by David Weber
"Uncle Arthur?" he invited.
"Thank you, Madison," Keita rumbled in his deep, thick-chested voice, and Alicia felt herself leaning towards him. Calling Alwyn by his first name wasn't the sort of affectation it might have been in another officer of Keita's seniority—assuming that there'd been another Cadre officer of his seniority, that was.
General Arbatov might be the Cadre's official commanding officer, but Sir Arthur Keita was the Cadre. He'd joined it over seventy years before, and he was well past the mandatory retirement age. An astonishing number of the Cadre's field grade officers had served under him at one time or another, and he'd displayed an uncanny talent for nurturing and training outstanding unit COs.
Not only that, but it was common knowledge that he'd refused promotion above his present rank not just once, but several times. And he'd gotten away with that because he was, quite simply, the man Seamus II and, before him, Empress Maire, had absolutely and completely trusted. He was the Cadre's field commander, and he would be that until the day he died or he chose to give it up.
People like Alwyn called him "Uncle Arthur" for a reason, and he enjoyed the same fierce loyalty from the men and women under his command as he himself gave to his Emperor.
"As I'm sure all of you have already figured out," he continued now, "we have what we refer to as a 'situation.' " He smiled thinly. "In this instance, it has the potential to be particularly ugly, and I'm afraid that it's going to fall squarely into Charlie Company's hands. I was on my way to Tamerlane, with a stopover on Gyangtse, when the balloon went up. Given the nature of the problem, Old Earth starcommed orders for me to drop everything else and personally attend to our little problem."
He paused, as if to give all of them a moment to absorb that much. Then he folded his hands on the conference table in front of him and leaned slightly forward over them.
"Five weeks ago, HMS Star Roamer, a transport chartered by the Ministry of Out-Worlds, departed the Raintree System for Old Earth. As some of you may be aware, if you've been following the news over the last several months, Raintree's voters have just approved the system's Incorporation referendum. Star Roamer was assigned to transport Raintree's official Incorporation delegation to Old Earth to lay the results of the referendum before the Senate and formally request Incorporation from His Majesty.
"Unfortunately, there was a slight hitch. While Star Roamer was in the process of accelerating towards supralight, she was hijacked."
Alicia felt herself twitch in her chair. Every so often, someone managed to hijack a merchant ship. In fact, one of the more successful pirate tactics was to put a clutch of hijackers aboard a ship under the guise of legitimate passengers. But despite a handful of attempts over the centuries, no one had ever managed to hijack a personnel transport with such a high-profile official passenger list.
"I'm sure there's going to be an exhaustive inquiry into exactly how the hijackers managed to get aboard in the first place," Keita said flatly. "All we know so far is that they managed it somehow. The ship diverted from its planned flight profile just before it wormholed out of Raintree, so the local authorities knew something was up and suspected what it might be. They immediately contacted Old Earth, and that was the point at which General Arbatov starcommed my new instructions to Gyangtse to await my arrival. At the time, that was all anyone knew, however, and it stared that way until Star Roamer turned up in the Fuller System two weeks ago."
Well, Alicia thought, that explains why he's talking to us about it.
Fuller was less than a week and a half's supralight flight from Guadalupe, squarely in Charlie Company's area of responsibility. The Cadre's small size—there were only ten Cadre brigades in the entire Empire—meant that the largest tactical unit it normally fielded was a company. Third Battalion was Charlie Company's "parent" primarily for administrative and support purposes, but the battalion's three companies were deployed into three entirely different star systems, each strategically located to cover as many potential trouble spots as possible. The Marines would no doubt have used entire battalions, as they had on Gyangtse, but the Cadre had embraced a slight paraphrase of an ancient pre-space law-enforcement organization. Its philosophy was "One crisis, one company." Alicia could have counted the number of times that the Cadre had found it necessary to deploy entire battalions on her fingers and toes . . . without taking off both boots.
