Coalition Defense Force Boxed Set: First to Fight

by Gibbs, Daniel

  "You two behave," Tia said. "Don't think we've forgotten what happened on Hendry's Station."

  "You take all the fun out o' it," Cera protested while Piper giggled.

  "Hey, wait!"

  Brigitte emerged from the hatch as well, wearing a gaudy pink suit jacket over a purple blouse with pink leggings and lime-green shoes. "I'm coming with!"

  "The more, the merrier!" Piper answered.

  "I still cannot believe you go out into public like that," Tia said with a sigh. As much as she appreciated their skills, the behavior of her three comrades when on leave could still frustrate her sometimes. "Keep your commlinks on and don't get yourselves arrested!"

  "Right, Mum!" Brigitte said sarcastically while falling into step with the other ladies.

  Tia briefly rested her face in her right palm before turning away. She walked into the Shadow Wolf via the same hatch, leading into the port hold, which stood empty.

  Yanik was standing by the inner hatch. "I will never understand humans," he said.

  "I'm human, and I don't understand us sometimes.”

  "Captain Henry has already granted all pay and bonuses for the run," Yanik remarked. "I have already arranged my earnings. What about you?"

  "I've got business in town to 'arrange my earnings,' as you put it," she replied, thinking of the message again. "Personal business."

  "Of course." Yanik fell in with her, following Tia to the stairs leading to the upper door of the hold. "Pieter, Oskar, and I will remain to watch the ship if you desire time in the city."

  "I have a few things to finish up first, but thank you. I will take you up on that."

  * * *

  Pieter prided himself on his skill in dealing with the myriad repairs that even standard operations on the ship demanded of him. And he prided himself on avoiding the kinds of accidents that could bruise, cut, or generally harm men and women in his position.

  It was thus quite the blow to his pride to walk into the Shadow Wolf's infirmary, cradling his bleeding left hand, his face twisted into a grimace of pain and injured pride. "Doctor, a little help?"

  Oskar looked up from an open box of medicines. "Ah, Pieter. What can I do for you?"

  "Bloody damned hinge is worn down on one of the port thruster access hatches, smashed my damn hand. Cut it pretty good too."

  "Let me see it." Oskar beckoned him to one of the four exam beds arranged in the infirmary. He examined the left hand by eye for a moment before bringing out a scanning tool. It rendered it into a holographic image. He tapped a key, rotating between X-ray, magnetic resonance scan, and a couple of other images. "No breakage, at least. Damage to muscle and other tissue. Here." He went to his bandaging gear. Within moments, a clean white pad was affixed to the center of the wound, turning crimson where Pieter's blood stained it. Gauze from a roll was swiftly wrapped around Pieter's hand to hold the pad in place. "There. It should be better in a few days."

  "Nothing to hasten it?"

  Oskar laughed. "Nothing we can afford, I assure you. Perhaps if I was back, well, you know where, I could do something more. If my chief approved the treatment."

  Pieter smirked at him. "You're telling me the precious bloody League and all of its talk about caring for everyone is shit?"

  "Shit indeed." Oskar shook his head. His expression darkened, and his eyes grew distant. Old memories seemed to be playing through his mind. "Society is not improved if resources are wasted on the careless and undeserving, after all. Back home, it is not so bad, since there are so many resources, but the moment you run even a little short…" He sighed. "It makes a little sense, I suppose, in a rationing situation. An engineer needing his hand fixed is more important than repairing the leg of a station-minder, since he or she sits for work. But the League maintains such systems even when the rationing is not necessary. Individual austerity is the mandate. To consume unnecessarily is to emulate the failures of humanity before the League."

  "Huh. Sounds a bit like how things can get back home," Pieter said. "If you don't need something, why should you have it?"

  "At least New Oranje can argue it has the finite resources of a society that has yet to fully use the resources of its own planet. It isn’t an interstellar society with many thousands of star systems within its borders." Oskar shook his head. "But I am getting political again."

  "Were you like this back in the League?"

