There was no response. “Hold fire until the forces are in position,” I ordered, before Ed could say anything. If Jock was in the complex when we opened fire, we’d be condemning him to certain death, along with the prisoners. The Communists might have killed them by now, but I lived in hope. “Bring up the 7th and 8th units and get them deployed to seal off any possible route of egress.”
A string of detonations made the ground shudder under my feet. We’d located some of the enemy tunnels and used shaped charges to cause them to collapse, rather than send infantrymen down into the tunnels against a prepared enemy. The clear-up crews would probably be spending years clearing up all the debris from the fighting and removing bodies from the sewers. I didn’t like to think about it in such ways, but it was possible that by removing most of the population, we were actually doing them a favour. The possibility of disease couldn’t be underestimated.
“They’re moving in now,” Ed confirmed. “I’m adding some of the newer tankers to the older forces. They’re going to need support.”
Baptism of fire, I thought. We hadn’t expected such savage fighting and so we hadn’t built a native tank regiment. We hadn’t realised we’d need one, and now… the Legion had lost too many tanks, even if they were easy to replace. Russell had set up a tanker school at the spaceport and rushed a group of drivers and gunners though a heavy training schedule, but I was uncomfortably aware that I was sending babes to the slaughter. They wouldn’t know half the tricks of my tankers and they might not have time to learn. The burned-out shape of a Landshark showed me just what would happen to most of the young fools I’d sent to die. They deserved better from me.
A flight of shells roared overhead, coming down in the midst of an enemy position two kilometres to the north. We’d succeeded in breaking up the enemy position and isolating different groups in their strongholds, but most of them were still fighting savagely. I think that losing much of their civilian cover might almost have been a relief to them. It took a particularly unpleasant mind to accept the thought of fighting where families and friends might be hurt. I’d studied history enough to know that humans were capable of any barbarity, but this was beyond the normal run of unpleasantness. The Communists knew that they had nothing left to lose.
“The gunners are reporting that they scored nine direct hits,” Ed said, consulting the take from the UAVs. The Communists didn’t seem to have realised just what the birds actually were, although there had been some attempts to shoot them out of the sky for dinner. None had succeeded, luckily. The UAV would have exploded if it had been shot down, but even that would have been too revealing. “They’re asking for permission to fire another spread.”
I nodded. “Do so,” I said. The sound of firing seemed to be coming from all around us, as if we were surrounded and being fired upon from all sides. The city’s atmospherics had been weird before the fighting had begun, the residents had told us, and now it seemed to be perpetually wrapped in fighting. “I take it there’s no sign of any let-up…?”
My earpiece buzzed suddenly. “Boss, this is Jock,” Jock said. I almost sagged with relief. “I’m in Strongpoint Four and… sir, they’ve got at least a hundred prisoners here, including some of the local government. I can’t see Muna anywhere, but they’ve mixed up men and women together. The smell is dreadful!”
“Great,” I said, grimly. We couldn’t bombard Strongpoint Four, not if there was a chance of taking them back alive. The reporters probably wouldn’t give us any better press for saving the politicians — not that I could blame them for that, of course — but the politicians might be grateful. I doubted they’d be grateful enough to overlook their destroyed city, but perhaps… and perhaps pigs might fly. “What’s your status?”
“I’m just watching and waiting at the moment, sir,” Jock said. “They think I’m just a coward and have got me running supplies around the place. I can free the prisoners easily; I just can’t get them out without help.”
I looked over at Ed, who looked back. “I’m sending in soldiers to help you,” I said, finally. “The attack will begin in…”
“Make it ten minutes,” Jock said. “Once the chaos starts, I’ll get rid of the guards and keep the prisoners safe in their bunker.”
“We’re on our way,” I said, and closed the connection. “Ed?”
“Already on it,” Ed said. He paused for a moment. “The gunners want to fire shots at the other strongpoints, perhaps convince them that they’re about to be attacked…”
“Make it so,” I ordered, looking down at the plan of the city. We’d secured barely half of it in a week’s fighting, but the remainder was either No Man’s Land or Communist-held territory. As we compressed their strongpoints, resistance became fiercer, but also more hopeless. They had to know that they were badly outgunned. If the Government hadn’t decided they wanted them all dead…
I pushed that thought away and keyed my earpiece. “Tech,” I said, “I have a job for you. When the strongpoints fall, I want you to find out as much as you can from the Communist documents, if you can find them.”
“Understood,” TechnoMage said. “I should warn you that we haven’t had much success interpretation what little documents we have recovered. The Communists didn’t seem to be good at keeping records.”
I nodded. Most of the really bad Communist societies had been very bad at keeping accurate records of anything useful. They’d had people at the bottom of the food chain lying to the people above them because failure to meet their impossible goals would have been punished. Having had nothing to lose, they’d decided to lie to their lords and masters. The UN had had a similar problem, but they’d been able to draw on the resources of the Colonies to keep the ship of state afloat. It had lasted longer than any Communist regime, but it had had advantages that most of them could only dream about.
“The forces are in place,” Ed reported. “We’re ready to move.”
I looked at the time. “Launch,” I ordered. “Tell the gunners to open fire.”
The sound of heavy guns echoed over the city as the gunners opened fire. It was something else that we hadn’t thought to teach the locals and I’d had to man the guns with my own cadre. Normally, we’d have used the cadre to teach the locals how to use the weapons, but there was no time. It was something else I intended to fix once the Communist Uprising had been firmly squashed. There was no reason why the locals couldn’t handle the weapons for us and lighten the burden on my men. They hadn’t expected such hard fighting. In hindsight, of course…
I smiled as new explosions billowed up in the distance. The Communists had dug in extremely well, but we were just piling on the pressure, hour by hour. We’d seen some Communist fighters stumbling out of their barricades, blood leaking from their ears and quite mad. We’d removed them to one of the detention camps, but the medics had confirmed my belief that they’d never recover their hearing again. It didn’t matter. The local government intended to kill them all, even the grunts.
“They’re moving in now,” Ed said, slowly. The sound of shooting was barely audible over everything else I could hear, but it was definitely more focused. “The tanks are going up the front, as bold as brass; the infantry are going in the rear.”