“One would hope,” I agreed. The guards insisted on checking our identity; they’d moved into the sheltered interior, but there was no way in without passing them. I passed over my ID card without comment and pressed my thumb against the scanner when they asked for confirmation. Peter and Russell followed suit. “Come on.”
The interior of the command bunker, I was relieved to see, wasn’t full of panic and confusion. Robert, who’d been in command until I arrived, looked relieved to see me, even though he seemed to have been doing fine. The enemy had been doing fine as well; the number of red pinpricks on the display, each one marking an enemy attack against our forces, seemed to have multiplied into the hundreds. I silently cursed the UN for leaving so much war material and ammunition lying about, before focusing on the reports coming in from the main gate.
“I’m having B Company prepped to go out and chase the bastards away,” Robert said, obviously intending to take command himself as soon as I was fully briefed. “They’re pushing too close to us to drive them away without an infantry advance, but they’re obviously armed and well-prepared. They’ll pick off any tanks we send out without infantry support.”
I nodded. Infantrymen never believed it in the UN — where infantry and tanker units were kept well apart, for some stupid reason a bureaucrat had come up with years ago, but in the Legion, there was a great deal of crossing between different types of units — but tankers were often scared to death of infantry. It went both ways, of course; from the infantryman’s perspective, the tank was an invincible rumbling fortress, but the drivers knew that they could barely see, that their sensors were unreliable, and that an enemy with an antitank weapon or a Molotov Cocktail could ruin their day. The Landshark was a formidable weapon, but a lucky insurgent with a bottle of petrol could take one out, if they were lucky.
“See to it,” I agreed. The display showed that the enemy was attacking from all sides, but they only seemed to be making a real effort at the main gate. That wasn’t too surprising. The remainder of the base would be far harder to break into even with a preliminary bombardment. We hadn’t had to worry about moving in and out ourselves, so we’d rigged up even more unpleasant surprises for anyone stupid enough to try to break in. The barbed wire alone had caught a handful of Communists during the Communist Insurrection.
Robert hurried out as I turned my attention to reports from the other garrisons. We’d established a network of small patrol bases and garrisons intended to harass enemy fighters and prevent them from slipping close to the cities, and all of them had come under attack. The enemy had clearly been using the lull to lay their plans carefully, but it didn’t look as if most of the garrisons were going to be overrun. They didn’t have counter-mortar units shooting down incoming mortars, but they did have mortars of their own, armed with counter-battery radar. The main commanders of those bases were locals — I couldn’t spare many men from the Legion to command them, even if it wouldn’t have bred resentment — but they seemed to be doing fine. Only a handful had been caught so badly by surprise that it looked as if they were going to fall.
“Show me the feed from the UAV,” I ordered, cursing — not for the first time, naturally — my own position. I could issue orders and know that they would be obeyed, but I couldn’t actually do anything for myself. My Captains and Sergeants and even Privates would be hitting back at the enemy, but my duty would keep me well away from the front lines — unless the enemy brought them to my position. Even so, I wasn’t meant to be fighting, but staying alive to ensure continuity of command. I wanted to be out there, fighting back, yet what choice did I have? “I want to know what’s happening in the countryside.”
The UAV was skimming rapidly towards Fort Galloway, but even it was held back by demands from other sides, requesting real-time footage of what was going on around them. The ground seemed to be seething with enemy soldiers surrounding the various garrisons and pinning them down, while the handful of patrols that had been caught in the open seemed to be trapped — or being forced to surrender. I hoped that the enemy would treat their prisoners well — we hadn’t mistreated our own prisoners, but insurgents played by different rules and their media groupies whined when we played by their rules — but I remembered what the Freedom League had done to Muna and I and scowled. If they mistreated their prisoners, I would make them pay.
“Lieutenant Barrowman is reporting that his men are out of ammunition and are firmly trapped,” a dispatcher reported, breaking through my thoughts. “He’s decided to surrender and ask for terms.”
“Understood,” I said, looking through the eyes of the UAV as the soldiers offered surrender. Wary farmers surrounded them, cuffed them, and took them away on farm vehicles. I keyed a command into my console, warning the UAV to watch the farm vehicles and see where they ended up, but I knew it wasn’t going to be useful. We didn’t have enough UAVs to task one of them to observe the prisoners and their treatment full-time. It would have been different with a full satellite system and a set of intelligence analysts to maintain it, but Svergie wasn’t a wealthy world. It couldn’t have afforded such a system even if it could have built it. “Enter a note in the log; Lieutenant Barrowman had no choice and will not suffer any punishment for it, once he returns to us.”
“Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said. Under the UN, every POW had to be accounted for with so much paperwork that some POWs were simply reported as dead, just to keep the paperwork down to a handful of forests. A returning POW would be interrogated at length by the Security Directorate and the Political Officers, just to ensure that he or she hadn’t been contaminated by the exposure to the enemy. Some POWs on Heinlein had made the mistake of telling their interrogators — after they were returned — how much better Heinlein was to Earth and had never been seen again. We could afford to be a great deal more civilised than the UN.
My earpiece buzzed. “Sir, this is Robert,” Robert’s voice said. “We are preparing to engage the enemy now.”
“Understood,” I said. “Good luck.”
The sound of mortars grew louder as we fired our own shells back at the enemy positions, forcing them to duck and cover, while B Company advanced out of the rear gate. The enemy hadn’t pressed an assault against that section — I wasn’t sure why, unless they only had limited manpower — and it was an oversight that cost them dearly. Backed up by a pair of tanks and several APCs, the men of B Company cleared the enemy away from that section and started to circle around the spaceport, hunting for the site of the enemy mortar teams. Even for highly-trained infantry, covering such ground took time, allowing the enemy a chance to redeploy their own forces to meet them. It was a chance that we weren’t going to allow them to use.
Another furious salvo of mortar fire pinned down the enemy as the tanks advanced from the main gate. They didn’t have to worry about the prospect of any of our people among the enemy and so they laid down massive waves of fire into anything that might have been a threat. An enemy antitank team, either very brave or very stupid, got off an antitank rocket and destroyed one of my tanks before being scythed down by its fellows. With B Company attacking from the flanks and the tanks advancing — now with infantry support themselves from C Company and local reserves — the enemy started to fall back. It was an attempt to gain time to counter our move, but again, we weren’t going to give them that time.