Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “He’s out,” Grosskopf said. If he harboured any doubts about how Edward had forced the Governor out of the room, he didn’t show them. “Are you coming yourself?”

  “One moment,” Edward said, and keyed his communicator. “Gwen? Gwen; come in.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Gwen said. She sounded relieved, although only someone who had known her for years would have been able to tell. “Captain; report your status.”

  Edward ran through a brief explanation. “We’re safe for now,” he concluded, although the sound of shooting suggested otherwise. “What’s going on outside Government House?”

  “An all-out attack,” Gwen said. “The spaceport, the Civil Guard bases, and even the individual platoon houses … they’re all coming under heavy attack. The Civil Guard bases took the worst of it—according to the reports we got, the attacks started inside the bases and were joined by forces from outside—and several have gone completely silent. I’ve dispatched drones to send back live footage from the bases and they report heavy and confused fighting. The spaceport is currently secure, but that will change when they get their hands on heavy weapons.”

  Edward bit down a curse. The only thing, he had come to realise, that had prevented the Crackers from just strolling into Camelot and disposing the Governor was their fear of the Imperial Navy. If they’d overcome that fear … no, they hadn’t; they’d just realised that if the Marines were allowed to continue with their program, the war would be on the verge of being lost. The thought made him swear aloud. They hadn’t known it, but the Governor had been on the verge of agreeing to give them most of what they claimed to want. If they’d held off the operation for a few more days, they would have won anyway … without fighting.

  He shook his head. There was no point in worrying about what might have been.

  “I’m dispatching support to your position,” Gwen added. “It is imperative that the Governor remains alive. The Council Chamber has been destroyed and the command and control network is in tatters. They even tried to knock down our network and would have succeeded without our command protocols.”

  “Understood,” Edward said. The sound of shooting was growing louder. “We’ll try to hold out here.”

  He broke the connection and crawled rapidly out of the room, where he discovered that the Governor had been sick against a wall and was sitting down, shaking mindlessly. “There’s help on the way,” he said, to Grosskopf. “I think we’d better get down to a safer floor and wait for them to arrive.”

  “We might be safer up here,” Grosskopf pointed out. “The bastards will certainly search the lower floors first.”

  “We don’t want to be high up when the shooting starts again,” Edward countered. He reached for the Governor and helped him to his feet. The man needed a shower and at least seven hours in bed, but there was no other choice. “If they’re investing this building, they’ll move in as soon as they realise that we have help on the way.”

  He calculated it as they both half-carried the Governor towards the rear stairs. Gwen hadn’t given a specific ETA, but flight time from Castle Rock was seven minutes, assuming that the Raptors loaded up with Marines on the island. He knew better. They’d have to pick up the QRF from the spaceport—Gwen wouldn’t authorise stripping the island of its final defenders, even for him—and then fly over the city to reach them. That meant at least ten minutes, perhaps longer if the spaceport was under heavy attack.

  “I should have brought my armour,” he muttered, as they reached the stairwell. “A direct link into the live feed from the drones would be very useful right about now.”

  Grosskopf nodded as they stumbled down the stairs, hearing noises echoing up and down the shaft. It sounded as if someone was searching the building, perhaps a Cracker assault force. They shared a look and stopped at the first floor, helping the Governor into the suite of private offices used by the higher-ranking bureaucrats who helped run the planet. The power had failed, casting the offices into an eerie darkness, but they were still able to open one of the private offices … and came face-to-face with a pair of bureaucrats, tied to a chair with duct tape.

  “Hellfire,” Edward swore, as he moved forward. Someone had been very determined that the two bureaucrats—one male, one female—would be unable to get loose on their own, wrapping them back to back with enough duct tape to hold a dozen prisoners. He pulled out his knife and started to saw through the gag, allowing the woman to speak. “What happened?”

  She stared up at him, her eyes wide with terror. “They just came inside after the blast and…”

  Edward pushed the two prisoners to the ground as someone started shooting behind him, throwing himself to the ground a moment later. There was at least one armed hostile on the floor, one with a submachine gun, judging by the sound. He also seemed to have plenty of ammunition, Edward realised, as he kept firing, without any concern for conserving his supplies. His lips twitched in disdain. Ammunition was not something to waste, at least outside training exercises. The Crackers should have known that.

  He held up a hand, signalling to Grosskopf in the code the Imperial Army had developed, years ago. It had been a long time since either of them had had to use it, but he nodded in understanding, slipping back into the shadows as the gunman finally exposed himself in the gloom. Edward put a neat shot through his head and followed up by throwing a grenade in his general direction, which detonated two seconds later. Grosskopf covered him as he moved forward, checking the four bodies quickly and efficiently. Three of them were dead. The fourth looked as if he would be wishing he was very soon. A grenade at close range left scars for life.

  “Ouch,” Grosskopf muttered. None of them were wearing civilian outfits. They were all dressed in Civil Guard uniforms, with a black armband around their right arms. “Their clothes fit too.”

