Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason (12 page)

It wasn't easy, but I pushed the thought aside and thought about my family instead. I’d sent several messages to my parents, telling them that I would be coming home for a visit, but they hadn’t replied. I found that worrying, but Mom had never been one to learn how to use a communications terminal properly. She knew nothing – and I had known nothing, until I boarded the Jacques Delors – about how the terminal really worked. It was quite possible that one of the many computer filters built in to prevent the spread of hate speech had eaten her messages, although I hoped not. Sending more than a handful of hateful messages – as defined by the filters – meant a mandatory class on avoiding hate speech. One of my friends from school had had to sit through one and he’d never been quite the same since.

I didn’t dare sleep on the train – too many of my fellow passengers looked desperate enough to steal what little I had on me – and so I watched as the massive habitation malls of Albuquerque came into view. They’d been built at least a hundred years ago, I’d been told, each one capable of housing thousands of people in reasonable comfort at the time. They weren't now. The vast majority of them were effectively governed by petty criminals and corrupt policemen. No wonder that the people wanted to escape the cesspool, whatever it took. It had taken me to Luna Base and the Academy.

It looks worse than I remember, I thought, as I stepped off the train. The railroad station had actually been linked to the underground system for reasons that I’m sure had made sense at the time, but now no one with any brains would go into them for fear of his life. When I’d been younger, we had used to run through them on a dare, before being exposed to more adult pleasures like drugs and girls. A handful of my female classmates had become prostates before even reaching the legal Age of Consent, just to keep their boyfriends (and pimps) happy. Others had cheerfully rolled their clients for money. I was tempted to walk through the tunnels anyway, for old time’s sake, but it wouldn’t have been wise. I walked through the streets instead.

My family had always lived in Harrison Ford Mall, named for someone who had otherwise been removed from history. I’d looked him up once on the Internet and found nothing, although the deeper levels of the net had suggested a movie career. It towered ahead of me as I walked through the grin streets, noting with disapproval how much litter had simply been dumped there, but as I drew closer, it became apparent that something was seriously wrong. Half of the Mall was a burned out ruin, populated only by louts and drunkards. The remainder looked deserted.

I stopped and stared, helplessly. Where were they? I wanted to run forward and search the entire mall, but even as I moved forward I knew it was a fool’s errand. The whole mall should have been torn down and rebuilt, but instead…it had just been abandoned. What had happened, I asked myself desperately; where was my family? What had happened…?

I felt two fingers sneaking into my pockets and caught them, hard enough to hurt. I turned to see a young boy, barely nine years old if that, staring up at me. He might have been handsome under other circumstances, but one of his eyes was missing, replaced by a cloth patch. He opened his mouth to scream and I squeezed harder. I wasn’t going to let him off lightly.

“All right,” I said, picking him up effortlessly. He weighed barely anything. I knew how his life would go in the future. He’d die, soon enough, or be sold to a pimp to satisfy the really unpleasant set of customers. “If you scream, I’ll snap your neck, understand?” He nodded, terrified. No one would have stood up to him before. The odds were that he was giving some of his loot to a more senior gang. “What happened to this place?”

He stared at me. “I don’t know,” he said. I started to squeeze harder. “There was a fire and the place burned down and everyone was killed…”

“That’s impossible,” I said, shocked. There had been tens of thousands of people in the mall. There were also fire-suppressing systems and…

I cursed. What was I thinking? This wasn't the Jacques Delors, with Captain Harriman and the Senior Chief and the Engineer and the rest of the crew. This was Albuquerque, a city in the Pan-American Union, controlled by people who didn’t care what happened to their citizens. The brightly-coloured posters on the wall advertising the wonders and glories of the People’s Progressive Party, the National Socialist Workers Party and the Communist League of Freedom meant nothing. The real rulers of the city were not chosen in anything so droll as an election…

The little thief wiggled free and ran. I let him go, knowing what it must have been like for anyone caught in the blaze. If I’d stayed, maybe…no, that was foolish. Once the fire had started, it would have spread quickly, particularly if the systems had failed completely. If I had been there, I would have died with the others of my family…

The bastards didn’t bother to even tell me, I thought, angrily. There had been some updates from Earth, but none of them had been addressed to me, nor had they discussed disasters like a fire that killed tens of thousands. The media wouldn’t have mentioned it at all. No one on Earth, apart from those in Albuquerque, would have known about the fire; they certainly wouldn’t have realised that it could have been prevented, if proper maintenance had been undertaken. Suddenly, everything fell into perspective; the men and women I’d recovered from the freighter were needed here, because Earth no longer produced competent minds! I hadn’t understood just what the Senior Chief had meant, until now.

“There he is,” someone shouted. I turned slightly to see the little thief. He wasn't alone either. “I told you he was here.”

A gang, I realised. There were only four of them, but they swaggered along as if they owned the place, and, in many ways, they did. They wore red shirts, the better to mark themselves as members of the Bloody Blades, and carried metal sticks on their backs. They wouldn’t have any firearms, of course, or energy weapons, but they were quite intimidating enough to the average citizen. I knew what I was meant to do; run, throwing my wallet on the ground behind me, but somehow I no longer cared. I watched them swaggering closer and I realised, with a flicker of delighted amusement, that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what they were doing.

And then I recognised one of them. “Hello, Jase,” I said, calmly. He’d been a bully back at school, despite the best attempts of the teachers, and somehow I wasn't surprised to discover that he’d joined a Gang. There were thousands upon thousands of kids like him; too under-qualified to get a job or go to the Academy, too smart or cowardly to be attracted to the Infantry, and otherwise without prospects. They wandered the streets, extorting what they could and dealing in drugs and prostitutes. My family were dead…and he had survived? “Journey’s end in lovers meetings, as they say?”

