by Richard Fox
Tiberian fired a single bullet that hit an Indus in the chest. The wounded man backpedaled, clutching at the wound, then his entire upper body exploded into gore. Tiberian cut down the rest of the Indus with ease, stabbing the last in the sternum and lifting him up off his feet. He swung his blade aside and the dead man crashed down next to Silvas.
Tiberian walked up to Silvas, blood dripping off his armor and blade. Silvas was frozen in shock, his jaw open as he stared up at the skull motif of Tiberian’s helmet. Tiberian lay the flat of the blade on Silvas’s back, then drew it away to wipe it clean of blood. He repeated the motion for the other side, all the while looking at Silvas, his head tilting from side to side as if he didn’t know what he was looking at.
“Please,” Silvas said, holding up trembling hands.
Tiberian poked the tip of his sword into his turban, then flicked it up ever so slightly.
“Off? Take it off?” Silvas pressed his hands to its sides, his breathing shallow. He was about to push it all the way up, when his eyes fell on his dead comrades. Silvas’s eyes hardened and he let his hands fall to his sides.
Tiberian kicked Silvas in the face, crushing his skull and killing him instantly.
“My lord,” said a Daegon soldier who approached Tiberian as he looked down at the corpse. “We’ve lost direct contact with the Minotaur. Interference from the destroyed star fort.”
“It will clear in time,” Tiberian said.
“Yes, my lord, but we’ve lost the orbital fix on our prey.” The soldier lowered his head slightly. “We still have a direction link to the tracker. They’re here…somewhere.” A holo map projected off the Daegon’s forearm. A line traced from the warehouse where they’d crashed across several city blocks to the river.
“Last-known location was here.” Tiberian touched a space not far from the line. “At least we landed on the correct side of the river. Fortune favors us that way.”
“The target is between us and the freezing water…” the soldier said.
“Have the other packs spread out,” Tiberian said, making for the door. “Triangulate where they are and run them down. The kill is mine and mine alone. There’s a traitor among them. Leave that one to me.”
Tiberian ran a thumb down the side of his arm and his armor shimmered, mirroring the colors and textures around him. The rest of his soldiers slipped away from view.
“Let us hunt.”
****
“I’m cold,” Aidan whined as he, Salis and Bertram hurried down a street. No cars were moving. A fire truck and emergency crews sprayed down a burning building as others pulled peopled out from a wrecked apartment complex, the remains of a Chakram fighters strewn across the road.
“What did we say about speaking in public?” Bertram adjusted a scarf over his mouth to hide his lack of beard, then pushed down hard on his turban. “We mustn’t be noticed, young master.”
“Stop making it worse.” Salis, wearing a padded sarong, picked Aidan up and put him on her hip. Her armor had retracted from her face and head, but Bertram could still see hints of it along her wrists and neck. She pressed Aidan’s face to her shoulder as they hurried past the disaster.
“We should…I feel like we should help,” Bertram said. “Everyone else is helping. We’d blend right in, yes?”
“Until someone asked you something in Indus and your beardless mouth couldn’t answer,” she said. “We have no duty to them, only to the Prince.”
“Yes, of course, of course,” Bertram said.
“This street leads directly to the Duja Bridge,” she said. “The safe house is just on the other side.”
“I still think we should have gone to the one on the outskirts. No bridge. Just factories along the way that—”
“Factories with no civilians to blend into.” Salis gave him a hard look. “Factories that are all on fire from bombardment.” She tilted her head to a wall of smoke rising over the other side of the city.
“Then can we rest? Aidan needs to warm up,” Bertram said.
“Keep moving,” Salis said and took a few more steps, then she came to a sudden stop.
“But you just said—”
Salis grabbed him by the shoulder. Armor plates slid down the back of her hand and wrapped around her fingers.
“Something’s wrong.” Salis yanked him toward a doorway. “No soldiers at the checkpoint a block away.”
“Maybe they’re getting warm. Spot of tea, perhaps,” Bertram said as he half stumbled along with Salis.
