Vanguard

Chapter 6

“The freighters appear to be loading their shuttles. We can’t tell what’s being loaded,” Rob said. The blue and white and brown and green globe of Glenlyon slowly went by beneath as Squall continued to monitor the two freighters from Scatha. In order to do that while the freighters were in orbit, Squall had been forced to come much closer to the other ships, only about fifty kilometers away.

“Can you tell where the shuttles are going to land?” Council Member Leigh Camagan asked.

“I have no way of knowing at this time. A lot of the planet is accessible from this orbit. About all we can rule out is the north and south polar regions. When they launch, it will give us some ability to estimate the general area they are aiming to land at. But until they launch, we can’t even guess.”

“Ninja tells us she is still having no luck hacking into the freighters’ systems,” Leigh Camagan told Rob. “Are you prepared for anything?”

“As well as we can be,” Rob said. “Our weapons are ready.”

“Be advised that half of the council remains in the city. The rest of the members have been dispersed to three different locations outside the city. If the city is overrun by whoever comes out of the first shuttle drops, someone will be able to contact you to give you approval to destroy the shuttles when they rise back into orbit.”

“What if Scatha jams your signals?” Rob said. “They could have gear to do that hidden on their freighters.”

Leigh Camagan paused before replying. “Use your best judgment, Lieutenant. You have followed the spirit and letter of your instructions up to this point, so I feel confident that you will not act contrary to what you know the will of the council to be.”

Apparently, there were times when good deeds were rewarded. Or at least acknowledged. “I understand,” Rob said. “Glenlyon can count on all of us up here. We are still concerned about the freighters, whether they have some means available that will neutralize Squall. Because they will want to do that.”

“Do you have any idea what that means could be?”

“No,” Rob said. “Our best guess is that they may have intended to hack our systems just as we once did to this ship, but Ninja’s firewalls have prevented that.”

“Let’s hope you’re correct,” Leigh Camagan said.

As Leigh Camagan’s face vanished, Danielle Martel called out from her watch station. “The freighters are altering orbit again!”

Rob frowned at his display, seeing the ships from Scatha using their thrusters and main propulsion to nudge themselves higher in orbit and closer to the planetary equator. “That’s the third time since they reached the planet. What are they doing?”

“No idea,” Danielle said. “You can set the maneuvering systems to automatically maintain position on the freighters so we don’t have to order maneuvers every time they shift.”

“I know,” Rob said. “Warships at Alfar had that capability.” But he paused, frowning again, as he brought up the menu to set the maneuvering systems on auto. Scatha knew about that capability, too. So why were the freighters moving around like they were? They must be aware that Squall could almost effortlessly match their orbital alterations.

He looked at the options menu, feeling increasingly uneasy for reasons he couldn’t have explained, and finally tabbed the “maintain relative position automatically but request permission” selection. It would slow things down, it would put an extra burden on him, but something made him feel like that was a good choice.

“You don’t need that approval step,” Danielle said as the change popped up on her own display. “Those systems are very reliable.”

“I know,” Rob said.

She gave him a puzzled look, then shrugged and turned back to her own display.

Fifteen minutes later, the freighters shifted orbit again, this time a little lower and up toward the pole. Rob glared at the automated solution that instantly popped up for his approval, annoyed by having to review it. The orbital change was simple enough, a curve swinging over and slightly down to maintain the same position relative to the freighters. Why did he need to bother with approving it?

But as he reached to change the option to full auto, Rob tapped the approve command instead.

Squall swung over and down.

Rob made a fist and softly pounded one arm of his command seat as Squall settled into her new orbit. “Why are they doing this?” he said out loud.

“They’re messing with us,” Drake Porter said.

“Yeah, but why? Why are they messing with us in a way that shouldn’t be bothering us? They know we can have the ship automatically maintain station on them.”

“It is bothering you,” Drake pointed out.

“Yeah, and why is that?” Rob looked at Danielle. “I don’t understand why they’re doing this.”

She shook her head. “Maybe they think making us follow them around will make us do something to justify whatever they’re planning on. Or maybe they’re enjoying making us follow them around. It kind of emphasizes our inability to stop them from doing what they want.”

