Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  Jasmine’s lips twitched as she saw a bandit who had somehow managed to hide himself behind a tree and was popping away desperately at the Marines with a little hunting pistol. It was more powerful than she would have expected—but then, Avalon’s wildlife tended to be dangerous—but it hardly mattered. His shots weren’t going anywhere near the Marines. She targeted him carefully, wondering if she was aiming at one of the rapists who had left small and broken bodies behind, and placed a shot directly on his nose.

  And, suddenly, it was all over.

  “Cuff the survivors and prepare to take them back to camp,” Gwen ordered. Her voice was as cold and dispassionate as ever, but Jasmine could have sworn she heard a note of satisfaction hidden behind the commanding tone. If half of the rumours about Gwen’s activities were accurate, the dead bandits were the lucky ones. “I want 4th Platoon to sweep the area towards the badlands. Now!”

  Jasmine exploded out of her hiding place, half-expecting to feel a bullet slamming into her armour. There was nothing, but a bloody field full of cooling bodies. A handful were still moving, suggesting that they were alive, even though they had lost the will to fight. Jasmine didn’t blame them. After six months of boot camp, she had thought she was good. The very first battle exercise they’d done at the Slaughterhouse had been a bloody defeat for the new recruits, a humbling and pointed reminder of how inexperienced they were. She smiled at the memory—defeat always taught more lessons than victory—and reached the first captive, a young boy barely out of his teens. He stared up at her, his eyes wide with terror.

  She rolled him over with her boot, then grabbed his hands and cuffed them behind his back. He cried out at the new pain, but she ignored him, leaving him lying there for the recovery team to find. The next bandit was clearly too badly wounded to live for long, even with the best of medical care. It was tempting to leave him there to bleed out and die, but what little mercy remained in her pushed her into putting her foot on his head and crushing the remains of his life out of him. It had probably been something of a relief.

  The next captive had been playing possum, holding a pistol to his chest until she got too close for him to miss. Jasmine watched with detached amusement as he levelled it at her chest and pulled the trigger four times. Four heavy punches slammed into her chest—the armour couldn’t block everything—but it was nothing, not compared to what she’d been through without the armour. She reached forward, snatched the pistol out of the bandit’s hand, and crushed it in one armoured fist, before rolling the suddenly-subdued bandit over and cuffing him. He didn’t offer any more resistance.

  “Nineteen prisoners,” Captain Stalker said, over the general channel. Jasmine caught herself breathing heavily as she started to come down from the high of battle and carefully forced her breath into steady gulps. “Well done, all of you.”

  Jasmine shrugged, staring around at the devastation. It had been the single most one-sided battle she’d ever taken part in. Her old Drill Sergeant would have been impressed. Of course, she’d also been a bloodthirsty bitch who had once told her trainees that the quickest way to a man’s heart was with ten inches of a monofilament blade, stabbed right through the chest. There had to be nearly a hundred bandits lying dead, yet there was no way to know for sure until a forensic team got out to Eddisford and started putting the pieces together.

  “We done good,” Blake said, over the platoon’s private channel. “We sure kicked some ass today! Even Unlucky over there didn’t get into trouble.”

  “Fuck you, with the greatest of respect,” Joe said, crossly. “You want to bet that the next time won’t be so easy?”

  Jasmine privately suspected that he was right.

  CHAPTER 19

  The fundamental problem with human rights is that there is no such thing as a human right. By definition, a right is something that is not only self-evident, but impossible to remove. Few, if any, of the human rights cited by lawyers across the Empire meet that definition.

  Regardless, it is self-evident that rights come with responsibilities, yet the vast majority of the Empire’s population demands the former without the latter. Such a system cannot survive for long.

