Captain Harl of the Rebel 91st Battalion's anti-walker platoon was quietly confident,
despite the panicky comms traffic they'd picked up earlier. With mountains to their left
and soft ground to their right, the Imperial walkers would have to come through the trees
dead ahead, and by the time they cleared them they'd be well within range. He looked
around his position, checking the tangler teams again. Each team had two remote-control
missiles on tripod launch rails, connected to each end of 100 metre spool of
mono-filament cable. In front of him, the command-mine control box was all wired up
and armed, and the kill teams with their mag-bombs were ready to go. They'd learnt a
lot since Hoth.
Suddenly, a heavy explosion to his right showered him with earth. More plasma bolts
were screeching overhead, and he sought desperately for the source of the fire. It took
him a moment to re-calibrate his brain, because the fire was coming from across the
soft ground, and from a very long range.
"What the Hell...."
Harl scrabbled about for his macro-binoculars. Unbelievably, grey Imperial vehicles
were advancing across the marshland, showers of spray and mud obscuring his view
of how they were doing it. He was completely wrong-footed: all the mines were between
his position and the woods and the tangler teams' arcs wern't good.
"Target right flank! Re-deploy! Re-deploy!"
His men scrambled to point their equipment at the new threat. A corporal shouted
something he didn't catch, pulled some plugs out of the command-mine box and ran
off towards the trees before he could question it. The fire was coming in thick and fast
now and they were taking serious casualties. Eventually, tanglers lept from their rails
and sped off towards the mystery vehicles. Rudders hard over once past them, they
spun round and round the target until it's legs would be wrapped in cable and unable
to move. it was foolproof and tested in battle many times, but today it made no difference.
He watched in horror as the vehicles simply ploughed on, dragging the spent tangler
rockets behind them like discarded toys.
He was still frozen, watching the advancing vehicles, when a blurred sillouette appeared
in his view finder. He put the focus cues on it, and it resolved into the shape of the
corporal. He was running towards the Imperial attack, from cover to cover, and he was
carrying something: one of the command mines. Eventually, he got himself in front of the
lead vehicle, stood up, and threw the mine like a discus. It cost him his life as a shower
of blaster bolts blew him to pieces a second later, but his aim had been true and the mine
had gone under the vehicle. As it advanced, it suddenly vanished in a heavy explosion of
mud and earth, and then shuddered to a halt.
Harl's men began to cheer at the sight of this, but their cheers were cut short as, to their
amazement, the Imperial vehicle
didn't fall over: it just sat there, pouring fire at them.
Harl couldn't understand it: how the hell were they doing this? Watching though his
binoculars again, he got his answer. Another vehicle turned sharply sideways to go around
the disabled one, and he could see that it was rolling on multiple wheels, with a mechanism
that laid a kind of articulated "carpet" under them and then picked it up once they'd rolled
over it. In the back of his mind, he knew he'd seen something like this in a history book,
but it wouldn't come, and this was no time for reverie.
Harl looked around at their piles of kit. It was all useless: these things rolled over the
tangler cable, they were too fast for the kill teams to approach with mag-bombs, the
grav-field disrupters were irrelevant, there was nothing they could do. He made a decision.
"Retreat! Fall back! Every man for himself!"
They didn't need telling twice. The Imperials gave no quarter, blizzards of blaster bolts
cutting through the men as they ran, felling many. In his fear and frustration, Harl wanted
desperately to turn and shake his fist a them, make some sort of defiant gesture, but he
didn't. He just ran, like the rest.
At the command post, General Timpu was seething with frustration and his staff were
taking the brunt of it.
"How in the gods' names can they be
there man? They'd have to be walking at 40kmh
to do that and no walker's that fast, not even an AT-ST! Are all our scouts drunk? These
reports don't make any sense at all!"
"It's all true Sir."
The General spun around to see Captain Harl in the doorway. He was panting and
dishevelled, and nursing an ugly blaster burn on his arm. Despite this, he’d had time
to dredge his memory.
“They’re not walking General, they’re using
tracks....”
“Tracks!” Timpu was thunderstruck.
“Well the devious Imperial bastards.....”
(Note that the AT-TS obeys Imperial design rule 1a: "All vehicles shall be painted grey
irrespective of operational enviroment" and rule 2b "All vehicles, no matter how
formidable, shall incorporate a critical weakness that can be exploited by some reckless
hero with more bollocks than brain cells". In this case, one of the vulnerable umbilicals
at the back has saved him the trouble by disconnecting itself....
)
