Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason (36 page)

I stepped into the shuttlebay and looked at the infantrymen as they formed up into ranks. They were wearing desert uniforms, specially adapted to Botany, and looked very professional, except for their faces. They looked, male and female alike, looked as if they were being sent to their own execution after a show trial. Andrew was inspecting them, one by one, and making reassuring comments, but his heart wasn't in it. He knew, as well as they did, that most of them would not survive to be picked up in five years – if the UN bothered to send a transport to pick them up.

“I understand that you’ll be coming with us to pay your respects to the governor,” he said, once he’d finished the inspection and allowed the Sergeants to take over. “Are you going to be flying the shuttles personally?”

“I think that’s going to be done by their pilots,” I said, regretfully. I would have loved to fly myself, or given the task to some of the Ensigns as a reward for good behaviour, but Botany’s weather made flying dangerous. I understood that the UN’s engineers had tried to set up a space cable several times and discovered that the cable broke under heavy winds. “Are your men ready?”

“We’re going to be going armed, with loaded weapons,” Andrew said. He was probably expecting me to object – loaded weapons onboard shuttles into anything, but a war zone, were strictly prohibited – but I didn’t bother. I knew enough about Botany to be grateful for the precaution. “We have to load, but then we’ll be ready.”

“Good,” I said, checking the time. In five minutes, we would be orbiting the planet and the Captain didn’t want to stay very long. I couldn’t blame him. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone to pay his respects, but Botany was hardly a normal posting. “Shall we proceed?”

The first cargo of convicts had either killed each other or had been killed by the environment, as very few of them had survived to see the second group arrive, but the UN hadn’t been concerned. They’d just kept pouring more prisoners onto the planet, sometimes near the first group of prisoners, sometimes at the other side of the world, just to see what would happen. The convicts hadn’t been given much in the way of medical equipment, or even survival tools, but they’d discovered through experimentation that they could eat some – not all – of the planet’s vegetation. There were even oasis-like places where they could dig down for water. The smart and brutal ones had formed tribes, snatched as many female convicts as they could – the UN had ruled that convicts had to be dropped in equal numbers of males and females – and set up a social system that worked, barely. The tribes moved from oasis to oasis, hiding from the storms under woven tents and trying to eke out an existence under horrific circumstances. The truly horrifying part was that the UN hadn’t even bothered to sterilise the prisoners, which meant that children were being born on that hellhole, knowing nothing else. The tribes hadn’t forgotten their origins, but as time wore on, they grew better at wiping out the newer arrivals, or breaking them into the tribe. It was a thoroughly hellish existence.

The UN hadn’t cared. They set up a small garrison on the planet’s surface, which was staffed by officers and men who had offended someone in some way, but they hadn’t attempted to help the locals. It was questionable how many of the locals even knew of its existence. There might have been a handful of tribes orbiting the garrison, but there was little interaction between them, apart from a tiny amount of trade. The garrison staff were quite happy to trade food and supplies for women and as for the women, living in the garrison, even as a slave or a whore, was preferable to living out in the endless desert.

And then everything had changed. For reasons best known to itself, the UN had ordered a re-examination of every piece of survey data from barely habitable worlds, insisting that they be studied through new eyes. One bright-eyed researcher had spotted that Botany not only had vast amounts of silicon – something that could be found on hundreds of worlds, including Earth – but hints of something else, rare elements that were normally found in the asteroids. The UN had leapt at the chance to obtain a new source of supply and promptly sent in a mining team to extract as much as they could. One thing the UN had right – the amount they ruled on, I had to like those odds – was that planet-size mining was inefficient. The miners could only produce small amounts of ore, but it didn’t matter. The UN needed as much as it could get. The locals had objected to this despoiling of their home and low-level war broke out. The UN had finally realised that this might be a problem and dispatched Andrew and his Company to Botany to suppress the enemy. It wasn't going to be an easy task.