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

  The small barn had once belonged to the homesteaders, before they had abandoned their farm to fear or threats or debt. Edward’s Marines had spent a day fixing it up and turning it into a makeshift prisoner interrogation centre—the prisoners themselves would be held in another barn, one that had originally been used to hold pigs or sheep—before setting out on their mission. The Governor had questioned the expense when Edward had notified him of what he was doing, but Edward had reassured him that they’d take prisoners. The entire battle plan had been based around taking prisoners. The Governor’s reluctance to consider the possibility had surprised him, although Gwen had pointed out that most prisoners taken by the Civil Guard were probably released by their captors, upon the payment of a substantial bribe.

  “Bring in the prisoner,” he ordered, as he took one of the two chairs in the barn. The other one had been rapidly turned into a holding chair. It had been splashed with blood when they’d found it in the corner of the barn, leading him to wonder just what had happened to make the original owners flee for their lives, if they had managed to escape at all. The records had suggested that the homestead had been abandoned and no one had bothered to move in to take over the farm. The owners had simply vanished.

  Two Marines, wearing full body armour, marched in the first prisoner. Edward studied him with cold dispassion, noting how the fight had fallen out of the thug as he’d realised that he was up against genuine soldiers. He and his gang had been used to terrorising farmers and their families; the idea of determined opposition had come as a complete surprise to them. The first battle on Avalon’s soil—the Marines first battle, he reminded himself—had been easy. The others wouldn’t be anything like as simple.

  The prisoner was thrown into the chair and cuffed to the metal. Edward smiled thinly as he recognised the man’s features, the racially-mixed features of Earth’s Undercity. Edward’s own father had been the same race as his mother, but several of his half-siblings had had differently coloured skins and odder features. There were even families down in the Undercity where the taint of incest had begun to take hold, the taboo broken long ago under the pressures of living in such conditions. The whole concept made him sick, yet how could he condemn people who were doing only what they had to do to survive? He’d broken out of the Undercity and never looked back; the young man—boy, rather—facing him had not.

  He was tall and badly bruised from his fall, but there was nothing wrong with his mind. The Marines had poured cold water over him to shock him awake, after they’d stunned him and transported him to the platoon house, hopefully disorienting him before they started to ask questions. Edward knew that stunners were unreliable weapons—a simple layer of body armour could neutralise their effects—yet they seemed to have worked perfectly in this case. The prisoner had been taken alive. Edward doubted that he would have the nerve to suicide in any case; still, they had all been bound and gagged, just in case. The prisoner’s eyes rose to meet his and then flinched away, bitterly. This one, Edward decided, would not have made a good Marine.

  Edward leaned forward and reached out towards the prisoner’s chin, lifting it up to face him. The prisoner flinched away, but he couldn’t prevent Edward from touching his face. Edward held his eyes, watching as the prisoner mentally cowered away from him. He knew what to expect, all right, even if he didn’t know who’d captured him. The competent Civil Guardsmen would probably quietly dispose of him rather than putting him in jail and watching helplessly as one of the jailors freed him.

  He spoke, finally, and watched as the prisoner flinched again. “Do you know who I am?”

  The prisoner swallowed hard. “Fucking Wasps,” he said, in a futile gesture of defiance. He cringed, expecting a blow, but Edward only smiled. Wasps was
an old nickname for the Civil Guard, who wore yellow and black dress uniforms while on parade. “You can’t do this to me.”

  Edward allowed his smile to grow wider. “I am Captain Edward Stalker, Terran Marine Corps,” he said. “My men have slaughtered most of your friends. You are thousands of miles from any hope of rescue”—a flat lie, but one that would be believable to a man who had no idea how long he’d been out of it—“and you are our prisoner. I trust that you are comfortable?”

  The prisoner looked as if he wanted to spit, but didn’t quite dare. “I want you to understand something,” Edward continued. “You have been taken prisoner while engaged in an act of terrorism. Your guilt has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Under the Terrorism Act, I am authorised to use any methods required to extract information from you, before summarily executing you for crimes against Avalon and its residents. Do you understand me?”

