“Bring up the command links,” Jamie ordered. “And make damn sure you triple-check our IFF signals.”
“Aye, sir,” Foxglove said. Pinafore heaved as another enemy missile slammed into the hull, wiping out a handful of point defence nodes. Red lights flared up on the status display, then faded away. “Missiles are ready, sir. They’ve recognised our IFF codes.”
“Let’s hope so,” Jamie grunted. “Fire the missiles on my command.”
Sameena braced herself. Ideally, the missiles should be launched from the closest approach point, just to give the enemy as little chance as possible to prepare to face them. But the closer the enemy came to the missiles, the greater the chance they might detect the missiles and take precautions. It was yet another balancing act, one they’d simulated time and time again without finding a real answer. Too much depended on how the enemy chose to react to their actions.
“Wait for it,” Jamie ordered. He studied the display, timing it mentally. They inched through the missile cloud, shortening the range still further. There would be nothing between the missiles and their targets. “Fire!”
The missiles came online and lunged towards their targets. Sameena could have sworn that the enemy craft flinched as the missiles appeared. They were far too close for any form of evasive manoeuvres; the only thing they could do was try to ward them off with their point defence. But there were too many missiles for that ... Sameena watched, feeling cold pleasure, as the missiles slammed into their targets. Laser heads burned through hullmetal, stabbing deep into the starship’s vitals, while nukes slammed through hulls and detonated inside ships. One by one, the enemy starships died until there was nothing left, but debris.
Sameena could imagine the last nightmarish moments of the enemy ships. The sudden realisation that they’d been led into a trap, the awareness of the missile swarm bearing down on them, the desperate attempts to fend it off ... and the certainty that there was no escape. Hulls would have been torn open, power would have been lost and fusion cores, normally so stable, would have blown. There would have been little time to run to the lifepods before it ran out forever.
“All targets destroyed,” Foxglove reported, with heavy satisfaction. On the display, the last traces of the enemy starships faded away. “I say again, all targets destroyed.”
“Take us back to the planet, doglegging around the stranded enemy ships,” Jamie ordered, sharply. “They can be left to die on the vine.”
He sounded pleased, although they would have to move fast to capitalise on their victory. “Order the troop transports to advance into the system,” he ordered. Paddy and the ground assault force had remained on the edge of the Phase Limit, ready to retreat if things went badly wrong. “Tell the CO that we’re going to need them to secure the orbital stations and the remaining starships. And broadcast a demand for surrender.”
Sameena scowled. A planet was largely helpless once its orbital defences – starships or defence platforms – were destroyed, which tended to encourage surrender once the high orbitals had fallen. After all, the attackers could simply blast any resistance on the ground from orbit, with all the attendant civilian casualties. The Imperial Navy ensured that almost all of its ships were capable of orbital bombardment if necessary.
But she was sure of one thing, unfortunately.
The Guardians were unlikely to surrender.
Chapter Forty-Three
But all of the savings were just not enough to prevent the Empire’s final collapse. Abandoning bases and garrisons saved nothing. As the Empire’s grip weakened – and Earth itself collapsed into the chaos of a multi-sided civil war – entire Core World sectors began to break away from the Empire. Ambitious officers did not hold back. They knew that they would never have a better chance at supreme power.
- Professor Leo Caesius. The Science That Isn’t: Economics and the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.
“We’re picking up no response from the planet,” Foxglove reported. “They haven’t replied at all.”
“Keep broadcasting the demand,” Jamie ordered. He looked over at Sameena and lowered her voice. “You think they’ll listen to reason?”
“Probably not,” Sameena admitted. On the display, the enemy were trying desperately to get the remaining ships into action. It was clear that they weren’t going to succeed, certainly not in time to make a difference. Jannah’s orbital defences were minimal, assuming that the stations were armed. “But we have to try.”
She gritted her teeth as they closed in on the planet. Jannah’s government deserved to die – and she would show no hesitation in putting them on trial for their crimes against the universe, then executing them – but most of the population was innocent. Bombarding the entire planet would be a crime fully as great as the invasion and occupation of Maxwell, with a far greater body count. And yet the Guardians had had plenty of time to lay the groundwork for an insurgency. She hadn't realised just how little she had known about her homeworld until after sitting down with the intelligence officers and trying to write down everything she knew.
I was kept deliberately ignorant, she thought, bitterly. How many others were kept that way too?
Abdul’s education had been more formalised than hers, but it had also been very limited. He’d been taught how to recite religious texts, forced to memorise vast quantities of approved books ... and he'd still managed to ask questions that had convinced the Guardians that he was a disbeliever, along with his family. She supposed she should be proud of that, even though he had gotten his parents killed. And if Sameena hadn't fled, she would have been killed too.
But how many others would have the potential for greatness, if they had some proper education?
“I wish we had a division of Marines,” Jamie admitted. “They could secure those ships easily.”
Sameena gave him a sharp look. “How does one secure a ship when the crew are prepared to blow it to take your boarding party with them?”
“You don't,” Jamie said. “Standard procedure would be to blow the ship away.”
