Old Men and Children
By Raven Green
I
signed up to be a peacekeeper, not a soldier. We all did. The Seltris Rangers
weren’t supposed to be a military force. We were keepers of the order, not
fighters for any cause. But history doesn’t respect institutional boundaries.
And war respects them even less. We couldn’t have stopped the Pan-Sectoral War
if we tried. It was a boss’s war.
It
all started with the assassination of Ambassador Franz Lipsmit of the New
Heptian Confederation. New Heptia’s government had declared itself neutral with
regard to the Unification and Anti-Unification movements in the Seltris Sector.
But Lipsmit favored Unification, and was willing to meet with planetary leaders
who also favored it. When he was killed on his way back from a diplomatic
conference on the neutral planet of Ingraham B, and no one stepped up to take
credit for the killing, the Unification Movement blamed the Anti-Unification
Front. The AUF denied it, and condemned the assassination, but refused to make the
reparations the Unificationists demanded without direct evidence of their
involvement. Both sides deployed ships at strategic points and the conflict
escalated into open warfare when the Anti-Unification Front Militia seized
property owned by Unificationists on several planets.
As
Seltris Rangers, we didn’t like the Unificationists’ methods. We didn’t like
that they resorted to interplanetary bullying, threats and force to goad the
AUF into playing the villain role they desperately wanted to cast them in, but
we didn’t like the AUF either for letting itself be goaded, and we didn’t think
it was their right to seize civilians’ property. Our politics were broadly
pro-unification, more specifically pro-peace, and unification was more likely
to engender peace and drive out the warlords and arms dealers than a divided
Seltris Sector. So the Seltris Rangers entered the war on the side of
Unification. The Unificationists were overjoyed, thinking our alliance
legitimized their movement, and they agreed that in allied operations, we
should be in command. Ranger Prime knew this was a double-edged sword. It meant
that if we failed, we would take the fall, and in the post-war sector, we would
have no role, even as peacekeepers. But the alternative was to let nationalists
and ideologues run the war, and so, the Seltris Rangers agreed to lead the
Unification Forces in battle.
I
knew my days as a Ranger were numbered. I did my job, but Ranger Prime knew how
I really felt about Unification. I was opposed. I thought the planets and moons
of the Seltris Sector deserved autonomy, not involuntary trade agreements and
redistributive taxation. I didn’t become a Seltris Ranger to force statist
policies on foreign planets. I did it because I wanted to serve an organization
that still stood for something. Back then, we stood for defending the weak and
the vulnerable.
There
was this one night, on a planet called Indigo 2, in the Azure System, that I
stopped believing I’d ever stand for the weak and the vulnerable again. It was
the third night of our advance, our push into enemy territory. The meadows and
forested river valleys of the southern continent had been transformed into
choked, ashy wastelands beset by howling winds, broken every once in a while by
the strafing sounds of combat dropjets. We traveled at night, avoiding patrols
by the Tantalite and ex-military Rigelian mercenaries the AUF hired. At least,
we thought it was mercs we were up against. Intel called them “Irregulars.” It
was so dark, a moonless night, we couldn’t see… when the giant blue sun rose,
we realized who we’d been killing. They were all under sixteen, except for the
two who must have been older than sixty. They were old men and children we’d
felled in the night, their “irregular” uniforms nothing more than the charity
clothing and rags worn by the impoverished anti-Unification villagers we were
supposed to protect. They’d gone over to the other side, declared us “enemy.”
And now, they were dead. These old men, and children. They hadn’t even carried
rifles- the most deadly weapons they had on their persons were a few old
revolvers and a pair of crossbows. The youngest was armed with merely a sling
and pebbles. He looked like he was ten.
I
had my next crisis of conscience at Esmeralda’s Ring. This was an Ancient
NetGate, a wormhole stabilizer that permitted sub-light ships access to a
network of other gates throughout the Sector. I was piloting a corsair, one of
fifty the Seltris Rangers sent to safeguard a convoy of refugees fleeing the
anti-Unification government of the Bianca System, the Decimeth Order. The
Decimeths sent four squadrons of Interceptors after the convoy, and we were
vastly outgunned in our nimble but lightly armed corsairs. Then, one of the
Decimeth ships began accelerating toward the NetGate. I scanned the ship and
determined they were carrying a quantum inversion bomb that would destabilize
the wormhole and cut off escape for anyone stuck in a sub-light ship. The ship
was moving too fast for targeting scanners to lock on, and she could easily
have shot down any guided missiles. I transmitted the information to the other
corsairs in the Ranger fleet. Ranger Prime herself was with us that day, in the
lead corsair. And the order came from her to abandon the convoy, abandon the
gate, abandon that system. We were cutting our losses. I was ordered to jump
away. I can still hear the Biancan refugees screaming for help over the
comm-grid when I close my eyes. They come back every night. I can hardly sleep
anymore.
