First Strike

by Christopher Nuttall

  The shuttle touched down and the hatch opened, revealing a pair of Marines serving as an honour guard. Protocol demanded that the Admiral be escorted by a platoon, at least, but there was a shortage of Marines who could be spared for close protection duties. The city was on the verge of collapse and the Marines were all that were holding it together, replacing the police force the aliens had created. One lesson humanity had learned in its long history was that both liberation and occupation forces needed to impose order right from the start. Freedom, democracy and human rights could come later. And the colonists had been through hell for the past five years. Tobias couldn’t blame them for wanting a little payback.

  He exchanged salutes with the Marines as another flight of shuttles roared overhead. The spaceport was the only place on the planet that could take an influx of troops from orbit quickly, even if it was alarmingly close to the main city. Brigadier Jones and his command staff had already established their headquarters in the spaceport, although if Tobias knew the Brigadier he was commanding operations from within his armored suit, far closer to the action than Tobias would have preferred. Marines were a law unto themselves; their commanding officers served on the front lines, taking insane risks to win and keep the respect of their men. Tobias allowed his escort to lead him towards the largest of the spaceport buildings, once the processing center for new immigrants to Terra Nova. His daughter and her husband would have gone through the center before being allocated their land, a place where they could start building a new life together. Now, the building had fallen into disrepair. The Funks hadn't wanted more human immigrants and they’d been reluctant even to allow visitors.

  Colonel Lafarge looked up from where he'd been studying a map when Tobias entered. He inclined his head in greeting, but didn't salute. Saluting senior officers in a combat zone marked them out for enemy snipers. Some of the Funks were still trying to hurt the liberators before they were wiped out. The map was paper, rather than one of the electronic plotting displays Tobias was used to using, but the Marines didn't seem to have any problems with using it to represent the city. They’d marked the location of patrols on the map with pencils.

  “Admiral,” Lafarge said. His accent was French, even though – like all Federation Marines – he spoke English perfectly, along with Galactic Three. “The city is largely under our control.”

  “Good,” Tobias said, shortly. Lafarge had drawn the short straw, no doubt, and had to remain at the spaceport while his CO and the other colonels were on the front lines. It worked for the Marines, even though it wouldn't have worked for the Federation Navy. “And the Funks?”

  “We’ve taken over several large buildings and turned them into makeshift prisons,” Lafarge informed him. “The Funks are being searched, processed and then guarded by a pair of companies. I’ve had to issue orders for no locals to be allowed to enter the camps after one of their more unwilling collaborators killed a prisoner.”

  “Good thinking,” Tobias said, ruefully. He’d intended to be gentle in victory – it would have made for good publicity among the Galactics – but the locals really did have other ideas. “How secure is the city itself?”

  “Most of it is fairly secure, but some parts have been consumed by riots before we could get troops in there to deal with them,” Lafarge said. “And there are still a handful of Funks out there, looking for trouble. We’ll bring it to them when they show themselves.”

  “Riots,” Tobias said, quietly. The Funks had steadily created an underclass of humans, one that had fallen into criminal activity as the only way to stay alive. Of course they were rioting, now that the iron hand of Funk control had been removed. Terra Nova would take decades to recover from the trauma of alien control, assuming that humanity won the war. “And how much of the local government has survived?”

  “The original Governor has not been found,” Lafarge said, “but a number of collaborators were killed when we stormed the garrison. And...”

  He hesitated. “And we found proof that some of them had been indulged by the Funks as a reward for their collaboration,” he added. “They were permitted to rape, torture and murder as the whim struck them. Two of them were found with preteen children in their quarters...”

  Tobias blanched. “Take them all into custody,” he ordered, flatly. He wanted to unleash the Marines without a trial, to punish the collaborators as they deserved, but they had to make it clear that they were punishing the guilty. And what of those who had had no choice, apart from collaboration? Could they really blame someone if the Funks had put a gun to his child’s head and demanded his services, or else? “Make sure that enough evidence is recorded to use against them when we hold trials.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lafarge said.

  “I need to go to the city,” Tobias said. It was selfish of him, but he wanted to see what the Funks had done with his own eyes. The reporters were already being shipped down from the assault carriers, ready to beam their reports back to Earth. They’d known that conditions on Terra Nova were bad, but they hadn't realised just how bad they’d become. “I’ll need to meet with the Brigadier personally.”

  * * *

  Conrad kept a wary eye out for Funks – or angry civilians – as the small platoon advanced down the street. He would have preferred a more subtle approach than a patrol that stood out for miles, but their orders had been clear. The Marines were to make a show of strength to convince the Funks that further resistance was futile, and warn the civilians that the colony was now under martial law. Some of them had been very ungrateful and started to riot as soon as the Funks were gone. Others were starting to kill collaborators, or to hunt down anyone who had helped the Funks, even against their will.

  The sound of sobbing caught his attention as they turned the corner. He stepped forward, motioning for two Marines to follow him while the others remained behind, covering them. A young woman – hardly more than twenty years old – lay on the pavement, crying. Two other women stood over her, one hacking away at the crying girl’s hair while the other held her down. Their victim looked pitiful, awakening Conrad’s protective instincts. He lifted his rifle and pointed it directly at the hairdresser.

