Man typing this so fast hurt my fingers, but I just couldn't hold the words back. Anyway - we're almost up to the beginning of the actual conflict here. Thought it would take longer to set the stage. BTW, the M251 Lejeune is essentially a non-flammable M551 Sheridan with a more reliable main gun.
==*==
Chapter Five
16:00 CST, 15 September 2331
Reynosa, Republic of the Rio Grande
President Leonardo Alvarez looked over the square from the balcony of his office. The Republic of the Rio Grande could be considered perhaps the oldest nation to have begun existing post-war, rising straight out of the ashes of the Chinese nuclear attack. Local Mexican government workers and American garrison troops had worked together to survive, making their capital the pre-existing regional administration centre, the small city of Reynosa. Waves of Texan refugees heading south from the nuclear wasteland had moved in over the next few months and years, guarded by the ragged remnants of National Guard formations.
And so their society had developed, growing over time to cover the southern bank of the river and the Mexican coastline – from Piedras Negras to Monclova, Tampico to Matamoros. To the south-east was the Sierra Madre Oriental and the lawless bandito-infested desert of the Valley of Mexico, separating the Republic from the West Coast and from the sclerotic feudalism that was the Third Mexican Empire far to the south.
Now, the Californios were starting to meddle further into Mexico’s affairs than they had for decades, after taking Baja. First they had swept into Sonora and annexed it twenty years ago, suppressing the cartels there. No-one in Reynosa had wept over them. Then four years ago they had invaded the region of Chihuahua and deposed Generalissimo Vallejo, setting up a puppet state to administer it for them. Few in Reynosa had spared a thought about his downfall. Now they had invaded the Lone Star Republic – a nation that had signed a treaty of friendship with the RRG shortly after its foundation. Many people in both nations had relatives in the other, and there had been calls for war shortly after the attack.
He sighed and turned back into his office, looking over the peeling wallpaper and ratty-looking furniture, before pulling down the shutters – ensuring any sniper posted on the opposite end of the square couldn’t get a lock on. It was his guest’s request, and Alvarez was not a bad host.
War, no matter how principled a stand, was futile – in any conflict with the NCR Rio would be crushed like a bug. Its soldiers only had assault rifles – not laser weapons – and the pre-War power armour suits that remained (the vast majority T45) would not be sufficient to face off against the whole regiments of powered-armour infantry that they fielded.
Alvarez had been at the peace talks in Corpus Christi – they’d been doomed from the start. The Norteamericanos strutted around like peacocks, acting as if they owned the place and refusing to budge from their high-handed demands of complete annexation. The Californios for their part had been paranoid and hostile, refusing to accept the few gestures of good faith the Norteamericanos had made. That the peace talks had ended in a fist-fight was not a surprise – what was was that they hadn’t immediately turned into one.
Which brought him into the current situation. The Californios wanted Rio to stop trading with the Norteamericanos and to allow their troops to move through the country into Texas. To which Alvarez had told them in less diplomatic terms to fuck off. In response, they had enacted an embargo, damaging the relatively small country’s economy.
And now the American vice president was entering his office right now. He had sandy-coloured hair and green eyes, and was very young – mid-30s, about the minimum age the Americans let their Presidents be. That their own President had not left was something of an insult – but he could understand their desire not to bring him too close to what was undoubtedly hostile airspace.
But the man’s presence was not that much of an insult, considering his relations. He came from a prestigious American family – his aunt was the American First Lady, his cousin was their Ambassador to Great Britain, and his great-great-grandfather had been their President, who the NCR claimed had been the worst tyrant in the world’s history – worse than Hitler or Premier Cheng – and the Americans claimed had been a noble hero who had sought to carry out diplomacy with them and then been despicably betrayed.
He looked impatient to get to business – he’d had to fly in a circuitous route over Yucatan, and even that had not been entirely safe – right now his fighter escort was buzzing several farmsteads to the south, eager to get him back.
“Greetings, Mr. Alvarez,” he said in an authoritative tone.
