Picking Up The Pieces (Martial Law)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Rotate half of the men off-watch and tell them to get some sleep,” I ordered, grimly. Ed nodded, sharing my concerns. A tired army was one that would make mistakes. “No drugs or sleeping machines; tell them to sleep with their boots on.”

  “I’ll supervise,” Peter volunteered. Sleeping with their boots on was an old UN piece of slang, referring to having soldiers sleeping in their uniforms and body armour, with their weapons by their side. The UNPF required hours of paperwork before it was permitted, but I didn’t have to worry about that. My men would be as ready for battle as I could make them. If the fort was seriously threatened, we’d need to get them up and firing as quickly as possible. “Keep an eye on him, sir.”

  “Yes, dad,” I said, tiredly.

  “You should get some sleep too,” Ed said. He didn’t look any better than I did; we both looked like walking zombies. His normally clean-shaven face was showing signs of stubble and his eyes were dark circles. I rubbed my own chin and felt two days worth of growth. I needed a shower, a shave and several hours in bed, perhaps not in that order. “It doesn’t look as if they’re going to break through.”

  I looked down at my wristcom. There were still five hours before local dawn. We’d have to be on alert then – dawn was a common time to launch an offensive – but before then…I could sleep, couldn’t I? The thought was seductive, overriding my sense of duty and obligation to my men; I could crawl into one of the bunkers, get a blanket, and sleep for those five hours. I cursed it under my breath, but Ed was right; I could sleep – I even should sleep.

  And my mind was wandering.

  “Wake me if there’s a problem or twenty minutes before dawn,” I ordered, bowing to the inevitable. “If they don’t push in an offensive, I’ll relieve you then and you can get some sleep yourself.”

  I staggered down the stairs, returned to the command bunker, and curled up on the floor with a blanket. There were UN Generals who had insisted on travelling with their personal staff and bedding, but I felt I should set an example. At that moment, it seemed like a very stupid decision to me; I should have brought more bedding for myself. It was the tiredness talking…

  A moment later, Peter was shaking me. “What’s happening?” I asked, blearily. I felt as if I hadn’t slept at all. “Are we under attack?”

  “It’s twenty minutes before dawn,” Peter said. I stared at him, half-convinced that he was playing a trick. I couldn’t have slept, could I? I looked at my wristcom and confirmed the time, then rolled over and stood up carefully. My mind felt musty and old, but somehow I managed to pick up my weapon and follow him out of the bunker, back up to Ed’s observation post. I could see the first hint of sunlight in the distance, turning the darkness of the night sky into the dull grey of morning. “They’ve been shooting at us all night.”

  I snorted. “Let’s hope they’re as tired as we are,” I said, as we stepped into the observation post. “Ed?”

  Ed didn’t look much better than I did; I suspected he’d popped a stimulant or something to help him keep awake. “They’ve been probing our defences all night, but they haven’t launched a serious attack,” he reported, grimly. “I don’t think they’re going to attack us, but they’re going to be a definite presence in the surrounding area. I think that any patrols are going to have to be heavily armed and perhaps escorted by the armoured cars.”

  “Probably,” I agreed, looking at the take from the UAV. I didn’t trust it completely, but it didn’t look as if an enemy force was massing and preparing to attack. They’d be foolish to launch such an assault, as tired as we were; they knew we’d tear them a new asshole. They’d be better off sniping from a distance and hitting patrols. “Still, we’ll watch and wait.”

  An hour passed slowly as the sun climbed into the sky. Little happened, apart from a handful of shots fired towards us, leading me to believe that the enemy had definitely decided to fall back and avoid a conventional battle. As the sun rose higher, I made my own plans. Once the first convoy arrived, I’d go back to the spaceport with it, leaving Ed in command until I returned.

  “Hold the fortress and run patrols through the countryside,” I ordered, gazing towards the mountains. The miners were lurking there, waiting for the chance to attack us, or perhaps preparing for our own attack. They knew we had to go after them sooner rather than later. “I want to have a few words with the Acting President. It’s time we started looking for a political solution to this…nightmare.”

  Chapter Thirty

  An insurrection needs to be ended with a political solution. Sometimes, it is possible to defeat an insurgency in the field, but unless the causes of the insurgency are addressed, it merely guarantees that the insurgency will spring up again in the future and cause further devastation.

  -Army Manual, Heinlein

  The first convoy arrived at Fort Galloway without incident, apart from a handful of shots fired at the vehicles from a distance that killed no one, and I boarded the returning convoy for the trip back to the spaceport. The commanding officer of the convoy offered tactical command to me, but I was in no shape to exercise it and allowed him to remain in command, although I suspected he felt that I was looking over his shoulder. It was common in the UN to have an ‘observer’ who was really in command, but I didn’t work that way. Besides, I needed to sleep desperately and caught up as best as I could in the armoured car. The return trip, luckily, passed without incident and I allowed myself to wonder if we’d overawed the farmers, although I knew better. The farmers hadn’t misplayed their cards so far and they wouldn’t want to attack a heavily armed military convoy.

