Lao Pak watched them go. “You believe Lao Pak, now? You pretty smart. But no wait for your two soldiers. They not find anything. Need to go now.”
Chhun removed his helmet so he could look Lao Pak in the eyes. “Walk with me to the airlock.”
“We go on stroll? Okay, I go with you. You chief legionnaire. You tell Wraith I a big help. Deserve big credit raise.”
As they passed the solar chargers on the way to the main control interface, Chhun paused to initiate the departure sequence. This station might still be needed for future travelers, and shutting it down to preserve as much power as possible was protocol. They could always turn it back on if Lao Pak was lying.
Chhun pulled out the blaster pistol they’d taken off the pirate during a search and held it out to him. “Here.”
Lao Pak eyed the weapon suspiciously and then quickly snatched it back. “Why you give back? I wouldn’t give back.”
“Because I believe that Captain Keel sent you, and I trust him.”
“I not do that either.”
Chhun folded his arms. “You don’t have to. But you do need to answer my next question. You said we had to leave now. Why?”
Lao Pak mimicked Chhun and folded his own arms. “I tell you already. I have appointment. Can’t be late.”
“With who, the Republic?”
“Republic?” Lao Pak scoffed. “No, who care what they think? The Gomarii.”
Chhun furrowed his brow. Why would the Gomarii be on Herbeer, and why would they have any say about when a shuttle can or can’t arrive? The synth mines were for penal labor in the galaxy’s most notorious penitentiary. What did that have to do with a race that had built its reputation on humanoid trafficking?
The answer made Chhun feel sick the moment it hit him. “You’re saying the Gomarii dump unwanted slaves at the synth mines? That the Republic profits from slave labor?”
Lao Pak made a face, as if suggesting that what Chhun had said was stupid to the point of incredulity. “No. Gomarii get to take monthly shuttle load of prisoners to sell as slaves. That what we go to pick up—can’t be late.”
That was worse than Chhun had imagined. The Republic—his own government, one he’d fought and bled for—was selling its people into slavery for… “For what?”
“What?” asked Lao Pak. “You mean why? Because Gomarii not run and tell how bad synth mines are. They not say how many innocent people working the mines—innocent like Lao Pak.” The pirate crossed his fingers. “They in it together, Republic and Gomarii.”
“Well,” Chhun said, gripping his blaster rifle tightly, “once we get our friend out, that’s all gonna change.”
Lao Pak shrugged. “Not my problem. I just get you inside.”
A chime sounded from Chhun’s helmet. He was being hailed over L-comm. Nothing beyond the ding-deet-ding of the chime would be audible until the bucket was over Chhun’s head and his biosignature was confirmed. A nifty little trick to keep anyone from eavesdropping on the L-comm in the event they captured a dead leej’s bucket.
The bucket back on his head, Chhun said, “Go for Chhun.”
“Ship’s clear,” reported Fish. “Not much to look at, but it’s clear.”
“Acknowledged.” Chhun went squad-wide on his comm. “Let’s get on board the ship. Jailbreak begins now.”
Synth Mines
Herbeer
Owens looked over the latest strength and positioning reports of the guards on a datapad lifted from some careless Gomarii. It was amazing just how much contraband his troop of cast-off legionnaires had acquired in the years since their inception. And from conversation with some of the men, he’d gathered that this forgotten remnant of the Legion had been a thorn in the side of the Gomarii slavers ever since they organized. It had been something of a cold war, but not without its open battles. With real casualties on both sides. Except the Gomarii could always send in new guards, whereas the Legion had to wait for a newly arrived tragedy, a stand-up soldier wrongfully sent to spend the rest of his days toiling away for the Republic.
“There’ll be a reckoning once I get these boys out,” Owens mumbled to himself. He rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He hadn’t been sleeping, and the constant glow of the datapad wore on his eyes. Maybe one of the guys could find him a pair of replacement shades. That would be nice.
