Favour the Bold, page 9
part #16 of The Empire's Corps Series
They’d understand taking a gamble, he told himself. And they’d be much more concerned about me doing nothing.
“Start making the preparations,” he ordered. “And keep me informed.”
“Aye, sir.” Anderson stood. “Get some rest, sir.”
“You too?” Jeremy laughed. “Why does everyone want me to get a good night’s sleep?”
“When the boss is asleep, everyone else can goof off,” Anderson said. “And I’ve been waiting years to goof off.”
“And you can wait a few years more,” Jeremy said. “Your schedule is too full for goofing off.”
Anderson chuckled, threw him a jaunty salute and hurried out. Jeremy sighed, then turned to the window and looked out over the darkening landscape. There were times when he was tempted to collect everything they’d built over the years, from the warships they weren’t supposed to have to the giant transports and factory ships, and set course for the Rim. He’d seeded hundreds of marines and retired marines out there, most with sealed orders to maintain civilisation by any means necessary. He could join them, with enough firepower and technology to rebuild a formidable industrial base in a few short years. But it would mean giving up on the Core.
And giving too many others a chance to build up power bases of their own, he thought, grimly. He had no idea who’d inherit most of the Imperial Navy, but anyone who controlled a battle squadron and a handful of supplies would be in an excellent position to carve out a vest-pocket empire for himself. Jeremy had already authorised the assassination of one such officer, although it would be weeks before he knew if the operation had succeeded or failed. And, one day, whoever comes out ahead will start expanding into the Rim.
Shaking his head, he turned and headed for bed.
***
Haydn hadn’t expected more than a day or so of rest when his company reached Safehouse. Indeed, he was a little surprised they’d been recalled to Safehouse in the first place. Their orders, filed before the raid on Gamma Prime, had been to remain on the concealed shipyard and provide security until the evacuees were processed, interrogated and shipped to their final destinations. Haydn hadn’t expected trouble from their guests, save perhaps for the handful of evacuees who’d had to leave their families behind. He’d been morbidly amused to hear one man promising the stars, as long as he didn’t have to go back to his estranged wife.
He walked into the briefing room and looked around with interest. The chamber was packed, with brass as far as the eye could see. Haydn himself was one of the lowest-ranking officers in the compartment, although that meant less amongst the marines than the regular army. His lips quirked at the thought. He’d be a coffee boy if he’d joined the regular army. An officer he’d met once - unfortunately - had thrown a fit when he’d discovered that he was expected to brief mere captains and even majors ...
Haydn put the thought aside as he surveyed the other officers. Most of them were active-duty, but a handful looked to be reservists who’d been recalled to the corps when the shit hit the fan. Haydn guessed most of them had lived on the Slaughterhouse, evacuated ahead of the attack that had left the world a radioactive wasteland. The wags might joke that it was a vast improvement, but ... rage simmered in his gut. There would be no mercy when they found out who was behind the attack. They’d pay for what they’d done.
That was part of our history, no matter how much we hated it when we were there, he thought. He didn’t remember much about the Slaughterhouse, but pain ... pain and a grim determination to never quit. They had no right to take it from us.
Major-General Anderson strode into the room, followed by a pair of grim-faced staffers. Haydn rose with the rest of the assembly, then sat down when Anderson waved them to their seats. He didn’t stand on ceremony, unlike regular army officers. Marines knew their superiors had gone through the Slaughterhouse - and then served on the front lines - well before they’d been promoted. And they rotated in and out of the front lines for the rest of their careers, just to make sure they didn’t lose their touch.
“We may be deploying, as a division-sized force, to a hostile world,” Anderson said, without preamble. A rustle of anticipation ran around the room. “Our objective will be to land, capture the PDCs and convince the local population to work with us. As of now, we don’t know how they’re being treated or how they’ll react to us.”
Haydn nodded, curtly. Civilians were inherently unpredictable. Some loved the marines, some viewed them as trigger-happy Rambos - whatever a Rambo was - some viewed them as corrupt bastards like the Civil Guardsmen and some, the most heartbreaking of the bunch, saw the marines as people who restore order, then would go away and let the former government come back and punish anyone who welcomed the marines too openly. It was never easy to trust an outsider when that outsider might cut and run at any moment, leaving you to face the wrath of your former friends. Better not to commit yourself than run the risk of being abandoned.
“The staff will put together the deployment scenario, which will be updated when we obtain accurate information from the target,” Anderson continued. “Your role will be to prepare your troops for deployment and poke holes in the plan, before the enemy puts bullet holes in it. I don’t think I need to tell you that this mission is important. We cannot fail. We will not fail.”
His eyes swept the room. “We haven’t done anything like this for years. We’re out of practice. And now ... we have to get it right, first time. Failure is not an option.”
Haydn let out a breath. A forced landing, an opposed landing ... it would be a challenge. But he relished it. He’d joined the corps for the challenge. He would not fail. They would not fail.
