Military Base, Star City Sunward Dome
The stream was, perhaps, a little too perfectly picturesque to be natural. It tumbled down a short hillside formed from rocky outcroppings to spill into a nicely ornamental pond, and then wandered away across the grounds along a shallow, meandering channel with grassy banks. Ferns sprouted from the rocks beside the little waterfall, fish idled in the pond below, insects buzzed in the air above. It was hard to decide exactly what gave it away, except that perhaps it was trying too hard.
Warren Armstrong, until recently commander of the Terran Offworld Force, wondered why that bothered him. It wasn’t as if the planet below had any shortage of similar faux-natural landscaping in its office parks and campuses— including its military bases. So what was it about this one that made him uneasy? Ground Level on the base had plenty of athletic fields, training and parade grounds. He could see one a short way away, where a group of crewmen were at drills under the eyes of a sergeant. This bit of decoration in among the Admin buildings didn’t get in the way of anything.
Why did it bother him so much?
Armstrong was born in Star City, but since joining the military had spent most of his adult life down on the planet. He’d never felt any particular attachment to the Colonies, and he felt no particular reluctance to obey his orders when he was assigned to make them shut down. He thought the order misguided and the Born To The Earth party’s claims nonsensical, but Monroe was legally in power, and so orders were orders.
When he finally received an order he could not obey, it wasn’t loyalty to the Colonies that stopped him. He wondered if Charles Safreth understood that. Armstrong knew why the so-called Interim President of the United Offworld Colonies had asked for this meeting. Safreth would be disappointed.
He was here. Safreth and his escort appeared around the corner of the “building”— actually just the top floor of a section of offices mostly on the decks below— a short distance away
Two Star City police officers in uniform accompanied Safreth, along with the two MPs Armstrong had assigned to escort him from the entry gate. Armstrong supposed that Safreth had a security detail at all times now, given his new title. As the small party approached, Armstrong rose from the park bench where he’d been waiting. He did not salute.
“Governor Safreth,” he said.
Safreth did not react to his choice of address. “Commander Armstrong. It’s good to see you again.”
“I’m not a commander any more,” Armstrong said. “I resigned my commission after the events in May.”
He waited for Safreth to reply that he wasn’t a governor any more either, but Safreth still did not rise to the bait. “And yet you still seem to be in command here.” He nodded in the direction of the open field and its troop of crewmen.
“Mostly just going through the motions. It seemed best to keep up a standard of training and organization, at least until you decide to let my officers and crewmen leave the base to find new jobs.”
“How about returning to your old jobs?”
There it was, the question Armstrong had expected. He shook his head. “No. If any of my people want to join some rebel military, I don’t suppose I have any legal authority left to stop them. But not me. I didn’t stand down in May because I sided with your revolution.”
“Why did you?”
“Because President Monroe ordered me to use force against civilians, in words that in military language meant ‘open fire,’ and he gave that order when there was a nonviolent option available. I believed that was an illegal order.”
“I took the trouble to look up the rules before coming over here. The MLC I think you call it— Military Law Code. It’s right there in plain language that an officer may not obey an order he knows to be illegal.”
Armstrong nodded. “That’s in there for good reason. Too many officers in history have said ‘I only followed orders.’”
“But it also says that an officer invoking that rule has to then justify it in an automatic court martial, and it mentions a range of penalties a good deal stiffer than ordinary insubordination. Which makes sense, you can’t have a chain of command if everyone’s playing lawyer over any order they don’t like, you’ve got to make sure no one does it on a whim.”
“That’s right.”
“And yet you didn’t return to Earth to face that court martial. Neither did any of the people who sided with you back in May. Why not, if you really believe the order was illegal?”
Armstrong turned away, and studied the stream as it splashed over its landscaped waterfall.
Safreth persisted. “Your plan to smash the algae tanks would have worked, by the way. We hadn’t thought of it, there’d have been nothing in the way of your sabotage teams. I don’t mind admitting that to you— you can rest assured there’s plenty of security around them now. If if you really believe you did the right thing according to the MLC, why not follow the procedure that same MLC specifies?”
Armstrong still did not answer. There was nothing to gain by getting into a debate.
“It’s because you knew whatever court martial happened would be no more legal than the order you refused, isn’t it?” Safreth said. “It’s because you know you have a madman to deal with. He wanted violence for its own sake. Some of my advisors think he wants casualty lists on the newsnets so he can blame us, boost his propaganda, but you’ve talked to him. You know better. He’s insane and he just wants blood.”
Suddenly, Armstrong understood. Safreth wasn’t here on general principles, just to set up a military for the UOC. He turned back to face him. “Something has happened.”
