Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter One

“I’m picking up the beacon from the spaceport now,” the pilot called back, from his seat. “We should be landing in seven minutes.”

I nodded, tensing despite myself. There was no reason to believe that we were flying into a hostile situation, or an unwelcoming committee waited with SAM missiles capable of shooting down a shuttle, but old habits died hard. I looked at the threat board, tracking the Fleet destroyer in high orbit and the Julius Caesar in low orbit, and smiled. The destroyer could have picked us off with its lasers, but Fleet was officially neutral on Svergie. The planet’s internal affairs were none of Fleet’s concern.

“Stand ready,” I ordered, checking the pistol I wore at my belt. The other members of the advance party did the same. The UNPF, which used to make use of my services, disliked people loading weapons in shuttles, but I got to make the rules for my own people and I saw no harm in it. Besides, it the shuttle was shot down and if my some miracle we survived, I’d prefer to have a weapon in hand.

“Nice countryside,” Sergeant Peter Henderson observed, from his seat. I nodded. Svergie was definitely a blessed world, which made all the oncoming war and violence ironic in the extreme. More human wars have been fought over resources than anything else combined. “No signs of actual fighting.”

I shrugged. “The last war never touched here as bad as Heinlein or Terra Nova,” I said, seriously. I’d reviewed all the files I could find after being hired by the local government, but the UN files were half lies and I wasn’t sure I could trust the local files any further. Fleet would have the most modern files, but they might refuse to share them with someone most of the senior officers would consider a mercenary. “They only fought an underground war without any serious battles.”

The spaceport came into view as the pilot ghosted us down towards the surface. It looked fairly typical, but then, most UNPF spaceport facilities looked as if they were designed according to a plan some military bureaucrat had drawn up in a safe office on Old Earth. It was massive, large enough to hold hundreds of thousands of UN soldiers, administrators and servants, but now it looked almost abandoned. The UN forces on Svergie had been pulled out months ago and most of them hadn’t been sad to leave. It had been a hard life on a planet where most of the locals hated them. I doubted that they had left anything, but a caretaker crew, if that. The local government might well have taken over the facility.

“We’re being told to land now,” the pilot said. I tensed again as the shuttle came down and touched down neatly on the ground. It had been a near-perfect landing, although the jokes revolving around shuttles and landing craft generally focused on a good landing being one that you could walk away from. Military humour; you had to love it, or go insane. “Sir…?”

“Power down the shuttle and remain here,” I ordered, as I pulled myself to my feet. Peter pulled a heavy assault rifle out of the rank and slung it over his shoulder. I wasn’t fooled. As casual as he looked, he could still have it ready for action in seconds, perhaps less. “Shall we proceed?”

The scent of the planet, mixed in with the smell of a military base that had been, until recently, operating, struck us as soon as we opened the hatch. I breathed in hints of flowers and ripe corn in the distance, then recoiled as the smell of burning fuel and even hints of burning flesh touched my nose. The reports hadn’t been clear, but the spaceport had clearly been targeted by the insurgents several times, using mortars to strike from a distance. I could see a handful of burned out vehicles in the distance, but otherwise… nobody moved.

“I’ve never seen a base unmanned before,” Peter said, lightly. I suspected he felt the same unease I felt. The sense of something badly out of place kept growing. It had kept me alive in hundreds of engagements and I had learned to listen to it. “There should be ground crews and soldiers on patrol, spacers down from the starships and entertainers wandering around, officers wasting time and…”

“It’s been abandoned,” Muna Mohammad said, tightly. She was my supply and logistics officer. She’d had a strange career in the UNPF before it had rebelled against the UN and renamed itself Fleet, but she came with strong recommendations from John Walker himself. I’d known John briefly while he’d been a mere First Lieutenant. “They’ve probably looted the supply dumps as well.”

“Contact,” Peter hissed. I grabbed for my weapon before realising what he meant and glaring at him. He looked unmoved. Peter had been with me for years and he’d forgotten more about the military than I’d ever learned. He said I was the best UNPF Infantry officer he’d served under, but it wasn’t much of a compliment. The vast majority of UNPF officers couldn’t have found their butts with both hands and a map. “Over there…”

I scowled into the distance and saw a dark figure waving to us. Normally, no one ran at the spaceport unless there was an emergency, but there was no one around to complain about the safety violation. We double-timed it over to him and stopped right in front of him. To do him credit, he might have looked more like a computer geek than a soldier, but he didn’t flinch. He wore the simple black uniform of Fleet, with the golden rank bars of a Commander, although not one in the chain of command. It had been a while since I’d brushed up on Fleet protocol, so I snapped a salute and wasn’t entirely surprised when it was returned. He wasn’t quite sure where he stood either.

