Tarnished Knight

by Jack Campbell

  Morgan waved at the map. “If we take out the snakes, do the regular troops keep fighting?”

  “That depends on whether they think they’ll die if they try to surrender.”

  “Will they?” Drakon asked.

  “Some units have committed serious atrocities. They’ll have trouble trying to surrender,” Kamara said as calmly as if she were talking about road conditions. “Others have been a lot better behaved.”

  Morgan smiled. “We can split the loyalist soldiers, then. All it takes is contact with the units that will be allowed to surrender.”

  “I can give you the identities of those units,” Kamara said. “Managing hidden contact with them may be—”

  “No problem,” Morgan said, her smile still in place but now wolflike. “I can handle it.”

  Kamara stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the map.

  Malin was running his finger across scattered purple blotches on the map, all of them concentrated in urban areas. “This marks areas controlled by the Workers Universal?”

  “Roughly.” Kamara’s expression shifted to disgust. “If we can roll up the snakes and turn everything on the Workers Universal, I think they’ll fold pretty quick because they’ve hollowed themselves out. Sure, the workers have gotten lousy deals. But the ones who went with the Workers Universal are a lot worse off now. I told you about the human waves the WUs sent against us. Some real nutcases have taken over there. Their opposition in the workers’ leadership was accused of treason, arrested and shot, or simply disappeared. These days, the ones left in charge are killing as many of their own workers in purges as we are in fighting them.”

  “Cannibalization of the revolution once the most radical begin competing for purity,” Malin commented. “It’s happened countless times in the past. Right now, many of those in this star system seeking stability are drawn to the loyalists as protection against the Free Taroans and the Workers Universal. But if the loyalists are defeated, then the choice for such people will be between—”

  “Freedom and homicidal nutcases,” Kamara finished. “I figure we’ll look pretty good at that point to anyone wanting to choose sides.” She glanced at Drakon. “The loyalists offered to conduct joint operations with us against the Workers, but I knew better than to bite that poison apple.”

  Drakon smiled crookedly, inwardly pleased that Kamara had not tried to keep that offer secret from her new allies. He studied the map, zooming in to identify some good locations for surgical strikes. “Colonel Malin, please get Colonels Gaiene, Kai, and Senski. We have a snake hunt to plan.”

  “We can’t afford to lose a lot of infrastructure,” Kamara said. “Neither can the loyalists, which is the only thing that has kept them from dropping rocks on us from orbit.”

  Morgan blew out a derisive breath. “You want us to defeat the loyalists without breaking anything?”

  Kamara met her eyes soberly, nodding. “That’s right. The loyalists are sitting on some of the most critical facilities on the surface. If all we inherit is ruins, then our victory would be as hollow as they come.”

  “The snakes have been following scorched-earth tactics every time we’ve fought them,” Malin said. “Once they know defeat is inevitable, they try to take us with them.”

  “Then we try to make sure the snakes don’t know they’re losing until it’s too late to do anything about it,” Drakon replied. “Colonel Morgan, get the identities of the units you want to undermine from Sub-CEO Kamara and get started on that. I want to know what units those are, too, so we can work our plans around them and hit the other units first.”

  “How often do you want updates on what I’m doing?” Morgan asked.

  “Let me know what I need to know when I need to know it. Otherwise, you’re free to run with it.”

  She grinned. “No problem.”

  Kamara cleared her throat. “You’ve left two companies occupying the orbital dockyards. We’d be happy to send some of our militia up there to maintain control and free up your troops.”

  Drakon smiled at her. I bet you’d be happy to gain control of those dockyards. Do you really think I’d just hand them over to you? “With our warships protecting the dockyards, it’s better that they deal with our own people there if any threats develop.”

  After a pause, Kamara nodded. “Certainly. I understand.”

  At least, she understood that the Free Taroans were in no position to demand the dockyards.

  * * *

  COLONEL Rogero walked alone back to his quarters after a coordination meeting with President Iceni’s representatives. Meetings with people in locations remote from each other were easy to hold, everyone gathering in a virtual meeting place, but just as easy to tap into and monitor despite every possible security precaution. For routine matters, that was accepted as a fact of life. The ISS, and possibly someone else, would be listening. For anything important, or anything that shouldn’t be overheard, it had become habit for people to choose actual meeting places at the last moment. Much more secure, but it could also lead to long walks as twilight darkened the sky and streets grew dim before the gloom deepened enough to trigger streetlights to life.

  There were bars he could have gone to, restaurants he could have dined at, but Rogero preferred burying himself in his work. Every time he visited a bar or a café, he would find himself looking for her, knowing she couldn’t possibly be there but still studying the crowd. Someday, I’ll buy you a drink, Bradamont had said at their last meeting. Someday, I’ll buy you dinner, he had replied. Neither had believed it could ever happen, but still Rogero found himself searching crowds.

  She had been in the Midway Star System. She had sent him a message. But it was still impossible.

