I keyed my earpiece quickly. “Launch the first helicopters,” I ordered, sharply. “The enemy is in disarray.”
The display updated as the first helicopter lumbered into the air, orbiting out over the spaceport and heading towards the enemy positions. The gamble seemed to have paid off; the enemy hadn’t had a chance to set up any antiaircraft weapons again to take pot shots at the helicopters, at least before the helicopters opened fire themselves. The enemy, deprived of anywhere to hide, melted away under the helicopters’ ruthless fire and died in droves. A handful threw their hands up in surrender, casting their weapons on the ground, but the vast majority tried to run. There was nowhere to hide from the helicopters, or the advancing counterattack.
“Take prisoners,” I ordered, when Robert contacted me to ask if we should bother. We needed to know what the prisoners knew, although the odds were that it wouldn’t be very much. I wouldn’t have sent people who knew everything into a position where they could be captured and interrogated by the enemy. I’d been captured myself, of course, but I hadn’t been going somewhere where I might expect to be captured. “Get them secured, then get them back to the guardhouse. I want the interrogators to pull out all the stops.”
Under the watchful eye of the helicopters, the handful of prisoners were rounded up, apart from a pair of men who were too badly wounded to last for very long. Robert’s men did the only thing they could and gave them a mercy killing, before setting out to survey the surrounding territory and looking for more enemy forces. I wouldn’t have put it past the enemy — and the intercepted transmissions suggested that I was right — to have an observer or two watching from a safe distance, just to report on what had happened to the enemy leadership. They would know that their assault on the spaceport had failed; indeed, that it hadn’t even come close to succeeding. Why…?
Because they wanted to pin us down, I realised, and swore under my breath. “Get me the feed from the UAV,” I snapped. I’d turned it away from watching what was happening in the north so that I could watch Robert’s men as they destroyed the enemy fighters. “Show me Fort Galloway.”
The UAV computer suggested something else I should look at, something that even the UN-issue program operating the UAV thought was important. I looked at it and swore. An entire army was advancing down from the mountains, towards New Copenhagen — and Fort Galloway. An entire modern armoured force. It looked to be about a Regiment in size.
“Shit,” I said, mildly. “Contact the garrisons and tell them to start deploying according to Alpha-Seven. We may have a bit of a serious fight on our hands.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
While a fort is useful in a counter-insurgency, it is rather less useful on a modern battlefield, where tanks and mobile artillery can hammer away at a fort’s advantages and cripple the defenders very quickly.
Fort Galloway came under heavy attack first.
The Fort had been effectively invulnerable to the vast majority of the insurgents’ weapons. Machine guns and assault rifles had simply ricocheted off the Fort’s heavy walls and came down harmlessly in the area surrounding the Fort. Their light RPGs and even antitank weapons could do no more than scar the walls or perhaps slip through one of the firing slots if they were lucky — but even an interior detonation would do relatively little damage. Mortar rounds could do more damage, if they landed, but the point defence lasers could pick them off before they detonated and counter-battery fire could prevent the insurgents from launching the mass attack they would need to get a handful of rounds through the defences. And as for a ground assault… well, with clear fields of fire and a clear idea of how to defend a Fort, no ground assault could succeed unless the defenders ran out of ammunition. Ed had good grounds to feel that he could defend Fort Galloway indefinitely. The enemy had other plans.
The miners hadn’t used all of the war material the UN had left behind — they didn’t have the numbers or training to use all of it — but with some help from the Freedom League, they’d managed to get most of the armoured units working, without being noticed from orbit. They’d risked blowing their cover when they’d downed the UAV, but they’d had no choice; they needed to mass their forces without being spotted. Once their first assault had begun, keeping my forces pinned down and distracted, they’d started the advance, moving a formidable Regiment-sized force down towards New Copenhagen. This was the nightmare that the President had predicted; outright civil war, with devastation as the only winner.
The UN hadn’t been keen on heavy artillery — it hadn’t needed many self-propelled guns, as it could always call in fire from orbit — but it had abandoned several dozen self-propelled guns and rocket launchers. Those were now brought to bear against Fort Galloway, smashing away at the Fort’s defences from outside its mortar range. The hail of fire was too intense for the point defence lasers to stop more than a handful of the incoming shells, allowing the shells to come smashing down on the Fort and shattering the defences. The UN hadn’t provided them with armour-piecing shells, but it didn’t matter; the sheer weight of the bombardment was enough to break through the Fort’s defences and wreck havoc among the inhabitants. The walls started to crack and the barracks collapsed, shattering water bunkers and starting fires all over the Fort. The enemy wasn’t even sending in any infantrymen to attack under cover of the incoming fire; they were merely hammering the Fort to death from a very safe distance.
“You can’t hit back,” I said, to Ed. We were still in touch, but there was little we could do to help the beleaguered defenders. I was still rushing to get a defence line in place near New Copenhagen. If we couldn’t stop the enemy’s armoured thrust, we would lose the war and with it any hopes of preserving Svergie for civilisation. “You have to surrender.”
The line seemed to flicker as another series of shells shook the entire fortress. I didn’t want to think about how many of my men were dying in the attack, unable to even hit back at their tormentors. The UAV had launched all four of its rockets against the enemy self—propelled guns, but there hadn’t been enough rockets to take them all out. I thought about deploying the helicopters up to assist, but Ed had already lost his helicopters in the first assault and the enemy clearly had antiaircraft units. I’d be throwing away the helicopters for nothing.
“I understand,” Ed said, bitterly. The line fizzed again. “Don’t you dare let them get away with this!”
“I won’t,” I promised. I hated to see any of my men going into captivity, but there was clearly little choice. They were helpless to hit back; helpless to do anything, but die. “Good luck.”
I watched on the display as the Fort fired surrender flares into the air. I had wondered if the enemy would even know what they meant, but as the fire slacked off I allowed myself a moment of relief. The enemy had accepted the surrender. Their infantrymen approached Fort Galloway’s remains carefully, guided through the minefields by my men, and accepted Ed’s surrender. Ed would have purged the computers before surrendering and it was standing orders that nothing classified was to be committed to paper where it might be found, but it was quite possible that the Freedom League would interrogate Ed and his men. They wouldn’t be able to use drugs on their captives — or, at least, on anyone who actually knew anything — but torture, isolation and other tricks would definitely have an effect. I silently prayed that they’d be safe, and then deliberately turned my attention to the enemy’s armoured force, rushing southwards towards New Copenhagen. I didn’t want to watch the surrender.