to subtlety. Outgunned and outnumbered, all he had left was surprise, speed, and ferocity. 'Faster, faster,' he screamed over his shoulder, waving his troopers into a sprint that slammed B Company into the containment line blocking their retreat to the west. For all the battlefield intelligence pouring down from the recon drones overhead, the marines were slow to react to the onslaught, letting B Company get far too close. When they did react, their response was a terrible thing, a blizzard of rifle and machine gun fire pouring into the NRA's ranks. Heedless, the survivors closed on the marines, the terrible losses ignored as they clawed their way into the marines' hastily prepared positions.
Shock, sheer momentum, and a suicidal disregard for personal safety did what lack of numbers could not; in only minutes, B Company had punched a hole through the Hammers' lines. Chiaou's orders had been clear: Anyone who made it through was to keep going, and so they did, those who could.
Those too badly wounded to follow whispered their farewells and prepared to die the only way they knew how. Only minutes after B Company had smashed into the Hammers' containment line, a microgrenade finished off the last NRA trooper still fighting, but not before she took a good many Hammers with her. When the trooper died, less than thirty of B Company had survived. Chiaou had not; with manic bravery, he and a handful of troopers had fought their way into the marines' command post, and there they, too, had died, along with most of the battalion's senior staff.
As silence fell, the Hammer battalion's new commander walked the ground, shaken by the ferocity of the morning's events and embittered by the loss of so many of his men. He had refused to believe his intelligence officer when told the battalion had faced a single reinforced NRA company. He shook his head as he studied the latest casualty report. Only a reinforced company? How could that be? He had never seen anything like it, and this was not the NRA's only operation that day. It had launched attacks on targets all across Maranzika: a factory manufacturing inertial navigation units, another producing air-to-air guided missiles, a third assembling heavy lander fusion power plants. They had assaulted DocSec security posts and support facilities, planetary ground defense supply depots, and a marine recruit induction center. It was unbelievable, every operation stamped with what were fast becoming the NRA's trademarks: audacity, speed, ferocity, and a willful disregard for self.
The battalion commander kicked the ground with the toe of his boot. Today was his first in combat against the NRA, a day he had not enjoyed. Something told him it would not be his last.
'Sir,' one of his sergeants said.
'Yes?'
'Major Schmidt's compliments, sir. He has the prisoners ready for you.'
'How many?'
'Five, sir.'
'Five?' the battalion commander said, looking up sharply, his eyes narrowed in astonishment. 'You sure? Five? That's all?'
'Yes, sir. I'm sure. Five.'
'Kraa! So few. Okay, lead on.'
The man followed his sergeant to a small rock-backed hollow in the valley wall. There lay the five NRA prisoners. They were a pitiful sight: every one badly wounded, combat overalls blood-drenched, wounds dressed with hastily applied field dressings. But it was their eyes that took his attention; wounded or not, hate blazed from all of them.
Schmidt came over to meet him. 'Hard to believe, sir, but that's the lot. The rest are either dead or got away.'
'They going to tell us anything useful?'
'Doubt it, sir. They won't say a word, any of them. Get too close, and all they do is spit at you.'
'Kraa-damned sonsofbitches,' the battalion commander said, voice harsh. 'Screw them. We have better things to do. Shoot the bastards.'
Schmidt's eyes flared wide in surprise. 'Sir?'
'You heard me, Major. Shoot them. Then we pull out; planetary defense after-action teams are on their way to clean up.'
'Sir!' Schmidt's voice rose in protest. 'I don't believe that is a legal-'
'I'm not interested in what you believe, Major Schmidt. Either we shoot them or DocSec does. What difference does it make? So do it. That's an order.'
'What DocSec does is their business and doesn't alter the fact that we are not permitted to shoot prisoners out of hand. I'm sorry, sir, but that's a fact.'
