Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “Yes,” Leo said, “and that includes the debts they are owed.”

  “Yes,” Captain Stalker agreed. “And then the Governor will probably try to sell them off again.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Leo said, expounding on his idea. “Why not cut the knot and tear up all the debts?”

  He smiled, waving his hands in the air as he tried to outline the solution to Avalon’s problems. “You know as well as I do that that money is never going to be repaid,” he said. “For half of the people in debt, it isn’t even a trap they fell into willingly, but one passed down from their parents or siblings. Why do you expect anyone to repay their debt when they didn’t even have the pleasure of spending the original money?”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” Captain Stalker said. “The Governor wouldn’t like it.”

  “You’d undercut the Crackers in one fell swoop,” Leo pointed out. “Just by giving people back their independence, they’d have a chance to reject the Crackers and all that they stand for. If you give them what they claim to want, you could separate the irredeemable from the redeemable and make it easier to wage war on them.”

  Captain Stalker chuckled. “A neat idea,” he said, seriously. “I’ll run it past my command staff and see … it might just work.”

  -o0o-

  “And so you fled,” Carola Wilhelm snapped. “What exactly do you expect me to do for you?”

  The cringing man in front of her claimed to come from a high-born family. In Carola’s experience, the claim had about as much validity as the claims that a mad scientist had successfully discovered the secret of FTL communications and needed to go into partnership with someone saner in order to market it to the universe. It was, of course, a con trick intended to separate a fool from her money … not that Carola disapproved of that, of course. It was just another way of separating the smart from the stupid. Besides, the highest-born child of Avalon wouldn’t even qualify for membership in a cadet branch of Earth’s aristocracy.

  “But I had to leave,” he pleaded, desperately. “If they had put me through the lie detector, they would have known about everything I’d done and then I would have been disappeared, like the others. I would have vanished and my family would never have known what had happened to me…”

  Carola fixed him with a look, unable to tolerate his cringing any longer. She had arranged for the young man—already overweight and unhealthy—to join the Civil Guard as a favour to his mother, who was one of her strongest allies. A man in his position who kept his eyes open and his mouth shut could have been a valuable asset, but he hadn’t even been capable of doing that. And, when the Civil Guard worm had turned, he had fled rather than face interrogation. The irony was overwhelming. He hadn’t done anything that would have provoked his arrest—apart from being grossly under-qualified for the job—but by going AWOL, he had guaranteed that the Civil Guard would want to ask him a few questions when they finally caught up with him.

  “And so you fled,” she said, repeating herself. This time, he got the message and shut up. “What use are you to me? No, don’t bother; I already know the answer. You’re no use at all and there’s no point in giving you any help.”

  She half-turned away, and then turned back to him. He wasn’t a pretty sight. If she had managed to get him a combat command, at least the Crackers or the bandits would have killed him and improved the human gene pool a little. His mother was a tough bitch with ice water in her veins, but she had a massive blind spot where her children were concerned and tolerated all of their foibles. The one cringing in front of her was the best of a bad bunch. One of them was simply too stupid to organise a gang-bang in a brothel, let alone work within the Civil Guard. Another had tastes that made even Carola shudder in revulsion.

  “Or maybe there is something you can do for me,” she added. “You still have your codes for the Civil Guard’s mainframe, right?”

  “Yes,” the man said. He looked up slightly, sensing the first ray of light at the end of the tunnel. Unluckily for him, Carola knew, it was an oncoming train. “I still have the access codes I was given…”

  “Good,” Carola said. “I want you to pull out the details of Major Grosskopf’s schedule for the next few days. Get them back to me as soon as possible.”

  “But…”

  He broke off at her look. Either he did it or he failed. Carola didn’t care. “Go,” she ordered, and, having applied the stick, added a little carrot. “If you do this for me, I will see to it that you never have to want again.”

  -o0o-

  It had been a long time since Kitty Stevenson had had to carry out surveillance on her own, but she had to admit that she was enjoying the experience. Identifying one of Carola Wilhelm’s sources had taken more time than she had expected—the wretched woman was good at covering her tracks and sheer luck had played a part—but it had all paid off. The recording she had taken might not convince the governor, but she knew who it would convince …

  She looked towards the lighted mansion and the guards patrolling the grounds. Carola had to have been feeling paranoid, for she’d doubled the guard force over the last two days. Or perhaps she felt as if she had dodged a bullet. It didn’t matter anyway. One day soon, if Kitty had her way, she was going to go down hard.

  CHAPTER 44

  The insurgent and the counter-insurgent battle for the hearts and minds of the civilian population, who are caught in the middle of the fighting. It is a war of perceptions more than reality, where the appearance of weakness can rapidly become a weakness, or where a rumour of atrocity can destroy years of painstaking work. Learning to eat soup with a knife? Rather more like trying to count all the grains of sand on a beach wracked by windstorms.

  - Major-General Thomas Kratman (Ret), A Marine’s Guide to Insurgency.

  “I never knew what hate was,” Private Tom Crook subvocalised, as the platoon slowly made its way through the marketplace. “I feel like someone is drawing a bead on my back.”

