by Tim C Taylor
Arun took a deep breath, suddenly feeling the weight of years and the gulf that now stood between him and these, his fellow Marines.
One face was missing. The silver lining to there being so few Marines who had outlasted everything the New Empire, the Old Empire, the Hardits and everyone else could throw at them, so few survivors from the only Human cadets who had ever avoided facing the Cull – was that only one of their number would be required to do so now. The White Knights weren’t daft. Their ‘Cull’ had never claimed a significant number – roughly 1% as a rule. Why deplete your fighting force any more than necessary?
One of their number had already been chosen: Phaedra Tremayne. Springer; his oldest friend, the person he had relied on throughout his early years and who would always be more than just a friend, if never the person in his life she might have wished to be.
Springer stood behind him now, he knew that. He could feel her presence even while he resisted the temptation to glance over his shoulder and look at her.
Behind Springer stood an honor guard of Wolves, and this was an honor, as well as necessary for the full implementation of Arun’s intentions. None of the Marines here today had done anything to merit facing the Cull. Quite the opposite. They were heroes, every one of them. They had fought their way across space, from Tranquility to Athena, acquitting themselves with distinction. These were the veterans of the war, and their reward was to gather here to witness one of their fellows condemned to death, facing execution at the hands of their own side in order to cement a future for those who survived. The Cull was barbaric; bad enough to see it levied on untried cadets, but this…
These were the very points Xin had made to Arun, and he couldn’t refute them, couldn’t deny that she was right, but there was more to it than that. The wider picture – that was what he had to consider: the circumstances that made it unavoidable that the Cull must be seen to be enacted no matter how abhorrent it might be. He had no choice. Surely Xin could see that.
The truth was that he missed her; missed her presence, her touch, her support… her love. That was what he felt most angry at. He resolved to go to her as soon as this was over, to try again, and to keep trying until she understood.
Why couldn’t she trust him?
Why hadn’t he trusted her with the truth?
The honor guard was ready. The condemned was ready. The audience was ready. That just left him. Tearing his attention away from his own woes, Arun set about doing his duty, addressing the brave men and women who stood before him, finding as he did so that he could no longer meet their gaze.
“Marines. Know that what we do here today will cement our victory. From this day forward, humankind and our allies will stand tall, as respected and revered as any member of the Empire. The battle has been hard and brutal, and we have all been called upon to make sacrifices.” Tremayne more than most. “But all that is now behind us and our aims have been achieved. The White Knights recognize and value us and the Human Legion will govern its own autonomous region of space. Freedom has been won!”
The words sounded hollow even to his own ears given the circumstances, and the half-hearted repetition he received in response suggested he wasn’t alone in that.
Nonetheless, he turned and addressed the commander of the honor guard. “Proceed, Sergeant.”
The guard consisted of some of the most extreme examples of Wolves that Arun had yet encountered. The gnarly growths and overlapping layers of mutated skin resembled an odd mix of plate armor and rocky outcroppings. Facial features were distorted as much as everything else and Arun had trouble recognizing any of the party.
“Sir!” the sergeant replied.
The guard formed up around Tremayne, who hadn’t attempted to make eye contact with Arun at any point, and now it was too late. There would be no opportunity for goodbyes. She was obscured by the hulking forms of the Wolves, as the party marched the short distance to the waiting gas chamber.
This was the moment when proceedings became private, according to the concessions Arun had won in the Treaty of Athena. All transmissions ceased. Initially the Emperor had demanded that the whole procedure should be monitored, particularly the execution, but Arun had refused, insisting that the recipient of the Cull be allowed at least that much dignity. The condemned would walk into the chamber, and would disappear from this existence, never be seen again. Eventually, the Emperor had agreed that would be enough.
The other concession had been the means of execution. Traditionally, those selected for the Cull faced a firing squad, but Arun would not ask any Marine to do that under these circumstances. On this, the Emperor had given ground readily. He didn’t care how the Cull was achieved, just so long as it was.
The sergeant had reached the grey door to the grey windowless block that formed the gas chamber. Opening it, he moved to one side, allowing Tremayne to step through. She entered without once looking round, though by now Arun was staring at the back of her head and willing her to do so. The honor guard formed a wall along the front of the gas chamber as the sergeant closed the door and stepped in front of it, completing the wall.
Arun’s gaze was riveted to the single light above the door, which, as he watched, turned from green to red. The seconds stretched and Arun realized he was holding his breath.
Then the light turned green again. Springer had gone long ago. Now Tremayne was gone too.
— Chapter 50 —
Arun saluted the Marines outside Xin’s quarters on Lance of Freedom, wishing he could swap places with them. He laughed bitterly. The Marines would have their own issues in their lives, but he doubted any had problems as enormous as his. And right now his main problem was Xin.
He hesitated, chimed the hatch entry as a courtesy, and then jetted his chair inside.
She had been brushing her hair before his interruption. Made up, and with her clothes set to her lieutenant-general’s dress uniform, she looked the epitome of human martial virtue: strong, handsome, resourceful, and inspirational. Haloed in charisma, she radiated the aura of someone who made things happen.
