by Jay Allan
It had been a long shot, but one Holsten was sure had just paid off. Ricard Lille wasn’t the type to visit agents on routine espionage duties, and Holsten couldn’t come up with anything that could have drawn Gaston Villieneuve’s top lunatic killer to Megara save whatever was going on with the Senate…and Striker’s disappearance, two things Holsten was ready to bet his left eye were related.
If Lille is involved, he might have just killed Van. Taking hostages isn’t his preferred mode of operation…
But Van Striker isn’t the average target either.
Ethan Zacker knelt down next to Holsten, staring at a small tablet in his hands. The display was showing the street scene below. Almost a dozen men and women streamed out of the building, rushing in all directions, up and down the street, and across to the structures on the opposite side.
“They’re definitely after something, Gary. Did we just see an attempt on Lille’s life?”
“Looks like.” Holsten was focused, and, by then, he was sure about what they had seen. But there was something else, an unsettled feeling as he wondered who had almost killed the Sector Nine assassin. “But who took that shot?”
“It’s not like Lille doesn’t have enough people who want him dead.” Zacker seemed confident enough, but Holsten wasn’t satisfied.
“Want him dead? Sure. Able to track him down? How much effort did it take for us to find these safe houses? And you know we just got lucky that he showed up here himself. It took skill to track him down, and even more determination.”
“How many people has he killed, Gary? Somebody came looking for revenge.”
Holsten didn’t answer right away. He had an image in his head, a thought of a friend who had tangled with Lille. One he knew was on Megara.
Andi.
You damned fool…no wonder she was so ready to come here…and you gave her an alibi, and helped her sneak to the planet.
Andi had played him. She’d taken him to Megara, but she’d never have been able to get through the system’s security without the cover and devices he’d provided. He’d gotten her back to the Confederation’s capital…so she could go after Ricard Lille.
Holsten didn’t begrudge Andi her revenge, nor did he have a problem with her killing Lille. The man was a blot on human existence. But he was dangerous, too…perhaps deadlier than anyone Andi had every faced off against. He wasn’t worried about Andi killing Lille. He was worried about Lille killing her.
And my guess is, he knows she’s after him now.
“Gary…we’ve got to move. We have to go in or get the hell out of here.”
Holsten looked back at his comrade, and then to Jon Peterson and the dozen armed Marines crouched down behind the officer. Holsten was used to having almost limitless resources at his disposal, but he was locked out of Confederation Intelligence, at least by any routes in those who replaced him knew about, and, adding to his problems, his vast personal assets had been frozen.
Again, those anyone else knew about.
He’d been damned lucky to reach Colonel Peterson—General Peterson, he swore to himself, if he ever got back into a position of power and influence—and his people. They’d all played a role in the rescue that had freed him, and they’d been left behind on Megara for lack of transport. Holsten had been relieved to find that they’d managed to lay low. They’d risked themselves to save him, and they deserved better than to end up in a Senate-controlled prison as traitors.
And he needed them again.
Holsten glanced down at the tablet. There were at least three or four agents heading in his direction. Zacker was right. They had to hit the building, or they had to bolt. There was no time to waste.
But Holsten didn’t know if Striker was in the building or not. He’d narrowed it down to five spots that seemed likely places Lille would hold a prisoner of Striker’s importance, but that selection didn’t take into account the very real possibility—hell, the probability—that Sector Nine had other locations completely unknown to Confederation Intelligence.
Or, with all that’s happened…is it possible a faction in the Senate was involved in Striker’s kidnapping, that Lille had nothing to do with it? He still thought of his friend as a hostage, trying hard not to consider the very real possibility that he had simply been killed, by Lille or by someone else.
If he sent the Marines in, he’d alert Lille…even more than the assassination attempt just had. If his people didn’t find Striker, there was a good chance Lille would react by killing the admiral immediately.
But this may very well be our best chance.
Our only chance…
He paused, for only a few seconds, but it was all the time he had.
“Go in,” he said, his voice scratchy, the words forced.
“Go,” he repeated, louder this time, and as he did, he reached around behind him and pulled out the pistol he’d shoved under his belt.
* * *
“That damned fool!” Desiree Marieles had closed the door to her office and then activated the soundproofing system she’d had installed. She wanted to scream—she had to scream—and she didn’t want to be interrupted.
She’d just two separate reports from captains of ships returned from Admiral Whitten’s encounter with Tyler Barron. Whitten had taken more than enough force to overwhelm Barron, but all the same, she’d been at least prepared for news that her paramour had been defeated, that Barron was still loose. Whitten was the prime pawn in her efforts to destabilize the Confederation, especially now that she seemed to have lost influence over Senator Ferrell. She’d imagined if Whitten had lost, he’d at least have battered Barron’s forces, that the Confederation fleet would be in disarray.
But his whole fleet, practically every ship, gone over to Barron’s side with hardly a shot fired? Barron had won not with lasers, not with brilliant tactics, but with a speech?
