Their Last Full Measure

by Christopher Nuttall

  Hameeda shuddered. “Really?”

  “It’s the logical thing to do,” Piece said. He sounded as if he didn’t care, although she knew he must be deeply concerned. “They know just how quickly we can press captured fabricators into service. If they can’t keep them out of our hands, they’ll destroy them.”

  “Ouch,” Hameeda said. She could see the logic, but ... it was sickening. The entire system would be reduced to penury. “Are they that desperate?”

  “I think it’s starting to sink in that they could lose the war,” Piece said. “They’ve never come close to losing a war since they climbed into space. They haven’t even fought a war with a peer power for generations. And now ... humanity, an insignificant little race from a system that doesn’t even have a gravity point, is kicking them in the ass. They’re finally coming out of denial.”

  “How terrible,” Hameeda said, archly.

  Piece grinned at her. “How long do you have? Before you have to leave?”

  “I can stay a few more hours,” Hameeda assured him. She started to undo her tunic. “I don’t have a tight schedule. I’m expected to recon Gateway before heading back to the fleet.”

  “Great,” Piece said. He stood and unbuckled his trousers. “I’ll give you something to remember me by.”

  Hameeda laughed. “Ass.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “We’re back on an alien freighter,” Butler said, as the team waited in the giant airlock. “I thought I’d sworn off them.”

  “I thought you’d sworn at them,” Martin said. “Whose dumb idea was this, again?”

  “Yours, sir,” Butler said.

  “A brilliant idea,” Martin said. “Sheer genius. A brilliant idea that cannot possibly go wrong.”

  “Well, they say self-delusion flourishes in the minds of the deluded,” Butler said, dryly. “And, as a sergeant, it is my job to knock it out of you.”

  “When we get home, I’m taking a look at your job description,” Martin said. “And if this goes wrong, I’ll be sure to add scapegoat to your list of jobs.”

  He snorted, then sobered as the freighter quivered. They were far too close to Tokomak One for comfort, close enough that a single burst of plasma fire could reduce the freighter to atoms. He would have preferred a more conventional assault, perhaps one with a squadron of starships providing covering fire ... if they didn’t simply blow the alien fortress to atoms itself. But that wasn’t an option. Admiral Teller and his fleet were still too far away, while the Tokomak were cracking down hard. They had to move now.

  And is that something we believe to be true, he asked himself, or simply something we’ve told ourselves to justify moving now?

  He shook his head. The rebels had hundreds of thousands of cells being prepped for battle ... one of them, perhaps only one, would jump the gun or do something else stupid, something else that would draw the Tokomak like carrion drew flies. He would have been astonished if the Tokomak didn’t have some inkling there was trouble afoot, despite the combination of endless false alarms and suborned dispatch officers. They knew Admiral Teller wasn’t that far away. The rebels would be in a better position to negotiate with the human invaders if they were in control of the planetary system when the humans arrived.

  And they’re not going to control everything, even then, Martin warned himself. There were only a handful of rebel cells on the gravity point fortresses, nowhere near enough to take the stations by storm. We have to dig in and prepare for a fight.

  An alert bleeped up in his helmet as the air was steadily pumped out. He tensed, bracing himself as the last few seconds ticked away. They were still alive, thankfully. Personally, if he’d been in command of the defences, he would have kept Tokomak One completely isolated from the rest of the system. It was a huge station. It could sustain itself long enough to get resupply direct from Tokomak Prime, if there was no other choice. But the local government was clearly having problems maintaining control. The rebels swore blind that they hadn’t reported the full extent of their troubles to their superiors. Martin hoped that was true. It would make it easier to shock the Tokomak if - when - the Twins fell.

  The hatch opened, smoothly. Martin felt a flicker of fear, half-expecting the compartment to violently decompress even though he knew the air had been pumped out, before he walked to the edge of the hatch and peered into space. They were close enough to the station to pick it out with the naked eye, a mute testament to the sheer size of the structure. They weren’t that close, on a human scale. The planet below looked odd, as if it was half-enclosed by a giant metal sphere. It took him a moment to realise he was seeing the edge of the planetary ring. This close, it dominated the horizon. It was easy to believe it was more than just a ring.

  He swallowed hard, then threw himself into space and glided towards Tokomak One. His passive sensors updated rapidly, reporting matter-transmission beams and radio signals flickering between the station and the converted starship. The teleports had to be powerful, if there was enough bleed for his sensors to pick them up ... unless the signals were already degrading. He grimaced, trying not to think about what would happen to a living being if the signals suffered even the slightest degradation. They’d be lucky if the receiving station could put them back together again.

  Tokomak One grew larger as they approached, growing larger and larger until it dominated the horizon. His perspective altered - he closed his eyes as he rotated the suit - until it felt as if he was descending towards a planetary surface. His enhanced eyesight picked out a handful of weapons and sensor emplacements, scanning space for threats ... he hoped, desperately, that they’d miss something as small as a single human. Even the smallest missile known to exist was much - much - bigger. The Tokomak would hardly risk themselves on such a mission. Why would they expect their human enemies to do the same?

