Democracy's Right

Chapter Forty

“You are clear to launch,” the voice said in his earpiece. It was a sultry female voice, promising much to the heroes when they returned — if they returned. “Good luck.”

Captain Thomas Wilson took a breath as the launch tubes opened and the assault pods were blasted out towards the asteroid, accompanied by a hail of decoys and sensor jammers intended to prevent any surviving rebel weaponry from locking onto them and blowing them into the next world, even though the squadron claimed to have destroyed all such weapons. Thomas had enough experience with such claims to know that they were often over-optimistic and, as the commander of the assault, he wasn’t going to take any chances with his men and their lives.

He could hear the beating of his own heart and feel the sweat on the palm of his hands as the pods fell towards the asteroid. It grew in his vision, changing from just another rock to something that dominated the entire horizon. At some point, up twisted and became down and he started to fall towards the rocky ground, cursing as enemy weapons started to light up, their plasma bursts picking off a handful of pods. The starship crews hadn’t got them all! The tiny automated missiles escorting them dived forwards and attempted to destroy the weapons, but not before seven of his men and ten decoys were picked off and killed. An eighth man was so badly injured that his suit had to put him into suspension and scream for immediate recovery.

Thomas braced himself as the pod touched down and split open, allowing him to step out onto the surface of Sanctuary. They had landed below the massive crater that seemed to serve as a rebel spaceport, yet as his teams formed up it became evident that the rebels had taken the precaution of hiding additional defences in the ground. The Blackshirts picked them off, advancing towards the lip of the crater and over it, staring down into the spaceport. The gravity was doing odd things as they passed through varying gravity fields — the rebels, instead of spinning the asteroid to produce gravity, had chosen to install a gravity generator instead — and he cursed under his breath. He had trained his men hard, rather than trusted to the drugs and indoctrination most Blackshirt units used, yet they hadn’t been trained to work in such an environment. It was a tribute to their training — and their superior officers, who had wanted a dedicated unit for operating in space — that they were doing as well as they were.

The rebels had divided the spaceport into two sections. One, dominated by starships clinging like limpets to the asteroid, was visible to his eyes. The other, with starships passing through a massive hatch to rest inside the asteroid, was clearly closed off. The hatch would require high explosives to blast it open, yet there was an easier way into the asteroid. He led his platoon towards the first freighter, ordering the other teams to spread out and target the other ships. Not entirely to his surprise, the first freighter rose up into space as his team approached, spinning around and preparing to flicker out. The missile that slammed into the ship and blew it cart-wheeling away from the asteroid, launched by one of the battlecruisers, cast an eerie light over the scene. Thomas allowed himself a moment of relief. If the freighter had attempted to engage his team, the results would not have been pleasant.

“Down here,” he ordered, as he led his team towards where the freighter had been docked. There was a hatch there set within the rock that resisted him when he tried to open it with an armoured hand. He chuckled as his lips quirked in wry amusement. That was against Imperial Law and carried a mandatory sentence of twenty years in prison. The rebels were guilty of yet another offence, one more serious than most. It hardly mattered. One of his team carried a set of explosive charges and used one of them to blow their way into the airlock. Somewhat to his surprise, no hail of fire greeted them as they forced their way into the asteroid.

“Deploy sensor bugs,” he ordered, as he followed the first four into the asteroid. It was rather disappointing to his eyes. For all that the Security Officer had talked about the asteroid, warning them of the many dangers and temptations they would face once they forced their way into the rebel stronghold, it was depressingly normal. The inner airlock had an emergency forcefield to prevent the air from leaking out, although no one dared take off their helmets. Selective depressurising of compartments was a neat way to get rid of unwanted guests. “Contact the ships and tell them to send the second wave down to join us.”

He smiled as the images of the interior of the asteroid started to build up in his HUD. The sensor bugs could move far faster than any human and were completely invisible to the naked eye, although the rebels had access to Marine-issue systems that could probably pick them up without trouble. Sanctuary — and that, he considered, was a rather inappropriate name — was starting to take shape and form, plotting out the various passageways and compartments. As his team expanded and started to advance into the unknown, he found himself waiting patiently for the hammer to fall. The rebels wouldn’t tamely accept their violation of their base, not when they’d had their chance to surrender and had refused it.

“The remaining ships are secure sir,” his deputy said. The rebel ships had either tried to escape — whereupon they’d been picked off by the waiting battlecruisers — or had been bitterly defended. Their crews had finally been beaten and either killed or captured, with their boarders trying to get them away from the asteroid and into the waiting arms of the Imperial Navy. The technical staff could analyse their computers, do some number-crunching and hopefully find the location of more rebel bases. “We’re on our way to join you.”

