Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The map on the wall looked grim, as well it might. As far as anyone could tell, the writ of the central government barely ran outside of the major cities. Four days after our brief battle with the farmers’ militia — or whatever they were calling themselves — we only controlled the territory under our guns. The handful of government outposts across the region had been wiped out — those that had surrendered, at least, had had their personnel repatriated to the cities — and it looked grim. Victory would be long in coming, if it came at all.

I had managed to talk Frida into a strict rationing scheme, but simple logic suggested that it would take weeks before the system could take effect, by which time much of the food would be gone. Some of the nearer farms still shipped to the cities, but they couldn’t produce enough to make up for what we’d lost from the other farms, and the miners… well, they weren’t talking to us at all. I had the unpleasant feeling that they were waiting for the next interstellar freighter to arrive, whereupon they’d sell what they’d produced directly to the freighter and place orders for items they wanted themselves, rather than thinking about the good of the planet. It was a legal grey area; the freighter crew would have to have something from the trip, and if the local government clearly didn’t control the countryside, then why not buy directly from the miners?

“The sooner we repossess Fort Galloway, the better,” I said. We had been unable to tell if the farmers had occupied the fort or not, but the UAV flights suggested that they’d just ignored the fort. We should have sent out a caretaker crew to maintain the base, but we’d been distracted by the Communist uprising. I hated to admit it, but perhaps some of the UN Generals had deserved their massive salaries. They’d seen a big picture that barely floated in front of my eyes. “Ed, is the convoy ready to move?”

“It has been ready for two days,” Ed said, not without a certain amount of amusement. We’d been forced to keep putting the departure date back as I had to run around pissing on fires. If it hadn’t been the farmers, it had been the massive anti-farmer demonstrations in the cities, or riots among the ex-Communist prisoners in the work gangs. Not for the first — and probably not the last — time, I cursed the absence of a real police force. The planet was damn lucky that the murder rate hadn’t risen sharply. It wasn’t as if we were equipped to track down murderers we didn’t catch in the act. “A Company is on permanent standby, B Company is ready to act as a QRF, and the designated local units need only their alert to move.”

I nodded. Although the vast majority of the local soldiers came from the cities, a handful came from the farmers… and I was unwillingly aware that they could be acting as spies within the Army. I hated to do it, but we’d been spreading rumours and even outright lies about our future plans, just in the hopes that they’d confuse the enemy leadership. The brief bursts of encrypted transmissions had continued, but no one knew what they said, or even who was sending them. Even if we had wanted to create a real police state, Svergie simply lacked the infrastructure to operate one.

“Then we move tomorrow,” I ordered, finally. “Confine the designated local units to barracks and brief them in tonight; we’ll move out tomorrow morning, bright and early.”

“Yes, sir,” Ed said. He looked as if he wanted to dispute my presence on the convoy, but finally decided not to say anything. “We’ll be ready to depart at 0700.”

I spent the rest of the evening discussing contingency plans with Robert and Muna, before joining Suki in bed and trying to sleep. I’d used to find it hard falling asleep before a mission, but that had faded as I’d become older and wiser and learned to sleep whenever I could. There was no such thing as enough sleep. Suki didn’t know that I was leaving tomorrow; as much as I hated to deceive her as well, she could have been a spy as well. Anyone who wasn’t part of the original Legion could be a spy.

The thought tried valiantly to keep me awake. If I’d been planning ahead, I’d have recruited agents from among the urban residents, rather than people from the rural areas who might be marked out as spies just because of their origins. I’d have tried to place agents among the Army as a matter of course; the enemy, logically, would have done the same. Who among the force I’d designed and built was a spy?

Perhaps we should interrogate them all under a lie detector, I thought grimly, and drifted off to sleep.

I was up at the crack of dawn the following morning. I kissed Suki goodbye, showered — I might not be able to shower at Fort Galloway — and dressed in standard BDUs, before pocketing my rank insignia. I couldn’t wear it on the convoy or else I’d mark myself out for an enemy sniper; shooting senior officers was an old and dreaded sniper tactic. I ate breakfast along with the men, exchanged a few words with Robert and Russell, who would hold the spaceport in my absence, and finally went out to join the convoy. The vehicles were already assembled and, as I watched, surprised local soldiers were urged into the trucks. They’d only been told where they were going last night.

