Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade (3 page)

An excellent combat plan of attack normally guaranteed a near complete pacification of enemy forces. Often up to ninety-eight percent. Most enemy forces were taken out completely within minutes of the initial engagements. The overwhelming, interlocking firing profiles were that devastating, efficient, and effective. No foe could stand up to such levels of intense, coordinated indirect and direct fire for very long.

Especially when those waves of destroying fire were unleashed suddenly and without warning. The initial engagement was often the only engagement, and became the deciding factor in most battles. In many instances, the local landers could move in and take over the cleanup in the aftermath, once the main groups of invaders were crushed and obliterated.

Couple these amazing tactics with Bravo’s elite night fighting abilities, and the combination made for a furious, one-two punch that the invaders could not survive.

The Ejjai did what they did, with ruthless efficiency. They were already pounding and shelling the gigacity of Elaris with heavy waves of massed rockets and artillery. These violent attacks were meant to soften the civilians up, in prep for violent swift assaults by waves of tanks and gunships, and hordes of ruthless, armored infantry.

The invaders were not soldiers. They were murderers, sadists, and butchers, cloned to crush weaker, lander populations and feed them into the horrible factory meatships. Meatships that would feed the next generations of clone hordes, spreading their horror and terror from world to vulnerable world.

It had been proven time and time again that the invaders could not stand before an equal-sized and properly equipped and trained force of real warriors and soldiers. But the Ejjai were never looking for a fair fight. All they wanted was to slaughter and torment helpless civilians.

And infect the entire galaxy with their evil, if no one stopped them.

It was time to stop them once more.

And Bravo was the hammer.

The despised enemy meatships were usually the first targets marked for certain destruction. Then any enemy command and control, dropships still full of troops, and equipment carriers. After that, deployed artillery, tank formations, and gunship waves–and finally–all enemy firing positions and individual troops.

Each Ejjai invader was painted by the complex targeting system. Their weapons and gear were scanned and analyzed. All of this data was fed into the Spacer Marine battlecomp array for evaluation and tactical analysis.

When the advanced targeting profiles for all of the Marine units involved went out, the various assaults and attacks were planned in unison and almost flawlessly executed. It was an amazing system, and normally, when it worked, it worked extremely well.

But in every battle, on every new system where they combatted the invader, the enemy would do everything in their power to disrupt and beat the system. The invaders upgraded weapons and tactics in a never-ending attempt to outwit their fierce opponents.

And the Spacers and their Marines did all that they could to maintain their edge of superiority.

The difficult part for forward observing teams on such missions was waiting and completing all of the scanning and targeting in order to set up a crushing, wipeout attack.

It took grim discipline for the Marines to hold back, watching and doing their duty, preparing while the hated enemy continued shelling and attacking such helpless cities and their populations. The slashers, as they called the invaders, slaughtered innocent civilians each second. The Ejjai gloried in their bloody work, and murdered all that lived with a rapacious glee that was staggering.

But simply rushing in and attacking without sufficient planning and coordination was never as efficient, and took much longer in the end, providing the invaders with much more time to keep killing.

The Marines and their commanders quickly understood that their hi-tek, disciplined approach actually saved many more lives on both sides in the long run. They could cut the foe down faster, and move on to the next objective just that much quicker. Even the Ejjai killing machine was nothing compared what the Marines could accomplish, once they were properly led, directed, and unleashed in all-out, split-second timing.

Anyone who witnessed these lightning attacks would never forget such an experience.

Finally, all of the Bravo forward ops finished their tasks and required scans. The orders of what to attack, where, and when filtered down to the forward Marine units, and Bravo Command positioned their forces to unleash their direct assaults in waves of sheer fury.

Adrenalin kicked in even more as the war on that system was about to soar hotter, to an almost infinite degree. Miranda-Naero got set with her fireteam.

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Platoon positioned itself perfectly to sweep in fast on an enemy mechanized infantry unit, a full company, a hundred strong, with armored support vehicles and mounted heavy weapons and unit shielding teams.

Miranda-Naero carried the latest, E-19A5 version of the standard Marine pulse rifle with updated, advanced targeting optics. It could also be used to launch either microgrenades or float-seeker smartmines that would lock on and autoseek available targets. The direct fire of each Marine like herself was coordinated by the CPA for maximum effectiveness.

The tek in her advanced helmet array fed her and Command constant data flows on the best evolving patterns of attack to use in order to engage the priority targets nearest to her, and quickly brought up secondary and tertiary targets in a rapid progression.

It even tracked her remaining weapon systems and reminded her when to reload or switch ordnance types for more effectiveness, and could even have her fixer help her with such functions. All of this was coordinated not only within her entire platoon, but also their company and the other units all around them on the evolving combat grid.

Yet automation on the battlefield could take a Marine only so far, and sometimes the data flows came in too fast or grew confusing. Miranda-Naero knew from experience that in some cases, after the initial assault, it was often better to switch over to semi-reflex, instinctive shooting. In that mode, all of the AI suggestions could be muted, taken as valuable suggestions, and processed by the individual shooter, letting her decide what to fire up.

She selected three-shot burst on her selector switch over full auto fire. Miranda-Naero trusted her marksmanship.

The call went up over their links.

Commence attack in five seconds, mark. Green and hot in five-minus.

Engage and fire at will. Follow the flow of battle as directed.

Their helmet shields instinctively tinted darker to shield their eyes.

So much happened all at once.

Miranda-Naero cut loose with a spread of ordnance and put down all six of her initially assigned targets in less than a split second.

