The Empire's Corps: Book 05 - The Outcast

by Christopher Nuttall

  “There’s always a problem when you touch down,” Brad commented. “The simulations never quite manage to duplicate it.”

  Sameena nodded, feeling the subtle difference in gravity as the shuttle’s onboard field faded away. Rosa was slightly smaller than Earth, according to the files, and Earth had provided the standard for gravity throughout the Empire. She would be able to jump higher on the planet than she could onboard ship.

  Pity it won’t give us superpowers, she thought, remembering some of the older movies they’d watched together. One of them had implied that travellers from space would develop strange abilities under an alien sun. You need to be a heavy-world native for the super-strength.

  Brad unstrapped himself and headed down to the hatch. “I think I see our welcoming committee,” he said. “You coming?”

  Sameena nodded and followed him through the airlock, taking her first breath of the planet’s atmosphere. It smelt ... sweet, as if there was a life about it that was simply lacking onboard ship. She felt an odd pang of homesickness as she stepped onto the concrete ground, catching sight of a handful of butterflies buzzing through the air. Perhaps, if she’d had a better life on Jannah, she would never have wanted to leave.

  “I don’t understand how they can live on Earth,” she muttered to Brad. “Wouldn't they prefer to live here?”

  “The average citizen on Earth sits in his poky little government-provided flat, eating his government-provided ration bars, watching government-provided entertainments and fucking his no doubt government-provided wife,” Brad muttered back. “They are kept deliberately ignorant, fed propaganda instead of being taught how to think ... do you think that they would welcome the chance to leave? Those that do leave willingly are the rarity.”

  He smiled at her expression. “Paddy was quite detailed when I asked him about it,” he admitted. “Earth is not a nice place to live.”

  Sameena looked up as she saw their welcoming committee. Two men, both with sun-tanned faces and grim suspicious expressions. One of them held out a datapad, the other merely watched as Brad read the datapad and then checked it against his own.

  “Half of the weapons are in the shuttle,” he said. “The other half will have to be brought down from orbit.”

  “Understood,” the man said. His accent was so thick that Sameena could barely understand him. “We can start unloading ...”

  There was a loud whistle from the other side of the field. A small army of men had appeared and started running towards them. Sameena glanced around, one hand reaching for her pistol, and saw other groups coming in from every direction. They were surrounded! Their greeter drew a pistol and started firing towards the men; Sameena grunted in pain as Brad tackled her, knocking her to the ground and lying on top of her body. It took her a moment to realise that he was trying to shield her as the newcomers started returning fire. Seconds later, a body crumpled to the ground. The newcomers had shot their greeter dead.

  Brad swore as someone hauled him off Sameena and slammed him down to the concrete. She had a moment to see his attacker yanking his hands behind his back and slipping on the cuffs, then her own hands were wrenched out from under her and cuffed too. A man rolled her over and searched her roughly, removing everything from her pistol to the wristcom that linked back to the ship, then sat on her as his comrades pulled Brad to his feet and dragged him off towards one of the hangers. Sameena tried to struggle, but resistance was futile. She could barely move at all.

  She twisted her head and stared at the two bodies. Something had gone very badly wrong, she knew now, but she didn't know why. If she’d listened to her instincts ... she gritted her teeth, fighting to breathe. Her captor leered down at her, then stood up as a small vehicle drove across the landing strip and stopped beside them. Sameena had only a moment to feel relieved before they shackled her ankles and forced her into the vehicle. It was a mobile prison cell.

  “Sit down and wait,” her captor ordered. “You are under arrest.”

  He slammed the metal door shut before Sameena could say a word. Instead, she looked around, wincing at the pain in her wrists. The cuffs were far too tight. She concentrated, remembering what Paddy had taught her, and forced herself to consider her predicament as best as she could. The vehicle was nothing but bare metal walls. Even if she had free use of her hands and feet, she doubted that she would be able to get out. And she was completely cut off from the ship – and Brad.