  Tonight, then, he walked straight from the meeting to his quarters. But even though his course was a straight one, he didn’t actually walk in a straight line or at a steady speed. Reflexes from the battlefield had become natural to him, so that as Rogero walked, he would, without thinking, speed up or slow down between steps, veer a bit to one side or the other, move slightly to keep objects between him and open lines of sight that could become lines of fire. It made it hard for anyone to target him on the battlefield and annoyed the hell out of anyone who walked with him at other times, but it took a conscious effort to not do it, so when he walked alone, he gave in to instinct.

  As a result of one such sudden jerk forward, the shot fired at his head instead grazed the back of Rogero’s skull.

  He fell forward, rolling behind the nearest streetlamp base, weapon in hand as he searched the night for the assassin. The streetlights came on, triggered not by the oncoming night but by sensors that had detected the shot, and sirens hooted nearby. The police would be here soon, he would give a report, and they would search for the killer.

  Rogero knew they wouldn’t find anyone. This felt too much like the work of a professional. He raised his free hand to touch the bleeding scrape across the back of his head. Someone had tried to kill him, but who that was mattered less than who had ordered the hit. Or had he escaped death? Could the shot have been aimed to miss, a warning? If so, from who? And would that warning have been intended for him or General Drakon?

  But whoever had fired had known he would be meeting with President Iceni’s representatives and had known where that would be so they could predict what route Rogero would have to take back to his quarters.

  * * *

  “LAUNCH the bombardment,” Drakon ordered. He stood in the Free Taroan command center, eyes on the big map display, which had rotated and risen so that he could watch everything play out. Ideally, he would be out there, with the attack, but there was too much going on this time, too many widely dispersed things happening, and he needed to be somewhere he could watch it all with the fewest possible distractions near at hand.

  The tracks of kinetic projectiles fire
d by the warships in orbit appeared on the display, curving downward like a precise sort of rainfall. All of the projectiles were timed to hit at the same moment, and instead of falling across the three targeted valleys, they were aimed in curtains that dropped toward the defenses on the rims of the mountains surrounding the valleys and along the narrow coastlines where the valleys met the sea.

  Massed along the other sides of those valley rims were Drakon’s brigades, supported by some of the Free Taroan forces. Three brigades, three valleys, each valley held by an understrength battalion. Overwhelming force deployed against the most hard-core portions of the loyalist ranks. Victory wasn’t in doubt, but if they couldn’t time it just so, and the snakes blew everything to hell, then the victory would be a hollow one, as well as costing the lives of more of his soldiers.

  Drakon’s eyes rested on one of the falling projectiles. Just a chunk of metal, aimed precisely, gaining energy with every meter it fell. There were a lot of meters between orbit and the surface, and the projectiles were already moving fast when they were launched. The seconds to impact vanished in a flurry of numbers spinning by too fast to read; then the rounds hit.

  It was as if volcanoes had erupted in long lines along the ridges, rock and dust flying upward, the ground trembling, a sustained roar of noise rather than single crashes from impacts. The defenses along the ridges vanished, replaced by rubble.

  He had been close to bombardments like that. Drakon could have closed his eyes and seen the rocks hitting, sometimes those fired by Syndicate warships to batter Alliance defenses before he sent his own soldiers in to attack and seize the ground, sometimes rocks launched by Alliance warships against him. Men and women as well as structures disappeared under those bombardments, not simply killed but their bodies blown into fragments, leaving battlefields empty and strangely devoid of the dead. That’s what hell really is. Not those places with fire and demons but just a place where death has been, and nothing remains because humans have wiped out all trace that humans or any other life had ever been there.

  I know how Conor Gaiene feels. I’m tired of turning places into hell.

  But I don’t know any other way to get this done that wouldn’t kill a lot more people.

  * * *

  THE sentry gaping at the violence erupting along the ridges died without even knowing Roh Morgan was nearby. A moment later, the antiair vehicle the sentry had been guarding rocked as a limpet mine tore out its insides and killed its operator. Under the distraction of the bombardment hitting, commandos in stealth suits who had carefully infiltrated over the last few days struck at the same time, carrying out pinpoint attacks to destroy mobile defenses which had parked among the populace to discourage bombardments aimed at them.

  A platoon of soldiers came pounding down the street, staring around for enemies. Morgan took careful aim and dropped their leader, who had made himself obvious by gesturing commands. Grinning, she gunned down two more soldiers, then shifted position as shots began hitting the area around her.

  A panicked civilian racing across the street blocked her next shot. Annoyed, Morgan fired twice, both shots tearing through the civilian before slamming into the soldier behind him.

  Green lights glowed on Morgan’s helmet display, showing the other commandos in the valley had completed their hits.

  But all of it had been a distraction, designed to keep the snakes confused and overwhelmed as reports of activity and threats poured in from all sides. She had learned that about people at an early age—how easy it was to divert and disorient them by throwing too many ideas and images and emotions their way. Men were particularly prone to losing the ability to think when women tossed the right enticements in front of them, but almost any human could be knocked off-balance by enough of the right kinds of mental overloads.

