by Jay Allan
“Bullshit,” Blake Coleman said. He’d been fed a combination of drugs that should have helped keep him docile, but his implants seemed to be counteracting them, somehow. Doctor White hadn’t been able to explain how they were working, to the point where he’d wondered if Coleman had somehow been enhanced to be resistant to drugs. Gaby would have believed him if it hadn’t been for how he’d been captured in the first place. “I know you’re lying.”
Gaby dropped the pretence as Blake’s dark eyes turned to fix on her, mask and all. “So I am,” she said, with mock surprise. “Whatever gave me away?”
Blake smiled. “You’re not a very good liar,” he said, with calm amusement. Gaby felt her face flushing and couldn’t keep the scowl under control. “Your voice betrayed a certain lack of truthfulness. You simply lack the ability to serve up a shit sandwich while calling it roast beef and horseradish sauce.”
Gaby chuckled. “Your people are fighting well,” she admitted, as she took a seat. “How does that make you feel?”
“Pride in my friends and comrades,” Blake said, dryly. “Regret and shame that I am not with them. Or did you expect me to somehow escape from this cell and return to the land of the living?”
“I have read hundreds of stories about the Terran Marine Corps from the Imperial Library,” Gaby said, seriously. If half of the stories were true, the Crackers were in serious trouble. “I would not have been too surprised to discover that you had chewed your way through the iron chains and vanished through the walls.”
“I think that you have done too good a job on these chains,” Blake said. “I couldn’t get out of here if my name was Adam One.”
Gaby snorted. Adam One was the Empire’s favourite comic book character—or so all of his press releases said. By day, he was a loyal and conscientious bureaucrat in the Department of Colonial Representation; by night, he was the Silver Swordsman, hunting down the enemies of the Empire while cracking one-liners that never failed to get giggles from impressionable children. The comics had even reached Avalon, but by then Gaby had been seventeen and able to recognise them for the cheap propaganda they were. Even so, Adam One had had muscles on his muscles, just the sort of character to appeal to teenage boys and girls.
“I’d prefer not to take chances,” she said, inspecting his bonds. “Is there anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable?”
Blake pretended to consider it. “Well, I’d like my hands unbound, some food that doesn’t go into me through an IV line, a lift to the surface and a map pointing the way back to Camelot,” he said, dryly. “This hotel has really poor service, you know. I think I’m going to lodge a complaint.”
Gaby smiled. “I see that Adam One rubbed off on you too,” she said. “I’d like to comply, but … you’re our prisoner. Sorry.
“Yeah,” Blake said. He looked up at her and she had the sudden, disconcerting feeling that he could see right through her mask. “I take it that you’re getting worried, right? The grand attack plan not going according to plan?”
“Early days yet,” Gaby said. She refused to allow him to get to her. She was merely interrogating him, or so she told herself. Everything he said would grant her insights into how his mind worked. “Your people are tough. I’ll give them that.”
“The toughest you’ll ever face,” Blake assured her. She had the nasty feeling that he was right. “You do realise that you’re just digging your own graves?”
Gaby rounded on him. “Do you think that we have a choice?” She demanded. “Our choice seems to be between trying to take our freedom and bowing before the Council, one that has exploited us ever since the ADC sold off our contracts to raise some quick cash. Why the hell should we not fight?”
“Things are changing out there,” Blake said, lifting his head slightly to indicate the sky. “There’s a very distant possibility that Avalon might simply be abandoned. If that happens, the Captain will have far broader latitude to come to an agreement with you … but not if you kill his men. He won’t be able to let that pass.”
Gaby gathered herself. “There’s an old story my father told me,” she said, flatly. “Once upon a time in a mythical land named China…”
“It wasn’t a myth,” Blake said, flatly. “They were on the losing side in the Third World War and came late to the party when the Phase Drive was discovered, but they settled a couple of dozen worlds before the Federation collapsed and was replaced by the Empire. Some of their worlds are pretty nice, if sometimes a little weird; a handful of them are just hellish. They’re pretty much par for the course, really.”
