“Madness,” Jasmine said, finally. “They’re insane.”
“It makes perfect sense, from their point of view,” Howell pointed out. “An inspection might show that their inventory wasn't complete, which would mean an investigation, perhaps even career death. In order to protect their careers, they delay as long as they can before sending out anything we might requisition.”
“But they could just order a new batch of supplies,” Jasmine said. “Or…would that cost them money?”
“Of course,” Howell said. “They don’t want to look as if they’ve recklessly spent their department’s budget, do they? Think what their political enemies would have made of it. I bet you that by the time we return to Earth, Winslow and his friends will have been purged because they handed over billions of credits worth of equipment to us. The internal auditors will hold them to account for it.”
“But we requested the supplies,” Jasmine said. “They can’t blame Winslow for that.”
“You’ll be amazed how logical illogical thinking sounds when it’s done by a committee,” Howell said, lightly. “The more divorced from practical reality any given theory is, the greater its fascination for those who are also divorced from reality.”
He smiled as the aircar came down to rest near the Barracks. “Anyway, time to get back to work,” he said. “I want you to report to the shuttles in twenty minutes. We need to start supervising the loading before someone manages to mess it all up.”
The next four hours passed slowly, but Jasmine barely noticed. A Marine Transport Ship was designed to allow pallets to be slotted in easily, yet they all had to be carefully logged and tracked so that supplies could be pulled out in transit if necessary. It never failed to amaze her just how much could be crammed into a single hull…and how tiny their requirements were compared to the vast stockpile built up in the Sol System. Winslow had had nothing to complain about, really; the Supply Corps had enough supplies stored in the Sol System alone to keep the Imperial Army operating for years. She was tired beyond measure when the loading was finally completed, thinking of her bunk and a long rest before she returned to the training ground. Everyone would be ahead of her.
She walked down to the shuttle hatch and stopped, staring out of a viewport towards Earth. Humanity’s homeworld had once been green and blue, but now it was a mixture of blue and a muddle brown colour. The lights of the massive mega-cities could be seen from orbit, lighting up the sky. Humanity’s homeworld was dying, killed by the race it had spawned. Jasmine’s homeworld, for all of its faults, was kinder than Earth, where there were places no one sane dared venture without a suit of heavy armour.
And yet, somehow, the sight left her with a lump in her thought. No one had said so directly, but everyone in the company had realized that this wasn't going a short posting.
She might never set foot on Earth again.
Chapter Eight
It may seem paradoxical, but despite having mastered faster-than-light spaceflight, it still takes time to send a message from one end of the Empire to the other. Humanity has spread out so far from Earth that it literally takes six months to send a message from Earth to the Rim, leaving planets on the edge of known space barely represented in the Senate. In the absence of FTL communicators, messages have to be transported on starships, while it can take years to reinforce the Imperial Navy detachments on patrol…
- Professor Leo Caesius, The Waning Years of Empire (banned).
Edward stood at one end of the tubing facility on the Sebastian Cruz and watched dispassionately as his Marines started to enter the compartment. It could be a daunting sight for civilians, but the Marines took it in their stride; they’d been placed in the tubes before, sometimes hundreds of times over the last few years. The compartment held thousands of tubes for Marines, yet only a handful would be required for his men. They would have plenty of room for supplies.
He glanced at one of the tubes, seeing the young teenage girl frozen in the eerie light. Leo’s daughter had been terrified of the stasis field, a common reaction. Time might stop within the confines of such a field, but people feared – irrationally – that thought would go on, leaving them frozen like a fly in amber, yet awake and aware. Edward knew from experience that the universe would just seem to blink and they’d be there. Mandy – or perhaps it was Mindy – wouldn’t have to experience the boredom inherent in any long voyage under Phase Drive. Edward had a private bet going with himself that her father would seek to enter stasis himself after he realised just how boring the journey was going to be.
It hadn’t always been so simple, he knew. Back in the early days of spaceflight, humans had hibernated like rodents and snakes, their body temperatures lowered to the point where they could be safely frozen and preserved over the years. It hadn’t always worked. The early mortality rate had shocked him when he'd researched the period in OCS. It made the Slaughterhouse look like one of the safest worlds in the galaxy. The march of science had, thankfully, removed the need to risk so many of his Marines. If the power failed, as it had on many of the early interstellar colony missions, they would just come out of stasis. They might even be able to survive the aftermath of whatever disaster had cut the power.
He looked back towards the girl, and then looked away. Mandy was too young to be attractive. The confidential reports from the Commandant had warned him that both of the girls had been sulking during their stay in the Marine Headquarters, suggesting that they wouldn’t adapt well to Avalon. The Professor’s wife had been worse; after all, there was no hope of her ever receiving rejuvenation treatments now. They simply didn’t exist outside Earth and the Core Worlds. There were treatments that were offered to colonists who were willing to settle specific worlds, but Fiona was simply too old to take one and live. The Professor wasn't going to have a happy married life.