“Welcome to Svergie Spaceport,” he said, as he led us into a conference room. It had air conditioning and a small drinks cabinet on the wall. I disliked it on sight. The senior officers on a dozen worlds had gotten together there, drunk freely, and then issued orders that made little sense in the cold light of day. “I’m Commander (Fleet Intelligence) Daniel Webster.”

“Fleet intelligence,” I mused. This meeting was starting to look rather unlike a coincidence. “Captain-General Andrew Nolte of the Legio Exheres, the Legion of the Disinherited.”

He frowned. “Captain-General?”

“Long story,” I growled. It wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with anyone who wasn’t already part of my community. Fleet tended to take a dim view of mercenary units like us, even though some of them regarded us as a necessary evil. “This is Peter and Muna.” I didn’t give their ranks. “I assume that you have a briefing for us?”

Daniel nodded. “I’m supposed to…”

“First things first,” I interrupted. “How much direct support can we hope for from Fleet?”

He frowned. “Very little,” he said. “It is imperative that no one sees our hand in this, directly or indirectly. We can probably send you orbital reconnaissance images from the William Tell, but Captain Price-Jones is one of the Captains less willing to violate the letter of Fleet Regulations. The Fleet Protocols are in effect.”

A tap on a hidden console brought up a map of the planet. “Svergie was settled, originally, by a Scandinavian consortium headed by the Swedes,” he said. “They put up most of the early funds and got the right to name the planet, although the Danes got to name the first real city — New Copenhagen. Yes, I know; very imaginative. The original settlement was restricted to people from Scandinavia and was largely a success; immigration picked up as the European Union collapsed into the UN. The global financial crisis forced the consortium to plead for help from the UN, which allowed the UN to get its hooks into the planet. Oddly enough, they only insisted on the settlers accepting Icelandic and Irish colonists and...well, it wasn’t a disaster. The stains blended together neatly.”

I nodded. The UN had blundered badly from time to time, forcing planets to take in ethnic groups that were fundamentally opposed to the first settlers. Persia, a planet settled directly from Old Iran on Earth, had been forced to accept a large immigration quota of Sunni Muslims from the Middle East. The results had not been pleasant. The largely Shia population of Persia had moved there to get away from the Sunni in the first place. Svergie had been lucky.

“Disaster struck around fifty years ago when the UN discovered that the planet had vast deposits of various vital minerals,” Daniel continued. “The locals objected to the UN attempting to assert further authority and rebelled. The UN fought back with Infantry and moved a few thousand miners onto the planet. They weren’t popular with the locals and the war got worse. To add to their woes, the UN was suppressing a rebellion in Indonesia at the same time and dumped several thousand Indonesian women onto the planet, along with their young children. I think the idea was that they would provide wives for the soldiers and miners. Some of them did, but others became prostitutes or worse. By the time Admiral Walker launched his coup, the planet was heading for a nasty crisis, which was barely averted by the UN’s pull-out. Even so…”

I nodded. “They wouldn’t have hired us unless they needed us,” I agreed. Svergie’s Government had offered vast inducements to hire us, which suggested either desperation or stupidity. I wouldn’t have bet on the latter. “What’s the current situation like?”

“Unstable,” Daniel admitted. He paused. “I’m going to have to lecture, I’m afraid.” I nodded impatiently. I have never met an Intelligence officer who didn’t like the sound of his own voice. “The Government was formed from the underground resistance, which claimed descent from the last legitimate government on the planet, before the UN took over openly. The President — you’ll meet him this afternoon — was the political head of the resistance and quite popular among the people. He’s also something of a statesman in his way. He convinced Fleet to keep the spaceport rather than trust it to any of his own people because… well, it was the cause of the greatest political fight since the UN pulled out.

“The President is the head of the Liberty Party, which used to serve as the core of the resistance,” he continued. “Now that the war is won and the UN is gone, it’s having something of a crisis of confidence; they used to unite everyone, but now the factions are becoming clearer and political consensus is being lost. The President couldn’t stop the trend and there are now several other parties competing for the voters. I don’t think that Liberty will win the next election, which is in six months.

“The Conservatives and Farmers Party is the most reactionary of the parties and basically serves as the mouthpiece for many of the older residents, although they don’t cross the line into open racism. They’re popular with the farmers, but less popular with the city-dwellers, not least because they want to force the underclass to work or starve. Fringe groups are even talking about developing a Heinlein-style government here and altering the franchise, or evicting non-Scandinavians from the planet.

“The Progressive Party is pretty much their exact opposite. They stand for universal franchise and an extension of state welfare benefits to as many people as possible. They’re popular among the underclass as they’re seen as the people who stand up for their rights, but they’re universally loathed among the upper classes. Their leadership includes people who were abandoned here by the UN and preach that everyone could have the kind of lifestyle people have on Earth. Unfortunately, they may be right.”

