The Xenocide Mission Read online

  ‘Thank you.’ King James had aged. Still a slim man in good trim, but the hair and the moustache were greying. The original mission that had brought humans to the Roving and led to the foundation of the Commonwealth had been four years ago, and the then Prince James had inherited his throne unexpectedly in the course of events.

  The mission hadn’t gone quite as James and his father had hoped, but the man couldn’t complain. His kingdom, UK-1, orbited the Roving and acted as the official port of entry to the planet. Plan A, rebuilding the British Empire on the Roving with the First Breed as its loyal subjects, hadn’t quite worked out for the Windsors but as far as Gilmore was concerned, Plan B was a bloody good second best.

  ‘Before we came here to the Roving,’ James said, ‘UK-1 had very little in the way of a defence force. We had the Royal Space Fleet, a small space service, but nothing much. Nothing demanding.’

  As if by accident, his eyes met Gilmore’s as he said that; or at least, his gaze drifted past Gilmore. Gilmore, of course, had been a captain in that small, undemanding Royal Space Fleet.

  So had John Chase, and from the way James blinked, Gilmore suspected James had suddenly remembered this fact. The king hurried on.

  ‘Our main defence was our isolation and the fact that no-one had any particular need to attack us. That changed when we came to the Roving – we became a far more desirable target and, due to the decision of the Commonwealth to make its technology available to the nations of Earth, our enemies suddenly acquired the ability to attack us.’ Another lighthousebeam glance around the room again caught Gilmore’s eye. James was blaming him.

  Well, what was I supposed to do? Gilmore thought. Everyone knew the nations of Earth would soon catch up with the Roving technologically, and if they were left to do it in secret then they would get there without the Roving knowing it. Far better to have it all out in the open; and so, admittedly with qualms, he had decided the Navy should make the principles of its ship technology generally available. None of the Earth nations had put that technology to use yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  ‘And so,’ James said, ‘we decided to build up a proper defence force, should UK-1 ever come under attack. We now have two troops of marines, a couple of hundred men and women in all, and we intend to build up a complete regiment in time.’ He looked up, not this time at Gilmore but at the couple sitting by him. ‘Stand up, please, you two.’

  They both stood smartly to attention.

  ‘May I present Captain Bill Perry, two-i-c A-Troop, King Richard’s Regiment of Royal Marines and officer commanding Able Platoon,’ said James. ‘Next to him, commanding Baker Platoon, Lieutenant Peter . . .’

  The king trailed off, realizing that the marine next to Bill Perry wasn’t a Peter at all. ‘Lieutenant, ah, Donna McCallum, officer commanding Charlie Platoon,’ he said. Donna McCallum gave a small nod. Gilmore took a brief moment to work out, from the swirl of names, who was commanding which phonetically named platoon, then turned his attention back to the meeting.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ James said, and turned back to the meeting. ‘We’re willing to lend Able and Charlie Platoons to the Commonwealth for the duration of this mission,’ he said. ‘Captain Perry is a veteran of the European Marine Force and Lieutenant McCallum saw service in the Pacifican conflict, and their men and women are likewise experienced. That’s two platoons for you, sixty marines, experienced and trained for combat in all conditions and gravities . . .’ (And that’s quite a range . . . Gilmore the spacer mused.) ‘. . . ready and raring to go. How is that for you, Captain McLaughlin?’

  Andrew McLaughlin, whom Gilmore knew, sat across the table from James. Like many other human personnel of the Navy, McLaughlin was a veteran of the original Roving mission from Earth; he had commanded the North American Federation’s Enterprise. More to the point he was also the recently appointed captain of Pathfinder, the first of the Navy’s joint First Breed/Human starships and the nearest thing there was to a flagship. Next to McLaughlin was a Rustie which Gilmore suspected was Sand Strong, the First Breed Senior on Pathfinder.

  McLaughlin had his back to Gilmore and hadn’t noticed him.

  ‘It would suit me just fine, sir,’ McLaughlin said, looking not at James but at Chase, ‘if only Pathfinder had the berths for sixty extra crew.’

