Edge of Conquest (The Restoration Armada Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

  Sharpe finished her meal, sent Rajpar a couple credits, and got up to leave. Delagarza paid a random amount of credits for his food and rushed to catch up with her.

  “Wait!” he called, approaching her from behind. “I need to talk to you.”

  Sharpe half turned and tried hard to hide the annoyance from her face. “Oh. Look, I’m flattered, but I don’t have the time to…”

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “Dr. Sharpe, I’m here to warn you. The people you’re hiding from are on your tail again. They’ll find you soon.”

  Her eyes widened, then narrowed. She frowned, then started walking again, fast, toward her clinic. Delagarza followed her.

  “Are you listening to me? They’re coming for you!”

  A couple looked his way like he was insane. He’d have a few minutes, at best, to make himself scarce before the police showed up.

  “Look, whoever you are,” Sharpe said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no one I’m hiding from. Please, stop following me.”

  They were halfway to the clinic by now, and Delagarza was attracting quite a lot of attention. He felt desperation rising through is throat like bile, clouding his judgment.

  How can I tell her about the enforcers without mentioning them aloud? Alwinter was laid with listening devices and cameras, and those were trained to pick up on certain keywords. “Enforcers” and “Reiner” probably rated high on that list.

  Isabella, on the other hand, was a very common name in certain colonies.

  “I think you know exactly who I’m talking about, Isabella,” Delagarza said.

  Sharpe stopped in her tracks, like she’d been struck by lightning. A nearby maintenance worker shuffled close, glaring at Delagarza.

  “Is everything OK, ma’am?” the man asked. “Should I call security?”

  “Regular,” Sharpe said. The word sounded wrong coming from her. Delagarza knew she’d picked the slang from her work with ganger rehabilitation. “I forgot I knew this man. I’m sorry, I was the rude one, not him.”

  The maintenance worker nodded, not buying her plain lie, but he had no reason to accept it. Delagarza ignored him and matched Sharpe’s pace, leaving the man behind, still glaring.

  “What makes you think I’m her?” Sharpe asked.

  “Honestly, it’d take quite a while to explain. Short version, I got hired by…those friends of yours…to open an old piece of ‘ware. I failed, and they broke the deal off. But a third party revealed they had the contents already, and they gave them to me. Inside, I found your travel log. From before you came to the planet. Not very useful to find you now, but your friend in ATS pointed me your way.”

  “That’s quite a story you’ve got there. I find it difficult to believe.”

  “You don’t have to believe me. I followed your trail, and your friends have the same tools I used to do so. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “My friends are not famous for their technical acumen, mister…”

  “Delagarza.”

  “Mr. Delagarza, those people have a brutish reputation. That’s why they employ people like you to do the dirty work for them. And since you’re here, warning me, instead of with them…I assume I am quite safe.”

  “You don’t understand!” Delagarza wanted to shake her by her shoulders. Of course she was stubborn! She had spent sixteen years fighting against Alwinter’s cutthroat culture. Edith Sharpe wasn’t a woman who easily let others change her mind.

  “I’m afraid it’s you who doesn’t understand. You’re way over your head, Mr. Delagarza. I advise you leave and pretend we never met.”

  That’s the third person who offers me that choice, Delagarza thought. Himself included.

  “There’s people coming for you,” he said, desperate to make her understand. “They’ll arrive soon.”

  She raised her eyebrows at him. “Is that right? Do you know them?”

  “No,” Delagarza admitted, “but…they’re supposed to be the good guys.”

  Even to him it sounded like a terrible answer. He cursed himself for being so bad at this. He was about to mess everything up.

  They had reached San Jeronimo clinic. Sharpe sighed and placed a hand against the white wall.

  “Delagarza, if you don’t know them at all, what makes you think they’re any different from the people you’re warning me about?”

  Delagarza stopped, at a loss for words. To be honest, he’d never given it much of a thought. The EIF was on one side, and Tal-Kader was on another. You either were with one of them, or a neutral. Until today, Delagarza hadn’t given an ounce of a fuck about it.

