Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  It gave Kalder all the might he needed to do what he did next.

  : The Knights of Sol

  Someone once told him that life is lived moving forward, but only experienced looking back. Lyokh was coming to see the wisdom of that assessment, especially the second part.

  Lyokh looked at himself in the mirror to gauge his appearance. Recently, he had been forced into more situations where he had to wear his uniform more than his armor. Before that, it had been years since he’d worn formal wear. It was all muscle memory where everything went, the rote motions of his fingers and hands like a little symphony, each one playing their part.

  He adjusted his tie, which army regs said had to be a Windsor, half-Windsor, or four-in-hand knot, and it should fall just half an inch above the belt. He tied a half-Windsor, then double-clipped it to his shirt so it didn’t drift. He checked his collar, which had to fit snugly without gapping, with one-quarter to one-half inch of the shirt collar showing above the coat collar at the back.

  He glanced down, suddenly aware of the looping vid he had put on with himself, Heeten, and the others all training. A vid taken by his helmet cam in the weeks leading up to Phanes. It seemed like ages ago.

  Only now, looking at the vid, did he truly feel what had come before. He felt every moment. The nostalgia, the regret, the things he would change, the things he wouldn’t, the things he yearned to feel again. It all formed a nameless stew that, for just a few seconds, rendered him utterly unable to finish dressing. He had to put a hand against the wall, lean there for a second, and imbibe it all.

  When he closed his eyes, he saw them. All their faces. He heard all their screams. And he saw the enemies. There were many of them. The Brood and their hive, the Queen of Mothers, the Ascendancy and their mechanicae and their grasshopper drones…it all went through fast-forward, bringing him here, to this moment.

  Life is lived moving forward, but experienced looking back. Who had told him that? Was it his mother?

  Lyokh shook off the moment of retrospect.

  Next, he checked his branch insignia, which had to be situated one and one-quarter inch below the Republican Army insignia, with the centerline of the branch insignia bisecting the Army insignia and parallel to the inside edge of the collar. All was satisfactory. Finally, he tugged at his coat, which had to be one inch below the crotch, while the jacket sleeves had to extend one inch beyond the wrist bone and cover the shirt sleeves.

  A knock at his door.

  “Be right out, Durzor,” he said.

  “You said that five minutes ago. Let’s see some hustle, soldier.”

  “Copy that.”

  He looked himself in the mirror one last time. The ritual complete, he now felt as calm as a snowflake gliding towards the ground, surrendering to gravity’s pull, but slowly, and under his own terms.

  When he stepped outside, Durzor and Meiks were there in the hallway, both fully decked out in dress, and laughing about something. When Durzor looked up at Lyokh, he shook his head morosely. “Jesus, you somehow look even uglier in uniform. How do you do that?”

  “Take it easy on him, Durzor,” Meiks said. “Poor leopard can’t change the stripes he’s born with.”

  “Yeah, but he can at least do a kindness to others and shave the stripes off once in a while,” Durzor replied. “You know, to at least show that he’s trying?”

  “I read you on that,” said Meiks. “Makes sense. The leopard’s just being selfish at that point.”

  “I’m going to regret introducing you two to one another, aren’t I?” Lyokh said, walking right past them.

  “If you haven’t already, you’re a damn fool,” Meiks laughed.

  “You know, for a man who’s about to get his own batallion, you sure act like you want to get tossed in the brig.”

  “As long as I get three hots a day and get to sit out the Crusade, I call it a win.”

  “Don’t say that too loud around here,” Lyokh said seriously.

  Meiks’s smile evaporated. “Right.”

  Durzor rolled up beside him. “You hear about the thing happening in the Norma Arm?”

  Lyokh shook his head. “No, what’s going on?”

  “An Isoshi world named Tabith is getting sacked by the Brood as we speak. I think you’ll want to add that to your talking points in your next interview. I’ve got the numbers on several spreadsheets. Eleven billion Isoshi will be killed, the few million survivors will be displaced. Might even be headed to human space stations.”

  Lyokh sighed. “Which is only going to create tensions between humans and Isoshi, thanks to Kalder’s apartheid.”

