War Core Wednesday, War Core 2, Chapter 18.

Chapter 18.

Hugh’s vision jolted as the countdown timer hit zero. His point of view was now hovering over the small fleet of ships he had ordered constructed. Looking inside the transports, Hugh could see his ground forces were all positioned inside the drop pods, ready to fight once they hit the ground. His map of the system pinged as Felicia gave orders for the fleet to form up.

“Hugh, are you there?” Captain Lewis asked.

“Roger that, Lewis, glad to have you join the party. Take a look at your interface, and bring our ships into the correct formation,” Hugh ordered.

He hadn’t worked with Captain Lewis before but was looking forward to seeing how her Space Force team would handle their starships. His other officers joined the battle, confirming their forces were linked in and ready to fight. The ground team had little to do but sit and wait, which was probably the hardest job. Tremaine and Lewis were busy, moving their starships and air mechs into position.

Felicia’s discount on starships must have been bigger than Hugh had thought given that her fleet was sporting six battleships, ten cruisers, and ten destroyers. She didn’t have any fighters, but Tuckers force more than made up for it. For now, the air mechs maneuvered over to the transports, transforming into their ground operation mode and magnetically attaching themselves to the larger ships. They would try to hide the number of air mechs from the foe for as long as possible.

Upon entering the battle, their godlike view of the battlefield was restricted to what the sensors upon their warships could glean from the space around them. Occasionally, they would receive a feed from the Krixnas, whose ground-based sensors and hidden weapons platforms were still giving the Ssath some headaches. Their task force kept pace with the slowest ships, the battleships, which gave them some time to see how the Ssath were responding.

Much of the Ssath space force was orbiting the planet, drop pods shooting out of transports while a flotilla of smaller warships would engage anything on the surface that looked threatening. A wall of hostile ships pulled away from the planet, placing themselves in between the expeditionary force and their target. Felecia updated their formation a few times, bringing the transports in tighter to the rest of the fleet and pushing out a picket of destroyers.

“It looks like the Ssath force moving up to try and block our approach is just a bit bigger than our own. I’m sorry to say the Ssath have the advantage in ship quality, but we should have enough on hand to punch through and allow the ground forces time to make their landings,” Felicia advised.

“Any hope of winning the orbitals?” Hugh asked.

“No, they have us outnumbered nearly two to one in ships, and their ships have more upgrades than ours. We should be thankful the Krixnas are causing the Ssath so much trouble on the surface that they can’t bring their entire fleet to bear,” Felicia replied.

The range counter tracking their distance the planet slowly ticked down. Instead of fighting just out of orbit, the Ssath blockade fleet pushed toward the human ships, anxious for the fight. They were an aggressive species and waiting around for the human ships to call the shots wasn’t going to happen.

“Form up according to the plan I’m sending over. We’ll punch through and start dropping our forces. The Ssath will eventually overcome our ships, but I think we can hold them off long enough to get most, if not all, of our forces on the ground,” Felicia ordered.

Hugh saw the attached force of Krixnas vessels pull forward, forming the vanguard of the combined fleet. His destroyers were also pushed to the front of the formation, while the patrol boats formed a close escort around the transports. The Krixnas had used their patrol boat class of ships to absorb the first missile volleys, but Felicia apparently thought it was more prudent to provide some extra point defense around the most valuable and vulnerable ships of their fleet, the transports.

Hugh’s subordinate officers, Lewis and Tremaine, moved their ships and air mechs into position. While the humans finished sorting themselves out, the Ssath launched their fighter craft toward the approaching fleet. Hugh counted only about fifty or so of the air mechs heading toward them. Likely, the Ssath were using more of their air mechs to support the landings. Given the thrashing that the Krixnas had given their air mech forces earlier, the Ssath numbers must have been thinned out considerably. Despite the numerical advantage, Hugh wasn’t sure how his simple level one air mechs would hold up against the more advanced Ssath machines.

Tucker had built over a hundred air mechs, his focus on air mechs making them less costly and better performing than those of the other cores. Combined with the air mechs that the other cores had built, the humans amassed 212 mechs to meet the Ssath attack. Their level one mechs didn’t have access to anti-shipping missiles, and the humans could only use their air mechs to counter the enemy units, and, according to Felicia’s plan, function as a bit of additional point defense against the missile swarms that would launch soon.

Various comm channels had been set up earlier, and now Hugh listened in as Tucker ordered the other air mech commanders, identifying targets. Outclassed or not, the Ssath would have a hard time dealing with a four to one ratio. From what they had been able to see of the earlier fights against the Krixnas, the Ssath handled their air mechs competently but their pilots were nothing special. Hugh knew that the humans in the combat pods piloting the various air mechs saw themselves as elite and would get the most that they could out of even the basic level one units.

The two air mech forces entered range and began to bang away at each other with their plasma-based weapons. While the initial volley seemed to favor the Ssath, the human fighters soon turned the tide against their numerically inferior foe. Whenever a Ssath moved to engage a target, another human mech would open up on them. The exchange often resulted in both a killed human and Ssath mech. It was costly, but Tucker’s strategy was winning the fighter duel. Hugh’s air mechs were taking a beating along with those of the other cores, and by the time they had finally finished off the last Ssath mech, Hugh had gone from twenty-five air mechs, all the way down to eleven.

“Good work Tucker, keep that distance from the fleet and try to thin out the missiles,” Felicia ordered. The range between the two fleets was closing quickly, and the first missiles were even now flying out from the Ssath fleet. Hugh’s ships were still a bit out of range and wouldn’t get to fire back until after the Ssath launched their second volley.