  “Let her go, now,” he ordered. Civilians were strange; sometimes they obeyed orders and sometimes they wanted to debate them, as if they didn't feel the need for discipline. But then, he’d been a tearaway before the Royal Marines had knocked some sense into his head. The distance between him and the youths lashing out at their former tormentors was less than he would have preferred. “Now!”

  He clicked the safety off and had the satisfaction of seeing the first woman stumble backwards. The hairdresser, made of stronger stuff, glared at him. Up close, he could see bruises on her face, inflicted by someone who had intended to hurt her without causing permanent damage. He’d seen them before, on women in places occupied by Western military forces. Their husbands liked to compensate for perceived insults to their masculinity by knocking their women around. They were brave enough to hit their wives, but not brave enough to confront the armed Marines.

  “This… bitch used to sleep with Howell,” the hairdresser said. Conrad winced, inside. The Marine network had already informed him that Howell had been one of the worst collaborators, a failed - by his own mismanagement - farmer before the Funk arrival. He’d been unemployed up until the moment he’d realised that he could sell his services to the Funks. “She used to entertain the lizards. Why should we not punish her?”

  Conrad doubted the last charge; interracial sex was rare, almost non-existent. There were no actual laws against it, but as most intelligent races didn't really feel attraction for other races the Association didn't need to bother. The Hegemony males wouldn't find human females attractive, if they even recognised the difference between male or female humans. It was more likely that the hairdresser was exaggerating. Conrad certainly hoped she was exaggerating.

  “Because all collaborators will be tried and, if found guilty, will be punished,” Conrad sai
d, firmly. He understood how they felt, but another thing learned from human history was that revenge was a road that had no ending. The losers would seek their own revenge as soon as they felt strong enough to take it. “She will be tried, along with the others. Let her go.”

  “And then she will walk,” the hairdresser said, angrily. “Someone like her will flutter her eyelashes at the judge and jury and convince them that she was an unwitting dupe! A fancy lawyer will get her off on a technicality. She used to name people suspected of being part of the resistance and Howell’s police picked them up and beat them until they confessed. I…”

  Conrad pointed his rifle right at her heart and her voice trailed off. Regulations concerning the care of prisoners, whatever their crimes, were clear. The Marines were to prevent anyone harming the prisoners, particularly the ones who might have useful information for intelligence teams. Conrad doubted that the crying girl would have anything in her mind that ONI could use, but regulations were clear. Besides, rough justice offended his sense of order.

  “Release her now or I will shoot you,” he said, flatly. Behind him, the two Marines took off their own safety catches. “Step away from her.”

  The hairdresser looked into his eyes, and then reluctantly let the girl go. “You don’t understand what we’ve been through,” she said, finally. “You should help us.”

  “We did,” Conrad said. “Now please go home. We’ll take her to the camp.”

  He shook his head as the two women walked away. It was going to be a long day.

  * * *

  Gagarin City had once been a prosperous, if rough, city. Tobias had seen pictures sent home by Judy and he'd admired the neat little houses and the brick buildings that were steadily replacing the prefabricated structures produced on Earth. The Old West must have looked similar, back before civilization had crawled over North America, with small towns islands of human settlement in the wilds. Some of the colonists had been wealthy enough to afford to buy and operate a groundcar, but most of them had used bicycles or horses to get around the city – or outside. Terra Nova lacked any animals that could be domesticated to take the place of the horse.

  Now, parts of the city were in ruins and the rest looked decayed. Many once-prosperous buildings were falling apart through lack of maintenance. The city’s water and electricity infrastructure had been taken by the Funks, who often cut the supplies just to remind the humans who was in charge. Several buildings housed homeless families who’d had nowhere else to go. Some colonists had managed to turn a profit in the years of occupation, but they were the exception. The majority were poorer now than they’d been before the Funks arrived.

  He'd done his best to read through all the reports, but they didn't prepare him for the reality - and there were sights he never wanted to see. Terra Nova had suffered a food shortage in the second year of occupation, a combination of a bad harvest and the demands placed by the Funks on the food supplies. They’d attempted to solve the problem by rounding up hundreds of unemployed humans and shipping them out to work on the farms, only to discover that the results were nothing short of disastrous. The people they’d chosen as farmers had never been farmers and most of them had been too ignorant to know how to start. Vast stretches of farmland had been ruined before the Funks realised that they’d made a mistake and gave up.

  There was worse. People had been forced to turn to crime to survive. The Funks didn't seem to care about what humans did to each other, which allowed criminal syndicates to survive – hell, some of them had clearly allied with the Funks. Hundreds of women had been forced into prostitution, serving the few humans able to afford their services. A loaf of bread, a slice of meat, an egg or two… that was all it took to buy a prostitute for the night.

