Picking Up The Pieces (Martial Law)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “I’m not sure that you could be described as having tender mercies either,” Frida said, dryly. “You do not feel that your troops should be accountable?”

  “They are accountable to me,” I countered, firmly. “If they cross the line, they get punished according to regulations. If you have complaints against my men, bring them to me and I will deal with them.”

  Frida nodded and changed the subject. “I also have a list of complaints from various people who hold property in Pitea,” she said. “They’re complaining about the damage being done to the city by your attack. Is there any way you can reduce the amount of damage…?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. I wasn’t surprised by that line of questioning. The industrialists were probably going mad with worry that nothing would be left of their investments, but piles of rubble. I couldn’t blame them for that, but the Communists had dug in so firmly that nothing short of heavy firepower would dig them out. “The city is very strongly held.”

  “And thousands of innocents are being killed every day,” Frida said. “Is there nothing you can do about that either?”

  “They’re in the city,” I explained, grimly. “We’re getting as many of them out as we can, but they’re often being held back by the Communists and used as human shields. We’re doing the best we can, but a combat zone isn’t the safest place on the planet.”

  It was worse than I’d suggested. Hundreds of civilians had been gunned down by accident, mistaken for Communists in the heat of the battle. Others had been raped by the Communists or, in one case, by two of the local soldiers. Their Sergeant had handed out swift justice from the barrel of a gun and placed himself on report. God alone knew what we were going to do with him.

  “And then there’s the ones you have in the detention camps,” Frida continued. “Do you know how much feeding them is costing us?”

  “Do you know how much havoc even a handful of Communists could cause outside the city, if we let them go?” I countered. “We have to keep them somewhere safe and out of the way.”

  “They’ll have to be moved,” Frida said. “I was talking to some of the other Councillors and it should be possible to foster some of the families in the more rural areas, where there’s food and some of them can work for a living. Others will have to come here to help rebuild the damage the Communists inflicted. We can’t keep them penned up in the camps or we’ll end up with riots on our hands.”

  I shrugged. “I would like to recruit amongst them as well,” I suggested. “We’re going to need to rebuild entire units after feeding the army through the meat grinder in the city. There are plenty of young men and women who could become soldiers and God knows they’ve seen just how much damage the Communists have inflicted. They’ll have motivation, all right.”

  “See to it,” Frida said. “And the remainder can be sent here, or to the farms?”

  “If you insist,” I said. I had doubts about fostering them out to the farms, but it was her decision. We’d probably end up picking up the pieces later. “We’ll try to end the Communist occupation of the city as quickly as possible, but…it would go a lot easier if you promised not to kill them out of hand.”

  “I can’t,” Frida said, her eyes darkening with fire. “Even if I wanted to spare the Communist leadership, the Council and the people would never let me get away with it. They want the bastards to hurt!”

  “I want them to hurt too,” I agreed. “The problem is that they know they’re going to be executed once they’re captured, so they have no reason to surrender and quite a lot of reason not to surrender. They might survive if they kept fighting, or so they tell themselves, while we batter down the city around their ears. You could always exile them to one of the unpopulated islands.”

  “No,” Frida said. I remembered what Daniel Singh had said and felt cold. Was Frida prepared to have them all killed to cover up her own links with the Communists, or was it just an attempt to confuse the issue? The Communists had learned to lie from the UN, past masters of the art. “We want them dead and if they survive the fall of the city, we want them tried and hung right here in New Copenhagen. The people want revenge!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  A desperate foe is a foe who will not offer or accept quarter. It is therefore wise to avoid placing a foe in a position where he feels that he has no choice, but to fight or die.

  ­-Army Manual, Heinlein

  Pitea was dying.

  I stood and watched as flames consumed yet another part of the city, despite the fire hoses the remains of the fire brigade had turned on the blaze. The Communists had withdrawn back into their inner strongholds, daring us to come and blast them out, leaving the remainder of the city to stand or fall on its own. The city was struggling to survive valiantly, but the fighting was making it hard for the remains of the local authorities to take control. The contrast was staggering; some parts of the city were almost intact, almost homelike, while other parts were nothing, but ruins. What the Communists hadn’t used, they’d tried to destroy; they’d utterly ransacked and then burned the richer parts of the city, just to make their point.

  And it was all so pointless! The mindless vandalism wouldn’t solve anything. The workers the Communists claimed to represent wouldn’t find their lives any easier because of the devastation; many would find themselves out of work, or trapped in mindless brute labour jobs, clearing up the mess. Each destroyed factory or small business represented another few hundred people unemployed, looking for jobs that didn’t exist. They’d have to turn to crime to survive, I knew, and the rest of the planet wouldn’t be able to tolerate it. The Communists had a hell of a lot to answer for, eventually. If we took their leaders alive, their own people would be trying to crucify them. They probably wouldn’t live long enough to stand trial.

