Ep.#14 - The Weak and the Innocent (The Frontiers Saga)

by Ryk Brown

  * * *

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Commander Telles called after Jessica as she left the interrogation room.

  Jessica turned back to face him. “What do you want, Telles?” she asked as she turned back and continued down the corridor to the exit.

  “It’s Commander Telles, Lieutenant Commander,” he said as he followed her down the corridor, “and I would like a word with you, in private.”

  “I’m a little busy right now,” Jessica said as she passed the guard station in the entry foyer and headed out the door.

  “I can make it an order if you like?” the commander pressed as politely as possible.

  “Don’t push your luck,” she remarked as she exited the building and descended the steps down to the walkway outside.

  Commander Telles stopped at the top of the steps, standing fast, his hands behind his back as he spoke. “You will stop right there, Lieutenant Commander,” he barked, “or I will have you arrested and brought up on charges. Am I making myself clear?”

  Jessica turned back to face the commander, her head cocked to one side and contempt in her eyes.

  “Stand at attention, Lieutenant Commander!” the commander demanded.

  Jessica begrudgingly straightened her posture into something resembling full military attention.

  “I believe a salute is in order when in the presence of a superior officer.”

  Jessica took a deep breath, stiffened up, and slowly raised her hand to her brow in salute, holding it fast until returned, as per protocol.

  Commander Telles slowly descended the steps, making her hold the salute for as long as possible to make his point. He walked up to her, stopping a meter away, then raised his hand and returned her salute. “At ease, Lieutenant Commander.”

  Jessica assumed a proper stance, her feet shoulder width apart and her hands clasped behind her back, again making an obvious effort to follow protocols. She stood there looking straight ahead, saying nothing.

  “I would like a word with you… in private,” he repeated slowly. He pointed to an open courtyard to his left. “If you please.”

  Jessica turned and walked over to the courtyard a few meters away, coming to a stop and resuming her original stance. “How may I help you, Commander?” she asked without emotion.

  Commander Telles stood slightly less than a meter away from her. “What the hell is wrong with you, Lieutenant Commander? Making threats to a superior officer? Calling out my master sergeant? Insubordination, behavior unbecoming… Am I leaving anything out here?”

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?” Jessica asked.

  “Speak your mind, Lieutenant Commander.”

  Jessica maintained her posture as she looked directly at the commander. “You know damn well what this is about, Telles. You said you’d get her off of that rock. You said you’d take care of it yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Then where the fuck is she, Commander?”

  “She is with Gerard and the CLA. He gave me his comm-frequency and authentication algorithm before he left. When we were ordered to withdraw, I knew we did not have the resources to come for her and that doing so would likely endanger her further. So I sent Gerard a message, told him to take her and go into hiding, and that we would attempt contact later, when it was safe.”

  “That wasn’t the plan,” Jessica protested.

  “Neither was withdrawing!” Telles argued, “and neither was losing half my men! In case you’ve forgotten, this is a fucking war we’re fighting. Shit doesn’t always go as planned. Now, when the opportunity presents itself, I will go in and get Naralena out, myself, or I will die in the attempt. Not because I made a promise to you, but because it is the right thing to do, and it will be the right time to do it. And just for the record, the Ghatazhak don’t like leaving people behind. We’re just smart enough, and strong enough to know that sometimes, the mission has to come first. And those that get left behind know that as well.”

  Jessica stood there, saying nothing as the commander continued to stare at her. It was the most emotion she had ever seen him exhibit in all the months she had known him. She wanted to argue, but she had nothing to say. She knew he was right, and that she was wrong, and she wanted to apologize to him, but the words just wouldn’t form. Instead, all she said was, “Is there anything else, Commander?”

  “Negative,” Commander Telles replied. “Actually, there is one more thing. I would recommend that you refrain from getting ‘in the face’ of any more of my men. They don’t all like you as much as the master sergeant and I do.”

  A small grin threatened to peek out from the left side of Jessica’s mouth. “Yes, sir.”

  Telles noticed the subtle change in her expression and decided that he had indeed accomplished this particular mission. “Dismissed.”

  Jessica turned smartly and headed for the airfield. As she turned the corner between the buildings, Kata Mun and her porta-cam operator came walking toward her.

  “Lieutenant Commander Nash,” Kata called out. “I was hoping we might see you. We heard you were on Porto Santo. Do you have time for an interview?”

  “Now’s not a good time for me,” she said in all honesty. “However, there’s a few dozen Cetian women being held over in the interrogation center that you might want to interview.”

  “Are we cleared for that?”

  “I just cleared you. If they give you any guff, just ask to speak with Commander Telles, and tell him I said it was a good idea.”