“They wouldn’t have left their rifles on the ground,” she said.
“They what?” Bertram leaned back to look, and a sniper bullet snapped past his face and clipped his jacket, sending a bloom of down feathers into the air.
Salis kicked in the door and tossed Bertram onto a couch. Her armor ripped through her sarong and Aiden climbed onto her back as a cocoon of plates covered him, forming a hump over her back and shoulders. She swung her carbine up as a blur crashed through a window. Shots sparked off the Daegon’s armor, then the field failed as a bullet punched through his helmet and exited out the back of his head.
The infiltrator slid to a stop next to the couch where Bertram was still struggling to get out of a mass of pillows.
Salis brought a fresh magazine off the small of her back and was about to slam it into her carbine when a blurry hand grabbed her by the wrist. She reared back and slammed a head butt into the Daegon, sending a ripple across the infiltrator’s cloaking field as he stumbled back, his grip still firm.
Salis punted him in the groin hard enough to lift his feet off the ground, then grabbed him by the forearm and twisted, sending him sprawling. A ghost image of another Daegon tripped over the other and a crystal blade appeared out of nowhere, swinging at her wildly. The blade hit the cocoon and Salis gasped in fear for Aidan.
The blade bounced off and the Daegon slammed into her, pinning her against a bookshelf taking up the entire wall. The blade flipped over and stabbed at her neck. With her forearm, she blocked the arm holding the blade and held it there as the Daegon tried to use brute strength to drive the weapon home.
The infiltrator’s cloak failed, and Salis looked into a flat visor over the man’s face. The Daegon wagged the blade from side to side…then let it go. Salis knew instantly what he was doing—the other hand would catch the blade and ram it into the hump on her back…killing Aidan in the process.
Bang.
The Daegon flinched and the blade clattered to the floor.
Bertram, pistol in hand and still enmeshed in pillows, fired again and hit the infiltrator in the shoulder.
The Daegon turned around and Salis saw blood dripping from wounds on his back. She slammed two palms against the side of his head and twisted, snapping the neck and turning the visor around one hundred eighty degrees. The Daegon fell to his knees, then chest-first to the ground, feet twitching.
Bertram swung his pistol to the side and fired. The last infiltrator suddenly appeared where he was trying to get back on his feet, a bullet through the temple. The Daegon collapsed to the ground.
“Forgot about that one,” she said.
“That’s two…for me,” Bertram brushed the pillows away and got to his feet. “Wait until Commodore Gage hears about this. I got two…and just one for you.”
“You try fighting when you’ve got a monkey on your back.” The cocoon retracted off Aidan and he lashed out, squirming and fighting as he sobbed.
“Now, now…” Bertram held out his arms and Aidan practically leapt onto him. “Shhh, we’re almost there. Almost there.” He stroked the boy’s hair as Salis reloaded her carbine.
“Issue is,” she said, “did they find us by accident or did they know where we were?”
“Neither answer is good, is it?” Bertram asked.
“One less bad than the other.” Salis chambered a bullet.
“Tigey! Where’s Tigey?” Aidan whined.
“Here.” Salis bent down to pick up the stuffed animal…and
her grip tightened on something in the foot. She squeezed hard and the tracker inside cracked.
Her armor formed a helmet over her face and a wave of static assaulted her ears and eyes. Everything went dark and her body froze in place.
+Unauthorized code+ her AI told her.
“Reset, get me loose.” Salis fought to move, but the suit was like a vice.
+Overriding. Motor function enabled+
She fell against the bookshelf, bringing down a cascade of antique hardbacks as shelves broke beneath her weight. She struggled to right herself, then pulled Bertram from the building as she ignored his panicked questions.
“…mo te comdenavis.” Sounded in her ears. “Quid na…who is this?” Tiberian asked.
“Morgaten, break the connection. Do something,” she said.
+System processing.+
“Anything!”
