The first interstellar colonies of man were, generally speaking, successful.
Such was the wealth of habitable and resource-rich worlds made available to humanity upon the discovery of the hyperdrive that violent conflicts largely subsided. In their place came conflicts of prestige; any nation worth talking about needed at least one interstellar colony, often established by the cheapest of means.
Many of the better-backed colonies did, in fact, become success stories in their own way. With national pride and prestige fueling political will, these quickly became model replicas. Yet success left their backers in the same predicament as those whose colonies had been barely scraping by, as the first order of business of a self-sufficient colony was to cut ties with them and seek better fortunes peddling their products on the open market.
There followed a secondary spree of colonization, made cheaper and faster by the first colonies’ experiences. Yet these ‘second-class’ colonies were not planted with national pride or prestige in mind, for the wonder of colonization had largely worn off for the majority of mankind’s population. Commerce was a far better motivator; the daughter colonies were established as planet-sized mines and farms, freeing their progenitors to pursue higher-value industries.
The new colonizers were far wiser than their Terran predecessors and, as such, limited or entirely barred their planet-sized business ventures from growing out of their strict role. Yet they failed to account for their own hubris, for they thought themselves capable of controlling men and women who relieved themselves of the luxuries of properly industrialized worlds for the mere chance at a life free from government control.
Some controlled the spaceports, believing that their ventures could not establish independence -as they themselves once had- without control of their exports. Yet a population could only be forced into such subservience if only it was willing to be logical…and logic was a rare value indeed in the interstellar frontier. Many a colony rebelled against their masters, violently so.
The homeworlds invariably were forced to either abandon the colony or reinforce and reunify it by military means. Yet any kind of military operation ultimately intensified the disruption, and the inevitable collateral damage of a conflict between colonial militaries and rebels against the majority-neutral populace made any kind of reconciliation a herculean task.
Even if a military solution was found, the problem of what to do with the troublemakers inevitably arose. Solutions ranged from monstrous to stupid. On Jawhara, a joint farming venture between the egyptian Warada and the pakistani Khajana colonies, three thousand surrendered Sikh fighters were executed. On Solstice, a joint European lithium mining colony, much of the rebel populace succumbed to an enhanced malaria strain because they did not want to accept medical aid from the colonial government. Yet these were outliers.
In the vast majority of cases, the defeated ‘troublemakers’ were sent to cause trouble somewhere else. That required there be other conflicts to fight in, but there was always another problematic world to reassert control over or a backwater colony whose produce could prove profitable if only it could be taken over at a manageable cost.
The chaos that followed this second wave of colonization ensured that there would always be somebody willing to hire expendable troops.
By the middle of the twenty-second century, the roving bands of armed exiles had transformed into organized mercenary outfits as small as a squad of marksmen or as big as an army, with payments and equipment sales managed by dedicated companies. The chaos never stopped; it merely moved far enough from humanity’s cradle and out of the minds of the billions on Terra, Mars, Proxima Centauri and Trappist.
For many within the core worlds, it was a barbaric profession best left to rot in the long and dusty annals of human history. Terra and her closest daughters had long banished war from their backyard, their militaries remaining powerful through their immense industrial and technological superiority. Violence had been exported to the outer worlds rather successfully, and to great profit.
A brave -or crazy, depending on your viewpoint- few thought it more honorable than most. The practice held an undisputed allure to millions of farmers, miners and factory workers in the Heartland or the Outer Worlds; the average footsoldier earned about as much as a middling corporate shill but needed no qualifications greater than youth and vigor, and he had the ‘luxury’ to see the galaxy’s beautiful, exotic and lethal sights.
To Colonel Steele, it was the only life he'd ever known.
—
“What the fuck do you mean, don’t harm the statues?!”
BOOM
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The radio headset crackled around his ears.
Indeed, the contract stipulated that no harm could come to ‘objects of archeoxenological interest’…unless his soldiers’ survival demanded it.
He glanced at the large screen at the wall in front of him, watching through the remote rig dialed to one of his panzers as cloth-clad extremists hurled Molotov cocktails and fired mortars at his troops from inside the statue-decorated outer walls of the city. Two of his tanks were already cooking off amidst the grassy plains, and soon the religious nutters would be bringing in more rockets.