“Hola, Senor Richardson,” replied Alvarez.
“Call me Leopold,” Richardson replied. “I think this will be easier if we use first names.”
“Well, then Leopold Richardson, what do you want me to do?”
“Primarily – not to interfere when we liberate Texas. Then, once that’s done, make a declaration recognising the United States of America.”
“That would make California declare war on us for certain.”
“And by that point they’ll already be halfway to defeat – and them opening up another front in Mexico will just speed that up. They won’t get far into your territory before we’re at the gates of Shady Sands.”
“And if they do make it deep into our territory?”
“We’ve spent the effort reconstructing our allies’ territories after war in the past – I guarantee we can do it again.”
“Agreed.”
“Deal.”
The two men shook hands.
==*==
0:00 EST, September 20 2331
Daytona Beach, Florida, Gulf Coast Commonwealth, USA
It was a dark, moonless night on Daytona Beach, but to somebody wearing a T-90 PA helmet set to thermal vision mode, it was just like noon.
The vehicles stormed out onto the coastline – M-125 Dornans equipped with high-power hydrojet modules, one per side, enabling them to swim relatively fast through the waters. Instead of the Army five-pointed star they had the eagle, globe and anchor of the US Marine Corps. Overhead, vertibirds flew, soldiers jumping out of them onto the beach, their impacts making small craters in the sand dunes of the beach. And there were tanks too – light vehicles, using hydrojets similarly to the Dornan IFVs to move through the water and onto the coast.
USMC Captain Lionel Barrett looked on his men with pride as they played their part in the exercise. Now that surfing season was mostly over the local government had been over-eager to allow the USMC to cordon off a section of their beach for manoeuvres – which were always necessary, even in the de facto peace of the last forty years. There was talk decades ago of using simulation pods to replace such exercises altogether, but this ended quickly after a fumbling attempt which quickly established that the sheer scale of such an undertaking made it impractical.
The tanks though – them he wasn’t sure about, not having been truly tested in combat. The Marine Corps had requested them after discovering both the Custer and the Lafayette were too heavy for effective amphibious landings. Driving underwater was fine for crossing rivers, but not for a beach assault. So they had lobbied for the entirety of the Fairfax Presidency to get budgetary support for a tank built for amphibious assaults.
Excelsior Motors had gotten the contract and produced a quite capable design – the M-251 Lejeune – but the Army had spent years blocking funding for acquisition until the Corps redesignated it from a “Light Tank” to a “Heavy Amphibious Assault Vehicle” during the Kirkpatrick Administration. It was only 18 tons – to the Custer’s 60 and the Lafayette’s 30 – and it sacrificed armour for mobility and firepower – Barrett only hoped the electro-reactive armour tiles would serve to help remove that weakness. Its main gun was a turreted electromagnetic cannon with attached rapid-fire plasma gun based off of the P-94 design used by US infantry during the early Sino-American War (then widely ditched for its bulkiness the instant the Repconn design was put into service, with most examples being designated as surplus and left to rot in stay-behind arsenals on the West Coast).
He looked behind him a moment – noticing 4 of the navy’s 8 Normandy-class Amphibious Warfare Vessels – the USS Normandy herself, then the Trenton, Iwo Jima, and Shanghai. 280 metres long, they carried 24 vertibirds each and each ship had space for 2,000 men.
He hoped for sure General Dornan knew what he was doing when this operation would be carried out for real – at Galveston, with an aim to quickly capture the town and then head north towards Houston, securing a landing site for heavier troops. Idly walking around the beach and checking that his men were playing their parts sufficiently, he came across a shop for beach supplies – closed for the night, obviously. There was a poster on the wall, with surfers waxing their boards on a beach, with Old Glory waving above them on a flagpole and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. The text on top spoke plainly - “NEXT SUMMER IN CALIFORNIA” – and various logos of the US Armed Forces, along with the DPI, were at the bottom along with addresses for the local recruitment stations.
I have a feeling it won’t be quite as simple as that, Barrett thought.
