“Wow,” Judy said, somehow appearing behind me and helping me to my feet. “Did the Earth move for you too, honey?”
The hide hadn’t been designed to stand up to such a blast and was collapsing, so Jock and Dan helped the rest of us out of the structure, leaving us to stare towards where the town had been. It was utterly devastated, the more so because there was no fire and little smoke. I saw the infantry advancing rapidly in their armoured vehicles, hoping to wipe out the remaining resistance before they could recover from the pounding. I barely noticed when Jock started to lead me away from the hilltop. I couldn’t wipe the sight from my eyes.
“You did well,” the General said, when we met his advancing convoy. The infantry was no longer being opposed and the only danger was pre-placed mines and explosive devices. The locals, unfortunately for the infantry, were very good at producing them. “The remaining insurgents have retreated and now we’ll go to occupy the town.”
It seemed pointless to me – the town no longer existed, really – but I accepted the offer of a lift. The town once had been neat, designed for a few hundred people at most, but now…now, it was just rubble. The infantry probed through the ruins carefully, finding little to distract them…until they discovered the cellar. They opened it, carefully, and then stumbled back. The smell of death was overpowering.
I couldn’t help myself. I had to look. The cellar had held children, young children, ranging from babies to early teens. They had been hidden from the infantry as they probed the defences, but not from the KEWs. The overpressure had killed them, perhaps, or maybe it was the shock. It didn’t matter. They were dead.
And I had killed them.
Chapter Eighteen
The UN has hundreds of different definition of the term ‘war crime,’ including everything from prisoner mistreatment to causing the deaths of civilians in combat. The sad truth is that, despite the high ideals behind the laws and regulations, the UN is completely unable to enforce the rules on everyone else, nor is it really inclined to enforce them on its own people. The only people charged with war crimes under the UN are people who have incurred powerful political enemies.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
Back at Lazarus, I got very – very – drunk. It didn’t help. My dreams were still full of dead or dying children, slain by my own hand. The bar, intended for UNPF officers off duty, didn’t have anything vile enough to blot out the memories…and I had never been a drunkard. There were millions of drunkards on Earth, drinking endlessly to wash away the numb horror of their existence, and yet…it didn’t help me. I’d killed those children as surely as if I’d killed them myself, one by one. My nightmares tormented me with their faces and their dreams. Whatever the sins of the parents – and, if Roger was to be believed, Heinlein was only guilty of being too successful – why should the children have shared in the punishment? Why had they even been there in the first place?
I tried, hard, to convince myself that the resistance had left them there purposefully, just to trick us into committing war crimes against the civilian population, but somehow it didn’t work. The guilt just kept flowing up and mocking me, reminding me time and time again that I had blood on my hands. I tried illegal drugs and even a visit to the brothel that had been established for the infantry, but nothing worked. When I closed my eyes, I still saw the dead and dying children…
It was almost a relief to be summoned back to the Devastator. The Captain had ordered another pair of Lieutenants to the surface to take over the coordinating role – I don’t know if it was because he knew that I’d killed innocents, or because he wanted other officers with the same experience – and I’d been recalled. I should have gone in one of the armoured buses back to the spaceport, but instead I rode in a jeep. If one of the insurgents decided to take a pot shot at me, I might as well make it easy for them. I didn’t want to live any longer.
Nothing happened on the drive, not even a handful of sniper shots aimed in our general direction. It seemed that Heinlein had decided that I was to stay alive, even though I had committed a crime against innocent civilians. I wasn’t relieved when we finally passed through the ring of steel wrapped around the spaceport – it wasn't enough to prevent the insurgents shelling us from time to time – and boarded the shuttle to return to the ship. The only distraction from my thoughts was a SAM attack on the way back to space, which the shuttle avoided easily. Once in space, we were fairly safe…
But not completely safe. I hadn’t had a proper briefing, but rumours spoke of starships raiding our supply lines and battles against asteroid miners in the asteroid belts. Individually, the miners didn’t have anything like the technology we could bring to bear against them, but as a group they were formidably powerful. The UNPF had lost another starship to the miners and two more had had to retreat back to the nearest fleet base for repairs – it seemed that the Heinlein shipyard personnel weren’t cooperating with the UN. Even if they were, I wouldn’t have trusted them to repair a starship anyway. God alone knew what they could slip onboard if they had a moment.
I reported back onboard, checked my assignments in the duty roster, and then went straight to my cabin. I hadn’t missed the Ensign’s wardroom since I’d boarded the Devastator, but I missed it now. With five others around me, I couldn’t afford to brood for long, but on my own…I tried to sleep, but it wouldn’t come. Even when Kitty came to welcome me back onboard personally, I tried to push her away. How could she even bear to look at me? I couldn’t live with myself!
