Snippet – The Fires of Freedom
Prologue I
From: Covert Operations of the Solar Union, Baen Historical Press, 101SY.
As we have seen in previous volumes, the desperate need to crack the secrets of GalTech forced the Solar Union to risk deploying a covert operations team, the Firelighters, to Belos, a world that had been effortlessly conquered by the Tichck hundreds of years ago and turned into a nightmare that would make Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Jefferson Davis blanch. The team had orders to capture one or more GalCores – the keys to GalTech – and smuggle them back home, a mission they rapidly discovered would be very hard to carry out. Indeed, their first attempt at stealing the GalCores was an abject failure. They had to flee into the hinterland and hide, while preparing for a second attempt against an alerted foe.
Luck was with them, and they made contact with the planet’s underground resistance movement. The natives – the Belosi – wanted to be free of alien domination, although the sheer gap between the natives and their overlords was almost impossible to comprehend, let alone surmount. The Belosi were little better than slaves, at best, and they were kept ignorant of the outside universe and the rights they could, in theory, claim under Galactic Law. There were few powers even aware of the resistance, let alone willing to help. The Firelighters, by contrast, were more than happy to enlist the Belosi as allies, providing weapons and equipment that gave them a fighting chance against their oppressors. It was a considerable stretch, and the Covert Operations Oversight Committee argued that the Firelighters had exceeded their authority, but it paid off for them. As the Belosi rose against their enemies, the team was able to make a second attempt to secure the GalCores and ship them out of the system. That attempt proved successful, giving humanity the keys to the universe. It is no exaggeration to say the Solar Union would not have survived without the mission, nor that humanity owed a great debt to the Belosi.
Realising there was no way the Tichck would allow the Belosi to remain independent, the Firelighters encouraged the underground to steal as many FTL-capable starships as possible and flee the planet, heading into the trackless wilderness of interstellar space. It would be impossible to track the fleeing ships, they reasoned, and the Belosi would have years, or decades, to build up their forces in preparation for a return to their homeworld. There was a considerable split within the ranks at that point, with a number of resistance fighters choosing to remain and fight for their freedom, but a sizable number – nearly a million – Belosi were uplifted before the hammer came down and the Tichck regained control of the high orbitals. Precisely what happened on Belos after that remains uncertain, as the Tichck imposed a complete information blackout, but it is clear the resistance was defeated. The Tichck, embarrassed in front of their peers, were unlikely to be gentle. They went so far as to deploy a genetically engineered bioweapon to keep the remaining Belosi under control. Any native who escaped into the hinterland, and was therefore no longer being fed on the plantations, would die in short order. The resistance died out shortly afterwards. Literally.
The Solar Union had an additional stroke of luck. The Tichck knew the Belosi had been incited by off-world elements, but they had no idea who had tried to bury a knife in their back. Indeed, they were unaware of the real purpose of the mission; the GalCores were reported destroyed in the confusion, and – of course – an advanced race would have no difficulty either bringing along a GalCore of their own or simply duplicating their abilities through less spectacular means. The Tichck blamed a number of their rivals, most notably the Vesparians, and though the Tokomak were able to pour cold water on the confrontation before it turned violent the Tichck never lost their belief the Vesparians had been behind the world affair. This was incredibly fortunate for the human race. The Solar Navy of that era could not have stopped the Tichck if they had chosen to attack Sol, nor would the Tokomak have lifted a finger to stop them.
The Belosi Exiles spent the next few decades mastering GalTech, building up their population and preparing for a return to their homeworld. The Solar Union kept them at arm’s lengths, fearing they would jump the gun and attack ahead of time, exposing them to a near-certain defeat that might expose human involvement too, but a number of human advisors – including the remaining Firelighters – were deployed to assist them. On paper, these advisors were mercenaries, deniable elements that had no ties to the Solar Union; in practice, they were and remain agents of the Solar Union. It was difficult, at times, to keep the Belosi from launching a mission to their homeworld, even a single probe, and they were chaffing at the bit during the opening moves of the Human-Tokomak War. The only thing that kept them from attacking, and throwing the galaxy into even greater chaos, was the promise of human support in recovering their homeworld after the Tokomak were defeated. And when the war ended in a decisive human victory, the time came to keep that promise.
