Jasmine nodded. “I’ll brief him personally,” she said.
“There is one other issue,” Edward said, diffidently. He didn't miss Jasmine’s eyes narrowing as she registered his tone. “You will be ... shadowed by a reporter.”
“A reporter?” Jasmine repeated. “Why?”
“It is important to showcase how far we’ve come since the Cracker War,” Edward said, truthfully. “And equally important to show Avalon the importance of the Commonwealth to their security. We cannot risk losing public support.”
He couldn't blame Jasmine for being irritated by the mere suggestion. The Empire’s corps of reporters had been staunchly anti-military – or at least their editors, who took orders from the Grand Senate’s vested interests, had been anti-military. Every commanding officer had learned to dread the well-connected reporter sticking his nose into military affairs, asking stupid questions on one hand and breaching operational security on the other. Edward had heard rumours that half of the problems on Han wouldn't have occurred if a handful of reporters hadn't leaked military secrets to the rebels. It didn’t strike him as particularly unlikely.
“This reporter does have some experience from the war,” he added, as reassuringly as he could. “And besides, he won’t be sending live dispatches from the battlefield.”
“Good,” Jasmine said. She still didn’t sound pleased. “I look forward to meeting him.”
“You’ll have a chance to review some of his work tonight,” Edward said, picking a datachip off his desk and passing it to her. “He hasn't broken any of the agreements he made when he started his relationship with the military, at least as far as we have been able to determine. And he’s going to be under military discipline while on deployment. If he gets in the way, feel free to put him in cuffs somewhere out of the way.”
Jasmine snorted. In the Empire, an officer who put a reporter in irons could kiss any future career advancement goodbye, even if his peers silently cheered him on. But Edward had written the new protocols for interacting with reporters personally. If they did give one of his officers real trouble, they could spend the rest of the trip as a prisoner; Edward would back the officer responsible to the hilt.
“We need to have the CEF ready for deployment as soon as possible,” Edward concluded. “I don’t know where the next threat will come from, but there will be a next threat. We still don’t know what happened to Admiral Singh, among other things.”
“Yes, sir,” Jasmine said. She sounded confident, he noted, although Marines were taught to sound confident at all times. It helped reassure the civilians – and the Civil Guard, when Marines were deployed to stiffen their spines. “I won’t let you down.”
She saluted, then turned and marched out of the office. Edward watched her go, then looked down at the papers on his desk. There was just more and more paperwork for him and the other senior officers, no matter how hard he struggled to keep it under control. The rapidly-expanding military seemed to practically breed paperwork.
That’s why I have to go on the mission, he told himself. It will be a change from paperwork.
Pushing that thought aside too, he picked up a datapad and returned to work.
Chapter Two
International Diplomacy can be defined as the profession, activity, or skill of managing international relations, typically by a country's representatives abroad. This is, however, the simplest possible view.
-Professor Leo Caesius. Diplomacy: The Lessons of the Past.
“Damn it,” Lieutenant Michael Volpe muttered as his wristcom started to bleep urgently, driving away the last vestiges of sleep from his mind. “All right, all right.”
He picked up the wristcom from where he’d left it on the bedside table, checked to ensure that he wasn't being summoned back urgently, then clicked off the alarm. The temptation to stay in bed was almost overwhelming, but he knew better than to delay his return to the base any longer than strictly necessary. Instead, he looked over at where the girl was buried under the blankets and then around her apartment. He hadn't had a chance to take in the decor when he’d picked her up last night and allowed her to take him home.
“Hey,” he said, poking the girl’s shoulder. He realised suddenly that he didn't even know her name! “Where’s the shower?”
“Next room,” the girl muttered, sleepily. “What time is it?”
“Seven in the morning,” Michael said, as he pulled himself out of bed and stood upright. “I’ll leave you in bed, if you like.”
