turin, walked into the room. She was followed by Director Camilla; head of the Security Directorate on Turin.

“Your reports on the progress of the war” Governor-General Geller said after a few moments.

General Antiope spoke first. “They hold space supremacy and air superiority. We can still send up fighters, but they can put a lot more fighters in the air than we can. A lot of our bases were wiped out in the initial bombardment. I made sure to scramble our aircraft when the orbital station fell, that saved us a lot of losses, but most of these planes lack proper refueling facilities. The only facilities we have left are the ones next to native cities and towns. For some reason the Patriarchists seem reluctant to hit those…”

“The Americans want to minimize civilian casualties” General Leary interjected.

“Do you attribute noble motives to these Patriarchist scum?” Lieutenant General Athena snapped.

“I’m telling you the self-evident truth” General Leary snapped back. “Which you’d know if you got your head out your ass and actually looked at some of the Security Directorate’s reports. Not even the really secret stuff mind you, stuff you could find out by watching American television a little. They don’t like getting their hands dirty. They’ve got nothing against blowing up a million people at one go from orbit, but they don’t like seeing the suffering at eye-level, and they especially don’t like seeing it at camera level. They like to look clean. Diana’s tits I know you like your pretty little soldiers to stay ignorant, but do you deliberately avoid learning even the most basic facts about your enemy yourself? No wonder we’ve got a Patriarchist enemy within two jumps of Scythia…”

Athena’s fists clenched and she looked ready to murder General Leary right then and there but Governor-General Geller intervened. “Not another inter-service argument now, please. This pointless rivalry only benefits our enemies. General Leary…”

“We managed to wipe out two of their landing points” General Leary began. “They’ve dug in and secured the rest of their landing zones and have started to expand them at several points. Our counterattack against their LZ points on the eastern coast of the Oranto Peninsula seemed to be successful at first, but they were reinforced and broken out by a lightening assault from the other side of the peninsula. They’re in good positions to attack Alleppa and Oranto. We’re having a hard time getting recon because they’ve knocked out all our observation satellites and everything that doesn’t fly under heavy fighter escort doesn’t fly very long. But that’s about the size of the situation.”

“All the preparations have been made?” the Governor-General asked.

General Leary nodded. “We’ve abandoned and mined everything we don’t have to defend. And what we do have to defend… will be defended until there isn’t anyone left to defend it. I’ve given the them orders to that effect.”

“Then there’s nothing more to add, is there? We can only hope the individual commanders will do their duty.”

“There is one more thing” Athena said and looked at Director Camilla. “If we are to loose Turin to the Patriarchists, we still will not permit its former masters to simply move comfortably back into their old ways.”

Director Camilla handed a folder to the Governor-General. “We are prepared to implement the Purification Protocols here. Just like we did at Kamchatka.”

“Just as we should have done on all our worlds from the beginning” Athena put in.

Governor-General Geller was speechless for a moment. “But… the Purification Protocols call for the execution of every male human on the planet!”

“Exactly!” Lieutenant-General Athena said raptly. “We will not let them simply put things back the way they were before they showed up! They may win, but it will be cold comfort to the old oppressors of Turin!”

“Great Goddess!” Geller gasped. “That’s 75 million people!”

“Oh it won’t be so difficult” Director Camilla said. “We already hold them in cordoned-off areas of the main city. We gather them all into a central square, there are already machine gun nests looking down on them…”

“Governor-General” General Leary broke in. “You realize that, if you do this, it will destroy any hope for a negotiated peace?”

“Negotiated peace!” Lieutenant-General Athena spat. “Yes, sell ourselves into slavery for the Patriarchists so they may spare our precious necks! Just like a Gilead whore! No, we will never…”

“Never what?” Leary interrupted. “Surrender? Then the Americans will wipe us out. All of us. They can. Down to the last one of us. I doubt they’ll have to, but they’ll totally destroy our culture, everything that makes us what we are. Understand this Lieutenant-General” she stressed the junior title. “We cannot win. No matter how hard we fight or how tenaciously we resist the Americans cannot be stopped. We do not have the means to stop them. We couldn’t win from the beginning, but we certainly can’t win now. We have what, three, five worlds left to us, including this one? How do you propose to win? Even you can’t seriously imagine it, can you? Our only hope is to convince the Americans that Scythia will be too costly to take by force of arms and convince them to accept a conditional peace…”

“Then we will die!” Athena said. “If we cannot win, we die! But we will never accept a renewal of our servitude! It would be a betrayal, a slap in the face to everything the founders wanted and stood for!”

General Leary turned to Governor-General Geller. “Governor-General, she is the sort of people who doomed Scythia in the first place! The day we attacked Panthalassa was the day the death-warrant of Scythia was signed. Now you’re going to let these people pound the final nail in our coffin too?”

“Enough!” Geller slammed a fist on her desk. “We will activate the Purification Protocols, but only in cities which’s fall are imminent.”

“Governor-General, I beg you to reconsider” General Leary said. “If you do this we will go down as some of the greatest butchers in the history of the human species! It will destroy all hope of a negotiated peace-“

“Enough” Geller said. “You have your orders, now carry them out.”

Sorry about the delay. I took off for the 4th of July, plus I had to fill out my FAFSA for the university. It's a bit short this time I'm afraid.

CHAPTER 6

US 18th Armored Division, near Alleppa, June 11th 2517

General Buckley watched the satellite pictures being beamed down from the orbiting destroyer William F Ortler with concern. They showed Sallie tanks and armored troops moving toward his position, not the penny packets of two or three they’d ran over on the road from the LZ but a good solid four armored divisions. Not a very big force compared to the ten divisions under his command, but… enough. He signaled to the communications officer sitting by a huge bank of screens and equipment near the back of the command vehicle. The command vehicle was basically just a regular Ortega APC, but instead of soldiers it carried the command staff and a sophisticated communications suite. His headset comm. beeped, telling him he was on.

“Sallies’ got smart boys” he said. “Instead of sending her tanks out to die by ones and threes she’s sending ‘em out to die en masse. Looks to us like four armored mechanized divisions. Mostly Erinyes from the photos, but could be some Dianas mixed in there so watch out. Blow them apart as soon as they get over the horizon and into range of the main armored group.”


Scythian 7th Armored Division

General Goldman watched the lead elements of Patriarchist armored thrust move over the horizon with her binoculars. They hadn’t opened fire yet. They were already in range, but they were waiting for the main elements to crest the horizon line. She dipped her head back into the command vehicle. The command vehicle had started out as an Erinyes tank, but the turret had been removed and replaced with a command center and communications suite. She tapped the communications officer.

“How long until we get into range?”

“The Dianas are in range General” the comm. officer said. “The Erinyes… not for another four minutes.”

General Goldman scowled and curled her fingers into a fist, digging her nails into her palm hard enough to hurt. The Patriarchists’ railguns were limited only by the curve of the horizon. But Scythian factories lacked the expertise and equipment necessary to produce such weapons, and the Erinyes still mounted a 120 mm chemical gas-expansion cannon, with vastly less range and power. If only they had more Dianas! But of course the Dianas were nothing more than mothballed Tiger 2850s shipped directly in from the NFPA’s junkyards. Scythian factories could never replicate them, and they were in very short supply. Armored companies fortunate enough to get their hands on one cherished it like a favorite daughter.

“Tell the Dianas to begin firing.”


Lead tank, US 18th Armored Division, Alleppa Invasion Force

Corporal Forest cursed as an 88 mm shell of solid, dense metal slammed into the Grady next to his at hypersonic velocity. The stricken tank rocked back with such violence that axles broke and treads were sheared off. The glacis was crumpled into a shapeless mass. Seconds later an explosion blew apart the turret as the missiles’ fuel and explosives brewed up while they were still in their racks.

“Return fire!” Forest shouted. “The first tank you see!”

“Aye sir, loading” Private Jack Thrust, the gunner, said. There was the deep clank of the autoloader dropping a shell into the railgun’s barrel. Electric motors whirred as Thrust repositioned the tanks’ robotic turret. The Grady’s three man crew all rode in the tank’s body, which allowed the turret to be made much flatter and minimized the target profile. An instant later the tank rocked violently as Thrust let loose with the railgun. Corporal Forest grinned in satisfaction as his cameras showed the round strike an Erinyes. The round would have cored the 135 mm IF armor on a Grady. The Erinyes used 120 mm of common polyfiber steel for alloy; not even true armor but nothing more than high-grade construction material. About what you’d expect from a planet in the Outer Reaches. The Sallie tank virtually exploded. Large plates of armor siding were sent flying. The turret was flipped into the air and landed at a grotesque angle; the gun barrel rolling back to skewer the unfortunate gunner like a living shish kabob. Seconds later it did explode, as explosives and shell powder caught fire.

“New target” Corporal Forest said.

“Aye sir!” Private Thrust said. Again there was the clang of a round falling into the railgun barrel, and again Forest felt the tanks’ weight shift as the turret rotated. The tank bucked and another Erinyes was torn to pieces.


Lead tank, Scythian 5th Armored Division

“Freya’s cunt!” Corporal Ariadne exclaimed as she heard the death screams of her sister tankers as the Patriarchists’ 75 mm railgun shells tore their tanks out from under them. Some were mercifully short. Others dragged on horrifically as women were burned alive, trapped in tanks that had become ovens. Hatches popped and tankers scrambled out only to be cut down by the Patriarchist tanks’ machine guns.

“Driver, forward! Maximum speed!” Ariadne shouted into her headset.

“This is as fast as I can make it go” the driver said from her pit in the tank’s body.

Not for the first time, Corporal Ariadne cursed the Erinyes’ maximum speed of 65 kmph. By comparison the Diana could hit 95 kmph, and the Patriarchists’ Grady could go as much as 105 kmph.

“Almost in range! Give me a round of AP!” the gunner, Private Ameri shouted. She was a dark-skinned, thick-bodied girl who looked to be of Arab origin. Maybe the child of some refugee from one of the Caliphal states.

Private Cybelle turned around and grabbed one of the shells lying in the storage compartment at the back of the turret. The 120 mm solid AP round was heavy, and Cybelle strained to get it into the gun barrel. Ameri opened the barrel’s hatch and helped her push the heavy shell in. She closed the hatch, careful not to smash Cybelle’s fingers in the process, and entered a target into the targeting computer. The turret rotated and the gun fired. Ariadne watched as the AP round hit a Grady… and bonked right off its sloped armor, spitting sparks as it went.

“Shit” Private Ameri cursed and opened the gun hatch again. She and Private Cybelle repeated the procedure of stuffing a heavy shell into the barrel and firing. The gun fired again.

“What the fuck?” Private Ameri screeched. “I hit him twice dead on with a tungsten round! It should have died! Why will it not die?”

Ariadne shook her head. Ameri was a newbie. She hadn’t been up against the Patriarchists before. The Americans built excellent tanks. Nobody had told Ariadne that, but she knew it all too well from bitter experience.

“Try and get around him and hit the treads or the turret join. Aim more carefully next time.”

The tank lurched to the side as the driver sent it moving off to the side. The Grady’s gun was already turning to track it. Ariadne found she had yet another thing to curse; the mostly treeless, mostly flat terrain of this part of the planet. It was great tank country… which wasn’t such a good thing when you had a lousy tank. Even as the driver urged the tank to greater speed Private Ameri rotated the turret and opened the gun hatch. She and Cybelle wrestled another shell in, and this time she took a few seconds to take careful aim. The gun fired again, and this time the shell hit the Grady at the bottom of the skirt. Pieces of metal flew and a tread track came off. The Grady’s engine ground and smoked; it was immobilized.

The turret was still alive though, and already tracking. The Grady’s machine guns blazed and bullets pinged off the Erinyes’ armor. But it was now immobilized, and three other Scythian tanks began concentrating their fire on it. Two AP rounds skidded off the turret’s thick armor. The third hit dead on and smacked the turret to one side, rendering it useless. Hatches opened in the Grady’s body and two figures began crawling out.

“They’re ducking out, shoot them!” Corporal Ariadne shouted. Several seconds passed and Ariadne shouted again, with mounting annoyance. “What is your malfunction? Shoot them dammit, they’re getting away! What’s wrong with you mor-“ she stopped as she slapped the machine gunner in the thigh, which caused her to slump over. A machine gun bullet or perhaps just a random piece of shrapnel had left a hole in her skull through which blood and still-warm brains were leaking.

“Shit!” she screamed. She wondered briefly just exactly what design genius had the brilliant idea of mounting the Erinyes’ machine gun outside the turret with only a gun shield for protection, forcing the machine gunner to stick her head out of a hatch if she wanted to use it.

