He hopped out and began moving back down the dirt road that his vehicle had turned up even as the gunner swung his machine gun around, facing where the shots had come from across the far side bridge. He didn’t actually open fire as it wasn’t obvious where the enemy was, which Andrew thought was wise as all it would do would be attract the Jap’s attention. There was no point in attracting attention if he didn’t have a decent target to make it worthwhile. Andrew used his magic to reach out into the distance and sensed only six enemy troops, maybe three hundred meters up the road hiding in the trees. He opened his eyes and compared the scene with his mental image but couldn’t actually see any of the enemy soldiers, so he moved position further along the dirt road, getting much closer to the main road they had been driving along.

The Nuzeelanders were dismounting from their vehicles and deploying into the scrub both on the high side of the road and also on the low side from where they were starting to return fire. Then he felt more enemy troops coming up the road. They were moving closer so fast that they had to be in a vehicle, he decided. Just before they would have come into view, the vehicle pulled over, and he could feel the enemy soldiers disembarking and spreading out. That included the driver, who also jumped out of the vehicle according to Andrew’s magical detection. The vehicle had been packed, and as a result, they added another fourteen soldiers to the enemy force that was blocking their advance.

Andrew put up a shield and raced over to the burning wreck, sheltering behind it. He’d angled the shield a little, so the bullets striking it hadn’t knocked him off balance as he ran across the space. He sliced open the top of the APC as he climbed onto the deck of the vehicle and then looked inside, but no one was still alive. He sucked the heat out of the fires burning inside the cab while absorbing the energy until he had snuffed them, by which time he felt like he was glowing with power. With the fire out, he turned toward the enemy and let loose a fireball using all the power he could. The wooded area wasn’t tinder dry, but it wasn’t damp either, and an area of maybe a hundred meters across went up in flames with a whoosh.

At least one of the enemy soldiers was caught in the fire, and a couple of others had to scramble to get out of the way, so he used a push spell to force the fire to change direction, which caught one of the two before the fire front passed them. He dropped down from the deck of the vehicle and looked back toward the Nuzeelanders. A couple of them were crouched at the edge of the bush, and one of them nodded toward the vehicle behind him, so he shook his head, indicating that there were no survivors. The man grimaced, so Andrew thought he would make the news even worse.

Contact with headquarters informed them all the troops that were available had been pushed forward to a point west of Princetown, where they were digging in until the Nuzeeland troops arrived. Safely on a main road, they raced westward to Port Campbell, where they found the Nuzeeland troops had been getting themselves ashore from their transport vessels and were organizing themselves. A lot of the heavy equipment was still aboard the ships and heading toward Warrnambool to be offloaded, but they had managed to offload a whole range of wheeled AFVs and even a couple of light-tracked ones from a couple of specialized landing ships and maybe two thousand troops. They only had mortars rather than heavy artillery, but the General in charge of the expeditionary force, who had landed with his troops and intended to lead from the front, felt it was better that they bottle the Japs up in the hilly and wooded terrain between Princetown and Appollo Bay rather than letting them get out into the open countryside beyond Princetown.

Despite assurances of his intention to stop the Japanese in the wooded hills, the General let a whole day go by before the first of the Nuzeeland troops headed east along the Great Ocean Road. Andrew was forced to say goodbye to his mad but speedy driver, who headed back north with the vehicle they had come south in, and Andrew swapped into a Nuzeeland LAV. It was quite a nice little four-wheel, lightly armored vehicle designed for reconnaissance, primarily. Its armor would stop small arms fire and slow down the cyborg’s lasers but wouldn’t stand up to heavy weapons, but that was okay, as that was one of the reasons Andrew was along.

The Nuzeeland General and most of the senior officers of the unit were dubious about the value of having a mentalist attached to their force, particularly one that insisted on riding at the front, but enough information had circulated about the effectiveness of the Jap mentalists that they were willing to accept his addition to their force. To give the Nuzeelanders their due, once they got moving, they moved quickly. They didn’t stop until they reached the defensive positions of the small militia group holding the exit of the Great Coast Road from the more rugged terrain it passed through after leaving Apollo Bay.

