by Jay Allan
“I will ask you again,” the voice said. “Who are you, and why have you come here?”
Blackhawk’s awareness was almost back. There were five figures in the room. The one speaking to him was clearly in charge. That was obvious from his dress, his demeanor, the tone of his voice . . .
Durienne.
Blackhawk stared back at his tormentor. He tried to steady himself on his feet, to prepare to lunge forward, but then he felt something hit his stomach. A rifle butt. He wobbled where he was, but he didn’t fall. It was endurance, strength—and maybe a touch of pride—keeping him on his feet.
Then the rifle slammed into his midsection again, and even the mighty Arkarin Blackhawk tumbled hard to the floor.
Blackhawk didn’t give up, not ever. But he was a realist, too. He’d come to kill Durienne, but things were looking grim. He’d always known one day some fight would be his last.
Was this it?
If so, his ego was not happy at the thought. To be taken down by such a nonentity as Durienne?
No, he wasn’t ready to die just yet.
He just wasn’t sure he had a choice.
He swung his body hard to the side, trying with all his strength to break the shackles, to try to get back on his feet. Then, a boot slammed into his midsection, just below his armor. More pain. He ignored it, but he didn’t have the strength to break free. He lurched hard, flipping himself over, and he somehow managed to get his legs under him. He pushed, with all the strength he could muster, and somehow he was barely able to get back on his feet. He was coughing, spitting up blood, but none of that mattered. He was like a feral beast, driving toward the men in front of him, determined to kill his enemy, however unlikely that seemed.
“This one won’t break.” It was the same voice, with a finality to the tone that hadn’t been there before. “He won’t tell us anything. Kill him.”
Blackhawk’s body tensed, even as he threw himself to the side, an attempt to evade whatever attack was coming. He heard a shot, then another. For an instant, he thought he was hit, but then he realized he’d gotten out of the way just in time.
It was a victory, a small, fleeting one. Enough to buy another few seconds of life, though. And perhaps that’s all he needed.
But then another shot. He tensed again . . . but the sound of the gun was different, higher pitched.
And familiar. He’d heard that weapon before.
It fired again, then twice more. Blackhawk could see the shadows on the wall, the guards dropping to the floor. He turned, first one way, then the other, his eyes moving to the felled soldiers. They were dead, all of them, each with a single red circle in the center of their foreheads. He only knew one person that precise, excluding himself.
He sucked in a deep and ragged breath, and then he looked right at Durienne . . . and at Katarina Venturi standing behind the gangster, her razor-sharp blade at his throat.
“Katarina . . . I’m not sure what to say.” His voice was back, if a bit worse for wear, and his vision was close to its usually precise state. “You saved my life. Thank you.”
“My pleasure, Ark. I told you when I came back to the Claw, I was part of the crew. And, you know I mean what I say . . . at least to you.” The last few words were crucial. Blackhawk couldn’t even imagine the number of lies she’d told in her various covers as a former assassin. The Sebastiani were a strange group, one that had somehow perfected the seemingly oxymoronic skill of lying with honor. What she was saying invoked all that honor, but with none of the irony.
“Well, I’m damned glad you did.” He took a step forward, his eyes focusing on Durienne. He could see the fear in the gangster’s eyes. He had just opened his mouth to speak when Shira and Ace came running into the room.
“I’m glad you two could make it,” he said, turning and extending his shackled arms toward Shira. “If you don’t mind . . .”
She took a step forward, and without a word she brought her pistol to bear and fired a single shot, snapping the shackle’s chain. “Sorry we’re late, Ark, but at least we didn’t manage to get ourselves chained up.” There was a touch of humor in her voice, but she was still on edge. They still had no idea what other threats remained in the building, or were possibly on the way.
“You want me to make him talk?” Katarina’s voice was almost noncommittal, but Blackhawk knew enough about Venturi to understand just how chilling a question that was.
He looked at the gangster, who was trying to scream, to beg for mercy, but he couldn’t quite force the words from his throat. Blackhawk stared for a few seconds, his expression cold, morphing almost to stone. His hand dropped to the bag at his side, feeling the outline of the two tablets inside.
“No, we didn’t come here for information . . . and I’ve already got all we could want anyway. I suspect we’ve got more trouble heading this way. I think it’s time to call Lucas and get the Claw here.” He turned toward Shira and Ace—and Sarge, who came jogging into the room as he was speaking. “You three, I figure you’ve got eight minutes before we bug out of here, so go find anything you want to take out of here. And be careful . . . there might be more bogies hiding somewhere.”
Shira and the others nodded and raced out of the room, even as Blackhawk pulled the small comm unit from his belt, his finger hovering over the Claw’s recall button. He pressed it, and then he looked back at Venturi. He paused for a few seconds, then he stared right into Durienne’s eyes.
“It’s time to finish the mission.” Another pause. “Kill him.”
Blackhawk watched as an instant later, Venturi’s blade sliced across the gangster’s throat in a motion of almost unparalleled grace . . . and his lifeless body fell to the floor with a loud thud.
Chapter 8
“Your Excellency, we have received a report from the monitoring station orbiting Visagera. A number of ships—very large ships—have jumped into the system.” The aide stood just inside the doorway leading into the palatial office.
