The Halls of Montezuma

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  Thaddeus held up a hand. “Right now, we have to assume the worst,” he said, nodding to Gilbert. “In the short term, the marines can do a great deal of damage to us. In the long term, we should have the edge.”

  “If we can find their base,” Gilbert said. “It could be anywhere.”

  McManus glared. “Surely it can be found ...”

  “There are billions of stars within the galaxy,” Gilbert said, dryly. “There’s a very good chance the marines established a major base outside the Core Worlds themselves. We’d have, at best, millions of possible star systems to search. We could reduce the number of possible targets by making assumptions about what sort of world they’d choose, but if one of those assumptions turned out to be wrong ...”

  Thaddeus considered it while Gilbert and McManus exchanged sharp remarks. The empire was immense. Had been immense, he corrected himself. There’d been hundreds of known and unknown colonies beyond the rim, beyond the edge of formally explored, claimed and settled space. And yet, he doubted the marines would want to go that far from the Core Worlds. They’d have to invest in infrastructure, if nothing else. The costs would skyrocket to the point no black budget could hope to hide them. And yet ... was that actually true? Costs were high because the bigger corporations hadn’t had any interest in finding ways to lower them. Thaddeus had seen the reports. Given time, and a small degree of investment, isolated worlds could catch up at speed ...

  They’ll want to be close to the political centre of empire, he reminded himself. And that means their base has to be somewhere near the core.

  “Right now, we concentrate our fleet and stall for time,” he said. “How long until they can take the offensive?”

  “Unknown,” Gilbert said. “However, I doubt they can take the offensive very quickly. They would need to maintain a garrison on Hameau, replace whatever men and materiel they lost during the fighting ... they may even be unsure where to go.”

  “They sent their prisoners back here,” McManus snapped.

  “Yes,” Gilbert agreed. “But is this world, which is listed as a relatively minor colony world, the core of our operations? Or is it just another Hameau?”

  “Admiral Agate could answer that question,” Thaddeus pointed out. “We concentrate the fleet. We prepare our defences. We send out diplomatic missions and say nice doggy a lot, while we gather our forces and scout out their positions. If nothing else, we can raise the spectre of launching another invasion of Hameau ... or even scorching the entire planet.”

  “There are steps we can take to strengthen our defences here,” Gilbert said. “We need to start bringing more and more of the newcomers into the planetary defence network.”

  “They’re not indoctrinated,” McManus objected. “They might be more loyal to the empire ...”

  Thaddeus raised his eyebrows. “What empire?”

  McManus scowled. “Sir, with all due respect, we would be better relying on men who’ve served us for decades.”

  “Most of whom are on the fleet,” Gilbert said, quietly. “We don’t know if we can trust the ones who returned home.”

  “No.” Thaddeus rubbed his forehead. “Do you think they’ve been conditioned?”

  “We tested Julia Ganister-Onge thoroughly,” Gilbert said. “There should have been some sign if she’d been conditioned. It would have had to have been a rush job, one that would have left scars on her mentality ... scars we could detect when we monitored the activity within her brain. She could have agreed to serve them willingly, which wouldn’t have left any telltales for us to see, but I don’t think so. We certainly didn’t catch her in a lie.”

  “No,” Thaddeus agreed. “Let her rest, then have her shipped down to my estate. She can offer her insights, if she wishes to regain her former post.”

  “If you think she can be trusted,” McManus growled. “Is she good for anything?”

  “I do need a new aide,” Gilbert offered.

  Thaddeus laughed. “Find your own,” he said. “I need her on the surface.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gilbert said.

  “This is a challenge,” Thaddeus said, addressing the entire group. “We knew there would come a time when we’d face a peer power, a force that would challenge us. We didn’t expect it to happen so soon, but it did. We need to handle it quickly and decisively and I have faith we can and we will. Any final issues?”

  “Just one,” Adamson said. “What do we tell the people?”

