Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Twenty-Two

A week later, I stood on the parade ground, watching as the latest group of recruits went through their basic training. The Sergeants were shouting at them as they tried to carry out fifty press-ups and only managed a smaller amount, demanding that they kept trying until they did all fifty. A handful of fitness freaks did all fifty easily and only stopped smiling when they were ordered to do fifty more. It was astonishing just how many recruits we had after the Communist Insurrection, even if they were all just interested in the girls. If nothing else, they would have to work to get their uniforms and they wouldn’t be going off-base until they qualified as cadets.

“We’re going to have to expand the training facilities,” Peter said, from behind me. I nodded as a Sergeant screamed instructions to another bunch of recruits, demanding that they stopped hiding behind their mothers and started pretending to be something like soldiers. There was always a lot of work to do with new recruits, but half of this intake had been practicing being soldiers before they came to the camp, and naturally they’d picked up bad habits. Their salutes were far from perfect. “How many of the locals do you think we can use as trainers?”

I scowled. There’s an old joke that the life of a Drill Sergeant is easy and all a candidate needs is a good pair of lungs. It’s nothing like that simple. They have to be capable of keeping raw recruits in order and, somehow, prevent them from injuring themselves without appearing to care what happens to the recruits. The recruits are not meant to like their teachers; they’re just meant to learn from them. A drill sergeant needs to know when to stop, as well; a sadist or an idiot could do untold damage to new recruits. The UN hadn’t cared, of course; some of the graduated soldiers had been treated like dirt and had been effectively useless. One of them had been raped by his — male — instructor. If I’d had that bastard in my command, he’d have been torn apart by wild dogs.

“Russell thinks that there are seven or eight possible candidates,” I said, finally. It wasn’t something easy to decide quickly, yet that was exactly what we needed to do. There might well be others after they had a few years of soldiering under their belts, but at the moment… we would have to rely on relative newcomers. They might have had combat experience in New Copenhagen or Pitea — I wouldn’t have accepted them if they had no experience at all — but would they know enough to translate it into terms the new recruits could understand?

It got worse. The longest-serving local had around seven months in the army. They’d all grown up very fast after the fighting had begun — those who had survived the experience — but they would still think of themselves as recruits. There would be a temptation to go easy on the newcomers — or, alternatively, to bully the newcomers — and that had to be resisted. Men whose memories had dimmed would be more likely to understand the reason for the hard-ass discipline and the seemingly-pointless labours, and inflict them on the recruits without qualms. I’d never been a Drill Sergeant myself, but I knew the score. The job required a man with perfect control and few of the locals had had the time to build that control.

“That’s bad,” Peter said, dryly. “Is there any point in recruiting the ex-UNPF personnel here?”

I shook my head. I’d considered it, but most of the ones I’d want were up in the mountains or on the farms, while those who had remained in the cities were effectively useless, although that hadn’t stopped the Communists from killing several hundred of them. Even if they’d all been qualified to help, they wouldn’t have had the experience working with Russell and the rest of the Drill Sergeants, nor would they have had an understanding of how we work. The standard UNPF introductions to military life bore about as much resemblance to real military life as Heinlein did to Earth. The recruits were coddled, even those who should have been kicked out on general principles.

“Leave them alone,” I ordered finally. It wouldn’t be easy, but we’d manage somehow. “Have you got the bill of lading for the ship?”

“Muna is sorting it out now,” Peter said, accepting the change in subject. We were going to have to send the Julius Caesar back to Botany to pick up some additional supplies, along with a handful of other Legionnaires who might be useful here. “I think that Fleet will want to have a quick look at her before she leaves.”

“Muna or the ship?” I asked, without humour. Muna had been in the UNPF before it mutinied and became Fleet. She rarely spoke about her time on the starships, but it must have been something dramatic. Every time John Walker’s name was mentioned, she winced. “No, stupid question; they’ll want to inspect the ship.”

“Of course,” Peter said, dryly. “I don’t know why they want to bother, but if they insist…”

“Then we have no choice, but to comply,” I agreed. It struck me as rather pointless — Svergie had nothing worth the effort of smuggling off-planet, even if it had laws against it, which it didn’t — and I suspected that Captain Price-Jones was taking the opportunity to harass us a little. He’d heard the Communist broadcasts claiming to be an independent state and even though he hadn’t intervened, he couldn’t have been very happy about them, or the allegations concerning Fleet’s involvement with Svergie. “Let me know when they want to inspect the starship and then let them get on with it.”

“Yes, sir,” Peter said, spying Ed in the distance. “I think Ed wants a word with you.”

