Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  Brent held up a hand before they could say anything else. “Who do you accuse?”

  Captain Stalker met his eyes. “Councillor Sally Park, Councillor Frank Wong, Councillor Cole Smith, Councillor Markus Wilhelm and Councillor Carola Wilhelm,” he said. “The other two named suspects are not members of the Council, but are closely connected to its leaders. One of them runs a supply company that has been used to transport weapons and supplies from Camelot and, in return, brings in women and stolen goods taken by the gangs. They are all guilty of treason against the Empire.”

  Brent felt his senses reel. “You can’t be serious,” he said, in disbelief. He could imagine any of the more troublesome councillors being ruthless enough to set the Marines up for slaughter, but actually dealing with the gangs … ? “They wouldn’t do anything of the sort.”

  “We were not gentle,” Captain Stalker said. There was a cold fury in his voice that sent chills running down the back of Brent’s neck. “We used lie detectors, and then we drugged them unmercifully until we were sure that we had the truth. There was not an iota of doubt left in the interrogators minds that the few senior gang lords we had were telling the truth. They are guilty. They need to be arrested, now.”

  “They are also responsible, I suspect, for the death of Smuts, the former commander of the supply depot,” Grosskopf added. “He was unquestionably assassinated, yet we have been unable to identify and locate his assassin, even though we secured the base only a few minutes after he died. Our arrival could have been the sign to the assassin to act. We have, however, traced orders through the base’s chain of command that resulted in delivering hundreds of thousands of credits worth of advanced weapons to the bandits.”

  His lips twitched humourlessly. “If nothing else, Governor, we will have to account for all that equipment when the Imperial Inspectorate checks their records and starts asking questions,” he said. “Smuts committed grand theft on a massive scale.”

  Brent remembered Smuts, the son of a wealthy landholder who had been promoted into his position over the objections of the Civil Guard’s last CO. The man had been both greedy and stupid, yet there had been no choice, but to take him.

  “Smuts,” he repeated. “Are you sure that it was him?”

  “Apart from him, everyone who could have issued the orders went into custody and through a lie detector test,” Grosskopf said, impatiently. “Smuts was the one who issued the orders. We also uncovered several dozen corrupt officials, nine Cracker agents and a number of illegal gambling rings. Kappa Company may have to be disbanded completely. Their CO spent absolutely no time on training and apparently decided to keep the training budget for himself. Morale in the Civil Guard, I must add, is at rock bottom. First we get our heads kicked in by the bandits, and then we discover that the bandits were aided and abetted by one of our own.”

  He looked up. “Sir,” he said, “I intend to seek the death penalty for the traitors. They should be arrested at once, before they can do more harm.”

  Brent sighed. They weren’t going to like what he had to tell them. “We can’t,” he said. “We don’t have the evidence required to sustain a charge of treason in a High Court.”

  “Nonsense,” Grosskopf said. He waved a hand at the Marine, whose eyes had narrowed sharply. “We have the recordings of the interrogation, don’t we?”

  “That isn’t enough proof,” Brent said, tiredly. Just once, he wished he hadn’t trained as a lawyer. Acting in ignorance of the law might well have worked … and it would certainly have been more satisfying. “The bandit might have been lied to and merely told you what he believed to be true, or someone else could be trying to set them up and get them off the planet. We could not arrest them under this evidence, let alone put them through a formal interrogation of their own. The Grand Senate’s Edict on Treason rules that out.”

  He quailed mentally before their expressions. The Tyrant Emperor had been fond of using the treason charge to get rid of his enemies, for dealing with treason had been in the sole hands of the Emperor. In his brief reign, hundreds of inconvenient people had been rounded up, charged with treason on flimsy grounds, and summarily executed. He had terrorised most of the Empire into remaining silent, backed up by the New Men and their allies, until he had been assassinated by a lone gunman. In the wake of his death, the Grand Senate had moved to take treason charges firmly into their hands, demanding a colossal level of evidence before a suspect could be arrested, interrogated and tried.

  Any halfway competent lawyer would have been able to get them released, once the case was put in front of a High Court. The Empire’s legal system was so convoluted that it was possible to cite almost anything as a precedent, using cases of dubious relevance … or even none at all. The Empire’s fastest-growing industry was the legal profession, and yet there would never be enough lawyers to cope with the demand. If it were handled badly, they might be proved guilty at a later date … and they would still have to be freed.

  “That is unacceptable,” Grosskopf snapped. “We know they’re guilty!”

  “No, we don’t,” Brent said, wondering if he was about to be the first victim of a military coup. If it happened, he decided, it happened. “All we know is what we were told by a bandit, who might have only told us what he believed to be true.”

  “They killed a Marine,” Captain Stalker snapped. His voice had risen sharply. “That is not a laughing matter!”

  Brent lowered his eyes. “If we arrest them now, without proper proof, the rest of the Council will revolt against us,” he said, sharply. “Avalon will grind to a halt. Their guilt has to be proven conclusively before we can move.”

  “We cannot be seen to let this pass,” Grosskopf insisted, angrily. “The men in the Civil Guard are not exactly morons, sir! They know that the weapons had to come from our stores, even before I led the remains of two companies to secure the supply base. If we don’t take steps, someone else might.”

