The Lord’s Army wasn’t any better equipped, but the Prophet Isaiah certainly did a better job of building enthusiasm in his followers than King Jorge II did. Rumor had it that Jorge and his three mistresses had left Pontefract for a safer planet several months ago …and this time rumor was dead right. Ruthven’d heard that from a buddy on Colonel Hammer’s staff.
The command car eased through the S-bend at the base entrance. Melisant was squaring the corners, apparently to impress the locals. Ruthven looked down at them, trying to keep a friendly smile. They were impressed, all right, waving and cheering so loudly that sometimes he could hear them over the car’s howling fans.
Good Lord they’re young! he thought. It really was a war of children. Most of the Royalist soldiers were teenagers and so undernourished they looked barely pubescent, while the Lord’s Army recruited ten year olds at gunpoint from outlying villages.
It’d go on for as long as King Jorge managed to pay the Slammers and the Five Worlds Consortium shipped arms to the Prophet. A whole generation was dying in childhood.
History was a required subject at the Academy; Ruthven had done well in it. The realities of field service had provided color for those textual accounts of revolts, rebellions, and popular movements, however. That color was blood red.
He’d expected a vehicular circuit inside the wall, but the interior of the compound was sprinkled randomly with shanties and lean-tos except for the road from the gate to a clearing in the center. The four howitzers were emplaced evenly around the open area, each in a low sandbagged ring which again must’ve been built for its morale value.
“You want us up between the guns, El-Tee?” Melisant asked. “Looks like they dump the resupply there and the troops hoof it back to their billets, right? Over.”
“Roger that,” Ruthven said. “Break, Unit, we’ll form in the central clearing while I figure out what to do next. Six out.”
Blood and Martyrs! This’s looking more and more like a ratfuck. Ruthven hadn’t been thrilled by the assignment from the start, but until E/1 got to Firebase Courage he hadn’t have guessed how bad things really were.
He’d expected the Royalist troops to be ill-trained and poorly equipped …because all Royalist field units were: the defense budget never percolated far from the gaudily dressed officers in the capital, Zaragoza. He hadn’t expected Fire Support Base Courage to be so ineptly constructed, though. It was a wonder that the Lord’s Army hadn’t rolled over the position long before.
The Headquarters complex was four aluminum trailers which’d been buried in the ground to the right of the gate. A tower in the middle of them carried satellite and short-wave antennas, making the identification obvious and coincidentally providing an aiming point to the Prophet’s gunners. The Lord’s Army had only small arms, but painting a big bull’s-eye on your Tactical Operations Center still isn’t a good plan.
An officer in a green dress uniform with gold crossbelts was coming up the steps from one of the trailers, steadying his bicorn hat. The three aides accompanying him were less gorgeously dressed; that, rather than the rank tabs on his epaulets, identified Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera.
Ruthven dropped into the compartment again. As soon as Melisant brought the car to a halt, he swung the rear hatch down into a ramp and stepped out to meet the Royalist officers.
Carrera stopped where he was and braced to attention. A rabbity aide with frayed cuffs scurried to Ruthven and said, “Sir, you are the commander? My colonel asks, what is your rank?”
Ruthven frowned. Instead of answering, he walked over to Carrera and said, “Colonel? I’m Lieutenant Henry Ruthven, in command of Platoon E/1 of Hammer’s Regiment. We’ve been sent to you as reinforcements.”
“A lieutenant?” the Royalist officer said in amazement. “One platoon only? And where are the rest of your tanks? This one thing …”
He flicked his swagger stick toward the command car.
“ …this is not enough, surely! We must have more tanks!”
What Major Pritchard, the Slammers Operations Officer, had actually said when he assigned Ruthven was, “to put some backbone into the garrison.” It wouldn’t have been polite or politic either one to have repeated the phrasing, but now Ruthven half-wished he had.
“We’re infantry, Colonel,” Ruthven said calmly, because it was his job …his duty …to be calm and polite. “We don’t have any tanks at all, but I think you’ll find we can handle things here. We’ve got sensors to give plenty of warning of enemy intentions. We’ve got our own powerguns, and we have direct communications to a battery of the Regiment’s hogs.”
“Oh, this is not right,” Carrera said, turning and walking back toward his trailer. “My cousin promised me, promised me, tanks and there is only this tank.”
“Sir?” said Ruthven. Sellars was bringing her squad in; the jeeps of Heavy Weapons followed closely. “Colonel! We need to make arrangements for the siting of my troops.”
“Take care of him, Mendes,” Carrera called over his shoulder. “I have been betrayed. It is out of my hands, now.”
Carrera’s aides had started to leave with him. A pudgy man in his forties, a captain if Ruthven had the collar insignia right, stopped and turned with a stricken look. The Royalists didn’t wear name tags, but he was presumably Mendes.
“Right, Captain,” Ruthven said with a breezy assertiveness that he figured was the best option. “I think under the circumstances we’ll be best served by retaining my troops as a concentrated reserve here in the center of the firebase. We’re highly mobile, you see. We’ll place sensors around the perimeter to give us warning of attack as early as troops there could do.”
That was true, but the real reason Ruthven’d decided to keep E/1 concentrated was so that his troopers could support one another. Self-preservation was starting to look like the primary goal for this operation. The Slammers’d been hired to fight and they would fight, but Hank Ruthven knew the Colonel hadn’t given him troopers in order to get them killed for nothing.
All elements of E/1 were now within the compound. Hassel’d put the troopers with 2-cm shoulder weapons on the wall aiming northeast, toward the ridge they’d just come from. Both the tribarrels covered the high ground also.
The ten troopers with sub-machine guns faced in, keeping an eye on Ruthven and the babbling crowd of Royalists. They weren’t threatening; just watchful. With their mirrored faceshields down they looked like Death’s Little Helpers, though, and they could become that in an eyeblink if anybody gave them reason.
“We’ll need the use of your digging equipment,” Ruthven continued. “The bulldozer and whatever else you have; a backhoe, perhaps?”
“We have nothing,” Mendes said.
Ruthven’s face hardened; he gestured with his left hand toward the dug-in trailers. His right, resting on the receiver of his slung sub-machine gun, slipped down to the grip.
“They went back!” Mendes said. “They came, yes, but they went back! We have nothing here, only the guns; and no tractors to move them!”
Bloody hell, that was true! Ruthven’d assumed he wasn’t getting signatures from heavy equipment during E/1’s approach simply because nothing was running at the moment, but the shanties scattered within the compound would make it impossible for even a jeep to move through them.
“Right,” said Ruthven. “Then I’ll need a labor party from your men, Captain. We have a few power augers, but there’s a great deal of work to do before nightfall. For all our sakes. However the first requirement is to garrison that knob.”