Quoted By:
You think about using the radio and even incline your body slightly forward as if to reach up front and towards it, but think better of yourself. You know nothing about the operational environment here. The brief warned about the continued presence of wreckers and saboteurs - is there any reason those wrecker-saboteurs couldn't have been supplied with radio listening equipment from the stores of the Republian army? At the present stage, there really is no way to tell. Besides, you have yet to fully assemble the military forces available to you. If you are going to shine like a beacon on the RF band, you must be fully prepared first. It would not do to broadcast your positions and activity at this early and immature stage in pacification operations. So, for now at least, you will remain radio silent unless the situation specifically calls for a radio.
Instead of intervening and requesting the radio, you do nothing. You lean back into your seat and let Meliev pull away into the street and take you slowly down the main road until you arrive back at the high school. There are many more people on the streets now than there were when you first arrived in the city. A least a dozen other cars pass you on the street and you can assume a similar number were behind or in front of your own vehicle. Pedestrians were also more active and, compared to earlier in the day, you see many more men and many more children. You hadn't realized it before, but most of the people you saw on your earlier walk were women, sometimes with a child or three in tow; now there are swarms of children being corralled by parents and grandparents along the sides of the road. In a chain reaction, that realization sparks another: you have seen no young men or women in the town yet. You peer more intently out of the window, but the children you see seem to age out at around their mid-teens and then there is a demographic gap until the parents in their early 30s. The likely cause is conscription, Republia has gathered all of its youth into the army and they pulled back from their homes when the army pulled back from this front. Trouble brews at the edge of this thought - such widespread conscription must tie people to the Republian cause; out the window, every middle-aged pedestrian now has sons or daughters that can only return with a Republian reinvasion. The brief was right to warn about potential spies and wreckers, you can imagine they would be rife in a social environment like this.