  They also consider their servants expendable, Martin reminded himself. They’d have no qualms about sending them into the fire if they felt they had no choice.

  The ground came up and hit him. There was a thud, running through the suit so loudly he was sure they’d heard it on the other side of the armour, followed by silence. Martin waited, half-expecting to be struck dead at any moment. They thought the point defence couldn’t be brought to bear on targets clinging to the hull, but they couldn’t be sure. And the station carried hundreds of gunboats. Any one of them could systematically blast the marines off the hull, if it had reason to look. He counted his men as they landed, using hand signals to get them moving towards the uppermost hatch. They didn’t have much time. A single rebel cell jumping ahead of time would put the whole system on alert.

  He kept his eyes low as they walked up the station, towards the hatch they’d picked out ahead of time. The Tokomak had been careful, but they hadn’t been able to keep copies of the station’s plans from leaking to the rebels. Perhaps they’d simply assumed the rebels wouldn’t be able to take advantage of them. Martin suspected it was true, if only because they could have smuggled a nuke onboard if they’d wished. But Tokomak One was so heavily armoured - inside as well as outside - that a lone nuke, detonating inside the structure, wouldn’t take it out. Not completely. The Tokomak would have time to pass control to whichever station was next in line before they abandoned Tokomak One.

  The hatch looked innocuous as Corporal Higgins went to work, uncovering the processor box and hacking into it. Martin braced himself, knowing they were embarking on the most dangerous part of the operation. It would be easy, very easy, to open the hatch, but doing it without setting off an alarm would be trickier. The Tokomak might be perfectly aware of the danger of leaving someone trapped outside, yet they were equally aware of the dangers of letting someone enter the station without supervision. His lips quirked as Higgins gave them a thumbs up, then opened the hatch manually. The chamber inside was empty. Martin breathed a sigh of relief as he led the way inside, the hatch closing silently behind him. He felt trapped, again, until the inner hatch rotated open. His suit bli
nked up a series of alerts as atmosphere rushed into the chamber. The air was poison.

  Clever, Martin thought. What sort of madman would poison his own air?

  It made sense, he decided, as he directed the team forward. The poison - it was really a nerve gas, one that would be hard to detect without military-grade sensors - wasn’t species-specific. It would attack almost any higher life form known to exist, even the Tokomak themselves, and condemn them to death in screaming agony unless they were already immunised. And then ... he realised, suddenly, why the Tokomak weren’t so concerned about someone sneaking onto the station. They’d poisoned the air. That little detail hadn’t been in the files, either. A rebel might take his helmet off and drop dead seconds later. He’d never know what’d hit him.

  His heart started to pound as they made their way along the corridor, heading deeper and deeper into the structure. Tokomak One was immense, but - according to the rebels - seriously undermanned. A significant number of trained personnel had been reassigned, either to the alien fleet or the battlestations orbiting the gravity point. It wouldn’t have normally mattered, Martin knew. As long as Tokomak One remained isolated from the rest of the universe, they could have dominated the entire system while undermanned. But ... he tensed as they reached a closed hatch and started to open it. Who knew what was on the other side?

  Butler held up his hands in a simple signal. Two seconds.

  Martin nodded, lifting his rifle as the hatch opened, revealing a corridor leading towards another hatch. A pair of Tokomak stood on guard outside, looking bored. They had no time to react before Martin opened fire, riddling them both with bullets. He would have preferred to use a stunner, or a plasma weapon, but either one would set off alarms. It was just possible the Tokomak wouldn’t tune their sensors to watch for chemically-propelled weapons, something so primitive they were hardly ever used. The Tokomak had derailed many races as they climbed towards the stars by taking them as slaves and introducing them to modern technology.

  He smiled, thinly, as the bodies hit the floor. The metal beyond looked undamaged. It was designed to stand off a nuke. A handful of bullets wouldn’t even scratch the paint. The people inside probably wouldn’t have heard the noise. He glanced back at his men following him, then drew his stunner and keyed the hatch. It hissed open. He felt his smile grow wider as he jumped inside and opened fire, spraying the Tokomak with stun bolts. They never stood a chance.

  “You’d think they’d be a little more careful,” Higgins observed, as he went to work on the commander’s console. “Don’t they know there’s a war on?”

  “They’re in the safest place in the system, hundreds of light years from our fleet,” Martin reminded him, as he checked the offices. The governor-general was nowhere to be seen, probably somewhere on the planet or the ring. Martin hoped he’d be surprised when his servitors tried to cut his throat. “How were they to know they might be boarded at any moment?”

  He smiled, remembering some of the stories the old hands had told him when he’d gone through OCS. There had been military guards who’d gotten lax, despite being in the middle of a war zone. They hadn’t been allowed to keep a close eye on their local allies, he’d been told, and they’d even banned soldiers from wearing their personal weapons on base. The results had been inevitable, once the enemy had managed to realise it wasn’t a trap. He supposed the Tokomak hadn’t been that far wrong. The rebels couldn’t have taken Tokomak One without stealth and armoured combat suits. If the enemy had had the slightest hint of warning ...