  * * *

  Naralena looked out across the lake, watching the sunlight dance off the ripples in the water. It was peaceful here, more peaceful than she could ever remember. It was hard to imagine that she was in any danger and she had to remind herself not to let her guard down. The last time she had let herself relax on this world, Gerard’s men had come bursting in the back door to rescue her and Jessica just as the Jung were breaking through the front door to arrest them.

  She took in a full, deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but why are we sitting here again?”

  “It’s what couples vacationing at a lake do, isn’t it?” Gerard posed.

  “I wouldn’t know. We didn’t have lakeside cabins on Volon. We didn’t even have lakes on Haven.”

  “No lakes? Where did your water come from?”

  “The ground. Haven has a long dark period while it goes behind its parent world. I don’t even know how many Earth days it is. A few months, probably. It would rain constantly. Everything would get soaked. The ground would turn to mud, things would flood, it was awful. Then, the sun would return and the rain would stop. There would be a lot of ponds and such for weeks, but they would eventually dry up. The rest of the water would just seep into the ground.”

  “Where did the water for the rains come from?”

  “There were some oceans on the far side, but no one lived over there. They were full of sulfur and they smelled horrible. You couldn’t get within a few hundred kilometers of the coast.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a place worth settling, if you ask me,” Gerard commented.

  “It was pretty much just a mining camp that eventually grew into a city. There’s a huge ring of rock and ice, rich in all sorts of ores and minerals. The Haven Syndicate set up camp there centuries ago. Most of the worlds in the area go there to buy the ores that are unique to that system.”

  “What’s the Haven Syndicate?”

  “A couple of brothers who didn’t want to work for the family business in some system. Nobody knows which one, actually. They got themselves a couple ships and struck out on their own. They found a mining camp where a handful of families were barely scraping out a living. They tried to buy in, but the families didn’t want them. So they killed them and took it for th
emselves.”

  “Sounds kind of like the Jung Expansionist caste,” Gerard said.

  “Caste?” Naralena wondered. “I’m not familiar with that term.”

  “It’s like a sub group within a culture, one with certain common beliefs or goals that separate their group from other groups within the same culture. The Jung have four of them, at least at the top level. They used to refer to themselves as clans, but as the Jung empire grew, the clans became more numerous and caste groupings started to form.”

  “What are the four castes?” Naralena asked.

  “Ruling, Business, Military, and Labor,” Gerard replied. “Ruling and Military can be further subdivided as well. The Ruling caste was originally composed of the founding clans from many centuries past. In recent centuries, they divided into two main branches. The founders became known as the Isolationists. They believe that the Jung should only be concerned with their own world. The Expansionists are the ones who are a threat, and there are two mindsets there as well; the ones who want to take over the entire sector, and the ones who want to rule everything. We call them the Conquerors.”

  “Shouldn’t the military caste be the Conquerors?” Naralena questioned.

  “You’d think so, yes. But the military caste doesn’t concern themselves with politics. They only care about service. They, too, are divided into two sub-castes.”

  “This is getting complicated.”

  “The Honor caste is the original Military caste. They have always seen themselves as the protectors of the Jung empire. The Warrior caste is far more aggressive, caring only about conquest. They see battle as the only path to honor. They’d rather die in battle than live a long, boring life just ‘playing’ soldier.”

  “It sounds like a very strange system,” Naralena said, “and very confusing.”

  Gerard shrugged. “Not really. The more you study it, the more sense it makes. It’s all about human nature. Every one of us has our motivations. That’s the key to understanding such systems. You have to understand their motivations. What do they want? How can they get it? To what lengths are they prepared to go to get it? There’s always a reason behind everything any person, or group of people, does. It doesn’t always make sense to everyone else, but it must have made sense to those who chose to do it, or they wouldn’t have done it to begin with.”

  “I don’t know. My father used to say that some men are just evil. At the time, I think he was referring to Caius Ta’Akar.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A prince who killed his own father, then tried to assassinate his older brother, all to start his own empire.” Naralena explained.

  “Others may judge him to be evil, and they may be correct, but I expect most of the conquerors throughout history, even the most ruthless ones, did not consider themselves to be evil. Most believed they were doing what was right for their people.”

  “My father also used to say that if you ask for too much, you might get nothing.”

  Gerard nodded. “Za dvoomya zaitsamee pagonishsya, ni odnovo ne paimayesh.”

  Naralena smiled. “‘If you run after two hares, you will catch neither.’ I forgot, you mentioned you spoke Russian.”

  “On my father’s side.”

  “So, who controls the Military caste?”

  “For the most part they’re controlled by the Ruling caste. Of course, since they are pretty much divided into technically three different camps, decisions are often unpopular with the masses.”

  “I don’t see how the Jung can possibly exert any kind of control over such a vast area, even with comm-drones that can travel one hundred times the speed of light,” Naralena argued.

