Emancipation and Exodus

Collected accounts of the New Jefferson landing on Tyre, September 2597 - by Blackjack555

Personal account, Gunnery Sergeant Michael O’Neil, New Jefferson Marine Corps, Tyre Expeditionary Force

We hit orbit over Tyre to the sound of shrapnel bouncing off the hull and the seemingly chaotic racket of a landing force preparing to drop. The assault cruiser CNS Okinawa’s armored “well deck” was full of shouting officers, maintenance crews and loading teams sprinting about, and Marines running for their stations. Marines climbed into drop pods, transports took on munitions and heavy equipment, and orbital drop mechs prepped for ejection from the ship. To the outside observer, it would look like utter pandemonium, but everyone was going where they were supposed to, doing their job to ensure a successful mission.

We could see the battle going on outside on our helmet displays. A massive fleet from the Democratic Republic of Chiss had just made orbit when we entered the system, and the Navy were doing their damnedest to see us through their blockade. The hull rang with the impact of a heavy shell from one of their guns, the deck plating visibly buckling under the blow and knocking a few sailors off their feet, but it didn’t noticeably slow the loading process. My squad, already locked in our drop pods, watched the countdown to launch, eager to be off the ship and into the fight where we could do something.

A New Jefferson Marine Corps Orbit to Surface Deployment Pod, Individual, is the kind of thing that makes a lot of people think Marines are insane. The exterior is covered in angled armor plating around a boxy, padded interior cabin. When you sit back in the pod, adaptive elastic bands and expandable padding lock you and your weapons in place, preventing anything from bouncing around in flight. Each pod has a very small inertial compensator, an air supply, and maneuvering jets. We launched from the cruiser in standard orbital assault drop mode as soon as the Okinawa reached the deployment point.

The ship shook slightly as hundreds of decoys, small drones with ECM packages, flares, and chaff, fired off in a barrage ahead of us, then the indicator light turned green and our pods dropped. Well, dropped is the wrong word, as each pod is fired by a compact magnetic accelerator coil, the ship’s inertial dampers keeping the momentary 200 Earth gravities of acceleration from reducing us to paste. We cleared the orbital battlefield in moments, slammed into the atmosphere, and started decelerating, our pods’ defensive systems taking us on wild, unpredictable maneuvers as multispectrum jamming fields blanketed the local area to try to stop enemy anti-aircraft weapons from locking onto us. The Democratic Republic of Chiss knew what we were doing, and their batteries sent up flak, self-guiding smart shells, missiles, and laser beams, as their fighters raced to intercept us. Our own fighters, A/SF-43 Stormcrows, raced by outside, intercepting the Chiss aircraft while orbital artillery fired on their ground defenses. Closer to the ground, drogue chutes and short-burn plasma thrusters engaged to slow us down, taking the landing from “instant death” to merely “uncomfortably jarring”.

Inevitably, we lost a few pods on the way in. The armor will withstand a lot, but direct hits from air defense artillery is a bit too much even for our systems. However, the countermeasures worked, and we hit the ground ready to fight. The pod unlocked and I called out over the comm, “All right, Marines! FCA IFF transponders are already loaded into your suits, so disembark and engage at will! Oorah!” The door blasted open and I jumped out, rifle in hand already firing at the first Chiss soldier I saw.


Personal account, Squad Leader Tyrone Fredericks, Free Colonial Alliance Tyre Expeditionary Force

We’d been told that we were getting reinforcements from the New Jefferson Confederacy, but I can’t say we really understood what that meant at first. Me and mine were dug in to hold the southern point of the Three Sisters plateau, in the ruins of Dale’s Ridge. God only knows what happened to that place, but by the time we got there, the whole city was already a mass of broken, collapsed buildings and debris. We were told to entrench in the ruins overlooking the only major route that went directly through the area, a big highway built to allow passage to the enormous volume of ground cargo and personal transports between the plateau and port and the outlying manufacturing and storage centers. Now, the Democratic Republic of Chiss were set to advance right up that same highway from Halesburg and seize the port for themselves.

