War in Texas should be concluded in one or two chapters. Sorry for taking so long, consider this an early Christmas gift - Kimball's speech was moved to the next chapter for taking up too much space.
==*==
Chapter Twenty-Nine
1400 PST 5 March 2332
New Vegas, NCR
It was very rarely that James Russell had been here during the war in the Mojave all those decades ago; the heart of Mr. House's spiderweb of influence, the top floor of the Lucky 38. Even now, being back here brought back memories. He could see the sterile walls, the two robotic Securitrons housing brain-tape copies of the old man's mistresses' consciousnesses; and looming over everything, controlling everything, the flickering emerald-hued computer screen through which the man himself was talking, his computer-generated image speaking in time with the synthesised voice coming from the speakers.
Even after all these years, he still wondered what the old man's body looked like after its long centuries on life support - or was there even anything left? Was there a head - even a brain? - floating in a vat of yellowish-green biomed gel keeping unnaturally alive, or was there simply a simulation of his consciousness running on a mainframe in some corner of the casino, an electronic ghost of the Old World?
"I've done as you asked, House," Russell said. "Given the recordings I took of Enclave territory to the NCR government."
"Excellent," House said. "Hopefully this will make those empty-headed windbags in Shady Sands see reason. The only way this war can end is through a ceasefire. All probabilities converge on that eventuality. And when the time for that comes, the Enclave and the NCR will find that I will be the best placed to serve as an intermediary."
"Why?"
"Because neither side can win this war. They would each have to occupy up to half of the old United States - an impossible burden. The NCR has prime defensive territory in its mountains and deserts which the Enclave won't be able to break through even with their power armour and vertibirds. And as for the NCR … you saw their last attempt. Logic demands that eventually they'll come to the negotiating table. And when that happens … I'll be primed to be the perfect broker, with my ties to both pre-War America and the NCR."
"But what makes you think they'll seek peace? I saw what the Enclave thinks about us, how they can't accept an inch of what they think their land is not being theirs."
"You don't understand; this is the problem with democratic societies. They can't sustain a war effort for so long, and can't prosecute the measures they'd need to end it quickly. Public opinion prevents it. Two hundred years ago, if the United States had launched an atomic strike on China immediately, before the Stealth Fleet had even been conceived of, America would have survived. But the men in the White House and the Pentagon tried to keep it conventional, tried to keep it civilised, and what was the result? Ten years of senseless, bloody fighting; from Anchorage to Africa, across Central Asia and India, in orbit and on the moon. A million Americans died along with twelve million Russians, fighting so bravely to keep the Chinese from world domination - and it all ended in nuclear fire anyway. I won't see that happen again. I won't see the last two hundred years of human progress laid waste - as they will if this war drags on much longer."
Russell shuddered. What did House know that he didn't? The man had eyes and ears everywhere - he was just one of them, and he'd been retired until recently. If House was concerned that this war threatened all progress society had made since the apocalypse, surely he must be truly frightened.
==*==
1500 PST 5 March 2332
NCR Presidential Palace, Shady Sands
President Kimball sighed as he looked over the speech, due to be given on the morning of the 14th. The choice he'd made had been simple. The essence of his problem was that the North would brook no compromise in the war against the Enclave; the South was more amenable, but ultimately wouldn't stand up to the North enough if push came to shove. And Langdon could split off enough of the South's Senators, together with the North, to make impeachment an inevitability. He chuckled to himself at the bitter irony. The least corrupt and most motivated of California's politicians, the ones that he was trying to raise up while minimising the influence of those controlled by special interests … they were the most doctrinaire.
So, given the option of making a statement that'd mollify the National Consolidation Senators and their ideals of the "Californian Way", or the northerners, he'd been forced to do the latter. The Consolidation Party could tolerate a plan that involved aggressive war; the northerners would never accept any settlement that left the Enclave in existence or in control of any territory. Not to mention that the latter were also members of his own party; he could afford their displeasure far less than he could the NCP's. As the war went on, dragged out into the long slugging match it was now clear to Kimball it would be, he'd be able to take advantage of that; push his aims down to a status quo regarding Texas and forcing the Enclave back to the Appalachians.
The Myrmidon Project would help with that, he'd read the reports by Weathers on its progress. In facilities across the NCR tens of thousands of soldiers – Weathers said he thought he could get up to 100,000 by the end of the year - were being gestated in artificial wombs, nine months to get them to biological age 21 – that was the minimum to prevent the risk of physical and mental defects – then a genetic tweak to tune their ageing to human normal. They were produced by a process that wasn't quite pre-War cloning, it was the artificial recombination of sperm and egg cells created from the donated genes of ten thousand volunteers. No specific gene-markers that could be targeted by Enclave bioweapons. As they floated in the venom-green tanks, unconscious, they would be implanted with copied memories drawn from those same volunteers, recombined just as their genes were. No mental programming that could be subverted, they'd fight for the NCR for the same reasons all California's soldiers did.
Then, maybe, another war past his own term to finally settle the matter. Maybe the acknowledgement that there were other independent states in America would break them, start a runaway process of collapse. At any rate, the war would break the Brotherhood no matter the result.
He ran it over again, making note of what he'd added in the newest revision - the red meat he'd thrown to Langdon to keep him on side while undermining him. The man's ideas were half-crazy - he wanted direct representation of the Barons, the Shi, and other groups in Congress. The argument he made in his manifesto was that this would reduce corruption - giving them a direct voice in government would, in his eyes, reduce their incentive to interfere with the democratic process. Kimball had snorted when he'd read that; was the man so naive to think they'd take their share and go home? More likely it would only increase the power of these groups. More likely it was a play he was making; Kimball could easily imagine that the robber barons he was trying to root out would be eager to support somebody who offered them more spoils.
But other elements of the man's ideology had attracted support from the Northern Senators, and the man was a rising star in the party. The mix of his blatant support for special interests and populist wartime sentiment represented the biggest threat to re-election Kimball had yet seen. Co-opting the most popular elements of his manifesto was a way to nullify his ambitions. Keep the man manageable. Keep his own work from being halted, even reversed. He couldn't afford to look the slightest bit soft on the Enclave – what else would the Republic expect of the man whose grandfather had declared the three no's – no recognition, no negotiation, no peace? And truth be told, after what they'd done to Aaron he wasn't in the mood to see them come out of this war with any gains to speak of.