That was not an easy task. The Solar Navy was spread out over thousands of light years. The task of maintaining garrisons and patrols over occupied space, demilitarising large numbers of enemy starships and keeping the gravity points open for interstellar trade meant that there were few starships that could be spared to support the Belosi. Worse, the defeat of the Tokomak had encouraged a number of other Galactics to assert themselves, in a bid to either succeed the Tokomak as unquestioned masters of the known universe or simply to asset their independence from all other powers. There was a very real risk of a number of Galactics banding together to challenge the human race, and many of those powers were nowhere near as hidebound and ultra-conservative as their former masters. The Solar Union needed to keep its promise, true, but it also needed to keep prospective rivals off-balance as long as possible.
A task force, under the command of Commodore Elton Yasser, was put together as quickly as possible. It was carefully designed to make it tricky for any watching eyes to work out who had actually dispatched the fleet, using ship designs that had been largely finalised before the rise of the first human civilisations and weapons that could have come from anywhere, instead of the advanced missiles and other technologies the human race had used to win its war. The presence of humans amongst the landing force was not, in itself, indicative of anything; a sizable number of humans had served the various alien superpowers as mercenaries for centuries, and there was no reason to tie their presence back to the Solar Union. Indeed, every attempt was made to convince the Tichck that their local rivals were backing the Belosi. It was a lie the Tichck were disposed to believe.
Commodore Yasser had additional orders. If the Tichck reacted quickly, and there was a very good chance the entire task force would be destroyed, he was to cut his losses and withdraw as quickly as possible. The Solar Union could not afford heavy losses, even if they escaped blame for the entire disaster. Those orders would cause considerable friction further down the line.
The task force linked up with the Belosi and stormed the Belos System, securing the gravity points and the high orbitals before landing troops on the planetary surface. It rapidly became clear the Tichck on the ground had no intention of surrendering, and bombarding the megacities from orbit would result in massive civilian casualties. The Tichck had worked hard to turn Belos into an industrial centre, inviting investment from hundreds of interstellar corporations, and – intentionally or not – those off-worlders served as de facto living shields. The troops would have to take the megacities on the ground, forcing them into an uneasy stalemate while the task force brought pressure to bear against the Tichck elsewhere.
Already in the middle of a plan to assert control of the local sector, and the stars surrounding their sphere of influence, the Tichck reacted quickly. They dispatched a fleet up the gravity point chain towards Belos, forcing the task force into a series of running battles, and another though starships and gravity points that were technically supposed to be neutral. This fleet broke back into Belos, threatening to trap the task force against the planet and destroy it. Precisely what happened at that point remains debatable, as Yasser’s orders to withdraw were clearly not heeded, but it is clear they chose to make a stand. The combination of Belosi and Solar Union warships met the Tichck, and bested them. The planet was secure …
And there was a window of opportunity, a very short one, to win the war once and for all.
Prologue II
A human who saw the innermost conflict chamber would have described it as unbearably gauche.
The Tichck disagreed. There was no point in being amongst the wealthiest and most powerful races in the galaxy, they reasoned, if you couldn’t show off a little. Or a lot. The walls were lined with expensive paintings from a hundred different systems, the shelves and cases covered with artworks that were rare, if not unique, and worth more money than the vast majority of sentient beings would ever see in their lives. It was not enough to have made it, to have climbed to the top through fair means or foul; it was the cold desire to prove their success, to remind anyone who visited that they were nothing more than supplicants, prostrating themselves before their superiors even as they bided their time, hoping to reach the top themselves. The Tichck had never heard of the human observation that the rear one kicked on the way up might wind up being the one you had to kiss on the way down, but if they had they wouldn’t have taken it for the warning it was meant to be. It was the way things worked. If you won, you deserved it by right; if you lost, you deserved everything you got.
Chairperson Harpeth sat on his chair – a human would have thought of it as a throne, and rightly so – and watched the servants fussing about, their faces carefully blank as they handed out the food and endured abuse from their masters. The Tichck prided themselves on being hard and ruthless, willing to do anything in search of power and profit, and the ones who reached the very top were the hardest and most ruthless of all, unwilling to let even a moment go by without reminding their inferiors that they were inferior. Competition was baked into their society, even in scientific research and technical development. Harpeth had seen enough of other societies to understand the downsides, but he had no intention of trying to convince his people to take a different path. The Tokomak had tried to freeze the entire galaxy in stasis and look how that had worked out for them! No, competition was the way forward, and the Tichck were well-placed to win.
