Patriotic Treason

Chapter Ten

UNS Jacques Delors had been beautiful, even to an untrained eye. UNS Devastator was ugly as sin. I found myself staring at her through the docking tube and wondered just what the designer had been thinking. She looked blocky and dark, studded with sensors and weapons, a blunt instrument among shining knives. The designer had been in no doubt what the starship was actually designed to do and, in an unusual burst of honesty, had designed the starship to fit the role. I knew that if I lived on a planet, the last thing I would want to see was Devastator in my skies.

I checked my reflection in the glass and walked the rest of the way down to the airlock. This time, I was determined, there would be no embarrassing mistakes. I was a Lieutenant now, as hard as it was to believe, and I couldn’t afford to alienate my new commanding officer. I wasn’t even sure if the Captain would come to meet me personally — it didn’t seem likely, somehow — but when I stepped through the airlock, I came face to face with an attractive blond woman, wearing a uniform like mine. I checked her service pins automatically. She’d been a Lieutenant for three years.

“Welcome onboard the Devastator,” she said, in a surprisingly soft voice. She had an odd accent I didn’t recognise. “Lieutenant Walker?”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” I said. With that length of service, I guessed that she was probably the First Lieutenant and therefore the Captain’s confident and second-in-command. “Permission to come onboard?”

“Granted,” she said. She waited for me to finish saluting the flag before continuing. “I’m Lieutenant Anna Ossipavo, First Lieutenant. The Captain is quite eager to see you, John, so please come with me.”

I doubted that the Captain was really eager to see me, but I followed her through the starship’s passages and corridors anyway, noting how the monitor was considerably larger than my old vessel. Captain Harriman had been able to reach any point on his ship within minutes, but the monitor was much larger; I wondered if the starship actually had intership cars. The starship might even have been large enough to survive hits that could have knocked the Jacques Delors out of commission. It wasn’t something I felt inclined to test. If the Senior Chief had been right, the UNPF wasn’t getting starships in anything like the numbers it required.

“That will be your cabin there,” Anna said, pointing to an unmarked door as we entered Officer Country. I wasn’t too surprised to see that it was just at the border between Officer Country and the remainder of the ship: I was still a very junior Lieutenant. “We’ll move your possessions there after you’ve spoken with the Captain and he’s welcomed you onboard formally.”

“Thank you,” I said, slightly nervously. I’d heard only a few rumours about Captain Shalenko, but few of them had been good. He might not have been listed among the Captains it was generally safer to commit suicide than to serve under, but that didn’t mean that he was one of the good people. I was tempted to ask Anna about him, but I doubted she’d tell me anything. She was probably loyal to him if she was his First Lieutenant. “I’ve only got this duffel bag.”

“Really?” Anna asked, lightly. “You’re a Lieutenant now. You’re entitled to two duffel bags.”

She smiled to show that it was a joke and pressed her hand against a panel beside a hatch, which lit up at her touch. “Sir, it’s Anna,” she said. “I’ve brought the new Lieutenant.”

“Thank you,” a gravely voice said. The hatch hissed open slowly. “Come on in, the pair of you.”

Captain Shalenko was sitting at his desk, studying a terminal, but he closed it down and swung around to face us as we entered. He was an impressive man — at a guess, he was actually younger than Captain Harriman — with short grey hair and a stern face. It was probably the result of cosmetic surgery, I decided, in a moment of disrespect. I hadn’t seen a chin that strong since the last time I’d watched the video pictures. He was tall, I realised as he stood up, and strong, perhaps even stronger than me. It was quite possible that he, too, trained with the Marines. His blue eyes studied me for a long moment, before flickering over to Anna and dismissing her with a nod. She nodded back and left the cabin, leaving us alone together. I had the uncomfortable sensation that I’d been thrown to the lions.

“So, you’re Percival’s latest find,” Captain Shalenko said, gravely. His voice had the same accent as Anna’s, but I still couldn’t place it. I was so surprised to hear Captain Harriman referred to as Percival that I didn’t have time to think about it. “I understand that I have you to thank for some of the workers on my ship. Without them, we might not have met our departure date in time to join the invasion.”

Invasion? I wondered. I didn’t dare ask. I hadn’t wanted the reminder that I’d captured people whose only crime was refusing to be sent to Earth to help maintain a crumbling society, but I couldn’t say that to him. If they’d worked on the Devastator, my life was in their hands… and it wasn’t a particularly reassuring thought. They had good grounds to hate me and the rest of the crew.

The Captain straightened up suddenly. “I am Captain Aleksandr Borisovich Shalenko,” he announced, as if I should know the name. I didn’t. “I am the commanding officer of this starship. There is one rule on this ship and that is that what I say goes, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I knew the right answer. It struck me as odd — most Captains reported to their Political Officers, at least for some of their duties — but who was I to question?

“Good,” Captain Shalenko said. “You’ll find that our duties are quite different to those of a common cruiser. You, as the newest Lieutenant, will be trained to operate every one of our systems, just in case we lose another Lieutenant on detached duty. You will also stand watch — under supervision for the first couple of weeks — and handle logistics.”

“Logistics, sir?” I asked, surprised. I’d had some experience on my old ship with logistics, but I hadn’t expected to be placed in charge of them on the Devastator.

“Yes,” Shalenko said. There wasn’t an inch of give in his voice. “You will learn to handle logistics so that we are well-supplied for the coming operation. It is something that requires a Lieutenant and my previous logistics officer was promoted at the end of the last cruise. I expect that you will be on my ship for at least two years, John.”

His voice darkened slightly. “These are hard times for the United Nations,” he added. “We will be called upon to serve in whatever capacity we can manage. I expect that you will do your duty to spread peace and civilisation throughout the galaxy. You are an officer in the finest space force in existence and I expect you to live up to it, or I will have your resignation. Do you understand me?”

Captain Shalenko, I realised suddenly, was a fanatic. “Yes, sir,” I said. A resignation onboard ship would be meaningless if we were in the wormhole, but it would be quite possible to eject someone into space if they irritated the Captain too much. “I’ve seen Terra Nova firsthand, sir…”

“They should just scorch that damned planet and start all over again,” Captain Shalenko snapped, angrily. “We have the whip hand and we don’t use it, because of people back home who don’t understand what the real situation is in deep space. They don’t understand and they don’t care and all we can do is pick up the pieces afterwards. No matter what we offered to give them, they will keep fighting until we can pound it into their heads that fighting never gets anyone anywhere.”

He glared at me, daring me to disagree. I didn’t, but I did wonder — would Jase and his friends have learned anything from the beating I gave them, only four days ago? I might even have shown the civilians on the ground that resistance wasn’t futile, although it might not matter in the long run. The state, I was starting to understand, wouldn’t want a grassroots movement for change; hell, they relied upon the scrum of the streets to keep people in their place. If they rose up against the gangs, the police would probably end up stopping them with extreme violence. It wouldn’t do to have people trying to change the way they lived…

“Anna will show you to your cabin and then give you access to the logistics system,” Captain Shalenko concluded, as if he had never spoken at all. “If the data-constipated bureaucrats give you a hard time, refer them to me personally and I’ll deal with them. We need everything we can get and I don’t care how much they whine about the costs, or how badly it will screw up their budgets. We need to be fully provisioned before the main body of the fleet starts working up. We’ve been first ready for a long time and I don’t intend to stop now, even if I have to break in a new logistics officer.”

He raised his voice. “Dismissed!”

I saluted again, turned, and marched with parade ground precision out of the hatch and back into Officer Country. I had barely noticed how large his cabin had been, or how decorated it had been, with a handful of truly disturbing images lining the bulkheads. Anna smiled at me as the hatch slid closed and favoured me with a wink, but I wasn’t sure how to respond. It had been too long since I had been with a woman. I hadn’t even visited one of the brothels on Orbit Nine.

Or perhaps she was just being friendly.

“You survived, I see,” she said, with a wink. I nodded in understanding. Captain Shalenko was a very different person to Captain Harriman. He was far more of a tyrant…and a fanatic to boot. “How are you feeling?”

“Enthusiastic,” I said, dryly. She smiled knowingly at me. “He said that I was to become the new logistics officer?”

“You poor bastard,” Anna said, as she turned to lead me down the corridor. “You do know why that’s the junior lieutenant’s billet?” I shook my head. “There’s a fortnight until we are scheduled to depart from this station and you’ll need every second — quite literally — to get what the Captain wants out here. The bastards at the supply dumps have never served on a starship themselves and they will question everything, even including oxygen tanks and spacesuits. We’re supposed to get everything we need, but don’t be too surprised if you end up having to call in the Captain and get him to pull strings.”

She smiled again, rather tightly. “Consider it a rite of passage, John,” she added. “If you can survive the accountants who want to make sure that we don’t take more than we absolutely need, you’ll survive anything, even the Captain in one of his rages.”

“Yes…ah, Anna,” I said, slightly unnerved. I hadn’t counted on becoming the logistics officer so quickly. Hell, I hadn’t counted on it at all. “When will I be on watch?”

“You’re a keen one, aren’t you?” Anna said, dryly. I couldn’t tell if she approved or not, but somehow I doubted it. “The day is divided into eight watches of three hours each and they all require a senior officer on duty. A bit of a waste of time when we’d docked, if you ask me, but the Captain insists on it. You’ll get the 1200-1500 slot tomorrow, with the Captain or me watching over your shoulder, and then we’ll put you on a regular slot once we’re sure of your ability. The Captain likes to shake things up from time to time so you’ll discover that your slot will keep changing.”

“Thank you,” I said, doubtfully.

“Don’t worry about it,” Anna said. “Nothing much ever happens at the docks. It gets much more exiting when we’re in hostile space.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “He mentioned something about an invasion…?”

“You’ll hear all about that later,” Anna assured me. We stopped outside my cabin and she motioned for me to press my hand against the sensor. The hatch hissed open and we stepped inside. “This is your cabin, John. I’d suggest that you got settled in, and then started working through the logistics papers one by one. I’ll send Kitty to help you out in a couple of hours. She was assisting Lieutenant Chi with the logistics duties before Chi was promoted to Commander and assigned to one of the bases orbiting Mars.”

She walked out the hatch and it hissed closed behind her. I let her go, staring around my new cabin. It was smaller than the old wardroom we’d shared, but it was all mine! It was barely large enough to swing a cat, but it was all for me. I didn’t have to share it with anyone. I hadn’t realised how much I’d loathed the wardroom until I’d been given a cabin of my own. I spent nearly thirty minutes just exploring all the hidden drawers and unpacking my duffel bag before opening the terminal and logging on to the ship’s computer. As a Lieutenant, I had more access than as an Ensign, but certain details were still closed to me. I thought, briefly, of the icon the Senior Chief had given me and winced. I’d spent two days on Orbit Nine examining it and if I had dared to hook it up to a shared terminal…

“Maybe not,” I said aloud, and brought up the logistics files. I’d seen them before with Lieutenant Hatchet, but the Devastator required far more supplies than any mere light cruiser. Food and drink were obvious, as were a goodly number of spare parts — the Engineer had complained bitterly about shortages on the Jacques Delors — but others were more confusing, the more so because they didn’t come with an explanation, other than that the Captain wanted them for his ship. What, I wondered, were KEW capsules, or buckshot containers, or even maser tuners? In total, the Captain was requisitioning over a thousand different items… and that was being conservative.

I opened the direct link to the Supply Department on Orbit Nine and placed the orders. I hoped that they would just agree at once and send the items over to the ship, but I knew better. It wasn’t an hour before a message came back, reluctantly granting a quarter of what I’d asked for…and querying the rest. It was just absurd. Every starship in the UNPF needed a reserve supply of oxygen, just in case the life support systems broke down, but they were demanding to know why we needed it. What did they think I was going to do? Steal the oxygen and sell it on the black market? I was still staring at the message in numb disbelief when the hatch chimed.

“Come in,” I called, absently, keying the hatch.

“You must be John,” a rich female voice said. I turned to see a redheaded woman wearing a Lieutenant’s uniform, smiling at me. She was utterly beautiful. I couldn’t help, but notice her. If she’d lived down on Earth, she would probably have been raped by the gangs by now, unless she had connections. I’d seen it happen far too often. “How are you?”

“Swamped,” I said, finding my voice. This had to be Kitty. “I don’t even know where to begin?”

“I had the same reaction,” she admitted, with a grin. She extended a hand and I took it automatically. “Lieutenant Kitty Hanover.”

“John Walker,” I said, seriously. It was an effort to drag my mind back to the problem of logistics, but somehow I managed it. It helped that I didn’t want to look like a fool on my first day. “How the hell do I answer these stupid questions?”

Kitty leaned over my shoulder and smiled thinly. “Oh, that’s Cecil,” she said. I stared at her in puzzlement. “He’s one of the staff officers in the Supply Department. I tried to charm him once, but it turned out that he was homosexual and wasn’t interested in my charms.” She chuckled, leaving me to reflect on his insanity. “He’s a right royal prick, so just copy and paste the answers from last year.”

She tapped keys on the terminal and brought up the document. I was starting to see why Lieutenant Chi had been so keen to leave. He’d written massive essays on the subject of why the Devastator required so much from the supply department. They didn’t even come from Earth, I realised, as a bell began to sound in my mind. The supplies all came from the asteroid belt and the industrial habitats there.

“They’ll question most of it again, so repeat what you said in sharper tones,” she added. “Don’t worry, you have a fortnight. Just keep bombarding them until they give in. If they don’t give in, tell the Captain the day before we depart. He’ll tear them a new asshole.”

“Thanks,” I said, seriously.

“You’re welcome,” Kitty said. “Now, do you want a tour of the ship or not?”

Chapter Eleven

If there was one thing that Captain Harriman and Captain Shalenko had in common, it was a shared desire to see that their starships were always in the best condition possible, regardless of the circumstances. The Devastator’s Engineer found that there were no objections to obtaining the most expensive spare parts ever, while the starship’s crew and senior officers found themselves working endlessly on keeping the starship in good shape. I had heard of starships where essential maintenance was deferred endlessly, risking hundreds of lives, but the Devastator wasn’t one of them. Captain Shalenko wouldn’t have allowed it.

Life as a Lieutenant was very different to life as an Ensign, but it had its compensations. Apart from the cabin and the joyous opportunity to be alone for a while, it had additional duties and responsibilities. I had never been more than a little responsible on my old ship and I had always known that I was under supervision. That wasn’t true on the Devastator. I was expected to take charge of myself and ask for help if I needed it, not watched by senior officers terrified that I would make a serious mistake and crash the ship into an asteroid. It wasn’t likely to happen, but from what the Senior Chief had told me, it was quite possible for a new Ensign to make every mistake in the book. We were kept under very close supervision.

And I also grew to hate the logistics personnel back on Orbit Nine, or scattered around the Solar System. The speed of light delay imposed on radio traffic kept me from screaming at them, but they seemed to take an unholy delight in slowing my requests for supplies, or new equipment. They never seemed to run out of excuses for refusing our requests and when we finally managed to convince them to send us the items, we often discovered that it was late. The Engineer discovered that a shipment of spare parts was shoddy and chewed me out for it, leaving me to pass on his displeasure to the bureaucrats. Apparently the spare parts had passed the checking process back on the industrial asteroid, but when the Engineer had checked them, they hadn’t passed even a simple check. He hadn’t been happy and had had to counter-sign more requests and demands for immediate delivery.

It didn’t help that other starships were cannoning up as well. The Captain hadn’t said anything else about a possible invasion, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the UNPF Headquarters was forming up a task force for operations outside the solar system. Nineteen starships, the most formidable force gathered for quite some time, were being assembled near Orbit Nine, each one trying to get their inventories filled before they departed. It might have moved quicker if I’d sent the Marines to shoot a few bureaucrats, but Kitty had told me that there were always more where they came from. The UNPF could have built an orbital tower reaching all the way to Mars with the paperwork. After barely a week of dealing with the bureaucrats, I was ready to slam my fist through the terminal and choke the life out of them. They just didn’t understand.

“Of course they don’t understand,” Kitty said, when I complained to her. She might have had a few months on me, seniority-wise, but we had become friends. I liked to think that we might become something more — there was no regulation against dating someone in the same rank and grade as yourself — but so far it hadn’t happened. “Show me the bureaucrat who served on a starship, even for a day, and I’ll buy you a five-course meal at Finnegan’s Wake.”

I snorted. “No bet,” I said. I already knew what I would find. “That animal doesn’t exist.”

“Quite,” Kitty agreed. She sat up suddenly and smiled. “There are still five days until we depart, John, so if you can’t get anything in three more days, report to the Captain.”

I scowled. I didn’t want to report to the Captain and admit that I had failed, even though I had managed to get my hands on most of the wanted list. I’d taken to checking everything carefully with the help of a pair of Ensigns — it seemed impossible that I had ever been that young — just in case of something else going wrong, but so far I’d found nothing. Somehow, it wasn’t reassuring. The Engineer had shown me just how many things could look normal…and then break down at just the wrong moment. If the wormhole generator broke down…well, it was a long flight to the nearest inhabited planet at sublight speed.

But I might have no choice. “I understand,” I said. I felt utterly snowed under by logistics alone. “Does it get any easier when the ship’s away from Earth?”

My terminal buzzed. “Lieutenant Walker, report to the Political Officer at once,” it squawked. “I repeat, Lieutenant Walker, report to the Political Officer at once.”

“At a guess, I’d say no,” Kitty said, dryly. I laughed, nervously. I hadn’t met the Political Officer yet and didn’t know what she was like. “Don’t worry, you will get used to it.”

Political Officer Ellen Nakamura was a strange blend of Japanese and European features. She was blond, with a tall willowy body, yet her face was more typically Japanese with faintly slanted eyes. She would have been beautiful if she hadn’t looked, constantly, as if she smelt something vaguely unpleasant in the air. Unlike Jason Montgomerie, she looked terrifyingly efficient and dangerous; she even wore a pistol at her belt. I was less impressed by that than I might have been without the Marine training sessions, but even so…it was a sign of grace and favour. Only the Captain was allowed to carry a pistol on his ship normally.

“Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” she said, somehow managing to convey the impression that she was smelling me in the air. Her eyes flickered once over my body and then focused in on my face. It was disconcerting. I had never met a woman who didn’t blink before. “I have not had the time to meet with you before and I do trust that I am not keeping you from anything important.”

“No, thank you,” I said, carefully. She was keeping me from writing yet another abusive message to the Supply Department, but I knew better than to say that. Ellen was clearly a very different kettle of fish to anyone else. Besides, I wasn’t expected on watch for another three hours and really should have been trying to catch a nap.

“Good, good,” Ellen said. Her voice was vaguely seductive, but her body language was all wrong, as if she were a blunt instrument measuring its target. “I have heard great things about you, John. I do hope that the tales haven’t grown in the telling.”

