The Imperialists: The Complete Trilogy

by H. T. Kofruk

  “But, sir, we have no friends or allies unless you count the Pacific. But they’re fucked as much as we are. Excuse the language, sir” refuted the sergeant.

  Terry looked at the weathered face of the sergeant. He had a vertical scar on his face next to his right eye, making it droop downward. Terry knew that such scars could easily be avoided or fixed but the sergeant had chosen to keep it. Younger soldiers sometimes did that to look intimidating or to distinguish themselves from civilians. But the sergeant looked too serious, too solemn to do something like that just for fun. Terry guessed that he did it to remember his brothers-in-arms who had died in an unforgettable combat situation. He probably had scars throughout his body to mark each memorable battle where he had lost battle buddies.

  “The Pacific will survive. They’re much tougher than we give them credit. But I’m not only talking about our current political allies. I’m talking about all Rendens, even intelligent aliens. The enemy is conquering to instil a way of life and a way of thinking that the conquered will never accept. Could you accept the Chinese Emperor not only as your sovereign, but also as your god?” said Terry.

  There were scoffs at the idea. Others chuckled at the ludicrous nature of the suggestion.

  “The only way we’re going to be able to overpower an enemy with more guns, more ships and more alien soldiers than us is to be able to gather more friends than them. And I mean more Afrikans, more Indians, more Arabs, even more Chinese and Russians. We’re not fighting a race or a people, we’re fighting an indoctrinating idea.”

  The sergeant still didn’t look impressed, though some of the younger soldiers looked at him with more hope. “How do you propose we do that, sir?” questioned the sergeant.

  “Sergeant, that depends on our ability to accept and to attract new friends, something we’re sorely lacking now” answered Terry while meeting the older soldier’s gaze.

  A slight bump and a change in the interior light from white to orange signalled the deceleration of the shuttle in order to dock with the station. Terry was secretly relieved for the distraction as the men bustled to gather their equipment and check their harnesses.

  When the shuttle hatch opened, Terry was the first one off. Though he was passionate about what he had said, he realized in the middle of the conversation how much he lacked a coherent theory. It was all good to say that they needed more friends but was the theocratic Atlantic Alliance capable of making more friends? Wouldn’t that seem like a compromise and an admittance that divine intervention wouldn’t happen to save God’s chosen children? For all he knew, a change of doctrine would bring down the whole Church and government with it. I thought I came to relax my mind…

  Only two of the eighteen decks on the station were powered through the Virgin Mary’s fusion reactor. One of them was the engineering deck where the navy and Marine Corps engineers and science officers were working to bring the station’s own massive generator on line. The other was the recreation deck where twenty per cent of the crews of both ships were getting some R&R.

  Terry took the gravity lift down to the recreation deck. He passed the large fitness facility where soldiers, marines and fleet personnel were enjoying tennis, football, cricket and other sports. A company of Ewani warriors were engaged in a basketball match. When the sport had first been exported, it immediately became widespread and loved by the intelligent aliens. With their superior physical abilities, the court had to be slightly modified; the basket stood fifteen feet from the ground, the court was double the size of a standard Renden one and the ball was far bouncier. When the two teams played, it resembled a flock of grasshoppers darting to one side and then to the other at speeds that made a viewer’s eyes water.

  Then there was the ‘relaxation area’, a myriad of small rooms that had intricate holograph projectors built into them. Though many servicemen used the facility to satisfy their sexual needs, most simply went to sleep with holographs resembling their homes.

  The botanical area was much larger than the one on the Virgin Mary, perhaps four times the size. The vegetation was also much more diverse and not exclusively from Earth. There were plants from Onut, indicating at least a small number of Ewani soldiers had been permanently stationed here. Although Terry had never been to the planet, he recognized the giant orange ferns of which a modified version was now common in Renden households on Earth.

