Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Thirty-Two

“There’s going to be a protest march today,” Suki said, as we drove into New Copenhagen. There was a definite feel of tension in the air. “It was on the news; the Revolutionary Front Against Forced Contraception intends to march up to the government buildings and back down to the schools to claim that there is no public support for the emergency contraception legislation.”

I shrugged. I had known that it wouldn’t be popular and it had apparently cost most of Frida’s political capital to get the measure through, even with emergency powers. The government paid mothers to have kids — that wasn’t how it was presented to the public, but that’s how it was — and mothers wanted kids to get that money. They didn’t want to be told that the price for receiving government-issue rations and even benefits was having a contraceptive shot that would prevent them from having any more kids for at least two years. In their place, I’d probably have been unhappy too… or maybe I’d have got on my bike and looked for work. If the UN had done something like it on Earth, perhaps the entire system wouldn’t have fallen apart when they lost their ability to hold the Colonies.

“They don’t have a choice,” Muna said, harshly. She’d come with me to brief Frida on our logistics problems, but she seemed to have little sympathy for the protestors. “There are thousands of orphan kids on the streets. Let them adopt them if they want children and bring them up properly. They don’t have to have a kid of their own body.”

Suki gave her a surprised look, but I understood. Muna couldn’t have children herself any longer and, to all intents and purposes, the Legion was her family. She would see the entire issue in terms of costs and benefits and would understand that the more urban children, the greater the strain on the planet’s resources. I agreed with her, but it was a worrying development; so far, we’d avoided yet another outbreak of urban terrorism. This could be the issue that set off another round of bitter fighting.

“I used to think that I’d have twenty kids,” Suki said, finally. “Is that really so bad?”

“Every single kid in a city is a non-productive leech,” Muna said. Her voice was very cold and bitter. “The earliest they can do reasonable amounts of work is fourteen, or thereabouts, and this planet forbids them from working until they’re sixteen. That’s sixteen years of food, drink and resources being drained away, for nothing. It may not get any better after they turn sixteen; they’ve never been taught anything useful, anything that might give them a profession. That leaves them good for nothing, but brute labour, which this planet already has a surplus of.”

Her voice hardened. “And while they’re drinking to forget their sorrows and taking drugs to dull the pain, they’re knocking up girls and starting the whole cycle of hopelessness all over again,” she snapped. “If it isn’t nipped in the bud, it will consume everything until the city collapses in on itself.”

I nodded when Suki looked at me. The same pattern had repeated itself on Earth, where the UN had rewarded being unemployed… and, in any case, unemployment rates had hovered around eighty percent even before John Walker’s coup. The cities had been occupied by gangs of thugs who fought wars amongst themselves and terrorised the local population, while the police had stood by and watched. I had escaped it by the skin of my teeth and countless others hadn’t been so lucky.

“It’s monstrous,” Suki said, finally. I guessed from her tone that I wasn’t going to see her naked again for a while, but I hadn’t had the time anyway over the last few weeks. Between watching for the other shoe to drop after the UAV had been shot down and waiting for the farms to start producing food crops, I hadn’t had the time to rest, let alone enjoy myself. “How many women will never have kids because of it?”

I said nothing as the car turned the corner and drove past the beginnings of the demonstration. There were hundreds of men and women there — mainly women — carrying placards that started out as rude and went downhill from there. They seemed to be willing to believe the worst of Frida; the kindest thing they called her was a traitor. There were nasty suggestions about what she intended to do in the future, snide remarks about her relationship with me, and even vile slanders suggesting that she intended to make people pay to have the contraceptive injection nullified. The last one was definitely nonsense. In a year or two, it would wear off completely.

And the worst of it was that many of the protesters would never live without government benefits. They would never have children now. They could have put the energy they put into protesting into farming — we’d be quite happy to provide them with a farm of their own, sooner or later — and they might even have a family out in the countryside, away from the many pitfalls of the city. They chose, instead, to suck on the government teat and ensure, by doing so, that the government was permanently short of money. No wonder that Frida had attempted to tax the farmers… and no wonder that they’d resisted. They knew the likely outcome as well as I did.

“Here you are,” Suki said, as we drove into the government complex. “I’ll wait for you here.”

Muna and I walked inside, passed through the nervous guards, and entered the waiting room. “I don’t think she likes me very much,” Muna said, dryly. “You do know that there’s no choice, don’t you?”

