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Six hours and thirty-two minutes after receiving the alert, Second Battalion, Second Brigade, was spaceborne, beating the requirement by twenty-eight minutes. Things had been so rushed that Rev hadn’t even hung up his blues but had just tossed them on his rack in the rush to get changed, grab his deployment pack, and get to muster, and then he’d had no time to get back.
From what they’d been told so far, this was the real deal, and Second of the Second was just the tip of the spear. More units were being scrambled, and they’d be following over the next week as soon as they could be mounted out and ships assigned.
The stakes couldn’t be higher, to the point of whether the Congress of Humanity could continue as a viable force in the galaxy. After the common enemy of the Centaurs bringing humankind together, what was happening on Cat Scratch could very well tear the alliance apart and spiral humanity back into a never-ending series of conflicts, confrontations, and out-and-out war.
The Home Guard was being thrust into the conflict. If they could not handle the situation, then there was the very real possibility that a great power war could be the result. That was a huge responsibility being thrust on their shoulders, and Rev hoped they were up for the task.
They didn’t have all the details yet, nor an operations plan. Those were being worked on now. But the crux of the matter was one that had been a tinderbox for fighting for thousands of years: land.
Cat Scratch was colonized early in the first diaspora—“colonization,” however, was being generous. With an oxygen-based atmosphere and close to Earth-normal, it was a logical choice, requiring minimal terraforming.
But the planet never became the paradise that was envisioned. Wisteria Industries, who won the terraforming contract by being the lowest bidder, botched the job, wasting money and years before finally being bought out. By that time, the resources the first surveys hinted at never came to fruition, and the new parent company decided to pull the plug. Technically, the planet was inhabitable, so they were within their rights, under the Standard Charter of the time, to do so.
But it was hardly a Garden of Eden. The O2 percentage at sea level was 13.2%—livable, but far from the 20.9% of Earth-normal. Arid and dusty, the local fungi—the highest form of native life—shot spores twice a Cat Scratch year, which was about nine Earth months. These spores were so virulent that they made hay fever an ancient tickle with a feather. Every spore season, the spores mutated, making it difficult to develop effective antihistamines.
With millions of inhabitants, modern medicine could develop those in days, but given the hostile environment and lack of commercially viable resources, the entire population consisted of squatters--descendants of various religious cults and other groups who sought refuge there. Most of the young left the planet for greener pastures, so the population hadn’t exceeded thirty thousand at any time over the last hundred years.
For most of its existence as a human-inhabited world, no one cared if the residents were illegal. The planet was a harsh mistress, and if they wanted to scratch out a life there, they were left to their own devices with only tramp ships bringing in supplies and taking out the few products the people could produce.
Until the rediscovery of gorbnium. Those early surveys hadn’t been totally wrong. The gorbnium had always been there but scattered in wide, low-density deposits. With the Centaur’s scouring of Nimon 22, one of humankind’s largest suppliers of the rare earths, there was a shortage, and with new mining methods that didn’t need dense deposits, suddenly, Cat Scratch was back on the map. Six years before the war ended, Evvo, Inc, a subsidiary of the Chang-Moud Group—who’d inherited the rights to the planet when they bought out the previous holder—returned to the planet and erected an industrial site.
The inhabitants protested, but the site was far from their small, scattered settlements. And with the ongoing fight with the Centaurs, no one paid much attention to them.
With the war over, Evvo poured resources into expanding their operation, running huge bucket wheel “eaters,” which took in the soil and extracted the gorbnium. After denuding their initial surface gorbnium fields, they moved to the next big field, which was right in the heart of the largest human concentration of settlements.
The Scratchers protested again, sending representatives to Titan to plead their case. Their contention was that after almost seventy generations, they were the rightful owners of the planet. CMG lawyers argued that they had no rights. They were squatters.
While the lawyers argued before Congress and the courts, Evvo brought in more equipment and stepped up the mining. After Evvo forcibly evicted five families and destroyed their homes, the Scratchers reacted, burning two excavators. CMG, which had a very robust corporate army, sent in the troops.
In normal conditions, this wouldn’t be a huge problem. From a legal standpoint, most experts opined that the CMG had the upper hand. And to be blunt, the fate of such a small Scratcher population was not going to be a major flashpoint.
Until the Osnovnoy Alyanz got involved.
With the war with the Centaurs over, various governments started the age-old game of power. Everyone was at peace, but for how long? And no one wanted to cede what power they’d manage to create. Before the war, the Osnovnoy Alyanz was a mid-level government, but they had ramped up military production until it almost matched that of the Union, MDS, and Federation. And they were in the thick of the fighting, losing perhaps more soldiers and sailors to the Centaurs than any other nation. And now, they were flexing their strength, anxious to be considered a major power.
One of the very first refugee groups to reach Cat Scratch was a small sect from the Ural Mountains on Earth, back when humans still lived there. The Osnovnoy Alyanz used that connection, which was tenuous at best, to claim protectorship over the entire Scratcher population. Grasping at any lifeline, the Scratchers agreed.
The Alyanz sent a task force of four ships and a regiment of Cossacks to take orbit above the planet and demand that the CMG troops stand down. Using the Alyanz as cover, the Scratchers raised their own militia to face the corporate troops.
The CMG force could mow down the militia, but when the ships were taken into account, the militia and Cossacks, if they landed, were far more powerful than the CMG troops, so it looked like they would have to comply.
Except . . .
CMG was a Federation of Independent States corporation, and Talik Moud, son of the CEO, was high in the FIS central government. There was no way that the FIS was going to one: allow CMG, who they said was legally in the right, to be taken under threat by a foreign government, and two: allow the upstart Osnovnoy Alyanz to maneuver its way into a seat at the table as a major power.
While Rev and the rest of the Home Guard Union Marines were enjoying their birthday ball on Enceladus, a task force of eight FIS ships and a division of soldiers entered the Cat Scratch system. Their terse message was that if any Alyanz ship fired upon the planet, or if any Cossack set foot on it, the SA would consider that an act of war and would react accordingly.
The Alyanz commander replied that they would consider any movement of the CMG forces against the Scratchers an act of war, and they would react accordingly.
This situation was one of the reasons the Congress of Humanity existed. Before the war, the CoH might have tried to rely almost exclusively on diplomacy, but the new Counsel General was more proactive. He knew diplomacy took time, and the situation on Cat Scratch was a powder keg, ready to blow. With his mission to cement the place of the CoH as the de facto government of humanity, he had to prove the CoH’s worth. This was the situation that was either going to do that or relegate the CoH to the trash bin of history along with every other attempt at uniting humanity.
Six hours after the arrival of the FIS task force, the Home Guard got its marching orders. The alert battalion was to immediately leave for Cat Scratch to make sure the powder keg’s fuze wasn’t lit.
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