Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Forty

The Peace Treaty was signed two weeks after the Battle of New Copenhagen.

I’d advised Frida on how to handle it, from agreeing to some of their terms to pushing forward the ultimate requirements of the planetary government. Some of the Svergie Army recruiting would come from the countryside, but there would no longer be any private militias or fighting forces, although there was nothing the government could do about the spread of guns. Disarming the entire planet would be an impossible task and it would restart the fighting. We could do, I said, without that and Frida reluctantly agreed. Gun ownership would remain part of the planet’s constitution for a long time to come.

The development of the new farms provided the impetus for major social change. The victory in the war ensured that Frida’s program would continue — her Party, naturally, was swearing undying loyalty to her again, even as they sharpened the knives for her back — and most of the population would find themselves moved out the countryside soon enough. With the end of the war, it was possible to work more officially with the farmers to develop the new farms — and avoid some of the more common mistakes, such as too-extensive government regulation. The new farms would provide enough food to keep the planet alive without the need for looting the old farms, while the planet might even build up a food surplus.

Not everyone was happy, to be fair. The miners had driven a hard bargain — it helped that no one actually wanted to restart the war — but some of the funds gained by selling their ore would definitely go to them and help expand the mines with modern technology. I suggested that in the long run it wouldn’t matter — given twenty years, the planet could probably build an asteroid mining industry, more than enough to supply the planet’s needs — but their representatives had to have something to take back to their people. If they hadn’t been able to convince them to accept the peace treaty, we might have had to spend the next few years chasing them through the mountains.

The one sticking point had been the Freedom League. I’d insisted that their representatives be turned over to us as part of the deal, but when they’d arrived at the spaceport they’d all been dead, killed by an implanted suicide device. The miners wouldn’t have had the tech to scan for it even if they had thought to do so, and I didn’t hold them to account for it, but it was still galling. The proof that Fleet needed, the proof that could have been used to push other worlds into clamping down on the Freedom League, was missing. They hadn’t even brought very much to Svergie; merely themselves and their knowledge. It had been their influence that had convinced the miners to launch the Battle of New Copenhagen, knowing that if the battle failed, they were lost anyway. I would have cheerfully strangled them for that decision — the overall death toll had been over four thousand people, including hundreds of civilians who had been killed by shells that overshot their targets — but they had killed themselves to avoid interrogation.

I watched as Councillor Erik Henriksson and Councillor Albin Arvidsson signed their parts of the treaty, before reassuming their role as Councillors. The voting boundaries were going to be redrawn as well, giving the farmers and miners additional representation, although that would include the new farms as well. I suspected that it wouldn’t work out well for them in the long run — the more of any group there were, the less chance of actual unity — but they were happy for the moment. So, I suspected, was Frida; she no longer had to worry about the prospect of a coup from the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party itself was on the verge of splintering apart.

“That’s my father up there,” a voice said behind me. I turned to see Suki standing there. She flinched back from my gaze. “He said I ought to go talk to you before you left.”

I nodded, tightly. One of the terms of the Peace Treaty was that all foreign mercenaries were to leave the planet, apparently on a quid pro quo basis for the loss of the Freedom League. I wasn’t unhappy with that, although naturally I’d protested and finally got them to agree to a phased withdrawal period of six months; the planet no longer needed us. The officers and men we’d trained could take over, aided by the men and women who had formed ties to Svergie and would be resigning from the Legion to remain on the planet. There had been some dark mutterings about traitors, but I had squashed them. If some of us had found a new home on the planet, more power to them. I doubted that I would ever consider Svergie home.

“Indeed?” I asked, coldly. It was easy to allow her to lead me into a private room. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Suki said, biting her lip. It made her look absurdly young. Suki, like most others who had fought on the losing side, had been granted amnesty, but she was damn lucky she hadn’t encountered Peter, or Muna. Peter wanted to tear off her head and shit down her neck. Muna just wanted her dead. The planet would probably be spending the next few hundred years settling scores after the civil war, then settling new scores created by settling the first scores...I rather suspected that several thousand people were likely to take a new boat and move out to settle one of the empty continents. “I didn’t know what the Freedom League was like.”

“We took you in,” I said. I heard the betrayal in my voice. Suki flinched back as if I’d slapped her. “We gave you a home, a purpose, training… and you decided to throw it all away for the Freedom League.”