He guessed she had anticipated his arrival, and that her pristine appearance was for his benefit, because normally she reset her clothes to civilian mode the instant she stepped into her quarters. As she liked to put it: what was the point of having private quarters if you dressed as if you were on parade?
She returned to brushing her immaculate hair. “If you wish to apologize, Arun, you can do it to yourself someplace else. I don’t wish to hear you speak.”
Arun said nothing. In truth, he did not know what to say. His anger at Xin had burned itself out, leaving only cold ashes. There was nothing he could say except the truth, and that was too dangerous to even suggest.
Xin bounded into action. Leaving her hairbrush floating in midair, she propelled herself across the bed to land with her feet on the deck in front of Arun’s chair. She stood, looming over him like a drill sergeant glaring her disapproval at his unsatisfactory conduct.
He couldn’t look her in the eye.
“Trust me,” he whispered.
“What’s that? Trust you? You’re so lacking in conviction that you can’t even say the words properly. Speak up!”
She bent her knees and floated herself down to be level with him. She grabbed him, digging her fingers into the side of his head.
For a moment, he thought she was going to head-butt him, but what she did was worse.
Xin advanced her forehead to touch his, and held them together, transmitting the shaking motion of her body. Her shakes escalated into racking convulsions as crying claimed her.
“I did trust you,” she sobbed.
He joined her sobs, his stream of tears mingling with hers, filling the gap between their faces with a salty pool of shared woe.
A yawning gap opened up in his heart, a hole he did not dare to peer into because he knew he would see only oblivion there.
No, not like this. This is not an ending. I won’t let her go!
; He pulled away from Xin, and tried to stare at her, but the bulb of tears concealed her face. He smacked the blob away, trying not to see significance in the way their mingled tears dissipated, its unity erupting into a spray of droplets that would never recombine. It can’t end like this.
Emerging from behind the veil of tears, Xin looked at him expectantly. She seemed like a little girl, lost and bewildered – scared too – wishing her parent would scoop her into his arms and kiss her. Tell her everything would be all right.
And he could still do that. He wanted more than anything to tell her that despite all the horrors she had witnessed today, things were not as bad as they appeared. But… if he told his secret, then the very act of doing so would jeopardize the hope she so badly needed. He couldn’t risk making matters every bit as bad as they appeared on the surface.
He nearly asked her again to trust him, but his opportunity had gone, and anything he said now would be too dangerous. If a single word escaped the barrier of his lips, he would break down and confess all. Even if the cabin were secure from eavesdropping, Xin would be one more person to burden with the greatest of all secrets, one more point of potential failure in the ultimate high-stakes gamble.
He watched her features as the last bastions of hope ebbed away, to be replaced by coldness unbound.
Arun swallowed hard. With nothing left to say, he turned his chair around and left Xin behind.
——
Arun fled Xin’s cabin in a trail of tears. He wandered along deserted passageways, emptied by his security detail, who operated just out of his sight but guarded his safety and his solitude with ruthless efficiency.
Barney tried to distract him with trivia about equipment malfunctions, but Arun’s brain had no space for such details, and so he unstuck the flap of false skin behind his ear and removed his personal AI. He drifted along the passageways alone.
The Lance of Freedom had been his home for decades, but it was easy to forget the vastness of her interior. How long he lost himself in the labyrinthine emptiness he did not know. He had had counters and timers and all manner of augmentations implanted in his mind since he was a baby. Even now – if he allowed himself to look – he could play back the key events on that night under Antilles when he and Xin had first pledged to face the galaxy together, and he could recount the timeline of that story in millisecond detail. But his torturing at the hands of the Hardits had broken his inner timers, along with so much of a body that was now mostly reduced to replacement parts. He had asked not to have his timers repaired because he sought solitude so often now.
Arun came back to himself. Maybe it was his body’s insistence that, even in his blackest despair, he still needed to quench the thirst which sprang at him like a beast, impossible to ignore. Sneaking up behind his thirst, he was hit with the realization that a fragile seedling of hope had grown in the wilderness of his heart, nourished by the same sense of absolute loss that had consumed him these past hours. The most intense pangs of loss were not for the Xin he had known, but the loss of his future with her. And his family to be.
During this war, all of his hopes and ambitions and pleasures had been deferred. Everything he had done had been in the expectation that there would come a time when he would no longer lead an army, would no longer war on the galaxy, and that time would be his ultimate reward: a time to be shared with Xin.
Frakk it! He deserved happiness. But his parting with her had been so final. He had no way back to her. In securing the peace, he had lost his prize. He’d spent his future.
And without his family around him, there was no future worth a damn. And that, in its perverse way, was what rekindled his hope. No matter the risk, he had to trust Xin. He had to be with her.
He sped back to Xin’s quarters, pushing his chair to its maximum velocity, careering off the turns in the passageways to send jolts of pain along his still-healing body. But he didn’t care, because the critical wound was to his heart, and that wound he knew how to heal.
Just one word. That’s all it would take.
One word, and a last draw from Xin’s deep well of trust.
One word: ‘Wolves’.
As he approached Xin’s quarters, he barely noticed the absence of her Marine guard outside, or that her hatch was already open.
