Wanneroo glared at the ridgeline.
This damned terrain could only be made worse by rain.
Which meant that everything else was completely shit.
The weather was already half shit, the ground was clay which was shit to try and entrench, the terrain was shit with its hills and valleys, not a single flat bit of ground anywhere, and the altitude was shit, up high and then down low.
It was, in specific words, shit.
And he had to fight his way up.
His teeth clenched.
The Combine infantry were clustered in defensive pillboxes along the ridge, and given it was the Combine, it would be nigh impossible to dig them out with a frontal assault.
The solution was to encircle them and dig them out from the rear.
Doing that was safer but took longer... More importantly, it took training.
His men weren't trained for infiltration of Combine infantry positions.
They were trained for quick movements to surround and cut off Combine units, to then emplace and destroy with overwhelming firepower.
The main goal being the destruction of armour and Battlemechs.
This, unfortunately, meant that they weren't trained to dig out entrenched infantry.
A bit of an oversight if he had to be honest here.
They just weren't important enough to bother with in the planning.
After all, the plan had been to take the offence to an enemy planet, kill the armour and Battlemechs, then leave. There was no thought to training them to dig out the infantry, not when that process could take weeks or months.
The important bits were the irreplaceable mechanical assets, not the squishy humans that could conscripted by the million.
Nobody had figured they would jump all the way to Tetersen to start a fight, that was just plain crazy.
In fact, it was better to just starve them out.
Boss man wanted an example made of them though.
To show the Combine that they would be destroyed in their entirety if they attacked a Lyran world.
On the topic of training, his men didn't even have thst in abundance. They were, after all, green. Not as green as the recruits in the Ducal Guard thank god, but still green.
So here he was trying to figure out the best way to take this pillbox without losing too many men while also not having the training to do so.
He sighed.
Things were going to be very difficult indeed at this rate.
He wondered just how many of his men and women would be alive in the next few days.
Looking at it carefully, his eyes narrowed in thought.
"Sergeant." He said.
"Sir," Matthews looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
"Have the men bring up the AC/5s, but do it quietly. We're going to try and knock these bunkers out without an infantry assault." He said.
"Sir." The sergeant's voice was filled with appreciation.
"Fletcher!" The sergeant's voice came with a characteristic that all sergeants learned, the paradoxical art of shouting quietly.
"Sir." Fletcher came crawling up to the line.
Thankfully he had learned from what happened to McKinley and didn't run with his head in the open.
"Bring up the AC/5s, Leutnant wants then used on the bunkers. See if we can't knock them out without an infantry assault."
The Corporal nodded rapidly.
"Sir! I'll get the guns up now." He said with haste, slipping and sliding his way down the slope to get his men moving.
"I don't know where that man gets his enthusiasm from." Muttered Fletcher as he turned his head back to look at the pillboxes.
They were currently silent.
That was good, when they got loud, that was when men started dying.
"Let the other sections know what we're planning. We have those guns, better use them all at once hmmm?" He said.
+Break+
It had taken half an hour to get the guns up to the frontline.
They had done it slowly and quietly.
Slowly enough that nobody would notice was the hope.
Piles of mud piled in front of the guns, shredded wooden pieces, even bodies of the Combine soldiery that had died to defend the pillbox locations that they were now occupying. Everything and anything that they could scavenge from this blasted hellscape of a hill. After all, mud did not have very much structural integrity when trying to use it to build a hide.
The concealment of the guns also meant that they could only fire at a single target directly in front of them. The gun barrels barely free floating of the mud… if barely.
It also meant that they were protected from sight from the other pillboxes, and if you can't see something, you can't shoot that thing.
"Pass the word down. Start firing at 0800 exactly." Wanneroo said quietly, his hands motioning to his men behind him.
"Sir." Matthews replied as he pulled himself down the slope.
The orders had been given, his men had been directed to their places, and the timing had been set.
All that was left was the time.
He checked the watch on his wrist as it metaphorically ticked along reassuringly.
No matter what happened in the world outside, different gravities, light, storms, or anything else that the universe might dream up, the quartz watch would continue to tell the time.
And right now it was telling him 0730.
30 minutes.
He took in a deep breath.
This was always the worst of the times.
It was here, in the twilight of decision and the raising dawn of action that he was forced to contemplate.
Had he done everything he could to guarantee the success of his men?
Had he done everything he could to anticipate the action of the enemy?
Had he done all that he could to gain the support of external factors for his men?
Had he…
Had he…
Had he…
The questions circled in his head endlessly.
Fuck it. He'd do another check.
He had done one in the morning, but he'd do another one now.
To keep the men focused on their task and not focused on what would happen in the next 40 minutes.
He crawled back from the tiny perch that he had dug out, one that let him watch the pillboxes from a different angle. His hand motioned for the waiting observer to take their place once he was gone.
