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The capital of New Doncaster, Roland noted, had changed a great deal since the insurgency had turned into a full-scale war. There were police checkpoints everywhere, backed up by SWAT teams and army infantry patrolling the streets. The shops were either boarded up, in the vain hope of keeping the next round of fighting from causing real damage, or closed altogether. There were only a handful of civilians in plain view, almost all of them aristos or townies. The city’s population of debtors and indents were keeping their heads down.
Roland brooded as Sandra drove them into the underground garage, then led the way past a pair of checkpoints and up into the council chamber. The war council had been thrown together in a tearing hurry, drawing councillors from both the aristos and the townies. Roland hadn’t had anything like enough time to monitor the political squabbles, but he was uneasily aware there were people on both sides who regarded the war council as nothing more than a placeholder, a temporary measure rather than a permanent part of the planetary government. Roland hoped - prayed - no one would try to reshape matters before the war was brought to an end, let alone go back on the power-sharing agreements everyone had made after the first insurgency had exploded into life. It would be utterly disastrous to the war effort.
The rebels must be praying we’ll fall out amongst ourselves, he thought. If we start fighting amongst ourselves, their ultimate victory is assured.
He saluted the Prime Minister - Sandra’s father - then looked around the table. There were nine members in all, but only two others had been invited to attend. Lord Hamish Ludlow sat on one side of the Prime Minister, his face unreadable; Daniel Collier, Richard’s father, sat at the other. Roland suspected the decision to exclude the other five members boded ill, particularly as his vote was only meant to be used to break a tie. Or maybe the others simply hadn’t been able to attend. No, that was unlikely. Roland himself had travelled further than any of them to attend the meeting.
“General,” Lord William Oakley said. The Prime Minister seemed to have aged a decade in the last six months. He’d only become PM, from what Roland had heard, because he’d been seen as a safe pair of hands. The insurgency had seemed containable. There’d been no reason, not at the time, to look for a more active war leader. Now ... “We must put formality aside, when we are discussing Lady Porter.”
“Yes, sir,” Roland said. “There is little dispute about the facts. Private Angeline Porter murdered prisoners in cold blood. Word is already out and spreading. We have to get ahead of it by putting her in front of a court-martial, then - at the very least - sentencing her to a lifetime on a penal island. Ideally, she should be executed. There is no way we can tolerate her actions.”
“I protest,” Lord Ludlow said. “It is a point of law that aristocrats are spared capital punishment.”
Roland met his eyes. “She is a murderer whose actions have almost certainly prolonged the war,” he said, flatly. “We must throw the book at her.”
“We committed ourselves to fighting a reasonably civilised war,” Collier agreed. “Her actions have thrown our commitment into question. If we fail to discipline her, to make an example if nothing else, we will be seen as condoning an atrocity. The rebels may well retaliate against our own people, either the prisoners in their hands or our civilian populations.”
Roland nodded. The rebels had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of prisoners. It was an open secret that there were thousands of people in Kingsport - and the outlying islands - who had never been accounted for, even when the investigative teams started digging up the graves to check the bodies. Many would be dead, he was sure, but a number might well have been kept prisoner. Hell, the smarter rebels wouldn’t have let their men kill all the aristos. They’d make good human shields, as well as field workers.
“The rebels themselves have not fought a civilised war,” Ludlow countered. “How many mansions have been destroyed? How many men have been killed? How many women have been raped and then killed? Why should we fight a civilised war when they are manifestly committed to an uncivilised war?”
Roland chose his words carefully. “It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that one side ignoring the laws of war is an excuse for the other side, your side, to do the same,” he said. It had been discussed at Boot Camp, the DI explaining how the perception of unfairness could wear away at military discipline until the urge to retaliate in kind became overwhelming. “In the short term, it might be satisfying. In the long term, we must convince the vast majority of rebels that they have a future with us or commit ourselves to a war that will be disastrous, even if we win. People who feel they have nothing to lose will not surrender. They will keep fighting and do their best to claw us, even as they go down.”
He took a breath. “We must reach out to the uncommitted and try to convince them to join us,” he stated. “And that means we must admit what she did, and make it clear she has been punished for her crimes.”
“Agreed,” Collier said.
“There are political issues that have to be addressed,” Ludlow said, smoothly. “First, she went through utter hell. Her servants betrayed her family. She was raped repeatedly, by at least six different men. The rest of her close family was apparently killed, if they weren’t taken prisoner, and she was expected to die herself. The only reason she survived was sheer luck.”
Roland scowled. “That is not an excuse.”
Ludlow ignored him. “There was a great deal of sympathy for her, when the story broke,” Ludlow continued. “Her life, and all hope of being a wife and a mother, were destroyed through no fault of her own. She was even seen as a heroine, of sorts, for not letting everything that happened destroy what little she had left. There is no way any of her supporters, her admirers, will condone her imprisonment or exile.”
