The Royal Marine Space Commandos- RMSC Omnibus

by James Evans

  “Because I don’t want to watch the Marines dying,” she’d said in frustration when someone had pointed out, again, how easy it would be to get a micro-drone into position. “Don’t ask again, or you’re off the team. Clear?”

  After that, nobody had mentioned it, but the whole team had still been glued to the low-res images coming off the high-altitude airship, watching until the Marines left the enemy base in their convoy of captured vehicles.

  “That’s enough for now,” Priscilla had said, shutting off the feed. “Finish your sweeps, log your reports and then we’ll call it a day.”

  A few days later, the Ashton Blues launched the first of a new type of unpowered drone, a glider dreamt up by Jenny to augment the slow-moving airships they’d been using for far-field observation. The ultra-light gliders were equipped with a cutting-edge camera system allowing them to see further than the other flyers.

  “They’re based on designs from Sol,” explained Jenny as she outlined her ideas. “The wings are photovoltaic membranes stiffened with carbon fibre rods, the camera uses next-gen metalenses to minimise weight and the processor can run the image recognition AI, so if the glider flies over something that isn’t natural, it’ll trigger an alert here at base.”

  Priscilla was impressed and she said so. She had wondered how Jenny had got bandwidth on the wormhole communicator to get new designs from Earth, but then she decided that she didn’t really care, as long as they worked.

  “The basic component designs are from Earth,” Jenny had continued, “but we combined them here and used the AI to change the designs so that the parts fit our requirements.” Jenny had shrugged, as if AI-designed ultra-gliders were a normal part of everyday life. “Then we sent the designs to the fabricators, churned out the parts and slotted them together.”

  Corporal Wilson had been impressed as well, especially after he’d watched the first ultra-glider being towed into the air by one of the larger long-range drones. The two drones had disappeared into the afternoon sky, climbing quickly until the glider detached and the powered drone returned to base.

  Now the teams were reviewing the images that the ultra-gliders were producing, checking for errors or biases in the AI’s programming and weeding out false positives. The images were excellent, far better than those produced by the cameras in the airships, but still not as good as the low-flying micro-drones.

  “I don’t like the look of that,” muttered Priscilla as she looked over Luke’s shoulder at a huge shape on the screen. “What is it?”

  “No idea,” replied Luke, fiddling with the image controls to try to resolve the details.

  “Let’s get a long-range drone out there to take a close look,” said Priscilla.

  “Already despatched. Should be there in,” Luke paused to consult a timer on his data slate, “about twenty minutes.”

  “Bring it up on the Grid,” said Priscilla, “and let’s see what’s going on.”

  Luke flicked at his controls, transferring the live feed from the ultra-glider to the main screens. The huge shape was looked too regular to be a simple hill but they couldn’t make out the details. Priscilla could feel the hairs on the back of her neck rising as she waited for more information. In the corner of the screen, a map of the area showed the image in relation to Ashton. A red dot and a thin line marked the approach of the nearest long-range drone that Luke had re-tasked to investigate the target.

  Twenty minutes dragged slowly past as the drone flew over the near featureless terrain. Priscilla peered at the main screen, her unease growing as the drone inched its way along the flightpath. As the timer ticked down, a shiver ran down her back and she shook her head.

  “How high is the drone?”

  “Er, about fifteen hundred metres, boss,” said Luke, frowning at her tone. Priscilla was quiet for a moment.

  “Take it higher,” she said suddenly, “much higher, up to its operating ceiling.”

  “Why? Nobody’ll see it at fifteen —” then saw Priscilla’s face and gulped. “Taking it higher,” he said, hands flicking at the controls.

  The rest of the room had fallen quiet as the teams watched the drone’s progress across the landscape.

  “I’ll need to divert course to reach altitude before we reach the target, so it’ll take longer to get the new images,” said Luke, pointing out an obvious downside.

  “Just do it,” snapped Priscilla, now thoroughly spooked but not sure what was worrying her. She felt a twinge of guilt. Luke wasn’t being patronising, he was responsibly raising a potential problem with her. She’d have to apologise later, which would suck but would be the right thing to do.

  Luke worked silently, altering the drone’s flight path to give it time to reach its maximum altitude before it flew over the target. It soared higher and higher, the ground dropping away as Luke pushed the drone’s motors to their limit. As it passed ninety per cent of its operational limit, progress slowed.

  “That’s it, four thousand metres, can’t go any higher.” He glanced at Priscilla. “Okay to fly over the target?”

  Priscilla nodded and together they watched the drone level out and head towards the shape. It made just one pass, shooting hi-res video, and nobody said a word as the feed played on the main screen.

  “I think we have a problem,” said Priscilla.

  28

  “Let’s come to order, ladies and gentlemen,” said Denmead when the last of the councillors had arrived. The temporary space they had been using for meetings in Fort Widley had started to take on the appearance of a more permanent chamber. Most recently, a coffee machine had appeared in a nook that had been carved specifically for the purpose.

  “This is an update meeting only,” said Denmead, “so that we can apprise you all of the latest discoveries.”

