Spooker
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Grass Eaters 2 | 10 | Holdout V
🕑 Added 2024-06-07 16:47:00 +0000 UTCPriunt Spaceport, Datsot-3
POV: Skhork, Znosian Dominion Marines (Rank: Six Whiskers)
“We have no orbital support, no aircraft, and no indirect fire. Our infantry is a limited resource. And the only armored element we have is my single Longclaw. As the combat computer has calculated, a successful operation must rely on the element of shock. We hit the enemy so hard, so fast, that they cannot possibly respond before it is too late. Therefore, this attack will resemble more a deep penetration raid than a combined arms breach.”
Skhork gestured at the holographic projection of the sector spaceport on the floor of his tent as his platoon leaders crowded around. They could afford to use the battery-powered device now that the Longclaw has been fully recharged.
“The critical weakness of the predator facility is once again its rear entrance: it is a mere hundred meters to the dense hilly forest nearby. We will approach the base under this cover of foliage. Our Marines in full combat gear can cover the distance of the clearing in twenty seconds. Our Longclaw can traverse it in five.”
He then pointed at the newly installed autocannon turret covering that approach.
“Given the enemy’s newfound reliance on combat robots, the combat computer predicts the turret will likely also be automated like ship defenses. Its response is estimated to be quick and precise. Our Longclaw will immediately engage and destroy it. Carrying as many Marines on the Longclaw hull as possible, we will pierce the outer gate and establish a beachhead. We will deploy concealment and all infantry platoons will follow.”
The holographic image displayed the Longclaw plowing through the thin metal fence on the outer perimeter, and then Znosian Marines sprinting out from the forestry into the clearing to the outer gate.
“Once within the perimeter, the infantry will cover the Longclaw, prioritizing engaging enemy anti-armor teams in the inner checkpoint. According to our reconnaissance, there will likely be standard predator anti-armor traps to immobilize our gravity engines before we can breach the inner gate. They will need to be disabled. Once the checkpoint is secured, the demolitions team will clear the way for our Longclaw, which will proceed to break through the second, inner gate. This second breakthrough should take place within five minutes, or the mission must be cancelled.”
Then, the hologram shifted to display the interior of the base, with an underground entrance highlighted in yellow, followed by a map of a complicated series of tunnels underground.
“We have two primary objectives. First, Platoons 1 to 6 will enter the underground shuttle hangars and destroy as many of their spacecraft as possible. The enemy’s most elite units are likely to be concentrated there, so be prepared for a firefight. Time is of the essence, so push through your casualties and accomplish the objectives by any means necessary.”
The leaders of the designated platoons nodded their heads knowingly. Most of their Marines were not expected to survive. They would do their duty to the Prophecy. One of them muttered under his breath with grim resignation, “Our lives were forfeited the day we left the hatchling pools.”
Skhork nodded and continued his briefing. A series of new targets appeared in the above ground complex.
“The Longclaw, Platoon 7, and Platoon 8 will focus on the other primary objective: denying the future use of the spaceport to the enemy. Using demolition charges and our Longclaw shells, we will take down the control tower and all six of the spaceport’s launch pads in sequence.”
The light from the hologram faded, casting the tent into darkness. Skhork’s eyes, sharp and intense, met each of his gathered subordinates.
“Once inside the base, we should all have twenty minutes to complete our mission and another five to retreat back into the forestry before enemy orbital support arrives. Thirty minutes, in and out. Is everything clear?”
One of his platoon leaders, her voice laced with concern, began, “If we cannot finish destroying the underground shuttles before—”
Skhork interrupted her. “You will complete your tasks. One of the Marines on the surface will alert you by backup radio if enemy orbital support has arrived before you can exit the hangars. If you are still in the structure by then, you will hunker down and force the predators in orbit to participate in further destruction of their own spaceport or send their own infantry in to clear you out. Do you understand my plan?”
“Yes, Six Whiskers.”
Nods rippled through the tent.
“Any other questions? No? Good. Fearless, we have destroyed the value of our troops and equipment a dozen-fold from the enemy in the last month. With this mission, a hundred-fold is easily within our grasp. We have proven ourselves worthy, all of us. Worthy of the responsibilities we have been given by the Prophecy. We are Znosians. We are the Servants and executors of the Prophecy, and Its Will shall be done. Trust in your herd! Trust in your purpose! Awoo?”