  The vehicle roared into life, lurching forward towards an unknown destination. Sameena sat down hastily, then closed her eyes and tried to think. They were trapped, under arrest ... and that meant ... what? Could it be that they’d been caught up in a civil war? But the government had ordered the weapons, hadn't it? She had the nasty feeling that they’d been conned.

  It was nearly forty minutes before the vehicle finally lurched to a halt. Sameena felt nothing, but relief; the ride had made her want to throw up. Jayne could probably have explained why she had a bad reaction to the vehicle when she’d never had a problem with spacecraft ... Sameena considered the problem briefly, then pushed it aside. There were more important matters to worry about. Where was Brad, for a start, and what was going to happen to them?

  The door was yanked open, revealing the interior of a garage. A pair of uniformed men pulled her out of the vehicle and half-carried her down the corridor, rather than letting her walk for herself. Sameena forced herself to show no reaction, even when one of them allowed his hand to reach down to her breast and squeeze. He seemed disappointed by the lack of any response and stopped prodding her. There was no time to feel any relief before she was thrust into a small room and pulled to a halt in front of a table.

  “That will be all,” a woman’s voice said. She stepped out of a door set into a wall, unmistakable authority in her tone. “Let's have a look at what we have here.”

  Sameena shuddered inwardly when she saw the woman, instinctively knowing that she would have been better off with the men. The woman was short, mildly overweight and had an expression that suggested that Sameena was even less than an insect in her eyes. She reminded Sameena of one of her mother’s friends, a woman who had had two daughters who had always looked fearful when they thought no one was looking. And her children had always had nasty bruises on their faces.

  The woman studied her back, her piggish eyes showing a hint of glee at having someone so completely in her power. Sameena had known that there were men who stared at her – and she was never comfortable with it – but this was different. She had the feeling that the woman wouldn't need much of an excuse before she began to hurt someone.

  “I am Colonel Desiree,” the woman said. Her Imperial Standard was better than the guard’s. “Let’s see now.”

  She made a show of consulting the sheets of paper on her desk. “You were caught smuggling arms to the surface to arm the rebels. You were in cahoots with the treacherous Osaka. You landed on our planet without permission. Tell me – do you think that anyone in the Empire will care what happens to you?”

  Sameena gritted her teeth, but said nothing. Osaka had been the name on the permits to import weapons; assuming the woman was telling the truth, he’d been a rebel ally until he'd been caught. And that meant ... what? She knew almost nothing of what was really going on.

  “They won’t,” Desiree said, answering her own question. “No one will ask any questions about you, ever. Your only hope is to cooperate with us.”

  She nodded to the guards, who stepped up behind Sameena and removed the shackles, followed by the cuffs. There were ugly red marks on her skin, she discovered, as she rubbed at them frantically. Desiree watched, making no effort to hide her amusement. Sameena felt sick, but forced it down. She couldn't afford to make a mistake.

  Desiree smiled. “Take off your shirt,” she ordered. “Now.”

  Sameena looked back at the guards. They were leering, anticipating the show. She turned back to Desiree, but saw no mercy in her eyes, merely a cruel sadistic amusement that chil
led Sameena to the bone. Power had turned her into a monster.

  And she was already trying to manipulate her captive, Sameena realised. Pushing her into an involuntary striptease would make her more cooperative in future. And it would serve to underline just how vulnerable she was ... Paddy’s Marine textbooks had gone into considerable detail on how someone could be broken down and rebuilt.

  “No,” she said, firmly.

  Desiree quirked an eyebrow. “No?”

  She nodded to the guards. Sameena had no time to react before one of them grabbed her and started to tear off her clothes. The shirt tore instantly, but the shipsuit was much tougher, giving her an opportunity to kick the guard in the shins. He yelped, shoved her to the floor and used a knife to cut the shipsuit away from her skin. She braced herself as his hands gripped her buttocks, but then he hauled her back to her feet. The remains of her clothing fell away, leaving her completely naked.