Jase leered at me. I don’t know if he recognised me or not. “Here’s how it’s going to be,” he said, dramatically. The idiot was trying to pose, of all things! “You give us everything, including the clothes on your back, and we’ll let you off with a few broken bones. If not, we’ll take them from you and hang you to show them that the Bloody Blades are…”

I punched him, right in the nose. I’d been training with Marines, not ignorant thugs, and it showed. I would never have dared do anything like that to a Marine – I was woefully aware that I had telegraphed my own movement too clearly – but Jase was taken completely by surprise. He went over backwards, already out of it, and two other gang members stepped forward. They seemed to be moving in slow motion; one started to draw back his fist for a punch, while the other began to take his stick off his back, but they were already too late. I smacked the first right in the throat and sent him to the ground choking, and then kicked the second right in the groin. He folded up, screaming in pain, and I took the opportunity to relieve him of his stick. I turned to face the fourth gang member and was unsurprised to see him heading the other way as fast as he could. The gangs rarely had to fight someone who was willing and able to stand up to them and, like most cowards, they broke easily. For the first time since I set foot on Earth, I almost felt happy, even though the Master Sergeant would have torn me a new asshole for exposing myself like that. It almost took some of the pain of losing my family away.

“Run,” I said, to the kid. He was staring at me in stark terror. I could almost read his thoughts – his protectors and masters had been exposed as frauds and cowards – but I didn’t care. I could have broken his neck with ease and we both knew it. “Just run.”

He ran. I turned back to Jase and his two cronies. The one I’d kicked in the groin was still moaning and I brought the stick down on his head, knocking him out. After the kick, it probably came as something of a relief. The other two wouldn’t present any further problem, but I knocked them out anyway, before relieving them of their possessions. Let the police think that it had just been a mugging, although both they and I knew differently. It hardly mattered.

I strode away from the bodies and walked back into the crowd. I’d learned how to hide when I was very young and by the time I had reached the station I had made a handful of minor changes in my appearance, dumping my jumper and replacing it with a shirt. The cameras wouldn’t recognise me if they saw me, but just to be sure I blended with the crowds until I returned to the orbital tower and returned to orbit.

I would never set foot on Earth again.

Interlude One

From: The Never-Ending War. Stirling, SM. Underground Press, Earth.

To understand the scale of the problems facing the UN, it is necessary to know something of the background to the colonies. Put simply, the vast majority of colonies were founded by groups who were opposed, for various reasons, to the UN’s concept of a single government for humanity. These ranged from nationalist colonies to religious and social groups, all intent on building their own paradise. Although the groups were very different, they found common cause in opposition to the UN.

Very few of the colonies managed to construct their own space-based industry and shipyards before the UN decided to move in and effectively occupy all of the colonies. The net result was that resistance in space was minimal and tended to consist of what the UN was pleased to call piracy. To them, it seemed to signal a certain victory over the forces opposed to them. They were wrong.

To put it simply, and acknowledging in advance that the analogy is a limited one, the UNPF is engaged in a counter-insurgency campaign on a galactic scale. Of three hundred human-settled worlds, over two hundred and thirty have a major UNPF presence, ranging from a small garrison to a considerable fighting force. Despite Earth’s firm commitment to the war, they cannot claim to control more ground than they hold at any one time, and only the absolute control of orbital space surrounding many of the worlds prevents their total defeat. The UN, therefore, is trapped in a classic insurrection problem. They cannot win and they cannot be beaten.

An insurrection can be defeated by making political concessions, or reshaping the defeated nation, or even the complete extermination of the native population. The UN is incapable of using any method, simply because of the goals of the war. It is not enough to take and hold territory, but it must also put the colonies to work on behalf of Earth, a step that the colonists naturally find objectionable. (Not least, it should be added, because even if the UN managed to crush all resistance without further delay, it would only slow the inevitable decline and fall.) There are no political concessions that could be made without undermining the very basis of the war itself. The colonists would want a real say in their affairs, if not complete independence, and the UN would find that unacceptable. There is no hope of a negotiated peace.

Destroying the colonists, or altering their societies, would only ensure that the UN would be unable to exploit them for its own purposes.

This is not fully understood on Earth. The UN Media paints a constantly upbeat view of the war, claiming that vast tracts of land are taken and enemy forces are constantly decimated (a careful analysis would reveal that the UNPF had, according to the media, wiped out the entire colonist population several times over), which makes it difficult to accept that there is a serious problem. The forces garrisoning various worlds are often undermanned and short of supplies, something that the local rebels are very aware of, and frequently find themselves on the verge of defeat. Only orbital bombardment prevents the loss of many worlds to insurgent forces. The logistic problems inherent in servicing as many garrisons as the UN possesses only make the problems much worse. In short, the UN is unable to win and the insurgents are unable to push them off their worlds. The war has stalemated.

[Professor Stirling and a handful of his students were arrested for subversive activities two weeks after the above book was published, tried for spreading hate speech and anti-unionist propaganda and sentenced to a penal colony on Mars.]

Part II: Lieutenant

Chapter Ten

The UN is fond of claiming that it does not want to practice war, either against the colonists or anyone else, but the reality is different. While the vast majority of the UNPF starships are capable of civilian as well as military applications, a handful of starships have no purpose other than the military one. Those starships are generally concealed behind a façade of lies and misrepresentation, all of which conceals the fact that the UN, supposedly peaceful, requires the services of starships capable of destroying whole planets.