Picking Up The Pieces (Martial Law)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Or that my men might prove themselves innocent?” I asked. “Why don’t you send those youths out to work on farms, or something else useful? There’s plenty of land on this planet for expansion. They don’t have to swagger around the city all day, mugging civilians and living off the proceeds.”

  “We can’t send them out to the farms,” Frida protested. “They wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do?”

  “Then teach them,” I suggested, knowing that it was useless. The Progressives drew much of their support from the street gangs – those who depended on government largess – and sending them out to farm would deprive them of some of their strength. I made a mental note to look into the possibility of opening new farms, but put it aside for the moment. There would be time enough for that later.

  “Besides, the farmers wouldn’t accept them,” Frida added. “We sent experts to advise the farmers on how to grow their crops and the farmers laughed at them. They even drove them away with guns! We can barely take a census, let alone anything else.”

  “I’m sure they did,” I murmured. I’d seen the pattern before, but Earth remained the poster child for the end results of such disastrous policies. “It worked so well for Earth…”

  “It did,” Frida agreed. “The people there live in a paradise where their every need is catered for by the government.”

  I had to bite my cheek to prevent a laugh from bursting out. The hell of it was that she believed it. I doubted that anyone on the planet knew about Earth’s real condition, but they’d all seen the UN propaganda broadcasts, with their claims about how Earth was a paradise and how the Colonies could be a paradise too, if they stopped resisting and accepted that the UN knew what was best for them. Earth had looted most of the Colonies and it hadn’t been enough to keep the planet afloat. I didn’t want to get involved in Earth’s ongoing civil war, but the death toll had already passed the billion-death mark.

  “My position is simple enough,” I said, coldly. I wasn't going to play games any longer. “I work for the government, provided it pays me. I also want a ROE Contract.”

  Frida blinked. “A roe contract?”

  “ROE; Rules of Engagement,” I explained. “At the moment, we have none beyond our standard ROE, which basically prohibit kinetic non-reactive operations.” I saw her puzzled look and smiled thinly. “We can respond to attacks, but we cannot launch attacks, or combat operations. I need a ROE Contract from the Government specifying what we can and cannot do. Without it…well, Fleet might take an interest in us.”

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” Frida said. I suspected she’d consult her lawyers before she mentioned it to the President, or anyone else. The Progressives would probably try to draft the contract and then ram it down their throats. “What happens if you don’t like the contract?”

  “I suggest revisions,” I said. “Look, I’m training an army and officers to run it. I need to tell them what they can and cannot do, or there will be accidents and disasters, all of which will cost lives. Are they allowed to burn farms? Are they allowed to torture suspects? Are they even allowed to take prisoners? You need to get me answers to those questions soon, before the first class is ready to be deployed.”

  Her expression made her look as if she’d been hit with a bargepole. “I can send you a recommended version if you like,” I offered. She nodded gratefully. “Once you get the Council to sign off on it, we can begin combat operations at any time.”

  “There’s no one to fight,” she mumbled, before collecting herself. “I shall see to it personally.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Now, was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

  As it happened, the answer was yes. Frida spent hours listing every possible complaint, which I shot down as calmly as possible. She probably didn’t realise it, but she was giving me insights into her own mind, and how badly we’d been infiltrated by the political parties. Why would she have complained about the month the recruits had spent without any outside communications unless she had spies among the recruits?

  And she wasn't the last politician to seek my company. Over the next month, I met with representatives from all of the political parties, even the Communists. None of them impressed me as much as the President had, but all of them left vaguely disappointed. I’d been careful to remain openly mercenary. As long as they thought they could buy my loyalty, we were safe. I just hoped that that would continue after the election.

  Chapter Six

  No military man can afford to be a virgin where politics are concerned. Although most soldiers will claim to distrust politicians and politics, the smart ones understand that wars – all wars – grow out of political causes. It is therefore wise for the military officer to study local politics carefully. They may serve as a harbinger of local conflicts.

  -Army Manual, Heinlein

  One month before the election, I called a Council of War.

  “It’s been five months,” I said, as soon as coffee was served and the room checked for bugs. I was fairly certain that none of the factions on Svergie had a hope of slipping a bug through our detectors, but neglecting precautions tended to lead to disaster. It was a bad habit to develop. “In one month, Svergie goes to the polls to elect a new government, at which point we may find ourselves thrown into combat. We have to be ready.”

  My gaze swept the room. “Russell?”

  I smiled as Russell adjusted his uniform before speaking. Councils of War were common back in the United Nations Peace Force, with every officer trying to cover his ass if the operation went badly wrong – victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, as the saying goes – but much rarer on Heinlein. Russell would probably have preferred to give a straight report and return to drilling the new recruits, but I needed his input. It didn’t help that only four of us knew the true purpose of the mission. I didn’t dare let that slip out into the open.

