The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword

by Jack Campbell

  “We didn’t want the snakes left aboard to have time to find out what we had done and override it!”

  “Idiots,” Diaz murmured, his eyes on his display. “Kommodor, our ships might be able to pick up some of the escape pods that will still be within the danger region—”

  “No,” Marphissa replied. “They jury-rigged something to put that self-destruct device on a timer. We don’t know for certain when the power core will overload. I cannot risk any of my ships being caught by that blast.” She hit her comm controls, cursing vengeance-minded workers who didn’t stop to think through their plans for reprisal against their supervisors and the snakes. “All ships, this is Kommodor Marphissa. The Syndicate battleship’s power core is rigged to overload in roughly ten minutes, possibly less. All units are to immediately use maximum acceleration to clear the danger radius around the battleship. Stay clear of the danger zone until I give permission to reenter it. All ships acknowledge and get moving!”

  Midway was closest to the Syndicate battleship and had the farthest to go to clear the blast radius, but fortunately she was also by far the most heavily armored and shielded of the warships and thus best able to ride out the shock if it happened too quickly. Marphissa had barely finished speaking before Midway’s thrusters came to life on full, pivoting her to one side, the battleship’s main propulsion kicking in as soon as Midway’s bow had swung far enough away from the enemy warship.

  “All of our ships should be all right,” Kapitan Diaz noted. “Five minutes less warning, and it would have been a different story.”

  “Are your sensors picking up definite instability indications from the battleship’s power core yet?” Marphissa asked.

  “Not yet,” the engineering specialist answered. “Just what we had before. But, Kommodor, when we saw this snake device used at Midway, you remember the light cruiser they destroyed when it mutinied, there were no warning signs until the power core entered the last stages of overload, and those came with unusual rapidity.”

  “That’s right.” She looked at Diaz as another thought occurred to her. “How do we know those idiot workers actually set the overload device before they fled?”

  “Did you see how scared they were?” Diaz answered. “They sure seemed frightened of being caught in that blast to me. Ah. All ships are clearing the danger radius, Kommodor. Midway is the last, and she will be beyond any danger within a minute.”

  “Good.” Marphissa stared at her display. “See if your comm specialist can establish contact with the Syndicate battleship. I want to speak to their commander.”

  “Kommodor, that will be CEO Hua Boucher.”

  “I know. I want to speak to her,” Marphissa repeated.

  It took another half minute before a new virtual window appeared before Marphissa.

  CEO Hua Boucher, the “Happy Hua” whose grandmotherly appearance and pleasant demeanor had lured countless victims into deadly overconfidence or confessions, sat in the command seat on the battleship as if nothing could cause her to move from it. She had a frown creasing her usually cheerful face, but otherwise what could be seen of the bridge of the battleship had a jarring feel of the routine to it. Buried deep with the hull of the warship behind immense armor and the sheer mass of all the intervening compartments, the bridge was physically untouched by the battering which had been inflicted on the Syndicate battleship’s hull. “What do you want?” Hua Boucher demanded like a disappointed elder.

  Marphissa gazed back at her, marveling at how different outward appearances could be from the person inside. “I wanted to see the sort of human who could order the bombardment of Kane.”

  “They were traitors. They had murdered servants of the Syndicate. They had no right to expect any other fate,” Hua Boucher explained, still in those disappointed tones.

  “That’s it?” Marphissa paused, trying to find words. “I grew up in the Syndicate. I know how horrible it is. But it is supposed to be efficient, it is supposed to be practical. Why kill all those people, why destroy so much? All you did was convince everyone in this part of space that the Syndicate cannot be trusted, that they must prepare to defend themselves against the Syndicate.”

  “Any other traitors will be dealt with in the same way,” Hua Boucher said. From force of habit, her words came out sounding like a firm but gentle admonition.

  “No,” Marphissa said. “You can’t keep that up any longer. You must know that. The Syndicate government on Prime must know that. Why? Why did you do something that you must have known would turn more people against you?”

