Colin scowled. In some ways, it was the single most dangerous part of the operation. His superdreadnaughts – the only ships with large supplies of KEW projectiles to drop – were going to be operating close to the planet, so close that they would be trapped within its gravity shadow. If an enemy fleet happened to arrive, Colin would find himself trapped against the planet, forced to punch his way out rather than simply flickering to safety. And if that enemy fleet happened to consist of superdreadnaughts…Colin liked to think that the Popular Front could go on without him, but it wasn't certain. Nothing was truly certain in life. He’d been living on borrowed time since he’d launched a mutiny against the Empire.
He smiled, pushing the dark thoughts aside. “Inform the Marines that they are cleared for launch,” he added. Whatever happened, he knew that his people would give their all. “They may engage the enemy at will.”
***
Colonel Neil Frandsen hooked into the assault shuttle’s sensors as it launched from the Marine transport, the pilot already gunning it down towards the planetary surface. Neil allowed himself a moment to enjoy the sight of a lovely world before he started to check up on the other shuttles. One had developed a drive fault and was being held back – a problem that occurred more frequently than the Marines liked to admit – but the remaining ninety were already spinning through space.
“Prepare to flicker,” he ordered. The shuttles were so small that they could flicker – with reasonable accuracy – far closer to the planet than any capital ship. Unlike the penal world, where there had been no counter-fire to speak of, Jackson’s Folly was occupied by the Blackshirts, who knew that they could expect no mercy from the locals. “On my mark…flicker!”
The shuttle seemed to go black for a terrifying second, then it was suddenly buffeted by the atmosphere as it materialised in the air. The craft lurched suddenly, dropping several feet before the drive systems caught on and powered it through the air, leaving him feeling delighted. They’d survived the jump! He linked back into the Marine combat network and noted the absence of two shuttles, both having vanished during the jump. If they were lucky, their drives had failed or they’d reappeared somewhere else. If they were unlucky, they had materialised within the planet and had been killed before they’d had any time to realise that something had gone wrong.
“I am picking up enemy sensors,” the pilot reported. Through his mental link, Neil could see them as red bands of light sweeping through the sky. As he had hoped – when he had sold Admiral Walker on the plan – their sudden appearance had alarmed the Blackshirts. “They are attempting to lock onto us.”
“Good,” Neil said. He laughed, knowing that non-Marines would consider him insane. “Go to evasive manoeuvres and call in strikes from high overhead.”
“Don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs,” the pilot countered. The gee-forces increased as the shuttle started to slip into evasive manoeuvres. The small formation was coming up on Freedom, the city that had served as the capital of Jackson’s Folly. It looked like a war zone now, even from the shuttles. “Time to ejection is two minutes and counting.”
Neil grinned. This, the chance to make a forced landing on a hostile planet, was what he lived for. It was what war was all about, something that the Imperial Navy would never understand. And as for the Blackshirts…his grin widened. Killing them never got old.
***
“Sir, we have incoming enemy shuttles,” the operator reported.
General Branford cursed. He had hoped that digging into Freedom – the absurdly-named city – would provide a degree of protection from orbital strikes. His men had trapped most of the city’s population in with them, using them as shields against both insurgents and rebels. As far as he could tell, there had been no link between Jackson’s Folly and the mutineers, but now one was definitely forming. Besides, Public Information had to get some things right, if only by accident.
“Order them to open fire as soon as the enemy enters range,” he ordered, coldly. The enemy commander had to be a Marine. No one else would be insane enough to flicker into the atmosphere, just to mount a raid. It had to be a raid. If the rebels had the firepower to defeat the Imperial Navy, they’d be off trashing Camelot or even Earth, rather than liberating Jackson’s Folly. No, it was a raid. “And then order the forces on the ground to disperse.”
He clenched his fist in outrage. As a loyal servant of the Empire, he knew his duty; he had to bring Jackson’s Folly into the Empire, whatever it took. It hadn’t been a peaceful deployment. The locals were armed to the teeth and reluctant to bend the knee to the Empire, forcing him to deploy his forces and strike back at rebels and insurgents. The bastards wore no uniforms and fought without honour. They were to blame for the massive death toll. Branford took no pleasure in slaughtering hostages, or in exterminating traitors, yet there was no choice. The insurgents had made it so.
“The enemy shuttles are entering range,” the operator said. Branford nodded. Some of his encampments had been struck from orbit, but others had been spared, spared because of the human shields gathered around them. “The defences are opening fire…now!”
***
“They’re opening fire,” the pilot said. “Prepare for ejection.”
Neil braced himself as his suit was picked up and thrown down through the hatch, out into the open air. The sky was filling with green flashes of light as plasma cannons attempted to smash the shuttles out of the sky, yet they were already too late. The men and women of his Marine Regiment were already deploying. The enemy were clearly reacting too late to prevent it. A handful of shuttles vanished in fireballs – others launched missiles back towards their tormentors, hoping to knock them out before more shuttles died – but the remainder kept going, turning away from the enemy base. Neil barely had a second to see the ground coming up towards him before he landed, feeling the jerk even through the compensator field enveloping his armoured combat suit.
