Chapter 4

“Captain Williams, are your people ready to go?” asked the Marine Lt. Colonel in his clipped British accent.

“Yes Colonel, they are,” replied the extraction team commander.

“Do they understand and accept what we are planning to do down there?” continued the Colonel.

“Yes Colonel, they do,” confirmed the Captain.

The Colonel raised an eyebrow forcing the Captain to expand his brief comment.

“Colonel, the only non-British members of my team are both from down under, a Kiwi and an Aussie, and they’ve already asked for permission to pass information about what we are doing here on to their former senior officers. After the mission is completed of course.” The Captain met the Colonel’s gaze full on, “and all of us were at P’yong when that mess had to be cleared up,” he said as though that answered any possible doubts the senior officer could have had.

His reference to the atrocities that had occurred on the colony world of P’yong caused the Colonel to wince as he remembered the reports he’d read.

P’yong had been one of the earliest colonies that the Darjee had established and its mainly Chinese population had been place under the Governorship of Deng Zemin. He, despite his high CAP score and his previous employment of running a manufacturing plant, had turned out to be a sexual predator with delusions of Roman grandeur. The combat units from P’yong had been ferocious in combat, as failure had meant ending up in the Governor’s games when they returned to the planet, which were just another painful way of dying disguised as entertainment.

The Darjee’s refusal to intervene, citing the Confederacy rules on planetary autonomy, had pushed many humans away from the idealistic beliefs of the Confederacy. These ideals were fine in a colony were everyone worked for the common good and no one would abuse power, a rare thing amongst humans. The changes were reflected in an adoption of a more pragmatic frame of mind.

The Colonel nodded his understanding, “Very well Captain, good luck! You may begin your extraction.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” said the Captain before nodding to his First Sergeant, who’d been doing his best to ignore what was going on around him and still be available if his boss needed him.

The composite company that Captain Wainright was leading was a clear indication that the Darjee were no longer running the show. As with all extraction teams it was a composite unit, but where the troops were normally drawn from a random selection of units, this one had been put together with care. They had been drawn from former members of the British military, predominantly the elite units. And had all proven themselves to be loyal to their commanders rather than the Confederacy. The only members of the team who weren’t British had been drafted in at the last minute following injuries to original team members, and had come at the express recommendation of Captain Wainright.

The extraction team commenced boarding the four Panther assault shuttles allocated to this mission. That they were using shuttles rather than the simple transporter network gave some indication that this was a larger than normal mission. When the departing shuttles rendezvoused with four of the A20 Super Warthog ground attack craft the full scale of the operation became apparent to everyone who could see it.

As the support fighters joined the formation Captain Wainright consulted with the Earth Force AI and got the all clear to begin the insertion. He glanced at the pilot and nodded, “The mission is Go!”

Following the official announcement that contact had been made with aliens, or more specifically the Confederacy, things on Earth had begun to change. The threat posed by the Sa’arm and the requirements for humans to combat this threat had moved many nations onto a militaristic footing. The purpose of CAP testing and the lower age, fourteen, for volunteering had forced changes on most societies.

In Great Britain legal change was a process that took time and a great deal of debate with a lot of it heated and rather bigoted in nature. The impact on existing legislation took several years to unravel; lowering the age at which drinking, sexual consent and voting could occur led to several other acts needing amendment.

In the end it was decided that a new act was required to enable these sweeping changes. The new legislation was styled the ‘Age Restrictions (Confederacy) (Amendments) Act’ and the drafting process began. It was whilst this process was going on that the attack on Israel took place and the subsequent events left its mark on this Act, though most people wouldn’t have noticed.

The British Secret Intelligence Service, like most similar Agencies around the world, had been cut out of the loop by the combination of the Darjee and the military. This enflamed the already established suspicion and distrust between the intelligence community and the military and led the various Secret Services to seriously investigate events involving the Confederacy, its policies and its actions. When the Agencies had been cleansed, as the military liked to phrase the wholesale removal of key personnel, the SIS, CIA and their sister organisations were left with a basic institutional mistrust of the Confederacy and its motives.

When the newly crowned Queen Beatrice had summoned the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service to her and tasked him with finding anything that would be useful to her aims he’d set about it with a vengeance. He’d quickly set his people to digging up every anomaly, fabrication or change in procedure they could find.

When he’d made an interim report on the findings of the Service he had included the information that the concubine limits did not seem to be as set in stone as had first appeared. He also noted that, in some colonies, concubines were not the slaves that everyone had been led to believe.

One of the final pieces of information that he presented to Her Majesty and the Prime Minister turned out to have far reaching implications for their plans. The Director presented details of an extraction run by two Confederacy Marines, Cpl Rick Evans and Cpl Peter Taylor. During the extraction a case had been put forward by a volunteer, Mitchell Franke and his concubine, Michelle Rawlins, to allow the extraction of a non-related child, Tyler Gregory. To achieve this the legal guardianship of the child was transferred by its parents, David and Bettina Gregory, to the volunteer during the extraction. Both of the Marines present, in consultation with the AIs running the event concurred that this was acceptable.

This last revelation led to a section in the Act that ordained that the legal guardianship of all children under the age of fourteen in Great Britain would be vested in the Government. The Government would normally allow the biological parents to supervise their children but would be able to transfer this authority as it saw fit.

The explanation given, when the section was questioned, was that it saved time when dealing with those admittedly rare occasions when a child whose parents had been extracted found itself being left behind. Given the ongoing fight concerning the lowering of the age of consent and other similar matters the section was passed without further scrutiny.

One impact of the time taken for this Act to get through Parliament was the rise of the Earth First party within British politics. At the beginning it was in a very vocal minority but it was becoming more powerful and extreme as time wore on. Within three years it would become the second largest party in British politics, forcing an amalgamation of the former mainstream Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties to combat its growth and power.

The announcement of the Queen’s garden party was greeted with mild interest by the nation’s media. The Windsor monarchy had established a tradition of hosting garden parties three or four times a year and although the odd event had been missed they were deemed to be nothing special by those in the know.

This event took on added interest when it was intimated that it would be in honour of the Queen’s two children Prince Andrew and Princess Elizabeth and would serve as their formal introduction into public life. In their honour the guest list would consist predominantly of people in their own age group and would be drawn from a cross section of the country’s young people.

The only real voice of opposition came from some of the leadership of the Earth First party and even this became muted when it was revealed that the actual leader of the party, Donald Prendergast and his wife had already accepted an invitation to attend along with their two children.

The day of the event dawned clear and sunny and people started to arrive early. Security was high, which everyone understood given the way recent events had unfolded, but it did mean that the party was a little slow to get off the ground.

It was mid-afternoon before a chamberlain entered the Queen’s quarters and announced, “Ma’am, all of the guests have arrived.”

“Thank you, have the children been informed?”

“Yes Ma’am, they’re in the Music Room awaiting your arrival.”

“Is the Prime Minister with them?”

“He hadn’t arrived when I left, Ma’am but I believe he was making his way there.”

“Very well, tell them I’ll be there shortly.”

As the chamberlain left Queen Beatrice looked at her reflection in the mirror and tried to smile. She was one of the few who knew that if everything went according to plan then this would be the last she would be seeing of her children for a long time, if not forever. Which, she acknowledged, was both a blessing and a worry that she had to deal with, especially when she considered that when this was finished most parents of the children present today were just going to receive the standard Confederacy notification that their children had been extracted. After a few moments of quiet contemplation the young Queen rose and made her way to her children and, despite other recent events, was certainly the hardest event she’d attended in her life.