The Empire’s Corps: Book 01 - The Empire's Corps (41 page)

“And, as the years go on, we look to the past to remind ourselves of where we came from. The old guard – we who were there at the beginning – grow older, yet our memory lives on. And, as long as a single Marine remains alive, our memory will never fade. Out of a culture that practices democracy and self-determination, we embody the best of that society. We fail in that charge at our peril.”

He looked up, staring down at the assembled Marines. Just for a moment, his eyes met Michael’s and they seemed to share a moment of communication, of understanding. “We will not forget our brother, who gave his life so that we may live,” Captain Stalker said. “Sergeant, assemble your men.”

A Sergeant Michael didn't recognise stepped forward, followed by his platoon. Silently, in perfect formation, they marched apart and lined up on each side of the casket, producing their rifles and pointing them into the sky. Michael realised what was about to happen just before the Sergeant barked the first command and the rifles fired, so close together that it seemed that only one shot had been fired. The Marines fired a second volley, and then a third, before returning their rifles to their shoulders and picking up the casket. As a lone trumpet played, they carried the casket off the stage and out of the parade grounds.

“We will not forget,” Captain Stalker said. His voice seemed quieter after the shooting. “You are all dismissed.”

Michael followed Barr as he assembled the recruits and marched them back down towards the shooting range. Part of his mind realised that Barr wasn't giving them any time to brood, but he couldn't help thinking about the dead Marine...and about a tradition that had lasted for over a thousand years. Barr had made them study the history of the Marine Corps – someone, he expected them to read massive volumes in their
abundant
spare time – yet it had all been dusty words, until he’d realised what the tradition
meant
. It would never die, not as long as men like Captain Stalker kept it alive.

***

“Here’s to David,” Blake said, as 2
^nd
Platoon gathered in their barracks. “God rest his soul.”

Jasmine took her own plastic glass and sipped the fine brandy carefully, enjoying the taste as it rolled off her tongue and down her throat. David Robertson’s wake wouldn't be the grand carouse it would have been on the Slaughterhouse, or on a more mundane deployment, but he would understand. The brandy had been shipped all the way from Old Earth, which made the bottle Blake had produced expensive as hell. The Marine who had donated it could have sold it to the locals and made a fortune – in local currency, at least – but instead it had been preserved for a wake.

“God rest his soul,” she echoed, as she took another sip. There was no hope of seeing another bottle like the one they were drinking until they returned to Earth, if they ever returned to Earth. The brandy was so far ahead of the local rotgut that it wasn't even funny. “May he always be remembered by us, wherever we may wander.”

There was a long pause as the platoon drank, remembering the dead. Jasmine remembered being partnered with Robertson for a brief scouting mission back on Han, when she’d been the new shrimp from the Slaughterhouse, convinced that she knew it all and didn't. Robertson hadn’t been interested in promotion, or graduating to become an NCO, but he’d been patient with the newcomer and taught her the tricks the Slaughterhouse had never shown her. Like the rest of the Company, he’d been her sibling in every way that counted, apart from biology. She would miss him.

She’d seen other Marines die, of course, but back on Han she hadn't had time to make friends with her new comrades before the shit had hit the fan. Afterwards, back when she’d woken up and discovered that she was a veteran, she had bonded with the rest of her unit, only to lose some of them when they were killed in action. It never got easier. Jasmine had hoped that 2
^nd
Platoon would have a chance to crack some heads when the Civil Guard hit their own supply depot, but the Civil Guard had handled it themselves. She held them in contempt – they’d met far too many Civil Guard units that broke at the first sniff of enemy action – but she had to admit that they’d handled themselves well, once they’d realised that they’d been ambushed.

The brandy aftertaste was fading and she took another sip. The aftermath of the battle had been confusion incarnate, but once they’d realised that it was all over, the Marines had settled down to hashing out what had happened and assimilating the lessons – getting their stories straight, as Blake had joked at the time. It was never easy to put together what had happened during a battle, but a comprehensive picture had slowly begun to emerge. The Civil Guard had followed a predicable path and walked right into an ambush, one that had threatened to snare the Marines as well. The lessons had been hammered home by the Sergeants; take nothing for granted, they’d warned, and watch for advanced weapons that shouldn't exist outside the Civil Guard, or the Marines themselves.