==*==
12:00 CST, September 25 2331
Low Earth Orbit Over North America
Orbital Attack Satellite 98213, Designate “Bradley-Hercules”, was a relic. For two centuries it had floated 2,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, the last of many orbital bombardment stations placed into space during the Sino-American War – then its computer core had received new orders. A tightbeam of data connected it to the planet by an invisible thread once more, originating from Adams AFB. New targeting co-ordinates had been designated. It had been readied to fire. But the order to launch its last three payloads of micro-nuclear projectiles had never come, and for decades it had continued to drift in space. Forgotten.
Three months ago a spaceplane had docked with the station, of unknown design but sending the correct IFF responses. The station’s laser defences had not activated, and for the first time in centuries humans had been to Bradley-Hercules, clad in suits that protected them from the vacuum and the radiation of outer space. They had clambered over its exterior and replaced its plasma thruster, disabled 150 years ago by a stray micro-meteoroid. They had entered and refilled the payloads of micro-nuclear projectiles, bringing them back up to their intended ten.
Then after they had left the satellite, orders came again – this time from the Pentagon, one of the locations targeted for destruction in a conflict that had ended almost 60 years ago. The old list of targets had been wiped clean, and new ones installed. The properly-working new thruster moved Bradley-Hercules into a new orbit, one that took it over the North Atlantic, South Pacific, and – most importantly – Texas.
If Bradley-Hercules’ computers could have felt anything, it would be anticipation in once more being prepared to fire its arsenal – as it had countless times over the Sino-American War, at targets as diverse as Mombasa, Pyongyang, and Hanoi. Instead they whiled away the hours and days and weeks through countless system checks and status updates, keeping itself in order for the second the signal would come and it would be ordered to unleash its wrath.
==*==
18:00 EST, October 1 2331
Washington DC, District of Columbia, Columbia Commonwealth, USA
While the west wing of the White House were full of conference rooms, it was the east wing where the President and his close family actually lived, and where guests were entertained. And so it was where Rhonda Washington and her husband were entertaining the German Ambassador, along with Vice President Leopold Richardson and his own wife, about ten years younger than him. The ambassador's name was Carl Maria von Hapsburg, and he was of old aristocratic stock – distantly related to the Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia. When Europe had fallen into societal collapse after the nuclear war, that being the final nail in the coffin of the quixotic project that had been the European Commonwealth, many of them had quite readily rallied to the ancient noble houses, who had been all too happy to regain a position of actual power.
The ambassador was wearing a powder-blue military dress uniform, that of a Colonel in the Austrian Army. The Germans in some ways were federated in a looser way than the US, and in some more tightly.
“I wish my children could be here so we could greet you as a proper family,” Nate said idly. “But they’re all too busy. Shaun is researching fundamental particles at CIT in Massachusetts, Eliott is preparing to lead a company of US Army recruits into battle, and Frederick is playing in the World Series. Lucy and Joanne could have arrived – they live nearby – but they would have insisted on bringing their own families along, and the Secret Service has insisted that they wouldn’t allow such a security risk. So here we are, just us four.”
“Five,” Natalie Richardson, the Vice President’s wife replied in a sarcastic tone, and started cutting into the dinner Rhonda had just served. The White House had plenty of household robots to do such menial tasks as serving dishes, but being so impersonal to a guest would only be needlessly offensive.
“So, let’s talk business,” Leopold said. “How many troops can the Hohenzollern Kaiser give us if we call?”
“200,000 exactly can be spared for an expeditionary force,” Carl said plainly. “Led by Feldmarschall Crown Prince Friedrich August.”
“Didn’t I meet him once?” Nate idly asked. “At President Autumn’s funeral, I think.”
“Yes, most of the Imperial Family were there, along with the Chancellor and the leaders of our biggest political parties. Your old President was a very good friend of theirs, especially after his abdica- I mean, his retirement. He used to hunt with them outside Berlin every year until the illness that took him – though some of our nobility did find his use of a laser weapon unsporting. I even think the Crown Prince was named after him.”