  “Nothing, not yet,” Thaddeus said. “And make it clear to your staff that anyone who leaks anything, even the slightest hint, is going to be unceremoniously fired.”

  Out an airlock, his thoughts added, silently. Or perhaps straight into the sun.

  “Yes, sir,” Adamson said.

  ***

  Rachel felt her heart starting to pound as she opened the airlock, her implants telling the local processors a string of comforting lies. The locals actually implanted their people with trackers, as if they were condemned criminals ... she shuddered, feeling sick even as her implants started to put out the same signal. Earth had tried a similar system, but it had never gotten off the ground. The logistics of implanting everyone from birth had been completely unmanageable. Here ... the corprats seemed to have managed. She put her disgust out of her mind as she inched into the airlock, knowing she was on the verge of complete success or utter defeat. If she’d missed something, the airlock would seal itself until a security team arrived to investigate.

  She breathed a sigh of relief as the outer hatch closed behind her, the inner hatch opening a moment later. The corridor in front of her was empty. The anchor station’s sensors had sworn blind the entire section was deserted, but Rachel hadn’t been too impressed. If she could hack the system from the outside, someone on the inside could presumably do a much better job. She’d been through enough transit stations to know they were infested with smugglers, criminals and even terrorist supporters. It was astonishing how few people realised they’d be first against the wall when the revolution came until it was too late and they found themselves against the wall.

  The airlock cycled again. Phelps stepped out, his armoured suit looking faintly out of place. Rachel waited for the others, then led them down the corridor and into a deserted living suite. There’d be time to get undressed, wipe themselves down and blend into the station’s population while she put together more complete IDs. They shouldn’t attract any attention, as long as they didn’t do anything suspicious. The automated systems would think they were authorised to be onboard and do nothing.

  “I stink,” Bonkowski said, as he removed his armour. “Next time, can we try to sneak onto a resort world?”

  “You’d be bored within a day,” Phelps said, removing his helm. His face looked pale and sweaty. “Rachel?”

  “I’m just poking holes in the system,” Rachel said. Like all large networks, the enemy system seemed to assume that anyone who got through the airlocks was authorised to be there. As long as it didn’t kick a query up to a living human, it should be fine. “Give me a couple of moments.”

  “And then we get to work,” Perkins said. He struck a dramatic pose. “Do I look ready?”

  “You look like a complete asshole,” Bonkowski said. “Perfect!”

  “It’s the uniform,” Perkins said. “Why do they make their people dress like this?”

  “Because anyone who doesn’t stands out,” Rachel said. She could see the logic. She could also see the glaring hole in the enemy defences. “Shall we get to work?”

  Phelps grinned. “Yep.”

  Chapter Ten

  The carpenter then puts his skills to work on the trunk, cutting away the branches and bark and sawing whatever is left of the wood into long planks. This does not reduce the value of the wood. Instead, it increases it. The planks themselves may be worth around one hundred credits, even though they’re smaller than the original trunk. The debris, too, may be worth something as firewood.

  - Professor Leo Caesius, The Rise
and Fall of Interstellar Capitalism

  In space, Kerri reminded herself, no one can hear you scream.

  It was a cliché so old, it predated spaceflight by decades, a cliché so old that few people knew where it had originally come from. She wouldn’t have known, if she hadn’t gone through a training simulation based on one of the remakes of the ancient flick. It was plain common sense - sound didn’t travel in space - and yet hardly anyone believed it. She could have held a keg party on the bridge and none of the enemy sensors would have heard a thing, yet her crew would have been horrified if she tried. They spoke in hushed voices, when they spoke at all. The slightest sound made them jump.

  Kerri smiled, although there was little real humour in the thought. A jumpy crewman might bring the active sensors online if he got a fright, revealing their presence to every sensor within the system. Or ... her imagination provided too many possibilities, each one more worrying than the last. The system steadily unfolding in front of her, revealing its secrets one by one, was an order of magnitude more industrialised - and defended - than Hameau. Onge itself was far too close to first-rank status for her peace of mind.

