All is Fair Ch. 04

He waited for everyone to take their seats again. "I wish I could have met all of you under better circumstances," he said, making a conscious effort to stand taller. "What happened on the beach was a travesty and an unnecessary one at that. There has been enough bullshit and deceit in the last few weeks to last all of us a lifetime, so I'll cut straight to the point. The Imperium sent you to their deaths so they could justify a major escalation of their war with us, a war that they have been keeping from the people of the Imperium and even from most of their armed forces. They leaked your comm frequencies to us, along with your shield and power shut-off codes, and dared us to use them or be slaughtered in the assault, after which they would do the same thing in their next attack. For what little it is worth, I am truly sorry that it had to be you and that your men paid the price for the Emperor's betrayal," he paused to let the ripple of murmurs die down. "Each and every fallen Marine has been given a burial with full military honors, and a service will be held later today at the grave site for any of you who want to attend."

"Under normal circumstances," he went on, "I would be able to afford you the time and the respect to process these events in your own ways, but, unfortunately, that isn't an option." He stepped to the side and nodded to the Captain, who, in turn, tapped a few buttons on her wrist-mounted interface. A large holo-projection flickered into existence along the entirety of the back wall, and the familiar face of Imperial News Network's main anchor, Jeremy Freeman, stared back at them.

"A few days ago, we brought you the terrible news that the 381st Marine Division had been wiped out to a man while on training exercises on Garros II by rebels, cowardly using a weapon of mass destruction instead of facing them like men. News from the Ministry of Defence today confirmed that all fifteen thousand members of the Division were lost. A relief convoy sent to Garros II found no sign of rebels and was unable to recover the bodies of any of the Marines. The Minister of Defence had this to say on the steps of the Imperial Council Chamber in the Capital."

The picture faded to the beady and shrew-like face of Isagora Doukas. Stevo had never liked Doukas, he couldn't say why, not with any certainty, but there was something about the way the man held himself that seemed to clash violently with Stevo's Marine sense of honor. This was a man with no code. There was something about his eyes that told him that, but he stayed quiet and watched with everyone else as Doukas started talking.

"In response to this act of unparalleled aggression, carried out by criminals and traitors against the honorable men of the 381st Marine Division, the Emperor has issued an edict now brandishing this foolish and dangerous movement as an enemy of the state. Three task forces are to be assembled, then sent to find any rebel planetary or space facilities... and destroy them. The time for mercy and good faith negotiations is over; the rebels have ignored every attempt made to address any grievances they have and have instead chosen to start this conflict with an act of unimaginable barbarism. There is to be no amnesty for any member of this criminal organization, nor for anyone within the Imperium found to be aiding them. A full list of new security measures will come into place at midnight tonight, Imperial time, and can be found on the government's holo-net portal. That is all for now."

The holo screen shut off, and the General turned back to face the Marines in the room. "You know as well as I do that their story is a lie, but the part about the task forces was a lie as well. They were being assembled before you even left Spacedock. They obviously know we're here, and according to our sources, they will arrive in a little over a week. That means we can't be here when they do. For us, that is simple: we pack up and leave. For many of you, there is nothing simple about it. If you wish to stay behind, to rejoin the Imperium, after everything they have done, and knowing that your being alive is proof of their deception - and the potential danger that comes with that - then nobody here will stand in your way. You are free to leave at any point before we load onto the ships. If you want to come with us and be dropped off on some outer ring planet to live out your days keeping yourselves hidden from the Imperium, that is fine too; arrangements will be made."

He paused, his tongue slipping out of his mouth to wet his lips. "But I know there are people in this room who fully grasp the betrayal that has happened here, I know they won't cast aside the loss of their brothers and sisters so easily. To you, I say this. There is a place for you in the rebellion. No matter if you are wounded or not, I will get you the justice you seek, or I will die trying, and you are more than welcome to join us. But that is a decision that can only come from each of you."