  “The gunners are ready to hit Stronghold Four,” Ed said, from behind me. We’d moved the Mobile Command Post into the suburbs of the city, despite Peter’s objections. I wanted – needed – to know what was being done under my instructions. A commander who tried to run the battle from miles away – or light years away, as some of the UN Generals had tried – was one who simply wasn't in control. I couldn’t afford that kind of luxury, not now. “We haven’t heard anything from Jock.”

  “Hold fire for a while,” I said, keying my earpiece. Strongpoint Four was the most likely location on the prisoners; a complex of several factories, including considerable underground facilities. The entire city was riddled with tunnels and sewers and the Communists had used some of them to launch attacks from the rear. They’d grown less enthusiastic about it since we poured gasoline down the sewers and set it on fire. The complex under Strongpoint Four was supposed to be extensive enough to house a bunker; it had been built in the days of fighting the UN and no one seemed to have a clear idea of just what was under there. The owner of the complex had never made it out alive. “Jock, can you hear me?”

  There was no response. “Hold fire until the forces are in position,” I ordered, before Ed could say anything. If Jock was in the complex when we opened fire, we’d be condemning him to certain death, along with the prisoners. The Communists might have killed them by now, but I lived in hope. “Bring up the 7th and 8th units and get them deployed to seal off any possible route of egress.”

  A string of detonations made the ground shudder under my feet. We’d located some of the enemy tunnels and used shaped charges to cause them to collapse, rather than send infantrymen down into the tunnels against a prepared enemy. The clear-up crews would probably be spending years clearing up all the debris from the fighting and removing bodies from the sewers. I didn’t like to think about it in such ways, but it was possible that by removing most of the population, we were actually doing them a favour. The possibility of disease couldn’t be underestimated.

  “They’re moving in now,” Ed confirmed. “I’m adding some of the newer tankers to the older forces. They’re going to need support.”

  Baptism of fire, I thought. We hadn’
t expected such savage fighting and so we hadn’t built a native tank regiment. We hadn’t realised we’d need one, and now…the Legion had lost too many tanks, even if they were easy to replace. Russell had set up a tanker school at the spaceport and rushed a group of drivers and gunners though a heavy training schedule, but I was uncomfortably aware that I was sending babes to the slaughter. They wouldn’t know half the tricks of my tankers and they might not have time to learn. The burned-out shape of a Landshark showed me just what would happen to most of the young fools I’d sent to die. They deserved better from me.

  A flight of shells roared overhead, coming down in the midst of an enemy position two kilometres to the north. We’d succeeded in breaking up the enemy position and isolating different groups in their strongholds, but most of them were still fighting savagely. I think that losing much of their civilian cover might almost have been a relief to them. It took a particularly unpleasant mind to accept the thought of fighting where families and friends might be hurt. I’d studied history enough to know that humans were capable of any barbarity, but this was beyond the normal run of unpleasantness. The Communists knew that they had nothing left to lose.

  “The gunners are reporting that they scored nine direct hits,” Ed said, consulting the take from the UAVs. The Communists didn’t seem to have realised just what the birds actually were, although there had been some attempts to shoot them out of the sky for dinner. None had succeeded, luckily. The UAV would have exploded if it had been shot down, but even that would have been too revealing. “They’re asking for permission to fire another spread.”

  I nodded. “Do so,” I said. The sound of firing seemed to be coming from all around us, as if we were surrounded and being fired upon from all sides. The city’s atmospherics had been weird before the fighting had begun, the residents had told us, and now it seemed to be perpetually wrapped in fighting. “I take it there’s no sign of any let-up…?”

  My earpiece buzzed suddenly. “Boss, this is Jock,” Jock said. I almost sagged with relief. “I’m in Strongpoint Four and…sir, they’ve got at least a hundred prisoners here, including some of the local government. I can’t see Muna anywhere, but they’ve mixed up men and women together. The smell is dreadful!”

  “Great,” I said, grimly. We couldn’t bombard Strongpoint Four, not if there was a chance of taking them back alive. The reporters probably wouldn’t give us any better press for saving the politicians – not that I could blame them for that, of course – but the politicians might be grateful. I doubted they’d be grateful enough to overlook their destroyed city, but perhaps…and perhaps pigs might fly. “What’s your status?”

