Retreat Hell Read online

  “That would depend,” he said carefully, “on just what those terms were.”

  The youngsters, he knew, would have been horrified at his attempt to sound out the contact. They would have protested, perhaps rightly, that the underground did not enjoy the luxury of being able to debate terms and conditions. Without advanced weapons systems, the underground could not hope to prevail. If worst came to worst, they’d argue, they could always launch another uprising against the contact’s backers. Pete’s caution would not bode well with them.

  He smiled, a little sadly. Some of the underground might have made good Marines, once upon a time, while others were the kind of people the Marine Corps existed to defend. Now, they were forced to fight or accept permanent subordination ...

  The contact didn't sound offended. “We would like your political neutrality,” he said. “If you do not wish to associate yourselves with us, you may avoid commitment, but you may not side with any other interstellar power.”

  Pete looked at him for a long thoughtful moment. He knew that the contact represented an interstellar power – no one else would be able to produce the weapons they’d offered – but he didn’t know who. But the insistence on political neutrality suggested Wolfbane. There was no one else who had any interest in Thule remaining uninvolved. It was vaguely possible, he supposed, that the Trade Federation was covertly sabotaging the Commonwealth’s operations, but it seemed unlikely. If nothing else, the Trade Federation benefited hugely from the current state of affairs. Why would they want to upset the applecart?

  They wouldn't, he thought. Everything he knew about the Trade Federation backed up its assertion that it was not interested in political power, at least not to the extent of the Commonwealth or the vanished Empire. No, they were interested in interstellar trade and little else. They didn't benefit by upending the situation on Thule.

  “Very well,” he said, finally. “I cannot speak on behalf of every underground organisation, but my group will accept your terms.”

  “Good,” the contact said. He turned to the collection of metal boxes at the rear of the cabin. “Once we have unloaded these, I will depart and you can begin your war.”

  Pete nodded. The youngsters couldn't think in the long term, but he could ... and he couldn't help wondering if he’d just sold his soul along with the planet itself. But they had no alternative, no choice if they truly wanted to overthrow the government and create a new order. They needed outside support.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  ***

  First Speaker Daniel Krautman, elected Head of State only weeks prior to the first financial shockwaves that had devastated the planet’s economy, looked out of the Speaker’s Mansion and down towards the empty streets. Once, they had been bustling with life at all hours, a reflection of the economic success the planet had enjoyed under his predecessors. Now, they were empty, save for passing military and police patrols. The city was under martial law and had been so for months. Even the camps of unemployed workers and students who had been evicted from their homes were quiet.

  He shook his head in bitter disbelief, wondering – again – just what he had done to deserve such turmoil on his watch. He’d told himself that running for First Speaker would be a chance to ensure that his name went down in the planet’s history, despite his comparative youth. He'd told himself that he would serve the fixed ten-year term, the economic boom would continue and he would retire to take up a place on a corporate board or simply write his memoirs. Instead, the bottom had dropped out of the economy only weeks after his election and nothing, no matter what he did, seemed to fix the problem.

  Gritting his teeth, he swore under his breath as he caught sight of his reflection. He’d been middle-aged when he’d been elected, with black hair and a smile that charmed the lady voters – or so he’d been assured, by his focus groups. Now, he was almost an old man. His hair had turned white, his face was deathly pale and he walked like a cripple. The doctors swore blind that the constant pains in his chest were nothing more than the results of stress and there was nothing they could do, but he had his suspicions. There were political and corporate figures demanding a harsher response to the crisis and some of them might just have bribed the doctors to make his life miserable.

  Or maybe he was just being paranoid, he told himself as he turned away from the window. He was lucky, compared to the men and women in the homeless camps, building what shelter they could from cardboard boxes and blankets supplied by charities. There, life was miserable and short; men struggled desperately to find a job while women sold themselves on street corners, trading sex for the food and warmth they needed to survive another few days. And the children ... Daniel couldn't help shuddering at the thought of children in the camps, even though there was nothing he could do. Anything he might have tried would have been ruthlessly blocked by the conservative factions in the Senate.

  But they might be right, he thought, numbly. The founders set out to avoid creating a dependent society, like Earth.

  He shook his head, angrily. What good did it do to tell the unemployed to go get a job when there were no jobs to be had? What good did it do to insist that the government should create jobs when there was no money to pay the additional workers? What good did it to do to cling to the letter of the constitution when a crisis was upon them that had never been anticipated by the founders? But the hawks were adamantly opposed to any changes while the doves couldn't agree on how to proceed. And he was caught in the middle.

  Daniel stepped over to his desk and looked down at the report his secretary had placed there before going to bed. It seemed that the only growth industry, even after contact with the Commonwealth and the Trade Federation, was government bureaucracy, as bureaucrats struggled to prove they were actually necessary. The report told him, in exhaustive detail, just how many men, women and children had been arrested at the most recent protest march, the one that had turned into yet another riot. Daniel glanced at the executive summary, then picked up the sheaf of papers and threw it across the room and into the fire. Maybe he should have offered it to the homeless, he told himself, a moment too late. They could have burnt the papers for heat.

  There was a tap on the door. Daniel keyed a switch, opening it.

