BattleTech: Front Lines: BattleCorps Anthology, Volume 6, page 22
“Let’s take a walk.” Hanse looked up at Ardan, leaning against the office doorjamb with a scowl on his face.
Hanse wondered what had gotten his friend into such a foul mood so quickly as he replied, “I’m busy, Dan. What’s wrong?”
“It’s chow time. Why don’t you take Dana to the chow-trailer and get something to eat?”
Hanse’s mouth twisted downward. “You know I usually eat here, Ardan. What’s going on?”
“What’s going on, My Prince,” Ran started as he passed Ardan with Dana and walked into the small room. Hanse shot up an eyebrow—he hadn’t even heard Ran and Dana approach, and any time Ran addressed Hanse by his title, it was usually in a rebuke. “Is that we’re worried about you.” His voice got quieter, ensuring none of the communications techs or vehicle crew could hear the Prince receiving advice from a “mere” general. “Look at yourself. You haven’t shaved in days, you’re exhausted, you’re pale—”
“You look like shit,” Ardan interjected helpfully. Ran and Hanse rolled their eyes.
“Yes, Hanse, you do,” Ran went on at Hanse’s head shake. “I know you’re trying to lead from the front, just like Ian did, but the soldiers know you’re here, and that you can fight. What they need to see now is confidence, a leader who’s sure enough in himself and his troops that he lets them plan and execute operations without his personal touch. What the soldiers need to see now is the smiling and positive Hanse Davion, planning a slick move to trap and destroy Kurita and still eating dinner with his fiancée. What they don’t need is a slovenly paranoid, living in his command center and obsessively tracking every detail. Go away. Trust me, and Cindy, and Carl.” He smiled. “We have been doing this a while, you know.”
Hanse looked at Dana.
“I’ve been gone a week—take me to bed or lose me forever,” she said with a smile.
Hanse quirked an eyebrow and, turning to his computer, hit SAVE. Standing, he took her hand, and, looking at Ran and Ardan, said, “Thank you both for your concern. I’ll get out of here for a while, not come back for a couple hours.”
Ardan rolled his eyes while Ran shook his head and turned to Dana. “Major Stephenson, I don’t want the Prince back in here until at least dawn, tomorrow. Understood?”
Dana grinned widely, and, squeezing Hanse’s hand, replied, “Don’t worry, General. You just send someone to fetch him when you need him back.” She started to walk away with Hanse in tow, smiling and shaking his head, but turned slightly as she passed Ran and cheekily added, “Oh, and make sure they knock first.”
* * *
WILMINGTON
HALSTEAD STATION
ASHIO PREFECTURE,
DRACONIS COMBINE
18 JANUARY 3014
HANSE TIREDLY WORKED his way through the medical ward, almost overflowing with casualties, before finally heading to a bed tucked in the corner. Coming up behind Ardan, he put his hand on his right shoulder and quietly said, “I’m sorry.” Ardan mutely nodded from his seat next to Elaine’s bed, where he was holding the unconscious woman’s left hand.
Elaine’s only hand now—her right arm had caught as she’d ejected, and she’d lost everything from her right elbow down in a moment. Thankfully she’d kept enough wits about herself to wrap a tourniquet around her arm before she’d passed out, but the surgeons had been forced, because of the damage, to reamputate above the elbow so the remainder of her arm could eventually accept a prosthetic.
“I’ll make sure she gets the best replacement available,” Hanse said to his friend.
Ardan merely nodded again as he ran his hand through her blond hair, quietly talking to her as she fogged up the oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose. He shook his head slowly. “Her respirator had a hole in the line—she took in a lot of gas, and she has pulmonary edema in her lungs from the cyanide.”
Hanse looked towards the floor for a moment as the two grew quiet, the sounds of the wounded—groaning in pain, crying, moaning in their drug-induced sleep—overshadowing Elaine’s labored breathing.
“Stay here—I’m heading to Ops, linking up with Ran,” Hanse said, before turning and walking back through the ward. He felt bad he didn’t have the time to meet with the wounded now, to thank them for sacrificing so much, but he knew it would have to wait. The situation had changed for the worse on Halstead Station, and time was now precious.
