The Empire's Corps: Book 03 - When The Bough Breaks

by Christopher Nuttall

  A colossal explosion thundered up behind them as they leapt to the next building. Belinda had no idea what had exploded, but the blast caught her and slammed her through a window and into a deserted room. Medical alerts flared up on her retina display as her leg snapped, painkiller drugs automatically entering her system. The armour went rigid, allowing her to try to walk ...

  “Deploying gas,” the pilot said, over the intercom.

  Belinda cursed as a fourth termination signal flashed up in her display. McQueen was dead, either killed by the mob or slammed into the ground too hard for his armour to protect him. She could hear the sound of people crashing their way into the building and heading upwards, right towards where she was lying. Desperately, she pulled herself to her feet and limped forward, looking around for something she could use as a crutch. The pilot’s cheerful voice in her ear didn’t help; the gas was spreading, but not fast enough to help her.

  Grimly, she switched her rifle from single-shot to full auto and opened fire as the mob burst into the room. They were thrown backwards as the bullets tore through them, but there were so many more pushing upwards that the dead and wounded were just thrown forwards. Belinda cursed out loud and started to launch her final grenades into the mob, even as new warnings began to flash up in her display. She was pushing herself too far ... the grenade exploded, setting fire to the building. Belinda saw the flames starting to spread, heard the mob howling in pain, smelled the stench of burning human flesh ...

  We failed, she thought, numbly. And we’re all dead.

  And then she blacked out completely.

  Chapter Two

  For those of us who live after the Fall of Earth and the end of the Empire, there is a sense of inevitability about its collapse. The Empire must fall. And yet, there seemed little reason for its citizens to realise the truth. The Empire had endured for three thousand years. Why should it not endure for three thousand more? To answer that question, we must delve into the history of the Empire itself.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, The End of Empire

  The glittering towers stretched as far as the eye could see.

  Major General Jeremy Damiani, Commandant of the Terran Marine Corps, stood at his office window and stared out over Imperial City. It was an awe-inspiring view; tall skyscrapers punching the sky, massive towers belonging to the Grand Senators and the major interstellar corporations and – in the distance – the hive-like CityBlock structures where countless humans lived and died without ever leaving their blocks. Beyond that, he could see a thin thread reaching up to orbit, one of Earth’s six massive orbital towers allowing quick and easy access to low orbit. It was a testament to all that mankind could accomplish on Earth.

  “It all looks so safe and tranquil,” Hiram Green said. “You would never believe that there was anything wrong.”

  Jeremy shrugged. Earth’s land surface was covered in megacities, each one home to billions of human beings. Centuries of mistreatment had finally pushed the planet beyond salvation; the parts of the land that were not covered with metal were too badly poisoned to support human life. The oceans that had once fed countless humans were now dying, with thousands upon thousands of marine life forms rendered extinct. Even if the Imperial Reclamation Corps had been something other than another boondoggle to extract money from the government, it was hard to see how they could save the planet. Earth was dying.

  And yet the population still bred. Officially, Earth’s population was listed as forty billion; unofficially, it was at least sixty billion and Jeremy had his suspicions that the true figure was almost certainly much higher. The undercity warrens were crammed with people, living out their lives in darkness – unless they were deported from the planet or managed to sign up with a colony project. Earth expelled millions of people each month and yet they were only a drop in the bucket of the multitudes swarming over the planet.

  There were no visible signs of decay in Imperial City, but Jeremy knew that they were there. The infrastructure built up over centuries to feed the population, to provide light and heat and power, was finally starting to fail completely. There were just too many failure points and too few maintenance crews to fix them, even when the crews weren't diverted to attend to the whims of one Grand Senator or another. Sooner or later, and Jeremy knew in his heart that it would probably be sooner, there would be a cascading series of failures that would finally tip the planet over the edge and into darkness. And then? No one knew for sure, but Jeremy had a feeling that it would make Han look like a pillow fight between teenage children.

