She looked up. All along the line, insurgents had fallen, their captives pulling themselves free. It was a miracle, as if the hand of Allah had swept down from the heavens and wiped out the infidels who were holding them prisoner, the infidels who would have forced the girls into loveless marriages for their own pleasure. Moments later, she heard the first explosions in the distance and scrambled for a place to hide. Maybe the infidels were coming anyway, but it no longer mattered. They could hardly be worse than the insurgents.
Finding a hole, she crawled into it and closed her eyes to wait.
***
Steve heard a faint whine as the drones moved forward, searching for IEDs. The quickest way to get rid of one was simply to detonate it in place, so the drones were vibrating the ground to trigger the weapons. Those that refused to detonate were marked down for later attention, while the advancing troops were steered around them. Inch by inch, the troops moved closer to the occupied town.
It looked fairly typical for the region, he noted, as they closed in on the edge of the defences. A large number of primitive huts and hovels, a handful of more modern buildings in the centre and a single stone mosque, rising above the buildings and gleaming in the sunlight. It had been used as an Observation Point by the Taliban, Steve knew, trusting that the American infidels wouldn't fire on the mosque. But the ROE hadn't saved the men inside. The drones had killed them the moment the command was given, leaving their lifeless bodies on the ground.
A chill fell over him as he realised what was missing. No one fired at them as they entered the town, not even a single shot. Most of the human shields looked to be in shock as they stared down at their former captors, others had probably grabbed weapons and fled for their lives. The Taliban had told them, Steve guessed, that the American troops would kill the men, then rape the women and children. They’d told the same story everywhere, hoping to encourage the locals not to cooperate with the Coalition. And, given the behaviour of some local policemen, the bastards might even have a point.
The chill grew stronger as he looked down at one of the bodies. There was a tiny hole in the side of his head, smoking slightly. His AK-47 lay beside him, abandoned and useless against an attack they hadn't even seen coming. Kevin had been right, Steve told himself, as he looked up towards the mosque. The world had changed and he could no longer be the person he had been, when he had nothing to worry about but the ranch.
“Dear God,” Henderson said. “What have you done?”
Steve shook his head as he looked back at the body. “Opened a whole new world,” he said. “And a whole can of worms too.”
“You never spoke a truer word,” Henderson said. “Have you grown up a little now?”
Steve shrugged.
The afternoon was almost surreal. Normally, evicting the Taliban from a mid-sized town would take days of hard fighting, particularly if the ROE refused to allow close fire support for the advancing troops. But now, all that remained was carting out the bodies and then clearing out a handful of homes that had been turned into massive IEDs. The locals looked to have been reduced sharply by the insurgents; civil affairs teams spoke to the handful of male survivors and discovered that most of the men had been butchered as soon as the siege had begun. Steve wasn't too surprised. The insurgents had only had a limited supply of food and the town’s menfolk, watching their wives and children starve, might have turned against the Taliban.
He watched a platoon of Royal Marines transporting bodies towards the mass graves, then looked up at the sun setting in the sky. Life in the village would never be the same again, even if the ones who had fled in time to escape being taken captive managed to return. The whole district had been traumatised, first by the Taliban and then by the Coalition’s counter-attack. Maybe they should just offer to take the women and children with them, maybe offering them a place to live on the moon. But it would be a problem when there were no quarters available for them.
“You’d better make yourself scarce,” Henderson warned. “The media is on the way.”
Steve sighed. At his request, the media had been kept away from the front lines, in hopes of keeping the secret a little longer. But they’d finally broken through the bureaucratic cordon and convinced the officials to allow them to move up to the town. Hell, with resistance crumbling so quickly, it was quite possible that they thought the Taliban was finally on the verge of breaking and wanted to be there when it did.
And it will break, Steve thought, bitterly.
But most of the men who’d died today weren't the true monsters. They'd been pushed into fighting, either out of religious conviction or because they simply didn't have anywhere else to go. As always, the true brains behind the terrorists and fanatics had remained out of battle, hiding on the other side of the Pakistani border. But not any longer, Steve told himself. The network of drones was already picking its way through the networks, isolating the true monsters at the heart of the Taliban. They were all doomed. They just didn't know it.
He caught sight of a young girl, staring at him from the darkened entrance to a tiny hovel, her face no longer hidden behind a veil. It was hard to guess her age; in America, he would have confidently guessed that she was still preteen, perhaps ten at the most. But in Afghanistan, where so many children were malnourished and treated badly, she might well be old enough to marry by local standards. Her face was bitterly pale, her eyes fixed on his face. Steve felt a wave of pity, tinged with bitter helplessness. It was girls like her who had borne the brunt of the war, massively oppressed by the Taliban and then caught in the middle of savage fighting as the Coalition fought to shatter a grassroots insurgency. Somehow, he doubted she would survive the coming winter.
I could take her, he thought. It would be simple enough; walk over to her, take her arm and teleport them both to orbit. But what would happen then? But I couldn't take them all.
