Christopher Nuttall - Picking Up the Pieces

I watched as Councillor Erik Henriksson and Councillor Albin Arvidsson signed their parts of the treaty, before reassuming their role as Councillors. The voting boundaries were going to be redrawn as well, giving the farmers and miners additional representation, although that would include the new farms as well. I suspected that it wouldn’t work out well for them in the long run — the more of any group there were, the less chance of actual unity — but they were happy for the moment. So, I suspected, was Frida; she no longer had to worry about the prospect of a coup from the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party itself was on the verge of splintering apart.

“That’s my father up there,” a voice said behind me. I turned to see Suki standing there. She flinched back from my gaze. “He said I ought to go talk to you before you left.”

I nodded, tightly. One of the terms of the Peace Treaty was that all foreign mercenaries were to leave the planet, apparently on a quid pro quo basis for the loss of the Freedom League. I wasn’t unhappy with that, although naturally I’d protested and finally got them to agree to a phased withdrawal period of six months; the planet no longer needed us. The officers and men we’d trained could take over, aided by the men and women who had formed ties to Svergie and would be resigning from the Legion to remain on the planet. There had been some dark mutterings about traitors, but I had squashed them. If some of us had found a new home on the planet, more power to them. I doubted that I would ever consider Svergie home.

“Indeed?” I asked, coldly. It was easy to allow her to lead me into a private room. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Suki said, biting her lip. It made her look absurdly young. Suki, like most others who had fought on the losing side, had been granted amnesty, but she was damn lucky she hadn’t encountered Peter, or Muna. Peter wanted to tear off her head and shit down her neck. Muna just wanted her dead. The planet would probably be spending the next few hundred years settling scores after the civil war, then settling new scores created by settling the first scores...I rather suspected that several thousand people were likely to take a new boat and move out to settle one of the empty continents. “I didn’t know what the Freedom League was like.”

“We took you in,” I said. I heard the betrayal in my voice. Suki flinched back as if I’d slapped her. “We gave you a home, a purpose, training… and you decided to throw it all away for the Freedom League.”

She showed, for the first time, a flash of anger. “You weren’t there at the end,” she snapped, angrily. “You didn’t see how that bitch pushed my father into authorising the final assault on New Copenhagen, or how they tried to take control of the entire war effort, or… you don’t know what they’re like.”

“I’ve seen their handiwork before,” I said, tiredly. Outside the private room, the delegates were cheering the end of the war and the beginning of a new era. Their jubilation would last only until they realised that building a new world would take time and effort, but for the moment they were happy. “You betrayed us, Suki. How do you expect me to look past that? No one can ever trust you again?”

“I know,” she said. “I knew what I was doing when I went into it. I’m sorry and that’s all I have to say to you.”

She marched past me, opened the door and stepped outside. I expected her to pause and deliver a final crushing retort, but instead she closed the door behind her and vanished into the crowd. It was hard to feel sympathy for her, I decided, even though part of my body was making a very urgent argument to forgive her. She had made her own bed and now she could sleep in it — alone. I shook my head and headed out of the room myself, over to the President’s wheelchair. He looked up at me and smiled.

“Thank you for everything,” he said. His voice was weaker than I remembered, but he was definitely recovering from the sniper shot — it felt like years ago now, instead of nine months. “I’m just sorry that we couldn’t keep you and your men around for longer.”

We shared a wry smile. I had the feeling that he, at least, knew who I was truly working for and why, but he wouldn’t share it with anyone. He’d grown into a statesman the hard way, just as Frida had grown into a stateswoman herself. He knew what most of the politicians in the room preferred to forget; power came with costs and sometimes those costs included lives. It was something that many people never learned.

“It’s not a problem,” I assured him. It wasn’t as if the Legion was going to be short of work, even if we had been a common mercenary army rather than one of Fleet’s more covert operatives. “Do you think that the peace will hold?”

“Oh, I imagine that it will,” the President said. “Now you’ve broken the power base that kept people trapped in the cities, using them as tame voters, the planet can settle down to a more reasonable developmental pattern. We might even seek outside investment that we can use to build a space industry. The possibilities are endless.”

“I suppose they are,” I said, catching sight of one of the former POWs on the other side of the room. One non-negotiable condition of the peace treaty had been the immediate return of all POWs; ours and theirs, and Ed and his men had returned to us. The farmers had kept them well-separated from the Freedom League, which was something we owed them for; the Freedom League had apparently wanted to interrogate them heavily. “Good luck.”

“You too,” the President said. “And know that you have the thanks of a grateful population and government. If there’s anything we can ever do for you…”

“We won’t hesitate to ask,” I assured him. There was no longer any reason for me to stay at the conference hall, so I nodded goodbye and waved to Peter. “Coming?”

The ride back to the spaceport passed quickly.

Day followed day as we prepared to depart. The officers who had been promoted in the wake of the Battle of New Copenhagen were put through their paces, helped — this time — by a growing officer corps native to Svergie. The Drill Sergeants Russell and his men had picked out were given responsibility for basic training and watched like hawks until they had proved themselves. Training was finally moved to a training field on the other side of the main continent, leaving the spaceport and the barracks we had created feeling slightly empty. It was the end of an era.

“We can replenish most of what we lost from local supplies,” Muna assured me, one evening. Perhaps she felt the same way too about leaving, but she had no ties to Svergie to keep her here, unlike the men who had gotten married in the last few months. We’d be down nearly four hundred men when the dust finally settled, but we could get replacements for them fairly easily. Quite a few Svergie men had volunteered to remain with the Legion rather than stay on the planet. “We only really need to pay for the new shuttles and UAV craft.”

“Make out a list of stuff we can purchase and we can pick it up from Heinlein,” I said. We’d be swinging through the Heinlein System after we departed anyway. “They should be able to meet most of our requirements.”

My earpiece buzzed before Muna could answer. “Sir, this is Thomas down in dispatch,” a voice said. “A Fleet battleship just entered the system and her Captain has demanded that you come onboard personally.”

“Understood,” I said. I knew who had to be onboard that ship. I also knew that delay would merely irritate Fleet. “Tell them that I’m on my way.”

There were only ever three battleships in existence and one of them was destroyed at the Battle of Earth, during John Walker’s coup. The UN had built them as prestige craft for the high-ranking Admirals, wasting resources that could probably have been used to build a dozen cruisers for each battleship. The Percival Harriman was an impressive vessel — I wouldn’t have doubted that — but it was wasteful . Fleet had kept the two captured battleships, but they hadn’t bothered to build more. What could one battleship do that a dozen cruisers could not — and more besides?