He fell into the Marine command network at once, deploying his suit’s weapons and looking for targets. A group of Blackshirts were already running towards them, trying to deploy, when they were scythed down by the Marines. Moving as one, their training coming to the fore, the Marines attacked savagely, heading directly towards the Blackshirt base. The Blackshirts, instead of using armoured suits, preferred to use armoured vehicles. It was a mistake, Neil knew, one he intended to exploit. The plasma cannons his Marines carried could punch through anything the Blackshirts had on hand.
The fighting grew more savage as they raced through the city, as if they were all of one mind. The locals, at least, had the sense to stay out of the way, although fragments of chatter his suit picked up suggested that some of them were taking the opportunity to attack the Blackshirts and score a little payback for the suffering and torment they’d undergone. Neil was right in the heart of it, fighting alongside his men and feeling a little bit of himself die when a Marine fell. The Blackshirts had broken out their heavy plasma cannons, powerful enough to burn through a Marine armoured suit, firing almost at random. The cannons didn’t survive long when the Marines saw them, hitting them with their own weapons and causing them to explode with colossal force, but it hardly mattered. A handful of Marines were killed before they could react. Neil saw a running Blackshirt, his body ablaze with white fire, and felt sick. The Blackshirt had been too close to one of the plasma cannons when the containment field had exploded. He snapped off a mercy shot and put the poor bastard out of his misery.
“Onwards,” he snapped. The fighting had become kinetic, with the Marines responding to threats as they appeared, but they kept pushing towards the main base. The Blackshirts had taken over the city’s governmental buildings and converted them into their headquarters. The level of defences around them looked oddly paranoid, but then the locals had been very good at slipping explosive devices and even armed men through the gaps. He wondered, absently, why the Blackshirts had bothered to place their headquarters there, yet it hardly mattered. Perhaps they'd se
en it as a way to mark their claim on the local real estate.
The fighting became a blurred series of impressions as they assaulted the main base. They tore through barriers intended to keep out vehicles, running right into the Blackshirts and their final stand. Neil realised that they were using their drug injectors, rendering themselves largely immune to pain and fear. Marines didn’t use the drugs, largely because they affected the brain as well, turning the Blackshirts into soulless killing machines with little sense of right or wrong. He saw a Blackshirt run right at them, firing madly, and cut him down. Others resisted the temptation to seek self-immolation and held out until the Marines cut through them, like a knife through butter. The final defences were destroyed and the Marines pushed onwards, into the building. Neil checked the map he’d downloaded and installed in his HUD and smiled. If he knew the General’s reputation, he would be in the main office, the one that had belonged to the planet’s President.
General Branford lifted a pistol as the Marines burst into the office, but he wasn't hopped up on battle drugs and Neil knocked it from his hand before he could do anything. The General looked…as if he didn’t want to surrender, yet didn’t want to go on fighting anyway. There was something cold and hard in his gaze, as if he thought he could get out of anything. Neil looked at him and felt sick. The ordinary Blackshirt was drugged, to the point where he could never be justly held accountable for his actions, but the General…the General had known all along what he was doing. When Neil had faced such a choice, he had refused; the General…had carried out his orders.
Neil reached out with one armoured hand, ignoring the General’s protests, and crushed his head like a grape. It felt as if he was cleansing the Empire, crushing all that was rotten and unwholesome within it…and it was personal. Branford had carried out the orders Neil had refused to obey.
“It’s over,” he said, with a sigh. Without their leader, the remaining Blackshirts would be unable to coordinate any resistance. The locals could deal with them, at least until reinforcements arrived from Camelot. By then, the rebels would have quit the system. “We’ve won.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“I wish I could say that this was rare,” Hester said, in her whispery voice. She had insisted on accompanying the fleet, despite Colin’s objections. “I wish I could say that Jackson’s Folly was the only world to suffer in such a manner.”
Colin nodded, hiding his own shame. He hadn’t understood until it had almost been too late. If Percival had given him the rewards and patronage he’d wanted, that he’d earned, he would never have allowed himself to see the festering corpse the Empire had become. His petulance – there was no other word to describe it – had opened his eyes to the truth, and yet…even then, he had never allowed himself to see the full horror of the Empire.
Jackson’s Folly had a population of six billion souls, scattered over the system; its daughter colonies, between them, had another ten billion. Under the Empire’s iron heel, at least a billion had died, either through the bombardment, the fighting, hostage executions, starvation or plain outright sadism. The Blackshirts had crushed resistance as harshly as they could, yet it had continued, flaring up whenever they thought that an area was pacified and the forces there could be moved elsewhere – at which point they discovered that the region was not pacified at all. They had prescribed horrible punishments, for everything from owning a weapon to giving Blackshirts dirty glances, but still the insurgency had continued. Perhaps they would have won in the end, with a commander willing to permit the most barbaric acts against the insurgents and those who sheltered them, yet most of the planet would be shattered. The industries that Stacy Roosevelt had wanted so desperately would be destroyed in the crossfire.