“Now,” Anderson said. “To work.”
Chapter Nine
There was no point, they argued, in wasting time shipping broken devices or vehicles back to the Core Worlds. And indeed, they were right. Given the problems with interstellar shipping and trade, in the last century before the fall, there was no guarantee that anything sent back to Earth would ever be returned.
- Professor Leo Caesius. Earthfall and its Aftermath.
It was almost a relief, Kerri decided, when Havoc finally started her approach to the Hameau System. The trip itself had been so boring that she would have almost welcomed a pirate attack or an encounter with a hostile warship, even though she had strict orders to avoid enemy contact. The only real excitement had come from one of the marine pathfinders hitting on her, a courtship she’d shot down without hesitation. Technically, she wasn’t in their chain of command, but as long as they were on her ship she was in charge. It would cause all sorts of problems, she thought, if it came down to a question of command. Both sides knew better than to put too much pressure on the relationship between spacers and groundpounders.
She took her command chair and watched as the timer steadily ticked down to zero. She’d given a great deal of thought to where and when to come out of Phase Space, but - in the end - she’d found herself balancing trade-offs between speed and security. It didn’t help that she had no idea what sort of defences awaited her, or how many sensor platforms the Onge Corporation had scattered around the system. In the end, she’d made the decision to come out some distance from the Phase Limit. It would add several hours to their flight, once they headed into the system, but it would minimise the risk of detection. They’d have to get very unlucky to come out of FTL close enough to a ship that would note their presence and sound the alarm.
“Captain,” Commander Joaquin said. “We will drop out of Phase Space in five minutes.”
“Sound battlestations,” Kerri ordered. “Set Condition One throughout the ship.”
She smiled, grimly, as the drumbeat drove her crew to their combat stations. Cold logic told her there was no chance of detection, but she knew better than to take the risk of coming out of FTL fat and happy. Besides, it would underline the fact they were entering hostile territory. Her crew was as well-trained as any regular navy crew - she’d drawn half of them from the Imperial Navy, back when it had been a going concern - but all crewmen had a tendency to backslide when confronted with long weeks of boredom. It wasn’t a problem in FTL - the odds of an engagement in Phase Space were very low indeed - but she couldn’t tolerate it when they might find themselves going into battle at any moment. The slightest delay could prove fatal.
“All stations report combat-ready, Captain,” Tomas said. “We are ready to engage the enemy.”
“Keep all sensors passive only,” Kerri ordered. “I say again, passive only.”
“Aye, Captain,” Tomas said.
Commander Joaquin was intently focused on his console. “Realspace in ten seconds,” he said. “Nine ... eight ...”
Kerri braced herself as Havoc dropped back into normal space. It had been a long time since she’d had any reaction to FTL travel - people who didn’t overcome their first nauseous reaction rarely served on starships - but she knew to take precautions, just in case. The display blanked, then started to fill with icons. Hameau’s star - the locals hadn’t bothered to give it a proper name, if the files were accurate - glowed in front of her. Hameau itself was on the other side of the primary. It would make it harder, she hoped, for anyone to notice their arrival.
“Transit complete, Captain,” Joaquin reported.
“No enemy contacts detected,” Tomas added. “Local space is clear.”
“Deploy sensor platforms, then hold us here,” Kerri said. The impulse to power up the drive and glide into the enemy-held system was almost overpowering, but training and experience held it at bay. She needed to wait and make sure of her ground before she put the ship at risk. “Put the live feed on the main display.”
“Aye, Captain,” Tomas said.
Kerri watched, grimly, as the display continued to fill with icons, natural and artificial. The system had two visible gas giants - the files claimed there was a third, which was presumably on the other side of the primary- each one surrounded by a host of artificial emissions. Artificial emissions sources, she knew; everything from cloudscoops to industrial nodes. A number of asteroids were clearly being mined, although - as far as she could tell - there wasn’t a major asteroid-dwelling population. She supposed it wasn’t really a surprise. It was uncommon for corporations to encourage asteroid settlements to develop, despite their advantages. They tended to be difficult for founder corporations to boss around after the first few years.
“I’d say this was more of a stage-three or stage-four colony, Captain,” Tomas said, after the first hour. “There’s more industry in this place than in a bunch of older worlds.”
“It probably helps that they kept the colonial development bureaucrats out,” Kerri commented. She’d yet to see a system the bureaucrats couldn’t screw up, one way or the other. Malice, stupidity or ignorance ... it hardly mattered. The bastards had given themselves a bad name, practically guaranteeing that hardly anyone outside the bureaucracy had a good word for them ... or their masters. “Are you picking up any transmissions?”
“Not much,” Tomas said. “It looks to be pointless chatter. Nothing obviously encrypted.”
Kerri leaned back in her chair. “Tactical, put the ship on condition-two,” she ordered. There was no point in keeping her crew at battle stations indefinitely, not when there was no immediate threat. “Helm, I think we’ll go with Course-Delta. Take us into the system.”