  “They all think that they can resist,” Desiree said. “But no one ever fails to give me what I want.”

  Sameena did her best to block out the next ten minutes as hands prodded her body, exploring every last inch of her skin. Anywhere she might have hidden something was examined, while Desiree watched, her face twisted into a smile. Eventually, she was cuffed again and made to stand upright in front of the sadistic woman. If she had come straight to Rosa from Jannah, part of her realised numbly, the experience would have broken her. As it was ...

  “You will have some time to contemplate what you will say to me next,” Desiree informed her. She looked over at the guards. “Take her away.”

  They obeyed, shoving Sameena down a long corridor that opened into a room filled with cages. Several of them were inhabited by prisoners, all female. Sameena shuddered at the stench as the guards opened one of the cages, then pushed her inside and used another pair of cuffs to lock her to the bars. Finally, they released her hands and stepped backwards, slamming the door shut. She was trapped.

  “Wait,” she said. The guards paused and looked at her, expectantly. “Where’s my ... my friend?”

  “Somewhere,” one of the guards said. “I suggest that you start thinking about how to satisfy the Colonel. She’s really quite demanding when she wants something.”

  She could hear them sniggering as they walked away, leaving the prisoners alone.

  For a long moment, Sameena felt absolutely helpless. She was naked, unarmed, cuffed ... there seemed to be no way out. But she knew never to give up. There would be an opportunity, Paddy had insisted when he'd discussed disaster scenarios with her, and when it came she would have to take it. But would it ever come?

  And what were they doing to Brad?

  “Hey,” a female voice said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I just landed,” Sameena said. She looked over at the woman in the next cage. “What are you doing here?”

  “Long story,” the woman said.

  Slowly, she started to talk.

  Chapter Twenty

  This in turn fuelled a demand for worker power, a demand that would eventually lead to both the trade union movement and communism. The former was often quite reasonable when the management could crush any individual worker effortlessly; collective bargaining was often the only weapon they could use against their employers.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. The Science That Isn’t: Economics and the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.

  “My name is Ginny,” the woman said. “My father wanted to leave Earth. He’d kept trying for promotion and he never got it. Eventually, he booked all of us on a transport and signed up with the RDC – the Rosa Development Corporation. I was four years old at the time.”

  Sameena listened, studying the woman. She was badly bruised, the marks clearly visible even in the dimly-lit room. The damage would leave her permanently scarred without proper medical treatment, although Sameena suspected that hardly anyone left the jail once they arrived. Desiree and her guards didn't seem too worried about future complaints from their former prisoners.

  “It was difficult at first,” Ginny continued. “My older brothers and sisters bitched like mad beasts over losing all the benefits of Earth. Father insisted that we get a homestead and learn how to farm. We were lucky enough to apprentice with a decent farmer and his wife, so we had good tutors. Didn’t quite manage to make ends meet for five years, but eventually ... I learned to love the farm. I don’t think my siblings always felt the same way.”

  “I know the feeling,” Sameena said, remembering how her adopted brothers had different aspirations. Even if the horror stories about Earth were exaggerated, she wouldn't have wanted to leave outer space – and its technology – and live on Jannah. “What happened?”

  “The development corporation simply abandoned us,” Ginny said. “One day, the starships simply stopped coming. There were no new colonists, no new supplies ... and the governor went mad. All of a sudden, he turned into a dictator and started imposing his own rule on us. Some of us tried to fight ...”

  She tapped one of the scars on her body. “I was one of them,” she admitted. “We attacked a supply convoy ... I think it was a few weeks ago. They caught me and dragged me here. I haven’t seen the outside world since.”

  Sameena shuddered. It would be easy for someone to make a bid for supreme power if a stage-one colony world had been cut off from the Empire. She wouldn't have considered it worth trying, but the governor clearly disagreed. And such a regime would attract sadists and psychopaths as shit attracted flies. She wanted to talk about their contract, about what had happened when they arrived, yet she knew that might be far too revealing. Who knew who might be listening to them?

