Martial Lawless (Calm Act Book 3)

by Ginger Booth

  “Colonel, what have you learned so far about Beaufort’s death?”

  “Our topic tonight is the constitution broadcast,” Emmett replied. “I will not discuss the investigation. Yes, Mrs. Wiehl?”

  “Could we have that here? Free universal Internet access? Voter testing and licensed religion?” A hiss like a swarm of wasps arose from the Pittsburghers. Sergeant Becque advanced menacingly and they shut up.

  “I’m new here,” Emmett replied hesitantly. “I don’t know enough about Pittsburgh yet to form an opinion. Yes, Penny?” It was our guards’ turn again.

  “How do I resign from the army?” she asked. “I don’t want to leave you, sir. But my tour was up two years ago.” Becque advanced on his own troops this time, as the room erupted in ‘me, too!’

  Emmett shrugged. “We’ll look into it when we get back to Brooklyn. Unless, are any of you from western Penn?” Apparently not. “Well, I can’t release you here, then. If you want to head west from here, talk to Captain Johnson. Hi, Brandy.” Brandy’s hand only lowered while she was speaking.

  “Are you in favor of this constitution, Colonel?” she asked. “Specifically, do you support limiting freedom of speech and religion? And how can you, when you’re one of the principals behind Amenac and PR News?”

  Emmett smiled crookedly. “Hudson’s governor and constitution have my complete support. Next?”

  “But sir!” Brandy demanded.

  “Asked and answered, Brandy,” Emmett said firmly. “People who ask the same question twice get to leave the building. Yes, sir?” He selected an elderly Pittsburgher in the back.

  “Can we keep the meshnet?” he asked. “When you go?”

  Emmett looked to me. I nodded. “Yes. That can be arranged,” Emmett replied. He pointed to another Pittsburgher.

  “Are you and that woman living in sin?” the man asked. “Like the preachers say?”

  Emmett’s mouth hung open briefly. He closed it, scowling. “Sir, my private life is not your concern. However – as all of Hudson knows – Ms. Baker and I are partners in a committed relationship. Eventually, I expect we’ll get married.” Then he looked like he was kicking himself internally for reacting to that one. He could have let it go with ‘none of your business.’ “Alright, gang, now I’m tired and cranky. Last two questions. Yes, Brandy.”

  “Why is PR News being allowed access to your investigation, and not IndieNews?” she demanded.

  “Ms. Baker is helping with my investigation. At the request of the military governors,” Emmett replied. “Both of us are management with PR News. That’s true. But that’s not what we’re here for.”

  “But you’ll share announcements?” Brandy followed up.

  Emmett wobbled his head so-so. “We’ll share military censors, that’s for sure. Last question! Sir. In the back.”

  “Any chance you’ll stay on as our new Resco, Colonel?” another militia member asked. His buddies pursed their lips at him. “You’ve given us better communications than we’ve had in two years. Tornado touchdowns are already marked on the meshnet map. You’ve only been here one day.”

  “Currently, I intend to return to Hudson,” Emmett replied. “That could change. But I’m glad you like the meshnet. Ms. Baker set that up. My partner does great work.” He smiled at me tiredly, and gestured for me to rise. I stood briefly, smiled and waved.

  “Good night, everyone,” Emmett said. “Thank you for sharing your beautiful tornado shelter with us. Beats heck out of my momma’s basement. Her spiders bite.” He smiled and waved to the crowd in general, then pointed at the militia men in back and the buffet room. He headed off to rendezvous and talk to them, Tibbs and the IBIS agents trailing.

  Emmett left me his phone again. I contemplated it sadly. Lots more texts, still no red flags. I wrote again to the rulers of the shiny new nation of Hudson, trying not to feel totally out of my league.

  Q&A just ended. Six tornados and done. EM meeting random militia. Deeb.

  Chapter 12

  Interesting fact: Before the Calm Act, the least religious part of America was New England, where as few as 33% of adults considered themselves ‘highly religious.’ In contrast, West Virginia, which wrapped Pittsburgh to south and west, was 69% highly religious. Alabama and Mississippi tied for most religious, at 77%.

  “Dee, did you know about this religious crackdown in New York?” Dave demanded shrilly over the phone.

