Siege of Bounty

"The human general in the city is a terrible butcher."Intercepted transmission of the Khanate's command at Cirban, 2429

The Siege of Bounty was the defence of Bounty, the largest world of the Ciriban Gulf's Sectors, against the Red Khanate, from September 2428 to May 2430. After the Battles of Haedius the Republic's fleet withdrew, and Bounty's 360 million people were left with a defence force raised by a retired Marine general, Alerio Biohó. The Republic evacuated 30 million of them, the largest evacuation in human history. The Defence Zone of 150,000 held the orbital station Bijou Nan Syèl La for seventy-eight days and the city of Toussaint for fourteen months against ten Fevarian cohorts of 4.5 million.

Biohó was killed on 3 March 2430. His successor, Colonel Marguerite Delacroix-Sainvil, kept signalling in his name, and the Khan's captains, who had promised the Khan the butcher alive, attacked the last position at Roric's Plaza on foot rather than burn it from orbit. The Plaza fell on 18 May 2430. The Khan's ground losses on Bounty were 1.1 million, more than in any other ground campaign the Khanate fought. Three hundred million of Bounty's people died. The defenders' name, Biohó's Butchers, and the warcry "For Bounty" became the Republic's for the rest of the war.

Background

Bounty in 2428

Bounty in 2428 was the fourth largest world in the Republic, with 360 million people. Toussaint, its capital, was a city of 40 million on the largest island and the two hundred islands of its lee. It held the Sector Council's chamber, the Binami Fleet's headquarters, the Corps' Sector command and the yards at Toussaint's orbital. Above it was Bijou Nan Syèl La, a station of 60 million tonnes with 3 million residents and 400 docks, the largest civil structure the Republic had built. The Sector defence force stood at 40,000 and the planetary militia at 200,000.

After Haedius

The Khan's fleet took Haedius in September 2428 after the First and Second Battles of Haedius, and the road to the Binami sector lay open. When the news reached Bounty, millions tried to leave, and the docks were overwhelmed. Admiral Kvoravich's fleet came out of Haedius and lay at Cirban through the autumn with 250 hulls, repairing.

Preparations, September 2428 to January 2429

Biohó

Alerio Biohó was born in Toussaint in 2361, of Haitian descent, and served in the Marine Corps for thirty-eight years. He commanded the 20th Marine Division from 2402 and the Corps' Sector command at Toussaint from 2408 to 2415, and retired as a general in 2419 to a house on the lagoon. On 12 September 2428, aged sixty-seven, he was appointed commander of the Bounty Defence Zone by the Sector Council under the Rearmament Acts' emergency provisions, over the Corps' serving Sector commander. The Ministry of Defence confirmed him on 20 September.

The Defence Zone

Biohó built his force from the troops that had come out of Haedius aboard Kvoravich's transports and hospital ships:

• the 23rd Rapid Orbital Deployment Regiment;
• two Marine battalions of the 20th Marine Division, held at Paldron's ring before the withdrawal;
• an armoured company and an artillery battalion;
• 9,000 stragglers of every service.

To these he added the Sector defence force, the militia, the Bounty garrison's 30,000 regulars and 40,000 volunteers from the city. On 1 January 2429 the Defence Zone held 150,000 troops, of whom 60,000 had fought before.

The evacuation

From September 2428 to January 2429 every hull the Sector Council, the Scheme's freight working group and the fleet could find lifted people from Toussaint's docks and Bijou Nan Syèl La to Nomotar, Saolea and Talandra. Thirty million left. The Sector Council itself left for Saolea on 2 December 2428, by a vote of 40 to 12. On 8 January 2429 Kvoravich's fleet left Cirban on the Navy Board's order. A fleet of 250 hulls could not fight 320 monoliths, and the Republic could not lose another. It left behind the three starforts, the orbital's guns and Biohó's 150,000.

