A Learning Experience

Chapter Thirteen

Shadow Warrior, Earth Orbit

“This ship is really unbelievable,” Jürgen Affenzeller said. “And you can do so much from up here?”

Kevin had to smile. He rather liked Affenzeller, even if he had been the person who’d seen through the cloak of secrecy and realised that something was up. It was a pity he worked for the DHS, yet with some careful nurturing perhaps Affenzeller could be convinced to switch sides and join the growing lunar settlement.

“Yes, we can,” he said, keeping his doubts to himself. “And just wait until you see some of the stuff the aliens can do.”

He tapped a switch, accessing the live feed from thousands of nanotech drones scattered across Afghanistan. The level of access was just unbelievable, so much so that he doubted he could even begin to analyse it all, even with the help of the ship’s computers. Each of the Taliban fighters lying in ambush in yet another mid-sized Afghani town had a tiny drone firmly fixed to his head, without any clue the drone was there. Even the larger models were far too small to be seen with the naked eye.

Piece by piece, they were putting together a picture of the enemy network that had simply never existed beforehand. Couriers were identified, tagged and tracked as easily as tracking wild animals in the jungle. Each of their conversations were recorded, then scanned for incriminating keywords. When certain keywords were used, a second flight of drones would be dispatched to tag the next group of insurgents and continue the process. It had only been two days since Steve and the President had come to an agreement, of sorts, and the Taliban were already on the verge of defeat. But they didn’t know it yet.

He made a face as he looked down at some of the other reports. There were local policemen who weren’t Taliban, but preyed on the people they were meant to protect without even the fig leaf of religious justification used by the Taliban. Some of them were simple thugs, others were drug addicts, rapists or even paedophiles. Kevin shuddered at one particular memory, then silently blessed the Hordesmen who’d brought the starship to Earth. The new settlement would never have to compromise with evil just to make progress.

And they hate us because we support one set of their enemies while claiming to fight the other set, he thought, bitterly. No wonder the Taliban sometimes looks better than the alternative. They actually have a nose for government, even if it is harsh and brutal.

It was worse, he knew. The Afghani Government was corrupt, so much so that nearly half of the foreign aid poured into the country had vanished into Swiss bank accounts. Most of the ministers were put into office based on who they knew, rather than the results of any election, and were more interested in feathering their own nests than helping to fight the Taliban. No wonder half of them were left carefully alone by their enemies. They were better advertisements for the Taliban than anything the insurgents could do for themselves.

Affenzeller coughed. “Sir?”

“I got distracted,” Kevin confessed. On the display, the drones had also carefully marked the positions of over five hundred IEDs. “Are they ready to proceed.”

“Craig says so,” Affenzeller confirmed. “He’s with the front line, ready to advance.”

Kevin nodded. Over the past two months, Coalition forces had steadily surrounded the nondescript town, trapping over three hundred insurgents inside the net. Naturally, the insurgents had prepared themselves for war, using the civilian population as human shields and press-ganged labour while they rigged their homes for demolition. And, with the human shields preventing the Coalition from simply bombing the town to rubble, the insurgents had an excellent chance of killing a few American or British soldiers.

Or so they think, he reminded himself. Let’s see how this goes.

He checked the location of the civilians again, carefully. The insurgents had pushed veiled women and children forward, using them to shield their positions. Kevin shuddered — if the women survived the engagement they would almost certainly be killed by their menfolk afterwards — and then keyed a switch. One by one, the drones attached to the insurgents reported back. Everything was in position, ready to move.

“Remote controlled warfare,” he muttered. “The dream and the nightmare.”

He cleared his throat. “Tell the Colonel that we will trigger the drones in ten minutes,” he said. “And then he should advance with care.”

Almena was fourteen years old and terrified out of her mind. Once, her life had revolved around cooking, cleaning and trying to learn as much as she could from her schooling, after the old restrictions on girls going to school had been removed. Now, she was a helpless prisoner, caught in the arms of a strange male. The school had been destroyed, her teachers had been killed, her brothers had been taken away and her life had become a nightmare. All she wanted now was for it to end.

She twisted, slightly, in the man’s grasp. He was older than her, wearing flowing white robes that were badly stained with something, perhaps human blood. He’d already told her that they would be married, once the battle with the infidels was over. Almena knew that he could make his promise — his threat — come true. She’d always known, from the moment she knew the difference between males and females, that one day her father would decide a suitable match for her. Her opinion would barely have been considered. But now… her father had lost his power to someone even worse.