And it’s my fault, Hanse thought as he walked out of the building to the command vehicle. I brought this upon us.
Initially, the AFFS plan had gone beautifully. Falling back to Wilmington, they’d called their DropShips in for yet another attempt to evacuate Halstead, the projected path landing them on the large, rolling plains outside the moderately sized city. The DCMS had risen to the bait, and when the BattleMechs of the two forces collided on the plains, the Thirty-fourth Avalon had taken down one specific company in the Second Proserpina to open a five hundred meter gap in the lines. Leading her previously-hidden battalion through it, Elaine had gone behind the Draconis line and swung right, intent on sweeping through the rear areas and hitting artillery, headquarters units, anything she could find.
What she had found were all four battalions of the Second Sword of Light Regiment, personally led by Takashi Kurita, the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine. Elaine’s sweep became a slaughter as her battalion attempted to escape, the Thirty-fourth losing most of its Second Battalion to open another hole. Marshall Sanders had led the First of the Tenth to his Second Battalion’s aid, but by the time he’d reached them, they were down to a half-dozen ’Mechs, with ejected MechWarriors—including Elaine—scattered across the plains. Scooping up the survivors, he’d lost most of a company of First Battalion before they finally made it back to friendly lines.
There’s no other reason for Takashi to be here, thought Hanse. He’s here for me. His mood was dour when he walked into the mobile headquarters, and he noticed Sanders was chewing out a captain, angrier than Hanse had seen him the entire campaign.
Sanders paused when he noticed Hanse and said, “We’ll discuss this later, Aelia. Dismissed.” As the captain all but ran out of the room, Sanders took a second to calm himself, walking over to stand next to Marshal Fergusan as Ran approached Hanse.
“I have good news and bad news,” the general began.
Hanse couldn’t help it, and let his temper take hold of him for a moment. “We’re trapped on a planet with the head Drac personally out to kill us, and we’ve lost two battalions in a day: which ‘bad news,’ specifically, are you referring to?”
Ran just stood there quietly, and Hanse shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to explode on you, I just came from visiting Elaine and Ardan.”
Ran nodded. “How’s he holding up?”
“About as well as can be expected.”
Ran nodded, looked off to the side, and then coughed. “Well, you’re partially right—I guess I should have been more specific. This is all new bad news.” Hanse’s eyes opened wide as he continued, “We went ‘red’ on ammo this afternoon.”
“Why’s that—oh. Oh, hell,” was Hanse’s reply, and then he shook his head. Motioning for Ran to lead on, Hanse followed him to the briefing table, now projecting a contoured holo of Halstead’s surface.
Walking further into the room, Hanse glanced at two viewscreens on the walls showing the surrounding tunnel network. He took another moment to fight through his exhaustion and focus before nodding to Marshals Sanders and Ferguson, both looking drawn and tired from the day’s fighting. “How bad’s it going to get?”
“Bad,” Sanders replied. “Ran will be able to field almost a regiment of energy-armed tanks. Cindy has almost one battalion, but I’ll be lucky if I can scrounge up a pair of companies out of both regiments, and my jump troops will be throwing rocks.”
Hanse looked at Ran. “Sorry, Ran, you were right, this is a problem.” He sighed. “So, what’s the plan? We’re ‘red’ which means, what, we have five days worth?”
The Heavy Guard supply officer, tucked away in the corner next to a commo technician, nodded. “Yes, my Prince, about six days actually. We’re down to the second echelon of support—battalion organic ammunition transporters. Once that’s gone, it’s just what’s in the tanks’ magazines.” The flustered-looking man glanced at General Felsner for guidance, who dismissed him with a nod.
Hanse nodded, placing his hands on the holotable, thinking hard. Since every battalion had taken losses since landing, they were closer to being down by a third of their strength, the equivalent of six battalions now facing Kurita’s ten. But being out of ammo was an even bigger problem.
