“If,” Daniel agreed. “It may interest you to know that there were a number of heavily-encrypted transmissions from New Copenhagen to somewhere in the Mountains. This started a few days after the Communist leadership was sentenced to death and hung… how is the planet taking that, by the way?”
“Surprisingly well,” I confirmed. He probably knew already. There were a handful of small riots in some industrial areas, but overall the Communists blotted their copybook pretty well without help. There are some parties who are saying that they should have been sentenced to hard labour without the possibility of parole, but they’re very much in the minority. The general mood on the streets seems to be that the bastards got exactly what they deserved.
“As for the smaller fry, the vast majority of them will be spending ten-twenty years helping to rebuild,” I continued. “They’re going to be at hard labour for most of their lives, but in the end they should be safe and allowed to return to civilian society. A handful have been offered the chance to settle the other continents and see if they survive, so others may follow them. There was a minority opinion that said that they should all be exiled to a Communist planet, but the costs and logistics put a stop to that pretty quickly.”
“I’m not surprised,” Daniel said. The costs of transporting a few thousand men and women to another planet were astronomical. There was no point in doing it for convicted criminals, even if they probably deserved the reception they would find. “But I digress. There were encrypted transmissions and… well, we couldn’t decode them.”
That was a surprise. By law, every planetary encryption system had to have a backdoor built into the system to allow Fleet Intelligence to read their mail. It was about as popular as a dose of the clap and there were plenty of covert groups willing and able to produce encryption software without a backdoor — or at least not a Fleet backdoor. Fleet Intelligence could still decrypt messages, but it wasn’t easy and it sometimes took longer than they had. Whoever owned the system was risking Fleet’s anger, for what?
“You couldn’t get any idea of what they said?” I asked. There were times when it was easy to learn quite a bit about what was being said, even without the code being broken, but this obviously wasn’t one of them. “You don’t even know who owns the transmitters?”
“We suspect the Mountain Men, which adds fuel to the speculation that the Freedom League is involved,” Daniel said. “However, one of my subordinates pointed out that we might have already cracked the message, without knowing that we had cracked the message. If they used a pre-arranged code…”
I nodded. A simple substitution cipher could be a nightmare to crack without knowing the book they were using as the base for the cipher. It wasn’t as if we were short of possible candidates. The Freedom League might not be involved at all and only our own paranoia was convincing us they were there, but if they were, the Mountain Men would be the best allies they could hope to find.
“There’s still no grounds for intervening, but be careful,” Daniel concluded. “If the shit hits the fan completely, we might have to cut you out of the orbital images without warning.”
“Understood,” I said. I’d been out on a limb before. It didn’t make any difference if it were the UNPF or Fleet who were standing behind me, holding a saw, ready to cut off the limb and send me crashing to the ground. “Have you considered levelling with the Captain and explaining the truth?”
“Captain Price-Jones is a very by-the-book person,” Daniel reminded me. “His first response would be to brig the lot of us for usurping his command, followed by ordering your men into barracks and sending to Unity for instructions. The lid would be blown completely off the Legion and far too many people would learn the Legion’s real purpose.”
I scowled. “How the hell can they complain?” I demanded. I didn’t mean to shout at him, but the stress was getting to me. “We’re trying to stabilise a hundred worlds that would otherwise tear themselves apart!”
“It’s a question of who is actually in command,” Daniel reminded me. “If they feel that Fleet is turning into another UN, only one that is actually competent, they’ll start worrying about who’s next, or what we might have in mind for the long term. So we work in the shadows, and deny everything if someone gets a hint of what we’re doing, and know that no one will ever thank us for it.”
He grinned. “If the game were easy, anyone could play.”
“Hah,” I said, sourly. “Tomorrow, I have to speak to a load of young officer-candidates on military duty and what it actually means. How could I tell them about this?”
“You don’t,” Daniel said. “You just keep it to yourself until the time is right.”
“Never, in other words,” I concluded. “I just hope that you can sleep at night.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
How does one explain to young officer-candidates that lives, the lives of their men, the lives of their loved ones, the lives, even, of their entire country may rest upon their shoulders? Perhaps the best answer is to tell them the truth, evading nothing, and allowing them to see the price of their new rank and the responsibilities that come with it.
I had given some careful thought to my personal classroom. It wasn’t going to be a perfect school-like room, with desks for the kids and a bigger desk for the teacher, and it wasn’t going to be very informal. I wanted to speak to the kids — the young local officers — as a big brother, not as a commanding officer or as a mercenary. It wasn’t going to be easy. No one who had spent years in the military would not be aware of a person’s rank, and their status within the organisation. They would all see me as their temporary commanding officer, and, perhaps, as a mercenary who got paid more than they did. Would they regard themselves as superior? It was quite possible. I hadn’t thought highly of mercenaries when I’d been in the UN’s service.
In the end, I’d settled for a mild information room with a standardised drinks table — no alcohol — and a handful of comfy chairs. I saw their expressions as they filed in and smiled to myself. Whatever they had expected, it wasn’t what I’d presented to them and they had to be wondering just what I was doing. I had wanted to put them at their ease, but first, they had to realise that it wasn’t a trap, or an attempt to lure them into breaching regulations.
“Come on in,” I said, calmly. “Take a seat, any seat.”
I felt absurdly like an oversized nursery teacher as the young officers took their places and stared at me. They looked ridiculously young for the uniforms they wore, but there had been little choice, but to accept their promotions. Five of them had been promoted by the local authorities themselves, without consulting us, and the remainder had been picked out by my people. They weren’t seasoned yet and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that some of them would get their men killed. I couldn’t stop that from happening, but at least I could try to warn them of the dangers, and the responsibilities, of their new rank. I also wanted to discuss the role of a proper military organisation and why it existed. I looked at them and wondered, privately, how many of them would actually understand the message.