“All present and correct, sir,” Ed assured me, as he and Captain Jörgen Hellqvist came up and nodded. We’d already discarded salutes on the verge of going into combat — and I was mortally certain that the enemy would be waiting for us. Our attempts to set up an intelligence network of our own had failed dismally, but we’d picked up enough to know that the enemy forces were watching the city. Some small patrols had been ambushed outside the city and others had been wiped out completely. “We’re ready to roll.”

I inspected the convoy personally before boarding my armoured car, Peter at my side. We had ten armoured cars — I’d have preferred tanks, but tearing up the countryside roads would not have endeared us to public opinion — seven trucks packed with soldiers and a handful of specialist vehicles. The lead vehicle had cost the UN so much that they kept them back for special occasions; it was designed to sniff out mines and IEDs that might be planted in our path. They generally had a high success rate, but the Generals had preferred not to use them. Dead soldiers caused less paperwork.

“Excellent,” I said, finally. I keyed the radio and was pleased to discover that the radio net was working perfectly. “Roll out.”

The convoy drove out of the spaceport and onto the main road, heading down towards New Copenhagen. We’d been running armed convoys along the road for several days now — the farmers had a habit of shooting up military vehicles that weren’t escorted heavily — and hopefully they wouldn’t see it as anything other than another convoy to the city. The first twenty minutes passed completely uneventfully, apart from spotting another convoy heading in the opposite direction, and I allowed myself to relax. The real challenge would come when we headed out into the countryside.

“We have to turn off here,” Ed murmured, through my earpiece. He was in a different armoured car, preventing a lucky shot from killing all of the commanding officers at once. It had happened, more than once, to the UN. “I’m moving the UAV to scan ahead of us now.”

The turn proceeded smoothly and soon we were racing away from the city, towards the mountains in the distance. The UAV had detected no sign of an ambush, but I wasn’t too impressed. They hadn’t picked up other ambushes before they’d been sprung, although some ambushes had been noticed because they’d been almost painfully amateurish. I’d hoped that they’d been linked to the militia, but the prisoners — after recovering from their shock — had confessed to being little more than youths out for a thrill. They’d thought that taking a few shots at armed soldiers would have been fun. I hoped they found the detention camp equally fun.

I watched as the buildings faded away into the countryside. Like most cities on colony worlds, New Copenhagen had a clearly-designated border between the urban and rural areas, but the sprawl was already pushing at the boundaries. Apparently, on Earth, cities had just kept expanding until they’d actually linked together into much larger cities, creating nightmarish areas of poverty and suffering. My hometown had been tame compared to some of the places I’d heard about on Earth, places where the UN’s writ hadn’t run at all, even before John Walker’s Coup. The UN had been putting out a call for mercenary soldiers, but I had already decided that the Legion was going to stay well away from Earth.

The roads grew rougher the further we moved from the city. The original settlers had intended to build railroads between the cities and the farmers, rather than develop a massive road network, but the UN had — quite accidentally, this time — put a stop to that. The net result was that the roads were in a terrible shape — it was something else, I decided, to have the unemployed working upon — and our progress grew slower. I suspected that even if the enemy hadn’t had any advance warning, they would have known we were coming just from the massive clouds of dust rising up in our rear.

“We’re about to pass through a town now,” Ed’s voice warned. I scowled. We had hoped to avoid all settlements as we moved, but we had no choice for some of them. They’d been built directly adjacent to the roads, for reasons that still eluded me, and had grown up to dominate the area. “Everyone stand at the ready.”

We rounded a corner and braked, hard, not an easy trick in a twenty-vehicle convoy. Someone, and it took no effort at all to guess who, had built a blockade right across our path, forcing us to halt. I conferred briefly with Ed, who ordered A Company to advance carefully. We couldn’t go around the barricade without crossing cross-country — which would tear up the fields and make a terrible mess for the locals to fix afterwards — but if someone had gone to the effort of building a barricade, they might well have it covered by armed men. A barricade without armed men was little more than a nuisance. I picked up my terminal and checked the live feed from the UAV. The town looked deserted, but there were hot spots in most of the houses. A moment later, the shooting started, pouring down at us from the buildings.

I ducked into the armoured car as bullets began to ping off the armour. “Return fire,” Ed barked, as the shooting grew louder. The heavy machine guns mounted on the armoured car returned fire — deafeningly loud, even inside the vehicle — and swept the buildings, trying to force the enemy to keep their heads down. The buildings were well-built, but they couldn’t stand up to heavy machine gun fire for long, any more than could the hedgerows or the barricade itself. A thunderous explosion marked the end of the barricade as a set of IEDs detonated under our fire. The lead armoured car advanced, laying down fire as it moved, and came too close to a buried mine. The explosion threw the entire vehicle over; it caught fire and exploded seconds later.