The Ssath missile count for the first volley was 142, and as they passed through the air mech screen, the count dropped as their mechs did what they could to shoot down the blindingly fast targets. Each mech would only get a few shots before the missiles were out of range, but they didn’t do too poorly, bringing the total down to just over a hundred. The fleet’s point defense then went into action, and it looked like Felicia had positioned her ships well, the inbound missile count was dropping by the second.

Despite their layered point defense, Ssath missiles were starting to leak through, the first hits savaging the battered Krixnas vessels at the front of the formation. Subsequent volleys did less damage as the human air mechs began to improve their kill rate. Still, each hit that damaged or destroyed a ship served to further degrade their ability to counter the following volleys.

Without a screen of air mechs, the Ssath had to rely on their point defense to thin out the human missiles that were now beginning to strike home. The two sides were battering themselves to pieces, but the humans were making headway, getting closer and closer to the battle planet with each passing second. Once inside gun range, the battle became even more frantic, and the damage began to mount. Eventually, the two fleets passed each other, the Ssath falling behind as they frantically tried to turn their ships and burn their way back toward the human assault.

“Our second battleship is down, but we’re almost in orbit. First drop teams, get ready,” Felicia called out. All the space force commanders were frantically trying to keep their transports protected inside the center of their dwindling formation, even as new Ssath ships were pulled from bombardment duty to engage them.

“Some new kind of missile inbound, they look huge and are heading toward the transports,” Valery advised. The main Ssath fleet was now behind them, firing these strange, oversized missiles even as their engines tried to bleed off the velocity they had built up. The point defense began to prioritize the new targets, but the strange missiles were heavily armored and shielded, each surviving multiple hits that would have vaporized a normal anti-ship missile.

There were only a dozen of the strange missiles, and the focused fire of the point defense finally started to burn through the armored shells, thinning their numbers. The remaining patrol boats maneuvered to place themselves between the new threat and the vulnerable transports. They watched as the huge missiles smashed their way through the small patrol boats, the impact shattering the small vessels while at the same time throwing the missiles hopelessly off course.

A pair of missiles made it through the point defense and valiant sacrifice of the patrol boats. One was targeted on Hugh’s rearmost transport and the other was heading for one of Jiro’s ships. Instead of detonating and blasting his transport to dust, the heavy missile began to fire reverse thrusters, slowing itself down before finally slamming into the side of the transport’s hull. The front of the missile smashed into the ship, damaging, but not destroying the transport. Hugh waited for an explosion that never came, instead, he began to hear frantic calls from the ground force comm channel.

“Get your weapons powered up, we’re being boarded!” Captain Brubaker who was in charge of Hugh’s marines called. Shifting his view into the transport, Hugh could see the armored tip of the missile had detached and Ssath mechs were pouring into the transport, tearing into the waiting drop pods and the human mechs inside. Packed tightly for their impending drop, the forces inside had little room to maneuver, and only a few were able to get their weapons arms free to engage the Ssath cutting their way into the drop pods.

The attacking Ssath looked like infantry mechs, larger than Hugh’s infantry and sporting more weapons designed for close in fighting. Looking like a twisted version of a mechanical, oversized velociraptor, the Ssath tore into the nearest human mechs, chainsaw-like teeth shredding the lightly armored human units while a plasma rifle mounted on their shoulders fired at everything it could. These were low-level Ssath and while they moved with the jerky gait of a standard infantry mech, they were still much more agile than his units. Hugh counted a dozen Ssath in the boarding party, and they were doing a number on the troops stationed inside the transport.

There were thirty infantry mechs on this transport, along with four light mechs, one of which finally got its main gun into action. The heavy fifty caliber plasma round the weapon fired easily smashed through the nearest Ssath, but it also drew the attention of the others, drawing most of them toward the mech struggling to get out of the dropship restraints. Another Ssath went down before the swarm of dino mechs caught the immobile light mech. Plasma rifle rounds and grinding teeth tore into the mech, destroying the lightly armored T-7 with little problem.

More and more of Hugh’s mechs were freeing themselves from the restraints. The drop pods restraints were automated to release once the pod landed, and it took time for the Space Force soldier controlling this particular ship to figure out how to manually release everyone. With each mech released, the Ssath found themselves pelted with fire. Their mechs were better than the ones humanity used, but not by a huge margin, and once outnumbered and not facing helpless prey, the Ssath started to fall.

Hugh had to give the enemy credit, they were vicious and relentless, trying to damage or destroy as many of his units as they could before the last was gunned down. When the last Ssath had fallen, Hugh was left with only nine infantry and one light mech in that transport. It wasn’t enough to fill even one of the drop pods inside the transport, which was a good thing, too, as only one of the drop pods was still functional, even though it was flagged as having heavy but non-catastrophic damage.

“What were those things?” Hugh asked over the command channel.

“Some kind of boarding torpedoes. We had thought something like that was possible but considered it an unlikely weapon given the losses you would take just to deliver a small number of boarders. All told, that exchange was in our favor,” Felicia said. Hugh wasn’t so sure, between his and Jiro’s losses, the human forces were down forty-eight infantry mechs, and five light mechs, while the Ssath were now down, 144 infantry mechs. Something told him that the Ssath not only outclassed them in upgrades, but also had a substantial numerical advantage.

“I’d rather our forces face them on the surface and not while they’re strapped into transports,” Hugh added.

“First drop point is approaching. Valery, Tucker, and Stephan, get your troops ready to go,” Felicia called out.  Their much-reduced naval forces were through the main Ssath lines and while they were still under constant attack from the ships orbiting the battle planet. It would be some time before the Ssath could gather a coherent force from among the scattered ships supporting their invasion forces and the humans planned to use every second to get their ground forces down safely.