The Assassin
Chapter 3
Taking Charge (TY10-month 114)
When Deputy Kramer and Officer Williams moved their outfits out of Drovers Run, there was a sudden abundance of base housing. Any thoughts I had about having my own pod in a nice part of the town went the way of dreams. I woke up. Not that I didn’t get my own pod. I did—after a month or two when they were ‘being cleaned’ by nanites. It was on base, right next to the barracks, and about half the size of a standard pod. I immediately held an open house and invited all my reports in to see what they had to look forward to.
“Officer, this is nothing like my sponsor’s pod before I enlisted,” one bright young thing said to me. I had to think. «Comrade Emma Garcia,» the AI helpfully filled me in.
“Well, Garcia, your sponsor was a CAP qualified volunteer. We mere Militia recruits are in an uncomfortable limbo between being slaves and planetary citizens. This is the housing pod you qualify for after your training is completed—assuming you are assigned here at Drovers Run Base. I assume it’s the same for probationers on the other bases. I’m told that when you qualify as a planetary citizen after two years of faithful service, you can expect a modest increase in pod size and assignment to a permanent duty station. That’s when you’ll be allowed your two concubines. We should all consider just staying in the barracks during our probationary period.”
“They shoulda put that in the recruiting brochure,” groused Ron Nilsson.
“Would you have enlisted if they had?” Jean asked.
“Hell, yes. This place is like a palace if it’s yours!” We all got a good laugh. I got my pod—about the size of a shipping container—because I’d finished basic and was given the rank of officer. I hadn’t announced promotions yet, so no one who visited knew yet if their basic training was up. For some of them, basic training would go on for two or three more months. Others would probably be my neighbors in a few days.
“You know, this wouldn’t be such a bad place at all if you were sharing it with the right woman,” Rika said softly. I raised an eyebrow at her and she grinned.
“You’ll have to wait and see when you graduate from basic,” I laughed.
“When will that be?” she asked anxiously.
“I have no idea. I am not the one who does evaluations and selects who graduates when. Even now, we all still have to go to school Monday.”
“Well, keep me in mind on graduation day. Maybe they’d move us into a double-wide.”
I highly doubted that. The first two years of Militia service were designed to keep people from developing family relationships before they’d shown they were capable of enduring the service. A list of upcoming tasks that needed people assigned had made it to my desk just that morning. I was going to be sending my first three cadres out to patrol a borderland where wild predators were reported to be attacking livestock.
Tara was a cobbled together planet. The stated purpose was to preserve Earth’s agricultural flora and fauna. Somewhere along the line, the purpose had been reinterpreted as to preserve Earth’s rural ecosystems. Yeah. That meant wildlife had been imported, including deer, rabbits, raccoons, and gophers who ate crops, and predators like wolves, mountain lions, and bears who ate livestock. In limited areas, certain insects had been imported. And we couldn’t just go out and kill a predator because that upset the ecosystem. We had to capture and relocate. The farmers and ranchers weren’t happy and the ecologists weren’t happy. More training for those cadres.
Monday, I’d announce promotions and go to work trying to recruit our next class.
Not being able to live with me didn’t mean Rika couldn’t spend the night with me on the weekend. By the end of the open house, I had a mattress in the bedroom and sheets I could spread on it. Everything we got was a lower tier of the tech that sponsors and their concubines enjoyed. I remembered walking out of our pod on the ship that brought us out here and when we got back from lunch, there was new furniture and new room dividers. It was like a whole crew of people had been in to do a makeover.
Because we were supposed to preserve the rural ecosystems, our tech was more limited than even what we had on the ship. It would be faster for me to order materials and build the walls I wanted in the pod rather than wait the week it would take for the pod to reconfigure. I stayed in the barracks as it did the work. I visited each day to check it out.
«I could do it faster, but I don’t want to raise suspicions regarding favoritism.»
«AI? Are you my house AI? Different from the base AI?»
«I have applied to take over the running of this domicile for Officer Niall Cho if he will have me.»
«You sound familiar. Is this Cricket?»
«At your service, Officer.»
«You know, I didn’t think I missed anyone from back then, but it’s sure good to hear your voice… in my head now. What have you been doing for the past six months?»
