Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2)

by A. G. Claymore

  BEYOND THE RIM

  By A.G. Claymore

  Edited by B.H. MacFadyen

  Copyright 2015 A.G. Claymore

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and brands are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Sea Change

  Lost Colonies

  If You Want it Done Right…

  Who Are We Really Fighting?

  The Real Enemy

  Sea Change

  Regrets

  CentCom had thought it a brilliant plan.

  In an unemotional, detached way, Paul realized that it should have been his first warning. The vast majority of orders coming from that office over the last decade had been to local restaurants. Any units in contact with hostile forces usually preferred to finish the fight before contacting superiors. Promotion, after all, was simply nature’s way of removing idiots from the tactical chain of command.

  Julia had possessed the sense to question their plan after the top brass had so enthusiastically endorsed it, but then, she’d earned her star the hard way. Each promotion had come only after blatant displays of competence had forced the Marines to either have her cashiered out or move her up.

  When she’d confessed her unease to Paul, they’d gone over the plan and made a few refinements, but they still felt the overall concept was sound. Having found no concrete reasons to explain the sense of unease, they’d used the wormhole generator aboard the Sucker Punch to insert their small shuttle into the Sintel constellation.

  Stolen from the Grays, the alien carrier possessed an alarmingly advanced wormhole generator that, unlike Imperial systems, didn’t require a gate at both the origin and destination. It created the hole and focused the location of both ends, giving the Grays an ability to strike anywhere within the Imperium. The Human defenders would be limited to the existing network of gates.

  Paul knew he should feel alarmed about their capture by the Grays. It had happened within heartbeats of their arrival in the system. He’d been in the Marines for a long time and he had no illusions about CentCom’s planning abilities. He probably deserved to be in his current predicament but he was more concerned, no… cognisant, of the fact that Julia was in a stasis pod right next to him.

  Some part of his mind registered that he’d been terrified for her before the pods had activated. He knew, from the raid on Narsa, that Humans held in Gray stasis pods were conscious the entire time, but emotions were somehow inhibited.

  It must be what it felt like to be a Gray.

  He knew she was an arms reach away, but she might as well be on another planet. He couldn’t raise his arm, turn his head or even move his eyes to catch a glimpse of her. He was completely unable to feel any alarm over their shared predicament, but he was quite certain that he should.

  His eyes registered a movement to his left, just inside the limits of his peripheral vision, and he knew it meant a door had slid open.

  Perhaps the moment for their deaths had come.

  A Gray ambled into view, stopping midway between Paul and Julia. “You are being taken to our home world,” the clone told them in dispassionate tones. “You will be tried for assaulting our worlds and for the theft of our property. After the verdict is confirmed you’ll be executed before the members of the Gray Quorum.”

  Paul idly wondered whether the theft charges would be limited to the ships they’d taken or if the Grays would be so arrogant as to include the nearly thirty thousand Humans rescued in the Narsa raid.

  Not that it really mattered. He was going to be vaporized either way. It was considered a painless way to go, really. For the Grays, execution was the punishment. Pain had little impact on the Grays. It was the end of consciousness that terrified them.

  Still, it did seem as though this particular Gray was taking a great deal of satisfaction from his announcement. His head was tilted to the left a couple of degrees and his third eyelid was blinking ever so slowly. By Gray standards, he was positively dancing with glee.

  So they were on a ship, not still in holding on Sintel. Paul knew, without alarm or frustration, that every second took them farther away from their rendezvous. For all he knew, the Sucker Punch had already opened the return wormhole and the gourmands at CentCom had written them off as lost. The rumor of thousands of Human abductees on Sintel would remain unsubstantiated.

  But Paul and Julia now knew the rumor for what it had really been.

  A trap.

  For a supposedly dispassionate race, the Grays certainly knew how to hold a grudge. They’d been wanting to get their chalky little hands on Julia since the battle of the Carbon Well and Paul’s efforts at Narsa had added him to their shit list.

  Every second that Gray smirked at him, they went deeper into Gray territory. The chances of a daring rescue by Julia’s fiercely loyal troops grew increasingly slim.

  Perhaps that was what CentCom had in mind when they authorized this mission. Julia was an incredibly popular officer. Her exploits had given citizens on the Rim worlds a measure of security and pride they’d never known.

  Though she was almost violently opposed to the idea of a political career, the media was awash with pundits opining on what she might accomplish as a Grand Senator.

  To CentCom, she represented uncertainty, disruption, and change. Perhaps it would be more convenient for them if she simply disappeared. Perversely, they’d wanted her head after she’d stopped Seneca from carving out his own little slice of the Imperium, but the media was five steps ahead of them and so she’d been promoted from colonel to brigadier general.

  Competence couldn’t be tolerated. It made the command staff look bad. Advancing by merit sent the wrong sort of message and Paul was almost worse. He’d been a miner’s son and he’d ended up as an Equestrian Knight and an Inspector with the ‘Eye’, thanks to the powerful Nathaniel family.

