Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason (43 page)

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

Back on Old Earth, long before the UN evolved from a transnational talking shop to become the oppressive government of Earth, a new system for governing international relationships arose. It was referred to, not without reason, as MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction. Put simply, it stated that if the United Soviet Socialist Republic (a prisoner state now held up as an example of an proto-UN state) launched a massive nuclear strike against the United States of America, the Americans could detect the launch and launch their own nuclear weapons in response. No side could launch a nuclear assault without guaranteeing their own destruction.

As the USSR collapsed, this taboo lost its power, with the eventual use of nuclear weapons in a war zone – India against Pakistan – and two terrorist nukes, Marseilles and Stalingrad. The UN, therefore, was keen to remove the remaining nuclear stockpiles from Earth as quickly as possible and, as national governments collapsed into the overreaching transnational authority, this became possible. It also led to the creation of a security state that, intended to prevent a third nuclear terrorist attack, was used to create the modern-day UN. The threat of terrorists (now including patriots and independence-seeking factions) was, as always, a useful excuse for clamping down on freedom and personal liberties.

The MAD dynamic continued to hold power when the UN went to war against the colonies, some of which had their own nukes, or the ability to produce them. It rapidly became clear that nukes could be used against UN forces on the ground, but that it would provoke immediate retaliation against the civilian population of the colony world. This was not particularly welcome in some sections of the UN – they needed the colonies and their population to mend their economy – but it was accepted, on the grounds that nukes would make it impossible to hold down the colonies. The moral issues surrounding the use of nuclear weapons were ignored.

This assumed a degree of willingness on the part of the colonists to abide by the UN’s rule. In the later stages of the war, this willingness was severely tested. The UN itself was considering the use of WMD.

Part IV: Captain

Chapter Thirty-Four

Computer programmers talk in terms of GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. The reasoning is simple enough. If a computer – which is not capable of independent judgement – is programmed to believe that black is white, it will believe that black is white. This also applies to life support systems on starships, which is why they are heavily monitored by the crew and secondary systems. A starship’s computer, convinced that oxygen was poison to humans, would quite happily kill the entire crew.

Something of the same can be said for political indoctrination. If a child is taught that the UN is the finest system in the known universe from birth, they will find it hard to understand that it is nothing of the kind. They will be ready to believe anything of the UN’s enemies and to cast them as darkest villains. It should come as no surprise that political officers all have a certain inflexibility of mind when they start their careers, and few succeed in overcoming it. Those who do will often end up being arrested by their fellows, if they are unwise enough to share their doubts with anyone.

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

Devastator felt much as I remembered, I decided, as Lieutenant Anna Ossipavo escorted us to the conference room. The monitor was largely unchanged. I was surprised that Anna had remained onboard as a Lieutenant, but apparently Captain Shalenko had requested that she continue to serve him. I understood why now. A good First Lieutenant was rarer than gold. Muna was shaping up well. I only hoped that I had served Captain Harriman half as well.

The conference room was bigger than I remembered, although as a Junior Lieutenant I hadn’t had much opportunity to spend time in it. It held a table, a large display screen and a handful of chairs, three of which were occupied. I recognised Captain Shalenko and his Political Officer, but the third man was unknown to me. He was a grey man in a grey suit, without any insignia at all. I guessed that that meant that he was either important or someone pretending to be important.

Captain Shalenko rose to his feet as I entered and I realised, for the first time, that he was wearing a Commodore’s rank bars. I saluted him at once, which he brushed aside and shook my hand firmly. He looked older than I remembered, with more grey hair and a longer beard, but his grip was still strong.

“Welcome onboard, Commodore,” he said, with a faint grin. I understood. I might have been a fellow Captain now, but I could never be addressed as Captain onboard his ship. Even so, he was apparently a Commodore…and a Captain as well. “Congratulations on the promotion, John, even if it did come at a cost.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, slightly puzzled. If he were a Commodore, how could he be a Captain as well? “I understand that congratulations are in order for you as well, sir.”

“Maybe so,” Shalenko agreed. He tapped his bars thoughtfully. “They agreed to bump Anna up to Captain pro tem, but I don’t know if these will be permanent yet.” He looked up as two more men entered the conference room. “Ah, Captain Hardwick.”

Captain Hardwick was a man whose expression just dared me to make a joke about his name. He looked more like a Marine than a starship commanding officer, but there was no mistaking the Captain’s rank bars he wore, or the name of his ship on his lapel. George Robertson wasn't a name I recognised, but I knew the cruiser by reputation. She had a good history for hunting pirates and resistance starships.

“Alex,” Hardwick said, nodding to him. His rank pins below his rank bars showed that he had been a Captain for seven years, either being denied promotion or having refused it when it was offered. Either one could be the case. I had heard of Captains who had died on their ships after refusing transfer, despite injuries and age. I understood now I’d become a commanding officer myself. “And you must be John.”

His tone was neutral. Still, his time in grade made him senior to me. “Yes, sir,” I said, shaking his hand.

“I was sorry to hear about Percival,” Hardwick continued. “It was probably how he would have wanted to go, but he deserved better than that. I trust that you held a proper ceremony for him afterwards?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Hardwick grinned. “You don’t have to call me sir,” he reminded me. “You can even call me Gary if you like.”

The grey man cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind, we are operating under a time limit here,” he said. “Could we place the social interaction at the end of the meeting?”

“Of course, sir,” Shalenko said. “John, Gary, all of you, please would you be seated?”

