The Empire’s Corps: Book 01 - The Empire's Corps (12 page)

“We cannot let this pass,” Linda said, flatly. She was too young for a post like Deputy Governor, Brent decided. She just didn't understand the problems involved in sending the Civil Guard on a wild-goose chase. “We have to act...”

There was a knock at the door. “Governor, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we just received a message from Orbit Station,” his secretary said. Abigail had been with him for years and he trusted her judgement and discretion implicitly. “A Marine Transport Ship and two destroyers have just entered the system.”

Chapter Ten

Although the Empire likes to claim that planetary development corporations are free to operate without supervision or obligation to the Empire, that is actually very far from the truth. Every settled planet, for example, must build – out of its own pocket – an Orbital Transhipment Station and a spaceport - and maintain a fleet of shuttles for swift and efficient transfer of materials from orbit to ground, or vice versa. More advanced colony worlds – stage-three or higher – are generally encouraged to build a cloudscoop and maintain a stockpile of starship fuel for the Imperial Navy. To put all of this in context, an orbital station alone costs twenty billion credits, a significant chunk of any development corporation’s budget. That has to be repaid by the settlers
.

- Professor Leo Caesius,
The Waning Years of Empire
(banned).

The tunnel of light suddenly faded into darkness, a darkness so complete that Edward felt his soul crying out in agony. He stared into the darkened viewport and was unable to withhold a sigh of relief as the stars started to twinkle back into existence. Six months of flight, six months with only a handful of crewmen and Leo for company, were almost over. He couldn't wait to get down to the planet.

“All hands, this is the Captain,” Yamato’s voice said, echoing over the ship’s intercom. “We have returned to normal space. Prepare for heavy acceleration. I say again; prepare for heavy acceleration.”

Edward looked over at Leo as the background noise slowly started to rise. Avalon itself lay five light minutes from the local primary, four and a half hours from the Phase Limit. Any system in the Core Worlds would have had a handful of destroyers lurking along the Phase Limit, watching for pirates and starships that had suffered a catastrophic drive failure, but Avalon had no ships capable of maintaining its security. It didn't even have powerful sensor arrays that would provide warning of a new arrival. It would be almost laughably easy for any pirate ship to slip up to the planet and open fire.

I guess that’s one advantage of being dirt poor
, he thought, sourly. Avalon’s development corporation had been wealthy, but the planet itself had very little that could be picked up and carried away. Pirates might try to raid the system’s deep-space facilities, such as they were, but there was little point in raiding the planet itself. The only thing they could reasonably take from the planet was people. It wasn't unknown, yet the records suggested that no such raid had been mounted against Avalon.

Leo looked up at him, his face pale and wan in the starlight. They’d become friends, of a sort, during the six months of enforced company. Edward had introduced Leo to Kipling – the Marine Corp’s favourite poet – and, in exchange, Leo had given Edward a copy of his banned book. Edward had read it over a few nights and had understood just why it had been banned. It was political, social and religious dynamite. The Empire’s Grand Senate would not have enjoyed reading about how they were destroying the Empire.

“We’re here,” Leo said. He sounded rather surprised. The boundaries of his world had shrunk to the confines of the Marine Transport Ship, most of which was off-limits to civilians. “Is there any chance of us being attacked by pirates?”

“I rather doubt it,” Edward said, dryly. He smiled. He’d been trying to educate Leo about Marines and the realities of combat, but it had been uphill going. Leo knew details about the Marines without understanding what they really meant. Edward privately likened him to an intellectual who had read a few books and privately considered himself an expert. What did the dreaded March of Death, or the Watery Grave, or even the Crucible itself mean to a man who had never experienced anything like them? He had never walked across a desert, carrying a wounded comrade on his back, let alone fought to hold off rebels from sweeping over a spaceport and destroying all hope of rescue. There was a difference in their perspectives that could never be bridged. “Pretend you’re a pirate. Would you dare attack a ship full of armed Marines and escorted by two destroyers?”

“No,” Leo said, finally.

