Hendrick's Rangers

[RedEye]

This (start of a) story came about because of my conflicting feelings about mechs -- so cool, yet the common Mechwarrior style point-blank Flintstones-boxing-match combat is utterly implausible. I'm trying for a more realistic technothriller/military sci-fi approach; like most of the genre, I've had to incorporate quite a bit of exposition at the start to get the reader up to speed with the tech and terminology.

As far as technology goes I've chosen to keep it simple and near future-- no artificial gravity or hyperdrive. Fusion power and plasma weapons are available as well as lasers and railguns, but these are not totally dominant over missiles and other conventional weapons. There will be tactical advantages, disadvantages, and countermeasures affecting all types of weapons. The mechs themselves are designed to be low-profile and stealthy, more like what I consider to be the more practical/survivable Mechwarrior designs like the Puma, Cauldron Born, Bushwacker etc instead of the sticks-out-like-a-sore-thumb humanoid upright style.

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Hendrick hated night assaults.

It didn't make sense. Avenger was equipped with sensors far more advanced than anything available to the rabble he usually faced. Theoretically, night ops gave him all the advantages. It was like stalking blind and deaf men in a brightly lit room; he could hit them before they knew he was there. His intellect and training told him to trust the sensors. Unfortunately, the ancient instincts that still lurked beneath the veneer of culture and civilization cared nothing for theoretical advantages. He didn't trust anything he couldn't see with his own eyes, and at the moment that was exactly nothing.

He keyed the cockpit intercom. "Status report, Top."

"Same as five minutes ago, Captain," Sgt. Frank "Top" Tolson replied. "I can't see three-fifths of **** all out there. We're 400 meters from waypoint Charlie, if you believe the navcomp."

"Roger. Stop at Charlie and we'll do a quick scan." For all the good that'll do, he thought. Nights might get darker than this somewhere, but probably not by much. Low, thick overcast blocked the starlight, and there was no moon tonight -- like every night -- for this planet, Haven, had no moon. A gusting wind just shy of hurricane force drove sheeting rain almost horizontally against the nanotube-reinforced polycarbonate of the cockpit canopy. Infrared imaging was useless in these conditions, and light amplification only marginally less so, giving less than two hundred meter visibility with maximum enhancement. Radar would penetrate the storm, but using it would scream out their position to anyone within a hundred klicks. At least the bandits' IR and laser-guided weapons won't work any better in this mess than our sensors do, he told himself. The torrential rain would severely degrade the performance of any laser-based weapon or sensor system, and even decrease a plasma cannon's effective range a bit. As far as he knew, the enemy's anti-armor weapons consisted of man-portable and a few vehicle mounted missile launchers. They wouldn't be able to lock on at anything except point-blank range, and Avenger should have an advantage in a slugging match. Hendrick certainly hoped so, since they likely wouldn't be able to spot the enemy unless they walked right into him -- literally.

Avenger was a walker, a Centurion Mk.2 LOMACC -- Low-Observable Mission-Adaptive Combat Chassis. Low-observable was a fancy way of saying that the Centurion was stealthy, designed to be hard to detect and lock onto with radar and infrared sensors. Mission-adaptive referred to its modular design, allowing it to carry a wide variety of specialized equipment to suit different mission profiles. With its flattened chassis mounted atop a pair of backward-bending "chicken" legs, it resembled nothing so much as a bipedal horseshoe crab, bristling with weapons and sensors. Its motion reminded Hendrick of a carnivorous dinosaur, a deceptively ponderous gait that could explode into deadly, fluid speed without warning.

Walkers had long been dismissed as a pipe dream. Expert opinion considered them impractical if not downright ridiculous. The early models quickly gained a reputation as the ultimate white elephant, and for good reasons. Hideously expensive and overcomplicated, slow, vulnerable, impossible to maintain in the field, they were outgunned and outclassed by conventional tanks. Technology eventually solved most of these problems. The development of compact fusion reactors provided a suitable power source; electromechanical synthetic muscle replaced slow, bulky, unreliable electrical or hydraulic actuators. Joints rode on frictionless superconducting magnetic bearings, and the steady advance of computer technology allowed the systems to work together with an efficiency approaching that of a living creature. The real complexity of the system was now in the software; a modern walker was no more mechanically complex than a tracked vehicle, and far more reliable.

These same technological advances also applied to tanks, of course. Virtually unlimited fusion power made hovertanks practical, and capable of carrying a huge weight of weapons and armor. Light weight was a priority of walker design, so they were lightly armored in comparison. Hovertanks had much higher top speeds on level terrain; walkers had better acceleration, were capable of quick lateral movement and could crouch behind cover. Hovertanks were better on muddy or boggy terrain; walkers were better on very rough and steep terrain and in close confines such as city streets. On paper it was a wash. In reality, when walkers went toe to toe with tanks they got slaughtered. They were better used in scouting or armed reconaissance roles, or for engaging more lightly armed mechanized infantry. As developments in energy weapons and missiles reduced aircraft survivability over the battlefield to near zero, walkers took over the role of the attack helicopter. Find the enemy, attack from concealment, and get the hell out.

"Waypoint Charlie," Top announced as he brought their speed down from a walk to a crawl. "Looks like a good spot for a scan over there."

Hendrick looked past the instrument pod at Top, ahead of him and below in the forward part of the helo-style stepped cockpit. The driver's bulbous helmet was looking ahead and a bit to the left, where a slump had carved a notch in a low ridgeline. Tolson thumbed a control and the nav system noted where he was looking, correlated it with the map, and designated a nav point that appeared in Hendrick's headsup display. "Okay, take us up."

