Boabdil
Copyright© 2026 by Prince von Vlox
Prologue
United Families Navy Command & Staff School
“How does one invade a whole planet?” Captain Louise Alexander looked around the small conference table. “More importantly, how do we invade a planet?”
“You mean, how do we invade Boabdil?” Captain Corey Andersen redefined the question and rubbed her chin thoughtfully with her natural hand. “Let’s get that right.” She chewed on her lip and nodded slightly. “That’s the real question you’re asking, isn’t it, Louise? How do we invade a place like Boabdil, where they don’t have the kind of system defenses we do, where they don’t have a central organization, and where they are scattered over three continents? I wouldn’t even want to consider how we might invade a planet with modern defenses. We can’t.”
“We have the Empire’s model.” Admiral Petra Johnson winced even as she heard herself speak the words. Shocked faces swiveled towards her. “Sorry. That does sound awful, doesn’t it? We can’t ever say it that plainly outside this room, and I hesitated to say it among the three of us. I don’t mean nuclear strikes on civilian population centers, even if there are military resources in those cities. With our fighters, we can be cleaner and more precise than a missile.
“What I meant was invasion by simultaneous landings at a dozen places with troops spreading from each to link up their perimeters and cut enemy communications and transportation. At the same time, we break up enemy troop concentrations with our fighters and landers and ships in low orbit. We get our business over with quickly so we can leave quickly. It’s an extension of what we’ve done in the past when we attacked Idenux bases. We’ve had good results with that approach, even when we stretched it at K-303. As far as I know, K-303 is the only base we ever deliberately took intact with the intention of keeping indefinitely.”
“K-303 was still just a base,” Corey said immediately. “We’re talking about an entire world now. On Boabdil, we can’t get our business over with quickly and leave. The whole world is our business. From what we’ve learned, our kin are scattered everywhere. We don’t have the resources to take and occupy an entire civilized world. I admit calling Boabdil civilized stretches the definition. Still, poor as they are, they have more people there today than we had on Setosha before the invasion.”
She flipped through the papers in an open folder. “Judging from some of the reports I glanced at in your briefing document, Louise, the Idenux have spent the last several hundred years killing each other in local wars. We have to expect they could have relatively modern weapons and lots of people experienced in using them. Those veterans would hurt us badly, and probably do so long before our Landing Zones link up. Look at how much damage a few surviving Marines and Reaction Force gals on Setosha inflicted on the Imperials in the first days of the Invasion. And remember, those gals were mostly armed with light infantry weapons.
“From the reports PSK Techs pulled out of captured Imperial computer systems, we know the Impies hit the ground with just over 20,000 troops in their first wave. They would have had more, but our ships killed some of them in space, and local defenses shot to pieces more than a third of the invasion force on their way down. That was after the Imperial Fleet hammered half our cities flat with fusion bombs, and their battleships’ fixed mount beam weapons worked over any other obvious points of resistance. Even with all of those preparations, they lost another 8,000 troops by the end of Day Two. Opposed landings are risky and extremely expensive operations.”
“We don’t have even 20,000 troops, much less what General Koeyera started with.” Captain Alexander frowned and tapped the proposed Order of Battle for Operation Restore Kin with her finger. It was the first page of the thick report, copies of which lay on the table before each officer. “We have two regiments of Marines. That’s every Marine we can scrape up, including the finned, furred, feathered, and walking wounded--just over 6,000 troops.”
Louise was the oldest woman at the table, lean, small, and white-haired. She was head of the Tactics and Strategy Department at the Navy’s Command & Staff School. The Navy had assigned her to create a sensible plan to recover the Families’ lost sisters and daughters on Boabdil. Idenux raiders acting for the Empire had stolen many of her kin, students, and friends over the last 33 years. This committee was her best hope for finding a military solution to recovering them if the Families Council chose violence over guile. She had good reason to believe the Council might decide on the military option. After the invasion of Setosha and the atrocities Imperial forces had committed there, the sentiment in the Families ran strongly in favor of doing something decisive about the Empire, and doing it soon. More and more these past few years, “doing something” seemed to translate into military action.
Louise had formed this committee to explore the military side of the problem. She had no illusions that the military options were good--quite the opposite. She knew that any intrusion by Families Navy or Marines into the fratricidal society that covered the surface of Boabdil would only increase the hazard to everyone. She had been told that other planners were working on this problem from other perspectives, formulating a variety of different strategies for the Families Council to review. She hoped those gals would find a solution less risky for the would-be rescuers and less dangerous for those to be rescued. Still, if the final decision was to use the Navy and Marines, Louise Alexander had reason to believe that between the three of them at this table they could devise a workable military plan to recover the Families’ lost kin.
To her left was Admiral Petra Johnson, just returned from the PSK, the People’s Star Kingdom. Admiral Johnson had just taken over command of the Home System defenses. She was openly acknowledged to be the premiere carrier admiral the Families had developed in their long war with the Idenux. She was a sturdy woman with a broad face, iron in her hair, and, according to her junior officers, glacial runoff in her veins. She had the hard eyes of one who had seen too much waste, suffering, and death, but she still wielded her carriers’ fighter squadrons like a surgeon making precise cuts with a laser scalpel.
Sitting opposite Admiral Johnson was the officer widely considered to be the best combined arms tactician in the Families Navy, Captain Corey Andersen. She was small, as were all of the women in her family, and she was young. Louise often had to remind herself that in a few short years this fresh-faced girl had accumulated more combat experience than officers with several decades in service. Stories had already accumulated around Corey’s name, around Crazy Corey’s victories, the sort of stories that too easily became legend.
It was hard to remember that this young woman was only in her late 20s, whereas Petra Johnson was well past 50. Of course, Petra had birthed her own children years before the Families Navy was even founded. She had been assigned to command her first ship several months before Corey Andersen was born. Unlike Petra, Corey’s entire generation had never known a time when there was no war. They had all grown to maturity in a world strikingly different than the one Petra and Louise remembered from their childhood--different and far more deadly.
Corey brought a disciplined mind, a terrifying intellectual quickness, and a sharp, focused imagination to her Navy service. She had benefited greatly from the experience and training of Petra Johnson, Leah Bridges, Louise herself, and others who remembered when the Navy’s main strength could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Corey was dark-haired and had a thin, almost elfin face with large eyes that made her seem far too young and innocent for her reputation and skills. Even though she was still only a Captain, she had commanded the entire Fleet at the liberation of Setosha six months before. At that battle, her quickness, her perception, and her tactical skills had enabled the Families not only to liberate Setosha but also to utterly destroy the Imperial battle fleet in that system.
Louise turned to look at her. “Do you have any ideas, Corey?”
Corey shook her head, her eyes unfocused. “Nothing comes to mind just yet.” She stared at the map of Boabdil. “The prerequisites for a rescue are simple to determine. We need to know where our kin are, and we have to have some idea how many of them are still on Boabdil. That’s an intelligence function, and I have no idea how they would accomplish that. It’s a wonder we know as much about the surface as we do.” She snorted in wry half-amusement. “Even if we knew all that, we still don’t have the sheer number of bodies to make multiple landings.” She swept a hand across the map, emphasizing the vast geographic scope of their intended theater of operations. “We would need an army to conquer the entire planet, a large army. And we’d need one just as large to hold the place after we took it. We don’t have either one.”
“We have a pretty good idea how many of our kin have been taken,” Petra said softly. “And we have a good idea how many the Empire has removed from Boabdil. We don’t know where the survivors are on Boabdil; in fact, we don’t know how many have survived.” She sighed. “As a first step, we can certainly blockade Boabdil so more of our kin don’t end up there.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.