The Hard Lessons

[Cable Shike]

It was a karked up drop from the start.

Some backwater world, so remote that Cable didn't even remember the name at de-brief. Some gaggle of inbred mongrels feuding with another, over whether their god smoked the right kind of ganja. Okay so maybe it was a political struggle between city states over a critical piece of land that contained the only marketable resource on the planet, but both sides painted it in religious terms.

The pitch to Shadowline had been all about righteousness and the inherent justice of the cause. The 'Kahyel Army of God' versus the heretical 'Party of the People for Faith and Justice.' All the little details, about how the KAG had been burning PFJ villages to the ground, and how the PFJ had been conducting terror attacks in Kahyel for nearly a decade, and so on and so forth, had all been left out of the pitch. No, it was truth versus lies, order versus lawlessness. Or at least it had been until the Dragonlady and the Old Man had straight out told the ambassador to can his bullpoodoo and spit out the real terms.

That was the story that Section Commander Bask had told, at any rate, and it was well past too late to ask him since he'd been in Brighteye 704, which had caught three old school heat-seeking missiles in the side while hovering to deploy its extraction team, and old Bask, well, he was always the last guy in the bird.

Which brought things back full circle to the beginning, and how things went from being karked up to really, truly karked.

 

[Cable Shike]

It was supposed to have been a textbook operation. Four companies of Helldivers to provide the big initial hit on the PFJ stronghold in the city of Varag. According to the ambassador from Kahyel, if they could take Varag it would cut off the head of the PFJ and end the war.

The Old Man thought otherwise, and had said as much, but in the end Dragonlady decided to go for it. Cable didn't learn why until much later, after the shipments of raw resources started rolling in, another link in the chain that made up economic empire of Houes Tregessar.

KAG units had been dug in for weeks, unable to make much progress and suffering more casualties than the leadership were willing to take. So they decided to reach offworld for support, and ended up finding House Tregessar first.

The tech level of both cities was low, but not sticks and stones low. They had jet fighters and advanced munitions and though they hadn't quite reached blaster-level tech, they had plenty of imports and enough know how to deal with a bit of duraplast.

Whatever else you could say for them, the yokels were not stupid, they understood that the at of killing motherfuckers had evolved quit a lot in the galaxy at large.

They were eager to learn from the best.

 

[Cable Shike]

So the plan was the KAG launches a general offensive across the ctiy, to tie up PFJ forces. While this was going on the Helldivers strike every key defensive position. Pillbox you just can't crack? Stick a Thunderbird on it with thumper shells loaded. Forward command post? Platoon of helldivers dropping on the roof. Mustering point? Strafe it with Hellhawks. It was a fool proof plan, really, but depended on one particular thing.

The PFJ was not just a guerrilla organization, they had the backing from several other smaller and less wealthy city states, mostly to try and keep Kahyel from becoming the dominant power in the region. That support tended towards an active and effective air force, comprised of old school petroleum-derivative jet fighters.

It doesn't take a strategic genius to see the issue here. KAG was supposed to provide combat air patrol and defensive anti-air weaponry, and also hit enemy air-defense sites. They claimed to have weaponry that would keep the enemy aircraft away, and artillery to keep AA sites supressed.

Turns out they lied.

 

[Cable Shike]

The attack started as planned, with a general assault by the KAG across the city. The Helldivers, waiting on hot standby, went in second. Cable had been part of a platoon assigned to hit a set of artillery pieces that were used to pummel KAG troops whenever they tried to advanced up the center of the city.

The arty were covered by a pair of AA sites, each was supposed to be suppressed by KAG aircraft and subsequently hit by a follow on Helldiver deployment and a local armored KAG unit.
Maybe Section Leader Bask didn't notice or pretended not to, but he made no note of the fact that AA fire was way heavier than it should have been. A platoon in this case meant six Hellhawks and a single Thunderbird for support. The PFJ weren't' stupid, they hit the Hellhawks first, a chorus of MANPAD's rising out of buildings and the winding morass of the city below. Eleven shots, and even if the Thunderbird poured mass driver fire they could on the targets afterwards it didn't do much to stop the barrage.

