Chapter 2
March 4th, 3025
Continent of Alshayra
Suk II
Leutnant Colonel Franklin Lapointe looked at his holotable briefly with the seventeen dots descending into low-orbit around the planet under his protection, looking like tiny beehives with fighter support around each one. In a few moments they would begin their flip and deceleration burn, and within an hour or so they will be planet side.
"Any updates from satellites or our scouts?" He looked up across the table to his chief intelligence officer, Hauptmann Harold Abramsen, who bent over it, stroking his salt and pepper goatee. That job's really doing a number on his hair, too," thought Lapointe.
"Negative. We'll have a few updates in about ten minutes from our fighters. There's simply too many of them landing in too many different directions to safely commit up until about three minutes ago, and by that time they already were dispersed to recon instead of intercept duty." Abramsen scowled.
"It's obvious they're not doing any type of full-scale invasion by this point, because it's too simple of a job to sweep in on every landing zone with greater forces, one at a time, until they get knocked down to such a low number that it'd be a waste to continue. Their forces are just about everywhere. My gut's going with long-term guerrilla ops, and I doubt most of these dropships, if any, will still be here once they've unloaded." He swept his hand higher above the table, continuing.
"Most of our satellites…well what's left of what's left of the planet's satellites from the last few years of raids can really only keep up with the weather. They took out two of the ones we launched last month on the way down. Either happy circumstance their orbits went into several of their flight paths, or just good luck and having a really big net on the way down."
Between both of them, Lapointe's XO, Hauptmann-Kommandant Steven Dusselhoff, thumped the edge of the table. "We're sending out recon teams to their projected landing areas, but I'm holding off on anything heavy just yet. Each of the major purification plants they're landing closest to has at least a company of our own guarding it, and in the event they compile forces between landing zones like here, and here, we should be fine." he said, pointing around the table near the center of all the combined landing areas which covered several thousand square kilometers.
Lapointe nodded. "We drilled for this kind of thing in between raids last year. Let's emphasize that to our junior commanders and stress that reacting to just one event will make us just chase our tails like a dog. They need to think like our new neighbors think, from their perspective." He looked at his HP again. "How many of these dropships do you think actually have forces in them?"
Abramsen shrugged. "Could be half of them, but I'm willing to bet it's more like four or five. Enough to keep us near the treatment plants for the most part, then one or two dropships of actual raiders to either pillage the Gimli or Dothhill mining facilities. Those got raided two years ago by the Dracs. I'm not sure they're going for a two-game streak. We'll have a better idea when our initial patrols find out what remains at the landing sites. If we see footprints, that's a good sign. If it's a trash dump, well that's one less site to worry about.
The "trash dump" tactic Abramsen was referring to was something many larger-scale commanders enjoyed doing over multi-planet campaigns. If you had some extra C-bills lying around, or were savvy enough during the negotiation process to suggest this to your employer, you could save them some money by asking some of the less-occupied dropship pilots in the area to just gather up as much tonnage as they could find, strap it down inside, and take it with them amongst other dropships with actual military hardware and troops. After you've landed, they dumped what you have on-planet, simulating an actual unload, and helps split up your enemies to deal with ghosts. Not everyone was crazy enough to sign up for that kind of a job, but there were plenty of desperate businesspeople in the Inner Sphere.
Traffic control specialists, spacers, and most people who've seen dropship maneuvers on a regular basis will have to assume, based on your maneuvers that are based on your mass, that you're the real deal, and have to plan/divide forces accordingly. In the case of Suk II, with most satellite coverage knocked out ahead of time and lots of places to hide, this strategy could be particularly effective. Case in point, the planet already had several heaps of broken down salvage laying in piles from previous invaders and raiders that nobody had gotten around to cleaning up yet. One dropship captain decided to leave a half-ton pile of actual crap behind. Either it was just time to get that kind of stuff off your ship, or maybe they had a bad experience with aerospace fighters on the way down and wanted to leave behind a little something special.
"The big boss is still over on Tharkad, hashing out deals that assume that we still have two functioning battalions on this planet when he gets back, and two companies on deployment for three more months. Most guerilla contracts go between one and two years. Given what we talked about, I'd say we're dealing with about two battallions of various kinds of mercs with a Combine liaison of at most…one to two companies, with support. That's including at least one to two lances distributed amongst the mercs as liaisons. Let's focus on defending and keeping our own people alive, as well as the treatment plants, major cities, and industry. I'd rather not go on seventeen simultaneous witch hunts. We'll find them. Eventually." By then, Hansen and the rest of the Roughriders would be back. Nods across the table seemed to put the next few weeks into perspective.
Dusselhoff stood straight, with his hands behind his back holding his famous riding crop he enjoyed using as a pointer on holotables. "Everyone recalled from leave is back and ready, with two AWOL exceptions. Their 'mechs are in pretty deep repair, so those two weren't expecting to see action anyway. We'll deal with them later. Got a preference on which continent you want to start searching for landing sites?" he asked with a smile.
"Let's start down south, along the equator. With Gimli."
