by Adam Roberts
The British Army has access to satellite reconnaissance - billions of euros of money spent in launching and maintaining these devices - and this gives them a good sense of where our NMA is. Part of that technology involves them fighting (as it were) on multiple fronts with people who resist the culture of secrecy involved in blocking access to such imagery. Google Earth doesn’t derive from military satellites, but since the Goog has now started updating their images quarter-hourly it’s almost as good. Military attempts to block access to it run up against fierce civilian opposition. How else could the media have covered the battle of Basingstoke otherwise? Those blocky knots of His Majesty’s troops, in various sticky situations; the rapid ant-scuttle from all sides of our troops.
We also had toy planes. You would be surprised just how much recon you can get from a €50 toy plane fitted with a €70 digital camera - in many respects more than you can get from a satellite. We set a bunch of these planes buzzing about, and processed the info, and discussed things on the wiki, drawing on the expertise of people who knew the area and people who had escorted prisoners before. As a result we went through the countryside like coffee through grinds. We moved quickly and in a coordinated manner. There were localized regular army formations in villages and farms in the sweet British countryside, and a mass of troops was gathered at Reading, presumably for a counter attack. But it takes time to assemble tens of thousands of troops; or at least it takes time to do this according to the exacting structural logic of the old army. We could move much more quickly. We picked a path through half a dozen defended farms and villages. In each case we noosed an advance completely around the redoubt. I fought personally at an industrial farm called Honeysuckle, the main memory of which for me is the intense stink of the pig sheds - big metal hangers swarming with writhing pink bodies. This resulted us in suffering rather more casualties than was ideal, since the men we were fighting, lacking a route of escape, had no option but to uncover within themselves reserves of ferocity and determination. But we took all the targets, nonetheless. Had the positions been reversed the Regulars would either have fought, or else would have obliterated the farm and everything in it (men, pigs, all) from the air, so in that respect the feudal troops were luckier. But we took few prisoners, and vacated the sites as soon as we had prevailed.
This took a day and a half; and we debated - on the move - whether to rest and recuperate, or to push straight on for Reading. We were all exhausted, which was a powerful argument on the side of the former proposition, but the strategic advantage was with the latter.
The feudal enemy expected us to rest, because that is what they would have done. But we pressed directly into Reading, and fought rapidly through to the shopping centre and railway station in the town centre. The middle of Reading is littered with oversized cubes and boxes of brick and concrete, big edifices of glass. A little ordnance makes a big crash and bash in such an environment. Sheared stumps of concrete: the strands of iron cable poking up from the point of fracture like hairs from a wart.
To spare you the tedium, I will not give a street-by-street account of the battle for Reading. We ignored the suburbs and cut straight to the middle, and most of the fighting was by the river. It is larger than Basingstoke but is basically the same place - tight, antique centre, larger modern sprawl, a motorway running to the south. Motorways, by the way, are ridiculously easy to clog. Civilians are so habituated to travelling along them, and by no other route, that they continue to try to make their way even when a barricade of vehicles has blocked the route.
After Reading we rested in shifts, and reopened negotiations. A necessary preliminary was the release of our previous negotiators, and this was achieved by lunchtime the following day. I don’t know what happened to the feudal officer who had ordered their arrest, for it is in the nature of the traditional hierarchies by which these armies are run that a metaphorical losing face can be as dangerous as an actual wound.
We had a long drawn-out, slightly ragged debate (because some of us were asleep, or else were waking up as others slept) about this. It went on for several hours. One upshot of it was that we appointed a new team of negotiators, and my name was put forward. This happened on the reasonable grounds that I had served in the British Army; although, since about a third of our force could claim the same distinction, I am not sure it explains my personal distinction. Indeed I put the point that, since I had absented myself from the British Army without leave, there was a risk that they would use that as a pretext to detain me. Several debaters thought the British ‘wouldn’t be so stupid as to try that trick twice’, although my view was that saying so showed them ignorant of the conceptual inertia of the organization in question. But the vote was passed, and that was that.
6
The usual number is six emissaries, but given our previous experience with the British Army we sent only three this time, myself, and two women: Sol Barber, a soldier I had pinged several times in the previous two battles but never before met, and a sureshot called Theodora, last name unknown, whom I knew very well. We serviced our weapons - of course we took our weapons with us - and drove a vehicle through the outskirts of Reading. Most of the houses were more or less untouched; a little pockmarked in places: just a little work for the glazier and plasterer. There were some enemy corpses that had not yet been cleared from the thoroughfare, and many automobiles lay slumberous on their sides or backs.
Our vehicle’s tyres hissed disapproval at being required to roll over the granulated glass littering the road. The wiki buzzed with all sorts of traffic: tactical speculation, and facts plucked from the internet, patches and apps to further enhance our wire-security wormed into the weave of connectivity.
