by Jay Allan
“Okay, then we take the refined list, and we come up with the quickest path through, right?”
Andi nodded. “Telus Zakaris is the bug in that. It’s at least three extra jumps to get there from anywhere on our course plot. We’d save a lot of time if we dropped it out.” Andi stared at the starmap. She could speed things up considerably by removing that single system…but she couldn’t come up with another reason to scratch it. It matched all the search parameters, just like the other systems.
It’s one out of twelve, even one out of the seven or eight likeliest. That’s maybe a twelve percent chance, max…and you’ll save at least two weeks…
The thought was a seductive one, but Telus Zakaris was located near the beginning of the range of systems, and her progressive search would lead Pegasus farther and farther away. It would be the second, maybe third system they search…otherwise, she’d spend close a month going through the others, and if none of them panned out, another two weeks to get back to Telus Zakaris.
It’s a gamble. You’ve taken them before, more times than you can probably remember…
But something was different this time. She wasn’t sure if it was some nugget of data in the scant records she had on the troublesome system, or just the immense stakes riding on her mission. She’d struggled for wealth before, even for her own personal survival, but this time she was striving for more than that. For Tyler, for Cassie…for everything she knew and cared about.
“Telus stays in, Vig. I don’t think we should skip any significant possibilities. Not now.”
You’re being comprehensive, but the lost days could just as easily be the difference between getting back in time…or arriving too late.
Vig was right, but so was she. There was little advantage to thinking too much about it further or worrying yet again about what to would mean if she was late. Andi had never been one to discount the prospect of failure, but she was doing her best to do just that. She simply couldn’t fail. She couldn’t fail Tyler and Cassie. No matter what it took.
“We’ll hit Telus third. Maybe Lex can squeeze some extra push from the engines and shave some hours off that travel time…”
* * *
“It’s close, Vig. Damned close.” Andi was staring at the data scrolling down her screen, checking the planet types and orbital positions. The information she had from the imperial capital was detailed but also incomplete, and however much analysis she and her people put into their search, guesswork was going to play a role. She still had some doubts lingering, even as she checked off boxes in her mind.
“We’re getting the probe data in now. There are definitely some kind of ruins on planet four. It’s got to be something imperial. Readings suggest fairly extensive constructions. If this was fifteen years ago, we’d be all over this place, Andi.”
Andi felt a brief flash of amusement at Vig’s reference to their time as true Badlands prospectors. She’d been fresh from the slums of the Gut in those days, focused with laser sharp intensity on the acquisition of wealth. She’d have gone down to the planet below them with both guns drawn, ready to tear through those ruins—and anybody who tried to get in her way—but now, her cheerful recollection faded almost immediately, swamped by one overriding fact.
The base they were looking for was supposed to be on the third planet, not the fourth. The ruins her people had found might be an incredible find, stuffed full of artifacts worth billions of credits. But she hadn’t come for scraps of old electronics or bits and pieces of imperial history, however valuable they may be. She had come for the secret to defeating the Highborn…and that was going to be on a third planet, not a fourth.
“Mark it in the logbooks, Vig. If we survive this war, we’ll send somebody back to check this out.” That wouldn’t be her, though. She’d already promised herself, if she got the chance for quiet and peace with Tyler and Cassie, nothing short of the need to save the Rim again would drag her from it.
“Done.” Vig was silent for a few seconds, then he added, “I remember how excited I would have been at something like this…and now I barely care. I guess we’re getting old, Andi…”
“Old…or maybe we’re just growing up. There was a time nothing seemed more important to me than finding some piece of an old circuit board, something we could sell back on Dannith.” She remembered those days, and the emotions that drove her. But she couldn’t really remember how it really felt.
She remembered the Gut, too, the misery, the constant struggle to survive, to find something to eat…and on a good day, something that wouldn’t turn a rodent sick. But she knew those recollections were partial and incomplete as well. She understood what it was like to be hungry, crawling through the garbage, eyes peering in every direction for another vagrant ready to kill or a few scraps of food. But it was sanitized now, like she was thinking of someone else, not herself.
She’d come so far from those days, gained so much…and unless she succeeded in her current mission, she could lose it all.
No, I’m not going to fail…
The Highborn were immensely powerful, a nightmare produced by humanity, that now threatened to enslave their creators. Her rational mind told her there was no way, that she was on a fool’s errand, that the fight against so powerful an enemy was without hope.
Then she told her rational mind to go to hell.
She was a cold realist, and she had been since her days of squalor and misery. Andi had seen enough of the universe’s dark side, the seething underbelly of human civilization to inflame her cynicism to the very depths of her soul.
But now she relied on hope, on her belief in her own determination and ability. She told herself she had accomplished other ‘impossible’ missions, that she had come improbably far from her wretched beginnings. She told herself her crew were veterans, the best at what they did.
But in the end, it came down to one thing, utterly at odds with her usual approach to things.
She would succeed because she had to, because failure was unthinkable.
Because she had to help save those she loved, and the comrades and friends she had acquired in her wild and almost unimaginable life.