I said nothing. I was vaguely aware that Captain Harriman and Jason Montgomerie had written glowing testimonials about my abilities, but that was something that every candidate for promotion had to have. It wasn’t enough to be average: I had to constantly set the standard for everyone else…and walk on water besides. If they had tried to promote all six of us at once, the Promotions Board would have probably gotten very confused when they read the sworn statements.

“And you caught the men and women who were attempting to slip away from us,” she added. Her gaze suddenly sharpened and bore into my eyes. “How do you feel about that?”

I answered carefully, only to discover that it was only the first part of a searching interrogation covering everything from my early life at school to my shore leave. I worried at first if she knew anything about what I’d done on Earth, but as she wore on, I realised that even if she did know, she didn’t care. Jase and his friends were nothing to her, so far beneath her notice that she didn’t even know they existed. I could guess at her background. The odds were that she came from a family like Roger’s and had been born to her position.

“You’re going to fit in here well,” she concluded, finally. I hoped that she was wrong; the hints about the Devastator’s missions had been worrying enough, but I was stuck. The only purpose the ship seemed designed for was to bombard targets on the ground. “Do you like the media?”

“The media?” I asked, puzzled. “I haven’t had time to watch anything since I came onboard the ship.”

She smiled. The media spent most of its time pumping out programs intended to keep the lower classes tranquil, mainly boring stories about perfect people in perfect lives. The propaganda for the UNPF had at least been entertaining, although it had shied away from the suggestion that anything like violence might be involved somewhere. The remainder of the media had mainly carried stories about how great life was on the colonies under the UN… and how stupid a handful of rogue colonists were being in resisting the UN’s paternal oversight. I couldn’t say that I was a fan of the media. I’d hardly had the time to become a fan.

“We are going to be playing host to a number of reporters,” Ellen said, smiling openly for the first time. It was still rather disconcerting. “Among your other duties, you will play host to them and serve as their… first port of call. Give them whatever they want, within reason. They’re very important people.”

I felt cold even before she took me down to the airlock to introduce me. The reporters looked worse than we had done back when we had boarded the Jacques Delors. Two of them looked as if they were going to be sick, despite the artificial gravity, and the others looked worse. I could see the thoughts flickering through their heads; they had barely been on the ship a few seconds and they already couldn’t wait to get back to the ground.

“Welcome onboard the Devastator,” Ellen trilled, spreading her arms wide and accepting a kiss from a dark man who was so overweight that zero gravity would only have been an asset. Ellen sounded as if she were sucking up to them and, I realised suddenly, they were responding to it. Four men, three women…all reporters. I noticed that they’d dumped a collection of bags outside the airlock in the docking tube — a serious breech of regulations — and scowled inwardly. I’d have to get some crewmen to help me move their luggage to their cabins. “You’ve in the staterooms in Officer Country — John, if you’ll bring up the rear, please?”

She led them through the corridors and I was grateful that she’d put me at the rear. It was all I could do to avoid bursting out into laughter. Two of the girls — no, female reporters; reporters aren’t human — wore high heels and were clearly having problems walking on the deck. If they fell over, the dirty part of my mind commented, they would expose everything they had in those tight dresses. I saw crewmen turning to stare as they passed, with the more adroit among them concealing smiles. They knew, as I did, just how badly the reporters had prepared for their voyage. I wouldn’t have bet on them packing a spacesuit, even though regulations insisted that all passengers had to have their own pressure suits in case of emergencies. The four men weren’t much better. The fatty seemed to be having real problems manoeuvring his bulk through the passageways. Almost everyone who served on a starship was slim — exercise was also mandated by regulations — and the corridors hadn’t been designed for his bulk.

“Here you are,” Ellen said, finally, opening the hatch for them to enter the stateroom. I hadn’t realised that Devastator had so many crew quarters, although I suspected that the designers had probably had something else in mind. The cabins in the stateroom would have suited forty Cadets or Ensigns. I doubted that even an Admiral on a battleship would have such accommodation.

“It’s too small,” one of the women said. She had a nasal voice that made me detest her right from the start, a high-pitched whine that might have been more suited to a dog whistle. She hobbled around on her high heels, the better to glare at Ellen. “We were promised the best quarters on the ship.”

“There are the best quarters on the ship,” Ellen said. She didn’t look hassled in the slightest, despite staring into a face that showed the signs of too much cosmetic surgery. It might have looked good on the videos, but face to face it was appalling. “They were designed for an Admiral and his staff, more than suitable for you.”

She smiled at the men and I watched them melt under her smile. “And if you have any further questions, Lieutenant Walker will be glad to handle them,” she continued. My thoughts were unprintable. “I have to return to help the Captain make the final preparations to depart.”

I watched as she swept out, having thrown me to creatures that were worse than lions. “This is our manifesto,” one of the male reporters said, thrusting a sheet of paper into my hands. I was surprised that they didn’t use datapads, but perhaps reporters were exempt from the strict limits on how much paper people could use. It was a valuable resource, after all. “I expect that all of it will be here or I will be forced to talk to Admiral Hoover, a very dear friend of mine.”

“Certainly, sir,” I said. I actually suspected that Admiral Hoover had never heard of him, but I didn’t want to risk finding out the hard way. I scanned the sheet of paper quickly, shaking my head. It seemed that some of the reporters had supporting staff who would be travelling on a converted assault carrier, but some of their supplies were travelling with us. It was an odd list too, odder than some of the Captain’s requests; they had alcohol and hard drugs. “I’ll see to it at once, shall I?”

“And be back here quickly,” one of the women added. She gave me a smile that had absolutely no humour in it whatsoever. “We will have more tasks for you.”

I slipped outside and used my terminal to call the crewmen who were in the pool, waiting for someone to give them orders. I told them to pick up the luggage that the reporters had left out in the airlock and transport it to their quarters. I guessed that the reporters would be spending the entire trip stoned out of their minds. I just hoped they wouldn’t start selling it to the crew. Once I had finished issuing orders, I went back inside, only to discover that an argument was going on.

“The food on these ships is terrible,” another female reporter snapped. She wore a dress that showed off all of her breasts, apart from her nipples, but somehow I couldn’t find her attractive. “I want you to ensure that we get the best food from quality dealers.”

“I shall do my best,” I promised. Everyone on the ship, apart from the Captain, was supposed to eat in the mess with the rest of the crew. I’d have to check with Anna if the reporters were allowed to eat in their own stateroom. I couldn’t see the Captain agreeing, but it didn’t seem fair to expose the rest of the crew to the seven reporters and their endless complaints. “And…”

There was another deluge of complaints. I wished that the Academy had taught more diplomacy, instead of just Non-Violent Conflict Resolution, but Gandhi himself would have sworn off non-violence after meeting the reporters. When I’d been chewed out on the Jacques Delors, I had thoroughly deserved it. The reporters seemed to expect me to have more authority than the Captain and the ability to snap my fingers and make things happen. That didn’t work, even on a properly-run starship.

“That crewman was leering at me,” one of the women — the one exposing her breasts — protested, when the crewmen finally delivered the luggage and left. Her voice rose to a pitch that hurt my ears. “I demand you have him punished at once!”

It looked to me as if I should ask the Ship’s Doctor to check his eyes, or perhaps his sanity, instead, but I didn’t say that out loud. “I shall see to it,” I promised. Some kind of reward seemed to be in order. “Do you want a tour of the vessel once you have finished unpacking?”

It was nearly an hour before I could escape and report back to Ellen that the reporters had started to settle into the stateroom. She seemed pleased about it, although I still didn’t understand why we were putting up with them in the first place. Why couldn’t they have travelled on an assault carrier along with their support staff?

But a good thing did come out of it. I had forgotten all about the logistics bureaucrats. When I returned to that task, it was almost a relief.

Chapter Twelve

“You did well,” Captain Shalenko said, gravely. “I only needed to intervene once.”

I nodded, too tired to speak. I’d finally managed to convince the Supply Department that we actually needed the items on the Captain’s list — all, but one. I’d kept playing the game until one day before our departure date, but then I’d had to admit defeat and ask the Captain to handle it. I don’t know what he said to the Supply Department, but suddenly all the obstacles melted away and we got everything we wanted, quickly. It almost made working with the reporters worthwhile.

“As a special reward,” the Captain continued, “you are to escort Miss Johnston with us when we go onboard Admiral Hoover’s flagship for the briefing.”

I blinked. “Captain… is that wise?”

“The Admiral wants a reporter there for the briefing,” Captain Shalenko said. He didn’t chew me out for my remark, which I took to mean that he privately questioned the Admiral’s wisdom as well. “You will find her and bring her to the Captain’s Boat for 1400.”

“Aye, sir,” I said, and went to the reporters stateroom. They had already exhausted most of the pleasures on the starship — which were few and far between — and had been driving me crazy with their incessant demands. Two of the reporters seemed to have fallen out with the other five and weren’t speaking to them, while the other five seemed to be drafting the victory proclamation already. Given that no one on the starship, but them, seemed to know the fleet’s target, I couldn’t help, but wonder if they were being premature.

But I had to admit that Lillian Johnston was the best of a bad bunch. She wore tight clothes that revealed everything while showing nothing, but she actually seemed to have a brain in her head. It just wasn’t one that was focused on surviving in space. She’d already asked me a whole series of silly questions — she even asked me if she could go outside the starship without a spacesuit — and I didn’t want to read any of her work. It actually turned out, when I questioned her, that she was actually paid to present the news, rather than dig it up. The Admiral might have been smarter than I’d thought. She certainly wouldn’t notice anything amiss.

“The Captain wants me to come?” She asked, for all the world as if she got requests like that every day. “I’d love to, darling.”

I managed to duck the other reporters, who were shouting demands that they be allowed to come as well, and led her out of the stateroom. I saw her nose tighten slightly as she took in the lower decks, obviously comparing it to a pleasure liner she’d travelled on years ago. I’d already heard enough about the White Swan to feel that I knew it perfectly, apparently, the crew were respectful and the food was divine. It never seemed to cross their minds that the passenger liner was designed for the idle rich and that real starships were much more cramped. If half of what they said was true, the liner had to be making a loss with each passage.

“This is the Captain’s Boat,” I explained, when we reached the shuttlebay. Unlike a more workable shuttle, or tug, the Captain’s Boat looked surprisingly pretty. I’d heard that they were actually constructed somewhere on one of the colonies, which wasn’t something to put my mind at rest. The engineers had been all over it, but a competent engineer could have probably rigged the boat to blow at will. “She can hold nine passengers in reasonable comfort.”

“This isn’t comfort, darling,” Lillian trilled, as soon as she saw the interior of the tiny ship. “This is barely large enough to swing a cat.”

“It was large enough for four First Lieutenants,” the Captain said, gravely. Anna followed him into the boat and took the helm. “We were on shore leave at Tropicana and decided to see how many First Lieutenants we could fit into the ship.”

I swallowed the bait. “But, sir… surely you could have fitted in five more…”

“Oh, at that point we ran out of First Lieutenants,” Captain Shalenko said, with a flickering grin. “We had to make up the difference with some of the locals.” He winked at me. “Not quite regulation, but close enough for government work.”

I blushed. “Yes, sir,” I agreed. “Close enough.”

Anna was a skilled pilot, I realised, as we flew out of the shuttlebay and orientated ourselves on Orbit Nine, before racing past it to the battleship looming up in the distance. It was large enough to be visible with the naked eye almost before we passed Orbit Nine, a single white craft that seemed to dominate the surrounding area. It was surprisingly elegant, in a way, shaped like a long oval. The drive blisters at the rear seemed only to mar its perfection.

“She’s beautiful,” I breathed. Suddenly, I envied Roger and his service on a battleship. “Sir, why don’t we have more like her?”

Captain Shalenko snorted. “She cost the same price as ten light cruisers and took five years to build,” he said. “If old Admiral Picard hadn’t wanted a proper flagship, she and her twins wouldn’t have been built at all. She handles like a wallowing elephant and is the easiest target this side of a planet. We should have built the cruisers instead and then we would have had more flexibility. Instead…”

Lillian spoke into the silence. “Do you think that she’s not beautiful?”

“Beauty only takes a person so far,” Captain Shalenko said, crossly. I caught his gaze and winced inwardly. “If she wasn’t such a big target, I might admire the designers, but as it is… she’s nothing more than a glorified pleasure yacht for the Admiral and his staff. If she gets hit and taken out of action, the entire fleet will be decapitated.”

“Coming in to dock now,” Anna said, breaking into the conversation. “The Command Deck has cleared Docking Twelve for us.”

“Closer to the conference room,” the Captain commented, as we swept closer. “They must be in a hurry.”

As we came in to dock, I realised that a dozen other shuttles and smaller craft were also docked to the battleship, studding her white hull like so many limpets. The Captain had mentioned that it was a briefing, but I hadn’t realised that it was for so many officers and men. It looked as if every starship in Earth’s solar system had sent representatives. We docked, with nary a bump, and I smiled inwardly. If nothing else, I was looking forward to seeing the interior of the battleship.

“Welcome onboard the Kofi Annan,” a very familiar voice said. It was Roger, wearing his dress uniform. I was surprised by how much I missed him and the others. I was also surprised that I hadn’t been ordered to get into my own dress uniform, but perhaps the Captain hadn’t cared. “I am to escort you to the conference room.”

“Of course,” Captain Shalenko said. “Lead on.”

I wanted to exchange comments with Roger, but we both had to be businesslike. The starship’s corridors were almost completely empty, apart from a handful of officers wearing more braid than I ever expected to be wearing in my lifetime. I saw seven Captains, two Commodores and the Port Admiral; Roger and I, of course, were beneath their notice. Captain Shalenko exchanged comments with a few of his contemporaries, while I lurked behind him and tried not to be noticed. It took nearly ten minutes to get into the conference room…and it was heaving. There were nearly two hundred people in the compartment.

“Take Lillian and go to the rear,” Captain Shalenko ordered, tightly. Roger had vanished into the crowd, perhaps to round up some more strays. “Report back to me once we’re dismissed.”

“Admiral on the deck,” a voice cracked out. The entire room rose, apart from the reporters, who looked unimpressed. Lillian was far from the only reporter in the room and I found myself wondering why the Admiral had wanted her. Some of the reporters actually looked intelligent.

“At least,” Admiral Hoover said, gravely. His voice seemed to hang in the air. I realised that he was using a sound-effect producer to be heard throughout the room. “You may be seated.”

I found myself studying the Admiral as the room sat down. He wore a white uniform covered in enough gold braid to feed a thousand starving families. His uniform seemed to distract from his face, which was slightly overweight; he was, in fat, a surprisingly fat man. His uniform, I saw after a moment, was carefully tailored to avoid showing his bulk. It had probably cost him more than I made in a year.

“This task force has been gathered together in accordance with UN Resolution #46537,” the Admiral said, without preamble. Now I could hear him properly, it sounded as if he had something caught in his throat. Despite himself, I wasn’t particularly impressed with what I saw. “By order of the United Nations General Assembly, summoned as of two months ago, we are empowered to do whatever is necessary to restore the Heinlein System to the jurisdiction of united humanity and punish those who have chosen to rebel against the system. Gordon?”

Another man stood up. He wore only a black jumpsuit, but I fancied that I had made him at once. He was an intelligence officer. “Heinlein’s government was fundamentally opposed to the United Nations and the Rights of Man ever since it was founded two hundred and forty years ago,” he said. He had a droll factual voice that wouldn’t have been out of place on a librarian or a teacher. “In accordance with various United Nations resolutions, a Peace Force garrison was moved into the system to begin the process of bringing Heinlein fully into the United Nations. Their mission has not been altogether successful.”

He paused. “Heinlein’s corrupt government restricts the franchise in a distinctly fascist manner,” he continued. “The local leadership, deeply unpopular with many of the planet’s residents, had no motive to assist us in bringing Heinlein into the United Nations and manufactured crisis after crisis to slow the process down. Eventually, there was a major confrontation between the garrison and the local authorities and the garrison was forced to retreat to the spaceport. As of last report, they were under permanent siege and were not expecting to hold out until relieved.”

I scowled. There was no way to send a signal faster than the speed of light. The only way to send messages from star to star was to transport it on a starship, and starships were always in short supply. If the last report was a month old, it was quite possible that the garrison had either been taken by storm or starved out already, or would fall before we arrived to save it. I also wasn’t sure if I believed everything he was saying. The Senior Chief, wherever he was now, had warned me that the higher ranks always lied to their juniors, and somehow I suspected that the garrison hadn’t behaved itself. There was no way to know.

“We have links with various friendly parties down on the planet’s surface,” Gordon concluded. “Our mission is to liberate the planet from their corrupt government, install a new government and complete the task of bringing Heinlein into the United Nations. Ideally, we also want to preserve the considerable orbital and asteroid belt infrastructure that the inhabitants have built up. Admiral?”

“Thank you,” Admiral Hoover said. He gazed around the room. “Heinlein possesses a considerable deep-space industry and various installations that may be used to develop weapons. It is also possible that they are one of the major sources for equipment and weapons for the rebel factions, including pirates and freebooters. It is therefore likely that our entry into the system will be opposed, but only on the level of converted freighters and small gunships. Heinlein never developed a space fleet of its own.”

“Are we sure of that?” Someone said, from the rear of the room. I realised with a moment of amusement that it was one of the reporters. “I was on the Balkans Campaign and they had all kinds of weapons and tech they weren’t supposed to have.”

“Intelligence checked everything in their records before the garrison was established,” Gordon said, tightly. I had the feeling that that reporter wasn’t going to be coming with us any longer. “They produced several dozen freighters, but mainly concentrated on mining ships for the asteroids and the gas giants. They have not produced any warships, although weapons are a very real possibility.”

I felt cold. I hadn’t forgotten the pirate we’d encountered back at Terra Nova, over a year ago. It had taken the Senior Chief to point it out to me, but it was clear that the pirate ship had risked itself in combat against a cruiser, without actually having to do anything of the sort. The Senior Chief had concluded that the pirate was actually a raider, showing off weapons that were more advanced than anything in the UN’s arsenal. It had been the one thing he couldn’t understand. Why had the raiders shown off their weapons…for nothing? They could have saved them for an unpleasant surprise later.

Admiral Hoover took centre stage again. “The fleet will depart tomorrow at 1300 precisely,” he said. I felt a faint murmuring passing through the audience. Most UN ships and units would be unable to make that time, and so the Admiral would probably be planning to leave later, which in turn meant that they had no incentive to be on time. “We will proceed as a group to the Heinlein system and rendezvous one light year from their star. Coordinates will be transmitted later. When the fleet has linked up again, we will advance at once into their system and secure the low orbitals.”

He paused, apparently inviting comment. None came. “Once we have secured the orbitals, we will start landing troops at once, concentrating on their largest cities,” he continued. “Once the cities have been secured, Infantry units will advance into the countryside and suppress rebels and insurgents there, before we begin working with friendly forces on the ground. After the locals see that our forces are capable of defeating the corrupt government, they will ally with us and the remaining insurgents will be rapidly weeded out.

