Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The enemy had made one mistake, I realised as I took my position in the command post; they’d mistimed their arrival so that the William Tell was high overhead. They might have suspected — the Freedom League definitely would have suspected — that we had a link to the destroyer and a live feed from her sensors, but they had been delayed enough to fail to reach New Copenhagen before the destroyer returned to a position from which it could observe their arrival. The enemy force — at least the armoured units and self-propelled guns — were clear on my display.

“Open fire as soon as they come into range,” I ordered, contacting our own long-range guns. We didn’t have as heavy an artillery section as I would have liked, but at least we now had locals trained on the heavy guns, allowing me to pull back my own people to their original units. “Use the live feed from the UAV” — officially, we were getting the information from an orbiting UAV with strictly limited protocols — “to adjust fire for effect.”

I heard the sound of the heavy guns booming in the distance, answered seconds later by the enemy guns as they fired back at their opponents. The telemetry from the destroyer suggested that they’d mounted lasers on trucks as well, using them to detonate shells well short of their target, making it harder to hammer them into dust. Without them, we would have smashed their force with artillery long before they reached the city. We were using lasers as well, but at least we had our forces dug in and ready to withstand a bombardment.

“Target their laser units with units A to D,” I ordered, knowing that it might be futile. The enemy would have assigned self-protection as their lasers highest priority. They’d be foolish not to do so, but if we spread out our fire to force them to divide their attention, it was quite likely that we’d get a few shells through their defences. It was a shame that we didn’t have self-guiding shells, but the UN had always considered them too expensive to purchase for anything other than the direst need. “Warn the first line to stand ready to repel attack.”

The enemy weren’t waiting for their shells to batter us down. Their commander had evidently come to the same conclusion that I had, or perhaps he — or she — believed that a long siege worked in our favour. Their infantry were advancing under cover of rockets launched from a UN MLRS towards our lines, forcing our men to duck and cover before scrambling into position to return fire. The display kept updating as both sides targeted each other, one trying to break through the lines, the other trying to keep them back.

“They’re running into the minefield,” Robert observed, from his position. I’d thought that he’d be taking command of B Company, but we’d decided to hold B Company and most of the tanks in reserve. If we broke the enemy advance, we could use them to drive the enemy from the field. “I wonder if it will slow them down…”

I watched as the enemy infantry fell back in shock and dismay, and then the MLRS opened fire again, rocketing the entire area and detonating the mines. I had to admire the solution, although it wouldn’t have worked perfectly against a properly-laid minefield. There are minefields on Heinlein and countless other worlds that are still deadly to anyone unfortunate enough to walk across them. The locals had been clearing the minefields for years and they were still dangerous. This time, as the enemy advanced, they encountered less resistance.

“The 3^rd is falling back to the secondary lines,” Jock’s voice said, through my earpiece. “I request permission to wreck havoc on the enemy lines.”

“Go for it,” I said, flatly. Jock and the remainder of the Specials had been sent into the area between our lines and the enemy, hopefully hidden from all, even the orbiting destroyer. He’d had plans to hit the enemy from the rear, but I wasn’t sure how well they would work out with the enemy on alert. “Kick their butts.”

The sound of firing grew louder as the enemy infantry advanced on the secondary line. This time, my infantry called in artillery fire on their enemies, summoning mortars and short-ranged guns to bombard the advancing soldiers, who were ripped apart by the incoming fire. A handful set up their own mortars and returned fire, but they couldn’t bring enough fire to bear on our positions to force us to fall back again. I was tempted to send the reserves forward to add to the 3^rd’s strength, but I held them back on impulse. I had the feeling that I was going to need them.

An explosion, powerful enough to shake the ground even at such a distance, billowed up from the enemy lines. Jock must have hit something, I decided, or a shell had broken through and come down on a supply truck loaded with ammunition. I keyed my earpiece, hoping to hear from him, but there was no response. It was as cold and silent as the grave. I hoped — desperately — that he and his team were still alive, but there was no way to know until after the battle. The enemy were pushing closer, right into the killing ground.

“They’re advancing their tanks now,” one of the dispatchers said. “They’re not even trying to be subtle; they’re just advancing right at the defence line.”

“Keep an eye out for a trick,” I ordered. There might have been a certain amateurishness about the enemy’s armoured tactics, but anyone who scanned a UN manual on tank operations would learn that charging a position equipped with antitank guns was asking for disaster. If they were sending their tanks forward they were either idiots, which I wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of, or they had something cunning up their sleeves and were using the tanks to distract us. “Warn the 3^rd to stand by with antitank weapons.”

