Chapter Three
I felt that I had thrown away my birthright. I was a despicable renegade.
—Legionnaire Frederic Martyn, French Foreign Legion, 1889
The carriership loomed large in the observation lounge viewport, a vast, spindly web of metal that blotted out half the sky. Only a handful of the separate docking modules held ships, and most of them were battered and battle-scarred from running fights with the Ubrenfar Navy. It was a miracle any of them had eluded the invasion fleet.
Wolfgang Hauser was one of the dozens of refugees crowded into the lounge to watch as the passenger liner eased closer to the Commonwealth carriership Solomon. Just over a week had passed since Surapat had blasted clear of the Telok port complex. Hauser had spent most of that time in the frigate’s sick bay, sharing limited regen facilities with the scores of other wounded aboard. The doctors had told the dramatic story of how Suartana had brought him through the airlock and aboard ship with only minutes to spare before she sealed up for launch, but Hauser hadn’t felt much like thanking the Indomay. The painful memory of the desperate fighting in the warehouse on Telok still burned within.
Perhaps it would have been better if Suartana had left him for the Ubrenfars, he told himself bitterly as the slow, stately dance of the docking continued outside. Thanks to his mistakes, a lot of good men had died back there. He had no business being alive.…
He thrust the thought from his mind and tried to concentrate on the activity on the screen. Hauser had never traveled beyond Telok’s orbit, and this was his first encounter with one of the huge carrierships that were the heart and soul of all interstellar travel. Under other circumstances he would have been totally absorbed by the excitement, but today he found it hard to feel anything but regrets.
It seemed wrong to be here, fleeing Laut Besar’s star system and the invaders who had occupied his homeworld. But he’d been given little choice in the matter.
Surapat had fled from Telok to Danton, the cold, dreary planet-sized moon of Barras, the huge superjovian world occupying the outermost orbit of the star system. Perpetually locked with one face toward its brown dwarf primary, Danton was a world of fire and ice, heated by the faint radiation of Barras on one side, but bitterly cold across the face away from the giant planet. Still, Danton was considered marginally habitable, and the Terran Commonwealth had leased the world from the government of Laut Besar as the site for a scientific research station and the system terminal, Systerm Liberty, from which visiting carrierships were serviced.
The commonwealth science station on Danton had transformed in a matter of days into a huge refugee camp crammed with fugitives from the fall of Laut Besar, while a handful of surviving Besaran ships and military units, including the frigate, remained on active duty … but only under the protective umbrella of Commonwealth forces. Even the Ubrenfars would hesitate to stir up a direct confrontation with the Terrans. Decades of minor clashes and border disputes had made both sides wary.
But how long the Commonwealth would continue to extend protection was still unknown. Once the nearest regional Governor got involved, anything could happen. If he decided that protecting Laut Besar’s refugees wasn’t worth the risk of war with the Ubrenfars, Danton wouldn’t survive as a safe haven any longer.…
The world was fast becoming an armed camp, and as quickly as ships could gather in the refugees they were being shipped out by way of Systerm Liberty to the waiting SOLOMON. The carriership had dropped out of irrational space during the first week of the crisis, a lucky coincidence for the fugitives from the Ubrenfar invasion. Laut Besar wasn’t on any regularly scheduled carriership routes and frequently went months without receiving a visit from one of the huge FTL transports. SOLOMON had made the short side trip from the nearby Commonwealth world of Robespierre, and the commander of the military contingent attached to the carriership, Brigadier Nachman Shalev, had taken stock of the situation quickly and deployed his troops to Danton on his own initiative. Three regiments of Commonwealth colonial troops seemed little enough to challenge the Ubrenfar invasion force, even with the help of the reorganizing Besaran units which had escaped the fall of their homeworld. But as long as higher authority within the Commonwealth didn’t overrule Shalev, those units on Danton would at least make the Ubrenfar commanders pause before escalating their incursion into a full-scale confrontation with Humanity.
