The Long-Range War

by Christopher Nuttall

  He assessed the situation quickly. The enemy commander didn’t strike him as a professional soldier, but he hadn’t done a bad job. He’d put his forces, such as they were, in a bottleneck, forcing Martin to come to him if he wanted to break through to the command centre. There was no way to know, either, what might be holding back, waiting for Martin to commit himself. The snoops were encountering jamming fields and counter-drones as they tried to probe their way towards the command centre. For all he knew, the enemy commander could have put his expendable forces on the front line while conserving his real forces for the counterattack.

  Not that it matters, he thought. We could take out the entire ring if we wanted.

  “We’ll clear the way with plasma grenades,” he said. “Sergeant ...”

  His suit flashed up an alert. Someone was trying to call him.

  Martin blinked. “A Galactic?”

  He hesitated, suddenly unsure of himself. The message was coming from the command centre, although it wasn’t coming over the ring’s communications network. And that meant ... what? A rebel? A spy? Or someone who wanted to make contact without having it recorded? He wondered, briefly, if he should relay the message to Major Griffin, but the major was on the other side of the planet. Martin was the man on the spot.

  “Put it through,” he ordered.

  A sibilant voice, like a child with a lisp, echoed over the communications network. “Is this the human commander?”

  Martin shivered. The voice was indisputably alien. “Yes.”

  “We will surrender, in exchange for protection,” the voice said. “The” - the next word was unfamiliar to Martin - “are at the airlocks.”

  Martin hesitated, taking a moment to run the message through the suit’s translator. There was no exact translation, but it came across roughly as shit-scum. Martin cursed under his breath, realising just what sort of headache they’d stumbled into. The Tokomak had to have cleared the entire sector when they’d realised the system was under attack, only to discover that their panic had inspired the underclass to rise up against them. They no longer looked invincible ...

  “Order your defenders to stand down,” he said, finally. He had orders to accept surrenders if they were offered. “Turn over all command keys to us, open your datanets and give us full cooperation in taking control. And, in exchange for that, we will grant you protection.”

  There was a long pause. Martin forced himself to wait, despite a grim awareness that they might be running out of time. The Tokomak might just be stalling, hoping to find some way to retake the advantage. And yet ... the enemy fire slackened and died. An uneasy silence fell over the chamber.

  “We accept your terms,” the sibilant voice said.

  Martin exchanged glances with Sergeant Howe, then slowly walked down the corridor. A small collection of aliens stood at the far end, their weapons lying in a heap on the ground. It was a multi-species group, with at least five different alien races represented. Martin was surprised to see that not all of them were Galactics, although he supposed he should have expected it. There were always members of the junior races who were willing to collaborate with their masters, even at the expense of their own kind. Humans had collaborated too.

  He detailed two of his men to watch the prisoners, then stepped into the command centre itself. It looked weirdly like a circular throne room, with the commander - a Tokomak - seated in the exact centre, allowing him to look down on everyone else. Most of the senior officers were Tokomak, save for a couple of Harmonies. Martin eyed the latter two suspiciously. The Harmonies had a reputation for backstabbing since they’d lured Odyssey to their system and tried to capture her.

  The commander stood and held out a set of code-keys. Martin took them, realising that it was a gesture of surrender as much as anything else, then nodded to his men to take control of the system. The Galactics had locked their computers, but the code-keys unlocked them instantly. Martin allowed his suit to access the network and scan for potential trouble while the prisoners were removed to somewhere a little safer. It wasn’t particularly surprising to discover that their captives hadn't had control of the entire ring. That rested in the planetary governor’s hands.

  “Shit,” Sergeant Howe muttered. “Look at that.”

  Martin looked at the monitor. A swarm of aliens was pressing against a set of heavy airlocks while, behind them, a handful of more organised rebels were approaching with cutting tools. There were thousands of rebels in that one sector alone. No wonder the Tokomak had surrendered so quickly. They’d known there was no hope of saving themselves if the rebels overwhelmed the defences. Their plasma burners wouldn’t last forever.

  He forced himself to think. The snoops were still reporting no contacts, outside the command centre itself, which meant ... he poked the system until it threw up a location. He’d half-hoped the rebels might be hundreds of miles away, but they were on the other side of the main airlock, far too close for comfort. And he couldn't think of any way to stop them without deadly force. A stun bolt that would put a member of one species out of commission would either kill - or merely irritate - another.

  “Close the hatches between the main airlock and here,” he ordered. It wouldn’t slow the rebels down for long, but it would buy him some time. “And then deploy half the troop to ... to here.”

  He tapped a location on the map, cursing under his breath. Mobs simply didn’t listen to reason. Human mobs didn't, in any case, and he doubted it would be different for the aliens. And that meant ... he was going to have to use force, if reason wasn’t enough. There was no way he could get the prisoners out of the ring before it was too late ... and besides, even if he could, he couldn't allow the rebels to tear the command centre to bits. They needed that orbital tower to get troops down to the surface.

