“They’re ready for you, boss.”
Pete Rzeminski nodded and stood, blanking the terminal and placing it carefully in his pocket. Carrying the device was a risk, even with the Marine Corps-grade security programs he’d uploaded, but there was no alternative. The only way for their backers to send messages was to insert them into the planetary datanet, where they could be recovered and forwarded to the terminal. And the message that had just arrived was important enough to justify the risk.
He picked up his mask and pulled it over his face, then checked to make sure that he wasn't wearing something – anything – that might lead the security forces to him. It was amusing to hear the young men who made up most of his fighting force brag about how they intended to resist interrogation, but Pete knew better than to assume they would be allowed to keep their mouths shut. Everyone broke, either through drugs, mental conditioning or even simple torture. The only way to keep a secret was to ensure it was shared with as few people as possible.
The living room was crammed with people, too many people. If Pete hadn't been aware that the entire district was packed with people, half of whom had moved in with their families when the economic crisis had really started to bite, he would have been more worried about concentrating so many of his subordinates together. He had no illusions about how effective some of the security forces could be, even if they were suffering problems from trying to expand too far too fast. Given enough time, they would start working out who was part of the insurgency and then use that person to lead them to others. And if they isolated a house ...
He shook his head. One young man stood in the centre of the room, his hands cuffed behind his back. Two others stood behind him, weapons in hand; the remainder gave all three of them some room. Pete sighed, inwardly. Why was it always the young men? He couldn't help thinking that he hadn't been so stupid when he’d joined the Marines, although there was little room for youthful stupidity in Boot Camp. The Drill Instructors would have forced it out of him or given up and sent him to the Imperial Army instead of the Marines. But there was something about untrained young men that made them want to prove themselves, even if it meant breaking with the plan. Or, in this case, committing a major security breach.
It was easy to discipline Marines ... or even soldiers. There was a chain of command backing up any commanding officer, no matter how weak-willed and feeble. If someone had decided to commit a military offence, if even the entire unit decided to commit an offence, the commanding officer would have support if he called for it. But insurgencies – at least the smarter ones - didn't have such chains of command. They could easily be penetrated and then used to take the entire group apart. But it did mean that disciplining its members was harder than it might have seemed.
Pete sighed, then looked at the young man. He was young, barely seventeen years old ... and clearly torn between righteous indignation and fear. At least he wasn't a complete monster, thankfully; the quickest way for an insurgency to destroy itself was to prey on the local population to the point where the locals, desperate to escape their iron grip, called for help from the security forces. He’d seen insurgencies that had tormented their host populations to the point where the hosts had risen up against the insurgents, no matter what grievances they had with the outsiders. But this young man had just been an idiot.
“Tell me,” he said. “Why are you here?”
The young man looked at him. “They said I broke security.”
Pete allowed his voice to harden. “And did you?”
“I only told one person,” the young man protested. “I ...”
Pete interrupted him. “Let me see if I understand what happened,” he said. “You were trying to get into a certain girl’s panties, right? In order to impress her, you bragged that you were a member of the Voter Liberation Army” – one of the subgroups that had merged into Pete’s unified force – “and that you were involved in a major operation against the government. But the girl, instead of opening her legs for you, went straight to her father, who happened to be one of our coordinators.”
The young man gasped. Pete rolled his eyes. Honestly! What was the point of having a brain if one didn't use it? Girls might not, as a general rule, be as strong as men, but that didn't stop them from carrying out vital tasks for the insurgency. The girl in question had served as a courier more than once, simply because she was less likely to be stopped and searched than a teenage boy. And, unlike her paramour, she’d had the sense to keep her mouth shut about her involvement. Pete made a mental note to ensure she was kept somewhere safe for a few days – the young man might seek revenge on her, rather than recognising that he was the one at fault – and then leaned forward. The young man shrank back.
“You were told, time and time again, that certain details were not to be discussed,” he said, coldly. “Or have you forgotten the oaths you swore, when you joined? Not a word to anyone, from your parents to your closest friends, unless you received permission to talk about your role in the war. Did you forget your oath?”
He took a step forward, and another, until their faces were almost touching. “Or was the sight of a pretty face enough to make you forget? Should we fear the government catching on and sending nude prostitutes dancing through the Zone? Should we expect you and your entire cell to go dancing after them with your tongues hanging on the ground, walking after the bitches until you walk right into a prison cell?”
“I’m sorry, all right!” The young man protested. “I didn't mean to say a word!”
“No, you meant to brag,” Pete corrected him, rudely. “Was getting laid so important to you that you had to open your mouth?”
He sighed. The answer was almost certainly yes. Men, particularly young men, found themselves growing horny at the prospect of danger, excitement breaking down whatever barriers common sense and strict orders might provide. Pete still remembered the odd flow of excitement and anticipation that had gripped him, the day he’d gone into action for the first time ... and he’d had drugs to help calm his mind. But was the lapse forgivable?