Rob sat back, glowering at his display.

Five minutes later, another alert sounded, and Rob saw the symbols for the shuttles falling away from the freighters.

“They’ve launched,” Danielle Martel announced. “We don’t have a vector yet. I’ll get that to you as soon as… the freighters are shifting orbit again.”

Rob closed his eyes, counting to five inside, determined not to let the annoying maneuvering by the freighters get to him, especially when he needed to focus his attention on the shuttles.

When he opened his eyes, the proposed automatic maneuvering solution for Squall was displayed. Rob reached to hit approve, angry.

And stopped himself.

There was something about the curve of that path through space to the next orbit. What was it?

“Lieutenant?” Danielle Martel asked.

“Hold on.” What was bothering him? Rob stared at the proposed path through space, trying to understand. Was he simply losing his nerve? Freezing up when confronted with a difficult situation as the freighters and the shuttles both required his attention?

Rob tapped approve, fighting against his own worries.

He was in command, Rob thought as Squall began adjusting orbit. He couldn’t just give in to fears when all he had to do was let Squall follow—

Danielle had said something earlier. “They’re making us follow them around.”

He stared at the curve of Squall’s projected path. Which this time ran directly through the orbital location where the freighters had been when they launched the shuttles.

Rob didn’t realize he had reached for and punched the main propulsion command until he had done it. Squall leaped as the main propulsion cut in at full, jarring everyone on the ship.

“What the hell?” Danielle gasped, staring at her display, then at Rob in disbelief.

Out in space, hitting the main propulsion like that would have altered the vector of the ship, flattening the curve of her path. But in orbit, the rules were different. Adding velocity caused Squall to rise, jumping upward into higher orbit as well as flinging her forward faster. Her projected path, which would have run through the spot where the freighters from Scatha had been, swung upward instead, passing above that orbital location.

Still accelerating and rising in orbit, Squall leapt over her earlier path. As she tore past the orbital location the freighters had previously occupied, alarms blared.

“Something blew up!” Danielle Martel shouted. “Combat systems estimate we are just inside the danger zone!”

Squall rocked as fragments and a shock wave struck her shields aft and toward the bottom of the ship, then steadied out again.

Jerking himself back into action, Rob cut off the main propulsion, breathing heavily.

“What was that?” Drake Porter asked, sounding scared.

Danielle Martel answered, staring at Rob. “At least one mine. The freighters must have dropped off some stealth mines at the same time as they launched the shuttles, using the same loading docks. How did you know?” she asked Rob.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I just… they wanted us to follow them.”

“And you figured out why. If we’d stayed on that vector, Squall would have been badly damaged or destroyed.”

“We were far enough out, and going away from the blast, so the shields held,” Drake said. “No damage to the ship.”

Rob nodded, grateful that he had listened to his instincts. He only gradually became aware that everyone was staring at him with a mix of grins and wonder. And that the Scatha shuttles were still heading down toward the surface of the planet. “Back on task, people! Figure out where those shuttles are going and get us back close enough to those freighters to engage them if we get orders to!”

“Why can’t we shoot them up?” Drake Porter demanded. “They attacked us! They tried to destroy this ship!”

“We don’t have any proof that they did,” Rob said. “And I don’t have orders authorizing me to engage those freighters!” He touched the comm control, trying to get his breathing back to normal. “Squall was nearly lured into a minefield,” he reported to the council. “It must have been laid by the freighters from Scatha when they launched the shuttles, but we have no proof of that as of yet. All we can tell about the shuttles so far is that they are headed for a landing site somewhere in the midlatitudes of the northern hemisphere.”

He was waiting for a reply, Squall swinging cautiously onto a new vector to close once more on the freighters, when three more explosions erupted near the same location where Rob’s display showed a bright red danger marker.

“They just destroyed the evidence,” Danielle said. “They knew we wouldn’t go back through there.”

“What have they got as backup?” Rob asked her. “Scatha must have something as backup if the mines didn’t work.”

“No idea,” Danielle said. “You seem to be a hell of a lot better at this than I am, Lieutenant.”

