“I’m not working for either of them,” I said, patiently. I hadn’t expected outright disbelief. “Sally, just how badly have I just compromised myself?”
“Son of a fucking bitch,” Sally said. “You are serious!”
“Yes,” I said, flatly. “I can’t promise you revenge for everything you’ve suffered, but I can promise you that it won’t happen to anyone else, if we strike when the time is right! Do you think that you would remain an Ensign in a properly-run fleet? How would you like a chance to realise your ambitions and rise to your proper heights?”
I held her tightly. “You didn’t deserve any of what happened to you,” I said. “Do you remember the hopes and dreams we had at the Academy? We can make them real?”
“I wish,” Sally said. Her voice became doubtful, pleading, and my heart went out to her. “I’ll help, John, but how far can we get?”
I winked at her. “As far as we need to go,” I said, and kissed her. I was breaking regulations, but I didn’t care. Besides, it would help convince her that I was telling the truth. “We can go as far as we want.”
After a moment, she kissed me back.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
One of the fundamental problems facing the UN was the degree to which its decisions were influenced by irrelevant political factors. Some of them were ludicrous – including laws prohibiting the ‘pollution’ of outer space and the attempt to prevent the terraforming of Mars, which were passed to please the environmentalist factions in the UN – and some were downright ridiculous. Having decided that condemned prisoners could not be executed, and having decided not to face the political unrest caused by releasing said dangerous prisoners, the UN decided to exile them all to Botany, a world that – after the intervention of the environmentalist lobby – was barely habitable. The UN lost its scruples soon afterwards, but by then exiling convicts was policy, not to be altered by mere mortals.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
Botany, I discovered one night in my cabin, was perhaps the only world where the files I obtained from Heinlein and the information available to me from the UNPF computer files largely agreed. Heinlein itself was a democracy with an earned franchise, or a military-run state, depending on whom you believed, but Botany…well, the files agreed on all of the major points and most of the minor issues. The only real difference lay in the politics, and that was no surprise.
“Emergence complete,” the Pilot said, as the wormhole closed behind us.
“Local space appears to be clear, sir,” I said, from the tactical console. I’d hoped that the Ensigns would be allowed to handle the emergence from the wormhole into normal space, but the Captain had discontinued that practice as raider attacks increased, even though statistically it was unlikely we would be attacked right out of the wormhole. It was regrettable. We could have used it as a prize for the most innovative Ensign. I’d had them solving puzzles all week. “No sign of any intruders.”
“Good,” the Captain said, from his command chair. “Pilot, take us towards the planet.”
“Aye, sir,” the Pilot said. The hum of the ship’s drive increased as the Pilot powered it up and took us towards the planet. “We will reach standard orbit in thirty minutes, sir.”
I smiled as the image of local space started to fill up. Botany simply wasn't a very interesting system. It had three rocky planets, one gas giant and a handful of comets. The gas giant might be suitable for mining, later, but so far no one had bothered to invest in a cloud-scoop. In theory, one day Botany itself would develop a space industry that would need fuel from the gas giant, but I wasn't holding my breath. The files from both Earth and Heinlein agreed that any civilisation forming on Botany would be a long time coming. The only other sign of space-based activity was the station orbiting the planet and a handful of satellites in high orbit. It seemed rather insecure, but then, Botany had had little to loot – until now.
The files had agreed that Botany had originally been rated as a seventy-percent planet, a planet that had been suitable for quick and easy terraforming into an Earth-like world. I’d been surprised that they had even considered it, but back then no one had known for sure how many planets there were out there to be colonised, or how many of them were like Earth. The settlement rights had been bought by an Australian-based investment group – it had taken me several days to work out what an Australian had been; Australia was now part of the Pan-Asian Zone – and they’d started terraforming the planet. They’d been well on the way to establishing a habitable world when disaster had stuck.
At this point, the files diverged. The UNPF files referred only to mild sabotage by socially misguided rebels with a cause, a description that could have fitted the Heinlein Resistance, along with all the other resistance groups. The Heinlein files waxed lyrical about environmentally-friendly terrorists who had seen the terraforming effort as an assault on nature itself and had somehow managed to sabotage the program. Two years later, the planet was barely habitable, but swept with massive dust storms and other problems that made building a sustaining civilisation very difficult. The Australians had tried to fix the problem, breeding up newer forms of plant life in the hope it would stabilise the planet, but nothing seemed to work. The UN eventually took over the planet and most of the Australian settlers moved to Oz, which at least had the benefit of not being a dusty hellhole.
“Lieutenant Walker,” the Captain ordered, “confirm with the Infantry that they are ready to head down to the planet.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I turned the console over to Lieutenant Hafiz and left the bridge. The infantry weren't looking forward to their new posting, from their Captain to the lowest soldier. Andrew himself had been sleeping with two female crewmen, according to rumour, just to try to forgot the hellhole waiting for his men. They’d done their jobs too well and had been exiled from Earth. I wished – now – that I’d dared discuss revolution with him. The risk hadn’t been worth taking.
