Knight's Move

by Nuttall, Christopher

  The only consolation was that the spaceport’s defenders had clearly torn the attackers a new asshole or two. A handful of wrecked shuttles lay on the ground, shot out of the sky before they’d had a chance to realise that they were under attack. The Colonial Militia didn't have the endless teams of specialists the Federation Navy could deploy, but a handful of engineers and soldiers were crawling over the wreckage, looking for clues. Coffey hoped they’d find something, yet he wasn't hopeful. Anyone prepared to piss off the Colonial Militia to this extent had to be utterly paranoid about hiding their origins, let alone their starships and bases.

  “Take us back to the city,” he ordered.

  The pilot nodded and obeyed, pulling the shuttle around so Coffey could see the smoke rising from the distance. Thankfully, there had been no indiscriminate bombardment, but what there had been had been quite bad enough. Over two thousand civilians dead, mostly for being too close to military targets. Coffey wondered, bitterly, if they’d even heard the warnings. Or if they’d been confident that the planet was secure until it was far too late.

  He looked up towards the darkening sky and scowled. Twenty-one Colonial Militia starships were in orbit now, but he knew that the raiders wouldn’t bother to return. Why would they when they’d hit their targets and withdrawn in good order? They’d flattened the alien camp with dirty warheads – the one survey team he’d dispatched towards the camp had reported that it would be weeks before it could be approached without proper protective gear – and looted the spaceport. What else did they want?

  The shuttle dropped down and landed next to the schoolhouse, where the surviving members of the government had assembled, along with their senior military leaders. It had shocked Coffey to realise that the senior survivor was a mere Captain; the others had died, either in orbit or during the fighting on the ground. Captain Bester had been lucky; he’d been in one of the emergency fallback locations, which had been completely unknown to the raiders. That secret, too, had never been shared with anyone off-world.

  “Mr. President,” the Vice President pro tem announced. She’d been a junior congresswomen, seventeenth in the line of succession. Now, she was Vice President ... and utterly unqualified for the post. “Welcome back.”

  Coffey nodded brusquely, then sat down at the head of the table. Someone had doodled on it, he noted, as the others sat too. Half of them were still stunned, either at the devastation or at their sudden elevation to power. Even Captain Bester looked exhausted. Yesterday, he'd been a junior supply officer. Now, he was effectively the CO of what remained of the planet’s military.

  “We have completed our preliminary investigation,” Bester said. He was a surprisingly fat man for a military officer, but supply officers weren't held to the same standards as combat troops. “We now know how the enemy took out the orbital battlestation. They used security codes from Fairfax to dock with the station, then triggered an antimatter mine. It was a major security breach, sir.”

  “I thought those bloody stations were supposed to be damn near indestructible,” the President snapped, angrily. “Or was that just bad propaganda?”

  “The station wasn't designed to contain an antimatter explosion inside its shields,” Bester admitted. “Normally, no ship would be allowed to dock without verification of her bona fides. In this case, they used codes from Fairfax to bypass the standard security checks.”

  “Which leads us back to Fairfax,” Coffey said. “The leak came from there?”

  “No one else should have had the codes,” Bester said. He swallowed, nervously. “Someone on the planet must have been bribed or threatened into handing them over.”

  “Change all of our codes,” Coffey ordered. It might well be locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen, but they had to learn from the whole disaster. “I want absolutely nothing shared with Fairfax until we have this damn leak plugged, understand?”

  He glared from face to face, thinking hard. It had to be a leak; the chances of Fairfax authorising the attack were less than zero. They'd have to be completely out of their minds, particularly as such an attack could shatter the Bottleneck Republic. But he didn't know who he could trust any longer. If there was such a high-placed leak ...

  “I will speak to Representative Asimov personally,” he continued. “He will demand answers for us – and we will get them - or we will look to our own protection.”

  “Mr. President,” Bester said carefully, “our best case estimate gives us ten years before we can replace everything that was lost. Right now, we probably could not afford to replace the battlestation without going into serious debt. And that assumes that we don’t get into a trade war with the rest of the republic.”

  Coffey scowled. Xenophon had gone, within hours, from being an important world in the republic to being a charity case. Bester was right; the last thing they needed was a political tussle that could affect their ability to rebuild. But he was damned if he was trusting Fairfax with anything that impacted on his planet's security, not any longer. Their leak had cost thousands of lives. God alone knew how many more would be lost in the coming weeks and months.

  “I know,” he said, “but we have no choice. Right now, we don’t know who we can trust.”

  Chapter Thirty

  General Gustav Mannerheim knew that he was an uncomplicated soul. It had all seemed so simple during the war; stop the Dragons or the Dragons would crush the colonies and turn any survivors into slaves. And the Dragons themselves had never been particularly subtle, or inclined to sneak around; they’d just charged at their targets and tried to hammer them flat. Why not? They’d always had the biggest hammer in space, at least until the TFN had taught them that there were bigger powers out there. They hadn't needed to be subtle.