Ed saluted as he walked up to us and I returned the salute. “We’re about to start the first heavy exercise now,” he said, as we walked towards the testing ground. A hundred vehicles and three hundred men had deployed into a large and deserted area of the countryside for their first heavy exercise. It wasn’t quite live-fire — we had laser systems to count hits without risking harm to anyone — but people had been known to be injured or killed on such training grounds. “Do you wish to observe?”

I shook my head. “I can observe through the UAV units if I have to watch,” I said, seriously. I would have loved to watch, but I just didn’t have the time. Ed was luckier than he knew; he got to run a Company and a training exercise, while I was trapped between paperwork and Fleet’s demands. “Let me know if there’s something I should keep a particular eye on.”

“I will, and I’ll even write you a report afterwards,” Ed teased. He knew what I was feeling, all right. “Have a good time here, sir.”

My earpiece buzzed before I could frame a suitably insulting reply. “Sir, this is dispatch,” a voice said. “A Fleet shuttle is inbound and the officer onboard insists on seeing you personally.”

“Understood,” I said. I had a strong suspicion I already knew who was on that ship, but better safe than sorry. “Show him into my office when he arrives.”

Twenty minutes later, Commander (Fleet Intelligence) Daniel Webster was shown into my office. I didn’t waste time pretending to be busy; I stood up, shook his hand and invited him to sit on the sofa. He accepted a cup of local coffee — no UN-brand for him, clearly — and we chatted for five minutes about nothing. I knew, just from that alone, that it was going to be bad.

“The Captain was quite annoyed about the Communist broadcasts,” he explained, once he had run out of small talk. “I take it that there’s no need to worry that the Protocols were infringed?”

“No,” I said, firmly. Daniel — he had the same first name as Daniel Singh, I realised suddenly — looked doubtful. “The Communists lost the election, nor did they manage to use force of arms to overturn the results. The Fleet Protocols were not infringed as it was a purely local matter.”

“It is questionable how… local this entire affair is with you and your men mixed up in the middle of it,” Daniel commented, dryly. “The requests for recognition from the Communist Government, the… ah People’s Republic of Pitea were quite worrying. If it had turned into an interstellar incident, certain people would not have been best pleased.”

I understood the underlying message and nodded. “It shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, playing the guilty schoolboy. “It won’t happen again.”

“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Daniel said. “Captain Price-Jones is unaware that we allowed you to use the ship’s orbital imaging systems to monitor the situation on the ground. If he were to discover the truth — and it doesn’t sit well with anyone on the ship who does know — the results would not be pleasant. At the very least, you’d be cut off from all further intelligence from us; at worst, you’d be ordered off-planet in such a way that it couldn’t be countermanded easily. The entire situation might well have been exposed to scrutiny.”

“It won’t happen again,” I repeated, angrily this time. I hadn’t expected the Communists to beg for help from Fleet, although Captain Price-Jones had refused to get involved. “Like I said, it was a purely local affair.”

“It may not stay that way,” Daniel said, as he calmed down a little. “The William Tell detected several unexplained wormhole signatures over the last three weeks. It’s possible that someone is smuggling stuff down onto the planet and that, of course, is a major concern for Fleet.”

“Or it could be just someone setting up base in the asteroids,” I countered. The only official arrival at Svergie had been a freighter acting as a pathfinder for an interstellar shipping line, wondering if it was worth the effort of adding Svergie to their list of destinations. I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected that they had decided against it and vanished back into more profitable shipping lanes. “Do you have any proof that someone managed an orbital insertion without being detected?”

“No,” Daniel said, “but that proves nothing. Fleet’s… sensors are good, but not that good.”

“True,” I agreed. I knew far less about space combat and tactics than I did about ground warfare, but I knew enough to understand his point. Given sufficient time and patience, a stealth shuttle could have landed when the William Tell was in the wrong position to observe it and catch them in the act. A landing pod would have been even easier, although the new arrival wouldn’t have been able to leave the planet afterwards. “We detected nothing, of course.”

“It could be just jumping at shadows,” Daniel agreed. “It’s not as if Svergie is a closed system where no one might want to come under any circumstances. It’s even possible that the wormholes belonged to freighters performing navigational checks before heading out again to their next destination. It’s just… worrying, and with the reports of the Freedom League taking an interest in this general area…”

I snorted. ‘This general area’ consisted of hundreds of light years and a couple of dozen inhabited planets. It was possible that the Freedom League might have their hand in events somewhere, but I doubted they’d work with the Communists. The Freedom League had been born in revolt against the United Nations and preferred to support democratic systems against the UN, or Fleet. They hadn’t stopped operating just because the UN had been broken and Fleet had taken its place.

