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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/KamchatkasRevenge on 2024-11-26 00:24:29+00:00.

Book 7: Last Contact

USFS Kandahar Province - Ready Room

Gol’Shan, Moon of the Planet Primus, Cannidor Corporate Space

“Jotunn company, this is Control. Scramble, I repeat, scramble! Friendlies under attack. Skoll company was out on patrol and is being engaged. Multiple casualties reported. Repeat scramble!”

Captain Stanley ‘Pirate’ Arnesen leaps to his feet and zips up his flight suit, his text message to his wife Cora instantly forgotten as the battle stations alarm starts to scream throughout the ship. They’d been waiting for this! He grabs his new helmet and races over to the intercom panel on the wall and triggers it.

“Jotunn Six copies. All walkers scramble!” Stanley turns and looks at his team. “Alright people, let’s get out there and pull those tanker’s tails outta the fire!”

He’s first out the door of the ready room, and his other pilots are hot on his heels.

He’d gone from a mech suit platoon commander to the leader of Jotunn company, the Crimson Tear’s new combat walkers, mech suits the size of a Carnifex and twice as mean, in just a few short weeks. In that time he’d been pushing his new team to the absolute limit, in simulators and in their suits once they’d been delivered by the manufacturer, and now it was show time!

The massive bipedal war machines are snugly tucked away in the Kandahar Province’s main assault bay, which had recently been retrofitted with cradles to support the massive war machines, along with the existing tie down points for other more conventional armored fighting vehicles.

The Admiral had been future proofing aggressively when he’d signed the contract to buy the state of the art assault ship, and with all the new toys added to Marine Battalion Crimson Tear’s roster recently, he clearly knew what he was about.

The Khopek pattern combat walker was a premium product from the Cannidor’s premier corporate weapons manufacturer, Cannid Solutions. The war machines were touted as fast, durable and beyond versatile, with load outs changeable more or less on the fly so long as you had the weapons, or the parts to readily convert weapons to Khopek mounting points, handy.

In terms of scale, normal power armor for a full grown Cannidor was to the Khopeks as Cindy Bridger in her toy power armor, a now frequent and adorable sight within the passages of the ship were to her mother Jaruna in her power armor.

The standard load out consisted of four massive laser cannons on the arms, a heavy rail cannon over the right shoulder, and a plasma cannon that had a bore a few people could use as a hot tub over the left. For that old fashioned Undaunted flavor, a set of 20mm rotary cannons had been added to the upper chest, around where the clavicle would be on a human. Predominantly for erasing smaller threats like infantry and defending against missile threats. Missile threats like the Undaunted Khopeks carried in a pod on their back in racks of twenty tubes.

They were like nothing Stanley had ever dreamed about, and ever since the Admiral had tapped him to take command, he’d been as giddy as a kid on Christmas. It was almost as exciting as hearing Cora was pregnant.

Almost.

Stanley gives his crew chief a high five as he throws himself into his cockpit, quickly strapping in and hitting the master power. In seconds the war machine comes to life and he feels the tell tale tingle of the machine’s computers connecting to his new implants.

::Connecting.::

::Connection established. Reactor online. Weapons online. Sensors online. All systems nominal.::

Stanley’s first out of the bay, goosing his throttle to get down the ramp before waiting for the other three walkers in his unit to catch up.

“Jotunn, this is six. Report status.”

“Mustang, ready op.”

“Banshee, ready op.”

“Specter, ready op.”

Stanley nods in satisfaction, his three pilots confirming what his telemetry was already telling him, they were combat ready.

“Pirate, ready op. Jotunns, switch to hover mode and move out.”

One feature of this particular model of combat walker was powerful anti-grav systems in the feet. With the jump pack on the back and a little careful handling, it allowed a pilot to ‘skate’ their walker across the ground at incredibly high speed. Only down side? It didn’t do well in anything besides relatively gentle terrain, and it drained so much power from the compact axiom reactors the walkers had aboard that they couldn’t use their shields. Not ideal for a fight, for this part though? It was perfect.

In moments the four walkers are dashing across the surface of the moon in a loose formation, naturally spreading out to avoid both collisions and the chance of enemy artillery fire.