  “Another reason I wanted to bring it up. The next journalist you speak to will probably mention it. The loss of Tabith will be a big win for Kalder, reinforcing the need for humans to find a way to fight off the Brood, but the problems that are likely to come out of all the refugees, well…you can expect Kalder’s popularity to take a hit in some sectors.”

  “I’ll run it by Dolstoy,” said Lyokh. “I’m sure she already has some thoughts on it. Right now, I want to focus on getting through this.”

  Durzor spun his wheels so that he turned down a different corridor. “Good luck out there, you ugly son of a bitch. I’ll be watching the ceremony with great interest.”

  Lyokh stopped and looked at him. “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think I’m going? I’m watching from the sidelines.”

  Lyokh looked at Meiks and smiled. “Should we tell him?”

  Meiks shrugged. “Your call.”

  “Tell me what?” Durzor said.

  Lyokh rubbed his chin. “I don’t know, after all that ‘ugly’ talk, I’m considering a change of heart—”

  “Tell me what?” Durzor repeated, wheeling over to Lyokh and nudging his knees with his chair.

  “Well, I was going to let it be a surprise during the ceremony, but…” Lyokh leaned over, and clapped Durzor’s shoulder. “Sergeant First Class Taclaritus Durzor, you are hereby ordered to stand by my side as I am knighted, and be the First Witness to my appointment, and to be ready to receive your promotion to Captain’s Hand. Long may your wheelchair roll, far may your enemies run.”

  Durzor gaped at him. “You gotta be shitting me.”

  “I wish I was. Hell, I wish I could’ve found anyone else. But the Orphesians are too good at their jobs, so I need them where they are, and the vorta don’t speak at all. I need someone who is useless in all other ways but can still manage to form a sentence. I thought of twelve other people, but they’re all dead, so then I landed on you.”

  “You ass! When were you going to tell me?”

  “We’re telling you now, aren’t we, Meiks?”

  “I think so, doyen.”

  Durzor rammed both of their shins with his chair, and all three of them were laughing. It was all in fun, of course, but Lyokh saw the tears barely hidden in Durzor’s eyes.

  ONE OF THE most vivid memories Lyokh had from his life was his father and Uncle Jodick sitting outside, watching the planetset, drinking some sort of alcoholic beverage that his father had been forbidden by his mother to drink. Uncle Jodick had asked the boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. When Lyokh had told them about a dream he’d had where he was flying a spaceship, both his father and his uncle had chuckled. Embarrassed, he had asked them what was so funny. “That’s fine for dreaming, son,” his father had said, “but folks like us have to actually work for a living.” When Lyokh had argued that flying was work, his father had laughed at him, and waved off his silliness. “Farming keeps you alive, boy. All other work is a joke.” When Lyokh asked about being a soldier, his father had said, “Especially that. Farm and fear God, that’s the way to get it all done.”

  No other work had mattered but farming. No other belief system worked but the one that worshipped Christ and God. That’s what his father had believed.

  When Lyokh saw the Army come to destroy the Harbingers of Timon, he had practically thrown himself at them, wa
nting a way off that dead-end rock. His father had told him he would be disowned if he went. The rest of his family seemed to agree. Lyokh had given it an hour’s thought, and decided it was worth losing his family over. Timon was a great big nowhere, a place trapped in a bubble of time. It was never going to evolve. No new opportunities were ever coming there.

  “You’ll end up nowhere,” his father had shouted as he walked out the door, his mother weeping in the kitchen. “You’ll end up a nobody, lost in nowhere! If you leave this house, you turn your back on me, your mother, and God Himself! I don’t forgive that! God doesn’t forgive that! If you walk out of here now, you’re gone forever! Don’t ever come back!”

  Lyokh remembered that vividly. He also remembered not giving a shit, because leaving Timon, leaving his family, had felt like liberty, like stepping out of a prison for the first time and breathing fresh air.

  And now, he was about to receive the highest honor a soldier could hope for. Somewhere out there, if his parents were still alive, they had surely heard about his heroics, maybe even watched his interviews.

  The ceremony was held in Lord Ishimoto’s main hangar bay. A thousand of Lyokh’s soldiers stood in perfect lines, with gaps in between them for those that were called up. Of course, all of them would be knighted, but only twenty of them would have it done publicly. The others would receive their promotions with nothing more than a signed piece of slinkplast and a handshake.

