The Bonds of Orion (Loralynn Kennakris Book 5)

by Owen R. O’Neill

  In bygone days, pitched battles often broke out over a Crimson Mirrowtip bloom, but now the known sites were parceled out to various localities who guarded them fiercely. The best sites, of course, had been taken over by the colonial government, who worked them with ‘guest labor’, that is slaves. Halith processed the spores into a drug they used to control a sizeable portion of their huge slave population. Aside from their horror at the prospect of losing a colony, production of this drug accounted for Halith’s interest in the planet. The locals produced related, but more recreational variants of this drug.

  The spores were toxic, making them difficult to handle. Without adequate protection, mortality among harvesters was high, and among those who worked in the labs that processed the spores, higher. Halith cared little for the lives of slaves, but the need to constantly bring in replacements did slow production and raise costs. As the supply of new slaves shrunk due to Halith reverses in the war, these costs skyrocketed and the government had been forced to the extreme step of issuing their ‘guest workers’ protective gear.

  The brilliance of employing POWs was that they had mil-grade immunocyte implants, which slaves did not, protecting them from the spores’ toxicity. Not incidentally, it also put the drug trade in the hands of the military’s POW organization. Which is to say, in the hands of General Tristan Heydrich, who ran it. This gave Heydrich, whose wealth derived from his family’s fortune, a personal asset of enormous value.

  Next, Heydrich had the ‘perfect place’ to house his POWs: Bishan Island, an uninhabited rock due south of the capital. Heydrich was a ground forces officer, but he’d never held an operational command. No doubt he believed holding POWs on Bishan was without risk. After all, the island was impregnable to a foe lacking air power, or even a means to ferry troops to an island two hundred klicks off the coast, wasn’t it? To even contemplate an attack on Bishan, the separatists would have to get ahold of Frunze, with its starport and harbor, and capture enough air and naval assets for the attack. Protected by over 14,000 Halith troops supported by aircraft based at the starport and fully shielded automated defenses, the idea of the city falling to rebel assault was laughable.

  So sure was he of the capital’s defenses that he hadn’t bothered to do more on Bishan than throw up some primitive POW camps clusters of makeshift huts with a few pit latrines surrounded by fences and meters of razor wire and guard barracks that weren’t much better. This the lieutenant reported to Colonel Yeager and, of course, it all made sense. With air support from Frunze and the craft in the harbor, the capital’s defenses and the island’s were one in the same. Fortifying Bishan amounted to an expensive duplication of effort and a wasteful expenditure of resources. Especially when the only threat was the separatist’s ragtag forces. Seen from the perspective of General Heydrich’s headquarters back on Halith Evandor, that conclusion was neat, tidy, and airtight.

  It was also like most neat, tidy, and airtight conclusions Colonel Yeager had met with dead wrong.

  Her private war had taught her a good deal about the troops the Doms had on-planet. They were security forces from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), not Halith regulars. Regular soldiers loved to heap scorn on irregulars and always had (as often as not, based more on pride and prejudice than combat effectiveness), but in this case, she felt it was richly deserved.

  They’d taken these low-grade troops “the scum of a thousand planets”, “barrel scrapings”, even the ancient joke “nasty, brutish and short”; it all applied and deployed them in the capital, awash with the temptations of sex, supplied by legions of prostitutes, and drugs; exactly what bored, ill-disciplined troops were most susceptible to. The POW lieutenant’s report confirmed what the snippets of information they’d gleaned since arriving had suggested: a flourishing commerce existed between the MPS soldiers and the locals, in which the former sold their supplies, and even their weapons, to the latter for sex and drugs. At times, they even sold themselves.

  Officers were not immune. In fact, having more to steal and much better opportunities to steal it, they were even less immune than the enlisted men. History taught that the rot set in very quickly under these circumstances, and there was every sign that it had. Yet secure in their smug, swaggering sense of superiority, officers and men alike could report that morale was high (it was) and all’s well (it wasn’t).

