***
“We have all the records downloaded, sir,” the communications officer said. “They’re being routed to intelligence now.”
Colin nodded, shortly. They only had a handful of intelligence officers – Anderson was the most senior – who had volunteered to join the rebellion. They couldn't be trusted in any case; Colin only trusted Anderson because he could have blown the whistle at any time and wrecked the whole plan to mutiny before it had even got off the ground. Still...he’d found some volunteers from Daria’s people and, between them, they could start locating the prisoners the underground wanted liberated.
“Good,” he said. The Colonel was already returning to his transport ship, leaving a pair of Marines on the station along with the secured prisoners. “Prepare to land the landing force.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Good water, yes?”
Simon Alenichev nodded, sipping the water and trying not to edge away from the creature facing him. The crab-like creature, a strange combination of crab and octopus, was equally at home on the land or in the water, but the Garak’Tor preferred to live in the water. There were only a handful of aliens on the penal colony, most of them preferring to keep their distance from the humans, yet he’d managed to make contact with one small colony. They could help each other, even though the aliens touched off every phobia humanity had about insects and underwater monsters.
“Yes,” he said. He suspected that the Garak’Tor were actually more intelligent than humans – a few hundred years of difference and it might have been their empire that overran humanity’s, rather than the other way around – but they were limited to very basic communication without computers and other high tech. The alien’s mouth could barely shape Imperial Standard, while no human could duplicate their language. “It is very good water.”
He straightened up and looked around. Two days ago, a flash-flood had roared down the valley, scouring it clear of life. The planet’s indomitable wildlife was already starting to reclaim the area, bringing with it the dangerous animals that threatened the lives of everyone on the planet. Only Haven, as far as they knew, was relatively safe from the planet’s defenders...and that only through constant patrols and careful precautions. The weather on the planet was unpredictable, to the point where Simon and the other leaders of the small colony feared that one day a powerful storm would destroy their colony and leave them exposed to the planet’s wildlife. The Empire had definitely known what it was doing when it sent the involuntary colonists to the planet. It would probably kill them all eventually.
The trade between humans and Crabs – as most humans called them – was based around water and small supplies. The Crabs could tell if water was clean and pure – water bubbled up from great underground reservoirs, sometimes pure and sometimes very unclean – without running the risk of poisoning themselves. Humanity had the only industrial base on the planet, although it was very primitive by the standards of the Empire, allowing them to trade basic weapons and equipment in exchange. He picked up the small bag of swords and other tools, passing it over to the alien, which took it in one clawed hand. Even watching the alien sent a chill down his spine.
“I’ll meet you in one week,” he said, as the Crab turned and started to scuttle away, down towards the deeper lake. They had an entire colony underwater, the envy of the humans who watched from the shore, although Simon had a suspicion that the planet’s wildlife was attacking their colony with just as much determination as it was attacking Haven. “We’ll be waiting...”
He turned and walked away from the shore, careful to stay on the sand that had been deposited there by the flash-flood. The planet’s most dangerous wildlife resembled nothing so much as giant snakes, but they seemed to swim through the soil and appear just when they were ready to strike, right underneath their victim. The alert watcher could spot signs of their presence and prepare to stab the snake with a spear as soon as they arrived; the unwary died, often without knowing what had hit them. The Empire had told them that if they tamed the world, they could have it for themselves, but Simon privately doubted that it was possible. It was far more likely that, one day, Haven would fall and the colony would be destroyed. And then there were the crazies.
The Empire hadn't been very discriminating when it unloaded its problem cases onto the planet’s surface. Rebels like Simon – he’d led an underground movement that had eventually been broken open by the Empire’s security forces – had been shipped to the planet, accompanied by petty criminals, victims of intrigue and outright psychopaths. The criminally insane hadn’t thought about cooperating, or about obeying some laws for the greater good; they’d just sought to turn a hellish world into even more of a nightmare. They’d formed roving gangs of bandits, attacking Haven and the handful of other colonies, with no ambition, but destruction. Simon remembered fighting off the last attack, a raid that had threatened to break through Haven’s defences, and shivered. One day their luck would run out and Haven would fall.
His walk took him up the stony hill – he suspected that it was a dead volcano – and towards the small town. The defenders had built a wall around their village, a combination of hard wood from the trees that grew on the surface and stone, even a primitive form of cement. It was pitiful compared to what the Empire could have built, but they’d been denied any form of high technology. They’d had to look to the past and develop blacksmiths and gunsmiths, creating weapons and tools that the Empire would have considered laughable. There had been no choice. Without at least some weapons, they were doomed.
He snorted. The Empire had thoughtfully provided them with farming tools and even some seeds. What the Empire hadn’t realised – or simply hadn't cared about enough to notice – was that there was little solidity outside Haven. They’d tried to grow crops, but the native wildlife – or the bandits – destroyed them. Their only source of food was hunting the Earth-native life that had carved out a niche on the planet’s surface and the handful of native plants that humans could eat. The native wildlife, typically, was poisonous to humans. The bandits used it to poison their spears.
