by Jay Allan
A commotion disturbed her and she glanced down towards the handful of tubes at the bottom of the compartment. A youngish-looking man—with the attitude of an older man, suggesting that he had had rejuvenation treatments at some point in his life—was hugging a teenage girl, who wasn’t enjoying the experience. Jasmine remembered when it had suddenly become embarrassing to be hugged by her own father and felt a silent moment of sympathy, although she wasn’t sure who she was feeling sorry for. The girl’s older sister was openly eying some of the Marines, while her mother looked torn between disapproval and fear. She’d probably watched hundreds of reports that had made the Marines out as trained killers, rapists and looters, rather than the most highly-professional military force in the Empire. It had to be galling to be dependent on men she feared would ravish her poor innocent daughter—although, judging from the girl’s lustful expression, innocent was not a word that could be fairly applied to her.
“Nice piece of ass,” Blake muttered, as he squatted down beside Jasmine. “I could ride on her all day.”
“And then the Sergeant cuts off your nuts and wears them as a trophy,” Jasmine muttered back. The briefing they’d been given on their civilian guests had been scanty, but Gwen had left them in no doubt as to what would happen if any of them were molested. Jasmine had found that rather insulting herself—none of the men in her Company would molest a girl—but she understood the Sergeant’s attitude. A court martial would disgrace the entire Marine Corps—and generate entire realms of paperwork. “Besides, looking at her, I bet you she’s been had by hundreds of men already.”
“So have the whores who gather around the barracks and we don’t complain,” Blake countered. “What’s wrong with a girl who shares her charms with everyone, as long as she shares them with me?”
Jasmine pretended to consider it. “This might be why we got our asses royally fucked back on training last year,” she said. Blake had been squad leader at the time. “You were unable to risk the temptation to stick it in a convenient orifice and got us all buggered.”
“That’s not what you said at the time,” Blake protested, dryly. “You were telling me what a genius I was before the first grenades started to detonate.”
“It might have been tolerable if they hadn’t gloated about it afterwards,” Jasmine said, with a wink. “They kept telling us that they were sure that we wouldn’t walk into that trap.”
She pulled out the armour pieces and placed them in front of her, then started to strip down to her underwear, removing anything that couldn’t be worn under the armour. Blake followed her example, looking away to grant her what privacy he could. Fraternisation was forbidden within the same Company, although the rule was sometimes ignored and Jasmine was used to stripping down in front of the men. No one said anything. They all depended on each other to stay alive when the shit hit the fan.
Jasmine looked up and saw the girl staring at Blake’s torso as he pulled off his tunic. She had to admit that it was a nice torso, although the scars were a reminder of everything they’d been through together. She looked over at the girl and saw her blush and look away, her face as bright as a red stop sign. Jasmine smiled as Blake blinked at her, puzzled. He had completely missed the byplay.
“Never mind,” she said, as she started to pull on her armour. It felt good to be back in the light armour again, although she knew that some Marines had been roasted like chestnuts when their enemies had deployed weapons capable of punching through their armour. Heavy combat armour, by contrast, was almost indestructible, but those suits had to be custom made and cost as much as a frigate. It was hard enough to convince the Grand Senate to fund a few hundred suits a year. One day, she was sure, the technology would advance to the point where every Marine could have a heavy combat suit, but not for a very long time. And, by that time, heavy armour would be considered light armour. Some things never changed. “Just remember the Sergeant’s motto and you’ll be fine.”
She pulled the helmet down over her head and blinked as the suit came online, transmitting a series of signals right into her eyes. The armour’s sensors provided a complete image of what was outside, an image that could be rotated at will, while hundreds of tiny windows popped up to mark out points the suit’s onboard computers considered interesting. Blake’s armour was marked as FRIENDLY; the civilians, staring at the armoured Marines in astonishment, were marked as UNKNOWN. Blake’s armour powered up beside her and he chuckled, a noise picked up by the intercom and transmitted to her.
