Knight's Move

by Nuttall, Christopher

“Thank you, Clara,” he said, as the girl bowed. “We don't require drinks.”

  Jason sat down on the chair without being asked. “We don’t?”

  “No,” Mr. Ford said. He produced a bottle of brandy and passed it to Jason. “Congratulations on the success of your mission.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jason said. “The untraceable funds were greatly appreciated by my crews.”

  “I’m sure they were,” Mr. Ford agreed, blandly. He gave Jason a long considering look. “My superiors were so pleased that they insisted that we move ahead with the next act.”

  Jason lifted an eyebrow. “Another raid on an alien camp?”

  “Something a little more daring this time,” Mr. Ford said. “You are aware, no doubt, that the new Governor has arrived in the Fairfax Cluster?”

  “I might have heard something to that effect,” Jason agreed. He knew better than to assume that anything would go according to schedule. “I take it that she arrived on time?”

  “Remarkably, she did,” Mr. Ford said. “What is of considerable importance to us, Commodore, is that she brought six freighters loaded with supplies to the Cluster with her.”

  “Really,” Jason said. The Federation was not renowned for being generous, certainly not to the colonies. “And what did she have in those freighters?”

  “Alien supplies,” Mr. Ford said. “Enough to feed a refugee camp like the one you destroyed for several years. I believe her intention is to provide each such camp with several months worth of supplies. This has not gone down well with public opinion on this side of the Great Wall.”

  His eyes narrowed. “We want those supplies destroyed,” he added. He picked up a datachip and held it out to Jason. “The Governor has insisted that the convoy and its escort head to Tyler’s Rest first, then start distributing the supplies according to this timetable. We want you to intercept it as soon as possible.”

  Jason took the datachip and slotted it into his reader. “It might be tricky,” he said, thoughtfully. Where had Mr. Ford even obtained the timetable? “It's a minimum of five days from here to Tyler’s Rest, assuming that hyperspace allows free passage.”

  “If it isn't possible, we want you to attack the next refugee camp after the convoy completes its mission and departs,” Mr. Ford said. “If the supplies cannot be destroyed on the ships, they can be destroyed on the ground.”

  “Along with the aliens,” Jason said. He studied it for a long moment. “I would very much prefer to attack the camp. A single heavy cruiser would put up a vicious fight, even if outnumbered badly.”

  Mr. Ford quirked his eyebrows. “And you don’t want to get your ships scratched?”

  “It’s hard to collect a paycheck if you’re dead,” Jason snapped. The accusation of cowardice didn't faze him, not when he had more than proved himself over the years. “And there is a considerable risk of having one or more of my ships captured.”

  “Understood,” Mr. Ford said. “My backers will support your decision, as long as the Federation is embarrassed by the outcome.”

  “Good,” Jason said. “And the new ships?”

  “We’re still obtaining them for you,” Mr. Ford said. “There should be a new medium cruiser or two on the way soon. Can you crew them?”

  Jason made a face. Finding crew for starships wasn't too difficult, but finding crews ready to embrace what he and his men did was much harder. He’d already had to kill four of his men for not having the stomach for doing what needed to be done or for simply objecting to the treatment of the alien refugees. The real dregs of the military were generally kicked out for incompetence rather than sociopathic tendencies.

  “I believe so,” he said. Whatever his inner thoughts, he would not reveal weakness to his paymaster. “Recruitment is still proceeding in earnest.”

  “Excellent,” Mr. Ford said. He stood. “I believe that your crew should enjoy a day’s rest and then return to their work.”

  Jason jerked a rude gesture at the man’s retreating back, then took a long swig of the brandy. The man should know better than to issue orders concerning his crewmen, although at least he hadn't done it in front of Jason’s subordinates. It was a dangerous habit, at the very least.

  Shaking his head, he stood himself and headed out of the room. There was time to find a brothel and forget himself for a few hours before he returned to the ship. And then he would have to pull his crews back onboard and set course for the next alien refugee camp. There was work to be done.

  And then hope like hell they got there in time to prepare.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “All hands to battlestations,” Glen ordered. “I say again, all hands to battlestations.”

  The klaxon howled through Dauntless as her crew rushed to their combat stations. They’d run endless drills during the flight from Earth to the Fairfax Cluster, but this was different. There was no way to scan normal space before they arrived, no way to know what might be awaiting them at Tyson’s Rest. The planet had been silent ever since the distress call that had reported the attack on the refugee camp.

  “All stations report ready,” Sandy reported. “Weapons charged; ready to fire. Defence grid charged; ready to fire.”

  “Normal space in twenty seconds,” Helena said.

  “Independence signals that she is ready to follow us through,” Danielle added. “The remaining ships will wait in hyperspace until we give the all-clear.”

  “Good,” Glen said. He took a long breath, bracing himself for the unknown. “Take us out.”

