War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
13
Lights danced high above the desert, playing across the dawning sky in reds and greens and purples. Dozens of strands of music wove into each other, spreading from the different corners of the festival like so many threads in a rope. The sounds of voices calling to each other mixed with the music.
As the sky lightened, they rose up out of the scrub a quarter-mile from the tents and trotted half-crouched across the rocky ground. Their weapons were held low and they glanced occasionally at the lightening sky. They covered their faces with masks, so that only their beards and eyes were visible. When they came within forty yards of the tents, they straightened up and started running. Ten yards out, they began yelling in strange tongues and firing their weapons indiscriminately. A young woman, no more than twenty, had at that unfortunate moment stepped out of the closest tent. She was looking back over her shoulder and calling to someone. She was laughing. A string of white and blue flowers tied back her straight, dark hair.
The first shot tore off her nose and ear and the second shattered her spine. Tiny projectiles ripped open the tent and these were followed by small grenades. When these went off, the grenades sent the tent up in flames. With streaming eyes, screaming young people dashed out of the tent, some with cuts and burns on their arms or faces. Most were teenagers. They were shot down as they ran.
The masked men slowed to a walk and began methodically strolling among the tents, setting them on fire, and shooting the young men and women as they ran out. The masked men yelled in jubilation. They came to a grassy field filled with frightened youths. None was older than twenty-five. None of them had a weapon. Some held their hands in the air, as if trying to surrender. They were shot down where they stood. They rest began to flee and were shot in the back. The masked men moved on.
They fanned out through the festival, chasing after those who fled, burning tents, and butchering their victims with old-fashioned firearms and dart guns and handheld blades. Their weapons were primitive, but not a single festival-goer was armed. A few tried to fight back with rocks and tent poles, but their efforts were absurd.
By now, most of the living festival-goers were running away from the tents into the desert, desperately trying to escape. A signal went out and the masked men began looking for hostages to take alive. They walked among fallen tents and small fires, killing anyone close to death and tying cords around the rest. The sun had risen over the horizon now and the pale white light of the sky shone down upon the grey sand and the grey-green scrub and the carnage of the festival.
Several of the masked men ran out into the desert after the fleeing festival-goers. They had come from the east and their victims were fleeing west. To the southeast, the sun had risen.
A fleet of rotor-wing gunships appeared in the northwest sky, flying low towards the festival. One of the masked men pointed and they all stopped pursuing their victims. They turned and ran back towards the smoking tents. A volley of heavy shells came in over the fleeing youths and landed amongst the retreating attackers. Great clouds of rock and sand filled the air as the ground ripped open. The gunships quickly reached the scene of the carnage and began to circle. Any masked man who tried to flee back to the east was hit with a five-inch shell. The gunships buzzed in circles, firing down upon any heads. A few of the masked men tried to fire back, but their primitive weapons were ineffective against a dozen gunships. They had expected a response, but not this quickly and not so punishing a response. The Kridralians were spending hundreds of thousands of marks a minute to go after a collection of bandits. The masked men hadn't expected this many gunships.
So they did the only thing they could. They held their hostages at gunpoint and dragged them out into the desert, heading east. They made a show of waving their guns and pointing to the hostages, to make sure the pilots and gunners knew what would happen. There must have been some consultation, for the gunships made no move until all of the masked men were out in the open desert, dragging screaming teenagers along in their tow.
The order must have gone out that the hostages would be better off dead than raped and tortured to death in caves. The gunships opened fire upon the masked men and their victims, pounding the desert into rubble until nothing was left alive. Then they flew back to where the remaining festival-goers huddled crying. They landed and medical teams dashed out, along with soldiers watching the ground to the east.
14
News of the terrorist attack in Kridalia spread throughout the entire Merian Federation in days. A small republic located in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy, Kridalia was the Federation’s closest ally. It spanned three star systems, and within its home system eight planets had human beings. Four of those, along with a dozen moons, were well-developed.
It was on one of these planets, Quinque, that the terrorist movement had begun. The Raathi Front had been established several dozen years ago, and had grown over the decades, militating against mainstream Kridalian society and occasionally perpetuating attacks throughout Kridalian systems. The precipitating animus of the Raathi Front was that the Kridi System had been settled centuries ago by some early pioneers coming from Mars, and that when later groups of settlers had come in from Old Earth, they had displaced the original inhabitants. Quinque was the home world of the original settlers, the Raathi, although today Kridal was the capital of the system and the republic.
Most citizens of Kridalia, even those of primarily Raathi descent, were not fond of the Front, which made its presence known by exploding civilian transports and poisoning supplies of fresh drinking water. In the centuries since the republic had been founded – by a joint pact between Raathis and Kridians, many in the republic were quick to point out – most citizens had grown to like living in a free and prosperous society, where the rights of all ethnic minorities were secured and citizens had equality under the law.
But the “hardcore Raathi,” as they were known, saw this as an abomination. When the original pact had been made between the Kridians and the Raathis, a dissident group of Raathis had assassinated some of their own people’s leaders in response. Remnants of this group, or those who harbored their sentiments, remained. They viewed any truce with the later settler group unbinding. The system belonged in perpetuity to the Raathi, and by rights it should have been called Raath and not Kridi. Clearly, their story went, since everything in Kridalia was named for the later settlers, Raathis had been given the short end of the stick and were no better than second-class citizens.