“And will they be happier,” Roland demanded, “when the rebels strike back by blowing up the next debutante ball?”
He went on before Ludlow could muster a response. “It is a simple fact, as much as the civilised universe may try to deny it, that the only thing preventing war crimes is the promise of bloody revenge. We don’t do it to them because they’d do it to us; they don’t do it to us because we’d do it to them. Right now, the rebels have all the excuse they need to commit an atrocity of their own, an atrocity that will slip through our defences and take lives. We need to punish her for her crimes, to make it clear we do not support them, before the rebels kick off a series of atrocities, and retaliations, and more atrocities!”
Ludlow glared. “The rebels have committed thousands of atrocities,” he said. “They have killed and raped and looted and destroyed homes and crops that took centuries to build. What makes hers so special?”
“It was committed by one of us, by someone under my command,” Roland snapped. “And we cannot afford to condone it.”
“I would take rebel protests more seriously if they hadn’t committed atrocities of their own,” Ludlow said. “Why shouldn’t we strike back?”
“Because the goal is to win the war without tearing the planet apart,” Roland said. He wanted to point out – to scream – that Angeline Porter had killed children! “If the rebels think they cannot surrender, they will not surrender!”
Collier leaned forward. “I think it is fairly true to say that support for her is concentrated amongst the aristocracy,” he said. “Us townies are largely indifferent to her.”
“She was treated ...” Ludlow made a visible attempt to calm himself. “Those vile animals destroyed her life! How can you be indifferent to the atrocity they perpetrated against her?”
Collier started to speak, but Roland overrode him. “I understand what she went through, as much as anyone can,” he said. “However, that does not excuse her crimes. She was cautioned not to slaughter prisoners, or indeed commit any of a number of war crimes, and she did it anyway. She needs to go to a penal island, at the very least.”
“And if you try to bring charges against her, there will be political uproar,” Ludlow said. “Right now, the story is breaking. Many news reporters, sick to death of rebel atrocities, are taking her side. The remainder will still not condemn her. Do you really want to tear the government apart over a minor incident, no better or worse than what the rebels did to their victims? Why don’t we just paint her actions a retaliation for their crimes?”
“Because they weren’t,” Roland said. “She killed children, sir, and people who had nothing to do with how she was treated. The problem with eye-for-an-eye reasoning is that you eventually run out of eyes!”
“Her conduct was disgraceful,” Collier said. “We can agree on that, if nothing else.”
The PM held up his hand. “There are good reasons to move ahead with a formal trial,” he said, calmly. “At the same time, the trial will prove divisive at the worst possible moment. Her defenders are already getting organised. They will paint the trial as a witch hunt, and insist she is being unfairly blamed for her actions.”
Roland snorted. “Nonsense.”
“People will believe anything, when they want to,” Collier said. “Or even when it is convenient for them to believe it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the PM said. “What matters is that her supporters will believe it. There is a lot of anger over the devastation the rebels wrought, from the destroyed mansions and fields to the raped and murdered aristocrats. Her supporters will try to argue that she did the right thing and enough people will agree with them, or pretend to do so, to make putting her on trial very difficult. And there’s ...”
He paused. “There’s also the issue of the hell she went through, and what it might have done to her,” he added. “They may even claim diminished capacity, on the grounds she was traumatised by her experiences. No matter the result, no matter what happens to her, there will be absolute chaos. We simply cannot afford it.”
Roland felt a hot flash of anger. “The rebels will retaliate,” he said. “Can we afford that?”
Ludlow scoffed. “You don’t know they’ll retaliate.”
“I do.” Roland clenched his fists. “I told you. The law cannot, just by existing, prevent atrocities. They can only be stopped by the threat of punishment or retaliation. If we fail to punish her, the rebels will assume we decided to condone her actions, or that we planned them in advance, and they will conclude the only way to keep us from doing it again is to carry out an atrocity of their own. They must, because if they don’t they’ll only encourage us to do it again and again. Turning the other cheek after you’ve been struck is not a good idea, in a world without enforced laws. It merely encourages the aggressor to strike the other cheek too.”
“It’s a valid point,” Collier said. “Perhaps we should hand her over to the rebels.”
“That will not go down well,” Ludlow stated. “The government will fall.”
“I suggest a compromise,” the PM said. “We will not put her on trial, because that would trigger a major faction fight at the worst possible time. However, she cannot be allowed anywhere near a military operation ever again. We will, therefore, assign her to a guardpost in the middle of nowhere, perhaps somewhere along the edge of the habitable zone, and leave her there. She can stay there for the rest of her miserable life.”