Avenger employed a variety of active and passive sensors that enabled its computers to keep the machine upright and the turret stabilized as it traversed rough terrain. Lidar and ultrasonic imaging operated at extremely low power levels so the walker could "see" where to place its birdlike three-toed feet, without side-scattered radiation giving its position away. Tolson drove the walker with an aircraft-style HOTAS system -- Hands On Throttle And Stick. The throttle in his left hand controlled the speed, the stick in his right steered the chassis. Clusters of secondary controls on both stick and throttle allowed him to perform most common functions without moving his hands or looking down at the MFDs -- Multi-Function Displays, an array of touch sensitive LCD panels. In combat, the time it took to look for a control was more than enough to get you killed.

Tolson's hands and wrists were as thick and heavily muscled as the rest of him, but his touch was feather-light on the pressure-sensitive stick as he turned Avenger towards the gap in the ridgeline. The computers did the rest, automatically keeping the cockpit level as they traversed the talus slope, overgrown with low scrub and a few spindly trees. Tolson brought them to a smooth halt when they were a few meters short of the top. "Deploying mast," he said as he thumbed the control on the side of the throttle to raise the sensor pod from its storage well behind the cockpit. Avenger remained hidden hull-down behind the ridgeline while the mast peered over the top. The pod contained a millimeter-wave radar as well as lidar, optical sensors with UV, low-light and infrared capability, and passive sensors covering the full range of electromagnetic spectrum. Hendrick didn't expect any of it to be of much use right now -- the optics wouldn't show anything but trees and rain, and if the enemy were stupid enough to be using active emitters near their own base they would have been dead a long time ago. They certainly wouldn't have become such a problem that Haven's government was forced to call in a mercenary company to deal with them.

"Nothing, Captain," Tolson reported. "No activity on any frequency. Hold on! Encrypted burst transmission detected, very low power, bearing zero-four-one, estimated range four klicks." The pod's sensitive RF antennas had picked up a marginal signal the conformal antennas in the hull, masked by the ridge, would have missed. To a normal receiver, the scrambled transmission would appear to be just a millisecond burst of static. Avenger's powerful computers couldn't decrypt it on the fly, but they could make a good guess as to the sender's location. The computer marked the probable position of the radio transmitter on their map displays. "Looks like it came from the edge of the treeline, across the river."

Somebody screwed up, Hendrick thought. "How close can we get without breaking cover?"

"Computer says we can get within two hundred meters by following the stream." The route appeared on the map display, overlaid directly on the river and ending on the left flank of the probable contact. "The river's supposed to be only a few meters deep here."

Hendrick glanced at the rain-streaked canopy. "Supposed to be. But it's been raining like this for almost two days straight. I don't like it."

The map display updated as Tolson changed the waypoints. "There's thick brush all along the river. If we stick to the bank, we'll still be below the brushline. There's a ford here -- " an arrow appeared on the map "-- and the bank on the far side looks navigable all the way to Delta." The computer had designated their closest point of approach to the suspected enemy position as waypoint Delta.

"Okay Top, " Hendrick said, cringing inwardly at the thought of another blind, sensor-controlled approach to a hostile position. "Retract the pod. Datalink the navpoints to the rest of the company and let's get to it."

Hendrick's Rangers was an overstrength company consisting of two armor platoons, two mechanized infantry platoons, and a support platoon. The armor platoons totalled eight Centurions; each mech platoon consisted of four Viper infantry fighting vehicles carrying a squad of infantry apiece plus a driver, commander, and gunner. The support platoon was made up of everything else, including an air-defense vehicle, a massive tracked Armadillo maintenance and recovery vehicle, and another pair of Vipers modified to serve as field hospital and mobile command center. The support platoon was many klicks behind them, in the relative security of the forward deployed government troops. The rest of the company was advancing behind Hendrick, with 1st platoon in the lead. Closest was Lieutenant Jan Brody in Warhammer, about two hundred meters back. Sergeants Lacy and Beck flanked Brody at about three hundred meters distance, the farthest they could go without sacrificing the secure laser datalink that enabled the company to coordinate their actions without sacrificing stealth. The laser comm system was strictly line-of-sight, and very short range in the present atmospheric conditions, but virtually undetectable. Once contact was made, they'd switch to a more flexible encrypted radio link. 2nd and 3rd platoons -- the mechanized infantry -- came next, with 4th platoon's walkers held in reserve as a quick reaction force. Like 1st platoon, the spacing between units was dictated by the limits of the datalink.

Hendrick watched as the unit symbols blipped green to acknowledge receipt of orders. So far, so good, he thought as Tolson guided them along the ridgeline toward the river.

The computer flashed a warning in the corner of his heads-up display, beating Tolson by half a second. "Another burst transmission, Captain. Computer's got a tighter fix on the location now." The enemy position on the map moved twenty meters closer to the river. "Got a second source now, about one klick northwest of the original. Second radio source is also sending encrypted burst."

Well well well, Hendrick thought. "What do you think, Top? Looks like an observation post calling in."

"That's a roger, sir. Even bet that they got spooked, broke radio silence, and caught hell for it. It's gotta be lonely sitting in a hole a klick away from the nearest friendly, especially on a night like this."

"Remember that old saying Top: be careful what you wish for. They're about to get a lot more company than they'd like"