The Empire’s Corps: Book 01 - The Empire's Corps

by Christopher Nuttall

  Always learn from mistakes made by other people, her first Drill Sergeant had bellowed, after verbally tearing apart a particularly disastrous exercise. It’s much cheaper than learning from your own.

  “He saved my life during the HangChow extraction,” Blake said, slowly. He’d been a shrimp then too, but he’d grown up rapidly. “Without him, I wouldn't be here today.”

  “He used to play chess with me,” another Marine said. “We’d spend some of our off-duty time playing together, competing endlessly for victories. We even invented our own form of chess and tried to market it on Earth.”

  Jasmine smiled slowly, sipping her drink as more stories emerged. One day, they’d give her the same wake, telling the new recruits stories about her life before she finally bought the farm. She wondered just how many of the young faces staring at her would be alive to see her off at her wake, or if they would all die together, going out in a blaze of glory. If nothing else, Han had proven that Marines could die just as easily as civilians, when their transports were hit by missiles and destroyed.

  Blake poured the last of the brandy into their plastic glasses and threw the bottle against the wall. “That’s the last of it,” he said, quietly. It was odd to see him so subdued. “It’s the local piss-water now.”

  Jasmine shook her head as the bottles were offered around. It had always struck her as odd that drinking wasn't discouraged in the Marine Corps, although rendering oneself unfit for duty was an offence against military order and heavily punished. If necessary, the Marines would inject themselves with sober-ups before they returned to duty, although the experience wouldn't be pleasant. Running the Gauntlet for being unfit for duty would be worse. She'd heard of Civil Guard units that had spent their entire tours in a permanent drunken stupor, and then had been surprised when all hell had broken loose in their sectors.

  “Leave it,” she said, and put the glass down. “I’ll see you all later.”

  She stood up and walked out of the barracks, heading towards the shooting range. She had an urge to blow off as much steam as she could, yet there was no one in the practice ring who could give her a bout. The targets would have to face her wrath.

  ***

  Edward watched one of his Marines heading to the shooting range, and then turned back to the communicator. “So the Governor didn’t order your immediate arrest, then?”

  “No,” Major Grosskopf said. “I think he was a little scared of the public reaction after rumours of what happened to the Civil Guard started to leak out. We may not be entirely popular on the planet, but our soldiers do have friends and relatives in the cities. And we smashed a bandit ambush and killed or captured over two hundred of the fuckers. It’s not all bad news, even if I did...exceed my authority.”

  Edward smiled at the understatement. He’d signed off – unofficially – on the Major’s plan and had even stationed Marines nearby to help if Kappa Company had decided to try to fight rather than surrender, but he’d half-expected to hear an urgent message from the Governor demanding that he move to suppress a Civil Guard mutiny. That would have been awkward, to say nothing of placing both Grosskopf and himself in a very dangerous position.

  “The bad news is that Smuts was definitely assassinated,” Grosskopf added. “There’s a good chance that we swept up the assassin in the purge and we’ll get him when we pass him through the lie detector, but for the moment we’ve hit a blank wall...as far as anyone on the outside knows.”

  “The bandit we captured with the radio,” Edward said. They shared a long look. Officially, no bandit leaders had been taken alive, or so they’d informed the media, knowing that it would get back to the right ears. “We were going to start interrogating him tomorrow.”

  “And find out if he knows who was behind this,” Grosskopf agreed. “He has to be important if they trusted him with a radio.”

  Edward wasn't convinced of that – someone important would have known that the radio transmissions could be tracked - but he held his peace. “We’ll see,” he said. “How are your men coping?”

  “Morale is surprisingly high after we invaded the supply dump,” Grosskopf said. “I think we could probably turn the whole thing around in a few months, if we have the time.”

  Edward nodded. “I’ll let you know what our friend knows once we’re finished with him,” he said. “And then we can decide what to do next.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The dividing line between legal and illegal combatant is blurred and – like all other such principles – is effectively determined by the winner. Given the nature of the wars we fight, expecting an enemy to conduct themselves according to the Azores Conventions of 2052 is foolish. We can therefore define a ‘legal’ combatant as one who attempts to spare civilian lives, where possible, and an ‘illegal’ combatant as the opposite. The latter, under the Articles of War, have no rights whatsoever. This does not sit well with civilians – or, rather, it does not sit well with civilians who are isolated from the war.

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

  Lucas sat back against the wall of his cell and tried to make himself comfortable. It wasn't easy. His leg had been firmly shackled to the floor and it could barely move, while a cold draft blew under the door and sent shivers down his spine. He was naked; the Marines, or perhaps the Civil Guard, had stripped him after he’d been stunned and then dumped him in the cell. Somehow, despite knowing about his backers, he found it hard to remain optimistic. He didn’t know how they'd done it, but they'd somehow identified him as an important person. How much did they know?

