by R Coots
Effective. Look at that word. How many credits you think you’d get paid if they knew you could say it in more than one language?
Syrus shoved the voice back down, to the corner of his brain where he kept everything else not needed for of surviving from day to day. He didn’t have time to deal with his conscience, imaginary or not.
The ralenen stood looking at him, adding the slow drip of acid contempt and the heat of anger to the electric fear radiating off the watching prisoners. Fuckers. Whole fucking Fleet felt like this, damn it all. Even the ones who claimed to support his rule as Warlord did their best to bake him dry and corrode his brain.
So far he’d managed to hide his reaction to the constant state of near rebellion, but he knew if they ever figured out they could torture him just by standing in the same room as him, his ass was cooked. Too fucking bad his survival instinct outweighed the temptation to let them in on his secret. Three years and he was still paying the price for keeping Rissa’s body from desecration.
Survival was a fucking bitch.
“Who wants this fucking shithole backwater?” Syrus snarled down at his men. “Step up.”
Ten of the thirty men separated themselves from the rest and came to stand in front of him. Syrus nodded to the others, who stepped back to line the sides of what was now an arena. The ten challengers thumped their fists to their shoulders and bowed.
Syrus eyed them for a moment, then looked around for his second. He found Quinn standing in the hatch of the drop ship, almost completely hidden by the shadows of the interior. Syrus snorted. The man knew how to make an entrance when he wanted to.
“Quinn,” he yelled. “You ready to get this thing started or what?”
If the man had a problem with the way his warlord handled the job of taking official ownership of a solar system, he’d never said anything one way or the other. He bowed, the bleak sunlight gleaming off the silver enamel of his helmet, and came down the ramp to stand in front of the candidates.
Syrus tuned out for the speech. He’d paid attention the first couple times he’d heard it, back when he was still learning this warlord shit and getting used to the fucked-up way the Fleet ran its business. But the words Quinn used didn’t change much. So long as the trials went as planned, Syrus figured he didn’t need to worry about them. He’d be gone by sunset and this backwater hole wouldn’t be his problem to deal with. A few days in his quarters reminding his women that he still existed, a real bath, and he’d be off to stomp the next bunch of Imperial bastards into the ground.
Quinn shouted, and Syrus hauled his focus back to the arena. The ralenen were trying to kill each other. It was more organized than the free-for-all of battle, but since the pairs of fighters had all started at once, it wasn’t tidy either.
Quinn moved through the combatants, judging. Watching. Every so often he’d put himself between an attacker and a downed body, hauling the winner off before the man could strike the killing blow. Feet churned the bloody sand to sticky mud. More than one man caught a glancing blow from a knife. Med-techs ran in under flailing limbs and slashing knives, loading one man after another onto floating stretchers.
Each time a wounded ralen rose, dripping, he snarled louder and swung harder. Some were more calculating. Some trusted brute force. They all puffed and blew, and Syrus knew it wasn’t just because of the air quality. He could feel their emotions from here. He could barely keep a lid on the answering temper churning his insides. Lucky, his duties as Warlord didn’t include keeping the ralenen in line during a Challenge.
Best he could figure, the reasoning was that they might turn on their warlord, knife him, and fuck up the leadership of the Fleet itself. Syrus didn’t care about that. In his case, he’d be just as likely to lose his shit first and rip their throats out. Anything to make the pain stop.
The Challenge didn’t last long. Quinn dragged the new anined off his last opponent and threw him at the feet of the throne. Then he planted a foot in the man’s spine to keep him from going after the stretcher. Syrus raised an eyebrow at Quinn. For the third Campaign in a row, these two ralenen had found each other in the melee. And for the third time, the same man had been loaded on a stretcher and carried off. Well, their little pissing contest was over now. Syrus took a deep breath and braced himself against the emotions churning through the air around the anined. He still hadn’t figured out how these people could be happy and angry at the same time.
“Milord.”