  Michael felt the same way. Sangria was a relatively small and prosperous town in the countryside, far cleaner and safer than Camelot itself, but the population hated the soldiers and resented their presence. The sheer psychic hatred was almost overwhelming and, without the training he’d gone though, he would have been walking with a hunch, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. The population—many of whom were in debt themselves and struggling to make ends meet—refused to have anything to do with them if it could be avoided. The patrol had barely been outside the compound for ten minutes and they had already had four incidents that could have proven fatal.

  He had never been outside Camelot before signing up with the army and Sangria was an eye-opening experience. The Council had been telling everyone about how the evil farmers had been deliberately starving the cities and supporting the Crackers, for no better reason than sheer unadulterated evil. In reality, Sangria was almost paradise, one that the farmers were willing to fight for, one that the Council kept threatening to destroy. The situation puzzled him, even as he kept a wary eye on the nearby locals; he, a young man born into a debt he had no hope of escaping, was enforcing the rule of the Council on others. He’d signed up expecting to fight bandits and terrorists, not threaten ordinary citizens. The farmers weren’t monsters at all.

  His helmet felt heavy on his head as the sun poured down from high above and sweat trickled down his back, but they had been warned in no uncertain terms not to remove any of their armour. The Marines had armour that was tailored to them individually, but the Army of Avalon didn’t have access to such technology, at least not yet. The body armour they wore might be the end result of literally centuries of human research and development, but it was still hot, sweaty and uncomfortable. The netting that held their supplies, including a handful of grenades and clips for their assault rifles, seemed to be dragging them down. It seemed a high price to pay for protection when no one was shooting at them.

  Sangria had been designed as the centrepiece of an ex
panded community, one that stretched out over forty square miles. The farmers occupied their individual homesteads, using the town as a social centre, marketplace and knowledge base. The small library in the town might not have anything like the contents of the Imperial Library in Camelot, but it concentrated on materials the farmers would need for expanding their footholds in the soil. The permanent population of the town was over a thousand … and all of them seemed to be packing guns. Apart from the preteen children, Michael had yet to see a person without a gun. The gangs who preyed upon helpless civilians in Camelot would have been rapidly eliminated out in the small town. There were laws against the private ownership of firearms in the city, but the farmers were vulnerable to the nastier wildlife out in the countryside. They needed their guns.

  And, if the Crackers appeared and started shooting, it would be impossible to tell friend from foe.

  He shook his head as he caught sight of a pretty girl. She was pale, with strawberry-blond hair, wearing a shirt and tight shorts that exposed everything she had to best advantage, even the rifle slung across her shoulders. She looked so much more … alive than anyone in the city that Michael felt his heart skip a beat, not out of desire or lust, but out of anger. A proper diet might have saved thousands of lives in the city, but the Council just didn’t care.

  The girl looked at him and met his eyes, and then her face darkened, as if she had smelled something unpleasant. She sauntered away, swinging her hips mockingly, although Michael could read a certain tension in her pose, wondering if the soldiers were going to try anything stupid. Michael had reviewed the files of the last Civil Guard unit to be based out so far from Camelot and they hadn’t made cheerful reading. It had been alarmingly clear that they had treated the local population badly and made far more enemies than they could handle. The surprising fact was that they’d lasted as long as they had before they had finally been recalled back to Camelot.

  “Bitch,” one of the soldiers subvocalised. “Hey, Corporal, you want us to go after her and teach her a lesson?”

  “As you were,” Michael snapped. He was chillingly aware of the danger and found himself wondering just what the Marines had had in mind when they’d sent him out in command, an inexperienced officer commanding equally inexperienced soldiers. On the face of it, they had made an absurd mistake. “You know the rules as well as I do.”

  There was some subvocal grumbling, but no one broke ranks. They had been warned—again, in no uncertain terms—not to fool around with the local women, no matter how willing they were. The horror stories that had backed the warnings up should have kept their cocks in their pants, but the combination of heat and sheer physical desire made it hard to remember the danger. At least a dozen Civil Guardsmen hadn’t survived encounters with local women, often in circumstances that made it hard to know just what had happened, or who had truly been to blame.

  He glanced down at his timepiece and then led them onwards, part of his mind noting that civilians were thinning out the further they moved from the marketplace. The outskirts of Sangria were dominated by a handful of small shops and a couple of large warehouses, but they seemed to have been abandoned, something that sent warning bells sounding in the back of his mind. Camelot had hundreds of abandoned shops and they had all been taken over by the gangs, or used as drug dens for the thousands of addicts who wasted their lives smoking or injecting shit into their bodies. Sangria had no gang problem, but maybe …

  Something whistled through the air. He had barely a second to realise that they’d stumbled into an ambush when fire started to pour down on them from high above. He swore and ducked for cover, feeling a pain in his chest as a bullet impacted directly with his armour, but he somehow managed to take cover beside the walls. A figure appeared on the opposite roof, a man carrying a rifle and a stack of grenades and Michael fired at him, striking him on his first shot. The man stumbled and fell to the ground, no longer within Michael’s sight.