==*==
Thousands of miles away, another leader was embroiled in a meeting of the National Security Council; an elite group of Executive Branch officials who were currently in one of the White House conference rooms. President Nathan J. Washington looked with tired eyes at the group; Sebastian McCain, Secretary of War; the Secretary of Homeland Security Helena Mellors, who oversaw the Joint Intelligence Chiefs along with other matters relating to border security and counterterrorism; the Secretaries of the Navy, Army and Air Force; and finally the National Security Advisor.
Mellors had just finished giving her opinion that the POW civil labour program Richardson was pushing for posed little to no security risk and was in compliance with the early-20th century conventions – for what little they mattered in this new age – and the Secretary of the Army, Ted Devers, was finishing up a statement that the activation of the Army reserves was going as scheduled. They were only 50,000 men but made up primarily of experienced officers and NCOs; the brains and skeleton of a far larger force, only awaiting muscle to be added to their numbers to create fully-functional units. Nate nodded and moved on to the next topic.
"Mr. Secretary," he said firmly, looking to the Secretary of the Navy. "In the worst-case scenario, is extraction of our forces in southern Texas and north Mexico possible?"
"Potentially, Mr. President," the man replied, reserved as ever. "We may be able to do a repeat of Dunkirk if it comes to that; but lightning doesn't strike twice, you know. The Caribbean Fleet will be able to deploy against the rebels when they're finished restocking on munitions at Havana; the Atlantic Fleet remains committed to protection of our merchant shipping. USS Nereid and Oceanid – the Liberty Star ocean liners we requisitioned – are almost ready to be deployed as hospital ships. But any such operation will be risky, Mr. President. We might lose more in the retreat to the coast than we would if we held our ground waiting for reinforcements."
Nate sighed. This war was quickly becoming more complex than what had initially been envisioned. Perhaps it was his age. He'd been in his twenties and early thirties when he'd served as an infantry officer against the Red Chinese, in Boston against the Brotherhood and the CIT and the super mutants, and finally in Canada against the "Ronto" rebels; now he was in his 70s, grey-haired, an elder statesman. Perhaps it was an atrophy of his skills; he'd spent far more years in politics by now than he'd ever spent on the battlefield. A cushy position in Autumn's administration followed by steady decades of easy electoral victories as a Federalist Senator for Massachusetts; maybe that'd softened him.
As it was, he wasn't concerned about the midterms at least. The last data Nate had looked at – given by Stephanie McSally, chairwoman of the FRNC – indicated that the traditional Federalist heartlands - the South, the Caribbean, and New England - were solid blue, but the mid-Atlantic north of Mason-Dixon and Steel Belt looked a greenish-yellow. The Appalachians were even brighter yellow - the Free States movement had been defunct for two hundred years, not being nearly as prepared for atomic war as they'd believed, but the memory of them lingered - their descendants thankfully far less radical than their pre-War ancestors, who'd been borderline anarchists. Thank heavens for that, he mused.
The big wild cards were the newly reintegrated areas - Texas and Oklahoma - which remained to be seen whether they'd be in a state to hold an election by November, but if so it was a tossup in which camp they'd end up. Senator John Ellis Bush V, "representing" Texas as an appointee, had expressed an intent to campaign for his seat when it came up - he may lose the party a winnable seat, but the man was from an old pre-War political dynasty and viewed a position in government as practically his birthright. That sentiment was shared by a lot of the appointee Senators, and though Autumn's expansion of reintegrated territory had thinned their ranks and the accession of new States had diluted their power, there were still far too many of them for Nate's liking. Polling at least showed the traditional supporters of the Federalist Party - the military, urban big business, the suburban middle class, and rural family farmers - remained solidly wedded to the party, along with the religious vote.
McCain spoke up next.
"The new tactical fusion weapons are due to-"
"Yes, the replacements for the Autumn-era plasma bombs. I've already cleared them for field deployment, we've both read the memos. 8 feet long, high-explosive induced magnetic flux compression causing fusion of lithium deuteride, 20 to 80 tons of TNT equivalent. It's the same technique we use for our mini-nukes and larger nuclear weapons; Princeton's done the math, CIT's designed them, Republic is making them. That's enough for me."
McCain raised his voice again.
"Mr. President, I'd advise for the deployment of Chemical Corps assets in Texas."
"That's up to me and General Autumn, and neither of us is willing to deploy them right now. We've gotten backlash, and not just from the morons in CASE. The Vatican, the Hagia Sophia, the National Cathedral, and several big-name preachers and rabbis have all made statements against their use. Even Senator Granite has made comments about it – and at any rate the NCR is rapidly switching to full CBRN protection."
That last statement was telling. Douglas Granite was a rising star in Congress, the young senator being a key figure in the less hawkish wing of the party. There was another reason of course – the areas of the Chicago outskirts where poison gas had been deployed were still being cleaned up. It had been effective though; killing and maiming agents had slain or crippled thousands of NCR soldiers and panicked tens of thousands more – the mix of aerosolised green food colouring into the warheads had been an inspired touch, both marking out dangerous areas for the counter-attacking US troops and contributing to the near-rout that had prevented AFB O'Hare from falling, as NCR forces believed they were being hit with FEV.
Nate looked at the carpet of the Great Seal on the floor, the eagle carrying in one hand the olive branch of peace and the other the arrows and lightning-bolts of war. The last of those were certainly not there for no reason.
"I'll issue a statement to mollify them. They'll know that the United States will respond to force with force, and the use of atomic, biological or chemical weapons with our own arsenals of such as tactical circumstances dictate. And of course – though I won't say it – if the Cali rebels cross the Mobile-Toronto Line I'll deploy the nuclear arsenal against their formations and immediately enact Operation Wormwood on their homeland."
--*--
MEMO ON REPLACEMENT VEHICLES FOR US ARMY
FROM: Secretary of the Army Edward H. Devers
TO: Secretary of War Sebastian G. McCain
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: To ignore a violent attack strengthens the heart of the enemy. Vigour is valiant, cowardice is vile.