Syrus looked up at Quinn as the man crunched his way up the hill to the throne. A killer’s blue eyes watched him from under the man’s helmet. The snakes that wrapped and twisted around the brambles lining its rim gleamed dully in the flat light. For one second, Syrus almost thought the snakes had turned to watch him, but it was just a trick of the light.
Fucking snakes. Why the hell did a space-going fleet have such an obsession with trees and snakes?
“Milord, are you ready?”
Syrus jerked out of his daydream of bashing that helmet to pieces and looked back at the ralen standing in front of him. “Yeah,” he said. He waved at a cluster of soldiers standing just behind the throne and called out, “String him up.”
The men obeyed, hauling long metal bars down the hill and dropping them in the middle of the little arena. More men brought equipment, while the rest started lifting and bracing things into place. In minutes, a framework had risen on the bloodied rocks and the soldiers started bolting on supports to brace it against the winds.
“Milord, if I may.”
Syrus decided that if Quinn called him “milord” one more time, he was going to do something unacceptable and violent. His gloves creaked as he gripped the arms of his throne and waited, wondering if the man would say it again.
Nothing. Just expectant silence and the emptiness of feeling only this man could manage.
Syrus sighed. “What now?”
“Milord, we have a report in from the next system.”
There were two possible exits from this shithole. One full of people to Conquer, the other not full of people. Of course Quinn was going to make him guess which one he was talking about. Syrus raised his eyebrows at the man.
Quinn coughed. “The unpopulated one.”
Syrus took the slate Quinn handed him and propped it against his knee. He didn’t crack it in half or twist it to pieces, or any of the other things he wanted to do. And he didn’t order the soldiers to grab Quinn and drag him down to the torture rack. The rard was already in place anyway, dangling from the top spar and coughing quietly.
“We don’t have a complete scan just yet. Long-range units are still sending back data on individual satellites. The mainframe of the Edde Belo is still what parsing geologic and astrological data there is. There is a planet in the habitable zone.” Quinn stopped, frowning.
“The data, Quinn.”
“It’s the fourth planet from the sun,” Syrus’s second said. “Preliminary scan says it’s uninhabited. But . . .” He looked down at his slate and seemed to make some sort of internal calculation before swiping his fingers across its surface. A batch of pix bloomed on Syrus’s slate. “There are structures. They look Navlad.”
So much for the data from the dummy-sat. Fucking thing had gone through, latched on to the Barbican framework on the other side, and told them nobody’d been through the gate since “ever.” Right. Trust a sat labeled “dummy.”
“It find any other keys coming in to that gate?” Syrus asked.
“No, my lord. Not yet.”
Figured. It took the techs weeks to punch their way through the encryptions on the Barbs, forcing the keys to reveal themselves so the Fleet could move on to the next system. They started the moment Conquest began on the current system. Fuck, half the reason the Fleet did just Seed the planets as they went by was to give the techs time to break through to the next system.
This go around they’d been focusing on the populated system. The empty one was just a formality, a place to send green troops from
the reserves on already-Conquered planets to season them up a bit. Now it looked like the techs would have to shift their focus. And fast.
The rard screamed and Syrus looked up from the slate. From the way the Imperial man strained against his restraints, the new anined had just made his first cut. The tethers between the shackles and their anchors snapped him back into place, a little tighter than before. Even odds he’d get his arms pulled off before the new anined was done skinning him.
The anined did something else out of sight, and the rard screamed again. The noise cut off halfway through as the man dissolved in broken coughs. But his fear didn’t stop. Even up the hill, Syrus could feel it stabbing at his nerves.
He looked back down at the slate before he gave anything away. An empty system? Maybe a vacation planetside was what he needed. Go down, look around, not worry about how many men they’d lost in the latest push or if they had enough birds in the air to cover them all.
“Sure there aren’t any people down there?” he asked. They’d been planning to use the next system to reorganize the ships in the Fleet. Bring up reserves from shipyards and planets further back in the chain of occupied systems. Then Seed the satellites so the Navlad couldn’t use them, check for another Barb, and move on.
