by Jay Allan
Brent smiled, almost despite himself. He could have liked Captain Stalker under other circumstances. “Let’s see,” he said. “We have three different insurgency movements operating against us. We have a political logjam that simply won’t break. We have a Civil Guard that is weak and not particularly effective”—George snorted angrily at that—“and our local industry can barely produce what it needs to keep us going. And, if that wasn’t enough, we have pirate ships using the system as a base. Can you deal with that, Captain?”
“Give us time and we can deal with anything,” Captain Stalker said, seriously. He pulled a datachip out of his uniform pocket and placed it down on Brent’s desk. “My orders from the Empire.”
Brent picked up the chip and opened one of his drawers, pulling out his datapad and slotting the chip into it. The datapad was irreplaceable. There was only a handful on the planet—when they would be dirt cheap in the Core Worlds—and Avalon’s industry couldn’t even begin to produce them, not yet. The investment required to boost the local industry to a higher level simply didn’t exist. He studied the short brisk prose and blinked. The orders were vague in the extreme.
“I see,” he said, finally. It was something he would have to discuss with George and Linda, at least before they brought the rest of the Council in on it. “Do you have any immediate requirements, Captain?”
Captain Stalker didn’t even blink at his tone. “I need to use the spaceport for unloading the Sebastian Cruz,” he said, flatly. “We have a mountain of supplies that we brought from Earth. We also need an isolated location near Camelot that can serve as a base of operations and a full and accurate briefing on the current political situation. Once we get everything down on the planet and organised, we can start training up the local Civil Guard.”
Brent exchanged a quick glance with George. “I recommend Castle Rock as your base of operations,” George said. “It’s actually a mid-sized island off the coast of Arthur—this continent—and it already has a landing strip built on it. There are a handful of indebted families down on the ground, but they’d be happy to move if the Governor bought out their contracts. If you have plenty of supplies, you really need an island. Your supplies are going to attract every thief in the city.”
“The Wilhelm Family owns Castle Rock,” Linda pointed out. “You may have to negotiate with them over rent or purchase.”
“Maybe not,” Brent said. For once, he could put a finger in their eye and it would be perfectly legal. “If we buy out the settlers, the island reverts back to the government and we can hand it over to the Marines if we want. The owners can go to hell.”
“Thank you,” Captain Stalker said. “With your permission, then, I will start moving my men down to the spaceport. The sooner we get started, the sooner Captain Yamato and his ship can leave the system.”
“I will have dispatches for them to take back to Earth,” Brent said quickly. “I’ll have them sent up this evening.”
“Of course,” Captain Stalker said. He looked out of the window, towards the mountains in the distance. He didn’t know that rebels were lurking there. “You have a beautiful planet.”
“We like to think so,” George said, dryly. “My driver will take you back to the spaceport.”
Captain Stalker saluted and left the room. “So,” Brent said, once the door had closed behind him. “What do you make of our new ally?”
“Handsome, determined and ignorant of the local realities,” Linda said. Brent looked at her in surprise. Was Linda attracted to the Marine? “It was clear that he didn’t have any real idea of what is going on here.”
“That isn’t actually surprising,” George said, flatly. “Earth simply doesn’t care about tiny issues on faraway planets. They wouldn’t have had access to any real briefing papers, certainly nothing up to date. They’ll learn, of course. Marines have the highest rating of all when it comes to adapting to new situations.”
Linda smiled. “Are they even better than your old regiment?”
“Only by a tiny margin,” George said, quickly. They shared a laugh. “Of course, my old regiment was commanded by an idiot who got his post through political connections and didn’t have the slightest idea which end of a gun fired the bullet. The Marine officers have to work their way up through the ranks. It gives them a major advantage over us poor mortals in the Imperial Army.”
He paused. “Which does make you wonder,” he added. “Just what did Captain Stalker do to be exiled out here?”
