Roswell Fanatics

The scout vehicles are the eyes and ears of a mobile force, and when they suddenly go blind and deaf, they WILL be noticed by the commander.

After the third fruitlessattempt at calling any of the scout vehicles, Zata took the microphone himself.

"All units be alert, we are taking losses from someone in close contact with us, not just the artillery. Look closely, people, someone just took out four scout vehicles. Units 7, 9. 14. and 16.....you now need to take scout positions."

Zata had purposely chosen infantry fighting vehicles for the replacements. Not as agile as the humvees, but harder to destroy. If they were using anything short of a heavy machine gun, the Bradley fighting vehicles would be immune to their fire, and even with a heavy machine gun the opponent would have to be extremely skillful to destroy one of the infantry fighting vehicles...even with a heavy machine gun. The trucks and humvees, however, were easy targets.

Max watched as the vehicles spread out, limiting the damage being done by the 105mms that were still close enough to engage. But that was nothing he could help. What he could do was engage the one remaining tank...the only weapon on the battlefield that could hit the silos from the position they currently held.

"Overseer," came the radio call on the tactical net, "Vehicle 14.....we have crested the hill and can see large artillery pieces near silo two....most llikely 155mm. It would appear that two of them are being readied to fire."

Zata looked quickly at the map. They were almost inside the minimum range of 155mm cannon. They could not stop the convoy...not as dispersed as they were. Nonetheless, it was senseless to take unnecessary casualties. The soldiers manning the artillery certainly would not be the ones who had fired the missiles....

As the tank commander received the order he gunned the monster vehicle to the top of the hill. He could have fired from lower....the 120mm smoothbore had the range, and the location of the silos were clearly identified on his chart. But tankers are uncomfortable with direct fire...they like to actually see what they are firing at, and by putting himself on the crest of the hill, it gave the tank commander an excellent view of the distant artillery pieces. But just as tracers work both ways, so does highlighting yourself above the carnage of the battlefield.

As he crested the rise, the tank commander identified the target to the gunner.

"Target, artillery pieces, load high explosive general purpose...."

This presented the gunner with a dilemma. The tank was normally used for counter-armor configurations and already had an APFSDS-T round in the breech. This round fires a fin stabilized sabot that would easily destroy any other tank. But while it would put a four inch hole in anything it hit, unless it actually made contact with the barrel of the howitzer, it wouldn't destroy anything. To pull the round out and load the proper one would take time...probably 30 seconds. It would be quicker to just fire the wrong round, reload, and fire again. He quickly asked for and got permission to do just that.

The noise of the 120mm smoothbore cannon going off pulled Max's eyes to the crest of the hill, where the remaining tank was preparing to fire again. He quickly aimed the TOW and sent if flying.

It would take the gunner almost 12 seconds to load and aim the second round. That turned out to be two long. The TOW flashed above the tank, sending down a small formed piece of metal to explode the reactive armor covering the light armor on the top of the tank. The explosive forged penetrator quickly followed. The penetrator blasted quickly through the armor on the turret, richoceting wildly inside as it emulsified the gunner. On about its 25th ricochet it happend to find the the round the had prepared to load next....another high explosive general purpose round. The result was both immediate and catastrophic.

The radio call came instantly.

"Overseer.....vehicle 16....the TOW missile was fired from a small vehicle on your left flank...coordinates BC 0.5 by 14.3. We will engage with our chaingun.....

They were fatigued by thirty hours of getting the second missile prepared for launching, and once it successfully fired it was only normal that there would be a letdown. They were having trouble getting the big 155mm howitzer set in place, and readying it for firing. It was only natural that they were a little inattentive, not really even noticing the tank as it reached the top of the gentle rise…about four miles away. It wasn’t that the five men were dogging it….they were just fatigued, and the fatigue had naturally sapped their motivation.

The Depleted Uranium fin stabilized penetrator had a velocity of almost 1500 meters per second as it passed three feet over the head of the five artillerymen. What it didn’t have was a warhead. The penetrator was a kinetic kill round, with no explosive. What it didn’t hit, it didn’t destroy. Even so, the sonic boom from its passing got everyone’s attention, and their eyes turned quickly to the tank. They realized they were staring death in the face and had only seconds…and then the tank went up itself as a TOW missile reached out and blew it apart, the turret tumbling wildly through the air.

