Tarnished Knight

by Jack Campbell

  Finally on his way back to his own room to do some final preparations of his own, Drakon came across the brigade commander. Colonel Gaiene sat in a passageway, back against one bulkhead, facing the bulkhead across from him since no one else sat on that side. If they had to describe Conor Gaiene’s appearance in one word, most people would have chosen “dashing.” Or maybe “gallant” or perhaps “swashbuckling.” Even sitting on the deck, he somehow seemed ready to leap up and lead a charge.

  That was how he appeared until you noticed his eyes, dark and weary even though Gaiene was still a few years shy of middle age. Now those eyes looked up as Drakon approached. “Good afternoon, General.”

  “Good afternoon.” There were few other soldiers near the command deck, and those were giving their brigade commander as much room and privacy as current circumstances allowed, so Drakon took a seat next to Gaiene. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m sober. And alone. Alas.” A female soldier walked by, and Gaiene watched her appreciatively though discreetly. “No sleeping with subordinates. Is that rule really necessary?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Most CEOs don’t care. Most CEOs right now would have a drink in one hand and one of their subordinates in the other.”

  Drakon grinned. “I’m not most CEOs.”

  “No. You’re not.” Gaiene looked toward the far bulkhead, his expression pensive. “For which I am smart enough to be grateful.”

  “You’re brilliant in battle, Con.”

  “And the rest of the time I’m a royal pain in the butt.” Gaiene ran one hand through his hair, and Drakon caught a glimpse of the ring on one of his fingers. How long ago had she died? Ever since then, Gaiene had tried to forget her with every woman who was willing and every bottle he could crack open. But he still wore the ring. “I don’t know why you keep me around.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Any other CEO would have had me in a labor camp long before this,” Gaiene remarked. “As one of the guards or as one of the inmates.”

  Drakon nodded. “And that would be a real waste.”

  “A waste. Yes. We know all about that, don’t we? Scarred lives and damaged souls. We’re all damned, you know,” Gaiene went on in a conversational voice. “Everywhere we’ve fought, we’ve left a little piece of ourselves and replaced it with a small piece of the hell we found in that place. Now most of us is scattered in a hundred little pieces in a hundred places where death walked. I see those places. I see them all the time. Usually in my dreams, but sometimes I see them when I’m awake.”

  Gaiene could be moody when sober, but this was worse than usual. “Are you all right?” Drakon asked. “Can you handle going into another fight?”

  “I’m fine. The psychs say I will soon achieve emotional equilibrium again. They’ve been saying that for a very long time. I will go on, though,” Gaiene added, his tone now slightly distant. “I will go on until the day I end; then you will give me a proper warrior’s burial, and you will go on.”

  “Unless we both end together that day,” Drakon said.

  “Ah, no, General. It’s not for you to talk of endings. You still have a future.”

  “So do you.”

  But this time Gaiene did not reply. He sat, his eyes on the opposite bulkhead, but looking at another place and time.

  There were a great many things that Drakon needed to be doing. But he sat next to Gaiene for a long time without talking, shoulder to shoulder against a future that was uncertain and a past too clearly remembered.

  * * *

  “FIVE minutes to docking,” the announcing system on the freighter declared. The operator of this particular freighter had chosen a woman’s voice using an odd and strong accent, producing an effect that combined attention-getting for the strangeness and annoyance over the difficulty of understanding some of the words.

  “Probably the voice of the owner’s mistress,” Gaiene commented. He and all of his soldiers were in combat armor, ready to go when the freighter docked.

  “I can’t think of any other explanation.” Drakon’s armor was tied into the freighter’s own systems, so he could monitor the approach directly. On visual, the shape of the dock ahead of them stood out brilliantly white against the black of space. “No sign of any special— Wait. Looks like a squad of local troops in armor.”

  Colonel Gaiene sighed with exasperation. “Now we’ll have to waste ammunition on them.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. They don’t look tense.” The troops waiting on the dock were being careless, moving so they were clearly silhouetted against the bright white of the dock walls instead of keeping to shadowed locations or cover. And they stood holding their weapons casually, propped over one shoulder or resting nose first against the deck. He had seen similar carelessness and postures before, when commanding detachments who had felt what these soldiers clearly felt, though he hadn’t let them get away with those kinds of behaviors. “Looks more like they’ve been on alert too long. They’re going through the motions, but they’re bored by it all. They’ve probably been doing the same drill when every ship arrives.”

  “Do you want to try to take them alive?”

  Drakon thought for a moment, then nodded. “It’s critical that we keep the snakes on this facility from realizing what’s happening until it’s too late for them to trigger any self-destruct. The sooner we start shooting, the less time we’ll have. How do we surprise them with overwhelming force and keep them from sounding an alarm?”

  Gaiene smiled. “Contraband in one of the freight compartments. The sort of contraband that bored soldiers would love to get their hands on. They’ll have to go check it out in person before anyone in authority confiscates it.”

  “What kind of contraband?”

  “Hmmm . . . happy dust.” A mythical drug, undetectable by any means, nonaddictive, no side effects, cheap, and the nearest thing to feeling like a god.

