She swept out and I took the opportunity to leave with her, leaving the reporters alone to write their stories. I knew now that none of them would see publication until Ellen and the Admiral’s horde of Political Officers had gone through them and rewritten them at will, just to conform with their own idea of what had happened. I didn’t want to deal with that, but there was no choice. Whatever happened in the weeks and months to come, the truth would be what the UN said it was…at least as far as the rest of the Human Sphere was concerned.
I shook my head slowly and made my way back to my cabin. It was strange to think that no matter how much I had complained about my cabin being tiny – if better than a shared Ensign’s wardroom – I was still comfortable, warm and well-fed. The Captain didn’t skimp on the food and the gallery staff knew better than to try to palm us off with bad ingredients, even though it was hard to work miracles with reprocessed foodstuffs. The soldiers on the ground would be under constant attack, living in their foxholes and desperately trying to stay alive on a planet that hated them. I remembered old friends of mine who had signed up for the infantry, having failed the exams for entering the UNPF Academy, and wondered what had happened to them. Were they down on the planet, struggling to survive, or were they already dead? We hadn’t been encouraged to write letters to friends and relatives in any of the services. I had no way to know.
I lay down on my bunk, trying to get some sleep, when there was a chime at the hatch. Surprised, I opened it, to see Kitty outside. She winked at me as she stepped inside and closed the hatch behind her. She looked good, as always, even though she was wearing a crumpled uniform. There were no dress uniforms when a battle was expected.
“How are you?” She asked, sitting down beside me on the bunk. I caught a whiff of her scent, something slightly flowery, and felt a tingle passing through me. “How did you cope with today?”
I didn’t want to discuss it, but how could I push her away? “It was…strange,” I admitted. I didn’t want to discuss it at all. “It was beautiful and terrible and frightening and exciting…”
Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly aware of just how female she was. I wasn't a virgin – I’d paid one of my classmates for sex back in Albuquerque, when I’d been fourteen and intensely curious about sex – but I’d never had a real partner. Everyone said, back home, that the guy had to be very firm with the girl, but it struck me as a recipe for having my head kicked in. I felt uncomfortable and hoped – prayed – that she couldn’t sense it. She probably could.
“Yeah,” Kitty said. Her voice softened. “It was that for me too, John, and it doesn’t get much better. But you survived and you’re alive…”
She kissed me, hard. After a moment, I kissed her back.
It was the first time we made love.
Chapter Sixteen
UN Regulations on sexual relations between officers in the Peace Force can be summed up simply. They are only permitted between officers of an equal rank, above Ensign, or crewmen in different chains of command. An Ensign is not expected to have sexual relationships while onboard ship, nor is a Captain permitted to sleep with anyone on his vessel. Naturally, the rules are often flouted and ignored. Provided the affair does not hamper the performance of the starship, most commanding officers will ignore any relationships between his crew.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
It was three weeks before I was allowed to go down to the surface.
I wasn’t too unhappy about it. Officially, the war was proceeding well, with only a handful of casualties and dozens of towns and cities occupied by the infantry. Unofficially, it was far worse. There were hundreds of engagements every day, with dozens of infantry killed in brief brutal encounters…and the natives were ingenious. The Admiral had allowed some air transport to operate after the invasion – mainly first aid and food supplies – and one of the aircraft had been armed with a shipkiller missile, which it fired at Devastator, high overhead. It came within metres of destroying the entire ship and, after that, there were no more aircraft permitted to fly.
The reporters, at first, had demanded to go down to the ground at once, but as rumours filtered through their grapevine – the Admiral’s pet reporters had been allowed down at once – they started to become much less enthusiastic, choosing instead to write and file stories that drew heavily on the official broadcasts from the Admiral’s office. I’d read some of them while taking them to Ellen for the first check and discovered that they bore little relationship to reality. The reporters knew which side their bread was buttered on, all right.
And my relationship with Kitty continued to grow. I don’t know if the Captain knew about it – he certainly never said anything to us – but Anna knew and never lost an off-duty moment to tease us. On-duty, we were strictly professional and pretended we didn’t know each other. I doubt we fooled the Captain, but from what I gathered, he wouldn’t have said anything unless we acted the fool while on duty. I just hoped the reporters didn’t know. I’d heard that two of them had paid female crewmen for the pleasure of their company for a few nights and I didn’t want to remain Frank Wong about Ensign Gomez. They’d probably try to use it as blackmail information.
Devastator remained in continuous operation and it was a rare day when we fired less than a hundred KEW pellets into the planet, targeting areas identified by the infantry on the ground. We were stationed directly over Lazarus, which left part of the planet free of our interference, although the other starships continued to patrol and bombard the other side of the planet if necessary. I began to see why the Captain had been so determined to load all of our holds with KEW pallets. We had barely been in orbit for a week before we had to reload the first set of launchers. It wouldn’t be long before we would have to resupply from the transports, or even leave for the nearest UNPF base. I just hoped that the planet would be more peaceful then, although I rather doubted it. The death toll just continued to rise.