One Whitten was too much of a fool to jam so his people couldn’t hear it?
Losing Ferrell had been bad news, but this was a calamity. By all accounts, Whitten was Barron’s prisoner…and that left her out in the cold, her military and political influence all but gone.
And, someone will trace some part of this to you…hell, Ferrell will probably piece the truth together eventually.
And when the pompous Senator realized he’d been used, that her manipulations had turned his hatred for Gary Holsten into virtual treason…
It was time to shut down her operation. Completely. She had to get off Megara. She’d hoped to take things farther, but she’d managed to make more of a mess on Megara than anyone had ever thought possible. There was no way Gaston Villieneuve could consider her mission anything but a great success, even if she was forced to terminate it early.
Was there?
She felt a chill, but she wrote it off to nerves. Villieneuve was a hard man, one who expected the best from his people, but he was also a realist.
She wasn’t sure she’d convinced herself, but she knew one thing. She had to get off Megara. If—when—her machinations began to unravel, all sorts of fingers would point to her. The cover she’d established as a lobbyist turned media investor would unravel with shocking speed, and those she’d manipulated would come after her from every direction.
Yes, it’s time to shut things down and get out of here.
She looked over at the comm, wondering whether she should warn Lille. Her first instinct was no…let the bastard fend for himself. But Admiral Striker could still be useful, especially if she had any trouble getting out…and Lille had Striker.
She leaned forward and activated the comm.
Chapter Twenty-Six
2,000,000 Kilometers from Station Vesta-9
Ventica System
Year 317 AC
Stockton leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, just for a minute. There was no time for sleep, not for the foreseeable future, and the energy his own worn body couldn’t produce itself would come from stims. He’d been in situations like that before. He st
ill held the record for the longest stretch ever recorded in a fighter cockpit…and he held second, third, and fourth place as well.
He faced a long trip now if he was to escape from the Ventica system and rejoin the fleet.
Assuming his jury-rigged fuel supply held out until he could find another source, and he managed to elude the Hegemony forces in the system and get through the transit point…and he somehow held his exhausted body and ship together long enough.
Oh yes…and assuming he could find the fleet and get past the enemy forces almost certainly in pursuit of Admiral Winters’s forces. That would entail some detailed scanning, analysis of particle trails and residual transit point energy signatures…and one hell of a series of lucky guesses.
It was enough to crush the morale of most spacers…but not “Raptor” Stockton. There was a part of him, one even he didn’t fully understand, that simply found it impossible to give up. At least the very long odds had gotten quite a bit shorter when he’d found not only fuel in the abandoned Vesta station, but also enough spare parts to rig an auxiliary tank in the bomb bay that had held his plasma torpedo.
It wasn’t sufficient to get him back to the fleet…but it was enough to get out of the system, and possibly to another source of fuel. He would be traveling through Confederation systems, and while the Hegemony would no doubt have blockaded the worlds they passed, he doubted they could have clamped down so quickly on every outpost and base, every mining station and fuel depot. He’d find what he needed, he was sure of that, in the serenely confident way he approached everything.
He would get back. Somehow.
Stockton knew he would die one day, that his skill and luck and perseverance would eventually fail, that the shadow that had stalked him for so long would have its victory in the end. But he was sure he would know when that day had come. It didn’t make any sense, but he was as positive of that as he’d ever been of anything. He would know his last battle, his final struggle, when it came, and he would go into it fully aware of what it was.
That day had not come.
He tapped his throttle, blasting the thrusters, keeping the acceleration down. He knew he had a good chance of slipping out of the system, but as much as he wanted to get back to the fleet, he didn’t imagine sending up a giant flare of full strength engines would be helpful in that regard. Better to slip out, leaving the smallest possible energy trail. Once he transited, he could open up, put some real distance behind him and get back to the fleet.
He glanced at the long-range scanner, a cursory look, more out of curiosity than anything else. He sympathized with Dannith’s people, and with the Marines tasked with the planet’s hopeless defense…but there was nothing he could do about any of it.
His eyes froze as he looked at the screen, not on the cluster of vessels around the planet, but at a new contact in the outer system, heading toward the planet from the enemy’s inbound transit point. For an instant, he felt a fatigued wave of misery. The Hegemony fleet had been almost hopelessly vast already…and from the looks of things, there were hundreds of new vessels inbound.
But there was something different about the new force. The energy outputs were all wrong for warships. He was far out, and he knew his readings were incomplete, that he could be missing something. He reworked his settings to feed more energy into the scanners, risking a few active scanning pulses.
No, those aren’t warships…but what, then?
He stared at the screen, and his eyes hit a row of vessels in the center of the formation. Huge vessels. Larger than the Hegemony’s most massive battleships. He felt a flush of panic at the thought of even more powerful warships, but the readings were…different.