“In addition, Marine units will seize their largest orbital installations and production plants. Once secure, those plants will be turned over to supporting the invasion and producing items needed to pay Earth for the liberation mission. I anticipate no real difficulty in carrying out the invasion, so once the troops have been landed, the majority of our fleet can be dispersed for other duties, leaving a light observation squadron and, of course, the Devastator in the system.”

There was a pause. “Any questions?”

“Yes,” someone said. I was surprised to see a Marine Major General sitting in the front row. Marines normally had little to do with matters outside their sphere. “Just how long do you expect the invasion and occupation to take?”

“I expect that major combat operations will be completed within the first month,” Admiral Hoover said. “We should be able to pull out most of the infantry within the next year or so, depending on local conditions. The locals will see that we are resolute and firm in our determination to convince them to share what they have with all of humanity. We have a paternal oversight role to consider…”

“I suspect it will take much longer,” the Major General said. “I was actually involved in a joint operation with Heinlein reservists and they were damned good. It will not be ended quickly…”

“Thank you,” Admiral Hoover said, tightly. His voice became harsh and unbending. I knew what he was going to say before he spoke. “If I had wanted your opinion, I would have asked for it.”

I scowled, despite myself. I’d learned that the Marines were far from stupid back when I’d been training with them. Overall, I’d trust a Marine’s opinion rather more than the Admiral’s… and, now that it had been pointed out to me, it was clear that the Admiral was being very optimistic. The war could drag on forever.

It struck me, then, that we were going to invade another planet. We were going to bring them war and devastation in the hope that they would become more like us. I remembered what I’d seen on Earth and shuddered again. Whatever Heinlein was like — and I didn’t even know where the name came from — it could hardly be worse than Earth, could it? Somehow, I doubted it. Even Terra Nova was a paradise compared to Earth.

But what could I do?

I mulled it over as we were dismissed and I reported to Captain Shalenko, but the answer was all-too-clear. There was nothing I could do about it. History was on the march and I was nothing, but a helpless spectator. All I could do was watch, and wait.

Chapter Thirteen

“Captain, the remaining starships have finally logged in,” Lieutenant Marya Jadwiga said, from her position on the bridge. “They’re signalling that they’re ready to go.”

“Finally,” Captain Shalenko hissed. I didn’t blame him for being frustrated. The Devastator had been ready to go at 1300, as we had been ordered, but the other ships hadn’t been anything like ready. I was silently grateful for the time I’d spent on logistics. It was becoming increasingly clear that the other ships hadn’t spent anything like as much time on it… and the Admiral had been chewing the walls. It was now 1500 and we were barely ready to go. “Lieutenant Walker, please take our guests to the observation blister.”

“Aye, sir,” I said, tiredly. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to the reporters, but orders were orders. Besides, the sight of a wormhole opening at close range would be enough to shut them up for a while, I hoped. “I’ll get right on it.”

The reporters, I was amazed to discover, had dressed up in their finery for the trip to the observation blister. I tried very hard not to laugh as I escorted them through the passageways — some crewmen were rather less discriminating — and took them into the observation blister. Space — and the sight of Earth, visible as a blue-green sphere in the distance — still took my breath away, but the reporters didn’t seem impressed. They’d probably seen it often enough that it was no longer a wonder to them, although I couldn’t understand why. It had never stopped being a wonder for me.

“Tell me something,” Frank Wong said. Wong seemed to be the senior reporter, insofar as there was such a thing. “When are we actually departing? I was told to expect you at 1300.”

I wasn’t going to explain all the problems to him. “There were delays,” I said, reluctantly. There was no point in elaborating. “I believe, however, that we will depart in a few moments. It really is a fantastic view.”

“He’s trying to distract us,” Mytych Milan insisted. I had never been able to untangle where he’d come from originally, but he was a reporter through and through. From what I had been able to gather, he was under the impression that he was an investigative reporter, out to gather dirt that could be used to make the UNPF look bad. I doubted that he’d be long with us either. “We could be…”

“Stuck in the stateroom with nothing to do, but drink and fuck,” Frank Wong snapped back, angrily. I was pleased to see that he had some sense, although in their place, I’d have been brushing up on my studies. There was always something to do on the ship. “Watch and learn. It’s your first trip out of the Solar System, isn’t it?”

“Now hear this,” the Captain’s voice said, echoing through the starship. “We are ready to jump. I repeat, we are ready to jump. The wormhole will be opened in two minutes…mark.”

“Watch,” I said, softly. This sight, too, never lost its power to thrill. “You won’t regret it.”

Ahead of us, the light from the stars seemed to twist suddenly into a shimmering ball of light, which expanded rapidly into an open mouth, a rent in the fabric of space and time. The funnel grew larger, rapidly blurring through the colours of the rainbow, and seemed to rush at us. A moment later, we were inside the wormhole and flying towards our destination. The lights vanished and we seemed to be inside nothing, but darkness.

“My god,” Mytych Milan said, stunned. “It…what was that?”

“That was a wormhole,” I said, dryly. I’d feared that the reporters would throw up — it wasn’t uncommon for first-timers — but they seemed to be holding themselves together. Two of them looked pale and wan, but the others seemed fine. “Heinlein is forty light years away, after all. That’s a months journey even with wormholes.”

“I never even thought about it like that,” Lillian said. “What happened to the lights?”

I took the opportunity to lecture them. “Technically speaking, we’re inside a private universe at the moment,” I explained. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but so few people understood the Jump Drive that it was a worthwhile analogy. “There are no stars or other sources of light here, so there’s nothing, but darkness.”

“What about the other ships?” Frank Wong asked. “Why can’t we see them?”

“They’re not in our wormhole,” I said. “We’re all in separate universes of our own.”

They still seemed subdued when I escorted them back to their stateroom, apart from Frank Wong, who caught my arm and pulled me to one side. He didn’t know how lucky he was. The Marines had taught me what to do with someone who caught hold of me with unpleasant intentions. I could have broken his arm quite easily.

“You know that Ensign you had helping us yesterday,” he asked, with a leer. “What would it take to have her sharing my bunk for a night?”

I couldn’t help it. I just stared at him. Ensign Gomez was beautiful, with delicate Hispanic features and a warm smile that seemed to light up the room, but I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. She was on her first cruise as an Ensign — she’d graduated from the class after mine, back at the Academy — and she was hard to think ill of, even though I tried. It was the job of a Lieutenant to toughen up the Ensigns. Had I ever been that young?

“You won’t even think about it,” I hissed, angrily. It was all I could do not to knock his teeth down his throat, but the Captain would have been annoyed. I didn’t want to think about his reaction to this incident. “She’s an officer on this ship and not someone you can hire, understand?”

Frank was either too stupid or too sure of himself to back down quickly. “When I was on the old Panama, the Captain sent two young Ensigns to share my bunk,” he said, his voice hardening. “You will send her to me or…”

“No,” I said, flatly. I believed him — there were Captains who would quite happily do that, even though regulations forbade it — but this wasn’t the Panama. “If you touch her without her permission, I will beat hell out of you, understand?”

He wilted, perhaps finally sensing that I was serious. “I have powerful friends,” he called after me, his voice shaking. “You’ll regret this…”

The hatch cut him off and I stormed away, shaking with rage. How dare he ask me to send him an Ensign for the night? It was quite possible that Ensign Gomez wasn’t as innocent as she looked — she’d grown up in Ciudad Barranquilla, one of the worst cities on Earth — but even so, how dare he treat me as a pimp, or a procurer? I wasn’t going to allow him to bully me like that, even if it cost me my career. I was still raging when I reported to Anna and made a full confession. I had to know where Captain Shalenko stood on such incidents.

“I shouldn’t worry about it,” Anna said, once I’d explained everything. “The Captain will put him through a bulkhead if he tries anything like that on one of his crew.”

“Thanks,” I said, more relieved than I cared to admit. “I just…”

“It won’t be the last time,” Anna warned, slowly. “That kind of people will always treat us in the Peace Force as second-class citizens. We’re the ones who were foolish enough to sign our lives away, after all.”

I nodded slowly. The Peace Force recruiting office claimed that most recruits enjoyed a high standard of living, and excellent job prospects after retirement, but they were lying, of course. The Academy had been hard enough and the starships had been primitive for the newly-minted Ensigns; I dreaded to think what life on some of the research colonies or military bases was like. Afterwards… well, it wasn’t uncommon to set veterans on the streets, begging for money. A handful had even been burned to death by the gangs.

“But if it happens again, report it at once,” she added. “I’d better have a few words with the Ensigns as well. We can’t forbid the bastards from chatting up the Ensigns, but we can promise them that if they do get… taken against their wills, they will be supported. The Captain won’t take that lightly.”

“Thank you,” I said, again. “You’ve put my mind at rest.”

“Mine isn’t,” Anna said, with a grin. “You’re on watch in thirty minutes. Go grab a cup of tea or coffee from the mess before you go on watch, or the Captain will throw you off the bridge for being distracted.”

I nodded and left her cabin.

The days wore on slowly, falling into a routine. I stood my watches — with the Captain or Anna watching me, at first — and learned more about the Devastator and her capabilities. Captain Shalenko insisted that we all be trained in operating every console on both the bridge and the Combat Information Centre — the Devastator had both, as did the Kofi Annan — just in case one of the regular officers was wounded. I hadn’t realised just how capable the Devastator actually was until I worked through the tactical simulations. We could strike and blow up an infantry unit on the surface below and never cause any collateral damage. We could dominate an entire planet from orbit. I began to understand, in a way, why the Admiral was so confident. He had weapons that no insurgents could hope to match.

And yet, I wondered in the dead of night, if that were the case, why was Terra Nova still a running sore?

“Because the weapons are only useful if they find a target,” Kitty explained, one night. We had taken to spending most of our off-duty time together, mainly playing chess or watching videos. One of the videos on the computer had been a documentary entitled The Liberation of Heinlein, which had apparently been produced before the fleet had departed to invade the target world. It seemed to be nothing, but poorly-cobbled together propaganda, without any mention of either violence or political upheaval. “How do you sort out an insurgent from a loyal citizen?”

I blinked at her, almost missing her attempt to fork my king and queen. “That’s against the Laws of War,” I protested, horrified. I’d only seen a pirate ship before…and then I remembered the ambush on Terra Nova. I hadn’t really had a chance to take in the details, but had they been wearing uniforms. “They can’t do that, can they?”

Kitty snorted. “I do wonder what he saw in you,” she said, dryly. “If a Law of War only benefits one side, why should the other one follow it?”

I nodded in reluctant understanding. “And so they hide among the people?”

“More or less,” Kitty agreed. “I bet you dinner somewhere expensive, perhaps on our next shore leave, that we’ll take the high orbitals all right, and then find ourselves trapped in a long insurgency, again. The Captain won’t permit random bombardment of the planet and even if he did, it wouldn’t solve the problem. We might never break the planet entirely.”

“No bet,” I said, without hesitation. Kitty was almost certainly right. “I don’t understand, then. Why was the Admiral so confident of victory?”

Kitty smiled. “How many Infantrymen are there in the troop transports?”

“Two hundred thousand,” I said, automatically. The troop transports were among the largest ships in the fleet, converted colonist-carriers. The UN preached that Earth’s population problem would be solved by exporting the population to the colonies, but even I knew that the logistics would never work. We might be able to export maybe two million a year, perhaps more if we really worked at it, but in that time the population would grow again. “I don’t understand…”

“They’re the dregs of society,” Kitty said, seriously. “The Admiral wouldn’t care in the slightest if half of them died to bring Heinlein back into the United Nations. Why should he? They’re pulled off the streets, given just enough training to make them dangerous, and then sent out to occupy resentful planets. Most of them will never be able to claim the patch of land the UN promises them in exchange for their services.”

She paused and moved a pawn forward. “I don’t know about the enemy, John,” she said, “but by God they frighten me.”

I lifted an eyebrow at her choice of words. Religion had no place in the UN’s brave new world, or so we had been told. It was illegal to discriminate against any particular religion, but practicing any religion was not encouraged. Muna had been allowed to keep her scarf for some reason, but she’d received no other encouragement. It simply wasn’t allowed.

“They’re hated on every world,” Kitty added, grimly. “Whatever hope there was that the worlds might come into the UN voluntarily, they destroy, just by behaving like complete bastards, looting, raping and murdering wherever they go. They’re not Marines, John; remember that. They’re monsters in UN uniforms.”

She reached out and touched my icon the Senior Chief had given me. “Welcome to the Brotherhood,” she said. I felt my heartbeat racing suddenly. “The best we can do is try to prevent our honour from being tarnished any further.”

“You’re in the Brotherhood?” I asked, astonished. I hadn’t even given any through to who else might be in the Brotherhood, although I would have bet good money that Captain Harriman was a Brother, and Captain Shalenko was not. “How did you know about me…?”

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” Kitty said, her green eyes very serious. I caught her meaning and nodded. The Security Department wouldn’t hesitate to subject us both to intensive interrogation if they realised that we were members of what they would regard as a subversive group. “You’re young, but the word was passed along to keep an eye on you. You’re not the first to have doubts.”

I stared at her. “Kitty…what happens if we get caught?”

Kitty shrugged. “How many members of the Brotherhood do you know?” She held up a hand before I could answer. “I doubt you know more than three at most — don’t tell me — and you won’t encounter many others face to face. What you don’t know can’t be forced from you. I only told you now because you need to know that you’re not alone.”

A nasty thought crossed my mind. “Kitty…how do we know that the Brotherhood is real?” I asked. “What if it’s secretly run by the Security Department?”

“They’d have rounded us all up by now,” Kitty said. “I suspect that they do have some idea we exist, but they’re not really capable of rooting us all out, for various reasons. Several…ah, friends went silent last year and I think that they did get caught, but they weren’t able to betray the rest of us.” She shook her head. “We’ll talk more about that later. Checkmate.”

I looked down at the board. She’d won, all right. “Neat,” I said, admiringly. I’d played Chess in the Academy team and declined an offer to play for the big leagues. Kitty made me look like a newcomer. “Why can’t we do something?”

“Like what?” Kitty asked, seriously. “What is going to happen to Heinlein is going to happen and there is nothing we can do to stop it? Look” — she continued, catching my expression — “suppose that you have Brotherhood cells on all of the starships. What would we do with them? How could we coordinate our actions openly and take the ships, knowing that everything would be so confused…and what if Heinlein attacks?”

“I see,” I said, but Kitty wasn’t finished.

“The Admiral was convinced that Heinlein has no warships,” Kitty continued. “I suspect that they will have a few surprises waiting for us. They have to know that the United Nations won’t let their defiance pass. The last thing we need is a struggle for power when the fleet is under attack. Besides, who can we trust?”

I nodded, reluctantly. Everyone knew about the dangers of informers in the ranks, men and women who would betray their comrades to the UN Security Department for money, or power, or even under threat of blackmail. Who could we trust? We’d probably end up shooting at each other.

“We’ll talk more later,” Kitty said, standing up. “Get some sleep. You’re going to need it tomorrow.”

I couldn’t sleep very well that night, or the night afterwards. I kept working the problem, trying to find a solution, but Kitty was right. There was nothing we could do to prevent the invasion from taking place, leaving us all as unwilling participants in the UN’s plan. I thought, seriously, about deserting, but where would I go? Earth would hardly welcome me now. Three weeks later, when we arrived at Heinlein, I was still no closer to a solution.

The Admiral had claimed that victory would be easy.

Need I mention that it was nothing of the sort?

Chapter Fourteen

“Wormhole exit in fifty seconds, sir,” the Pilot said. “All systems are standing by.”

“Excellent,” Captain Shalenko said. He, at least, wasn’t trusting his ship to a green Ensign when we entered a war zone. “All hands, this is the Captain. Battle stations. I say again, battle stations.”

I checked the duplicate tactical console quickly, confirming that I was locked out of the system — unless something happened to Anna. I doubted that it would matter that much — if Anna was taken out, the entire ship would probably be lost — but the Great God Regulations demanded my presence. At least the reporters weren’t on the bridge. The Captain had insisted that they remain in their stateroom until the system was secure and none of them, even Frank, had dared to argue.

“Systems ready, sir,” I said, when the Captain checked with me. If everything went to plan, I’d be nothing, but a helpless observer.

“Emergence,” the Pilot said. The wormhole twisted open in front of us and new stars started to shine through onto the ship. “We have emerged in the Heinlein System, sir.”

Captain Shalenko didn’t smile. “Confirm location,” he ordered. “Communications, link us up with the other starships.”

“Location confirmed,” the Pilot said. I checked myself and he was right. “We have emerged within two decimal places of our target coordinate.”

“The other starships are checking in now,” Kitty said, from her console. “Ah… not all of them have emerged in the correct locations.”

“Signal the Admiral, inform him of our status, and request orders,” the Captain said, a hint of frustration in his tone. I understood his feelings. If the remainder of the fleet had arrived in the correct locations, the Devastator would have been well-protected by the cruisers. As it were, we were dangerously exposed to anyone out there with weapons and bad intentions. “Tactical, bring up the main sensors and sweep local space. Report at once if you detect anything out of the ordinary.”

The Heinlein System took on shape and form on the main display. It was a fairly mundane system, as systems went; three rocky planets, two gas giants and one life-bearing world. Heinlein itself rated a 92% on the Planetary Scale — 92% like Earth — which made it habitable enough to support the human race without major terraforming efforts. The inhabitants probably wouldn’t want to move. By now, despite UN regulations, they had probably adapted the planet completely to their specifications. I winced when the scale of industrial activity became apparent. Heinlein was the most industrialised system I’d seen, short of Earth itself. The asteroid belts swarmed with miners and industrial stations.

I remembered what the Senior Chief had said about the UN needing to conscript trained workers from the colonies and shivered, despite myself. Heinlein didn’t seem to pay homage to the UN’s rules and, despite that, had somehow developed a vast industry. There had to be millions of trained workers the UN could kidnap and take back to Earth to turn into slaves, despite the dangers of trusting an industrial plant to conscript workers. Would it not be easier, I wondered, to train new workers on Earth?

“The fleet has finally responded, sir,” Kitty said. “The Admiral is ordering the fleet to form up on the flagship and has designated a spot for us.”

“Pilot, move us into position,” Captain Shalenko ordered, tightly. “Tactical, link into the fleet datanet, but remain alert.”

Twenty minutes later, the fleet was finally moving towards Heinlein. The Admiral had ordered us to emerge from the wormholes at roughly an hour from the planet, even though we could have emerged a lot closer, perhaps even in orbit around the planet. I hadn’t understood at the time, but I understood now. If we’d emerged in range of the planet’s defences in such a chaotic state, we’d have been turkeys in a turkey shoot. I was surprised that we hadn’t been attacked upon emergence anyway, but perhaps Heinlein was conserving its strength. Who knew what had happened since the last report had reached Earth?

“The Admiral is trying to contact the garrison, but there’s no response,” Kitty said, into the growing tension. I almost wanted the attack to begin, just to get on with it. The tension was almost worse than the battle. “The isn’t even any chatter from the planet’s surface.”

