I smiled. Her oriental looks mixed with mine might produce an interesting child, although as long as they had their mother’s looks and their father’s brains I’d be happy. It had to be something to do with the way we’d spent last night. I don’t normally go to bed with a woman and think of children the day afterwards.
“What a pity,” I said. “Do you want to practice some more?”
She laughed and I advanced upon her with open arms. Afterwards, we took a shower together and washed each other, before I finally forced myself to get dressed in my uniform. It felt disgustingly unclean to the touch, but I hadn’t thought to bring a spare uniform to the ceremony. In hindsight, I should have brought an entire infantry company and a few dozen tanks, never mind a uniform.
I checked my wristcom and swore. It was much later than I had thought and I cursed myself for spending time with her, even if a soldier who won’t fuck won’t fight. I remembered the men I’d disciplined for being late back to their duties because they’d met a girl in town and winced. They’d all be laughing at me behind my back and I couldn’t blame them. God knew I would have done the same thing in their place.
“Ed, this is Andrew,” I said, hunting for the earpiece with one hand. “I need a status report.”
“Peter insisted that you needed sleep and threatened to beat hell out of anyone who disturbed you before you woke naturally,” Ed explained. He knew what I meant, alright, even though if it had been something truly urgent I would have been woken anyway. “The city is currently quiet, but still under curfew and we’re patrolling heavily to ensure it stays that way.”
“Good,” I said. I wasn’t commanding a UN unit any longer, where the commander had to have direct control at all times, but one composed of men who used their initiative when necessary. I could trust them to get on with it. “I’ll be downstairs at the command post in a few minutes. Have a pot of coffee ready for me.”
Ed laughed and cut the connection and I turned back to Suki. “I’m going to have to leave you now,” I explained. “I’ll see you back on the base later.”
“Later,” Suki agreed. “Make sure you get some proper food as well.”
I rolled my eyes and walked out of the room, pausing to dismiss the guards that Peter had left to ensure that my sleep was undisturbed, before walking down the stairs into the room that Ed had turned into a command post. Unlike the bedroom, there were no windows in the hall, although I would have been worried about mortar shells if I’d been in charge of the building. One day had inflicted more devastation than the UN had in years! Ed was standing near a portable communications unit, inspecting the report, and he saluted when he saw me.
“Good morning, sir,” he said, with a wink. “Did you have a good night’s sleep, sir?”
That, I decided, settled the question of how many people knew that I’d been with Suki. “Yes, thank you,” I said, putting an edge into my voice to suggest that ragging me wouldn’t be a good use of his time. “I need a status report, right bloody now.”
Ed nodded. “The city itself is calm, as I said,” he commented, nodding to the map. “We’ve got the industrial area sealed off still and we’re poking through it looking for unpleasant surprises, but the teams are pretty confident that we found most of the IEDs. The entire area was devastated, but some of the heavy machinery survived, which may mean that they can rebuild quicker than we thought.”
I remembered the piles of rubble that had replaced strong brick buildings and shrugged. It was possible to be optimistic, but I privately suspected that it would be years before the industrial complex was up and running again. They might be able to replace what they’d lost on-planet, but if not… they’d have to try to buy from another star system and that would drain the planet’s limited off-world currency reserves. It wasn’t as if they had much to trade, but raw minerals from the mines.
“The bad news is that they’ve definitely lost control of Pitea,” Ed continued. I winced, although it wasn’t a surprise. Pitea had been a Progressive city, according to the election results, but the Communists had been strong there. There were hundreds of factories there that used unskilled labour for menial work and they strongly resented the way they were treated. In the long run, the Communist program would lead to industrial wastelands and devastation, but in the short term… they might not mind, provided that they were allowed to hang the industrialists. “The last report had the police stations being overrun and… sir, Muna’s still missing.”
“I know,” I said. Muna was somewhere in Pitea… and I hoped she’d managed to go to ground and hide, but I feared the worst. Our communications systems were too advanced for the locals to jam, unless they’d had help from off-world, and Muna would have been able to report in if she’d been free. That suggested that she was either dead or in enemy hands. “And our own forces?”
“I redeployed A and B company to make their way to Pitea, and ordered most of the local units to prepare for the same journey,” Ed explained. “The bastards have taken out the local railroad, however, and they’ve blown up several bridges. We can still get there, but it’s going to take us three weeks to move the main body of the army there, assuming that there are no other problems.”
I swore. Attacking an industrial complex had been bad enough; attacking a full-sized city — Pitea was listed as having over seven million inhabitants — would be an order of magnitude worse. They’d have plenty of time to get ready for our attack and the only advantage we had was that it was possible, just possible, that not all of those seven million were committed Communists. We might be aided by a revolution in their rear. If we were lucky…
“Try and speed up the progress, if you can,” I ordered, finally. Ed would do everything in his power to get us there quicker. “What about the toll, Ed?”
“We lost eleven men,” Ed said, flatly. “Seventeen more have been injured and are at the spaceport medical bay. The doctors think that there’s a good chance that they’ll pull through, but three of them are going to be permanently disabled. We might be able to keep them on in some role, or we might have to pension them off…”
“Yeah,” I said. The UN had literally allowed people in wheelchairs to serve as combat troops — absurd regulations designed to counter ‘discrimination against differently able people’ — but I had no intention of allowing it to contaminate the Legion. If they could become clerks, I’d be delighted, but it was more likely that they would drink themselves to death. The poor bastards deserved better. “And the enemy?”
“We pulled around two thousand bodies out of the rubble,” Ed admitted. “I don’t know, of course, how many of them were actually enemy fighters or merely people caught up in the fighting, but we’re still finding bodies everywhere. We took over a thousand prisoners and they’re currently cooling their heels in detention camps, but I don’t know how we’re going to sort the hardcore out from the soft bastards.”
He paused. “Oh, and the local police — what was left of them — wanted to arrest some known hardcore we caught,” he added. “It seems that the Acting President’s decree banning the Communist Party means that the leadership have to be transferred to the local jail for immediate trial.”
“I see,” I said. “And you said?”
“I said that the final fate of the prisoners would depend upon you,” Ed said, passing the buck shamelessly. Well, I suppose the only other choice would have been to hand them over and wash our hands of the blood, afterwards. I wouldn’t shed any tears for them, but I believe in fair trials, then shooting the guilty. “I know we have hardcore, but we also have too many people who clearly aren’t hardcore.”