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“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

- George Orwell

“There is a special Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.”

- Otto Von Bismarck

“In this corner of the universe, we are the Klingons.”

- War Amongst the Stars: A Brief History of Post-Contact America, by Admiral Hubert De Grasso (ret.),

Prologue: First Contact

The Hrauwah cruiser Wisdom of War emerged from warp space somewhere between the single star in the system and its nearest planet, spewing atmosphere from several breaches in its hull.

“Go into full stealth mode,” King-Captain Grace-Under-Pressure said as soon as she recovered from warp transit, her demeanor befitting her Chosen Name. Her vessel was damaged, and their warp jump had taken them to an uncharted world on the tail-end of the galaxy, but panicking would achieve nothing but the loss of dignity before one’s inevitable demise.

“As you wish,” her Lord Engineer said. Their wireless neural interfaces made words superfluous, but verbal commands were traditional, and tradition was one of the building blocks of the Hrauwah Naval Service.

All non-essential systems on the cruiser – everything but basic life support and its force fields – shut down, reducing its energy signature to the point that its pursuers would have to come within a light-minute to detect the vessels’ presence. Doing so was risky, but at the moment the Wisdom of War was unable to fight or flee; hiding was the only viable option left.

For two long hours, the Wisdom drifted in space as its damage control teams worked desperately to restore its damaged systems. King-Captain Grace used that time to curl up in her command chair and take a nap, her tail wrapped tightly around one of its gripping bars, following instincts carried down from her species’ arboreal ancestors. One slept when one could in times of war. She woke up when her neural implant hissed in her ear, alerting her that she was needed.

“Warp emergence detected,” Lady of Tactics Courage-and-Discretion announced coldly. “Approximately five light-minutes away.”

Passive sensors were low-ranged, but it was all they dared use at the moment. Even running silently and with force fields diffusing the ship’s heat signature into something barely above the ambient temperature of outer space, the Wisdom was dangerously close to the enemy’s emergence point. Captain Grace waited patiently while Lady Courage analyzed the data.

“Target identified as a Risshah Three-Claw-class battlecruiser. Same energy signatures as the vessel that engaged us at Star System Ninety-six.”

A chorus of growls greeted the news; everyone in the bridge bristled in anger and apprehension. The Risshah were hated throughout the galaxy, and their unprovoked attack on the Wisdom only confirmed what everyone knew: the Snakes were murderous, treacherous savages.

“Silence in the bridge,” King-Captain Grace said. “We knew we were up against the bloody Snakes, didn’t we? All we can do now is try to be ready for them. Unlike the last time,” she added soberly.

A Three-Claw battlecruiser had a good ten percent more firepower and fifteen percent stronger shields than her vessel. The Snake warship had ambushed the Wisdom by hiding behind an asteroid and using a decoy beacon to lure the Hruawah cruiser into range. Only sheer providence had saved it from total destruction. Sheer providence and the skill of its crew, who had managed to launch its own salvo of missiles and beams before fleeing into warp-space. The ensuing stern chase had been long, with only a faint hope they might be able to evade their enemy. The Wisdom had sped through warp space until reaching a suitable emergence point. All Grace could hope for was that the enemy wouldn’t find them until her crew could restore the Wisdom’s damaged systems and offer battle on slightly better terms.

Minutes passed, grew into hours. The King-Captain used the time to examine the data on the system they’d found themselves in after performing that most dangerous maneuver: an unplanned warp-jump, following a random gradient in space-time leading to the nearest major gravity well. The chances that such a jump would leave them stranded in the strange sub-universe between warp points were somewhere in the twenty percent range. Only the fact that certain death at the hands of the Snakes had been the only alternative made the maneuver advisable.

So where in the Seventeen Heavens and Hells had they arrived? Grace-Under-Pressure accessed the data her exhausted Lord Astrogator had hastily assembled. A Class Seven star with eight major planetary bodies. Including one inhabited world, the star’s third closest planet. One blue world, rich in water, inhabited by a technologically-proficient species; it radiated enough energy in the electromagnetic spectrum to stand out like a bonfire in the night. Her blood ran cold. The Snakes chasing her ship would assume that they had followed the Wisdom to a hostile system. And the Snakes dealt with potential hostiles in only one way.

“Lord Engineer,” she said, her icy tone of voice hiding her terror and despair. “What is our status?”

“We are back to seventy percent in all essential systems. Two missile tubes remain non-operational, but the rest are ready. Lasers, plasma and graviton cannon are all online, although I fear some of them are good only for one or two volleys before…”

The King-Captain cut him off. “Thank you, Lord Engineer.” She switched to the general channel. “Battle stations. We will engage the enemy shortly.”

“Your Majesty, the Risshah have performed a warp jump!” It took a few minutes to detect the Snake’s emergence. “Target reacquired! They are…”

“In orbit around the third planet from the sun,” Grace finished for her Lady of Tactics. “And are preparing to depopulate it.”

Lady Courage nodded, wide-eyd and panting from stress.

The news was over four minutes old. The enemy vessel would take five to ten minutes to start its attack run after emerging from warp-space, depending on how efficient its crew was, how well it would recover from the warp-transit process, and how much damage the Wisdom had inflicted on it before fleeing. The only chance the helpless primitives on that planet had to survive would require Grace-Under-Pressure to risk her ship and all aboard her.

Her Royal Court, the officer-noblemen charged with managing each aspect of her vessel, received her orders in silence. There were doubtful glances cast back and forth, but no one questioned her, and she allowed herself a moment to savor her pride in them as they rushed to do battle with a superior enemy under highly adverse circumstances.

“Prepare for warp jump,” she said as her implants delivered the coordinates to her crew. “We will emerge at long range, launch an automated missile volley, and conduct a direct approach after warp recovery.” Her terse orders were put into effect, years of training paying off. All the details were worked out in under a minute.

“Warp engines ready. Coordinates set.”

“Engage.”

Transition.

The Wisdom of War ceased to exist in normal space. Grace’s perceptions shifted, surrounded her with hallucinations and manifested memories, fears, emotions, some of them her own, others belonging to her crew, and yet others having no relation to any reality she knew. She forced herself to ignore the distorted sense of time that made the transition process seem to last several minutes, all the while surrounded by howling, crying ghosts. Her dead parents were there – father, bearer and mother, all three of them cursing her for dishonoring her family and the Supreme Arbiter. Shame and fear became physical sensations, sending shivers down her spine.

Closing her eyes didn’t help; warp perceptions had nothing to do with physical senses. The meditation techniques that all Starfarers practiced did help, a little. Only one percent of her species could enter warp-space while awake and aware. Another five percent could do so only while unconscious or in suspended animation. The remaining ninety-four percent could not endure warp transit; exposure resulted in death or incurable insanity. Even among the warp-rated, multiple jumps had a tiny but gradually-increasing chance of inflicting serious side effects. Every transition could be one’s last.

Emergence.

They were back in the universe where they’d been born, the place where light had a fixed speed and space-time’s curvature could be deduced and manipulated according to knowable laws, a universe that made sense. Recovering from transition took some time, however, as her mind struggled to set aside the fading but still vivid alien stimuli and grasp reality yet again.

During that time, only the automated systems on the Wisdom were able to act. They dumbly followed their programming and fired eighty-three missiles.

Grace’s ship had emerged one light-second away from the Snakes. Her missiles would cover that distance in two minutes – plenty of time for the enemy battlecruiser’s sensors to burn through their stealth systems and its point weaponry to destroy them all. The volley was a distraction, meant to buy time while her crew recovered from the warp jump and rushed into optimal firing range, under half a light second, close enough for missiles and beam weapons to overcome their target’s force fields and point defenses.

They were too late, however. The Snakes had already launched on the unsuspecting planet below.

The Rissha’s genocide tactics were simple. A swarm of hundreds of missiles zeroed in on concentrations of electric light, radio waves, and graviton emissions. Down below, on the planet’s night side, circles of red light started to blossom, each marking the funeral pyres of millions of sophonts. Grace recovered in time to watch half a world die. After the first swarm of missiles was exhausted, more volleys would follow, destroying every city, then every town, and finally every village, hamlet, and air, land or sea vehicle they could find, murdering everyone except for a handful of survivors in the most remote areas of the world, where they would be hunted down at leisure.

“The Snakes are turning to face us!”

“Maintain course.”

“They are engaging our missile salvo, but… Their point defense systems are degraded. Attrition rates are too low. They won’t stop them all!”

All eighty-three missiles should have been detected and destroyed in a minute or less. The enemy battlecruiser had indeed been damaged by the Wisdom’s parting shots, however, and the Snakes hadn’t had enough time to effect repairs. Their sensors were having trouble locking onto the incoming missiles; their effectiveness increased as the ship-destroyers got closer, but not enough.

Seventy-six missiles were destroyed. Seven reached their target. They detonated against the battlecruiser’s force fields, their graviton and plasma warheads battering the invisible barriers protecting the ship. One got through a breach in the shields and struck the battlecruiser’s armored hull.

“Hit!” The visual and data display showed the effect; the Snake battlecruiser lurched in space, knocked off course, ejecting burning atmosphere at the point of impact. The damage was enough to turn a hopeless fight into one that the Wisdom could win.

“Fire as you bear,” the King-Captain ordered, unnecessarily yet again, but the proper forms must be followed. She wanted to throw her head back and howl in triumph, as her ancestors had done in the emerald forests of her planet’s prehistory, but she retained her composure.

Her first volley smashed through the enemy’s remaining shields. Gravity-beams, plasma bolts and multi-spectrum lasers cut through the hull and its internal force fields, turning vital components and hissing Risshah crewmen into undistinguishable vaporized matter. The enemy struck back, but their return fire was diffuse and badly coordinated; the Wisdom’s force fields held under the onslaught as it continued its attack on the crippled, dying Snake ship. Inevitably, a beam or missile struck the containment field around the battlecruiser’s gluon power plant, releasing massive amounts of energy. The enemy vessel vanished in a flash of light that half the planet below saw as a new sun glowing in the sky, blindingly bright.

Any joy Grace might have felt over her victory was short-lived. Over two-thirds of the planet’s cities had been consumed, mostly on one hemisphere, although no land mass had been spared. A world’s civilization had been crippled, possibly beyond repair.

  The Hrauwah did not cry. They expressed sorrow by whimpering and howling, and the pain Grace felt watching the destruction wreaked by the Snakes could no longer be contained. She was far from the only one doing so: the crew’s combined keening filled the bridge.

Her ship-domain – her entire species – owed the people of that planet a blood debt, and they would help in any way they could. The survivors of the unprovoked onslaught would have to make their own choices, however, and learn to survive in the new reality that had come crashing upon them.

“Welcome to Starfarer society, you poor sophonts,” Grace said.

Down below, thousands of cities continued to burn.

Excerpts from First Contact: A Multimedia Archive:

“This is the President of the United States. We surrender unconditionally. We only request that you extinguish the arson weapons you have deployed against our cities. In the name of decency and compassion, I beseech you to spare the innocent lives of millions of people who never meant you any harm. Whatever our sins may be, we will repent and make amends. We… We beg for your mercy.”

“This is Trish Valenzuela, reporting from the Empire State Building. The entire city and its suburbs are surrounded by a ring of fire. The flames appear to be growing in height and intensity, and rolling steadily inwards, consuming everything in their path. They…”

(She winces at an explosion in the sky)

“That was news chopper, I think. It hit some sort of invisible barrier, near where the fires started. It’s… (long pause). “I’m getting reports of at least a dozen major urban centers similarly affected. Thousands are already dead, and if the fires are not contained, millions will follow, including this reporter. May… May God have mercy on our souls. Back to you at the studio, Morty.”

Robert Freemantle @RobAtHome67

The fires are getting closer. Most of the Valley already engulfed. Smoke is getting bad. I think we’re all goners. #LABurning

101 replies 83 retweets 3 likes

“Mom, dad… If you’re still in town, get out into the country as soon as you can. If you can. It’s all happening in cities, they’re targeting the cities. I’m… Listen, I love you both very much. I… I have to go now.”

- voice mail from First Contact, courtesy of the Benson family.

“They were able to use their phones until the end. Dad was on a business trip in Chicago. He called us from his hotel, and we talked until his room caught fire. We heard him scream before the line went dead.”

- Testimonial by Theresa Delacourt.

Last upload from YouTube star Gina Pebbles: The video shows the skyline outside her apartment in Atlanta. It is wreathed in flames, reaching hundreds of feet in height. Police sirens can be heard in the distance. “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragon is playing in the background, the music mixing with the sounds of disaster outside. Down below, several figures run from the conflagration; some of them are already on fire.