He waited for the last of the servants to leave, then tapped the console beside his throne. The GalCore ran through a series of security checks, ensuring the chamber was as secure as GalTech could made it, then displayed a holographic starchart in front of the committee. A low hiss ran through the chamber as the councillors stared at the display, a handful of stars surrounded by tactical icons that cautioned them the data was dangerously out of date. The Tichck had expended a great deal of money building up a communications network that was second to none, but the vagaries of the gravity points and the limits of FTL travel ensured it took weeks, if not months, for reliable data to flow from the edge of their sphere of influence to the homeworld, and by the time the homeworld replied to any messages the situation had already moved on. It was hard to be sure of what was happening a mere ten light years away, let alone on the other side of their sphere of influence, but one thing was clear. Belos remained in enemy hands.
“The report is vague to the point of uselessness,” he said. He didn’t bother with any preliminaries. They were for lesser races. “The operation to recapture Belos and regain control of the gravity points has failed.”
Another hiss ran through the chamber. The Tichck had expended billions of credits in expanding their network of influence, buying politicians and hiring influencers who might – openly or covertly – steer their planets into becoming de facto client states. Some were well known, others were so well hidden that no one, as far as they knew, would realise they were actually working for the Tichck. It had taken dozens of such deniable assets to convince the various governments to allow the task force to pass through their systems and gravity points, turning the concept of their neutrality into a joke. Harpeth knew it would have been dangerously revealing even if the operation had succeeded, as local reporters and analysts started asking hard questions about just why so many politicians and military leaders had bent over backwards to please the Tichck. The networks would be uncovered, and that meant …
“Impossible,” Chairman Tomah said. “How could we lose?”
“The Belosi have backers,” Harpeth pointed out. “And they are clearly a very powerful race.”
He felt his canines slip into a snarl. The Belosi had been primitives, too stupid to even come up with fire, when they’d been discovered, and very little had changed in the hundreds of years they’d spent under Tichck domination. They were fit only for brute labour, their minds too small to comprehend what they were doing or their ultimate role within the Tichck Consortium. No, they could not have come up with the idea of revolting against a vastly superior race on their own, not when they had no comprehension of the greater galaxy or the towering civilisation surrounding them. The whole idea of allowing other races to set up shop on Belos had been, in hindsight, a mistake. Someone had gotten greedy, someone had decided to make a play for the entire system …
But who?
The analysts had drawn a blank. The enemy starships were designs that dated back hundreds of years, hulls in service with a hundred different races … the design so old, he reflected grimly, that the ships they were facing might have passed though several separate sets of owners before being deployed against the Tichck Navy. They had been modernised, according to the analysts, but again there was nothing that pointed to their true owners. Everything from their jump drives to their missiles were almost disturbingly common, products of fabricators that could be found on almost any truly developed world. The Tichck had put feelers out, trying to determine who might have hired a few thousand mercenaries, but results had been inconclusive. Everyone was hiring mercenaries at the moment, from races with ambitions of conquest to others who feared their neighbours were planning to invade. The intelligence staff had admitted, reluctantly, they had been unable to identify their culprit. They’d covered their tracks in a manner that would have been admirable, if it hadn’t been aimed at him.
“We cannot afford to let this pass,” he said, quietly. “It makes us look weak.”
“It does weaken us,” Chairman Tomah pointed out, dryly. “We’re not collecting any revenue from the gravity points.”
Harpeth couldn’t disagree. The Belos System had always been prime real estate, as far as the Galactics were concerned, because of the three gravity points. They’d been able to charge transit fees to anyone who wanted to pass through, and there had never been any shortage of people willing to pay. But now, the Belosi – and their new masters – were in control of the system. The Tichck had declared the gravity points off-limits, yet he knew better than to think anyone would actually listen. The galaxy cared nothing for words, when action was all that counted. And he couldn’t keep starships from transiting the gravity points.
“It’s the Vesparians,” Chairman Domoh said. “Who else can it be?”