“Of course not,” Edward said. “Most pirates – who are among the worst kind of scum you’ll ever meet – don’t want to pick on targets that can fight back. They want helpless little merchant ships they can board, loot and capture, or simply scuttle once they’ve taken whatever they want from the hull. They go for passenger ships for kidnap victims, transport ships for manufactured components and tools and other civilian ships, but going after a military ship isn't healthy for them. Even if they win the battle, and most pirate ships are poorly maintained and armed, they still have to repair their ship. It’s just not cost-effective.”

“I see,” Leo said. “It’s just a business, isn't it?”

“Exactly,” Edward said. “They want to maximise their gain and minimise their risk.” He shrugged. “There’s a good chance that we will encounter pirates in this system, sooner or later. The looted supplies have to be sold and planets along the Rim, ones without any kind of manufacturing capability, are ready markets for stolen goods. You take a bunch of mega-city dwellers from Earth and put them in a farming town and they’ll be desperate for whatever help they can get. They’re not going to ask too many questions about where the modern tools or devices came from, are they?”

He grinned. “You’re lucky, in a way,” he added. “You’re going to be going down to a world where most of the hard work has already been done. The pathfinders, the people who start the first settlements on a new world, are the ones who have the hardest tasks. You’ll be able to find a place to live, perhaps a teaching position at their local schools...you won’t have to indenture yourself to live.”

His communicator buzzed before Leo could answer. “Major, please could you come to the bridge,” Yamato’s voice said. “We’re entering the system now.”

“On my way,” Edward said. He looked over at Leo. “Enjoy the view from out here. We’ll probably start untanking people in the next few hours, trying to get organised before we enter orbit and dock with the Orbit Station. At least we should be able to land without someone shooting at us.”

Leo frowned. “Does that happen often?”

“Often enough that this ship is heavily armoured and is designed to get us down to the surface as quickly as possible,” Edward admitted. “A landing on a hostile planet can be the most dangerous operation in history. It’s not unknown to lose half of the attacking force in the first ninety seconds.”

Leaving Leo with that thought, he made his way back to the bridge. The main display caught his eye as soon as he entered, showing almost no sign of any human activity. Earth’s system had been buzzing with starships and in-system spacecraft, but Avalon’s system was almost empty. A pair of tactical icons on the display marked the presence of two ships – the sensors suggested that they were light freighters – making their way towards the planet, yet there was nothing else. The entire system looked as dark and cold as the grave.

Edward shivered inwardly. It was an illusion, of course. It was simple to hide a starship’s drives from passive sensors. The entire 1
^st
Fleet could be hiding within the system and the transport would have no idea it was there until it was jumped. A starship was tiny on a cosmic scale. A starship that wasn't burning with energy might as well be a rock as far as hostile sensors were concerned. Edward’s old CO had told his junior officers about boarding a pirate cruiser that had taken the risk of stepping down its drives to nothing in hopes of avoiding detection. A few minutes either way and they would have gotten away with it.

“We have reached the Avalon System,” Yamato informed him. “I have already transmitted our IFF signal to System Command.”

“Such as it is in this system,” Edward commented. Yamato nodded flatly. A Core System would have a single unified authority controlling operations and authorising everything, with armed starships on call to back it up if necessary. A colony world along the Rim might not even have someone manning the stations in orbit, watching for incoming ships. It wasn't as if they could do anything about it when they appeared. Avalon’s ability to interfere with pirate operations in their system was almost non-existent. “I take it that there has been no response?”

“No,” Yamato said. “They should have replied at once, but we have not yet received anything, even a simple acknowledgement.”

Edward nodded. Gravity pulses could be used to send FTL signals over very short ranges, allowing a limited degree of FTL communications within any given system. A Core System would have relay stations to pick up and repeat the original transmission, preventing it from fading away and being lost in the background gravity field. Avalon had nothing of the sort and probably wouldn't have for hundreds of years. It was quite possible that their response had simply been lost in the background noise. The Empire had poured literally trillions of credits into developing a method of extending range over light years, but so far the experiments had all been complete failures.

