“Then I will order it seized,” Frida snapped back. There was an audible gasp in the chamber. No one had expected that. “I will not let people starve!”
The discussion raged backwards and forwards, but the outcome was preordained from the start and all parties knew it. I wondered if Albin was right – no, I knew he was right. The farmers would object to having their crops confiscated and would fight back. I knew how many weapons there were in the inner farmlands and the mountains, including far more armed and armoured vehicles than the Communists had ever possessed. I had the unshakable feeling that we were about to rage headlong into another insurrection, only a far more dangerous one. The army I’d built was going to be fed headlong into another meat grinder and this one would be far worse.
I looked over at Frida and realised, to my shock, that she believed every word she was saying. She truly intended to feed the poor and dispossessed. It wasn't even an ignoble goal, but I feared that it was an impossible one. There were too many mouths to feed and most of them were useless. She needed long-term plans, not short-team measures that would only alienate the farmers and miners from her government. If she fostered out dispossessed and orphaned children to farming families, she might even prevent them from dying in the streets.
“It is time to move on to the vote,” Frida said, finally. The standard procedure allowed an hour for debate and discussion, but it had gone on for far longer. “All those in favour of adopting the emergency measures, raise your right arm.”
I counted the votes. As I had expected, all seven Progressive Party Councillors had voted in favour of the measures. The independent hesitated, and then voted in favour as well, leaving the two Conservatives isolated. I wondered if they would vote in favour now, just to have the law passed unanimously, but they were made of stronger stuff than that.
“I will not continue to participate in this farce,” Councillor Albin Arvidsson snapped, as he stood up. “These measures are utterly illegal and without any form of justification. You are attempting to square the circle and you will soon discover that you don’t have the ability to even begin to get enough food for all the poor and hungry there are out there, nor can you hope to get enough jobs for them just by decreeing them into existence. We barely escaped one bureaucratic state and you intend to create another. There will be no pretence that we agree with your plans, or that we will merely…view with concern. We will challenge you in the High Court and the court of public opinion.”
“Public opinion is firmly behind these measures,” Frida said, coldly. She believed – again – what she was saying. “We did hundreds of surveys to see if the public would accept them.”
“And you did them here, in the cities, where people believe that food magically appears on the shelves of shops without giving any thought to the harsh realities of farming life,” Albin said. “The farmers will be against your plan because it enslaves them for nothing. The miners will be against your plan because it enslaves them for nothing. The rest of your population will be behind your plan until they realise the costs and how badly you’ve fucked up your duty. It will all be on your head. Goodbye.”
He marched out with the same precision that Erik had shown, but I hoped that they wouldn’t be going to the same place. As the new measures were passed into law, and the reporters scurried out to write their stories and place them on the news nets, I looked over at Frida, hoping she would consent to talk to me. It would be easier said than done. She was currently shaking the hands of various celebrities and thanking them for their support. I knew it would come back to bite them on the behind. I just hoped it would be painful.
I keyed my earpiece as the room emptied. “Ed, this is Andrew,” I said, without preamble. The spaceport had to be warned before the shit hit the fan. If we were lucky, we might avoid further losses. “Code Yellow, I repeat, Code Yellow.”
“Understood,” Ed’s voice said. Code Yellow warned him that the spaceport – or anywhere else we had a presence – might come under attack at any moment. They would all be put on very quiet alert and patrols would be doubled, just in case. The soldiers on leave would be recalled to their bases and warned to be careful. The situation might explode at any moment. “Our heavenly friend had a message for you; it came in two minutes ago. There was another one. Another one what?”
“Never mind,” I said. Daniel and I had arranged for me to be informed when there were any more encrypted transmissions. If there had been another transmission, who had sent it? Erik? One of the Conservatives? I looked over at Frida again and wondered just what she was thinking. “Go to Code Yellow Status and wait for me.”
I stepped over to Frida as the last of her admirers departed towards the exits. “This is not a good idea,” I said, flatly. I pushed as much icy firmness into my voice as I could. She had to believe that all the self-congratulation was just the calm before the storm. “They’re not going to take it lightly.”
“I know it’s not a good idea,” Frida agreed. Her face twisted bitterly. “But tell me; what else can I do? If I do nothing, people die. If I act, people may die. What choice do I have?”
I had no answer.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The term ‘Phoney War’ first originated during the 1940s on Earth when the British and French faced the Germans on the western front. Despite a declared state of war, peace existed along the battle lines – until it was broken by the smashing German advance in May 1940. More recent comparable examples include the UN’s position vis-à-vis Heinlein before the Invasion and the Terra Nova Conflict. It must always be remembered that while peace is apparent on the surface, the fires of war may be burning underneath. Keep the powder dry.