“You really should have gone to a prostitute,” he said, tiredly. There was no shortage of prostitutes, in or out of the Zone. Some of them had been well established when the crisis had hit, others had been forced into selling themselves when they ran out of money and goods to pawn. “Do you understand what you did wrong?”
“Yes, sir,” the young man said.
Getting caught, Pete thought, dryly.
He smiled. “Are you prepared to submit to our judgement?”
The young man shuddered, but nodded. Pete understood; they’d been warned, time and time again, that if they did something wrong, punishment would be severe. A traitor – and the movement had had its fair share of traitors – could expect to be brutally murdered. Several of the smaller groups had even targeted the traitor’s family too, something that Pete had tried to discourage. The more they seemed like monsters, the more people would see the government as the lesser of two evils. But he had to admit that it was an effective warning to other potential traitors.
He sighed. Punishment was always a problem in an insurgency. Punish too lightly and others wouldn't be discouraged, punish too harshly and he would have an enemy for life. And if he killed the young man, his family would be outraged ... particularly as he hadn't actually betrayed the movement to the government. Whatever oaths the young man had sworn, Pete doubted his family were completely unaware of his involvement in the movement. Families tended to be more observant than their younger members realised.
“There is a group of trainees leaving the Zone tomorrow,” he said. “You will go with them to the camp and stay there for a month. While you are there, you will carry out whatever duties are assigned to you by the CO – and, let me assure you, there are no shortage of shit duties in the countryside. You will carry out those duties without complaint, even when you are called upon to shovel shit and clean up the campsites. If you serve well, you will be permitted to rejoin the movement
.”
“Thank you, sir,” the young man said.
Pete concealed his amusement. The idiot thought he was getting off lightly – and he was, in the sense he wasn't going to be flogged to within an inch of his life, let alone killed. But shovelling shit for a week would be enough to determine if there was a useful person in there or if he was nothing more than a liability. If the latter ... well, people vanished in the countryside all the time. There would be a quiet execution and the body would be buried somewhere far from civilisation.
“In addition,” he added, “you are not to speak to anyone in the Zone, or attempt to communicate with any of them, without prior permission. You will be allowed to write letters to your parents, which will be carefully read before they’re posted. If you attempt to break this restriction, there will be no further chances. Do you understand me?”
The young man nodded. Pete wondered, inwardly, if he realised he wasn’t allowed to write to his girlfriend – his ex-girlfriend – or if that realisation would come later. Not that it mattered, he suspected. With her cover damaged, if not blown, the girl had already been hidden elsewhere within the Zone. She would never see the boy she’d betrayed again, which was probably for the best. A day or two of shovelling shit would probably have him blaming her for his punishment.
“Take him away,” he ordered. The two young men behind the prisoner grabbed his arms, then turned and marched him through the door towards the cellar. He would be kept down there until the following morning, whereupon he would be attached to the group leaving the Zone. “Cell Leaders; stay. Everyone else, go down to the lower room and wait.”
He waited for the group to sort itself out, sighing inwardly. The Zone – hundreds of thousands of cheap homes, warehouses and closed shops – wasn't a pleasant place to live, even at the best of times. In some ways, it reminded him of Earth, even though the comparison seemed absurd. But there were too many people crammed into too small a space, most of them unable to leave no matter what they did. If the Zone hadn't been so restive, he had a suspicion that most of the inhabitants would be homeless by now. They didn't own their homes, after all.
And it felt cramped. He would have preferred the farm. But that was no longer an option.
“We received a message from our sources,” he said. He suspected that most of his allies knew that they had off-world support, but nothing had been said openly. “The Commonwealth has finally dispatched its forces to aid the government.”
There was no surprise or expressions of outrage from the group, merely a handful of muttered swearwords. Most of the excitable members had been killed by the government’s forces or sidelined into places where they could do no harm. Pete still smiled at the member of the Thule Socialist League, who’d managed to alienate half of their allies through promising to nationalise all property and distribute it to the population. The government had barely needed to lift a finger to keep them from spreading outside the universities and college campuses, where the real world rarely intruded. They’d allowed the beauty of their cause to get the better of them.
“We would be looking at five thousand highly-trained soldiers, including a number of Terran Marines,” he continued. “I've reviewed what information there is on their prior deployment, the Battle of Lakshmibai. Despite being caught on the hop” – he still wondered what sort of idiot hadn't realised that Lakshmibai was not going to be a peaceful deployment – “they fought their way over three hundred miles of countryside and urban areas and saved their fellows from a thoroughly unpleasant death.”
“That doesn’t sound like good news,” one of the cell leaders said.
“Five thousand isn't that many,” another objected. “It certainly isn't enough to occupy everywhere.”
Pete nodded. He was right; Asgard alone would require thousands of troops to secure, while the miles upon miles of sprawling development surrounding the other cities would be a nightmare for even a million-man army to handle. But then, the government did have some forces of its own. The CEF would probably serve as a quick reinforcement, then a rapid reaction force, buying time for the government to train up its own troops.
