Le Mort Homme
Moderator: LadyTevar
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Crazedwraith
- Emperor's Hand
- Posts: 11924
- Joined: 2003-04-10 03:45pm
- Location: Cheshire, England
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Pablo Sanchez
- Commissar
- Posts: 6998
- Joined: 2002-07-03 05:41pm
- Location: The Wasteland
Le Mort Homme
Chapter Five
A Hint of Nausea
The squad filed past the two soldiers guarding the hallway. The men laid prone just past the doorway and said nothing, they merely picked up their gun and went back into the other room, where the rest of their 'platoon' was waiting. One of them stopped in the doorway.
"How many grenades do you have, each?" he asked passively.
Atkins was the closest, so it fell to him to answer, "Ah, four or five. Why?"
The soldier shook his head and stepped through the doorway. Looking the other way, he explained, "You'll need more than that. Don't be afraid to take them from the dead."
Atkins shrugged and followed Private Morys down the corridor. He was part of that little fire team of four men, which was the standard number for room clearing. One man would burn down the door with his rifle on maximum, then the next would charge through, covering the two far corners. Another man immediately behind would sweep right, and the last would clear the left. The idea was to burst through with all possible speed in a flurry of firepower to intimidate and silence anyone waiting inside before they could shoot.
The teams advanced down the hall, picking doorways in turn. Three four-man teams stopped on the way, and the final team, which was Morys's, crouched just past that third door, covering the rooms yet to be cleared to prevent enemies from rushing out. Atkins breathed evenly and held the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at nothing in particular. There were short bursts of blaster fire behind him, and the three teams reported the offices as cleared. The squad moved back into the hall and Atkins advanced to the next door. The squad stopped and allowed the others to leapfrog past.
They waited until everyone was halted and ready. Peren took the breaching position and clicked the safety off. His A-280 was dialed to maximum power, and the little ammunition indicator on the side of his visor's holographic display read full charge.
Morys nodded. Atkins pulled the trigger and the weapon jerked back against his shoulder. The door ahead of him came apart in a shower of plasteel fragments that would probably cause significant harm to anyone on the other side of it. Morys was in first, followed by Corning and then Private Heller, whom Atkins had only just met.
"Clear!" Morys called from inside.
It seemed fairly easy so far, they hadn't even encountered any enemies yet. They continued down the corridor like this for several cycles of the fire team, until finally Morys turned up the hallway to complain.
"Sergeant... there isn't anybody here. What the fuck are we doing?" he called.
Davis stuck his head out of another empty room, "Where were you during training? This is standard room clearing practice. If you want to play games and skip every other door and then get shot in the back, get your own squad. Get your own army, for that matter."
"Someday I will, Sarge. Someday," Morys rejoined with mock wistfulness.
Then it was back to blowing up doors and charging full-bore into empty offices. The squad grew increasingly loose as time went on, but they weren't entirely lax quite yet. They were just bored.
"What the hell was that dumbass corporal in the other room talking about? There ain't shit down here," Morys said, sitting down just long enough to eat a ration bar and get a sip of water.
"And I suppose his platoon just tied their bootlaces together and fell down the stairs? Somebody shot them, and somebody must still be here, Bryan," Corning replied.
"You've just got all the answers, don't you, Adan. And don't use my first name, familiarity breeds contempt," Morys ordered sternly.
"As if you need help with that," Corning replied with a wink to Atkins.
"Alright, I've got point on the next fucking door instead of you, I'll show you how it's done," the corporal said, wiping the crumbs away from his mouth.
He stood and moved to the next door. The fireteam covering the hallway was scarcely at attention, holding their weapons loosely and glancing back and forth.
Corning took up the position that Morys should have filled on this turn, aiming his rifle at the door. Atkins would be the second through. Adan waited until everyone was ready, and then he blew open the door. Morys went right through the haze of smoke and into the room, with Peren right behind him.
Suddenly there was a very loud and high-pitched sort of sneeze, and half of Atkin's vision went dark behind a veil, red-tinged at the edges. Dimly he saw the corporal tumble to the ground in front of him, and a human shape in the office beyond moved to aim a rifle at him. Peren couldn't see well enough to aim precisely and he thought he felt blood running down his face. It was possible that he had been struck in the head--or even the eye, since he couldn't see anything out of his right.
He clicked the A-280 to full-auto and cut loose, not because he was panicking, but because he didn't have time to actually aim. The rifle spat out ten rounds per second and sent little fingers of energy slamming into the walls. The man on the other side of the room took at least two in the center of mass, and Atkins turned to the corner on his left. There was another enemy there, and he went down as well. Then Heller was in the room and liquidated someone in the right-hand corner.
Peren stood for a moment, then Corning barrelled into the office and knocked him aside.
Atkins turned and looked out the door, red bolts were going down the hall in both directions, and he dimly realized that there was a lot of blaster fire going on. He looked at Corning.
"Shit," the other private said, staring at Peren.
"Am I hit?"
"No... you're covered in bits and pieces of Morys," he answered, having to shout over the din, "half your visor is shut out and the whole right side of your face is covered in his blood. Get a bandage or something to wipe it off."
Peren dug into one of the pockets on his webbing and pulled out a field bandage. As he wiped it off, Corning moved back to the door and stuck his rifle out. He was looking down the corridor with the camera sights, and every once in a while he squeezed off a shot. There were a few muffled thumps of grenades going off, but all in the direction of the enemy. It was probable that they had already run out of grenades.
Peren had to use a little bit of water from his canteen to clean off the last streaks of blood on his visor. His vision had been restored and his face was clean, though he had a significant amount of gore on his right shoulder.
"Is Morys alright?" he asked Heller, who was attending to the corporal.
"He's dead," Heller shouted back, "but ya killed the fuck out of those other guys."
Atkins examined the scene. Morys was definitely dead. The man that had shot him had been crouching on the other side of the room, and the bolt had passed through his right shoulder and over Atkin's head at an angle, probably just missing the private but showering him in blood. In turn, that enemy had been cut almost in two at the waist, and the other one Atkins had bagged was scarcely recognizable as a humanoid.
With all that, Peren considered, he didn't feel as sick as he expected. Just as he completed that thought, he had a fleeting hint of nausea, but it passed quickly.
Corning was still at the door, firing intermittently down the hall at enemies that Atkins couldn't see. He turned back into the room.
Adan said, "The bastards showed up just now, they're right next door!"
"What happened to the--" Heller started to ask.
"The guys who were covering the hall are dead," Corning interrupted.
Peren thought about the implications of the enemy being in the office next door. Suddenly he realized that when he had gone cyclic, he had dealt a lot of damage to the walls. The rooms were really just prefabricated boxes and the walls were less than a foot of plastic and insulation. His bolts had punched ragged holes the size of his head clean into the next room. He was amazed that the republicans hadn't noticed yet.
