Christopher Nuttall - Picking Up the Pieces

I shook my head. “Just keep an eye on them,” I ordered. I wanted to interrogate them until they hurt , but we already had enough problems with the local government. I hadn’t heard anything about the parents of the molested girl — damned if I could remember her name now; it had been swept away by the pressure of events — but that was probably lurking in the shadows until it saw a chance to spring. “If they’re people we can rotate to reasonably safe duties, do so. If not…”

It would have been so easy to send them on suicide missions. “If not, just keep an eye on them,” I concluded. “We’ll deal with them if they become a threat.”

“Yes, sir,” Robert said, as we stepped into the command bunker. I was pleased to see that there was an added element of security surrounding the central command post, using men drawn from the Legion. We couldn’t trust the locals for that, even though they were handling their own security in the various outposts and garrisons we had scattered throughout the countryside and around the cities. There, of course, they had to worry about enemy forces attacking them. “The current situation is as follows…”

I listened as he outlined the remarkable shortage of enemy activity. It puzzled me; over the last two months, the farmers had launched entire waves of hit and run attacks on our positions, trying to bleed us into submission. Snipers, IEDs and other nasty tricks had all wrecked havoc on our forces, but now there was hardly anything. A handful of shots hardly constituted a problem. It was quiet — suspiciously quiet.

“Keep everyone on alert,” I ordered, finally. There was little else we could do for the moment. With the new regiments, once they were worked up and ready for action, we could take the offensive into the mountains, but that was still months off. For the moment, all we could do was wait and see if the enemy showed themselves. “And the prisoners from Jock’s raid?”

“We had them shipped here and interrogated them, as per standing orders,” Robert confirmed. “They apparently know nothing about anything — of course — and more specifically they know almost nothing about the Freedom League. They thought that the woman was just one of the mining representatives from the Mountain Men.”

“Mountain Women, in her case, I would have thought,” Peter injected.

I scowled at him and looked back at Robert. “They were really there just to add additional men to the guard force,” Robert continued. “The interrogators believe that they don’t actually know much else; hell, they didn’t even know who they were guarding.”

“A likely story,” Peter growled. “Are we sure they’re telling the truth?”

“The interrogators were not gentle,” Robert said, darkly. “They knocked the poor bastards about and used drugs and lie detectors unmercifully. They didn’t have any drug immunisations or even any counter-interrogation training. If they’re lying, they’re better at it that some of the people from Heinlein, the ones who were given full-scale training. Russell checked their biofeedback rhythms and swears blind that they weren’t using any such training.”

I held up my hand before the argument could get out of hand. “Never mind,” I said, firmly. “If they don’t have anything else to tell us, make them the same offer as the other farmer POWs. Tell them they can serve us for a short period on the new farms, or they can rot in the detention camps until the war comes to an end, one way or the other.”

“Yes, sir,” Robert said.

Peter looked mutinous. “Don’t you feel,” he asked, “that some harsher punishment is in order? They assisted in kidnapping you…”

“We’re not going to make a big deal out of it,” I said, firmly. “The people who planned and carried out the kidnapping weren’t captured. We’re not going to give the grunts, the people who didn’t know what was really going on, a harder time than we have to give them. Let them see that we’re not going to treat it as a life-threatening matter, because it’s not. I survived.”

I grinned at them. “I hope you warned all of the departmental heads,” I added, with a mischievous smile. “It’s inspection time.”

I spent the next three hours going through everything on the spaceport, from the training period with Russell and the new recruits — many of which were happy to see me returned safe and well — to the crews servicing the tanks, helicopters and space shuttles. I inspected everything, handing out awards and punishments as required, just to ensure that everything was still working. The laser batteries providing protection against incoming mortar rounds were working perfectly — a relief; a single high explosive round in the wrong place would be devastating — and the crews were quite happy to run through a drill with me watching over their shoulders. The simulated incoming rounds were all downed well short of their targets. The simulations, in fact, were far worse than anything we had faced so far, even at Fort Galloway.

“Excellent work,” I said, finally. They all breathed sighs of relief, for which I couldn’t blame them. They’d probably heard that I was looking for faults to punish, but standards hadn’t slipped on the laser batteries. “Carry on, men.”

An hour after that, Commander Daniel Webster finally arrived. I’d called him down from the William Tell as soon as I’d returned to the spaceport, but I’d known that it would probably take some time before he could actually report to me. The destroyer did allow some of its crew to take shore leave on the planet — the duty would be intolerable without that safety valve — but it wasn’t in a good position to launch a shuttle when I called. The handful of crewmen immediately sought the bus to New Copenhagen and the delights there — whores, bars and other entertainments — while Daniel visited me in my office. I was surprisingly glad to see him.

“The Freedom League is definitely active here,” I said, once we’d exchanged greetings. I doubt he’d heard that I’d been kidnapped. The enemy hadn’t used it as part of their propaganda attack and we, for obvious reasons, hadn’t told anyone either. There was no point in giving the enemy a boost forward and dismaying our own people at the same time. “I saw one of their representatives recently.”

I outlined everything that had happened — I’d been right; he hadn’t known I’d been kidnapped — and watched his expression carefully. I had hoped that it would prompt Fleet into more open intervention, but it wasn’t really proof, was it? The word of a mercenary trapped in a war that conventional wisdom said was hopeless, against a group of freedom-loving farmers and miners who only wanted to be rid of a tyrannical central government. I doubted that Fleet’s story would seem convincing to the Federation, or anyone else for that matter. It could tip over the applecart completely.

“It’s not the kind of proof we can use,” Daniel said, finally. I nodded in bitter understanding. He was right, of course; we’d still have to beat the farmers on the ground and hopefully capture the woman and her thugs in the process. “I don’t suppose you know her name, or any other details we can use?”

“Maybe,” I said. “We took a WARCAT” — War Crimes Assessment Team — “team through the house and they found DNA belonging to several people who weren’t among the dead or prisoners. We could compare it to your records…”

“It might work, but I doubt it,” Daniel said. “If mopping up the Freedom League was that easy, we’d have them by now.”

I sprung my little surprise. “The woman had a Heinlein accent,” I said, seriously. I saw his eyes go very wide. “There’s nothing quite like it outside Heinlein itself and I’m dead certain that that was what I was hearing. Is that any help?”