“Have one of the ships moved to the main hatch and used to block it,” Thomas ordered, calmly. The sensor bugs were finally picking up traces of real people, lying in wait. “Once that’s done, have the other airlocks opened and start expanding the bridgehead. We need to press our advantage as quickly as possible.”

Neil had finally had the chance to get into his armour — one of his Marines had brought it to him, before running back to join the defenders massing towards the spaceport — before the enemy troops had started to break their way into the asteroid. He’d been relieved the moment that he realised that the attackers, whoever they were, weren’t Marines. It had lasted until he’d realised that whoever was in command was smarter than any Blackshirt commander he’d ever met. He’d taken a number of starship crewmen as prisoners without any of the atrocities that commonly followed in their wake.

“Move the 1^st and 2^nd platoons up to cover the entrance points,” he ordered, calmly. “I want 3^rd platoon to get up to the surface and start moving in on their rear.”

“3^rd reports that the enemy support is too close to the surface to risk contact,” the CO of 3^rd platoon said, through the Marine datanet. “We can risk it once the enemy craft have been drawn towards the spaceport.”

Neil scowled. “Understood,” he ordered. A Blackshirt commander would have ordered them to make the attack and to hell with how many good men were killed attempting to do the impossible. “Stand by for…”

“Sir,” one of the operators said. “The starship crews are ready to fight!”

Neil swore. He’d known from the start that there was no way to protect the starships concealed within the spaceport and had ordered the crews to abandon their ships and make their way to safety. Instead, they’d ignored him and chosen to make their own stand… in the most fragile part of the asteroid! He opened his mouth to issue new orders, to tell them to get the hell out of there, but it was too late. They were already in position and couldn’t fall back without being seen.

“Damn them,” he muttered. Could he help them? If he ordered the two platoons to advance… no, that would throw away his men and some of the trainees for nothing. They couldn’t get into a pitched battle so close to the hull or all hell would break loose when the battlecruisers started firing directly into the asteroid to support their people. “Order the two platoons to hold position.”

None of the operators objected, but he knew what they were thinking. He’d abandoned the starship crews, leaving them to die. And the hell of it, he knew, was that part of him felt the same way. The cold logic of war was sometimes not enough to warm his heart.

Jane Chaney braced herself as she crawled through the tube, holding her breath for as long as she could. The interior of the tube stank badly of oil and gas, as well as other stenches that entered the asteroid whenever a visiting starship opened its airlocks and started to air out its interior. For Jane, who had stowed away on a starship that had visited her very fundamentalist home asteroid back when she had been nine, it was the sweet smell of home. And her new home — after four years of working her passage on a dozen different starships — was under threat. There was no way she was going to allow the invaders to enter the asteroid unopposed.

She swore under her breath, using words the chief engineer on her first starship had taught her, as her developing breasts caught on the side of the tube. Jane, like many other children born on asteroid habitats, had matured slowly, even as she had developed mentally at a far greater rate than many other kids her age. She had even travelled disguised as a boy for most of the time, after learning that many spacers developed a flexible attitude to planet-bound rules of morality and whole new standards of beauty. Where once she had been able to squirm through the tightest of tubes without problems, her developing body was now betraying her, leaving her wondering if she was going to wind up caught in a tube she could once have traversed without a sound. After the fighting was done, she would have to give serious thought to her own future.

The sound of hard footsteps echoed from below her as she reached the hatch. At some point, back when the rebels had been building their habitat, they’d installed small tubes and connecting tunnels for some reason best known to their leaders. Jane suspected that they’d designed them to move from place to place unseen — after all, it was what she used them for — even though most of them were too small for an adult. She rubbed her breast angrily as she peered down through the semi-transparent hatch. Most girls and all guys might speak in favour of breasts, but they were nothing apart from a pain to her. How the girls with really big breasts got along she didn’t know.

“Ok, you bastards,” she muttered, as she saw the black suits of armour making their way down the corridor. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them to look up, but then… in her experience, no one ever did. It was how she had hidden from a lecherous second officer on her fifth freighter, a second officer who had been surprised and horrified to discover her real sex. The idiot had thought that she was a boy! “I’ve got you now.”