“Let’s get this sucker sighted in!,” screamed the senior NCO. And get that ammo over here.”. Somehow their lethargy had just seemed to vanish.

100 feet away the two were working very delicately. The white phosphorous round were extremely dangerous to open up, even if they were mainly used as spotting rounds for laying down smoke. White phosphorous is dangerous nasty stuff. Spec4 Abrahamson wasn’t sure what the stuff was the Captainr was pouring in to replace it, but he was sure the WP would kill them if they weren’t careful. Of course, the tank round had gotten his attention too. “We need to hurry, Ma’am,” he said. The Skins are almost inside our minimum range.”

The main weapon on Vehicle 16 was a 25mm chaingun. To the uninitiated, this would look like an oversize machine gun, and it was in fact very similar. But machineguns use the energy of the recoil of the ammunition to continue firing, a chaingun has an independent motor driving it, allowing a huge increase in reliability and rate of fire.

The M242 mounted on vehicle 16 could reach out and touch people effectively…even out to 2000 meters, with fatal results. Normally the gun had a gyro stabilized platform and perhaps it would again…once the vehicle got back to base. The gyro stabilization had failed two days previously. Normally there would have been technicians to repair it, but that task hadn’t really been valued by the Skins when they’d decided who to replace, and there were no actual Skins with that skill. Since no humans had been allowed on the highly classified mission to set up the halon producing factories, no competent techs had been brought along.

Lack of the gyro stabilization certainly didn’t stop the chaingun from firing, it could still send over 200 six ounce projectiles downrange at nearly a half mile a second. What it couldn’t do well, though, was fire on the run.

The gunner had Max clearly in his sights, but the Bradley is a crew served weapon. The driver was doing his best to close the range….needlessly, since Max certainly couldn’t run a half mile a second, but that’s just what vehicle drivers do. As the gunner’s finger hit the firing stud the treads of the fighting vehicle had just passed over a large rock, and as the center of gravity came forward of that rock, the nose of the vehicle pitched down, and the rounds went out three degrees below where they should have.

If you are 800 meters from your target and shoot three degrees low, you miss your target by almost 40 meters. The richochets, however, can be very interesting….


Max’s plans to remain hidden in the relative safety of the observation bunker were abruptly changed by the burst of 25mm fire that landed 40 meters short of his position. Shrapnel and broken shards of rock rained in to Max’s left side. The pain cut through the confusion and he raced forward in the FAV, seeking cover as he did his best to heal the dozens of small injuries he had taken to his left side and face from the shower of fragments. Unfortunately, the FAV had been pointed right toward the bulk of the Skins troops, and in moving rapidly forward he removed himself from his only cover.

The FAV had no armor whatsoever, but it was fast and agile. He weaved his way frantically into and among the Skins vehicles, hoping to deter the enemy from firing at him for fear of fratricide, the shells missing him perhaps killing their fellow Skin brethren. It was somewhat successful, although several units with poor fire discipline did indeed fire, succeeding only in killing several of their more lightly armored fellows. The original convoy had been over eight hundred vehicles and the artillery and Claymores had certainly taken their toll. But the five hundred remaining vehicles would be more than enough to finish him off…at least if he couldn’t quickly break contact with them. Max called in more beehive rounds…using his green shield to protect himself for each barrage. But he was fatiguing…the green shield growing visibly weaker even after the third barrage. This couldn’t last long. he needed a way out. At last he saw it, a creek bed leading off in the distance. He raced for it and in doing so made a serious mistake. The dash for the creek bed was in a straight line, making him predictable.

The gunner led the target, but even so, he hit only in the very aft part of the strange looking vehicle. But as one tire was blown off the rim altogether, the vehicle spun out of control, flipping as it entered the area of the creekbed. But that was enough….the vehicle was now a mobility kill and if the driver were still alive, they’d have him shortly.