She barely had time to finish the thought when the hypersonic fist of a Grady’s 75 mm round slammed into her tank.


USNAF B-4500 “Marauder”, near Alleppa

Lieutenant Reese guided his bomber over the coastline of the Oranto Peninsula at more than 20,000 kmph. Flames of superheated gas were still licking at the window. He could see the rest of his wing of bombers and their escorting fighters easily. Every once in a while antifighter missiles or shoulder-fired SAMs would reach up from the ground toward him, but they’d rarely hit. And when they did the Marauder’s shields held them off. They’d yet to see a single casualty, and as yet no Sallie aircraft came up to meet them.

“We’re coming up on the target” he announced.

“Rodger that” the bombardier said.


Command vehicle, Alleppa Invasion Force

“The bombers are on their way” Colonel Haskell informed. “They should be here in a matter of minutes.”

General Buckley watched as the green triangles representing a wing of bombers moved rapidly toward his position. He switched to the external monitors just in time to watch them pass overhead, wreathed in flame from their hypersonic passage through the atmosphere. They were overhead for only a few seconds, but that was just enough time to release the hundreds of antiarmor missiles they carried, which streaked down to the ground and the Sallie tanks. It was a total surprise to the Sallies. Inactive point defense lasers warmed up and turned toward the sky, but they were too little too late. A few missiles were blown apart short of their targets. One or two were fouled by ECM and chewed nothing but dirt. But most made it and all over the plain missiles struck Sallie tanks and blew them apart. Even as the survivors began to pull back the bombers came again. Again antiarmor missiles flew toward the ground. Alert point defense reaped more of them this time, but this time far fewer actually had to make it. There weren’t all that terribly many targets left.

“The bombers signal they’re out of missiles” the communications officer said. “Admiral Travis asks if we need any more help.”

General Buckley shook his head as he watched the last, tattered remnants of the Sallie formation pulling away, chased by fire from the American tanks. Some of the Gradys fired their missiles as the Sallies disappeared out of range of their guns. “Negative, we’re fine. Good to have air superiority, isn’t it?”

CHAPTER 7

Scythian 13th Army Command Center, Alleppa

Alleppa was a good city to defend. It was in a hilly, rocky region, with limited points of ingress and egress. It crawled over a series of rocky hillsides, with only a little flat land near the Bay of Alleppa, which jutted into Turin’s Northern Continent like a broad spike, finally narrowing into the Taranto River. General Therese’s troops had turned all roads leading in and out of the city into death traps studded with mines and other booby traps, and automated defenses commanded them from the ridges that looked down upon them. Two lines of trenches blocked each road as well, protected by independent theatre shields, and more earthworks commanded the ridges, which were not passable to vehicles but might have been otherwise breached by infantry. General Leary had ordered that Turin be turned into a barbed spike upon which America’s blood would be drawn by the bucket, and General Caitlin Therese was more than happy to make good on those orders in her own sector of the planet.

Shortly before dawn broke over the eastern ocean the deafening booms of high-flying hypersonic aircraft had pierced the peace of the night. The automated AA and PD defenses had responded, and two Starhawks had been sent spinning out of the sky, but the bombers were of the new, shielded kind and had shrugged off the lasers and missiles that struck them. An instant later the sleeping city had shuddered beneath the blast of a shield-cracker. The nuke was only a few kilotons, but it was specially designed to channel all its energy into the shield grid. Alleppa’s central theatre shield generator had exploded, starting a fire that had raged through several blocks of the city, but General Therese had seen to it that anything important had its own local generator. The unfortunate civilians of Alleppa had suffered the most by far in the following barrage of conventional-explosive bombs. As General Therese had expected, the main American attack came with the rising sun.

From her command bunker buried in the earth she watched swollen ranks of Americans, she estimated a full Army Group of 400,000 men, advancing on the screens. No recon craft would fly very long anymore and observation satellites were long gone, but she still had the thousands ground-based of cameras and instruments that her combat engineers had emplaced all around Alleppa, and she could see what was going on quite clearly from them. The Americans had paused just outside the first of her minefields and begun to reorganize themselves in preparation for the attack. Leg infantry scrambled off the fragile, open-topped trucks that they dared not ride into combat. Mortars and towed guns were set up, further back the great self-propelled guns took up positions, and a desultory barrage was commenced. Rockets and heavy shells exploded against theatre shields or missed their targets and all too often landed in the unprotected streets of the city, wrecking buildings, starting fires, and filling the air with lethal shrapnel.

“They’re beginning to move General” one of her aides commented.

“Hyperfocus on the enemy troops please” General Therese said.

The camera shifted to show the American lines. The tanks were beginning to move, flanked by APCs and preceded by heavy minesweepers. Antipersonnel mines exploded as the minesweepers’ flail chains crushed them, sending bits of chain and casing flying. The APCs slowed and began to disgorge infantry who moved forward to protect the tanks and sweep the trenches. The main body of the army began to move up behind them.

“Begin counterbattery fire” General Therese ordered. The order was relayed and her few, precious heavy howitzers (a mere two battalions in total) began firing. 150 mm shells began landing among the advancing Americans. VT-fused shrapnel shells from almost 150 guns, at twenty rounds a minute, exploded over the American front ranks. Sharp, high-velocity metal shards rained down upon them, plinking off flak guards or bouncing off theatre shields sometimes, but more often cutting deep into soft flesh, mangling limbs and faces and organs, but they continued to advance in smaller clusters, seemingly undaunted.

But that was only the first thing General Therese had in store for them. Automated defenses commanding the ridges of over the Tarantino Pass, and the other three ingress points the Yankees were trying to force, came to life. First a flurry of missiles flew into the American formations and dozens of MBTs were left smoking, unrecognizable wrecks. Then the neutral particle guns and plasma guns began firing. Hot blue lances slammed into tanks and destroyed them. The weaker plasma guns targeted APCs and support vehicles, which they could seriously damage in one hit. Some stuttered over the thinly armored sides of light tanks, seeking weak points, burning away sensors and other vital gear. The American tanks returned fire with missiles, only to watch as they were stopped short of the gun emplacements by cleverly placed theatre shields. That was when the trench mortars opened up.

Self-propelled artillery was in short supply in the Scythian Army, but light artillery was a different story. One of the best decisions the Scythian Army ever made, in General Therese’s view, was the commission of millions of cheap and simple 60 mm black powder mortars. Ridiculously easy to manufacture, they were an excellent choice for the Scythians, who were still struggling to catch up with the Great Powers in both technology and bulk manufacturing capability. The factories of Scythia could turn them out in such quantity that every Scythian Army company now boasted a two mortar section. Brigade-level 120 mm mortars were slower in coming, but there were plenty of them too. The 60 mm mortars could fire thirty rounds a minute, the 120 mm mortars managed twenty. The result was that more than twenty thousand 60mm, 120 mm, and 150 mm shells were raining down on the heads of the Americans every minute, while the automated neutral particle and plasma gun emplacements continued to savage their heavy armor. The Patriarchist advance ground and slowed, but did not halt, beneath all that punishment. They were nearly in machine gun range of the first trench line now. The first sentry guns were already opening up on them. But General Therese had one final surprise for them.

“Detonate the antitank mines.”

Somewhere in the forward trenches a Scythian combat technician pushed a button and sent a little spark of electricity surging through hundreds of hair-thin superconductor cables to huge, buried bombs made of four 120 mm HE shells tied together. It was an incredibly crude way of doing things, any other Great Power would have used pressure-detonated mines… which was why the Yankees heavy minesweepers hadn’t set them off. The massive mines exploded simultaneously, killing dozens of men on all three fronts. On Stanton Pass one of them sent an MBT flipping into the air. On Beacher Pass two light tanks and an APC were obliterated. On Bloomer Pass there were no losses beyond a few infantry. And on Tarantino Pass two MBTs and four light tanks were destroyed or crippled. The crew of one MBT managed to escape before it was finished off with a shot from a neutral particle gun emplacement. For a few seconds the advance halted, then it began again. They were in range now…

On the forward trench lines, dozens of machine guns began firing.


US 21st Armored Division, Tarantino Pass

The Tarantino Pass was a broad stretch of flat, rough dirt and sharp gravel. Private Jesse Stewart’s cheek was scratched from keeping his face down in the dirt, with those jagged rocks. The scene around him was like something straight out of Hell. Artillery shells and rockets whistled down to explode in the middle of the flat road bed, or above it and shower the GIs with shrapnel and burning white phosphorus. The Sallie machine guns were literally pouring fire at the advancing GIs, their gunners firing them so often and so fast that the sound of gunfire didn’t come in bursts but in one continuous stream of chattering. Sentry guns barked, cutting men down as they ran. Men screamed as they were burned alive by white phosphorus. Grisly shredded corpses littered the roadway, while other still living victims cried out in agony as they slowly bled to death. Private Stewart could see one man screaming incoherently as he tried to stuff his own intestines back into his open belly. Behind him Stewart could see the burning hulks of several light tanks destroyed by neutral particle beams or gutted by plasma fire. The artillery bombardment was like one continuous rolling thunder, interrupted now and again by the high-pitched screams of rockets homing in. American artillery fired back. Missiles and howitzer shells sailed over Stewart’s head and disappeared behind the stone wall that had protected Alleppa in the days when fire and catapults were the mightiest weapons that might be brought against it and was now pitted with craters and falling apart in places.

“Aaarrrgggghhh!” Sergeant Rodriguez screamed. Private Culpepper crawled up to check on her. “She’s got hit in the leg!” he exclaimed. “Medic!”

“Come on! We gotta keep moving! If we stay out here much longer we’re dead!” Sergeant Rodriguez shouted.

Private Culpepper stood up and waved his arms. “Medic!” “No you fool! Keep your stupid head down you fucking idiot!” Corporal Haskill shouted. It was too late. A machine guns swept toward Culpepper, firing as it went, and a half dozen bullets ripped through his body in a neat line, sending pieces of his innards and spine flying. He was dead seconds after hitting the ground. “Let’s go!” Corporal Haskill waved them forward as he grabbed Sergeant Rodriguez with his left arm and started dragging her forward. The squad started moving again, running low to the ground to avoid being shot. Their APC gave a long burst with its machine gun to cover them. It was rewarded with being hit by a neutral particle beam from the shielded emplacements that commanded the ridge. Private Stewart turned around to see it explode and go up in flames.

“Shit!” Private Sterns said, pausing for a moment to watch it burn. It was a mistake. A sentry gun perched on the rocks above them was triggered by the movement and swiveled toward them. Bullets thudded home in his back and he fell over, choking on his own blood.

“Grenade!” Sergeant Rodriguez gasped. Corporal Haskill slipped a grenade into his launcher and fired at the sentry gun, destroying it. He motioned the squad forward again, dragging Sergeant Rodriguez with him. Not much point calling a medic to be honest, Stewart thought. They had their hands full and then some just tending to the worst of the wounded, and it didn’t help that the Sallie gunners seemed to think they made great target practice. Stewart ran ahead a little more and then dropped to the ground as a Sallie machine gun started shooting right over him. He heard an explosion, louder than most, and turned to see that a man had wandered off the cleared paths and stepped on a mine. He was sent flying and landed in the dirt, alive but with both his legs ripped off. A Sallie 60 mm mortar landed scarily close to him. Shrapnel dinged off his helmet and flak guards. A piece sliced his ear, scaring him badly. He reached up and groaned with relief to find he still had an earlobe there. He was blinking furiously to get the black powder fumes out of his eyes. He could smell black powder and aluminum – the Sallies put it in their shells to increase the explosive power. The APCs started firing again, suppressing fire in the trench, and they started moving forward again, following the minesweepers. The ridge emplacements fired again. Three minesweepers, four APCs, and three light tanks died. A few moments later another minesweeper was blown up by a Sallie RPG. A Grady fired its missiles at one of the neutral particle guns – for all the good it did, which was nothing. The Sallie machine guns and sentry guns started up again. Private Stewart crawled forward, his face pressed in the dirt, jagged rocks scratching off the skin on his cheek and his hands. At one point he actually felt a bullet pass his face, it was that close. He froze, and as he did so he heard a different sort of noise, a sonic boom.

