The Empire's Corps: Book 05 - The Outcast

by Christopher Nuttall

  “I think they don’t think that the Empire will help out,” Brad said, when she asked. “They might well be right.”

  Sameena nodded, sourly. Two months after they’d escaped Sungai Buloh, the Imperial Navy – as Jamie had predicted – had pulled out of the system, abandoning it completely. Sameena had never been back, but from what she’d heard at the Meet the entire system had fallen into chaos, with dozens of factions fighting it out for supremacy. And it hadn't been the only system to be abandoned. Rumour had it that a third of the Imperial Navy in the sector had been pulled back to the Core Worlds, leaving the rest of the sector fleet to pick up the slack as best as they could.

  “It seems legit,” she said, finally. It was clear that Brad had already made up his mind. “And when are we taking the weapons?”

  “This afternoon,” Brad said. “We’ll leave early tomorrow morning.”

  “Before the prices go up again,” Sameena said. Tabasco charged an immensely high price for HE3 and just about everything else, taking advantage of its odd position in the gray area between legal and illegal. Quite a few black colonies used the asteroid as a source of supplies. “I don’t want to come back here.”

  Brad nodded in agreement.

  They walked back to the ship in silence. Once they were onboard, Brad headed to the small bridge while Sameena went to her cabin to look up Rosa in the database. The official download from the Imperial Library stated that it was a fairly new colony world, settled late because of problems deploying the terraforming package. Apparently, the founding corporation had appointed a governor, shipped in several hundred thousand colonists ... and then nothing. Doing the maths, Sameena realised that it had been settled for just over seventy years. Surely there should have been something else in the database.

  The trader database wasn't much more informative. Rosa had four gas giants and an asteroid belt, which would allow it to develop a spacefaring economy in a few hundred years, but for the moment there wasn't much to attract independent traders. The founding corporation was known for its aggressive pursuit of unwanted settlers in their star systems, so there were no known black or gray colonies there. There wasn't anything at all on the planet’s political situation.

  She was still mulling it over when the weapons arrived, an hour later. Brad supervised the loaders as they moved the crates into the hold, then checked them off against the list he’d been supplied by the agent. It was rare to have sealed crates – the Imperial Navy always assumed that the Captain knew what he was carrying – and checking the list ensured that they couldn't be blamed for anything missing. By the time they were finished and the hold was sealed, both of them were tired and ready to sleep.

  “Make sure the hatch is sealed,” Brad reminded her. It was an irritating habit he’d picked up from his parents, but it was also a very useful one. “Do you want to play chess?”

  Sameena smiled, despite her exhaustion. Chess wasn't regarded as a feminine pastime on Jannah, which hadn't stopped her father from teaching her how to play. The rules seemed to have remained largely unchanged over thousands of years, much to her relief. There were variants on Chess that made the game almost unrecognisable. And Brad didn’t make a terrible fuss when she won. It probably helped that he beat her at most of the other games onboard ship.

  “One game,” she said, firmly. “And then we need to get some sleep.”

  Sharing a ship with Brad was ... different. Logan had had several crew she could talk to; Lead Pipe had precisely one other crewman. If they argued, there was no one to get in the way and tell them that they were being silly. But she also had a larger cabin – although the hatches were unlocked, they had a mutual agreement to stay out of each other’s personal space – and plenty of time to get on with her studies. It almost made up for her awareness that if they ran into trouble, it would be extremely difficult to deal with it.

  Brad was a fairly good player on the chessboard, although he did have his odd little quirks that puzzled her. Chess was one of the strings binding the trader clans together, with players exchanging moves over the course of several months whenever their ships passed one another in the endless darkness of space. Brad seemed to take a long time to decide on each move, as if he thought he had weeks to make up his mind. Sameena had sometimes considered insisting that they played with a timer.

  “Good game,” she said, finally. Her victory had been hard won. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

  “We undock tomorrow at 0900,” Brad agreed. “Don't be late.”

  Sameena snorted as she made her way back to her cabin. She had never been allowed to stay in bed past the crack of dawn; once morning prayers had been completed, there was an endless series of house chores to be done. It hadn't been any better on Logan either; she’d been given a schedule and expected to live up to it. Ethne would have given her a sharp lecture if she’d dared to be late for one of her duty shifts.

  She couldn't help feeling relieved as they undocked from Tabasco the following morning and slipped across the Phase Limit. The asteroid seemed to confirm everything the Guardians had said about the universe outside Jannah’s atmosphere, a place of horrors and depravities fit to turn a person’s stomach. If Madagascar had been like that ... she thought, grimly, of the refugees she’d provided for. What would have happened to them if she hadn’t been there?

  “Jumping ... now,” Brad said. Lead Pipe quivered as she jumped into Phase Space. “I feel cleaner already.”

  “Me too,” Sameena agreed. She glanced down at the course calculations. It would be twelve days before they reached Rosa. “Why do people tolerate places like Tabasco?”

