Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “We are winning when we are not losing,” Rufus said, coldly. “If we attempt to take on the Marines on their own ground, we lose. It’s as simple as that.”

  Gaby stared down at the map, wishing that they would both shut up and let her think. Her father had been young—barely entering his teens—when he’d become the Cracker, the head of the family and head of the movement. He’d had rejuvenation treatments at a very young age, but he’d lived out most of his extended lifespan without making any real progress. He’d married late, had her late … and, when Gaby had been four years old, he’d gone down fighting against the Civil Guard. No one had been more surprised than Gaby when she’d been declared the movement’s leader, although she had eventually realised why. The Crackers had split into two factions already. A second set of fissions would destroy the movement more completely than anything the Empire could do.

  They didn’t dare face the Empire in open combat, no matter what some of the younger fools said about the honour of open battle. They’d be slaughtered. Gaby might have grown up on a farm, but she was far from ignorant about the realities of the Empire’s power. The Imperial Army alone included more men than existed on the entire planet of Avalon. If the Empire wanted to crush the Crackers once and for all, they could do it. Gaby believed that while complete independence was impossible, they might be able to work out an agreement that would leave Avalon as an autonomous world. End the debts, end the indenture program, end the endless series of bureaucratic regulations that were killing local industry … Avalon might become a world to remember.

  She looked up at Julian and winced, inwardly. She had had to learn the techniques of underground warfare on the job, but she’d learned quickly. Julian had never learned at all, but then, as an officially unregistered child, he’d never had to learn. He’d moved from his father’s farm to the base camps in the badlands and up in the mountains, confident that he could handle anything that the Empire might throw at him. Gaby knew that it was a delusion, but it was hard to convince him otherwise.

  “Leave the argument for now,” she said, firmly. She’d told the movement’s council that she had no intention of being a figurehead, even if there were some people who questioned the wisdom of appointing a sixteen-year-old girl as leader. She wouldn’t have absolute authority—that was asking for trouble—but she would be respected and obeyed. “Are the Marines likely to come after us?”

  She saw the faint smile on Rufus’s face and her lips twitched. He was proud of her, although she didn’t know why. She hadn’t done anything yet! “I think that that is very likely,” Rufus said, finally. “They now represent the single most formidable combat unit on the face of the planet. The Governor will insist that they do something about us very quickly.”

  “They may go after the bandits first,” Julian put in. “Major Grosskopf has been shitting bricks about them, according to our spies.”

  Gaby nodded. Major Grosskopf was an uncomfortably capable officer. If the Civil Guard had been a real army, she had a nasty suspicion that the Crackers would have been in serious trouble. Even so, he’d pulled off a number of unpleasant surprises, convincing the movement’s council to try to have him assassinated. So far, he’d survived everything the Crackers had thrown at him.

  “We can only hope,” she said. The bandits were the other real enemy. When Avalon belonged to her people, they would be ruthlessly hunted down and destroyed. “That should give us a chance to learn just what they can do.”

  “Definitely,” Julian said, with a grin. It reminded her of the embarrassing times they’d shared when their hormones had gone into overdrive, back when they’d both been teenagers. He’d been attracted to her, but she hadn’t been attracted to a boy she’d known since she was a baby. His crush had faded when he’d fallen for someone else, yet there were times when being with him was uncomfortable. “And perhaps we can steer them towards the bandits.”

  Gaby looked up, impressed. “Devious,” she said. She wouldn’t shed a tear if the Marines massacred the bandits. The Civil Guard might not be able to track the bandits very well, but the Crackers knew roughly where their bases actually were. “I like that thought.”

  “On the other hand,” Rufus said, “anything that ties the Marines up is going to help us in the long run.”

  Gaby nodded. “Perhaps we can slip them information through our moles in the Civil Guard, get them more trusted,” she said. The Crackers had supplied quite a few men for the Civil Guard, although Major Grosskopf’s efforts had limited their effectiveness. “That might even things up a bit.”

  “Perhaps,” Rufus said. “The bad news is that the Marines are going to be moving to Castle Rock. We don’t have any sources there.”

  “We could probably get a few fishermen to take a look at the island,” Julian suggested. “Some of them do use it as a harbour during stormy weather.”

  “They won’t be able to stay,” Rufus said. “We’ll have to give the matter some thought.”

  Gaby nodded. It would have upset the Governor to know just how badly Camelot had been penetrated by the Crackers, or just how many spies there were operating within the planetary government. Good intelligence was one of the keys to victory—or so she had been told as a young girl learning at the feet of men and women who had fought for years—and she had that. The Marines might be impossible to penetrate—or so legend had it—but they’d need help from the mainland.

  “We can afford to play a waiting game,” she said, standing up. “We’ll watch and wait, maybe pull our horns in a bit and see what they do. Perhaps they’re overrated after all.”

  “Perhaps,” Rufus said. “And what if they’re not?”

  “We could always strike now,” Julian said. His voice became more eager as he outlined his new thought. “We have assets in place in Camelot. We could move now and obliterate the planetary government before they called out the Marines.”