Due to the toxic atmosphere, the conventional forces of both sides had stayed underground, skirmishing in the tunnels and fighting to vicious, hard-fought draws in the cities. The AFFS had concentrated many of its precious few fusion-powered tanks to support this mission and experimented with fuel cell-powered vehicles, but the retrofitted environmental sealing was not trustworthy enough for the vehicles to frequently emerge into the poisonous, oxygen-free atmosphere of Halstead. Without those infantry and vehicle regiments holding the side tunnels while the ’Mechs brawled on the surface, the DCMS would have torn through Hanse’s forces weeks ago.
Shaking his head, Hanse asked, “What’s the good news?”
Marshall Ferguson held out a flimsy. “We received word from Marshal Yvonne Davion that Marshal Stephen Davion and his First Regiment of the New Ivaarsen Chasseurs are leading a relief force to rescue you, Prince Davion.”
Marshall Ferguson’s face twisted into a grin, and Hanse couldn’t help but chuckle.
“We’re a big family,” he said in mock-apology. Yvonne Davion had been a personal mentor to Hanse during his time in the Capellan March, and one of the first things that he’d done when becoming First Prince was to appoint her to the position of Prince’s Champion. He had left her and Joan Davion, Minister of Ways and Means, running the Federated Suns in his absence, and had never doubted that she’d send a relief force.
Yvonne hated Duke Michael Hasek with a passion, and since Hanse’s half-sister Marie, Michael’s wife, was next in line for the throne, Hanse knew that Yvonne would commit the entire AFFS if need be to prevent that from happening. Having faith that Yvonne not only didn’t want to be First Prince, but would actively defend his throne in his absence was one of the reasons he’d felt confident enough to have joined the Halstead operation in the first place.
“Marshal Davion-Stephen, not Yvonne,” Ferguson continued, “plans to arrive at a pirate point and land here—” she gestured to a highlighted area on the viewscreen, “—on or about the third of February.”
Hanse thought for a moment. Nicknamed “The Wings,” Marshal Davion’s unit was a veteran heavy regiment with triple the normal amount of air wings assigned. Marshal Stephen Davion himself, a distant cousin, detested the Draconis Combine with unsurpassed hatred. Hanse couldn’t think of a better man or unit that could successfully break the blockade around Halstead Station long enough for them to evacuate. But they wouldn’t arrive before the vehicles ran out of ammo.
He leaned on the table, thinking hard. When he looked back up, he noticed for the first time that there was a city highlighted on one of the viewscreens. He focused on it. “What’s that?”
“A city named Kilgore, which has the only missile factory on the planet, but it’s also the site of this world’s original ammo depot, sir,” Marshal Sanders replied.
“Original?”
“The Dracs stopped using it as they constructed their big one. Most, but not all, of the ammo was transferred to the storehouse before we got here and destroyed it, and the level of security was reduced as they built the storehouse’s defenses up. It has all the ammo we need,” Ran explained.
“How far away is that?”
“About twenty-seven hundred kilometers,” replied Ferguson. “But the ‘Vees’ will never make it, not with the Dracs dogging us the whole way.”
Hanse looked at the leaders. “You have an idea.” It was a statement, not a question.
Ran stepped forward. “We split up. The first group heads east—we send one battalion of ’Mechs with everything that needs ammo, and they take Kilgore to load up. The second group heads northeast to the pickup site with the remaining ’Mechs and energy-armed vehicles. With any luck, we’ll be moving so fast the Dracs won’t notice the majority of our conventional forces are missing.”
He pointed to the holotable. “We’re heading to Marshal Davion’s landing location, the Madison plains, about nineteen-hundred kilometers from here. The Dracs will figure out where we’re heading, and chase us, because it’s an obviously defendable site to bring in DropShips.” He pointed to a viewscreen projecting the route of the first task force. “After they capture the depot, they’ll only need to head straight north about seven-hundred kilometers to link up with us.”
Hanse did some calculations in his head. “Twenty-seven hundred kilometers is about seven days worth of steady driving—do we have enough supplies for them to make it?”
Ferguson nodded. “If they’re not in combat, and they stretch it a little, it should be enough. There’s plenty of air in the tunnels, the water filters still have good cartridges, and they can carry sufficient food for the march.”
At Hanse’s questioning look, Ran cut in. “We have to split up while we still can. We can’t risk having the Dracs cut off the route—if they do that, if we can’t get the vees ammo, the tanks will be nothing but over-armored target practice for the Dracs.”