  His gaze drifted over to the Imperial Palace and, no less grand – the Grand Senate. The Grand Senators had no real understanding of the looming disaster threatening their positions – or they simply didn't care. Imperial City was insulated from the worst of the problems plaguing Earth, but it wouldn't be long before the systems started to fail there too. And then the shit would really hit the fan. Jeremy had moved his family from Earth to Safehouse long ago. Countless billions on the planet below didn't have that option.

  His communicator buzzed. “Commandant? Sebastian Cruz has broken orbit.”

  “Understood,” Jeremy said. He’d left orders that he was to be informed when the transport ship carrying Captain Stalker and his understrength force departed Earth. “Don’t interrupt us unless it’s something urgent.”

  He closed the channel and turned away from the window. The Commandant of the Marine Corps was entitled to a large office, if only because the other Joint Chiefs of the Imperial Military had their own large officers. Jeremy hadn't bothered to decorate it, beyond attaching a handful of medals and commendation papers to one wall. The only luxury item in the room was a desk that had been passed down from Commandant to Commandant for thousands of years. Jeremy knew that the Marines were probably the only people in the Empire who remembered where the desk had come from – and what it had once symbolised.

  There were two other people in the office, apart from himself and Green. Colonel Chung Myung-Hee served as the de facto Marine Intelligence Head of Station on Earth, although the Grand Senate would have been alarmed to discover that Marine Intelligence operated on the homeworld. A tall willowy woman with oval eyes and lightly-tinted skin, few would have believed that she was a Marine on first glance – or that she was one of the smartest people Jeremy had ever met. Beside her, Colonel Gerald Anderson seemed short, stocky and over-muscular. The CO of the 1st Marine Division had to look the part.

  “Report,” Jeremy ordered, as he took his seat behind the desk.

  “We have been given warning orders for sending three regiments of Marines to Albion,” Anderson said, shortly. “They are to be drawn from the 1st Marine Division.”

  Jeremy winced. The Grand Senate had been more parsimonious than usual over the last five years, using the Marine Corps as firemen while trying simultaneously to starve the Corps of the resources it needed to carry out its assignments. 1st Marine Division consisted – officially – of 20’000 Marines, the largest Marine force in the Empire. Unofficially, the division was badly understrength – and had been parcelled out to support the Civil Guard in keeping order on Earth. Losing three regiments would leave him with no more than 4000 Marines on Earth, all scattered over the planet. There were planets that could be held under control with 4000 Marines. Earth wasn't one of them.

  “The division has duties here,” Green pointed out. “They have to know ...”

  “The Civil Guard has been tasked with keeping Earth under control,” Chung said, tonelessly. “Their superiors have every faith in their ability to keep order.”

  Jeremy didn't bother to hide his disgust. The Civil Guard was notoriously corrupt and incompetent – and most of the units that were neither corrupt or incompetent developed local ties that made them untrustworthy. One of the reasons the Grand Senate had been pushing for a major deployment of soldiers – and Marines – to Albion was a suspicion that the Albion Civil Guard had grown too close to the population it was supposed to monitor and ke
ep under control. Albion was simply too economically important to be allowed to assert even the local autonomy it was permitted under the Imperial Charter.

  “What’s more worrying is that the orders weren't sent through Marine HQ,” Anderson added. “They came directly to me from the Defence Department.”

  “I noticed,” Jeremy said. The Grand Senate always meddled in military operations. It wasn't unknown for them to activate or redeploy certain units without bringing along the supporting elements those units required to be effective. Marine units were meant to be self-sufficient, but the Imperial Army had more logistics officers than it had fighting men. “Luckily, we can use that to delay matters for a few weeks.”

  Green put their doubts into words. “And then ... what?”

  “Sir, we cannot go on like this,” Anderson said. “Right now, the division is the only thing keeping a lid on a thousand powder kegs. If I have to give up even one regiment ...”

