Retreat Hell

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Stay alert,” he hissed, as the truck rocked. The vehicle was open-topped, rather than the heavily-armoured transports he would have preferred. Personally, he was rather surprised no one had taken a shot at them yet. “Don’t lose your situational awareness.”

  He glanced back at his men and smiled, inwardly. For some of them, the coming war would be their first taste of combat and they relished the challenge, but – at the same time – they were seeing the evidence that they would be fighting in a zone partly occupied by civilians as well as insurgents. Many of them had grown to manhood during the Cracker War, even fought during the war ... and some of them would almost certainly sympathise with the local population. Thomas, with the more detached perspective a Marine was encouraged to develop, was less inclined to blame outside forces. In hindsight, Thule had made a number of very poor decisions based on bad intelligence.

  But at least they’re from Avalon, he thought. The combat losses had made his brevet shift to combat command permanent, at least for the moment. I don’t have to worry about being embedded.

  The truck reached the remains of the police station and stopped. Thomas didn't hesitate; he hefted his rifle and scrambled over the side of the truck, dropping down to the ground. His men followed him, spreading out to pose a less vulnerable target to the enemy ... but no enemy materialised. The streets surrounding the destroyed building were completely deserted, at least of human life. He winced as he saw another wave of rats running from the ruins, scared off by the sound of the truck. They’d been seeing rats everywhere for the past couple of days.

  “Shit,” one of his men breathed.

  Thomas followed his gaze. There was a lamppost on the other side of the street, with a policeman’s body dangling down from a long piece of rope. The bloodstains on his uniform seemed to have congealed around his groin, suggesting ... Thomas had seen horrors before, but some of his men, judging by the sounds behind him, hadn't seen or imagined anything like it. It looked as though the lynch mob had cut off the man’s balls before they hung him.

  “Leave the body,” Thomas ordered. He wanted to cut it down and give the man a proper burial, but there was no time. “Squad A, secure this location; Squad B, with me.”

  He led them towards the first intact building, eyes alert for signs that someone had left a nasty surprise in place. But there was nothing ... he braced himself, then kicked open the door. Inside, a faintly unpleasant smell drifted towards him, a combination of human fear and wastes. Blocking out the distraction, he activated his goggles as he led the way into the building, peering into the darkened rooms one by one. Someone had boarded over the windows in hopes of preventing thieves from breaking into the house. Judging by the bullet holes in one particular window, the precaution hadn't made the house noticeably safer.

  “The toilet’s blocked up,” one of his men called. “But there's no one here.”

  Thomas wasn't too surprised. The water supplies hadn’t been cut off, no matter how badly the area had slipped out of government control. Nor had the electric power supply, something that worried him. The rebels could use the government’s own power supplies against it. But surely the power would be cut off before the assault on the Zone began.

  “This building will do as a FOB,” he said. Their orders said to establish a number of Forward Operating Bases around the Zone, which would then be linked together to isolate the Zone from the rest of the oversized city. “But we’ll search the rest of the area first.”

  It took several hours before the entire area had been thoroughly inspected. Most of it was deserted, as if the mobs that had destroyed the police station had hidden themselves out of fear of the government’s revenge, but they did find a handful of families hiding in one or two of the abandoned houses. The soldiers searched them, as gently as possible, then started making arrangements for the families to be moved to the first DP camp. Unsurprisingly, the families had looked terrified before Thomas explained where they were going. They’d thought they were going to be taken out into the road and shot.

  “Sir,” one of his men said. “Are we on the right side here?”

  Thomas wanted to laugh. Only years of experience kept him from snickering. The Knights of Avalon had an idealism that the Imperial Army and even the Terran Marines had long lost after fighting to uphold an Empire that had committed far too many crimes to be considered a wholly decent power. Idealism and war simply didn't go together.

  He could have explained, he knew, and tried to make him understand. Instead, he merely clapped the soldier on the shoulder and grinned.

  “Welcome to the true face of war,” he said. He waved a hand around to indicate the destroyed building, the deserted streets and the helpless families, squatting in the middle of the road. “Ambiguity, unhelpful allies, bastards on both sides ... and innocent people caught in the middle.”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said. From the look he was aiming at one of the civilians, a girl barely old enough to be considered a teenager, he was having second thoughts. It wasn't a lustful look, more of a recognition that she could easily have been his sister. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “End this as quickly as possible,” Thomas said. “And then try to convince everyone to play nicely together.”

  He looked towards the Zone, an ominous collection of buildings in the distance. Some of the apartment blocks, he noted, would make excellent observation post. It wasn't going to be easy to tackle the Zone without risking major losses on both sides.

  “You did this before, didn't you?” The soldier asked. “As a Marine, I mean. How many places were more peaceful when you left?”

  “Most of them,” Thomas said. He hesitated, then admitted the truth. Even their success stories had had fatal flaws in the peace solutions. “But not always for very long.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The latter, in particular, was unexpected by the social scientists. Didn't it amount to deliberately allowing their people to starve? (Even the social scientists who understood the dangers of factions didn't comprehend that warlords might be prepared to gamble with the lives of their own people.) But when it started, relations between the outsiders and the locals collapsed further into disdain, if not outright disgust and hatred.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. War in a time of ‘Peace:’ The Empire’s Forgotten Military History.

