They Shall Not Pass (The Empire's Corps Book 12) Read online

  It screamed as it struck the tent, emitting a sound fit to wake the dead and enough strobe lighting to disorientate a marine. Jasmine hit the ground automatically, silently glad of the blockers in her ears, as the other grenades detonated. The noise was deafening, but she could hear militiamen screaming in panic and see the guards running back towards the gates. Her lips thinned again - they could have rolled under the fence, just as the marines had done - and she motioned for the other two to stick with her as the CO stuck his head out of the lead tent.

  And they put their commander in the newest tent, she thought. No doubt they saluted him on the battlefield too. A sniper would have a field day. Aren’t these bastards lucky they got us instead of the Wolves?

  Buckley pointed his pistol at the commander’s head. “Bang,” he said, as the guards finally charged into the enclosure. “You’re dead.”

  “Fuck,” the commander said.

  “You’re fucked,” Jasmine agreed. She cleared her throat, then tapped a switch on her terminal. The grenades deactivated; silence descended, broken only by groans of pain and muffled curses. Their ears would be ringing for hours. “How many men do you have here?”

  The commander - he was a captain, she recalled - blinked in shock. “Forty,” he said, rubbing his ears frantically. “Forty men ...”

  “They’re all dead,” Jasmine said. The militia might be nothing more than weekend warriors - if indeed they bothered to assemble that often - but they needed to be better. “The exercise is over. Assemble your men, once their ears recover, and we will go over your series of mistakes.”

  “We could have killed you,” one of the guards protested.

  “We could have gunned you down long before you ran back into the camp,” Buckley sneered, nastily. “Why didn't it occur to you to hit the deck the moment the grenades went off?”

  Because they thought they weren’t real grenades, Jasmine thought. She wouldn't have been so casual about tossing them around, either, if they had been real. And because they wanted to salvage something from the fuck-up.

  She cleared her throat. “The exercise is over,” she repeated. “We will discuss your mistakes shortly.”

  The commander looked furious, muttering something about his uncle, but Jasmine ignored him. Martial law had been declared. If his uncle was foolish enough to make a fuss, he wouldn’t have a career for much longer. She turned and walked away, taking advantage of the chaos to sweep the camp and make a note of their other mistakes. Honestly! What idiot built the latrines so close to the camp? She hated to think what her drill instructors would have said if she’d designed the camp. Probably something nasty about wanting to get her men killed.

  She tapped her terminal, sending in a brief report, then strode back to the centre of the militia camp. The militiamen were looking sullen, their beauty sleep in tatters; she would have felt sorry for them, if she hadn't had to fight for over three days without respite on Han. There were limits, even for marines. She wondered, vaguely, if they were going to give her any trouble, then decided it was unlikely. Once they stopped screaming in outrage, they were certain to realise that Jasmine could have killed them, if she’d been a genuine enemy.

  “You were told that your camp would be raided,” Jasmine said, once the militiamen were lined up facing her. “And yet the precautions you took were laughably ineffective.”

  She paused, giving them a moment for her words to sink in. The sun was starting to rise, allowing her to see them clearly. They didn't look very promising, she had to admit; several of them were alarmingly old, two were suspiciously young and a number looked more like overweight businessmen than soldiers or spacers. She made a mental note to check up on them, then dismissed it for later. Corinthian, like all of the Commonwealth worlds, could recruit whoever it liked for its militia. War - and death - was no respecter of age.

  “There was far too much cover around your camp to hide us as we approached,” she said, waving a hand towards the trees and tall grass. “You should have camped somewhere with a clear field of fire, making it harder for anyone to sneak up on you. And then you didn't take any precautions with the fence. All we had to do was lift up a few wires and crawl underneath.”

  Which they are probably not used to doing, she thought. Crawling through mud - or worse - disgusted city-folk, she recalled. She’d always thought of it as an odd taboo, given what she knew city-folk tolerated. But they’ll learn as soon as the bullets start flying.

  The commander coughed. “The alarms kept going off.”

  I was right, Jasmine thought.

  She glowered at him instead. “A single false alarm is far better than having your men slaughtered in their sleep,” she said. “Being inconvenienced is less unpleasant than being dead!

  “In addition, your guards followed a predictable routine as they walked around the wire,” she added. “It was easy for us to time our crawl to the fence and get under it before the guards made their next sweep. They didn't even notice anything out of place! And then it was too late to keep us from killing forty men. All we had to do was stand and throw grenades!”

  There was a long chilling pause. “You did some things right,” she conceded. “But it was not enough to save you from three raiders.”

  She looked at the commander, who seemed furious. God alone knew what sort of chewing out he’d get from his superiors, when her report reached them. They wouldn't lose sight of what would have happened, if the attack had been real. Losing forty men for nothing would be bad, very bad. And it would cause a great deal of damage to morale. She hoped - prayed - that the militiamen would take the lessons to heart. The next attack might well be real.

