Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  What? No calling anyone a bastard? But he was a bastard!

  Anyway … we spend the rest of the day training, training and training, unless there’s something that needs doing elsewhere. I once spent a few hours hunting for someone who managed to get lost in the Mystic Mountains, which would have been fun if we hadn’t been freezing cold and generally bad-tempered at the time. And one of my officers had to go into choppy seas to rescue someone who was daft enough to go out in a hurricane. And then we go to bed, secure in the knowledge we’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. Unless, of course, we go out on deployment. Do you want to hear about that?

  Great! That’s far more interesting.

  Shortly after I graduated, my unit was assigned to a world with an unpronounceable name, so we wound up calling it … Hellhole. Yes, I know; we’re quite imaginative, aren’t we? Hellhole had once been a fairly united planet, but they’d had a drought and an economic collapse, which started off a civil war. Our job was to keep the peace. It sounded good on paper, until you realised that no matter how we looked, we couldn’t find the peace, let alone keep it. Everyone was just shooting at everyone else.

  The CO gave us the briefing. There was a faction called the Red Army, a faction called the Green Heads, a faction called the Honourable Livers, a faction called the Freedom Fighters and a faction called the Death-By-Cholesterol. (Hey, at least they were fairly imaginative.) Each of them had their own objective, which was completely unique; they wanted to rule the world. The thought of sharing power never seemed to occur to any of them. And we had to keep all these factions straight in our heads, before we went in and killed the lot of them.

  Well, that’s what we should have done anyway. If there was a single redeeming value among the major factions—and the countless sub-factions—I never saw it. Given power, they killed, raped, looted and generally acted like bleepers. I recall entering a ghost town, utterly undamaged—and utterly abandoned. We searched for two days before we discovered that nearly a hundred men and elderly women had been dumped in a nearby lake, their bodies weighted down with bricks and mortar. You really don’t want to know what happened to the rest of the villagers. By the time we caught up with them, they were …

 

  How old are these kids again? Thirteen? Ok, let’s just say they were worked to death.

  But the real crunch came when we started trying to secure the capital city, which had another utterly unpronounceable name. You can’t imagine it. Camelot, even now, has fewer than a million citizens. This city—which we started to call Pigsty—had over forty million people living there, most of whom had fled to escape the war. Entire districts were just heaving with people, living in the worst kind of shit. Quite literally, in many cases. There was so much infighting going on that no one had a hope of sorting out the city’s infrastructure. I believe there was a report that the city’s water supplies would collapse completely within the year, killing most of the locals. We were meant to stop this from happening.

  So we marched in and took over the power, water and sewage plants. This should have been easy, but it wasn’t. You see, everyone wanted those damn plants. They certainly didn’t trust us to handle them. We later found out that the team of negotiators the Empire had sent were trying to be sneaky, by talking to each of the factions behind the other factions backs. But they all had pretty good spies and they realised that someone was going to get screwed. A week after we moved in, they declared a truce long enough to attack us.

  And then the shit really hit the fan. We had laser weapons to intercept bombs and shells before they came down on our heads, but we were also meant to have long-range guns of our own. Hell, we had starships in orbit. We ruled the skies! But the idiot in charge, who had never been at risk of anything more than busting his gut after a diplomatic banquet, ruled that we weren’t allowed to actually use any of those weapons. There was too much risk of hitting civilians. So there we were, trapped inside the compound, gritting our teeth every time a shell made it through the lasers and hit our protective shielding, waiting for the end. We were running out of supplies, no one could get through the city to us and it looked like the end.

  So the CO goes to us and asks for volunteers. There’s a long pause. And then everyone looks at me. The wankers! Don’t they know it’s rude to volunteer someone else?

  Yes, I suppose they thought they was annoying too. What can I say? I was the maggot at the time. It took me years to get into a position where I could actually be busted down to Rifleman again. There was a little incident with a girl who had huge … ah, tracts of land.

  The CO outlined his plan. Intelligence claimed we were under attack by no less than twelve separate enemy factions. We all mentally revised it down to six. Intelligence isn’t really very intelligent, particularly when the raw data has been passed through so many different people that the results just cannot be trusted. Every time someone jokes about ‘Military Intelligence’ being a contradiction, they mean these guys. Our mission, if we were prepared to accept it, was to get those various factions to go back to war with one another. I hesitated, just long enough for the CO to start going purple, then said SEMPER FI very loudly.

  Semper Fi? That’s our motto. It means always faithful.

  So, that night, we snuck out under cover of darkness and a few thousand bullets the rest of the company fired to force the enemy to keep their heads down. You’d think they would have smelt a rat when they realised the company was shooting largely at random. We’re trained not to waste a single bullet. And besides, we were short on supplies. But we made it through the barricade by means of gecko climbing gear and a great deal of luck. And then we started scouting out the enemy positions.