  Standing on top of a building was a risk, Pete knew; Marines were trained in sniping and even the Riflemen were very capable indeed. The Marine Snipers could hit targets at distances most of their targets had flatly believed to be impossible. But he needed to see for himself as the low-level war surged around the Zone. He lifted his binoculars and smiled thinly as he saw a plume of smoke rising up in the distance. Another hastily-emplaced IED had picked off a target.

  Or maybe it was detonated ahead of time, he thought. Makeshift weapons could never be considered completely reliable, after all. Prior to his recruitment, the insurgency had lost a handful of bomb-makers when they’d blown themselves up completely by accident. Even afterwards, giving civilians a few hours of training and then expecting them to produce weapons was chancy, to say the least. There’s no easy way to know.

  He walked over to the hatch and dropped down into the apartment below, then headed down the stairs to the ground. His bodyguards appeared, as if from nowhere, when he passed through the doorway at the bottom, looking as alert as a Drill Instructor could have hoped. Pete concealed his amusement, then allowed his guards to escort him down another flight of stairs into the basement. Behind him, he heard a series of doors slamming shut as he pulled his mask out of his pocket and pulled it over his face.

  “That was foolish,” a middle-aged woman said, as he stepped into the room. She never bothered to wear a mask, something that suggested she simply didn't care what happened to her. Pete didn't know her story, only that she was as ruthless and determined to harm the local government as himself. Indeed, she showed a lack of concern for civilian casualties that bothered him more than
he cared to admit. “You could have been killed.”

  Pete shrugged as he picked up a mug of coffee from the table someone had wedged into the far corner and took a swig. “Risk of our existence,” he said, dismissively. There was no time to fear death in the middle of a war. “You’re the one who wears no mask.”

  The woman shrugged. She called herself Stone. No one, as far as Pete had been able to determine, knew her real name. There were all sorts of rumours, but as some of them were contradictory and others were physically impossible Pete had just decided to wait until she decided to tell him something of her own free will.

  “There are risks and then there are insane risks,” she said. She pointed one long finger at the chair on the other side of the central table. “Take a look at this.”

  Pete sat, obediently.

  “They’re knocking down entire rows of houses and apartments,” she said. “Only a few hours and they’ve already made quite remarkable progress.”

  “Standard procedure,” Pete said. Privately, he was impressed. It would take weeks for a division of Imperial Army soldiers to start setting up a barricade around the Zone. “And I guess they’re bringing up local soldiers too?”

  “Setting up barracks here, here and here,” Stone said. She pointed to large warehouses on the map as she spoke. “How long will it be until they’re ready to take the offensive?”

  “A few days, probably,” Pete said. “Are they still mounting their propaganda offensive?”

  Stone’s face darkened. “As if anyone would be foolish enough to take their word for it.”

  Pete nodded. The offer to take women and children out of the Zone, into safety, was a cunning ploy, even if there was no intention to use them as hostages. In other circumstances, it might well have worked, either causing divisions within the insurgency or removing enough civilians from the battlefield to make the attackers more willing to use heavy firepower to clear the way. But no one in the Zone trusted the local government’s promises ... and besides, starvation wasn't really a possibility.

  “Then we keep harassing them as much as we can,” he said. He’d hidden combat units in the districts surrounding the Zone, but the tactic of sweeping up everyone into DP camps had neutralised a handful of them. “And then we wait for them to come into the Zone.”

  He looked down at the map and sighed. Whatever else happened, the whole battle was going to be bloody as hell. Even if the plan worked completely – and that never happened, outside poorly-designed exercises – hundreds of thousands of people were going to die. And if their benefactors had their own plans for the system ...

  Stone snorted. “We will give them one hell of a bloody nose,” she said. “And they will not forget that we stood up and fought like free men, not cowardly shits from Earth.”

  “No,” Pete agreed. “They won’t.”

  ***

  “There was quite a bit of resistance from the criminal elements,” Joe Buckley said, as Jasmine joined him in his FOB. “But we kicked their heads in and they decided to obey orders instead of fighting.”

  Jasmine followed his gaze. A line of men, mostly young, were helping to pick up the bodies and carry them to a truck the local government had provided for the purpose. Their legs were shackled and they’d been warned that, if they moved too far from the Marines, the shackles would explode, blowing their legs into bloody chunks. So far, none of them had dared to try to escape. Even if they survived the explosion, cripples wouldn't last very long on Asgard’s streets.

  “Good,” she said. After some of the reports, she found it hard to muster any sympathy for the criminals. The insurgents might be fighting for a better world, as they saw it, but the criminals were merely making the civilians miserable. “What do you intend to do with them, once the bodies are gone?”

  “There’s always room for slave labour,” Buckley said. He gave her a twisted grin. “Were you thinking of dumping them in the DP camps?”

  “No,” Jasmine said. She shrugged. “Use them as you see fit.”

