The Empire's Corps: Book 04 - Semper Fi

by Christopher Nuttall

  And if the Empire was truly gone ...?

  The future seemed bright, full of promise ... and all hers.

  Chapter Twelve

  The answer, unfortunately, is simple – and rooted in human nature. An average person can be very smart, capable of understanding that the world is not black and white. A group of people, on the other hand, is nowhere near as smart as the stupidest person in the group. They tend to look for simple answers and reward political leaders who offer them, even though there are rarely any real simple answers to be found.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, Authority, Power and the Post-Imperial Era

  “You’ve gotten better,” Jasmine said, as Mandy threw a kick at her. “Much better.”

  “Not as good as you,” Mandy said. She sounded frustrated. “I should have gone to the Slaughterhouse too.”

  “You wouldn't have made it through Boot Camp,” Jasmine said automatically, and then stopped herself. The spoilt brat Mandy had been wouldn't have survived Hell Week in Boot Camp, but the woman she’d become might have managed to pass through the Slaughterhouse and receive a Rifleman’s Tab. Or maybe not; quitting was easy in Boot Camp. The recruits just had to walk up to the Sergeants and admit they couldn't take it. Mandy hadn't been able to simply quit the pirate ship.

  “Probably,” Mandy said, unaware of Jasmine’s thoughts. “I’m sure you were much better than me when you started too.”

  Jasmine shrugged. She’d grown up on a far less developed world than Earth, where outdoor activities were keenly encouraged, rather than being pushed to one side in Earth’s towering cityblocks. But then, outdoor sports had always encouraged independence of mind and that was the one thing Earth’s rulers were desperately keen to suppress. The last time Jasmine had been on Earth, the system had seemed so fragile that one false move could start an apocalypse.

  “Not as good as you are now,” she assured the younger girl. “But you keep trying to close with me. That’s a mistake. You can't fight me at close quarters or I’ll kick your ass.”

  “Maybe I should spar with one of your subordinates,” Mandy said. She grinned, suddenly. “Am I allowed to ask them?”

  Jasmine blinked in surprise, wondering if Mandy was trying to distract her. “There’s no regulation against it,” she said, recalling a handful of Imperial Navy officers who had sparred with the Marines on a regular basis. Some of them had been pretty good too. “Or do you have something else in mind?”

  Mandy flushed. “Maybe,” she said, trying to be coy. “Does it matter?”

  “It might to whoever you ask to spar with you,” Jasmine said. She dodged another kick, then lunged forward, knocking Mandy to the deck. “And it can get dangerous.”

  “Life is dangerous,” Mandy said, ruefully. Jasmine was holding her down too firmly for her to escape. “I wish I’d known that three years ago. I might have been able to do something about it.”

  Jasmine stood up and held out a hand, helping Mandy to her feet. “It isn't that easy,” she admitted. “But you’ve come a long way.”

  She looked down at her friend, remembering how Mandy had looked when they’d first met. Beautiful, with long red hair spilling down over a shirt two sizes too small ... but also weak, unprepared to face the untamed universe. Now, after several months of captivity and two years of hard work and training, she looked ... healthy, as strong and confident as she could be. And yet there was still the vague hint of brittleness surrounding Mandy, warning Jasmine to keep an eye on her friend.

  Jasmine’s wristcom bleeped. “We’d better shower and leave the compartment,” she said, letting go of Mandy’s hand. “Others want to use it too.”

  She stripped off the exercise suit as she stepped into the shower compartment, allowing warm water to wash over her body. Mandy joined her a moment later, the hesitation she had first shown when sharing a shower long gone. Jasmine looked away from her, granting her friend what privacy she could, as the water flow terminated. Hot air blew down over them, drying the water off their bodies. Jasmine smiled, remembering how some civilians had reacted to showers on military starships. Water was strictly rationed by the crew.