  “I’m just watching and waiting at the moment, sir,” Jock said. “They think I’m just a coward and have got me running supplies around the place. I can free the prisoners easily; I just can’t get them out without help.”

  I looked over at Ed, who looked back. “I’m sending in soldiers to help you,” I said, finally. “The attack will begin in…”

  “Make it ten minutes,” Jock said. “Once the chaos starts, I’ll get rid of the guards and keep the prisoners safe in their bunker.”

  “We’re on our way,” I said, and closed the connection. “Ed?”

  “Already on it,” Ed said. He paused for a moment. “The gunners want to fire shots at the other strongpoints, perhaps convince them that they’re about to be attacked…”

  “Make it so,” I ordered, looking down at the plan of the city. We’d secured barely half of it in a week’s fighting, but the remainder was either No Man’s Land or Communist-held territory. As we compressed their strongpoints, resistance became fiercer, but also more hopeless. They had to know that they were badly outgunned. If the Government hadn’t decided they wanted them all dead…

  I pushed that thought away and keyed my earpiece. “Tech,” I said, “I have a job for you. When the strongpoints fall, I want you to find out as much as you can from the Communist documents, if you can find them.”

  “Understood,” TechnoMage said. “I should warn you that we haven’t had much success interpretation what little documents we have recovered. The Communists didn’t seem to be good at keeping records.”

  I nodded. Most of the really bad Communist societies had been very bad at keeping accurate records of anything useful. They’d had people at the bottom of the food chain lying to the people above them because failure to meet their impossible goals would have been punished. Having had nothing to lose, they’d decided to lie to their lords and masters. The UN had had a similar problem, but they’d been able to draw on the resources of the Colonies to keep the ship of state afloat. It had lasted longer than any Communist regime, but it had had advantages that most of them could only dream about.

  “The forces are in place,” Ed reported. “We’re ready to move.”

  I looked at the time. “Launch,” I ordered. “Tell the gunners to open fire.”

  The sound of heavy guns echoed over the city as the gunners opened fire. It was something else that we hadn’t thought to teach the locals and I’d had to man the guns with my own cadre. Normally, we’d have used the cadre to teach the locals how to use the weapons, but there was no time. It was something else I intended to fix once the Communist Uprising had been firmly squashed. There was no reason why the locals couldn’t handle the weapons for us and lighten the burden on my men. They hadn’t expected such hard fighting. In hindsight, of course…

  I smiled as new explosions billowed up in the distance. The Communists had dug in extremely well, but we were just piling on the pressure, hour by hour. We’d seen some Communist fighters stumbling out of their barricades, blood leaking from their ears and quite mad. We’d removed them to one of the detention camps, but the medics had confirmed my belief that they’d never recover their hearing again. It didn’t matter. The local government intended to kill them all, even the grunts.

  “They’re moving in now,” Ed said, slowly. The sound of shooting was barely audible over everything else I could hear, but it was definitely more focused. “The tanks are going up the front, as bold as brass; the infantry are going in the rear.”

  I envisaged what must be happening in my mind’s eye. The defenders, struck suddenly by an all-out assault, trying to repel the offensive while, behind them, a silent killer struck again and again. Jock had the highest rating in the Legion and had once swum through a massive swamp to kill his enemy and escape. The Communists would be utterly unprepared for him as he took them apart from the rear. They wouldn’t even notice him until it was too late.

  The sound of shooting grew louder and then dimmed suddenly. “They’re through the outer wall,” Ed reported, as a series of sharp cracks resounded in the air. “They’re pushing the bastards hard…hell, sir; some of them are trying to surrender.”

  “Tell them to take them alive if possible,” I ordered, sharply. The local government could have them afterwards, but I wanted information first. “Standard procedure, but try and get them to our interrogators before someone puts a bullet through their heads.”

  “Understood,” Ed said. We shared a long look. There had been times when some prisoners hadn’t made it all the way to the detention camps. None of my people had been involved, thank God, but some of the civilians had lynched captive Communists before we could get them to safety. I couldn’t really blame them, but I needed the information in their heads.

  My earpiece buzzed again. “Boss, I got the prisoners secure,” Jock said. “Sir, one of them is talking about Muna!”

  “Find her,” I snapped, ignoring the danger. “Look for her and find her now!”

  “Of course,” Jock said. “I’m on the way now.”

  “The advance guard has penetrated down to the inner surface levels,” Ed commented, from his position. “We took nine prisoners, six of whom are badly injured.”

  “Get them treated and then send them direct to the interrogators,” I ordered. I thought about ordering a field interrogation, but there wasn't time. �
��Jock?”