  "Oh heavens, no! Getting political can make one a social danger, after all. Unless you're in a political post, and you have to be a dedicated Society man to get one of those." Oskar shook his head. "I was just a medical student, you understand. I graduated from Regensburg with a desire to become a doctor in my hometown. But the League Military Secretariat had other ideas. I was called up for service in the Social Defense Militia and shipped out to Sagittarius to serve in the occupied systems."

  Pieter nodded. Getting Oskar to talk about his past was never easy, and he’d never had occasion to overhear him speak about it. But despite that, he knew where the story eventually went. Military hospital work, and then… "I guess seeing the camps made you political?"

  Oskar closed his eyes. "You could say that," he admitted. "Yes. Seeing everything I was told, everything I believed, revealed as lies." He shook his head. "It’s the past. I am here now, and here I will stay. Captain Henry has been good to me."

  Pieter said nothing. He remembered when Oskar and Brigitte made their way aboard, following a visit to a League colony much like New Hathwell. Henry allowed them to stow away on the Shadow Wolf and covered their escape, for which they opted to work for him. "You gonna go out to see the city, Doctor?"

  "No," he answered. "If a League man spots me and knows who I am…" The older man shuddered. "I am quite content to stay here and take inventory. Just as you would prefer to do the same for your equipment, yes?"

  "Right." Pieter tested his bandaged hand. "Thanks, Doctor. You're good folk. Not like the other Uitlanders."

  "I'm sure you mean a certain other word?" asked Oskar.

  "No, I don't," Pieter answered harshly.

  "Not for whites, anyway," Oskar added with a bemused smirk.

  Pieter didn't answer that, although he knew it was right. It was one of the reasons he didn't miss home.

  That was a lie. There were times Pieter did miss home. He missed the fields of grain, the warmth of the orange star that made New Oranje habitable, the sight of the native furred viervoetige herds—literally four-legged or four-pawed, the basic designation stuck—thundering their way down the Kruger Valley as they sought the open grasslands that the Boer farmers had not yet fenced off. He missed his mother's cooking and his sister's jokes. He missed playing "trekkers and savages" with his brothers, Paul and Thomas, and all of those cousins and local boys. He missed his Uncle Maarten's lessons on the family farming equipment.

  But he didn't miss his father or the callused hands that had beaten him throughout his childhood. He didn't miss the small-minded ignorance of his neighbors, the bigotry and hatred shown to the "uitlander." The presumption that God had selected the Boers for salvation and already damned other peoples offended his very soul, and their sense of superiority within a society that still judged fellow humans as inferior when they were in a galaxy that had already introduced them to other sapient species offended his soul and his mind.

  His father had been particularly ready to throw his slaps and even punches when Pieter said things like that. "We once tried to live with the others, and do you know what they did? They tried to steal our land and wipe us out! We won't fall for that again! The only good uitlander is a dead one!" Pieter sometimes wished he had known then the history of his people, the full history, so he could have pointed out that they’d stolen that land first. It would have merited a full beating, but the moral victory would have been sweet.

  Pieter blinked. He realized he was still sitting in the infirmary, staring blankly ahead while Oskar watched quietly. "You and I have that in common," Oskar said.

  "What?"


  "We both have reasons to go home," he said, "but none as powerful as the reasons why we can't."

  Pieter nodded in agreement. "We are a ship of exiles, it seems," he answered. "God, help us all."

  "If there is anything like a deity in this uncaring universe, I highly doubt they would care about us," Oskar answered. He smiled thinly. "But I am the Leaguer atheist of the crew, so I'm sure my opinion on the matter is obvious."

  The reply from Pieter was a chuckle. The fact that his father would have slapped him for showing amusement at such blasphemy caused the chuckle to turn into a laugh.

  * * *

  Tia walked into the spacers' bar and enjoyed, for lack of a better term, the smells therein. Human and alien sweat, or whatever passed for such with regard to non-humans, mingled with all of the other substances to be found. Smoke from tobacco, synthetic and natural, joined with the particularly tangy wisps of Tal'mayan sweet smoke and what Tia thought was Saurian kriska. As she neared the bar, the smells were joined by those of the drinks being offered. She flashed a five-escudo note and called out, in Portuguese, for a Thanh's Special. The Thanh rice liquor, a product of her homeworld, Hestia, had a good kick itself, but mixed with single malt Scotch straight from the brewers of Caledonia, it was just the kind of drink she preferred when dealing with old memories.