The
final straw came when I was assigned to attack an automated food factory in the
Tau 400 System. What a shame, I thought, for this was a thing of beauty. The
factory trailed a single, medium-sized comet, collecting carbon, hydrogen,
oxygen and nitrogen from the comet’s tail with giant scoops, and converting the
particles into synthetic food to feed an entire population of two billion belt
miners. The miners lived in luxury, and so did the seven billion other people
on the three planets in their system that all benefitted from the same robot
food factory. But the people of Tau 400 were allied with the AUF, so
Unification Command asked us to sabotage this thing of beauty, this techno-economic
marvel that supported one of the freest interplanetary societies in the sector.
They even detailed us a specialized warship for the mission, a prototype
Zeltese combat cruiser, designed by the advanced shipbuilders of the Ice Moon
of Zelt Minor C, since our corsairs were simply not up to the task of assailing
such a large target. I found myself in command of a crew of eighteen Rangers
and twenty Zeltese warriors, aboard this prototype warship.
The
Zeltese were a contradictory people. Theirs was an ancient warrior’s tradition,
but the realities of survival on their only marginally habitable moon and
forced their entire civilization underground had led to a rigid, regimented
lifestyle, even for their civilians. Their leaders were not military officials,
as one might expect of such a people, but rather, scientists and engineers
whose expertise maintained their subterranean civilization’s delicate
technological and ecological balance. Their technical advances and preference
for cleanliness and precision were reflected in the interior design of the
cruiser, which was sparse and white. And yet, the warriors who served with me
on the clean, sharp-lined cruiser wore the traditional furs and hides of the
animals they still hunted on the surface, and carried venom-tipped neural
spikes in addition to their more modern distance-tasers and tranq-guns. I
wondered what they thought of unification. Were they blinded by its utopian
promises? Its insistence on an economics of justice? Or were they merely
soldiers, blindly serving their leaders? How would they have voted if the
Zeltese Civil Administration put the question of the war to a public
referendum? Such a motion was being debated in the Peoples’ Council, the
warriors told me, but they were tight-lipped as to what they thought about it.
I could respect that. We all had a job to do, whether we liked it or not. The
Civil Administration supported Unification, and that was all.
We
set the combat cruiser on an interception course for the food factory, leading
five squadrons of corsairs. The lean, angular warship pushed through the
opposing fleet of attack cutters sent by Tau 400’s Defense Forces. Ranger 472
and Ranger 91 piloted their corsairs, upgraded with guided plasma missiles,
into the service trench of the robot food factory and fired straight into the
huge machine’s secondary waste heat vent. An explosion rippled outward from
inside the factory, and the lights on its surface went dark. As I watched this
on the holoscreen that dominated the cruiser’s command deck, I imagined the
lights of entire cities likewise going dark on every planet in the system. I
tried to push the thought out of my mind, to tell myself this was war, that I
was a soldier now, but I still couldn’t make myself like it. Once again, the screams
of the refugees came back, and the faces of the old men and children slain on
Indigo 2 haunted me, howling at me, deepening the chasm of my guilt and my
shame. The combat cruiser rocketed away from the dying hulk of the food
factory, trailed by triumphant corsairs. But I felt like nothing less than a
warlord. I could not join the merriment of the other Rangers and our Zeltese
friends.
I
knew my corsair was stored in the secondary EVA bay of the combat cruiser. The
small ship had a limited FTL range, but it was enough to get me back to
Ingraham B… only I didn’t know if I wanted to return to the neutral planet
where the Seltris Rangers were based. I thought of my homeworld of New Heptia,
which had also once called itself neutral, but no longer. Nowhere was neutral
anymore. Not in this sector.
Three
jumps, however, and I could be in a different sector. I comforted myself with
this thought and I excused myself from the command deck and delegated authority
in my absence to Major Kav, my Zeltese XO. No one stopped me. I had all the
command codes I needed to make my exit quickly and without alarm. By the time
they noticed, I was already gone.
I
didn’t know where I wanted to go, just that I needed to get away. Three jumps,
another sector, some place I’d never been.
Maybe,
there, I could be a peacekeeper again.