“They must have been wiped out,” the Captain growled. He didn’t sound surprised. I’d learned enough about supply problems to understand how the garrison must have felt. They’d been trapped and then starved out, or perhaps forced to expend all their ammunition…and then defeated. It would have been fairly easy without any orbital bombardment system overhead. “I wonder if…”

“The Admiral is signalling the planet,” Kitty added. “Captain, would you like to hear it?”

The Captain nodded. “This is Admiral Hoover, Commanding Officer of Task Force 17,” the Admiral’s voice said. He sounded as if he were trying to be strong and resolute. It didn’t sound that convincing. “You are hereby ordered to comply with the terms of the UN resolutions concerning your planet and stand down all your defences, permitting my forces to occupy the planet’s surface. If you refuse to comply, we are authorised to use deadly force.”

“Well?” The Captain said, into the silence. It would take nearly seven minutes for the signal to reach Heinlein and another seven for the reply, if any. “Is there any response?”

“No, sir,” Kitty said. “I’m still not picking up anything from the planet at all.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Captain Shalenko said, tightly. “A planet with nearly a billion humans on must produce some radio chatter.”

Kitty looked flustered for the first time in my experience. “The briefing notes suggested that they had created a landline infrastructure for most of their communications traffic,” she said. “They may choose to limit their radio communications to prevent us from picking them up.”

“Good thinking,” the Captain said, grudgingly. “Try and see if the asteroid belts are producing…”

“Emergence,” Anna snapped, as red icons flashed into existence. “Five starships, unknown configuration, closing fast!”

“Stand by all weapons and defensive systems,” the Captain ordered, swinging his chair around to stare at the main display. Five blood-red icons were moving towards the green icons of the fleet with obviously hostile intent. “Point defence is cleared to engage incoming missiles. I repeat, point defence is cleared to engage incoming missiles.”

“I’m picking up targeting sensor emissions from the unknowns,” Anna said, as red-green sweeps of energy crossed the display. “They’re locking on…and firing.”

I blanched. No UN ship, short of a battleship, could have fired such a volley in one broadside, or turn so quickly and launch a second broadside. The fleet’s point defence systems were already locking onto the incoming missiles and torpedoes, burning them out of existence, but there were so many of them. I knew that some ships were going to be lost…

“The Admiral is authorising us to return fire,” Kitty said. “The cruisers are engaging now.”

The cruisers opened fire, but the newcomers, instead of closing for a standard engagement, vanished back down their wormholes and disappeared. The Captain swore a mighty curse in a language I didn’t recognise, but I understood. The Heinlein starships — if that was what they were — had tricked the cruisers into firing off expensive missiles, for nothing. The swarm of incoming missiles were striking home now; I saw a cruiser stagger, before somehow resuming its course and speed. The drive field had saved the crew, barely.

“Emergence,” Anna said, again. This time, only three starships appeared, shot their missiles, and vanished again. Lasers and other energy weapons raged out towards their prey, but seemed to have no effect. “Captain, they’re targeting the troop transports specifically.”

“Understood,” the Captain said. His gaze flickered to the display and he swore again. This time, I didn’t understand why. “Kitty, raise the Admiral and warn him of the threat to the transports. If we lose them, we may as well go home and abandon the entire mission.”

I saw what he meant, suddenly. The UN simply couldn’t afford to replace any lost starships and the troop transports, among the largest ships in the Peace Force, simply couldn’t be replaced quickly. It took years to build them, years that Heinlein could use to make itself all the more impregnable, or even take the offensive. I saw the UN’s dilemma clearly for the first time. If it took the boot off the colonies, the colonies would very rapidly out-produce it and eventually destroy the Peace Force. If it kept the boot on, it would find it very hard to maintain the tempo of operations. No wonder they were touting Terra Nova as a success! If the UN pulled out tomorrow, so what? Terra Nova wouldn’t be building starships anytime soon.

“The Admiral is warning the cruisers to continue to cover the flagship,” Kitty reported. “There is no explanation attached to the orders.”

Captain Shalenko said nothing, but I could guess what he was thinking. Coward.

“Continue to maintain watch,” he ordered, finally. “Engage any hostile missiles that come within range, regardless of their targets.”

“Aye, sir,” Kitty said. “Enemy starships have retreated again.”

“They won’t do anything else,” Captain Shalenko predicted. “Just by doing what they are, they’re tearing us apart.”

The next hour wore on slowly. Exactly as the Captain had predicted, the Heinlein starships kept jumping in and our, firing off their missiles and vanishing again before anyone could shoot back at them. Their only saving grace was that they didn’t have time to run proper targeting solutions, although it didn’t seem to matter that much. A cruiser was destroyed and another seriously damaged, left behind the rest of the starships. Somehow, I doubted that it would remain intact for much longer without the protection of the entire fleet. The battleship came in for particular targeting along with the troop transports, but our luck held. The Admiral survived the attacks and his ship remained intact. Somehow, I wasn’t sure if that were a good thing or not.

“I’m now picking up sensor sweeps from satellites in Heinlein’s orbit,” Anna said. “I think they’re armed platforms and perhaps gunships. The Admiral is clearing us to engage anything hostile, but anything non-hostile is to be left strictly alone.”

“The Admiral wants the satellite network intact,” the Captain growled. “It’s probably rigged to transmit information to insurgents on the ground…and he wants it intact to save money.”

I would have liked to disagree with him, but how could it? The massive sphere of Heinlein on the display was blinking up more and more red icons, including some on the ground that appeared to be planetary defence centres fully equal to some of the fortresses the UN had built on Earth, back when it seemed that war with the colonies was likely. If they were anything like the ones on Earth, they would have been formidable threats at one time, but considerably less useful against an active drive field. That suggested that Heinlein had probably updated the systems to confront us.

“Anna, mark the location of the ground-based stations and mark them for later attention,” the Captain ordered. “Kitty, pass the data on to the Admiral and request permission to engage.”

“Yes, sir,” Kitty said. “The Admiral is responding; the fleet is preparing to force its way into orbit…”

“Yes,” Anna said, in delight. “We got one!”

A dull cheer ran through the bridge. One of the Heinlein starships had miscalculated finally and emerged far too close to another UN starship, which had opened fire at once without waiting for instructions. Before the Heinlein starship could wormhole out again, it had been bracketed and rapidly blown apart into an expanding cloud of plasma. I felt the exultation as well, even shared it completely. It was harder to remember that the Heinlein starships were only defending their health and home when they were trying to kill me, and Kitty, and the remainder of the crew.

“Signal the skipper with my congratulations,” the Captain ordered, a thin smile crossing his face. “If we can take out the other four ships, this will be much easier.”

“Captain, freighters and other starships are departing the planet’s orbit,” Kitty said. “The Admiral is detaching cruisers to halt them until they can be searched.”

Captain Shalenko muttered another curse under his breath. “They’re traps,” he predicted, grimly. “They could have left at any time, so why do they wait until we’re right on top of them?”

He keyed his console and opened a direct link to the Admiral. I only heard his side of the conversation, but from his face, the Admiral wasn’t proving receptive to his advice. I hoped that his career wouldn’t suffer because of it, although if that Kitty said was true, Captain Shalenko was someone else who had obtained his position through connections. The Admiral might find it hard to discipline him.

“John, stand by to take the point defence,” Anna said, suddenly. The skies above Heinlein were coming to life as the defences rumbled into operation. Several of them had been so well-stealthed that we hadn’t even realised they were there until they brought up their active sensors. “I’ll have to handle the planet-side operations myself.”

The console came to life in front of me and I checked it rapidly. We’d fired hundreds of laser pulses in the last hour and had actually drained the laser capacitors quite badly. Anna had solved the problem by linking the laser banks to the main fusion plant, but that was draining power from other parts of the ship. The reporters, I realised suddenly, might be in darkness. It probably wouldn’t matter. As much as I despised them, they would at least be alive to complain. The experience might even do them good.

I ran through the systems as the planet’s defences opened fire. Some of them were standard missiles that had been left in orbit only to be triggered when the orders came, others were much nastier, including a missile that split apart into several other missiles just before it entered laser range. I couldn’t hope to handle it myself; I could just set priorities and allow the computers to handle the rest of it. If they failed to take out a missile in time, the Devastator might be destroyed along with the remainder of the fleet.

“The Admiral is recalling the cruisers,” Kitty said. “Captain…”

She broke off. Where the cruiser Michael Galloway had been, there was now nothing, but an expanding cloud of debris. The cruiser had been closing to intercept one of the escaping freighters and the Captain on the freighter had suddenly tripped the self-destruct system. They had to have loaded a dozen nukes onto the freighter to get that effect, I realised suddenly; the cruiser hadn’t stood a chance.

“They should have stood off and fired into the drive if necessary,” the Captain grated, angrily. I shared his frustration. “Anna, take down the planetary defence systems on the ground, now!”

The planet was firing on us itself. They’d installed massive laser cannons, each one far more powerful than anything we could mount on a starship, trusting them to sweep space clear of invading starships. How had they done it so fast? I found myself wondering. How could they have prepared all this in a mere two months? Anna fired back, launching Kinetic Energy Weapons down towards the ground-based defences, only to see some of her KEWs burned out of space by the lasers. The remainder of the fleet was clearing local space of orbiting defences, but as long as the ground-based systems remained intact, we couldn’t hope to support infantrymen on the ground.

“Got one,” Anna said. A red icon vanished from the display. I didn’t want to think about what that meant on the ground. The installation would have been devastated, but what about the surrounding countryside? Had the Heinlein defenders installed their weapons well away from the civilian population, or had they emplaced them right in the midst of their towns and cities? The death toll might be horrendous already. It would only get worse when the troops started to land. If half the rumours and stories I’d heard about Heinlein were true, it was going to be a nightmare. “We’re clearing the way forward.”

I nodded to myself. The Devastator was designed for bombarding the surface of a planet. No matter what the defenders did, they couldn’t prevent Anna from unloading hundreds of KEWs onto the surface, devastating defence installations and government centres. Their starships, which seemed to have retreated, should have targeted us first. They might have crippled the entire invasion…

No, I realised. Admiral Hoover would have pushed on regardless. I had the feeling that nothing short of death would deter him from his mission, even if it cost him the entire fleet. Failure would be punished at home; success, even costly success, would be feted. The cruisers and the battleship could bombard the planet if they had to, even if they didn’t carry the same weapons as the Devastator. They could still take the planet. They would still take the planet.

And orbital space was clear.

“The Admiral is signalling to the fleet,” Kitty said. There was something in her voice that brought me up cold. “Land the landing force!”

Chapter Fifteen

The display sparked with new icons as the first wave of shuttles launched from the troop transports, heading down towards the surface. Heinlein, at least, hadn’t named its capital Landing City or some variant on the theme; the capital city, Lazarus, was actually smaller than most capital cities. If the data could be believed, Heinlein’s population was spread out all over the planet, rather than being concentrated in a handful of cities. I was no expert in ground combat tactics, but it struck me that occupying the entire planet would take years, and far more infantrymen than we had.

“Move us into position to cover them,” the Captain ordered, as the shuttles flew down towards the ground. “Anna, target and destroy anything that attempts to impede them. We must have that spaceport intact.”

“Aye, sir,” Anna said. Now that local space was clear, there was less for me to do, but I watched my console carefully anyway. They might have hidden other stealthed weapons on their moons, or somewhere in orbit among the debris we’d missed. The satellite system the Admiral had been so keen to seize had been destroyed in the crossfire. He wasn’t going to be pleased about that. “They’re barely five minutes from parachuting down to the surface.”

I nodded, watching carefully. Earth had its orbital towers, but few other planets had them, not when a space cable or elevator would be sufficient. Heinlein, however, had neither, which meant that the only way to move troops down to the surface rapidly was to use spaceplanes and heavy shuttles, which in turn meant that we had to seize and secure all the spaceports. Heinlein didn’t even seem to have many spaceports, or airports, and losing one of them could be disastrous. The fleet was settling into low orbit now, using lasers to pick off any aircraft in flight to prevent them from engaging the shuttles, but if the spaceport were to be lost…

“They’re going to know that too,” I muttered. The Captain turned to look and me and I flushed, feeling an idiot for speaking out loud. I had no choice, but to explain myself. “They have to know that we need the spaceports as well, sir.”

“Quite right,” the Captain said, gravely. I had the faint impression that he was humouring me, for whatever reason made sense to him. “The garrison may even have lost the spaceport after a battle that would render it nearly useless.”

I frowned. “Then why…?”

“Because it’s not actually that easy to render a spaceport completely non-functional,” the Captain explained, calmly. “The landing pads and runways will still function — its not even easy to mine them without being obvious — and the infantrymen can take them without serious problems, particularly if we provide covering fire from orbit. Once they have the spaceports, we can begin landing the main force and advancing out to seize the cities.”

Unwisely, I pushed it further. “But doctrine says to seize the cities at once,” I protested. “How can we do it at once?”

The Captain grinned. “We can’t,” he said, dryly. “Doctrine says a lot of things that I just impractical, Lieutenant. The task of the people on the ground is to try and keep to doctrine as much as possible, while knowing when to ignore its demands that we do the impossible just to please the beauecrats back home. Our task is to support them and prevent the enemy on the ground from counterattacking before the troops have landed in sufficient strength to defeat any attack. Watch your screens and wait.”

I turned back to my console, relieved. Somehow, talking to the Captain sometimes left me with the sense that I had barely escaped a horrifying death by the skin of my teeth. On impulse, I set the console to inform me if there was anything I needed to deal with and brought up the images from the overhead sensors. The spaceport was a good twenty miles away from the city — no one in their right mind would build a spaceport right on top of a city — but it still looked built-up to me. It was surrounded by hangers for spaceplanes, barracks for crew and servicemen and even a handful of gardens, for reasons that escaped me. It was a massive installation…and, as I looked closer, I could see figures scurrying over the tarmac.

“They have what looks like an infantry unit dug in at the main building,” Anna said, flatly. “I am engaging…”

A moment later, the main building vanished in a massive explosion, just as the first infantrymen began to fall down towards the ground. They hit the ground and formed up, taking fire from two different buildings, which Anna promptly destroyed as well. As the shuttles swooped around and unloaded the second set of paratroopers, the first set started to advance, driving the enemy forces out of the buildings. I watched, fascinated, as the battle raged over the spaceport, with the defenders taking heavy casualties. In lives alone, the Devastator had just paid for herself. Without her, the attackers would have been wiped out before they could secure the landing zone.

“The heavy shuttles are launching now,” Kitty said, from her console. I flicked back to the main display and saw the heavier shuttles racing down towards the ground. Some of them drew fire from handheld weapons, but only one was hit, spiralling down towards the ground and exploding in a massive fireball. I stared in horror — there had been a thousand soldiers crammed into that massive craft — before turning my attention back to the spaceport. Now that the ground had been secured, the infantrymen were spreading out, calling in supporting fire as they needed it. As the heavy shuttles began to disgorge tanks, I realised that we’d actually secured the beachhead.

“Good,” the Captain said, tightly. “Anna, continue to watch the ground carefully and be prepared to offer support the minute they require it. Kitty, does the Admiral have any special orders for us?”

“We’re just to remain in orbit for the moment until they deploy additional orbital bombardment systems,” Kitty said, accessing the fleet database. The Captain didn’t look surprised. Unlike the cruisers, or even the battleship, Devastator was hardly a multi-role starship. The only other thing we were good for was transporting reporters and perhaps specialist troops. The thought reminded me about the reporters and I wondered how they were coping. I hoped that it wasn’t well. “The Admiral sends his compliments to your gunnery officers and requests that you stand by to dispatch ground-controllers if necessary.”

“It probably will be necessary,” the Captain said, annoyed. “The infantry on the ground have a habit of calling in fire on targets they barely need to destroy. John, after you have tended to your charges” — it took me a moment to realise that he meant the reporters — “take yourself off the watch list and brush up on how to call in fire from the ground. If someone has to go down, it will probably be you.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, despite myself. I wanted to set foot on a new world, but I doubted that Heinlein would be any safer than Terra Nova for a long time to come. “I’ll get right on it.”

“No hurry,” the Captain said. “The reporters can wait for another hour or two.”

The next hour seemed to pass very slowly. I hadn’t realised how tense I was until I tried to move, or how tired. Combat seemed to sap the energy from me, even if I wasn’t in any danger any longer, unlike the men and women on the ground. The rapidly-growing infantry force on the ground was moving out now towards the capital city, trying to seal it off before more of the population escaped into the countryside. The orbital imagery suggested that they would lose that particular race. The entire population seemed to be on the move.

I linked into the ground-based communications system and listened as the infantry advanced. There were two bridges between the spaceport and Lazarus and the defenders had dropped both of them into the water. As the infantry milled around, waiting for orders and bridging equipment, the defenders struck again and again, showering them with mortar fire and sniping from a safe distance. The infantry became more trigger-happy as their helicopters advanced overhead, clearing away the defenders until two of them were downed by handheld anti-aircraft missiles. The remaining helicopters promptly fell back and forced the troops to advance on the ground, inch by bloody inch. The bridge was repaired, allowing the infantry to advance… right into another ambush.

The system is more limited than I realised, I thought, angrily. In some ways, it was like a game — spot the ambushers before the ambush was tripped — but with very real consequences. The Heinlein defenders were good, perhaps as good as the Marines, or better. We rarely spotted an ambush until it was too late and as for the mines…by the time the infantry finally reached the city and started to seal it off, there was an entire string of burned-out tanks and IFVs behind them. The commanders on the ground, to judge from their signals, were growing frantic.

“They’re refusing to take prisoners,” one of them protested, in horror. “They just killed and butchered three of my men!”

“Call in an orbital strike,” another — harsher — voice insisted. “Kill them all!”

“Stand ready to deliver strikes on the city,” the Captain ordered, drawing my attention back to the ship. “If the Admiral wants it to fall quickly, he’ll have to order strikes.”

He was wrong. As the infantry pushed into the city, they met no opposition, apart from a handful of civilians who engaged them, as insane as it seemed, with handheld pistols. The infantry went through them like a knife through butter, but even so, they took casualties. The only real resistance occurred at what was supposed to be the Government Centre, which was held by a reinforced infantry company. Eventually, the commander on the ground called in a KEW strike and destroyed the building.

“Stand down from battle stations,” the Captain said. “John, you can go tend to your charges now; Kitty, Anna, pass control over to your seconds. Go get some rest.”

“Captain,” Anna said, “You’re exhausted too. You need some rest as well.”

“Later,” the Captain said. I was surprised that she dared to speak to him like that, but they had served together a long time. “You go get some rest. I’ll join you when Konrad arrives, ok?”

“Yes, sir,” Anna said.

