“Hail them,” I ordered. “Tell them to heave to and prepare to be boarded.”
“Done,” Alice said. The freighter’s drive seemed to increase in power. “There is no response.”
I stared. The freighter was trying to outrun us. They didn’t have a hope…unless they managed to reach a safe distance from the planet’s gravity well, where they could open a wormhole and vanish. I ran through the calculations quickly. If they managed to stay ahead of us for three more minutes, they could wormhole out and we’d never see them again. What the hell were they carrying that was so important?
“It must be illegal weapons,” Alice murmured. “What else could it be?”
I wanted the Captain to give me orders, but even if I called the Jacques Delors directly and asked for orders, the Captain would tell me that I was in command. He’d given me the responsibility and I couldn’t shirk it. It would have been easy to hesitate long enough to let the freighter go, but I remembered the battle on Terra Nova and shuddered. I wasn’t going to let more illegal weapons loose if I could help it.
“Pursuit course,” I said, engaging the drive. The shuttle leapt forward as if it had been stung by a bee. Under such orders, I could ignore most safety regulations and I took a hellish delight in skimming closer to another freighter. “Alice, charge weapons; prepare to engage.”
“Aye, sir,” Alice said. I was astonished that there was no sarcasm in her tone. She seemed confident that I could handle the task without prodding. “Lasers ready, sir; shields deployed.”
I nodded. On the face of it, we were engaging a behemoth, but the freighter couldn’t hope to outrun us, or even destroy us if we were careful. I looked down at the manifest from System Command and frowned. It didn’t list any weapons at all, but that proved nothing.
“Transmit a sterner warning,” I ordered, still puzzled. They might escape, but not without us taking a bite out of them. Maybe I was being foolish, but I wasn’t going to allow them to escape so easily, whatever they were smuggling. “Tell them to stand down their drives at once or we open fire.”
“Signal sent,” Alice said. There was a long pause. I was starting to wonder if I would have to fire into the vessel, or perhaps try to force-board them, before the drive field flickered out of existence. “They’re standing down their drives now.”
“I don’t understand,” I muttered, wishing – again – that I could consult the Captain. I tapped a key, sending a full data download to the Jacques Delors, but the Captain probably wouldn’t issue any different orders. The ball was still in my court. “Prepare to dock.”
The mystery was solved the moment we stepped onboard the small freighter, weapons ready. The Captain was surrounded by a group of unregistered men, their faces tired and desperate, pleading for mercy. I didn’t understand until we took their biometrics and compared them to System Command’s download; they were all listed as wanted criminals. Somehow, the Captain had managed to move over two hundred criminals onto his ship to transport them out of the system. I sent a signal to System Command, asking for reinforcements and a crew for the ship, and then searched the remainder of the vessel. We found several women and children, hidden away in various sealed compartments, but none of them were on the wanted list. I wondered if they were kidnap victims, but they seemed unhappy to see us. One attractive blonde even tried to kick a Marine in the groin.
Once the reinforcements had arrived and formally arrested the criminals, who offered no resistance, we returned to the Jacques Delors and I made a full report. The Captain listened quietly, without interrupting, but he wasn't pleased. I could tell that he wasn't pleased, even though he seemed unconcerned and even gave me a note of commendation for my file. There was just…a slow anger burning away in his eyes…
And I honestly didn’t understand why. What had I done?
Chapter Seven
Officially, the UN is a representative democracy, with everyone having a vote. In practice, it is run by a ‘political class’ and controlled by literally millions of bureaucrats. Although there is a certain pretence of elections and democracy, the senior personages are always from the same class and outside candidates are defeated by a complicated political selection process. Any political party must have the approval of the UN General Assembly to operate…and, naturally, no party is granted this approval without being firmly wedded to the status quo. The system is, quite simply, beyond reform. It is worth noting that of the last seven Secretary-Generals, three of them attempted to reform the bureaucracy…and ended up dying under mysterious circumstances.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
“I thought I’d find you here,” the Senior Chief said. “How are you feeling?”
I shrugged. I had been sitting in the observation blister for the last twenty minutes, watching the stars. We didn’t get much free time on the starship – that was for leave, or so Lieutenant Hatchet had informed us – but what little we had, I tended to spend in the blister. There was just something about looking at the unblinking stars that put the entire universe in perspective.
“Lousy,” I growled finally, too tired to care about how I spoke to him. “What did I do wrong?”
If the Senior Chief was offended by my tone, he didn’t show it. “What makes you think you did something wrong?”
“The Captain wasn't happy with me,” I said. I felt as if I had failed him, but I couldn’t understand how, or why. “What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing,” the Senior Chief said. He came fully into the blister and closed the hatch behind him with an audible thump. “You did nothing wrong, John. That’s the problem. You followed orders and regulations to the letter.”
