by Jon Evans
“Civilian drones? All our drones are civilian, Corporal.”
“No, I don’t mean that kind of civilian, I mean the drones the citizens own for their own use.”
“It can’t be that many, surely. Are there really that many grown men that want to play with drones?”
“I’ll take that in the spirit it was intended, Mrs Robinson. But I wasn’t thinking of the adults, you’ve got kids here as well, right?”
7
Atticus stared at the holo-table, amazed that the thing had survived the firefight that had engulfed the city but it was an absolute boon. It was showing the terrain around Ashton, and the colony’s geologists and engineers had marked several sites that could be used to conceal the dropships. Atticus had been trying all morning to decide the best way to distribute them. His eyes were beginning to glaze over with the mind-numbing tedium.
The problem was to balance utility and security. Keeping the dropships close to Fort Widley maximised their value by ensuring they would be available if they needed to evacuate civilians or run med-evac from hot zones.
But any launch might be noticed by the enemy, and a launch close to Fort Widley might draw attention to their base. Did they dare use the dropships except in an emergency?
Atticus twiddled the stylus between his fingers, thinking. He was vacillating, stuck with an awkward decision that could easily go either way, and he needed to break the deadlock.
“Get a second opinion,” he muttered to himself, drafting a message to request assistance from Lieutenant Warden and Governor Denmead.
Then he went back to his pondering. His feeling was that the dropships should be far enough from Widley to allow launches to take place without revealing the location of their base. That would leave just two proposals and a limited set of options for locations.
Governor Denmead arrived just before Lieutenant Warden and Atticus went straight to work, laying out the risks and rewards of the two options. He answered their questions quickly then called a vote. Each of them scrawled a letter on their data slate.
“And I vote option B,” said Atticus, turning his slate around to show his choice.
“Unanimous,” said Denmead once she and Warden had flipped around their own slates, “well, that was easy.”
“So you say,” grunted Atticus, guiltily aware that he’d spent half the morning on a question that they had just settled in under fifteen minutes.
“To summarise,” he said, repeating himself to be sure that everyone agreed and understood, “the pods will be stripped from the dropships, installed in Fort Widley and the dropships positioned well away from both Ashton and the caves. The locations are reasonably accessible, but the dropships will be concealed, to some degree, by the surrounding terrain. Two will be in canyons over here,” he said, pointing at a spot on the holo-table, “and the third will be below a rock arch near some cliffs over there. We’ll add anti-scan camo-netting to make life a little more complicated for the enemy.”
He paused to look at Denmead and Warden.
“Any questions?”
“Are the dropships armed?” asked Governor Denmead.
“Not with anything worth mentioning,” answered Warden, “and before you ask, it’s not likely we can build and mount anything that would make them useful as gunships for assaulting ground troops.” He paused but spoke again as he saw a new question in Denmead’s face. “And don’t even think of suggesting ship to ship engagements,” he said, watching her face as the question died.
“Is there anything else we should take out along with the pods?” she asked next.
“Weapons, armour and munitions are already taken care of,” said Warden
“We aren’t going to spend any significant time in them,” said Atticus thoughtfully, “so there are probably some creature-comforts that could be dumped. We need the beds in case we have to use them for medical evacuation. Let’s have a couple of Marines go through the dropships again with your team, Governor, just in case there’s anything we won’t need, and you can use in Fort Widley.” Warden nodded, making notes on his slate.
“Good, thanks. We lost a lot of equipment to building collapses, and I don’t want to spend manufacturing resources on anything that you don’t need for the fight. We’re scavenging what we can from the city and moving it to the caves or to other places we can use as temporary stores,” said Governor Denmead.
“Fine. Warden, get it done. Unless anyone has anything else on this subject, I suggest we move on and get the dropships stripped as quickly as possible. The sooner it’s done, and they’re away from the caves, the better.”
And the easier I’ll sleep, thought Atticus as he followed the other two out of the room and flicked off the light switch.
8
“Right,” said Governor Denmead, rubbing at her tired eyes, “so that’s the last of the task assignments unless anyone can think of anything else to add to the list?” She paused, but nobody else had the strength to make suggestions.
“Good, which means that there’s only one topic left to cover, namely how we will form our militia. The civilians will have to help with the defence,” she said, speaking over the angry voices of her councillors, “they will help because there’s no other way. Captain Atticus will explain how the militia will function and how we will integrate his force to make our very limited resources stretch as far as possible. Captain?”
Atticus nodded and prepared to launch into the details of the plan that he and Denmead had concocted. He'd lost count of how many times they had reconvened today, but at least he had only had to attend some of the meetings.
Denmead, on the other hand, had been in every significant meeting and he'd seen the updates coming over his HUD all day. Items would get added to the main list to be actioned, assigned to someone and sometimes, completed. Then as each new meeting started, a flurry of additional items would be added to the list.
