by Dave Bara
When my alarm went off at 0530 they were still in my hand. I stumbled off to the bathroom to be sick, then swallowed the pills quickly with some water. I hated this planet.
Marker arrived precisely at 0600 as I struggled to get into a pair of casual marine fatigues. Karina came out of the bedroom in a bathrobe, rubbing at her weary eyes. I remembered that I’d wanted her up on Defiant for the evening, but she had obviously made other plans and stayed with me.
“Christ, it’s not even light out yet,” she said. “Where are you two going?”
I made a “hush” gesture, index finger to my lips, then said, “Up the coastline. We’re going to watch the sunrise, check out the fishing industry, that sort of thing. It might be helpful to Sandosa if we can find some useful industries to add to their application,” I said, lying.
“When are you coming back?” Karina asked. I shrugged.
“Midday, hopefully. I’m not helping in the negotiations anyway, so I’ll probably be heading up to the ship after that,” I lied.
“I’ll wait for you to get back then,” she said. I shook my head no.
“The transfer shuttle will wait for you. Marker and I will take the one that’s already on the ground. I want you back aboard Defiant pronto. Lots to do today,” I said. “And tell Layton all is well down here.” That last part was military code for heightened readiness. Basically I was ordering Layton to prepare the ship for a potential conflict on the surface. I wondered if Karina was awake enough to catch the code.
She hesitated a second, cocked her head at me, then said, “I’ll pass your message along, Captain.” I nodded at that, finished strapping my boots up, then stood to leave with Marker. Karina came up to me. “I’ll be home within the hour,” she said. That was code for message received and understood. I kissed her cheek, then headed out the door. Out in the hall I randomly picked two of our marine guards to join us on the flight for protection, leaving two for Karina. Then we made our way down to the shuttles.
“Forget to take your hangover pills, sir?” asked Marker as we headed for the tarmac.
“More like I passed out before I could take them. What is it we used to say at the Academy?”
“I feel like two bags of shit warmed over,” said Marker.
“Accurate,” I said.
“Well then, we’ll try and keep it a smooth ride,” he said, smiling.
I was just trying to hold down whatever I had left in my stomach.
Corporal Verhunce flew us out of New Seville and up along the coast, and we filed a flight plan indicating the same and got confirmation from Sandosa flight control. I guess we were too big as dignitaries for them to deny us.
“So, when do we deviate?” I asked Marker, finally feeling the positive effects of the hangover pills after another trip to the shuttle loo. Marker checked his watch.
“I’ve planned us to hug the north coast, then turn inland where the coast nearly touches the mountains. It’s about a sixty-kilometer run inland and then upward to what appears to be a heavily populated camp at about twenty-four hundred meters. We can probably safely survey from there, sir,” he said.
“No offense, John, but I didn’t come on this flight to observe from a distance. If we can get over the camp or even down into it, can we defend ourselves against their military?” I asked.
“Aye, sir, if that’s what you need us to do. Right, Verhunce?” he asked.
“That’s affirmative, sir. I can fly this bucket anywhere past their defenses. I doubt they can lay a finger on us,” she said.
On that note, I lay back on my flight couch in the pilot’s nest and closed my eyes. “Then wake me when we start the climb,” I said.
Forty minutes later Marker shook me gently awake.
“On our way up, sir. And we’ve increased our speed, and we’re running quiet. I’m betting they don’t have anything that can track us,” he said. I sat up from my couch and checked the controls. We were only thirty kilometers from our target. Marker had let me sleep some extra minutes. I turned to Verhunce.
“What are our defenses?” I asked.
“None at the moment, sir. I can run a kinetic energy screen all the way up to a full Hoagland Field,” she said. I looked to Marker.
“The Hoagland’s not needed, sir. The screens will stop any conventional ammunition plus most missile warheads. We haven’t seen any evidence they have anything close to advanced weapons available.” I looked to Verhunce again.
“The screens should be enough, sir,” she said with a smile. I liked her. She rather reminded me of Dobrina Kierkopf, which wasn’t too surprising, as they were both of Slovenian descent.
“Then we’ll go with the screens,” I said. “How long until we’re at the camp?” Marker looked at his watch.
“Six minutes, sir.”
“Take us up another thousand meters, Verhunce. I want a good look at this operation before we drop down on our friends,” I ordered. She gunned the shuttle engines and took us up to a flat thirty-five hundred meters, likely well out of their conventional weapons range.
“Think we’ll be pissing them off having a look from up here, sir?” asked Marker. I shrugged.
“I could care less about their feelings, John. We’re here to evaluate them as potential future partners, not make friends.”
A minute later I was at the shuttle’s limited longscope, using a long-range viewer and looking down. It only took a few more moments to find the camp.
“Hold it here, Verhunce. We’re right over them,” I said. She did as instructed, and the shuttle went to station-keeping over the camp. I zoomed the ’scope. What I saw appalled me.