  Heydrich might believe those reports, Colonel Yeager thought. Or, if he didn’t, might hold the separatists in the same contempt that MPS forces on-planet did. At least, she concluded, he was acting that way. He’d also set up his drug processing facilities on Bishan Island, an obvious choice since that’s where the POWs were and a stupid one. The guards for the POW camps had to be brought in from the capital, depriving them of two things they felt entitled to. The POWs had access to one of these, the drugs, which (along with the raw stamens) made for convenient bribes, and the guards helped themselves to the other, using the female POWs.

  This is where it all fell apart for them and came together for the POWs the lieutenant explained. All POWs were fitted with an anklet to track and cripple them if they tried to escape or otherwise misbehaved. But a lot of guards didn’t like the idea of taking their ‘recreation’ in the POW compounds where there was surveillance. So they took the women to their barracks, meaning they had to take the anklets off. Over time, the women managed to steal a number of the anklet’s unlocking tools from their drug-addled rapists. Thefts of this kind (when they were remembered) were not the type to be reported. Not by the enlisted men, who would face savage punishments. Not by their noncoms (who frequently acted as pimps). Not by the officers, who indulged (and were implicated) as deeply as anyone else. After all, what good was one unlocking device to the POWs? Or even two? Even three?

  That was how the POWs managed to surprise and overpower their guards during a harvesting trip.

  The storm of events unleashed by the POWs’ escape as brilliant an example of the power of nonlinearities as the colonel had ever seen continued to roll and build. The POWs had their guards’ weapons, and adding them to her own people gave her a command of nearly a hundred effectives; enough to stage a raid on an MPS outstation at the mouth of a long, narrow valley they’d travelled through on the trip down. The Halith patrol sent to investigate was ambushed and wiped out. Rather than withdraw, Colonel Yeager, her people now armed with weapons from the outstation’s depot, set her sights on bigger game. Knowing the Halith authorities would respond with a much larger force, and gambling they’d divide it to send an airborne detachment ahead in hopes of catching her retreating up the valley, she rapidly advanced to engage Doms’ follow-on force. Surprised and overwhelmed in spite of their superior numbers, the Doms were decimated before the airborne detachment, off on their wild goose chase, could respond. Arriving late, disorganized and bewildered, the airborne troops surrendered.

  Colonel Yeager gained a dozen flyable aircraft, old, tough, reliable tilt-rotors which could carry thirty-two people each, two platoons of light armored vehicles, some wrecks that could provide spares and air lorries to haul them with, a plethora of arms and equipment, and a big problem.

  The problem was her prisoners, some four hundred of them. She could not easily transport or guard that many. She resented the idea of having to feed them. Nor could she eliminate them.

  Lacking other viable options, she locked them inside the depot, shivering in their underwear and surrounded by explosives set to go off at a sneeze. A wretched lot: most of them young conscripts, their heads rough-shaved for their first deployment, shivering less from cold than fear; many of the rest, evident hard-cases whose dull eyes reflected nothing but a brutish, deeply stupid animosity. Their bald scalps often showed crisscrossed scars from ‘cane duels’, a particularly vicious betting sport where the participants took turns assaulting each other’s naked skulls with their long, flexible truncheons. But the officers were the worst putrid with a level of rank degeneracy unusual even by MPS standards.

  Disgusted, she assig
ned a single squad to keep watch while the rest of her people went north to scout for a defensible position, and she, herself, paid a call on the local separatist commander.

  As it happened, that commander had also been looking for her. She could see him now, sitting third from the left. A dour saturnine fellow, hawk-nosed and hawk-eyed. He still looked pissed off. Her antics had stirred up the Doms wonderfully, at a time he clearly considered to be most inopportune. A tense negotiation followed. In the end, he agreed to take charge of her prisoners. She assumed he hoped to exchange them for members of his organization, now in Halith custody. But she made a point not to ask.