There was no sign of the Japanese, but that didn’t mean anything as their scouts probably included at least one mentalist who could detect the Nuzeelanders from some considerable distance and not have to expose himself. They broke camp at dawn and resumed their advance along the road toward Lower Gellibrand. There had been no indications or reports that the Japanese had reached this far west, so they were traveling at a fair clip. Andrew’s LAV was in the lead, followed by a wheeled APC, with the rest of the force strung out along the road in a long sinuous column.

Ironically, they had passed a sign that said high-risk area not that far back when shots impacted the light shield he was keeping in front of the vehicle. Fortunately, the driver heard the shots and swung left into a side road stopping behind some bushes up a small rise. The second vehicle, a wheeled APC, wasn’t so lucky and it took an RPG round in the from cabin, rolled, and came to a halt diagonally across the road about ten meters beyond the road junction Andrew’s LAV had turned up. The vehicles behind the APC came to a screeching halt and began backing up the road. Shots continued to fill the air, and the bushes Andrew’s vehicle was hiding behind shook as bullets impacted the leaves and branches.

Better late than never – sorry

“The powers that be were impressed with your performance, Andrew. A promotion and a medal are coming, but more importantly, you will be transferred to the Nuzeeland troops they’re hoping will get to Apollo Bay in time to hold it. The high command was not sure exactly where the Japs have reached and how soon they’ll get to Apollo Bay, so you are instructed to take the road through Rokewood to Colac. From there, you can take the road through Gellibrand to Lavers Hill, and from there, you can either head towards Apollo Bay or back towards Port Campbell, which is where the Nuzeelanders will land if Apollo Bay is out of the question.

The Captain had a map which he studied and nodded in agreement with her suggestion.

“Looks like a plan. Do you expect the troops at Apollo Bay to hold?”

“Just a company with no mentalist support? Not a chance. The only way the Kiwis will be able to land there is if the Japs decide to stop and have a rest instead of continuing their advance. It’s only like an hour and a half’s drive normally, probably twice that for armored vehicles, and I expect they’ll be in a position to attack tomorrow. Here are your orders.” She pulled some paper out of her jacket and handed them over. “They give you the leeway to cut across country to Port Campbell if Apollo Bay falls quickly. Right. There is a driver and a car outside. Get going.”

“Sir.” He saluted, which she returned.

“Look after yourself, Andrew,” She said as he reached the door.

He smiled but didn’t turn back. The car was easy to find, and after a brief stop at his billet to grab his gear, they were off at a hundred k’s an hour down the through road to Rokewood and then Colac. They got held up at various checkpoints, and at one point outside Colac, they had to stop and wait for a long convoy of trucks that had been impressed into the army to pass by before they could proceed.

Andrew thought the trucks couldn’t have traveled much more slowly and still kept moving, and it took forever for the convoy to finally go past. Most were medium-sized box trucks with no idea what was inside them, but there were several impressively marked vehicles that appeared to be carrying ammunition and others that appeared to be carrying food, plus several petrol tankers. So far, the shipment of oil from the oil refinery built on the southeast coast of Victoria nearest the Bass Strait oilfields hadn’t been interrupted, not that the country didn’t have a fair amount of fuel in reserve. He realized that the tankers, at least, must have gone up and around the whole northern front to get here from the refinery.

They were about three kilometers south of Colac when they got word over the radio that Apollo Bay had been taken, and the Japs were pushing ahead along the coast road so it would not be safe for them to take the road through Ferguson to Lavers Hill, but instead cut across to the Carlisle Road then work their way southwest from Chapple Vale and reached the coast road before the Twelve Apostles. Rather than stop to look at the maps, Andrew had the driver head west while he pulled up maps on his phone, and after some rather exciting moments on one dirt road or another, they made it to the Princetown Road and then the Great Ocean Road in one piece. They approached the road junction carefully, and it was with some relief that they decided they were ahead of the Japanese advance, which they saw no sign of.

Most of the defenders had already fallen back to face Tachibana’s attack, so his troops had no trouble brushing the remaining defenders aside and advancing into the town as well. It quickly devolved into a route during which probably only a third of the Ostrayan troops managed to escape along the ocean road. Yamashita had sent his troops in the four-wheel-drives to that further south on the fire trails anticipating cutting the Oastrayans off, but it took the troops longer to get back to the ocean road than they had anticipated. They arrived at the junction just as the first Ostrayan troops did and were held up short of the main road as an ever-increasing number of native soldiers joined the defense line to allow their brethren coming along behind to escape along the road.

