Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  The driver drove like a manic, leaving Leo silently praying for safety as they roared out of the city and down the long road towards the spaceport. Every so often, he’d been told, the Crackers slipped a team into position and fired on any official-looking vehicle, just to remind the Governor that they existed. They’d been quiet since the Marines arrived, although that might change in a hurry. Captain Stalker’s success against the bandits and the new recruits would tip the balance of power against the Crackers, unless they acted swiftly to counter the threat. Leo knew, from his own studies of insurgent warfare, that it wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Here we are, sir,” the driver said, as she pulled up outside the spaceport. “I’ll have to wait for you here.”

  Leo scowled as he passed through the security checkpoint and was pointed towards a small VTOL aircraft that had probably been picking up Marines who had gone on leave. They’d proven surprisingly popular in the city, if only because any thugs who tried to pick on them rarely survived the experience. Mandy wasn’t the only girl to have been saved from death or worse; indeed, the Civil Guard had even started to shape up and patrol properly in the wake of the Marines. The Council had had a long list of complaints about Marines taking the law into their own hands, yet they could do nothing. The Marines didn’t set out to find trouble; it just found them.

  He reflected on that as the VTOL took off and headed over the blue sea to Castle Rock. The last time he’d seen the massive island, there had only been a few buildings, mainly former homesteads that had been abandoned when the Marines moved in. Now, it had mushroomed into a military base, with dozens of buildings scattered around and guarded by armed Marines. He caught sight of new recruits training in a field as the VTOL came in to land and found himself hoping that they turned into good Marines. There simply weren’t enough Marines to make a major difference, not yet. The aircraft touched down with a bump and he had to go through another security check before he was escorted into the new office block. It was, thankfully, air-conditioned.

  “Captain,” he said, in greeting. “Do you need all of those security checks?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Captain Stalker said, from the window. The building looked down onto the training yard. A hundred men, stripped to the waist, were going through exercises under the command of a man barking orders. Leo looked at them and felt distinctly fat and podgy. “Some people have tried to slip in through the security checks and we’ve turned away a couple of fishermen who tried to land. It’s rather worrying.”

  Leo followed his logic. “Because the Crackers might try to slip people onto the island,” he said. “Were the fishermen Crackers?”

  “I’d be surprised if they didn’t have Cracker sympathies,” Captain Stalker said, dryly. “How is your family?”

  Just for a moment, Leo wondered what—if anything—Captain Stalker knew about recent events. “Fiona is having … a great time amidst the social whirl,” he said, slowly. “Mandy is improving and Mindy has decided that she wants to join the Marines when she’s sixteen.”

  “I’m sure we could find a place for her,” Captain Stalker said. “We had to separate out male and female recruits here, at least for the first few months of their training. There’s more raw material here than I thought, but they’re almost completely undisciplined.”

  Leo blinked. “I thought segregating the sexes was illegal,” he said. “The Civil Guard doesn’t do it.”

  “Put men and women together without proper discipline and sex will start complicating the picture,” Captain Stalker growled. “Men will do anything for sex; women will learn to use their sex to get ahead. Men will ask the obvious question; was she promoted because she was good at her job, or because she put out for a superior officer? Women will wonder if they’re being treated differently because of their sex.”

  He shook his head. “Boot Camp and the Slaughterhouse always segregated the sexes until the new recruits had completed their first year of training and had the rules firmly drummed into their heads,” he added. “The designers of the training program were practical men. They went with what worked, rather than some idealised version of the universe.”

  “I see,” Leo said. It was a way of looking at the world that would have shocked the old him, although the new Leo understood. “Mindy will have fun if she survives that long.”

  Captain Stalker shrugged. “True,” he said. “Tell me something, from your civilian point of view. Does this planet have a future?”

