Falcone Strike

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Captain,” Rose said. “Why are we creeping towards the planet?”

  Kat blinked, her surprise almost overriding her irritation at being questioned on her own bridge. A moment later, she realized that Rose, for all her political experience, wouldn’t have any real understanding of interstellar distances. Few did; politicians should know it took a month to travel from Tyre to Cadiz, but they rarely grasped it. The StarCom FTL network spoiled them.

  “I would prefer to know in advance if we’re about to run into trouble,” she said. “They’d have some additional warning if we were to jump through hyperspace and open a vortex on top of them.”

  Rose frowned. “Do you think they know you’re coming?”

  “I hope not,” Kat said. If the Theocracy had set up an early-warning network, or if their sensors were far better than intelligence thought, the flotilla might be about to run into a nasty surprise. “But it’s better to take precautions than be caught by surprise.”

  The observer nodded, then started to putter around the command deck, never approaching any of the consoles too closely. Kat couldn’t decide if she was concerned about distracting someone at a crucial moment or if she was just trying to see what would draw a reaction from the crew. She’d seen politicians do the same in the past, before the war; now, a distraction at the wrong time could prove disastrous. Thankfully, Rose thought better of it after a few moments and headed for the hatch, walking off the bridge. Kat exchanged a glance with her XO, then sighed. The woman was going to be trouble. She knew it.

  “Six hours, thirty minutes to the penal colony,” Weiberg said.

  Kat nodded. “Rotate the crews,” she ordered. The alpha crew could get at least five hours of sleep before the attack began, unless the squadron was caught by surprise. “Mr. XO, make sure you get some sleep.”

  “You too, Captain,” the XO said. “You too.”

  * * * * *

  Jean-Luc Orleans swung the pick at the ground, cursing under his breath. A year on the hellworld, a year since he’d been captured throwing bombs at an armored convoy, had left him hard but powerless. There was no hope of escape, no hope of doing anything but eking a minimal supply of food from the ground; hell, he didn’t even have any hope of finding a wife and raising a family. The settlement had no women, none at all. There had been some on the transport ship that had taken him to his new home, but they hadn’t been dropped into the settlement. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened to them.

  “You need to break the ground harder than that,” Perrier said. He was one of the old sweats, a man who’d survived more than five years on the ground. Jean-Luc had no idea what kept him going; Perrier, like the rest of them, had nothing to live for. “We need loose soil to plant the next set of seeds.”

  “It’s pointless,” Jean-Luc snarled. He glared down at the patch of dirt, then slammed the pick into it hard enough to hurt his arms. “There’s no damn point in planting more crops.”

  He sighed. The hellworld—he had no idea if anyone had bothered to give it a name—was right on the edge of the habitable zone, so cold that it wasn’t uncommon for frost to kill their crops before they could be harvested. The handful of native plants that could be eaten were hardier, but there simply weren’t very many of them. If he hadn’t had a great deal of genetic engineering in his background, he had a feeling he would be dead by now. The native crops had to lack some of the nutrients humans required to stay alive.

  “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” Perrier said. He lifted his own pick, then struck the hard ground with practiced ease. “We may yet survive.”

  Jean-Luc stared at him, then turned to peer towards the settlement. It was nothing more than a primitive village, a handful of makeshift huts surrounded by a dirt wall. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine it becoming anything more, not when they had to fight every year to harvest enough food to keep themselves alive. And even if they managed to stabilize themselves, what would they do then? It wasn’t as if they could have children without women!

  “Hah,” he grumbled.

  “Johan went out naked,” Perrier said quietly. “Do you want to join him?”

  Jean-Luc sighed. Some prisoners just gave up living—and when they did, they stripped themselves naked and walked out into the cold. They never lasted long; their bodies, if they were recovered, were buried in shallow graves and left to rot. He’d known that Johan was too depressed to carry on for long, but he hadn’t expected him to commit suicide so soon . . .

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. There were days when he just felt like sitting down and waiting for the cold to claim him. “I just don’t know.”

  “That’s why we keep going,” Perrier said. “Because while there is a spark of life left in our bodies, Jean-Luc, we don’t let ourselves lie down and die.”

  “Hah,” Jean-Luc said. He looked up at the darkening sky. “We don’t have anything to live for, do we? There isn’t even a hope of revenge.”

  The stars would come out soon enough, he knew, and one of them would be the Theocracy’s orbiting station. He hadn’t seen much of it, when he’d been hastened off the transport and dumped into a one-way landing pod, but he knew it was there. Perhaps the women were there too, serving as slaves or worse. It was just another reminder that he was helplessly trapped, forced to struggle to tame a world that had killed hundreds of people so far. If they’d killed him instead, when they’d captured him, it might have been a mercy.

  But they’re not concerned with mercy, he thought. Merely with mak ing us work.

  * * * * *

  “It’s a fairly basic orbiting station, Captain,” Roach said as the squadron closed in on the planet. “I’d place it as a modified Type-III UN colony station. The only real difference is that there don’t seem to be any shuttles attached to the hull, but they may have fitted an internal shuttlebay instead.”