“Awoo awoo awoooooooo!”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Skhork looked up at the empty sky in his open cupola. No moons. Low light. Even in his night vision scopes, the outlines of the forest were barely visible. Navigation was only possible because of the Znosians’ sensitive thermal sensors. Darkness was their ally.
He lowered himself into the armored Longclaw cabin. “Everyone ready?”
“Ready,” his crew replied in unison in the confined space.
“Two minutes,” his Gunner announced, taking a quick glance at her watch.
Skhork grunted in approval and stood back up to look towards the edge of the clearing. Only a few steps away, the foliage was so thick that the facility beyond it was fully obscured. Even so, he could dimly hear the activity in the busy spaceport. There were no landings at this time of night, but the work of maintenance and cargo transfer was still ongoing.
He glanced back towards the dozen Marines clinging onto the paw holds on the outside of his vehicle. He whispered at them, “One minute!”
A moment later, he got a nod back from the platoon leader, barely visible in the pitch darkness. Skhork couldn’t see the other platoons he knew were laying around the forest floor next to them, but he trusted they would do their jobs.
“Thirty seconds, engines on.”
The Longclaw’s gravity engines switched on, its hum muffled by the wet leaves on the surrounding trees. Skhork put on his helmet, dialing up the hearing protection to the maximum.
The Gunner pre-aimed their turret cannon towards the known location of the enemy autocannon turret.
“Five, four, three, two, one… fire!”
The cannon discharged in a loud explosion, the flash lighting up the forest around them for an instant. Before his eyes adjusted, Skhork saw the eager faces of his people laying next to his vehicle, their bodies tensed, ready for the fight.
“Drive!”
At his command, the Longclaw surged forward, crashing through the trees into the clearing, bringing the base in view. He brought up his optics, and to his relief, the enemy turret was out of action, its top half missing and the surrounding machinery in flames.
It took the predicted five seconds for his vehicle to traverse the open clearing. The Longclaw crashed through the spaceport’s outer metal gate, trampling it beneath the gravity engines like a pile of broken twigs.
Thud. In unison, the heavy assault platoon on his hull dismounted, bringing up their automatic rifles, pouring fire towards the half dozen guards in the inner gate and its gatehouse.
“The checkpoint!”
But he needed not have given the order. The Gunner was already working on it. The secondary kinetic ammunition shredded through the inner gate’s checkpoint: glass, steel, concrete, flesh, and blood.
Ten seconds.
“Smoke!”
With the flick of a button on his console, the dozen grenade canisters mounted on the turret fired towards the front, filling the night with a cushion of obscuring smoke. Behind the Longclaw, the infantry platoons rushed out of the clearing and sprinted towards the opening they made with their war cries.
“Watch out for their anti-armor troops!” Skhork yelled at the infantry surrounding the Longclaw, but he didn’t expect to be heard through the din of battle. They did their jobs anyway, suppressing anyone beyond the inner gate with their automatic fire. A trio unfolded a tripod with practiced paws to set up a mounted machine gun next to the Longclaw. Their grenadier launched another two grenades towards the gate, discouraging any predator troops from poking their heads out.
Twenty seconds.
Skhork looked at the solid metal plates embedded into the asphalt in front of the inner gate. Gravity engine traps, as expected. His demolition teams would know what to do with those. He glanced at the enemy’s inner gate. There was no other sign of resistance, other than the few dead guards in the checkpoint. They must have been caught completely unprepared. As he pondered where the rest of the enemy’s infantry were, the spaceport’s loud sirens began to sound.
A little faster than expected, but not unusual enough to worry over.
Thirty seconds.
The infantry behind them filed into the checkpoint area, rapidly setting up a security perimeter around the Longclaw.
“Demolitions, disable those gravity traps!” Skhork yelled, gesturing at the plates with his paws.
There was no way he could be heard over the din. But the demolitions team leader clearly understood his assignment, waving his paw in acknowledgement as his team rushed towards the task of disabling the traps that would fry their gravity engines if they tried to forcibly push through over it.
One minute.