  Time seemed to slow down, just for a second. He’d taken part in hundreds of exercises, but he had never killed a man in real life, not until now. The Cracker had been a living man, a man who had loved, hated, feared and mourned … and now he was dead. The training hadn’t prepared him for the gut-wrenching realisation that he and he alone had ended a life. The enemy combatant would have had no qualms about shooting him, or so he told himself, but somehow it failed to convince. The sound of shooting was growing louder as enemy fighters emerged from hiding, coming after the soldiers.

  “This is Charlie-one,” Michael snapped, keying his radio. They’d trained for that as well, luckily. The training kept him from panicking. “We have major enemy contact; estimate thirty-plus enemy fighters, closing in from all directions.”

  He swore as a bullet pinged off the wall bare centimetres from his head, so close that he felt dust spraying against his face. “Get the door open,” he snapped, to two of his men, as he returned fire towards the enemy positions. “We need cover.”

  We got lucky, part of his mind whispered. A few seconds later and the platoon would have been caught in the middle of the street and been riddled with bullets before they had any idea what was going on. The Crackers, for reasons unknown, had opened fire too early. He took a silent moment to thank God for their mistake as the door was rammed open and they streamed into the deserted shop, hunting for cover.

  “Understood, Charlie-one,” the dispatcher said. “We have drone coverage of your position. Seventeen enemy fighters are on screen.”

  “Just seventeen,” Michael muttered, as the shooting dimmed. He waved for his men to take up positions at the windows. If he was in the enemy shoes, he would have started to throw grenades through the windows, rather than rushing the shop and being shot down for his pains. “Seventeen men and we fled from them like little girls.”

  The dispatcher didn’t bother to respond to that comment. “Help is on the way, Corporal, but it may be delayed,” he warned. “Secure your position and await orders.”

  Michael swore as the shooting intensified. They seemed to be wasting bullets, which made no sense to him, for they’d been warned—time and time again—not to waste bullets during a battle. The Crackers had more experience with their weapons than he had with his, so why were they wasting bullets? They could produce bullets for themselves, but could they produce enough to spend them like water?

  A nasty thought occurred to him and he swore. “You, you and you stay here and keep firing from time to time to discourage them,” he said. One explanation made far too much sense. The Crackers intended to pin them down while they brought up the heavy artillery. “The rest of us are going to search this building and then get up onto the roof.”

  The ground floor of the shop was nothing special, apart from a cage that had once held a parrot or some other large bird. It looked more occupied than he had expected, raising the question of just what had happened to the original owners. Had their business failed and they had left, or had they only cleared out for the day to allow the ambushers to go about their work. Climbing up the stairs, every sense on alert, Michael heard … whimpering? It didn’t sound hostile, but more like someone was terrified out of their mind. He exchanged silent glances with his men and advanced towards the source of the noise, gently pushing the door open with his foot. It crossed his mind—too late—that it could be a trap, but no IED exploded in his face. The whimpering was replaced by screams, terrifyingly loud at such close range.

  “Stay here,” he muttered, and carefully peeked into the room. Two girls, barely entering their teens, were clinging to one another, their faces distorted by sheer terror. It dawned on Michael that he had to look terrifying to them, a stranger, his face hidden under a helmet and combat goggles, entering their house. There was no sign of their parents or anyone else that might have looked after them.

  “It’s all right,” he said, as calmly as he could. The girls had stopped screaming, but they were shaking madly, clearly expecting a horrible fate. Cracker propaganda warned that the Civil
Guard would do horrible things to anyone young, pretty and female they caught, or even someone merely young and pretty. The Civil Guard had provided them with any number of real incidents to bolster their claims. “Calm down. What are you doing here?”

  It took nearly five minutes to get a coherent story out of the girls. It would have been easier if they’d had a female soldier with them, but the handful of female soldiers in the Army of Avalon had been assigned elsewhere, leaving the girls to be terrified of hulking evil-looking men. They owned the shop themselves—Michael didn’t believe them at first, but one of his men who had had a friend from outside Camelot confirmed that it did happen—and they worked to keep themselves going. He still didn’t believe it—how could a pair of preteen girls run a shop, he asked himself—but at least they hadn’t lured the soldiers into a trap.

  “Remain here and stay on the floor, lying down,” he ordered, harshly. The Crackers hadn’t known that the girls were there, or so he told himself, feeling as if he had aged twenty years in the space of a few minutes. They hadn’t meant to put the girls in danger. “If we can get you out of here, we will come back for you.”

  It didn’t look as if they believed him, but at least they followed his orders. He glanced at them, realising that they were probably going to have problems in the next few years … assuming that they survived the coming hours. The shop was well-built, but it wouldn’t stand up to a mortar or rocket attack … and the Crackers were known for having both. He took a final glance at them, wondering if they had been telling the truth all along, and then left the room.

  Back outside, he checked the remainder of the house and then started to slip up to the roof. The sound of shooting was growing louder, but luckily no one had tried to block the hatch that would have allowed egress. Carefully, using the Marine Knife he’d been issued, he unscrewed the hatch completely and lowered it into the room, rather than opening it and warning the enemy that they were coming out. In their place, he would have had someone on the roof from the start, but perhaps they’d been lucky …