“I am aware,” he confirmed, folding his hands together on top of the desk.
“And you are prepared to accept the responsibility of whatever else happens from this point onward?” she asked.
“I am prepared,” he replied.
Yarrow paused for a moment longer before she turned the box to face him and pushed it across the desk towards him. She stepped back after that, pulling her gloves from her pocket as she did and tugging them on.
Ekks reached for the box and pushed the lid up. There was a small console inside, deceptively simple considering the task it had been designed for.
Ekks had to type in three codes, and he had to confirm each one twice. And finally, it was done. He closed the box and pushed it back across the desk to Yarrow.
“Good evening, General,” he offered pleasantly, folding his hands on his desk once again. As an afterthought, he tacked on, “Thank you for your time.”
She eyed him for a moment before she drew in a slow breath and sighed it out once again. Whatever it was she wanted to say, she kept it to herself, and Ekks felt no need to ask her to speak her mind. Her opinion, after all, was irrelevant.
She picked up the box and left after just a moment of lingering. Ekks waited until his door slid closed behind her before he sagged back in his seat, his hands falling to his lap. He let his head fall back against his seat, and he observed the paint job on his office ceiling for a moment.
For such a big step, it had felt so…small.
He had been expecting it to feel more momentous. With some reluctance, he sat up straight once again and pulled his communicator from his pocket.
He knew the number he needed to call off the top of his head, and it rang only twice before Raj Ghetti answered it.
“Commander Ekks,” Ghetti greeted smoothly. “I trust you’re calling to give me good news?”
“I’ve done what you asked of me,” Ekks confirmed, leaning his weight onto one of the arms of his chair. “From here, it all depends on how trigger-happy some of the fleet commanders decide to be.”
“And you’re certain there won’t be any backpedaling?” Ghetti asked. “You know I will be most displeased if we’ve come so far only to have it all fall apart at the last moment. A great many people would be displeased, in fact.”
His tone was mild as he said it.
Pleasant, even.
As if he was discussing a particularly unique cloud.
“I’ve handled the only one who tried to push back hard enough to be a concern,” Ekks replied, just a note of irritation slithering into his voice. While it was almost certain that Ghetti noticed it, he made no efforts to bring it up. Ekks’s ire, after all, was of no consequence to him.
Ghetti hummed a low note, skeptical but at least acknowledging what Ekks was saying. “If you’re certain,” he sighed. “Will there be anything else, Commander?”
“If I may, sir, might I recommend a vacation?” Ekks suggested dryly, drumming the fingers of his free hand against one armrest. “Somewhere in the inner system, of course. I’ve been led to believe that things in the outer system are going to get rather turbulent in the near future, after all.”
Ghetti chuckled in reply, a low, rumbling sound. “Perhaps I will,” he mused. “Regardless, you’ve done good work, Ekks, assuming you can keep it up. We’ll be in touch.”
The line went dead almost immediately after, and Ekks blinked at his communicator for a moment, before slumping back in his seat once again and rolling his eyes. That had been some impressively faint praise.
Still, it was better than the alternative.
He shoved his communicator into his jacket and dragged one hand down his face. For a moment he simply sat there, as the light from the window gradually shifted across his desk. Finally, he levered himself back up to his feet and headed towards his office door.
He was done for the day, he decided. It was time to head home and pour himself a goddamn drink.
Chapter 11
Aboard The Empress, Outer System
Brock’s attention was pulled by a flashing button on his console unit.
“Hey Ruther, man, I gotta go. Looks like something has come up.”
“Okay, no problem, friend. Talk to you soon. I’m off shift in twenty minutes.”
Brock held up his hand in a wave at the screen. “Alrighty,” he confirmed, his thoughts already in another place. He closed the connection with the Zhyn flagship.
“What you got, Emma?”
Emma responded over the cockpit intercom. “Oz is just decrypting the message now, but it looks like we’ve been able to intercept a signal to the Estarian fleet.”
“Oh,” Brock noted, swiveling around his console chair to see if Crash was registering any of this. Do we know what it says yet?”
“I believe Oz is telling Molly what it says now.”
Just then Molly arrived in the cockpit, looking a little disheveled, as if she’d been trying to catch a nap as they waited. “The Estarian fleet is on its way,” she announced. Joel bowled in behind her.
“It sounds like they’ve been given full authorization to engage with what they’re terming the enemy, and anyone who stands in their way.”
There was a deadly silence in the cockpit for a moment as they processed the information.
Brock was the first to acknowledge the implications. “That means that if we stay here, we’re mincemeat.”
Molly shook her head in dismay. “Don’t they realize that the Zhyn ships will destroy them in a heartbeat?”
Joel dragged a hand down the lower half of his face. “Clearly not.”
“Unless that is what the Northern Clan wants?” Molly mused, pacing over to one of the console chairs and sitting down. She spoke slowly, as if thinking her way through it. “If the Estarian ships are obliterated by the Zhyn, for instance, they will then have the support to declare war on the Zhyn Empire. If they’re destroyed by the ARs, then they pretty much write a ticket to do whatever they want.”
