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“Aircraft!”
Richard ducked, instinctively, as the enemy aircraft came into view. The pilots were good, good enough to follow the road as if they were driving cars rather than flying aircraft. It made it incredibly difficult to spot the aircraft before they started shooting, let alone blowing them out of the air. The aircraft spat fire towards the squad, bullets lashing into the road, bouncing off tanks and tearing into men who hadn’t taken cover in time. Richard gritted his teeth as the lead tanks returned fire, their machine guns filling the air with lead. The aircraft seemed to hang in the air for a long chilling second, then exploded into a fireball, fragments of debris falling to the ground. Richard directed a squad forward, although he had no real expectations of finding a living pilot or even an intact body. The explosion suggested the aircraft had been carrying bomblets, ready to drop on their heads.
And it might be for the best, he told himself, as the scouts reported back. The pilot might not survive being taken into captivity.
He cursed under his breath as the force resumed its advance, heading down the road to Pallas City. The soldiers had been given clear orders to accept surrenders and take prisoners, unless it was obvious the enemy troops were only pretending to surrender long enough to lure the soldiers into a trap, but the men were reluctant to take snipers and pilots prisoner. Richard had heard one report of a sniper being shot down as he tried to surrender and two more shot while trying to escape. Roland had ordered the culprits returned to the beachhead, but Richard had a feeling it would be difficult to prove anything. Soldiers reserved a special hatred for snipers and pilots. The evidence would be gone, and everyone would have their stories straight, before a court-martial could be held.
The tanks rumbled down the road, machine guns constantly searching for targets. Richard stayed alert, even as the foliage started to thin before giving way to overgrown fields and the city beyond. Pallas City wasn’t that big, not by the standards of Kingston, but it was still a major port as well as residential area. Richard frowned as he saw smoke rising from the distance, near the harbour. Something was burning, but what? Shots darted through the air, a bullet pinging off the tank nearest him. The nearest side of the city was a collection of soulless residential blocks, put together from diagrams that had been outdated long before the planet had been settled, reserved for merchants and the handful of townies who’d settled on Winchester. The locals had hated them, if the spooks were to be believed. Now, they’d turned them into sniper nests.
Richard keyed his radio. “Snipers, if you get a clear shot at the enemy, take it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” Richard said. “The heavy guns are not to engage. I say again, the heavy guns are not to engage.”
He saw a pair of infantrymen looking dubious as they started to harden the new position and smiled, grimly. They probably didn’t realise it, but the residential blocks were notoriously flimsy even on Kingston. The designers hadn’t seen the importance of preparing their blocks for heavy weather, which meant some of the earlier buildings had simply been blown down, and - when they’d learnt to compensate for high winds - they still hadn’t been prepared for constant rainfall. Richard had grown up in a well-maintained apartment block - the locals had been willing to take care of their environment - and even they had had trouble dealing with leaky roofs, water dripping inside the walls and mould growing everywhere. It said a great deal about the wretched buildings that even his father, an elected official, couldn’t do anything about them. The buildings in his gunsights were so fragile, he feared, that blasting them with the machine guns would send them tumbling to the ground. Richard understood it might be impossible to take the city intact - they couldn’t let the buildings be turned into sniper nests or worse - but the rubble would make excellent barricades, blocking his men as they tried to advance. It was going to be hard enough to take the city without it.
Richard changed channels, giving Roland a quick update as more and more troops flowed down the road to lay siege to the city, then started to survey its defences. The loss of the drones was a dangerous inconvenience, suggesting there were some modern weapons within the city. Richard wanted to believe it was just an electronic distorter, something capable of blowing an unarmed drone out of the sky, but he feared it was something worse. A plasma cannon could turn his tanks into flaming coffins, burning through their armour and incinerating the crews before they had a chance to escape. Hell, a skilled gunner could probably take out several of his tanks with a single shot.
He lifted his binoculars and peered towards the city. The enemy had taken every damaged or destroyed vehicle they could find and turned them into barricades, welding them together and then pouring concrete over the mess to make them impossible to remove in a hurry. The warehouses on the far side looked normal to the naked eye, but he could see the murder holes through the binoculars. The enemy had gunmen in there, waiting for them, or he was a monkey’s uncle. He cursed under his breath. It would be simple enough to reduce the city to rubble, but taking the facilities intact would be a great deal harder. He mentally updated the vague assault plans they’d sketched out, before they’d known anything about the enemy defences. The basic outline remained suitable, barely, but they still knew very little about what to expect. Ideally, he would have preferred to surround the city and wait for the defenders to starve. But that wasn’t an option.
“Prepare the lead assault units,” he ordered, as he turned away from the city. “We’ll move as soon as we’re ready.”
