Senior Advisor Sirhaan was in a foul mood. How dare they impinge upon the honour of his people! To hem them in with a blockade was not only disruptive, but downright insulting. Levantine people thrive on commerce, and to threaten their ships and their lives for doing their jobs was incorrigible.
“Senior Advisor, please, I’d ask you to be calm. No good will come while you’re up in arms about this.”
“Silence! Miss Thomas, it is not your place to tell a senior advisor of the council to ‘calm down’. Calm down indeed! ‘Up in arms’ is precisely how my people should be!”
“Senior Advisor, may I strongly suggest that you take a moment to consider the situation with the due care that it deserves, before—“
“Get me Al Jazeera, right away. I am going to make an emergency broadcast to the homeworlds.”
Within a half hour, the message was being repeated on screens across four whole planets, a voice message over images and brief video clips of the war and the glorious part the Levant played in it. The pictures and words were expertly matched up to show a perceived Confederate inferiority; it was the worst kind of cherry-picking from footage to add spin, a centuries-old tactic of corrupt and untrustworthy regimes everywhere. Not once in the four minute message did the people of the Levant—nor in the rest of the CSTO, as the message was bounced from world to world—see a Socialist ship destroyed, nor see a wounded Socialist soldier. The whole four minutes was a venomous, hateful tirade of fear-mongering and false solidarity designed to blind a populace wearied by ten years of war. Any knowledgable or impartial observer would have dismissed it as such within the first thirty seconds.
The problem was, people bought it.
The public response in the wake of the broadcast was overwhelming. Popular opinion of Sirhaan improved exponentially, almost rivalling Noonan in popularity, and zealotry began to creep into the demeanour of the average joe. The Socialist military at large turned from a tired and lacklustre mob of clock-watchers to a vigorous—if still lacklustre—fleet of murderous and hate-blinded zealots. Levantine ships began trying to run the blockade, less for the money now and more for the thrill of sticking it to the Confeds. As CMC troops began landing on the four planets, things turned ugly. It wasn’t long before the Levant claimed its first Confederate life, when a diplomatic convoy fell victim to a hasty ambush: one young Marine was killed and four severely wounded when their LM-2 was struck by a rocket. Fearing the start of a guerrilla war, the pressure was now on the CMC to bring more armoured vehicles to the surface. What was supposed to have been a simple blockade and embargo had turned in the space of a day into the beginnings of that old strategic quagmire, the dreaded ‘counter-insurgency’. The 3rd/4th Cavalry Regiment was in demand almost from the minute they landed.
C Squadron was to land on the planet of Tarsifa, to provide an armoured mobility force for the main CMC contingent that was setting up a Forward Operating Base outside the capital, Chandarra. While the base was going up, the troops on the ground were vulnerable; having light armour around would help clear transport corridors that unarmoured trucks simply couldn’t survive in.
One of the landing craft held two LCRVs and six MCV-44 cavalry vehicles, which made up Red Troop from C Squadron. Most of the cavalrymen were squashed inside the tank-like personnel carriers, helmets on and hugging their knees as the lander ploughed down into the atmosphere. After several minutes it began to glide on its momentum, and things got a lot less bumpy. The lander belly-flopped into the dusty ground and skidded to a stop, and a buzzer sounded somewhere.
“Red Troop, dismount!” came the Lieutenant’s shout.
Everyone began bustling around the hold of the lander, untying straps and gathering equipment as the massive rear doors were cranked open, letting a blast of hot air and light inside. Within a couple of minutes, Veraa was drenched with sweat as she loaded ammo boxes into the back of one of the LCRVs. The senior Cav Scout gestured for her to put on her body armour and helmet—the hold was so noisy that words were useless beyond a metre—and get ready to drive the LCRV. She nodded, threw her bags into the back, and climbed into the driver’s seat. As she pulled her body armour on, she saw the first MCV roll out the back of the lander. Soon, all of the vehicles were rolling out into a cloud of dust. One of the other Cav Scouts, Lance Corporal McCallum, jumped into the back of Veraa’s LCRV just as she got to the door. He climbed over the small pile of gear and into the passenger seat as the jeep sped along in the wake of one of the MCVs. On either side, there was nothing but wide, open spaces; dusty plains, haggard crops, the occasional building in the distance. It seemed like farmland. Veraa just kept following the convoy, and a glance in her mirror showed the second LCRV a little way behind her. Somebody up front seemed to know where they were going. The back of her neck prickled, and she reached down beside her seat, feeling for the reassuring solidity of her carbine. “Feels like we’re being watched,” she said over the intercom.
McCallum nodded. His voice crackled across to her headset. “Yep. That feeling doesn’t go away, no matter how many patrols or deployments or postings you take. If it does, you don’t last long.”
Life on the Fringes 