“Ready,” Andrew’s sergeant reported. “All present and correct, sir!”

Andrew raised his voice, pointing to the first shuttle. “Platoons A to D, load up,” he barked. He switched to the second shuttle. “Platoons E to G, load up!”

I’d seen Infantrymen on Heinlein moving as a disorganised mob. This unit moved with an easy grace and confidence that belied their destination, or what their superiors generally thought of them. They carried their assault rifles slung over their shoulders in a ready position, where they could grasp them at once if they were required. If the shuttle crashed somewhere on the planet, they should have enough firepower to cut through the tribesmen and escape, unless the tribesmen had similar weapons. The UN had apparently refused to give them anything beyond a handful of knives, but the files had been vague on just what they had. Andrew had assumed the worst and armed his men to the teeth.

I keyed my terminal. “Captain, this is Lieutenant Walker,” I said. “The shuttles are fully loaded and we’re ready to depart.”

“Understood,” the Captain said. I could hear the Pilot’s weather report in the background and rather wished I couldn’t. It didn’t sound good. “You may depart when ready.”

I boarded the shuttle, Andrew right behind me, and made a quick check of the men. They were all buckled in and waiting impatiently to depart, much to my quiet amusement. The Infantrymen on Heinlein had often neglected the simplest precaution and had to be babied through everything. I took the seat next to the pilot and watched him running through the pre-flight checks, taking special care with our transponder equipment. There was no one here to listen in on our conversation and, if something happened, we’d need the signal to arrange rescue. The Captain would find a way to rescue us, I was sure.

The shuttle’s drive spun up and we started to glide towards space. “Departing now,” the shuttle pilot said. “All systems functioning normally.”

I stared as we dropped into open space. All of the worlds I’d seen, from Earth to Heinlein and Terra Nova, had been a mixture of blue-green. Botany was a dull reddish-orange colour, like a desert seen from space. There was no sign of any surface water as far as I could see, although apparently there were times when it bubbled to the surface in places. The Australians had introduced water into the planet by dropping a pair of comets into the atmosphere, but most of it had apparently drained into massive underground caverns, rather than remaining on the surface. The garrison drilled a line deep underground to obtain fresh water for itself, but apparently the tribes lacked the ability to do that. It kept them permanently nomadic. The miners probably tapped into the same underground reservoir.

“Ghastly looking place,” Andrew commented. “Do you know that there are people who believe that Earth will end up looking like this one day?”

I stared at him. “No,” I said, in surprise. It seemed impossible. “Why do they think that?”

He smiled, darkly. “The atmosphere is growing more and more polluted,” he said. “This kills the vegetable life, which makes it harder to replenish the oxygen and even causes humans to develop illnesses. The icecaps are melting which pushes salt water further inland, killing more farmland. Worst of all, the corporations that have paid the UN vast bribes to avoid the environmental regulations have been having disasters as their overworked equipment starts to break down. The entire planet is dying and we killed it.”

I said nothing. I’d heard that there were problems, but nothing on such a scale. I wasn't even sure if anything could be done about it. The regulations already existed, but if they were being avoided on such a scale…how could anything be done about it? I wondered, vaguely, if the Captain’s family knew, if they were trying to do something about it, but there was no way to know. It was taboo even to suggest that something might be wrong on Earth.

The shuttle buckled slightly as it fell into the atmosphere, streams of superheated air surrounding it as it raced down towards the ground. I could see the mighty storms making their way across the desert, giant darker patches of moving sand that overwhelmed anything puny humans could do to counter them. The files had suggested, from the reports of a handful of anthropologists who’d gone among the tribesmen, that they’d started to worship their planet. It was no wonder. A sandstorm on the wrong place would be utterly lethal.

