Christopher Nuttall - Picking Up the Pieces

Frida blinked. “A roe contract?”

“ROE; Rules of Engagement,” I explained. “At the moment, we have none beyond our standard ROE, which basically prohibit kinetic non-reactive operations.” I saw her puzzled look and smiled thinly. “We can respond to attacks, but we cannot launch attacks, or combat operations. I need a ROE Contract from the Government specifying what we can and cannot do. Without it… well, Fleet might take an interest in us.”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” Frida said. I suspected she’d consult her lawyers before she mentioned it to the President, or anyone else. The Progressives would probably try to draft the contract and then ram it down their throats. “What happens if you don’t like the contract?”

“I suggest revisions,” I said. “Look, I’m training an army and officers to run it. I need to tell them what they can and cannot do, or there will be accidents and disasters, all of which will cost lives. Are they allowed to burn farms? Are they allowed to torture suspects? Are they even allowed to take prisoners? You need to get me answers to those questions soon, before the first class is ready to be deployed.”

Her expression made her look as if she’d been hit with a bargepole. “I can send you a recommended version if you like,” I offered. She nodded gratefully. “Once you get the Council to sign off on it, we can begin combat operations at any time.”

“There’s no one to fight,” she mumbled, before collecting herself. “I shall see to it personally.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Now, was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

As it happened, the answer was yes. Frida spent hours listing every possible complaint, which I shot down as calmly as possible. She probably didn’t realise it, but she was giving me insights into her own mind, and how badly we’d been infiltrated by the political parties. Why would she have complained about the month the recruits had spent without any outside communications unless she had spies among the recruits?

And she wasn’t the last politician to seek my company. Over the next month, I met with representatives from all of the political parties, even the Communists. None of them impressed me as much as the President had, but all of them left vaguely disappointed. I’d been careful to remain openly mercenary. As long as they thought they could buy my loyalty, we were safe. I just hoped that that would continue after the election.

One month before the election, I called a Council of War.

“It’s been five months,” I said, as soon as coffee was served and the room checked for bugs. I was fairly certain that none of the factions on Svergie had a hope of slipping a bug through our detectors, but neglecting precautions tended to lead to disaster. It was a bad habit to develop. “In one month, Svergie goes to the polls to elect a new government, at which point we may find ourselves thrown into combat. We have to be ready.”

My gaze swept the room. “Russell?”

I smiled as Russell adjusted his uniform before speaking. Councils of War were common back in the United Nations Peace Force, with every officer trying to cover his ass if the operation went badly wrong — victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, as the saying goes — but much rarer on Heinlein. Russell would probably have preferred to give a straight report and return to drilling the new recruits, but I needed his input. It didn’t help that only four of us knew the true purpose of the mission. I didn’t dare let that slip out into the open.

“We have absorbed nearly six thousand recruits with what I may as well term superhuman efforts and contributions from every department,” Russell said, flatly. “I have a feeling that we’re stretching ourselves to the limit, but overall I’m fairly pleased with progress — not that I’d tell them that, of course.” He smiled. “We graduated the first few classes, branded them as soldiers rather than recruits, and started to give them harder training exercises. They’ve developed unit pride and cohesion, at least in the exercises, but the real test will come when they go to war.”

He paused, considering his next words. “We’ve had seven fatal training accidents and thirty-two injuries that range from modest to severe,” he continued. “This course is wimpy compared to some of the courses I went through back home” — there were some good-natured chuckles; Russell’s original plans for the training would have killed half the recruits — “but it definitely makes men out of them. The dead recruits were graduated posthumously and we held full funeral ceremonies for them. Their families insisted on reclaiming the bodies and we saw to it they were given a proper send-off. The injured were put on light duties if they could handle it; the seriously injured were given medical discharges, although two of them want to continue to serve in any capacity. I’ve sent them to train as clerks, although one of them will remain permanently wheelchair bound.

“The majority of the recruits have mastered the basic skills and have definitely learned to shoot,” he concluded. “We’re lucky that this place doesn’t have what is laughably called a martial tradition; we were able to break them of the few bad habits they’d picked up from the videos the UN used to show. We’ve burned through hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, but I feel that it was a fair price to pay…”

“Speak for yourself,” Muna muttered.

“…For the many benefits of having soldiers who actually know what it’s like to fire a weapon. We moved from assault rifles and pistols to heavy weapons and antitank systems and hammered those into their heads. We’re short on SHORAD units, it should be noted, but we trained on portable SAM missiles anyway. They might be required. Overall, by Election Day, we should have three to four thousand qualified soldiers ready and waiting.”

I smiled. “What about local commanders?”

Russell smiled. “We’ve identified several promising commanders and sergeants within the recruits,” he said. “In a month, we should have some local lieutenants, maybe even Captains, although that’s really pushing it too fast. The officers they tried to foster on us are utterly unprepared for the position and need to go through Basic Training before they can be trusted with anything. I have a feeling that the real local officers will rise from the ranks rather than being imposed on the soldiers from above.”

“Good,” I said. “Ed?”

“The three Companies are at readiness and we’re rotating through the duty areas and leave,” Ed said, sipping his own coffee. He was more at ease in the Council than Russell; like me, he’d escaped from the UNPF. He also had a simpler task. “It’s annoying to lose people to the demands of the training cadre, but we have enough reserves to cover our current duties. There have been no attempts to attack the spaceport or Camp Currie, but there have been several attempts to sneak into the secure locations, mainly by local reporters. I’d have preferred to shoot them, but as you ordered we’ve simply tossed them out stark naked. It seemed to deter them.”

“Not that much of a hardship in this weather,” I observed, thoughtfully. It was moving towards high summer and the temperature was rising steadily. “And what about the bar fights?”