Christopher Nuttall: Picking Up the Pieces

I scowled into the distance and saw a dark figure waving to us. Normally, no one ran at the spaceport unless there was an emergency, but there was no one around to complain about the safety violation. We double-timed it over to him and stopped right in front of him. To do him credit, he might have looked more like a computer geek than a soldier, but he didn’t flinch. He wore the simple black uniform of Fleet, with the golden rank bars of a Commander, although not one in the chain of command. It had been a while since I’d brushed up on Fleet protocol, so I snapped a salute and wasn’t entirely surprised when it was returned. He wasn’t quite sure where he stood either.

“Welcome to Svergie Spaceport,” he said, as he led us into a conference room. It had air conditioning and a small drinks cabinet on the wall. I disliked it on sight. The senior officers on a dozen worlds had gotten together there, drunk freely, and then issued orders that made little sense in the cold light of day. “I’m Commander (Fleet Intelligence) Daniel Webster.”

“Fleet intelligence,” I mused. This meeting was starting to look rather unlike a coincidence. “Captain-General Andrew Nolte of the Legio Exheres , the Legion of the Disinherited.”

He frowned. “Captain-General?”

“Long story,” I growled. It wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with anyone who wasn’t already part of my community. Fleet tended to take a dim view of mercenary units like us, even though some of them regarded us as a necessary evil. “This is Peter and Muna.” I didn’t give their ranks. “I assume that you have a briefing for us?”

Daniel nodded. “I’m supposed to…”

“First things first,” I interrupted. “How much direct support can we hope for from Fleet?”

He frowned. “Very little,” he said. “It is imperative that no one sees our hand in this, directly or indirectly. We can probably send you orbital reconnaissance images from the William Tell , but Captain Price-Jones is one of the Captains less willing to violate the letter of Fleet Regulations. The Fleet Protocols are in effect.”

A tap on a hidden console brought up a map of the planet. “Svergie was settled, originally, by a Scandinavian consortium headed by the Swedes,” he said. “They put up most of the early funds and got the right to name the planet, although the Danes got to name the first real city — New Copenhagen. Yes, I know; very imaginative. The original settlement was restricted to people from Scandinavia and was largely a success; immigration picked up as the European Union collapsed into the UN. The global financial crisis forced the consortium to plead for help from the UN, which allowed the UN to get its hooks into the planet. Oddly enough, they only insisted on the settlers accepting Icelandic and Irish colonists and...well, it wasn’t a disaster. The stains blended together neatly.”

I nodded. The UN had blundered badly from time to time, forcing planets to take in ethnic groups that were fundamentally opposed to the first settlers. Persia, a planet settled directly from Old Iran on Earth, had been forced to accept a large immigration quota of Sunni Muslims from the Middle East. The results had not been pleasant. The largely Shia population of Persia had moved there to get away from the Sunni in the first place. Svergie had been lucky.

“Disaster struck around fifty years ago when the UN discovered that the planet had vast deposits of various vital minerals,” Daniel continued. “The locals objected to the UN attempting to assert further authority and rebelled. The UN fought back with Infantry and moved a few thousand miners onto the planet. They weren’t popular with the locals and the war got worse. To add to their woes, the UN was suppressing a rebellion in Indonesia at the same time and dumped several thousand Indonesian women onto the planet, along with their young children. I think the idea was that they would provide wives for the soldiers and miners. Some of them did, but others became prostitutes or worse. By the time Admiral Walker launched his coup, the planet was heading for a nasty crisis, which was barely averted by the UN’s pull-out. Even so…”

I nodded. “They wouldn’t have hired us unless they needed us,” I agreed. Svergie’s Government had offered vast inducements to hire us, which suggested either desperation or stupidity. I wouldn’t have bet on the latter. “What’s the current situation like?”

“Unstable,” Daniel admitted. He paused. “I’m going to have to lecture, I’m afraid.” I nodded impatiently. I have never met an Intelligence officer who didn’t like the sound of his own voice. “The Government was formed from the underground resistance, which claimed descent from the last legitimate government on the planet, before the UN took over openly. The President — you’ll meet him this afternoon — was the political head of the resistance and quite popular among the people. He’s also something of a statesman in his way. He convinced Fleet to keep the spaceport rather than trust it to any of his own people because… well, it was the cause of the greatest political fight since the UN pulled out.

“The President is the head of the Liberty Party, which used to serve as the core of the resistance,” he continued. “Now that the war is won and the UN is gone, it’s having something of a crisis of confidence; they used to unite everyone, but now the factions are becoming clearer and political consensus is being lost. The President couldn’t stop the trend and there are now several other parties competing for the voters. I don’t think that Liberty will win the next election, which is in six months.

“The Conservatives and Farmers Party is the most reactionary of the parties and basically serves as the mouthpiece for many of the older residents, although they don’t cross the line into open racism. They’re popular with the farmers, but less popular with the city-dwellers, not least because they want to force the underclass to work or starve. Fringe groups are even talking about developing a Heinlein-style government here and altering the franchise, or evicting non-Scandinavians from the planet.

“The Progressive Party is pretty much their exact opposite. They stand for universal franchise and an extension of state welfare benefits to as many people as possible. They’re popular among the underclass as they’re seen as the people who stand up for their rights, but they’re universally loathed among the upper classes. Their leadership includes people who were abandoned here by the UN and preach that everyone could have the kind of lifestyle people have on Earth. Unfortunately, they may be right.”

I snorted. The UN had told the Colonists that everyone on Earth lived in a state-run paradise from cradle to grave, a world where everyone was equal and all rights were respected. It was also complete nonsense. The UN had created an equal distribution of poverty.

“They’re trying to push through various subsidy bills that would force the farmers to sell at set prices, but they’re being heavily opposed,” Daniel added. “They’re having more success with education and training programs for young children, many of whom come from the underclass.

“The Communist Party is a more extreme version of the Progressive Party. They want to have everything owned and operated by the state and set up communal farms and other such nonsense. They’re smaller than the Progressive Party, but actually more disciplined and they’re training a militia of their own. I don’t think they can win an election, but if they share it with the Progressive Party… well, they can probably have a major impact on politics.

“And finally there’s the Independence Party,” he concluded. “They’re not a political party as such; they represent the interior and are seriously considering seceding from the remainder of the planet. They think that the next government will do whatever it can to limit their rights and tax the planet to death, so they’re plotting resistance and independence. If the Progressive Party wins the next election, they say, they’ll secede from the government. If that happens… the planet will either have a civil war or a split government, with all that that implies for their future. It doesn’t look rosy.”