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Grass Eaters 3 | 38 | Close Air II
🕑 Added 2025-01-20 16:47:00 +0000 UTCPrunei City, Grantor
POV: Bertel, Znosian Dominion Marines (Rank: Five Whiskers)
“Ground team, we can’t get any closer. We are going to be firing blind into your proximity. Take cover.”
Bertel selected a small squad of infantry — it looked like four or five — huddling near the street corner furthest away from the broken-down convoy, zeroed her Skyfang gun with the laser rangefinder, and mumbled a short prayer to the Prophecy that they were predators as she squeezed the trigger.
Rat-at-at-at-at-at.
The 20mm chaingun coughed out a half-second burst of shells. Two seconds later, their impacts engulfed the center of Bertel’s screen with their detonations, throwing dust, smoke, and predators — hopefully — into the air.
To her relief, the radio came alive again, this time a triumphant cheer evident in the background. “You got them! Continue to engage! Continue to engage!”
Rat-at-at-at-at-at.
More dead predators.
Rat-at-at-at-at-at.
“Good hits, pilot! Hit them again!”
Buoyed by their excitement, she didn’t even bother to correct their misidentification of her title. Instead, she selected a new group of white-hot dots on her screen, and let loose with the gun again.
Rat-at-at-at-at-at.
And as she depressed the trigger again, Bertel saw — to her horror — one of the white dots hop from cover to cover.
They hopped.
Hopped.
Oh no.
No. No no no. No no no no no.
She sat there in horror. For four helpless seconds, she couldn’t do anything but watch as the rounds she loosed traveled to their targets with perfectly engineered Znosian precision. The impacts of the high explosive shells blew the unfortunate victims sky-high. For a split second, Bertel morbidly noted in her subconscious that the concussive effect of the shell did indeed throw the smaller and lighter Znosian body far further than it did the Slow Predators she’d killed earlier.
The radio crackled. “What are you doing, pilot?! Cease fire! You’re hitting our own people! Cease fire!”
Her mouth was dry. She wanted to vomit.
Bertel collected herself before she spoke into the radio with a trembling voice, “Ground— ground team, I take full responsibility for the targeting error. We are— we are going to get closer to— to better identify our targets.”
“Medic! I need a medic over here… Pilot, you better get real close to take care not to—”
A familiar voice cut into the radio traffic. “Belay that, Floppy-4. This is Oats Aviation. You will not risk your precious Skyfang for a lost convoy. The convoy team — their lives were forfeited to the Prophecy the day they left the hatchling pools.”
Bertel wanted to contradict him, but as she looked back down at the screen, she saw that the savaged convoy was indeed a lost cause. At most one or two of the supply trucks remained functional. Just as Oats assessed. And her Skyfang was worth more than the ground team. That she felt a small personal sense of responsibility for the predicament they were now in was irrelevant. She choked out, “What is your directive, Oats Aviation?”
There was a long pause on the radio.
Just when she thought it was malfunctioning — it was rumored the predators occasionally had something to do with that — Oats came back on the radio, “Hold one. We are getting approval.”
“Holding.”
Another minute later, and the voice of Oats returned, this time more subdued. “Floppy-4, here is your new directive: the ground team is now considered lost. The Flooded Cave Order is now in effect. Ensure their equipment does not fall into enemy paws, then report back to base for your responsibility assignment hearing. Transmitting the one-time codes to your machine now.”
Bertel wasn’t sure she heard him right even as the confirmation appeared on her dashboard. “What?! We still have Marines moving down there and if I can—”
“Those are your directives, Floppy-4. The predators can’t be allowed to think they can win. Acknowledge my order.”
She hesitated for a moment, then said into the radio with a trembling voice, “Understood, Oats. Flooded Cave. Floppy-4 complying.”
Then, she keyed the control for the squad leader on the ground. “Ground team, your convoy has been considered a flooded cave. I will take full responsibility for this failure in my assignment of responsibility hearing. If you can, get out of there now. If not, may the Prophecy be fulfilled through your sacrifice.”
“Pilot, we’re pinned down— you— you— you—” he sputtered as the firefight raged in the background. After a moment, he recovered his decorum. “Understood, Skyfang. The flooded cave must be sealed. Our lives were forfeited to the Prophecy the day we left the hatchling pools.”
Bertel dipped her head as he recited the prayer, forgoing her last chance to correct him about that pilot thing. Then, she removed her Skyfang from the local radio network. It would be distracting for her duties. At least, that was what she told herself.
Bertel zeroed her autocannon at the target area one last time. She closed her eyes and held down the trigger.