  Outside, she pulled on her shipsuit and checked the telltales quickly. It was far too easy to imagine a disaster in phase space, one that might damage a starship as ill-maintained as Lightfoot seemed to be. Wearing a shipsuit might make the difference between life and death, although Jasmine knew better than to make more of the garment than it was. Her instructors had always staged decompression exercises near compartments where emergency life support equipment could be found.

  “Let's face it,” the Drill Instructor had said, when the recruits had asked. “If you’re not near emergency gear, you’re dead. Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.”

  And if you suffer an accident in phase space, you’re dead anyway, Jasmine thought, as she waited for Mandy to join her. There were stories of starships limping out of phase space after suffering a serious accident, but as far as she knew they were just stories. It was far more likely that a starship would be able to travel from star to star at sublight speeds, which would take years, than survive an accident in phase space.

  “I need to go back to the bridge,” Mandy said, as she checked her wristcom. “We’re due to arrive in three hours.”

  Jasmine nodded. It had been a tedious trip – normally, Marines travelled in stasis if the journey time was longer than a couple of weeks – but it was finally coming to an end. She felt the old shiver in her chest as it finally sank in that they were about to test themselves, once again, against a powerful foe. Admiral Singh might be far more capable than any of their other enemies. She certainly had a great deal more firepower.

  The Admiral just had a single heavy cruiser, she thought. Admiral Singh may have nine battleships.

  She winked at her friend, then headed out of the compartment and down towards the refitted hold. Sergeant Hampton had taken it over and turned it into a small exercise room for the non-Marines, forcing his fellow refugees – and Mr. Canada – to work hard in hopes of preparing themselves for the oncoming mission. Jasmine opened the hatch and glanced inside, seeing the three non-Marines working through their routine. Kate looked horribly sweaty, sweaty enough to make her shirt cling to her chest, revealing the swell of her breasts. Tired, worn ... she still looked attractive enough to catch a man’s eye. No wonder she’d managed to break the refugees out of their prison and help them to get control of the freighter.

  “Lieutenant,” Blake said, as he came down the corridor. He’d been reluctant to work with his new partner at first, but the certainty that they would be going into action soon had concentrated his mind. Besides, Watson was definitely a joker; he’d reluctantly admitted that his former comrades had called him Winker, although he had no idea why. “We just completed our set of personal exercises.”

  “And coming here to tell me about it?” Jasmine asked, as she closed the hatch to ensure that the non-Marines weren’t disturbed. “I wonder why.”

  Blake pasted his best shit-eating grin on his face. “We were trying to prove our dedication by reporting to you in person?”

  Jasmine rolled her eyes. “That sounds plausible,” she said, sardonically. “And how did your exercises go?”

  “We die only one quarter of the time now,” Watson assured her. “And we scored a new record in the shooting gallery.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Blake admitted. He hadn't been the only Marine to be unhappy with the makeshift facilities. “The system crashes every so often; the hack isn’t really perfect at all.”

  “We’ll just have to make do,” Jasmine said, although he understood his point. “It’s civilian gear and can't be pushed too far.”

  She scowled. The shooting galleries the Marines used to test their skills included holographic representations of civilians; men, women and children, all caught up in the combat zone. Shooting one in the midst of combat cost the Marine points – and hundreds of press-ups if the Marine actually went into negative
points. Her class of recruits had wondered if the Drill Instructors actually rigged the galleries to ensure that they were always doing press-ups. Even Han hadn't had so many civilians caught up in the line of fire.

  But civilian VR systems weren't supposed to include civilians at all. Jasmine had never been a gamer – VR games had been rare on her homeworld – yet she’d heard enough to know that they’d had as much of the violence as possible stripped out of them. Indeed, some of the more violent games had been banned ... which hadn't stopped bootleg copies of the games being smuggled from world to world. It said something about the Empire’s skewed priorities that there was almost no effort being made to prevent pornography vile enough to suit the most depraved tastes, or entertainment videos that were even more depraved, being shipped from world to world.