Safreth nodded. “A week ago we asserted jurisdiction over the industrial platforms in Earth orbit. We offered the corporations a slew of ridiculously favorable incentives to get them to support our claim. Going along with that, we have to prove we can take over law enforcement, protect the factories.”
Organized crime cartels, sponsoring piracy and smuggling, were the reason a Terran military still existed. Many got their start as defiant remnants of the governments defeated in the Unification War, and presented a threat beyond the capacity of civilian police.
Armstrong could work out the scenario easily enough: the cartels would see the UOC’s move as an opportunity, and if they started raiding the platforms, the Terran military had only to stand down and let the world see the Colonies couldn’t defend their claim. “So you need a Navy before the cartels start raiding,” he said.
Safreth shook his head. “No. This morning six platforms were attacked, all in the low-Earth orbital corridor. Four have been occupied. One of those managed to get a distress call off. The remaining two heard the call and managed to stop the raiding ships from docking. The raiders were all disguised as automated freighters bringing up raw materials from the planet. Monroe hasn’t stopped those shipments, he’s kept the factories running even while cutting off our lifesystem supplies.”
“Occupied?” Armstrong frowned. “What do you mean occupied? Raiders would drop in, steal as much as they could load, and get out. Even if they figured the military wouldn’t lift a finger, they’ve got no reason to stay.”
“But they have,” said Safreth. “At first, they tried to send out messages to sound like everything was normal, it seems their plan was for us not to realize anything had happened. But once they realized that one distress signal got out and we weren’t buying it, they went dark. Four factory platforms are now in control of the raiders and maintaining com silence. And according to that one call, the raiders weren’t cartel pirates— they were Terran military.”
Armstrong thought that over. “It almost makes sense. Establish Terran law enforcement jurisdiction by force, regardless of what your Colonies try to claim. But they should announce it, not go dark… unless the plan was to try and grab a lot more platforms before you noticed. Even then, now they know the secret’s out they should announce the seizure.”
“Yeah it would be a major blow to the Colonies, if they took the factory platforms away from us. My people say we can’t function without them, our whole economy is built around servicing the offworld industries. If the Terrans grab them up, they can strangle us economically. It would be a neat, tidy, and nonviolent way to put an end to our independence. So then, do you think that’s the plan President Monroe approved?”
Armstrong felt himself stiffen, as if wires up and down his back had suddenly tightened until near breaking.
“Neither do I,” Safreth said, as if Armstrong had answered out loud. “I don’t know what plan they do have. Maybe you can figure it out. But we both know what kind of plan it’s got to be, if Monroe approved it. You refused to carry out Monroe’s massacre for him. The question you’ve got to answer now is, will you stand by while someone else does it?”
He turned and started to walk away before Armstrong could respond, calling over his shoulder, “Thank it over. I’ll be waiting for your answer.”
Armstrong watched him and his escort go until they vanished back around the same corner where they’d appeared. After a few minutes, he sat back down on the park bench by the stream, feeling very tired.
He suddenly noticed a dragonfly darting above the surface of the water, pausing briefly to hover before flashing away, and he thought, Someone decided that should be there.
The days were long past when spacecraft launched from carefully sterilized clean rooms, and no doubt plenty of insects and other small creatures had made their way to the Colonies over the decades. He doubted that dragonflies were among them. Some biosystems expert, somewhere in the past, had worked out that it was a needed species.
He raised his eyes from the stream to look at the terraces and buildings mounting up in curved array on the inside of Star City’s sunward dome. Every horizontal surface showed green. The algae tanks might be the prime source of the Colony’s oxygen, but every bit of photosynthesis helped and offworld engineers had learned over the last century that species diversity improved stability in their lifesystems. Somewhere in this Colony and all the others were not just farms but parks and “nature preserves,” richly filled with carefully calculated arrays of species. The Colonies were on a decades-long, slow buildup in their biosystems, not yet complete, and at some point during those years someone had decided, We need this species of dragonfly.
The level of detail, the careful thought and work behind the Colonies, that began with the engineering of the structures themselves but continued on, and on, and on into so many decisions, so many mistakes and corrections, so much research and new insights… it was almost beyond comprehension, an achievement beyond anything human civilization had attempted before.
And now he knew why looking at that decorative stream on the military base bothered him so much. It was just one detail among millions, but it stood for all the rest. For all that he, Warren Armstrong, would have destroyed without hesitation if Monroe had approved his original plan. Sure the human population would have had time to evacuate, but what would lie behind, abandoned, all its time and effort and life wasted? And what would that make him?
Warren Armstrong, Destroyer of Worlds.
Will you stand by while someone else does it? Safreth’s question repeated, over and over, in his mind.
He knew the answer.
To Be Continued
