Chapter 211: The Roadside Defence Zone
Back with his unit, Kian called his officers together for their own briefing.
He laid out the operational area on the map and put the question directly.
"Straight push, or do we want to be clever about this?"
Egghead — now commanding an infantry company — studied the map.
"Boss, there's nothing complicated here. Put our Chimeras at the front, everyone else in the haulers, drive straight to our sector and start building. No need to overthink it.
And we don't need to worry about the road mines — Second Battalion's sector is ahead of ours. They go first, they find the problems first. Any serious device in our path, Hans's people will have set it off before we get there."
Kian raised an eyebrow.
"That means we owe Second Battalion a favour."
Ash said: "Reciprocity. We're all brothers out here — complicated enough on a battlefield. We'll find a way to return it."
General agreement around the table. The debt was acknowledged. They moved to specifics.
The tactical problem was simple: thirty kilometres of road, twelve hundred personnel, keep it clear. The solution they settled on was equally clean.
A central garrison at the midpoint of the sector — battalion headquarters, all eight one-sixty-millimetre howitzers positioned here. From the centre, the guns could reach both ends of the zone.
Four smaller outposts distributed along the road, each holding a hundred soldiers.
Between outposts, interlocking trench positions with heavy stubber emplacements — filling the gaps, ensuring no dead ground.
Large outposts, small outposts, machine gun positions, and armoured vehicle patrols running continuously. The road would be held.
If a small outpost took contact too heavy to handle, the nearest large outpost was within two kilometres. If the large outpost couldn't resolve it, the central guns could. If the guns weren't enough, the battalion headquarters could mount up and drive to the problem.
Standard linear defence doctrine. Exactly right for this kind of assignment.
Decision made, Kian shifted to something the tactical briefing couldn't cover.
"Brothers — this is a civil war. Nobody here needs to die proving a point. You're not short of food, I've made sure of that, so none of you are in the desperate situation that's driving the rest of the army.
Hold our sector, hold it properly, and come home whole. That's the objective.
Armed rebel fighters you encounter — engage them. That's what we're here for. Civilians moving in groups — fire to disperse, not to kill, if that option exists. But keep yourselves alive first. The battlefield is unpredictable, and your life is worth more than a clean conscience in a messy situation. Dismissed."
The next morning, the army moved.
Five years of garrison torpor, of cards and drinking and collecting a salary — it vanished in a single morning. The famine had done what no officer's speech had ever managed. These men were red-eyed and dangerous, staring north toward rebel territory with the focused intensity of people who had stopped calculating risk.
Whatever the rebel leadership had expected from the PDF, Kian doubted they'd expected this.
His battalion moved out in the afternoon — four Chimera transports leading, loaded with soldiers, followed by a long column of cargo haulers, several of them towing artillery pieces behind them.
The column moved through forest, past ridgelines, across cultivated farmland.
When the road ran through the first stretch of fields, Kian stood up in his vehicle and raised his field scope.
He lowered it after a moment without comment.
The cultivated land was covered in bodies. Farmers who had apparently been working their plots when the advance elements of the PDF came through. Someone had made a decision, or more likely no one had made a decision and the soldiers had simply acted. Autogun rounds at full velocity against unarmoured targets produced the kind of damage that made assessment difficult from a distance.
Kian put the scope away and exhaled.
The 41st Millennium. He'd never quite managed to stop being surprised by it.
A short while later the column encountered a large crater in the road and a Chimera transport sitting beside it in pieces. Egghead noted the hull markings.
"That's one of ours — 109th Regiment. Second Battalion must have hit a device."
"Route around it and keep moving," Kian said. "Second Battalion will have cleared the rest. Get to our sector and start building."
The main garrison site Kian selected was excellent ground — flat approaches in all directions, no obstructing terrain, clear lines of fire. A Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubber mounted here turned two to three kilometres of surrounding land into a killing ground by definition.
There was also a water source — the farmland on both sides of the road had been under irrigation, and the farmers had installed hand-pump wells for the purpose.
Unloading began immediately. Tents first, then a perimeter of individual firing positions, then communication trenches connecting them. Heavy weapon emplacements, artillery positions, additional trench networks, vehicle staging area, supply storage. Four thousand man-hours of earthwork compressed into seventy-two hours.
Every PDF soldier carried an entrenching tool. Given something to dig, they dug with genuine enthusiasm.
Three days and the central garrison was functional. Kian sent four hundred soldiers out along the sector to build the four subsidiary outposts. Once those were established, infantry sections would be distributed into the gaps to construct the machine gun positions and complete the defensive network.
The main garrison was still being finished when the first of the offensive regiments began passing through.
Enormous convoys — hundreds of vehicles, armoured transports, cargo haulers — driving straight north toward the rebel cities with populations in the hundreds of thousands.
What Kian hadn't anticipated was what happened when one of these regiments — a full ten-thousand-strong unit — passed his position and noticed that the fields on both sides of the road were planted with potatoes.
The entire regiment stopped.
Ten thousand soldiers climbed off their vehicles, produced their entrenching tools, and began digging up potatoes.
They worked with the focused energy of people who had been thinking about food for weeks. Several hours later, the fields around the garrison resembled a landscape of craters. Every potato within reach had been extracted, bagged, and loaded.
Half the regiment's vehicles turned around and headed back toward the Hive. The other half drove on.
The regimental commander stopped at Kian's headquarters before leaving, and left two hauler-loads of potatoes behind as acknowledgment.
[End of Chapter 211]
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