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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ApprehensiveCap6525 on 2024-10-27 22:07:57+00:00.

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The second wave of marines hit the ground hard and fast. The Moscow had dumped her entire onboard contingent onto Sevran in hopes of a quick but costly breakthrough, sacrificing lives to win land like generals had done since time immemorial. A civilian would have called it evil. Of course it was. War was evil incarnate.

“Brigade one reports eighteen hundred M.I.A!” an officer called out. “Brigade two reports sixteen hundred M.I.A!” Twenty thousand Terran soldiers had just made planetfall. Ten thousand had died in their pods. “Brigade three reports four thousand M.I.A!” In rapid response bases all across Sevran, alarms were sounding. Soldiers were being mobilized. Young men and women alike, brainwashed by fascist propaganda and armed with disposable gear, strapped into their exoskeletons and loaded their weapons as they prepared to fight for their slavemasters to beat back their liberators. They kissed pictures of loved ones and sent their families what news they could as they loaded into their troop transports and lifted off into the sky.

“I’m picking up Alliance aircraft converging on the citadel,” came a cold, clinical report from the sensor teams aboard the Moscow. Not people. Not lives. Not even soldiers. Just target signatures.

“Confirmed,” Calixus Ralg stated as he received the report. “Agent Reteri, you have the guns. Terminate at your own discretion.”

Lance after lance after lance burned into the crust of Sevran. Gunships and troop carriers alike fell from the sky. Convoys of armored vehicles stopped dead in their tracks at collapsed bridges and tunnels, only to be massacred from orbit as laser beams melted through their hulls with surgical precision. Even under the protective covers, camouflaged metal panels that were meant to hide roads from an orbital scan, there was no respite from the bombardment. It was disgustingly easy to take lives from a dreadnought. Armies burned as they moved from their bunkers.

The batteries of the dreadnought Moscow aimed and fired with deadly precision. The sheer accuracy of the bombardment, leaps and bounds above what any Coalition warship would have been able to deliver, caught the defenders of Sevran entirely off guard. Their ground and air forces, whose rudimentary sensor scrambling technology was fast proving ineffective against the precision tracking of the best targeting array ever built by human hands, began to hunker down. Their electronic warfare assets began working overtime. Their pilots and drivers switched to manual control. A thick and impenetrable fog of sensor jamming began to envelop Sevran.

“Target acquisition is tricky, but I’m getting there,” Terris reported. “There’s too much sensor fog to get a good fix on the enemy.” A laser battery ceased fire just as its targets began to fly over an inhabited city. They re-scrambled their signatures and slipped out under the cover of advanced camouflage. “Remind me again what the acceptable threshold for collateral damage is?”

“None,” Admiral Ralg snapped, directing the assault on Janus Ora’s fortress. Terris noted absentmindedly that other warships were already on their way to disgorge their own regiments of marines. Calixus Ralg was going to take that citadel if he had to turn the mountains of Sevran red to do it. “If the Alliance Space Navy were to hold orbit above your world, they’d reduce it. They would spare nothing. We must teach these people to expect better from us.”

“Brigade four has broken through,” an officer announced. “They report heavy losses.” The remnants of the E.N.S. Moscow’s marine contingent had been organized into four brigades of five thousand soldiers each, a piece of Republic Defense Force doctrine that they had been able to impress upon their protectorate, and they were advancing inexorably toward the greatest bastion of Alliance power. They, just like the conscripted legions of their Republic overlords, were proving incontrovertibly that there was one maxim true of every army. When it came to soldiers, quantity had a quality of its own.

“Give the first and second brigades the go-ahead to commence their part of the operation,” Admiral Ralg commanded. “How is brigade three?”

“Significantly reduced,” came the report. “Three thousand soldiers, plus insignificant light armor, remain of the original five thousand.”

“Where is the marine commander?” Terris called out, diverting her attention from tracking down and lancing the last stragglers of the Alliance Army’s rapid response forces. “A navy admiral should have no fucking business directing ground operations!”

