Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Nineteen

One by one, they crawled out of the remaining strongpoints, their hands in the air.

I watched, grimly, as the remaining Communists stumbled forward. We hadn’t taken any chances; they’d been ordered to come out naked and to be very careful that they didn’t do anything that might alarm the armed guards. They’d tried to protest, objecting to the thought of showing everything they had to the world, but I’d been firm. They came out naked, male and female alike, or they would be shot down like dogs. I just wanted the fighting to end.

I’d set up A Company to receive the prisoners, trusting them not to abuse the Communists more than I trusted the locals. I’d heard some grumbles from Ed about his men being used as glorified policemen, but I rather suspected that he was enjoying their punishment, just a little. The Communists had killed too many of his men and A Company had lost seventeen men. That would have been a pinprick to the UNPF or even Heinlein’s resistance forces, but to us it was devastating. I didn’t have a ready supply of replacements I could slot into the Company, although we could fill up the holes from the trainers if necessary.

“Check them, secure them and send them into the trucks,” I’d ordered. We didn’t have a complete list of Communists — Svergie had never compiled such a list, but we knew the leaders — but those we did know would be taken prisoner and transferred to a more secure prison camp. The smaller fry would end up going into a more standard prison camp and would be held until the local government decided what to do with them. They looked tired and worn as they marched out to be taken prisoner; they’d probably be glad of the rest.

“That’s one of their propagandists,” Captain Jörgen Hellqvist muttered to me, as a blonde woman stumbled out, her hands in the air. She looked terrified and ashamed, furious and… yet, she was trying to pose. I guessed she’d been an actress before she’d gone into politics — she’d probably taken the idea from the UN’s use of actors to endorse their politics — and even while she was being taken prisoner, she was acting. I foresaw a future in chicks in prison movies. “She always knew what to say to cause a riot or convince the poor that it was someone else’s fault that they were poor. She had half of the kids wearing red caps and talking like Communists.”

I shrugged. “Whatever she was, she’s a prisoner now,” I said, as the cuffs were snapped on and she was pushed — not gently — towards the prisoner buses. It had taken several hours just to clear the roads so we could get the buses up to the strongpoint boundaries, but there had been little choice. If we’d marched the prisoners through the streets, they would have been lynched. “She’ll be tried and convicted by a fair court.”

“After today, you won’t find a fair court on the planet,” Jörgen said, tightly. “Look around at all the damage and ask yourself; who’s going to stand up for them and say that they don’t deserve death?”

“No one,” I said, without hesitation. The vast majority of the Communist leaders would probably end up facing a firing squad, or perhaps the hangman, on the grounds that hanging people was cheaper. Svergie had had massive stockpiles of ex-UN weapons left lying around, but we’d probably used far too many of them in the brief Insurrection. I couldn’t believe the damage the Communists had been willing to inflict on the city. What had they been thinking?

But I knew the answer to that. They’d thought that they’d been in the right and anything they did for the right was justified because it was for the right. The UN had felt the same way too, as had any number of terrorists and wreckers. If they couldn’t play nicely by the rules, they sought to tip over the board and make the rules for themselves. Anything could be justified with the right Cause and the right Words; people like the actress had helped to convince millions that their Cause was Just. Her fans would probably disown her… or wait, that would be the logical thing to do. They’d be more likely to claim that she was an innocent dupe all along.

I smiled. The videos of her arrest would probably be selling on the black market tomorrow.

“Hang on,” I ordered, as yet another naked and bleeding form stumbled from the strongpoint. “I want to talk to that one.”

Daniel Singh had looked much better the last time we’d met, a week ago. It felt like centuries. He was bleeding from several wounds and his body was covered with scars and bruises. It looked as if he had been the victim of a bare-knuckle fight and I wondered just what had happened inside the bunker. Had he wanted to fight to the last and been overruled, or had something else occurred?

“It’s over,” I said, tiredly. His smell probably qualified as an illegal weapon in its own right. “You’re under arrest.”

Daniel shook his cuffs at me angrily. “Do you think that you’ve won?” He demanded. “You can’t keep the People down forever!”

I made a show of looking around at the blackened ruins surrounding the strongpoint. “You seem to have blown most of them out of their homes,” I observed. “First you took the city, then you started to kill hundreds of people you didn’t like, and then you fought and destroyed half the city. I don’t think you’re going to be Man of the Year after getting so many people killed.”

