Galen's Way: A Starquest 4th Age Adventure

by Richard Paolinelli

  “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Dwyn. I will see you and the Princess back on Salacia.”

  “Figure on a few days to get ready,” Galen said as he too rose from his seat. “I should be on Nammu in about a week and Salacia a few days later.”

  “Very good,” Harmool turned to leave.

  “Hold up one second,” Galen stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. His grip was like iron. Once Harmool turned back, Galen with drew a formidable blade from a sheath in his jacket and flung it at a table surrounded by several disreputable denizens. The blade smashed through a bottle and imbedded itself into the wall between two of the men.

  “This man,” Galen announced somewhat loudly as he led Harmool to the exit, “is under my protection.

  “If you leave now,” he whispered to Harmool as an aside, “you just might make it back to your ship alive.”

  The Chamberlain wasted no time on the pleasantries and quickly departed. Galen casually strolled over to the table, retrieved his knife, and sheathed it. No one at the table felt lucky enough to try anything. After a moment, Galen turned and pitched a Persidian silver piece in the tavern owner’s direction. The man snatched the coin out of the air without looking at it.

  “For the inconvenience,” he said as he too exited the bar. “And if you keep serving whiskey like that, this place is going to get a bad reputation.”

  He stepped out into the night, the air damp with fog. He spotted his current employer safely getting into a waiting flitter. Harmool’s personal safety wasn’t any of his concern, but that chip with the twenty million aurox bars in the man’s pocket was going to be his in less than two weeks. He’d rather not have to chase down some low-level street crook to get it. Turning his collar up against the cold, he headed for the planet side spaceports where his ship waited. With any luck, the dock master had finished swapping out her fuel cells with freshly charged pods.

  “I assume you heard all of that,” he said aloud though no one was within hearing distance. “And recorded it, too.”

  It wasn’t that he distrusted Harmool, but it was always best to have a recording in case certain contractual disputes arose.

  “Of course, I did,” a woman’s voice replied in his ear. “I’ve already laid in a course for Nammu. I suppose you are taking this job only for the money? This would have absolutely nothing to do with Tristan Dragonsong, would it? You were the one who said that ‘in your line of work, revenge was a sucker’s play,’ weren’t you?”

  Galen sighed softly. When he’d ‘acquired’—certain authorities often used the word ‘stolen’ when discussing the transaction—the Tempest a decade ago, he’d removed the standard-issue AI that ran the ship. Wanting something with a little more personality than a stale cracker, he’d traded a crate of Flurillian silk that a client had failed to pick up—crashing headlong into a moon while being pursued by the authorities tends to make one miss upcoming appointments—for a custom-made AI.

  The coder had proudly presented him with “Cassandra”, who turned out to be somewhat impish, frequently sarcastic, and always a pain in the neck. But she ran the Tempest’s systems flawlessly and more often than not, anticipated what he needed her and his ship to do before even he himself knew it. Although he would never admit it to Cassandra out loud, he was actually quite fond of her.

  “This has nothing to do with revenge,” he responded, pulling his reader out of his pocket. “This is purely business. It isn’t good business to let someone else get killed when you’ve been set up. Word gets around, and suddenly you can’t get any new jobs.”

  He called up his account and punched in a series of commands.

  “Tristan should never have been there in the first place,” he continued as he worked, never breaking stride. “Vedastus sold me out to the Rekasji government thinking I’d be delivering that cargo. Tristan never knew what hit him. And that miserable rat has been holed up on Nammu ever since.”

  Galen finished by tapping send, transferring one million aurox bars into the account of Tristan’s widow.

  “My, we’re feeling generous today,” Cassandra remarked.

  “He earned it,” Galen growled, letting the AI know he was done with the subject. “He left behind a wife and a young son, and they’ll need the money. I’ve been working out how I was going to get my hands on Vedastus to settle up for that betrayal. Our client just gave me a bonus for doing it now.”

  “You might want to worry about a more pressing problem,” Cassandra replied. “You’re being followed.”

  “A young man and a younger woman from the bar,” Galen agreed. “I picked them up about a block after I left.”

  “And two more men approaching from the east,” Cassandra reported. Galen scowled. Those two he hadn’t known about. “It appears they are looking to intercept you at the intersection you are now approaching. I doubt they are looking to exchange vishtak recipes.”

  Galen quickly altered his course, slipping into the shadows of a nearby doorway and waited for his pursuers. He returned the reader to its pocket and withdrew his knife, its blade just one foot in length. A slight pressure of the thumb on the hilt and the blade’s molecular structure expanded and solidified into a blade of three feet in length. The Bata’van’s Sabre. The weapon given to every soldier of the Bata’van, the Alliance’s military, to ever wear the uniform. Galen had earned his years ago and had kept the blade as payment for service rendered when he left, the same reasoning he used when he left the military’s base planet in the Tempest.

  He left his blaster holstered. Gun play inside a bar was one thing. As far as the local judiciary was concerned, what happened inside the bars and the pleasure houses, stayed inside those establishments. But any funny business outside of the bars and pleasure houses? That was not tolerated.