A line of Marines marched past him, pausing long enough to salute. He was pleased to see that they looked calm and composed, rather than the near-panic that most civilians showed when they came face-to-face with the stasis tubes. A claustrophobe would hate them, even just for the handful of seconds that they’d be in the tube and aware that they were in the tube. But then, a claustrophobe would never have made it through Boot Camp, let alone the Slaughterhouse. Edward remembered crawling through tiny passageways, barely wide enough to admit him, and shivered inwardly. The Slaughterhouse more than lived up to its name.
“All present and accounted for,” Gwen informed him. Edward nodded, relieved. Being late for muster was a disciplinary offence, but it happened more often than the Marine Corps liked to admit. Marines would go off on leave, find a girl – or a boy, if their tastes ran that way – and lose track of time, aided by alcohol or recreational drugs. When they returned to awareness, they would be horrified to discover that they had overslept and they were late for muster.
“Good,” he said, looking over at the Marines. They looked ready for anything, carrying their weapons and survival equipment with them. There was no need for them to be naked or unarmed within the stasis tubes and so they carried their weapons, just in case of trouble. He raised his voice, hearing it echoing all over the compartment. “You may enter your tubes.”
***
The compartment was nothing, but stasis tubes, each one large enough to hold a good-sized Marine and his or her equipment. Jasmine was reminded, helplessly, of early days at the Slaughterhouse, battling through carefully-designed environments that simulated combat all over the Empire. The tubes still seemed sinister to her, even though she had been through stasis before and never felt anything. She had taken part in an insane charge against rebels in the Han System, something that no one in their right mind would have done, yet it was hard to walk up to her tube and key it open.
She caught sight of a frozen girl, barely entering her teens, and smiled inwardly as she stepped into the tube. If a teenage girl could endure it, so could she. The cold air struck her bare skin and she shivered as she checked her weapon and emergency supplies. The re
al nightmare was the ship suffering a disaster and losing power, leaving them stumbling their way out of a stasis tube, completely confused and without the slightest idea what was going on. She’d heard of ships that had lost main drive and yet somehow retained the stasis tubes, allowing their crews to be rescued years later, but few of the stories had any basis in fact. If something happened to the Sebastian Cruz, they were all going to die without ever knowing what had hit them.
The tube hissed closed and she braced herself, as if she were expecting a physical blow. Back on the Slaughterhouse, she had been hit repeatedly in order to teach her how to take a blow, yet this was different. She felt sick, unsure of her ground, almost as if she were on the verge of panic. She hadn’t fallen to panic since she’d entered her teens. Indeed, her self-control had been remarkable, or so she’d been told. There had been no need to enter a stasis tube on her homeworld and even crawling through tight spaces had still had her in control and aware of her surroundings.
“Stasis field activating in three,” a voice said. She could hear a thumping sound in her ears and it took her a moment to realise that it was her own heart. How many other Marines, she wondered, were nervously waiting for the moment of stasis? How many others were on the verge of panic? “Two…one…”
The universe blinked…
***
“Stasis field activated,” a crewman said. He had been a Marine before mustering out and transferring to the auxiliary section, taking up a position on the transport ship. The Corps used it as a way of circumventing the restrictions on the Corps’ deployable strength, although it had been too long since the crewman had served as a Marine. “Major?”
“Good,” Edward said. It still felt odd to be called by a superior rank, even though he understood the practicalities of the situation. On his first deployment, he’d earned a punishment duty for calling his Captain by his actual rank while onboard ship. “Check the power systems and then prepare to seal this deck.”
He walked down the compartment, glancing into several of the tubes as he moved. His men hung suspended in eerie light, an unearthly shimmer playing over their faces, frozen in a single instant. They wouldn’t endure the boredom of the voyage; they’d come out of the tubes on Avalon, feeling as if no time had passed at all. He would have joined them if it had been permitted, but there was too much work for him to do. There was one final tube in the compartment for the Professor, if he chose to use it.
The massive airlock hissed closed as they stepped out of the compartment, leaving the Marines frozen in darkness. He felt the dull clang running through the ship as the docking clamps were released, allowing the transport to start powering up her drives and start heading out of the system. A pair of Imperial Navy destroyers had been assigned to escort them, although he knew that they wouldn’t be remaining at Avalon once they’d tanked up from the orbiting fuel depot. It was a shame, but there were too many other planets that needed starships and Avalon just didn’t rate as important. The entire planet and its population wouldn’t even be noticed among the massive sea of the Empire.
His communicator buzzed. “Major, this is Captain Yamato,” a voice said. “Would you care to watch the departure from the bridge?”