  “We have absorbed nearly six thousand recruits with what I may as well term superhuman efforts and contributions from every department,” Russell said, flatly. “I have a feeling that we’re stretching ourselves to the limit, but overall I’m fairly pleased with progress – not that I’d tell them that, of course.” He smiled. “We graduated the first few classes, branded them as soldiers rather than recruits, and started to give them harder training exercises. They’ve developed unit pride and cohesion, at least in the exercises, but the real test will come when they go to war.”

  He paused, considering his next words. “We’ve had seven fatal training accidents and thirty-two injuries that range from modest to severe,” he continued. “This course is wimpy compared to some of the courses I went through back home” – there were some good-natured chuckles; Russell’s original plans for the training would have killed half the recruits – “but it definitely makes men out of them. The dead recruits were graduated posthumously and we held full funeral ceremonies for them. Their families insisted on reclaiming the bodies and we saw to it they were given a proper send-off. The injured were put on light duties if they could handle it; the seriously injured were given medical discharges, although two of them want to continue to serve in any capacity. I’ve sent them to train as clerks, although one of them will remain permanently wheelchair bound.

  “The majority of the recruits have mastered the basic skills and have definitely learned to shoot,” he concluded. “We’re lucky that this place doesn’t have what is laughably called a martial tradition; we were able to break them of the few bad habits they’d picked up from the videos the UN used to show. We’ve burned through hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, but I feel that it was a fair price to pay…”

  “Speak for yourself,” Muna muttered.

  “…For the many benefits of having soldiers who actually know what it’s like to fire a weapon. We moved from assault rifles and pistols to heavy weapons and antitank systems and hammered those into their heads. We’re short on SHORAD units, it should be noted, but we trained on portable
SAM missiles anyway. They might be required. Overall, by Election Day, we should have three to four thousand qualified soldiers ready and waiting.”

  I smiled. “What about local commanders?”

  Russell smiled. “We’ve identified several promising commanders and sergeants within the recruits,” he said. “In a month, we should have some local lieutenants, maybe even Captains, although that’s really pushing it too fast. The officers they tried to foster on us are utterly unprepared for the position and need to go through Basic Training before they can be trusted with anything. I have a feeling that the real local officers will rise from the ranks rather than being imposed on the soldiers from above.”

  “Good,” I said. “Ed?”

  “The three Companies are at readiness and we’re rotating through the duty areas and leave,” Ed said, sipping his own coffee. He was more at ease in the Council than Russell; like me, he’d escaped from the UNPF. He also had a simpler task. “It’s annoying to lose people to the demands of the training cadre, but we have enough reserves to cover our current duties. There have been no attempts to attack the spaceport or Camp Currie, but there have been several attempts to sneak into the secure locations, mainly by local reporters. I’d have preferred to shoot them, but as you ordered we’ve simply tossed them out stark naked. It seemed to deter them.”

  “Not that much of a hardship in this weather,” I observed, thoughtfully. It was moving towards high summer and the temperature was rising steadily. “And what about the bar fights?”

  Ed smiled, before remembering that he should look properly regretful. “The fights are always provoked by local gangs,” he said, confirming what I’d believed. “My men have given a pretty good impression of themselves and have sent several hundred thugs to the hospital. It seems that the local police can’t decide if they love us or hate us; one soldier rescued a woman from being raped and beat her attacker into a bloody mass. The Sergeants have been riding hard on the drinking and have prevented anyone from drinking too much, or using drugs while we’re here.”

  I nodded. It wasn't against regulations to drink, but being unfit for duty was a serious offence and I wouldn’t hesitate to order anyone foolish enough to report for duty drunk to run the gauntlet. It was something that people decried as barbaric, but discipline had to be maintained. There had to be both regulation and the demonstrated willingness to punish breaches of the regulations.

  “We’re probably going to start losing our edge soon,” he concluded. “I’d be happier if we had someone to fight.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” I said. “Muna. You’re up.”