Rob blinked, surprised to realize that he had impressed an Earth Fleet–trained officer. “Can we spot if they drop any other mines?”

“Yes. They’ll have to open something like they did when launching the shuttles. The mines themselves are stealthy enough to fool our systems, but we should be able to spot when they could be deployed.”

“Good.”

“Message from the council!” Drake Porter called.

Rob brought it up, seeing Council President Chisholm’s face this time. She was still in her office, one of those waiting in the city in the face of the possibility of an assault by Scatha. His opinion of Chisholm rose a few notches. “Lieutenant Geary, have you fired on the freighters?”

“No.”

“What are they doing now?”

“They’re holding orbit,” Rob said. Why weren’t the freighters making any attempt to run after their attack failed? Why weren’t they at least splitting up to make it much harder for Squall to engage them? The reason why suddenly struck him. “They want me to fire on them.”

“Yes,” Chisholm said. “The provocative act. They still want us to start this. Scatha will commit the first aggressive act, Lieutenant Geary. We want no doubt of who began hostilities. And after Scatha does its worst, we will show them just how big a mistake they’ve made.”

Before Rob could reply, Danielle called out. “We’ve got an estimated landing site for the shuttles!”

Rob saw the map image appear before him and tapped it to send the same image to the members of the council. “They’re heading for the other northern continent.”

“Get over the landing site!” Chisholm ordered. “We want the best possible overhead view to see what those shuttles drop off!”

“We’re on our way,” Rob said.

As Squall shifted orbit again, moving lower and away from the freighters, Ninja called.

She glared at him. “Still alive, huh?”

“Ninja, it’s not a good time—”

“The shuttles and the freighters are staying silent. I still can’t hack them. But I’ve been looking at the stuff they sent to try to hack you. It’s really good.”

Rob took his gaze from the path of Squall and the two shuttles on his display long enough to give her an alarmed look. “Are we in danger?”

“No!” Ninja said, sounding insulted. “The walls I set up can handle stuff a lot worse than that. But standard walls wouldn’t have held, not even the stuff I saw being sold at Alfar just before we left. Scatha has spent the money to hire some decent code monkeys.”

“So they expected their remote attack on our systems to work?” Rob asked.

“Yes.” She narrowed her eyes at him in question. “And?”

“You must have heard that they tried to hit us with mines, which would have torn this ship apart. I’ve been trying to think what their backup attack would be,” Rob explained. “But based on what you just said, I think the mines were the backup attack. Scatha wanted to recapture Squall, not destroy her. If that failed, they were ready to take us out the hard way.”

“Huh. Yeah. That’s likely right.” Ninja rubbed her face with both hands. “They might have to start talking when the shuttles set down. Can you make sure I get a relay of any signals you pick up between the shuttles and the freighters?”

“Drake?” Rob called. “Can we link Ninja into any signals we intercept?”

“Ummm, yeah…” Drake Porter replied. “Give me a couple of minutes to figure this out.”

“We’re working on it,” Rob assured Ninja. “I’ve got to get back to monitoring things.”

The moment Ninja’s face disappeared, it was replaced by orbital imagery. “I think I’ve localized the landing site the shuttles are headed for,” Danielle announced. “Unless they make major adjustments in their paths, this is where they’re headed.”

Rob squinted at the imagery. “An open plain where a big river meets the sea. That looks awfully familiar, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a lot like where we set up our first city,” Drake Porter said. He looked startled. “Hold on,” Drake added, pulling out his personal pad and checking something on it. “Yeah. A whole lot like it. That’s a spot marked for a future city site by the council.”

“I’m getting a feeling that our plans have been overtaken by events,” Rob said, feeling tired. “Heavy-lift shuttles. Freighters that can carry lots of equipment and people. And a landing site very suitable for a city location. What does that look like to you?”

“They can’t do that!” Drake protested. “It’s illegal!”

“They are doing it,” Rob said. “Planting their own colony on our world.”

Squall reached a good overhead location as the first shuttle landed. The images of the site were slightly hazed by the intervening atmosphere, so they weren’t clear enough for perfect detail. But it was still possible to pick out men, women, and children moving out onto the scrub grass that covered the land there. “Families,” Danielle said. “If we’d fired on the shuttles, we would have killed kids.”