“Aye, Captain,” Joaquin said.
Susan looked up. “We could be there a lot quicker ...”
“Yes, we could.” Kerri kept her face expressionless. Clearly, one lecture on not questioning superior officers on their bridge hadn’t gone very far. She had to struggle to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “If, of course, we wanted to be detected. Which we don’t.”
She understood the younger girl’s impatience, though. It felt odd to be creeping around the system, but they had strict orders to avoid detection. She put the problem aside for later contemplation and forced herself to watch as a handful of new icons appeared on the display. It looked as if the cloudscoops were funnelling HE3 to the asteroids as well as the planet itself. Her analysts suggested that the corporation wasn’t interested in making the asteroids self-sufficient.
Which would be par for the course, Kerri thought. They’d sooner cut their own throats than risk having their people start dreaming of independence.
Her lips quirked. There was literally no one more capable of improvising than RockRats, independence-minded asteroid dwellers. She would have been astonished if someone wasn’t already thinking of ways to circumvent the corporation’s dictates, probably by setting up fission reactors or even concealed fusion power plants. Who knew what would happen, if the system was left alone? Civil unrest? Civil war? Or a simple declaration of independence? She shrugged. It wasn’t going to happen.
The hours ticked by, steadily wearing down the crew. Kerri sent her bridge crew to rest as they crawled through interplanetary space, then took a nap in her ready room. It felt odd to be sleeping when the ship was in danger, but she knew - through training and experience - that there was very little actual danger. If they were detected ... theoretically, they’d have plenty of warning to reverse course and evade contact, or simply escape, before it was too late. It wouldn’t be easy for the locals to set up an ambush without being detected themselves, although she knew it could be done. If that happened ...
Nothing materialised as she slept, then returned to the bridge. Hameau itself was growing larger within the display, a slightly oversized world surrounded by a single moon and thousands of pieces of space junk. She sucked in her breath as she saw the impossible sight, her experience telling her that her passive sensors had to be having flights of fancy. Earth’s halo of industrialised asteroids and space habitats had been huge, but Hameau was an order of magnitude bigger. It took her several seconds to realise that most of the rocky asteroids had been utterly untouched by mankind.
“My God,” Susan said. “What happened here?”
Tomas looked up. “Well, Ensign, there were some very angry aliens who blew up a moon and the debris ...”
“Please,” Kerri said. She’d read the files. No one had been able to give any real explanation for why Hameau was surrounded by a halo of asteroids, but she doubted the truth included aliens. No traces of alien life had ever been discovered. It was far more likely that the double-system - more like a triad system, really - had been unstable until gravity had torn one of the worlds apart. “We don’t need to waste time on a snipe hunt.”
She felt her expression darken as she studied the sensor feed. Dozens of asteroids were being mined, or converted into industrial facilities, or ... the scale of the program was astonishing, the vision quite beyond anything she would have expected from a latter-day interstellar corporation. She silently saluted whoever had come up with the plan, even though it was inconvenient. They were well on their way to establishing a formidable industrial base. She tapped her console, making a handful of projections. It was hard to be sure, but it looked as if Hameau was well on the way to becoming the most efficient industrial base in the sector.
“Captain,” Tomas said. He sounded hesitant, as if he expected her to refuse him without thinking. “I’d like to deploy a pair of stealthed drones.”
Kerri hesitated, silently weighing up the pros and cons. The drones were tiny, compared to the ship. The odds of them being detected were very low, even in an empty system. Here, with so much space junk orbiting the planet - her sensors tracked a handful of chunks of debris falling out of orbit and burning up in the atmosphere - it was hard to believe that the drones would be detected, let alone identified. The system had to be a nightmare to secure. The sensor grid must either be stepped down or ... her lips quirked in amusement. The alarms would be going off every day. The defenders must be sick and tired of the sensors crying wolf.
And when a real wolf comes along, no one believes in him until it is far too late, she thought, dryly. And then everyone starves to death.
“Launch the drones, ballistic-only,” she ordered. There was no point in wool gathering. The corps needed the information only drones could provide. “Steer one of them into the planet’s atmosphere.”
“Aye, Captain.” Tomas sounded surprised. He knew as well as she did that they had orders to minimise risk ... but he also knew, he should know, that some risks had to be taken. “Drones launching ... now.”
Kerri smiled - normally, the beancounters would have thrown a fit at her sending a drone to certain destruction - and then sobered as more and more data flowed into the display. The planet was heavily defended, although most of the defences appeared to be automated weapons platforms rather than giant battlestations. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not. Battlestations were formidable opponents, but they were also easy targets. They couldn’t hide from incoming missiles or move to evade them. Their only real advantage came in soaking up hits, and even that wouldn’t last. Sooner or later, their defences would be ground down.
“I’m picking up twelve warships, holding station just above the halo,” Tomas said, slowly. “None of them are within engagement range, none appear to be powering up. The largest appears to be a battlecruiser.”
