Chapter Eight
October 27 2331, CST 09:00
City of Dallas, Lone Star Republic
Private Walker woke up to the sound of shellfire and laser-blasts tearing through the air, activating his armour’s tactical systems. They came to life, instantly recognising his squad-mates as transmissions blazed through the military data-nets. Good, they’re all here, he thought.
Even as he got up his armour’s inbuilt injectors activated, chemical compounds cleansing the lingering tiredness of sleep from his body. Even so, his body burnt with a mix of anticipation and fear. The US Army had pushed the NCR back from the eastern area of the city, the front line being the intersection of the old interstates I-75 and I-30. Still in ruins (unlike those in US territory) the interstate had been demolished by the NCR and essentially turned into a giant mound of rubble – which had then been heavily mined, booby-trapped and further fortified with AA lasers, mortars, and field positions.
“We’re going to be at the forefront of the battle today,” Sergeant Feldman said bluntly. “Command’s identified a gap in the enemy defences guarding the city centre. Our company is going to take the breach.”
They collectively nodded, and got into the M-175 IFV. It was a bumpy ride, and the sounds of distant explosions constantly hammered against the vehicle’s walls. For 30 minutes they drove towards the heart of the city, and then … it was time.
The squad jumped out with a long-practiced motion, under the covering fire of the vehicle’s gatling laser. Blue beams darted out to strike at NCR or Brotherhood men. At the front of the charge was Sergeant Feldman, leading Fireteam A along with Corporal Otto Anderson, while Fireteam B pushed at the surrounding walls.
The breach, as it was, had barely any room for the seven men, and Walker felt a frisson of fear while they moved through it.
One artillery shell and this is over, he mused. But they moved through it successfully … right into an open kill-zone, a city square now abandoned by civilians. Laser fire hit them from all directions, met with plasma fire from Walker’s team and laser fire from other groups. Walker squeezed off a burst, taking out an enemy sergeant.
Walker checked his suit integrity – there was ominous yellow on his right arm.
Enemy troops, both power-armoured and not, were pressing in …
Explosions rang out, a mix of artillery plasma-shells, missiles out of launchers, and mini-nukes, tearing through the buildings in which the enemy had set up. The enemy counter-attack was stifled, confused. Their men in the square were forced to divide their fire between the US soldiers in the open and those now surmounting the mound of rubble. IFVs started moving through the breach in single file, adding more firepower to their support.
Vertibirds landed, carrying combat engineers and power-armoured reinforcements, firing on enemy remnants. The engineers set up sentry guns and force-screens before leaving , while the reinforcements and most of the 3rd Infantry Regiment moved on to strike deeper into the city.
==*==
October 27 2331, CST 12:00
City of San Antonio, Lone Star Republic
Col. James Mitchell, NCR Army, looked through his binoculars at the dead centre of the Texan rebels’ area of control in his district. The Alamo, an old Spanish mission long left in ruins but restored in 2036 to capitalise on its semi-legendary history. Now once more the seat of fruitless defiance. The rebels had done well for themselves in temporarily catching the NCR army off-guard on the 23rd, but it hadn’t lasted. Over the next few days the NCR had ground them out of their pocket of resistance, cutting it down to almost nothing. In a few more days the San Antonio and Austin groups of Enclave sympathisers would be crushed.
But only a token force was left to do it – the greater part of NCR Second Army was moving west to retake Houston - 80,000 men with 20,000 Texan soldiers in tow. And so the rebels in San Antonio and Austin remained stubbornly entrenched, at least for now …
--*--
Back at his command post in Atlanta, General Granite was not unsatisfied. His two corps commanders in the north were still making progress on Dallas, but in the south Rothenberg and Moreno (never mind Dornan) were concerned. An NCR mechanised counter-push was making progress towards Houston, and a victory there would leave them capable of moving further into Louisiana. If they were driven back to the Mississippi, it was an open question if the United States would be able to hold them there without the sort of measures only the President was authorised to enact.
“Move to intercept?” Moreno asked.
“Wait until they get closer to Houston,” Granite replied. “Let the enemy stretch their supply lines just that much further.”
It was hard to explain – he just had an instinct about these things. And with the National Guard troops beginning to move into Houston, he had a solid reserve … as well as two aces in the hole.