Silence fell on the room as Marines looked contemplatively at each other or lost in thought at the floor. "What about the more seriously wounded, the ones who aren't here now?" Stevo stood himself up straight and away from the wall.

The General turned to face him. "That's a good question, Sergeant, and thank you for asking it. Membership of the rebellion is, and has to be, an informed decision. There are several Marines still in a serious enough condition to have not regained consciousness yet; there are many more who are conscious but not well enough to be transported here. The latter of that group have each been given a holo-terminal that is presenting this meeting to them in their beds, and they are each being given the same choice as you. The former, however - the ones still unconscious - are going to have to be taken with us. We cannot leave them here without care; most of them wouldn't survive. But we also can't assume their consent either. So we will continue their care and present them with the second two of those three choices when they recover."

Stevo nodded, it was the answer he expected, but having a squad member in that group of people yet to regain consciousness, he wanted to be sure. "Thank you, General," he nodded.

"I would like to speak," A voice came from behind Stevo, from the doorway that led into the corridor from which he and his cellmates had entered. Every man in the room spun around to see who owned the familiar-sounding voice.

Colonel Michaels had seen better days. Having been in one of the tanks on the beach, Stevo had assumed that Michaels had been killed during the initial bombardment, but astonishingly, he seemed to have survived, if only barely. Sitting in a wheelchair, the Colonel's face was a patchwork of bruises and cuts, one of his eyes was partially bloodshot, both of his hands were wrapped in bandages, and one of his legs was missing from below the knee. Still though, despite being sitting and in such a clearly wounded state, the man still cut an impressive figure.

"Colonel Michaels," General Crow nodded a respectful bow. "I'm glad to see you have recovered. Please, speak freely."

The colonel was wheeled to the center of the room. Reaching to the side, the Colonel pulled a crutch from its holder attached to the side of his chair and drove the rubber end of it into the ground with a thud that echoed around the room.

Then, with a herculean show of strength and willpower, the one-legged Andre Michaels pulled himself out of his chair and, with the help of the crutch, up onto his feet... or foot.

He looked around the room. "I want to make something very clear to every Marine who can hear my voice!" he bellowed loudly. "We were betrayed. Fifteen thousand of your brothers and sisters are dead... Fifteen. Thousand. Of them... were lied to, disarmed in every meaningful way, and sent to be slaughtered by the very people we were sworn to serve! You already know that. What you may not know is that the pilots of our air support and the dropships we landed on were executed - to a man - when they returned to the carriers. I have heard the blocked transmissions myself. If there is any man or woman who thinks they can return to the Imperium, knowing what you know, and expect to be allowed off this planet alive, then you are a fool! There is no way the Emperor will allow the truth about what happened here to get out! If you don't want to fight, I understand. So much has been lost, and so many of our brothers and sisters are gone. There is no dishonor in living out the rest of your lives in peace, in their name. For what it is worth, though, I have chosen to join the rebellion and do what I can to avenge our fallen, and I would be honored to have any one of you fight by my side."

"As would I," the General nodded respectfully.

"As would I," the man pushing the wheelchair said loudly as the Colonel dropped back into it. Stevo, like every other Marine in the room, had been so transfixed by the Colonel's appearance that he hadn't paid any attention to the man pushing his wheelchair.

"Admiral Valdek," a series of hushed whispers floated around the room. "He's alive."

The murmurs of quiet conversation quickly filled the mess as the Colonel and Admiral Valdek joined the General at the front, falling into conversation. Stevo watched them quietly, only to find his own eyes drawn to Captain West... who happened, at that moment, to be looking right back at him. If he didn't know any better, he would say she blushed a little, but he offered her a small, respectful nod just in time to be interrupted by Mac.

"So that's what ya were talking to tha pretty Captain aboot then," he smirked at his Sergeant through his thick Scottish accent. "Are ya for the fightin', or nae?"

"Sorry, Mac. I can't tell you," Stevo answered. "This has to be a decision you make on your own."

"Aw, C'mon, Not even a clue?" the mountain of a man grinned at him.