-Army Manual, Heinlein
The first week went surprisingly quietly. Too quietly. I’d expected a major explosion within hours of the public announcement of the Frida Holmqvist Recovery Plan – Frida had named it after herself, as politicians were wont to do – but nothing took place, at least on the surface. A and B Company, injured as they were, took turns patrolling around the spaceport and becoming more familiar with the terrain they’d be expected to operate upon if the balloon went up. The Svergie Army kept a watchful eye on developments and waited for the opening rounds. The farmers…didn’t seem to be doing anything at all.
“We picked up more transmissions over the last few days,” TechnoMage said, when I buttonholed him on the subject. It hadn’t been easy to arrange for him to be monitoring unusual wavebands for transmissions, but I’d had little choice. It was a shame I couldn’t share the truth about our mission with him, but someone with such a shady past might well use it against us. “They were just brief burst transmissions and we haven’t managed to unlock them at all.”
Nor has the William Tell, I thought, grimly. I had scrutinised their orbital images carefully, but they’d picked up little of use. The limitations of orbital surveillance were well known and anyone who had survived the Occupation would be well aware of how to circumvent such observation. They might not know that we were looking at the take from the orbiting destroyer, but they’d certainly be watching for our UAV spies.
“Which means that there are still some of them in the city,” I concluded, slowly. They could be anything from spies to political agents to terrorists. They were no way to know what they were until we could unlock the code and it didn’t look as if we would unlock the code. The decryption section was still working on it, but neither they nor Daniel Webster were hopeful. “And we’ve seen no sign of trouble?”
“Unless you could the occasional bar fight,” Ed said, from his position studying the map. “The recovery crews repairing the damage from the last war have been drinking heavily in the evenings after finding bodies that had been buried under vast piles of rubble and some of the bars had had nasty bar fights. I don’t think that they’re the work of the farmers, or the miners, or even us.”
I smiled thinly. I’d cancelled the regular leave schedule, but unless trouble broke out soon I would have to reinstate
it. The Legionnaires were used to such treatment, but the locals would gripe and complain about not seeing their families. The new recruits could be kept on the spaceport indefinitely, but not so the trained soldiers. Some of them needed a period of leave before they went on deployment up towards the farms, which the farmers would see as a hostile act.
“Probably not, no,” I agreed, silently cursing Frida under my breath. Her scheme sounded good, in the abstract, but applied to real life the results would be disastrous. There’s no such thing as objectivity when humans find their own interests involved and the farmers and miners would regard it – they did regard it – as a direct assault on their livelihoods. I’d seen it before on a dozen worlds. The UN set price caps, trying to feed the poor, only to discover that the farmers went out of business and food supplies dwindled. “Keep A Company on Quick Reaction Alert anyway. I think we’re going to need them sooner rather than later.”
I looked down at the map and winced inwardly. There was no single capital to take out in the countryside, no place where pressure could be brought to bear to defeat the enemy, just endless farms, small villages and a handful of towns. The farmers were tough and independent characters; they’d harassed the UN infantry with a mixture of determination, heavy weapons and sheer bloody-mindedness. I doubted our men would do much better if it came down to a counter-insurgency war; we couldn’t offer the farmers much more than the UN could offer them. Frida had managed to burn that particular set of bridges quite nicely.
No soldier liked counter-insurgency warfare, with good reason. The enemy could be hiding among scores of innocent civilians, often indistinguishable from them until they opened fire. If they were losing, they just faded back into a population that generally either supported them or was too scared to assist the soldiers in tracking them down and exterminating them. It was a delicate balancing act, but one that insurgent forces – living among the people as they were – had to master; failure to keep the people on their side meant certain extermination. We lacked the insight into the rural areas and their way of life – all of our local soldiers came from the urban cities – and picking out the guilty from the innocent would not be easy. And, if they were defending their livelihood, they’d feel that they had a cause and refuse to surrender easily, unless they got what they wanted.
I ran my eyes over the map and scowled. No one was quite sure how many farmers and miners there were, but general estimates said around two to three million at most, spread out over a vast area. The vast majority of the planet’s population was concentrated in the cities – the work of the UN and its plan to dump surplus populations here – and wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do if dropped in the countryside and told to work or starve. It was something we could work on – it wasn't as if there was a shortage of unclaimed land that could be turned into farms – but that would take time, time we didn’t have. I was morbidly certain that the explosion was already on the way.
