The newest of my colleagues always make the mistake of equating an army that fights for coin to one that fights for a nation. They deify the weapons they are given; panzers capable of winning a fight outmatched two-to-one, rocket artillery that can fire everything from cluster to orbital denial munitions, aircraft whose technology makes all but the most advanced detection systems more obsolete than a rock sling.
Those that survive their first few years commanding an outfit learn to specialize in their use or dispose of such fancy equipment, for they were designed for a military that had to fight, bleed and still make a profit at the end of the day.
Let’s compare, for example, the ‘Astreus’ MBT, the most advanced tank ever deployed outside of the Core Worlds, and the humble ‘Rhino’ panzer.
The former’s active and passive defenses make it virtually impervious to rocket and guided missile attacks, while its frontal armor can take a direct hit from most sabot or shaped-charge rounds in use. Yet its protections require skilled technicians, expensive spare parts and regular maintenance to remain in top condition, while giving it a factory-fresh weight of eighty tons.
It’s fast for its size, thanks to a martian engine design and its four tracks. Alas, the former requires a specialized fuel to run with any kind of efficiency, which is both expensive and difficult to source because of the small number of refineries that can make it, while the latter further decreases the ratio of frontline units to rear maintenance personnel by being double the normal size and double the work to keep in good condition.
The Rhino, on the other hand, is a far leaner machine. It mounts the exact same 14cm gun but carries only thirty-five instead of sixty-two rounds of ammunition and has both thinner and weaker armor and a comparatively lacking active protection system.
Yet its turbine engine can run on liquefied charcoal in a pinch, and can be virtually rebuilt in the field with a truck-mounted machine shop and a couple skilled mechanics. At just fifty-two tons in full combat kit it can cross most bridges, and the ubiquitous M1088 heavy truck can carry two Rhinos instead of just one Astreus on basic asphalt or dirt roads.
The Astreus might win you the battle, but its logistical requirements will lose you the war. It costs two times as much to maintain and needs two to three times as much logistics and maintenance personnel to keep in combat conditions, though it’s by far the best the Heartland Worlds have to offer.
It’s the best tank for a modern, capable, state military, which can afford the extra logistical challenges in return for lower casualties and better chances at victory against a peer enemy. Yet to one of our own it’s more of a white elephant, amazing to parade around but absolutely terrible to budget for.
Now, of course, your outfit might be special. I’ve seen my fair share of ‘elites’ hired as a force multiplier by weak but willing colonial security forces. Yet if you, like most of us, are hired with the job of winning a war with minimal support, your secret weapon is no supertank.
It’s logistics.
—Colonel Victor Steele, Decennial Security Providers’ Conference, 2344
—
Steele and his regiment had fought on many worlds, from the exotic to the ugly and most often the boring. Each world was slightly different, though the reason they were colonized was mostly the same; resources. Whether it was massive herds of cattle, endless seas of wheat or deep crust mines, colonies were planet-sized resources extracted for the good of whichever government or corporation invested the money to develop them.
Though the resource and method of extraction differed from planet to planet, every colony invariably started from a single location; its spaceport.
For advanced worlds, this was a massive city-sized logistics zone where planet-sized land, sea and air corridors combined to load and unload hundreds if not thousands of metrics tons of cargo on huge dropships. Anything more advanced was done in orbit, where microgravity and vacuum allowed the construction of massive spaceports, shipyards and refueling stations.
Yet this was the exception.
Rural worlds, like Xandria, had far less illustrious facilities…and significantly more uniform.
Entire megacorporations had formed around the industry of colonization, fine tuning the architecture and logistics of establishing a spaceport until all the necessary tools, heavy equipment and buildings could be packed into two dozen standard shipping containers and sent dozens if not hundreds of light years across space to their new forever home.
The main terminal also functioned as the colonial headquarters for the first years of development, though on Xandria the government had long moved out and dedicated the building to traffic control and logistics agencies. Bright red-colored bunkers sat over underground fuel depots for the dropships; the local system had little in the way of orbital infrastructure, and the small merchants that bought its few goods used ships that landed on planets instead of sending ferries down from geostatic orbit. Last but not least, rows of metal warehouses and grain silos surrounded the tarmac, a large oval several kilometers long and almost a klick big at its widest.
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It was there, on that hot tarmac, that the barely aerodynamic brick that was the Victoria sat in all its splendor.
Once a military dropship employed by Victor’s homeworld, it had been sold to him along with a whole lot of goodies for a job whose details were best left under lock with the key forgotten. The only thing that mattered was that it was his, in the best sense of the word, completely reliable in even the worst of scenarios unlike the boats-for-hire most mercenary outfits had to rely on to take them off-world.
As Victor watched through the glass wall of the restaurant nestled at the top of the terminal, a row of trucks and armored personnel carriers had formed in front of the lowered rear ramp, with navy ratings wearing high-vis vests and holding colored batons guiding them inside the massive vehicle hold of the dropship.
“Colonel?” A male voice called to him from the other side of the dining table.