Foxglove coughed. “We’re picking up a message,” he reported. “They’re responding to our demand.”
“Put it on,” Jamie ordered.
Sameena almost flinched as a thick torrent of Arabic echoed over the bridge. The speaker didn't sound as if he wanted to surrender; instead, he seemed confident that God would grant him and his forces certain victory. Sameena couldn't help thinking of one of Brad’s favourite movies, where a Knight had kept trying to fight despite losing all of his limbs, even though she knew that he was being stupid.
Jamie elbowed her. “What’s he saying?”
“No, basically,” Sameena said. Some of the insults were imaginative, but he was mainly refusing to surrender ... again and again and again. “Can you pinpoint the source of the transmission?”
“Abdullah,” Foxglove said. “Right in the centre of the capital city.”
“Asshole,” Jamie said. “If we drop a KEW on the source, it will certainly cause civilian causalities.”
“Paddy and his men can handle the orbital stations and starships first,” Sameena said. “Once we get complete control of the orbitals we can deal with the folks on the ground.”
Somewhat to her surprise, securing the orbital stations was easy. The crews were either press-ganged engineers from captured ships or ignorant trainees from the planet below, all thoroughly demoralised by watching the destruction of the active fleet. Most of the press-ganged engineers were quite happy to tell their stories, including a grim warning that all of the female members of their crews had been taken down to the planet. They hadn’t been seen since.
“The battlecruiser will require at least a year to restore to full fighting trim,” an engineer reported, after Paddy’s team had secured it. “Whoever sold her to them took the money and ran. The interior was more or less completely gutted; they even tore out four of the six fusion cores. She’s a right ghastly mess.”
“We can put her back in
to service,” Jamie muttered. “Steve might be able to work more of his wonders on her.”
“It will take us years to build up the manpower base to crew the captured ships,” Sameena reminded him. “But you’re right. It might be very useful.”
She scowled at Jannah as her ships entered orbit. There were no planetary defences, as far as she could see – but then, only a handful of worlds had fixed defences on the planet’s surface, where they might draw fire from high overhead. But there might be other weapons to make an occupation difficult ... hell, even if the vast majority of the population welcomed them, the Guardians would definitely have a chance to make everyone’s lives miserable.
“We’re tracking some military vehicles and bases,” Foxglove reported. “It would be simple enough to take them out from orbit, then land troops.”
“I can't disagree,” Paddy said, through the intercom. “We have the firepower advantage for once. We should take advantage of it.”
Sameena scowled, but nodded. “Land your troops,” she ordered. “Call for bombardment as you need it.”
She looked over at Jamie. “I should be going down there,” she muttered. She hated the thought of sending people into danger without sharing it for herself. “All I can do is watch.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Jamie muttered back. “I’ll bet you’re their principle target right now, the person who brought their utopia crashing down in rubble. They’ll do whatever it takes to kill you.”
He was right, Sameena realised, as the invasion unfolded on the display. The spaceport had fallen quickly, but they needed to land troops up closer to the capital. Once the shuttles were down, the Guardians directed mobs of unarmed men, women and children at the advance parties, using the civilians as human shields to cover their advance. Even after snipers started to pick them off, the civilians kept coming. The obedience the Guardians had instilled in them over the years was terrifying.
“When this is finished,” Jamie muttered to her, “there won’t be much left of Jannah.”
“Good,” Sameena muttered back. A display showed a young boy, barely old enough to walk, carrying an explosive charge towards her troops. The charge, apparently timed poorly, exploded in his hands, blowing him to bits. She fought down the urge to vomit as other civilians joined the mad rush, or were caught up in chaos as the Guardians pressed the counterattack. “This is sickening.”
She looked down at the display and saw a pattern emerging. “Target the Guardians here,” she ordered, pointing to posts just outside the city. “See if we can encourage people to flee, rather than get caught up in the madness.”
“I’d suggest taking out the transmitters too,” Jamie added. “Their radio keeps pouring fuel on the fire.”
“See to it,” Sameena ordered. “And then start broadcasting suggestions that people stay in their homes, out of the firing line.”
It was nearly four hours before Abdullah fell, Paddy leading his troops to seize the mosques and government buildings at the heart of the city. Sameena looked down from high overhead and watched rivers of blood pouring into gutters and down towards the sea, unable to avoid feeling sick. She’d delighted in the thought of coming home and rubbing her success in the Guardians collective face, of using her firepower to blast them off the planet and avenge her family, but the reality was sickening. How many innocents had been mashed in the gears because the Guardians had turned them into weapons.
They will have been taught to be obedient and never to question, right from birth, she thought, mutely. How lucky Abdul was to be able to think at all!
“We found their supreme leader,” Paddy reported. “The Grand Mufti won’t be standing trial, I'm afraid.”
Sameena scowled. She hadn't even known that the Council of Guardians had a Grand Mufti until the interrogations had revealed his existence – and a version of history that was considerably more violent than any she’d learned since leaving the planet. It hadn't taken long to realise that most of it was nothing more than lies; there was no way that Jannah’s Founders had posed a serious threat to the Empire, even during the height of the Unification Wars. They’d turned what was, at best, a cowardly flight into a dignified retreat, laying the groundwork for a later return to power. But it had been nipped in the bud.