“I’ve got the garrison’s beacon now,” the pilot said, from his position. “We should be landing at the landing pad in thirty minutes,”

I leaned forward as the shuttle shook under the impact of a gust of wind. If I’d been out there without any protection at all, it would have sent me flying through the air, perhaps even killed me. A moment later, we broke through into clear air again and we could see the mining camp below us. It was an ugly mixture of glinting buildings and dust, flying into the air from the open mine. I suspected that the locals would regard it as blasphemy. What else could it be on a living planet?

“There’s the garrison,” the pilot added. “We’ve coming into land now.”

“It doesn’t look very secure,” I commented, as the buildings came into view. “Andrew?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Andrew agreed, slowly. “They told me that they used weather-control equipment to try to keep the dust storms away from the mines, but it only worked half the time, if that.”

I looked at him. That hadn’t been in my files, either of them. “It’s not commonly advertised,” Andrew added, seeing my look. “They used to use it on Earth to get better weather for farming. After a few years, they discovered that it only caused more havoc later on and banned it – too late. Botany, on the other hand, doesn’t have an environment to fuck up any further.”

A moment later, the shuttles came down to land and I saw the Governor and his men.

I took one look and knew that we weren't going to get on.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The position of Planetary Governor tended to vary wildly in importance. Some of them, particularly on worlds like Terra Nova, had vast powers and control of the UN Garrison to back up their decisions. Others, such as the Governor appointed to Heinlein before the invasion, had very limited powers and had to contend with local governments that resented dictation from Earth. The posts naturally became key magnets for greedy or corrupt men and the rewards were often great indeed. Those who prospered even found that the UN regarded them as experts on the planet in question and were consulted on all issues involving the planet.

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

“Welcomes to Camp Sand,” the Governor said. He had a voice that reminded me of a gang-member, a mixture of overwhelming power and confidence, underlain by the awareness that he didn’t control everything. I disliked him on sight. “I am Governor Rollins.”

“Lieutenant Walker,” I said, shaking his hand. It was soft and flabby. The man himself was grossly overweight. I didn’t understand how he managed it on a place where foodstuffs were always rare, but it was possible that some supply transport had dropped off thousands of MREs for the Garrison. “We’ve brought the…”

“Yes, yes, I can see that,” the Governor cut me off, impatiently. “Captain, I trust that your sergeants can allow Captain Ridley to lead your men to the barracks?”

“Of course,” Andrew said, a tight note of anger barely concealed in his voice. I understood exactly what he was thinking. This overweight governor held his men in contempt? “Sergeant Pascell; please see to it.”

We shared a glance as Captain Ridley led the soldiers away towards the barracks, which we could see in the distance. The entire garrison wasn't even fenced in, or encircled by walls, and even to my untrained eyes, it looked like a recipe for disaster. The Captain had looked surprisingly well-dressed; in fact, he’d looked too well-dressed. He didn’t look like the kind of man who’d been chasing tribesmen away from the mining equipment. I heard a noise in the distance and caught sight of a sandy-coloured beast, being led by the nose towards a watering plant. I couldn’t help myself. I stared. I’d never seen anything like it before.

“It’s called a Camel,” Rollins explained. I caught a glimpse of the man he’d once been underneath and smiled to myself. His enthusiasm was almost touching. “They were originally used by desert nomad tribes on Earth as they travelled the deserts, mainly because they didn’t need to drink as much water and could eat things that no human could eat. Back when they landed the garrison here, the first Governor ordered a few hundred of them shipped in and handled most of them out to the nearest tribes. They bred them and there are now thousands of the beasts wandering the planet.”

He paused. “Anyway, if you’ll accompany me…”

I didn’t see anything to change my first opinion of the garrison. It was little more than a collection of prefabricated buildings that had been dropped onto the planet from orbit and then carefully embedded in the soil. Most planets would have broken them up as they built new homes and offices from local materials, but Botany’s governors hadn’t bothered. It wasn't as if there was much to build from on Botany, apart from sand or stone. If there were other raw minerals on the planet, it would require too much effort to get at them.