I watched grimly as the tanks lumbered across the battlefield and opened fire with their machine guns at extreme range, choosing not to come any closer and run right into the antitank weapons. Their tactic did make a certain kind of sense; as long as those heavy machine guns were blazing over the 3^rd’s position, they couldn’t shoot back, but it was keeping their own infantrymen down as well. The ground was being chewed up by the bullets and everyone was ducking for cover. I thought about sending in the helicopters to hammer the tanks, but it was too dangerous as long as the enemy kept their antiaircraft weapons in position to cover their advancing forces. They’d see the helicopters coming a mile off.

“Call in mortar fire on those tanks,” I ordered grimly, as the tanks pressed forward slowly. It was enough to make me wonder if they had access to orbital reconnaissance as well… and then I understood what they were doing. There were birds flying in the air where most birds would have had the sense to flee for their lives, which suggested — shouted, rather — that most of those birds were UAV craft. I keyed my radio and ordered the machine guns to shoot them down, but as the birds started to evade our fire — dropping the pretence that they were anything other than common birds — I realised that the enemy had other tricks up their sleeves. The UAV birds flashed down towards the trench lines and exploded; a moment later, the tanks gunned their engines and raced forward, charging through the mud to press their advantage.

A tank — and a second tank — exploded as antitank rockets slammed into them and blew them into raging fireballs, but the remainder kept coming, hosing down any possible threat with their machine guns. The 3^rd hadn’t been trained for such intensity of fire and panic spread through the ranks, sending soldiers running for their lives where many of them were mown down by the tanks. I found it hard to blame them; yesterday, they’d been fighting a counter-insurgency campaign and now they were taking on some of the most fearsome weapons of modern war. The UAV birds had cleared the way.

The mortars opened fire, forcing the tanks to fall back slightly, but the enemy infantry were already advancing into the next set of lines. I saw a tank explode as a mortar round came down right on top of it, but the remainder were unharmed; they wouldn’t be harmed by anything short of a direct hit. The drivers realised what we taught our own tankers in training school and gunned their engines, pushing forward despite the increasing weight of fire. They thought that they were invincible.

“Move the 1^st forward to counter their advance,” I ordered, tightly. It was a risk, but if they tore through the lines they’d probably win the battle. We wouldn’t even be able to withdraw in good order… and even if we did, where would we go? The spaceport couldn’t be used to evacuate all of us before the enemy arrived and captured it. “Warn the tankers to be prepared for their own advance.”

I hoped it wouldn’t come to that — the Landsharks weren’t really designed to take on other tanks — but I’d bet on our tankers against theirs if there was no other choice. The enemy infantry were slowing down again — they seemed to have an unlimited supply of infantry, which didn’t strike me as being very fair, but they probably had the same impression about us — as our bombardment sharpened, but their tanks kept pushing forward gently, despite losing several more to antitank guns. Captain Jörgen Hellqvist and the remains of his unit fought a desperate battle to prevent the enemy from overrunning the trench lines, before falling back and detonating IED weapons in the enemy’s path, forcing them to slow down and check for more. The soldiers booby-trapped their dead comrades’ bodies with grenades before leaving, allowing them to strike one final blow in defence of their planet.

The meat-grinder rolled on. I threw in some of my reserves, slowing the enemy down again, even as the enemy sprung their surprise. As they’d sent their tanks forward, they’d sent infantry out to circle around our positions and try to come at us from the rear. They encountered the men of B Company in their position, waiting for the order to advance, and fell back in disarray at the precise and deadly fire that tore into their position. A UAV launched a spread of missiles at what we hoped was the enemy command vehicle, but only one missile made it through the lasers to detonate… and the enemy seemed barely slowed, if at all, by the attack. I decided that intelligence had probably gotten the details wrong…

“Incoming fire,” Peter snapped. He tackled me and knocked me to the ground just before I heard the whine of incoming shells and felt the shock as they detonated bare meters from the command post. The entire complex blacked out as the explosions cut power lines and damaged computers; emergency power, coming on a few seconds later, could only activate a handful of the computers. “Sir, this place is no longer tenable.”

“Probably,” I said, pulling myself to my feet. Peter’s weight was considerable. Did the enemy know what they’d done? We’d trained our people to use their initiative where necessary, but with the command links severed it would be harder to control the overall battle. “We need to fall back to the secondary command post.”

