"Don't sweat it," Mosovich said with a chuckle. "We'll find you a weapon. And women generally aren't stupid enough either; they can have babies any time they want. That being said; I don't agree with the policy either, but nobody can seem to get it changed."
He stepped through the door into a concrete room. It was about fifty meters wide and a hundred deep with black lines painted on the floor. The walls were covered in condensation and a steady breeze blew out of the elevator towards the glass doors at the end. Halfway down the room there was a series of small bunkers. As they approached them it was clear that most of them were half filled with dirt and garbage, some of it blown in, but much of it dropped into them by passersby. Many of the lines on the floor had peeled up and there was trash all over the room, although clearly little of it was new.
"I think I know the real reason that it's nearly impossible for females to get in Ground Force these days," Mosovich noted. "But it's a nasty reason and you won't like it."
"I've dealt with a lot of stuff I don't like," Wendy said. "My life seems to consist of dealing with stuff I don't like."
"In that case I think the casualties are the answer, two answers really," Mosovich said.
"The first reason is that we're being bled white. We've lost about eighty percent of our productive-age male population. But even with combat casualties, we've only lost about thirty of our productive-age females . . ."
"We're breeders," Wendy said.
"Yep," Mosovich agreed. "The powers that be are obviously thinking that when the Posleen are kicked off planet, it won't do much good to have nobody left but a bunch of old women and a few children to 'carry on.' So they're conserving the breeding population."
"It takes two to tango," Shari pointed out, adjusting Shakeela's coat. The bunker was quite cool compared to the underground city they had left and it was clear that the fall had settled in up here. "Where are the 'breeders' going to find . . ."
"Guys?" Mueller asked. "It's not a nice answer, but it doesn't take many guys to make lots of babies, but it's a one for one ratio with women."
"He's right," Mosovich said. "It's not nice, but it is true. That's only half the story, though.
"In the first wave there were massive conventional casualties. There was a real question whether we were going to hold everywhere and we didn't hold a couple of places. Losses among combat formations were huge. And there was a . . . a disparity in female losses versus male. Losses among women in combat units were nearly equal to males, but they only comprised a third of the force at the maximum.
"I read your whole packet, Captain," he continued doggedly. "And I'd already read a classified after-action report in which you were a minor bit player. You did a good job at the Monument, no question, but if it hadn't been for Keren, you'd be dead right now. And your . . . experiences in the retreat from Dale City are one of the classic egregious examples."
"Who's Keren?" Elgars asked. "And what do you mean by that?"
"Keren is a captain with the Ten Thousand," Mueller said as they reached the doors. There were two sets with a chamber in between and they acted as partial airlocks, reducing the blast of wind that was trying to escape the bunker. "He was in a mortar platoon near the rear of the retreat. He apparently picked you up during the retreat and you rode with him all the way to the Monument."
"You'd been dumped by another unit," Mosovich said tightly. He turned left and headed up the wide stairs on the exterior. There were two sets of those as well, one on each side of the entrance. There was a walkway on the wall opposite the doors that joined them near the top. Running along the surface on that side were small concrete combat positions, which were accessible from the walkway. On the far side was an open area nearly two hundred meters across and then a large parking lot filled with dirt covered cars and trucks and one Humvee, parked on the grass on the verge.
"That was what happened to a good many females in that retreat and others. Some units returned with nearly one hundred percent female casualties versus fifty to sixty percent casualties among the males."
"Well, the actual incidence of why she was dumped wasn't that high," Mueller pointed out.
"Why was I 'dumped'?" the captain said carefully.
"You'd been raped," Mosovich said tightly. "Then they took away your sniper rifle and dumped you with an AIW and a single magazine."
"Oh," Elgars said. "That's . . . annoying in a distant way."
"So, you're saying that they don't want me in the Ground Forces because I might get raped in a retreat?" Wendy said angrily. "Then they shouldn't ought to let their damned soldiers in the Sub-Urbs!"
"Am I to take it that's why you were so uncomfortable coming to the surface with us?" Mueller said. "In that case, I'm sorry I asked. And if you'll give me a name and unit I'll take care of it."
"I was just giving testimony," Wendy said. She stopped at the top of the stairs blinking her eyes against the light and looked down at the town.
Franklin had been a small, somewhat picturesque city nestled in lightly inhabited hills before the war. Its main industry was supporting the local farmers and retirees who had moved up from Florida to get away from the crime.
With the change to a war footing, it became a vital linchpin in the southern Appalachian defenses. Units from just south of Asheville to Ellijay depended upon it for supply and administration.
The city was now overrun by soldiers and their encampments stretched up the hills on either side of it. The small strip mall that the entrance overlooked had been taken over by pawnbrokers and T-shirt shops with the only sign of "normal" presence being a dry cleaner.
She looked down over the bustle and shrugged. "When . . . when the Urb was first set up anyone could come and go at any time. That was . . . good at first. The corps did a lot of good in the Urb. And . . . there was a lot of dating. Most of the corps was male and most of the Urb is female so . . . things naturally happened. Then . . . the . . . the attitude sort of changed."
"A lot of the girls in the Urb were . . . lonely," Shari said. "They would take up with the soldiers and some of the soldiers practically moved into the Urb. A lot of what you could call 'black market' transfers went on; you used to be able to find coffee even. But then things started getting out of hand. The security force wasn't large enough, or effective enough, to keep the soldiers under control and they had an authority dispute with the corps MPs, who were numerous enough and quite ready to crack heads."
"We ended up having a . . ." Wendy shrugged her shoulders and shuddered. "Well, one of the officers that was involved in the investigation referred to it as a 'sack' during a long weekend. Something like a riot with a lot of rapes. I made it to the range and Dave and I sort of stood off the couple of groups that came around us."
"I had a . . . well, a group of . . . boys really that were like kids I was taking care of," Shari noted. "A couple of them were there when the riots started. I was okay."
"Others weren't," Wendy said darkly. "So we don't like the corps in the Urb. Anyway, the Urb was put off-limits to military personnel . . ."
"Unless they had orders," Mueller pointed out.
"Unless they had orders to go there," Wendy agreed. "And now they stay up here and we stay down there and any girls who want to go . . ."