I stepped into the shuttlebay and looked at the infantrymen as they formed up into ranks. They were wearing desert uniforms, specially adapted to Botany, and looked very professional, except for their faces. They looked, male and female alike, looked as if they were being sent to their own execution after a show trial. Andrew was inspecting them, one by one, and making reassuring comments, but his heart wasn’t in it. He knew, as well as they did, that most of them would not survive to be picked up in five years — if the UN bothered to send a transport to pick them up.
“I understand that you’ll be coming with us to pay your respects to the governor,” he said, once he’d finished the inspection and allowed the Sergeants to take over. “Are you going to be flying the shuttles personally?”
“I think that’s going to be done by their pilots,” I said, regretfully. I would have loved to fly myself, or given the task to some of the Ensigns as a reward for good behaviour, but Botany’s weather made flying dangerous. I understood that the UN’s engineers had tried to set up a space cable several times and discovered that the cable broke under heavy winds. “Are your men ready?”
“We’re going to be going armed, with loaded weapons,” Andrew said. He was probably expecting me to object — loaded weapons onboard shuttles into anything, but a war zone, were strictly prohibited — but I didn’t bother. I knew enough about Botany to be grateful for the precaution. “We have to load, but then we’ll be ready.”
“Good,” I said, checking the time. In five minutes, we would be orbiting the planet and the Captain didn’t want to stay very long. I couldn’t blame him. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone to pay his respects, but Botany was hardly a normal posting. “Shall we proceed?”
The first cargo of convicts had either killed each other or had been killed by the environment, as very few of them had survived to see the second group arrive, but the UN hadn’t been concerned. They’d just kept pouring more prisoners onto the planet, sometimes near the first group of prisoners, sometimes at the other side of the world, just to see what would happen. The convicts hadn’t been given much in the way of medical equipment, or even survival tools, but they’d discovered through experimentation that they could eat some — not all — of the planet’s vegetation. There were even oasis-like places where they could dig down for water. The smart and brutal ones had formed tribes, snatched as many female convicts as they could — the UN had ruled that convicts had to be dropped in equal numbers of males and females — and set up a social system that worked, barely. The tribes moved from oasis to oasis, hiding from the storms under woven tents and trying to eke out an existence under horrific circumstances. The truly horrifying part was that the UN hadn’t even bothered to sterilise the prisoners, which meant that children were being born on that hellhole, knowing nothing else. The tribes hadn’t forgotten their origins, but as time wore on, they grew better at wiping out the newer arrivals, or breaking them into the tribe. It was a thoroughly hellish existence.
The UN hadn’t cared. They set up a small garrison on the planet’s surface, which was staffed by officers and men who had offended someone in some way, but they hadn’t attempted to help the locals. It was questionable how many of the locals even knew of its existence. There might have been a handful of tribes orbiting the garrison, but there was little interaction between them, apart from a tiny amount of trade. The garrison staff were quite happy to trade food and supplies for women and as for the women, living in the garrison, even as a slave or a whore, was preferable to living out in the endless desert.
And then everything had changed. For reasons best known to itself, the UN had ordered a re-examination of every piece of survey data from barely habitable worlds, insisting that they be studied through new eyes. One bright-eyed researcher had spotted that Botany not only had vast amounts of silicon — something that could be found on hundreds of worlds, including Earth — but hints of something else, rare elements that were normally found in the asteroids. The UN had leapt at the chance to obtain a new source of supply and promptly sent in a mining team to extract as much as they could. One thing the UN had right — the amount they ruled on, I had to like those odds — was that planet-size mining was inefficient. The miners could only produce small amounts of ore, but it didn’t matter. The UN needed as much as it could get. The locals had objected to this despoiling of their home and low-level war broke out. The UN had finally realised that this might be a problem and dispatched Andrew and his Company to Botany to suppress the enemy. It wasn’t going to be an easy task.
“Ready,” Andrew’s sergeant reported. “All present and correct, sir!”
Andrew raised his voice, pointing to the first shuttle. “Platoons A to D, load up,” he barked. He switched to the second shuttle. “Platoons E to G, load up!”
I’d seen Infantrymen on Heinlein moving as a disorganised mob. This unit moved with an easy grace and confidence that belied their destination, or what their superiors generally thought of them. They carried their assault rifles slung over their shoulders in a ready position, where they could grasp them at once if they were required. If the shuttle crashed somewhere on the planet, they should have enough firepower to cut through the tribesmen and escape, unless the tribesmen had similar weapons. The UN had apparently refused to give them anything beyond a handful of knives, but the files had been vague on just what they had. Andrew had assumed the worst and armed his men to the teeth.
I keyed my terminal. “Captain, this is Lieutenant Walker,” I said. “The shuttles are fully loaded and we’re ready to depart.”
“Understood,” the Captain said. I could hear the Pilot’s weather report in the background and rather wished I couldn’t. It didn’t sound good. “You may depart when ready.”
I boarded the shuttle, Andrew right behind me, and made a quick check of the men. They were all buckled in and waiting impatiently to depart, much to my quiet amusement. The Infantrymen on Heinlein had often neglected the simplest precaution and had to be babied through everything. I took the seat next to the pilot and watched him running through the pre-flight checks, taking special care with our transponder equipment. There was no one here to listen in on our conversation and, if something happened, we’d need the signal to arrange rescue. The Captain would find a way to rescue us, I was sure.
The shuttle’s drive spun up and we started to glide towards space. “Departing now,” the shuttle pilot said. “All systems functioning normally.”
I stared as we dropped into open space. All of the worlds I’d seen, from Earth to Heinlein and Terra Nova, had been a mixture of blue-green. Botany was a dull reddish-orange colour, like a desert seen from space. There was no sign of any surface water as far as I could see, although apparently there were times when it bubbled to the surface in places. The Australians had introduced water into the planet by dropping a pair of comets into the atmosphere, but most of it had apparently drained into massive underground caverns, rather than remaining on the surface. The garrison drilled a line deep underground to obtain fresh water for itself, but apparently the tribes lacked the ability to do that. It kept them permanently nomadic. The miners probably tapped into the same underground reservoir.