In the command IFV Zata watched his troops firing at the strange looking vehicle. It was like swatting a fly. It was necessary to incapacitate him of course, he was obviously the one who had been the artillery observer and putting him out of commission would blind the artillery units, but they were almost out of range of the guns to the north anyway, and it was almost too late for the guns to the west to fire, they were not direct fire weapons and had to loft their shells in high arcs to hit a target so near…and in a mile or so it would be too late even for that. But as he was about to designate a few units to finish off the intruder…and order the rest to make best speed westward, the governor dropped the fieldglasses and looked up with disbelief….

“That is Zan….I saw him shield…”

"That is not Zan," said Zata, "although if that is indeed his hybrid that would start to explain what has happened. They attacked us indirectly to lure us away from the silos, and kept their troops hidden to avoid us moving more quickly toward the west. No,....that is not Zan, not if he offers his own life to slow us down...to save the humans in those silos."

Zata's mind went back almost eighty years, to when he'd been an ordinary soldier...part of a squad sent to cut off the secret passageway from the castle. Zan had been a spoiled child..like his sister...his child bride...and his ridiculous 'general.' Spoiled and arrogant children of privilege, none had prepared themselves for their duties. They ruled neither by skill nor knowledge, simply by the "Divine Right" of Kings, much as Kivar ruled...and equally poorly. By the time they had gone in desperation to the common people to try to rally them to fight off Kivar, it had been far too late.

Zata had watched Zan die...without remorse. The four Royals had been parasites...none deserved to live.

But this soldier...he had fought them with honor, holding a large force against overwhelming odds, to give those humans in their silos a chance...a chance to flee...a chance to suicide...a chance to do...who knew what? No, perhaps it was his human DNA...perhaps it was the culture that had nourished him, but this hybrid was a better man than Zan had ever been.

"We need to hurry....to capture those silos quickly. I will leave a small force to pin him down...finish him off. We must hurry to the silos."

"No," said the Governor. "He is a Royal. We must capture him. Kivar will reward us well."

"It is my command," said Zata, "..and it moves west now..and quickly."

The burst of 25mm fire had struck the rear of the FAV like a bolt of lightning from the gods, the first few rounds shattering the engine and sending the ungainly vehicle into an uncontrollable slide even before further rounds took the rear wheels off altogether. What started as a spin turned into complete disaster as the vehicle entered the downslope to the small creekbed.

In his rush to get out of the line of fire, the safety harness had gone unfastened, and Max was thrown from the vehicle on the second turn...which was probably just as well as the fuel from the vehicle's ruptured tank caught fire as he lay on the ground momentarily stunned.

He rushed back to the flaming vehicle, using the last of his energy to repair the injuries he'd sustained from the rollover. Desperately he salvaged the radio...without it he'd be unable to direct the artillery...and then reached back to where the M-16 was secured to the vehicle....it's range was better than the Beretta sidearm he carried.

Somehow his BDU pocket had torn in the rollover and he felt the photograph drop away from him as he leaned over. He had carried it there for almost five years, and he sensed it's loss as if he'd lost a part of himself. It clattered to the ground, the glass frame shattering as it hit just within the pool of burning fuel, and even as he started to reach for it he saw it darken and start to burn...the innocent eyes disappearing into flame, even as his hand reached for it.

'It doesn't matter, Max' he told himself, trying to shove away the pain of the loss of the picture as he'd tried so hard to shove away the pain of her loss for these long years, '... soon it will be over anyway and maybe, if she was right about her God, you'll be with her again. But now you have a job to finish...'

Everything in a war takes longer than you think it should. Bryan knew that....just as any good military commander did. Even so, when a friend was about to die, and when Taylor's poorly defended group of artillerymen and researchers were about to be overun, it took all of his control not to scream at the driver of the humvee to drive faster. That wouldn't have been smart though, they were already driving too fast, the command vehicle pushing forward into the dust left by the Scout vehicles before it even had time to settle. They were racing down the narrow road blindly, risking disaster if somehow the Skins had managed to get even a small group to block them, because the distance they still had to go didn't allow for prudence. If they were careful, they would almost certainly be too late. But as he looked at the map, it told the story. With the distance they still had to go, they'd almost certainly be too late in any event.