There was no need to turn the secondary tactical console over to another officer, so I locked it and saluted the Captain, before departing the bridge. I had only thought that I was tired before, I realised numbly; I felt as if I wanted to collapse into my bunk and sleep, and yet I also felt horny. I stopped that line of thought when I realised that two of the reporters were on the verge of looking attractive, but still…having survived the battle gave me a charge. I barely thought about the infantrymen on the planet, but their war was only just beginning. I had the feeling that it definitely wasn’t going to end quickly for them, or for us. Who knew how long Devastator would be forced to remain in orbit around Heinlein?

“Well?” Frank Wong demanded, as soon as I entered their stateroom. The reporters all looked utterly terrified, although I saw no reason for their terror. They hadn’t seen the enemy starships on the offensive, or the massive planetary defence batteries on the surface. They’d just known that there was a battle going on…and they’d been trapped in their stateroom, almost as prisoners. Perhaps I should have felt a little sorry for them — they wouldn’t have known what was going on and therefore would have only had their imaginations to feed their fears — but I found it hard. They were obnoxious beyond belief. “What happened out there?”

“We won,” I said, flatly. They stared at me for a long moment, and then began snapping off questions, which I answered as best as I could. “Yes, there had been a battle, yes, we’d taken losses, yes, we’d taken the high orbitals, yes, the troops had landed…”

It seemed never-ending. I was grateful beyond words when Ellen Nakamura entered the cabin, giving the reporters her faintly-menacing smile. “The battle is over and the Admiral has proclaimed Heinlein a member state in the United Nations,” she said, and began her own explanation of what had happened. Apart from the detail that a battle had taken place, it didn’t seem to agree with mine on any point, even the fundamentals. She spoke of cheering crowds welcoming the UN infantrymen and hundreds of corrupt government officers being arrested and handed over to the infantry for their own protection. I knew for a fact that none of that had ever happened, but I kept my mouth firmly closed. It wouldn’t gain me anything to dispute her version of events. It was the version of events that would be spread back home and believed by everyone.

“You will all be allowed to go down to the planet soon enough,” she concluded. I felt a brief moment of sympathy for the reporters — the planet was nowhere near as safe as Ellen was promising them — but not much. They would probably end up getting killed on the ground and good riddance. “Lieutenant Walker will see to your requests tomorrow if you wish to go down sooner, but the transport is mainly required for infantry for the next week and we may not be able to fit you in.”

I half-expected a series of demands for immediate transport to the surface, but no one moved. “Let Walker know tomorrow,” Ellen finished. She gave them another half-smile. I watched in astonishment as the reporters responded to it and wondered where the real balance of power lay. “Enjoy your sleep, knowing that it is peaceful because of the valiant efforts of the Peace Force.”

She swept out and I took the opportunity to leave with her, leaving the reporters alone to write their stories. I knew now that none of them would see publication until Ellen and the Admiral’s horde of Political Officers had gone through them and rewritten them at will, just to conform with their own idea of what had happened. I didn’t want to deal with that, but there was no choice. Whatever happened in the weeks and months to come, the truth would be what the UN said it was…at least as far as the rest of the Human Sphere was concerned.

I shook my head slowly and made my way back to my cabin. It was strange to think that no matter how much I had complained about my cabin being tiny — if better than a shared Ensign’s wardroom — I was still comfortable, warm and well-fed. The Captain didn’t skimp on the food and the gallery staff knew better than to try to palm us off with bad ingredients, even though it was hard to work miracles with reprocessed foodstuffs. The soldiers on the ground would be under constant attack, living in their foxholes and desperately trying to stay alive on a planet that hated them. I remembered old friends of mine who had signed up for the infantry, having failed the exams for entering the UNPF Academy, and wondered what had happened to them. Were they down on the planet, struggling to survive, or were they already dead? We hadn’t been encouraged to write letters to friends and relatives in any of the services. I had no way to know.

I lay down on my bunk, trying to get some sleep, when there was a chime at the hatch. Surprised, I opened it, to see Kitty outside. She winked at me as she stepped inside and closed the hatch behind her. She looked good, as always, even though she was wearing a crumpled uniform. There were no dress uniforms when a battle was expected.

“How are you?” She asked, sitting down beside me on the bunk. I caught a whiff of her scent, something slightly flowery, and felt a tingle passing through me. “How did you cope with today?”

I didn’t want to discuss it, but how could I push her away? “It was…strange,” I admitted. I didn’t want to discuss it at all. “It was beautiful and terrible and frightening and exciting…”

Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly aware of just how female she was. I wasn’t a virgin — I’d paid one of my classmates for sex back in Albuquerque, when I’d been fourteen and intensely curious about sex — but I’d never had a real partner. Everyone said, back home, that the guy had to be very firm with the girl, but it struck me as a recipe for having my head kicked in. I felt uncomfortable and hoped — prayed — that she couldn’t sense it. She probably could.

“Yeah,” Kitty said. Her voice softened. “It was that for me too, John, and it doesn’t get much better. But you survived and you’re alive…”

She kissed me, hard. After a moment, I kissed her back.

It was the first time we made love.

Chapter Sixteen

It was three weeks before I was allowed to go down to the surface.

I wasn’t too unhappy about it. Officially, the war was proceeding well, with only a handful of casualties and dozens of towns and cities occupied by the infantry. Unofficially, it was far worse. There were hundreds of engagements every day, with dozens of infantry killed in brief brutal encounters… and the natives were ingenious. The Admiral had allowed some air transport to operate after the invasion — mainly first aid and food supplies — and one of the aircraft had been armed with a shipkiller missile, which it fired at Devastator, high overhead. It came within metres of destroying the entire ship and, after that, there were no more aircraft permitted to fly.

The reporters, at first, had demanded to go down to the ground at once, but as rumours filtered through their grapevine — the Admiral’s pet reporters had been allowed down at once — they started to become much less enthusiastic, choosing instead to write and file stories that drew heavily on the official broadcasts from the Admiral’s office. I’d read some of them while taking them to Ellen for the first check and discovered that they bore little relationship to reality. The reporters knew which side their bread was buttered on, all right.

And my relationship with Kitty continued to grow. I don’t know if the Captain knew about it — he certainly never said anything to us — but Anna knew and never lost an off-duty moment to tease us. On-duty, we were strictly professional and pretended we didn’t know each other. I doubt we fooled the Captain, but from what I gathered, he wouldn’t have said anything unless we acted the fool while on duty. I just hoped the reporters didn’t know. I’d heard that two of them had paid female crewmen for the pleasure of their company for a few nights and I didn’t want to remain Frank Wong about Ensign Gomez. They’d probably try to use it as blackmail information.

Devastator remained in continuous operation and it was a rare day when we fired less than a hundred KEW pellets into the planet, targeting areas identified by the infantry on the ground. We were stationed directly over Lazarus, which left part of the planet free of our interference, although the other starships continued to patrol and bombard the other side of the planet if necessary. I began to see why the Captain had been so determined to load all of our holds with KEW pallets. We had barely been in orbit for a week before we had to reload the first set of launchers. It wouldn’t be long before we would have to resupply from the transports, or even leave for the nearest UNPF base. I just hoped that the planet would be more peaceful then, although I rather doubted it. The death toll just continued to rise.

Eventually, it was decided that our reporters would be permitted to set foot on the surface of the planet, along with myself. Anna had spent part of the time in orbit drilling me on calling in strikes from the surface — the Captain firmly believed that the infantry were calling in strikes they didn’t really need, wasting KEWs that couldn’t be replaced quickly — and insisted that I took the equipment with me. She kept calling it shore leave, but I had the feeling that it wouldn’t be anything like shore leave on Earth, and that had been dangerous enough.

I had my first inkling of danger when the shuttle pilot briefed us on safety precautions. “Remain firmly strapped in at all times,” he ordered, tightly. He’d been a confident young man back when I’d boarded Devastator, but he looked to have aged fifty years overnight. Three weeks of flying to and from a hostile planet seemed to have done that to him. The infantry claimed to have seized vast quantities of weapons, but there were still attacks on our shuttles and aircraft with handheld SAMs “If I sound the alert, prepare for heavy manoeuvring.”

It wasn’t something designed to reassure the reporters, who were already half-scared to death, but they complied. The first part of the flight down to the surface was uneventful and I rather missed not having a viewport, but that changed when alarm tones rang through the shuttle and we began to lurch from side to side. I heard the reporters screaming at each other, trying to understand what was going on, and for once I was as ignorant as they were. We might have been under attack, or the pilot might have been extracting revenge for their comments about his ‘poky little shuttle.’ There was no way to know, but as the lurching grew stronger, it was all I could do not to vomit. The reporters weren’t so lucky.

“What a mess,” the pilot commented, after we landed. The compartment was in a thoroughly disgusting state. “There are showers in the buildings out there, so you can take them to shower and change while the ground crew mops out the shuttle. It won’t be the first time.”

“Thank you,” I said, sourly. An Ensign who threw up in a shuttle would be expected to clean up the mess, but the reporters didn’t even offer to help. They staggered off the shuttle and practically kissed the ground below their feet. “I’ll make a note of your services and commend you to the Captain.”

Heinlein’s main spaceport looked like hell. The smell hit me as soon as I stepped out of the shuttle, a faint mixture of burning and decaying bodies. The landing field was as packed as the field on Terra Nova, but here there was a tense air that seemed to defy understanding, at first. I heard a distant popping sound and, a moment later, explosions echoed out along the fence. A trio of massive guns positioned at one corner of the airfield swung around automatically and returned fire. A moment later, a flight of attack helicopters followed the gunfire, hunting for targets on the ground.

The buildings around the landing field looked devastated. I remembered with a tinge of guilt how we had blasted them from orbit, clearing the way for the infantry to seize the spaceport; down on the ground, it must have been a nightmare. We stumbled past a line of burned out vehicles, being moved back to the spaceport in accordance with various UN regulations, trying not to breathe in the smell. I doubted that Heinlein had always stunk of rotting bodies. Hadn’t the infantry bothered to dig mass graves and bury them?

“This way,” a headquarters soldier called. I knew he was a headquarters soldier because, as the Master Sergeant had taught me, his uniform was absolutely perfect, despite being in the middle of a war zone. I found myself disliking him on sight. “You can get your showers here and then fresh outfits.”

The shower felt like heaven and I managed to ignore some of the comments from the female reporters — and the rather more disturbing ones from one of the male reporters. Kitty had said that I had a nice ass, but really! I almost felt human again when I donned a new outfit, but that rapidly changed when I realised how much body armour I was being given to wear. The streets were evidently not as safe as the UN had promised. The reporters, for once, weren’t blind to the implications either. They protested until the headquarters staff officer informed them that they’d be travelling in the midst of a heavily armed convoy, something that didn’t reassure me in the slightest. I’d been in a heavily armed convoy back on Terra Nova.

This time, to be fair, it was a little better organised. The reporters went into a security truck that was so heavily armoured that I doubted that even a KEW could break it. I went into a different truck, which would at least allow me to take a look at the city as we passed through. As the truck rumbled to life, I heard more explosions in the distance. The insurgents were keeping up the pressure at all times. They also had time on their side. We had to haul all our weapons from Earth or one of the other fleet bases. Their sources of supply were right here on Heinlein.

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

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?”

“Now?” “Jock asked. “Now we get you suited up and ready.”

Our next destination proved to be a massive supply dump, seemingly large enough to house Devastator and another couple of starships like her. Hundreds of supply clerks swarmed around the dump, filling in requisitions and supplying requests — or, if my experience back at Earth was any guide, thinking of extremely good reasons why they shouldn’t honour such requests. The clerks took one look at Jock and collectively winced. I guessed that they’d met him and the rest of the Specials before.

Jock grabbed one hard enough to cause him to drop the paperwork he’d been carrying. “This is an emergency,” he said, so coldly I almost winced in sympathy. “I want this gentleman” — one long finger pointed at me — “outfitted now with Special-grade gear, understand?”

“Yes,” the clerk finally stammered. He looked at me and probably found it something of a relief after Jock. “Your sizes, sir?”

It took nearly thirty minutes to outfit me like the rest of the team, but that was something of a record where the supply departments were concerned. At the end of it all, I was wearing a simple uniform, without any rank badges or insignia, weighed down with dozens of items I knew nothing about. Jock examined me thoroughly, removed half of them and dumped them back on the desk, before leading me back outside. The remaining team members were waiting in a small jeep.

“Keep your rifles at the ready,” Jock ordered, tightly, as Dan revved up the engine. “If we get shot at, I expect you to shoot back without waiting for orders.”

“Of course, boss,” Judy said. Her name, I realised suddenly, was shared with one of the reporters — wherever they were now — but her voice and attitude was very different. I wouldn’t have wanted to run into her in a dark alley. Jase and his merry band of rapists wouldn’t have known what hit them. “We’ll put them off their stroke all right.”

Jock snorted as the jeep raced out of the guarded compound and down the main road. Back on Earth, the roads had been clogged with litter; here, they were clean, apart from a handful of burned-out vehicles. The infantry had imposed a ban on all vehicles right from the start, forbidding the natives to use their personal vehicles — and that was a new concept to me too — unless it was urgent. Apparently, some vehicles had been packed with explosives and driven by their automated systems right into the guarded compounds, or infantry units on patrol. The streets were as dangerous as they ever were.

“Sniper,” Dan hissed. “Judy…”

“I see him,” Judy said. I barely had my rifle in position before she took the shot, sending a young teenager — barely a few years younger than myself — falling to his death. A hail of shots came at us from the windows, but Jock returned fire with his massive weapon and deterred them from coming any closer. “You got anything else for me, Danny Boy?”

“Bitch,” Dan said, with feeling. “No matter how much I give you, you’re never satisfied.”

“Men,” Judy retorted. The banter didn’t stop her from firing off several more rounds towards other insurgents. “If it wasn’t for the three or so hours of sex you get out of them each night, what use would they be?”

Jock laughed. “You will keep wearing them out,” he said. He sounded a different person away from the base, more relaxed despite the possibility of insurgent attacks. “Did you ever return that guy you kidnapped and chained to your bed?”

I listened in a state of numb disbelief. At the Academy, speaking like that would have earned demerits, if not outright punishment for hate speech. We were told that hate speech — sexist, racist or any other kind of hate speech — demeaned people, but here they were just bouncing off one another. It didn’t even seem to affect their teamwork, either; Judy saved Dan’s life, despite his words.

“Of course not,” Judy said, with a wink. “He was too good to be allowed back so quickly.”

“He’ll be dead when you get back then,” Charlie said. “You did remember to feed him, right?”

“Best kind of man,” Judy said. She gave him a wink that probably qualified as a lethal assault in its own right. “As long as he can keep it up…”

I tuned them out as we raced into open countryside and studied the terminal in my hand. It was UNPF-issue, but designed for use on the ground. I could have taken a hammer to it and it would still work, according to the specifications. I knew better than to take that too seriously, but I could still practice. Calling in a strike from Devastator wasn’t hard, after all. It just required practice and care. Everyone had been warned about the danger of accidentally calling in a strike on their own position.

“Here we are,” Jock said, as he came to a halt outside a small camp. The soldiers on guard looked much more professional than the ones back in the city. Their weapons, and a handful of automated weapons mounted on a small armoured vehicle, tracked us as we approached. Now that the jeep had come to a halt, I could hear explosions in the distance…and heavy shooting. “Don’t those willies look alert?”

Judy snorted behind her hand. “I could take them out in three quick shots, boss,” she commented. “Perhaps we should try to sneak in instead, just for shits and giggles.”

“Damn right,” Charlie agreed. “Boss?”

“Not this time,” Jock said, firmly. This close to the war zone, they were almost professional. “We have to report to the General.”

The guards inspected our papers and took our fingerprints, before grudgingly allowing us to enter the camp. It was crowded with men, like the city, but there was a very real difference. Most of the soldiers here were fighting soldiers and there seemed to be no sign of any luxuries. A handful of local buildings had been converted into barracks and offices, but the General had set up camp in a large tent. I wasn’t sure that that was wise, but as I saw the mobile defence units shooting down incoming rounds, it became apparent that it was safer than it seemed, if not by much. Personally, I wished I was in a bunker, or back in orbit.

“Jock,” the General said. He was a bluff man with a heavy beard, carrying a rifle like the remainder of his staff. There were no headquarters soldiers here. “You brought the controller?”

“Here,” Jock said, pushing me forward. “Say hello, controller?”

The General ignored his comment. “We’re advancing now against these towns,” he said, tapping the map on the table. Red arrows lay on the map. It was primitive, compared to the holograms I’d used back on the Devastator, but that might have been the point. No one could hack into a paper map. “I want you to escort our guest to here” — he tapped a location on the map — “and call in strikes as requested by the local commanders.”

“Yes, sir,” Jock said, saluting. It was the first time I’d seen him using anything reassembling proper military protocol. He grinned at me as we walked out of the tent. “We walk from here, punk.”

I groaned. An hour later, I felt worse, even though we hadn’t walked very far. The four Specials had escorted me along smaller roads, avoiding vehicles and soldiers from both sides, until we reached the top of a hill. Dan and Charlie had scouted ahead and found an enemy hide there, which they had promptly cleared with a pair of grenades and some knife work. I ignored the still-bleeding bodies as best as I could and stared down into the valley. There was a medium-sized town below…and the inhabitants were defending it furiously.

“I’m surprised they haven’t been screaming for strikes already,” Jock commented, dryly. I wondered if he were bored. If half the stories I’d heard about the Specials were true, this was tame compared to their more normal missions. “They’re probably cursing the lack of heavy artillery now.”

I watched as explosions seemed to rip through the town without suppressing the enemy forces. “Why are they there?” I asked. “Why aren’t they retreating?”

“They can’t,” Dan supplied, from his position. Charlie and Judy were watching for enemy forces that might wonder what had happened to their spotter. “The General has infantry units in position to block any escape from the town.”

“But who are they?”

“Heinlein had the largest army and army reservists in the entire Human Sphere,” Jock said. “They could be anyone, making a stand because they know that they could bleed us to death here. This entire area was prepared for us and the General had no choice, but to enter it. Hear that?”

I nodded. The sound of mortars firing in the distance kept echoing out, answered by heavier guns from the infantry positions, a long-range duel to suppress each other’s fire. I hoped that none of the enemy had the hill targeted. It would be an absurd way to die after everything else.

“They’ll have everywhere here carefully targeted and marked with a big red circle saying ‘hit this when occupied,’ Jock predicted. “They want to bleed us…”

I looked down at the terminal. A fire request was already coming in. “They want a general shot over the entire town,” I said, in disbelief. They couldn’t demand that, could they? There were regulations against it. “That’s…”

“What’s required,” Jock said, a steely tone in his voice. “Do it.”

I started to object. “Do it,” Jock snapped, again. “How many of our people do you want to die if they storm the town?”

The terminal was heavy in my hand. I keyed it open, placed my finger against the scanner to confirm it was an authorised user, and carefully entered the coordinates, double-checking to ensure that I’d entered the right ones. The link back to Devastator buzzed as the tactical officer — Anna would be on duty, I thought — checked my coordinates against the system, and then confirmed the shot. It was ready on demand.