The infantry advanced under cover from the armoured cars and attacked the buildings. They took no chances; they kicked in doors and window and threw grenades into the buildings, before pushing through the wreckage to kill the remaining insurgents. I wanted to join them, even though I knew that house-to-house combat was the most dangerous of all, and forget that I was the commanding officer. Inch by bloody inch, we cleared the village of insurgents and IEDs, before driving the vehicles through as quickly as we could, leaving several burning buildings behind us. Before we’d arrived, it had been a quiet and prosperous town; now, it was nothing, but blackened ruins and shattered lives.

“We took a couple of prisoners,” Ed reported, once we were a safe distance from the village and could pause to lick our wounds. I could see smoke rising up from where we’d been and winced inwardly. “One of them is injured, but the other is unharmed, if not talkative. It was clearly a planned ambush, sir; there wasn’t a single child and only a couple of women in the village.”

“That’s a relief,” I said, and meant it. I had no problem with killing insurgents and people who were trying to kill me, but I hated seeing children caught up in the gears of war and mashed to bloody paste. I allowed him to lead me to the prisoners and examined them carefully, but neither of them was feeling talkative, even with the medic binding the wounds of the injured one. They both looked like typical farmers and the uninjured one managed to glare at me, even with his hands firmly secured behind his back with a plastic tie. I wasn’t sure if that were bravery, stupidity or a determination to make us kill him before we could make him talk. “Put them in one of the trucks. As long as they behave themselves, we won’t hurt them, but if they cause trouble, feel free to put them out of the truck with a cut throat.”

I walked back to the armoured car and took the chewy bar I was offered to replenish my strength. I think they make them taste awful on purpose; I’ve heard stories about UN units starving to death rather than eat them. Once everyone had had a snack and paused to answer nature’s call, we mounted up again and drove off towards the Fort. I settled down in the back of the armoured car and returned to studying the take from the UAV. There were three more small villages and one larger town we’d have to pass through before we reached the Fort… and that assumed that the Fort remained unoccupied. If it didn’t, we were going to have to assault it without causing too much damage, although I doubted that the farmers would seek a conventional battle. How many losses could they absorb before they lost the ability to farm their fields?

The next hour passed slowly, even though we picked up an escort in the form of a couple of attack helicopters. I’d kept a handful of them running patrols around the area, but I was persistently worried that one or both of them would get shot down by the enemy. The farmers seemed to dislike the helicopters, but it was still a mystery how many SAMs they had, or even if they had any. They would probably have picked them up from a UN deport, but would they still be in working order?

“Another village,” Ed’s voice said, in my ear. “Here we go again.”

This village was completely deserted. The infantry dismounted and searched the area carefully, but found nothing, apart from signs of a quick evacuation. We checked out the houses that were nearer the roads, but they were definitely empty. I even brought up the bomb-sniffing vehicle and checked the area, but it was clean of IEDs and mines. It actually felt eerie and I was glad to be away when we left. I’d had the feeling that someone was drawing a bead on us from a distance. Still, if they chose not to fight, it was something of a relief. I just wondered where the villagers had gone! Had they been ordered to leave, or had they heard about our approach and decided to hide?

“There’s no way to know,” Ed said, when I commented on it. He sounded as if it had been bugging him too. “They could be anywhere in the fields.”

I looked around at the vast empty fields, the cattle and sheep waiting plaintively for their masters to return, and took his point. There was no time for a search and so we drove on, passing through another empty village and a town that completely ignored us. The inhabitants saw us coming and cleared the main road, rather than attempting to talk or fight. It was better than fighting, I decided, but it would have been nice to talk to someone and try to set up diplomatic links to the militia. We might have been able to talk them out of continuing the fight…

No, I thought, with a touch of bitterness. They have no reason to stop fighting.

Three hours later, after a long drive filled with moments of screaming terror as snipers fired at us and vanished into the distance, we finally reached the fort. There was little pleasant about the massive blocky building — the UN had come up with a design it liked for a fort and kept it on all of the colony worlds — but it was clear, even from a distance, that the fort was occupied. We would have to assault it just to take it off the enemy.

“Get the men rested and bring up additional helicopters,” I ordered, tightly. The advantage of surprise was already lost. “We’ll assault the fort in an hour.”