  “Happy dust doesn’t really exist,” Drakon pointed out. “It’s an urban legend. Or I guess just a legend since I’ve never been anywhere that hadn’t heard of it.”

  “Which means we don’t actually have to have any,” Gaiene pointed out in turn. “Sergeant Shand!”

  A stout soldier trotted forward. “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Get out of your armor and into a survival suit. You are a drug smuggler. You have a cargo of happy dust. You are willing to bribe the squad of local soldiers with some of it as long as they let you keep the rest. Get them all into this freight compartment.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  By the time the freighter shuddered gently as the grapples locked it into the dock, Sergeant Shand was ready, looking remarkably seedy and dissolute in a grubby survival suit pulled out of the freighter’s emergency locker. Shand went to the compartment access, while Gaiene dispersed his troops around the compartment itself, hidden behind anything that would serve.

  Drakon watched, keeping his breathing even, his heart rate under control. Gaiene could be trusted to handle the assault, but Drakon had to remain calm and focused, ready to spot problems before they developed and make sure nothing hung up anywhere.

  When one of the bored soldiers opened the access to plug in and check the manifest, Shand was there, talking suit to suit with the soldier on the crew circuit as he gestured in alternately enticing and pleading ways.

  More soldiers showed up. Sergeant Shand waved invitingly inside.

  They followed him. Drakon counted a full squad as the last cleared the access. His outside view showed no one visible on the dock.

  A sudden rustle of motion marked a couple of companies of soldiers leveling weapons at the shocked local troops, all of whom were wise enough to freeze into total immobility.

  Motion on the dock, a single figure in battle armor coming out, pausing long enough to take in the situation, then he
ading toward the freighter access like someone who was very unhappy and ready to unload that emotion upon others. “Is their squad leader with them in here?” Drakon asked Gaiene.

  The reply took only a moment. “No.”

  “He or she just figured out that the squad is all inside the freighter and is heading this way, no doubt mad as hell.”

  A few seconds later the sergeant came storming through the access, then stopped as four of Gaiene’s soldiers near the door planted weapons against the sergeant’s helmet.

  Gaiene clucked a disappointed sound. “The sergeant tried to send an alert. Our jammers blocked it inside the hull. She has an impressive grasp of profanity.”

  “She can exercise it on her squad while they’re all locked up aboard here,” Drakon said, as the locals were disarmed and herded away. “We’ve got a couple of minutes more at best before somebody notices that they’re gone from the dock.” He switched to the command circuit that went to every one of his soldiers. “Don’t forget to let any of the soldiers defending the facility surrender if they don’t fight us. We need to move fast, and we don’t need any last stands holding up the attack. Move!”

  The elements of the brigade exploded from the freighter, using the big cargo-loading hatches. Soldiers swarmed along the dock, heading for objectives loaded into their combat armor. There had been plenty of copies of the layout of the facility available at Midway, and the soldiers had spent a lot of their time on the trip running virtual assaults. Now they didn’t hesitate as they attacked the real thing.

  Just inside the facility access, a snake sitting at the personnel screening desk died before she knew what was happening, her alarm untouched. A group of civilian workers fled in panic, some huddled against the deck in fright, but the soldiers ignored them until one reached for an alarm panel, only to be knocked sprawling against the nearest wall.

  Drakon stayed back, trying to remain near the center of the mass of soldiers as they spread through the facility. He focused not on the action in the area right around him but on the big picture shown on his helmet display, watching for trouble, especially with any of the units heading for the main construction dock and those charging toward the control compartment for the orbital docks.

  Colonel Gaiene seemed to be everywhere, always in the lead, pushing his troops in a race to occupy as much of the facility as possible and overrun as many local soldiers as they could before alarms sounded.

  A team of combat engineers locked into the control circuitry of the docks and began downloading software to take over systems and prevent any new commands from being entered by the defenders.

  Still no alarm as Gaiene’s troops charged through still-open hatches and down undefended passageways. The barracks nearest the docks got swamped by a wave of attackers, the surprised defenders blinking in amazement as they were suddenly confronted by overwhelming numbers of armored soldiers. None were foolish enough to resist.

  The attack spread through the facility in a ragged bubble as different sections were overrun. A break room full of off-shift workers was seized. A workshop occupied. “Secondary docks cleared,” a battalion commander reported to Gaiene and Drakon. “Heading into the main dock now.”

  Drakon focused on the displays from unit leaders charging into the dock. The security doors were unmanned, using automated readers that were overridden in instants, then soldiers were swarming into the main construction dock. “Hot damn,” one of the unit leaders exclaimed as he saw the object hidden inside until then. “Battleship or battle cruiser. Sure as hell.”

  “It’ll be one of those things someday,” another leader commented. “Right now, it’s just a shell.”

  Startled late-shift workers were dropping tools and raising their hands as the soldiers swept among them. “No resistance here. No guards. Main construction dock is secured.”

  “Make sure there are no charges planted to sabotage that hull,” Drakon ordered. “Go over the whole thing with some of those workers in tow.”