  He finally reached the officers’ quarters, which was, in reality, a series of storage rooms that had been converted in order to avoid powering the other decks. He checked in with a junior enlisted clerk and found his own small room. He threw his bag on the floor and dutifully took off his armoured amplifier suit. Though it looked like a blue jump suit when the armour wasn’t inflated, each part of the suit had to be detached from his muscles with care since electrical sensors sent signals to his nerves. If he ripped it off, a sudden signal could activate his pain receptors and hurt like he was bitten by a fire ant.

  He then put on his ‘civies’, a simple tracksuit made of bio-rubber and Bahalar cotton that soldiers and marines wore when they were off duty. Despite the name, wearing it didn’t make a marine a civilian.

  Having decided he needed some good, non-purified air, he headed towards the botanical area. For the first time in more than a year, he strolled. He even hunched his back a bit. Soldiers who passed by stared at him but he didn’t even notice. Perhaps Admiral Hernandez was right? Perhaps he really did need some time to just think of…nothing for a while. He breathed deeply as if he had held his breath for the past few months.

  When he reached the glass walls of the botanical area, he was awoken from his daydreams by a commotion in the adjacent fitness facility. At first he was annoyed of the disturbance but then realized that many of the soldiers were running towards the noise. Was it an emergency? Did it require the presence of an officer? He first walked briskly and then jogged.

  What he saw on his arrival to the fitness area startled him. A tactical team of twelve armed soldiers in fully inflated armour were pointing their guns at the Ewani soldiers who had been playing basketball. One of aliens was in uniform and was the only one pointing his gun at the marines. He then realized that the other Ewani were just as wary of the armed one as the tactical team.

  “Drop the gun, sergeant!” shouted one of the soldiers to the armed alien.

  “So you can kill me?” yelled back the armed Ewani.

  “Why are you doing this, Sergeant Thanag?” said one of his kinsmen. Though there were no rank insignias on civies, Terry thought that he was perhaps an officer.

  “We have to go home. All of us. But they won’t let us” yelled the one called Thanag.

  “Drop it! This is the last time I’m going to say it!” said the soldier sergeant. Terry recognized the voice; it was the sergeant on the shuttle.

  The Ewani who looked like an officer approached the lone armed one. “Why do we need to go home, Thanag?” he said in a soothing voice. He was speaking in the One Tongue rather than their own language so that the onlookers would see that he was under control.

  The armed Ewani answered back in his native language in an obviously distressed tone. He didn’t take his eyes or his barrel off the squad of armed soldiers.

  The news seemed to shock all the Ewani in the room. They started murmuring among themselves. “How did you find this out?” questioned the officer.

  This time Thanag replied in the One Tongue. “I read some of the logs. They’ve known ever since we got here but they didn’t tell us.”

  The murmurs from the group of Ewani grew louder and angrier. “Silence!” said the officer. “This will be brought up with the Colonel and the Admiral accordingly. Put down your weapon, Thanag.”

  “But Reag was destroyed! Months ago!” he roared. “My family is dead and the Thag scum are killing us!” He then switched to his own language and sputtered from anger and frustration.

  Terry approached a soldier near him and asked him whether he knew what the Ewani was talking about. The sol
dier shook his head and said “I think their planet’s in a civil war or something.”

  The armed Ewani was getting more and more worked up while the officer and now the other Ewani were trying to calm him. Terry could see the situation getting worse. Too much tension was building up despite the Ewani officer and tactical team sergeant’s efforts to calm everyone down. Right when he decided he needed to intervene, one of the soldiers in the tactical team fired his weapon.

  Terry was almost sure that he was a rookie. First, a shot in such a situation with dozens of onlookers was rarely a good idea. Second, killing a fellow soldier, even an alien soldier, as if he was a common criminal was the worst possible solution, both for morale and for manpower. Lastly, the pulse was at minimum strength, meaning it would shock an unarmoured human but would only momentarily surprise an Ewani.