The locals took up defensive positions on the far side of a creek at the next town, but they didn’t have time to dig in properly before the now combined Japanese troops arrived. Tachibana did the same trick by putting mentalists in the armored infantry vehicles and simply charged across the mudflats and assaulted the defender’s positions with the mentalists shielding the vehicles as they approached. The short, sharp action lasted for about an hour, leaving the few survivors to flee further west along the ocean road.

Chapter 13

Responding to the Japs

Rumors of the breakthrough down on the coast road spread rapidly through the Ostrayan army once word had reached headquarters in the usual manner that rumors spread through armies faster than the speed of light. Troops were pulled out of their positions near Winchelsea and rushed south. Two companies of infantry with artillery support were sent to Deans Marsh with instructions to push forward down that road and bottle the Japs up on the coast. More troops were sent to Forest with similar instructions for the road leading down to the coast from there. A company of infantry and some artillery that were at Warnumbool raced along the coast in a convoy of cabin cruisers and reached Apollo Bay before the Japanese did where they dug in. The hope was that they would hold until the Nuzeeland troops arrived, who were due any time soon.

Andrew had not been called upon in the two weeks since the battle of Backus Marsh, as it was now being called. Captain Greaves was back on her feet, and Paul Nguyen had turned up to reinforce their mentalist stocks. When news of the breakthrough arrived, there was considerable concern shown by all concerned. Captain Greaves pulled Andrew and Paul aside the day after the news of the breakthrough had been released officially and informed them that David Williams and Tony Contos had also been assigned to this front but had since been forwarded to the troops in the south. Contos was assigned to the force holding the Deans Marsh Road, and Williams was headed for Forest. The Captain gave a subtle signal to Andrew to stay behind when Paul left the room.

He proposed using the still-fresh Natori battalion to hook around the northern flank of the locals and either force them to retreat in a hasty and disorganized manner or get cut off and trapped in the western half of the town. It took two days for a reply to come back, which only said that they were looking at his plan. Then, two days later, a mentalist turned up whom he’d never met, so he was presumably one of the Natori people. One of the Tachibana family, Hiro, was in his fifties by the look of it, but if he’d had a good response to Rejuv, he could be a good deal older. He strode into Toshiro’s headquarters as if he owned it, which didn’t endear him to Toshiro, but he was quite respectful in his manner. After introductions, he got down to the reason for his appearance.

“I’ve got a force of ten tracked APCs with troops to add to your force. The general likes your idea and wants you to get the operation underway tomorrow.”

Toshiro was a little surprised but didn’t object to getting things underway. He introduced Tachibana to Gentaro, and the three of them sat down to work out the operational details for the following day’s attack. Because Tachibana’s troops were completely fresh, it was decided they would take the lead in the offensive, supported by all the operational armored vehicles, with Gentaro’s battalion following behind to back them up. The plan was to swing north around the large mine site that was out of use and follow the forestry trails to attack the Ostrayan positions in the flank and rear. Tachibana suggested they round up local cars to provide extra mobility for Gentaro’s troops, but Toshiro reduced that down to just four-wheel-drive vehicles and informed Gentaro would assign all the four-wheel-drive vehicles he had to Gentaro, but it wouldn’t be enough for even a quarter of his troops. Nothing else would get through the forestry trails. Tachibana shrugged and accepted their assessment of the local situation.

The attack kicked off just on first light with a team of mentalists, including Gentaro and Tachibana, ranging ahead of the lead troops knocking out the sentries and scouts. It worked so well that Toshiro didn’t think the locals realized what was happening until they were nearly surrounded. The main attack came slicing down past where the ruined communications tower was, slamming into the back of the defenders with little or no warning as far as Toshiro could tell from his position on the far side of the river.

A chaotic action ensued in the houses as the defenders tried to hold up the Japanese attack, but they hadn’t received enough reinforcements to compensate for the losses they’d taken as a result of their own attack a few days previously. Their depleted units had great trouble stopping the armored vehicles pushing into their positions, especially the ones that had mentalists aboard shielding the front of them, and gradually their whole position collapsed. Toshiro personally led an attack by his veteran first battalion across the sands at the mouth of the river where the Ostrayans had been decimated in their attack.

