KnightofTempest
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Chapter 37
🕑 Added 2024-07-08 12:23:19 +0000 UTCAs we charged out of the Alpine Forest toward the Combine Base, we almost immediately began coming under fire from Combine Battlemechs and the Base Defenses. A Short-Ranged Missile streaked past my Highlander from an SRM Launcher Emplacement backing the Garrison, missing me by a hair's breadth to slam into the front armor of one of Second Guards' Rampages that was guarding my right rear flank.
The Rampage's armor boiled away from the warhead and even though the pilot managed to duck into cover from one of the Base's Autocannon Emplacements, he was nailed by a burst of Autocannon Rounds from a Combine Dragon that finished cracking open his frontal armor. He ejected just before the Dragon fired its medium lasers into his now armorless front, destroying the Rampage. I could see he hadn't ejected in time to avoid taking a coolant bath, making him our first Mech Casualty of the Invasion of Oberon Six. More would follow after him, I was certain.
In response, I fired my Gauss Rifle and Ultra-Autocannon at the offending Dragon, Ferronickel slug cracking open the frontal armor and armor-piercing shells taking revenge for the casualty, but even more Combine Mechs began boiling out of the base. Another Rampage was taken out by a full salvo of LRM and SRM Fire from two of the Combine Dragons and the Base Defense Launchers, a salvo that wound up damaging a Dragoon and a Griffin at the same time.
I popped around a rocky outcropping to send two Ferronickel Slugs and a burst of Ultra-Autocannon Fire down range as a response. The first Dragon Fell back behind the Base Wall, but the second was too slow to do so and found a ferronickel slug punching into its LRM Ammo Bunker, ripping it in half with secondary explosions. Then the base defenses fired and took out the damaged Griffin and Dragoon. I'd ducked back around the rocky outcropping to avoid the missile salvo, as had many others, but already we had lost four mechs.
"Somebody take out those base turrets!" I commed.
"On it, My Lord!" Came the Voice of Captain Pilvi Salmela Nystrom, the commander of Second Guards' Artillery Complement.
With roots going back to Vipaava in the First Rasalhague Principality, Pilvi had been born deaf in her right ear. She had made up for that, however, with a mathematical mind that allowed her to plot out firing solutions by hand that most would need a computer to do. While we'd left the artillery behind in order to make use of speed in our surprise attack, if anyone could plot out a firing solution from that position, it would be her.
Indeed, there was a whistle of incoming rounds and suddenly high-explosive artillery munitions began dropping on the enemy base, sending the Combine Mechs scrambling for their hardened, fortified, mechbays. I picked off another Dragon and an Atlas with Gauss Rifle Shots and bursts from my Ultra-Autocannon as they tried to dodge shells to get to cover. Most of the An-Ting Legion made it into their mech bays, though they'd left a dozen mechs on the ground to do so.
The base defenses weren't so lucky. While the artillery had suppressed the Mechs and sent them running for cover in their mech bays, the base defenses had suffered the full brunt of the artillery bombardment. Autocannon Turrets and SRM Launchers were bombarded and destroyed as for a full twenty minutes, it was as if the sky had opened up and begun raining fire. No sooner had the last of the turrets and launchers been taken care of, than Pilvi ceased her bombardment. Unfortunately, the An-Ting Legion seemed to have been waiting for that as well.
Their Mech Bays were dug into the rock of the mountains we were fighting in, reinforced with thick slabs of armor and buttressed with structural supports. Collapsing them in on the defenders would take a lot more than a twenty-minute bombardment. It figured that the Combine would get the purpose-built bases for their Mech Regiments. I'd gotten reports that Fifth Guards had run into similar problems against their target, with Fourth Guards having it only slightly better. Third and Sixth Guards were having a cakewalk compared to our fight, they'd only suffered two mechs killed and a third damaged.
