“GET ME THAT MISSILE, DRUMSTICK!”
Lylah needed no encouragement, but the TOW canister wasn’t cooperating. The LPV-4 was a roomy vehicle normally, but far more missile canisters were stuffed into the back than regulations had ever allowed for and there just wasn’t room.
A CRACK! sounded out just behind her and she dropped the missile on her toe just as she got it out the rack, steel toed boots saving her from a broken foot. The sabot crashed into the Volzhanka to their front’s track, a shower of sparks indicating the shot had broken something. It didn’t matter. The tank had lost its other track minutes ago, and its return shot buried itself into the offending Fournloke’s turret cheek.
A dozen similar duels were taking place all across the plain as Lylah finally got her fingers back on the missile. Blue PLAID Navajos and green PVC Fournlokes traded shots with black Irsmun Volzhankas, and while the Coalition had numbers the enemy was dug in well. Neither side’s cannons were able to penetrate the other side’s armor, it seemed, but they were happily blasting away regardless, while the Coalition missile carriers hunted for weaknesses.
“C’MON, FASTER FASTER FASTER!”, but Lylah was finally there, busying herself shoving the missile into the launcher’s cradle and hooking the wires up behind her gunner. She was nearly finished when a new sound made her look up, a horrible tearing of metal. She was just in time to watch a second round scream through a neighboring PVC IFV’s turret. Both PLAID troopers in the LPV’s turret watched with horror as the IFV’s commander slumped down into his turret.
It seemed the Ismurns had tired of blasting the Coalition MBTs ineffectually and decided to find some softer targets to shoot before they ran out of ammo. Her gunner punched her shoulder, voice gone mute and as she turned back to finish prepping the TOW she caught the Volzhanka to their front lining up on their LPV, the muzzle flash, the sabot flashing through her gunner’s torso, one of his lungs exploding out of his body and into her face.
She stood there, staring dumbly at Proctor Dean Fresno’s corpse. Impossibly, it turned to her and spoke.
“This was your fault, Lylah. If you’d just loaded the damn missile I’d still be here.”
She was still trying to process how he could speak with no thorax when an alert sounded and Prefect Lylah Todorovich woke up in her bunk on Cold The Ice Below.
The alert had been for the Interdiction Group- and by extension, the Regimental Combat Team’s arrival in Nuvastia, soon to be Saratia. Lylah was still trying to work out why the Regicides were here. There wasn’t really anything for PLAID’s most veteran formations to do in the Confederacy's worst member state.
Lylah was also trying to work out why she was here.
The battle had been one of the Coalition's crowning victories. The line was still thrown about whenever someone wanted to flex; barely a dozen Coalition soldiers had been KIA when they had shattered three of Irsmuncast’s finest Guards divisions in the only direct tank-on-tank clash of the front.
It didn’t feel like such a win when Lylah’s best friend had been one of the dozen, but her nightmares were certainly dramatizing things. The Volzhanka may not have been as affordable and light as the Navajo, but it still had protection to match and much like its sisters the tank that had killed Dean had absorbed everything the Coalition vanguard could throw at it. It had taken the deployment of PLAID’s Hakori tank hunters and their massive GRLS missiles to finally silence the enemy MBTs.
Lylah knew intellectually that one more piddly TOW missile wouldn’t have saved Dean- if only her subconscious agreed.
After that particular personal disaster she’d been reassigned to the Surface Interdiction Forces as tactical officer on one of the Pavise (B) artillery corvettes assigned to the East Hook bombardment force. They’d been short officers for the massive fleet buildup for that and figured an orphaned Carabinier would do fine pulling the triggers for the corvette’s artillery pieces.
Lylah missed Pass The Sugar Addie. The posting had come with a promotion, life as a SIF officer agreed with her, and fighting thirty kilometers away from the enemy armor agreed with her even more. Addie had been decommissioned with all of her sisters after East Hook and the end of the war, however, so a few years of service and another promotion found Lylah returned to the Regicides, assigned as Procurator Alycia Scanthor’s aide.
Being Scanthor’s aide sucked in some ways. Being back with I RCT made the nightmares worse, and the woman seemed allergic to actually working in her office, forcing Lylah to deliver the requisite coffee, paperwork, and snacks to some of the most asinine spots she had ever been to on Cold The Ice. Scanthor led from the front, which meant if the RCT found itself in another shooting war Lylah would probably find herself in an LPV under fire again, this time in the driver’s seat. The seat they would shoot first.
Scanthor treated her staff well though, and there was supposed to be an armored command car in the works, so Lylah supposed she was alright with where she was. It didn’t answer the question of what exactly the RCT was doing here, but there was a general officer’s meeting scheduled in an hour.
With all luck, she would get her answer there.