Two shots missed, flares stopped one, the shields stopped four more. Five missiles slammed into the two Hellhawks and sent each spiraling into a high rise, along with twelve Helldivers.

 

[Cable Shike]

There was more to come, of course. Not that losing a fourth of your assault force in a matter of minutes was bad enough or anything.

Brighteye 707, Cable's Hellhawk, was supposed to hit the outer defenses first. It was the only reason he figures he survived, and was able to see the rest of the battle. They came in fast, the nose mounted laser cannon spitting fire to keep the enemy heads down, and Cable and his team roped down and were in the fight. The PFJ were easy enough to outgun once you were on the ground, they weren't exactly professionals or anything. A simple pin and flank maneuver took out the twenty or so enemy forces on opposing Cable's 'lance,' and they moved in and prepped to breach the building on the ready signal of the Section Commander.

But things were just going from bad to worse for the forces in the air.

 

[Cable Shike]

It wasn't just MANPADS and SAM's, after all. The PFJ fighters rolled in just after Cable and his team had secured their first objective. The Thunderbird, a sluggish dropship which thanks to heavy shields had managed to absorb every MANPAD shot against it was the first to go. It died, along with seventeen Helldivers and a Hetairoi tank, and basically all hope for mission success.

Two more Hellhawks died too, including 707, which was struck by three missiles as it attempted to to pick up three survivors from the Thunderbird's crash.

Just another name for the list in the Citadel, another name for the old warriors prayer.

Come ye and walk with me
And forward we go, into battle
To fight, to labor, to carry on
And march, in the end, with the exalted dead
Those who would plunge into hell

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

The rest of the night would end up a passing memory for those Helldivers who survived it. The casualties for the entire force were well beyond expected, with the KAG support almost non-existent. For Cable and his squad, that meant a night of bitter fighting. For others, that meant death with no hope of relief. Another battle for thelegendarium. 1200 Helldivers went in, 400 walked out, the rest held their last rite.

They won of course, they always did, you made up the difference in weight of bodies and the skill of those who died. Maybe the Old Man had to beat a Kahyel general senseless with his bear hands to save his men, maybe he didn't. That too became part of the story. The 'Chosen of Kahyel' they would be called.

In the end the offensive was a success, and the KAG was able to retake most of the city. The price was only a few hundred alien mercenaries, right?

The lessons of any military are writ in blood, no less for a private force. Kahyel paid the price for its deception, one simply does not avoid the wrath of Houes Tregessar. But there were other lessons to be learned as well, the cost of the Battle of Kahyel had laid clear the necessity for organic close air support.

There are two parts to that problem, one being the method of delivery, the other being the actual craft used. The latter was easier to solve, and became the subject of an inquiry by Katharine Tregessar.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

The craft needed several things in order to meet the requirements laid out by the head of house. First was durability to survive in a potentially high volume fire environment. Second was speed, in order to both strike targets on time and provide rapid support where necessary. Third was at least a reasonable capability against other aircraft (or hovercraft, or repulsorcraft, or whatever). The vulnerabilities of the Thunderbird and Hellhawk had been made clear at Varag.

Fourth, of course, was firepower. A conventional gunship simply wouldn't cut it.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

The primary weapon to meet the 'close air support' mission was a somewhat unique design, styled after more conventional railguns but altogether different. Rather than focus on either volume of fire or individual round velocity it tried to utilize both in concert in order to make more formidable weapon.

Cooling the system was an issue, it only functioned according to specs in atmosphere. In space the lack of any sort of wind and generally limited capability of radiation heat dissemination meant it had a tendency to overheat the barrel. You could work around it, of course, by not firing too much or for too long, but it still meant that for the cost, price, and size, the so-called 'Aries' Strike Fighter made a poor superiority craft.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

But of course space superiority wasn't its intention. The Helldivers weren't a unit designed to board ships or take a fight to space (though they did reasonably well at that particular mission). This was a fighter designed to support Helldiver units in a close air support mission, and provide a limited deterrence to enemy fighter craft in a combat air patrol mission.

Sure they were expensive, maintenance-intensive, and hard to fly. But damned if the Helldiver grunts didn't love the sound of the 'Grinder' chaingun over their heads. The dead had managed that much, in the end.

Mission accomplished.