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Blue-Eyes stirred in his bunk, jolted awake by the noise of battle outside his cell. His friend, Arnem, was already on his feet standing close to the bars. There were no windows in the holding facility, and pretty soon there were no lights. The explosions cut the power, both from the auxiliary generators and the backup. Most of the guards had left to join in the fight, leaving only a small squad to watch over the prisoners. Flashes of gunfire and ordnance detonations illuminated the two friends' faces, revealing a mix of excitement and tension as they both wondered who or what was attacking Riverside.
"It's our boys, it has to be!" Arnem grinned, gripping the bars and giving them a rattle. "Oh you assholes are so screwed now!"
The wall came apart just two cells away from the two friends, and a Shieldbearer mech took a peek down both ends of the dark corridor. Its pilot saw the guards coming and immediately moved his rig inside to cover the squad of initiates looking to liberate any of their captured comrades. The knight leading them hefted a large gatling-laser and started hosing down the corridor with deadly streaks of burning red light.
The rooks scattered, abandoning their position to regroup in the square. The southern wall had fallen and the 22nd Regiment had been pushed back further into the citadel. The Brotherhood of Steel, having secured a foothold in Riverside, shored in more armor and soldiers until all three airships have been emptied of their supply of manpower.
"Arm yourselves, brothers!" The knight said as he ripped the cell doors free with his own hands, using the impressive raw strength of his power-armor to do so. "And join the battle, take vengeance against your captors!"
Blue-Eyes and Arnem would have to fight without body armor, but it didn't matter. All they needed was a rifle in one hand and a handful of 5.56 rounds. The two friends busted out of the holding facility and followed the other initiates.
The fighting in Riverside was intense. Street to street, building to building, corridor to corridor. Sometimes they fought in the same room. The vertibird gunships, lifting off and hovering over the battlefield like metal hummingbirds, filled the skies with tracer-fire and screaming rockets. While the Brotherhood felt more at ease engaging the Dominion's tanks in open fields, coming to Riverside meant they'd have to finally go toe-to-toe with them. The same old game, just with bigger pieces on the board. The cramped conditions of the battlefield were mostly ignored by either side, as both the Dominion and Brotherhood were used to urban warfare.
However, the Dominion was quick to pick up on the invasion, having been listening in on outbound distress signals sent from Riverside's outposts on the verge of being overrun. The armor company attached to the 22nd, deployed three hours before the attack to pursue the Brotherhood forces that fled Sand Valley, were recalled back to Riverside to break the enemy's momentum and relieve the beleaguered defenders. They were expected to arrive within the next five hours.
Five hours too long. Everyone knew that, so the Dominion sent their Bloodhounds to provide close air support. Strafing and bombing runs every thirty minutes, just to soften up the Brotherhood. It should've been effective, but back when they were the terror of the skies, the Brotherhood didn't have the airships covering their troops a hundred percent of the time. With their latest upgrades, they were more than capable of shooting down enemy aircraft.
And they did. As the twin ships Benevolence and Malevolence hovered over Riverside, no more than a hundred feet from the ground, their presence created a thick blanket of protection over their ground troops from the Dominion Air Force. When the Bloodhounds finally swooped down to drop their deadly payload, Brotherhood gunners shot them right out of the sky. Powerful railguns roared alongside their laser-cannon counterparts, turning the perfect shapes in their targeting reticles into molten slag. The howling strike-fighters broke formation to avoid the deadly red hail, though few survived the Brotherhood's defenses. Fewer still were able to hit their targets.
Any attempts to attack the airships themselves proved futile. Rockets, missiles, even artillery shells, were all like glass bottles being thrown at a concrete wall. The airships were protected by an unseen bubble of kinetic shielding, shimmering into view only when high-velocity projectiles and energy weapons fire threatened its hull. Nothing could penetrate the barrier, and the Brotherhood rejoiced at this discovery. Their greatest weapons had not failed them this time.
For the first time in twenty years, the Dominion found itself vulnerable when facing this latest of their Wasteland foes. A fatal chink in its armor had been exploited. But even then, its soldiers refused to go down without a fight. Riverside was theirs, not the Brotherhood's. If they were going to take it away, it will cost them dearly. Every inch of their advance, they will pay for it in blood.