Always learn from mistakes made by other people,
her first Drill Sergeant had bellowed, after verbally tearing apart a particularly disastrous exercise.
It’s much cheaper than learning from your own
.

“He saved my life during the HangChow extraction,” Blake said, slowly. He’d been a shrimp then too, but he’d grown up rapidly. “Without him, I wouldn't be here today.”

“He used to play chess with me,” another Marine said. “We’d spend some of our off-duty time playing together, competing endlessly for victories. We even invented our own form of chess and tried to market it on Earth.”

Jasmine smiled slowly, sipping her drink as more stories emerged. One day, they’d give her the same wake, telling the new recruits stories about her life before she finally bought the farm. She wondered just how many of the young faces staring at her would be alive to see her off at her wake, or if they would all die together, going out in a blaze of glory. If nothing else, Han had proven that Marines could die just as easily as civilians, when their transports were hit by missiles and destroyed.

Blake poured the last of the brandy into their plastic glasses and threw the bottle against the wall. “That’s the last of it,” he said, quietly. It was odd to see him so subdued. “It’s the local piss-water now.”

Jasmine shook her head as the bottles were offered around. It had always struck her as odd that drinking wasn't discouraged in the Marine Corps, although rendering oneself unfit for duty was an offence against military order and heavily punished. If necessary, the Marines would inject themselves with sober-ups before they returned to duty, although the experience wouldn't be pleasant. Running the Gauntlet for being unfit for duty would be worse. She'd heard of Civil Guard units that had spent their entire tours in a permanent drunken stupor, and then had been surprised when all hell had broken loose in their sectors.

“Leave it,” she said, and put the glass down. “I’ll see you all later.”

She stood up and walked out of the barracks, heading towards the shooting range. She had an urge to blow off as much steam as she could, yet there was no one in the practice ring who could give her a bout. The targets would have to face her wrath.

***

Edward watched one of his Marines heading to the shooting range, and then turned back to the communicator. “So the Governor didn’t order your immediate arrest, then?”

“No,” Major Grosskopf said. “I think he was a little scared of the public reaction after rumours of what happened to the Civil Guard started to leak out. We may not be entirely popular on the planet, but our soldiers do have friends and relatives in the cities. And we smashed a bandit ambush and killed or captured over two hundred of the fuckers. It’s not all bad news, even if I did...exceed my authority.”

Edward smiled at the understatement. He’d signed off – unofficially – on the Major’s plan and had even stationed Marines nearby to help if Kappa Company had decided to try to fight rather than surrender, but he’d half-expected to hear an urgent message from the Governor demanding that he move to suppress a Civil Guard mutiny. That would have been awkward, to say nothing of placing both Grosskopf and himself in a very dangerous position.

“The bad news is that Smuts was definitely assassinated,” Grosskopf added. “There’s a good chance that we swept up the assassin in the purge and we’ll get him when we pass him through the lie detector, but for the moment we’ve hit a blank wall...as far as anyone on the outside knows.”

“The bandit we captured with the radio,” Edward said. They shared a long look. Officially, no bandit leaders had been taken alive, or so they’d informed the media, knowing that it would get back to the right ears. “We were going to start interrogating him tomorrow.”

“And find out if he knows who was behind this,” Grosskopf agreed. “He has to be important if they trusted him with a radio.”

Edward wasn't convinced of that – someone important would have known that the radio transmissions could be tracked - but he held his peace. “We’ll see,” he said. “How are your men coping?”

“Morale is surprisingly high after we invaded the supply dump,” Grosskopf said. “I think we could probably turn the whole thing around in a few months, if we have the time.”

