Chapter Fourteen
09:00 CST, 8 December 2331
Rural Illinois, Near Rockford
General McDowell looked at the tactical map of the area in his command vehicle. The early morning mists were taking an unusually long time to clear – and were particularly bad to the immediate south – rendering large portions of the battlefield hard even for the spy-birds to properly reconnoitre. At the same time, he knew what the stakes were. 24,000 US Army soldiers – two mechanised PA divisions and one armoured – with two and a half times that number in National Guard troops. Almost a hundred thousand soldiers. To meet the enemy within 30 minutes … he was not worried or hesitant. At the Battle of Columbus a month ago, two corps of US Army soldiers had smashed an NCR army of 100,000 that outnumbered them almost two to one, breaking it as a coherent fighting force. He was expecting to face about the same odds here.
His plan was textbook in nature. A mechanised-armoured push by the greater part of the Army and National Guard forces to break up the enemy lines mixed with combat drops to disrupt their response to it and keep them in a state of confusion. The enemy force would be cut into pieces and defeated in detail. As the rebel forces were pushed against the small river that abutted the town of Rockford, one of the mechanised PA divisions would sweep in from the north with National Guard support, and hit them from that side. This would result in the final collapse of any order, and in the general rout his opposite number would probably be captured or killed. In any case, he would arrive at DC a hero having quelled the invasion with ease – a triumph would be given him and he would have an excellent springboard for a political career should he choose to start one.
Let it never be said that he had not worked hard for it.
--*--
Corporal James Fields fired his laser rifle, hitting an Enclave power-armoured soldier in the throat. He fell over dead instantaneously, and Fields breathed a sigh of relief. The Enclave’s soldiers were like walking nightmares, with their glowing eyes and the toughness of their armour and their terrifying height and strength and speed. His own combat armour could take maybe one laser-rifle hit – the Enclave’s power armour could take up to two dozen before failing. Casey had sacrificed himself to hit one of those bastards with a plasma grenade, and Harson had been lasered to a charred piece of meat by one of their own heavy-weapons men.
At least, hitting the joints was an option, but hard to make happen. Only the Rangers could pull off such a shot reliably, and they had gauss rifles that could penetrate the armour anyway. Explosives were far better, but grenade rifles and mortars were restricted to heavy-weapons teams.
Where the Enclave’s power-armoured soldiers met normal NCR troops, the latter were inevitable thrown back. When they fought Brotherhood or NCR powered troops, it was more equal – but still, they were inevitably being forced back between the troops jumping out of vertibirds and running out of IFVs. As he took cover along with Castillo behind a tank blasted onto its side by an artillery shell, Fields hoped that General Robertson knew what he was doing.
--*--
The time had come. Colonel Kyle Coleman of the NCR Army Third Armoured Regiment was about to help make history. The order had come to turn off the equipment from Big MT – the devices that had created that impenetrable mist around the southern region of the battlefield. They confused thermal vision and increased water condensation massively in the air to create a concealing mist – no-one in the NCR knew how they worked, and the factories of the Boneyard could never produce them. The underlying technology was related to another that unnaturally stirred up warm air to create incredibly vicious sandstorms – but at any rate, the gadgets had served their purpose. Now to bring about the downfall of the Enclave.
--*--
The armoured components of the 13th Armored Division had been chewed up pretty bad, and Lieutenant Carl Bergman – a second-generation immigrant from Germany – could not see a positive side to the situation. The mist had dropped all of a sudden at noon, revealing what it had concealed – an NCR force of tanks, powered-armour mechanized infantry, and a third type of vehicle. They were fast in comparison to tanks – too fast to hit reliably with a Custer’s main gun – but very fragile. The weaponry they packed certainly wasn’t anything to sneeze at though – it was a superheavy electrolaser rapid-capacitor-weapon designed to take out aircraft up to 25,000 feet, and it laughed at elmag armour.
The damn things had taken out tank after tank, burning through armour and either killing the crew or detonating fusion reactors. Where crew lifesigns failed, automated self-destructs turned the Custer MBTs into heaps of slag – rendering them useless for recovery but also useless for reverse-engineering.
