Next four chapters will be about the Battle of Dallas, which lasts about a week.
==*==
Chapter Six
CST 23:58, October 22 2331
Poseidon Energy Building, Houston, Lone Star Republic
The Poseidon Energy Building was the tallest in the city – one of the few skyscrapers that had survived the atomic strike of October 2077, A marble statue of the ancient god stood in front of the grand stairway which led into the building, carrying his trident with an attitude of arrogance. Behind and above him rose a facade of red granite stretching for 80 floors, the very top designed as a facsimile of a classical Greek temple. Around the building rose artificial hills – a layer of topsoil that covered mounds of compacted concrete, twisted steel, and broken glass, the only remainder of Houston’s old business district. Atop and around the hills were blocks of one- or two-storey adobe buildings – the very first to be built when survivors of the blasts returned to Houston – separated by narrow, twisting alleyways.
The environment was perfect to defend, and so the NCR and their Lone Star Armed Forces patsies had been unable to take it in a year-long siege. Now these days the situation was looking better than ever – USAF transport planes dropped regular supplies of food, ammo and other materiel.
Colonel Sam Hollis looked to the south, at the new Business District, from the Penthouse Suite that had housed the CEO of the Poseidon Energy Corporation until he had moved to the American continuity-of-government secret base west of California in the beginning of 2077. Skyscrapers had been under construction until the war, a dozen corporations eager to open new offices – and now the outbreak of war had halted it. He was worried, truth be told.
Americans have all but ordered me to try and break out tonight … what are they playing at? What’s their plan? Just then he felt a shockwave rip through the air – shattering the windows of the penthouse once more as the loudest noise Hollis had heard in his life filled his ears.
==*==
CST 0:00, October 23 2331
Two Miles South of Fort Hood, Lone Star Republic
The NCR vertibird flew north, carrying Samuel Benbow. Officially, he was nothing but the NCR Ambassador to a fellow nation, helping them cooperate against an insurgency that had taken many thousands of lives. Unofficially, his job was to communicate the NCR’s demands to the Texan President, and to its military leaders. General Maguire was the actual man in charge of the operation, but had never left his command post in Albuquerque for the entirety of the campaign. Which meant that Benbow was de facto the link between the Texan military and the NCR military.
Now, he was here to request the Texan army to do its fair share of suppressing the insurgents – that in recent months Enclave special forces were starting to operate at their leisure within the LSR – not just the Enclave’s Secret Service men, but their “US Army Rangers” as well. The estimate was about ten thousand – hundreds of small teams moving around across the vast countryside in trucks or on motorcycles, living off the land or being sheltered by Enclave-sympathising farmers, staging ambushes and IED attacks, or helping co-ordinate similar actions being taken by the rebels themselves.
He could see it almost ahead from his position standing at the entrance to the cockpit – the gleaming lights of Fort Hood, home base of first the US Army and then the Texan Army. Fort Hood which had survived the Great War intact due to its auto-defences, which had in recent months been taken westward to supplement the NCR’s missile defence network.
Fort Hood which served as base for the Lone Star Republic’s General Staff, their 25,000 best soldiers and 75% of their air force.
And then the instruments of its doom approached. At first they seemed nothing but unusually bright stars – then they got closer, brighter against the firmament, and Benbow realised they were objects moving closer and closer to Earth – then they seemed to break up, each into 24 smaller objects. With horror he realised they were headed straight for Fort Hood. He tried to warn the pilot, but his headphones were already piping in NCR military networks. Things seemed to move with a horrible slow motion – time itself seeming to slow to a crawl – as the objects blossomed with the fires of atmospheric re-entry, eerie trails of air following them.
Then, they detonated. Moving too fast for the AA lasers to even try and track, they exploded each with the force of 100 tons of TNT, half a kilometre above ground level. And right on top of Fort Hood.
72 artificial suns briefly blossomed into existence, creating supersonic shockwaves that flung tanks around like a child’s toys and would have turned flesh to pulp if the flash hadn’t already carbonised it. In Fort Hood, 50,000 souls became just as many hunks of charcoal nigh-instantaneously as the blasts tore off roofs, knocked down walls, and shattered windows until every building was reduced to rubble. The very air turned into fire, a furious firestorm that was propelled through the bunker doors (left open by negligence) and into the underground areas of the base until its own greedy hunger for oxygen killed it. Thousands more died screaming below ground, and yet more thousands were asphyxiated in the aftermath.
So close to the epicentre of the blast, Benbow’s vertibird was hit by the shockwave shortly after. He wasn’t blinded by the light flash of the bombardment due to its polarized windows but he could barely see anything at any rate as the tiltwing aircraft was sent rolling in all directions by the turbulence. Then it went into a final tailspin, one of its rotors sheered off by the sheer force of the pressure pulse. It hit the ground and Benbow saw only darkness.