Stanton Halvert looked up from his vast desk—currently covered with reports and tablets full of dispatches, requests, and complaints. He’d seen hard service in Augustin Lucerne’s army, and he’d risen to a general’s rank. He’d also been one of the few who’d garnered the full trust of the great marshal. But none of that had prepared him for the work he’d been called to do in the service of Lucerne’s daughter.
Astra had handpicked him for the job, to take over the administration of the former provincial capital of the empire’s small swatch of systems in the Far Stars. For a thousand years, Galvanus Prime had stood as an ominous warning, the planet everyone in the sector knew would rule over them all if imperial claims to the Far Stars ever became reality. Now, that world, like the other five in the onetime imperial demesne, had been liberated and incorporated into the growing Far Stars Confederation. But military conquest was one thing, as was signing treaties changing a world’s status. But undoing a millennium of imperial rule, rooting out corruption and an entrenched nobility, that was quite another.
It was work for a diplomat, or for a policeman. But not for a soldier.
Yet, Halvert was there, a soldier given the job, and the reason it had fallen to him had turned out to be the sole factor in preventing him from refusing it. Astra Lucerne trusted him, and she needed someone in that nest of ex-imperial vipers in whom she could have total, unshakable faith.
He wasn’t about to let her down.
Still, he was intrigued by this new report. At least ships would take his mind off-planet, even if only for a few moments.
“Details, Farrus . . . I need specifics. What, exactly, did the scanners pick up?” Halvert sighed. He’d appointed a number of locals to his staff, an outreach of sorts to a population that had been under the iron boot of the empire for fifty generations. But “very large” didn’t meet the standards he expected in his reports. He almost smiled when he thought of how Augustin Lucerne would have reacted to that kind of dispatch.
“I’m sorry, General.” Th
e aide fumbled with a small tablet in his hands, glancing down at the screen. “Ten ships, General . . . Governor. Mass . . .” The aide hesitated.
“Spit it out, Farrus.” Halvert should have known of any incoming ships, and certainly any large freight convoys, but the only other large ships would be military, and that he would definitely know about.
“Five point seven billion tons, Governor.” The aide’s voice was shaky, and barely audible. It was clear he hadn’t really read the tonnages, even as he repeated them . . . or, at least, that they hadn’t truly registered in his mind.
“Five point seven billion?” Halvert had only been half listening, but now his attention was fully on the man standing in front of him. “I think you’d better go and recheck those figures.” He shook his head. He didn’t know who had fouled up, but he was sure there wasn’t a ship in the Far Stars anywhere close to that size.
“Yes, Governor . . . I’m sorry.” The man turned and took a step toward the door, when a woman came running in. She wore a crisp uniform, dazzling Celtiborian dress reds, and her bearing was worlds apart from the aide. Major Glistyne Loriman was part of the tiny staff he’d brought with him to Galvanus Prime. Halvert had taken to wearing civilian dress, mostly to lessen the feel of what was, in effect, still military rule on the planet. But he’d kept his Celtiborian staff in their uniforms, though he wasn’t sure if he’d done it for them, or for him.
“General Halvert . . .” He knew immediately something was wrong, and unlike the civilian aide, he trusted Loriman’s words completely. “. . . Visagera Station has stopped transmitting. Their last communique sent images of the approaching ships. I had it sent to your screen.”
Halvert looked at the workstation on the side of his desk. He reached over and pulled up the dispatch Loriman had sent.
His eyes froze on the screen.
The image only lasted a few seconds before the drone transmitting it had been destroyed, and then it looped around. Halvert realized almost immediately that the tonnage figures Farrus had reported a few moments before were correct. The ships on his screen were that large.
It seemed impossible, and for a fleeting instant he wondered where in the Far Stars they could have come from. Then cold realization set in.
He’d heard of imperial battleships, of the immense floating fortresses that were the ultimate tools of the emperor’s will. Vast, immensely powerful, pure manifestations of terror . . . but always with the caveat, the one thing that had saved the Far Stars for centuries: no ship that size had ever successfully crossed the Void.
Until now.
For all his decades of combat experience, Halvert suddenly felt sick to his stomach. It was a terrible realization, and his mind tried to rebel against it, to seek solace in the long-held belief that the Far Stars were safe from the emperor’s terrible war machines.
But there was nothing else they could be. The empire was back in the Far Stars, with far greater strength than ever before. Even as he realized without a doubt that the base orbiting Visagera was gone, almost certainly vaporized under the fire of the massive imperial batteries, something even more disturbing crystallized in his mind.
Those ships were heading toward Galvanus Prime, even as he sat at his desk. He jumped up, gesturing with his arms as he began to snap out orders.
“Planetary alert, Farrus . . . now!” He waved toward the door, sending the panicked aide fleeing out almost at a dead run. He turned toward Loriman.
“Mobilize all units, Major . . . every ship we’ve got, every soldier on leave. We’ve got a fight coming, and it’s going to take all we can muster if we’re going to have any chance at all.”
But, even as he said the words, he knew in his heart that nothing he could do would make any difference at all. Not against the shadow of doom approaching Galvanus.