DATE: 06/03/2332
Mr. Secretary,
As per your instructions I have gone over the reports concerning the M125 Dornan IFV and found several glaring flaws. Worthy of note are difficulties covering rough ground and moving off-road, vulnerability of the wheels to enemy fire resulting in many mobility kills and increased burden on maintenance teams, and high centre of gravity causing difficulty making sharp turns and presenting a taller silhouette for enemy fire – all these are difficulties inherited from the M124 McArthur IFV and though reduced have not been eliminated.
As a result I am henceforth contracting with Excelsior Motors (who already produce the new M500 Longbow SPART vehicle) to replace the Dornan with their competitor model to Hermes' winning design which abandons the Stryker-McArthur-Dornan design philosophy of a wheeled IFV and returns to the conventional tracked model, exemplified in the first half of the Cold War by the M113 and its larger successor. The Dornan's specialist variants which serve in rear-line roles will continue to be produced while USMC and National Guard forces will make use of replaced vehicles. We expect a slight decrease in maximum speed, from 65 to 55kph, and an increase in weight of IFV units to 45 tons from 40. Strategic-level airlift will still be possible via C180 Pegasus cargo plane and the newly introduced VB-04 quad-tiltrotor dedicated transport.
The new vehicle will be designated the M126 Grant and will begin taking its place in the ranks in late 2332 to mid-2333.
This will be at the same time as the other vehicle replacement projects. First of this is the Hermes Motors M90 Rockenbach MBT, which we estimate will not fully replace the M75E Custer for two decades and will be the first US tank with a remote-operated turret, carrying as main armament an M82C fusion cannon capable of firing in both beamed and pulsed mode. In addition, the tank will have photonic resonance-based protection as standard in addition to conventional and NERA-elmag armour. Second is the Aegis Industries M91 Reagan LBT to replace the M72 Lafayette, carrying as main armament an autoloading railcannon, 105mm caliber. I am yet to decide on reviving the Pershing II heavy tank, and in the meantime have decided to contract for additional M81 Constantine SHBT production in accordance with doctrinal changes – Constantines are not to deploy singly but to deploy three a division as a tank platoon to enable mutual support.
God Bless America.
==*==
Teddy Roosevelt Elementary School, Washington D.C.
10:00 AM EST, March 9 2332
"There are voices of hope that are borne on the air,
That our land shall be free from its clouds of despair,
For brave men and true men to battle have gone,
And good times, good times, are soon coming on!"
"Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!,
Sound the news from the din of battle booming,
Tell the people near and far that better times are coming!"
Helen Hendry took a deep breath and paused after finishing the first verse and chorus of the song, the children in front of her following along. The new patriotic songs that were being sung as part of the State curriculum for elementary schools, approved by the local school board, put her on edge. She didn't pretend there wasn't a war on like the people in CASE, but at least the kids ought to be shielded from it.
"We'll show the Cali murderers a thing they never knew,
And fight for the honour of the Red, White and Blue
The traitors and the rebels will soon meet their doom,
Then peace and prosperity shall dwell in every home!"
She barely knew what the point was; were they going to let in ten-year-olds at the recruiting stations. She guessed it might keep up morale; the invasion in the Midwest had reached farther than it had any right to, ravaging loyal towns and cities and being stopped at the very gates of Chicago. The news out of Texas wasn't great too, but still.
"Generals Sherman and Pershing and Patton long are gone,
But still we have our brave men to lead the soldiers on,
The noise of battle will soon have died away,
And the darkness now upon us will lead to a happier day!"
She breathed a sigh of relief. She didn't disapprove of singing patriotic songs in class, but songs about the war felt too … too real. Like it was penetrating everywhere, what had been a distant thought in the back of every US citizen's mind until now becoming known in full awful clarity. There are a horde of rebels out West who want to tear down our country, stamp Old Glory into the mud and destroy everything we've worked hard to build for 50 years. It was a sobering thought, and Hendry couldn't help but frown a bit as the final chorus finished. Alright then, it was time to start today's first English lesson …
==*==
14:00 CST, March 9 2332
South Texas
Sergeant Royez, NCR Army, was not enjoying this situation. His unit's advance had halted at a place called Lyford along I69E – a worthless little town that would have been of no relevance to the NCR's advance to the Rio Grande, had not it - along with the dozens of other small Texan towns in this area - been assigned an Enclave regiment, which the NCR were having a hard time driving out. They'd taken the section of road no problem, but it was a devil getting the eye-guys out of the rest of the town. The smoking wrecks of a dozen NCR tanks – both Coyotes and Cougars – that had tried to breeze past after they'd taken the highway attested to how much they needed to do this.
He took a deep breath, concealed in his foxhole. It wasn't common for men in power armour to go prone - the sheer weight and bulkiness of the suit made it easier to kneel - but not impossible. Right now, he and finding it necessary. Every base is supporting each other, he thought … we turn to deal with one enemy position, and we find another shooting us from our back. Fucking Old World roaches. Every enemy base had at least a few Enclave light artillery pieces, and behind the front line they had their self-propelled guns shooting and scooting, never letting up with near-automatic artillery fire. The enemy guns were more accurate than the ones he'd faced at Chicago – and far more flexible. They'd do bullshit like fire a round to flush out NCR troops from a position, then while the first one was still in the air fire a whole spread of rounds around it to hit at the same time, one piece acting as a whole battery.
He heard loud whistles overhead – he knew the sound well, one of the NCR Army's missiles. Guided by radio trucks, they were being launched from all the way back in California, zooming in at supersonic speed to strike the enemy. The thing was, even with the trucks they weren't nearly as accurate as the Enclave's missiles – a mile was considered good enough, he'd heard. Some meant to hit the southern defence line had landed in Reynosa. He saw it explode above him, saw the cluster submunitions rain in front. One of them hit an enemy IFV, firing from behind an earthen embankment on the top, caving in its turret – most of the rest went wide.