Joel scratched his head. “But say they do declare war on the Zhyn Empire, they’d have no chance of winning.”
Joel could see the cogs turning as Molly thought the situation through. “I guess it depends on your definition of win. If the Federation needs to wade in to keep the peace, it could be exactly what they want to get special trade agreements and reparations from them. Not only that, but all the while it gives them a stronger hold on power domestically.”
Brock spun around in his chair. “You’re kidding me? This is all about some fucked up group deciding that they want more power? These are real lives that are going to be ended. We’re going to be ended! Does that count for nothing?”
Molly shook her head grimly. “I’m afraid not. It’s just how these people work.”
“Well then what are we going to do?” he asked, waiting for Molly to give them the magical solution that would get them out of the situation.
“I don’t know,” Molly muttered, getting up out of the chair. “I need to think.” And with that she wandered back out of the cockpit as if in a daze.
Spire Memorial Hospital, Estaria
Something was beeping. Not quietly. Not subtly. It was loud and grating and constant.
He was trying to sleep, goddammit.
Vero squeezed his eyes shut even tighter, as if that might somehow drown out the insistent, shrill beeping. It made no difference, and he clenched his fists in the sheet beneath him.
“Romero?”
The voice was quiet, almost nervous. But familiar. It was coming from somewhere beside him.
But that didn’t make any sense.
He lived alone.
Come to think of it, his bed was supposed to be much more comfortable than whatever slab of concrete he was lying on just then.
Slowly, reluctantly, he cracked one eye open. He closed it again immediately. The lights were too bright, and combined with the white of the walls and the ceiling, it was blin
ding. A shadow fell over him a second later, and it became apparent that his sister had seen him open one eye, even for such a brief moment.
“Romero!” she hissed urgently, prodding at his shoulder insistently, too cautious to actually shake him.
“Cissy, stoooooppppp,” he groaned, still not entirely awake. His face scrunched when she continued, and finally he opened his eyes. That time, his sister was leaning over him enough to block out the worst of the light.
As he blinked up at her, she stared down at him, eyes wide and worried. Finally, she stopped poking at him like some sort of experiment.
“Romero?” she asked once again, as if she suspected she was looking down at someone else.
“Cicero?” he questioned, in much the same tone. He glanced around, taking note of the guardrails on the bed and the beeping heart monitor beside it. He could feel a tube against his face and a cannula in his nose.
There was an IV in his arm, taped in place.
Hospital. He was in a hospital. But why—?
The memory of the car crash came back to him with almost the same impact as the crash itself. Without even thinking about it, he sat up, so quickly that Cicero had to practically leap away from him.
“Romero, no—” she tried to scold, only to cut herself off when he went still.
He didn’t hurt, at least not quite. Everything just felt…stiff. He hadn’t moved in a while and he could feel it. And he most likely would start hurting soon, once he was disconnected from whatever was dripping into his arm.
“What happened?” he demanded abruptly, like a wind-up doll jerking back into motion.
Cicero wrung her hands together and shifted back and forth on the stiff plastic chair beside the bed. “You were in a car crash,” she informed him, almost matter-of-factly. “There was something wrong with the engine—”
“My car was fine,” he stated flatly, cutting her off. His hands curled into fists against the bed again.
Cicero was watching him fretfully, and he let his hands uncurl and shook his head briefly. “What else?” he asked, already tired again.
“They, uh—the doctors, I mean—took you off life support a few days ago when you started breathing on your own again. And—”
“Out there,” Vero specified, gesturing towards the window with one hand. It was dark out.
Cicero shifted on the chair again. “It’s…been a lot,” she replied carefully, as she picked up the remote for the screen on the wall and turned it on.
As the news played, Cicero outlined everything that had been going on. The blackouts, martial law, the chaos with looting and the rising crime rate as the population panicked, the order for the fleet to keep going.
Vero’s ears rang and his chest felt tight, and for a moment he thought maybe he was going to have a heart attack. But no, that wasn’t it; that would make no sense. He was just so pissed off.
“I need clothes,” he stated abruptly, cutting Cicero off again.
“Well—I mean, I have a bag for you,” she offered tentatively, getting to her feet to fetch the bag from the window seat. “I brought it with me when the hospital first called.”
Vero nodded distractedly in reply and reached for the buzzer to call the nurse. He tapped the button three times in rapid succession and was getting ready for a fourth when a nurse hurried in, looking slightly frantic. Her concern gave way to confusion, though, when she saw that Vero himself was the one to push the button, rather than Cicero.
“You’re awake,” she stated, bemused. “That’s wonderful!” she hurried to add, gathering her composure once again.
“I need to get out of here,” he interrupted quickly, before the nurse could say anything else.
Her expression flattened with displease. “Senator, I really must—”
“You can’t keep me here against my will,” he reminded her. “I’ll sign whatever waivers I need to sign, but I need to get out of here.”