  His life had been shaped by the war. Starship commander, squadron commander, fleet commander ... and finally supreme military officer in the Bottleneck Republic. It had made a stranger of his daughter, particularly when he’d cast such a long shadow that she’d transferred to the Federation Navy to make a career of her own; it had cost him his first wife when she’d died while he'd been fighting on the front lines. And, along the way, it had cost him thousands of brave men who had died facing the Dragons. There were days, he admitted silently, that he’d considered putting his pistol to his head and ending his life. Why not leave the troubles of peace to the next generation?

  But he knew his duty. Indeed, he had nothing else left. The farm was well-maintained without him, his daughter had her own career ... it was a shame that she hadn't managed to produce grandchildren yet, but she had decades of life ahead of her. Maybe one day she would meet a worthy man – if such a paragon existed – and get married, then pregnant. But until then ...

  He shook his head and turned back to the chamber. It was crammed with representatives, one from each member world of the Bottleneck Republic, and reporters, half of them from the Federation. The General couldn't help eying them with some suspicion, noting just how warily the politicians treated the Federation’s media. By the time their dispatches reached Earth, they would have been reprocessed into something that suited the media’s institutional prejudices or its backers political aims. Any relationship to the truth would be coincidental at best.

  “There was a leak on Fairfax,” Representative Asimov was shouting. “Someone here betrayed our world to the enemy!”

  There was a roar of agreement from around a third of the representatives. The General had seen the report and knew that Asimov was almost certainly correct, even though he had no idea who had chosen to leak information to the raiders. It had to be someone in a very high position, but all such individuals were known and trusted by him. But that wouldn't impress anyone, nor should it. The security precautions had proven alarmingly weak.

  “Nor is this the only leak,” another representative bellowed. “Who told the raiders where the Governor’s ships were going?”

  That was another mystery, the General knew. No one on Fairfax, apart from the Gove
rnor’s staff, had known where the ships and their supplies were headed. He could believe that the Governor might have leaked information intended to make her look good, but why would she send the information to the raiders rather than the media? Hell, why not send it to the media and let the raiders pick it up from them? It simply didn't make sense!

  “The militia needs to be redeployed,” Representative Asimov said, angrily. “Or we need to call for help from the Federation.”

  The General kept his face impassive, even as he winced inwardly. Every day, the Governor or one of her lapdogs asked why the colonies – she never called them the Bottleneck Republic – spent so much of their money on the military. She pointed out, correctly, that even the cheapest warship cost more than the farming equipment they needed to produce food and the freighters they used to move the food from planet to planet. But the scars of the war ran deep, too deep for any outsider to understand. The Bottleneck Republic would sooner bankrupt itself building up a military than see their work destroyed by a second war.

  After all, what was the point of having a nice house to live in if the next barbarian to come along simply took it?

  “The Federation has persistently refused to provide warships to take some of the burden from the Colonial Militia,” the President reminded Asimov. “They are unlikely to change their minds ...”

  “Then pull ships away from the alien refugee camps,” a representative shouted. “Or send the damn buggers straight to hell.”

  “These bastards are madmen,” Asimov shouted back. “Their message made that damn clear! We need starships and troops, not words and empty gestures.”

  The General cursed under his breath. There was no way to avoid the tactical dilemma facing the Colonial Militia. In order to pose a deterrent to pirates, it had scattered ships over star systems like confetti ... but the raiders, it was clear, were not deterred by one or two starships, not when they operated a small squadron of their own. The Colonial Militia would need to meet their squadron with a squadron and that would be difficult. If nothing else, they would be leaving more targets open to the raiders as the militia concentrated their ships.

  They’d made such hard choices during the war, damning low-population or otherwise useless worlds to enemy occupation to preserve their strength for the decisive battles. Most civilians might like to believe otherwise, but the General knew that no matter how hard they’d fought, the colonies would have been screwed if the TFN hadn't taken the brunt of the Dragon offensive. The Colonial Militia had been battered almost to uselessness during the later years of the war. It was why there were still so many ancient starships and starfighters still in service, along with a number of customized designs. They simply couldn't be replaced quickly, if at all.

  And we cannot guard every possible target in enough force that the enemy are deterred from attacking, he thought, sourly. There is no solution to this cold equation.

  “So we remove the aliens ourselves,” a representative snapped. “Let’s just kill them all ourselves!”

  “You would give in to these monsters?” Someone else shouted. “They didn't just kill aliens, you know.”

  The General rolled his eyes as the President gravelled for silence. There were definitely days when he missed the war.