***
“We still don’t know much of anything about the enemy positions,” Lieutenant O’Neal cautioned, as the operators sketched out more details on the map. “They could have anything beyond the outer lines, anything at all.”
Roland nodded, curtly. It was never easy to assault a city. The defenders had so many advantages, as he’d learnt in boot camp, that the attackers were very firmly on the back foot. They might have better weapons, better training and the ability to choose when and where the attack would begin, but all those advantages would be minimised when the shooting actually began. Too many of his men were about to die. Roland wished, not for the first time, that some of the promised advances in robotics had actually come off the drawing board and into reality. It was strange to realise that one could purchase a sexbot, but not an expendable robotic infantryman.
The cost is just too high, he reminded himself. A top-of-the-range sexbot used to cost almost as much as a navy frigate.
His heart sank. Taking a city, and clearing it of enemy forces, was a long and nightmarish job. Any hopes he’d entertained of bouncing the enemy out of Pallas without a real fight had died long ago. He’d deployed his forces to isolate the city, to keep the enemy from launching a counterattack, but ... Roland knew, all too well, that the offensive might turn into a bloody disaster. They were trying to take a city, even a relatively small city, within a day. It might not end well ... he sighed, hoping the enemy had the sense to surrender. Richard had orders to invite the enemy to surrender, before the shooting started again. If they refused ...
“Inform Collier that he is in tactical command,” Roland said. He would have preferred to go himself, but he couldn’t leave the CP. “And that he is cleared to begin the offensive when he is ready.”
“Yes, sir.”
***
Tamara White sat in her chair and studied the live feed from the sensors she’d concealed on top of the apartment block, peering down on the enemy forces. They were doing their best to conceal their movements but they hadn’t realised - or simply didn’t care - that they could be observed from the buildings. They had swept the rooftops, picking off snipers with disturbing accuracy. Tamara suspected they didn’t realise the sensors were there.
Which wouldn’t be a bad guess, normally, she thought. She’d needed weeks to convince the rebel leadership she could be useful as something more than just another grunt. Half the people she’d known were either carrying guns on the front lines or helping to move supplies from one place to another. Coolies, they called them. Tamara wanted to be something more, even if it meant admitting to skills no indent was supposed to possess. The planet’s tech base is pathetic. Why would they go looking for near-modern tech sensors?
She frowned as the enemy tanks came into view, their main guns swinging around to point at the city. They’d been reluctant to open fire into the city itself, something that puzzled her. It wasn’t as if the government had ever given a damn about public safety. Tamara had seen grown men and women whipped to death, their children taken away to be raised by loyalists or servants. Why would they hesitate to reduce the city to rubble? Did they think they could take the port intact?
“Sir,” she said, quietly. “They’re moving in for the kill.”
The rebel leader shot her a distrustful look. He’d been born on New Doncaster and had very little time for an indent from Earth, pointing out - the one time she’d asked - that she had no real loyalty to her new world. The only reason he put up with her, she suspected, was because his superiors had overruled him. He wasn’t stupid, but he was short-sighted. It wasn’t enough to trigger an uprising, kill the aristos and burn the plantations to the ground. They had to win the war or ...
“Alert the troops,” the leader ordered, stiffly. “Then get your ass out of here. They know what to do.”
The enemy tanks seemed to explode. Tamara stared, convinced - just for a second - that they’d blown themselves up. Her mind spun in circles. There’d been talk of a wonder-weapon that could sweep the enemy from the field ... she wondered, numbly, if it was actually true before the truth dawned on her. The enemy had opened fire, shelling the barricades ... the ground shook, violently. Pieces of plaster and dust fell from the ceiling, drifting down to land in her hair. They weren’t just shelling the barricades. They were shelling the city itself.
“Get out of here,” the rebel leader ordered, curtly. “Go.”
Tamara hesitated, then deactivated the terminal, folded it up and stuck the device under her arm. It wasn’t hers - her personal terminal had been left behind on Earth, if it hadn’t been confiscated in hopes of using her contacts to uncover the remainder of the hacking underground - but it would suffice. God knew the aristo brat who’d owned the terminal hadn’t had the slightest idea what to do with it. One of the most advanced terminals one could get, as a private citizen, and he’d stuffed it with porn that would have shocked even a hardened explorer of Earth’s datanet. She’d made it her own very quickly, after wiping it down with bleach.
The ground shook again. The bombardment was growing stronger. The leader didn’t look at her as he snapped orders into the primitive telephone, ordering his men to fight to the last while he prepared to destroy the docks. Tamara was tempted to stay, despite orders, but she knew better. She’d always been on thin ice, as an Earther with a skill few of the locals could evaluate. If she disobeyed orders now, she might be put in front of a wall and shot.
