Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Thirty-One

We started the following week.

I hadn’t expected it to be easy to round up the first prospective farmers — and it wasn’t — but there were hundreds of thousands of possible candidates. For the first few hundred, we concentrated on men who had families and something to work towards apart from their self-gratification, or their self-destruction, as seemed to be the case with most of the drug addicts. We couldn’t eat many of the native crops of Svergie, but one particular weed could be used as a drug, giving a short burst of near-orgasmic pleasure, followed by a long period of depression. The drug addicts never seemed to be short of supplies; the weed was so common that the planet didn’t really have a drug mafia like several other worlds.

We’d chosen, upon the advice of the Legionnaires who had some farming experience, a patch of land several thousand miles from New Copenhagen. I’d had several motives for agreeing to that location; not only would it be hard for the enemy to mount an attack on the new farms, but it was also be hard for the new farmers to leave the land and return to the city. I didn’t want to have to force them to work — and I expected that most of the volunteers, for they had been volunteers, would stick it out — but I didn’t want to make leaving easy. A handful of boats could transport the crop from the farms to the cities; in time, we’d build a road and a railroad. The important thing was that we wouldn’t be trespassing on the land owned by already-established farmers.

The first task had been to break the ground and here the Communist prisoners came in handy. I’d made them all an offer when we’d shipped them from the detention camps to the new farms; if they worked for five years assisting us with setting up new farms, they could have their own farms afterwards. I meant it too; after five years, they’d have skills we needed and they’d hopefully have picked up the working attitude. The drug addicts or hardcore Communists would weed themselves out before they were released. We put them to work breaking the ground and weeding out the native plants, while I went back to the other detention camp. I had people I wanted to recruit.

“I don’t see any point,” I told the imprisoned farmers, “in beating around the bush. You know why the war started as well as I do. I intend to fix the problem by transporting as much of the urban population out of the cities and into the countryside — into new farms — as quickly as possible. This isn’t going to be easy. Very few of them have the slightest idea how to grow small crops, let alone massive farms. We need your help.”

It was true. Back during the early days of New Copenhagen, there had been a set of allotments for urban residents who had wanted to grow their own food, or at least small amounts of fruit and vegetables. The UN had tried to limit or ban the practice, regarding it as elitist — there was more demand than there were allotments — but enough had survived the UN’s semi-legal attempts to get rid of them that we had a core of people who had a vague idea of what they were doing. The problem lay in scaling up what they knew to a full-sized farm… and that wasn’t going to be easy. We weren’t helped by the fact that our supplies of farm machinery were critically low and we needed to use hands and non-powered tools where we would have preferred powered equipment. There were skill sets that were never used these days, apart from the pastoral worlds, and we would have to reinvent them under pressure.

“You were all arrested in acts of aggression against the government,” I continued. I held up a hand to stem the political argument I knew was coming. The farmers were lucky to be alive. As the embargo continued to grip the civilian population, the soldiers had been growing nastier, aware of what was happening to their civilian relatives. “If you give us one year of your time to help make the farms grow, we will release you without further detention.”

There was a brief murmured discussion among the farmers, and then a leader was pushed forward. “We’ve seen attempts by the cities to push their surplus population out into the fields before,” one of the farmers said, finally. “Why should we assume that this will work any better than the last attempt?”

I studied the farmer thoughtfully. He looked to be pure Scandinavian blood, rather than the more mixed racial heritage of the cities, but I wouldn’t hold that against him. The racial aspect of the conflict had been kept on the back burner as much as possible — and yes, there were farmers who were far more mixed than their spokesman. In the long run, the entire situation might sort itself out, if Svergie didn’t tear itself apart first.

“We won’t let it fail,” I explained. “We’ll be establishing the new farms well away from your farms and giving them as much help as we can.” I threw in my sweetener. “If we can get the new farms established, the Acting President has agreed to repeal the legislation you find so offensive and end the war on favourable terms. The planet needs fed and this is the best way we can find to do it.”

In the end, seventy-one farmers agreed to work for us in the new farms, although they drove a harder bargain than I had expected. They insisted on having armed soldiers stationed at the new farms to protect them from their workers, rather than their former comrades, and some — mainly younger children of farmers who wouldn’t inherit — demanded farms of their own. I agreed at once; I’d already intended to have soldiers on guard — previous experiments had been wrecked by teenage urban residents stealing, raping and murdering — and giving them farms of their own would only provide encouragement to work to make it a success. A handful refused to join us and had to be returned to the detention camps. I couldn’t release them. Not yet.

