Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason (21 page)

The countryside was surprisingly neat, but it was marred by the destroyed towns and villages we passed, places where the defenders had tried to use as strongpoints. Eventually, they’d been bombed or blown out of them, leaving a blackened set of ruins on the countryside and thousands more civilians dead. A handful of men and women were wandering through the rubble, looking for survivors perhaps, and some of our escort unleashed a few rounds in their direction. I felt another rising gorge of vomit as a woman, who couldn’t have been older than me, fell to the ground with a hole in her head. I wanted to grab the weapon and shoot the infantryman, but what would have been the point? There were thousands upon thousands where he came from.

“There’s the city,” one of my escorts said. “Get ready to duck if you insist on watching.”

Lazarus was a city? My first impression was that it was a large town. I’d only seen two cities on Earth – I’d gone to Houston for a brief visit to relatives once, back before my father lost his job permanently – and both of them had sprawled out for miles, crammed to bursting with citizens who had no job, no life, and no hope. Lazarus looked like a dream come true; it was comfortable, surprisingly pretty and very open. If it hadn’t been for the handful of blackened buildings and the presence of thousands of UN infantry, it would have been a paradise.

The entire city seemed to be teeming with infantry marching the streets. They didn’t have the same presence as the Marines, but they seemed, instead, to be almost terrified. I saw them watching a pair of girls across the street – wearing outfits that would have been an invitation to rape back on Earth – as if they were scared of the girls. It was uncanny. There wasn't even a wolf whistle. The girls, for their part, completely ignored the soldiers, who looked glad to be ignored.

It changed as we drove into the heart of the city. Here, there were more damaged buildings and soldiers…and prisoners. Hundreds of men and women sat on the grounds, their hands firmly cuffed behind their backs, watched by a handful of heavily-armed soldiers. A pile of guns, larger than any I’d seen in my entire career, had been dumped in one corner of the yard. The prisoners gazed at the infantrymen, their eyes promising bloody vengeance, one day.

“Arrested for possessing illegal weapons,” my escort commented. “We’ve arrested men and women with enough weapons to fight a small civil war on their own.”

I stared. “What’s going to happen to them?”

“The detention camps, probably,” he said. “They’re…just bursting at the seams already. Everyone on this damned planet has guns.” We stopped in the middle of a large courtyard. “Here we are, son; hop off.”

The soldiers on the inner gate, at least, were very alert. They checked my identification carefully and then did the same for the reporters, some of whom protested at the imposition. They were ignored. No one, it seemed, was taking chances. Judging by the sullen resentment of the prisoners and the damage the town – no, city, I kept reminding myself – had taken, it was probably fully justified. A team of staff officers arrived and took charge of the reporters and I found myself alone…

“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called. “What are you doing here, you stupid bastard?”

I turned to see Roger. “An armed escort and two military policemen,” I joked. It was the old Academy definition of a patriotic volunteer. I hadn’t realised, until now, just why we had been taught to believe that. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I ended up taking down the Admiral’s zoo of reporters,” Roger said. I winced in sympathy. “Fancy a drink?”

There might have been a war on, but the headquarters staff hadn’t wasted time in seeing to their comforts. There were several large canteens, two bars and a brothel. The latter, I noted, was unmanned. Roger explained that the staff officers had found several women willing to work in them for the first week, and then the women had managed to poison the visitors, somehow.

“They probably did us a favour,” he added, with a hint of his old smile. “The sooner we start fighting this war properly, the better.”

I stared at him over my lemonade. Alcoholic drinks were strictly forbidden on duty and even through my charges had gone off to be lied to – or told the official version of what was going on, which was more or less the same thing – I was still on duty. Roger had ordered a exotic cocktail that looked as if it could glow in the dark, but he hadn’t drunk enough to make him drunk, had he?

“Roger,” I said, slowly, “look what we’ve done to their planet?”

“So?” He asked, taking another sip. I couldn’t believe it. What had happened to the carefree boy I remembered from the Academy, or the first starship we’d served on together? “The war has to be won, John. If they’d decided to be reasonable about it…”

“Why are we even here?” I asked. The wave of guilt bubbled out of my mind. “Heinlein wasn't a threat to us, was it?”

“Oh yes it was,” Roger said. He seemed to hesitate for a long moment. “Look, John, you’re a friend, so I’m going to give you a word of advice. If you’re having doubts, keep your mouth shut about them. It’s not healthy to shoot your mouth off here.”

“Why?” I demanded. “What’s happened to you?”

“I grew up,” Roger admitted. He sighed. “Look…you know about my family, right? Part of the Establishment, control several seats on the UN General Assembly, have interests in most of the industrial concerns…”

I nodded. Roger had never made an issue of it before. He could have been effectively running the Academy with a few words in the right ears, but instead he’d earned his Ensign’s bars the hard way. We’d all respected him for that, even though we had also envied him his position. He would rise far higher than any of us. I couldn’t believe the change that had come over him.

“The Admiral is…well, call him my Uncle,” Roger said. “He chose me specifically for the post on his ship, even promised me a bump-up to First Lieutenant as soon as it could be done…and he talks to me. There’s so much I didn’t know back at the Academy, but the Admiral…he knows it all.”

He paused. “You must have seen Heinlein’s asteroid mining operation and the orbital industries?” He asked. I nodded. I’d seen them on the display as Devastator had passed them to take up position to bombard the planet. “I’ve seen the reports on them. Heinlein, with a smaller industry, was actually on the verge of matching – even exceeding – the entire production levels of Earth.”