Edward nodded. “I’ll let you know what our friend knows once we’re finished with him,” he said. “And then we can decide what to do next.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

The dividing line between legal and illegal combatant is blurred and – like all other such principles – is effectively determined by the winner. Given the nature of the wars we fight, expecting an enemy to conduct themselves according to the Azores Conventions of 2052 is foolish. We can therefore define a ‘legal’ combatant as one who attempts to spare civilian lives, where possible, and an ‘illegal’ combatant as the opposite. The latter, under the Articles of War, have no rights whatsoever. This does not sit well with civilians – or, rather, it does not sit well with civilians who are isolated from the war.

-Major-General Thomas Kratman (Ret), A Civilian’s Guide to the Terran Marine Corps.

Lucas sat back against the wall of his cell and tried to make himself comfortable. It wasn't easy. His leg had been firmly shackled to the floor and it could barely move, while a cold draft blew under the door and sent shivers down his spine. He was naked; the Marines, or perhaps the Civil Guard, had stripped him after he’d been stunned and then dumped him in the cell. Somehow, despite knowing about his backers, he found it hard to remain optimistic. He didn’t know how they'd done it, but they'd somehow identified him as an important person. How much did they know?

The question ran around and around in his mind as he settled back, cursing the heavy chain under his breath. It was overkill – a short look at the door had told him that he wouldn’t be breaking out any time soon – but it wasn't there to keep him imprisoned. It was there, he knew, to make sure he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was a prisoner and his fate was completely in someone else’s hands. Lucas had used similar techniques himself back when he'd been a gang leader on Earth, even before becoming one of the Knifes, for the human psyche often refused to realise that a situation was truly hopeless. He’d seen women, kidnapped from the homesteads, slowly fall into new thought patterns, one that allowed them to remain sane in the face of sexual abuse from their new masters. The thought of someone doing the same to him – making him think that he was where he should be, no matter how much it hurt – was intolerable, yet he was no longer sure that he was sophisticated enough to resist it. He knew what they were doing…and it was working anyway.

He had no idea how long he'd been in the cell. It could have been bare hours since he’d been stunned and captured, or it could have been days or weeks. The single light, burning down from high above, never went out and there were no windows, depriving him of anything he could use to measure time. He’d tried to keep count of when he’d fallen asleep, yet he had rapidly lost track of time. The food supply, a handful of ration bars someone had placed in the cell along with a single water tap, didn’t provide any clues. Besides, the ration bars tasted suspiciously like someone had made them out of shit. He’d heard stories of farmers in the outlying regions who had starved to death rather than eat ration bars on a regular basis. Just now, trapped in the cell, the stories seemed quite believable. He had had to force himself to swallow even a single bite.

His backers had failed to materialise, he realised, or perhaps they were in trouble themselves. There had been no way to conceal the fact that the Knives were deploying advanced weapons, weapons they could only have obtained from the Civil Guard, and their only hope of preventing investigators from drawing a line from their source to the backers was to kill the source before he or she could tell all. There was no hope that the source would remain silent, either; the Marines or the Civil Guard could simply have injected him with truth drugs, or perhaps they would have resorted to good old-fashioned torture. Lucas had tortured men and women himself back on Earth and knew that anyone could be broken, given enough time. They could be building a case against him right now…and there was nothing he could do about it. He’d shouted, claiming his rights under the Imperial Charter and demanding to see a lawyer, but there had been no response. In many ways, that had been more frightening than an official thug entering the cell and beating the shit out of him. If his civil rights had been suspended…how much could they do to him?

I have things they want
, he reminded himself, trying to remain optimistic.
I still have room to bargain
…

The door to the cell clicked loudly as it was unlocked. Lucas looked up as the door swung slowly open, revealing two men wearing unmarked black tunics. There was nothing to saw who they were or which particular organisation they worked for, but they had to be soldiers. They held themselves in a military manner, although he couldn’t have pointed to exactly what had tipped him off. They didn’t show any fear of Lucas either. Of course, he reminded himself, with one leg chained firmly to the floor, all they had to do was remain out of reach and there would be nothing he could do to them.