The Empire's Corps: Book 04 - Semper Fi Read online

  Semper Fi

  The Empire’s Corps – Book IV

  Series Listing

  Book One: The Empire’s Corps

  Book Two: No Worse Enemy

  Book Three: When The Bough Breaks

  Book Four: Semper Fi

  Christopher G. Nuttall

  www.chrishanger.net

  http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/

  http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall

  All Comments Welcome!

  Dear Reader

  Semper Fi is the fourth book in the universe of The Empire’s Corps, following the adventures of the Marines on Avalon. In order to gain maximum enjoyment, you should probably read The Empire’s Corps and No Worse Enemy first: both are currently available on Amazon Kindle or Smashwords. When The Bough Breaks is largely stand-alone, telling the story of what happened on Earth in the final days of the Empire.

  You can download samples of the first three books – and many others – from my website and then purchase them on Kindle. If you like my books, please review them on Amazon – it helps boost sales and convinces me to write more in certain universes.

  As I am not the best editor in the world, I would be grateful if you email me to point out any spelling mistakes, placing them in context. I can offer cameos, redshirt deals and suchlike in return.

  Have fun! And if you want a fourth book, let me know...

  Christopher Nuttall

  Historian’s Note

  Semper Fi takes place two years after No Worse Enemy, with rumours (but no hard data) of what happened on Earth finally filtering through to the worlds on the Rim.

  Prologue

  System Command, Commodore Rani Singh thought, with a flicker of genuine amusement.

  It had been intended as a punishment. Admiral Bainbridge had not appreciated it when she'd turned down his advances and had promoted her sideways, straight into System Command, Trafalgar Naval Base. Everyone knew that System Command was staffed by those in disfavour with their superiors – it involved less paperwork than court martial and dishonourable discharges – and those assigned to Imperial Navy bases lacked even the opportunity for graft that their counterparts assigned to civilian systems enjoyed. Her career had come to a screeching halt.

  Or so the old goat had thought.

  Rani's family had meddled with their genes for centuries, pushing the limits of genetic engineering as far as they would go without crossing into direct technological enhancement. At forty-two, she looked nineteen – and beautiful. Long dark hair framed a dusky face, with dark eyes that seemed both alluring and forbidding. The white uniform, tailored to hint rather than reveal, drew the male eye. Men had always stared at her, only to discover that Rani rarely shared her favours with anyone, even those who could help her career in exchange. But then, she'd always considered herself to possess some integrity. She had no intention of selling herself merely to gain rank, not when it would have destroyed her career in the long run.

  It still galled her, four years after her assignment to Trafalgar, that it had taken her so long to understand the opportunity the Admiral had placed in front of her. She'd spent two months in a funk before resolving to do the best she could with what she had … and then it had hit her. System Command controlled everything, from personnel assignments to orbital docking stations for 15th Fleet; there was hardly anything in the system that didn't require approval from her subordinates. A person with ruthless ambition and a complete lack of scruples – and loyalty to the Empire – could go far. She could even make herself a warlord in her own right.

  She settled back in her chair and studied the orbital display. Bainbridge and his cronies couldn't see the truth, but she could; the signs of decay and impending disaster were all around them. Rumour had warned her that the Empire might abandon Trafalgar long before she had received the formal notification, spurring her to make preparations for that day. The Grand Senate thought that she would shut the base down and then follow Bainbridge back into the Empire. Rani had other plans.

  15th Fleet wasn't as mighty as it had once been – seven battleships, nineteen cruisers and thirty destroyers – but it represented the largest force in the sector, enough to wreck several worlds. If, of course, it was used properly. Bainbridge just didn't have the imagination to see the possibilities – and besides, he had links to the Grand Senate. Rani had none … and knew that the Grand Senate would be unable to respond to her plans before it was too late. If some of the rumours were to be believed, Earth itself was on the verge of catastrophe.

  She keyed her personal console, sending a message to her allies. Putting the force together had been easy, so easy that she'd been convinced that Bainbridge was setting her up …. until she'd realised that even Imperial Security had too much else to keep them distracted. Now, her loyalists were on their way to the battleships, where they would take control, allowing her to secure the naval base without fighting. She already held the four orbital defence stations in her thrall.

  Smiling, she listened to the first set of messages from her assault forces. Thankfully, the Grand Senate had ordered the Marines – who would normally have had a platoon or two on the battleships – to head towards the Core Worlds, instead of leaving them in place. Without the Marines, it was almost pathetically easy to overawe the crews and take over the ships. It helped that she'd arranged shore leave for most of the crewmen before launching her operation.

  “Admiral Bainbridge has been shot attempting to escape,” Colonel Higgs said. He was one of her closest allies, someone who had good reason to resent Bainbridge and his fellow aristocrats. She'd given him specific instructions to make sure that Bainbridge didn't survive the coup. “And the ships are ours.”

  “Excellent,” Rani told him. “Proceed with part two.”