He keyed his communicator. The girl vanished into the shadows as soon as she saw it, perhaps assuming it was a weapon. They’d recorded footage of the Taliban shooting their weapons randomly, purely for giggles. Or perhaps it had been intended to convince their prisoners that they were too irrational to be negotiated with.
“Kevin,” he said. “Round up a few volunteers for medical services, if you can find them, and send them down here. There are people who need help.”
“Understood,” Kevin said. There was an odd note in his voice. “Do you think that any of them are likely recruits? We could find space for a few dozen, if necessary.”
Steve swallowed, understanding – finally – the guilt he’d dismissed as a liberal delusion. He had so much and the locals had so little. He lived in peace; the locals lived in permanent war. His wife and daughter were safe; the women and children here might be married off against their will or simply raped, if the town fell to the wrong occupation party. And the American government, despite its flaws, was far better than anything the locals had produced or had designed for them. It was hard not to feel guilty.
“I believe some of them might be suitable,” he said. It was hard to know when everyone in the town had almost no practical schooling at all. “But others ... others are unlikely to fit in.”
He sent a command to the interface. The teleporter activated and the world faded away in silver light.
***
Gunter Dawlish had had enough run-ins with the military bureaucracy to know when he was being fed a line of bullshit. As one of the veterans of freelance journalism – it was a point of pride that he didn't take any regular pay from any newspaper or TV broadcaster – he’d heard enough spin to have a nose for it. And where someone was trying to sugar-coat a shit sandwich, it generally meant that someone had something to hide.
But what?
Gunter had gone to a great deal of trouble to be embedded with the 1st Marine Division. It did have a certain element of risk – reporters had been killed in Afghanistan – but it also allowed him to earn respect from the soldiers, who were the true heart and soul of the war in Afghanistan. But with
out respect, they wouldn't talk to him and most soldiers regarded reporters as the enemy. It was very hard to win their respect. Not being linked to any established part of the Mainstream Media did help, he knew, but so did bravery.
He jumped out of the AFV and looked around. It should have taken weeks, at best, to reduce the town’s defenders to the point where the Coalition could just walk in. Instead, it had taken barely an hour to take the entire town. There hadn't even been a major battle, his sources had whispered, and the only causality had been a soldier who’d triggered an undiscovered IED ... it just didn't make sense.
The town’s remaining inhabitants were gathered at one end of a field, being tended by a group of medics and Civil Affairs specialists. For once, there seemed to be no attempt to hide the women, something perhaps encouraged by the shortage of males in the group. Indeed, the more Gunter looked, the stranger it seemed. The defenders seemed to have been wiped out ... or had they fled? Had the military, having laid its plans for a great battle, discovered that its enemy had retreated and then claimed victory anyway? Or ...?
He followed the soldiers out towards the mass grave and swore, sucking in his breath as he saw the bodies. The defenders had died, he realised, and clearly no one in the local community had felt like burying them, a clear rejection of their ideology. But what had killed them? Most of the bodies seemed strangely unmarked. Indeed, there seemed to be very few insurgents who’d died conventionally. It just didn't make sense.
His imagination went to work. Gas? Something new and untried? But how could it have left one group untouched while others died?
Shaking his head, he removed his small camera and started to take pictures, then uploaded them to his storage site through the dongle his assistant in New York had procured for him. Sending messages through the military internet was always risky, particularly if they were trying to spin something into a victory. But the dongle seemed to allow him to bypass all of their precautions. And maybe a few people he knew might have an idea what happened to the bodies.
By the time they were escorted back to the base, he had half of his story already written in his head.
Chapter Fourteen
Shadow Warrior, Earth Orbit
“Welcome to your first dose of guilt,” Mariko teased. “It's what being human is all about.”
Steve snorted, but he couldn't escape the image of the girl staring at him. She had haunted his dreams for the past week, ever since he’d laid eyes on her for the first time. It wasn't romantic, he hastened to tell himself, it was a grim awareness that she was human, that she was real, that she had thoughts and feelings of her own. She wasn't just a statistic any longer.
He sat up in bed and looked over at his partner. Mariko had spent most of the last few days in Afghanistan, working in the refugee camps. From what she’d said, conditions had been hellish, particularly when some of the villagers who’d fled ahead of the Taliban started to return and assert their authority. Eventually, Steve had provisionally authorised a number of children – and teenage girls – to be moved to a camp and placed in line to go to the moon. It was a drop in the bucket, but his conscience would allow no less. Besides, he knew – all too well – what fate awaited them if they remained in Afghanistan.
“I thought I was human,” he said, bleakly. “I didn't know I wasn't.”
Shaking his head, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, making his way towards the shower. Whatever else could be said about the decor the Subhorde Commander had considered appropriate – the interface said it was alien porn, but it looked like nothing more than splashes of paint – the showers were wonderful. He stepped inside, allowed the warm water to wash the sweat of nightmares away from his skin, then waited for the hot air to dry his body. Outside, Mariko was already pulling herself out of bed.
