To the Victor

by R Coots

  Syrus levered himself back upright, coughed to clear the tightness in his throat, and tried to throw up a shield or two. Shit. He was so out of practice that it was like using wet cellulose to guard against artillery fire. How was Quinn doing it?

  “Armored?” he asked through the haze.

  Quinn gave him a look that would have withered grass. “Yes milord. Armored.”

  Oh. Yeah. Now he remembered. Funny how having all your failures and losses ripped out of hiding and dumped on your heart could drive everything else of your head. He looked closer at the man’s helmet. Not his usual ceremonial getup. An actual combat piece. That made more sense.

  “Well come on then,” Syrus said, reaching for his discarded helmet. “I have a feeling I know who’s causing this. Might as well bring her.” He waved a hand at Iira. “We’ll probably need her.”

  Quinn didn’t argue—just pulled his sobbing, apologizing wife to her feet, placed a hand in the small of her back, and pushed her forward. Syrus slapped his helmet on, tightened up his shields for good measure, and followed his second out of the room.

  >><<

  The halls didn’t quite run with blood, but only because the guards on the Edde Belo were stretched thin. That there was blood at all could be laid at the feet of custom. Being Fleet meant having an insane belief in your own indestructibility. Heavy armor was only for when you were getting actively shot at. On board, you compromised by wearing light duty gear of cloth composite. And no helmets.

  Syrus stepped over the body of a man who’d jammed a knife up through the soft palate of his mouth and made a mental note to have the whole Fleet wear full armor while on Campaign. Even off duty. Women included.

  It wouldn’t be a complete fix. Nothing short of wrapping everyone in a cocoon of shielding would keep them from being affected. Armor had joints and gaps, and most of the anti-sai shielding was in the helmet. But it was much, much better than nothing at all. He’d made Iira take his helmet when they reached the first of the bodies, and right now all Syrus wanted to do was sit down on the floor, bury his face in his hands, and cry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried.

  But he sure as hell wanted to. His mental shields had collapsed before he even made it out of the base infirmary. The only thing keeping him in control of his wits was fear of what would happen if he lost it.

  His breath dragged in his throat as he sucked in gulps of air and seriously contemplated swallowing his own tongue.

  Then, just as he was thinking he might actually follow through with that plan, the pain stopped. Like taking a step and finding a cliff, he went from grief and agony to numb deafness. He nearly tripped over his own feet in shock.

  “Milord?” Quinn’s voice was eerily calm.

  Syrus took a breath, then another just to be sure he hadn’t died, and shook his head. “It’s gone. Take off the helmet and see.”

  The man looked at his wife. Bastard.

  With shaking hands, Iira pulled the borrowed helmet off her head. For a moment she cradled it against her chest, shoulders hunched and head bowed. Then, slowly, she straightened. Her eyes were red, her face blotchy and tear streaked, but there was joy there like nothing he’d ever seen in any Fleet woman. Huh. Syrus raised an eyebrow but decided not to comment. Now that the grieving was gone, his head felt like someone had been using it for target practice. He didn’t want to reach out with his sai until he was sure he wasn’t going to get blasted again.

  “Right then,” he said. “Let’s go see what happened.”

  >><<

  Two crumpled heaps lay at the mouth of the corridor leading to his quarters. One was a guard. Next to him was one of the foundling women. Twenty feet to port from where Syrus stood, another body lay in front of the lift that led up to the bridge. Female, clothed. The stun gun on the floor next to her answered the question of how she’d gotten the foundling to turn off the fireworks. The flight pilot’s helmet on her head answered the question of how she’d made it down here in the first place. The etched silver collar around her neck was enough to tell him who the woman was. Quinn’s second wife. Oona.

  Syrus thumbed his comm unit and dialed in the bridge. The tech who answered sounded worried, but relatively calm.

  “Report,” Syrus said.

  “Bridge secure,” the tech replied. “No casualties.”

  For a second he wondered how they’d managed to stay sane when Oona left. Then he remembered. She would have used the airlocks on her way out.

