"In war, truth is the first casualty."
- Aeschylus
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The Barghest urban combat and pacification unit's forward operating base sat in a shallow bowl of dust and creosote scrub about eighty miles east of Bakersfield, its perimeter defined by a triple line of concrete anti-vehicle barriers, a Militech-branded electric fence rated for structural intrusion up to Class-4 threat vehicles, and a rotating deployment of Militech Griffin surveillance drones that traced a pre-programmed pattern above the base at four hundred feet. The drones had been designed to detect movement and did not care what it detected. There was no wind, and the current temperature at 11:14 am local time was 108 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity was just below eight percent.
A soldier barely dressed in uniform crossed the open ground between the communications tent and the command tent with a data shard sealed in a matte-black courier case clipped to his utility harness. The sun was assaulting him from directly overhead, radiating off the packed clay of the compound, off the desert-camo tarps, and off the exposed plating of the armored vehicles parked in rows to his left. It was so hot that the air shimmered in a thermal haze.
To his left was Motor Pool Alpha, which consisted of six Militech Basilisk main battle tanks. They sat in a staggered defensive arrangement, their eighty-ton chassis crouched low on their independent-torsion suspension systems. These were variants of the regular Basilisks, whose primary weaponry was 140mm smoothbore cannons rather than the typical mili-40L 20mm recoilless autocannon.
Their barrels were oriented forward at fifteen degrees of elevation, just waiting to be aimed and fired at something, and their desert-tan armor plating was streaked with the darker patina of a hundred sortie miles across the Central Valley. Due to the tank's geometry, they could easily blend into their surroundings as their armor and camouflage made them look like rocks rather than machines.
Beyond the Basilisks, there were three Militech Behemoth MT3 armored personnel carriers sitting in a service line, their rear ramps down for cargo transfer while their crews performed maintenance under the shade of woven camo netting suspended from poles. The MT3 was also yet another product that did not conform to the norm for Militech vehicles, as it was longer than the regular Behemoth by ten feet and weighed almost twice as much while empty.
The one closest to the soldier's path had its engine access panel open, and a technician in oil-stained coveralls was elbow-deep in the compound-boosted diesel. The technician made eye contact with the soldier and quickly saluted him. The soldier saluted the technician back and kept moving.
Between the tank line and the aviation section, there were forty Militech Cerberus IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles). Their crew hatches were open, and their thirty-millimeter chain guns tracked sub-arc patterns as their fire control AIs cycled through target acquisition drills that generated telemetry that fed back to the command network for real-time competency scoring.
Behind them were the drone charging cradles, sixteen of them, each one holding a Militech quadrotor combat unit locked into its docking clamps while the induction plates fed 480 volts of DC into their battery packs
Once the soldier walked past them, the aviation section came into view. The section was filled with six Militech Mayhem helicopters sitting on pads with their rotors folded. Their fuselages were painted in the same desert-tan livery as the ground vehicles but carried a more angular and predatory profile since it was an attack helicopter, one whose creation had not even been officially announced by Militech to any market or government body outside NUSA Command.
The Mayhem was a project designation that could possibly be turned into production models in the future, and the six aircraft on the pad were prototypes. Their existence was not acknowledged by Militech, and there was no real procurement documentation, and even the flight suits for the pilots had experimental technology in them. After all, there was nothing more profitable for technology and for the government than war.
The soldier stopped for a second, still mesmerized by the experimental helicopters they had received less than a week ago as a "Job well done" by their commanding officer in steamrolling any opposition. Then he remembered that he had important orders to deliver to his commanding officer and kept moving.
He made his way past the aviation pads and through the fuel and munitions depot, which occupied a fenced enclosure of roughly two acres, their perimeter marked by yellow-and-black hazard chevrons and monitored by a second layer of Militech Griffin drones. Behind the fuel tanks and the palletized munitions crates were the field maintenance shop's canopy tents. They housed the mechanics who kept the base's mobility rolling, and the soldier could hear the harmonic whine of a plasma cutter operating somewhere behind the tent wall, punctuated by the occasional clang of a mounted torque wrench.
Between the shop and the command tent, a Mobile Command Center trailer hooked onto a Behemoth's cabin sat. Its side ramp was closed, and its interior was occupied by the tactical intelligence staff who processed the raw feeds from every drone, satellite pass, and infantry helmet cam in the Barghest unit, turning the data into the briefings that would eventually reach Barghest's leader, Kurt Hansen's planning table.
Everywhere the soldier looked, there was hardware that had been provided by Militech under the fig leaf of jurisdiction.
The command tent sat at the center of the compound. It was a Militech-branded modular structure that measured forty feet by sixty feet under its reinforced canopy. The soldier approached the entrance flap, stopped, saluted the two Barghest MPs standing sentry at either side, and waited for the retinal scan to confirm his identity against the courier authorization roster.
Once he got the green light, the MP on the left lifted the flap and allowed him entry.
The interior of the command tent was climate-controlled and sat at a cool and crisp seventy-two degrees. It was dimly lit by tactical amber overhead panels that preserved night-vision compatibility, and populated by six comms officers and two intelligence analysts. The soldier did not make eye contact with any of them as he walked directly to the central planning table at the back of the tent, where a single figure stood alone over a topographic hologram of California.
"Sir," the soldier said.