He looked up and saw one of the sweetest sights he could ever remember seeing. A squadron of American Dragon bombers, escorted by Eagles. Missiles and PD fire went up at them from the Sallie lines, and one of the bombers burst into flames and started falling. But the others launched their missiles. Special shaped-charge concussion warheads exploded against the shields protecting the neutral particle and plasma gun emplacements. They didn’t have anywhere near the firepower to take down the shields – you’d need a nuke for that – but the theatre shields protecting the gun emplacements were small, and force shields couldn’t shunt off all a bomb’s energy. A cheer went up from the GIs as the powerful concussion bombs wrecked the heavy gun emplacements. The bombers dropped more bombs on the trench lines, but they didn’t do as much damage there. The APCs could now move up and fire their machine guns with impunity, and the GIs started running forward again. The minesweepers were moving ahead of them, and soon crashed into the trench lines. The GIs followed them. Sentry guns on the edges of the trenches spat bullets, killing dozens of men. Rifle-launched grenades took most of them out. As the men neared the trench they tossed hand grenades in and then leapt in right after they exploded. A shovel hit Private Stewart in the face, its rusty dirt-caked edge cutting his skin and grinding sweat and dust into the wound. His teeth rattled in his head and he felt something warm and salty seep out of his gums. His finger contracted on the trigger of his M-105 before he could even feel the pain, sending a long burst through the chest of the Sallie support corpswoman in front of him. Other GIs weren’t so fortunate. A lot of them ended up with crushed windpipes, or with their heads almost severed from their shoulders by a shovel’s rough front edge. Hundreds of Sallie infantry had been waiting in the trench, waiting for the Americans to get close enough so they could use their carbines to good effect, and with them were hundreds more combat support who’d armed themselves with pistols and even shovels and knives. Another combat support tech tried to brain Stewart with a pick. He sent three bullets into her shoulder and her arm sagged as the joint splintered. Another two bullets to her heart took her out for good. Another one pointed a pistol at him. He was bringing his rifle up but he almost didn’t make it. Before he could fire a look of pain and confusion flashed over her face and she slumped over. Stewart saw a Private he didn’t recognize standing there, assault rifle leveled. He smiled and was about to thank the guy when a Sallie riflewoman send a burst into his torso and he fell over. Then she fell over too, killed by somebody else’s gun. He saw a Sallie pull the pin on the grenade and throw it at her feet. His eyes widened; surely she wasn’t trying to use a frag grenade here, she had to realize she’d probably kill just as many friendlies as enemies. But training took over and he threw himself against the wall, shielding himself from the explosion. He heard the rattle of a gun close behind him and turned to see a Sallie fall over and Private Hopper standing behind her. She’d had her rifle aimed right at him. Then another Sallie combat tech came up and kicked Private Hooper in the gut, raising a shovel to knock his brains out. He sent a wild burst that cut her legs out from under her. Stewart finished her off, but a bullet from a Sallie carbine went right through the back of Hopper’s head, making blood and brains fly out of his mouth. The offending Sallie was cut down moments later. The hand-to-hand combat was short, but vicious, and by the time it was over the floor of the trench was covered with dead Sallies and GIs. Already some machine gunners were positioning their own pieces to cover the assault on the next trench. Teams of combat engineers and bulldozers were brought up to collapse parts of the trench and make it passable to the minesweepers. Machine gun bullets from the next trench line down were dinging off the bulldozers as they set to work. Stewart grimaced as he watched one fly off the side of the operator’s compartment, missing the window by a small miracle. He’d hate to have had that job. The American machine gunners started shooting to cover the bulldozers. The whole process took less than twenty minutes, and it was time to press the next attack.

This time it was easier. They were under the Sallies’ theatre shield now. Stewart grinned at the irony of being protected by the enemy’s own shield. If the Sallies wanted to throw artillery at them now they’d have to lower that shield, and trenches without a shield were nothing but bomb bait. The Sallies' machine guns and sentry guns didn’t have to worry about it though. Thankfully, most squad could get a fair degree of protection by moving close behind the minesweepers. Then again that wasn’t necessarily safe either, as minesweepers drew fire like bulls-eyes at a dart game. Machine gun bullets constantly pinged off their armored fronts and many were taken out with RPGs. The Americans stormed the second trench, and then the third. And then, finally, they were at the walls of Alleppa.

It wasn’t really a wall around the city per se. The rocky, hilly geography of the area made a wall almost impossible in most places without modern construction techniques, which the people who built this thing had not had, as evidenced by the fact that they considered it protection at all. It three walls, each one cutting off one point of ingress into Alleppa, each one with a heavy wooden gate. The Sallies hadn’t put any soldiers into such an obvious death trap, but automated weapons were a different story. Sentry guns and automatic rocket launchers swiveled on their mounts in the top of the wall and sent the loose clusters of soldiers running toward it. A neutral particle gun sang over the infantry’s heads and blew apart another light tank. Plasma guns washed three APCs and a squad of infantry in fire. In return the forward line of American light tanks launched their rockets. They hit near the top of the wall, sending avalanches of old brick, stone, mortar, and filler tumbling down. Within minutes every one of those automated weapons was scrap. Ortega APCs turned their main guns on the door itself, and in a matter of seconds it had been blown to bits. More automated weapons stationed on the other side of the door came to life and took their toll, but they didn’t have much time to kill. Rockets and neutral particle beams obliterated them in mere moments.

“It’s quiet” Private Walper said as the minesweepers were sent forward.

“Yeah” Corporal Haskill agreed. He was still supporting Sergeant Rodriguez.

“Where’s Corporal Zeminsky?” Private Hollewander asked.

Haskill shook his head. “Zeminsky’s gone. So are Sterns, Culpepper, Mendez, and Enriquez.”

“Jesus Christ!” Walper spluttered. “You’re telling me we lost five guys!”

Stewart shivered, shaken. Not just because he’d known those guys but… five men out of a nine man squad… if those rates of loss were typical, and they hadn’t even gotten into the city yet… “Jesus” he muttered.

“Yup” Haskill said, surveying his surroundings sourly. While the squad waited silently a medic came up with a stretcher and took Rodriguez away. “Time to move out in one minute” Lieutenant Kowalsky said over the headset comm.

“Come on, get ready” Corporal Haskill said, shouldering his rifle.

“Let’s go!” the Lieutenant’s voice said. A minesweeper went in first. Then the men started moving toward the shattered door, into the city itself. More sentry guns went off as the point squads advanced. Small grenades silenced them, no casualties so far as Stewart could tell. He eyed the crumbling doorway warily as he passed through it. The wall well over a meter thick and broken masonry and brick dust fell on him as he passed through. That wall looked ready to collapse outright at any moment after the pounding it’d taken. His squad (what was left of it anyway, he thought sourly) looked warily at their surroundings. They were in a confined street cramped in between crude brick buildings. Little alleyways lead everywhere. It would be the perfect place for an ambush. Fire teams were dispatched to check the side streets and buildings. Soldiers broke down roughly hewn wooded doors with their boots. That would often be followed by screaming, but only one by gunfire. A GI fell flat on his back with rifle bullets peppering his upper body. His buddy threw a grenade in, counted down until it exploded with a muffled thud, then threw the busted door open, gun held at ready.

“There was just one. Just one of ‘em” he said. “No civvies.”

The Captain nodded. “Keep moving. We’re bringing the armor up now.” Stewart nodded to himself and kept moving forward slowly, dirt crunching under his feet. He could see the pot-holes where the minesweeper had ran over a mine and blown it up.

The first armored vehicle to pass through the gate was one of the light tanks, armed with a machine gun and a box launcher but no cannon. Another one followed it, and the two light tanks took up flanking positions on either side of the gate. A third and fourth light tank followed, and behind them came the first MBTs. The tanks’ turrets swiveled to cover the infantry with their machine guns.

“I don’t like this” Corporal Haskill said. “We should be up to our necks in Sallies right now. Instead they’re just letting us walk in. It isn’t like them.”

“Maybe we got all of them” Private Walper suggested helpfully.

Haskill shook his head. “I don’t think so. They always leave their best units in reserve. Send the expendables out first, conserve their best fighters for the last. And they don’t like giving ground if they’ve still got warm bodies to throw at you.”


Rooftop, 4 blocks away

Major Carver watched the sniper carefully, lovingly adjust the scope of her laser rifle. “Perfect” she heard her whisper as she focused the scope. The Patriarchist troops were in almost the perfect position… her headset comm. beeped and she answered it.

“This is squad 12!” an urgent voice came over the headset. “We’ve been spotted!”

“Initiate Plan Crossfire! Now!” Major Carver shouted.


US 21st Armored Division

The sound of gunfire broke the stillness. It was nothing compared to the cacophony of artillery and machine gun fire Private Stewart had just come through, but it was enough to almost make him jump out of his skin.

An instant later his worst suspicions were confirmed. Half a hundred laser rifles fired at once from snipers nests in nearby rooftops and windows. The laser beams were invisible and silent. The screams of the men they hit were a different matter. Dozens of men fell dead.

“Lieutenant!” somebody shouted.

“The Lieutenant’s gone!” Corporal Haskill said. Stewart looked and saw that the Lieutenant was indeed lying on the ground with a neat smoking hole burned through his chest. He spotted the Captain lying not far from him. Most of the dead were officers. Figured. Stewart heard gunfire coming from the alleys.

“They’re coming out of the walls!” somebody shouted over the common channels.

“Retreat!” another voice – probably one of the surviving Lieutenants – shouted. One of the snipers fired again and a man fell over. “Hit the deck!” Corporal Haskill shouted. Private Stewart fell to the ground, spitting out dust that got in his mouth. He looked up and saw GIs running out of the side streets, firing at pursuing Sallie units. Sallies started boiling out of the alleyways. The machine guns on the tanks fired and dozens of them fell. The Americans were getting their feet back now and started engaging the Sallies. Dozens more fell to assault rifle fire as they started taking up firing positions, but more than twenty RPGs were already being leveled at the American tanks. The MBTs had already started shifting position to bring their heaviest armor – armor the Sallie RPGs, unlike American rockets, couldn’t penetrate – around to face the fire and many of the Sallie RPG teams had to rush out into the open to flank them. It was near suicide, but even as one group of Sallies was shot to hamburger another would run out, grab the tube, and try again. Five light tanks and two MBTs were the first hit. The light tanks were reduced to burning hulks, but the MBTs were struck on their glacis plates and survived. But then the more exposed groups of Sallies started to get off shots of their own. Five MBTs were mission-killed as RPGs tore through their weaker side armor. Then the surviving exposed teams, seeing that they had done as much damage as they could, scrambled back for cover. Few made it. But in distracting the American machine gunners and riflemen they gave their comrades time to reload, and they rushed out and fired point-blank into the sides of five more MBTs, so close that they themselves were wounded by the backblasts. Then it was their turn to be cut down mercilessly as the Americans extracted their revenge. The last survivors ran into the alleys and disappeared.

“Shit!” Private Walper said.

“Got that right” Corporal Haskill said as he surveyed the seventeen burning tanks that clogged the narrow street draped with the broken bodies of American and Scythian soldiers.


Alleppa, Near Containment District

Sentry guns in the wall up ahead started chattering. Machine guns in nearby houses joined them. Lieutenant Mitchell dove and fell face-first in the dirt. He saw bullets bounce off it, sending puffs of dust flying. For some reason the Sallies had built a wall around this part of the city. A big, solid wall, made of hastily poured splotchy concrete, with bits of stone and brick mixed in. Mitchell’s guess was they’d done some bombing the first time they took the city and put the debris in the wall. Higher up on the wall he could see bits of broken glass stuck in there too. Anybody trying to scale it would cut his hands to pieces on that. Barbed wire topped it and sentry guns looked down from the top. Mitchell’s first guess was that it was a prison of some sort. If so, it was an awfully big one. That wall surrounded almost a quarter of the city. Mitchell tried to guess how many people it might hold. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Maybe even hundreds of thousands?

Whatever it was orders were that it needed to be secured, and that was what was going to happen.

“What have we got?” Captain Sansky asked over the headset comm.

“We got machine gun nests in the fourth and fifth building to the left and the second and third to the right” Mitchell answered. And I’d say about three platoons. Bitches in Red.” That was the dogfaces’ term for the Amazon Guard.

“Storm number five left” Captain Sansky answered. “Most of the heavy iron’s tied down in other sectors and in taking that mortar factory, but I’ll talk to the Colonel and see what I can scrounge up.

Mitchell nodded and turned to Sergeant Ringo. “Let’s go.”