You’ve come all this way from the Gut. There has to be some purpose to that. It won’t end here, fighting these genetic monsters. It can’t…
She sucked in a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before exhaling hard.
“Let’s get the hell out of here, Vig. Planet three’s a barren desert, no signs it was ever inhabited.” She knew that wasn’t conclusive, that the imperials could very well have chosen a desolate world to construct a base of the sort she sought. But there wasn’t time to be sure. She didn’t have the resources to comb an entire planet for some underground base. She had to go with her gut.
And her gut was telling her to press on. What she had come for wasn’t in Alfaris Bootes.
It was out there somewhere…farther along on the trail she was pursuing.
She leaned down over the comm unit. “Vig, we’re setting a course for transit point three. We’ve got three jumps to reach Telus Zakaris. Let’s see what we can do to sharpen our vectors and cut down on that travel time.”
Chapter Nine
Forward Base Striker
Vasa Denaris System
Year 328 AC (After the Cataclysm)
“Do you mind if I sit with you for a moment?” Akella stood outside the doorway leading to the small lounge. Tyler Barron sat alone on a small chair, looking out through the hyper-polycarbonate window, at the blackness of the Vasa Denaris system, and the pinpricks of light speckled majestically across. The room had been intended for general use, but Barron had taken a liking to it, and now most of his comrades and officers shied away, not wanting to disturb his solitude. The admiral had been working relentlessly, a man obsessed with preparing to meet the Highborn, and to defeat them and send them back to the coreward reaches from whence they had come. But in his few moments away from work, he’d been morosely depressed, and the exhaustion from ma
intaining his warrior’s persona in the face of such desperate danger had eaten away at what was left of the man.
“Of course, Akella…how often does anyone say ‘no’ to you?” Barron turned his body partially to the side and looked over at the Hegemony leader. Barron had gone into the alliance with the Hegemony as reluctantly as any of his spacers, perhaps more so. The officers and crew of his ships had suffered terribly in the war against the Hegemony, but their pain had been limited to personal suffering, and the loss of friends and comrades. Tyler Barron carried all of it with him, the ghosts of millions who’d died serving under his command, the dead on worlds like Megara, where his efforts to defend them had failed, the names of ships gone, reduced to glowing plasma with all the men and women who’d served them aboard. He’d hated Akella and her people. He hadn’t even realized how fiery hot his rage had been, not until he’d learned to let it go.
Now, he realized he counted her as one of his closest friends. That was both a relief and a misery. However much his former enemies had become vital allies, revealed themselves to be human beings, both good and bad, part of him would always drown in self-hatred for his friendship with those who had killed so many of his spacers.
Akella walked across the room and sat in the chair next to Barron. “Tyler…I just wanted to check on you, see how you are holding up. How you are really holding up.”
Barron opened his mouth, ready to repeat the bottled response he gave everyone who asked him that question. But something stopped him. Akella was perhaps the only person on Striker he could actually talk to about such things. Atara was his closest and oldest friend, a sister to him in every way that mattered. But she was one of his spacers, too, and she had a right to draw strength from him, not to listen to him whine about his own weakness. The same applied to Clint Winters, Vian Tulus…even Chronos and Ilius, his Hegemony comrades. He was the effective commander in chief of all the Pact’s military, even if that had never been made entirely official. Everybody looked to him for strength, and giving it to them cost him more than they could ever imagine.
“It’s…difficult. If Andi was still here, and Cassie…” Barron knew Andi’s mission was a vital one, even if he was less sure than she that there was some secret weapon that would defeat the Highborn. And he didn’t really want Cassie anywhere near Striker, not when the most terrible battle of his life was likely to begin at any moment. But he still missed them terribly, and he worried about them every conscious moment.
“I would like to say I understand—and I do to an extent…” Akella had sent her own children back to Megara along with Cassie. Barron suspected that had been even more difficult for her in some ways than sending Cassie had been for him. His daughter was going home, at least. Akella was entrusting her son and daughter to allies who had been enemies not that long ago. “I miss my children already, though I’m sure like you, I want them nowhere near what is coming.”
“Perhaps you and the Council should prepare to evacuate as well.” Barron paused. He liked to think of himself as a confident man, but the truth was, if he’d been making a wager, he probably would have bet against himself. “Things are liable to get…sticky here. Even on Striker.” Especially on Striker. There was no potential Highborn attack plan Barron could imagine that didn’t center on knocking out the great fortress.
“I am going to put the Council in extended recess, and allow its members to leave as soon as they can prepare. Close to half of them are from planets still in our possession, at least for the moment, so they’ll have some place to go.”
Barron nodded as she spoke, but he kept the first thought that came into his mind to himself. She’ll be able to breath more easily with the Council out of session and dispersed.
So will you…now if you could just find someplace to send the Senate…
Barron suppressed a smile at his thoughts. The Senate was always a wildcard, but they were far away, and the Hegemony Council was still right there on Striker.
“And what about you, Akella? Where will you go?” Barron had only sketchy information on the Hegemony leader’s history. He was aware she hadn’t been born on Calpharon, but he knew nothing about her birth world. Save only that it was located in the region of Hegemony currently occupied by the Highborn.
