The marines wore suits quite like those of the fighters, but the color of dark mud, and while the squad had on light protective helmets the sergeant hadn’t even bothered to put his on. Since he couldn’t stop anyone from killing him nor would that thing protect him from a shot, he saw no purpose to it here, and once they’d secured the ship and prisoners and were marching their captives to Legal, the proper uniform would be no helmet anyway.
The captain of the tramp met him just inside the entranceway. He was not only old, he was perhaps the oldest man Maslovic had ever seen. Gray-haired, with a stringy, dirty gray beard, his skin had the look of ancient parchment and he stood slightly stooped in spite of a clear effort to look military himself. He wore a simple black flight jump suit that looked older and more wrinkled than he was, and some boots that had last been shined before the Great Silence.
“I’m Captain Murphy,” the old man introduced himself.
“Sergeant Maslovic,” the marine responded, looking around. “Sir, by authority of Combine Naval Code seventy-seven stroke six two I take command of your vessel. Where are your crew?”
The old man chuckled. “Crew? No crew. Don’t need much of a crew for this scow, Sergeant. I have some passengers, though.”
“We monitored three. Please have them come forward and then we can all go up to the Legal Officer.”
“Well, now, we might need some help in transporting two of them, I think, although I’m not at all sure you’ll understand why without diagrams.”
“Sir?”
“This way, Sergeant.”
Maslovic gestured for the guard to be posted at the airlock and the rest of the squad to fan out through the captive ship and begin to search and inventory it, then followed the old captain.
The ship stank. Body odor, oils and lubricants—it was hard to isolate the sources of the stenches, but it was not exactly a ship that would pass inspection in naval life.
The captain punched a panel and an interior hatch slid back, and Murphy gestured for the sergeant to enter.
“Sergeant, meet my passengers,” the old man said with a trace of amusement in his tone.
Maslovic entered what was clearly ordinarily the captain’s cabin and stopped. For a moment, he really did feel confused. Three women were inside, one in a reclining chair, one in the bed, and a third in a straight-backed utility chair bolted to the floor.
Maslovic had seen many colonial women before, but there was something odd about these. They were disproportionately fat, but not all over. Just in the…
He suddenly realized their condition and why Captain Murphy had been so apprehensive about them and yet amused to introduce them to him.
All three were hugely pregnant.
He suspected that these people would be going up to the cruiser. There was nobody here who could deal with them like this.
It was two kilometers long and looked like it had been assembled by a horde of drunken babies. Nonetheless, the Thermopylae was actually as functional as a socket wrench; in its time, its design fought wars, conquered rebellions, ran down smugglers and brought would-be dictators to heel. Its birth name was the CNC Thermopylae, the initials standing for “Combine Naval Cruiser.” Its armament was and continued to be more than formidable; it could incinerate the average solid rock planet, vaporize a path ahead of it through the densest of asteroid belts, and its defensive shields could withstand blasts from a ship of equal or lesser capabilities.
It did not, however, have many light armaments; instead, it carried a series of externally docked fighter squadrons in what were known as “pods” and, in four equally spaced “hangars” around its midsection, it carried and could quickly launch a like number of destroyers, each with formidable weapons of their own, each with their own single abbreviated pod of defensive fighters. The destroyers could use a wormgate on their own, as could the cruiser; the fighters had no such equipment aboard and were dependent for interstellar travel on the bigger ships even as they were dependent on the smallest for the first line of defense.
For all that, they’d had relatively small human crews when the Great Silence came down and all the wormgates leading to the old Combine and Mother Earth suddenly became inactive. Most of the systems were fully automated; the only ones aboard the large vessels were those who had to make the command decisions that it was felt no machine should be permitted to make and those who represented the human race in its projection wherever that force was required. Ultimately, it was the lowest and least of them that proved essential to remain essentially human. It was discovered, by long and rueful experience, that you could make the perfect soldiers out of robotic arts but so could the other guys. Stalemate was not the objective of a military projection; so long as machines of equal capabilities faced off, though, that’s what happened most of the time.
And that was why the pilots and the grunts, supported, of course, by the best in robotics, but not governed by them, remained.
The Thermopylae had exactly one hundred and sixty pilots in four squadrons with three hundred base personnel supporting them when she found herself orphaned from higher command; beyond those few was one division of marines divided into four regiments of eight forty-person companies each. Six hundred and forty men and women, with twice that in support, all of whom were also rated to replace anyone in the combat division if needed. The command staff included the small complements on each destroyer, the naval commanding officer, the cruiser’s captain and small support staff, and a fleet admiral. In all, far fewer than two thousand souls.
That had changed, but not as much as might be expected. More were needed in a fairly steady stream because of the time it took to evaluate and train competent personnel to replace what might be lost or what might be needed as a reserve, but wholesale expansion would have meant the end of the division as it drowned in a sea of consumers of limited resources.
Cut off from home, adrift in a sea of stars with no way home and no longer a clear mission nor view of its place in the universe, such ships as this either disintegrated or found a new purpose, new mission, and new identity. Military always had their own separate culture, their own feeling of “us” and “them” even in the best of times, and that had been reinforced after the Silence.
The Thermopylae, part deliberately, part without even realizing it as events and culture swept it along, became its own small world, its own society, its own unique nation and culture. Its power and isolation from higher command assured that it would be able to do so and make it stick; the rest came from the ancient human ability to justify to itself almost anything it wanted to do.
It saw itself as the law, the only law left in its more limited cosmos. It continued to safeguard what commerce was left, and to enforce order on the forces of chaos, anarchy and greed that always rode in to capitalize on any misfortune. Most of the other ships did the same, almost as a sense of duty, a matter of honor.
There were, of course, a few that went over to the other side and became the enemy, and those, too, ships like the Thermopylae sought out to battle and possibly destroy.
Nothing, particularly such a valuable commodity as security, was ever free, though, and with no taxing authority to finance it and no controlling government to set its worth and limit its reach, the ship quite naturally took a percentage of whatever was produced by those whom it protected. This was its just share for keeping the defenseless in business, and it was necessary for all the luxuries, necessities, repairs and consumables that such a military unit required. It did not make them universally loved in most places when they priced their own value and service at a rate much higher than their “clients” considered reasonable, proper, or possible, but the ships projected power that no one else could equal. There were no debates; the ships either were paid what they wanted or they took it.