by Jay Allan
“Uh, sir…” – White had no idea what he was doing talking to the general, and he could feel the nausea in the pit of his stomach – “…sir, I want to…”
“Relax, White. I was a sergeant once too. Just tell me what’s happening. I’d rather hear it from you up on the line than through six echelons of bullshit.” White didn’t know it, but Tyler had given him his stripes…and handpicked him to command the strongpoint at the end of the line, overruling the former private’s immediate superiors, who still considered him a discipline problem. But he was an unmatched fighter when he was in action, and Jarrod Tyler needed men who could kill the enemy.
“Yes, sir.” White took a deep breath. “The enemy is maneuvering around our left flank. We’ve inflicted heavy casualties, but they have a substantial advantage in numbers…and now they are widening their axis of advance.” White paused and took another breath. “They are now moving considerable forces on an arc outside our effective range and around the flank.”
There was a brief pause on the line…Tyler digesting what White had told him. “Alright, Sergeant. I want you to keep up the fire as hot and heavy as you can.” A short pause. “We’re going to try to hit the enemy flanking force with a counter-attack, so I want your people to be careful about firing at friendlies…you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” White snapped off his reply. He had no idea where Tyler was going to scrape up the troops for a counter-attack. But, he thought, I guess that’s why he’s got those stars.
“And White?”
“Yes, sir?”
“When the enemy pulls back…I want your guns to rip them a new asshole.”
“Yes, sir….with pleasure, sir.”
“Attention, Columbians.” Tyler stood on top of the body of the battle-scarred tank. The main gun had been torn off, and the autocannons were all twisted wreckage…but the thing still functioned as a vehicle. Without weapons, it wasn’t much good on the front lines, so he’d swapped it for his command car and its fully-functional dual autoguns. His army didn’t have resources to waste. If it had some kind of weapon, it was up on the front lines, not serving as the commander’s glorified taxicab.
He’d managed to organize a counterattack against the enemy flanking force, driving them back into the maelstrom of White’s guns. It was a nice little victory, but he knew his people couldn’t do it again. He’d put everything he had left, teams of reassigned mechanics marching along limping groups of walking wounded. They’d done the job, but now they were finished. Many of them were dead, the rest wounded, exhausted, broken. The next time the enemy attacked the flank, they would succeed. Their troops would stream around the end of the line and roll up his entire army. There was no choice. Stubbornness would only bring certain defeat. He had to abandon the line. And that meant giving up everything…the camps, the field hospital. Everything.
“Attention, Columbians,” he repeated, shouting as loudly as he could. The mic relayed his words to the speakers set up around the crowd, but he knew there weren’t enough to relay the message to the tens of thousands gathered around. Some would hear his words directly; the rest would have to rely on their friends and countrymen to pass the message on. “Your army is fighting 10 kilometers north of where we stand, battling against an army that outclasses us in both numbers and equipment. They have fought this war with everything men and women can give…with their blood, their bodies, their hearts.”
He gazed out over the mass of people. His people. They were staring up at him silently, attentively. “I cannot lie to you, Columbians, and tell you we can hold that line forever. We cannot.” He felt his own voice begin to falter. But then he looked out over the faces closest to him, those pressed right up against the tank…and he saw defiance. Lucia was right, he thought. These are Columbians, by God.
“Our enemy is too strong, their resources too vast. We have lost half our numbers…and inflicted horrific losses on the invader. But now we must make a difficult choice. Do we yield to our enemy, surrender and give ourselves over to their will?”
The crowd roared, “No, never!” Tyler looked out as thousands of Columbians, tens of thousands, pumped their arms in the air as they shouted, “Never, never, never…”
He waited for the screaming to die down. He knew the hardest part was still to come. It was easier to cheer mindlessly, but far harder to face cold realities. “Then we must flee to the Badlands. We must seek refuge in that untamed wilderness…make our enemy pursue us onto terrain that becomes our ally. This will become a guerrilla war. Behind every thicket and in every swamp our soldiers will be waiting. If the invader pursues us, we will turn the Badlands into their graveyard. If not, as long as we stand together, we will keep our freedom alive until help arrives.”
