Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Thirteen

When I awoke, I wondered for a moment where I was. It wasn’t my bunk in the spaceport, or my tiny cabin on the Julius Caesar, but somewhere far more comfortable. A slight movement told me that there was a person — a woman — in my bed and memory came flooding back. Last night… we’d slept together; no, that was too mild a term. We’d fucked so violently that I was surprised I hadn’t drawn blood.

“Welcome back to the world,” I muttered, and pulled myself out of bed. The room in the President’s house was larger than any house I’d had myself, although I’d spent most of my adult life on military bases of one kind or another. Apart from the massive four-poster bed, there was a smaller washroom complete with a shower and a window that looked out into the city. The plumes of smoke seemed to have faded away.

Suki stirred under the covers and sat up, exposing her breasts. I felt a sudden surge of arousal I tried to push down, but failed. “Hi,” she said, rather nervously. “I just… I just wanted to… you know.”

“I understand,” I said, gravely. “It always happens after a combat mission; men and women get horny. It’ll have happened all over the city and there’ll probably be a population boom in the next nine months.”

“Oh,” Suki said. One hand rubbed a bite mark on her left breast. “I’ve taken my pills for the month. There won’t be any children for me.”

I smiled. Her oriental looks mixed with mine might produce an interesting child, although as long as they had their mother’s looks and their father’s brains I’d be happy. It had to be something to do with the way we’d spent last night. I don’t normally go to bed with a woman and think of children the day afterwards.

“What a pity,” I said. “Do you want to practice some more?”

She laughed and I advanced upon her with open arms. Afterwards, we took a shower together and washed each other, before I finally forced myself to get dressed in my uniform. It felt disgustingly unclean to the touch, but I hadn’t thought to bring a spare uniform to the ceremony. In hindsight, I should have brought an entire infantry company and a few dozen tanks, never mind a uniform.

I checked my wristcom and swore. It was much later than I had thought and I cursed myself for spending time with her, even if a soldier who won’t fuck won’t fight. I remembered the men I’d disciplined for being late back to their duties because they’d met a girl in town and winced. They’d all be laughing at me behind my back and I couldn’t blame them. God knew I would have done the same thing in their place.

“Ed, this is Andrew,” I said, hunting for the earpiece with one hand. “I need a status report.”

“Peter insisted that you needed sleep and threatened to beat hell out of anyone who disturbed you before you woke naturally,” Ed explained. He knew what I meant, alright, even though if it had been something truly urgent I would have been woken anyway. “The city is currently quiet, but still under curfew and we’re patrolling heavily to ensure it stays that way.”

“Good,” I said. I wasn’t commanding a UN unit any longer, where the commander had to have direct control at all times, but one composed of men who used their initiative when necessary. I could trust them to get on with it. “I’ll be downstairs at the command post in a few minutes. Have a pot of coffee ready for me.”

Ed laughed and cut the connection and I turned back to Suki. “I’m going to have to leave you now,” I explained. “I’ll see you back on the base later.”

“Later,” Suki agreed. “Make sure you get some proper food as well.”

I rolled my eyes and walked out of the room, pausing to dismiss the guards that Peter had left to ensure that my sleep was undisturbed, before walking down the stairs into the room that Ed had turned into a command post. Unlike the bedroom, there were no windows in the hall, although I would have been worried about mortar shells if I’d been in charge of the building. One day had inflicted more devastation than the UN had in years! Ed was standing near a portable communications unit, inspecting the report, and he saluted when he saw me.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, with a wink. “Did you have a good night’s sleep, sir?”

That, I decided, settled the question of how many people knew that I’d been with Suki. “Yes, thank you,” I said, putting an edge into my voice to suggest that ragging me wouldn’t be a good use of his time. “I need a status report, right bloody now.”

Ed nodded. “The city itself is calm, as I said,” he commented, nodding to the map. “We’ve got the industrial area sealed off still and we’re poking through it looking for unpleasant surprises, but the teams are pretty confident that we found most of the IEDs. The entire area was devastated, but some of the heavy machinery survived, which may mean that they can rebuild quicker than we thought.”

I remembered the piles of rubble that had replaced strong brick buildings and shrugged. It was possible to be optimistic, but I privately suspected that it would be years before the industrial complex was up and running again. They might be able to replace what they’d lost on-planet, but if not… they’d have to try to buy from another star system and that would drain the planet’s limited off-world currency reserves. It wasn’t as if they had much to trade, but raw minerals from the mines.