“We know what you all are, you cowards,” Tiberian said. “You should have come with the rest of the True Rulers to beyond the Veil. You should have suffered with us, been made pure through the pain.”
“You’re monsters. Tyrants.” Salis pressed a thumb to the back of one hand to initiate a hard reboot, but her AI used her armor to pull her hand away.
“We are what humanity deserves. We are the whip that will bring you all back into the fold,” Tiberian said. “Geneva is too far gone. We won’t bother with your false Houses. We’ll just turn your planet to glass.”
+Keep him talking+
“How do you know anything about my House? I am of the Guards. There’s no stain on our honor like the Daegon.”
“Fool. You are the Daegon…or at least you were,” Tiberian said.
“What?” Salis stopped and looked back at the building from where they just escaped.
+Sending+
There was a scream over the connection and Salis ripped her helmet off. The transmission cut out and her AI prompted her to put the helmet back on.
+System cleared+
“What did you do?”
+Sensory feedback loop. Don’t ever make me angry or you’ll feel it too. Eighteen minutes to the bridge if you continue at normal pace+
She shifted the helmet off her face and head, then dragged Bertram over to a department store. She broke a glass with her elbow and took a sarong off a mannequin.
“Miss Salis…” Bertram and Aidan looked at her with wide eyes. “A bit of an explanation, perhaps?”
“I don’t…I really can’t. In fact, I’d like one myself. There was a device in…” She looked down at the stuffed animal in her hand and reached back to throw it. Bertram plucked it out of her grip and gave it to Aidan.
“Not anymore, I assume,” Bertram said. Aidan clutched the doll to his chest, staring daggers at her.
“No…no, it’s gone. But when I broke it, my AI and the programming in the device…merged. Which is supposed to be impossible.”
“And then?”
“And then…nothing else that matters right now. Keep moving. We have to get to the bridge before they catch up.”
****
Tiberian was on his hands and knees, a small pool of blood beneath his face as he spat out a bit of his inner cheek. The pattern struck him as somehow beautiful, the vivid red against the white snow of the rooftop.
“Master?” one of his soldiers asked. “Do you require an evac?”
“No.” Tiberian wiped tears of pain from his eyes and held up a hand. A soldier pressed the edge of his skull-faced helmet against his palm. Tiberian shook blood out from the inside and put it back on. He rose to his feet on rubbery legs, then keyed a drug cocktail that his suit injected directly into his spine, making all the pain vanish into a pleasant haze.
“All of you,” Tiberian said, “disconnect your compliance protocols from your suits. My voiceprint is your authorization. I forgot how much those things hurt.”
“How did—”
Tiberian marched away from the questioner and went to the edge of the rooftop. He looked out across the river to a bridge.
“I know where you’re going,” Tiberian said, touching the side of his helmet. A static-filled channel sounded in his ears.
“Fighter echelon nine nine. What are your orders, my lord?”
CHAPTER 19
Gage took a sip of tea, noting a faint taste of lemon and honey just the way he normally took it. Emma either had good instincts or Bertram had left her specific instructions. Gage was too tired to decide.
He set his tea cup down on a small tray built into his command console and rubbed his eyes. Hours of watching the battle over New Madras while reworking an idea again and again as the operational picture changed had worn him out.
“Progress, sir,” Price said. “Comms broke the firewall on the Indus internal network. They’re parsing for Chadda’s personal lines now.”
“Well done,” Gage said. “Don’t wait to patch me in. We’ve no time for subtleties.”
“Aye aye.”
Gage tapped in a command on his console and Captain McGowan appeared in the holo tank.
“Commodore?” McGowan looked like he’d just stepped out of a barbershop, his face clean shaven but for a pencil thin mustache and hair that would look impeccable even after removing his void helmet after a long battle.
“The Sterling received a cross level of torpedoes…three hours ago. Any integration issues?” Gage asked.
“I’ve got my sailors working nonstop to rebuild the tube housings,” McGowan said. “Next scheduled update isn’t for another hour. I was saving my report until then.”
