Chapter 16 Chapter VII

The "New Bushido Law," which governed Colonel Kassad's life, slowly developed, and it no longer required soldiers to keep their own lives.During the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Old Land, individual military commanders began to incorporate entire peoples into their war strategy, so that all citizens became legitimate military targets.The executioners in uniform sat safely in a bunker fifty meters underground.The surviving citizens were so disgusted with such dishonorable behavior that for nearly a century and more, the word "military" took on a certain connotation of irony.

As the new Bushido slowly evolved, it combined ancient honor with personal courage and felt that mercy should be given whenever possible.At the same time it contained an intelligent view of a return to the pre-Napoleonic style of small, "not all-out" warfare, with definite objectives and prohibition of excesses.The law calls for abandoning nuclear weapons and all-out strategic bombing, and attacking only the most important targets (unless absolutely necessary).In addition, it also requires a return to the concept of two-army battles in the Middle Ages on Earth, that is, the battle between small professional soldiers, the time of the battle is agreed by both parties, and the place of the battle can damage public and private property. Minimize.

The Law was fully enforced for the next four centuries after the Escape.The fact that the underlying technology was fundamentally stagnant helped the Overlord for the three centuries at that point, by having a monopoly on teleporters that could send the right military resources to the right place at any time.Even in those special colonies and independent worlds, which are separated from the ring network by leap years caused by time debt, they have no hope of competing with the power of the overlord.Unique political insurrections like the guerrilla warfare of Maui, or the insanity of Qom Riyadh, were thoroughly quelled, and any atrocities in these campaigns merely pointed to the importance of a return to the strict laws of the new Bushido.But no matter how thoughtful and well-prepared the army was, no one had fully planned for the inevitable confrontation with the Ousters.

For four centuries, the Ousters were the Overlord's only external threat, when the ancestors of this tribe of wildlings left the solar system in their crude warships: leaky O'Neill City, tumbling asteroids, and experimental comet farms .Even after the Ousters had Hawking drives, the official policy of the Overlord was to ignore them, and as long as their swarms remained in the interstellar darkness, those near-system plunders were little more than mining hydrogen for gas planets, or Just dig some ice cubes on the uninhabited moon. Early conflicts on outlying planets like Grass World and GHC 2990 were considered abnormal, but the Overlord turned a blind eye to them.Even the pitched battle on Lee San was treated only as a matter of colonial service, and the army task force did not arrive there until six years after the fighting had begun and five years after the Ousters had left, yet all barbarian brutality was left behind Cloud nine.People agree that as long as the overlord rolls up his sleeves and flexes his muscles, no barbarian will dare to raid again.

Decades after Li San's time, the military and Ouster space forces had clashed in more than a hundred frontier regions, though there had been no infantry engagements other than sporadic fleet encounters in a gravity-free, airless environment.Some rumors began to circulate in the world network: Ousters will never pose a threat to humans living on terrestrial planets, because they have adapted to the zero-gravity environment for centuries; Ousters have evolved something higher than, Or less than, human stuff; they don't have teleportation technology, and never will, so they'll never pose a threat to the military.Then, there was the Brescia incident.

Brescia is one of those self-righteous independent worlds, happy to have easy access to the Ring, and eight months to stay away from it, rich exporting diamonds, rough roots, and unrivaled coffee .It obsequiously refused to become a colony, but relied on the overlord's protectorate and common market to meet its burgeoning economic goals.Like most of the world at the time, Brescia prided itself on its self-defense forces: a dozen torchships, a converted decommissioned space attack carrier with half a century of service in the military air force, more than forty small fast orbital patrols a standing army of 90,000 volunteers; a respectable ocean-going navy; and a depot of nuclear weapons, though accumulated there for purely symbolic purposes.

The whereabouts of the Ouster's Hawking Tool once attracted the attention of the Overlord's monitoring station, but it was just another group of migration groups that were mistaken for the Ouster, and they would not approach the Brescia galaxy within half a light-year.Orders were then issued that unless the Ousters entered the radius of the Oort Cloud, no detection would be required.However, the hordes unknowingly and abruptly corrected their course until they entered the Oort Cloud radius, and the Ousters fell on Brescia like the plague of the Old Testament.There was a gap of at least seven months between Brescia and the overlord's call for help and response.