“You say that because they’re pressing against your territory,” Chairman Tomah countered. “It could be the …”
The discussion dissolved into chaos, the chairmen arguing loudly over just who was the prime suspect. Harpeth kept his mouth shut and listened, without committing himself. The Vesparians were probable suspects, and they had an excellent motive for seizing control of Belos and the nearby systems … a better one, perhaps, than they knew. If the plan to take covert control of many surrounding systems worked, the Vesparians would find themselves surrounded and restricted on all sides. They might well have chosen to act in a covert manner, leaving themselves with enough plausible deniability to back off if the operation failed. But they weren’t the only suspects. Harpeth was all too aware his people had enemies. Their competitive approach to galactic power made them feared, rather than loved. He didn’t care if his race was hated as long as their enemies were too scared to lift a hand against them. But if that fear died away …
“We need to act fast,” he said. “And that means launching another fleet as quickly as possible.”
“We can’t spare many ships from our other commitments,” Chairman Domoh pointed out. “And even if we can muster a fleet, can we send them through neutral space again?”
“We have enough firepower to force the gravity points, if they refuse to let us pass peacefully,” Chairman Tomah snapped. “If they wish to be our enemies, we can treat them as such.”
“We already have enough enemies,” Chairman Domoh countered. “Do we really need more?”
Chairwoman Maris leaned forward. Harpeth tensed. Maris had an absolute gift for looking foolish, right up to the moment she buried her knife in someone’s back. She had an odd view of the universe that, he had to admit, had somehow worked out for her. No one who had climbed to the top could be taken lightly, but Chairwoman Maris was easily the most eccentric of the councillors. And perhaps the one most likely to think outside the box.
“We could try to come to terms with the Belosi,” she said. “If we can separate them from their allies …”
“Treason,” Chairman Domoh howled. “They cannot be trusted!”
“And they are primitives,” Chairman Tomah added. “Why should we work with them?”
“Because we cannot afford a long drawn-out conflict,” Chairwoman Maris snapped. “Let us make a deal, and expose their allies. We can always deal with them later.”
Harpeth considered it, briefly. On paper, Maris had a point. There was no way the Belosi, primitive in name and nature, could understand the subtle tricks their masters would use against them, let alone realise how they were being isolated and prepared for the slaughter. Making concessions now might save them a war, and expose their mystery backers. But in practice, it would make the Tichck look weak. Other races would demand concessions, and that would be the end of their power. The galaxy was a lawless jungle, now the Tokomak were no longer enforcing the rules. If the Tichck slipped, they would fall a very long way.
The argument went on for hours, the Subdo servants bringing food and drink and then withdrawing as silently as they’d come. Harpeth paid them no mind. They were a servitor race and their opinions were irrelevant, in the great scheme of things. He kept his mind focused on the debate, although he already knew the outcome. It was unlikely the council would heed Maris, not when everything was at stake. The vote, hours after the meeting had opened, was a mere formality.
There would be war.
Chapter One
The enemy fleet looked as if it had been through the wars.
Commodore Elton Yasser stood in the observation blister, his hands clasped behind his back, and studied the remnants of the alien fleet thoughtfully. The Tichck had always believed that size mattered, and they’d taken the original battleship designs and crammed hundreds of modern weapons into their hulls, but it hadn’t been enough to save them. Their ships had been lured into a trap, forced to fight a duel at point-blank range with an enemy who didn’t care if they lived or died, as long as they hurt their tormentors, and then finally mouse-trapped by a superior alien fleet. Elton knew, with a hint of shame, just how close he had come to conceding defeat and fleeing the system; he had no illusions, not really, about just what his superiors would say when they found out what had happened. He had gambled, and won, and yet … he could easily have lost. The Solar Union could not afford to lose more than a handful of ships, not now. It could cost them all the gains of the last war.
