by Ian Douglas
Defenders of the policy pointed out that crime in targeted areas did indeed tend to drop; its critics suggested that the drop was due less to crime than to less reporting of crime; paying criminals to act as police militias was, they said, nothing less than sanctioned and legalized corruption.
In any case, a certain amount of graft, of intimidation, even of violence was unofficially tolerated, so long as the peace was kept. Wherever humans congregated in large and closely packed numbers, there was the danger of panic and widespread violence. Political fragmentation, religious fanaticism, rumors about the Xul or about government conspiracies all spread too quickly and with too poisonous an effect when every citizen was jacked in to the electronic network designed to allow a near instantaneous transmission of information and ideas, especially within tightly knit and semi-isolated e-communities.
Most citizens accepted the minor threat of being hassled by street-punk militias if it meant the authorities could identify and squash a major threat to community peace quickly. The Earthring Riots of 2855—in Corps reckoning the year had been 1080, just twenty-two years before—were still far too fresh in the memories of too many, especially within the orbital habitats where a cracked seal or punctured pressure hull could wipe out an entire population in moments. The Riots had begun less than twenty hours after the appearance of a rumor to the effect that the Third and Fourth Ring food supplies had been contaminated by a Muzzie nanovirus. That rumor, as it turned out, had been false—a hoax perpetrated by an anti-Muzzie fundamentalist religious group—but over eight hundred had died when the main lock seals had been overridden and breached in the panic.
And so the authorities had begun cultivating various street gangs and civil militias, with the idea that the more people there were on the streets with reporting software in their heads, the sooner rumors like the one about a terror-nanovirus one could be defused.
“Sir,” Ramsey said, “we didn’t know those…people were militia.”
“That’s right,” Delazlo added. “They came after us, not the other way around! Started hassling us. They started it!”
“I don’t give a shit who started it,” Jones said. “As it happens, I agree that hiring young thugs off the streets as peacekeepers is about as stupid an idea as I’ve seen yet. Politicians in action. However, the Ring Seven Authority has requested that you be turned over to the civil sector for trial. The charges are aggravated assault and battery.”
Shit. Ramsey swallowed, hard. In most cases, civil law took precedence over military law, at least within Commonwealth territory. They could be looking at bad conduct discharges, followed by their being turned over to the civilian authority.
No…wait a moment. That wasn’t right. A BCD was a punishment that a court-martial board could hand out, not a commanding officer.
“Before we go any further with this…do any of you want to ask for a full court?”
That was their right under regulations. They could accept whatever judgment—and punishment—Jones chose to give them under nonjudicial punishment, or they could demand a court-martial.
But there was absolutely no point in that. They’d all been caught absolutely dead to rights—AWOL and fighting with the civilian authorities. Better by far to take whatever Jones chose to throw at them; whatever it was, it wouldn’t be as bad as a general court, which could hand out BCDs or hard time.
“How about it? Ramsey?”
“Sir,” Ramsey said, “I accept nonjudicial punishment.”
“That go for the rest of you yahoos?”
There was a subdued chorus of agreement.
“Very well. You all are confined to the ship for…three days. Dismissed!”
Outside the lieutenant’s office, the six Marines looked at one another. “That,” Colver said, “was a close one!”
“She could have come down on us like an orbital barrage,” Chu added. “Three days?”
“I don’t get it,” Delalzlo said, shaking his head. “A slap on the wrists. What’s it mean, anyway?”
“What it means,” Ramsey told them, “is she’s keeping us out of worse trouble. Two days from now we’re shipping out.”
They’d learned that fact yesterday, shortly after coming back on board the Samar, but with other things on their minds, they’d not made the connection. The civil authorities might request that the six miscreants be turned over to them for trial, but unless and until they were handed over, they were part of Samar’s company. The needs of the ship and of the mission always came first; by restricting them to quarters, Lieutenant Jones was making sure that the civilian authorities didn’t get them.
Marines always took care of their own.
USMC Skybase
Dock 27, Earth Ring 7
1030 hrs GMT
General Alexander floated against the backdrop of the Galaxy, surrounded by the icons of the Defense Advisory Council. Despite the naggingly unpleasant presence of Marie Devereaux, it was actually a bit of a relief to be here. “Operation Lafayette,” he told them, “is on sched, with T-for-Translation Day now set for three days from now.”
For days, now, Alexander had been submerged in the minutiae of ops preparation. The actual strategic planning he tended to enjoy, with a sense of roll-up-the-sleeves and get things moving accomplishment. Going over the endless downloaded lists of logistical preparations and supply manifests, however, was sheer torture, and he found he was willing to endure even Devereaux’s acidly uninformed tongue to escape it, even if only for a little while.
“I don’t understand your use of the word ‘translation,’” Devereaux put in. “What does language have to do with it?”
“It has to do with a mathematical concept, Madam Devereaux, not with language,” he replied. “You can download the details here.” He paused, ordering his thoughts. How to explain the inconceivable? “Any point in space can be precisely defined in terms of its local gravitational matrix. If it can be so defined, it can be given a set of detailed spatial coordinates.
