TAS Vengeance, orbiting Vorota Prime, 23 Jul 2075, 1100Z ship’s time
Rear Admiral Gavin Bowdry shifted uncomfortably in his command couch. Just four days ago, he had been commander of all Raider Groups, commanding from his sleek NanoTex acceleration couch on his Corsair, Green One. The NanoTex couch fit like a second skin, filled with millions of tiny gel pockets which could be inflated and deflated in microseconds to compensate for inertia as the Corsair weaved and turned at speeds which could pulverize an unprotected occupant. It was a protective cocoon that melded him with the ship itself, making him feel almost superhuman.
By contrast, the Vengeance’s old-fashioned captain’s couch was a throwback, made of leather and mahogany and brushed nickel. Without the integral HUD or the NanoTex cladding, he felt like a very fragile human riding on the nose of an ancient and ponderous beast.
But he had to admit that it was more than the new couch that made him uncomfortable, it was the weight of command. Corsair crews were known for their initiative. With a crew complement of only 136, and all of them sealed into acceleration couches, you needed people who could take care of their job without supervision, who could coordinate and anticipate each other’s actions without face-to-face contact.
A Vanguard-class carrier was an entirely different experience. With a crew complement of nearly 1300 people, and a much slower rate of acceleration, it was much more like a traditional wet navy ship. It meant departments and layers of command and having to deal with a lot more people on a daily basis. And on top of that, Admiral Amano hadn’t just appointed him to command a carrier; he had him commanding a task force. When Amano transferred command of the Vengeance to him, he had advised him to let his XO run the ship’s operations, which had proven to be sage advice.
Bowdry scrolled through the operational plan for the hundredth time this morning. By this point, he could recite it from memory. On paper, it was simple: Stand guard, let the ground troops do the hard work, shoot only if shot at. But there were contingencies around the edge of his thoughts that bothered him. His scanner officer was the one to break him out of his reverie.
“Sir? 3 vessels just jumped in from Xingmen and are inbound. Appear to be Diligence-class. They’re headed straight for the planet, sir.”
“ETA?”
“At current heading and speed…6 hours, 12 minutes, sir.”
“Send a message on all known Bastani civilian frequencies. Let them know that the planet is under interdiction and they are to return to their point of origin immediately.”
“Aye, sir.”
Bowdry’s XO, Captain Jaime Hollister, stepped alongside him. “What do you think? More colonists?”
“Could be. Could also be a weapons transfer. Or reinforcements. Or it could be an evacuation attempt. This is what I don’t like about this op. Too many grey areas. We’re not shooting at civilians unless they try to impede the mission, but the definition of “impede” has been left wide open.”
“What do we do if they don’t turn back?”
Bowdry sighed. “Let’s hope they do. But if they don’t, I’m not going to be the first to turn this into a hot war. Unless [1st Volunteer Brigade CO Gen. Jewel] Pontarelli tells me that those ships are unloading weapons or troops, we’ll treat them as non-hostile.”
“What about the two Heritages?”
Bowdry looked at the two large yellow silhouettes on the tactical display. “We don’t know. They’ve just sat there the whole time. They’re over 30,000 tons each. If they were warships, I think we’d have known it by now. We’ve been going over the high-resolution imaging, looking for gunports but nothing so far. Same rule: until they prove otherwise, they’re non-hostile. HQ thinks they’re either some kind of bulk hauler or tanker.”
Two days passed as the 1st Volunteers disembarked from the mammoth Saipan-class troopship, formed up and made their assault plan. Due to Vorota Prime’s hostile environment, the colonists were in two compact settlement domes, which made things much simpler. Pontarelli looked over the holomap one last time. The primary dome would be surrounded by the 21st Volunteer Assault Regiment (VAR), while the 1st VAR would do the actual clear-and-hold work. The secondary dome would follow the same basic plan, with the 104th Mobile Infantry surrounding, and the 11th VAR clearing the dome. Her HQ unit would supervise from the landing zone, midway between the two domes. Intelligence had been vague on what kind of resistance to expect, but the Bastani didn’t have much reputation as fighters. On paper, they could put together maybe three or four regiments, but with what kind of weapons?