Gina turns her smartphone camera on herself. She is crying.

“This is it, people. I’m gonna upload this before it’s too late, ‘kay? Love y’all, and if there’s an America after this is over, don’t forget us, ‘kay? Find the fuckers who did this and make them pay.”

Janice Quinn @hnybny112

PPL R BURNING TO DEATH. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING HELP US

72 replies 329 retweets 0 likes

“This is Johnathan Britten, KDFW, outside Dallas-Fort Worth. The dome around the metropolitan area is completely filled by rising flames; everybody inside must be dead. The last reports we received from the other side of the dome came from a group calling from a bomb shelter, who claimed temperatures were reaching lethal levels before going off the air. I’m told the structure, the energy field apparently, is containing most of the heat inside it, somehow preventing it from spreading beyond its confines, which is the only reason my crew can film it from under a mile away. It’s still very hot in here. One might say hellishly hot.

“The fires are obscuring everything at the moment, but a news chopper captured visuals of the Reunion Tower as it collapsed. The heat inside the domes is intense enough to melt concrete and steel. It’s… Excuse me for a moment.”

(Johnathan moves out of frame; the sound of retching can be heard even through the roar of the flames).

“New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, a dozen other cities, they have all fallen silent. Millions are dead. The rest of the world is, if anything, in worse shape.” (pause). “Okay, fuck the teleprompter. We all saw the UFO footage from the ISS. E.T. came back, the motherfucker. He came back and killed everyone. We’re fucked, you hear me? Fucked!”

- Charlotte NBC Anchorman Keith Neelan, moments before his suicide.

“Much is lost, but much remains. We will never forget this day, and we will never surrender to those who seek our destruction. We will rebuild and restore our strength. God Bless America.”

- US President Albert P. Hewer, shortly after being sworn in.

Year Zero AFC (After First Contact)

“Good to see you, Mister President.”

“No rank in the mess, Ty. Sit down.”

Tyson Keller sat on a plush sofa facing the man who until a few days ago had been the country’s Secretary of the Defense. More specifically, the about-to-be-fired Secretary of Defense. Albert P. Hewer had left the Army as a one-star general, had been the head of the CIA for six years and then been tapped for Def Sec by an administration trying to deal with the latest cluster-fuck in the Middle East. Hewer had started butting heads with everybody from the get-go, and inside sources in DC claimed he’d soon be announcing his regretful resignation in order to spend time with his family, a funny exit line for a childless widower.

Then the aliens had come.

Tyson looked around the study, in a manor-style house in an undisclosed location. The Secret Service and Marines had come to his house outside Charlotte, which was possibly the largest US city still in one piece, bundled him into a chopper, and flown him here, here being somewhere almost four hours’ flight away. If he had to guess, they were somewhere in Kansas. Wherever it was, it was nowhere near the Beltway. There was no Beltway anymore.

“First of all, I’m sorry for your loss, Ty.”

“Thank you.”

When the balloon went up, Tyson had gotten a phone call from his oldest daughter Rebecca, who’d been a junior in Boston College. He’d listened to her as she burned to death.

The grief was there, pressing against his chest, and it almost overwhelmed him when Hewer’s words stirred it up. Almost. He pushed all emotions down somewhere deep, somewhere they would not show until he was alone with Mathilda. There were tears still to be shed for Becca, but not here and now. This was business.

“It’s just you and me,” the President of These Very Fucked Up United States went on. “No recording devices on the premises. You can speak freely, Colonel.”

“I’m just an accountant now, Al. And I was about to quit my day job, after the last book hit it big on the Kindle.” Not anymore, of course. Even if half the reading public in the US hadn’t just gone up in smoke, Tyson figured science fiction was as dead as the dodo, now that real aliens had shown themselves and bombed the world back to the Stone Age.

“Read a couple of your novels while I waited for you,” Hewer said. “Not too bad. Not my cup of tea; I’m into historical fiction, when I read fiction at all. But not too bad.”

“Don’t forget to leave a review at Amazon. Wish more people did.”

“Heh.”

Hewer grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant grin, or a pleasant face for that matter. Albert would have never gotten elected to any major office. Not photogenic enough. His face could best be described as ‘Nixonian,’ the kind of mug cartoonists and comedians would have a field day with. He was President only because everyone else above him had gone up in smoke, along with untold numbers of Americans. Including one of Tyson’s children.

 “So what do you need, Al? Want me to reenlist?”

“No. I’ve got plenty of trigger-pullers. I need someone willing to do what needs to be done.”

“Which is?”

“We’ve got to rebuild this nation, Colonel. This is the biggest disaster in the history of this country, of this planet. We lost, by the latest estimate, a hundred and sixty million people in CONUS alone. We’re probably going to lose another million or two, maybe a lot more, by the time the winter’s over. We have no economy. We’ve got plenty of food, but we may not have the fuel to move it where it’s needed. The aliens hit the twenty largest population centers in the country. Charlotte’s metropolitan area is number twenty-one, by the way.”

Tyson held up his thumb and forefinger, about half an inch apart. “Missed me by this much.”

“Lucky you. Lucky us.”

“What do you plan to do about this, Al?” What the hell can you do? He kept that last question to himself.

“There were two bunches of aliens up there, Ty. One of them took out the ones that blasted us. If they hadn’t, we would have been obliterated. We got hit by the first of what would have been successive bomb waves. As it is, we got off lightly, here in the US. The initial spread happened over Asia; we got the tail end. China and India have effectively ceased to exist. Ditto Japan, Australia, Indonesia, both Koreas. Billions are dead. Europe’s got a few cities left, but their power grid’s collapsed; a lot of the survivors won’t make it to next year. The second wave would have finished off what’s left. The friendly aliens saved our bacon.”

“And what happens now? Do they figure we owe them? Or that they own us now?”

“Not exactly. They feel a measure of obligation towards us. Their ship has left, but a few technical advisors and their equipment stayed behind. Their technology is just this side of magic, and they’re sharing it with us. With the US.”

“Not with the whole world?”

“No. For whatever reasons, they like us the best from all the countries that survived. The Russians are still around – some Russians; a lot of their military facilities didn’t get hit, and their rocket forces are relatively intact. But the good ETs don’t care for the Ivans. One of the first things we got from the Puppies was an anti-ballistic missile system that makes the Russians about as dangerous as a kid with a peashooter.”

“The Puppies?”

“Wait till you meet one. Kinda look like a cross between a raccoon and a light-skinned Dachshund. Cute as hell.”

“Mammals?” Tyson had always figured aliens would be absolutely different, not humans in funny costumes like in the TV shows he loathed.

“Pretty much. They are a DNA- and carbon-based life form, according to my Science Advisor, who happens to be another sci-fi writer on the side. Apparently it turns out some theory about the origins of life was right: ‘antiperspirant’ or something like that.”

“Panspermia, is that what you mean? Life originated somewhere else and came to Earth via comets and meteors?”

“Bingo. That’s one of the reasons I need you, Tyson. You’ve thought about this kind of shit already. That puts you miles ahead of your average government pinhead.”

Tyson’s head was spinning from the things he’d just learned. The hopeless malaise that had infected him ever since Becca had died began to give way, replaced by something else, something several Jihadists had become acquainted with shortly before their demise.

“I never cared for alien stories,” he said. “Figured if they showed up they’d be so far ahead of us we’d end up like the Aztecs and Incas at best, or like ants under a boot at worst. Guess I was only half right.”

“Now you don’t have to guess, and you’re mentally prepared for this stuff, more than most people. The other reason I want you, of course, is that you’re a hard case, an utterly cold-blooded son of a bitch. I need the Hun.”

“I never cared for that handle. Huns were undisciplined barbarians.”

Al had given Tyson that nickname, back when they’d gone through OCS together, a long time ago.

“You weren’t afraid of getting your hands dirty, Ty. Or bloody. That’s Hunnish enough.”

Tyson shook his head. “Al, you really don’t want me in a position of power. The country’s suffered enough already.”

“If we’re going to come out of this alive, we need to become something else altogether. We need to clean house and prepare, or we aren’t going to survive. The Puppies will help us, but sooner or later we’re going to have to stand on our own two feet. Sooner rather than later. We need to become a new Sparta.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“By any means necessary. Look, we lost a hundred and sixty million Americans, and ninety-nine percent were innocents who didn’t deserve what happened to them…”

“More like ninety-five percent. At least eight million of them needed killing. In my humble opinion.”

“Maybe. But the point is, most of the people who would be against the changes I’m going to institute are gone. We’re going to have to rearm, implement the new technologies we just got, and gird our ever-loving loins for war. One of the first things I’m doing is reinstituting the draft. Universal and mandatory. Everyone serves. Everyone spends a couple years in uniform, getting the stupid knocked out of them. Men and women. Ladies got the vote, so they get to put on combat boots and march while some drill instructor yells at them.”

“Good luck getting that passed.”

“There is no Congress. There is no Supreme Court. The only effective source of law and order in the country is the military, plus a handful of state governments. And yeah, that means getting around the Posse Comitatus, but my new Attorney General’s on the job. You might know him; he did some sci-fi writing himself. Luis Corazao.”

“The Mountain? The NRA activist?”

“And gun dealer. And lawyer. And writer. Talented guy. Took some doing, but he’s on board. Pro tem, since we don’t have enough congresscritters to do confirmation hearings, or fill a short bus for that matter. And that’s fine. It’s pen-and-phone time, and I’ve got the pen and the phone. And the trigger-pullers to make it stick.”

“That Portagee bastard’s got my vote. You probably should start reading some SF yourself. Start with Starship Troopers.”

“Oh, I read that one a while back. Lots of good ideas there.”

“You’re going to take an axe to the Constitution, aren’t you?”

“The Constitution was dead before fucking E.T. came a-knocking. Between ‘penumbras and emanations’ and ‘living Constitution’ and all that other bullshit, it was on its way out. The old America was dying, and now it’s dead. Before I go, I’m going to leave behind a new America. One that can survive in the universe we happen to inhabit, not the fantasy land libtards and proglodytes kept dreaming of, all while they cheerfully dismantled our civilization, with no guarantees whatever replaced it would be one iota better.”

“Don’t have to convince me, Al. I’m the one who said eight million needed killing. Which is why you don’t want me in charge of anything major. Most of my solutions come in 9mm Parabellum.”

“I’m hoping most fuckheads will appreciate the gravity of the situation. The rest… We’ll see.”

“We’ll see,” Tyson agreed. I’ve got a little list. Most of the names are crossed off already, but not all. “Tell me more about the aliens.”

 “Turns out the galaxy’s a nasty neighborhood, Ty. Wait till you get briefed on all the things the Puppies are telling us. It’s Might Makes Right all the way down.”

“So there’s no Prime Directive? No congenial peace-loving aliens?”

“Heh. I hated Star Trek when I was a kid. No. It’s nineteenth-century-style international politics. To the winner go the spoils. Primitive species are forced into trade agreements at gunpoint, or exterminated without a second thought. The lucky ones get sort of adopted by the nicer aliens, like the Puppies. In this case, we’re getting a great deal of help, because the Puppies accidentally led the Snakes – the motherfuckers who wiped out half the planet – here, and they feel they owe us.”

Is that so? Then, yeah, hound-dogs. You owe us.

“So there’s no rules at all?” he said out loud. “That’s rough. What’s stopping the Snakes from dropping a dinosaur-killer asteroid to finish us off?”

“There are some rules. Can’t inflict major damage to a planet’s biosphere, apparently. That’s why they didn’t use nukes or big rocks; their city-busters are designed to exterminate the tool-users while leaving most everything intact. Things like bioweapons aren’t allowed, or ‘grey goo,’ whatever that is.”

“You don’t want to know. Who enforces the law?”

“The Puppies were a little vague about it. Elders of the Universe or the fucking Q Continuum, something like that. Whoever it is, they mostly leave the Starfarers – the guys with starships – alone, as long as they stick to some very loose rules.”

“Good enough.” Tyson thought about it for a second, but the answer was never really in doubt. “All right, Al. You’ve got me, for whatever it’s worth. I think I know what we need to do.”

“I thought as much. We can’t afford second-guessers or self-haters to get in the way.”

“It’s not going to be pretty. The cure might be almost as bad as the disease.”

Hewer’s expression hardened. “As long as we survive and we carve a place for us among the stars, I don’t care. Three hundred years from now, college professors can denounce me as an evil tyrant. And that’s fine, because that means our species will be around three hundred years from now.”

