Chapter 213: Friendly Fire
The vox operator said Second Battalion was calling for assistance. Kian was in the comms tent before the sentence was finished.
"First Battalion HQ — what's happening out there?"
The voice that came back was urgent, broken up by scattered gunfire in the background.
"Sir — we're in a firefight with another PDF unit! Battalion Commander Hans is down, wounded! We have men dead!"
Friendly fire. Kian stood there for half a second processing that.
"Everyone up! Chimeras out, all heavy weapons, we're moving to Second Battalion's position now!"
He didn't know the details yet. He didn't need them. Hans was in his regiment, and his regiment's people had been shot by someone outside it. That was enough.
The battalion formed up fast — four Chimeras, several troop carriers, Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubbers mounted and ready, four hundred infantry loading up. Kian grabbed the vox-bead as the column moved and raised Rudolphson.
"Third Battalion — inter-unit firefight at Second Battalion's position. We're rolling. Get your people moving."
Rudolphson acknowledged without asking questions.
En route, Kian got the full account from Second Battalion's vox operator.
The story was straightforward and completely predictable once you heard it.
The 109th had been holding their sector for two months. The arrangement, as originally described by high command, was that forward regiments would seize food and split it — half to the soldiers who took it, half into a common pool for redistribution to rear-area units like the 109th who couldn't reach the fighting.
Two months of watching hauler after hauler roll back toward the Hive, and not a single bag reaching the 109th through official channels.
This was not surprising. Every link in the redistribution chain had the same incentive to skim. By the time food had passed through enough hands, there was nothing left to distribute. Everyone understood this and everyone acted accordingly — take what you can get your hands on now, because the system will consume everything else.
The 109th's soldiers had managed to get word to their families in the Hive. The answer came back: nothing from redistribution. The only food they'd received was from Kian's processing facility, through the family dependent certificates.
Which meant the families of the soldiers who had been holding this road for two months were surviving on food provided by their own battalion commander's private operation, and nothing was coming from the official channel that was supposed to feed them.
Hans had been watching loaded haulers pass his position for sixty days straight. At some point the arithmetic had become intolerable.
He'd put his soldiers across the road and stopped the convoy.
His logic was straightforward — these loads were going back to the Hive to disappear into the redistribution machine that everyone knew didn't work. If he collected one bag per vehicle right now, those bags stayed in his control and reached the families they were meant to reach. A hundred vehicles a day, one bag each, distributed through the regiment — the problem was solved without waiting for a system that had already demonstrated it couldn't be trusted.
His soldiers had agreed completely. One bag from a hauler carrying a hundred — that was fair, that was reasonable, that was what they were owed.
The hauler crews had not agreed at all.
Their food had been taken from rebel territory at the cost of lives. Men in their unit had died in the operations that produced these loads. Every bag in every vehicle was blood-bought. A rear-area unit that had spent two months sitting on a road with no enemy contact had no claim on any of it.
Both sides had a case. Neither side had been interested in adjudicating it calmly.
Shots had been fired. Hans had taken a round. Several soldiers on both sides were dead. The convoy had stopped.
And then both sides had sent for reinforcements.
Kian's Chimeras hit eighty kilometres per hour on the dirt road. Under twenty minutes from his garrison to the scene.
He saw it as the column approached: Second Battalion's soldiers dug in on both sides of the road, machine guns covering the approach, facing a line of cargo haulers whose crews had taken cover behind the vehicles and the field embankments. Several bodies lay in the road between them. Both sides had been shooting, and both sides had decided not to escalate further — not yet.
Hans's people had armoured vehicles, artillery, and crew-served weapons. The hauler crews had personal arms and numbers. If Hans had wanted to end it by force he could have ended it in under a minute. He hadn't. That showed something about the man.
Kian's force dismounted into combat dispersal.
Then from the north, moving fast: twelve armoured vehicles and a substantial hauler column, all marked with white-painted numerals. 81.
The 81st Regiment. This was the unit that owned the convoy.
They had been finishing a large-scale engagement with a rebel force — won it, taken ten loads of food, dispatched them south, and begun standing down for rest and resupply. The stand-down order had barely been issued when word came back that their supply column had been interdicted.
The 81st's regimental commander had assembled his entire main body and driven south in full force.
Now Kian's four hundred soldiers were facing Hans's dug-in battalion on one side and a full regiment's worth of veteran combat troops on the other, and everyone was angry, and people were already dead.
[End of Chapter 213]
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