  Another bus caught her eye as it appeared at the end of the street and stopped, waiting for its passengers. One of the Marines bellowed orders, opening up the doors to a large apartment block. A stream of people promptly appeared, many of them clutching bags of clothing in their hands as if they expected to need them. They were probably right, Jasmine considered. The local government was trying, but building up supplies for thousands upon thousands of displaced persons – refugees, in all but name – was a nightmare. At least they didn't look reluctant to go any more. Some of the early relocations had been handled by force.

  “It turned out there were quite a few people who’d made themselves masters of their blocks,” Buckley commented. “We had to deal with them – we added them to the labour gangs – before their former subjects would cooperate with us.”

  Jasmine scowled, unsurprised. There were people who talked about the virtues of a state without laws, without government ... but in practice it was nothing more than the rule of the strong. No matter the situation, there was always someone who was prepared to make it worse by preying on their fellow humans, through theft, rape or even permanently making themselves the boss. Human nature, it seemed, was ill-disposed to anarchy.

  But that was the Empire’s justification for taking power, she thought. How are we any different from them?

  “Keep moving as fast as you can,” she said. “How are the locals coming along?”

  “A mixed bag,” Buckley said. “Most of their infantry units aren't too bad, though there’s a high degree of hatred for the rebels, but their security units are fucking awful. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere near prisoners, let alone helpless civilians.”

  “Understood,” Jasmine said, although she knew she wouldn't be able to influence the local government enough to convince them to spare a competent unit to guard POWs. The level of hatred was worrying, though. People did stupid things because they hated their enemies and allowed that hatred to override their common sense. “Would they have been booted out of training on Avalon?”

  “Oh, probably,” Buckley confirmed. “But then, most of them simply don’t have enough training or have pretty crappy officers who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about either. Maybe they’ve stripped the recruiting pool pretty bare.”

  Jasmine wouldn't have been surprised. Like Avalon, Thule had had to expand its infantry units in a hurry and simply hadn't had enough competent and experienced officers to command all the new units. Given time, the problem might go away ... or it might swell up into a looming disaster that would rip the army apart. It had happened to particular regiments in the Imperial Army, regiments so incompetent that even other regiments had feared being forced to fight beside them. What sort of disasters would happen on Thule?

  “Yeah,” she said. “And there isn't much we can do, is there?”

  “Not unless you want to cause a diplomatic rupture,” Buckley said. “I had an officer from one of the local units come right out and tell me that he reported to their High Command, not me or my commander. Can we legally arrest one of their officers?”

  “I don't think so,” Jasmine said. “It might be a diplomatic disaster to try.”

  She scowled. The Empire’s views on command authority had been very simple – the Empire was in command at all times, with local officers subordinate to the outsiders – but the Commonwealth had a more nuanced view. They’d been too idealistic, Jasmine realised, and never considered that there might be problems integrating Commonwealth forces with local forces. An oversight, she realised, that stemmed from the Marines approach to war.

  “I think someone’s put you in position to be fucked up the ass,” Buckley said, spitting. “Probably with Tabasco-covered cucumbers. Did they do it deliberately?”

  “I’ve got to have a girl-to-girl chat with Lila,” Jasmine said. Buckley’s dark face reddened, but he held his ground. “What do you two do when you're in bed together?”

  She smiled at Buckley’s express
ion, then changed the subject before he told her something she didn't want to hear. “I don't think the Colonel or anyone else set me up deliberately,” she said, firmly. “But it’s clear that there’s a lot going on we didn't know about before we departed Avalon.”

  “No surprises there,” Buckley commented. “When have we ever been fully and completely and absolutely briefed before we were dumped into the shit?”

  Jasmine heard the sound of another explosion in the distance and glanced down at her terminal, then glanced back up at her friend. “Never,” she said. “And just try to bear that in mind at all times.”

  ***

  The building was a seven-story apartment block, almost completely stripped of everything that would have made it habitable. Thomas hadn't been surprised, when the soldiers had searched it, to discover only a handful of people living there, cowering on the topmost floor. The soldiers had helped them out, reassured them as much as possible, then handed them over to the local security forces handling the Displaced Persons. Once the building was empty, the demolitions experts went forward to take a look.

  “This building would probably have collapsed on its own within a year or two,” the expert called, when she returned to where Thomas was waiting. “You know just how poorly they set up the support structures? I swear they were rotting away into dust before my very eyes.”

  She gave him a slightly-manic grin. “But the charges are in place,” she added. “You want to push the button?”

  Thomas shook his head, inwardly rolling his eyes. Marine Auxiliaries were a little strange – and often resentful, no matter how hard they tried to hide it – but Elzandra was the strangest he’d encountered. From her file, it sounded very much like she’d fallen in love with demolishing things with high explosives at a very early age and attempted to join the Marines because they would provide her with the opportunity to do it legitimately on a regular basis. Given her slight build, he honestly wasn't sure how she’d managed to make it through Boot Camp. Someone must have seen promise in her that had ensured she made it to a specialised training centre rather than the more general path through the Slaughterhouse.