Tyson nodded.

“Let’s go to work.”

One

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

One step at a time.

USWMC First Lieutenant Peter Fromm’s left leg wasn’t working right, but he limped along, ignoring the stabbing pain that flared up with every shuffling stride. The artificial muscles in his combat suit weren’t working anymore, and the combined weight of his body armor and the unconscious form of Captain Chastain was becoming unbearable. Fromm’s desperate dash for cover with a body draped over his shoulders had quickly turned into a limping walk. Even hunched over, he knew he was too high off the ground, making a perfect target, but he also knew that if he went down he would just lie there.

One step at a time.

Nothing else mattered. He had to reach the entrenchments ahead of him, had to save the captain’s life. The CO of Charlie Company was a casualty only because Fromm had knocked him unconscious less than an hour ago. He’d had good reasons, but he couldn’t leave the man to die, even if the first thing he did upon waking up would be to order Fromm’s arrest.

Friendly fire ahead of him, flashes like fireflies in the night. Hostile fire behind him, the whine of ionizing charges followed by loud explosions whenever charged particle bursts or laser beams hit something solid. His force fields were down, and the only thing between him and the storm of deadly energies raining all around was his body armor, which might stop a hit, but most likely would not.

Just a few more steps.

A stray laser pulse from a Lamprey grav tank clipped him from behind.

There was one more thing standing between him and certain death: the limp form of Captain Chastain slung on his back. The unconscious officer he’d been carrying to safety burned under the megawatt glare of the Lamprey weapon. Sublimated armor, flesh and bone erupted in an explosion that smashed Fromm to the ground.

His mouth was full of blood. He couldn’t breathe.

I’m dying, was his last thought before the universe vanished.

* * *

Captain Peter Fromm, United Stars Warp Marine Corps, woke up with a start, memories of blood and breath still vivid in his mind.

He was safe. Astarte-Three was hundreds of parsecs away. The ‘police action’ that had decimated his company and led to the death of its commander was over, and peace reigned in the galaxy. He was safe.

“We’re putting you in a quiet spot out in the galactic boondocks until we figure out what to do with you.”

Colonel Macwhirter’s words echoed in Fromm’s mind as he watched the spectacle below the descending shuttle.

Uncontrolled fires ringed Kirosha’s capital city. Some quiet spot.

Unrest and warfare were common features in primmie planets even before making contact with a Starfaring civilization, and things usually got even more lively afterwards. The technological and sociological shocks of First Contact always brought about unintended consequences.

Earth’s own First Contact had been particularly harsh. Over sixty percent of the planet’s population had died within hours of discovering humanity was not alone in the universe. The survivors had adapted, even thrived in the aftermath, but it’d been a rough few decades. Fromm’s great-grandfather had shared lots of stories with him before passing on, shortly after his hundred and seventy-sixth birthday. Super-Gramp’s depictions of First Contact had made a much greater impression than any history lesson: the blooming fire-domes that marked the deaths of most cities on the planet; the struggle to survive amidst privation and unrest; nights spent shivering in the dark. Given that, Fromm wasn’t terribly sympathetic to the current socio-economic woes of Jasper-Five’s natives.

A closer look revealed the fires were outside the capital city proper. Fromm’s imp – the implanted cybernetic systems linked directly to his nervous system – laid a map schematic over the visual feed from the shuttle as it orbited the only spaceship-rated landing facility on the planet, waiting for clearance. The spaceport wasn’t exactly bustling with traffic, but its facilities could handle only one landing at a time. A Wyrm Cargo Globe had arrived shortly before the human freighter that had brought Fromm to his new posting, which meant a wait of half an hour if not longer until the alien vessel was unloaded and the landing pad cleared. Fromm could imagine the grumbling in the shuttle’s cockpit about spent fuel and wasted man-hours. Civvie freighter crews owned shares in their ships: all expenses literally came out of their pockets.

The delay gave him time to study his briefing packet and compare it to the reality he’d soon experience first hand.

Jasper-Five was almost identical to Earth, with a mostly-compatible Class Two biosphere and a dominant tool-using species. A pretty accomplished species, as a matter of fact. It had developed technologies roughly comparable to Earth’s first century before First Contact, or the twentieth century in the old calendar. Most sophonts in the galaxy never advanced beyond the Iron Age (the vast majority stayed at Paleolithic levels, as a matter of fact) before a Starfarer species showed up and uplifted, enslaved or exterminated them. Earth and Jasper-Five were exceptions to the rule.

The planet had been discovered some twenty years ago by an American survey ship, and First Contact had been established shortly after. The United Stars had placed the system and its inhabited fifth planet under its protection and largely ignored it, until a follow-up survey had discovered large deposits of rare earths, among the most valuable commodities in the galaxy. While asteroid mining provided most of America’s rare earth needs, new sources were always in demand. Jasper-Five’s lanthanide deposits were concentrated in one of the planet’s continents, dominated by the Kingdom of Kirosha.

While some Starfaring civilizations would have just seized the kingdom’s mineral wealth by force, the USA found it easier to negotiate with the locals for mining rights, providing them with hard currency they could use to improve their technology and living standards far beyond what they had before First Contact. It was cheaper than outright conquest, and in the future might provide the US with a client species that might serve as an eventual ally. The US could always use more friends in a largely hostile galaxy.

Over the ensuing two decades, Kirosha had changed a great deal; the formerly insular, relatively backward kingdom had become the most powerful nation on the planet. Its newfound wealth had allowed it to purchase the best military equipment available from its neighbors (no Starfarer was willing to sell them high-tech weaponry for the time being) and modernize their kingdom.

From the smoke dotting the edges of the city, it looked like the changes had brought their share of problems as well.

The fires were mostly concentrated on a ring of shantytowns that had accrued around the city proper like crystals in a supersaturated solution. The briefings didn’t provide any reasons as to why the locals seemed intent on arson as a form of protest. Fromm would have to figure that out by himself after he made landfall. He couldn’t even query his own command or the Embassy beforehand, not with two rival Starfarer delegations in place, quite capable of eavesdropping on any but the most heavily-encrypted communications.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the shuttle’s pilot announced. “We’ve been authorized to land, and will be arriving in under five minutes. Be advised; there are reports of civil unrest throughout the capital. Transport to the Foreigner Enclave has been provided for everyone, courtesy of Caterpillar, Inc and Star Mining Enterprises. Venturing outside the Enclave is not recommended. If you must go into the city proper, make sure you do so in groups. Things are a bit rough out there. Hope you had a good trip. God Bless America.”

“God Bless America,” the passengers chorused back. A couple of remfie suits sitting near the captain did so while rolling their eyes in jaded cynicism, but the miners, technicians and machinery operators who comprised the majority of the passengers said the words with the mildly bored sincerity of people raised to love God, Flag and Country from earliest childhood. Fromm’s own response was heartfelt, but tempered with the knowledge of the price involved in upholding those words. God might wish America His best, but He left most of the heavy lifting in the hands of mere mortals like Fromm and his beloved Corps.

There was the usual rapid shift in pressure as the shuttle dropped the last several hundred feet towards the ground, throwing itself on the mercy of the gravity grapples dirtside. The abrupt motion slowed down during the last few seconds, and the hundred-ton vehicle came down in a gentle, almost imperceptible motion. Fromm grabbed his personal satchel from the overhead compartment. His orders had come so abruptly that he’d left most of his meager possessions behind; they would follow him here eventually, which given the remoteness of his new posting meant weeks, if not months. On the other hand, a few weeks ago he’d fully expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars, which given the capital nature of his crimes was likely to be a very short time. A hasty posting to a planet in the ass-end of nowhere was a much better alternative.

The Marine took a deep breath as he stepped onto Jasper-Five’s soil for the first time. It was a bit of a ritual he had, marking his first impression of each new world he visited. Every planet was slightly different, even Full Goldie worlds like this one, where conditions were nearly identical to Earth’s. ‘Nearly’ always turned out to be a rather elastic term. In this case, there was a hint of spice in the air, likely coming from the cultivated fields beyond the spaceport, vast expanses of some kind of yellow-capped plant, broken by scattered copses of leafy trees. Mixed in with the fragrance of the local flora was a faint smell of burning things, coming from the capital city thirty klicks away.

He looked up. A huge moon was clearly visible in the mid-morning sky, easily four, five times larger than Earth’s. His briefing classified it as a planet, actually, but it looked like Earth’s Moon: a white, pockmarked disk, bereft of an atmosphere and life. The sky surrounding it was a blue so light it faded to white in places. Out in the distance, a line of snow-capped mountains filled the horizon. The temperature felt cool to his skin; his imp helpfully reported it was fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit at the moment, with a high of sixty-three and a low nighttime temp of fifty-two degrees. Not too bad.

The landing pad was a flat concrete circle a quarter of a mile wide and sixty feet tall, surrounded by the squat shapes of the port’s landing grapples. Loading cranes and trucks moved towards the shuttle’s cargo hold as the passengers disembarked. A fenced pedestrian path led to a flight of stairs and a lower level where ground transport was located. About a dozen humans and twice as many locals were waiting there.

His imp highlighted one of them: a woman in her mid-thirties, her light brown hair covered under a colorful shawl thrown over a utilitarian civvie outfit, a jacket over pants tucked into leather boots with sensible rubber soles, dressy but perfectly good for walking and running. The imp ran an overlay onto his field of vision, containing all her basic data: Heather Tamsin McClintock, Department of State, Deputy Charge D’affaires of the US Embassy on Jasper-Five. Her Facettergram profile was set to private; so was her curriculum vitae. Spook, he decided as she walked up towards him, a pro forma smile on her face.

Normally, he would have expected to be met by his platoon sergeant and a driver, maybe with a squad’s worth of grunts if an escort was deemed necessary. Nothing about this situation was normal.

“Captain Fromm,” she said, shaking his hand. Her nails were short, her grip strong, indicating someone who worked with her hands at least some of the time, if only for physical fitness purposes.

“Pleased to meet you, Ms. McClintock.” Imps made personal introductions largely superfluous, except for politeness’ sake, which remained rather important.

“Ambassador Llewellyn wanted to keep all military forces at the embassy, due to security concerns,” McClintock said, answering Fromm’s unspoken question. “Given the current situation, he deemed them necessary for the protection of the Foreigners’ Enclave.”

“I see,” Fromm said. What the hell’s going on in here?

“I’ll brief you in the car.” She looked at his satchel. “Is that all your luggage?”

He nodded, noting with some envy that most of his fellow passengers were dragging hundreds of pounds of baggage on their mag-lev carriers. It was nice to have stuff.

“You carrying?” she asked.

 “Colt PPW.” The 3mm pistol was standard Marine issue. Fromm could not imagine being out and about without a gun. It’d be like forgetting to wear pants in public.

Her smile became harsher and sincerer at the same time. “Good. You probably won’t need it for the trip to the Enclave, but you know how it goes.”

Fromm nodded. Better to have a weapon you didn’t need, than need a weapon you didn’t have.

When you needed a weapon, you needed it very badly.

Two

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

Heather McClintock led the newly-minted Marine captain to the embassy car. The locally-produced four-wheeler was overbuilt and massive, a civvie version of a Kiroshan military vehicle with off-road capability. It was painted a light sky blue, a color that indicated high-caste ownership. Her staff driver was leaning against the car. He was of the same species as the denizens of the Kingdom, but from a different nationality and ethnicity. The locals called themselves Kirosha, a term that covered the capital city, the greater nation-state, and its citizens, not unlike Earth’s Rome. Her driver’s name was Locquar, and he was the most trusted member of her staff. Among other reasons, because he wasn’t Kirosha, but a foreigner, as loathed and hated by the locals as any other aliens.

Like most sophonts from Class Two biospheres, the natives of Jasper-Five were humanoid in shape and general biology. They were bipeds with opposable thumbs on their four-fingered hands, with body size and mass well within human ranges. Their skin had a reddish tint, ranging from a deep scarlet to a light flamingo pink, the lighter varieties being most common among the Kirosha; they had very little body hair, concentrated mainly on a ridge beginning at the top of their heads and running down to the small of their backs. Their large eyes and smooth heart-shaped faces gave them a cartoonish appearance to human sensibilities.

Locquar’s skin was a deep scarlet, which clearly marked him as an outsider. He also shaved his ridge-hair, as was the custom of his tribal group but was considered barbaric by the locals. His small mouth was set in what Kirosha would consider a grim expression and humans would perceive as a comical moue.

