“Probably,” I said, pulling myself to my feet. Peter’s weight was considerable. Did the enemy know what they’d done? We’d trained our people to use their initiative where necessary, but with the command links severed it would be harder to control the overall battle. “We need to fall back to the secondary command post.”
Outside, the noise of fighting was loud enough to damage my eardrums, even with the earpiece communicator that also served as an ear protector. I covered my ears as Peter ran ahead, scouting for new threats as we followed, keeping low to avoid flying shrapnel. There were dead bodies even in the rear, men and women killed by debris from incoming shells and mortar rounds, and we ducked around them as we fled towards the secondary command post. It dawned on me, in a moment of pure amusement, that we probably looked ridiculous, but who cared? We had to stay alive. I was still smiling as we burst into the secondary command post and met the relieved gaze of the dispatchers, who’d suddenly found themselves coordinating a battle.
“Sir, you’re alive,” the leader said. “We feared we’d lost you when the command links went down.”
“Rumours of my death, etcetera, etcetera,” I said, as I took the command chair and summoned up the live feed from the destroyer. The enemy seemed to have stalled on the fourth defence line, but were bringing up their heavy guns to try and pound the defenders into paste before they advanced again. I couldn’t fault the tactics, but it was evident now that it had just been a lucky shot that had knocked out my command post. If they had known what they’d done, they would have used our brief confusion to push their advantage as far as they could. “Do we have full command links?”
”Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said. “We confirmed the links as soon as the primary command post went off the net and all units confirmed the switch in command, ah…”
“Good work,” I said. He was probably worrying that he’d overstepped himself, but the truth was that he’d done exactly the right thing, and done it just in time. Verifying the command links took time that we no longer had. The fourth defence line was the final one before we were reduced to fighting house-to-house in the suburbs. I didn’t want to do that if it could be avoided. New Copenhagen had been damaged enough already by the Communist Uprising. How simple everything had seemed in those days. “Contact the tankers and tell them that I want them prepared to execute a pincer manoeuvre on my mark.”
I drew my fingers across the touch-sensitive screen, drawing out what I wanted them to do. “And contact the gunnery commander,” I added. “On my mark, I want them to throw everything — go to rapid fire; don’t worry about the amount of shells used — at the lasers and the antiaircraft systems.”
Another chain of explosions in the distance underlined my words. “The gunnery commander acknowledges, sir,” the dispatcher said. “They’re standing by…”
I took a long breath. “Stand by,” I ordered, coldly. “Stand by… fire!”
The guns opened fire as one, sending a hail of shells towards their targets, followed by another, and another. Rapid fire exhausted the supply bunkers pretty quickly, but it no longer mattered. If we won, we’d have all the time we needed to re-supply, but if we lost… it wouldn’t matter. It also gave their point defence lasers some serious problems; if they failed to knock down all of the shells, the odds of a direct hit rose sharply. The shells might not have been supremely accurate — although we had better gunners than they had — but the more that landed, the higher the odds of a direct hit. I had one advantage they no longer had, either; I could watch from orbit as the shells crashed down and see their effects. The enemy were trying to pull back their antiaircraft systems now, but it was too late; one by one, they were destroyed, or tipped over, by the incoming shells.
Got you, you bastards, I thought.
“Contact Captain Yuppie,” I ordered. “The helicopters are to go on the offensive; NOW!”
We had held the helicopters back well out of range, but now they gunned their engines, racing forward like bats out of hell, hunting for their targets. The attack helicopters are dreaded by the tankers for very good reason — a single helicopter rocket can blow a tank apart with a direct hit — and now the miners no longer had anything covering them. The helicopters swooped out of the sky and opened fire; their first pass turned half of the enemy tanks into flaming debris. Their second pass, as the enemy struggled to hit back at them with machine guns and even RPGs, annihilated most of the enemy supply line. One helicopter, despite the armour, was blown apart and sent crashing to the ground, but the others escaped, leaving the enemy force shattered.
“Send in the tanks and B Company,” I ordered. The enemy hadn’t had the time to set up their own defence lines. They might even surrender — those who had survived. “Keep pushing. Don’t let them escape.”
I watched as the tanks advanced from the front and B Company from the flanks. The enemy force was in complete disarray and hundreds of their men were simply throwing up their hands in surrender. B Company’s soldiers paused long enough to secure the prisoners and then kept pushing, forcing the remainder to surrender, or die. Ten minutes after the helicopters had made their devastating pass, it was all over.
“My God,” I said, as the full scale of the devastation became apparent. Between us, we had wrecked what had once been a nice place for children. The entire area would have to be completely reshaped and cleared of military ordinance, unless we decided to keep it as a memento of the price of civil war. It might make an interesting museum, or perhaps the planetary government would prefer to forget. The butcher’s bill was beyond belief. Hundreds of our men had died and thousands of enemy fighters had joined them, or had surrendered themselves into our hands. The cost of the lost equipment alone would put a major hole in the Legion’s budget — and why was I worrying about that when so many had died? “What have we done?”
“It is good that war is so terrible,” Russell said, afterwards, “or else we might become too fond of it.”
Chapter Forty
The ending of a war, if not handled properly, can lay the seeds for the next war. History is full of examples, from the ending of World War One to the final Arab-Israeli War of 2024, where the victors failed to enforce just peace terms upon the losers and ended up the worse for it. Politics, as always, remains the womb of war.
The Peace Treaty was signed two weeks after the Battle of New Copenhagen.
I’d advised Frida on how to handle it, from agreeing to some of their terms to pushing forward the ultimate requirements of the planetary government. Some of the Svergie Army recruiting would come from the countryside, but there would no longer be any private militias or fighting forces, although there was nothing the government could do about the spread of guns. Disarming the entire planet would be an impossible task and it would restart the fighting. We could do, I said, without that and Frida reluctantly agreed. Gun ownership would remain part of the planet’s constitution for a long time to come.
The development of the new farms provided the impetus for major social change. The victory in the war ensured that Frida’s program would continue — her Party, naturally, was swearing undying loyalty to her again, even as they sharpened the knives for her back — and most of the population would find themselves moved out the countryside soon enough. With the end of the war, it was possible to work more officially with the farmers to develop the new farms — and avoid some of the more common mistakes, such as too-extensive government regulation. The new farms would provide enough food to keep the planet alive without the need for looting the old farms, while the planet might even build up a food surplus.