  Back on Earth, Leo would have given a smart answer to any student who had posed that question, but Captain Stalker deserved a proper effort. “No,” he said, bitterly. He had brought his family to another dead end. “As long as the current social system survives, Avalon is not going to have a future. The Governor cannot deal with the challenges or push through reforms against the entrenched interests, reforms that must be made if the planet is to have any chance of long-term survival. And, because the entrenched interests have made themselves so unpopular, any popular revolution is likely to be bloody and rapidly replaced by a dictatorship.”

  He spoke for thirty minutes, feeling like he was finally doing something useful. “There is no prospect of a peaceful transfer of power on Avalon,” he concluded. “The Crackers—or some urban resistance movement—will have to take power by force. When they do, the old elites will be strung up and left to die—and they know it, hence the private armies they have been building up and their attempts to take over the Civil Guard and co-opt it to their own purposes. If they could hold on long enough for the Imperial Navy to get here … but they can’t hold on. They’d be at war against the entire planet.”

  “That was pretty much what I was thinking,” Captain Stalker said, wryly. “So, Professor, what are we going to do about it?”

  Leo considered it. Only one answer came to mind. “Destroy the elites first,” he said, flatly. “Break up the monopolies, forgive all debts and reform the Council. Is that going to happen, Captain? Do your orders give you that much latitude?”

  “No,” Captain Stalker admitted. “On the other hand, perhaps we can press matters in the right general direction. If you are interested, Professor, I have a job for you.”

  -o0o-

  “So we definitely cannot get people onto the island?”

  “No,” Nomiki Dimitris said. The fisherwoman looked up at Gaby, her dark eyes furrowed. “We attempted to land on Castle Rock, as we had done before the Marines arrived. We were intercepted by a patrolling aircraft which ordered us to return to the mainland and not to attempt to land on Castle Rock. We thought it best to comply with their orders. A later attempt, with a damaged engine, only resulted in the Marines towing us back to the mainland. The crew was not allowed to set foot on the island.”

  Gaby listened grimly. The Marines had played it smart; just by establishing a base on an island, it would be almost impossible to get someone onto the island to spy on them, much less launch sabotage attacks. They could be up to anything there and the Crackers wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. The resistance couldn’t launch an assault across miles of open water.

  “Very nice of them,” she said, finally. “A Civil Guardsman would be more likely to sink the boat rather than offer aid.”

  She watched the fisherwoman head out of the room—she’d be smuggled back to one of the smaller fishing towns overnight—and turned to Rufus. “They’ve checkmated us,” she said, flatly. “How do we get a force over to the island?”

  It was a rhetorical question and both of them knew it. “We can’t,” Rufus said, gravely. “We’d have to wait until they started deploying their new forces over on the mainland.”

  “By which time the odds might start tipping against us,” Gaby said. She had scant respect for the bandits, but she had to admit that they knew how to hide. The Marines had located and destroyed one of their bases and—if the local media was to be believed—had done it without losing a single man. The Crackers were amidst the local population, yet how easy would it be
to hide when the Marines started active patrols? “We need to move operations forward, quickly.”

  Julian grinned. “We could always try to capture one of the Marines and ask them a few questions,” he said. “We know that they are allowed to go on leave in Camelot. One of them, perhaps one lured away by a girl, would be vulnerable to being taken alive.”

  Gaby considered it. “It might work,” she conceded, “but we’d have to be careful. The Marines have a reputation for not leaving their comrades behind.”

  She looked down at the datapad they’d liberated from one of the wealthy debt sharks. One of her agents, a man without debt, had taken it into the Imperial Library and downloaded everything they had on the Terran Marine Corps. Even allowing for exaggeration and propaganda, it made depressing reading. The Marines made the Civil Guard look like incompetent bunglers.

  “And then we might need to consider moving up Operation Headshot,” she added. “All of a sudden, time is no longer on our side.”

  “It would be a risk,” Rufus warned. “The presence of the Marines alone confirms that the Empire hasn’t lost interest in us.”