The Sergeants gave their orders and the GIs started to move up. Machine guns started again. Mitchell threw himself down and started crawling forward. One man screamed as an antipersonnel mine took off his hand. A Corporal started yelling for a medic. Mitchell reminded himself to be careful where he put his hands and feet. As they crawled forward Sallies darted out of their hiding places in alleys and houses. They wore red uniforms with black flak guards and all of them carried Kalashnikovs. Bitches in Red alright. The machine gun fired a long burst to cover them.

The Sallies took up firing positions and aimed their rifles. As they shouldered them and fired they let out a long, high pitched, ululating yell. It reminded Mitchell of the yell the Arabs used in movies about ancient Earth wars, but shriller, and there was a nasty undertone of righteous exaltation to it. He was close enough to see the enemy soldiers pretty well – close enough to catch glimpses of their expressions. You’d think they were shooting at somebody who’d just run over their puppies. This wasn’t a just a job for them. As far as they were concerned every shot was a righteous act, and the ones that connected were downright sacred. Mitchell bit his lip as he saw his men start to fall. They raced back to cover and took up firing positions of their own. The Sallies poured forward. The GIs put bullets into some of them.

“We’re almost ready” Sergeant Jimenez reported. He was in charge of the platoon’s machine gun squad. His squad’s machine gun cut in and more Sallies dropped. They were going down like flies. Mitchell shook his head. He’d gone up against the Sallies plenty of times already but he’d never gone up against the Bitches in Red. He’d heard they were supposed to be elite, the best, and the most fanatical. He knew the Sallie regular army could hold a position and bleed the enemy down like nobody’s business, so naturally he’d been more than a little wary about people who supposedly were just like that but twice more so. Now he was finding the Bitches in Red were actually easier to fight than the Sallie regulars. They had better equipment, but they were like early twentieth century armies. They seemed to think they could win by pure élan. They didn’t bother much with such trivialities as finding cover and watching their own assess. They only wanted one thing, and that was to kill the enemy, and they went after it with all the mindless enthusiasm of a rabid pit bull.

Jimenez’s machine gun reaped the Sallies like wheat under a combine harvester. The ones left didn’t even hit the deck. They just ducked and kept running forward, not even taking cover. The GIs added their assault rifles to the machine gun, picking off individual Sallies. Most of them were dead in two minutes, inflicting only a handful of casualties.

“Ringo, Mueller, take the house!” Mitchell ordered.

Ringo and Mueller’s squads advanced on the house where the Sallies machine squad (Mitchell hoped it was only a squad, he had Montoya’s squad stand by just in case) was holed up. The machine gun spat bullets but it was suppression fire, didn’t hit anything. The Kalashnikovs that poked their muzzles out of the broken windows were a different story. Three men were hit and went down before they closed the distance. A Private broke down the door with a savage kick and was about to start shooting, but whatever you said about the Bitches in Red they were quick on their feet. A pistol shot sounded and he went down. If he’d still been a Private Mitchell would have nearly fainted when he saw the man’s shattered jaw. He was still alive and conscious and was making horrible gobbling sounds as he tried to scream. His buddy got ready to throw a grenade in but took a short burst with a Kalash in the stomach for his trouble. The Sallies didn’t try to escape or hunker down. They ran out, almost growling with eagerness to get the manly foe they loathed with all their hearts and start killing. They were more impressive when they had the initiative. Ringo’s squad was caught flat-footed and almost wiped out in an instant. The last two survivors ran back behind an ancient, rusty stalled truck. The Sallies ran right after them. Jimenez’s squad sent a short burst of machine gun fire in their direction. Three of them fell dead. The fourth lived just long enough to hurl a hand grenade and kill the both of them before getting a dozen high velocity lead implants. The American machine gun turned back on the rest of the Sallies. They didn’t even bother to take cover, and it was an instant massacre. But more Bitches in Red started coming out of the alleys. Jimenez shifted fire onto them. Another machine gun squad joined them. A few of the Sallies hit the dirt and started firing back with their rifles, but most just ducked lower and kept running. They died. GIs dropped as the smarter ones started shooting. American soldiers shot back at them. One was hit. The others shifted position, seeking better cover. Machine gun fire got a couple of them as they ran. Mitchell signaled his men forward.

Sallie assault rifle fire almost got him. He crouched lower, slithering on his belly like a snake. He could go faster that way than a lot of his men could. He had lots of experience with it. And this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Tarawa and Malden, where he’d had to do it in mud so wet it was almost clay. That stuff sucked. It was sticky and it dried all over your clothes and got into anywhere you had cracks. Compared to that the dry dust of Alleppa’s streets wasn’t bad at all.

Sallies and Americans jockeyed for position over the street. The Sallies were too aggressive for their own good. They wanted too badly to press the attack, they didn’t know when it was better to stand your ground. But it didn’t help that they had machine guns in the buildings and sentry guns on the walls that would take shots at the GIs whenever they could. The sentry guns were particularly bad. Their computer-guided targeting systems were much more accurate than regular machine guns. When they aimed at something they usually hit it on the first try. The machine gun nests had to be cleared out one by one, with hand grenades and assault rifles. Finally, one by one, they fell silent.

“We got ‘em all” Captain Sansky said when the sound of gunfire died down. “They’re sending some bombers to clear us a path. Stand by and hold position.”

“Got it sir” Lieutenant Mitchell said, nodding to himself even though he knew the Captain couldn’t see it. He was sitting down, leaning against a stone wall with bullet holes in it. Mercifully, it was in the shade. Sweat was running down his face; it was hot and double hot under his field uniform. He looked at his watch and was surprised to discover only about fifteen or twenty minutes had passed. It felt like hours of action. They’d beaten the Sallies alright, but at had been at a cost. He only needed to look at the dead GIs littering the ground to see that. But then, there were a lot more dead Sallies.

After a few minutes Mitchell heard sonic booms overhead. He looked up to see a squadron of Dragons, escorted by Eagles. Little glints of light fell away from the bombers and then became yellow streaks; light bombardment missiles.

“Tell your men to hold their positions” Captain Sansky said.

“Tell your men to hold their positions” Lieutenant Mitchell repeated to the Sergeants, who’d doubtless pass it on to their men. The missiles came in and hit the wall. It collapsed in a shower of dust and stone chunks. A few moments passed.

“Come on, let’s go” Captain Sansky said as the dust settled.

The men got up and started moving. A few token bursts of assault rifle fire greeted them, but the defenders were just covering their own retreat. They saw buildings on the other side. Houses built in the usual style of Turin; stone or brick. The nearer ones were caved in; the bombers had blown them up just in case they had sentry guns or machine gun nests in them. Mitchell climbed over the rubble… and what he saw when he got to the other side made him stop cold.

The first thing he did was wonder how the Sallies (even the Bitches in Red) could possibly be stupid enough to stick such a dense concentration of troops in one exposed area. Then he realized the more-or-less literal mountain of dead bodies, so many they lay several layers deep, weren’t Sallie troops. They didn’t wear uniforms. They wore filthy, torn-up rags. They were covered with dust and dried mud and so grimy it must have been months since they’d seen a shower. Many of them had scraggly beards. He also realized quickly that they were close to emaciated. Bones stuck out through holes and tears in clothing. The stink of fear-sweat and blood and shit was strong, but through them Mitchell could also smell years of ground-in grease and sweat. Most seemed to have been shot with machine guns. A few had bigger, messier holes that must have come from pistols at close range. His eyes wandered to a platform on the opposite end of the plaza. A dead machine gun rested against it. Mitchell’s trained eye told him that it would have been in a perfect position to… An image formed in his mind with cold clarity. Thousands of people herded into this square… a Sallie hunched over that machine gun, looking out over all those people, feeding in ammo, maybe smiling, and then pulling the trigger and doing the two inch waltz, nicely filling up the entire plaza with flying lead. The people might have tried to run, but it was too late. A machine gun only needed seconds to do what it did against humanity that tightly packed. Then somebody else would have gone around with a pistol, finding any wounded, coldly and calmly pulling the trigger… or maybe smiling like a kid on Christmas morning as she send a metal stub into a man’s brain at supersonic speed.

“Christ” one of the Privates observed after a few moments of stunned silence.

“All men” another Private said. “Not a single woman in there.”

Mitchell shook his head, his face as pale as a ghost. He’d seen plenty of bad stuff in war. He’d seen men trying to stuff their own vital organs back into themselves. He’d seen men with limbs blown off and faces torn apart. He’d seen more bodies and more deaths than he could count. But this… he didn’t remember ever seeing anything that turned his stomach quite as much as this.

“LET’S GET THE FUCKERS WHO DID THIS!!!” a Lieutenant roared. The Americans screamed hungrily and charged forward into the buildings, running down the fleeing defenders.


73rd Amazon Guard Regiment, “Androktones”

“They’re coming right after us!” a Lieutenant reported. “Patriarchist breakthrough in the plaza! More Patriarchist units effecting breakthroughs, estimate two regiment strength!” Colonel Athene heard a gurk sound moments later, telling her a Patriarchist bullet had found a home in one of the Lieutenant’s more immediately vital organs.

“Fall back three blocks and hold your positions” Colonel Athene commanded. “I want machine gun squads along their lines of advance and snipers on the rooftops! We’re gonna fix ‘em just like we fixed those fuckers in the plaza.” Athene grinned as she remembered the delicious sensation of personally putting a bullet through the head of a man at close range, watching the disgusting creature plead for mercy. As if he deserved any, as if all this wasn’t the fault of his own kind. She’d fixed that fucker right and the Androktones would be doing some more fixing before the day was over. “Remember what they call you. Live up to your name!” That got yells of approval over the officers’ comm. channel.

Machine gun squads set up their pieces with admirable swiftness, snapping them together with a polished precision that Athene was sure the regular Army could never match if they had a million years to practice. Snipers climbed to the rooftops with the ease of monkeys. They had their laser rifles set up even before the machine gunners were finished and stood ready to pick away officers and anything else important. Athene wouldn’t have worried much about whether or not they had civilians in them in ordinary times. She would instantly and gladly give her life for the cause of destroying the Patriarchy, and she expected anyone else to do the same. As it was they contained nothing but the dead anyway. After gunning down the cockroaches in the square the Androktones had done a thorough cleaning of the whole Containment District. They’d found a few who’d hidden, or who’d just been too weak or infirm to make it out of the house. She grinned again, nastily. You could have fun with those. Gunning down thousands of the filthy beasts in an instant was all very well and good, but it was simple vermin extermination. Not really satisfying. It was much better when you could take your time, make them suffer, make them bleed…

She shoved those pleasant memories out of her mind as the first waves of Patriarchist came barreling down the street like stampeding buffalo, screaming and shooting. Colonel Athene grinned again, even nastier. They had even less discipline than the Army. This would be fun.

The snipers fired first. Along all the Patriarchist lines of advance Captains and Lieutenant Colonels and Lieutenants dropped in the dirt with smoking holes drilled into their bodies. Then the machine guns opened up. The Patriarchists ducked low but kept coming, taking casualties but pushed forward by sheer rage.

“They’re not stopping” a Captain shouted.

Athene bit her lip. The Patriarchists were reaching the first machine gun nests and starting to take them out. “Hold your ground!” she ordered. She turned to a Captain next to her. “Get me a long-range radio.”

“Aye” the Captain said and turned back to give the necessary orders. A few minutes later a skinny support tech came up and unlimbered a backpack-carried long range radio. She fumblingly set up the antenna and handed the speaker to Colonel Athene.


Polisso Air Force Base, Polisso

It was hot in Commander Demeter’s office. The building was a hastily knocked-together prefab with no air conditioning. The single fan perched on a metal filing cabinet tried valiantly to beat the heat, and failed. She was fanning herself with a piece of paper. It made her arms tired, but it more effective.

An urgent message beeped on her computer. Without even bothering to shift position she opened it. A Lieutenant’s face appeared on the screen.

“Commander, we’ve got a radio from a Colonel Athene. She says she’s getting driven back by a significant Patriarchist force in Alleppa’s containment district and she wants bomber support for her troops.”

Commander Demeter rolled her eyes. “Bomber support? Is she out of her fucking mind? Tell her to get stuffed!” With the way things were now putting just about anything into the air was a quick way to get pilots killed. Most Scythian air bases on Turin were gone, and the ones that weren’t gone had most of their planes blown out of the sky in the initial air battle. The Patriarchists didn’t have air superiority anymore, they had air supremacy. Trying to challenge it was sheer suicide.

“Yes Commander” the Lieutenant said. After a few minutes the computer had another message. Demeter sighed and opened it again. She blinked and straightened when she saw the woman on the other end was wearing the dress uniform of an Amazon Guard Brigadier.