“How long will they take to deploy?” Leopold asked again.
“We’ll take a year or two to bring them over to America.”
“Good – not too late to be of assistance.”
The conversation swiftly moved on to other matters of less importance.
==*==
16:00 CST, October 10 2331
City of Houston, Lone Star Republic
Henry Collins turned off his plasma torch and took off his welding mask, before going down the scaffolding that surrounded the NCS Rose of Texas, stretching out uncomfortably over the waters of Galveston Bay in which she sat. The Rose had once been a supertanker owned by Poseidon Energy – one of the corporations which had assisted in the foundation of the Enclave, and most deeply involved with them during their beginnings. She was larger than all of old America’s military ships by far – a full kilometre long in fact. A true leviathan, used to ferry oil around the world even as her fusion-based power supply proved it redundant. Five of her eleven sister ships – the NCS Valdez, the vessel that had brought Arroyo’s now-deceased Chosen One to the Enclave oil rig, foremost among them – had been recovered by the NCR and painstakingly converted into warships.
Covered in armour of high-quality steel, equipped with 16 and 12-inch turreted naval artillery, covered in AA lasers and rocket-launching systems. They put even the Enclave’s “Heavy Battleships” to shame, and formed the pride of the NCR fleet. And now the seventh Valdez-class was taking shape. It had been a devil of a task getting the Lone Star Republic’s new leader to allow the NCR to acquire her, taking over eight months – and even then she would not be allowed to actually leave Galveston harbour until the work was done.
Attacks by Enclave sympathisers hitting highways and rail lines had also caused critical delays, and now it was certain the Enclave would attack before the work was even half-finished. The armour was only a quarter done and only a few of the secondary guns, along with a quarter of the AA lasers, had been installed. The AA lasers were also flawed – the NCR had been unable to replicate the sophisticated auto-targeting systems on pre-War examples, and all its homebuilt AA lasers – whether they be stationary or vehicle-mounted – had to be aimed and fired manually.
All Collins could do was wait for the attack and hope the great vessel he’d helped put work into would survive.
==*==
18:00 PST, October 12 2331
NCR Presidential Palace, Shady Sands, NCR State of Shady Sands
Dinner was always a treat at the NCR Presidential Palace. Well-cut brahmin steak, caviar, and various other delicacies were on the table, washed down with finely aged wine from the Central Valley’s best vineyards. Right now, amidst the conversation, Dr. Walt Irving was talking to the Defence Secretary in-between mouthfuls.
“I’ve demonstrated before, the Enclave is fundamentally unstable. You can see it in how they have essentially three land forces – one, the ‘National Guard’ to suppress the population, an elite power-armored force, the ‘US Army’ to keep them in check, and finally an even more elite power-armored force with better equipment, the ‘US Marine Corps’, to keep them in check! Coup-proofed to a fault, I have to admit.”
“You certain of that, Walt?” Defence Secretary Gerald K. Moore, son of the famous Cassandra Moore, asked, somewhat tiredly. He had recently given an hour long speech helping to push through a law lowering the conscription age to 17. “I mean, we have our NCR Rangers and our Power Armor Corps – and believe me, those groups tangle like two bull bighorners in rut.”
General Menendez, the head of the platoon-strong power-armoured NCR Presidential Guard, smirked at that from across the table.
“If we can be certain of anything regarding the Enclave it is that it’s military is primarily geared towards internal security. As I demonstrated in my book on the events surrounding their conquest of ‘Capital Wasteland’, their ‘President Augustus Autumn’ likely took power in some form of coup or violent power struggle, so it makes sense that he would set up the military he built to prevent a challenger following in his footsteps. Enclave propaganda is always to be doubted. We’re talking about the people who insist that Frank Horrigan was a regular human being and that Richardson was a kind-hearted benevolent soul.”
“So how do you estimate the war will go?”
