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The relative combat strength of any military unit can be measured by two main factors: Equipment and training. Throughout all of recorded history, when superior numbers have been thrown at superior forces, the latter has performed better in every single instance. Sure, you can point to events such as the battle of Thermopylae, where the now legendary Spartan three hundred - and the lesser mentioned thousand or so other Greek soldiers - held their ground against around one hundred times their number and were slaughtered to a man.
And to any of you who would agree with that assessment, you need to read more and stop relying on Hollywood for your history lessons.
The soldiers holding the pass of the hot gates were never going to win, but they knew that. They didn't go there to win. They went there to delay the advance of the Persians, and if measured by this objective, they were staggeringly successful. Let's be generous and say there were, in total, two thousand Greek warriors - there weren't, there were at most fifteen hundred, but carrying on - they managed to hold up the march of anywhere between three-hundred thousand to one million Persians for four days, giving the rest of the Greek city-states enough time to martial their armies and meet the invaders in force. That happened at the battle of Platea, where they kicked the ever-loving shit out of Xerxes and sent his God-King ass paddling back to Asia. If it wasn't for that fuck stain hunchback traitor - the only character in the movie vaguely accurate to historical accounts - it is likely that they could have held them off for significantly longer.
Another example would be the entire Russian campaign during the second world war and the waves of T-34 battle tanks sent headlong into the invading Nazi lines. The Eastern Front is so full of hyperbole and myth that entire books can - and have - been written trying to correct all the bullshit that was propagated after the war. So let's clear some things up. The T-34 medium tank was... okay. It wasn't great. It wasn't bad, and it certainly wasn't the unstoppable war-winning machine that the Nazi commanders would have you believe. The countless memoirs of former Nazi officers beaten on the Eastern front are an exercise in self-justification, putting some distance between themselves and Hitler or the Holocaust, and in many cases, can be read as long-form applications for command positions in NATO. The lie that they would have you believe is that the ingeniously innovative sloped frontal armor (an innovation that can be seen regularly in 12th Century castles) could shrug off the rounds fired at it by anything smaller than a Panzer III, an apparently inferior tank, incapable of penetrating a T-34 despite the fact that they were blowing them to pieces with alarming regularity and were responsible for around sixty percent of all T-34 combat losses. The technological disparity between the Nazis and the Russians on the Eastern Front was, contrary to what your Dad told you, practically nothing. The Nazies were not several decades ahead of everyone else and were significantly behind by the end of the war. What separated the two armies were better training, equipment, and veterency on the Nazi side and massive numbers for the Russians. Yes, the Russians won, but not only can a large proportion of their victory be attributed to the opening of the second front when the allies landed in France, diverting a huge amount of Eastern-bound forces to its defense, but the fact that Hitler was a drug-addled moron who kept giving the German commanders orders which were tantamount to suicide. Even still, the Russian victory came with losses so high that, even now, eighty years later, there is no reliable number available. A conservative guess is that for every German soldier the Russians killed, they lost somewhere between thirty and eighty.
That is... terrifying.
Waves upon waves of Russian tanks and the young men inside them were hurled into the jaws of the Nazi war machine, and despite what the lazy historian might tell you, quantity does not have a quality of its own. One hundred shitty made and poorly operated tanks are not superior to ten good ones. Because for those one hundred tanks, you need ten times the crews, ten times the fuel, ten times the ammunition, ten times the maintenance crews, ten times the spare parts, and ten times the training for the men expected to use them to fight. Russia had none of those things, hence their jaw-dropping, blood-chilling losses. The Germans... well, also didn't; they just had more of it than the Russians, and the so-called superior race was getting its ass handed to it on not two, but three fronts. Yes, Italy counts as a front. All of those losses came down to marginally superior equipment and vastly superior training and experience. My point is that every time quantity has met quality on the battlefield, quality has won every single time. As the Russians were finding out once again with their ridiculous invasion of the beautiful country that we were now standing in. Weapon systems designed in the 70s and manned by soldiers with as little as six weeks of training tend to do poorly against modern weapons designed to blow them the fuck up.