  “I am aware of the dangers,” Jeremy said, coldly. He’d been in Anderson’s shoes himself, before he’d accepted promotion. “And it is going to get worse.”

  “It is,” Chung confirmed. “We know now who is going to take command of Home Fleet – and effective command of Earth’s defences. It’s Admiral Valentine.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Anderson exploded. “I ...”

  “As you were,” Jeremy snapped. He found it hard to be truly angry at his subordinate, even if speaking ill of a superior officer was a military offence. Instead, he looked over at Chung. “Why him?”

  “Political deals,” Chung said, simply. “His patrons are in the Grand Senate itself.”

  Jeremy nodded, unable to keep a sour expression off his face. The Imperial Navy had been promoting officers on the basis of political connections for thousands of years, pushing competence and dedication aside in favour of political reliability. Admiral Valentine had commanded precisely one major deployment – the operation on Han – and that had been a bloody disaster. By the time the military had restored order, millions of locals had died, either in the chaos or the reprisals that had followed the end of the fighting. If Jeremy had his way, Admiral Valentine would have spent the rest of his career on an asteroid mining station on the far side of the Empire. Instead, he’d been promoted.

  “Right,” Jeremy said, finally. “What do his patrons have in mind?”

  “I don’t know,” Chung admitted. “The Grand Senate spent months haggling over the position, which suggests that there was some heavy bargaining going on, but we don’t know the exact details. All we have is speculation.”

  “As always,” Anderson noted.

  Jeremy couldn't help agreeing. Chung, at least, was smart enough to understand the difference between speculation and actual hard fact, unlike some of the other intelligence officers Jeremy had worked with in the past. The disaster that had swept over Han had been so bad partly because the local intelligence services had been thoroughly subverted by the rebels and Imperial Intelligence had dropped the ball completely.

  “Leave that for the moment,” Jeremy ordered. “The important issue right now is the Childe Roland.”

  He smiled at their expressions. The Marine Corps was – legally – supposed to provide the guard for the Royal Family, but the Grand Senate had taken advantage of the Childe Roland’s minority to edge the Marines out, opening up a whole new field for patronage and political corruption. Jeremy had no idea what his predecessor had been thinking, but it had been a deadly mistake. The Childe Roland – the sixteen-year-old boy who was the Heir to the Empire – was utterly unprepared to rule. He’d been spoilt from birth, given everything he wanted ... while being carefully kept away from the reins of power. And once he took the throne, as he would when he turned seventeen, disaster would follow swiftly.

  “You plan to insert a bodyguard into his staff,” Chung said. “Will they let you?”

  “I wasn't planning to ask permission,” Jeremy said, mildly. “We still have the legal authority to take command of his protective force – and all we’re going to be doing is inserting an additional bodyguard.”

  “They won’t like it,” Anderson said. “Maybe we should just take him to the Slaughterhouse and make a man of him.”

  Jeremy snorted. By the time recruits reached the Slaughterhouse, ninety percent of them had failed or had been streamlined into another branch of the Empire’s military. The Slaughterhouse filtered out two-thirds of the remainder, assigning them to auxiliary units if they chose to continue working with the Marines. Only the best survived to complete the Crucible and be tabbed as Marines. Putting an unprepared Prince in the training program would be rather like dropping a cat into a blender.

  “I don’t think we’d be able to do that,” he said. He looked over at Green. “And Specialist Lawson?”

  Green frowned. “I confess that I would have grave doubts about inserting her back into a combat zone,” he admitted. “The physical wounds have healed; we were able to repair and even upgrade her augmentation in the process. But mentally ... she has a bad case of survivor’s guilt, as well as a burning hatred of intelligence officers. If she had shown the energy to leave the medical centre, I would have been worried for their safety.”

  Jeremy wasn't surprised. The official enquiry had concluded that the Pathfinders had been the victims of bad intelligence, but Marine Intelligence suspected that the team had been deliberately set up. They’d walked right into a trap that had been designed to kill the entire team. It had been sheer luck that had saved Specialist Belinda Lawson from following the rest of her team into the grave. He couldn't blame her for loathing every intelligence weenie she might encounter in future. But if she assaulted one, it would mean the end of her career.

