All the species of cranks and creeps, she thought. This was her war.
19
Dissembler
On high moorlands and city streets, in gutted refineries and abandoned service areas, she fought through the hot autumn and bitter winter. Days of storm alternated with calm, chill silences when the smoke of burning villages rose straight into a pale blue sky. She crawled through mud and water, bracken and barbed wire.
She learned about what was going on out in the world in snatches from television and radio. With Dissembler out of action, all the programs that ran on it, most importantly DoorWays™, were useless. The effect on communications was convulsive, and not altogether unwelcome: it was primarily administrative and military machines that were crippled. Turks and Russians fought inconclusively on the Bulgarian front; the Sheenisov (the name had caught on, become anglicized) reached Ulan Bator; a gang of asteroid miners declared themselves the Republic of New South Yorkshire. The US Government responded to the strikes and riots by pulling out of the UN and calling a Constitutional Convention. Several of the States seceded in advance, prompting commentators to remark that the US was rapidly becoming the world’s second Former Union: the FU2. The UN battlesats, starved by a rock-solid space-workers’ boycott, threatened selected targets with laser weapons. One of the lunar magnapult combines gave them a short lesson in orbital mechanics, and the threat passed.
And that was the last of the United Nations. Without the US to underpin it, there could be no US/UN. Space Defense became Earth Defense, its weapons turned outwards to face threats from nature, not from man. The Yanks became Americans again, and enthusiastically set about investigating and purging and denouncing and testifying.
Janis saw Jordan’s face one day, on a flickering television in an empty shop: some soundbite interview, over in seconds. She felt a pang of guilt, and that evening sat down and wrote a letter to him. He must know already that Moh was dead; the ANR was punctilious about these things. She knew, without ever having been told, that she should not tell anyone how Moh had died. It didn’t leave much to say, but she felt better for having said it.
She made friends, and lost some.
The Republic made enemies faster than it destroyed them.
Goddess, she thought, this place stinks.
It was a village of a few score people, in a green dell in the Lake District. Its generators ran on methane – fart-fuel, her comrades called it – and on scavenged solar cells. The houses were tar-paper and corrugated iron and animal hide. The people lived by farming and hunting and stealing, and didn’t wash.
Janis stood in the mud at the centre of the village, the rifle on her hip, turning and scanning. A few bodies sprawled among the houses. The thirteen surviving menfolk sat in the mud, their hands over their heads. Their rifles and crossbows and knives were stacked well out of their reach. About thirty ANR soldiers stood guard or went through the houses, throwing stuff out: clothes, weapons, food, furnishings. They had the look of people sifting through a nauseating heap of garbage. The women and children stood in the eaves of the unwalled shelter they called the long house. Rain dripped off it on to their matted hair, left runnels of white on their closed faces. If they took a step into the shelter or away from the run-off a snarl or a kick sent them back.
The air was filled with the whining of dogs muzzled with twisted wire, leashed by ropes held by a couple of ANR soldiers, and every so often by the scream of another dog as it was skewered on a long roughly sharpened spike driven at an angle into a low bank of ground. Six, so far. Five to go.
The rain rattled off a black body-bag in the back of a humvee at the entrance to the village, near the tree where they’d found the body: a captured soldier hanging by the ankles, and as the dogs had left it.
Three to go.
A small boy yelled out as that dog was spiked. He broke away from the grip of a woman’s hand on his shoulder and dashed forward. The line was within a second of breaking after him. Janis swung the gun round. It checked her hand as if it had struck a solid obstacle, and fired a single shot. The boy screamed and fell down in the mud. Janis felt her heart stop. The boy picked himself up and ran over to the woman.
The last dog writhed on the spike. The first had not yet died.
‘Nobody found their tongue yet?’ The unit’s leader, a small, mild-mannered, middle-aged man called Wills, looked around like a schoolteacher.
Silence.
‘Whose idea was it?’
Silence, and falling rain.
Wills turned to Janis.
‘Get a couple of guys to make another spike,’ he said, loud enough to be overhead. He looked over the line of bedraggled women and children as he spoke.
No, said a voice in Janis’s phones, you can’t do that! You can’t even threaten that.
It was Moh’s voice. She heard her own voice say to Wills, not loud enough for anyone else to hear: ‘No. You can’t do that! You can’t even threaten that.’
Wills’s eyes narrowed behind his rain-spattered glades.
‘Are you threatening me, citizen?’
‘No, I’m—’ She realized the gun had turned with her body, and was pointing straight at Wills. By now, not doing that sort of thing had become a reflex to her. She lowered the muzzle. ‘Sorry, Wills,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t do – what you suggested. Even to say it takes us near—’ She moved an open, stiff hand up and down: an edge.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ Wills said. ‘If we don’t—’
‘Do what we’re supposed to do,’ Janis snapped. ‘Call in a chopper, vac the barbarians out and trash the place.’
‘Not enough, comrade, not for the comrades.’ Wills tipped his head back very slightly. Janis knew he was right. The lads and lasses wanted revenge. If they didn’t get it, a provoked incident and an itchy trigger might give them a slaughter to remember.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘We trash the place first, let the barb watch it, then vac them.’
Wills looked at her for a moment, then nodded and smiled as if they’d been having a friendly discussion, and gave the order. The citizen-soldiers whooped, the barbarians wept as the houses went up in flames around them. More steam than smoke rose to meet the evacuation chopper. Another batch of bawling orphans and sullen new citizens sent to six months in the resettlement camps, and then a life in the shanty-towns. It happened to every village that didn’t join up with the Republic’s militia.
They called it the shake and vac.
That night they made camp in a village of proper houses, built of stone, whose street was bypassed by the main road. It was the sort of place that had always been part of the Kingdom, and had rallied, however reluctantly, to the Republic as a protection against the barb. The unit had no intention of alienating the inhabitants by billeting in their houses, and settled in an old building that had once been a local primary school. It had a good high wall around it, and a kitchen and canteen that could be used – even, to their delight, showers that worked.