Felsner gave him a serious look. “The AFFS has taken serious blows these past couple years—Takashi’s offensive in 3007, and the loss of your brother. If we lose here because we ran out of ammo, Hanse, the repercussions in the military’s morale will echo for decades.”
Hanse got quiet, thinking, before responding again. “Who’s leading the ’Mech force?” The three commanders looked at each other, and Hanse knew their answer before anyone spoke.
“Dana’s the right person for this mission, Hanse,” Ran said. “You saw how well she executed that sweep earlier this month. Besides, she’s only down a lance—she’s the strongest battalion left outside of the guards.”
Ferguson nodded. “Sir, I’d put her in charge of this mission even if I had to give her a different battalion to do it with. She’s my strongest commander.”
“Who’s going to be commanding the task force?” Hanse asked.
They looked at each other again.
“The senior leader on the ground will be Colonel Hosstert, my armor brigade commander,” Marshall Sanders replied, “and sir, I’ll be blunt—he’s hard-headed. He’ll do anything I say, but if I tell him he’s working for a major, he won’t listen, and the ’Mech Commander needs to be in charge of something like this.” Nods from the other two.
“Solution?”
Ran smiled. “Hanse, you need to promote your fiancée a little. We’ve all agreed colonel would be best, though she might be able to get by with leftenant colonel.”
Hanse was stunned. “You’re not saying that because of—well, the ring, are you?”
All three shook their heads.
“She’s a good officer—she’d have made colonel sooner or later. You’re just accelerating the inevitable,” Ferguson said.
“We don’t hold the fact she’s engaged to you against her, Hanse,” Ran said soothingly, and Davion laughed.
“It’s the right rank for the job,” Sanders said. A touch of sadness in his voice, he added, “After I attach what’s left of Second Battalion to her to bring her up to strength, she’ll have the same amount of ’Mechs under her command as I have remaining.”
Hanse nodded once. “Colonel it is.”
* * *
KILGORE
HALSTEAD STATION
ASHIO PREFECTURE,
DRACONIS COMBINE
30 JANUARY 3014
COLONEL DANA STEPHENSON nervously spun her ring, something she found herself doing more and more since setting out on the “beer run,” as some of the troops were calling it. Driving the units hard and fast on little sleep, she’d had hover-scouts find the most out-of-the-way tunnels, the caverns long-since abandoned by planetary inhabitants, trying to take a route the Dracs wouldn’t suspect and staying as far away from potential native sympathizers as much as possible.
It had paid off when her ’Mech battalion—plus the survivors of the Second Battalion, Tenth Deneb, who’d been attached to her—arrived at the facilities. The only security was a platoon of poorly-trained militia they’d gunned down in their barracks, and one old, creaky, mustachioed man at the front gate who’d shakily raised his pistol and told her to “halt.” The infantry had him in captivity—he wasn’t enough of a threat to harm—and her ’Mechs had swarmed the area, securing it for the vehicles.
Which were not loading fast enough. She had lost about a battalion’s worth of combat vehicles to maintenance problems—most simply due to lack of spare parts and combat fatigue, but a handful could have been fixed, if she’d given the mechanics the time.
Time was something they didn’t have, however, neither coming nor going—they had no time to stop en route to Kilgore, and they had no time to delay once there because they had a link-up time to meet.
The Madison plains weren’t the best defensible territory, but the commanders believed the ’Mechs could hold the plains long enough for Marshal Davion to arrive. Dana’s forces needed to top off with enough time to spare in case they had to divert from Madison, the link-up point on the south side of the plains, to capture Bismarck, a smaller city on the eastern edge, and the back-up landing site.
Without Dana making her link-up time and place, the AFFS could be surrounded on the plains and destroyed before the New Ivaarsen Chasseurs could land. Dana had also been pulled aside by Ran before she departed and quietly reminded of their duty as officers in the AFFS—if the conventional regiments didn’t make the link-up in time, Ran would order the more valuable BattleMech regiments—and the invaluable Hanse Davion—evacuated, leaving Dana and her forces behind.