“Launch all attack craft, Admiral Greeves.”
Idilus stood in the center of Vaxillus’s great control center, a circular room eighty meters across, holding more than a hundred bridge officers, plus dozens of guards and aides and attendants. The imperial service had never been called an understated affair, and the operations of a ship containing over one hundred thousand spacers, soldiers, and others was proof of that.
“Yes, General.” The admiral’s response was sharp and respectful. The rank structures of the imperial forces were a bit jumbled at the top. Admirals and generals were roughly equivalent in rank, at least notwithstanding the other details of their noble standings and appointments. Idilus had already outranked Greeves before the emperor had granted him viceregal status in the Far Stars, but on a ship, it could sometimes be problematic about who was actually in charge. Greeves responding so quickly showed the others it was Idilus . . . except that wasn’t exactly true.
There was still Ignes Inferni.
The notorious general carried his own assortment of special ranks and privileges. For now, Inferni was letting Idilus run things. But he didn’t have the slightest doubt Inferni would kill him without a second thought if he got in the way.
The uncertainty of authority between the two muddied the rank structure of the expedition, but Idilus knew that had been by design. The emperor was nothing if not paranoid, and for all he demanded his military run like a well-tuned machine, he also tended to keep his senior officers competing with one another, serving as bulwarks against any one of them becoming too powerful. A general or admiral making himself an emperor was hardly without precedent in history.
I don’t want to be emperor, though. I just don’t want to be killed for one’s fit of pique.
But he was confident in his mission, and having successfully brought the imperial forces through the Void, he had already regained some of the stature he had lost in the eyes of the emperor.
He hoped.
“All vessels report launch operations under way, General.”
Idilus just nodded, barely. The report didn’t need a response, and he didn’t waste time in giving one. He just turned and looked at the massive display on the far wall of the bridge, as oblong clouds of tiny specs began to appear next to his ships and move slowly forward, ahead of the ten massive battleships.
Each of his great mobile fortresses carried a thousand attack ships, each in turn carrying a three-person crew, as well as lasers, antiship torpedoes, and ground bombardment missiles. Each one of the almost-imperceptible dots on the screen carried the seeds of massive death and destruction, and there would soon be ten thousand of them in the space in front of his ships, all of them heading toward Galvanus Prime.
Idilus’s orders for the Far Stars were clear, especially regarding Celtiboria, but Galvanus had been an imperial world for centuries, and the emperor wanted it back. There would be executions, almost certainly, even genocide. There was little doubt many of the people of Galvanus had welcomed the Celtiborian invaders, or at least had not mounted the kind of resistance the emperor demanded from his subjects against enemies. But Idilus had been charged to retake the planet, not depopulate it. Not completely.
That meant the attack ships would be followed by landers. Each of his ships carried a full imperial legion, two hundred thousand combat soldiers in all. It wasn’t large, not by imperial standards on the other side of the Void, but Idilus didn’t imagine the entire Far Stars contained enough strength to stop his soldiers. Whatever defensive force had been cobbled together on Galvanus, it wouldn’t hold out for a week . . . if it lasted that long. Galvanus was, and would again be, the imperial sector capital, and he intended to burn the images of the power of the empire into its billions.
A ripple of . . . something . . . swept across the vast room. A stillness at odds with the activity of all those directing the attack. Idilus turned, knowing before his eyes confirmed, that Ignes Inferni had stepped onto the bridge.
“General Inferni . . . how can I assist you?” Idilus’s words were respectful, but there was caution there, too, even resentment. He had everything under control, and the last thing he needed was Inferni interfering with t
he operation just as it was getting started.
“I require one of your battleships, General.” His tone was cold, his voice deep.
“General Inferni, I have only ten ships to secure the worlds of the demesne, and to execute the imperial ban on Celtiboria. I am afraid I . . .”
“I require one of your battleships.” Inferni repeated himself. There was no noticeable change in his tone.
“Now?”
“Now.”
It was a struggle not to just explode on the man. Now? He waited until the moment of attack for this “request”?
But that was the thing: it wasn’t a request. The emperor had made it more than clear that Inferni’s mission trumped Idilus’s, despite the fact that the pursuit of one man hardly seemed as important as taking back an entire sector. Logic, though, wasn’t part of the equation at the moment, and—with a swallow of pride and anger—Idilus gave in, knowing that any further hesitation could be the equivalent of signing his own death warrant.
“You may take Exantallus, General Inferni. Your mandate from the emperor must be fulfilled . . . and I believe I can complete my own with only nine ships.” It was an attempt to save face. The act didn’t fool himself, and almost certainly not Inferni, but he hoped it was convincing to the officers surreptitiously observing this exchange.
“Very well, General.” A pause, only a few seconds. “I will take your shuttle to Exantallus. I will send it back before I depart the system.”
“That will be perfectly satisfactory, General Inferni.” Idilus practically choked on the obsequiousness emanating from his mouth.
Inferni simply nodded, as if such deference was his due—which it was, with all the blood on his hands—his face emotionless. He turned, and without another word, walked back into the elevator from which he’d emerged.
Idilus felt relief almost the instant the doors closed.