He muttered something in a language she didn’t recognise, then slapped her head. Almena saw stars and almost threw up, only swallowing the urge out of fear of another beating. The man snickered unpleasantly, then pointed a finger towards the edge of the town. Out there, the infidels were gathering. Almena was almost as scared of them as she was of the men who had taken her town and destroyed her family. Even if she survived, what would happen to a girl without a family? The younger girls had whispered dark stories about girls who were thrown out into the streets. Almena had never wanted to discover if any of them were true…

The man holding her jerked, then let go. One hand clutched his forehead, then he staggered and hit the ground. Almena jumped backwards, almost tripping over the edge of her dress, unable to take her eyes off the twitching man. He convulsed once, violently, then fell still.

She looked up. All along the line, insurgents had fallen, their captives pulling themselves free. It was a miracle, as if the hand of Allah had swept down from the heavens and wiped out the infidels who were holding them prisoner, the infidels who would have forced the girls into loveless marriages for their own pleasure. Moments later, she heard the first explosions in the distance and scrambled for a place to hide. Maybe the infidels were coming anyway, but it no longer mattered. They could hardly be worse than the insurgents.

Finding a hole, she crawled into it and closed her eyes to wait.

Steve heard a faint whine as the drones moved forward, searching for IEDs. The quickest way to get rid of one was simply to detonate it in place, so the drones were vibrating the ground to trigger the weapons. Those that refused to detonate were marked down for later attention, while the advancing troops were steered around them. Inch by inch, the troops moved closer to the occupied town.

It looked fairly typical for the region, he noted, as they closed in on the edge of the defences. A large number of primitive huts and hovels, a handful of more modern buildings in the centre and a single stone mosque, rising above the buildings and gleaming in the sunlight. It had been used as an Observation Point by the Taliban, Steve knew, trusting that the American infidels wouldn’t fire on the mosque. But the ROE hadn’t saved the men inside. The drones had killed them the moment the command was given, leaving their lifeless bodies on the ground.

A chill fell over him as he realised what was missing. No one fired at them as they entered the town, not even a single shot. Most of the human shields looked to be in shock as they stared down at their former captors, others had probably grabbed weapons and fled for their lives. The Taliban had told them, Steve guessed, that the American troops would kill the men, then rape the women and children. They’d told the same story everywhere, hoping to encourage the locals not to cooperate with the Coalition. And, given the behaviour of some local policemen, the bastards might even have a point.

The chill grew stronger as he looked down at one of the bodies. There was a tiny hole in the side of his head, smoking slightly. His AK-47 lay beside him, abandoned and useless against an attack they hadn’t even seen coming. Kevin had been right, Steve told himself, as he looked up towards the mosque. The world had changed and he could no longer be the person he had been, when he had nothing to worry about but the ranch.

“Dear God,” Henderson said. “What have you done?”

Steve shook his head as he looked back at the body. “Opened a whole new world,” he said. “And a whole can of worms too.”

“You never spoke a truer word,” Henderson said. “Have you grown up a little now?”

Steve shrugged.

The afternoon was almost surreal. Normally, evicting the Taliban from a mid-sized town would take days of hard fighting, particularly if the ROE refused to allow close fire support for the advancing troops. But now, all that remained was carting out the bodies and then clearing out a handful of homes that had been turned into massive IEDs. The locals looked to have been reduced sharply by the insurgents; civil affairs teams spoke to the handful of male survivors and discovered that most of the men had been butchered as soon as the siege had begun. Steve wasn’t too surprised. The insurgents had only had a limited supply of food and the town’s menfolk, watching their wives and children starve, might have turned against the Taliban.

He watched a platoon of Royal Marines transporting bodies towards the mass graves, then looked up at the sun setting in the sky. Life in the village would never be the same again, even if the ones who had fled in time to escape being taken captive managed to return. The whole district had been traumatised, first by the Taliban and then by the Coalition’s counter-attack. Maybe they should just offer to take the women and children with them, maybe offering them a place to live on the moon. But it would be a problem when there were no quarters available for them.

“You’d better make yourself scarce,” Henderson warned. “The media is on the way.”

Steve sighed. At his request, the media had been kept away from the front lines, in hopes of keeping the secret a little longer. But they’d finally broken through the bureaucratic cordon and convinced the officials to allow them to move up to the town. Hell, with resistance crumbling so quickly, it was quite possible that they thought the Taliban was finally on the verge of breaking and wanted to be there when it did.

And it will break, Steve thought, bitterly.