  “We’ll be back later this afternoon to discuss tactics,” she concluded. “And then we will be running another set of exercises. You need to do better.”

  Gritting her teeth, she turned and led the way towards the gates, striding out into the countryside. They weren't actually that far from where she’d landed, the first time she’d set foot on Corinthian. The countryside might have been designed for a defending force, she’d thought at the time, although it was unlikely Admiral Singh would have played war with the farmers when she could have obliterated them from orbit. This time, though, with the shield in place ... a handful of thoughts ran through her mind. Heavy weapons sited there, long-range weapons hidden to the rear there ... there were all sorts of options.

  “What a bunch of clowns,” Buckley commented, as they took their bearings and headed down towards the local HQ. “Did they really do anything right?”

  “They’re not drilled daily,” Stewart pointed out. “We were hammered into shape at Boot Camp before we ever saw the Slaughterhouse. They barely got a day’s training each month between Singh’s departure and now. The real wonder is that they did as well as they did.”

  Jasmine snorted. The militia’s shooting stats were excellent, thanks to the shooting clubs that dotted the cities, but they were sadly lacking in every other field. They didn't know how to march, they didn't know how to advance towards the enemy ... she hated to think what they’d do when they stumbled into an ambush, as they would from time to time. The natural reaction was to flinch back and it was almost always the wrong one.

  “They’ve had more time in the field recently,” she said. “You’d expect them to improve, wouldn't you?”

  “They need intensive training,” Buckley said, firmly. “And they’re not going to get it.”

  Jasmine had to agree. Corinthian had an army, a civil guard and the militia, the latter consisting of every able-bodied man and woman who wasn't in either of the first two. In theory, everyone could be conscripted; in practice, trying would blow a hole in an already badly-weakened economy. The planet had quite enough troubles without adding economic collapse to the list.

  Although the economy won’t last long, once Admiral Singh arrives, Jasmine thought. She knew what Colonel Stalker intended to do, if the planet fell to the enemy. The facilities that couldn't be evacuated would be destroy
ed. It would ensure that Admiral Singh won nothing, whatever else happened. And yet she knew it would weaken the Commonwealth significantly ...

  She looked up into the lightening sky. There were flickers of light high overhead, vast arrays of battlestations and industrial nodes - and starships - orbiting the planet. The latter were being moved now, pushed into deep space where they would be hidden until the fighting finally came to an end. It was tempting to believe that the orbital fortifications would be enough to keep the planet safe, but she knew better. Admiral Singh wouldn't have any trouble battering them aside, once the mobile forces were withdrawn.

  A pity we didn't spent more money on improving the fortifications, she thought, although she knew it had never been a possibility. We needed more mobile units instead.

  They kept walking down towards the HQ, passing lines of soldiers drilling in fields or carrying out shooting practice under the eye of senior NCOs. Jasmine had seen the defences surrounding Freedom City - five weeks of concentrated effort had turned the city into a fortress - but she knew the city had to be guarded by outer layers of defences - and raiding parties, ready to harass the enemy when they arrived. Admiral Singh might take the city anyway, yet she’d take hideous losses. Jasmine just hoped they were enough to weaken her position.

  A civil war on Wolfbane would help us, she told herself. And even a year’s delay would be long enough for us to put new weapons into production.

  “I feel like whining,” Buckley announced. “Do we have to go back this afternoon?”

  “Pass your bad feelings down to them,” Jasmine told him, dryly. “It’s character-building.”

  “Sergeant Roth kept saying that, didn't he?” Stewart recalled. “Everything was character-building, as far as he was concerned. It concentrated the mind wonderfully.”

  “Yes,” Buckley agreed. He snickered. “It concentrated our minds on new and interesting ways to murder a drill instructor and get away with it.”

  “I’m not sure that was quite what he had in mind,” Jasmine said. Sergeant Roth had retired shortly after she’d graduated, if she recalled correctly. Somehow, she found it hard to imagine anything killing the tough old man. “Who could kill him?”

  “He used to say that anyone who did kill him would get his job,” Buckley reminded her, mischievously. “No one had the nerve to try.”

  Jasmine had to smile, recalling her first day in the unarmed combat pit. Sergeant Roth, knowing his new recruits had completed Boot Camp, had offered - in all seriousness - to stand aside for anyone who thought they could beat him. They’d get his job and a Rifleman’s Tab, without having to complete the course. But they’d spent six months learning the ropes at Boot Camp, long enough to know they couldn't beat him.

  “Better watch your backs,” Stewart said, changing the subject. He lowered his voice. “That captain - whatever his name was - is probably the sort of person to think that arranging an accident for you is the best way to avoid explaining himself to his superiors.”

  “He’d have to be mad,” Buckley said. “What’s he going to do? Tell the colonel we walked over a landmine and got blown to smithereens?”

