Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Thirty

The first convoy arrived at Fort Galloway without incident, apart from a handful of shots fired at the vehicles from a distance that killed no one, and I boarded the returning convoy for the trip back to the spaceport. The commanding officer of the convoy offered tactical command to me, but I was in no shape to exercise it and allowed him to remain in command, although I suspected he felt that I was looking over his shoulder. It was common in the UN to have an ‘observer’ who was really in command, but I didn’t work that way. Besides, I needed to sleep desperately and caught up as best as I could in the armoured car. The return trip, luckily, passed without incident and I allowed myself to wonder if we’d overawed the farmers, although I knew better. The farmers hadn’t misplayed their cards so far and they wouldn’t want to attack a heavily armed military convoy.

As soon as we returned to the spaceport, I went into my quarters, booked a meeting with the Acting President for the following morning, and went to bed. I was surprised, and not a little horrified, by how badly I’d taken the day at the fortress and seriously wondered if I was coming down with something unpleasant. In the olden days — only a few years ago — I would have been able to stay awake for longer, although back then I had only been responsible for a single Company. The UN had decided that I was too untrustworthy — read competent — for a regimental command, so they’d frozen my career. Botany had been meant to be a death sentence; instead, I’d survived and prospered. Now, I was in command of a larger army than I’d ever dreamt of commanding and was in charge of a war I knew we’d lose, unless we created a political solution. That was not going to be easy.

Muna met me for breakfast the following morning. She looked better than she had after her captivity, but her wince when she saw my face convinced me that I hadn’t managed to wash away all the stress. I’d shaved and showered, but evidently it hadn’t been enough to make me presentable. She took a seat and a bowl of gruel — the UN called it Standard Breakfast Ration One, but everyone else called it gruel, mainly because it tasted like damp cardboard — and sat opposite me. I would have liked to devour everything I could, but instead I had a breakfast MRE myself. Nothing destroys morale faster than watching a commanding officer devouring a luxury breakfast when the common soldiers are still on MRE packs.

“I was looking at the farming problem,” she said, once she had eaten about half of the gruel and washed it down with water. I was drinking a mug of UN-standard coffee. “We need to get more food quickly and there are limits to what the farms can provide even if they surrendered tomorrow and accepted the Acting President’s proposals without further objections. We need additional farms and we need additional foodstuffs. I think I’ve found the answer.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “How useable an answer?”

She smiled, rather humourlessly. “One we should have seen from the start,” she said. “Have you ever heard of the Cropland Potato?”

I shook my head. “I’ve eaten potatoes, but I can’t say I ever paid any attention to what kind of potatoes they were,” I said, finishing my MRE and pushing it aside. “How can the Cropland Potatoes help us?”

“Oddly enough, the idea came from the UN,” she explained. “Back when the sea levels on Earth started to rise, before the UN got so bloated that it couldn’t take any action at all, they came up with a genetically-engineered crop that they could seed everywhere to prevent further soil erosion, which was destroying their own croplands and reducing their food supply…”

“So they tried to steal it from the colonies,” I said. I’d seen it happening, although naturally only the upper classes on Earth had benefited from the exercise in interstellar theft. The sheer logistics of transporting enough food to Earth to feed every starving mouth boggled the mind. The UNPF had never been large enough to transport all that! “I know how it worked.”

“Anyway, they used the common potato as the base for one of those crops,” Muna continued, refusing to be diverted. “They came up with something that would grow very quickly, within a few weeks, and produce a crop every month or so. The plants don’t last more than a year and they had to reseed them, but they were edible by humans without many precautions.”

She shrugged. “They wouldn’t need any precautions here,” she added. “There’s nothing in the planet’s atmosphere that would be poisonous to humankind.”

I sipped my coffee, wondering if she was right. Earth was a special case in many ways; the UN’s attempts to prevent pollution had backfired badly, leaving the planet on the verge of a permanent ecological collapse. The introduction of a genetically-engineered plant was against thousands of UN regulations, but I could see desperate men and women deciding to ignore the regulations and pushing ahead anyway. The UN might even have approved their actions afterwards… no, I was definitely dreaming. The people had probably wound up being exiled to Botany.

“If the crop is so useful,” I said, carefully, “why didn’t the UN use it to feed the starving on Earth?”

“They did,” Muna said, dryly. “Those ration packs that the UN used to issue to everyone on welfare — which was really almost all of the population — came from possessed potato and a handful of other crops. The problem was that the pollution kept getting worse, quality control became a joke, and the supply of even modified potatoes started to fall.