  “They have to be better,” Delagarza offered, “the bar is really low.”

  That earned him a smile. “Look. Thanks for the advice. I’ll keep it in mind. You should worry about yourself, in the meantime. Can’t fathom our mutual friends being happy about you talking to me at all.”

  The clinic’s doors opened. A man walked out. He was so tall he had to lower his head as not to hit his forehead on his way out. His body was so big and over-muscled that his reg-suit seemed like a square refrigerator.

  Major Strauze smiled, looking as official in his civilian clothing as he did in his enforcer uniform. The pistol in his hands, though, wasn’t civilian at all. “Now, now, that’s not true. In fact, we could not be happier with Delagarza’s involvement. He saved us a lot of time and effort,” he said.

  “Isabella Reiner?” Strauze asked, though he clearly knew the answer.

  Edith Sharpe looked at Strauze with wide eyes. She turned to Delagarza with a betrayed expression.

  “I didn’t—” he began to say, but Strauze’s pistol made him shut up when the enforcer aimed it his way.

  “Well?” Strauze demanded.

  “Yes,” said Edith. Even though it was barely a whisper, to Delagarza it sounded as loud as a gunshot.

  It was the middle of the day cycle, and the street was quite crowded. Or, more like, it had been quite crowded. People were making themselves scarce by the second. Someone called security.

  No use, this man is at the top of the food chain, Delagarza thought. He looked in all directions, trying to figure out an escape route. There were no alleys besides the clinic, no useful bend in the street he could use to block Strauze’s line of fire. The man had chosen the location well.

  Panic rose through Delagarza’s body like an electric shock.

  Sharpe laughed at Strauze. “This is it? Really, after all this time? A single enforcer with a gun? I expected Tal-Kader to have more style than this.”

  “You know how bureaucrats are,” said Strauze, not missing a beat, “always nagging to reduce costs. I didn’t come alone though.”

  He gestured at the rooftops of the neighboring buildings with his free hand. Delagarza couldn’t see the enforcers, but he could see the glint of their scopes. He figured several of them were aimed at his chest.

  “I see,” said Sharpe. She didn’t look half as terrified as Delagarza felt.

  Maybe, after a decade and half waiting for them to arrive, she’s just happy to get it over with. Delagarza thought.

  It was like a balloon deflated inside his chest. How had he been so foolish? Risking his life to warn her, thinking he could give the enforcers the slip…they had never lost track of him. He played right into their hands.

  His mistake had been to allow himself an ounce of idealism to filter through his mental defenses. For just a minute…he’d thought the universe worked differently. That the daughter of a hero could survive his assassination and start the revolution that would depose the tyrannical corporation that had killed her father.

  In that imaginary universe, someone would arrive to save the day. Perhaps Nanny Kayoko and her underground resistance. Maybe even Delagarza himself. Wasn’t he supposed to be an agent, himself, according to Kayoko?

  There was no hidden strength revealed to him in his moment of need.

  Life didn’t work that way. No, it wasn’t the person wit
h the better ideals who won, it was the one with the bigger stick.

  “Strauze,” Delagarza said, “don’t do this. You’re an Edge citizen, too. You know what she represents. You know what she could do…”

  “Idiot,” Strauze said, a flash of black anger hovering over his eyes. “You think all Tal-Kader personnel are mindless grunts? I could’ve been an agent, Delagarza, had Newgen not been disbanded. I have the brains for it. Of course I know what this woman is capable of doing. That’s why I’m here—”

  He raised his gun in a single fluid motion, too fast for Delagarza to react. Sharpe’s back straightened, though she was clearly shaking. She looked Major Strauze square in the eyes.

  “—to stop a war,” Strauze said, and pulled the trigger.

  Delagarza screamed a single “No!” that was drowned by the sound of the shot. Even though the barrel was silenced, it sounded like an explosion going off next to his hear.

  He didn’t see the bullet, but he saw the entrance and exit wounds appear at, seemingly, the same time. Sharpe’s head deformed like a melon smashed against the ground before the light had finished exiting her eyes.