As soon as the Skins had stopped their advance, Bryan had ordered Sergeant Major Grayson to put this group together. They had about twenty humvees, armed with TOW missiles...not enough to stop the Skins force, but enough perhaps to slow it down...enough perhaps to let the unarmed trucks that were the prime movers for the big 155mm artillery pieces carry away the two hundred or so people at the silos...to bring them back where the rest of the regiment was dug in and at least give them a fighting chance.

But the TOWs had been dismounted from the vehicles to allow them to be fired from protected bunkers and remounting them had taken time...and now, the very terrain that had made this area a good place to ambush the Skins was impeding their own progress. They'd have to go west and then cut south to the silos and judging by the transmissions from Max to the artillery officer...they weren't going to be in time.

"The problem, sir...," said Sergeant Major Grayson, "..is going to be them damn Bradleys. We can go head to head with their Scout troopsand their humvees, and their troops in trucks are no problem until they dismount and have a chance to get organized...but if they can get even one of those Bradleys within range of us, they can cut us up pretty good."

It was a strange situation to anyone but someone in the military. They were going to a fight that they were ill-prepared to win, but nonetheless taking chances to do it, and hoping they wouldn't be late. But it had always been the way that wars had been fought...and won...because strange things happened in battle. The single most important thing was always to just show up.

'Everything in a war takes longer than you think it should,' thought Colonel Taylor as he walked over toward Major Young. But a good commander didn't interrupt people who were working as hard as they could. If that tank round whizzing by them hadn't motivated them he thought, likely nothing else would either.

Major Young apparently had the same opinion, and was just standing there letting his men work, while he used his binoculars to stare into what little could be seen to the east, since a fire 50 meters away was putting dense clouds of smoke in the air...smoke that was blowing rapidly towards the enemy.

""Did the tank round do this?" Taylor asked, nodding toward the thick smoke.
"Nosir, that's the white phosphorous from the projectiles we emptied out...it somehow caught fire. I was going to have it put out but that would have taken time and men and...well, since the smoke is blowing right towards them, it is giving us some cover, so I decided to just let it burn. It won't stop the imaging infrared sights on the Bradleys, but they won't be able to fire a TOW if they can't see us. That'll mean they'll need to get maybe a kilometer and a half closer before they can open fire."

"How close are we to minimum range, Major."

"That's the worst part, sir. A minimum range shot....well we use the smallest powder charge and the steepest barrel elevation. The projectile itself mostly goes up and down, and during that time the wind is acting on it. Unless this wind dies down somewhat, it'll blow the projectiles past the Skins, even when we are able to fire."

Taylor nodded his head grimly. The big 155mm howitzers didn't use "full-up" rounds that were ready to fire. They had bare projectiles backed up with different size charges for different ranges. But it was never intended as a direct fire weapon, like the smoothbore of a tank. Even with their highest elevation and weakest propellant charge, the howitzers couldn't hit closer than three miles under no-wind conditions, and the advance units of the Skins were nearing that now. The situation was not looking good. If only the winds would ease up or even reverse themselves as the gust front passed.....

Everything in a war takes longer than you think it should. Zata knew that. But they'd been taking artillery fire for nearly an hour. They had to be at the extreme range for the artillery battery still firing on them from the north and their few cannon were not terribly effective as long as the column was kept well dispersed, although the darts from those damnable beehive rounds had played havoc with the poorly protected troops in the humvees and trucks. Why the heavier guns to the west reported by the scout vehicles had not yet come into play he was not sure, perhaps they had arrived at the site too late to prepare for firing, but whatever the reason the real urgency was to move the troops westward...away from the artillery to the north, and safely within the minimum range of the artillery there that was being hastily prepared to use against them.

Zata called the scout vehicles. "Are you within range to engage the artillery batteries to the west?"

"Not yet sir....," came the reply. "They appear to be putting down a smokescreen. We will not be able to engage with the TOW missiles....we will need more time to close within range of the chaingun."

Listening to the exchange, Tafor was certain the Overseer had gone mad. He had been under artillery bombardment for almost an hour, and was as frightened as he'd been in his entire life. Like most politicians, he'd always believed the military were basically cowards, always appealing for more funds for a larger army...more equipment...and to what result? Their unwillingness to engage decisively, he had been told by his fellow politicians, was the principal reason the humans were not yet subdued, and why even the docile Antarans were now threatening the Empire.