Outside, the noise of fighting was loud enough to damage my eardrums, even with the earpiece communicator that also served as an ear protector. I covered my ears as Peter ran ahead, scouting for new threats as we followed, keeping low to avoid flying shrapnel. There were dead bodies even in the rear, men and women killed by debris from incoming shells and mortar rounds, and we ducked around them as we fled towards the secondary command post. It dawned on me, in a moment of pure amusement, that we probably looked ridiculous, but who cared? We had to stay alive. I was still smiling as we burst into the secondary command post and met the relieved gaze of the dispatchers, who’d suddenly found themselves coordinating a battle.

“Sir, you’re alive,” the leader said. “We feared we’d lost you when the command links went down.”

“Rumours of my death, etcetera, etcetera,” I said, as I took the command chair and summoned up the live feed from the destroyer. The enemy seemed to have stalled on the fourth defence line, but were bringing up their heavy guns to try and pound the defenders into paste before they advanced again. I couldn’t fault the tactics, but it was evident now that it had just been a lucky shot that had knocked out my command post. If they had known what they’d done, they would have used our brief confusion to push their advantage as far as they could. “Do we have full command links?”

”Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said. “We confirmed the links as soon as the primary command post went off the net and all units confirmed the switch in command, ah…”

“Good work,” I said. He was probably worrying that he’d overstepped himself, but the truth was that he’d done exactly the right thing, and done it just in time. Verifying the command links took time that we no longer had. The fourth defence line was the final one before we were reduced to fighting house-to-house in the suburbs. I didn’t want to do that if it could be avoided. New Copenhagen had been damaged enough already by the Communist Uprising. How simple everything had seemed in those days. “Contact the tankers and tell them that I want them prepared to execute a pincer manoeuvre on my mark.”

I drew my fingers across the touch-sensitive screen, drawing out what I wanted them to do. “And contact the gunnery commander,” I added. “On my mark, I want them to throw everything — go to rapid fire; don’t worry about the amount of shells used — at the lasers and the antiaircraft systems.”

Another chain of explosions in the distance underlined my words. “The gunnery commander acknowledges, sir,” the dispatcher said. “They’re standing by…”

I took a long breath. “Stand by,” I ordered, coldly. “Stand by… fire!”

The guns opened fire as one, sending a hail of shells towards their targets, followed by another, and another. Rapid fire exhausted the supply bunkers pretty quickly, but it no longer mattered. If we won, we’d have all the time we needed to re-supply, but if we lost… it wouldn’t matter. It also gave their point defence lasers some serious problems; if they failed to knock down all of the shells, the odds of a direct hit rose sharply. The shells might not have been supremely accurate — although we had better gunners than they had — but the more that landed, the higher the odds of a direct hit. I had one advantage they no longer had, either; I could watch from orbit as the shells crashed down and see their effects. The enemy were trying to pull back their antiaircraft systems now, but it was too late; one by one, they were destroyed, or tipped over, by the incoming shells.

Got you, you bastards, I thought.

“Contact Captain Yuppie,” I ordered. “The helicopters are to go on the offensive; NOW!”

We had held the helicopters back well out of range, but now they gunned their engines, racing forward like bats out of hell, hunting for their targets. The attack helicopters are dreaded by the tankers for very good reason — a single helicopter rocket can blow a tank apart with a direct hit — and now the miners no longer had anything covering them. The helicopters swooped out of the sky and opened fire; their first pass turned half of the enemy tanks into flaming debris. Their second pass, as the enemy struggled to hit back at them with machine guns and even RPGs, annihilated most of the enemy supply line. One helicopter, despite the armour, was blown apart and sent crashing to the ground, but the others escaped, leaving the enemy force shattered.

“Send in the tanks and B Company,” I ordered. The enemy hadn’t had the time to set up their own defence lines. They might even surrender — those who had survived. “Keep pushing. Don’t let them escape.”

I watched as the tanks advanced from the front and B Company from the flanks. The enemy force was in complete disarray and hundreds of their men were simply throwing up their hands in surrender. B Company’s soldiers paused long enough to secure the prisoners and then kept pushing, forcing the remainder to surrender, or die. Ten minutes after the helicopters had made their devastating pass, it was all over.

“My God,” I said, as the full scale of the devastation became apparent. Between us, we had wrecked what had once been a nice place for children. The entire area would have to be completely reshaped and cleared of military ordinance, unless we decided to keep it as a memento of the price of civil war. It might make an interesting museum, or perhaps the planetary government would prefer to forget. The butcher’s bill was beyond belief. Hundreds of our men had died and thousands of enemy fighters had joined them, or had surrendered themselves into our hands. The cost of the lost equipment alone would put a major hole in the Legion’s budget — and why was I worrying about that when so many had died? “What have we done?”

“It is good that war is so terrible,” Russell said, afterwards, “or else we might become too fond of it.”