I sat down. I had hoped that Deborah Tyler – a woman the entire crew had come to detest in less than a week – would sit away from me, but she sat down next to me with all the inevitability of Christmas, or death and taxes. I’d been as polite to her as I could, even fawning on her, but inwardly I couldn’t wait to have her blown out of the airlock. She was nothing more than a one-woman morale destroyer. If we could have turned her voice into a weapon, the UN would have been invincible.

The grey man took control of the display and brought up an image of a blue-green planet I recognised instantly. Heinlein was very like Earth, apart from the fact that the ratio of land to sea was practically reversed. The handful of seas on the planet’s surface were effectively massive lakes. It was an unusual occurrence, at least in the four hundred or so Earth-like worlds that the UN had surveyed, and I suspected that there were geologists still trying to account for it. It didn’t matter to me in any case. I was more interested in knowing why we had been summoned to the monitor.

“The planet Heinlein,” the grey man said. His tone hadn’t changed at all, but there wasn't the slightest doubt in the room that he was in charge. I wondered, absently, who he actually was and who he worked for. Could he be Intelligence, or some other department? “I understand that you all served there at one point in your careers.”

“Yes, sir,” Shalenko said. I recalled my own tour on Heinlein with mixed feelings. I hadn’t enjoyed the planet at all, but at the same time Heinlein had proved to me just how evil the system was, and why it had to be fought. Dead children swam in front of my eyes. The irony was that Heinlein had taught me how to build a cell structure and use it to strike a blow at the heart of the UN’s power. “John served there under me. Gary served there a year later as part of the asteroid-patrolling squadrons.”

I eyed Captain Hardwick with new respect. The battles in Heinlein’s asteroid belts had been brief bloody affairs with quarter neither asked nor given. The UN had lost several cruisers – which should have been invincible to all, but major warships – to the asteroid miners and had resorted to destroying any habitable asteroid that didn’t surrender at once. Even so, the war had raged on for months…and, according to the Brotherhood, was still going on.

“Yes, sir,” Captain Hardwick said. “We patrolled for five months before we took enough damage to force us back to Earth for repairs. If that missile had detonated closer…well, I wouldn’t be here to talk to you today.”

“Thank you,” the grey man said. He stroked his chin. “What you are about to hear is considered classified material. Discussing this information with anyone outside this circle will be regarded as a breech in security regulations and punished by life exile to Bounty. If any of you require a briefing on the relevant security protocols, please say so now.”

There was a pause. “Good,” he said, finally. When I’d been confirmed as Captain, I’d studied the Official Secrets Regulations carefully. “The war on Heinlein has taken a turn not exactly to our advantage.”

I smiled inwardly. I’d read Heinlein’s history of Earth – more interesting than the bland pap I’d been taught in school – and I knew where that line came from. I wondered if the UN had finally decided to admit defeat, except I knew the United Nations. They would hardly be trying to prepare an invasion of Williamson’s World if, at the same time, they were going to withdraw from Heinlein. Unless…

I thought about Devastator’s capabilities and felt my blood run cold.

“You may all have heard rumours about the recent sabotage campaign mounted against Peace Force starships and installations by workers who came from Heinlein,” the grey man continued. “The effects of the sabotage have been much more serious than we appreciated at the time. Although we didn’t lose any starships directly, two cruisers suffered reactor overloads and ended up having to be towed to the shipyards for reconstruction. Other ships had problems ranging from the amusing to the serious – including the recent death of Captain Harriman.

“This has been merged with an ongoing offensive mounted against Infantry troops on the ground,” he added. “Attacks against peacekeeping forces have risen tenfold in the past five months, backed up by a growing campaign mounted against spacecraft and installations in orbit. Some of them have been direct assaults by the remaining Heinlein starships, others have been sneaker, while some are clearly the results of sabotage. General Hoover’s attempts to use industrial facilities in the Heinlein System for supplying his basic requirements have backfired. We nearly lost a starship due to a particularly cunning piece of sabotage.”

I frowned as I listened. The United Nations wasn't known for being so honest with its own people and I felt it boded ill. “Certain decisions have been taken,” the grey man concluded. “It has been decided to force the Heinlein Government to the table, by any means necessary.”

That, I decided as the silence grew longer, might not be possible. I hadn’t understood all the implications of Heinlein’s Government, but one I did understand – in hindsight – was that most of the Citizen’s Council would have escaped the destruction of their building, simply by not being there at the time. They preferred to use electronic communications systems and most of the people swept up by the Infantry had been nothing, but harmless workers. The UN had declared the Government captured, however, and no one had dared to disagree, openly.

The grey man looked at Shalenko. “Your orders are simple,” he said. “You are to take Devastator, with the two cruisers for escort, to Heinlein and destroy Valentine.”

I kept my face blank, somehow. Valentine was the second-largest city on Heinlein, although it would have vanished without trace in any of Earth’s crumbling metropolises. It had a population of over five hundred thousand if I recalled correctly – tiny compared to Earth’s population – and most of them had been penned inside the city by the Infantry, after the invasion. They’d resisted, of course, and the city had rapidly become a no-go area. I’d expected that the Infantry would have finally pacified it, but apparently they’d had other considerations. I wondered how many reporters had gone inside the ‘secure’ city and lived to tell the tale.

“Valentine has been picked for several reasons,” the grey man said, when we said nothing. “It is large enough to make our point, yet it is not worth preserving from our point of view. It makes the most sense as a target.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The UN had forsworn nuclear weapons on planetary surfaces for years. How could they break the strongest taboo the human race had? Even without that taboo, Heinlein had definitely built nukes of its own before the invasion. What was to stop them launching them against the UN’s Infantry? How much damage could they wreck if they took the gloves off.