No enemy units appeared, though the activity in the base appeared to have ceased. The suppressive fire from his troops towards the inner gate slackened to save ammunition.
One minute and a half.
The demolitions team continued their work as Skhork looked up worryingly at the sky. He knew his anti-aircraft operators were ready at the edge of the clearing behind him, and the startup sequence for predator rotary wing gunships was at least fifteen minutes. And that was on a good day.
Right?
Two minutes.
Finally, a response from the enemy.
He heard two dozen distinctive dry coughs deep in the spaceport that briefly eclipsed the sound of his troops’ fire. A quick check on his combat computer confirmed what he suspected as the Longclaw radar tracked twenty-four artillery projectiles in the air, close enough for them to measure their precise diameter: 105 millimeters.
That’s unexpected. They can’t have accurately zeroed in on us that fast.
Nonetheless, he was taking no chances.
“Indirect fire!” he shouted at his infantry. They couldn’t hear him, but at least a few of the platoon leaders also heard the shells being launched. They quickly dispersed the Marines in a wide pattern, taking cover best they could in the open perimeter; the remaining followed their example.
Two minutes and a half.
His Marines had stopped shooting to take cover.
Skhork tracked the incoming on his radar.
Five.
Four.
He ducked into his cupola. He didn’t think about it beforehand, and there wasn’t enough time to close it, but it was unlikely they’d score a direct him on the Longclaw anyway. Hopefully.
Two.
One.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Skhork heard numerous dull sounds around his Longclaw as the symbols disappeared off its sensor screen. A splattering of mud and dust clattered loudly against the armor of his vehicle.
After a few seconds, he peeked cautiously out of his turret. He spotted a couple of dimpled craters several meters from the Longclaw where the shells landed and no sign of the rest.
To his relief, all his Marines seemed… alive. No casualties.
Duds, maybe? Or just lucky.
Skhork did not spare a moment to question his unit’s good luck or express disdain at the predators’ faulty equipment, instead motioning for his troops to get up to resume their volume of fire.
Three minutes.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his demolitions team waving to him from the gravity tank trap. They were saying something. He made a gesture with his paw to his ear, the universal sign that he could not hear.
They gave him a positive paw signal.
Good to go. Traps disabled.
“Excellent work!” he shouted, more to himself than to anyone in particular.
He descended into his cabin again and shouted at his crew. “Good to go! Driver, take us through the gate!”
“Right away, Commander!”
The Driver happily complied, gunning the engines. Their infantry in front of them had enough sense to move out of the way. The Longclaw sped forward, through the gravity engine trap without issue, and grinded through the inner gates with similar ease to how it penetrated the outer perimeter.
“Smoke!”
The Longclaw’s smoke canisters discharged again, filling a wide volume in front of the vehicle with obscuration. The infantry behind them filed in, spreading out as they entered to maximize their coverage. More machine gun tripods were being set up, along with some temporary cover in the form of sandbags carried in by the spare infantry.
Skhork looked through his thermal optic, trying to identify enemy targets through the smoke for his Gunner.
There were none. Not a single enemy in sight.
They should be responding in force by now, even by the combat computer’s most optimistic projections.
Three minutes and a half.
Puzzled, he glanced at his infantry platoon leaders, trying to gauge if they saw anything from their facial expressions.
As he turned, Skhork noticed some liquid splash onto his half-open visor. The inside of it.
Liquid? Blood? Where?
Skhork checked his head and chest with his paws, running through his field triage training.
No openings.
No lacerations.
No signs of trauma.
No scent of external wounds.
He looked up in the dark night sky, wondering if it had started raining without him noticing. Suddenly, his night vision goggles seemed too dim. He flipped a switch on his helmet to turn up the brightness setting on the display, but even the bright night lighting around the spaceport seemed to start getting darker. He realized it was already on the maximum brightness.
Why is it getting so dark all of a sudden?
Skhork lifted his visor to check if something was wrong with his device. His paws — trembling now, oddly enough — touched his nose from under it: it was wet. Where from?
He tried to sneeze to expel the liquid stuck in his runny nose, but he found that he couldn’t even muster up the energy to do so from his abdomen.
“Something— something is wrong,” Skhork barely made out as he felt something squeezing his chest, like he was being sat on by a heavy predator.