“Goodbye, sir,” she said. “Good luck.”
***
Richard heard shots cracking through the air as he crawled towards the remains of the barricade in front of him, now little more than a burning ruin. The tanks had hammered it hard, first with armour-piercing shells and then with high explosives. If there’d been any enemy soldiers lying in wait behind the barricades, they were dead now or wishing they were. Richard slowed as he reached the ruins, then unhooked a pair of grenades from his belt and hurled them over the rubble. There was no point in taking chances. He was on his feet the moment the grenades detonated, leading his squad into the enemy position. There were no rebels to be seen. The encampment had been so completely devastated he couldn’t tell how many, if any, there’d been.
He cursed as he heard mortar shells dropping to the ground, far too close for comfort. The enemy presumably hadn’t expected the barricades to last for long, certainly not when the attackers had had plenty of time to lay their guns as they pleased. Instead of trying to waste their time making the barricades even tougher, they’d zeroed their mortars on the position they’d known they’d lose very quickly. He darted forward, tapping his communicator to call in artillery strikes. They had to take out the mortar teams before they managed to slow his men.
The ground shook, again and again, as the squad pressed on towards a warehouse. Richard saw tongues of fire blasting from the murder holes and ducked again, summoning an antitank team to put a HE rocket through the holes. The warehouse was solid - the merchants hadn’t been shy about demanding better accommodation for their wares - but the walls had already been weakened by the rebels. Richard saw the rocket slam into the wall, blowing it open and - hopefully - killing or wounding the rebels inside. There was no time to wait. He led his squad forward, his rifle sweeping for targets. A pair of rebels stumbled to their feet, weapons in hand. Richard shot them both down, then ducked as more bullets started cracking through the air. The rebels had a team in the office, right at the front of the warehouse ... they’d broken a window and turned it into a shooting position. Richard nodded to two of his men, who launched a pair of RPGs towards the enemy troops. The explosions took them both and nearly wrecked the warehouse.
Richard’s lips twitched. I wonder if they stole the goods before they turned the warehouse into a firing position.
He shook his head, dismissing the thought as more mortar rounds hurtled overhead. His reinforcements were coming under fire, while his gunners were clearly not doing their bloody job. He felt a hot flash of anger, mingled with a grim awareness mortars were designed to be set up, launch a few shells and then torn down again, the team well away before the enemy’s return fire crashed down on their former position. Their shooting would be much less accurate, as they moved from place to place, but it wasn’t as useful as he might have hoped. As long as the shells fell within the right general location, it would slow the offensive down.
His radio crackled. “Bravo and Delta Company are entering the combat zone now.”
Richard keyed the radio. “Understood,” he said. “Caution them to keep their heads down.”
He took a breath, then led his men onwards, the fighting blurring into an endless series of tiny skirmishes that seemed to be part of a greater whole. The enemy had surveyed the city well over the last few months, carefully choosing fighting positions that could be abandoned in a hurry when he brought his forces to bear on it. He broke into building after building; sometimes running into ambushes, sometimes crashing his way through an abandoned house or office, only to discover - too late - that the enemy were already raining mortar shells on his head. There were fewer rigged buildings than he’d feared - the enemy clearly hadn’t had the time to turn more than a handful of former homes into oversized IEDS - but the ones they discovered cost them dearly. He resorted to calling in artillery strikes on a handful of targets, knowing they didn’t have time to disarm the IEDs themselves. The rubble made it harder to advance, but there was no choice. His body ached, as if he’d gone beyond exhaustion and into a twilight world in which there was nothing left, but the war.
“Watch it, sir,” a voice snapped.
Richard looked up, just in time to see an enemy gunman point his rifle in his general direction and open fire. He threw himself aside as bullets cracked through the air, bouncing off metal walls and flying in all directions. His saviour snapped off a shot, sending the gunman tumbling to the ground. Richard silently saluted the enemy’s bravery. If he’d fired a moment or two earlier, Richard would probably have been hit and killed. He had no illusions. The body armour was good, but not that good.
“Fuck,” he muttered, suddenly too tired to keep going. “Bring up the rear units, then hold position here.”
He sagged against the wall. He’d been told urban combat was rough, but he hadn’t really believed it. Kingsport had been bad, yet ... it had been a walk in the park compared to the nightmare all around him. The ground heaved, something crashing in the distance so loudly it seemed to wash away all other sounds. Pallas was a small city. What would happen, he asked himself numbly, if the rebels turned a bigger city into a death trap?
We’ve already lost at least fifty men, he thought, although he had a nasty feeling the real number was a great deal higher. What’ll happen if this goes on?