“We’ll lose Houston and Dallas to the initial Enclave attack, but when our counter-stroke comes with its two thrusts at Chicago and Detroit we’ll see widespread defections amongst most of their ‘National Guard’ troops and popular uprisings across their territory in our favour. Then we smash their war industry in six months or less, and while resistance may continue for up to five years it’ll be a foregone conclusion by then.”
“You don’t think they’ll use their nuclear weapons?”
“As I’ve demonstrated in my book on the subject, the vast majority of the Enclave’s purported wonder-weapons – including those ‘nuclear missiles’ they carry around on trucks every July 4th – are just as much propaganda fabrications as their ‘free and fair elections’. Even if they did try and use nuclear weapons on us, our pre-War laser-defence grid – along with Mr. House’s heavy laser cannons – will keep our cities safe from any attempted strikes, be it nuclear or an FEV attack.”
“That’s a mighty big bet you’ve made, Walt.”
“As I said, even if they do have nukes and they do fire them, our defence grid will keep us safe. The NCR has nothing to fear from an Enclave nuclear strike.”
==*==
21:00 EST, October 15 2331
Lexington AFB Firing Range, Massachusetts, New England Commonwealth, USA
Flight Lieutenant Arlene Autumn watched as her last missile hit the ground, taking out the designated target in a green plasma pulse. Back before the nuclear war, she’d heard that the Air Force would only take college graduates as pilots. But such luxury wasn’t available right now, when America needed every pilot it could get. She worried sometimes about George, but as the months had worn on she had found she had only grown more certain of his safety and fidelity – a feeling she couldn’t understand or explain in her heart. He was fine.
Arlene definitely felt she was a good pilot – she’d aced the sims and done pretty well in actual flying – but she felt that this specific mission training – ground attack at night – was more advanced than what she would usually have been learning. Which told her something about when the attack on Texas would happen, and what her role in it was to be. She guessed it would be in about a week or even less, given the urgency they’d placed on her learning this.
She landed her bird at the airbase’s runway with practiced ease and left the F-97 Aurora, taking off her oxygen mask as she did so. She liked the plane, though she wasn’t sure about the “ejector relay”. Rejecting a traditional ejector seat entirely in favour of an emergency teleporter seemed foolish, even if she understood the reasoning.
She met her instructor half-way to the hangar.
“Good,” he said. “You did best out of all the other trainee pilots on this particular exercise. But there's always room for improvement.”
“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” she replied.
“Keep on training until the 18th, then fly to the air base at Baton Rouge in preparation for L-day. The attack is scheduled for 0:00 hours on the 23rd.”
So this was it. The war that had been all talk for most of 90 years was soon to be a reality.
Arlene didn’t know whether to be excited or scared.
==*==
13:00 EST, October 18 2231
Somewhere in Tennessee, East Central Commonwealth, USA
“Our Eastern states are dandy,
So the people often say,
From New York to St. Louis,
And Chicago, by the way ...”
Ray was singing an old folk song and playing guitar as the men of 2nd Squad, 1st Platoon, 3rd Company, 5th Battalion, 115th Infantry Regiment, sat in the train and tried to amuse themselves, their power armour suits carried in the freight car behind them. Rita was praying the rosary, Tyler was looking out the window at the scenery, Otto – the oldest guy in the squad at 26 – was twirling his combat knife with a creepy grin on his face, some of the others were playing cards, and George M. Walker was writing in his journal, which he had brought during the two days of liberty they’d given him at the conclusion of their training. Up at the head of the train car their Captain, Elliot R. Washington, was taking an afternoon nap.
George had met his uncle, in his early 30s, once or twice at family get-togethers, but not that often. Apparently he was looking to get promoted to Colonel, which had led him to re-enlist and get into one of the first units to meet the enemy,
George knew their destination well – the mustering grounds at Little Rock. There they would wait the last few days until the attack and receive more detailed briefings, but he already knew the general gist of their orders – take Dallas. Dallas and Houston were the initial targets to be taken during the liberation of Texas.
Well, he hoped to see action at least.
