The Empire's Corps: Book 06 - To The Shores...

by Christopher Nuttall

  “And now,” he requested, turning back to the General, “you can tell me more about this damned world.”

  Chapter Seven

  This puts them in a position where ‘diplomacy’ may boil down to an ultimatum that runs ‘give us what we want or we’ll beat the hell out of you and take it anyway.’

  -Professor Leo Caesius. Diplomacy: The Lessons of the Past.

  “Welcome to the new base, same as the old base,” someone muttered.

  “As you were,” Michael snapped, as they followed the Warrior out of the shuttle. The AFV rumbled across the tarmac and headed towards the vehicle park next to the empty barracks. “We don’t know just what’s going to happen here.”

  But the soldier had a point, he had to admit. The garrison didn't look that different from the bases on Avalon, apart from having a name he struggled to pronounce. Indeed, there was something strange about such a large base having a tiny population. The garrisons on Avalon that trained and based the Knights were thrumming with activity at all hours of the day, but this base had hardly anyone in view, apart from the newcomers. And there was a very different scent in the air.

  The barracks smelt musty, he discovered, as they opened the doors and peered inside. Everything that might decay had been removed, leaving only the frameworks of hundreds of bunks, shower stalls and tiny compartments for the soldiers to stow their possessions. There were a handful of pieces of graffiti on the walls, but nothing else to suggest that the barracks had once played host to hundreds of soldiers. Someone had cleaned up the compartment thoroughly. It struck him as odd; the brief SITREP they’d been given as the shuttle descended through the atmosphere had suggested that there were only a handful of personnel on the base. But then, if they’d been isolated for over five years, even a relatively small crew could have cleaned up everything.

  He reached for his pistol as a door at the far end of the barracks banged open, then relaxed as he saw a dark-skinned woman carrying a colossal pile of pre-packaged bedding on her head. One of the soldiers wolf-whistled as she entered, even though the robes she was wearing hid her body’s curves quite nicely. She was followed by several more, all carrying bedding of their own. Michael remembered that some of the locals had been recruited to help maintain the base and relaxed, slightly. It seemed odd to have servants doing any of the work – normally, they were expected to take care of themselves – but the base had clearly allowed standards to slip.

  Sergeant Grieves evidently agreed. “Don’t just stand there, you lugs,” he barked. “Each of you take a piece of bedding, then set up by the numbers. Move!”

  Michael allowed himself a smile as he took a package from the lead woman. She lowered her eyes, something that bothered him more than he cared to admit, if only because it reminded him of the women on the pirate-operated asteroid. They’d learned to keep their heads down too, knowing that the slightest hint of resistance would result in a savage beating – or worse – from their masters. He felt sick as he unwrapped the package, then spread the inflatable mattress out on a bunk close to the doors. It was alarmingly easy to forget some of the stories he’d been told about life in the Imperial Army – or the Civil Guard.

  He looked down at his wristcom as it bleeped. “Briefing at 1700, local time,” a voice said, shortly. The device had already adapted to the local time – Lakshmibai had a twenty-seven hour day, something he suspected would cause confusion when they started operating – and linked into the garrison’s datanet. “All armoured vehicles are to be paraded on the grounds immediately afterwards.”

  “Understood,” Michael said, dryly. They weren't going to get any time to relax, although he wasn't too surprised. If half of the muttered rumours in the shuttle were accurate, they were landing on a very rebellious and unwelcoming world. “We’ll be ready.”

  He closed the connection, then looked over at the mechanics. The Warriors should be in perfect condition – after all, they hadn't been moved at all while they’d been in transit – but he knew better than to take that for granted. It would be much better to discover any problems before they went into operation.

  “Pass out the MREs, then we can start working on the Warriors,” he ordered the Sergeant. “I need to attend the briefing.”

  “Understood,” the Sergeant said. He lowered his voice. “And you might want to ask about the local women too.”

  Michael blinked in surprise, then understood. Were the women servants, prostitutes or the wives of the garrison’s maintenance crew? It would probably be good to know before there was an incident. His men had been starved of female company on the transport and the handful of local women he’d seen had been beautiful. Of course, if half the stories he'd been told were true, there hadn't been a garrison or army base at the height of the Empire that hadn't been surrounded by bars, brothels and other institutions intended to separate a soldier from his monthly pay.

  “I’ll ask,” he said, softly. The Imperial Army had no regulations banning sexual contact with the locals, merely banning marriage until someone had several years of service under his belt. “And you can supervise until we know.”

  ***

  The briefing room was surprisingly ornate for a garrison on a world the sector government couldn't have considered very important, no matter how many people had seriously believed that the Empire could keep the peace right across the universe. Jasmine rolled her eyes as she saw the computer screens, holographic maps and even a near-space orbital display, each one more expensive than a Landshark tank. And there was no need for a communications system that could allow the CO to monitor the operations of an entire army ... when she considered just how starved the combat arms had been for funds in the last days of the Empire, it made her more than a little mad.

  “They don’t seem to be working either,” Joe Buckley pointed out, when she said her thoughts out loud. “There’s no communications nodes out there for them to draw on.”