"Excuse me, Uncle Arthur," Lieutenant Masolle said, "but why in the world would somebody hijack an Out-World transport and then go to someplace like Fuller with it?"
"I'll let Captain Watts explain what we think is going on in a moment, Lieutenant," Keita said. "Let me just finish setting the general framework first."
"Of course, Sir." Masolle sat back, but her brow was furrowed with what were almost certainly the same questions flowing through Alicia's mind.
"The short version is that the hijackers, when they arrived in Fuller, identified themselves as members of the Freedom Alliance and announced that they intend to hold the Raintree delegation, and Star Roamer's ship's company, as hostages until 'our legitimate demands for the freedom and liberation of our brothers and sisters in bondage are met by the imperialistic warmongers of the so-called Terran Empire.' "
Keita's voice was totally expressionless for his last sentence, but Alicia's heart sank. Like all of Charlie Company's personnel, she was familiar with the intelligence briefings on the Freedom Alliance.
Philosophically and conceptually, the umbrella organization for at least a half-dozen so-called planetary liberation organizations had a lot in common with the hapless wannabe terrorists the company had picked off in the Chengchou raid. Indeed, post-strike intel had pretty throughly confirmed that some of the Chengchou training cadre had, indeed, been FALA. Whether that was actually true or not, the Alliance was probably the most proficient—and dangerous—batch of terrorists currently operating against the Empire. Although imperial Intelligence had penetrated one or two of the Freedom Alliance's member organizations, the parent organization was a much tougher proposition. Its members were tightly disciplined and obviously security conscious, and they were also fiendishly well-financed. All indications were that most of its financial support came from a well organized fundraising net operating on at least a couple of dozen independent Rogue Worlds, and it also clearly had well developed contacts with various gunrunners and shady arms dealers, because its "Freedom Alliance Liberation Army" was much better armed than most of the "liberation" organizations.
Worse, the Freedom Alliance had demonstrated its willingness to shed blood—lots of blood, including that of its own people—in pursuit of its goals, despite the fact that anyone with a functional brain had to realize its fundamental objectives were ultimately unobtainable.
"As for what they're doing in Fuller, Francesca," Keita continued, "that's unfortunately clear. As you know, Fuller is not an imperial star system and it is a member of the Langford Association. The Association isn't exactly on the best of terms with the Empire, but our relations with its member worlds are still a lot better than our relations with many of the Rogue Worlds out this way. Apparently, the Freedom Alliance would like to see those relations take a turn for the worse, and it also seems likely they calculated that we'd be less likely to launch some sort of military operation on one of the Association's member planets.
"At any rate, they demanded sanctuary on Fuller while they 'negotiate' with the Empire. Needless to say, the Fuller planetary government is well aware of the Empire's standing policy where negotiations with terrorist organizations are concerned. King Hayden told them that it was out of the question, and his Parliament backed him up.
"At that point, the hijackers murdered Star Roamer's captain, first officer, and purser and jettisoned their bodies. Then they repeated their demands. King Hayden refused a second time. So they murdered the ship's astrogator, three of its enlisted crew members, a member of the ministry clerical pool, and the personal secretary of one of the Incorporation delegation's members. They
pointed out that that was twice the number of hostages they'd 'executed in the people's name' the first time their demands were rejected, and informed King Hayden that the next time around, they would double the 'penalty' yet again.
"According to the passenger manifest Raintree starcommed to us, there are at least six hundred more civilians, including the remaining members of Star Roamer's crew, aboard the ship. They'd already killed nine people that we know of—there may have been other fatalities when they actually seized the ship—and King Hayden and his government had every reason to believe they would carry out their threat, even if it meant eventually killing all of their hostages.
"Despite that, the King and Parliament were prepared to reject their demands yet again when the Duke of Shallingsport unilaterally offered to allow the terrorists to land the hostages in his duchy."
"In defiance of his own planetary government, Sir?" Lieutenant Paál asked in obvious surprise.