She showed, for the first time, a flash of anger. “You weren’t there at the end,” she snapped, angrily. “You didn’t see how that bitch pushed my father into authorising the final assault on New Copenhagen, or how they tried to take control of the entire war effort, or… you don’t know what they’re like.”

“I’ve seen their handiwork before,” I said, tiredly. Outside the private room, the delegates were cheering the end of the war and the beginning of a new era. Their jubilation would last only until they realised that building a new world would take time and effort, but for the moment they were happy. “You betrayed us, Suki. How do you expect me to look past that? No one can ever trust you again?”

“I know,” she said. “I knew what I was doing when I went into it. I’m sorry and that’s all I have to say to you.”

She marched past me, opened the door and stepped outside. I expected her to pause and deliver a final crushing retort, but instead she closed the door behind her and vanished into the crowd. It was hard to feel sympathy for her, I decided, even though part of my body was making a very urgent argument to forgive her. She had made her own bed and now she could sleep in it — alone. I shook my head and headed out of the room myself, over to the President’s wheelchair. He looked up at me and smiled.

“Thank you for everything,” he said. His voice was weaker than I remembered, but he was definitely recovering from the sniper shot — it felt like years ago now, instead of nine months. “I’m just sorry that we couldn’t keep you and your men around for longer.”

We shared a wry smile. I had the feeling that he, at least, knew who I was truly working for and why, but he wouldn’t share it with anyone. He’d grown into a statesman the hard way, just as Frida had grown into a stateswoman herself. He knew what most of the politicians in the room preferred to forget; power came with costs and sometimes those costs included lives. It was something that many people never learned.

“It’s not a problem,” I assured him. It wasn’t as if the Legion was going to be short of work, even if we had been a common mercenary army rather than one of Fleet’s more covert operatives. “Do you think that the peace will hold?”

“Oh, I imagine that it will,” the President said. “Now you’ve broken the power base that kept people trapped in the cities, using them as tame voters, the planet can settle down to a more reasonable developmental pattern. We might even seek outside investment that we can use to build a space industry. The possibilities are endless.”

“I suppose they are,” I said, catching sight of one of the former POWs on the other side of the room. One non-negotiable condition of the peace treaty had been the immediate return of all POWs; ours and theirs, and Ed and his men had returned to us. The farmers had kept them well-separated from the Freedom League, which was something we owed them for; the Freedom League had apparently wanted to interrogate them heavily. “Good luck.”

“You too,” the President said. “And know that you have the thanks of a grateful population and government. If there’s anything we can ever do for you…”

“We won’t hesitate to ask,” I assured him. There was no longer any reason for me to stay at the conference hall, so I nodded goodbye and waved to Peter. “Coming?”

The ride back to the spaceport passed quickly.

Day followed day as we prepared to depart. The officers who had been promoted in the wake of the Battle of New Copenhagen were put through their paces, helped — this time — by a growing officer corps native to Svergie. The Drill Sergeants Russell and his men had picked out were given responsibility for basic training and watched like hawks until they had proved themselves. Training was finally moved to a training field on the other side of the main continent, leaving the spaceport and the barracks we had created feeling slightly empty. It was the end of an era.

“We can replenish most of what we lost from local supplies,” Muna assured me, one evening. Perhaps she felt the same way too about leaving, but she had no ties to Svergie to keep her here, unlike the men who had gotten married in the last few months. We’d be down nearly four hundred men when the dust finally settled, but we could get replacements for them fairly easily. Quite a few Svergie men had volunteered to remain with the Legion rather than stay on the planet. “We only really need to pay for the new shuttles and UAV craft.”

“Make out a list of stuff we can purchase and we can pick it up from Heinlein,” I said. We’d be swinging through the Heinlein System after we departed anyway. “They should be able to meet most of our requirements.”

My earpiece buzzed before Muna could answer. “Sir, this is Thomas down in dispatch,” a voice said. “A Fleet battleship just entered the system and her Captain has demanded that you come onboard personally.”

“Understood,” I said. I knew who had to be onboard that ship. I also knew that delay would merely irritate Fleet. “Tell them that I’m on my way.”

There were only ever three battleships in existence and one of them was destroyed at the Battle of Earth, during John Walker’s coup. The UN had built them as prestige craft for the high-ranking Admirals, wasting resources that could probably have been used to build a dozen cruisers for each battleship. The Percival Harriman was an impressive vessel — I wouldn’t have doubted that — but it was wasteful. Fleet had kept the two captured battleships, but they hadn’t bothered to build more. What could one battleship do that a dozen cruisers could not — and more besides?