He fired again, pressing the trigger on his auto-LAER. Laser-guided electron beams struck out again and again, suppressing the enemy troops in front. One of their crew-served mini-nuke launchers went off, taking out an NCR automortar behind him with a loud boom. The eye-guys' non-powered troops'd gotten new armour plates – ones that hung down over the stomach, covered up the old weak spots. The other ones they were fighting alongside, the damned British and German troops – were holding up well with Enclave support. Some were even wearing Enclave armour, carrying their laser rifles – it took a black-white-red tricolour or Union Jack patch on the shoulder pad to tell the difference.
They had robots in the field too – new Sentry variants that stood on two legs, taller than a man in power-armour, with one arm carrying a missile launcher and the other a rapid-fire plasma gun, carrying nuke-mortars on their backs. They'd run out of ammo for the latter, but they were still deadly, still a match for the securitrons pushing down on the main enemy defense line. He fired at one of them that looked damaged, one of its arms broken off but still not the worse for wear, opening up full-auto with his LAER. The laser penetrated, and the electric beam it guided sent wild surges of power through the enemy robot, taking it down as it smoked and sparked. He fired again at another target of opportunity – his gun just clicked as the MFC was dry. Sighing, he reloaded and counted his remaining cells.
The Enclave troops here – about a thousand to fifteen hundred, Royez roughly estimated - were kneeling behind sandbags and earthworks in ditches – not like the elaborate trench networks at Chicago, the concrete-lined ditches with forcefields, razor wire and gatling lasers in front, followed up by atomic mortars behind, and once you got past the first line they had the underground dugouts roofed with reinforced concrete, filled to the brim with the reserve troops. He took a long, deep breath, pushing down the memory of that awful day. No, this was easy. This was manageable by contrast. They hadn't had the time to really dig in here. Gus's goons had been taken with their pants down comparatively, and with any luck-
He saw the glint of light reflecting off the barrel of an enemy tank right before it fired, hiding most of its bulk behind a low adobe wall. Royez heard a high-pitched ear-splitting roar as the tank's shell, a 105mm hypervelocity tungsten-steel slug, set the air behind it aflame passing by at ten times the speed of sound. The projectile slammed into an NCR Gecko flame tank rolling up to lay some fire on the enemy trenches, crumpling the front armour like paper, slicing a line of fire through the main gun's fuel reservoirs, and crashing through the engine block out the rear. Smoke poured from the entry and exit wounds, the crackling of fires mingling with the hellish screams of the turret crew as they fought to get out of their vehicle. One of the two managed to get out, but the flames were already consuming him, napalm eating away at his flesh even as he pulled himself out of the hatch, rolled around on the ground – whether he was trying to put the fire out or thrashing in agony, Royez couldn't know. Part of him wanted to run, reach out to him, do something, anything – but that'd expose his own position.
A gauss round from the Enclave side put the tanker's agony to an end. Medics would be coming to organise a burial detail immediately – better that than leave his body to the mercies of the Enclave. The other guy trapped in the turret, they'd be lucky to find shreds of bone. He'd heard talk from the men, his boys – how the Old-World roaches didn't bury the fallen like normal decent people but took the bodies to factories, rendered them down for explosive chemicals. NCR and eye-guys all mixed together, dissolving in some vat like soup. The image made him shudder. Royez took a deep breath and loaded a new fusion cell into his LAER, not knowing which fate was worse.
--*--
General Maguire had been moving to and fro across the battlefield for days now, after a hurried inspection of the damage done to San Antonio, and you could tell by looking at him. His command vehicle's foldaway cot was out permanently, and the hatch was sealed tight. He sighed, sat down by the crammed-in radio equipment all around him, and yawned. It was impossible not to try and stay alert. If the Enclave artillery got a clear bead on his position from his radio signals, their guns would wipe him off the face off the Earth – they'd already done that to one of his subordinates. There were a dozen situations as well that needed his personal supervision at any given moment, reports filtering in and orders needing to be given, dozens of thorns in his side in the Enclave bases he still wasn't able to reduce. He wasn't able to get clear air superiority either, they were still flying sorties over the sea from Cuba and Louisiana over the battlefield. He hadn't been able to shut down enemy resupply by air or the Port of Brownsville.
But those, he felt, were mild concerns. His overall plan was in essence simple, and in line with tried and tested NCR doctrine. Not like that maverick Robertson, whose long spearheads had run too far ahead of his supply lines and ruined the NCR's chance to end the Enclave at a single stroke. To be fair, Military Intelligence shared some blame. The national risings, large-scale mutinies and worker revolts they'd predicted had shown no sign of materialising – something that worried Maguire. Just what measures had the Enclave taken to prevent that?
Be that as it may, he was making a broad attack on a frontline 120 miles long from the Old World reservoir to the sea, primarily infantry with some assistance from powered and armoured elements, constantly cycling units back and forth, staying close to weaken their fire support. Continuous pressure, that was the name of the game. They would falter eventually – they must – and then, when the weak spots showed themselves – the reserve units, primarily PA soldiers, tanks, armoured cavalry units in IFVs – would break through. Navarro and Helios One had broken under continuous pressure; their airbase near Chicago would have if not for the gas. Everything was going as planned.
Three formations were gathering as the units that had swept over San Antonio and swung down to Raymondsville reconsolidated – two aimed at the Rio Grande via Edinburg-McAllen and Harlingen, and a third at Corpus Christi. On the broader scale, he was aiming to defeat all Enclave forces in Texas in detail via broad-front offensives. Corpus Christi and Reynosa would be just the first two to go, and he'd already successfully cut off Houston from Dallas to prepare for the next element of his counterstroke. Everything was going as planned, though he had decided to oversee the attack on the coastal plain personally to make sure it succeeded.
He looked at his vis-feed, the camera showing a link to the world outside his command vehicle. Dozens of NCR rocket trucks, dispersed prior to this, stood parked in long rows, concealed behind camo-netting, ready to open fire on the main defence line, accompanied by similar numbers of heavy 210mm artillery pieces, hooked to the backs of trucks for easy transport, and lighter 105mm self-propelled guns. After this happened, they'd disperse again to avoid counter-battery and concentrate again at another location in a few hours to hit another section of the Enclave defences. Not as fast as the enemy's – the only enemy that really mattered to the NCR's – self-propelled pieces, which were changing position so quick they had to be firing on the move, and somehow firing as a battery despite their evident distance from each other – but good enough. Continual, constant bombardment. He put his mouth to the radio equipment and gave the order.
