The Constabulary - Manning The Walls

[Iron Aquilifer]

The Great Seed has passed into distant memory, left in crumbling religious texts that speak of a blue planet from which the gods were exiled. Ten thousand years of history, of hardship and joy, of the birthplace to which all living beings owed their existence, has been lost forever. In its place is the hallowed Word of Orbona, itself falling from the mind of the people. For centuries the children of Orbona thrived in their home, gorging on the wonders of the solar system gifted to them by their almighty creator. But not even this unsoiled treasure was enough for them, and as the generations of silence from Orbona grew, so too did the sinful lust of her children.

Now, with war having ravaged the Malley system, only the Constabulary stands ready to maintain the fragile order that keeps society from reliving the calamity that saw birth of the Great Seed.

Chapters

One

[Iron Aquilifer]

Chapter One

The captain had no need for dreams anymore. Children dreamed, of wants and desires and a world full of monsters. He was no one’s child. He had the darkness in place of dreams. An absolute emptiness, carrying him on ocean currents without sense nor reason. There were no sounds to disturb the timeless expanse, no emotions to remind him of what was, and what could never be. Hours passed. Days. Weeks even. It did not matter, not with the darkness enveloping him in its entirety. Counting the passing of time was as futile as trying to make it stop. And he felt a sort of contentment in the unknown, in the motherly embrace of the eternal black.

At last there was a voice, so distant that the words barely pierced the gloom of the darkness. No, not words. Nothing so complex could exist in the black recesses of his mind. They were sounds, emotions rumbling from beyond the shadows. Louder and louder the sound rose, the emotion reaching a colourless crescendo that struck him like a hammer.

He opened his eyes.

His capsule was lit by a soft blue light, dancing off of the fluid that had sustained him through the voyage. The walls were as smooth as they were cold, as unyielding as they were confining. For a moment, one brief heartbeat that could easily have been joy or terror, he thought that he was dead. This was his coffin, a world of wet blue and hard cold so tight that he could scarce move.

It was not to be. Like any weakness, his fear, his joy, was just a passing fancy. This was not his coffin, nor a gate of gilded iron barring him from the world beyond. If anything it was the closest thing to a home that someone like him could have. A place to find a morbid sort of peace.

“Stephen Pollack, Captain,” a synthetic voice declared, echoing through the capsule with mocking clarity. “Designation: Trauma-Eight-Zero-Zero. Cycle complete.”

With a sigh the capsule front slid open, spitting the captain out like a grape seed. Flailing, Stephen found the unyielding floor with a distinctive crack. For a second he lay there, feeling life spread across his body. It was almost a pleasure. After what could only have been a lifetime suspended in a cocktail of numbing agents, even the sharp tang of pain was a lover’s embrace.

“Are you well, Trauma-Eight-Zero-Zero?” the machine asked him.

He offered an affirmative, wiping away the gummy seal that had formed to seal closed his mouth. An instructor, as cold and distant as a father, had promised that they would acclimatise to the chambers. One day, perhaps dreadfully soon, Stephen would repeat that same lie to the next generation. One more empty promise to add to the mountain that they had built for themselves.

There were five others around him, groaning and spitting out their own replies to their own computers. Despite himself, the captain broke out into a smile. They had undergone transit a hundred times before now and yet their responses were always the same. Maybe the machine took note of that, cataloging their growls and biting retorts alongside the number of dead cells that clung to their skin and the rate of the heartbeats in their chests. Yes, he reasoned. It would surprise him if it did not.

“How are my boys doing today?” a new voice asked. A woman.

No, Stephen’s returning memories told him. It was the woman.

He turned his head towards the noise, eyes focusing enough to take in a familiar sight. The woman was short, in height and in temperament. Her flesh was as pale as the officer’s uniform stretched tight around her.

“Are you getting up then?”

“Yes sir,” Stephen answered for his team, his mind catching up with his body. “What is the situation chief?”

