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Grand Central Station
by Khartoum |
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Inside the building, they took the stairs to the main computer room, and began unpacking their gear. The security doors were all standing open, due to the evacuation, and two of the computers hadn't even been locked, due to the rush outside. Grabbing their laptops, the Nicholson Corporals began hacking into the system, to learn the secrets. Private Morris was trying to listen in on Clan communications, but the steady jamming was making that nearly impossible. Clan systems normally used frequency hopping, and this jamming was covering their transmissions with static. Seeing an internal relay, she began tapping into it, figuring that the physical lines inside the factory would be easier to read. While there, she hooked up her batteries into the nearby outlets, taking advantage of the free power to recharge them.
leutenant Graves was watching the Sergeant deploy his men, covering the access corridors, and two watching out the window. While there, Private Phillips was using his recorder; in purely passive mode he was careful to note, to record the activities. Apparently the raiders were loading steel into their dropship, in massive chunks. They had exoskeletons to do the heavy lifting, and were simply stacking the steel in a random fashion, being more concerned with loading it onboard, than with saving space. Apparently they were going to reload the steel in their ship in orbit, and were more concerned with getting the steel up, than with organizing it.
Private Morris suddenly stiffened, "Sir, I've just got a pattern, Jade Falcon aerospace fighters on their way in."
Looking out the window, Lieutenant Graves could see several black shapes suddenly peel off and head to the north. He couldn't tell what type of craft they were flying as they were too high. Their speed seemed very high though, so they were likely composed of light to medium fighters. Against the Clan heavies he had seen as they had arrived, the raiders would get eaten alive.
Pulling another pair of binoculars out, he began looking towards the nearby base. The Clan Mech center was only fifty kilometers away, but from his height in the building, he might be able to see something. There wasn't any terrain to get in his way, so he had good visibility. Chances were, except for the Trinary in the woods, the Galaxy Commander was going to send everything he had to deal with these raiders. That was over two hundred Mechs, to deal with four tanks, and a shuttle. Plus whatever aerospace forces the raiders had.
"Movement," Yancey called out.
"Report."
"The Trinary of Mechs is on the move. Looks like they waited for the aerospace forces to bug out, and they're moving now. Oh wow, that is a heavy force. There's nothing out there lighter than sixty tons, and holy, I see three Dire Wolves! There are more behind them, but I doubt they've got anything lighter back there. Looks like those Dire Wolves are armed with PPCs, Gauss, and LRMs. They're going to splatter those tanks, and let their lighter buddies finish them off."
"Tanks are moving; I see three moving into position to engage. Current range to Falcon mechs is over two-"
A massive blast out the window caught the Sarge's attention, going over; he saw that the first three Clan Mechs had already been, downed?
"Report Sergeant."
"Sir, it looks like three," another series of blasts outside, "correction six Clan Mechs are down. Not injured, down. Straight through their center torsos sir. I don't know what those tanks are tossing around, but it punched through the front and rear armor like tissue paper. Those Mechs aren't going anywhere." Another series of bolts, "Correction, nine Mechs down. That's not the bad part sir; the tanks are engaging at over two miles."
Give the leutenant credit, he didn't jump up screaming. "Sergeant, you do realize that is over three times the range of any weapon we have in use?"
"Yes sir I do, I also saw it happen." A pause of silence went by, and Sergeant Vinson looked out. "Sir, all fifteen Clan Mechs are down. It took those tanks a little over a minute for each of them to kill five Mechs. They're also moving back to their original positions."
"What do you think their aerospace forces are doing to the Clan forces?"
"Assuming similar capabilities and range, I'd say that the Clan aerospace forces are going to get slaughtered. If the Clan Mechs move out, they will be destroyed as well. When this guy told the Clan to stay out of the way, he meant it."
"Any suggestions to fight these people?"
"Avoid open terrain like the plague sir. Basically the same tactics as when we first fought the Clans, but far more emphasis on close-combat fights. Also, practice working with only signal lights, or visual comms, given their tendency to jam everything. Basically, Special Operations type of thinking."
