Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

“Launch the assault sleds,” Brent-Cochrane ordered. Normally, assaulting and securing the orbital industrial nodes would be a Marine responsibility, but with Marine loyalties uncertain, the task had been given to the Blackshirts instead. Penny suspected that most of them were going to die in the assaults, yet she knew the Empire’s view; there were always plenty more Blackshirts where they came from. They were recruited from the poorest of colony worlds or Earth’s undercity, before being indoctrinated into the Security Division. “I want those facilities secured now.”

Penny shrugged, sitting back in her chair and watching with polite interest. A handful of positions on the ground were firing on the fleet — ground-based defences were rare in the Empire, officially because it would expose the civilian population to enemy counter-fire — and they were rapidly destroyed by KEWs dropped by the fleet. The civilian population down below would be terrified, wondering what was going to happen to them when the Empire finally started to land its occupation force. Penny hoped that most of them had the sense to get out of the cities and remain away from the Blackshirts. They were not known for being gentle occupiers.

“Shit,” someone snapped. Penny looked up just in time to see one of the asteroid facilities disintegrate in a towering explosion. The sheer size of the explosion suggested that someone had touched off a nuke, rather than allow the facility to fall into the Empire’s hands. “Sir, the facility has been…”

“Destroyed,” Brent-Cochrane snarled. Penny smiled inwardly. There went that bonus from the Roosevelt Family. “Order the remaining facilities to be secured, quickly.”

Somewhat to Penny’s disappointment, the remaining facilities weren’t rigged to blow when the Blackshirts occupied them. The few remaining Jackson’s Folly personnel were taken prisoner and transferred to one of the troop ships until facilities could be found for them on the surface of the planet. Brent-Cochrane watched from his own chair as the high orbitals were ruthlessly secured and the debris destroyed or tipped into the planet’s atmosphere, where it burned up harmlessly. There were no remaining shots from the planet’s surface.

“Land the landing force,” Brent-Cochrane ordered, calmly. The first assault boats separated from the transports and headed down towards the planet’s surface. The Commodore himself strode over to Penny and placed his hand on her shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “You’ll be able to report to the Admiral that we succeeded, of course. Jackson’s Folly is ours.”

“Of course,” Penny agreed, keeping her voice even. On the other hand, if the Commodore’s fleet were to be drawn away, the rebels would be able to liberate Jackson’s Folly. How long would the world remain occupied then? “Was there ever any doubt about the final outcome?”

“Anything to report, Lieutenant?”

Lieutenant Adam looked up as Commander Fox entered the compartment. “Nothing, sir,” he said. “Nothing to report… just as there was nothing to report every day for the past few months. There was nothing at all.”

Fox scowled at him. The Imperial Navy might have been responsible for maintaining the security of the various penal worlds throughout the Empire, but they were hardly going to waste competent or well-connected officers on the position. The penal worlds served as a dumping ground in more ways than one, with a joke running through the crews that if they screwed up again it was only a very short flight to their final and permanent posting. And, if the commanding officer wasn’t feeling generous, they wouldn’t be given a parachute or a drop capsule.

The Garstang System was officially off-limits to all civilian starships, but from time to time starships used it as a rendezvous point or a recovery location if their drives started to show signs of trouble. The Imperial Navy stations in the system didn’t usually bother to waste time tracking down the intruders, because there was nothing of value in the remainder of the system. As long as they didn’t try to breach the security stations surrounding the planet itself, Fix didn’t give a damn. It wasn’t as if he cared enough to waste time patrolling a handful of dead worlds. The system didn’t even have a gas giant or an asteroid field.

“Very good,” he said, finally. He’d managed the remarkable feat of nearly crashing his starship into another ship, disaster only being averted by quick thinking on the part of the ship’s commanding officer. He’d half-expected the Captain to execute him on the spot, but instead the Captain had promoted him and sent him to the penal world. It hadn’t taken long for Fox to realise that it was, in effect, a life sentence. The promotion was meaningless outside the system itself. “You stand relieved.”

Adam threw him a sloppy salute and headed out of the compartment, passing through the secured hatches and down into the interior of the station, while Fox settled himself down in the command chair. Standard Operating Procedure — SOP — insisted that at least three officers be on watch duty at any given time, but he just didn’t have the manpower to follow SOP to the letter; besides, it wasn’t as if they were a front-line station. His crew might be the Imperial Navy’s cast-offs and rejects, but he trusted them not to screw up too badly. Besides, he hadn’t been joking when he’d warned that some transgressions would result in the offender being dumped on the planet below.

Garstang had been an odd planet when the Imperial Navy had discovered it, a desert world orbiting a variable star. A runaway greenhouse effect combined with the occasional radiation bombardment from the local primary had resulted in a nearly-dead world with low levels of oxygen, habitable only to heavily-engineered settlers. The terraforming crews had, instead, dumped a massive biological packet on the planet’s surface and gone away to leave it to ferment. All of their computer models, they’d claimed afterwards, had said that the planet should have become a more habitable world. Ironically, they’d succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The terraforming crews hadn’t realised — or had professed not to realise, as there were billions of credits wrapped up in every terraforming mission — that Garstang wasn’t anything as close to dead as they had thought. The tiny signs of life on the planet’s surface — hardened lichen and comparable plant-like life forms — were only the tip of the iceberg. Deep underground, other forms of life struggled for survival, perfectly adapted to their environment. The sudden infusion of higher levels of oxygen and Earth-based forms of life provided a massive boost to the natives and, over seventy years, the planet flourished. Forms of animal life that had lived deep underground came up to the surface, where they established themselves as part of a new ecosystem. The entire planet had been reshaped. It was also unrelenting hostile to uninvited guests.

After the first attempt to plant a colony on the surface of the planet had failed miserably, the Ministry of Settlement had given up and converted the world into a penal colony. Every month, the freighters would arrive, carrying the human waste of the Empire — everything from rebels to murderers and paedophiles. The convicts were given a small amount of survival equipment, loaded into drop capsules — accompanied by their families, if they chose to accept permanent exile — and shot down to the surface. What they did after that, as far as the Empire was concerned, was their own affair. If they tamed the planet, the Empire could put in a garrison and take over; if they all died, the Empire had been saved the cost of an execution. Even criminals could be made to service the Empire.