  Brad frowned, considering. “People do what they have to do to survive,” he said, finally. “And there are always other people willing to take advantage of their desperation. The children ... the children might not have been meant for sex slavery. They might have been intended to go to a black colony that discovered, too late, that their population was too small for long-term survival.”

  Sameena frowned, horrified. “But where did they get the children?”

  “Too many possibilities,” Brad admitted. “Earth expels everyone who commits a crime, unless they can bribe their way out of the holding cells. Children aren't spared because of their youth. The indents tend to get shipped out to colony worlds and told to work off their debt to society. Most of them die off because they don’t have survival skills that they can use on an undeveloped world.”

  “Why?” Sameena asked, remembering Paddy’s survival training. “Don’t they care?”

  “There are eighty billion people on Earth,” Brad pointed out. “Even with algae-based foodstuffs, feeding that many people is extremely difficult. The government thinks that expelling criminals will take some of the pressure off, while founding corporations encourage it because it gives them a source of cheap labour to help develop new worlds. And as for the people themselves ... it doesn't matter. There are plenty more where they come from.

  “And then there’s the worlds that actually buy women and children,” he added. “Do you think Jannah did that?”

  Sameena looked down at the viewscreen. It seemed unlikely, but she’d already learned just how easily the Guardians could rewrite history. If they’d taken in children too young to have proper memories, how would anyone know? And even if they did recall ... the Guardians had ways to deal with disruptive people.

  “I hope not,” she said, finally. “It stinks.”

  “It’s the Empire,” Brad said, reluctantly. “People do whatever they have to do to survive.”

  Sameena left him on the bridge and walked back to her cabin, where she accessed the trader database. It was dependent on updates being provided by the traders themselves – if there was an editor, he or she didn't seem to do much – but she’d discovered that it was more honest than any of the downloads from the Imperial Library. She worked her way through some of the files and realised that Brad was largely correct. Earth seemed bent on expelling as many people as possib
le. So did some of the older Core Worlds.

  She had never worked on a life support system larger than a medium freighter, but the basic principles should be the same. Eighty billion people crammed together on a planet that was effectively one giant city. They’d be eating themselves to survive. The Imperial Library stated that everyone on Earth had enough to eat; the trader database suggested that large parts of the planet were effectively poisoned no-go areas. She knew which one she believed.

  The indentured colonist program, according to the trader database, was exactly as Brad had described it. It was nothing more than a way to get cheap labour into the hands of corporations and newly-settled colony worlds, with no concern about their future. The whole scheme was appalling to her; the indentured colonists might end up in a good position ... or they might end up as slaves or prostitutes – or rebels. In the long term, they might blur into the rest of the colony’s population ... or they might form a permanent underclass.

  Something will have to be done, she thought, grimly. But what? The refugee children were doing well on their studies – Professor Sorrel forwarded her copies of their examination results – and they might make good engineers, but she couldn't offer a scholarship to everyone. Maybe later, when she had more resources under her control ... she pushed the thought aside and closed down the datapad. She really needed to get her daily exercise before she started to gain weight.

  “We should have put in a bathtub,” she said, when she stepped into the exercise compartment and saw Brad already there. It no longer bothered her to see him wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts, although she averted her eyes politely every time. “You’re far too sweaty.”

  “The water recycler isn't that good,” Brad pointed out. “Besides, we don't have the water to waste. God knows if we will be able to get more at Rosa.”

  Sameena nodded as she took the machine next to him. It reminded her of a bicycle on Jannah, although naturally she had never been allowed to ride one. She started to ride, feeling her legs pumping as she pushed them through the motions. Paddy had insisted that she – and everyone else – do at least an hour of exercise every day. It was strange to look at her arms and realise that she was stronger than she’d ever been on Jannah. But she would never be as strong as the retired Marine.

  “Put on some music,” Brad suggested. “Or even a movie.”

  “Please,” Sameena said. She’d discovered that she rather enjoyed Brad’s collection of older movies, although he’d admitted that many of them were utterly unrealistic and played for comic relief. “Something funny.”

  “Stellar Star would be funny,” Brad commented, as he climbed off his machine. “But you don’t like it.”

  Sameena rolled her eyes. Stellar Star: Queen of Space had been scripted and produced by a whole team of groundhogs. If there was a single fact right in the entire series, it had been inserted by accident. And Stellar Star’s uniform popped open at the slightest provocation, revealing a chest that was far too large to be natural. The only reason anyone living in space watched it, as far as she could tell, was to gawk at the lead actress and her harem of subordinate girls, who pretended to be a starship crew. God knew that there was little else to sell the show.

  “Put it on if you want,” she said. “Or something older.”

  She smiled at Brad. It was a strange relationship – being friends, almost family, with a boy – and yet she liked it. It was where she belonged.

  “Thank you,” Brad said. “We can watch something else afterwards.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The stereotype of evil money-grabbing corporations and greedy robber baron bankers comes from such events, it should be noted. Leaders of those corporations would often turn their attention to manipulating and swindling the law – and exploiting their workers – rather than attempting to help grow their productive base. Their short-term interest often caused long-term havoc, all the more so as CEOs grew distanced from the inner workings of their businesses.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. The Science That Isn’t: Economics and the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.