Stevo turned to face him properly. "Dylan, what do you want to do?"

Mac allowed the smile on his face to fade away before he took a deep breath. "Honestly, I wanna find the Emperor and that Doukas wanka, and put their heads on pikes, then shit down their throats!"

Stevo nodded with a pat on his shoulder. "Then that is what you should do,"

"Aye, but will I be doing it without ya?"

"No... you won't," Stevo said quietly, "but you keep that shit to yourself until the others have made that decision for themselves. That includes Ryan and Angel when she wakes up."

Mac barked out a laugh. "Angel? Ya'd have to hold that girl back. She is gonna be fuckin' furious when she hears how high this all went." He turned and shouted at the top of his considerable-sized lungs into the room, "Fuck tha Emperor. They wanna war, We'll fuckn' give it to 'em! I stand with tha Colonel!"

A cheer from almost every other Marine in the room roared defiantly back in reply, including every one of the thirty people from the beach and from Ryan on the other side of the room. Stevo smiled to himself and let his eyes wander back to the flaming-haired Captain at the front. She seemed to be involved in the conversation between the three commanding officers, nodding away as she spoke. He could have tuned the crowds out, allowing him to listen in, and for a moment, he was tempted. But something stopped him. He knew almost nothing about her. He didn't know what sort of officer she was or how she had worked her way up the ranks, but at the same time, she was only a Captain and was commanding a conversation with a Colonel, a General, and an Admiral. People seemed to defer to her; they respected her, and they followed her. She was a leader.

And that was the sort of person Stevo could admire, even follow himself.

But god fucking damn, it was hard not to be distracted by the way she looked at him.

********

Laura 3.

One thing that being an exclusively space-dwelling society left you totally unprepared for was heights. It probably would have sounded like an odd statement to make to someone born and raised on a planet, considering a Mariner spent their lives dozens of miles above it and occasionally descended toward one in what was essentially a controlled fall. But that wasn't how it worked. Space had no concept of "down;" there was just movement in a different direction, and without "down," there could be no "how far down," let alone a "holy fucking shit, that is a really long way down!" Even the descent from orbit wasn't really a descent to a Mariner. It was just entering an atmosphere, and it felt no different to them than any other maneuver because they were doing it in a ship with a consistent pull of gravity from the deck plates. That lurching feeling you get when you are about to fall... it just didn't happen on a ship. There wasn't even a sense of tilting.

It was a subtle distinction but a profound one. To a Mariner, gravity was just another adjustable condition on a ship. It was a tool. It could be increased or lowered according to comfort, and it could even be turned off completely to aid with the movement of heavy equipment. There was never a point in a Mariner's existence, unlike people living on a planet where they were standing atop a tall place with nothing to stop them from falling and having to deal with the fact that, in a lot of cases, gravity was not their friend!

Planet-dwelling people dealt with that all the time, so much so that it had become instinctive. For any of them who doubted it, just ask them to stand on the viewing deck of a skyscraper and climb onto the edge. Watch how fast they would find something to hold on to. To them, that was the natural way to act. They knew, with every fiber of their being, that gravity would be perfectly happy to pull them violently back to the ground and kill them. Yes, obviously, a Mariner knew this too, but for them, having spent generations living an existence where the height you could fall was always limited by the height of the bulkhead above you, was rarely fatal and usually never any more serious than falling down a flight of stairs. That instinctive "oh shit" moment just didn't happen for them on an often enough basis for it to become part of their nature.

So when it did happen, it was a hell of a shock to the system.

It was about seventy meters to the bottom of the ravine, but to Laura, that was no different than seventy miles. She had never been this high up before, and on the few occasions where she could have said to have come close, she had not been expected to climb down it. She had done the holo-simulations, of course; that is how she had learned to rock-climb in the first place. But during those simulations, she had been instinctively aware that the deck plates, as disguised as they may have been, were only a few feet below her. If she fell, as she often did during those practices, there was no risk of harm. That was absolutely not the case now, and that "Oh shit" moment had hit hard!