“Captain Fromm, this is Locquar Asthan, Embassy Staff.”

To her surprise, Fromm squatted down, hands upraised in a standard Kirosha greeting, instead of trying to shake hands American fashion, as both she and Locquar had expected. The jarhead had done his homework, which put him well ahead of many Americans, who mostly assumed it was the locals’ job to learn their customs and language. The squat was awkward – human leg joints couldn’t quite reproduce the Kirosha motion – and he showed more deference than appropriate to the driver, who was technically three social rungs beneath him. The gesture was still miles better than what most State Department employees usually managed, let alone the other two thousand-plus humans currently dwelling on the planet. Cultural sensibility was not high on the list of US priorities. Understandable, given that humans were viewed largely as barbaric parvenus in Starfarer society and treated with contempt, but often regrettable. The only other human polity, the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was even worse; being largely Earth-bound, its behavior wasn’t readily apparent across the stars, however.

Locquar returned the squat – the greeting wasn’t what his people used, but he was well-versed in Kirosha mores – and batted his eyelashes at the Marine, the equivalent of a warm smile.

“It is a fine day, is it not?” Fromm said in Kiroshan, or tried to.

“It is, and also a pleasure to meet you, Captain,” Locquar said in English, which he could manage better than humans could speak the local languages; the natives’ audible range was a little past what human vocal chords could manage without mechanical aid. Heather’s throat implants, courtesy of the US Embassy, allowed her to talk like a native.

“We’ll leave as soon as everybody’s ready,” she said. The colorfully-painted bus Caterpillar Inc. had provided for its employees was filling up fast; a van hired by Star Mining Enterprises was collecting its own share of the shuttle’s passengers. They all had agreed to leave together. Safety in numbers. Things had gotten bad enough that no Starfarer dared leave the Enclave alone; two AmCits had been injured in separate incidents during the past week, and the Kirosha authorities didn’t seem to be in a hurry to round up any suspects. The arriving human passengers would travel in a convoy comprising the bus, van, and Heather’s embassy vehicle, sandwiched between two escort cars manned by armed private contractors.

Fromm spotted the lead and chase cars just before they drove off. “I guess it’s time for that briefing.”

“I’m sending chapter-and-verse to your imp,” she said. Analyzing that information would take time, however, so she went on. “The gist of it is, a peasant rebellion has been simmering for several months. At first it was limited to the outlying provinces, especially southwest from here, but the discontent has spread to the capital.”

“I see,” Fromm said, looking out the car windows. He nodded towards the smoke cresting over the horizon. “When did that start?”

“They set the first fires two days ago. You’d have been in warp-transit then.”

“Yes. A twenty-hour warp jump, New Parris to Lahiri, a day in-system, and then caught an inbound freighter here for an extra eight hours.”  

New Parris was a harsh, barely inhabitable planet the Warp Marine Corps had adopted as its training and staging center. The Lahiri star system had no planets at all, but its neutron star was a major warp nexus, with space-time ‘valleys’ that led to dozens of other systems, including Jasper. A total of twenty-eight hours’ warp travel over three days was no picnic, but the Marine seemed to have handled the trip well.

“What’s the rebels’ beef with the government?” he asked.

“The Crown has been raising taxes to modernize its armed forces for some time, which wouldn’t have been so bad if a drought hadn’t hit half the continent a year ago. And there’s been the usual problems with rapid modernization: peasants being displaced by farm machinery and discovering factory work is not to their taste, that sort of thing. The main issue is that a faction within the Kirosha ruling class is manipulating the rebels into blaming foreigners for all their problems.”

“Not a big leap, since Kirosha hate just about everyone who doesn’t look like them, right? The info files I got made that clear.”

Heather nodded. “Pretty much. Their words for ‘foreign’ and ‘wrong’ are closely related. ‘Foreigner’ also translates as ‘evil.’ If you aren’t Kirosha, you’re a demon, basically. Humans and any other Starfarer species are known as Star Devils.”

“They sound like a great bunch of guys.”

“They’re kind to their children, and love their pets. But if you’re an outsider, watch out. The Preserver faction hates the influence Star Devils have over the Kingdom’s affairs. Everything from the new mines to missionaries opening hospitals, schools and orphanages. And it’s using the rebels against us.”

“This is a fucking mess,” Fromm said. “Why are we letting this happen?”

“Money and politics. We don’t want to handle the expenses necessary to assume direct control of the country, for one; it’d likely cost more than what we’re getting from the mines. And the Kirosha might turn to the Wyrashat or Vehelians for protection, which could lead to tensions between us. Which means we’re treading softly, for now.”

“Sounds awesome.”

“And you’re the senior military officer on site. Congratulations,” Heather said.

The Marine probably wasn’t the right man for the job at hand. Then again, no recently-promoted captain was meant to handle something with the makings of an interstellar incident. Unfortunately, Ambassador Llewellyn wasn’t up to the task, either, in Heather’s opinion. The developing situation was above everyone’s pay grade and, worse, their competency level.

They fell silent while Fromm mulled things over and accessed the raw data she’d uploaded into his computer implant. He started outlining some key data out loud, seeking confirmation and elaboration form her.

“All right. There are over two thousand Americans on Jasper-Five: about two hundred Embassy personnel and dependents, the rest either corporate employees or missionaries of assorted denominations, plus about two hundred military contractors.”

She nodded. “Plus a few odds and sorts, raising the total human presence on Jasper-Five to twenty-five hundred or so. About three hundred are working in the main mining operation on the Neesha Valley, about five hundred clicks inland. They should be safe enough there; the mines are isolated and far away from population centers. About half the military contractors on the planet are out there, providing security.”

“Got it. If things go wrong, the US military presence consists of my Marine contingent: a platoon plus a number of attached units, including the original Marine Security Detachment: seventy-eight personnel total.”

“There is also a hundred or so military contractors in the capital, an Enclave constabulary force with fifty-two peace officers, and a hundred and eighty-two Navy personnel, including thirty master-at-arms ratings, mostly stationed at the spaceport.”

“I guess that’s better than nothing,” Fromm said. Technically, his command’s sole mission was to protect the embassy. In practice, he and his men might be called upon to help any Americans in need.

“At least almost everybody is in one place. A lot of people were working on assorted projects outside the capital, but after the first riot they’ve been advised to confine themselves to the Enclave. Which has caused no end of trouble; housing is scarce, and the area is packed with idle miners and machinery operators, not exactly the most placid folk. The constabulary force is having trouble keeping order.”

“I hope nobody thinks my Marines can help with that.”

“Not as far as I know. In fact, nobody at the embassy really knows what to do with your unit. The ambassador isn’t happy about the quote-unquote ‘needless expense.’ We got the reinforced platoon nine months ago; before that, our Marine Security Detachment consisted of nine men. The assignment happened over the ambassador’s protests, mostly because it’s put a big crimp on the budget even after additional funds were assigned for the platoon’s upkeep. He’d much rather spend the money on social functions.”

“Remfie,” Fromm muttered. Not the smartest thing to say, calling an accredited ambassador a Rear-Echelon Motherfucker, but Heather appreciated the gesture. She understood; he was placing her in a position of trust, because he needed somebody to trust among the Embassy’s weenies, or what was likely to be a nearly impossible mission could cross out the ‘nearly’ part.

“He is,” she admitted with a rueful grin. “Still doesn’t explain why we got reinforcements nobody asked for, unless someone in higher has figured out a way to foresee the future and anticipated we’d be having problems.”

“No, it had nothing to do with local conditions,” Fromm said.

“Budgetary?”

“You got it. The Corps had to disband five Marine Expeditionary Units after Congress overrode President Hewer’s veto and initiated cutbacks. A lot of their personnel got discharged, but a few units ended up distributed in penny-packets around the galaxy, with their upkeep paid for by the Marine Security Detachment budget. The Corp didn’t want to lose the trained cadre those troops represented, and this way the State Department pays for most of their upkeep. The Congress-Rats love the State Department, so they didn’t cut its budget.”

“Ah.” Heather had suspected something along those lines, but delving in Marine Corps’ politics wasn’t her job. Her professional curiosity was largely focused on the affairs of non-humans. “Sneaky,” she added appreciatively.

“We’re going to need those units,” Fromm said. “The Lampreys got slapped down hard on Astarte-Three, but they aren’t done playing games. I was there. I…”

The Marine froze for a second, his eyes focused on something only he could see.

“True enough,” Heather said, breaking the awkward silence. Fromm snapped out of it and turned his attention back on her.

Her own info on interstellar affairs was more detailed than a Marine captain was cleared for, and she agreed with his estimate. Of course, Fromm’s knowledge was of a far more personal nature; he’d lost most of his platoon during the skirmish on Astarte-Three. Said ‘skirmish’ had decimated a Marine Expeditionary Unit and almost sparked a full-fledged war with the Lhan Arkh – better known as the Lampreys – and their client races, which included the few Snakes left in the galaxy.

“Of course, none of that matters here. We’re nowhere near the Lhan Arkh’s sphere of influence,” she concluded.

“Yeah. Higher thought this would be a nice quiet spot to stash me away for the time being.”

The events at Astarte-Three were on the public record, as were Captain Fromm’s promotion and commendations resulting from the incident. Something else, something unofficial, had led to his transfer to the ass-end of nowhere, not to mention a command below his new pay grade: a reinforced platoon did not a company make. She’d have to do a little digging to find out more.  

The captain took a moment to check out the countryside as they drove on. The bucolic scenery was pleasant enough: Kirosha children in colorful knee-length tunics ran through orderly rows of gold-tinged Jusha; their antics were both work and play, serving to scare an assortment of flying critters away from the food-bearing plants. Jusha’s nut-like seeds were the principal staple of the continent, being used for everything from bread and noodles to a variety of alcoholic beverages, some of which were quite pleasant to human tastes, even the ones who also were violent emetics to human metabolisms. New visitors to Jasper-Five were warned not to consume any drinks before using their implants to run chem tests on them. A few practical jokers loved to offer newcomers the bad stuff. That didn’t apply to Marines, though: their digestive nanites would strip anything even remotely organic of any toxins and allow its nutrients to be absorbed. Marines could almost literally make a meal out of mud and cardboard.

“It looks peaceful enough around here,” Fromm said.

“It normally is. But there’s signs of trouble even in the country. Coming up in a couple minutes, as a matter of fact. The village to the left of the road.”

A makeshift camp had been erected near the village, haphazardly arranged canvas tents contrasting with the neat rows of wooden houses that served as the peasants’ permanent dwellings. A group of about twenty Kirosha, mostly males, were gathered on a fallow field nearby, practicing with spears, swords, throwing axes and weaponized farm implements. They all wore black tunics emblazoned with a distinctive sigil: a hand clenching a set of spiked brass-knuckles.

“Meet the Final Blow Society. Or the Order of the Coup-de-Grace, if you will,” Heather said as they drove by. A few of the black-clad warriors stopped their drill to look at the passing vehicles. Her hand instinctively reached for the shoulder holster under her jacket before she stopped herself. They hadn’t attacked her car on its way to the spaceport, and they probably wouldn’t attack them now, either. The armed peasants’ glares were definitely unfriendly, though.

 “One of the rebel groups?”

“The largest one. They’ve been flocking to the capital over the last few days, allegedly to present their grievances to the Crown. They are suspected in participating in the arsons plaguing the shantytowns around the capital, but either their sponsors are protecting them or the authorities are choosing not to suppress them.”

“And all they’ve got is spears and swords?”

“Yes, for the most part. There’s been a few snipers at work in the slums, shooting at firemen, that sort of thing. The Crown has very strict laws on firearm ownership, so those weapons must have been stolen from the police or military.”

“When I see a bunch of people wearing the same colors, it says ‘military’ to me.”

“The Kingdom is willing to look the other way as long as they pretend to be a martial arts club.”

“Who’s paying for all of this?” Fromm asked. “The uniforms, the weapons, the food they eat? Can’t be cheap, having a bunch of peons running around playing with sticks instead of raising crops or digging ditches.”

“The food’s easy: they ask for ‘voluntary’ contributions from nearby villages, which come out of whatever is left after the royal tax men get their cut. The rest comes from whoever is sponsoring them. The Preserver faction is the likely culprit. It is composed mainly of high-ranking bureaucrats, the Magistrate class, along with a smattering of aristocrats.”

“Rats will be rats,” Fromm said.

The motorcade left the village and the gang of martial artists behind. The smoke pillars up ahead grew larger. Heather saw Fromm was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing.