  Alarms finally blared as someone, somewhere realized that trouble had arrived. But with Drakon’s engineers confusing the information coming into the control compartment, no one yet seemed to have grasped that an attack was under way. Bewildered automated systems trying to figure out exactly which emergency was the problem mixed the tones of various alerts, the onboard fire alarm switched to the object-collision alarm, which became the riot alarm, which changed to the decompression alarm, which turned back into the fire warning.

  Where the hell are the snakes? Drakon wondered, scanning his display for any sign of them. “Do we have all control circuits locked down?”

  “No, sir,” the reply came from the combat engineer commander. “There are some redundant, totally independent circuits that we haven’t been able to reach yet.”

  “Colonel Gaiene, make sure your soldiers get access to all circuits for the engineers as soon as possible. Bypass other objectives if necessary until we get everything under control.”

  One platoon found a snake barracks filled with ISS personnel hastily trying to don battle armor. After a single instant in which both sides stared at each other, Gaiene’s soldiers launched grenades into the bunched snakes, followed by a rush in which the soldiers fired at anything that still moved, some of them continuing to flay the bodies with shots until their commanders slammed fists against their helmets.

  Drakon snarled with frustration as he saw red markers on his display showing vital circuits and compartments not yet seized. But the civilians on this facility were all awake, some piling into the passageways in panic and slowing down Drakon’s attack. He couldn’t put off the next step any longer. “Broadcast the message.”

  Over the pulsing of the different alarms still clamoring for attention, voices boomed over the internal announcing system hijacked by the comm specialists with Drakon’s troops. “This facility is now under the control of soldiers of the Midway Star System under the command of General Drakon. Do not resist. Any citizens and soldiers who surrender will not be harmed. Return to your quarters and remain there. Do not offer resistance.”

  Another snake barracks, this one alerted but with only a few occupants, who fought viciously before being wiped out.

  “Colonel, we’ve got a platoon holed up near engineering control. They’re . . . Damn! Got a soldier down. These guys are fighting.”

  “Take them out,” Gaiene ordered. “They had their chance.”

  Soldiers converged on the holdouts from three sides, overwhelming the defenders with a barrage of fire before charging in and finishing off any who were still alive.

  Drakon watched it all, remembering so many fights just like it. Then the enemy had been Alliance soldiers. We were taught to fight without mercy. They fought without mercy, too. Now we’re fighting ourselves the same way.

  Is that why Black Jack told his people to start taking prisoners again and stop bombarding citizens? Because he realized that if merciless behavior becomes habit, you can end up turning those tactics on yourself? The Syndicate government has been willing to do things like that for a long time, and here we are, without the Syndicate ordering it or the snakes forcing it on us, repeating that pattern.

  We’ve got to break out of it. “This is General Drakon. Everyone will provide opportunities to surrender to any defender at any point. Only if they keep fighting are they to be killed.”

  “General?” Gaiene questioned. “Your orders going in—”

  “Have changed. We’re not snakes.”

  “. . . Yes, sir.”

  Drakon’s eyes went to part of his display. He frowned, wondering what had drawn his attention, then saw an anomaly warning pop up near the main construction dock. “Heads up at the dock. There’s someone coming your way!”

  Moments later, a hatch blew open, and snakes and loyalist soldiers poured through it toward the massive hull under construction. Fire f
rom Gaiene’s soldiers pummeled them while Drakon started moving himself, calling to some of Gaiene’s nearby units. “To the main dock! Now!”

  Why should it matter? What could a few dozen snakes and soldiers do to something as massive and uncompleted as that hull? But they were fighting like hell to get to it, so there had to be some important reason. “Hold them!” he ordered the soldiers inside the dock. “Keep them away from that hull!”

  “Too many!” one of Gaiene’s soldiers cried, the signal cutting off abruptly on the last word as fire ripped into her.

  Reinforcements entered the dock from three locations, one group led by Drakon. They could see the force of snakes and loyalist soldiers moving toward the hull, their advance hindered by the stubborn defense from Gaiene’s original occupying force. Drakon’s force had come in from the side, giving them clean shots at the attackers. Leveling his weapon, Drakon sighted on a snake dashing forward, his shot hitting home moments before two others, the combined blows taking out the snake.

  The other two reinforcing elements opened fire as well, putting the snakes and loyalist soldiers in a cross fire coming from three directions on top of the shots still pummeling them from the defenders of the hull.

  A loyalist soldier jumped up to run, only to fall as the nearest snake pumped a shot into him. A second later, the snake died, too, as the loyalist soldiers turned on the ISS agents among them.

  “Hold fire!” Drakon ordered as the last of the snakes on the dock died and the loyalist soldiers dropped their weapons, then stood with empty hands raised in surrender. For an instant of time, the fate of the loyalists balanced on the knife-edge of veteran soldiers fighting their own instincts and experience to kill without mercy.

  But no more shots were fired. As Drakon took a deep breath and refocused on the situation elsewhere, he heard one of the loyalists broadcasting an appeal in a shaking voice. “You guys know us! We’ve fought together! Don’t scrap us!”

  And the reply from one of Gaiene’s soldiers. “Frost out, brother. We don’t work for some CEO. We’re General Drakon’s troops. His orders are to accept surrender.”