Authors: Christopher Nuttall
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Galactic Empire, #Military, #Space Fleet, #Space Marine, #Space Opera
Despite herself, Kat considered the problem of just what to do with a victory for five days while the small flotilla made its way to the penal world. Her father had told her, more than once, that idealism wasn’t something a corporate head could allow himself, but she’d always had more idealism than she cared to admit. The thought of imposing her will on an entire population was fundamentally wrong—it was what the Theocracy did—yet was there any choice? It was no comparison, but she couldn’t help wondering if the Theocrats felt the same way. By the time the squadron reached the penal system and slipped out of hyperspace at the edge of the system limits, she had reluctantly decided that the issue would have to be left until after the war.
“I’m not picking up any signals from deeper within the system,” Linda informed her. “The entire system appears to be as dark and silent as the grave.”
“No trace of any starships either,” Roach added. The tactical officer scowled down at his display. “There are a handful of rocky worlds and little else; no gas giant, nothing to sustain a modern industrial base.”
“No wonder they turned it into a penal colony,” the XO commented. “The system isn’t worth the effort of establishing a proper settlement.”
Kat nodded. The Commonwealth used the same principle, although she preferred to believe that most of the prisoners trapped on isolated worlds were guilty of much more than merely seeking freedom of religion. If they survived and prospered, she’d been told, their children would one day be admitted back into the Commonwealth; if they died, or killed each other, it was no skin off the Commonwealth’s collective nose. Everything she’d seen about penal colonies suggested, quite strongly, that shooting the prisoners outright would be kinder.
“Cloak us, then set course for the penal colony,” she ordered, leaning back in her command chair. There was no need to skip through hyperspace, not when the system appeared to be deserted. She had plenty of time to assess the target before deciding how best to assault the world. “ETA?
”
“
Seven hours, Captain,” Weiberg said.
“It is unlikely they’ve detected us, unless they set up a network of sensor platforms,” Roach added. “We were careful to scale our vortex down as much as possible.”
“True,” Kat agreed. It was unlikely the Theocracy would waste resources on establishing an early-warning network, not in a system it deemed worthless. Even the Commonwealth only set up such networks in wealthy systems and production nodes. “Helm, take us towards the planet, best possible speed.”
She forced herself to relax as the seconds slowly ticked away. It was just possible that the enemy naval base at Aswan knew, already, that they’d lost a convoy to raiders. What would they do? Kat knew
she
wouldn’t send a fleet to defend a penal world—and even if they did, it was unlikely one could arrive in time—but the Theocracy might have other ideas. Even so, they wouldn’t have dumped prisoners they regarded as supremely dangerous, would they? The Commonwealth executed prisoners who were just too dangerous to be allowed to roam free, even on a penal colony. Or maybe the Theocracy would just see it as a poke in the eye, one that could not be allowed to go unanswered.
“Captain,” the XO said. “Observer MacDonald is requesting permission to enter the bridge.”
Kat hesitated, but she couldn’t think of any reasonable grounds for refusal. At least Rose MacDonald was smart enough to
ask
before entering the bridge, unlike some of the other politicians she’d had to handle. If only she’d been in command of
Thunderous
, when they’d played host to a small group of committee members. Her family name might have allowed her to keep them in line instead of having them prowling around the ship poking their noses into everything. They’d been lucky, from what she’d seen, that one of them hadn’t accidentally walked out an airlock.
“Granted,” she said finally.
Kat looked up as the observer entered, then returned her gaze to the display and brought up the latest analysis from the intelligence staff. They hadn’t been able to fill in too many details, but they
did
have several new tidbits drawn from the prisoners. Five worlds within fifty light years had large local populations, some of whom were probably restive. But the Theocracy would have made damn sure to keep control of the high orbitals. As long as they were in a position to rain down KEWs from high overhead, no revolt could hope to take and hold ground.
“Captain,” Rose said. “Why are we creeping towards the planet?
”
Kat blinked, her surprise almost overriding her irritation at being questioned on her own bridge. A moment later, she realized that Rose, for all her political experience, wouldn’t have any real understanding of interstellar distances. Few did; politicians should know it took a month to travel from Tyre to Cadiz, but they rarely grasped it. The StarCom FTL network spoiled them.
“I would prefer to know in advance if we’re about to run into trouble,” she said. “They’d have some additional warning if we were to jump through hyperspace and open a vortex on top of them.”
Rose frowned. “Do you think they know you’re coming?
”
“
I hope not,” Kat said. If the Theocracy
had
set up an early-warning network, or if their sensors were far better than intelligence thought, the flotilla might be about to run into a nasty surprise. “But it’s better to take precautions than be caught by surprise.”
The observer nodded, then started to putter around the command deck, never approaching any of the consoles too closely. Kat couldn’t decide if she was concerned about distracting someone at a crucial moment or if she was just trying to see what would draw a reaction from the crew. She’d seen politicians do the same in the past, before the war; now, a distraction at the wrong time could prove disastrous. Thankfully, Rose thought better of it after a few moments and headed for the hatch, walking off the bridge. Kat exchanged a glance with her XO, then sighed. The woman was going to be trouble. She knew it.
