the Mallorys’ open invitation to make Erlang their home, the new arrivals knew that they had not invested so much and traveled so far simply to work the land like the simple peasants they took the Mallorys for. Regardless, their decision, after a suitably short debate, was unanimous: they would stay. Of course, with their ship disabled they had no other choice at the time, but Erlang offered too much profit potential for them to pass up.
Over the next century or so, the two groups worked to mold Erlang into the vision of what each thought it should be. Unfortunately, their visions and plans for their bountiful world soon diverged. The Mallorys were content to live with what they had, celebrating the anniversary of their landing each year with a feast and the knowledge that they had been saved through divine grace, no matter which divinity one chose to believe in. They were farmers and hunters, whose only profit was for their children to grow up strong and well on a world that would provide for all their needs for as long as any of them could imagine.
The Raniers, on the other hand, saw the enormous potential of Erlang as an economic power in this far-flung sector of space, and soon saw the Mallorys as a key ingredient in their budding plan for exploiting the planet. It did not take long for the newcomers to begin opening shops and businesses, to establish the roots of a real economy in the various Mallory settlements. And in but a few years, the Raniers had discovered the minerals that they knew would someday make them rich. It was hardly surprising that most of the backbreaking labor was later to be undertaken by Mallory hands.
Many years had since passed, and the dreams of Therese Ranier had come true in more ways than she could have imagined had she stood among her people today. With the first visits by enterprising merchant ships, Erlang quickly became the leader of a loose economic coalition of rim worlds. Her mineral wealth had put her very close to the top of the list as a resource for everything from gold and diamonds to the many ingredients that went into constructing starships, starships that soon came to visit the planet with reassuring regularity, despite Erlang’s remote location. And those families who had invested in this vision of the future – virtually all Raniers – had grown rich beyond the wildest dreams of their predecessors.
But there was a darker side to Erlang’s success. Only a hundred years after the Ranier ship had arrived, the way of life that had been cherished by the Mallorys was all but gone. The simple but effective system of barter and goodwill that had seen them through the many winters since their forebears arrived had been replaced by the specter of the bank and the company store. When once a person only had to turn to their neighbor for help or food, now they had to pay for it with money they often enough did not have; and if they did not, they had to find work from a Ranier, usually in the mines. At first, work in the mines, being paid for it, seemed like a good thing, a way to better their families’ lives. After all, many of them had thought, did their forefathers themselves not make their way in the mines?
But they had forgotten the hardship and eventual abandonment by the owners of the mines that had forced their forebears to seek out Erlang in the first place.
Worse, the Mallorys quickly lost their political power in a new system that the Raniers had promised would give one person one vote. Unfortunately, they neglected to inform the Mallorys that the only votes that really counted would be from Raniers, who in later generations became classic practitioners of the Golden Rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. This was an alien concept to the Mallorys as a group, as they had practiced the most basic kind of democracy since they landed on Erlang: anything that impacted on the whole colony was voted on by the whole colony, and on any part by those who stood to be affected. It was a tradition that had stood the test of time in many years of hard living.
But now most Mallorys lived in poverty, engaged in hard labor in the mines or cutting down their once pristine forests to make barges and ships to haul minerals to the Mallory spaceport. Exhausted from their daily fight to stay alive, they had lost the battle for civic equality, if not their pride. And their pride is what sustained them, along with a burning will to survive and overcome. It was the same strength that had carried their forefathers across light years from hopeless despair to find God’s gift. And their sons and daughters vowed that they would someday reclaim what they somehow had lost.
