I watched as explosions seemed to rip through the town without suppressing the enemy forces. “Why are they there?” I asked. “Why aren’t they retreating?”
“They can’t,” Dan supplied, from his position. Charlie and Judy were watching for enemy forces that might wonder what had happened to their spotter. “The General has infantry units in position to block any escape from the town.”
“But who are they?”
“Heinlein had the largest army and army reservists in the entire Human Sphere,” Jock said. “They could be anyone, making a stand because they know that they could bleed us to death here. This entire area was prepared for us and the General had no choice, but to enter it. Hear that?”
I nodded. The sound of mortars firing in the distance kept echoing out, answered by heavier guns from the infantry positions, a long-range duel to suppress each other’s fire. I hoped that none of the enemy had the hill targeted. It would be an absurd way to die after everything else.
“They’ll have everywhere here carefully targeted and marked with a big red circle saying ‘hit this when occupied,’ Jock predicted. “They want to bleed us…”
I looked down at the terminal. A fire request was already coming in. “They want a general shot over the entire town,” I said, in disbelief. They couldn’t demand that, could they? There were regulations against it. “That’s…”
“What’s required,” Jock said, a steely tone in his voice. “Do it.”
I started to object. “Do it,” Jock snapped, again. “How many of our people do you want to die if they storm the town?”
The terminal was heavy in my hand. I keyed it open, placed my finger against the scanner to confirm it was an authorised user, and carefully entered the coordinates, double-checking to ensure that I’d entered the right ones. The link back to Devastator buzzed as the tactical officer — Anna would be on duty, I thought — checked my coordinates against the system, and then confirmed the shot. It was ready on demand.
“Now,” Jock said, coldly. There was something in his voice that promised that failure would not go unpunished. “Place the request.”
I complied, trembling. Up above, a set of KEWs would be being fired from the tubes, targeted precisely on the town. The scatter-shots weren’t as precise as the more normal shots, but they would be devastating to the defenders. I found myself counting under my breath. The timer read 00.50 seconds to impact. I should have taken cover, but I had to watch. There was a streak of light in the sky, a thunderous series of explosions that blurred into one roar…and a slap in the face that left me sitting back on the ground, wondering if my sanity had been impaired. The blast wave had knocked me to the ground.
“Wow,” Judy said, somehow appearing behind me and helping me to my feet. “Did the Earth move for you too, honey?”
The hide hadn’t been designed to stand up to such a blast and was collapsing, so Jock and Dan helped the rest of us out of the structure, leaving us to stare towards where the town had been. It was utterly devastated, the more so because there was no fire and little smoke. I saw the infantry advancing rapidly in their armoured vehicles, hoping to wipe out the remaining resistance before they could recover from the pounding. I barely noticed when Jock started to lead me away from the hilltop. I couldn’t wipe the sight from my eyes.
“You did well,” the General said, when we met his advancing convoy. The infantry was no longer being opposed and the only danger was pre-placed mines and explosive devices. The locals, unfortunately for the infantry, were very good at producing them. “The remaining insurgents have retreated and now we’ll go to occupy the town.”
It seemed pointless to me — the town no longer existed, really — but I accepted the offer of a lift. The town once had been neat, designed for a few hundred people at most, but now…now, it was just rubble. The infantry probed through the ruins carefully, finding little to distract them…until they discovered the cellar. They opened it, carefully, and then stumbled back. The smell of death was overpowering.
I couldn’t help myself. I had to look. The cellar had held children, young children, ranging from babies to early teens. They had been hidden from the infantry as they probed the defences, but not from the KEWs. The overpressure had killed them, perhaps, or maybe it was the shock. It didn’t matter. They were dead.
And I had killed them.
Chapter Eighteen
The UN has hundreds of different definition of the term ‘war crime,’ including everything from prisoner mistreatment to causing the deaths of civilians in combat. The sad truth is that, despite the high ideals behind the laws and regulations, the UN is completely unable to enforce the rules on everyone else, nor is it really inclined to enforce them on its own people. The only people charged with war crimes under the UN are people who have incurred powerful political enemies.
Back at Lazarus, I got very — very — drunk. It didn’t help. My dreams were still full of dead or dying children, slain by my own hand. The bar, intended for UNPF officers off duty, didn’t have anything vile enough to blot out the memories…and I had never been a drunkard. There were millions of drunkards on Earth, drinking endlessly to wash away the numb horror of their existence, and yet…it didn’t help me. I’d killed those children as surely as if I’d killed them myself, one by one. My nightmares tormented me with their faces and their dreams. Whatever the sins of the parents — and, if Roger was to be believed, Heinlein was only guilty of being too successful — why should the children have shared in the punishment? Why had they even been there in the first place?
I tried, hard, to convince myself that the resistance had left them there purposefully, just to trick us into committing war crimes against the civilian population, but somehow it didn’t work. The guilt just kept flowing up and mocking me, reminding me time and time again that I had blood on my hands. I tried illegal drugs and even a visit to the brothel that had been established for the infantry, but nothing worked. When I closed my eyes, I still saw the dead and dying children…
It was almost a relief to be summoned back to the Devastator. The Captain had ordered another pair of Lieutenants to the surface to take over the coordinating role — I don’t know if it was because he knew that I’d killed innocents, or because he wanted other officers with the same experience — and I’d been recalled. I should have gone in one of the armoured buses back to the spaceport, but instead I rode in a jeep. If one of the insurgents decided to take a pot shot at me, I might as well make it easy for them. I didn’t want to live any longer.
Nothing happened on the drive, not even a handful of sniper shots aimed in our general direction. It seemed that Heinlein had decided that I was to stay alive, even though I had committed a crime against innocent civilians. I wasn’t relieved when we finally passed through the ring of steel wrapped around the spaceport — it wasn’t enough to prevent the insurgents shelling us from time to time — and boarded the shuttle to return to the ship. The only distraction from my thoughts was a SAM attack on the way back to space, which the shuttle avoided easily. Once in space, we were fairly safe…
But not completely safe. I hadn’t had a proper briefing, but rumours spoke of starships raiding our supply lines and battles against asteroid miners in the asteroid belts. Individually, the miners didn’t have anything like the technology we could bring to bear against them, but as a group they were formidably powerful. The UNPF had lost another starship to the miners and two more had had to retreat back to the nearest fleet base for repairs — it seemed that the Heinlein shipyard personnel weren’t cooperating with the UN. Even if they were, I wouldn’t have trusted them to repair a starship anyway. God alone knew what they could slip onboard if they had a moment.