This is the tenth installment of an exploration of some of
the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator catches a train for the agricultural hinterlands of the
Lakeland Republic, and learns some of the reasons why the Republic is so hard
to invade.
***********
The phone rang at eight a.m. sharp the next morning. I was
in the bathroom, trying to get my electric shaver to give me a shave half as
good as the one I got at the barbershop, and failing; I turned the thing off,
put it down, and got to the phone on the third ring. “Hello?”
“Mr. Carr? Melanie Berger. We’ve got everything lined up for
your trip today. Can you be at the train station by nine o’clock?”
“Sure thing,” I said.
“Good. Your tickets will be waiting for you, and Colonel Tom
Pappas will meet you there. You can’t miss him; look for a wheelchair and a
handlebar mustache.”
The wheelchair didn’t sound too promising—I had no idea what
kind of accommodations counties in the Lakeland Republic’s lower tiers made for
people with disabilities—but I figured Meeker’s people knew what they were
doing. “I’ll do that.”
“You’ll be back Saturday evening,” Berger said then. “The
president would like to see you again Monday afternoon, if you’re free.”
“I’ll put it on the schedule,” I assured her; we said the
usual, and I hung up.
It took me only a few minutes to pack for the trip, and then
it was out the door, down the stairs, and through the lobby to the street to
wave down a taxi. As I got out onto the sidewalk, a kid with a bag of rolled
newspapers hanging from one shoulder turned toward me expectantly and said,
“Morning Blade? ‘Nother satellite got hit.”
That sounded worth the price of a paper; I handed over a
bill and a couple of coins, got the paper in return, thanked the kid, and went
to the street’s edge. A couple of minutes later I was sitting in a two-wheel
cab headed for the train station, listening to the clip-clop of the horse’s
hooves ahead and reading the top story on the newspaper’s front page.
The kid who’d sold me the paper hadn’t been exaggerating. A
chunk of the Progresso IV satellite that got taken out by space junk a
week before had plowed into a big Russian telecommunications satellite during
the night, spraying fragments at twenty thousand miles an hour across any
number of midrange orbits. Nothing else had been hit yet, but the odds of a
full-blown Kessler syndrome had just gone up by a factor I didn’t want to think
about.
Aside from the fact itself, only one thing caught my
attention in the article: a comment from a professor of astronomy at the
University of Toledo, mentioning that his department was calculating the orbits
of as many fragments as they’d been able to track. I didn’t know a lot about
astronomy, but I’d learned just enough that the thought of trying to work out
an orbit using pen and paper made my head hurt. I wondered if they’d scraped
together the money to buy a bootleg computer from a Chicago smuggling ring or
something like that.
I’d just about finished the first section of the paper when
the taxi pulled up to the sidewalk in front of the train station. I paid the
cabbie, stuffed the newspaper into my coat pocket, and headed inside. The big
clock above the ticket counters said eight-thirty; there wasn’t much of a line,
so by eight-forty I had my round trip ticket in an inner pocket and was heading
through the doors marked Platform Four.
I’d just about gotten my bearings when I spotted a burly man
in a wheelchair halfway down the platform. He turned around and saw me a moment
later, made a little casual half-salute with one hand, and wheeled over to meet
me. Berger hadn’t been kidding about the handlebar mustache; it was big, black,
and curled at the tips. That and bushy eyebrows made up for the lack of a
single visible hair anywhere else on his head. He was wearing the first
hip-length jacket I’d seen anywhere in the Lakeland Republic, over an
olive-drab military uniform.
“Peter Carr?” he said. “I’m Tom Pappas. Call me Tom;
everyone else does.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand. The guy had
hands the size of hams and a grip that would put a gorilla to shame.
“Melanie tells me you rattled the boss good and proper
yesterday,” he said with a chuckle. “You probably know we’ve been getting a lot
of semi-official visitors from outside governments since the borders opened. Of
course they all want to know about our military. Care to guess how many of them
asked about that right up front, to the President’s face?”
“I can’t be the only one,” I protested.
“Not quite. Ever met T. Bayard Batchley?”
I burst out laughing. “Yes, I’ve met him. Don’t tell me he’s
the only other.”
“Got it in one. Of course he blustered about it in the grand
Texan style, and more or less implied that the entire army of the Republic of
Texas was drooling over the prospect of invading us.”
I shook my head, still laughing. “I bet. I was on a trade
mission to Austin a while back, and we got a Batchley lecture to the effect
that everyone in Philadelphia was going to starve to death if they didn’t get
shipments of Texas beef that week.”
“Sounds about right.”
The train came up to the platform just then, and the roar of
the locomotive erased any possibility of further conversation for the moment.
The conductor took our tickets and waved us toward one of the cars. I wondered
how Pappas was going to climb the foot or so from the platform to the door, but
about the time I’d finished formulating the thought, one of the car attendants
popped out, grabbed a handle I hadn’t noticed under the step, and slid out a
steel ramp. Pappas rolled up into the car, the attendant pushed the ramp back
into its place, they said a few words to each other, and then Pappas wheeled
his way over to a place at the back of the car, flipped one of the two seats
up, and got a couple of tiedown straps fastened onto his chair by the time I’d
followed him.
I took the seat next to him. “Do they have this sort of
thing in all the trains here?”
“Wheelchair spots? You bet. We had a lot of disabled vets
after the Second Civil War, of course, and got a bunch more in ‘49. That’s how
I ended up in this thing—got stupid during the siege of Paducah, and took some
shrapnel down low in my back.”