"Sir, we've got the download from the computers. They’ve also got external cameras, and I've started a download from them as well. The cameras inside the smelting bay aren't responding, likely shot out by these people."
"Sir, with the Clan Mechs out of the way, we'll have an easier time getting out."
"Good point private. In fact, we owe our success to these people. We'll stay here, until they leave, then leave at the same time, to avoid cranky Clanners coming after us."
For the next couple hours, they watched the shuttle get loaded with steel, take off, and return a few minutes later, apparently empty. The tanks patrolled the perimeter, and explosions inside the smelting end told of Clan warriors trying to drive the raiders out, and dying very quickly. Without seeing what was going on, they could only guess what was happening.
Finally, the shuttle took on the last load of steel, and the tanks were reattached beneath it. Taking off again, the shuttle simply pointed itself straight at the sky, and accelerated out of the atmosphere. Breathing a sigh of relief, leutenant Graves turned to his team, "All right. Get to the vehicle park, and head for the northwest corner. The guard post in that area got flattened, and the fence is down. We'll exit there, and meet back at two miles south of the town, in the forest's northern edge. If we get separated, Northwayland Flute will be our signal."
The team nodded, having studied different birds on the way to their mission, and knew the signal by heart.
Creeping down the stairs, they saw the damage that had been delivered, and had to pause, while fifteen very angry and shocked people walked into the plant. The Clan Mechwarriors were mad due to vehicles beating them, and shocked at the sheer power of the raiders' weaponry. Avoiding them carefully, they made their way to the rendezvous point, and relaxed. It would be a few days before they could sneak back on board the dropship, but they still had several miles to go. Corporals Nicholson had taken advantage of the incinerators to dispose of their garbage, to avoid having to hike it out, so their loads were lighter.
Galaxy Commander Crichell stared at the ruin of his forces. He had led out four Clusters, over a hundred Mechs, covered by two Trinaries of Aerospace fighters. Now, his Mechs were little more than Battlefield wreckage, and his fighters had all been shot down. The Elementals have tried to continue on, but the strange fighters had merely strafed them all, until the Elementals had either turned back, or were dead. Now twenty thousand tons of Clan war machines and weaponry sat cooling in the dusk, and his warriors were walking back to base. None of them were challenging him for this humiliating loss. The fighter pilots that had tried to engage the raider fighters had reported their shots not even damaging them, and a series of bolts shattering their frames in single firing passes. The fighters had apparently mounted a pair of either pulse lasers or PPCs, and doing massive damage as well.
His Mechwarriors had tried to charge out to engage the Raiders, but his faster mechs had been deliberately strafed first, and as he organized his Mechs to present concentrated anti-aircraft fire, the enemy fighters had merely come in from different directions. Whenever he had tried to circle his Mechs, to cover each others' rear torsos, the fighters had broken off, being content to let him sit there. Each time he advanced, the fighters would strafe his rear section.
His final tactic had been to use a covering method, where he split his force into two groups. The Mechs in front would circle out to the sides, and cover the sides. As the Mechs in the center moved forward, they would replace the guards at the front, and the guards would cover more to the rear. As the guards became the rear, they would turn back, and join the group moving in the center of the formation.
It cut his speed down by over half, but provided extensive firepower without presenting too many rear torsos. Unfortunately, the enemy fighters had countered easily. Using nap of Earth skimming, they had swept out, and proceeded to damage as many Mechs as possible, while presenting minimal exposure. His force had been slowed horribly, and the fighters had proceeded to strafe his command more openly, as weapon arms fell off, and firepower dropped.
Fortunately, the Mechwarriors had managed to recover the recorders from their Mechs, as had the fighter pilots. He planned to copy all the data from them, and send it to his superiors. He would demand a Kurulta of the Clan Khans, to see what they could do about these new raiders.
'Savashri, these raiders were powerful.' |
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