I had the odd feeling that I was being mocked. “And yet…why was the Captain unhappy with me?” I demanded. “Tell me!”
The Senior Chief smiled. “That might take some time to explain,” he said, seriously. “Tell me something. When you and your fellow Ensigns came onboard this ship, were you prepared for the experience?”
I remembered our disgraceful showing with a wince. “No,” I admitted. In hindsight, we’d all been foolish. We should definitely have been on time, wearing proper dress uniforms. “We were a disgrace.”
“How true,” the Senior Chief agreed. “Even after you looked the part, were you actually ready to play the part? Were you really qualified to be Ensigns?”
“No,” I admitted. We’d been badly ill-prepared for the position. I hadn’t known how ignorant we actually were until we found ourselves struggling to survive our first cruise. There were some Ensigns, according to Lieutenant Hatchet, who never managed to make it that far and ended up killing themselves through a simple mistake.
“No,” the Senior Chief agreed. “Tell me something. Do you know why you weren’t prepared?”
I hesitated. “No,” I admitted finally. “The Academy never prepared us for the role.”
“Oh, it taught you a lot, but it didn’t always teach you the right things,” the Senior Chief said. He seemed to be dancing around the question, but I controlled my frustration. The answers would come in time. “Tell me something else. How well did you do at school?”
“Pretty well,” I said, stung. “I got good grades...”
“Yes, I suppose you did,” the Senior Chief agreed. “Tell me one final thing. How many of your classmates got good grades?”
The moment of realisation hit me like a hammer. “Son of a bitch!”
“Quite,” the Senior Chief agreed. “Everyone got good grades. Everyone got good prizes and rewards for their work, regardless of how much, or how little, they were actually worth. The teachers taught you your rights, but not your responsibilities…and not what you needed to actually get a good job. You were taught nothing about science, or technology, or politics, sometimes through oversight and sometimes through deliberate planning.
“And, of course, there was no discipline.”
I shuddered, remembering the first weeks at school. The te
achers taught and had nothing to do with us otherwise. The children ran the school and formed gangs that waged war on each other, or the teachers. Some used drugs and became criminals very quickly, others drunk themselves to death or killed themselves, just to escape the nightmare. I might have been one of them if my life had been different, one of millions of semi-illiterate thugs roaming the city, terrorising the civilians. If I hadn’t made it into the Academy, it would have been a dead-end job or a life on permanent welfare, or maybe even the infantry.
And that had been one of the good schools.
“You have never been under real discipline until you boarded this ship,” the Senior Chief said. “The experts say that giving a child proper discipline hampers their development. The experts say that encouraging competition only fosters resentments and bitter hatreds. The experts say that penalising children for their own failures is unfair. The experts say…”
He broke off. “Tell me something,” he said, again. “If I told you to repair the Jump Drive, could you do it?”
“No,” I said, flatly. I was starting to have an idea of where this was going. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“Nor would I,” the Senior Chief admitted. “The Engineer could, I suspect, attempt it if there was no other choice. His assignment here suggests that he couldn’t do it. If he were one of the few people who really understood the Jump Drive, he’d be on Mars or Titan, working on research. Could you build a helicopter? Could you build a Marine Assault Rifle? A shuttle? A computer? Could you even tell me how one works?”
“No,” I said, reluctantly. “But why…?”
“Bear with me a moment,” the Senior Chief said. “The Education System down on Earth is designed to promote equality. It succeeds admirably...in spreading an equality of ignorance. For every man who understands how something works, there are a million people who might as well be peasants, sleepwalking through an age of wonder with their eyes screwed closed, never taught to understand the world around them. The reason Earth’s cities are decaying is because there are too few people who understand the problem and are working to fix them. You were one of the lucky ones.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Your friend Muna came from an area where women are kept under strict religious law, despite the UN’s high-minded rhetoric, because those self-same experts have convinced the UN that intervening to prevent human rights from being violated is a human rights breach in itself,” he said. “How lucky she was to have even a hope of escaping! How lucky she was that she found a UN officer who actually saw to it that she was sent to Luna Base and the Academy there! How lucky she was that the UN didn’t send her back the moment one of the bastards who claimed to own her complained about his rights being violated!”
I was genuinely shocked. “But the Bill of Human Rights…”
“Ink on paper,” the Senior Chief snapped. “You must have realised by now that the UN’s version of events has some holes in it. You’d be better off assuming that everything in the files is a lie and working from there.”
I stared at him, and then looked back at the stars. I hadn’t known that it was that bad in other parts of the world. I had just wanted to escape the slum that had been waiting for me since I had been born. If I had known…what could I have done? The Senior Chief was right. Helplessness had been bred into us from Day One.