“The fires are nowhere near our designate route,” she said.

The slums and the fires beneath the rising smoke were hidden from sight by a series of hills, each topped by a small fort and a watchtower. Fromm switched his attention to the fortifications as they drove past them. The ones nearest the road were relatively modern, their squatting, sloped walls designed to deflect cannonballs. Soldiers in colorful blue and pink uniforms and peaked caps milled atop the forts’ battlements; their gates were closed, and cannon and machinegun barrels poked behind the crenellations above, further protected by metal gun shields.

“Sixty-millimeter rifled artillery,” Fromm said, mouthing the specs his imp gave him. “Antiquated even by local standards, but almost as good as French seventy-fives from the second century BFC. And eleven millimeter heavy machineguns. Enough to penetrate standard infantry force fields after ten, fifteen direct hits. The locals really got far on their own, technologically speaking.”

“Good thing you won’t have to fight them, then,” she said.

“My job is to assess capabilities. Intent I leave to the politicians.”

“Fair enough. And although we aren’t formally allied with the Kingdom, we do have a trade agreement and full diplomatic ties.”

“You know who had all kinds of trade agreements and full diplomatic ties? France and Germany, just before they went to war with each other.”

“Sure, but neither France nor Germany could blast every enemy city to cinders.”

“Neither can we, not right this second. That would take at least a corvette in orbit,” Fromm said as the car passed the line of fortifications and drove past the suburbs, white-washed houses with green triangular roofs and black-and-red trimming, surrounded by similarly-decorated walls. Road traffic was strangely sparse for this time of day, Heather noticed. “We have no Fleet assets in-system, last I checked.”

“There is the squadron at Lahiri. That’s eight hours’ warp-transit away. None of the nations on Jasper-Five have any space assets beyond the weather and communication satellites we sold Kirosha, none of which are armed. The local tech is below even what Earth had during First Contact. They are completely helpless against us.”

“How about the other Starfarers in the area? Our good friends, the Wyrms and the Ovals?”

“The Wyrashat and the Vehelians have trade concessions and an embassy and a consulate, respectively,” she said, pointedly using the two species’ proper names rather than the borderline-insulting slang terms. “They have no military vessels anywhere near us.”

“They’ve got about five hundred people apiece in the Enclave, though,” Fromm said after checking with his imp. “And a short company’s worth of soldiers each.”

“A Velehian security detachment, and a Wyrashat Honor Guard. Hardly a threat. Hold on,” she said as her imp chimed in with a call from the Ambassador. She answered it.

Javier Llewellyn’s disembodied head appeared in front of her, the image inputted directly into her visual cortex by her imp.

“I just received a request from Envoy Lisst,” the Ambassador said, not bothering with any pleasantries before getting to the point, as was his wont when dealing with underlings and other inconsequential people. “He’s returning from the Royal Palace following a meeting with Her Royal Highness and would like to join your convoy on the way back to the Enclave. Security concerns.”

“We can rendezvous with him in a few minutes, as long as the roads are clear,” Heather said.

“Do so. Convey my regards to the Envoy.”

Llewellyn’s projection disappeared.

Heather turned to Fromm. “Speaking of the Vehelians, their Envoy wants to join our little parade.”

“Guess he’s worried,” Fromm said.

“With good reason. Something is wrong.”

Heather contacted all the vehicles in the convoy; the contractors in the escort cars weren’t happy about the detour, but a call to the Caterpillar top exec took care of their complaints.

The street they were on was wide and straight, but the rest of the city was a maze of narrow, twisting little paths weaving between wood and brick buildings, mostly three and four-story structures with peaked roofs that were clearly attempts to ape the more prosperous houses in the suburbs. Things didn’t look normal, though.

When she’d left for the spaceport, the city of Kirosha had been teeming with people, mostly on foot or on bicycles and tricycles, along with a few internal combustion cars reserved for the well-to-do. The streets were curiously empty now; the few Kirosha she could see – men in their traditional wide trousers, flowerpot or pointy hats and colorful tunics, women similarly clad except for shawls covering their heads and shoulders instead of hats – were clearly in a hurry to be somewhere else. A few of them were even running, something the dignity-conscious Kirosha only did when in fear of their lives.

“Are we going too far out of our way to pick up the ETs?” Fromm asked.

“A few minutes. At least traffic won’t be an issue.”

The street they were on – Triumphal Thoroughfare One – led straight to the Palace Complex, series of buildings and monuments that had started out as a fortress on top of a hill and had grown in leaps and bounds as successive rulers put their own stamp on it. Its principal building was the Royal Ziggurat, a flat-topped four-hundred-foot tall pyramid off to the side of the original hill, painted a bright canary yellow the Kirosha considered beautiful and Heather found painful to look at. The complex was surrounded by its own fortifications, an old-fashioned curtain wall with towers placed every hundred feet and watchful Royal Guardsmen standing on its battlements. Far more guardsmen than normal, Heather noticed.

The main gates to the palace were still open, however, and two black-painted cars emerged from them, each vehicle flying a little banner festooned with the colorful dark-blue and gold sigils of the O-Vehel Commonwealth. Heather’s imp chimed again.

“Greetings and good health, Ms. McClintock,” Envoy Lisst’s projection said in perfect English, or rather, his implant did. Vehelian imps were more sophisticated than anything humans could manufacture themselves: their implanted nano-chips could access the Envoy’s thoughts and translate them into any of the seventeen Prime Languages of the known galaxy. Just as well; to human ears, Vehelian speech sounded like an unintelligible collection of growls and hisses.

Vehelian heads looked like large eggs, their noses and mouths so flat they appeared to be drawn on their surface; their only other facial features were rows of little bumps that the human eye could barely discern but which were the primary way for the species to recognize each other and to express emotions. Heather was a trained exo-diplomat; she could read the slight discoloration in the upper row of bumps over the Envoy’s eyes as clear signs of worry.

“And good health to you,” she said. “We welcome the chance to render assistance. Please follow my car, and we will hopefully reach the Enclave without incident.”

“May hope become fact, and bless you for your kindness.”

“You honor me,” Heather said. Most VIPs wouldn’t have personally addressed a mid-level flunky like herself, but the Vehelians were rather informal in such matters, which made them a rarity in Starfarer society.

Her imp talked to their imps, and the two limos put themselves in the center of the formation, between Heather’s car and the bus, driving single file as they turned from Triumphant Thoroughfare One to the Road of Good Fortune, which would lead them straight to the Enclave. Problem was, there were a few questionable neighborhoods along the way.

As the motorcade left the palace grounds, it travelled through more built-up areas, residential buildings with shops on their lower levels, tightly packed except for the occasional park or plaza opening little clearings in the warren-like mass. One such plaza was empty; gone were the usual bunch of peddlers, laborers and beggars. Drums and gongs started playing as they drove by, however, and she spotted men in black tunics and brass-knuckle symbols coming out of nearby buildings. Coming out at a run.

“Trouble,” she said, moments before a rocket-propelled grenade struck the lead car.

Three

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

The new skipper showed up just in time to ruin Lance Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison’s card game. The death and mayhem that followed were just par for the course.

In Russell’s experience, all officers had lousy timing. The former CO of Third Platoon had been an okay guy for a First Lieutenant, but he’d managed to walk right in front of a speeding Ruddy motorcar. Sad way to buy the farm, run down like a dog on the street, but those were the breaks.

“Shuffle up and deal already,” Russell told fellow Lance Corporal Conroy, who was wrinkling his nose and casting glances out the window of the break room. Russell understood Conroy’s worries. He could smell the not-so-distant fires, too. The Ruddies were aliens, but their atmo and chemistry were Class Two, just like humans, even though they looked more like animated red-skinned dolls than people. Their food was even edible, not that was an issue for Marines. The fires that were burning outside the big city smelled just like they would in a human world.

And just like in a human world, the smell of arson was the smell of war. Things were getting hairy on Jasper-Five.

Until recently, their current deployment hadn’t been too bad. Russell didn’t like having his platoon out by itself, but life away from a regular base had its benefits if you weren’t married or otherwise encumbered. The food was damn better, for one; the Marines didn’t have a mess hall, so they ate at the Embassy’s cafeteria, where the chow was miles better than any tray-rats he’d ever had on base. And there were no MPs to worry about, just a bunch of ‘constables’ who treated the Marines with kid gloves. The platoon sergeant ran a tight ship, granted, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and that meant the more creative grunts like Russell and his gang had plenty of opportunities for extracurricular activities.

Conroy shook his head and finished shuffling the cards. Russell had checked the deck himself, making sure there were no marks on them. Using your imps to cheat was a tradition as old as the Warp Marine Corps itself. The same micro-implants that let the soldiers do all kind of nifty things to the enemy also made them hell to supervise in peacetime. Even the fact that imps could record every second of your life wasn’t enough to stop them; there were ways around that, if you had a creative mind.

“Smells like the Ruddies are having a party,” said the one private at the table. PFC Raymond Gonzaga was a little rat-faced guy who’d been busted down the ranks a good dozen times. Good guy when the chips were down, but a complete disaster during peacetime.

Russell was like that, too. He’d made it all the way to E-5 before he’d been caught trying to catch a ride back to base while naked, drunk as a skunk and in the company of a couple of bug-eyed tentacle-waving aliens – he never found out what species – who were also drunk. The details of the escapade remained hazy (he’d disabled his imp’s recorder at some point and whatever he’d taken had done a number on his short-term memory), but it’d earned him several Ninja Punches, including a demotion back to Private First Class.

Overall, the gun club had been good for him, though, non-judicial punishments and all. He’d put in twenty years already, starting at age sixteen, when he’d left his former life as a gangsta in the Zoo and used his Obligatory Service Term as a springboard into the fleet. Once he figured his way around the bullshit and discovered that the Corps valued his talent for killing people and breaking things, he realized he had found his calling.

His plan was to put fifty years in, which guaranteed him a twenty-five-year pension. That and a few shady dealings on the side would allow him to buy a bar and spend a couple or more decades having fun. Unless things got boring enough to make him want to go back to the Corps. Or the twenty-five-year pension ran out and he needed another source of income. Nobody was sure how long humans could last, now that they’d worked out most of the kinks on life-extension meds. One of the first casualties of life-ex had been lifetime pensions. Now you got back half the time you put in. Maybe he’d end up serving another fifty years in the Corps after taking two decades off.

Or maybe he’d switch outfits. Some people ended up serving in every branch of the service, from the shit ones like the Army or Coast Guard all the way to the Navy. Russell didn’t know how well he might do as a bubblehead – he hadn’t met many bubblies he liked – but you never knew till you tried.

“They’re burning down the slums,” Russell said, setting aside his plans for the future. “Not our problem. Enclave’s the safest place to be in the damn planet, other than the Ruddy Queen’s bedroom.”

He didn’t mind that the guys were worried about what was going on outside the Enclave. Worried grunts made stupid bets, which meant he might be able to get out of the hole he’d dug for himself. A hundred bucks in the red so far, which was a good half a week’s pay for a lowly Lance. Sure, a dollar went pretty far Ruddy-land, a.k.a. Jasper-Five, but if you ended up with zero dollars in your pocket you were screwed until the next payday. Twenty years in, and he had less than two hundred bucks in his savings account. Booze, smokes and hookers; all his money always ended up split three-ways between them. Russell had a big score in the works, selling some combat-lossed high-tech equipment to a notorious smuggler passing through Jasper-Five, but it’d be a while before he collected his cut, and hookers and booze couldn’t be bought on promises, even if his word was good enough to cadge a few smokes.

“Guess you’re right, Russet,” Corporal Harold ‘Rocky’ Petrossian said after he ponied up the small blind; when the dealing was done, he looked at his hand, and clearly saw something he didn’t like. Rocky was good people but if he looked unhappy, that was because he’d gotten a lousy hand. Rocky couldn’t bluff for shit.

“I know I’m right,” Russell replied absently, glancing at his hand: pocket sixes. Good enough to stay in the game.

“You shoulda been in New Lancaster when the Lizards torched their own town before we could get to it,” Gonzo told Conroy. “It spread out all over the forests around it. Flames all over the horizon, far as the eye could see. They had these trees, they were full of this gummy paste, and man, did that shit stink when it caught fire. Suit filters couldn’t cope with the fucking stench.”

“Yeah, that was nasty,” Rocky said. “We kicked ass, though.”

“Kill bodies,” Gonzo agreed.

Flop came out. An ace, a six, and the other six. Russell’s expression didn’t change an iota as his mind started figuring out the best course of action.

