Horjins Avante!

The Dietsland Free State is a small autonomous territory centered on the city of Davignon, and is a small enclave of Batavers.

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Continuator
"The devil in the details"
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Horjins Avante!

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The order they had been waiting for crackled loudly over the Regimental Panopticon net: "Horjins Avante!" This was it. The Imperial Forces were going onto the attack.

Tribunus Antoninus Rostami slipped down into the commander's seat of his Horjin AFV and slammed the turret hatch above him. "Driver, forward. Full speed." This order was almost apologetic as the seventeen-tonne Horjin sprung out of the hide in a cloud of dust. In part it was a feeling of apprehension. Rumours had been circulating for years about the nature of the horrors that were quietly being brewed in Voltrue. For the most part the Imperials had been able to console themselves that at least Jingdao would be on the receiving end of whatever nastiness the lunatic Myksos family had been keeping under wraps. Now it appeared that would not be the case.

At least, for a change, the Imperial Army was operating on the right side of the law, at the command of a lawfully elected Kaiseress, carrying none of the unfortunate connotations of the business last year. Now the full strength of the Imperial Republic was behind them, both figuratively and literally. Stacked up behind the 040 Infantry Regiment along the roads from Davignon to the borders with Voltrue were two further infantry regiments, two artillery regiments, an area defence regiment, an engineer regiment, the command regiment (derived from his own parent legion - the XII Legio Scholae Evocati) and a Supply Column from the Shirerithian Supplies Service that stretched almost all the way back to Davignon itself.

All told, there were 15,880 men, 698 armoured fighting vehicles and 200 artillery pieces being committed to the strike southwards into Voltrue from Davignon. A further 14,400 men from the legions assigned to the Puritanian Guidance Authority's Defence Directorate, remained in the forward operating bases and logistical hubs of the Imperial Garrison in Dietsland, in case there were any local difficulties while the operation unfurled.

Somewhere behind Rostami lurked the vast imposing bulk of his regiment's Snark - a monstrous armoured walker that was designed to serve as a mobile command post and artillery platform. Yet Rostami disdained it. It was too big, too obvious a target. He'd seen one burn during the brief but bloody incursion into the Vale of Angularis and he'd vowed never to be caught inside one. Instead he preferred the far smaller and much more agile Horjin. It allowed him to keep pace with his armoured infantry and have a better feeling for what was going on up ahead.

The Horjin AFV is an 8x8 wheeled Armoured Fighting Vehicle (AFV) comprised of five fighting platforms; Armoured Personnel Carrier, Reconnaissance Tank, Light Tank, Infantry Fighting Vehicle & the Electronic Warfare Vehicle. Rostami's was a EWV (*borrowed* from the legion's artillery regiment), only armed with a heavy calibre machine gun, but stuffed full of electronic jamming and eavesdropping gizmos, as well as the ubiquitous Panopticon Node, giving him the ability communicate with and direct his own troops whilst seriously fucking about with the command and control abilities of any opponent he might run into.

Visibility was perfect and ahead Rostami could see, magnified through the external optical sensors, the first Voltrue village. The regiment's complement of sixty-four Horjin's fanned out and sped towards the village at full tilt at some fifty km/h. It was, so Rostami mused, an impressive enough sight. A plume of dust billowed out behind each Horjin. Behind them trundled the rather slower complement of fifty armoured battlewagons, converted lorries, ill-suited to cross-country travel but armed with a fearsome rotary cannon that would serve as a rallying point for each of the troops following in the wake of the armoured infantry.

On either flank he could see but not hear the uncanny hovering effect of the Red Queen squadron command vehicles. In the absence of the Imperial Shirerithian Air Forces (and when was the ISAF ever not absent?) the ten Red Queens, gravimetric vehicles, assigned to his regiment were pressed into duty as flank guards as well as for conducting reconnaissance. They would play a giant game of leapfrog, one hovering at fifty to a hundred feet while the other bounded forward a kilometre before rearing up like a praying mantis into the hover to await for its partner to repeat the process.

Had Rostami a say in the matter he would have liked to have pounded every settlement on his line of advance into rubble, but the orders had been clear. Civilian deaths and collateral damage was to be avoided wherever possible - these were, however truculent, still citizens and subjects of the Imperial Republic. So the 80mm field guns assigned to the Vexillatio or battlegroup remained silent and Rostami's regiment would be obliged to do this the hard way - the entire way to Kingsrise.

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