  “Yet we have no choice,” Julian said. “Father … what happens if the Marines deploy vast new numbers of trained men?”

  “We lose,” Gaby said, flatly. “I will not let that happen.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Marine training is based around a very old military truism. Easy training, hard mission; hard training, easy mission. A certain amount of injuries—and even death—is the inevitable result of this process. It may seem unacceptable to the civilian mindset, but it is required to produce the finest fighting troops the galaxy has yet seen.

  - Major-General Thomas Kratman (Ret), A Civilian’s Guide to the Terran Marine Corps.

  “Get down!”

  Michael hit the ground as a burst of brilliant tracer flew over his head. The defenders—a group of hostage-taking insurgents—had dug into the hill and the training platoon had orders to capture or kill them all, yet it was starting to seem impossible. Even nook and cranny seemed to hide a sniper, or a hidden machine gun, or an enemy trap. The heat wasn’t making it easier. Sweat poured down his back as he hefted his own weapon.

  “They’re using live ammunition,” someone protested. Michael couldn’t help, but smile, despite the pain. The Sergeants had warned them that live ammunition was included in the training program, even if few of the recruits had believed them, at first. Michael couldn’t quite believe that any of the training cadre, as sadistic as they seemed, would deliberately take aim at one of the recruits, but accidents happened. A week into the training program and four recruits had already been dispatched into the base’s growing hospital.

  “Stay down,” he barked, cursing the other recruit under his breath. The assault line was coming apart, even since the nominal commander had been ‘killed’ by the enemy force. No one knew who was supposed to be in charge now, yet the trainers hadn’t ended the session. The recruits seemed to be expected to charge up the hill and die gloriously, yet that somehow didn’t seem right. “Keep your fucking head down now!”

  He heard the sound of mortar fire seconds before an explosion billowed up far too close to the small group of recruits. It was terrifyingly real … and then it struck him that it was real. The Sergeants had rigged the entire training ground to teach their charges how to fight and if a few of them got hurt or killed … well, that was part of the price. The longer they cowered in the depression, the greater the chance that they’d fail outright and be humiliated in front of their fellows.

  “Follow me,” he hissed, keying his radio and running a brief check. A fully-trained Marine could do several things at once, but Michael had barely even mastered the SAR-23 he carried. Barr had told them that the SAR was the most practical design for an assault rifle in the entire history of humanity, but Michael wasn’t sure if he believed him. The weapon seemed crude and almost heavy enough to use as a club, if they ran out of ammunition. “Come on!”

  The hill had once had a spring flowing down from high above, or so he guessed, a spring that had dried up in the wake of the summer heat. It had left a gully behind, one that should provide cover for the recruits as they advanced up towards their goal. Michael crawled towards it, hearing the sound of shooting growing louder as he reached the gully, and peered carefully up it. A sniper lay there, bringing his weapon around to bear on Michael’s head, and Michael shot him reflexively. The sniper twitched and lay still.

  Michael would have grinned, but he was too tired to grin. The training suits they all wore had one purpose, registering and enforcing a kill. The weapons they carried didn’t shoot real bullets, but beams of laser light which would trigger the suits, sending the person wearing the suit falling to the ground if they didn’t drop quickly enough to simulate death. He’d been trapped in his own suit a few times and the experience wasn’t one he wanted to repeat. It had been terrifying, as if he had been completely unable to move anything below his neck.