Rocked by the alarming news of her natural father’s death, swiftly followed by the disappearance of her half-brother, Taroniah begrudgingly returns to Marsea, the capital of Marland, at the urging of her natural father’s cousin. Here, she finds herself facing many problems; uppity nobles, rebellious Kerns, foreign invaders, and, most importantly, locating the whereabouts of her half-brother, Patros, who is now the King of Marland.

Most of these problems are not things her enormous magical power can easily rectify. Fortunately, there are some loyal people on her side who can help her resolve all these issues as she attempts to restore her brother to his throne.

“No problem. If headquarters doesn’t tell me to expand my front to the north more than it is now, I may use your troops initially to give some of my own troops a break. We’ve been practically fighting non-stop since the invasion began. Well, a lot of the men have. A few days’ break will do them good.” He gave his head a little jerk in the direction of their now-departed commander. “The enemy is building up to a counterattack on this front, or so my analysts assure me. I think it will be important that our men rest up as much as possible before the enemy launches their offensive rather than try and continue attacking ourselves just now.”

True to his word, he fed the Natori troops into the line and pulled his first battalion out for a break, and after a week, used them to replace the second battalion. Unfortunately for the second battalion, the locals decided to attack after they had only enjoyed two days’ rest. Fortunately, the local’s attack was ill-coordinated and not as strong as he had feared.

The battle raged for two days, and Toshiro even got into the action himself, personally leading a counter-attack at one point when it looked like the locals were going to break through the line. In the end, the locals lost nearly three to one in casualties and achieved nothing of significance. They managed to knock out three of his newly acquired gun carriers and a couple of the armored troop vehicles, and his brigade’s casualties were mostly among the more experienced of his troops, but it was still a resounding victory.

The key attack had come across the shallow river to the north of the town and actually managed to get across the river briefly. That was when Toshiro took the field personally. His mentalist combat skills, especially his shields, enabled them to drive back the locals across the eastern branch of the river and the western one, where they had been able to lodge a firm foothold on the far side of the river. Although his two original battalions were pretty worn out, the new one composed of Natori troops was still pretty fresh, especially as the area of the river they were defending had been subject to very little in the way of attacks by the locals.

A mad charge across the sand near the river mouth was decimated, and after that, the only action they saw was the desultory artillery barrage that went on intermittently while most of the fighting occurred further north. He pulled the second battalion back and gave them a couple of days rest before replacing the Natori battalion bringing it into reserve while he wrote up detailed plans, which he submitted to headquarters. He estimated that it would take the locals the best part of two weeks to recover from their losses in terms of organization and even longer in terms of replacements. They didn’t appear to be as short of infantry equipment as his own forces were getting, but they were short of artillery and heavy vehicles. Their losses in this battle wouldn’t help.

Better late than never… sorry

And he was no longer confident of their ability to conquer this world either. He was becoming increasingly convinced that the scouts had misunderstood or misrepresented the situation. He was expecting the high command to release one of the targeted plagues that they often used to subdue planets, but there had been no mention of one so far, and it was possible that the laboratory facilities required, along with the trained staff, were in the plague area.

Their initial attacks had gone well, but their opponents had fallen back in good order, evacuating their civilians ahead of them, not in a disorganized rout. Their technology level, in some areas, was higher than the Alliance’s, plus they had mentalists of their own, even if they were weak and badly trained. As far as he could see, the whole thing was falling apart at the seams. If not for the extra reinforcements that the fleeing Natori people would now provide him, he was half expecting to have to start falling back in the face of enemy attacks very shortly.

The enemy forces facing his own troops had increased substantially in the last few weeks, and from the few prisoners they had been able to get hold of recently, apparently, the enemy government had carried out a program of raising levies that were just now finishing their training and coming to the front. One of the men he had interrogated also reported that somebody called the Indoneeshans, who had been the main threat to the people they were invading, were now talking about making an alliance with the locals to face the invaders jointly. Even if all they concluded was a peace treaty, it would free up even more troops for the locals to send south.