  Edward followed his logic. The Civil Guard issued untailored uniforms to its men and expected them to make them fit properly themselves, for reasons that were lost in the mists of time. Someone who had just donned a new uniform would be unlikely to get one that fitted, suggesting that the four men who had ambushed him had been genuine members of the Civil Guard. Edward had no doubts about any of the Marines under his command, but Grosskopf did not—could not—say the same about his own people. The Civil Guard had been compromised by two different groups.

  He keyed his communicator. “Gwen, the enemy definitely include some members of the Civil Guard,” he said. The equipment they’d been using was Civil Guard issue as well. “They were also wearing a black armband on their right arms. It may be their recognition signal.”

  “Understood,” Gwen said. “I’ll pass the word on…”

  The wall suddenly disintegrated as someone fired a heavy machine gun, tearing through the plaster as if it was nothing more substantial than air. Edward dived for cover as the bullets chewed up the furniture, swearing aloud as the air was knocked out of him as he landed badly. Grosskopf gasped in pain as a bullet cracked into his chest and out the other side, marring his uniform with blood. Edward rolled over, trying to get closer to the wounded soldier, but the enemy was still firing. The noise was deafening.

  “Put your hands on it,” he shouted. If the bullet hadn’t gone though anything vital, Grosskopf would have an excellent chance of survival, assuming they could get him to a hospital in time. “Push down as hard as you can…”

  The enemy stopped shooting and charged forward, clearly assuming that they had killed or demoralised the opposition. Edward leaned up and opened fire, shooting down three men before they had time to realise that he was still alive. A fourth threw himself right at Edward and he shot him through the head, just before the body crashed into him, knocking him back to the ground. His pistol went flying as he hit the deck, leaving him kicking free of the dead body. A fifth man—no, a woman—was standing there, keeping a pistol trained on his skull.

  “I see,” Edward said, as he realised who the woman was. “All of a sudden, quite a few things make sense.”r />
  Linda smiled at him, but the smile didn’t touch her eyes. “I want you to tell the rest of your people to surrender,” she said. She was struggling to keep her voice dispassionate, yet Edward could hear the stress, no matter how she tried to hide it. No wonder she’d been reluctant to suggest mass lie detector tests. They would have uncovered her and her role, the spy right at the heart of the administration. “If you order them to surrender, no more people have to die.”

  Edward studied her, carefully. She clearly knew how to use the weapon she held, rendering jumping her a dangerous idea. If he’d been wearing armour, he would have dared her to fire, but without armour … a bullet through the skull would kill even a Marine. He decided to watch her and wait for an opening. One would come soon enough. It always did.

  “I can’t do that,” he said, as regretfully as he could. “There are standing orders that any senior officer in enemy hands loses all of his authority and his orders may be disregarded at will. My second will take over and the fighting will carry on.”

  He smiled. “How did a nice girl like you end up working for the Crackers anyway?”

  Linda didn’t smile at the weak joke. “I had to take a job to pay for my mother’s hospital care,” she said, flatly. “It turned out that most of what I earned had to go to pay my grandfather’s debt or the interest on his debt. My mother died in hospital because I didn’t have the funds to get her the medical care she needed to keep her alive. A while later I was approached by one of the recruiting agents in the city and offered a chance to extract revenge. You can probably guess the rest.”

  “You climbed up to Deputy Governor and aided the Crackers as best as you could,” Edward said. “You do realise that you won’t get away with this?”

  “I saw the reports on the state of the Empire,” Linda said. “There is a very good chance that we will get away with this. Now…”

  Grosskopf coughed, loudly. Just for a second, Linda’s attention was diverted and Edward lifted his hand, triggering the nerve-burst implant that had been built into his finger. She screamed in pain, her face twisted with unspeakable agony, before collapsing onto the ground. Edward slowly pulled himself to his feet and recovered his weapon. There was no need to hurry. A nerve-burst strike against an unprotected human was almost always fatal.

  “Her all along,” Grosskopf said. He sounded as if it was hard to speak a single word. “Brent dies; she takes over, at least until a new Governor is appointed. Without the Council…”

  “I know,” Edward said. It took seconds to locate a medical pack and seal Grosskopf’s wounds. He’d survive. “Lie back and relax. I’ll take care of it from here.”

  CHAPTER 53

  In war, it is always the civilian population that suffers worst. The core goal of the Marines, therefore, is to keep war as far from the civilians as possible. Unfortunately, that is not always possible.

  - Sergeant Howard Ropes, Wisdom of the Terran Marine Corps.

  “This is an emergency broadcast,” the radio said. “There is a combined military and civil emergency in progress. Remain in your homes. Do not attempt to go onto the streets. There is a combined military and civil…”

  Leo hit the switch angrily. The radio had been broadcasting the same message for what felt like hours, but he hadn’t needed it to know that something was badly wrong. They had heard the explosions from the direction of Government House and seen pillars of smoke rising up into the air. The sound of shooting, heavy shooting, could be heard in the distance; closer, he was sure he could hear the roar of an angry or terrified crowd.

  “Dad,” Mindy said, from where she was lying on the sofa. “What’s going on?”

