First Strike

by Christopher Nuttall

  Down the street, most of the Funk prisoners were being marched out of the city, towards a POW camp that had been established several miles from human settlements. Adrienne found it hard to understand why the military would want to keep the aliens alive – instead of allowing the locals to throw rocks at them endlessly – but she supposed that they had their reasons. Some of the reporters had suggested leaving the prisoners in the city as human shields – alien shields, technically – before being shouted down by the others. There was not a shred of evidence to suggest that the Funks cared one whit about the safety of their own civilians. The battle they’d fought against the Marines had showed a frightening lack of concern for their own lives, let alone human lives. And besides, it would look very bad to the other Galactics.

  She walked closer, studying them with genuine interest. Earth had played host to thousands of aliens over the last fifteen years – the Federation had worked hard to attract aliens with technical skills humans needed – but a surprisingly few number of humans had seen an alien in person. Adrienne had never seen a Funk before, even though they were humanity’s main tormentors. They didn't look very intimidating now, with Marine guns trained on their backs. If they’d had tails, they would have been dragging them through the dirt. They’d been defeated and it showed.

  A handful of locals were watching from the other side of the street. Two of them looked old enough to remember the days before First Contact; the other three were young children, barely older than the colony itself. A few more years and Howell and his gang of sadists might have come calling to take the children away to their den. Adrienne ambled over towards them and held up her press card. The reporters had been wandering the city ever since it had been declared safe, collecting interviews from the colonists. Everyone seemed to have a story to tell.

  But not all of them would talk. Some were fearful that the Funks would come back, although they'd have to start rebuilding the collaborator force from scratch. Others were frightened that their peers would deem their own little compromises collaboration; deprived of their main target, the mobs were turning on anyone who had been forced to work with the Funks. There was even another POW camp nearby for rioters who refused to listen to reason, forcing the Marines to arrest them. And then there were people who just wanted to put the whole nightmare behind them as quickly as possible.

  “They took my brother away one day,” the woman said. She looked down at the ground, sadly. “Howell’s men said that he was tied into the resistance, that he’d been responsible for planting bombs in the city. I never knew if that was true, but I never saw him again. They killed him…”

  Her husband took her hand, looking up reproachfully at the reporter who had intruded into their private grief. Adrienne understood; there might never be any answers for those who had lost friends and relatives to the Funks and their collaborators. Howell’s men had destroyed their records when the Marines landed, while the Funks hadn't bothered to keep any proper records of humans they’d executed during the occupation. Most of the bodies had been destroyed, or buried somewhere without a marker. Local rumour said that the Funks had eaten the bodies, but Adrienne hoped that that was just a sick joke. Humans had always made up horrifying tales about their enemies to justify their hatred.

  “I wish I could find out,” Adrienne said. Reporters had a great deal of access, more than most people realised. But she couldn't find records that weren't there. “I could ask...”

  “If you would,” the woman said, but it was clear that she didn't expect anything to work. Adrienne couldn't blame her. “His name was Cameron Williams, but everyone called him Buck. It used to be a joke before the end of the world. He used to love bucking the rules...”

  Adrienne looked at the children, and then turned and walked away, leaving them to their grief. They'd been traumatized by the occupation, as had every other human on the planet – and Earth itself would be shocked when the full truth was released. She’d already had two brief messages from Ward, one congratulating her on a piece that had been released just after the President’s speech to the nation and the other ordering her to attach herself to Admiral Sampson and send stories and feature articles. Unfortunately, Admiral Sampson’s aide had merely promised to pass on the request and had never got back to her. The military knew the importance of cooperating with the press, but the Admiral was likely to be very busy. There was a war on, after all.

  The faces of the woman and her children kept flickering through her imagination later that afternoon, when she was allowed into the detention center run by the Marines. Unlike the POW camp for Funks, the detention center for collaborators kept them separated from each other by wire, preventing some of the suspected collaborators from murdering others. At least one person had claimed to be a collaborator, according to rumour, so he’d have a chance at murdering the bastard who had raped and killed his sister. He would have succeeded if it hadn't been for a meddling Marine.

  A small investigation team had been charged with gathering evidence to use against the collaborators, confirming and quantifying their guilt. Those who had collaborated willingly, or engaged in atrocities, would face the hangman once they had been tried, or dispatched to Luna Penal Colony. The others, the ones who had been forced into collaborating, would be tried more leniently than the willing collaborators. But that probably wouldn't satisfy their enemies on Terra Nova.

  “It’s something of a legal gray area,” the Marine Legal Officer explained, in the small office he’d taken from a Funk. It was a vaguely disconcerting place, close enough to what a human would find comfortable for the oddities to stand out. “You see, the Federation Charter strongly restricts where the Federation has jurisdiction – no one in the national governments wanted to create a world government that would eventually be able to dictate to them, not unlike the US Federal government dictating to the states. A typical compromise and one that probably would have bitten us on the ass sooner or later, even without the Funks. The Federation does have jurisdiction over Terra Nova, but there is no provision for overseeing criminal trials, let alone trials for treason and collaboration. It’s not even certain if we could legally charge them with anything.”