Rat-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-at-
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Next morning, Bertel’s breakfast was interrupted by the sound of sirens. Again. Along with all the five and six whiskers in the hall, she scrambled out of her chair, hopping for the exit as fast as she could.
The forward base’s automated defenses were effective and well-supplied, but procedure was procedure. The predators could always get lucky.
Booooooooom.
As she exited the building, she heard the rumble of a distant explosion as the ground shook. She looked questioningly at Sminski, who was busy talking into his radio. “What happened?”
“Vehicle packed with explosives at the entrance checkpoint!” Sminski stashed his radio and pointed towards the hardened bunkers urgently. “Go! Base radar team says we’ve got incoming artillery rounds too!”
Hopping as fast as they could, they barely made it into their hardened bunkers. A few seconds later, the point defense opened up, spraying hot ammunition into the sky. Most of the incoming enemy rounds detonated mid-air before they could hit the base. In response, the base’s mortar pit coughed a dozen times as the counter-battery team sent a volley of rounds out towards where the radars detected the incoming fire from.
“What’s going on?” Bertel asked again. “Are they going to need our Skyfang in the air?”
A few seconds of speaking urgently into his radio later, Sminski shook his head. “Negative. Base commander says the predators left the area before our rounds got to them.”
She sighed, her shoulders drooping in disappointment. “Again.”
“Yes, again.”
“At least they didn’t get anything this time.” Bertel looked at him hopefully. “Right?”
“Nothing substantial this time,” he replied to her relief. “But… there is some bad news.”
A few minutes later, with the sirens silenced and base activity returning to normal, they made their way into the base commander’s briefing room. She did not seem happy.
“Do you need us in the air now, Seven Whiskers?” Bertel asked as they entered the room.
She shook her head. “No. It’s too late. Even if you’d been airborne when they fired, you wouldn’t have been able to catch them, Five Whiskers.”
Bertel scratched her head. “How could that be the case? Should we take responsibility and practice our quick dust-off timing?”
“No, no. It’s a new… thing they’re doing. At night, they go around and dig holes near the base, and they put their rockets in them, pre-aimed at our base facilities. And when the attack signal is given, they just trigger the devices remotely. They’re eating breakfast in their own nests, half a city away, when the attack starts.”
“Ah. That would be… a problem,” Bertel said, unsure how they should counter it.
“And these new vehicle bombs they have,” the base commander complained. “They don’t even use live predators to drive them up to us!”
“The Slow Predators have gotten a lot more cowardly since they started working with the Great Predators,” Bertel observed. “What about those new jammers we’ve been using at the checkpoints?”
“They stopped the vehicles, at first. But not anymore. Now they have their own versions of the Digital Guide on board those vehicles, and they’re no longer driven or triggered remotely.”
“That’s terrible!” Bertel shook her head in disgust. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that first!”
“Anyway, that’s not why you’re here.” The base commander sighed. “You have a bigger problem. From the radar team’s compiled reports, it appears the Slow Predator attackers have been precisely targeting our Skyfang pads in the last couple attacks.”
“How?! How could they know where we park them? We use random schedules and park on different pads!”
“It’s unclear. The Digital Guide is unsure who should take responsibility. It seems unlikely that the predators’ elite teams with flying machine scouts from Grantor City have come to somewhere as… unimportant as Prunei here.” The base commander shrugged. “But perhaps they’ve gotten around to mass producing those abominable devices. Either way, our pads are no longer safe for your Skyfangs, and you must be moved.”
“But… but… where would we go?” she asked.
The base commander gave her and Sminski each an unhappy look. “I recommended that your parking pads be relocated to a better protected Marine base far outside the city limits. This is a suboptimal choice—”
Bertel protested, “But we won’t be able to support long operations in the city! If something happens and we’re needed, by the time we fly back here, our Skyfangs would be almost out of fuel!”
“Yes, Five Whiskers. Nonetheless, I deemed that to be the only viable option we had, or we risk losing your valuable Skyfangs in one of these cheap predator attacks. I was ready to take full responsibility for the consequences of this choice… but I was overruled anyway.”
“Overruled?”
“Yes. Despite our need for your Skyfang, you have instead been transferred to the planetary capital defense zone near Grantor City. Apparently, they are running out of reserves and their needs are greater than ours. It appears that… you will be a temporary asset for Unit Zero.”
Bertel wasn’t sure what to say. “Wow. State Security?”
“Yes, this is a great honor for you, even if you will merely be a reserve unit. If you kill lots of predators, that could reflect well on even us and our bloodlines here for us in Prunei.”
“We won’t forget you.”