Hauser had still been carried on the sick list when Surapat dropped him off with the rest of the refugees at the systerm, and the authorities had ordered him transferred to the liner Freiheit Stern rather than allowing him to stay with the military units assembling on Danton. He hadn’t been given any other options, but that didn’t help salve his conscience much. He was abandoning Laut Besar, just as the military and the core of the government had left the planet to the tender mercies of the Ubrenfars.
The most disturbing part of it all was the sense of relief he had felt at the news. Hauser had never thought of himself as anything but a patriot … until now.
On the wall-sized viewscreen a carriership docking cradle dominated the scene now as the liner maneuvered closer. Long seconds later, there was an almost imperceptible jar as the ship made contact. The liner’s hull echoed with the clangs of boarding tubes and support conduits hooking up, turning the ship into an integral part of the vast carriership complex.
The wall screen went blank for a moment. Then it displayed the nebula-and-starship logo of the Commonwealth Merchant Service. A pleasant, well-modulated voice, a shade too even to be human, began to speak. “I am SOLOMON. Welcome aboard. Your cabin terminals are now integrated into my database, and you may feel free to question me at need. Passengers are invited to leave the ship to visit other docking modules, but please allow one hour for final docking checks before you debark.” There was a short pause while the carriership’s enormous artificial intelligence attended to some other duty … or more likely a whole host of duties. Hauser had heard about the sentient computers that piloted the huge interstellar transports, but he had never expected to meet one of them. Only an intelligent computer could handle the myriad computations necessary to maintain a Reynier-Kessler irrational field.
Carrierships by themselves were impressive enough, massing millions of metric tons of interstellar drives, AI computer networks, and support systems. But the carrier-ship proper was really only a framework in which a host of smaller vessels took passage from star to star. This trip SOLOMON, which was referred to by the masculine pronoun “he” instead of the more traditional “she” of classic naval usage, would be running light. He would be carrying no more than twenty assorted liners, freighters, and transports, all of them filled with refugees from Laut Besar. Most of the ships he had brought into the system—warships and military transports, for the most part—were staying behind in support of the deployment on Danton. A strictly commercial operator would have been screaming over the waste, but like all carrierships SOLOMON was a part of the Terran Commonwealth’s Naval Reserve Fleet, subject to activation at need. The SOLOMON computer, technically classed as an intelligent being, was now carried as a warrant officer in the Commonwealth Navy for the duration of the ship’s service.
The voice of the computer resumed smoothly. “We will shortly be departing from Danton orbital space. As we have been assigned two yard tugs, the maneuver will be made under constant acceleration, and we will reach the Reynier Limit in just under six hours. Throughout that time, escort will be maintained by the Commonwealth Navy. Please do not be concerned for your security or safety during the departure operation.”
Hauser let out a low whistle at that. Carrierships were designed for deep space operations, with low power thrusters for minor course corrections but no large-scale normal-space drives. Operating between systerms at the fringes of inhabited star systems, there was rarely a need for anything beyond a slow but steady progress in a minimum-fuel solar orbit to carry the carriership and its docked craft beyond the Reynier Gravity Limit that inhibited use of the interstellar drive. SOLOMON was being treated differently now though, assigned a pair of tugs to maintain constant boost and greatly reduce the transit time between Systerm Liberty and the transition to irrational space.
Plainly, Brigadier Shalev wasn’t planning on wasting any more time than absolutely necessary. The faster SOLOMON left Danton behind, the quicker he would reach neighboring Robespierre for another shipment of Commonwealth troops and ships.
“Screens will be reactivated when the departure maneuver commences,” the computer went on. “Thank you for your attention.”
The voice went silent and the logo faded from the screen. There was a long silence in the crowded passenger lounge as the refugees considered SOLOMON’s words. Hauser looked around one last time and then pushed his way through the door and into the corridor outside.
The disturbing feelings associated with leaving Laut Besar were getting to him again more than ever. He needed solitude, the privacy of the suite he shared with Sersan Suartana, to consider those feelings more closely.
Wolfgang Alaric Hauser von Semenanjung Burat felt like a coward. That was something he would have to come to terms with somehow if he ever expected to hold his head up among his peers again.