  “Too risky,” Rufus said. “We’d stand to lose too much if we lost.”

  Julian looked unhappy, but nodded.

  “Our objective is to win,” Gaby reminded them. “Our objective is a free and independent Avalon. That is our goal. We don’t need to launch a desperate attack to win. All we have to do is carry on with the plan.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The Civil Guard is, in theory, meant to provide a local force capable of handling most disturbances. In practice, the Guard is often heavily corrupt and completely useless. Promotion is based on political reliability rather than military competence. This is endemic to almost all of the Empire’s combat arms, but the Guard is almost certainly the worst.

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

  “Attention on deck!”

  The Marines stood to attention as Edward strode into the briefing room. It had once been a warehouse for storing dried fish and hints of the smell still lingered, but it was usable and far from the worst accommodation the Marines had used. The Governor had been apologetic about the living quarters—the owners of the island hadn’t bothered to install more than the basics—but Edward hadn’t cared. It would have surprised and horrified the Governor if he’d known that his former Captain had once commanded an operation, quite literally, from a muddy hole in the middle of the battlefield. That had been a clusterfuck to remember!

  “At ease,” he ordered, as he took his position at the front of the warehouse. Someone had pinned a large paper map of Avalon on one wall and a chart showing the local government officials on another, but the remainder were thankfully bare. It wouldn’t be long before the Marines started turning the makeshift barracks into home. “We have been here one week and the Governor is already asking when we intend to take the field against the bandits.”

  A low mummer ran through the room. They had all seen combat and few of them enjoyed it for its own sake, but they’d heard enough about the depredations of the bandits to want to wipe them out. They had been brought up to understand that the credo of the Marine Corps—and the Imperial Army a
nd Navy, for that matter—was to stand between civilians and those who sought to do them harm. And, besides, they were all bored of unpacking the shuttles and setting up prefabricated barracks and training grounds. The shortage of trustworthy civilian labour was forcing the Marines to work overtime. It was starting to take a toll on the Company’s morale.

  The former owners of Castle Rock—who had apparently sought to charge the Governor through the nose for the use of their island—wouldn’t have recognised it. It had been transformed from a windswept island with only a handful of farmers to a primitive, but effective military base. The Marines had loaded most of the supplies into a set of prefabricated warehouses and had placed them under heavy guard, even though no one outside the Marine Corps was supposed to set foot on the island. With some local labour, which Edward intended to bring in once the island had been properly secured, they could expand the base to the point where they could begin training new recruits.

  Over the last week, the Marines had explored the island carefully, poking their noses in everywhere. With the exception of a number of wild pigs and sheep, the island was deserted now that the farmers were gone. Given time, the Marines would possess an intimate knowledge of their new base, one that would serve them well if the Crackers ever sought to attack them at home. It would be suicide if they tried, but Edward knew better than to assume that the enemy would know it. Untrained insurgents could be very dangerous, if only because they would sometimes try things that no trained officer would dare. Sometimes they even succeeded.

  “It is my intention to start deployments tonight,” Edward continued. The Marines sat up straighter as they confronted the prospect of action. Hands unconsciously checked weapons and utility belts for equipment. “1st, 2nd and 4th Platoons will take the field against the enemy; 3rd and 5th will remain at the base and continue to unpack our supplies. 6th and 7th will serve as reserve. We will move fast and get into position to confront the enemy as soon as possible.”

  He felt Lieutenant Tom Faulkner’s wince beside him and carefully concealed his smile. Faulkner had not only passed the Slaughterhouse, but he’d spent two years of his career earning his Combat Engineer’s badge. If he hadn’t been so eager to transfer into a fighting company, he would probably have remained on Earth, or deployed out to one of the fireman deployments in the core worlds. The Imperial Army maintained separate Combat Engineering departments, but the Marines preferred to blur them together, if only to ensure that they had a reasonable blend of skills on hand. It would take weeks, at best, to bring in a Combat Engineering unit from the nearest military base. Faulkner would have to remain at Castle Rock until the base was properly up and running.

  “We will depart tonight under cover of darkness,” Edward said. Avalon, thankfully, wasn’t covered in cities. It was quite possible to move even a relatively large number of Marines under cover of darkness without someone noticing. The planet’s ATC was a part-time operation. They could barely track the Civil Guard’s aircraft, let alone the Marines. “We will board the Raptors and move out to the platoon house. Major?”

  He looked over at Major George Grosskopf, who looked up. His reaction to the Marines had been slightly disappointing, for he’d taken them in stride. Edward had had to remind himself that Grosskopf had served in the Imperial Army and had a good idea of the capabilities of Marines and their supporting units. The Civil Guardsmen who had never served off Avalon would be in for a shock.