“Now, the paraspace plenum we call the Quantum Sea is co-existent with…or, rather, think of it as adjacent to every portion of four-dimensional space-time. Practically speaking, that’s where we draw vacuum energy from…the realm of quantum fluctuations and zero-point energy. If we know the precise special and gravitational coordinates of where we are, and the precise coordinates of where we want to go, we can translate one set of coordinates to another by rotating through paraspace.”
“General, that makes no sense whatsoever.”
He sighed. “In simple terms, Madam Devereaux, the Quantum Sea allows us direct, point to point access through paraspace to any place in the entire universe.”
“This is something naval vessels can do?”
“Not naval vessels, Madam, no. I don’t know the engineering specifics, but in essence the translation requires enormous amounts of energy. Skybase is large enough to accommodate the zero-point energy taps necessary to effect a translation…but nothing smaller could pull down that much power.
“So what we’ve worked out is a kind of shuttle plan. We take on board as many of the 1MIEF heavies as we can…the first load will consist of a Marine fleet strike carrier, a Marine assault transport, and either three destroyers or a destroyer and a light missile cruiser for fire support. We make the first translation from Sol to the Puller system, drop those four or five ships off, then translate immediately back to Sol to take on board the next load of ships, which will be queued up and waiting. It will take, we’re now estimating, a total of sixteen such transitions to get all eighty vessels of 1MIEF shifted out to Puller. Obviously, we can take on more light ships in one load, or fewer heavies. We’re only limited by the docking storage space on Skybase’s main hangar deck.”
“Essentially,” Admiral Orlan Morgan added, explaining, “they intend to use Skybase as an enormous fleet carrier.” His icon grinned. “In the case of a fleet strike carrier like the Chosin, Skybase becomes a carrier-carrier!”
“If you’ll recall,”
Alexander continued, “Skybase was designed to reside in paraspace. It’s a fairly simple operation to move out of paraspace and into 4D space at any point of our choosing, if we have the proper field metrics and coordinates to make the transfer.”
“Why weren’t we told this before?” Senator Gannel put in. He sounded irritated. “It seems to me that this represents a significant strategic advantage, not only in war against other human stellar nations, but against the Xul.”
“That’s right,” Senator Kalin put in. “It also means we could send your battlefleet straight to Starwall or to Nova Aquila or wherever we want to go without having to pass through the Puller gate, without trespassing in PanEuropean territory!”
It was an effort not to lose patience with them. “To translate from one point to another,” he told them, “we need extremely exact coordinates for both points. We know the metric throughout Sol-space quite well, of course. We know the Puller system because we’ve had Marines out there for several years, now, and one of the things they’ve been doing, besides watching the Xul on the other side of the Stargate there, is taking gravitometric readings on local space…just in case. The stargates all put a considerable dimple into space-time, thanks to the pair of high-speed black holes each one has racing around inside its structural torus, and we take those measurements as a matter of course so that we can better understand the local matrix.
“We do not, however, have gravitational readings on places like Starwall. We’ve had Marine recon probes out there, but they had other things to keep them busy than flit around taking gravity readings. As for Nova Aquila, we have not yet had any probes out there, either manned or AI. We have absolutely no data on the local matrix out there.
“Does that answer your objections, Senator?”
“Adequately.”
“And have I answered your questions, Madam Devereaux?”
“Yes. You’re saying you can get the fleet to Puller, but not to any place on the other side of the Puller Gate?”
“Exactly. We are fairly confident we can make the translation to Puller, and each successful translation would give us additional data on the metric. We would not even be able to attempt a translation to Nova Aquila, however. We simply don’t have the requisite information.”
“We will be able to use Skybase translations out to both Nova Aquila and to Starwall once we have secured them,” Admiral Morgan added. “We simply need to have the time and equipment out there to make the necessary readings.”
“We think,” Alexander said. “The gravimetric situation at Starwall is pretty complicated. When I say we need exact readings, that’s not a matter of measuring the gravity from the local star and a couple of the closest planets. Starwall is close to the outer fringes of the Galactic Core, and literally millions of nearby stars are affecting the local picture. As for Nova Aquila…well, we’ll know more when we actually get some instrumentation out there. For now, though, it’s first things first. We need to secure the Puller system, and that we can do using Skybase as our transparaspace shuttle. We have the queue orders drawn up and transmitted. According to our current schedule, we will begin loading the first ships on board Skybase later today, using L-3 as our rendezvous point. The first translation to Puller space is now set for 1800 hours GMT, on 0112, three days from now. Operation Lafayette will commence as soon as the first ships are released at the Puller Gate. Any questions?”
“Yes, sir,” General Regin Samuels said. “I note in your plans that this operation will be depending heavily on a Traditionalist Catholic mutiny in the Puller system. Just how reliable is this element, anyway?”
