War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
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19
Two months went by. Heni had noticed long ago how quickly this happened in war. The hours of boredom, which constituted most waking hours, crawled along. The minutes of intense fighting seemed to slow until they filled days, with each second an hour. But the weeks rolled into one another, and each Monday when the rotation for their city patrols began all over again, it was as though no time at all had passed since the previous Monday. Each Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, they had a night patrol. The other days, they had day patrols. All night patrols were as one patrol, and all nights were as one night.
The people of Jaff had different names for the days of the week. The word was that they had a different number of days in their week, too, but Heni hadn’t been able to figure that out. They had no discernable weekend, although neither did the marines. Instead, there were odd feast days throughout the city at seemingly random intervals. A couple of times, he had been on patrol during one of these feast days.
He and Gurney were almost always assigned to patrol together, although occasionally they were separated. They were on the same weekly schedule, but multiple patrols went out at the same time. There was some muttering among the ranks that it made no sense to have a predictable rhythm of the same people on the same patrols on the same days at the same times every seven days. The Kridalians had random patrols under the theory that this would make their movements in the city unpredictable, but the Merian officers contended that it made sense to establish a certain order to their presence. Heni thought this didn’t make any sense, but he wasn’t paid to think, so he generally tried to avoid giving his opinion unless asked for it.
They had resumed foot patrols, in addition to vehicular patrols, because men on foot could go places bulky skimmers couldn’t and see things men inside tanks couldn’t see. They could walk among booths at the markets and mingle with the crowds in festivals.
At least in theory. Heavily armored men carrying large weapons attracted plenty of eyes and always caused a hush to fall over any crowd they encountered. The only people who wanted to speak to them were Kridians who hated the Raathi Front and weren’t afraid to let their hate be known, or hookers who wanted to market their wares. The marines were under strict orders not to visit any brothels, all of which were assumed by Merian officers to be traps. The punishment for being caught was fifty lashes with a laser whip calibrated to cause agony without impairing muscle function, damaging skin or organs, or breaking bones. Infractions were rare.
Foot patrols were much larger now. Twenty or thirty men would be sent at a time, traveling in irregular patterns designed to avoid problems of clustering. In every patrol, one or two men carried a rifle which fired a small missile capable of leveling a four-story house. The rest carried magnetic dart rifles, ballistic rifles, projectile rifles which fired exploding bullets, and occasionally laser rifles.
There had been a few suicide bombings, a couple of improvised explosions which killed men on patrol, and three shootouts. All of the attacks mounted by insurgents against armored vehicles had failed miserably, so they had learned not to attack the vehicles. Helicopters and low-flying planes and drones now patrolled the skies, too, and the Merian drone network made short work of any makeshift drones sent up by the insurgents.
There was some worry that at some point the Raathi Front would use some sort of interdiction field to disable all the drones in the city, but so far this hadn’t happened yet. The Kridalians claimed to have invented a technology which could detect the presence of an interdiction device, and their sensors so far had not detected any such device within the city limits.
But to Heni, it seemed that there wasn’t much progress in the war, if that’s what it was. After that initial battle, the Merians and Kridalians had quickly reestablished control of the city, but the faces of the residents told a different story. Many, almost certainly the vast majority, were on their side. But now it seemed that insurgents could be anywhere. If every crowd had even one or two, that meant there were thousands of enemy fighters within the city. And the longer they spent time patrolling as though they were an occupying force, the more that young Raathi boys might begin to wonder if the Front had a point.
Local law enforcement worked alongside them, but the local cops confided in their marine counterparts that they appeared to be losing touch with parts of the city. No longer did they have free rein in every neighborhood. On some blocks, doors shut when they stepped on the street, and faces disappeared from windows. Hoods went down when cops walked past, and the chief was considering asking the local counsel for a warrant to frisk anyone with a hood for weapons.
In all that time, Heni hadn’t spoken with a local civilian for more than fifteen minutes. And all of the interactions he had had with locals had been in the line of duty. There were some citizens who put Merian flags in their windows to indicate they welcomed the presence of the marines. This was brave. It made them a target for more terrorist attacks. But presumably, most of them owned firearms and some had private security.
Local police had made five hundred arrests in the months since the attack. Some of these had been released, but most were still held. Many hadn’t been given a trial date yet. The ones for which strong evidence indicated a connection to either the attack or the Raathi Front itself were not given the option of bail. Bail was set very high for the others.
This was causing tension within the city, which had never known a suspension of habeas corpus before. Local magistrates were beginning to order that the prisoners be released on bail or put up for trial. The chief insisted that they were all guilty, but the evidence was mostly circumstantial.
It was when Heni was on a night patrol without Gurney that the Raathi Front made an attempt to break their men out of prison. His helmet lit up with chatter as soon as the insurgents launched the first missiles, and immediately three patrols were ordered down to Rexferd Prison to stem the attack. More troops were being rustled out of their beds and the Kridalians were sending two patrols. Between them, they would have twelve armored vehicles.