“Maybe they think we’re pirates,” he said, dryly. “They couldn't get a good read on us at this distance, could they?”

“No,” Yamato said. “I have reviewed the files on their equipment. They barely have standard civilian-grade gear. They may not even be aware of our presence.”

Edward frowned. “I see,” he said. “I wonder...”

“Captain,” one of the naval ratings said, “we have received a response. They are welcoming us to Avalon and request that we make orbit as soon as possible.”

“Good,” Yamato said. “Helm; take us in.”

Edward smiled. “I’m going down to see to my men, with your permission,” he said. “Let me know when we enter standard communications range.”

***

“The Marines?” Brent repeated. He wouldn't have been more astonished if an entire squadron of Imperial Navy starships had shown up in the system, escorting an entire Imperial Army Division. “Why are the Marines coming here?”

Linda smiled, her white teeth shining in the sunlight. “Perhaps someone read your messages requesting support and decided to dispatch the Marines,” she said. “Or perhaps they’re just calling long enough to tank up and then they’ll be on their way out again.”

Brent ran his hand through his thinning hair. He’d had the standard rejuvenation treatments when he’d joined the Imperial Civil Service, yet somehow his hair felt as if it was on the verge of falling out completely, or going grey. No one had told him about the stresses involved in running a colony world when he’d been offered the post. They’d talked about the great honour the Empire was doing him by giving him so much trust. It hadn’t taken him long to start wondering if the only reason he’d been given the job was because no one else wanted it.

“Abigail,” he said. “Didn’t they tell you
anything
?”

“It was a standard gravity-pulse transmission,” Abigail said. She saw his blank look and hastened to explain. “You cannot actually send much information in a gravity pulse, sir. They pushed it right to the limits just to send us as much as they did. We won’t know more until they reach radio range and that won’t be for several hours yet.”

“They wouldn't want to burn out their transmitter,” Linda added. She smiled thinly at him, stoking her long golden locks. “We can wait a few hours to learn what they have in mind.”

Brent paused. Another nasty thought had occurred to him. “How do we know that these
are
the Marines?”

“They had the right codes,” Abigail said. She looked down at the ground for a long moment, her eyes worried. “They could be pirates pretending to be Marines, sir, but I don’t see why they would bother.”

“Of course,” Linda agreed, dryly. “What could we do to stop them if they decided to attack one of the asteroid mining platforms?”

Brent winced at the caustic tone in her voice, for the asteroid mining program was a sore spot between the two of them. The ADC, under the delusion that Avalon had a chance to jump two colony levels in one bound, had invested in a cloudscoop and a large asteroid mining project, bringing in RockRats from across the Empire to set up one of their mining systems. They’d succeeded, just in time for the economy to take a downturn and leave them lumbered with a massive white elephant...which, according to Imperial Law, they had to maintain in perfect working order. The RockRats, at least, could maintain themselves, but they insisted on being paid in cash. There was no trust to the relationship. There was also little point to it. The planned orbital industrial nodes had never materialised. What industry Avalon had had been built on the ground.

But she was right. In theory, Avalon’s Civil Guard had three gunboats and a handful of armed shuttles to stand off any threat. In practice, two of the three gunboats had been cannibalised to keep the third operating, while the armed shuttles couldn't even threaten an armed merchantman. A pirate ship could operate with impunity outside of Avalon’s gravity well and all the planet’s government could do was watch.

“Nothing,” he said, wishing that Major Grosskopf had been in Camelot when the Marines announced their arrival. The former Imperial Army officer would have known the difference between real Marines and posers, or even pirates posing as Marines. His advice would have been useful as well. “All we can do is wait and see what happens.”

“Yes, sir,” Abigail said. “Do you wish me to advise Orbit Station to prepare berths for the Marines?”

“Yes, please,” Brent said. Even if the Marines weren't staying, they could show the flag near the badlands, perhaps scare some of the nastier bandit gangs further away into the mountains. “I’ll discuss the other matter later.”