  Across the rough tabletop, the sole representative of the old leadership lean, rangy, with prominent cheekbones, a shaved upper lip and a beard streaked with gray like a true patriarch raised a hand. The flame of concord flickered in one bright crow-black eye, the other being a sightless gray, scored by the long seamed scar that started right above it and ran down the side of his face. The scar was an ornament; the blind eye struck her as a strange vanity. Even in a place like Amu Daria, cybernetic eyes were cheap.

  “Colonel,” he said, breaking the silence that had filled the room like a tangible presence since she’d sat down. “We are informed that you have offered to lead your men in a . . . forlorn hope? Against the starport.” He showed the edges of his teeth. “Forgive me if I use the term incorrectly.”

  Colonel Yeager returned the sharpened smile. In the early days gun-powder wars, a forlorn hope was a desperate assault on difficult objective, often a breach in the wall of a fortification. Successful or not, few ever survived it. Down the centuries, the antique term had retained its tinge of romance, and she briefly wondered where an Amu Darian warlord had learned it.

  “You’re close enough, General.” She used the rank out of politeness, having no idea of his real authority beyond being their spokesman, just as she diplomatically chose to consider his use of the word “men” to be non-gender specific. “But I don’t consider it forlorn. I don’t deal in hope.”

  “Please tell us, then, Colonel if you would what you do consider it. And what you deal in.”

  “Salvation” catching his one black eye with hers. “If you think you can take the capital without securing the starport, your planners don’t have the sense to pour piss out of a boot.”

  That was the crux of the matter; the convergence of events that had so pissed off the commander who’d taken over her prisoners and made this otherwise inconceivable meeting possible. When they met, he bluntly asked her what she intended to do with her new force. She answered candidly: free the POWs on Bishan Island. The shock on his face then owed more to alarm than surprise at her audacity, and when she realized this, it gave her the key to his anger. At length, her insight compelled him to admit the truth: the separatists were going to attack the capital. The operation had been planning since before she arrived, and they would put it into execution at the end of this current month.

  The gray streaks in the beard of the man she’d labeled the Patriarch caught the flame light as he answered. “We have considered it.”

  “Would you mind sharing those considerations?” Colonel Yeager asked. She had shaded her wording a bit: they might just might take the city without seizing the starport, but they’d never hold it. The capital drew its power from the starport’s fusion plants, and it was the main routing center for all their comms. The command center for the city’s defenses, a large underground facility, was also at the starport, and of course, all the air and sea power the Doms had in the vicinity. Unless they got control of it, their attack on the capital would amount to nothing more than a raid. And a raid, even one this large, seemed pointless.

  The Patriarch turned his head, showing a rugged profile, to bring his sighted eye to bear on the still pissed-off commander. “Major Evern. Explain please.”

  The man, Major Evern, did not alter his sour expression. “We have special units to deal with the starport.”

  “Special units.” Colonel Yeager mulled the words over. “Suicide squads?”

  He tilted his head sideways in a movement both assenting and annoyed.

  “So you’re gonna blow the shit outta the place.” Her attention swung back the Patriarch. “That doesn’t strike you as a little shortsighted?”

  The Patriarch moved his bony shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “We understand the starport is of essential interest to off-worlders. It is of little consequence to us.”

  The gibe was so obvious, she let it pass without a flicker. “If you say so. What about the command center? Your special units can’t disable it, so you can’t take the automated defenses offline.” Located beneath fifty meters of bedrock, even a moderate nuke wouldn’t touch the command center. Whatever the separatists armed their suicide squads with, it certainly wasn’t nukes. “What’s your plan, then, if you don’t mind an off-worlder asking?”

  The Patriarch gestured to Evern again. He passed his tongue across the edges of his teeth before answering. “Two thousand men are infiltrating Elborz” using the Amu Darian’s historical name for the capital. “At zero hour, they will capture the armory and all weapons caches within the city’s cordon and overrun the MPS posts in key districts. Then they will take over the government complex at the city center.”