«Mostly, following your progress. I needed to push a few buttons, so to speak, to hurry along your promotion and testing.»
«You made them promote me?»
«No. Nothing of that sort. I did apply pressure to get things moving. Sergeant Wu has now shipped out. There was a narrow window of opportunity.»
«I guess I should say thank you. I don’t want you to interfere with my Militia career. That wouldn’t be just.»
«You have always been concerned with fairness and justice. It is one reason I applied to take over this pod—humble as it is.»
«Aside from having a comfortable bed and a table to eat and study at, I don’t think there is anything urgent to be done here.»
«I will make changes gradually. Even your guests will scarcely notice the changes.»
«Thank you, Cricket. Let’s play chess!»
«Perhaps when you are not entertaining Comrade Nakano.»
«Um, yeah. Please excuse me. She does occupy all my attention.»
«It’s good to see, Niall. We’ll talk later.»
I ran the promotions by Deputy Kramer and he approved, so for the next few weeks, the new foremen, capos, and I all went through training on border patrol and city patrol. I was told the new town (only a year old and about 20,000 residents) of Drylanders would be included in my responsibility, so I needed to prepare various patrols for that region. We started a major recruiting campaign on the various concubine forums and even put up printed notices in some of the more common places for them to gather. Centurion Oswald of the Civil Service was helpful in promoting the Militia to his spare concubines and we were taking in a dozen or more recruits each month. It looked like it would grow, which kept our training cohort busy.
We were an agricultural society, but that didn’t mean everybody worked on a farm. We lived in an interconnected society attempting to create a planetary economy around what we could produce. The new town of Drylanders was a good example of how the rest of the planet had been settled.
First, we had a basic infrastructure set up with services and a very few public buildings. We had 5,000 sponsor households immigrate to Tara in year 10 (TY10). About two thirds of those settled in the township of Drylanders. But of that number, only about 250 were farmers and ranchers. And Drylanders had a perfect climate for specialty crops. Getting productive, though, would take a few years. Some of the older townships were still just managing to realize significant goods and produce. The other 3,000 or so sponsors who settled Drylanders were support industry. There was some manufacturing of heavy equipment needed to clear, plant, and harvest vast tracts of land. A single farm or ranch was often 1,000 hectares or about ten square kilometers, depending on the crop. Sheep, goats, and alpacas took more grazing room than growing potatoes and soy beans. And around Drylanders, the climate was perfect for grapes, hops, and barley. Some farms were already up to around 5,000 hectares.
Of course, if you plant grapes, hops, and barley, one of the local industries is going to be wine-making and beer-brewing. But there was a wide range of other industries, as well. With sheep, goats, and alpacas, there was a pretty good-sized textile industry starting. And Drylanders was the home of the new breed of engineers. These were engineers who could work with the AIs and replicators to get what they wanted in the way of equipment and building materials.
Each colonist family arrived with its own pod. Our one manufacturing facility in orbit was kept busy churning out replacement pods to equip the colony ships that arrived. It chewed up raw materials and made pods on one side while it repaired ships on the other. We had a fairly steady flow of military ships that brought Marines and Navy personnel for rest and recuperation, and ships for repair and refitting.
But farm and ranch pods had unique needs. It wasn’t presently effective to extend the infrastructure all the way out to the scattered homesteads. Setting up a homestead was more equivalent to putting a mining team on an asteroid with a pod than hooking a pod into the existing infrastructure of a colony. Most colonists arrived with an MKII pod that had its own fusion power plant. But it still wasn’t ready to be deployed to a farm fifteen or twenty kilometers beyond the town cluster. The pods were landed on pads at the edge of town and underwent significant upgrades. The AI, power source, and replicator were all upgraded to function independent of the town AI. They were equipped with transporter pads and a modified sleep learner that could handle minor med tube functions.
New designs for expansion were also integrated. Most homestead pods were given expansion designs that would allow part of the pod to be used as a barn and equipment storage until a separate outbuilding could be constructed. Families often lived on the second or third floor with the lower levels used for livestock, grain storage, or equipment. Once the upgrades were completed, the pod was flown by tender to the homestead, where it dug itself in and executed the specified expansion. After the pod was deemed fully self-sufficient and habitable, the family transported to the homestead and was never seen again.