He pulled a grenade off of his vest and walked up to the wall, then yanked the pin free and tossed it through on of the holes. The thump on the other end was follwed by a few screams. The walls were thick enough to turn fragments aside, but not nearly thick enough to resist blaster fire. He stuck the muzzle of his rifle through the crater and examined the view from the gun camera. The armor of the enemy soldiers was made of strong plasteel and had apparently allowed all but one of them to escape serious injury, though they were concussed and confused. The fourth one was laying unconscious on the floor and shooting blood in great spurts from his thigh. His femoral artery had probably been laid open, Peren thought cooly.
His rifle was still set to automatic, and he fired a few bursts at the disoriented men in the adjoining room. He cut the three down in moments. Heller got the idea and moved to the wall himself.
"Good shit, man," the other private said with a grin, then he turned back to Corning, still at the door, "I'm using a breaching charge, we're changing rooms."
"Do it," Corning replied.
Heller dug a breaching kit out of his pack, because the walls were too delicate to use a blaster--the bolt only went straight through. It was several thin sheets of high explosive with adhesive backing, and he used his vibroblade to slice it into strips of the correct dimensions. He then applied these to the wall as if drawing the outline of a door, each strip in contact with the next. Then he stuck the end of a detonator cord into on of the sheets and retreated to the other end of the room. Atkins followed.
Heller clicked the trigger on his detonator and the charges exploded. Atkin's helmet deadened the noise but his ears still rang, and a door-sized section of wall collapsed. He and Heller moved through, checking for any enemy survivors and finding none. Corning followed after a moment. The lights in the room had been shattered by the grenade and were flickering intermittently.
"Atkins, on me," Corning said. He turned to the door, priming a grenade. He threw it into the office across the hall, also occupied by enemies. Atkins tripped his own grenade and tossed it a second later. The staccato explosions ripped the other room apart.
At the same time, Heller dropped to one knee and fired a long full-auto burst through the wall into the next room down the hall. After thoroughly perforating the barrier, he let his A-280 hang by the strap while he pulled a grenade from his vest. Peren was just turning to him when a shot ripped through the divider and snapped Heller's head back farther than the neck was probably designed to flex. Shot through the right eye, Heller fell limp. Atkins heard a metallic snap and his blood ran cold. Heller had just pulled the pin from his grenade, and now the trigger had come off.
Peren dove across the floor as well as he could in full combat kit and grabbed the bomb. He rolled onto his side and whipped it sidearm through one of the many apertures in the wall. It exploded while still in the air, and Atkins quickly got to his feet and stuck his rifle through again. This time it appeared that everyone in the room had died, unluckily for them.
Corning was still at the door, and he turned back in, "I think they're running scared."
He fired a few shots down the hall, but the volume of fire had fallen significantly.
"Shouldn't we chase them?" Peren asked quickly.
"Take it easy... you killed a lot of people today," Corning pointed out, "and anyway we're very likely down half the squad. We'll take a breather unless Davis says otherwise."
Atkins looked around. Heller was dead, so was Morys; according to church doctrine Morys was burning in the fires of damnation and chances were that Heller had joined him. But as briefly as he had known them, they had been his friends, so he might as well throw them a few prayers and hope they could transition as high up as limbo. The concept of eternal damnation for earthly mistakes had always been distressing.
Corning leaned against the doorjamb and spared a glance for Atkins. He looked quite a sight: a gore-covered soldier kneeling on the floor, mumbling to himself, and fiddling with a string of beads. It was no wonder that religious types got so much crap in the modern age. They were asking for it. Corning was smarter, because he knew that the universe was utterly without meaning--only the action of people could fill that void. Atkins might as well be trying to divine the future in the entrails of farm animals.
"Shit," he said, "you know I enlisted just to get out from under my old man? I figured it'd be safe enough, how the fuck was I supposed to know they were going to fight a war?"
"That's what armies do," Atkins said helpfully.
Adan shook his head, "How nice that you feel comfortable saying spurious crap like that. I wonder if Heller felt the same way."
Atkins stood, "Take it easy."
----
Davis felt relieved, not just because the combat had taken a break, but also because his men were holding together better than could be expected. After a quick roll call he found that of the dozen men he had started with, he was down to six, two of them wounded. Well... one of them was wounded, anyway. The other, Corporal Harden was unable to stop weeping. He was doing it in a quiet way and it was evident that he was ashamed of himself, but all of Davis's admonitions to soldier up and stop crying were useless. The sergeant supposed that some people just reacted that way to mortal combat.
Other than that and Private Guye who had a small fragment lodged in his knuckles, his squad was intact. Still, unlike Atkins, he had known all of the dead men very well, had lived with them like brothers for months or even years. The regular army was like that. It wasn't time yet to think about what he could have done differently, but it would probably be impossible not to think about it eventually.
At any rate it would be impossible to continue moving forward with the squad at less than half strength. They would have to sit down and wait to be relieved. They had managed to secure one corridor in an office building that probably had thousands of them. It was a hell of a war to fight.
----
Grand Admiral Yuma frowned at the hologram, and the one-fourth scale projection of High Marshal Branning scowled back.
"Casualties at the end of the first day are severe. This damned sprawl is perfect for the defence, our spearheads get tangled and chewed up in a matter of hours. There's no maneuver, it's just a door-to-door slugging match," the general complained.
"I want solutions, not excuses," Yuma cut him off, "we've a schedule to keep."
Branning barked a clipped burst of military-man laughter, "Solutions? Get me every man you can spare. It takes a division to take a single block of apartments down here, what with the damnable vertical cross-connected buildings, with ten thousand levels each."
Yuma, "That's been done."
"Then get me some you can't spare. If you want to take Coruscant, you can either give me every warm body in the Imperial Army or you can turn the planet into a smooth ferrocrete parking lot," Branning said acidly, "you can preach at me all you want from up there, but down here the stories is different."
"Blasting isn't even an option to joke about, High Marshal, but we shall see what can be done to resolve the manpower situation," the admiral replied, then continued a little lamely, "Governor Timosniko has been saying something about raising Penal Divisions."
Branning snorted, "Hell, I can use some extra ammunition, but I need soldiers more... what about a draft?"
"A what?"
"You know, a draft of random able bodied males into the army. We did 'em in the Vong wars," Branning explained. Emergency levies of recruits had been carried out during emergencies in the war against the Vong, usually to quickly mobilize a given sector.
"I know what you're referring to. I don't see how it would help, we're already getting a lot of volunteers."
"I'm talking about an all out draft, through the whole Empire. Volunteers aren't going to cut it this time," the High Marhshal replied.
"That's never been done before. I don't think there would be sufficient popular support, people only put up with it when it was isolated to individual sectors and the danger was truly great," Yuma pointed out.
"Maybe, but this is a big war and we'll need a lot of men. And if we don't do it first, the Republicans will."
Yuma's face hardened, "I'll bring it up at my next conference with Overcommand, but I think they'll still be hoping for the war we thought we were fighting on the first of the month. You know, the one that was going to be over very soon? Moff Wergard will be quite smug."
"Well, we know better. Ground control out."
Chapter Five
A Hint of Nausea
The squad filed past the two soldiers guarding the hallway. The men laid prone just past the doorway and said nothing, they merely picked up their gun and went back into the other room, where the rest of their 'platoon' was waiting. One of them stopped in the doorway.