* * *
“The departure of this latest contingent of troops and ships underscores the importance of Laut Besar to the Commonwealth,” the reporter on the trideoscreen was saying. She was an attractive woman with a strange, lilting accent and blond hair cut in a style Hauser thought too mannish, but that was in line with her very presence anchoring a news broadcast. On Laut Besar Uro women lived pampered, sheltered lives, and rarely worked at any of the male-oriented aristo careers. Indomay women were a different matter, of course.
Hauser wasn’t sure he approved of a society that allowed Uro women to be thrust into the public eye.
But he was no longer on Laut Besar, and standards here were different. Since SOLOMON had arrived at the systerm on the fringes of the Soleil Fraternity star system, Freiheit Stern had been on her own again, shaping her course for Robespierre along with the rest of the ships which had taken passage on the carriership. The trideo broadcasts from Robespierre gave the new arrivals a chance to get a glimpse of their destination before they had to face the problems of direct interaction with a strange culture.
It was ironic that the normal-space trip from the outermost world of the system to Robespierre would take longer than the three-day Reynier-Kessler irrational drive voyage from Soleil Liberté.
The reporter on the trideo was still talking. “Among the units included in the most recent draft of reinforcements for Operation Cordon is an ad hoc battalion of the famous—some would perhaps say notorious—Fifth Foreign Legion. The battalion includes three light infantry companies, including the unit commanded by Captain Colin Fraser which served in the high-profile Legion operations on Hanuman and Polypheme over the last two years.” On the screen, the reporter was replaced by a scene of smartly dressed soldiers in khaki dress uniforms with blue cummerbunds and red epaulets marching at a slow pace down a crowded city street.
The reporter continued her voice-over commentary. “This will actually mark the second time the Fifth Foreign Legion has been called upon to intervene in Besaran affairs. The first occurred sixty-two years ago, when the Besaran aristocracy called upon the Commonwealth to help put down a massive insurrection by the lower class which threatened to oust the established government in favor of a popular democratic movement. Many people both then and now have criticized the government for taking this stand in favor of a ruling class which has been characterized as greedy, self-serving, and repressive, but the Commonwealth’s commercial interest in the onnesium supplies on Laut Besar has always outweighed any anti-aristocratic or prodemocracy sentiments.”
“Trideo off,” Hauser said with a snort. The three-dimensional image faded as the monitor switched off, leaving Hauser to stare at the blank imaging tank with a lingering feeling of disgust.
It was obvious that the media on Robespierre knew next to nothing about Laut Besar, even though the planets were the closest of neighbors as interstellar communities went. The distorted view of Besaran society these people held made it sound as if the Ubrenfars were actually justified somehow in their decision to launch the unprovoked invasion of Hauser’s homeworld.
In a way, he supposed, that attitude was inevitable, no matter how wrong it might have been. Laut Besar had been settled under the provisions of the French Empire’s notorious Clearance Edicts, drawing involuntary colonists from Terra’s Southeast Asia region and putting them down on the new world with a minimum of outside support. Those Clearance Edicts had ended up sparking the collapse of the Empire, galvanizing resistance to Paris instead of siphoning off the malcontents as the Imperial government had intended, and within half a century of being settled, Laut Besar had been virtually abandoned. The war that had brought down the Empire led into the era known later as the Shadow Centuries, when interstellar contact among Terra’s colonies had all but broken down. Like so many of the planets settled through involuntary colonization, Laut Besar had fared poorly during that time. The colony had all but failed by the time the next wave of Terrestrial exploration rediscovered the planet, and the Indomays who had survived had lost most of their technology and civilization in the process.
They didn’t really understand the situation here on Robespierre even today. It had been a prime colony, not a dumping ground for Terra’s excess population, and though they had lost interstellar travel and were forced to fall back entirely on local resources, the French-descended inhabitants of Robespierre had never really fallen on hard times like their neighbors on Laut Besar. If they had seen what the first Uros had found among the Indomays, they might have comprehended the forces that had led to the development of modern Besaran society.
