Empire & Ecolitan

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “I take it that we don’t report inbound until we have to.”

  “Why give more notice than we have to?”

  Lieutenant Ramsour shook her head. She said nothing, but readjusted the grav polarizer.

  Jimjoy checked the screen indicators. All read in the green.

  “If they’re watching the system EDI, we should have an inquiry reaching us in about one standard hour.”

  “That the comm break point?”

  “Roughly.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Jimjoy shrugged and leaned back in the shell. He eased open his face shield, closed his eyes, and let himself drift into sleep.

  The comm inquiry woke him.

  “…Interrogative inbound. Interrogative inbound. This is New Kansaw control. Please be advised that this is a quarantined system. This is a quarantined system…”

  “Now they tell us.”

  Jimjoy struggled erect, squinted, and checked the time. He had slept for nearly one and a half hours. More tired than he had realized.

  “You awake, Major?”

  “Mostly.”

  “You heard the message?”

  “The part about the quarantine? Yes. Was there more?”

  “Asked for I.D. on pain of death, destruction, and dismemberment, or the equivalent.”

  “Mind if I reply?”

  “Not at all. You have a certain way with words.”

  Jimjoy coughed, tried to clear his throat.

  “New Kansaw control. New Kansaw control. This is Desperado one. Desperado one, clearance delta. Departed Alphane for crew change New Kansaw. Authorization follows. Authorization follows.”

  Jimjoy called up the authorization codes from the navbank, then continued.

  “New Kansaw control, Desperado one, authorization follows. Delta slash one five omega slash six three delta. I say again. Delta five omega slash six three delta.”

  He touched the screen controls, toggled the Imperial I.D flash. While such flashes could be duplicated, any sector Commander who fired on a ship that had flashed such an I.D. would have a hard time explaining it away. Still…

  “You have a torp on board?”

  “Two, Major,” answered Berlan.

  “Program it with the information that New Kansaw control has declared a system quarantine, and that we have informed New Kansaw control of our mission and are proceeding in-system.”

  “What good will that do?” asked the Carpenter’s Captain.

  “By itself, not a great deal. But after we’ve informed New Kansaw of our helpfulness in spreading the word…”

  “Devious…” muttered Berlan.

  “Why are you so determined to get to New Kansaw?” asked the Lieutenant.

  “That’s where I’m ordered, Captain. Failure to obey orders is a cardinal failure for a Special Operative.”

  Jimjoy cleared his throat again, then triggered the comm system.

  “New Kansaw control, this is Desperado one. We are relaying your quarantine message to Alphane control via torp. Relaying your quarantine via torp. Proceeding inbound to assist in quarantine. Proceeding inbound to assist in quarantine.”

  He paused, then asked, “That torp about ready?”

  “Input complete, Major. Permission to launch, Captain?”

  “Launch when ready,” replied the Lieutenant.

  “Launching torp for Alphane.”

  Jimjoy tracked the thin trace of the small high-speed torp until it jumped from EDI display. He suspected that New Kansaw control also tracked the torp.

  Then he forced himself to lean back in the shell, and wait. And wait.

  The hiss of the old air circulation system and a faint whine from the open comm net were the loudest sounds in the courier.

  “Desperado one, this is New Kansaw control. Desperado one, this is New Kansaw control. You are cleared inbound to alpha control. Cleared inbound to alpha control. Do not deviate from course line. Do not deviate from course line. We estimate your arrival in point seven five standard hours. Please confirm.”

  “Slight improvement, Major.”

  “New Kansaw control,” answered the Special Operative, “this is Desperado one. Will maintain direct course line to alpha control. Will maintain direct course line to alpha control. Estimate arrival in approximately point nine standard hours. Point nine standard hours.”

  “Still trying to give yourself a margin, Major?”

  “Not much. They never consider standoff time, and I really don’t want to give anyone an excuse. For either one of us, Lieutenant Ramsour.”