"Lieutenant!" A rook yelled in Wesley's ear just as a vertibird came crashing one block from their position. The resulting explosion drowned out most of his words, but he managed to get the message across. "The colonel's been smoked! You just got promoted!"
Wesley nodded, his grim look turning all the more sour. "Copy that."
The lieutenant glanced up at the M2 Black Bear hulled-down with them at the square, the tank commander hadn't buttoned up with his crew yet so Wesley ordered him to focus fire on the mechs and let the rooks deal with the infantry themselves. It was the only thing, besides a four foot tall brick wall, that was keeping their position from being overrun. The Brotherhood had seized the motor pool early on in the invasion, having given it first priority above all else to deny the 22nd Regiment their IFV's. There were three entry points leading into the square, each a corridor narrowed down by rubble and debris that only a handful of men could cross at a time.
Wesley knew they were going to die there, but Riverside was a vital strategic point to this side of Dominion territory. If it fell to Brotherhood hands it wouldn't stay there for long. The Dominion had more regiments ready to fight, the same cannot be said of the Brotherhood. He glanced around at his fellow rooks and felt his chest swell with admiration for their courageous defense even in the face of defeat. They were his men, his devil-dogs, his comrades. Like the stalwart rook on the chessboard, they stood strong even as the other pieces fell apart.
He saw the recon EITS drones hovering above the square, recording everything since the attack. The eyes of the whole Dominion were on them now, history would remember the soldiers of Riverside. Whatever they would do next would echo for eternity, so they may as well put on a good show.
The lieutenant took a moment to send one last transmission before terminating the connection completely. He knew it would be the last time he'd get to say the Riverside garrison callsign, so he made the effort not to mess up his message. "Break, break." He said, to break up the radio traffic and squeeze his transmission through. "This is Romeo Actual, we cannot hold our position and we're about to be overrun."
Wesley paused to brace himself as a stray bomb, dropped from a panicking Bloodhound fighter plane, reduced several blocks behind them to rubble. The resulting explosion sent tremors through the streets of Riverside, and kicked up so much dirt that it blinded both sides momentarily. When the dust cleared, they resumed their deadly exchange.
On the other side of the battlefield, a familiar figure emerged to lead the final charge that would shatter the entrenched Dominion soldiers. Knight Marko, renewed through cybernetic augmentations, returned to Riverside to have his most coveted revenge against the Brotherhood's foes. His right eye had been replaced with a laser target-finder, and his left arm with a metal prosthetic, upon which he fixed his power-fist. Once again, he boldly strode to the front of the formation and rallied his fellow knights. A wicked smile was on his battle-scarred face as he surveyed the mountains of dead piled up on one another, all of them filled with Dominion soldiers killed in the laser-artillery barrage.
"Ad Victoriam!" He bellowed, his war cry echoing from one initiate's mouth to another.
The Dominion rooks had their own, albeit less elegant and more guttural, reply. "Fuck you!"
The Shieldbearers went in first, soaking up the Black Bear's shells as it fired again and again to halt their advance. They were followed by dozens of knights in power-armor, then by the initiates in squads of eight. Nothing would stop them from charging, but that didn't mean the rooks were at all helpless.
A combat engineer, wheeling in a box full of frag mines, decided to make good use of them by taping two and two together, then flinging them like frisbees to slide beneath the feet of the charging horde. It worked really well against the Shieldbearer mechs, whose kinetic barriers could only face in one direction but cannot cover their vulnerable mechanical feet. The crippled mechs stumbled about clumsily and ended up blocking the advance, but Marko was not to be stopped.
Recklessly, he leaped over the downed war machines and attacked the Dominion defenders. He kicked in their teeth and smashed heads into red pulp with his power-fist. His bold charge galvanized the other knights, and pretty soon they too charged into the crossfire. While it could be regarded as a useful tactic to most minds post-apocalyptic, Pre-War strategists would be appalled by the outdated maneuver and wasteful management of mechanized infantry. They ignored the heavy losses they took as they faced the rooks' fire head on, and managed to shatter the impromptu barriers of concrete blocks and sandbags. Getting that close meant that power-armor wouldn't shrug off small-arms fire as easily, but the knights weren't planning on shooting the battle out all day.
Wesley slipped on his helmet and prepared to engage the enemy in close-quarters combat alongside his men, signing off from the radio with a lament that he couldn't hold the line. "All call-signs, give 'em hell for us. Romeo Actual, out."