The train filled up around us. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Oh, it doesn’t slow me down that much. The only complaint I’ve got is that I’m stuck
in a desk job in Toledo now, instead of out there in the field.” He shook his
head. “How much did they tell you about our military?”
“Here, or back home?”
“Either one.”
“Here, nothing. Back home—” I considered the briefings I’d
been given, edited out the classified parts. “They’re pretty much baffled. We
know you’ve got universal military service on the Swiss model, but no modern
military tech at all—plenty of light infantry and field artillery, but no
armor, no drones, no air force worth mentioning, and a glorified coast guard on
the Great Lakes.”
He nodded as the train lurched into motion. “That’s about
right. And you’re wondering how we can get away with that.”
“It’s a concern,” I said. “As I told President Meeker, we
don’t want a failed state or a war zone on our western border.”
Pappas laughed, as though I’d made a joke. “I bet. What if I
told you that we’re less likely to end up that way than any other country on
this continent?”
I gave him a wry look. “You’d have to to some very fast
talking to convince me of that. With that kind of armament, I don’t see how you
could expect to defeat a country with a modern military.”
“We don’t have to defeat them,” he said at once. “All we
have to do is bankrupt them.”
I stared at him.
“War’s not cheap,” he went on. “Modern high-tech warfare,
square and cube that. Half the reason the old United States collapsed was the
amount of money it poured into trying to stay ahead of everybody else’s
military technology. I’m not going to ask you how much the Atlantic Republic
has to pay each year for drones, robot tanks, helicopter gunships, cruise
missiles, and the information systems you need to run all of it; you know as
well as I do that it’s a big chunk of the national budget, and I’d be willing
to make a bet that you have to skimp on the rest of your military budget to
make up for it—meaning that your ordinary grunts don’t have the training or the
morale they might have.”
I didn’t answer. Outside the window, commercial buildings
gave way to a residential neighborhood dotted with gardens and parks.
“So you’ve got a lot of money sunk in military hardware.
Let’s say you guys decided to invade us.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I told him.
“Just for example.” He waved the objection away with one
massive hand. “You send in your drones and robot tanks and helicopter gunships,
seize Toledo and wherever else your general staff thinks is strategic enough to
merit it, and dump a bunch of infantry to hold onto those places. You’ve won,
right? Except that that’s when the fun begins.
“All that light infantry and field artillery you
mentioned—it’s still there, distributed all over the country, and it’s not
dependent on any kind of central command.
It’s got first-rate training, and most of the training is oriented to
one thing and one thing only: insurgent operations. So thirty minutes after
your drones cross the border, you’re dealing with a full-on, heavily armed
insurgency with prepared positions and ample firepower, in every single county
of the Lakeland Republic. However long you want to hold on, we can hold on
longer, and every day of it costs you a lot more than it costs us. Oh, and a
lot of the training our troops get focuses on taking out your high-tech assets
with inexpensive munitions. So it’s the same kind of black hole the old United
States kept getting itself into—no way to win, and the bills just keep piling
up until you go home.”
“I’m a little surprised you’re telling me all this,” I said
after a moment.
“Don’t be. We want people outside to know exactly what
they’re up against if they invade.” He gestured out the window. “Check that
out.”
We were still in the residential part of Toledo, the same
patchwork of houses, gardens, and little business districts I’d seen on the way
from Pittsburgh, but something new cut across the landscape: a canal. It didn’t
have water in it yet, and so I could see that the sides were lined with big slabs
of concrete that must have been salvaged from a prewar freeway.
“We’re putting those in everywhere that the landscape
permits,” Pappas said. “Partly that’s economic—canals are cheaper to run than
any other transport—but it’s also military. You want to try to cross one of
those in a tank, be my guest. There’s a lot of that sort of thing. Every county
is its own military unit and builds bunkers, prepared positions, tank traps,
you name it. Since we’re not interested in invading anybody else, we can put a
lot of resources into that.”
I decided to take a risk. “If you’re not interested in
invading anybody else, why did your people put so much work into getting
detailed topo maps of our territory back before the border opened?”
The bushy eyebrows went up. “You know about that.”
I nodded. “We got lucky.”
“Gotcha,” Pappas said. “Did you hear much about the other
side of our dust-up with the Confederacy in ‘49?” I motioned for him to go on,
and he grinned. “We sent teams across the border into their territory to mess
with their infrastructure. Bridges, power lines, levees, you name it—anything
that would raise the price tag. We even got a couple of teams onto Brazilian
territory to do the same thing; we would have done more of that if the war
hadn’t ended when it did.”
“So it’s all about economics,” I said.
“Of course. You know how Clausewitz said that war’s a
continuation of politics by other means? He got that half right. It’s also a
continuation of economics—and the last guy standing is the one who can afford
to keep fighting longest.”
I nodded. Outside the window, the first of the farms and
fields were coming into view, brown with stubble or green with cover crops for
overwintering.
“All across this country,” Pappas said then, “we’ve got
young men and women doing their two year stints in the army, and showing up for
two weeks a year afterwards as long as they can still shoulder a gun—and
there’s a good reason for that. This country got the short end of the stick for
decades back before the Second Civil War, then got the crap pounded out of it
during the fighting, and then—well, I could go on. We found out the hard way
what happens when you let some jerk in a fancy white house a thousand miles
away decide for you how you’re going to run your life. That’s why President
Meeker’s not much more than a referee to ride herd on the parties in the
legislature; that’s why each county makes so many of its own decisions by
vote—and it’s why all the people you’re going to see tomorrow are putting a
nice fall weekend into shooting at drones.”
“Is that what’s on the schedule for tomorrow?”