  I suppose that if they’re masturbating, they’re not plotting, she thought. But how much of the Empire’s population wasted their lives away in front of the entertainment screen?

  “We’ll probably lose the next championship match,” Blake predicted, glumly. “3rd Platoon will laugh at us.”

  “If we get back safely, we can spend a few weeks breaking ourselves of the bad habits,” Jasmine said. She keyed her wristcom, flipping to the Marine channel. “General muster; right now.”

  She led the way down into the compartment where the remaining Marines were rapidly mustering, forming up in neat rows. Sergeant Harris inspected them, then looked over at Jasmine and reported that the Marines were all present and correct – apart from Sergeant Hampton. Jasmine hadn't expected him to attend; his task was to whip the non-Marines into shape, rather than serve as part of the platoon. He didn't want to admit it, but it had been years since he’d served in the Corps.

  “We will be arriving at the edge of the Corinthian System in three hours,” she said, making a show of glancing at her wristcom. The Marines followed suit; the wristcoms were linked to the freighter’s main computer, allowing them to watch the countdown to arrival. “Once we’re there, we may not have much time to plan our approach.”

  There was no disagreement. They’d gone over all of the possibilities, from brazenly flying into the system disguised as mercenaries to posing as a freighter crew ... to sneaking through the defences in armoured combat suits. One of the scenarios, proposed by Sergeant Hampton, had even included a missile attack on the planet as a division, purportedly in the name of the Greenland Liberation Front. Jasmine wasn't sure she liked that idea- one of the missiles striking the planet’s surface would be disastrous - but they might not have a choice.

  “We should not be detected as we drop out of phase space,” Jasmine continued, “but you have to be aware that Admiral Singh might have patrolling craft on the edge of the system. In that case, we will slip back into phase space before they can eyeballs us – hopefully, they will take us for pirates who thought better of sticking around. Luckily, we can catch up on our sleep while waiting for Harrington to complete her survey of the system.”

  “More sleep,” Blake said. “I’m rested here, Lieutenant.”

  “Hurry up and wait, again,” Jasmine said. She grinned. “Sorry.”

  She could understand Blake’s irritation. It seemed to be true of all military organisations in history; they bust a gut getting into position, then they had to wait for the order to carry out the next stage of the offensive. At least they weren't working with the Civil Guard on this operation. The officers held back the start time so their men could get ready, but the men knew it so they kept lagging, forcing the start time back still further ... if the Core World Civil Guard had ever managed to surprise the enemy, no doubt the guardsmen had been equally surprised. Jasmine knew that she would have been.

  “Don’t worry,” she added. “Once we know what we’re doing, everything will go very quickly indeed.”

  “And then we will wish we were back in our comfy beds,” Sergeant Harris said, stiffly.

  Jasmine smiled, then glanced around the compartment, moving from face to face. “This is going to be the trickiest mission we have undertaken – ever,” she said. “We won’t be fighting pirates or insurgents – we will be the insurgents. And we’re blind. We have very limited intelligence and what we have is completely out of date. I cannot warn you enough that we must not take anything for granted.”

  She allowed her smile to widen. “Which is pretty much what we always get from Imperial Intelligence,” she added. “We have to get back in that mindset.”

  There were nods from the Marines. Commonwealth Intelligence worked better than Imperial Intelligence had ever dreamed of working, if only because there were fewer layers of bureaucracy for the information to work its way through. Imperial Intelligence would probably have worked better if there hadn't been so many different analysts competing to see how much they could remove because it didn't suit their worldview.

  “You’ve read the debriefing notes,” she concluded. “Admiral Singh is operating a reign of terror – and it is our job to do something about it, as well as keeping her too busy to think about raiding the Commonwealth. We must not fail. We will not fail.

  “We are Terran Marines; the most capable military force in history. If it can be done, we can do it. We will do it.”

