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“Just how bad was it?” Sandra asked.
Roland said nothing for a long moment. The flight from Winchester had been rough. The rebels had set up an antiaircraft position on an outlying island, coming very close to blowing his transport out of the sky ... he shuddered, every time he considered just how near he’d come to certain death. The remainder of the flight had been safer, thankfully, but he was all too aware he hadn’t been summoned back to Kingston for a pat on the back. He was surprised Sandra had greeted him at the airport. There was a distinct lack of others welcoming him home.
“It was rough,” Roland said, curtly. He’d spent the last three days organising the defence line, conceding - reluctantly - that further offensives were impossible without reinforcements and a certain amount of rethinking. He had to give the rebels credit. They’d given his men a bloody nose, sending their morale plummeting even as rebel morale skyrocketed. The only upside, as far as he could tell, was that they didn’t have many tanks on the island. “They gave us a very hard time.”
Sandra shot him a sharp look as she led the way to her car. Roland wondered, unwilling to ask outright, what she’d heard. The news reports had been bland and utterly uninformative, glossing over the defeat as much as possible, but he’d been cautioned that rebel radio broadcasts and underground newsletters had been putting out a far more accurate version of events. Not, he supposed, that Sandra had to rely on the rebel media. She was her father’s trusted assistant, after all. She sat in the corner when he held meetings, keeping her mouth closed and her ears open. Roland suspected she offered her father her insights, when the meetings were over. It was astonishing, Rachel had once told him, what people would say in front of someone they considered to be nothing more than part of the furniture.
“There was a terrorist attack on Yelena Island, two days ago,” Sandra commented. She started the engine and steered the car through the checkpoint, then down onto the motorway. “They blew away a recruitment centre, killing at least fifty promising new recruits as well as the staff. Since then” - her fingers tightened on the wheel - “there have been more and more terror threats, all of which have to be taken seriously. It doesn’t look good.”
“No,” Roland agreed. “And with us taking a bloody nose, the terrorists have been encouraged.”
He sighed inwardly, wishing he’d been able to get more sleep on the flight. The government was caught in a bind. If it clamped down too hard, it would destroy its economy while provoking resentment that would eventually lead to a second major insurgency. If it didn’t clamp down at all, the terrorists would run wild and everyone who was trying to sit on the fence would move to support them out of sheer self-preservation. It would take a very capable government to steer a course between the two extremes and he feared the Prime Minister wasn’t up to it. He had too many enemies on both sides of the political divide.
His heart sank as they drove into the capital itself. There were more checkpoints, more troops on the street, more visible evidence of antiterrorist precautions. The strutting militiamen - many of whom had joined the militia to avoid the army - had been replaced by armed and dangerous men, their eyes sweeping constantly for possible threats. Roland scowled as he saw them checking passes, making it clear no excuses or deviations would be tolerated. It was just a matter of time before the security precautions started antagonising civilians, turning them against the government. And then the war would be on the verge of being lost.
“Here we are,” Sandra said, as she drove into the underground garage. “Good luck.”
Roland composed himself as he clambered out of the car, submitted to a brief search by a pair of guards, then allowed Sandra to lead him up the stairs and into the council chamber. The guards didn’t search Sandra, something that suggested half of the security deployment was nothing more than pure theatre. Sandra could cause real trouble for them, if she thought the search was just an excuse to grope her, but they could have called a female officer to do the dirty work. Letting her proceed without a search was asking for trouble.
He put the thought aside as he surveyed the council. There were more MPs, some he didn’t know personally, gazing at him with a mixture of indifference and open hostility. Lord Ludlow and his peers sat in a group, Daniel Collier and the remainder of the townies sat on the other side ... Roland’s lips twitched as he noted Lord Ludlow had brought his own personal secretary with him, a blonde woman young enough to be his daughter. The poor girl kept her head demurely bowed, unwilling to look up even as the PM called the meeting to order. Roland suspected she wasn’t born to the aristocracy. She certainly didn’t look remotely comfortable in the chamber.
“General Windsor,” the PM said. “What, precisely, happened?”
A nicely open-ended question, Roland thought, sourly. He’d made a full report, leaving out nothing of importance. Are you interested in the truth, or are you trying to give me enough rope to hang myself?
He felt a flicker of sympathy. The PM had gambled his political future on allying with the townies and appointing Roland general-in-chief. There’d been no choice, something that hadn’t stopped his enemies from hacking at his position whenever they got a chance. They weren’t the ones in the hot seat ... Roland’s lips twitched, wondering if the opposition didn’t want to give the PM a very hard time. If they did too good a job, they might find themselves lumbered with the same tasks - and the same limitations - as their former leader.