"Not . . . quite," Keita said. "Shallingsport is an independent duchy. I don't have all of the details and nuances of the Fuller political system at my fingertips, but as I currently understand it, Shallingsport is the largest, wealthiest, and most populous of several relatively small territorial units on Fuller which are at least nominally politically independent. The Duke of Shallingsport owes some sort of personal fealty to King Hayden, but not as the King of Fuller. Whatever the exact political relationship, the Duke—Duke Geoffrey—is a head of state in his own right, not legally bound by the decisions of Parliament. And in his role as head of state, he apparently decided that the only way to keep the terrorists from executing all of their hostages was to give them what they wanted.
"At the same time, he's obviously well aware of the Empire's policy where terrorists and planets which offer them sanctuary are concerned. Although he's permitted the hijackers to land themselves and their captives in his duchy and to take over a warehouse complex belonging to an off-world consortium as their local base of operations, he hasn't given them any formal promises of protection. So what he's done, according to the back channel messages he's passed to us, is to put the terrorists and the hostages into a contained situation. Since they've gotten the 'sanctuary' they demanded, they aren't going to take themselves, their hostages, and Star Roamer somewhere else. Which means they're going to be sitting exactly where they landed if—when—we come calling. In the meantime, he's informed them that while he's willing to give them sanctuary in order to prevent the loss of additional lives, he has no authority to negotiate on behalf of the Fuller planetary government, or of the Empire. He has, however, officially—and very publicly—requested that the Empire dispatch a negotiating team to Shallingsport. What he's telling us is that he's prepared to delay them, play for time, until we decide exactly what we're going to do."
He paused again, looking around the conference table, then shrugged the massive shoulders which had borne up under the weight of duty for so many decades.
"So that's why I'm here, people. We've decided what we're going to do . . . and you're the people who are going to do it."
Chapter Twenty
"Sir Arthur, Captain Alwyn, people," Captain Wadislaw Watts nodded to his audience as Brigadier Keita handed the briefing over to him. The Marine's expression was that of a competent professional who was fully aware of the gravity of the situation facing them, and he reached out through his neural headset to dim the cubicle's lighting still further.
The holo display above the conference table simultaneously came to life, showing the blue-and-white-swirled marble of a habitable world. As the image grew in the display, Alicia saw that it had a bit more water and slightly smaller ice caps than Old Earth. The nightside also showed far sparser concentrations of artificial light, indicating either an extremely low tech base or a smallish, widely dispersed planetary population.
"The planet of Fuller, in the star system of the same name," Watts said out of the semi-darkness. "The dominant political unit is the Kingdom of Fuller, which claims sovereignty over approximately seventy-three percent of the total planetary surface, and about ninety-two percent of the total planetary population. The kingdom is an odd hybrid, an absolute monarchy in the course of transition into a constitutional monarchy. The head of state, who's also the official head of government under the current political setup, is King Hayden the Fourth. He was educated in the Empire, and unlike most of the other planetary heads of state in the Langford Association, he's always been favorably inclined—for a Rogue World potentate, at least—towards the Empire. The fact that he's always been a voice of moderation in terms of the Association's relations with us may be one of the reasons the terrorists picked his planet. They probably figured that whatever decision he made was going to place a significant strain on his relations with us . . . or with his fellow Association heads of state.
"This," he continued, as the planet disappeared, replaced by a far larger scale map of a portion of its surface, "is the Duchy of Shallingsport." A bright amber line traced what were obviously the borders of an irregularly shaped territorial unit on a broad tongue of tangled, heavily forested mountains thrusting out into an ocean. "As you can see, Shallingsport claims virtually all of this peninsula extending into the Tannenbaum Sea. It takes its name from its capital and single major city, here." An icon flashed, indicating the coastal location of the city in question.
"The city of Shallingsport is also the site of the duchy's spaceport, which also doubles as its primary hub for purely atmospheric travel, as well. In the last couple of decades, the present duke—Duke Geoffrey—and his father have begun attracting some significant industry to Shallingsport. Most of that is also located around the capital, although there's also an industrial preserve here, in the Barony of Green Haven, which is called—not very imaginatively—the Green Haven Industrial Park."