“I’d hope not, Five Whiskers. Memory loss is not a common defect in whiskerborn rotary wing gunners. The route and logistics have already been worked out. You leave tomorrow.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Grantor City State Security HQ, Grantor-3
POV: Krelnos, Znosian Dominion State Security (Position: Administrator)
Station Director Krelnos was a frustrated Znosian. Ever since the Eleven Whiskers had been recalled back to Znos, things had been falling apart on Grantor… even faster — if that were possible. More equipment and supplies going missing. Mounting casualties fighting the locals. Purges at work camps beginning to face organized resistance.
It wasn’t like they were losing too many people to replace. After all, those expendable units were cheap and easy to breed. In fact, the Znosian population had increased every month, month-after-month, since the new insurgency began. The problem was mostly equipment loss. The manufacture of equipment was sensitive to small changes in the supply chain, and being cut off from the rest of the Dominion was a massive shock to the system. Grantor itself was self-sufficient, but transforming the pacification project from an interstellar economy into a global one took time. Lots of time.
Meanwhile, she was seeing early signs of breakdown in discipline among the Marine garrisons. All over the planet, Marine chiefs were obviously more reluctant to send their subordinates out of bases, choosing to huddle them behind the safety of their barbed wire fences and base defenses. Nobody liked to take full responsibility for losing valuable equipment. So far, none dared to disobey direct orders to participate in patrols or raids, not yet, but the collective impact of thousands of units all picking the safest available option all the time was being felt in the deteriorating security situations.
There were the weekly mortar attacks. Or for some bases, daily. The Underground gathered stockpiles of stolen munitions from the Dominion’s own work camps and factories. These were cheap. Unsophisticated. The locals would quickly set up a mortar site, dump a few rounds at her bases, and they’d be gone before the rotary wing assets arrived. It didn’t help that the Great Predator infiltrators were feeding them increasingly accurate real-time intelligence about where her overstretched quick response forces were.
Even those who stayed in their bases were not really safe. Base attacks from predators had increased in sophistication. And then there were the flying machines. Nothing could stop those, not reliably. Thankfully, those were mostly limited to smaller payloads. Enough to kill infantry squads and individual armored vehicles, but not quite enough to level entire buildings. And there weren’t that many of them; the enemy liked to use those in swarms and for major coordinated attacks. That said, if they wanted you dead, you were dead. That blow on morale was about as bad as their actual lethality. Krelnos noticed that her people had learned to look up whenever they were outside.
Her Marines took proactive measures. Reprisals worked… somewhat. Some of the locals collaborated to give her Marines information on the Underground when threatened with mass executions. But even that historically effective technique ran into obstacles against the Great Predator operatives behind it all. They coldly shrugged their metaphorical shoulders and simply copied what she did — against the collaborators and Marines they caught. After all, the spiraling breakdown in order and stability all over Grantor was a bigger problem for State Security to deal with than it was for them.
Krelnos suspected incompetence or apostasy among her ranks. Perhaps Sprabr’s replacement was not doing her job right. Perhaps it was on purpose. But after repeated leadership reshuffles and several assignment-of-responsibility hearings, she still couldn’t find the root cause to pin the full responsibility on. As a last resort allowed by State Security, she took direct control — and full responsibility — of the garrison forces on Grantor.
On her datapad screen, Director Svatken’s expression reflected a growing impatience that matched her own frustration. “What fresh Great Predator trickery do you have to report this week?”
Krelnos hung her head. “The Marines report that their checkpoint detectors at their base no longer reliably work against the latest Underground bombs. They’ve got some way of dissolving our plasma explosive compound that makes it look like a bundle of heavy clothing under the backscatter machine— anyway, I was consulting with our Security Design Bureau experts on Znos… on how we can fix the problem.”
“What did they say?” Svatken asked.
“They need six to eight months to design a machine that will detect this—”
“Six to eight months?!”
Krelnos nodded miserably. “Yes, that’s too long. And the Great Predators are coming up with fresh tricks every day. So the Security Design experts suggested we mix tagging chemicals in our explosives factories that our Lesser Predator abominations can smell. But—”
“But then you’d have to rely on those unreliable idiots,” Svatken finished for her with a sigh.
“Yes, Director.”
The Lesser Predator collaborators they’d brought in for their noses were… temperamental. The ones they’d broken didn’t refuse to work, but when worked too hard, their performance suffered. And unlike loyal Servants of the Prophecy who took responsibility as they should, it was hard to tell when these Lesser Predators were being worked too hard or just being lazy predators. Additionally, the supply of them was beginning to dry up quickly as the Navy was pushed out of their pre-war territory.
There were some rumors that higher ups in State Security had started a breeding program to keep up the supply of sniffers.
A breeding program.
Of predators.
Surely, that was just enemy propaganda.
“And are we sure the reprisals aren’t working?” Svatken asked.