The second shuttle grounded and began disgorging building equipment much like that Glenlyon had landed, as well as more family groups.

“We can intervene now, right?” Drake Porter demanded. “We have to—” He paused, looking worried. “What can we do? The police… the people down there already outnumber our police force.”

“Lieutenant,” Danielle Martel said, “if the council hasn’t already started looking for spies, they need to start. Scatha seems to have a really good picture of what Glenlyon has in the way of defenses.”

“It’s a pretty small picture,” Rob said, but he had to agree. Every move Scatha had made had reflected inside knowledge of Glenlyon. “Whoever is feeding them info can’t be too highly placed or too up-to-date because they didn’t know enough about Ninja’s work on our firewalls to know they wouldn’t be able to get through them. But they certainly knew that we didn’t have anything able to swoop in there and put a stop to that new colony work. They could have gotten that information from Alfar, though, just by knowing what our colony brought with it, and that would have only required combing through open-source contracts.”

It only took another five minutes before the council called again. Council President Chisholm looked openly furious, and the shouting in the background made it clear her emotions were shared by many in the council. “Can you disable those shuttles when they lift again?” Chisholm demanded.

Rob glanced at Danielle, who shrugged, then shook his head at Chisholm. “Maybe. Our grapeshot couldn’t be used. It’s just a tight field of ball bearings that’s not precise enough in the damage it does. Our pulse particle beam could, in theory, hit just the shuttles’ main drives. But even these heavy-lift shuttles aren’t that big compared to ships. Just about every spot on and inside them contains something important, and particle beams don’t just stop, not until they hit something so dense they can’t plow through or they lose enough energy. I can’t promise that shots aimed at a shuttle wouldn’t hit other critical components, or passengers.”

“They won’t have any passengers on the way up, will they?” Chisholm demanded.

“I don’t know,” Rob said. “Scatha has been really clever about this so far, and they are making no attempt at all to mask what they’re doing on the surface. That might mean—”

“A few of the families are getting back on the shuttles,” Danielle reported.

“That’s what I thought they’d do,” Rob said. “Yeah, they’re getting ready to lift again. Scatha is making sure that those shuttles have civilians, including children, aboard both while landing and lifting.”

Another outburst of shouting sounded behind Chisholm, who gritted her teeth at Rob’s news. “As far as you know, would we be legally within our rights to fire on those shuttles?”

“If we warned them, and they didn’t comply, yes,” Rob said. “But if we then asked for help, we’d be arguing points of law, and Scatha—”

“Would be displaying the bodies of dead children,” Chisholm said. “I understand. It appears that anything we do would be worse than doing nothing.”

Rob did not want to agree with that. Wasn’t the whole point of having a military unit like Squall to be able to act at times like this?

But he had to admit to the truth of it. Squall and her weapons were a hammer, but the problem they were facing was nothing so simple as a nail. “At this point, I believe that is correct, Council President.”

“Continue to monitor what Scatha is doing and wait for instructions!” Chisholm ordered Rob before breaking off the call.

He sat back and looked around the bridge. “We’re to stand by for instructions. I have a feeling this is going to take a while.”

“It’s going to be hard to stand by while we watch those Scatha shuttles taking more and more stuff down onto our planet,” Drake Porter said.

“I know.”

“Do we have anybody on the planet who knows how to handle stuff on the ground?”

Rob shook his head. “Not as far as I know. When I did my search for vets to put together a team to capture Squall, no one showed up as having any ground forces experience. That mixed passenger-freighter that left just before the ships from Scatha showed up dropped off several hundred new people. Maybe someone on it knows how to do ground operations. Did that ship come from any of the Old Colonies?”

“Not as far as I know,” Drake said. “I think it originated at Taniwha.”

Mele Darcy hadn’t spent long at Taniwha. It hadn’t felt right, for no reason she could have explained in any detail. She had swiftly hopped a ship heading farther down and ridden it to the end of the line.