"How many grenades do you have, each?" he asked passively.
Atkins was the closest, so it fell to him to answer, "Ah, four or five. Why?"
The soldier shook his head and stepped through the doorway. Looking the other way, he explained, "You'll need more than that. Don't be afraid to take them from the dead."
Atkins shrugged and followed Private Morys down the corridor. He was part of that little fire team of four men, which was the standard number for room clearing. One man would burn down the door with his rifle on maximum, then the next would charge through, covering the two far corners. Another man immediately behind would sweep right, and the last would clear the left. The idea was to burst through with all possible speed in a flurry of firepower to intimidate and silence anyone waiting inside before they could shoot.
The teams advanced down the hall, picking doorways in turn. Three four-man teams stopped on the way, and the final team, which was Morys's, crouched just past that third door, covering the rooms yet to be cleared to prevent enemies from rushing out. Atkins breathed evenly and held the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at nothing in particular. There were short bursts of blaster fire behind him, and the three teams reported the offices as cleared. The squad moved back into the hall and Atkins advanced to the next door. The squad stopped and allowed the others to leapfrog past.
They waited until everyone was halted and ready. Peren took the breaching position and clicked the safety off. His A-280 was dialed to maximum power, and the little ammunition indicator on the side of his visor's holographic display read full charge.
Morys nodded. Atkins pulled the trigger and the weapon jerked back against his shoulder. The door ahead of him came apart in a shower of plasteel fragments that would probably cause significant harm to anyone on the other side of it. Morys was in first, followed by Corning and then Private Heller, whom Atkins had only just met.
"Clear!" Morys called from inside.
It seemed fairly easy so far, they hadn't even encountered any enemies yet. They continued down the corridor like this for several cycles of the fire team, until finally Morys turned up the hallway to complain.
"Sergeant... there isn't anybody here. What the fuck are we doing?" he called.
Davis stuck his head out of another empty room, "Where were you during training? This is standard room clearing practice. If you want to play games and skip every other door and then get shot in the back, get your own squad. Get your own army, for that matter."
"Someday I will, Sarge. Someday," Morys rejoined with mock wistfulness.
Then it was back to blowing up doors and charging full-bore into empty offices. The squad grew increasingly loose as time went on, but they weren't entirely lax quite yet. They were just bored.
"What the hell was that dumbass corporal in the other room talking about? There ain't shit down here," Morys said, sitting down just long enough to eat a ration bar and get a sip of water.
"And I suppose his platoon just tied their bootlaces together and fell down the stairs? Somebody shot them, and somebody must still be here, Bryan," Corning replied.
"You've just got all the answers, don't you, Adan. And don't use my first name, familiarity breeds contempt," Morys ordered sternly.
"As if you need help with that," Corning replied with a wink to Atkins.
"Alright, I've got point on the next fucking door instead of you, I'll show you how it's done," the corporal said, wiping the crumbs away from his mouth.
He stood and moved to the next door. The fireteam covering the hallway was scarcely at attention, holding their weapons loosely and glancing back and forth.
Corning took up the position that Morys should have filled on this turn, aiming his rifle at the door. Atkins would be the second through. Adan waited until everyone was ready, and then he blew open the door. Morys went right through the haze of smoke and into the room, with Peren right behind him.
Suddenly there was a very loud and high-pitched sort of sneeze, and half of Atkin's vision went dark behind a veil, red-tinged at the edges. Dimly he saw the corporal tumble to the ground in front of him, and a human shape in the office beyond moved to aim a rifle at him. Peren couldn't see well enough to aim precisely and he thought he felt blood running down his face. It was possible that he had been struck in the head--or even the eye, since he couldn't see anything out of his right.
He clicked the A-280 to full-auto and cut loose, not because he was panicking, but because he didn't have time to actually aim. The rifle spat out ten rounds per second and sent little fingers of energy slamming into the walls. The man on the other side of the room took at least two in the center of mass, and Atkins turned to the corner on his left. There was another enemy there, and he went down as well. Then Heller was in the room and liquidated someone in the right-hand corner.
Peren stood for a moment, then Corning barrelled into the office and knocked him aside.
Atkins turned and looked out the door, red bolts were going down the hall in both directions, and he dimly realized that there was a lot of blaster fire going on. He looked at Corning.
"Shit," the other private said, staring at Peren.
"Am I hit?"
"No... you're covered in bits and pieces of Morys," he answered, having to shout over the din, "half your visor is shut out and the whole right side of your face is covered in his blood. Get a bandage or something to wipe it off."
Peren dug into one of the pockets on his webbing and pulled out a field bandage. As he wiped it off, Corning moved back to the door and stuck his rifle out. He was looking down the corridor with the camera sights, and every once in a while he squeezed off a shot. There were a few muffled thumps of grenades going off, but all in the direction of the enemy. It was probable that they had already run out of grenades.
Peren had to use a little bit of water from his canteen to clean off the last streaks of blood on his visor. His vision had been restored and his face was clean, though he had a significant amount of gore on his right shoulder.
"Is Morys alright?" he asked Heller, who was attending to the corporal.
"He's dead," Heller shouted back, "but ya killed the fuck out of those other guys."
Atkins examined the scene. Morys was definitely dead. The man that had shot him had been crouching on the other side of the room, and the bolt had passed through his right shoulder and over Atkin's head at an angle, probably just missing the private but showering him in blood. In turn, that enemy had been cut almost in two at the waist, and the other one Atkins had bagged was scarcely recognizable as a humanoid.
With all that, Peren considered, he didn't feel as sick as he expected. Just as he completed that thought, he had a fleeting hint of nausea, but it passed quickly.
Corning was still at the door, firing intermittently down the hall at enemies that Atkins couldn't see. He turned back into the room.
Adan said, "The bastards showed up just now, they're right next door!"
"What happened to the--" Heller started to ask.
"The guys who were covering the hall are dead," Corning interrupted.
Peren thought about the implications of the enemy being in the office next door. Suddenly he realized that when he had gone cyclic, he had dealt a lot of damage to the walls. The rooms were really just prefabricated boxes and the walls were less than a foot of plastic and insulation. His bolts had punched ragged holes the size of his head clean into the next room. He was amazed that the republicans hadn't noticed yet.
He pulled a grenade off of his vest and walked up to the wall, then yanked the pin free and tossed it through on of the holes. The thump on the other end was follwed by a few screams. The walls were thick enough to turn fragments aside, but not nearly thick enough to resist blaster fire. He stuck the muzzle of his rifle through the crater and examined the view from the gun camera. The armor of the enemy soldiers was made of strong plasteel and had apparently allowed all but one of them to escape serious injury, though they were concussed and confused. The fourth one was laying unconscious on the floor and shooting blood in great spurts from his thigh. His femoral artery had probably been laid open, Peren thought cooly.
His rifle was still set to automatic, and he fired a few bursts at the disoriented men in the adjoining room. He cut the three down in moments. Heller got the idea and moved to the wall himself.
