Another series of explosions crackled out, and then stopped. “Sir, we have some trying to surrender,” the tanker said. “Permission to take prisoners, sir?”
“Have the infantry deal with them,” I ordered. I wanted to kill them all after what they’d done, but I wouldn’t sanction a massacre. “Use the heavy protocols and keep them separated from the other prisoners. Don’t use locals to guard them, not after this; we’ll have to hold them ourselves.”
The fighting was slowly dying away as the infantry advanced, carefully, into a nightmarish maze. We’d broken through in three places and convinced most of them that it was time to surrender, even though the tanks weren't good at accepting surrenders. Shots still rang out as isolated holdouts attempted to make a stand, only to be crushed by overwhelming firepower. I wasn't going to risk more lives to capture people intent on dying and taking some of us with them. I watched the stream of naked prisoners, watched by heavily armed soldiers, as they filed out of the complex, their eyes grim and worried. They had cause to worry. I doubted that the planet’s population would suffer them to live.
“We’ve got the remainder barricaded into the centre building, but they’re refusing to surrender,” Ed said, sharply. “What do you want to do with them?”
“Pull back and let the mortars take care of them,” I ordered, grimly. I wanted to get my hands on the leadership, but if they were unprepared to surrender…well, the butcher’s bill was too high already. We were the most formidable military force on the surface of the planet and we’d lost at least fifty men in the fighting, probably more. It would have to wait until we’d totalled them all up, but every loss meant an irreplaceable soldier gone. “Contact the spaceport and tell them to rush extra supplies out here. We’re going to need them.”
A final set of explosions saw the centre building crashing down into a pile of rubble. The infantrymen probed it carefully, dispatched two mortally-wounded enemies, and then declared it safe. Peter refused to allow me to go forward into the remains of the complex, so I remained outside while Ed led the infantry and the local soldiers in a careful sweep of the entire area. A handful of IEDs were found and detonated from a distance. We could have disarmed them, but there was little point. I watched as the reinforcements arrive, having seen the damage the Communists had inflicted on the city, and warned them to treat the prisoners firmly, but gently. I’d have to deal with those who had treated them badly later, after I’d had a rest.
“Send them all to the guardhouse,” I ordered, when Ed raised the issue. He pointed out that it might be wise to deal with it now. “Tell the ones who beat prisoners that they have a choice between a month in the nick” – the guardhouse prison – “or running the gauntlet. The one who molested…I’ll deal with him later. There’ll have to be a court convened on that one.”
“Yes, sir,” Ed said, without argument. We couldn’t just hang our own people out of hand, regardless of what I wanted. We had to hold a formal court-martial. “Will you be observing the gauntlet?”
“Maybe,” I said, signalling for Peter and the driver. “I’m going to report back to the government headquarters and then get some sleep. Once C Company takes over the security here, get some sleep yourself. If the crisis in Pitea gets out of hand, we’re going to have to move down there and deal with it.”
“That's not going to be easy,” Ed warned. “Most of our transport is already overstretched.”
“I know,” I said. Pitea was seventy miles from New Copenhagen. It might as well be on the moon. We could march there in a couple of days, but we’d still have to fight at the far end. We’d just have to round up whatever transport we could. “We’ll deal with that tomorrow.”
Frida, I discovered when we arrived back at the stadium, had moved operations to one of the massive houses belonging to the elite. It wasn’t a bad choice. The President’s family owned a large house which they’d agreed could be used by the government, or what was left of it. Frida took one look at my tired face – I doubt I looked worse than her – and ordered me to bed. For once, I was quite happy to comply and the servant showed me to a room fit for a king. I showered, shaved, and came out to discover Suki sitting on my bed.
I stared. She was wearing a nightdress that left nothing to the imagination. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Why…?”
She interrupted me with a deep kiss. I felt myself responding automatically. “I want to feel alive,” she whispered. “I want…I want you, now.”
Perhaps I should have refused, but I felt horny too. A second later, we were in bed together, barely pausing for foreplay. It had been too long for me and the pressure of combat – and the joy of being alive – pushed me on. The night sped by very quickly.
Chapter Thirteen
The purpose of war, as a wise man once remarked, is not to die for your country, but to make the other person die for his. The role of laws of war, therefore, is to avoid endangering your forces; force protection is the first priority, always. The safety of your men – insofar as war can ever be termed safe – is more important than the safety or the dignity of the enemy.
-Army Manual, Heinlein
When I awoke, I wondered for a moment where I was. It wasn't my bunk in the spaceport, or my tiny cabin on the Julius Caesar, but somewhere far more comfortable. A slight movement told me that there was a person – a woman – in my bed and memory came flooding back. Last night…we’d slept together; no, that was too mild a term. We’d fucked so violently that I was surprised I hadn’t drawn blood.