“Yes Sister, what can I do for you?” Commander Demeter asked, using the standard form of address in the Scythian military for superior officers. Ma’am was considered Patriarchist and objectifying.

“I understand a contingent of my forces is under attack in Alleppa and has requested air support. You refused.” The Brigadier didn’t actually say anything like why?, but the question was pretty implicit.

Commander Demeter sighed. “Respectfully sister, because it would be a complete waste of good pilots. The Patriarchists own the skies sister. Anything we send up will be shot down.”

Something twitched in the Brigadier’s neck. “Are you saying your pilots are not willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the Great Emancipation?” She didn’t shout, but the outrage was palpable anyway. Demeter groaned inwardly. Dealing with the Army was bad enough, dealing with the Amazon Guard was a hundred thousand times worse. The Army had a healthy disrespect for pilots and crewers, who fought in air conditioned comfort with kilometers of distance between them and their enemies. That was true in just about every military, and nothing to get excited about. But the Amazon Guard were something else. They were so sickeningly sincere about what they were doing. They weren’t just doing a job like everybody else. They believed in what they were doing with a maniacal fervor that would have done any Patriarchist priest proud, and they pissed from a great height on anyone who didn’t.

“No sister, my pilots aren’t cowards” Demeter said, with some heat of her own. “But I’m not going to piss them away-“

“Well what else are you going to use them for if not to support our troops?” the Amazon Guard Brigadier demanded.

“Sister, odds are they’ll be intercepted and shot down before they even get a chance to drop their bombs” Demeter said.

“But they may not” the Brigadier said.

Commander Demeter sighed. “No, they may not. But they sure as day won’t come back, no matter what happens. You can fucking well count on it.”

“That is enough” the Amazon Guard Brigadier said. “Whether they live or die doesn’t matter. They should be honored to give their sacred blood for the Great Emancipation.” She shook her head. “This is shameful. As your superior officer I order you to give air support to my troops – and if you had any decency you’d do us all a favor and shoot yourself right now you unbelieving coward. I will have you shot if you don’t do what I say.”

Demeter’s hand dug so hard into the arm of her chair her nails started tearing the leather. She would have loved nothing more than to wipe that oh so sincere smug scowl from the Brigadiers face. But there was nothing she could do. The Amazon Guard Brigadier could have her shot. And that burned worse than anything.

“Very well” Commander Demeter said. “But you’re wasting my pilots lives-“

“Your pilots fight for coin. We for the Great Emancipation.” the Brigadier said. “A hundred of them aren’t worth one of my soldiers as far as I’m considered. Just follow your orders.” The transmission cut.

Commander Demeter had thought the Brigadier’s threats burned. She was wrong. That last sentence was much, much worse. Who the fuck did she think she was anyway? And the worst part was she’d get her way. Demeter opened a link to Captain Eurydice. There was a delay of several moments before the screen blinked and the Captain’s face appeared.

“I’ve just gotten some orders from on high” Commander Demeter said. “There’s a bunch of Guard holed up in the containment district in Alleppa. They want air support. I want you to take a flight of bombers out and help them.”

Captain Eurydice almost did a double take. “Diana’s tits they expect us to go up there? Are they nuts?”

Commander Demeter scowled. “Yes, yes I believe they are.”


Barracks, Polisso Air Force Base, Polisso

Polisso Base’s barracks weren’t much better than its officer quarters. They weren’t prefabs, at least. They were brick buildings dating back to before the war. Captain Hunter didn’t know what they’d originally been used for. Now they had a lot of empty rooms with cheap metal bunks stacked up in them. They got even hotter than the prefabs, the brick walls acted like an oven, and they didn’t even have any fans to cool them down. Hunter wasn’t used to that. True, the bunk decks of a carrier weren’t much more comfortable, but at least they never got hot. As somebody had once said, planets had lousy climate control. She frowned at the thought. The Irigaray had been a good ship. She’d died to a Patriarchist torpedo bomber. In the confusion Captain Hunter had been ordered to do CSP, which probably saved her life. She’d survived by taking most of the systems of her fighter offline and waiting out the battle. No Patriarchist had shot at her, they assumed she was a dead fighter. When her fighter’s orbit took it out of range of the Patriarchist fleet she’d descended into atmosphere and landed at the first base she saw, which was Polisso. She’d thought she’d get a chance to hit back at the Patriarchists again. No luck. The camp commander – a Commander Demeter – had grounded her for the duration. Not a single flight had launched since then, except a couple of recon drones, most of which hadn’t come back. She and the Air Force pilots she bunked with had spent their days in boredom and frustration. They all wanted to hit back, they wanted it so bad they could taste it, but Commander Demeter stubbornly refused to give the order to fly. Strangely enough, the Patriarchist hadn’t bothered them much. There’d been no raids, no recon drones taking a peek, nothing. The defenders of Polisso could only huddle under their shield and wait. So when the PA system blared Hunter almost jumped out of her bunk.

“This is Commander Demeter” it said. “Beta squadron, assemble on the tarmac. Suit up and bring your gear. You’re flying today.”

“That’s us!” one of the Air Force pilots who bunked with Hunter said. “Let’s go!” They moved off toward the equipment lockers. Hunter followed them.

“You’re not with us” Lieutenant McCaffrey observed.

“I’m bunked with you” Captain Hunter argued. “And to hell with it, I’m gonna hit back at those Patriarchist fuckers!”

Lieutenant McCaffrey shrugged. She could understand that sentiment very well.

Hunter still had her flight suit from the Cricket. She put it on quickly and marched off to the tarmac just as quickly. The suns were beaming down and the flight suit was hot in a way that didn’t bear thinking about. The Air Force pilots didn’t seem to notice. They were used to it. The flight suits could get uncomfortable enough on the ship, Hunter had never had to stand around with one on in heat.

“I got the mission download” Lieutenant McCaffrey said, tilting her head as it flowed into her neural interface. “Diana’s tits! They must be… Never mind. The deal is there’s a regiment of Amazon Guard that’s getting pushed back by the Patriarchists in Alleppa’s containment district. Now if they were Army they’d just do what all grunts do in that position and fall back. But retreat’s not in the Guard’s vocabulary.” It sounded complimentary, but from her tone of voice Captain Hunter suspected Lieutenant McCaffrey didn’t mean it that way at all. “So they want us to give them air support. I’ll give you the complete download here.” Captain Hunter felt the information go into her neural interface. She opened it and looked it over silently along with the rest of the pilots. She didn’t like the odds, but it was a chance to hit back. It was better than sitting in the heat and doing nothing while Turin went to hell in a hand basket. By the looks on the Air Force pilot’s faces most of them thought so too.

“Captain Hunter, you make our squadron overstrength” Lieutenant McCaffrey observed. “But you’ve got experience, so I’m letting you tag along. Diana knows we’ll need all the airplanes we can get up there. Now let’s go, we’ve got some Guards to bail out.”

“Thanks” Captain Hunter said as she hurried to her Cricket. Her flight suit was hotter than she’d have believed possible. She was sweating so much under it that if felt like her entire body had been rubbed with grease. It was an incredible relief to plug into the Cricket, turn the cooling fans on, shut the canopy and fill it with cool canned air. She ran over her checklist as the techs fueled up the Cricket.

“Everything squared away?” Lieutenant McCaffrey asked over the comm.

“Yes sister” Captain (acting Lieutenant) Hunter said.

There was a pause and Hunter knew McCaffrey was checking with other pilots. “Launch” she said.

Hunter gunned the Cricket’s thrusters. The engines whined as they warmed up and she let them have full power, lifting the Cricket off the ground. She started forward slowly, in a leisurely circling pattern. She watched the squadron’s six SX-10B “Whirlwind” escorts lift off. She was glad she had the Cricket. The Whirlwind was an old model, not particularly fast compared to a Cricket (although it was still faster than a Harridan) and with a truly pathetic armament of a single PD laser and one missile launcher with two missiles. The two SAFL-101 “Fury” bombers that lifted off after the fighters didn’t inspire much confidence either. They were decently armed and like most land-based bombers they had good range, but they moved with all the grace and speed of a rhinoceros. It seemed to Hunter that the Air Force was to a certain extent the neglected service. She’d fought USAF Bolos and Nighthawks and Spirits on Panthalassa, and they seemed not to really be as good as their USN equivalents either. She shrugged to herself. It wasn’t really her department.

“Form up” Lieutenant McCaffrey said over the radio. “Fly low and slow. That way the Patriarchists’ll be less likely to see us.”

The squadron formed up, the fighters taking the lead and the bombers at the rear, and flew forward. They were taking it slow, but the countryside underneath rolled away quickly. Slow for a fighter was still pretty damn fast on the scales of a planetary surface.

“Uh, I think I see something headed our way” one of the pilots said.

Hunter looked at her screen. There was a blip coming toward them.

“I see it” Lieutenant McCaffrey said. “Everybody use tightbeam like I’m doing. Keep the chatter to a minimum and keep going. They own the skies, they may think we’re just more of their own.”

The blip came closer. And closer. Radar identified it as a Warhawk. It came closer still. Hunter noticed a glint out her window and turned around. She said something blue as she realized she could actually see it. It flew past. She cursed again. If there was one thing they weren’t going to survive it was a close visual inspection.

“Engage!” Lieutenant McCaffrey shouted. Two Whirlwinds broke off and pursued the Warhawk. “We got him” came the message after a few moments. “But he got off a signal before he went down.”

“Fuck!” Lieutenant McCaffrey exclaimed. “This whole place is crawling with Patriarchists, they’re bound to-“

“Patriarchist squadron inbound!” another voice cut in and interrupted her.

The Patriarchist fighters were already over the horizon. The heavy laser turrets on the Furies rotated. Nothing happened visibly, but one of the oncoming fighters exploded in flames. Hunter checked and saw that they were Eagles. Probably diverted from escorting bombers. The Eagles launched their first missiles, right at the bombers. They knew what was what alright. The clumsy bombers tried pathetically to dodge. A PD laser took out one missile. The other two hit home. One bomber started tumbling down out of the sky right away, disintegrating as it went. The other stayed airborne but was trailing smoke. A door opened in the side and Hunter saw the two-woman crew bail out. One of the fighters immediately started a near-vertical climb, trying to gain height and speed. Her wingman followed blindly. McCaffrey cursed them but didn’t have time to do anything. They were moving in straight lines, on the targeting systems of fighters that had lightspeed weapons. Heavy lasers hit them and they paid the price of their inexperience. The remaining fighters split apart to maneuver on their own. The bombers were dead, but if a few survived they might still finish their missions. Fighters could damage ground targets too, just not as well. Hunter saw a pair of Eagles closing on her screen. Her wingman split to engage them. A shot with a heavy laser scored a direct hit on her fighter. Hunter moved desperately to evade, gunning her engine up to full power to loose the Eagles. Her aircraft jumped as if hit with a stone. Damage alarms blared. Hunter’s eyes widened in horror as she realized the reactor was about to loose containment. The computer began an emergency shutdown but it wasn’t quite fast enough. A little superheated gas touched the oxygen tanks behind her seat and melted through them. They exploded. Hunter screamed in raw agony as the flames washed over her and she was burned alive in her own cockpit.


Containment District, Alleppa

Sergeant Hartmann led his squad grimly through the streets of Alleppa’s containment district. The Bitches in Red had been beaten and were falling back. For a while they’d seemed to rally, stiffen up. The advance against them had ground down and more men needed to be brought in from nearby sectors of the city. That seemed to have broken them. The Yankees were moving up street by street, block by block. The Sallies were fighting hard though. Fighting hard for houses nobody lived in anymore. Hartmann spat at that.

A window broke in a house on a crooked street that neatly cut off his squad’s axis of advance. A machine gun poked out from it and started firing. His squad hit the deck. Sallies rushed out of the house, firing long bursts with their Kalashnikovs. His men raised their assault rifles and fired back. Most of the Sallies fell. A couple of them were smarter and rushed back behind what cover they could find.

“I need covering fire” Sergeant Hartmann said into his headset. “Yes sir” a Spanish-accented voice said back. A machine gun further back opened up on the Sallies. Hartmann’s squad started to move forward. The machine gun stopped and they dropped low. The Sallies came out again and started firing. Hartmann’s men returned fire and two of them dropped. The third one clutched her arm and ran back behind an abandoned truck. Hartmann gestured his squad forward again. The last Sallie tried to retreat, still holding her wounded arm. A short burst hit her in the back and she fell in the dirt.