  One such old memory took the stool beside her, the source of the message that had taken her there. He was a tall man, solid but not big, his brown complexion similar to hers. She owed hers to ancestors from Vietnam and Malaya, while Felipe Xiu's mostly came from the Philippines, and further back, from China. Like Tia, he was in a spacer's jacket over a dark-green shirt and black spacer's trousers. The growth of a beard on his face was something new. "Comrade Felipe," she said quietly.

  "Comrade Tia." He already had a drink, a Thanh's like hers but straight, no Scotch mixed in. He held up the shot glass, prompting her to do the same. "To fallen comrades."

  "To fallen comrades," she agreed. She gulped down the contents of the glass. It was good, strong stuff, and it made itself known as it descended her throat and hit her stomach. It wouldn't be enough to take away sobriety by itself, but it would undoubtedly chip away at it. She signaled for another drink to keep it company. "How have you been?"

  "Well enough," he said, his tone cautious. His gray eyes seemed distant. "I sometimes wonder if it is time to take up the government on the amnesty."

  Tia narrowed her eyes. "Oh?"

  "It's been fourteen years now, Tia. Fourteen years since our revolution failed. I miss being at home."

  "Bullshit," Tia growled. "You were never one to give a damn about home. What home did you—did we have? Being helots to the offworld corporations paying us as little as they could to gather our world's wealth for them? You used to say you'd rather die in exile than bare your neck for their boots." A suspicion crossed her mind. She took her next drink first, a jolt of liquid courage to voice it. "Or are you going back to join the Social Solidarity movement?"

  "If there is to be any future for the working class of Hestia, it will be in solidarity with the League of Sol," Felipe insisted. "The failure of our revolution—"

  "—was because of the League!" Tia shouted. Her voice carried over the bar, but there was no notice from the others. It was a spacers' bar, after all, and every spacer had something that would set them off. "After all of this time, you can't see that? They propped us up, gave us arms, gave us hope, encouraged us to strike, and then betrayed us to the government! Face it, Felipe, they never wanted us to win in the first place."

  "Of course they did," Felipe insisted. "But the League has to consider the needs of all oppressed peoples, not just Hestia. Victory for the Hestian working class then might have only led to defeat in the end, if the Coalition took advantage."

  Tia rolled her eyes at him but said nothing. It was the old argument again, the same one their League contacts had used after the killing was over, when she woke up on the evacuation ship, half dead from her wounds and mostly dead from the blow to her spirit. To hear Felipe repeat those lies after all those years was infuriating, and her face betrayed that feeling.

  "This is exactly why the League turned from us," Felipe said bitterly. "Because you and the others would not listen."

  "Oh, I listened," Tia remarked bitterly. "I heard the speeches about the needs of Society being greater than our cause. But let's face the facts, Felipe. The League was more interested in keeping Hestia neutral so they could trade with the megacorps too." She almost spat the word "megacorps," signifying the tremendously powerful corporations in neutral space that grew so wealthy and large that they could dominate planetary governments. Indeed, they nearly became states in of themselves. Memories of the conditions they kept her and her family in rankled, made bitter by the failure that had driven her from her homeworld.

  Felipe smacked his hand on the bar. "So they could defeat the Coalition and bring revolution to all of Sagittarius!"

  She didn't like the look in his eyes or his enthusiasm, not given what she knew about the League. "I've learned what the League's idea of revolution and the post-capitalist society is, Felipe, and they are no better than capitalists. Worse in most respects."

  Felipe nursed his drink instead of replying. Tia used the time to enjoy another. "So this is how it is, then? You will not relent."

  "Not to them. Never." Tia shook her head. "I will not drive the megacorps off of Hestia just to be enslaved by the League's precious Society."

