We drove through the streets back towards the detention camps outside the city and I found myself, once again, sickened by the realities of war. Here, there was a burned-out house with a family staring at it, unable to understand what had happened to their lives. There, there was a string of looters trying to make away with their new possessions before the soldiers caught them, placed them up against a wall and shot them. Hundreds of thousands of tired people, their faces blank and worn, barely had the energy to glance at us. Some shied away from the soldiers, others welcomed them; I saw young girls flirting openly with some of the local infantrymen. The pregnancy rate in the town was probably going to rise sharply over the next few months.
And there were plenty of silent testaments to the barbarity of the Communists. I saw a man hanging from a tree with a sign saying EXPLOITER, although it wasn’t clear what he had exploited. He could have been anything from a pimp to an industrialist. There were mansions built by the wealthy that had been burned down long before we had started to bombard the city, schools and colleges that had been destroyed and as for the city’s government centres…there was nothing left, but ashes. The Communists hadn’t confined themselves, either; they’d burned down churches and other religious sites without even a hint of discrimination. The priests who’d tried to appeal to their better natures had been slain beside their former parishes; the Communists, after all, regarded religion as nothing, but the drug used to keep the masses in their place. I wondered how many of them had gotten religion in their final hours. There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.
“Jesus, boss,” Peter said, suddenly. “How long is it going to take them to rebuild the city?”
“Years,” I said, my mind racing ahead to the problem. We hadn’t even put out all the fires yet, let alone anything else, but now the Communists had been disarmed we could bring up aircraft and drop water and fire-retardant foam into the mix. How long would it take? I wondered if it would take more resources than the planetary government possessed; after this, their off-world credit wouldn’t be very good at all. The political unrest would discourage investors from investing in the planet, knowing that the Communists might take over and nationalise all of their property. Even if Fleet intervened, the costs would still be enormous…
And I didn’t envy Frida at all.
“I want to inspect the detention camps,” I ordered, as we started to drive out of the city. The plumes of smoke still rising up behind us had a way of focusing the mind. “After that, we’ll have to see how much we can hand over to the locals without getting anyone lynched.”
There wasn't much to each of the detention camps; they were really just a massive patch of ground encircled by barbed wire and supervised by men who had permission to shoot if they felt the situation mandated it. There was no protection from the elements for the prisoners, apart from a handful of UN-issue sleeping bags; they were still naked. It was a vital part of convincing them that they had been captured and were completely helpless, but I suspected that they were taking it a bit too far. The prisoners didn’t have a hope of escaping unless a strong outside force attacked the camps and liberated them. The guards were watching carefully, but as far as I knew, the Communists no longer had a fighting force left.
I watched carefully as yet another prisoner was processed and thrown into the camp. The small wire attached to their forehead was linked to a lie detector that informed us when the suspect lied. The guards asked questions and watched the responses carefully, before either accepting them or demanding better answers. We’d build up a database of people we’d arrested and, bit by bit, separate the smaller fry from the leadership and those responsible for atrocities. The leaders had been moved to a separate camp and isolated for their own safety. We’d put them to death nice and legally.
The thought made me smile as I inspected the camps. The prisoners had been told to dig latrines and prepare for a long stay, but most of them just sat there, trying to hide themselves from our gaze. The men and women who had been caught up in the excitement of being a Communist now discovered that those on the wrong side – i.e. the side that lost – faced the uncertainty and doubt of the future. If things had been different, that could have been me behind the fence…
I nodded once to the guards, returned their salutes, and turned to leave. There were a million and one things that needed to be done. First, however, we had to bury the fallen. After that, we could start to heal.
Chapter Twenty
Learning from defeat is easy – the gods of Darwin see to that. Learning from victory is a lot harder, yet it remains the most important task of a victorious army.
-Army Manual, Heinlein
Two weeks after the city had fallen and peace – of a kind – returned to the planet, we gathered once again in the conference room on the spaceport. The room was decked out in black banners, a reminder of those who had fallen in the recent battle, but none of us needed the reminder. We’d held the funeral service yesterday and I had cringed, inside, as the bodies were systematically lowered into the graves we’d dug for them. It was so little for so much; the men and women who’d died on active service had deserved much better, but what else could we give them? They couldn’t go home again.
The names and faced seemed to shimmer in front of my eyes. We’d lost forty-seven infantrymen, nine tankers and five support staff…and all of them were effectively irreplaceable. B Company had suffered the worst losses, but we’d all been scarred by their deaths; the fallen ones would be sorely missed. There was no one on the planet who could take their place, not without heavy training; the local soldiers didn’t quite come up to our standards, yet. They’d suffered worse than we had in absolute numbers, yet they had far more to lose than us. A single highly-trained soldier from the Legion, one with several skills beyond fighting, was worth more than a local who knew nothing, but fighting. I’d had to throw them into the meat grinder and they’d been…ground.
