Christopher Nuttall - Picking Up the Pieces

“They take a handful of children every year,” Frida added, after a moment. “Parents are warned not to let their children swim alone, but every so often a few children get bitten and killed by the monsters. Some idiots look at them, think they’re safe and sweet like real Dolphins, and try to swim with them. It never lasts long.”

“I see,” I said, finally. There was a moral in that, somewhere. “I shall remember never to swim with them.”

Frida smiled. “Not if you value your nuts,” she said, dryly. I hoped she was joking. “They’ve been known to bite them off and eat them.”

A day after I returned from the farms, I was summoned to the main control room. “Sir, there’s been a development with the UAV flight,” the pilot informed me. “As you know, UAV-3 was orbiting over the mountains, watching for evidence of enemy activity.”

I frowned. “Was?”

“Was,” the pilot confirmed. “The UAV has been shot down.”

I stared at him. “Shot down?” I repeated. It should have been impossible. There was little on the planet that could detect the UAV, let alone shoot it down. “How?”

“I’m not sure,” the pilot said. “Judging from the telemetry, it was probably an electronic weapon of some kind; I suspect a directed EMP cannon. The signal blinked out completely, along with both backups. They may just have gotten lucky, or they might have obtained hyper-sensitive sensing gear from somewhere more advanced than this dump. Fleet-issue sensors, or stuff from Heinlein or Williamson’s World, could probably track the UAV from orbit. It was emitting a tiny signal, after all.”

“I see,” I said. I couldn’t help, but regard that as ominous. The William Tell wouldn’t be over the area for another few hours. A lot could happen in that time. “Get me a report on what it was seeing just before it was shot down.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said. “We could route UAV-5 over the general area.”

“And lose that as well?” I asked, dryly. “Or… wait; we could simply deactivate the transmitter, couldn’t we?”

“Yes, assuming that that was how they detected it,” the pilot said. I understood what he meant. If the enemy had an advanced radar system… but we’d have detected active sensors, and passive sensors wouldn’t have been able to locate the UAV, apart from tracking its transmissions. “These things are expensive, sir.”

“I know,” I said, sourly. “Keep the UAV back for the moment. I’ll have to discuss the matter with Ed.”

“There’s going to be a protest march today,” Suki said, as we drove into New Copenhagen. There was a definite feel of tension in the air. “It was on the news; the Revolutionary Front Against Forced Contraception intends to march up to the government buildings and back down to the schools to claim that there is no public support for the emergency contraception legislation.”

I shrugged. I had known that it wouldn’t be popular and it had apparently cost most of Frida’s political capital to get the measure through, even with emergency powers. The government paid mothers to have kids — that wasn’t how it was presented to the public, but that’s how it was — and mothers wanted kids to get that money. They didn’t want to be told that the price for receiving government-issue rations and even benefits was having a contraceptive shot that would prevent them from having any more kids for at least two years. In their place, I’d probably have been unhappy too… or maybe I’d have got on my bike and looked for work. If the UN had done something like it on Earth, perhaps the entire system wouldn’t have fallen apart when they lost their ability to hold the Colonies.

“They don’t have a choice,” Muna said, harshly. She’d come with me to brief Frida on our logistics problems, but she seemed to have little sympathy for the protestors. “There are thousands of orphan kids on the streets. Let them adopt them if they want children and bring them up properly. They don’t have to have a kid of their own body.”

Suki gave her a surprised look, but I understood. Muna couldn’t have children herself any longer and, to all intents and purposes, the Legion was her family. She would see the entire issue in terms of costs and benefits and would understand that the more urban children, the greater the strain on the planet’s resources. I agreed with her, but it was a worrying development; so far, we’d avoided yet another outbreak of urban terrorism. This could be the issue that set off another round of bitter fighting.

“I used to think that I’d have twenty kids,” Suki said, finally. “Is that really so bad?”

“Every single kid in a city is a non-productive leech,” Muna said. Her voice was very cold and bitter. “The earliest they can do reasonable amounts of work is fourteen, or thereabouts, and this planet forbids them from working until they’re sixteen. That’s sixteen years of food, drink and resources being drained away, for nothing. It may not get any better after they turn sixteen; they’ve never been taught anything useful, anything that might give them a profession. That leaves them good for nothing, but brute labour, which this planet already has a surplus of.”

Her voice hardened. “And while they’re drinking to forget their sorrows and taking drugs to dull the pain, they’re knocking up girls and starting the whole cycle of hopelessness all over again,” she snapped. “If it isn’t nipped in the bud, it will consume everything until the city collapses in on itself.”

I nodded when Suki looked at me. The same pattern had repeated itself on Earth, where the UN had rewarded being unemployed… and, in any case, unemployment rates had hovered around eighty percent even before John Walker’s coup. The cities had been occupied by gangs of thugs who fought wars amongst themselves and terrorised the local population, while the police had stood by and watched. I had escaped it by the skin of my teeth and countless others hadn’t been so lucky.

“It’s monstrous,” Suki said, finally. I guessed from her tone that I wasn’t going to see her naked again for a while, but I hadn’t had the time anyway over the last few weeks. Between watching for the other shoe to drop after the UAV had been shot down and waiting for the farms to start producing food crops, I hadn’t had the time to rest, let alone enjoy myself. “How many women will never have kids because of it?”

I said nothing as the car turned the corner and drove past the beginnings of the demonstration. There were hundreds of men and women there — mainly women — carrying placards that started out as rude and went downhill from there. They seemed to be willing to believe the worst of Frida; the kindest thing they called her was a traitor. There were nasty suggestions about what she intended to do in the future, snide remarks about her relationship with me, and even vile slanders suggesting that she intended to make people pay to have the contraceptive injection nullified. The last one was definitely nonsense. In a year or two, it would wear off completely.

And the worst of it was that many of the protesters would never live without government benefits. They would never have children now. They could have put the energy they put into protesting into farming — we’d be quite happy to provide them with a farm of their own, sooner or later — and they might even have a family out in the countryside, away from the many pitfalls of the city. They chose, instead, to suck on the government teat and ensure, by doing so, that the government was permanently short of money. No wonder that Frida had attempted to tax the farmers… and no wonder that they’d resisted. They knew the likely outcome as well as I did.