“Welcome back to the world,” I muttered, and pulled myself out of bed. The room in the President’s house was larger than any house I’d had myself, although I’d spent most of my adult life on military bases of one kind or another. Apart from the massive four-poster bed, there was a smaller washroom complete with a shower and a window that looked out into the city. The plumes of smoke seemed to have faded away.
Suki stirred under the covers and sat up, exposing her breasts. I felt a sudden surge of arousal I tried to push down, but failed. “Hi,” she said, rather nervously. “I just…I just wanted to…you know.”
“I understand,” I said, gravely. “It always happens after a combat mission; men and women get horny. It’ll have happened all over the city and there’ll probably be a population boom in the next nine months.”
“Oh,” Suki said. One hand rubbed a bite mark on her left breast. “I’ve taken my pills for the month. There won’t be any children for me.”
I smiled. Her oriental looks mixed with mine might produce an interesting child, although as long as they had their mother’s looks and their father’s brains I’d be happy. It had to be something to do with the way we’d spent last night. I don’t normally go to bed with a woman and think of children the day afterwards.
“What a pity,” I said. “Do you want to practice some more?”
She laughed and I advanced upon her with open arms. Afterwards, we took a shower together and washed each other, before I finally forced myself to get dressed in my uniform. It felt disgustingly unclean to the touch, but I hadn’t thought to bring a spare uniform to the ceremony. In hindsight, I should have brought an entire infantry company and a few dozen tanks, never mind a uniform.
I checked my wristcom and swore. It was much later than I had thought and I cursed myself for spending time with her, even if a soldier who won’t fuck won’t fight. I remembered the men I’d disciplined for being late back to their duties because they’d met a girl in town and winced. They’d all be laughing at me behind my back and I couldn’t blame them. God knew I would have done the same thing in their place.
“Ed, this is Andrew,” I said, hunting for the earpiece with one hand. “I need a status report.”
“Peter insisted that you needed sleep and threatened to beat hell out of anyone who disturbed you before you woke naturally,” Ed explained. He knew what I meant, alright, even though if it had been something truly urgent I would have been woken anyway. “The city is currently q
uiet, but still under curfew and we’re patrolling heavily to ensure it stays that way.”
“Good,” I said. I wasn't commanding a UN unit any longer, where the commander had to have direct control at all times, but one composed of men who used their initiative when necessary. I could trust them to get on with it. “I’ll be downstairs at the command post in a few minutes. Have a pot of coffee ready for me.”
Ed laughed and cut the connection and I turned back to Suki. “I’m going to have to leave you now,” I explained. “I’ll see you back on the base later.”
“Later,” Suki agreed. “Make sure you get some proper food as well.”
I rolled my eyes and walked out of the room, pausing to dismiss the guards that Peter had left to ensure that my sleep was undisturbed, before walking down the stairs into the room that Ed had turned into a command post. Unlike the bedroom, there were no windows in the hall, although I would have been worried about mortar shells if I’d been in charge of the building. One day had inflicted more devastation than the UN had in years! Ed was standing near a portable communications unit, inspecting the report, and he saluted when he saw me.
“Good morning, sir,” he said, with a wink. “Did you have a good night’s sleep, sir?”
That, I decided, settled the question of how many people knew that I’d been with Suki. “Yes, thank you,” I said, putting an edge into my voice to suggest that ragging me wouldn’t be a good use of his time. “I need a status report, right bloody now.”
Ed nodded. “The city itself is calm, as I said,” he commented, nodding to the map. “We’ve got the industrial area sealed off still and we’re poking through it looking for unpleasant surprises, but the teams are pretty confident that we found most of the IEDs. The entire area was devastated, but some of the heavy machinery survived, which may mean that they can rebuild quicker than we thought.”
I remembered the piles of rubble that had replaced strong brick buildings and shrugged. It was possible to be optimistic, but I privately suspected that it would be years before the industrial complex was up and running again. They might be able to replace what they’d lost on-planet, but if not…they’d have to try to buy from another star system and that would drain the planet’s limited off-world currency reserves. It wasn't as if they had much to trade, but raw minerals from the mines.
“The bad news is that they’ve definitely lost control of Pitea,” Ed continued. I winced, although it wasn't a surprise. Pitea had been a Progressive city, according to the election results, but the Communists had been strong there. There were hundreds of factories there that used unskilled labour for menial work and they strongly resented the way they were treated. In the long run, the Communist program would lead to industrial wastelands and devastation, but in the short term…they might not mind, provided that they were allowed to hang the industrialists. “The last report had the police stations being overrun and…sir, Muna’s still missing.”
“I know,” I said. Muna was somewhere in Pitea…and I hoped she’d managed to go to ground and hide, but I feared the worst. Our communications systems were too advanced for the locals to jam, unless they’d had help from off-world, and Muna would have been able to report in if she’d been free. That suggested that she was either dead or in enemy hands. “And our own forces?”