“Armed and armoured,” he said. The civilians thought of powered combat armour as something that clunked around the battlefield, but the truth was very different. “We’re hot and free.”
“Keep your weapons on safe until I give the order,” Gwen said. The armoured Marines were starting to form up now, allowing the civilians to walk past and out of the stasis chamber. “We just have time for some training before we board the station.”
Two hours later, the station—imaginatively named Orbit Station—came into view. Jasmine had been briefed that many early colony worlds used the same names and terminology to prevent misunderstanding, but in her considered opinion it was an excuse for bureaucratic lack of imagination. The station looked like a giant starfish; it could easily have been named Starfish Station, or even something more exotic. She’d seen a sex toy that looked rather like a station, although she was fairly certain that no colonial government would accept such a name. They’d be the laughing stock of the sector.
Orbit Station had been constructed out of prefabricated parts and should, according to the files, have been either expanded or replaced as local production came online, allowing the settlers to build their own facilities. Avalon’s Government hadn’t invested in the station, however, doing only the bare minimum to keep the station running and meet their obligations to the Empire. A dozen habitat nodes had been attached to the original station, while an old tramp freighter lay in dock, affixed to one of the docking tubes. There were eight in all and only one of them was in use. Earth had thousands of starships docking and undocking every day.
“All hands, this is the Captain,” a voice said in her ear. “Prepare for docking. I say again; prepare for docking.”
Jasmine followed Blake and four other Marines through the ship’s corridors and down to the main docking section. The great advantage of the powered combat armour was that it could also serve as a spacesuit if required, allowing them to operate even if the enemy managed to depressurise the section and blast them all out into space. Captain Stalker met them there, wearing his own armour; Jasmine’s armour reported that he was exchanging encrypted messages with Gwen. She could guess at the content of the messages. He wanted to lead his Marines into the station and Gwen, quite rightly, was saying no. Captain Stalker was the senior Marine in the system and, as such, couldn’t be risked unless the shit had really hit the fan.
A dull thump ran through the ship as it docked. Jasmine stepped forward as the hatch slowly swung open, carefully checking that her suit was armed and ready to go. It was a habit that had been drilled into her at the Slaughterhouse, where she’d been warned that equipment, no matter how advanced, could fail at any moment and leave her in the lurch. The Drill Sergeants had sometimes caused equipment to fail at bad times, just to ram the message home. Anyone whose suit failed had to drop out of line at once and report themselves as unfit for combat.
She smiled inwardly as the Marines advanced. The Marine Corps had hundreds of legends and one of them involved a Marine whose equipment was always going wrong. He hadn’t been a coward—he hadn’t lacked moral fibre, as the reports put it—yet nothing had ever gone quite right for him. One day, he’d done four parachute drops and in all cases, the main parachute had failed to open. His instructor had, angrily, taken him for a final jump, carefully supervising every moment of preparation. Both of the instructor’s parachutes had failed, sending him tumbling to his death. The Marine, understandably shaken by the experience, had resigned from the Corps.
The long tube yawned open in front of her, sending chills down her spine. An enclosed area was dangerous. She checked her weapons again, making sure that the stunner was ready to fire if necessary, before the second hatch opened and they stepped into the station. A young girl, barely more than nine years old if that, stepped forward and stopped, gaping at them.
“She looks a bit young for this,” Blake muttered, on the platoon’s channel. “What’s she doing here?”
“It’s run by a family,” Joe muttered back. The girl had shrunk back. If she’d never seen a Marine before, God alone knew what she thought they were. “She’s one of their children.”
Jasmine nodded in understanding. The space-born, the men and women who had spent all of their lives in asteroid settlements, had a habit of pressing children into work from an early age. A young child could certainly carry out most tasks in an asteroid, even if it was something as minor as minding the algae farms or repairing mining equipment. Some of them, later, joined the Imperial Navy and were among the most highly-decorated combat commanders. They knew, instinctively, the realities of space combat.