  ‘There’s more than enough room on Pathfinder’s hangar deck. Our people can bivouac there, with your approval. They don’t mind slumming it,’ said James, a man who had never willingly slummed it in his life. ‘Their supplies and equipment can be stored in the hold.’

  ‘Sure,’ said McLaughlin. ‘What happens when we get there?’

  ‘That is for the meeting to decide,’ James said, and made as if to sit back down. Halfway there, he stood up again. ‘Point of order,’ he said, and finally he was looking directly at Gilmore. ‘Is it in order to be discussing this in front of civilians?’

  ‘Civilians?’ Chase said. Then he realized. ‘Oh, of course. Hi, Mike.’

  ‘John,’ Gilmore said.

  McLaughlin twisted round in his seat and smiled. ‘Hey! Commodore!’

  ‘Ex-Commodore,’ James said.

  ‘Do you have an objection to Mr Gilmore’s presence?’ said duPont.

  James gave a small, wintry smile. ‘I do understand he has no official connection with the Commonwealth Navy. He officially handed in his duties.’

  ‘The Comm— Mr Gilmore built up the Commonwealth Navy from scratch,’ McLaughlin said.

  ‘But I understand he was never formally a member. Everything he did, he did on . . . what was it . . . a consultancy basis.’ James almost spat out the term. ‘And I repeat, he no longer has any official connection at all. It was all over the nets. Didn’t you see it?’

  Arm Wild finally spoke. ‘Michael Gilmore has offspring on SkySpy.’

  James’s regret was very well acted. ‘So do many men and women. I’m sorry, Madam Co-Senior, Arm Wild, but if you are to employ the services of my marines, this meeting will have to discuss matters that are officially classified as secret on UK-1. We have no objection to sharing these secrets with highly placed individuals in the government and Navy of the Commonwealth, but we do object strongly to sharing them with civilians.’

  Arm Wild may have been about to speak, but Gilmore had already got the message. More important, he sensed that the other Rusties around the table had got it too. James was appealing to hierarchy, to precedent, to the Proper Way of Doing Things, and that was how you swayed a Rustie’s feelings. And Arm Wild, like any good First Breed Senior, would be swayed by what his juniors felt.

  Anyway, if James’s marines could get to SkySpy and maybe help establish whether or not Joel was still alive, and use of those marines depended upon Gilmore’s withdrawal, he wasn’t going to stand in their way.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. He stood up abruptly and nodded at duPont and Arm Wild. ‘I apologize if I’ve inconvenienced the meeting and I withdraw.’

  He turned and walked out, seething, and was only dimly aware of the renewed gaze of Lieutenant McCallum, RM.

  Gilmore leaned against the balustrade of the terrace, his back to the white layered bulk of the Admiralty Building, gazing out to sea. It had been four hours. How much longer?

  Does it matter? said a still, small voice. It’s not as if you’ll be able to do anything. Gilmore scowled. That voice was an old, old friend. He had thought he had bid it goodbye four years ago.

  All his life, he had been plagued with self-doubt, but at the end of the Roving Mission, he had thought he had finally laid the ghost. He had had four years as head of the Navy, full run of the roost, able to do as he liked. And he had set up his own chain of command so that the Navy could be run with due procedure: an Admiralty, with a proper hierarchical structure, and a Space Ministry to advise the leaders of the Commonwealth on space matters and to link the politicians with the Navy under their command.

  All well and good, except that Arm Wild, being a Rustie, far preferred to deal with p
eople he knew. That was Rustie procedure. He would happily bypass every mechanism Gilmore had set in place to advise him and approach Gilmore directly. It was annoying for Gilmore, who was acutely aware of the sensibilities of the people Arm Wild was ignoring, and it was frankly insulting for the Space Minister and Admiral Chase, so Gilmore had forced the issue by resigning. As far as he had heard, Arm Wild now toed the line, going through the appropriate channels. It was too early to tell if Gilmore had lost a friend in the process.

  Now he was out of the chain of command and powerless, just when he badly needed power. He hadn’t just shot himself in the foot, he thought, he had blown his leg off below the knee.