  Blaster fire would instantly draw the attention of the local law, and he had neither the time nor the inclination for that kind of entanglement. No, he thought grimly, this was definitely blade work.

  The pair that had been following walked right past his hiding spot and continued on to rendezvous with their cohorts. All four quickly looked around in confusion.

  “Where’d he git off ta?,” the oldest man in the group demanded.

  “He was right in front of us all the way,” the younger male replied.

  “He prol’ly went inside one’na the doors,” the third man remarked.

  “Or,’ Galen said as he stepped out into the light, less than twenty feet away, “he’s standing right behind you.”

  All four turned in surprise, mouths gaping at the apparition that seemed to have materialized out of thin air. They should spread out, his military training analyzed, clustered together like that makes them easy targets for me to dispatch with minimal effort required.

  “This ends just two ways,” Galen said calmly, as if teaching a class back at the Academy. “You all turn around and walk away. This way, and only this way, you live to see the sun rise.”

  “And if’n we decide not’ta turn and walk,” the older man, clearly the leader, asked snidely. “Are ye gonta ask us pretty please?”

  The other men laughed. The girl, who couldn’t be more than a lune over fourteen cycles, looked nervous. Probably the first time she’s been involved in something like this, he decided, probably thought it would be a lot of fun and never once thought she could end up dead before the night was over. Her presence was going to make his task somewhat more difficult if her companions did something stupid. Which, of course, is exactly what they were going to do. He could read it in the stances the men took.

  “The second way,” Galen set, closing the gap between them to less than two yards before setting his feet and drawing back his blade, “is that you don’t walk away, and you die. You choose, and you choose now.”

  “Bugger off!” the leader shouted, drawing his blaster.

  Galen had no desire to let anyone get off a shot and bring the local law down upon them. A lunge, a sweep of the blade and half of
the leader’s arm——hand still clutching the butt of the gun—dropped to the ground. Its owner stood gaping at the stump of an arm still attached to his body, blood pulsing out in torrents. Galen didn’t give the man a chance to vocalize his pain. The blade flashed again, and the man’s head joined the arm, followed a few seconds later by the rest of the corpse.

  The second man managed to get his own blade out and got in a slash at Galen’s head. But the blow was parried, and the longer blade continued forward, piercing the man’s heart. Galen didn’t linger over the second corpse. Knowing his back was exposed to the younger man, he quickly kneeled as he pulled the sabre free. He felt the whoosh of air as the younger man’s own knife slashed the space where Galen’s neck had been only a second earlier.

  Without turning, Galen flipped the sabre around and thrust it hard behind him. The blade found its mark. He heard the sharp intake of air and the clatter of the young man’s knife as it fell from his limp hand to the street. Slowly, Galen stood, tugged the sabre free and then turned as the third man fell dead to the street.

  Sword in hand, blood still dripping from the tip, he faced the young woman. She hadn’t made a move the entire fight. Standing frozen in place she looked as if she couldn’t decide if she should flee in terror or just faint dead away in the midst of the carnage. Galen studied her silently for a moment.

  “Are you going to kill her,” Cassandra buzzed in his ear, “or transfer a million aurox bars into her account, too? She’s kind of cute though, maybe you should bring her along to Nammu as a stress reliever. It’s been awhile since you’ve had any female company. I’ve been meaning to mention that you’ve been a little cranky lately.”

  “How old are you?” Galen asked the girl, ignoring Cassandra’s needling.

  “I’m…I’m..eight…eighteen,” the girl stammered out, visibly shaking.

  “How old are you?” Galen asked again, a little more sternly.

  “Fourteen,” she admitted, her head dropping.

  “Too young for this kind of foolishness,” Galen replied, more than a touch of anger in his tone. “Where are your parents?”

  “They live in Ghoff’s Bay.”

  “Then go home to Ghoff’s Bay,” Galen dug out a handful of what passed for Cukierian currency and gave it to her. “Stay there, meet a boy, make babies, and don’t do anything foolish like this again. You aren’t cut out for it.”

  She remained frozen in place.

  “That means right now,” Galen prodded. “Unless you want to explain to the law what happened here. All they want to do in a situation like this is to throw someone in lockup for the crime. I doubt they’ll care if they catch the person who actually did it as long as someone is in a cell for it by the end of the night.”

  She shook her head sharply and then turned and fled down the street. The ferry piers lay in that direction, Galen noted in satisfaction.

  He wondered if her parents would be relieved at her return. He was an orphan and had been for as long as he could remember, with no memory at all of his parents. He had no happy memories of a “normal” home life and likely never would. A wife and children was not an entanglement someone in his line of work could afford. For a moment, that thought brought a brief pang of sadness.

  “You’re getting soft in your old age,” Cassandra chimed in as if she was reading his thoughts.

  “Stuff it,” he replied, wiping his blade on the trousers of the older man.

  “And unless you want to explain why you killed those three,” she continued without a pause, “which will likely bring up the matter of the other body you collected tonight, you need to get back to the ship now. Some busybody just called in a report of a fight in the street. The local constabulary is already en route.”

