She looks around at her troops, as if checking for consent. Nobody says anything.
“We’re troublemakers, Grayson. Mutineers. The 330th is a penal battalion, like I told you. So’s the 309th. Your SI troopies with their maroon beanies and the live ammo in their rifles, standing around the edge of the flight deck? They’re not there to teach us the ropes or boost our combat power. They’re there to keep us in check, in case we get silly ideas.”
It’s common knowledge that the fleet is taking advantage of the peculiar nature of message distribution across interstellar distances to present a selective and sanitized version of world news. As I listen to Sergeant Fallon’s narrative of the NAC’s recent trouble on its own soil, I am nonetheless amazed at how thoroughly they’ve kept us in the dark. I remember my trip to see Mom in Boston just a few weeks ago, and the omnipresent riot cops that all seemed to be on edge constantly. They had told me just how bad things had gotten in the old neighborhood, but according to Sergeant Fallon, Boston is a calm oasis of civil tranquility compared to almost every metroplex south of the Mason-Dixon line or west of the Rockies. The colony flights have stopped entirely, the Basic Nutritional Allowance rations are getting reduced by hundreds of calories every other month, and the pressure in the tenements has become too great without the few safety valves there used to be. Now the PRCs are lawless free-fire zones, and only the thin green line of Homeworld Defense troopers is keeping the place from unraveling completely. Once again, it seems that the Lankies aren’t doing anything to our species that we can’t do to each other all on our own.
“The first mutiny wasn’t even one,” Sergeant Fallon says. “It was just some company CO down in Atlanta-Macon, refused an order from the battalion CO to clean out a tenement high-rise with gunships. They didn’t even get violent or anything. Company CO tells his unit to stand down, and they do. No bloodshed. Division takes the whole battalion off the line, and dissolves the company. One hundred and forty-eight discharges on the spot, all benefits and accrued paychecks forfeit.”
“Holy crap,” I say. “Kicked out the whole company?”
“Every last grunt, from the company commander down to the privates folding laundry back in the supply group.”
“What a shit move.”
“Now the second mutiny—that was a real one. This time, they had a captain who had taken Neo-Constitutional Law back at Officer U, and he decides in the middle of a drop that using remote sentry cannons on unarmed civvies is illegal. So he tells his people to stand down. Only this time, Battalion sends in another company to arrest them and secure their gear, and the captain with the law degree decides that that’s an illegal order, too. So they don’t come quietly, and start a two-company firefight in the middle of a busy PRC that’s already in full riot anyway. The armed civvies jump into the fight on the side of the mutinous unit, and before you know it, there’s a hundred dead grunts on the ground, the battalion’s standby gunship wing making bombing runs with incendiaries, and ten square miles of SoTenn-Chattanooga are burning. That did not look too good on the Networks, I’ll tell you that.”
I should be astonished and angry, but I’m not really surprised, and I’ve long since lost the right to be outraged. Five years ago, I held the line on the ground against people who could have been my neighbors and schoolmates had we dropped into Boston instead of Detroit, and I ended up putting a bunker-buster missile into a building full of people. Part of my conscience tries to convince me to this day that there were no unarmed civvies in the high-rise by then, that anyone with half a brain would have gotten out of there when the shooting started, but my rational side knows better. I remember how we fought our way through the darkened city that night, scared shitless, standing on a carpet of discarded fléchette sabots, and mentally marking everything not in TA battle armor as a “kill on sight” target. Whether we were justified or not, whether it was legal at the time or not, morality left the equation the first time one of us pulled the trigger on a welfare citizen. If my oath of service commits me to the protection of the rights and freedoms of the Commonwealth’s citizens, I’ve violated it dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times since I got out of boot camp.
“We have guys going home on leave all the time. Nobody’s picked up any rumors about HD units in mutiny.”
“There’s nobody to talk to,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Most HD units are confined to base between drops now, and when you get down there on leave, they won’t let you anywhere near a hot PRC or an unstable unit. How many HD froggies did you bump into when you were last Earthside, Grayson?”
“None,” I say. “Just cops and MPs.”