  “Thank you for reminding me, Major Wright.” The woman’s tone was cooler than frozen ice.

  Jimjoy suppressed a frown. He obviously hadn’t thought that one through, but what could he say now?

  “Sorry,” he whispered, hoping the techs would not pick up on the apology.

  “Quite all right, Major. Quite within the rights of a Special Operative.”

  He did not shrug, but felt like it. Some days, even when he won, it felt like losing.

  XXXIX

  JIMJOY HEFTED THE two ship bags and slipped the dispatch case under his arm. Once again he felt awkward with the amount of equipment he was carrying, but after the trip on the Carpenter, he couldn’t exactly say he regretted it.

  He looked up.

  Berlan was standing by the cabin archway. The Carpenter only had curtains, not doors or portals as on larger ships.

  “Major…?”

  “Yes, Berlan?”

  “We appreciate it.” The tech’s voice was pitched uncharacteristically low. “You have to understand…”

  “Think I do, Berlan. Think I do.”

  He understood, all right, but wasn’t sure what to do. Rae Ramsour was a person, not a mission.

  “She’ll understand in time.”

  Jimjoy nodded, took a deep breath, and made his way forward.

  Lieutenant Ramsour was perched sideways on the edge of the control couch, looking neither at the controls nor at the Major, who stood there.

  “Leaving, Major?” She did not look up.

  “Not quite yet.”

  “Thought you’d burn your way through Hades to get to your mission.”

  “Only because I don’t have the choices you do, Lieutenant.”

  She finally looked up. “What choices?”

  He set down the bags and eased himself onto the edge of the copilot’s shell.

  “Running out of time, Lieutenant. Learned a lot as a Special Op. Learned enough to know that, one way or another, this is probably my last mission. If I can pull it off,” he lied, “it’s off to a desk. If I don’t,” he continued truthfully, “don’t have to worry about desks, or choices.

  “I know a lot about destruction and how to avoid it. But I made a lot of mistakes about people. Fact is…still making them. People matter.” He laughed harshly. “Right? Special Op killer telling you that people matter? Sentimental killer and all that flame?” He shrugged. “Not much else to say. Sorry I was hard on you. Hope I helped.”

  Slowly, he stood, picking up the bags.

  “Anyway…good luck to you, Captain. And to your crew.” He straightened. “Permission to leave the ship, Captain?”

  “Permission granted, Major.” There were dark circles under her eyes. “And thank you…I think.”

  Though she did not smile, there was no bitterness in her tone, Jimjoy reflected, and that would have to be enough.

  For some reason, he wondered, as he turned to activate the lock, if Thelina would have approved of his attempt to clear the air.

  “Good luck, Major.” Berlan, the first on the Carpenter to see him aboard, was also the last to see him off.

  “Same to you, Berlan. You’ve got a good Captain.”

  He did not listen for any response, but stepped through the lock to New Kansaw orbit control and the pair of armed technicians who waited to escort him planetside.

  XL

  “THE MAIN RESISTANCE headquarters has to lie in the Missou H
ills.” The Commander jabbed a pointer, awkwardly, at the wall projection. “We’ve cleared out all the other possibilities here on the central plains. The reeducation teams are having some success, and they would certainly have more…”

  “If the rebels weren’t so successful?” Jimjoy stood at attention, a rather relaxed attention that verged on insolence as the Operations officer summarized what he knew about the rebel positions. “How much does their success depend on your inability to find their base of operations? Do we even know if they require a fixed base?”

  “Look, Major, this isn’t a typical guerrilla action. We aren’t talking small farmers up in arms about the Imperial onslaught. Most of the planet was held by large landowners. What we have here is a bunch of professional rebels, the same group the landowners were fighting to begin with.”

  Jimjoy tried not to betray the sinking feeling in his guts. “They didn’t like the ecological transformations, I take it.”