Two weeks passed slowly. Fort Galloway, under Ed’s command, reported a series of skirmishing raids and a handful of snipers taking pot-shots at anyone who showed their face, but other than that little happened. My soldiers — the Legion and the Svergie Army — patrolled through the nearby farms, but left the mountains and the miners strictly alone. I didn’t want to risk men patrolling in an area that would take thousands of additional soldiers to take and secure. I wasn’t fooled by the quiet either. Quiet, in my experience, meant that the enemy was preparing something pretty damn devastating.

“There’s been nothing, apart from the shots,” Ed reported, when I checked in with him one night. “A couple of soldiers have the galloping shits” — tummy upsets caused by eating too many MRE packs — “and another nearly managed to hurt himself on the shooting range, but apart from that it’s been quiet.”

“Good,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. One explanation for the shortage of attacks was the shortage of targets for the enemy to shoot at. The farmers didn’t seem inclined to come close to New Copenhagen and the other cities, where we had a formidable presence and cleared lanes of fire, and we weren’t running patrols into the wild countryside. The stream of new recruits was being trained, whereupon we might have the numbers to take the war into the mountains and recover the mines, but until then…

I smiled to myself. There was an ulterior motive in creating the new farms I hadn’t mentioned to anyone, apart from Ed. If the enemy realised that we might — no, we would — escape the effects of the food embargo, they might launch a conventional attack before we escaped their pressure. The farmers and miners, or at least the handful we’d interviewed, had been willing to end hostilities, provided that the government stopped interfering with them, but the Freedom League might have different ideas. They wanted — needed — a government in New Copenhagen that would be friendly to them and their aims. They’d try to push their allies into a direct grab for power before their political power was shattered completely.

The map of the planet glowed in front of me and I smiled again. Svergie wasn’t a heavily populated planet, not by the standards of New Washington, or Edo, or even Terra Nova, and there was plenty of room for expansion. If we kept up the pressure, if we kept moving people out from the cities into the new farms, we wouldn’t run out of space in a hurry. We could even settle the other continents and spread out much further. The local government would probably see that as a threat to its power — it had been an issue on several other worlds — but we could cope with that. We might even go looking for new colonists from Earth. There were billions of people trying to escape the mother world.

Two days later, I accompanied Frida on a visit to the new farms. I was quietly impressed with how much had been done in the three weeks since we’d broken the first patch of ground, but we had plenty of manpower and determination. Apart from the Communists, we’d emptied the jails of everyone who had committed minor felonies and set them to work as well, under the direction of the farmers. There were others as well; teenage kids and unemployed men, working for their daily ration. It looked uncomfortably like a slave camp to me, the kind the UN had tried to run on Botany, but there was no choice. I kept telling myself that there was no choice.

“Madam President,” Jack Hawthorn called. “Welcome to the Defiance Farm.”

Frida smiled reluctantly. “The Defiance Farm?”

“We’re defying the food blockade here by growing our own,” Jack said, as he led us towards the first set of fields. “Give us a few months and we’ll have the first crop of potatoes and other quick-growing crops underway. That’ll win us time to start planting proper fields of corn and other crops; we can even start purchasing farm animals and using them in the fields…”

I listened absently as he expounded on his pet project. Jack had been a farmer before running off the farm — or being run off the farm, as he’d explained, by corrupt local governors and taxmen — and he knew more about farming than almost anyone else in the Legion. Finding him had been a stroke of luck, by all accounts; he’d had experience with the UN’s farming methods and more conventional methods as well. I was glad we had him; without him, we would have had to trust the local farmers completely.

“We’ve got nearly ten thousand people working out here now,” Jack continued. “Most of them don’t know their arse from their elbow, of course, but we can use them to break the ground if nothing else. This is simple, brute force farming and we’re going to have to rotate the crops after two or three plantings, but it’ll get us some time to work on more permanent solutions.”

He waved a hand at the massive UN-issue tents that had been set up in one corner of the farm. “We’ve got enough room for everyone to sleep under canvas for the moment, but we’re working on establishing some farmhouses and barns as we go along,” he continued. “Families get their own tent, as do lovers and friends; the vast majority sleep in the communal tents until they’re settled down. We’ve had some problems with discipline — a handful of thugs, a handful of drug addicts — but we weeded them out fairly quickly. A couple of stupid kids committed rape and we executed them in front of the entire group.”

“Good work,” I said. Frida still looked rather stunned by everything she was seeing. “Have there been any problems with the Communists?”