“Six hours, thirty minutes to the penal colony,” Weiberg said.
Kat nodded. “Rotate the crews,” she ordered. The alpha crew could get at least five hours of sleep before the attack began, unless the squadron was caught by surprise. “Mr. XO, make sure you get some sleep.”
“You too, Captain,” the XO said. “You too.”
Jean-Luc Orleans swung the pick at the ground, cursing under his breath. A year on the hellworld, a year since he’d been captured throwing bombs at an armored convoy, had left him hard but powerless. There was no hope of escape, no hope of doing anything but eking a minimal supply of food from the ground; hell, he didn’t even have any hope of finding a wife and raising a family. The settlement had no women, none at all. There had been some on the transport ship that had taken him to his new home, but they hadn’t been dropped into the settlement. He didn’t want to
think
about what might have happened to them.
“You need to break the ground harder than that,” Perrier said. He was one of the old sweats, a man who’d survived more than five years on the ground. Jean-Luc had no idea what kept him going; Perrier, like the rest of them, had nothing to live for. “We need loose soil to plant the next set of seeds.”
“It’s pointless,” Jean-Luc snarled. He glared down at the patch of dirt, then slammed the pick into it hard enough to hurt his arms. “There’s no damn point in planting more crops.”
He sighed. The hellworld—he had no idea if anyone had bothered to give it a name—was right on the edge of the habitable zone, so cold that it wasn’t uncommon for frost to kill their crops before they could be harvested. The handful of native plants that could be eaten were hardier, but there simply weren’t very many of them. If he hadn’t had a great deal of genetic engineering in his background, he had a feeling he would be dead by now. The native crops had to lack some of the nutrients humans required to stay alive.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” Perrier said. He lifted his own pick, then struck the hard ground with practiced ease. “We may yet survive.”
Jean-Luc stared at him, then turned to peer towards the settlement. It was nothing more than a primitive village, a handful of makeshift huts surrounded by a dirt wall. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine it becoming anything more, not when they had to fight every year to harvest enough food to keep themselves alive. And even if they managed to stabilize themselves, what would they do then? It wasn’t as if they could have children without women
!
“
Hah,” he grumbled.
“Johan went out naked,” Perrier said quietly. “Do you want to join him?
”
Jean-Luc sighed. Some prisoners just gave up living—and when they did, they stripped themselves naked and walked out into the cold. They never lasted long; their bodies, if they were recovered, were buried in shallow graves and left to rot. He’d known that Johan was too depressed to carry on for long, but he hadn’t expected him to commit suicide so soon . . .
“I don’t know,” he said finally. There were days when he just felt like sitting down and waiting for the cold to claim him. “I just don’t know.”
“That’s why we keep going,” Perrier said. “Because while there is a spark of life left in our bodies, Jean-Luc, we don’t let ourselves lie down and die.”
“Hah,” Jean-Luc said. He looked up at the darkening sky. “We don’t have anything to live for, do we? There isn’t even a hope of revenge.”
The stars would come out soon enough, he knew, and one of them would be the Theocracy’s orbiting station. He hadn’t seen much of it, when he’d been hastened off the transport and dumped into a one-way landing pod, but he knew it was there. Perhaps the women were there too, serving as slaves or worse. It was just another reminder that he was helplessly trapped, forced to struggle to tame a world that had killed hundreds of people so far. If they’d killed him instead, when they’d captured him, it might have been a mercy.
But they’re not concerned with mercy
, he thought.
Merely with mak ing us work
.
“It’s a fairly basic orbiting station, Captain,” Roach said as the squadron closed in on the planet. “I’d place it as a modified Type-III UN colony station. The only real difference is that there don’t seem to be any shuttles attached to the hull, but they may have fitted an internal shuttlebay instead.”
“Or they just don’t have any,” Kat mused. There were no shortage of stories and movies about criminals who’d escaped penal worlds by capturing shuttles after luring them down to the ground. It wasn’t as if they had much to lose. “It wouldn’t do to check on the prisoners after they were dumped on the planet.”
She frowned as she studied the display. “Any defenses?
”
“
There’s a remote weapons platform here, orbiting below the station,” Roach said. “I’d guess it’s designed to fire down at the planet, if necessary. There doesn’t seem to be anything capable of standing off a single destroyer, let alone the whole squadron. The station itself may not be armed.”
The XO leaned forward. “No weapons blisters?
”
“
None,” Roach said. “But they could have easily hidden them under the hull.”
Kat considered it briefly, then shrugged. “Target the remote weapons platform,” she ordered. “The Marines are to capture the station once we have killed the platform.”
“Aye, Captain,” Roach said. He keyed his console, then looked back at her. “Missiles locked on target.”