She pulled back the hatch and dropped the bag she’d been carrying down on top of the armour suits, before running as fast as she could. The explosion still sent her sprawling to the deck, gasping in pain as she banged her exposed elbows against the metal. There was no way to tell how many she’d killed, or even if she’d killed any of them, but… before she could react, a bolt of blue-white light punched its way through the deck far too close to her for comfort. She was scurrying away when a second pulse slammed into the deck and it weakened, tilting madly as overstressed metal started to give way. Jane realised, as the stench of ionised air reached her nostrils, that the Blackshirts had been firing madly into the overhead section. A final bolt of blue light struck her legs and she screamed in pain — all reserve gone — as she fell through the metal and down in front of them.

The pain was overwhelming, worse than her father trying to beat some sense into her, worse than the pain and humiliation she’d felt when she’d shocked herself while rewiring a module on her second starship. Massive black figures gathered around them, staring down at her, their features invisible behind their black helmets. She wanted to pull herself to her feet and die spitting defiance in their faces, yet she couldn’t feel her legs. There was absolutely no feeling from the lower half of her body. She could barely move her head. It dawned on her, slowly, that she had to have been badly injured, yet surely she could escape?

One of the black figures lifted a rifle, pointed it at her head, and pulled the trigger. There was a flash of blue-white light… and then nothing.

Thomas watched the girl’s head disintegrate, fighting down an urge to be sick. It had been a mercy killing; indeed, he had no idea how the girl had still been alive after a plasma blast had sheared off her legs and left the stumps cauterised. He’d seen many unpleasant sights in his career — one didn’t reach high rank in the Blackshirts without seeing thousands of horrific sights — yet the poor girl had been among the worst. She would have died without the intervention of a proper medical team and even then it would have taken years for her to recover from the shock.

“Pretty girl,” one of his team said. He didn’t sound disappointed or angry, despite losing his first chance at one of the perks of serving in the Blackshirts. Thomas, who liked to think of himself as more civilised than most of the other Blackshirts, would have relieved his feelings by bawling the younger man out. “What do we do now?”

Thomas looked back at the blackened shells that were all that remained of two of his men. Both of them had been caught in the blast the girl had caused, just before she’d been killed. It wasn’t a good exchange rate, even if they were all expendable.

“We keep moving,” he said. He sent a series of commands to the sensor bugs. They would expand their probes into the tunnel network that had been exposed by the girl, allowing them some advance warning of any more solo attacks. The dead girl, he suspected, might have operated on her own, but she’d certainly shown the enemy how to delay them. If they could use the tunnels to outflank them, the rebels could whittle away at his force until nowhere was safe. “There are more enemy fighters waiting for us up ahead.”

He concentrated on splitting up his forces. If the spaceport could be taken relatively intact, his reinforcements could be flown right into the asteroid, allowing him to push out faster and further. He doubted that the rebels would be surprised — they’d have to expect that much — but they’d be unable to react quickly.

“Onwards,” he ordered, and smiled. If he won, and if he survived, the sky would be the limit. “Prepare to attack.”

The starship crews didn’t go down easily. They’d built up a formidable position and backed it up with the weapons mounted on their ships. Neil watched in numb fascination as they threw back three attacks before the fourth one broke through, leaving three ships as flaming wreckage and pushing the defenders back. One of the battlecruisers had moved closer and started to open fire, picking off several of the defenders even through the forcefield covering the entrance to the spaceport. The massive hatch hadn’t stood up to its weapons for more than a few seconds. After that, the defenders were doomed.

“They’re pushing their way into the remaining starships,” one of the operators reported. The Blackshirts had continued to advance, despite their heavy losses. Sheer determination would make up for a lot of tactical flaws. And, for that matter, they definitely seemed more civilised than the ordinary run of Blackshirts. “One of the ships is planning to jump out.”

Neil felt his eyes go wide with horror. “Tell them not to move,” he ordered, knowing that the order would not be heeded. There was no other way for the crews to escape. “Tell them…”

“Too late,” the operator said. “They’re already powering up.”

Thomas cursed as the light freighter rose into the air on an antigravity field, using the positions of the Blackshirts to shield itself from the Vengeance’s fire. The battlecruiser couldn’t shoot without bringing the remains of the freighter down on the Blackshirts. Even so, what else could the ship do? They were unable to bring their weapons to bear on the attackers, for they’d just be shot off without their shields and they couldn’t use their shields in such a confirmed place. Unless…

He saw — too late — a shimmer forming around the prow of the freighter. Space itself seemed to warp and twist around it, the light from the fires suddenly refocused as mighty energies started to claw at the very fabric of space and time. He started to shout a warning as the flicker drive engaged, there was a brilliant flash of golden light and the starship vanished.

An instant later, the shockwave hit and the entire asteroid shook.