She smiled at our expressions. “I had to spend a year down on Earth,” she explained. “I learned more than I wanted to learn about how the system really worked.”
“I see,” Bruno said. “Very well, John; the floor is yours. Why have you called us all here?”
I took a breath. I was about to commit myself…no, I was committed. I owed it to the dead children of Heinlein and poor Ensign Gomez to commit myself. If I were to be arrested and tried for treason, at least no one would be able to say that I hadn’t tried.
“This cannot go on,” I said. “I cannot — I will not — serve as the enforcer for idiotic beauecrats intent on raping the colonies to keep Earth alive one more day. I want to stop it, dead in its tracks.” It was hard to say, but there was no choice. “I want to plan a mutiny.”
“It sounds like you want to mount a coup,” Alison observed. She didn’t seem angry, just curious. “Do you think that you could run the government better than the government?”
That, I decided, went without saying, but I had humbler objectives. “I want to take the fleet,” I said. “If we could seize control of the jump-capable forces in the solar system and their supporting elements, we could pick up the remainder of the fleet as individual starships return to Earth. If we held the fleet, the UN would be trapped on Earth and the colonies would mop up the garrisons.”
“There’d be a slaughter,” Alison pointed out.
“They’re…Infantry,” Bruno snapped. “They don’t deserve our sympathy!”
“There are units that are actually quite capable,” Alison said, coldly. “I have worked with them on occasion. Do they all deserve to die?”
“They don’t have to die,” I said, carefully. I needed her cooperation desperately. “We can force the colonies to allow the garrisons to leave peacefully…”
“And where will they go?” Kevin asked. “Earth, perhaps…or Botany?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Kady frowned from her position. “Tell me something,” she said. “The fleet needs supplied — you know that as well as I do. How do we get the supplies we need to keep the fleet operating without Earth?”
“The supplies don’t come from Earth,” I said, seriously. I’d seen it back when I’d been assigned to Devastator’s logistics. “They come from the asteroid industrial plants and stations there; they’re just shipped back to the Supply Department on Earth. The fuel for the shuttles and the fusion plants comes from Jupiter and the cloud-scoops there. Everything, but the crewmen themselves comes from somewhere other than Earth. We don’t need Earth to supply the fleet!”
“Assuming they will cooperate,” Bruno said, grimly.
“They will,” Alison said. “I took a tour out there last year. The rock rats hate the UN with all of their considerable fervour. Half of the staff on those stations are conscripts from worlds like Heinlein and really don’t want to be there. The remainder just want to live in peace without the UN’s impossible demands. They keep having nasty accidents that somehow never get reported.”
The discussion ranged backwards and forwards, but at the end of it, we had a plan. “Thank you all for coming,” I concluded. “Is there anyone here — now — who wants to back out?”
“No,” Bruno said. No one stepped forward. “What now?”
“Now?” I asked. I produced a set of datachips. If they’d been Brotherhood members, it would have been easier, but there was no way to know if they were Brotherhood. No wonder no one had managed to use the Brotherhood as an instrument of rebellion. “These have instructions on how to encode a message through the communications system. We’ll stay in touch and lay our plans.”
“It’ll take years,” Alison agreed. “If we all recruit a handful of others…”
“Quite,” I said. “Remember, keep these to yourself and don’t share them with anyone. Now, this is how we’ll keep in touch.”
Two hours later, I returned to my hotel, grinning from ear to ear. Anyone who saw me probably suspected I’d just been with a woman and I was content to let them believe that. One way or the other, the die had been firmly cast. There was no turning back. I felt so alive.
From: The Never-Ending War. Stirling, SM. Underground Press, Earth.
But who are the enemy?
The United Nations did not, at first, admit the existence of an enemy. That would have put the lie of their claims that they were beloved and ‘only’ at war against corrupt government officials and others who opposed the UN’s commitment for liberty and benevolent government for all. Indeed, despite various advances in weapons science deployed by the colonies — and other forces — the UN Intelligence Division (a contradiction in terms, if ever there was one) was unwilling to admit the existence of such weapons, as that would have made a mockery of the UN’s claims to be the most advanced society that ever existed, or ever would exist.
It would be easy to say that the enemy was everyone, and there would definitely be some truth in that statement. It would be more accurate to say that the UN’s main enemies, outside the independence-minded colonies, were hidden black colonies, wreckers (terrorist groups) and even renegade UNPF officers. The threat was multisided and seemingly limitless. No matter how many successful invasions — if only for a given value of successful — the UN mounted, no matter how many black colonies were encountered and destroyed, the hydra simply grew more heads. The UN sought the creature’s heart, to rip it out and tear it to shreds, but there was no such thing. The enemy had no head.
This should not have been surprising. Even during the first expansion into space, there were groups that sought to set up their own colonies and hide from the remainder of humanity. Some of them were religious communities intending to remain apart from infidels — see the Mormon Asteroid Colony, which became New Salt Lake City, for details — while others belonged to weirder fringe groups, including rogue criminal gangs and terrorists. The invention of the jump drive and the first expansion into interstellar space only strengthened this trend. As Earth became increasingly inhospitable to freethinkers and non-conformists, the vast reaches of space beckoned and the emigration began. Largely unknown to Earth — still dominated by nationalist governments at the time — thousands upon thousands of unregistered citizens were moving outside their control.
Some of these groups — the Mormons, in particular — founded planetary settlements, with or without the consent of the UN. Others found isolated stars without habitable planets and used their dead worlds as a base, fairly confident that the UN would not waste time trying to examine the systems thoroughly enough to locate the hidden colonies. The official wave of expansion pushed a more secretive wave of expansion in front of it, creating hidden populations with no reason to love the UN. Many of them, therefore, turned to supporting the UN’s enemies. Only the secrecy that is an inherent requirement for any black colony prevented the creation of a major threat to the UN.
The UNPF, therefore, found itself tasked with charting and patrolling the Beyond — as it came to be called. It forced them to divert desperately needed ships on courses that would keep them out of contact for months, perhaps even years. It was not surprising, therefore, that a few ships chose to rebel, or even died out among the stars, their passing unmarked by the UN until years later.