“Wait…your battle cruiser has twenty high yield tubes. Why are you—”
“Commodore,” McGowan smiled slightly, “my magazines have a precisely zero count of standard Mark XII torpedoes. You’ve loaded forty nine Mark XXI hot runners onto my ship. With the reconfiguration, I can loose a volley of twenty four hot runners in one go. If I’m going to throw a punch, it will be one the Daegon will feel. And if we need to conserve munitions, I can always launch fewer.”
Gage was silent as his mind reworked numbers.
“Good initiative,” Gage said. “I’ll have the Adamant, Storm, and the rest of the ships carrying the hot runners do the same.”
“I made the suggestion to them,” McGowan said. “All very receptive…with the exception of Captain Arlyss and the Renown.”
Gage glanced at Price, who nodded quickly and opened a comm channel to the recalcitrant officer’s ship.
“I’ve a concept of an operation,” Gage said. “You’re the most experienced captain in the fleet, as all our original ship masters were killed by the Daegon, and I want your take on it.”
“My pleasure, Commodore,” McGowan said.
Gage reached into the holo, squeezed his fingers to shrink the projection of New Madras and the close orbitals and a dizzying array of maneuver graphics, then tossed the holo ball at McGowan’s window. The holo snapped back into place.
McGowan’s eyes glanced around, absorbing the information as Gage watched him.
“This requires buy-in from the Indus that we don’t have…yet,” McGowan said.
“That’s correct,” Gage nodded.
“And you’ve left out a key weapon system,” McGowan said. “If the Reich will use their spine cannon, then—”
“How much interaction have you had with the Unter-Duke?” Gage asked.
“Very little. Lady Christina kept him all to herself.”
“The Reich aren’t a planning factor,” Gage said. “They’re going to watch from the sidelines.”
McGowan’s lip twitched with repressed anger.
“The Reich’s causus belli has always been that the chaos on their borders is a risk to their nation,” McGowan said. “Now there’s an existential threat to every settled world from the Daegon and they’re sitting this one out?”
“That’s correct,” Gage said.
“That’s…out of character. Klaven is young. Ambitious. He’s at the helm of the biggest hammer this side of th
e solar system. Everything should look like a nail,” McGowan said.
“He may come around,” Gage said. “But I’m not going to beg for the Reich’s help.”
“Nor should you.” McGowan raised his nose slightly. “I’ll add that the Castle Itter didn’t save us from the Daegon when we left the Coventry system. We were simply going the same direction as the Reich and they traveled with us.”
A new window opened and Admiral Chadda appeared. He spoke rapidly, one hand chopping up and down at someone off screen.
“Admiral,” Gage said and the Indus commander did a double take at him.
“Gage?” Chadda’s brow furrowed and he looked down at his own control screens. “How did you get this channel?”
“My people will speak to your people so you can plug the gaps,” Gage said.
“You’re not part of this fight, Gage. At least not yet. I’m trying to keep several fleets in this fight. All have had significant casualties, and I don’t have time for—”
“Albion can win this battle for you, Chadda, but you have to hear me out,” Gage said.
“You’re three hours and…seventeen minutes from high orbit. How exactly are you going to do that? I can barely anticipate what’ll happen in the next thirty minutes,” Chadda said.
“The Daegon are making a complete orbit around New Madras.” Gage zoomed in on the holo and shared his projection with Chadda. Dashed lines extended from the Daegon force and looped around the planet. “They’ll be able to bombard Theni City again in two hours.”
“At which time the governor will offer our surrender,” Chadda said. He shook his head slightly. “I can’t stop the Daegon. They’ll seize the sky soon enough and then we won’t be able to stop them from annihilating our cities like they did on Malout. The governor won’t trade our people’s lives for the pride of fighting to the last.”
“You’re wrong to believe the Daegon will spare the planet just because you’ve surrendered,” Gage said. “They want to break your will to fight. Not just yours, but all of the Indus. This is a Neo Sikh world. If you give up, then what chance do the rest of the Indus have?”