I stepped over to Frida as the last of her admirers departed towards the exits. “This is not a good idea,” I said, flatly. I pushed as much icy firmness into my voice as I could. She had to believe that all the self-congratulation was just the calm before the storm. “They’re not going to take it lightly.”
“I know it’s not a good idea,” Frida agreed. Her face twisted bitterly. “But tell me; what else can I do? If I do nothing, people die. If I act, people may die. What choice do I have?”
I had no answer.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The term ‘Phoney War’ first originated during the 1940s on Earth when the British and French faced the Germans on the western front. Despite a declared state of war, peace existed along the battle lines — until it was broken by the smashing German advance in May 1940. More recent comparable examples include the UN’s position vis-à-vis Heinlein before the Invasion and the Terra Nova Conflict. It must always be remembered that while peace is apparent on the surface, the fires of war may be burning underneath. Keep the powder dry.
The first week went surprisingly quietly. Too quietly. I’d expected a major explosion within hours of the public announcement of the Frida Holmqvist Recovery Plan — Frida had named it after herself, as politicians were wont to do — but nothing took place, at least on the surface. A and B Company, injured as they were, took turns patrolling around the spaceport and becoming more familiar with the terrain they’d be expected to operate upon if the balloon went up. The Svergie Army kept a watchful eye on developments and waited for the opening rounds. The farmers… didn’t seem to be doing anything at all.
“We picked up more transmissions over the last few days,” TechnoMage said, when I buttonholed him on the subject. It hadn’t been easy to arrange for him to be monitoring unusual wavebands for transmissions, but I’d had little choice. It was a shame I couldn’t share the truth about our mission with him, but someone with such a shady past might well use it against us. “They were just brief burst transmissions and we haven’t managed to unlock them at all.”
Nor has the William Tell, I thought, grimly. I had scrutinised their orbital images carefully, but they’d picked up little of use. The limitations of orbital surveillance were well known and anyone who had survived the Occupation would be well aware of how to circumvent such observation. They might not know that we were looking at the take from the orbiting destroyer, but they’d certainly be watching for our UAV spies.
“Which means that there are still some of them in the city,” I concluded, slowly. They could be anything from spies to political agents to terrorists. They were no way to know what they were until we could unlock the code and it didn’t look as if we would unlock the code. The decryption section was still working on it, but neither they nor Daniel Webster were hopeful. “And we’ve seen no sign of trouble?”
“Unless you could the occasional bar fight,” Ed said, from his position studying the map. “The recovery crews repairing the damage from the last war have been drinking heavily in the evenings after finding bodies that had been buried under vast piles of rubble and some of the bars had had nasty bar fights. I don’t think that they’re the work of the farmers, or the miners, or even us.”
I smiled thinly. I’d cancelled the regular leave schedule, but unless trouble broke out soon I would have to reinstate it. The Legionnaires were used to such treatment, but the locals would gripe and complain about not seeing their families. The new recruits could be kept on the spaceport indefinitely, but not so the trained soldiers. Some of them needed a period of leave before they went on deployment up towards the farms, which the farmers would see as a hostile act.
“Probably not, no,” I agreed, silently cursing Frida under my breath. Her scheme sounded good, in the abstract, but applied to real life the results would be disastrous. There’s no such thing as objectivity when humans find their own interests involved and the farmers and miners would regard it — they did regard it — as a direct assault on their livelihoods. I’d seen it before on a dozen worlds. The UN set price caps, trying to feed the poor, only to discover that the farmers went out of business and food supplies dwindled. “Keep A Company on Quick Reaction Alert anyway. I think we’re going to need them sooner rather than later.”
I looked down at the map and winced inwardly. There was no single capital to take out in the countryside, no place where pressure could be brought to bear to defeat the enemy, just endless farms, small villages and a handful of towns. The farmers were tough and independent characters; they’d harassed the UN infantry with a mixture of determination, heavy weapons and sheer bloody-mindedness. I doubted our men would do much better if it came down to a counter-insurgency war; we couldn’t offer the farmers much more than the UN could offer them. Frida had managed to burn that particular set of bridges quite nicely.
No soldier liked counter-insurgency warfare, with good reason. The enemy could be hiding among scores of innocent civilians, often indistinguishable from them until they opened fire. If they were losing, they just faded back into a population that generally either supported them or was too scared to assist the soldiers in tracking them down and exterminating them. It was a delicate balancing act, but one that insurgent forces — living among the people as they were — had to master; failure to keep the people on their side meant certain extermination. We lacked the insight into the rural areas and their way of life — all of our local soldiers came from the urban cities — and picking out the guilty from the innocent would not be easy. And, if they were defending their livelihood, they’d feel that they had a cause and refuse to surrender easily, unless they got what they wanted.
I ran my eyes over the map and scowled. No one was quite sure how many farmers and miners there were, but general estimates said around two to three million at most, spread out over a vast area. The vast majority of the planet’s population was concentrated in the cities — the work of the UN and its plan to dump surplus populations here — and wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do if dropped in the countryside and told to work or starve. It was something we could work on — it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of unclaimed land that could be turned into farms — but that would take time, time we didn’t have. I was morbidly certain that the explosion was already on the way.
“Ed, Russell, draw up a training schedule for rural conflict and have all of the local units run through it,” I ordered, finally. The rules were very different to urban conflict, but at least it was something that we’d had in mind for the last few months, unlike the war against the Communists. “I want them all refreshed and pushed right to the limit. Add in everything we know about the enemy, but also give them advanced weapons and tactics, just in case.”
Russell nodded once. “Hard training, easy mission,” he quoted. “Easy training, hard mission.”
“Good,” I said. “That leaves us with a single problem. Should we push ahead of occupy Fort Galloway now or abandon it completely?”
There was a long pause. Fort Galloway had been built by the UN in the early days of their occupation and existed roughly midway between New Copenhagen and the mountains — and the Mountain Men. The UN had intended to use it as a base for rapid deployment forces, but the shortage of UN Infantry had always limited the base’s usefulness. They’d only kept a Company there during the later years of the war, which had contented itself with firing back at attacking forces and otherwise keeping their heads down.