The Hell Valley settlement had a mixed population of ghouls and humans, although the latter seemed to be heading towards ghoulification all the same due to the intense radiation present in the environment. Hair-loss, necrosis and cataracts were a common sight among the settlers. Their attire ranged from simple roughspun tunics to brahmin-hide robes stitched together with electronic wires or duct-tape.
As for the ghoul marines themselves, they didn't fare any better than the settlers. They still wore traces of their old uniforms, the multi-cam fatigues of faded brown and light green, which did little to conceal the wrinkled and half-dead skin of their ghoulified bodies. They've taken to adorn themselves in crude metal armor, similar to those worn by the various raider factions found in the Texas Wasteland, and scratched or painted on them the symbols of the stars and stripes to further cement their fading identity as soldiers of the Old World.
At first, when the gate lookout spotted the expedition team's tank rolling in through the main road, the entire settlement geared up for battle. But when they saw Ranger Jack and Leckman riding alongside the armored convoy, they relaxed a bit and sent out a reception party to receive the visitors.
Colonel Rain Maxwell Mercer, a giant of a ghoul that stood at seven and a half feet, went out to meet Sgt. Sterling. The colonel wore a suit of power-armor, modified with parts from an armored car. A heavy one inch thick piece of steel, that looked like it was cut out of a humvee's door, was welded onto his left pauldron. Thick rusted patches were present all over the armor's surface, seconded only by the peculiar green feeding tubes snaking along the back up to the nape of his neck. The colonel carried a large chain-axe, a savage weapon that had motorized steel teeth in place of a fixed blade.
Mercer's eyes had an inexplicable green glow in them, and the radiation malformed his face to the point that unnatural bone formations pushed up his cheeks to create a secondary layer of protective plates- like the chitin on a mirelurk. His teeth were misaligned and filed to points, but he somehow he could still form a coherent sentence when he spoke to Sterling. His voice was a low and nasty hiss, like a snake attempting to speak. The radiation also caused every hair on his body to fall out, leaving only a rough and wrinkled surface in its wake.
In truth, his appearance was so terrifying that he looked more like a demon than a ghoul. Sterling had to order his men to steady themselves while he chatted with the colonel. All over the stone, mud and junk walls surrounding the settlement, the ghoul marines operating the sentry-turrets had their sights trained on the convoy. They didn't have the best equipment, but Sterling knew better than to underestimate them. Marines have pulled through engagements with worse conditions.
"Visitors, eh?" He said with that ugly grin on his mutated face, "I take it you've already been given the Valley's warm welcome?"
"You could say that." Sterling replied as he shook the colonel's armored hand, "They weren't much of a challenge."
After introductions were made, the convoy was allowed entry into the settlement grounds. Once there, the colonel ordered the gates to be shut tight and inspected the sorry state of his caravan.
"Leckman, I see you're a few cargo-bots short." Mercer turned to the ghoul, "The hell happened out there?"
"Rad-Eater ambush, colonel." Leckman reported, "They're getting bolder now, hitting us so close to the settlement. This is all that's left. Could've been a lot worse if it weren't for Sgt. Sterling and his men."
Mercer glanced up at the tank, then to the rooks, then back to Sterling. "You helped one of ours, sergeant. You're a friend of the Devil-Dogs. But I'm afraid I'll have to ask for your help again. We're anticipating an attack on the settlement, and we're short of manpower now thanks to the Rad-Eaters. Most importantly, we're short of firepower. Will you help us?"
Sterling hesitated a bit, feeling apprehensive given that he'd just been dragged into someone else's war. However, killing raiders was always the right thing to do, and Dominion rooks were very good at killing raiders. He later agreed and requested that he and his men be granted a place to stockpile their supplies and ammunition for the coming battle. The first thing the ghoul marines did once the rooks were settled in was to establish a crude trading post by bartering or trading items like MRE's, bullets and batteries. But of all the other items the marines desired most, nothing came close to the value of cigarettes.
In this part of Texas, cigarettes were like gold bars as caps were to coins.
"I'll be right frank with you, Sterling." Mercer said while pocketing away the pack he'd just bought off from a private with some old nudie magazines. "When we first heard about you Dominion folks, about the purges and the work camps... Well, we thought you were Nazis, come to redirect history on a clear canvas as this Wasteland."