“Skoll Six, Jotunn Six.”

“Skoll Six.”

The voice of the Tear’s newly arrived armor squadron XO, a Human woman who was an American army veteran who generally went by ‘Blaze’ when she wasn’t going by Captain Jill Kelly, sounds down right exhausted to Stanley’s ear. The normally smiling redhead was clearly neck deep in shit.

“Blaze, we’re on route. What’s your situation?”

“Pirate, we got hit hard by an enemy drop ship. One of my tracks is immobilized. The regular grunts have taken some wounded and dead. Don’t have numbers, haven’t heard from the platoon leader in a minute. The power armored infantry however is holding the line. They’ve got us hemmed in in a little crater. A lot of combat mechs. Not sure about actual vehicles, but the drop ship dropped off plenty of grunts and armored something or another that hauls big fucking plasma cannons around.”

There’s the sound of weapons fire over the comm net and Jill grunts as the impact throws her around inside her track a little bit.

“Major Hancock’s coming back with his RAT company but they were out doing a long range recon for an assault, hell only knows when they’ll get back. I’ll be frank, much as it pains me to ask a Jarhead for help, but I need all the help you can give before the bad girls bring up arty and smoke us.”

“Copy all, Blaze, we’ll make it to you asap and Doc Hancock can clean up our leftovers. We’re maybe… five, that’s zero five minutes out.”

“Please and thank you Pirate. Hit’em from the West, that seems to be where they’ve got their heavies.”

“Can do.”

Stanley switches back to his company net.

“Okay people, here’s the situation…”

The briefing takes two minutes of travel.

“Raven to all points. Surveillance drone is live. We’re working on some air support.”

Stanley grins as his tactical display begins to light up with bright red icons. Using the new system, ‘probable enemies’ were dark red with shapes to indicate the type of contact. Bright red meant a ‘confirmed’ contact. Green in two different shades covered friendlies, blue covered allied forces, and yellow was neutrals. Gray was for civilian assets, none of which were anywhere near this particular dust ball at the minute.

Good. Meant they could break out the big boom with little consequences.

“Jotunns, when we hit five minutes out from where Skoll’s hemmed in, we’ll use the telemetry from the drone to conduct a long range missile strike. If we get a chance or Skoll asks nicely we’ll hit 'em a second time. Then we’ll go weapons free. Mark your targets with your systems, I don’t want anyone wasting ammo killing the same enemy twice.”

A chorus of acknowledgements come back and Stanley goes back to watching his screens, waiting for possible threats while he works out his firing solution.

The view on the ground was fairly dire, and was more or less as Jill had described. Skoll Six was pinned down in a crater along with a fairly large body of infantry who were using the heavy armored bodies of the Grenadier Heavy Assault Vehicles for cover, as per doctrine.

When the Undaunted had started developing their tanks they’d run into an issue. Power armor was fast, mobile, heavily armed and hard to hit.

There were faster, maneuverable ‘small’ vehicles, like the squadron’s maneuver element, newly purchased Cannidor rapid assault tanks the Undaunted had named the M1 Piranha, that only had speed on power armored infantry beyond being much cheaper.

Combat walkers on the other hand, while great, were expensive in a whole new order of magnitude even compared to power armor.

So to strike a balance between affordability and useability, namely not having to get every tank crew a very expensive set of implants to merge their minds with their tracks, the Undaunted engineers had done the math and determined that the best thing they could do is go bigger. Much bigger. Not that that had stopped one team from developing a main battle tank equivalent, arguing that power armor couldn’t be everywhere, but that certainly wasn’t a problem around here.

As a result the Grenadier was a hulking behemoth, hauling an unholy shitload of guns, armor, shields and of course having nice comfortable compartments for a platoon of regular leg infantry to mount up across a four tank company with room left over to have a squad of power armor to embark. At least. The doctrine preferred a squad of power armored infantry to deploy with every two Grenadiers so far. If Stanley’s guess was right that number would go up.

You could never have enough dismounts, especially in complex modern combat environments for something that lacked power armor’s incredible maneuverability. Turns out the modern Earth truism that only an idiot would operate armor without infantry support was perfectly valid in the wider galaxy. Hell his beaut…

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