She had reached what seemed to be the current outer edges of the human expansion, a colony barely established, where opportunities were both boundless in the long term and limited in the short term. Unfortunately, long-term opportunities wouldn’t pay for short-term needs like food and shelter. The local police force was up to strength and not hiring, and Mele’s work skills didn’t seem to suit her for anything else available. She had sniffed around the beginnings of a naval force that the colony was putting together, but she had no experience with being part of a ship’s crew or any real desire for that line of work. There didn’t appear to be any local interest in standing up ground forces or Marines. She had actually been more interested in a job that involved exploring the surface of the new planet to augment the orbital surveys, but at the moment everyone’s attention was focused on the area around where the first city was growing. Which left her highly qualified in doing things that weren’t in demand.

Just to make it worse, she had arrived along with a bunch of other new colonists, many of whom were also looking for work. And there was a lot of talk about two more ships on the way to the planet that might be bringing even more competition for Mele’s job search. There was something odd about those ships, a strange lack of information from the government about exactly what they were and where they had come from, but no one on the street seemed worried about them.

Mele was studying the online want ads, morosely trying to decide whether farmwork or construction would take her, when the blare of a news alert sounded through the brand-new coffee shop where she had been nursing a single espresso for the last hour.

What the news alert lacked in detail it made up for in drama. “Blatant and unprovoked aggression!” the announcer declared, looking outraged. “The two ships that entered our star system two weeks ago have been identified as having come from Scatha. While pretending to be conducting innocent trade, they reached orbit and began sending down people and material to establish another colony on our world.” A map appeared, zooming in on a location thousands of kilometers away from the city where Mele was. She couldn’t help nodding in understanding for why Scatha, whoever that was, had chosen that location. It was far enough from the existing city where she was to make any reaction difficult, and by its placement would block expansion by the original colony onto the continent the invaders had occupied. The site made sense tactically and strategically, regardless of whatever its other virtues were.

“We have it from reliable sources,” the announcer continued, “that our own warship, the Squall, intercepted the ships from Scatha over a week ago but did nothing for reasons known only to the governing council. Our sources indicate the commander of the Squall requested permission to stop the freighters but was denied and told to merely escort them to our world! Even now, with an invasion under way, Squall has been told to do nothing.”

Further outrage was interrupted by an official announcement that was accompanied by a dramatic musical intro. A woman seated in a large but mostly empty office spoke calmly enough but with an edge to her voice that she couldn’t quite hide. “This is Council President Chisholm, speaking on behalf of the council. We are as shocked as anyone by the wanton disregard of law and personal liberty displayed by the rulers of Scatha in attempting to establish their own colony on a world granted solely to us in a star system granted solely to us. We do not intend to let this provocation go unanswered, or our own freedoms be limited by the actions of another star system. But the severity of this threat, coming so soon after we have established our first city on this world, is such that the council wishes to have as much input from our citizens as possible before deciding on a course of action.

“There will be an emergency meeting of the citizens and council of Glenlyon at 1400 local time this afternoon. The meeting will be physically held in the new amphitheater on the south side of the city. All citizens are invited to attend, either in person or by virtual means. We will discuss what is known of Scatha’s actions and our own options to deal with a blatant invasion of our world.”

Mele took a sip of espresso that had grown cold, thinking that perhaps she might find another job opportunity opening up soon. There just might be some call for her skills after all.

She decided to attend the meeting in person.

The amphitheater was one of those construction projects that would once have been the work of thousands or hundreds of people for years. Automated machinery built light years away, using an architectural design originally developed on Old Earth, had dug away part of a hill on the southern side of the city, compressing and fusing the excavated dirt and rocks into the rising rows of seating. Most of the data-support network hadn’t been built and installed yet, though, so the amphitheater still depended on ancient fallbacks like a speaker system and drones to home in on anyone who wanted to contribute to the discussion. Mele, dredging up memories of high school history, thought the public meetings in ancient places like Greece and China and New York must have been like this, with people having to physically walk to microphones to be heard.

Virtual 3D software and equipment was also either still missing or not yet calibrated, and that stuff still tended to have a lot of bugs in it, meaning that those attending the meeting from other locations had to be content with their presence being marked by a couple of large display screens that presented shifting tiled images. The technology felt a little medieval, but it worked.