  “But that's insane,” Adrienne protested. “Surely there are rules...”

  “There are, but precisely where those rules interact is the question,” the Legal Officer said. “When I was a jarhead, I was bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice – I volunteered, so there was no question about the UCMJ applying to me. When I requested transfer to the Federation Marines, I moved to the Federation Code, which was partly based on the UCMJ anyway. But in both cases I volunteered to accept entering that particular sphere.

  “But treason against Earth isn't on the statue books,” he added. “No national government wanted the Federation deciding what constituted treason. Who knew what would happen if that particular can of worms was torn open? Not them, that’s for sure. Now, Terra Nova had – has - a limited criminal code dreamed up by the idealists who spearheaded the colonisation project, but it doesn't include treason and collaboration. No one considered the possibility when they started settling the planet.”

  He grinned. “Confused, yet?”

  Adrienne nodded. “Yes,” she said, bluntly. “We went to war without knowing what we were going to do to collaborators.”

  “That always happens, every time something changes,” the Legal Officer assured her. “I think that, technically, our best choice would be to charge them under national laws against treason – they’re still citizens of their home nations, even if they live here. Luckily, none of the children are old enough to be put on trial – they’d have to be tried under Terra Nova’s law and that…”

  “Doesn’t cover it,” Adrienne said, impatiently. “So...what is going to happen to them?”

  “The spooks are currently picking through the prisoners’ brains,” the Legal Officer said. “Those who cooperate will have it entered in their records – perhaps they will be offered life impris
onment instead of execution. The others...will be charged once we figure out which body of law we can charge them under and put on trial. Whatever else happens, the victims will demand justice.

  “One possible thought is convening courts here, with Admiral Sampson as the judge,” he added. “If you squint at the regulations in the right way, it would be just about legal and quicker than anything else. But I don’t think that national governments are going to go for it – it would set a dangerous precedent. An alternative is convening a trial here with a local jury, at least for the ones who have committed crimes that can be charged under the local legal code. Getting an unbiased jury, on the other hand, might be a little tricky.”

  “I don’t envy you,” Adrienne said. “Should I write articles complaining about the lack of anything to bring the bastards to justice?”

  “Hard cases make bad law,” the Legal Officer quoted. “And so does political pressure to get laws passed quickly without considering the consequences. They tend to make a lot of money for lawyers.”

  “You are a lawyer,” Adrienne said.

  “I rest my case,” the Legal Officer countered, with a grin that Adrienne would have found charming under other circumstances. “But…”

  He looked up. “Hey, do you want to see them?”

  Adrienne nodded, allowing him to turn on a monitor screen. “I’m not entirely sure why the Funks built this place,” he admitted. “It was largely abandoned by the time we landed and the locals say that no one was taken here for at least six months. But it not only keeps several hundred prisoners in confinement, it allows us to watch them constantly. That one there” – he switched the screen to display a single prisoner – “is Howell. The evidence we collected just on the first day will be enough to justify his execution under local law, even if he is never charged with treason. We won’t even need the kids we found in his quarters to testify against him.”

  He shrugged. “And why did he do it?

  “Apparently, if you believe him, he never got a break,” he added, sardonically. “I can see why he might feel that way, right up until the moment I realise that he never even tried to succeed. He thought that success came automatically; he never realised that he had to learn and work and work damn hard. Maybe he was always twisted, maybe he was slowly twisted by bitterness… I don’t know or care. He lost his right to freedom and life when he started molesting kids and tormenting their parents. Damn the bastard to hell.”

  “He doesn't look very impressive,” Adrienne said, after a moment.

  “They never do,” the Legal Officer said. “I did some pro bono work during downtime between tours; one of the cases I handled was a group of Klansmen who’d been caught red-handed in the process of burning down a black church. None of them looked impressive; some were fat, some were disabled… one had a missing chin. The great champions of the white race were among its least healthy members.

  “We saw the same in the sandbox,” he added. “The nutcases who’d throw themselves on our guns were often the worst of the population. They could only thrive in chaos – not that any of them really did, of course. The ones who slap women for showing some skin are the poorly-educated men who have little hope of rising out of poverty, never realising that it is themselves that keep them back. And the whole bloody cycle goes on for year after year.”

  He shook his head. “If nothing else, we can do one thing,” he concluded. “We can take those bastards out of the gene pool.”

  * * *

  “The Federation Council extends its congratulations on your victory, Admiral,” Admiral Sun Ji Gouming said. The Chinese admiral had become the Deputy CNO through political compromise, but he was a fighter and Tobias trusted him implicitly. If the US had ever had to fight China over Taiwan, he sometimes wondered what would have happened if Admiral Sun had been commanding the PLAN. “National populations have experienced mixed reactions, but the news of Terra Nova gave public moral one hell of a boost. We may see fear later on, once the delight wears off…”

  He shrugged. China was less sensitive to what its civilians thought than America. “The Council has also accepted your proposal to push on and complete the reduction of Garston before the Hegemony can reinforce the world. If you detach the gunboats for raiding missions, you should be able to add to the enemy’s confusion. I’m afraid that neither of our two intelligence services have been able to report much on what the Hegemony is doing – reports are always at least several days out of date before they reach us. From what we do know, the Hegemony has no intention of throwing in the towel just yet. Their Ambassador has been projecting high confidence to the Commune – she hasn't even attempted to rally support, as far as we can tell. But it’s early days yet.