The defence plan

The Sector command's plan of 2424 had assumed a Voor landing against a fleet in orbit. Biohó's plan of 1 January 2429 replaced it. Toussaint would not be held at its edge, where orbital fire could reach every position, but in its districts, building by building.

• The city's foundations, the pontoon districts' hulls, the causeways and the sewers were mined and joined by tunnels.
• Ammunition, fuel and food for a year were spread across 4,000 sites.
• The 10 million people who could not or would not leave were moved into the deep levels of the megaplexes, the city's fifty largest buildings, which had been built to ride out the Gulf's hurricanes.
• Bijou Nan Syèl La was evacuated and garrisoned by 12,000 troops in forty independent commands of 200 to 400, each with its own stores, its own charges and orders to fight until its section was lost and then destroy it.

Bijou Nan Syèl La, 22 January to 9 April 2429

The Khan's fleet arrived at Cirban's edge at 0800 on 20 January 2429 from Haedius, with 260 monoliths, four captured hearths and 50,000 tributary hulls. The rest of his strength stayed at Haedius against Indata Mog's tunnels. The three starforts were reduced by the 22nd and the orbital's guns by the 23rd.

The Khan did not burn the station. It held the bonded warehouses of a century's trade, the docks his fleet needed and the yards the Scheme had enlarged, and his landing force went into it on 22 January to take it intact. Its 400 docks, 3,000 kilometres of corridor and warehouse decks the size of towns could not be cleared by orbital fire without destroying what the Khan had come for. The Fevarian landing parties, who had taken forty worlds by burning them first, fought in the corridors with weapons meant for boarding actions, against an enemy they could not find.

The defenders raided from hidden positions and destroyed each section as it was lost. The Corps' reconstruction credits them with 200,000 Fevarian and tributary troops killed in seventy-eight days. Eighty thousand died on 3 March 2429 in the detonation of the bonded warehouse decks, which broke the station in two. The last command was destroyed on 9 April 2429. Three hundred of the 12,000 escaped to the surface in the station's boats.

Toussaint, March 2429 to May 2430

The landings

The Khan did not wait for the station. His landings began on 14 March 2429. A Fevarian cohort is a clan's whole fighting strength, about 450,000 Fevarian and tributary troops under the clan's khan. Ten cohorts, 4.5 million, landed around Toussaint and surrounded it. Solar High Command estimated, at thirty to one, that the city would fall in two weeks.

From 16 to 19 March 60 monoliths fired into Toussaint's outer districts to open the landing grounds. The firestorm killed 400,000 people in three days and burned the pontoon districts of the lee to the waterline. The Khan's forces took the rest of the planet in six weeks. The island chains' towns were burned where they resisted. In April 2429 the Khan ordered the aquaculture that had fed the Gulf for a century destroyed from orbit, so that the planet could not feed the city.

Hugging the fevs

The Khanate's ground doctrine was its fleet doctrine on land. A cohort advanced behind the monoliths' fire, and its troops, tributary infantry first and clan warriors behind them, took what the fire had left. Biohó's order of 20 March 2429 forbade any position more than 200 metres from the nearest Fevarian one. The Khan's captains would not fire on their own clans, and found that their monoliths could not fire at all. The defenders called it "hugging the fevs".

The advance that Solar High Command had given two weeks took four months to reach the causeways. The causeways, mined and held from the water, took three more. Raiding parties came up through the tunnels under the megaplexes and the sewers behind the cohorts' supply columns and landing grounds. The Khan's supply, which had to come down from orbit through the city's fire, ran short of food and ammunition through the summer. The Fevarian cohorts had never fought a ground campaign longer than a month. The Khan rotated them back to the monoliths after ninety days, and did not rotate the tributary troops. The Corps' figure for the Khan's losses in Toussaint in 2429 is 600,000.

Biohó's Butchers

Killing Biohó became a priority for the Khanate. Intercepted transmissions from its command called him "a terrible butcher". The defenders heard of it, and took the name for themselves: Biohó's Butchers.