The Raathi Front went farther than this. They declared Kridians racially inferior and held that there could be no peace until the Kridalian Republic was dissolved and all those of Kridian descent had been purged from the Kridi system. It was often unspecified whether that meant exile or genocide, but official Raathi documents held that the colonizers must be expelled by any means necessary and in practice they mostly targeted the elderly and small children.
Thirty years before the war, the Raathi Front had created an uprising which managed to seize an entire continent on Quinque. For ten days, they indiscriminately slaughtered Raathi and Kridi and mixed-race citizens, sparing only those Raathis who swore allegiance to their front. Then a brutal crackdown by Kridalian forces, aided by local militias, had broken the back of the Front, which had collapsed. For decades only a small remnant had remained, which mainly functioned as a criminal syndicate, trafficking weapons and drugs and organs, and kidnapping teenage girls to staff their brothels.
But now the Front was back in the news. The attack on the music festival in the Cahli Desert had shocked the nation. Nearly a thousand people – mostly young men and women – had been killed. This was followed by several bombings in cities throughout the Kridi System, including on the moons. The Front released a manifesto proclaiming a new era of terror war.
Immediately, Kridalian officials began talks with their counterparts in the Merian Federation about ending their support for Merian war efforts. Fear at home demanded that troops be returned to keep order and, if necessary, to fight another war against the Raathi Front. Any day, there might be a repeat attack. The understandable, if unfortunate, consequence was going to be that the Merian fight would no longer be aided by several million Kridalian soldiers and a dozen Kridalian dreadnaughts.
The pullout came quicker than expected. Within two weeks of the attack on the Kii music festival, a series of bombings in major Kridalian cities brought public sentiment behind an immediate withdrawal from the galactic war and the commensurate launching of a full-scale campaign against the Raathi Front terrorists. Indeed, the leader of the Raathi Front, a man named Losam Oden – who had been presumed dead for three years – came out with a blurry holovideo which appeared to have been shot in a cave and in which he declared an all-out war against what he called the colonial occupiers. All hopes that he really was dead and the holovideo was a generated fake proved false when he allowed himself to be caught on security camera in a spaceport in Bel. Immediately, the spaceport was locked down, but he had disappeared. No one knew where.
One of the returning transports from the front was imploded by rogue members of the Kridalian navy who turned out to have been radicalized to the Raathi Front cause. Which was surprising, since many of them were racially Kridian. But they were young, and the Raathi cause was surprisingly popular among the Kridalian youth, many of whom had no memory of the previous round of terror war. On another transport, a Raathi soldier suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress took an automatic weapon and went on a spree, killing a dozen of his fellow soldiers before he was gunned down by military police.
There were several kidnappings and murders on Quinque. Riots broke out in a few dozen towns, including riots started by Kridians who torched Raathi districts and murdered Raathis in response to the attacks.
The situation grew so precarious, that the Merian Federation pulled troops scheduled to go into battle against the Xing Coalition and sent a small contingent into the Kridalian systems to aid in an ally’s war against their age-old enemies.
And so it was that Gurney and Heni found themselves on a transport spinning down into the Kridi System, destined for Quinque. A couple hundred thousand Merian marines had been sent to each of the three systems, along with a single dreadnaught group, and in this system they would be deployed to the surface of the planet most likely to be the major focus of the war. Private Stalfort thought it was ridiculous that the Merian armed forces were sparing badly needed men to aid a small ally who had just removed all of its troops from the war, but Gurney said you went where you were sent and didn’t ask questions.
“Hey,” said Stalfort. “Didn’t you and the other guy tell some officer you would quit the marines if they didn’t keep you together?”
“We told him we’d go anywhere they sent us. It just had to be together.”
“What are you, like…?”
“No. It’s not like that,” said Gurney.
“Hey, I’m not trying to mean anything by it,” said Stalfort. “You’re just very close, that’s all.”
“We adopted each other as brothers a long time ago,” said Gurney. “Not much in this universe is solid and not much you can depend on. I’ve seen so many places I don’t know where I’ve been anymore. You got to have something solid or you go mad. Heni’s my friend and I’m his. That’s what we’ve got.”
“Okay, man,” said Stalfort.
Their ship landed in Bel, the largest spaceport in Quinque. There, they unloaded and headed to a Kridalian barracks, where they were introduced to some Kridian marines who were to be their counterparts for fighting the insurgency. Nobody knew how long that would take, but everyone was hoping it would be short.
Lilia Trasker received a notification mid-flight about the attack on Quinque. The director told her several agents had been sent to the Kridalian Republic to investigate whether there were any ties between the Raathi Front and the Xing Coalition. It was suspected that the Coalition might be trying to fund separatists and revanchist groups within the Federation and her allies in order to upset the Merian war effort, but nothing was certain. Lilia’s mission was unchanged, but she was to be on the lookout for any connection to the small republic in the backwater arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The director also mentioned that there might be another agent joining her in the Wildprong Province, but he said he couldn’t tell her much because it was very up in the air at the moment, and the agent was in deep cover and his or her identity was need to know. Lilia thought she needed to know, but clearly it didn’t matter what she thought.
Read Chapters 15 and 16.