Quinn frowned and almost twitched. “Not so far as the sats can tell. No defenses in atmo or orbit, either.”
Something in the quality of the other man’s voice registered a bit clearer. This was about the buildings. Did he have some data he wasn’t sharing? Something more than ruins that may or may not have been Imperial Navlad?
In the past few hundred years since the Navlad Empire started fracturing around the edges, any number of planets had been abandoned. Fuck, whole solar systems had packed up their colony ships, pulled all the solar panels around their respective stars, and taken off.
Some had headed for the Core of the Empire. Some had scattered to the {{Borders. Various conglomerates, federations, and even single-system holdouts like this one were scratching out a living just beyond the reach of the Imperial Armada. But not out of reach of the Kuchen Fleet. As far as Syrus knew, no one could keep the Fleet from forcing their way through any Barbican they found. Not with the security protocols this side of Hadra’s Net so outdated.
Sometime in the past, there must have been a reason for a Barbican in this system to lead to the next. Structures meant people. Had they moved here, to this system? None of the histories he’d read mentioned anything about Barbicans being set without purpose. They were the gateways of the universe, the roads around the Galaxy. They made troop transport, freight, and even private travel possible. They shortened travel time from years to minutes.
Without the Barbicans, the rardog of the outer systems would have no way to back the capital. Agricultural Ajiri planets would have no way to ship their goods to the industrial planets. They’d have no market outside their own systems. And without Ajiri planets, the Core and Kovavek planets would starve in short order. There were limits to how much of a population you could support when space was limited and your facility was dedicated to turning out battery components instead of food.
The Kuchen Fleet knew this. It was how they’d managed to penetrate so far into the Empire. It was why they’d started this mad quest to begin with. The Fleet ate away at the edges as the Empire crumbled from the outside in. And as they came, they absorbed the technologies of the conquered worlds and set the shipyards and manufacturing plants to building Kuchen designs instead.
“What aren’t you telling me about this system, Quinn?”
“There seems to be a power source on the habitable planet.” The look on Quinn’s face would have been a scowl on anyone else.
Syrus raised an eyebrow, then laughed. “When was the last time we ran across an empty system? Nothing in it?”
“Before you joined us, My lord.” The look on his face said: Don’t ask questions if you already know the answer. Syrus made a rolling motion with his free hand. Quinn shut his mouth.
“You’re paranoid,” the warlord told his second. “That’s good. But there’s still a signal down there.”
“My lord,” Quinn almost blurted. “The risk.”
“Of it being a trap?” Syrus tapped the edge of the slate. “That’s true, but—”
The rard hadn’t quit screaming since the anined first touched him. Until now, Syrus had shoved the happenings in the arena down into the deep parts of his brain, to be endured and ignored.
Fear blasted its way up the slope, through Syrus’s exposed skin, and up his nervous system, frying the base of his brain. He snarled and nearly dropped the tablet. Stupid fucking bastard. Stupid relic of an obsolete—
He stopped. Set the slate on the arm of the throne and thought about what he was about to do. Could he do it? Could he manage it without blowing his cover?
How else was he going to find anything out? He could wait until they got through the Barbican. And maybe spring a trap before their sats could send them fresh data. Or he could find out what he could here and maybe avert disaster.
His only option in that direction lay with the rard. He couldn’t send the techs back into the domes to see if any data centers had survived the last push his men had made through there. There wasn’t time. Besides, he was only nominally in charge of the system. The new anined had just as much right as his warlord to say what would happen here. Once the rard was dead, the anined would have almost total control.
Syrus stood before he could talk himself in any more circles, then started down the slope to the clearing and its occupants.
“Milord?” Quinn asked.