“The rebels fell back as we mounted our offensive, then launched a counterattack of their own aimed at isolating and destroying our spearheads,” Roland said, curtly. He’d put together a pretty good picture of what had happened in the aftermath, from the intelligence failures to tactical shortcomings that had given the rebels a chance to strike and strike hard. “Their offensive was, at least at first, successful. They drove us back until we were able to set up a defensive line of our own, then bleed them white. They hurt us badly - I cannot deny it - but they failed to pull off a strategic victory.”
Lord Ludlow snorted. “The reports made it clear, General, that the rebels deployed newer and better weapons systems than ourselves. What do you say to that?”
“I would say, the reports were written by someone who didn’t understand what he was talking about,” Roland said, bluntly. He supposed he could have been a little more diplomatic, but he was too tired and worn. They could have given him time to take a shower, damn it. “The rebels did not come up with anything revolutionary. They merely chose to produce different weapons and vehicles, which gave them a brief tactical advantage. Their expendable rockets did a considerable amount of damage, for example, but they were of strictly limited value. Once we knew what to expect, we were able to take precautions.”
“They also deployed tanks,” Lord Ludlow said. Beside him, his assistant shifted uncomfortably. “And they caught us by surprise.”
“It should not have been a surprise,” Roland admitted, curtly. “We always assumed the rebels would produce an armoured force of their own, but we felt it was unlikely they’d commit the resources to building one so quickly. In that, we were wrong. However - it must be noted - their tanks were actually inferior to our own, suffering from breakdowns even when not advancing on our positions. Their value as a deep-strike force is very limited.”
He paused. “In this, we were lucky. If they’d deployed tanks equal to ours, they would have crushed the beachhead and driven us back into the sea.”
Daniel Collier leaned forward. “How many of our soldiers were killed or wounded?”
Roland winced. “As of the last report, we lost around five to six thousand men,” he said, grimly. A considerable percentage had been wounded in the fighting, then died before the medics could do anything for them. “A number of men remain unaccounted for, which means they may have been killed in the opening stages of the rebel counterattack or taken prisoner. The rebels have not, as of yet, made any attempt to inform us about their prisoners, let alone make arrangements for swaps. We may never know what happened to some of the missing.”
They might have fled the battlefield, then deserted rather than return to the ranks, his thoughts added. The rebels really did a number on our morale.
The PM tapped his table. “The offensive was a failure ...”
“You promised us the offensive would succeed,” Lord Ludlow interrupted. “And now, we are staring total disaster in the face.”
“The war is not over,” the PM said, crossly. “General Windsor, the offensive was a failure, but does it really bode the end of the war?”
“And should we start opening talks with the rebels,” Daniel Collier added, “while we still have something to offer in exchange for a negotiated transfer of power?”
“Traitor,” Lord Ludlow snapped. “Do you think the rebels will forgive you for serving on the council?”
Roland scowled as the two men argued, their voices rising as the argument got nasty. Lord Ludlow was dead, if the rebels won the war. Daniel Collier wasn’t that much better off. The rebels might not see him as a hatred aristocrat, even though he was a social climber as well as an MP, but they would probably regard him as a class enemy. The townies should, in their view, have sided with the rebels. Daniel Collier was one of the reasons they’d sided with the government instead, for the moment. If they thought the war was on the verge of being lost, they’d start trying to switch sides before it was too late.
The PM gavelled for silence. “General Windsor,” he said, again. “Can we still win the war?”
“Yes.” Roland let the word hang in the air for a long cold moment. “Our assessment of the rebel forces is that they shot their bolt, expending most of their arms and ammunition - as well as manpower - in a single desperate counterattack. There are hard limits on just how many men they can deploy against us, particularly trained and experienced men who won’t be anything more than cannon fodder, and we think they’re reaching those limits. Their tanks, for example, will need to be replaced before they can think about hitting our defence lines again.”
“They are not short of manpower,” Lord Ludlow said with a sneer.
“Yes and no,” Roland countered. “Trained manpower, men who know how to do everything from setting IEDs to driving tanks, is in short supply. We have seen insurgents blow themselves to hell in the process of rigging traps, because they simply don’t know what they’re doing. It’s easy to give a man a short lesson in using a rifle, but harder to teach them how to drive a tank or steer a motorboat or anything else they need to be anything more than a minor nuisance.”
“Forgive me,” a MP Roland didn’t recognise said, “but is it not true the rebels have been training their people from day one?”
“Yes,” Roland agreed. “And many of those trainees have been killed.”
He paused. “Manpower is not the clincher, however. There are hard limits on just how much military hardware they can produce, or how much civilian gear can be repurposed for military operations. They used their speedboats very effectively, but we have sunk hundreds of them and their effectiveness is dwindling. Their aircraft have the same limitations. They have expended much of their pre-war hardware in the fighting. It simply cannot be replaced in a hurry.”
