There had even been stories about workers falling from shops as they relocated. That in itself was not extraordinary in a market district, but the rumors that some shops subsequently ran a special on rooter ghirache in their new locations gave one pause when making lunch plans.
The large rooters were very similar to the wild hogs on Earth and, like their terran cousins, could easily be mistaken for humanoid flesh.
Certainly, no fly-by-night shop would ever dare to serve any kind of rooter dish anymore, for fear of the public reaction.
“He’s having lunch,” Harry muttered quietly into his headset. “When he comes out, we’ll start herding him your way.” The heady atmosphere of pungent spices had him wishing he was inside the restaurant with his target.
“I’ll be ready,” Lothbrok replied. “There’s two Dactari patrolmen just in front of our location. If he’s as cozy with them as you say, he’ll likely appeal to them for help. Otherwise, no witnesses around.”
“Excellent,” Harry answered with indecent relish. “It puts him exactly where we want him. I’ll deal with the guards.” He turned to the local next to him, switching to Oaxian, a language that still survived from their colonial origins. “Just make sure you get behind him. I want to shake him up before he runs.”
Vo’x grinned. The revolutionary had been quick to contact Harry and Lothbrok. The markets were largely unregulated. By commercial standards, they were small pickings for the Republic. It was the province of the individual Dactari patrolmen, who squeezed bribes from the shops and, in turn, passed a portion up the chain to their superiors.
It was a source of revenue that the separatists also sought, and with more success than their enemies. The shopkeepers were far more enthusiastic about giving up some of their profits if it meant thumbing their noses at the Republic. Those shopkeepers were also a source of an even more valuable commodity.
Information.
Word of two Alliance officers making inquiries in fluent, if dated, Oaxian was sure to reach the ears of the resistance leaders. They had acted quickly, bringing Harry and Lothbrok into one of the shops used to coordinate revolutionary efforts. The two were almost the same size as the Oaxian-descended Tauhentans, but there was always a chance a Dactari patrol might bump into them and realize that they didn’t quite belong.
Through generations of low-intensity conflict, the resistance had carried out an endless series of hit-and-run attacks. Their overall effect had been little more than a nuisance to a Republic determined to maintain their hold on the planet. When the two Alliance officers had proposed their scheme of garrisoning a free Tauhento in return for tax support, they had shown great enthusiasm.
The dream of countless generations was finally, realistically, in their grasp. They were more than willing to cooperate in this small, first step.
Harry and Vo’x walked to the door of the shop, just in time to flank Ro’j as he exited with a small white package of food. Harry grinned. The last time he had seen the smuggler, it had been in a similar market in Presh. He had claimed to be leaving the shuttle to get food for them.
That was less than ten minutes before Harry was captured.
“Hi, Ro’j,” Harry began in a light tone, using Dheema. “I have to say, I’m impressed that you came all the way back to Tauhento to get me my food. Might be a little cold, though, by the time you get back to Presh with it.”
Ro’j’s eyes widened in alarm. “Harry!” A sly look flashed briefly across his face as his gaze swept the crowd. He was quick witted, but not half as quick as he thought. “When I got back with the food, there was a huge crowd of those sour-faced Dactarii surrounding the shuttle.” He took a step back, no doubt preparing to run. He bumped into Vo’x who gave him a rough shove.
He collided with Harry, his package of food split open, spilling out onto his own chest. Harry shoved him to the left, sending him sprawling. “Get off me! You’re covered in Ghirache sauce.” The Human leaned down and grinned. “You are what you eat.” He nodded at the spilled food on the smuggler’s chest. “Or you will be, soon enough!”
The smuggler scrambled to his feet and ran away from his two assailants, thrusting his way desperately through the crowd.
“He’s coming your way,” Harry told Lothbrok. “We’ll stay close behind him. As soon as he starts talking to the guards, I’ll kill them while you nab the target.”
“What if he just runs past them?”
“He won’t.” Harry was almost as certain as he sounded. “This is his home base. If he’s friendly with the Dactari, then he’s sure to know the local officers. If he thinks he’s about to die, he’ll head for the strongest friends he has. He also knows I’m worth money to him. He’s sold me once already, so he’s thinking he can sell me to the local Dactari here on Tauhento and score points with the local commander.”
Ro’j tried to take a left turn but found a dangerous-looking individual staring straight at him. He went right instead, finding no resistance. He was slowly herded toward the ambush until he rounded a corner and saw the two guards sharing a ceramic tube filled with a mildly narcotic weed.
“There’s an Alliance officer right behind me,” he gasped out in Dheema.
The Dactari on the left stared dumbly at him for a few moments. “Huh?”
The second patrolman lowered the tube. “You’re speaking out of your clo… cloaca! Is... is it an… invasion?” He broke down into helpless giggles.
“I’m serious, you idiots,” Ro’j shrieked at them. “Call your commander right now and tell him… Huaaagggh.” He went down, convulsing from the tiny electric dart that Lothbrok had just shot into his back.
