War and Peace

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  The ship extended its wings to their fullest reach, floated low over the calm water of the channel harbor until it touched, settled in. Tugboats raced across clear blue water. Sweating seamen threw lines, secured the landing craft and warped it to dock.

  A long line of CoDominium marines in garrison uniform marched out of the boat, were gathered on the gray concrete piers into bright lines of color by cursing officers and sergeants. Two men in civilian clothes followed the marines from the flier. They blinked at the unaccustomed blue-white of Hadley’s sun, a sun so far away that it would have been a small point if either of them were foolish enough to look directly at it.

  Both men were tall and stood as straight as the marines in front of them, so that except for their clothing they might have been mistaken for a part of the disembarking battalion. The shorter of the two carried luggage for both of them and stood respectfully behind; although older, he was obviously a subordinate. They watched as two younger men came uncertainly along the pier. The newcomers’ unadorned blue uniforms contrasted sharply with the bright reds and golds of the CoDominium marines who milled around them. Already the marines were scurrying back into the flier, carrying out barracks bags, weapons, the personal gear of a light infantry battalion.

  The taller of the two civilians faced the uniformed newcomers. “I take it you’re here to meet us?” he asked pleasantly. His voice rang through the noise on the pier, carrying easily although he had not shouted. The accent was neutral, the nearly universal English of American officers in CoDominium service, marking his profession almost as certainly as did his posture and the tone of command.

  The newcomers were uncertain, however. There were a lot of ex-officers of the CoDominium Space Navy on the beach with CD budgets lower every year. “I think so,” one finally said. “John Christian Falkenberg?”

  His name was actually John Christian Falkenberg III, he thought amusedly. His grandfather would probably have insisted on the distinction. “Right. And Sergeant-Major Calvin.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, sir. I’m Lieutenant Banners, this is Ensign Mowrer. We’re on President Budreau’s staff.” Banners looked around as if expecting other men, but there were none except the marines. He gave Falkenberg a slightly puzzled look, then added, “We have transportation for you, but I’m afraid your men will have to walk. It’s about eleven miles.”

  “Miles.” Falkenberg smiled to himself. This was out in the boondocks. “I see no reason why ten healthy mercenaries can’t march eighteen kilometers, Lieutenant.” He turned to the black shape of the landing boat’s entry port, called to someone still inside. “Captain Fast. There’s no transportation, but someone here will show you where to march the men. Have them carry all gear.”

  “Uh, sir, that won’t be necessary,” the lieutenant protested. “We can get—well, we have horse-drawn transport for baggage. ” He looked at Falkenberg as if he expected the man to laugh, then went on. “Ensign Mowrer will attend to it.” He paused again, looked thoughtful, his youthful features knotted in a puzzled expression as if he were uncertain of how to tell Falkenberg something. Finally he shook his head. “I think it would be wise if you issued your men their personal weapons, sir. There shouldn’t be any trouble on their way to barracks, but—anyway, ten armed men certainly won’t have any problems.”

  “I see. Perhaps I should go with my troops, Lieutenant. I hadn’t known things were quite that bad on Hadley.” Falkenberg’s voice was calm and even, but he looked intently at the junior man.

  “No, sir. They aren’t, really … just that, well, there’s no point in taking chances.” He waved Ensign Mowrer to the landing craft, turned to Falkenberg again. A large black shape rose from the water outboard of the landing craft, splashed, and vanished. Banners seemed not to notice, but the marines shouted excitedly. “I’m sure the ensign and your officers can handle the disembarkation … the president would like to see you, sir.”

  “No doubt. All right, Banners. Lead on. I’ll bring Sergeant-Major Calvin with me.” No point in continuing this farce, Falkenberg thought. Anyone seeing ten armed men conducted by a presidential ensign would know they were troops, civilian clothes or not. Another case of wrong information; he’d been told to keep their status secret. He wondered whether this was going to make it more difficult to keep his own secrets.