He never got a chance to work out the angles, though. His imp chimed in his ear – everybody’s imp did. Priority call.

“Stop whatever the fuck you’re doing, fuck-socks,” Gunnery Sergeant Miguel Obregon said through the command channel. “The new CO is on his way from orbit, should arrive in about an hour. I want y’all out on the yard, field unis and gear, looking sharp, in forty-five minutes, or y’all gonna be on police call all over the embassy grounds. Acknowledge and get moving.”

Russell dutifully sent an ‘Acknowledged’ signal from his imp, which would show in the platoon display as a green light. A yellow light meant the Marine in question had failed to acknowledge, and Obregon would track the miscreant down and made him sorry he’d ever been born. With an imp right inside your skull, your only excuses not to acknowledge a command were death or a situation where taking a second to answer a call was worth your life.

The skipper had already screwed Russell over and he hadn’t even shown up yet. Fucking officers.

The card game broke up as everyone’s imps transferred their wins or deducted their losses from their accounts. Russell tried not to think about his depleted savings as he took a quick shower and put on his field ‘long johns’ back on. They wore the skin-tight gray-green bodysuits most of the time; the material was self-repairing, self-cleaning, breathed better than most civvie clothing, local or American, and was tough enough to resist knife slashes, something that Russell could attest to from personal experience. He clamped his back-and-breast clamshell armor over the long johns, followed by the articulated knee, elbow and wrist pads that, along with his helmet and the force field projectors built into them, made each infantryman invulnerable to explosive fragments and most civvie and primmie small arms, and highly resistant to modern weapons. Russell had been on the receiving end of arrows, spears, blunderbusses, bucketloads of plasma, grav beams and Lamprey lasers rifles, spread over seven different engagements in two wars and three minor conflicts, which had earned him a three-star Combat Action Ribbon and a Purple Heart with three oak leaf clusters. Considering he’d also bled like a stuck pig, shit and pissed himself, and endured more pain than he’d thought possible, he would have happily declined the honors, not that the fucking ETs trying to kill him had given him a choice in the matter. His armor was one of the reasons he was still around to bitch about it. Dumb luck and being a sneaky sumbitch were the other two.

The helmet closed around his head with a hiss as it pressurized its interior. The thin eye-slit provided fuck-all peripheral vision and little enough frontal vision, but his imp made up for it, projecting the take from his helmet sensors right into his brain. As far as his peepers were concerned, it was like he wasn’t wearing a helmet at all. Nanowire filaments sneaked out from the clamshell breastplate until they connected to the armor pads and his boots, creating a network of artificial muscle that allowed him to carry a hundred and fifty pounds of weapons and equipment with almost zero strain and fatigue, although it took training to overcome the momentum you generated while running under a full load.

A quick check showed that the two power packs mounted on the back of the clamshell armor were fully charged. One was dedicated to the force fields; the other kept the suit’s systems running for up to twenty-four hours, give or take, depending on how active those hours were. You could divert power from one pack to the other at a pinch, at the risk of running out of juice for the shields or the suit. It almost never came to that, but there’d been exceptions, and then it became a race between the force fields going down or having to move under a hundred and fifty pounds of weight while trying to see out of the little slit in your helmet without the benefit of your sensors. If both packs ran out, you ditched the armor and prepared to have a really bad day.

He and the other Marines emerged from their barracks – a converted warehouse behind the American legation buildings – and headed for the armory, a makeshift structure made out of three starship cargo containers welded together into a ‘U’ shape. Gunny Obregon was there, overseeing the weapons issue personally, probably to make sure nobody tried to walk away with more than their allotted stuff.

As the leader of a fire team, Russell’s issue weapon was a triple-barreled IW-3a – his Iwo, as all Infantry Weapons were affectionately called in the Corps. He checked the gun – his gun, there were many like it, but this one was his – to make sure it was the one he’d lovingly maintained and cleaned as if his life depended on it, because it did.

The IW-3a fired 4mm explosive bullets from a 50-round magazine, 15mm grenades from a 10-round tube, and a single-shot 20mm self-propelled projectile that came in a variety of flavors. Ordinary grunts made do with an IW-3 that only fired the 4- and 15mm stuff. Gonzaga was the fire team gunner; he got a ALS-43 burp-gun with more firepower than the rest of the team combined. Russell was happy enough with his Iwo, though. He went over the gun as if greeting an old friend.

Ever since they’d arrived to Jasper-Five, Marines not on guard or maintenance duty had been ordered to leave all their weapons – even their personal ones – at the armory. The order had come from the ambassador himself, relayed through the Regional Security Officer; Lieutenant Murdock had no choice but to go along. After Murdock got run over by a car, Gunny Obregon had done the same, even when things started heating up during the last few days. Russell had availed himself of a new set of personal hardware – a switchblade, a revolver and a holdout two-shot derringer, both .41 caliber, all of Ruddy manufacture – soon enough, but he’d much rather have some good American gear at hand instead. He was worried he might need it.

There was a lot to worry about. Third Platoon shouldn’t be here, out of contact with Charlie Company and the rest of the battalion some fucking Rat had broken up to save a buck or two. A weapons platoon wasn’t mean to operate by itself. The pogues in charge had stuck them in an embassy, enough grunts to cause trouble but not enough to defend shit, and if anything happened he and the rest of the unit would be expected to do the impossible. The platoon wasn’t in bad shape – even the boots that had come along for the trip had gotten a clue, thanks to the Gunny’s constant training – but if it was expected to protect the Enclave by itself, they were fucked.

He’d been in the shit often enough to tell when he was about to take another dip in the brown stuff.

Of course, he didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon.

His first hint that something was going on was a distant crump sound he recognized immediately. That was an explosion: either one of the fires had lit up something volatile, or someone had detonated some military-grade ordnance. A second one followed mere seconds later. Ordnance it was; you rarely got explosions that closely together unless someone was making them happen.

Obregon stepped away from the armory and started talking into his imp. Russell couldn’t overhear the conversation – the NCO had engaged his privacy filter – but his furious arm gestures made it clear he was having a violent argument with someone. Probably some Embassy puke.

The Gunny was getting the take from the swarm of micro-drones flying over the city, so he knew exactly what was going on out there. Obregon didn’t get excited easily, so whatever was happening wasn’t good.

“What’s the deal, Russet?” Gonzaga asked him; the short private had his ALS-43 Automatic Launch System slung over his shoulder; the big gun was almost as tall as he was, which made him look slightly ridiculous, but Russell knew some very lethal things came in stupid-looking packages.

“We’ll find out soon enough, Gonzo,” he said. “But don’t stray too far from the armory, because I think…”

“Gun Squads One and Two!” Gunny Obregon shouted on the priority channel. “Grab a combat load! We’ve got to extricate civilian and military personnel under attack. We’re rolling hot in five! Martin, you’re in charge till I get back. Organize a perimeter defense and break out the mortars, on my authority. The Ruddies have gone wild.”

“I knew it,” Russell muttered as he and the rest the Guns Section squads followed Obregon’s orders and geared themselves up for the real thing. For combat.

Fifteen of them, without proper vehicles, out in the big city, which last time he’d checked held some two million ETs.

He didn’t need another oak leaf cluster, but life sure as fuck was doing its damnedest to get him one.

* * *

The initial flash was warning enough. Fromm slunk down on the passenger seat before the lead car’s gas tank exploded. The shockwave from the ensuing conflagration washed over the embassy’s vehicle. The oversized four-wheeler shook but wasn’t flipped over; no hot air – or flames – filled the inside of the car, so its windshield had held.

“They are coming,” Locquar said from the driver’s seat.

The ambush had hit the convoy at an intersection, where a small road cut across the main street they’d been using. The rocketeer must have fired from the rooftop of one of the three- and four-story buildings lining both sides of the street.

Dozens of armed Ruddies were coming at them from both sides of the smaller street and from a plaza next to the tail end of the motorcade. Fromm saw them all clearly, thanks to the micro-drones following the convoy from a hundred feet up, recording everything with their artificial eyes. The crowd had erupted from several houses where they’d been hiding until just now. They were armed mostly with spears and swords, but a couple of the black-tunic wearers had rifles with straight box magazines in front of their triggers. Standard-issue Kirosha Army assault weapons, firing .29-caliber chemically-propelled slugs from a twenty-round magazine, capable of selective fire.

The last car in the convoy had eaten another rocket; its smoldering remains blocked most of the right lane of the road.

“Go!” he yelled at Locquar. Standing still meant death. Moving might not save them, depending on how fast the rocket team could reload and fire, but it provided their only chance.

The Ruddy driver reacted well enough. Tires squealed on the pavement as he accelerated; they spun in place for a brief instant before regaining traction and propelling the car forward even as one of the lead attackers brought his rifle to bear.

Fromm fired first, holding his weapon in a two-handed Weaver grip.

The Colt Plasma Projectile Weapon spat a 3mm steel-sheathed bullet that left a neat hole in the side windshield on its way out. It hit the Ruddy rifleman a little high and to the left from his center of mass. On impact – the hit on the windshield had occurred before its warhead was armed – the tiny round detonated, unleashing a jet of pure plasma, half an inch wide and eight inches long. Designed to defeat body armor or damage light military vehicles, the explosive bullet’s effects on mere flesh and bone were devastating. The unfired rifle went spinning off into the air, its wielder’s torn-up arm and a piece of shoulder still holding on to it. The explosion that dismembered the rifleman consisted mostly of steam from his own vaporized bodily fluids. ETs on each side of the target recoiled as bits of bone shrapnel and burning steam hit them, along with an overpressure wave powerful enough to rock them on their feet.

Fromm fired six more times, squeezing the trigger as soon as the targeting dot slid over another target. He missed twice – firing from a moving platform wasn’t easy even with neural implant targeting – but blew four more Ruddies to Kingdom come, turning them into miniature bombs that wounded several others. The car kept going. It shuddered but did not stop when Locquar hit a couple of attackers and sent their bodies caroming over the vehicle. On the other side of the passenger’s seat, McClintock was shooting as well; the screech of her beamer was noticeable even alongside the supersonic cracks of Fromm’s weapon.

Their car sped past the burning wreck of the lead vehicle and ran clear of the charging mob. Fromm twisted in the back seat to see what was going on behind them. The two Vehelian limos were following closely, knocking down Ruddies and running them over even as swords and spears glanced off their sides. The bus followed in their wake. A couple of firearm-wielding Eets raked the vehicles as they went by, but they were firing from the hip, spray-and-pray style, and Fromm didn’t think they hit anybody. He couldn’t see the van anywhere. Nothing he could do about that, except hope they all made it through the ambush point before the rocket launcher teams…

A puff of smoke erupted from the top of the second limo’s roof.

… reloaded.

The explosion didn’t look like much, but Fromm knew what it meant even before the limo swerved off course and drifted lazily to a stop. The missile had crashed through the top of the vehicle and shredded everyone inside. Only someone in sealed combat armor could have survived, and he doubted armor was part of Vehelian diplomatic dress code. The bus behind the doomed Oval car didn’t slow down, clipping the stopped vehicle and sending it off on a spin. The horde of Ruddies giving chase fell upon the stopped limo like lions tackling the slowest member of a fleeing herd.

McClintock looked at him, a question in her eyes. He shook his head. There was nothing they could do for the passengers of the doomed vehicle. The only consolation was that the mob tearing into the vehicle would only find corpses to desecrate. She bit her lip and checked the charge levels on her beamer. The energy weapons were as lethal as the plasma rounds his gun fired, but their effective range was measured in feet rather than yards, and their batteries only held enough power for five to seven shots, depending on the model. The Embassy spook changed battery packs. Fromm replaced his gun’s magazine with a fresh one. He’d only brought a spare magazine, never thinking he’d need more than forty rounds. Now he was down to thirty-three.

“Are we there yet?” he said, deadpan.

McClintock chuckled. “I will turn this car right around.” She went on in a sober tone: “Half a mile as the crow flies. A bit more on the road, but it’s a fairly straight shot there, unless…”

The road they were on had taken them over a slight rise on the ground. When they reached the top of the shallow hill, they saw the massed crowd it had hidden.

Several local vehicles, powered and animal-drawn, had been dragged across the street, blocking it.

“Quiet spot my ass,” Fromm grumbled.

The roar of the Ruddy mob drowned out his words.

* * *

“Where the fuck did they come from?” Gunnery Sergeant Miguel Obregon said as his imp fed him data from the overhead micro-drones. There was plenty of news, and all of it was bad.