  Dave wasn’t really the head of the Amen1 hacker group that powered Amenac and PR News. But he gave a fair impression of it, and ran our headquarters in Connecticut. Amen1 refused to tell anyone who their real head was. Dave was certainly their public spokesman.

  I blearily noted that I must have fallen asleep before Emmett made it back to our room last night, and he was already gone again. Dave’s call woke me at 7 a.m. Emmett’s a morning person. I’m not.

  “Hudson,” I corrected Dave vaguely. “New nation of Hudson.” And as an afterthought, I answered his question. “Saw new constitution first time last night. After you, probably.”

  “They’re rounding people up in the streets in the Apple Core and throwing them in jail!”

  “You woke me up, Dave,” I mumbled. “Who’s doing what now?”

  “The militia in the Apple Core is rounding up street corner preachers, and soup kitchen preachers, and throwing them in jail!” Dave continued, clearly incensed. And that was saying something, as I groggily realized. Dave was the mild-mannered unflappable Amenoid. “They’re saying a second offense gets 7 days in jail at half rations. Third is 30 days in a work camp! Dee, these are pogroms!”

  “I think you have to kill people to qualify as a ‘pogrom,’” I disagreed. “‘Persecution’ maybe.” I yawned hugely and forced myself to climb out of the warm covers and face the day.

  “Your censor Mora won’t let us publish!” Dave complained.

  That made me stop and blink. Lt. Colonel Carlos Mora was the military censor for Project Reunion News. This normally paid us huge dividends. If Mora OK’d something, we skated past every other censor in the ex-U.S. In my experience, if Mora forbade something, he had an awfully good reason. It still felt like an oxymoron – probably always would – but Carlos Mora was a good military censor. And I firmly believed he was on our side.

  “What do you want me to do, Dave?” I asked. “I’m in Pittsburgh on Resco business.”

  “Just call Mora for me, alright?” Dave requested.

  “OK.”

  “I bet Emmett knows what’s going on,” Dave grumbled.

  “Emmett hasn’t told me anything,” I insisted. “He wouldn’t. You know that. Look, I’ll call you back after I talk to Carlos.”

  I washed my face and got dressed before tackling Carlos, dawdling a bit due to deep misgivings. Dave was right. I couldn’t imagine they carried out this big preacher roundup on the streets of the city without Emmett knowing it was coming. But Emmett had every right to not tell me about plans for a martial law operation.

  “Hi, Carlos,” I greeted him. “Sorry to call you so early. But the Amenoids are in an uproar. So, why can’t PR News report on the religious loon roundup in the Apple?”

  “It’s all over Amenac,” Carlos said. “They’re not completely gagged. But Governor Cullen asked for a 7 day grace period on PR and IndieNews. Whichever fails to honor his request first, loses the right to publish in Hudson. Just on the religion crackdown. Though he’ll probably ask for another moment of silence when they crack down on civilian weapons. That’s gonna get ugly, too. Uglier.”

  “And you’re OK with this?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Look, Dee, sometimes martial law is gonna look like martial law,” Carlos reasoned. “Probably won’t make you feel any better, but I inquired with General Link.” Ivan Link was Hudson Governor Sean Cullen’s counterpart in New England, and the top of Carlos’ food chain. “Link told me absolutely, positively, to honor Cullen’s request. And for what it’s worth, I agree with what Hudson’s trying to do.”

&n
bsp; “You do?” I asked. “Does Emmett?”

  “You have a problem with Emmett, take it up with Emmett,” Carlos replied primly. “But yeah. Cam explained it last night. Churches are being entrusted with government functions, providing social services and food distribution. They need to be trustworthy. New rules. So we give Hudson 7 days for the dust to settle, and then talk about it.”

  “I can see both sides,” I said.

  “Me too,” Carlos agreed.

  “But we don’t have much choice,” I concluded.

  “Nope,” Carlos agreed. “Dee, I suspect something happened that Hudson will never allow to go public. Could be that something was in Pittsburgh. More likely, a bad pattern, with something big in upstate New York – west Hudson, whatever. But we’ll never know. Hudson’s Rescos still need to do their job, though. If religious movements are out of control, they need to wrest control back. That’s that.”

  “I’m guessing you already told Dave this?”