The moral of the story could be summed up when looking at the small group of men waiting for us just outside one of the hangers on this remote airstrip. Geared up in state-of-the-art equipment, they were the epitome of what an actual, real-life special forces unit should look like - as opposed to what Hollywood thinks they look like. Full, heavy-duty body armor, tactical helmets, and side-arms strapped to the thigh or chest, not the hip. Modern, encrypted, tactical radios, Polish-made Grot assault rifles with incomprehensibly advanced looking scopes and sights attached to the tac-rails, and not one of them had their chin straps hanging loose from their helmets. Those things stopped bullets; anyone with a modicum of sense wanted those helmets to stay on their heads to keep that sense where it belonged and not, say, spread all over the ground!
If any of these soldiers decided to sell the kit they were carrying around, they would make enough to buy the Queen's Head two or three times over. These were not the mercenaries I had expected when Bob had told me that a Private Military Contractor would escort us to our destination. Well, they were, but they certainly didn't look how I thought they would. They weren't sketchy-looking men in black fatigues and an assortment of equipment - like, for example, the now-dead Inquisitors who had attacked the party. These were honest to god soldiers, and all that shit they were carrying? They knew exactly how to use all of it with deadly efficiency.
What was even more surprising, considering they worked for the Inquisition, was that all of them were human.
Part of it was automatic, part of it was curiosity, but my mind instinctively reached out to theirs before we had covered even half the distance between the plane and the hangar. Each of them was, predictably, fanatically loyal to the Inquisition and to Isabelle in particular. To each of these men, the Inquisition, as they knew it, was akin to a secret society dedicated to maintaining order and world peace. An order that the micro-dicked twat in the Kremlin was currently fucking up in spectacular fashion with is ego-boosting crusade into Ukraine. But that was it. That was all the Inquisition was.
Not a single one of them had ever even heard of an Evo. Let alone the history of violence between our two peoples.
I suppose that made a sort of sense. If Isabelle was to be believed - as I was increasingly suspecting she should be - the Inquisition hadn't considered Evos to be an enemy since before the great-great-great grandparents of these men had been born. But at the same time, it was a little surprising, considering they had been sent here to help a bunch of us out. It made me wonder what the Inquisition did to pass the time these days and what it had been doing for the past few hundred years. But that was a question for another day. For now, I was satisfied that these men were not only who they were supposed to be but were determined enough and possessed the ability and loyalty to get the job done. I felt the brush of a familiar mind as I scanned through the thoughts of the last merc and cast a glance over to Jerry. He'd obviously had the same concerns as I did and was also scanning the minds of the men lined up before us. The small smile he flashed back to me told me that he was as satisfied with his findings as I was.
The other surprise that came from their minds was the fact that there were only six of them. Six! There weren't any more of them waiting in the hangar, and no more were on their way. In a war where Russian and Ukrainian soldiers had been throwing themselves at each other, fighting and dying by the thousands, I had expected we would need a significantly higher number to complete our mission. I had expected a convoy of heavily armed men to get us through the front lines and back again. But no, there were six of them.
However, every single one of the soldiers before me thought six was, if anything, overkill. They were all convinced that four could do the job almost effortlessly and the other two would be more useful on the front lines where they were badly needed.
These men had been fighting the Russians since the first days of the invasion. I don't mean that their company as a whole had been - although they had - but that these actual individuals had been heavily engaged in combat for huge portions of the past year. In the first week of the war alone, they had intercepted two teams of the Spetsnaz - the Russian special forces - in Odessa and had gleefully fucked with them so much that they ended up opening fire on each other. Then they mercilessly slaughtered the survivors without taking a single loss. It hadn't hurt that the Russian military was using unencrypted radio frequencies for their communications. In some cases, those radios had been looted out of the electronics stores of the city they were now invading. You can imagine the surprise of the inhabitants of Odessa when they woke up one morning, flicked on their radios, and were able to listen in on classified,
live
, Russian military coms traffic.
Of course, they didn't just listen for long. By the end of the first few days, the Russians were finding their coms routinely jammed up by civilians blasting the Ukrainian national anthem at them or just calling them all fascist cunts.
However, the more tactically minded opposition to the invasion - like the men before me - had used that glaring weakness to track enemy movements, feed them false information, lure them into ambushes, and generally ensure that they had a really bad day. Often the last day they would have at all.