What this meant, though was that the fight was far from over. Indeed, as the An-Ting Legion came boiling up out of their Mech Bays, I realized they still had a lot more mechs than we did. It came down to a difference of organization between the Periphery and the Inner Sphere. Unless you were the Taurians, a Periphery State putting together an entire regiment of just Battlemechs wasn't on the cards. Production just wasn't feasible for that sort of thing and import on that scale came with its own problems. No, the Periphery mostly relied on combined arms to pad out our Regiments, adding in combat vehicles, infantry, and artillery. My own regiments only had thirty-six Mechs in Total per regiment.
That wasn't the case in the Inner Sphere, which was far more heavily populated, industrialized, and financed. There, you could put three battalions of mechs together and call it a regiment without having to pad numbers with combined arms. What this effectively meant was that each Combine Battlemech Regiment would have one-hundred-eight Battlemechs to its name. We'd killed sixteen of those in the opening salvo, but now the Combine was beginning to stir and we'd soon be swamped under a tide of metal.
I fired everything I had, as did all of my mech forces. Our technology was superior, we could take hits that Inner Sphere mechs couldn't, dish out attacks they couldn't deal with accurately from farther away, and maneuver faster thanks to more powerful reactors. They still had something like three times our numbers in mechs. We couldn't afford for this to turn into a full-power slugging match because sooner or later we would be bled dry by so many enemies.
I took out three more Combine Battlemechs in the next five minutes, ripping into an Atlas with my Gauss Rifle from above as I flew on my Jump Jets. The slug punched through the lighter top armor and crammed the reactor. I landed on top of an enemy Dragon in a textbook Highlander Burial, bowling it over and spraying armor-piercing rounds from my Ultra-Autocannon into its front at point-blank range. I ignited my jump jets to maneuver away from another Atlas that fired its entire complement of four medium lasers into me, succeeding in getting away at the cost of a number of the armor plates on my right leg. I fired back, managing a lucky shot that took out enough heat sinks to overheat the Atlas as it fired its four medium lasers once more. I dodged back behind cover to avoid the lasers, before popping out to give it a Gauss Rifle slug and full burst from my Ultra-Autocannon as it struggled with its overheating, killing it.
Still, it wasn't enough. More enemy mechs came out of the fortified mech bays of the base. I spotted Captain Jakob Nilsson of Delta Company, Alpha Battalion in his white-painted Griffin firing his PPC into the side of a Combine Pheonix Hawk while simultaneously taking down a Dragon with a full salvo from his LRM Launcher. I spotted Captain Ilse Schroeder of Beta Company, Alpha Battalion in her Black and Red Dragoon Unleash Hell on a Combine Dragon with PPC and Laser Fire, practically melting through the torso even as she landed a shot with her autocannon that punched into the missile storage of a Combine Atlas, ripping it apart in a secondary explosion. I even saw Colonel Lindqvist and Major Mazurek of Alpha Battalion wading into the fray, blue and gold and red and white-painted Rampages tearing into enemy mechs with Gauss Rifles and Ultra-Autocannons.
It still wasn't enough. The Combine had so many mechs packed into a single regiment that even with our tech advantage, the element of surprise, and the ferocity of our attack, they were starting to push us back away from their base perimeter through sheer weight of metal. Combine Mechs boiled out of their fortified mech bays over the corpses of their comrades to fire back at us like a sort of human wave.
They were inflicting casualties, too. I saw a number of Dragoons, Rampages, and Griffins go down as the battle ticked over into hour two. As hour three dawned, the Combine had managed to push us back away from the base perimeter through sheer, bloody-minded determination and weight of metal. Colonel Lindqvist had been forced to withdraw from the fight due to damage and my own Highlander was missing armor plates and had damage to the myomer in its left arm. One of the medium lasers in the torso was also rendered non-functional, but I had taken out a dozen Combine mechs in the process.
We took cover in the rocky outcroppings and alpine forests of the Highlands as we conducted a fighting withdrawal. The Combine was pushing us further away from their base, bleeding us, but we weren't dead yet. We were bent, but not broke, and now, I realized we had an opening to finally turn the tide back to our favor after it had swung to ours. In their Zeal to push us back, the Combine had gotten far enough away from their fortified mech bays that they wouldn't be able to get to them in time. I sent out a comms call to Captain Nystrom with our artillery.
