A/N
Thank you, dear readers, for your continued support of this fic. Means a lot. Here's another update for you. I'm experimenting again with shifting POV's, but I'll try my best to keep the story coherent.
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They came from the south.
That's what the intel said. They came from the south, with three airships and a fleet of vertibirds, and took one of the frontier outposts southwest of Riverside. That was about a week ago.
A supply and distribution center, with a small garrison of rooks stationed there. 144 dead, 6 MIA. Heading in deeper into Dominion territory was a mistake, though. They hit them pretty hard in that first attack, but when they started rolling out to seize more territories, the Bloodhounds made life a living hell for their troops. News spread fast, and the men started hearing stories about how entire convoys were being left burning in the frontier roads.
Cpl. Edna Roe, or better known as 'Doc Roe' to her peers, didn't pay much heed to the report when her senior officer read it out as part of the morning briefing. And yet, some details remained in the back of her mind. As a soldier, she'd been conditioned to memorize any detail of import and whittle away the filler in between. What remained was all she needed to know about their enemy, and what their mission was all about.
They called themselves the Brotherhood of Steel, and they weren't like the waster factions the Dominion came across in the last decade. They were the real deal. The Brotherhood didn't come with some scrap-strapped bunch of raiders, ramshackle vehicles or any of the like that the Wasteland was wont to throw at them each time the Dominion pushed its borders forward. They were significantly better equipped, and possessed a competent army and aerial fleet. It was easy to see that they would be quite the challenge. Rubbish, some would say. Most Dominion folks believed in the strength of their army, some would even dare to say it was the strongest there ever was.
Why they attacked, the question was best left unanswered. They had a war on their hands. The Dominion didn't start it, but they would most certainly finish it.
Riverside had two companies garrisoned, with an attachment of heavy and light armor. Intel suggested that the enemy wasn't stopping, and they were coming for the town next. Their priority was to fortify the defenses, and all army personnel to be on the alert at all times. There was no telling what the Brotherhood had in store for them, but it was safe to assume that they brought a whole lot of hurt just for the rooks stationed at Riverside.
Whatever it was, the Dominion would be ready. The Brotherhood's advance will be stopped there, in a town dominating the twin rivers, surrounded by walls of reinforced steel and concrete.
Throughout the day, rooks moved about the town, its surrounding walls and outer perimeter. Combat engineers were hard at work digging up holes all around the perimeter and setting up automated defense turrets into the little trench-like dugouts they called 'pocket-holes'. Slit-trenches were dug all along the southern perimeter, and light armored Centaurs were put into hull-down positions in anticipation for enemy armor. The empty desert valley soon became an ugly mess of trenches, razor-wire barricades and land mines. Mortar teams set up behind the walls, with E.I.T.S drones to assist in calculating aiming trajectories.
There were only three M2 Black Bears in Riverside, as the rest were undergoing repairs. The commanding officer in charge of the armoured company decided it was best to use the tanks defensively. He picked a spot near the old Riverside Chapel, an ancient building that miraculously survived the aftermath of the Great War, that was situated on a hill overlooking the walls and into the flatlands outside the town. There, he ordered one of the tanks to hull-down and support the troops from afar.
The other two were kept on reserve, in case there was a breach.
Civilians and all non-essential personnel were evacuated further inland. Riverside was about to become a warzone, there would be no room for them.
At dusk, the Brotherhood finally showed up. When the horizon bit the sun and spilled its blood across the sky, turning it into a red sunset, they came riding through the desert.
Some of them came driving captured Dominion vehicles, and some in vertibirds. Someone made a guesstimate that they amounted to a hundred, with even twice the amount in terms of combat personnel. The garrisoned troops outnumbered them two to one, but the Brotherhood brought some help this time. And they learned rather quickly when facing the might of the Dominion Air Force. To protect their convoys from aerial attacks, they outfitted many of their light armored vehicles with anti-air weapons.
Rail-guns, low caliber but powerful enough to punch through their fighter-craft armor.
Orders were to hold out until reinforcements came. The 13th Regiment was on its way, and was expected to arrive in no less than a week. The rooks knew that, but the Brotherhood didn't. If they could pin them at Riverside, the Dominion could halt their advance and would be able to counterattack. If they failed, the Brotherhood would cut off supply lines crucial to the support of distant territories and gain access to the twin rivers, and by extension the whole region south of Carlon.
Darkness fell quickly over the land. Roe was at the southwestern wall when the fight started. There was no moon that night, and out there it was all pitch-black. All she could hear were the faint commanding shouts of Brotherhood officers, and the brisk whup-whup-whup of inbound enemy gunships.
