The spaceport looked different to my eyes as the helicopter made one final circuit of the base before coming in to land, but for a moment I couldn’t have said what was different about it. It struck me a moment later; for the first time since we’d arrived, the spaceport looked like a fully-functioning spaceport, with aircraft and even shuttles on the ground being serviced and launched back into the air. It might well have looked that way for quite some time, but I hadn’t seen it from the air since the last time I’d used a helicopter.
“Welcome back, sir,” Robert said, as I stepped out of the helicopter and accepted his salute. A small number of senior officers had gathered to welcome me back to the base, even though I hadn’t been gone for more than a few days. I like to think that they were happy to see me, but it might just have been relief over what would have happened if the enemy had killed me. “We have a situation report for you if you wish to see it.”
“Yes, please,” I said, accepting the final salutes. Everyone seemed to have found an excuse to come salute me and, even though I felt a hell of a lot better, I still wanted to get back to work rather than glad-handing everyone. I’m a soldier, not a politician. “What is the security position here?”
“We went through everyone’s records again after… well, your aide decided to kidnap you,” Robert said. “We isolated a handful of possible suspects, but we don’t actually have any evidence that we can use to press charges against them, just suspicions. We could put them through standard interrogation training if you want…”
I shook my head. “Just keep an eye on them,” I ordered. I wanted to interrogate them until they hurt, but we already had enough problems with the local government. I hadn’t heard anything about the parents of the molested girl — damned if I could remember her name now; it had been swept away by the pressure of events — but that was probably lurking in the shadows until it saw a chance to spring. “If they’re people we can rotate to reasonably safe duties, do so. If not…”
It would have been so easy to send them on suicide missions. “If not, just keep an eye on them,” I concluded. “We’ll deal with them if they become a threat.”
“Yes, sir,” Robert said, as we stepped into the command bunker. I was pleased to see that there was an added element of security surrounding the central command post, using men drawn from the Legion. We couldn’t trust the locals for that, even though they were handling their own security in the various outposts and garrisons we had scattered throughout the countryside and around the cities. There, of course, they had to worry about enemy forces attacking them. “The current situation is as follows…”
I listened as he outlined the remarkable shortage of enemy activity. It puzzled me; over the last two months, the farmers had launched entire waves of hit and run attacks on our positions, trying to bleed us into submission. Snipers, IEDs and other nasty tricks had all wrecked havoc on our forces, but now there was hardly anything. A handful of shots hardly constituted a problem. It was quiet — suspiciously quiet.
“Keep everyone on alert,” I ordered, finally. There was little else we could do for the moment. With the new regiments, once they were worked up and ready for action, we could take the offensive into the mountains, but that was still months off. For the moment, all we could do was wait and see if the enemy showed themselves. “And the prisoners from Jock’s raid?”
“We had them shipped here and interrogated them, as per standing orders,” Robert confirmed. “They apparently know nothing about anything — of course — and more specifically they know almost nothing about the Freedom League. They thought that the woman was just one of the mining representatives from the Mountain Men.”
“Mountain Women, in her case, I would have thought,” Peter injected.
I scowled at him and looked back at Robert. “They were really there just to add additional men to the guard force,” Robert continued. “The interrogators believe that they don’t actually know much else; hell, they didn’t even know who they were guarding.”
“A likely story,” Peter growled. “Are we sure they’re telling the truth?”
“The interrogators were not gentle,” Robert said, darkly. “They knocked the poor bastards about and used drugs and lie detectors unmercifully. They didn’t have any drug immunisations or even any counter-interrogation training. If they’re lying, they’re better at it that some of the people from Heinlein, the ones who were given full-scale training. Russell checked their biofeedback rhythms and swears blind that they weren’t using any such training.”
I held up my hand before the argument could get out of hand. “Never mind,” I said, firmly. “If they don’t have anything else to tell us, make them the same offer as the other farmer POWs. Tell them they can serve us for a short period on the new farms, or they can rot in the detention camps until the war comes to an end, one way or the other.”
“Yes, sir,” Robert said.
Peter looked mutinous. “Don’t you feel,” he asked, “that some harsher punishment is in order? They assisted in kidnapping you…”
“We’re not going to make a big deal out of it,” I said, firmly. “The people who planned and carried out the kidnapping weren’t captured. We’re not going to give the grunts, the people who didn’t know what was really going on, a harder time than we have to give them. Let them see that we’re not going to treat it as a life-threatening matter, because it’s not. I survived.”
I grinned at them. “I hope you warned all of the departmental heads,” I added, with a mischievous smile. “It’s inspection time.”
I spent the next three hours going through everything on the spaceport, from the training period with Russell and the new recruits — many of which were happy to see me returned safe and well — to the crews servicing the tanks, helicopters and space shuttles. I inspected everything, handing out awards and punishments as required, just to ensure that everything was still working. The laser batteries providing protection against incoming mortar rounds were working perfectly — a relief; a single high explosive round in the wrong place would be devastating — and the crews were quite happy to run through a drill with me watching over their shoulders. The simulated incoming rounds were all downed well short of their targets. The simulations, in fact, were far worse than anything we had faced so far, even at Fort Galloway.
“Excellent work,” I said, finally. They all breathed sighs of relief, for which I couldn’t blame them. They’d probably heard that I was looking for faults to punish, but standards hadn’t slipped on the laser batteries. “Carry on, men.”
An hour after that, Commander Daniel Webster finally arrived. I’d called him down from the William Tell as soon as I’d returned to the spaceport, but I’d known that it would probably take some time before he could actually report to me. The destroyer did allow some of its crew to take shore leave on the planet — the duty would be intolerable without that safety valve — but it wasn’t in a good position to launch a shuttle when I called. The handful of crewmen immediately sought the bus to New Copenhagen and the delights there — whores, bars and other entertainments — while Daniel visited me in my office. I was surprisingly glad to see him.
“The Freedom League is definitely active here,” I said, once we’d exchanged greetings. I doubt he’d heard that I’d been kidnapped. The enemy hadn’t used it as part of their propaganda attack and we, for obvious reasons, hadn’t told anyone either. There was no point in giving the enemy a boost forward and dismaying our own people at the same time. “I saw one of their representatives recently.”