==*==
CST 14:00, October 27 2331
65 Miles West of Houston
The Texas plains were supremely flat, much like their counterparts far to the north. In this respect they made supreme territory for armoured warfare. Homesteads sparsely dotted the land, and townships more sparsely still. Some could boats of having existed before the nuclear war of 2077, and bore the names of the first great wave of German immigrants to the United States – Weimar, Schulenburg, New Ulm. Others were from after – from the floods of refugees that had fled the nuclear fires which consumed America’s cities, or from efforts to repopulate the land after those nightmare decades.
So there were many names that could be given for the battle that was beginning to take place here. But in the end it would be the township in the centre of this wide expanse – Columbus, on I-10 – that would ultimately claim the dubious honour.
--*--
“Take out that enemy position!” Staff Sergeant Evans yelled. Even within the sealed-off environment of his combat armour, itself within the air-conditioned, sealed-off hull of the Custer MBT, it was starting to get hot. He and his men had been stuck in these conditions for an hour – it was 15:00 already – and fatigue was slowly starting to take its toll. The gunner took heed and fired the tank’s fusion gun on a two-second burn, targeting a farmhouse 800 metres in the distance where the rebels had set up a rapid-fire plasma caster. The explosion took out half of the building’s second storey, and set the dry wood that made up the rest of it to flames in an instant.
Just then a plasma artillery shell hit the water-tower by the building where an NCR sniper, armed with a gauss rifle was set up. The man himself was evaporated instantly by the blast, but the men under the building – not in power armour – burned under the molten metal that rained down from the burst. Their power-armoured compatriots, abandoning the inferno that had formerly been a homestead owned by a Texan family who had fled northward from the colliding armies, tried to save them but could do nothing.
Two short sharp shocks hit the tank then from the right in quick succession - the blasts from an NCR tank’s two main guns. They hadn’t penetrated the armour, but the crew were still rattled momentarily. Evans wasted no time in turning the tank around and as soon as visual contact was confirmed, striking back at the NCR tank 950 metres away, at the very edge of the Custer’s range. The fusion beam lashed out again on a one-second burn, piercing straight through both reactive and regular layers of armour, right into the crew compartment. A flood of superheated metal vapour filled the NCR tank, followed microseconds later by a beam of plasma as hot as the Sun’s corona – the vehicle’s crew died before they knew anything had happened.
Across the field of war, fires began to spread. Energy beams and explosions were everywhere, and there was plenty of kindling. Dry grass; trees thickly surrounded by fallen leaves; barns and granaries full of produce from the harvest, it all flashed to fire. Smoke and dust rose up over the battlefield, turning what had been a bright day to a murky twilight. And yet the battle was still far from over.
--*--
For all intents and purposes the township was just a few houses, a church and a watering hole set up by a small lake 60 miles due east of Houston. Captain Benavides didn’t even know it’s name – nevertheless he and the power-armoured company under him stood well-entrenched, ready to hold it against the Enclave’s forces of tyranny. Around the township, smoke rose and swirled from the vicious wildfires that were covering the landscape – the orange-red light of early sunset mixed with that created an unnatural twilight. Every so often a new hail of explosions would strike from artillery positions located miles away – the NCR’s artillery had taken heavy casualties, towed guns not able to match up with the Enclave’s self-propelled guns and rocket vehicles.
But still, they’d had victories – half an hour ago, at 17:30, one of their two monster tanks had been forced to retreat – and Benavides knew that if they held out, they could at the least give the Enclave a bloody nose. Hopefully they could damage the enemy to the point they were forced to pull back from Houston.
Regardless of the matter, Benavides knew that he would hold this position as best possible. Already his men had thrown back two pushes from enemy power armour – he held on to his laser RCW tightly, half-wishing he had access to some kind of slugthrower capable of breaching power-armour. In the smoke and dust that dominated this battlefield – so thick that vision was obscured quite frequently, though the Enclave troops seemed to have better sensors – laser weapons were only good to half their usual range. Not to mention the issues with identification – the smoldering wreck of an NCR vertibird, shot down by his men on being mistaken for an enemy plane, lay near the edge of town.
