Dinh Diep Holocaust Museum
The valley was confined at the junction between two mountain ranges and the headwaters of the Little Mekong river-a river that swells to become Golden Lake some two hundred Kilometers to the North East. The plant life here is twisted and stunted, and the immediate impression is of rocky terrain with sinkholes, until you get closer.
"The street level is about one hundred meters down." his guide, a young man wearing a radiation panic-badge on his tan jacket, explained. "rad levels are actually mostly safe in most of the site. Once the SLS Belleau Wood realized they'd set off a thermonuclear detonation, the follow-on laser fire was mosty effective at disrupting and destroying the major fallout in the upper atmosphere...at least, that's the working theory. it took care of the long-term stuff anyway, took gamma levels down to beta and alpha, but nothing is perfect."
up close, the rocks and some of the twisted 'vegetation' resolves into the bones of buildings-girders and re-bar, poking out of millions of tons of tailings that had been shipped in and dumped to contain the worst of it, burying the scorched remains of a city that had once boasted millions of residents, a city burned and destroyed by the Star League on behalf of the Amaris Regime.
By Clan standards, Nelson knew, he was standing on the grave of a war-crime.
Excavation equipment and decontamination gear surrounded a circular pit. "what is that?" he asked.
"Dig site. we've recovered books, a few artifacts, done some forensics on the actual strike." his guide answered, "Some of the lower levels like the public rail terminal are intact, we found quite a collection of things down there, along with the bodies."
Nelson knew this wasn't from the traitor-lords in their civil war. This was done during the golden age of the Star League. "People trapped by the bombardment, or later?" he asked.
"Execution style in the upper strata of the dig." his guide says it blandly, "medical exams suggest pulse laser to the base of the skull, mostly civvies, a few kids, Rimjob work. uppermost tier of the mass grave's mostly rad exposure and signs of overwork, but down in the subways? lots of suffocation cases, the bodies are pretty well preserved. We keep havin' to revise the death toll upward. started at five million people, finding more evidence of more every day. most date between 2729 an' 2755, when the Star League let the Rimjobs handle the cleanup. They used forced labor."
he followed the man down into the uncovered subway. Work lights showed a mass-transit arrangement that would be familiar to any Homeworld city-dweller, neatly built, of quality materials, the platforms swept clean by the researchers to reveal standard structural elements, posters in frames and blank monitors were arranged everywhere, and a few monorail cars were even parked where they had ceased motion.
an SLDF recruitment poster, visibly faded, in a ferroglass display frame stood inset to the wall, the image was idealized. It was like a punch to the gut, seeing that and knowing what happened here.
"This incident was...lightly discussed in our histories." Nelson offered, "What do your histories say happened?"
"The Rimjobs lost control during the uprising, and called in the Star League to help put it down, the SLDF sent SLS Belleau Wood, a Potemkin class cruiser with a Division embarked from exercises on Arluna with the Lyrans. Our folks opposed the landing, demanded a Star League court hear our grievances, and beat them so bad, they called down an orbital strike, only the coordinates they got from their scouts were wrong, instead of hitting a command bunker they hit the municipal power plant, the overpressure from the strike sent the core supercritical, the plant went up like a dirty bomb. That's the nearest thing we can establish to an objective description, wasted the whole city, hell, got the whole valley in the initial shock and firestorm."
"And then??"
"Then they buried the incident for a decade or so, until a kid named Kerensky showed up with a fact-finding mission. He wanted to charge Admiral Chivington with numerous violations including using orbom on a civilian population, but by then, the old bastard was retired and Steve Amaris was the young first-lord's very bestest pal, so it was basically forgotten about." his guide shrugged, "Politics. nobody was even charged with negligence. The story we got is that the First Lord let funds for the cleanup, but you wouldn't see much of that here. we know that House Amaris and the Rim Worlds Republic pulled in political prisoners from off-world, along with civilians they didn't like from on-world, and used them as disposable labor burying the site, and moved their admin headquarters to Nha Tranh and their military headquarters to Hue."
despite himself, he asked, "How many do you estimate? rough guess?"
"We've found enough using echo-sounding and excavation to suggest around thirty or forty million, and archaeological remnants suggest most of 'm were from offworld after about 2735 or 36. They ran a ****** concentration camp here until the late fifties or early sixties. It wasn't, apparently, interesting enough for the SLDF to become involved, unless they were complicit. we don't have much info on that, but there's no supporting evidence here that anyone on Terra knew what was going on out here, at least, not at the time."
Elbar makes so much more sense now.
"Do you maybe want to take a look at our documentation efforts?" his guide asked, "Maybe you can put some clues together we missed?"
Nelson spent the afternoon looking at survey data, holoimagery, artifacts, and bones. A scientist-caste, which any of this crew would easily fit, would have a field day with so much raw historical data. he just felt emptier, and increasingly more horrified by the obviousness of the information. people had been worked to death, and then killed, here for decades, after a mistake made by the Star League that went un-punished.