The crowd shouted again, though with considerably less enthusiasm this time. The Badlands were enormous, a vast wasteland full of swamps and scraggly forests…and Columbia’s most aggressive native fauna. It would be hard to sustain the planet’s population there, probably even impossible. Thousands would die, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Famine and pestilence would run rampant. It was easy to shout defiant cries, quite another to embrace a plan so desperate and dangerous.
The comment about help arriving bought its own rumble from the crowd. When the enemy first invaded, the Columbians expected the Marines to come, as they always had before when enemies attacked. But the weeks of combat turned into months, and no one came…no relief force, not even any word. They sacrificed their capital to nuclear devastation to damage the enemy and buy time, and still no one came. The Columbians were beginning to lose faith; they were coming to believe their world had been abandoned. That they were truly on their own.
“Will you follow me, Columbians? Will you come with me to the Badlands…to face whatever hardships and sufferings await us? Will you battle at my side until our world is ours again?” Tyler had his arm high in the air, hand balled tightly into a fist.
The crowd hesitated, staring up as Tyler stood before them, his uniform torn, a bloodstained bandage wrapped around the arm he held aloft. It started with a single voice from deep in the crowd, a lone, ‘yes,’ barely audible across the vast sea of people. Then it was joined by another…and another…until the whole surging mass was screaming as one, “Yes…yes…yes…”
Tyler pumped his fist and encouraged the cheering. But his thoughts were dark. It was one thing to rally the crowd, to incite defiance, standing here in this plain. He knew their morale would quickly diminish when they were marching through the swamps…when they started to run out of food. They would begin blame him, he knew, and this show of loyalty would quickly transition to disappointment, then to despair…and finally to hate. They would chant his name at first, swearing loyalty and support. But later, when they had suffered enough, saw their friends and neighbors dying around them, they would shout his name as a curse. If the exile went on long enough, he knew a dread day would come…when he had to turn the rifles of his army on his own people. He knew he would do it when he had to…the alternative would be to fall into disarray and defeat. But he didn’t know if he could live with it afterward.
Is this the right thing to do, he thought…or am I leading them all to their deaths? It was the right choice for him, certainly. He had no doubt of that, none at all. If defeat was his destiny, he knew he had no wish to survive it. Jarrod Tyler had no stomach to live as a slave, to meekly do the bidding of his conquerors, to watch his soldiers led away as defeated captives. He would choose Valhalla first, to die in arms resisting the enemy to his last breath.
But did he have the right to make that decision for almost two million people, the men, woman, and children who called themselves Columbians? Was he their war leader, encouraging them, bolstering their morale, cultivating their strength until victory was theirs? Or just a butcher leading them all to certain death?
Chapter 21
CAC Committee Command Bunker
South China Sea
Earth - Sol III
Li An s
at back in the plush leather chair taking in the luxurious surroundings. She’d last seen the room on an inspection tour a decade ago, but it had been maintained in perfect condition over those years, waiting until a crisis made it necessary. It was furnished with priceless rugs and antiques. The walls were covered with rare teak paneling worth a king’s ransom. The facility had been spec’d out at least 30 years before, and she wondered if the trees that yielded the precious boards even existed anymore. C1’s chief wasn’t a botanist, and she didn’t spend much time thinking about trees, but she knew many rare species were lost each year. The Treaty of Paris had pulled man from the brink of extinction, but the damage done to the Earth by centuries of war and abuse wasn’t so easily reversed. Recent events suggested it might not be so easy to keep man from extinction either. The Treaty of Paris had held for a century, but now that peace was in ruins. Earth’s Superpowers were at war again.