  She leaned forward as more and more data flowed into the display. The planet was heavily defended, with everything from orbital battlestations to hundreds of automated defence and sensor platforms. The giant anchor stations were probably armed too, along with the asteroid habitats. There were surprisingly few starships within sensor range - she’d expected an entire fleet to back up the fixed defences - but the locals clearly thought they didn’t need mobile fleets. They might be right, she acknowledged sourly; it was hard to get a solid look at the planet from so far away, but her optical sensors had already picked out a handful of planetary defence centres as well as towering megacities. The locals might well assume they didn’t need the fleet to see off anything smaller than the Imperial Navy.

  Which no longer exists, she mused. They may not even realise we’re coming at them.

  She shook her head. The enemy commanders knew what had happened to Hameau. They’d start interrogating the returned POWs immediately, then decide to do ... what? She didn’t know. It defied belief that the ships she could see - and the ones that had been lost at Hameau - represented the entire enemy fleet. A corporation with a dozen major shipyards under its control could easily put together a much larger force, even if they’d had to keep it off the books. And yet ... she remembered just how many shipyards had been destroyed, or seized by warlords, in the months since Earthfall. It was quite possible the corprats couldn’t rely on anything outside their small cluster of colony worlds.

  Her eyes narrowed as her stealthed probes fanned out across the system. There were a surprising number of asteroid mining stations, some apparently independent ... although not that independent. The corprats would have enough monopolies on everything from fresh food to interstellar shipping that they’d be able to keep the rest of the system in a vise, if one that wasn’t very obvious as long as they didn’t put pressure on it. Kerri doubted the asteroid miners had any illusions about how dependent they really were. Spacers couldn’t afford to let themselves believe in illusions. Everything had to be solid, or the weak links would get people killed. She’d dated a RockRat once. She knew how they thought.

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Kiang said. Her voice nearly made Kerri jump. “I’ve prepared some projections on industrial output.”

  “Good,” Kerri said. “Let me see them.”

  She keyed her console, bringing up the projections. The planet seemed to have a surprising amount of industry on the ground, something odd for a world settled by a corporation. They could easily have set up an entire halo of orbital industrials, if they’d had time. Perhaps they’d planned a more gradual shift to space-based units or ... there were some advantages, she supposed, in remaining on the surface. They already had a pair of space elevators. It was unlikely they’d build an entire orbital tower, let alone four, but they didn’t need one. They could send everything they needed to orbit via the elevator.

  We could do something with that, she thought, before she caught herself. She’d seen the videos of Earth’s orbital towers falling one by one, each one crashing with the force of a dozen asteroid strikes. Or perhaps we should be careful not to take them out.

  “Interesting,” she mused. “What are they doing on the surface?”

  “They may be trying to avoid a declaration of independence,” Kiang said. She was young, but strikingly cynical. “The asteroid colonies might let their personnel have a degree of freedom - too much freedom. On the surface, social control would be a great deal easier.”

  “True,” Kerri agreed. The RockRats had been born from independence-minded asteroid settlers who’d realised, thousands of years ago, that they didn’t have to put up with orders from distant beancounters who manifestly didn’t have the slightest idea what was actually happening. The immensity of space had ensured the RockRats simply outlasted the fools who’d thought they could be forced to work. “Is it worth a little inefficiency to keep control?”

  “I believe so,” Kiang said. “The vast majority of their output could be churned out on a planetary surface. There’d be no need to cross-train the workers or give them any hint they could rise higher. I guess the really rebellious ones would be steered towards the army or simply given a one-way ticket towards the nearest penal colony. It certainly matches what we were told by the POWs.”