  He wasn't sure just what the raiders had in mind – they’d gone to a great deal of trouble just to exterminate the alien camps – but he understood why some planets wanted to just submit to the raider demands and remove the aliens themselves. They’d barely survived the war against the Dragons, who had given humanity the choice between surrender and slavery or fighting like mad bastards. Now, there was a human enemy, one who might be less unpleasant than the Dragons. And if the message from the so-called Colonial Liberation Front was telling the truth, the planets that removed the aliens would be safe from attack. It would be horrendously tempting ...

  Sure it would, he thought, coldly. It isn't humans who would be shoved out into the cold, just aliens. And who gives a shit about them?

  Racism and xenophobia had always been part of human nature. It was amusing to look back over a thousand years of human history and realise that humans had discriminated against one another because of skin colour, rather than anything rational, but it hadn't been as funny at the time. Skin colour had just been a way to raise barriers between one group of humans and another; religion, sex and even age had been used at one time or another. But now there were real aliens and somehow racism was acceptable once again. Why not? The aliens weren't human, could never be human ... and some of them had posed a deadly threat to the human race.

  We won, he thought. And now we have to deal with the aftermath.

  ***

  Governor Chandra Wu knew that she was unpopular. When one was focused on the bigger picture, it was natural that one would incur the displeasure – even hatred – of those who couldn't see beyond their own rice bowls. Or their planets, she reminded herself, remembering the politicians who were steadily resisting the expansion of Federation power on the grounds it might infringe upon their planet’s autonomy. What did that matter when there were vast numbers of starving humans and aliens left by the war? Or billions upon billions of credits worth of destroyed infrastructure?

  From a strictly local point of view, she could understand their attitudes. Why should Terra Nova, oldest of the colony worlds, send money and supplies to help rebuild Garston, a colony world with only a couple of million settlers? It wasn't as if Garston was a daughter planet settled directly from Terra Nova. No, Garston had been settled by a group that had wanted no connection with the rest of humanity at all ... which had become a sick joke when the planet had been attacked and occupied by the Dragons. But Chandra knew that the human race had to work together to survive and prosper. Local concerns had to take second place to the overall health of the Federation.

  It would have surprised her hosts, she acknowledged, that her views on aliens weren't too different from theirs. Aliens fell into two categories; those that presented a threat to humanity and those that were incapable of defending themselves from the first category. The Mice, largely incapable of fighting, had been natural slaves for the Dragons. They’d been spread out over hundreds of star systems, told to breed millions more of their kind ... and there hadn't even been a single uprising. Give humans such an advantage and control of so much infrastructure, Chandra knew, and the Draconic Empire would have been thoroughly crushed in a brutal revolution. Instead, the Mice had just toiled away until the human invasion had liberated them.

  The Dragons presented a threat because their culture made them a threat. If they were integrated into the Federation and taught a better way to live, would they remain dangerous to humanity? She doubted it; there were no shortage of worlds or resources in the endless reaches of space. And the Mice ... if they couldn't look after themselves, surely they could become part of the Federation, which would protect them. The human race had a duty to the aliens it encountered, a duty that it could not be allowed to shirk. It was their burden to protect and reshape alien cultures until they could coexist safely with humanity.

  But the chaos left behind by the war had to be handled before the grand project could go ahead. It shocked and dismayed her to realise that the colonies were not interested in handling the chaos, merely in getting it as far from them as possible. Yes, the scars of the war went deep, but did they really go that deep? It was outright racism, plain and simple, to herd aliens into concentration camps and abandon them on poor worlds that couldn't or wouldn't do anything to help them. If the colonies were reluctant to take advantage of alien labour, which they were, they could at the very least treat the aliens decently ...

  She shook her head, looking down at the chip Harrison Montgomery had passed to her. It was proof that certain people within the Fairfax Cluster had directly conspired against the aliens, using factions within the Colonial Militia to target and exterminate the alien camps, slaughtering thousands of aliens. They were committing genocide on a terrifying scale a
nd it had to be stopped. Whatever happened, she told herself, it had to be stopped.

  The doors leading into the governing chamber loomed up in front of her. By law, she could call a meeting of the colonial representatives at any point, but it was unnecessary. According to Montgomery, the colonial government had been arguing ever since the news of Xenophon reached Fairfax. Someone within the government had not only betrayed the aliens, they’d also betrayed their own people. They had to pay.

  She kept her face expressionless as she stepped into the chamber, even though the racket as representatives shouted at one another was shocking to someone used to the more genteel debates on Earth. But then, there was something almost honest about the open anger of the colonial representatives. On Earth, Senators and Congressmen were almost chillingly polite to one another while they calculated where best to stick the knife. They’d had years in office to get used to how best to manoeuvre to get what they wanted from government.