He fought down a sense of embarrassment as he padded across to the door and opened it, wishing that he’d thought to ask more questions before going to bed with her. There was no way to know if she shared her apartment with other girls, her parents or if she was alone ... no, that was unlikely. His memories of the previous night were a blur, but he was fairly sure that she was a student and few students could afford to live on their own. The bathroom held enough supplies, he decided as he stepped inside, for a small army of girls. He stepped under the shower, lowered the temperature as much as possible and closed his eyes as the cold water washed away the last remnants of exhaustion. Just how much sleep had he gotten last night?
Not much, he thought, with a sense of heavy satisfaction. Two weeks spent preparing the 1st Avalon Mechanized Infantry Battalion for deployment had been rewarded by four days leave, which he’d spent in Camelot. Like almost all of the battalion, he’d spent the time looking for sexual partners and trying to relax. The girl – and he still couldn't remember her name – had merely been the last of a string of partners.
He stepped out of the shower, dried himself with a towel that was almost ludicrously small for him and walked back into the hallway. There was a gasp from behind him and he turned to see another girl wearing a nightgown that left almost nothing to the imagination. Michael, who had lost any sense of body modesty he might have had in training – or when he’d been a pirate captive – merely nodded to her and stepped back into his girl’s room. She was sitting upright in bed, her bare breasts marked from their lovemaking. Michael felt a surge of lust which he ruthlessly pushed aside. There wasn’t time for any more fun and games.
“Look me up when you come back to the city,” the girl ordered, as he pulled on his uniform and inspected himself in the mirror. All the nice girls on Avalon loved a uniform, he’d discovered; it was almost a guaranteed lay to wear one’s uniform on leave. The Empire might have banned its soldiers from wearing uniforms when they weren’t on duty, but there was no such rule on Avalon. “And thank you.”
Michael shrugged, fought down the temptation to ask for her contact code and walked downstairs, leaving her behind. Outside, the streets were already starting to fill up with people, mainly soldiers and spacers in uniform. He wasn't the only person who was expected to report back to base early in the morning, or the only soldier who had tried to spend his last hours of freedom with a pretty girl. Quite a few of the men on the streets looked considerably worse for wear. He hoped that they would have the presence of mind to use sober-up tabs before reporting for duty. A soldier who turned up unfit would be lucky if he merely spent the next week in the guardhouse.
Churchill Garrison was located to the east of Camelot, close to a small port that provided a sea link to Castle Rock, where the Marines and most of the training facilities were based. It had expanded rapidly ever since it had been founded, during the height of the Cracker War, until it consisted of over a hundred barracks, hangers and supply deports. A chainmail fence ran around the complex, guarded by armed soldiers with authority to shoot anyone who tried to enter without authorisation. The Crackers might have been largely defeated and assimilated into the new order, but everyone knew that there were some factions that remained as unrelentingly hostile to the Commonwealth as they had been to the Empire. No one expected them to remain silent forever.
At least the bandits are gone, he thought, as he signed in at the guardhouse and entered the garrison. Thousands of uniformed soldiers were thronging over
the base, most of them heading for the barracks where their sergeants would sort them out, match them up with their vehicles and equipment and then take them out to the exercise grounds. In the distance, he could hear the sounds of shooting as the infantrymen practiced on the shooting ranges. The sharpshooting competitions between the different units were intense, deliberately encouraged by senior officers. Michael took some pride in knowing that his unit had taken the cup for sharpshooting several times before losing it to other units.
His wristcom bleeped, ordering him to report to the briefing complex. Shaking his head, he turned and walked down towards the large concrete building. They’d been promised that there would – finally – be answers about their planned off-world deployment. Despite his curiosity, Michael was almost disappointed. The rumours had been fun.
***
There was a refreshing air of informality, Jasmine was pleased to note, as she entered the briefing room. Unlike the Imperial Army, which had over three thousand years of precedent and protocol to draw on, the Knights of Avalon and the other Commonwealth military organisations were new. Given time, Jasmine was sure that they would evolve traditions of their own, but for the moment they were not burdened by the past. It should give them more flexibility, she told herself, than the Imperial Army had ever shown.