  "I see. I wish I could persuade you otherwise." Felipe let out a sigh. A sad look came to his face. "Do you remember Quan?"

  Tia smiled. "I do, fondly." She did not remark on the abrupt change of topic. The best way to deal with a dispute between old friends was to focus on old memories and, that evening, with a lot of Thanh Specials.

  "I remember that time, before the revolution, when we were in the safehouse in Thyssenbourg…"

  11

  When Miri returned to her rented room, she did so with added and welcome weight. Aside from the bag of food, mostly fruits and vegetables and some self-heating dinners, she was carrying a Burleigh & Armstrong pulse pistol in a small-of-back holster and a pair of small Makarov flechette pistols in ankle holsters. It was perhaps a bit much, but she intended to survive, and the guns gave her options.

  She found a call had come from the Kensington Star's owners, Patterson and Yarborough Transport of New Cornwall, usually called P&Y for short. She sent out a response and soon was face-to-face with a young, dark-skinned woman with a New Cornish accent. "Ms. Lupa, I am Patricia Okon, company security. Thank you for getting back to me." She sounded impatient. Miri had kept her waiting.

  "I needed to get food," Miri explained. "I came back as quickly as I could."

  "Your report makes for interesting reading," Okon said, her tone tense. "You're positive the attacker was a League ship?"

  "I've seen them before, ma'am. It was." Miri considered Okon's body language. A healthy skepticism was apparent, but there was no sign yet that she wasn’t trustworthy.

  "And you spaced yourself to get away?"

  "I did."

  Okon's suspicions grew more noticeable. "Why?" she asked pointedly.

  "The crew wasn't resisting, and I had no intention of being taken prisoner. I have a record with the League. They'd have spaced me anyway. Without an EVA suit." After the drugs and beatings and whatever other cruelties State Security came up with to punish me for Lowery.

  Okon didn't seem surprised. If she were competent, Miri suspected Okon was already certain Karla Lupa was a legend. But Miri wouldn't have been the first spacer to go under an assumed name, especially in neutral space with all of the Coalition—and less frequent League—deserters, ex-pirates, and others with a sordid past. The scrutiny was on Miri's present activities, not her past. "You're lucky the Tokarev brothers were in the area. Otherwise, you'd be dead."

  "I'm well aware of that, Ms. Okon."

  "So why didn't we get a distress call?" Okon asked. "Ke
nsington Star had a QET."

  "I'm not sure, Ms. Okon. I wasn't on watch when the attack came." Miri thought back. "We lost main power, and the ship's drives went down. Captain Lewis called a warning that we were being boarded but told us to stay in quarters. From what I gather, he surrendered almost immediately."

  "I suppose there was little more Captain Lewis could have done in the circumstances," Okon said. "I am curious how you escaped."

  "Through maintenance access spaces adjacent to my quarters, after the League sealed us in."

  Okon jotted down a note. "All right. I'll commence an investigation. Please keep yourself available for further interviews, Ms. Lupa. We'll arrange for a ship to come out to Harron for you immediately."

  "Thank you, ma'am."

  Miri had nothing more to say and allowed Okon to terminate the call. She turned away from the monitor and considered her next action. Her instincts told her to minimize how much she went out. She had enough supplies to stay in for several days.

  But she'd already been seen by many people. P&Y was going to put her under further scrutiny, and that might attract other attention. The League had operatives in the neutral worlds, after all, and she had no illusions that they hadn't been briefed on Miri Gaon. If they had someone in a position to connect Miri Gaon to the existence of Karla Lupa…

  That was not a possibility she was willing to risk.

  Thankfully, the Coalition had its own intelligence assets in the Trifid Nebula region and the rest of neutral space. They also had a vested interest in keeping Miri Gaon alive and out of League hands, regardless of her official resignation.

  Miri picked an orange from her bag of fruit and retrieved a bowl and a knife from the small efficiency kitchen in her room. She returned to the monitor, activated its connection to the extranet, then went to work peeling the orange while considering the wording of the message she would send to her CIS contact.