Ch. 26 snippets!
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18:00 AST, February 12 2332
Off The Coast of Guiana
The submarine NCS Chief Hanlon was a cramped vessel at the best of times. Off the coast of Gan Colombia, near what had once been named Guiana on pre-War maps, thousands of miles away from the NCR and her home port of Dayglow, Captain Jack Jeffries could not hide his discomfort. The subs were so far away from home that if they were in the Pacific they would be out past the NCR’s westernmost outpost on Hawaii, half-way or more to Australia. The salient-green packed rations – tasteless but nutritious – gave them 120 days of rations, which marked sufficient time to raid for a hundred days, then resupply and put on more torpedoes and food at the Altagracia Naval Station.
The facility lacked true submarine pens, but sufficient facilities to take on fresh supply. In addition, the Ranger Seth-class submarines had a triple-stealth configuration – radar stealth through their angular shapes, sonar stealth through the materials of their hulls, and last but certainly not least visual stealth through large-scale photonic distortion generators which bent light around the craft.
Jeffries kept an eye out for contacts as his crew looked them over. Every vessel sailing towards Enclave waters had been marked out by Naval Command as a potential target, save for those carrying the flags of Gran Colombia, France or Nueva-Maya. If they weren’t funnelling troops toward the Enclave they were funnelling resources and civilian workers. They would not be able to stop every ship, he knew – but every ship that didn’t reach their waters was one less that would be of use to them.
...
10:00 EST, February 15 2332
Chesapeake Bay
Three ships of war sailed into Chesapeake Bay under the frosty sun in stately procession, two smaller ships flanking a great battleship almost twice their length. Their escort was a matter of pomp and circumstance more than real military concern – it would not do for them to come in on their own, ignored. So it was that USS New England, second only to the flagship of the American navy USS Columbia, had come in to escort the heavy cruisers HMS Kent and SMS Von Mackensen into the harbour of Norfolk Naval Station. Crown Prince Friedrich August Von Hohenzollern, heir to a dynasty more than a thousand years old and an Empire less than a century, looked at the fog-covered waters of the port from his transport ship’s bridge as he entered it. The sky was overcast, but he could plainly see a number of ships in harbour – a few civilian vessels, fishers and cargo ships mainly. Then the small flotilla took a hard left, and Friedrich saw the Atlantic Fleet in port.
There were three battleships – not counting USS Columbia, twelve cruisers, thirty destroyers, and one carrier (the other, he had heard, was seconded to the Caribbean Fleet). The ships went on through the harbour, and Friedrich had a feeling he knew what this was about. The Americans wanted to show off their fleet to him as he entered, to let him know in no uncertain terms who was fundamentally in charge here. Even knowing their goals, he couldn’t help but be overawed. The Royal and Imperial Navies couldn’t build ships three-quarters as large, and certainly not in such numbers.
He wondered what Maudling must be feeling. Now they moved on to ships under construction, teams of men with some robotic assistance welding them painstakingly together with brilliantly bright plasma torches that resembled – tellingly enough – some old plasma rifles he’d been shown as part of the military curriculum he’d studied at West Point. He read the names written on the new carriers – about 400 metres long, greater than the ones currently in service; CVN-120 Augustus Autumn, CVN-121 Ronald Reagan. Then on the battleships; Canada, Heartland, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Hawaii, New Mexico. The ship turned to head to an unoccupied pier – he estimated there were six cruisers and twice that number of destroyers under various stages of construction in drydock,
The ship halted at one of the unoccupied piers and Friedrich walked out, a touch unsteadily – his sea legs still weren’t good – followed by two single-file columns of Imperial Army Seetruppen in their stone-grey parade dress, carrying their weapons – laser rifles of the European Commonwealth, designated the Strahlgewehr-101 in the Imperial arsenal. They fired in the orange spectrum, powered by hydrogen-fuel energy cells – less charge than American microfusion, but practicable for German industry to produce.
The British Army troops guarding Maudling, to his left, looked askance at their German counterparts – the conflicts of centuries past were not wholly forgotten.
…
General Maguire had all but won this battle. The Enclave’s bases in San Antonio had been overrun – the Texans were holding up his flanks well, and NCR troops were on the outskirts of Austin. Now the city centre yet remained, and the enemy remnants in their area were using as their command post the same location they had during the insurgency and the Texan Civil War. The Alamo, legendary location of a valiant last stand during the Texan Revolution some years ago, then turned into a thorn in the NCR and the loyalist Texan forces’ side.
Like Santa Anna in days long gone by, he could not afford yet another lengthy siege. Speed was of the essence – he needed to maximise his advantage and his opportunity, strike when the iron was hot. Local sensibilities be damned, he thought to himself. The NCR has to do this. He took up his pip-boy from his belt and gave the appropriate orders to various of the air attack squadrons and artillery batteries under his command.
They roared thunder from an unforgiving sky. Rockets and explosive shells rained down once more on the historic park, scything down what plants had grown since the earlier bombardments of the last year and the chill of winter. Buzzard attack craft joined the chorus of destruction, raining down ground-attack rockets and explosive bullets from heavy machine-guns. The Alamo – the old mission building used as a fort multiple times in its long history, now the centre of Enclave efforts to converge and command a counter-attack – took the brunt of it. By the end of fifteen minutes of relentless bombardment, no stone stood on another. Where the building had been was only a mass of craters, the very structure of the ground deformed by the explosive forces unleashed.
The last remnants of the Enclave garrison retreated from the city of San Antonio by 11:30 AM February 19th 2332.