I was quietly pleased with the local soldiers, but they’d lost over two hundred men in the fighting and it would have been worse, if they hadn’t been heavily supervised. Some of them had the knack for being warrior leaders and had learned fast, but others had gotten themselves and their men killed for lack of experience. Several units had been wiped out and others had been decimated, not always by the enemy. Two soldiers had been shot by others for taking the oldest revenge on some of the Communist women. Others were currently cooling their heels in the guardhouse until the argument over who should have jurisdiction was settled. The only consolation was that none of my people had gotten into trouble this time.
The words of the funeral service echoed through my mind. I’d spoken about each and every one of the fallen, in turn, while the drummers had tapped out the last drumbeat and we’d lowered them into the grave. There hadn’t been a dry eye or a resentful scowl among the men, either; they knew that it could quite easily have been one of them lying there dead on the ground. Some of the men had had families back on Botany, or local girls, and they’d be taken care of, but the others had nothing, but the Legion. We weren’t called the Legion of the Dispossessed because someone had thought it was a cool name.
“We’re clean,” Peter said, finally, as we sipped our coffee. The local coffee was much better than the UN-brand – which wouldn’t have been that difficult – but we still drank the original whenever we met in conference. It helped remind us of where we’d come from, something that seemed to grow more and more important as the years slipped by. “No one’s managed to slip a bug into the room, sir.”
“Good,” I said, calling the room to attention. My inner circle sat up in their chairs and came to a version of attention that would have had a drill sergeant in tears, before he expressed his displeasure in very loud words. “Two weeks ago, we liberated Pitea from the Communists and cleared the remainder out of New Copenhagen. We won, in short, but it won’t be the last challenge we face.”
My gaze swept the room. “Who would like to go first?”
&nb
sp; Ed leaned forward, seemingly reluctantly. “The infantrymen are generally pleased with their performance, as am I,” he said. “The deaths were…unpleasant, but they accepted them and silent wakes” – an old UN tradition among the enlisted men – “were held last night in their name. They can be safely said to have been avenged. The downside is that we are down in numbers and we don’t have replacements that can be thrown into the Companies without needing heavy training.”
I nodded. “You don’t feel that the locals can replace them?”
“I doubt it,” Ed said. “Every one of my men is a long-lifer who has at least five to six years of experience in the infantry, either with the UNPF or one of the planetary armies. There are few people on Svergie who can claim the same length of service and few of them served with the UNPF or anyone else. I think we’re either going to have to slot in some of the trainers or send back to Botany for replacements. Either way, we’re going to need more exercises.”
“I know,” I said, juggling priorities in my head. We had a rule that everyone in the Legion had to be qualified as an infantry rifleman, if nothing else, but the support troops were generally needed elsewhere. I could throw in a few dozen support staff for a short period if I had to, but doing it permanently would leave dents in my roster. There were a few who would want to transfer, and that could be arranged, but others wouldn’t be too keen on the idea. It’s a bad idea to force a man to take such a position if he doesn’t want it. “Put out a call and see who volunteers, then put them through the training course. If they don’t make it, we’ll send back to Botany for replacements.”
I paused. “Is there anything else?”
“Nothing that needs to be discussed in council,” Ed said, after a moment. “There are some concerns about the quality of the local mortar teams and artillery gunners, but that can wait until they have proper training.”
“Which leads nicely to my part,” Russell said, blowing a smoke ring from his cigar. He shot Ed a quick grin and carried on, puffing out smoke. “The local soldiers generally did very well, or at least as well as could be expected, given the limited nature of their training and how they were tossed right into the worst field of war. They’ve actually refused to accept the disbanding of the shattered units and are insisting that we refill them with new recruits, something that I wouldn’t have expected to see in the locals for quite some time.”
We exchanged glances. A unit – a company, or a regiment, or a division – outlasts everyone who has every served in it. The Legion would go on after my death and the new recruits would be told that they had joined a proud tradition started by one Andrew Nolte. There were UN units that had lasted for hundreds of years, proudly carrying their battle standards from planet to planet; hell, I didn’t know a single planetary army that didn’t have such a tradition. The soldiers might have fought for their planet, but they would die for their comrades…and with such baubles soldiers are led.