  “First Speaker,” General Erwin Adalbert said. “I apologise for disturbing you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Daniel said. He trusted the General, insofar as he trusted anyone these days. There were times when he suspected the only thing preventing a military coup was the simple fact that the military would have to solve the crisis itself. “What can I do for you?”

  “We received an intelligence package from one of our agents in the underground,” Adalbert said. “I'm afraid our worst nightmare has come to pass.”

  Daniel smiled, humourlessly. Protest marches, even riots, weren't a major problem. The various underground groups spent more time fighting each other and arguing over the plans to repair the economy – or nationalise it, or send everyone to the farms – than they did plotting to overthrow the government. His real nightmare was the underground groups burying their differences and uniting against him.

  “They’ve definitely received some help from off-world,” Adalbert continued. “There have been several weapons shipments already and more are apparently on the way.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said. “Who from?”

  “Intelligence believes that there is only one real suspect,” Adalbert admitted. “Wolfbane.”

  Daniel couldn't disagree. The Commonwealth had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by empowering underground movements intent on overthrowing the local government and reshaping the face of politics on Thule. Wolfbane, on the other hand, might well see advantage in trying to covertly knock Thule out of the Commonwealth. Given that the closest Wolfbane-controlled world was only nine light years away, they certainly had an interest ... and probably the capability to do real damage.

  “I see,” he said.

  “We can expect t
he various underground groups to start working together now,” Adalbert added, softly. “Their suppliers will certainly insist on unity in exchange for weapons.”

  He paused. “First Speaker, we need to ask for assistance.”

  Daniel looked up, sharply. “Remind me,” he said coldly, “just how much of our budget is spent on the military?”

  Adalbert had the grace to look embarrassed. “We spent most of the money on upgrading and expanding our orbital defences,” he said. “It provided more jobs than expanding troop numbers on the ground. We can expand our recruiting efforts, but we’re already having problems training our current intake ...”

  “And we don't know how far we can trust the new recruits,” Daniel finished.

  “Yes, sir,” Adalbert said. “And most of our new recruits are trained for policing duties, not all-out war. But that’s what the underground is going to give us.”

  Daniel stared down at his desk. He’d wanted to go down in history, but not like this, not as the First Speaker who had invited outsiders to intervene in his planet’s civil unrest. The Senate would crucify him, safe in the knowledge that they didn't have to deal with the situation. They’d voted him emergency powers, enough to call for assistance, but not enough to actually come to grips with the situation.

  Damn them, he thought.

  “Summon the Commonwealth representative,” he said, finally. He honestly wasn't sure if the Commonwealth could legally help Thule. This was an internal problem, not an external threat. But there was no choice. “We will ask for help.”

  Chapter Two

  No, there wasn't. Peace is merely defined as the absence of fighting. In actual fact, there were very few years in the Empire’s long history when the Empire’s military forces were not deployed into combat. They might face rebels or insurgents, terrorists or freedom fighters, but they were never truly at peace.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. War in a time of ‘Peace:’ The Empire’s Forgotten Military History.

  It was raining the day they laid Lieutenant Elman Travis to rest.

  Colonel Edward Stalker stood by himself, away from the handful of spectators, and watched as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Traditionally, insofar as ‘tradition’ had a meaning on a world barely a hundred years old, those who had died on active service would be buried in a military graveyard on the outskirts of Camelot, but Lieutenant Travis’s father had insisted on laying him to rest in a private churchyard. Ed had raised no objections, knowing that the grieving needed time to come to terms with the loss. Councillor Travis, he suspected, had yet to truly believe his son was dead.

  The preacher started to speak, his words barely intelligible under the driving rain. Ed had never been particularly religious – a life in the Undercity, then in the Marine Corps had never predisposed him to believe in God – but he understood the value of believing that the dead were gone, but not truly gone. Councillor Travis clung to the belief he would see his son again, drawing strength from his conviction. Ed privately hoped he was right. But he couldn't escape the feeling that dead meant gone.

  It had been his fault, Ed knew. Lieutenant Travis had died on Lakshmibai, victim of a treacherous attack that had claimed the lives of over a hundred Avalon Knights. Ed had looked at the files, such as they were, and decided that there was no reason to object to Wolfbane’s choice of Lakshmibai as a neutral world. And really, what threat could Lakshmibai pose to two spacefaring interstellar powers? It had never really occurred to him that the locals hated the outsiders so much that they would rise up against them, even under the threat of colossal devastation when the starships returned. If the Commonwealth Expeditionary Force hadn't been deployed to Lakshmibai, Ed knew that he would be dead by now, along with the representatives from Wolfbane. Who knew what that would have done to relationships between the two interstellar powers?

  Ed was used to death, or so he’d told himself. Being in the Marines meant the near-certainty of a violent death – and no one, not even the most highly-trained Marine, was immune. He’d lost far too many people over the years, from Marines he’d considered friends to Marines who’d served under his command ... and then Avalon Knights and others who had joined the military and helped make the Commonwealth a success. But those deaths had taken place before he'd screwed up, badly. And he had screwed up. In hindsight, always clearer than foresight, it was alarmingly clear that Lakshmibai was a disaster waiting to happen.

