Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason (25 page)

I stared. I was looking at a walking mannequin, shaped like a nude woman with astonishingly large breasts. It was almost flawless. Only the eyes gave its real nature away. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I’d never seen anything like it before. It looked so realistic that I wondered if young men ever tried to have sex with it.

“Ah,” I said, finally. “What are you?”

“I am a Susan Calvin Corporation Mark XII Automated Drone,” she – I couldn’t think of her as an ‘it’, somehow – said. “I am the librarian of this library. Can I help you, sir?”

I couldn’t grasp the implications at first, and then I felt pure rage. While the UN kept its people in crumbling cities and helplessness, the Planet of Heinlein was so rich that they could afford robot librarians! The UN distrusted AI for all kinds of reasons and I wasn't sure that they were wrong, but surely…why couldn’t we have robots too? Or access to this treasure trove of information, or even political freedom? Why did we have to have Political Officers looking over our shoulder all the time? Earth starved, simply because the farms couldn’t produce enough food to feed the planet, while Heinlein…I would guess that life as a beggar on Heinlein was better than life in the inner circle on Earth.

“Yes,” I said, shaking my head. In the darkness, I would have mistaken her for a real woman. I wondered, with a near-giggle, if anyone got electrocuted trying to have sex with her. “Can you show me a good general history of Heinlein?”

“Of course, sir,” the robot said. She walked past me – I was captivated by the swaying of her ass, despite the growing sense of unreality surrounding me – and took a book off the shelves. “Here you are, sir. Is there anything else?”

I hesitated, and then took the plunge. “Do you do electronic texts as well?” I asked. “Something I can use on a UN-standard terminal?”

“Of course,” the robot assured me. “How many different formats would you like?”

I reeled again. The UNPF Academy used electronic texts as a matter of course, but they were so heavily protected that they could only be accessed on the library computers, apparently to prevent someone from copying them and distributing them on the deep Internet. The endless regulations had killed electronic books back on Earth, but here…she could fit an entire library on one terminal.

“UN-standard,” I said, finally. I knew that that would work on an isolated terminal and I doubted that I’d be allowed to take a Heinlein-grade personal computer, or would I? “Do you have electronic readers here?”

“Yes, sir,” the robot said. She leaned forward and this time I couldn’t resist. I reached out and touched her breast. It felt far too real. Her voice sounded real as well. “Please don’t do that, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, absurdly. “Please could you fetch me the reader?”

“Yes, sir,” the robot said. I was astonished. I’d expected a demand for payment, but instead…I was just getting it for free! “What would you like to have loaded onto the reader?”

“Everything you can,” I said. Even a UN-grade terminal had thousands of terabytes worth of data storage capability. I had a feeling that Heinlein would be capable of producing something more capable than the UN. “How much can you fit on?”

“The entire contents of the library database,” the robot said. There was a long moment as she returned behind her desk and pulled out a small reader, before passing it to me. “Enjoy, sir.”

I rolled my eyes and opened the book on Heinlein. It was harder to read than the prior book, simply because I lacked some of the background information that the book’s writer assumed I would have. I still didn’t know who Heinlein had actually been – the book sang his praises, but didn’t say much about him – but it did provide a brief overview of Heinlein itself. The planet had been founded by people who’d believed in Heinlein’s vision – I wasn't sure if they’d been contemporaries of Heinlein or if they’d come later – and had made it come true. It hadn’t all been wine and roses, but if the book was to be believed, it had worked better than the UN.

“Thank you,” I said, finally, and pocketed the reader. It was smaller than anything the UN had produced, which suggested worrying things about their military capabilities, and I could hide it easily. I thought about pointing others towards the library – I didn’t understand why it had been left alone, even – but I knew better. That would eventually bring security down on my head. “I have a lot of reading to do.”

The robot waved at me as I left. “Have a nice evening, sir,” she said. “I hope to see you soon.”