Light glimmered in the distance as shuttles made their way to and from the airlocks, conveying the alien prisoners to temporary holding cells, and repair drones patched up the damage as best as possible. The enemy CO had been bullied into surrendering without destroying the fleet’s datacores, ensuring the ships could be put back into action relatively quickly, but it didn’t mean the ships were fit for anything more than soaking up missiles. The human prize crews would have very real difficulty flying and fighting them, if only because the Tichck had designed their ships to be as specific to their species as possible. A great many systems would have to be reconfigured for human or Belosi use, before the ships could be taken into battle, and the Tichck – in defiance of Galactic Law – had made that surprisingly hard. Elton had no idea if it was a security precaution, or simple laziness, but he couldn’t deny it had worked in their favour. It would be weeks before the ships could be pointed at their former masters, at best. And that might be dangerously optimistic.
The communicator pinged. He glanced at it, torn between relief and a certain kind of apprehension as the update appeared in front of him. The reinforcements had arrived … such as they were. The Solar Navy had been able to detach old and outdated vessels that had been surrendered, in the wake of the last war, but there would be no modern weapons and very few crew. Elton understood the logic – the moment the fleet deployed Hammers or LinkShips, the Tichck would know precisely who they were fighting – yet it still gnawed at him. The war could have been shortened, quite sharply, if he’d been able to use the most advanced weapons in the known galaxy.
No, he corrected himself. The most advanced weapons you know to exist.
He scowled. He didn’t need to bring up a political starchart of the explored galaxy to understand the dilemma facing the Solar Union. The Tokomak had been beaten, but their defeat had freed a considerable number of major powers from their straightjacket of alien control, powers that could face the human race on equal terms and were no less capable of innovating for themselves. Elton had been a diplomat as much as a military commander – he knew without false modesty he was a better diplomat than a commodore – and he knew the Galactics were very far from stupid. The Tokomak had tried to keep a lid on technological development, but now they were gone. It was just a matter of time before the human race was challenged, probably on multiple fronts.
We’re like Alexander the Great, he reflected. We beat the Persians. But now we have to somehow integrate their empire into ours, while also dealing with threats as far afraid as Rome, Carthage and India. And if we try to keep it all, we won’t be able to keep any.
The thought didn’t please him. Military victories were easy, compared to keeping and ruling one’s gains. Just ask Napoleon, or Hitler. The Solar Union controlled an unimaginably vast region of space now, let its control was very light and there were doubtless places where it wasn’t felt at all. The Galactics might be shocked by the fall of Tokomak Prime, and the defeat of the once-invincible Tokomak, but that wouldn’t last. It was just a matter of time before they banded together to face the human race, or started warring amongst themselves. There were already at least a dozen minor wars underway, if the reports were accurate. It was hard to be sure. They were already several weeks out of date.
His communicator pinged, again. “Commodore, nine transports just arrived from the exile colony,” Captain Lana Mendlesohn said. “They’re bringing additional trained crewman.”
Belosi crewmen, Elton thought. The Belosi had done remarkably well, for a race that had been effectively slaves seventy years ago, but he feared the gaps in their knowledge. Humanity had started from a far more advanced point, when the first FTL ship had been captured by Steve Stuart and the rest of the Founding Fathers, yet it had taken years to evaluate GalTech and work out how to improve upon it. Are they up to the task before them?
He took a breath. “Get them through the biofilters, then on to their new ships,” he ordered, finally. It would be tricky, but they’d have to cope. “Make sure they know not to head to the surface. We’re still working on genetic scrubbers.”
“Yes, sir,” Lana said. Her voice darkened. “They won’t take that well.”
Elton grimaced. He was old enough to remember the days mankind had thought itself alone in the universe, old enough to remember when a young man could have a fairly good – and safe – life on Earth, before it had turned into hell. He had little inclination to return to what remained of his hometown, and he was fairly sure it would be unsafe, but he understood the impulse. He, at least, had left willingly. The Belosi exiles had fled Belos, all too aware that if they stayed they’d be slaughtered. Elton couldn’t blame them for wanting to set foot, once again, on the eerie yellow-green hills of their homeworld. But it would put the exiles in immense danger.
He ground his teeth in silent frustration. The Tichck had crushed the rebels, and slaughtered vast numbers of natives to make their point, and then – just to make sure further revolts were impossible – they’d infected the survivors with a genetically-engineered bioweapon, altering their biological makeup so they couldn’t survive without regularly ingesting a very specific compound that was carefully added to their plantation rations. Any Belosi who fled, on the assumption he could live off the land, was going to die in short order, ensuring the natives could no longer assemble outside Tichck control. It was a neat and simple solution to the problem, Elton reflected, and yet no one had anticipated it until the bioweapon had been discovered during the invasion. And now, any exile who went down to the surface would rapidly become infected himself.