“Now,” Jock said, coldly. There was something in his voice that promised that failure would not go unpunished. “Place the request.”

I complied, trembling. Up above, a set of KEWs would be being fired from the tubes, targeted precisely on the town. The scatter-shots weren’t as precise as the more normal shots, but they would be devastating to the defenders. I found myself counting under my breath. The timer read 00.50 seconds to impact. I should have taken cover, but I had to watch. There was a streak of light in the sky, a thunderous series of explosions that blurred into one roar…and a slap in the face that left me sitting back on the ground, wondering if my sanity had been impaired. The blast wave had knocked me to the ground.

“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

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 children 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?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I would sooner deal with reporters than kill innocent children again. The reporters, at least, couldn’t be shot. Regulations were such a nuisance at times. “Do you want me to supervise their activities on the planet?”

“Not at present,” the Captain said. “The Admiral’s staff are capable of controlling them and ensuring that they toe the line. You’ll be given some time to check in with them in a week or so, but unless they want to come back onboard, they’ll be out of your hair.”

I remembered just how secure Lazarus was and decided that the reporters would probably be happier filing lies from orbit, even with Heinlein starships jumping in, firing off a few volleys, and vanishing again. The battles in space had stalemated with no side able to claim an advantage. The UN held the local system, but isolated starships were easy prey for the Heinlein raiders. It was a toss-up if I were safer in space or on the ground.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Good,” the Captain said. He gave me a paternal smile. “You are dismissed.”

I saluted, turned about-face, and marched out of the cabin, thinking hard.

Chapter Nineteen

The war raged on.

Over the next six months, UN Ground Command declared Lazarus a secure city four times. Every time, something happened within a day of the announcement that put the lie to their words. Admiral Hoover would appear on the communications network, bragging about how the UN had finally secured the planet, only to end up dodging incoming mortar shells. On the third time, someone screwed up and the entire planet was able to see the shells barely miss the Admiral’s podium. It probably encouraged resistance no end.

I remained on the Devastator for most of the time, but I heard plenty from the communications networks — and the Brotherhood. The Infantry were seizing and sweeping through towns in vast numbers, but the insurgents were very good at slipping into the countryside and vanishing. The Infantry were mainly city boys and girls and knew little about the countryside. Heinlein had developed its own set of animals and some of them were very dangerous. Soldiers shied away from harmless snakes only to run into lethal creatures that killed, and were killed. At first, Ground Forces Command attempted to prevent the soldiers from killing the animals, only to discover that it was a set of orders that wouldn’t be obeyed. The soldiers might have been trained to obey orders, but it was amazing how quickly such orders were forgotten when it was their lives at stake. The animals also proved to be inedible — which didn’t stop hungry soldiers from trying to eat them when their supply trucks were hit and left as burned-out ruins.

We fired thousands of strikes against the planetary surface in just those six months. The Captain, at least, had had the foresight to order additional KEWs brought along from Earth in freighters, rather than count on supplies from the asteroid industrial plants. The native workers were determined not to knuckle under so quickly and had started to sabotage their own machines and equipment. I hadn’t understood what I was seeing, until Kitty pointed out that most of the guards had come from the inner cities and malls of Earth and knew less than I did about industrial equipment. The workers could probably run rings around them.

It wasn’t much better in deep space. The Heinlein starships were still mounting their hit-and-run raids, each time trying to take out a cruiser or a troop transport starship. I had worked out the logistics behind that myself. If we lost troop transports in unacceptable numbers, we would have to start using freighters, or colonist-carriers. If we started losing those in significant numbers, the war would be on the verge of being lost, all over the Human Sphere. Without the freighters and heavy transports, the UN wouldn’t be able to hold what it had. It certainly couldn’t found new colonies further away from Earth.

“Bastards,” I heard Anna say, at one time. “They could just come out for a fight!”

“That would be stupid of them,” Konrad pointed out, in return. “All they have to do is keep going and they’ll drive us mad. Why should they waste themselves butting their heads against a stone wall when they can undermine it instead?”

The news from the planet seemed to range between the insanely optimistic and the extremely depressing. Another order was being passed banning all contact with Heinlein’s vast array of prostitutes — except they weren’t prostitutes, but something else, something honourable in their society I never understood — after a prostitute somehow drugged and killed seven men. Other orders banned drinking in local bars, or eating local food, or even talking to local children. I didn’t understand the motivation behind all the orders, but I knew one thing. Morale was falling right through the deck.

“Perhaps the locals can help,” Anna said, tiredly. “They’re coming out in our favour, right?”

I doubted it. I’d only seen videos of the Heinlein Front for Progressive Unity, but they didn’t strike me as impressive. Their spokesmen talked about the benefits of UN rule, parroting back UN propaganda to the point where I was sure that everyone knew that they were just talking heads. There were real collaborators down on the surface, but some of them ended up dead after their security had slipped — just once — and others had proved to be working for the other side. An arms dump of captured weapons had been betrayed to the insurgents by a collaborator, who’d vanished into the night with his new friends. The war knew no end and the death toll — on both sides — was mounting rapidly. We’d lost over ten thousand, mainly infantry. God alone knew how many they’d lost.

“You’re going to have to check in on the reporters,” the Captain ordered, one day. It was something of a relief. I might not have participated in any more bombardments, but I knew that the day was coming. The Captain had had to sent two of his Lieutenants and three Ensigns to the cruiser Susan Sontag after several of the crew were caught in a rigged asteroid and killed in a massive explosion. Several Captains had just started blasting suspect asteroids from long range, despite official orders against it. “Take some leave after it and check out Lazarus. I want a full report when you return.”

I saluted and took the next shuttle down to the surface. The only change was that this time we were greeted with several SAM weapons, instead of just one. The Heinlein Resistance had obviously been stockpiling them for the invasion and distributed them widely. We lost several helicopters a week, and at least seven heavy shuttles had been shot down. I was lucky — again — and escaped serious injury, although the pilot kept swearing all the time until we hit the surface. I should have written him up for losing his cool under fire, but he had landed us safely, despite that. I doubt I could have done as well.

Heinlein really was a beautiful place, I reflected, as I joined a military convoy leading into Lazarus. It was marred by burned out towns and villages — the Infantry had cleared away every place near the roads leading to the city — but even so, it was beautiful. Earth no longer looked like that, as far as I knew. The planet was so heavily polluted that it was growing increasingly hazardous to life and limb. It was no wonder that the inhabitants were willing to defend it and, judging by the twitchy demeanour of the soldiers, were doing so successfully. None of the Infantry had signed up for an all-out war.

“We found the remains of the last patrol in this area,” the Infantry Captain told me, after I asked. “They’d cut off their balls and stuffed them in their mouths. The girls had knives rammed up their cunts. It’s growing harder to patrol so close to the city and it’s giving them time to bring up new weapons and resupply their people.”

The city looked like a war zone. The vast majority of civilians were now gone, replaced by UN Infantry and endless convoys of supplies being shipped to distant outposts. Even so, the city kept fighting — I heard the sounds of several IEDs as we drove into the expanded secure zone — and it was far from secure. A handful of arrested girls were being raped by a group of Infantry, their screams echoing for miles…and I turned my head and looked away. There was nothing I could do.

“The men need to blow off steam,” the Captain said, seeing my expression. “It doesn’t matter. The bastards will kill us all in the end.”

I should have reported the defeatism, but again, I just couldn’t be bothered. The secure zone looked more like a fortress than ever, covered with gun emplacements and heavy roadblocks. A line of armoured tanks seemed to follow us with their machine guns as we drove past them. It was almost a relief to see Frank Wong and the rest of the reporters. They’d lost weight, I noticed, and they were pale and trembling. The compound, it seemed, was shelled daily. The locals could set up a mortar, fire a few rounds, and then vanish before the Infantry could locate them.

“You have to get us out of here,” Frank insisted, desperately. I was tempted to twit him about his endlessly optimistic statements, but it wasn’t the right time. “It won’t be long before they break in and kill us all.”

I looked back at the defences. “I don’t think its that bad,” I said, unable to resist the temptation. He had been a major pain in my ass. “They’re not going to lose so quickly, are they?”

“They broke in last week,” Frank said, seriously. “They killed seven of the officers before they were hunted down by the Infantry. You have to get us out of here.”

I smiled as another flight of helicopters raced overhead, their stubby wings crammed with weapons and sensors, hunting human prey. “I’ll do my best,” I murmured. “I’ll see to it as soon as possible.”

Frank left, heading back towards the bunkers, while I pulled out my terminal and issued the necessary orders. There were plenty of empty shuttles going back to the Devastator, so they could just hitch a lift. I had just finished when another round of shells came crashing into the compound, but only two of them avoided the counter-battery fire and hit the ground. I smiled as the sounds died away and started to walk. The Captain had insisted on a report from the ground, hadn’t he? He’d get his money’s worth.

I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I finally encountered what had to be a library. Out of curiosity, I went inside, wondering if there was an insurgent in the library waiting to put an end to me. The lights came on as I entered and my hand fell to my pistol, but nothing leapt out at me. It was an automated system. No one would use anything like it on an Earth city, not when it might put someone else out of work. I looked at the books, lying on the shelves, and felt an eagerness I hadn’t known since Kitty and I had made love for the first time. I’d never set foot in a library until I’d gone to school. There just weren’t any back in my hometown.

The next hour passed quickly as I browsed, wonderingly. There were books that shocked me — a sex manual for group orgies and detailed instructions on how to produce a nuclear bomb — and some that surprised me. One discussed, at length, the history of the United Nations and explained many things I hadn’t understood. There had been no grand unification, no final coming-together of the human race, but something far darker. As the colonists had fled to the stars, the UN had quietly taken over Earth and transformed itself into a vast bureaucracy that controlled every aspect of human life. It was a version of history I’d never heard at home…and that, too, was not surprising. The book explained how the UN censored everything, all from the purest of motives, until the human race had no past. There were nations, and people, I’d never heard of in the past, building humanity’s future, a future that had turned sour.

I pushed the book aside, finally, and looked for others. Some of them were fictional stories set in worlds that couldn’t exist, although the UN had always rather approved of fantasy novels. I don’t know why, but everyone knew that dragons, goblins and werewolves didn’t exist. Others were set in dreams of the future, ones created before the tawdry reality of real interstellar logistics and the Jump Drive had settled in. Several hinted at war with intelligent aliens, but we had never even seen signs of alien ruins, let alone massive cube-shaped starships. I doubted that anyone could build a wormhole generator large enough to transport a ship that size. The UN had been looking at a wormhole large enough to take an entire planet, but the power requirements would be literally astronomical.

And there were so many wonders in the library…

Something moved behind me. I spun around, my hand dropping to my pistol. “Can I help you, Citizen?”

I stared. I was looking at a walking mannequin, shaped like a nude woman with astonishingly large breasts. It was almost flawless. Only the eyes gave its real nature away. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I’d never seen anything like it before. It looked so realistic that I wondered if young men ever tried to have sex with it.

“Ah,” I said, finally. “What are you?”

“I am a Susan Calvin Corporation Mark XII Automated Drone,” she — I couldn’t think of her as an ‘it’, somehow — said. “I am the librarian of this library. Can I help you, sir?”

I couldn’t grasp the implications at first, and then I felt pure rage. While the UN kept its people in crumbling cities and helplessness, the Planet of Heinlein was so rich that they could afford robot librarians! The UN distrusted AI for all kinds of reasons and I wasn’t sure that they were wrong, but surely…why couldn’t we have robots too? Or access to this treasure trove of information, or even political freedom? Why did we have to have Political Officers looking over our shoulder all the time? Earth starved, simply because the farms couldn’t produce enough food to feed the planet, while Heinlein… I would guess that life as a beggar on Heinlein was better than life in the inner circle on Earth.

“Yes,” I said, shaking my head. In the darkness, I would have mistaken her for a real woman. I wondered, with a near-giggle, if anyone got electrocuted trying to have sex with her. “Can you show me a good general history of Heinlein?”

“Of course, sir,” the robot said. She walked past me — I was captivated by the swaying of her ass, despite the growing sense of unreality surrounding me — and took a book off the shelves. “Here you are, sir. Is there anything else?”

I hesitated, and then took the plunge. “Do you do electronic texts as well?” I asked. “Something I can use on a UN-standard terminal?”

“Of course,” the robot assured me. “How many different formats would you like?”

I reeled again. The UNPF Academy used electronic texts as a matter of course, but they were so heavily protected that they could only be accessed on the library computers, apparently to prevent someone from copying them and distributing them on the deep Internet. The endless regulations had killed electronic books back on Earth, but here…she could fit an entire library on one terminal.

“UN-standard,” I said, finally. I knew that that would work on an isolated terminal and I doubted that I’d be allowed to take a Heinlein-grade personal computer, or would I? “Do you have electronic readers here?”

“Yes, sir,” the robot said. She leaned forward and this time I couldn’t resist. I reached out and touched her breast. It felt far too real. Her voice sounded real as well. “Please don’t do that, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, absurdly. “Please could you fetch me the reader?”

“Yes, sir,” the robot said. I was astonished. I’d expected a demand for payment, but instead… I was just getting it for free! “What would you like to have loaded onto the reader?”

“Everything you can,” I said. Even a UN-grade terminal had thousands of terabytes worth of data storage capability. I had a feeling that Heinlein would be capable of producing something more capable than the UN. “How much can you fit on?”

“The entire contents of the library database,” the robot said. There was a long moment as she returned behind her desk and pulled out a small reader, before passing it to me. “Enjoy, sir.”

I rolled my eyes and opened the book on Heinlein. It was harder to read than the prior book, simply because I lacked some of the background information that the book’s writer assumed I would have. I still didn’t know who Heinlein had actually been — the book sang his praises, but didn’t say much about him — but it did provide a brief overview of Heinlein itself. The planet had been founded by people who’d believed in Heinlein’s vision — I wasn’t sure if they’d been contemporaries of Heinlein or if they’d come later — and had made it come true. It hadn’t all been wine and roses, but if the book was to be believed, it had worked better than the UN.

“Thank you,” I said, finally, and pocketed the reader. It was smaller than anything the UN had produced, which suggested worrying things about their military capabilities, and I could hide it easily. I thought about pointing others towards the library — I didn’t understand why it had been left alone, even — but I knew better. That would eventually bring security down on my head. “I have a lot of reading to do.”

The robot waved at me as I left. “Have a nice evening, sir,” she said. “I hope to see you soon.”

I was still laughing to myself when I boarded the shuttle to return to the Devastator.

Chapter Twenty

The books made fascinating reading each night, I discovered, as I lay in my cabin reading. I’d made the decision to tell Kitty almost as soon as I returned to the ship — I couldn’t have her wondering why I wasn’t interested in her any longer — and we read them together. I swiftly came to realise that reading them all would take my entire life-time, if not much longer. There were thousands upon thousands of books on the reader, most of them banned by the UN. I didn’t understand why at first, until I realised that many of them talked about revolution against legitimate authority. That was exactly the kind of thinking the UN wanted to suppress.

And they were part of humanity’s heritage. The more I wondered about it, the more I wondered why the library hadn’t been looted, or simply destroyed outright. Could it be that the Generals commanding on the ground hadn’t given the library any thought? As far as I knew, no such treasure trove of information existed on Earth…might they have completely missed its significance? Or, perhaps, the building had been off-limits and I simply hadn’t realised. There certainly hadn’t been any guards there to stop me from entering.

Or, perhaps, they wanted the library for themselves. I owned the reader and merely owning it made me feel like I had a privileged insight into humanity, even though very little had actually changed. The Generals might feel the same way, or perhaps they might even be considering using the library themselves, perhaps to advance their own careers. There was no way to know and, as long as no one knew I had the reader, it wouldn’t matter. If someone realised what I had, they’d probably report me, which would mean — at least — the end of my career.

“Then keep it locked at all times,” Kitty said, when I confided my fear to her. “As long as no one has any reason to go searching your baggage, no one will find it.”

The days passed slowly in orbit. The fighting on the ground seemed to fade away for a few weeks — long enough for the Generals to declare victory — and then it resumed with equal or greater violence. The resistance had clearly taken advantage of the pause to rearm and prepare new positions, because Lazarus itself came under heavy attack and the government compound in the secure zone came within an inch of falling. It turned out that the resistance had been using the sewer pipes under the city to gain ingress to pretty much anywhere and finally they risked a mass offensive. The UN only won by the skin of its teeth. The declaration of victory was never mentioned again.

I spent a brief week on one of the orbital stations, watching the native workers. It wasn’t a good week. Nothing happened to me personally, but the natives watched us all sullenly and were compelled to explain everything at great length to their Infantry or Marine supervisors. The delays were not inconsiderable. The Infantry came from the inner cities and knew even less than I did about high technology. A set of defective components, when finally traced back to their source, turned out to have failed because the Infantry officers supervising the workers had forbidden them to include a certain chip. Their faces were carefully blank, but I was sure that they were laughing at us inside. It was hard to blame them.

And there were the damned reporters. The Captain had, I decided, found a subtle way to punish me for my attempt to report the war crime. I had already detested the reporters, now I hated them as well, reading their smug articles that bore little relationship to reality. Apparently, a million Heinlein insurgents had died in the last month of fighting, which struck me as rather unlikely. If we had killed as many locals as we claimed to have killed, we’d have exterminated the entire planet’s population several times over. It wouldn’t seem so strange on Earth, where there were billions of civilians living in cramped cities, but here it was just a sick joke. I didn’t even know why they’d been allowed to come on the invasion. They could have made shit up back home and no one there would have known the difference. Perhaps their enemies were hoping that the insurgents would dispose of them. Several reporters had been killed and another couple had been kidnapped for ransom, which had promptly been paid. The reporters were apparently worth more than the infantrymen. No one tried to ransom them.

And then there were the logistics problems. Devastator had been built for long-term operations and, in theory, we could have remained in the Heinlein System permanently, but in practice it wouldn’t work out that well. We needed food, fuel, weapons and other supplies and our sources were limited. After a near-disaster with a locally-produced KEW, we had become dependent upon supplies shipped in from Earth and more loyal systems, if there was such a thing. The Captain wanted me to square the circle without requisitioning more supplies from Earth, but it was impossible. The pre-invasion planners had claimed that we would be able to supply ourselves from Heinlein, but how could we do that when we couldn’t even trust the food? The planners had probably gotten rewarded back home for launching an invasion on the cheap, while we were short of all supplies and starving. I’d heard of infantry units using enemy weapons and ammunition because they were so plentiful.

It was a nightmare that never seemed to end.