  Muna nodded tightly. “I’ve been conducting an industrial and economic survey of Svergie,” she said, tapping the map I’d placed on the window with one dark finger. “The results have been interesting and I’ve placed a full report in the computers, but for now I’ll just give you the highlights. Svergie is not a modern economy, but roughly at 1985-2020 levels. That’s not uncommon for a colony world, but there are some odd points. As I believe I noted earlier, the fuel here is largely oil-based, rather than hydrogen or fusion power cells. I think, reading between the lines, that the first oil company slipped some UN inspector a pretty hefty bribe; the UN’s figures bare only a passing resemblance to reality. Overall…

  “The factories here can produce tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters for us,” she continued. “I doubt that Svergie will be looking at a major arms-exporting industry anytime soon, but they should be able to meet local needs. The problem lies with the workplace disputes that have been growing more frequent as memories of the occupation start to fade. Basically, the highly-trained workers want more wages while the unskilled workers want equal pay, while there are very clear limits on just how much the owners can afford to pay. Svergie has discovered unions, but they haven’t yet learned how to use them. My best guess is that the situation is going to worsen before it gets better, sir; there’s almost no investment in local industries at all, just because of the political stalemate. What’s the point of investing when the Progressives or the Communists might take it all away from you?

  “We need to encourage them to start prospecting for more oil,” she concluded. “That’s the single greatest weakness…”

  “Neat,” Russell said. He scowled down at the table. “What about convincing them to switch to hydrogen?”

  “They can’t,” Muna said. “They can extract hydrogen from seawater or from the gas giant. They don’t have the infrastructure to do either, nor do they have the technology to develop it quickly. They’d need to build up their space-based industries in any case, yet they would first need to bootstrap a new space capability; they only have a handful of shuttles, all ex-UN issue. They’d need to purchase the equipment from off-world and they don’t have much to offer in return.”

  I frowned. “Can’t they ask Fleet for help?”

  Muna’s face flickered, just for a second. “Fleet is unlikely to be able to spare the resources,” she said. “They’d insist on a fuelling facility that Fleet starships could use, rather than just a simple cloud-scoop. I doubt that they'd consider it worth their while. Some of the big interstellar corporations might disagree, but they’d insist on a stiff price tag or even direct control. Svergie probably wouldn’t be interested.

  “More importantly, the oil workers would object, strongly,” she concluded. “If hydrogen was to be brought into the system, they’d feel the pinch and protest. It might be hard to convince the Government to accept it when they faced losing so many votes. The same could be said about too many other parts of the economy. They’re heading towards a spending crisis, yet any attempt to deter that spending crisis would result in disaster.”

  “Neat,” Peter observed. “Civil war, here we come.”

  “Yes, sergeant,” Muna agreed. “TechnoMage?”

  TechnoMage nodded. He’d come into my service after discovering that his hacking exploits had made his homeworld too hot for him. He’d once reprogrammed a UN orbital weapon to fire on UN forces on the ground, which had killed over seven hundred soldiers. I didn’t bear a grudge, but I’d advised him to keep it to himself. He also served as my chief spy, hence the name. Even I didn’t know what he was originally called.

  “I’ll be brief,” he said. He’d watched the recordings of my meetings with the politicians. I should have told them that they were being recorded, but people are normally much more talkative when they think they’re not on the record. “I may be wrong – polls are not an actual science, no matter what the UN claims – but the Progressive Party is almost certainly going to win the coming election. It took several weeks to parse out how the system works, but overall the votes going to them will have more…weight than the votes going to the other parties. That is just as obvious to them as it is to us – perhaps more so – and they’re going to react badly.”

  He paused. “The Communist Party is already talking revolution,” he said, to my surprise. “They’re officially viewing the Progressives as fellow travellers, but their leadership seems to believe that the Progressives are not…ah, progressive enough for their tastes, or that they’re planning a purge of the Communists after the election. Their counter-surveillance tech is worse than the UN’s tech, but they’ve been very careful not to say anything too incriminating out loud. I have a feeling, however, that they’re definitely planning something bad for after the election.

  “The same can be said for the farmers and miners,” he continued. “The irony is that Svergie’s economy is too interdependent, but…”

  I held up a hand. “Explain,” I ordered. I hadn’t spent long enough studying the local economy, obviously. “How interdependent are they?”

  “I’m going to have to lecture,” TechnoMage explained. I rolled my eyes. He loved lecturing us. No matter what he’d said, I’d never heard a concise briefing from him – ever. “Svergie can – this is a generalisation, of course – be said to have four sectors; the cities, the industries, the mines and the farms. T
he majority of the population lives in the cities and is largely unproductive from an economic point of view. This is reflected in their voting system, where seventeen of the voting districts are within the cities. Basically, the cities and the industries co-exist, while buying food from the farms and mined ores from the mines.”

  He smiled. “The cities need the food to survive and they need the ores because it’s about the only thing that Svergie can export,” he said. “They therefore need them both as cheaply as possible, but the producers are…objecting to their treatment by the government. This sends unrest down into the industries, which the farms and mines need to produce their equipment, and sparks off more unrest. The Government isn’t helping by insisting on trying to pass laws that affect the farmers and miners without giving them anything in return, or even listening to their concerns. There was a law being passed that forbids the use of child labour…”