“They’ll just have to cope,” Elton said. He recalled hearing stories of people who’d been evacuated from Chernobyl, after the disaster, and then tried to sneak their way back into the district. They had wanted to go home, if he recalled correctly, and didn’t care about the risk … even if they understood it. “We don’t have enough medical support to tend to all the victims.”
He cursed the Tichck under his breath. Human medical science was superior to anything the Tichck could boast, but isolating the bioweapon and scrubbing it out permanently was a nightmarishly difficult task. They simply didn’t have the resources to do it on the required scale, and the medical supplies they’d captured on Belos – the planet itself was now completely in their hands – were designed more to keep the bioweapon appeased rather than remove it completely. They’d been lucky the Tichck hadn’t thought to destroy the facilities. It would have led, rapidly and inevitably, to the death of most of the slave population. He wondered, idly, why they hadn’t. Perhaps they’d thought they could retake the world. It wasn’t as if they gave a shit about public option.
“Yes, sir,” Lana said.
The connection closed. Elton rubbed his forehead, feeling a wave of tiredness threatening to overcome him. The task force had won a battle, but the enemy was still out there. They had at least one squadron of their own on the far side of Gravity Point One – Elton wanted to believe his missile barrage had damaged or destroyed the enemy fleet; decades of naval service had taught him the dangers of wishful thinking – and they would have reinforcements on the way. His analysts had predicted the enemy homeworld already knew what had happened … Elton didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t deny the logic. The smart money was still on a Tichck victory. The smaller powers orbiting their sphere of influence wouldn’t change sides unless they thought the outcome was in doubt. The hell of it was that they might be right. If the Tichck brought their entire fleet to bear against Belos, the Belosi would lose.
He turned his head, staring into the starfield. The Tichck had turned the system into a major industrial node, and most of the fabricators had fallen into their hands when they’d invaded. Given time, the Belosi would have a chance to build up a fleet of their own … but would they have that time? The Tichck had to be planning trouble. And God alone knew what the rest of the Galactics were thinking.
They invested a shitload of money into the system, he reflected, as he opened the hatch and left the blister. And they’ll want their investment back as quickly as possible.
Elton put the thought aside as he walked through the ship, the naval crewmen saluting him as they hurried about their duties. MacArthur hadn’t taken heavy damage in the final engagement, thankfully, but there was never any shortage of work for her much-reduced crew. Assigning half her complement to repair duties on other ships was a risk – there might not be enough time to get them home if the shooting started without warning – yet there was no other way to get the ships ready for action before it was too late. Elton had seen the computer models, watched the hundreds of possible enemy actions get slimmed down to a handful of possibilities. They might be attacked within two weeks, perhaps less if enemy reinforcements were already on the way. They had won a great victory, but their gains were fragile. They could still lose.
He sighed, inwardly, as he stepped into the CIC. The big displays were throbbing with activity, from warships and support vessels holding station near the gravity points and the planet itself to mining and industrial ships making their way from the asteroids to the fabricators and back again. It was an impressive sight, representing more industrial might than the United States at the height of its power and sophistication, yet he knew it was tiny compared to the enemy’s core worlds. They were churning out missiles and mines already, and they were well on their way to producing starship components and sensors, but the enemy could outproduce them by several orders of magnitude. He wanted – he needed – a silver bullet, one that could render the enemy’s fleet little more than scrap metal. It was galling, to say the least, to know that the Solar Navy had one. He just wasn’t allowed to use it.
And that policy won’t change, he reflected, as he took his seat and scanned the reports. We’ll just have to grin and bear it, and hope we can get ready before the storm finally arrives.
***
Sarah Wilde wondered, not for the first time, how actors like Michael Dorn or René Auberjonois managed to survive their careers, wearing rubber masks and costumes that made them look almost completely alien. The guise she wore was lighter than those, made from modern materials that were designed with her comfort in mind, yet they were still hot and sticky and left her feeling weirdly exposed even though she was heavily disguised. She would have preferred to wear a heavy battlesuit, although they were bulky and everyone knew they made easy targets for alert enemies. They didn’t leave her feeling as though she was trapped in a rubbery slimy nightmare.