“Not many,” Jack confirmed. “A handful tried to lecture everyone on Communism and got a bad reception, while several others tried to escape under cover of darkness. They’re all fitted with locator beacons, of course, so tracking them all down was fairly easy and we brought the bodies back to the camp. I think that impressed some of the teenage thugs more than having armed soldiers scattered around the camp.”

I nodded. Thugs — street gangs, bullies, and other scrum like that — always thought of themselves as tough, but most of them melted away when confronted with real violence. Each of the soldiers guarding them had been in real wars, real fighting, and it showed. Life might have been cheap on the streets, but it was rare for gang wars to be fought out to the bitter end. The sight of dead bodies would have made an impression on them, even though the Communists had left enough dead bodies littering the streets of New Copenhagen. We’d tried to train some of the street thugs to join the army, but it hadn’t worked very well. They lived in a world where they had to fend for themselves. Working in large groups was alien to them.

“We have films every night and what other entertainments we can scrounge up,” Jack continued. “Various ball games, some board games, card games… I had to forbid people from gambling for money, but we’re not here to make this a hellish death camp. We had some girls trying to sell themselves as well, but overall… this place could be a lot worse.”

“This is horrible,” Frida said, shocked. “You’re using them as slaves.”

“The farmers who landed on your planet would have had to do the same thing,” I pointed out, seriously. I looked over at the turned earth that would be planted with crops soon and smiled again. “The farms you know and love didn’t come out of nowhere. They had to be developed, by brute force if necessary.”

“I never thought about it,” Frida admitted, finally. I followed her gaze towards where a team of young men were pulling a makeshift plough. We’d given priority to farming tools in the factories, but it would be a while before they produced anything useful. The mining embargo didn’t just cover minerals that could be shipped off-world. We might have to start melting down cars and other metal items to produce the raw materials. “How long until you have proper farms?”

Jack smiled. “In ten years,” he assured her, “this area will be covered with farmland.”

I escorted Frida through a long tour of the area before we boarded the light aircraft to return to the spaceport. We took a detour over the ocean to avoid the threat of enemy SAM attacks and I watched as dolphin-analogue creatures swam in the blue waters below the aircraft. They looked so enchanting that I wanted to swim with them, but Frida wanted me — when I admitted to that desire — that the Jaws had sharp teeth and a great dislike of humanity. No one was quite sure why; their flesh was inedible and they were generally regarded as nuisances. No one even bothered to hunt them for oil.

“They take a handful of children every year,” Frida added, after a moment. “Parents are warned not to let their children swim alone, but every so often a few children get bitten and killed by the monsters. Some idiots look at them, think they’re safe and sweet like real Dolphins, and try to swim with them. It never lasts long.”

“I see,” I said, finally. There was a moral in that, somewhere. “I shall remember never to swim with them.”

Frida smiled. “Not if you value your nuts,” she said, dryly. I hoped she was joking. “They’ve been known to bite them off and eat them.”

A day after I returned from the farms, I was summoned to the main control room. “Sir, there’s been a development with the UAV flight,” the pilot informed me. “As you know, UAV-3 was orbiting over the mountains, watching for evidence of enemy activity.”

I frowned. “Was?”

“Was,” the pilot confirmed. “The UAV has been shot down.”

I stared at him. “Shot down?” I repeated. It should have been impossible. There was little on the planet that could detect the UAV, let alone shoot it down. “How?”

“I’m not sure,” the pilot said. “Judging from the telemetry, it was probably an electronic weapon of some kind; I suspect a directed EMP cannon. The signal blinked out completely, along with both backups. They may just have gotten lucky, or they might have obtained hyper-sensitive sensing gear from somewhere more advanced than this dump. Fleet-issue sensors, or stuff from Heinlein or Williamson’s World, could probably track the UAV from orbit. It was emitting a tiny signal, after all.”

“I see,” I said. I couldn’t help, but regard that as ominous. The William Tell wouldn’t be over the area for another few hours. A lot could happen in that time. “Get me a report on what it was seeing just before it was shot down.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said. “We could route UAV-5 over the general area.”

“And lose that as well?” I asked, dryly. “Or… wait; we could simply deactivate the transmitter, couldn’t we?”

“Yes, assuming that that was how they detected it,” the pilot said. I understood what he meant. If the enemy had an advanced radar system… but we’d have detected active sensors, and passive sensors wouldn’t have been able to locate the UAV, apart from tracking its transmissions. “These things are expensive, sir.”

“I know,” I said, sourly. “Keep the UAV back for the moment. I’ll have to discuss the matter with Ed.”