I was on Deck Seven when I heard the screaming. Deck Seven was the main residence deck, including the Ensign’s Wardroom and the various sleeping quarters for Marines, Specialist Officers and the crew. Inspecting it regularly was technically part of Anna’s duties, but with her spending much of her time on the surface, the Captain had passed it on to me. It wasn’t as much as a punishment as working with the reporters. Unlike some ships I’d heard about, Devastator wasn’t commanded by a Captain who didn’t care about conditions in the crew quarters and everything was kept neatly in order. By long tradition, the crewmen bunked with whoever they pleased, but I had to inspect everything, learning where two lovers had become careless. The screaming, however, was unprecedented.

The deck clanged under my feet as I ran through the corridors into a smaller maintenance corridor. The noise grew louder as I turned through the corridor and stopped dead when I entered the supply room. A man had a woman firmly bent over the small workbench and was fucking her from behind. It took me a moment to overcome my horror and realise that Frank Wong was raping Ensign Gomez. Her screams proved that, if nothing else. She struggled, but couldn’t escape. He was too strong for her and she, unlike me, had had no training.

“Let go of her, now!” I snapped, reaching for Frank. Everything moved very quickly. I saw him pull out of her and draw back a fist to hit me, so I punched him in the side of the head. He staggered, but didn’t fall. My fist hurt, so I kicked him in the chest and sent him gasping to the deck. “Ensign, are you all right?”

Two crewmen and a Marine had appeared behind me. Frank was lucky that he was already down and out. Ensign Gomez was popular and their expressions promised bloody vengeance for her treatment. I looked at her and realised that she was shaking, trying to cover herself with the remains of her uniform, and looked away. A moment later, one of the crewmen passed her an overall and she pulled it on gratefully.

“Corporal,” I said, catching myself and remembering that I was supposed to be in charge, “take this piece of shit to the brig and throw him in, then stay on guard. Don’t let him talk to anyone until I’ve had a chance to speak to the Captain.”

“Yes, sir,” the Marine said, and picked Frank up by the collar. “Come along now, you fucker.”

Frank staggered out, half-dragged by the Marine. I watched him go, hoping he’d try to resist, and then turned to Ensign Gomez. She was shaking, holding her hands wrapped around herself, her eyes wide with fear. I touched her shoulder and she flinched back. Frank was luckier than he knew. If he’d still been there, I would have killed him personally.

“It’s all right now,” I said, as softly as I could. “He can’t hurt you any more.”

With a little help, I escorted her to Sickbay and handed her over to Doctor Choudhury. She was a small brown woman with an air of brisk competence and I trusted her completely. The Ship’s Doctor wasn’t a commissioned officer, nor was she in the chain of command, and younger officers and crewmen had a tendency to talk to her about their problems. I hoped that Ensign Gomez would talk to the Doctor, even though she would probably have to talk to the Captain later. Frank wasn’t a crewman, worse luck, but a guest with powerful connections. I wished Anna was onboard. It would be so much easier if I could drop it all in her lap.

“She’s not that badly injured, physically,” Doctor Choudhury said, twenty minutes later. She’d taken Ensign Gomez into an examination room, leaving me waiting outside pacing like an expectant father. It was all I could do to remain patient for two minutes. “There are some bruises on her thighs and neck, where he apparently held her, but she’ll recover from that quickly. There are no signs of internal damage, luckily. Mentally…”

Her face twisted bitterly. “Her confidence has been completely destroyed and… well, she’s not in a good state,” she added. “I’d prefer it if she were fighting back, frankly. We don’t have a proper team of psychologists here who could help her recover and… shipboard life is no place for anyone who has been raped like that. She thought the ship was safe.”

“I thought the ship was safe,” I said, bitterly. Rape was very common where I’d grown up, but I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. My sisters had never been raped — or had they been raped after I’d left. I remembered some of the bull sessions we’d had back as teenage men, talking about women and how sometimes you had to push them… had they led to rape? The bile welled up in my mouth and I had to swallow hard to prevent vomiting. “What are you going to do with her?”

Doctor Choudhury looked down at her terminal. “I’ve got her sedated right now,” she said. “I’ve taken samples from her skin and vaginal area and can prove that she definitely had sex with him, but it may come down to his word against hers.”

I stared. “And the screaming? The physical wounds?”

“There are two crewmen down in Engineering who inflict far worse on each other and love it,” Doctor Choudhury said. “I actually had to speak to one of them quite severely about how they were treating each other. I’m sure that some people get their thrills by being beaten with a rattan cane, but they were risking putting one of them here for longer than a day or two.”

“Ouch,” I said, wondering who the couple were, before returning to the important issue. “You can’t swear that she was raped?”

“I can swear that force was used,” Doctor Choudhury said. “I cannot prove that it was rape.”

“Shit,” I said. The last thing I wanted to see was Frank getting away with it. He might well get away with it. I couldn’t recall a single conviction for rape back home, despite thousands of complaints to the police. The police were more likely to dismiss the issue completely. They might even have their fun with the girl themselves. “Is there no proof you can offer?”

Her dark face was all the answer I needed. For a moment, I considered just walking into the brig and strangling Frank myself, but what would have been the point? I’d just have been charged with murder myself, perhaps even a war crime, which would have been ironic beyond belief.

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “I’d better go report it to the Captain.”

The trial, such as it was, was a farce. I had forgotten how little power the Captain had over guests on his ship, particularly guests with political connections. The Political Officer served as the presiding judge and allowed Frank to conduct his own defence, facing Ensign Gomez herself. She wasn’t allowed a lawyer of any kind, despite UNPF Regulations stipulating that anyone involved in a court martial of any kind needed a lawyer, and it was easy to cast doubt on her testimony. The Doctor had to admit that there was no direct proof that she had been raped and I…I was told, by the Captain, to keep myself out of it. The ending was inevitable. Frank Wong was declared innocent. The only upbeat news was a conversation I overhead between Frank and the Captain, where he warned Frank in no uncertain terms that another rape would mean his instant death. Frank came out of that meeting sporting a black eye.

And Ensign Gomez? She never recovered from her experience, despite all the help that we could give her. At the end of our deployment, she was transferred to a research centre in deep space, well away from anywhere else. I pitied her more than anyone else. She’d once been full of promise, until a bastard with too many political collections had got his hands on her.

The remainder of the deployment — two years, mostly spent in orbit around Heinlein — went slowly. I ended up remaining on the Devastator most of the time — Frank had apparently asked for my removal from the reporter-babying duty — handling the duties of three other Lieutenants. I also spent more time on two other starships, replacing officers who had managed to get themselves transferred, or killed in the line of duty. Actually, one of them had been killed in a local brothel, but it had been recorded as a combat death. Heinlein being Heinlein, it probably was.

I had the faintest glimmerings of a plan before we started to prepare to return to Earth, but even with Kitty’s help, it would have to wait until we had some shore leave to ourselves. We also knew that we might not be together for much longer. I suspected that the Captain would approve my transfer request and Kitty might not be able to go with me, even though she wanted a transfer as well. She was technically senior to me. She might well be sent to another starship. I studied the lists of opening posts and tried to make a good case for us to be sent as a couple, but there were few openings for two lieutenants. There were plenty of possible posts for a single officer — and, of course, they might have been filled before I returned to Earth. Roger even offered to put in a good word for me with the Admiral, but the last thing I wanted was a post on the battleship. It was just too large.

The only peace of good news came in a week before we departed for Earth, having been finally relieved by the Annihilator. Frank, who hadn’t set foot on the starship since someone — not me — had played merry hell with the stateroom’s life support systems, had been finally sent out of Lazarus to report on the countryside and the ‘Heinlein Improvement Project’s’ progress. The insurgents located his convoy and attacked it. No one survived. The infantrymen who finally reached the convoy’s remains reported that someone had cut off his penis and stuffed it up his ass. I couldn’t help, but laugh when I heard the news. Never let them give you to the women…

“Serve the bastard right,” I gloated to Kitty. Ensign Gomez had perked up a little when she heard the news. Anna had convinced the Captain to allow her one of the spare cabins for her bunk, just so she wouldn’t be surrounded by male Ensigns, but it hadn’t helped. We’d even looked for a Rape Trauma Specialist down on Heinlein, but found none. Heinlein seemed to believe that the only good rapist was a dead one. How could I disagree? “I wonder how that’s going to be reported.”

I should have known. The reports claimed that he had been killed after a heroic struggle that killed hundreds of insurgents. I doubted that there was anyone in the system who was impressed with the UN’s propaganda any longer, even the UNPF Generals. No matter what they said, it was always proved spectacularly wrong soon afterwards.

As the ship headed for home, I had to force myself to relax.

Back at Luna Base, the real work would begin.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Well,” Ellen Nakamura said. “You’ve had an interesting couple of years, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, carefully. Ellen looked as hauntingly beautiful as ever, but I wasn’t fooled. She had a razor-sharp mind and full knowledge of everything that had happened on the deployment. I wouldn’t forgive her for sacrificing Ensign Gomez on the alter of political expediency, but I wouldn’t underestimate her either. She could break my career. “I have learned a great deal.”

Ellen laughed gaily. “You definitely have,” she said. “You did well on your deployment to the ground and Captain Jones spoke highly of you during your deployment to his vessel. He actually wanted to offer you a post on his ship, but we decided that your services were still required here.”

That rankled, more than a little. The longer I stayed on the monitor, the greater the chance that I would have to launch or call in another fire mission, directed against the ground. God alone knew how many innocents had been killed on Heinlein, but I would have bet good money that it was well over a million. I hadn’t known that Captain Jones had wanted me — he was short of officers after the insurgent attack — and I would have transferred at once, if he had offered me the chance. Life on a cruiser would have been far more tolerable than life on a monitor. The people I would have killed, at least, would have been trying to kill me.

“But in any case all good things must come to an end,” she said, moving back to the more serious persona. “You are requesting permission to transfer to another starship? Don’t you like it on the Devastator?”

It was an innocent question that had a nasty sting in the tail. I didn’t have the Senior Chief briefing me this time, warning me of what I would face. Saying the wrong thing would wreck my career, but I honestly wasn’t sure what I should say. If I confessed to disliking the starship’s purpose, it would get me marked down as a possible subversive, while if I claimed to love it… well, she’d probably know that I was lying.

“I want to get further experience of starship operations,” I explained, finally. It was even true. “The Devastator remains in one system and operates there. I want to serve on a starship that carries out patrols and maybe even explores new star systems.”

“Boldly going where no one has gone before,” Ellen agreed. It was the motto of the UN’s Survey Corps, which examined new planets for human settlement. One of the charges the UN had levelled against Heinlein’s Founding Fathers was that they hadn’t waited for the Survey Corps to clear the planet before settling. The Heinlein books had suggested that the Survey Corps would have delayed classifying the planet until they were bribed into agreement, or tried to place unacceptable conditions on the settlements. I had once thought about joining them, but I hadn’t made it through that section of the Academy. I hadn’t understood why under much later. “I admit that you have the qualifications — now — to try for a position on a survey ship, but you must realise that your experience mandates against it.”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said, slowly. “I was hoping to serve on a anti-piracy patrol vessel or another starship that would be operating along the edge of explored space. I can qualify for that.”

“Indeed you can,” Ellen agreed. She changed tack suddenly. “What did you think of the invasion of Heinlein?”

I shrugged, as artlessly as I could. “I think that they needed to be brought into the UN before their individualistic tendencies led to civil war,” I said. I knew the answer to that one, of course; Ellen lectured on it every fortnight. “Our presence in the system prevents them from turning their guns on one another.”

“Of course,” Ellen agreed. I reflected that they’d turned their guns on the infantry instead, but that proved nothing. It was possible that the UN was right, but if half of the Heinlein guidebooks were to be believed, Heinlein had a far lower level of violent crime than Earth. I suppose that the possibility of being shot dead while committing a crime did add a certain deterrent value. “Once we start settling proper citizens from Earth on the planet, we can drain their violence natures from them and reshape their world.”

“Of course,” I agreed, slowly. I doubted that it would be anything like as easy as she suggested. Heinlein’s system was very embedded into the planet and they were still resisting furiously. I’d heard rumours that the UN had even considered the use of biological or chemical weapons — it was a war crime to even suggest the use of such weapons — in hopes of bring the war to an end before it was too late. The settlers who were being prepared to land on the planet had been put off time and time again. Their transports were needed to supply more soldiers to the planet’s garrisons. “I’m sure that it will work perfectly.”

“But enough of that,” Ellen said, finally. “I have checked, as you know, with the Captain and Anna. The Captain was quite happy to endorse your transfer request, if you chose to make it, but Anna did point out that you would no longer be Junior Lieutenant after this cruise. Two Lieutenants are leaving the ship and their replacements would probably be junior to you. Do you want to risk returning — remaining — to a junior role?”

It actually didn’t matter. My two years as a Lieutenant (Command Line) would remain on my service record until I was either promoted or moved into another department, which would make the end of my career. It was possible that we would get two new green lieutenants, or that both of them would be senior to me. It wasn’t as important as it was for the Ensigns, but it made little difference.

“I actually enjoyed my work as a Junior Lieutenant,” I confessed. Ellen hid a smile, not entirely successfully. No one enjoyed being the junior man on the totem pole, even if I did have the Ensigns and enlisted personnel below me. My position meant that I was the first in line for any new tasks the Captain felt like setting. It was why I had been sent down to Heinlein first, or entrusted with the reporters, in the first place. “I would not mind having to do it again.”

“Doubtless,” Ellen murmured. “Your…other qualifications” — she meant my political reliability — “are in order. If you find a suitable berth, you may apply for it. Inform the Captain one day before we reach Orbit Five so that he can find a replacement for you. If you find nothing by then, either stay here or ship yourself to Luna Base and the personnel pool.”

I nodded, hiding my exultation as best as I could. The Devastator was supposed to carry nine Lieutenants at all times. The problems with finding qualified and capable personnel meant that she had only carried seven, including me. The Captain would have to put out a request for an additional Lieutenant to replace me, which might mean that he would have to accept the services of someone who had been beached for good reason. I hoped that he found someone more to his taste. If my political reliability was still unquestioned, that meant that he hadn’t reported my attempt to file a protest.

“You’re a good man,” Ellen said, standing up and dismissing me. “I wish you all the best.”

And what about Ensign Gomez? I thought, but I couldn’t say that to her face. Instead, I shook her hand, saluted her and returned to my quarters.

A day later, we emerged from the wormhole in Earth’s solar system. Unlike my last return to the system, there was no point in cruising around the outer edge of the system, trying to see what might be lurking there in the darkness. The Devastator emerged only two days from Earth at cruising speed and, while we could have come in much closer, the Captain ordered a full check of the entire ship. Two years of hard service had placed a great deal of wear and tear on the systems.

In-between working on the logistics — for the last time, I hoped — I checked the fleet listings from Earth. There were only seven starships in the system at the time, not counting the merchant freighters or the heavy transports, or even the colonist-carriers. One of them sailed past us two hours after we emerged and we exchanged salutes, leaving me to wonder if it actually did any good. The new colony wouldn’t be productive for years to come, at least, even if the UN didn’t screw it up right from the start. I’d read several histories of smaller colonies that made Terra Nova look like a perfect success.

“You should look at this one,” Kitty said, that evening. “The Walter Gallium, a new cruiser, only launched this year. The Captain needs several berths filled before he departs.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, slowly. The freighters and transports always needed officers — they were the least-liked berths in the UNPF — and I could have gotten one of those easily, but that would have killed my career if I’d taken it willingly. Ironically, I’d probably be a freighter Captain within a year, but it would be boring. They went from world to world on a strict schedule and they were completely unarmed. Pirates used them as targets when they located them in deep space. The Heinlein Fleet had hurt us more by hitting the transports than the real starships. “Let’s see…”

The process wasn’t quite like a job interview on Earth, where I could send in an application for hundreds of different jobs, simultaneously. In the UNPF, I had to apply for one berth and see what happened before I applied for the next one. I couldn’t have afford to have a Captain angry at me because he’d approved my application, only to discover that I had applied to another Captain as well. I applied for the Walter Gallium, only to discover, an hour later, that the Captain had already filled the berth. It grew to be a depressingly familiar experience over the next few hours. The competition for interstellar berths was fierce. I was starting to think that applying for several posts at once was a low-risk strategy after all.

“Here,” Kitty said, finally. “Look at this one?”

My eyes went wide. Captain Harriman was looking for a new Lieutenant? Why would anyone ever want to leave his ship? I asked Kitty and she laughed.

“Ambition, of course,” she said, dryly. I rolled my eyes, but really — wasn’t I being ambitious as well? “Anyone who’s still a Lieutenant after five years probably doesn’t have a hope of making Captain, even if there were more Captain slots open for the aspiring Lieutenant. Why do you think I want to advance?”

I grinned. Kitty had only a year on me. She might have a chance of becoming a Captain herself in a year, if she had a term as First Lieutenant to prove that she could handle a starship. And, of course, if she could convince the UNPF Promotion Board that she was reliable enough to command a starship. Roger would probably make Captain as soon as possible, just because of his family. I hadn’t realised, until Heinlein, just how much of a stake he had in the UN. His family were among the top ten of the system.

“Particularly if Anna doesn’t want to leave,” I agreed. Anna would probably wind up inheriting Devastator if something happened to the Captain. It was a reasonable way to run for command, unless the Promotion Board decided to assign another commander to the monitor. A newly-minted Captain would outrank her, regardless of her length of service. “I’m going to apply for this post, if you don’t mind…”

“I don’t want a cruiser,” Kitty said, firmly. “I’m applying for the battleship openings.”

The next few hours went by slowly. We both went on duty and joined the crewmen and junior officers checking each nook and cranny. I went through the supply workroom where Frank had raped Ensign Gomez and made sure that it was unmarked, without even a trace of what had happened there. Perhaps I was being silly, but somehow the pain and shock had faded away, leaving only a dull memory. The poor girl had been scarred for life… and no one cared. Even the Captain had only been able to give Frank Wong a black eye. The insurgents had done more for her than any of us. I made endless lists of components that needed replaced for my successor, although part of my mind was already resigned to remaining on Devastator for another cruise. I wasn’t sure, but it was possible that even a transport would be preferable. I didn’t want to kill more innocents.

“I got it,” Kitty said, calling my terminal directly. I’d never heard her so happy in my life. “Captain Hafiz sends his compliments and welcomes me onboard Trygve Lie, in Earth Orbit. I’ll be Second Lieutenant!”

“Congratulations,” I said, as I walked back to the cabin. I was happy for her, and yet… part of my mind was devastated at losing her to another ship. We could exchange letters via the Brotherhood communications network, but it wouldn’t be quite the same. I’d known that one day we would part — it was inevitable, given our careers — but it still hurt. “One step down from First Lieutenant, right?”

“Oh, I’m sure I can knife my opponent in the back,” Kitty agreed, with a laugh. I had to agree with her. The Second Lieutenant had ample opportunity to embarrass his or her nominal superior. It was quite likely that their Captain wouldn’t tolerate open warfare, but subtle manoeuvring was fairly common. “Have you received anything yet?”

I checked my terminal, but shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. It was traditional to get back to the applicant as soon as possible, but it was possible that Captain Harriman was busy, or couldn’t be bothered contacting me. My imagination could invent all kinds of possible scenarios. “When does he want you onboard?”