Finally, the preparations were complete and the troops almost in place. The secondary dome was surrounded, but unexpectedly difficult terrain had slowed the primary strike group from reaching their target. 1st VAR was just now reaching the dome, with the 21st close behind. Pontarelli used a pair of optics to scan the horizon. Each dome was about 30km from the LZ. She could see a wide glow to the southeast, the lights of the 104th’s APCs. Swinging around to the northwest, there was only the low, dark shadow of the primary habitation dome. The VARs weren’t visible, because they lacked armor assets.
Created in the aftermath of the liberation of Tau Ceti back in ’64, the Volunteer regiments were the most basic kind of army: grunts in sealed combat suits with a standard-issue firearm. The firearms varied according to the mission environment: gauss rifles in Earth-like or low-atmos environments, plasma guns on high-G or dense worlds like Tau Ceti. There was some talk of kitting them out with laser rifles for use on extremely low-G worlds, to avoid the problems with slug-throwers throwing a bunch of spall into orbit when the muzzle velocity exceeded escape velocity, but so far that hadn’t been much of a problem.
Tactical organization was based around the five-man squad: three riflemen, one support/heavy weapons man, and one technical specialist. The TechSpec could be anything from a medic to an electronic warfare tech to an interpreter. It allowed for a lot of specialization and customization of forces to fit mission requirements, while not diluting the firepower. Every Volunteer was cross-trained as infantry and a specialist, so that if you were a medic but the mission called for your unit to do demolition work, you’d be assigned a rifleman role while somebody trained in combat engineering would fill the TechSpec role.
For this mission, most of the squads had Bastani interpreters and medics in the specialist role. This was the first “live” operation any of these men and women had ever seen. Other than the liberation of a few Wraith listening posts (which had all been done by the “line” units from the core Army, mostly the heavy troopers), there hadn’t been a major ground operation since the end of the Great War. Pontarelli’s earbud crackled to life. “General, what is your status?”
“Secondary group is in position. Primary is almost there. Rough ground slowed them down a bit. How’s it looking up there, Admiral?”
“Clear sailing so far. Those freighters bugged out right after liftoff, so it’s just us and the two Heritage haulers. We’re watching the Xingmen jump like a hawk.”
“Sounds good. Permission to enter the domes?”
“You don’t want to wait for your first group to get in position?”
“It’s not like we’re losing the element of surprise. And so far we haven’t seen so much as a pointy stick out of the Bastani.”
“Permission granted then.” Pontarelli keyed the go sequence into her vidcomm.
30 kilometers away, the 11th’s CO’s in-helmet display blinked amber with the message “ARGENT BROOM: FOXTROT GOLF JULIET”. He keyed a re-transmit, and his battalion commanders received the message. They did the same, and on down to the company commanders, the platoon commanders, the squad commanders and finally it flashed up on the helmet of every Volunteer crouching behind rocks and outcrops in front of a massive 3km wide dome.
Sgt. Emil LaCrosse keyed up his squad-transmit. “Ladies and gentlemen, this smeg just got real. Ivanov, you’re the guest of honor. If you would be so kind…”
Cpl. Grigori Ivanov took a deep breath, stepped out from behind the boulder he’d been leaning against for the last hour and a half, and broke into a half-run, half-trot towards the dome’s airlock. Back home, he’d been a maintenance electrician and locksmith. Like a lot of guys his age, he was swayed by all those slick vids that UniCom had pushed on the Internet: the kind with a guy in Heavy Trooper armor dropping in like a one-man badass army, wasting a bunch of alien monsters with a plasma cannon, and popping open his helmet at the end to reveal some dude with movie-star good looks and a precisely calculated amount of five-o’clock shadow. Everybody wanted to be that guy. More importantly, everyone wanted a job. And with a global unemployment rate over 10%, there were plenty like him that decided the Army was the life for him: see space, kick some alien butt, and earn a metric crapton of money doing it.
The reality was altogether different. 92% of the Volunteers had never left Earth. Training consisted of endless repetitions of weapons drills, basic squad tactics, and his MOS training. He’d been in the service 10 years and never so much as fired a weapon in anger. His armor was nowhere near as flashy or as safe as a Heavy Trooper. It was basically a spacesuit with a couple of armor plates strapped to it. He’d almost lost count of how many times he’d barfed in “the Truck” [TAS Truk]: on the way to orbit, during each jump, during the burn-in to Vorota Prime, during the landing. And now he had the “honor” of being the only guy in 30 klicks who wasn’t behind cover of some kind, walking up to a giant alien dome, and trying to figure out how to pick the lock on the sonofabitch. He really didn’t want to throw up in his combat suit.