Victor turned towards Xandria’s governor, a gray-haired man of Japanese descent who went by Hiroshi Susuki.
“Yes, Governor?”
“I think you will be pleased to know…” Governor Hiroshi said, sliding a tablet across the table. “That your payment has gone through.”
The simplistic interface of Banque Credit Insterstellaire, the premier intra-system bank this side of the galaxy, showed Victor’s favorite words.
[Transfer Approved]
“Two hundred and fifty million solariis for services rendered, as well as another seventy-three million and change for damages incurred.”
“Excellent.” Victor replied, digging into his steak.
“…plus an additional seven million, four hundred and fifty to thousand, nine hundred and nineteen solariis, and thirteen cents.” The Governor added, grimacing.
“I hope you’re not planning on keeping some of my men on retainer with that offer.” Victor replied, cutting off another piece of perfectly seared steak. Beneath his mask, a cold smile took form.
Hiroshi shook his head, taking a swig of the rich red wine that Xandria had begun exporting half a t-decade prior to great success. “That is the remainder of Director Misaki’s research fund. An apology, on our behalf, for the…confusion she caused. I hope the Consortium will be able to request your services and discretion once more if the need arises.”
Victor nodded slowly, grimacing. In truth, he was never going to blacklist the Sakura Consortium; greedy fuckers they might be, like every other trillion-solarii megacorp, but they paid very well in return for his discreteness. Case in point, this ‘apology’. A bribe in all but name, but one any bank would eagerly process nonetheless. Finance in the outer worlds was less regulated than xenoarcheology, and every solarii billionaire worth their fortune had an alien artifact in the lobby of his villa on Mars.
“A most unfortunate incident indeed; the Veisgolt Regiment accepts your apology in full.” He replied.
A less experienced merc would’ve asked about the Director’s fate; Victor knew better. Best-case scenario, she would be teaching her craft at some middling university for the rest of her miserable life. Worst case…well, Xandria’s farms could always use more fertilizer.
…
The plains of the Xandrian Highlands were much like the Central Plains of Lieutenant Pavlo Stepanovych Borysenko’s homeworld, Zorya. Both were dedicated in their entirety to growing grains, though Zorya had specialized in a protein-rich strain of corn instead of the drought-resistant wheat Xandrians cultivated for a living.
Yet there were stark differences that he couldn’t get used to. Xandria was cold, windy, and so dry that pure-strain crops couldn’t make it to harvest. The terrain was also full of short hills, which turned the experience of riding a fifty-ton main battle tank into being through in a running washing machine.
“Think you’re going to miss the place, Emanuel?” He asked the brown-skinned man enjoying a cup of caf from his own hatch on the turret.
Sergeant Emanuel Garcia, the Nutcracker’s loader, had served under Colonel Steele for nearly three t-years. The man was supposed to be twenty-three according to personnel records, but looked closer to thirty-two. Nobody could blame him; even Borysenko was starting to see gray hairs in the mirror after the Xandria Campaign…which was thankfully coming to an end.
With the Legion’s heavy artillery and SAM emplacements destroyed in a siege two Xandrian Months ago -two and a half standard- the Regiment had been free to advance its own shorter-ranged artillery and aviation assets towards the jessomite strongholds on the eastern deserts. The Nutcracker had been part of that very siege, barely managing to take down an entire building with a siege round before the legionnaires inside reloaded their rockets.
A peace treaty had been signed just last week after a flurry of negotiations between the Xandrian Colonial Government and the Jessomite Council, allowing the latter autonomous control over much of the barren desert that was so holy to them in exchange for funneling their profitable production of pixie dust through the former’s spaceport and paying taxes. A shuttle full of justicars from the Bonding Authority oversaw the entire thing; non-compliance by either party would mean a slow and painful death by ironclad sanctions.
“Well…” the latino muttered, taking a sip of caf. “Not really. The weather’s pretty nice, but the coingirls…they are a bit too conservative for my taste.”
“And expensive!” Hans, their driver, shouted from the sun-baked tarmac beside the left track as he inspected the wheels for cracks. “They charge the same rate as the bordello dancers on Haven, but they can’t move half as well!”
Borysenko shook his head with a smile; only a standard year ago he’d been a captain of tanks in the Zoryan Guard, a ‘prestigious’ position whose salary barely equaled that of a sergeant in the Regiment’s mechanized infantry, and with a significantly shittier quality of life to boot. Now a lieutenant with a single platoon of four tanks —panzers, he reminded himself, as they were called in the regiment—, he made one and a half times his previous salary plus combat pay…
Say what you will about the Colonel’s attitude during combat operations; the man was worse than a slave driver without a doubt. Yet he knew how to take care of his men, with regular pay in credit or coin, food that didn’t make them shit rocks, and even bonuses so that even the lowest-ranking men could enjoy a night a week with the local—
Borysenko keyed his headset, sending back a short ping of confirmation to the captain’s tank. Soon the rest of Dagger Company replied, and the captain spoke again.