Syrus ignored him and kept moving. A sort of rustling noise filtered through the air around him, the prisoners muttering to themselves as they watched his progress towards their ruler.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing and took a breath. If he’d thought it was painful when he was up on the throne, then being this close was hellish. He wanted to tear his armor off until he got to the nerves. Not only did he have some thousand odd people watching him like he was going to rip their leader’s face off—now he had the anined giving him the stink eye. And putting out enough furious heat to make the dormant volcano they were standing on start spitting lava all over again.
Where was a winter lake when you needed one?
Syrus settled back on his heels and dropped his hands to the guns holstered on his hips. Deep breath. Feel the bad air burn the throat, and exhale. He could manage this. He’d managed worse. A voice screamed at him from the sinkhole in the back of his mind, telling him to get a grip and not give in. He ignored it. There was no one around to knock him on his ass or keep him from killing everyone in reach if he lost control. He’d have to manage the same way he always managed. Sheer force of will.
He snorted and curled a lip.
The new anined opened his mouth, probably to demand an answer as to why Syrus was interrupting the Transfer ritual. Syrus held up one gauntleted hand. “Just have some questions,” he told the man.
The ralen growled—out loud, even—but stepped back and lowered the knife he’d been using to peel the maruste from the rard’s back. Blood dripped on the gravel in small pat pat pats. The stones crunched under Syrus’s feet as he circled the little clearing, moving closer to the scaffolding with each turn. The tension in the air climbed as he went, but he braced his shields as well as he could and kept moving.
By the time he came to a halt in front of the croaking rard, he could almost bear the pain. At least, enough to talk without losing his breath to agony. Syrus unclipped the hilt of a knife from his belt and used it to tip the rard's chin up. Bloodshot eyes met hard brown. Syrus waited, wondering if the rard would recognize what stood in front of him. But the only thing he saw in the man’s eyes was panic.
“How many keys does your Barbican have?” he asked, slowly enough to disguise the rasp at the back of his throat. Just the air. That was all. Just the tainted air.
The rard’s face fell. So, he’d h
oped for some sort of salvation.
Syrus jabbed the rard in the throat with the business end of the hilt. “How many?”
“Two,” the man croaked, trying to pull away from the knife hilt and failing.
A flare of heat at Syrus’s back made him turn to look at the ralen. The man stopped, halfway into a step that would have brought him within punching range of his warlord.
“You stay fucking put,” Syrus snarled.
The rard twitched against the weapon Syrus still had against his skin. Something surfaced and roiled under the fear, but it wasn’t strong enough to make out clearly.
Syrus looked back at the prisoner. “Just the two? We found three.”
The rard’s Adam’s apple bobbled against the hilt. “No! No! There are only the two. Please! The one, Anteaf, the—the one you came from; and the next one in the chain! Erlkonaf! There isn’t a third, I swear it!”
“Then why the fuck did we find three?” Syrus roared as he shoved the man back. The rard rebounded against the limits of the grav tethers attached to the frame of the scaffold and wobbled in midair as the shackles and their anchors readjusted themselves for the movement.
Too late, Syrus realized he’d activated the knife. The rard sagged in his restraints. Blood leaked out his throat around the living metal of the blade, which had grown through his windpipe and probably his spine too.
Syrus snarled and pulled the weapon free. Fucking perfect. Just what he needed.
“You! You ruined it!”
Something hit him from the side. Syrus went down under the weight of the enraged anined and the heat of his fury. In the background, the crowd shouted. He forced the noise from his mind. There was just the enemy, a knife he shouldn’t use again, and the knowledge that unless he could get this man off him, it wouldn’t matter if he had any sanity left at all.
Syrus dropped the knife, scooped up a handful of dirt and rock, and scrubbed it in the man’s face. The man yelled and clawed at his eyes. Syrus lunged up. His armored fist hit the anined under the chin and sent him falling backward. Syrus followed, scrabbling to his knees, and then to his feet so he could loom over the man. Stupid fuck kept trying to get up, eyes screwed shut and roaring at the top of his lungs.