Zu winced and leaned forward onto the table, rubbing his temples.
“I suspect many things, My Lord Hand,” he said finally. “I can prove none of them. Or do you think me so lacking in honor I would let the things whispers accuse my Governor of to pass?
“But I have no proof, and he remains my Governor,” the General told Damien. “Oath and law alike command my obedience while these things are true.”
“I have proof,” the Hand replied flatly. “I can prove a dozen of his crimes or more, but let’s leave it at one: I know he killed Alaura Stealey with his own power.”
“And so he is judged for one and not the many,” Zu whispered, and Damien shook his head.
“He is judged for them all,” he said flatly. “Every protestor ridden down, every child murdered in a faked terrorist attack, every miner killed at Karlsberg - every worker in Government House sacrificed to make the attack on Stealey look good. I judge him for them all, and I judge him guilty.”
Damien’s words were not metaphorical. A Hand, above all other things, was a judge - the highest member of the Protectorate’s judiciary short of the Mage-King himself.
The old General’s face was now entirely buried in his hands, and he stayed like that for a long moment. When he straightened, however, his gaze was level, and he appeared calm.
“I do not doubt you,” he said flatly. “And unless I choose to defy the Hand you wear, I am bound to obey you over even my own Governor. But understand that I cannot deliver Vaughn to you.”
He held up his hand before Damien could speak, shaking his head and continuing.
“It is not that I am unwilling,” he clarified. “But Vaughn has long had his finger in the promotions and assignments in the Ardennes Planetary Army. Many of my officers owe their loyalty to him. Those loyal to me or even simply to justice are insufficiently concentrated for me to assemble any kind of reliable force.
“Were I to move against Vaughn, my Army would tear itself apart - and I would achieve nothing. So tell me, My Lord Hand. What would you have me do?”
“That is about what I was expecting,” Damien told him, considering the old General. Trying to build a truly professional army while Vaughn kept interfering to keep chunks of it loyal to him must have been frustrating for Zu, but the old man barely showed it.
“I have assets in place or in motion to remove both the Governor and Mage-Commodore Cor,” he told Zu quietly. “But the resources I have on the surface are insufficient to overcome both the Ardennes Special Security Service forces in this city and the Ardennes Planetary Army forces here.
“While it would be useful if you could provide reliable troops, it is not necessary,” Damien continued. “What I need is for you to make sure the Army stays in their barracks when I move.”
“You’re working with the Freedom Wing,” Zu stated. It wasn’t a question, and Damien wasn’t really surprised. If he didn’t need Army troops, he’d either co-opted the Wing or brought his own - and Zu would know exactly how many of the people Damien had arrived with were still alive.
“Does it matter at this point?” Damien asked. “Vaughn is guilty of treason, murder, and more besides. Can you really judge the Freedom Wing for standing against him?”
“No,” Zu sighed. “No, I can’t. But it’s been my job for a long time to make sure they couldn’t destabilize the planet.”
“Hardly an unworthy goal, General,” the younger man told him. “Avoiding destabilization is high on my list of priorities - but removing Governor Vaughn is at the top.”
General Caleb Zu laid his hands on the table and firmly shook his head, as if shaking clear loose thoughts.
“I can make sure the Army stays in their barracks,” he finally said. “That’s an order both loyal and disloyal will obey - and make sure others obey. They don’t want to fight their brothers in arms any more than we want them to. How am I to know timing?”
“When the Navy arrives, lock them down,” Damien told him. “If you have a secure communications line, I’ll take that too - I can think of too many situations where being able to reach you will be necessary.”
“Then it is done,” Zu said calmly. “Past time, I think, for justice to return to Ardennes.”
“That, my dear General, is why Mars sent a Hand.”
#
Chapter 37
Amiri sat on the mountainside watching the sun set. She wore a heavy coat against the chill, but the view was worth it.
From here, you couldn’t make out the cities and conflicts of humanity, only the snow, and the forest below. A glow in the distance marked what she knew was Nouveaux Versailles. Somewhere between that glow and her, Damien was in a helicopter winging his way back to the hidden airbase.
Sixteen hours remained before the earliest time the Navy task force could arrive. The next day would see the end to her mission on Ardennes, one way or another. That mission had changed and metamorphised since she’d arrived. First, to spy and make contact with the rebellion. Then, to protect Montgomery.
Then she’d had to kick the Hand’s ass into final gear - but once he got going, Montgomery had proven he had at least some idea of what to do. Now, she’d see the mission done - watching the Hand’s back and keeping him alive.
Crunching sounds in the snow distracted her from the sunset and she glanced behind her. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised to see Mikael Riordan walking across the snow towards her.
“Grab a patch of snow,” she told him. They hadn’t really spoken after falling into bed together, nor had it been repeated. She got the impression she’d shocked him.
“I forget how beautiful sunsets are in the mountains,” he said softly as he settled into the snow next to her. “I grew up here - you get used to it, but it… means something to see it with new eyes.”
“New eyes?”
“I’m not a fighter, Julia,” he said softly. “I don’t think I’ve ever gone to sleep knowing I’m going into battle the next day. But I can’t sit this one out - none of us can.”
