by Jo Zebedee
Copyright © 2015 Ian Sales
Published by Tickety Boo Press
www.ticketyboopress.co.uk
Edited by John Jarrold
Copy-edited by Emma Compton
Cover Art by Gary Compton
Book Design by Big River Press Ltd
Ian Sales is represented by the John Jarrold Literary Agency
www.johnjarrold.co.uk
A Prospect of War by Ian Sales is available as a signed limited edition hardback at:
www.ticketyboopress.co.uk
A PROSPECT OF WAR
Book One of AN AGE OF DISCORD
by Ian Sales
It is in scripture declared that light was above and darkness below, and between those two was open space. / Chian was in the light, and Konran in the darkness; Chian was aware of the existence of Konran; Konran was not aware of the existence of light and of Chian. / It happened that Konran, in the gloom and darkness, was visiting the borders of his realm, and a ray of light was seen by him; and because its nature conflicted his own, he determined it must also come within his absolute power. And as he came forth, Chian met him in struggle, and He did it in pure words and cast him back to the gloom.
The Book of the Sun
(the holy book of the Chianist Church)
CHAPTER ONE
In the frenzied activity of leaving Vengeful and coming ashore, Rizbeka demar Rinharte had not seen a moment’s peace. An armchair in the empty nobles’ hall in Tanabria Station’s boat-bay was her first opportunity to relax. She accepted it gratefully.
No sound disturbed the hall’s reverent hush, and the air beneath the arched roof of carved wood hung heavy and still. Rinharte had expected servants, but none materialised on her arrival—a sad indication of the station’s decline. From the décor, she judged Tanabria to be six hundred years old, half the age of the Empire. The picture of Emperor Willim IX was, of course, much newer.
Leather creaked as she shifted in her seat. She dozed lightly.
A tall woman, Rinharte’s height was evident even in the expanse of leather chair enfolding her. The folds of a long travelling dress of pale green hid her legs. Its bodice held her slim torso upright and stiff, but could not disguise a military bearing.
She did not want to be here. She did not want to be dressed like this. Much of her self-identity lay in her uniform, and she missed the assurance given by its badges of rank. This lone yeoman miss, in her old-fashioned dress, a small travel trunk at her feet, was not how she saw herself. The discrepancy was unnerving.
She felt uncomfortable with her mission. The Admiral could recruit to their cause: she had the authority and the charisma. Lieutenant-Commander Rinharte was a, well, a lieutenant. She was no persuader; even if she did believe in the Admiral and her cause with every fibre of her being.
Footsteps approached. Rinharte’s eyes flicked open. Striding towards her was a tall, heavily-built figure in uniform.
“Lieutenant-Commander Rizbeka demar Rinharte,” he said.
Rinharte recognised the uniform the moment she focused on the man: a knight stalwart. Knights of the Order of the Emperor’s Shield were elite troops.
The knight stalwart halted and drew his regulation sword. Rinharte watched him take another step towards her. She was not wearing her own sword—the woman she purported to be would not have worn one.
She beat a soft coded tattoo against the side of her travel trunk with one foot.
The trunk hurtled from the floor.
It rocketed towards the knight stalwart. He had no time to react and it struck him in the face. The impact carried him over backwards.
He was dead before he hit the floor.
Rinharte stared at the body. Her travel trunk sat upended in what remained of the knight’s head. Blood pooled on the floor, gleaming wetly against the polished wood.
Dear Lords, what had she done?
Horrified, Rinharte rose to her feet and approached the body. She gave the corpse a kick in the ribs, but there was no response. The trunk had done its gruesome work.
Lifting the luggage from the knight’s ruptured skull, Rinharte grimaced at the blood and brains that now decorated one end. She pushed the trunk to one side, knelt and rifled the dead man’s pockets. She strove to be quick as well as thorough—Tanabria Station boasted only a remnant population, but it was not wholly deserted. His identification she found hanging from a ring on his belt: Sir Keyo dem Wovsa, parole knight-lieutenant of the Order of the Emperor’s Shield. ‘Dem’: a life-yeoman, then; and likely risen through the ranks. A parole knight-lieutenant too: he had only recently been raised from proletarian to yeoman.