  Delagarza didn’t see anything else. He turned, and ran for his life, faster than he’d ever ran in his life, a human-shaped projectile moving away from Strauze. Still, the sound of a body hitting the pavement came clearly to him.

  He wanted to scream, but the only sound was a ragged howl. Like a wild animal, he looked around, trying to find anything, anyone that could help him. The streets were deserted. Even the stores had thrown their “closed” signs and lowered their security curtains.

  Krieger waited for him a few meters away from the Pakistani food stand. She was grinning at him in that cruel way of hers, the same way she’d done while he slept with her. She aimed a gun at him, and Delagarza stopped, dead in his tracks. He looked back and saw no one. Strauze hadn’t thought him important enough to chase. Hell, he hadn’t considered Delagarza worth the effort of ordering the snipers to open fire.

  It was a distressing idea. At least Krieger cared enough about him to meet him face to face.

  “You made me look terrible when you survived Taiga Town,” Krieger said. “The clean-up crew had to come out of my own pocket, you know?”

  “Krieger—”

  The world flashed white for an instant. Numbness spread through Delagarza. Some force pressed against his abdomen, not in a painful way, but hard enough to make breathing hard.

  Delagarza found a tiny hole in his reg-suit, about an inch above his navel. He looked at his hands. They were covered in blood which was already browning and crusting against his skin. He opened his mouth to beg for his life.

  Krieger shot him another two times.

  All force rushed out of Delagarza’s body, like a water balloon with a leak. His knees failed him, and he slid down the wall and to the floor, leaving a red streak as he went. The most he could do was press his hands against the wounds, trying to contain the flood of blood. It didn’t hurt as much as he expected. The wounds became three stinging sensations, not entirely unlike being stuck by a wasp.

  “As they say, all is well which works out in the end. Or something like that,” Krieger told him. “Thanks for the assist, Delagarza. Never could’ve done it without your help.”

  As pain—real pain—began surge from Delagarza’s stomach, the adrenaline gave him enough strength to ask:

  “How?”

  Krieger stopped a few steps away from him. The soles of her boots left bloody footprints on her wake. “After you survived Taiga, we kept tabs on you from Outlander. You’d be amazed at what one can see with the password of all security cameras and access to the orbitals around a planet.”

  “Oh.”

  He never had stood a chance.

  Krieger turned his back to him. “Now, be a good boy and wait for the clean-up crew to take you out of the streets. I’ve a celebration party to attend,” she said, and left him there.

  Delagarza could feel his heart rate slowing as all pain and fear abandoned his body. Even the blood flow slowed, which was probably a bad omen. He pressed against his wounds harder. Strange. That hadn’t been his conscious decision at all.

  Just give up, Delagarza told himself, it’s over. Stop nagging at me and let me bleed out with some dignity.

  He closed his eyes and let darkness overtake him.

  It’s not over until I say it’s over, himself answered back, now shut up and let me focus. I never quite got the hang of this one.

  The reg-suit spat a constant blare of warnings at him. Cold seeped through the suit’s damaged fabric, and power drained out of the battery.

  It was a race to see what would kill him first—the cold or the blood-loss. So far, the blood-loss was winning, but the cold wasn’t giving up hope.

  Besides the indescribable agony of being shot in the stomach three times, Delagarza felt at peace.

  He had done his best. For once in his life, he had done good. Sure, he deeply regretted it and he wished he’d never tried, but he still had done it, and that had to count for something.

  I wonder if I’ll see my mother. Maybe there’s an afterlife, after all.

  Believe me, if there’s a God, we’re on his naughty list. Now shut up and do as I say. Get Rajpar’s attention. He’s hiding behind his stand. Ask him to let you use his wristband. Yours is compromised, that’s how Strauze kept tabs on you. Call Cooke, or Charleton. Ask them for help. Have them get you to a doctor. On the down-low, though. No hospitals.