Mele, not being tied to a job, had snagged a place not too far from the platform where the council would be seated for the meeting. Her military service having given her plenty of experience in waiting, she dozed lightly while the many other seats in the amphitheater were filled by later arrivals.

As 1400 approached, Mele yawned and came fully awake, listening to the talk around her. People were worried and angry, arguing among themselves about what to do about Scatha’s latest aggression. Or rather, as was usually the case, arguing about what someone else should do about it. Many expressed anger at Squall’s lack of action, but opinion seemed split on whether to blame Squall or the government for that.

Twenty minutes after 1400, the council finally filed out onto the platform to a mix of applause and jeers from the audience. Once that was finally quieted, the council president stepped forward and repeated the same information that Mele had heard presented on the newscast a few hours earlier.

“They’re still landing materials and equipment,” Chisholm finished. “All the signs are that they are establishing their own colony on part of this planet.”

A babble of shouts rang out.

“They can’t do that!”

“They are doing it.”

“What do we do?”

“Call the… Notify… Who do we tell about this?”

“Why didn’t our ship stop them?” someone bellowed. “Aren’t we paying to keep operating that ship?”

“Let’s hear from our ship!” came from numerous throats.

Chisholm gestured and one of the display screens shifted to show a man who Mele could see was seated aboard some sort of military ship. “This is Acting Lieutenant Robert Geary,” Chisholm said.

Geary looked out across the amphitheater. “I am on the Squall. We are maintaining orbit over the site being occupied by Scatha. We—”

“WHY AREN’T YOU DOING ANYTHING?”

Once the commotion subsided, Geary spoke in a flat voice. “I am following orders from the council. If you have questions regarding those orders, you need to speak to them. I cannot act contrary to what the council orders me to do, and my orders are to watch and not open fire.”

Mele grinned as Geary tossed the problem right back to the council, where it belonged. Most of the council did an impressive job of looking at other council members as if expecting them to handle it.

“Did the council ask for your advice?” “What did you tell them?” other members of the audience demanded.

Robert Geary paused before answering. “The council did ask for my advice. I gave it. I cannot disclose that advice without their permission.”

A rumble of outrage rolled through the amphitheater.

One member of the council finally stood up. “For those who do not know me, I am Council Member Leigh Camagan. Lieutenant Geary told the council that he could not engage the shuttles from Scatha without running a serious risk of causing the death of civilians, including children. The council could not agree to take such action. Do any of you object to that? Scatha wanted us to attack ships and shuttles full of unarmed men, women, and children, so that we would be seen as aggressors. We will need assistance against Scatha. But if we were perceived as having attacked what Scatha would claim to be a peaceful mission, we would not be able to gain the help we need.”

“Help from where?” the question came. “Who else is going to help us?”

“Earth!” hundreds of shouts responded. “Old Earth!”

“Earth will do nothing!” other shouts came in reply. “We’re on our own!”

Mele saw police moving through the amphitheater, quieting the competing cries so that one person could pose a question to the council. “Who are we going to tell? Who will do anything about this?”

“We have to assume,” Leigh Camagan said, her voice ringing through the amphitheater, “that we are the only ones who will act. We will seek help from neighboring star systems, and, yes, from Old Earth. But there are no guarantees aid will come.”

“We shouldn’t just react without thinking,” another questioner insisted. “We need to do this in a lawful way. We need to give Old Earth a chance to deal with this.”

Council President Chisholm finally spoke again. “It would take at least six months for a message from us to reach Earth and a reply to be received. That’s if we use a fast ship, which we would have to hire, and Old Earth acts immediately, and there is no reason to think it will. Some of you came directly from there. What do you think? Will Old Earth send forces to help us?”

The silence that followed answered the question better than any words could have.

A man on the stage stood up. “I am Council Member Kim. We cannot afford to wait while Scatha continues to expand a settlement on the surface of a planet that belongs in its entirety to Glenlyon!”

“We can’t attack a colony just because it’s not our colony!” another council member protested.

This time the babble of argument erupted among both the council on the stage and the audience in the amphitheater.