  “Or they just don’t have any,” Kat mused. There were no shortage of stories and movies about criminals who’d escaped penal worlds by capturing shuttles after luring them down to the ground. It wasn’t as if they had much to lose. “It wouldn’t do to check on the prisoners after they were dumped on the planet.”

  She frowned as she studied the display. “Any defenses?”

  “There’s a remote weapons platform here, orbiting below the station,” Roach said. “I’d guess it’s designed to fire down at the planet, if necessary. There doesn’t seem to be anything capable of standing off a single destroyer, let alone the whole squadron. The station itself may not be armed.”

  The XO leaned forward. “No weapons blisters?”

  “None,” Roach said. “But they could have easily hidden them under the hull.”

  Kat considered it briefly, then shrugged. “Target the remote weapons platform,” she ordered. “The Marines are to capture the station once we have killed the platform.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Roach said. He keyed his console, then looked back at her. “Missiles locked on target.”

  “Transmit the surrender demand as soon as we fire the missiles,” Kat ordered, addressing Linda. “I don’t want them to have a chance to consider blowing the station.”

  Because that would be inconvenient, she thought coldly. We couldn’t get the prisoners down to the surface without the landing pods. We’d have to leave them on the freighters or dump them all into space.

  “Aye, Captain,” Linda said. “The message is ready for transmission.”

  Kat nodded, tensing. Everything looked safe; everything looked as though she had all the cards in her hand, but she knew all too well just how quickly things could change. The enemy might be on the ball; the enemy might have seen them coming; the enemy might already have signaled for help . . . the only advantage, as far as she could see, was that there was no StarCom. Even if the Theocracy had a courier boat in the system, it would be several days before it could fetch help. “Fire,” she ordered.

  Lighting shuddered as she fired two missiles towards the remote weapons platfo
rm. The enemy, taken completely by surprise, didn’t even have a chance to raise shields before the missiles struck home, vaporizing their target. Kat smiled in savage glee, then glanced at the communications console. A message was already going out, filling the airwaves with a cold—masculine—demand for surrender. If the station was unarmed, the crew had to know they didn’t have a hope of survival unless they surrendered. But what if they tried to blow the station . . .

  They might have a selfdestruct system already powering up, she thought grimly. The Marines were already on their way, four assault shuttles heading towards their target. They might wait until the Marines dock, then trigger the bomb.

  “Captain,” Linda said, “I’m picking up a message. They say they’re willing to surrender in exchange for guaranteed survival.”

  Kat’s eyes narrowed. Did they believe the Commonwealth ritually butchered prisoners and used their remains in satanic orgies? Or did they have some other reason for demanding guarantees? “Tell them that they will survive as long as they surrender promptly,” she said. Davidson’s shuttle was on its final approach now, far too close to the station for her comfort. He would insist on leading from the front, wouldn’t he? “They are to hand the station and its control codes over to the Marines once they dock.”

  There was a pause. “They’ve surrendered, Captain,” Linda said. “They’re opening the hatches now.”

  Kat frowned as the Marines swarmed into the station, ready to deal with any resistance. It didn’t look as though there was any; indeed, the station, which would normally have had a crew of at least two hundred, seemed undermanned. They took thirty-seven men into custody, then searched the station. And then they broke into the hold.

  “They kept some prisoners, all women, Captain,” Davidson said. His voice sounded cold and dispassionate, but Kat knew him well enough to pick up the underlying shock and rage. “They’re not in a good state.”

  No wonder they wanted guarantees, Kat thought angrily. She expected such behavior from pirates, not the Theocracy. But then, if one had a society that regarded even believing women as chattel, it wasn’t a stretch to start enslaving prisoners and turning them into whores and sex slaves. And being trapped on an isolated station wouldn’t have helped. Those men would be killed by their own people, let alone us.

  “Let the medics deal with them,” she ordered tartly. There was nothing the Marines could do for the women, not now. “Move the enemy prisoners to a storage bay, then see if you can get the pods ready for deployment.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Davidson said. There was a pause. “With your permission, I’d like to deploy an intelligence team too.”

  “Granted,” Kat said. She doubted there would be anything important in the station’s database, but even a prisoner manifest would be useful data. At the very least, they’d know what the prisoners were supposed to have done. “Ask the prisoners if any Commonwealth POWs were dumped here.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Davidson said.

  We can dump the station crew on the planet too, Kat thought as the channel closed. If she hadn’t offered guarantees, she could have killed them out of hand. They’ll have their lives and a better chance than their former prisoners.

  “There are at least seventy small settlements on the planet’s surface,” Roach observed. “I think the largest isn’t much bigger than a couple of hundred personnel, although it’s impossible to be sure. I’d honestly rate the planet as uninhabitable and leave it at that, at least without trying to set up a greenhouse effect . . .”

  Kat nodded. The penal colony was too cold to sustain life for long, unless the food crops were genetically modified to survive. Even so, it was hard to imagine anyone willingly immigrating to the planet unless there were some very strong incentives. And what could anyone offer, she asked herself, that would match the opportunities on warmer worlds? “Set up a shuttle schedule, based on the assumption that we will spend no longer than five days here,” she ordered. “I want each of the settlements visited; if the prisoners want to leave, we make plans to pick them up once the freighters are empty.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Roach said.