  Banners ushered them quickly through the bustling CoDominium marine barracks, past bored guards who half-saluted the Presidential Guard uniform. The marine fortress was a blur of activity, every open space crammed with packs and weapons, the signs of a military force about to move on to another station.

  As they were leaving the building, Falkenberg saw an elderly naval officer. “Excuse me a moment, Banners,” he muttered, and turned to the CoDominium Navy captain. “They sent someone for me. Thanks, Ed.”

  “No problem. I’ll report your arrival to the admiral; he wants to keep track of you. Unofficially, of course. Good luck, John. God knows you need some right now. Sorry about everything else.”

  “Way it goes,” Falkenberg said. He shook the offered hand warmly. “Pay my respects to the rest of your officers. You run a good ship.”

  The captain smiled thinly. “You ought to know … look, we pull out of here in a couple of days, John. No more than that. If you need a ride out, I can arrange it. The Senate won’t have to know. We can fix you a hitch to anywhere in CD territory. Just in case, I mean. It might be rough here.”

  “And it won’t be everywhere else in the CoDominium? Thanks again, Ed.” He gave a half salute, checked himself, and strode back to where Banners stood with his sergeant. Calvin lifted three personal effects bags as if they were empty, pushed the door open in a smooth motion.

  “The car’s here. “ Banners opened the rear door of a battered ground-effects vehicle of no discoverable make. It had been cannibalized from a dozen other machines, and some parts were obviously cut-and-try jobs done by an uncertain machinist. Banners climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine, which coughed twice, then ran smoothly. They moved away in a cloud of black smoke.

  They drove past another dock where a landing craft with wings as large as the entire marine landing boat was unloading an endless stream of civilian passengers. Children screamed, men and women stared about uncertainly until they were ungently hustled along by guards in uniforms matching Banners’s. The sour smell of unwashed humanity mingled with the crisp clean salt air from the ocean beyond. Banners rolled up the windows with an expression of distaste.

  “Always like that,” Calvin commented to no one in particular. “Water discipline on them CoDominium prison ships being what it is, takes weeks dirtside to get clean again.”

  “Have you ever been inside one of those ships?” Banners asked.

  “No, sir,” Calvin replied. “Been in marine assault boats just about as bad, I reckon. But I can’t say I fancy being stuffed into no cubicles with ten, fifteen thousand civilians for six months.”

  “We may all see the inside of one of those,” Falkenberg commented. “And be glad of the chance. Tell me about the situation here, Banners.”

  “I don’t even know where to start, sir,” the young man answered. “I—you know about Hadley?”

  “Assume I don’t,” John Falkenberg told him. Might as well see what kind of estimate of the situation the president’s officers could make. The fleet intelligence report bulged in the inner pocket of his tunic, but those reports always left out important details.

  “Yes, sir. Well, to begin with, we’re a long way from the nearest shipping lanes—but I guess you knew that. The only real reason we had any merchant trade was the mines. Thorium, richest veins known for a while, until they started to run out. For the first few years, that’s all we had. The mines are up in the hills, about eighty miles over that way.” He pointed to a thin blue line just visible at the horizon.

  “Must be pretty high mountains,” Falkenberg said. “What’s the diameter of Hadley? About sixty percent of Earth? Something like that. Horizo
n ought to be pretty close.”

  “Yes, sir. They are high mountains. Hadley is small, but we’ve got bigger and better everything here.” There was pride in the young officer’s voice.

  “Them bags seem pretty heavy for a planet this small,” Calvin said.

  “Hadley’s very dense,” Banners answered. “Gravity nearly ninety percent standard. Anyway, the mines are over there. Have their own spaceport. Refuge—that’s this city—was founded by the American Express Company. Brought in colonists, quite a lot of them, all volunteers. The usual misfits. I suppose my father was typical enough, an engineer who couldn’t keep up with the knowledge explosion, got tired of the rat race. That was the first wave, and they took the best land, founded the city, got an economy going. Paid back American Express in twenty years.” Banners’s pride was evident, and Falkenberg knew it had been a difficult job.