Gaby frowned. “There was once a leader who decided that all crime had to be punished with death,” she continued, refusing to allow him to distract her. “Everything from stealing a chicken to rape and murder earned the death penalty. Death spread rapidly, for who can be perfect all the time? One day, a group of labourers were walking to work when suddenly the leader turns to his men and asks them what is the punishment for being late? Death, they reply. And what is the punishment for rebellion? Death, they say again.”
She snorted. “And what does he tell them?” She asked. “They’re already late!”
“I know the story,” Blake said. “And so they decide to go off and start a rebellion.”
“That’s the position we’re in,” Gaby said. “Quick death at the hands of your fellows or slow death at the hands of the Council. Why should we not fight? We might win.”
Blake somehow managed a shrug, despite the chains. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “But you should try contacting the Captain first and seeing what he might offer you.”
“You don’t understand,” Gaby said. “I told you; I read as much as I could about the Marines. You’re great soldiers; loyal, honourable, and brave to a fault … and I bet you’re really kind to dumb animals. Except you’re here, and you’re fighting to keep the Council in power, because we know that you know just what kind of shit the Council has been pulling over the last few years. And what exactly have you done about it? Nothing! How can you claim to be a third force when you are so closely linked to the corrupt bastards who have been draining this planet dry?”
“You might be surprised by how much authority the Captain has, if you approached him,” Blake said. “Until then … I’ll just wait here, shall I?”
Gaby glared at him. “We could always start trying to extract information by force,” she reminded him. “What would you say to that?”
Blake yawned. “Why, nothing,” he said. “I really doubt that you can put me through anything worse than I have already endured.”
Gaby looked at him for a long moment, and then stormed out of the cell.
-o0o-
“You really shouldn’t go speak to him alone,” Julian said, when she entered the meeting room. “It’s not safe…”
The condescending tone in his voice almost made Gaby explode. “And nothing we’ve been doing since you and I were knee-high has been safe,” she snapped. The last thing she needed was Julian pulling the over-protective big brother or boyfriend act. She’d known that he admired her from afar, but she didn’t have any romantic feelings about him. Julian … was just another male friend, almost a brother. “The Marines could hit this place at any time and we’d be scooped up and arrested. This is not safe! We are not in a safe business!”
If he had smiled, she would have knocked it off his face. “You elected me the commander of this local cell,” she said, knowing that it had been her name rather than anything else that had won her the position. The Cracker Family had an unbroken heritage of defeat, yet people still had faith. “Are you going to start challenging my authority at every turn?”
Julian wilted under her gaze. “I meant no offence,” he said, shocked at her fury. “I merely wanted to make sure that you were safe.”
Gaby looked him up and down, remembering the times they’d played together. Where had those moments gone? They’d been stolen by the demands of their war. Julian had grown up and become a figh
ter, just as she had … just as the eighty-odd dead Crackers had become. They had died because of her commands, shot down by the Marines or their new army.
“Good,” she said, forcing a gentler tone into her voice. “I was perfectly safe.”
“But he’s an inhuman killing machine,” Julian protested. “There’s no such thing as safe…”
“Julian, behave,” Rufus said, firmly. The older man had entered the room and took a seat by the table. “I don’t have time to take my belt to you today.”
Julian scowled, but fell quiet. “The fighting isn’t going as well as we had planned,” Gaby said. Julian started, as if he wanted to dispute that claim, and then thought better of it. “Although we have inflicted damage, they have inflicted damage on us and both sides are hurting.”
The memory of seeing some of the wounded rose up unbidden in front of her eyes. She’d gone to see them, despite the risk, and had ended up horrified by the sight. The Crackers had taken a beating … and for what? None of the deployment bases had been overrun. The Marines and their puppets had fought back savagely and the devil himself seemed to be helping them. She wasn’t even sure how many of their people had been killed or wounded.