Waves of concentrated fire lit up the enemy positions in blinding blasts and flares of white-hot oblivion. More than half of the invaders were cut down in those first few instants.

Bravo moved in swiftly, shields in front, even as the heat and light flared.

Miranda Naero already snapped calm, precise fire at her next round of secondary targets. She drilled each one in rapid succession in a priority sweep, squeezing off precise bursts, quick and calm.

With nearly every trigger pull, an enemy dropped, lost a head, or was torn apart. And the formerly triumphant invaders withered and died in droves, wherever they stood or attempted to fight.

Tertiary targets. She pumped microgrenades and seeker mines into enemy vehicles, shield pods, fuel supplies, and ammo and ordnance pods and carriers.

For a short time, they crouched behind their own shields to let everything in front and around them finish blowing up and cooking off. No sense rushing into all of that.

More targets. This time the CPA directed them to pop up into the sky and interlock their fire with units rushing in below and around them.

They took sporadic but growing return fire from all of the built-up areas around them in the gigacity itself. The enemy wasn’t done just yet.

They fought the invaders not just in the air, but in a three hundred and 360-degree battlefield all around them. Once they penetrated far enough in, enemy fire could come at them from everywhere, even hidden and concealed underground, just buried and waiting.

But the Marines piled it on, and attacked the invaders wherever they showed themselves.

Another set of targets, this time more spread out and not as concentrated. An autogun emplacement here, a pocket of infantry or a sniper there. Miranda-Naero nailed eight targets in rapid succession, proving once more, according to standard Marine doctrine, that a superbly trained sharpshooter was still one of the most deadly weapons, even on a hi-tek battle field.

And it wasn’t just her. Each elite Marine was an incredible shooter with highly advanced weapons and optics. They punched enemy tickets to hell in rapid order, the CPA keeping them all shooting at different targets, and not wasting time firing up the same ones. The combined fire was so precise that many aimed for enemy helmet after helmet, tearing them off in kill after kill.

Like all of the other units, 2
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Platoon continued to advance at assault speed, sweeping the invaders away and leaving nothing but death in their wake, as ordered. At one point they were six hundred meters up or more, fighting among the gigacity pyramids and high-rises.

The Anaconda suddenly led them back down in good order to press the assault on a hardened enemy position, where the slashers were attempting to blow up and collapse an enormous skyscraper down across the forward line of battle.

Everything seemed to be going well. So why was Miranda-Naero’s sense of warning going nuts?

She checked in with Om, the Kexxian AI defensive protocol secretly existing inside her mind. Om, I know you’re monitoring everything all around on the nets and the fixer arrays. Is the enemy getting ready to surprise us with one of their tricks?

N, I’m striving to make sense of their actions and movements, but I think so. Okay, got it. Very slight traces of high EM signatures, scattered throughout this half of the entire gigacity grid.

Miranda-Naero kept maneuvering with her squad and firing on her available targets. Are all of those signatures underground, Om?

Yes, and many more than I first detected. There are hundreds and thousands of them in specific patterns, many coupled with an explosive device with the yield of a handheld fusion bomb. But what are the others? Why haven’t they set these devices off, and what would they accomplish? Our forces aren’t even near most of them, yet.

Teknomancy. Miranda-Naero used teknomancy to try to assess the situation. She quickly studied the scans of the tek on hand and the level of electromagnetic signature echoes and all of the other strange reads.

What purpose would the enemy have for setting up countless EM burst generators and these other things?

Then the answer hit her and Om nearly at the same time in their shared mind. And neither of them liked the conclusions.

N, those aren’t just–

I know, Om. Some of them are devices specifically designed to cause massive EM burn waves–across the full spectrum of our tek frequencies and energy patterns. Those pulse blast EM effects will knock out all coms and active tek within the range of their blast net. All our tek in this region will be taken down and rendered useless at the same time.

And as you suspected, N, the other objects buried in the ground are powered-down, shielded enemy troops, waiting to pop up after the tek-crippling EM waves pass over us. Then they’ll simply fire up their tek, which will still function, and charge in to mow us all down.

The enemy did a good job setting this trap, Om. They’ll wait until we sweep in closer, thinking we’ve all but won. Then they’ll knock out our coms and our tek.

Our people are in trouble, N. I calculate a full enemy battalion alone nearby, hiding just within the radius of half a klick. They have huge numbers waiting to hurl at us, once our tek goes out.

Hurry, Om. Translate that assessment through the fixer nets and shoot the intel to HQ and Command. Spread the word. I have to get the Leftenant to notice before it’s too late.

“Leftenant Wilde,” she called out over their secure link. “We have a situation.”

The Anaconda spun in mid-air, pumping fire from her carbine and her microgrenade pistol into an hidden enemy hardpoint in the skyscraper, where the slashers had an artillery piece and several autoguns set up.

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Platoon attacked the position directly, coming under heavy return fire, degrading their defensive screens.

“Not now, Allen. Stay in front of me and keep firing down the building. Nice shooting percentage, by the way.”

“Thank you, sir. But you need to look at the scans we have flowing to HQ from the fixer nets. Strange patterns, echoes, and energy signatures all around us and even to our rear. I’m guessing its some kind of concealed minefield.”

“Minefield? Show it to me Allen.”

Naero pweaked it a bit to make the findings slightly more obvious.

Wilde stopped firing and even pulled back in mid-air, drawing off the platoon with her. “Holy shit, Allen! That’s no goddam minefield. 2
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Platoon, halt and stay with me, inverted Victor double defensive lines. All shield pods up and online in sphere defense.”