She didn’t smile as he dragged himself to his feet. Not that she could, he found a part of himself explaining. Not after Most Hale. The shadow of death seemed to disfigure her like an untreated wart. It disfigured them all of course, but her scars were visible for all to see.

“We are coming up on the station. Decel began at fourteen thirty-two eleven, ship adjusted time. Arrival is set at twelve hours thirteen four.” That certain fact brought a weak smile to her face. She hadn't seemed to check the time. “I will see you in the CIC, captain.”

Throwing the retreating woman a salute, Stephen eased himself round to find his locker. With the grace only sim junkies could match in its erratic fashion, the rest of his team clambered over each other to collect their own equipment. Though chemicals still dripped from their orifices, the peacekeepers were beginning to look like living creatures.

“She is not looking well,” noted Christian, his eyes motioning towards the empty corridor.

Stephen had to agree with his subordinate. Younger than them all, the commander should have been glowing with life. She was their handler, expected to ferry them from mission to mission and speak on their behalf to the public at large. It was a tough job, and one few could qualify for. They owed her their lives in a very literal sense, more times than any person should have a need to. But there were rules, regulations codified into Constabulary law, which had to be followed to the letter. Sentiment was not something that could come into it. Not when weakness of one’s body could endanger the mission for a hundred others.

“That is why she has us,” he replied. Christian wasn’t a rookie, not with a record of successes that was almost a rival for his own. He knew as well as Stephen what they would have to do if things got worse. Neither of them could use the lie of it being something that would bring her some measure of peace. It would be a betrayal of the highest magnitude, even if the oath they had sworn demanded it of them.

“I’ll get them into routine,” Christian said, pulling on his suit. “Don’t want to leave her waiting.”

Stephen accepted the suggestion with a nod. Leaving his team to the tender mercy of his second-in-command, the captain dragged himself through the ship to finally get his answers about their new mission.

Dauntless was big, according to its engineers. Not just vast by the standards of modern military doctrine, whose warships were ants compared to the cargo ships of civilian industry, but even when compared to the cruise liners which could burn their engines from one colony to the next without a worry of their fuel reserves. Near enough a kilometer long and bearing a radius of almost eighty metres, Dauntless enjoyed a page size that was only matched by the now gone interstellar colony ship Bellerophon.

Inside his ship, it was easy to forget. Dauntless was an old warship, built in a time where scarcity and cynicism joined together in engineering despair. Most of the ship lay empty of breathable air, left to the elements and packed from nose to thruster with weapons necessary to win one bloody skirmish or another. Over the years, as fewer and fewer humans were left aboard to run it, more and more of the limited human compatible space found itself turned over to storage of the missiles and drones needed for the next conflict. Now Stephen and his men had the luxury of a single habitation unit, joined with the command center by a corridor narrow enough to give any grown man of an average build pause.

Striding through the circular tube that represented the spine of their liveable zone in the Dauntless, Stephen took a moment to collect himself. Transition was always messy, a gut punch from living to artificial sleep and back again. For a human, unaugmented and born into an atmosphere created by the wonder of the divine and not by the careless hand of man, the Constabulary's method of preserving the strength of their operatives would be fatal. And even for those designed to survive it, especially for those expected to use it with such regularity as Stephen and his men, there emerged a clear distinction between surviving and being able to enjoy something approaching life.

“Captain Pollack,” the woman, Camilla, said by way of address. “You ready for briefing?”

“Yes chief.”

The CIC was as large as it needed to be. And that was large enough to squeeze ten people into their compression couches, and nothing more. Even for the two of them, there was little room to converse comfortably. Following their own personal routine the two of them chose adjacent couches, bringing up the mission details on their computers with a practiced flourish of their limbs.

“3021-Cephas, satellite of the moon 1763-Badar orbiting Mehere. Nothing notable in the records about the rock itself, claimed by the Velvon corporation eight years ago in the third wave of their mining expansions.”