But the last hour had told a different story, as he's watched the Overseer lead his troops into this....this ...this slaughter, that now threatened to end his life as well, if only one of the randomly falling high explosive rounds happened to find this vehicle.

'....and he has victory within the palm of his hand...,' thought Tafor. The reconstruct of Zan was surely the key. They had only to capture him, Tafor reasoned, and victory would be theirs, not just on this toxic wastedump of a planet...but on Antar as well. Zan was not just any Royal...he held the Seal of Antar. Yet this idiot Overseer seemed to ignore that fact....seemed willing to charge into the very mouths of the even larger cannon to the west , rather than to simply capture Zan and hold him hostage against the behavior of both the humans and the people of Antar.

"Overseer...you overlook an opportunity to end this quickly. Zan is not just any Royal...he has the Seal of Antar. We have merely to capture him and both Antar and Earth will surrender."

Zata looked at the governor more in disbelief than annoyance. The man could not possibly be that stupid...but the face looking back at him appeared to believe what he was saying.

"The man is an artillery spotter in enemy territory and most likely the one who triggered the three minefields that have killed so many of our troops. This is a suicide mission....I doubt that even he expects to survive. He is here doing his best to stop us from getting to those silos. That he would be willling to make that sacrifice attests to the importance of that installation and the people in it. THEY are the ones we must capture."

Tafor looked at the Overseer with disgust. He'd thought the man smarter than that, but in the end he was only a soldier...with no understanding at all of politics.

"As Regional Governor...I insist we capture Zan."

"Governor or not, this is a military operation..and I am the commander. We proceed west...to the silos."

Max took cover in the dry creek bed where the seasonal stream had carved a slight notch under several large boulders in a bend in the stream. He could hear the IFV that had targeted his FAV coming along the creek bed, less than 400 meters away. The beehive rounds would have no effect upon it, but high explosive certainly would. Unlike the beehive rounds the high explosive rounds could be fused to go off on impact, and they would be much less affected by the eind than the flechettes. By running squarely down the middle of the creek bed the driver believed he would eventually have to find Max, and perhaps that was true. But he was also making himself predictable.

The IFV was perhaps 300 meters away from Max when the two high explosive (HE) rounds came screaming down from the north. Neither actually hit the vehicle, but the first explosion overturned it and the second landed only meters from the vehicle, the belly taking almost the full brunt of the explosion. The floor bent noticeably on the outside, but what was happening on the inside was far worse.

It was called spalling...where flakes of metal from the inside of the armor break off from the metal and fly around at a high rate of speed within the armored vehicle. Since they have no place to go inside the sealed vehicle, they ricochet around inside until they have exhausted their energy on everything inside the vehicle which generally emulsifies the bodies of those inside leaving a gelatinous mess. That apparently wasn't quite what happened to Skins, since they turned to dust rather than to hamburger, but the effect was little different.

Max was flung about by the concussion of the falling 105 mm rounds, even from three football fields away. He was bruised and battered, but had no serious injuries of consequence. Now that he'd used the last TOW missile he had no other effective way to take out the infantry fighting vehicles, but as long as they kept moving and kept out of confined spaces like the creekbed his chances of actually getting a kill with the few 105mm rounds that he could direct to target were few. So he did what he could, calling in beehive rounds to kill the lightly armored Skins in trucks and humvees, while mixing enough HE shells to keep the IFVs stirred up and worried. It was all he could do, as long as the Skins were so widely dispersed. The problem was, they were just about out of beehive rounds.



Units 7, 9. 14. and 16 had been designated as the Scout vehicles, once Max had killed the hummers originally used for this purpose. Sixteen had just been destroyed in the creekbed trying to get Max, but the other three were still performing their scout mission, and were the westernmost of the Skins vehicles.

The four units had been a squad, commanded by squadleader Koja, the commander of unit 14. Units fourteen and sixteen had originally scouted the center of the advance, with seven and nine taking the north and south flanks. With the untimely demise of unit sixteen, squadleader Koja found his vehicle alone covering the center of the advancing Skins force, and it was he that Zata had been asking if he was in range to fire on the 155mm howitzers that were being made ready near the silos.