The nurse spent a moment longer trying to scowl him into submission, without any success. Finally, she heaved an aggrieved sigh and stepped towards the bed to remove his IV line and disconnect him from the various monitors.
He wasted no time in getting dressed while she left to get the relevant paperwork. Within ten minutes, he had signed his discharge forms and was heading towards the elevator with Cicero fretting at his heels.
Senate House, Spire, Estaria
A Senate meeting was well underway when Cicero pulled her car to a halt and parked.
“How did you even know they would be in session?” she wondered, folding her arms and slumping in her seat. She already knew she wasn’t going to be going anywhere until the meeting was over; her brother didn’t exactly have his own car anymore.
“I’ve still been getting the schedule updates on my communicator,” Vero answered distractedly as he got out of the car. “I’ll try to hurry things along,” he assured her before he closed the car door and headed for the door at a brisk walk.
He jogged through the familiar halls at a hurried pace, until the door to the boardroom was looming in front of him. He keyed in his identification number to unlock the door and it slid open.
Almost at once, everyone around the table stopped talking and turned to look at him. There was a beat of silence, and then Zenne managed, “Senator Vero.” Surprised, but quietly pleased all the same. “We weren’t expecting you back for quite some time.”
“Yes, well.” Vero stepped into the room. “As soon as I heard about everything that was happening, I knew I couldn’t waste a second languishing in bed.”
He rounded on the Speaker of the House. “I’m fairly sure I never imagined that you’re the Speaker of the House, correct?”
“Of course I am—” the Speaker began to reply, affronted.
Cutting him off, Vero demanded, “Then why have you not been speaking for the house?” He spread his arms and gestured around. “No one in this room wants to go to war. No one in this room thinks it’s a good idea.”
“What if we had been wrong?” the Speaker asked sharply. “What if we had been sitting idle when an invasion came?”
“What if he’s wrong?” Vero shot back, pointing out of the door, as if in the direction of Ekks’s office. “We could spend all day, every day, trying to figure out which ‘what if’ is more likely, or we could acknowledge that starting an unnecessary war with an unknown enemy would be the worst outcome. We can respond to a threat, but we can’t undo a declaration of war. On top of everything that’s happened being eighteen shades of illegal, of course.”
He stomped down the little voice in the back of his mind that reminded him he would be lucky not to be disciplined for berating the Speaker of the House.
The Speaker was silent for a moment before his expression steeled and he turned to face the table again. “All in favor of repealing the previous vote and calling the fleet off of the offensive?”
One by one, each Senator around the table lifted a hand, until each member had a hand raised.
The boardroom seemed charged after that, as if a current had raced through the room as the Speaker, pulling up his holo, managed to connect so he could make a call.
“Commander Ekks, you’re needed in the Senate House. We’ve cast an emergency vote and your presence is required.” His expression twisted as if he had licked a lemon as he listened to the reply, in a manner that suggested Ekks was not pleased. The Speaker made no mention of what the Commander said.
Vero took his seat at the table, his substitute leaving with hardly a backward glance.
They waited in silence until they could hear booted footsteps in the corridor.
The door opened, and Ekks breezed in with all the warmth of a blizzard. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded before the door was even finished sliding closed again. “I made myself rather clear about—”
He stopped talking abruptly, staring at Vero. His lip curled in displeasure for a split second before his expression wen
t neutral again. “Vero,” he greeted tightly. “So good to see you’ve returned to us.”
“Commander,” Vero returned curtly. “I’m sure you’re thrilled.”
The Speaker stepped between them before anything unpleasant could happen, clearing his throat to get Ekks’s attention. “While you were clear on what you wanted last time, we were not,” the Speaker explained, calm and level. “We’ve called you here to rescind the order for the fleet to pursue the ships in the outer system. Until such a time as we have an adequate amount of information on the situation.”
Ekks opened his mouth to protest, only to rethink that decision and close his mouth once again when he was greeted with a dozen expectant stares. He drew in a breath, held it for a second, and sighed it out. “Very well,” he muttered, straightening his uniform and looking away from them.
He opened his holo and promptly connected a call with Admiral Boys. It felt a bit like a production, standing there with the entire Senate watching him make a call.
“Commander Ekks,” the Admiral greeted him warily. “Has there been an update?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Ekks replied waspishly. “The situation has changed enough that it’s been decided the fleet should stand down.”
There was a long, drawn out moment of silence as Boys absorbed that statement, before he swallowed and cleared his throat. “Of course, Commander,” he acknowledged once he gathered his composure once again. His voice seemed to waver nervously. “I’ll be sure to inform the rest of the fleet command team of the change of plans. Is there anything else I should know?”
Ekks hung up the call without saying anything else, and he turned a pointed glare on the Speaker. “Will that be all?” he asked, silken and almost sickeningly pleasant.
The Speaker sighed slowly. “That will be all, Commander. Thank you for your time.”
Ekks turned and stormed from the room without another word. The room erupted into chatter, wary, excited and cautiously hopeful in equal turns. And Vero sagged back in his chair, the adrenaline surge that had carried him there from the hospital finally waning.
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