Edward hesitated, and then realised that it might break him out of his funk. “I’m on my way,” he said, hearing a dull thrumming beating through the ship as the drives slowly came up to full power. “Thank you, Captain.”
The Sebastian Cruz’s bridge was massive, large enough to serve as a CIC on a battleship, although only a handful of consoles were operated. Edward had been a Lieutenant during the Han Campaign and he’d seen how a transport had served as the headquarters of the Major-General in command of the operation, allowing him to issue overarching orders from high orbit. He’d been chewing tacks at being unable to go down to the surface, but with the planet in open revolt and enemy-crewed starships in the system, he’d been deemed too vital to be risked. He would probably have been happier as a Captain, even when the rebels had started launching nukes towards the Marines and the Imperial Army regiments backing them up.
“Please, take a seat,” Yamato invited. He was a tall Japanese-ethnic man, with a quiet air of competence. Ethnic Japanese were rare among the Marines – the legacy of the Third World War had cast a baleful shadow over the Terran Federation, and the Empire – but those who did pass through the Slaughterhouse were renowned for being among the best. “We’re just clearing the high orbital defences now.”
Earth floated at the centre of the display, surrounded by enough tactical symbols to almost obscure the planet itself. As humanity’s homeworld, Earth was the best-protected world in the Empire, surrounded by over a hundred orbital battle stations and thousands of automated orbital weapons platforms. Hundreds of asteroids, space stations and industrial nodes circled the planet, part of an industrial base that was second to none. The Sol System, with massive orbiting factories around all of its planets, hundreds of cloudscoop facilities and a combined population of over seventy billion humans was the greatest concentration of industrial might in the Empire. It took five of the oldest colony worlds, settled for over seven hundred years each, to amount to Earth’s massive industry. The sight of Earth’s halo of industrial stations never failed to fill him with pride.
And yet it was limited. The Terran Federation had had an even greater advantage over its enemies and it had never been able to put down the revolts that threatened its very existence. The Empire, which had replaced the Federation at the height of the Age of Unrest, had made deals with most of its opponents, offering them autonomy within a united human Empire. The remaining ones had been ruthlessly crushed. Yet, still, the Empire couldn’t hope to hold down all of its worlds if they all rose against it. Leo had been right. The Empire was more dependent than ever on its population’s goodwill…and that was increasingly lacking.
“Thank you, Captain,” he said, as they passed the final orbital battle station. Earth’s defences were probably rated as overkill. In theory, the entire massed might of the Imperial Navy couldn’t break through the defences. In practice…Earth hadn’t been attacked since the end of the Age of Unrest, at least not directly. Terrorists and independence movements had attempted to launch covert strikes in the past. “It is a spectacular sight.”
“It is,” Yamato agreed, seriously. He settled back into his command chair as the two escorting destroyers took fore and aft positions in the tiny convoy. Edward was mildly surprised that they hadn’t been asked to escort some freighters as well, but perhaps it was understandable. There was no direct traffic between Earth and Avalon. “It is the safest world in the galaxy.”
There was no detectable irony in his voice. Edward had grown up on Earth. Unlike Leo, he’d been aware from a very early age just how thin the veneer of civilisation was over the planet, no matter what the Empire spent on welfare. Millions of people left Earth every year, willingly or unwillingly, yet it was nothing more than a drop in the bucket. He knew how block gangs could hold thousands of people to ransom, or how terrorist cults could pop up, carry out their merry slaughter and vanish again, or how the services could sometimes cut off for hours on end. For someone born in the Undercity, Avalon would be paradise itself. Somehow, Edward doubted that they would appreciate it.
“Depends where you live,” he said, finally. He’d signed up for the Marines on his eighteenth birthday and never looked back. “How long until we cross the Phase Limit?”
Yamato made a show of checking his timepiece. “Nine hours,” he said. “You are welcome to stay and observe, if you wish.”
Early human experiments into faster-than-light travel had all failed, without exception. It had taken years of experimenting before the human race realised that it was simply impossible to generate a phase field inside a star’s gravity well, no matter how much power was applied by the engineers. The first phase ships had triggered their drives light months from Sol; now, with advanced gravimetric sensors, it was possible to locate the precise moment when it
was possible to leap into Phase Space. It had opened up the stars to human settlement.
“Thank you,” Edward said, “but I have paperwork to be getting on with. I’ll watch it from the observation blister.”
Nine hours later, he stepped into the observation blister and was surprised to see Leo standing there, staring out into the darkness of space, lit only by the unblinking glow of a thousand stars. Sol itself, the star that had illuminated Earth since before the human race first crawled out of the sea, was little more than yet another point of light, perhaps slightly brighter than most.
“Major,” Leo said, in greeting. “I just wanted to see the transition for the first time.”
The Empire’s Corps: Book 01 - The Empire's Corps Page 8