Simon might have been the elected chief of the village, but his house was no bigger than any other house. He stepped inside – pausing to look at the five metre-long snake skeleton he’d hung on the side of the house, one he’d killed a day after his arrival on the planet – and smiled at his wife. Alice had been a petty criminal when she’d been sentenced to exile and transported to the penal world. Now...there was nothing to steal and she had adapted herself to her new life. None of the settlement’s women were ever allowed outside the wall. The bandits, if they caught a woman, would use her dreadfully and then kill her. They were too crazy, driven mad by their environment, to even think about the future.
“Hey,” Alice said, with a wave. There were times when he wondered if she was going a little crazy herself – if they were all going a little crazy. “What did the Crabs have to say?”
“The new springs are drinkable,” Simon said, shortly. He sat down on a stool and watched his wife, feeling tiredness and despair creeping over him. “And we’d better move quickly to take what we can. There are other humans in the area.”
Alice’s eyes widened. She’d nearly been captured by bandits when her one-way pod had crashed on the planet’s surface. “There are more bandits in the area?”
“No way of knowing,” Simon said. “They could have picked up one of our parties and...”
He broke off as a sonic boom echoed out, high overhead. The sound was so unexpected that he thought, just for a moment, that it was thunder. The planet’s eerie weather was known for producing weird effects, including a display of thunder and lightning that had resembled a planetary assault underway. The first boom was followed by others, suggesting...
Simon pulled himself to his feet, his wife a second behind him, and ran out of the hut’s door. Outside, the watchers, permanently on guard against wildlife or bandits, were staring up towards the sky, where a series of lights
were ploughing their way down towards the planet. Simon felt Alice grab his arm as the shuttles turned, heading back towards the settlement, but he was too surprised to respond. It had been made clear to him, during the brief stay on the orbital station, that there would never be any relief. No shuttles would come down to the planet, ever...yet they were here. He felt his mouth opening, but no words emerged. Had the Empire tired of watching them struggling to survive on the surface of their world, or had they merely decided to bring more criminals to the planet’s surface?
The shuttles descended towards the patch of sand to the north of the settlement, away from the lake. Simon heard the mutterings from the watchers and knew what they meant; the shuttles were landing, accidentally or otherwise, right in one of the most unsafe places on the planet. That sand would probably take the shuttles – it wasn't quicksand – yet it was almost certainly infested. The crawlies, or snakes, or great worms would attack them at once. Simon considered shouting a warning, and then changed his mind. If they were from the Empire, who gave a damn what happened to them?
***
“Nice place you’ve brought us to, sir.”
“Shut up,” Neil said, as he checked his weapons and suit. According to the files that had been extracted from the orbital station, most of the rebels from the various underground movements had been dumped in a handful of locations, along with plenty of criminals and madmen. They’d flown a recon mission over the settlement, yet his most optimistic estimate suggested that the settlement’s population would be a thousand at most. If all the settlements had comparable populations...what had happened to the remainder of the rebels?
The shuttle grounded itself in a patch of sand, allowing the Marines to troop down the ramp and onto the ground. Neil was silently grateful that he couldn't smell the penal world’s atmosphere. The suit’s atmospheric monitoring programs reported that there were high concentrations of various gases in the air, not enough to be lethal, but certainly enough to create a foul smell. The sand felt odd under their armoured feet, yet they weren't sinking in it. He led the way towards the settlement – the village – in the distance, wondering why the involuntary colonists hadn't expanded their domain out towards the jungle in the distance. Neil was no expert on geography, yet surely they could have expanded...
A red light flashed up in his HUD, a second before...something burst out of the ground and came right at him, jaws opening wide to reveal very sharp, very white teeth. It clamped onto Neil’s arm and emitted a howl of pain as its teeth shattered on the armour, although red icons in his HUD warned that the teeth had actually dented the armour, somehow. Neil reached out with his other arm, pulled the creature off his armour and examined it thoughtfully. It was a long snake-like creature, with bulging eyes – he imagined that they looked surprised – and a massive jaw. Neil wouldn't have cared to meet one of them without his armour. Those teeth could have bitten off a human’s head without even noticing. The files on the planet hadn't been very detailed when it came to wildlife and he was starting to understand why. Anyone who went down to catalogue the planet’s wildlife probably ended up being eaten by it.
He took the creature’s head in one armoured hand and squeezed, hard. The snake’s skull popped, like a grape, leaving the remains of its body trashing about in the sand. Neil muttered a command for his Marines to deploy sensors to watch for other creatures, only to recoil in shock when the first results started to come in. The sand might have looked harmless, but underground there were hundreds of creatures, swimming through the sand towards the armoured Marines. There was barely a second’s warning before another creature roared up and started to drag a Marine into the sand, before his comrades could rescue him and kill the creature with a burst of plasma fire.