“I’m not, umm… I’m not telling Chorelna that.” The guard stifled a huge yawn as he watched the smuggler twitch at his feet. “He’d put me on… bomb disposal for a …” His meandering sentence ended in a strangled cry as Harry sliced his throat.
The second guard watched his companion fall in dull silence, uttering no sound as the blade came back to drive through his own temple.
Vo’x shook his head at the two bodies. “Both of ‘em were completely curdled on lagweed.” He offered his hand, palm up. “We’ll get rid of these two,” he offered as Lothbrok waved his own hand, palm down, over Vo’x’s in the old Imperial handshake. “We’ll be ready,” Vo’x added. “When we see the station destroyed, we’ll do our part down here.”
“It will happen this morning.” Harry resisted the urge to warn Vo’x that the raid in orbit might not be the success they required. There was no way to warn him without revealing the true target of the pending attack. If he started telling allies about the logistics tracking system, the Dactari would get wind of the scheme and shut the system down.
That in itself would be a small victory, but the Alliance was hoping for something bigger. They needed to goad the enemy into a fight while that system was still broadcasting all Dactari ship locations. They needed to hit the Republic hard before the secret got out and the momentary advantage was lost.
Lothbrok and Harry dragged the drooling smuggler into the shop where the Midgaard had been hiding. Lothbrok grinned at the owner who sat, bound, in the back corner with a gag over his mouth. “Won’t be long now,” he told the poor man in fluent Oaxian. Lothbrok had been one of the first to receive Harry’s extracted memories after the return from Oaxes. If he was going to be the warlord of an ancient Oaxian colony, he needed all the information he could get.
One of Vo’x’s people activated the controls and, to the public eye, another questionable shop lifted off to find a new location in the market. The actual destination was a nearby maintenance district, where the two Alliance officers had parked their Weiran shuttle. The flight path would attract no attention and it saved them the difficulties of exiting the market on foot with an unconscious prisoner.
Once on the shuttle, they heaved their guest onto one of the benches that ran along both sides of the cargo bay. Harry slapped Ro’j’s face. “Wake up!”
Slowly, the smug
gler’s eyes began to focus. He looked around dumbly, looking for all the worlds as though he had been smoking lagweed himself.
“Hey, stew meat, I need you to focus,” Harry shouted at him.
Ro’j looked at Harry for a few seconds and then his eyes widened in alarm.
“There we go!” Lothbrok said cheerfully. “He remembers you now.”
“When we get into orbit,” Harry told the smuggler, “I’m going to put you behind the controls. You’re going to dock us at the logistics station and sell me back to the Dactari.”
The smuggler frowned. “Sell you to the Dactarii? What the hells for?”
“Never mind why,” Harry replied as he leaned down, putting his face within inches of the frightened Tauhentan. “Just remember what I want done or I’ll start cutting off parts of your face.”
Ro’j shuddered, leaning back until his head was against the hull. “I can’t just dock with a Dactari station.”
“Sure you can,” Harry stood up as the back ramp began to close. “You’re one of the smugglers they allow to operate in contravention of their own laws. You’re useful to them, which is why they make you report in every time you return to Tauhento.”
“Like you did seven hours ago, you lying sack of excrement,” Lothbrok cut in.
The engines began to whine as the shuttle lifted off.
Harry grabbed an overhead tray of conduits to steady himself as the vehicle shifted. He looked back down at his prisoner. “How much did they pay you last time you sold me?”
“Fifty thousand imperii,” came the sullen reply.
Harry nodded. “Not bad, I suppose. You have to start somewhere.” He appeared to give the matter some thought for a moment. “Better ask for eighty, this time.”
Farewell
The Midway, Weirfall Orbit
“…we therefore commit their bodies to the deep.” As Captain Hunter finished the service, the automated gurneys began to move forward across the hangar deck toward the massive, open door at the starboard bow.
All through the fleet, the last batches of plague victims, the ones who didn’t survive the inoculation, were being buried in one fleetwide service. The ceremony was very similar to the time-honored naval tradition of ‘Burial at Sea’.
Now as the captain of each ship completed the service, the automated gurneys were carrying the bodies out into space. Once through the shields, each row of gurneys would come to a halt, allowing the shrouded bodies to slide out from underneath the ensigns on a trajectory that would take them into the local sun.
As each gurney returned through the hatch, the ensign was removed from its fastenings and folded. If the fleet ever re-established regular contact with Earth, the ensigns would be sent to the families of the deceased, assuming that any sort of administration would still be operating.
Towers stood next to Hunter as the last of the Midway’s dead floated toward the launch door. These men and women had died as a direct result of his decision. He could have turned the Pandora back as soon as he learned of their intentions, but he had decided to vaccinate the fleet.
A gurney with a tiny form under it drifted past.
It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the Pandora had arrived after the relaxing of the fraternization rules. It was bad enough to watch your crewmates die, but now the fleet was now filled with couples. Families had been torn apart over the previous weeks and now there were more than a few orphans living on the ships.