“They do have thousands of speedboats,” the MP said.
“But they cannot commit them all to the war,” Roland said. “Even if they did, they’d have problems getting them all to Winchester.”
The PM raised a hand. “What do you propose we do?”
Roland hesitated. A long, drawn-out campaign was in no one’s interests. Whichever side won, finally, would inherit a devastated planet ... assuming, of course, that offworlders didn’t intervene. His instincts told him he needed to launch a single decisive strike and yet ... it wouldn’t be easy. He had an idea, but making it work ...
“We have cleared most of the shipping lanes to Winchester,” Roland said. “I propose deploying heavy reinforcements to Pallas, then resuming the offensive by isolating the rebel factories from the remainder of the island and pinning the rebels in place. We could then wear down the defences or, if it seems impossible to take the factories intact, simply bomb and shell them into rubble. I believe it can be done.”
Lord Ludlow made a rude sound. “And why should we listen to you, after your failure?”
Roland felt a hot flash of irritation. “The campaign is not yet over,” he said. “I cannot deny we lost a battle. Nor can I deny the enemy has been gifted a chance to undermine our morale, attack our rear area and further weaken us. However, we can continue the offensive, which will repair the damage as quickly as possible, or we can step back, go on the defensive and accept eventual defeat.”
He wondered, as the argument began again, if the Grand Senate had ever been so ... dysfunctional. He’d studied countless military campaigns, mounted in the final years of the empire, which had been hampered by political considerations that had next to nothing to do with the campaign itself. New Doncaster’s politicians were a little smarter than the Grand Senators, who’d been living inside a bubble right up to Earthfall, but they were still bent on ensuring they came out of the fighting with all the advantage they could muster. Lord Ludlow wanted the aristocracy to remain on top, while Daniel Collier wanted a more reasonable division of power ... Roland tried not to roll his eyes as the debate went on and on. They had to hang together or the rebels would hang them separately. It still puzzled him, despite everything, that they didn’t seem to realise it.
But then, you grew up in a bubble too, Roland reminded himself. You didn’t even know how ignorant you were until Belinda popped the bubble and showed you the world outside.
The PM caught his eye. “Are you certain you can beat the rebels?”
“Yes, Prime Minister,” Roland said. He had no doubt his plans would leak out - or, rather, the plan he’d told them. If the real plan worked, all would be forgiven. If it didn’t ... he put the thought out of his head. If it didn’t, he was likely to be too dead to care. “We have a window of opportunity to grind them down, to force them to face us on our terms. And then we can win the war.”
“We do need to offer a political solution,” Daniel Collier said. “If we offer better terms ...”
“Right now, it would be taken as a sign of weakness,” Lord Ludlow snapped. “We can’t risk offering them anything until we have a clear victory under our belt.”
“Agreed.” The PM silently assessed the chamber’s mood. “General, put together your reinforcements and take them back to Winchester as soon as possible, then win us the war.”
“The campaign,” Roland corrected, already compiling the list of assets he’d need. Thankfully, most of the preparations were dual-use. The rebels shouldn’t see anything odd in a sizable convoy of transports and makeshift warships setting course for Winchester, not until it was far too late. “I will attempt to get the reinforcements on their way within the week.”
Which will make it harder for the rebels to realise what we’re really doing, he added. He had no faith in the government’s ability to keep a secret. The rebels had clearly known Winchester had been his first major target, although they hadn’t worked out where he intended to land. This time, we really need the advantage of surprise.
“Good luck, General,” the PM said. “I’ll see you again, before you depart.”
Roland nodded, recognising the dismissal. He wasn’t blind to the underlying message. His position was shaky, perhaps on the verge of collapse. If there was a second failure, if the rebels managed to stop him in his tracks, he’d be fired. He wondered, idly, what they expected him to do. Wait for a freighter, then take passage to a more developed world? Or return to training duties, leaving the fighting to native officers. It didn’t really matter. The Commandant would be unamused if he failed, particularly after exceeding his orders so drastically. He’d had no choice, but that might cut no ice with the inquest if the excession led to utter disaster.
He saluted, then left the chamber. He’d go back to the training base, then discuss the matter with his most trusted staff. He’d have to tell them what he had in mind, although the remainder would be given sealed orders and cautioned not to open them until the right time. He needed them to do a sanity check before he committed himself to a suicidal idea. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d come up with something that looked good on paper, only to have a more experienced officer point out the gaping holes in the plan.
If this works, it will be a masterstroke, he thought, as Sandra joined him. He couldn’t help a thrill of anticipation. And if it fails, I’d better make sure I don’t come home.