  She watched their faces, knowing that they too felt the butterflies she felt before the mission actually began and there was no longer any time to worry about what they were doing.

  “Dismissed,” she said, quietly. “Relax, eat some of the foodstuffs we took onboard at Avalon, catch some sleep ... because soon we will be moving.”

  The Marines relaxed and scattered, some heading for the gaming rooms while others walked towards the dining compartment. Jasmine watched them go, feeling oddly conflicted. It hadn't been a very good speech, she was sure. Colonel Stalker would have made a much better one while rallying the troops to attack the enemy. But what else could she have said?

  She turned and strode out of the compartment, back towards where Sergeant Hampton was drilling the non-Marines. He looked up as she opened the hatch, then listened gravely as she told him to ensure that his people relaxed too. None of them had seemed very happy with even the mildest proposal for reaching the planet. If they had to do it the hard way, Jasmine had privately determined that the non-Marines would be sedated. The experience bothered Marines and experienced spacers alike. It would be nightmarish for groundhogs.

  “I’ll make sure they get some rest,” he assured her, when she finished. “And you too, Lieutenant.”

  Jasmine nodded, although in truth she didn't feel like resting. Part of her was as keyed up as the rest of the Marine Riflemen. Shaking her head, she walked to the mess and found one of the ship’s crew preparing fried chicken for the Marines. She hesitated – the tradition of senior officers serving their men before an operation was normally only applied to Captains and other higher ranks – then took the ladle and started to serve the food herself, without comment. The cook looked surprised, but other Marines understood.

  Their faces reminded her of the first time she’d been served by a senior officer, back on Han. It had felt weird, she remembered, but at the same time it had been a link to the traditions they'd learned about at the Slaughterhouse, traditions none of them had really grasped until they’d entered the field as qualified Marines. Marine officers were taught to serve first, then lead; Imperial Army officers never had the experience of being grunts down in the trenches.

  Once the platoon was fed – traditionally, the Marines had to help with the washing up, but the cook chased them out before they could break more than a couple of plates – they went back to their compartment and tried to sleep. Jasmine felt too keyed up to sleep still, but she concentrated on her mental disciplines and eventually felt sleep reaching for her. She must have slept, but it still felt as if she hadn't slept at all when she felt the starship returning to normal space. They had arrived in the enemy star system.

  She stood up, left Sergeant Harris in command and hurried to the bridge. The main display,
far smaller than it would have been on a warship, was showing a star and little else. At this distance, it was impossible to see Corinthian itself, although it would show up on gravimetric sensors. Starships, on the other hand, would not.

  “Transit completed, Captain,” the helmsman whispered. There was no need for anyone to whisper, but few escaped it when they were sneaking around a hostile system, as if the slightest sound might jinx the entire mission. “We are holding position, two AUs short of the phase limit.”

  Mandy nodded. “Run passive sensor sweep,” she ordered. “Are we alone?”

  There was a long chilling pause. “No active starships detected,” the sensor officer reported. Several crewmen breathed signs of relief. “Some limited chatter from in-system.”

  Jasmine felt a shiver running down her spine. Someone could be lying doggo, hiding in seemingly-empty space ... and watching for intruders with passive sensors alone. They’d be almost impossible to detect until it was far too late. The odds were vastly against it, but it was still a worry. She’d be worrying until they made it down to the surface.

  “Take us into stealth,” Mandy ordered, “then contact Captain Delacroix. Inform her that she is cleared to proceed.”

  And good luck to her, Jasmine thought.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Old Earth, the development of atomic power prompted a level of hysteria in the ill-educated mind that unscrupulous politicians used to their own advantage. No one would deny that nuclear power had dangers, particularly when the power plants were built by states that cared little for simple safety precautions. However, such dangers could be averted – but the 'nuclear is evil' mindset was too deeply embedded to be easily removed. The simple fact that every development throughout history offered its own dangers was overlooked – or ignored.