“It wasn't your fault,” she said, when I had finally confessed. We’d tried to make love, but somehow I found myself impotent. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything so normal as having sex with the girl I loved. Even her mouth couldn’t convince my body to cooperate and rise to the occasion. I couldn’t even play with her without feeling unworthy. “You didn’t know what you were doing, did you?”
“It’s always my fault,” I protested. I’d told her about the escaping conscripts I’d caught when she’d revealed that she was a member of the Brotherhood, but they too still haunted my dreams. Had I condemned them to a life of hell, or had they merely been killed when they reached Earth, just for trying to escape servitude? “I didn’t know what I was doing, but it was my fault!”
“How?” She asked, reasonably. One hand pulled my hand to her naked breast, but I couldn’t respond. “If you didn’t know what you were doing, how is it your fault?”
“I called in the shots,” I protested. “I…”
“And Anna fired the weapons,” Kitty snapped. Her voice grew harder as her face darkened. “Oh, and the Specials protected you so that you could commit murder. And the General launched the attack that led to the use of KEW pellets against a defended town. And the UN General Assembly ordered the invasion in the first place. And the insurgents decided to make a stand where there were children to be killed by the bombardment. And Heinlein refused to comply with the UN Resolution. Who is really to blame?”
“But what’s the point?” I asked, desperately. I pulled my hand off her breast and waved it in front of her. She caught it and returned it to her breast. “There’s blood on my hands.”
“It wasn't your fault,” Kitty repeated, angrily. I saw her face flush with anger, and grief. “Would you like me to beat hell out of you to prove it? Would you like to go visit the Marines and call them vacuum-suckers to their faces? John…it was not your fault!”
I shook my head slowly. No amount of physical pain would atone for what I’d done. “I still feel that I’m to blame,” I said, slowly. My next words were a cry of pain. “Why can’t we do something, Kitty?” I held her eyes. “What’s the Brotherhood for if we can’t do anything to stop this from happening?”
Kitty gave me a humourless smile. “You’ve seen the communications system,” she said, coldly. She’d taught me how to use it two weeks after she’d made contact with me. “Do you think that we could organise a mutiny without someone with
big ears catching wind of it?”
That brought me up short. The Brotherhood existed in the fringes of the UNPF computer network, but it was impossible to be really sure to whom you were talking. It was a security measure – I only knew two other Brotherhood members personally – and yet, it made it impossible to coordinate operations. Kitty had suggested, in all seriousness, that the Brotherhood was actually run by officers like Captain Harriman, men too smart to believe the UN’s lies, yet men with a stake in keeping the system.
“No,” I admitted, miserably. If we tried, and failed, we’d spend the rest of our short and miserable lives in a Luna prison. The odds would be hugely against success. I didn’t even know how many members of the Brotherhood were at Heinlein. “But we have to do something.”
“Like what?” Kitty asked, dryly. Her voice became sarcastic as she pushed me away. “Will you use Devastator to bombard our own positions on the surface?”
I flinched at the thought. I hadn’t liked the Infantry, but there were the Specials…and Roger. How could I kill them? She was right. Even if I somehow gained control of the monitor, what could I do with her? The other UNPF starships would blow us out of space if we started bombarding UN positions on the surface.
“I wish…I wish that things could be different,” I said, bitterly. I reached for her and pulled her into my arms. She held me tightly while I sobbed, like a newborn child. “Why can’t we do anything about it?”
It was a day later when I was summoned in front of the Captain. I hadn’t spoken to him alone in weeks, not since I’d passed muster as a watch commander and entrusted with the bridge in the wormhole. He didn’t look happy as he stared at a datapad in front of him. I knew, ahead of time, what it was. It was the only avenue of protest open to me.
“Lieutenant,” he said, gruffly. His face didn’t look welcoming. “What exactly is this nonsense?”
His tone didn’t inspire me, but I pushed on regardless. “My official report on the incident on the surface, sir,” I said, carefully. “It’s also a request that the firing patterns be investigated and the officers on the ground brought before a War Crimes Tribunal.”
Captain Shalenko glared down at the datapad for a long moment. “I can see that,” he said, finally. I’d written the statement in a blaze of white hot anger, but now I was starting to wonder if it had been wasted. “Why do you believe that it was a war crime?”
“Sir…” I hesitated. “Permission to speak freely?”
“Granted,” Captain Shalenko said, icily. “This had better be good.”
I took a breath. “The forces on the ground insisted on a scatter-pattern shot over the local town,” I said. I still didn’t know the town’s name. I’d tried to look it up, but the only notation in the ship’s computer files had been a grid reference. “The entire town was devastated and almost all of the inhabitants killed, including over seventy children in their preteen years. That is a war crime, one committed by forces adhering to the United Nations Declarations on the Laws of War…”
“Don’t cite chapter and verse at me,” the Captain snapped. “Why do you believe that it was a war crime?”