“And let’s not forget the civilians,” Rufus added, casting a sharp glance towards his son. Julian had been the least caring about civilian casualties. “We have at least a hundred civilians injured and more made homeless by the fighting. It would have been worse if we hadn’t run the risk of warning people to run at the first sign of fighting. Even so, it was quite bad enough.”
“The evacuation plans are working,” Julian protested. “They’d be safe if they followed them.”
“But they can’t,” Gaby reminded him. “We’re talking about them walking away from everything they own, for what? Just to allow us and the Marines to wreak havoc on their property.”
She stared down at her hands. Unlike Camelot and the other four cities, the countryside was decentralised to extremes; the townships didn’t really have a natural existence. Once the fighting had begun in earnest, most of the uncommitted citizens had moved out of the towns and into the countryside, following an evacuation plan that had been drawn up years ago. Julian had proposed only helping those who helped the Crackers, but Gaby and Rufus had overruled him, insisting that all of their people be helped equally. Good press was worth a thousand bullets and, besides, she’d settle for just keeping people out of the firing line.
And that brought her all the way back to the true reason for calling the meeting.
“Operation Headshot,” she said. “Are we ready to go?”
“Give us four days,” Rufus advised. “We’ll have to get all of our assets in place and prepared to move … and we’ll have to rely on our source in the Governor’s office to help hide the preparations. You do realise that this is a hideous risk?”
“It’s worth it, father,” Julian said. “If we can win the war in one fell swoop, we won’t have to worry about anything else ever again. The Imperial Navy will be helpless to intervene; the Marines will either be wiped out or isolated on Castle Rock and the Council will be destroyed. The war will end.”
“Assuming that we pull it all off,” Rufus warned. “The problem with any kind of battle plan is that it never survives first contact with the enemy. If I was in their place, I’d be taking a good hard look at anything coming into the city and if they find just one of the transports, the entire plan will become exposed. Their sweep through the Civil Guard may have removed most of the Council’s placemen, but it also wiped out most of our sources. We may no longer be able to bribe our way out of trouble.”
“Fancy that,” Julian said. His voice was faintly mocking. “A Civil Guardsman who didn’t take a bribe.”
“Give them a few more weeks of hard training and they’ll be able to add an extra three thousand men to the enemy ranks,” Rufus snapped. “Give them a few months and they’ll probably be able to deploy upwards of twenty thousand men. There are plenty of unemployed young men in Camelot they could bring into the Civil Guard or the Army of Avalon, if they started to pay them in cash.”
“Or perhaps they’ll just start conscripting people,” Gaby added. Rufus was right; Operation Headshot was a risk, but it was one they had to take. Given a few months, the odds would swing badly against the Crackers and the war would be on the verge of being lost. She glanced down at her timepiece and scowled. “Operation Headshot will be launched six days from now.”
“And God help us all,” Julian said. “With your permission, then, I will start making my way to Camelot. You’re going to need our support.”
Gaby nodded tiredly. Operation Headshot had one major weakness; it required her to be in the city, rather than lurking somewhere on the outskirts while others did the hard work. Rufus had urged her to let someone else take the risks, but the legend demanded that a descendent of Peter Cracker stood up to claim the reins of government. The irony was almost overwhelming. Peter Cracker had never sought power for himself either.
“Of course,” she said, tiredly. There was no point in explaining that she would rather not have had Julian’s support, or rather his protection. “Start diversifying our assets. If everything goes wrong, we don’t want to give the Marines a chance to dismantle the entire cell.”
“I’ll see to it,” Rufus said. “You go get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”
-o0o-
“We got him, sir,” Gwen said. “He was feeling very cooperative.”
“Oh he was, was he?” Edward asked. “How much did you have to beat him to get him to talk?”
“We showed him the videos and told him that if he refused to cooperate, we’d dump him in the main jail after showing the inmates the video and promising to pardon the man who brought us his head,” Gwen said, darkly. “It worked. He couldn’t wait to tell us everything he knew.”