She couldn’t help but feel the extreme luxury was misplaced in a wartime shelter, but most of the CAC’s leaders were the sons and daughters – mostly sons – of the previous generation of Committee members. They’d never known anything but unimaginable luxury and phenomenal excess. The sparse, sustenance-level lives most of the Combine’s citizens lived would be unimaginable to them. They would retreat to an undersea bunker to protect themselves in wartime, but that refuge had to befit their stations. Li knew firsthand the Committee could argue about such things with as much vigor and emotion as major matters of state. She recalled an ancient parable with grim amusement. If Nero did, indeed, fiddle while Rome burned, she thought, depressingly little had changed in two millennia.
Li An was a rarity in the CAC hierarchy. She had not been born to privilege; she’d grown up in the notorious Shanghai ghettoes, surrounded by a level of violence and deprivation no one in the government class could truly understand. She’d pulled herself up by her own skill and initiative, something nearly impossible in the CAC. But Li had a brilliant mind and a flexible attitude toward morality, the perfect attributes for a career in espionage. With her knack for information-gathering and her sleek, petite figure, she rose quickly, using the two tools that were highly effective for the upwardly mobile – sex and blackmail. The young Li An had been one of the most wanted women in the CAC, and she used her appeal with ruthless efficiency. Her secret files had struck terror into the heart of the highest government leaders for almost three-quarters of a century. Her data – and the fear of what information she might have – formed the basis of her power, and it had taken her from starving street urchin to the only woman on the Committee.
Her office in the undersea command bunker was smaller than her palatial quarters at C1 headquarters, yet it would have been accounted plush enough for an ancient duke or prince. She leaned back in the priceless chair, her head sinking into the buttery soft leather. Li An was facing her own failure, trying to understand what had gone so horribly wrong. How, she thought…how did things get out of control so quickly?
Stark. The name floated around her mind like a curse. Alliance Intelligence’s brilliant mastermind had been killed in the explosion that claimed his headquarters…at least that was the official story. Li An didn’t believe a word of it. Not for a second. More than likely, it was Stark himself who had blown the building. The CAC had taken the blame, but she was certain no one in the Combine had been involved. She knew none of her people had done it…and it was inconceivable any other CAC personnel could have pulled it off without her knowledge. But the evidence was real…and damning. She couldn’t imagine anyone other than Stark who could have framed the CAC so effectively without her people finding out about it.
She was certain Stark was behind other events that had fueled the rapid slide into open war. The destruction of Marseilles, the nuclear exchange in the North German Plain…she saw Stark’s fingerprints on all of it. She had no real proof, but there wasn’t a doubt in her mind. Nearly a century’s experience in the field further fueled her intuition. She leaned back and sighed. Yes, she thought…it’s Stark. All of it. But what can I do to stop him?
She wished she could talk with Roderick Vance. She was sure the Martian spymaster would have come to the same conclusions she had. But communications in and out of the secure bunker were controlled by the Chairman’s personal security. And that made contacting Vance difficult and dangerous, a gamble she wasn’t ready to take. At least not yet.
Huang Wei had allowed himself to be swayed by the hawkish party on the Committee, and he’d grown less and less receptive to her counsel of caution. There wasn’t a doubt in Li’s mind that the foolish CAC mobilizations Huang had insisted upon made Stark’s job vastly easier. The CAC chairman later pulled back, paused the preparation for war. But a mobilization that size left evidence, information Stark undoubtedly used to help move the Alliance to war.
Now, however, Huang was in a state of paranoia and near-panic. Committed to his hawkish rhetoric, he found it had taken him down a path he now feared. He’d locked down all communications and ordered Committee members to remain in the bunker at all times. The generals and admirals were running the war now, while the politicians who’d destroyed the peace hid under ten kilometers of seawater and solid bedrock.