  Jasmine nodded. Apart from a handful of drones, the garrison had no presence at all on the mainland. There was a live feed from the orbital station, providing additional coverage of the sea around the island and the causeway – currently under the waves – but little else to justify such an expensive investment. She could have purchased enough equipment to raise a light infantry regiment for the price of everything in the garrison.

  There was a paper map pinned to the wall, right at the front of the compartment, showing the countryside near the garrison. Someone had been marking on it with pencil, trying to keep track of the political situation. It looked oddly familiar, but it took her several seconds to place it; the maps she’d seen of Avalon, during the height of the Cracker War, had looked quite similar. The political situation shifted then, she realised, shifted so quickly that it was impossible to produce any permanent maps.

  “At ease,” Colonel Stalker ordered, as he entered the compartment. “Take some coffee or water if you want; this is probably going to be a long session.”

  Buckley motioned for her to stay where she was, then headed over to the coffee machine. It wasn't common for drinks to be served during Marine Corps briefings, although Jasmine could see some advantages when the briefer was too tedious to keep her attention. Some of the briefers she’d had to listen to on Han – the ones on loan from the Imperial Army in particular – hadn't known to focus on the important details. She’d even had to pretend to pay attention during a briefing on the ecology of the region they were going to use as a base.

  She took the cup of coffee and sniffed it, feeling an odd sense of Déjà Vu. The Imperial Army had had, according to rumour, a whole series of worlds devoted to producing coffee that was foul-tasting, but very good at keeping soldiers awake. Jasmine hadn't tasted it in years, ever since supplies of pre-packaged foodstuffs on Avalon had run out. The stuff they produced on Avalon just wasn’t the same.

  “That’s why we’ve come,” Buckley muttered. “They want us to pick up the coffee.”

  Jasmine smiled, then suppressed it as one of the garris
on’s officers stepped forward. “I am Colonel Cindy Macintyre, Imperial Army Intelligence,” she said, as the room quietened down. “As punishment for my sins, I was told to remain here with the garrison and monitor the local situation. This has been an immensely difficult undertaking and I cannot guarantee the accuracy of much of the following data. The situation simply changes too rapidly.”

  “Give her points for honesty,” Buckley whispered.

  “True,” Jasmine whispered back. Intelligence officers, in her experience, tended to assume that they knew everything and that their conclusions were always correct, often ignoring facts that contradicted their theories. There had even been a handful of officers who had claimed that Han wasn't on the verge of exploding, even when Imperial Army garrisons and patrols had been coming under increasingly heavy attack. “But then, her career isn't going to go any further.”

  “To sum up a very long story, Lakshmibai was founded by a group of exiles from Hindustan, some seven hundred years ago,” Colonel Macintyre said. If she’d heard Jasmine and Buckley whispering, she gave no sign of it. “These exiles believed that the key to paradise was to return to the caste system of their ancestors – or how they chose to interpret the caste system – and, after a brief civil war on their homeworld, they were transported here and dumped on the planet’s surface, where they started to build their own perfect society.

  “Everything went relatively well for them until some bureaucrat in the Imperial Civil Service, looking for a place to put refugees, decided that Lakshmibai would be an ideal destination,” she continued, smoothly. “The refugees refused to fit into the caste system and civil war broke out, a situation made worse by an uprising among the lower-caste members, who were confronted by people who didn’t care about birth. Their lives were so hopeless that they kept on fighting even after the Imperial Army landed a garrison to assist the local government in dealing with the mess. Right now, large parts of the countryside are effectively under rebel control. Only the weapons and equipment supplied to the central government have allowed it to remain in power.”

  Jasmine winced. Avalon, even during the rule of the Council, would be preferable. At least Avalon hadn't had seven hundred years of population growth and development to fuel the fighting, or ensure that the hatreds were too deeply embedded to be removed by anything other than major bloodshed. In some ways, Lakshmibai even sounded like a rerun of Han ...

  But Han was a sector capital¸ she reminded herself. This world isn't even remotely important to anyone else.

  “The caste system is outlined in your briefing notes,” Colonel Macintyre said. “What you need to know is that there are five prime castes, ranging from rulers and warriors to those who do the shit work. There are actually gradations within the castes – some are more important than others, even though they share the same caste – and you’ll be lucky to find someone who isn't intensely aware of his status. As a general rule of thumb, higher caste – or position within the caste – trumps everything else. The lower castes have few legal rights.”

  Buckley stuck up a heavily-muscled arm. “And they just accept it?”

  “Their religion states that everyone starts out in the lowest caste and, assuming they have lived a good and blameless life, are reincarnated into a higher caste after they die,” the Colonel explained. “They climb up the ladder until they pass through the very highest caste and then graduate into paradise. As you can imagine, that is actually quite an effective tool of social control.”

  Jasmine nodded. If the lower castes genuinely believed that they had to work hard to rise, they would; if the higher castes thought themselves entitled to their power – and that the lower castes existed for their use – they’d become monsters. And those who didn't believe, who questioned the very basis of their society, would be shunned by all of the castes, although for different reasons. Believers wouldn't want any truck with non-believers, for fear that it would rub off.