One thing was clear: the Ruddies knew the Americans had them under aerial observation. They had come into the city in small groups and gathered indoors, out of sight until they’d used gongs and drums to let everyone know it was time to come out and play. A proper Intelligence section would probably have noticed the Ruddies’ movement patterns and figured out they were massing for an attack, but Third Platoon didn’t have an Intelligence section, just a pack of attached Navy bubbleheads, each trying to do the job of three or four people. Neither did it have organic vehicles, aerial support other than their micro-drones, or much of anything else. They’d been tossed into this miserable shithole with a whole lot of fuck-all.

It didn’t matter. One of their own, and a bunch of civvies, were out there, surrounded by an estimated five thousand bloodthirsty Ruddies, and it was Obregon’s job to go out there and extricate them by any means necessary.

Improvising while being ass-deep in alligators was part of the job. Obregon knew that the Dark God Murphy was always waiting in the wings, ready to strike. He’d taken precautions against that possibility, aided and abetted by Lieutenant Murdock, God rest his soul. Even so, the only reason this sortie into hostile territory wasn’t a forlorn hope was the fact that his unit had been Charlie Company’s weapons platoon, and that the same whimsical Rats who had sent them to this God-forsaken mudball had also sent all their equipment along. As soon as Obregon got his feet under him and realized they needed a mobile element in case the shit hit the fan, he and the other NCOs had gone to work, acquiring several native vehicles by means fair and foul and spending their own time and money to turn them into improvised infantry fighting vehicles.

The traditional term for such makeshifts was ‘technicals.’ Obregon had been raised in a dirt-poor colony world where you had to build most of the stuff you wanted, simply because the hard currency you’d need to buy it wasn’t available, and the few fabbers on site had more important things to produce than consumer goods. Between his hard-earned skills, the info the imps helpfully provided, and a lot of sweat and the liberal application of super-duct tape, he and his volunteers had assembled something better than a typical fleet of technicals.

A mental command opened the rolling door to their improvised vehicle depot as he and Sergeant Muller approached it. Inside awaited the fruit of their labors. The three monstrosities had started their lives as a cargo van, a ten-ton truck and a demilitarized Ruddy version of the venerable Humvee. Form followed function, and the native-designed vehicles had been roughly similar in appearance and capabilities to their equivalents from Earth’s 20^th century. Had been.

Force field generators had been cannibalized from the platoon’s area defense gear and welded onto every possible surface on the three vehicles. The devices used Starfarer Tech to bend space-time itself, generating invisible planes of force capable of deflecting all kinds of energies from one direction while allowing their users to shoot from the opposite side. Never mind how – according to Woogle, human brains couldn’t understand the physics behind the force fields; most Eets didn’t, either. Their coverage wasn’t perfect – the vehicles’ tires and parts of their undercarriages were still hideously vulnerable to mines and IEDs – but they would stop a direct hit from the 93mm Ruddy artillery pieces that did triple-duty as general bombardment, anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. At least, they would do so as long as their improvised batteries could supply energy to the fields. His imp’s best guess was that three or four hits of that magnitude would deplete the force fields’ power packs, at which point the technicals would turn back into pumpkins, and just as easy to smash. Until then, though, they’d be proof against most things.

They hadn’t just added defenses to the truck, of course. Obregon and his team of volunteer mechanics had taken a sizable fraction of the heavy weapons in the platoon’s Table of Organization and Equipment and attached them to diverse parts of their vehicles. ALS-43s were the bastard plasma-spitting children of the pre-Contact M240 machinegun and the Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher; he’d gotten at least one of them mounted on every vehicle. His command van had a ALS-43 and two 20mm self-propelled missile launchers, which gave the unit – they’d named it Rover Force – more firepower than a local tank company. He had no desire to get into a running battle with the local ETs, but if he was forced into one he intended to win it.

Obregon all but leaped into the driver’s compartment of Rover Two. He turned the primitive ignition system’s switch, and the vehicle roared into life. He did a status check: most everything was green, and the systems highlighted with blinking yellow lights would do, for a while.

“Y’all fucked with the wrong people,” the Marine growled as he gunned the engine.

Four

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

They were probably screwed, but it wouldn’t be because they hadn’t tried everything they could think of.

“There,” Heather said, her imp marking the building she’d selected as Locquar swerved to a stop, less than a hundred yards from the barricade. Nobody had shot at them yet, but that was bound to change.

The structure she’d led them to was an auto garage situated at the top of the hill. The locals’ propensity to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down meant the lot was surrounded by a sturdy wall, concrete blocks with razor wire strung on top, its main entrance sealed off by a sliding metal gate.

“We can make our stand inside until the authorities drive off the rioters,” she said.

“Fine,” Fromm said. He didn’t sound terribly convinced, but time was short and he clearly knew that a bad plan of action executed now was better than a perfect plan contrived after it was too late. “Get everyone inside. I’ll cover you.”

“Locquar, help him,” she said as they left the car. The Vehelian limo began to go around it, then stopped when its driver saw the barricade and mob waiting down the road. Behind them, the bus also came to a stop. A glance told her the mob giving chase behind them wasn’t very far away, and it’d been reinforced by more militant society warriors and regular civilians. Her imp could have given her a good estimate of the number of aliens rushing towards them, but she didn’t really want to know. More than enough, she was sure.

“We’re going to fort up over there,” she announced through the imp, which overlay a virtual arrow all humans and Vehelians would see through their own implants.

Heather headed towards the garage’s entrance. There was an intercom by the metal gate but she was sure the people inside weren’t going to be hospitable. Instead of trying to communicate with them, she placed a hand over the gate. Its lock was electronic, a new model using imported Starfarer tech, the kind of cheap trinket any fabber could produce for pennies’ worth of raw materials and then sell at a nice profit to primitive worlds. Her imp’s special apps took over the lock’s crude systems, and the gate started rolling open. Off to her right, the captain’s blaster coughed once, followed by a burst from the submachinegun Locquar kept under the driver’s seat. Things were getting lively already, and there was no time to lose.

She rushed inside as soon as enough of a gap opened up. There were two Kirosha on the courtyard, a man in grease-stained coveralls who’d been working on a sporty-looking two-door car, and an older male in the informal tunic, pointy hat and pantaloons of one of Kirosha’s small but growing entrepreneurial middle class. They were both unarmed, which was unsurprising, since city ordinances made possession of firearms of any kind a crime punishable by mutilation, torture or death, sometimes all of the above.

“You are not welcome here!” the shop owner shouted at her, his head shaking up and down in the Kirosha negative gesture.

“Sodomizing foreign devils!” the mechanic said, rummaging through his toolbox.

He was probably looking for something hefty enough to batter someone’s brains out. Heather didn’t give him a chance to try; a warning shot aimed at the ground between the mechanic’s feet sent him scrambling away as dirt flew from the point of impact, some of it hot enough to sting wherever it touched his skin.

“Now you sodomizing listen to me!” she told them in flawless Kirosha with enough of a high-class accent to command respect. The sight of the Star-Devil-filled bus and limo rolling through the gate added to the intimidation factor. “Stay out of the way, and you won’t be hurt. We need to remain here until the authorities disperse the riot. You will be compensated for any damages, and receive a fitting reward for your hospitality. Do you understand?”

Both Kirosha squatted down in submission.

“Yes, Blessed Star Devil,” the owner said. “The Final Blow Society will kill us all, but perhaps my family will be compensated for my sacrifice, yes?”

Outside, a flurry of blaster and slug-thrower fire seemed to confirm the Kirosha’s pessimism.

* * *

At first, the Ruddies at the barricade just stood there and watched them. Fromm accepted the momentary truce with gratitude. If the ETs charged before they could get behind cover, he and every human and Oval in the convoy were dead.

The quiet only lasted a few seconds. One of the leaders, a big Ruddy with a fluttering banner strapped to his back, stepped in front of the barricade and started haranguing the troops, who cheered him on.

Fromm turned to Locquar. “Will shooting him help or hurt?”

“Can’t hurt,” the friendly said with a shrug.

“Okay.”

The plasma discharge set the banner on fire as it burned a hole big enough to fit a grapefruit into the leader’s torso and sent his head flying up like a popped cork. The crowd fell silent at the sudden and gruesome death, and Locquar added a three-round burst into the mix, riddling another banner-man. The driver shouted something at the rioters. Fromm hoped it was something meant to scare them into withdrawing.

The mob swarmed over the barricade, screeching like a gaggle of angry human schoolgirls.

Well, that didn’t work, Fromm thought as he fired the remaining nineteen rounds in his Colt, pivoting to the right to spread the joy over a wide front. The rioters were packed so tightly together that each round injured or killed at least two or three extra targets. Locquar followed suit with his submachinegun, and between the two of them they filled the street with limp and writhing bodies. Fromm ducked behind cover and switched the empty magazine with the partially-full one that was all he had left. Fourteen rounds and a target-rich environment added up to a really bad day.

The Embassy Rat had gotten the compound’s gate open and the bus and limo were already inside. Good. There would be no time to move their car, though. He and Locquar scrambled towards the gate as the Ruddy mob made its way past the bodies they’d dropped. The sliding metal door was already closing; he made it through with a couple seconds to spare.

Now that he was behind cover he had time to answer the phone.

One of the problems of modern communications was that people kept trying to talk to you while you were too busy staying alive to talk back. Imps helped by answering some calls themselves. The faux-AI systems learned a number of preset responses by watching their owners over time. Some things required a personal touch, however.

The imp downloaded several voice messages directly into Fromm’s memory, a highly-uncomfortable process used only for emergencies. Suddenly remembering things you hadn’t known a moment before could induce several forms of mental trauma.

Suddenly remembering some very bad news was no fun, trauma or no trauma.

Gunnery Sergeant Obregon was mounting an impromptu rescue and the Embassy was trying to contact the Kirosha authorities to lend a hand. Problem was, the locals weren’t answering the phone and the Embassy remfies were dithering instead of authorizing the rescue mission. That kind of SNAFU wouldn’t be solved before the mob outside stormed the compound and slaughtered everyone inside.

“Gunny, I authorize the rescue operation,” he sent out; his imp added all the requisite legalese that would turn the sentence into a formal command and would place all responsibility and blame squarely on Fromm’s shoulders. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d pissed off assorted officers and gentlemen. The last time, he’d ended up assigned to Jasper-Five, and it clearly couldn’t get much worse than that.

The Embassy woman was busy organizing the passengers as they disembarked from the bus. The Ovals from the surviving limo included three civvies in colorful robes of office, good only for catching rounds that might hit somebody useful, and a driver/bodyguard armed with a short-barreled combat laser, the kind of weapon the US still couldn’t afford to manufacture in quantity. The Oval and his ray-gun would come in handy.

About two-thirds of the human passengers had some kind of weapon. Only about half the Rats, of course – corp-o-RAT, bureau-cRAT, city-RAT; the immortal song’s lyrics flashed through his mind – but most of the passengers were miners or machinery operators, the kind of men and women who felt naked without something that could cut, bludgeon or shoot. McClintock directed the ones with handguns to take cover behind the vehicles scattered around the garage, where they could pick off anyone trying to climb over the razor-wire on top of the walls. For a Rat or even a spook, she was turning out to have the makings of a damn good sergeant.

He looked around, studying the battleground at hand. The walled enclosure was a rough square, some sixty feet on each side. A cinderblock wall surrounded the perimeter, topped with the Ruddy version of concertina wire. Good enough to stop bullets and keep the rabble out, for a little while at least, although it wouldn’t prevent the mob from tossing things over it, anything from spears to hand grenades or Molotov cocktails. There were two buildings inside the perimeter, the larger one in the center; the other was a supply shack near one of the walls. The bigger structure was two stories tall, a box with a peaked roof. The upper level had a window overlooking the street.

Fromm had his imp contact the Vehelian bodyguard, who promptly walked over to him. Ovals looked like what you’d get if you shaved a bear, replaced its head with an ostrich egg, and painted a face on its surface. The bodyguard was a particularly large specimen, a good seven feet tall and almost as wide; hopefully he’d be able to fit inside the building.

“Follow me!” he sent out; the implant translated the order a couple of seconds later.

“I will comply, Marine Captain,” the ET said in English.

Fromm turned to the Ruddy driver. “Locquar, assist your boss. We’re seizing the high ground.”