It added a certain kind of piquancy to Colin’s dilemma. If he destroyed the industries before he withdrew from the system, he would also destroy the only thing standing between Jackson’s Folly and a scorching. Yet, if he left the industries in place, they would be used against him and the other rebels. He had wrestled with the issue for several hours before deciding that he couldn’t countenance destroying the industries, not if the price was opening the way for a scorching. Jackson’s Folly had suffered enough.
“Yes,” he said, finally. “I understand.”
Hester gave him a sharp look, but said nothing…or perhaps she understood better than she cared to let on. Her own homeworld had been treated in a comparable fashion, after she had founded and led a rebellion against the occupying troops; God alone knew what had happened to most of her friends and family. She’d survived when so many others had died, spared by the whim of fate. No wonder she was feeling guilt. Looking down at Jackson’s Folly was like looking down into the past.
Colin looked up as the hatch opened, allowing a pale-faced man to stumble into the starship’s interior. Speaker Brenner Java was the last surviving member of Jackson’s Folly’s Government, the only one to evade the Blackshirts as they swept for political leaders and men who might breed dissent. Jackson’s Folly had hidden most of its leaders, but the Blackshirts were very good at extracting information from unwilling donors. Java had only survived because he’d been paranoid; legally, he was the First Speaker, at least until new elections could be held.
“Welcome aboard,” Colin said. Java stared at him, almost as if he didn’t quite believe that Colin was real. “We need to chat.”
Java’s eyes fixed on Hester. “You,” he said. “Why are you even here?”
Colin concealed a smile as he led the way into the conference room. He’d ordered some food for the fugitive Speaker and anyone he brought with him, although Java had insisted on coming alone. Colin guessed that he’d designated others to succeed him if he died, just to ensure some degree of continuity. The security scans had picked up some items of uncertain purpose on the man’s body, suggesting that he had also come prepared to kill himself if necessary.
“We came to win you some time to regroup,” Hester said, as they took their seats. “The Blackshirts can be removed from your world, but they will be back…”
“God damn you,” Java burst out. Colin reached for the weapon he wore on his belt before realising that Java was confining his outburst to shouting. “Do you know what they will do to us when they come back?”
“They won’t scorch your world,” Hester said, calmly. Colin nodded, but said nothing. He understood Java’s point of view. They couldn’t build a flicker drive powerful enough to move the entire planet away from the Empire. “We decided to attempt to win you time to regroup.”
Java glared at her, but nodded reluctantly. “Very well,” he said, sharply. “What do you want?”
“The Empire intends to make use of your trained manpower,” Hester said. “We want to take them out of reach, into the Beyond, along with their families. I think that that will make it easier for us, in the long run, to defeat the Empire.”
Colin listened as Hester outlined the Popular Front and what they hoped to achieve. He wasn't too surprised to learn that Java hadn’t heard of the Popular Front. Jackson’s Folly wasn't part of the ICN and wouldn’t be until it was properly subdued, which would take years at this rate. Java sounded interested, but he was also unwilling to commit himself or his world. Colin couldn’t blame him. The Empire would be furious when it learned about the rebellion and any world with known coordinates that could be blamed for the crisis would be scorched. Even Jackson’s Folly’s immunity wouldn’t last forever.
“I see,” Java said, finally. “And you cannot uplift the entire population?”
“I’m afraid not,” Colin said. Earth, with its orbital towers and rulers determined to exile as much of the population as possible, was still a teeming mass of humanity. Even the entire Imperial Navy would have been unable to transport billions of humans from one star system to another. Evacuating an entire planet was well beyond the capabilities of the Popular Front. “We can take those who can help us liberate the Empire and, eventually, free your world.”
J
ava turned his gaze on Colin. Despite himself, Colin almost flinched, realising that that man had seen terrible things. Like Hester, he had been permanently scarred by his experiences, even if the scars were invisible. Colin felt a flash of guilt. Even during the exile Percival had forced on him, he had lived comfortably, if not well.
“I do not believe that that is possible,” Java said, finally. “We fight on because there is nothing to live for, no hope of freedom or even life under the Empire.”
“Then help us,” Colin said, searching for the words that would touch the man. “Help us help you. We can work to liberate the entire Empire from their rule.”
“Perhaps you can,” Java said. “We’ll trade. You can take those who want to go and their families. In exchange, we want the remaining Blackshirts and their weapons.”
“We brought along weapons to transfer to you,” Hester said, quietly. “And as for the remaining Blackshirts…you can do what you like with them. We need their transports for your people.”
Democracy 1: Democracy's Right Page 31