“Impossible,” I said. Earth – the solar system – was the most heavily industrialised location in known space. The factories on Earth, Luna, Mars, Jupiter’s moons and hundreds upon hundreds of asteroids…how could Heinlein hope to match and exceed them in barely two hundred years? “Roger…”

“I’ve seen their systems and I’ve seen ours,” Roger said. “They use heavy automation and vastly more advanced technology. Those ships they used against us didn’t come out of nowhere. If they’d had ten more years, perhaps less, they would have been dictating terms to us instead. The Admiral made that clear to me. Their system and ours cannot co-exist. One of us must destroy the other.”

I winced. “Is that why we’re here?”

Roger nodded. “If we can break them down into good little UN citizens, well and good,” he said. “Even if not…we can still prevent them from becoming a major threat to us, just by maintaining an occupation force on their surface and in the high orbitals. Their industry can be used to boost ours. Their people can help us maintain Earth’s systems…”

“Earth’s crumbling systems,” I commented, angrily. “Wouldn’t it be better to train up new engineers of our own?”

“I said that to the Admiral,” Roger said. He shook his head. “My family likes to think that it has influence, even control, but our powers are far more limited than you might think. How can we solve Earth’s problems? If we try to fix them in any other way, we will merely be replaced ourselves. We don’t control the system – no one controls the system.”

I opened my mouth and then bit down hard on what I’d been about to say. “Like I said, don’t go mouthing off,” Roger concluded, standing up. “You have a long career ahead of you. Why waste it for the people on this worthless planet?”

He left, leaving me alone, thinking about what I’d almost said. If the system is broken, or beyond repair, why not destroy the system? Roger would have had to report that, wouldn’t he? As it was, he thought he’d done me a favour.

The hell of it was that I didn’t even know if he was right.

Chapter Seventeen

The UN, despite its claims to be inclusive, multicultural and non-judgemental, must not permit any other system to develop, independent of itself. A successful system based on other principles would stand as an example to the UN’s citizens of a society that worked better than the UN…and force them to ask, if they understood it, why the United Nations could not work so well. It is that line of questioning that the UN must prevent, at all costs. A rebellion on any of the colony worlds could be handled. A rebellion on Earth itself would be lethal.

-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.

I met the Specials the next morning.

According to Master Sergeant Erwin Herzog, back on the old Jacques Delors, there were four levels of soldiers in the United Nations. There were the police and their counter-terror units, the infantrymen, the Marines…and the Specials. The Specials, he’d explained, fell somewhere between the Marines – who were trained to operate in space, rather than on the ground – and the infantry. They weren't as incompetent as the infantry – his words – but they were also utterly ruthless. They were trained to defeat the enemy or die trying.

“You must be Walker,” their leader growled. He was as large as Herzog, a giant of a man, covered in tattoos that were strictly non-regulation, but I doubted that anyone dared to complain. I was intimidated already. “I’m Jock. This is Charlie” – a smaller man, carrying a rifle that was larger than he was – “Judy” – a woman who had saved her head, apart from a tiny strip of hair surrounding her dome – “and Dan” – another giant of a man, but clearly oriental in origin, despite the name – “and you’ve been assigned to us. Can you shoot?”

“Yes,” I said, confidently. The Marines had hammered that into me on the Jacques Delors. “I’m qualified with pistol, rifle and laser pistol.”

“Really?” Jock said, managing to express his disbelief without – quite – being offensive. “The last officer who was assigned to us wet himself when we thrust a gun into his hands and died because he didn’t shoot the wanker attacking us in time. Perhaps you’ll last longer…follow me.”

He led us around a set of buildings, forcing me to walk faster to keep up with him, and I was breathing heavily at the end. The four team members didn’t seem to be bothered in the slightest by the pace, bastards. The infantry had set up a shooting range in a large field. It was populated by seven officers, all staff punks in clean uniforms, who stared at us in disbelief when we arrived. Jock marched right up to them, glared into the largest officer’s face, and told them to piss off. I’d never seen headquarters soldiers moving so fast.

“They’ll be still wetting themselves this time tomorrow,” Jock predicted cheerfully. He unslung his rifle and passed to me with one hand, pointing down towards the targets in the distance. “Hit that, now!”

I almost stumbled, but managed to bring the rifle up and fire a single round. The target rang like a bell when I hit it, sending the bullet bouncing off somewhere into the distance. Jock frowned at me and nodded to Dan, who unslung his rifle and fired a shot so quickly that it was a blur. He'd hit the target dead centre.

“Again,” Jock barked. I moved faster this time, somehow. “Again!”

It was an hour later when I’d finally reached something Jock considered barely acceptable. I’d fired off more ammunition than I’d ever used before, even back with the Marines, learning how to use the rifle properly. The Specials had made their point quite well. I’d also had to listen to Jock’s rants on the subject of the infantry and their poor shooting habits. It was a window into a world I didn’t know existed.

“The officers are given a budget for training and they’re also rewarded for spending as little as possible,” he’d explained, angrily. “There are soldiers on the ground here who are firing shots for the first time in their lives. Laser training simulations can’t tell you everything about the weapons, can they? No – but the stupid morons keep getting their men killed because it looks better on the report.”

He turned to lead us out again. “Ah, sir,” I said, “What about…”

“My name is Jock,” Jock snapped. “We’re fighting men, not headquarters morons with shit in their brains. What is it?”

I hesitated. “Shouldn’t we fill out a report…?”

“On the shooting, hell no,” Jock thundered. The others laughed, but I didn’t see the joke. “That’s the other reason officers are so poor. They spend most of their time filling out paperwork and not working with their men. They can’t even rely on the Sergeants to do it because they have to do paperwork as well and its easier not to train at all. I bet you half your wages for this year that half the occupation force will not live to see their wives, girlfriends and whores again.”

“No bet,” I said, finally. Jock’s way of doing things was almost refreshing, even if I did feel like a fish out of water. “What now?”