“We have no marine officer aboard with a rank higher than colonel,” Admiral Ralg informed her. “In this scenario, the navy admiral is the only officer with any ‘fucking business’ commanding an offensive of this magnitude.” He turned to one of his subordinates. “Bring that company around to there. Withdraw those other two. Thank you.” Then back to Terris. “If you have someone in mind who is more suited for command, then please, have them assume it.”

She raised her wing. “What good could you possibly do in a large-scale operation?” Admiral Ralg scoffed. “You’re Marcus Wayne’s secretary!”

“And you’re leading battalion three-one directly into a kill zone,” Terris pointed out. “Those mountains are arranged in a V pointing outward. The only vehicle-traversable route for fifty miles is right up the center of it.” She tapped into the ship’s systems to illuminate the Alliance kill-box on the status map. “Should they have put up a sign saying ‘WARNING: TRAP HERE’, or would you have missed that one, too?”

As if on cue, anti-tank cannons began to open fire on the forward elements of brigade three’s first battalion. Their light vehicles and hoverbikes were the first to go. Then came the infantry. Then, finally, Terris assumed direct command and ordered a retreat. “Give me control. At least let me serve in an advisory role. You’re out of your league.”

Terris’ order, though it was not countermanded, had come too late. The Alliance positions had waited for their enemy to walk fully into the trap before springing it, and now, the only thing anybody aboard the Moscow could do was watch. The entire first battalion was being decimated in real time. “My god,” Admiral Ralg breathed. “You can assume command.” He stepped back from the status map, whispering to Lieutenant Thole. “I never dreamed I’d be upstaged by a-”

“Cut it there,” Terris snapped. “No need to add to your vices, admiral, you’ve already got enough.” She discarded the first battalion as doomed, giving them orders to stand and fight to the last in the hopes of straining one last scrap of value out of what remained of Earth’s marines. “I’m sending the third and fifth battalions around in a flanking maneuver,” she reported.

“Up the mountains?” Admiral Ralg exclaimed. “They have air supremacy! Your troops will be cut to bits without their anti-aircraft vehicles!”

“Yes, and they’ll be cut to pieces even worse if they try and charge through that kill zone. Lubricators aren’t a resource to be thrown haphazardly at anything that poses a challenge, you know.” The first wave of Terran infantry reached the mountain peaks’ heavy defenses. Autocannons and railguns cut them down in droves. Still, under orders to continue, they pressed on.

“Lubricators?” asked Admiral Ralg. “What in mankind’s name is a lubricator?”

“Expendable,” Terris told him matter-of-factly. Marcus Wayne stood up and left the bridge. He was not meant for this kind of conflict. “But you have to spend them wisely.” Alliance skimmers screamed over the mountaintops, their dragonfly wings buzzing, and vomited death down upon the Protectorate troops from their hull-mounted missile pods. A salvo of railgun rounds, haphazardly fired but still lethal to the extreme, shot up to meet them.

Within minutes of their arrival, a third of the Alliance air contingent had dropped from the sky. The remaining two-thirds began to perform evasive maneuvers, focusing their fire on pre-planned vectors to lure the Protectorate infantry into minefields or the firing line of ground-based defenses. It worked wonderfully. Terris, for all her talents, was left overwhelmed as she took direct control over the battle and tried to salvage her assault by directing each individual unit’s fire.

At first, it worked. One by one, the Alliance gunships fell from the sky. But their destroyers incurred a terrible loss in return. Air power was supreme in the mountains of Sevran. Without any cover for ground forces to use against munitions coming from above, one attack skimmer could annihilate a platoon. The first instinct of any marine commander who saw a skimmer heading their way was to order his unit to take cover. The second was to retreat. Neither was an option, but the marines tried them anyway. Terris countermanded their established doctrine, giving each unit present a direct order to stand and fight regardless of the losses. At first, they were obeyed. But, as casualties on both sides rose and the two forces became locked in a battle of attrition, each one defenseless against the attacks of the other, the Terrans’ resolve began to break.

“No, no, no,” Terris stam…

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