Floodlights immediately denied the advancing Brotherhood squads their advantage, blinding them to the strong beams of white light streaming from the sentry towers. Suddenly, the flat and empty land in front of the wall didn't seem at all empty. About four dozen men in power-armor were advancing from the valley, taking cover behind fast moving captured Centaur IFV's. The Dominion eagle was gone. Replaced by the Brotherhood Cog and Sword. The sight of it felt like an insult to all the Dominion defenders.
Following close to the advancing power-armored infantry's heels were hundreds of conscripted troops, all of them equipped with salvaged gear and weapons from dead Dominion soldiers.
That part was the last straw. Someone was going to die, and the Dominion would draw first blood.
"Tin-men in sight!" A Dominion sergeant entrenched in the outer perimeter, which was about fifty yards from the southwestern wall, gave the order. "Engage!"
Doc Roe donned her helmet and tightened the chin-strap over her chin. The deafening roar of Dominion guns thundered across the valley, spitting thousands of tracers at the advancing column.
It slowed their advance to a crawl. But a moment later, the sky suddenly opened up. A red flash of light filled the valley, followed by a deafening screech as an entire section of the southwestern wall was atomized. Whole clusters of men, steel and solid concrete, wiped out in an instant. Rooks who were facing the blast found themselves blinded by the brilliance of the Brotherhood's super-laser attack, blood and liquified flesh flowed out of their empty sockets as they screamed in agony.
Stunned, the Dominion soldiers who were left unharmed from the blast could only watch in horror at the thirty foot hole where a wall used to be. Among them was Doc Roe. The shot came from one of the airships hovering thousands of feet in the sky above. For what the Brotherhood lacked, they put everything else in a single beam of hatred.
Doc Roe didn't move from her spot behind the defensive line. Not until someone yelled the magic word for help.
Eventually, someone did.
"MEDIC!"
Blue-Eyes' heart hammered against his ribcage so hard he could hear it above the deafening peal of the shells hitting them from all sides. He never felt so small in all his life.
He and all the other initiates were like little ants on a death march through a busy street, about to be crushed at every turn. Every shell blasted into the ground slapped his body about like a sapling in a sandstorm, and the ground quaked as though it was just about to open up and swallow him whole. He kind of wished it would. Anything to get out of the killzone he found himself in, anything to stay clear of the Dominion's guns...
It felt like the whole world was shooting at them.
Then, he heard Knight-Commander Marko shout at the top of his lungs. "Incoming artillery! Cover your eyes!"
The initiate closed his bright blue eyes and prayed that the shelling and shooting would give them pause. Then, the Liberator fired its super-laser cannon. Even through his closed eyelids, Blue-Eyes could see the brilliant flash of red particles detonating on impact. The red flare left black spots in his vision when he dared to open his eyes again.
There, no further than fifty yards away, stood a thirty foot breach in the Dominion's defenses. Across a field crawling with dozens of dazed but still able-bodied Dominion soldiers hunkered down in their foxholes and trenches.
"There's the breach!" Marko cried excitedly, "Knights! Follow me! CHARGE!"
And charge they did, right into the fire. The knights were more than willing to risk the enemy's storm of bullets, laser-fire and shelling- but not the initiates. Many of them had things to prove, had dedication and a certain willingness to follow those who they saw as heroic, a sight better than the horrid things of the Wasteland.
Here, there was no heroism. This was war, in all its raw and purest form.
It scared the living shit out of Blue-Eyes. He knew it, the men in front and behind him knew it, and so they scattered. Knight-Commander Marko saw this and grew livid, "No! NO! Stay in formation! Come back you fucking cowards!"
A Dominion machinegun cut down the retreating infantry, then focused on the knights.
The captured Centaur providing cover for Kenzie's squad as they advanced took a round to the front and stopped in its tracks. A few seconds later, the ignited rounds inside triggered a cookoff. The thing started to come apart and spit hot lead in all directions. The crew burned with it, scarring Blue-Eyes forever as he heard them scream.
"Down! Down!" The knight ordered, setting the squad up against the wreck as a new rain of 12.7 mm rounds stirred up the dust around them and pattered against the burning wreck. Marko's squad had gotten closer than anyone else, coming to at about thirty yards away from the breach. The armored car leading them in didn't fare any better than the rest, and it soon blew up in Marko's face. Now, he was stuck in the killzone same as everyone else.
Blue-Eyes grabbed Arnem and pulled him against his body just as a mortar round whistled overhead and landed a few feet away from where he stood moments before. The blast tore apart one of the initiates, a kid not much older than fifteen, and sent pieces of him flying in all directions. Arnem whimpered when he felt the sticky red stuff coat his face and hands. Blue-Eyes grunted and checked if either of them got hit.