  “Complicating matters is the presence of a Hegemony heavy cruiser and a light cruiser in the Heavenly Gate System,” he continued. “ONI fucked up – we didn't know about their existence until the Canary Ambassador quietly passed the information to Ambassador Li. We’re not sure what the Canaries will do; technically, any Galactic neutral should intern the ships until the end of the war, but the Hegemony will probably start pressuring them to be a little more accommodating soon if they’re not already doing so. I don’t think the Funks are particularly welcome guests…”

  Tobias snorted. The Canaries had populated their solar system by the time the Association stumbled across them, meeting the Cats from a stronger position. But unlike the feline explorers, the Canaries had a religious taboo against leaving their system and very few had ever journeyed more than a light-year from their star. They were tough, with an understanding of their technology that the Hegemony lacked, but not strong enough to stop the Hegemony invading their system if the Funks were prepared to soak up the losses. Tobias could easily believe that the Canaries wanted the Hegemony ships gone, or destroyed, yet they couldn't do it openly.

  “The Council wants your thoughts on the matter soonest, before you head off to Garston,” Admiral Sun concluded. “Just remember to keep reading Sun Tzu and apply it to the war - you won’t go wrong.”

  He laughed, just before the recorded message came to an end. Tobias replayed it, listening carefully, and then read through the attached documents. The Canaries had always been friendly to the human race, but then they’d been friendly to everyone who visited their system. And they had no ambitions to become a major galactic power.

  Picking up his terminal, he began to issue orders. He had an operation to plan.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I think we have a contact,” Karla said. “It’s definitely a Hegemony convoy.”

  Joshua smiled, coldly. The Hegemony didn't control this sector of space very well, although not even the Association possessed a fleet large enough to patrol quantum space. With so many raiders on the loose, it was no surprise that the Hegemony preferred to use convoys rather than sending ships out on their own. The chances of any given ship being detected and intercepted were low, but losing even one ship could be irritating. Besides, even though the Hegemony was rich and powerful, replacing a lost ship was expensive.

  “Good,” he said. They’d been waiting for five days for a suitable target. Two other ships had passed near their position, but they’d both belonged to other powers. Attacking them wouldn't have harmed the Hegemony and possibly expanded the war. “How many ships?”

  Karla frowned down at her console. Sensor readings were untrustworthy in quantum space, even at relatively close range. The convoy might be little more than a mirage, or it might be a fleet of warships heading to the front. Even with the best equipment money could buy, they still needed to slip closer to their targets before they could be sure they weren't flying into a trap.

  “At least five ships,” she said, after a moment. She’d developed a knack for reading sensors in quantum space, better than anyone else Joshua had met. It was still dangerous to take anything for granted. “Four of them are freighters, judging from their mass; the fifth is a destroyer, or possibly a light cruiser. It keeps altering position
so I can’t get a solid look at their emissions.”

  “Alert the other ships,” he ordered. “Prepare to attack.”

  The borders between major galactic powers were infested with pirates, rebels and independent settlers, but very few of them would have dared to attack a warship. It would have been unprofitable even if they’d won the fight. The Hegemony’s decision to send along only a single escort hadn't been a bad one, assuming that they would be facing common pirates or raiders. What pirate would dare to pick a fight with a warship, even if he outmassed his target?

  But Joshua had brought along six warships to his first operation, each one more powerful than the Hegemony escort ship. They’d destroy the ship and capture or destroy its charges – and when the Hegemony worked out what had happened, they'd know that they needed to send additional starships to escort their convoys, drawing reinforcements away from the war front. Joshua had spent the time between Earth and their current base researching the enemy’s economy and their operations along the borderlands, concluding that many of the lesser clans within the Hegemony were heavily involved in trade with the Hegemony’s neighbours. They would put pressure on the Empress to react strongly to the pirates, even if there was a war on. Some of them couldn't afford more than a few losses before they collapsed.

  He tapped his console and Blackbeard slipped forward, heading towards her target. The other ships hung back, watching as the Hegemony destroyer finally realised that they were there and turned to face the oncoming ship. Energy weapons and shields weren't always reliable in quantum space either – few militaries would have chosen to fight a battle there if it could be avoided – which meant that they would be throwing torpedoes at each other. Joshua smiled darkly as the ship’s ECM – ironically, bought from the Hegemony – went to work, creating ghostly sensor reflections around his ship. If they were really lucky, the Hegemony clans might start blaming each other for the raiders. It wouldn't be the first time one clan had started attacking another to clear the way for their own expansion.