  As soon as we returned to the spaceport, I went into my quarters, booked a meeting with the Acting President for the following morning, and went to bed. I was surprised, and not a little horrified, by how badly I’d taken the day at the fortress and seriously wondered if I was coming down with something unpleasant. In the olden days – only a few years ago – I would have been able to stay awake for longer, although back then I had only been responsible for a single Company. The UN had decided that I was too untrustworthy – read competent – for a regimental command, so they’d frozen my career. Botany had been meant to be a death sentence; instead, I’d survived and prospered. Now, I was in command of a larger army than I’d ever dreamt of commanding and was in charge of a war I knew we’d lose, unless we created a political solution. That was not going to be easy.

  Muna met me for breakfast the following morning. She looked better than she had after her captivity, but her wince when she saw my face convinced me that I hadn’t managed to wash away all the stress. I’d shaved and showered, but evidently it hadn’t been enough to make me presentable. She took a seat and a bowl of gruel – the UN called it Standard Breakfast Ration One, but everyone else called it gruel, mainly because it tasted like damp cardboard – and sat opposite me. I would have liked to devour everything I could, but instead I had a breakfast MRE myself. Nothing destroys morale faster than watching a commanding officer devouring a luxury breakfast when the common soldiers are still on MRE packs.

  “I was looking at the farming problem,” she said, once she had eaten about half of the gruel and washed it down with water. I was drinking a mug of UN-standard coffee. “We need to get more food quickly and there are limits to what the farms can provide even if they surrendered tomorrow and accepted the Acting President’s proposals without further objections. We need additional farms and we need additional foodstuffs. I think I’ve found the answer.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “How useable an answer?”

  She smiled, rather humourlessly. “One we should have seen from the start,” she said. “Have you ever heard of the Cropland Potato?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve eaten potatoes, but I can’t say I ever paid any attention to what kind of potatoes they were,” I said, finishing my MRE and pushing it aside. “How can the Cropland Potatoes help us?”

  “Oddly enough, the idea came from the UN,” she explained. “Back when the sea l
evels on Earth started to rise, before the UN got so bloated that it couldn’t take any action at all, they came up with a genetically-engineered crop that they could seed everywhere to prevent further soil erosion, which was destroying their own croplands and reducing their food supply…”

  “So they tried to steal it from the colonies,” I said. I’d seen it happening, although naturally only the upper classes on Earth had benefited from the exercise in interstellar theft. The sheer logistics of transporting enough food to Earth to feed every starving mouth boggled the mind. The UNPF had never been large enough to transport all that! “I know how it worked.”

  “Anyway, they used the common potato as the base for one of those crops,” Muna continued, refusing to be diverted. “They came up with something that would grow very quickly, within a few weeks, and produce a crop every month or so. The plants don’t last more than a year and they had to reseed them, but they were edible by humans without many precautions.”

  She shrugged. “They wouldn’t need any precautions here,” she added. “There’s nothing in the planet’s atmosphere that would be poisonous to humankind.”

  I sipped my coffee, wondering if she was right. Earth was a special case in many ways; the UN’s attempts to prevent pollution had backfired badly, leaving the planet on the verge of a permanent ecological collapse. The introduction of a genetically-engineered plant was against thousands of UN regulations, but I could see desperate men and women deciding to ignore the regulations and pushing ahead anyway. The UN might even have approved their actions afterwards…no, I was definitely dreaming. The people had probably wound up being exiled to Botany.

  “If the crop is so useful,” I said, carefully, “why didn’t the UN use it to feed the starving on Earth?”

  “They did,” Muna said, dryly. “Those ration packs that the UN used to issue to everyone on welfare – which was really almost all of the population – came from possessed potato and a handful of other crops. The problem was that the pollution kept getting worse, quality control became a joke, and the supply of even modified potatoes started to fall.

  “In any case, they can be obtained on several words,” she continued. “Erin, in particular, maintains a massive supply of them because the UN issued an edict that they were to do so for cultural reasons. There are a handful of others, but we could get them cheaply on Erin.”

  I smiled, tightly. The UN’s belief that all cultures were equally valid and worthy of respect led to some appalling blunders. Having decided that the potato was the national symbol of Old Ireland – a nation on Earth that founded Erin, a colony world only a hundred light years from us – the UN had decreed that they were to have potatoes all the time…and there’s only so much one can do with the common potato. The UN in a nutshell; it must be sensitive and tolerant in the most infuriatingly insensitive and intolerant way possible. The Irish hadn’t seen the joke. By the time John Walker launched his coup, the garrison on Erie was up to seventeen divisions and was still losing ground.