“The result of their system is that inquiring minds are generally squashed quickly,” the Senior Chief said. “The really smart people left and emigrated to the colonies centuries ago, back before the UN clamped down on emigration. The ones who were left were so few in number that any advance was mainly a matter of luck, rather than judgement. They are rarer than gold, and yet the UN works them to death, because there are too few of them to waste. There are billions of people on welfare to be fed, somehow.”
He looked over at me. “The UN tried to square this circle by decreeing that the colonies would supply manpower to Earth to help fix the problems they had caused,” he added. “They don’t want brute force manpower – they have plenty of that in people like you – but scientists and theorists who might be able to make the next breakthrough that will prevent Earth from starving. The UN garrison here put out an order for two hundred qualified people to report to the spaceport for shipping to Earth. They decided they wanted to escape…”
I understood. “Until I caught them,” I said, shaking my head. It all came crashing down suddenly. “What did I do?”
“Oh, nothing much,” the Senior Chief said. “You merely condemned two hundred people unlucky enough to be smart and trained to use those smarts to a lifetime working to reform a system that is well past reform. Congratulations, John. You’ve ruined hundreds of lives.”
He couldn’t have hurt me worse if he’d punched me in the nose. “I didn’t mean to do it,” I protested. “I was only following orders…”
The Senior Chief snorted. “Do you think that that makes any difference?”
His voice softened. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be onboard this ship,” he explained. “There are far worse ships, commanded by UN zealots, who can get away with anything. This ship is the best ship in the fleet and don’t you forget it. The Captain won’t hold you responsible for your little fuck-up. You were only following orders.”
I felt my temper flare. “Why was he so angry with me, then?”
“Because the Captain might have known what was going on and chose to turn a blind eye,” the Senior Chief explained. “The System Command sent him the intercept request first and he turned it down on a point of order. They then sent it to you and made you carry out the interception. You didn’t know it, but they were placing you in a really bad position. Luckily…the refugees didn’t open fire.”
He smiled thinly. “Tell me something,” he added. “Do you think that two hundred, or two thousand, or even two hundred thousand people would make any difference to Earth?”
“No,” I said, remembering irregular power supplies and the tainted, odd-tasting water, that we’d been forced to drink. Entire districts had been blacked out for weeks on end. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“No, you didn’t,” the Senior Chief said. He hesitated. “The Captain knew it as well, hence his willingness to let them go. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I think you need to know. You were damned whatever happened, but you’re going to get a commendation and probably a promotion to Lieutenant when we return to Earth. You’re a hero! You stopped the colonies from hoarding some of their knowledge capital instead of sharing it out equally.”
“I don’t feel like a hero,” I said, numbly. “I feel like a bastard.”
“So you should,” the Senior Chief said. “Did you ever think to wonder why the Captain was given you Ensigns specifically?”
“Us?” I asked. “I just thought we’d been assigned to the ship as normal.”
“Normally, one to three Academy graduates would join a pair of Ensigns who had already served on the ship and had seniority,” the Senior Chief said. “The Captain was given seven totally green Ensigns because his enemies wanted to embarrass him and perhaps cost him his command. You see, the Captain obtained his post through political connections and then let the side down a bit by actually being good at his job. There are ships where the Captain is a frightened man, scared of his own crew, and ships that are run by tyrants. On this ship…raw Ensigns become men.”
He looked down at his hands for a moment. “There’s a power struggle going on back home,” he said. “One side wants to try to come to terms with the colonies and reform the system from within. The other side wants to fight it out till the bitter end. The Captain was supposed to be a member of the latter faction, but effectively changed his allegiance. They can’t get rid of him without looking like idiots, but they’ll be watching and waiting for a chance to stick a knife in his back. There are times when I wonder if he’s going to go rogue, but he’s got too much of a sense of duty to accept that.”
“I’m sorr
y,” I said, helplessly. “I didn’t know.”
“No, you didn’t,” the Senior Chief said. There was no condemnation in his voice. “You couldn’t know what they were doing, or why. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I’ll refuse the promotion,” I said, suddenly. “I’ll stay here and…”
“No, you won’t,” the Senior Chief said. “You’ll accept the promotion and the probable transfer. This ship has a full complement of Lieutenants, so you’ll end up being transferred, and you’ll go there and remember what I told you. It’ll serve you well in later life.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s the point?”
“Earth is on the end of a very long supply line,” the Senior Chief said. “It cannot feed itself for very long. When the system finally falls apart, we’ll still be here. The galaxy needs us.”
“As what?” I demanded. I was too angry to care any longer. “Kidnappers and thieves?”
Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason Page 7