“In any case, they can be obtained on several words,” she continued. “Erin, in particular, maintains a massive supply of them because the UN issued an edict that they were to do so for cultural reasons. There are a handful of others, but we could get them cheaply on Erin.”

I smiled, tightly. The UN’s belief that all cultures were equally valid and worthy of respect led to some appalling blunders. Having decided that the potato was the national symbol of Old Ireland — a nation on Earth that founded Erin, a colony world only a hundred light years from us — the UN had decreed that they were to have potatoes all the time… and there’s only so much one can do with the common potato. The UN in a nutshell; it must be sensitive and tolerant in the most infuriatingly insensitive and intolerant way possible. The Irish hadn’t seen the joke. By the time John Walker launched his coup, the garrison on Erie was up to seventeen divisions and was still losing ground.

“We’ll send the Julius Caesar to purchase enough to start them growing here,” I said, finally. “Once we fix the food problem, we might be able to fix other problems as well or at least win time for a political solution.”

“That might not be easy,” Muna pointed out. “If we feed the poor, they will continue having babies and put new demands on the food supply. I think we need to look at longer-term solutions.”

“I know,” I said. “I intend to discuss it with the Acting President this very morning.”

Suki — after greeting me with a kiss — drove me into New Copenhagen and, at my request, drove us through the riot scene. A handful of Communist prisoners, wearing yellow jumpsuits and shackles to prevent escapes, were working on clearing up the mess. The riot hadn’t done that much damage compared to the insurrection, but a few more of them would destroy the city. The people who had friends and relatives out in the countryside had already gone to stay with them, leaving the inner cities packed with the hopeless and the destitute. Frida had her hands full… and yet, her solution would only cause more suffering. It would have been easier if she were evil. I could have assassinated her without remorse.

Frida looked tired when I saw her, sitting behind a desk and signing papers after reading them. I guessed that she had never learnt to delegate her duties, or even work out what was urgent and what could be handled by a lower level. There were probably hundreds of people in the Progressive Party alone who were demanding the attention of the President, and who would be angry if she brushed them off with someone else. It might explain her distraction, I decided; the President, at least, knew what to put aside for someone else to handle.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said, softly, signing another sheet of paper. I read it upside down and realised that it was a contract for repairing the damage to the roads caused by the war. Another involved welfare benefits for those who had been rendered homeless by the Communists. She pushed the rest of the paper aside with a sigh of relief and looked over at me. “Congratulations on occupying the fort.”

“Thank you,” I said. I’d taken the time to skim through some of the local newspapers and hadn’t recognised myself in them. It read as if I’d taken the fort single-handedly without even a single soldier to back me up… and that the occupation was a decisive blow and the war would end tomorrow. They were both lies. “We need to talk.”

Something in my voice caught her attention. “We need to talk?” She repeated. “What do we need to talk about?”

“The war,” I said, flatly. I looked at her and was surprised to see how tired and worn down she was. She was being hectored by everyone who wanted a position or influence. “We need a political solution to the war or we will lose it.”

She stared at me in shocked silence. “We can’t lose the war,” she protested. “How can we improve the planet if we lose the war?”

“You won’t have to worry about that,” I said, dryly. “If the farmers win, they’ll be condemning you and most of your government to death.”

Frida ground her teeth. “Explain,” she said, finally. “Why can’t we win the war? We outnumber the money-grabbing bastards!”

“We don’t,” I said. “Counting recruits, police and militia, we have around ten thousand men who can reasonably be considered fighting troops. That includes, by the way, the Legion and recruits who have had just a week’s training. We have a small base of a thousand men who handle everything from supply and logistics to what little paperwork we have, but they’re not fighters. The vast majority of the people in the cities are not trained to fight and we don’t have the facilities to train them up to fight. If we used them as soldiers now, the result would be a massacre and probably atrocities on both sides.

“The farmers and miners have, between them, around three million men and women who have some shooting skills, all the equipment they could use and are spread out over a vast area,” I continued. I wasn’t going to mention the possibility of off-world help, not to her. Frida didn’t need to know that. “We don’t have the manpower to hold them all down without burning then out of their farms, which would be… counterproductive as you need the farms to produce food. Your census agents have been wiped out and I cannot provide enough protection to guarantee their safety. We can win any conventional battle unless they bring in some of the equipment they took from the UN — like tanks and armoured cars — but they don’t have to win themselves. They just have to not lose.