Further out of town we passed a shopping mall that was in some disarray, and further still a cement works that had been hit several times by high detonation shells. It was everywhere covered with heaps and piles and grey snowdrifts of cement powder, like the aftermath at Pompeii.
We were emailing the British Army informing them of our route and our mode of transportation, but there was nevertheless always the risk that we would be targeted and killed as we travelled. That, indeed, would have been a safer way for a feudal army commander to vent his fury at defeat than arresting us, as had happened with our predecessors. Murdering us could always be passed off as accidental fire, or a misunderstanding, where locking up half a dozen accredited negotiators clearly could not. But we made our way out of town just fine, despite knowing full well that the enemy had a satellite tracking us, cannons adjusting their elevation incrementally as we moved, and planes ready at a single word to swoop down and burst us to bloody fragments.
I tried not to think about all that.
It was, actually, a pleasant drive. The countryside was starting to fizz with early spring. Blossom was all over the trees like the stuffing spilling from upholstery. There were very many varieties of green. You think of spring green as a single colour - but take a look and you’ll see it’s more than twenty: darker, lighter, sea-tinted and saltlike, or olive green, or bright young green, or green mixed with a dose of steadying black.
‘Nice day,’ said Sol Barber.
‘That cloud?’ said Theodora, not pointing. ‘It’s bruised. Means rain.’
‘Pessimist,’ I said, with excessive sibilance.
‘Rain is not a bad thing,’ Theodora elaborated, blithely. ‘Nice refreshing spring rain.’
We drove along the high-banked road for ten minutes or more, and then we were compelled to stop by a herd of moo-cows: prodigiously massy and logjamming the way. The brainless heft and solidity of cows is a striking thing, when you encounter it up close - I know that saying so, of course, marks me a city boy. Anyway, the fact that these beasts had spilled from their field and now milled about untended suggested that their farmer had vacated his smallholding. Which was sensible of him, given the intensity of fighting in that area.
It was hard to get past the cows. They’re too heavy to shove, and they greet attempts
to persuade them with the blank walls of their eyes, and the saliva-tasselled motion of their enormous jaws. Theodora tried discharging her weapon into the turf-bank to our right, and it made a right old noise, but although several of the beasts stiffened and stopped chewing, a shiver going through their slow bovine souls - the Ghost of Abattoirs Future shouting to them across time - it did not clear them out of the way. In the end we inched forward in our vehicle, regretting that we had not commandeered a 4by4, nudging here a flank and there an arse until eventually, after twenty minutes or more, squeezing a way through, we came out the other side. It left our front bumper well and truly dented, I don’t mind telling you.
By the time we got going again properly the light had dimmed and Theodora’s bruised portion of cloud had swollen, as bruises tend to do. Then a thin drizzle began, raindrops as tiny and persistent as midges. Then the rainfall gathered pace, and the windshield wipers flapped ineffectually. Rain’s glass acne across the view, constantly wiped away and constantly returning.
‘Bravo,’ said Sol, sarcastically. ‘Brav-oh.’
We drove on to the sound of Nature’s applause.
Theodora was chatting in a loud voice, to Sol I thought at first, until I realized that it was somebody on the wire. ‘But these new software patches are not just inert,’ she was saying, brightly. ‘They’re adaptive.’ Pause. ‘No, no, not given the stress our firewall is under, we need roaming antiviral. We really couldn’t do without a roaming antiviral. The sorts of risks you’re talking about are pure science fiction. The benefits outweight any - I said, fiction. Science fiction, I said.’ Pause. ‘It’s raining pretty hard here, so I’m finding it hard hearing what you - I said raining pretty hard here. The new antivirals are quasi-AI, so they can respond adaptively to - no, I said, raining.’
We drove on. The rain died away.
Soon enough we reached a checkpoint. These things, I can tell you, are another fetish of the old feudal army. They are not a necessary things, because in this day and age it’s possible with a wiTag to locate any and every element in an army, to know exactly where they are and where they are going; and that is a much more useful thing than counting people through temporary barricades. But this is how the Regular army had always done things, so this is how they continued to do things. A clutch of squaddies sang out ‘halt!’ and aimed their rifles at us, and we had to go through the rigmarole of stopping and getting out and surrendering our weapons and boarding a British Army truck to be shipped up the temporary command centre to meet the officers.
Sol Barber did a sudoko on her armscreen. Theodora watched the countryside go by, and made vocal notes as to the expressions on the faces of the soldiers we passed. There were a great number of these last, standing or sitting, smoking or talking, and none of them looked happy. ‘Sucking a wasp,’ Theodora said, of one. ‘Face like a ballbag,’ of another. ‘Smacked in the gob with the glumstick,’ of a third. They did all look pretty sorry for themselves, too. The technical term for this (if you’ll indulge me) is morale, and maintaining morale is one of the major burdens placed upon commanders in the old feudal-style armies. It is a very major issue because a serf has naturally very low morale. What is more demoralizing than being a slave? So morale must be artificially inflated and maintained, and that takes colossal effort and application; and the slightest thing punctures it. These men were conscious of having lost three battles one after the other, each time to a much smaller and more primitively equipped force, and their morale had consequently fallen upon the bedrock of their own servitude.