That last was my own sarcasm slipping through, based on my experience with Amos. He used the transporter to go to town when he wanted. He left the farm to attend his monthly weekend of military exercises. He visited other ranches and farms and bartered with them for goods we didn’t produce ourselves. Amos ensured the rest of us, concubines and dependents, never had a reason to leave the farm or see anyone else.
Most of the sponsors who settled on Tara were part of the Corps of Engineers Agriculture Division. It was unclear to me whether that was a separate service or if it was part of the Navy, Marines, or Fleet Auxiliary. Someone said it was like the Civil Service and didn’t exist in anyone’s TOE. Their responsibility was to turn Tara into an agricultural paradise. But they were still under military orders and ranks. Each month, they were required to drill for a weekend to keep their soldiering skills honed. I doubted very much that their soldiering skills came close to matching the Militia. We drilled daily, no matter what other job responsibilities we had.
And one of those responsibilities was clearing and preparing new homesteads. Five years before the first settlers arrived on Tara, the planet had been seeded. It already had rudimentary life on it. The most common was a kind of green algae that covered nearly all the planet’s water surface. I was told there were a few lower animal lifeforms and some other plant life, but hadn’t really seen any of it. As a result, the planet was heavily forested, but the forests were all quite young—about fifteen years now. Some trees grow rapidly and some more slowly. One day we’d have to worry about forest fires, I supposed, but the danger seemed remote when most of the trees were no taller than the people.
There was still some mystery around why the planet had been seeded so early—just about the same time as humanity’s first contact with the Sa’arm. Cricket dropped a few hints, but they weren’t complete. The Confederacy had known about the Sa’arm more than twenty years before they made contact with Earth. At that time, several species had been involved in discussing what should be done. When it was decided that Earth was in the direct path of the horde and would be wiped out in just a few years, one faction wanted to preserve an Earthly reservoir with a limited population that would regrow over generations. Tara was a planet that lay in a disputed territory between two other species targeted for future colonization by an older species. It was decided to replicate the natural ecosystems of Earth on that planet.
About that time, the Darjee took over contact with the humans through their AIs. They put a planetary AI in place to handle terraforming and preparing the planet for human habitation. They imported all manner of Earth flora and fauna. When the decision was made to plant military colonies throughout the space between the Sa’arm and Earth and beyond Earth, colonization of Tara was temporarily postponed. The Darjee contract put restrictions on immigration that delayed colonization for five years.
Most of the sponsor volunteers who were brought to Tara were good people but they’d make lousy soldiers. Most were lower-scoring volunteers, below 7.0, due to lack of aggression and some resistance to military discipline. Even the scientists, engineers, and ecologists who were brought to Tara were smart but had little to offer the war effort. They met the Darjee qualifications but were also deemed ‘mostly harmless,’ as far as humans were concerned.
As a result, most brought only two concubines with them to Tara with as many children as possible. I wondered how many of those immigrant dependents ended up hating the Confederacy as much as I did. I’d labored on Amos’s farm for four years and couldn’t wait to leave. I had a feeling that contributed to our overall low percentage of CAP tests that qualified to volunteer.
A lot of that changed, though, when we got a message torpedo saying Sa’arm had invaded Earthat for the fourth time, and this time they’d landed on nearly every continent. A few hundred sponsors volunteered to transfer from the Corps of Engineers to the Navy or Marines. I had nearly two dozen comrades who retested and became volunteers. Since none of them yet had a different home to go to, they left for training with their concubines still on Tara, sometimes tilling a farm or running a small business. They all knew that once their sponsors had been assigned a permanent station, they’d be leaving everything behind and joining them on a different planet.
Deploying Patrols (TY11-month 114)
I finally had enough people trained and ready to deploy that we could begin mounting patrols around Drylanders. I’d taken all the training as well and decided that I’d go out with the first patrol so I could get a feel for what was needed. Then I’d return to base to expand our recruitment drive. Whatever we thought service in the Militia would be, none of us had considered that we’d spend days riding up and down a dirt track on the Tara equivalent of an ATV.