  Lawson’s record was impressive, even for the Marines. She’d been born on Greenway, a planet along the frontier where the settlers had been forced to fight to survive. Her father, a retired Marine, had taught her how to hunt and shoot; she’d been winning prizes since she’d been old enough to hold a gun. And then she'd gone into Boot Camp at sixteen, the youngest Marine in her year, and graduated to the Slaughterhouse within two months. Her record there was remarkable; she’d come first in her class, a rarity for female recruits. The Drill Instructors had said that she would go far.

  She’d served as a Rifleman with Potter’s Pranksters and seen combat action on several worlds before being offered a chance to return to the Slaughterhouse and qualify as a Pathfinder. Her record made it clear that she’d been pushed right to the limit, like all of the other candidates, but she’d qualified and joined Team Six, under the command of Doug Adams. She’d fitted in well ... until Team Six had been effectively wiped out on Han.

  Marines were always close to one another –Marines were encouraged to regard one another as brothers and sisters - but Pathfinders were the closest of all. He couldn't blame Specialist Lawson for feeling guilty over having survived, when the rest of her team had died. And he knew that they couldn't risk sending her back to the Pathfinders, or even reassigning her to a standard Marine company. But using her as a close-protection operative – a bodyguard, in other words – brought its own risks.

  “She does need a new challenge,” Green said, as if he were reading his superior’s thoughts. “And I don’t think that she might go rogue ...”

  Jeremy grimaced. The media was fond of using rogue Marines as bad guys in countless entertainment flicks with the same plot – and actresses whose clothing was inversely proportional to their intelligence – but they were very rare in reality. Marines were tested extensively during their training; those that might break were gently eased out of training or streamlined into a different military branch. Someone who had gone to the Slaughterhouse – even if they hadn’t graduated – would do well in the regular military.

  “Good,” he said, flatly. “She’ll be on her own for most of the time. We won’t be able to provide her with a proper supporting element.”

  “Not least because we’re moving Marines to Albion,” An
derson grumbled. He scowled down at the table, then looked up. “Maybe we can keep a company on QRF near the Summer Palace. There would be no obvious connection between them and your Specialist unless the shit hit the fan, in which case no one would be able to complain ...”

  Chung coughed. “Have I told you how much I like your optimism?”

  Jeremy held up a hand. “See to it,” he ordered. Having a company of Marines nearby would be helpful, although they might have to work hard to come up with an excuse for their presence if the Grand Senate asked questions. Securing Imperial City was the responsibility of the Civil Guard. “Maybe we can work it in as a training exercise. God knows we don’t run enough joint exercises as it is.”

  “Yes, sir,” Anderson said. His face twitched into a bitter smile. “Of course, they'd find them upsetting and embarrassing. They might even be discomfited.”

  Jeremy scowled. A military unit needed to be training and exercising when it wasn't actually on active deployment – and the Civil Guard barely trained to minimum acceptable standards. It was hard to blame their commanders when every last training exercise required a mountain of paperwork, but it was dangerous. Civil Guardsmen regularly made mistakes that got them killed in the field. Jeremy had once run a Civil Guard battalion though Ambush Alley – a training facility on the Slaughterhouse – and the entire unit had been wiped out. And that had been on the easy setting. A full regiment of Marines would have had problems running through the hard setting.

  “They’ll live,” he said, finally. He looked over at Chong. Marine Intelligence covered a great many programs that the Grand Senate knew nothing about. It would only have upset the Senators if they knew just how many programs Jeremy had started when he’d realised that the Empire was in serious trouble. “And the preparations for Safehouse?”

  “Going ahead, sir,” Chong said, unhappily. “I have a full report for you if you want it, but I can’t say I’m happy about it. It just feels too much like running away.”