“Next week,” Kitty said, slowly, reading through the data packet. The battleship was newly commissioned, it seemed, having taken five years to build. I wasn’t blind to the implications. The UN was having problems maintaining its construction program. I wondered, suddenly, how many workers had been conscripted from planets like Heinlein. “I’ll have four days at Luna City, unless I choose to report to barracks, etcetera, etcetera.”

She looked nervous, suddenly. “Will you join me there, if you can get leave?”

“The locals will hate me,” I predicted. Luna City was notorious for its facilities for spacemen. It included hundreds of bars, dozens of brothels and numberless gambling dens. A crewman might take his service bonus in one day and emerge with enough money to retire, but it was far more likely that he would end up completely broke by the end of the day. It was also a known gangland habitat, operated by one of the most notorious criminal gangs in space. The Outfit kept it all running smoothly, but woe betide the health inspector who took a close look at the eateries there. “You turning up with competition on your arm.”

“Twit,” Kitty said. She elbowed me hard enough to hurt. “Get that uniform off, mister.”

She pulled me down on top of her and into her. I pushed deep inside her, feeling closer to her than ever before, and started to move. I was moving faster and faster when my terminal bleeped, announcing an incoming message.

“If you stop now,” Kitty panted, “I’ll cut off your fucking balls.”

I couldn’t have stopped if she’d told me to stop. I kept moving, feeling the orgasm building up inside of me, until it burst out and we came together. She shuddered endlessly under me, gasping out loud, until we finally subsidised.

“You’re magnificent,” I breathed. It was true. Naked and dishevelled, her long red hair hanging down over her breasts, she was beautiful beyond words. I wanted her so much it hurt. “I wish… let’s get married, now.”

“You’re being silly,” she said, after kissing me. I felt rejected, even though I knew better. Lieutenants couldn’t get married until they were assigned to a permanent station. It was almost worth doing just for her. “We can’t get married and you know it.”

I pulled myself off her and sat up, reaching for my terminal and opening the message. I had to read it twice to confirm that I had read it properly. It offered me the post of Lieutenant on the old Jacques Delors, under Captain Harriman. I yelled aloud in delight and threw myself at her. It was nearly another hour before she picked up the terminal and thumbed through it herself. I didn’t begrudge her the chance to look at it. If nothing else, we could compare postings.

“John,” she said, carefully, “have you read this bit here?”

I checked. It was the list of service periods for the four other Lieutenants. I blinked again. “That can’t be right,” I said, puzzled. None of them had a service period over a year. “What happened to Lieutenant Hatchet?”

“I don’t know,” Kitty said, “but reading this… you’re First Lieutenant. You will be the second-in-command of the entire ship.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

It had been nearly three years since I had set foot in Luna City, but little had changed. The massive dome covering the Sea of Tranquillity still allowed the unblinking stars to glare down on a scene of debauchery that would have shocked the early Romans. I had fond memories of my visits to Luna City while I’d been at the Academy and, looking around, I could see other Cadets staring around, wondering if they dared seek entrance to some of the strip bars or brothels the Outfit ran. Others walked hand in hand with girls they’d picked up, enjoying their company before taking them back to their hotel rooms to complete the bargain, or even not waiting that long. I saw, in a dark corner, a Cadet making out with a woman who looked old enough to be his mother. He wasn’t the only one either. Luna City had very little in the way of laws.

I’d read two versions of how Luna City and the Lunar Authority came into existence. One, the version I’d been taught back at the Academy, had had the United Nations running the entire Lunar settlement program from the beginning, carefully settling the moon so that everyone had a share in the resources there. The other version, the one I’d read in the Heinlein books, suggested that the moon had been settled from different nations, eventually united into a government that then fell under the sway of the United Nations. The Luna-born were largely trapped. Unlike me, or anyone from Earth, they couldn’t survive for long in a high-gravity environment. There were some asteroids that had Luna-standard gravity, but they were rare.

In theory, Luna City was responsible to the Lunar Authority, but in practice it tended to go its own way. I hadn’t understood why the UN hadn’t done something about it until I’d studied it more carefully. Luna City had nothing worth the taking and provided an excellent distraction for the cadets on their off-duty hours. They could take the monorail from the Academy and be in Luna City in a couple of hours, then spend a week in some prostitute’s bed. The Outfit kept the entire place under very strict control. It might have been a den of scum and villainy, but the Cadets were fairly safe in Luna City. The last thing the Outfit wanted was to do anything that the UN might feel obliged to take notice of, or react to. A missing Cadet would be a serious problem for them. Luna City was, in effect, a grey colony in the solar system.

I smiled to myself as I passed a set of Japanese-looking girls wearing nothing, but translucent underwear. The thought of seeking their company — and they would be willing, if I paid them enough — was attractive, but I had another destination. I gave the girls a wink and passed onwards, trying to ignore their perfume as best as I could. I’d seen Cadets lose themselves completely in the fleshpots of Luna City, or accidentally overdosing themselves on something they were sold in a bar, and I couldn’t afford the distraction. I passed the Hub bar, where many Cadets used to go for drinks, and smiled again, remembering the many good times I’d had there. The hotel loomed up in front of me and I paused. Did I dare go through with it? It would be so easy to make a single mistake and lose everything.

The interior of the hotel was surprisingly low-key, but then, the Casa Carola had always prided itself on a more upscale clientele than the more average hotel in Luna City. The receptionist, wearing a modest outfit instead of the more spectacular lunar outfits, smiled at me and asked where I was going. When I answered, she pointed me towards the right room, without even checking my ID. That had astonished me when I’d first visited — on Earth, you couldn’t go a week without an ID Card — but now it was a relief. I didn’t want anyone having a record of who’d joined me.

“Hey, John,” Lieutenant Rolf Lommerde shouted. “Long time no see!”

I smiled back at him and the others in the room. We’d all shared classes together at the Academy and we’d agreed, when we graduated and were assigned to different starships, that we would keep in touch. I’d had to be careful who I invited — several of my classmates hadn’t made Lieutenant yet and I couldn’t socialise with them — but it was good to see them again. I was just glad that Roger was still back at the Heinlein System. I didn’t dare invite him.

We spent the first hour chatting about old times, sharing Academy yarns and tall stories about what we’d been doing on our first starships. Rolf, of course, had served with me back on my first starship, but Lieutenant Darryl Farnan had been posted to a survey ship and told lies — at least I think they were lies — about discovering the remains of an alien civilisation on a distant world. Lieutenant Bruno Lombardi had a fantastic story about a team of blonde swimmers from New Scandinavia, a vat of custard and the Captain’s daughter. Halfway through the tale, I realised that I didn’t believe a word of it…and it didn’t matter. I had almost forgotten what it was like to laugh.

“And in the end, they slept with everyone on the ship,” Bruno finished. “They formed a circle and bent over and we all fucked them, moving from woman to woman, trying to see who could last the longest.” He paused. “It was me, of course.”

“Of course,” Lieutenant Kady Jones said. “Never mind that you were voted ‘Mr Quick Finish’ at the Academy.”

Bruno flushed. “Who told you about that?”

I listened, without saying much, as the stories grew taller and more unbelievable. One claimed that his Captain had slept with every female on his ship, half the males and some of their pets. Another was more serious and talked about a Captain who had been killed in the line of duty, or a Political Officer who had overridden the Captain on his own ship. I’d expected some degree of bitching, but this was more than I had expected. What had happened to the young officers who had had such high hopes and dreams?

Reality, I thought, and leaned forward.

“I asked you here for a reason,” I said. “I don’t want to get anyone involved against their will, but I must ask for a pledge of secrecy. If you repeat anything you hear here, it will have the most unpleasant repercussions.”

“Let me guess,” Bruno said. “You’ve gotten the Captain’s daughter pregnant and he’s now sending you on missions wearing a red shirt.”

I scowled. It was an old joke. Officers who wore red shirts in the line of duty had been deemed expendable. No one wore a red shirt — UN duty uniforms were blue — but the joke was still passed on from rank to rank. I didn’t know where it originally came from; it was probably inherited from one of the national armed forces that had been integrated into the UNPF.

“No,” I said. “It was on Heinlein…”

I outlined everything that had happened on the planet, sparing them nothing, but the secret of the library. That was something I wanted to keep to myself until I knew who could be trusted, or not. I told them about the occupation, about the reporters and about how they lied endlessly about what was going on down on the surface. I finished with recounting the strike on the town and the hundreds of dead children, slain by my hand. I even confessed that I had attempted to file a protest, only to have it withdrawn.

“I don’t think you meant to do it,” Kady said, finally. She was young and blonde, with faintly-vulnerable features. She and Bruno had been an item back at the Academy and I wondered, absently, if they were still together. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was our fault,” I said. “The UNPF invaded their world and…”

I stumbled through an explanation of how wealthy and pleasant Heinlein was, compared to the Earth we’d escaped. The society was wealthy, crime and social deprivation seemed to be at an all-time low, very different from Earth. The planet had been more advanced than Earth in many ways — I remembered the robot librarian and smiled inwardly — and it hadn’t been a threat. We — the United Nations — had made it a threat, simply by invading. It was our fault.

“The newscasts keep claiming that Heinlein was building a war fleet to bomb Earth into radioactive rubble,” Lieutenant Christopher John Roach pointed out, when I’d finished. He didn’t sound unbelieving, just concerned. “Do you think that we might have seen their defensive fleet pointed at us one day?”

“I doubt it,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that were true enough. If I lived in the malls without a hope of escape, I’d be praying for merciful liberation, or even death. If Heinlein had bombed Earth…but they hadn’t bombed Earth. The newscasts kept claiming that we’d gotten our retaliation in first, but how could one retaliate against something that had never happened? “Their society wasn’t set up to launch an offensive war.”

I leaned forward. “And then there were the workers we conscripted from Albion and other planets,” I added. “How much right do we have to take them away from health and home just to put them to work for the UN?

“And even that isn’t the final issue,” I concluded. “Tell me something. Do you think that we — the United Nations — can win this war?”

There was a long pause. “I used to work on Devastator’s logistics,” I explained. I’d deduced how basic economics worked before the Heinlein texts had placed everything in a kind of context. “It’s becoming harder to obtain basic supplies, let alone items we desperately need to run starships. It now takes years to build a starship when it once took months. The freighters are overworked by the demands of the war and…well, I saw one of them burn out its drives because it hadn’t been in a shipyard for repairs. How long will it be before we don’t have a transport fleet left?”

I pushed the point forward. “The resistance in space knows that as well as we do,” I continued. “They’re targeting freighters and troop transports, rather than tangling with our cruisers and battleships. Freighters are effectively defenceless, so we have to cut loose starships to escort them, which spreads our starships critically thin. If we have to cut down on supplies to occupied worlds, we will start losing garrisons and eventually start losing control of entire planets. How long can we continue fighting this war?”

“I did logistics as well,” Kady admitted. “My most optimistic estimate would be ten years, assuming that no new invasions were mounted.”

“They probably will be mounted,” Lieutenant Kevin Sartin offered. “I’ve been hearing rumblings about both Williamson’s World and Iceberg being targeted for occupation. Williamson’s World is suspected of supplying aid and comfort to Heinlein, among other worlds, and is a known source of illegal starship components. It’s quite possible that they are supplying Heinlein’s resistance fleet through a black colony…”

“And how long will they have to prepare for the invasion?” I asked, coldly. “We lost a handful of ships in the first month of invading Heinlein. How many will we lose in another invasion?”

“How many soldiers will we lose on the ground?” Marine Lieutenant Alison Brooks asked gravely. She’d been a Cadet who’d transferred to the Marines and I’d been in two minds about inviting her, but we would need help from the Marines. “The big brains back home are going to fight the war to the last infantryman, or the last starship crewman.”

“All right,” Bruno snapped, rubbing one dark arm in front of his face. “I take your point. We’re going to lose the war, right?”

“Yes,” I said, flatly.

“That’s nonsense,” Ellen protested. “What about nuclear weapons…?”

“Turning Heinlein into a radioactive wasteland won’t help save the UN,” I said. “I’ve done the maths carefully. Assuming that we get no further conscript workers from the colonies, we’re looking at a complete social collapse within thirty years — at best. It may well come sooner if a successive failure chain starts moving; hell, it may be moving already.”

I saw their expressions. A failure chain began when one component failed, and in failing, caused another component to fail, which caused yet another component to fail… We’d been taught a rhyme about it at the Academy. “For want of a nail,” I quoted, and ran through the entire rhyme. “And even if we manage to fix one problem, we’re still going to have others, hundreds of them. I doubt that the collapse can be averted for long.”

“They must know this,” Kevin protested. “Why aren’t they doing anything about it?”

“They don’t care, or they can’t do anything,” Allison said. “Look, the people who issue our orders cannot change much about how the system works. They need to cut spending drastically and they can’t do that without destabilising everything, so they try to take as much tax money as possible…and that puts businesses out of work, which only increases the burden on social spending.”

She smiled at our expressions. “I had to spend a year down on Earth,” she explained. “I learned more than I wanted to learn about how the system really worked.”

“I see,” Bruno said. “Very well, John; the floor is yours. Why have you called us all here?”

I took a breath. I was about to commit myself…no, I was committed. I owed it to the dead children of Heinlein and poor Ensign Gomez to commit myself. If I were to be arrested and tried for treason, at least no one would be able to say that I hadn’t tried.

“This cannot go on,” I said. “I cannot — I will not — serve as the enforcer for idiotic beauecrats intent on raping the colonies to keep Earth alive one more day. I want to stop it, dead in its tracks.” It was hard to say, but there was no choice. “I want to plan a mutiny.”

“It sounds like you want to mount a coup,” Alison observed. She didn’t seem angry, just curious. “Do you think that you could run the government better than the government?”

That, I decided, went without saying, but I had humbler objectives. “I want to take the fleet,” I said. “If we could seize control of the jump-capable forces in the solar system and their supporting elements, we could pick up the remainder of the fleet as individual starships return to Earth. If we held the fleet, the UN would be trapped on Earth and the colonies would mop up the garrisons.”

“There’d be a slaughter,” Alison pointed out.

“They’re…Infantry,” Bruno snapped. “They don’t deserve our sympathy!”

“There are units that are actually quite capable,” Alison said, coldly. “I have worked with them on occasion. Do they all deserve to die?”

“They don’t have to die,” I said, carefully. I needed her cooperation desperately. “We can force the colonies to allow the garrisons to leave peacefully…”

“And where will they go?” Kevin asked. “Earth, perhaps…or Botany?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

Kady frowned from her position. “Tell me something,” she said. “The fleet needs supplied — you know that as well as I do. How do we get the supplies we need to keep the fleet operating without Earth?”

“The supplies don’t come from Earth,” I said, seriously. I’d seen it back when I’d been assigned to Devastator’s logistics. “They come from the asteroid industrial plants and stations there; they’re just shipped back to the Supply Department on Earth. The fuel for the shuttles and the fusion plants comes from Jupiter and the cloud-scoops there. Everything, but the crewmen themselves comes from somewhere other than Earth. We don’t need Earth to supply the fleet!”

“Assuming they will cooperate,” Bruno said, grimly.

“They will,” Alison said. “I took a tour out there last year. The rock rats hate the UN with all of their considerable fervour. Half of the staff on those stations are conscripts from worlds like Heinlein and really don’t want to be there. The remainder just want to live in peace without the UN’s impossible demands. They keep having nasty accidents that somehow never get reported.”

The discussion ranged backwards and forwards, but at the end of it, we had a plan. “Thank you all for coming,” I concluded. “Is there anyone here — now — who wants to back out?”

“No,” Bruno said. No one stepped forward. “What now?”

“Now?” I asked. I produced a set of datachips. If they’d been Brotherhood members, it would have been easier, but there was no way to know if they were Brotherhood. No wonder no one had managed to use the Brotherhood as an instrument of rebellion. “These have instructions on how to encode a message through the communications system. We’ll stay in touch and lay our plans.”

“It’ll take years,” Alison agreed. “If we all recruit a handful of others…”

“Quite,” I said. “Remember, keep these to yourself and don’t share them with anyone. Now, this is how we’ll keep in touch.”

Two hours later, I returned to my hotel, grinning from ear to ear. Anyone who saw me probably suspected I’d just been with a woman and I was content to let them believe that. One way or the other, the die had been firmly cast. There was no turning back. I felt so alive.

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

But who are the enemy?

The United Nations did not, at first, admit the existence of an enemy. That would have put the lie of their claims that they were beloved and ‘only’ at war against corrupt government officials and others who opposed the UN’s commitment for liberty and benevolent government for all. Indeed, despite various advances in weapons science deployed by the colonies — and other forces — the UN Intelligence Division (a contradiction in terms, if ever there was one) was unwilling to admit the existence of such weapons, as that would have made a mockery of the UN’s claims to be the most advanced society that ever existed, or ever would exist.

It would be easy to say that the enemy was everyone, and there would definitely be some truth in that statement. It would be more accurate to say that the UN’s main enemies, outside the independence-minded colonies, were hidden black colonies, wreckers (terrorist groups) and even renegade UNPF officers. The threat was multisided and seemingly limitless. No matter how many successful invasions — if only for a given value of successful — the UN mounted, no matter how many black colonies were encountered and destroyed, the hydra simply grew more heads. The UN sought the creature’s heart, to rip it out and tear it to shreds, but there was no such thing. The enemy had no head.

This should not have been surprising. Even during the first expansion into space, there were groups that sought to set up their own colonies and hide from the remainder of humanity. Some of them were religious communities intending to remain apart from infidels — see the Mormon Asteroid Colony, which became New Salt Lake City, for details — while others belonged to weirder fringe groups, including rogue criminal gangs and terrorists. The invention of the jump drive and the first expansion into interstellar space only strengthened this trend. As Earth became increasingly inhospitable to freethinkers and non-conformists, the vast reaches of space beckoned and the emigration began. Largely unknown to Earth — still dominated by nationalist governments at the time — thousands upon thousands of unregistered citizens were moving outside their control.

Some of these groups — the Mormons, in particular — founded planetary settlements, with or without the consent of the UN. Others found isolated stars without habitable planets and used their dead worlds as a base, fairly confident that the UN would not waste time trying to examine the systems thoroughly enough to locate the hidden colonies. The official wave of expansion pushed a more secretive wave of expansion in front of it, creating hidden populations with no reason to love the UN. Many of them, therefore, turned to supporting the UN’s enemies. Only the secrecy that is an inherent requirement for any black colony prevented the creation of a major threat to the UN.

The UNPF, therefore, found itself tasked with charting and patrolling the Beyond — as it came to be called. It forced them to divert desperately needed ships on courses that would keep them out of contact for months, perhaps even years. It was not surprising, therefore, that a few ships chose to rebel, or even died out among the stars, their passing unmarked by the UN until years later.

The enemy could be anywhere.