  “And while we’re tied up in political chaos, the Crackers will take advantage,” Brent said. “Arresting them might bring Avalon to a halt.”

  “Perhaps I can suggest a compromise,” Kitty Stevenson said, sweetly. Brent eyed her suspiciously. “We can agree that there are strong grounds to open an investigation, so perhaps that is what we should do. We are not, after all, required to notify them that they are the subject of an inquiry. When we discover the proof, we can ram through a suspension of their powers and arrest them before they can react.”

  “It is also possible that they have other allies within the Civil Guard,” Grosskopf said. “I am organising wide-sweeping lie detector checks of my senior officers and I will not allow anyone to refuse them, unless they offer me their resignation on the spot. I strongly advise you to do the same, starting with the people closest to you.”

  He looked up at Linda, who smiled demurely back. “I have nothing to hide,” she said, “but even asking people to undergo a loyalty check—and that is what it will be—is against the Imperial Charter. They did not agree, when they were hired, to undergo random tests to determine if they were loyal. We could not even legally ask for volunteers.”

  “Perhaps you should set a good example,” Captain Stalker said. His voice was very cold. “Would you like to be the first person to be tested?”

  Linda refused to flinch from his eyes. “I would have to refuse,” she said, dryly. “You have no legal grounds to insist that I take a test.”

  Brent rubbed his temples, feeling a headache coming on. Linda was right; with techniques that could extract the truth out of a person, willing or not, there were strong regulations built into Imperial Law that governed when a person could be forced to undergo such a test. There had to be strong evidence of a crime, or a reasonably small body of suspects, and even then the suspect had to be tested in the presence of a lawyer of their choosing. It was intended to avoid abuse, yet it could be a burden at times. Military personnel signed away their right to refuse such a test when they joined up, but outside the milit
ary it was rare to have mandatory loyalty tests.

  “If we don’t uphold Imperial Law,” he said, tiredly, “what are we?”

  “In trouble,” Grosskopf said. “I intend to complete sweeping through the Civil Guard and…”

  He broke off as Captain Stalker’s wristcom buzzed. “Trouble,” he said, glancing down at it. “I’ll be right back.”

  -o0o-

  Edward strode into the antechamber, fighting to get his temper back under control. The urge to hit the Governor as hard as he could, right in the face, had been bubbling up ever since the man had pointed out that they didn’t have a strong case after all. With a thousand years of legal changes, precedents and endless red tape, it would be harder than he had hoped to simply arrest them. He had every confidence in his interrogators, yet the Governor had none. They needed swift decisive action, not sneaking around and trying to produce the evidence that the Governor thought they needed to act.

  “This is Stalker,” he said, keying the wristcom. Gwen wouldn’t have interrupted the meeting unless it was something truly important … and, after years of working with her, he trusted her judgement. Anything she couldn’t handle herself had to be bad. “The area is clear; report.”

  He smiled at his own words. Kitty had told him, just before the Governor had returned to his office and greeted him formally, that she’d pulled no less than nine bugs out of the room. They had all been late-generation military-grade tech, which raised the question of where they had come from and who had emplaced them in the room … and why? No; the answer to that was obvious. Edward had learned the value of good intelligence over the years and it was too much to expect that the Council would have failed to learn the same lesson.

  “Sir,” Gwen said, “we have a problem.”

  Edward winced. The last time Gwen had spoken in that tone, it had been to inform him that the Company was being sent into action against the Nihilists, without proper protection or support. It never boded well.

  “Understood,” he said, harshly. “What’s happened?”

  “Rifleman Blake Coleman has failed to make his scheduled check with his platoon,” Gwen said. It wasn’t—quite—going AWOL, but under the circumstances it was definitely a chewing out offence. “I attempted to raise him on his implanted communicator and received no response.”

  Edward swore. A communicator implant was impossible to ignore, unless a Marine had been so badly sedated that they would sleep through anything. He had bitter memories of being woken up after he’d picked up a girl for the night and being ordered back to his station, after some military emergency had broken out. If Blake Coleman had found a girl and gone to bed with her, it would have been a minor matter; ignoring his communicator was not. There was only one circumstance in which a Marine would be unable to reply … and that boded ill.

  “Ping his communicator and get a location,” he ordered. The implanted communicator would send back a signal and a DF system would track him down. “Once you find him…”

  “I tried,” Gwen said, sharply. “There was no response from his communicator at all.”

  He’s been abducted, Edward thought, in horror. If Blake had been unconscious or even dead, his communicator would still have been able to send back a location pulse. He had to be somewhere where a communication’s signal couldn’t reach, which meant that he was in a secure room … or a travelling compartment. Either way, this wasn’t a random kidnap, but a carefully-planned assault.

  “Recall all of the Marines on leave and get them to confirm their locations,” he ordered. “Scramble the alert team from the spaceport—armour and all—and get them ready to go after him as soon as we track him down. Start looking at the last place we found him and … no, belay that; get his platoon mates to accomplish that. They’ll be more motivated to find him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gwen said. “I’ll deal with it right away.”