“I know,” I reassured her. I could do the maths as well as she could. The planet was heading for disaster unless we could force it off the failure path. The contraceptive program, as harsh and cruel as it was, was a step in the right direction. “There’s no choice at all.”

Frida looked tired and worn when we were finally shown into her office. Her scar looked more prominent on her face than before. “General, Captain,” she said, with a thin smile. “I don’t have as much time as I thought — I’m supposed to be away from here by the time the protestors arrive — so shall we cut right to the meat of the matter?”

“Of course,” I said, seriously. “Muna?”

Muna coughed and folded her dark hands on her lap. “The food rationing program is holding up so far,” she said. She’d been tasked with handling it because few locals could be trusted to do so. Everyone and his dog wanted extra rations and they’d found all kinds of ways to pressure the government into feeding them. “There has been a slight drop in the number of people claiming food rations as they’ve gone out to the new farms, but otherwise numbers remain fairly consistent.”

She smiled, reciting from memory. “There has actually been a slight economic boost as a result of the program,” she added. “It’s too complex to analyse here, but items that are not rationed cost considerably more than items that are rationed, pushing people into spending money on other goods. This has led to a slight rise in sales and several hundred additional jobs being created. That is actually separate to work crews clearing the rubble from the streets, here and in Pitea, and other make-work programs, which are actually net drains in some ways. Unfortunately, we have no choice, but to rely on them.

“The attempt to rebuild the damaged or destroyed industrial capability is running into problems,” she continued. I heard Frida’s muttered curse and fully shared it. “The Communists killed a number of the trained and skilled workers we need to rebuild the industry, operate what we have, teach new apprentices and generally be in several places at once. Again, we have no particular shortage of unskilled labour, but the lack of skilled labour is producing a major bottleneck. In short, I’ve pulled a number of skilled workers out to serve as teachers and training manages, but I don’t think we’ll see major results for at least another five years. We can repair the damage, but rebuilding Pitea is going to take years.”

Frida glared down at her hands. “Is there no way the process can be sped up?”

“Not easily,” Muna admitted. “The quickest way to speed up the process would be to hire labour from off-world, but that would be costly; Svergie, frankly, does not have a high credit rating or trustworthiness index. The fact that there’s a war on…”

“I understand,” Frida snapped. “The sooner we put an end to the war, the better. General?”

I nodded. “The current stalemate seems likely to continue for the next two years, unless something happens to upset the apple cart,” I explained. “Once we have the new farms up and running, we can either negotiate a peace treaty or move into the mountains and defeat the enemy on their own ground. The mere presence of the new farms will weaken our dependence upon the old farms — although we will have to remove most of the government inspectors, those who are still alive.”

“Of course,” Frida said, annoyed. Most of the inspectors had been killed by the farmers. Those who had survived were not keen on going out again without a heavily-armed escort and guns of their own. It hadn’t saved several more from a violent and unpleasant death. “We should just admit defeat, like that!”

She snapped her fingers. “You have little choice,” I pointed out, reasonably. “Your government lacks the support in the right places to carry out a UN-style restructuring, even if it would work — and I think we have established that it wouldn’t work. Once the new farms are up and running, I think you will discover that the farmers and miners are willing to discuss terms.”

“I hope you’re right,” Frida said, sourly. “I just got an earful from the Progressive Party Coordinator. He thinks that I’m betraying the dream and had the nerve to demand that I submit to a full self-criticism session. I told him to go to hell, of course; the mass of the Party supports me, not him.”

She looked over towards the window. The noise of the protest could be heard, faintly, in the distance. “That’s his work out there,” she added. “He was rounding up everyone who thought that the contraception program was a bad idea and getting them to round up the usual suspects. It won’t matter, of course; much of the party supports me, even though they don’t dare say so out loud. It would get them lynched like the Communists. The great mass mind of the Party would regard it as high treason.”

I nodded. I was not unfamiliar with such reactions. On Earth, it was illegal to engage in any form of hate speech — which was basically defined as whatever the UN wanted it to mean — and yet, many would have supported a more vigorous crackdown on the gangs, or religious terrorists, or people whose only crime was being different. It was just politically incorrect to say so. A mob might only be half as smart as the stupidest person in it, but it was still composed of people who could think — in theory — for themselves. They might, given time, learn how stupid the ideas they professed to believe in actually were.

The door opened and one of the Presidential Guard stuck his head in. “Madam President, the protest march is approaching the lines now,” he said. “You have to evacuate.”