Most of the incoming ships looked like some kind of freighters or tankers…a massive supply fleet? He wasn’t an expert on logistics, but he understood its role in space combat. Warships required repair, resupply, fresh ordnance. It was the central tenet of combat strategy. For the last century, every major advance had slowed in the face of the realities of supply. Ships got farther from their logistical bases, deeper into ravaged enemy space. It took longer to bring fresh ordnance forward, and damaged ships had to limp back to repair bases far behind the lines of advance. Every major defensive strategy was based on this…fact.
But was it a fact? Or just a question of having the vast resources needed to overcome the limitations?
Stockton was still staring at the images on his scanner as the AI updated the readout and began to analyze the results. Minutes passed, almost half an hour. Stockton had shut down his engines, gone as silent as possible, and watched the massive new fleet move across the system toward Dannith.
The AI had managed to suggest likely ship types, with assigned percentages of reliability between seventy and ninety-four percent. There were freighters, hundreds of them. And tankers, as well.
Then there were mining ships, and what appeared to be fuel processing vessels, almost portable refineries. Lastly, there was a line of enormous vessels that his AI had pegged as factory ships and portable shipyards.
Stockton felt his breath slipping away from him, and he stared, dumbfounded and shaken to the core. He’d come to think of the Confederation as the strongest economic power in the galaxy, but as he looked out at the tonnage figures scrolling down his screen, he imagined it would have taken a century or more for all the worlds of the Iron Belt to produce such a force.
The vast support fleet he was watching was no immediate threat to him…but it was a deadly danger to Winters’s fleet, and to the Confederation.
He was sure the admiral was basing his defensive strategy on trading space for time, on pulling back and allowing the Hegemony fleet to outrun its supply lines.
But that’s not going to happen. Not with this support fleet coming up.
He sat for another few minutes, watching the vast array of support vessels. They were the true key to the enemy’s conquest of the Confederation, even more than the Hegemony’s intimidating battle line. Without the enemy outrunning its supply sources, unless Winters and his forces could win an outright victory, there was nothing to stop the enemy, or even to slow them down.
They can advance straight to Megara…
Stockton felt cold…afraid not for himself, but for his comrades, for the entire Confederation.
He’d been excited to find the fuel he needed, to retain the hope of returning to the fleet. But now he had to get back. It was about more than his own survival, more than getting back to Stara.
He had to warn Admiral Winters. He had to warn the fleet—and the rest of the Confederation—just what they were facing.
* * *
“Major, get your people back now. There’s no way you’re going to stop those tanks, not now that they’re deployed.” Colonel Blanth was standing in the middle of a blasted, open plain. It was a damned stupid pace for anyone to be, especially the commander-in-chief of the planet’s entire defense.
What there was of it, anyway. Blanth’s commands had been a series of directives to retreat, to run, abandon the cities and take to the hills. To escape. That was a hard order for Marines to follow. And for a Marine commander to give.
He’d sent in some forward units, allowed them to hit the enemy LZs while they were still unstable. They’d taken out a few tanks and a fair number of the enemy ground troops, but they’d suffered as many casualties as they’d inflicted, and in the end, for all their effort and losses, they’d bought a day, maybe two. Time that had utterly no tactical effect whatsoever. There was no hope of reinforcement, no relief on the way. Dannith was cut off, abandoned, and that meant his people were on their own.
“We’re pulling back, Colonel, but…”
“No buts, Major.” Blanth snapped out the words a little more sharply than he’d intended. But there just wasn’t time to argue. There were explosions all across the field. The Hegemony tanks had begun bombarding the area heavily, and if he didn’t get the last of his Marines under cover in the next hour, they were going to be bla
sted to bits. They didn’t like running, but they’d be no good to anyone lying dead in the field.
“Luther, listen to me…we’ve got to think long here. We’ve got zero chance of beating back this invasion. Zero chance of holding any city or built up area. At best, we can keep a guerilla fight alive…but only if we get our people out of here and into prepared positions.” Blanth paused, and then he ducked as a shell struck the ground less than fifty meters from his position. The two officers were pelted with chunks of dirt, but were otherwise unhurt.
That was close…
“I don’t like running any more than you do, but that’s what duty demands right now. Our oaths don’t give us the option of heroic deaths for no gain…not when we can continue to resist the enemy another way. So, don’t argue with me right now…just help me.” Another pause. “Please.” Not a word Marine commanders used often, but right now, Blanth was ready to try anything.
Luther Holcott looked back at the colonel, standing still for a second and then nodding. “Yes, sir. But what about the local units, the planetary forces and the militia? Their families are in those cities we’re giving up without any fights. Will they obey orders like that?”
Blanth shook his head. “I hear you, but we just don’t have a choice. Anybody who doesn’t follow orders, who refuses to get to the prepared positions—and do it now—is as good as dead. Or captured, at least.” Blanth had no idea what the enemy’s policy was on prisoners. Would they accept the surrenders they’d no doubt get from the planetary forces once they were trapped with no retreat? Or would they simply gun down the terrified citizen-soldiers?