The Constantine Mailed Fist that Bergman commanded had been crippled by the devilish craft, but its secondary weapons had reaped a considerable toll of the enemy – almost three dozen burning wrecks lay around it. The Custers’ gatling lasers and even plasma rifle fire by US Army PA infantry was also effective, but the things were just too effective against IFVs and tanks, and with their support the attack from the southern flank had been inordinately successful.
A complete encirclement of the US Army and some National Guard forces was now looming, and the majority of the National Guard were unable to prevent it. The forces deployed to the north were failing to cross the river – the Brotherhood troops were holding that flank tenaciously.
The tank would not be able to hold out forever, Bergman knew. He had a duty to not allow the technology of the Constantine superheavy battle tank to fall into enemy hands, and with retreat or recovery impossible there was only one option.
“Initiate self-destruct,” he ordered to one of his subordinates. Scant seconds later, a newborn star briefly blossomed into existence in front of the NCR forces overrunning that section of the battlefield, killing a whole battalion of troops.
--*--
General Lance Robertson had almost completely won. The Enclave army’s most dangerous parts were completely encircled – but something remained unclear. The un-armoured troops – the slave-soldiers, NCR intelligence was very clear on – were not in either a full-scale rout, nor had they been driven to mutiny or outright offer defection. Shouldn’t they be glad to see their hated masters in such a poor position? He considered hitting the Enclave troops in the centre with his remaining artillery to annihilate them, but decided not to. His men were still too close.
He would do the honourable thing and give an offer of surrender.
--*--
“Soldiers being forced to fight under the Enclave banner!” the radio message rang out loud and clear on all frequencies the NCR could access. “The NCR does not want to fight and kill you, but to liberate you from their slavery! To the Enclave soldiers – you are encircled and cannot win. We offer you surrender.”
The fighting kept on relentlessly as General McDowell fired his plasma rifle, taking out a Brotherhood soldier in power armour with two quick three-round burst. He gave his reply over helmet radio, on the NCR military frequencies.
“To Hell with you bastards! We all know what kind of quarter you’ve shown the US Army in the past. I’ll die with my two feet standing on the ground, not with them swinging in the air! You’ve shown you want war to the knife, so I’ll show you what it looks like!”
McDowell could see if not victory, then at least escape ahead – the enemy encirclement was weak to the southeast. He quickly gave Lt. General Marsden outside the correct orders and moved in that direction within his command vehicle, arriving there within 15 minutes. He got out once again and rallied the closest and most intact PA infantry units to his position. The enemy had underestimated the National Guard after pushing most of them out of the battlefield, going so far as to turn their backs to them.
McDowell got into position, reloaded his rifle, and stood in the first line of the charge against the NCR lines.
“REMEMBER NAVARRO!” rang in three thousand metallic voices, as the American forces made their desperate attempt at a breakout. Some men fell to gatling laser or multi-LAER fire, but the majority reached the lines – and once they got there it was a massacre. Power armour excelled especially at close-range firefights, and as the other sides of the pocket contracted the troops flowed towards the point where it was weakening almost as a law of nature.
McDowell leapt out of his command vehicle and assisted in the fighting personally, firing off quick bursts of plasma fire at NCR troops and vehicles. Elsewhere, soldiers that had run out of ammo gutted, sliced from crotch to chin, or decapitated their NCR enemies with chain-bayonets or smashed their skulls with the butts of their rifles, turning the churned-up snow and mud a deep red colour. Where they had lost their weapons, they punched NCR soldiers so hard their faces caved in and their necks snapped, or knocked them to the ground and stamped mercilessly on their chests or heads, or sprinted straight at them, sending them flying.
The movement was unsophisticated, but it had power of its own. Two National Guard divisions assaulted the NCR positions from the back shortly after McDowell launched his move. Faced with overwhelming attack from both sides, the NCR forces in the south-eastern area of the pocket broke.
McDowell grinned as he saw the National Guard units help lead his soldiers if not to victory then to survival – then a last twist of fate took place. A stray shot from an NCR grenade rifle hit his armour near the hip joint, detonating on impact. Shrapnel lanced through his abdomen, viciously perforating the organs there in dozens of places, slicing through his spine and cutting his legs off from the rest of his nervous system.
He collapsed, unable to stand. The Med-X his armour was pumping through his system was enough to numb the pain, but McDowell knew from his HUD that he would not live to see dawn next morning, never mind get the proper treatment he needed. He felt glad as his body was dragged into a transport though – even with his death, his body would never be dishonoured by the rebel scum.