  The Ewani was immobile for a split second before he jumped in the air, taking out one of the soldiers with an expert shot. The situation deteriorated swiftly after that. The armed Ewani landed behind his kinsmen and shot out from in between two of them, taking out another soldier. Terry would have ordered a retreat in order to isolate the situation. The sergeant yelled at his soldiers just that. But not before they lost control after seeing two of their team killed.

  The following event could only be described as a massacre. Terry was horrified as he watched the soldiers mow down all of the Ewani, including the single armed one. He ran towards them shouting as loud as he could while everyone else ran out of the facility. “Stop! Cease fire!”

  By the time he reached them, eleven Ewani and two Renden bodies were lying on the basketball court.

  Chapter 18: The Carulio System

  ‘The Tzaks are inherently hot-blooded, cruel and violent. This is particularly true for the warrior-priests who constitute the ruling class of Tzakbat. Their sole occupation for the last three thousand years has been warfare, and they are outstanding at it.

  The Carulions are cooler but have an even more ample capacity for cruelty. They are calculating and business-like. One must not construe their lack of facial expression or tonality in their speech for emotionlessness; their anger will only be apparent when they start killing.’ – Thuy Chinh, first Pacific Federation ambassador to the Carulion System, , year 2767

  General Yin Jia was the only female infantry general in the Imperial Forces, and her success in the military had cost her already two marriages and three estranged children. Her children, all from her first marriage, had not contacted her for over fifteen years and probably hated her for never having tried to contact them either. The truth was that their father, a successful businessman with connections to the Imperial Family, jealously blocked all her attempts to send presents and letters to the three people who she had carried in her womb.

  She sipped a glass of smooth Irish whisky as she looked out the reinforced glass at the large red sun at the centre of the Carulio System. Well, fuck him. With two stars pinned on her black collar, she formally outranked the ship’s captain, but the Imperial Forces Directive 225 mandated that on a military vessel, the captain outranked everyone regardless of pay grade. This was not to grant personal fiefdoms to captains and admirals but simply to ensure that the person with the best knowledge of the ship and its crew had complete control.

  The Carulio System housed two inhabitable planets, a very rare phenomenon. The two planets, Carulio and Tzakbat, orbited their sun while at the same time orbiting the tiny ‘moon’ that they shared. When the Rendens first ‘discovered’ the planets, they also came into contact with the only other space-faring civilizations in the Yinhexi at the time. The Carulions and the Tzak were extremely different in appearance, with one looking like giant crabs with overgrown right-hand claws and the other resembling hairless wolves, but studies showed that they, and indeed all life on the two planets, had descended from an amoeba-like life form still found on the moon. The distance between the moon and the two planets was about the third of that between Earth and its own moon, so the bacteria had probably been ‘blown’ from the moon to the rocky worlds during major disturbances in the planets’ atmospheres.

  Jia had learned that of the two species, the Carluions were first to emerge as intelligent hunter-gatherers by a margin of about two million years. Of course, Tzaks refuted this citing their own archaeological evidence. When the Carulions had first developed rockets powerful enough to send them to their small moon, they later found the remains of Tzak explorers who had arrived a century before them. A space race between the two species ensued with both parties trying to lay claim to the symbolic moon.

  This competition had instigated the development of relatively advanced space technology two hundred years before the Industrial Revolution on Earth. Battles that included chemical and biological weapons raged on the two planets and the moon until they both lost perspective of their system’s tininess. The moon, which the Carulions called Tharoa and the Tzak called Gamalbat, became a rallying point for each species’ perceived dominance.

  Their first encounter with Rendens, a Pacific Federation mothership two and a half centuries ago, was a wakeup call to both races. Their dispute for nearly a millennium had been focused on a tiny moon, blinding them to the vast expanse of the universe. They had subsequently developed disproportionately powerful instruments of war while their space-faring technology had remained comparatively low-tech for hundreds of years, barely advancing beyond the chemical fuel-propelled rockets used by Rendens in the twenty-first century.