  Not her, though. Morgan could always see her goals with crystal clarity no matter the confusion around her. It had all snapped into focus after she had been pulled from that asteroid. She had been reborn then because she had a destiny. Drakon’s acceptance of her as an officer had been part of that destiny. He didn’t know that yet. But she had known it for a long time.

  She leaned back calmly against the nearest wall, completely unfazed by the small-arms fire being sprayed out from the survivors of the loyalist squad, tapping out a coded command. Puppet master limpets that Morgan and her team had previously attached to critical junctions in the loyalist command network went to work, sending out bogus commands and false updates. In the flurry of incoming reports, the snakes would see many that said everything was going well, and their minds would seize upon the things that they wanted to see in that mass of information overkill.

  * * *

  “THERE are the signals,” Sub-CEO Kamara said, as major explosions occurred in all three valleys. “The commandos have softened things up inside the valleys.”

  Drakon nodded. “All brigades, go.”

  Shuttles hopped into the air, almost clipping the tops of the ridges as they crested the obstacles and burst through the still-falling dust to plummet toward the floors of the valleys. Many of those shuttles were Drakon’s, but others belonged to the Free Taroans, battered remnants of the aerospace forces that had once protected the skies and low orbits of this world. Those Taroan pilots who had survived this long were either very lucky or very good, and both qualities served them now as they led the Midway shuttles into the attack. Only a few scattered shots erupted from any defenders who still lived and hadn’t been disoriented or disabled or destroyed by the bombardments or the commandos.

  * * *

  COLONEL Malin paused, eyeing the vapor barrier guarding the loyalist headquarters complex in this valley. The water misting out from the barrier would allow detection of someone wearing even the best stealth suit, protecting the headquarters from infiltration.

  But that barrier also clearly identified the headquarters and isolated it from surrounding structures. Even though it was well hidden from overhead view, Malin could precisely locate it from his position.

  It had also made it relatively easy to spot the buried communication lines radiating out from the structure. Puppet master limpets were already at work on those, providing reassuring updates and blocking alerts and activation codes. Malin somberly eyed the readouts from the limpets, ensuring that the protocols and ciphers acquired after the ISS headquarters on Midway was overrun were working to undermine the snakes on Taroa.

  Take nothing for granted. Have backup plans for your backup plans. For reasons unknown, higher powers had left Syndicate space to the whims of gods of chaos. Finding harmony again would require riding the waves of chaos, finding the means to ease the tempest by degrees, using the right forces to calm the storm.

  Sometimes, that meant unleashing other storms.

  He called the heavy cruiser, providing the coordinates for the drop, then faded away from the headquarters as fast as possible while not betraying his presence, while sending out an alert to the other commandos in this valley to beware of the impacts.

  Seconds later, two bombardment projectiles fell through the atmosphere, moving too fast to be visible but leaving lethal streaks of light in their wake. The ground shuddered as the loyalist headquarters became a crater.

  But on Malin’s display, the limpets reported information still flowing to and from the now-vanished headquarters. Clever. Even internal references have false position information. I need to find the real headquarters and get it shut down before it sends the wrong commands.

  Malin and his commandos went back to work.

  * * *

  “COLONEL Malin is showing red-status readout on mission accomplishment,” Colonel Senski reported.

  Kamara rapped on her controls as if that would change the information on her display. “Your bombardment destroyed the target at the coordinates he provided,” she complained to Drakon.

  “If Malin says
the job’s not done, it’s not done,” Drakon replied, eyes narrowed as he took in the situation in all three valleys. “Colonel Senski, continue your approach and carry out your assault.”

  “But, General,” Senski protested, “if the assault goes in, and the snake headquarters is still functioning, enough accurate information may reach them to trigger a decision to go doomsday on us.”

  “The longer we continue the operation, the more chance we have of that happening anyway, Colonel. Get in there and take your objectives. If Malin needs something to cover his takedown of the snakes, your assault will draw their attention.”

  Kamara stared at the display, her expression grim. “There could be a snake doomsday device in this city,” she said to Drakon. “The snakes want to recapture the rebellious portions of this planet if they can, not nuke it. But if CEO Ukula has time to realize what’s going down—”

  “We get a real big kick in the butt,” Drakon replied, keeping his own voice casual. “I figured that might be the case. Pulling back now, hesitating now, will only worsen the risks.”

  She gave him a wry smile. “Since both of our butts are on the line, too, I hope you’re right.”

  Me, too. “Malin will take out the snake headquarters.”

  * * *

  THE main bodies of the brigades were arriving at their objectives, shuttles landing hard to spray out armored soldiers in overwhelming numbers. The defenders, hurt, disorganized, and getting contradictory orders thanks to the limpets on the snake command lines, resisted in some places and surrendered in others.

  “Command links severed in this valley,” Colonel Kai reported, looking perfectly composed even in the midst of battle.

  “How can you be sure you got all the command links?” Kamara demanded.

  “Because we have severed every comm link in this valley except our own. That part of your infrastructure will be much easier to repair than if this entire area is cratered,” Kai replied.