The storm of debate was broken off by Lieutenant Geary, his voice booming out of the primitive loudspeakers. “We’re seeing something different coming off the latest shuttles. About four hundred people who are clearly civilians have already landed, along with plenty of civil construction equipment. But these latest shuttle loads are not the same. We’re still analyzing them.”

His image was replaced by relayed orbital video. Mele watched the ranks of men and women exiting the shuttles, saw how they moved and interacted, and knew what they were before Lieutenant Geary said anything else. She also recognized the types of containers they were bringing out. Just as military personnel usually wore uniforms, there was a certain uniformity to the containers they employed as well.

“They’re military,” she called out. “Ground forces, most likely.”

A few heads turned her way, staring at Mele, but most remained fixed on the images from orbit.

“How many are there?” Council President Chisholm asked of nobody in particular.

“It looks like about a hundred,” Lieutenant Geary reported.

“One hundred soldiers mixed in with families!” Council Member Kim said with disgust. “Using their own civilians, their own children, as human shields!”

Council Member Leigh Camagan cut off the babble of talk that followed. “We can now be clear on one point. This is not simply an illegal colonization effort by Scatha. This is an actual invasion.”

“Scatha will claim those soldiers are there for self-defense!” another member of the council protested.

Most people shifted their gaze to the stage and the once-again-arguing members of the council, everyone appearing stunned by what had happened. Mele kept her eyes on the orbital video and saw something she thought she recognized. “Hey, Lieutenant!” she called, hoping he was still listening to the audience as well as the council. “That thing coming out from a shuttle now. That’s a heavy, isn’t it?”

Lieutenant Geary’s response came a moment later. “Yes. The ship’s database identifies it as a major component for an antiorbital particle beam. When they get that set up, they’ll be in a position to threaten any ship orbiting over or near them.”

The sound from the crowd in the amphitheater more resembled a gasp of despair than a cry of anger.

“Is our ship in danger?” Council Member Odom demanded.

“No,” Lieutenant Geary replied. “It will take them a while, at least a few weeks, to get it properly set up and emplaced. It’ll also require their surface power plant to be functioning to provide the energy necessary for it. Once it’s operational, it will only be able to engage targets in certain orbits. But… yes, if we kept this ship orbiting over Scatha’s base, it would be endangered by that weapon. So would any other space traffic within the firing arc of that weapon.”

“That means no satellite will be able stay up there,” Leigh Camagan said. “We won’t be able to use orbital surveillance to keep track of what they are doing at their invasion site.”

“We can’t just call it an invasion site,” Council Member Odom complained. “There are families among them. We’ve seen children!”

“Human shields,” Kim repeated. “To keep us from simply bombarding that site out of existence from orbit.”

“You can’t be seriously suggesting that as an option!”

“Exactly what do you think Scatha would do?” Kim demanded. “Lieutenant Geary! That ship you’re on, that we captured from Scatha, has orbital bombardment capability, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Lieutenant Geary replied. “These cutters weren’t designed for that sort of mission.”

Mele saw Council Member Kim pause, frowning, before speaking again. “But the other warships Scatha has? Two destroyers? They have that capability?”

“Yes. Danielle Martel says she heard discussions about using the threat of orbital bombardment to force us to cough up the money that Scatha was demanding if we refused to give in to the threats from the cutter.”

“How much can Martel be trusted?” another council member grumbled. “She was one of them! A mercenary for Scatha!”

“She’s former Earth Fleet,” Lieutenant Geary argued. “Like others of us out here, she came down looking for a new start and was recruited by Scatha, using false assurances and promises. Danielle Martel has been screened, and all indications are that she is being honest and straightforward with us.”

“Screenings are not foolproof,” Council Member Odom objected. “Why didn’t this Martel warn us that Scatha was planning something like this?”

Mele recognized the type of look on Lieutenant Geary’s face and wondered if he would go there.

He did.

“With all due respect, sir,” Lieutenant Geary said, “Danielle Martel did warn us that Scatha would not simply accept our defeat of their first attempt to coerce us. She warned that Scatha would make other attempts, and those warnings were conveyed to the council.”

