The MAD dynamic continued to hold power when the UN went to war against the colonies, some of which had their own nukes, or the ability to produce them. It rapidly became clear that nukes could be used against UN forces on the ground, but that it would provoke immediate retaliation against the civilian population of the colony world. This was not particularly welcome in some sections of the UN – they needed the colonies and their population to mend their economy – but it was accepted, on the grounds that nukes would make it impossible to hold down the colonies. The moral issues surrounding the use of nuclear weapons were ignored.
This assumed a degree of willingness on the part of the colonists to abide by the UN’s rule. In the later stages of the war, this willingness was severely tested. The UN itself was considering the use of WMD.
Part IV: Captain
Chapter Thirty-Four
Computer programmers talk in terms of GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. The reasoning is simple enough. If a computer – which is not capable of independent judgement – is programmed to believe that black is white, it will believe that black is white. This also applies to life support systems on starships, which is why they are heavily monitored by the crew and secondary systems. A starship’s computer, convinced that oxygen was poison to humans, would quite happily kill the entire crew.
Something of the same can be said for political indoctrination. If a child is taught that the UN is the finest system in the known universe from birth, they will find it hard to understand that it is nothing of the kind. They will be ready to believe anything of the UN’s enemies and to cast them as darkest villains. It should come as no surprise that political officers all have a certain inflexibility of mind when they start their careers, and few succeed in overcoming it. Those who do will often end up being arrested by their fellows, if they are unwise enough to share their doubts with anyone.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
Devastator felt much as I remembered, I decided, as Lieutenant Anna Ossipavo escorted us to the conference room. The monitor was largely unchanged. I was surprised that Anna had remained onboard as a Lieutenant, but apparently Captain Shalenko had requested that she continue to serve him. I understood why now. A good First Lieutenant was rarer than gold. Muna was shaping up well. I only hoped that I had served Captain Harriman half as well.
The conference room was bigger than I remembered, although as a Junior Lieutenant I hadn’t had much opportunity to spend time in it. It held a table, a large display screen and a handful of chairs, three of which were occupied. I recognised Captain Shalenko and his Political Officer, but the third man was unknown to me. He was a grey man in a grey suit, without any insignia at all. I guessed that that meant that he was either important or someone pretending to be important.
Captain Shalenko rose to his feet as I entered and I realised, for the first time, that he was wearing a Commodore’s rank bars. I saluted him at once, which he brushed aside and shook my hand firmly. He looked older than I remembered, with more grey hair and a longer beard, but his grip was still strong.
“Welcome onboard, Commodore,” he said, with a faint grin. I understood. I might have been a fellow Captain now, but I could never be addressed as Captain onboard his ship. Even so, he was apparently a Commodore…and a Captain as well. “Congratulations on the promotion, John, even if it did come at a cost.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, slightly puzzled. If he were a Commodore, how could he be a Captain as well? “I understand that congratulations are in order for you as well, sir.”
“Maybe so,” Shalenko agreed. He tapped his bars thoughtfully. “They agreed to bump Anna up to Captain pro tem, but I don’t know if these will be permanent yet.” He looked up as two more men entered the conference room. “Ah, Captain Hardwick.”
Captain Hardwick was a man whose expression just dared me to make a joke about his name. He looked more like a Marine than a starship commanding officer, but there was no mistaking the Captain’s rank bars he wore, or the name of his ship on his lapel. George Robertson wasn't a name I recognised, but I knew the cruiser by reputation. She had a good history for hunting pirates and resistance starships.
“Alex,” Hardwick said, nodding to him. His rank pins below his rank bars showed that he had been a Captain for seven years, either being denied promotion or having refused it when it was offered. Either one could be the case. I had heard of Captains who had died on their ships after refusing transfer, despite injuries and age. I understood now I’d become a commanding officer myself. “And you must be John.”
His tone was neutral. Still, his time in grade made him senior to me. “Yes, sir,” I said, shaking his hand.
“I was sorry to hear about Percival,” Hardwick continued. “It was probably how he would have wanted to go, but he deserved better than that. I trust that you held a proper ceremony for him afterwards?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Hardwick grinned. “You don’t have to call me sir,” he reminded me. “You can even call me Gary if you like.”
The grey man cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind, we are operating under a time limit here,” he said. “Could we place the social interaction at the end of the meeting?”
“Of course, sir,” Shalenko said. “John, Gary, all of you, please would you be seated?”
I sat down. I had hoped that Deborah Tyler – a woman the entire crew had come to detest in less than a week – would sit away from me, but she sat down next to me with all the inevitability of Christmas, or death and taxes. I’d been as polite to her as I could, even fawning on her, but inwardly I couldn’t wait to have her blown out of the airlock. She was nothing more than a one-woman morale destroyer. If we could have turned her voice into a weapon, the UN would have been invincible.