Lying on her stomach so she could look out over the precipice, she was confronted with the startling reality that to complete her mission, she would need to climb down that and then - somehow, even more dauntingly - climb back out again

Well, that idea could fuck the fuck off! It could keep fucking off until it got somewhere else, and when it got there, she hoped someone would be kind enough to tell it to fuck off from there too. People could keep telling it to fuck off until the idea could get all the way back to her, just so she could tell it to fuck off again!

She went back and got her ship.

It took the whole god-damned day. It was long, it was hard, her suit was stifling and claustrophobic, it smelled in ways that a Mariner had to deal with even less regularly than gravity, and the entire fucking trek was uphill.... Although she will admit that she smiled a little when she found the remains of three partially vaporized people and a few bags of... stuff... outside her ship when she finally got there. Proof that people were still as predictable as always and, more importantly, her security systems still worked.

She dragged the bags into the cargo hold for later, locked the ship back up again, and went to bed.

By the time the sun had come back up, she was circling her ship around her target location and was spending a few more blissful and well-deserved minutes out of that fucking suit. The suit itself, incidentally, had been in the decontamination chamber since she had woken up.

Landing a ship of any size in the narrow confines of a place like a ravine was always a risky proposition, especially with a ship the size of hers. It wasn't necessarily a risk of hitting the sides - although for a lesser pilot, that would certainly be a consideration - the ravine was easily two hundred meters wide, and although the Seren was almost exactly one-hundred meters long, it was only twenty meters wide. Simply orienting it to face along the course of the river was more than enough to give her adequate room to land. The problem came from the thrusters.

Each time she feathered the flight stick, even for a course correction of a few degrees or a handful of inches, the relevant thrusters fired along her hull. Each one of those thrusters produced more jet wash than an ancient earth scram-jet engine, and that, in turn, caused massive localized air currents. Landing out in the open was fine; those currents dissipated pretty quickly, but landing in a confined space like this was the opposite. The wind blasts hit the walls of the ravine and then bounced back to buffet her ship, making her need to apply more force to the thrusters to hold her steady. Most dangerously, however, was the fact that every single Newton-meter of that wind force was being smashed into a ravine face that was already dangerously unstable. The slightest movement could cause a massive section to collapse. If she was lucky, that would only make digging into the vault harder... if she wasn't, a collapsing ravine face could bury the Seren along with it.

"Easy... Easy. Stay the fuck where you are, planet!" she murmured to nobody in particular. "Nothing to see here!" Jesus, what she wouldn't give for a good set of anti-gravity field emitters right now. She could drop like a stone and stop her ship from hitting the surface with little more than a gentle breeze. She could...

She blinked, then looked down at the scanners.

"Oh, for fuck sake!" She cut her engines, all of them, and put her shields up to maximum. The Seren was left to the tender mercies of the planet's gravity and dropped the last fifty meters. She clamped her hands onto the armrests, pressed her shoulder into her flight seat, and braced for impact.

The water from the river exploded in every direction as it was violently and suddenly displaced by a thousand tonnes of starship landing on it. But being a hundred meters from the ravine face in either direction and with a fairly strong current, the force of the wave was washed away and dissipated by the river itself before making much of an impact on the banks, and her shields happily and easily absorbed the impact. She would have saved herself a fair bit of trouble by checking the depth of the river earlier. At an eighth of a kilometer wide, with a strong current, and after the gouging out of its bed by the tsunami and receding flood waters, the river was more than deep enough not to worry about hitting the bottom of it. Getting out would be easy. Gun the engines and shoot out there as fast as her thrust could carry her; she couldn't care less if the ravine collapsed from the jet wash then, she would already be out of it.

Reactivating the thrusters just enough to lift the keel of the Seren out of the water and arrest its own reaction to the river's current, she then set the engines to hold it in place in the air, effectively hovering it above the fast-flowing water.