Castle's Tanks
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: Tanks, but I don't own Castle. Rating: K Time: Several centuries into an AU future.
Gordon was tall, heavily built and without an ounce of fat on him. He pounded Rick on the shoulder.
"Looks like we've both come up in the world, Rick. I have a brigade and you're a commissioned officer in one of the best mercenary units around." Gordon looked at the Tarkai moving the vehicles around. "And it looks like you're working on freeing Tark."
Rick shook his head.
"That's a long time in the future, I'm afraid. Black Jacques Schram is selling some armored vehicles we acquired and I'm babysitting them with my platoon and a few others. But how did you end up here and with a brigade?"
"Come into the spaceport lounge. I'll buy you a drink and tell you all about it."
Three minutes later the two were sitting in comfortable chairs with a pretty waitress putting a drink in front of each of them. A bowl of munchies was placed conveniently nearby.
"Colenso Mining and Manufacturing works on the moons of a gas giant…" Gordon began.
"I've heard of that." Rick broke in." The ship's captain told me the story up to the arrival of some Netherlanders to run the farms and ranches."
"Okay. All was going well until about fifty years ago. A group of Japanese got kicked out of some godawful colony and were chased here. There were fifty or so Daimyos, Japanese for Lord and each one of them had his gang of samurais with him. Anywhere from two hundred to maybe five hundred. Now don't think these samurai were anything like what you've seen in the old historical vids with guys in enameled armor waving big swords around. They had good infantry weapons, some heavy infantry weapons and were well trained and fanatical."
"And the daimyos! They were as proud and egotistical as anyone you've ever met. They could hardly stand to cooperate with each other and wouldn't subordinate themselves to another daimyo for anything. I've heard two daimyos in the middle of a battle screaming at each other because the requests for help weren't polite enough for them."
"But they overran the Dutch. Colenso didn't much care who ran New Haarlem as long as they got food."
"Have you ever heard of Jakob van Wyck, Rick?"
Castle shook his head.
"No. Should I?"
"If you hung around the Expanse for a while, you'd hear of him. He was born here just after the Japanese took over. At maybe twelve, he lit out for the spaceport. He managed to make himself useful there and even managed to talk his way onto a ship heading off planet as a crewman. He's smart. Hell, he's brilliant. By the time he was twenty-five, he was a millionaire. By the time he was thirty-five he was a billionaire and at forty-five he was a trillionaire several times over. He bought Colenso and the spaceport and hired me to kick the Japanese out."
"He raised a whole brigade?" Rick asked.
"Not likely. I landed here in the outback with a little over a hundred veteran solders. We set about raising a good, old fashioned guerilla war. We got the people on our side and did the usual guerilla stuff. You know: The enemy advances, we retreat; The enemy halts, we harass; The enemy retreats, we attack. After a bit we moved from guerilla warfare to mobile warfare. We'd use two infantry companies, plus whatever heavy weapons we had to attack platoon sixed posts. After a while, the daimyos pulled their troops back into company sized posts. That gave us more people to recruit from. Old van Wyck made damned sure we had enough weapons to arm everyone. Eventually, each daimyo was shut up in his own town or city with his troops and everything else belonged to us. That's when we changed to conventional warfare. We'd stage multi-battalion and sometimes regimental sized attacks and eventually drove the daimyos out of maybe eighty percent of New Haarlem."
Gordon pulled out a pad and brought up a map.
"See? We have this triangular shaped island. There's a river on one side of us and an arm of the ocean on the other. On the other side of the water is what's left of the daimyos."
"So, the war's over?" Rick asked.
"Not by a long shot. The Japanese never give up. They still outnumber us five or six to one and have managed to get weapons and other supplies from off planet."
"How?" Rick asked. "The only reason New Haarlem us here is to export food."
"Unluckily for us, the daimyos found an aromatic wood that's in demand for high end furniture off planet. They also took over the farms and ranches we didn't liberate and moved them as far from us as they could."
"I have a good brigade, Rick. There're three good infantry battalions, an artillery battalion, an aviation battalion, plus company sized units of scouts, engineers, intelligence, medical, you know, the usual. I even have my own navy, but they're just small patrol boats. "
"But the Japanese are doing what we used to do. When we advance, they retreat, when we stop, they harass us, when we retreat, they attack us. Plus, they go after our supply lines. I can only go so far before my advance starts to get bogged down and that's not close enough to destroy their farms, ranches and their lumber mills. God knows I've tried. Even if I had those tanks of yours and your Tarkai scouts, I still couldn't destroy the Japanese."
"So, you're bogged down in an endless war?"
"Not a bad job for a real mercenary. I do ten or twelve battalion sized raids a year and three times that number of company sized raids, plus the occasional artillery barrage or helicopter gunship attack. The daimyos don't do more than a half dozen raids of any size."
"There ought to be some way to end the war."
Gordon shrugged.
"People have come up with ideas. There was a suggestion that Colenso build an in-system warboat. Just bad enough to keep anyone from landing in Japanese held territory and resupplying them."
"Sounds like a good idea. What happened?"
"Lawyers. They said sending warships after innocent freighters doing legitimate business was piracy. Plus, the idea of some trillionaire having his own space navy didn't appeal to a lot of governments. A nice mercenary unit protecting something you owned on planet was one thing, but the idea of corporations building their own warships was a real non-starter."