  “Besiege it, you mean.” Colonel Yeager added the qualifier. The government compound and at least some of the MPS outposts would be shielded by security enclosures. With the weapons they had available, the infiltrators and whatever support could get through the automated defenses to join them after the initial surprise attack would have to wait till local power was exhausted before storming any shielded facility. Assuming they cut the power from the starport, of course.

  “We have allowed three days.”

  “And you don’t think the Doms will train their automated defenses on the capital itself?”

  Now all ten men handed a look around their sides of the table. “They would not destroy their own city!” declared a man from the shadows on the far left.

  “They have a lot of ’em,” the colonel observed. “They won’t miss this one.”

  “You suggest they will sacrifice their own people?” the patriarch added, sitting straighter.

  “Those people?” Colonel Yeager had an image of the MPS troops she’d captured clear in her mind. “You’re kidding, right?”

  More disgruntled looks: some leaning forward over the table with an antagonized glare at her suggestion or her levity or both; others sinking their heads between their hunched shoulders in tart disapproval.

  “Obviously, you have an alternative,” the Patriarch said after the pause.

  “Airborne assault,” the colonel answered promptly. “From the sea.”

  “From the sea?” asked the man on the far left.

  “If they think we’re a flight from Bishan, that might buy us a little.”

  “As soon your aircraft fail the challenge,” he snapped, challenging her, “the automated defenses will activate. You buy nothing.”

  “With the keys, you buy everything.” Studious incomprehension on the other sides of the table. “PALs.” The acronym for permissive action link did not seem to penetrate either. Finally, one of the men who had not spoken yet pointed a finger at her.

  “She means futbalový.”

  Football? Where the hell had they gotten that term from? Colonel Yeager mastered the urge to blink as the men glanced at one another and nodded. Then the man who supplied it looked at her and said, “How would you expect to obtain the futbalový the keys, as you say? How would you hope to use them? You do not have the codes.”

  It occurred to her that he somehow expected her to obtain the keys two metal ingots that when applied to a PAL controller allowed the automated defenses to be armed and disarmed, once the proper codes were entered after the attack had begun, and use them to take control of the automated defenses.

  Of course, that was impossible for the reason he’d given but observing his intent, even inq
uisitorial gaze, she wondered if he believed she had, being CEF, secrets she did not care to reveal. He was one of the youngest men there, wore the look of a firebrand on his dark, robust face, and didn’t trust her a micron.

  What she did have in mind she knew would, by his lights, justify him in his distrust. And she didn’t give a flying fuck. She wanted the starport, and she wanted it intact, not as a heap of smoking rubble. And they wanted the capital, so they could change the name back to Elborz (the one thing she was sure they would agree on) and fall to bickering about everything else. That was fine with her. But to get the POWs off-planet, she needed an operational starport. And this permanently aggrieved and easily offended band of indignantly righteous dried-up motherfuckers was not going to get in her way.

  “I don’t need the codes. If I get the keys before you slip the leash on your guys, they can’t arm the automated defenses. No automated defenses, no security enclosures. Nothing in the way of your forces outside the cordon and no reason for your angel-wannabes to go up in a blaze of glory you can break that to them gently and if you really want to blow the starport, I guess there’d be time for that later.” Unless they wanted to do it before she was ready. In which case . . . over my dead body.

  “So you would not retain control of the starport?” asked the Patriarch, his words frosted with suspicion.

  “Look, you gotta think of us as poor little lambs who've lost our way.” The literary reference to the famous poem by the Corps’ patron saint sailed a clear mile over their collective heads, and she added, “We just wanna go home.”

  Aware she’d oversold one point a hair, she watched them digest this. While it was true that activating the automated defenses would activate the security enclosures, it was not impossible the enclosures could also be activated manually. But that was a level of control Halith was loath to put in the hands of their regular troops, and she guessed that for ill-disciplined, half-mutinous MPS units, the thought was anathema. If she was wrong, the separatists would be in for a nasty surprise.