  “Rest of the ship?”

  She took a little longer answering that one. Just as he started to ask again, she spoke. “Engineering reports minimal casualties. Flight decks secure. The rest have not checked in yet, milord.”

  Which meant they were probably dead or dying. Great. Kizen was going to take this whole mess and practically wallow in it. Just what they needed.

  Nothing he could do about that now.

  “Keep trying,” Syrus growled at the woman, then shut down the link. Kneeling, he scooped up Oona’s gun and clipped it to his belt, thinking hard. One way or another, he was going to have to touch the foundling. He couldn’t make Quinn take her, not with Oona to handle. Iira was in no shape to carry the woman. It would be stupid to make her try in the first place.

  Brushing a tangle of near-black hair away from the too-thin cheek, Syrus touched his fingers to the foundling’s neck. The air lit with the amber-orange glow of her maruste. Fully activated. He hadn’t remembered to turn the fucking thing off the night before. Shit. Now he was really fucked up the ass.

  Something hit the floor with a soft thud. He looked up. Quinn had dropped Oona. Not far. He was still kneeling. And she was still wearing the helmet. But his second didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t holding his wife anymore. “Milord,” he breathed.

  Syrus decided he’d ignore the fact that the other man was actually showing emotion. “Don’t ask me how or why or what,” he said, hoping Quinn wouldn’t push. Satisfied that there was still a heartbeat in there somewhere, he shifted, scooped the woman up in his arms, and stood. The light was even worse like this. Would it be this bad when he finally got around to screwing her?

  He’d have to figure out what to do with her in the long term. She might be worth keeping in his quarters, if she ever woke up again. And managed to put on a little weight. But if he wasn’t even going to be able to touch her without getting his eyeballs seared out of his skull, he’d have to figure out something else.

  A tidbit of information, half remembered, flitted through his head. Some old proverb about the marriage night and orgasms and blinding light. Fucking hell. He was going to have to talk to her about this. Hopefully she knew which of her glyphs he needed to cut open to get the thing to stop the light show.

  “Come on,” he said once he’d managed to open an eye against the glow. “Let’s get her put away and this mess cleaned up. Still got a planet to Conquer, and it ain’t gonna wait.”

  > Chapter Ten

  Syrus

  No one who has not achieved the rank of letten may take a wife. They may have use of the Breeder ships same as any unattached soldier, but the unpredictable nature of the lower ranks is such that trained techs cannot be risked in permanent attachment to them.

  -Rights of Ownership, Fleet Training Manual

  Syrus had met some stubborn people in his life, but every so often Quinn reminded him of the difference between stubborn and single-minded.

  The man was fairly subtle about it. He could afford to be. With Oona sitting there glaring daggers, all but demanding Syrus drop his two strays out an airlock, Quinn could sit back and make comments. Little hints as to what would happen if the rest of the Fleet found out what had happened earlier in the day.

  “I’m saying no,” Syrus growled at Oona where she lay in the infirmary bed. “I need them alive.”

  “In the meantime, you want me to lie to my crew,” the woman replied. Frustration rolled off her like heat waves in a desert, pricking and bursting like needle-fille
d bubbles. “And tell them what exactly?”

  “That the Navlad military managed to hide a sai on the Customs base. The scanner crews missed a compartment before they cleared the base for entry.”

  “Are you implying that my—”

  Quinn cut his wife off with a hand over her mouth. Syrus raised an eyebrow. That was new. His second wasn’t exactly restraining Oona, but it was as close as no nevermind. Interesting. This shitstorm with the sai woman must have rattled him more than he’d let on.

  “Hush, wife,” Quinn said. His voice was quiet, but the order was still there. “This is your warlord. Remember that.”

  Nice to know he’d been downgraded from person to thing. Syrus snorted and propped a hip up on the bed next to Oona. “You going to be civil now?”

  She glared at him over her husband’s hand, then nodded.

  Syrus waited another moment before picking up the slate he’d set aside and waving at his captain. “Now. Let’s sort out these deployments, hmm?”