I was still laughing to myself when I boarded the shuttle to return to the Devastator.

Chapter Twenty

The UN’s position on rape is somewhat mixed, depending on the exact circumstances. On one hand, it’s a crime against the victim and all of womankind. On the other, there are times when it is accepted as a legitimate form of social protest, or even part of a working society. A young black man who rapes a white woman has the defence, assuming that he is ever brought to trial, that he is merely avenging slights committed against his race in ages past. A woman from a tribal society can be raped by her husband, after being married off by her father, and the UN regards it as part of their culture and therefore acceptable. The irony is that the UN has created perhaps the most racist community in centuries…and that is not unacceptable. The military principle of divide and conquer remains strong.

-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.

The books made fascinating reading each night, I discovered, as I lay in my cabin reading. I’d made the decision to tell Kitty almost as soon as I returned to the ship – I couldn’t have her wondering why I wasn’t interested in her any longer – and we read them together. I swiftly came to realise that reading them all would take my entire life-time, if not much longer. There were thousands upon thousands of books on the reader, most of them banned by the UN. I didn’t understand why at first, until I realised that many of them talked about revolution against legitimate authority. That was exactly the kind of thinking the UN wanted to suppress.

And they were part of humanity’s heritage. The more I wondered about it, the more I wondered why the library hadn’t been looted, or simply destroyed outright. Could it be that the Generals commanding on the ground hadn’t given the library any thought? As far as I knew, no such treasure trove of information existed on Earth…might they have completely missed its significance? Or, perhaps, the building had been off-limits and I simply hadn’t realised. There certainly hadn’t been any guards there to stop me from entering.

Or, perhaps, they wanted the library for themselves. I owned the reader and merely owning it made me feel like I had a privileged insight into humanity, even though very little had actually changed. The Generals might feel the same way, or perhaps they might even be considering using the library themselves, perhaps to advance their own careers. There was no way to know and, as long as no one knew I had the reader, it wouldn’t matter. If someone realised what I had, they’d probably report me, which would mean – at least – the end of my career.

“Then keep it locked at all times,” Kitty said, when I confided my fear to her. “As long as no one has any reason to go searching your baggage, no one will find it.”

The days passed slowly in orbit. The fighting on the ground seemed to fade away for a few weeks – long enough for the Generals to declare victory – and then it resumed with equal or greater violence. The resistance had clearly taken advantage of the pause to rearm and prepare new positions, because Lazarus itself came under heavy attack and the government compound in the secure zone came within an inch of falling. It turned out that the resistance had been using the sewer pipes under the city to gain ingress to pretty much anywhere and finally they risked a mass offensive. The UN only won by the skin of its teeth. The declaration of victory was never mentioned again.

I spent a brief week on one of the orbital stations, watching the native workers. It wasn't a good week. Nothing happened to me personally, but the natives watched us all sullenly and were compelled to explain everything at great length to their Infantry or Marine supervisors. The delays were not inconsiderable. The Infantry came from the inner cities and knew even less than I did about high technology. A set of defective components, when finally traced back to their source, turned out to have failed because the Infantry officers supervising the workers had forbidden them to include a certain chip. Their faces were carefully blank, but I was sure that they were laughing at us inside. It was hard to blame them.

And there were the damned reporters. The Captain had, I decided, found a subtle way to punish me for my attempt to report the war crime. I had already detested the reporters, now I hated them as well, reading their smug articles that bore little relationship to reality. Apparently, a million Heinlein insurgents had died in the last month of fighting, which struck me as rather unlikely. If we had killed as many locals as we claimed to have killed, we’d have exterminated the entire planet’s population several times over. It wouldn’t seem so strange on Earth, where there were billions of civilians living in cramped cities, but here it was just a sick joke. I didn’t even know why they’d been allowed to come on the invasion. They could have made shit up back home and no one there would have known the difference. Perhaps their enemies were hoping that the insurgents would dispose of them. Several reporters had been killed and another couple had been kidnapped for ransom, which had promptly been paid. The reporters were apparently worth more than the infantrymen. No one tried to ransom them.