  Delagarza rolled his eyes. This part of dying sucked. The hallucinations. The talking to himself. Why couldn’t he just dream of his childhood? Whatever. His heartbeat had all but disappeared. It was over.

  What did I just tell you? I slowed your heartbeat. You’re not bleeding out yet. Now ask Rajpar for help. Hurry, this meditation is fucking hard to maintain from my own subconscious. And there’s digestive acid soaking my intestines, which doesn’t help at all.

  “Dude…” Delagarza muttered. Just. Stop. Let it go. She’s dead. We failed. The EIF is not getting their space princess.

  She’s Reiner’s daughter. And I care because she isn’t dead.

  Delagarza blinked. He flashed the clean memory of Edith Sharpe as the bullet plastered her brains all over her own clinic’s walls.

  That’s not Isabella Reiner.

  What? She said…

  What she had to say to protect Isabella. She lied. People do that. Get used to it.

  This can’t be happening.

  Our job isn’t over, Delagarza.

  “I am a prim and proper asshole,” Delagarza whispered.

  He opened his eyes.

  18

  Chapter Eighteen

  Clarke

  The trip to the old fleet’s coordinates lasted four days. Then the Beowulf drifted in deep space, without anyone knowing its location, and with no way to return to civilized space. No one hailed them upon their arrival, and the detection systems were deaf and blind, so if anyone was out there, there was no way to know.

  Burying their dead was a grim task. Pascari carted Antonov’s remains, in a plastic bag, next to Julia’s drifting body. Captain Navathe pushed the pilot’s body next to the others. Clarke waited until Navathe and Pascari cleared the airlock and then cycled it. From the inner lock window he saw the bodies float out of the ship and for a second matched its speed, like three birds riding an airplane’s coattails. Slowly, they disappeared from view. They’d end up hitting the energy-density ring, where the forces involved would atomize them and spread their atoms across the universe.

  A fitting end for the men and woman who died fighting for the Edge.

  Julia had found her peace, but Clarke had lost his.

  No, not lost. It had been stolen. And he would’ve given anything to return the favor to that gunship. A new dream was added to his nightmares about Broken Sky. A simple dream, short. He heard again the smug voice of the unknown commander of the gunship who had been replaced by Admiral Ernest U. Wen
traub, at times mixing up with Captain Riley Erickson of the Vortex. The gunship commander, face to face with Clarke in dream-space, ordered him to surrender his ship and his crew. Clarke knew Isabella Reiner was a passenger, so he refused. The commander, then, showed him all the hostages he had captured, and that Clarke had condemned to death. Julia, Antonov, and all the sailors of the Applegate, his friends and family who had died during Broken Sky, some of them following Clarke’s orders. In the dream, Clarke saw them transform into corpses, broken and bloodied, while he screamed and the commander laughed.

  He’d wake then, wishing he could close his hands around that man’s neck.

  But he was stuck in a ship one malfunction away from becoming a derelict, and the only thing he could to stop the anger from consuming him was to drown in work. Luckily, there was a lot of work to be done in the dying Beowulf.

  They set up base in the med-bay, which had, by some miracle, survived the railgun barrage without losing structural integrity. It had no life-support and no functioning airlock, but that only meant more problems for Clarke to solve. He welcomed the chance.

  The first step was to restore the med-bay life-support. That meant getting a portable generator from the ship’s locker to restore the med-bay’s busted power lines. Clarke and Navathe made the trip while Pascari worked on removing the damaged machinery.

  After the med-bay was up and running, they raided the kitchens and the storage area for food supplies. There were enough crates to outlast their air supply.

  Once they had food and shelter, days passed one after the other as they fell into a sort of routine. They’d relieve themselves twice a day in airlocks and recycle the air. They’d perform maintenance on all the ship’s systems they could work on with their limited tools and knowledge and watch all the others slowly fail. Clarke and Navathe would check on the bridge to make sure the communications was still emitting the Beowulf’s code and EIF password to all local traffic, and Pascari would drift across the dark passages of the ship, taciturn, refusing to speak to anyone.