“I redeployed A and B company to make their way to Pitea, and ordered most of the local units to prepare for the same journey,” Ed explained. “The bastards have taken out the local railroad, however, and they’ve blown up several bridges. We can still get there, but it’s going to take us three weeks to move the main body of the army there, assuming that there are no other problems.”
I swore. Attacking an industrial complex had been bad enough; attacking a full-sized city – Pitea was listed as having over seven million inhabitants – would be an order of magnitude worse. They’d have plenty of time to get ready for our attack and the only advantage we had was that it was possible, just possible, that not all of those seven million were committed Communists. We might be aided by a revolution in their rear. If we were lucky…
“Try and speed up the progress, if you can,” I ordered, finally. Ed would do everything in his power to get us there quicker. “What about the toll, Ed?”
“We lost eleven men,” Ed said, flatly. “Seventeen more have been injured and are at the spaceport medical bay. The doctors think that there’s a good chance that they’ll pull through, but three of them are going to be permanently disabled. We might be able to keep them on in some role, or we might have to pension them off…”
“Yeah,” I said. The UN had literally allowed people in wheelchairs to serve as combat troops – absurd regulations designed to counter ‘discrimination against differently able people’ – but I had no intention of allowing it to contaminate the Legion. If they could become clerks, I’d be delighted, but it was more likely that they would drink themselves to death. The poor bastards deserved better. “And the enemy?”
“We pulled around two thousand bodies out of the rubble,” Ed admitted. “I don’t know, of course, how many of them were actually enemy fighters or merely people caught up in the fighting, but we’re still finding bodies everywhere. We took over a thousand prisoners and they’re currently cooling their heels in detention camps, but I don’t know how we’re going to sort the hardcore out from the soft bastards.”
He paused. “Oh, and the local police – what was left of them – wanted to arrest some known hardcore we caught,” he added. “It seems that the Acting President’s decree banning the Communist Party means that the leadership have to be transferred to the local jail for immediate trial.”
“I see,” I said. “And you said?”
“I said that the final fate of the prisoners would depend upon you,” Ed said, passing the buck shamelessly. Well, I suppose the only other choice would have been to hand them over and wash our hands of the blood, afterwards. I wouldn’t shed any tears for them, but I believe in fair trials, then shooting the guilty. “I know we have hardcore, but we also have too many people who clearly aren’t hardcore.”
“Put them through a level one interrogation,” I ordered, finally. Heinlein’s invention of perfect lie detectors saved a lot of trouble. We wouldn’t have to keep everyone prisoner indefinitely after all. “Separate them out and keep the hardcore in prison. Release the innocent and use the softer Communists to clear the streets, under armed guard. Feel free to shoot them if they try to escape. We might as well get some use out of them.”
“Yes, sir,” Ed said. He grinned, suddenly. “You’ll be happy to know that all of the local troopers accepted the gauntlet rather than spending time in the nick. I’ve scheduled the ceremony for tomorrow morning and promised them that you’d attend.”
“Bastard,” I said, without heat. They’d be relieved. Russell was probably so far beyond furious that he’d strangle one of the troopers, if given half a chance. His tolerance for indiscipline was less than mine. “Very well; I’ll attend. I’d better go see the President.”
“Take a driver and an armoured car,” Ed advised. “The streets are supposed to be clear, but I’m not taking chances with you.”
The city looked, if possible, even worse than it had during the fighting. There were hundreds of damaged and destroyed buildings, the latter little more than towering piles of rubble, and hundreds of dead bodies everywhere. Soldiers, emergency crews and volunteers worked together to clear the bodies away, but the sheer size of the task would keep them going for days. The estimate of how many people had died might be far too low, I realised, and silently cursed the Communists. Their mad plan had killed thousands of people, including some of my men, for nothing. Their control over Pitea might let them force a stalemate…
I shook my head. It wouldn’t; the farmers wouldn’t supply them with food. Given time, they’d probably start raiding the farms, or trying to force the farmers to cooperate. The war was barely underway and we were already looking at disaster. If they stayed penned in th
e city, they’d still starve and the men with the guns ate first. The innocent hostages – including Muna, if she were still alive – would die. The gunmen would live on human flesh, if they had to, to survive.
The Acting President – Frida – had moved operations again to Progressive Party HQ. It wasn't a decision I would have supported at the time, but most of the other governmental buildings had been destroyed or damaged in the fighting. Ed, whatever misgivings he’d had, had assigned local units to guard the building and backed them up with a pair of Landshark tanks. Their guns tracked my armoured car as it approached, ready to deal out instant death if we showed them anything suspicious, then relaxed when the soldiers saw me and waved us through. I didn’t relax and jumped out of the car, marching over to the Sergeant in charge.
Picking Up The Pieces (Martial Law) Page 13