“I am not leaving.” Her words were a surprise, at first, but less so as Barron considered them, alongside all he’d come to know of Akella’s character. Still, her intention to stay concerned him.
“I appreciate your courage, Akella…but perhaps you should reconsider. You are, after all, the closest thing the Hegemony has to a head of state. If things go…poorly…here, you will be needed…”
“If things go poorly here, it’s all over, Tyler. You know that as well as I do. The Hegemony will be finished, the remaining systems occupied within a matter of months. The Kriegeri garrisons will put up a hell of a fight, but they will eventually be overwhelmed. Or the enemy will tire of their resistance and bombard the stubbornly held worlds to oblivion. The Confederation and the Alliance will fight on, of course, as will whatever remnants remain of Hegemonic forces…but if we cannot hold them here, there is little chance of doing so in six months or a year somewhere else, when we are much weaker, far more desperate.”
Barron had long been impressed by Akella’s grasp of military realities, despite her almost complete lack of formal education in the area or experience in battle.
“Maybe you should pull back to Confederation space, prepare…just in case we need a Hegemony government in exile.” Barron had seen Megara fall, watched as the remnants of the Confederation government had continued to function in an alternate location. But that had been different. The fleet had been pushed back almost on top of its supply sources. The capital had fallen to the Hegemony, but the Confederation forces had remained strong and well-supported. If his fleet lost at Striker, they would never again be as strong as they were at that moment. It would be a defeated and demoralized force that retreated back across the Badlands.
And it’s very possible we’ll have enemy forces behind us as well…
Barron had tried not to think too much about what was happening around Fortress Grimaldi, mostly because there was nothing he could do about it. But if his forces were defeated at Striker, the situation looked grim, any way he shuffled the details in his head. Even if Grimaldi managed somehow to hold on.
“That would serve no purpose, Tyler…and you know it. Chronos and the fleet—or anyone else in command if Chronos…isn’t there—will fight at your side whether they receive orders from some political authority or not. A Council in exile would be an exercise in ego and self-importance, and whatever my faults have been in those areas, both are in low ebb right now. I have no desire to outlive the Hegemony, nor to watch as our few survivors continue a hopeless struggle. And I certainly don’t want to sit on some Confederation planet and listen to Thantor and his allies prattle on endlessly, no doubt about how the entire Highborn invasion was my fault. If I do not reconstitute the Council, I can spare you his machinations, at least.”
“I would be honored to have you here, Akella…though I still think you should go, leave the battle zone.” Barron had always respected true courage, and he’d seen far too little of it in the political personages who ran the governments of the various nations. He’d found the Hegemony’s system of genetic ratings troublesome, and also unreliable. He didn’t have to look any farther than Thantor, allegedly the second most perfect human known, to see that.
But the system, unfair misguided, well-intentioned, whatever description one chose to assign to it, had scored a direct hit with Akella. Barron truly liked his friend…and he respected the hell out of her as an ally.
He just hoped he was able to find some way to come through, to hold the line and push back the Highborn. To save the Rim, for Andi and Cassie, for himself…and for the men and women like Akella, those he’d been privileged to know in his violent and tumultuous career.
Those who deserved a future free from slavery to
a self-designated group of would-be gods.
And dammit, I’m going to get that done…somehow…
* * *
“Bryan…your people haven’t seen much action in this war, not yet at least.” Barron had seen Confederation Marines in action, and he knew just how good they were. But the fight against the Highborn had taken place mostly in space, and the desperate ground defenses to hold worlds abandoned by the fleet had so far been fought by Hegemony Kriegeri.
Barron knew that could change, that it would change if the defense of Striker failed. There was nothing defensible behind the great fortress, not until Dannith itself. And that was Confederation space.
But for the moment, he had another idea in mind for Rogan’s Marines.
“No, Admiral, not yet. But I can promise you we’re ready, whenever you need us.” Bryan Rogan had been with Barron in one way or another since he’d commanded the contingent of Marines aboard Dauntless. The old Dauntless.
The Marine hadn’t been in a serious battle for six years, but Barron could still see clearly that Rogan still had his thousand-meter stare. The fighting on Megara and some of the other Confederation worlds during the Hegemony War had been some of the fiercest he’d ever seen, with casualty rates so high, it didn’t seem possible formations could take such abuse and stay in the fight. Barron was no stranger to war and strife, but he’d never seen anything quite like the looks in the eyes of the survivors from those battles, and Bryan Rogan stood at the head of that list.
“Well, I don’t have any planetary invasions to assign to you yet, but I was thinking maybe we could give your people something else to do. This is going to be a huge fight, Bryan, maybe the biggest—and most important—we’ve ever seen. We’ve got Anya Fritz back, and she’s whipped the engineering teams into a frenzy, but still…any extra help will make a huge difference. What do you think of pairing off your squads with the damage control teams? They’re not engineers, but that doesn’t mean they can’t help. If they can clear wreckage, help move equipment…they just might aid the tech teams in repairing damage that much quicker. And getting a gun back online, or a reactor powered up that much sooner could make the difference…”