  It wasn’t easy. There are laws, you see, that say every combatant has to wear a uniform. But I’ve yet to see an insurgent force that actually did wear a uniform. It took several hours before we had figured out where the various forces met, where they had placed their guards. That was good news. It told us they didn’t actually trust each other anymore than they trusted us. We sneaked around, placing a few surprises in the right places, and then started firing as the sun threatened to peek over the horizon. From their point of view, it looked like their allies had broken the truce and opened fire. Ha! We slipped away as they started firing madly in all directions. By the time the sun had risen, the siege was a distant memory and we were probing around for other weaknesses.

  And then we saw it. One of the factions had set up a heavy weapons nest far too close to us for comfort. I don’t know how we missed it earlier. Maybe intelligence hadn’t been as far wrong as we’d thought. And the bastards saw us at the same moment. They’d been caught by surprise, so we charged. We didn’t think, we just charged.

  Yes, that was tactically unsound. If they’d had a few supporting nests in place we would have been blown into pieces of … very small pieces of Marines. Where did you learn such words anyway? Your dad’s a Knight? Good for him. But we charged, we took the guns and we turned them on the guns that had been raining death on our positions. The enemy, in complete disarray, fell back, allowing the CO to bring two platoons out to join us and drive the bastards well away from the power plants. And then we secured the roads and waited for a convoy of reinforcements to come meet us.

  You’d think we’d get a medal for this, wouldn’t you? No, we just got redeployed to hammer a bunch of bastards so hard that everyone else hated them. And, given what everyone else had been doing, you really don’t want to know what this lot did. We beat hell out of them, then marched the survivors to a POW camp. This wouldn’t have been a bad idea, except that the camp was guarded by local auxiliaries who were supposed to be loyal. Three days later, half the prisoners were slaughtered and the other half were released. By the time we got there, it was far too late to catch them. The CO did his nut and there was a screaming match … ah, a frank exchange of views, between him and the local commander. In the end, we got sent off on guard duty as punishment.

  se>

  Why do we keep being punished for our CO’s indiscretions?

  But anyway … guard duty at the spaceport wasn’t too bad. It helped that the spaceport was in the arse end of nowhere, several dozen kilometres from the nearest settlement. Anything that came within more than five kilometres without permission could be engaged at once. It made things a lot more relaxed, so the CO gave some of us permission to go on leave. There’s always a place for us to get some shore leave by the spaceport, where there are hundreds of women with loose morals and large …

  Yes, did your daddy tell you they were whores?

  Listen, smartass. A person is never free to do what he or she pleases. There are always problems, always barriers. The women who worked there had no choice, but to sell their bodies to horny men in exchange for food, drink and a place to stay. Do you think that most of the people on Hellhole wanted to be caught in the middle of a faction fight? To spend the mornings having to support one faction, then spend their afternoons being beaten, raped and murdered because a second faction had taken their village? There were millions of people on that complete shithole of a planet who had no choice, but to bend over and take it. They were never offered a vote and it wouldn’t have been honoured if they had. I think we should have killed every last of the fuckers and then …

  Oops. I used that word again.

  What? You think your parents sending you to school is the same thing? How terrible! How unjust! How heartless they are to send you to learn to read, write and use a computer! Oh, but without education you won’t be able to make anything of yourself. Those people on Hellhole? If they were lucky, half of their education consisted of lectures on how awful the other factions were; if they weren’t lucky, they got no education at all. You’re not being taken away from your parents, given guns and told to shoot the enemy! I recall one group of child soldiers, no older that you, who were told to carry out unspeakable acts on their families before they left, just to make sure they had nowhere else to go. And you’re whining about having to go to school!

  Listen, kids; it could be a hell of a lot worse.

  And that’s what we do, really. We let children like you sleep peacefully in their beds while we thump hell out of the people who would kill you. Because the world is not safe, because there are total bastards out there, because there are wolves among sheep and we’re the sheepdogs charged with keeping you safe. That’s what we do.

 

  Ah, well … time to go. I need a stiff drink. Infopacks are available to anyone who wants them, showing how you too can be a Marine. We give everyone a chance. Semper Fi!

 

  From: Colonel Edward Stalker, Terran Marine CO

  To: Lieutenant Jenifer Stark, Internal Affairs

  I can’t spare this man. He fights.

  ----o0o----

  REBEL:

  REBEL STARS, BOOK 0

  EDWARD W. ROBERTSON

  _o0o_

  © Edward W. Robertson

  All rights reserved.

  SHIP’S LOG: 1

  We were not told we would be left behind until three days before the invasion. When Captain Ffel announced this to the bridge, the crew threw up their forelimbs in dismay, and I joined them.

  “How can this be?” Tton asked, tentacles bent in anguish. “For years, we travel here, the doorway to our new world, only to be left on the threshold?”

  “We will join the others in time,” Ffel said. “This is prudence. This is our duty.”

  “It is an insult! We will be permitted to arrive only after all the glory has been taken by others.”

  He spoke boldly, but our vessel was in times of calm, when the captain’s voice was of the same weight as each of the crew. We made orbit around the great planet of swirling blue gas and waited while the others advanced upon the ravaged homeworld of the humans. I was the tender of the ship’s mind, and as the pictures came in, I was the first to see them. The few surviving humans resisted with their jets and tanks and rockets, but our army swept them away like shells in the tide.