“You don’t know the half of it, mercenary,” Daniel snapped, his voice rising. “The People cannot be held down forever. They followed me because I promised something better and…”

I sighed. “If you must monologue, do it somewhere else,” I said, as calmly as I could. It wasn’t very calm at all. “You promised them the impossible and gave them nothing, but rack and ruin. Whatever else happens, you won’t be going back into politics here.”

“And when you’ve defeated me, who next?” Daniel asked, his voice rising. “Will you turn on the Progressives or the Conservatives, just for a change. How long, oh mighty General, until you’re Emperor of the entire planet?”

“Enough,” I said, and looked at his guards. “Take him to the secure centre and have his wounds treated, and then put him in solitary confinement.”

“Yes, sir,” the Private said. He grasped Daniel by the shoulder and started to half-lead, half-drag, him away. I watched him go, listening to the shouts of abuse that continued until the Private slapped Daniel’s head, hard. His suggestion had cut; I had no desire to rule the planet, even if John Walker wouldn’t have sent Fleet to do something about it. I just wanted to build a strong stable government that could hold together for more than a few years before coming apart.

“That was the last of them, sir,” Peter said. He’d insisted on inspecting all of the prisoners personally and I couldn’t blame him. His paranoia had been aroused. “The strongpoint is empty.”

I nodded to Ed. “Take it and inspect it carefully,” I ordered. I wouldn’t have put leaving a few IEDs behind past the Communists. “Once it’s clear, give me a shout.”

It was an hour before the bomb disposal squad had finished checking the strongpoint and confirmed that it wasn’t booby-trapped, allowing me to go in with Peter behind me. He had tried to talk me out of it, but I had insisted; besides, I think he was just as curious. The interior of the strongpoint reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of Hitler’s bunker hundreds of years ago; a strange mixture of burned-out sections and others that were almost habitable. Weapons and equipment lay on the floor where they’d been dropped or thrown in frustration, while half-eaten cans of food stood on a table. The stench of too many people in too small a space was appalling; we might have lived in similar conditions, but we observed basic hygiene. The Communists, it seemed, hadn’t bothered to prepare for a long siege.

Ed put it into words. “Were they that confident of victory, sir?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. It seemed an odd place to plot the conquest of the world, but even John Walker had had to plan in secret. If the Communists had worked from within, they might have succeeded in implementing lasting change, rather than upsetting everyone and turning the name of Communism into mud. I doubted that there would be a Communist Party on the planet for years to come, although there would always be something to fill that void. They’d probably call themselves socialists. “Maybe they really believed that half of the planet would rise up in their favour.”

I mulled it over as we explored further into the strongpoint. The dead had been stacked like cordwood in one place; hundreds of men and women, just abandoned and left to rot. I gagged at the stench and muttered orders for us all to be decontaminated after we left the strongpoint. We’d probably have to send in a chemical warfare team in full masks and gowns to recover the bodies, or perhaps it would be better just to bury them all below the wreckage of the building. A flamethrower would set them all on fire, but the stench would only grow worse. The city stank quite enough already.

“They were definitely running short of ammunition,” Peter said, as we inspecting an inner bunker. It had once clearly stored thousands of rounds of ammunition, but was now almost empty. I wondered where they’d gotten all of the weapons and if there actually was an off-planet supplier involved, but it didn’t look if anything here had come from anywhere apart from the UN. The only exception was a hunting rifle that looked almost homemade, although it was clearly serviceable enough.

“Mine,” Ed said, firmly, clutching the weapon. “I claim it as the spoils of war.”

I laughed. “That probably counts as looting,” I said. I don’t understand how some people can be so mad over guns. They’re just tools, as far as I am concerned, tools used to fight and win a battle. I had a commanding officer once who had an antique weapon from the pre-space era and always chose to use it in combat. The paperwork must have taken him hours to complete, every time he used it — the UN frowned upon private ownership of firearms — but he hadn’t hesitated. “Pay the locals a reasonable price for it and then keep it, if you insist on having it.”

Ed nodded. I don’t approve of looting under normal circumstances, but if the owner of the weapon was dead or a traitor, Ed might as well have it. If it could be traced to a person who was still living, however, he would have to return it or pay for it.

“Yes, sir,” he said, finally. “I’ll put it in the sack for the moment.”

We reached another room under the strongpoint. It was bare, apart from a card table strewn with documents. “I want TechnoMage down here as soon as possible,” I ordered. “I want him to go through everything here and find out just how far the Communist influence actually stretched.”

“Yes, sir,” Ed said. “I’ll call him as soon as we’re out of this place.”