His neck had been broken by the crash – he might have survived with prompt medical attention, but such wasn’t forthcoming. He, along with his pilots, died in the wreckage.
-*-
General Maguire spat as the radio man set out the news. He was 50 years old … too old for this. But Shady Sands had asked him to fight the Enclave sympathizers in Texas, and as a native of Redding he had leapt at the call. The southern states just didn’t understand the Enclave the way the northern ones did – they’d just marched north to siege Navarro then gone in for a ticker-tape parade when it was done and gone.
And now … his control room was in a state of chaos, staffers frantically running about as the base’s men fought to re-establish a sense of order.
“Fort Hood isn’t responding,” he said. “Neither is Mr. Benbow’s VB. I think we have to consider them to be destroyed.”
“And our ambassador?”
“Likely dead or so severely injured as to be crippled.”
“Any more news?”
“I’ve run the numbers on the explosion,” an OSI woman said coolly, nervously fiddling with her brunette hair. “I’d estimate about 7 kilotons. Normally I’d estimate that to be a nuclear strike, but our radar team’s reports aren’t consistent with that. Each bomb’s own blast was about 100 tons, but there were 72 of them.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“Origin point is from far outside Earth’s atmosphere, coming in at a 45-degree angle. Like meteorites.”
“You think that could have been it?” Maguire asked, mockingly. “Just a fucking natural phenomenon?!”
“No, sir.”
Just then, a radar man rushed up to the General.
“Sir,” he said breathlessly. “Our radar teams at Houston are reporting a large number of enemy ships approaching in formation. They have to be Enclave warships.”
“The diversion then,” he said.
NCR Military Intelligence had recently uncovered details as to the invasion promised by the Enclave President some months ago. There would be two main attacks – one at Dallas intended to take the LSR’s largest city, and another at Corpus Christi intended to push towards Austin via San Antonio – and a diversionary move against Houston intended to draw forces away from the attack on Corpus Christi. He had anticipated this and moved several divisions from Houston to Corpus Christi, ready for the attack which the NCR’s spy rings in Enclave territory had said would came this week.
==*==
30 Miles Southeast of Galveston, Gulf of Mexico
01:00 CST, October 23 2331
USS Columbia rocked as she fired a full broadside – 12 18-inch railguns, set in four triple-turrets – for the first time ever in anger. Even Admiral Howland, in his captain’s chair on her bridge, was shaken. Then the secondaries opened up – six 8-inch railguns, the half of the full complement of 12 that faced the enemy, added to nine of eighteen three-inchers.
The shots had been targeted precisely, to take out enemy AA emplacements – the Columbia’s targeting centre incorporated live feeds from vat-grown cyborg spy-birds and data from US global positioning satellites. Every one was a guaranteed hit. The Caribbean Fleet’s three Iowas – USS Alaska, USS Texas, and USS California, all new vessels – added their own voices to the growing chorus of shellfire and explosions.
The twenty-eight “Lightning Strike” cruise missiles, stacked in the 300-metre-long heavy battleship’s VLS cells, were reserved for bombarding Houston.
Then followed the eight Phoenix-class cruisers – USS San Diego, USS Los Angeles, USS San Francisco, USS Havana, USS Tampa, USS Galveston, USS New Orleans and USS Baltimore – adding in their own broadsides, eight-inch railguns spitting high-explosive shells towards their targets.
And in the midst of all this, the 12 John Paul Jones-class destroyers fired their plasma railguns, spitting out hypervelocity bolts of raw destructive plasma. The blasts were bright blue-white – the US military was transitioning towards a new elemental mixture as the basis for its plasma weapons, one that lacked the (still not fully understood) molecular destabilisation effect but burnt at 2500 degrees Celsius over 2000. All in all, no difference, but easier to contain.
The two supercarriers, USS Richardson and USS Kitty Hawk (renamed during the Kirkpatrick administration – the deeply religious President Kirkpatrick had not approved of former President Trump’s womanising behaviour even three centuries after the fact), waited. They would wait for destruction of the enemy air defence to be confirmed before releasing their fighter complements.
The amphibious task force, led from the USS Normandy by Vice Admiral Shepard, was twelve miles ahead.
So be it, Howland thought, sipping some coffee from the State of Hispaniola. We’ll see if we can pull this off.
-*-
Private James Hunter was scared. One hour thirty minutes ago, Fort Hood and the top level of the LSR Army’s command had ceased to exist. Then for the past thirty minutes a relentless bombardment had struck Galveston. The great ship the NCR had been converting into a warship, the Rose of Texas, had been hit by a flurry of plasma blasts – with incredible accuracy, right on its unarmoured areas – and been sunk.