Linda smiled. “Let’s see,” she said. “I was left here for refusing the advances of a superior officer. You were sent here because you won a battle by disobeying every order you were given. Half of the staff in Government House were sent here because it was cheaper than firing them. What do you think Captain Stalker did?”
“It wouldn’t have been anything that rated a dishonourable, or he would have been discharged from the Marine Corps,” George said. He chuckled. “For all we know, he was caught in bed with a Senator’s daughter and her outraged father insisted on him being exiled to Avalon, along with his Company.”
“Or,” Brent said quietly, “they’re all the reinforcements we’re going to get.”
The room seemed to grow colder. Brent had been appealing to the Sector Capital for help for years, but nothing had ever materialised, not even an Imperial Navy destroyer. Trade was falling all over the sector. The flood of new colonists—even the involuntary settlers from Earth—had become a trickle. Captain Stalker’s men were the single largest group to land on Avalon all year. Brent didn’t want to think about it—he had been a loyal servant of the Empire and had served it faithfully—but what if the Empire was on the verge of abandoning Avalon completely.
He knew the local sector fairly well, for he’d been based there for his entire career. Avalon’s sector was right on the Rim, the border of space controlled by the Empire. Beyond the Rim, there were hidden pirate bases, black colonies and strange eerie rumours about encounters with aliens, told in spaceport bars by drunken spacers. If the Empire abandoned Avalon completely, what might come out of the darkness to threaten his adopted world?
And yet, even that wasn’t the real worry. The Crackers had been smashed once before by the Imperial Navy. What would happen if they realised that the Imperial Navy would never return to Avalon? They’d push forward as quickly as they could and the Civil Guard wouldn’t be able to stand in their way. How long would it be before they took Camelot and put her inhabitants to the sword? The Crackers had no reason to love the Council or respect its authority. His never-to-be-sufficiently-damned predecessor had made sure of that.
“George,” he said slowly. “How much of an impact can they make on the enemy?”
George hesitated. “In the short term, quite a bit,” he said. “In the long term, perhaps nothing, unless they succeed in turning out new recruits for the Civil Guard. Even so, the Council will probably try to hobble it, if only because a stronger army is a danger to them as well.”
They shared a long look. George and a handful of other professional military officers did what they could, but the Avalon Civil Guard was an unwieldy creature. Officially, it had five thousand soldiers, yet realistically it was far fewer. Many of the senior officers were political appointees, men and women trusted by various Councillors to respect their interests. Others were deeply corrupt and—perhaps—working for the enemy. Launching any sort of military campaign against the bandits, let alone the Crackers, was impossible.
“I see,” Brent said. “I’m going to give him complete control over Castle Rock. Legally, the Council won’t be able to do anything about it, not without compromising their own positions.” He snorted at the thought. Half of the Councillors were in it for the money, what little of it there was on Avalon. The other half were in it for the power. “At least that should keep their influence off the island.”
“Maybe,” George said. He stood up. “With your permission, I have to get back out to my men. I want to do a sweep through the coun
tryside. We might just catch a few bandits to hang.”
“Good luck,” Brent said. They both knew that the operation wasn’t likely to succeed. “And good hunting.”
-o0o-
One of the little secrets the Marine Corps had somehow never got around to sharing with anyone who hadn’t passed through the Slaughterhouse was that each Marine was issued a subcutaneous communicator. It was low-powered, meaning that it had very short range, but it was effectively completely undetectable outside of the Core Worlds. Marines trained endlessly to be able to speak privately to each other, without anyone on the outside having any idea of what was going on. It had been used, more than once, to give the Marines a tactical advantage.
“So,” Blake said. Anyone looking at him would have just seen him standing there, as unmoving as a rock. His jaw didn’t even twitch. The two Civil Guardsmen eying the Marines warily heard nothing. “What do you make of our posting?”