  You’ll end up nowhere, his father said, shouting from the corridor that led into the past.

  The hangar had been done up well. The fab room had outdone itself. Not in an age had anyone seen such pomp and display like this. Banners bearing the insignia of IX Legion and the crests of all the military branches were hung proudly from walls. Chairs were provided so that many of the captains and executive officers could attend. Artemis of Artemis stood with his red cape of office, holding onto Thrallyin’s reins and standing with one foot up in a climbing stirrup.

  The High Priestess was there, laden with layers of fine, multicolored silk and glittering jewels. Zane watched with her maidservant close by her side, her imperious gaze looking over the ceremonies as though they were for her, as though they were to her liking, as though she had any say in it at all.

  Kalder’s chastisement didn’t sink in far, Lyokh wagered.

  Moira Holdengard sat near Zane, dressed in a simple white stola, a with a red palla hood pulled over her head. No jewelry. She was the antiparticle to Zane’s regality.

  More names were called. One by one, they all went up. Meiks smirked at being called “sir” for the first time. Paupau had an ear-to-ear grin. Tsuyoshi looked like a man floating on air, like it was the greatest day of his life. Takirovanen looked like Takirovanen.

  A ramp was provided for Durzor, who Lyokh saw clenching his jaw as Kalder’s sword touched his shoulder and dubbed him Sir Captain’s Hand Taclaritius Durzor.

  Lyokh stood at the far right of his row of leaders, all in freshly refurbished Charon-III STACsuits. These were the men and women that would make up his new command coterie. Some of them he knew well, some of them only barely. One by one, they were called to the raised dais that a group of vorta had erected at the center of the hangar. As was tradition, they stood beneath the gaze of a wyrm. For the ceremony, they used Rabastiik, a 160-foot-long coil. A real buck, with the chevron-shaped Sigil of the Republic draped over its long neck. The coil had mounted a skyrake, and its Tamer had directed it, with a mix of hand signals and dracun, to remain perfectly still and poised, until such time that a newly knighted soldier stood up. Then, Rabastiik would extend his great neck, lower his head, and sniff the soldier. That was part of a tradition dating back hundreds of years, when a new knight was tested to see if he would flinch at the stench of the sulfurous breath, or retreat beneath a wyrm’s withering gaze.

  Brother Penitent Morkovikson was there, too, along with a hundred of his contrite brothers. He was smiling through his thick beard. Not looking at anything in particular. It was a smile of contentment, like he was amused by the idea of being alive at all.

  Kalder presided over the ceremonies, having been invested with the power, just this once, to act in the capacity of a member of a Visquain. As each man and woman was knighted, they kissed a ribbon with the starburst symbol of the Knights of Sol, then wrapped it around their right arm. Lyokh watched the old man’s hands move. They were steady with a sword. Kalder hadn’t been lying about being a soldier once, Lyokh was sure.

  “Captain Aejon Roth Lyokh,” Kalder finally said.

  When he heard his name called, he moved with rehearsed precision. He knew that there were cameras watching, for Dolstoy had assured him that the ceremony would be broadcast throughout the Republic-held worlds. Word was, even a few xeno-controlled systems were going to show it, since a knighting was something little seen, and gave them insight into human culture.

  Lyokh walked up the steps. The armor he was wearing was partially his, partially something else the armigers had cooked up. With its white stripes and thicker plates, it felt heavier than any other armor he’d ever walked in. He stood before Kalder, drew his sword, and bent one knee. Kalder took up his ceremonial sword, and touched each shoulder.

  You’ll end up nowhere, his father had said.

  “Captain Lyokh,” said Kalder, his voice carrying across the hangar without need of microphone. “For your services to the Republic of Aligned Worlds, and your efforts to face her enemies head on, without complaint or excuse, without fear or timidity, I bestow upon you a position as weighty as the new armor you wear. I name you Sir Captain Aejon Lyokh of the Knights of Sol, Commander of the Crusade Ground Forces, Defender of the Republic’s Assets, Leader of Your Knight Companions, Master Adept of the Sword, and Protector of the Realm of Men. Long may your sword swing, far may your enemies run.”