The previous month, the Merian marines had begun a practice of keeping two patrols of men awake and ready to go inside the base at any given time. If they had to surge troops to anywhere in the city, these men could supplement those who were already out. They did so now.
Immediately, the guards on both bases were doubled and the police chief ordered all of his officers not directly involved with the prison back to the station. It was expected that there would be more attacks elsewhere in the city. Perhaps to distract from the attack on the prison. Or perhaps the prison attack was the distraction.
Rexferd Prison sat on the triangular corner of a street which split into two, and it formed a triangular skyscraper with walls twenty-feet thick. There were no windows. There was one entrance, which had three gates, each of which was reinforced against a different attack.
The first missiles didn’t manage to take down the outer gate, but the second round breached it. Automated guard turrets had popped up out of the walls and roof and begun firing in the direction in which the missiles had come. Several drones and automated ground vehicles were sent out into the streets, but these were brought down with missiles. The fire on the prison grew heavier and it came from several directions. More missiles took out most of the guard turrets.
Inside the prison, the prisoners were trying to riot. Only a handful had been out of their cells, and these were forced back inside with electric stun batons and old-fashioned truncheons. The rest were banging at their doors and bars. A couple of makeshift knives were tossed out at guards who ran past, but these didn’t do anything. A few guards threatened to toss stun grenades into each cell if the prisoners didn’t quit making trouble.
Most of the guards were occupied in the armory, suiting up in heavy armor and charging up their automatic weapons. An automatic dart-slinger used a sudden, miniature magnetic field reversal to shoot a stream of pin-sized darts fast enough to tear the hinge off a door. A small backpack could carry tens of thousands of these darts, which meant that if the gun was charged up enough, a single man could hold out for several hours against dozens.
Other officers monitored video feeds from cameras embedded in the walls, or hidden in the buildings around. Some of these went dead as they were found and smashed. Some had gone dead as soon as the missiles struck, indicating they had been discovered earlier. A few cameras flew around overhead, watching from tiny drone-copters.
Heni saw all of this on his helmet feed. The guards at the prison were scared, because the missiles which had been hitting Rexferd hadn’t been small. This wasn’t a fake attack. They were casting out to any Merian or Kridalian servicemembers in the city, urging reinforcements to descend on the prison immediately.
The second gate was breached. Now, the bombardment had slowed, but the missiles that came were more targeted and designed to blow through the kinds of doors which comprised the third gate. Dozens of guards were positioned against the walls just inside the gate, ready to start firing when the door blew.
The missiles were coming from the street now. Over a hundred fighters had poured out of the buildings across the street from the gates and they were making ready to charge inside the prison. They fired ballistic rifles at the automated turrets which hadn’t been destroyed. The turrets fired back, but the last of these had been damaged beyond repair already and the firing came feeble and slow.
The third gate breached. Tiny needle fire erupted out into the street, spraying the fighters and killing over a dozen. The others ducked for cover or started firing back and one or two fired rocket-propelled grenades.
Then the first Merian tank rolled around the corner and insurgents began scattering. The tank fired a single shell, which exploded in the middle of the crowd and killed another couple dozen. A series of missiles poured out of one of the buildings again, pummeling the tank, but doing nothing to it. The explosions did little to the tank’s armor. The tank took careful aim at the building and began firing. With methodical blows, it leveled the building. The missiles stopped.
Heni came around the corner now with twenty other marines. They moved carefully along the walls of the buildings, covering each other and taking aim at any straggling insurgents in the street. They moved so quickly with their rocket-boosted steps that their coordinated leapfrog pattern seemed less a stutter and more a flow. They were fired upon from upstairs windows, and a couple of grenades were thrown, but these didn’t penetrate the Merians’ armor. The shots were returned and soon the shots stopped coming.
Then the street blew up. Heni found himself tossed into the air. It hadn’t been a mine. He was sure the tank would have triggered it. Explosives must have been packed into an underground tunnel for remote detonation.
He caught himself midair and rocketed away against a wall. Laser fire had begun pouring out of windows around, cutting up some of the Merians still in the air. Heni pressed himself against the wall and scooted up to the top floor. He kicked a window in and jumped inside.
The room he found himself in was some sort of bedroom. As best he could tell, it hadn’t been slept in for several days, but it had been used to stake out the prison. There were a few spent shell casings on the floor from an old-fashioned pistol, an ancient pair of binoculars which had the benefit of being small and lightweight and untraceable, and a piece of electric paper with some tallies. He guessed the tallies had to do with changes of the guard or prisoner leave or some similar business.
Heni let his suit’s sensors scan the rest of the house while he walked to the door.
20
Thirty years before the Great Galactic War, Senk Wuigh had founded a small commune on Quinque dedicated to creating a new chapter in the Kridalian Republic. A prominent pacifist and activist, he took seriously the claims that the Raathi had been mistreated by the Kridian settlers. Although most of Kridalian society – Kridian and Raathi – had long moved on, he became famous for giving speeches in which he explained that the Raathi Front would not exist if there weren’t legitimate grievances which had gone unaddressed for too long.