All signs pointed to another off-world transfer of prisoners into the trafficking market. Men and women… and probably children born into the darkness of the synth mines… would be smuggled to planets like the zhee home worlds, where slavery was only nominally illegal. Or to planets with a complex culture involving indentured servitude, where the wealthy and elite convinced themselves at balls and parties that the bondage they perpetrated was actually better than the plight of the so-called common man living in freedom. Slavery wasn’t an easy sell and wasn’t officially tolerated—core world sensibility didn’t allow it to be—but it was a reality.
Hopefully what Owens and Synth Company had planned would put a dent in all of that. Probably not, but it was worth the effort.
“Still at it?”
Rowdy was at the opening to the cavern that served as the Legion headquarters on Herbeer.
Owens leaned back in his chair—liberated from an armored shuttle undergoing repairs—and stretched as a sigh turned into a long yawn. “Sorry,” he said when the yawn subsided. “Yes, still at it. Based on what I’m reading about Gomarii procedures and behavior—and this is good intelligence, you men did the Legion proud here—a transport of prisoners ought to be happening in the next two days.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Rowdy. “That was my thought, too.”
Owens pulled at his beard. “Let me ask you something. You seemed to be doing a fine job leading this group. You didn’t need to hand over command to me. So…”
“So why did I?” The first sergeant brushed a hand over his hair, as if checking to make sure his flat-top remained level. “Life in Herbeer is hard. Honestly, I think a lot of these people almost look forward to being taken by the Gomarii, if only for a change of pace. A chance to see a sun again. Of course, they haven’t seen the things we’ve seen when we’ve busted up their slaver rings. The depravity and cruel inhumanity makes life down here seem almost suburban.
“But like I said, it’s a hard lot down here. And men need something to work for, something to live for. All these leejes, they were heartbreakers and life-takers. They knew how to KTF, and they lived for their brothers. Would have died for them. Would have preferred to have died than… this.
“When I took over command, the troop had been led well by a sergeant. Leej had been a corporal only a month earlier, and then got railroaded onto Herbeer right after his promotion. He was doing as good a job leading the men as any officer I’d ever served with. Nothing required a change in command. But he told me, for this to work, for life down here to have a purpose, we had to be as much like the Legion as possible. That included command structure… and so I took over.”
“What happened to him? To the sergeant?” Owens asked.
“He died a few months later. Killed by the Gomarii during a raid that got us the supply of synth we’re still using to meet quotas. We found out about a guard rotation and hit ’em while they were under-manned. But there were enough. He died to give us a near-permanent reprieve from the quotas.”
Owens’s throat gave an appreciative growl. Men like that dead sergeant—men like Rowdy—shouldn’t be wasting the prime of their lives gathering what could be collected by bots. They shouldn’t even be spending their time in the considerably more humane Legion prisons sprinkled throughout the galaxy. Men like the ones he’d encountered on Herbeer needed to be on the front lines. In the fight. Making sure that…
… that what?
The Republic wasn’t perfect. Owens knew that. He’d dealt with the points. Served long enough to know the difference between total war and the lawyered-up wars waged over the last fifteen years. As a citizen, he was concerned wit
h the constant strivings of the House of Reason and Senate, both of which seemed more concerned with partisan approval ratings than doing something for the good of the entire Republic. But he never would have imagined his government was doing to its own innocent citizens what it was doing here on Herbeer.
He couldn’t stand for that. Couldn’t fight for leaders who would orchestrate such things. And he had no doubt, given that Delegate Orrin Kaar himself had made an appearance at his show trial, that this corrupt abuse of power went to the very top of the government.
“Rowdy,” Owens said, his fingers forming a steeple in front of his lips. “How hard would it be for us to get our hands on some long-range comms and blasters?”