With no zivvy, it was going to be impossible to control the locals they had taken prisoner. They couldn’t even control their own juveniles, and there were increasing reports of youngsters fleeing to the dubious safety of the enemy. So far, the government had resisted introducing the so-called pinning method that had recently been approved due to the poor survival rate of those it was used on, but the pressure to adopt that method was growing with the ever-increasing number of prisoners. Chipping had been bad enough, and he had several relatives who had had bad grow-ins, including his cousin Himari who had gone from a bright above, average student to a drooling idiot when she received a wife chip. He briefly wondered what had happened to her in all this turmoil before turning his attention back to the matters at hand.

“I had best end my leave and return to the front to oversee the integration of these new troops into my command, sir.”

“Unfortunately, yes. Right. Gentlemen, I shall leave you to it.”

The General received and returned their salutes and departed, leaving Toshiro and Gentaro facing each other. Toshiro took in the nervous expression on the face of the newest mentalist assigned to his command and smiled.

“Where are your troops at the moment?”

“Strung out along the road leading to this town. The armored gun carriers and the mechanized vehicles were right behind us, maybe thirty or forty minutes at most. The rest are on foot, so they probably won’t be here till tomorrow.”

On further examination it has been decided there is another problem with my left eye that need’s ficiing first – so I am having surgery on that on Monday 23rd – its said to be painful and require wearing eye protection afterward for at least 2 days so there will be no Ostraya post this week –
I will still have to have the other surgeries I mentioned in about 6 weeks time with a 10 day gap which places them in early December hopefully they will both be completed before Xmas.
My writing will probably be affected between now and early January (we have 20 days holiday from the 27th dec onward every year)
Taroniah will hopefully still be out the weekend after next or thereabouts
Kyron will be delayed I expext.

Bloody hell! He thought about his first wife and shuddered. The picture was getting messier and messier! Not that things were going well here, either, but at least they were making ground.

“Damn! What a mess.” Then another thought hit him. “Is there any sign of it here?”

“Not so far. The thinking at headquarters is that the Natori situation was the result of deliberate action by the Enemy because it was so well planned. They sought out the disaffected on the planet and built a network without anyone realizing it. With no separate native enclaves left on Natori, their guard was down with regard to the chances of internal revolt. We’re watching more closely here, if for no other reason than we are already fighting a war. It’s bad enough the natives have mentalists of their own.”

The General paused to gather his thoughts. So far, Toshiro hadn’t had to face any enemy mentalists on his front. He understood that, generally, they weren’t as powerful as the average True Man mentalist, but there were rumors of at least one or two very powerful enemy mentalists that had been encountered in the north, but they were not operating on his front line yet. Why you would hold your strongest back, Toshiro had no idea, and they were only rumors, but it was worrying. He considered asking the General but the General spoke first, waving a hand at the other officer.

“Saburo here will be commanding what will be your third battalion. It is composed of mostly Natori people and has the usual mix of a few trained military cyborgs and a lot of semi-trained former civilians. Plus, we are adding six armored gun carriers to your armored company, which will give it some bite back.”

Toshiro nodded. The armored company was down to four tanks and six of the gun carriers, although two more tanks were being repaired at present, mostly by cannibalizing a tank that had been hit badly and deemed not worth repairing.

“Your mechanized company is going to be split in two to form a mechanized company and a motorized company. You’ll be getting eight armored tracked troop carriers supplied by Natori, complete with troops, and we are ramping up the conversion of local vehicles to build a lot more of those armored utility vehicles. Eventually, we hope to build enough to build your motorized company up to full strength.”

“That’s the good news. The bad news is that the trickle of reinforcements you’ve been getting for your infantry battalions is going to dry up, at least in the short term. The locals have fielded some new units on the northern front, and we’ve taken some losses. So the north is getting all the reinforcements in the short term, Then the northwest and you last, I’m afraid.” Toshiro nodded in acceptance. The recent assault on the town that was the key to the left end of the northern front had been stopped with heavy losses, which explained why most of the Natori troops would be sent north. What choice did he have, anyway? So now Natori was lost to rebellion like Tomkya was, or at least the most heavily populated part of Tomkya. The Enemy was bringing the Alliance to its knees, and no one seemed to be able to stop them.