  Soon, all I saw was the silent cities, the husks of their machines, the useless strips of roads. Except survivors remained. Far too many.

  “So what?” Tton said. “We knew some lived.”

  “The virus was supposed to take them all. That was the promise. If they live and struggle, I wonder if we still follow the Way.”

  “Your doubt profanes us. When we stand alone, you will see.”

  I wished I shared his confidence. Despite my doubts, I too was shocked to my hearts when the final pictures came in. The ones that showed our great ship in ruins in the bay.

  The invasion was over. We had lost.

  CHAPTER 1

  It wasn’t easy to see the landscape as anything less than beautiful, but Rada did her best. The blue patches of deep ice didn’t look like placid pools, but crushing, cold blocks, barren of life. The green streaks of shallow ice weren’t electric veins, but lines of frozen snot. The white-dusted rocks were just that: boring old rocks. No different than the ones you’d use to landscape your yard.

  Isolating each section of the terrain was the only trick that worked. Because when you looked at the moon of Nereid as a whole, it looked like the blueprint for a new world. Perfect. Pristine. Gorgeous.

  And she couldn’t accept that it was her job to destroy it.

  Downhill, the mole dug into the slope, spraying a brown-black line of pulverized rock across the glistening ice. There was no atmosphere to carry its rumble, but she could feel it in the soles of her boots. Inside her suit, she was barely cold.

  The other way to look at it was that the scar the mole was leaving was only permanent on a human scale. It might take thousands of years, but eventually, melted sludge would belch from below, jostled by the tidal pressure exerted by Neptune, and flow across the scar, healing it with a fresh skin of white and blue and green. In time, there would be no evidence that humans had ever disfigured the place.

  That was comforting, provided she didn’t think about it too long. Because by the time Rada was dead and buried in a gouge of her own, the evidence of what she’d done would still be here for all to see.

  Behind the mole, the cart scooped up loose rock, sifting it for ore, feeding the promising bits into its hopper. Once it filled, the cart withdrew from the torn-up earth, halted on level ground, and beeped in Rada’s comm. She padded across the crust, flung open the door, and climbed inside.

  The microgravity meant the rocks and ice jumbled the surface in absurd spikes and piles. The nearest flat and stable landing site for the Box Turtle had been seven miles away. The ship’s computer had already plotted a preferred course for the cart’s return. Rada double-checked it and punched in her approval. The cart started off, jouncing lightly over the scoured ridges of ice.

  Now and then, Rada swerved to a stretch that looked better than the planned course, but for the most part, the ship’s scans had done their job. Leaving her with nothing to do but babysit as the cart navigated itself home. The most frustrating of her duties. She’d asked Parson if she could drive the cart freehand, but he’d cited the safety figures and that had been the end of that.

  The vehicle began a long climb. At the peak, she tried to ignore the black wounds in the vistas of white and green.

  Her device beeped on the back of her left arm. She tapped it to life, certain it would be Captain Parson babysitting her as she babysat the cart, but the ID made her heart skip. JJO, LLC. She’d applied weeks ago—long-range hauling, full crew position. Lateral move, salary-wise, but it was the other move she was much more interested in: the one that would take her off these rocks and into space.

  The joy was fleeting, replaced by the dread of what the message likely contained. She considered waiting to open it until shift was over and she’d had a fortifying dose of Plain Grain. With this thought, she made a fist, ready to punch herself. If she hadn’t been afraid of damaging the suit, she would have. She opened the message.


  Form letter. Thanks for your interest, but alas and alack, many qualified applicants, blah blah blah. She deleted it and stared out the windshield at the unyielding stars.

  Three years ago, when she’d first seen a documercial about it on the net, it had sounded romantic, life with an independent mining crew. Hopping from rock to moon and back again, yo-yoing around the Solar System in search of the big score. On the clock, you work hard, and when you’re on leave at a station or a city somewhere, you drink even harder. Good money, too. Put most of it away and you’d be close to retirement within ten years.

  The reality of it, though, was … reality. The show’s timeline had been condensed to make good drama. What the cameras didn’t show was how long you spent flying between jobs and stations. How leave wasn’t a never-ending string of parties, drinking songs, and beautiful strings-free partners, but a repetitive procession of booze, hangovers, and men who’d be anywhere else if they were worth half a damn.

  Time was the killer. You started to drink just to make it go away. At first she’d been concerned for her health, but a few months in, seeing the others, she understood it was a lifestyle you could maintain for decades. From a remove, this was obviously not a sound game plan. Anyone in straight society would see her as scum, a sad waste, willingly pouring herself down the drain.

  They didn’t understand, though. It wasn’t a decision you made all at once. It came piece by piece, night by night, until your old life was gone.

  Three years in the digs, and all she had to show for it was a few grand and a habit she was no longer certain that she didn’t want.

  The cart jolted. Its computer warbled. The vehicle lurched again, seemed to tip down—but it wasn’t the cart, it was a shelf of ice breaking away, collapsing before her. Then the cart did tip. Red lights came on across the dash screens. The warble pitched up. Rada swore, pulling the sticks hard right, trying to veer away from the sliding, cracking ice. The autopilot ceded control.