But those facts screamed their significance when he found her quarters to be empty. An itching fear insisted that this cabin wasn’t merely empty, it had been abandoned.
He placed a hand on her bed. It was standard issue, cramped, and not particularly comfortable, but it held powerful memories – not just of passion, but of contentment, of belonging, and of dreaming a shared future. The covers were neatly made up and secured so they didn’t float away; the bed was cold to the touch. Xin was not coming back.
What the hell was going on?
He shouted for his guard commander. “Cortez!”
His Marines had enhanced hearing, enough to hear him from afar, but there was no reply.
“Cortez, respond!”
When he was met again by silence, cold fear gripped him in a tight embrace. He wanted to reach for his carbine, for Barney, to cry for help… but the fear froze his muscles.
Had the Hardits come again, slipping through Legion sensors despite all the upgrades they had implemented since the last time?
The last time…
Groaning, his mind flashed with visions of Tawfiq torturing his Xin.
Get a grip of yourself, Marine!
The horror of what they would do to Xin and his daughter unfroze Arun. He reached for Barney, deftly reinserting his AI into the slot behind his ear.
She’s gone, Arun.
I can tell that.
No, really gone. Arun, the Legion is breaking up. Standby… patching you into the comm network.
“Arun?” It was Indiya. “Are you fit to make command decisions?”
Was he? If Xin was in any danger, then damn right he was. “Yes. Go ahead, Admiral.”
“Good. I have approximately sixty ships refusing to obey orders. I suspect more will join them. Many more, maybe as much as a third of the fleet will split away if we let them. I have firing solutions. We can win this fight, but the tactical advantage is evaporating by the second. Do I fire upon the mutineers?”
“Have they declared their intentions?”
“Damn right they have. They’re broadcasting throughout the fleet, inviting all who will not accept the Cull to join them.”
“I don’t understand. Where can they go?”
“Mader zagh, Arun! It’s a chodding mutiny for frakk’s sake, we don’t have time for speculation. Do we enforce discipline, or do we do nothing and watch the Human Legion disintegrate before our eyes?”
A new voice interrupted, sourced by Barney as coming from Vengeance of Saesh. “We’re going to carve out a new freedom for ourselves. A true freedom, without the Cull.”
In spite of the circumstances, Arun’s heart lifted to be hearing Xin’s voice. “But Xin… you will be hunted down and killed.”
“By you?”
“No. Never. But you will die all the same. If not you, then your descendants. Our descendants.”
“Shut up, Arun. I’ve heard all before about the Trans-Species Union coming after us, but we are taking another road where they won’t follow. The option you never considered. One that can only work if the Legion splits. We’re going to leave the Trans-Species Union altogether and win ourselves a new territory, carved out of the Muryani Accord – out beyond the frontier. Hey, maybe we’ll bump into the Amilx. I’ve a suspicion they are in my future, but not yours, Arun. You will be dust years before we reach our destination.”
“But… Our daughter…”
Xin groaned, and Arun realized her words were cutting both ways. “I will tell her your name, Arun McEwan. I will speak well of you, and I will tell the truth – that her father died long before she was born.”
All this… he could have prevented all of this with a single word, even a hint that a
freakish intervention by a mother ginquin to give succor to helpless human babies would have even further-reaching implications than anyone realized. But when the moment came to place his trust in Xin, he had failed her. And now it was too late.
Or was it?
“Indiya, where is Ambassador Sandure?”
Indiya hesitated, but her mind was sharp. She would figure it out. “He’s still loyal. On board Holy Retribution with me, and despite Kreippil’s jaw-snapping frustration, my senior subordinate remains loyal too. My flagship isn’t going anywhere without my say-so.”
Xin laughed. “I’ve known a lot of people with their head stuck up their ass, Arun.” Xin sounded almost cheerful. Dammit, she was reminiscing. Already! “You weren’t like them, Twinkle Eyes. Your head was always stuck in your dreams. I always loved that about you. I have no idea what the Bonaventure signifies, nor what it means for you to have seen an alternate version of Sandure, but don’t use those enigmas to kid yourself that I’m ever coming back. I hope your mystery ship gives you such intoxicating dreams that you can lose yourself within them. Goodbye, Arun.”
She severed her connection to him.
“Troop transports are lifting off from Athena’s surface,” said Indiya. “Whole divisions are declaring for Xin. Make your call, General McEwan. Do we fire on the mutineers or not?”
With the crystal clarity that came from his brain augmentations, that allowed him to record sensory data for future reference, Arun remembered another crunch meeting with Indiya and Xin 135 years ago in 2566, when the fledgling Legion had fled Tranquility in Beowulf. They had been so ignorant of interstellar politics, of the long laid-plans of the Hummers, but the Reserve Captain had seen deeper than anyone.
He could hear her words with piercing clarity, from all those years before. Xin was to be the leader, she had told them, the inspiration that many would follow. Decades had passed since then in which Xin had inspired the Legion’s armies, but it wasn’t until today that the old Jotun’s words had born their bitterest fruit. As for Indiya, she was to be the great captain, a master strategist and tactician in the art of war.