And then there were the logistics problems. Devastator had been built for long-term operations and, in theory, we could have remained in the Heinlein System permanently, but in practice it wouldn’t work out that well. We needed food, fuel, weapons and other supplies and our sources were limited. After a near-disaster with a locally-produced KEW, we had become dependent upon supplies shipped in from Earth and more loyal systems, if there was such a thing. The Captain wanted me to square the circle without requisitioning more supplies from Earth, but it was impossible. The pre-invasion planners had claimed that we would be able to supply ourselves from Heinlein, but how could we do that when we couldn’t even trust the food? The planners had probably gotten rewarded back home for launching an invasion on the cheap, while we were short of all supplies and starving. I’d heard of infantry units using enemy weapons and ammunition because they were so plentiful.

It was a nightmare that never seemed to end.

I was on Deck Seven when I heard the screaming. Deck Seven was the main residence deck, including the Ensign’s Wardroom and the various sleeping quarters for Marines, Specialist Officers and the crew. Inspecting it regularly was technically part of Anna’s duties, but with her spending much of her time on the surface, the Captain had passed it on to me. It wasn't as much as a punishment as working with the reporters. Unlike some ships I’d heard about, Devastator wasn't commanded by a Captain who didn’t care about conditions in the crew quarters and everything was kept neatly in order. By long tradition, the crewmen bunked with whoever they pleased, but I had to inspect everything, learning where two lovers had become careless. The screaming, however, was unprecedented.

The deck clanged under my feet as I ran through the corridors into a smaller maintenance corridor. The noise grew louder as I turned through the corridor and stopped dead when I entered the supply room. A man had a woman firmly bent over the small workbench and was fucking her from behind. It took me a moment to overcome my horror and realise that Frank Wong was raping Ensign Gomez. Her screams proved that, if nothing else. She struggled, but couldn’t escape. He was too strong for her and she, unlike me, had had no training.

“Let go of her, now!” I snapped, reaching for Frank. Everything moved very quickly. I saw him pull out of her and draw back a fist to hit me, so I punched him in the side of the head. He staggered, but didn’t fall. My fist hurt, so I kicked him in the chest and sent him gasping to the deck. “Ensign, are you all right?”

Two crewmen and a Marine had appeared behind me. Frank was lucky that he was already down and out. Ensign Gomez was popular and their expressions promised bloody vengeance for her treatment. I looked at her and realised that she was shaking, trying to cover herself with the remains of her uniform, and looked away. A moment later, one of the crewmen passed her an overall and she pulled it on gratefully.

“Corporal,” I said, catching myself and remembering that I was supposed to be in charge, “take this piece of shit to the brig and throw him in, then stay on guard. Don’t let him talk to anyone until I’ve had a chance to speak to the Captain.”

“Yes, sir,” the Marine said, and picked Frank up by the collar. “Come along now, you fucker.”

Frank staggered out, half-dragged by the Marine. I watched him go, hoping he’d try to resist, and then turned to Ensign Gomez. She was shaking, holding her hands wrapped around herself, her eyes wide with fear. I touched her shoulder and she flinched back. Frank was luckier than he knew. If he’d still been there, I would have killed him personally.

“It’s all right now,” I said, as softly as I could. “He can’t hurt you any more.”

With a little help, I escorted her to Sickbay and handed her over to Doctor Choudhury. She was a small brown woman with an air of brisk competence and I trusted her completely. The Ship’s Doctor wasn't a commissioned officer, nor was she in the chain of command, and younger officers and crewmen had a tendency to talk to her about their problems. I hoped that Ensign Gomez would talk to the Doctor, even though she would probably have to talk to the Captain later. Frank wasn’t a crewman, worse luck, but a guest with powerful connections. I wished Anna was onboard. It would be so much easier if I could drop it all in her lap.