  “Request additional troops from the fleet,” he said, although he doubted that reinforcements would get to the ring in time to be useful. There was so much electromagnetic disruption in the high orbitals that no one would risk teleporting. “And then take command here. I’ll be at the front.”

  He ignored the sergeant’s protest and headed down towards the blockade, trying desperately to think of a peaceful solution. But he’d seen enough riots - at refugee camps, at detention centres - to know that there probably wasn't one. Their suits carried non-lethal weapons, but with aliens involved ... it was hard to be sure what was truly non-lethal. His mind ran around and around in circles. They might have to hurt the people they’d come to help.

  The hatch burst open. A torrent of aliens poured in. Martin felt a flicker of pity for the ones at the front, the ones who were being pushed forward and would be trampled if they fell. One of his brothers had died in a protest march, years ago. He’d fallen, according to the official report, and been crushed to death. Martin hadn’t believed the report, not then. It had been easier to blame everything on everyone but his brother. And yet, Charlie had always been talking about violence ...

  “ATTENTION,” he said, using the suit’s speakers to amplify his voice. The aliens recoiled as the sound blasted into their ears. It would be acutely painful for a human. He tried not to think about what it might do to them. “THIS SECTOR HAS BEEN SECURED BY THE GALACTIC ALLIANCE. IT IS NOW UNDER OUR PROTECTION. YOU NEED TO RETURN TO YOUR QUARTERS AND WAIT.”

  The alien mass seemed to waver. Martin noted over a dozen different kinds of aliens in the mix, all of them from servile races. He thought some of his ancestors would approve of them trying to free themselves, even though their revolution would have ended very badly if the human ships had been driven out of the system. But he couldn't allow the aliens to ransack the sector. The engineers were already reporting that the orbital elevators could be put back into service, with a little work, or the tubes opened up to allow a rapid and sheltered descent to the planet. His reinforcements would probably pause long enough to say hello and then hurry down to the surface. He wanted - he needed - to go with them.

  “YOU WILL HAVE THE SYSTEM, ONCE
WE HAVE LIBERATED IT,” he told them. “BUT, FOR THE MOMENT, YOU NEED TO STAY OUT OF OUR WAY.”

  “Send out the childless ones,” a voice called. The speaker looked rather like an oversized chicken, although the nasty-looking beak and unpleasant glint in his eye robbed his appearance of any humour. “Let us peck them to death!”

  The mob roared with agreement, although they didn't try to move forward. Martin didn’t know why. They might not trust the humans to deal with the prisoners properly ... or they might think that nothing short of pecking them to death themselves would satisfy their lust for revenge. Martin didn’t really blame them. Slaves sometimes needed to watch their former masters burn. But he had his orders.

  “RETURN TO YOUR QUARTERS,” he ordered. “I WON’T ASK AGAIN.”

  There was a long, chilling pause. Martin braced himself, trying to guess what the mob would do. It seemed to be a universal law that a mob’s intelligence was inversely proportional to the number of people in it. And all it would take to start a riot - and a slaughter - would be one idiot saying the wrong thing. He looked at the mass of aliens, silently urging them to go home and wait ...

  And then, slowly, they turned away.

  Martin let out a sigh of relief. There hadn't been any real danger to him, as far as he could tell, but he hadn't wanted to kill thousands of aliens. He’d wanted ...

  “Let them go,” he ordered, quietly. They’d have to set up forcefields, just in case the mob decided it had been given a raw deal and returned. “Sergeant, do we have any update on those reinforcements?”

  “They’re coming down the pipeline now,” Howe said. “They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. But they’re going on to the planetary surface.”

  “Lucky bastards,” Martin said. He ignored the sergeant’s snort. “I wish I was going down too.”

  “Cheer up, sir,” Howe said. “There will be plenty of other tempting opportunities to commit suicide in the future.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “PDC Four is still holding out,” Yolanda reported. “But the majority of the planet is quiet.”

  “For a given value of quiet,” Hoshiko said.

  She shook her head in disbelief. The planetary government had surrendered, once the Apsidal Ring had been captured, but there were countless riots and purges breaking out on the planet’s surface. Hoshiko hadn’t seen anything like it, even during the aftermath of the Druavrok War. The former slaves were turning on their masters with a brutality unmatched since the collapse of the United States. Appeals from orbit for patience and restraint had simply been ignored. The slaves wanted their pound of flesh and no one, not even humanity, could deny them.

  “How’s the refugee situation coming along?”

  “We have most of the former masters and their dependents on their way to the orbital towers and the ring now,” Yolanda said, checking her records. “Civil Affairs thinks we will be dealing with millions of refugees, eventually. The slaves aren’t being very discriminating, Admiral. They’re attacking every Galactic on the surface.”