Then, of course, there were the infected. They thrive in places like the network of transit tunnels, underground housing blocks, and utility spaces underneath most major cities. Over the last few months, we’d pretty much cleared them out of the surface structures in our territory, though we still found the odd pocket, but the tunnels? Those were their domain, and we didn’t really figure we could get them out any time soon. Soldiers like us are no good in an environment where the toxic smog kills sensors, air, artillery, and armor can’t get in, and the enemy has claws and teeth that can breach armor and can move in on you in an instant without any warning. The Chiss had the bright idea of using those tunnels to mount a second advance, which on the one hand consumed a few thousand of their men in a hopeless push into the dark, and on the other gave the infected a few thousand reinforcements. Not everyone bitten dies, and not everyone who dies of the infection turns, but enough do that it’s a very real problem. Especially when those who turn are still wearing full assault armor, not great against a horde of teeth and claws but still just as good against bullets as ever, now worn by something that barely feels pain and has no concept of fear.

All in all, as my squad sat there in the rubble of an old skyscraper that partially blocked the road, we weren’t feeling all that optimistic. That morning, we’d already fended off one Chiss advance. They shelled us with long-range gun batteries, forcing us to hide deeper in the ruins, then drove right up the road, armored infantry carriers and light tanks screening a column of mechanized infantry. About two companies of Alliance troops had been assigned to stop them, and we caught them as they entered the same rubble field we now defended. At first, it was going our way. I know Fuller’s heavy anti-vehicle autocannon accounted for seven or eight enemy vehicles, and the opening salvo from our AT crews’ Javelin missile pods looked like a storm of meteors descending on the enemy from above to punch through weak points and hatches. Soft-cover infantry transport trucks were just shredded under the rain of explosives and high-caliber rounds, and we probably accounted for at least our number of them before they were able to regroup. But then, they brought up heavy armor, got their men out of the transports, and called in reinforcements. Their infantry swarmed into the buildings we held, our heavy weapons suppressed by tanks and artillery fire, as they redoubled their artillery and started dropping shells on our own mortars and cannons. Our own command brought up another company with air support to back us up, and the battle overhead became a confusing tangle as our fighters and theirs, both sides using the venerable AIC joint-designed MF-78 Star Falcons, dueled, craft on one side or the other breaking free at random to launch strikes on whatever targets they could hit. On the ground, the Chiss drove our forces back briefly, but faltered as they hit actual fixed defenses, strongpoints within the ruins set up in case this exact thing happened. After a few hundred casualties on both sides, the Chiss withdrew to regroup, resupply, and plan.

They hit us the second time in early afternoon. The artillery bombardment picked up from the rather sporadic shelling they had maintained to keep us from getting any real rest, to a hurricane of explosive and shrapnel. Their men advanced on foot this time, already spread out and in cover, denying us the opportunity to ambush them in their trucks again. Heavy tanks, the leading edge of which had been hastily up-armored with sheets of reactive armor bolted on top of the turrets to block our Javelins, raced along up the road, guns blazing, caring less about actually hitting us than about simply pinning us down. Overhead, their fighters roared in, dropping bombs and firing salvos of rockets at any position they could find. A second set flew cover, intercepting our air support and blocking our interceptors, while low-flying gunships annihilated any ADA emplacement that opened fire. We were making them pay for every inch of ground, the interior of the buildings between our defenses and the open ground a nightmarish meat grinder of strongpoints, mines, traps, and pre-placed ambush teams, but it was clear we were losing. Our comms were filled with requests for fire support, medics, and supplies, and the screams of the dead and dying.