  Leo winced at the terror in her voice. “I don’t know, baby,” he admitted. Admitting that cost pride and he thought of the Marine communicator Captain Stalker had given him, but the last thing the Captain would want was a distraction. Whatever was going on, the Marines had to be in the midst of it. “I just don’t know.”

  “They’re attacking the Marines,” Fiona said. Her voice was harsh and broken. She’d been arrested when Carola Wilhelm’s mansion had been raided and even though she’d been released within a day, the experience had still told on her. She’d spent weeks trying to get close to the local power structure, only to see the rising star she’d hitched herself to crash and burn. “The whole city is coming alive and attacking the Marines.”

  “I doubt it, mom,” Mandy said. Leo’s oldest daughter was staring out the window with a fascinated expression. Leo wanted to tell her to get under cover, but somehow he couldn’t find the words. He’d connected with his daughter again over the last week and he didn’t want to lose that now. “It sounds more like a Cracker attack.”

  Fiona glared at her daughter. “And you would know what a Cracker attack sounds like?”

  The noise of two fast-moving helicopters echoed overhead and Leo made up his mind. “We’re going down to the basement,” he said, picking up the radio. It would inform them when it was safe to come out. “We can’t do anything to help, so we’re going to stay out of the way.”

  He left his other thought unspoken. If the city was descending into chaos, how long would it be before the lower classes—the ones the Council had held down for their entire lives—started to realise that there was nothing stopping them from attacking the remainder of the upper class? Leo knew that his family weren’t really upper class, not by any reasonable definition of the term, but would that really matter to angry men out for a little revenge while the Civil Guard was distracted? Mandy had almost been raped and murdered once. He didn’t want to see the rest of his family face the same peril.

  “Come on,” he ordered, firmly. Mandy hesitated, but followed his lead. They’d spent hours planning the new University of Avalon that he intended to open one day, just chatting as they hadn’t since she’d hit puberty, and he had no intention of wasting that time. “We’ll be back to the surface soon enough.”

  Another explosion, closer, underscored his words.

  -o0o-

  Jasmine watched as the first VTOL Raptor came in to land, after spraying rockets down into a few locations surrounding the spaceport. The Crackers had gotten far closer than any of the defenders had expected, but they hadn’t broken the perimeter and the defenders—a motley combination of Marines, Marine Auxiliaries and Civil Guardsmen—had counterattacked vigorously. The Crackers had counted on their mortar fire to inflict significant damage on the spaceport, but the laser counter-battery system had detonated the shells before they could strike their targets. The entire battle seemed to have stalemated, although the intervention of the Raptors had turned the tide in favour of the defenders.

  “We just got a new uplink from Sergeant Barr,” a voice said, in her ear. “He was at Armstrong Base when the shit hit the fan. He’s alive and met up with other loyalist forces and they’re moving to retake the base.”

  “Understood,” Jasmine said. With the local command arrangements in disarray, she’d been breveted to Corporal and given command of a platoon that really consisted of elements of 2nd and 3rd Platoons jammed together. Another military organisation might have had problems fitting two units together, but the Marines drilled for such an eventuality. Besides, her oversized platoon was all that Sergeant Patterson had to send into the city. “Do you wish us to head to Armstrong Base instead?”

  “Negative,” Sergeant Patterson ordered. “You are to proceed to Government House and clear the area of enemy fighters, before rescuing the Governor and Captain Stalker.”

  “Understood,” Jasmine said, as the Raptor touched down. “We’re on our way.”

  The pilot didn’t bother to shut down the engines or still the rotor blades. He just opened the hatch and waved for the Marines to board rapidly. Jasmine had already made her arrangements; seven Marines would board one Raptor and seven would board the other, ensuring that if they lost a Raptor, help would still be on the way. So far, the Crackers had shown no sign of possessing advanced antiaircraft weapons, but
it was so obvious a chink in their procurement that she would have been astonished if they hadn’t tried to fill it. If they had support from within the Civil Guard—and the uniforms and weapons they’d used proved that—there was no reason why they couldn’t have got their hands on HVMs.

  She pulled herself into the Raptor and waited impatiently as the pilot spun up the engines again and hurled them into the sky, linking in to the aircraft’s onboard sensor suite to look down at the city. Camelot was burning, with some areas clearly badly attacked and other areas left completely alone. Judging from the fires, attacks had been concentrated against government and military targets, with a handful of exceptions. One of them made no sense to her at all until she compared it against the street map of Camelot she’d been given and realised that the Crackers had hit the Bank of Avalon, the most hated building on the planet. If the main records had been destroyed, they’d also taken out so all the debts. She had to smile at the concept. The Council—or whatever replaced it—could no longer prove that anyone owed money.

  Assuming that they got all of the records, she reminded herself. New reports were flashing up in her helmet display as bases and units reported in, although a number of Civil Guard bases remained silent. If they’d lost their commanders, the Crackers would have managed to isolate them from the rest of the network, even if they hadn’t taken the entire base. The opening moves of any battle were always confusing, but in this case confusion helped the enemy and not the defenders. Jasmine had never seen anything like it, even on Han. She just hoped that the locals were keeping their heads down and out of the line of fire.