Li had operatives in the Chairman’s security team, of course, but only a few. They were extremely valuable assets, and she couldn’t risk exposing them simply to get a pointless message through to Vance. The Martian intelligence chief undoubtedly had plenty of his own problems now. Li admired Vance, but she also knew his interests and hers had diverged. They’d shared a desire to preserve the Treaty of Paris and avoid war. But now that war was a reality, the likelihood of stepping things back seemed remote at best. Li hadn’t wanted war; she’d done everything she could to prevent it. But now, she realized the only way she could serve the CAC was to try and find a way to win it. If winning was even possible.
She looked down at the reports piling up on her desk. There was rioting throughout Hong Kong…and most of the other major cities. The economy had collapsed entirely, but the government was so focused on the war, it was doing almost nothing to deal with the problem. The wealthy neighborhoods and government districts were cordoned off, garrisoned by army detachments and provisioned by special armed convoys. But a mob was a hard thing to control. Killing a few sometimes put enough of a scare into the rest to send them flying back to their homes. But these masses were starving, facing slow and painful deaths if they disbanded. It wouldn’t be long, she knew, before they lost their fear of the soldiers and tried to break through to the elite areas.
The Committee members and their families were safe in the command bunker, but there were plenty of influential politicos left in Hong Kong and the other cities…well within the reach of the mobs. The CAC couldn’t function without those legions of bureaucrats. If the armed checkpoints failed to keep the political neighborhoods safe the CAC itself could collapse. And Li and the rest of the Committee members would be nothing but a bunch of windbags hiding under the South China Sea.
She sighed and looked at the chronometer. So many problems, so little time. The Committee meeting was about to begin. She held onto the armrests of the chair, pushing herself painfully to her feet. She could feel her strength slipping away almost daily. Why, she wondered, couldn’t I have faced my worst crisis when I was younger and stronger? Why did this happen now, when there is so little of me left? She knew there was no answer. Crises chose their own moments, and those affected could only do their best to cope.
She grabbed her cane and moved slowly toward the door.
The Committee Chamber was considerably smaller than the ruling body’s magnificent meeting place in Hong Kong but, for a facility buried deep below the seabed, it was breathtaking. The rulers of the CAC had been preparing their wartime refuges since the day the Treaty of Paris was signed. The CAC elites demanded both safety and comfort for themselves and their families during wartime, and the undersea shelter southwest of Hong Kong addressed both concerns admirably. It had been the pr
imary bunker marked for the wartime use of the Committee for 50 years…half a century during which there were one or two scares, but no major crises. Now it was in full operation…the wartime seat of government for the Central Asian Combine.
“We must strike a major blow against the Alliance. We must drive them from our sphere of influence at the very least.” Deng Chao was one of the oldest members of the Committee. Autocratic and arrogant, he’d been the unofficial leader of the hawkish party for the last twenty years. “We can no longer tolerate the enemy’s presence in the Philippines.” He paused, then added, “Or Oceania.”
Li held her tongue. Let him finish, she thought. His words will make your case. She had been Deng’s primary opposition for years, urging restraint in dealings with the Alliance. Li was as cold-blooded as anyone in the CAC, but she knew what war would be like, and she’d done everything in her power to maintain peace between the Powers, at least on Earth. Too many Committee members had forgotten the horrors their grandparents had suffered to forge the CAC from the gutted ruins of China and half a dozen other wrecked nations. The early leaders, those who ruled from Hong Kong in the early days of the peace, knew firsthand how close they had come to the brink. Their capital was a devastated ruin, the process of rebuilding just beginning. They had considered it unthinkable to risk the renewal of war on Earth. But time had virtually wiped away living memory of the horrors of the wars, and slowly, steadily, the fear that reinforced sanity faded. The leaders were afraid of war on Earth, but not the same way their grandparents had been.
“We must not blindly fear controlled escalation.” Deng slapped his hand on the table in front of him. “We cannot crawl before the Alliance, fearing their military might, checking our every move for concern over their response. Indeed, it is time for us to take the initiative, to strike hard against our enemies and allow the Combine to achieve the true greatness that is its just due upon the world stage.”