Star Force: Escalation (SF12) Read online

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  December 8, 2107

  Graham rolled his eyes and tossed his cards on the table. “I swear, you have to be bloody cheating.”

  William reached forward and pulled the small pile of Star Force credit tokens towards him, eliciting sneers from the other three men.

  “A combination of luck and skill, my friend,” he revealed, methodically stacking up the currency chits that had become extra valuable ever since Star Force had handed down the 35 year ban against the United Kingdom for their part in the ‘Belt War’ as many of the naval officers had come to call it, with the label quickly spreading throughout the rest of the British holdings along with the news of their victory over the Americans.

  “Must be a shit load of luck, because we all know you’re as dumb as a rock,” Stuart said as he collected all the cards and began shuffling them for another hand.

  “Whatever works,” William deflected, rolling a white/gold token across his knuckles artfully. The Star Force currency had quickly become the envy of the British soldiers stationed on Mars given that they no longer had access to the currency exchanges and Star Force now refused to accept British pounds from anyone, eliminating the possibility of them using a 3rd party middleman to make local purchases.

  Everything on the Mars black market was traded for with physical currency, and with the pound no longer useful at Star Force installations it had become next to worthless outside of the British colonies, so those few Star Force credits still in circulation within the ranks had jumped in value, making the little circular, synthetic tokens worth their weight in gold.

  Graham belatedly looked down at his watch. “Hey, turn on the telly!”

  One of the British army regulars at another table in the military base lounge responded and walked over to the small screen on the wall and flipped it on, with British newscast feed already tuned in.

  “There we go,” Graham said excitedly, seeing the attractive female anchor talking over a map of the asteroid belt and highlighting another section of the American territory where a recent battle had taken place. The Yanks continued to fall further and further back, already having lost 3/4ths of their fleet and trying to save the rest of it as they consolidated their remaining strength around their entry point with a host of unarmed supply ships and tankers to protect, otherwise they’d be stranded in the belt without fuel and easy pickings for the Royal Navy.

  A cheer went up around the room, then half the men and women assembled went back to what they were doing while the others continued to watch with interest.

  “Hey, mate. You’d play better if you paid attention,” Stuart said, dealing Graham his cards.

  “We lost another ship,” Graham noted, only half paying attention to his dismal hand. “A cruiser? How the hell did they get one of our cruisers?”

  Someone near the telly either heard him or was of a similar mind, because he stood up and tagged the news icon for that substory on the screen and brought it up into full view. The HMS Diadem had been engaging 16 American ships in a retreating action with only four destroyers and another cruiser in support, but they had succeeded in destroying 11 of the American vessels, including the carrier USS Bellicose.

  The anchor explained in great detail how the Diadem had pushed through the sloppy American formation and pursued the carrier to her destruction, but eventually succumbed to the S-12 fighters and their ‘shipbuster’ warheads. A new American invention that lended the destructive power of a small, tactical nuke without the hazardous radiation. 17 confirmed hits from the dangerous missiles took down the Diadem, from which only 13 crewmembers were recovered.

  “We got their bloody carrier,” Stuart pointed out. “That makes four for us, none for them.”

  “A lot of good chaps died taking her down,” Graham said, taking a moment out of respect before turning back to his cards…which flew out of his hand as the man sitting behind him shoved a startled elbow into his back as a base-wide alarm sounded.

  Graham and William exchanged glances, then bolted to their feet along with everyone else to get to their combat stations, theirs being the armory.

  The pair ran down three flights of stairs and across half the level before they got to their barracks and hastily dressed into their combat gear, then met up with the on-duty armory guards another level lower as they were passing out firearms to the regulars.

  “Corporal!” Sanders yelled, tossing Graham a rifle. He grabbed it out of the air and shouldered the weapon a moment before the cartridge came sailing his way. He loaded his weapon and took up an auxiliary guard post outside as more and more unarmed regulars poured in to receive their weapons.

  “What the hell is going on?” William asked, standing on the opposite side of the hall in a small wall recess.

  A passing Lieutenant turned his head towards the question as he waited in the ever moving line. “We’ve got incoming, 10-15 minutes out.”

  “Americans?” William asked, not fully believing it. The fighting was way out in the asteroid belt, not here on Mars.

  “Who else, Corporal?” the Lieutenant reiterated as if it was a stupid question. He retrieved a belt with sidearm from the armory handlers, along with a battle rifle and flak jacket, then headed off with a group of his men towards one of 8 airlocks on the army base where they began setting up barricades and fortifying the hallways around those sections, knowing that if the Americans intended to get inside, that’s where they were going to have to come.

  Elsewhere on the base, crews were running for the vehicular bays where their defense tanks were housed, connected to the main base via underground tunnels. Once inside the garages, the crews boarded via internal docking airlocks, then drove their multi-wheeled craft out of the rising doors and onto the red martial surface, spinning about and wheeling across the base toward the boundary wall gate. In ones and twos they sped outside, passing by the defense turrets as they looped around the back side, out of the view of the Americans, as they organized themselves to flank the attackers.