Then, of course, the war with the Kreelans had come. While Erlang had never itself been attacked, the planet had nonetheless felt the impact of the war as the newly formed Confederation – of which Erlang had unanimously become a member – sought to tap the resources, human and material, of its constituent worlds. Erlang was not yet large enough to raise a combat regiment of its own, but the Confederation sponsored it with equipment to form a powerful Territorial Army and Coast Guard to protect its vital mineral wealth. Virtually all the Territorial Army personnel were drawn from Ranier families, a slight that the Mallorys fought to overlook in the best interests of their world. Then, fifty years later, the first regiment was raised for the Marine Corps for service on worlds that no Mallory and few Raniers had ever seen or heard of; the enlisted ranks were filled by the sons and daughters of Mallory families, the officers all drawn from Raniers. And so the Mallorys saw their children bleeding and dying under alien suns, but weren’t trusted to serve in defense of the world that was their home.
It was the final insult, the spark that ignited their long-suppressed rage into open violence. A series of strikes and riots ensued that were quickly and savagely put down by the Ranier-controlled Territorial Army and police forces, and thereafter the Mallory townships had lived under virtual martial law.
The emergence of outright oppression, however, only fueled the determination of the Mallorys to overcome the domination of the Raniers. Mallory township elders and activists set about organizing themselves into a political underground that became known simply as the Mallory Party. The party was illegal in the Houses of Parliament that were dominated by the Raniers and puppet Mallory leaders who made up the Ranier Alliance. But the Mallory Party had gradually gained strength in numbers and weapons until its leaders felt they could force the Ranier Alliance to accept it as a viable political entity and return some sense of equality to Erlang. The Mallorys had hoped that the Confederation would assist them in their efforts to achieve political equity on their homeworld. But the Confederation government, preoccupied with an endless war and besieged with the pleas of worlds under attack, had little time to deal with what the Council saw as little more than petty political squabbling.
This, of course, did nothing to make the Mallorys – or the Raniers, for that matter – any more receptive to Reza’s newly arrived Marines. As he always did before landing his people, Reza had made a reconnaissance of the spaceport where he had intended to land his troops. He found that it was encircled by two rings of people, each invisible to the other. On the inside were police and Territorial Army troops facing out toward the landing zone’s electrified perimeter; on the outside, facing in, hundreds of people Reza could best describe as partisans lay in wait, as if planning an ambush for the incoming Confederation forces. Reza reached out his mind to them, and his initial observations were confirmed. Armed with hunting rifles and homemade bombs, the civilians hiding in the forest had every intention of attacking the spaceport in hopes of driving the Marines away before they could become established.
Reza was impressed by their courage. Even if there had been no Ranier troops between the waiting Mallorys and the incoming Marines, any battle would have been swiftly decided. There would have been many dead Mallorys, and his Marines would still have landed.
Realizing that the landing could not go as planned, Reza had decided to make a tactical landing on a ridge overlooking Mallory City and its spaceport, about five kilometers distant. The colony’s president, who had sponsored a welcoming parade for the first Confederation Marines to visit Erlang in nearly ten years, had not been happy about the unannounced change in plans.
“What in blazes are you doing, captain?” President Belisle’s voice crackled over the comm link. “You are only cleared to land at the spaceport, not–”
“Forgive me, Mr. President,” Reza cut him off quietly, “but I believe a more neutral location would serve my purposes better. I apologize for ruining your welcoming plans, but it cannot be helped. I will be in contact with you again as soon as we have completed our landing.” He disconnected just as the president’s reddening face contorted with a reply.
That had been two hours ago. He watched the holo tactical display that had been set up in a large room of an abandoned equipment building as his troops finished deploying into a defensive perimeter. Until Reza could sort out who their enemies were and who were their allies – if indeed there were any – he would trust no one. The landing boats and the carrier that had dropped them here had already left orbit and jumped into hyperspace. The Marines were on their own.
“We’re ready, sir,” Hawthorne reported from where he hovered over the company’s command and control console, monitoring everyone’s progress while Eustus walked the perimeter outside, making sure everything was being done right. “Everyone’s in place, and the arty’s sited behind the ridge.” For this mission, they had received a battery of six multiple rocket launchers – MRLs – that Reza had targeted against the local Territorial Army garrison