Nha Tranh...
Upon his return to the hotel, a book was waiting for him at the desk. leather-bound and ancient, written with a spidery, precise hand. Tranh Truk Ngo's war diary from the campaign against the Usuper, it was a copy done using image-transfer but still, contemporary to the Star League's fall.
"You'll want to sleep well tonight, the Archive where the Declaration is housed is ready for your visit in the morning." a Coast Guard officer in dress uniform explained.
"Thank you."
Nelson didn't rest, he spent much of the night reading his gift, filling in holes in his own information on the various campaigns of the first war to Liberate Terra. Colonel Ngo's writing was sparse, terse, a soldier's writing, with a touch of poet, but not so much as to make any of it seem glorious. The primary point he gathered was that Kowloon didn't join the war against the Usurper out of any love for the Star League, they joined out of a sense of hatred and outrage that was bones-deep. They joined to punish the Rim Worlds not for overthrowing the Camerons, but for crimes committed against their people.
Crimes clearly evident after today.
Coast Guard Naval Air Station Spider Moon, Boojum III, 2 AU from Kowloon itself.
The trip from Nha Tranh to Spider Moon took two full days in a relatively comfortable modified Buccaneer class dropship. Nelson was not alone now, he had four of his warriors with him, and he was no longer playing civilian, but dressed in his own Clan's dress uniform, a dignitary being shuttled by a neutral nation to a site they rarely showed to outsiders.
the 'Naval Air Station' was visible on approach. As the dropship landed, he noted the general layout would be (again) achingly familiar to anyone who visited a Snow Raven outpost, or the Ghost Bear asteroid mining facilities.
"what was this before you took it over?" he asks.
"We're not exactly sure, there were bio-research areas and quarantine rooms, but there were also missile silos." Commodore Alicia Li explained, "Most of whatever they were working on was removed before they shut it down, but some of the sections were clearly burned using thermite-plasma flushes, so it was probably dangerous. the site itself dates from the teens to late twenties."
"YOu put an archive here?"
"No, we put the base here, the Archive is inside the moon." she explains, "You can't fit what we stored down there in that little base."
inside, the color-coding was familiar to anyone who grew up with Brian Caches or SLDF's architecture. even the path lines, automatic doors, seals, air-locks and patterns were the same.
The paint was fresher, and it was carefully maintained.
"We do Coast Guard officer training in the outer levels for Dirtyfeet, and we have some of the admin functions located here, but it's not a node of control you can just knock out." Li explained, "overcentralized control of defenses is how my ancestors lost Kowloon to the Rimjobs the first time, we decentralized everything after that."
"So a decapitation strike would be worthless." He said approvingly, "very intelligent."
"We try not to be stupid, doesn't always work out, but we do make the attempt." she said with a smile, "What we do have, is a pressure-walk elevator to the place you want to be visiting, and it's secure."
The lower catacombs were mined out of the bedrock of the moon, and they were extensive. as he followed the Commodore deeper in, he noted names were carved into the walls, with dates.
"What are...what is this?"
"everyone who's died in defense of Kowloon, or under the colors of Kowloon." she told him. "all the way back to the First war, with the Rimjobs, at least, everyone we could confirm. Newer entries are further down, we're still adding names, dates, places."
at a point the passage branches, and she leads him down the branch, to a door.
The crest of the 171st, a red brush-stroke resembling a dragon on a gold field, beside it the crest of the 90th Heavy Assault Division, and finally the crest of the Kowloon Coast Guard, an Orca, rampant on a field of blue that fades to a starfleld at the top.
"it's in here." she tells him, "You might want to seal up, we keep it pressurized with neutral gasses to prevent degradation of the records."
He mountd his helmet and sealed it, activating the rebreathers and scrubbers. "Do you also have records of the 90th?" he asks.
"a few, as many as their gunslinger let us put away, anyhow." she tells him, "some info on where they went, after the fall-would've been better if they'd come here, but...who knows? when they misjumped, they vanished from the worlds, but that was days after your ancestors left Earth for the last time."
They walked through the airlock, into a vast room, filled with hermetically sealed document casings, digital media on racks, holotapes, crystal readers...a librarian's nightmare or fondest dream.
"Somewhere in here, we've got the original copy of the Kowloon Republic's constitution, the colonial charter, and copies of every treaty we were forced to adopt." her voice was tinny through the output speaker of her own skinsuit. "You're looking for the Elbar Declaration, we've got two copies, Gilmour gave us his before Colonel Ngo left Earth for home, and we've got the Colonel's original. I think this is a bad idea, but Liz told me specifically to let you choose which one to see first. there's also something else she wants you to look at while you're here."
"what is it?" he asks.
"The last conversation between Tranh Truk Ngo and General Aleksandr Kerensky, recorded as it happened, no edits. Liz must have a plan for letting one of you guys see that, I don't think it's a good idea, but then, I was against this whole thing."
"Why would you oppose it?" he asked.
"because it will bring nothing but trouble."