Every laser AA emplacement in Galveston had also been levelled – again, the shots were uncannily accurate. And now four ships loomed against the southern horizon, getting closer. Then he realised with horror that there were many small boats between them and the shore, and the large vessels were launching great numbers of vertibirds.
He wasn’t sure who to fight for – he wanted to deal with the mutineers, but what’d happened to Carrera was … were the Americans any worse than the NCR? The NCR stations made them sound like demons, but a year ago Hunter had vacationed with his family in American territory – even been registered as a citizen by them – and it had been quite … fun. Not at all the dire wasteland of tyranny and despair the NCR talked about.
He kept breathing tensely. The Californians were at their backs – a mixed unit of light infantry and power-armoured troops. And they would not dream about letting the Texan men surrender so easily.
So he manned the barricade at the beachside … waiting. As the American boats rapidly closed the distance through the surf, the vertibirds above them Hunter realised that they hadn’t been boats … they were APCs and tanks.
Just then a US soldier jumped out in strange power armour and fired his rifle. The last thing Hunter saw was a bright flash of blue-white plasma approaching him.
-*-
Captain Lionel Barrett jumped out of the Dornan IFV and hit the beach, urging his command squad to follow him. Across the beachside men dismounted, clad in T-90. Attempts to make the T-90 “Hellfire” suit to be used by the US Army had failed owing to logistical issues as the Army rapidly increased in numbers. So the comparatively more elite Marines and Secret Service had gone on to make it their own.
He fired his M-72 plasma rifle in a three round burst, hitting an enemy soldier who’d made the mistake to look up to see the commotion. Three bolts of white-blue plasma rushed by, burning a fist-sized hole through the man’s chest and melting the glass of a shopfront behind him. The M-251 Lejeune behind him fired its main gun, blowing apart the barricade set up on the beach. Body parts and pieces of furniture went flying, and the Marines under Cpt. Barrett rushed to follow him through the beach. The enemy’s PA soldiers launched an attack from the alley – a planned ambush.
They were NCR men in their own model of PA, helms designed to resemble the snarling faces of bears. They had rapid-fire laser rifles – laser RCWs, a design popular with the pre-War mafia.
Barrett moved his command squad down the left while the other two squads of his platoon took the right as the voice of his old teacher at officer cadet school roared at him from beyond the grave – “Counter-attack is the best response to an ambush! Don’t hand those fuckers all the initiative!”
They took position behind the rusted-out wreck of a car – hit during one of the many firefights that had hit these streets in the past year. The enemy had … some kind of rapid-fire pulse weapon? The noises it made were certainly distinct from those made by laser and plasma guns. Jacobs, the heavy weapons man, sent a spree of shots from his grenade MG that silenced whatever it was; with it done, they headed down the street.
A whole Marine division was attacking Galveston, and they were making good progress. Enemy forces seemed confused and paralytic, reacting to attacks slowly. The Texans for their part seemed not to want to fight US troops – Barrett guessed they must be locals – while the Californians seemed just unprepared for the intensity of the Marines’ push. Already the casualties were starting to mount up though.
But under relentless air attack from the USMC’s vertibirds, the NCR forces could not hold Galveston. Bloodied, they fell back across I-45, collapsing the bridge behind them with explosives. It was a futile gesture – the 1st Marine division was fully amphibious, with even its power armour suits having attached hydrojet modules that made each soldier into captain of his own personal sub.
-*-
Lieutenant General Ingham was tired. Not only had the pro-Enclave insurgents made a push out from their holdout, supported by a rampant wave of sabotage and guerrilla ambushes across the city and the whole countryside, but Galveston had fallen to their landing party and they had a beachhead on the opposite shore despite his best efforts – about 8,000 men he believed, all power-armoured, with IFVs and light tanks.
As well they might – he was well aware that Houston was just a diversion for the Enclave, a bid to lure NCR troops away from the main thrust at Corpus Christi, where they’d been humiliated on the diplomatic stage. No wonder they would seek to avenge themselves on the NCR there.
All he had to do was wait for reinforcements to arrive from the airport.
-*-
Flight Lieutenant Arlene Autumn moved her F-97 Aurora from supersonic cruise to low-velocity configuration. Weakening her plane’s stealth would be a bad move ordinarily, but apparently spy-bird intel had determined a complete lack of laser AA at Houston International Airport, now an NCR airbase. The NCR had apparently placed the majority of it at Galveston, where it had been destroyed from the sea.
All this seemed to indicate that they thought Houston would be a secondary target – the Marines had revealed on the radio network their confusion at the relative lack of enemy resistance. Intel reports had put a lot more enemy soldiers at Houston than any US aligned forces had encountered – it was as if the enemy had inexplicably moved them away in the past few weeks.