She looked gorgeous, Steve realised, once again. Part of him wanted her right away, to take her back to bed and prove to both of them that life went on, but he knew there was no time to waste. The meeting was scheduled to take place in thirty minutes. Instead, he walked over to the food processor, picking up pieces of clothing along the way, and ordered them both breakfast. There was a ding from the machine as it produced its latest version of something edible for humankind.
“They won’t starve, down there,” Mariko said. “And they won’t die of thirst either.”
Steve nodded. He’d sent two biomass processors down to the surface, along with a portable water cleanser. It was probably best not to think about where some of the biomass was actually coming from, but the locals wouldn't starve. So far, they were so grateful to be fed that no one had started to complain about the tasteless food. The cynic in Steve suspected that it wouldn't be long before that changed.
He passed her one of the plates and tucked into something that looked like scrambled eggs, although the eggs were gray and the bread a faint pinkish colour. It tasted fine, despite its appearance. Kevin and Mongo kept experimenting with the food processors, trying to produce something that both looked and tasted good, but there were just too many variables in a system designed to feed individuals from over a thousand different races, each one with their own requirements. The sections on interstellar diplomacy he’d accessed through the interface had warned of problems in serving dinners when two or more races met to talk. One race’s food might be literally sickening to the other race ...
Once they were finished, Steve returned the plates to the processor and walked out of the cabin, heading down towards the conference room. It was astonishing just how much like home the giant starship had become, now they’d cleaned the decks and removed most of the more disturbing alien artworks. The interface seemed to believe that some of them were worth considerable amounts of galactic currency in the right places, but Steve found it hard to believe that it was right. But then, if someone could stick a piece of wood in a glass of urine and claim it was modern art, perhaps the Horde had their own sense of aesthetics. Or, for all he knew, there were races that collected their art.
The conference room was an odd mixture of human and alien technology. Steve had moved the heavy wooden table from the ranch into the compartment, then surrounded it with chairs from the closest office store. One of the alien projectors sat on the table, ready to project images into the air; another was placed near the door, allowing people outside the starship to attend the meeting virtually. The system was so remarkable that it made videoconferencing look like a piece of crap. Kevin hadn't taken long to point out that it would also add a whole new dimension to pornography.
He sat down at the head of the table and waited, accessing files from the interface to bide the time. Kevin, having the shortest distance to go, arrived within minutes, then sat down at the other end of the table. Charles, who had teleported up from Earth, took a seat next to Steve, while Mongo and Wilhelm sat down at the middle. Steve couldn't help wondering if they were already picking sides, in anticipation of the moment they developed factions. It hadn't taken the newborn American Republic long to develop political parties.
Steve shook his head, inwardly. As long as he had influence, he would make damn sure there were no political parties, no one voting the party line against their conscience. Maybe parties had an important role to play, but they eventually became more intent on ensuring their own survival than actually representing their people. And that was the death knell of democracy.
“I call this meeting to order,” he said, cheerfully. “Coffee’s in the processor, smoke them if you have them, etc, etc.”
There was a brief pause as the group found cups of coffee for themselves and Wilhelm lit up a rather large cigar. Steve, who had given up smoking years ago, watched it with some amusement. Now, with alien medical technology, smoking posed no health hazard at all. But it was still banned on the moon, outside the smoking room. The CO of Heinlein Colony wasn't inclined to take chances with the rapidly expanding base.
“It’s been a week since we intervened in Afghanistan,” Steve said, once they were sit
ting again. “It’s been ten days since we came to a preliminary agreement with the United States Government. I believe, therefore, that this is a good time to take stock of our position and bring us all up to date. Kevin?”
“I get to go first, do I?” Kevin asked. He smiled, rather dryly, then sobered. “At the moment, both the Afghanistan and Pakistani Taliban are in disarray. Their senior leadership has been effectively wiped out, shattering their command and control structures. In some places, this may allow for local accommodations and even surrender talks, as the Pakistani Taliban absolutely refused to allow any form of compromise between the Coalition and insurgent fighters. We have successfully created a window of opportunity for the local government and the Coalition to re-establish their authority over the nation.
“However, we have not tackled the underlying conditions that brought the Taliban into existence and gave them so many supporters. Corruption in the government has not been brought under control, tribal issues remain untouched and there is still a growing humanitarian crisis in large parts of the country. In the long run, we may see a resurgence of the Taliban insurgency – or something else, something more local.
“A further problem is that we may have accidentally destabilised the Pakistani Government,” he added. “They had ties to the Taliban, despite our protests, fearful of what would happen after the inevitable American withdrawal. Now, several of those agents are dead and the Pakistani Taliban is unravelling. The government may take advantage of the situation to eradicate the last traces of the insurgency or it may become more inclined to host them, as the geopolitical realities have not changed.”
A Learning Experience Page 14