"You've got our position and can triangulate the enemy's yes, Captain?" I questioned as I ducked behind a copse of pine trees. The enemy fire shredded the light cover, but it had done its job to shield me as I ran for a rocky ridge where the remainder of Alpha Battalion was taking cover.
"We do, My Lord." Answered Captain Nystrom.
"Good. Drop the hammer on them." I ordered, snapping off one last ferronickel slug that punched into the cockpit of an enemy Pheonix Hawk, killing it.
"As you will, My Lord." Confirmed Captain Nystrom.
I just barely managed to get behind the cover of the ridge before the whistling of incoming munitions sounded out. Then all hell began to rain down on the strung-out Combine Regiment. They had chased us away from their base and the shelter of their fortifications. They had bled us badly, with twelve mechs destroyed or forced to disengage due to damage. Now it was their turn. The artillery bombardment was fierce, Long Toms dumping high-explosive shells onto the exposed Combine Mechs. When it was all over, not a single Combine Mech would remain in the field, all were destroyed or damaged too heavily to continue fighting.
I ordered the infantry forward to clear the enemy base. They would have sentries and guards as well as Battlemechs I reasoned. This was a decent guess, because as soon as the infantry and combat vehicles got into the base perimeter, hidden machine-gun nests opened up from fortified positions. Not many, mind you, and not enough to complete the crossfire that had clearly been envisioned by the enemy, several of the nests were in bunkers that had caved in during the initial bombardment. It was enough that combined with the effort it took to clear the underground sections of the base, we'd wind up taking around a hundred-sixty-five casualties among the infantry sent in. Eventually, however, we managed to completely destroy the Combine Regiment, apparently it was the Second An-Ting Legion.
It's Tai-Sa Ijogi Waters, wound up being captured as our forces managed to break into his office and knock him unconscious before he could commit Seppuku. We took very few prisoners, but there were some. Most of the Combine preferred to die rather than be captured, however. We also captured a number of munitions, weapons, spare parts, and replacement Battlemechs. All those would go toward my negotiating strategy once we finished this.
We didn't have time to mourn our dead, we had to move on to the town of Kremlovsky in the highlands which had acted as a supply point for the Second An-Ting Legion. After sending the damaged mechs, prisoners, and wounded troops to the rear, we headed out. About four hours southwest of Kremlovsky we stumbled into a short, thirty-minute, ambush by survivors of Sixth Guards' attack on the Placida Guards to the east. Apparently, the Placida Guards had managed to retreat in good order after being hit by Sixth Guards and Colonel El-Fadil had felt that taking the town of Zhitopol was more pressing than chasing the remnants of the Placida Guards, leaving them for us to stumble on.
The ambush opened with a Placida Guards Marauder charging out of the Alpine Forest and lighting up a trio of LVT-Four Hover Tanks with a full salvo. Hidden Thumper Artillery opened up from the ridge line even as I put a Gauss Rifle Round into the Marauder's Cockpit and sprayed down an onrushing Assassin with armor-piercing rounds from my Ultra-Autocannon, punching into its reactor and forcing an emergency shutdown to avoid scramming the reactor. More Combat Vehicles were damaged or destroyed by the hidden thumpers before they were silenced by LRM Salvos from the remaining Griffins of Delta Company, Alpha Battalion.
As we turned the tide on the ambush, the remnants of the Placida Guards, now amounting to no more than two and a half companies of mixed combat vehicles, mechanized infantry, and a trio of scorched and damaged Marauders retreated back toward Kremlovsky. Fortunately, their ranking commander, Captain Torres, agreed to talk terms for surrender.
"I'm offering you surrender under the stipulations of the Ares Convention. You will be treated as prisoners of war and accorded the rights of such as stipulated by the convention." I offered.
"Ares what now? I didn't go to a university, I'm a rancher who signed up to fight for the Tax Breaks." Pointed out Captain Torres. It took him a bit to have a dataslate with the terms of the convention brought up but when he did, his eyebrows climbed up his forehead in surprise.