  The Imperial Navy tigership, the Yuan Chonghuann, had arrived to the Carulio system two days ago after permission from the joint Carulion-Tzak authorities. The relatively remote system was the only place in the galaxy where the complete absence of Rendens was guaranteed. Jia was well aware of the extremely powerful weapons at the disposal of the Carulion-Tzak alliance, such as the enormous plasma cannons and tiny, undetectable but extremely powerful photon-propelled nuclear torpedoes. The ‘death wave’, as named by Rendens, was by far the most feared weapon, however. The technology was beyond the grasp of human scientists. It was invisible, virtually undetectable and brought the instant death of any life-form with no impact on machinery or circuits. Any false movements by the Renden warship would result in a quick and fatal response from their hosts. It was almost ironic that the alliance had such powerful weapons yet lacked the technology to travel faster than three per cent light speed, the result of centuries of space war but little space exploration.

  Today was the day of the meeting. Admiral Liu Sheng, the highest ranking officer in the fleet, had received the initial request for the meeting three weeks ago. The first person he had contacted was the highest ranking army personnel, who happened to be Jia. Both officers, with almost sixty years of active service between them, knew that the mere fact they had not reported the request to Sky Command was a serious offense that could lead to execution.

  As the tigership swivelled silently in the vacuum, the two planets soon came into view. Carulio was slightly larger with vast seas that gave the planet its blue colour while Tzak had two great salt lakes, each the size of North America, but was otherwise mostly desert. Despite Carulio having a much milder and wetter overall climate, the extreme tides generated by the proximity of the two planets and their moon made only the highest points of land habitable. The tides were said to resemble tidal waves.

  Several hundred battle satellites surrounded the two planets and their moon, looking rather like a swarm of bees buzzing around a hive. Jia had been told that each one had weapons powerful enough to take out a tigership. Each empire had tried for centuries to gain some of the weapons technology in exchange for wormhole or light-speed travel know-how. The two races had wisely refused any deal, knowing that with the resources available to the Renden empires and access to such weapons, the Carulio system would quickly be annexed as just another colony.

  Jia’s Web-Com receiver told her that someone was trying to contact her. She opened the line and Commander Hu, the ship commod
ore’s aide, appeared. He saluted her nervously.

  “Commodore Xing requests your presence on the bridge, ma’am” he said unnecessarily loudly.

  Jia could see the nervous twitches of the commander in the high-definition holograph. She secretly enjoyed the emotional commotion she often caused in other officers. “Did he specify the reason, commander?” she said gently but with drops of venom in her voice. She knew perfectly well why she was being summoned.

  “Yes, ma’am. The meeting is scheduled for sixteen hundred, Imperial time, and the current time is…”

  “I know the current time” she snapped. “And the time of the meeting, thank you, commander. Does the commodore suspect that I have trouble with punctuality?”

  The shaved head of Commander Hu was shiny with sweat. “No, ma’am. As the highest ranking officer of the ship, he would like you to have the honour of welcoming the…”

  “Does he suspect that I do not know my duty?” asked Jia, barely able to conceal her enjoyment as she tortured the burly commander who was seven inches taller than her and double her weight.

  “No…no, ma’am. He would just like to ensure…” the commander’s voice trailed off.

  “What is your name and rank?” she asked, already well aware of this information. She knew that asking the name and rank of any soldier had an immediate effect of bringing him to the position of attention. It also made them feel more scrutinized and accountable for any actions or words.

  “Commander! Hu! Zi! Lai!” he yelled with his eyes looking thirty degrees up, indicating that he was at the position of attention.

  “Well, Commander Hu Zilai. Please inform the commodore that my presence on the bridge can be expected in ten minutes. Thank you for your reminder” she said calmly before cutting off communication. She giggled slightly at the poor officer’s discomfort.