"Good shit, man," the other private said with a grin, then he turned back to Corning, still at the door, "I'm using a breaching charge, we're changing rooms."
"Do it," Corning replied.
Heller dug a breaching kit out of his pack, because the walls were too delicate to use a blaster--the bolt only went straight through. It was several thin sheets of high explosive with adhesive backing, and he used his vibroblade to slice it into strips of the correct dimensions. He then applied these to the wall as if drawing the outline of a door, each strip in contact with the next. Then he stuck the end of a detonator cord into on of the sheets and retreated to the other end of the room. Atkins followed.
Heller clicked the trigger on his detonator and the charges exploded. Atkin's helmet deadened the noise but his ears still rang, and a door-sized section of wall collapsed. He and Heller moved through, checking for any enemy survivors and finding none. Corning followed after a moment. The lights in the room had been shattered by the grenade and were flickering intermittently.
"Atkins, on me," Corning said. He turned to the door, priming a grenade. He threw it into the office across the hall, also occupied by enemies. Atkins tripped his own grenade and tossed it a second later. The staccato explosions ripped the other room apart.
At the same time, Heller dropped to one knee and fired a long full-auto burst through the wall into the next room down the hall. After thoroughly perforating the barrier, he let his A-280 hang by the strap while he pulled a grenade from his vest. Peren was just turning to him when a shot ripped through the divider and snapped Heller's head back farther than the neck was probably designed to flex. Shot through the right eye, Heller fell limp. Atkins heard a metallic snap and his blood ran cold. Heller had just pulled the pin from his grenade, and now the trigger had come off.
Peren dove across the floor as well as he could in full combat kit and grabbed the bomb. He rolled onto his side and whipped it sidearm through one of the many apertures in the wall. It exploded while still in the air, and Atkins quickly got to his feet and stuck his rifle through again. This time it appeared that everyone in the room had died, unluckily for them.
Corning was still at the door, and he turned back in, "I think they're running scared."
He fired a few shots down the hall, but the volume of fire had fallen significantly.
"Shouldn't we chase them?" Peren asked quickly.
"Take it easy... you killed a lot of people today," Corning pointed out, "and anyway we're very likely down half the squad. We'll take a breather unless Davis says otherwise."
Atkins looked around. Heller was dead, so was Morys; according to church doctrine Morys was burning in the fires of damnation and chances were that Heller had joined him. But as briefly as he had known them, they had been his friends, so he might as well throw them a few prayers and hope they could transition as high up as limbo. The concept of eternal damnation for earthly mistakes had always been distressing.
Corning leaned against the doorjamb and spared a glance for Atkins. He looked quite a sight: a gore-covered soldier kneeling on the floor, mumbling to himself, and fiddling with a string of beads. It was no wonder that religious types got so much crap in the modern age. They were asking for it. Corning was smarter, because he knew that the universe was utterly without meaning--only the action of people could fill that void. Atkins might as well be trying to divine the future in the entrails of farm animals.
"Shit," he said, "you know I enlisted just to get out from under my old man? I figured it'd be safe enough, how the fuck was I supposed to know they were going to fight a war?"
"That's what armies do," Atkins said helpfully.
Adan shook his head, "How nice that you feel comfortable saying spurious crap like that. I wonder if Heller felt the same way."
Atkins stood, "Take it easy."
----
Davis felt relieved, not just because the combat had taken a break, but also because his men were holding together better than could be expected. After a quick roll call he found that of the dozen men he had started with, he was down to six, two of them wounded. Well... one of them was wounded, anyway. The other, Corporal Harden was unable to stop weeping. He was doing it in a quiet way and it was evident that he was ashamed of himself, but all of Davis's admonitions to soldier up and stop crying were useless. The sergeant supposed that some people just reacted that way to mortal combat.
Other than that and Private Guye who had a small fragment lodged in his knuckles, his squad was intact. Still, unlike Atkins, he had known all of the dead men very well, had lived with them like brothers for months or even years. The regular army was like that. It wasn't time yet to think about what he could have done differently, but it would probably be impossible not to think about it eventually.
At any rate it would be impossible to continue moving forward with the squad at less than half strength. They would have to sit down and wait to be relieved. They had managed to secure one corridor in an office building that probably had thousands of them. It was a hell of a war to fight.
----
Grand Admiral Yuma frowned at the hologram, and the one-fourth scale projection of High Marshal Branning scowled back.
"Casualties at the end of the first day are severe. This damned sprawl is perfect for the defence, our spearheads get tangled and chewed up in a matter of hours. There's no maneuver, it's just a door-to-door slugging match," the general complained.
"I want solutions, not excuses," Yuma cut him off, "we've a schedule to keep."
Branning barked a clipped burst of military-man laughter, "Solutions? Get me every man you can spare. It takes a division to take a single block of apartments down here, what with the damnable vertical cross-connected buildings, with ten thousand levels each."
Yuma, "That's been done."
"Then get me some you can't spare. If you want to take Coruscant, you can either give me every warm body in the Imperial Army or you can turn the planet into a smooth ferrocrete parking lot," Branning said acidly, "you can preach at me all you want from up there, but down here the stories is different."
"Blasting isn't even an option to joke about, High Marshal, but we shall see what can be done to resolve the manpower situation," the admiral replied, then continued a little lamely, "Governor Timosniko has been saying something about raising Penal Divisions."
Branning snorted, "Hell, I can use some extra ammunition, but I need soldiers more... what about a draft?"
"A what?"
"You know, a draft of random able bodied males into the army. We did 'em in the Vong wars," Branning explained. Emergency levies of recruits had been carried out during emergencies in the war against the Vong, usually to quickly mobilize a given sector.
"I know what you're referring to. I don't see how it would help, we're already getting a lot of volunteers."
"I'm talking about an all out draft, through the whole Empire. Volunteers aren't going to cut it this time," the High Marhshal replied.
"That's never been done before. I don't think there would be sufficient popular support, people only put up with it when it was isolated to individual sectors and the danger was truly great," Yuma pointed out.
"Maybe, but this is a big war and we'll need a lot of men. And if we don't do it first, the Republicans will."
Yuma's face hardened, "I'll bring it up at my next conference with Overcommand, but I think they'll still be hoping for the war we thought we were fighting on the first of the month. You know, the one that was going to be over very soon? Moff Wergard will be quite smug."
"Well, we know better. Ground control out."
"I am gravely disappointed. Again you have made me unleash my dogs of war."
--The Lord Humungus
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Crazedwraith
- Emperor's Hand
- Posts: 11924
- Joined: 2003-04-10 03:45pm
- Location: Cheshire, England
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Pablo Sanchez
- Commissar
- Posts: 6998
- Joined: 2002-07-03 05:41pm
- Location: The Wasteland
It's always better to read from the beginning... and yes, it is his first name.Crazedwraith wrote:1st post now to read.
EDIT: As always an interesting read. Is "Peren" Atkins 1st name or something? I'm slightly confused about that.
"I am gravely disappointed. Again you have made me unleash my dogs of war."