Roland shook his head. “Compared to what she deserves, that’s letting her off with a slap on the wrist. No, without even a slap on the wrist!”
“It has its advantages,” Ludlow said. “On paper, she will have been sent into de facto exile, somewhere so far away she might as well have been sent to a penal island. She will be punished without actually undergoing a trial. And she’ll never return to aristocratic society.”
“It isn’t enough,” Roland said, although he suspected he’d already lost. The PM had suggested the compromise and Ludlow had agreed to it, leaving Collier as the sole holdout. Roland’s own vote was worthless if there wasn’t a tie ... he tried, hard, not to show his frustration. There was no point in even lodging a protest vote. “We cannot afford to be seen as condoning the atrocity.”
“We won’t be,” Ludlow said. “That’s the beauty of it. We’ll be sending her into exile without ever quite making it permanent, without ever charging her with something she can appeal against. She will know she is being punished, as well everyone else, but it will never be formally recorded. She’ll ... just remain in exile for the rest of her life.”
Roland tried not to snap at him. “Do you think the rebels will be impressed?”
“We do have some low-key communications channels,” the PM reminded him. “We can let them know.”
“We’ll see,” Roland said. “But I think this will end badly.”
He sighed. On the face of it, Ludlow’s idea of sending Angeline Porter into exile without ever quite making it formal had a lot to recommend it. Angeline had some survival training - she’d been a soldier, as well as a plantation resident - but it was unlikely she’d last very long. Her exile might be more of a death sentence than anything else. He supposed the government would play that up as much as possible, when they communicated with the rebels. They hadn’t sentenced Angeline Porter to death, but ... they’d sentenced her to death. Roland tried not to groan openly. There was something mealy-mouthed about the whole affair that didn’t sit well with him. Surely, it would be better to hold a formal trial and let the chips fall where they may?
And what can you do, he asked himself, to change their minds?
It was a galling thought. There was nothing. Even threatening to resign wouldn’t have the effect he’d hoped. The days the government had hung on his every word as gospel were gone. There weren’t that many officers better than he was, not on the planet, but ... he wasn’t irreplaceable. Trying to fight would be utterly disastrous, both to the war effort and to his career. He dreaded to think what his superiors would say, if they knew how badly he’d fucked up. And the only thing he could do was step back and let a war criminal effectively get away with it.
She’s going into exile, he reminded himself. It’s a fucking death sentence wrapped up in pretty words and pathetic excuses.
He tried to keep his face under tight control. The hell of it was that, a couple of years ago, he would have done the same thing. The spoilt brat he’d been, too wrapped up in himself to acknowledge the humanity of his peers, wouldn’t have spent any time thinking about the issue. Angeline Porter was an aristocrat, the heir to her family’s titles and monies, while her victims were nothing more than filthy commoners. Who gave a damn, his old self would have asked, what she did to them? They were just ... things. If Belinda hadn’t sorted him out ...
You would be dead, his thoughts pointed out. There was no doubt of it. No one, save for Belinda, had considered him worth saving. Who could blame them? He’d been a little brat in an adult body. You’d have died during Earthfall.
“Then we seem to have agreement,” Collier said. He made a show of looking at his watch. “I think it is too late to continue the rest of our planned discussion. We can meet again tomorrow to discuss the war, and our future operations?”
“I think that will be suitable,” the PM said. “I’ll have the police make arrangements to transport Angeline Porter to a holding cell, then prepare her supplies for her exile. Once she’s ready, she can be dumped on an island and she’ll no longer be our problem.”
But even if she dies within the week, her ghost will haunt us, Roland thought, sardonically. There’s no way the rebels will let this pass. They’ll strike at us, at a soft target, and we’ll be left holding the bag.
“Good,” Ludlow said. He clapped his hands together. “I agree. We should resume tomorrow.”
Roland nodded, curtly. He had the oddest feeling he’d been played ... and yet, he couldn’t put the sensation into words. Had Ludlow wanted him to demand Angeline Porter’s execution? Or ... or what? Perhaps he was just overthinking it. Ludlow had good reason to stand up for the young woman, even if she was a war criminal. And the solution might just work ...
“With your permission, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Roland said. He’d already arranged to meet Rachel afterwards, then go back to base with her. If nothing else, talking through the matter with her would clarify things. “And I hope this won’t come back to bite us.”
“There is no way we will not be bitten, whatever we do,” Ludlow said. He shot Roland a smile that looked as if it were intended to be reassuring but failed miserably. “We just have to choose what bites us and when.”
And you are prepared to risk the rebels retaliating against your civilians - our civilians - rather than start a fight over her future, Roland thought, as he stood. It galled him, more than he cared to admit, that he understood Ludlow’s thinking. You may be right, in the long term, but the effects are still going to be bad.