He had every right to point that out, Mele knew. But she also knew that superiors rarely accepted being reminded that they had failed to listen to timely warnings of looming problems. That lieutenant would probably pay a future price for his candor. But not until the government here didn’t need him anymore.

Council Member Kim broke the resulting silence. “And those warnings were not taken seriously enough!” he cried, earning himself a glare not only from Odom but from several other members of the council. “We should have done something to prepare for this!”

Leigh Camagan interrupted what looked like the beginning of more major public bickering among the members of the council. “What we should have done, what we could have done, no longer matters. What we have to decide is what we should do now. Our options are limited because we lack resources to deal with an invasion. The capture of the Squall, which I will remind the council was the result of Lieutenant Geary’s actions, gives us a limited defensive ability in space but cannot counter the problem we face on the surface of this planet.”

“What about the police?” someone called from the crowd.

“Our police force is twenty officers strong, armed with nonlethal shockers. The entire force would have trouble handling five hundred uncooperative civilians. Sending them against one hundred soldiers would be suicide.”

“We could ask for volunteers,” Council Member Kim suggested. “Form a militia, get some military weaponry of our own constructed—”

“That’ll take time,” another council member said. “If you’re talking about the latest military-grade weaponry, the designs are complex, and we’d have to get some of the necessary materials by mining since we didn’t stock everything needed for such weapons.”

“What about slug throwers?”

“Those would be easier, but, I understand, not as effective as modern weapons.”

“Weapons and volunteers alone are not enough,” Council President Chisholm said. “We need leadership and training. Lieutenant Geary, if you took on that job, how long do you think it would take to produce the sort of force we would need?”

Lieutenant Geary, looking startled, shook his head. “I couldn’t take on that job. I don’t know how ground forces do things. I could organize a military force, but I wouldn’t know what training they needed, or their tactics, or how to plan their operations. You need someone with ground forces experience. Or a Marine. Who was that who first recognized the soldiers that Scatha landed?”

“Here she is!” the people around Mele called, pointing at her.

Mele stood up, wondering what her big mouth had gotten her into this time. “Yeah. That was me.”

“Do you know anything about ground forces?” Chisholm asked. “Any experience at that sort of thing?”

“Yes,” Mele said. “I’m a former Marine with Franklin’s fleet.”

She heard “Marine” being repeated all around. Those surrounding Mele stared at her as if she were an alien creature who had suddenly appeared among them.

“Who are you?” Council Member Odom demanded.

“I’m a recent arrival here. Mele Darcy.”

“Why did you come to Glenlyon?”

Mele shrugged. “The same reason as most people here, I guess. Looking for a restart.”

“Why did you leave the Marines at Franklin? Did you commit a crime?” Odom pressed her.

Straightening a little more and crossing her arms as she met his eyes, Mele shook her head. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. Did you?”

Odom’s glower increased, but if he planned on saying anything else, he was cut off by Council Member Leigh Camagan. “What was your specialty as a Marine?”

“We were a pretty small organization,” Mele said, forcing herself to relax, “so we didn’t specialize much. I trained for ground and space assault, force reconnaissance, special missions, whatever was needed.”

“I see. Then this situation falls within your training and experience? What would your advice to the council be?”

Mele looked around at the thousands present and the screens showing tile images of thousands more. “Um… my advice would be to offer my advice in a less public setting. No sense in tipping off those Scatha guys about what might happen.”

She sat back down while everyone debated about that. Half of the people at the meeting seemed to think that she could single-handedly defeat the Scatha forces on the ground, and the other half seemed to believe that Mele intended a nefarious plot to subvert the government of Glenlyon. She wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed or flattered at the widespread belief in her abilities, a belief that hadn’t been shared all that much with the superiors writing her performance evaluations back in Franklin.

Why had she even gotten involved? Why not beg off and walk away? Glenlyon had one small warship and nothing in the way of ground forces to deal with another star system that was far better equipped and organized for fighting. This looked like a hopeless cause.

But Mele stayed in her seat, waiting.

She had always been sympathetic to hopeless causes and had always wondered whether she could win a hopeless fight. Maybe it was time to find out.