  “That was, what, fifty years ago?” Falkenberg asked. They were driving through crowded streets lined with wooden houses, some stone buildings. Rooming houses, bars, sailors’ brothels, the usual for a dock street, but there were no other cars on the roads. They could see horses and oxen pulling carts. The sky above Refuge was clear, no trace of smog or industrial wastes. Out in the harbor, tugboats moved with the silent efficiency of electric power, but there were also wind-driven sailing ships, lobster boats powered by oars, a tops’l schooner lovely against clean blue water throwing up white spume as she raced out to sea. A three-masted, full-rigged ship was drawn up to a wharf where men loaded it by hand with huge bales of what might have been cotton.

  They passed a wagonload of melons. A gaily dressed young couple waved cheerfully at them, then the man snapped a long whip at the team of horses which pulled them. Falkenberg studied the primitive scene, said, “It doesn’t look like you’ve been here fifty years.”

  “No.” Banners gave them a bitter look, swerved to avoid several shapeless teenagers lounging in the dockside street, swerved again to avoid a barricade of paving stones which they had masked. A shower of stones banged against the vehicle. The car jounced wildly, leaped over a low place in the wall, and Banners accelerated rapidly.

  Falkenberg carefully took his hand from inside his shirt, noted that Calvin was now inspecting an automatic rifle that appeared from the oversized barracks bag he’d brought into the car with him. When Banners said nothing about the incident, Falkenberg knitted his brows and sat back, listening. The intelligence reports mentioned lawlessness, but this was as bad as a Welfare Island on Earth.

  “No, we’re not much industrialized,” Banners continued. “At first there wasn’t any need to develop basic industries. The mines made everyone rich, so rich we imported everything we needed. The farmers sold fresh food to the miners for enormous prices. Refuge was a service-industry town. People who worked here could soon afford farm animals, and they scattered out across the plains, into the forest. Those people didn’t want industry; they’d come here to escape it. Then some blasted CoDominium bureaucrat read the ecology reports about Hadley. The Population Control Bureau in Washington decided this was a perfect world for involuntary colonization. The ships were coming here for the thorium anyway, so instead of luxuries and machinery they were ordered to carry convicts. Hundreds of thousands of them, Colonel Falkenberg. For the last ten years, it’s been better than fifty thousand people a year dumped in here.”

  “And you couldn’t support them all,” John said carefully.

  “No, sir.” Banners’s face tightened. He seemed to be fighting tears. “Every erg the fusion generators can make has to go into basic protocarb just to feed them. These weren’t like the original colonists. They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t do anything … oh, not really, of course. Some of them work. Some of our best citizens are transportees. But there were so many of the other kind.”

  “Why’n’t you let ’em work or starve?” Calvin asked bluntly. Falkenberg gave him a cold look, and the sergeant nodded slightly, sank back into his seat.

  “Because the CD wouldn’t let us!” Banners shouted. “Damn it, we didn’t have self-government. CD Bureau of Relocation people told us what to do, ran everything . . .”

  “We know,” Falkenberg said gently. “We’ve seen the results of Humanity League influence over BuRelock. My sergeant-major wasn’t asking you a question, he was expressing an opinion. I’m surprised though—won’t your farms support the urban population?”

  “They should, sir.” Banners drove in grim silence for long moments. “But there’s no transportation. The people are here, and most of the agricultural land is five hundred miles inland. There’s arable land closer, but it isn’t cleared … our settlers wanted to get away from Refuge and BuRelock. We have a railroad, but bandit gangs keep blowing it up, so we can’t rely on Hadley’s produce to keep Refuge alive. With about a million people on Hadley, half of them are crammed into this one ungovernable city.”

  They were approaching an enormous bowl-shaped structure attached to a massive square stone fortress. Falkenberg inspected the buildings carefully, then asked what they were.

  “Our stadium,” Banners replied. There was no pride in his voice now. “The CD built it for us. We’d rather have had a new fusion plant, but we got a stadium that can hold a hundred thousand people. For recreation. We have very fine sports teams and racehorses,” he added bitterly. “The building next to it is the Palace. Its architecture is quite functional.”

