“Got it,” Andrew said. He fired a burst himself at a dark figure, which toppled over backwards, howling in pain. “Why the hell are they attacking now?”
The answer flashed into my brain. “The shuttles,” I said, grimly. I keyed my terminal. “Shuttles, come in — now!”
“Pilot Van Diamond here, sir,” the lead pilot said. “What’s all the shooting?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Seal up the shuttles completely; no one to get onboard without either mine or the Captain’s permission.” I thought about ordering them back to orbit and thought better of it. If we needed to evacuate the Garrison, we’d need the shuttles. The tribesmen’s bomb had made sure that we had a lot of empty seats. “Andrew…”
He was way ahead of me. “Sergeant, take D and E and get them to the shuttles,” he ordered. “I want the ground around the shuttles swept and then secured.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, and started to run. The infantry were reorganising on the fly and, once again, I was impressed by their professionalism. I’d seen attacks on Heinlein that had broken down as one unit tried to advance through ground controlled by another unit, or even fired on their own side, quite by accident.
“We’ll cut them off from the shuttles, and then drive them back from the garrison,” Andrew grated. I saw him smile and realised that he was enjoying himself. “Contact the ship and see if they can move into position to support us.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and keyed my radio again. “Captain, we’ve got a bit of a situation here.”
“I understand,” the Captain said, when I had finished explaining. “We’ll move into low orbit and prepare to unleash KEW strikes if required, but our sensors can barely pick up the tribesmen.”
Andrew overheard. “Anyone outside the compound is an enemy,” he said. “We really need a helicopter flight or two.”
I nodded. Botany’s atmosphere was too much for helicopters though, or even any other kind of aircraft. The Garrison had experimented with an airship, but the idea had never really worked in high winds. The shuttles might be able to lay down fire for us, but the cost in fuel would be prohibitive. Of course, we were probably past being able to care about it.
“Understood,” the Captain said. “We can use our lasers to target the ground.”
“Do so,” Andrew said. “I want a wide-beam sweep around the compound.”
I covered my eyes as the laser beams swept through the air. Normally, a laser beam is invisible until it hits its target, but the weird atmosphere made the beam show up as a flickering ray of light. The results were unmistakable. Sand overheated and became glass, while any tribesmen caught in the beam died instantly. I hoped — prayed — that it would be enough. After that, the tribes were probably going to be out for blood.
“Sir, this is Sergeant Price,” Andrew’s radio said. “There was an attempt to rush the shuttles, but we beat it back and they faded into the desert. The little shits can hide right under our noses.”
“Well done,” Andrew said. He looked at me. “With their goal now impossible to reach, what do you think they’ll do?”
I heard a sound, rather like a thin trombone, in the air. A moment later, the tribesmen stopped shooting and vanished into the desert. Our shooting stopped a moment later as we realised that there was nothing left to shoot at. The brief attack — it didn’t seem that it really had only been ten minutes — was over.
“Sergeant King, take A Platoon and sweep around the compound,” Andrew ordered. “All others, sound off.”
I listened absently as the infantry ran through their names. “Get the injured to the medical clinic,” Andrew ordered. He frowned down at one of the dead tribesmen. “Check the tribesmen and find out if any of them are alive. I want to know where they got those weapons.”
It was an hour before we found out the truth. The captured tribesman had sworn that he wouldn’t talk, no matter how much we hurt him, but an injection of truth serum loosened his mouth. He’d explained how the tribes had been contacted by someone from the stars who had offered them weapons and supplies, inviting them to take their revenge on the garrison and its people. One of the tribe, a convict who had survived the harsh welcome, had even suggested taking the shuttles and the starship in orbit. With a little luck, the plan might even have worked. Would the Captain have realised the danger in time to fire on his own shuttles?
And the observation network surrounding the planet was primitive. Anyone could have landed without being observed. They might have been resistance fighters from a dozen worlds, or they might have been pirates. It didn’t matter in the end, did it?
“Good luck,” I said to Andrew, afterwards. “You’re going to need it.”
A day later, we opened a wormhole and headed onwards to the Beyond.
Chapter Thirty
The UN’s decision to leave various tiny asteroid colonies — even a handful of planet-bound colonies — alone comes as a surprise at first, but the truth is that the ‘grey’ colonies are simply not that important, compared to more productive worlds like Heinlein. While the UN would like to bring them under its formal authority, there is little point in wasting military resources occupying the asteroids. The UN chooses, instead, to content itself with ensuring that the grey colonies do not support interstellar resistance efforts.
It was the best of times.
We spent nine months cruising in the Beyond, moving from star to star. Some of them were completely empty, as far as we could tell, although the Captain insisted on treating them as potentially-hostile systems anyway, just in case. It would have been easy to hide an entire population right under our noses with the right level of technology and not all of the human settlements needed Earth-like worlds to survive. Others had isolated human populations, known to the UN and generally ignored, few of whom were pleased to see us. They’d come out so far to get away from the UN and enjoy their blessed isolation.
It surprised me just how diplomatic the Captain could be, as we moved from isolated settlement to isolated settlement. It helped that there was no one looking over his shoulder, apart from Jason Montgomerie, and even he understood that there was little point in bullying the tiny grey colonies. We called in, asked if they needed any help and if they’d had any contact with resistance forces, but otherwise left them largely alone. A couple of religious colonies invited us to send over people for shore leave — in hopes, perhaps, of converting crewmen to their religions — but other than they, they didn’t seek to harm us, nor did we seek to harm them. They had nothing that the UN wanted or needed.
I stood on the icy surface of Planet Eskimo and wondered at the settlers who had somehow managed to set up a functional settlement on the planet. It was further away from its sun than Earth and was completely covered in ice, inhabited only by deep-water fish that swam in the warmer water under the ice. Humans couldn’t eat the native animals — not without getting very ill, at least — but Earth stocks had taken well to the alien sea and the Eskimos lived off them, and the products they grew in their underground farms. They were even more isolated than some of the odder settlements, even Botany, and I suspected that they might even consider Earth a legend as they dug deeper under the ice. Some of their foodstuffs might become delicacies in the years to come — if the UN survived its current crisis, or something else arose in its place — but for the moment, everyone was content to leave them alone. What did they have their pirates might want? Fish?