Its space defense force was wiped out within the first twenty hours of the battle.Then, the Destroyer Tour Group sent more than 3,000 spaceships into Brescia's Earth-Moon space.Systematically strike planetary defense facilities. This world was originally established by decent Central European immigrants during the first wave of great escape, and the two continents were also commonly called South Brescia and North Brescia.The Northern Continent has deserts, high-altitude permafrost, and six cities. Most of the residents are thick-root growers and petroleum engineers.South Brescia, which is more temperate in terms of geography and climate, is the main concentration of the world's 400 million people and is also home to large coffee plantations.

As if to prove what war was like, the Ousters bloodbathed northern Brescia, first with hundreds of dust-free nukes and tactical plasma bombs, then with death rays, and finally with custom-made viruses.Only 14 million residents escaped the tiger's mouth.South Brescia was not bombed, only specific military targets, the airfield and the large port at Sono were targeted. The military has this dogma: Although a planet may be attacked from orbit, for an industrialized planet, a military invasion in the true sense is impossible; because there will be logistical problems after landing, and it is necessary to occupy such a vast area. area, the size of the invading army will become difficult to control, which is the biggest trouble for the invasion itself.

The Ousters apparently hadn't read the military textbooks in the army.On the twenty-third day of the post-occupation authorization ceremony, more than two thousand landing ships and assault craft descended on South Brescia.Within the first hour of the invasion, the rest of the Brescia Air Force was all over.Two nukes did hit the Ouster's area of ​​activity: the first was deflected by the energy shield, and the second hit a scout ship that might have been a decoy. These Ousters, it seems, have been physically altered over the course of three centuries.They do prefer a zero-gravity environment.But the powered exoskeleton worn by their mobile infantry works well here, and in just a few days, those Ouster soldiers covered in black and slender limbs occupied the entire city of South Brescia, like giant spiders. Like mass raids.

On the nineteenth day of the invasion, the last organized resistance was also crushed.The capital Baijinmin Temple also fell on this day.An hour after the Ouster army entered the city, the last hyperluminous message sent from Brescia to the Overlord was lost in the middle of its transmission. Colonel Federman Kassad arrived twenty-nine standard weeks later with the Ministry's First Fleet.Thirty Omega-class torch ships protected a space jump ship equipped with a teleportation system and entered the galaxy at high speed.Three hours after the spiral descent, the singularity ball was activated, and ten hours later, four hundred first-line warships sailed into the galaxy.Twenty-one hours later, the counterattack against the invasion began. In the first few minutes of the Brescia fight, it was just math for some.For Kassad, those few weeks were not just about the math, but more about the brutal beauty of combat.This is the first time that a jumping ship has been used as a unit above the aviation unit level, and the confusion can be imagined.Kassad walked in out of daylight and fell into a cloud of sand and yellow dust, because the teleportation port of the assault boat faced down a steep slope covered with mud and the blood of the leading squad. Very slippery.Kassad lay in the mud, looking down at the chaotic scene below.Of the seventeen teleportation assault boats, ten fell and burst into flames, scattered at the foot of the mountain and in the plantation like broken toys.The containment fields of the remaining ships were shrinking, too, as missiles and charged particle beams attacked, covering the landing area under a dome of orange flames.Kassad's tactical display was a hopeless mess; his helmet showed an unbearable swath of vectors indicating artillery fire, flashing red dots indicating where troops were dying, and overlaid with Ouster jamming signals. Someone in his rudimentary command circuit yelled, "Oh shit! Damn it! Oh shit!" The implant didn't register the signal, where the data for the command group should have been. A soldier pulled him up, and Kassad patted the mud off his baton, walked over to where the next squad had arrived, and the fight resumed. From the first few minutes of his arrival in South Brescia, Kassad realized that the new Bushido was dead.More than 8,000 well-armed and well-trained army soldiers: the army who came out of the assembly area wanted to find an uninhabited place to fight.The Ouster army retreated behind a line of charred mud, full of booby traps and dead paupers.The military department uses long-distance transmission to chase the enemy and find the enemy to fight.The Ousters responded with a barrage of nuclear and plasma weapons, confining the pursuing armies, while the Ousters took the opportunity to back off and take cover in prepared fortifications around cities and dropship sites.