The ring also held an iron key. Each knight stalwart commanded a retinue of ten serjeants. That single key indicated Wovsa had brought only one with him. For that, Rinharte was grateful.
After pocketing the identification, she used the knight’s surcoat to wipe the gore from her travel trunk. Rising to her feet, she gazed down at the knight stalwart lying dead before her. She felt curiously empty. The corpse’s ruined head, a bloody confusion of flesh and bone, had robbed the knight of his identity, his body of its humanity.
She noticed blood on the sleeve of her dress, an angry smear dark against the pale green fabric. She scowled, irritated by her own clumsiness, and by the fact the dress was now ruined. It was a heartless response to her act of murder, and she knew it. But she refused to feel for her victim. The moment Rinharte had seen the device on the knight’s surcoat—a blank shield—she had known fear. She had reacted instinctively.
She disabled defence-mode on her travel-trunk’s control-mechanism, and left the nobles’ hall. The trunk obediently floated after her. She glanced back. The corpse could not be seen through the doubled archway. It would not be found until someone entered the hall and literally stumbled over it—
No. Not “it”. Him. Sir Keyo dem Wovsa, parole knight-lieutenant of the Order of the Emperor’s Shield.
There was a puzzle there. The knights stalwart answered only to His Imperial Majesty Willim IX. Rinharte had never believed she had much to fear from the Imperial authorities: the Empire was too big, and the Admiral too careful. Nor was the Admiral working directly against the Imperial Throne—her enemies were of the Empire’s upper reaches, but not working for the Empire.
Or so Rinharte had assumed.
The dead knight stalwart in the nobles’ hall argued otherwise. Either the Admiral’s enemies had suborned the knights stalwart—which was unthinkable. Or the Emperor was now involved… for reasons of His own.
There was another puzzle too: how, wondered Rinharte, had she been recognised? She had sneaked aboard Tanabria Station, jetted from a jolly boat to a seldom-used airlock on one of Tanabria Station’s engineering levels. She had bought passage to Darrus using false identification.
How had the knights stalwart known she was on Tanabria Station?
There was only one explanation.
She had to make a signal to Vengeful… if the battlecruiser had not already left the planetary system. Rinharte would ask to be extracted. Tanabria Station had suddenly become too dangerous.
There were only two places on Tanabria Station to send messages: the local bureau of the Imperial Company of Signalling Agents, and the station authority’s Central Signals Office. If the knight stalwart Rinharte had killed was not alone, the former was likely under surveillance by his fellow knights. The latter was off-limits to all but station personnel.
Approaching the Signalling Agents bureau, Rinharte kept an eye open for uniforms. The bureau was located on Tanabria Station’s high concourse, an endless mall which traced the circumference of the main level. The concourse was a wide and dimly-lit space, forever curving gently, and roofed with small square panes of glass. Through these could be seen star-speckled interplanetary space. Many of the offices and shops on the concourse were closed: Tanabria Station no longer boasted the population to keep them in business.
Rinharte
stopped in the shadow cast by one of the ornately-carved wooden pillars which supported the mullioned roof, and studied her destination. The bureau was well-lit, its glass frontage giving a good view of the interior… and the two uniformed figures currently interrogating the bureau chief. Rinharte swore under her breath. One of the figures wore a sword: an officer and knight. The second, a serjeant, carried a steel stave topped with an armour-piercing point, since proletarians were forbidden blades of greater than eight inches in length.
Rinharte tapped out a command on the top of her travel-trunk and it disgorged a compacted telescope. At the click of a button, the telescope extended, and she put it to her eye. She had already recognised the uniforms—white surcoats over grey coveralls—as knight stalwart, but she now saw that the officer was a knight-captain. His belt-ring held two keys, one brass and one iron. The brass key told Rinharte he had only one knight-lieutenant accompanying him. That would be Wovsa, now dead in the nobles’ hall.
