“And in the end, they slept with everyone on the ship,” Bruno finished. “They formed a circle and bent over and we all fucked them, moving from woman to woman, trying to see who could last the longest.” He paused. “It was me, of course.”
“Of course,” Lieutenant Kady Jones said. “Never mind that you were voted ‘Mr Quick Finish’ at the Academy.”
Bruno flushed. “Who told you about that?”
I listened, without saying much, as the stories grew taller and more unbelievable. One claimed that his Captain had slept with every female on his ship, half the males and some of their pets. Another was more serious and talked about a Captain who had been killed in the line of duty, or a Political Officer who had overridden the Captain on his own ship. I’d expected some degree of bitching, but this was more than I had expected. What had happened to the young officers who had had such high hopes and dreams?
Reality, I thought, and leaned forward.
“I asked you here for a reason,” I said. “I don’t want to get anyone involved against their will, but I must ask for a pledge of secrecy. If you repeat anything you hear here, it will have the most unpleasant repercussions.”
“Let me guess,” Bruno said. “You’ve gotten the Captain’s daughter pregnant and he’s now sending you on missions wearing a red shirt.”
I scowled. It was an old joke. Officers who wore red shirts in the line of duty had been deemed expendable. No one wore a red shirt — UN duty uniforms were blue — but the joke was still passed on from rank to rank. I didn’t know where it originally came from; it was probably inherited from one of the national armed forces that had been integrated into the UNPF.
“No,” I said. “It was on Heinlein…”
I outlined everything that had happened on the planet, sparing them nothing, but the secret of the library. That was something I wanted to keep to myself until I knew who could be trusted, or not. I told them about the occupation, about the reporters and about how they lied endlessly about what was going on down on the surface. I finished with recounting the strike on the town and the hundreds of dead children, slain by my hand. I even confessed that I had attempted to file a protest, only to have it withdrawn.
“I don’t think you meant to do it,” Kady said, finally. She was young and blonde, with faintly-vulnerable features. She and Bruno had been an item back at the Academy and I wondered, absently, if they were still together. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was our fault,” I said. “The UNPF invaded their world and…”
I stumbled through an explanation of how wealthy and pleasant Heinlein was, compared to the Earth we’d escaped. The society was wealthy, crime and social deprivation seemed to be at an all-time low, very different from Earth. The planet had been more advanced than Earth in many ways — I remembered the robot librarian and smiled inwardly — and it hadn’t been a threat. We — the United Nations — had made it a threat, simply by invading. It was our fault.
“The newscasts keep claiming that Heinlein was building a war fleet to bomb Earth into radioactive rubble,” Lieutenant Christopher John Roach pointed out, when I’d finished. He didn’t sound unbelieving, just concerned. “Do you think that we might have seen their defensive fleet pointed at us one day?”
“I doubt it,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that were true enough. If I lived in the malls without a hope of escape, I’d be praying for merciful liberation, or even death. If Heinlein had bombed Earth…but they hadn’t bombed Earth. The newscasts kept claiming that we’d gotten our retaliation in first, but how could one retaliate against something that had never happened? “Their society wasn’t set up to launch an offensive war.”
I leaned forward. “And then there were the workers we conscripted from Albion and other planets,” I added. “How much right do we have to take them away from health and home just to put them to work for the UN?
“And even that isn’t the final issue,” I concluded. “Tell me something. Do you think that we — the United Nations — can win this war?”
There was a long pause. “I used to work on Devastator’s logistics,” I explained. I’d deduced how basic economics worked before the Heinlein texts had placed everything in a kind of context. “It’s becoming harder to obtain basic supplies, let alone items we desperately need to run starships. It now takes years to build a starship when it once took months. The freighters are overworked by the demands of the war and…well, I saw one of them burn out its drives because it hadn’t been in a shipyard for repairs. How long will it be before we don’t have a transport fleet left?”
I pushed the point forward. “The resistance in space knows that as well as we do,” I continued. “They’re targeting freighters and troop transports, rather than tangling with our cruisers and battleships. Freighters are effectively defenceless, so we have to cut loose starships to escort them, which spreads our starships critically thin. If we have to cut down on supplies to occupied worlds, we will start losing garrisons and eventually start losing control of entire planets. How long can we continue fighting this war?”
“I did logistics as well,” Kady admitted. “My most optimistic estimate would be ten years, assuming that no new invasions were mounted.”
“They probably will be mounted,” Lieutenant Kevin Sartin offered. “I’ve been hearing rumblings about both Williamson’s World and Iceberg being targeted for occupation. Williamson’s World is suspected of supplying aid and comfort to Heinlein, among other worlds, and is a known source of illegal starship components. It’s quite possible that they are supplying Heinlein’s resistance fleet through a black colony…”
“And how long will they have to prepare for the invasion?” I asked, coldly. “We lost a handful of ships in the first month of invading Heinlein. How many will we lose in another invasion?”
“How many soldiers will we lose on the ground?” Marine Lieutenant Alison Brooks asked gravely. She’d been a Cadet who’d transferred to the Marines and I’d been in two minds about inviting her, but we would need help from the Marines. “The big brains back home are going to fight the war to the last infantryman, or the last starship crewman.”
“All right,” Bruno snapped, rubbing one dark arm in front of his face. “I take your point. We’re going to lose the war, right?”
“Yes,” I said, flatly.
“That’s nonsense,” Ellen protested. “What about nuclear weapons…?”
“Turning Heinlein into a radioactive wasteland won’t help save the UN,” I said. “I’ve done the maths carefully. Assuming that we get no further conscript workers from the colonies, we’re looking at a complete social collapse within thirty years — at best. It may well come sooner if a successive failure chain starts moving; hell, it may be moving already.”
I saw their expressions. A failure chain began when one component failed, and in failing, caused another component to fail, which caused yet another component to fail… We’d been taught a rhyme about it at the Academy. “For want of a nail,” I quoted, and ran through the entire rhyme. “And even if we manage to fix one problem, we’re still going to have others, hundreds of them. I doubt that the collapse can be averted for long.”
“They must know this,” Kevin protested. “Why aren’t they doing anything about it?”
“They don’t care, or they can’t do anything,” Allison said. “Look, the people who issue our orders cannot change much about how the system works. They need to cut spending drastically and they can’t do that without destabilising everything, so they try to take as much tax money as possible…and that puts businesses out of work, which only increases the burden on social spending.”