  Her smile grew wider as she contemplated the possibilities. If Bainbridge and his ilk wouldn't allow her to rise in their Empire, she'd damn well build one of her own. And her Empire would be far stronger than theirs …

  After all, who was going to stop her?

  Chapter One

  When considering authority, it is important to realise that all authority ultimately stems from force – from the barrel of a gun, as the old saying has it. Those who claim authority and yet are unable to back up their orders with force have no authority, even though it can take time for others to realise it. The teacher forbidden to punish his charges, the policeman forbidden to make arrests and the CO forbidden to discipline his men have no authority.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, Authority, Power and the Post-Imperial Era

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Andy Reynolds said, “I think we have a bite.”

  Captain Layla Delacroix leaned forward in her command chair, studying the display. CSS Harrington had been flitting from system to system, patrolling the edge of Commonwealth space and looking for pirates to kill. Chasing pirates was largely an exercise in futility, she knew, particularly the pirates who had survived the Admiral’s defeat two years ago, but sometimes it was simple enough to lure the bastards in for the kill.

  “Good,” she said, as the enemy icon solidified. They weren't even trying to be stealthy. “Once they enter civilian detection range, send them a standard challenge. Let’s see what they say.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Reynolds said.

  Layla shook her head as the young man turned back to his console. And he was young, barely seventeen ... and far too young for a bridge posting, at least according to the Imperial Navy’s regulations. But the Imperial Navy was gone, leaving the makeshift Commonwealth Navy to hold the line. Competence mattered more than family connections in the Commonwealth Navy and Reynolds had shown himself to be c
ompetent in the countless exercises she’d run since assuming command. And yet he had never truly been tested.

  She ran through the scenario in her mind as the pirate ship closed in. They were definitely hostile, if only because they were aiming to intercept Harrington well short of the phase limit – and not even trying to communicate. The bureaucratic rules and regulations that had governed interstellar shipping had died along with the Empire, but most spacers were still trying to honour the unwritten protocols for ship-handling, including the very basic rule that one didn’t come close to another starship without permission. It risked accidents – and misunderstandings. The pirates were making their intentions very clear.

  And they didn't know what she was, she told herself, and smirked. Harrington was new-build, the first heavy cruiser to come rolling out of the shipyard orbiting Avalon’s largest moon. She wasn’t that dissimilar to a standard Imperial Navy cruiser to the naked eye, but the pirates wouldn't realise that she was a military starship until they got too close – and by then it would be too late. If they'd known, they would never have risked engagement. What sort of pirate would risk his ship and crew for nothing?

  “Captain,” Reynolds said, “they are entering civilian detection range.”

  “Challenge them,” Layla ordered.

  The Empire had forbidden civilian crews from purchasing or installing military-grade sensors and weapons systems on their starships, a regulation that had largely been ignored. Military-grade equipment was so much more capable than civilian models that possessing it was a necessity along the Rim, even before the Empire withdrew from the outermost sectors. The pirates must have assumed that they would be detected as soon as they entered military detection range, but would they know for sure? Not, in the end, that it would matter.

  “No response,” Reynolds reported, after a long moment.

  “Alter course to evade,” Layla ordered. A harmless merchantman could neither fight nor run from a warship, but the crewmen would certainly try. Very few pirate crews would treat their captives decently. The men would be killed, the women would be raped and then killed – unless they had useful skills or could be ransomed back to their friends and families. It was worth doing whatever was in their power to stay alive and free as long as possible. “And scream for help from the inner system.”

  She imagined the pirates smirking as they heard the radio message and smiled, coldly. It would take hours for the message to crawl its way to the system’s sole inhabited planet – and there was little that Selig Salaam could do to help a freighter on the edge of the system. Even if there was a warship near the planet, it would take hours before it was in position to intercept the pirates, by which time the helpless freighter would have been gutted and left to drift throughout interstellar space. It could take years to rediscover the ship, particularly if the pirates left her heading out of the system.

  “The pirates are altering course themselves,” Reynolds said. “I’m picking up targeting emissions.”

  Layla nodded. “Send a second message, more panicky than the first,” she ordered, calmly. The pirates didn't know it, but they were already well inside her missile envelope. Escape was impossible. “And then ...”

  “Missile separation,” the tactical officer barked.

  The pirates had fired to miss, Layla realised, just to prove to the freighter that they actually carried weapons. Some freighter crews were supposed to know nothing about weapons, or to believe that the only armed starships belonged to the Imperial Navy, although Layla suspected that was just rumours spread by the big interstellar shipping corporations. No freighter crewman could afford to be so ignorant, if only because deep space punished ignorance and incompetence with a thoroughness and indiscrimination a Drill Sergeant would have been hard-pressed to match.

  “Detonation,” the tactical officer said, as the pirate missile vanished from the display. “One standard warhead, Captain. No nukes or laser heads.”

  “Unsurprising,” Layla said. The tactical officer was experienced, thankfully. He was earmarked for a command of his own once the next generation of cruisers rolled out of the yards. “They wouldn't want to waste either on a harmless merchantman.”