“Clean out that house” Hartmann ordered as the machine gun opened fire again. Corporal Acosta dropped a grenade into his launcher, aimed it at the window, and fired. The grenade flew in and exploded somewhere inside, sending a backwash of smoke out. Hartmann cautiously picked up a rock and bounced it off the side of the house next to it. There was no response. His squad rushed forward quickly, still keeping low just in case the Sallies were playing possum.

“Bravo” Hartmann whispered. Private Bravo nodded and leveled his M-105 at the latch on the door. The door was just rough wood planks, and the lock was a crude thing of wrought iron. It crumbled away easily. Bravo snapped off a hand grenade, pulled the pin, kicked the door in, threw it through, and then jumped back and leaned against the side as it exploded inside with a muffled bang. Bravo kicked in the door again and he and Private Wheeler rushed in. There were bursts of gunfire and Wheeler went down, still alive but with bullet holes in his gut. Bravo returned fire. The rest of the squad rushed in.

Hartmann took in the vital things quickly. There’d been two Sallies tending the machine gun and they were both dead. That left six more. Two of them were hiding behind an overturned table, two behind the dresser, one was running through the room to the back door. A long burst caught her. Hartmann hosed the table with assault rifle fire. It looked flimsy and thin. He was right. The bullets went right through it and into the Sallies behind it. Private Cornejo took a burst right to the chest. The Sallie that hit him went down a moment later. So did the other two.

“You alright?” Hartmann said, turning to Private Wheeler. The kid’s only response was to scream very loudly. Hartmann undid his flak jacket and inspected the wound. Four holes to the belly. At one time that would have been fatal. As it was it could probably be repaired, but he wouldn’t have a very pleasant time of it. His guts were bound to be all torn up. “He needs a medic” he said.

Private Bishop nodded. “I’ll go.” He ran out the door and down the street.

“Uh, sir” Private Lindsey called. Hartmann saw she was standing in the door to the next room and leaning almost drunkenly. She looked distinctly green, or as green as you could get when you were dark brown.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I think you better see this.” She indicated something in the room with her assault rifle. Hartmann glanced at Private Bravo and Corporal Casson. They walked over to the room and peeked in.

Sergeant Hartmann had fought through four planets before Turin, and before that he’d fought in the war against the British in at the turn of the century. He’d been on Roanoke and Storland and Endicott. He’d seen a lot of things that he’d rather not have.

That was probably all that kept him from immediately turning around and heaving projectile vomit all over the wall like Corporal Casson did.

“Madre de Dios” Private Bravo whispered and crossed himself. His eyes had gone so wide they looked like they were going to pop out of his head.

Part of the floor had been torn up. There’d been a secret compartment under there, apparently. In it was an old man. They’d stabbed him again and again. Not in the chest mind you. Not, then he’d die quickly, and whoever did this had plainly been enjoying themselves. They’d beaten him to the point that his jaw had broken and part of his face had caved in. They’d cut his cheeks with a knife so that his mouth widened into a horrific, unnatural grin. The reason they’d done that was so that once he was dead (Hartmann prayed to God it was after he was dead) they could cut off his genitals and ram them so far down his throat he appeared to be half-swallowing them.

“My God” Hartmann whispered. “What the hell kind of people are these.”

Operation Crossfire is a homage to Plan Backfire in 55 Days in Kalunda, if you caught it.

I can't help thinking that no human shields means no need to waste troops lives taking the battle to the Sallies on the ground now. So the Yanks should be free to nuke them from space .

Plus it would encourage the defenders of Scythia not to do the same to any prisoners or slave labour there...

Unfortunately I expect that might make writing a story about the Fall of Turin a bit harder if it ends in 5 minutes from nuclear salvos, and I'm enjoying this story and want more! But I'd like to see how you respond to my thoughs above.

BTW Junghalli I like your writing and encourage more. In particular your portrayal of the US seems very true to character of the real American military post WW2 from what I've read.

frogcurry wrote:I can't help thinking that no human shields means no need to waste troops lives taking the battle to the Sallies on the ground now. So the Yanks should be free to nuke them from space

The US will not just leave tens of millions of people to be massacred. They're going to be doing as much as they can to save them.
That should involve quite a bit of special forces work... I'm going to love pitting the Amazon Guard against the US Navy SEALs.
Besides, they need the infrastructure of the planet (it's going to be their logistical base for the attack on Scythia, remember?), and there's still the female half of Turin's population to consider.

Plus it would encourage the defenders of Scythia not to do the same to any prisoners or slave labour there

I wouldn't be so sure. Remember, these people are fanatics. The very idea of surrendering is so repugnant to them most of them don't even want to consider it, and their government will happily see their entire population wiped out first. Think of WWII Japan.

BTW Junghalli I like your writing and encourage more. In particular your portrayal of the US seems very true to character of the real American military post WW2 from what I've read.

Thank you. Since I have no military experience myself, it's always reassuring to know I'm being true to life.

For this next bit I tried to give a little glimpse of the the home front, if you were expecting more ground combat sorry to disappoint you. )-
I actually was going to post this right after Chapter 7 but I got sick (must have eaten some bad food) so couldn't concentrate.

CHAPTER 8

Hartford, Wisconsin, New America, June 23rd 2517

It was a little after six in the evening in summer, which meant it was just starting to cool down. When you stepped into the shade it was fairly nice, but in the sun it was still so hot and wet it was like walking through thin soup. The weather report said it would rain in a day or two. Mary Nelson could believe that. It had certainly been humid the last couple of days. It was the time of year New America’s equivalent to mosquitoes would swarm. She was saved from their worst attentions by being a moving target. You didn’t have those in New York, but she’d lived out here long enough not to notice them – any more than anybody else, that was.

She’d taken a long detour, through the northern edge of Hartford and then back around to the downtown. She could just have walked to the market directly, but then she could have just driven there too. She needed to get out somewhere farther away than the backyard. She liked walking, even if the air lay across the land like a wet hot rag for most of the summer when it wasn’t raining. She couldn’t understand how some people could just stay inside all day.

She walked by the little artificial lake in the northern end of town, with its impressive fountain in the middle. Probably the most impressive bit of architecture in the whole town. Up above that were a few odd houses and beyond that mostly farms. Somewhere beyond those was the Great Lake, but the finger of water it extended southward was closer, to the east. You could see it when you came in to land at the airport in Adelaide. She walked along the northern edge of town a little and then turned back down Main Street and headed toward Hartford’s tiny downtown, which was about two blocks long and consisted of a modest supermarket, a few eateries, and a hospital that struck her as having all the profound charm of a prison. She went into the market (which was wonderfully air conditioned – thank God), picked out food for tonight and tomorrow, paid the cashier, and walked out with a bulky paper bag. It was more than a bit heavy, but she wouldn’t have handed in a chance to walk around for the convenience of the car. And it was lighter than it had been, now that Petie wasn’t home.

Mary Nelson felt lizards crawl down her spine at that thought. Petie had joined the Army as soon as he got out of high school. She’d done her best to argue him out of it, but he insisted his country needed him. She’d tried telling him that there were other people who could do it but he’d said if everybody thought like that they’d have to start drafting, and besides, it wouldn’t be fair of him to hand it off to somebody else. It was a loosing battle. Petie was a good patriot, probably too damn good for his own good, and after the Sallies attacked Panthalassa just about everybody wanted a crack at them. It only got worse when the planet was liberated and the things the Sallies had been doing to people there were revealed for the newspapers and cameras to see. As far as Mary was concerned that should have made any sensible person want to stay as far away as possible, but the Army had so many new recruits after that they’d had to start turning people away.

She’d been incredibly relieved when Petie wrote to say he’d been sent to Palmyra. A planet that hadn’t seen a single bullet fired in the entire war. He hadn’t sounded too upset about it. His messages had some grumbling in them, but she thought it was mostly so he didn’t look like he wanted to shirk his duty. If he couldn’t go up against the Sallies himself, he seemed OK with freeing up somebody else to do it. But she’d known that the Army could call him to the front at any time. The worry had nagged at her from the start, and as the Army started taking planets closer and closer to Scythia and needed more and more manpower she’d started getting more and more worried about it. Then finally, one day, she got the message she’d been dreading. He’d been called up for an attack on a planet called Turin. The newspapers and the TV all said that when Turin was taken they US would be one or two steps away from knocking the Sallies out of the war. Mary sure hoped so. She just hoped her son would be around to see it. She’d heard so many stories about what was going on out there, few of them good…

As she was walking home she heard an engine noise so loud it hurt her ears. She looked up to see five big heavylift freighters lifting off in formation, already climbing up into the high atmosphere. Probably out of Chicago spaceport. They sometimes went northward when they flew, although more often they went south. They were escorted by two smaller ships. Must have been missile corvettes or destroyers. Sure as hell another reminder of the war. Ships rarely had to travel in convoys before the war; pirates knew better than to mess with American shipping in their own space, by in large. Those ships were probably bringing supplies up to Killiman or Tarawa or one of the other planets where Sallie missile corvettes might still slink around. Hell, they might very well have been going to Turin itself.

She cut back across town and went home. She came in through the back. Willy Nelson liked to keep the front door locked most of the time, but he left the back open most of the time. It opened conveniently into the kitchen. She didn’t see Willy but she knew he’d be sitting by the TV watching the news. He sure was a creature of habit. The same went for Petie. He took after his Dad alright.

“Mary, that you?” Willy Nelson called. Mary saw smoke curl in the air in the living room. Willy was a heavy smoker. Mary herself had never picked up the habit, and wished he wouldn’t stink up the house so much. She’d long since given up trying to get him to quit; he could have given a mule stubborn lessons on some things. Or she’d never been a very good persuader. She was honest enough to admit that was more likely true than not.

“Honey, the news is on” Willy Nelson said. Mary put down the groceries and hurried into the living room. She was torn when it came to the news. She didn’t like it; it made her worry about Petie. But at the same time she didn’t want to miss out on what was happening either.

She missed the better chunk of the first story. It was nothing terribly important. A group of Langeist pirates taking advantage of the USA’s stretched supply lines had been doing some raiding around Blackbird, on the opposite side of US territory from Scythia. The Navy was sending a battlecruiser flotilla to deal with them and anticipated success. They’d probably get it too. Every couple of months it seemed some pirate decided the far side of US territory would make good pickings, with the Navy surely being much too busy to worry about little him. And every couple of months the Navy would send some ships and he’d either be run off, caught, or blown to hell. It came down to the same thing either way.

“What’s on tonight?” Willy asked.

“Settling Accounts, remember” Mary said. “We watched it twice already.” It was an old war movie about a bunch of soldiers caught behind British lines on Hancock III. It was OK, but it seemed like ever since the war started there’d been a war movie on every third night. It got repetitive after a while.

Willy raised a hand. “The lead story’s on. I hear it was a hell of a thing.”

“What?-“ he shushed her.

An announcer appeared on the screen. He wore a flak jacket and a soldier’s helmet. A little tag at the bottom of the screen indicated the message had been prerecorded and sent through QD from Turin. Big bolded words briefly flashed over the screen. HORRORS OF ALLEPPA.

”This is David Housemann, reporting from the city of Alleppa, on Turin, just recently secured by the US military. First, I will remind you that some of what you are about to see is extremely disturbing. We advise you to exercise discretion if you have young children in the room.” He paused for a minute or so, presumably to allow any parents to shuffle their children out the door. The scene cut away from the evening light that had been behind Housemann to apparent midday. The light looked sharper and whiter than that cast by New America’s sun. The scene was unsteady and bouncing, the obvious mark of a field cameraman’s shoulder cam. The camera focused in on a concrete and stone wall, topped by barbed wire.

”When American forces liberated this city they found horrors almost beyond the comprehension of civilized man when they marched through these walls. This is Alleppa’s Containment District. As you know, when the Scythians occupy a world it is their normal procedure to separate the male and female population. Over two and a half hundred thousands men were imprisoned in this area, less than two kilometers square, with no electricity or running water.” The film cut away to pictures of autopsies. “Typhus, cholera, dysentery, and other diseases ran rampant in the crowded and filthy conditions while the Scythians horded vital medical supplies within sight of the wall. Autopsies reveal that chronic malnutrition was also endemic here, despite significant stores of food likewise horded in nearby warehouses, and burned by the Scythians before they could fall into the hands of the advancing Americans.”

“But these were the least horrors of the Alleppa Containment District. We say autopsies, because there are no living survivors to tell the tale. So deep was the Scythians’ hate of the men imprisoned in this place that they massacred them all rather than allow them to be delivered to freedom.” The camera showed brief footage of corpses being dragged away on stretchers and buried in a mass grave. The next scenes grew progressively worse.