Another icon blinked, this one at least two hundred kilometers from the duchy's capital.
"In fact, Duke Geoffrey's been doing his best to get as much as possible of the Shallingsport industry relocated to Green Haven in order to reduce congestion in the capital. He's been offering some very attractive financial incentives and tax breaks to get people to relocate, and to put new industry into the Green Haven area as it arrives from off planet. In addition, he's established a freight-handling spaceport facility with King Hayden's approval. Because of the way the planetary government is set up, the Green Haven port is going to cost Geoffrey a pretty credit in import duties once it goes officially on-line, which it's supposed to do sometime in the next local month or so. But Hayden's been looking the other way and letting it handle cargos 'unofficially' for the better part of a year, without imposing the legally mandated import duties, in order to help facilitate development in the area.
"I'm sure," Alicia's augmented vision easily saw Watts' tight grin, despite the lighting (or lack thereof), "that you're wondering just why I'm giving you all this information about industrial development in Shallingsport. Well, there's a reason.
"After Duke Geoffrey agreed to grant the terrorists holding Star Roamer 'sanctuary,' there was a fair amount of negotiation between him and the terrorists concerning the best location. The terrorists wanted to be as secure against potential ground attack as they could be, and Duke Geoffrey wanted them as far from his capital as he could get them, in case there was a ground attack and it got out of hand. The compromise solution, which was proposed by the terrorists, was that they take over the Green Haven Industrial Park. Duke Geoffrey pointed out that the entire industrial park would be rather large for their needs, and they responded by suggesting that they take over a single facility. They insisted, however, that the facility in question had to be large enough to permit them to keep themselves and all of their hostages under cover and to make aerial and orbital reconnaissance difficult.
"After quite a bit of hemming and hawing, the terrorists finely suggested that they take over the Shallingsport facilities of something called the Jason Corporation. It's a sort of wildcat operation headquartered on Tri
lateral, another of the Langford Association's members. It's also one of the newer arrivals in Shallingsport—a specialist in heavy construction which intends to play a major role in Geoffrey's Green Haven project. Because it's so new, its facility—which is a very large structure, in order to incorporate the necessary maintenance and service facilities for its heavy equipment—wasn't yet fully occupied. The relatively low number of staff Jason had on-planet could be evacuated fairly easily, the facility itself is well outside the area of Green Haven's main existing development, and the existence of the freight spaceport simplified the transfer of the terrorists and hostages from Star Roamer to the planetary surface.
"Which means that this facility here," the map of the Shallingsport peninsula vanished, replaced by a detailed aerial shot of a cluster of three smaller structures around a single very large one, "is going to be your objective."
Alicia frowned. Not only were the buildings themselves large enough to allow the terrorists a lot of flexibility in how they positioned their sentries, but the entire facility was set atop a fairly steep-sided hill that rose out of the peninsula's otherwise dense, green forest on the very fringe of Duke Geoffrey's "industrial park." The bad guys were going to have a commanding lookout post, and the buildings were, indeed, big enough, and solidly enough constructed, to severely limit what overhead passive reconnaissance could pick up.
"Now," Watts continued, "here's what we know about the opposition force.
"First, as Sir Arthur has already said, we don't know how they got aboard Star Roamer in the first place. We also don't have any positive IDs on any of the people involved in the hijacking. They've identified themselves as members of the Freedom Alliance Liberation Army, and the Freedom Alliance issued an official communique claiming responsibility for the operation before news of the hijacking became public. On that basis, it seems likely we are, indeed, dealing with the FALA. We just don't know who the individuals involved are. We believe our background efforts to penetrate the Alliance have positively identified a couple of dozen leadership figures, but so far we haven't placed any of them aboard Star Roamer. Frankly, they're being very careful in their contacts with the Fuller authorities and with Duke Geoffrey to prevent us from IDing any of them, as well.