  Quinn took his hand off Oona’s mouth. She took the slate and sighed, and Syrus headed for the nearest med-tech station to grab a stool so he wouldn’t have to sit on Oona’s bed while she argued with him about how they were going to cover all the missing posts. He’d brought the stool over to Oona’s medunit and was just relinking it to a grav tether when the door at the far end of the infirmary melted open. Kizen came charging through like a one-man stampede. A med-tech ran over to intercept him, asking what she could do for him. Kizen grabbed her and threw her against a nearby medunit.

  The rest of the techs got out of the line of fire, running back to their duties with heads down and shoulders hunched. That left the way clear for the other warlord to come charging up the aisle.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” the man roared as he ground to a halt.

  Syrus didn’t take his hand off the knife hilt clipped to his belt.

  “You!” Kizen headed around the end of the bed towards Quinn. “What do you think you’re doing, coddling this woman? We’ve got a system to conquer and a fucking cunt just flattened half your fighting forces without laying a hand on them. The hell do you think you’re doing in here?”

  If it hadn’t been for the small sun of fury the man was giving off, Syrus might have laughed. Kizen thought he could intimidate Quinn. The other warlord’s emotions aside, Syrus still would’ve let the tantrum play out. Except Kizen had blown past Syrus like he didn’t exist. Acting like he was the ranking officer here. As if Quinn was supposed to obey him without question.

  If Syrus didn’t cut this off at the knees, the rest of the Campaign was going to be a shitstorm of squabbles and power plays. He had enough to worry about without inter-Fleet politics fucking things up.

  So he set his slate on the bed and stood. “Talking to the wrong person,” he said. “You want to bitch at someone, bitch at the person who gives the orders.”

  Kizen spun. “You,” he spat. “OutFleet cur. You’re not even fit to lick my boots. Why should I give two creds what you think? Whatever lip service this eunuch of a second here gives your title of Warlord, I know very well that you are merely the figurehead. Fuck, he probably helped you take down your predecessor—just so he’d have a tame body under the Helm while he runs this fleet into a star!”

  Syrus couldn’t tell what Quinn felt, if anything, eclipsed as he was by Kizen. But the man’s face settled into lines that Syrus had only seen once before. When he’d held out the Helm of the Fleet, still full of Brander’s blood, for Syrus to take.

  Kizen was baiting them. Trying to see how far he could push the outFleet warlord and his crew. It didn’t matter if he was doing it on purpose or not. Question was, how to shut the man down without turning this into an all-out brawl?

  Quinn solved the problem for him. “The strong rise; the weak fall. If you have not yet synced records with our database, then you should do so. The vid of his fight for the Helm has been made available to all. OutFleet he may be, but he has kept to the tenets of the Fleet.”

  “Fah. Coddling your women.” Kizen waved a hand in Oona’s direction. “Is this in keeping with the tenets of the Fleet?”

  “Getting a captain back to her post is,” Syrus said before Quinn could do anything. “Until she’s back on the bridge, we need to work from here. Now, if you have something useful to input, you’re welcome to stay. Otherwise, I’m sure—”

  “A woman! As Captain? How long have you been out of touch with the rest of the Fleets? Women don’t belong in any sort of position. You stuff them on a Breeder ship or drop them planetside and mount as many men as you can on them until they birth enough squalling infants to make up for the men killed to take the damn system in the first place! You don’t give them any more responsibility than that!”

  Oona went from emotional stonewalling to supernova between one heartbeat and the next. Syrus fought the urge to slap at the invisible fires incinerating his skin. Instead, he fisted a hand in the bedsheets, gritted his teeth, and tried to throw up shields. He fucking sucked at shields. The more time he spent on this damned ship, the more he wished he’d actually learned how to use them.

  But he’d always been so much better at enduring.

  Satisfaction rippled through the air, cool and oily. It was almost unnoticeable, but it gave him something else to focus on. He took a full breath, unclenched his jaw, and narrowed his eyes at Kizen. “What did you really come for?”