"I suggested that a division sized force, heavy on airmobile assets with some heavy armor could overrun the daimyos. But what do we do then? Put everyone, women and children included, in POW camps? That'd make me a war criminal. Sooner or later, we'd have to let them go and in twenty years or so, they'd be right back attacking us. And occupying them with a reinforced division forever would cost too much."
"Looks like you have a job for life." Rick said.
Gordon laughed.
"Let me show you something."
He stood up and led Rick out of the spaceport lounge and downstairs where he used a key card to open a doorway. He used another to open the door to a small room. In the room was a table with seven grey metal bars on it. The bars were some eight or ten inches long and two or three inches thick.
"Do you know what that is, Rick?"
He shook his head.
"Pallaindrium. It's a transuranic heavy metal that's not found on any of the moons that Colenso operates on, but it is found here. It's used in the AI computers needed to run starships. I get it from the daimyos."
"Why?" Rick asked.
"They bribe me to not attack them. Well, that's not accurate. If I didn't attack someone the others would get real suspicious. So, they get hit, but not as hard or as often as everyone else. Oh, I share with my fellow off world officers, of course, but I make more than my salary each year from this. And I can blackmail the daimyos who deal with me. I've gotten some priceless intel this way. And, maybe, one day, my tame daimyos will stop fighting me and realize it's better to be friends than enemies. Or not."
"Does van Wyck know about this?"
Gordon shrugged and then laughed.
"Maybe, maybe not. I sure haven't told him. And this is chicken feed to a trillionaire."
Not for the first time, Castle was glad he wasn't a real mercenary, but part of the United Kingdom's military. He'd met real mercenaries in his time. He once met a hard-bitten old sergeant who's signed up as a young man with a not overly honest mercenary command. He'd been taken prisoner, but at the end of the war, instead of being released, his captors wanted a ransom for all their mercenary prisoners. Neither his command or their employers had any interest in this, and the mercenary had been used for slave labor for five years before escaping. He was still looking for his old commander who he intended to kill.
He could see Gordon's point even if he might not have done the same thing in his place. Gordon was the well-paid commander of an excellent mercenary brigade. But, if van Wyck got into some serious financial problems, he might decide that financing an endless war on a planet he probably hadn't seen for decades was something he could do without. Gordon wouldn't be the first successful, well paid mercenary colonel to find himself suddenly in command of and understrength, poorly armed, poorly trained and poorly paid company in the middle of nowhere.
In the week he had to spend on New Haarlem he had twice joined Gordon in his command center to watch a battalion sized raid and then a company sized raid. The battalion sized raid was against one of the daimyos that paid off Gordon, so aside from artillery fire destroying some crops, not much happened.
The company sized raid was different. A daimyo had sent up a platoon sized outpost where the troops could shoot at Gordon's small patrol boats on the river. It began with an artillery barrage blanketing the post for twenty minutes. Then helicopter gunships raked the place. Finally, the infantry, backed by combat engineers attacked. It was over in less than an hour from the first artillery round.
"Wait." Rick said. "How did you blow up that last bunker? I didn't see anything."
"One thing about these samurai. Getting captured, for them, is a fate worse than death. Whoever was in that bunker suicided."
Castle was happy to get back aboard the Auld Ark and finally head for his destination, Dawn.
"Dawn planetary control, this is the Auld Ark. We have cargo for you." Captain van der Bijl radioed to the planet.
"Auld Ark, this is the planetary control of the People's Democratic Revolutionary Republic of Dawn. Are you this ship bring war machines to the former, blood soaked, fascist, reactionary murderous government that the people so bravely destroyed?"
"We have a shipment of armored vehicles for you, that's correct."
"The People's Democratic Revolutionary Republic of Dawn need nothing but the courage of the masses and their bravely wielded bayonets. It you try to land to unload your filth, we will destroy you."
Van der Bijl tried talking to the authorities on Dawn, but they refused to let the ship land.
"Well, Lieutenant, I can take you to my next stop. From there, you'll have to contact your command and get a ride back to the UK."
"Shit." Castle said.
Three months later, Castle found himself reporting to Colonel Black Jacques Schram after submitting a written report to him.
"Sit down, Rick." Schram said. "In spite of how badly things went, it wasn't your fault. Besides, the check from the old government of Dawn cleared before the new government took over, so we made a profit there and we managed to sell the armor to another party."
Seeing the look on Castle's face, he quickly added, "They're sending their own ship for them."
"Now, as far as the gift from Captain Xi, I agree with her. This is a donation for the liberation of Tark and has no connection with your mission for me."
"Thank you, sir."
"No need to thank me, Rick. I ran this by the Staff Judge Advocate. What she did was perfectly legal. However, I've decided not to pay you and your platoon a bonus."
Castle was unable to keep the disappointment off of his face.
"What I'm doing instead is giving you a check for the Tark Liberation Fund. It's for one hundred thousand UK pounds."
"Thank you, sir."
"You should. I'm probably financing the loss of the best scouts I've ever had."
"I'll return to you if I can, sir,"
"Now, as for as your…contact with Mr. DeRuyter and Seven Provinces Interstellar Trading. I've passed what you told me onto the appropriate UK government department. We probably won't get more than some sharing of intelligence at first, but if other people in human space are getting worried about what the nationalists of all three countries are doing back on Earth, we might get more. It's a start, anyway."
"Now, you've had a difficult mission, and the brigade is standing down for a bit. Go have some fun."
"Thank you, sir."
Castle saluted and left.
TBC