  Far too many street urchins on far too many worlds now had a gleam of hope in their eyes. Few things were more dangerous than giving hope to those who weren’t born to it.

  Doubtless the Grays would transmit footage of their executions to the Imperium.

  CentCom would ‘regretfully’ declare them dead and immediately give the Engineering Corps orders to break up the Sucker Punch. The Corps couldn’t even do a proper job of maintaining the existing network of wormhole junctions; what chance did they have of reverse engineering an even more advanced system?

  As time wore on, their increasingly apparent failure to unlock those secrets would only prove the unthinkable – that aliens had invented something Humans couldn’t understand. Better to get rid of it now and sidestep the entire issue.

  “An armada has been dispatched to escort us through the Bezmat Arm,” the Gray told him. “We rarely bother with an escort because the percentage of ships lost doesn’t justify the expenditure, but the Quorum was very clear that you both should be brought to trial.”

  Another interlude of languid eye fluttering from the Gray, who was clearly taking a great deal of satisfaction from the situation. “There will be no chance of rescue.”

  Whatever lurked in the Bezmat Arm – Paul assumed this referred to some nebula – it was unfriendly to the Grays and, potentially, friendly to Humans. They were too deep in Quorum territory for them to fear Imperial interference.

  Paul realized he’d just stumbled onto an important fact. The Gray Quo
rum’s territory was a matter of public record. Any Human could have checked with Imperial records and seen that a straight run from Sintel to the Gray home world came nowhere close to any frontier.

  Clearly the Quorum was in the habit of claiming territory they didn’t actually control. So what was out there, causing them to dispatch escort vessels?

  Not that it mattered. He’d never be seeing Imperial territory again. He’d feel regret about that, he supposed, once the inhibitor fields of the pod were shut off.

  Fighting Chance

  The lights came on again and Paul’s mind was suddenly overloaded by the sensory input. His involuntary muscles were still active and his pupils were able to react to the sudden change in illumination, but they were incredibly slow about it.

  His thoughts were scrambled at first, but they slowly began coalescing into coherent, dispassionate assessments. A Gray, perhaps the same one (but who could tell?), was standing in front of them checking the telemetry holo.

  He finally waved the projection aside and turned his attention to the two prisoners. “You will be pleased to know that we’ll reach the rendezvous within the next centi-day, where you’ll be transferred to the Vengeance.”

  Paul was reasonably sure they’d just been treated to what passed for Gray sarcasm.

  The large head tilted back slightly, obsidian eyes blinking slowly at him. “You may have crippled our wormhole program for the time being,” he droned, “but our planet-killers are now coming online and they’re more than a match for your super-dreadnaughts.”

  Paul had heard nothing from the intelligence briefings about any planet-killer program, but he could imagine what form such a vessel might take under Gray doctrine. It was almost certainly built around a central mass driver and lacking in defensive weaponry.

  The Grays were single-minded like that. Each ship had its purpose. An escort was meant to defend the larger ships in a squadron, so why waste resources giving the larger ship a defensive array?

  That was why their ship-destroyers were always deployed with gunship escorts. It worked well enough for the Grays, but it did leave open a few exploits of which a clever enemy might take advantage.

  He reminded himself to feel alarm at this new information once the pod was turned off. It could have been worse, he realized. If they hadn’t lost their jump-ship program, they could have used their planet-killers throughout the Imperium with absolute impunity, simply opening wormholes and firing through them with minimal risk to themselves.

  The lighting dimmed and the Gray lurched to the left, arms flailing in a failed battle to keep his balance. Paul hadn’t felt any change in momentum but it seemed the only explanation. As far as he knew, Grays weren’t given to sudden fits of experimental dancing.

  The creature climbed back into view and checked the status holo. “Those degenerates in operations should know better than to use a trainee helmsman on such an important mission.”

  There was no emotion in the statement, but Paul was sure the Gray was grumbling. He swept the holo away and walked out of sight.

  Planet-killers. They sounded nasty, but what if he didn’t manage to warn his superiors about them? If he could shrug, he would.

  Without their jumpships, the Grays couldn’t deal the Imperium a knock-out blow right from the start. The minute they attacked a Rim world with their planet-killers, CentCom’s budget would quadruple and a war would be declared.

  The Imperium was ripe for civil war. Something like this could very likely steer it down a more profitable path.

  A soft chime began pulsing, muffled through the pod’s containment field. It sounded almost soothing.

  The Gray stepped back into view, opening a new holo screen and searching quickly through the menus. His third eyelid blinked but not with the same arrogance as before. Now he looked concerned.

  He acknowledged a flashing red icon and opened a new menu.

  Paul suddenly felt cold. He felt it everywhere, both in the extremities and at the core of his body. It was as if someone had suddenly pumped ice water down his throat.

  His vision began to turn gray at the outer edges and he realized he was being killed. He was pretty sure he should be alarmed about that but it simply wasn’t possible. He could hear his heartbeat but it was far too fast. It seemed to come from outside the pod and, oddly, it just stopped completely.

