Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  Jax rallied my survivors, and they hooked up with the other groups along the rock wall to sandwich the enemy strike force between them and the Colonel. Caught in a vice and ravaged by multiple fields of fire they melted away. I heard that a few tried to surrender, but it was far too late for that. No more than a handful escaped to regroup with the rest of the landing force.

  From that point it was a confused, chaotic melee. Both sides had lost all semblance of order, and it broke down into shattered remnants of units fighting each other. In the end, the home field advantage told. Colonel Holm had integrated local militia scouts into our units and, as it turned out, it was a brilliant move. These guys knew every boulder, every vantage point where a SAW could cover the approaches. They ran circles around the invaders, and we tore them to pieces.

  When the enemy sounded the recall and pulled back to their landing ships the colonel unleashed his coup de grace, a nuclear barrage of our own, turning the enemy’s rally point into an atomic hell. Not a single ship escaped. The few survivors broke and tried to run for cover, but the colonel sent out search and destroy teams to root them all out. As far as I know, not one enemy trooper who landed on Columbia lived to tell the story.

  It was a huge victory, and another heap of glory for the colonel, but it was dearly bought. Our losses were over 60%—closer to 80% if you count the lightly wounded and those with minor cases of radiation poisoning. Columbia itself was another casualty. The inhabited area of the planet was devastated. The enemy had detonated half a dozen battlefield nukes, and we’d hit their rally point with ten.

  When the enemy realized what had happened to their strike force they tried to bombard the surface. But Holm had one more surprise waiting for the enemy. He’d hidden several large defensive batteries, and now he had them open up on the incoming missiles. We managed to shoot most of them down, but a big fusion warhead got through and hit one of the coastal towns, leaving nothing but a crater.

  I was beyond impressed with Colonel Holm’s prescience. Time and time again he’d seemed to read the minds of the enemy. But withholding point defense capability while the enemy landed almost 10,000 troops in two waves virtually without opposition? I was awed at the discipline. And, of course, he was right. Those batteries could have shot down some landing craft, but the colonel knew the enemy could still bombard the surface. By keeping these weapons hidden he convinced the enemy we had no such capacity, and when they did try to blast the planet it was one big sloppy salvo, making it relatively easy for us to target and destroy the incoming ordnance. Had they planned the bombardment to counter a substantive point defense capability, there is no doubt that many more warheads would have gotten through. As it was, the enemy had expended all their ordnance, and they had no real choice but to withdraw before we were able to get fresh naval forces to the system.

  So the colonel had held Columbia in the face of almost overwhelming odds. As to what that salvaged real estate was worth now, that was anyone’s guess. The best estimate was that a quarter of the planet’s population had been killed, and a lot more were wounded, homeless, and in desperate need of supplies. Certainly, most of the manufacturing capacity, power generation, and other infrastructure had been destroyed, or at least severely damaged. Nevertheless, it was a victory, and a badly needed one. It was the talk of the hospital once the word got out, and we Columbia survivors were the most highly sought after conversationalists in the Armstrong Acute Care Facility.

  There isn’t much to do in the hospital but talk to the rest of the recovering partial-soldiers, so we anxiously traded any bit of news about the war or just about any subject other than doctors and medical procedures. Anything to get our minds off the next time some white-clad figure with a sickly, too-pleasant smile would wander in to extract blood or cell samples, particularly since this usually occurred sometime around 4am, about 20 minutes after you finally managed to fall asleep. Unless it was my doctor, of course. I always had time for Doctor Sarah.

  My first thoughts of the hospital went something like, “Well, at least no one is shooting at me.” In a month I was ready to trade the bad food and boredom for a little incoming fire. It’s not like getting shot hurts more than growing new legs. Regeneration is painful … really fucking painful. At least for limbs. The internal organs are a lot easier, and since I got some of those too, I have a frame of reference for comparison.

  They replaced virtually my entire digestive system, most of which was destroyed beyond healing by the radiation. They extracted the stem cells they needed and grew me new, perfectly compatible organs. Exact copies, in fact, of the ones I was born with, but grown to adult size. The whole thing took about a month, with another couple days to recover from the implant surgery.

  Then the fun started. Digestive system regeneration requires what was gently described to me as an “adjustment period,” as my brand new guts settled into my old body. There was no rejection as there is with foreign transplants, like the one my sister had. These organs were mine, with the exact genetic makeup of the originals.

  But they were completely new adult organs, lacking the bacteria and other bits of stuff needed for them to work properly. My system was infused with several batches of new intestinal flora, and my stomach chemistry was adjusted several times. Does any of that sound like fun? It’s not.

  Once I got through the gut-wrenching sickness and started to feel at least a little human, it was time for me to grow new legs. I know it sounds counter-intuitive that growing a new leg hurts more than, say, new lungs but it’s true. They can regenerate organs in the lab and transplant them, while a new leg has to grow on your body. And it hurts like a motherfucker.