Rowdy nodded with enthusiasm. He seemed to like where Owens was going. “Right. Let’s start with the easy question: blasters. We’ve already acquired a few, though not enough for any serious fighting. You’ve probably noticed that the guards only keep blaster rifles close to central command, and they use the energy whips farther into the mines. That’s to keep us from ambushing some guard far from command and confiscating his blaster.” He smiled. “Sometimes guards don’t follow the directive. We take advantage when we can. But it’s taken a long time to get what we have.”
“If that’s the easy question,” Owens said, “I’m looking forward to hearing the answer to the hard one. Long-range comms?”
“Like I said, that’s tougher. The guards’ portable comms only work on-planet, for communication with one another. That’s by design—the last thing the Republic wants is for word of what’s going on down here to reach the rest of the galaxy. That’s why every sentence is life. And that’s why all comms with enough range to leave the planet are hard-mounted in the command and control center.” Rowdy looked up at the major. “You have someone you want to contact?”
“The Legion commander,” Owens said. “If he learns what’s happening down here, this place will be swarming with leejes. One message is all it would take.”
Rowdy gave a half smile and looked down at his shoes. “Well, we might be able to do it… but it would put an end to our little counterinsurgency against the Gomarii.”
“How so?”
“There’s a lot of back and forth right now. The Gomarii are willing to lose synth, food, even lives. And the occasional blaster. Because none of those things are going to raise the ire of the Republic. But losing comms, even for a single message… that would put the entire operation at risk. They’d fight that possibility with maximum force. You’ve seen the turrets, right?”
Owens nodded.
“They can be activated from various points around their HQ. The turrets will fire at anything that moves, but are smart enough to not harm the guards. Or so I’m told—I’ve never seen them in use. But a couple here have. I’ve heard tales of past attempts at armed revolt where the guards turned on every auto-turret and nearly wiped out the entire prison population just because things were escalating too quickly.”
Owens shook his head. “They can always find more prisoners, right?”
“Sounds about right. Something they’d say.”
“Still, why not call in Republic backup to keep things from reaching that point? I mean, the prisoner-to-guard ratio isn’t in our captors’ favor,” Owens said, scratching his beard. “And they know there are a number of leejes in the prison population who ain’t friendly. If that’s me in command, I’m calling in at the first sign of a problem to at least have a quick reaction force standing by.”
Rowdy nodded. “That’s because you’re thinking like someone with integrity. The guys running things down here, that isn’t them. The Gomarii are getting rich because the Republic looks the other way. But the Gomarii have to maintain the impression that they have everything under control—that there’s no risk to the Republic here. If Herbeer starts calling in every skirmish or riot… I mean, each one is a chance for someone to get jumpy and call off the whole deal. Trust me, the guards will go to almost any length to keep the situation they have going. They’ll kill all the prisoners, just to prove they’re able to keep a lid on things, before they’ll call the Republic.”
“Is there any way to disable the auto-turrets?”
“Only from the command center. Which, if we’re after long-range comms, is where we’ll be anyway. If we can get there.”
“And what about the possibility of getting off-planet?”
Rowdy laughed. “That’s the ultimate fail-safe. There’s only one flight-ready shuttle or freighter allowed down here at a time, and you can be sure the homing beacons can be adjusted to send a blind-flying craft straight into the dirt. Unless you control the facility, there’s no getting off this rock.”
Owens shut off his datapad and tossed it onto the makeshift table in front of him. He stood, feeling the fatigue from too little sleep. “So any long-range comm requires taking over the command center. Any serious action, anything big, beyond just disrupting the slave round-up, requires that we shut down the auto-turrets—which again requires taking over the command center. And getting off this planet also requires taking over command. So it’s all or nothing. Anything less than a complete takeover results in mission failure.”
“And a lot of deaths,” added Rowdy.
“And a lot of deaths,” echoed Owens. “I’ll be honest here. I’m fifty-fifty on whether to just make the Gomarii pay for gathering up a new load of slaves, or whether to take a shot at the end zone. Classic dichotomy, the type we prepared for in Academy. Risk it all? Or make sure you can fight another day.”