“I believe that their commander is a Marine,” he said. There had been a considerable amount of information available, but it hadn't been very specific. “She will go on the offensive as soon as possible, once her forces are deployed. I believe she will certainly attempt to take us on here.”
He smiled. None of them seemed to like the idea – which was, he had to admit, sensible enough. Urban combat might limit the advantages of trained troops, but it would still mean a brutal fight which would count thousands of unarmed civilians as collateral damage. He liked to think that a Marine would hesitate before ordering such an operation, yet he knew better than to think the local government would have any such qualms. Even if the First Speaker objected, there were members of his faction who hated the Zone. It had, after all, defied them.
“So we will go on the offensive first,” he said. He’d planned a knockout blow aimed at the local government, but there were too many variables. “Our objective will be knock the CEF out before it can be deployed.”
“As far as I know,” one of the older leaders grated, “we have no starships under our command.”
“True,” Pete agreed. “But they will be vulnerable while they are trying to deploy.”
He felt his smile widen. The Terran Marines were – had been, he suspected – the ultimate in rapid reaction forces. They were trained extensively to deploy across light years as fast as possible, with all of their equipment standardised and lightened to make deployment and resupply an easy task. The Imperial Army had been far more cumbersome, often taking months to deploy to a single world. Reading the news reports, he suspected the CEF fell somewhere in between. But even the Marines had run into snags while they were deploying their forces.
“The current ETA is one week from now,” he said. He’d worked it out from the data he’d been sent, cursing the absence of an FTL communicator as he did so. It had once been the Holy Grail of the Empire’s science, although he’d suspected that progress had been deliberately stalled more than once. “We will have that long to prepare a warm reception.”
He walked over to the table and picked up a sheet of paper. It would have to be destroyed, of course, once the meeting was over. He’d hammered into their heads, time and time again, that nothing was to be written down permanently. Marines, if no one else, knew the value of information pulled from a terrorist hideout. And whoever they were facing would not fail to learn that lesson, not when she needed to leverage only a small number of troops to their best advantage.
“I want all five of you to prepare cells for deployment,” he said. “The spaceport will be our primary target, but we have to prevent the local forces from becoming involved. Ideally, we want to suggest that the local forces actually knew the attack was coming and did nothing.”
“Might be tricky,” one of the leaders observed. “They wouldn't want to ruin their relationships with the Commonwealth.”
“Which leads to another point,” another leader asked. “How many soldiers do we have to kill before the Commonwealth pulls out?”
Pete shrugged. The Empire had been indifferent to causalities, as long as the media hadn't caught wind of them. But when it had, the Imperial Army had been forced to protect its own ass first and fight the enemy second. Sometimes, a spectacular disaster that killed a few hundred soldiers had served as an excuse for withdrawal, while a steady loss rate had passed under the media’s radar. There was no way to know what sort of loss rate the Commonwealth considered acceptable.
“We will probably have to find out the hard way,” Pete said. He ran through the provisional plan, then listened to their input. Some aspects were dismissed as being too ambitious, others were modified slightly. “But if we can force the Commonwealth to withdraw, to abandon its commitment, we will be halfway to victory.”
He smiled at them. “And once we win the war,” he added, “we ca
n create a new world.”
Chapter Fifteen
Finally, however, there was the baleful influence of the Empire’s ivory tower social scientists. They had never carried out field work, never researched their subjects properly ... and yet they branded themselves experts in social science. Their ignorance and incompetence would have been laughable, had it not been for the simple fact that they were believed.
- Professor Leo Caesius. War in a time of ‘Peace:’ The Empire’s Forgotten Military History.
It was relatively easy for anyone, even someone who wasn't a trained navigator, to trace out the least-time course between two separate star systems. A civilian, however, might not realise that even the slightest error in calculation would be enough to make the starship miss its predicted arrival point by millions of kilometres. It was this reason, Mandy knew, that ensured that the standard pirate ambush tactic was to lurk just inside the Phase Limit and wait patiently for a prospective victim to arrive. After all, if the ambush was triggered while the starship was still outside the Phase Limit even the quickest pirates wouldn't be able to prevent their victim from escaping.
Not that I expect to run into pirates here, she thought, as Sword started to move towards the Phase Limit, followed by her squadron and the military transports. Pirates rarely dare take on a warship.
“Send System Command our ID and our planned ETA,” she ordered. “And then take us in, best possible speed.”
She settled back in her command chair to watch as the squadron crawled inwards, its passive sensors picking up signs of industrial activity from all over the system. Despite the economic crunch, Thule still possessed a formidable industrial base; given a few more years, it was quite likely that the planet would be supplying the entire sector. Jasmine, in one of her more pensive moods, had suggested that their real task was to support the local government long enough for the economy to recover completely, undermining the rebel position and destroying their support base. Mandy had her doubts – the crisis wouldn't be forgotten so easily – but she would do whatever she could to support her friend.
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