  Even a Numb would know that he’d surprised Kizen. He just had no control over his emotions. Or his face. But the emotion faded fast. “Where’s the bitch?" the warlord snarled.

  There it was. Syrus grinned and crossed his arms. “Your branch of the Fleet has been ignoring the ‘strength of mind’ half of the creed for a long time, eh Kizen?”

  The man’s face turned an even deeper shade of purple.

  “I’ll save you the trouble of the argument. Yes, she’s in my quarters. No, I won’t bring her out. She’s got information. I want that information.”

  “She killed half your forces! Without ever laying a hand on them!”

  Repetition could tell someone a lot. Kizen was stuck in a loop on this whole sai issue. The man was terrified.

  “She didn’t take out half the forces. Not even close.” Syrus picked up the slate, still open to the figures he’d been looking over. “Only a quarter of the men. A sixth of the women were off ship, going over the base. A third of the women were at their stations in shielded sections of the ship.

  “The rest, well.” He shrugged and set the tablet down. “We’re stalled for a bit, true. Our support ships are intact. We can cycle the recruits about to graduate, train them up early and supplement with reserves from settled systems. It’ll take a few standard days to get them shuffled through the Barbs. By the time we go our separate ways in the next jump through the Barbican, I should be at full strength. Good thing we ran into you. Wouldn’t have had the backup in place otherwise.”

  Kizen looked like he didn’t know if he should gloat or not. On one hand, he’d just been told his forces would have the honor of carrying the weight of the Campaign for the next week or so. On the other hand, he’d just been told that his forces would be responsible for the brunt of the losses in the Campaign for the next week or so. It was a risk, leaving an opening like that, but Syrus figured it would be worth it if he could get the man off the topic of the two women.

  “What information could she possibly have that makes it worth keeping her alive?” the man finally growled. “There’s a reason we get rid of every Imperial woman with a drop of highborn blood. Not even this puling, gutless—” he waved at Quinn. “—would have allowed that custom to fall into deadspace. They should have been fucking killed the moment you realized they had more than an inch of those marks on their backs!”

  Oona muttered something under her breath, but quieted when Quinn laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t be shy,” Syrus told the woman before Kizen could start in on the Captain thing again. “I can tak
e it.”

  She looked up at her husband, frowned, and sighed. “He has a point, milord. There is a reason we do not keep women on board who can use—” She waved her hands slightly. “Sai.”

  Syrus shook his head. Not even the Navlad were as obsessed with sai as the Fleet. To the Empire, the talent was a resource. These Fleet fuckers acted like it was a monster in the dark, waiting to rip them to pieces the minute their backs were turned.

  Up till now, the Fleet hadn’t run across any serious resistance from a sai. What they had found was planetside. Easy enough to drop a missile or two. Or ten in some cases. No more sai, no more problem. The shielding panels built into the ships themselves would keep out the rest of their metaphysical enemies. But the panels weren’t in the outer hulls, just certain compartments. Everyone else was wide open. Now that it’d hit them on the flagship itself, they didn’t know how to handle it. That might be what fueled Oona’s temper. She’d just had a very loud alarm blasted in her ear, and it was saying she didn’t have enough armor in her ship.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said once everyone was done glaring at each other. “So far, you people have had it easy. Everything we’ve run into since I came on board has been planetside storm compared to what we’ll face once we get inside Hadra’s Net. That shit will be like a star going supernova. Everything inside the Net, the Core and all the rest of the little territories? Those are the systems that the local Families are going to protect.”

  He leaned forward so he could make sure Kizen was looking at him. “One woman. One out-of-control Projective Feel managed to stall our Campaign. We’ve lost the element of surprise now. Doesn’t matter how many Imperial satellites and communications relays our drones take out. They know we’re here and they have time to dig in.

  “Now, imagine fifteen or twenty of her. Think of what they could do to the whole Fleet. Not just one ship.” Syrus sat back and hooked his thumbs in his belt.