Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “Send three platoons in to investigate and warn them not to get complacent,” George ordered. Avalon’s Civil Guard had never been lavishly equipped, even after local production lines had started to produce homebuilt weapons. The drones were third or fourth-generation military surplus, probably originally owned by a third-rate regiment from the Imperial Army. Their sensors were hardly modern mil-grade systems. “The enemy could have left a trap in place to hurt us when we arrived.”

  The Guardsmen didn’t need telling twice. They were all veterans of the simmering war that was being fought out for Avalon’s future and, even though they lacked proper training, they had learned from experience. They slipped into the village, keeping well away from anything that could serve as a trap, or hide an improvised explosive device. The rebels, bandits and terrorists who hid out in the badlands had set up their own production plants, converting an astonishing variety of civilian produce into weapons and explosives. The Civil Guard could barely keep a lid on the violence. Indeed, although the Governor would never admit it, several provinces were effectively under the control of the enemy.

  George followed his men as they checked out the various domiciles, wincing inwardly at the frail shacks many of the town’s populace had had to use. There was no shortage of wood or stone near the town, but apart from the early settlers, few of the town’s population had proper homes. He saw a wooden barracks block in the distance and scowled. It was a fitting irony that the indents, the town’s local work gang of imported criminals from Earth, had better accommodation than most of the free population. The indents themselves had probably not appreciated it. They’d all been minor criminals from Earth and they’d never worked a day of hard labour in their lives until they reached Avalon. Revolts and small mutinies were not uncommon.

  But the township had been improving, he told himself, as they finally found a row of new-built homes. They’d been built from stone, suggesting that the locals had finally started to mine for stone and use it to improve their lot. The official policy of the local government was to force the new settlers to become as self-sufficient as possible, even though it meant many of them suffering until they built proper homes and learned to till the fields, a policy that long history encouraged. It didn’t make it any easier to watch generations of settlers making the same mistakes time and time again. There were times when George wondered if the Crackers had a point; after all, it would be fairly simple to assist the colonists to prevent them from making the same old mistakes. He caught sight of a simple wooden church and smiled inwardly. The influence of the Reformed Church of Christ the Pacifist, which had purchased ten percent of the original ADC stock, had ensured that their priests always had good homes. It was official policy.

  George had been on Avalon—and a hundred other worlds before it—to know just how badly life was screwed up on the frontier, courtesy of people back on Earth or the Core Worlds who didn’t have the slightest idea of what life was really like. The Cracker Rebellion would never have happened if the ADC had treated the settlers as anything other than human cattle, while the ongoing simmering war could be brought to an end if the Governor had made some basic concessions to the rebels. The vast majority of the Crackers, at least, would be happy if the more idiotic regulations were withdrawn and the planetary government became more accountable to the population. It wasn’t going to happen. Over a century of mismanagement, first by the ADC and then by the Empire, had seen to that. It was easy to be cynical.

  “Major,” Sergeant Evens called. He was one of the few Guardsmen who, like George himself, had some military experience. George kept a sharp eye out for new settlers with military experience and tried to convince them to join the Civil Guard. The locals were either enthusiastic and inexperienced, or corrupt. “You need to come and look at this now.”

  The warehouse sat on one edge of the town, a testament to the power of political lobbies back at Camelot. Every township was supposed to send a certain level of foodstuffs back to the main cities, yet it would be years before Kirkhaven started to produce enough food to pay the tax. It hadn’t mattered. The warehouse had been built—of modern materials, naturally—and left empty until it was time to start filling it with supplies. The town’s council had petitioned to be allowed to use it for other affairs, but the planetary government had refused. It was their warehouse and that was the end of it. No one in power cared what a bunch of hicks near the badlands thought. George strode towards it, suddenly aware of an unpleasant smell drifting towards his nostrils, and shuddered. The smell was becoming alarmingly familiar.

  “Here,” Evens said. He was a short man with an air of calm competence. He’d been in the Imperial Army for just over seven years before being discharged without cause, at least according to his service record. George had kept a sharp eye on him, just in case he’d been discharged for a criminal offence, but over the years he had relaxed his vigil. Evens had given him no grounds for suspicion. “Look what they did, sir.”

  It was dark inside the warehouse—the lighting elements seemed to have failed—but the Guardsmen had brought torches with them. George unhooked his from his belt and shone it ahead of him, recoiling at the sight. The town’s missing population lay in front of him, piled on top of one another, their hands bound tightly behind their backs and their throats slit. Blood had poured down, pooling on the ceramic floor, washing against the waterproof walls. He fought down the urge to vomit—the younger inexperienced Guardsmen were throwing up helplessly—and staggered backwards. Whoever had done that, he vowed, would pay. If—when—they were caught, they would discover the true meaning of hate.

  “Organise a work party,” he ordered. His voice sounded strange to his ears. “No; organise two work parties. One to get the bodies out and into the light; the other is to start digging graves in the fallow field. Get to it now!”

  His men, stung by his tone, started to work. It took nearly an hour to get the bodies out and place them in the open, but it didn’t take that long to realise that only half of the town’s population had been murdered and abandoned. The township had—officially—a population of over seven hundred souls. There were only three hundred and seventeen bodies in the warehouse. Most of them were male. There were no children and only a handful of women.