What looked like thousands of people, men and women wearing gray-and-white-striped prisoner’s garb, were shuffling back and forth from ramshackle barracks to a massive mine entrance. Those who came out were hauling small railed cars full of black ore, likely coal, and depositing it on conveyor belts, either with shovels (if they were lucky) or by hand. The second outgoing line had much smaller cars on a separate rail-and-belt system. I ran a spectral scan and found this second line contained metals, primarily copper with some others mixed in. The cars on this line were much smaller and run exclusively by women. They were all unloaded by hand. What we clearly had here was one line going into the mountain hole and two separate lines coming out. No doubt the two lines diverged somewhere deep inside the mountain. I guessed, based on the volume of workers and the size of the barracks, that there were perhaps twenty-five thousand people involved in the operation. The whole area was fenced in with defensive turrets spread around and plenty of armed guards on display. I turned to Marker.
“Chief, please confirm my findings,” I said. Marker took to the longscope for about thirty seconds, then stood back up.
“Looks like an enforced labor camp to me, sir,” he said.
“Are you getting a recording of everything from the ’scope, Verhunce?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. Fully recording, sir,” she said. I locked eyes with my Master Chief.
“Under Article Two of the Union Code, any and all forced labor camps encountered during any mission, First Contact and beyond, are to be neutralized immediately. The victims are to be treated as refugees, the oppressors as enemy combatants. Do you concur with my conclusion that this camp meets those criteria, Chief?” I said.
“I do, sir,” he said. I turned to Verhunce.
“Corporal, take us down as fast as she’ll go, right over the camp as low as you can, and then back out to open air over the valley. If I don’t see the guards all crapping their pants, I’ll be writing you up,” I said.
“Aye, sir,” said Verhunce enthusiastically. I turned to Marker.
“Chief, man the weapons console. We’ll make a warning pass, and then we’ll swing back out over the valley, give them a chance to decide if they’re going to make a business decision or not. Then we’
ll make our run in. If they fire at us, take out every tower on the first run. Second run I want those fences down.” Then I hesitated.
“Third run, sir?” asked Marker. I thought for a second.
“If they shoot at the laborers, take them all out.”
“Civilian casualties, sir?” asked Marker, taking his station. I took my safety couch and strapped in.
“Likely can’t be avoided. Do your best, Chief, but saving as many as we can is the priority,” I stated.
“Understood.”
I swiveled to our two marine escorts in the shuttle personnel bay.
“Strap in, boys. Likely to be rough from here on in.”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison. I turned back to my pilot.
“Call Defiant, Verhunce. Use the longwave. Tell them I want every marine they can spare crammed onto the reserve shuttle, and I want them down here in less than ten minutes. And call the rotation shuttle in New Seville. I want them off the ground immediately with my wife aboard if they haven’t already left.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“Start our run in two minutes,” I ordered.
“Yes, sir,” they both said in response. And so we waited the time out in silence, Verhunce forwarding my orders via longwave text com.
The shuttle descended at a frightening rate, straight down, right on top of the camp. As I watched on the display, the roar of our engines terrified them, and both prisoners and guards went scrambling for cover. Then Verhunce hit the jets, and we went from VTOL mode to flying over the camp and out into open air over the valley as Verhunce turned us back to face the mountaintop camp.
“Station keeping,” I ordered. “Let’s give them a minute to decide what to do.” I watched on the longscope viewer as the workers all scrambled for cover, some in the barracks, some under the mountain. It was chaos. The guards were trying to keep the workers away from the fences by firing warning shots. None were firing at the workers so far. I watched for a few more seconds, then said, “Let’s make our run.”
“Aye, sir,” said Verhunce. We closed in on the camp at about half the speed we’d gone out at, letting them know we meant business this time.
“Towers targeted, sir. I count eight,” said Marker. “Easy to take out with the forward coil cannon, sir.”
“Confirmed,” I replied. We were within about fifteen hundred meters of the camp when they made their decision.
The shuttle shook from an impact on our kinetic energy shielding, then sputtered and began to lose altitude.
“Verhunce!” I yelled as the engines strained to stay in operation.
“Some kind of advanced microwave weapon, sir. Invisible to the naked eye and no warning, either. Kinetic energy shield is completely gone, and they’ve damaged the engines with some sort of disruption beam, sir,” she replied frantically, struggling with the controls.
“Hoagland Field!”
“Already up, sir,” Verhunce said. “A few more seconds of that and they’d have had us.”
“Weapons? Communication?” I asked Marker as we shook from side to side.
“All out, sir. If that’s the best they’ve got—”
He was cut off by an alarm klaxon.
“Incoming missiles!” warned Verhunce. “Plasma-tipped warheads detected.”
“Two of them, sir,” reported Marker. I turned to Verhunce.
“Get us down on that plateau, Corporal!”
“Aye, sir!” She pushed the shuttle forward as the missiles approached.
“They can’t get through our Hoagland with those,” said Marker.
The missiles hit a second later, and the shuttle shook violently. The plasma breached the hull in the personnel bay, burning a hole about a foot across in the hull and starting a fire as melted metal dripped to the floor. One of the privates unstrapped, jumped up, killed the fire, and sealed the hole with a single foam canister. I turned back to Marker.
“I thought you said—”
“A microwave burst from the warhead disrupted the Hoagland Field, sir. The plasma ignited on impact. They can’t shoot us down, but they can punch holes in us like a tin can,” yelled Marker over the blaring klaxon.
