“Not that much of a hardship in this weather,” I observed, thoughtfully. It was moving towards high summer and the temperature was rising steadily. “And what about the bar fights?”
Ed smiled, before remembering that he should look properly regretful. “The fights are always provoked by local gangs,” he said, confirming what I’d believed. “My men have given a pretty good impression of themselves and have sent several hundred thugs to the hospital. It seems that the local police can’t decide if they love us or hate us; one soldier rescued a woman from being raped and beat her attacker into a bloody mass. The Sergeants have been riding hard on the drinking and have prevented anyone from drinking too much, or using drugs while we’re here.”
I nodded. It wasn’t against regulations to drink, but being unfit for duty was a serious offence and I wouldn’t hesitate to order anyone foolish enough to report for duty drunk to run the gauntlet. It was something that people decried as barbaric, but discipline had to be maintained. There had to be both regulation and the demonstrated willingness to punish breaches of the regulations.
“We’re probably going to start losing our edge soon,” he concluded. “I’d be happier if we had someone to fight.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” I said. “Muna. You’re up.”
Muna nodded tightly. “I’ve been conducting an industrial and economic survey of Svergie,” she said, tapping the map I’d placed on the window with one dark finger. “The results have been interesting and I’ve placed a full report in the computers, but for now I’ll just give you the highlights. Svergie is not a modern economy, but roughly at 1985-2020 levels. That’s not uncommon for a colony world, but there are some odd points. As I believe I noted earlier, the fuel here is largely oil-based, rather than hydrogen or fusion power cells. I think, reading between the lines, that the first oil company slipped some UN inspector a pretty hefty bribe; the UN’s figures bare only a passing resemblance to reality. Overall…
“The factories here can produce tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters for us,” she continued. “I doubt that Svergie will be looking at a major arms-exporting industry anytime soon, but they should be able to meet local needs. The problem lies with the workplace disputes that have been growing more frequent as memories of the occupation start to fade. Basically, the highly-trained workers want more wages while the unskilled workers want equal pay, while there are very clear limits on just how much the owners can afford to pay. Svergie has discovered unions, but they haven’t yet learned how to use them. My best guess is that the situation is going to worsen before it gets better, sir; there’s almost no investment in local industries at all, just because of the political stalemate. What’s the point of investing when the Progressives or the Communists might take it all away from you?
“We need to encourage them to start prospecting for more oil,” she concluded. “That’s the single greatest weakness…”
“Neat,” Russell said. He scowled down at the table. “What about convincing them to switch to hydrogen?”
“They can’t,” Muna said. “They can extract hydrogen from seawater or from the gas giant. They don’t have the infrastructure to do either, nor do they have the technology to develop it quickly. They’d need to build up their space-based industries in any case, yet they would first need to bootstrap a new space capability; they only have a handful of shuttles, all ex-UN issue. They’d need to purchase the equipment from off-world and they don’t have much to offer in return.”
I frowned. “Can’t they ask Fleet for help?”
Muna’s face flickered, just for a second. “Fleet is unlikely to be able to spare the resources,” she said. “They’d insist on a fuelling facility that Fleet starships could use, rather than just a simple cloud-scoop. I doubt that they’d consider it worth their while. Some of the big interstellar corporations might disagree, but they’d insist on a stiff price tag or even direct control. Svergie probably wouldn’t be interested.
“More importantly, the oil workers would object, strongly,” she concluded. “If hydrogen was to be brought into the system, they’d feel the pinch and protest. It might be hard to convince the Government to accept it when they faced losing so many votes. The same could be said about too many other parts of the economy. They’re heading towards a spending crisis, yet any attempt to deter that spending crisis would result in disaster.”
“Neat,” Peter observed. “Civil war, here we come.”
“Yes, sergeant,” Muna agreed. “TechnoMage?”
TechnoMage nodded. He’d come into my service after discovering that his hacking exploits had made his homeworld too hot for him. He’d once reprogrammed a UN orbital weapon to fire on UN forces on the ground, which had killed over seven hundred soldiers. I didn’t bear a grudge, but I’d advised him to keep it to himself. He also served as my chief spy, hence the name. Even I didn’t know what he was originally called.
“I’ll be brief,” he said. He’d watched the recordings of my meetings with the politicians. I should have told them that they were being recorded, but people are normally much more talkative when they think they’re not on the record. “I may be wrong — polls are not an actual science, no matter what the UN claims — but the Progressive Party is almost certainly going to win the coming election. It took several weeks to parse out how the system works, but overall the votes going to them will have more… weight than the votes going to the other parties. That is just as obvious to them as it is to us — perhaps more so — and they’re going to react badly.”
He paused. “The Communist Party is already talking revolution,” he said, to my surprise. “They’re officially viewing the Progressives as fellow travellers, but their leadership seems to believe that the Progressives are not… ah, progressive enough for their tastes, or that they’re planning a purge of the Communists after the election. Their counter-surveillance tech is worse than the UN’s tech, but they’ve been very careful not to say anything too incriminating out loud. I have a feeling, however, that they’re definitely planning something bad for after the election.
“The same can be said for the farmers and miners,” he continued. “The irony is that Svergie’s economy is too interdependent, but…”
I held up a hand. “Explain,” I ordered. I hadn’t spent long enough studying the local economy, obviously. “How interdependent are they?”
“I’m going to have to lecture,” TechnoMage explained. I rolled my eyes. He loved lecturing us. No matter what he’d said, I’d never heard a concise briefing from him — ever. “Svergie can — this is a generalisation, of course — be said to have four sectors; the cities, the industries, the mines and the farms. The majority of the population lives in the cities and is largely unproductive from an economic point of view. This is reflected in their voting system, where seventeen of the voting districts are within the cities. Basically, the cities and the industries co-exist, while buying food from the farms and mined ores from the mines.”
He smiled. “The cities need the food to survive and they need the ores because it’s about the only thing that Svergie can export,” he said. “They therefore need them both as cheaply as possible, but the producers are… objecting to their treatment by the government. This sends unrest down into the industries, which the farms and mines need to produce their equipment, and sparks off more unrest. The Government isn’t helping by insisting on trying to pass laws that affect the farmers and miners without giving them anything in return, or even listening to their concerns. There was a law being passed that forbids the use of child labour…”