The UN had rapidly decided that Botany was a useless world. Although the atmosphere was breathable – and some of the more optimistic projections suggested that it might even settle down and become habitable in a few hundred years – no one in their right mind would want to live there. It had experimented with moving some of the remaining human tribes from the desert regions of Earth there, but it had been pointless. No one knew what had happened to them.
And then someone had had a brainwave. The UN had been taking over law and order on Earth for years, but it was causing them problems, because the UN’s ideology made it bad at handling law and order. Back then, back when it had had to care what people thought, it had a bad reputation for coddling criminals and not executing them, no matter how bad they were. The unnamed beauecrats – only a group of beauecrats could come up with something so stupid – had suggested exiling them to Botany instead. If they lived or died there – and both were possible as the planet couldn’t support large settlements – they wouldn’t be the UN’s problem any longer. The idea was taken up at once and several thousand criminals were dumped on the planet, the very dregs of society. Serial killers, mass murderers, paedophiles, religious fanatics and – inevitably – a growing percentage of people who had offended the UN in some way. There was no shortage of them.
I stepped into the shuttlebay and looked at the infantrymen as they formed up into ranks. They were wearing desert uniforms, specially adapted to Botany, and looked very professional, except for their faces. They looked, male and female alike, looked as if they were being sent to their own execution after a show trial. Andrew was inspecting them, one by one, and making reassuring comments, but his heart wasn't in it. He knew, as well as they did, that most of them would not survive to be picked up in five years – if the UN bothered to send a transport to pick them up.
“I understand that you’ll be coming with us to pay your respects to the governor,” he said, once he’d finished the inspection and allowed the Sergeants to take over. “Are
you going to be flying the shuttles personally?”
“I think that’s going to be done by their pilots,” I said, regretfully. I would have loved to fly myself, or given the task to some of the Ensigns as a reward for good behaviour, but Botany’s weather made flying dangerous. I understood that the UN’s engineers had tried to set up a space cable several times and discovered that the cable broke under heavy winds. “Are your men ready?”
“We’re going to be going armed, with loaded weapons,” Andrew said. He was probably expecting me to object – loaded weapons onboard shuttles into anything, but a war zone, were strictly prohibited – but I didn’t bother. I knew enough about Botany to be grateful for the precaution. “We have to load, but then we’ll be ready.”
“Good,” I said, checking the time. In five minutes, we would be orbiting the planet and the Captain didn’t want to stay very long. I couldn’t blame him. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone to pay his respects, but Botany was hardly a normal posting. “Shall we proceed?”
The first cargo of convicts had either killed each other or had been killed by the environment, as very few of them had survived to see the second group arrive, but the UN hadn’t been concerned. They’d just kept pouring more prisoners onto the planet, sometimes near the first group of prisoners, sometimes at the other side of the world, just to see what would happen. The convicts hadn’t been given much in the way of medical equipment, or even survival tools, but they’d discovered through experimentation that they could eat some – not all – of the planet’s vegetation. There were even oasis-like places where they could dig down for water. The smart and brutal ones had formed tribes, snatched as many female convicts as they could – the UN had ruled that convicts had to be dropped in equal numbers of males and females – and set up a social system that worked, barely. The tribes moved from oasis to oasis, hiding from the storms under woven tents and trying to eke out an existence under horrific circumstances. The truly horrifying part was that the UN hadn’t even bothered to sterilise the prisoners, which meant that children were being born on that hellhole, knowing nothing else. The tribes hadn’t forgotten their origins, but as time wore on, they grew better at wiping out the newer arrivals, or breaking them into the tribe. It was a thoroughly hellish existence.
The UN hadn’t cared. They set up a small garrison on the planet’s surface, which was staffed by officers and men who had offended someone in some way, but they hadn’t attempted to help the locals. It was questionable how many of the locals even knew of its existence. There might have been a handful of tribes orbiting the garrison, but there was little interaction between them, apart from a tiny amount of trade. The garrison staff were quite happy to trade food and supplies for women and as for the women, living in the garrison, even as a slave or a whore, was preferable to living out in the endless desert.
And then everything had changed. For reasons best known to itself, the UN had ordered a re-examination of every piece of survey data from barely habitable worlds, insisting that they be studied through new eyes. One bright-eyed researcher had spotted that Botany not only had vast amounts of silicon – something that could be found on hundreds of worlds, including Earth – but hints of something else, rare elements that were normally found in the asteroids. The UN had leapt at the chance to obtain a new source of supply and promptly sent in a mining team to extract as much as they could. One thing the UN had right – the amount they ruled on, I had to like those odds – was that planet-size mining was inefficient. The miners could only produce small amounts of ore, but it didn’t matter. The UN needed as much as it could get. The locals had objected to this despoiling of their home and low-level war broke out. The UN had finally realised that this might be a problem and dispatched Andrew and his Company to Botany to suppress the enemy. It wasn't going to be an easy task.