Eventually, it was decided that our reporters would be permitted to set foot on the surface of the planet, along with myself. Anna had spent part of the time in orbit drilling me on calling in strikes from the surface – the Captain firmly believed that the infantry were calling in strikes they didn’t really need, wasting KEWs that couldn’t be replaced quickly – and insisted that I took the equipment with me. She kept calling it shore leave, but I had the feeling that it wouldn’t be anything like shore leave on Earth, and that had been dangerous enough.
I had my first inkling of danger when the shuttle pilot briefed us on safety precautions. “Remain firmly strapped in at all times,” he ordered, tightly. He’d been a confident young man back when I’d boarded Devastator, but he looked to have aged fifty years overnight. Three weeks of flying to and from a hostile planet seemed to have done that to him. The infantry claimed to have seized vast quantities of weapons, but there were still attacks on our shuttles and aircraft with handheld SAMs “If I sound the alert, prepare for heavy manoeuvring.”
It wasn't something designed to reassure the reporters, who were already half-scared to death, but they complied. The first part of the flight down to the surface was uneventful and I rather missed not having a viewport, but that changed when alarm tones rang through the shuttle and we began to lurch from side to side. I heard the reporters screaming at each other, trying to understand what was going on, and for once I was as ignorant as they were. We might have been under attack, or the pilot might have been extracting revenge for their comments about his ‘poky little shuttle.’ There was no way to know, but as the lurching grew stronger, it was all I could do not to vomit. The reporters weren't so lucky.
“What a mess,” the pilot commented, after we landed. The compartment was in a thoroughly disgusting state. “There are showers in the buildings out there, so you can take them to shower and change while the ground crew mops out the shuttle. It won’t be the first time.”
“Thank you,” I said, sourly. An Ensign who threw up in a shuttle would be expect
ed to clean up the mess, but the reporters didn’t even offer to help. They staggered off the shuttle and practically kissed the ground below their feet. “I’ll make a note of your services and commend you to the Captain.”
Heinlein’s main spaceport looked like hell. The smell hit me as soon as I stepped out of the shuttle, a faint mixture of burning and decaying bodies. The landing field was as packed as the field on Terra Nova, but here there was a tense air that seemed to defy understanding, at first. I heard a distant popping sound and, a moment later, explosions echoed out along the fence. A trio of massive guns positioned at one corner of the airfield swung around automatically and returned fire. A moment later, a flight of attack helicopters followed the gunfire, hunting for targets on the ground.
The buildings around the landing field looked devastated. I remembered with a tinge of guilt how we had blasted them from orbit, clearing the way for the infantry to seize the spaceport; down on the ground, it must have been a nightmare. We stumbled past a line of burned out vehicles, being moved back to the spaceport in accordance with various UN regulations, trying not to breathe in the smell. I doubted that Heinlein had always stunk of rotting bodies. Hadn’t the infantry bothered to dig mass graves and bury them?
“This way,” a headquarters soldier called. I knew he was a headquarters soldier because, as the Master Sergeant had taught me, his uniform was absolutely perfect, despite being in the middle of a war zone. I found myself disliking him on sight. “You can get your showers here and then fresh outfits.”
The shower felt like heaven and I managed to ignore some of the comments from the female reporters – and the rather more disturbing ones from one of the male reporters. Kitty had said that I had a nice ass, but really! I almost felt human again when I donned a new outfit, but that rapidly changed when I realised how much body armour I was being given to wear. The streets were evidently not as safe as the UN had promised. The reporters, for once, weren't blind to the implications either. They protested until the headquarters staff officer informed them that they’d be travelling in the midst of a heavily armed convoy, something that didn’t reassure me in the slightest. I’d been in a heavily armed convoy back on Terra Nova.
This time, to be fair, it was a little better organised. The reporters went into a security truck that was so heavily armoured that I doubted that even a KEW could break it. I went into a different truck, which would at least allow me to take a look at the city as we passed through. As the truck rumbled to life, I heard more explosions in the distance. The insurgents were keeping up the pressure at all times. They also had time on their side. We had to haul all our weapons from Earth or one of the other fleet bases. Their sources of supply were right here on Heinlein.
The countryside was surprisingly neat, but it was marred by the destroyed towns and villages we passed, places where the defenders had tried to use as strongpoints. Eventually, they’d been bombed or blown out of them, leaving a blackened set of ruins on the countryside and thousands more civilians dead. A handful of men and women were wandering through the rubble, looking for survivors perhaps, and some of our escort unleashed a few rounds in their direction. I felt another rising gorge of vomit as a woman, who couldn’t have been older than me, fell to the ground with a hole in her head. I wanted to grab the weapon and shoot the infantryman, but what would have been the point? There were thousands upon thousands where he came from.
“There’s the city,” one of my escorts said. “Get ready to duck if you insist on watching.”