  “They will need medical support,” the XO offered. “Hell, if they don’t want to leave, we could drop the ration packs on the surface.”

  Kat shrugged. “I think they’ll all want to go,” she said. She found it hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to stay. “The only real question is where we take them.”

  Her console bleeped and a voice came online. “Captain, this is Davidson. I’ve downloaded a copy of the prisoner manifest. There’s no trace of anyone from the Commonwealth.”

  “Thank you,” Kat said, disappointed. It would have been nice to rescue POWs. “Copy the intelligence over here, then continue with your operations.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Davidson said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “There’s a shuttle inbound,” Talien shouted. “There’s a shuttle!” Jean-Luc frowned as he pushed the blankets aside and scrambled to his feet. He’d seen the explosion in orbit, where he assumed the orbiting station had been, and pieces of debris burning up as they fell into the planet’s thin atmosphere, but he hadn’t allowed himself to hope that they were about to be rescued. It was far more likely, he told himself, that the Theocracy’s crewmen had done something stupid. Or that one of their prisoners had managed to cause an explosion that had destroyed the station.

  He stumbled out of the hut and peered into the distance. There was a shuttle inbound, heading towards the settlement and dropping down to land just outside the walls. He stared in disbelief—he hadn’t seen a shuttle since the day he’d been shipped up to orbit and thrown into a holding cell—and then joined the others as they ran towards the walls. The Theocracy had never sent anyone to check up on them, not since they’d been abandoned. Whoever was flying the shuttle, he was sure, wasn’t one of their jailors.

  The hatch opened, revealing a man in powered combat armor. Jean-Luc felt a flicker of fear, recalling the Theocratic stormtroopers who’d broken countless resistance cells, then relaxed as he realized the markings on the armor were different. He had no idea whom he was staring at, but at least he didn’t work for the Theocracy. Were they being rescued? He couldn’t help feeling a flicker of hope, his first in a year. They might survive after all!

  “Greetings,” the figure said. There was an odd accent to his Galactic Standard, but it was understandable. “I represent the Commonwealth of Tyre. We have smashed this world’s defenses, but we cannot remain here for long. How many of you wish to leave?”

  “All of us,” Perrier said.

  The figure nodded. “How many of you are there?”

  “Fifty-seven,” Perrier said. “When can you pick us up?” There was a long pause. Jean-Luc had a moment to feel that, perhaps, there were too many of them to be uplifted, then the figure spoke again.

  “A shuttle will be assigned to pick you up tomorrow morning,” he said. “If you have personal possessions, declare them to the Marines. You may not be allowed to take them with you.”

  Jean-Luc snorted inwardly. Personal possessions? There were no personal possessions in the settlement! It was why the suicidal stripped naked before giving themselves up to the cold. Someone else could use their ragged clothes . . . there was nothing, not even the shirt on his back, that truly belonged to him. They had achieved an equality he couldn’t help feeling the communists on his homeworld would have envied.

  “We understand,” Perrier said.

  “I have some food supplies for you, along with basic medical gear,” the figure stated. “You are welcome to them, but please be prepared to leave as soon as the shuttle arrives. We may not have much time.”

  Jean-Luc barely heard him. They were saved! Wherever they were going, he was sure, had to be better than the penal colony! And who knew? There might be food, drink, women, and warmth! He’d give up the first three for the fourth.

  He watched as the shuttle crew unloaded a pallet of supplies, then retu
rned to their ship and took off. Perrier elbowed him, pushing him to join the men running towards the pallet and digging it open. Inside, there were a hundred ration packs and a handful of medical kits. It looked very much like manna from heaven.

  “Don’t eat too much at once,” Perrier warned. “You’ll get sick.” Jean-Luc knew he was right, but, as he tore into a ration pack, it was hard to resist the urge to just eat and eat until he burst. Real food! And they were going back into space . . .

  “This is the best day I’ve spent here,” he said, grinning. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone was grinning like an idiot. “And tomorrow we’re leaving for good.”

  * * * * *

  “Most of the female prisoners were either kept on the station as slaves or dumped in an isolated colony,” Doctor Katy Braham said. “They’re not as badly off as . . . well, pirate prisoners, but they were treated pretty badly. Most of them managed to survive, however, with their sanity intact. I expect them all to make a full recovery.”

  William winced. “And the ones on the ground?”

  “They’re worse off,” Doctor Braham told him. “If they hadn’t received regular food shipments from orbit, I think most of them would be dead. Hell, even with the shipments, quite a few just died of despair or nutritional problems. They didn’t have a hope of growing enough food to feed themselves.”

  “Then this was never intended as a breeding colony,” William observed. The Theocracy never failed to find new ways to horrify him. “They were all intended to die out within a generation.”

  “Or someone changed the plan,” Doctor Braham said. “Several of the sex slaves admitted they served willingly, in exchange for food being sent down to the surface. And it was, apparently. They might have changed the plan to hide what they were doing.”