"These are pretty generous. I gotta wonder if you're trying to fuck us somehow." Frowned Captain Torres.
"I intend to rule this stretch of the Periphery. Call it an investment in having less unrest after the war." I shrugged.
"That, I buy. You've got a deal, we'll surrender on those terms. Beats dying. We're not the Combine, after all." Smirked Captain Torres.
And with that, this section of Titania was cleared. Kremlovsky was mostly a mining town with some local agriculture. It was a big one, though, at sixty-five-thousand people. The second largest population center on Titania after Zhitopol's ninety-five-thousand people. The other four towns, Pilotsk, Rhavosk, Halomir, and Gorsikov, averaged around twenty-five-thousand each. Titania was actually fairly heavily populated by Ethnic Ukrainians descended from the Boyko Expedition. Around a quarter of a million people, all pulling minerals out of the rugged landscape to be shipped to foundries on Oberon Six.
Over the next five days, I received similar all-clears from Third through Sixth Guards as well as Seventh Guards over on Puck. Colonel Oivo of Fifth Guards had gotten it the worst. Apparently, she'd run up against another Combine Mech Regiment, this one the Ninth Pesht Regulars had managed to withdraw in good order after giving Colonel Oivo a bloody nose. Reports from the Flotilla indicated that they'd managed to flee to some hidden converted civilian transport dropships in the mountains and make a getaway to Oberon Six after inflicting close to a third of Fifth Guards' total strength in casualties.
Second Guards wasn't much better off, though we would be able to repair and replace more of our lost strength than Fifth Guards would. It seemed Fifth Guards had more destroyed and killed mechs, combat vehicles, and personnel than we did. Colonel Kelly and Fourth Guards had run across the Third Oberon Guards under Colonel Johann Grimm who had inflicted around twenty percent casualties on Fourth Guards destroyed, damaged, and killed before Johann surrendered. Third and Sixth Guards had come out of the battles for Titania with a relatively light fifteen and sixteen percent casualties respectively. Seventh Guards over on Puck had made out the best with around five percent casualties, largely owing to the fact that Puck was sparsely populated and barely defended. The defenders, a mixed group of militia and armed police, tried one single ambush near the Innishmore Methane Ice Fields and when they got beat back to the Inishmore Colony, they surrendered rather than risk the Colony Dome being destroyed in a siege.
However, badly we got mauled, though, the Oberon Confederation and their Combine Masters got it worse. Five Regiments lost with a sixth lightly damaged, along with the loss of both moons of Oberon Six. The first week of fighting favored us instead of them, however costly it had wound up being. Now, we would consolidate our gains, repair and replace losses, and prepare. In a week, we would be moving to Oberon Six Proper with all fourteen regiments.
If the fighting on Titania was any indication, we would be in for an even tougher fight down there. . .
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AN: So yeah, Titania and Puck fall after a week of combat. Unfortunately, casualties are pretty heavy doing so, especially against the Combine. Second and Fifth Guards got mauled badly enough to have taken thirty-three percent casualties in the fighting. What's more, the Ninth Pesht Regulars managed to escape the ambush and make it back to Oberon Six to join the defense of Dadaocheng City.
It's looking like an even tougher fight is brewing down on the planet below. Fortunately, they now have the Combine and Oberon Confederation Forces outnumbered. Unfortunately, in the week it took them to take Titania and Puck, the defensive lines around Dadaocheng City have been beefed up. On the bright side, Second Guards is likely to be able to replace the majority of their losses after a week to heal up and repair. That can't be said for Fifth Guards, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, Hendrik Grimm has got to be wondering if he backed the wrong horse by throwing in with the Combine. If nothing changes soon, he's going to put his own plans into action and damn the consequences.
At any rate, the next chapter will be an interlude showing how the various other fights on the moons went in more detail. Then we'll be back with Jozef for the assault on the Dadaocheng Line.
Stay tuned. . .
