The administrator looks over to the handful of troops by the entrance to the food storage bunker again.
“You guys are nuts. Not that I don’t appreciate your offer, but what can you do with a platoon against a whole regiment? That’s what, forty against a thousand?”
“Two thousand,” I say.
“Well,” Sergeant Fallon says, and smiles a lopsided little smirk. “We also have two full battalions of my own Homeworld Defense guys sitting all over this rock already. You have a bunch of those atmospheric puddle jumpers at the airfield, don’t you?”
The administrator and the constables stand off to the side for a few minutes, debating the situation in hushed, but animated talk. Then they walk back to where Sergeant Fallon and I are standing.
“Look,” the administrator says. “I don’t relish the thought of you grunts shooting it out with each other right in the middle of my town.”
He looks at the food storage bunker and chews on his lower lip for a moment.
“But I sure as hell didn’t sign up for a military occupation by my own people. Commonwealth Constitution says you serve us, not the other way around.”
“You’re the ranking civilian down here,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Until they open that chute again and send us orders to the contrary, that makes you my boss, not that one-star pencil pusher up there on the carrier.”
She nods at the troops by the bunker entrance.
“You want to keep all that stuff in civilian hands, you say the word. If you want them, I’m putting my whole outfit under your authority. Chances are they won’t want to try and root out fifteen hundred of us. And if they do, they’ll find out that Homeworld Defense is better at this game than they are.”
“How you going to handle those drop ships?” Constable Guest asks. “They can drop on top of us any time they want. You got something here that’ll scare off a flight of those?”
Sergeant Fallon smiles.
“We sort of, ah, borrowed the garrison’s brand-new drop ships. All four of ’em.”
Constable Guest shakes his head with a smile.
“Do it,” the administrator says. “Before they get wind of what you guys are doing down here. I’ll get on the radio with the fleet boss upstairs once you’re set up. See if I can talk some sense into him.”
Constable Guest turns to his fellow cops.
“We’re going to need a shitload of badges. I want to deputize every last one of these guys.”
“Time to pick a side,” Sergeant Fallon says to me a little while later, when the squad is setting up defensive positions at the food bunker. “I could use your help. You’re a pro running the tactical network. I need someone to coordinate the puddle jumpers and drop ships. Let us know when they send us company from orbit. But I’m not going to hold a gun to your head to keep you here. You want no part of this, you can go back to Frostbite, and no hard feelings. We’re probably all going to end up at a court-martial, best-case scenario. I’m not asking you to flush your career down the toilet.”
I don’t like the idea of taking sides against my fellow soldiers and fleet sailors. If I throw in my lot with Sergeant Fallon and her HD battalions, I will be forever persona non grata in any fleet chow hall and ship berth, even if I don’t spend the next twenty years in a military prison for mutiny. Since we’re at war, they probably wouldn’t leave it at that. What we’re doing here could get us all in front of a firing squad.
But to what end are we here? If we exist to defend the colonies, how can siding with the civvies down here be treason?
I remember the oath of service I took at my reenlistment ceremony just a few weeks ago. To bravely defend the laws of the Commonwealth and the freedom of its citizens.
Do we honor our oaths if we try to defend the Commonwealth’s laws by letting our commanders ignore them? Do we defend the freedom of its citizens by taking it away at gunpoint?
I don’t want to shoot at my fellow soldiers. But the thought of shooting at civilians is even more upsetting. I don’t want to pick a side, but now that I am forced to choose, I know which one I have to join.
“Maybe they’ll put us in neighboring cells at Leavenworth,” I say, and Sergeant Fallon smiles.
She pats me on the shoulder, and turns around to address the civvies standing around the ATV. “Can one of you folks give Sergeant Grayson here a ride to the airfield?”
By the time I get to the civilian airfield on the outskirts of the town, the administrator has passed the word down to all the colony facilities already. I pair my control deck with the main console of the local ATC system, and do a quick scan of the air and orbital space above New Longyearbyen.
“Sarge, this is Grayson,” I send to Sergeant Fallon. She has turned the platoon channel into our new top-level command circuit. The encryption isn’t completely bulletproof, especially not against our own people, but even with the hardware they have on the Midway, it will take the fleet a while to break into our renegade comms network.