“The bad news is that they’ve definitely lost control of Pitea,” Ed continued. I winced, although it wasn’t a surprise. Pitea had been a Progressive city, according to the election results, but the Communists had been strong there. There were hundreds of factories there that used unskilled labour for menial work and they strongly resented the way they were treated. In the long run, the Communist program would lead to industrial wastelands and devastation, but in the short term… they might not mind, provided that they were allowed to hang the industrialists. “The last report had the police stations being overrun and… sir, Muna’s still missing.”

“I know,” I said. Muna was somewhere in Pitea… and I hoped she’d managed to go to ground and hide, but I feared the worst. Our communications systems were too advanced for the locals to jam, unless they’d had help from off-world, and Muna would have been able to report in if she’d been free. That suggested that she was either dead or in enemy hands. “And our own forces?”

“I redeployed A and B company to make their way to Pitea, and ordered most of the local units to prepare for the same journey,” Ed explained. “The bastards have taken out the local railroad, however, and they’ve blown up several bridges. We can still get there, but it’s going to take us three weeks to move the main body of the army there, assuming that there are no other problems.”

I swore. Attacking an industrial complex had been bad enough; attacking a full-sized city — Pitea was listed as having over seven million inhabitants — would be an order of magnitude worse. They’d have plenty of time to get ready for our attack and the only advantage we had was that it was possible, just possible, that not all of those seven million were committed Communists. We might be aided by a revolution in their rear. If we were lucky…

“Try and speed up the progress, if you can,” I ordered, finally. Ed would do everything in his power to get us there quicker. “What about the toll, Ed?”

“We lost eleven men,” Ed said, flatly. “Seventeen more have been injured and are at the spaceport medical bay. The doctors think that there’s a good chance that they’ll pull through, but three of them are going to be permanently disabled. We might be able to keep them on in some role, or we might have to pension them off…”

“Yeah,” I said. The UN had literally allowed people in wheelchairs to serve as combat troops — absurd regulations designed to counter ‘discrimination against differently able people’ — but I had no intention of allowing it to contaminate the Legion. If they could become clerks, I’d be delighted, but it was more likely that they would drink themselves to death. The poor bastards deserved better. “And the enemy?”

“We pulled around two thousand bodies out of the rubble,” Ed admitted. “I don’t know, of course, how many of them were actually enemy fighters or merely people caught up in the fighting, but we’re still finding bodies everywhere. We took over a thousand prisoners and they’re currently cooling their heels in detention camps, but I don’t know how we’re going to sort the hardcore out from the soft bastards.”

He paused. “Oh, and the local police — what was left of them — wanted to arrest some known hardcore we caught,” he added. “It seems that the Acting President’s decree banning the Communist Party means that the leadership have to be transferred to the local jail for immediate trial.”

“I see,” I said. “And you said?”

“I said that the final fate of the prisoners would depend upon you,” Ed said, passing the buck shamelessly. Well, I suppose the only other choice would have been to hand them over and wash our hands of the blood, afterwards. I wouldn’t shed any tears for them, but I believe in fair trials, then shooting the guilty. “I know we have hardcore, but we also have too many people who clearly aren’t hardcore.”

“Put them through a level one interrogation,” I ordered, finally. Heinlein’s invention of perfect lie detectors saved a lot of trouble. We wouldn’t have to keep everyone prisoner indefinitely after all. “Separate them out and keep the hardcore in prison. Release the innocent and use the softer Communists to clear the streets, under armed guard. Feel free to shoot them if they try to escape. We might as well get some use out of them.”

“Yes, sir,” Ed said. He grinned, suddenly. “You’ll be happy to know that all of the local troopers accepted the gauntlet rather than spending time in the nick. I’ve scheduled the ceremony for tomorrow morning and promised them that you’d attend.”

“Bastard,” I said, without heat. They’d be relieved. Russell was probably so far beyond furious that he’d strangle one of the troopers, if given half a chance. His tolerance for indiscipline was less than mine. “Very well; I’ll attend. I’d better go see the President.”

“Take a driver and an armoured car,” Ed advised. “The streets are supposed to be clear, but I’m not taking chances with you.”

The city looked, if possible, even worse than it had during the fighting. There were hundreds of damaged and destroyed buildings, the latter little more than towering piles of rubble, and hundreds of dead bodies everywhere. Soldiers, emergency crews and volunteers worked together to clear the bodies away, but the sheer size of the task would keep them going for days. The estimate of how many people had died might be far too low, I realised, and silently cursed the Communists. Their mad plan had killed thousands of people, including some of my men, for nothing. Their control over Pitea might let them force a stalemate…

I shook my head. It wouldn’t; the farmers wouldn’t supply them with food. Given time, they’d probably start raiding the farms, or trying to force the farmers to cooperate. The war was barely underway and we were already looking at disaster. If they stayed penned in the city, they’d still starve and the men with the guns ate first. The innocent hostages — including Muna, if she were still alive — would die. The gunmen would live on human flesh, if they had to, to survive.