  “If one death does not convince traitors of their errors, then ten deaths will,” Happy Hua said in her grandmotherly way. “If ten deaths do not, then a hundred will. If a hundred do not—”

  Snake philosophy, laid out in the starkest possible terms. Marphissa looked away, trying to regain her composure. “You’re about to die. Do you have any regrets at all?”

  “Only that you did not die first.” Happy Hua smiled. “But that may still happen. We may not be as easy to overcome as you think.”

  “We’re not boarding your ship,” Marphissa said.

  “Kapitan,” the engineering specialist said to Diaz, “we’re seeing a sudden jump in power fluctuations on the battleship.”

  “How long do they have left?” Diaz asked.

  “I estimate thirty seconds, Kapitan. No more than a minute.”

  Happy Hua was still gazing back at Marphissa, but with some amused puzzlement now. “Do you intend starving us out?”

  “No,” Marphissa said. She could see, in the background behind Hua Boucher, people suddenly rushing around on the Syndicate battleship’s bridge. They no longer had any means of controlling their power core from the bridge, but their instruments could tell them what was happening. “I had no choice in this. The workers you terrorized, tortured, and murdered have had their revenge. They killed you. Take that thought to hell with you.”

  For the first time, Happy Hua looked rattled, her eyes widening. She started to turn to speak to someone at the back of the bridge.

  Her image vanished.

  “Overload, Kapitan,” the engineering specialist said.

  “We are well outside the danger region,” Senior Watch Specialist Czilla said. “We will feel the shock wave, but it will have spread out too much to be a danger to us.”

  Diaz nodded, touching a control to speak throughout Manticore. “Brace for shock wave.”

  Manticore rocked like an oceangoing vessel hit by a large swell.

  “No damage to Manticore, Kapitan,” Czilla reported.

  Diaz waved one hand in acknowledgment. “Kane is avenged, as are the crew who died aboard Harrier,” he told Marphissa.

  “And yet I have no joy,” Marphissa murmured. “Only satisfaction that she will kill no more.” She straightened and checked her display. The Hunter-Killer that was the sole surviving Syndicate warship in this star system was still fleeing toward the jump point for Kiribati.

  Marphissa touched her comm controls. “Midway, you are detached to proceed at best speed to the inhabited world and provide support to our ground forces on that planet. All other ships, operate independently to recover surviving escape pods. Keep all Syndicate personnel you recover under guard until we can screen them to see if any snakes are among them.

  “The space of this star system is ours. You have won it. For the people, Marphissa, out.”

  —

  ICENI ate dinner in her office, seeking solitude to recover from the shock of the day’s events and the stress of having dealt one-on-one with so many citizens without a single intermediary. It hadn’t killed her, but it had been so different from anything in her experience that she was still trying to adjust to the mental and emotional strain of it.

  “Madam President, we have received a message from the Alliance mobile forces. It is marked as a reply to your earlier message.”

  Iceni took a drink of wine before answering. “Send it to me. There’s still no sign of Mehmet Togo
?” She had wondered if he had somehow been trapped by the mobs, penned into some location from which he couldn’t escape without attracting far too much attention. But if that had been the case, he should have been able to move again after the threatening mobs turned into participants in a planetwide festival that was still ongoing in many places.

  “No, Madam President.”

  She peered at the command center supervisor. “How long have you been on duty? Didn’t I speak to you this morning?”

  “Yes, Madam President, you did, but we were ordered to remain on full alert until stood-down, so I have remained on duty.”

  Iceni barely managed not to roll her eyes in exasperation. Some senior supervisor had decided to play it as safe as possible by keeping all of the more junior personnel on full alert. “Stand down from alert status. Return to normal routine. Advise all offices of that, then you get some rest.”

  The supervisor smiled in sudden relief. “Thank you, Madam President. You . . . thank you.”