  He wasn’t going to move from the terrace until he found out what was happening, and his mind was racing with alternative plans of his own. He looked over at the launch promontory and the assembled detritus of the Roving’s old space programme. And there, the centrepiece of the collection and its newest addition, was Ark Royal, the ship he had commanded when he brought Prince James to the Roving. One ship among the many sent by the Earth nations in a quest, it had turned out, to provide the Rusties with new masters following the extinction of the Ones Who Command. Gilmore never liked to overplay his own role in events, but it had to be said he had had a hand in persuading the Rusties not to take on any human nation as their new masters but instead to recruit their services on, yes, a consultancy basis, and to set up the Commonwealth instead. No wonder King James had a dislike of consultancy in general and Gilmore in particular.

  But Ark Royal, Earth’s technological state of the art, had been bought by the Navy so that the technicians of both species could work out how to integrate their respective technologies. Ark Royal was the spiritual parent of Pathfinder and every other Human/First Breed vessel in the Navy. He remembered the day it had been brought down from orbit, supported by antigravity generators, lowered down to ground level as gently as an elevator car to touch the surface of a planet for the first and last time.

  And now he was fantasizing. If Ark Royal could be lifted back up again, it might still be spaceworthy. The fuel tanks were still there and just needed topping up somehow. The fusion engine could be made serviceable. There would be a few miles of optic cabling that needed re-laying . . . but if he could get that and if some other ship could open up a step-through point for him and if he could find a crew then he could get his old ship to SkySpy ...

  God, he was desperate, he thought with a wry smile, and then the smile vanished. He had to get to SkySpy. It wasn’t a joke.

  ‘Commodore?’ said a woman’s voice behind him, nervous, hesitant. He turned and saw the woman marine there. One part of Gilmore’s mind mentally appraised her: hair so dark it was black, cut short enough to fit into a helmet; blue eyes; not bad looking, though the profile could perhaps look a little severe.

  Another part of his mind added that she was indeed about Joel’s age, which meant she was young enough to be his daughter. She took a half step forward, stopped.

  ‘I’m, um, I’m Donna,’ she said. He detected a faint Kiwi tang in the words.

  Marine formality certainly isn’t what it was, Gilmore thought. ‘I’d guessed you weren’t Lieutenant Peter,’ he said.

  ‘No, he’s Baker Platoon.’

  ‘And what happened to him?’

  ‘Broken leg. He fell down some steps.’

  ‘Must have been a bad fall,’ Gilmore said sympathetically.

  ‘Two flights of them,’ she added. ‘He, um, just kept on falling.’

  She still seemed hopeful, as if he should be responding in some different way. He couldn’t work out what.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘is the meeting over?’

  She hesitated for a beat more, then suddenly drew herself up to a far more formal pose. ‘Yes, sir. Pathfinder’s still in the middle of a refit, but they’re bringing it forward and she leaves day after tomorrow with official observers from the Earth nations and us. And I, um, I just wanted to, um, pass on my, um, sympathies regarding your son on SkySpy, sir.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Gilmore said mildly. ‘But as your employer pointed out, I’m not the only parent in this situation.’

  ‘You’re the only one who knows about it, sir. Officially, SkySpy is simply out of contact, possibly due to a failure in the step-through generator, and Pathfinder is going to investigate.’

  ‘Sixty marines should certainly be able to fix a faulty step-through generator,’ Gilmore agreed. ‘Tell me, Lieutenant—’

  ‘Donna? We’d best get to the boat. We’ve got platoons to mobilize.’ Captain Perry had come up behind his subordinate and he was looking at Gilmore with something not far removed from hostility. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Gilmore. We’ll find your son for you.’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ Gilmore said with a fixed smile and not the slightest friendliness. ‘What makes you think I’m not coming with you?’

  Perry’s answering smile was condescending and equally unfriendly. ‘Your friend Arm Wild will tell you all about that, sir. His Majesty laid down certain conditions for our inclusion on this mission and, well, people like you featured in the small print.’

  Perry, Gilmore deduced, was the king’s man.

  ‘And what sort of people am I like?’ he said.

  ‘Civilians,’ Perry said.

  ‘Oh, that sort of people.’ Gilmore boiled inside but his tone was bland. ‘Out of interest, if your platoons have yet to mobilize, what are you doing down here wasting time when you should surely be with your people?’