"All rockets and artillery, fire for effect on the designated sectors. I want a sustained barrage, fifteen minutes."
Just outside the vehicle, hundreds of rocket contrails split the air with whistling shrieks like a demented pipe organ, darkening the evening sky as the reflected glow of sunset turned the sky to fire, the drumbeat of artillery fire providing a rhythmic counterpoint. The orchestra was starting its concert.
--*--
Private Dan Fuller stood up on the trench's firing step, in the earthworks surrounding the Edinburg-McAllen salient, and fired his laser carbine near blindly into the fray, not quite sure where each burst of fire was hitting. Even the thermal vision setting he had on wasn't doing well to penetrate the smokescreen NCR artillery was near-continuously laying to cover their soldiers' advance against the Enclave lines.
He remembered a week ago, the 22nd Ontario Rifle Regiment, National Guard – his own, that he'd joined to get a good job while avoiding the harsher discipline that the regular Army enforced – had just been shipped down to Mexico, They'd landed ashore to no resistance and driven straight to Reynosa, before dismounting and crawling like worms through the tall grass over the last few hundred metres to carry out a lightning surprise assault on enemy defensive trenches under cover of night, a hurricane barrage of fire from atomic mortars the first hint the enemy had of their arrival.
The fighting had been over within hours – they'd stormed the trench in good old Canadian fashion, just like Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach – and shown Uncle Sam's enemies yet again why the people of the US's northernmost Commonwealth had such a warlike reputation. It was a shame the people of the northern colonies had refused to take part in the American Revolution, only joining the US when their attempt to be neutral in World War Three put them on the brink of Red Chinese invasion. The fight itself had been quick, brutal and bloody – Fuller had seen the life go out of more than one man's eyes personally, his first taste of real combat. He still wasn't sure what to make of it.
And it had also been no real contest. In some sectors they'd just driven up in engineering vehicles and buried the poor fools alive as they struggled to get out of their dugouts – in others like his own, it'd been hand to hand, with laser carbines, plasma grenades, shotguns, and chain bayonets. When the confused, terrified enemy managed to hit them, their bullets shattered against their armour. There had been no deaths and few injuries.
The day after, they'd paraded through the streets of the city, alongside good'ol boys from Dixie, tawny-skinned Latins from Cuba and Hispaniola, tall blonde-haired Icelanders, all united under Old Glory. It had seemed so easy then, like they'd already won and the rebels were on the run. Now it seemed the opposite. The rebels came every day in wave after wave trying to breach the US trenches; squads of infantry backed by their automatic mortars, APCs and IFVs providing support, a few tanks, maybe a squad of powered infantry here and there. V-birds and buzzer ground attack planes swooped in whenever they spied a hole in the air defences. At least they were forced to let up during the night beyond sporadic artillery fire.
He gritted his teeth and fired again, taking out a rebel soldier as he loped, half bent over, to find cover by the wreckage of a twin-barrelled NCR tank, its turret blown sky-high, along with its crew, by the autoloader system that'd gone up when struck by an AT missile carrying a shaped plasma charge. The man screamed and called frantically for a medic as he tried to hold in his guts, belly burst open by the laser fire.
Fuller , sending the remnants of him falling away. Then, they came. With a loud whistling sound dozens – no hundreds of rockets descended, all around. Not many hit near the trench, but they didn't need to. It was enough to have him and the other National Guard soldiers keep their heads down, as the bombardment dragged on with ear-splitting explosions all around him. After five minutes of hell, he looked and saw them – dozens of rebel soldiers in power armour, walking through the smoke and the thrown-up dust, backed by tanks. Laser beams fired above his head as they carried on relentless volleys of marching fire, not even needing to reload their recharger weapons. The enemy tanks moved forward, firing bright streams of burning napalm into the trenches, the firing positions, the pillboxes. People were already running when the order to retreat was given.
Fuller heard the call to retreat over the radio – this position was untenable – and moved due south into Edinburg, sprinting like mad. A couple of times he turned his back to fire sporadic bursts at the advancing enemies, but he wasn't sure he was hitting any. Then he saw them, in the direction he was headed – NCR Rangers, just deployed from an enemy v-bird, scurrying to find cover. Fuck, he thought, firing his carbine at them as they opened fire on the retreating US troops.
The flechettes hit him square in the upper chest, penetrating his armour, arterial blood flying out in sprays of gore. As his vision darkened and he breathed his last, he saw an NCR ranger's corpse lying beside the man that'd killed him. At least I took out one of-
-*-
Ranger-Sergeant Brandon McGrath fired his gun from the sill of a broken window, kneeling on the carpeted floor as he loosed bursts of flechettes. Enclave soldiers kept on retreating past his position, as he opened bursts of well-aimed fire that took out a fair few. He was glad the Rangers were getting to outshine the bastards in the PA Corps, being the tip of the spear against the Enclave's forces on this sector of the front. We get so little respect these days, he bitterly mused, when we were around before the fucking NCR. And for that the Rangers had been systematically neglected since the Legion Wars.
The PA Corps, the tank forces, the re-equipping of the regular Army – the Rangers had been a redheaded stepchild, with some even arguing they should be disbanded or put under the Army. Where are those mocking Senators now?, Brandon mused. The 6th Ranger Regiment had got behind the enemy lines before the powered boys had even reached them – if Robertson hadn't held them back and relegated the NCR's best to play a support role in his attack on the Enclave air base when they should have been spearheading it, the Old World roaches would have already lost the war by now.
He knelt a sec to take cover and reload his gun, putting one of his spare mags in the spot behind the trigger with a click and tossing the old one aside. The Rangers had never given up on ballistic weapons for reasons McGrath had never bothered finding out. Call it stubbornness or old-fashionedness, but it worked. The result was the M8 Assault Rifle, firing saboted fin-stabilised 7.62mm flechettes capable of breaching Enclave combat armour with burst fire and threatening power armour with sustained use. For all the other roles they were expected to perform they had Cazador missile launchers for anti-tank and AA deployment, M186 Sequoia gauss rifles for light vehicles and power armour, the M41 Bozar as a sniper rifle/LMG crossbreed, combat knives and Desert Eagles for close-range work. With a real war happening, suddenly the politicians and the generals could mysteriously find a lot more funding.