  Space twisted around Dauntless as she returned to normal space, several million kilometres from the planet. Normally, the starship would have jumped in closer to her destination, but it was quite possible that the mystery attackers had mined near-orbit space in hopes of doing damage to whoever responded to the planet’s distress call. Information flooded into his implants from the sensors, reporting nothing more than debris in planetary orbit, debris that was rapidly de-orbiting and plunging down towards the surface. There was no sign of any other starship at all.

  “Picking up a faint distress beacon from the surface,” Danielle reported. “There’s little other traffic as far as I can tell.”

  “That’s standard procedure,” Sandy’s voice said. She was on the secondary bridge; right now, Glen would have preferred to have her beside him. “If the colony came under attack, they would shut down all transmissions for fear of giving the enemy more targets.”

  Glen nodded. Standard procedure for invading a planet was to bombard anywhere radiating a signal, which was why most developed worlds used landlines even though they were less flexible than wireless signals. It was much harder to pick up the landlines from orbit, which allowed the defenders to coordinate their activities without the attackers locating their bases.

  “Sweep the system,” he ordered. “Are there any signs of hostile vessels?”

  “Negative,” Cooke said. “But they could be lying under cloak – or simply doggo.”

  “Send a general signal to the planet,” Glen ordered. “Inform them of who we are, then see if the government responds.”

  He scowled as more information flowed into the sensors. The planet had been bombarded, selectively. Whoever the attackers had been, they had clearly had excellent intelligence on the planet’s surface; they'd bombarded anything that might pose a threat, including power plants and communications centres. It looked as though they’d been planning an invasion, only to change their minds at the last moment. Or maybe they’d been scared off ...

  Or maybe they did raid the planet and then pulled out, he thought. They completed their mission and left.

  The refugee camp had clearly been devastated. Orbital observation showed that the buildings had been burned to the ground, while alien bodies lay unburied on the ground. It didn't look as though anyone, human or alien, had survived, although Glen knew better than to take that for granted. Even the most precise orbital observation systems often missed tiny details, details that sometimes presaged
disaster for landing parties. There might be an ambush party waiting down there, hiding under the bodies.

  “Picking up a low-power signal from the planet,” Danielle reported. “They’re requesting confirmation of our ID.”

  Glen sighed. “Tell them that we will be dispatching a landing party to the planet,” he said. There was no way they could prove themselves from orbit, not when the planet’s orbital monitoring systems had been destroyed. “Ask them what they need in the way of medical assistance.”

  He keyed a switch on his console. “Commander Mannerheim, you will take a platoon of Marines to the refugee camp and inspect it,” he ordered. Sandy’s word would be good enough for both him and her father. “Doctor Foster, you will accompany the remainder of the Marines to the human settlement and provide what assistance you can.”

  “Understood, sir,” Sandy said.

  “I’m preparing emergency kits now,” the Doctor agreed. “It would help if we had some idea just what they needed.”

  Glen nodded, although he doubted the locals would just hand out the information to a voice on the radio. And they’d probably have dealt with any serious injuries themselves by now. Still, the Federation needed to make a show of helping the colonials; they might have been on the verge of human space, but they were still human ... frustrated, he shook his head. He was thinking just like the Governor.

  “Maintain full sensor sweeps of the surrounding region,” he ordered Cooke. “If a single atom moves out of place, I want to know about it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cooke said.

  Glen settled back into his command chair, trying to relax. His instincts told him that the mystery attackers had vanished as swiftly as they’d come, but he knew better than to take anything for granted. It was quite possible that a cloaked starship was lying in the system, watching their activities from a safe distance. If they caught a sniff of her presence, they might be able to lay an ambush and capture the ship, which might lead them to the perpetrators of the atrocity.

  “Captain,” Danielle said, “Independence is sending shuttles down to the surface.”

  “They didn't bother to clear it with us,” Cooke protested. “I ...”

  “As you were,” Glen said, tightly. Anywhere on the other side of the Great Wall, Cooke might have had a point. Here, it was anyone’s guess who was really in command. “Just keep an eye on them, make sure they don't blunder into our shuttles.”

  Somehow, he wasn't surprised to realise that none of the colonial shuttles were heading to the refugee camp.

  ***

  Sandy had flown through hostile airspace before – the Colonial Militia didn't separate out the piloting roles like the Federation Navy – but she couldn't help feeling nervous as the shuttle dropped into the planet’s atmosphere. The armoured combat suit she wore was designed to keep her cool, yet she felt sweat trickling down her back. Anything could be waiting for them down below, anything at all.

  The first time she’d worn a suit, she’d felt invincible. It hadn’t lasted; her instructor had pointed out, in great detail, that the suits had their weaknesses and only a fool would assume that they were indestructible. Sure, they could run through a barrage of machine gun fire without being badly injured, but plasma weapons or missiles would crack the suits wide open. And, when they did, it was unlikely that the wearer would survive. Even the heavy combat suits worn by the Federation Marines were not invulnerable.

