War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20.
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21
Heni opened the door out into the hall and cautiously stuck his head around. His suit told him there wasn’t anybody outside in the hall, but he still expected drones or automated lasers. He picked up a small chair, barely large enough for a child, and tossed it out into the hallway, waiting for it to be sliced to pieces by laser weapons.
It clattered to the ground. Heni waited a full twenty seconds and then poked his head around. Nothing. He stepped cautiously around the door an out into the hall. Still nothing.
It was only when he reached the head of the stairs that he encountered any resistance, but by firing down upon that resistance from the top of the stairs, he managed to subdue it. Cautiously, he proceeded downstairs and found most of his enemies dead. A few were seriously wounded. From these latter, Heni took weapons and ammunition.
Methodically, Heni cleared the house. He had already sent signals to the operating system of the tank and to the men in the street not to fire on the house. When he was finished, he sent off an all-clear signal.
By this time, the prison break had been stymied. There hadn’t been any other attacks elsewhere in the city, and it was estimated that over forty-five militants had fled.
In the days following the attack on Rexford Prison, the city locked down. All civilians – including those with Kridalian or Merian flags in their windows – were ordered to stay in their homes except to go to work, or to buy groceries, or for medical reasons. Every street had soldiers walking along it. Young men were frisked for weapons and some were pulled in for questioning.
Local law enforcement had a list of suspects, and Heni and Gurney found themselves acting as auxiliaries to the city police as they went to the various suspects to interrogate them. For the most part, they stood on guard holding powerful firearms, looking ready to blow the heads off of anyone foolish enough to do something rash. At times, they had to secure buildings or city blocks, in one or two cases kicking down doors.
A few suspects were pulled in for questioning, but most were released almost immediately. Few of the usual suspects seemed to know much of anything, indicating that the attack had been organized from outside the city. The handful of attackers who had been captured instead of killed were not forthcoming about the nature of their organization, even when threatened with life in prison without parole.
“They think they’re going to be broken out,” Heni told Gurney. “They don’t think it will last.”
Patrols resumed as before, although with some variations in transportation, time of day, number of marines, route in the city, and number of patrols per day. Heni and Gurney found themselves working overtime trying to help cover all of these patrols.
But soon, even with a frightening attack on Rexford prison, the two men settled into the monotony again. Patrols rarely proved eventful. Nights flowed into days flowed into nights. All meals were eaten at the mess hall and all meals were tedious and tasteless. Heni realized he was losing weight. And he had already been lean before the reassignments.
The entire city remained on edge. Whenever Heni imagined that now, at least, people could stop thinking about what happened, some new revelation would hit the local papers and the city would go back to high alert. Everyone wanted to know when the next attack would be. Heni wanted to know whether law enforcement was making any progress breaking the Front’s networks. Despite, like his fellow marines, reading the local papers with an interest he had never had for news media back home, Heni did not learn anything which indicated one way or the other who was winning.
Despite paper having been rendered obsolete centuries ago, the word “newspaper” was still used for the daily periodicals which reported generally on all current events, including politics, war, crime, athletic competitions, economic forecasts, and weather. Some of these, at least in the Kridalian Republic, still ran a print edition on old-fashioned paper. In Jaff, these could be found in old-timey metal boxes throughout the city, purchasable for a half-crown, or on newsstands alongside other anachronistic paper items, such as magazines, travelers’ guides, and illicit pornographic slicks. Heni downloaded the instantaneous version of the Jaff Chronicle and the Jaff Gazette-Tribune every morning and evening, for which he paid far less than half a crown per issue. But occasionally he picked up a paper copy of the Underground Jaff when he was out walking in the city on patrol.
The Underground was an alt-weekly magazine which took a strong political stand in favor of labor interests and against business interests. At the outbreak of the insurgency, the editorial board had split over the issue of the Raathi Front, with a few of the writers joining with much of the reporting staff in siding with the Front, while the bulk of the editorial board and several veteran reporters condemned the terrorists as cowards and fascists. This led to a series of dramatic resignations, followed by the founding of a second alt-weekly, the Weekly Revolutionary devoted solely to championing the cause of the Raathi Front and exposing the hypocrisy of the local governing class.
This split had exposed intense fault lines in the community of Underground writers and the freelancers loosely affiliated with the magazine – who were generally known as the undergrounders. All of them were steeped in anti-war, anti-military, anti-law-enforcement activism, and all of them viewed the Merian Federation as an abusive hegemony which used its size to negotiate trade agreements perceived as unfairly lowering trade barriers the Kridalian Republic had placed to protect local industry from foreign competition. Many of the more traditionally-minded working-class writers naturally took the side of majority sentiment in working-class neighborhoods, which held that the Raathi Front better hope the police caught them before local union men did. Some of the younger writers believed this wasn’t radical enough, and saw the Front’s cause as just, even if their methods were less than desirable.