”This so-called Containment District was administered with what can only be described as enthusiastic sadism. Records kept by the District Commandant clearly and unashamedly record hideous atrocities. The slightest disobedience was punished by public whippings of dozens or hundreds of lashes. To control work-gangs the guards used vicious scourges with little pieces of metal tied into them that tore skin and flesh – repugnant as a simple whip would be it did not satisfy the guards’ insatiable lust to inflict pain on their charges. For an inmate to even look upon a guard was punishable by death – successively more hideous deaths assigned for greater offenses. The punishments used by the Scythians give disturbing insight into their bizarre and twisted belief system. Simply speaking back to a guard or glancing in her direction was considered a form of rape under their tragically laughable parody of a legal code…”

“US soldiers storming the Commandant’s quarters made horrifying discoveries of gruesome trophies. A shrunken head used as a paperweight by the District Commandant herself. Severed genitalia, preserved by dessication, hung from the walls on hoops of wire. Even the most courageous veteran troops, men who had fought through the jungles of Tarawa and the killing fields of Barker IV, could barely contain their horror at what they found. But even that was not the very worst…”

“After gathering the inmates into the central square and massacring them by machine gun the Scythians’ elite Amazon Guard conducted a house to house search of the Containment District, searching meticulously for any who had evaded the slaughter. And those they found they tortured hideously, apparently for the sheer joy of it.” The TV screen displayed a picture of a youth who’d been stabbed so many times in the gut it looked like he’d been dipped in blood up to his waist. His throat had been cut and his tongue pulled through the gash, following which his amputated genitalia had been shoved into his mouth. Mercifully, it lingered only for a few moments.

“My God!” Mary Nelson gagged, the word barely articulate as she brought her hand to cover her mouth. And it wasn’t just the abstract knowledge that such things could happen that terrified her. “Petie’s – he’s – he’s going against those psychos! What if…?” the last thought was so horrible she couldn’t even finish it in her own mind.

Willy Nelson put a reassuring hand around her shoulder. “I know” he said. “Don’t worry. He won’t. He’s a good kid and he’s always known what he’s doing. He’ll come back.”

I'm back!
PS some of this is a bit PG-rated.

Bunker below Scythian Planetary HQ, Nova Catalina, Turin, June 28th 2517

Nova Catalina hadn’t been bombed yet. It was still safe and sound under its shield. But General Leary knew that the only reason for that was that the Yankees didn’t want to create unnecessary civilian casualties. Who knew how long that would hold out? It seemed prudent to move most operations into the bunkers, in case they changed their minds. The air down here was tasteless, faintly stale, and cool. None of the heat of Turin’s summer made its way down here. Nevertheless, General Andrea Leary was sweating. Perspiration dripped across her forehead and collected anywhere she had cracks or curves or grooves. She was still a little short for breath.

I may not look 73 she thought to herself, but there are times when I sure do feel it. Antigerone treatments and a bottle of hair dye might keep most of the visible signs away, and take most of the bite out of it, but the body still wore down over time and you couldn’t help but noticing. It was there in your muscles ached at the end of the day, in the way running and exercise seemed harder than it used to be, in the way your stomach and vitals didn’t seem to work quite as smoothly as they used to. And it was definitely there in bed. She might look middle aged, but her body definitely didn’t respond the way it had when she was forty, let alone when she was twenty.

Hacking and spitting came from the bathroom, followed by gargling and more spitting. The door was open and a fat slice of white light, bright enough to be painful in the otherwise perfect darkness of Andrea Leary’s quarters, poured through. Maria Talenti was bent over the sink, brushing her teeth with fervor, as if she’d just been made to chew something foul. It made Leary feel vaguely guilty, even though she’d in no way pressured the Scythians spokeswoman on Turin to become her lover. It was something of a mystery to her why the woman continued sleeping with her. It was obvious she wasn’t at all comfortable with being another woman’s lover. She still blushed and looked down at the floor in apparent shame when they did something as little as holding hands. At first Leary had thought the woman expected favors in exchange, but she knew by now that Leary did not deal in such favors. She’d made that perfectly clear from the first day, and four years was plenty of time for even the most slow-witted or cynical person to realize she was telling the truth. And she knew Maria definitely wasn’t the former, and probably not the latter either. She was very smart, if basically uneducated… like many Outer Reach worlds Turin didn’t educate its women much if at all. Leary shrugged to herself. Maybe she just wanted companionship… or something.

Maria finished and switched the light off. Leary turned on the bedside lamp so she wouldn’t have to find her way across the room in the darkness. Maria didn’t bother with a bathrobe; they’d seen each other’s bodies enough that modesty would have been pretension. She was very dark skinned and seemed to be of Latina heritage. That was common on Turin. Superficially she looked older than Leary, but she was actually only middle-age. Very few people on Turin could afford antigerone treatments. She crawled in under the covers and turned the light off. For a moment Leary heard only her breathing in the perfect darkness.

“Did you look over my revised speech?” she said after a moment.

Leary nodded, and realized belatedly that the movement would be invisible. “Yes. Director Tyers isn’t pleased at the way you keep toning down her speeches. She finds you quite annoying, you know.”

Maria said something about where Director Tyers could put her speeches. “If she wants a good little parrot she should have gone to somebody else.”

General Leary didn’t point out that half of Director Tyers’s staff was convinced Maria was trading sexual favors for the General’s protection. General Leary was protecting Maria; she knew for a fact the woman wouldn’t have gotten a sixth of the freedom she did with the Ministry of Intellectual Liberation’s Turin branch if it wasn’t for the fact she had somebody powerful and influential looking after her. But she did that simply because she cared about Maria, not because she expected something for it. They’d just been friends when she’d kept Maria from having to praise the Scythians’ breaking up of thousands of families to canton most of Turin’s male population in the containment districts. She kept all these thoughts to herself, as it was very old ground.

“Director Tyers is sincere, you know” General Leary said after a minute. “She believes in the cause, very deeply. She really doesn’t understand why you don’t agree with everything the MIL tells you to say.”

“Which is more than you can say for the – people –“ Maria sounded like she had a less pleasant word in mind “who I have to deal with most of the time. Tyers – she acts like she’s like she’s trying to explain to me why sticking my hand in a pan of boiling water is bad, but at least she’s nice. That Maybecker on the other hand… I know for a fact that if it wasn’t for you she’d just stick a gun to my head, put the script and the mike in front of my nose, and tell me to say it or I get my head blown off.”

“That’s not an unusual method for them” General Leary said. “I saw them do it to this one girl on Tarawa, when the Army killed a man for looking in a Major General’s direction and she refused to read their script commending them for stopping her ‘attempted rape’” she made sure Maria could hear the mental quotation marks. “So they got an Army Corporal to hold a Vallejo to her skull and read it. They did it a couple of more times too, until she got the message. I hear one of the first things the Americans did after they took Tarawa was formally restore the government and the courts and then put her on trial for treason. Don’t know how it turned out.” She felt Maria’s arm go tense where it touched her. She was instantly sorry for having brought it up – Maria had to be worried about something similar happening to her. She knew very well it was a question of when the Americans won, not if.

“I won’t tell you not to worry” General Leary responded to her unspoken concern. “But when the time comes there’ll be a ship to carry away people like me and the Governor-General. Those vital to the war effort, they’d say. And I’ll be sure you get a spot on it.”

“I don’t want to take anybody else’s place-“ Maria began.

“You know very well I wouldn’t put you ahead of anyone who might actually matter – for all the good they’d be likely to do, which isn’t much” Leary said. “You’ll be last in line. Or maybe second or third to last if you’re lucky. But you’ll get a spot. I’ll make sure of that. I’d make sure of that even if I didn’t know you – you’re exactly the kind of person who’d get to look forward to being lined up against the wall if you’re caught here – victor’s justice and all that. Your odds of waiting things out are much better on Scythia – your face is plastered everywhere here. That won’t be good for your health when the Yankees own the place – I’ve got a pretty consistent historical constant to back me up on that.”

Maria whistled air between her lips. “One thing I never thought was back before the war was that doing what you people wanted of all things would get me in trouble someday.”

“Blame the idiots who thought it was a good idea to pick a fight with a country five times our size” General Leary said. “And it’s the people like Tyers who did that, not the people like Maybecker. The sincere ones. I hate them. I very much prefer the hypocrites. They’d never have done a thing like this on their own.” She sighed. “Might as well not dwell on it. Thinking about it doesn’t do anything. Get ready for your speech; you’re going to have a lot of arguing to do with the MIL people tomorrow.”

For a moment they didn’t say anything, and then Maria moved. Her arms went around Andrea Leary’s shoulders and clasped tightly around her.

“Andrea” she whispered. “I heard… I heard a rumor. That General Athena is planning to kill everyone in the containment districts. I… I don’t think it’s true. I like to imagine – I hope even somebody like Athena isn’t capable of that, but…”

Leary had been dreading this. Not simply breaking the horrible news but worse, admitting her own helplessness. Her own culpability. The temptation to lie was powerful, but she resisted it. She’d told Maria quite a few painful truths, things that she might have been happier not hearing, but she’d never lied to her.

“It’s true. Lieutenant-General Athena plans to implement the Purification Protocols. Maria… she plans to kill every male on this planet. Not just in the containment districts, every last one of them. She’s completely mad… no, it’s not just her. The whole high command is completely mad. They were completely mad from the beginning, and… In the beginning, as we were starting to loose, I realized that. I also realized that as the war took its course we’d get more and more desperate. Desperate people do crazy things, horrible things… and people who are already mad? What do they turn into when they get desperate? Back then that question made my skin crawl… now I think I’m seeing it happening, and it’s every bit as bad as I imagined.”

“You can’t let this happen!” Maria gasped. “You can’t let her do it!”

General Leary sighed again, heavily. She didn’t want to have to say this to Maria. She didn’t want to tell her friend that part of the responsibility for this lay with her. She couldn’t in good conscience obey these orders, but at the same time she couldn’t betray her country either. And that meant she couldn’t just wring her hands and say it wasn’t her fault. The black, diseased weight of responsibility was on her chest. At the moment, it seemed to be smothering her, dark and cancerous. The disease of madness oozed from it and made her sick. She didn’t want to friend to look at her and see its mark on her.

“Maria… I would, but my orders…” she spread her hands helplessly. “I can order the Army not to carry out the Purification Protocols, that would work… but only because their implementation is the province of the Cohors Amazona. They would carry it out.”

“Can’t you order the Amazon Guard away?” Maria suggested. “They’re supposed to be the best troops” she ignored General Leary’s disbelieving snigger at that “so shouldn’t they be out fighting the Americans instead of – instead of-“ she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“Yes, I can do that. I’m senior to Athena, so I technically can order her around. Technically.” General Leary emphasized. “The problem is – well, Athena is never going to take orders from the Army. Especially orders like that. Women like her – they’d put purification on a higher priority than the war effort. I’m not kidding. She’ll go over my head, send a QD back to her superiors on Scythia. And they’d back her up.”

“So appeal to your own superiors” Maria said.

“I wish – oh Goddess I wish!” Leary almost laughed at the irony of how much easier she would have had it all around if things were set up so she could do that. “The Cohors Amazona is the senior service. In a row between my superiors and her superiors mine will loose. Really, the only way I could stop this would be to turn my own troops against the Amazon Guard. And that isn’t practical. Maybe a handful of units would obey those orders, but not enough to make any difference.”

Maria shifted against her. She took her hand, balled her own fingers around them. “Please, save who you can. I understand that you can’t save everyone, but do what you can. Do it on a tactical level. Juggle the Amazon Guard units around so they’re never quite in the right place. Don’t give any general orders, nothing Athena can have countermanded. Just manage the tactical ends so that things fall through.”

General Leary nodded. “Yes, that’s the only thing that might work. I’ll need reliable commanders at Brigade-level and above to pull it off. That may be difficult, but I think I can manage it… sometimes. But not all the time. Maybe – probably – not even most of the time. There will be thousands” she choked “millions that I can’t save.”

“If you save one person, just one, it’ll have been worth it” Maria argued.

General Leary was silent for a few minutes. She’d disagreed with the women who ran her country on many things, but this would be the first time she’d outright defied them. Was she prepared to do so now? After some consideration she decided that yes, she was. Simple humanity demanded it. Plus, the more thoroughly the Purification Protocols were carried out here the more thoroughly the hopes of a negotiated peace were dashed. Ultimately, it would be better for Scythia if she blunted the stupidity and madness of the high command as much as possible.