  “What do you mean by an ‘update meeting’?” asked Councillor Louise Dunbar, face schooled to the bland expression for which she was well known. “Are we not to discuss the situation as well?”

  “Update and discuss, yes, but there’s a briefing pack you’ll want to absorb in full before we make any decisions.”

  “A briefing pack? I don’t believe I’ve received anything,” said Councillor Dunbar, poking at her tablet.

  “The pack will be with you later this evening,” said Johnson, Denmead’s aide, “but this is sufficiently important that the issue can’t wait.”

  “The micro drones have ranged far and wide,” said Denmead, launching into the next part of her presentation before anyone could object further, “and the children have been prototyping a new type of ultra-lightweight glider with an enhanced camera lens system designed for high-altitude, long-range imaging. The first versions flew yesterday morning. They’re solar powered, completely autonomous and very simple to make.”

  “We all know this, Governor,” said Smith. “It’s very impressive, but so what?”

  “Since noon yesterday,” Denmead continued, ignoring Smith’s interruption, “when the first gliders passed beyond the areas covered by the previous generation of drones, our AIs have been scanning the images looking for anything of interest. Unfortunately, they found this,” she said, flicking an image onto the big screen at the end of the room.

  “As you can see, this image shows an object that is clearly not natural and the AI directing the drones sent two more to the area to build up a detailed picture.”

  The image changed, jumping from a blurry, low-resolution image to a hi-res version of the same thing.

  “That looks like a habitat,” said Grimes, leaning close to inspect the image, “and some sort of manufacturing or production plant.”

  “Are those chimneys?” asked Smith.

  “That bit looks like a defensive wall with gun turrets,” said Councillor Armstrong said, her brow furrowed as she squinted at the image.

  “And this definitely isn’t one of ours?” asked Grimes, leaning back in his seat, his face now set in a grim expression. “I mean, I don’t remember building anything like this, but
maybe one of you...” he fell silent as he looked around the table. It was an absurd suggestion and he knew it.

  “It’s about eight hundred kilometres to the south-west,” said Johnson, “well beyond the area we’ve colonised and far outside even the outer limits where we’ve constructed solar farms, storage facilities or hydroponic farms. Our development plan won’t have us putting anything out that far from Ashton for at least fifteen years, and that assumes a consistent level of success and continued population growth.”

  “And you’ll note that the architecture is definitely not similar to our own designs. The domes, we think, are purely decorative, affectations maybe, or throwbacks to their collective history. Either way, this is clearly a Russian-influenced settlement built by the Deathless,” added Denmead.

  There was a moment of shocked silence as the councillors absorbed the news, then the questions began, all at once.

  “What do we do?”

  “How many people?”

  “When was it built?”

  “How big is it?”

  “How do we destroy it?”

  Denmead held up her hand and gradually the room fell silent.

  “Let me put the scale up on the image to give you an idea,” she said, tapping at her tablet. “At just over two thousand metres long and almost a thousand metres wide, this is by far the largest structure on the planet.”

  “It’s the largest surface structure within several dozen light years,” muttered Grimes, impressed despite the obvious scale of the threat.

  “Quite,” said Denmead, “and in some places, it is a hundred metres tall. We have no way to know how far it extends beneath the surface, but even if half of it is given over to manufacturing and food production, there’s still enough volume within the walls to hold fifty to a hundred thousand people.”

  “How could they possibly have built this without us noticing?” asked Councillor Armstrong, her tone ratcheting steadily towards ‘very angry’.

  “Ah. I think perhaps you mean ‘Whose incompetence allowed this to go unnoticed?’, Councillor? As it happens, this city has been built in an area that wasn’t routinely covered by our satellites. After all, there’s no need to monitor areas that aren’t populated,” Denmead retorted.

  “The last flyover was about eighteen months ago and, yes, we’ve checked. It wasn’t there then, so the whole thing is less than eighteen months old. Whenever they started, to build so much so quickly speaks of an impressive amount of organisation and an astonishing quantity of material delivered right under our noses and through our orbital cordon without detection.”

  That shook them. Nobody wanted to consider the implications of a hostile nation slipping through their defences to build a city in secret.

  “So this could have appeared any time in the last eighteen months, and they’ve just been sitting there all this time?” Councillor Stoat asked, incredulously.

  “Yes, Councillor. With the information we have, that’s all we can be certain of. It seems likely to me that they have only arrived much more recently, though. The problem is, how did they build such an installation so quickly? How could they do it at all? We have no sure way of knowing, at this point,” Denmead said.

  “Is it populated?” Grimes asked.

  Denmead hesitated, then nodded. “We think so. Electromagnetic emissions suggest active communications from the inside. They’re encrypted, obviously, so we can’t know what they’re saying, but it appears to be a near continuous stream of activity. There’s some activity outside the structure – there’s a road leading to the nearby mountains where it seems they’ve been mining or quarrying for something – but it’s impossible to say how many people might be inside.”

  “So it could be empty?” Councillor Dunbar asked. “It could be a simple automated facility, one that’s entirely devoid of life?”