  “Captain, we’re picking up a message,” Reynolds said. “They’re demanding that we cut our drives and prepare to be boarded – or else.”

  Layla’s lips twitched with genuine amusement. “Then we’d better do as we are told,” she said, dryly. “Helm; cut drives. Let them come to us.”

  The pirate ship closed in as Harrington’s drive field faded away to nothingness, leaving the ship drifting through interstellar space. Layla studied the report from the sensors, noting that the pirate ship was definitely ex-Imperial Navy, although probably not a rogue unit that had decided to turn pirate and go hunting the ships it had formerly protected. The Imperial Navy had been decommissioning ships and laying off crewmen for decades prior to the decision to abandon the Rim, but it had still had thousands of starships in service before losing contact. No one knew what had happened to those ships.

  Six months to Earth, she reminded herself. A starship had been dispatched to investigate a rumour, heard fifth-hand, that Earth had been destroyed. So far, the ship and crew had not returned. Anything could be happening over there and we would never know.

  “Fat and happy,” the tactical office commented. “Don’t they have any common sense at all?”

  “We’re just a harmless merchantman,” Layla reminded him. “Even if we had weapons bolted onto our hull, we wouldn't be a match for a real warship.”

  They shared a predatory smile. “Lock weapons on their drive section,” she added. “Prepare to fire.”

  “Weapons targeted, aye,” the tactical officer said.

  “They’re ordering us to unlock our airlocks,” Reynolds reported. “And all weapons are to be secured before they dock.”

  “Too late,” Layla said. The pirate ship was practically close enough to touch. It wouldn't be long before they eyeballed Harrington’s hull – and then they’d know that she wasn't a genuine merchantman. “Tactical ... you are cleared to open fire.”

  The tactical officer tapped a switch. At such close range, the only warning the pirates would have would be when the weapons struck their hull. It was hardly a fair fight, but Layla had no intention of giving them a fair chance. The pirates certainly never gave any of their victims a chance to escape or to fight back. Besides, if they’d been more careful, they would have had a chance to escape before coming into point-blank range.

  “Two direct hits,” the tactical officer reported. “Their drive section has been disabled.”

  And if their maintenance is up to the standards we have come to expect from pirate crews, Layla thought, they’re going to lose the rest of their power rapidly.

  “Open a channel,” she ordered, tapping her console. “Pirate ship, you are under the guns of a warship. If you surrender, you will be taken into custody and transferred to a penal settlement. Resistance will be met with deadly force.”

  “No response, Captain,” Reynolds said. The pirate ship was already drifting. “They might have lost all power.”

  “Perhaps,” Layla said. She keyed her console. “Marines, you are cleared to launch.”

  ***

  “What a mess,” Rifleman Blake Coleman muttered.

  Lieutenant Jasmine Yamane couldn't disagree as 1st Platoon’s shuttle led the way towards the pirate ship. She had once been a standard Imperial Navy destroyer – a boxy starship studded with weapons and sensor blisters – but the brief assault had inflicted terrifying damage on her hull. The drive section looked to have been completely destroyed, rather than disabled, while air was streaming out of at least two breaches in the hull. Emergency systems should have sealed off the damaged parts of the hull by now, preventing the entire ship from venting its atmosphere out into space, but it looked as though they had failed. It wouldn't be the first time a pirate crew’s sloppy maintenance came back to haunt them.

 
She studied the plans they’d downloaded into their suits from Harrington’s database and came to a quick decision. “1st Platoon will board though this gash in the hull” – she designated a hull breach through the shared communications network – “and advance towards the bridge. 3rd Scouts will board though a different hole and advance towards the engineering compartment. They might not all be dead, so watch your backs as you move.”

  There was a brief round of acknowledgements. The Marines sounded confident, as well they might; they’d spent the last two years boarding pirate vessels and bringing their crews to heel. 3rd Scouts sounded much less confident; it would be their first deployment on active service, ever since they had passed the makeshift training program for fighting in space. Jasmine was more worried than she cared to admit about having the Scouts along, but she had to admit that there was no choice. There were only a handful of Marines and they couldn’t all be assigned to pirate-hunting starships.

  “Open the airlock,” she ordered. “Marines ... go.”

  The vastness of space seemed to welcome her as she led the way out of the shuttle, firing her suit’s thrusters so that she would head down towards the tear in the enemy hull. Standard procedure was to board a welcoming vessel through the airlocks, but the pirate crew were far from welcoming. The Commonwealth sent captured pirates to penal settlements rather than simply shoving them out of the nearest airlock, yet Jasmine knew better than to assume that the pirates they were facing believed them. After all, the Imperial Navy had often promised to spare surrendered pirates and then broken its promise.

  She winced as she pushed down into the pirate ship, dropping into a corridor that had been mangled by the direct hits. The upper half of a pirate corpse drifted through the corridor, spinning helplessly; Jasmine took one look and knew that there was no point in trying to get the pirate to a stasis tube. There was no sign of his legs anywhere.