--*--
Lance Robertson listened to the steady drip of reports in shock and confusion. It was not that the Enclave had broken his encirclement and begun a fighting retreat – it was that their “pure” power-armoured forces were forming a rear-guard position, fighting to protect the un-armoured troops – the wastelander conscripts – as his men half-heartedly pursued them. Not only had there been no great mutiny or surrender – quite the opposite – but the slave-masters were giving their lives for the “genetically-inferior” slaves. All the studies of the Enclave’s military psychology he had made prior to the invasion were flying out the window.
He looked across the battlefield, where the dying light of the sun turned the snow the colours of blood and fire, through his binoculars.
What was happening today should not have happened, but it impossibly had. And so the enemy had managed to salvage about half their power-armoured forces and two-thirds of their un-armoured ones. None of the latter had mutinied or defected to the NCR troops sent to liberate them. And if that had not happened, the prospect of a general mutiny once Chicago fell looked far more distant. Pre-war techniques like CODE could explain the former half of the inexplicable events that had taken place today, but not the latter. At any rate, the choice the enemy had made in the direction of their retreat also frustrated his aim.
They were moving south-east toward the city of Chicago – not towards Rockford to continue the battle. A full-hearted pursuit was out of the question – his men were too exhausted by the long advance through the endless snow. The Brotherhood were eager to complete the destruction of the enemy, but would not be able to do it themselves. Their northern forces had been able to link up with the southern ones, and of the Enclave army they were the most-preserved.
He had also faced far too many casualties among his AA laser vehicles to continue using them as tank destroyers – he had beyond the next battle to think about after all. But he would make sure the OSI and Defence Department knew about the basic idea after he returned from Chicago.
30,000 NCR troops of 160,000 lay dead, in contrast to 10,000 US Army and 20,000 National Guard soldiers (2,000 of the Army and 5,000 of the National Guard were too wounded to immediately see action). It was unquestionably a victory for the NCR. But what that victory precisely meant lay in question.
==*==
18:00 EST, December 8 2331
The White House, Washington DC
Reichskanzler Konrad von Ehrenstein, head of the National Liberal Party, was welcomed into the White House and ushered in by a nice young lady who wore a respectable black dress, tied her black hair in a short bun, carried satin black gloves on her hands and wore neat black pumps on her feet. He had not been here before – it was more often the American President who would come over to Germany, arriving on his great flying-wing plane at Tempelhof AFB before being driven to the Imperial palace to meet with the Kaiser. Even as they walked by black-armoured panzermensch on duty toting energy weapons and robots heading to and fro, he noted the woman was far more than she seemed. There were hints of well-trained muscle in her legs and arms, some of the ornaments in her hair looked like they had an oddly bladed design, a laser pistol was holstered at her belt, and military rank insignia was sewn into the front of her dress – the only splash of colour that it displayed apart from the bronze buttons of her dress. At the same time she had a gold ring on her gloved finger. At once an Amazonian tigress, and a dutiful wife.
He had been told by his predecessor that he would never understand the Americans. They were flighty, impatient and frivolous with money (especially their youths), and at the same time industrious with a devoted work ethic. They did not often go to war, but when they did so they fought brutally and steadfastly, seeming to take a savage joy in how much they could make their enemies squeal in humiliation as they were ruthlessly taken apart. One factor was constant though – they were proud. When they were not proud of the deeds of their fathers, they were proud of their own technological advancement. When they were not proud of their skill at making war, they were proud of their skill at making money. When they were not boasting of ruling the waves, they were boasting of ruling the skies and the reaches of space that lay beyond them.
Neither had he flown on an aircraft before – Europe had only two functioning airports (which would not have existed if not for American investment. They liked to fly around everywhere.).
At any rate, they swiftly arrived at the door of the Oval Office, which was locked firm. Ehrenstein could hear snatches of conversation.
“51st chemical battery is to be deployed … effective immediately … I will keep to his commitment … Operation Wormwood ? … no, not unless … feel free to have the most lethal munitions used.”
After he entered the door opened by itself, to reveal not the American President at, but someone much younger. Their Vice President, if he recalled.