  “I’m on my way now,” Edward said. If nothing else, it would provide a distraction from worrying about the Council. A direct attempt to abduct a Marine was hardly their style. It was far more likely that it was the other enemy faction. “Get in touch with the Civil Guard and start looking at how they might try to take him out of the city. We have to get him back before they take him to the badlands or even the outlying farms.”

  He mentally skimmed through the map of Camelot he’d memorised. There were only four roads heading out of the city. Perhaps they could set up roadblocks in time to be effective. He’d never had one of his people abducted before, but he knew the theory—and the Empire’s policies on hostages. If they couldn’t recover Blake Coleman in time, he would be deemed as expendable …

  “Not on my watch,” he vowed, checking his weapons. His bodyguard was downstairs, waiting for him. “Not this time.”

  CHAPTER 38

  The first twenty-four hours of a kidnap/hostage situation are always the worst. The kidnappers will want to get their hostage to a safe and secure location from where they can bargain for their hostage’s life. The security forces, by contrast, will have the greatest chance of picking up a lead and locating the hostage before the kidnappers have a chance to make a clean break. This ensures that both sides are in a high state of nervousness and the hostage may be killed if one side panics.

  - Major-General Thomas Kratman (Ret), A Civilian’s Guide to the Terran Marine Corps.

  “Jesus, look at the size of him,” Carl said, as he came into the room. “My masculinity is so threatened.”

  “Big guy too,” Janice agreed. She wasn’t looking at his height. “How did it feel going in?”

  “Shut up and get the coffin in here,” Felicity snapped. She was going to endure a lot of good-natured ribbing from the other Crackers for sleeping with a Marine, even though she hadn’t had much choice in the matter. She had lured him to her apartment with the promise of sex and seeing he had inconsiderately failed to collapse before things could get that far, she’d had to go through with it. It was hardly the worst thing she’d done for the cause … and, besides, he hadn’t been all that bad in bed. “Hurry!”

  Carl nodded and opened the door, pulling in the massive metal box, clearly marked USED FOOD. For some reason, the Council had ruled that any spare food from the Farmer’s Market had to be returned to the farms, rather than simply handed out to the poor or used as fertiliser near the city. It was yet another thing the Crackers intended to change, but for once it worked in their favour. Struggling, sweating and cursing, they moved the Marine’s colossal body into the box and sealed the lid.

  “Done,” Janice announced, as she put a padlock on the coffin and locked it tight. Street thieves sometimes tried to steal the leftover food and had to be dissuaded, particularly now. The thought of one of them stealing the entire box and opening it, only to discover a comatose Marine, made Felicity smile. It would be rather less funny if he was awake at the time. “Come on.”

  Picking up the coffin, even between the three of them, wasn’t easy, but somehow they managed to get it down the stairs to the van waiting outside. It was a local model, hired out—at exorbitant rates, of course—to one of the more distant farms, one run by a family who owed allegiance to the Wilhelm Family. If the Marines managed to trace their lost comrade that far the family—who had managed to alienate the entire district—would have to answer some tough questions from the Marines. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for them.

  “Get the van doors open,” Carl ordered. Julia, who was barely twelve years old and undersized for her age, got out of the van and leapt to open the door. The thinking had been that a preteen girl would help divert suspicion away from them, although Felicity hadn’t been convinced of the value of her presence. The Civil Guard could normally be bribed to allow the van to pass without being inspected—although, after the big shake up a few days ago, even that was in doubt—but the Marines wouldn’t be fooled. Julia might end up in a detention camp for small kids, even if they had to build it just for her.

  Getting the coffin into the van was h
ard enough, but finally they managed to shove it into place. Felicity stepped into the rear of the van and picked up a small spray, using it to stink out the van. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell to someone who had been born on a farm, but someone who was from the city who smelled it would recoil in disgust. It would certainly discourage an inspector from attempting to open the box. Her mind slipped to the makeshift weapons hidden inside the van and she winced. If the inspectors did try to open the van, the Crackers would have to take them out quickly and brutally … and that might be impossible.

  The van’s engine roared to life as she slipped into her seat. Carl took the wheel and guided them away from the apartment and out towards the city limits. She had no idea how quickly the Marines would react—or even when they would realise that they had a missing comrade—but she had a feeling that they needed to be out of the city as quickly as possible. They had worked hard to turn her rented apartment into one that might be used by a young scholar studying at the technical school—yet she had no idea how much of it the Marines would notice. They weren’t from Avalon and it might not occur to them that she was dangling clues right in front of their face. Irritatingly, they might miss the misleading trail completely.

  “We’re off,” Carl said, with more cheerfulness than Felicity could muster. She was used to acting and playing a role, but this would be the hardest role of her life. “West Gate, here we come.”

  “Yep,” Julia said, with a toothy smile. She’d been born on a farm and hated the city, claiming that it stank. The city-dwellers said much the same about the farmers. One of the reasons the Council refused to do much about the bandits, or so Cracker propaganda would have it, was because the city-dwellers generally disliked the farmers more than the bandits. It made little sense to her, so it was probably the right answer. The Council wasn’t known for logic and reason. “We’re heading home!”