  He winced as the groundcar turned a corner and he saw the man hanging from the lamppost, very definitely dead. Someone had hacked away at his body just to make sure and blood was pooling under his swinging corpse. A collaborator, no doubt, or perhaps someone murdered to pay off an old grudge in the confusion. Even the Federation Marines couldn't be everywhere at once. Small patrols moved through the streets, constantly broadcasting warnings for people to remain in their homes. In the distance, he could hear brief crackles of gunfire as the Marines stumbled across lurking Funks. They still hadn't completely surrendered.

  The park had once been Gagarin City’s pride and joy. A group of settlers had brought flowers and trees from Earth and planted them in the heart of the city, in front of the town hall. It had been beautiful before the Funks had destroyed it, burning the entire garden to the ground. Now, fencing had hastily been erected around the blackened soil and used to construct a POW camp. Inside, several hundred Funks sat listlessly, their bodies inhumanly still. They never wasted a movement, Tobias knew; it was a point of pride with them that they never wasted anything. Their homeworld had never encouraged conspicuous consumption.

  Outside, a handful of Marines held their weapons at the ready, guarding the POWs. At least the Funks could be fed on human rations, making it easier to feed the prisoners. They could eat a far wider range of food than humanity, another legacy from their homeworld. Some races could only eat foodstuffs from their homeworld, or grew sick if they didn't eat precisely the right food every day. Feeding them would have been a great deal harder even with Association-level technology. No one had yet managed to produce something out of nothing.

  The Town Hall had been patterned after the White House, although it was far smaller. There had been a minor scandal when it had first been designed, as critics had pointed out that the Governor only really wanted a spectacular mansion for himself. The Governor had been replaced at the end of the year, but the Town Hall had been completed just in time for the Funks to take over the planet. They’d installed the worst of the collaborators in the Town Hall and used them to administer the planet. A human would have used the building for himself. Tobias couldn’t tell if the Funks didn't like the Town Hall, or if choosing to place their Governor in their garrison had been a security decision. Or perhaps it made perfect sense from their point of view. The supreme commander should have the securest possible accommodation, if only to intimidate possible opponents.

  Inside, a handful of Marine intelligence specialists were moving from room to room, removing papers and computer processors from the Town Hall. The spooks would work their way through them and extract any useful intelligence, although Tobias doubted that they would turn up anything interesting. Whatever else could be said about the Funks, their operational security was very good. They didn't tell their people anything unless their superiors believed that they needed to know.

  “Admiral,” Jones said. The Brigadier had ditched his armor as soon as the main body of fighting came to an end, like most of his men. “Welcome to Terra Nova.”

  Tobias smiled. They’d won the battle, even if the war would go on. The Hegemony would probably know that it was at war by now. He’d sweated bullets over the timing of the declaration of war – it might have come too early or too late – but it hardly mattered. The report from Formidable had confirmed that the Hegemony base hit by the gunboats had passed on a warning before it was destroyed.

  “Thank you, Brigadier,” he said. “It’s great to be here.”

  Jones smiled. “We found someone in the basement you’re going to want to meet,” he said, and tapped his wristcom. “Send her in, please.”

  The door opened... and Tobias stared, all decorum forgotten. It had been years since he’d seen Judy, and she’d aged from the girl she’d been as a child, but he recognised her at once. He swept her up into his arms and hugged her tightly, kissing her forehead. His daughter was alive and well!

  “I knew you’d come,” Judy whispered. Tobias felt hot tears pricking at his eyes. “I waited for you and you came!”

  “I came,” Tobias said. It was suddenly very hard to speak. “I came for you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Apart from Tirpitz, which was completely destroyed, all of our c
ruisers suffered only minimal damage,” Commander Sooraya Qadir reported. It was a day after the Battle of Terra Nova. “Captain Tallyman estimates that repairs to Woodward, the most badly damaged of our cruisers, will take no more than three days now that the Fleet Train has entered orbit. We could advance against the next target once repairs are completed.

  “However, five destroyers were lost,” she added. “Two of them hadn't been refitted with the reinforced variable shield generators that gave the rest of the fleet additional protection, but all five of the lost ships were picked off by the superdreadnoughts as they closed in on their attack runs. They just don’t have the defences to stand in the wall of battle.”

  “We knew that when we went in,” Tobias said, flatly. He would have loved to visit Judy’s farm – the Funks had arrested her after discovering that she was involved in the resistance – but there was no time. The news about the war was already out and spreading. “And the Marines?”

  “One hundred and nineteen died in the assault on the garrison,” Sooraya informed him. “The largest single loss was the destruction of a shuttle before the Marines had finished bailing out, taking out fifteen Marines and the shuttle crew. Thirty-seven have also been injured severely enough to merit a return home to where they can receive proper medical care. They’re currently in stasis in the Fleet Train.”

  Tobias nodded, sourly. Every one of the Galactics with ambitions to replace the Cats as the dominant race in the galaxy maintained a Fleet Train, a fleet of supply and transport starships that supplied their navies as they advanced away from their homeworlds. Humanity, on the other hand, hadn’t had the time or resources to do more than improvise a fleet train from commercial freighters and a couple of mothballed deep-space survey ships purchased from the Association. Given time, he had no doubt that the Federation Navy would build a proper supply fleet of its own, but they would have to make do with what they had for the moment.