“I see no reason to disband them, even if we do have to rebuild them from scratch,” I said, seriously. The table murmured agreement. “Do you have any specific concerns?”
“Discipline was generally good, although there was some…ah, reluctance to jump right into the fighting,” Russell said. “They weren’t too trusting of the body armour at first and frankly that’s not a bad attitude for them to have. Body armour is good, but it’s far from perfect. A handful of soldiers broke down completely and had to be helped off the battlefield…”
He snorted. “I must be mellowing in my old age,” he added. “Time was when I would have shot those bastards for daring to show cowardliness in the face of the enemy.”
“You’ll outlast us all,” I snapped. It was probably true; Heinlein had sold the regeneration treatments to almost all of its citizens. It was just something else that the UN propaganda machine had turned into a great injustice perpetrated against the UN. “And the other departments?”
Russell frowned. “The tankers and gunners need a hell of a lot more training,” he said, firmly. “In fact, as you know, I was opposed to sending them into battle at all, but there was no choice. Even so, I would recommend that we attempt not to commit them again until they have had much more training and experience. As for the gunners…they need more training as well. If we had used them without supervision in the recent battle, there would have been far more friendly deaths, caused by our own shooting.”
There was a long pause. “We lost nine helicopters and had two more badly damaged,” Captain Erica Yuppie said. The Airborne commander scowled as she looked at me. “Seven attack helicopters were blown out of the sky by their SAM missiles and two transports were picked off while they were vulnerable. We do have replacements for the vehicles here, sir – the locals have allowed us to replace our losses – but training an attack helicopter pilot is not an easy task. We’re desperately short of reinforcements and we don’t have locals who can stand in.”
She looked down at the table. “We barely started work on developing a training program for local pilots,” she admitted. “We need to push that forward as hard as we can and get replacements in the air before the shit hits the fan again. At the moment, we barely have seven attack helicopters and nine transports capable of being deployed. If we are called upon to serve in our normal role, that of assisting an advance against dug-in enemy forces, we will have serious problems meeting our obligations.”
“I know,” I said. She was right, too. We didn’t have the numbers to absorb such losses without feeling the pain. “Get a list of what you need and expand the training program as fast as you can. I’ll authorise the expense.”
“Excuse my ignorance,” Muna said, “but couldn’t you borrow some of the shuttle pilots from the transport?”
“They have a different set of skills,” Erica said, grimly. “If they could fly attack helicopters, I’d have borrowed them in a split second.”
I looked over at Robert, who smiled dryly. “The spaceport defences were barely tested during the insurrection,” he said. “I think the Communists preferred to have a go at people who might not fight back. There were a handful of mortar rounds that were fired into our defences, but the point defence took them all out before they could crash down and actually damage something. I don’t expect that we’ll be as lucky the next time, but for the moment, we’re safe enough here.
“On the other hand, we need to expand the patrols around the base perimeter and watch out for mortar teams or SAM teams trying to slip into range,” he added. “We might well lose a shuttle to a SAM and if that happens, the cost of replacing it will be considerable.”
“See to it,” I ordered. Shuttles couldn’t be produced on Svergie; they lacked the technical base to even begin to construct the ships. We’d have to ship in a replacement from a more advanced world and the shipping costs would push up the overall price astronomically. Most shuttles come with the starships; a new one, built to our specifications, would be costly, even if we could find an old UN-surplus craft. “Apart from that…?”
“Nothing that needs to be discussed in council,” Robert said, a way of saying that he had everything under control. The UN would have insisted that I kept an eye on him – and everyone else – permanently, but that would have just driven me mad. I trusted them to handle their sections and wouldn’t think any less of them if they had to ask for help. “There are a number of semi-permanent relationships forming between the men and the local help, but so far there haven’t been any incidents because of it. It seems that merely wearing a military uniform can get you laid in New Copenhagen at the moment…”
“So naturally you went and tried it out,” Ed said, quickly. I smiled and some of the others laughed openly. “Did it work?”
“I only got my cock sucked seven times and had sex three times, so clearly it was a failure,” Robert said, dramatically. There were more chuckles. “Seriously, though, I don’t think we have to worry too much about the issue, but I’ll keep a close eye on it, just in case.”
“Good,”
I said. Soldiers have something of a mixed relationship with the hired help. Some would be white knights in shining armour, others would just see the girls as a convenient outlet for their lusts…and the Sergeants would have to separate the two. Svergie, at least, allowed prostitutes to operate – although I have never seen a world that managed to suppress prostitution – and so there were other outlets. “Muna, you’re up last.”
Picking Up The Pieces (Martial Law) Page 20