“They… work sometimes. But it is not a fully reliable method. Our experts are devising a radical new pacification strategy based on— based on some interesting new information that has come to light.”
Svatken narrowed her eyes. “New information?”
“We have— we have captured some Underground members distributing reading material. These texts have been meticulously removed of all references to the Great Predators themselves during translation, using fictional or transplanted references throughout,” Krelnos said as she trod carefully. “But… it is clear that they have a long history of dealing with occupied populations. We are— some of our Marine leaders have been… proposing modifications to our strategy based on those.”
“Oh?” Svatken asked curiously, “What are they proposing?”
“The use of local troops. They have been analyzing the possibility of what they call the predatorization of our security forces. Use predator collaborators to fight predators.”
Svatken’s jaw dropped. “And give them guns and armored vehicles? Are we sure this isn’t just some elaborate disinformation campaign devised by the Great Predator operatives?”
Krelnos bowed. “That is a small possibility. But the Digital Guides say… that it may reduce our overall attrition. The personnel attrition is not a major issue given our elevated hatching rates on Grantor, but we are losing equipment and control far faster than we can replace them.”
“And giving equipment to predator collaborators would reduce equipment losses?!”
“The idea is to give them cheaper, easier to fabricate versions of the weapons and vehicles we use. And predators are less likely to shoot at fellow predators.”
Svatken scratched her whiskers. “We’d have to spin up new supply lines and devise a new training regimen and develop new doctrine to fit it! Did their Digital Guides account for the costs of all of those?”
“I’m not sure. Are we to allow them to explore the idea further?”
The director looked pensive for a moment, clearly thinking it over. She shook her head. “No, not on the ground. That would likely take too long. I will make a note to fully develop that strategy with our people in the Design Bureau, but it seems impractical for your station given the rapidly deteriorating situation.”
“Should I get you the names of the Marine chiefs who proposed this idea for responsibility assignment?”
“That would be unnecessary.” Svatken sighed. “Perhaps Grantor is— perhaps it truly has become a lost cause.”
Krelnos didn’t dare directly contradict the director or accuse her of defeatism. “Perhaps that is the case. But, Director, if we give up Grantor, the Great Predators will simply drop their agitators on another one of our planets undergoing pacification, and they will do the same thing there unless we find a way to stop them. And the next planet. And the next.”
Svatken’s eyes looked blankly at the screen for a few moments.
She sighed again, even more deeply and resigned this time. “Perhaps they will.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
TRNS Crete, Dvalkost-6 (8 Ls)
POV: Carla Bauernschmidt, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Rear Admiral)
Carla sighed at the wreckage of the Znosian radar ships above their gas giant. “Well, they’ll know where we are and where we’re coming from.”
Speinfoent nodded. “Too bad we couldn’t sneak past them. They must have deliberately stationed all these sensor ships here above all the refuel points knowing either they would see us or we’d be forced to blow them up… leaving a full trail through their territory.”
“Not much we can do about that. Our support ships don’t have the low observability of our combat ships. We need to clear the way, one way or another.”
“At least they don’t know what hit them… And there’s more news: from the sound of it from the Sonora, it looks like their Eleven Whiskers got through the blockade. He’ll probably get to Znos in less than a month if he’s in a real hurry.”
Carla nodded. “Nothing we can do about that. How are we on the reconnaissance?”
“The drones are mapping the next system,” Speinfoent reported after a moment of querying. “We are now officially the furthest any free predator has gone in the Dominion.”
“So far,” Carla added calmly. “The furthest any free predator has gone in the Dominion so far.”
Speinfoent smiled. “Yes, Admiral. Who knows what tomorrow could bring?”
“The Granti got this far in at the beginning of their war?” she asked after a minute. “That’s… not too bad.”
“A Granti diplomatic ship flying a flag of truce. They allowed her in this far before they boarded the ship and executed her crew.”
“Ah,” Carla said. “That really puts the whole negotiating-peace-with-them thing into perspective, huh?”
“Perhaps your people will succeed where we failed,” Speinfoent said neutrally. “I have learned not to underestimate your people.”
“We aren’t going to just blindly trust them to fulfill their end of the deal in a negotiation if that’s what you were thinking. We’ve dealt with our share of untrustworthy assholes.”
“Ah, the Red Zone. See? I’m glad I was there. Now I understand all your fun historical references.”
“Far more than that. Those guys are fairly tame compared to actual historical examples. On and off, that war only lasted like fifty years.”
“Only?!”
“It could have been worse is what I’m saying— Anyway, talk of negotiation with the enemy is premature if you ask me.”
“Premature?”
“Yes. That is why we are here. The negotiators can do their work. That’s not our job. We are here to give war a chance.”