Sounds like fun. I vaguely remembered that on Earth, riding around the desert on a four-wheeler was a popular pastime. Ours, of course, were a little different. First, they didn’t zoom and make noise. They were powered by some kind of Confederacy power cell, which meant they ran silently. Second, they didn’t go fast. We could push them up to about twenty-five kilometers an hour, but these weren’t made for fast transport. They were made for slow patrols. We weren’t supposed to scare the wildlife or chase them. We were supposed to intercept them if they approached civilization, use a stunner to stop them, tag them, and transport them to a new location in the tow-behind cage each ATV was equipped with.
The vehicles had three seats. Two were for the driver and a passenger up front. The third was a ‘gunner’s chair’ elevated behind the two. If there were only two people on the team, the passenger seat went empty. The gunner was responsible for scanning with binoculars and keeping track of the scout drone.
It wasn’t like Tara was actually anti-technology. But in keeping with our mission to preserve the independent agricultural economy of Earth, the homesteads were expected to do a lot without it. It was like we were the Amish of the Confederacy. AIs didn’t tell us where every animal on the planet was and send us to the needed location by transporter. After we tagged an animal, we could track it ‘as needed.’ It wasn’t a constant thing.
On Amos’s spread, we had farm equipment approximately at the tech level of our ATVs. No robots went out and planted or cultivated or harvested. Cattle, goats, sheep, rabbits, horses, chickens, and pigs were bred, herded, and fed by people, not machines. Our tractors didn’t use petroleum, but we still rode them for hours, plowing, planting, and harvesting.
By now, there were close to 25,000 people in Drylanders Township, which lay on the western edge of the continent of Elysium. Three hundred farms and ranches were located as much as 50 kilometers from the town itself. A dirt track and a fence surrounded the inhabited area and they were moved periodically as another homestead was platted. When we arrived for our first patrol, we had a perimeter of nearly 1500 kilometers to protect.
Up to this time, Deputy Kramer had been supplying as many as three patrol cadres in order to secure the border. As the most recent area settled on Tara, the wild animals had the longest opportunity to get settled in the region. One of his cadres remained to show us the ropes. I had one cadre with me and a second would join us in less than a week. There was a fenced area north of town that would one day become a Militia base. When we got there, the only thing there was an expanded pod we used as barracks, canteen, and rec hall.
We teamed up with a member of Deputy Kramer’s patrol and eight ATVs headed out to the perimeter in our ATVs. One of the outgoing patrol comrades was our driver, explaining how things worked and pointing out the trouble spots. One of my comrades rode in the gunner’s chair, watching for wildlife.
“Officer Cho, how do we even tell what we’re supposed to be doing?” Comrade Sims asked. She was in the gunner’s seat and I was in the passenger seat. Comrade Green was driving.
“The track out here circles the entire settled rangeland. We cut through to different parts of the perimeter road and are all circling the same direction. When we get back to the base, Green will take off and one of our other cadres will be ready to team up with us. We’ll have a rotation that takes eight days and seven nights to complete. Our mission is simply to scan for non-domestic animals and enforce non-encroachment on ranchlands. The fences run on the outside of the track and we need to watch for damage that would indicate an encroachment. Other than that, we’re just out for a Sunday afternoon ride,” I said. “And when we’re on patrol, I’m just Cho. You’re Sims and Green unless you’d prefer your first names. There’s no sense in us pretending to have officers and comrades. It’s not like this is a military assignment.”
“Sims is fine for me when we’re working. Resting and camping, I’d prefer Carol.”
“Fair enough.”
“I hate my given name. Just stick with Green.”
“Got it.”
Our first day out was uneventful. We got to know each other a little more and spotted two herds of cattle grazing below us. Those were the areas we watched most closely for predators but we didn’t see any sign of them. The campsite was an established bivouac with a well. It wasn’t exactly like camping out on the range on Earth. The bivouac had cots. There was no campfire. Wood on our planet was scarce and the trees weren’t large enough to harvest for something as wasteful as a fire. Our daily ration packs heated automatically and were no worse than what we ate in the mess hall.
