“Then we move tomorrow,” I ordered, finally. “Confine the designated local units to barracks and brief them in tonight; we’ll move out tomorrow morning, bright and early.”
“Yes, sir,” Ed said. He looked as if he wanted to dispute my presence on the convoy, but finally decided not to say anything. “We’ll be ready to depart at 0700.”
I spent the rest of the evening discussing contingency plans with Robert and Muna, before joining Suki in bed and trying to sleep. I’d used to find it hard falling asleep before a mission, but that had faded as I’d become older and wiser and learned to sleep whenever I could. There was no such thing as enough sleep. Suki didn’t know that I was leaving tomorrow; as much as I hated to deceive her as well, she could have been a spy as well. Anyone who wasn’t part of the original Legion could be a spy.
The thought tried valiantly to keep me awake. If I’d been planning ahead, I’d have recruited agents from among the urban residents, rather than people from the rural areas who might be marked out as spies just because of their origins. I’d have tried to place agents among the Army as a matter of course; the enemy, logically, would have done the same. Who among the force I’d designed and built was a spy?
Perhaps we should interrogate them all under a lie detector, I thought grimly, and drifted off to sleep.
I was up at the crack of dawn the following morning. I kissed Suki goodbye, showered — I might not be able to shower at Fort Galloway — and dressed in standard BDUs, before pocketing my rank insignia. I couldn’t wear it on the convoy or else I’d mark myself out for an enemy sniper; shooting senior officers was an old and dreaded sniper tactic. I ate breakfast along with the men, exchanged a few words with Robert and Russell, who would hold the spaceport in my absence, and finally went out to join the convoy. The vehicles were already assembled and, as I watched, surprised local soldiers were urged into the trucks. They’d only been told where they were going last night.
“All present and correct, sir,” Ed assured me, as he and Captain Jörgen Hellqvist came up and nodded. We’d already discarded salutes on the verge of going into combat — and I was mortally certain that the enemy would be waiting for us. Our attempts to set up an intelligence network of our own had failed dismally, but we’d picked up enough to know that the enemy forces were watching the city. Some small patrols had been ambushed outside the city and others had been wiped out completely. “We’re ready to roll.”
I inspected the convoy personally before boarding my armoured car, Peter at my side. We had ten armoured cars — I’d have preferred tanks, but tearing up the countryside roads would not have endeared us to public opinion — seven trucks packed with soldiers and a handful of specialist vehicles. The lead vehicle had cost the UN so much that they kept them back for special occasions; it was designed to sniff out mines and IEDs that might be planted in our path. They generally had a high success rate, but the Generals had preferred not to use them. Dead soldiers caused less paperwork.
“Excellent,” I said, finally. I keyed the radio and was pleased to discover that the radio net was working perfectly. “Roll out.”
The convoy drove out of the spaceport and onto the main road, heading down towards New Copenhagen. We’d been running armed convoys along the road for several days now — the farmers had a habit of shooting up military vehicles that weren’t escorted heavily — and hopefully they wouldn’t see it as anything other than another convoy to the city. The first twenty minutes passed completely uneventfully, apart from spotting another convoy heading in the opposite direction, and I allowed myself to relax. The real challenge would come when we headed out into the countryside.
“We have to turn off here,” Ed murmured, through my earpiece. He was in a different armoured car, preventing a lucky shot from killing all of the commanding officers at once. It had happened, more than once, to the UN. “I’m moving the UAV to scan ahead of us now.”
The turn proceeded smoothly and soon we were racing away from the city, towards the mountains in the distance. The UAV had detected no sign of an ambush, but I wasn’t too impressed. They hadn’t picked up other ambushes before they’d been sprung, although some ambushes had been noticed because they’d been almost painfully amateurish. I’d hoped that they’d been linked to the militia, but the prisoners — after recovering from their shock — had confessed to being little more than youths out for a thrill. They’d thought that taking a few shots at armed soldiers would have been fun. I hoped they found the detention camp equally fun.
I watched as the buildings faded away into the countryside. Like most cities on colony worlds, New Copenhagen had a clearly-designated border between the urban and rural areas, but the sprawl was already pushing at the boundaries. Apparently, on Earth, cities had just kept expanding until they’d actually linked together into much larger cities, creating nightmarish areas of poverty and suffering. My hometown had been tame compared to some of the places I’d heard about on Earth, places where the UN’s writ hadn’t run at all, even before John Walker’s Coup. The UN had been putting out a call for mercenary soldiers, but I had already decided that the Legion was going to stay well away from Earth.
The roads grew rougher the further we moved from the city. The original settlers had intended to build railroads between the cities and the farmers, rather than develop a massive road network, but the UN had — quite accidentally, this time — put a stop to that. The net result was that the roads were in a terrible shape — it was something else, I decided, to have the unemployed working upon — and our progress grew slower. I suspected that even if the enemy hadn’t had any advance warning, they would have known we were coming just from the massive clouds of dust rising up in our rear.
“We’re about to pass through a town now,” Ed’s voice warned. I scowled. We had hoped to avoid all settlements as we moved, but we had no choice for some of them. They’d been built directly adjacent to the roads, for reasons that still eluded me, and had grown up to dominate the area. “Everyone stand at the ready.”
We rounded a corner and braked, hard, not an easy trick in a twenty-vehicle convoy. Someone, and it took no effort at all to guess who, had built a blockade right across our path, forcing us to halt. I conferred briefly with Ed, who ordered A Company to advance carefully. We couldn’t go around the barricade without crossing cross-country — which would tear up the fields and make a terrible mess for the locals to fix afterwards — but if someone had gone to the effort of building a barricade, they might well have it covered by armed men. A barricade without armed men was little more than a nuisance. I picked up my terminal and checked the live feed from the UAV. The town looked deserted, but there were hot spots in most of the houses. A moment later, the shooting started, pouring down at us from the buildings.
I ducked into the armoured car as bullets began to ping off the armour. “Return fire,” Ed barked, as the shooting grew louder. The heavy machine guns mounted on the armoured car returned fire — deafeningly loud, even inside the vehicle — and swept the buildings, trying to force the enemy to keep their heads down. The buildings were well-built, but they couldn’t stand up to heavy machine gun fire for long, any more than could the hedgerows or the barricade itself. A thunderous explosion marked the end of the barricade as a set of IEDs detonated under our fire. The lead armoured car advanced, laying down fire as it moved, and came too close to a buried mine. The explosion threw the entire vehicle over; it caught fire and exploded seconds later.
The infantry advanced under cover from the armoured cars and attacked the buildings. They took no chances; they kicked in doors and window and threw grenades into the buildings, before pushing through the wreckage to kill the remaining insurgents. I wanted to join them, even though I knew that house-to-house combat was the most dangerous of all, and forget that I was the commanding officer. Inch by bloody inch, we cleared the village of insurgents and IEDs, before driving the vehicles through as quickly as we could, leaving several burning buildings behind us. Before we’d arrived, it had been a quiet and prosperous town; now, it was nothing, but blackened ruins and shattered lives.