Enough self-congratulation, let's move it. The enemy AA wouldn't be suppressed forever and the vertibird was leaving, there were Enclave defensive lines further within the town before they hit the Rio Grande. Just eleven fucking klicks. He could taste victory now. He gave the order to move forward by hand signal, knowing his voice wouldn't be heard over the sounds of battle. How hard can this be?
0600 CST, March 8th 2332
Kansas City Bastion, Brotherhood Territory
Colonel Flores took a deep breath and sighed, before firing another burst of plasma fire from behind the concrete barricade at a Brotherhood squad leader. They struck true but were mere glancing hits - scoring the pauldron and hitting one of the decorative horns on his T-72 knockoff. He sighed and targeted centre-mass on another Brotherhood soldier, two three-round bursts in quick succession dropping the man with ease. A gauss sniper round went out from the airfield's control tower - a sturdy reinforced-concrete pre-War building that'd survived both the nukes two hundred years ago and Bradley-Hercules' fire - hitting Flores' first target square in the middle of his helmet. The Brotherhood man fell dead instantly, mushed brain matter pouring from the hole in the back of his armour.
The situation was still not good for the men of the 101st Airborne. General Wainscott, the officer in full command of the division, had landed shortly after the Brotherhood airfield had been deemed secure and sent most of the initial spearhead force to convene on his location. They'd taken control rapidly, establishing a stronghold using the Brotherhood's own defences - the tangle of streets between the ruined factories and warehouses around it serving to slow down and limit the movement of the Brotherhood's superheavy attack robots. The armored regiment dropped to the north of the city had also done its job, interdicting any enemy movement to keep it safe. But they were running out of time. The
Flores sighed yet again as he sent out another volley of shots, looking out at the mass of enemy troops. They were falling back, pulling together their forces for another assault across the old trainyard. The metal monsters they'd called up from the bunkers were serving as direct-fire artillery support, blasting at the Brotherhood airbase – but of course, they didn't want to damage their own infrastructure. That was slowing them down, holding them back – good for him. Every hour the Brotherhood survivors of Kansas City spent fighting to retake their own airport was another hour the onrushing mechanised spearheads were penetrating their territory.
If they could just-
The plasma shell slammed into the foremost super-robot's top at Mach 5, carving a deep crater into the hardened steel, before detonating. There was a brilliant flare of blue-white plasma followed by secondary explosions as shells and fusion cores went up in orange-white plumes of fire and deep black smoke, followed by the thing falling down on the barren concrete, ripped into two halves by the furious fire of US artillery pieces. Flores smiled inside his suit as he loaded the last MFC he had in his Peacemaker rifle, knowing that the main US forces had just gotten in firing range of their location.
--*--
About eighty miles east of Kansas City, near the town of Sedalia, Cavalier-Captain Godfrey Fitzgerald gritted his teeth in the tight confines of his Cortana battle tank. It was another enemy unit – a group of Custers, three or so, on the fringes of the Enclave tank army driving in from the east. The Enclave units seemed to be everywhere at once, as Brotherhood forces floundered in the dark. Every hour, every minute it seemed they were sighted somewhere new as units reported fresh sightings deeper into the Brotherhood's territory. They'd broken the line along I-44 at the beginning of their attack at midnight and the Brotherhood still hadn't established a new one after three days. Some units had reported finding Enclave troops already at the positions they'd tried to fall back to, others were being attacked from the air and wiped out as they dared to move in the open, yet others tried to put up a fight but were simply moved past by the onrushing armoured spearheads and left stranded in what had now become enemy territory. Dozens of bunker outposts were out of contact, presumed lost. Entire militia units had killed their Brotherhood officers and reportedly defected, in the worst treachery Godfrey could have imagined.
His unit, ten Cortana tanks at the start of this new campaign, had taken losses but also won victories – but the battles were always taking place further and further from the Enclave lines at the start.
He took a deep breath, tried to stay calm, waiting for an opportunity. His tank was hull-down, concealed in thick brush along with the other crews under him, engine at low power mode to help conceal them. There – a glimpse of a Custer's turret. The Cortana fired its main gun, each coil disengaging as the projectile passed it, the magnetic differential lending more speed to the slug as it struck out and hit the vehicle in the side of the turret. At least one crewmember had been taken out, and its main gun was wrecked for sure. Other Cortanas fired on, but missed or glanced the Enclave tanks. The others opened up with their own cannons, blasts of fusion fire making trees explode as their sap flash-boiled, hitting one and turning a whole side of it to slag in a single hit, Enclave IFVs swerving to help support the embattled tanks as the Cortanas moved on. Godfrey broke contact with the enemy and headed towards his objective – the Whiteman bunker, said to be embattled by Enclave forces.
When he arrived the airfields surrounding the facility had definitely seen a battle – there were corpses of both Enclave powered soldiers and some more of their unpowered ones, many of the latter still tangled in their parachutes, along with still-smoking crashed vertibirds. But still, the Brotherhood men at the site were leaving. He asked the Paladin-Commander in command, his superior under the Chain that Binds, why.
"We can't hold Whiteman," he bitterly replied. "The Enclave moved round us. While we were trying to hold them on I70 and I49, they sent a whole army through the Ozarks to reinforce the airborne troops they dropped at Kansas City. Not good country for tanks or vehicles, but the bastards somehow did pulled it off. People're saying they had some kind of super robot leading the charge, something that no Brotherhood unit could take on. This whole place is lost, or about to be."
"Then-"
"We can't hold anything south or east of Kansas City. We're pulling north now - we have to fall back, trade space for time. The Germans made big gains when they invaded the Soviets too, and at the end of it they were howling that the great steppe was devouring them."
"So-"
"Don't worry. Even in the worst case, they'll never break through our mountains."