“It could be nothing,” Daniel conceded. “However, there are more practical concerns on Svergie itself. What do you make of the local situation?”

I hesitated, and then decided to be truthful. “It’s unstable,” I said. “We beat the Communists hard enough to make anyone else think twice about starting a second insurrection, but we’re going to have to work to rebuild the damage and that it going to take time and resources the planet doesn’t have. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of the Council and the Acting President are Progressive, which leaves the other parties feeling left out and suspicious. The farmers will have to produce extra food over the coming year to feed the starving, which isn’t going to make the political situation any better. Overall… if we can last the next year or two we should have a fairly stable planet.”

“If,” Daniel agreed. “It may interest you to know that there were a number of heavily-encrypted transmissions from New Copenhagen to somewhere in the Mountains. This started a few days after the Communist leadership was sentenced to death and hung… how is the planet taking that, by the way?”

“Surprisingly well,” I confirmed. He probably knew already. There were a handful of small riots in some industrial areas, but overall the Communists blotted their copybook pretty well without help. There are some parties who are saying that they should have been sentenced to hard labour without the possibility of parole, but they’re very much in the minority. The general mood on the streets seems to be that the bastards got exactly what they deserved.

“As for the smaller fry, the vast majority of them will be spending ten-twenty years helping to rebuild,” I continued. “They’re going to be at hard labour for most of their lives, but in the end they should be safe and allowed to return to civilian society. A handful have been offered the chance to settle the other continents and see if they survive, so others may follow them. There was a minority opinion that said that they should all be exiled to a Communist planet, but the costs and logistics put a stop to that pretty quickly.”

“I’m not surprised,” Daniel said. The costs of transporting a few thousand men and women to another planet were astronomical. There was no point in doing it for convicted criminals, even if they probably deserved the reception they would find. “But I digress. There were encrypted transmissions and… well, we couldn’t decode them.”

That was a surprise. By law, every planetary encryption system had to have a backdoor built into the system to allow Fleet Intelligence to read their mail. It was about as popular as a dose of the clap and there were plenty of covert groups willing and able to produce encryption software without a backdoor — or at least not a Fleet backdoor. Fleet Intelligence could still decrypt messages, but it wasn’t easy and it sometimes took longer than they had. Whoever owned the system was risking Fleet’s anger, for what?

“You couldn’t get any idea of what they said?” I asked. There were times when it was easy to learn quite a bit about what was being said, even without the code being broken, but this obviously wasn’t one of them. “You don’t even know who owns the transmitters?”

“We suspect the Mountain Men, which adds fuel to the speculation that the Freedom League is involved,” Daniel said. “However, one of my subordinates pointed out that we might have already cracked the message, without knowing that we had cracked the message. If they used a pre-arranged code…”

I nodded. A simple substitution cipher could be a nightmare to crack without knowing the book they were using as the base for the cipher. It wasn’t as if we were short of possible candidates. The Freedom League might not be involved at all and only our own paranoia was convincing us they were there, but if they were, the Mountain Men would be the best allies they could hope to find.

“There’s still no grounds for intervening, but be careful,” Daniel concluded. “If the shit hits the fan completely, we might have to cut you out of the orbital images without warning.”

“Understood,” I said. I’d been out on a limb before. It didn’t make any difference if it were the UNPF or Fleet who were standing behind me, holding a saw, ready to cut off the limb and send me crashing to the ground. “Have you considered levelling with the Captain and explaining the truth?”

“Captain Price-Jones is a very by-the-book person,” Daniel reminded me. “His first response would be to brig the lot of us for usurping his command, followed by ordering your men into barracks and sending to Unity for instructions. The lid would be blown completely off the Legion and far too many people would learn the Legion’s real purpose.”

I scowled. “How the hell can they complain?” I demanded. I didn’t mean to shout at him, but the stress was getting to me. “We’re trying to stabilise a hundred worlds that would otherwise tear themselves apart!”

“It’s a question of who is actually in command,” Daniel reminded me. “If they feel that Fleet is turning into another UN, only one that is actually competent, they’ll start worrying about who’s next, or what we might have in mind for the long term. So we work in the shadows, and deny everything if someone gets a hint of what we’re doing, and know that no one will ever thank us for it.”

He grinned. “If the game were easy, anyone could play.”

“Hah,” I said, sourly. “Tomorrow, I have to speak to a load of young officer-candidates on military duty and what it actually means. How could I tell them about this?”

“You don’t,” Daniel said. “You just keep it to yourself until the time is right.”

“Never, in other words,” I concluded. “I just hope that you can sleep at night.”