I snorted. The UN had told the Colonists that everyone on Earth lived in a state-run paradise from cradle to grave, a world where everyone was equal and all rights were respected. It was also complete nonsense. The UN had created an equal distribution of poverty.

“They’re trying to push through various subsidy bills that would force the farmers to sell at set prices, but they’re being heavily opposed,” Daniel added. “They’re having more success with education and training programs for young children, many of whom come from the underclass.

“The Communist Party is a more extreme version of the Progressive Party. They want to have everything owned and operated by the state and set up communal farms and other such nonsense. They’re smaller than the Progressive Party, but actually more disciplined and they’re training a militia of their own. I don’t think they can win an election, but if they share it with the Progressive Party… well, they can probably have a major impact on politics.

“And finally there’s the Independence Party,” he concluded. “They’re not a political party as such; they represent the interior and are seriously considering seceding from the remainder of the planet. They think that the next government will do whatever it can to limit their rights and tax the planet to death, so they’re plotting resistance and independence. If the Progressive Party wins the next election, they say, they’ll secede from the government. If that happens… the planet will either have a civil war or a split government, with all that that implies for their future. It doesn’t look rosy.”

“No,” I agreed. I frowned and dropped a name. “What does John — sorry, Admiral Walker — want from this situation?”

Daniel clicked the display until it became a star chart. “At the moment, Svergie is simply not very important in the Human Sphere,” he said. “The planet is actually quite far from Earth and… well, while it is closer to Williamson’s World and New Paris, it’s not close enough to make shipping easier — now. Fleet’s projections are that interstellar trade will actually increase in this sector over the next twenty years and Svergie will be in line for a share of the benefits, if they have a united government. Chaos in this sector, on the other hand, will lead to Svergie being isolated or even dampen the development of the entire sector.”

Muna was nodding. No shipping line in their right mind would have a starship come out of its wormhole in interstellar space. Modern drives weren’t as prone to burning out as some of the early designs, but it still happened and being stranded in interstellar space would mean certain disaster. Svergie would definitely benefit from increased interstellar trade, but only if there was a united government in place to deal with the Merchant Guilds and the shipping lines. Without one, the shipping lines would be able to name their own terms.

“On a different note,” Daniel added, “we believe that the Independence Party has some links with off-world groups. The Freedom Alliance never went away and they’re currently opposed to what they call Fleet’s hegemony. They may be linked with the Independence Party, or it might be another government attempting to spread chaos, or even someone working for the shipping lines. There’s no clear proof yet, but if we find it…”

I nodded. John Walker hadn’t made many mistakes in his coup, but one of them might come back to haunt him. He’d dictated terms to governments in a manner that would certainly cause resentment, even hatred. Fleet was still the strongest military force in known space, but it had limits, not least the lack of any major ground-combat force. The Marines couldn’t take and hold an entire planet. He had also agreed to leave internal planetary affairs strictly alone. Whatever happened on Svergie, Fleet couldn’t be seen to interfere.

“I understand,” I said, without demur. The planetary government had hired me, not Fleet. Fleet couldn’t be blamed if something went wrong, although I was still unsure of what the planetary government wanted from me. I decided to ask. “Tell me something. Do you know what they hired us for?”

Daniel shrugged. “Not directly,” he admitted. “The general theory held by Fleet’s analysts on the William Tell is that the planetary government wants you to serve as a deterrent to the Independence Party, although a minority opinion says that they want you to take out the Independence Party, or even support the Progressive Party.”

“We do have minds of our own,” Peter protested.

“Hush,” I said. I couldn’t dispute his logic. I was even rather insulted that someone would see us as nothing more than guns for hire, even if I wanted them to see us as mercenaries. “What does Fleet think is going to happen here?”

“The Progressive Party may well win the next election,” Daniel said. “If that happens, they will probably push ahead with their program… and push the planet into civil war. The analysts have simulated the war extensively, despite our limited knowledge, and they’ve concluded that the most likely outcome will be absolute chaos. I doubt that the planet could afford two nations on one continent. We’ll be looking down from orbit at mass slaughter.”

“Like a dozen other worlds,” Muna said, coldly. “What makes this one so special?”

“Nothing,” Daniel said. “Our hands are tied, legally. We cannot interfere unless one side breaks the Federation Protocols. Even so, it would be chancy. The current situation is so unstable that if Svergie were to go under, it might have serious repercussions for Fleet… and the whole Federation. The best we can do is give you what information we have and hope.”

He smiled, thinly. “Good luck, sir,” he added. “You’re going to need it.”