  He held the prisoner’s gaze until the man finally nodded bitterly. The prisoner knew what he and the rest of his gang had done to the settlements near the badlands; he knew that he could expect no mercy from the Marines, or the Civil Guard, or the local population. His gaze flickered across the array of farm tools placed against one wall, his imagination convincing him that they could—that they would—be used to torture him. Edward took no pleasure in breaking the man, even if there was no need to actually hurt him physically, but there was little choice. They needed information urgently.

  “Good,” Edward said. “There is no way that you will be able to lie to us. The device on your wrist”—he pointed to a wristwatch-sized gadget that one of the Marines had attached to the prisoner, after they’d cuffed him to the chair—“serves as a lie detector. So far, no one has managed to fool it, even with the best training. They lied so convincingly that everyone listening believed them, but the machine wasn’t fooled. Do you want to tell me a lie, just to test it?”

  The prisoner shook his head. Edward smiled inwardly, even though the fear in the man’s eyes showed that there was no reason to believe that the interrogation would fail. It was a pity in many ways. A few words from him would allow the lie detector to calibrate itself, learning the precise biofeedback patterns the prisoner possessed. The lie detector, like other learning software, grew more accurate as time went on. There was no reason for the prisoner to know that, of course. The more accurate he believed the lie detector to be, the less reason there would be to lie.

  “Good,” Edward said. “Now … the first time you try to lie to us, we will hurt you. The second time, we will inject you with truth drugs and get our answers that way. And if we have to do that, we will have no reason to be merciful when it comes to handing out the sentences. If you refuse to cooperate, we’ll just use you as an object lesson and hang you in Camelot City. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” the prisoner said. A sour smell wafted across Edward’s nostrils and he winced inwardly, showing no trace of his feelings on his face. The prisoner had urinated on the seat. “You can’t do this to me…”

  “Yes, I can,” Edward said, flatly. He found the whole concept distasteful, but a field interrogation was the only real alternative. He had no prisoner holding pens on Castle Rock. “Now … start talking. Tell us everything you know.”

  The lie detector had one weakness; it couldn’t detect when a prisoner was holding something back. The prisoner might succeed in misleading the Marines even without lying to them, although a skilled interrogator could generally tell when the prisoner was attempting to lead them up the garden path. If the prisoner talked freely, without answering questions, he might suggest new lines of enquiry without ever knowing that that was what he had done. The interrogators would record the conversation, play it back in their helmets and ask follow-up questions. And, once the prisoner had been drained of everything he knew, they’d put him back in the holding pens and start interrogating the next prisoner.

  He listened as the prisoner stumbled through a life story that was, more or less, what Edward had expected. He’d been arrested on Earth, walked past a judge whose assistant had reviewed the case file and sentenced him to indentured servitude on a faraway planet and exiled to Avalon, where he’d eventually joined up with the gangs. It was hard to show no reaction as a sickening list of atrocities starting to pour out of the prisoner; looting, rape and mass slaughter. The gang—the Knives, the prisoner called them—had been busy. They’d infested the landscape like vermin. They would, Edward resolved, be wiped out like vermin.

  “So, tell me,” he said, breaking into a story about how the prisoner and one of his mates had kidnapped and raped a farm girl, “where is your base?”

  The prisoner blanched. Edward didn’t need the lie detector to know that the prisoner was agitated. If he betrayed the location of his base to the Marines, his fellows wouldn’t hesitate to kill him when they got the chance. The gang was definitely organised on the same system as was used on Earth, where betrayal was punished by a horrible death and there was no such thing as safety, even if the betrayers got away at first. Edward’s own childhood had been marred by memories of how gangs had punished their wayward members, in one case systematically torturing a former member’s family to death before finally crushing his skull. The prisoner knew he didn’t dare answer the question …

  “Please don’t be a fool,” Edward said, coldly. “We have ways of making you talk.”

  “They’ll kill me,” the prisoner screamed. Raw panic was written on his face. “You don’t understand. They’ll kill me!”