Lazarus was a city? My first impression was that it was a large town. I’d only seen two cities on Earth – I’d gone to Houston for a brief visit to relatives once, back before my father lost his job permanently – and both of them had sprawled out for miles, crammed to bursting with citizens who had no job, no life, and no hope. Lazarus looked like a dream come true; it was comfortable, surprisingly pretty and very open. If it hadn’t been for the handful of blackened buildings and the presence of thousands of UN infantry, it would have been a paradise.
The entire city seemed to be teeming with infantry marching the streets. They didn’t have the same presence as the Marines, but they seemed, instead, to be almost terrified. I saw them watching a pair of girls across the street – wearing outfits that would have been an invitation to rape back on Earth – as if they were scared of the girls. It was uncanny. There wasn't even a wolf whistle. The girls, for their part, completely ignored the soldiers, who looked glad to be ignored.
It changed as we drove into the heart of the city. Here, there were more damaged buildings and soldiers…and prisoners. Hundreds of men and women sat on the grounds, their hands firmly cuffed behind their backs, watched by a handful of heavily-armed soldiers. A pile of guns, larger than any I’d seen in my entire career, had been dumped in one corner of the yard. The prisoners gazed at the infantrymen, their eyes promising bloody vengeance, one day.
“Arrested for possessing illegal weapons,” my escort commented. “We’ve arrested men and women with enough weapons to fight a small civil war on their own.”
I stared. “What’s going to happen to them?”
“The detention camps, probably,” he said. “They’re…just bursting at the seams already. Everyone on this damned planet has guns.” We stopped in the middle of a large courtyard. “Here we are, son; hop off.”
The soldiers on the inner gate, at least, were very alert. They checked my identification carefully and then did the same for the reporters, some of whom protested at the imposition. They were ignored. No one, it seemed, was taking chances. Judging by the sullen resentment of the prisoners and the damage the town – no, city, I kept reminding myself – had taken, it was probably fully justified. A team of staff officers arrived and took charge of the reporters and I found myself alone…
“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called. “What are you doing here, you stupid bastard?”
I turned to see Roger. “An armed escort and two military policemen,” I joked. It was the old Academy definition of a patriotic volunteer. I hadn’t realised, until now, just why we had been taught to believe that. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I ended up taking down the Admiral’s zoo of reporters,” Roger said. I winced in sympathy. “Fancy a drink?”
There might have been a war on, but the headquarters staff hadn’t wasted time in seeing to their comforts. There were several large canteens, two bars and a brothel. The latter, I noted, was unmanned. Roger explained that the staff officers had found several women willing to work in them for the first week, and then the women had managed to poison the visitors, somehow.
“They probably did us a favour,” he added, with a hint of his old smile. “The sooner we start fighting this war properly, the better.”
I stared at him over my lemonade. Alcoholic drinks were strictly forbidden on duty and even through my charges had gone off to be lied to – or told the official version of what was going on, which was more or less the same thing – I was still on duty. Roger had ordered a exotic cocktail that looked as if it could glow in the dark, but he hadn’t drunk enough to make him drunk, had he?
“Roger,” I said, slowly, “look what we’ve done to their planet?”
“So?” He asked, taking another sip. I couldn’t believe it. What had happened to the carefree boy I remembered from the Academy, or the first starship we’d served on together? “The war has to be won, John. If they’d decided to be reasonable about it…”
“Why are we even here?” I asked. The wave of guilt bubbled out of my mind. “Heinlein wasn't a threat to us, was it?”
“Oh yes it was,” Roger said. He seemed to hesitate for a long moment. “Look, John, you’re a friend, so I’m going to give you a word of advice. If you’re having doubts, keep your mouth shut about them. It’s not healthy to shoot your mouth off here.”
“Why?” I demanded. “What’s happened to you?”
“I grew up,” Roger admitted. He sighed. “Look…you know about my family, ri
ght? Part of the Establishment, control several seats on the UN General Assembly, have interests in most of the industrial concerns…”
I nodded. Roger had never made an issue of it before. He could have been effectively running the Academy with a few words in the right ears, but instead he’d earned his Ensign’s bars the hard way. We’d all respected him for that, even though we had also envied him his position. He would rise far higher than any of us. I couldn’t believe the change that had come over him.
“The Admiral is…well, call him my Uncle,” Roger said. “He chose me specifically for the post on his ship, even promised me a bump-up to First Lieutenant as soon as it could be done…and he talks to me. There’s so much I didn’t know back at the Academy, but the Admiral…he knows it all.”
He paused. “You must have seen Heinlein’s asteroid mining operation and the orbital industries?” He asked. I nodded. I’d seen them on the display as Devastator had passed them to take up position to bombard the planet. “I’ve seen the reports on them. Heinlein, with a smaller industry, was actually on the verge of matching – even exceeding – the entire production levels of Earth.”
“Impossible,” I said. Earth – the solar system – was the most heavily industrialised location in known space. The factories on Earth, Luna, Mars, Jupiter’s moons and hundreds upon hundreds of asteroids…how could Heinlein hope to match and exceed them in barely two hundred years? “Roger…”
Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason Page 16