"Report," Colonel Kurt Hansen said, without looking up or turning around to greet the soldier.
Hansen was six-foot-four and two hundred and thirty pounds of career military mass wrapped in a Barghest tactical uniform that had been cut to accommodate his shoulders and that still looked strained across his delts. His hair was cropped short and starting to gray at the temples, and his hand was planted flat on the edge of the planning table. He was watching the hologram of the Central Valley cycle through a slow rotational preview of the current force disposition.
"We have received new orders from Command, sir. They were delivered via secure courier from the Sacramento uplink at ten-forty-two hours," the soldier spoke as he unclipped the courier case from his harness and set it on the corner of the planning table. "It was tagged with priority classification Alpha-Red, and the seal is still intact."
"Alpha-Red..." Hansen repeated, the words seeming to draw his attention.
"Yes, sir," the soldier said.
Hansen was quiet for a moment as his eyes remained on the hologram, but the soldier could see the tension that entered his shoulders at the classification. An order classified as Alpha-Red was a message that Command expected the receiving officer to dislike.
"You're dismissed, Corporal Delgado," Hansen said as he glanced back at the soldier behind him.
"Sir," Delgado saluted, then executed a clean about-face and walked out of the command tent. The MPs at the entrance did not look at him leave, and to the Corporal, the heat outside almost felt more comforting than standing behind an angry Hansen.
He did not know what was on the shard, and he did not want to know.
Hansen waited until Corporal Delgado had left before moving.
He picked up the courier case, thumbed the biometric latch, and lifted the shard from its foam cradle. It was a standard NUSA military data wafer, matte-black, unmarked except for the Alpha-Red classification stripe along its short edge. He slotted it into the planning table's secure reader, waited a few seconds for the encryption to hand off to his personal command key, and watched the orders unfold across the tabletop display.
He read the orders once quickly at first, only skimming for the headlines. Then he read them once again, taking his time. As he read, his jaw began to set.
The orders weren't long, only about four paragraphs that had been written in a compressed and unambiguous shorthand. Task Force Barghest, currently making their way to position themselves for continued offensive operations against Night City, was ordered to immediately break their path and redeploy northeast to coordinate a joint operation against the Free State stronghold of Sacramento.
Hansen had been given a seventy-two-hour window to coordinate with the other task forces, with the operational objective of full pacification of the Sacramento metropolitan area with acceptable civilian casualty projections listed as "unrestricted." The rationale for the redeployment was listed as classified.
Hansen's fists clenched as he stared at the orders. For three weeks, his forces had been grinding through the Central Valley with the single strategic objective of setting up to attack and overtake Night City, the largest, wealthiest, most operationally significant urban target in the western theater. A city whose fall would collapse the Free State coalition's economic base and end the war in the west before Christmas.
He had already drawn up the plans of where he would position his armor, staged his aviation, and run supply lines that had cost him a hundred good soldiers to secure. He had watched Bakersfield burn, and Tehachapi burn, and half a dozen smaller cities burn, and he had done it because the strategic map had one target circled in red, and every mile of Central Valley ground his forces took was a mile closer to the circle.
And now Command wanted him to pivot, and turn the fuck around to go to Sacramento, a city whose strategic value was, at best, one-tenth of Night City's. A city whose "pacification" would consume weeks of operational tempo, incur hundreds of casualties, and enough ordnance to reduce the metropolitan area to a Radio Chernobyl reference case, and would produce, at the end of it, a smoking pile of political theater that would look good in the briefing rooms but would not, advance the war effort in any way.
Hansen closed his eyes, and his fingers cracked as he clenched his fists even tighter. Hansen was being assaulted with the anger that came from processing the confirmation that his career and his campaign had been reduced, once again, to a chess piece being moved by staff officers who were sitting in a circle jerking each other off in a climate-controlled conference room three thousand miles away and had never smelled a burning tank. People who did not understand that the war they were fighting on paper was not the war he was fighting on the ground.
He picked up a steel mug that was on the corner of the planning table. He examined it for a second, taking in its empty weight before he threw it into the far wall of the tent in a fit of anger. It struck a support strut with a metallic ring that carried across the tent and back and left a dent in the strut roughly the size of a fist.
Everyone in the tent froze for a moment, but nobody dared look up from their work. Hansen's staff had been through this before.
He turned back to the planning table, gripped its edge with both of his hands, and stared at the hologram of the Central Valley with rage. He was going to comply with the orders because compliance was what officers did, but who was going to remember being toyed with by high command, and he was going to carry the memory into every subsequent operational meeting for the rest of his career. His dissent with the NUSA was growing bigger and bigger with every dumbass order he was given.
"Sacramento," Hansen said quietly. "Fucking Sacramento."
He tried closing his eyes once again to gain control over his emotions, but he was beyond pissed with the shit the NUSA High Command was pulling. He kicked the leg of the planning table hard enough to shift the entire assembly a few inches across the floor.
The staff behind him kept working as Hansen turned around.
"Send Lieutenant Norris the news of our reassignment and order him to hold back on going through with the plans for the time being, but to continue gathering information on Militech," Hansen ordered his staff.
After the orders were sent to James Norris, the orders from High Command were executed. Barghest began to pack shop that very day and over the following seventy-two hours, redeployed northeast, joining up with two other task forces.
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Stones aren't edible, might as well give them to me...
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