  “It’s warm,” said Johnson, “and these structures here look like cloning facilities, so even if it were empty a few months ago, it isn’t now. The scale of these facilities suggests an output of maybe thirty clones a week, and our analysis suggests there may be more than a dozen of them, although there could be far more underground that we can’t see. If they’ve been running for a month, then we could be looking at a population of one to three thousand. Unfortunately, since we don’t know how long they’ve been there or how many cloning bays they have…” He trailed off without finishing the sentence, but the logical conclusion was obvious.

  The councillors groaned.

  “But they could just be banking blank clones,” Smith pointed out, “setting them aside for a mass colonisation. They haven’t necessarily deployed colonists to them.”

  That hope was thin, and they all knew it. Body banks were commonly used throughout the populated solar systems, but even a large city would hold only enough to cope with natural deaths which, given the advanced nature of the available medicine tended to be few and far between. No one, not the British, not the Chinese or the Japanese, stockpiled huge numbers of clones on the off chance they would want them later. After all, they required upkeep; you couldn’t just stick them in a freezer and defrost them four years later after a natural disaster.

  “So we’re back to considering our response to the further invasion of our colony,” said Councillor Stoat, “and I say we wipe the Deathless from the face of our planet.” There was a chorus of nods from around the table, although not all the councillors were in favour. “We have the prior claim, we’re longer established, and our colony is recognised by interstellar law,” he went on, “and they attacked us. Nobody would object. It would be self-defence.”

  “And what would you propose?” Denmead asked, playing devil’s advocate.

  “A nuclear strike, obviously,” said Stoat promptly to a round of varied agreement and horror. “As soon as Vice Admiral Staines arrives, this council should order him to bombard them from orbit. He’ll have the arsenal to do it. One or two fusion warheads dropped into that valley would destroy the settlement entirely and preserve our safety.”

  There was immediate uproar from the council as calls and shouts erupted across the chamber. Denmead held up her hand for silence then banged it on the table when nobody took any notice of her.

  “Thank you for your opinions,” she said loudly. “Captain Atticus and I have already discussed these options, and discarded them on good grounds.”

  “You take a great deal on your shoulders, Governor,” said Stoat sharply, “but this is something for the council to decide upon since it affects every person in this colony.”

  “We should at least hear the reasons,” said Grimes in a conciliatory tone. Lots of nodding around the table.

  “Of course,” said Denmead, “and really it’s very simple. While launching such a strike would, indeed, obliterate the contents of the valley, it would not resolve the larger war. We would have irradiated a large part of our own planet, but that would not prevent the Deathless from setting up a colony elsewhere or landing further settlers, including military expeditions. Which, we can assume, they would immediately protect with anti-ballistic missile systems.

  “In addition, the settlers living in that city are people. Their soldiers might wage war on us, an unjust, unprovoked, illegal war, but that doesn’t give us carte blanche to do as we please.”

  “It’s a bit more than an unprovoked war,” snapped Stoat. “They’ve bombed our city, murdered our civilians and destroyed our facilities.”

  “Do you think they would think twice before nuking us?” demanded Smith.

  “They haven’t nuked us,” pointed out Johnson reasonably, “and the bombardments have focussed on our governmental and military structures, such as they are.”

  “I can’t believe you’re defending them,” said Stoat, horrified and appalled. “They’re alien scum who deserve to be eradicated!”

  “Dammit,” snapped Denmead, slapping her hand on the table again. “They’re still people, and we share a common ancestry, regardless of how they might have diverged
since their Ark left Sol.”

  Stoat looked like he was about to say something but Denmead, no longer in the mood for debate, powered on.

  “Even if the nuclear option were morally defensible, which it isn’t,” she continued, “there are still two insurmountable problems. Firstly, any plan that involves the use of WMDs needs approval from the local military command, which is Captain Atticus. I have to tell you that he has already stated that he will be unable to approve any such action under his current rules of engagement unless or until there is a very considerable escalation in hostilities.

  “Secondly, and more important from a strategic position, we have no information whatsoever about the enemy’s other cities or their true capabilities. A nuclear attack would invite a nuclear response and our only opportunity for survival would be to destroy the Deathless utterly. As we neither know what other facilities they have on the planet nor what they might have in orbit or in transit, we cannot launch a pre-emptive strike, since to do so would be to guarantee our own destruction.”

  Denmead paused to allow this to sink in before continuing more calmly.

  “For now, our only option is to continue the fight against the conventional forces. Captain Atticus is already altering his plans to allow for the impact of this city but, from a civilian perspective, we have to get used to sharing our planet.”

  There was a degree of angry muttering from around the table.

  “Sooner or later, we’ll need a diplomatic solution,” Denmead went on, pausing as the councillors mumbled angrily again. “Every battle is a prelude to negotiation and peace.”

  Smith snorted. “But what sort of peace?” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “And what sort of battle?” asked Grimes.

  “Quite,” said Denmead, looking around at her councillors. Then she nodded and stood. “The full briefing pack will be with you this evening, and we can discuss this situation again tomorrow.”

  Then she strode from the room, Johnson hurrying behind, leaving the councillors to discuss and squabble amongst themselves.