“I’ll do my best. It’s all we can hope for, with things the way they are now.”

There was not much more that could have been said. They simply embraced, drawing warmth and comfort from each other. There is no reassurance, Andrea Leary thought, quite like simple, animal closeness.

She was surprised when the simple embrace turned into something else. She gratefully forgot about everything outside their room… for a little while, anyway.

Francesco, Turin, June 29th

With Alleppa gone the US Army had some six Scythian infantry divisions cut off in the Oranto Peninsula. Word had they were going to keep the pressure on them with bombing raids but otherwise leave them. Instead the Army was swinging north, into the main bulk of Turin’s western continent. That involved a drive across the flatlands and then into the Apennine Mountains.

Tall, jagged peaks covered with snow the Apennines would have been an unpleasant place to try to haul all those divisions across in the face of hostile opposition. Fortunately they wouldn’t have to. This was one of those situations where even Army men had to admit the Marines came in mighty handy. You couldn’t ask for anything better than a fast-moving all-airborne force that traveled almost entirely in eleven-man aircraft for fighting in an environment like that. It took them less than four days to seize and secure the three major routes across the Apennines. When he heard that Petie thought that was mighty good news. Now that he was back slogging it out house to house with the Sallies, in Francesco this time, he wasn’t so sure.

“Jesus, I’d hate to be in there” Private Adams said, shaking his head. “In there” was a Sallie-held pocket maybe a couple of blocks wide. The Lieutenant had passed down that there was about a battalion of Sallies trapped in there, bypassed by the advance into the ammunition factory – which was now nothing more than a heap of rubble thanks to hours of pounding by US artillery.

“Sho’ thing that” Private Cooper agreed. Petie nodded. There was nothing valuable in that pocket, so it could be pounded with impunity. Artillery fire was pouring into it like water. The endless repetitive booming hurt Petie’s ears.

“Forward!” Lieutenant Coffee said over the comm. Elgars motioned the squad up and Petie began to crawl over the rubble on his belly, shattered brick and stone nicking his hands. The machine gun squad opened up to cover them, a continuous stream of bullets flying over their heads. Some of the Sallies ahead took potshots, but they couldn’t raise their heads for fear of getting a machine gun bullet to the face so they couldn’t aim very well. All their shots missed. Snow took a shot at one of them, Petie didn’t think he hit anything either. As they got closer green-splotchy figured popped up from the ruins and started running away, hunched over to avoid getting shot. They presented perfect targets nonetheless. Petie aimed his rifle and fired. One of them fell onto its knees and crumpled. It was his first kill. He’d wondered if he would feel any different after taking the life of another human being for the first time. He briefly searched his feelings and found that he didn’t. He wasn’t surprised, though he didn’t know whether to feel uncomfortable about that or not.

“Halt” Lieutenant Coffee said. “Machine gun squad’s moving up.”

They stopped advancing and hunkered down. Some of them pushed rocks around in front of them to make themselves more secure. Sallies popped up, leveled submachine guns, and fired. Petie pushed himself further down and adjusted his M-105 from burst fire to full auto. He ejected the nearly spent clip, popped in a fresh one, leveled it against the ground, and fired away. The rifle roared like a small machine gun and he sprayed a semi-circle in front of him with a steady stream of bullets, using up the entire clip in less than a minute. That should keep their heads down. He ejected the spent clip, popped the old one back in, and set it back to burst fire.

“Forward” Lieutenant Coffee ordered. Behind them the machine gun started chewing again. The squad moved forward and Sallies fell back. Petie sighted one of them and killed her with a short burst. Two more fell dead before the rest hit the dirt again. The machine gun lulled. “Move up again!” Coffee ordered. They started moving. Machine gun fire burst out again. At first Petie thought it was from their own gun, then he noticed the little flames licking out ahead. He hit the dirt, letting himself fall so hard he bruised his ribs. Cooper swore as Sallie fire raked over them.

“Anybody hit?” Coffee demanded.

Elgars checked. “We’re OK, but we’re pinned down.” After a few moments she gestured at Corporal Pablo Sanchez. “Sanchez, take Lopez and Cooper. I want that nest out of action. The rest of you, cover them.”

“Sure Sarge” Sanchez said. The three of them began moving forward cautiously, slowly picking their way over the shattered buildings that now spilled all over what used to be streets. Petie saw Lopez pull out a grenade. Sanchez and Cooper moved with their rifles leveled. The platoon’s machine gun fired to cover them. Nevertheless, some Sallies took inaccurate potshots at them with submachine guns. Petie set his rifle back to full auto and spent the rest of his near-empty clip to pin one of them down. Some of the other squad members did likewise. Elgars’ squad was lucky in not having had a casualty so far, and they all wanted to keep it that way as long as possible. Petie watched as they got within throwing distance. Lopez sent the grenade flying. The Sallie machine gun spat out a short, panicky burst and then went silent. There were a few moments of silence, punctuated by short bursts of submachine gun fire and returning spats from M-105s. Lopez picked up a rock and threw it at the machine gun nest. When there was no apparent response she crawled cautiously up to it.

“It’s gone” she said.

“Move forward” Lieutenant Coffee said. The platoon machine gun gave another long burst and they started crawling forward again. Suddenly Corporal Kendall broke in. “Wait! Hold your fire!”

“Wha?” Sergeant Elgars began, then she noticed the topless Sallie walking upright towards them, carrying a wooden pole with a white flag (actually white underpants really) nailed to the top. She walked ahead of a rifle team, also walking upright, their submachine guns and assault rifles lowered toward their feet. Behind them was an older Sallie with graying hair and a slightly fancier uniform. Petie wasn’t familiar with Sallie uniforms but he guessed she was an officer of some kind.

“Looks like a truce party” Private Adams said after a moments thought.

“Haven’t they ever heard of bras?” Cooper said, leering openly at the half-naked standard-bearer.

“No, they think they’re sexist” Corporal Kendall supplied. “And no, don’t ask me why. These people are crazy, that’s all there is to it.”

The Sergeant was all business, for the moment. She shouted over at the Sallies “Y’all stop right there! Y’all lower y’ rifles and put up y’ hands an’ keep ‘em where I can see ‘em! Take off y’ pistols too, and the grenades. Put ‘em all down on the ground!”

The grey-haired Sallie slowly took a pistol out of her belt and threw it to the ground. She said something to one of her riflemen. The other women shook her head and gestured violently.

“I’m sorry” she shouted back “but my escorts refuse to surrender their weapons until they have your commanders’ word as an officer that no harm will come to them.”

Elgars whispered into her mike. Everything was quite for a few minutes, save for the distant sounds of artillery and gunfire, which never stopped at any hour of the day or night. Then an American rifle team came out, with Lieutenant Coffee at the head.

“This is Lieutenant Coffee, 33rd ID, US Army. You’ve got my word as an officer. We follow the Geneva Conventions; you’ll be treated humanely if you surrender.”

The Sallies slowly, reluctantly, put down their weapons and came forward. Elgars’ squad got off the ground and stood up. It seemed safe enough, but they kept their rifles trained on the Sallies the whole time. The men leered at the standard bearer, with varying degrees of openness. Some of them didn’t even bother to hide it. Private Snow whistled. Others, like Petie, tried not to but couldn’t help looking at her. It wasn’t every day you saw a woman parading around without anything on above the waist. The woman didn’t seem to like the attention one bit. She looked back at the GIs with a combination of anger and open terror.

“So much for a Patriarchists’ word as an officer!” she told the grey-haired one, loud enough that the GIs could all hear it. She meant for them to hear it. She snarled it, but it was obvious that if she weren’t snarling she would have been screaming, or maybe crying.

“We aint harming you” Snow challenged.

“Alright, you’ve had your peep show, now cut it out” Lieutenant Coffee said.

“Yes Lieutenant” Snow said contritely.

“I’m Major Wynn. I want to speak with your commanding officer” the grey-haired Sallie said.

Coffee gestured at one of the men with him. “Jeffers, take ‘em back to the Colonel.”

“Yes sir” Jeffers saluted and gestured for the Sallies to come with him.


The Patriarchist squad led Major Wynn back behind the American lines. She passed soldiers sitting in the rubble of destroyed houses cradling assault rifles and then past machine guns still vigilantly pointed at her troops. Further back she was lead through a winding street. Partially wrecked houses stood on either side, gutted but their walls still holding up for the most part. The Patriarchist troops kicked shards out of their way. She passed more Patriarchist squads moving up to reinforce their positions, and one sitting at an intersection eating their rations. They paused scraping their tins to look up at her suspiciously, and at Private Pasiphae with either shock or titillation. One man, upon catching a glimpse of her, swallowed his food the wrong way and coughed violently. Wynn was given to understand that in most Patriarchist societies a woman was supposed to be ashamed of her breasts, and that the Americans in particular had a ridiculously strong nudity phobia. Pasiphae stared back at them with a sullen contempt that was a thin veneer for nearly overwhelming terror.

The Patriarchist Corporal – Jeffers – blocked their path with his assault rifle. His men leveled their rivals as well. One of them spat out a stream of chewing tobacco. Major Wynn looked at their rifles with envy. They looked better and fancier than the Kalashnikovs the Scythians used, and the Scythians could only afford to equip the Marines and the Amazon Guard entirely with Kalashs. Compared to the sleek black rifles the Americans held the submachine guns most Scythian Army soldiers had to make do with seemed like children’s toys.

“Come on, weapons search. Spread ‘em” the Patriarchist Corporal said roughly. One of the guards grabbed her rudely and forced her arms and legs apart. He patted her down with coarse professionalism. She felt his hands fumble at something on her belt. “Don’t move” he said tightly. He drew her combat knife out of its sheath and threw it to the ground.

“Do as he says” she told her escorts. They looked varying degrees of terrified, but they obeyed, holding themselves with the same kind of stiff stillness one might when one was about to receive a painful injection. Most of them obviously expected to be gang-raped on the spot, and were mentally preparing themselves for what was to come as best they could. The Patriarchist soldiers repeated the procedure while the tobacco-chewing soldier covered them with his rifle. It was over quickly, and (to the Scythians’ great relief and surprise) the Patriarchist soldiers were mostly professional in their searches.

“They’re clean” one of the Patriarchists said.

The tobacco-chewer gestured them forward with his rifle, his jaws still smacking together. It put Major Wynn in mind of a cow chewing on a cud. They were pushed toward what looked like an American APC, but with its weaponry replaced with antennae. The door was open and through it she glimpsed Patriarchist soldiers hunched over computer monitors. A command vehicle.

Two more Patriarchist soldiers guarded the command vehicle, as far back from the lines as it was. They stopped the Scythians and talked for a moment in low tones with Corporal Jeffers. After arguing a little they gestured for Major Wynn to go into the command vehicle, but held the rest of the Scythians back. The two guards covered her back with their rifles as she ducked in. Her escorts watched her worriedly. They plainly didn’t believe a word of what the Patriarchist Lieutenant had said about Americans treating their prisoners humanely. They expected nothing good to happen to her – or them.

One of the Patriarchist soldiers passed her, saluted, and whispered something into the ear of a slim, dark-skinned man. He wore a field uniform that looked a bit fancier than those around him. That would be their Colonel. His name tag read HARRIS.

Colonel Harris turned to face her. “Major Wynn” he said. “I understand you’re here to surrender your battalion?”

Major Wynn nodded. “Yes, conditionally. I want your word as an officer that they will not be killed, raped, forcibly married off, or sold into slavery upon their surrender.”

For a minute Colonel Harris looked as if he was struggling not to laugh. “Excuse me, forcibly married off, I…” his face straightened. “No Major, rest assured that we Americans don’t do things like that. Your – men - will be treated humanely in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Geneva Convention. You have my word as an officer and as a man of honor.”

“Most Scythians would say that’s a contradiction in terms. Man of honor” Major Wynn clarified when Colonel Harris raised his eyebrows. “But since the alternative is for my entire battalion to be wiped out I suppose I shall have to trust you. I’m under no delusions as to how the war’s going – unless there’s a miracle it’ll make no difference in the end whether they surrender or not, except to cause just a little more death than there probably has to be. And, uh, there’s one other thing you should know.”

“Yes?” Harris asked.

“Since we’re on the subject of unnecessary death I think you should know that the – well, no doubt you’re aware Francesco has a containment district, and I think you better seize it right away. I mean that, within the next two hours at most. You see the Cohors Amazona have orders…”

Any updates? I'm really enjoying this story tons!