If there was another thing Arlene was surprised by, it was the lack of lights from below. Over the centuries, the halo of suburbia that had once surrounded Houston had been reclaimed by the countryside. A city that had sprawled over thousands of square miles now only covered about 60.
And that meant if the airport was taken, any NCR response would take a good while. All the time it would take for the 7th and 9th Cavalry Regiments – wholly airmobile units – to take and secure the airport, and for the 6th Armored Division to arrive via C180 Pegasus military cargo planes. If NCR fighters didn’t take out their vertibirds before they touched the ground, which her squadron's role was to prevent.
She could see their radar returns immediately – though they were designed for radar stealth, the NCR hadn’t been able to replicate or independently discover the radar-absorbent composites the F-97 Aurora was made of. Which meant that the Condor warplanes flying against them – while fuzzy – could be made out to an extent.
She silently prayed and tried to remember what her instructors had told her about the Condor, based on NCR propaganda materials and simulations of its design. Designed as a high-speed interceptor to counter our bombers, she remembered. Very maneuverable, but also prone to instability. Harder to control than the Aurora. Large lifting surface – vulnerable to being punched straight through. Uses an autocannon firing high-explosive bullets – limited ammo.
She’d done sims before – flying a Mustang against Germans and Japanese, a P-160 Meteor against Red Chinese Xian fighters over Anchorage, flying an Aurora in any number of situations. This was the real deal. If her plane was hit, and the ejector relay built into her seat failed to teleport her out of harm’s way, she was dead.
At any rate, the die was cast.
She joined the rest of her squadron in an attack dive on the enemy squadron, themselves preparing to pounce on the vertibirds of the 7th Cavalry. She took out one plane with one of her air-to-air missiles, and punched a major gash in another with her heavy gatling laser, causing it to crash. The element of surprise was total – the enemy squadron was annihilated in a moment. But in that moment, surprise had been lost.
Another enemy squadron was moving up – and knowing there were enemy planes in the area, they’d pay heed to even the faintest radar readings. Stealth wasn’t nearly as much an advantage now. And now the enemy squadron was zooming up to meet them, closing the distance … only two or three klicks now.
The situation dissolved into a wild furball of dogfighting, and Arlene was forced to move by instinct. There was no time to think or second-guess, and even the cybernetic implants they’d put in her before starting flight training – the reflex boosters and perception enhancers – didn’t give her as much of an edge as she’d hoped to. By the end of it, she thought it had been an hour – it had only been a quarter that time – and four of her fellow planes had been taken out, a third of the squadron’s strength. Two of her wingmates had survived, the other two’s planes had been destroyed before their relays could take them out of danger.
The rest of the enemy planes based here realised their position was untenable and tried to flee – the USAF was merciless. Missiles and gatling lasers took them out on the ground, shortly before the Army vertibirds landed. Fighting continued for about thirty minutes on the tarmac of the runway, between power-armoured NCR soldiers and US ones, but with the latter having air support the battle was a foregone conclusion.
Houston’s main port and its main airfield were both under US control. The 11th Cavalry and 33rd Infantry divisions had just passed by Beaumont to the east and the NCR was starting to move from the city, which their local commander had realised was untenable to try and hold.
Things would not be nearly easy to the north, at Dallas.
==*==
NCR Presidential Palace, Shady Sands, NCR State of Shady Sands
12:00 PST, 23 October 2331
“Fuck General Ingham, that fucking coward,” VP Cole swore, fuming, punching the table in the centre of the NCR Presidential Palace’s conference room. “He handed Houston to the Enclave on a silver platter.”
“He didn’t have the men to hold it,” Secretary of Defence Moore stated plainly. “General Maguire moved a significant proportion of Houston’s garrison out of his command and to Corpus Christi, on the recommendation of Military Intelligence.”
“Which turned out to be errant,” General Menendez said. “I talked to my colleagues there a day before the Enclave attack and they were certain Houston was a distraction from Corpus Christi. But Corpus Christi has reported no signs of any Enclave attempt at amphibious landing. Houston was the big amphibious attack.”
“So ...” Moore stated worriedly. “Either Military Intelligence fucked up or … Military Intelligence’s operations within the Enclave are compromised.”
“Impossible,” Dr. Irving said. “Even if some of our spies did ‘flip’ under torture, the agents we’ve brought in there from Arroyo … they would never turn, and those are the ones who sent us that particular piece of data. And they’re still sending the codephrases regularly, which means they can’t have been captured or killed.”
“A mystery,” President Kimball said. “But one we’ll only solve once the war is won. Nevertheless, NCR Military Intelligence data given from within the Enclave is to be regarded as untrustworthy from now on.”