  Off to the east the Americans were advancing rapidly, driving their own multi-wheeled tanks by the hundreds, with support vehicles bringing up the rear. When the leading elements got within a few kilometers, the larger flatbed haulers in back stopped in their tracks and launched the close support aircraft they carried.

  The small VTOLs were fuel hogs, combining rocket propulsion with fan-blade engines for use in the thin Martian atmosphere. The A-22 ‘frogs,’ as they were known, took off from the flatbeds and flew out past the tank lines, targeting the wall turrets with missile attacks before the assault force came within range.

  The few automated turrets blew to pieces on impact, as did the thin walls surrounding the military base. A pair of anti-aircraft chaff guns responded to the frogs, driving them off momentarily before being targeted by mortar fire, with the positions of the guns supplied by the aerial frogs as the heavy cannon-bearing tanks fired up and over the wall in a shallow, low gravity arc, lobbing explosives that detonated on impact. After a few initial misses the tanks got their range and eliminated the anti-air threat, giving the American frogs free reign over the skies.

  The light cannon-bearing tanks collected along the east wall and began assaulting the gate, knocking it down with successive hits as the British force counterattacked from both sides, coming in from the north and south and engaging the Americans at close range while the frogs picked at them from above with missiles and auto-cannons.

  Several of the leading American tanks were hit and destroyed by the British explosive rounds as the flanking maneuver began, but the outnumbered defenders were quickly matched and driven back, with the survivors fleeing around to the far side of the base, skirting the wall to provide cover as the A-22s
left the main force in pursuit. The six-wheeled British ‘Monarchs’ clawed away at the red Martian soil as they fired backwards on the run at the pursuing American’s lighter elements.

  With a roar of engine wash, several of the frogs skipped over the corner of the base wall and came into view, firing down on the fleeing tanks with what missiles they had left, then chewing them apart with their depleted uranium slugs with the red-camo colored armor plates shredding on impact, killing the crews inside instantly or exposing them to the inhospitable atmosphere with rips in their pressure suits.

  One of the frogs took a lucky/well placed tank shell to its starboard engine and went down hard, careening back over the wall and crashing inside the base perimeter with a plume of shrapnel marking its landing point. With the lower gravity, every explosion seemed larger, with debris flying further up and away, then falling more slowly to the ground, making for an eye-popping display had anyone been around to observe the carnage. The nearest habitation other than the base itself was some 53 klicks away, an industrial complex fed by several mining sites in this region, of which the military base was tasked to defend.

  Due to the spread out nature of the British infrastructure and the inhospitable surface conditions, the military presence in the region had been designed to be light and mobile, with convoy escort and defense patrols being the primary duties of the otherwise unnecessary military presence. Prior to this attack there had never been any fighting on the surface of Mars, so the exact dynamics of such a conflict had never been thoroughly worked out.

  The Americans had planned better, sending a convoy overland from an adjacent barren sector where they’d landed a fleet of dropships that ferried the ground troops some 1,500km from a much more substantial surface base. The attack convoy brought with it its own light tanks, but added a host of other vehicles, some combat in nature like the heavy, eight-wheeled Armadillos that stayed behind and pounded the main gate of the British base, and others mobile equipment sleds for later use in the assault.

  As the frogs and light tanks finished mopping up the monarchs outside the base, the American heavies broke through the gate and moved inside the base, taking fire immediately from guard turrets with small arms that couldn’t penetrate the tank armor, nor could seriously damage the thick, airless rubber tires that carried the armadillos down the paved road towards the visible sections of the main base, a few kilometers inside the wall perimeter.

  Behind the heavy tanks came the support craft, including the mobile A-22 landing trailers, refueling trucks, and breach gear…the last of which was maneuvered up to one of the personnel airlocks on the main building’s wall after the machine gun turrets flanking it were eliminated by sticky grenades launched from a swarm of APCs enroute to the vehicle hangars.

  With the anti-personnel defenses down around this particular airlock, the nearest equipment sled, which was the size of a basketball court, rolled up against the side of the building and lowered its house-like central structure down half a meter on its 28 wheels so that its own airlock was approximately aligned with that of the military base, after which a breach umbilical ‘sucked’ up against the British side and visibly swallowed the airlock from the outside while the aft end of the sled lowered another airlock down towards ground level until it matched the height of the APCs.

  Inside the sled, cutting devices began burrowing hard points into the outer structure of the British base, ‘building’ a larger American airlock annex on the exterior that would connect to the one inside the sled. Once it was firmly attached and pressure sealed, the American crew opened their side and began cutting through the British airlock door with handheld equipment designed for such a task while the APC train began docking with the sled and depositing soldiers inside the ‘waiting area’ who would form the initial breach party.