They had covered food, water, energy, the hospital and the fabs and transport. Then there'd been meetings to update on earlier meetings and add further actions. Attendees changed as necessary, and Denmead was enforcing strict discipline on time-wasting; it seemed her earlier comments had been taken to heart. Now, finally, most of the tasks they had identified had been categorised, prioritised and pushed to their assignees and, Atticus hoped, things were starting to happen.
“As the Governor says, I've joined you to discuss what I hope is the final topic of the day, namely the formation of a militia. I don’t have the numbers to mount a solid defence, let alone a counter-attack, and we now know that the fleet isn’t carrying significant numbers of clones, so it'll be weeks at least before reinforcements arrive to allow us to fight back and drive the enemy from the city.”
“Anyone not already assigned a task or a team,” said the Governor, stepping in smoothly with the next part of the explanation, “will be issued weapons and given as much training as we can manage. They’ll divide into troops and provide what support they can to the Captain’s Marines. Only citizens whose roles are essential to our survival will be excluded from the militia.”
“B Troop of my company are deploying as we speak. After this meeting is done, I'll be going to brief Lieutenant Hayes, who leads the troop. She will be taking the lead with the militia and training the recruits. You've already been through the list of available citizens, and the good news is that we have enough to deploy a battalion,” said Atticus.
He moved to stand beside a large display on the wall and sent a diagram of the battalion structure to the display.
“As you can see from this diagram, the Lieutenant becomes a battalion commander, quite a promotion at her age. Each group of civilian militia will be led by a Marine, and the overall companies will be led by NCO's. The militia will be instructed on the absolute basics; shooting, keeping to cover, working as a team. Then they'll be deployed in defence of the colony,” Atticus said.
“But we've got only a few days before the enemy arrive!” Councillor Stoat blurted out, “Yo
u propose to give them less than a weeks’ training and then hurl them into battle against those... those... things?”
Atticus shook his head. “Most of them have either already been involved in the fighting, or they've been here during the defence of Ashton. They're used to being in a war zone, albeit not at the level we're now facing. I'm also not planning to hurl them into battle as you put it. The militia will be used primarily for defensive purposes so that our professional forces, the Marines, can focus elsewhere.”
He brought up an image of the city with locations marked for the defensive positions he'd planned with Warden and Colour Jenkins.
“I won't go into much detail, but these are the locations we’ll be using as our defensive positions. The militia, along with B Troop, will be responsible for holding Ashton as long as we can. A Troop will be launching attacks on the enemy in an attempt to disrupt their operations.”
He paused, looking around to see if anyone would ask questions.
“Regarding the training period,” he said when it was clear that the councillors were too shocked to ask anything at all, “it won't be a full week of combat drilling. None of the militia recruits were in essential roles, and they don't have other duties, but we need a lot of manpower to get Fort Widley up and running. They will be our labour force and will spend some of each day doing those tasks under the guidance of their section leaders. We’ll give them as much training as we can, and that's the best we can do,” said Atticus.
“The NCOs are used to looking after new recruits and remember, Marines will be distributed amongst the Militia to lead by example. They'll provide instruction on the basics and then position them, wherever possible, in defensive positions with clear and straightforward instructions on how long to stand and when to retreat. That should maximise their effectiveness and minimise the number of body deaths.”
Atticus paused to allow all this to sink in. The councillors looked somewhat shocked and not a little scared but, strangely, they seemed to have accepted the general strategy with remarkably few complaints.
“If there are no objections,” said Denmead, “we’ll wrap up there. Captain Atticus will make the arrangements with his people, but you will need to speak to your constituents and make sure they get their assignments. And make sure you field any complaints; the Captain and his Marines can't be dealing with anyone who doesn't like the cards they've been dealt, they're far too busy. If you have anyone whose finished their assigned duties and is no longer needed, they'll be moved to the militia. We will have casualties to replace.” She stood up before anyone could ask questions and, with a slight grimace at the pain, left the room.
Atticus answered a few minor questions about practical matters of organisation, and then the meeting broke up, and they all went about their work. He sat there a few minutes longer, working through his own checklist, then went to find volunteers amongst B Troop.
He grinned. They were going to love this.
9
Atticus looked at the limited tactical overview they’d been able to pull together and tried to factor in everything they knew about the enemy, which wasn’t enough for his tastes. He shook his head.
“It’s not going to be enough,” he said quietly so that only Denmead could hear him. He’d found that they worked well as a team. She was an effective administrator and a gifted politician and had proved her worth a dozen times over in the last few days. “There’s just too much that can go wrong and we just don’t have the forces.”
It was a discussion they’d had several times and repetition wasn’t making things any better. Denmead gave him a stern look and checked the scanners again.
“A day out,” she said, pointing at the map of the solar system showing the enemy fleet’s rough position in relation to New Bristol and the other planets, “a day out and there’s nothing we can do but watch.”
That wasn’t quite right, of course, but they had already done everything they could think of doing and now it was just a case of seeing how the plan went.