  The question ran around and around in his mind as he settled back, cursing the heavy chain under his breath. It was overkill – a short look at the door had told him that he wouldn’t be breaking out any time soon – but it wasn't there to keep him imprisoned. It was there, he knew, to make sure he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was a prisoner and his fate was completely in someone else’s hands. Lucas had used similar techniques himself back when he'd been a gang leader on Earth, even before becoming one of the Knifes, for the human psyche often refused to realise that a situation was truly hopeless. He’d seen women, kidnapped from the homesteads, slowly fall into new thought patterns, one that allowed them to remain sane in the face of sexual abuse from their new masters. The thought of someone doing the same to him – making him think that he was where he should be, no matter how much it hurt – was intolerable, yet he was no longer sure that he was sophisticated enough to resist it. He knew what they were doing…and it was working anyway.

  He had no idea how long he'd been in the cell. It could have been bare hours since he’d been stunned and captured, or it could have been days or weeks. The single light, burning down from high above, never went out and there were no windows, depriving him of anything he could use to measure time. He’d tried to keep count of when he’d fallen asleep, yet he had rapidly lost track of time. The food supply, a handful of ration bars someone had placed in the cell along with a single water tap, didn’t provide any clues. Besides, the ration bars tasted suspiciously like someone had made them out of shit. He’d heard stories of farmers in the outlying regions who had starved to death rather than eat ration bars on a regular basis. Just now, trapped in the cell, the stories seemed quite believable. He had had to force himself to swallow even a single bite.

  His backers had failed to materialise, he realised, or perhaps they were in trouble themselves. There had been no way to conceal the fact that the Knives were deploying advanced weapons, weapons they could only have obtained from the Civil Guard, and their only hope of preventing investigators from drawing a line from their source to the backers was to kill the source before he or she could tell all. There was no hope that the source would remain silent, either; the Marines or the Civil Guard could simply have injected him with truth drugs, or perhaps they would have resorted to good old-fashioned torture. Lucas had tortured men and women himself back on Earth and knew tha
t anyone could be broken, given enough time. They could be building a case against him right now…and there was nothing he could do about it. He’d shouted, claiming his rights under the Imperial Charter and demanding to see a lawyer, but there had been no response. In many ways, that had been more frightening than an official thug entering the cell and beating the shit out of him. If his civil rights had been suspended…how much could they do to him?

  I have things they want, he reminded himself, trying to remain optimistic. I still have room to bargain…

  The door to the cell clicked loudly as it was unlocked. Lucas looked up as the door swung slowly open, revealing two men wearing unmarked black tunics. There was nothing to saw who they were or which particular organisation they worked for, but they had to be soldiers. They held themselves in a military manner, although he couldn’t have pointed to exactly what had tipped him off. They didn’t show any fear of Lucas either. Of course, he reminded himself, with one leg chained firmly to the floor, all they had to do was remain out of reach and there would be nothing he could do to them.

  “Well,” he said, as the two men rapidly inspected his cell. He’d assumed that there were pick-ups in the cell as a matter of course, just to see if he said anything incriminating while alone, but perhaps not. “Are you going to take me to my lawyer?”

  “No,” one of the men said. His accent was very clearly not an Avalon accent, which suggested quite strongly that he was a Marine, rather than one of the Civil Guard. Lucas felt his blood run cold. He had allies among the Civil Guard, men who would risk their lives to save him rather than risk him blowing the whistle on their covert activities, but he had no allies among the Marines. For the first time, he realised deep inside that he might not be able to get out of the trap. “You have a different appointment.”

  The men finished their sweep of the cell and drew back. “Stand up,” the leader ordered, “and place your hands on your head.”

  Lucas glowered at him for a long moment, and then reluctantly complied. It wasn't as if resistance would have gotten him anywhere. They could simply have produced a stunner and stunned him, and then dragged him wherever they wanted him to go. It was better to be awake and aware, he told himself; perhaps he would see something that he could use to leverage his escape. A moment later, one of the men moved behind him and cuffed his hands firmly behind his back. The cuffs were so tight that Lucas rapidly lost all feeling in his hands.

  “You will come with us,” the leader informed him, as he unlocked Lucas’s chain. His companion took one of Lucas’s arms and started to push him towards the door. Helpless, Lucas allowed him to keep pushing at him, looking around with interest as they stepped out of the cell and into a darkened corridor. It took him a moment to realise that he was looking at a prefabricated building; a new prefabricated building. His heart sank. The only place on Avalon that could be expected to have new prefabricated buildings was Castle Rock, the home of the Marines. “Do not attempt to escape.”