--The Lord Humungus
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Crazedwraith
- Emperor's Hand
- Posts: 11924
- Joined: 2003-04-10 03:45pm
- Location: Cheshire, England
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Singular Quartet
- Sith Marauder
- Posts: 3896
- Joined: 2002-07-04 05:33pm
- Location: This is sky. It is made of FUCKING and LIMIT.
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Crazedwraith
- Emperor's Hand
- Posts: 11924
- Joined: 2003-04-10 03:45pm
- Location: Cheshire, England
Just re-reading Suicide Squad at the moment. Is this the same battle that the documentry's about? If so will we get to see the orginal Pablo Sanchez?
Last edited by Crazedwraith on 2004-04-08 05:12pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Pablo Sanchez
- Commissar
- Posts: 6998
- Joined: 2002-07-03 05:41pm
- Location: The Wasteland
This fic is a prequel, but it's more serious in tone and won't feature Denizen guest stars... but since I plan to explore the same territory, similar characters and events can't be ruled out. I might allude to the character, but I think it would take away from the 'fic if I use my own name in it again.Crazedwraith wrote:Just re-reading Suicide Squad at the moment. Is this the same battle that the documentry's about? If so will we get to see the orginal Paplo Sanchez?
"I am gravely disappointed. Again you have made me unleash my dogs of war."
--The Lord Humungus
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Sea Skimmer
- Yankee Capitalist Air Pirate
- Posts: 37389
- Joined: 2002-07-03 11:49pm
- Location: Passchendaele City, HAB
Fun, and this quality of construction calls for yet another WW2 tactic, set up a heavy machine gun or E-WEB in this case and simply sweep your fire through a building from the outside. Though in this case a corner of the structure will do. Destructive, but very effective and cheep if you known the enemy is inside.realized that when he had gone cyclic, he had dealt a lot of damage to the walls. The rooms were really just prefabricated boxes and the walls were less than a foot of plastic and insulation. His bolts had punched ragged holes the size of his head clean into the next room.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
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Pablo Sanchez
- Commissar
- Posts: 6998
- Joined: 2002-07-03 05:41pm
- Location: The Wasteland
Le Mort Homme
Chapter Six
Reconnaissance in Force
"You're shitting me. Tell me you're shitting me," Davis ordered the runner.
The private first class shook his head, "The Captain's been ordered to withdraw the company, because the Major--I mean Captain Algun--got orders to withdraw from the Colonel, who got his orders from... you get the idea. I think the whole division is pulling out, probably the whole army group."
"Fine. Major Prote's dead?" the sergeant asked.
"Along with his staff and most of a company. Some bloody explosive booby trap. I gotta get back to Arpad now," the runner concluded. He turned on his heel and trotted away. All-frequencies jamming, electromagnetic pulses resulting from orbital fire missions, and the thick ferrocrete construction of the environment all contributed to make the troopers' commlinks all but useless. On the morning of the third day on Coruscant, the Empire's brave landing forces had been reduced to the primitive expedient of messengers. The only consolation was that the Republic had to do the same, and they didn't even get the benefit of controlling the surface.
Davis passed the word along to the pathetic remains of his platoon. Out of the fifty men who had constituted the band during the landing, only twenty-five remained. Because of the lethality of modern war, almost all of the casualties had been fatalities; a man hit solidly by a blaster bolt was dead on impact. Lieutenant Pierce himself had been killed, leaving the sergeant in command. Davis was not entirely comfortable with the idea.
Now, his first major order to the platoon was to withdraw from the office blocks they had won at such great cost. Clearly someone had made a mistake. The sergeant hoped it wasn't him.
"Alright, the order's come from above to pull out," he called on the platoon comm. At that short range the helmet radios could punch through the walls so that everyone could hear him. Fortunately, radio discipline was well-ingrained and he didn't have to hear the curses and moans of disbelief.
Peren, several rooms away, didn't utter any such words, but he did have some to hear.
Corning spat on the floor. "What's the use, eh? Send us down, pull us back. Shoot us from orbit. Fuck it."
The private had gotten around three hours of sleep in the past 50 hours and wasn't on his best behavior. Peren could sympathize, he was as tired. He struggled to his feet and out into the corridor. The platoon walked out of the rooms they had fought hard to secure and made their way to the surface. The bodies that had formerly graced the stairs had been removed, but the stains remained. Peren tried not to step in the places where there had been corpses, but they had simply been too thick in places.
When they finally made it to the surface, the soldiers were herded back down into a nearby tubeway station, already packed with soldiers from their regiment. Corning sighed.
"This is probably way too many people for this station," he said, "try to breathe as little as possible. Reminds me of home."
Atkins gave a little grunt of understanding. He was from a far less populous system than Coruscant and there was little that could have been more unlike his home than this ferrocrete hive. There was a slight whine and crackle as the platforms magnetics warmed up in preparation to decelerate the train, and it was in the station almost before anyone saw it coming. The doors opened up and everyone trooped in. It was standing room only, but Atkins and Corning ended up next to the wall and were lucky enough to be able to lean against it. The tube's magnetics warmed up again and Peren looked out the window.
The train zipped out of the station in less time than it would have taken him to blink, and then they were in a gray tube that allowed the eye no sense of movement, which was just as well. They were now going far to fast for anyone to discern any details there might have been. Without acceleration compensators they would have been a red stew filling the last car. An express tubeway on Coruscant could circumnavigate the globe in about 30 minutes.
Come to think of it, Peren had no idea where the division was heading. They might have been going a few score of kilometers or around the planet, for all he knew. There was lively chatter throughout the cars, and presently they were at their destination.
The soldiers dismounted the vehicle and moved back up to the surface. A captain from another company was next to Peren and rolled up his sleeve to glance at his chronometer.
"Four, three, two, one," he counted down, but nothing happened. The officer chuckled nervously and smiled at Atkins, "Damn navy, eh?"
A few seconds later lines of green light began sleeting down from space in every direction. It was impossible to see where any of them were landing from where he was, but Atkins knew that somebody was catching hell. In many places over the horizon there were gigatons of energy being released.
Corning laughed and punched Peren on the shoulder. "I'll bet you thought we were invading Coruscant. No, this was nothing but a reconnaissance in force. A multi-billion man reconnaissance in force." He stopped laughing and sighed, "It's all so damn _big._"
The captain smiled serenely at the display of firepower. "We'll be going to secure the Palace zone spaceport next. It's time for the big push."
Atkins grunted in an approximation of approval. Officers were always saying stuff like that.
----
"We've cleared several centers of enemy resistance with that last bombardment. I think it ought to allow landings in force against some of the more important tourist attractions down here," Branning's hologram explained with an entirely predatory smile.
"Tourist attractions?" Grand Admiral Yuma asked.
Branning nodded, "There's nothing else to call them. You've ordered me to take the Coruscant Centurions' blastball stadium intact. What legitimate military purpose does that serve?"
Yuma considered, "Well... hearts and minds."
"Uh-huh. What have you been doing about my manpower problem?" the general demanded.
"As much as possible. My proposal for a referendum to establish a commission to begin the draft study is being considered by the Moff Council," Yuma said.