  Someone had ordered weapons from off-world. The rebels, according to Desiree ... but the governor had clearly managed to detect the shuttle and send troops to intercept Sameena and Brad before the weapons were unloaded. They hadn't even known to try to conceal their landing, even though it would have been easy. Rosa didn't have a dedicated monitoring service for tracking starships and shuttles entering the system.

  But if we’d known that we had to make a covert landing, I wouldn't have agreed to take the contract, she thought, cursing her own mistake – and Brad’s desperation to pay off his debts. I should have hired him myself and to hell with his pride.

  “Tell me about the governor,” she said, instead. Knowledge was power, after all. “What sort of government does he run?”

  The average stage-one colony had very little government, she knew; the corporation might hold all the power, but it had problems running every aspect of the population’s lives. Mostly, the government would only step in if there was a serious problem ... such as bandits or raiders in the hinterlands. Rosa’s governor, freed from all constraints, had armed indents and turned them into a personal guard. He’d then established control over the city and created the basics of a police state.

  “We can't get him out of the city, but he hasn't been able to break us,” Ginny said, with a hint of pride. “But he might have won by now.”

  Sameena said nothing. She did have evidence that the fight was far from over, but she didn't want to say that out loud either. But the governor might be able to use either her or Brad to get up to Lead Pipe and then ... the freighter wasn't armed, yet it wouldn't be hard to find small rocks and drop them on selected targets. Or he could simply use the craft to bring in mercenaries from off-world. There was no shortage of people who would fight to uphold his government if the price was right.

  She shuddered. Brad was devoted to his ship – he seemed to have fallen in love with Lead Pipe the moment he set eyes on her – but the governor’s thugs could simply threaten Sameena’s life to make him comply. Or they could torture him until he broke ... she considered, briefly, if she could convince them to take her back to the ship. There were computer overrides she could use that would render it useless, if she couldn't take back command. But it would be far too risky.

  Only one of us should have gone down, Sameena though
t, grimly. In hindsight, the mistake was glaringly obvious. But Brad had been desperate and the papers had seemed legit – hell, they were legit. If one of us had remained on the ship, that person could have threatened the planet or simply left to get reinforcements from the clans. Or even summoned the Imperial Navy.

  But no one cared enough to intervene, she knew. Planets were being abandoned all over, even the worlds that had once showed promise for future development. Even Jamie, if asked, might shrug and leave Rosa to collapse into chaos.

  She looked over at Ginny. “Tell me about yourself,” she said, seriously. “What was life here like, before the governor went mad.”

  Ginny gave her an odd little smile. “Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Where do you come from?”

  Sameena hesitated. “The traders,” she said, finally. “And I never meant to end up here.”

  They were still deep in conversation when the guards returned, swaggering down between the cages and leering at the prisoners. Sameena watched them coming, fighting to keep her thoughts and emotions under control. Surrendering to fear would cripple her, according to Paddy, making it impossible for her to fight back. There would be an opportunity, she told herself. She just had to be ready for it when it came.

  “Good luck,” Ginny muttered, very quietly.

  “Silence, bitch,” one of the guards barked. Clearly, Ginny hadn't been quiet enough. “And you, outsider. Give me your hands.”

  Sameena scowled as they cuffed her, shackled her legs and then pulled her out of the cage. She had to admire the cruel ingenuity of whoever had devised the shackles, part of her mind noted; it was impossible to walk at anything more than a shuffle, at least not without falling over. If she tried to run, she would trip over herself. There was no way she could escape as long as she was wearing them.

  The guards inspected her briefly – as if she could have somehow hidden a weapon on her person in the cell – and then marched her down the corridor, slapping at her buttocks when she failed to move fast enough to suit them. It was yet another tactic to break her, she knew, yet knowing what it was didn't stop it working. She gritted her teeth, promising herself that the guards would suffer later. The part of her mind that always remained cool and collected refused to simply give up.