0800 CST, March 13th, 2332
Near Falfurrias, Texas
Staff Sergeant George M. Walker knelt for a second behind his Dornan IFV, eyes absent-mindedly going over his armour integrity - it was all good, every indicator flashing green. They'd received new armour modules during their stay in Reynosa - not upgrades that he'd heard rumours had to be in the works, just replacements while their old ones were sent back to US Army depots for refurbishment, to eventually be sent to another unit God knew where. Circulating PA modules like this was common practice - not the least for morale reasons, as despite official memos everybody from the lowliest private to the General of the Armies himself knew it was bad luck to wear gear from a dead man's suit. He got up from his position with his squad, the soldiers fanning out under direction of his hand signals. A simple maneuver – he'd lead a push down the centre, suppressing the enemy with marching fire, while the other two elements outflanked them.
The harsh cracks of laser beams were a constant noise, second only to the roar of hypervelocity gauss rounds, as he and his men fanned out, each team under its leader. The enemy shots were running wild however, though they were far more than he anticipated – these weren't the trained sharpshooters that had taken his right hand in Missouri. But still, the cracks of gauss rifles opening up brought back unpleasant memories as he and the other team leaders sprinted from cover to cover, always one group giving suppressing fire while the other two used what little terrain there was on this vast expanse of flat scrubland to outflank and hit the enemy. Once, this area had been a sprawling suburb of the town beside it – Young had pointed out the remnants of asphalt roads still marking out the fragments of a grid pattern, almost like he was back in his old job. Now it was a nameless stretch of countryside bordering I-2, which the enemy were trying to cross as part of their general assault on US positions.
He gritted his teeth and ran forward - they'd crossed the Rio Grande trying to outmaneuver one of the enemy spearheads, only to run into elements of that force trying to circumvent the defensive works along I-2 and flank the town of McAllen. Adrenaline drove him as he reloaded his Peacemaker rifle in what was now a well-practiced motion and opened with volleys of plasma fire, hitting a Cali trooper in the head. His helmet gave way under the first two shots of the three-round burst, carving open the way for the last to hit and take him down. He shuddered to think of what his foe's corpse would look like after that, of white teeth still gleaming in a charred-black skull.
His IFV's autocannon was silent – the vehicle had already run out of ammo in previous skirmishes, and the carrier had been held up. Thankfully the co-axial gatling laser was still blazing away, giving off suppressing fire that helped his men as they advanced. His own team was bunching up behind the Dornan whenever they could – if nothing else, the vehicle was mobile cover.
He took a deep breath and pressed forward. Behind him he could hear US guns roaring with a constant drumbeat of artillery fire – both new specialised artillery vehicles back across the river, in the process of replacing the Electric Ediths that were now seen as having too little ammo, and their lighter counterparts closer in – new Dornan-chassis variants with an Enola nuke-launcher in place of a turret, the space no longer used for troops now filled with ammo. The constant fire was already turning this place into a moonscape of shell craters.
He fired on and again, taking out the man next to him. Rita made a comment in Spanish as she fired her laser cannon again, kneeling to take aim before firing on one of the thin-skinned NCR AT vehicles, aiming for the engine block as she crouched behind a fallen log – scant cover if the enemy vehicle fired her way, but to conceal her long enough. The NCR armoured car's whole front went up, and Walker gave the signal to move on. The rebels were fighting hard, but the battle seemed to be slowly swinging towards the US forces. The Custer MBT supporting his platoon swept the ridgeline with gatling laser fire, a line of light blazing across Walker's vision as it raised its gun and took out a low-flying enemy vertibird, sheering off one of the wings completely and sending it into a doomed tailspin.
He radioed his team leaders; they were good on the uptake, going about their assigned tasks with ease. But still he felt worried. What was this whole attack by the 115th even about? Still, he guessed, not his business to think about – he wasn't even Platoon Sergeant yet.
--*--
Dozens of miles north, NCR Army Sergeant-Major Dan Macfarlane took a deep breath and sighed in frustration. He was in the middle of a three-mile-long tangle of logistics trucks, stretching from Falfurrias to La Gloria, carrying an ungodly mess of food, munitions, spare parts, weapons, and more – everything needed to feed the army's relentless hunger for supplies. After the second spearhead of the main assault had pushed down I69E, running through the farmland outside of Corpus Christi, the enemy had launched a counterattack with auxiliary forces that had swept aside the garrison left there. NCR units had pushed them back, but the area was still contested and subject to constant enemy counterattacks – mixed with barrages from the guns there that the highway was in range of. Not to mention the gunboats which patrolled the coast from Corpus Christi, sailing through the shallow waters of the lagoon till it became unnavigable by Padre Island and whose guns, oh so wonderfully, had just enough range to hit NCR trucks that tried to take the junction east and move down 69E from there.
So 69C had been subject to double the logistical weight it had been expected to carry, with this wonderful situation as the glorious result. There were jams running all the way down from Mathis to Encino, as the endless trucks and other motor vehicles heading down from San Antonio struggled to make their way forward, slow as molasses, along a road carrying twice the number of vehicles it had been planned to.
Grimond still felt uneasy despite being out of range of Enclave guns and rockets. Logistics elements of the Army, among other groups, still hadn't gotten the new helmets – themselves cheap versions of Ranger helms stripped of electronics and night vision – and were still using the old models based on Old World combat armour. If they used gas again, he and all his friends would die screaming.
Suddenly, he heard a sound other than idling engines. The roar, so high-pitched for how loud it was, split his ears as terror filled and what he realised what was happening. Fuck. He swore inside his head, even as the terrifying crash drowned out any sound he could think of making.
--*--
Flight Captain Arlene Autumn checked her instruments and gritted her teeth. The months she'd spent at Adams had been pleasant, if boring, but then Texas had reopened like a sore wound in the US's southern flank. Her squadron had been redeployed to the AFB at Artemisa, Cuba with all due haste six days ago, and then spent time prepping for the series of raids due to start now. Dedicated interdiction squadrons were still deploying, and AFB O'Hare's crews were busy pummelling the Brotherhood, so it had fallen to them to carry this out.
"Romeo, watch your six," she gave out, talking to Ostlund. The callsign, picked according to the NATO phonetic alphabet the US had used for almost 400 years, was certainly appropriate – after trying to pick her up earlier in the year before she'd made it very clear she wasn't interested, she had seen him with her friend Cathy looking at each other in a way that made it obvious they had gotten together. "All pilots, stay in cruise until targets are identified."