“Hello,” she said, unhooking her helmet and disconnecting from the tactical gestalt. “My name is Jasmine. What’s yours?”
“Flora,” the girl said, her eyes going wide as Jasmine emerged from the armour. “Who are you?”
“My name is Jasmine,” Jasmine said. Nothing in her training had prepared her for dealing with Young Children, but she’d helped raise nieces and nephews. “We’re the Marines. Can you take us to your parents?”
“Her father is here,” a heavily-accented voice said. Jasmine recognised the accent; an ex-asteroid miner from one of the Scottish-ethnic systems. “Why have you boarded my station?”
“We have to secure it before we start unloading,” Gwen explained. Her voice echoed from her suit’s armour. Jasmine caught the undertone of annoyance. There was no threat here, just a frightened child. “We’re not going to damage anything.”
“I hope not,” the man said. “I’m Douglas Campbell, manager of this station for my sins. Would you like me to call out my family?”
“That would make life easier,” Gwen said. She changed to the Marine-only channel. “Start searching the station. Do not damage anything if possible.”
Jasmine smiled inwardly as she pulled her helmet back on and sank into the electronic universe surrounding her. Campbell’s family—seven men and women—nineteen children—came at his call, waiting in one of the massive—and empty—loading bays while the Marines checked out the station. Jasmine guessed that it was an open family, with mixed relationships rather than a single mother and father, a not uncommon pattern among RockRats. Who cared who fathered a child, or who gave birth to her, as long as the children were loved and cherished? The conservatives on her homeworld would have been horrified, of course, but Jasmine didn’t care. Besides, she and every other Marine in existence were married to the Corps. She only took lovers occasionally.
The interior of the station was in surprisingly good shape, although some of the maintenance looked jury-rigged and dangerous. That wasn’t too surprising. The technology in most of the station was primitive, dating from the early days of spaceflight, just to make it easy to repair. It was something that had struck her as odd when she started reviewing the histories of settled worlds, but serving in the Marines had taught her the wisdom of the practice. A piece of technology that was impossible to repair when broken was effectively useless.
“It’s clear,” Blake reported, finally. “No weapons apart from a handful of low-power laser cannons and rail guns. There’s nothing here that can threaten us.”
“Good,” Gwen said, briskly. “Blake, Jasmine, Joe; report to the shuttlebay for close-protection duty. The rest of you report back to the ship and prepare to start unloading the Sebastian Cruz. The Captain wants to be rid of us and we might as well oblige.”
Jasmine smiled, delighted. Close-protection duty meant that she would be going down to the planet first. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, like stepping onto a new world. It made everything else worthwhile.
CHAPTER 12
The Empire’s system of planetary government is intended to evolve as the planet itself evolves. In theory, within the first fifty-hundred years, the planet should have evolved a local council that eventually becomes a planetary government. In practice, with development corporations striving to extract every last credit from their investment, the planetary government becomes a corrupt sham. The game is rigged against the children of settlers, who never signed a contract and were never in hock to the Development Corporation.
- Professor Leo Caesius, The Waning Years of Empire (banned).
From orbit, Avalon looked as green and blue as Earth had looked, before the human race had come alarmingly close to killing its own homeworld. Edward watched as the shuttle started to head down towards the largest continent, admiring the green blur that hid the human settlements. Earth glowed in the night, illuminated by the lights of a thousand mega-cities; Avalon looked pristine and unspoiled. There were religions that worshipped untainted worlds and pressed for an end to colony flights, although they had never had a chance of convincing the Grand Senate to abandon their main source of wealth. Besides, the more distance between the different human sects, the better. It kept the bloodshed down.