Whoever controls the past controls the future, she thought. And the Empire did its level best to forget that it had had a past.
“Oh,” she said. She’d lost any reverence she might have had for religious figures a long time ago. “What happened to him?”
“His wives did,” Paddy said. He sounded thoroughly disgusted. “He had ten poor bitches in his private quarters, half of them badly bruised. When we attacked the outside, they attacked him. I have them all in protective custody now.”
“Excellent,” Sameena said, although she knew that it might well be a problem. The Grand Mufti could have been convinced to order the holdouts to surrender. She just didn't have the manpower to even begin to occupy the entire planet. “Keep the capital city under control. I wish to visit later.”
She looked over at Jamie. “Stand the fleet down from battlestations, but be ready to provide fire support to the forces on the ground if necessary,” she ordered. Between Paddy and Jamie, the Imperial Navy’s standing orders on bombardment had been heavily revised. “And detach one of the destroyers and send it to Madagascar. The Meet needs to know what happened here.”
They’d be behind the times, she knew. At full speed, it would still take two weeks for the destroyer to reach Madagascar, leaving the Meet wondering just what had happened at Maxwell. Just another reason, she told herself, why the Grand Senate had had so many problems controlling the Empire. She would just have to keep delegating her authority, no matter how much she disliked it. But there was no choice.
Jamie objected strongly when she insisted on going down to the planet the following morning, but Paddy – who Sameena had expected to agree with Jamie – understood at once and only insisted that she wear armour and take other armoured guards with her. Feeling uncomfortable in the powered combat suit, Sameena waited until the shuttle had landed outside the town and walked inside, surrounded by her guards. The population had made themselves scarce.
She felt an odd aching pain in her chest as she strode up towards her father’s house. It was smaller than she remembered – but then, she’d been smaller and younger too. She half-expected to see her mother as she stepped into the garden, but saw nothing. A red sign, painted on the door, indicated that the house had been sealed by the Guardians. The population had been so terrified that they’d left it alone for five years.
“Stay here,” she ordered, pushing open the door. “I’ll be fine.”
The door was locked, but the suit’s servomotors had no difficulty smashing it down. She hesitated, then opened the suit and walked into her house. Memories rose up around her as she peered around, remembering how many people had questioned her father’s decision not to build a separate section for his womenfolk. His enemies had lost no time in denouncing him once Abdul had run into real trouble. A faint smell taunted her as she stepped into the kitchen, the remains of the meat and vegetables her mother had intended to cook. The stench would merely have added to the sense of a house of disbelief, before it wasted away to dust.
Upstairs, she looked into her room and saw the opened window she'd used to make her escape. Her clothes and everything else had simply been left to rot, like the rest of the house. She picked up one of her stuffed toys and hugged it to her chest, then walked down to Abdul’s room. They'd taken his books, she noted, and a few other things. Everything else had simply been abandoned.
Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes as she walked back into her bedroom. Her father had been a good man, better than most on Jannah. He’d seen to it that she had an education, even if he’d never envisaged where it would take her, and he’d tried to ensure that she had some choice in who she married. And he’d done it despite his culture, despite the Guardians. The fact he’d
failed, in the end, didn't make him any less of a man.
The family photo album had been abandoned in her parent’s room, she discovered, even though the Guardians had clearly taken her father’s books too. She looked down at the yellowed photos, feeling the urge to cry as she saw her mother and father looking back at her. And her maternal grandfather with his four wives ... Abdul hadn't been welcome at his house after he’d questioned the point of the photographs. All four of the women wore the complete face veil.
Sameena took the photo album and walked back downstairs, then climbed back into her armour and left the house behind. There was nothing there she wanted, not any longer. Let the local population take the rest of her father’s goods. She said nothing, apart from brief orders, as they returned to the shuttle and headed to Abdullah. Part of her just wanted to hunch up inside the suit and cry.
A mistake, she told herself. Her home no longer felt like home. I shouldn't have come here.
Abdullah, she’d been told, had been the most beautiful city in the universe. She'd never actually visited before returning to her homeworld. Perhaps it had been beautiful once, but the destruction and carnage of the brief battle had wreaked havoc on the city. Entire buildings had been destroyed, the streets were stained with blood ... even though teams of prisoners had been forced to help clear up the debris. The thought of mass graves revolted Sameena, but there was no choice. Even identifying the dead would be impossible. Jannah, as far as she knew, didn't keep DNA records of its citizens.
The clerk looked scandalised at seeing a woman in armour, carrying weapons and not wearing a headscarf, but he had enough intelligence not to say it out loud. Instead, he pulled up the paper file Sameena had requested – the whole system was frustratingly primitive – and passed it to her, then sneered until one of her guards dragged him away. It was precisely the same attitude Sameena had seen from the Empire’s bureaucrats, although she had to admit that it was slightly more justified. Searching vast stacks of paper documents would be much harder than scanning a computer file.
The Empire's Corps: Book 05 - The Outcast Page 42