  “And I will hurt you until you answer the questions,” Edward said, dispassionately. The fear ran deep, unsurprisingly. Gangs were held in line by fear and the sheer numbing horror of life. A resident of the Undercity who wasn’t in a gang had no safety at all. They were effectively fair game for anyone. His own sister … he shook his head and pushed the thought aside. “You will talk to us, one way or the other.”

  The prisoner tried to pull himself together. “And if I tell you,” he asked, “will you protect me?”

  “Your leaders will never get their grubby little paws on you,” Edward assured him. It was even true. After hearing the list of crimes, he had no intention of allowing the prisoner to walk free. His hanging would serve as an object lesson, all right. “Now talk, or do we have to start getting creative?”

  He waved a hand at the tools on the wall. “I’ll talk,” the prisoner said. Sweat was pouring off his face. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  Edward listened carefully as the prisoner started to outline the location of the gang’s camp, a sinking feeling spreading through him as he realised what he was dealing with. The gang had a number of bases in the badlands, but the prisoner they’d caught only knew the location of one of them. The gang was operating under operational security. The more he listened, the more he wondered if their leader had greater ambitions than simple banditry. They almost seemed to be developing a separate government near the badlands. If they played their cards carefully, they’d have the townships paying tribute rather than be raided. A few generations and the gang might be running the entire area.

  It had a dark veneer, but he’d seen it before—and studied it at the Slaughterhouse. The gangs—or insurgents—would move in, slowly start chipping away at the organised government and replacing it with their own structures. Resistance would be harshly punished. A few object lessons and the remainder of the population would fall into line. How could they fight back, even with weapons, if they had no idea where to attack, or when a gang attack would be underway? It was clever, devious and almost unstoppable.

  At least until we get a new army trained up, he thought. The Civil Guard was effectively worthless. The five hundred combat effectives wouldn’t be able to spread themselves out any more than the Marines could, and the remaining soldiers would be worse than useless. It was the old classical insurgent problem, with a nasty twist. As long as the insurgents were not losing, they were winning … and their victory would put the future of Avalon i
nto the hands of men who had learned their trade in the Undercity, where government was an enemy and might made right. Avalon’s future, although precariously balanced, would be shattered.

  “Show the prisoner out,” he ordered, finally. He’d be kept in the pens until he could be moved to Camelot for his date with destiny. “Check his story with the others and let me know if they can give us more accurate directions.”

  Leaving the interrogation team behind, he walked out of the barn and across to the farmhouse, watching with calm approval as a guard shimmered into existence and checked his ID. Only a platoon of Marines had been left to guard the platoon house, but the area was so isolated that he was fairly certain that any newcomers would be bandits, looking to try to loot the farmhouse. Once word got around as to who had taken it over, there would be no more probes … or perhaps he was deluding himself. If the gangs really wanted to establish a secondary government, one that would eventually separate from Camelot’s authority, they’d have to try to evict the Marines.

  He smiled as he stepped through the door. The farm might have been overgrown, but the former owners had carefully removed all of the trees from the fields and ensured that anyone approaching the farm would be seen easily, even without the network of sensors the Marines had scattered around the area. A KEW or a long-range missile would obliterate the farmhouse and the platoon of Marines guarding it, but there was no reason to believe that the gangs possessed such heavy weapons. The interrogation had suggested that the heaviest weapons they possessed were machine guns and—perhaps—homemade mortars. The gangs on Earth had never been known for their weapons discipline either. Unless they’d learned how to take care of their weapons, they might not have as much firepower as they thought they had.

  “We need to redeploy the forward platoon,” he said, as he entered the briefing room. It had once served as a dining room, but the only trace of the former occupants was a painting someone had left on the wall. No one had had the heart to remove it and so four children, a handsome woman and an ugly man smiled down at the Marines. “We have an approximate location for the enemy base.”