“We’re not space-worthy with that hole in the fuselage,” chimed in Verhunce. “And the starboard engine is on fire.” I looked out the window to confirm the fire.
“Thank you, Corporal.” I slid over to the longscope viewer again and looked down, seeking an advantage. “I’ve got a fix on a ridge they appear to be firing from. Can we hit it with anything?” I asked Marker as a second round of plasma missiles fired at us.
“Railgun’s out, all I have is anti-personnel grapeshot, sir,” Marker said.
“Do it. Don’t wait for my order,” I said. Marker just nodded and fired. The grapeshot was a collection of small metal balls like ball bearings, ranging in size from a centimeter across up to cricket-ball-size. Very effective against unarmored soldiers or fast-moving targets that carried their own kinetic energy. In this case they found their perfect match in the incoming missiles. They exploded in a bright red fireball a few hundred meters from the shuttle. We passed through the dissipating warhead plasma with minimal new damage.
“Again,” I ordered Marker. “This time at the ridge.” He nodded and fired a second time.
We all watched as the scene played out before us. Marker’s grapeshot scattering against the ridge sent bodies and parts of bodies falling from the rock. Verhunce let go of the useless shuttle controls as we glided in and hit the plateau on a fairly flat plane, then slid through the camp’s fences, taking out one of the guard towers before skidding to a halt right in the middle of the damn camp. All I could do was watch.
I unbuckled and jumped up out of my chair. “Weapons!” I said as I grabbed the nearest coil rifle, charged it, and went straight to the view window in the pilot’s nest door.
About a hundred Sandosan soldiers were slowly closing in on our smoking hulk of a shuttle.
“I’d say we’ve got about two minutes,” I said.
“And then what?” asked Marker.
I looked back at him but didn’t say anything.
The second shuttle I’d called down for backup took out the ridge weapons position a few seconds later, then sent all the Sandosan soldiers scrambling as they pummeled the camp’s towers and blew out large gaps in the fencing. At that point many of the prisoners began braving the fracas and ran out of the barracks, heading for the open fences. The second shuttle hovered about ten meters above the middle of the compound and quickly released her cargo of thirty marines on tether lines before ascending again to continue the barrage. The marines spread out to cover our position, taking out many of the scattering Sandosan soldiers as they advanced to protect us.
“Out!” I ordered, pushing the cabin door open, and we were all on the ground in seconds. Our jobs, though, seemed confined to mopping up. The marines were fully armored, and the Sandosans were no match.
Marker came up to me ten minutes later, the middle of the camp full of hundreds of Sandosa soldiers sitting disarmed with their hands on their heads. Now they were the prisoners. Sporadic fighting continued around the camp.
“Those were sophisticated weapons, sir. Nothing the Sandosans have shown us up until now,” he said. I nodded.
“They didn’t develop them, so where did they get them?” I replied. I think we both knew the answer. Confirmation came seconds later.
“It’s Commander Babayan, sir. Defiant is under attack,” Verhunce said, handing me a portable longwave com.
“What’s the situation, XO?” I demanded.
“Suicide drones, sir, lots of them. Nothing we can’t handle, but this is not Sandosan technology. They date to late Imperial War days. They’re disruptive, keeping us busy,” Babayan replied.
“Take them out as swiftly as possible,” I said. “S
omething is up here, XO. And I don’t mean just on Sandosa. This mission has been in the works for several months, so it stands to reason intelligence could have gotten out about us coming here. This is a distraction. The question is from what.”
“Yes, sir. Expediting clearing the space over Sandosa, sir,” she said.
“Do we still have the ansible link to the Admiralty?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. Drones are not targeting it.”
“Expedite a message to Wesley. Tell him we need reinforcements ASAP. Wasps, troop transports, administrative officers. Sandosa is going to need a new government.”
“Sir,” she started to protest, “Defiant can handle any and all required military contingencies—”
“I’m very aware of that, XO, but I need Defiant ready to move on at a moment’s notice. I don’t believe this attack is isolated. The question is, where’s the next one they’re trying to keep us from?” I said.
“Aye, sir,” she replied. “Anything else?” I hesitated for a second.
“Is my wife back aboard?”
“Yes, sir, along with Historian Gracel and the whole diplomatic team.”
“Good. Call down to the Sandosa government. Give them fifteen minutes to evacuate that Administrative Hall and government complex, then burn it to the ground. Can you do that and fight the drones at the same time?” I asked.
“Aye, sir!”
“You have your orders, XO. I’ll make contact with you when I’m back in space. Secure longwave frequencies only.”
“Acknowledged,” she said, and with that I signed off and handed the com back to Verhunce, then turned to Marker.
“Can your marines handle the cleanup here, John? I need to get back to Defiant.”
“Aye, sir, we can. Just got word a gunship is on its way with the rest of the marines. What shall we do with the prisoners, sir?” he asked.
“Standard POW protocol. Take anything, down to their underwear, that might be a weapon. Turn their rations over to the prisoners, then tell them to get the hell off this mountain. I want you finished and off-planet in two hours. Can you do it, Chief?”