The officers came to attention as she took the stand, looking at her with obvious curiosity. A gathering of Imperial Army officers would have found her beneath their notice, even though she was a Marine; she was just too junior to garner their attention. And the Imperial Army officers would probably have been decades older than her, at the very least. Rejuvenation treatments had ensured that officers held their posts for years before finally moving on or retiring from the service. But the Knights were young ... even their senior officers were younger than Jasmine herself. Only a handful had served in the military for longer than any of the junior Marines.
The Colonel was right, she realised, as silence fell over the assembly. They don’t have the experience they desperately need.
“At ease,” she ordered, projecting as much confidence and command personality into her voice as she could. “We have a great deal of ground to cover.”
She paused, then pushed onwards. “We will be deploying to Lakshmibai,” she continued, knowing that few of them would have heard of their destination. A handful of officers began to surreptitiously look it up on their datapads. “Once there, we will provide security for a diplomatic mission and exercise as a combined unit on hostile soil, away from our logistics bases on Avalon or any other Commonwealth world.”
The officers didn't have the experience to hide their reactions, she noted. Several of them looked confident, others looked worried at the prospect of operating away from their homeworld. A handful definitely seemed to relish the challenge. None of them, even the ex-Civil Guard officers, seemed to show any resentment at her being placed in command. They knew their limits. Besides, Avalon knew how much it owed to the Marines.
She smiled to herself as she caught sight of Michael Volpe – Mandy’s former lover – in the audience, then looked away from him. There would be time to catch up with him later.
“We are expected to embark on the transports in three days,” Jasmine informed them. “That gives us two days to carry out what joint planning and exercising we can before we leave.”
She’d deliberately picked a deadline she didn't expect to meet, knowing that it would encourage her new subordinates to look for ways to speed up the process. Embarking even a relatively small military unit on a transport could take hours, particularly when it included tanks, aircraft or other vehicles. The entire CEF might take days to embark on the four purpose-built transport starships. Still, the only way to practice the operation was to actually do it. Paper exercises never worked out well in real life.
“I have worked out a rough deployment plan for you to consider prior to departure,” she said. There were officers who would have refused to consider asking their subordinates to comment on their plans, but Jasmine knew that the men who’d handled their units since they’d come into existence would know more about their operations than she did, even though she’d spent most of the evening skimming through their reports. “However, our first priority remains the security of the diplomatic team.”
She scowled at the thought. There was relatively little information on Lakshmibai in the databanks, even though the Imperial Library was supposed to contain exhaustive information on every world within the Empire – and she knew that it was outdated by several years, at the very least. The situation on the ground had been nasty even before the fall of the Empire; there was almost nothing to suggest what it might be like now. It was possible, she supposed, that peace and prosperity might have broken out, but that struck her as unlikely. Civil war seemed a much more definite possibility.
Which leads one to wonder why Governor Brown picked the system in the first place, she thought, sourly. What was he thinking?
“I would suggest that you review the information on our destination once we’re on our way,” she concluded. “I want to run a full-scale exercise tomorrow, if possible, and that must take priority. We need to be as practiced as possible by the time we leave.”
She looked around the room, her eyes moving from face to face. “I don’t need to tell you just how important this operation is,” she said, firmly. “Failure is not an option. Dismissed!”
The officers saluted, then stood up and headed for the doors. Jasmine watched them go, feeling the weight of responsibility settling down on her shoulders. The 1st Commonwealth Expeditionary Force was a new formation, composed largely of individual units that had barely even practiced working together. They really needed several months to practice and prepare for their first off-world deployment.