“Ready,” Andrew’s sergeant reported. “All present and correct, sir!”
Andrew raised his voice, pointing to the first shuttle. “Platoons A to D, load up,” he barked. He switched to the second shuttle. “Platoons E to G, load up!”
I’d seen Infantrymen on Heinlein moving as a disorganised mob. This unit moved with an easy grace and confidence that belied their destination, or what their superiors generally thought of them. They carried their assault rifles slung over their shoulders in a ready position, where they could grasp them at once if they were required. If the shuttle crashed somewhere on the planet, they should have enough firepower to cut through the tribesmen and escape, unless the tribesmen had similar weapons. The UN had apparently refused to give them anything beyond a handful of knives, but the files had been vague on just what they had. Andrew had assumed the worst and armed his men to the teeth.
I keyed my terminal. “Captain, this is Lieutenant Walker,” I said. “The shuttles are fully loaded and we’re ready to depart.”
“Understood,” the Captain said. I could hear the Pilot’s weather report in the background and rather wished I couldn’t. It didn’t sound good. “You may depart when ready.”
I boarded the shuttle, Andrew right behind me, and made a quick check of the men. They were all buckled in and waiting impatiently to depart, much to my quiet amusement. The Infantrymen on Heinlein had often neglected the simplest precaution and had to be babied through everything. I took the seat next to the pilot and watched him running through the pre-flight checks, taking special care with our transponder equipment. There was no one here to listen in on our conversation and, if something happened, we’d need the signal to arrange rescue. The Captain would find a way to rescue us, I was sure.
The shuttle’s drive spun up and we started to glide towards space. “Departing now,” the shuttle pilot said. “All systems functioning normally.”
I stared as we dropped into open space. All of the worlds I’d seen, from Earth to Heinlein and Terra Nova, had been a mixture of blue-green. Botany was a dull reddish-orange colour, like a desert seen from space. There was no sign of any surface water as far as I could see, although apparently there were times when it bubbled to the surface in places. The Australians had introduced water into the planet by dropping a pair of comets into the atmosphere, but most of it had apparently drained into massive underground caverns, rather than remaining on the surface. The garrison drilled a line deep underground to obtain fresh water for itself, but apparently the tribes lacked the ability to do that. It kept them permanently nomadic. The miners probably tapped into the same underground reservoir.
“Ghastly looking place,” Andrew commented. “Do you know that there are people who believe that Earth will end up looking like this one day?”
I stared at him. “No,” I said, in surprise. It seemed impossible. “Why do they think that?”
He smiled, darkly. “The atmosphere is growing more and more polluted,” he said. “This kills the vegetable life, which makes it harder to replenish the oxygen and even causes humans to develop illnesses. The icecaps are melting which pushes salt water further inland, killing more farmland. Worst of all, the corporations that have paid the UN vast bribes to avoid the environmental regulations have been having disasters as their overworked equipment starts to break down. The entire planet is dying and we killed it.”
I said nothing. I’d heard that there were problems, but nothing on such a scale. I wasn't even sure if anything could be done about it. The regulations already existed, but if they were being avoided on such a scale…how could anything be done about it? I wondered, vaguely, if the Captain’s family knew, if they were trying to do something about it, but there was no way to know. It was taboo even to suggest that something might be wrong on Earth.
The shuttle buckled slightly as it fell into the atmosphere, streams of superheated air surrounding it as it raced down towards the ground. I could see the mighty storms making their way across the desert, giant darker patches of moving sand that overwhelmed anything puny humans could do to counter them. The files had suggested, from the reports of a handful of anthropologists who�
�d gone among the tribesmen, that they’d started to worship their planet. It was no wonder. A sandstorm on the wrong place would be utterly lethal.
“I’ve got the garrison’s beacon now,” the pilot said, from his position. “We should be landing at the landing pad in thirty minutes,”
I leaned forward as the shuttle shook under the impact of a gust of wind. If I’d been out there without any protection at all, it would have sent me flying through the air, perhaps even killed me. A moment later, we broke through into clear air again and we could see the mining camp below us. It was an ugly mixture of glinting buildings and dust, flying into the air from the open mine. I suspected that the locals would regard it as blasphemy. What else could it be on a living planet?
“There’s the garrison,” the pilot added. “We’ve coming into land now.”
“It doesn’t look very secure,” I commented, as the buildings came into view. “Andrew?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Andrew agreed, slowly. “They told me that they used weather-control equipment to try to keep the dust storms away from the mines, but it only worked half the time, if that.”
Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason Page 28