And we hadn’t prepared the Svergie soldiers for such fighting. I’d expected that we’d be taking on farmers and miners in the open, not Communists in the city. Whatever the links between the Communists and the Progressives, they’d clearly been broken now. It was war to the knife and God help the person who lost. I doubted that public opinion would stand for mercy, or even permanent exile to Botany — as if they could be transported there in any case.
The next hour passed slowly. The Svergie Army units entered the city and paired up with a handful of our recon platoons. They discovered that the enemy had set off a handful of bombs in the residential area — they would have killed the Conservative leadership if they had been there at the time — but had otherwise fallen back towards the industrial area towards the north. It made a certain kind of sense, I decided; the Communists probably drew their greatest support from the factory workers and they would know the area perfectly, far better than my own people. The remaining streets were almost unoccupied, apart from a handful of looters. We shot several of them and looting dropped off to almost nothing.
“Christ, boss,” Ed said. “What a fucking mess.”
I nodded. It would take days just to take the dead bodies off the streets and give them a proper burial, but we had no choice. If the bodies were allowed to decompose, we’d be looking at a disease outbreak. Svergie wasn’t a rich world; their vaccination programs weren’t as all-encompassing as some of the programs Heinlein or Williamson’s World had mounted, or even the illegal genetic engineering programs in the Beyond.
“Yes,” I agreed, flatly. “Have you heard anything from the local police?”
“Only dead bodies,” Ed said, with a twinge of gallows humour. “They seem to have vanished completely. We’ve found hundreds of dead policemen, who died trying to prevent the chaos from growing worse, but no live ones. They seem to have had a special hatred for the police and several police stations have been attacked and burned out.”
“We’ll have to become the police,” I said, grimly. I didn’t like the idea at all. My men would make much better policemen than the scum on Earth pretending to be cops — it would be hard to make worse policemen — but that didn’t mean that they were suited to the role. They’d been taught to shoot first and shout questions at the body, not arrest someone as gently as possible. “What the hell do we tell them?”
“Just to stay off the streets,” Ed suggested. “At the moment, they’re going to be listening to that Communist pile of crap and wondering what the hell is going on. You have to tell them that there’s still a functional government…”
“Is there?” I asked. They’d started with twenty-one Councillors and a President. The President was badly injured and at least ten of the Councillors were dead. The police force seemed to be out of the picture, we hadn’t seen any sign of the fire department, and there was an armed rebellion underway. The only good thing about the whole situation was that a lot of reporters had died. “If we tell them the truth…”
I shrugged and walked back to the command post, keying in a specific series of commands. We could blanket the airwaves for a single message, if we chose. I set it to record and started to speak.
“Citizens of Svergie, this is an emergency broadcast,” I said. “There is a combined military and civil emergency underway. The Communists have launched an attempt to topple the government, which has failed, but military operations are still underway. Remain in your homes. Do not go out onto the streets. If you have injured, hang out a white sheet and we will attempt to come to your aid as quickly as possible. Remain in your homes. We will end this as soon as possible.”
I listened to my own voice twice and then pushed the send button. My signal would now be competing with the Communist signal, at least until we retook the broadcast centre. I detailed several platoons to secure vital infrastructure, such as the water plant and the fusion reactor that the UN had supplied, before keying my earpiece.
“Jock,” I asked. “What do you see?”
“They’re digging into the industrial sector,” Jock reported. “They seem to have had this planned for a long time. They’re using help — students, mainly — to set up barricades and there are definite signs of heavy weapons going into the area. I think they want to force you to come after them.”
I cursed. They would insist on making this difficult, wouldn’t they? “Understood,” I said. “Relay your impressions to Ed.”
I looked over at Ed and he snapped to attention. “Seal off that area, no one gets in or out,” I ordered. “If anyone tries, arrest them; get the Svergie Army to set up a detention centre — better make it two — using the equipment the UN kindly left us. If threatened with deadly force, reply in kind, but don’t try to force your way into the area. That’s going to take some careful planning.”
My bodyguard fell in around me as I walked back into the building. It was already looking neater — someone had moved the dead bodies and placed them in body bags, even the enemy bodies — and I inspected it briefly before walking up the stairs and looking in on the President. The Doctor and his medical team were working as quickly as they could, but it didn’t look good to my untrained eye. I don’t know much about advanced medicine. The UN had regarded medical corpsmen as non-combatants and denied them weapons. The net result was a serious shortage of medical corpsmen. Luckily, I got to make my own rules for the Legion.
I went up to the second floor and saw a handful of politicians sitting on the floor, looking warily at the heavily-armed soldiers on bodyguard duty. They probably thought that I would order the soldiers to gun them down, or arrest them permanently and take power for myself, but I wasn’t interested. Even if I had been, Fleet would probably have taken a dim view of it. They’d have taken a dimmer view of a successful Communist coup, but that would have been an internal affair. They couldn’t have interfered.
Frida’s eyes met mine and I was surprised at the fury within her. She looked angry, not at me, but at the people who’d plunged her world into hell. I doubted she’d ever been in as much danger in her life and she knew, not being particularly stupid, that she’d come very close to dying. The Communists probably considered her a class traitor and had attempted to kill her. They’d almost succeeded.
“We need to talk,” I said, quietly. She nodded and stood up on unsteady legs — I put out a hand to help her, but she brushed it away angrily — and staggered over towards a private meeting room. It had a window open to the north, which I checked carefully while she stared at the billowing clouds of smoke and fire. Was that a tear I saw in her eye?
“They’ve killing everyone,” she said, dully. I’d never heard her sound so defeated before and she flinched as the sound of another helicopter echoed overhead. Ed would direct them to where they were needed, but I doubted they’d be safe flying anywhere near the Communist stronghold. They’d probably hidden plenty of SAM units in the area, just in the hope we’d send another helicopter to be blown out of the sky. “They’re killing us all.”
“That’s not true,” I said, and hoped to God that I was right. “We have the main body of the army here and patrolling the streets. You’re safe now.”
Frida shook her head, rubbing the scar on her face. “We’ll never be safe again,” she said. “How could anyone do this to their own people?”
“Welcome to the wonderful world of political violence,” I said, not unkindly. The President had wanted to disarm the various militias and fighting groups once the Army was up and running — or perhaps shooting — but he hadn’t moved quickly enough. The Communists had made him pay for that lesson, in blood. “They’ve hurt us badly, but the government is still intact.”