This was, by any reasonable standard, utterly crazy. One of the hallmarks of the F-97 Aurora (to be renamed the Valkyrie II, she'd heard) – was its ability to supercruise at any altitude. Which still meant that flying at Mach 2.5 just above treetop height, for that extra bit of radar stealth, was beyond dangerous. She took greedy gulps of air from her oxygen mask, knowing that one mistake, one lapse of focus, would have her and her bird scattered across the Texas countryside. With luck, they would find one or two of her teeth to bury.
She saw the signals appear on her radar, just barely over the horizon. Unmistakeably an NCR convoy. They overshot it, but that had been planned – as one the fighter jets climbed and looped up back, prepping for the real attack run.
"Move wings to attack position," she said, clicking the button as she reduced engine throttle, cutting down the flow of air through the fusion ramjets that drove an Aurora fighter, allowing herself a smile. The engine was an exercise in simplicity itself - running air through an operating reactor meant fast speed with no moving parts, even helped cool down the plant as it was running. The planes smashed back down through the sound barrier as the enemy came in view. Taking a breath, Arlene lined up targets, opened her plane's weapons bays, and fired her missiles.
-*-
The AGMs roared in with rapid speed scant seconds after Macfarlane heard the sonic boom, targeted precisely at the SAM and laser air defence vehicles. They went up in devastating explosions, eye-searing micro-nuclear flashes and clouds of smoke fading to reveal mangled, semi-molten wrecks of vehicle hulls.
Soldiers rushed to the front, carrying Cazador AA-variant missile launchers, but the enemy warplanes were coming in fast. Macfarlane could barely make them out, their speed and the reflection of their glossy black surfaces making it hard to tell their position and shape.
-*-
They were out of AGMs – an Aurora carried two missiles a bird, but the alpha strike needed to take out as much enemy AA as possible, so she'd instructed her planes to fire both on the first pass . However, the Aurora had a weapon that was operable so long as the reactors were running. The gatling laser was one of the pinnacles of pre-War weapons technology. The cyclic multi-barrel design allowed for rapid fire to be sustained with high-grade laser weaponry, each shot a pulsed beam that fired dozens of times in the second it operated. A Lawnmower gatling laser could cut a power-armoured man in half – the Aurora's gun applied the same principles behind it to a light anti-vehicle laser cannon.
Sapphire beams scythed down from her warplane, guided by holographic sights integrated into her flight helmet. Munitions trucks went up in bursts of fire and smoke as ammo cooked off, others simply went up in flames, The soldiers who'd rushed out to fire MANPADs and provide some air defense quickly became chunks of scorched meat littering the highway under the brutal volleys of firepower. For the NCR's soldiers it was a choice of staying buttoned up and dying in their vehicles or running out and dying in the open. But still –
Arlene checked her radar again, after about five minutes. Enemy fighters coming from north-west, Condors by the signature, probably a patrol already in the air. Soon, they'd be in missile range, there'd probably be two or three hits, and her squadron would have to do a dogfight against planes that were probably still more maneuverable (she wasn't sure of the new thrust vectoring systems), over enemy territory, with less numbers from the missile hits. There was only one realistic choice that didn't end in her and her wingmates killed or captured. And she sure hadn't been ordered to clear the skies.
She gave the order to return to cruise and flew the squadron away back to Cuba. There were two whole air wings carrying out these missions right now, with more on the way.
-*-
By a miracle Dan Macfarlane had survived the attack. Five minutes of pure Hell – utter destruction wrecked by Enclave birds flying out of the blue. He looked around in a state of semi-shock, looking over the ruined corpses of NCR reduced to chunks of scorched meat by the power of the enemy's lasers. Fucking vultures, he mused. One in ten to five of the vehicles in the convoy had been taken out, at a glance – and concentrated near the front and rear too. It'd take half a day at best to get it moving. And for all the sake of joining another traffic jam further south.
--*--
Dozens of miles to the south, Corporal John Stanstead gritted his teeth and looked down the sights of his Custer MBT's gun over the low-rise buildings of northern McAllen, looking for any sign of rebel targets. He hadn't even bothered to clean up the remnants of the MRE he'd had earlier; hippo cutlets from Louisiana, marinated in gravy and served with fries, the vestiges of it still on his lap. He could wash that all off later. He'd taken off his helmet mask too; all tank crews did despite regs saying otherwise. What good did they do compared to the tank's own systems – its laser rangefinder, targeting HUD and thermal vision mode? The other benefits the damn thing gave were also supplied by the spall liner and NBC sealing a Custer had.
Commander was talking into the comms – what he was saying Stanstead couldn't make out, over the noises of the battle outside and his own focus on watching for enemy movement. Whatever it was, it wasn't being sent over radio, but the Custer's tactical laser comms system – only 3-5 klicks of range, but the enemy had no hope of jamming or intercepting it.
The enemy tanks that he now saw approaching, smashing through flimsy suburban wood houses, were a mix of Coyotes – easy enough to deal with, their twin 90mm guns couldn't reliably pen US armour – and their new laser variant, which could. The Bobcats were to be avoided too, being a near-perfect match for the urban warfare they were in. Powered infantry could take the vehicles out with heavy weapons or even sustained plasma fire – no need for a Custer to risk damage facing a target that its turret could barely swing around to hit.
Okay – he saw it – enemy armour. He didn't need an order to open fire, striking out with his fusion cannon as the enemy tank turned its own turret to attack. It was one of the older tanks, the one with the twin cannons. Not likely to penetrate, but capable of doing damage if it hit a sensitive spot. He fired, default one-second burn. The lance of plasma, millions of degrees hot as it underwent nuclear fusion at its core and mere thousands for most of its outer layers, struck right into the rebel tank and sent thousands of molten metal shards flying into the tank's interior at high speeds as its outer layer of armour evaporated. Ammo cooking off did the rest, the turret flying sky-high. The Custer then moved to a concealed position as power-armoured troops moved up to contest the enemy advance, ready to support them.
But they still kept coming, still pushing. They weren't letting up. He sure hoped the brass had a plan to fix this situation, because he sure couldn't see one.