  The warning was unnecessary, for Lucas had already realised that escape would be impossible. The building should have been a simple design, yet he lost track of just where they’d taken him very quickly, as if they were leading him through a maze. The corridors were so interchangeable that they could have been taking him in circles and he would never have realised it, or perhaps the building was larger than he had thought. The only other prefabricated building he’d seen had been a colonist barracks, back when he’d first came to Avalon. It had been dingy and decaying; this one was new and apparently massive. Even guessing what they had done provided no relief. There was still no hope of escaping his captors, let alone finding his way off the island. He would have to remain calm and focused on the only chips he held. They were his only hope.

  A door opened up in front of them on an unseen command and the Marines marched him into a small room. At first, Lucas thought they’d simply returned him to his cell, after giving him some demented version of exercise, but then he saw the chair that had been placed in the exact centre of the room. His escorts pushed him into it and secured his cuffs to the back of the chair; a second later, before he could do anything, they locked his legs firmly down as well. A band went around his throat, making even the smallest movements uncomfortable. He could barely move.

  “Good work,” a new voice said. Lucas blinked in shock. There had been other men in the room and he hadn’t even noticed them in the shadows! Marines, it was rumoured, had enhanced eyes, allowing them to see in the dark like cats. Even if it wasn't true, they might well have far better eyesight than Lucas or any of the Knives, allowing them to fight in the dark as easily as fighting in daytime. “Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?”

  The new speaker came into view, a tall man with short blonde hair and an expression of cold, dispassionate fury that reminded Lucas of his first Gang Boss. That man had been as safe to play with as unstable explosives and had once ordered one of his whores to be lowered feet-first into a vat of acid for some imagined slight. Lucas had been terrified of the man and even when he had managed to carve out an independent existence for himself, thoughts of his first master still haunted him. The newcomer wore no insignia, yet Lucas was somehow sure that he was looking at the Marine CO. He held himself, not only as if he expected to be obeyed, but as if the issue was completely beyond argument.

  “You,” Lucas said. It was hard to talk with the band around his throat, which made him wonder if they simply intended to execute him, rather than interrogate him to find out what he knew. Had they drugged and interrogated him in his sleep? “I want to deal.”

  “Yes,” the Marine said. His voice was cold and flat, yet there was a hint of underlying amusement, as if he were a cat playing with a mouse. Lucas swallowed his pride and lowered his eyes, knowing that he couldn’t afford to play his cards poorly. He had never been in so much danger in his entire life. “You want to deal.”

  He waited. Lucas wanted to out-wait him, but he didn’t quite dare. “I know information that you need to know,” he said, realising that there was no way he could out-wait the Marine. “I also know that you cannot interrogate me using drugs or torture. You have to bargain with me for the information.”

  The Marine smiled. “Really?”

  Lucas shivered at the tone. “I have a nerve-burst implant in my head,” he said. “If it detects that I am being interrogated by force, it will kill me and you will be unable to learn anything from my body. It is impossible to remove and…”

  “We scanned your head when we brought you in,” the Marine said. His smile suddenly had a very cruel edge. “You have no such implant. You have nothing, apart from a handful of colourful tattoos on your body and an Indent ID number tattooed on your ass. You have no way of preventing us from draining information out of your head by force.”

  His lips twitched. “As if a gang lord would have access to such technology,” he said, mockingly. “I doubt that you were ever that important.”

  Lucas scowled inwardly, struggling against a tidal wave of despair. If Earth’s Civil Guard had known who they had arrested, he would have been lucky to have been merely dumped on a hellish world with minimal supplies and no hope of survival. But they hadn’t known and his records, of course, had shown him as just another indent, perhaps a little smarter and healthier than most. His few chips had been knocked from his hand.

  “We know that you were important because you had a radio and were giving orders,” the Marine said. Lucas flinched as he realised how easily he had been caught. “You know what we need to know, so we’re going to make you an offer. Tell us everything – and I mean everything – that you know and we’ll indenture you again rather than tossing you off a boat and leaving you to the Dagger Fish.”

  Lucas blinked. Being indentured again wouldn’t be any fun, but it would hold the possibility of escape and a return to the badlands. It had to be a bluff, a cruel way of making him talk.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, stubbornly. “You’re lying.”

&nb
sp; “I swear to you, upon the honour of the Marine Corps, that you will merely be indentured, rather than executed,” the Marine said. Lucas heard the sudden shift in tone and realised that he was serious. “It’s the best offer you’re going to get, but…”