He pressed his face to the viewport as the main continent took on shape and form. Avalon had three main continents—named Arthur, Lancelot and Galahad by the Captain of the survey vessel that had discovered the world—each one about the size of Africa and spread out across the planet. Hundreds of islands, ranging from the size of Cuba to the size of Nantucket, were scattered across the remainder of the oceans. Some of them, according to the briefings, played host to human settlements established in defiance of the planetary government. It was hardly an uncommon development on a planetary surface, but in the long run, such tiny colonies were eventually absorbed into the mainstream. The human race had learned a harsh lesson about allowing too much ethnic or religious diversity on a planetary surface.
Like almost all colony worlds developed by a corporation out for profit, development had focused on one of the continents and concentrated on building up a local farming infrastructure as quickly as possible. The survey team that had spent a year on the surface, catching and studying the wild crops and animals, had calculated that Earth’s crops could be added to the soil without risking ecological collapse. The native animals were generally edible—although there was one specific kind of animal that preferred to eat humans rather than be eaten—and fish and other creatures had been released into the sea. The blue seas below him teemed with life, including a creature that the original team had named the Jonah Whale, a monstrous creature that was the undisputed king of the food chain. They had taken to eating Dolphins and lesser fish with enthusiasm. The briefing paper had warned that hunting Jonah Whales was asking for trouble. Luckily, there weren’t many of them and they tended to stay away from humanity’s ships.
The same couldn’t be said for the Gnasher. The photographs included in the briefing notes had suggested nothing more than a large black dog, one that a young boy might enjoy romping through the woods with, chasing rabbits and catching sticks. It was an illusion. The creature had a gland within its heart that somehow supercharged it and allowed it to literally rocket towards its victims, savaging them with teeth that bit though flesh and bone with equal abandon. The briefing notes had warned that the safest thing to do with confronted with one of the monsters was to shoot it at once with explosive bullets. When supercharged, they had an astonishing ability to absorb damage and somehow keep going.
He pushed the thought aside as the shuttle descended towards one edge of the largest continent. The city of Camelot lay below him, the largest settlement on Avalon, although that didn’t mean very much. It was tiny to his eyes, barely holding a few hundred thousand people at most. The handful of other settlements weren’t any more impressive, although th
e briefing papers had suggested that some of them had been built from scratch and were generally more orderly than the capital city. He pushed that thought aside too. Avalon was six months from Earth and it was astonishing how much nonsense, or downright falsehoods, could creep into the files. He’d just have to wait and see what happened when they landed.
“We’re coming down towards the spaceport now,” the pilot said. He sounded astonished. “They built it twenty kilometres from Camelot.”
Edward nodded. “A very droll way of saying ‘fuck you’ to the Empire,” he said, dryly. “If they have to maintain the damn thing, they can at least make it inconvenient for nosey bastards from Earth.”
He snorted. By law, every planet had to maintain at least one spaceport, even the planets inhabited by agricultural communities that had settled their worlds to get away from technology and all of its evils. Most worlds, particularly the ones that were intent on building up their own technological and industrial base, didn’t regard it as a burden. It was, however, a serious expense for a stage-one colony world and not something that would pay for itself quickly. It took decades for a spaceport to break even.
Camelot looked untidy from the air, although he knew from experience that such impressions were deceptive. Massive prefabricated buildings dominated one corner of the city—the homes of the planet’s industry, such as it was—while other buildings were constructed out of bricks or stone. People thronged the streets, some gazing up at the shuttle and wondering what it portended, while others just ambled about, looking for trouble. Camelot just didn’t look dynamic at all. It looked more like a city that had never quite found itself.
The spaceport came into view as the shuttle banked towards it, heading down towards a landing pad that had been clearly marked by a beacon. A handful of other pads were dominated by aggressive-looking helicopters and aircraft, either shipped in from the Empire or built on Avalon itself. He hoped it was the latter. Shipping almost anything across interstellar distances was expensive as hell. A number of prefabricated buildings dominated one side of the spaceport, covered in grass and lichen. It looked as if the planetary government barely bothered to maintain the spaceport at all. Given how few starships visited the system, it was easy to see why they thought it wasn’t worth their while.