  “It’s very quiet,” Sameena commented, as Rosa came into view. “Very, very quiet.”

  “That isn't uncommon for a first-stage colony world,” Brad explained. “They haven’t even bothered to install an orbital station yet, just plunked everything down through the atmosphere and onto the planet’s surface. The corporation must be running short of funds.”

  Sameena nodded. She’d researched how colony worlds were founded over the last few days and the basic pattern was almost always the same. Farmers would be landed first, to start taming the land and preparing food supplies, then the rest of the population would slowly filter down and start turning the world into a human colony. Over the years, an industrial base would be built up to allow the colonists to produce most of what they needed on the surface, although their industry was always limited. It hadn't taken long to confirm that the founding corporation wanted to keep the settlers dependent on them for outside tech.

  There was almost no development at all outside the planet’s atmosphere, save for a handful of orbiting satellites. They hadn’t even started work on a cloudscoop. But then, the planet – according to the standard development pattern – wouldn't actually need a cloudscoop for at least another fifty to one hundred years. They could import their fuel from a nearby star system until then.

  And what will happen, she asked herself silently, when the transports stop coming?

  If there was one thing she had to admit was a workable idea for developing first-stage colonies, it was the dependence on animal labour and the determination to ensure that a planet could feed itself as quickly as possible. Rosa might well be able to continue to survive even without off-planet trade, but it would be years before it could reach back out into space ... if it didn't collapse back into barbarism. It had happened before, according to the files, and it would happen again.

  “They don’t even have a system control,” Brad said, ruefully. He worked his console for a long thoughtful moment, “Or a basic datanet. All we can do is ping them and see who responds.”

  It was nearly forty minutes before the response arrived, directing them to land their shuttle at a small landing strip some distance from the sole city. Grosvenor looked, from orbit, like a mass of converted shipping containers surrounding a handful of prefabricated structures that had probably been part of the original colony supplies. No matter how they looked, they couldn't even find a proper spaceport.

  “Odd,” Brad commented. “A spaceport and an orbital station are always part of the package for a new colony world.”

  Sameena frowned, noticing something else that didn't quite make sense. Rosa had been settled for seventy years, so they should have managed to replace the original buildings by now. There was no shortage of wood or stone to convert into houses, given proper equipment. And that too should have been included in the first drop.

  “Maybe we shouldn't land,” she said. “We could take the weapons ...”

  “We wouldn't get the other half of our fee,” Brad said. “And we’d have to explain the weapons to the Imperial Navy. And we’d probably get sued. And we’d ...”

  “I know,” Sameena said. She shook her head, chewing on a long strand of hair. “I just don’t like it.”

  She looked over at him. “I could take the shuttle alone,” she added. “You could stay here.”

  “We’re both going to be needed on the surface,” Brad said, shaking his head. “The ship will just have to be left on automatic until we return.”

  Sameena nodded and headed down to where the shuttle was docked to the hull. It had taken several days to move the cargo pallets into the shuttle, but there had been no choice. Without an orbital station, they couldn't simply pass it over and allow the station's crew to take it to the ground. They’d have to ship it down themselves. By her count, it would take at least two round trips before they could deliver all the weapons.

  “R
eady,” she said into her wristcom, once she had checked the pallets one final time. “How about yourself?”

  “I just loaded some emergency programs into the computer,” Brad said. “No one will be able to board and take control without our permission.”

  He came through the airlock and joined her in the cockpit. “There’s no ground control here,” he added. “Do you want to fly the shuttle yourself?”

  Sameena nodded, firmly. “Yes,” she said, as she ran through the pre-flight checklist. “How often do we get a chance to land on a planet’s surface?”

  She smiled as she disengaged the shuttle and tapped on the thrusters, slowly moving away from Lead Pipe. Rosa was a colossal green and blue sphere against the viewport as she turned the shuttle and then headed right towards it. It grew larger and larger until her perspective seemed to flip, shifting it from a sphere to a living world. The shuttle rocked slightly as it entered the atmosphere, but she ignored it. She loved to fly.

  “Remember we’re heavily loaded,” Brad warned, as they dropped through the atmosphere and headed towards the landing strip. Oddly for a newly-settled world, the main settlement was in the middle of a continent, rather than on the coastline. “She may handle a little roughly as we get lower.”

  “I can cope with it,” Sameena assured him. The shuttle vibrated again as she dumped speed, taking the craft on a wide berth around the settlement. Flying directly over a large settlement was forbidden. “Can you find the beacon?”

  “Pulsing away,” Brad said, nodding to the main display. “They’re waiting for us.”

  The landing strip didn't look very suitable, even to Sameena’s inexperienced eye. It was nothing more than a large concrete field, with a pair of hangers at one end and a single large helicopter at the other. She slowed the shuttle to a hover, then lowered the craft down towards the ground. It rocked – hard – as it touched down.