I was met at the shuttlebay by a single officer, who escorted me through the ship’s corridors to Officer Country, and waved me into a single stateroom. I could have been convinced of the wastefulness of the battleships just by the Admiral’s stateroom — large enough to store extra missiles or emergency components — but my attention was distracted. It had been nearly two years since I last saw John Walker in the flesh.

“John,” I said, shaking his hand. “You’re looking well.”

“Liar,” John said. He still looked absurdly young for the Admiral’s uniform he wore — he couldn’t be older than thirty-five, if that — but he looked worn. “You still haven’t got rid of those scars, I see.”

“No, sir,” I said, taking the offered seat. It was easy to sit and banter with him, a distraction from the real purpose of the visit. “I feel that they add character to my face.”

“Someone lied to you,” John said, deadpan. “I read your reports — and Captain Price-Jones’ reports. You did very well down on Svergie. How long do you think it will last?”

I hesitated. I hated intelligence officers who made predictions — often just pulling the answers out of their behinds — but I understood why John was asking. If Svergie was reasonably stable, Fleet could encourage investment without fear of something blowing up in their face and forcing them to intervene openly.

“I think the new government will last until the elections in five years,” I said, finally. “The worst of the effort involved in creating the new farms will be over by then, so I suspect that the Progressives will probably find themselves weakened to the point where they have to adapt or be replaced by other parties — neither of which will threaten the planet’s new stability. Without us, the Svergie Army should still be able to handle any trouble that pops up now that the main body of the enemy force has been degraded and destroyed. After that…”

I shrugged. “It should hold together,” I concluded. “We broke the worst of their problems during the emergency situation.”

“Good enough,” John said. He looked relieved. “Not everyone on the Admiralty Board was happy with the concept of risking the Legion — or, rather, risking our activities being revealed — to try to save Svergie from itself. Now that it’s happened successfully, I think we can probably press for more interventions, while offering Svergie the trade credits it needs to make the jump to a space-based economy.”

“And ensure that it becomes a waypoint for the development of the sector,” I added. John didn’t bother to deny it. “Is it true that there will be nine more worlds founded in the next few years?”

“There are millions of people who want off Earth,” John confirmed. “There’s no way that they can all be housed in the solar system, even if the people who have already settled on Mars and Venus were willing to accept them — and they’re not. They made their feelings clear at the big conference on Unity last year. They will take some children, perhaps people with technical skills, but no one else.

“So we have to rush around trying to settle new colonies for them and force a lot of people who were basically just worthless parasites to actually become something useful. The shipping capability is stretched to breaking point even with the new starships coming off Heinlein’s production lines. If we can settle them and force them to work or starve, we will, but most of them would probably prefer to starve.”

I scowled. “I trust that you are not thinking of sending the Legion to Earth,” I said. “I wouldn’t go there on a bet.”

“I don’t think that the Legion could do anything even if you went,” John said. “Fleet Intelligence’s most optimistic projection is that half the population will die in the next few years. There’s a total biosphere collapse underway. We’re holding the orbital towers in hopes of keeping the gates open as long as we can, but God alone knows how many people are trapped down there without hope of anything, but death.”

“I’m surprised you’re even trying,” I said. If it was that hopeless, was John pouring Fleet resources down an endless hole? “I’m surprised that your fellows are allowing you to expend resources on saving them.”

John shrugged. “Earth still represents the largest human population in the Human Sphere,” he said, seriously. “If we can save as many as possible, we might be able to expand faster, maybe even get the Federation on its feet without another war.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How is the Federation coming along?”

“Slowly,” John admitted. “Half of them think that Fleet intends to become an Empire, the other half are out for what they can get for themselves and hang the rest. It’s total bloody chaos, not helped by the fact that there are people in Fleet who think that we should become an Empire, just to keep the children in line. If what you found implicates Heinlein… that demand is only going to grow stronger. Heinlein is definitely one of our problem children.”

He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter for the moment,” he said. “Take your time; rest, recover, and prepare for your next deployment. Svergie is hardly the worst world out there, Andrew, and they all need fixing.”

I smiled. “Just call us the fixers,” I said. “It makes a change from breaking things in the name of the UN.”