“Ed, Russell, draw up a training schedule for rural conflict and have all of the local units run through it,” I ordered, finally. The rules were very different to urban conflict, but at least it was something that we’d had in mind for the last few months, unlike the war against the Communists. “I want them all refreshed and pushed right to the limit. Add in everything we know about the enemy, but also give them advanced weapons and tactics, just in case.”
Russell nodded once. “Hard training, easy mission,” he quoted. “Easy training, hard mission.”
“Good,” I said. “That leaves us with a single problem. Should we push ahead of occupy Fort Galloway now or abandon it completely?”
There was a long pause. Fort Galloway had been built by the UN in the early days of their occupation and existed roughly midway between New Copenhagen and the mountains – and the Mountain Men. The UN had intended to use it as a base for rapid deployment forces, but the shortage of UN Infantry had always limited the base’s usefulness. They'd only kept a Company there during the later years of the war, which had contented itself with firing back at attacking forces and otherwise keeping their heads down.
“If we occupy the base, it may be taken as a provocative act,” Muna said, from her chair. She sounded more like her normal self now, but she was being worked off her feet running between factories that might be rebuilt and factories that were being overworked and risking self-inflicted damage. It didn’t help that employers had cracked down hard on union movements after the Communist Uprising and industrial unrest was growing. I half-expected Frida to pass legislation to deal with that, but it was a minor issue compared to the farmers. “We could occupy the base, no problem, but it might kick-start the war.”
“And yet, if we do not occupy the base, we will be forced to fall back on garrisons near the cities,” Ed pointed out, reasonably. “That would limit our ability to react to attacks on governmental forces and agents.”
I scowled. Frida’s latest brainwave involved thousands of ‘government inspectors’ who would go out to the farms, take the long-overdue census, and then give them their quotas for the year. It might have given people jobs, but the farmers would resent being told what to do by men and women who wouldn’t even know what part of a cow gave milk, let alone anything more useful. There was good value in actually taking a census, but everything else would just cause trouble. I saw their presence as being the spark that ignited the gunpowder. The other job opportunities she’d announced weren't much better.
Robert snorted. “Do we want to react to attacks on such people?”
“We wouldn’t have a choice,” I said. “We’ve assumed a role here and we have to play it out to the bitter end.”
Robert shrugged. “I respectfully point out, sir, that if this goes belly-up – and it will – the reputation of the Legion will be severely damaged,” he said. “Our task here was to train the local boys and turn them into soldiers. We were meant, at most, to provide training, support, back-up and specialised assistance for the locals, not spearheading a counter-insurgency campaign. The local government has dug itself a hole and we can’t get them out of it.”
“I thought that that was what soldiers were for,” Russell said, dryly. “Doesn’t this prove that there is value in a system that only lets ex-soldiers vote and stand for government office?”
“We could not impose such a system here,” Muna said, crossly. “We could not even limit the franchise to natives – what is a native anyway?”
“And Heinlein only worked because the founders were all veterans who knew what they intended to create,” Ed added, dryly. He'd served on Heinlein at the same time as Russell, although they’d been on different sides of the fence. I wondered, absently, if they had faced each other in battle. “If we limited the franchise to veterans here, there wouldn’t be many voters. Even if we expanded it to everyone currently serving in the military, they’d have only…three hundred thousand? Perhaps a few more?”
Robert scowled. “That doesn’t change the issue at hand,” he said. “We did not sign up to become so deeply involved in the local politics. If we do become further involved, what happens to the Legion’s reputation?”
“Our contract specifics that we will handle combat missions at the discretion of the local government,” I said, firmly. It wasn't an uninteresting argument, but Robert wasn't one of those aware of the real mission. I hated leaving him in the dark, but the more people who knew, the greater the chance of a leak further down the line. Besides, politics had no place in planning sessions – well, at least my planning sessions. “We’re committed to supporting them unless they choose to order us out or insist that we break the ROE in their favour.”
I looked around the table and saw them all straighten to attention. “Ed,” I said, “after the training preparations have been completed, I want you to make preparations to escort a couple of local companies up to Fort Galloway to occupy it permanently. We’ll move up some of the attack helicopters as well, along with enough supplies to keep them active even if we get cut off from t
he Fort. We won’t go expecting a battle, but if we should happen to encounter resistance, we’ll deal with it.”
Ed frowned. “We, sir?”
“I’m going to be leading it,” I said, firmly. “I have to see the ground first-hand, so I’m going to command the escort force. If nothing else, that should prevent any pissing contests over who’s in charge. We’ll aim to set off in two days, although we may have to put the convoy back a few days if trouble breaks out here.”
Picking Up The Pieces (Martial Law) Page 25
