Scavenged Restoration 34 (Patreon)

Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs

Scavenged Restoration

Chapter 34

-VB-

When he returned to Andurien, he was going to make sure the Duchy of Andurien paid for all of the repairs and replacements. 

Colonel Davis Heller of the Tooth of Ymir took in a deep breath through his cigar and then let it out slowly. He let the smoke waff away from him as he looked down at the report on top of his makeshift desk.

Having commandeered a simple noble’s house at the start of the campaign, he and the rest of the Tooth expected to move on quickly to capture the planet’s capital and the spaceport. This expectation reflected how shoddily set up this manor was for their command operation. 

Instead, they had been stuck here for the past few weeks. 

He brought only one battalion here to fight the CCAF here on Primus while he sent another battalion to take down CCAF on Prix. 

This had turned out to be a big mistake on his part. 

Not only was his command battalion not enough to take down Primus’s CCAF militia defenders, the other battalion had been driven off of Prix within the first month after losing half of the mechs.

Davis stared down at the paper with hastily scratched down information on the current standing of his battalion. He started with the following:

40 mechs with an average tonnage of 40 tons per mech.

2 wings of Aerospace Fighters

2 infantry companies.

8 combat vehicles with an average tonnage of 40 tons per combat vehicle.

1 company of medical, administrative, and “utility” servicemen.

Now, he was left with these:

21 mechs with an average tonnage of 30 tons per mech.

3 infantry platoon.

2 combat vehicles with an average tonnage of 40 tons per combat vehicle.

2 platoons of medical, administrative, and “utility” servicemen.

Suffice to say, he was in the same position as the 2nd Battalion had been in over on Prix before their retreat. Unlike the 2nd Battalion, he had no way to retreat because during the last fight involving his aerospace fighters, one of the Capellan conventional atmospheric fighters suicide-rammed his dropship. The resulting explosion as both the fighter’s missiles and bombs exploded which then chain-exploded his dropship’s own ammunition stores. The secondary explosion of the main Overlord dropship exploding from its own cooked ammunition took out the Union close by, leaving him with just one Leopard and one Union. It was just shy of what he needed to completely pull his battalion back.

Otherwise, he would have to leave multiple mechs behind to retreat. 

‘Damn the fucking Capellans…!’ he thought his a wrathful hiss. ‘You don’t attack dropships! Did they want us to fight to the death?!’

Except… he knew why they had done that. 

The Capellans had changed between pre- and post-Fourth Succession War. They weren’t like their old selves. Fanaticism in the CCAF was expected, yes, but the suicidal maneuvers of the militia weren’t. 

And it was those unexpected suicide attacks that had crippled his battalion in the first place. 

“Colonel, scouting reports,” the last major left in the battalion said as he walked into the command room with a noteputer. 

Davis took it and read the report. 

His eyes widened. 

“Get everyone into their mechs!” he shouted. “I want those bunkers manned!” 

He knew it would be stupid to order the tank crews back in their broken tanks; those tanks were listed as still “available” on his report, but he knew after having seen them that they could barely move. 

As the major saluted and left to relay orders, Davis picked up his radio.

“This is Colonel Davis Heller of the Tooth of Ymir. Once again, I am offering a ceasefire and for my mercenary company to fully retreat from this world,” he reiterated for the third time. 

No response. 

He nearly threw his radio in rage. 

The Capellans didn’t want his surrender. 

They wanted him to die.

“Fuck!” he shouted as he threw the noteputer instead, which had carried a damning report. 

CCAF militia force inbound.

30 bug mechs.

20 light/medium combat vehicles.

2 infantry platoons. 

It was a force that overnumbered his, even if each individual mech under his command was tougher, bigger, and heavier. 

But did that matter?

Fuck no! 

He’s been fighting these bastards for the past month. The Capellans burned everything around them! It didn’t matter if a heavy mech could take out three bug mechs to match its weight in mass, there will always be another bug mech around the corner to put an end to the heavy mech! That’s what happened to his XO. That’s what happened to his son. That’s what was going to happen to the rest of them! 

Then he heard it. 

Whistling jets. 

He whirled around and looked out of the command room’s large windows. 

Conventional jets, much weaker and more fragile than aerospace fighters, came flying almost leisurely, and dropped bombs… on his Union. The Union and whatever mechs around it tried to shoot the fighters down, but they only managed to hit one. Even then, the now smoking fighter didn’t go down and limped away. 

The bombs, some kind of cluster bombs, fell down and exploded all around his Union. So many exploded, in fact, that his Union listed to the side … before fully tilting and crashing into the ground.

He stared at what had been his company’s only route of escape.

Then his radio crackled. It was the first time the Capellans were reaching out since the Tooth of Ymir landed on Primus.

“This is Major Michael Stutten. I have heard your offer and I reject them. I am, however, willing to discuss much more stringent surrender from you. You can take the last dropship, whatever it can fit, and leave. Everything else now belongs to the Capellan Confederation. You have three hours to comply. After that, we will run you over and no mercy will be offered. A mongrel mercenary like you should have known better than to accept a contract to invade and conquer a Capellan world.”

And then the radio cut out. 

He fumed as he stared at the radio.

“Load up the Leopard with all of our heavies,” he hissed the order out. “We’re leaving the rest behind.” 

And once he got back to Andurien, he was so going to have the MRB roast the Anduriens for this. Weak, Blake’s ass! If the Anduriens didn’t pay him for his son’s death on top of all of his losses, then he was going to go over to the Capellans in exchange for revenge! 

-VB-

“What?” Magistrix Kyalla Centrella uttered as she looked straight at the MCAF officer. 

