Chapter One Hundred and Seventy-Three: Strike Two
Tancredi IV, November 30th, 3035
"Have Gamma Battalion start folding in," Romano Senn-Liao ordered. "The enemy is pushing forward into our center exactly how we planned it. With our flanks closing in we should be able to pin this regiment in place and finish them off."
"Aye ma'am, relaying orders now," the comms officer responded.
"Once we have them surrounded I'm going to ask if they would like to surrender," Romano stated.
"And if they don't surrender ma'am?" The officer asked.
"Then we keep going until one of them catches sanity," Romano replied. "And we don't stop until they either surrender or are dead."
The HQ personnel then went back to their individual tasks, getting information on the tactical situation and relaying it to whomever needed the information.
"General Liao, a battalion of militia have managed to take out the guards of one of the work camps, they're asking for further instructions,"
"Reroute some APCs to their location, let's get the civilians out of there and make sure that they get taken care of," Romano ordered. "And divert one of our two Stings to provide support, we need to make sure that they live."
Sergeant Major Kent looked at the hundreds of civilians that they had rescued from the camps with horror that was hidden behind a visage of steel. While his fellow platoon members were trying to process everything he walled it all off in a corner of his mind to deal with later.
"Let's get our packs open, all of our rations, blankets, and extra clothing go to the civilians;" Kent ordered his platoon while he grabbed his own heavy pack that he had on his Mithril suit and dropped it on the ground.
"What are you waiting for?!" He barked at the still frozen members of his platoon. "Are you waiting for gorramed Santa Claus to show up and fix things? Or are you gonna get your asses in gear?!"
The platoon then moved quickly, unslinging their packs and handing out extra rations, blankets and clothes to the crowd of civilians.
"Women and children first," Kent ordered the line crowd. "There isn't enough here for everyone yet, but we have more on the way."
"But we're all starving, we need to eat," the leader of the group said. "Will there be enough food?"
"We'll make sure to spread it out as evenly as possible for now, and I'll get on the horn with command and get some support here," Kent said. "You're the third camp we've liberated in the past two days and we're still working out the kinks in our plans."
Overhearing the conversation, the Corporal who had the extra comms gear began to get everything set up. "Command, this is Alpha-Nine; we need one of our Triumph class dropships, we've got over 500 civvies to transport over here,"
"We've got one available for tasking, Alpha-Nine estimated wait time is forty-five mikes."
"Solid copy, Command, Alpha-Nine out."
"Forty-five minutes til pickup Sarge," the communications tech relayed to The Sergeant Major.
"I copy," Kent replied as he knelt down by a family of four and placed an emergency blanket around them.
It was like something out of the ancient World War Two documentaries, the skeletal people, the ragged clothing, and the shivering children. The camps were made up of thin prefabs that didn't keep the cold of winter out, and the clothing they had was ragged as well.
"Easy on the soup, if you eat too much now you'll end up worse," one of the combat medics instructed. "Drink water and get warm, we'll be giving inspections for frostbite later."
"Tear down some of those buildings, let's get some fired started," Kent instructed, pointing at some of the buildings that were made out of wood.
A squad moved over and with the enhanced strength of their Mithril began to tear away at the wooden walls, the lack of insulation making the job easier. Then, stacking the wood up in one massive pile and several smaller piles they began to set portions of the piles of wood on fire, bringing warmth and relief to many of the civilians that were shivering.
"Get as close to the fire as you can bear, we don't want any of you to die of hypothermia here," the medics instructed.
The civilians huddled together around the fire, enjoying the warmth from both the fire and from the food that was being distributed among them.
"What kind of man or woman is willing to do this to other people?" One of the younger soldiers asked over the privacy of Alpha-Nine's internal comms.
"The kind who is willing to view other human beings as somehow being "lesser",, or "barbarians"," Kent replied. "This isn't the first time that mankind has committed an atrocity of this magnitude, and I'm afraid that it is likely not the last," Kent sighed loudly. "Man's capacity for self-delusion is nigh infinite under the right circumstances, and makes us capable of many dispicable things." The man began to portion out some food to several families. "But sometimes that same capacity for self-delusion brings about greatness, men and women lifting vehicles many times their weight, the Black Watch versus the Rim Worlds Republic, and many other stories and legends about us breaking past the limits of humanity." Kent then chuckled a bit. "But that's not of critical importance right now, we've still got these civilians to take care of."
"Roger that Sarge, getting back to work,"
"The children are in better shape than the adults?" Romano asked the Chief Medical officer of the 1st Terran Guard regiment.
"Yes, and it makes sense as to why," the CMO replied. "The parents and adults would set aside food and would tear their own clothing in order to make sure that the children were better taken care of. This led to the children needing far less recovery time than the adults that we've rescued."
"While that's good to hear, it still leaves us here on the defensive instead of pushing the Word of Blake even further back," Romano said angrily. "Luckily we won't be waiting here long, We've got supplies and garrison troops en route from Haynesville coming in a month or so."
"We'll need to start documenting the names of everyone that we've rescued," the CMO responded. "It'll make it easier to get them back to their families."
"Aye," Romano said. "It'll also help us figure out if a child has been left orphaned or an adult made a widow or widower."
"Tragic times we live in," the CMO responded as she shook her head sadly.
"Still, we're probably the best unit to have on this assignment, we have the experience from dealing with MASK and rescuing survivors from the nuclear blasts," Romano muttered. "The stresses put on the survivors is something we know how to handle better than most."
"I'll have the medics and doctors start distributing the names of the people that we've treated so that we at least have a place to start from," the CMO stated.
"Good, it's better than starting from nothing," Romano replied. "Reunification is always the hard part anyway."
Author's note: This chapter was hard, I didn't know how much detail I'm even allowed to go into as far as something akin to the holocaust. So I erred on the side of less detail. I struggled with separate sections here and it may be a bit jumpy. I apologize for that as well.