“There’s more trouble than they told us about,” Jasmine said, in reply. One of the Civil Guardsmen was staring at her as if she was a creature from another world. The thought made her smile. In a sense, it was perfectly true. “They took a risk when they drove the Old Man from the spaceport to here.”
She glanced at the wooden doorway leading to the Governor’s office. A wooden door would have been unthinkable on Earth, outside of the Imperial Palace itself. What few forests remained on Earth were under heavy protection, with guards authorised to shoot on sight. On Avalon, it was commonplace and a single hard kick would bring the door down in splinters.
“Or perhaps they were exaggerating the threat,” Blake said. “It wouldn’t be the first time that someone has tried to convince us that matters were worse than they seemed.”
Jasmine nodded, remembering deployments where the Marines had been sucked into the maelstrom of local politics, where one side had attempted to use them to forward their own political agenda. Avalon might be barely developed, but it certainly had a political maelstrom brewing. She sighed inwardly. Wonderful; another campaign where no one knew who was the good guy.
The door opened before she could reply. “Come on,” Captain Stalker said. He looked as calm and composed as ever, but Jasmine could just see something else beneath his face. “We have to go back to the spaceport.”
CHAPTER 14
One of the many symptoms of decline is the sudden profusion of intelligence agencies. Where once Imperial Intelligence (the dreaded Double Eyes) handled all of the Empire’s intelligence requirements, there are now dozens of different intelligence agencies. Some work for specific branches of the armed forces—Naval Intelligence, Marine Intelligence—while others work for individual Senators and even for the media. The results have not been good.
- Professor Leo Caesius, The Waning Years of Empire (banned).
Four hours after Edward returned to the spaceport, fifty Marines had landed and conducted a thorough sweep of the surrounding area. They’d found nothing incriminating apart from a few caches of locally-produced drugs, but it hadn’t been hard to convince the Civil Guard to move their helicopters to a nearby airstrip and leave the spaceport to the Marines. There was simply nowhere else on Avalon that could be used to land so much gear so quickly. Lieutenant Howell had set up a command post in one section of the spaceport and was conducting operations quickly and smoothly, while Lieutenant Young had been dispatched to Castle Rock to carry out a quick survey. Edward wasn’t entirely happy at being based on an island—even if they were Marines—but it would provide a barrier between the Marines and the local political struggles. It would also be easy to secure.
He’d had orbital images downloaded to his terminal on the trip back to the spaceport and he’d studied them carefully. Castle Rock—and he had no idea how it had picked up that name—was a medium-sized island about twice the size of Nantucket on Old Earth. It had some good farmland and fishing opportunities and he hadn’t understood why it wasn’t more heavily settled, but a quick look at the survey report had informed him that there was simply much better farming on the continent itself. The settlers who had started to try to farm on the island hadn’t been very successful, something that puzzled him. They should certainly have been able to feed themselves by now.
“The remainder of the Company is assisting Captain Yamato to unlock the pods and start loading them onboard the shuttles,” Lieutenant Howell explained. “I think we’re going to have to run our own security until we get everything set up on Castle Rock. I didn’t realise just how dirt poor this planet actually is until I had a good look at their local records. We might as well have landed entire mountains of gold, sir.”
“Keep two platoons back at all times to maintain guard on the spaceport,” Edward ordered. It was a dangerously thin security blanket. Marines or not, it really required at least a full Company to hold and secure a spaceport. Twenty-one Marines wouldn’t be enough to stand off a determined assault. “Once we get the drones and assault vehicles unloaded and set up, we can start deploying them to the island and on random patrols.”
“Yeah,” Howell said. He didn’t sound happy, but then, few logistics officers ever were. The Marines rotated such posts around the Lieutenants to ensure that they all understood how to handle logistics, yet Howell had been unlucky. Stalker’s Stalkers had never had to operate at the end of such a long supply chain before. Offhand, Edward couldn’t remember any Marine unit in recent history that had. “I bet you ten credits that we’ll have locals out here soon enough offering to assist us in exchange for vital supplies. A single fusion reactor would completely change the balance of power here and we have ten of them.”