The megaplexes

By the autumn of 2429 the Khan's captains had learned to take a building by cutting its water and its tunnels and starving it. From November the fifty megaplexes, each with its garrison and tens of thousands of civilians in its deep levels, fell at the rate of one a week. On 20 December 2429 the Sector Council sent a relief convoy of twelve freighters and four frigates from Nomotar under Kvoravich's cover. It was destroyed at Cirban's edge, and no second convoy was sent.

The death of Biohó

Biohó was killed on 3 March 2430 at his command post under the fuel terminal of the Bienvenu district, with his whole staff, when silos thought to be empty were ignited by shellfire. Command passed to Colonel Marguerite Delacroix-Sainvil of the 23rd Regiment. The Khan was not told that Biohó was dead. Delacroix-Sainvil kept sending the Defence Zone's signals in Biohó's name, on his order of the previous year.

Roric's Plaza, 17 and 18 May 2430

The last position was Roric's Plaza, the square before the Sector Council's chamber, held by 4,000 troops in the chamber, the Council's tower and the Exchange building on the square's three sides. They were the 23rd Rapid Orbital Deployment Regiment and the remnants of the 34th Special Armoured Company, the 1044th Artillery Battalion, the 198th and 213th Marine Battalions and other units.

The Khan's captains believed Biohó was among them, and had promised him to the Khan alive. On the morning of 17 May they sent the remaining strength of three cohorts across the square on foot, rather than burning it from orbit. The fight lasted thirty hours, and the Corps' reconstruction puts the Khan's dead in it at 40,000. The chamber fell at noon on 18 May 2430. The last position, on the Exchange building's upper floors, fell at 1700.

The Khan's captains took few prisoners. Delacroix-Sainvil, wounded on the Exchange building's top floor, was taken alive, because they believed she could tell them where the butcher was. She told them nothing, and the Khanate's record of her questioning, recovered in 2451, ends with the captains' report that the butcher was dead and had been dead for ten weeks. The Khan burned what was left of Toussaint on 20 May 2430 and left the planet under a tributary garrison.

Aftermath

Losses

The siege lasted sixteen months. The Khan's ground losses on Bounty were 1.1 million, on the Corps' estimate, and the Republic's histories record it as the most costly ground campaign the Khanate fought. Of the 150,000 defenders, 2,000 survived as slaves of the tributary garrison. Of the 330 million people who had not been evacuated, 300 million were dead by the end of 2430, in the firestorms, the burning of the island chains, the famine that followed the destruction of the aquaculture and the landings. The rest were carried off to the tributary worlds.

For Bounty

The warcry "For Bounty" became a rallying cry for the Republic's forces, and a statement that even against certain defeat they could make the Khanate bleed. The Khan's next campaigns against the Sectors were fought with orbital fire first, and the Navy's histories date the Khanate's caution about ground assaults from Toussaint.

Liberation

The Retribution Fleet destroyed the last monoliths in Bounty's orbit on 14 and 15 May 2450, and the 20th Marine Division, raised from Bounty's evacuees, landed on 16 May, twenty years after the Plaza. It found 30 million people alive, and among the tributary garrison's slaves 2,000 of Biohó's Butchers, Delacroix-Sainvil among them. She was sixty-one. She testified to the Chamber's war inquiry in 2452 and declined every honour except the 23rd Regiment's colours, which she carried at the Plaza's first commemoration on 18 May 2451.

The 23rd Rapid Orbital Deployment Regiment was raised again from Bounty's survivors and given the name the Fevarians had given its defenders. The Sector Council voted in 2461 to leave Roric's Plaza, the chamber, the Exchange building's shell and the fuel terminal as they stood, and Toussaint's dome over them is one of the Republic's three national memorials.

Order of battle

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part XII, §12.1 "First and Second Battle of Haedius"
2. Solar Eternal, Part XII, §12.2 "Paradise Lost: The Burning of Bounty"
3. Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.1 "The Reclamation of the Binami and Saolea Sectors"
4. Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.5 "The Burned Worlds"