“Run,” Neil ordered. An armoured suit could move at nearly a hundred kilometres an hour, at least on flat ground. Newer snakes burst up all around them, only to run into plasma fire as the Marines terminated any threat rapidly and brutally. None of them had served in such an environment before, yet they had adapted quickly; Neil was proud of them, in his own way. “Get up to the village and...”
The moment they stepped onto the stony ground, the attacks faded away and ended, as if they’d never been. Neil looked back towards the sand, where they’d left dead creatures in their wake, only to see nothing. The local wildlife had taken the bodies of the dead and sucked them down under the surface, where he suspected that they would be devoured by their own kind. He checked the sensors and wasn’t surprised when they concurred. The alien world seemed to have no place for compassion, or even courage.
He turned back towards the village. “Wait here,” he ordered, and started to walk up towards the gates. The settlers should have nothing that could stop an armoured suit, but he hadn’t come to make war on them. He had to talk to them, somehow, and they were likely to be feeling paranoid. Or perhaps they were laughing, he added in the privacy of his own head; the Marines probably hadn’t looked very impressive when they’d been running across the sand.
The gates opened as he approached, revealing a single man, aged before his time. Neil honestly couldn't place his age; he looked to be around thirty, yet he seemed to act as if he was far older. Grey hair and an unhealthy pallor in his face suggested that the settlers didn't have a proper diet, let alone proper medical care. Neil had been on worlds that had been deliberately settled with the intent of using as little modern technology as possible, but even they had proper medical care. The penal world, of course, hadn't been given anything of the sort. No one gave a damn about what happened to the people on the surface. They’d been sent to the penal world to die.
“Welcome to Haven,” the man said. There was a weary resigned tone in his voice, as if he expected that the Marines had come to lay waste to his world. “What do you want here?”
Neil smiled inwardly. The man was direct, something he appreciated. He cracked open his visor – after running a final check on the local environment – and opened his armoured suit, allowing them to see his face. The stench – a stench of rotting eggs and fish, reminiscent of part of the Marine training camp – hit him like a hammer, but somehow he refrained from gagging. He needed them to believe him. It would be so much easier if they believed him.
“We’re not from the Empire,” he said. Explaining about the mutiny and the rebel fleet – to say nothing of the popular front and the various underground groups out along the Rim – would take too long. “We’re here to take you away from this world, if you would like to leave.”
The man stared at him. “Are you mad?”
“No, sir,” Neil said, trying to project confidence and certainty into his voice. “We rebelled against the Empire and we are looking for recruits. Do you want to stay on this planet or come with us?”
He wasn't sure what reaction he would receive. There had never been a breakout from a penal world before, yet there had been some dark stories in the Marine Corp’s archive, suggestions that perhaps not all of the convicts would want to leave. Or, perhaps, that the strong men who ruled the penal worlds wouldn't want to give up their power – or, perhaps, that they simply would not be believed. The men and women who had been dumped onto the hellish world would not expect anyone to come for them. They had known that they would spend the rest of their lives on the planet’s surface.
The man started to cry. “We want to leave,” he said. “When do we go?”
Neil concealed a smile. “We can start loading you onto the shuttles now,” he said. “We just have to find as many people as we can.”
The chief led him into the centre of the village. Neil was shocked, despite himself; the sight was pitiful. Half-built huts, starving people, a handful of very thin children...the women, in particular, looked beaten down by their lives. Young men armed with primitive firearms – his sensors picked up traces of gunpowder, of all things – watched his suit warily, although some of them were clearly envious. There were a number of cripples wandering around, their faces blank and unheeding; wome
n who could have been cured within days back in the Empire. There were no male cripples, yet it took him a moment to realise why. The hash logic of survival meant that a male cripple couldn't make any contribution to the community, so they were turned out into the world to die.
Neil had seen terrible things before. He'd waded through blood after a rebellion on a mining colony had become too dangerous for the Blackshirts to handle; he’d seen the aftermath of a radiation bomb strike on an inhabited planet’s capital city. He should have taken it in his stride, yet somehow the sight affected him more than he wanted to admit. These people had been simply abandoned to their fate. It was...disgusting. The penal worlds were just part of the system for keeping people in line.
“We’re going to start bringing down additional shuttles now,” he said, trying to avoid looking at one woman. Heavily pregnant, one of her legs was missing, forcing her to walk around on a wooden cage. The sight disturbed him on a very primal level. “And then we can get you all out of here.”
“Thank you,” the chief said. The sheer gratitude in his voice was almost embarrassing. His wife, a weak-looking girl with fading hair, gazed up at the Marines worshipfully. “Thank you.”
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