“It was worse than we thought,” Kitty added. “It turns out that the Wilhelm Family has several allies we didn’t know about.”
“If we know about them now,” Edward warned. “Are you sure that he was telling the truth?”
“We hooked him up to a lie detector once we had finished scaring the shit out of the fat bastard,” Gwen said. “He was telling the truth as he knew it. It wasn’t very reassuring.”
Edward skimmed the transcript, shaking his head. Lucas Trent hadn’t known the half of it He hadn’t known about the private army Carola Wilhelm had been building up, or about the plan to replace the Governor and Major Grosskopf through assassination, or about the plan to start firebombing Cracker villages to exterminate the threat once and for all, or about the indentured servitude …
“A thoroughly sick woman,” he concluded, finally. He looked up at Kitty. “We have the proof we need to move and move now, before she can launch any of these crazy plans.”
“It looks that way,” Kitty agreed. “I suggest striking now, without bothering to consult with anyone else. Your Marines can take her mansion and…”
“No,” Edward said. A single platoon of Marines, all that he had on hand without recalling one of the units from the outlying villages, wouldn’t be enough. Besides, it wasn’t the Marines who had the strongest reason to go after the Council. “I want you to take this directly to Major Grosskopf and tell him to move, now, before they realise that something has gone badly wrong. The Civil Guard’s Alpha Company can take the lead on this one.”
“Yes, sir,” Kitty said. If she was surprised at his decision, she didn’t show it. “I’ll tell him personally.”
“Gwen”—he was on the verge of saying that he would go in person, but she would never have allowed it—“take the QRF and hold them”—he glanced over the street map of Camelot—“here. If the Civil Guard runs into trouble, you are cleared to use any means necessary to assist them, but remember we want as many of them alive as possible.”
“Sir,” Kitty said, slowly, “do we really want to take them alive?”
“Yes,” Edward said, flatly. An idea had sta
rted to flicker into existence at the back of his mind. “We have a Council problem and a Cracker problem. With luck, solving one problem will help us to solve the other.”
CHAPTER 49
The Empire’s laws were originally intended to be blind, to serve all without fear or favour. It didn’t last. The rich and powerful could manipulate the law to their own ends, destroying the faith in the law that the law needed—must have—to survive.
- Professor Leo Caesius, The Waning Years of Empire (banned).
Tam Howard checked the guest’s ID card, confirmed it against the list of people Carola Wilhelm had invited to her latest party and waved her in. The young lady gave him a wink that would have gotten a less well-connected woman arrested and headed through the gates, leaving Tam shaking his head. Most of the population of Camelot was remaining inside, fearing that the Crackers would soon bring the war to Camelot itself, but Carola Wilhelm had decided to throw a party instead. Everyone who was anyone in society was going to be there.
“Nice piece of ass,” one of the other guards observed. He was new, having quit the Civil Guard only a week ago following an unexplained discrepancy in the regimental accounts. He’d been luckier than he deserved and Tam had made a mental note to keep an eye on him. A thief couldn’t be trusted too much. “Do they sometimes come on to you?”
“Our job is keeping the mansion safe,” Tam reminded him, sharply. “Playing with the guests is not allowed, particularly not when we’re on duty. Concentrate on your job and visit a whore later if you feel blue-balled.”
“Jesus, mate,” the other guard said. “I was only kidding.”
Tam shrugged. Carola Wilhelm had hired over a hundred guards to protect her family home, ensuring that they were armed to the teeth with barely-legal weapons. Tam, himself a former member of the Civil Guard, rather enjoyed some of the perks of the job, even though his wished that his mistress was less sociable. Her parties provided too many opportunities for someone to get inside and hurt her, or one of the guests. It didn’t help that her guests were generally wealthy and well-connected and—of course—objected strongly to the suggestion that they might be under suspicion of anything. He wasn’t allowed to search their bags, or even run them through a basic security scanner, which meant that they could bring anything inside the building. One of them could easily be carrying a bomb.