Making his way down the muddy and broken terrain, the result of the tons of bombs dropped by different small craft from the skies above.
Thousands of them, turning the very earth itself, immutable and eternal into a churned mass of browns, greys, reds, and more browns.
The different craters forming a web of barely viable pathways that slipped and crumbled as he walked along them. The rocks and mud tumbling down into the craters that marked the gravesite of hours of human labour. Some shell fragments and the whiff of human piss the only remnants left of what had been the culmination of so much work and dedication.
Ammonia was oh so very distinctive and oh so very nauseating.
He made his way to the twenty men of his platoon. 10 had been lost since this morning.
He estimated that he had about 1 hour of further fighting before his platoon was rendered ineffective.
All to engage and then destroy what he assumed was a single platoon's defences.
They were trading lives here and the Commonwealth would come out on top, this was their world… but at what cost?
He sighed.
"Maxwell, your feet." He said, looking at the private that was shuffling from one foot to another as he double checked his weapon.
"Good sir, good." The private said with a face that said, in fact, not good.
"Boots off man. Let's have a look."
"But sir! If I go back, who's going to look after the young-uns?"
Wanneroo looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
"And if you stack it and lie there because you can't walk, what's going to happen to those young-uns who try and lift you out?" He answered.
Maxwell looked down at his feet.
Then he pulled his shoes off.
The Leutnant let out a brief sigh of relief.
Well, it wasn't trench foot at least. He could keep his toes.
The problem was that he was, well, suffering from what all of them suffered from.
Constantly wet feet that water logged the skin, which made it easier for the skin to tear and deform. The swelling and purpleness was worrying.
"Have you been taking your boots off and drying your feet?" He asked.
"Yes sir. It's the damned holes in them. Shrapnel through the sides in the last attack, now they leak something fierce."
Wanneroo shook his head, "get yourself back to the depot and get yourself a new pair of boots. You're no good to me like this. Make sure to try your feet with talc before you go. There's 30 minutes before the assault starts, you should be able to make it there and back by then." He ordered.
The man looked down and sighed before saluting.
Wanneroo turned to the rest of the men, they were, in fact, looking at him with trepidation.
"Okay you lot, final checks. I want to see your feet and arms. No exceptions."
They all balked and sat down, the 10, no, 6 of them after this morning and Maxwell, pulling their boots off and looking up at him expectantly.
"What do you think is going to happen sir?" One of them asked, Candice, a local from memory.
He knelt down to check her feet, wincing slightly at the cold as the wet cushion in his knees, all that kept the knee guards from scratching said knees raw squelched dramatically and blasted his legs with cold water.
A hand went up to pull it closer, turning it this way and that, checking in between the toes, making absolutely sure that the feet were not in danger of developing trench foot or any of the many other illnesses that one could catch in Tetersen's hills and mountains.
Thankfully they had been vaccinated against most of them, but certain diseases kept coming back in mutated forms which prevented the vaccines actually lasting.
Good, no damage, no signs of impending damage either.
Dropping the second foot he looked up at the men and women who, in turn, looked at him expectantly.
"Infantry assaults don't work, you saw that. So we're bringing up the guns and then we're going to blast them until there's nothing left. Once that's done, I'll scout the way ahead and we'll see where the next set of guns are hmmmm? We repeat this enough times and we'll have this ridgeline in hand by the end of the day I'd say." He answered as he checked their feet, made sure that their webbing was on properly and their weapons were fully loaded.
The smoke grenades and flares were a must in case they encountered more pillboxes and needed some quick fire support.
"But, do you think it's going to work?" Timothy asked, sounding worried.
"Well, that's the thing about war Timmy, we've got a plan, but so do the other buggers. The Colonel's got a good head on her shoulders though and I figure that if we keep following the plan, we're going to get through this." He answered. Colonel Augustine was good at her job, especially after she had been defeated a few times in the exercises against the Triple Vs.
She had discovered, against the instincts it appeared, the fact that infantry were in fact capable of doing things other than garrison duties.
He wasn't sure about this tactic in particular… but it was better than a frontal assault. That and it was one that he developed haha.
He checked his watch, 0745.
"Right, 15 minutes. Get yourselves ready, I'm going to check the other sections before we get stuck in." He said.
Moving down the slope and through the spidewebbing craters, he sighed.
Lucky he had made a second check or Maxwell would have slipped through the gap. Then the next time he would hear about a problem was when Maxwell tripped, couldn't get back up due to his feet, then two more soldiers died trying to get him out.
Right then, let's check the men.
The assault was about to begin.
+Break+
The time was 0800.
Right.
Fingers over his ears Wanneroo called, "fire!".
"Fire!" Shouted Fletcher to the platoon.
Duuuoohm Duuuoohm Duuuoohm Duuuoohm, Clang Clang Clang Clang.