  “Obviously. Why else would they sabotage the landowners? Remember, the Council asked for Imperial assistance when they failed to meet their repayment schedule for the planetary engineering. We didn’t get called in until the minority landholders withheld their taxes and declared the High Plains independent.”

  Jimjoy wanted to shake his head, but did not. Instead he asked another question. “So the majority landholders claimed that the rebels and the minority landholders were somehow destroying the crops?”

  “Worse than that. They were targeting the planetary diversion projects and the holdings of the landholders who supported them…anyone who supported the Empire.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s why they have to have a fixed base. Because their operations aren’t antipersonnel.”

  Jimjoy knew better than to dispute the Commander’s facts or logic, neither of which was totally accurate. “What about a quarantine?”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying for the last three standard months,” said the officer in crimson and red, “but they don’t have any conventional ties or transportation, at least nothing that we can track, even by satellite sensors. They aren’t a large group, never mount more than a limited number of operations, but they have cost us more than fifty million creds’ worth of equipment and three squads. We’ve lost one Commando team and one Special Operative. They were the only ones who inflicted more damage than they received.”

  “Terrain too rough for conventional support?”

  “‘Rough’ isn’t the word for it. All you can do is land on the objective and hope the ground doesn’t collapse under you. Take the badlands of Noram, add the winds of Coltara, the aridity of Sahara, and the ashes of Persephone, and you have some idea of the terrain.”

  “Why so much difference between the hills and the High Plains?”

  “The Plains sit practically on the bedrock. The hills were upthrusts where the aquifers broke out. Mess of fractured rock, silt. That’s why they’re collapsing now. No water supporting them.”

  Jimjoy again refrained from comment on the Commander’s inadequate grasp of geology. “That why the area was never terraformed?”

  “That and the fact that the alkalinity was phenomenal. It was too high to bother with, and too unstable. The Engineers just diverted the subsurface water tables and let it go.”

  “So there was a lot of vegetation there?”

  “That’s what they say. Supposedly, it climbed all over the cliffs, even down into the ravines. It’s almost all dust and ashes now.” The Commander cleared his throat and set the pointer down on the dull gray finish of the projector’s console. He glanced over Jimjoy’s shoulder toward the portal.

  Since Jimjoy had not heard the telltale whisper of a portal opening, he knew that the other officer was hoping someone else would come in. He repressed a grin. The Operations theorists were never happy when they had to brief a Special Operative directly. It put them too close to the cold-blooded side of the mayhem. They all preferred to think of combat as either an art or unavoidable.

  “I take it you want them neutralized?”

  “Ummm…of course. Wasn’t that why you were sent?”

  “Yes. I was dispatched to find the quickest and most effective solution to your problem—regardless of the cost to the rebels or to the ego of Imperial forces. But no one would have dared to state that openly.” Jimjoy paused before twisting the knife further. “They prefer not to ask too many questions about my solutions.”

  The Commander looked down at the drab and gray plastone floor, then back over Jimjoy’s shoulder at the portal, and finally at the Major in his tan singlesuit without emblems or trappings—only the crossed bars of his rank on his collars.

  The singlesuit was immaculate, as was Jimjoy. But neither looked traditionally military, since Jimjoy did not affect instantaneous obedience, and the singlesuit possessed no knife-sharp creases, braid, or rows of decorations.

  Jimjoy knew the only military aspects of his person were his eyes. Even Admirals had wavered before them. Not that he was anything other than superbly conditioned and trained. He just wasn’t military at heart, and probably shouldn’t have been in the Service at all.

  But he had survived for more than a decade in a field where the casualties ran eighty percent in every four-year tour.

  He waited, his silence exerting a pressure on the Commander to speak.

  “How long will it take?”

  “Depends on what I have to do. One way or another, be finished in three months. Might be three weeks.”

  “Three months?”

