The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

The churches had very little money, but the planet didn’t need heavy industry. Animals were shipped instead of tractors, on the theory that horses and oxen can make other horses and oxen, but tractors make only oil refineries and smog. Industry wasn’t wanted; Arrarat was to be a place where each man could prune his own vineyard and sit in the shade of his fig tree. Some of the Federation of Churches’ governing board actively hated industrial technology, and none loved it; and there was no need, anyway. The planet could easily support far more than the half to three-quarters of a million people the churches sent out as colonists.

Then the disaster struck. A survey ship found thorium and other valuable metals in the asteroid belt of Arrarat’s system. It wasn’t a disaster for everyone, of course. American Express was happy enough, and so was Kennicott Metals after they bought mining rights; but for the church groups it was disaster enough. The miners came, and with them came trouble. The only convenient place for the miners to go for recreation was Arrarat, and the kinds of establishments asteroid miners liked weren’t what the Federation of Churches had in mind. The “Holy Joes” and the “Goddamns” shouted at each other and petitioned the Grand Senate for help, while the madams and gamblers and distillers set up for business.

That wasn’t the worst of it. The Federation of Churches’ petition to the CoDominium Grand Senate ended up in the CD bureaucracy, and an official in Bureau of Corrections noticed that a lot of empty ships were going from Earth to Arrarat. They came back full of refined thorium, but they went out deadhead . . . and BuCorrect had plenty of prisoners they didn’t know what to do with. It cost money to keep them. Why not, BuCorrect reasoned, send the prisoners to Arrarat and turn them loose? Earth would be free of them. It was humane. Better yet, the churches could hardly object to setting captives free. . . .

The BuCorrect official got a promotion, and Arrarat got over half a million criminals and convicts, most of whom had never lived outside a city. They knew nothing of farming, and they drifted to Harmony, where they tried to live as best they could. The result was predictable. Harmony soon had the highest crime rate in the history of man.

The situation was intolerable for Kennicott Metals. Miners wouldn’t work without planet leave, but they didn’t dare go to Harmony. Their union demanded that someone do something, and Kennicott appealed to the Grand Senate. A regiment of CoDominium Marines was sent to Arrarat. They couldn’t stay long, but they didn’t have to. They built walls around the city of Harmony, and for good measure they built the town of Garrison adjacent to it. Then the Marines put all the convicts outside the walls.

It wasn’t intended to be a permanent solution. A CoDominium Governor was appointed, over the objections of the World Federation of Churches. The Colonial Bureau began preparations for sending a government team of judges and police and technicians and industrial-development specialists so that Arrarat could support the streams of people BuCorrect had sent. Before they arrived, Kennicott found an even more valuable source of thorium in a system nearer to Earth, the Arrarat mines were put into reserve, and there was no longer any reason for the CoDominium Grand Senate to be interested in Arrarat. The Marine garrison pulled out, leaving a cadre to help train colonial militia to defend the walls of Harmony-Garrison.

* * *

“What are you so moody about?” Deane asked.

“Just remembering what was in the briefing they gave us. You aren’t the only one who studies up,” I said.

“And what have you concluded?”

“Not a lot. I wonder how the people here like living in a prison. It’s got to be that way, convicts outside and citizens inside. Marvelous.”

“Perhaps they have a city jail,” Louis said. “That would be a prison within a prison.”

“Fun-ny,” Deane said.

We walked along in silence, listening to the tramp of the boots ahead of us, until we came to another wall. There were guards at that gate, too. We passed through into the smaller city of Garrison.

“And why couldn’t they have had transportation for officers?” Louis Bonneyman said. “There are trucks here.”

There weren’t many, but there were more than in Harmony. Most of the vehicles were surplus military ground-effects troop carriers. There were also more wagons.

“March or die, Louis. March or die.” Deane grinned.

Louis said something under his breath. “March or Die” was a slogan of the old French Foreign Legion, and the Line Marines were direct descendants of the Legion, with a lot of their traditions. Bonneyman couldn’t stand the idea that he wasn’t living up to the service’s standards.

Commands rattled down the ranks of marching men. “Look like Marines, damn you!” Ogilvie shouted.

“Falkenberg’s showing off,” Deane said.

“About time, too,” Louis told him. “The fort is just ahead.”

“Sound off!” Ogilvie ordered.

“We’ve left blood in the dirt of twenty-five worlds,

We’ve built roads on a dozen more,

And all that we have at the end of our hitch

Buys a night with a second-class whore.

The Senate decrees, the Grand Admiral calls,

The orders come down from on high.

It’s ‘On Full Kits’ and ‘Sound Board Ships,’

We’re sending you where you can die.”

Another Legion tradition, I thought. Over every orderly room door in Line regiments is a brass plaque. It says: YOU ARE LINE MARINES IN ORDER TO DIE, AND THE FLEET WILL SEND YOU WHERE YOU CAN DIE. An inheritance from La Légion Etrangère. The first time I saw it, I thought it was dashing and romantic, but now I wondered if they meant it.

The troops marched in the slow cadence of the Line Marines. It wasn’t a fast pace, but we could keep it up long after quick-marching troops keeled over from exhaustion.

“The lands that we take, the Senate gives back,

Rather more often than not,

But the more that are killed, the less share the loot,

And we won’t be back to this spot.

We’ll break the hearts of your women and girls,

We may break your arse, as well,

Then the Line Marines with their banners unfurled

Will follow those banners to hell.

We know the devil, his pomps, and his works,

Ah, yes! We know them well!

When you’ve served out your hitch in the Line Marines,

You can bugger the Senate of Hell!”

“An opportunity we may all have,” Deane said. “Rather sooner than I’d like. What do they want with us here?”

“I expect we’ll find out soon enough,” I said.

“Then we’ll drink with our comrades and throw down our packs,

We’ll rest ten years on the flat of our backs,

Then it’s ‘On Full Kits’ and out of your racks,

You must build a new road through Hell!

The Fleet is our country, we sleep with a rifle,

No man ever begot a son on his rifle,

They pay us in gin and curse when we sin,

There’s not one that can stand us unless we’re downwind,

We’re shot when we lose and turned out when we win,

But we bury our comrades wherever they fall,

And there’s none that can face us, though we’ve nothing at all.”

VI

Officers’ Row stretched along the east side of the parade ground. The fort was nothing special. It hadn’t been built to withstand modern weapons, and it looked a bit like something out of Beau Geste, which was reasonable, since it was built of local materials by officers with no better engineering education than mine. It’s simple enough to lay out a rectangular walled fort, and if that’s enough for the job, why make it more complicated?

The officers’ quarters seemed empty. The fort had been built to house a regimental combat team with plenty of support groups, and now there were fewer than a dozen Marine officers on the planet. Most of them lived in family quarters, and the militia officers generally lived in homes in the city. It left the rest of us with lots of room to rattle around in. Falkenberg drew a suite meant for the regimental adjutant, and I got a major’s rooms myself.

After a work party brought our personal gear up from the landing boat, I got busy and unpacked, but when I finished, the place still looked empty. A lieutenant’s travel allowance isn’t very large, and the rooms were too big. I stowed my gear and wondered what to do next. It seemed a depressing way to spend my first night on an alien world. Of course, I’d been to the Moon, and Mars, but those are different. They aren’t worlds. You can’t go outside, and you might as well be in a ship. I wondered if we’d be permitted off post—I was still thinking like a cadet, not an officer on field duty—and what I could do if we were. We’d had no instructions, and I decided I’d better wait for a briefing.