“We killed children,” I said, horrified. “How could they have been insurgents?”
“There are children down on the planet who have proven to be remarkably good shots,” the Captain mused. “I say again, John; why do you believe that…incident to have been a war crime?”
I stared at him, disbelieving. “We killed them,” I said, finally. “I killed them.”
“The Laws of War, as you should know from the Academy, specifically forbid strikes against civilian populations unless authorised by the proper authority,” Captain Shalenko said, calmly. “A civilian population is deemed as one that is not in rebellion against the United Nations. By turning their town into a strongpoint, the insurgents made it a legitimate target under the laws of war. The General commanding was quite within his rights to call for a strike and we had no grounds to refuse.”
He held up a hand before I could speak. “We all have moments where we see the costs of war and think that we have paid far too much,” he said. “We also have moments when we come face to face with the barbarity of the enemy and realise that they have to be stopped, no matter what the cost. The people on the ground chose to use their children as human shields to prevent us from attacking…and, if we had chosen to allow them to deter us, we would have lost far more men in the future. Your complaint will, if you wish, be forwarded, but I am telling you now that it will not be heeded and no action will be taken. There are no grounds to take action.”
“They were children,” I pleaded.
“Nits breed lice,” the Captain said, coldly. “They were growing up exposed to propaganda that would have turned them against us in the next few years, turning them into insurgents themselves and sending them out to kill more of our Infantry. Their parents could have moved them out of the war zone, or even bargained with us to remove them before the fighting began, but instead…they chose to keep them there. What happened was tragic, but it needed to be done.”
“You don’t care,” I said, feeling like a child myself. “Why…”
“You should have learned that at the Academy,” Captain Shalenko said, his voice still cold. “Before the United Nations was established, there were endless wars between nations on Earth over everything from resources to religion. Men did terrifying things to one another because they believed that they could be individuals and put themselves above the remainder of humanity. The great leech nations, nations you may never have heard of, polluted the globe as they raped Earth of her resources. The ideology behind Heinlein even came out of one of those leech nations. The duty of the Peace Force is clear – we have to maintain the peace. It is better that a hundred, a thousand, a million children die on Heinlein, than the consequences of all-out interstellar war. You saw the starships they used to raid the fleet as we advanced. In ten years, they might have been striking at Earth.”
He looked up at me and met my eyes. “They would have been striking at Earth,” he corrected himself. “Their ideology is unrelentingly hostile to the UN. They were building a war fleet in secret and preparing to use it against us. Would you rather your family died on Earth, under a bombardment from Heinlein-based starships, or that people opposed to the UN died on Heinlein?”
My family were dead, I recalled. I’d seen where they’d died, where the safety systems on their mall – no malls on Heinlein, as far as I could tell – had failed, due to carelessness or simple lack of maintenance. Captain Shalenko didn’t know that my family were dead. I doubted that it was even in my file. The Heinlein battlefleet hadn’t killed them on Earth. They had been killed – murdered – by a system that didn’t care what happened to its people. A system that was prepared to expand to other star systems and destroy anyone standing in the way. A system that had made me compliant in its crimes. I was just as guilty as they were.
I also knew the right answer. “I would rather that my enemies died,” I said. It was perfectly truthful, after all. “Sir, I…”
“Enough,” Captain Shalenko said. “I am impressed with your performance so far, so I’m going to do you one favour and delete this…ah, request from the computers and your file. It won’t do your career any good to have this on your record. When the Political Officer sees something like that, the person is normally transferred to an isolated fuelling station or sent back to Earth in disgrace. In exchange, I expect you to carry out your duties without demur. Do you understand me?”
I straightened to attention. “Yes, sir,” I said, sincerely. How could I fight a system I had come to hate when I was outside it? There had to be a way to hurt the UN badly enough to force it to back off from the colonies, somehow. “Thank you, sir.”
“Speak nothing of it,” the Captain ordered. I understood his meaning. He was technically supposed to report anything reassembling political unreliability to the Political Officer. I suspected that having doubts about murdering innocent ch
ildren would probably count as political unreliability. There was no room for doubt or scruple in the service of the UN. “Now…”
He pulled his terminal round and examined it carefully. “As you are having…issues with working as a forward operations controller, I’m going to assign you to taking over some of Anna’s and Konrad’s duties while they’re working as controllers themselves,” he said, firmly. “I expect them carried out with the same level of competence and dedication they bring to their tasks. I dare say the Specials won’t object, even though Sergeant Ryan filed a note of commendation for you. They’re both working with the Ensigns at the moment and while you are too young for the role, you’ll have to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“The reporters are bouncing back and forwards between us and the ground, so you’ll be responsible for them as well,” the Captain said. He looked me in the eye again. “Do you still want to be removed from your position as forward controller?”
Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason Page 18