Rowdy closed his eyes, slowly, and nodded. He seemed relieved to not to be making the call himself. If he had advice, he held it a guarded secret, letting silence settle over the cavern.
“You should go for the throat,” said Crux.
He had entered the room undetected. Owens didn’t know how much the old man had heard, and he didn’t particularly care. But he was interested in hearing the opinion of what had to be one of the few living survivors of the Savage Wars.
“Tell me why,” Owens said.
The old man hobbled toward the major with a limp that Owens didn’t remember seeing before. As if the weight of the coming words affected him physically. “In the Savage, there was never any fightin’ for another day. You squared up with the Savage marines and fought until one side didn’t have nothin’ left. Every fight was definitive. Every battle to the death. You wanted to survive, and that meant killin’ any way you could until there weren’t nothing left to kill.”
This was true. The nature of the struggle was such that when the Legion engaged a Savage army, whether invading a planet they’d taken or tracking down one of their light-hugger cruisers, the fight didn’t end until one side was utterly destroyed. And for centuries, it went back and forth, with the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance.
Crux compressed his eyelids into slits of fury. “We won that war by being more vicious and hard than the Savage. We were always smarter, but we fought ’em on their terms. Gave ’em a taste of their own medicine until they were utterly and completely vanquished. There’s no force in the galaxy that can stand up to us once we go Legion on them. You asked me, Major… I say it’s time the Republic and their Gomarii hirelings find that out the hard way.”
“Thank you for your opinion, Crux.” Owens turned back to Rowdy and tilted his head to the side, popping the vertebrae in his neck. “Sergeant Cosler, round up our squad leaders. We’ve got some work to do.”
12
Victory Squad
Deep Space Survival Outpost Tully 3
Lao Pak had to be the worst pilot Chhun had ever seen. The freighter was large and unwieldy—Chhun had seen that the moment he stepped aboard. On most of these big galaxy-class ships, the handling was so dreadful that the flying was left up to the bots. The skeleton crews of six or seven men were around mostly just in case the bots needed maintenance. But Lao Pak had no bots to help him. Instead, he flew the massive cargo-hauling beast of burden on full manual.
&nb
sp; And he was terrible at it.
To start with, the pirate engaged his sublight thrusters before the airlock-dock sequence had completed. From his vantage point on the spacious bridge, Chhun watched on monitors as various supplies and detritus that had been on the deep space survival station were sucked out into the vacuum of space before its emergency airlock doors could finish closing. Worse, a quick cycle through holocam feeds showed that the freighter was still magnetically attached to the airlock’s extendable covered bridgeway that served as access hatch between the station and whatever ship docked with it. That didn’t bode well for anyone who showed up to that station in a life pod, as life pods typically weren’t equipped with bridges of their own.
As the freighter accelerated in sublight, the impervisteel bridge clanged loudly against the outer hull. Lao Pak released the magnetic grip, and the bridge floated away into the vacuum of space.
“It fine, it fine,” said Lao Pak.
“Yeah. Sure.” Chhun continued to cycle through the holofeeds, checking for any damage to the hull. He was no pilot himself—Keel was the only legionnaire he’d ever met with a real affinity for flying—but he might be able to spot something that could spell disaster for their outbound flight. He’d just gotten off one survival station, and he wasn’t keen on the idea of being forced to visit another.
Everything looked all right to his untrained eye, so he moved on to cycling through the interior holofeeds. Several of these were dead or showed nothing but compressed static.
Lao Pak swatted Chhun’s hand away. “Stop touching cameras. You break ship.”
“How is a holocam going to break a galaxy-class freighter?” Chhun asked. “Where’d you even find this thing?”
“It gift.”
Masters, who was aboard the bridge with the rest of the crew, walked over to stand between his captain and the unqualified pirate. “I dunno, Cap, this hunk of junk looks pretty bad. You could actually break something. Maybe even cause the reactor to blow…”
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