“We’re not going to get out of this alive anyway,” Singh pointed out. “Darling Frida will want to kill us all, just to ensure that her own connections with us are buried beneath our dead bodies. Would it surprise you to know that she was once a Communist in good standing?” I shrugged. “Or do you care, seeing that you are just a mercenary with no sense of what you’re fighting for?”
“Not really, no,” I said, ignoring his insults. Removing him and the rest of his gang suited both sets of orders. “Are you going to offer me a bribe?”
He smiled. “Bring your force over to our side and I’ll pay you twice what Frida and her government are paying you.”
I laughed, loudly enough for him to know that he was being mocked. “If I accepted that bargain, and I don’t believe that you could or would keep it, no one would ever hire us again,” I said. “There’s a whole string of mercenary companies out there and all of them would gleefully point out that the Legion of the Dispossessed had turned on their backers when a better offer came along. Fleet would probably forbid us from moving around if they viewed us as bearers of chaos… what can you offer us to make it worthwhile?”
He looked as if I’d struck him. “You could come work with us…”
My laugh grew louder. “Communism has never worked,” I said. I’d studied history enough to know that to be true. “The best you could create is a prison camp for your planet; the worst would be another civil war. Even if you became the government of the planet, you couldn’t make communism work — it simply doesn’t work.”
“There are communist planets out there,” he protested. “They work.”
“They were all created by committed believers,” I pointed out, in response. “And even they didn’t remain stable when their children learned about different worlds, did they? Some will probably go capitalist soon enough; others, the worst ones, will probably have a civil war. You have to force communism on people who don’t want it. You’ll be lucky if you last a year.”
His gaze darkened. “We have some of your people prisoner,” he snapped, forgetting his manners. “If you attack us, they will be killed.”
I felt a knife stabbing into my heart, but pushed it down angrily. “Anyone who joins the Legion knows the score,” I said. “If they die on active service, they die on active service… and we will hunt their killers to the ends of the universe.”
I watched as he stumbled away. If they weren’t going to give up…
We’d have to attack.
Chapter Sixteen
MOUT — Military Operations in Urban Terrain — is among the most dangerous forms of combat. The advantages of modern trained troops are cut down to nothing. It is therefore recommended that all ROE be adjusted to ensure the safety of the troops as the first priority.
Three days later, we began a careful advance into the city.
I’d planned, after some consultation with Jock — who had finally bothered to report in — and Ed, for an attempt to win over most of the city’s population. Jock had confirmed my suspicions that most of the city’s population was caught in the middle of the fighting, without actually being Communists or even Communist Supporters. I wasn’t too surprised by that — the Communists had lost their seat, after all — but if they were caught up in the fighting, they might turn on my people. The Communists, it seemed, had disarmed the Police and most of the other militia groups, leaving them as the dominant presence in the city. I couldn’t see how they intended to convert their control of the city into control of the planet, unless they thought their resistance would spark off other insurrections in the other cities. I doubted it would work. Everywhere else, the Police had rounded up known Communists and thrown them in the detention camps.
The Communists clearly had SAM missiles, which they’d proved by firing at and missing a helicopter that flew too close to the city, but they hadn’t realised just how advanced the UAVs we had were. We might not have been able to count on the William Tell to continue to supply us with orbital reconnaissance — the broadcasts from the encircled city contained more than a few mocking references to Fleet’s apparent reluctance to intervene — but the UAVs would fill in the holes. The big ones could hover high over the city for hours, completely beyond detection, while the smaller ones fluttered down between the buildings. They looked so much like birds that they would almost pass unnoticed, at least until someone shot one down in hopes of an addition to their rations. The Communists had clearly stockpiled food and drink — hell, they had the entire seacoast to draw on for water — but they were already looking a bit sparse. I’d have held off for longer, but the political pressure had become irresistible. We needed to destroy the Communist faction before further trouble erupted. It probably wouldn’t be long in coming.
I looked over at the take from the bird-shaped UAVs and smiled. The Communists didn’t know it, but between them and the Specials we knew where most of their strongpoints were. This would be very different from battering our way into the Industrial Complex, when we were almost blind; this time, we’d know where we were going, and just where to hit to split up the enemy forces. They might have turned the city into a strongpoint, but we could break it up, at a cost. The thought made me wince. We had half of the Legion and four thousand soldiers from the local army… and we were about to assault a city with over six million people. It was going to be nasty.
“Ed?” I asked, finally. “Is everything ready?”
“It’s as ready as it’s ever going to get,” Ed said. We’d strengthened the ring of steel around the city as more units were shuttled down from the spaceport or New Copenhagen. Hundreds of people were still trying to flee and we’d picked most of them up, taking the time to debrief them properly. The Communists were still purging the city of everyone they hated; having killed the Police and the Industrialists, they’d moved on to the landlords and the loan sharks, even the drug dealers. The tidal wave of human movement had netted us quite a few people the Police would want to have a few words with, afterwards. “We could do with more men, but…”
“We could always do with more men,” I said, peering over in the direction of the city. There were small plumes of smoke rising up in the distance, caused by cooking fires, but otherwise it seemed peaceful. That wouldn’t last very long. “Are all of the units ready?”
Ed saluted sharply. “The Legion is fully at your command, Captain-General,” he said, formally. It was an old phasing, dating back from well before the UNPF and the Colonies War. “We are good to go.”
I took one last look at the display and keyed my earpiece. “Missile teams, this is Lead One,” I said. “You are cleared to open fire. I repeat; you are cleared to open fire.”
The missile trucks had come from the UN deports on the planet, where they’d been abandoned along with enough ammunition to fight a civil war, and it hadn’t taken long to get them back into working order. They weren’t used that often when there were starships in orbit, beyond any danger of being shot down or captured, but I had a use in mind for them now. I heard the noise as they fired the first spread of light cruise missiles into the city, targeted on the Communist command posts. If we were lucky, we’d kill the leadership and decapitate them in the opening round. I smiled as the streaks of light raced over the horizon and flew towards the city, watching carefully for any signs of laser point defence fire. The Communists could have obtained a ground-based point defence station from one of the UN deports, but instead the missiles came crashing down on their targets, exploding in massive fireballs that I could see even at a distance. There would be no way that they’d be hiding that from their captive population!