  “He didn’t like it,” Carlos confirmed.

  Experimentally, I said, “I wonder if it’s an accident that they rushed to air the big constitution reveal special report when Emmett was out of town.”

  “Emmett and you,” Carlos suggested. “No. Not with Dane Beaufort’s death, either. No coincidence.”

  I sighed. “OK. Thanks for being so forthcoming, Carlos.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Carlos denied. “Be careful out there, Dee.”

  I called Dave back. And no. He didn’t like it. I argued that PR News supporting the martial law governments was our brand, our niche. At that, he hung up on me, which was probably just as well. I needed to have a chat with my own conscience, not Dave’s.

  The thing is, I detested the street-corner prophets. Life was hard enough in the Apple Core these days without hellfire and brimstone over cornflakes. There were ghastly hate-mongers, blaming loose women and shameless homosexuals for climate change. And people were listening. Defenseless women and gay youths were beaten, even stoned to death in the streets, because some holier-than-thou fanatic blamed climate change and the Calm Act on them.

  But PR News didn’t report that, either, to any great extent. Nor the mass killings, when some loon went on a rampage with an automatic rifle. We kept those events quiet at the Rescos’ and martial law governors’ request. They argued that this sort of hysteria was contagious. The militia needed to know about it, and act, and they did. But the knowledge would not help ordinary citizens, just make them anxious, which helped disorder spread, made it harder to stamp out. I knew about these violent disorders, not from Emmett or Amenac or the news, but from the meshnet. I lived in the Apple. People marked these events on the map, and the militia scrambled to respond. Our enclave in Brooklyn wasn’t bad, though there were some hate crimes and vagrant preachers even there. Some parts of Manhattan and the Bronx were a nightmare.

  The Hudson government’s discretion put them in a bind, at the moment. With this new constitution they took extreme steps. But they’d never admitted the threat was extreme enough to justify those steps.

  And here I was, knowing all of this. Ever since the Calm Act went into effect, I’d known more than the general public did about what was really going on. For myself, I chose to know the facts. For Amenac, I’d risked my life to publish a subset of the truth. Weather forecasts and safe market travel routes. And here I was again, visiting someplace where even that pittance of truth was hard to come by for ordinary people.

  “Hey, darlin’,” Emmett said, returning from his run. “Good morning.” He froze in concern at the look on my face. “What?”

  I pursed my lips. “Sean Cullen put a gag order on PR News for 7 days while they start enforcing this new not-freedom of religion. I was just thinking that through.”

  Emmett blew out a long breath and perched on the edge of the bed. “Uh-huh.”

  I shrugged. “Talked to Dave. Carlos. Dave again. Now I’m trying to decide what I think. I think…Sean’s making a mistake.”

  “Uh-huh,” Emmett said. He didn’t meet my eye. He started to say something else, but didn’t.

  “It’s not just that I believe in freedom of speech, though I do,” I elaborated. “Or that I believe in freedom of religion, though I do. And I’d happily cure the religious loons if I could. I want violent lunatics controlled and off the streets. But we all have a different idea of what constitutes lunacy.”

  “Uh-huh.” Emmett untied his sneakers. For him, that was almost rude. Usually he paid careful attention to me while strewing these ‘uh-huhs’ about.

  A light dawned. “You weren’t behind this licensed religion move, either,” I accused.

  It took some wheedling, but he finally admitted, “Look, I consider it a collection of behavior problems, not a religion problem. I don’t care what people believe. None of my business. I care what they do. Public nuisance, put them in jail. Hate crimes, execute them. If there’s a pattern of bad actors from one religious congregation, lean on the preacher to shape up. Send militia to their services. Close down their soup kitchen. Whatever. Escalate until the problem is resolved. Cam and I both. The other top Rescos, and Governor Cullen, thought religion was off-limits, so they didn’t.”

  “Ash didn’t follow your lead?” Ash Margolis was the other Resco in the city, in charge of Manhattan and the Bronx directly, and supervising the Resco of Jersey-borough as well, the Jersey side of the Hudson River, just as Emmett had oversight on Staten Island in addition to direct responsibility for Brooklyn and Queens.