  “It’s actually not as hard as you might think. Each region has a leader who is free to make decisions based on the Jung empire’s policies known to him at that time. The same is true of the commanding officers of each ship, be they gunships or battle platforms. If the next highest official cannot be consulted in a timely fashion, then the authority to make a decision falls on the highest authority in that area. In most cases, that ends up being either a system ruler or the admiral in command of a battle platform.”

  “What about their military? How do they coordinate on a strategic level? How do they plan for invasions and such?”

  “That’s where it becomes more difficult. Their comm-drones may be fast, but it takes a lot longer to move assets into place. Because of that, Jung forces are in a constant state of flux, moving about to be ready to respond when and where they are needed. That’s why there were twice as many forces in this system as usual. They were building up their forces to re-invade Sol. I even heard rumors that there was another battle group expected in a few years.”

  “The Jung leaders are a patient bunch, I’ll give them that,” Naralena confessed.

  “Some believe that the Jung, at least those living on the Jung homeworld, have much longer life spans than most humans, perhaps two to three hundred years. But I suspect they are indeed only rumors. Another rumor I’ve heard recently is that some of the Warrior caste ships are considering abandoning the Expansionist’s plans to conquer Earth and rule the Sol sector. With the rise of the Alliance, and their ability to jump between stars at will, many are following other Warrior caste ships that left the sector decades ago in search of new human-inhabited systems to conquer. There are stories of hundreds of civilized worlds further out in space, in all directions, all inhabited by the descendants of refugees that fled the Sol sector to escape the bio-digital plague a thousand years ago.”

  “We’ve heard similar rumors,” Naralena admitted. “Do you think they’re true?”

  “It’s certainly possible. There is no shortage of Jung clan leaders who would love to start their own empire, free of the other castes. And one thing’s for sure, the Jung do not like getting their asses kicked, so it makes sense that they would go someplace where they’d meet less resistance.”

  “Do you really think there are hundreds of human-inhabited worlds out there?” Naralena wondered.

  Gerard looked over at her, surprised by her question. “That’s an odd question, coming from you. How many inhabited worlds do you know of back in the Pentaurus sector?”

  “There are at least thirty of them,” she said. “Not all of them are fully industrialized, planet-wide civilizations, mind you; about half, maybe.”

  “How big is your sector?”

  “About the same as Sol.”

  “There’s at least fifty inhabited worlds here, and at least half of them are fully industrialized. So that’s about eighty worlds right there. It only took three hundred years for those worlds to develop here, probably not much longer in your neck of the woods, not after you factor in the travel time getting out that far. So, imagine if one hundred ships left Sol a thousand years ago, all of them headed out in different directions. Each one of them settles a pretty little Earth-like world. They grow, they thrive, they overpopulate, like humans always do. Then they spread out as well, just like the people did in your sector. We’re probably talking in the thousands, not in the hundreds.”

  Naralena thought about it for a moment, as Gerard leaned back onto his elbows and gazed up at the twilight sky. She looked up as well, noticing that a few stars had appeared.

  “Man, what I wouldn’t give for the life span of a Jung, and a ship with a jump drive. Can you imagine all the places you could go? All the people you could meet? All the things you could see?”

  She looked at him, noticing a boyish look on his wrinkled, weather-beaten face. Despite all he had seen and done in his lifetime, he still looked up at the night sky in wonder.

  “It’s getting dark,” he finally said. “We should probably head back. The boys should already have their kills cleaned and ready to cook.”

  “Just a few more minutes?” Naralena begged, looking up at the s
ky herself.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Commander Telles said as they approached the door to the dormitory where the women from the Jar-Benakh were being detained.

  “If these women are from the Tau Ceti system, then I think it’s my duty to report their story to my viewers,” Kata insisted. “Besides, Lieutenant Commander Nash said it would be a good idea.”

  “I know, that’s why I asked,” the commander replied, one eyebrow knowingly raised. “Sergeant,” he said, nodding to the guard at the door.

  The sergeant opened the door, allowing Kata and her porta-cam operator to enter.

  “Just knock when you’re ready to leave,” the commander instructed, after which he nodded at the sergeant again to close the door.

  Kata looked out across the large room. There were barred windows on either side, all with closed shutters on the outside making it impossible for those inside to see out. There were metal bunk beds along either wall, none of which looked terribly comfortable. The women, which Kata guessed to be around thirty in number, were all attractive and young, none of them looking a day over twenty-five. They were all clad in orange, oversized jumpsuits and flip-flops, and every one of them had their hair unceremoniously tied back. The oddest thing was that, for women from worlds that were quite conscience about their appearance, not one of them wore any makeup.

  At least half of the women were gathered around a woman with long, red hair, listening intently to her every word with looks of amazement and disbelief on their faces.

  Several of the women nearest her saw the porta-cam and immediately withdrew, not wanting to be recorded on video. A few others looked curious.