"Political bullshit won't get me the men I need."
"Watch your tone and your language, High Marshal. Just because you're on the ground, it doesn't give you the right to abuse an official channel."
Branning reddened and his jaw tightened, but he suppressed his snarl of rage, "I apologize, Admiral. Things are very tense down here."
"As long as it doesn't happen again. At any rate, the Moff Council is also looking into the possibility of establishing a defense board for the purpose of managing wartime matters in a more efficient manner. That should help."
"Mmm. I've opened a path to the old Imperial Palace. If all goes well, we ought to be inside within a week. Expect it to take a month, at least. Ground control, over and out."
The hologram winked off as Branning cut the connection. Yuma sighed and turned back to the primary display.
"Enemy fleet movements," he ordered.
Rear Admiral Pirtra tapped a few buttons and the relevant hologram appeared, "They've ceased their offensives along the Outer and Central Rim axes of advance and pulled their fleets out. Naval intelligence suggests that they're going to defend their shipyards from our raiding groups until they can make good their losses, at which point they'll launch a major counteroffensive."
"We'll be ready. What does the Ubiqtorate say?"
"Nothing," Pirtra reported.
'Mysterious bastards,' Yuma thought, rubbing his eyes, which had begun burning again. He hadn't slept since kickoff and was running on a combination of stimulants and devotion to duty. He said, "You're dismissed, Admiral Pirtra. Six hours for rest and relaxation, then we're going to Yaga Minor to sell the draft to the Moffs."
"Thank you sir. But don't you think that you should get some sleep as well?" the other man asked sympathetically.
"I have to go over the reports from our attack on the Corellian Free State," the Grand Admiral replied, "When _my_ superiors tell me to rest, I'll consider taking a break."
----
The sound of blaster fire and explosions got louder and louder as the mixed platoon drew closer to the spaceport. Sergeant Davis spit his wad of combat gum into his hand. The fruit-flavored, amphetamine-laced lump of chewy artificial material had lost its edge and its flavor, but the chemical traces would keep him awake and alert for a few more hours.
He looked around the cramped bed of the speeder truck at the forty or so men clinging to the hastily welded handholds. The truck had originally belonged to a ritzy garbage disposal service for the wealthy, which actually _picked up the trash_ and transported it away. Only 'common' people put their refuse down the chutes to their neighborhood recycling centers, rich people just threw their trash away. Recycling involved saving for the future, and saving for the future had the subtle stink of poverty about it.
Of course, the rich people had fled the planet and so had the company formerly in possession of this fleet of speeder trucks, and the Empire needed all the transportation they could get. So he was riding in an ex-garbage truck with the rest of his platoon.
Davis had decided that things were getting really bad. Shortly after reaching the rally point after the big bombardment, he'd been handed twenty privates from some division that had gotten sliced up at a grain elevator. Usually the army tried to maintain the integrity of their individual forces, because a bunch of guys from core planets could identify more easily with eachother than with Corellians, for example. Davis wished he had been given a bunch of Corellians. Core dwellers like the Fusilliers naturally thought cooperatively, did their duty with a minimum of fuss, and could almost always be trusted to do things right and proper, whereas Corellians were talkative braggards who thought only as individuals and all wanted to be heroes. Davis hated Corellians, but he _wished_ he had been given Corellians.
Instead he had been saddled with ex-members of the 290th Forest Infantry, from the Outer Rim. Rimtrash. Stupid farmboys from scuzzball planets the Imperial Survey had taken one look at and decided that they'd seen enough. The sergeant looked around at the soldiers clustered near the egress port (which was actually a just whole that had been sliced from trash container with plasma torches). They were all gawking at the skyscrapers, which were estimated to be "really tall" and "wow, totally tall." Davis flicked his bit of gum past their heads and into open space, allowing it to become his contribution to urban art when it hit the ground kilometers below and formed an abstract pattern.
"Hey, yokels, if you're going to look out the rear port then you should at least do us the courtesy of trying to spot the enemy instead of staring like stupid tourists," Davis said.
"I think I saw one, sir," one of the earnest young men said.
"What?" the sergeant pushed his way through to stand by the door, "Where?"
The soldier shrugged, "That apartment building. I think I lost sight of him."
Davis glanced at the man's name tag. A Private Cam Cloudwatcher. That was another thing he disliked about Rimtrash, they all had stupid names, like Cloudwatcher and Darklighter and Skywalker. Luke Skywalker might have been a Jedi Master but he still had a name that made him sound an asshole. Davis didn't feel like using the name Cloudwatcher, it felt stupid even just to _say_ it.
"Uh... Cam? Are you sure you saw something? And it wasn't just a civvie?" he asked.
Cam nodded, "He had a rocket projector."
There were several dozen garbage speeders in the convoy, transporting what amounted to just about two full companies. Their particular speeder fell somewhere in the middle, and the one immediately behind it was struck squarely by an armor-piercing rocket. The shaped charge explosive burned a hole into the jerry-rigged passenger compartment and filled the interior with burning gas. Flames shot out the back of it and the anti-gravity drive died, leaving the truck to plummet down and join Davis's wad of gum.
"I see him again," Private Cloudwatcher said, "he's at the base of that line of rocket exhaust."
"For fuck's sake!" Davis hissed as he grabbed convulsively at the nearest handhold with his right and caught hold of Cam's belt with his left. A half second later the truck jerked wildly as the driver threw it into a wild evasive pattern. The soldier next to Cam fell through the door and into the abyss with a shriek, and Cloudwatcher would have joined him if the sergeant hadn't been so quick thinking.
----
"Shit shit shit shit shit..." In the pilot's seat, Corning whispered frantically and constantly as he through the truck into maneuvers which it had never been designed to perform. Grey and white rocket contrails traced just meters away.
Atkins was thinking more clearly, "They've fired their first volley--now that there's no point in their hiding anymore, they'll start firing guided missiles."
"Huh?" Corning asked inarticulately.
"Get us to ground," Atkins commanded.
Corning started to protest, but the truck just ahead of them blossomed into flames. "Fuck it."
He jerked the steering yoke hard to his left and sliced across towards a closed parking dock built into one of the apartment complexes. It was a thick durasteel door and locked tight, but the truck had enough mass to get through on momentum. The body of the vehicle deformed and the doors screamed in protest as they were torn from their moorings. The drive unit failed and the speeder slid twenty meters across the concrete floor before coming to rest against a duracrete pillar.
Atkins looked over at Corning, "You alright?"
"I'm not hurt. Just my pride," he replied, shifting his weight with a wince, "and my knees."
Peren's door was too derformed to open, so they both tumbled out of the pilot's side. In the back, Sergeant Davis groaned and pushed ineffectually at Private Cloudwatcher's body, which was pinning him to the floor as the rest of the platoon piled out of the truck. His left arm ached as he did this. He had probably wrenched it badly preventing the private was tumbling into the abyss, but at least it wasn't dislocated. He had also bashed his helmet into the floor after the collision, so his head hurt, and so did his neck.
"Get the fuck off of me," Davis moaned.
