Piedmont Reisling's Planet
Sadachbia Sadalbari
Fairfield Fallon II
Farwell
Ulan Batar Unkador
Vecchio
Fomalhaut Galatia III
Genoa
New Home New Rhodes III
New Stevens
Van Diemen IV Wasat
90 LIGHT YEARS OR 27.6 PARSECS 30 LIGHT YEARS
MAXIMUM JUMP: APPROXIMATELY 30 LIGHT YEARS
LEGEND
THE SUNS RESURGENT
96
Jericho proved the easiest objective to take; only two ’Mech battalions from the Sixteenth Benjamin Regulars stood guard at the industriplex, augmented by a regiment of infantry, light artillery, and fixed gun emplacements. The Combine defense collapsed after two days of fighting, during which the Federated Suns force managed to establish a partial encirclement of the area before pushing their way through weak points at the city’s north and southeast entry routes. Even after the last DCMS BattleMech fell, however, the fighting continued for another three days as surviving squads of Combine infantry forced the Suns’ own troopers to root them out, sometimes one building at a time. Worse, in the midst of the fighting, massive chemical bombs were set off in the main complexes of the Jericho Weapons factories, located on the western side of the Rostovok River which ran through the city. The cascading explosives not only caused severe damage to the industriplex that made up so much of Jericho’s land area, it poisoned the Rostovok for nearly a decade to come.
The capital city of Bueller took nearly a week to seize, thanks to the dug-in Kurita occupation forces there, estimated at more than a reinforced regiment of BattleMechs, supported by four armor battalions and two infantry regiments. Before the fighting was over, a full quarter of the city was in flames, and hundreds of civilians had been killed in the crossfire. Errant artillery fire even damaged the local ComStar HPG compound, disrupting interstellar communications through Robinson for nearly three months afterward.
But the oddest battle of Robinson’s liberation took place at Exeter Island, site of the Exeter Island Maximum Security Prison, just off the west coast of the Solomon continent. According to the locals, most of the cadets from the Battle Academy of Robinson had been sent there after they were forced to dismantle their own school, brick by brick, in the early days of the occupation. When AFFS troops arrived at the island complex, however, they found a facility already in flames amid sounds of heavy weapons fire.
Fearing the worst, Marshal Halder-Davion, who chose to personally lead the prison’s liberation, ordered his troops to cross the relatively shallow waters between the island and the mainland at once. Once more, Kurita aerospace fighters rose up from nearby airfields and attempted to stop the Davion troops, strafing them in the water. An AFFS squadron swooped in to help to drive them off when suddenly one of the island’s anti-aircraft turrets swung about and shot down two of the Combine fighters. It soon became clear that the sounds and signs of carnage from within the prison were not the mass executions Halder-Davion feared, but a full-scale prison rebellion led by Robinson’s academy cadets.
Evidently, the imprisoned MechWarriors had spent years planning their escape, and were just days away from carrying out those plans when word of the Federated Suns’ assault reached them.
Emboldened by their captors’ distraction with other on-world events, the cadets struck, effectively freeing themselves mere hours before the AFFS reached the area.
By May 2814, the worlds of Robinson and Dahar IV were back in House Davion’s hands.
enough to provide intermittent fire support. Within minutes, New Samarkand was reduced to a dead hulk, burning from the inside out as her internal attackers fought through a blazing hell of their own creation to escape the doomed ship. Only three members of the boarding squadron managed to find their way out before the great ship exploded, taking with her one of the DCA’s most experienced carrier crews.
Meanwhile, the Raider’s escort destroyers successfully put down the Shōwakusei, but not before the Sarah Davion was crippled by a devastating broadside. Though the fighter battle would continue for nearly a half-hour more, Admiral Arrian’s task force successfully established orbital superiority. Only then did he signal the rest of the invasion force, commanded by Marshal Thomas Halder-Davion, to approach the planet.
Compared to the Robinson assault, the naval action for Dahar IV was far less exciting, but much more costly. There, the Federated Suns’ attack force approached with a naval group comprised of two Davion II-class destroyers flanking the Robinson-class carrier Marlette. Opposing them was a single Kuritan WarShip, the Aegis-class cruiser Eos. Despite being both outnumbered and outgunned by her attackers, Eos maneuvered to engage them, launching nuclear-tipped capital missiles as soon as she was in range. Lacking sufficient anti-missile capabilities, Marlette’s escort destroyers were both crippled by Eos’ fire, and Marlette herself suffered a devastating impact that disabled her port-side weapons batteries by the time her fighter squadrons managed to finish off the enemy vessel.
The ground defenses of both worlds were roughly proportionate to their naval support, with the DCMS presence far stronger on Robinson than on Dahar IV. Despite Dahar’s mineral wealth and its strategic value as a military command center before the war, the planet’s harsh temperatures and desolate landscape proved barely worth the trouble to defend. As a result, the Combine military presence there gradually waned in the months prior to the Davion assault that would liberate it, to the point where the planet fell after only a brief skirmish near the capital city of Drakaar.
The ground campaign for Robinson was much more hard-fought. The first AFFS landing attempts took place near the capital city of Bueller and the industrial city of Jericho, both located on the Canaan continent. As the Davion forces entered the atmosphere, they came under immediate attack by two wings of DCMS aerospace fighters. Focusing much of their effort on downing the invaders’
DropShips, the Kuritan pilots scarcely paid attention to the enemy fighter cover, and many became easy prey as a result. Increasingly desperate as more FedSuns transports burned their way toward the surface, a few even resorted to suicidal kamikaze attacks, ramming their fighters into the engines and hulls of the ’Mech transports.