  Emmett looked rueful. “Ash is my senior, not my subordinate, darlin’. Cam and I only talked to each other about it. We never asked permission. Didn’t think we needed it. Our prerogative. Mine, really, since I was Cam’s boss until yesterday. I’m not sure what Tony’s policy was upstate. He was awfully quiet in that discussion. But Ash, Pete, Sean – they felt we were out of line.”

  “Your way would have worked better,” I said softly. “Wouldn’t raise so many hackles. Not so ‘un-American.’”

  “It did work better,” Emmett agreed. “But Dee, Pete Hoffman is my commanding officer. Sean Cullen is our commander in chief. Sean felt that the way Cam and I went about it was dishonest. He wanted to be upfront about what we were doing and why. And he felt licensing religion gave us more control.”

  “You lost the argument.”

  “Uh-huh,” Emmett confirmed. “Darlin’, I need to be a team player on this. Yeah, I think Sean made the wrong call. Not morally wrong. Just, my tactics worked better. But it was his call to make. My job is to make the new constitution work. He’s the boss.”

  “I thought maybe they hurried up and aired the constitution special report because we were out of town,” I prodded.

  “Uh-huh. I want breakfast,” he said decisively, and fled into the bathroom.

  -o-

  Emmett declared a day ‘in’ after breakfast. He was fed up with talking to people without sufficient background briefing. Tibbs had given him a reconstituted laptop, and Emmett intended to study Dane Beaufort’s computer records until he could wring no more meaning out of them without…talking to people again.

  Apparently his interview the night before, with the four militia who waited out the thunderstorms with us, had been another frustrating conversation. Yes, they were Apocalyptics, and so was their captain. Mount Washington, where Dane lived, was largely split between Catholic and Apocalyptic militia units. Yes, other people lived there, too. Yes, there was an Apocalyptic rally at Station Square that morning, though none of them attended. The sect was using the abandoned pretty plaza as an open-air church. Yes, their captain asked them to keep tabs on what our expedition from New York – Hudson – was up to.

  No, they didn’t have anything against Dane, and they didn’t think their church did, either. As for ‘what God demands of us’, their theories were split four ways between the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the New Testament as a whole, and the idea that God only gives you a cross that you’re strong enough
to bear. The four agreed that none of those guesses were specifically Apocalyptic. Trying out Matthew 10:34 on them unearthed the fact that two were originally Evangelist, like Emmett, and spoke fluent Bible. But that problematic Bible quote wasn’t any clearer to them than to him. ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ All four – five counting Emmett – felt that verse contradicted the bulk of Christ’s teachings elsewhere in the New Testament.

  The foursome honestly didn’t seem to know anything about Dane’s death. And that was peculiar. The version they’d heard matched Paddy Bollai’s – Dane’s neighbor and handyman – that Dane died of a beating in Green Tree. Nothing to do with the Apocalyptics.

  Emmett showed them the video of the rally, of the crowd surging against Dane. The militia men correctly pointed out that the video didn’t show violence, just a surging crowd. Then later, a dead Resco. And that the video showed Station Square, not Green Tree. They supplied names for about a dozen people, including Apocalyptic leaders at the front of the crowd, and Paul Dukakis, the one who brought Dane’s body to Paddy Bollai, Dane’s handyman. They claimed Paul was a member of Judgment, though, not Apocalyptic. The named collection of Apocalyptics included their pastor and their militia captain, standing right by Dane in the video.

  No one had ever spotted Dwight Davison, Dane’s second, in that video.

  Basically, the militia men seemed perfectly forthcoming, and the Apocalyptic worldview not nearly as rabid as Paddy had led us to believe. They also didn’t believe the video showed anything amiss. Kalnietis vetoed telling them that our evidence seemed to confirm that Dane died at Station Square. He wanted to speak to the pastor and captain first.

  For today, the IBIS agents set out to interview all these people. I kept Emmett company in a conference room downstairs, intending to tweak the meshnet and start looking for a local administrator to hand it off to.

  “No,” Emmett vetoed my plan. “Controlling the meshnet gives too much power. We don’t know who to trust yet. We need to control it ourselves for now. Do something else for me, darlin’? I’d like a number, what percentage of land was affected by the tornados. If you can automate it, I’d like numbers for the surrounding Resco districts too.”