I took the hint and nodded, allowing Peter to lead us back towards the surface, keeping my thoughts to myself. Daniel had suggested that the Communists and Progressives had had strong ties — and that Frida might be a Communist, or once have been a Communist. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if she had turned out to have planned the entire insurrection… and she’d definitely used it to get rid of some of her political enemies. If she was guilty… what the hell would we do? It would be a grey area.

First, we find out if she really was a Communist, I thought, finally. If she is one, or was one, then we can decide what to do.

The fresh air of the city was a relief, even though it still stank of fire and burning flesh and hydrocarbons, an unholy cocktail that would probably linger in the air for years. We sucked in deep breaths as we walked back to the Command Post to confirm that the remaining Communist strongholds had been searched, emptied and disarmed. The city was probably still mined in any number of inventive and unpleasant ways, but given time, we’d disarm them all. The soldiers were spreading out now, looking for any rogue holdouts, but it seemed that the Communists had accepted their leader’s orders to surrender. I’d known UN Infantry units with less discipline than that.

We drove through the streets back towards the detention camps outside the city and I found myself, once again, sickened by the realities of war. Here, there was a burned-out house with a family staring at it, unable to understand what had happened to their lives. There, there was a string of looters trying to make away with their new possessions before the soldiers caught them, placed them up against a wall and shot them. Hundreds of thousands of tired people, their faces blank and worn, barely had the energy to glance at us. Some shied away from the soldiers, others welcomed them; I saw young girls flirting openly with some of the local infantrymen. The pregnancy rate in the town was probably going to rise sharply over the next few months.

And there were plenty of silent testaments to the barbarity of the Communists. I saw a man hanging from a tree with a sign saying EXPLOITER, although it wasn’t clear what he had exploited. He could have been anything from a pimp to an industrialist. There were mansions built by the wealthy that had been burned down long before we had started to bombard the city, schools and colleges that had been destroyed and as for the city’s government centres… there was nothing left, but ashes. The Communists hadn’t confined themselves, either; they’d burned down churches and other religious sites without even a hint of discrimination. The priests who’d tried to appeal to their better natures had been slain beside their former parishes; the Communists, after all, regarded religion as nothing, but the drug used to keep the masses in their place. I wondered how many of them had gotten religion in their final hours. There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.

“Jesus, boss,” Peter said, suddenly. “How long is it going to take them to rebuild the city?”

“Years,” I said, my mind racing ahead to the problem. We hadn’t even put out all the fires yet, let alone anything else, but now the Communists had been disarmed we could bring up aircraft and drop water and fire-retardant foam into the mix. How long would it take? I wondered if it would take more resources than the planetary government possessed; after this, their off-world credit wouldn’t be very good at all. The political unrest would discourage investors from investing in the planet, knowing that the Communists might take over and nationalise all of their property. Even if Fleet intervened, the costs would still be enormous…

And I didn’t envy Frida at all.

“I want to inspect the detention camps,” I ordered, as we started to drive out of the city. The plumes of smoke still rising up behind us had a way of focusing the mind. “After that, we’ll have to see how much we can hand over to the locals without getting anyone lynched.”

There wasn’t much to each of the detention camps; they were really just a massive patch of ground encircled by barbed wire and supervised by men who had permission to shoot if they felt the situation mandated it. There was no protection from the elements for the prisoners, apart from a handful of UN-issue sleeping bags; they were still naked. It was a vital part of convincing them that they had been captured and were completely helpless, but I suspected that they were taking it a bit too far. The prisoners didn’t have a hope of escaping unless a strong outside force attacked the camps and liberated them. The guards were watching carefully, but as far as I knew, the Communists no longer had a fighting force left.

I watched carefully as yet another prisoner was processed and thrown into the camp. The small wire attached to their forehead was linked to a lie detector that informed us when the suspect lied. The guards asked questions and watched the responses carefully, before either accepting them or demanding better answers. We’d build up a database of people we’d arrested and, bit by bit, separate the smaller fry from the leadership and those responsible for atrocities. The leaders had been moved to a separate camp and isolated for their own safety. We’d put them to death nice and legally.

The thought made me smile as I inspected the camps. The prisoners had been told to dig latrines and prepare for a long stay, but most of them just sat there, trying to hide themselves from our gaze. The men and women who had been caught up in the excitement of being a Communist now discovered that those on the wrong side — i.e. the side that lost — faced the uncertainty and doubt of the future. If things had been different, that could have been me behind the fence…

I nodded once to the guards, returned their salutes, and turned to leave. There were a million and one things that needed to be done. First, however, we had to bury the fallen. After that, we could start to heal.