Koja had only been on Earth for six months...transferred at his own request from Antar where he had made a reputation by ruthlessly attacking the Partisan units that were increasingly harassing the occupying Skins forces. He had come to Earth...well, for the equipment, really. Koja had little use for the primitive humans themselves, but the weapons they produced...like the Infantry Fighting Vehicle he was driving, were immensely superior to those fielded by the Skins ot the people of Antar. Koja knew the people of the Earth would soon be extinguished, that was the purpose of the factory they had come to build. Once that happened the Skins would be able to divert the warfighting resources of Earth, like this IFV, to suppress the growing rebellion in Antar.

Unlike Tafor, Koja well understood the situation with regard to the heavy artillery to the west, and understood that since he was inside their minimum range they posed far less threat to him than he did to them. The Zint-damned problem was that even though he WAS in range of the artillery, he couldn't engage it because of the damned screening smoke.

As the acrid white phosphorus pentoxide smoke came in the vents it stung his visual receptors...even underneath the husk he was wearing. He reached over and turned on the nuclear-biological-chemical protection system, shunting all outside air through the filters. It helped, but he knew it would not help for long. The Skins had made sure early in the war that they controlled all the nuclear weapons, and this country had long ago given up offensive chemical and biological weapons. No one had changed the filters...not in years, and they would only slow down the irritating smoke..but even that was a help.

IFV number 14 wasn't exactly close to the human artillery....but he was within range of the twin TOW missiles that were attached just above the turret on the left side of the Bradley. But the problem was the smoke from the White Phosphorus...the smoke that was blowing directly at them as they proceeded west.

Normally the TOW missiles were optically guided, but with the smoke that was impossible. So Koja was trying to get within range of his 25mm chaingun, and was using the imaging infrared sight of the gun to direct the driver in the thick smoke. And it was working...the vehicle was making good time. He could see with the imaging infrared fairly well, even in the smoke. But as he got nearer .... almost within gun range, the infrared from the burning phosphorus suddenly increased...washing out much of the foreground.



Major Young looked at the smoke coming from the burning phosphorus. It was only serendipity...no one had actually thought about using the white phosphorous from the 155mm shells like this until the stuff spontaneoulsy combusted, but he'd ordered some of his men to empty more projectiles and throw the contents into the fires. The M-110 projectile had originally been designed as a projectile to deliver blister gas...way back in the fifties before the US had renounced such weapons. But that made it ideal for what they desired....something to deliver the agent....the Colonel had called it EBP...it was just too bad they only had enough for four rounds....assuming again the wind died down enough for them to actually be able to use them.

Major Young could hear the IFV in the distance...coming nearer in the smoke. It made for an interesting situation...if the wind kept blowing, it would delay for awhile longer the IFV being able to take them out with its TOW missiles...but unless the wind eased up, there'd be no point in firing they four rounds at all...they'd sail right past the Skins. They'd have only a few seconds once the wind stopped...if it stopped at all...to get their rounds away before the Bradley destroyed them all. And if the wind DIDN'T stop within the next ten minutes, the IFV would be on top of them, and once it left the smoke it would rip them apart with its chaingun.

"Just another great day in the Army," the Major said to no one in particular.

Koja strained to see the artillery pieces in the imaging infrared sight, twisting the turret slightly right and left as he directed the driver to continue through the smoke that here was like a heavy fog. But the bright glare of the burning phosphorus in the sight left little doube where the humans were, and by weaving a serpentine course slightly to the north than to south, Koja coule even estimate the distance to their position.

Koja loved the feeling of power he got maneuvering the huge vehicle, over 20,000 kg of lethal force at his command, with claws that could rake out two miles to ravage an enemy. And by his estimate, they were within two miles already.

He clicked the sight to its highest magnification, intending to spray the general area of the fire ahead. In doing so he missed seeing the chain link fence that materialized through the smoke before him, but the IFV went through it effortlessly... the armored behemoth as oblivious to the eight foot fence as it was to the sign attached to it...."SALT II Compliance Area, Property of US Government."