“Yes, thank you,” Frida said, crossly. I got the impression she didn’t want to be driven out of her government’s headquarters, but I agreed with them. Svergie didn’t need another power struggle on top of everything else. If Peter had been here, he would have been urging me to go with her to safety. “Andrew, we’ll catch up later, all right?”

“Of course,” I said, standing up. “It will be my pleasure.”

The noise of the mob stuck us with full force the moment we stepped out of the building. I could see it in the distance, a tangled mass of humanity, advancing with all the inevitability of a UN battleship, or a force of armoured tanks. The handful of policemen and soldiers keeping an eye on the protest seemed pitiful compared to the howling fury pent up within the snarling fury the mob was expressing. Their rage was almost a palpable thing and I shivered. I had seen soldiers swarmed under and crushed by such a mob and I had no wish to go the same way.

Muna’s hand caught on to mine. It was so out of character for her that I was astonished, but her face was as pale as it ever got. “We need to get out of here, sir,” she muttered, desperately. She was shaking like a leaf in a howling gale. “Sir, we have to get to the car.”

“Come on,” I said. Suki had already revved up the engine and was waiting for us impatiently. Not for the first time, I cursed the agreement that had put control over security in the capital in the hands of a wholly-Svergie unit. I could have contacted the spaceport and demanded reinforcements, but what good would it have done? I helped Muna into the rear and slipped into the jeep’s passenger seat, one hand reaching for the pistol I kept on my belt. “Suki, we’d better get moving.”

“Way ahead of you,” Suki growled, spinning the jeep around and taken off like a bat out of hell. Behind us, the mob reached the gates and spread out around them, howling slogans into the air. Their words all seemed to merge into an eerie cry of CHILDREN, CHILDREN, sending shivers down my spine and chilling my very soul. There was little individuality left in the mob now, just howling animals. “Oh, hell.”

I saw them at the same moment she did; other rioters, running up to join the riot, or to try to suppress it. The entire situation seemed to have billowed way out of control — indeed, it had never been under my control. I keyed my earpiece, contacting the spaceport, and wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that the Svergie Government had asked for help. The riot seemed to have been carefully prepared; I remembered Frida’s comment about others in the Progressive Party trying to move against her, and I worried about it being intended as an attempt to unseat her. If that was the case…

“We’ll just have to deal with it when it comes,” I muttered, as Suki took us down the street fast enough to force oncoming rioters to jump out of the way. I’d thought I’d seen bad driving before, but Suki was treating the jeep as if it were a tank, complete with armoured covering. A handful of glass bottles smashed off our bullet-proof windows and shattered — it would take more than that to damage them — followed by more junk and debris. Behind us, someone had started a fire. I wondered about Molotov Cocktails for a second, and then pushed it out of my mind. I had to concentrate on staying alive.

“Boss, this is Robert,” my earpiece buzzed. The tone was sharp and very insistent. That didn’t mean good news. “Find somewhere safe to hide until we get the reinforcements into the city. There are riots breaking out all over. This is looking very bad…”

The jeep spun around a corner and right into a barricade someone had constructed across a side-street, barely wide enough to allow the jeep and a handful of other vehicles to pass. Suki snapped something in a language I didn’t recognise as men wearing dark clothes materialised around us and slashed at the tires, before pulling at the door and trying to open it. I drew my pistol and kicked it open, firing a single shot into the first man’s head. I saw him tumbling backwards and hoped that the others would see sense and run, but instead…

Suki grabbed my right arm and yanked it back, just as I fired a second shot, which ricocheted harmlessly into the distance. A moment later, one of the men knocked the pistol out of my hand and pulled me out of the car. I dimly realised that Suki had driven us right into a trap — on purpose — as I allowed him to pull me forward and kept coming, lifting my knee and kicking him right in the groin. He yelled and staggered, then collapsed as I slammed a fist into his throat. It had been too long since I’d fought for my life, but I’d drilled every day with Peter and the others on the spaceport. Part of me was almost enjoying it, somehow.

Muna had grabbed Suki’s neck and was making a valiant attempt to strangle her. I couldn’t remember how good Muna was as I lashed out at another man, who came at me with a club… which suggested that they wanted us alive. Not good. Anyone who wanted us alive probably had unpleasant plans for us. I snapped a punch right into his throat and sent him choking to the ground. I turned to face the next man, only to see that he was holding a stunner. I barely had a moment to catch my breath before he pulled the trigger and blue-white light sent me crashing to the ground.