  You would think that attaching a new arm or leg would be relatively easy, especially since they’ve been able to re-attach severed limbs for a couple centuries now. But unlike organs, the process for transplanting new limbs has never been very successful. Something to do with developing the leg itself to match the stump. So instead of being cultivated in some glorified incubator, my legs would be grown in place, right on my body, which sounded simple but was, in fact, significantly more complicated.

  One problem, at least from my perspective, was that most anesthetics and pain relief drugs interfered with the growth and development of new nerves. I’d been heavily medicated with pain-killers since I got to the hospital, but that all stopped when they strapped me into the regeneration machine. I got to feel every bit of it, pure and undiluted. Mostly undiluted, to be completely accurate—they did try to mitigate the agony a bit.

  They administered pain-control hypnosis and something they called “compensatory neural stimulation,” but trust me, none of it did much … sort of like giving you two aspirin before setting you on fire. It hurt like hell 24/7 for the entire six weeks it took for my legs to grow.

  Doctor Sarah checked on me every day, spending a few minutes examining the development of the legs, but mostly trying to distract me from the pain, I think. It was a noble effort, and if anyone could have managed it, it would have been her. But this shit really hurt. I was irritable and miserable, and I even yelled at my beautiful doctor a few times, which only made me feel worse afterward.

  Florence also spoke to me in soothing tones, and she (it?) got the worst of my frustration. Actually, I found the medical AI to be quite an amazing device. A sophisticated computer system that managed my condition and drug intake 24/7, it was also programmed to help alleviate boredom and provide customized companionship to mending patients. Among other things, she beat me at chess about 30 times. She could also do things like turn what was most likely a database of past patient comments into a casual conversation. Something like, “I hear the pasta with mushroom sauce on tonight’s menu is particularly good. Shall I order it for you?”

  By the way … food. It was about halfway through my leg growth that they actually started giving me real food. Not that I wasn’t a connoisseur of various flavors of intravenous nutritional replacement formula—I think that’s what they called it—but
by the time they actually fed me something solid I almost burst into song.

  Solid is a bit of an overstatement—the first thing they brought me looked like soupy oatmeal that had been through a food processor, but I could have waxed poetic about it for hours. Any food that entered my body through my mouth and not directly into my bloodstream was A OK with me.

  I was strapped into a machine with my torso disappearing into a shiny metal cylinder extending to just below my sternum. Below the cylinder, each stump extended into its own clear plastic tube that would hold and support the new leg as it grew. Inside the cylinder, in addition to the machinery that powered the regeneration, was an assortment of plumbing that attended to by bodily functions while I was strapped in, immobile for weeks.

  I was most concerned with—in this order—pain, boredom, and going a little crazy because I could hardly move, but I have to admit it was a learning experience watching my legs grow. At first it was just the bone, growing down from the existing stump at a rate of about 6 centimeters a day. I used to stare at it to see if I could perceive it actually growing. I thought maybe I could a couple times, but I was never sure.

  The whole process was monitored and controlled by the medical computer. I was growing legs from my own genetic material, but I needed adult legs, not the baby legs I was born with that grew over 15 or 20 years. Organs were regenerated in almost the exact way they initially formed and grown to adult size, albeit at a greatly accelerated rate. A new liver, for example, would start as a tiny one that would grow, much as it does in a fetus, and later a child as it ages.

  But my new legs were grafting right onto my adult body. The doctors couldn’t grow tiny fetus legs and allow them to gradually increase in size. The genetic material had to be stimulated to grow in a certain way directly on my body, and this was manipulated by medical lasers, electrical pulses, and a variety of other tools.

  Once my new tibias and fibulas were finished with their development, I was amazed at the spectacle of my new skeletal feet growing. About the same time my upper legs began to grow muscles, cartilage, nerves, arteries, and the rest of the goop it took to make things work. For a while I was a living anatomy lesson—upper leg showing the muscular system and lower leg the skeletal.

  I mentioned that all of this hurt, didn’t I? I’d describe what new nerves feel like when they are growing, but honestly, I just don’t know how to put it into words. It hurts. A lot.

  Doctor Sarah would visit me as often as she could, and we’d talk about different things. Of course, I had realized early on that Doctor Sarah was also Captain Sarah, and that she was every bit as much a Marine as I was, and outranked me to boot.

  It also meant that, as angelic and patrician as she looked, she probably had not had the easiest life before the Corps. Most of us were plucked from one gutter or another. But I didn’t ask her, and she didn’t ask me either. Since the majority of us had shitty backgrounds, it was traditional to keep it off limits. We were all reborn into the Corps, our old sins expunged.

  We were both from New York and had both lived in the MPZ when we were young, but that’s as far into that subject as we got. She received her medical training in the Corps. Before that she made a few assaults, though not as many as I had. She asked me about Achilles, about what it had been like on the ground. She’d served on one of the support ships as surgeon, but never made it to the surface. With a little help from Florence, she got me through the boredom and pain and frustration. I think helping me helped her a little too. The war had not been going well, and I can only imagine neck deep she’d been in blood, working around the clock to put partial soldiers back together day after day.