  And if we get hit by a missile, she thought, recalling assaults on defended planetary surfaces, we’re all dead.

  Nothing rose up to threaten them as the shuttle stabilised and headed towards the refugee camp. Indeed, there was nothing else in the air at all, apart from birds. The local wildlife had proven no match for transplanted plants and animals from Earth, she noted; the immigrants had ruthlessly supplanted the local ecology. There was a metaphor in that for how the colonials feared alien influences. Or, for that matter, the all-encompassing reach of the Federation.

  She watched through the sensors as the refugee camp came into view. Sandy had seen horror before, but the sight was still shocking. The victims hadn't been Dragons launching a final mass charge into the teeth of human firepower; they’d been refugees, aliens who had had literally nowhere else to go. Sandy disliked aliens as intensely as the average colonial militiaman, yet she had to admit that the Mice were largely harmless. They hadn't deserved to be slaughtered like cattle.

  “Take us down,” Corporal Loomis ordered. He was in tactical command, even though Sandy outranked him. Marines always had primacy when jumping into hot landing zones. “We deploy as soon as the hatch opens.”

  Sandy held back as the shuttle hit the ground. The hatch sprang open and the Marines dived out, first taking up a defensive formation around the craft and then spreading out as it became clear that they were not going to be greeted by incoming fire. Loomis beckoned to Sandy and she followed them out of the shuttle, hefting her rifle in one armoured hand. But nothing came to greet them. The camp seemed completely deserted.

  “Deploying scout drones,” Loomis reported. A hundred tiny devices, each one barely larger than an insect, detached themselves from his armour and started to spread out over the region. The combat datanet activated a moment later as the drones started to send data back to the Marines, allowing them unrivalled situational awareness. “Ted, Rupert, guard the shuttle; everyone else, with me.”

  Sandy was glad of her helmet as they marched towards the refugee camp. A week in the sun had done nothing for the alien bodies, even though most of the local wildlife seemed to have left them firmly alone. The stench would be appalling, she told herself, as they reached the edge of the camp and halted, examining the bodies. They all looked to have been killed by heavy plasma fire.

  “The Refugee Commission files said that there were over seven thousand aliens in this camp,” Loomis said, quietly. “They’re all dead.”

  “So it would seem,” Sandy said. The camp had been shattered, so it was hard to be sure, but it looked more like a prison than a refugee centre. Indeed, if there had been seven thousand aliens in the camp, they would have been pressed together like insects. The Mice might be comfortable with population densities that would have driven humans to screaming madness, but it was still inhuman to treat them as prisoners. “Unless some of them made it away from the camp.”

  She doubted it. Tyson’s Rest had been about as friendly to aliens as the rest of the former Occupied Zone. The Mice would have known that the average human was more likely to shoot on sight than come in peace. Besides, unlike humans, they didn't seem to have much of a fighting instinct. The Dragons hadn't needed to apply much force to make them comply with their demands.

  “There should be a human crew here too,” Private Yu put in. “Where are they?”

  Sandy nodded, looking down at the take from the drones. Alien bodies – thousands of them – but nothing human. The files definitely agreed that ten humans had been assigned to the camp to supervise ... she shook her head in disbelief. Ten humans to handle the requirements of thousands of aliens? Even minimum security prisons in the Federation had a better ratio of guards to convicts. But then, no one really expected the Mice to cause trouble.

  And they’d think of the refugee supervisors as alien lovers anyway, she thought, with a bitter pang of guilt. If the Mice really did go on the rampage, the locals wouldn't hesitate to apply deadly force.

  “There’s no trace of them at all,” Loomis said. “We have to assume that they were taken by the attackers.”

  They moved over to the edge of the camp, where the attackers had clearly stood as they’d launched their offensive. Armoured footprints could be seen in the soil; the Marines counted at least thirty separate pairs, although Sandy knew that couldn't be taken for granted. Beyond the footprints, there were heavy indentations where the shuttles had landed and picked up their people. Loomis pronounced them to be standard assault shuttles, of a design that predated the war. Sandy, who knew that thousands of those craft had been
sold by the Federation Navy, was unimpressed. There were no shortage of people who flew assault shuttles.

  An alarm ran through the datanet. “One person, seemingly human, coming down from the hills,” Yu said. “Request permission to move to intercept.”

  Sandy studied the live feed. The girl looked young, but moved like an old woman. It was almost certainly the result of dehydration and poor nutrition, she decided, as the Marines moved away from the camp. The girl didn't look very threatening, yet the Marines refused to allow themselves to grow sloppy. Sloppy Marines, as Jess had told her more than once, ended up dead. The Dragons were quite ingenious when it came to setting up traps on the ground.

  The girl came to a halt when she saw the Marines, staring at them in horror. Sandy was puzzled – if there was one military force with good publicity, it was the Marines – and then realised that the girl simply hadn't recognised them. She stepped forward and cracked open her helmet, trying not to breathe through her nose. The stench was appealing.