Edward nodded. “I didn’t discuss what we’d brought with the Governor,” he said. “We’ll have to see who we can bring in locally to assist us. God knows, we can’t handle everything ourselves.”
“No,” Howell said. “In fact…”
Edward’s communicator buzzed before he could finish speaking. “Captain, this is Rifleman Lin on the front gate,” a voice said. “You have a visitor. She says she’s from Naval Intelligence.”
Edward exchanged a brief glance with Howell. “Naval Intelligence?”
“Yes, sir,” Lin said. “She wants to talk to you as soon as possible.”
“How unusually polite,” Edward murmured. Naval Intelligence, in his experience, tended to issue demands and threats instead of polite requests. They considered themselves the senior military intelligence service, second only to Imperial Intelligence. “Check her, and then have her escorted into the main building. I’ll see her in the spaceport manager’s office.”
He’d inspected the office earlier. It was surprisingly simple for such a post, decorated only by a handful of posters of movie stars who had been out of fashion long before word that they were in fashion reached Avalon. The manager, he’d been told by the Civil Guard, only worked part time, unsurprising when starships only visited the system every few months. She had offered to come in and assist the Marines, but Howell had turned her down, warning her that it could be dangerous. The real reason was far darker. Spaceport managers on the frontier had a habit of assisting smugglers and thieves to supplement their limited income. It was something he felt that they could do without. He took one of the seats—the manager hadn’t believed in comfort, evidently—and waited.
“Captain, this is Colonel Kitty Stevenson of Naval Intelligence,” Lin said, knocking on the open door. “She’s clean.”
“Thank you,” Edward said, standing up and holding out a hand for Kitty to shake. “Please close the door behind you.”
Kitty Stevenson was a tall redheaded woman, wearing a simple Imperial Navy tunic without rank insignia. She actually reminded Edward of Mandy and Mindy, apart from the air of quiet desperation that seemed to hang around the older woman. Her tunic was unbuttoned, showing off a certain amount of cleavage, but her gaze was sharp and direct. Edward let go of her hand and waved her to a chair, holding out a datapad to her.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have
to ask you for your prints,” he said. “I wasn’t briefed that you were going to be here.”
Kitty nodded and pressed her fingers against the pad’s sensor. A moment later, the pad bleeped up a file; Colonel Kitty Stevenson, Naval Intelligence, assigned to the local sector fleet and then to Avalon, for reasons unknown. Edward skimmed through the highlights and nodded inwardly. Kitty was who she claimed to be.
“I wasn’t told that the Marines were going to be coming,” Kitty said. “I was just promised that Avalon would receive some support sooner or later.”
Edward felt his eyes narrow. “Who promised you that?”
“One of my superiors on Earth,” Kitty said. Her face revealed nothing. “He just told me that some form of military support would be coming soon.”
Edward frowned inwardly, thinking hard. He hadn’t known that he would be heading to Avalon until just after he’d told the Grand Senate exactly what was wrong with them and their ideas, yet the Commandant had organised the transfer remarkably quickly. Had he intended to send a Marine Company out to Avalon, or had it simply been a matter of slotting a round peg into a round hole? And then there was the encryption key he’d been given. Just what, he asked himself angrily, was the Commandant up to on Old Earth?
“I see,” he said, finally. It wasn’t something he could ask her. Chances were that she was just as ignorant as him. “And, now you’re here, why are you here?”
Kitty showed no offence at his brusque manner. “Officially, I am in charge of the Imperial Navy recruiting station on Avalon,” she said. “Practically speaking, the station is moribund and has been so for years. I have thousands of kids on my lists who want to enlist, but without transport to a training centre they get nowhere. By the way, I’d like to send them back on your transport.”
She shrugged. “Unofficially, my task is to monitor the situation on this planet and report to higher authority.”