“They think you’re exploiting them for your own benefit — for the benefit of the cities — and they’re right. They can’t feed the expanded population anyway without expanding massively, which they don’t feel like doing because they think you’re going to legally steal the crops anyway. From their point of view, half the city population dying off in the next year isn’t actually a bad outcome. The remainder might feel more inclined to respect the farmers and their point of view.”

“That’s horrible,” Frida said, genuinely shocked. “We’re trying to make the world a better place.”

“But you’re trying to do it by force,” I said, as gently as I could. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing — and on the face of it, you are — but it’s simply unsustainable over the long run. When it collapses, as it will, you’ll have a nightmarish time rebuilding anything from the ruins of your planet, just as the UN is having problems rebuilding Earth. It might not actually matter. You and I will probably be dead by then.”

“But…”

I drove over her objections. “You have these elaborate schemes to fix the problems faced by the poor,” I said. “You’re giving them free education, free housing,, free healthcare, free welfare grants, free children’s benefits, free… well, free everything. Where is the money for them all coming from?”

Frida looked at me. “From taxes,” she said, surprised. “We do have a working tax base.”

“Not any longer,” I said. “You see, the programs you want are expensive and I did the math.” Actually, it was Muna who’d done the math, but I decided not to bring her into it. There was no point in exposing anyone else. “You can’t afford to pay for them. You’ll run out of money very quickly.”

“Then we’ll raise taxes,” Frida said, sharply. “Why shouldn’t the rich pay to help the poor?”

“Because you don’t have very many rich people,” I countered. “You will start raising taxes directly and indirectly, either though honest taxes or regulations with infinitive fines on them. This will push the cost of operating a business through the roof and businesses will start to close rather than pay you taxes for nothing. This, in turn, will put thousands more unemployed people onto the streets, increasing the burden on your welfare payments at a time when you want it sharply reduced. The fall in working businesses will mean less tax revenue and a spending crisis.

“All of this will be matched by a parasite bureaucracy, which will rapidly become corrupt and oppressive, and a parasite state of people who will vote for you in exchange for government largess. The costs of running the state will skyrocket at the exact same time your income is falling sharply. If you try to discard elements of the parasites, you will discover that their votes slip to your political opponents, some of whom won’t hesitate to take advantage of the situation and dispose you, taking power for themselves.

“At some point, probably within two years at the most, you will discover that your system has rotted away from the inside and that your aim of building a better society will have been replaced by trying desperately to stay on top, knowing that falling from such heights would destroy you utterly. You will, in short, have entered the same failure curve as the UN back on Earth, with two major exceptions. You will be unable to export your revolution because there is a powerful neutral force — Fleet — willing and able to prevent it. You will also be threatened by increasingly desperate resistance from the farmers and miners who might well succeed in toppling your government and imposing their own order on the chaos. By then, extremists will have come to power and they may commit genocide to obliterate the people they will blame for their misfortunes.”

I allowed anger to slip into my voice. “It’s happened before and it will happen again,” I concluded. “You can use the emergency powers you’ve granted yourself to prevent it from happening to your world, or you can continue this futile attempt to reshape your world and be crushed when it all falls apart.”

Frida stared at me. She probably couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d hauled off and slapped her right in the face. Like most people of her kind, she thought of soldiers as being robots, or endlessly obedient, and didn’t realise that we could think for ourselves. Of course we could; we analysed battles of the past to prepare, as best as we could, for the future. I’d studied politics ever since I’d realised that I’d picked up hundreds of political enemies. I knew what was going to happen… unless we sought to avert it.

“Very well,” she said, finally. I knew better than to take that to mean that she’d given in completely. “What do we do about it?”

“First, we start getting people out to the fields and preparing new farms,” I said. “We can probably use some of the Legionnaires who come from a farming background to help newcomers start work on the farms. We won’t aim for anything too ambitious, but there are thousands of kilometres of unclaimed land out there. We can develop it and force people out onto the land. That would not only boost the food supply, but keep people out of welfare.”

I paused. The second suggestion was the kicker. “I would also suggest that you insisted that everyone who went on welfare take a contraceptive injection,” I added. Her eyes went wide. “The price for going on welfare should be to refuse to have any more children as long as they’re a drain on the public purse. I know it sounds horrible, but you don’t have any other choice. An increasing number of children in the cities will only be a drain on your resources. You need to move them out to the countryside…”

She didn’t want to hear it, or the rest of the suggestions, but I pushed her as hard as I could and finally she agreed to a trial session. That suited me just fine. We’d make it work and then adapt the scheme to the entire planet. And if that didn’t end the war…

There was always the doomsday option.