2951-10-04 – Tales from the Service: The Quickley Fortification

“In position Sarge.” Corporal Columbera sounded out of breath; on a world with more or less Terran gravity, like Quickley, that probably meant he and his detachment had been forcing themselves through thick underbrush for most of the last fifteen minutes. “I think so, anyway.”

“Understood.” Sergeant Myron Vergossen took one last look at the terrain map, then dismissed it and called up the targeting display instead. A haloed cross-hair appeared in the center of his helmet’s face-plate, then slid off the lower edge of the armor-glass screen as the display detected which way the railgun attached to his right arm was pointing. Just to be safe, he raised his arm and pointed the weapon toward the underbrush beside the road, and watched the cross-hair reappear.

Around him, most of his squad of Confederated Marines had probably already tested their targeting systems and warmed up their various weapons. The unit’s Rico suits were tough, but something always seemed to break in one of them after several hours of tramping about in the dirt and dust of an alien world; being caught by surprise by a failed targeting optic after the shooting started was not an option.

“Everyone ready?” Myron turned a half-circle to look at each of the men in turn. Less Columbera’s quartet, he had fourteen Marines for the frontal assault. Most of their weapons would do little against the walls of a hardened Incarnation bunker, but that was all right; knocking the position out was Columbera’s job.

Nobody answered vocally over the radio channel, but within two seconds, a series of blue status indicators in Myron’s HUD winked out and returned green.

“Follow me. Heads down.” Myron had already set the position and rough size of the enemy fortification, so it was a matter of two commands to call its virtual likeness up on everyone’s HUD. With as thick as the local underbrush was, the position would probably be invisible in visible-light optics if the Marines didn’t already know where it was.

A drainage ditch with several inches of slimy mud at the bottom provided cover for most of the approach, and within two minutes Myron had his suit’s back pressed to the root-choked slope facing the enemy. He waited as the other Marines, their suits hunched over and almost crawling on their hands and knees, took up positions on either side. No doubt the enemy knew they were coming and already had their guns pointed at the ditch; Incarnation sensor-nets were notoriously good.

“Let’s ring the doorbell, boys.” Myron turned around until it was his suit’s hardened chest-plate, not the weaker back-plate, that was facing the enemy. He reached down to the infantry micro-missiles racked along the sides of his leg, pulled two free, and held them in one huge alloy palm. The missiles, being on the tac-net, had already acquired the target, and now as each Marine readied his own, the weapons automatically established a saturation targeting pattern. A lucky missile could possibly sneak through a firing port, but Myron wasn’t counting on that. He wanted the smoke and debris cloud the salvo would throw up.

“Now.” Myron flicked the two missiles into the air. On either side of him, a swarm of gleaming tubes rose into the sunlight as thirteen other Marines did the same. Infantry missiles were more precise if fired out of launchers, but at close range, against a static target, it didn’t matter. Each one oriented itself with a puff of compressed gas, then zipped away as its solid-fuel rocket kicked in. The thunder and hail of dirt-clods that followed gave no indication of how many the bunker’s point defense had shot down, but Myron didn’t care.

Without needing orders, the Marines around Myron popped their heads and shoulders out of the ditch, leveled their weapons, and let loose. Most of them, armed like Myron himself, sprayed the target with high-velocity ferroceramic projectiles. Aliev and Kinneman pierced the explosion-thrown dust with yellow tongues of flame from their plasma lances, and Singh let loose a four-round burst from his armor-piercing autocannon.

Only a few seconds after the Marines started shooting, Myron sent a fall-back signal, and his Marines ducked back under cover just as the dust plume began to disperse. Most likely, they’d done nothing but rattle the defenders, but rattling was more than sufficient; even as Myron verified that everyone had pulled out of the firing line cleanly, lasers began to slash through the underbrush over their heads.

“Drone shows no obvious damage.” Private Morello, still in control of the tiny scout-drone circling a thousand meters above their heads, sent updated imagery to Myron’s HUD. “But we definitely got their attention, Sarge.”

“You don’t say, Private.” Myron heard a tree, cut in half by high-wattage laser fire, crash down behind them. ‘They’re not saving power, so they’ve got a reactor in there.” This wasn’t too surprising, but it did make their task a bit more dangerous; it meant their enemy could keep up continuous fire forever.

“Sounds like the party’s started, Sarge. Ready for V-E?”

Myron winced as Singh clambered back up to fire a few more cannon rounds and fell back almost immediately with a pair of glowing spots on his chestplate. “Not yet, Columbera. But get ready.”

“Aye, Sarge.”

It sounds like the bulk of the fighting in the Lee-Hosha system is over, but this account from the first day of the battle will take at least one more week to relay in this space.

Our own Nojus Brand, who went groundside with the Marines, reported back that he and the other civilian correspondents have entered the spaceport site at Q-S1, which was incomplete at the time the Incarnation occupied the world, and which they finished to use the place as a depot. Unfortunately for Seventh Fleet, the garrison slagged most of the infrastructure when it became clear that they were doomed, and the place needs almost as much work as it did to begin with before the world will be good for anything.

Nojus has taken many stills and many hours of footage of the battle’s aftermath, most of which should be available on our corporate datasphere hub within a few days of this posting. Obviously, any imagery that shows Confederated casualties will not be shown, out of consideration for the families of those wounded and killed.