“Our assault on New Roland, Repulse, and Andarmax have all failed, magistrix,” the flat-chested woman with a bow of her head. 

“Explain in detail,” she demanded as the rest of the occupants of the throne room settled in to hear the news. 

“... The Capellan Confederation has veered away from standard military doctrine and operation of the Third Succession War and its own predecessors,” Colonel Trisha Tellaverde reported. “Our assumption had been that the Capellan Confederation was still relying heavily on their flexible defense doctrine, which would have been severely reduced in capacity with the end of the Fourth Succession War. Instead of shoring up their reduced mobile mech regiment numbers, the Capellans changed their doctrine to what can only be described as a defensive swarm doctrine.

“On New Roland, the Capellans deployed a mech design that had been extinct prior to the Fourth succession War: the Firebee. Equipped with inferno rockets and just a single large laser, this cheap light mech is not as powerful as a Panther, not as fast as a Locust, not specialized enough like a Firestarter, and not cheap enough like Commando. 

“What we hadn’t realized was that the Capellan Confederation had pivoted not just tactically but industrially on a strategic level, magistrix. We are suspecting that the Capellans are now in possession of at least five different and separate Firebee factories across just the Sian Commonality.Nothing else explains the presence of Firebee light mechs present on all of the worlds that we and our allies have landed on.”

“And how does a mediocre and outdated light mech design repel our mercenaries and extremely well equipped forces?” 

“Because even if it is not cheap as a Locust or a Commando, a Firebee is barely more complex than a Locust. This allowed the Capellans to mass produce the Firebee like how the rest of the Successor States mass produce Locusts and Phoenix Hawks. This is the only method that we can accept which would allow the Capellans to field over five hundred Firebees all along the border. The only other possibility is that they stripped their border worlds along the Federated Suns and the Lyran Commonwealth prior to the end of the Fourth Succession, but that would make no sense. The Anduriens and we gave no indication that we were planning this war.

“Worse, many of the worlds that we struck were desert or tropical worlds. The inferno rockets these Firebees carry all cause mechs to overheat, and only those mechs operated by the most paranoid and hater of heat managed to survive an onslaught. Even if one of our Atlas destroy four of the Firebees, a fifth Firebee will destroy the Atlas and the Capellan Confederation would have a better return from the match. However, that is not how we have been seeing the Capellan Confederation operate. 

“The Capellan Confederation has strengthened their conventional forces. So much so that all of our forces have encountered at least ten wings of conventional atmospheric fighters and at least a hundred medium weight tanks on the ground at each of the worlds we landed on. Even when we matched their strength evenly, Capellan mechwarriors, tank crews, and infantry showed themselves to be suicidally fanatic. It … it may have to do with this.”

A noteputer was produced, and her guards took it, checked it, and then turned it over to her. 

Kyalla grabbed the noteputer and turned it around so that she could see the image of a crumpled poster. 

“‘Service to the State, Citizenship for You and Your Family even in death’...?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” the colonel grimaced. “As you know…”

“Everyone knows about the Capellan caste system,” she waved her hand. “Is this poster truly suggesting that?”

“It is. And it is the only explanation we have for the change in Capellan militia’s aggressiveness. No, recklessness. We are now operating under the assumption that much of the Capellan militia we encounter will be of the servitor caste looking to elevate themselves, if not their families, back to the Citizen caste. Our mechwarriors have been targeted by suicide bombers in cars. Some of whom have jumped off buildings to directly target the mechs’ cockpits at the top of the mech.”

What the fuck?

“I suspect that the Anduriens will face the worst of it, however.”

“What can it be worse than this?” she demanded exasperatedly and angrily, almost slouching into her seat. But she didn’t. She had too much training and discipline to slouch like a lazy bum or a homeless gambler.

“Please slide to the next image, ma’am.”

She did.

“That is an ugly mech.”

“It is, magistrix. That mech, however, can use parts from some of the most readily available mech parts on the market. It’s called a Cataphract, the Capellan’s newest heavy mech, and it can stand up to most Assault Mechs. It is the kind of a mech that the Phoenix Hawk wishes it can be. If it gets damaged, then the Capellans will strip random medium mechs until compatible parts are found and jam it in, returning it to operation on the field. So we should be thankful that we are fighting them en masse. While we have encountered a handful along the Capellan rimward border, we suspect that the Capellans are deploying the majority of it against the Anduriens. And I don’t think the Anduriens have enough Assault Mechs to matter.”

A heavy mech that could go up against assault mechs… a light mech design that was so old that it was too simple to produce and too effective for its cost that they were swarming her soldiers… a change in doctrine right before she and her ally invaded…

The Maskirovka had spies in her court. They have been killing her spies in their worlds and corporations while feeding her and her people lies.

Worse, the war was over before it started because they had operated on old information and vastly underestimated their enemy. 

“Fuck.”

And while the Capellans had their defenses prepared for the goddamn apocalypse, Magistrix Kyalla Centrella knew that she hadn’t prepared her people at all for a counter-invasion. It had never crossed her mind that the supposedly weak Capellans would have enough strength left. 

But that had been a thought made from false information. 

The Capellans possessed enough strength. They had enough manpower. They had enough mechs. 

And if primitive mechs could be used, then why not primitive dropships and jumpships? Those cheaper and faster to make, if they had the blueprints for them? Firebees were supposed to have been extinct, but they weren’t, so why not primitive dropships and jumpships? 

Double fuck.

She felt her stomach drop.

…

If primitive dropships and jumpships could be made, then why not primitive warships? 

Because even a primitive warship was better than no warship.

And the Magistracy had no warships or even a shipyard capable of producing one.