  Galen melted into the shadows and slipped away from the grisly scene. By the time the first cop arrived on site, Galen was already back aboard the Tempest. An hour later, fully fueled and provisioned, the Tempest lifted off from the surface of Cukier and set her course for Nammu.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chancellor Apam Napat.

  He’d known since his early boyhood that nothing would stand between him and his destiny. He would rise up and become Chancellor of the Alliance. Forty-three cycles later, still tall but somewhat heavier now with a hairline rimmed in grey and in full retreat up his scalp, and here he was on Taygeta, the center of the Hominid’s domain. The official residence of the Chancellor in the capital city of Jayemdahis where he called his home. He should be thrilled, ecstatic, greatly satisfied that the arc of his life had brought him right where he wanted to be.

  Instead, he found himself on the terrace of his residence, looking over a bustling city as the first sun rose above the horizon. He was worried, anxious and looking at the future with a slight tingle of fear crawling up his spine.

  On this very morning, the Senate leadership was meeting to consider calling a special session, one he himself had not called for. In an unprecedented move, the President of the Senate himself, Haverth Somilian, had called for the meeting with the intent to summon back the Senators from every Hominid world for a rare special session. Napat’s name had not appeared anywhere on the official list of invitees to this meeting either. Not that the oversight mattered. He knew in his heart that he was the subject of the meeting and would be the same for the special session which would almost certainly be called.

  Despite two peaceful years of economic growth and stability throughout the Alliance, whispers raced across the space lanes like wildfire. Whispers of impropriety in the Chancellor’s office; of backroom deals that put money in secret accounts for Napat’s benefit; and scandalous affairs with several women and two men. Not a word of it was true of course, but that hardly seemed to matter. The rumors flew on unabated.

  But those were matters that he could handle. They came with being a career politician. There was no greater indicator that you were doing your job than a higher number of rumors centered around you suddenly springing up at any moment. His predecessor had survived much worse, up until that fateful night when a combination of alcohol, a brand new designer drug, and the vigorous efforts of a female companion proved to be too much for the man’s heart to handle.

  Napat found himself wondering if he shouldn’t arrange for such a fate to befall him. He was certain he was being targeted by a specific foe, one he could not strike back against because he had no proof to support his suspicions. But he knew, beyond any doubt, that the real threat to his position was coming from Salacia.

  What he couldn’t decipher was why. Iodocus Neasa had been a long-time ally. The man had spearheaded his candidacy for the Chancellorship three years ago. Yet, over the past year, Salacia’s relationship with the Chancellor’s office had turned cool. The source of many of the rumors currently plaguing Napat could be ultimately traced back to Salacia. Even more alarming was the sudden buildup of the Salacian military.

  Adding to his frustration was the fact that there was nothing he could do about it. He could not send the Bata’vans to Salacia, not even as a show of force much less to carry out any kind of punitive strike. That would send Salacia straight to the Senate in justifiable outrage. His Chancellorship would come to an abrupt end shortly after.

  “Chancellor?” an aide stepped out onto the terrace. “Rowan Eldereef has arrived and is waiting for you in your office.”

  “Thank you, Phare,” he replied as he turned away from the city vista. “You may tell the spy master that I will be there shortly.”

  The young woman gave a slight bow and departed to deliver the message. Napat paused long enough to cast a last look at the massive Senate building less than a mile away. Every Hominid world was represented within those walls. His job was to represent them all in their combined interest—as long as they had faith in him to do that.

  He couldn’t help but wonder if, the next time he stepped into that building, it would be to discover that they no longer did.

  * * * * *

  “Rowan,” Napat greeted
as he strode into his office. “I am glad to see you, old friend. I could use some good news right about now.”

  “I’m afraid I have none to give you,” Eldereef replied sadly as he rose from the chair nearest the Chancellor’s desk in the spartanly decorated office. “As much as it pains me to say it, Apam, we have turned up nothing of use.”

  “Nothing?” Napat exclaimed, walking around his desk and sitting down heavily in his chair. “How is this possible? I was certain…”

  “As I still am,” Eldereef assured as he reclaimed his seat. “My spies are still in place and keeping their eyes and ears open. There is something off about Salacia right now, we just need more time to uncover what they are up to.

  “Sooner or later,” he continued, “they are going to slip up and reveal their secret to us. The moves they are making are anything but what a peace-seeking planet makes, Apam.”

  “We may not have the luxury of time,” Napat replied with a sigh. “The Senate’s special session will get underway as soon as the last of the representatives from the outer systems arrive.”

  “It will still take them time to get here much less get to a final vote,” Eldereef pointed out. “And you have, at your disposal, many ways to delay that vote. It could be almost a full cycle before they could move to depose you. If that is in fact what Salacia is aiming to accomplish.”

  “You sound as if you don’t believe that is their goal.”

  “I am beginning to suspect there is more to this than just replacing you,” the spy master shifted forward in the chair. “We should begin entertaining the thought that Iodocus might be attempting to replace the entire Alliance itself with himself as Emperor.”

  “That is madness! Even if he somehow convinces the Senate to remove me, or even abolish the position of Chancellor outright, he could never get the other worlds to accept him as their ruler. Nor could he ever hope to raise a fleet large enough to defeat the combined forces of the other Alliance worlds.”