Although these costly tactics spent most of the Combine’s air power over the two major cities, their efforts successfully cut down nearly two battalions worth of Davion BattleMechs, and one more of armored vehicles, before they could make landfall. The AFFS forces that did land successfully were scattered across the rolling hills and woodlands that made up much of the region below, and were forced to spend hours rallying for their ground battles, often under periodic strafing and bombing runs.
97
THE SUNS RESURGENTFarwell, Mirach, and Ulan Batar would eventually fall back under Capellan control over the next nine years, the Suns would hold onto Demeter and Chesterton. Further fighting along the Confederation-Suns front saw another half-dozen worlds lost to House Davion before the war’s end in 2821.
Mission Accomplished
With the Capellan Confederation’s last great drive into Federated Suns space thwarted, and the core of the Draconis March liberated, Prince Davion briefly considered one more pause in his counteroffensive campaign. In all, some twenty more of the Suns’ worlds remained under DCMS occupation, but the strain on the realm’s economy and infrastructure was evident everywhere he looked. The surge in morale sparked in the wake of the Kentares Massacre, and further boosted by the inspiring victories that followed, was giving way to exhaustion.
The Combine’s warriors felt the same weakness. While the honor stains of Kentares still plagued the DCMS, industrial, economical, and physical exhaustion made the war increasingly difficult for its soldiers to prosecute. The Suns had already taken back some of their most important star systems; what remained under the Dragon’s banner were mere consolation prizes in comparison. Worse still, the wave of officer suicides—whether from the shame of Kentares, or the shame of failing to hold their ground in the face of the resurgent Davion enemy—forced the Combine military to fill their gaps with younger and far less experienced replacements. Jinjiro Kurita even forced himself to discontinue summary executions of failing officers, and forbade those in the field whom he could not reach from doing that job for him. Even a poor commander was better than none at all.
Instead of calling a complete halt, Prince Davion instead decided to slow the pace of his counteroffensive. In the four years that followed the recapture of Robinson and Dahar IV, the AFFS advanced more cautiously than before, seizing only one or two worlds from each flank of the occupied territories per wave.
Although some fierce battles did still erupt—including a heavy nuclear exchange on Klathandu IV following an orbital attack by Kuritan WarShips—the majority of the fighting was modest compared to the battles earlier in the war.
By the middle of 2818, the AFFS had finally swept the armies of House Kurita back to an approximation of their pre-war border.
With the fall of Marduk, Scheat, and Tripoli, in fact, the number of worlds retaken by Paul Davion’s forces matched the number seized by those of Jinjiro Kurita’s entire campaign. Reconnaissance raids, however, now showed that the Arm of the Dragon was reinforcing this new border, preparing itself for the next wave of AFFS attacks.
Rather than push his luck, the First Prince ordered his army to instead fortify its conquests. Declaring his goal of driving the serpent from his realm now complete, Paul Davion decided that the time had come for the Federated Suns to begin the long, arduous task of rebuilding and repairing all that it could.
Liao’s Last Play: The Battle for Chesterton
In May 2812, Chancellor Liao sent a massive assault force to seize Chesterton once and for all. The force included the First and Second Ariana Fusiliers, Vincent’s Commandos, and Cochraine’s Goliaths, along with an equal number of armor and infantry support forces. With the AFFS already stretched thin across the contested region, this battle group seemed certain to overpower the enemy defenders. In an effort to take the Suns by surprise, the CCAF and Maskirovka did their best to conceal the assault force’s true objective, so much so that even rank-and-file MechWarriors on board the task force’s DropShips were uncertain of their destination.
Unfortunately for the Confederation, a mole within the Maskirovka alerted the MIIO of the operation mere days before the fleet set out. By the time Liao’s assault group reached Chesterton, the AFFS was ready for them.
When the Capellan fleet materialized in the Chesterton system, they found no significant Davion naval presence to oppose them, and their burn in-system passed without incident. Planetside communications traffic was low, and only a smattering of aerospace forces scrambled from bases on one of the planet’s moons to oppose the incoming DropShips. So far as the attackers could tell, it appeared as though the Federated Suns had indeed been taken by surprise. If anything, their defenses on Chesterton were surprisingly light—so much so that the vanguard ships of the Ariana Fusiliers found they could land at the empty spaceport just outside the planetary capital of Chesterton City.
Only as the Capellan forces began unloading their troops did the AFFS defenders spring their trap. Emerging from prepared positions across the spaceport and city outskirts, two regiments of Crucis Lancers backed up by the Belinda’s Irregulars mercenary command and several more supporting elements hammered the invaders while they were still in tight formation. The First and Second Fusiliers suffered heavy damage, losing more than two BattleMech battalions in an opening skirmish that became even more chaotic when the Lancers pushed forward.
At the industrial cities of Tristram and Swansea, where the Commandos and Goliaths were set to land, respectively, similar events unfolded as secondary Davion forces emerged from hiding to smash the off-loading ’Mechs. Despite the heavy damage, the Capellan invaders solidified their positions and held out for nearly three days before it became clear that they no longer possessed enough strength to overcome the dug-in defenders.
On the third day of the disastrous operation, with over a regiment’s worth of BattleMechs and MechWarriors killed or captured, the ranking CCAF commander finally called a retreat. Of the twelve ’Mech battalions that set foot on Chesterton soil, only two came away from the debacle whole.
The failure on Chesterton cost the CCAF some of its best warriors, and further undermined the Confederation’s capabilities against the Federated Suns. Although the worlds of Castleton,