  Once the skin had completed its growth my regeneration was declared complete. That doesn’t mean I was as good as new though. In theory, my new limbs were exact copies of my old ones, though the reality was a bit more complicated. I hadn’t spent a couple years learning to walk with my new legs, and the neural pathways required to move them were slightly different. It took a month of hard physical therapy before I could walk around normally, and longer before I felt really comfortable with my balance. You’d be amazed at the sweat you can work up holding onto parallel bars and willing your new legs to move a few inches.

  Once I was up and walking around, it was time for general physical rehab. I was now healthy, more or less, but I certainly wasn’t the toned and fit combat soldier I had been. I was 20 kilos lighter than before I was wounded, and it was mostly muscle that was gone. So they put me on an aggressive training regimen and, most wonderfully of all, they finally started feeding me real solid food consistently. I’d worked my way through the mushy cereals and clear soups, and I can’t even express how good a sandwich tastes after weeks of slop.

  The training was hard and exhausting, but it was a true pleasure. I got outside, breathed the fresh air, felt the sun (suns, actually) on my face. I started taking short walks, but before long I was running half marathons every day. There was a pristine lake on the hospital grounds, and I took a daily swim too. The air, the water, the sun—it all made me feel alive again, a little more each day.

  I spent afternoons in the training rooms, going through one strength-building routine after another. As my strength and endurance increased I really began to feel like myself again. I’d been weak and infirm for most of a year, and now I felt as if I’d been reborn.

  The care I received was amazing, and I have nothing but praise and gratitude for my entire medical team. Doctor Sarah, of course, but also the other surgeons and all the tech and support personnel. I knew the Marines took care of their own, but it was incredible to see how much effort was expended on a single wounded sergeant. Back on Earth, only a member of the Political Class would get this kind of treatment, and it would have to be a highly placed member at that.

  When they finally declared me healthy and discharged me, I made point of thanking each of my doctors and medtechs before I left. They’d literally given me my life back. It was pretty emotional saying goodbye, but when I got to Doctor Sarah it just then struck me that I wasn’t going to be seeing her every day anymore, that I might never see her again. I would actually see her many times in the future, but I didn’t know that then, and the thought of saying goodbye to her forever made me terribly sad. She hugged me and tearfully reminded me she’d promised I’d be good as new. One of the techs took an image of us and flashed it to our data units. So I took my duffel bag and my picture of Doctor Sarah, and I walked out of the hospital into the dazzling sunlight. Both of Armstrong’s binary stars were high in the morning sky, and it was as magnificent a day as I have ever seen on any planet.

  I took the monorail to the spaceport and boarded the shuttle to Armstrong Orbital. Before I even checked into my billet I reported to the armorer to be fitted for a new suit. My old armor had been torn to shreds saving my life, but I’d have needed a new set anyway. I looked the same as I did before, but with all the weight I lost and then gained back, not to mention growing new legs, I would have needed new armor. A fighting suit had to fit you like a glove to function properly.

  I had 60 days of leave for rest and recreation, but I really wasn’t interested. I’d had all the rest I could take in the hospital, and I was anxious to get back into the fight. Plus, I had a bad case of missing my doctor, and I figured hitting ground on some planet or another was the best way to put it out of my mind.

  There was a problem with that theory, however. It turned out I wasn’t going right back to the battle after all. While I was in the hospital I found out that the colonel had not only nominated me for a decoration; he’d also recommended me for officer training. The day after I was discharged I got the orders. I was on my way to the Academy. The next time I was bolted into a lander it would be as Lieutenant Cain.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Academy

  Wolf 359 III

  Humanity occupied, to some extent or another, 385 planets and moons located in about 700 explored solar systems. Some of these were fairly robust colonie
s, generally small but growing rapidly. Others were just remote outposts, usually placed to exploit some valuable resource or to operate a refueling station for ships travelling between systems. A few were core worlds, the first colonies established, which had now grown into sizable populations and modest industry.

  The warp gates that connected them were naturally occurring gravitational phenomenon that physicists had yet to fully explain. Some solar systems had only one; the largest number yet discovered was ten. A system with three or more was particularly valuable. It was the kind of place we’d likely be found, there to hold onto it or to take it away from someone else.

  I had been surprised at how much classroom education there was in Marine basic training. But that was nothing compared to the Academy. The powers that be had obviously decided that to become an officer one must have a head full of obscure knowledge, much of which seemed to me of dubious utility. Or something along those lines. There was math, science, engineering and, of course, battle tactics. A lot of it was boring but relatively easy, and I didn’t have to pay too much attention to get through it. The one thing I really enjoyed was the history. And we got a lot of it. Real history, not the manufactured drivel taught in public schools back home.

  Our world was the product of the Unification Wars, a series of bitter conflicts lasting 80 years that finally ended with the familiar eight superpowers controlling the globe. The root causes of the wars were many, though so many records were lost over decades of desperate fighting it is only possible to speculate on the relative importance of each.

  By the mid-21st century the democracies of the west, which had been the drivers of 20th century growth, were in rapid decline. Beset with corrupt and bloated governments, bankrupt by decades of appalling mismanagement, riddled with cronyism, and unable to recapture the economic dynamism of their past, they were teetering on the verge of collapse.