  Higgins looked up. “I have control, sir,” he said. “They’ll probably try to lock me out, if they have time, but ...”

  Martin took a breath. They were committed ... he shook his head. They had always been committed. It was the rebels who were going to be committed now, who’d have to take up arms and fight in the certain knowledge the entire planet would be scorched if they lost. And yet ... he’d seen the rebels, tasted their desperation and hatred and grim determination to fight back even if it meant nothing more than kicking and scratching their way to the gallows. And yet ... Piece might be cold-blooded about the vast number of aliens - of people - who were about to be killed, but Martin didn’t have that luxury. His hometown wouldn’t have been such a disaster zone if the people who’d ruled it hadn’t thought of the inhabitants as nothing more than numbers.

  “You know what to do,” he said. “Start the program.”

  He forced himself to sit back and watch, grimly, as the automated defences rotated and started firing at the planet below. The rebels had prepared a targeting list, covering everything from military garrisons and police stations to communications centres and Tokomak-only residences. Martin wasn’t so sure those were good targets, but the rebels had insisted, pointing out that they were effectively fortresses and communications centres in their own right. Bombarding them was the only way to keep the Tokomak from rallying and organising a counterattack, or a defence that might last long enough for help to arrive. The starships on the gravity point couldn’t break through the planetary defences alone, but help was on the way. Martin was morbidly sure of it. The Tokomak would want to fight Admiral Teller well clear of their homeworld.

  “Firing pattern complete, sir,” Higgins reported. “All targets destroyed.”

  “Switch to the secondary list of targets,” Martin ordered. “And then transmit the message.”

  “Aye, sir,” Higgins said.

  Martin sucked in his breath, trying not to think about the death and destruction he’d unleashed across the planetary surface. It was easy to forget that the icons marking destroyed targets actually marked dead bodies and shattered lives, that for every guilty person they’d killed they’d probably also taken out a handful of innocent people who hadn’t deserved to die. The rebels hadn’t cared - they hated all the Tokomak, guilty and innocent alike - but Martin did. And yet, there was no choice. Half-measures would only doom the uprising before it had truly begun.

  And am I telling myself that because it’s true, he asked himself, or because I want to convince myself that I’m not the bad guy?

  He pushed the thought aside, savagely, as the first reports started to trickle in. The rebels had risen, right across the planet. Isolated enemy positions, the handful too close to vital locations to be smashed from orbit, were under savage attack, their defenders being pressed to the limit. Emergency transmissions flooded into Tokomak One, everything from screaming accusations to desperate pleas for help. Martin watched howling mobs chasing the Tokomak and their allies, shuddering at how the Galactics had been transformed into helpless villains. He wanted to look away, but he forced himself to keep watching. He had to bear witness to the disaster he’d unleashed.

  The hours ticked by slowly. Reports came in from across the system, noting revolts both successful and unsuccessful. Hundreds of freighters left orbit, gambling they wouldn’t be fired upon as they fled for the gravity points or deep space. A handful of Tokomak installations managed to isolate themselves from the datanet, suggesting that whoever was in charge had a working brain. It wasn’t enough to save them. The rebels kept pressing against them, capturing hundreds of facilities and industrial nodes. A number even fell without a fight.

  But there will be a fight, once they get organised, he thought. The corrupted datanet wouldn’t keep the gravity point fortifications from realising what had happened. And then ... what? The starships couldn’t retake the planets, but they could do a lot of damage if they were willing to run a few risks. Thankfully, there’s nothing incentivising them to try to force the defences now.

  He felt sick. The reason there were no incentives for the Tokomak to attack quickly was that just about every Tokomak who’d been on the planet was dead. Or captured ... the rebels had promised to try to take prisoners, but Martin had little hope they’d keep that promise. He watched the live feeds as they grew stronger, broadcasting scenes of anarchy and horror. The Tokomak were gone and the rebels were turning their attention to the collabo
rators, slaughtering everyone who’d worked for their oppressors. Martin could understand their anger and rage, the desire to see the bastards dead, but ... he shook his head. The rebels were likely to destroy the workforce that made the system work if they weren’t careful. Piece understood the risks, but did they?

  “The rebels want to join us,” Butler said. “And so does Mr. Piece.”

  “Clear the atmosphere first,” Martin ordered. The rebels wouldn’t thank them if their leaders died on the station. “And tell them to wear protection, just in case.”

  “I imagine getting pregnant now would be a bit of a bother,” Butler said, dryly.

  Martin snickered. “That is terrible,” he said. It wasn’t the worst joke he’d heard, but it was definitely in the bottom ten. “That is so terrible that I want to court martial myself for laughing.”

  “I’ll speak in your defence,” Butler said. He shot Martin a mischievous look that was strikingly childish. “The worst jokes get the best laughs.”

  “Hah.” Martin snorted. “Tell them to wear spacesuits. And, once they’re in command of the station, we’ll see where we can make ourselves useful.”