Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Invasion by Krauter Ryan

Author:Krauter, Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silver Impala Press
Published: 2011-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Marine Assault ship Torino arrived and took station off the Avenger’s port bow, the larger ship an imposing machine of strictly business, a noticeable contrast to the Avenger’s sleek, stealthy lines. Where the Avenger was almost sharklike in form, the assault ship was blockier and more angular. Large docking bays underneath, typical of Confed ship design, allowed landing craft to fly through the hangars as they delivered troops and equipment. A respectable complement of twenty-five Intruders and twenty-five Talons rounded out the mix. Heavy laser batteries were scattered around the ship for direct engagements, though the armament was skewed towards anti-aircraft and long range fire support, as evidenced by the generous number of point defense mounts and the four large, long barreled artillery guns in two mounts of two guns each, one each in a traversable turret on the dorsal and ventral forward hull. Not very useful in ship-to-ship engagements because of their slow traverse and recharge time, from orbit they could swiftly level just about any above-ground structure known to exist. The ship’s complement of five thousand marines was an imposing quick-reaction force capable of assaulting and holding a beachhead until reinforcements arrived. With stealth not a design priority, large communications dishes and arrays projected from several key superstructure points on the upper hull such as the bridge and forward fire/air control. Their communications arrays could power through many methods of jamming, or create a comm jamming field of their own.

Captain Elco was always glad to have the punch of a ship like that around, and was saying as much to their captain in his quarters.

“I suppose it would create quite the incident if we just landed your whole strike force and requested our people back at the point of a blaster,” Elco mused.

“As much as I’d like to, I doubt we’d we captains for long after that,” replied Captain Spiron. He was a Qualin, older than Elco, a career marine ‘ground pounder’, as he called himself. He had passed up promotion several times in order to stay in the field, eschewing desk assignments that would have furthered his career but taken him away from the action. He reckoned he’d be an Admiral by now, but that wasn’t what was important to him. Commanding a powerful war vessel with several thousand angry marines aboard was.

“You think we could take them?” Elco asked only half-jokingly, gesturing out his viewport towards the planet Callidor and the Enkarran ships orbiting near it.

“If you snuck away, came back behind them and dropped a couple torpedoes up their engines it would even the score, that’s for sure. Navy needs to start letting you guys use these ships like they’re supposed to be used, not just trying to use them like every other ship in the fleet.”

Spiron was giving voice to a common argument that plagued armed forces the galaxy over whenever revolutionary equipment or tactics were born- the painfully slow process by which those that made policy adapt to new abilities and technologies.

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