Sterling bit back a retort, although feeling very much offended for the comparison. The purges were necessary, for they were aimed specifically at the raiders and slavers plaguing Middle Texas. The work camps that came after, they were also necessary in that they would serve to reeducate the savage denizens of the Wasteland and integrate them into a functional society as solid citizens. If it didn't work for the first generation, it would certainly help the next one.
"And now?"
"Hmph." Mercer fished out a stick and drew in a smoke-filled breath once it was lit, "I suppose it's a proper response to this new and dark age. I am curious, though. What are you doing this far south?"
The sergeant turned around just in time to see Autumn narrowly avoiding the grabby hands of some of the more lecherous ghoul marines. He quietly ordered her to stay inside his Centaur, a gesture the tribal woman gladly received and disappeared into the armored car.
"Vault-hunting, colonel. Our initial scans of this area indicated the presence of one."
"Oh." The ghoul pointed to the center of the settlement, "Well you're in luck, sergeant. You're standing right on top of it. Help us weather this attack and I'll show you the way. Although I have to warn you, you might not like what you'll find in there."
"...and our brave soldiers, though outnumbered and outgunned, stood together against the savage Brotherhood of Steel and fought till the bitter end. This wasteland menace holds nothing sacred and has defaced even the Dominion's standard by tearing it down and trampling it underfoot. Riverside is now in enemy hands..."
Stern switched off the radio and turned to face the men assembled in two rows before him at the main hangar of the White Bastion. Twelve men, all the finest pilots in the Dominion Air Force, handpicked to form the 2nd Wing's 1st Squadron. Just like Blackwatch, the 1st Squadron would be utilizing experimental weapons and technologies, designed to turn the tide of war back in the Dominion's favor.
Behind old High Marshal stood the successor of the A3-1 Bloodhound strike-fighter, the A4-2 Warhound jet-powered fighter. It was only a matter of time before the Dominion transitioned to the use of turbine-engines for their aircraft, the war with the Brotherhood of Steel only served to spur the development program even further.
The A4-2 had a single fusion-powered jet engine, which made it the fastest aircraft in the entire Dominion arsenal. Instead of ballistic cannons, it was armed with two gatling-lasers and a fusion-lance capable of firing a concentrated beam designed to cut through heavy Brotherhood armor.
In the whole Dominion there were only 24 Warhounds ready for service, with production tanking due to slow reallocation of resources. 1st Squadron had been training with them for little more than a month, but now that the Brotherhood was gaining ground it became rather clear that the war cannot wait.
Ready or not, they would have to strike back before their enemies regained momentum.
Thanks to the intel gathered by West's team, the Dominion discovered a fatal flaw in the Brotherhood's airships, which were their greatest weapons. The kinetic barriers protecting their airships were patterned after an outdated version of Pre-War shield emitters. And because the Dominion still possessed a generation of scientists accustomed to fighting an enemy with technologies on par with their own, similar to the Chinese in the Great War, it didn't take long for the R&D team at Vault 115 to come up with a solution.
The shield-emitters operated on a fixed frequency, which meant that any projectile slower than the average bullet or missile could penetrate the barriers. The team put together a deployable EMP spike, a two meter long spear-shaped device that, in theory, could shut down its target's systems and unleash a continuous stream of EMP blasts to keep it grounded. Once the airships were left vulnerable, 1st Squadron would bring them down right on top of the stupefied Brotherhood of Steel.
Stern stifled a cough and addressed the men, particularly their flight chief, First Lieutenant Axel Weiss. His wingman and twin brother, Second Lieutenant Reese Weiss, stood proudly beside him with his helmet tucked tight beneath one arm. "The enemy is at our doorstep, and thinks to push us off this land. He is already gloating. He can taste his victory."
The High Marshal's eyes narrowed, "But what he fails to see is that we will make this his last meal. They've come for our blood, make them drown in their own."
The pilots saluted Stern and donned their helmets. Within minutes, the Warhounds rolled out of the hangar and sped down the runway. And then, they were up in the skies, each armed with nine barrels of hellfire and an extra 500 pounds of spear-shaped steel. They were out to hunt the biggest game there was, and free Riverside from the clutches of the Brotherhood.
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