Date: April 9, 2459
Location: Loric
Title: A Dish Served Cold
Authors: Chris Hartford and Jason M. Hardy
Type: Short Story (BattleCorps)
Synopsis: Captain-General Geralk Marik's command bunker shudders under a Lyran artillery barrage supporting an LCAF assault which has punched through his perimeter, swatting aside his best troops in the process. His comtech reports the western logistics park is gone, and that counterbattery fire has been ineffective, while the Lyran advances have been slowed, at high cost, to the north and west, where FWL forces hold the Djansky crossing and the Kohlan Road. Geralk asks for an update on the eastern front, but the comtech can't raise anyone there.
Geralk exits his bunker and looks east. Through the smoke, 500 meters away, he sees large figures advancing through the burning wreckage of the supply depot. He dismisses their apparent size, believing them to be spotters casting long shadows through the setting sun and mist. He orders the security company to reinforce the eastern perimeter.
His ComTech reports receiving a direct communication from the Lyran commander, General Marcus Andrews, who tells him he is surrounded, and offers him the honors of war. Geralk refuses to surrender, and dismisses the Lyrans as a few infiltrators. Andrews signs off, and the Lyran assault renews with a hail of lasers, missiles, and cannon shells, knocking Geralk flat and singeing his hair. The Lyran 'Mechs crash through the FWL defenses and shrug off desultory return fire from the armored vehicles present at the command camp.
Getting to his feet, Geralk grabs an armored vest and a helmet and orders his forces to withdraw to the Sumire River and hold there, if possible, then fall back to the DropShips, if not. He then runs to a tank parked next to the command post and charges the oncoming 'Mechs to buy his forces time to retreat.
Notes: As with "Nothing Ventured" and "Prometheus Unbound," I'm revisiting "A Dish Served Cold" in the scene-by-scene deep dive format, since my initial review compressed two years of story on Alarion into a few paragraphs. I plan to do the same for "The Spider Dances" and "The Top of the Scrap Heap," by which point I'll have covered all the longer early stories in the deep-dive format, then play catch-up with Star League era and 1st-3rd Succession War stories that have come out in the last few years. Then on to the 4th Succession War stories.
The story ending implies that Geralk drove in alone, guns-a-blazing, against the oncoming Mackies and got stomped flat. However, the original Marik sourcebook indicates that the battle raged for hours, with Geralk remaining in control throughout, throwing everything he had at the Lyran ‘Mechs, even to the point of having his DropShips hover over the battlefield to provide ground support fire. Most likely, after he saw that his tank's main gun wasn't having much effect on the BAR 10 armor, he too fell back to the Sumire river and coordinated the fight from there. The fact that Geralk has crusted blood on his face from earlier fighting implies that he was leading from the front, and that his tank took enemy fire.
The historical record is that the battle ended with Geralk's forces shattered and him standing alone in front of a victorious Mackie, when then stomps on him in revenge for all the destruction he'd wrought during his invasion of Lyran space. That would seemingly require his plan to "fall back to the DropShips" to have gone awry - perhaps because he chose to order the DropShips to be brought up to the Sumire river for fire support, rather than handling the evacuation. Given the thin armor of the day, the Mackies might have crippled those ships (glorified cargo shuttles in this early era) and left Geralk with nowhere to run.
Loric seems to have been a multicultural settlement. Sumire is a Japanese name, Kohlan is the name of an ethnic Azeri village in Iran, and Djansky is Polish.
The Lyrans aren’t piloting pure Mackie clones. They mount lasers, missiles and autocannon. Whatever data they pulled from Hesperus II appears not to have included the HAF’s ‘Mech-mounted PPC, or at least Lyran engineers weren’t able to duplicate it for their first generation of ‘Mechs. (The Typhoon entry indicates that the LCAF debuted its prototype PPCs on that chassis in 2461 – two years after this battle.)
At this point, the FWL is probably fielding Kestrels (heavy tanks), Tigershrikes (hovercraft), missile/autocannon carriers, APCs, Stoats (scout cars), Randolphs (support vehicles), Eagle and Dragonfire aerospace fighters, and perhaps Mosquito conventional fighters (though those were mostly sold to militias), and had been handily defeating LCAF Marsdens (heavy tanks), weapon carriers, APCs, Stoats and Randolphs. Both sides also rely heavily on infantry and artillery. They Lyrans had some sort of aerospace fighters and armored VTOLs at this point (both were used in the Vega raid that stopped the earlier DCMS invasion of Skye cold), but solid data on which designs in particular is currently lacking.
The primary point of difference between the LCAF and FWLM during Geralk Marik's invasion is in their main battle tanks. Looking at the Marsden vs. the Kestrel, the FWLM superiority becomes evident. The two tanks have identical 3/5 movement profiles, but the larger (80 tons vs. 65) Kestrel mounts a heavy rifle capable of punching through the then-standard BAR 7 armor, while the Marsden had just an AC/5 that has to drill through all the plating before inflicting critical hits.
The FWL seems to have been completely in the dark about the existence of BattleMechs, since Geralk at first dismisses their size as an optical illusion. Thing is, not only have BattleMechs been around for 20 years at this point (though apparently the National Intelligence Agency was unaware of this - so they probably lack assets in the Federated Suns, the Terran Hegemony, and the Draconis Combine, where fights involving the Hegemony's superweapon would have been discussed), but IndustrialMechs have been around for centuries. Why wouldn't he have assumed that the Lyrans had fielded weaponized WorkMechs, as some militaries tried to do (albeit ineffectively) prior to the introduction of BattleMechs?
I wonder what happened to the FWL aerospace fighters? Geralk asks where his air support is. Why doesn't his holotank show him real time updates of those assets? The Large Lasers on the Dragonfire and Eagle, along with the LRMs, would allow those fighters to effectively engage the Mackies with roughly equivalent firepower. The main weaknesses of those fighters are their comparatively thin armor and weaker engines, so perhaps they did make a run at the Mackies while the eastern perimeter was collapsing and were shot out of the skies.