  ‘We were required at the meeting,’ Perry said frostily.

  ‘I saw.’ Gilmore couldn’t help grinning and he hoped Perry found it offensive. ‘King James just loves to show off his officers, regardless of how much it interferes with their actual duties. Perhaps we can get together some time, we could share a beer and I’ll tell you about the number of times he shoved his oar in during the Roving mission . . .’ He suspected strongly that Perry agreed with him completely, but wasn’t going to say so if it involved criticizing the king. ‘Anyway, give my regards to His Majesty, and tell him how delighted I am we actually see eye to eye on something at last.’

  ‘Oh?’ Perry looked immediately wary.

  ‘Sending a gunboat,’ Gilmore said. ‘The definitive answer of the British Empire whenever the natives started getting uppity.’

  ‘Oh.’ Perry seemed to lose interest in the matter. ‘Come on, Donna.’

  They turned away and Donna McCallum gave Gilmore a final glance so intense it could have been a telepathic signal. Gilmore was left with the lingering feeling that he had an ally, and he couldn’t for the life of him think why.

  Well, he could worry about that later. Joel was worry number one at the moment and, as a kind of sub-worry, there was the matter of getting onto Pathfinder.

  He took his aide from his belt and looked at it.

  ‘Don’t do it to yourself, Mike,’ he muttered. ‘You’re miserable enough as it is.’

  But what the heck . . .

  It was pleasantly shady beneath the trees but Gilmore wasn’t there because it was cool. He just wanted somewhere where the display of his aide wouldn’t be wiped out by the glare of the sun.

  ‘Retrieve report,’ he said. He screwed up his brow in thought. ‘Can’t remember the name. Report is pre-Commonwealth, about ninety years ago, details contact with the beings of Sample World Four.’

  ‘Please wait,’ said the aide. A moment later: ‘Two reports are found matching your criteria. Author: Sigil Measure Lantern of the Ones Who Command. Full report and digest are available. ’

  ‘Digest,’ said Gilmore. He sat on the ground and read.

  The story he knew so well: he could have recited it like he could once have recited a nursery tale to Joel. A squadron of prideships entered an unexplored solar system and noted signs of intelligent life on two worlds. Hope flared in the hearts of the Ones Who Command who led the squadron, and of the First Breed who crewed the ships. The mission to find a replacement for the Ones Who
Command, to be new masters for the First Breed, was running out of time. Even the best candidate race they had found so far was far from ideal.

  The two worlds were the second and third planets of the solar system and they were dubbed Sample Worlds 4 and 5, respectively. Sample World 4 was detected first because it was emitting radio signals. Sample World 5 was radio-silent, and from orbit the ships detected signs of a pre-industrial civilization. The world was metal-poor and they didn’t see it ever developing a decent level of technology, so they decided to concentrate their attentions on Sample World 4. The Pre-Contact Team began the task of deciphering their transmissions and learning their languages. They soon worked out that Sample World 4 was recovering from a near-catastrophic war.

  The first nuclear explosion on the surface of Sample World 5 took the team completely by surprise. Their first reaction was to reassess the technological capability of the inhabitants: had they somehow managed to be a stone-age but nuclear-capable society? But the next twenty nuclear explosions, scattered at random over the surface, showed what was really happening. A stream of primitive liquid-fuelled missiles was heading from Sample World 4 to Sample World 5. The missiles had taken years to reach their destination and must have been launched before the prideships arrived. They took one on board to study it and found it to be quite unsophisticated.

  Should they intervene? Should they stay unobserved? They debated at length, but the problem was solved for them when the stream of rockets suddenly ceased. Sadly it was only because the inhabitants of Sample World 4 were refining their rocket technology to a higher degree.

  The new rockets were bigger, faster, multi-stage devices that made the journey between worlds in half the time. However, they did not have nuclear bombs on board. Their payload was observation satellites. The rockets reached Sample World 5 and deployed their load into orbit so that a network of satellites covered every inch of Sample World 5’s surface.

  And then Sample World 4 launched another salvo of nuclear warheads. Faster, better, they took only months to reach their target and it was clear that the satellites were guiding them onto the cities of Sample World 5.