When they had left Earth, only a few short years ago, he had never dreamed that a temporary orphanage would be set up on his flagship. He would certainly never have expected the need to appoint a nursing officer. With at least thirty young mothers dead from failed inoculations, there had been an urgent need to locate every remaining woman who was still feeding a child.
He still wasn’t ready to forgive himself for that. He should have realized the risk of starvation posed by the vaccination program. That no children had died as a result of that oversight was small consolation. He should have made allowances in advance.
Two million six hundred and thirty thousand, Towers thought. That was the current Human population within Republic territory – former Republic territory. The losses had been just over fifty thousand, not counting the crew of the Guadalcanal.
But the equations had changed.
Until now, he had been facing a steady decline in numbers. There was simply no way for new births to keep pace with the mortality rate in the fleet. By the time he was in his sixties, there would be no fleet, only small pockets of Humans trying to avoid being noticed by the Dactari.
Now, accounting for accidental deaths, the population was expected to grow by just over twenty one percent in the coming year. There were at least a dozen conflicting projections put forward by Strauss and his staff. The current female population was roughly thirty percent, and it was expected that they would fall off the calculations over the next two decades.
Even though life expectancies now ran into the thousands of years in some cases, menopause would still come in the forties or fifties. Despite the longer lifespans, oocyte degeneration still occurred at the normal rate.
The eight hundred thousand women currently in the fleet were being rotated out of combat duty and would remain there until medical staff had confirmed the end of menopausal symptoms.
That had not been a popular announcement. Many of the crew had expressed outrage at denying combat roles to women. The public affairs officers had been kept busy, reminding the fleet that they now represented an endangered species. With so few women, Humanity simply couldn’t afford to lose them.
It had helped to know that they would return to their combat roles over the coming decades, and the promise that daughters would eventually fight alongside their mothers had finally brought about a truce. Twenty years out of several thousand didn’t seem like so much, when you thought about it.
Towers had thought growth would slow as the current female population passed out of childbearing years. When he had seen the various projections, he realized that he had neglected to account for the fact that each new generation would be half female. The population would actually come to balance itself as the centuries wore on.
It was a tricky situation to navigate. He could relax the rules, authorize videos that encouraged the formation of families, offer better accommodations to couples and even better accommodations to families, but he drew the line at anything beyond that.
One medical officer on the population planning group had suggested a compulsory system and Towers had given serious thought to removing him from the team. One of the women in the group had looked like she would physically remove the man from the room.
At the end of the day, Towers had explained to the shocked room, it was necessary to air any possible idea, if for no other reason than to soundly reject it.
The current program was working relatively well and Towers found himself looking forward to the day when they would have civilians. For the next several centuries, new children would be trained with an eye toward military service, but the day would come when a substantial population of civilians would outnumber the military.
There might even be elections.
Towers had been nominated by a President and confirmed by a Senate vote. Neither institution existed anymore. He found himself in the uncomfortable position of being the leader of a new species of Human, and the pressure was relentless.
The sound of the guns brought him back to the present. The first salvo of the salute had fired, using the first successful batch of ammunition from Weirfall. A bugler began to play Taps, the simple tune contrasting the harshness of the gunnery. The bugler fell silent at the last salvo and Towers stepped forward.
“Over the last decade, our species has faced a whirlwind of change,” he began, pausing for a moment to allow the translators in other ships to keep up. “We have faced two invasions by the enemy, and we have thrown them back into space, both times.
“A deadly plague was unleashed on Eart
h,” he continued, “and our support was cut off, but the good people of Weirfall kept the faith with us. They have endured hardship for that decision and we will never forget that.
“The plague came to us in the form of a vaccine. Every one of us can name friends and family who died as a result of that vaccine. Today we remember those who did not come through the storm. In the centuries to come, we will tell their stories and they will endure in living memory.” He paused again, looking at the assembled crew and Marines of the Midway.
“We also remember what we once were. Today we witness the passing of one species and the birth of a new one. Humanity is forever changed and there can be no going back to the old ways. As the first generation of this new species, it falls to us to ensure its survival, and we are taking the first steps, even now.” It was the closest he would come to revealing the secret operation that he had authorized against the forces at Tauhento.
“From this moment on, we move from a defensive posture to an aggressive stance.” He heard a few cheers from the huge crowd, and they began to coalesce into a low roar. “From this moment, we will take every opportunity to show our enemy our resolve.” The volume of the crowd continued to grow. “From this moment, we work to ensure the future of our people.”
The entire hangar reverberated to the sound of thousands of cheering voices. For years, the fleet had sat idle. A shrinking force that saw no way to make gains and hold them. The Dactari, weakened as they were by two failed attempts against Earth, still possessed enough force in their own territory to wage a war of constant harassment against the Alliance.
Any attempt to take additional worlds away from the Republic would have ended in disaster. If the Alliance split their forces to hold Tauhento and Oaxes, the Dactari would have gathered a huge assault group and destroyed their enemy piecemeal.
The Orphan Alliance Page 11