The battalion commander stepped back a pace and unbuttoned the flap over the pistol at his waist. 'You're sorry? You're sorry?' he said, voice rising as shock and stress let anger take control. 'This is a battlefield, not a courtroom. It is for me, not you, to decide what is legal and what is not,' he shouted, all self-control gone, spittle gathering white in the corners of his mouth. 'Obey my order, Major. Obey it now, or I'll shoot you and then I'll shoot them myself. Make up your Kraa-damned mind, Major!'
The silence hung heavy, the major's mouth hanging half-open in stunned disbelief. 'I'll make sure it's done, sir,' he said at last, his head dropping in defeat.
The battalion commander holstered his pistol, turned, and walked away. He had gone only a few meters when the air behind him crackled with a short burst of rifle fire. The silence was broken by a single defiant shout of protest cut off in midsentence by one last shot. A soft moan of pain trailed off into silence.
The battalion commander walked on. Monday, August 20, 2401, UD FWSS Redwood, in orbit around Nyleth- B
'Okay, folks, let's get into it,' Michael said. 'Before I kick things off, any burning issues we need to talk about first… No? Good. Right, first the situation on Commitment, and in a word, it's good… good for us, that is. Not so good for Chief Councillor Polk and his government. Now, if you look at the holovid…'
Heads swiveled as a map of Maranzika, Commitment's largest continent, appeared on the holovid, a jagged- edged mass a good 17,000 kilometers long north to south, its center pinched in to a narrow neck less than 1,500 kilometers wide.
'The Nationalists' strategy is clear, even if achieving their military goals is proving difficult thanks to the fact that the Hammers have an air force and the NRA doesn't. In the west, they have attacked Bretonville, and our analysts are predicting that they will soon launch an attack on the towns of Perdan and Daleel to the east. The Hammers pushed the NRA out of Bretonville eventually, and the analysts think any attack on Perdan and Daleel will suffer the same fate, but I'm damn sure they'll be back to try again until they succeed. When they succeed, they will have cut Maranzika in half along a line'-Michael's pointer slashed across the holovid-'running east-west between the Branxton Ranges and the floodplains of the Oxus and Krommer rivers, about four hundred k's south of the capital, McNair. Not the end of the world for the Hammers, but a massive psychological win for the NRA. Janos?'
'Makes sense,' Kallewi said. 'This is not war as we marines think of it. It's about making the citizen in the street believe that there is a real alternative to the Hammer government. So every time the NRA has a win, the Hammers lose and the NRA gains credibility. Then Nationalist agitators call the mobs out onto the streets, and DocSec can't cope. That forces planetary defense onto the streets to try to maintain control of the cities, easing pressure on the NRA front line and eroding morale inside planetary defense. If planetary defense cannot contain the situation, the marines get called in, which they hate. We know from intelligence reports that not one marine, from the commanders down to the lowest grunt, signed on to fight unarmed civilians, and that erodes morale, which in turn allows the NRA to make more gains, and so on. From the Nationalist's point of view, it's a virtuous circle… but only so long as the NRA keeps delivering.'
Kallewi paused. 'Which brings us,' he continued, 'to the NRA's main problem: getting the weapons and supplies they need to support larger- and larger-scale operations. There's a limit to what the NRA and their Nationalist cadres can steal from the Hammers, and their lack of heavy ground-attack landers and air-superiority fliers is a major weakness. Once away from the Branxton Ranges, the NRA is vulnerable to Hammer air power. Bretonville showed that. They captured it but weren't able to hold on to it.'
Michael nodded. Kallewi had put his finger on the NRA's weakness. 'Mind you,' he said, 'the Hammers did a lot of damage in recapturing the city. I'm not sure the locals will be too happy about that, not happy at all.'
'No, they wouldn't,' Kallewi said. 'History shows that the indiscriminate use of too much firepower alienates the locals, drives recruits into the arms of the NRA, enhances the moral authority of the Revival Party, and degrades intelligence assets. So Bretonville was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for the Hammers. That's not the least of their
