“Yes, sir.” Carabali saluted, then her image disappeared.
The images of the maps lingered for a moment. Geary looked at them, knowing his choice had meant life or death for some of the Marines he was sending down onto that planet, and knowing, like Carabali, that he hadn’t had any other real option.
“THE fighting seems to have spread substantially on the third and fourth planets,” Lieutenant Iger was reporting as the Alliance fleet settled into position above the third planet. An orbital fortress that had tried pumping out shots at the oncoming Alliance fleet had been blown apart by several kinetic-energy projectiles, and since then nothing had attempted engaging the Alliance ships. All of the Syndic heavy cruisers left in the star system had jumped out, and the remaining light cruisers and HuKs were sticking close to the jump points for other stars. None had made any moves toward the region of the engagement where Geary had left his most badly damaged ships being repaired along with the auxiliaries and a strong escort. “There’s still no faction that seems to be gaining control on the ground?”
“No, sir,” Iger replied. “There are plenty of claims being made, but we’re not seeing evidence on the planetary surface to back up those claims.”
“The guard force in the camp has stopped responding to our transmissions,” Rione added. “They either can’t or won’t negotiate any further.”
Geary took a look at the display for the camp, imagery overlaid with symbology. In a few places concentrations of Syndic guards had been identified, but for the most part the guards seemed to have vanished. “We haven’t spotted any guards leaving the camp?” he asked Iger.
“No, sir. They’re all still in there, somewhere.”
“What about the POWs?”
“They all seem to be in their barracks, possibly locked down.”
Rione eyed the display suspiciously. “If they’re going to fight, why haven’t the guards taken our prisoners as hostages?”
“Good question.” As much as he hated bothering subordinates preparing for action, Geary figured this was something Carabali would want to talk about.
The Marine colonel nodded as if unsurprised by the report. “The guards are getting ready to fight. If you compare the estimated number of prisoners to the estimated size of the guard force, sir, you’ll see that the prisoners outnumber the guards. Just as we don’t have the numbers to occupy the entire camp in force, they don’t have the numbers to guard all of their prisoners and fight us. They’re choosing to keep the prisoners locked down. That keeps the prisoners available as future hostages but also ensures the prisoners aren’t running around threatening the guards. Our assault plan should forestall any last-ditch plans they have to make use of the prisoners, though.”
“I don’t understand, Colonel. It sounds like the Syndic guards know they can’t win. If they can’t fight us and guard all the prisoners at the same time, why the hell aren’t they surrendering?” Geary asked.
“Probably because they’ve been ordered to hold on to the prisoners and resist any attempt to liberate them, sir.”
Just as Rione had also guessed. Put up a good fight and maybe die trying to defend the prison camp, or let the Alliance have its personnel and certainly die at the hands of the Syndic authorities. “Looks like we’ll be doing this the hard way, Colonel.”
“Yes, sir. Request that the fleet carry out the preassault bombardment as laid out in the battle plan.”
“Consider it done. Good luck, Colonel.”
“They’re not asking for much in that bombardment,” Desjani observed after Carabali’s image vanished.
“There aren’t many targets identified yet.” Geary indicated the real-time imagery of the camp far below Dauntless as the battle cruiser and the rest of the Alliance fleet orbited Heradao’s third planet. “We can’t just hit the whole camp because it’s full of prisoners, and we don’t know every building that holds them. The preassault bombardment is mostly aimed at eliminating fixed defensive sites, trying to overawe the defenders, and suppressing their response to the assault.” He glanced at the time lines scrolling down one side of the display. Time to launch of Marine shuttles. Time to launch of evacuation shuttles. Time to launch of bombardment.
The aerodynamic chunks of metal formally known as kinetic bombardment projectiles harkened back to the earliest weapons known to humanity. Aside from their streamlined shapes, they worked like rocks, and fleet slang referred to them that way. Unlike rocks hurled with only the force of human muscles, however, these kinetic bombardment rounds were launched from orbit high above the planet, gaining energy every meter of the way as they dropped. When they hit, the results were as devastating as if large bombs had struck. Simple, cheap, and deadly, the rocks were almost impossible to stop once they were fired.
“Marine shuttles launching,” the operations watch reported.
On his display, Geary called up an image of the launches, the shapes of the shuttles enhanced for visibility. “I’ve never seen this many launch at once,” he commented to Desjani.
“Sir, you should have been at Urda. Thousands of shuttles coming down. Absolutely amazing.” Desjani’s eyes shaded for a moment in memory. “Then the Syndics opened fire.”
“Bad losses?”
“Horrible.” She forced a smile at him. “This won’t be like that.”
He managed to force a smile back, wishing that Desjani hadn’t mentioned Urda.
“First wave of evacuation shuttles launching.”
“We have enemy movement on the surface. Armored column heading for the prison camp.”
Geary’s display illuminated the line of armored vehicles crawling along the surface toward the POW camp. He reached and with careful deliberation tagged the column as a target, asked the combat system for an engagement solution, got it an instant later, then tapped approval. Rocks punched out of three Alliance warships, hurtling downward into the planet’s atmosphere. The entire process to firing had taken less than ten seconds.
“Preassault bombardment launching.”
A wave of rocks burst from Alliance warships, each projectile aimed at a specific point within the POW camp. With the shuttles coming down slower than the rocks would drop, the bombardment would clear the airspace over the camp before the shuttles reached it.
“Boom,” Desjani muttered, as the armored column disappeared under a cloud of fragments and dust tossed into the air by the impacts of the bombardment aimed at it.
“Maybe they’ll figure out that resisting us is a bad idea,” Geary observed.
“I wouldn’t count on it, sir.”
“We have surface-based particle-beam batteries opening fire at five locations!” the operations watch called. “Near misses on Splendid and Bartizan.”
Geary faced his display, tagged the batteries, got a firing solution, and launched another bombardment.
“Good thing I already had the fleet doing evasive maneuvers.”
The preassault bombardment slammed into the surface, some of the rocks aimed simply at trying to suppress unseen defenses but many smashing into identified enemy locations and every guard post or tower. Within moments, craters of rubble had replaced the guard installations, and the formerly solid wall between them had collapsed in many places.
“Do you think there were any of them inside those guard posts?” Desjani asked.
“I doubt it. Colonel Carabali figured they were planning on firing the weapons on the guard posts by remote if we left them standing. So we didn’t.”
The operations watch called out another report. “Marine shuttles are two minutes from drops.”