We don’t have this problem, and I’ll tell you why not. Because we are not slaves.
Field Command was on a small hill, and ringed around with many large-scale thorn-crowns of barbed wire. We were greeted by a lieutenant and were requested politely to wait. This annoyed my companions, although it was what I expected. Hierarchical structures of power have their own little rituals and crotchets, and this business of forcing people to waste their time cooling their heels before granting them access to the VIP higher up the pecking order was one of them. It was supposed, I guess, to convey the sense that simply being in the presence of the VIP was a valuable thing, purchased with hours of tedium and inconvenience. To a mind inculcated into the logic of the hierarchy this all seems natural and normal. To a mind used to properly democratic interaction it is one of the oddest of cultural eccentricities.
The lieutenant attended us, like a servant (which, of course, is what he was) during this period of waiting. He took off his helmet, revealing unruly stuck-up hair. That, combined with the roundness and relative flatness of his face, rather gave him the look of a spork. His job was to chaperone the three of us until the Top Brass were ready. It was an easy enough matter to engage him in conversation, for he was constitutionally bored.
‘I don’t know how much you know about the British Army . . .’ he said, at one point.
I told him I had served in his army for several months. This bewildered his poor young spork-face.
‘I don’t understand that at all,’ he said. ‘You fought for us? And now you’ve joined the marauders - pardon me, the mercenary group?’
‘You’ve not been detailed to us on account of your diplomatic skills,’ I noted.
His attitude was one of radical noncomprehension. We met these sorts of soldiers all the time. A man with pips on his shoulder like silver boils would march up to a group of us and say: ‘Right, who’s in charge here?’ Such a person would fume at our blank looks. But when you’re faced with somebody who plain does not get it, what can you do but look blankly? Who’s in charge?
I mean: really.
My spork-face soldier had the grace to dip his head a little. ‘I apologize,’ he said . ‘It’s a little hard for me to understand. How can you call yourselves an army when you have no chain of command?’
‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, in return, ‘you mean: how can we keep beating you in battle, given that we lack the chain? Do you really consider this chain essential to military success?’
He went pink, and put his helmet back on. The rosé-tint was anger, not embarrassment. Reminding a soldier that you have beaten him will, naturally, enrage him.
‘Don’t bait him,’ advised Sol Barber.
‘It’s my turn to apologize,’ I said, quickly. ‘I don’t mean to gloat.’
‘You have been lucky,’ he said, through lips set like a letter slot. ‘Battlefield lucky.’
‘Lucky would be one explanation. Or perhaps we’ve better tactics.’
This loosened him, and his cheeks turned back from rosé to chardonnay - their natural tint. ‘That’s what I don’t get. How could you evolve these tactics? You’re - forgive me, but you are - a rabble.’
‘Your definition of rabble?’ I asked.
‘I mean that you don’t really have any discipline. Not as I understand it.’
‘I disagree.’
‘No order, no drill, no chain of command!’
‘But these things are not at all the same as discipline.’
‘And another matter,’ he went on. ‘I don’t see what’s in it for you.’
This was an unusual question, and it gave me pause. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s not as if there haven’t been groups of bandits before,’ he said. ‘Look through the history books. Bandits get together, they don’t much bother with military discipline, grab what loot they can and then - you know. They disband to enjoy their gains, or else hole up somewhere safe - in the mountains, say. But that’s not what your bandits do.’
‘Indeed not,’ I said, dryly.
‘Why do you exist?’
‘Why do you?’
He looked puzzled at this, perhaps because he had intended his ‘you’ to refer to the whole of my NMA whilst assuming my ‘you’ referred to him alone. Rather than tangle with the existential anxiety implicit in trying to answer such a question, he said: ‘What?’
‘Your army,’ I said, ‘What’s it for?’
‘To d
efend the country,’ he said.
‘By?’
He peered at me. ‘What?’
‘How do you defend your country?’
‘We fight our enemies.’
‘Exactly. In point of fact, that’s what you’re for. Fighting.’
‘Of course. But for a cause.’
‘It’s the same for us. What we are for is fighting. The present cause is defending ourselves, since the British Army is trying to follow through their declared aim of eradicating us. That in turn is because we were appointed by the anti-successionists to . . .’
‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ he said, waving his hand, evidently prepared for this last reference. ‘Never mind that. All that Celtic fringe nonsense. That’s just politics. I mean, what’s in it for you?’
‘I don’t mean to be facetious,’ I said, ‘but I could again turn that question round on you.’
‘You’re asking why am I in the British Army? Because I take pride in serving, in defending my country. Because I’m a professional.’