Return to the CI-Net Home PageButcherbird is a brief scene from a BattleTech campaign I played once. The scene is the planet Alphard (I call it Alphard, anyway; the maps and the sourcebooks don't agree on its name) in what was once the Marian Hegemony on the Periphery of inhabited space. At the time of the story, the Marian Hegemony had been recently absorbed by my pan-Periphery state, the Outworlds Confederation. House Marik, disturbed by this growing power on their border, launched an attack against Alphard with a full regiment of crack 'mechs outfitted with rediscovered technology. Defending the planet was the First Marian Regulars, which consisted of two companies of standard 'mechs, a company of tanks, and two fighter wings, one aerospace and the other conventional.
The Regulars took out a full third of the Marik force before it even reached the ground, due in large part to the efforts of the Shrikes and a pair of Steelhawk aerospace fighters that shredded the Marik command battalion's Overlord class dropship while it was still in space. The rest of the Marik dropships were destroyed on the ground by conventional fighter strikes.
The vastly outclassed Confederate garrison managed to hold on somehow at the primary area of conflict, the outskirts of Nova Roma. The Gazelle that went down in the city was very helpful to that cause; it went down behind Confederate lines where it was quickly boarded and brought under control by Marian militia units. It contained almost all of the Marik supplies and its cargo of tanks was more or less intact, and were quickly put into action against the Marik 'mechs.
By the second day of fighting, the Confederates were still holding out, but were obviously unable to continue for much longer. Many of their 'mechs were missing limbs and had been all but stripped of their armor. They were pulling disabled 'mechs (both Confederate and Marik) from the field when the battle lines moved away from them, doing the minimum of repairs necessary to get them functioning again, and sending them back out with Confederate pilots who had already had one 'mech shot out from under them.
The Marik forces weren't particularly happy, either. They were doing much better as far as damage taken went, but they didn't have any repair parts or ammunition (all of which were aboard the Gazelle), so they were relying almost entirely on energy weapons while the Confederate 'mechs used their own shells and missiles against them.
When, late on the second day, Confederate reinforcements arrived, in the form of the fresh Star-League-tech 'mechs of the MacLeod's Highlanders regiment dropping from orbit into the middle of the Nova Roma battlefield, the Marik force surrendered.