They sat for several minutes watching as the map updated slowly before them. It was depressingly mesmerising.
Then the comms tech, Barlow came in and Atticus could tell from his face that the news was unlikely to be good.
“Message from HQ, Sir,” said Barlow, “there was an update on our own fleet - nothing interesting there - and an encrypted package marked for your eyes only. I’ve forwarded it to your tablet, Sir.”
“Thank you, Barlow,” said Atticus, turning his attention to his tablet as Barlow nodded and left. There was indeed a package of encrypted information in his inbox, just arrived. Atticus tapped into it, entered his private key and waited while the tablet re-confirmed his identity. Then he began to wade through the information that HQ had deemed useful for him to have.
“They’ve matched the markers in the DNA samples we sent to the clones supplied to a Lost Ark ship that went missing a couple of hundred years ago,” he said finally, summarising the information for Denmead. “It seems that it was a privately funded club of malcontents who weren't happy with the worldwide legal restrictions agreed by Sol governments. The core members of the group were ethnically Russian, but had members from every continent and country still capable of supporting life in the years before they launched.”
He went on, “A multi-cultural melting-pot of people seeking the freedom to experiment with genetic manipulation, body-hacking and cloning in an attempt to achieve functional biological immortality.”
He skimmed the rest of the information as Denmead nodded and thought about that.
“The ship was the Koschei, named after, if you can believe it, an ancient Slavic or Russian archetypal antagonist, Koschei the Deathless or Koschei the Immortal. Appropriate, given the crew’s philosophy and intentions.” Atticus read on then snorted. “Very thorough. They’ve even sent us an image of a painting from 1927, for all the good it’ll do us.” He turned the tablet around to show Denmead a picture of an ancient king cuddling a maiden.
“Gruesome,” murmured Denmead, frowning at the image. Then she paused at a brief spasm of pain in her shoulder, “so what we're facing is some kind of ancient rebel group?”
Atticus shrugged, “If I recall my history, at the time a lot of groups sent out Arks. The control of the national governments was more fragile and international relations hadn't recovered. Lots of private groups and companies funded their own Ark ships because the governments weren't sending enough. Earth was a cesspool back then, and everyone wanted off it.”
“Skip forward a couple of hundred years and these people have gone out, far beyond the frontier of colonised space. Where the hell did they go?”
Atticus looked at her and frowned. He steepled his fingers and then pressed his hands to his face, holding his head in his long-fingered hands for a moment. The gesture was utterly human, in an utterly alien-seeming body. But it wasn't alien. Not really, she thought. It was human, just not in a way she recognised.
“More importantly,” he suggested as he leaned back and looked up again, “why did they come back?”
That stopped her train of thought. Why had they come back? Where had they been? Where and why? “I don't have an answer for that. They've come here and attacked without warning, as if we were the hostile party.”
This was really just another in a long string of human encounters where explorers from one country had discovered or claimed a land that was already settled. Natives and invaders had probably looked at each other, wondering about their strange appearance and often the encounters ended in hideous violence, even if they started peacefully.
“Yes, they're aggressive but... why? There's nothing in here that suggests this group was anything but a slightly crackpot bunch of people who wanted to modify their bodies and live as they pleased. They weren't violent or disruptive. They didn't have any strong political ideology, and they weren't suggesting anyone else should do what they wanted to. They just wanted to go out and explore, as so many of our ancestors have do
ne, and adapt their bodies according to their own rules. From this, they seem more like scientists than soldiers or revolutionaries,” Atticus said.
Denmead looked through some of the information, then suggested they both get through the entire report. They read in silence for some time, Atticus making copious notes.
It was a while before Denmead spoke again.
“You're right. Almost none had any military or police service. They were mostly scientists and engineers of one form or another. Computing, biology, bionics, cryogenics, high energy physics, electronics, clean energy. They probably had the best-educated crew and passengers for centuries. But does it matter at this stage?”
“Yes. Yes, it does Governor. I'm a military man; I need to know about my enemy to defeat him. They've been out there somewhere, possibly for a century or more. They had the people and capability to improve their engines en-route. We have no idea how far they've been, but we do know their ship was unusually large and sophisticated for the time. They weren't dreamers, they were realists and they assembled a large group of like-minded, talented and smart people. Their goal was to establish a colony, that much is clear, and for a long time they even sent back updates.” He paused for a moment to think about that.
“Not all of the Arks communicated; some were highly isolationist. These people weren't. They wanted to remain in touch but, eventually, the updates stopped and they joined the ranks of the Lost Arks. It was assumed they had encountered something terminal, but I've been looking at the population projections. They were headed past New Bristol on the route they broadcast back to Sol. If they founded a colony out there, they would have had at least a hundred years to build it, maybe more.”
Denmead asked which section it was, and he told her, she skipped back to population figures and looked at the charts for a few minutes, muttering to herself as she read.