The New Jefferson Marine Corps really know how to make an entrance. The callsign for the defense line was Palisade. A Marine officer with an accent somewhere between Old Earth Southern and a landslide came on the network and very calmly announced, “All Palisade elements, this is Werecat Actual. Find some cover and hang in there, we are inbound hot. Palisade squad leaders, use the battlenet to mark targets for air and orbital support fire. Watch your fire once we arrive, your IFF should show us as friendly and it’s not hard to tell we ain’t Chiss but it’s gonna get a little bit crazy here in a few seconds. Hold fast, the Marines are coming.”

Up above us, hundreds of points of light drew rapidly closer to the ground. A flight of their fighters roared by overhead, punching straight through the dogfight toward the ground before making an extremely tight turn to fly practically at rooftop height. The Star Falcons are big, heavy, three-engine beasts with a pilot, gunner, and comms/engineering tech, a somewhat short body, and long wings that can fold back in space or for storage. They’re not slow or cumbersome by any means, but the new fighters made them look like it. Two engines, the blue-white glow suggesting plasma drives rather than standard solid-fuel/turbine multirole jets, forward-swept angular wings, and what I eventually realized are vectored thrusters for tight maneuvers in any direction at various points on the body. The four Stormcrows went by with guns and missile pods blazing, knocking out air defenses and heavy armor. Along the front, which had now expanded along the ruined streets and leveled debris fields until it was a couple of kilometers across, more fighters flew past, as a group of them entered the fray with the Chiss interceptors. I watched, in a moment of relative calm as I reloaded, as one of their fighters got into a fight with three Chiss birds. His wingman, I assume, came down from above and ripped one of the pursuers apart with what looked like an autocannon, but much, much more powerful. The pilot of the pursued fighter went into a straight climb, then flipped his fighter around, momentum carrying him upward, and fired a missile into another pursuer. The third Star Falcon managed to get off a shot, a pair of missiles that streaked toward the smaller aircraft, one of which lost its lock and spiraled off into the distance randomly. The other was taken out by a point defense weapon and exploded, the shrapnel tearing into one of the fighter’s engines, but the pilot retained enough control to get off a missile of his own that detonated right next to the last Falcon’s power plant, annihilating it in a brilliant fireball. The wounded fighter and his wingman turned and headed back to orbit, the fighter badly damaged but still victorious and able to return to its carrier.

Then the drop pods hit the ground. Frankly, even though I knew they were on my side, the experience of their landing is terrifying. The braking jets make a hissing, shrieking sound, just audible over the roar of the wind around the pods. When they land, everything shakes. The Marines inside leapt out, some instantly opening fire where they stood, others dropping to find cover or pull heavy equipment out of their pods. Smaller ones, supply containers, landed around them, using their ability to survive a much harder landing than the human cargo of the main pods to gain some extra time to maneuver to avoid collisions before impact. Some contained weapons, others food, medical supplies, ammunition, and a variety of specialized equipment. After I looked for a minute I realized they had everything in those pods that they would need to operate for a week or so as an independent force. Most impressive, though, were the mechs. Much larger pods than the individual Marines’ hit along the battlefront in places where it looked like they would need more support. Those pods blew open on all sides, allowing four meter tall bipedal armored mechs to step out with a wide array of weapons. One landed just in front of our position, between us and a group of enemy light assault vehicles moving up with anti-personnel cannons and flamethrowers. The mech had a massive assault shield on one arm, while the other “hand” held a long powered axe and a large-bore railgun extended from its wrist. The pilot slammed his axe down on the turret of one of the boxy, tracked assault vehicles, crushing the turret and the middle of the vehicle. The charged particle field around the blade ignited the vehicle’s ammunition stores, and it exploded. Two other LAVs opened fire, but couldn’t penetrate the shield, and the mech drove his axe into the side of one, killing everyone inside, while stomping on the crew cabin of the other. The fourth tried his flamethrower, which made the mech stumble back for a moment, but then the pilot recovered from the surprise and fired the railgun, sending a twenty-five centimeter long metal dart through the vehicle with enough force to knock it backward and crumple the front halfway toward the back, only to bow out again as the fuel and ammunition cooked off.