The new Revolutionary took the position that not only was the Front’s cause just, their methods were actively good, because their victims had it coming. All of the writers published anonymously, but everyone knew that it was helmed by Et Kan, formerly of the Underground. Within a week of the first publication of the Revolutionary, he and other suspected staff of the weekly were hauled into jail to be interrogated, but despite holding them for forty-eight hours, the police found no evidence that they had any connection – beyond sympathy – to any criminal activity or any member of the Raathi Front.
Ever after, the Weekly Revolutionary was on notice. A motion was introduced in the local city council to have the staff arrested and put in prison for the duration of the war. This attracted widespread condemnation even from staid and traditional newspapers. The members of the Underground saw an opportunity to win back their mojo and staged a protest outside city hall in favor of free speech and freedom of the press. They loudly trumpeted their commitment to freedom for radical speech in their staff editorials. Heni followed these developments with interest.
It was one morning when he was reading the latest editorial from the Chronicle regarding the protests that he heard shouting in the barracks. Before he had time to look around, a new update flashed across his helmet’s screen.
There had been another attack. No, two. No, four. No, ten. No, it was a full-fledged war. All across the worlds of the Kridalian Republic, in city after city, on moons and even on space stations, Insurgents from the Raathi Front were staging coordinated attacks on civilian and military targets. Already, there was heavy fighting near city hall in Jaff.
Heni grabbed his gun, pulled on his boots, and ran out into the hallway.
22
The black peak cut out of the forest like the fin of some predatory fish. It filled the window of the hotel serving area, haunting the city with its sharp edges. Lines of snow ran along a few of the crags, like tiny rivers of water flowing off the breasting fin.
Lilia watched the mountain, and she watched the hovercrafts flitting about before it. She watched the street outside, where men and women in purple robes and cone-shaped hats walked velveteen-clad children to school. She had always thought Wildprong fashion a tad ridiculous.
Dr. Sideney sat opposite her. His coffee – the traditional, Old-Earth variety – had cream in it. They said that Marielan cream came from real cows. Cattle were still kept on some of these worlds.
Lilia drank hers black, although these days she slipped a tasteless acid-neutralizer in before drinking it, in concession to having left her youth behind.
“Do you suppose it will be a productive conference?” asked Sideney.
Lilia looked away from the window to meet his gaze. She had bought nothing to eat, but he was biting into a batfruit pastry at that moment. “That depends on what you mean by productive,” she said with a shrug. “It’s a conference. Most of the presentations will have no value and a few will be brilliant and will revolutionize my understanding of my work. What do you expect?”
“I find,” said Sideney through a full mouth, “that the connections one meets at conferences are far more valuable than the discussion panels or the lectures.”
Lilia took a sip from her coffee, to avoid having to respond to this. She wished he would come out and tell her what he wanted from her.
“Most people do,” she replied, when he took another bite from his pastry.
“I am intrigued by you, Dr. Sackleton. I haven’t decided yet whether you will be a useful connection to have. You are awfully coy, do you know that?”
Lilia had glanced back out the window, but she turned back and held his gaze again. She watched his prominent nose and dark eyes. “You must admit,” she said finally, “to being rather coy yourself. You have thus far failed to explain the reason you contacted me on the spaceliner in the first place, other than that you wanted to get acquainted with another conference attendee. But there is something you specifically want from me, isn’t there?”
A light came into Sideney’s eyes, and he turned up the corners of his mouth. “Ah,” he said. “I see we have decided to be more forward.”
Lilia did not respond.
“Well, then,” went on Sideney. “I must ask you what your real purpose at the conference is, Dr. Sackleton? Surely you didn’t make the trip all the way out to Wildprong to attend a few boring lectures and valueless presentations and rebuff the attempts of potential colleagues to get to know you.”
Lilia finished her coffee before speaking. She stared around the serving area, making him wait. The hotel was one of those traditionally-patterned ones, with an alcove on the ground floor well stocked with coffee, fruit, and pastries. There were three tables against one window and two high tables against one wall for those who preferred standing. The two of them were seated at the only booth, towards the back of the alcove.
“I came here because I have questions and I’m looking for answers,” she replied. “I want to know what is going on in the universe. I think you have some of those same questions.”
“Perhaps. But what do you mean by that Dr. Sackleton? Many people will say they want to understand the universe, but we all mean something different when we say it.”
“You mean, ‘who do I work for?’” asked Lilia.
“You work for the University of Wenghent,” responded Sideney. “Unless…”
“Who do you work for?” asked Lilia. But Sideney just smiled.
He checked the time. “I had best be going,” he said. “I’ll need to dress and clean my teeth before heading to the conference. I’m sure we will run into each other on the way there.”
“I’m sure.”
“Good to chat, Dr. Sackleton. See you soon.”
Read Chapters 23 and 24.