“Medic…” he gasped hoarsely.
Nobody responded in the din.
It was getting difficult to even breathe, each breath more laborious than the last.
His strength left him. The upper half of his body gave out before his rear paws: Skhork slumped on his side across the top of his Longclaw turret.
One of his platoon leaders turned around and shouted something at him.
Help me. Help me.
The platoon leader turned to call out to her platoon medic. As she pivoted, he could see her frowning.
She vomited, clutching her sides in pain. He watched helplessly as she too collapsed to the ground, next to the lifeless body of one of her squad leaders.
The gunfire around him slowed to a stop. From his paralyzed point of view, he could see his troops drop to the tarmac, one-by-one; some twitching, vomiting, or gurgling on the ground as she did; others limp and lifeless.
Skhork could only observe feebly as silhouettes of the enemies raced out of the smoke his own Longclaw had deployed, moving unnaturally fast against no resistance.
Combat robots, he noted dumbly, of course. They approached his troops without a care in the galaxy. Some of them weren’t even armed. One of the cursed machines jabbed something into the neck of one of his unconscious Marines. Then, another.
Still painfully aware, Skhork realized he was inhaling the saliva pooled inside his mouth into his lungs with his shallow, involuntary gasps of breath. His diaphragm muscles refused to respond to his brain desperately signaling for them to cough the liquid out.
It felt like drowning.
Loss of consciousness seconds later was a mercy.
Four minutes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Priunt Security Force Headquarters, Datsot-3
POV: Vionvu, Malgeir Federation Security Forces (Position: Chief Sector Commander)
The drone video recording stopped.
The sector command center was silent but for the hum of its computer fans.
The security commander looked up in horror at the expressionless advisor on the main screen. Her eyes didn’t quite meet the camera.
He managed to stutter out, “What— what was— what was in those gray and green canisters you gave us?”
Comments
Spooker
This is chapter 10 from a while back.
Cosmic Bananas
I swear I saw this same exact one word for word a month ago
Valdis Trautmanis
It's quite safe to reveal Terran C-weapons to the Buns remaining on Datsot. They're completely surrounded, cut off from any comms with HQ, written off by their Command and slated for extermination by the Allies. This intel isn't reaching Znos anytime soon.
AnAbsoluteVillain
Reminds me of the Red Mist in Stellaris. An alternative orbital bombardment method you find on a red toxic world covered in the stuff. Humans, are thinking long term about what to do when they come to a Znosian homeworld. Billions of genocidal zelot buns. 🤔🤔🤔
Jim Smith
My only concern is that while tactically useful, it doesn't seem like it was strategically worth it as far as revealing the capability, and the more salient point, providing the concept to the Znosians. I am not aware of them using biological or chemical weapons in theater for combat purposes, or even for their planetary sterilizations. I can certainly believe that genocidal fanatics would use it in combat, even if their own troops were in harms way, simply because they don't care about their own troops for the most part. Human containment gear is bulky, obstructive, and detrimental to normal combat, I can see the Znosians not caring if their own troops die in 15 minutes, if they can wreak havoc in 10 of those and inflict defeats on the enemy. Further, a way to strike at civilian populations if they are forced to abandon a planet is certainly in the Znosian metaphorical wheelhouse. Yes the unit was troublesome, but I can't help but feel that mines, actual artillery strikes on the Znosian position, repositioning an orbital strike unit, et cetera might have been a wiser play long term.
M
Oh dang...
Desurtfawks
The implications of this is that because the Buns never agreed to be civil, and never treated any of their enemies fairly under the conditions of the Geneva Convention; Earth created gas weapons, that could otherwise never be used in human conflict (all countries are signatories to the GC), just as an extra fuck you to the buns. Author, basically saying Earth is pissed beyond all reason. It also implies that every biolab on Earth could be making Znosian flavor nasties. Yikes.
Jim Smith
While tactically sound, I can't help but feel that genocidal bunnies, once they latch onto the idea of chemical and biological weapons, will set to with a will. That said, if it could be dispersed widely enough, or hit the birthing pools, that might be the best way to stop a "Znosian wave." Fundamentally attack their logistics, by removing their supply of future combatants.