The grey man took control of the display and brought up an image of a blue-green planet I recognised instantly. Heinlein was very like Earth, apart from the fact that the ratio of land to sea was practically reversed. The handful of seas on the planet’s surface were effectively massive lakes. It was an unusual occurrence, at least in the four hundred or so Earth-like worlds that the UN had surveyed, and I suspected that there were geologists still trying to account for it. It didn’t matter to me in any case. I was more interested in knowing why we had been summoned to the monitor.
“The planet Heinlein,” the grey man said. His tone hadn’t changed at all, but there wasn't the slightest doubt in the room that he was in charge. I wondered, absently, who he actually was and who he worked for. Could he be Intelligence, or some other department? “I understand that you all served there at one point in your careers.”
“Yes, sir,” Shalenko said. I recalled my own tour on Heinlein with mixed feelings. I hadn’t enjoyed the planet at all, but at the same time Heinlein had proved to me just how evil the system was, and why it had to be fought. Dead children swam in front of my eyes. The irony was that Heinlein had taught me how to build a cell structure and use it to strike a blow at the heart of the UN’s power. “John served there under me. Gary served there a year later as part of the asteroid-patrolling squadrons.”
I eyed Captain Hardwick with new respect. The battles in Heinlein’s asteroid belts had been brief bloody affairs with quarter neither asked nor given. The UN had lost several cruisers – which should have been invincible to all, but major warships – to the asteroid miners and had resorted to destroying any habitable asteroid that didn’t surrender at once. Even so, the war had raged on for months…and, according to the Brotherhood, was still going on.
“Yes, sir,” Captain Hardwick said. “We patrolled for five months before we took enough damage to force us back to Earth for repairs. If that missile had detonated closer…well, I wouldn’t be here to talk to you today.”
“Thank you,” the grey man said. He stroked his chin. “What you are about to hear is considered classified material. Discussing this information with anyone outside this circle will be regarded
as a breech in security regulations and punished by life exile to Bounty. If any of you require a briefing on the relevant security protocols, please say so now.”
There was a pause. “Good,” he said, finally. When I’d been confirmed as Captain, I’d studied the Official Secrets Regulations carefully. “The war on Heinlein has taken a turn not exactly to our advantage.”
I smiled inwardly. I’d read Heinlein’s history of Earth – more interesting than the bland pap I’d been taught in school – and I knew where that line came from. I wondered if the UN had finally decided to admit defeat, except I knew the United Nations. They would hardly be trying to prepare an invasion of Williamson’s World if, at the same time, they were going to withdraw from Heinlein. Unless…
I thought about Devastator’s capabilities and felt my blood run cold.
“You may all have heard rumours about the recent sabotage campaign mounted against Peace Force starships and installations by workers who came from Heinlein,” the grey man continued. “The effects of the sabotage have been much more serious than we appreciated at the time. Although we didn’t lose any starships directly, two cruisers suffered reactor overloads and ended up having to be towed to the shipyards for reconstruction. Other ships had problems ranging from the amusing to the serious – including the recent death of Captain Harriman.
“This has been merged with an ongoing offensive mounted against Infantry troops on the ground,” he added. “Attacks against peacekeeping forces have risen tenfold in the past five months, backed up by a growing campaign mounted against spacecraft and installations in orbit. Some of them have been direct assaults by the remaining Heinlein starships, others have been sneaker, while some are clearly the results of sabotage. General Hoover’s attempts to use industrial facilities in the Heinlein System for supplying his basic requirements have backfired. We nearly lost a starship due to a particularly cunning piece of sabotage.”
I frowned as I listened. The United Nations wasn't known for being so honest with its own people and I felt it boded ill. “Certain decisions have been taken,” the grey man concluded. “It has been decided to force the Heinlein Government to the table, by any means necessary.”
That, I decided as the silence grew longer, might not be possible. I hadn’t understood all the implications of Heinlein’s Government, but one I did understand – in hindsight – was that most of the Citizen’s Council would have escaped the destruction of their building, simply by not being there at the time. They preferred to use electronic communications systems and most of the people swept up by the Infantry had been nothing, but harmless workers. The UN had declared the Government captured, however, and no one had dared to disagree, openly.
The grey man looked at Shalenko. “Your orders are simple,” he said. “You are to take Devastator, with the two cruisers for escort, to Heinlein and destroy Valentine.”
I kept my face blank, somehow. Valentine was the second-largest city on Heinlein, although it would have vanished without trace in any of Earth’s crumbling metropolises. It had a population of over five hundred thousand if I recalled correctly – tiny compared to Earth’s population – and most of them had been penned inside the city by the Infantry, after the invasion. They’d resisted, of course, and the city had rapidly become a no-go area. I’d expected that the Infantry would have finally pacified it, but apparently they’d had other considerations. I wondered how many reporters had gone inside the ‘secure’ city and lived to tell the tale.