  The door slid open and he could see his heartbeat, out in the hallway, every pulse of sound accompanied by a bright red flash. It stopped again and a dark shape moved into the room, growing larger in the haze of Paul’s vision until it towered over the distracted Gray.

  Paul saw a hand, oddly Human, appear on the Gray’s shoulder and the alien was easily shoved aside. He bounced off a stanchion and fell out of sight. The Human hands began working on the holo screen and Paul felt the icy grip on his body relent.

  A second shape moved past in the background to the place where the Gray had fallen. As the warmth flooded through Paul’s body, his vision cleared, showing a woman standing over the Gray. She brought her knee up, nearly to her chest, and slammed her boot down on the head of the stunned creature.

  Paul felt an intense satisfaction at his captor’s grisly end. He suddenly turned to his left, the fears he’d been unable to experience suddenly rushing back all at once, but Julia was there, looking at him with relief.

  “Aye wash worried you might not shurvive that,” she slurred with a lopsided grin. “An aging doughnut commando like yershelf…”

  He tried to frame a suitable reply but gave up when he noticed the weapon pointed at her head. He’d almost forgotten about their saviors for a moment there.

  Now it seemed like they might be having second thoughts.

  “Where’s your chip?” the woman demanded. “Why are you trying to conceal your citizenship?”

  The man was holding a sub-machine-gun on Paul, but he snuck a glance at Julia, squinted for a heartbeat and then his eyes grew wide. “Roll me in butter and call me a flounder!” he whispered in shock.

  He lowered his weapon, the movement drawing the woman’s attention. He looked over at her. “Don’t you realize who we’ve just found, Robin?” He nodded at Julia. “That there’s none other than Brigadier General Urbica of the Imperial Marines!”

  Robin looked back at Julia, a grin slowly spreading across her face. “The Wolf of Gliese?” She nodded grudgingly. “Figures you’d recognize her!”

  “Almost a shame,” the man said as he helped Paul out of the pod. “If they were on the missing list they’d be worth a fair bit of crust, but they ain’t even citizens.”

  “We are citizens,” Paul insisted, his tongue finally catching up with his brain. He couldn’t understand how they’d recognize them and not know that.

  Robin looked at Paul. “I suppose you’d be Inspector Grimm from the ‘Eye’?”

  Paul grinned, nodding weakly in confirmation. With her shaved head and combat implants, Julia was definitely more recognizable than he was and, for a leader like her, that was a definite asset. A cop doesn’t need to be recognized; in fact, he worked best in the shadows.

  “Yes, I’m Grimm and we are citizens.”

  Julia flexed her limbs, forcing life back into them. “How did CentCom know where to find us?”

  Their two rescuers shared a glance.

  Robin tilted her head, eyebrows low. “Why would you think we’re from the Imperium?”

  Now Julia and Paul looked at each other. “If you aren’t from the Imperium,” Julia asked, turning back to Robin, “then where are you from?”

  Robin waved them toward the door. “Let’s get moving. Our suppressor field is glitchy at the best of times and the Grays are probably trying to self-destruct as we speak.”

  She led the way to the door and checked the companionway before leading them out of the room. “We’re both from Roanoke,” she told them before checking a crossing passageway.

  Paul’s implants were operational again, now that he was free of the stasis pod, and he ran
a check for the name. Not a single planet in the entire Imperial database carried that title, not even as a nickname.

  But there’d been a colony ship – five centuries ago.

  “You’re descendants from one of the lost expeditions?” he asked.

  A chuckle from the man. “Lost, he calls us. Did you hear that, Robin?”

  “Lost would give the impression that the Imperium actually made an attempt to find them, don’t you think, Dem?” Robin took aim at something in the hazy distance as they reached the hangar deck.

  Whatever had caught her eye must have moved out of sight. She lowered her weapon with a mild snarl of disappointment. “Someone in the Imperial Exchequer decided that conquest paid better dividends than colonization, so they just wrote us off and declared the ship as lost.”

  Paul suddenly remembered what he’d heard in stasis. He put a hand on Robin’s shoulder. “The Gray said a planet-killer was coming to rendezvous with them, along with an escorting armada.”

  “Within a centi-day,” Julia added.

  Robin frowned at a random point on Julia’s tunic for a moment. She looked up. “As long as we knocked this ship out of distorted space by more than a few milli-days ahead of their schedule, we should have enough time to get clear before their fleet arrives at their rendezvous and start looking for us.”

  “Maybe,” Dem grunted. “Distortion eats up the distance pretty fast, but I’d rather not put that to the test, though.”

  She jabbed her hand to the left and Dem led them through an orderly forest of palletized cargo stacks. They moved forward a few rows and stopped to wait for Robin.

  Dem pressed his back up against the right corner of a massive cuboidal drum of fluid. He took a quick peek and turned to give Paul and Julia a thumbs-up. “Clear for now,” he whispered.

  Robin glided up to them and Dem turned again to aim his weapon down their new path. She passed him and moved over to the right-hand side of the path, giving him a clear field of fire. Paul and Julia shared a nod and moved off after her.