  As the sled’s crew worked to gain entry to the main base, the other APCs assaulted the vehicular bays, which had wisely closed their exterior doors, but it wasn’t enough to stop the attackers. One of the Armored Personnel Carriers stopped outside and deployed a three man team in pressurized combat suits against the door, loading it up with explosive charges before retreating back inside their ride and driving off a safe distance, detonating the packages by remote.

  The mammoth door crumpled along the centerline, cracking apart but not fully removing itself from the entrance. One of the nearest APCs drove up and nudged the door shards inward with the tip of its angled nose, reminiscent of the mako/rover design made famous by the Mass Effect video games, but it couldn’t budge the material more than a meter or so.

  A few minutes later one of the heavy armadillos drove up and smashed through the broken door and pushed aside the fragments to allow the APC swarm inside where they began docking with the empty tank ports and pouring troops into the maintenance areas which connected to the main base via the underground tunnels. That’s where they met up with the first British troops and began a pitched firefight down the long, narrow tunnels that the Brits had set up with a series of defensive barricades that made it very hard for the Americans to advance…and even when they did manage to overcome one, the Brits could retreat back to the next in line and repeat the engagement all over again.

  The exterior airlock was another matter, giving the Americans a direct line into the main structure, which appeared as a gigantic, low rising pyramid when viewed from afar. There were several other garages and auxiliary buildings connected to it by tunnel, but the main structure housed all the critical facilities underneath a thick concrete shell as opposed to the hundreds of different individual structures typical of military bases back on Earth.

  Inside the equipment sled, the American cutting crew attached an extendable magnetic grapple to the center of the airlock door, connected to a mini utility rover/tank as the final torch cuts were being made. It held aloft, then pulled back the exterior door while the cutting crews got to work on the interior one, then dropped it in the corner of the workroom with uniformed, vest-wearing troops standing ready by the dozens off to the sides and behind in the now claustrophobic sled, with more still waiting outside in the APCs.

  The rover returned to the airlock and attached to the inner door, waiting for the cutting crews to burn their way through the seals and hinges. There was an audible ‘clunk’ when the airlock was finally severed, with the cutters immediately pulling back a moment before the driver of the rover ordered its rubberized treads to move forward, pushing the airlock door inside the base as a type of shield while the soldiers followed less than a meter behind.

  A hail of rifle fire ricocheted off the door, but the defenders weren’t yet visible to the Americans as they stepped over the small hump at the entry point and encountered a bouncing grenade that slipped under the edge of the rover’s makeshift shield.

  Without thinking, the nearest American soldier stepped forward and kicked the grenade back the way it had came, just missing the underside of the airlock door as the rover pilot dropped it to the ground to keep them from sliding any more through. It detonated on the good side of the barrier, but threw some shrapnel back under the gap a split second before the door hit the floor. Three of the Americans took hits in their boots, then the rover driver gunned the accelerator and plowed the undersized airlock door ‘shield’ forward into the barricade the British had set up, jumping off the back as several of the defenders became visible around the edges.

  The Americans charged forward with a deafening roar of battle cries, either trying to intimidate the British or psych themselves up for the bloodbath that was coming. Even with the rover/door providing some cover, they were running directly into the well placed British defenses.

  Another grenade popped behind the American lines and killed five of the tightly clustered men instantly, but the attackers didn’t stop coming. As the sled’s waiting room quickly emptied, more and more APCs offloaded additional troops which fed into the base, having to crawl over the bloodied remains of their fellow soldiers until they got past the initial breach point an
d into a quickly reforming foothold as the surviving Americans from the lemming-like rush repositioned the British barricades and gave themselves their first good defensible position in a small atrium a few meters down the stubby hallway from the airlock.

  To the front, left, and right of the atrium were more British defenses, situated several meters down each of the connecting hallways with rifle fire coming from the front and left…but not on the right. There was a high blockade of crates and other junk blocking that hallway up to the ceiling, creating a stop rather than a crossfire that could have resulted in the British shooting each other from opposite sides.

  The Americans quickly took advantage of the blockage, forming a V-shaped defensive barrier as the Brits continued to lob grenades their way. As the forward American elements struggled to establish that foothold with mounting casualties, additional equipment came through, including a proper wedge which they attached to the front of the rover, replacing the grapple arm.

  Once it was in place, the Americans opened up the forward hallway blockade and advanced behind their tiny tank shield, ramming into and through the British defenses and advancing further into the base.

  With two entry points now established into the British compound, it was only a matter of time before the numerically superior Americans overwhelmed the British defenders and secured possession of the base…though the Brits made them earn every corridor and room they took, dragging out the internal engagement for 38 hours before finally succumbing to attrition.

  It was a resounding American victory, and wouldn’t be the last. All across Mars the American army began assaulting British military bases and slowly kicking them off the planet in retribution for the losses they’d suffered in the asteroid belt, escalating this from a regional conflict into a full scale war, with both countries gearing up to take the fight to the enemy anywhere and everywhere they could in space.

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