[ IP ] Life of a Mercenary

`` Stack up, stack up! Get those charges down. Seven, you're on point! Detonate on my mark!'' 
 
 Seven would be the first through the hole, as usual, not that he minded. The pay was always better for the first man in. 
 
 `` Breach.'' 
 
 As One gave the order, Seven tensed himself, preparing to hurl himself through the shattered wall. Three thumbed the detonator key, and the defenses collapsed inwards. Raising his rifle as he turned, Seven leapt around the newly created corner and sprinted into the breach. As his IFF system picked out targets, he began methodically cutting down the defenders. By the time Four and Nine had crossed the threshold, the firing had ceased. Half a dozen militiamen in ill fitting uniforms lay haphazardly, bodies draped across a crude wooden table. 
 
 `` All targets down. Awaiting further orders.'' 
 
 `` Secure this location until Coalition forces can arrive to take control of the facility.'' 
 
 It was always the same. The PMCs were called in to break the defences, to cut down the militias. Then, when the dust had settled and the blood had been bleached from the walls, the newscasters showed up to interview the career soldiers, in their pristine uniforms. They talked big about their humane treatment of prisoners, their non-lethal subjugation of the opposition, the fact that they'd taken no casualties. The public loved that shit. 
 
 It was all true, to an extent. The Coalition Military *did* use non-lethal methods, and they had n't taken a single casualty since the beginning of the conflict. And since the `` Independent Contractors'' were n't technically part of the Coalition, the newscasts never needed to mention the brutal and vicious fighting that took place on the frontlines, or the interrogation techniques that Fourteen had employed to locate this safehouse. They did n't need to know about the Company's involvement in this conflict, or the widow and little girl that Twelve had left behind when an unlucky militiaman had pulled the trigger of his AK in a dying spasm. 
 
 In today's civilized world, they did n't need to now, Seven reflected as he began removing the magazines from the dead men's rifles and stacking the weapons. It was better this way. If people knew what war really looked like, what it really did, they would n't be so quick to demand action. If they saw the damage a 7.62 did to a man, heard the screams of the injured, knelt beside a fallen friend to close their eyes, they would n't be so quick to send their husbands, brothers, fathers, and children out. 
 
 He understood the political necessity of what he did, all of them knew. It was the first lesson any man was taught when joining the company, not that most of them cared. 
 
 For Seven, there was one thing far more important than some duty to society, than preserving the lives of the professional soldiers. Far above any honour or glory, above even the camaraderie between the men, was the ten-thousand tax-free Euros that appeared in his accounts every month. 
 