Four shells from the AC/5s cassette, each shell weighing in at 12 and a half kilograms each.
Launched from the barrel of the autocannon as it jerked backwards, the sound filling not just his ears but his entire body, his organs shuddering from the shockwave.
He couldn't see the shells but he could imagine where they were landing and on who.
The sound of the shell casings bouncing off the deflecter hit his ears before they landed with a splash in the mud behind.
The sound was repeated three times from the three guns in his platoon.
That was repeated five more times as five other platoons started their own attacks up and down the starting line.
"How hit!" The partially deaf Leutnant screamed into his microphone.
"Good hit Yellow!"
"Good hit Red!"
"Good hit Green!"
The three observers who were tasked with a single pillbox each shouted back into his headset.
"Keep firing!" He called out to Fletcher.
"Keep firing!" Fletcher shouted.
Duuuoohm Duuuoohm Duuuoohm Duuuoohm, Clang Clang Clang Clang.
The cannons repeated their firing.
The observers continuing to call in their hits.
The return fire started.
"Mark that return fire!" He shouted, his ears already ringing from two fire missions.
"Good effect, keep firing!"
"Good hits! Good hits!"
At some point Wanneroo stopped being able to hear and think. His head pounding from the ringing in his ears.
Was he deaf now? How many shells had been fired?
"——" Fletcher was in front of his face.
"WHAAAT!?" He said calmly.
"Sir!"
The sound was coming back.
"Sergeant? What is it?" He asked.
"Look!"
His eyes turned to see the hand's direction and… there we go. He chuckled, hell yes.
"Good hits! Good hits!" He shouted out with a laugh that sounded strange to his ears.
"Fletcher, get first section ready, we're going to push up as far as we can while they're reeling." He said chucking as the explosive plumes of crackling blue and orange fire went up into the sky.
The pillboxes had been demolished in the most 'confimed' manner possible.
"Sir."
+Break+
And then they were up into the front. Moving at a crouch, his eyes scanning the mud in front of his eyes, the ever upward slant of the land peaking somewhere 10 metres in front of him.
There was a lack of bullets, lasers, or PPCs penetrating his squishy human parts.
It was, if he was being honest, incredibly disconcerting.
"See anything?" He whispered back to his men as they moved to join him.
"Lots of dead bodies sir. Not much else."
Wanneroo nodded.
The crackling sound of fire as it devoured the bodies of the infantry that had been in the pillboxes and the ammunition they had been using was joined by the acrid smell of burning batteries.
He was… going to get cancer from this battle, he was sure of it.
Strange thoughts aside, the pillboxes were clear, the men inside turned into literal pieces, their weapons adding to the carcinogens in the air, and the other bloody shoe hadn't dropped.
Who stuck a single line of defence on a hillside and then left it there? Were the hell were they thinking?
"What are the other sections saying?" He asked.
"They're empty too, just one line of defences." The one that had met with the other section on the right flank.
He paused.
Ah, that was a problem wasn't it?
They were all on the other side weren't they?
Reverse slope defence?
Doing to them what they had done to the attackers of the Festungen.
Concentrate that amount of firepower into a reverse slope where they couldn't actually identify them to direct fire support.
He sighed.
"Grab my legs boys. Give me 1 second to look over the edge and then pull me back. In case they're ready for us." He said to his section who were looking at him with worry in their eyes.
This was going to be a bitch to crack wasn't it?
His head leaned over the ridge.
His section behind him ready to pull him back.
And, there it was.
Pillboxes faced upwards
Dozens of them.
Their guns pointed in his direction.
Behind them were infantry, tanks, and Battlemechs concealed from the air, ready to push forward and counterattack, driving them back and then overruning them to cause as many casualties as possible.
Fuck.
Then his men pulled him back by the legs as a stream of PPC fire went up along the ridge.
"Withdraw!" He shouted to his men as he gave them shoves to get them moving.
"Leutnant Wanneroo here, they've got significant rear slope defences, heavy assets, counter-attack. We're not going to be able to crack this with infantry." He called, breathing hard as he ran down the hill. The sections on either side of his own following him as he ran down the slope.
Fuck fuck fuck.
This was going to be shit.
He couldn't say it, he absolutely couldn't.
The men relied on him to be their rock and even if things went absolutely shit, he always needed to be in control.
Even when it looked like there as a regiment of armour and battlemechs ready to charge over the ridge behind him.
"Confirmed Leutnant. Get yourself back to the starting line and hold."
He sent an acknowledgement and continued to jog down the 100 metres that separated the peak and the valley floor.
His feet moving to avoid the craters, the bodies, the damaged equipment, and the slippery mud, shining malevolently in the sunlight.
This day had started out so well as well.
The ground started to shudder.
The DCMS was on the move.
Fuck fuck fuck.
"Get ready lads! We need to hold the line!" He shouted with far more confidence than he actually felt.