The kid made the mistake of trying to run. But there was nowhere to run. All around them was death, no way out except forward. And forward had the fiery mouth of hell yawning wide to swallow them up.
"You! Give me that!" Kenzie grabbed a rocket-launcher from one of the initiates, "I'll try to silence those guns and give you cover. When I tell you to, get ready to run back to the rally point. Do you understand?"
"Yes, knight." Everyone, except Blue-Eyes, said in acknowledgement.
Three Brotherhood vertibirds flew in and provided some support for the troops on the ground. One of them brought a Brotherhood rocketeer, and he leaned out to fire an HE rocket to blast a sentry tower into pieces. With its 20mm assault-gun silenced, Knight Kenzie leaned out of cover and fired her own rocket, blowing up an automated defense turret to clear a path of escape for her men.
She turned around and yelled at the initiates, "Go! Now!"
They fell back as commanded, leaving the knight to help drag her comrades still stuck in the deathtrap of their own making. Brotherhood soldiers were slaughtered left and right, and Kenzie found herself prioritizing essential combatants over non-essentials, which meant she had to leave the dying initiates behind to pull knights off to safety. For what felt like hours, she ran back and forth through the haze of dust clouds and tracer fire, bringing the wounded men and women back safely into Brotherhood lines. Her own armor started to fall apart, taking hundreds of rounds the whole time she zipped around the battlefield.
Eventually, the last man she had to get out of there was her own stubborn commander, Knight-Commander Marko.
The strategy of their attack was clearly flawed, but it was also clear that he refused to see it. When Kenzie found him, Marko was still fighting back. His whole squad was dead, and he was alone behind the wreck of a burning Centaur. His armor's torso was scratched and full of holes, his left arm was missing. The right eye of his helmet had been cracked, revealing the bloody hole where his eye should've been.
He was radioing the Liberator to fire another super-laser shot when Kenzie finally reached him. His trembling hand grasped the receiver of a dead radioman's CNR, the salvaged military radio the Brotherhood used at the time. "What do you mean you can't do a damn thing?! Our men are dying down here! We need you to fire again!"
The matter-of-factly voice of Lancer-Commander Lissandra Maxson replied, "The Liberator has suffered critical damage, Knight-Commander. That shot was all it took to blow the reactor right out of the engine room, and very nearly took the ship down with it. You won't be receiving any artillery support at this time."
"Then tell the Malevolence to assume fire-support role! It's got a gun of its own, doesn't it?!"
"Not until after we figure out what's wrong with the super-lasers. I'm not risking the only airships we have. To do so may lead to sacrificing the only edge we have in this campaign, Knight-Commander."
"Damn you, woman!" Marko cursed, his voice growing weak from blood-loss.
"KC, we have to fall back!" Kenzie said, grabbing him by the shoulders. She ignored his protests as she struggled to put the full weight of his power-armored body on hers. The strain it caused threatened to break her own suit, but the knight was determined to make the long haul back into the valley. She forced the radio out of his hand and started walking, half-dragging and half-lifting the Knight-Commander out of the battlefield.
"What the hell are you doing?" Marko demanded, "I didn't... I didn't give the order to retreat!"
"Take a good look around, there's no one left to follow you in!" Kenzie argued, still headed for their lines.
"There's a breach in the wall... we can take them!"
Strangely, it seemed as though not a single shot that came right after she started moving away from the Centaur wreck was aimed for her. Kenzie was aware that the dust had settled enough for the Dominion gunners to get a clear field of fire. Halfway through the fifty yards of burning debris and bullet-ridden corpses, Kenzie dared to turn her head back to look at the Riverside wall.
The breach had been blocked by an M2 Black Bear. It was the first time Kenzie had seen one in person.
The thing was a beast, a veritable colossus of steel and composite alloy with more firepower strapped into its hull than she'd ever seen on any vehicle. Its main gun was pointed directly at her and Marko. So intently did she stare into its gaping barrel that Kenzie swore she could see the faint glint of the shell loaded into its breech.
Kenzie's breath caught in her throat, and she froze up thinking that her end was near. She hoped and prayed it would be a quick one.
"Cease fire!" Someone from behind the wall ordered, much to the knight's surprise, and the Dominion guns fell silent.
Astonished, Kenzie realized that the Dominion defenders were showing her quarter. It was unlike anything she'd heard about them in the past year. She decided to think on it more later, for she had to get away while they still allowed it.
"That's right! Run, tin-man!" A Dominion rook jeered, his voice followed soon after by the victorious cheers of the other soldiers.
Defeat stung the Brotherhood's pride, but there was one thing that remained all too clear for both sides. The war was far from over, the Siege of Riverside had only just begun.
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