“The President is currently unable to fulfil the duties of his office,” the man said by way of explanation. “A serious flu. We have the best medical technology in existence, but the viruses mutate year after year. He’s stable, but hospitalised and his prognosis is for recovery within a few weeks or so. During which time I, Vice President Leo Richardson, will serve as acting President. So, you were going to talk about ...”
“The exact number and disposition of the troops Germany is to send, and the political issue of Feldmarschall Friedrich August.”
“Yes – I know already. It makes no military or political sense for you or the British to take overall command, but your top commanders technically outrank ours. We have several months until German troops actually arrive and it becomes an actual practical issue. We will discuss it tomorrow – for right now, I have much more serious issues of state and of war to concern myself with.”
“Aren’t you worried about the invasion?”
“Massey wants me to nuke them immediately, but I’ll stick to Washington’s ruling and not strike until they cross the Appalachian Line that stretches from Toronto to Mobile. We have only ever used nuclear weapons as a last resort – when the Japanese were prepared to destroy themselves in a senseless last stand rather than surrender, and when the Chinese launched first; again, rather than surrender – and I’ll stick to that position.”
==*==
NCR Presidential Palace, Shady Sands
21:00 PST, December 8 2331
"A toast for our triumphant general, Lance E. M. Robertson! We have a great victory in Illinois!"
Dr. Walter Irving was ebullient as he poured the wine – a well-aged vintage from the Central Valley’s vineyards.
“He reports that he managed to drive the force the Enclave sent after him packing, and almost managed to completely annihilate it. We should have a major revolt in our favour soon.”
“About that,” Moore commented. “There has been no rebellion against the Enclave but rather partisan activity against us. It’s still nothing more than an irritation as of yet, but it is worrying.”
“Which raises the question of why it’s happening. Very probably they’re using a system such as CODE to mentally rewrite their subjects into partisans. That, or this is a case of slaves selling out their fellows. Whatever the cause, they are seemingly resisting being liberated. That is most disturbing.”
“It doesn’t matter,” VP Cole replied. “They haven’t surely managed to get enough of their population so conditioned so as to prevent a general revolt on some more tangible victory. Speaking of which, can we begin to implement the Bishop Plan once we take Chicago?”
“No,” President Kimball replied. “Bishop and Weathers assured me it was meant for after victory had been achieved. I won’t count our chickens before they’re hatched.”
“So,” Admiral Charles Fletcher, commander of the NCR Navy’s Southern Task Force, said. “Is my own phase of the operation ready?”
“Yes,” Kimball replied. “It’s imperative that the Enclave’s line of retreat to the Caribbean be cut, and also that auxiliary soldiers, food and raw materials be prevented from reaching them via the Atlantic. To the first task, the Southern Task Force will deploy two-thirds of its strength to the Caribbean. To the second, the Second, Third and Fourth submarine squadrons will deploy in the Caribbean and Atlantic under strict orders to sink any ship sailing towards Enclave territory.”
==*==
03:00 AM CST, 9 December 2331
Outside Rockford, Illinois
Lance Robertson looked out from the hill to the town of Rockford in the north, wrapping his woolen greatcloak round himself to keep away the wind off the hilltop. Though he could not make out many details, he could see the twinkling of many lights – both normal and multi-coloured, probably Christmas decorations. That confused him. Why would anybody put Christmas lights around a great big glorified slave camp?
And why did the Enclave troops fight so hard to defend their slave-auxiliaries? Their actions had been so uncanny and bizarre – but effective nonetheless. Something told him that there was something important missing, a detail the NCR had not factored into its war plans. He needed to unravel this mystery for himself. Every riddle had an answer, and to achieve victory he knew he had to find the answer to this one. Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will be victorious in every battle, he heard the ancient teaching went. Well, he knew himself, but he certainly did not know his enemy.
Which is why he would be going personally – with a squad of heavily armed bodyguards, and an army just outside town waiting to occupy it on his order – to reconnoitre Rockford. Had Weston and McLean not gotten killed when the vertibird they were taking aerial footage of the battle from was shot down he would have brought them too to assiduously document it in video and photography, but he did not have that luxury and the California Times’ other war correspondents were still on their way.
Come 10:00 AM, he would see the truth of the matter for himself. But no matter what – he would always stand by the NCR. That he had sworn, and that he would fulfil.