“You could, you know,” she told him. “You’re a speaker, not a fighter. No-one will think less of you if you stay out of the fight. We’ll need you to help rebuild, if nothing else.”
He shook his head.
“Found out that I can’t stand by while others go into battle,” he said simply. “The other night… I’d rather fight by my people’s side than wait for them to… not come back.”
He was talking both generally… and specifically. With a sigh, she shifted slightly to rest her leg against his, and reached out to take his hand.
“That wasn’t a mistake,” she told him firmly. “Passion of the moment - of surviving? Hell yes. But not a mistake.”
“Didn’t think it was,” Riordan replied, squeezing her hand gently. “But it helped me make up my mind, Julia. I’m going into battle beside you, I’m not staying behind. This is my planet and I’ll fight for it.”
“You’re a better man than this rock deserves,” Amiri observed, glancing back out over the stark white snow and pale purple foliage of the foothills beneath them.
“Look at that,” he instructed, gesturing out across the world spreading out beneath them with his free hand. “Look at the beauty of this world and tell me that it’s not worth my utmost effort. That my world is not worth even my dying breath. I’ve convinced dozens - hundreds! - of others of my cause. I think it’s worthwhile to fight for it myself.”
“And what if you don’t come back?” she asked him softly.
“Then I will be missed, I think,” he replied, equally quietly. “But I will have died in the cause I convinced others to take up. I can’t… I can’t think that isn’t worth it, or everything I’ve done has been hypocrisy.”
Amiri leaned against him.
“We’d better both come back, then,” she told him. “Because you may be right, but I for one want to see the day after tomorrow, and what that brings.”
“I can’t say you’re wrong,” he admitted with a laugh, “though I�
��ll admit to wondering what tonight is going to bring.”
Amiri arched an eyebrow at him and smiled lasciviously.
“I don’t think wondering is necessary.”
#
The hangar was crowded with aircraft and empty of people when Damien returned to the hidden rebel base. All twelve of the Freedom Wing’s aircraft were now stuffed into a facility designed to hold and service six of them.
The extra squadron had been armed at their southern base and had only needed to be refueled here, a necessity given that the lack of space meant the automated loaders built into the base couldn’t actually equip any of the Phantoms.
Nonetheless, Brute neatly slotted the last gunship into the space left for it.
“Get some rest,” Damien ordered the pilot. “We’ll all need it tomorrow.”
“Que sera, sera,” the pilot replied. “Bonne nuit.”
“Bonne nuit,” Damien returned, turning to glance around the hangar. Even with the hatch closed, the blast of cold air that had accompanied them into the hangar had chilled the entire space, and he shivered slightly.
With Brute gone, the cavern rapidly became eerily quiet, but he found himself unable to leave. He knew he wasn’t going to be sleeping anytime soon - he was far too wound up.
Somehow, though, he wasn’t surprised to find Lori Armstrong sitting on the ammunition crates exactly where he’d waited for Amiri the other day.
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” he asked the rebel leader.
“It seems… unlikely to happen,” she replied, her gaze fixed on the stealth aircraft filling the hangar. “Do you think this will work?”
“‘He either fears his fate too much or his desserts are small, who dares not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all’,” Damien quoted. “I don’t know if the plan will work, such as it is,” he admitted. “The Army will stay out of it, though, which just leaves us with the Scorpions.”
“And most of them are cracking heads across the planet,” Lori agreed with a sigh. “I hate that. People are dying, and we’re using it as a distraction for our mission.”
“If we succeed, it all stops, Lori,” the Hand told her. “Vaughn goes down - arrested or dead. Ardennes rebuilds.”
“It sounds so easy when you say it like that,” she replied. “Was this what you expected when you came here?”
“This was supposed to be a cake-walk,” Damien admitted. “An easy, if high level, arrest, with an entire Navy squadron for support if things went south. Then, Alaura died, and what was supposed to be a training opportunity turned into a trial by fire.”
Lori snorted.
“Think you’ve passed?”
“These sorts of things are pass/fail from what I can tell,” he said. “If Vaughn is dead or in chains by tomorrow night, and I’m still breathing, I’ll call it a pass.”
“What happens then?” she asked. “Part of me… was never quite sure. The other part expected a coup d’etat that would leave me Governor.”
“That won’t happen,” Damien warned softly. “Mars doesn’t remove Governors lightly. We encourage civil wars… almost never. But it’s happened. And we have a follow-up plan.
“An interim Governor is already preparing a Task Force on Mars,” he continued. “He or she - I don’t know who it is yet, other than ‘not me’ - will arrive with a force of Military Police, forensic auditors and political advisors. They’ll take over governance and law enforcement until they can rebuild the institutions of democracy on Ardennes, one piece at a time.”
“So, what?” she demanded. “We trade a local dictator for a Mars-picked one?!”
“No,” he disagreed. “The interim Governor has a fixed term - a few years at most. You’ll have a new assembly as soon as possible. But… it will be months under direct rule from Mars. Years before we pull the MPs off the streets - and we’ll probably never fully withdraw our troops.
