Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [157]
And that was the last of the United Nations. Without the US to underpin it, there could be no US/UN. Space Defense became Earth Defense, its weapons turned outwards to face threats from nature, not from man. The Yanks became Americans again, and enthusiastically set about investigating and purging and denouncing and testifying.
Janis saw Jordan’s face one day, on a flickering television in an empty shop: some soundbite interview, over in seconds. She felt a pang of guilt, and that evening sat down and wrote a letter to him. He must know already that Moh was dead; the ANR was punctilious about these things. She knew, without ever having been told, that she should not tell anyone how Moh had died. It didn’t leave much to say, but she felt better for having said it.
She made friends, and lost some.
The Republic made enemies faster than it destroyed them.
Goddess, she thought, this place stinks.
It was a village of a few score people, in a green dell in the Lake District. Its generators ran on methane – fart-fuel, her comrades called it – and on scavenged solar cells. The houses were tar-paper and corrugated iron and animal hide. The people lived by farming and hunting and stealing, and didn’t wash.
Janis stood in the mud at the centre of the village, the rifle on her hip, turning and scanning. A few bodies sprawled among the houses. The thirteen surviving menfolk sat in the mud, their hands over their heads. Their rifles and crossbows and knives were stacked well out of their reach. About thirty ANR soldiers stood guard or went through the houses, throwing stuff out: clothes, weapons, food, furnishings. They had the look of people sifting through a nauseating heap of garbage. The women and children stood in the eaves of the unwalled shelter they called the long house. Rain dripped off it on to their matted hair, left runnels of white on their closed faces. If they took a step into the shelter or away from the run-off a snarl or a kick sent them back.
The air was filled with the whining of dogs muzzled with twisted wire, leashed by ropes held by a couple of ANR soldiers, and every so often by the scream of another dog as it was skewered on a long roughly sharpened spike driven at an angle into a low bank of ground. Six, so far. Five to go.
The rain rattled off a black body-bag in the back of a humvee at the entrance to the village, near the tree where they’d found the body: a captured soldier hanging by the ankles, and as the dogs had left it.
Three to go.
A small boy yelled out as that dog was spiked. He broke away from the grip of a woman’s hand on his shoulder and dashed forward. The line was within a second of breaking after him. Janis swung the gun round. It checked her hand as if it had struck a solid obstacle, and fired a single shot. The boy screamed and fell down in the mud. Janis felt her heart stop. The boy picked himself up and ran over to the woman.
The last dog writhed on the spike. The first had not yet died.
‘Nobody found their tongue yet?’ The unit’s leader, a small, mild-mannered, middle-aged man called Wills, looked around like a schoolteacher.
Silence.
‘Whose idea was it?’
Silence, and falling rain.
Wills turned to Janis.
‘Get a couple of guys to make another spike,’ he said, loud enough to be overhead. He looked over the line of bedraggled women and children as he spoke.
No, said a voice in Janis’s phones, you can’t do that! You can’t even threaten that.
It was Moh’s voice. She heard