“You want me to retreat now, you moron? A little late for that! I’ve got tanks a hundred meters from the walls, and they’re getting closer by the second!”
“No, you hear me, Director. If we retreat right now, I’ll lose half a battalion of men and equipment to their artillery without two kills and a penny to show for it! You try to get a contract after that, because I sure as hell won't!.”
At a gesture across his neck, the comms specialist sitting on his right cut the crazy scientist out of the regimental comnet. The Bondsmen sure wouldn’t like being dragged out to the edge of nowhere to settle a dispute, but they would award the money to him. Enough outfits had been fucked over by indecisive colonial governments that even the most boilerplate contract had ‘heat of battle’ clauses protecting him from bullshit orders.
Switching to the kampfgruppe’s network, he heard the local commander keeping his troops as calm as one could in these conditions.
“—smoke mortars. Keep tossing them out, men.”
Within another try at the frequency dial, he turned the connection private between the pair.
“Ocelot Actual, this is Overlord Actual, you copy?”
“You do, Ocelot Actual. Clearance granted, dig em out!”
Whether the following sounds were static or laughter, Victor didn't know.
Even without returning fire, most of the armored column had remained untouched; the jessomites had frightfully weak anti-armor weapons, powerful as their long-ranged artillery might be. With heavy munitions back in play, the tides turned in moments.
BOOM
The tank broadcasting through the remote rig fired its main armament, the fourteen centimeter smoothbore gun utterly obliterating a heavy stubber emplacement atop the gatehouse.
Though Victor often dreamed of commanding entire divisions of panzers, it was sights like these that reminded him what as a single beast could accomplish…especially with a trained and bloodthirsty crew. Torrents of autocannon fire came from the personnel carriers, sheltering behind the tanks in neat rows of two. The twenty-mil guns seemed tiny compared to tank armament, but they fired ten times faster with the same computer-aided accuracy.
Ocelot moved as one, twenty-four vehicles and nearly two hundred soldiers advancing deep into the city to find their targets.
They crushed their way through the paths of most resistance, searching for that which the jessomites’ mercenaries valued the most.
The extremists themselves were bona fide religious nutheads, searching for meaning in forgotten relics of an ancient civilization that had gone extinct a dozen millennia prior. Yet even they understood they were outclassed when Steele’s troopers landed on the planet with tanks, artillery and combat aviation supporting a core of battle-hardened mechanized infantry.
So they had hired the Iron Mountain Legion, an outfit made up of veterans from the civil war on the russian-speaking world of Zamoroz. Not the best outfit, but respectable none the less and just barely cheap enough to be bought with the foreign exchange the jessomites earned selling pixie dust to off-world smugglers.
The Legion was smaller than Victor’s Regiment, three or four thousand men with no heavy armor to speak of. But they were not supposed to fight the same fight his soldiers did. Their job was to sit tight and defend against the opposing outfit until the enemy party —government or rebels— ran out of will, patience or money, and signed over whatever land or resources their clients demanded in return for peace.
Their primary tool was none other than a battalion of heavy artillery, currently hiding amidst the irreplaceable relics Victor’s own clients were crying about. Unfortunately for the Legion and their clients, he had a reputation to maintain…and the New Geneva Conventions said nothing about alien heritage sites.
Static came from his headset’s speakers, then a familiar voice.
There was no response from his own bunker, but Victor was certain the command bunker housing Fire Control Central, nice and safe several hundred klicks away, was scrambling to respond. He and his staff officers merely listened, nice and tight inside their forward command post.
The tactical table in front of Victor flickered, local counter-battery radars as well as orbiting fire control satellites picking up on the salvo of 15cm shells.
On the remote rig, the panzer fired at the supporting column of what looked like a temple; gray-clothed legionnaires ran out with their hands in the air, only to be buried a moment later under tons of crumbling stone, carved before man had learned to farm.
As the dust cleared, a series of explosions came from the camera’s left.
Going by the sounds of secondary explosions and bright flashes, they’d hit the legionnaires exactly where it hurt.
The kampfgruppe commander’s voice came on the commnet not a second later.
Before the first eighteen landed, the fourth barrage shot into the sky, and it didn’t stop until the tenth. By that time, the entire central district of the city had been levelled, statues and temples reduced to rubble, filled with broken howitzers and shattered bodies.