Mar Sara's capital district—Fort Martin restricted zone, Command Office on the command island at the heart of the Command Center.
Fort Martin's history was as old as the Mar Sara colony itself. Built in the seventieth year after the Terran Confederacy regained control of warp-drive technology, it had begun as a stone edifice of marble and concrete.
Now, the ancient stone ramparts had been replaced by fortification walls: twin layers of plasteel plate with cores packed with powerful binding agents and high-strength synthetic resin. Originally engineered to deal with Mar Sara's bandits and large predators, the walls had been raised and thickened, mounting Mark-series electromagnetic cannons and automatic autocannons—enough to annihilate any Terran army that approached rashly.
At the center of the fortifications rose the sprawling Command Center, ringed by blinking barracks, heavy factories, supply hubs, and mechanized loading bays in motion. Black-and-red-liveried Revolutionary Army strikecraft transports were lifting off and touching down at the fortress's lone military airfield.
Augustus still held the posture he'd kept while speaking with Edmund Duke: sitting straight, gaze fixed through the Command Office's tempered, light-transmitting glass. Only the flicker in his gray eyes proved he was truly there, not a synthesized or pre-recorded three-dimensional hologram.
He had more than one way to deceive Duke—clone stand-ins, virtual imagery convincing enough to pass for real, nano-masks—but Augustus was in this Command Center, not with the fleet or anywhere else.
Duke had taken the man he'd just spoken to for a pre-recorded holo. In fact, it had been Augustus himself. Duke had thought Augustus would never be so foolish as to reveal his position over a call; in truth, Augustus was right here waiting for him, ready to smash his forces to pieces.
Within the Command Office, aside from the footfalls of Revolutionary Army staff and soldiers, no one spoke. At Augustus's side, Corporal Faraday and Kerrigan stayed silent, not intruding on his thoughts.
Several minutes later, Augustus stood and straightened his uniform and cap.
"Summon my staff officers and military advisers. Order the fleet in orbit to continue tracking Alpha Squadron's movements and report to this office," he said. "Patch the operations demonstration map to the Command Center's holo-display."
"Sarah, prepare me a cup of extra-strong coffee. Corporal Faraday, report the latest frontline brief."
"Tychus Findlay and Mira Han's two brigades have already breached the capital district's outer walls and are pressing the Confederacy troops around the Governor's Palace," Corporal Faraday reported, as Kerrigan—wearing a black, close-fitting combat suit—flicked her red ponytail and pivoted at the waist to brew the coffee.
"Major General Jim Raynor's Raiders Brigade, together with the 2nd and 3rd Divisions, have stepped off from Hinterland and Lorenzana. Colonel Lundstein's 4th Division is force-marching in the southern desert about 320 km west of Major General Raynor's command. Estimated arrival at Anthem Base is in four hours."
"Excellent. They've carried out my orders superbly." Augustus was unstinting with words of praise for the generals under his command.
Just then, a holo-display sprang up before him—the terrain map of Mar Sara's southern hemisphere he had already reviewed countless times. The lines and data that formed its highlands, plains, deserts, and valleys were long since etched into his memory.
Across this expanse of more than 26 million square kilometers lived roughly 4.6 million Mar Sarans, scattered among small and midsize towns and in border cities sited by mining and industrial zones. Between the cities and towns lay barren farmland and oases spaced at intervals. Each farm owner had to cultivate on the order of several tens of acres—roughly 8–32 hectares—just to scrape by, and now the war had burned swath after swath of crop.
As for the losses caused by the fighting, the Confederacy government—headed by the Governor of Mar Sara—turned a blind eye, whether or not it could even protect itself. The Revolutionary Army, however, compensated local farmers at the full value of their destroyed crops; as a result, even those who had been skeptical of the revolution began to hail the Revolutionary Army as a just force.
Of course, these payouts all came from the large stocks of Confederacy military supplies the Revolutionary Army had captured and from the reserves of the local government. Notably, even with 70 % of the population going hungry, large quantities of grain were still being exported through Mar Sara's spaceport to Tarsonis and other Core Worlds.
On the map, the twelve contiguous states and free cities—everything outside the capital district—were already under Revolutionary Army control. Government forces held less than one third of the capital district. If Augustus had not deliberately refrained from a general assault, letting the government forces cling to their last breath, the capital district would have fallen three days ago.
