The Great Horse Dance
Written by: Ripshot
I'm kind of at a loss at being told to write down what happened that day, I mean you had to be there to believe some of the things that went down that night. One second you're minding your business in the upper districts of Raleigh, sipping your soycaf and buying your NERPs in the post-christmas 'your gift sucks so I'm returning it' sale, next thing you know an armored chopper's mounted your car and an Elf with a funny lookin' moustache is spraying McHughs with a submachinegun. Crazy rude, eh omae? So how the hell did this end up happening?The Conflict
Prelude
Now you gotta understand that at that time, the Horse Dancers weren't even a blip on the city's radar. Everyone knew that there were go-gangs in the concrete forest, but all of them were considered small-time operations of maybe a dozen hoods on dirtbikes. The Khan had other reasons to make a raid, but he doesn't make it a secret that one of his reasons was to make himself and his goals known to the public. So he gathers his best men and his best gear, and tells them how they're gonna make history: They're gonna straight-up raid Raleigh, no subterfuge or sneaky-business, just rolling right on through with bikes taking what they want and letting the locals know who's the new threat to their way of living. The gang agreed in the way most go-gangs do when their boss comes up with a wizz plan: getting steaming-drunk and firing a few bursts of gunfire into the neighboring buildings.
Deployment
The Khan's hand-selected raiders showed up near midnight, sitting on their bikes which were in turn being carried inside an armored-up truck - you don't want to spoil the surprise with the sound of a dozen or so bike-engines revving up, after all. Once they reached what was considered the edge of the Concrete Forest and the begining of the 'civilized' parts of Raleigh, they downed their last beers and flooded out the back, each individual knowing his own objective and moving into the city as independant raiders as much as loosely-knit but coordinated teams.
Lone Star picked up the scent of trouble quickly when one of their beat-cops called in seeing bikes rev through his street, but didn't take it seriously until another officer reported automatic gunfire and got a report signifying an officer's biomonitor reporting grievous injuries. At that point, they called up all the spare HTR units they had and redirected all the nearby patrols to get to the incident-area ASAP.
The Engagement
Khan and his boys put up a hell of a raid, but even they were smart enough to know that a group of gangers in flak-jackets on motorbikes - no matter how cool said bikes are - wouldn't stand a chance against any actual resistance by law-enforcement, so as soon as Lone Star's HTR vans started to pull up at the end of the streets, they immediately turned tail to fall back into the Concrete Forest and hopefully lose them before making their way home.
Outcome
The Horse Dancers managed to succeed at what they set out to do, but at a pretty heavy cost. Having two riders on some of the bikes meant that they were able to get away with most of their gear along with the newly-stolen bikes despite the deaths, but Khan took the loss of some of his most reliable men pretty damn hard. if the size of the pyres were anything to go by.
Lone Star on the other hand, despite failing to prevent the Dancers from getting away but consider their repelling actions to be an overall success, stopping the raid the moment they arrived and preventing any bystander deaths (for once).
Aftermath
Long-term, it looks like both sides got something good out of the whole deal: Khan's rep exploded overnight, both in the city and in the Concrete Forest for having the balls to lead a raid right into the city and mostly get away with it, while Lone Star came off as heroes for repelling the Dangers and even managed to finagle a budget-increase out of the deal.
Conflict Type
Skirmish
Battlefield Type
Urban
Start Date
4/1/2069, 11:30PM
Ending Date
5/1/2069, 0:10AM
Conflict Result
Overall victory for Lone Star and Raleigh, strategic victory for the Horse Dancers.
Location
Belligerents
Lone Star HTR
Strength
Papa Khan took eighteen of his best men on this raid, all straddling the best bikes the go-gang had to offer and rigged with the best-kept guns the Concrete Forest had to offer, as well as a couple of tricked-out armored trucks near the edge of the forest to give them safe transport in and out the Forest.
Once Lone Star realised what was happening, they went out in full: Two armored vans and four pursuit-cars packed full of the city's best HTR teams were scrambled in under ten minutes, as well as every beat-cop in the district being called in to provide backup and try to contain the situation.
Casualties
Six gangers in all were killed in the raid: The pointman, calling himself 'Vesuvius', was the first to go, getting ignonymously plinked by a bystander who drew a CC'd pistol. Two more were killed when they opened fire on a mob-owned cafe and got blasted with automatic-shotguns when the owners thought it was a hit on the visiting underboss. Finally, thee of the Khan's personal escort were killed covering their retreat when Lone Star finally came out in force, two dying from the hail of retaliatory gunfire and the third, Khan's right-hand man 'Soyombo', ate his own gun after a wounding-shot took him off his bike. All six were given full honors posthumously back at the camp, or so I heard.
The Horse-Dancers are a lot of things, but 'accurate' isn't one of them. Lone Star only had two casualties: a beat-cop who got ventilated by Khan himself after winging one of his personal-guard, and an HTR operator who actually got zipped by one of his own subordinates in a little blue-on-blue action. Jury's out on of the second one was really an accident.
Objectives
On the surface, the raid just looked like a bunch of go-gangers tearing shit up, but the Dancers actually accomplished a few other goals in the midst of all the chaos: Two high-end bikes were stolen from a local dealership, along with a bunch of other stuff lifted from shot-up stores, and were able to get a good metric on how far Lone Star's willing to chase bikes back into the Concrete Forest.
You might think that Lone Star were looking to wipe them out then and there, but their actual objectives - leaked from misposted after-action report - were pretty tame: they didn't know what kind of numbers they were really dealing with, and cornering the go-gangers might lead to a bloody last stand, so they went for the pragmatic route of chasing them out back into the Concrete Forest by forcing a retreat.
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