  He checked the gully anyway, looking for signs that might have suggested a buried mine or an explosive charge, before leading the way up the gully towards the top. A line of small stones rattled down from high above as he caught sight of a cat-like creature staring down at the humans who had invaded its territory, but it clearly wasn’t an enemy soldier. A thought struck him and he stared at the creature, who stared back disdainfully before walking off, twitching its tail. It could have been a surveillance robot in disguise …

  A line of rockets seemed to explode in the sky, deafening him as he reached the top of the gully. He used hand signals to get three of the other recruits to move up beside him, then produced a line of sonic grenades and threw them over the top. The grenades were non-lethal weapons, normally used for crowd control, but they also triggered training suits. The howl of the grenades covered the noise as they scrambled over the edge and ran right into a group of defenders on the ground. Their suits were all blinking red, showing that they were officially dead, but Michael checked them all anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d been punished for taking anything for granted. A few minutes of being shouted at by a Sergeant, they’d been told, was far better than spending weeks in hospital having their legs regenerated, or worse. They’d been shown images of Marines who had been wounded on active duty and some of them had never recovered, regardless of the best medical treatment the Empire could offer.

  “Nice one,” one of the other recruits said. Michael was already looking for the way up towards the top of the hill. The gully seemed to end with a dried pool, where once a boy could have gone swimming with a girl. The heat had dried it up, leaving the remains of a handful of dead fish baking on the ground. “Where do we go now?”

  Michael pointed up towards a sheer cliff. At first sight, it had seemed impossible, but he was confident that they could climb up it. He motioned for four of the recruits to stay back and cover them, while he led the other four up to the cliff and started to climb up it. It was easier than he expected. There were plenty of handholds and places to put his hands and feet. It occurred to him, too late, that one of the holes could play host to one of Avalon’s nastier forms of insect life, but there was no going back. He scrambled up as quickly as possible and peered over the top. There was no sign of any enemy force.

  “Come on,” he hissed, helping the next recruit over the edge. “We have to move…”

  A line of explosions shook the entire area, almost sending him plummeting back over the cliff and down to certain death. Somehow, he caught himself and managed to remain stable, even though he was badly shaken. He unhooked his rifle from his shoulder and looked around, but there was still no sign of the enemy. Had they killed them all … no, he corrected himself; if they had, surely the Sergeants would have told them. He kept moving forward as the others spread out and was narrowly missed by a beam of red light that flickered out from a hidden cave. Three of the other recruits fell to the ground as their training suits activated. Michael fired desperately into th
e cave—there was nowhere to hide—and sighed in relief as the red light winked out. A brief glance confirmed that one of the defenders had hidden in the cave with a machine gun.

  He glanced back and swore. He was alone. Common sense suggested that he should call in to the HQ and report what had happened, but he wanted to press on. He kept moving, flitting from tree to tree, until he stepped into a clearing. A girl was sitting at the other end, her hands hidden behind her back. She was so self-evidently tied up that it didn’t occur to him to question it; she had to be the hostage the briefers had told them about. A sense of chivalrous determination came over him and he ran forward, intending to cut her free … and then she produced a small pistol from behind her back. Michael had no time to react before she shot him and his training suit sent him sprawling to the ground.

  -o0o-

  Jasmine smiled down at the young recruit, whose eyes glared reproachfully at her. It was quite understandable, even though a fully-fledged Marine wouldn’t have made the mistake of assuming that she was innocent, just because she looked to be tied up. If the recruit had surveyed around the clearing first, he would have seen Jasmine holding a hidden pistol and would have known that she was just another of the defenders, rather than an innocent maiden hoping to be rescued by a modern-day St. George. The civilian clothes she’d worn only added to that impression. He had probably taken one look at her tits and concluded that she couldn’t possibly be a Marine.

  “Sorry,” she said, as her radio buzzed, signalling that the exercise had come to an end. “If it is any consolation, I fell for the same trick myself at Boot Camp.”

  It wasn’t entirely true—Jasmine had been fooled by a baby who had actually been a robotic doll linked to an explosive charge—but perhaps it would be some consolation. She held out a hand as the recruit’s suit unlocked and helped him to his feet. Down below, the attackers would be mustering to hear the Drill Sergeant’s opinion of their efforts. The recruit she’d shot had been the only one to reach so high; perhaps Barr wouldn’t be so hard on him. Or perhaps she was deluding herself. Young recruits didn’t learn through kindness, but through blood, tears and sweat.