She kept the thought to herself as she stood and watched the alien prisoners being escorted out of the shuttles and into the makeshift POW camp. No one was quite sure what would happen to the alien prisoners – Tichck, Subdo, a bunch of others from races that were important or considered themselves to be – but it went against the grain to mistreat them, or allow others to mistreat them. There would be a demand for an accounting, sooner or later, and that could easily lead to trouble if a race was looking for an excuse to start a fight … not, she supposed, that it would matter even if there wasn’t such a race. The Solar Union had very clear rules on the proper treatment of prisoners, and mistreating POWs who were behaving themselves was asking for a court martial and a long prison sentence. She didn’t want to find out the hard way what would happen if she allowed the Belosi to mistreat them. She understood the impulse – she had seen the plantations – but it could not be allowed.
Her eyes narrowed as she watched the POWs sorting themselves out. The officers and corporate suits had been taken to another complex, where they’d be interrogated before they were traded back to the enemy, and it looked as if the POWs were segregating themselves. The Tichck were refusing to share barracks with Subdo, while the other races were separating themselves still further … she didn’t care, as long as it didn’t turn into a fight. They had warned the POWs not to fight each other, or try to escape, but Sarah had little expectation they’d do as they were told. She’d been through the dreaded Conduct After Capture course herself, and she knew she had a duty to resist, and to attempt to escape, to the best of her ability. There was no reason the enemy wouldn’t have their own version of the course, and their own orders to escape …
Her lips quirked as she turned away. Any who tried would find it difficult. The island had been abandoned years ago, the native population either transferred elsewhere or simply left to die when the bioweapon swept over the planet. They could make a raft if they wanted, and set sail for the mainland, but they’d have to cross nearly two hundred miles of water, teeming with dangerous sea creatures, and then somehow survive the Belosi on the far side. Sarah doubted any would last long enough to reach a megacity, and even if they did it would be impossible to get offworld. She hoped they’d listened, when the staff had pointed it out. They had no friends on the planet, just enemies who were less hostile than others. And nothing could keep the Belosi on the mainland from slaughtering every Tichck they caught.
“We should be able to keep them fed and watered, for the moment,” Lieutenant Patty O’Rourke said. She looked like a parody of a Vesperian, although Sarah had the advantage of knowing it was a rubber suit. “The food will be bland, but there won’t be any problems with compatibility.”
“Let us hope so,” Sarah said. One Galactic’s favourite food was another’s poison. Literally. The Galactics had had centuries to devise ways to feed multiple races at the same time, but the food tended to be tasteless at best and foul at worst. Her body had been genetically modified to consume almost anything, yet there had been times when she’d had to force herself to choke down the slop. “Let them talk, if they will. Some may know something useful.”
“Of course,” Patty said. “But I doubt it.”
Sarah couldn’t disagree. The Solar Navy cross-trained its personal and a very high percentage of the officer ranks were mustangs, officers who had been crewmen and then transferred to officer training. Solarians were expected to think about what they were doing, and initiative was keenly encouraged. The Galactics, by contrast, rarely trained their crewmen in anything that didn’t touch on their role, and never told them anything more than they needed to know at any one time. She hoped it would impose limits on their naval expansion programs, but it was hard to tell for sure. The Tokomak had believed quantity had a quality all of its own and they’d written the tactical manuals the other races had read, then copied.
Her communicator bleeped. “Sarah, report back to the shuttle,” Captain Riley Richardson said, curtly. “We’re invited to a conference on the flagship.”
“Got it.” Sarah let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. They’d won one battle, and secured the planet, but the war was still to be won. Or lost. “I’m on my way.”
She closed the connection, then took one last look at the alien POWs. They looked listless and worn, something that could easily be an act. No POW in their right mind wanted to look dangerous, for fear they’d be knocked down – or worse – by the guards. For them, the war was over. Or was it? The enemy might regain the high orbitals and the POWs would suddenly find themselves called back to duty. And that would be the end of any hope of freedom for a sorely troubled and abused world.
Not if we have anything to say about it, she told herself. And we do.