  “This is Avalon,” Grosskopf said, nodding to the big map on the wall. “You will notice that there are only five main cities on the planet, all concentrated on Arthur, the main continent. Those cities hold around half of the planet’s population. The remainder of the population is scattered over the countryside in townships, which are effectively farming communities intended to develop the planet. Some of them are friendly towards the local government, some are deeply hostile and some are under permanent threat by the bandits, forcing them to pay tribute and keep them informed of our movements. It has so far proven impossible to dislodge the bandits from the countryside.”

  He pointed with a long stick towards an area of the map that had been shaded red. “The badlands,” he said. “The badlands are easily the worst terrain on the planet, perhaps the worst outside an H-Class world or even the Slaughterhouse.” Edward smiled at some of the chuckles from the Marines. “Some thousands of years ago, there was a massive series of earthquakes and the ground is all broken up into canyons, underwater pools and exposed mineral deposits. The deposits, in particular, make it hard to use sensors or even primitive navigation devices within the badlands. The terrain is so bad that it is very hard to locate or destroy bandit camps. There could be hundreds of thousands of bandits in there and we wouldn’t know a thing about it.”

  Edward saw his face twist, bitterly. “There are a large number of townships scattered near the badlands, for reasons best known to the ADC,” he continued. “In theory, those towns are armed and capable of looking after themselves. In practice, everyone has to work hard to give the town a chance of surviving and it is quite easy for a bandit raid to get into town before the inhabitants have time to react. You cannot imagine the scenes of horror; the bandit gangs loot, rape and burn before escaping back into the badlands. We—the Civil Guard—have been unable to get a force into position to block their escape in time.”

  “A question,” Gwen said. “How many bandit gangs are there?”

  “No one knows,” Grosskopf said. If he was surprised at her question, he didn’t show it. Marines always asked questions during briefings. “Our intelligence suggests that there are many small bands, but some of them cooperate with each other and others try to wipe out their fellow bandits while also raiding us. There have been reports of a super-gang emerging, one that has absorbed or destroyed the smaller gangs, yet we have been unable to obtain confirmation.”

  Edward frowned inwardly. The Civil Guard had had an astonishing round of bad luck, which suggested that another factor was involved. It hadn’t taken more than a quick glance at their records to realise that they never carried out background checks on any of their recruits, particularly the poor bloody infantry. It wouldn’t be hard for a bandit gang to slip a few of their members into the Civil Guard, or simply apply large sums of cash for information. If they received advance warning of a raid, they could simply pull up stakes and vanish into the badlands.

  “We have, however, been granted an opportunity,” Grosskopf said. “My Intelligence Officer has been running a source in one of the bandit gangs, trying to pin down their next move. She believes that the bandits intend to attack Eddisford, a large-sized township five miles from the outer edge of the badlands. Eddisford is lucky in that most of the settlers were actually able to pay off their debts and reinvest in equipment they need—in short, they’re not the kind of people to pay tribute to the gangs. We need to catch those bastards in the act and wipe the fuckers out.”

  “We need to take as many of them alive as possible,” Edward injected, quickly. “Now…”

  He pointed a long finger at the map and tapped a handful of locations. “This is what we’re going to do…”

  -o0o-

  “Now this is real activity,” Blake said, as they checked their weapons and armour. The thin humming sound of the Raptors spooling up could be heard in the distance. “How many bandits do you want to bag?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Joe Buckley said. “I think it’s a bit of a comedown after hunting pirates and storming rebel fortresses.”

  “The Captain said to take them alive,” Jasmine reminded them. She pulled on her armour and studied the refection in Blake’s armour. “That means stunners only at first; lethal force authorised only if they fight back.”

  “Of course they will,” Blake said, turning slightly so he could check his own armour. “Imperial Law demands the death penalty for their crimes. We may take them alive, but only so we can beat the crap out of them for information and then hang them from a nearby tree. What do they have to los
e by fighting us?”

  “The chance to help our gallant Empire grow and develop,” Koenraad said, dryly. “How could any self-respecting bandit pass up on that chance?”

  Jasmine chuckled to herself. “They’re not interested in chances,” she said. “They’re not even interested in a political cause. They’re just interested in what they can take off other people. They’re the worst kind of scum.”

  She scowled down at her helmet, thinking furiously. They’d been shown some of the pictures that the Civil Guardsmen had taken of the aftermath, after the bandits had invaded a town, had their fun and headed off again. There had been bodies everywhere, burning buildings and desecrated churches. Worst of all, at least to her eyes, had been the handful of dead women left on the ground, stripped naked. It hadn’t taken much imagination to know what had happened to them. She’d thought about rape, even acknowledged that it could happen to her, yet coming face to face with the reality was sickening. Blake was right. The bandits deserved to die.

  Cold discipline, the result of three years on the hardest training ground known to man, forced her emotions down into the small compartment in her head. Yes, the bandits would die, but only after they’d betrayed their friends and allies. They might think themselves tough, yet they were nothing compared to the puniest Marine in the entire Marine Corps. And, when they did die, Jasmine intended to volunteer for the hanging squad. Let the bastards see her tying the knot and yanking them up to break their necks.