But we need to practice rapid deployment, she told herself, remembering why the Marines had been called the Emperor’s Firemen. A Marine unit could expect to be summoned at a moment’s notice and then thrown into battle, without time to muster a colossal logistics base to support its operations. The 1st Commonwealth Expeditionary Force had to function along the same lines, which wouldn't stop the whole experience from being painful for everyone involved. They’d learn lessons, all right, but they’d also be dispirited ...
Her wristcom buzzed. “Brigadier,” Joe Buckley said, “you have a visitor waiting for you in your office.”
Jasmine nodded, even though she knew he couldn't see her. “Understood,” she said. Joe Buckley had politely but firmly taken a place as her aide as soon as he had arrived on the base. “I’m on my way.”
One of Colonel Stalker’s decisions when he’d been creating the new army had been to ban comfortable offices. Jasmine had approved, although she hadn't really understood why it had been necessary until she’d assumed command of 1st Platoon. There had been a temptation – a very slight one - to withdraw into seclusion and leave the platoon to the sergeants. It had to be much stronger, she suspected, if the unit she commanded was large enough to prevent her having such strong emotional ties to its personnel. No wonder some of the Imperial Army officers had created luxurious offices for themselves and then hidden inside. The weight of the responsibility had beaten them.
Assuming they were aware of their responsibilities, she told herself, darkly. Some of them didn't seem to know what planet they were on, let alone which units they commanded.
Her office was a simple concrete room, furnished with a desk, a computer terminal, a handful of metal chairs, a coffee machine and little else. One wall was covered with operational diagrams, including the CEF’s order of battle; the other three were bare, leaving her with the uncomfortable sensation that the walls were closing in on her. Jasmine was hardly claustrophobic – and if she had been, she would have been unlikely to graduate from the Slaughterhouse – but she couldn't escape the urge to leave the office and go out onto the field.
A man was seated on one of the chairs, watched by a scowling Joe Buckley. Jasmine studied him as he
rose to his feet, quietly evaluating the reporter as best as she could. He was of medium height and very thin, with strikingly pale skin that contrasted oddly against very brown hair and eyes. The coverall he wore hid most of his body from her eyes, but what little she could see suggested that he was more muscular than she had expected. Not up to Marine standards, or even those upheld by the Knights, yet hardly a weakling.
“You must be Brigadier Yamane,” the reporter said. His accent was pure Avalon, although his face suggested a level of genetic modification that was somewhat unusual for a world settled by the Empire. “I am Emmanuel Alves, Avalon Central.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Jasmine lied, as he held out his hand. She took it, taking the opportunity to further gauge his strength. Definitely not a weakling. “Welcome to the 1st CEF.”
She hadn't had to deal with reporters personally before, certainly not as a senior officer. There had been thousands of reporters on Han, but most of them had largely ignored the junior Marines as being beneath their notice. Besides, only a couple of the hordes had gone out into the field with the soldiers, even in the safer regions of the planet. Most of them, from what she’d heard, had preferred to file largely fictitious dispatches from the secure zones and reap the plaudits from their fellows who hadn't even dared to go within light years of the planet.
“Thank you,” Alves said. He sounded as though he actually meant it. “It is a honour to be here.”
Jasmine nodded, impatiently. “I understand that you have reviewed the operational requirements,” she said. “Is that correct?”
“I have embedded before,” Alves assured her. “And I do understand the value of security. I was trying to outsmart the Council a long time before you arrived.”
“So I heard,” Jasmine said.
She had taken the time to review his file – and she had to admit that it was impressive. The Council that had ruled Avalon – and fought a losing war with the Crackers – had clamped down on the media, turning what few reporters lived and worked on Avalon into their propaganda department. Alves had been one of the handful who had tried to set up an independent newspaper, something that had been technically illegal in the Empire without the proper permits. Under the circumstances, he’d been lucky to merely be thrown in jail by the Council. The Crackers had broken him out a few months before the Marines had arrived and he’d helped to run an underground newspaper that had gone mainstream after the Battle of Camelot and the truce that had ended the war.
The Empire's Corps: Book 06 - To The Shores... Page 2