“‘Regime change’ leaves us with a responsibility we can’t throw aside,” he continued. “Mars will not permit Ardennes to descend into a chaos of factional strife, reprisal and counter-reprisal. History tells us what happens if you intervene in a country or a planet and don’t stay the course.
“Mars has the resources and the will to stay that course,” he finished. “We will. Ardennes will be rebuilt. There will come a day, soon I hope, when you’ll be proud of your world again.”
“It all sounds so easy,” Lori repeated. “I don’t know if everyone will be so accepting of an outside rule.”
“It’s a compromise, and compromises are never comfortable,” Damien told her. “But, in the end, there’s a reason Hands get away with forcing compromises: we find the compromise. The Navy enforces it.
“Mars has found we go a lot further with a compromise backed by firepower than with an unenforced compromise - or an entirely external decision imposed purely by firepower,” he shrugged. “It sure as hell works better than forcing a change of government and walking away.”
She sighed, shaking her head and looking back at the gunships.
“All of that presumes we win,” she reminded him. “What happens if our plans fail?”
“Vaughn won’t know what hit him either way,” Damien said quietly. “He got a preview at Sunshine, but I don’t think it sank home - no-one on this planet really knows what it means for a Hand to go to war.”
#
The main conference room aboard the Righteous Guardian of Liberty was equipped to allow a mixed physical and electronic conference of every ship’s captain in an entire fleet deployment. The Captains and Executive Officers of Jane Adamant’s tiny task force rattled like peas in a pod.
“Thank you all for coming,” the newly minted Mage-Commodore told them. Since she was still acting as Captain of the Guardian herself, there were only ten people in the room - six men and four women. “We’ve done a lot of electronic communication and preparation over the last two days, but I wanted to have everyone together face to face before we entered the Ardennes system.”
A Mage could only safely jump every eight hours at most, and even the Navy had problems putting more than four on a warship - usually including the Captain. At a jump every three hours, her task force had been pushing to reach Ardennes.
They’d been floating at the last jump point for an hour, long enough to convene the Captains by shuttle and get them back before they made that final leap.
“Does anyone have any high level questions before we start going over the situation and potential operations plans?” she asked.
The other officers in the room exchanged a series of silent glances, until finally the senior-most of the women, Mage-Captain Nicole Isabel, spoke up.
“I think I have to ask what everyone is thinking,” the dusky-skinned cruiser commander said softly. “Do we really believe we’re going to have to fight our own cruiser squadron? I mean… this has never happened - not in two hundred years!”
“Two hundred and six,” Adamant confirmed. “We have seen Navy vessels end up in criminal hands - the Azure Gauntlet, most recently. We have seen individual Navy Captains go rogue and have to be put down. But you are correct - in the two hundred and six years the Royal Martian Navy has existed, we have never had a major formation revolt.
“If the intelligence we have received is correct, we are about to participate in the single largest space battle since the Eugenicist Wars,” she told them all bluntly. “Those battles may have had more ships, but the largest vessels were barely half the size of a modern destroyer.
“Unfortunately, the source of our evidence for Cor’s treason is impeccable,” Adamant reminded them. “I don’t believe any of us makes a habit of doubting His Majesty’s Hands?” she glanced around and smiled coldly.
“The best case situation is that only Cor’s flagship is with her, and that the crew of the Unchained Glory mutiny when they realize she’s been found out,” she continued. “However, assuming the best is a good way to get our people killed.
“Make no mistake,” Adam
ant told her people, glancing around the room. “Cor is very capable, and has demonstrated a ruthlessness I would not expect of any Navy officer. She blew up a city, people, and that’s not an option I would expect anyone in His Majesty’s uniform to embrace short of the worst scenario imaginable.”
“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst?” Captain Kole Jakab, a pale-skinned Terran native, suggested softly. “If she surrenders, our preparations have at least tested and sharpened our crews. If she fights…”
“If she fights, Cor may prove a real threat,” Adamant said grimly. “We have almost a hundred million tons of warship to her seventy-five, but if anyone can find a way to climb those odds, Adrianna Cor is one of the few who could.”
“So yes, I intend to plan for the worst,” she told them. “And, sadly, I really do believe we will have to fight her entire squadron and the ASDF. If there was even a chance of anything else, we would have known of her treason long before now.”
#
Chapter 38
The alarm interrupted Cor’s breakfast. The meal was the only time of the day she allowed herself to indulge her sweet tooth, and she glared at the communicator on the table in her quarters across the stack of waffles.
“What is it?” she demanded after swallowing.
“Commodore, we have a massive jump flare at the one light minute mark,” Lieutenant Trevor Hamilton, Unchained Glory‘s tactical officer, reported. “CIC is resolving further detail, but the Captain asked me to let you know.”
“How many ships?” Cor demanded.
“Unsure, ma’am,” the officer replied. “The flare was big enough to cause sensor interference. It’ll be a few minutes before we can resolve detail.”
“Any communications?”
“None yet. They may be blocked by the interference - I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jump flare of this size.”
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