1763-Badar was a large moon, a planet unto itself in the eyes of the uneducated masses. Flicking his eyes through the information being displayed in glowing red and blue, Stephen picked out notes as if at random. They wanted it for colonisation, another lifeless rock to spread themselves across in a desperate bid to sate their lust of living space even if only for a fleeting decade. Wiser minds had somehow prevailed, leaving the great rings of ore and minerals circling around it to the greedy companies who fed humanity for the small price of lifelong indentured servitude.

“Dwelling Station,” Camilla announced as she sent him a new set of information. “Population on record is ninety-two souls, all Velvon contracted employees. The last word is that none of them have been killed. However from the scans of a Velvon drone they managed to get past the station’s security suggests that there is at the least eight personnel missing. Since there are no black zones, they are presumed dead.”

“Priority of the hostages?” He had served for long enough to know that Velvon had no need to recover their workers. No company big enough to buy the exclusive rights to mining colonies had to worry about the well being of anyone. Still, there was always the question of public relations. A lazy population always felt morally obliged to make noise about the injustices which they could have no effect on.

“Strictly secondary for this one. First priority after elimination of hostiles is the retrieval of the station AI core.”

That made sense. The core could easily have been as costly as the rest of the station, and within the recesses of its synthetic mind would be all the information that could be gleaned from the attack. More importantly to the corporation and its interests, all the information on their mining operation. With the findings from the core, Velvon would be able to step up security on the rest of their holdings. Or more likely, figure out which systems they could strip for reduced costs when they reopened mining operations. It wasn’t like they didn’t have specialists they could call upon to deal with the inconveniences of people growing violent in opposition to their greed.

“The attack occurred sometime this week previous, station security would be able to offer a definite timescale. Terrorists, numbering eleven, boarded a commercial sleeper liner, code HGS-114, and proceeded to break free of their sleeper units two months into flight.”

A display of the spaceship’s traditional trajectory violently shifted off course as it neared its point of reverse thrust. Stephen closed the pop ups of HGS-114’s crew, barely acknowledging the distinctive white lettering that declared them deceased. The what of events did not concern him, no more so than the why. It was the how that was important for his mission.

“Implanted weaponry?”

“No confirmation. Velvon believes they had inside assistance.”

The display then continued to show the craft hard burn darkward, bypassing the populates centres that would have made a tempting target for a martyring band of zealots. Instead it flung itself towards Mehere, and then one moon among dozens.

“Velvon security attempted to intercept but their attempt did not reach HGS-114. Their ship, code FHS-41, proceeded to enter a holding pattern above Dwelling where they received the terrorist's demands.”

Stephen allowed himself a moment to read the manifest of Velvon’s security craft, acknowledging with a sigh that it was almost as undermanned as Dauntless. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Such counter espionage measures clearly didn’t recoup enough company assets to be worth investment. And now it fell to the Constables to resolve the issue.

“They demanded amnesty and compensation for illegal experimentation on company retainers to a total of ten billion Friest standard, and in return they wouldn’t destroy the station wholesale.”

“So no success with negotiation?”

“Correct. Communications were severed after the terrorists discovered the drone. Velvon hasn’t attempted any other aggressive movement.”

That sounded like standard protocol for their kind. It had been years since the last time a band of martyrs had ever attempted to genuinely reach some sort of peaceful resolution. And Stephen had yet to come across a group who ever truly trusted their demands to be met without some form of deceit.

“The Dwelling's schematics are standard Velvon modular design. So it looks like you will be able to get by with basic boarding charges.”

“I’ll discuss method with Paris,” Stephen replied, already running through the tactics best suited to their assignment. “Presumed firearms?”

“Small arms, probable explosives. As far as we can ascertain this is a group wanting a firefight.”

The Constable glanced up from his monitor. The comment was funny in its accuracy.

“Well we will have to deliver then, won’t we?”

[Alwyn]

Great start! I enjoyed Stephen's reactions to the first two voices he hears after waking up in the capsule and his memory of what the instructor had told him. You've got me interested in your world(s) and in Stephen's dangerous mission.