  Kerri shook her head in disbelief. Haydn had insisted they were facing an alternate civilisation, rather than a mere corporate monstrosity, but she hadn’t really believed it ... not until now. The corprats were condemning everyone, including themselves, to a living death and eventual bloody collapse. By the time the end finally came, there would be no one with the experience to make a post-collapse society work. Did the corprats think they had a solution? Or were they foolishly convinced their plan was going to work?

  She glanced at the communications console. “Have we picked up anything from the Pathfinders?”

  “No, Captain,” Ensign Susan Perkins said. “We pinged the platform four hours ago. There was no update.”

  Kerri nodded, tartly. There was a possibility - she’d known it from the moment she’d received her marching orders - that she might lose contact with the Pathfinders completely. They might not be able to send a message to the platform ... hell, they might try to send a message, completely unaware it wasn’t reaching its destination. They knew there wouldn’t be any acknowledgement. If the enemy picked it up ...

  She felt the hours slowly crawl by, one by one. Their orders were to spend four days surveying the system, unless they had to leave early. She wondered, grimly, if her subordinates had managed to get enough of Hammerblow’s systems back online to allow her to fly to the RV point, accompanied by the remainder of the captured ships. It was a shame they couldn’t use her as a Trojan Horse to get into weapons range. The enemy knew she’d been captured.

  And if they didn’t, she mused, they sure as hell know now.

  Kerri stood. “Commander, continue our survey,” she ordered. “I’ll be in my ready room.”

  ***

  If there was one advantage to the enemy state of alert, Rachel decided, it was that they were rushing officers and crew all over the system without any pause for thought or reconsideration. The losses they’d suffered at Hameau had to have hurt worse than she’d thought. They’d clearly not expected to have to deploy a mid-sized army across the interstellar void at a couple of weeks’ notice ... she admitted, rather sourly, that they’d done a remarkable job. The marines could hardly have done better and their divisions were designed for hasty deployment. Now, the cracks in the enemy personnel departments were starting to show.

  “You have your records,” she said. They’d spent the last few hours in a temporary suite, posing as crewmen waiting for their next assignment. “Are there any questions?”

  She smiled, grimly, as she recalled the facts and figures she’d forced herself to memorise.
Lieutenant Hannah Gresham would have been astonished to discover she hadn’t been assigned to the lost fleet after all ... Rachel had gone through the files very carefully, making sure there were few - if any - people who might have known Lieutenant Hannah Gresham before her departure and death. She’d been on one of the enemy ships that had been destroyed in the final engagement, her presumed friends killed with her ... there was always the possibility of running into someone who knew her, but the risk was as low as possible.

  “I think so,” Perkins said. “Why did you take the prime job for yourself?”

  “I’m a bitch.” Rachel stuck out her tongue. “And there weren’t that many places we could go.”

  She smiled. Lieutenant Hannah Gresham looked - had looked - a little like Rachel. Not enough, perhaps, for Rachel to fool someone who’d known her well, but as long as she was spared that encounter, she would be safe enough. The others hadn’t been so easy. She hadn’t wanted to assign them to military units where they’d be the FNG and therefore carefully watched, or risk having them sent right across the system. Their covers were slightly looser than hers.

  “We can’t expect perfection,” Phelps said, shortly. “Don’t fuck up.”

  Rachel watched him and the others go, then breathed a silent prayer. There were so many people coming and going that it was hard to believe they’d be noticed, but she wasn’t completely confident that she’d jiggered the records properly. There were too many gaps in her knowledge of the enemy datanet for her peace of mind. The defence systems were completely isolated from the rest of the network, unsurprisingly. Hackers had caused so much damage, back on Old Earth, that only a fool would allow his weapons to be hooked up to an all-encompassing datanet. She’d heard stories about hackers who’d triggered missiles in their launch tubes, but her instructors had insisted they were nothing more than stories. It was hard to believe anyone would rig a system that would allow a hacker to do that.

  Although there have been terrorists who blew themselves up while making bombs, she reminded herself. And simple human laziness opens gaps for evildoers to do evil.