Was the iron key, however, for the man with the stave? Or was he Wovsa’s serjeant?
She pulled the knight-lieutenant’s identification from her pocket and peered at the coat of arms on it. A man in a cap, holding a curved horn to his lips. Telescope back to her eye, she focused on the serjeant… A blazon on his shoulder depicted four rings beneath a crescent. So, not Wovsa’s man.
Which implied there was another serjeant still somewhere at large, perhaps guarding the Central Signals Office. Rinharte was trapped on Tanabria Station, with no way to call for rescue.
After returning the telescope to her trunk, Rinharte backed carefully away from her vantage point.
Tanabria Station was serviced by occasional boats from the world of Darrus. Rinharte had a seat booked—under a false identity—on the next to depart for the planet’s chief starport, Minadar. She could no longer use it. The knights stalwart knew she was on Tanabria Station, and the knight-lieutenant’s appearance in the boat-bay nobles’ hall implied they knew of her booking.
Hurrying along the concourse, Rinharte considered her options. Tanabria Station was not so large she could successfully evade her hunters for long. Sooner or later, they would find her, and that she could not allow to happen. As the Admiral’s lieutenant of intelligence she knew too much. Rinharte was not normally a field operative. Aboard Vengeful, her chief role was order-of-battle analysis and assessment.
Rinharte’s priority was clear: she must find a way of leaving Tanabria Station. Extraction by Vengeful was no option, and likely the battlecruiser had already left for the Ralat system.
Motion ahead caught Rinharte’s attention. Someone was approaching along the concourse. She stopped and turned to gaze at a shop-window as if admiring the wares on display. Behind her, footsteps drew near and passed. The reflection of a uniformed station authority officer drifted ghost-like across the shop-window. Rinharte saw the spectral oval of his face turn towards her… before he continued on.
Abruptly and embarrassingly, she realised the shop she stood before was no longer in business. The goods in its window—various ornaments and artworks—were cobwebbed and dusty. The gleam of the precious metals had long since vanished beneath creeping patination, the jewels’ lustre had dimmed.
Turning to go, something drew her eye to a carved wall-panel to the right of the shop frontage. It appeared loose, at an odd angle to those either side of it. No, it was ajar. It was a hidden door.
It was not a secret passage, merely hidden for propriety’s sake. Doors like it existed in every public space throughout the Empire. Rinharte had never passed through one.
She looked down at the pale green dress she wore. Old-fashioned in style, it suited a yeoman lady travelling without a lady’s maid and in reduced circumstances—a not unusual sight on Tanabria Station. She turned back to the hidden door—
Did she have a choice? It was audacious, almost unthinkable. And sure to be safe for that very reason. The knights stalwart would find her soon if she stayed on this level. She did not doubt that.
She pushed the door open, stepped through… and found herself standing at the lip of a square shaft. It appeared bottomless. She had expected automatic lighting. Clearly there was none. Perhaps it no longer functioned.
The door swung shut behind her, leaving Rinharte in darkness. She tapped a code on her trunk, and it provided her with a lit lantern.
The chamber’s lighting no longer worked, and neither did the shaft’s elevator. When Rinharte put a foot forward a platform should have appeared from beneath the shaft’s lip. It would carry her down to the station’s proletarian levels—but no platform appeared. She swore under her breath.
There was only one way down. She reached inside her travel-trunk and dialled up its charger to a level that would almost support her weight.
Hugging the trunk tight to her midriff, she stepped off into nothing.
Rinharte fell gracefully. The lantern in her hand wrote a sliding circle of light on one wall of the shaft. Metal panels and their riveted edges drifted upwards, her only evidence of motion. Looking down, she could not see the foot of the shaft, only a narrowing square of blackness. Logic insisted it would not be far. Perhaps ten, twenty yards…
Rinharte landed inelegantly. Her feet hit the ground, and she stumbled in surprise. Dust coated the wall. She pulled back her hand with a grimace—
And watched in horror as her trunk ascended serenely up the elevator-shaft. She had let go. She followed it with her lantern until it disappeared into the shadows above.