At present—after five more "Deadman's Port" divisions had been shipped to Mar Sara—the Revolutionary Army's ground forces numbered over 70 000. About ten thousand soldiers had CMC-200 power armor, with a smaller allotment of CMC-300s; thirty-odd Arclite Tanks and four Goliath combat-robot companies provided fire support.
The rest of the Revolutionary Army troops assigned to combat duty wore older exoskeleton rigs that lacked real armor and offered only limited protection. These rigs were derived from T-230 dock-handling exoskeletons used in factories to augment workers' strength, built on alloy mechanical frames with simple servos and powered by batteries.
Compared with the Kel-Morian labor auxiliary troops—who wore only combat uniforms sewn with kinetic plate inserts—these exoskeletons did grant respectable mobility, helping Revolutionary soldiers keep pace with the elite units in powered armor. But their protection relied on an all-metal helmet, a chest plate, and a ballistic vest—defenses that meant little against rounds accelerated by electromagnetic means to several times the speed of sound.
By contrast, the Confederacy Marines embarked with Alpha Squadron were all equipped with CMC-300 power armor. Even at Guild Wars–era ratios, the share of resocialized soldiers in their ranks had already surpassed 70 %. Nor were they lacking in armored personnel carriers and other vehicles for rapid forward deployment to the front.
Like other noble-born senior officers in the Terran Confederacy, Edmund Duke not only did not balk at commanding morally dubious resocialized soldiers—he was more than happy to replace Alpha Squadron's ranks with these stolid, death-unfearing modified troops.
In straight-up, head-on engagements, those well-equipped resocialized soldiers could unquestionably smash any human force of equal size. The Kel-Morians' rout across the main front had come precisely because they were blindsided by resocialized troops supported by power armor.
On a frontal battlefield, it was nearly impossible for the Revolutionary Army to break Alpha Squadron. Alpha's combat power yielded to no famed Confederacy formation—never mind that, aside from the resocialized troops, the rest were veterans tempered by war after war.
Augustus's task was to sidestep their spearpoint and lure the enemy in. From what he knew of Duke, overconfidence and rashness would claim the man sooner or later. And the moment Duke heard Augustus's name, he would charge howling like a man dosed to the gills.
Five minutes into studying the map, Sarah Kerrigan returned to Augustus's side with a steaming cup of strong instant coffee.
"You lean too hard on coffee," Kerrigan said. "The Mengsk family's private physician told you to mind your rest. You always sleep too little and work too long."
By now, Kerrigan had become nearly inseparable from Augustus's life. The formidable Ghost operative oversaw his personal security and used her potent telepathy to verify that the officers around him remained loyal.
Whenever new recruits enlisted—or when new members joined the Pan-Terran Revolutionary Party—Kerrigan, together with other psionics under Augustus, conducted the final screening by reading their minds.
At the same time, Kerrigan had become Augustus's personal close-quarters instructor, teaching him Ghost close-combat techniques. Kerrigan believed he would never need them under her protection, but Augustus preferred to be remembered as a brave revolutionary fighter.
"For today, four hours is enough," Augustus waved her concern aside. Ever since the Revolutionary Army began engaging the government forces, he had stayed in the command post. Once the fighting started, he sometimes went without sleep through the night—forty hours straight—until his forces won or withdrew safely.
"I can still hold out." He sipped the coffee and waited for the latest reports to come back from units at the front. For the moment, all he could do was wait. "Knowing my soldiers are fighting for their lives at the front… I can't sleep."
"I really do worry you'll suddenly burn out one day," Kerrigan said. "Isn't Lisa writing every day to ask about your health? It's like she thinks I can't take proper care of you."
"I can certainly take care of myself." Augustus was about to say more when Lieutenant General Horace Warfield's dark, weathered face sprang onto the holo in front of him.
"Augustus, Alpha Squadron has begun deploying landing forces to the surface," Warfield said. "In under ten minutes, two hundred APOD transports and shuttles have already departed the fleet. Factoring their velocities with planetary rotation at the target latitude, we estimate they'll make landfall on the Eastern Continent of the southern hemisphere."
"The enemy fleet is driving on ours at full speed." As Warfield spoke, Augustus could see the bridge of Iron Justice shuddering violently.
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