Wuigh was racially Kridian, but he claimed to have Raathi blood many generations back on his mother’s side. He founded the commune – which was later named Haral-Dek – as a refuge for both Raathi and Kridian citizens who desired mutual understanding. The commune did not explicitly require members to be pacifists, but most of those who joined were. The mission of the commune was peace and cooperation, and though there had been no major wars in the region in decades, members by and large still viewed Kridalian society as hopelessly violent.
Members of the commune were not allowed to own property. All the land was worked in common and there were requirements for hours worked each week. Barring illness, pregnancy, nursing, or injury, all residents between the ages of seventeen and one-hundred-and-five were required to work six days a week – unless they were absent from the commune – every week of the year. Those who failed to meet their obligations were threatened with exile, and some few were exiled early in the commune’s tenure. Wuigh had seen other communes fail and it most commonly happened when idealistic members cursed with shiftlessness sought to use commune life as an escape from the workaday world of obligation and material consumption. No commune could last if it didn’t reject members who refused to pull their weight. Any commune that allowed free riders would quickly find that nobody would cook the food or clean the toilets or grow the crops.
All two hundred of the residents – a number which fluctuated, but stayed around two hundred for the better part of three decades – practiced a simple life. Access to communications technology was limited, as was access to any advanced transportation. Weapons were, of course, banned, except for knives to cut meat and bread.
The commune was polygamous, although not excessively so. It was not like some of the less-reputable communes, which had become known for being little better than permanent, drug-fueled orgies. Wuigh had nothing against orgies or drugs, but he’d seen too many communes fail when they emphasized partying over work.
The great work of Haral-Dek, beyond the agriculture and cooking and cleaning and childcare and eldercare which comprised the work of daily living, was mutual understanding. Wuigh wanted the commune to be a beacon of hope, a place where hatred was dissipated and diverse people could come together in love and neighborliness.
And for thirty years, it was. For thirty years, members came from all over the Kridalian Republic and beyond. For thirty years, if ever a member was required to leave, or decided to leave of his or her own accord, there was no acrimony or bitterness. For thirty years, residents lived together, were born and died, cooperated, and shared the blessings of nature and life.
And then, seventy days from the insurgency in the city of Jaff, several young Raathi members and one young Kridian member pulled swords out of their robes in the middle of the morning meeting, and proceeding to cut through their horrified colleagues around them, ignoring all imploring, begging, and screaming, and easily overcoming the pitiful resistance put up by a few members of the community who decided to try fighting.
Some members tried to escape, but found the doors were locked. In horror, they tried to surrender, offering the young men anything they could think of to stop the slaughter. But the young men with the curved swords ignored their pleas. They proceeded to systematically kill every member of the commune, including its founder. When they were finished, they left that place and never returned.
Lilia heard the news about the attack when she woke in the cold bed of her hotel room. The headline and a small description of the attack had been transmitted instantly around the Federation, and it was the first news item she saw.
​"No Survivors in Commune Slaying, Terror War in Kridalian Republic Intensifies" read the headline.
"Early on the morning of the second of February, a dozen young men from the Haral-Dek commune attacked their fellow members during the morning all-commune meeting, killing over one hundred and seventy five. The perpetrators fled the scene and the bodies were not discovered until later that day by a mail deliverer making a stop at the commune. The men are all between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six. They are presumed members of the Raathi Front, but the Front has yet to claim responsibility for the attack. Entire Republic shocked and horrified at the atrocity. Haral-Dek commune was known throughout the galaxy for being a model of pacifism, egalitarianism, and cooperation. The unprovoked nature of the attack has left some wondering if anyone is safe from the Raathi Front's expanding terror war."
Lilia had never been to the Kridalian Republic, and she had never met anyone from it. She wondered whether what looked to be a widening war would pull the agency in.
Presumably, someone was already there. Multiple someones. Besides, she had her own business to deal with.
​The director had taken the trouble to send her an expedited private message to a spaceliner in hyperspace to tell her that there would be another agent joining her in the province. But he hadn't told her the identity of the agent, and he had indicated this would remain a secret for the time being. Did he not trust her? How was it the case that there were agents in the Merian Intelligence Services whose purposes were so inscrutable and whose cover was so deep that Lilia Trasker, the most distinguished agent in the Clandestine Agency, wasn't allowed to know their identities? Were there other agents like this? Was there more compartmentalization within the agency than Lilia realized? Perhaps the director believed there was a mole. Or multiple moles. If so, why hadn't he told her? Presumably, that was something she should know. Unless he didn't trust her. Lilia wasn't sure whether she was angrier at the other agent for being self-important enough to keep his or her identity from her, or the director for not trusting her.
But she didn’t have much time to think about it. The message on her room’s receiver had been from Dr. Sideney. He had wanted to meet for coffee at seven the next morning. He was, apparently, staying in the same hotel. She had returned the message, agreeing to the meeting.
It was six, so she had just enough time to shower and dress before leaving to meet him.