Cam got to his feet and hopped out onto to ferrocrete floor. Davis limped down next to him. His knee hurt. Come to think of it, everything hurt.
"Did you get the serial of the star destroyer that fell on me?" he asked.
Cloudwatcher looked at him in awe, "You saved my life, sarge."
"Don't remind me," he told the kid, then did a double take, "where's your helmet?"
Cam reached up and tussled his hair, "I guess I lost it. Should I go look for it?"
"Fuck it," Davis ordered. He took a quick look around. They were in a large, very stereotypical parking garage--if you'd seen one, you'd seen them all. Ferrocrete floor, cieling walls, and support pillars; painted slots to park in, and speeders to fill them. Very nice speeders, in this case. This had evidently been a rich building.
"Right!" Davis shouted, "The enemy is upstairs, shooting up our comrades. We're going to shoot him up in return. Get into your squads and get ready to move."
Cloudwatcher was carefully examining some luxury airspeeder, so Sergeant Davis slapped him on the back of the head. "You're with me. Come on."
Chapter Six
Reconnaissance in Force
"You're shitting me. Tell me you're shitting me," Davis ordered the runner.
The private first class shook his head, "The Captain's been ordered to withdraw the company, because the Major--I mean Captain Algun--got orders to withdraw from the Colonel, who got his orders from... you get the idea. I think the whole division is pulling out, probably the whole army group."
"Fine. Major Prote's dead?" the sergeant asked.
"Along with his staff and most of a company. Some bloody explosive booby trap. I gotta get back to Arpad now," the runner concluded. He turned on his heel and trotted away. All-frequencies jamming, electromagnetic pulses resulting from orbital fire missions, and the thick ferrocrete construction of the environment all contributed to make the troopers' commlinks all but useless. On the morning of the third day on Coruscant, the Empire's brave landing forces had been reduced to the primitive expedient of messengers. The only consolation was that the Republic had to do the same, and they didn't even get the benefit of controlling the surface.
Davis passed the word along to the pathetic remains of his platoon. Out of the fifty men who had constituted the band during the landing, only twenty-five remained. Because of the lethality of modern war, almost all of the casualties had been fatalities; a man hit solidly by a blaster bolt was dead on impact. Lieutenant Pierce himself had been killed, leaving the sergeant in command. Davis was not entirely comfortable with the idea.
Now, his first major order to the platoon was to withdraw from the office blocks they had won at such great cost. Clearly someone had made a mistake. The sergeant hoped it wasn't him.
"Alright, the order's come from above to pull out," he called on the platoon comm. At that short range the helmet radios could punch through the walls so that everyone could hear him. Fortunately, radio discipline was well-ingrained and he didn't have to hear the curses and moans of disbelief.
Peren, several rooms away, didn't utter any such words, but he did have some to hear.
Corning spat on the floor. "What's the use, eh? Send us down, pull us back. Shoot us from orbit. Fuck it."
The private had gotten around three hours of sleep in the past 50 hours and wasn't on his best behavior. Peren could sympathize, he was as tired. He struggled to his feet and out into the corridor. The platoon walked out of the rooms they had fought hard to secure and made their way to the surface. The bodies that had formerly graced the stairs had been removed, but the stains remained. Peren tried not to step in the places where there had been corpses, but they had simply been too thick in places.
When they finally made it to the surface, the soldiers were herded back down into a nearby tubeway station, already packed with soldiers from their regiment. Corning sighed.
"This is probably way too many people for this station," he said, "try to breathe as little as possible. Reminds me of home."
Atkins gave a little grunt of understanding. He was from a far less populous system than Coruscant and there was little that could have been more unlike his home than this ferrocrete hive. There was a slight whine and crackle as the platforms magnetics warmed up in preparation to decelerate the train, and it was in the station almost before anyone saw it coming. The doors opened up and everyone trooped in. It was standing room only, but Atkins and Corning ended up next to the wall and were lucky enough to be able to lean against it. The tube's magnetics warmed up again and Peren looked out the window.
The train zipped out of the station in less time than it would have taken him to blink, and then they were in a gray tube that allowed the eye no sense of movement, which was just as well. They were now going far to fast for anyone to discern any details there might have been. Without acceleration compensators they would have been a red stew filling the last car. An express tubeway on Coruscant could circumnavigate the globe in about 30 minutes.
Come to think of it, Peren had no idea where the division was heading. They might have been going a few score of kilometers or around the planet, for all he knew. There was lively chatter throughout the cars, and presently they were at their destination.
The soldiers dismounted the vehicle and moved back up to the surface. A captain from another company was next to Peren and rolled up his sleeve to glance at his chronometer.
"Four, three, two, one," he counted down, but nothing happened. The officer chuckled nervously and smiled at Atkins, "Damn navy, eh?"
A few seconds later lines of green light began sleeting down from space in every direction. It was impossible to see where any of them were landing from where he was, but Atkins knew that somebody was catching hell. In many places over the horizon there were gigatons of energy being released.
Corning laughed and punched Peren on the shoulder. "I'll bet you thought we were invading Coruscant. No, this was nothing but a reconnaissance in force. A multi-billion man reconnaissance in force." He stopped laughing and sighed, "It's all so damn _big._"
The captain smiled serenely at the display of firepower. "We'll be going to secure the Palace zone spaceport next. It's time for the big push."
Atkins grunted in an approximation of approval. Officers were always saying stuff like that.
----
"We've cleared several centers of enemy resistance with that last bombardment. I think it ought to allow landings in force against some of the more important tourist attractions down here," Branning's hologram explained with an entirely predatory smile.
"Tourist attractions?" Grand Admiral Yuma asked.
Branning nodded, "There's nothing else to call them. You've ordered me to take the Coruscant Centurions' blastball stadium intact. What legitimate military purpose does that serve?"
Yuma considered, "Well... hearts and minds."
"Uh-huh. What have you been doing about my manpower problem?" the general demanded.
"As much as possible. My proposal for a referendum to establish a commission to begin the draft study is being considered by the Moff Council," Yuma said.
"Political bullshit won't get me the men I need."
"Watch your tone and your language, High Marshal. Just because you're on the ground, it doesn't give you the right to abuse an official channel."
Branning reddened and his jaw tightened, but he suppressed his snarl of rage, "I apologize, Admiral. Things are very tense down here."
"As long as it doesn't happen again. At any rate, the Moff Council is also looking into the possibility of establishing a defense board for the purpose of managing wartime matters in a more efficient manner. That should help."
"Mmm. I've opened a path to the old Imperial Palace. If all goes well, we ought to be inside within a week. Expect it to take a month, at least. Ground control, over and out."
The hologram winked off as Branning cut the connection. Yuma sighed and turned back to the primary display.
"Enemy fleet movements," he ordered.
Rear Admiral Pirtra tapped a few buttons and the relevant hologram appeared, "They've ceased their offensives along the Outer and Central Rim axes of advance and pulled their fleets out. Naval intelligence suggests that they're going to defend their shipyards from our raiding groups until they can make good their losses, at which point they'll launch a major counteroffensive."
"We'll be ready. What does the Ubiqtorate say?"