“Valentine has been picked for several reasons,” the grey man said, when we said nothing. “It is large enough to make our point, yet it is not worth preserving from our point of view. It makes the most sense as a target.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The UN had forsworn nuclear weapons on planetary surfaces for years. How could they break the strongest taboo the human race had? Even without that taboo, Heinlein had definitely built nukes of its own before the invasion. What was to stop them launching them against the UN’s Infantry? How much damage could they wreck if they took the gloves off.
“Devastator is certainly capable of destroying the city,” Shalenko said, dispassionately. I wanted to scream at him to stop, but it would only have destroyed my career for nothing. “I do not understand, however, why you require Devastator. Any cruiser or even a gunboat could destroy a whole city.”
“Devastator has something of a reputation on Heinlein,” the grey man said. “Besides, there are other considerations. The use of nuclear weapons is strongly prohibited on a planet’s surface without direct orders from the General Assembly and other starships might have problems overriding the safety systems built into their missiles. A monitor is designed for planetary bombardment.”
He stood up. “I trust that no one has any questions?” He asked. I was too stunned to speak. “You are cleared to depart Sol this evening and return as soon as you have completed your mission.”
“Thank you, sir,” Shalenko said. The grey man swept out of the hatch, which hissed closed behind him. “As Commodore, I will be commander of the mission. The George Robertson will provide our forward escort and scout, while the Jacques Delors will bring up the rear. We can expect the Heinlein Resistance to go all-out to stop us if they suspect our purpose, so we will maintain strict silence on our goals until we enter Heinlein orbit.”
“I protest,” Hardwick said. “I’m sure that none of my crew have links to Heinlein.”
“I merely wish to prevent any leaks before we have completed the mission,” Shalenko said. His words were so calm and composed that I almost forgot the horror lurking behind them. We were going to butcher the population of an entire city. We were going to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocents who had done nothing to deserve to die. We were even going to be killing UN Infantry who were trying to secure the city. I would have bet good money that they wouldn’t be warned in advance. “We will depart at 2200 precisely. Dismissed!”
He held up a hand as we turned to leave. “John, I want a word with you,” he added, before I could escape. “Remain behind.”
“I should be here too,” Deborah protested. “My orders clearly state…”
“And my orders clearly state that I am in complete control of every aspect of this mission,” Shalenko barked, so loudly that Deborah jumped. “My First Lieutenant will escort you to the mess, where you may eat if you wish, or to the airlock if you wish to return to the Jacques Delors ahead of its Captain. Leave.”
Deborah threw him a glance that could have killed and stalked out, head held high. I doubted that she’d gone very far – she was probably lurking outside the hatch, waiting for me and trying to listen through the solid metal – but at least she was gone.
“Political officers are always such a bore,” Shalenko commented, when we were alone together. I remembered the rumours that he and his political officer were lovers, but I didn’t believe them. The thought of Ellen Nakamura having anything to do with love…the mind couldn’t stand it. “I imagine that you have concerns, John?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, grimly. “We’re considering mass murder!”
“We’ve done more that consider it,” Shalenko said. “I checked that man’s credentials very carefully. He’s not just a messenger boy, John, but someone with very strong links right to the top. The message he passed on might have been signed by the General Assembly, but everyone who’s anyone in power agreed to it first. They knew the risks and accepted them for everyone else.”
I stared at him. “But, sir…”
He held up a hand. “There’s no more time, John,” he said. There was a finality in his tone that quelled protests more than even a royal chewing-out. “I prevented you from throwing your career away over this before, but this situation is different. The UN itself is in desperate waters and needs time to recover before the war is truly lost. I believe that there were even groups calling for nothing less than the complete eradication of Heinlein…and not a few other planets into the bargain.”
&nbs
p; His eyes bored into mine. “If you insist on protesting this decision, I won’t be able to protect you any longer,” he added. “No one, not even Admiral Rutherford himself, will be able to prevent you from being summarily tried, convicted, stripped of rank and executed. They’re desperate, John. If you protest, you’ll lose everything and it will happen anyway!”
I looked at him. “Do they deserve it?”
“Does anyone?” Shalenko asked. “All I know is that if something doesn’t happen to break the logjam soon, the entire United Nations will come crashing down. The good we do will vanish along with the bad. The colonies will rebuild and seek to wage war on Earth, or maybe even on each other. The rule of law will be completely destroyed. We need to end the war on terms we can accept, or we all lose.”
I wanted to protest anyway, but he was right. I had to remain silent and wait for the right time to move. I wanted to move now, but we weren't ready. A failure, with so many ships left untouched, would mean our swift annihilation. We needed more time. That time would be bought at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason Page 34