  The Major sighed. “You want a miracle. I’m here to do it. The difficult we do on schedule. The impossible takes longer. This is impossible. You can’t take anything mechanized into the terrain except flitters. You don’t know who the enemy is or where they are. You haven’t been able to solve the problem in six months with five thousand Imperial Marines. You’ve lost Commandos and Special Operatives, and you want me to fix it overnight?”

  He threw a skeptical glance at the Commander, who responded by stiffening and squaring his shoulders.

  “Spare me a lecture about how each day costs money and troops,” the Special Operative continued, his words stopping the protest from the senior officer. “Understand that. But you’ll have even more delays and costs if I go off half blasted and get zapped. Now, if you’ll excuse me…Is the rest of the material in the console?”

  The Commander nodded, his face tight.

  “Fine. After that I’ll probably be wandering around to get a feel for the situation. Then I’ll let you know what I’ll need.”

  “What you will need?”

  “Don’t carry supplies with me, Commander,” commented the operative as he drew the stool up to the console.

  The Commander stood there, staring blankly at the Major’s back, until he realized that he had effectively been dismissed by a junior officer. Finally, he turned and walked woodenly from the room.

  As the portal whispered shut, Jimjoy glanced backward. “All alike. If it’s not laid out in their order files, it doesn’t exist. If it wasn’t taught at the Academy or spelled out in Service policy, it’s not possible.”

  He continued his scan of the background material, strictly a factual description of New Kansaw and the grain belt plains.

  New Kansaw—T-type planet, variation less than point zero five from norm. Atmospheric oxygen content sixteen point five percent, and gravity point nine three of T-norm. Mean surface temperature within acceptable parameters…He skimmed through the facts.

  The odds were that the statistics would tell him less than nothing, another fact that the Operations types never quite understood. He shook his head as he concentrated on the more detailed information about the higher plains where the Empire had expected the colonists to concentrate on grains and synde bean production.

  The one number that might have some significance, he reflected, was the number of cloudy summer days. Why he could not recall, but somewhere, sometime, he had read about the need for an inordinate
amount of unobstructed sunlight for successful synde bean cultivation.

  Clouds usually meant rain, and rain meant moisture. Some grains did not do well later in their growing seasons with too much precipitation.

  He keyed in the inquiry, more to see if the unit were connected to a full-research data bank.

  Beep.

  “Subject inquiry requires ‘Red Delta Clearance.’”

  The Special Operative gave the screen a wry grin and closed down the console. Stretching as he stood, he stepped away from the console and began to pace around the bare-walled conference room, his feet hitting on the gray plastone tiles with a flat sound.

  He found it hard to give his full attention to New Kansaw. The Accord situation, especially the friendly detachment of the Ecolitans, still bothered him. Even Thelina had been professional. Only Temmilan had shown any interest, and that had been for the express purpose of compromising him.

  He had made his report, hadn’t even been asked any follow-up questions, which would not have been precluded by his hurry-up departure. Hersnik just wanted him dead, one way or another, without any blame on Hersnik or the Service itself.

  On the one hand, the Service was concerned about Accord. On the other, the Admiralty really didn’t want any new information or insights, just an excuse to act against the planet.

  Running a stubby-fingered hand through his short black hair, Jimjoy pursed his lips. He could worry about Accord, about Thelina, after he had muddled through the New Kansaw mess. If he muddled through.

  He grinned—what else could he do?—and headed for the portal.

  As he stepped out into the humming of the main corridor, he could not avoid the senior technician, fully armed, who came up to him.

  “Major Wright? Technical Specialist Herrol, sir. At your service, sir.”

  Jimjoy said nothing, let his eyes survey the lean-looking, dark-haired young man with the flat brown eyes. He did not nod, but it was obvious that Technical Specialist Herrol would be both bodyguard and expediter, if not assassin, at the appropriate time, should one Major Wright show any lack of suicidal enthusiasm in pursuing his assignment.

  “You know where I’m quartered, Herrol?”