  “Despite – or perhaps because of – their population density, conditions in their cities are actually quite wretched,” the Colonel added, returning to her subject. “There is almost no social mobility at all, no way to make a living outside the castes; the vast majority of the population is really little more than property. Vast resources are lavished on temples and palaces for the elite, or military formations assembled from the warrior caste, but almost nothing is spent on the common people. They exist permanently on the verge of starvation, which helps keep them under control. It isn't uncommon for hundreds of lower caste servants to die during winter.”

  “Just like Earth,” Buckley said.

  “In many ways, yes,” Colonel Macintyre agreed. “But while Earth has several safety valves – people could sign up with a colony development corporation or join the military – Lakshmibai has almost none. If you happen to be born to the untouchable caste, you’ll spend half of your life shovelling shit and the other half scavenging for food. And you’ll be a permanent victim. Should someone from a higher caste decide that he wants to rape or kill you, no one will stop him. Life will grind you down and you’ll be lucky if you live past fifty.

  “The rebels generally want to destroy the caste system and replace it with something else,” she added. “However, they have several different visions of what they expect to put in its place; several of the rebel groups, I suspect, merely want to reverse the order of the caste system rather than destroying it altogether. Others would be happy if they could declare independence from the local government.”

  Colonel Stalker leaned forward. “Do you have any contact with the rebels?”

  “We have tried to keep ourselves completely isolated from both sides,” Colonel Macintyre said. “We didn't want to be drawn into the fighting – or to make it worse by handing over weapons and equipment from the garrison. However, we do know that Jhansi – the settlement on the other side of the causeway – is caught between rebels and the central government. I’ve been expecting them to start fighting for months now.”

  Jasmine looked up at the map, then frowned. “Are they worried about you intervening?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Colonel Macintyre said. “But if they have an accurate idea of our strength, they’d know that we couldn't hope to intervene if fighting did break out again.”

  Major Lobo Villeneuve snorted. “How ... capable are the local government’s forces?”

  “Generally, a very mixed bag,” Colonel Macintyre said. “Those born to the warrior caste will generally be accepted into the military, regardless of their other qualifications. Some of them are very tough, capable fighters; some are little better that ceremonial units, prancing around in fancy uniforms and shiny vehicles. Right now, they don’t have the force to eradicate the rebellion, while the rebels don’t have the force to push them back and destroy the central government.

  “However, they are capable of the most shocking atrocities,” she added, grimly. “Even the Butchers of Bullhorn would blanch at some of their crimes.”

  Jasmine shuddered, a reaction shared by almost all of the experienced officers. The Butchers of Bullhorn had been an Imperial Army unit with a reputation for putting down uprisings and rebellions with shocking cruelty. Their CO, a man with enough friends in high places to shield him from any punishment, had actively encouraged his men to loot, rape and burn their way across a dozen worlds. By the time they’d finally been disbanded, they’d been responsible for thousands of needless deaths ... and rumour claimed there had been millions more.

  “Which leads to a different issue,” Colonel Stalker said. “Why did Governor Brown choose here as a place for talks?”

  “If I had to guess,” Colonel Macintyre said, “he believed that this world’s neutrality would allow it to serve as a meeting place. Besides, the locals wouldn't dare pick a fight with either side; they have absolutely no orbital defences at all. A single corvette could carry out punitive strikes that would bring the local government down in an afternoon.”

  Jasmine exchanged a long look w
ith Buckley. It sounded plausible, but she knew that expecting religious fanatics to act rationally was asking for trouble. Besides, if the population on the planet’s surface was so isolated from the external universe, they might not really comprehend what the outsiders could actually do to them.

  “One other thing,” Colonel Macintyre said, when she’d finished the rest of the briefing, “I’d advise dark-skinned personnel to lighten their skins and female personnel to pose as men. As a general rule of thumb, the darker the skin, the lesser the caste; they’re not likely to take a dark-skinned officer seriously.”

  “Hell with that,” Buckley muttered “I’d like to see Blake’s reaction when they refuse to take him seriously.”

  “He can wear his battlesuit,” Jasmine said, quietly. She looked down at her own skin, wondering if she should lighten it. Principle was all very well and good, but if she had to work with the locals ... luckily, Marine BDUs could conceal her breasts, particularly if she wore proper body armour. “But I’m glad I don’t live here permanently.”

  “Me too,” Buckley agreed.

  The meeting broke up, but Colonel Stalker called for Jasmine to remain behind. “You seem to be handling the CEF well,” he said, once they were alone. “But we may have to rethink carrying out operations on the mainland.”

  “Perhaps it would help remind them of our power,” Jasmine said, although she understood his concerns. “And maybe that would head off trouble at the pass.”

  Chapter Eight

  However, this approach can be costly or backfire. In some cases – the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939, for example – the weaker party may still be capable of inflicting considerable harm on the aggressor. Or other weaker parties may collectively stand up to the stronger party, forcing the aggressor to fight on several fronts at once.

  -Professor Leo Caesius. Diplomacy: The Lessons of the Past.