  “Around three hundred and fifty people completely unaccounted for,” Sergeant Evens reported. His terminal contained a complete database of the town’s population—at least, a complete database of those who had registered with the government. George knew, as well as anyone else, that there were thousands of people who had simply dropped off the system, or had never been on it in the first place. “Two hundred and seventy of them are young women between the ages of sixteen and forty. Forty of them are male indents. The remainder are young children, born to the townspeople or brought in with their parents. There may well be more children who were never registered.”

  George scowled bitterly. Avalon had had rare promise when the first settlers started to land, lured by the ADC’s promises of cheap land and shares in the growing system economy. If the ADC hadn’t run into stormy economic waters, it might even have kept its promises, but instead it had been reduced to trying to extract as much from its settlers as possible. Debts that should have been paid off within ten years had been extended and passed on from father to son. Children had been born, registered with the government and discovered that they were heirs to a growing debt. The unregistered children suffered no such handicap. God alone knew how many free settlements there were out in the badlands, or simply miles from any official settlement. As they grew up, they knew that they would be cheated, that they would be slaves forever … why the hell should they not rebel? The only thing that kept most of the townships and settlers in line was the threat of overwhelming force.

  The irony might almost have been amusing, under other circumstances. If the settlers had registered their children, the Civil Guard would have known who to look for, but instead they’d never know if they’d recovered all the children or n
ot. The bandits would probably bring them up as bandits themselves, or sell the children into slavery themselves. The missing indents suggested that the bandits had been former indents too, rather than Crackers. They’d probably attacked the town, freed their fellows and slaughtered the population.

  “Start putting them in the grave,” he said. The settlers deserved better than a mass grave where they had once placed their hopes and fears, but there was nothing else he could do for them. A more developed world would have summoned a forensic team, but there was no point on Avalon. Cataloguing the full depths of the atrocity was pointless. “I have to make a report to the Governor.”

  He headed back towards the helicopters, staring towards the mountains rising up in the distance. They might get lucky. The bandit gangs were hated and feared by the civilian population, unlike the Crackers. The Crackers could count upon a friendly reception almost anywhere. The bandits would be shot at on sight. Who knew—perhaps the Crackers would encounter the bandits and dispose of them. Stranger things had happened.

  The radio buzzed with static as he keyed it and began to make his report. Like everything else on Avalon, it was either built in an inferior factory on the planet or imported second-hand from the Empire. George was morally certain that the Crackers, at least, had developed the ability to listen in on their communications, but there was no other alternative. The planet-wide datanet—intended to link all the settlements into a coherent whole—was a joke. The Crackers, no doubt, had infiltrated that too.

  -o0o-

  Two hundred miles to the south, Governor Brent Roeder stood in his office, looking down towards the blue ocean and the harbour that the early colonists had constructed. The ADC’s original plans for settling Avalon had placed a high priority on developing a maritime transport network, linking the three continents together without having to import much in the way of heavy lifting craft from outside the system. It hadn’t worked out as well as they’d hoped—settlement on the other two continents had barely begun—but he had to admit that sailing was one of the few perks of living on Avalon. Local fishermen had been quick to start building sailing boats and setting off to challenge the waves; Brent himself had even learned to love sailing on a natural boat, so different from a starship or a shuttle. It almost made up for his posting.

  Avalon’s exact political state was a mess, thanks to his two predecessors. Not a day went by when Brent didn’t curse them in seven different languages, for whatever lofty ambitions they had, they had never realised just how fragile the entire planet actually was. The first Governor—appointed after the ADC had lost control of the planet, after the Cracker Rebellion—had tried to crack down hard on the semi-independent settlements, including banning the private ownership of guns. He had been—quite reasonably—concerned about another rebellion, but the settlers had simply ignored the order. The wild animals that roamed the interior of the continent thought of humanity as just another species of game. No one in their right mind wanted to come face-to-face with a Gnasher armed only with a knife. The Civil Guard had completely failed to carry out his orders. The second Governor had been worse. He’d tried to make political concessions and had managed to create a Planetary Council, without ever considering the implications. The settlers had known all along that the game was rigged. The second Governor had rubbed their noses in it. The results had not been pleasant.

  He stared down at Camelot, keeping his expression dispassionate. Camelot would have vanished without trace in one of Earth’s teeming mega-cities. The core of the city had been laid down according to a plan drawn up by a soulless machine—it was far too neat and tidy—while the remainder of the city had just grown up around it, like a pearl forming around a grain of sand. The city, though, was hardly a pearl. There were areas that were almost respectable and areas that the Civil Guard wouldn’t go without heavy armed backup.

  Brent took a final look at the city and turned back to face his Deputy. “George won’t be back until tomorrow,” he said, with a hint of quiet pleasure. Major Grosskopf took his duties seriously, too seriously. He wanted to wipe out the rebels, yet mounting such a campaign would be far beyond Avalon’s limited resources. He’d placed a request at the Sector Capital for additional regiments from the Imperial Army, but nothing had been promised or delivered. “That leaves us with an important question. What do we do about the bandits?”

