I reported back onboard, checked my assignments in the duty roster, and then went straight to my cabin. I hadn’t missed the Ensign’s wardroom since I’d boarded the Devastator, but I missed it now. With five others around me, I couldn’t afford to brood for long, but on my own… I tried to sleep, but it wouldn’t come. Even when Kitty came to welcome me back onboard personally, I tried to push her away. How could she even bear to look at me? I couldn’t live with myself!
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said, when I had finally confessed. We’d tried to make love, but somehow I found myself impotent. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything so normal as having sex with the girl I loved. Even her mouth couldn’t convince my body to cooperate and rise to the occasion. I couldn’t even play with her without feeling unworthy. “You didn’t know what you were doing, did you?”
“It’s always my fault,” I protested. I’d told her about the escaping conscripts I’d caught when she’d revealed that she was a member of the Brotherhood, but they too still haunted my dreams. Had I condemned them to a life of hell, or had they merely been killed when they reached Earth, just for trying to escape servitude? “I didn’t know what I was doing, but it was my fault!”
“How?” She asked, reasonably. One hand pulled my hand to her naked breast, but I couldn’t respond. “If you didn’t know what you were doing, how is it your fault?”
“I called in the shots,” I protested. “I…”
“And Anna fired the weapons,” Kitty snapped. Her voice grew harder as her face darkened. “Oh, and the Specials protected you so that you could commit murder. And the General launched the attack that led to the use of KEW pellets against a defended town. And the UN General Assembly ordered the invasion in the first place. And the insurgents decided to make a stand where there were children to be killed by the bombardment. And Heinlein refused to comply with the UN Resolution. Who is really to blame?”
“But what’s the point?” I asked, desperately. I pulled my hand off her breast and waved it in front of her. She caught it and returned it to her breast. “There’s blood on my hands.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Kitty repeated, angrily. I saw her face flush with anger, and grief. “Would you like me to beat hell out of you to prove it? Would you like to go visit the Marines and call them vacuum-suckers to their faces? John…it was not your fault!”
I shook my head slowly. No amount of physical pain would atone for what I’d done. “I still feel that I’m to blame,” I said, slowly. My next words were a cry of pain. “Why can’t we do something, Kitty?” I held her eyes. “What’s the Brotherhood for if we can’t do anything to stop this from happening?”
Kitty gave me a humourless smile. “You’ve seen the communications system,” she said, coldly. She’d taught me how to use it two weeks after she’d made contact with me. “Do you think that we could organise a mutiny without someone with big ears catching wind of it?”
That brought me up short. The Brotherhood existed in the fringes of the UNPF computer network, but it was impossible to be really sure to whom you were talking. It was a security measure — I only knew two other Brotherhood members personally — and yet, it made it impossible to coordinate operations. Kitty had suggested, in all seriousness, that the Brotherhood was actually run by officers like Captain Harriman, men too smart to believe the UN’s lies, yet men with a stake in keeping the system.
“No,” I admitted, miserably. If we tried, and failed, we’d spend the rest of our short and miserable lives in a Luna prison. The odds would be hugely against success. I didn’t even know how many members of the Brotherhood were at Heinlein. “But we have to do something.”
“Like what?” Kitty asked, dryly. Her voice became sarcastic as she pushed me away. “Will you use Devastator to bombard our own positions on the surface?”
I flinched at the thought. I hadn’t liked the Infantry, but there were the Specials… and Roger. How could I kill them? She was right. Even if I somehow gained control of the monitor, what could I do with her? The other UNPF starships would blow us out of space if we started bombarding UN positions on the surface.
“I wish… I wish that things could be different,” I said, bitterly. I reached for her and pulled her into my arms. She held me tightly while I sobbed, like a newborn child. “Why can’t we do anything about it?”
It was a day later when I was summoned in front of the Captain. I hadn’t spoken to him alone in weeks, not since I’d passed muster as a watch commander and entrusted with the bridge in the wormhole. He didn’t look happy as he stared at a datapad in front of him. I knew, ahead of time, what it was. It was the only avenue of protest open to me.
“Lieutenant,” he said, gruffly. His face didn’t look welcoming. “What exactly is this nonsense?”
His tone didn’t inspire me, but I pushed on regardless. “My official report on the incident on the surface, sir,” I said, carefully. “It’s also a request that the firing patterns be investigated and the officers on the ground brought before a War Crimes Tribunal.”
Captain Shalenko glared down at the datapad for a long moment. “I can see that,” he said, finally. I’d written the statement in a blaze of white hot anger, but now I was starting to wonder if it had been wasted. “Why do you believe that it was a war crime?”
“Sir…” I hesitated. “Permission to speak freely?”
“Granted,” Captain Shalenko said, icily. “This had better be good.”
I took a breath. “The forces on the ground insisted on a scatter-pattern shot over the local town,” I said. I still didn’t know the town’s name. I’d tried to look it up, but the only notation in the ship’s computer files had been a grid reference. “The entire town was devastated and almost all of the inhabitants killed, including over seventy children in their preteen years. That is a war crime, one committed by forces adhering to the United Nations Declarations on the Laws of War…”
“Don’t cite chapter and verse at me,” the Captain snapped. “Why do you believe that it was a war crime?”
“We killed children,” I said, horrified. “How could they have been insurgents?”
“There are children down on the planet who have proven to be remarkably good shots,” the Captain mused. “I say again, John; why do you believe that…incident to have been a war crime?”
I stared at him, disbelieving. “We killed them,” I said, finally. “I killed them.”
“The Laws of War, as you should know from the Academy, specifically forbid strikes against civilian populations unless authorised by the proper authority,” Captain Shalenko said, calmly. “A civilian population is deemed as one that is not in rebellion against the United Nations. By turning their town into a strongpoint, the insurgents made it a legitimate target under the laws of war. The General commanding was quite within his rights to call for a strike and we had no grounds to refuse.”
He held up a hand before I could speak. “We all have moments where we see the costs of war and think that we have paid far too much,” he said. “We also have moments when we come face to face with the barbarity of the enemy and realise that they have to be stopped, no matter what the cost. The people on the ground chose to use their children as human shields to prevent us from attacking…and, if we had chosen to allow them to deter us, we would have lost far more men in the future. Your complaint will, if you wish, be forwarded, but I am telling you now that it will not be heeded and no action will be taken. There are no grounds to take action.”