But most of the men who’d died today weren’t the true monsters. They’d been pushed into fighting, either out of religious conviction or because they simply didn’t have anywhere else to go. As always, the true brains behind the terrorists and fanatics had remained out of battle, hiding on the other side of the Pakistani border. But not any longer, Steve told himself. The network of drones was already picking its way through the networks, isolating the true monsters at the heart of the Taliban. They were all doomed. They just didn’t know it.

He caught sight of a young girl, staring at him from the darkened entrance to a tiny hovel, her face no longer hidden behind a veil. It was hard to guess her age; in America, he would have confidently guessed that she was still preteen, perhaps ten at the most. But in Afghanistan, where so many children were malnourished and treated badly, she might well be old enough to marry by local standards. Her face was bitterly pale, her eyes fixed on his face. Steve felt a wave of pity, tinged with bitter helplessness. It was girls like her who had borne the brunt of the war, massively oppressed by the Taliban and then caught in the middle of savage fighting as the Coalition fought to shatter a grassroots insurgency. Somehow, he doubted she would survive the coming winter.

I could take her, he thought. It would be simple enough; walk over to her, take her arm and teleport them both to orbit. But what would happen then? But I couldn’t take them all.

He keyed his communicator. The girl vanished into the shadows as soon as she saw it, perhaps assuming it was a weapon. They’d recorded footage of the Taliban shooting their weapons randomly, purely for giggles. Or perhaps it had been intended to convince their prisoners that they were too irrational to be negotiated with.

“Kevin,” he said. “Round up a few volunteers for medical services, if you can find them, and send them down here. There are people who need help.”

“Understood,” Kevin said. There was an odd note in his voice. “Do you think that any of them are likely recruits? We could find space for a few dozen, if necessary.”

Steve swallowed, understanding — finally — the guilt he’d dismissed as a liberal delusion. He had so much and the locals had so little. He lived in peace; the locals lived in permanent war. His wife and daughter were safe; the women and children here might be married off against their will or simply raped, if the town fell to the wrong occupation party. And the American government, despite its flaws, was far better than anything the locals had produced or had designed for them. It was hard not to feel guilty.

“I believe some of them might be suitable,” he said. It was hard to know when everyone in the town had almost no practical schooling at all. “But others… others are unlikely to fit in.”

He sent a command to the interface. The teleporter activated and the world faded away in silver light.

Gunter Dawlish had had enough run-ins with the military bureaucracy to know when he was being fed a line of bullshit. As one of the veterans of freelance journalism — it was a point of pride that he didn’t take any regular pay from any newspaper or TV broadcaster — he’d heard enough spin to have a nose for it. And where someone was trying to sugar-coat a shit sandwich, it generally meant that someone had something to hide.

But what?

Gunter had gone to a great deal of trouble to be embedded with the 1^st Marine Division. It did have a certain element of risk — reporters had been killed in Afghanistan — but it also allowed him to earn respect from the soldiers, who were the true heart and soul of the war in Afghanistan. But without respect, they wouldn’t talk to him and most soldiers regarded reporters as the enemy. It was very hard to win their respect. Not being linked to any established part of the Mainstream Media did help, he knew, but so did bravery.

He jumped out of the AFV and looked around. It should have taken weeks, at best, to reduce the town’s defenders to the point where the Coalition could just walk in. Instead, it had taken barely an hour to take the entire town. There hadn’t even been a major battle, his sources had whispered, and the only causality had been a soldier who’d triggered an undiscovered IED… it just didn’t make sense.

The town’s remaining inhabitants were gathered at one end of a field, being tended by a group of medics and Civil Affairs specialists. For once, there seemed to be no attempt to hide the women, something perhaps encouraged by the shortage of males in the group. Indeed, the more Gunter looked, the stranger it seemed. The defenders seemed to have been wiped out… or had they fled? Had the military, having laid its plans for a great battle, discovered that its enemy had retreated and then claimed victory anyway? Or…?

He followed the soldiers out towards the mass grave and swore, sucking in his breath as he saw the bodies. The defenders had died, he realised, and clearly no one in the local community had felt like burying them, a clear rejection of their ideology. But what had killed them? Most of the bodies seemed strangely unmarked. Indeed, there seemed to be very few insurgents who’d died conventionally. It just didn’t make sense.

His imagination went to work. Gas? Something new and untried? But how could it have left one group untouched while others died?

Shaking his head, he removed his small camera and started to take pictures, then uploaded them to his storage site through the dongle his assistant in New York had procured for him. Sending messages through the military internet was always risky, particularly if they were trying to spin something into a victory. But the dongle seemed to allow him to bypass all of their precautions. And maybe a few people he knew might have an idea what happened to the bodies.

By the time they were escorted back to the base, he had half of his story already written in his head.