The Acting President — Frida — had moved operations again to Progressive Party HQ. It wasn’t a decision I would have supported at the time, but most of the other governmental buildings had been destroyed or damaged in the fighting. Ed, whatever misgivings he’d had, had assigned local units to guard the building and backed them up with a pair of Landshark tanks. Their guns tracked my armoured car as it approached, ready to deal out instant death if we showed them anything suspicious, then relaxed when the soldiers saw me and waved us through. I didn’t relax and jumped out of the car, marching over to the Sergeant in charge.

“Sergeant,” I snapped. He jumped to attention. “Why didn’t you check my ID?”

“But you’re the General,” he protested, stammering in surprise. “I know who you are…”

“I could be someone disguised as the General,” I snapped back. “You check everyone who tries to come into the secured zone, understand?”

He nodded. I waved my ID card under his nose, waited patiently for him to examine it, and then walked into the courtyard. In happier times, children had played here while their parents had directed the Progressive Party towards its electoral victory, but now it was occupied by armed soldiers, who watched me warily as I marched towards the main entrance. The security here was a little tighter, I was relieved to see; the guards checked my ID again and waved me through into the main office. The corridors were covered with propaganda posters, some promising the moon and the stars above, others making slightly more reasonable promises, and I smiled as I entered Frida’s office. She waved the others out as I entered, waving for me to take a seat.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, as soon as the door closed. She looked awful. Her face was paler than ever and her eyes looked tired and worn. I made a mental note to insist that a doctor examined her and perhaps prescribed a sedative, but for the moment I’d just have to watch what she said. A tired mind would make bad decisions. “What’s going on out there?”

I ran through a brief breakdown of the situation and she nodded when I reached the section about Pitea. “We got a message from them after you defeated their forces in this city,” she explained. “Everything was so confused that we didn’t know anything about it until hours after it was received. They’re declaring independence and demanding that we recognise their independence as the People’s Republic of Pitea.”

I smiled, remembering some of the scenarios we’d come up with when we’d started studying the planet’s politics. “We cannot allow it to stand, of course,” she continued, “but they’re hinting that they’ve asked Fleet to… meditate the crisis. Is that actually true?”

“If Fleet hasn’t contacted you to order you to remain in position while someone negotiates a settlement, then no,” I said. “I doubt that Captain Price-Jones will be willing to intervene without permission from Fleet HQ and, in any case, this is definitely an internal affair. Fleet won’t intervene as long as the chaos stays on the planet and no outsiders get caught up in it.”

Frida frowned. “Are you sure?”

“If Fleet wanted the Communists to create their People’s Republic, they would have told you so,” I confirmed. “They’d draw a line and tell you not to cross it. If there’s been no message from them, then they’re not planning to intervene. You could confirm it by speaking to Captain Price-Jones yourself, but I doubt it’s necessary.”

“Thank you,” Frida said, seriously. Her expression tightened slightly. “And the prisoners?”

“We’re going to begin sorting through them as soon as possible,” I said. If she wasn’t going to bring up the incident with the local police, I wouldn’t either. “Once we’ve sorted out the hardcore from the chaff, we can decide — you can decide — what to do with them. I’d recommend hard labour in the mines myself.”

“The miners won’t like that,” Frida said. She grimaced, as if she had just tasted something nasty. “I never realised how much the President carried on his shoulders. I never thought…”

“How is he?” I asked. “The last I heard was last night.”

“He’s stable and in the hospitals under heavy guard,” Frida said. “The doctors think he’ll be up and moving again in six months or so, but they don’t want him stressed or forced to move quickly. The Council — the remains of the Council — voted to put his term on hold until he recovers completely and can resume his duties.”

She shook her head firmly. “Never mind that at the moment,” she said. I had to admire her. I hadn’t realised that she had so much inner strength. I might still wonder at her politics, but perhaps she would shape up into an admirable leader after all. “Can you defeat the Communists?”

“Yes,” I said, seriously. “It’ll take us time to get our forces into position to move, but when we do so, the Communists will be crushed. They may have a whole city, but that merely pins them down and keeps them trapped. We’ll have the city surrounded by light forces by the end of the day” — we could move them via helicopter — “and then they’ll be trapped there until we move in to remove them.”

I wished I were as confident as I sounded. It was going to be a very nasty battle.