“Transmit the surrender demand as soon as we fire the missiles,” Kat ordered, addressing Linda. “I don’t want them to have a chance to consider blowing the station.”
Because that would be inconvenient
, she thought coldly.
We couldn’t get the prisoners down to the surface without the landing pods. We’d have to leave them on the freighters or dump them all into space.
“Aye, Captain,” Linda said. “The message is ready for transmission.”
Kat nodded, tensing. Everything
looked
safe; everything
looked
as though she had all the cards in her hand, but she knew all too well just how quickly things could change. The enemy might be on the ball; the enemy might have seen them coming; the enemy might already have signaled for help . . . the only advantage, as far as she could see, was that there was no StarCom. Even if the Theocracy had a courier boat in the system, it would be several days before it could fetch help. “Fire,” she ordered.
Lighting
shuddered as she fired two missiles towards the remote weapons platform. The enemy, taken completely by surprise, didn’t even have a chance to raise shields before the missiles struck home, vaporizing their target. Kat smiled in savage glee, then glanced at the communications console. A message was already going out, filling the airwaves with a cold—masculine—demand for surrender. If the station was unarmed, the crew had to know they didn’t have a hope of survival unless they surrendered. But what if they tried to blow the station . . .
They might have a selfdestruct system already powering up
, she thought grimly. The Marines were already on their way, four assault shuttles heading towards their target.
They might wait until the Marines dock, then trigger the bomb
.
“Captain,” Linda said, “I’m picking up a message. They say they’re willing to surrender in exchange for guaranteed survival.”
Kat’s eyes narrowed. Did they believe the Commonwealth ritually butchered prisoners and used their remains in satanic orgies? Or did they have some other reason for demanding guarantees? “Tell them that they will survive as long as they surrender promptly,” she said. Davidson’s shuttle was on its final approach now, far too close to the station for her comfort. He would insist on leading from the front, wouldn’t he? “They are to hand the station and its control codes over to the Marines once they dock.”
There was a pause. “They’ve surrendered, Captain,” Linda said. “They’re opening the hatches now.”
Kat frowned as the Marines swarmed into the station, ready to deal with any resistance. It didn’t look as though there
was
any; indeed, the station, which would normally have had a crew of at least two hundred, seemed undermanned. They took thirty-seven men into custody, then searched the station. And then they broke into the hold.
“They kept some prisoners, all women, Captain,” Davidson said. His voice sounded cold and dispassionate, but Kat knew him well enough to pick up the underlying shock and rage. “They’re not in a good state.”
No wonder they wanted guarantees
, Kat thought angrily. She expected such behavior from pirates, not the Theocracy. But then, if one had a society that regarded even
believing
women as chattel, it wasn’t a stretch to start enslaving prisoners and turning them into whores and sex slaves. And being trapped on an isolated station wouldn’t have helped.
Those men would be killed by their own people, let alone us
.
“Let the medics deal with them,” she ordered tartly. There was nothing the Marines could do for the women, not now. “Move the enemy prisoners to a storage bay, then see if you can get the pods ready for deployment.”
“Aye, Captain,” Davidson said. There was a pause. “With your permission, I’d like to deploy an intelligence team too.”
“Granted,” Kat said. She doubted there would be anything important in the station’s database, but even a prisoner manifest would be useful data. At the very least, they’d know what the prisoners were supposed to have
done
. “Ask the prisoners if any Commonwealth POWs were dumped here.”
“Aye, Captain,” Davidson said.
We can dump the station crew on the planet too
, Kat thought as the channel closed. If she hadn’t offered guarantees, she could have killed them out of hand.
They’ll have their lives and a better chance than their former prisoners.
“There are at least seventy small settlements on the planet’s surface,” Roach observed. “I think the largest isn’t much bigger than a couple of hundred personnel, although it’s impossible to be sure. I’d honestly rate the planet as uninhabitable and leave it at that, at least without trying to set up a greenhouse effect . . .”
Kat nodded. The penal colony was too cold to sustain life for long, unless the food crops were genetically modified to survive. Even so, it was hard to imagine
anyone
willingly immigrating to the planet unless there were some
very
strong incentives. And what could anyone offer, she asked herself, that would match the opportunities on warmer worlds? “Set up a shuttle schedule, based on the assumption that we will spend no longer than five days here,” she ordered. “I want each of the settlements visited; if the prisoners want to leave, we make plans to pick them up once the freighters are empty.”
“Aye, Captain,” Roach said.
“They will need medical support,” the XO offered. “Hell, if they don’t want to leave, we could drop the ration packs on the surface.”
Kat shrugged. “I think they’ll all want to go,” she said. She found it hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to
stay
. “The only real question is where we take them.”
Her console bleeped and a voice came online. “Captain, this is Davidson. I’ve downloaded a copy of the prisoner manifest. There’s no trace of anyone from the Commonwealth.”
“Thank you,” Kat said, disappointed. It would have been nice to rescue POWs. “Copy the intelligence over here, then continue with your operations.”
“Aye, Captain,” Davidson said.