3028, Algol, Capellan Confederation

Operation Rat Phase 1

MIIO “Rabbid Foxes” Special Operations Group 7

The Davion agent closed on the facility with a smile on his face and a thermally sealed food courier bag in his hand, his team second lumbered under the weight of a heavy sloshing portable coffee urn, both with the local tea house chain logo prominently displayed.

The two gate guards had been hitting on the female jogger stretching against the fence, casually flirting with the Capellan Militia guards as the two food delivery people approached. The left most gate guard abandoned his pickup attempt as the delivery team approached and raised his hand to challenge.

“Halt, no authorization has been given for any food delivery.” The guard ordered sternly. He may only be a gate guard, but this was the main ground station for the satellite arrays that fed StarCom its real time data on what was happening beyond Algol’s near space orbit. No unauthorized personnel were permitted, and now the state of alert had been raised, so every regulation was being enforced.

His challenge was greeted with a casual wave, which must have been a signal, because the round from a Zeus heavy sniper rifle punched through each guard’s helmet like the hammer of an angry god, blowing bits of anti-ballistic plastic in a spray over the gate.

The female jogger calmly pulled an electronic kit from her fanny pack and clipped into the wires at the guard box. Swiping the guard leaders badge through the e-reader attached to her kit, she pulled his codes and used them for access to the gate controlls. Letting the MIIO software show the worth of Davion’s Military Information and Intelligence Operations (MIIO) budget, the software quickly overcame the less sophisticated Capellan Defense Force security software and both opened the gate and building doors and disabled the notifications for said opening.

Taking a needle pistol from the now open food delivery box, she followed her team into the building. Seven executions later, she sat down at the controls while her team mate took the heavy field computer out of the fake liquid coffee carrier and spliced into the raw satellite feed.

StarCom would continue to receive accurate real time reports about both friendly and Davion forces at the Nadir jump point, the point below the ecliptic of the system’s sun where the gravitational forces balanced enough for jump drives to safely enter or leave the system.

What the field computer did was remove from the live stream any record of the Invader class jumpship that had jumped in far closer to the planet at what was known as a “pirate point”, a temporary point where system bodies gravitational stresses cancelled out enough to jump in our out. As these points were far closer to the planets than the standard point, and both temporary and risky, they were largely only used by pirates, and invaders.

In the raw feed, they could see two wings of Davion Aerospace fighters surging away from the Nadir jump point to screen the invading army. Two wings of Liao Aerospace fighters blasted from the planet and boosted to intercept.

The raw feed also showed the Invader class jumpship above the planet, far closer than the Nadir jump point, but behind the planet itself. The Invader disgorged a heavy Vengeance Class fighter carrier dropship, a Leopard CV light fighter carrier, and a Seeker class infantry carrier. The Vengeance class swiftly began deploying another two wings of Davion Aerospace fighters making a slow, low signature close on the planet behind a wave of jamming produced by the Leopard CV and its single squadron of specialized electronic warfare shuttles.

In the Com Star compound, Precentor Algol, Wieclaw Tseng looked at his own sensor feed and what his ROM (Com Star’s elite intelligence and terrorism agency) was showing him and raged.

“How is this possible. Our analysis of Davion message traffic confirmed that Operation Galahad was over, that the Davion troops were stood down from the exercises and already in transit back to their own bases in the Crucius and Capellan Marches. We confirmed with our code breaking of messages between Chancellor Liao and Duke Hasek-Davion of the Capellan March that there was no readiness to attack! Our blessed order is the only way to send messages between the stars, there is no way that Davion could have misled us this badly!”

The ROM agent had the cold gaze of a professional field operative for the soft office worker who has never had to face and deal death in the shadows, where comfortable assumptions got you killed, and ignoring the facts in front of you could lead to being strapped to a chair in a room full of people capable of keeping you alive far longer than you wanted, and long after they could make a stone speak. His voice was as calm and respectful as Com Star indoctrination forced it to be.

“Precentor, your own HPG network confirms the same is happening at a dozen worlds across the Capellan border. I suggest we simply accept Davion has found a way to pass messages we have not yet been able to reveal, and deal with the question at hand. Do we pass along our own sensor data to the Capellans, or do we let the Davions spring their trap?” The ROM agent said slowly, and firmly, as this was a policy decision that would reveal to the ever-paranoid Capellan Confederation that Com Star had planetary defense network access the Capellan Confederation neither authorized nor knew about. Com Star provided interstellar communication to all parties with strict neutrality, but their order had been guiding the Houses of the Inner Sphere towards their own destruction to herald the day their blessed order could fulfil its purpose of remaking the former Star League into a humanity united under Com Star’s benevolent leadership.

The Precentor weighed the need to stop House Davion and the Federated Suns from achieving victory and the cost of revealing Com Star’s true abilities. Secrecy won, as always. Com Star would neither hint at its intellegence agencies penetration of all the Successor States, nor its own hidden military power. If necessary, they could simply slightly aid the Capellans, and slightly hinder the Davions and let the friction of war undo whatever strategic brilliance the damnable “Fox”, Hanse Davion, had created.

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“No. Our neutrality is our shield. We will not aid the Capellans at this time. Monitor everything you get from both Davion and Liao forces, and agents, on this world and forward it to Precentor Sian. If we are to move, Precentor Sian must get the First Circuit and Primus to authorize it.”