  Protector of the Realm of Men. That part was new. It hadn’t been mentioned in any of the rehearsals Lyokh had gone through. The Republic of Aligned Worlds had never before been described as a mankind-only realm. Was that Kalder’s addition? Lyokh believed it was.

  Captain Desh stepped forward and clamped a new magnetic medal to his arm, exactly like the one all his people would get, signifying their victory at Phanes. It went nicely with the Imperator’s Medal of Valor, which also hung from his armor.

  You’ll end up nowhere.

  Desh stepped back, and without missing a beat, Lyokh stood up and touched his own blade to Kalder’s. Then, they both sheathed their swords. Lyokh was perfectly rigid. He gave a sharp salute, turned smartly to his left, and walked off the stage to join the knighted others.

  That was it. As simple as that, Lyokh had ascended to a rank higher than any base soldier in the Armed Forces. That is, if his legitimacy as the Captain of the Knights of Sol was thorough, and not merely ceremonial. Kalder had assured him of his legitimacy, and Dolstoy said that his popularity was growing far too strong for the Senate to back down now. “After this,” she had said, “the deal will be sealed.”

  As Lyokh watched Kalder presiding over it all, and launching into a speech about the future of humanity, the rise of Man from the ashes like a phoenix, and how maintaining the “purity” of Man mattered most of all, he wasn’t at all sure what sort of deal he had helped seal.

  You’ll end up nowhere.

  Heeten.

  Eulekk.

  Protector of the Realm of Men.

  The wall.

  “HOW DOES IT feel being anointed?” Meiks asked, accepting the porhl deck from Durzor and starting a shuffle.

  “You tell me,” Lyokh said. “Do you feel any different now that you’re a knight?”

  “I will when I see that first paycheck.”

  “It’s not that much more than you were already pulling in.”

  “Doms are doms, doyen.”

  “Speaking of doms,” Takirovanen said, tossing his ante into the middle. They all followed his example.

  Durzor said, “Has Kalder got a plan of approach for Taka-Ren
ault yet, doyen?”

  “He’s sent two scout ships, Ramlock and Ark of the Redeemed,” he said, taking a peek at the cards Meiks had dealt him. “That’s why we’re parked way out here in the middle of nowhere. We’re waiting on their report.”

  “What is that, a four-week round trip?” asked Tsuyoshi. It was his first time joining them at porhl, and already he seemed lousy at it, but took no offense to losing. Indeed, he seemed elated to be losing anything. They all did. They were on a post-mission high, just happy to be alive, breathing, playing cards, occasionally fucking.

  “That’s affirmative,” said Lyokh, meeting the raise that came around to him. “And their survey mission is expected to take two to three weeks.”

  “So minimum we’re cooped up in ol’ Ishi for six weeks, and that’s if Ramlock and Ark come back fast with good news, and we take off right away.”

  “Gives us a lot of time to train,” Takirovanen put in, glancing over at Durzor. It turned out Durzor was a match for Takirovanen, causing the man to strategize more with his betting, accepting some losses rather than chasing after wins. “There are always silver linings, if you know where to look.”

  Tsuyoshi nodded. “Seems like all we got left is silver linings.”

  Meiks snorted. “What is that, some kind of positive nihilism?” He laughed. “Reminds me of this joke. A Harbinger sits at a card table with an optimist. The Harbinger explains the rules, and they start playing. On the first round, the Harbinger gets a Proud Castle. On the second round, he wins with a Row. In the third round, he Kicks the Charlie. Angry, the optimist shoots to his feet, and shouts, ‘This is all a joke! There’s no winning! There’s no point to any of it!’ The Harbinger says, ‘Now you’re getting it!’” He laughed at his own joke for a moment, then looked around the table, confused. “Shit, is it my bet?”

  “It is,” said Takirovanen evenly.

  Meiks tossed in his doms, and declared, “Call.”

  The betting became more intense with each round. Lyohk could scarcely believe how eager Tsuyoshi appeared, and how stubbornly Takirovanen and Durzor went after each other. Like rams locking horns, they would not relent. After several rounds, Durzor came out on top, but it had been a bloody fight, with everyone else the victims.