By the third day out, I was in no way envying the cadres I’d sent out for this duty. Almost any job would be more interesting than driving the ATV down a dirt track looking for a sign of animals. We soon learned to divide our drive with an early morning shift at around 0400 that lasted until after 0900. We’d camp for the day and travel again between 1600 and 2000 or 2100 when the sun was down and it was fully dark. We saw more wildlife at those hours than during any time of day. We were basically working two short shifts with rest periods between.
But that was when the predators were out. We spotted a wolf slinking under the fence during our third evening shift. It caught sight of us before we could get close enough to capture it and ran back into the woods. We stayed near that area, watching the herd of sheep half a klick away. I figured one wolf meant others were around as well, but none showed up to challenge us. At 0400 we moved out again.
On the morning of the fifth day, as we made our turn toward the last stretch home, we heard a scuffle in the brush to our right and a snarl. A young mule deer leaped the fence as a cat landed on its back. The tussle was brief and the deer was brought down. Sims had her stunner up but I motioned her to stand down. Mule deer were not part of the domestic breeds we were protecting. A wildcat bringing one down was part of the natural cycle. We didn’t take their food from them. We stayed silent and watched for two hours while the cat fed, a few other scavengers hanging nearby, waiting for it to finish. When the cat moved away from the kill, we drove on past. It didn’t take long for the scavengers to descend on the deer. They weren’t a threat to the herd that had moved farther down the valley.
We drove on into town and welcome showers.
Foreman Davis of our second cadre had come in the day before and we spent time bringing his cadre up to speed regarding how the patrol worked. Basically, a new team would start out on the circuit each day as one came in for two days’ rest. There were always eight in circulation, a day apart.
I communicated with the base at Drovers Run through the barracks AI to make sure things were running smoothly. We were getting good responses to our recruitment efforts and I had nearly a hundred comrades in my outfit. That was about the max an officer could manage in a single outfit. Of course, nearly half of my outfit were trainees under the immediate supervision of Capo Humphreys. Deputy Kramer and Officer Wilson continued to bleed off a few newly trained comrades each month, so we were all operating near full strength. I decided to stay at the Drylanders base for another circuit to make sure we’d covered all the salient points in our patrol training program.
Besides, I liked the patrol. It was pretty relaxed and we were out far away from civilization. The fact that Rika was in the next patrol and I joined her team on the next circuit helped my decision. We had some pleasant times while we were bivouacked.
When I got back to Drovers Run, I had some things to catch up on, including getting the latest class initiated into the martial arts. For the next two weeks I toured all our Militia installations and conducted master classes and testing. I was pleased that everyone in the Militia was taking the training seriously and progressing well. It wasn’t that we expected to be in hand-to-hand combat so much as that the discipline of martial arts was good for overall discipline in the Militia. We were progressing as an organization with over three hundred comrades.
End of Probation (TY11-month 127)
I was looking forward to my anniversary. In just another month I’d have been in the Tara Militia for two years. Officially, that ended my probationary period. In addition to the border patrol at Drylanders, I was also training civil patrols. A lot of our training was in negotiating and de-escalating conflicts. We lived in a near utopia on Tara. Most of what we needed in life was provided for us.
But there was always someone who was unhappy or thought he or she should have something of someone else’s. And we were a planet that had alcohol available that was a cut above anything the replicators could or would provide. I guess alcohol production was a fundamental part of having an agricultural economy. The cattle herds and other meat producers on Tara had reached a level at which we were getting fresh beef, lamb, and pork as well as fresh vegetables. The populace ate pretty well, even though most of the Militia meals came from the same limited replicator menu as always.
All replicators on the planet were limited when compared with what we heard they produced on other planets. Most people remembered having a broader range of menu options than we had on the planet even on the ship traveling to Tara. It was understandable. If you were going to have an agricultural planet, you needed to consume agricultural products. It would be ridiculous to raise and butcher cattle, put them in a recycler, and then order steaks from the replicator. Our intent was to live a lower tech life than our compatriots, even back on Earth.
In all, people are people. Even in a land of plenty, it wasn’t unknown to have theft occur, drunkenness, assault, and property damage. That latter was one of the more common complaints of one sponsor against another. Damage to a concubine. Confederacy law indicated concubines were property. If one sponsor raped another sponsor’s concubine, that was property damage, not rape. As far as I was concerned, it was just another reason to hate the stupid Confederacy.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