Near the Nadir jump point, Algol, Capellan Confederation

The disk like shape of 30 ton Capellan Thrush Aerospace Fighers (ASF) blasted ahead of the single wing of heavy Transit fighters. Their job was to scout the enemy, and push through its screen to get a definite read on what dropships the Davion invaders brought. The dart of light Davion Sparrowhawk fighters blazed out to deny them. A high speed pass cost six Sparrowhawk and two Thrush lost outright as the three medium lasers of the Thrush were able to kill some Sparrowhawk before its own two medium and two light lasers could close enough for the light lasers to reach. The half second firing pass was all either got as they passed at a rate too extreme to think about dog fighting.

The Thrush pushed on, while the Sparrowhawk clawed around to escape crossing the medium T50 ton Transit’s firing arc. The slower moving Transit boasted a bank of medium range lasers and a heavy class 20 Autocannon able to destroy even the heaviest ASF with a single hit, and designed to mass fire to destroy incoming dropships.

Between the charging Liao Thrush and the Davion Dropships stood the combat space patrol of the medium weight Davion Corsairs. Slower than the Thrush, they were not charging and were able to manoeuvre to chase once the Thrush pushed past them. This was a problem for the Thrush. Mounting three medium class lasers and light armour, they had to suffer the long-range sniping of the Corsairs large lasers, each fighter carrying two of the longer range, heavier punching weapons, before trading blows with their own triple mediums versus two Corsair medium lasers. Half of the Thrush were wreckage before they completed their pass, two more died as the net of small lasers carved into those ASF that tried to pass close between defending Corsairs, but nine of the thirty six light Thrush made it through to see the Davion fleet.

The news was critical. This was not a raid. This was not even a normal invasion. Jump Ships and Dropships were scarce resources, so no nation would waste them to send anything but the most effective weapon they had available, that meant battlemechs. The defenders had the advantage, because while they had their own battlemech forces, they also could draw upon armour, artillery, and infantry to support them, so attackers brought more of the most effective weapon, but the defender could use combined arms tactics to balance their inferior numbers of mecha.

The forces at the jump point were not simply mech carriers. Armour transports, infantry transports. By the markings, the Third Davion Guards RCT and the 71st Light Horse Regiment, Eridani Light Horse. Two mech regiments, one an elite mercenary unit dating back to the fallen Star League, each with two full armoured regiments, and at least two infantry regiments. If they were standard Davion Regimental Combat Teams (RCT) that means each came with its own artillery battery, so the invaders would have an advantage of three to one in mecha, two to one in armour, complete dominance in artillery. Only in Aerospace fighters did they have close to parity, at least, outside the reach of the dropship weapons.

The Liao Aerospace commander looked at the feed from his Thrush scouts and knew he could not close with his Transits to try for Dropship kills. Between the Corsairs and the heavy throw weight of the anti-aircraft guns on the dropships, he would spend his force to no return.

Better to screen his remaining air assets, return and rearm for ground support missions. At least, he could deny the Davions command of the air while the two battalions of his Ariana Fusiliers tired to see if David could somehow smite the incoming Goliath.

Neither the Corsairs nor the light Sparrowhawk were ready to risk facing the big guns of the Transit to try to settle the air war in orbit, so the Davion fighters fell back to screen their incoming dropships, while the Liao ASF returned to refuel and rearm for the battle above the sky when the ground forces clashed.

Unseen, bomb laiden Corsairs swept along the ocean of Algol, streaking toward the Liao airbases. The planetary air defense grid promptly identified each fighter and tracked it, passing the update to the ground station where the MIIO special forces squads electronic warfare computer happily deleted any reference to Davion fighters already on planet before passing along the current sensor feed to the Capellan StarCom control center.

The 50 ton Transits were being refueled as the heavy machines burned most of their fuel in the run to the Nadir jump point, and the nine remaining Thrush were receiving armour repair, refueling, and being equipped with ground attack bombs for anti-landing operations. They received their first and only warning from the airfields own radar, as the Davion fighters screamed in just below the mach limit, their bomb loads already released and tracking cleanly towards the Aerospace fighters, their refueling trucks and the ready ammunition being loaded onto them.

House Liao’s air defense came apart in a series of explosions that set off the alarms on the inbound dropships for possible nuclear weapon use. The explosions were conventional, but the magnitude of the explosion of the airfield’s aerospace fighters, fuel supplies, ammunition, along with all the ground crews and the control tower made an explosion that shone like a beacon from the night side of Algol on its last night as a Capellan world.

As the first Davion dropships began to burn into the atmosphere, they already owned the sky. Below on the planet Algol, the 1st Ariana Fusliers 2nd and 3rd Battalion mounted into their battlemechs and all of them were aware they were not alone in their cockpits. Despair and fear made the ever-cramped cockpit of the Vidicator, and the more fragile but spacious Locust mecha a very tight fit indeed.

The Lorix Order put the mechwarrior at the pinnacle of Capellan society, the respect they were given was balanced with the duty to always and ever stand between the citizens and subject of the Confederation and their foes. They were required to fight; they were not required to survive.

It was time to earn their paycheques.