The civilians stood huddled in the church or in various cellars – they didn’t like the NCR soldiers, and had kept a wide berth. They had a better attitude towards the Texan contingent, who were their own countrymen at least; but that force had already been bled white.
It was near the edge of town that Benavides saw the giant. It was tall, far larger than any combat robot the NCR had ever made, and its silhouette, half-hidden by the orange-red clouds of cloying smoke, was a nightmare to behold.
It bellowed warlike slogans in a deep metallic voice like some sort of mythical monster.
“Seccessionist forces – surrender or die! As Fort Sumter was, Camp Navarro shall be reclaimed! Those who would shatter the Union will be shattered themselves!”
The heavy weapons men fired at the distant colossus as it approached, a mix of mortar rounds and missiles. Some missed, other struck but to no seeming effect. Then the superheavy robot held out its right hand and fired several mini-nukes from launchers set around its wrist at the NCR forces. Benavides watched whole platoons evaporate in moments, great flowers of blue-green flame consuming them utterly, leaving charred bones and ash in slagged armour.
Desperate, he rallied his men and led his command squad in a charge against the giant, hoping to achieve something, anything. Time seemed to slow down as adrenaline rushed through his body. Then he noted with horror that its singular eye was starting to glow with an incredibly bright light.
It was the last thing he ever saw.
--*--
General Braxton listened to the reports again as they rang through his temporary field headquarters. Some … giant robot was attacking the NCR’s forces under Enclave direction, with tremendous effect. Everything that had gone up against it, quite frankly, had died. The titan-machine walked, and where it struck none- survived. Even the robo-scorpions and securitrons had failed
He wished that more of the Texans would have moved in against the Enclave; only half of them in the region under his command had joined the fight. The rest were still entrenched in the sieges at San Antonio and Austin; better at least than the ones to the north, who hadn’t left Fort Worth since the fighting at Dallas had started. With its high command gone and no suitable replacements in place, the Texan army was still uncertain of who precisely was meant to be in overall command.
But nevertheless, he only had one solution to the metal monster deployed against him. It was a long shot, but still ...
“How much heavy artillery do we have left?” he asked one of his subordinates.
“18 guns, sir,” the adjutant replied. “Heavily camouflaged. But if we fire them, the Enclave will be able to triangulate their positions. We’ll only be able to pull off one volley.”
“Then I’ll make it count. Do we have a unit near that particular asset?”
“Yes sir,” he said. “The 415th Powered Infantry Company.”
“Then they’ll have to do. Hold it down long enough to destroy it via artillery. Use the plasma shells – we need to make it count.”
--*--
Internal chronometer check: 18:15 CST
All systems functional.
Enemy forces are engaging me – rebel power-armoured troops in APCs, both ineffective against my formidable arsenal. Yet another band of traitors for my high-powered internal weaponry to destroy – I wonder why they continue trying, but such pointless violence simply is just more proof of their obsessive hatred of the American ideals. They’re even worse than the Chinese communists I was originally designed to fight.
Hellebore-Pattern Particle Cannon charged to 80%.
Right-hand Micro-Nuclear "Quarterback" Launcher - 13/20 Micro-Nuclear Charges remaining.
Left-hand Micro-Nuclear "Quarterback" Launcher-
CRITICAL DAMAGE SUSTAINED.
Pain-analogue sensations coming from lower part of body … electromagnetic motivators in upper legs critically damaged by large-scale direct contact plasma explosions, lower legs and feet destroyed by same. I cannot walk. I topple forwards to the ground. Distress signals are received by vertibird units in area – I cannot be of use in this battle anymore. I do not know how long repairs will take – estimate six months at the latest.
Enter standby mode – if I do not, enemies may continue firing on me under belief that I am still active – if I do so, they may believe their actions have caused the permanent failure of the L-001 ‘Liberty Prime’ unit. Human idiom - ‘playing possum’.
--*--
General Braxton looked over the latest report, as his pip-boy’s chronometer marked the time. Nineteen-hundred hours. His men had disabled the Enclave giant robot, but the troops he’d sent to destroy it had been held back, forced to withdraw after thirty minutes of pushing. He’d lost 20,000 men right now at the latest estimate. But he was still holding in the centre of the field – if he could just properly encircle the main thrust of their spearhead …
He didn’t know just what they had in store for him.