  “Hindsight is always clearer,” the lecture had said, when he’d gone to OCS on the Slaughterhouse. “You will always be second-guessed by people who will have access to a much more accurate picture than you had at the time. The trick is not to let those people get under your skin, because they will find it very hard to filter out the information they gathered in hindsight from what you knew before the disaster occurred.”

  He shook his head, bitterly. There were just too many unanswered questions over the whole Lakshmibai debacle for him to relax, even if he had been inclined to let the dead go. Had someone aided the locals, promising assistance that would prevent either the Commonwealth or Wolfbane taking bloody revenge for the slaughter of their people? Had the locals believed that the starships would never return? Or had they just been maddened fanatics, too enraged to consider the long-term consequences of their actions?

  The preacher finally stopped speaking and nodded to the friends and family, who stepped forward, picked up clods of earth and started to hurl them into the grave. Ed watched dispassionately as the coffin was slowly buried, part of him wishing that he could join them and help bury a young man who’d died too soon. But Councillor Travis had made his wishes quite clear. Ed could attend the funeral, but not take an active part in the ceremony. He blamed Ed for his son’s death.

  It was a bitter thought. Ed had cared little for Earth’s cadre of professional politicians, from the mayors and managers of the giant cityblocks to the Grand Senators, who were – in fact, if not in name – an aristocracy that had succeeded, long ago, in barring outsiders from rising within the Empire’s power structure. They’d known nothing, but politics; their actions were considered purely in terms of how they would help or hinder their endless quest for more and more political power. It didn't take hindsight – as Professor Caesius had demonstrated years ago – to understand that Earth’s politicians were certainly part of the problems tearing the Empire apart. And now the Empire was gone.

  But Councillor Travis was different. Ed and Professor Caesius had written most of the requirements for political service on Avalon – and the rest of the Commonwealth – and Councillor Travis qualified. Indeed, part of Ed rather admired the man for what he had accomplished, even before the Marines had arrived on Avalon and disposed the old Council. He was no professional politician ... which made his new opposition to the military – and Ed personally – more than a little heartbreaking. But there was no point in trying to avoid the fact.

  I never had children, Ed thought, sourly. It wasn’t uncommon for Marines to have children while on active service, but the children tended to be raised by their mothers while the fathers were moved from trouble spot to trouble spot. But Ed had never found someone he seriously considered marrying until he’d been sent to Avalon – and they couldn't marry, not while they were holding important posts. What is it like to lose a child?

  Losing a Marine was always a tragedy, all the more so when he had been in command, responsible for the lives of his men. But Marines were trained to the very peak of human capability before they were set loose on an unsuspecting universe and assigned to individual Marine companies. Ed had never been responsible for training his men. A child, on the other hand, was raised from birth by its parents. There was a connection there that even the most loyal and determined NCO failed to grasp with his men. How could he blame Councillor Travis for his grief?

  He caught sight of the older man, leaning over the grave and shuddered. Councillor Travis was older than Ed, his body carrying the scars of struggle with the old Council’s stranglehold on A
valon’s economy. His hair had faded to white long ago, but there was a grim determination in his eyes that had carried him far. Now, that determination was turned against the military itself – and the Commonwealth.

  Ed sighed, bitterly. The hell of it was that he believed that Councillor Travis was right.

  ***

  It felt strange, Brigadier Jasmine Yamane considered, to be wearing civilian clothes. She hadn’t been a civilian since she’d turned seventeen and walked right into the Marine Corps recruitment station on her homeworld. At Boot Camp, she’d worn the khaki outfits the new recruits were issued by the Drill Instructors, while the Slaughterhouse had expected them to wear combat battledress at all hours of the day. Even when she’d gone on leave, which had only happened once between her qualifying as a Marine and being exiled to Avalon with the rest of the company, she’d worn undress uniform.

  But the instructions for the funeral had been quite clear. No military uniforms. None of the guests were to wear anything that could even remotely be construed as a military uniform. And, for someone who had never really considered how to dress herself for years, even picking something to wear had taken hours. It annoyed the hell out of her that she could react quickly and decisively on the battlefield, but found herself utterly indecisive when trying to decide what to wear. There was no way she could talk about that with the other Marines.

  She caught sight of her own reflection in the growing puddle of water on the grass and sighed, inwardly. Eventually, she’d settled for a black shirt and a long black skirt that swirled oddly around her legs. It was loose, but it still felt constraining. The first time she’d pulled it on, she’d had a flashback to one of the nastier exercises she’d undergone at the Slaughterhouse, when she’d been chained up and dropped into a swimming pool. It hadn't surprised her, afterwards, to learn that several recruits had quit when they’d realised what they had to do to proceed.

  The preacher started to speak again, his words hanging on the air. Jasmine had once been religious, religious enough to understand why Councillor Travis and his family sought comfort from their belief in God. It had been a long time since she’d prayed formally, she reminded herself, although heartfelt prayers on the verge of battle were probably more sincere than anything she’d offered back on her homeworld. But listening to his words was a bitter reminder that over a hundred young men and women were dead – and most of them had died under her command.