  She sighed as that window vanished and another appeared with Black Jack’s message ready to play. If her supervisors started acting like those citizens in the plaza, there wouldn’t be anyplace left for her to hide.

  Iceni poured more wine and leaned back, determined to be as relaxed as possible while viewing Black Jack’s message. If it was bad news, being tensed up wouldn’t make it better. She touched the play command.

  Black Jack must have sent his reply as soon as he received Iceni’s message. He looked a bit stressed and worn, but given his responsibilities, that was understandable. Still, maybe someday she could give him a few pointers on managing his external appearance. Maybe at the same time he could give her pointers on dealing with masses of worshipful citizens.

  “President Iceni, this is Admiral Geary,” he began. “We came here only to escort the Dancers back to Midway. They are proceeding home from here on their own. We cannot remain in this star system one minute longer than absolutely necessary because of the danger that the hypernet gate may be blocked before we can leave. I don’t know when any Alliance ships will be able to come through here again. Perhaps not until we figure out how to override that ability to block access to the gates. I regret that we cannot offer any assistance at this time and also that we cannot offer any suggestions as to the meaning of the message the Dancers sent you. Good luck, and may the living stars aid you. To the honor of our ancestors, Geary, out.”

  She sat thinking after the message had ended. She couldn’t fault Black Jack for not wanting to be trapped here if the Syndicate used its trick to block access to the hypernet. Until it was learned how the Syndicate was able to do that at times and places of its choosing, and more importantly how to counteract or nullify the block, everyone had to treat the hypernet as a potential one-way street that could leave them stranded far from home.

  It would be a good idea to keep as secret as possible that Black Jack had no idea when he might return with a fleet at his back. Not that Black Jack showed up very often, but the uncertainty tied with the amount of power that the ruler of the Alliance wielded surely helped discourage some parties from planning aggression against Midway Star System and its allies. The Syndicate wasn’t the only problem out here.

  May the living stars aid you. What exactly did that mean? She sent the query into her database, receiving a long answer about old religious beliefs and how they tied in with even older ones.

  As she read, it gradually dawned on Iceni that the phrase meant that Black Jack was genuinely wishing for her success and invoking the most powerful influences he believed in to help her.

  Well. That was good. That was very good.

  Iceni raised her wineglass in a toast to a man who by now was somewhere nowhere in the hypernet. You are a very good friend to have, Black Jack. Here’s to what I hope will be a beautiful friendship.

  But thinking of friends and the support they could offer somehow led to thoughts of Artur Drakon and wondering whether Midway had reached Ulindi in time to make a difference. That took a lot of joy out of the moment.

  —

  FROM this high up, the city where the ground forces had landed didn’t look too bad except for one large crater where the snake headquarters complex had once been and a big field littered with smaller craters that marked the site of the ground forces base. The base itself lay under an uneven, heavily cratered expanse that marked extensive surface-level bombardment.

  Midway slid with ponderous grace into low orbit, hurling out bombardment projectiles that turned Syndicate artillery positions into more craters. A forest of hell lances danced downward from the battleship, tearing apart aerospace craft racing to hide or escape.

  “Find the highest-power jamming sources,” Kapitan Mercia told her bridge crew. “I want them taken out so we can speak with our ground forces.”

  “Bombardment?” her weapons specialist asked.

  “Uh, no. Not unless they occupy isolated locations. We’re not Syndicate anymore. The people . . . are safe from us.” That felt very odd to say, but also very good. Mercia looked over at Bradamont, wondering if the Alliance officer was judging her, but instead Bradamont looked as if she was remembering unpleasant events. Of course. The Alliance had bombarded citizens, too. The realization that Bradamont would not be lording it over her about the Alliance’s smug moral superiority in that regard (and all others) relieved Mercia, but also saddened her that such a thing had to be among their shared experiences. “Do you think humans will ever reach the point where something like Kane could not happen?” she asked Bradamont.