“I believe I can answer that, Regie,” Navin Bergenhal, of the Intelligence Advisory Group, said. “We have good, solid intelligence assets throughout PanEuropean space, including inside both the DST and the DGSE. Those assets, in fact, are how we determined that the French are indeed holding some of our people for questioning.”
Not entirely true, Alexander thought. The initial data had come from Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, still watching and listening quietly from the hidden asteroid base orbiting the Puller stargate. But the Commonwealth’s DCI2 had developed that intelligence further, and brought home a lot of data concerning both the political and the military situations inside Republic space.
“From the Marines’ point of view, General Samuels,” Alexander said, “we will welcome help from local forces if it is available. We will not count on it.”
And that was the final decision made after a very long series of discussions and ops planning sessions, including many hours of virtual-reality simulations playing out each aspect of the mission. Most Marine officers, from the MIEF’s platoon commanders up to Alexander himself, felt the possibility of Traditionalist assistance at Puller was going to be more trouble than it was worth. The situation presented endless possibilities for targeting the wrong PE units, for friendly fire incidents, and for outright deception by the Republic’s defensive forces.
“So, are you saying you don’t trust the Catholics, General?” Devereaux asked.
“I’m saying, Madam Devereaux, that the MIEF will have the greatest chance for success if we welcome any help that’s offered, but go in prepared for no help at all. As a matter of fact, our defensive stature will assume that the T.C. mutiny is actually a PanEuropean deception, a trick. We would be foolish to act in any other way, or to lower our guard without very solid reasons to do so.”
“Quite right, General,” Samuels said, and other military officers in the assembled council murmured agreement.
It was impossible to get a feel for what Devereaux actually thought. Her Net persona was well filtered, her icon image emotionlessly bland in affect. When she’d asked if he didn’t trust Catholics, however, it had been impossible not to get the idea that she was fishing for something—a weakness, perhaps, or an opening for an attack. She was, he knew from her public records, from a Traditionalist Catholic family, but he also knew she wasn’t herself a believer…at least not to the extent of going to Mass or accepting the word of the Papess in Rome as law.
What the hell was her game?
He didn’t trust the woman, not after her attempt to shut down the Marine Corps. He still wished he knew what her personal stake was in the Corps—why she seemed to hate it so. Further searches of available public data had turned up nothing more on her background. So far as he could tell, she was simply a political opportunist who saw in the current situation a possible way of making political capital at the Corps’ expense.
That made her no less of a viper, however. She would need to be watched, and carefully, by the few friends the Marines still had within the Senate. He did not think it impossible that she might even be working for the PanEuropeans; the Québecois link, certainly, suggested that possibility. Quebec and France had been in each other’s pockets for centuries, since the First UN War at least, and possibly even well before that.
At least the chances were good that the woman wasn’t working for the Xul. The Xul, Alexander thought with a wry and inward grin, didn’t work with anyone unless they were Xul, and even Madam Devereaux wasn’t capable of bridging a gap like that.
“My ops planning staff has put together an assault plan,” Alexander continued, addressing the group at large. As he spoke, an animated diagram unfolded in the assembled minds of the audience. “The first ships in will act to set up a local defended space into which we can continue to drop ships and men. As you see here, there are two primary centers of interest within the Puller 659 system…here at the stargate, where our covert listening post is still in operation…and far in-system, here, at one of the moons of this lone gas giant. As of our last set of reports from the LP, the French fleet is in orbit around the gas giant. So far they’ve made no move at all to investigate the stargate.
“We will materialize here….” He indicated an area some 10 light-seconds away from the stargate, and nearly 30 light-minutes from the gas giant’s current orbital position. “With luck, we’ll be able to bring the en
tire MIEF into position before the PEs even know we’re in-system.”
“Won’t they be aware of your ships when they arrive?” General Samuels asked. “Neutrino emissions from your ships’ reactors.”
Samuels had a valid point. The QPTs or Quantum Power Taps utilized by Commonwealth naval vessels required massive input from conventional antimatter power plants to open the zero-point channels. Once those channels were open and functioning, energy from the zero-point field itself was more than sufficient to keep those channels open and working, but the power-up procedure required a lot of initial seed energy…and they wouldn’t be able to go through the paraspace translation with their power taps on. That, any good QPT engineer knew all too well, was an excellent way to release a very great deal of energy into a small volume of space in an accident—a “casualty,” in naval parlance—that would almost certainly result in the complete vaporization of Skybase.
With a thought, Alexander switched on a doughnut-shaped swath of red light surrounding the glowing point of light that marked the Jovian gas giant. “We hope that the answer to that, General, is ‘no.’ At the moment the PE fleet is deep inside the radiation fields of the Puller Jovian. If their sensors are finely tuned enough, they might pick up our reactor leakage, but they would have to know exactly where to look to have much of a chance of picking us up. We’re hoping that the radiation belts in this area—and their own shields against that radiation—are going to keep them pretty well blind to our approach.”