The Kirosha tilted his head sideways, his version of nodding yes. Fromm left him to it and headed for the main building, gun ready. The front door was open; Fromm took a quick peek inside. He felt horribly exposed – fucking naked –  doing a building entry evolution without backup other than an ET he hadn’t worked with before, and without grenades to clear the way. He went in, fully expecting to get shot.

Nobody shot at him. The room had a glass counter with several auto parts on display, a couple of armchairs in a reception area, and a statue of a naked fat Ruddy riding some sort of dragon. There were no signs of life. He had to kick open a couple of doors before he found one leading to a set of stairs going up. The Oval behind him had to squeeze past a couple of tight spots, but was able to keep up with him.

Meanwhile, the enemy had arrived. He could hear them screaming all around the compound. Someone was beating on the metal gate. They’d better get a move on or they’d be overrun.

A dash up the stairs led them to a narrow corridor and two closed doors. Fromm heard a fusillade of gunshots and beamer discharges, which increased his sense of urgency. He kicked down another door and found the window he’d seen from outside.

Two cowering Ruddies were inside the room, hiding behind a desk. He watched them over the barrel of his Colt, his imp painting targeting carats over their centers of mass. An old male and a young female, looking absurdly cute with their oversized eyes and narrow chins. Seemingly unarmed.

“Go!” he shouted at them in American, gesturing with his head for them to get out. They got the idea and scrammed. Leaving two potential hostiles loose behind him was not a great idea, but there was no time to do anything other than shoot them dead or let them go, and he needed to save his last fourteen rounds for confirmed hostiles. At least, that was what he told himself as he and the Oval headed for the window.

The view was terrible.

The street outside was jammed with ETs. At the moment, most of them were beating ineffectually at the walls and gates. One body was draped over the razor wire on top of a wall, leaking blood and pureed tissues from a through-and-through wound. That death wouldn’t deter them for long, however.

The Oval knew what to do. “Do I kill them now?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

The laser weapon usually fired micro-second pulses, each packing about half as much energy as a blaster round, with a cyclic rate of six hundred pulses a minute. Against the massed crowd, the ET switched to a continuous beam setting, and swung the long line of coherent light like a giant industrial cutter, tilting the weapon so the energy stream cleared the wall and slashed into the rioters at a shallow angle.

The Ruddies protected by their proximity to the wall were unharmed as the beam passed over their heads. Those further back were sliced in two by the one-millimeter coherent-light weapon. The laser went through a hundred feet of cloth, flesh and bone like piano wire driven into a block of soft cheese. The beam wasn’t hot enough to cauterize the wounds, so Ruddy blood spurted freely from severed limbs and torsos as dozens bodies fell in two pieces; variations in biochemistry gave the fluids that spattered everywhere an orange coloration and a greasy quality. The ones closest to the laser had the tops of their heads loped off; the ones further out, their necks or faces. Dozens of rioters were bisected at the chest or waist, some of them still alive as their upper torsos slid off the convulsing lower halves of their bodies. As the beam angled down, it severed hips, thighs, knees.

Three seconds. A hundred dead. Another hundred maimed and dying.

Fromm watched the massacre without reacting; he might or might not feel something later, but at the moment all he cared about was the tactical situation. The untouched members of the mob – eight-tenths of them or more – recoiled from the horror show the laser had created. A few leaders tried to rally them, noticeable by the wood and paper banners propped up behind their backs.

Fromm picked them off one by one.

The little rounds of his pistol had an effective range of a hundred and fifty yards, and his imp made aiming ridiculously easy, estimating range, windage and bullet trajectory in the time it took Fromm to level his weapon, and painting a red dot on the estimated landing point of his shot. Crack, and a sword-wielding warrior’s head vanished in a cloud of plasma and vaporized brain matter, his audience screaming as pieces of his skull tore into them. Crack, and a woman who’d clambered over the abandoned car bent sideways as her hip bone exploded. Crack. Crack. Crack. Five shots, five dead leaders.

“Do it again?” the Oval asked Fromm. He’d inserted a fresh power pack into the magazine well in the pistol grip of his laser, and was ready to cut down another two hundred Ruddies.

“Wait a bit,” Fromm said. Maybe the stupid bastards would decide to run and live to fight another day. Maybe…

He didn’t hear the rocket’s detonation as it hit the second-story wall, but he sure as hell felt it.

* * *

The weight of all the extra equipment strained the van’s suspension something fierce, making Obregon’s seat bounce uncomfortably, but that didn’t bother him. It kind of reminded him of life in Jazmin-Two, of driving to the town’s general store in his Pappy’s barely-functional jalopy, a hydrogen-burner made of equal parts rust and baling wire.

What bothered him was seeing the gate leading out of the embassy’s compound was still closed. And that the assholes manning said gate – the Marine assholes manning said gate – were waving at him to stop.

“Open up!” he sent through his imp.

“We’ve got orders to keep all combat forces inside the compound,” replied Staff Sergeant Amherst, the former commander of the Embassy Security Group. Amherst was an officious asshole who’d long forgotten what it meant to in the Corps, but Obregon couldn’t believe he was pulling this shit. “You need to deploy to protect the Embassy, Gunny.”

Obregon’s three-vehicle formation – Rovers One through Three – was coming up to the gate and he had to make a decision. The take from the micro-drones was streaming on his field of vision’s right quadrant, and he could see that the walled property the Americans had holed up in was being hit with rocket and small arms fire, not to mention a couple thousand ETs with swords trying to get over the fence. The skipper was too busy fighting for his life to deal with this bullshit.

“Move it or lose it,” he said.

“Say again, Gunnery Sergeant?”

“Open the gate or we’re busting it open. Last chance.”

“You don’t have the balls,” the asshole said, just about the worst thing he could have uttered.

“Light it up,” Obregon told Corporal Hendrickson. The gunner was on the improvised cupola they’d put on the van’s roof, manning the ALS-43 auto-launcher.

“Copy that,” Hendrickson said without hesitation. The ALS-43 could fire a variety of 15mm projectiles at a rate of three hundred rounds a minute. To blow the gate open, Hendrickson fired a three-round burst of anti-armor plasma rounds. The shaped-charge explosions tore the gate apart without doing much damage to the guardhouse on its left side.

‘Much damage’ is a relative term, though. The structure wasn’t destroyed outright, but it did catch fire. Amherst and the other sorry bastard inside got a little bit scorched, given that they were wearing dress blues and no armor. They’d live, though, and the gate could be fixed in under an hour, given all the fabbers the Embassy had. No harm done.

There would be consequences, of course, but he didn’t give a shit. He had a job to do.

* * *

“We’re gonna get in trouble, aren’t we?” Private First Class Hiram ‘Nacle’ Hamblin asked as their car drove past what was left of the guardhouse.

“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” Russell said. “Gotta save the new skipper, don’t we? Those assholes were acting against orders.”

“But the ambassador...?”

“Fuck the ambassador. He ain’t in the chain of command. He gotta tell the RSO and the RSO gotta tell the skipper, and then he tells the NCOs, and they tell us what the fuck to do.”

Nacle – short for Tabernacle – shrugged, still clearly uncomfortable. He was good people, but also a Mormon, and they mostly didn’t like coloring outside the lines, although Russell had met several wild and woolly exceptions. He’d calm down when they got to the hostiles. Nacle didn’t have any problems shooting ETs. None of them did. Travel the galaxy, meet colorful aliens, and blow the shit out of them. That was the name of the game.

Rover One was on the ass end of the formation as it drove through the streets of the Foreigners’ Enclave, heading for the curtain wall surrounding the area and yet another gate, a much bigger one, manned by Ruddy Royal Guardsmen. Ruddies who were probably going to object to their going out there and killing a bunch of their friends and neighbors. Things might get hairy in a minute.

The walls around the Enclave were manned by a battalion of Guardsmen. They wore light blue and pink uniforms – no accounting for ET tastes – but although their equipment was all local-made and out of date, it included artillery and even a tank platoon. Ruddy tanks were no great shakes, about as good as an up-gunned Sherman from two hundred-plus years ago on Earth, but their 79mm main guns were no joke. Russell wasn’t sure the shields they’d mounted on their technicals would take more than a few HEAT rounds from one of those. Even if they did, his Hummer-like car would probably end up flipping end over end just from the shockwave. Which would suck, since the fucking thing was open-topped and body armor wasn’t going to help for shit if you landed on your head with five thousand pounds on top of you.

What the fuck you gonna do, he told himself.

They drove past the Wyrm Embassy, which the ETs had built for themselves rather than rent out some Ruddy houses like the Americans had, and which looked like someone had melted a bunch of different kinds of scrap metal and poured them over a giant sea shell. The Wyrms were on lockdown; Russell could see the tell-tale soap-bubble shimmer that meant their shields were up. Russell didn’t care for the scaly bastards; they were biologically related to the Snakes, the assholes who bombed the shit out of Earth during First Contact. Still, the Wyrms had always respected the US and were sort of friendly. If the Royal Ruddies got shitty, the Wyrms would lend the Americans a hand instead of piling on. So would the Ovals, especially since they had people out there too.

The main gate to the Foreigners’ Enclave stood dead ahead, surrounded by sixty-foot walls and four towers with the pointy-hat roofs Ruddies loved to put on everything they built. The Enclave had once been a fortress before cannon made their walls obsolete. Russell had gone through the gate almost a hundred times during his deployment on Jasper-Five, mostly on his way to and from one of the discreet whorehouses they had downtown. Ruddy women weren’t exactly built like Americans, but all the important parts fit well enough to get the job done, although you had to watch out for their bristle-backs if you were into doggie-style. It had been a while since he’d gotten his dick wet. If he didn’t get killed, and if the fucking curfew was lifted, he’d have to do something about that.

“Rover One, Rover Three, hang back,” Gunny Obregon said. “I’m gonna try to talk us through the gate. Get ready to start blasting on my command, or if the Ruddies get frisky.”

“Fuck,” Russell said, driving off to one side, some hundred feet away from the gate. Traffic was light – only complete morons would choose to venture into a riot in progress – so he had a nice view of about a hundred Ruddies in Royal Guard uniforms milling around the gate, and a couple hundred more on the battlements atop the walls. No heavy weapons he could see, but he knew the Guard had plenty of portable rocket launchers, and those mothers packed a hefty punch. More than enough to overload his personal force fields with a direct hit; enough of them would do for the slapped-on shields on their Rovers, too. It would suck if they had to fight their way through.

They had people out there, though. You didn’t abandon your own. That shit had been true when Marines had deployed out of wooden ships, or when breaking out of Frozen Chosin, long before they’d added the word Warp to the Corps’ name. Russell had forgotten most of the useless crap they’d tried to teach him at boot camp, but the history lessons had sunk in.

The two massive iron-bound doors at the gate were wide open, which was about the only piece of good news so far. Rover Two headed towards it and the troops standing guard in front of it. None of the Ruddies leveled their assault rifles in its direction, but they were holding them at port arms, so that could change in a hurry. If the shit hit the fan, Gonzaga and his ALS-43 would unleash hell on the Ruddies on the ground floor while Rocky on Rover Three raked the battlements above and Nacle and Conroy dropped 15 and 20mm death on them. That should suppress them well enough for the three technicals to roll out without taking too much fire. Should. If Russell had a buck for every time things didn’t turn out the way they should, he’d be sitting pretty.

That left the small problem of what would be waiting for them when they got back. The Ruddies would have plenty of time to warm up their tanks and assemble their arty by then, and they might be pissed off enough to use them.

The whole situation was weird. Whatever happened today, the fleet would show up sooner or later, and every ET involved in shooting Americans would end up dead. The city might even eat a bloomie if things got bad enough. Americans frowned on using city-busters but were willing to make exceptions, as the Snakes had found out. The Ruddies would have to be crazy to get in the way of a rescue. Problem was, people didn’t have to make sense, be they alien or American.

Russell decided to let leave the big questions to the assholes in charge and concentrated on marking targets for his IW-3a with his imp; he could drive with one hand and fire his Iwo’s missile launcher with the other. There was a Ruddy officer off to one side riding a fucking horse – the Ruddy version looked more like a skinned deer than a horse – who was begging for a 20mm frag round, and Russell would be happy to oblige him.

Obregon’s voice came on again. “Rovers, we’re clear. Proceed.”

The Rovers got moving. Russell’s fire team kept an eye out in case the Ruddies were playing games, but they rolled without incident past the guards, through the thick walls surrounding the gate, and out into the open. Other than the fires still burning out in the distance, the only sign of trouble was a much nearer mess of smoke less than a klick away.

“Here we go,” Russell muttered as Rover One drove towards their date with the Ruddies.



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