  The Alliance officer looked back at her. “Humans seem to have too great a talent for that sort of thing. But I hope we can make such things as rare as possible.”

  “That’s something worth working for,” Mercia agreed.

  —

  “SOMETHING is going on in the Syndicate positions.”

  Drakon raised his head, blinking away fatigue. How many days had it been since the assault force landed? He wondered if another up patch would be a good idea but decided to put that off a little longer. “What are you seeing?”

  Colonel Kai pursed his lips judiciously. “It looks like fighting.”

  “Fighting? In the Syndicate positions?”

  “Yes, General. It could be a trick, of course, but to all appearances, the Syndicate troops encircling us are fighting each other at various points opposite my brigade.”

  “General?” Colonel Safir called in. “What Colonel Kai is talking about, I’m seeing that spreading into the parts of the Syndicate line facing me.”

  “Colonel Malin,” Drakon called, “are we picking up anything about the activity we’re seeing in the Syndicate positions?”

  It took Malin a moment to answer. “General, there’s still a lot of jamming, so we’re not seeing any comms. Our sensors are spotting weapons fire that isn’t aimed at us, though. Wait. Here’s something. Watch this replay of an event that we just observed opposite sector five.”

  Drakon saw a small virtual window appear on his display, the image zooming on part of the Syndicate positions as a single figure in battle armor stumbled out into the open and began running at an angle, not toward the base or back into the Syndicate lines, but through the open area between them. Whoever it was had only taken a half dozen steps before weapon discharges could be seen coming from the buildings behind. The figure stumbled, tried to regain its feet, then fell and lay unmoving.

  “Unfortunately,” Malin said, “the lack of rank markers on the outside of the armor prevents us from knowing whether this was a worker, a supervisor, or a snake.”

  “Should we intervene?” Safir asked.

  “It could be a trick,” Kai said. “To lure us into sending troops into the open. That bit with the soldier shot down in plain sight was a bit too dramatic.”

  “Colonel Kai raises an important point,” Malin said.

  “There’s a lot of weapon discharges going on out there,” Safir argued. “If this is a trick, they are burning a lot
of ammo and energy on it, and we’ve spotted other soldiers being hit inside the Syndicate positions.”

  Drakon zoomed in his focus from the base sensors and those on his soldiers that could see the events playing out in the Syndicate line. The command network automatically integrated all of those pictures to create a single view that showed everything that could be seen.

  The open area between the outer defenses of the base and the first row of buildings had once been a flat, level expanse of pavement in some spots and grass in others, kept painfully clean and clear to avoid offering cover or concealment. Now it was littered with the remnants of expired chaff round decoys and pitted by craters of varying sizes from bombardment. The remains of the soldiers that Drakon’s forces had lost assaulting the base were still out there, most of them hidden under the bodies of the much larger numbers of Syndicate ground forces who had died in repeated, futile attacks. A haze, born of the fighting, slowly dissipating chaff clouds, and the vestiges of the bombardments which had fallen on or near the open area, drifted slowly across Drakon’s field of vision, partially obscuring his view.

  The buildings where his own soldiers had sheltered before taking the base, and which had been occupied by Syndicate soldiers since then, were riddled with large and small holes on their first stories. Some were merely skeletons of buildings, the curtain walls within and on their exteriors having collapsed to leave bent frames standing. Rubble from the buildings had been mounded before the largest holes to provide cover and block views, and also formed into temporary, low walls across the wide streets separating blocks of the buildings to allow concealed movement behind them. The damage allowed fragmentary views of activity among the Syndicate soldiers. Drakon could get momentary glimpses of soldiers rushing through the buildings in groups of various sizes, spot weapons discharges that were not aimed at the base occupied by his own soldiers, and occasionally what looked like brief hand-to-hand encounters. But the partial views left him unable to know what he was not seeing and did not provide a complete enough picture to be sure of what he was seeing.