  The city was even more thickly populated as they approached the fortress-like palace. Now the buildings were mostly stone and concrete instead of wood. Few were more than three stories high, so that Refuge spread as far as the eye could see along the shore, the population density increasing beyond the stadium-palace complex. Banners was watchful as he drove along the wide streets, but seemed less nervous.

  Refuge was a city of contrasts. The streets were straight and wide, and there was evidently a good waste disposal system, but the lower floors of the buildings were open shops, the sidewalks were clogged with market stalls, crowds of pedestrians; there were still no motor traffic, no moving pedways. Horse troughs and hitching posts had been constructed at frequent intervals, along with starkly functional street lights and water distribution towers. The few signs of technology contrasted strongly with the general primitive air of the city.

  A uniformed contingent of men thrust their way through the crowd at a street crossing. Falkenberg looked at them closely, then at Banners. “Your troops?”

  “No, sir. That’s the livery of Glenn Foster’s household. Officially they’re unorganized reserves of the President’s Guard, but they’re household troops all the same.” Banners laughed bitterly. “Sounds like something out of a history book, doesn’t it? We’re nearly back to feudalism, Colonel Falkenberg. Anyone rich enough keeps hired bodyguards. They have to. The criminal gangs are so strong the police don’t try to catch anyone under organized protection, and the judges wouldn’t punish them if they were caught.”

  “And the private bodyguards become gangs in their own right, I suppose?”

  “Yes, sir.” Banners looked at him sharply. “Have you seen it happen before?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen it before.” Banners was unable to make out the expression on Falkenberg’s lips.

  They drove into the Presidential Palace, were saluted by blue-uniformed troopers. Falkenberg noted the polished weapons, precise drill of the Presidential Guard. There were some well-trained men on duty here, although there probably weren’t too many of them. He wondered if they could fight as well as stand guard.

  He was conducted through a series of rooms in the heavy stone fortress. Each had heavy metal doors, and several seemed to be guardrooms. Falkenberg saw no signs of governmental activity until they had passed through the outer layers of the enormous palace to an open courtyard, through that to an inner building where clerks bustled through halls, girls in the draped togas fashionable two years before on Earth sat at desks in offices. Most seemed to be packing desk contents into boxes, and all aro
und the palace people were scurrying about. Some offices were empty: desks covered with fine dust, plastiboard moving boxes stacked outside them.

  There were two anterooms to the president’s office. President Budreau was a tall thin man with a red pencil moustache and quick gestures. As they were ushered into the overly ornate room the president looked up from a sheaf of papers, but his eyes didn’t focus on his visitors for long seconds. Slowly the worried concentration left his face and he rose.

  “Colonel John Christian Falkenberg, sir,” Lieutenant Banners said. “And Sergeant-Major Calvin.”

  “Pleased to see you, Falkenberg,” the president said. His expression told them differently; he looked at his visitors with faint distaste, said nothing else until Banners had left the room. When the door closed he asked, “How many men did you bring with you?”

  “Ten, Mister President. All we could get on board the carrier without arousing suspicion. We were lucky to get those. The Senate had an inspector at the loading docks to check for violation of the antimercenary codes. If we hadn’t bribed a port official to distract him we wouldn’t be here at all. Calvin and I would be onTanith as involuntary colonists.”

  “I see.” From his expression he was not surprised. John thought he might have been as happy if the inspector had caught them. Budreau tapped the desk nervously. “Perhaps it will be enough. I understand the ship you came on carried the marines who have volunteered to settle on Hadley. They should provide the nucleus of an excellent constabulary for us. Good troops?”

  “It was a demobilized battalion,” Falkenberg replied. “Those are usually the scrapings of every guardhouse on twenty planets. We’ll be lucky if there’s a real trooper in the lot.” Falkenberg saw Budreau’s face relax into a mask of depression, every trace of hope draining out. “Surely you have troops of your own?”