  Deputy Governor Linda MacDonald leaned forward. A tall blonde with impressive breasts, Brent had never really understood why she hadn’t been offered the post of Governor, although he could make a few guesses. He’d been given Avalon as a reward for over sixty years of dedicated service in the Imperial Civil Service; Linda, as a native daughter of Avalon, would be unacceptable to the ICS as a Governor, although she could be transferred to another world if she wished to rise higher.

  “They’re indents, of course,” Linda said. Her voice was low and husky. If Brent had been a few years younger, he would have tried to court her. She wouldn’t have been interested in a small dumpy bureaucrat, though. “We should send the Civil Guard after them.”

  “I wish it were that easy,” Brent said. “Most of those indents should never have been sent here in the first place.”

  He scowled. Earth’s solution to its population problem was to deport everyone convicted of even a minor crime. Most of the indents who were transported to Avalon found themselves working in the fields in chain gangs, hated and feared by the people they were supposed to be helping. The Crackers made much political capital out of indent gangs and the crimes they committed against innocent settlers. The endless flood of new criminals was yet another factor in the growing civil unrest.

  “We cannot let this pass,” Linda said, flatly. She was too young for a post like Deputy Governor, Brent decided. She just didn’t understand the problems involved in sending the Civil Guard on a wild-goose chase. “We have to act…”

  There was a knock at the door. “Governor, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we just received a message from Orbit Station,” his secretary said. Abigail had been with him for years and he trusted her judgement and discretion implicitly. “A Marine Transport Ship and two destroyers have just entered the system.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Although the Empire likes to claim that planetary development corporations are free to operate without supervision or obligation to the Empire, that is actually very far from the truth. Every settled planet, for example, must build—out of its own pocket—an Orbital Transhipment Station and a spaceport—and maintain a fleet of shuttles for swift and efficient transfer of materials from orbit to ground, or vice versa. More advanced colony worlds—stage-three or higher—are generally encouraged to build a cloudscoop and maintain a stockpile of starship fuel for the Imperial Navy. To put all of this in context, an orbital station alone costs twenty billion credits, a significant chunk of any development corporation’s budget. That has to be repaid by the settlers.

  - Professor Leo Caesius, The Waning Years of Empire (banned).

  The tunnel of light suddenly faded into darkness, a darkness so complete that Edward felt his soul crying out in agony. He stared into the darkened viewport and was unable to withhold a sigh of relief as the stars started to twinkle back into existence. Six months of flight, six months with only a handful of crewmen and Leo for company, were almost over. He couldn’t wait to get down to the planet.

  “All hands, this is the Captain,” Yamato’s voice said, echoing over the ship’s intercom. “We have returned to normal space. Prepare for heavy acceleration. I say again; prepare for heavy acceleration.”

  Edward looked over at Leo as the background noise slowly started to rise. Avalon itself lay five light minutes from the local primary, four and a half hours from the Phase Limit. Any system in the Core Worlds would have had a handful of destroyers lurking along the Phase Limit, watching for pirates and starships that had suffered a catastrophic drive failure, but Avalon had no ships capable of maintaining its security. It didn’t even have powerful sensor arr
ays that would provide warning of a new arrival. It would be almost laughably easy for any pirate ship to slip up to the planet and open fire.

  I guess that’s one advantage of being dirt poor, he thought, sourly. Avalon’s development corporation had been wealthy, but the planet itself had very little that could be picked up and carried away. Pirates might try to raid the system’s deep-space facilities, such as they were, but there was little point in raiding the planet itself. The only thing they could reasonably take from the planet was people. It wasn’t unknown, yet the records suggested that no such raid had been mounted against Avalon.

  Leo looked up at him, his face pale and wan in the starlight. They’d become friends, of a sort, during the six months of enforced company. Edward had introduced Leo to Kipling—the Marine Corp’s favourite poet—and, in exchange, Leo had given Edward a copy of his banned book. Edward had read it over a few nights and had understood just why it had been banned. It was political, social and religious dynamite. The Empire’s Grand Senate would not have enjoyed reading about how they were destroying the Empire.

  “We’re here,” Leo said. He sounded rather surprised. The boundaries of his world had shrunk to the confines of the Marine Transport Ship, most of which was off-limits to civilians. “Is there any chance of us being attacked by pirates?”

  “I rather doubt it,” Edward said, dryly. He smiled. He’d been trying to educate Leo about Marines and the realities of combat, but it had been uphill going. Leo knew details about the Marines without understanding what they really meant. Edward privately likened him to an intellectual who had read a few books and privately considered himself an expert. What did the dreaded March of Death, or the Watery Grave, or even the Crucible itself mean to a man who had never experienced anything like them? He had never walked across a desert, carrying a wounded comrade on his back, let alone fought to hold off rebels from sweeping over a spaceport and destroying all hope of rescue. There was a difference in their perspectives that could never be bridged. “Pretend you’re a pirate. Would you dare attack a ship full of armed Marines and escorted by two destroyers?”