  “We’ll send the Julius Caesar to purchase enough to start them growing here,” I said, finally. “Once we fix the food problem, we might be able to fix other problems as well or at least win time for a political solution.”

  “That might not be easy,” Muna pointed out. “If we feed the poor, they will continue having babies and put new demands on the food supply. I think we need to look at longer-term solutions.”

  “I know,” I said. “I intend to discuss it with the Acting President this very morning.”

  Suki – after greeting me with a kiss – drove me into New Copenhagen and, at my request, drove us through the riot scene. A handful of Communist prisoners, wearing yellow jumpsuits and shackles to prevent escapes, were working on clearing up the mess. The riot hadn’t done that much damage compared to the insurrection, but a few more of them would destroy the city. The people who had friends and relatives out in the countryside had already gone to stay with them, leaving the inner cities packed with the hopeless and the destitute. Frida had her hands full…and yet, her solution would only cause more suffering. It would have been easier if she were evil. I could have assassinated her without remorse.

  Frida looked tired when I saw her, sitting behind a desk and signing papers after reading them. I guessed that she had never learnt to delegate her duties, or even work out what was urgent and what could be handled by a lower level. There were probably hundreds of people in the Progressive Party alone who were demanding the attention of the President, and who would be angry if she brushed them off with someone else. It might explain her distraction, I decided; the President, at least, knew what to put aside for someone else to handle.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said, softly, signing another sheet of paper. I read it upside down and realised that it was a contract for repairing the damage to the roads caused by the war. Another involved welfare benefits for those who had been rendered homeless by the Communists. She pushed the rest of the paper aside with a sigh of relief and looked over at me. “Congratulations on occupying the fort.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I’d taken the time to skim through some of the local newspapers and hadn’t recognised myself in them. It read as if I’d taken the fort single-handedly without even a single soldier to back me up…and that the occupation was a decisive blow and the war would end tomorrow. They were both lies. “We need to talk.”

  Something in my voice caught her attention. “We need to talk?” She repeated. “What do we need to talk about?”

  “The war,” I said, flatly. I looked at her and was surprised to see how tired and worn down she was. She was being hectored by everyone who wanted a position or influence. “We need a political solution to the war or we will lose it.”

  She stared at me in shocked silence. “We can’t lose the war,” she protested. “How can we improve the planet if we lose the war?”

  “You won’t have to worry about that,” I said, dryly. “If the farmers win, they’ll be condemning you and most of your government to death.”

  Frida ground her teeth. “Explain,” she said, finally. “Why can’t we win the war? We outnumber the money-grabbing bastards!”

  “We don’t,” I said. “Counting recruits, police and militia, we have around ten thousand men who can reasonably be considered fighting troops. That includes, by the way, the Legion and recruits who have had just a week’s training. We have a small base of a thousand men who handle everything from supply and logistics to what little paperwork we have, but they’re not fighters. The vast majority of the people in the cities are not trained to fight and we don’t have the facilities to train them up to fight. If we used them as soldiers now, the result would be a massacre and probably atrocities on both sides.

  “The farmers and miners have, between them, around three million men and women who have some shooting skills, all the equipment they could use and are spread out over a vast area,” I continued. I wasn't going to mention the possibility of off-world help, not to her. Frida didn’t need to know that. “We don’t have the manpower to hold them all down without burning then out of their farms, which would be…counterproductive as you need the farms to produce food. Your census agents have been wiped out and I cannot provide enough protection to guarantee their safety. We can win any conventional battle unless they bring in some of the equipment they took from the UN – like tanks and armoured cars – but they don’t have to win themselves. They just have to not lose.

  “They think you’re exploiting them for your own benefit – for the benefit of the cities – and they’re right. They can’t feed the expanded population anyway without expanding massively, which they don’t feel like doing because they think you’re going to legally steal the crops anyway. From their point of view, half the city population dying off in the next year isn’t actually a bad outcome. The remainder might feel more inclined to respect the farmers and their point of view.”

  “That’s horrible,” Frida said, genuinely shocked. “We’re try
ing to make the world a better place.”

  “But you’re trying to do it by force,” I said, as gently as I could. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing – and on the face of it, you are – but it’s simply unsustainable over the long run. When it collapses, as it will, you’ll have a nightmarish time rebuilding anything from the ruins of your planet, just as the UN is having problems rebuilding Earth. It might not actually matter. You and I will probably be dead by then.”

  “But…”

  I drove over her objections. “You have these elaborate schemes to fix the problems faced by the poor,” I said. “You’re giving them free education, free housing,, free healthcare, free welfare grants, free children’s benefits, free…well, free everything. Where is the money for them all coming from?”