  “We’ll save as many as we can,” Hoshiko said. Providing protection was part of the terms of surrender, but there were limits. She wasn't going to risk an open confrontation with the rebels, not when she might need them later. “Getting them further away is going to be a major headache.”

  “The logistics will be impossible, despite the ships we’ve seized,” Yolanda said. “It would take every ship in the fleet years to move the refugees to the next star system. And there are no facilities at Mokpo to house them.”

  Hoshiko nodded, curtly. Something would have to be done, but what? She couldn't afford to leave the refugees on the ring indefinitely. If nothing else, their mere presence posed a security threat. The Galactics weren't very good at acting on their own initiative, without orders from higher up the food chain, but it would only take one of them to start real trouble at the worst possible time. The marines were already badly overstretched.

  And that PDC is still holding out, she thought, sourly. The planetary government had ordered the PDC to surrender, but the CO had refused. And his forcefield was strong enough to keep her from simply dropping rocks on his head. The force she’d need to crack the field would do unacceptable damage to the surrounding area. We might be able to starve them out, but it would take years.

  Yolanda looked up. “Major Singh had an idea, Admiral.”

  Hoshiko lifted her eyebrows. Major Singh was an engineering officer, not someone in the chain of command. She’d assigned him to inspect the orbital towers and the ring itself, both to see if it was still stable after the battle and to decide if it was worth duplicating. She had no idea if the Solar Union would be genuinely interested in building rings of its own, but she could see the advantages. Apsidal moved millions of tons of freight - and millions of people - between the surface and the ring every day. There was no way teleporting could move so much material without unacceptable energy costs.

  “What?”

  “He thought we could disconnect the ring from the orbital towers, then push it away from the planet and turn it into a giant space station,” Yolanda said. “The refugees would then be safe, without interfering with anyone else.”

  Hoshiko had to fight to keep from giggling. Major Singh didn't think small. It made her wonder if he’d join the Extreme Construction Society, once he served his time in the navy and returned to civilian life. She’d seen some of their plans. They made Dyson Spheres look small. She couldn't imagine any responsible government agreeing to waste resources on what was effectively a giant vanity project for the entire human race.

  “I think it would be too risky,” she said, finally. “And it would piss off the provisional government. Speaking of which ...?”

  Yolanda picked up the unspoken question. “The various rebel groups are pulling together now,” she said. “They’ve promised they’ll appoint a representative soon.”

  “We’ll see,” Hoshiko said. In her experience, provisional governments took years to form and rarely wielded much authority, at least at first. “They might not hold together for long.”

  She sighed. The rebels had been held together by an overpowering threat. They’d known, after centuries of having their cells broken open and countless members dispatched to penal colonies that were effectively death sentences, that they had to remain united against the planetary government. But now they’d won - or at least they’d been liberated - and all the issues that had been buried under the urgent need to fight would come bubbling to the surface. Who would rule Apsidal? And how would it be ruled? Would the different races manage to live together? Or would they break up into different factions and start fighting?

  Her lips twitched. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.

  She smiled, remembering Movie Night when she’d been a child and her parents had been introducing her to the classics, then pushed the thought aside as she turned her attention to the reports. The Mokpo Point was now heavily guarded, with a number of prefabricated fortresses being hastily assembled and manned to provide additional cover. Hoshiko would have preferred to rely on a mobile defence, but she had to admit the fortresses could soak up a hell of a lot of incoming fire. The Tokomak fortresses had proved that during the first engagement. It wouldn't be too long before the Tokomak copied the assault pods and put them into production.

  They have an industrial base at N-Gann, devoted to supporting their fleet, she thought, grimly. They can just start churning out assault pods there and funnelling them up the chain towards us.

  It was a worrying thought. The one thing the planetary government had been unable or unwilling to do was tell her when the main enemy fleet was supposed to arrive. They knew it was coming - they’d said as much, when she’d asked - but they didn’t know when. Hoshiko had no idea if they were telling the truth or not, although she suspected they were genuinely ignorant. The Tokomak CO wouldn't have given them a precise time. There was a good chance the fleet would
be delayed, simply by having to funnel thousands of starships through the gravity points one by one. It was something she hadn't really appreciated until she’d had to take her own fleet through the gravity points.

  She shook her head, again. So far, everything had gone according to plan. She’d secured the system, landed troops on the planet’s surface and begun the immense task of turning the planet’s industries into a support base for her fleet. Given a few weeks, they’d start churning out vast quantities of everything from missiles to mines. Minefields were normally useless in interstellar war, but not when the enemy had to come through the gravity points. It was clear why it had taken so long for a genuine interstellar hegemony to arise. Waging interstellar war through the gravity points alone was immensely costly for the attacker, while giving the defender nearly every possible advantage. It made her wonder why anyone had bothered.

  “Admiral, we just received a message from the surface,” Yolanda said. “The provisional government has finally appointed a speaker. He’s requesting a meeting with you at your earliest convenience.”