  “Some people can be very stupid indeed,” Jasmine reminded him. “And he may not be thinking too clearly.”

  She broke off as her terminal buzzed, flashing up an urgent signal. All thought of the militia fled as she took it in. All hell was about to break loose.

  “That’s the orbital alert,” she breathed. She could hear alarms in the distance as soldiers were summoned back to their camps. “They’re here!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lakshmibai had no planetary defences, no network of ground-based or orbital weapons. A hail of KEWs would be enough to smash the planet’s forces from orbit, allowing the Commonwealth Expeditionary Force to march to the planet’s capital and recover the diplomats without serious risk.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. The Role of Randomness In War.

  “Captain,” the sensor officer said. “I just picked up a FLASH-signal from the long-range sensor platforms. A number of ships just crossed the phase limit.”

  “Send the alert,” Mandy ordered automatically, cursing the time delay under her breath. The warning was at least three hours out of date. “And put what you have on the display.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the sensor officer said. “They’re on a least-time course from Thule.”

  Mandy frowned, contemplating the possibilities. Thule wasn't that far, relatively speaking, from Corinthian, but intelligence had suggested that the occupied world was being used as a base for thrusts deeper into the Commonwealth. But then, if Admiral Singh had had to put the operation together on the fly, she would have needed to draw forces from every forward base under her control. Stripping Thule bare, with the Commonwealth in no state to mount a counteroffensive, might make a great deal of sense.

  She put the thought out of her mind as the long-range sensor reports popped up on the display. Seven battleships, at least thirty smaller warships ... and seventeen heavy freighters and troop transports. It was more than she’d expected, she had to admit; they might have underestimated Admiral Singh’s desire to regain control of Corinthian. Or she might have decided not to take chances. Losing the battle, Colonel Stalker had said, would undermine her position on Wolfbane. Better to bring vast amounts of overkill than risk an embarrassing defeat.

  “Nothing new,” she mused. “Do they show any signs of being modified?”

  “Not as far as I can tell, Captain,” the sensor officer said. “But they may be mounting additional weapons and point defences and we wouldn't know until they opened fire.”

  Mandy nodded, stroking her chin with a finger as she contemplated the display. The Wolves had been launching new starships, but they were all based on the Empire’s designs. They'd been strikingly conservative, which had puzzled her until she’d realised that Wolfbane was effectively run by giant corporations. Innovation was neither desired nor encouraged. They must hate the simple fact that the Commonwealth and the Trade Federation were forcing them to innovate after so long.

  But those battleships have a lot of missile tubes, she thought. In days gone by, a single battleship had been more than enough to cow all opposition. Seven battleships could dominate an entire sector with ease, the mere threat of their weapons keeping the population in line. They may be looking to overwhelm our defences by swamping them.

  She closed her eyes as she contemplated the latest reports. Wolfbane had added extra missile tubes to its ships, after the Commonwealth had taught them that their imagination was far from adequate, but they had to know that wasn't enough. What other surprises might be hidden in the enemy hulls? How could they adapt what they had to overcome her new technology? A year of hard fighting had been more than enough to convince her that her advanced weapons didn't make her invincible. Wolfbane had taken heavy losses, but they could afford to replace them. The Commonwealth could not.

  “Deploy a full sensor shell,” she ordered, quietly. Corinthian already had a pretty good deep-space tracking system, but she wanted additional stealthed platforms of her own. Admiral Singh would destroy the local network as she decelerated. “And then keep the fleet at yellow alert.”

  “Yellow alert, aye,” the tactical officer said.

  Mandy leaned back in her chair, trying to project an air of calmness she didn't really feel. If Admiral Singh redlined her drives, her ships would be in firing range within six hours; if she took a more leisurely approach, she’d be in orbit within eight or nine. Mandy rather doubted she’d take the risk of coming in slower, even though it would give her the chance to capture a number of deep-space stations and industrial nodes. The longer Corinthian had to prepare, the tougher the fight Admiral Singh would face. She was too old a hand to allow the enemy more warning than strictly necessary.

  She might even hope she wasn't detected, when she came over the phase limit, Mandy thought. It was what she would have wanted, if the positions had been reversed. Did Singh know that the C
ommonwealth had improved its sensors, along with everything else? Or was she smart enough to assume the worst, even as she hoped for the best? We can't keep her from realising that she’s been detected for long.

  “Captain,” the communications officer said. “We are receiving a private signal for you from System Command.”

  “Put it through,” Mandy ordered.

  She nodded politely as Admiral Amir Melaka’s face appeared in the display. They’d worked together closely over the last six months, even though she was a starship commander and he was a system defence officer. Indeed, she’d added a suggestion to her report insisting that the concept of separating the two responsibilities be discontinued. Melaka knew the problems facing her and her squadron, but not every officer was so understanding. Besides, switching from starships to fortresses and then back again would broaden their minds.