"Nothing," Pirtra reported.
'Mysterious bastards,' Yuma thought, rubbing his eyes, which had begun burning again. He hadn't slept since kickoff and was running on a combination of stimulants and devotion to duty. He said, "You're dismissed, Admiral Pirtra. Six hours for rest and relaxation, then we're going to Yaga Minor to sell the draft to the Moffs."
"Thank you sir. But don't you think that you should get some sleep as well?" the other man asked sympathetically.
"I have to go over the reports from our attack on the Corellian Free State," the Grand Admiral replied, "When _my_ superiors tell me to rest, I'll consider taking a break."
----
The sound of blaster fire and explosions got louder and louder as the mixed platoon drew closer to the spaceport. Sergeant Davis spit his wad of combat gum into his hand. The fruit-flavored, amphetamine-laced lump of chewy artificial material had lost its edge and its flavor, but the chemical traces would keep him awake and alert for a few more hours.
He looked around the cramped bed of the speeder truck at the forty or so men clinging to the hastily welded handholds. The truck had originally belonged to a ritzy garbage disposal service for the wealthy, which actually _picked up the trash_ and transported it away. Only 'common' people put their refuse down the chutes to their neighborhood recycling centers, rich people just threw their trash away. Recycling involved saving for the future, and saving for the future had the subtle stink of poverty about it.
Of course, the rich people had fled the planet and so had the company formerly in possession of this fleet of speeder trucks, and the Empire needed all the transportation they could get. So he was riding in an ex-garbage truck with the rest of his platoon.
Davis had decided that things were getting really bad. Shortly after reaching the rally point after the big bombardment, he'd been handed twenty privates from some division that had gotten sliced up at a grain elevator. Usually the army tried to maintain the integrity of their individual forces, because a bunch of guys from core planets could identify more easily with eachother than with Corellians, for example. Davis wished he had been given a bunch of Corellians. Core dwellers like the Fusilliers naturally thought cooperatively, did their duty with a minimum of fuss, and could almost always be trusted to do things right and proper, whereas Corellians were talkative braggards who thought only as individuals and all wanted to be heroes. Davis hated Corellians, but he _wished_ he had been given Corellians.
Instead he had been saddled with ex-members of the 290th Forest Infantry, from the Outer Rim. Rimtrash. Stupid farmboys from scuzzball planets the Imperial Survey had taken one look at and decided that they'd seen enough. The sergeant looked around at the soldiers clustered near the egress port (which was actually a just whole that had been sliced from trash container with plasma torches). They were all gawking at the skyscrapers, which were estimated to be "really tall" and "wow, totally tall." Davis flicked his bit of gum past their heads and into open space, allowing it to become his contribution to urban art when it hit the ground kilometers below and formed an abstract pattern.
"Hey, yokels, if you're going to look out the rear port then you should at least do us the courtesy of trying to spot the enemy instead of staring like stupid tourists," Davis said.
"I think I saw one, sir," one of the earnest young men said.
"What?" the sergeant pushed his way through to stand by the door, "Where?"
The soldier shrugged, "That apartment building. I think I lost sight of him."
Davis glanced at the man's name tag. A Private Cam Cloudwatcher. That was another thing he disliked about Rimtrash, they all had stupid names, like Cloudwatcher and Darklighter and Skywalker. Luke Skywalker might have been a Jedi Master but he still had a name that made him sound an asshole. Davis didn't feel like using the name Cloudwatcher, it felt stupid even just to _say_ it.
"Uh... Cam? Are you sure you saw something? And it wasn't just a civvie?" he asked.
Cam nodded, "He had a rocket projector."
There were several dozen garbage speeders in the convoy, transporting what amounted to just about two full companies. Their particular speeder fell somewhere in the middle, and the one immediately behind it was struck squarely by an armor-piercing rocket. The shaped charge explosive burned a hole into the jerry-rigged passenger compartment and filled the interior with burning gas. Flames shot out the back of it and the anti-gravity drive died, leaving the truck to plummet down and join Davis's wad of gum.
"I see him again," Private Cloudwatcher said, "he's at the base of that line of rocket exhaust."
"For fuck's sake!" Davis hissed as he grabbed convulsively at the nearest handhold with his right and caught hold of Cam's belt with his left. A half second later the truck jerked wildly as the driver threw it into a wild evasive pattern. The soldier next to Cam fell through the door and into the abyss with a shriek, and Cloudwatcher would have joined him if the sergeant hadn't been so quick thinking.
----
"Shit shit shit shit shit..." In the pilot's seat, Corning whispered frantically and constantly as he through the truck into maneuvers which it had never been designed to perform. Grey and white rocket contrails traced just meters away.
Atkins was thinking more clearly, "They've fired their first volley--now that there's no point in their hiding anymore, they'll start firing guided missiles."
"Huh?" Corning asked inarticulately.
"Get us to ground," Atkins commanded.
Corning started to protest, but the truck just ahead of them blossomed into flames. "Fuck it."
He jerked the steering yoke hard to his left and sliced across towards a closed parking dock built into one of the apartment complexes. It was a thick durasteel door and locked tight, but the truck had enough mass to get through on momentum. The body of the vehicle deformed and the doors screamed in protest as they were torn from their moorings. The drive unit failed and the speeder slid twenty meters across the concrete floor before coming to rest against a duracrete pillar.
Atkins looked over at Corning, "You alright?"
"I'm not hurt. Just my pride," he replied, shifting his weight with a wince, "and my knees."
Peren's door was too derformed to open, so they both tumbled out of the pilot's side. In the back, Sergeant Davis groaned and pushed ineffectually at Private Cloudwatcher's body, which was pinning him to the floor as the rest of the platoon piled out of the truck. His left arm ached as he did this. He had probably wrenched it badly preventing the private was tumbling into the abyss, but at least it wasn't dislocated. He had also bashed his helmet into the floor after the collision, so his head hurt, and so did his neck.
"Get the fuck off of me," Davis moaned.
Cam got to his feet and hopped out onto to ferrocrete floor. Davis limped down next to him. His knee hurt. Come to think of it, everything hurt.
"Did you get the serial of the star destroyer that fell on me?" he asked.
Cloudwatcher looked at him in awe, "You saved my life, sarge."
"Don't remind me," he told the kid, then did a double take, "where's your helmet?"
Cam reached up and tussled his hair, "I guess I lost it. Should I go look for it?"
"Fuck it," Davis ordered. He took a quick look around. They were in a large, very stereotypical parking garage--if you'd seen one, you'd seen them all. Ferrocrete floor, cieling walls, and support pillars; painted slots to park in, and speeders to fill them. Very nice speeders, in this case. This had evidently been a rich building.
"Right!" Davis shouted, "The enemy is upstairs, shooting up our comrades. We're going to shoot him up in return. Get into your squads and get ready to move."
Cloudwatcher was carefully examining some luxury airspeeder, so Sergeant Davis slapped him on the back of the head. "You're with me. Come on."
"I am gravely disappointed. Again you have made me unleash my dogs of war."
--The Lord Humungus