“Damn.” Her voice echoed hollowly, and she shivered.
“Damn,” she said again, more forcibly, taking courage from her anger.
She found the exit from the shaft, and cautiously pushed the metal door open. The corridor outside was lit by a procession of guttering lights, a chiaroscuro of bright brief-lived shapes on the floor and walls. Proles in coveralls passed through these flickering islands of light, obscure in the shadows, somehow exotic when lit. A couple turned at Rinharte’s appearance, their faces abruptly ordinary.
Embarrassed at their scrutiny, Rinharte looked away. Her social station was obvious from her dress, and she had seen the proles’ recognition of this in their gazes. She could not hide here; she was not one of them. She did not want to be one of them.
A figure loomed close, and Rinharte turned defensively towards it. Her eyes immediately fastened on the escutcheon, the coat of arms, pinned to the prole’s collar. It depicted a deer leaping a barred gate. She wondered if it was an omen.
“My lady?” The prole loaded the question with disapproval at her presence.
He was a typical enough example of the breed, with coarse features and a body thickened by manual labour. Rinharte recoiled at his leer.
“Yes?” she snapped.
“Lost, my lady?” He smiled, twisting his leer into a servile expression.
“No… Yes.” She gestured in annoyance at the elevator-shaft behind her, although it was not the elevator that had irritated her. “It’s not working.”
“No, my lady.” He gave a puzzled smile. “Surely my lady didn’t come down this way?”
“That’s of no concern to you,” Rinharte told him harshly. “Just show me how to get out of here.”
What, she asked herself, had possessed her to think she could hide amongst the proletarians? It was unthinkable because it was ridiculous. And quite possibly dangerous. For the first time in her adult life, Rinharte felt vulnerable. Capture by the knights stalwart seemed almost preferable to the prospect of rubbing shoulders with these creatures in their shadow-world. She wondered how many were left aboard the Station. They could not leave, of course, unless accompanying their liege.
I am not cut out for undercover shore missions, Rinharte told herself. But the contact she was to meet on Darrus had asked for her by name. The underhandedness of her mission only made her feel more stupid for the mess she had made of this one. A dead knight stalwart. And she had lost her travel-trunk too.
Rinharte had taken no more than half a dozen steps from the elevator-shaft’s exit. A clang echoed hollowly from the doorway. She looked back in puzzlement.
A flash of light threw the passage into stark relief, made silhouettes of the proles. A shattering roar blew the elevator-shaft door across the corridor. It hit the wall with a deafening clang. A pressure wave knocked Rinharte to the ground.
The smell of burnt metal filled the air. Fine soot swirled cloudily about the lights. Someone began to scream. Another voice joined it.
A five-yard stretch of the corridor was now dark, its lamps destroyed by the blast. Even so, Rinharte could make out sprawled figures in the shadows. Glistening blood sparkled from the darkness. Something scrabbled weakly. At least four proles had been caught in the destruction.
“My trunk…,” Rinharte whispered.
She had booby-trapped it. The knights stalwart must have found it, and tried to open it. That had triggered the charger to implode, to create a singularity… Which had subsequently ripped a hole in space, releasing enormous destructive force.
Rinharte turned back to her proletarian guide. He was staring open-mouthed at the devastation behind them. She slapped him.
The prole put a hand to his burning cheek, and stared at Rinharte in horror.
“Get me out of here,” she ordered.
“But, my lady…” He gestured uncomprehendingly at the bodies in the corridor.
She glanced back and peered into the shadows. Damn. She couldn’t leave them. Those unhurt by the destruction were so stunned into imbecility, they stared and did nothing.
Rinharte took charge.
“You,” she snapped at one nearby prole, “go fetch help. Medical aid. Quickly, man!”