The Terran Commonwealth had ultimately emerged from the Shadow Centuries to reclaim Terra’s sphere of influence, and the first survey mission to revisit Laut Besar had found the Indomays on the verge of complete collapse. But they had found something else of critical importance, a discovery that had put Laut Besar on the star charts in a way no one could have predicted. When the Imperial surveys had first mapped the planet they had noted the presence of large quantities of onnesium, a rare element which existed in an island of stability beyond the short-lived radioactives on the periodic table. At the time it had merely been a curiosity, the apparent result of a mammoth asteroidal strike which had crippled the planetary ecology and reshaped the face of the world in an earlier age.
But in the interim between the first and second surveys, onnesium had become important, vitally important, and the deposits on Laut Besar boosted the planet into interstellar prominence. Onnesium had become the principal element used in plating the field coils of Reynier-Kessler interstellar drives. Interstellar travel was possible without onnesium, using the technology of pre-Commonwealth times, but those early drives had been primitive and inefficient compared to the new models that made use of onnesium plating. Since it was still comparatively scarce, any large deposits merited exploitation and development. Laut Besar’s plight had aroused sympathy but little action … until the critical commercial value of a viable settlement there had emerged. Then, suddenly, everyone was interested in assisting the Indomay “lost colony.”
Specialists in mining and industry had come to the planet from the Commonwealth courtesy of Lebensraum Bergbau und Ingenieurwesen Korporation, a resource exploitation company. They reintroduced advanced technology to Laut Besar and helped the Indomays recover from the long years of isolation and decline, and in the process managed to gain long-term control over the major onnesium deposits and, just as importantly, the new factory complexes and other industries they were bringing to the world. The Indomays had lacked the knowledge and the assets to do any of this for themselves, but they’d been more than happy to share in the prosperity the Uros were bringing. That had laid the groundwork for the development of the Besaran class system, especially after the corporation relocated its main offices to Laut Besar and began to encourage large-scale Uro immigration. The Uros, few in numbers but in possession of the sophisticated skills needed to make Laut Besar rich, had slowly transformed into an aristocracy ruling over the more numerous but less advanced Indomays who had preceded them.
Then came the Semti War, when Mankind faced its most formidable opponents in a full-scale interstellar conflict. It was at the height of the war that the Uros on Laut Besar decided to sever their political connection with the Commonwealth, not out of disloyalty but rather in the hope of gaining a better deal with a Terran government already notorious for colonial exploitation on the most unfair terms. With the need for onnesium more urgent than ever because of the war, the Terrans had been willing to recognize the Besaran Declaration of Sovereignty, providing the supply pipelines stayed open. After the war the Uros had skillfully played the Commonwealth against the other emergent interstellar power of the postwar era, the Ubrenfars, who had quietly occupied a habitable world in the third system of the trio of stars that contained Laut Besar and Robespierre several decades before. Each interstellar government was eager to support a neutral and fully independent Laut Besar if the alternative was losing access to the onnesium. But the Commonwealth had always regarded the Besarans with suspicion and no little disdain for their secession, and the growth of the aristocratic society on the neutral world had only added fuel to the fire among Commonwealth citizens who regarded democracy as the only reasonable form of government.
Hauser, like most Besaran aristos, had no real quarrel with the principles of democracy … but conditions on Laut Besar hadn’t been right for a completely open government by all the people. The Indomays were slowly learning the intricacies of modern civilization, and some day they’d be ready for full participation. But not yet. Not for many years to come.
Now, though, everything had changed. One or more of the semi-independent Ubrenfar warclans had evidently decided to risk Commonwealth intervention in order to win total control of Laut Besaran onnesium. The Commonwealth was sure to rally behind the legitimate Besaran government. They had sent assistance in the past, and they were doing so now. But after a hundred years of talking about the inequities of “greedy, self-serving aristocrats” who “exploited their Indomay compatriots,” the Commonwealth news media might be slow to break old stereotypes and recognize that the Besarans were their allies, the victims rather than the villains of this particular drama.
Thinking about Commonwealth misconceptions, Hauser found his own personal doubts had vanished. He loved his planet, his culture, his people … and these things deserved to be defended, whether it was against the slurs of outsiders on Robespierre or the guns of Ubrenfar invaders.
Wolfgang Hauser would go home again someday, go home to fight. No other course made sense.