Two weeks passed slowly. Fort Galloway, under Ed’s command, reported a series of skirmishing raids and a handful of snipers taking pot-shots at anyone who showed their face, but other than that little happened. My soldiers — the Legion and the Svergie Army — patrolled through the nearby farms, but left the mountains and the miners strictly alone. I didn’t want to risk men patrolling in an area that would take thousands of additional soldiers to take and secure. I wasn’t fooled by the quiet either. Quiet, in my experience, meant that the enemy was preparing something pretty damn devastating.
“There’s been nothing, apart from the shots,” Ed reported, when I checked in with him one night. “A couple of soldiers have the galloping shits” — tummy upsets caused by eating too many MRE packs — “and another nearly managed to hurt himself on the shooting range, but apart from that it’s been quiet.”
“Good,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. One explanation for the shortage of attacks was the shortage of targets for the enemy to shoot at. The farmers didn’t seem inclined to come close to New Copenhagen and the other cities, where we had a formidable presence and cleared lanes of fire, and we weren’t running patrols into the wild countryside. The stream of new recruits was being trained, whereupon we might have the numbers to take the war into the mountains and recover the mines, but until then…
I smiled to myself. There was an ulterior motive in creating the new farms I hadn’t mentioned to anyone, apart from Ed. If the enemy realised that we might — no, we would — escape the effects of the food embargo, they might launch a conventional attack before we escaped their pressure. The farmers and miners, or at least the handful we’d interviewed, had been willing to end hostilities, provided that the government stopped interfering with them, but the Freedom League might have different ideas. They wanted — needed — a government in New Copenhagen that would be friendly to them and their aims. They’d try to push their allies into a direct grab for power before their political power was shattered completely.
The map of the planet glowed in front of me and I smiled again. Svergie wasn’t a heavily populated planet, not by the standards of New Washington, or Edo, or even Terra Nova, and there was plenty of room for expansion. If we kept up the pressure, if we kept moving people out from the cities into the new farms, we wouldn’t run out of space in a hurry. We could even settle the other continents and spread out much further. The local government would probably see that as a threat to its power — it had been an issue on several other worlds — but we could cope with that. We might even go looking for new colonists from Earth. There were billions of people trying to escape the mother world.
Two days later, I accompanied Frida on a visit to the new farms. I was quietly impressed with how much had been done in the three weeks since we’d broken the first patch of ground, but we had plenty of manpower and determination. Apart from the Communists, we’d emptied the jails of everyone who had committed minor felonies and set them to work as well, under the direction of the farmers. There were others as well; teenage kids and unemployed men, working for their daily ration. It looked uncomfortably like a slave camp to me, the kind the UN had tried to run on Botany, but there was no choice. I kept telling myself that there was no choice.
“Madam President,” Jack Hawthorn called. “Welcome to the Defiance Farm.”
Frida smiled reluctantly. “The Defiance Farm?”
“We’re defying the food blockade here by growing our own,” Jack said, as he led us towards the first set of fields. “Give us a few months and we’ll have the first crop of potatoes and other quick-growing crops underway. That’ll win us time to start planting proper fields of corn and other crops; we can even start purchasing farm animals and using them in the fields…”
I listened absently as he expounded on his pet project. Jack had been a farmer before running off the farm — or being run off the farm, as he’d explained, by corrupt local governors and taxmen — and he knew more about farming than almost anyone else in the Legion. Finding him had been a stroke of luck, by all accounts; he’d had experience with the UN’s farming methods and more conventional methods as well. I was glad we had him; without him, we would have had to trust the local farmers completely.
“We’ve got nearly ten thousand people working out here now,” Jack continued. “Most of them don’t know their arse from their elbow, of course, but we can use them to break the ground if nothing else. This is simple, brute force farming and we’re going to have to rotate the crops after two or three plantings, but it’ll get us some time to work on more permanent solutions.”
He waved a hand at the massive UN-issue tents that had been set up in one corner of the farm. “We’ve got enough room for everyone to sleep under canvas for the moment, but we’re working on establishing some farmhouses and barns as we go along,” he continued. “Families get their own tent, as do lovers and friends; the vast majority sleep in the communal tents until they’re settled down. We’ve had some problems with discipline — a handful of thugs, a handful of drug addicts — but we weeded them out fairly quickly. A couple of stupid kids committed rape and we executed them in front of the entire group.”
“Good work,” I said. Frida still looked rather stunned by everything she was seeing. “Have there been any problems with the Communists?”
“Not many,” Jack confirmed. “A handful tried to lecture everyone on Communism and got a bad reception, while several others tried to escape under cover of darkness. They’re all fitted with locator beacons, of course, so tracking them all down was fairly easy and we brought the bodies back to the camp. I think that impressed some of the teenage thugs more than having armed soldiers scattered around the camp.”
I nodded. Thugs — street gangs, bullies, and other scrum like that — always thought of themselves as tough, but most of them melted away when confronted with real violence. Each of the soldiers guarding them had been in real wars, real fighting, and it showed. Life might have been cheap on the streets, but it was rare for gang wars to be fought out to the bitter end. The sight of dead bodies would have made an impression on them, even though the Communists had left enough dead bodies littering the streets of New Copenhagen. We’d tried to train some of the street thugs to join the army, but it hadn’t worked very well. They lived in a world where they had to fend for themselves. Working in large groups was alien to them.
“We have films every night and what other entertainments we can scrounge up,” Jack continued. “Various ball games, some board games, card games… I had to forbid people from gambling for money, but we’re not here to make this a hellish death camp. We had some girls trying to sell themselves as well, but overall… this place could be a lot worse.”
“This is horrible,” Frida said, shocked. “You’re using them as slaves.”
“The farmers who landed on your planet would have had to do the same thing,” I pointed out, seriously. I looked over at the turned earth that would be planted with crops soon and smiled again. “The farms you know and love didn’t come out of nowhere. They had to be developed, by brute force if necessary.”