Hegemony

by Kalina, Mark

  The broad table in front of him was empty of other patrons in spite of the crowd. That gave Nas space in the crowded room. The table also hid the hand resting on the grip of his pulse-laser. One of the staff, a Modified girl with a wild mane of neon blue hair framing a sky blue face sculpted for slightly inhuman beauty, caught his eye and nodded, weaving among other staff and patrons to bring his drink. There were places that charged hundreds of credits for the privilege of live service. And then there were places like the Fortunate Landing, where live service was all there was because the dirtball excuse for a planet that held it couldn't afford the automation.

  Nas was used to places like this: dingy, jury-rigged, worn. Nas had once been at home in those other places; the automated, well polished and gleaming places. Now there was nowhere that was home, if not the bridge of his own Whisperknife. A smile twitched across weathered features. He looked very little like the smooth-faced Fleet Academy cadet that had once, long ago, been dishonorably dismissed from Hegemonic Fleet service.

  He ran his mind over the old wrong like a tongue touching a long-sore tooth; expected, almost welcome pain. Pale blue eyes narrowed as he remembered the cold, perfect faces of the aristokratai officers as they looked with perfectly concealed and still perfectly obvious relish at the disintegrating dream of a mere demos who had dared to try to enter their world. Demoi, commoners, could and did join the Fleet, could become officers, but never without falling on their knees in supplication to some patron of the aristokratai. Upstarts like him had to be shown the error of their ways. No matter that he had proven himself better than them.

  Or rather, of course, that had been the crux of it. A demoi was not allowed to show himself better than his "betters." He had been just on the cusp of becoming one of them, of being made into a daemon. Instead of which; dismissal, dishonor, the ruin of his family's reputation; those cold, perfect artificial faces had probably expected his suicide in response.

  What they got was something else again. Even a truncated training regimen at one of the Fleet Academies was valuable, and if no respectable Hegemony shipper would hire him on, plenty of other ships had no such qualms. It had taken all of his money, and a great deal of luck, to find passage to the anomic fringe worlds. There were thousands of long and hard hours of learning the rules of the sudden-death world of the Brotherhoods, before he had a place on a ship; a place he had to fight for, literally tooth and nail. Then there were tenkays of work on that first blockade-runner to get a reputation that would be noticed by the syndicate that funded the ship. There had been enemies to kill, rivals to face down, fortunes to take. In a way, this game often played none too different from what had been done to him by the Aristokratai, except that it was more honest and up-front. Among void-runners, you killed your enemy straight out... Well, except when you didn't, Nas thought with a rueful smile. Maybe there was no real difference between this existence and that other one, except that now he fully understood the rules of the game.

  His men, his crew, were scattered throughout the bar, in twos and threes, drinking, taking hits of a local drug called Blue-Smoke, or plugging euphoric data feeds into their brains. A few wore the dark red sash that identified them as crew of the Whisperknife, at least to any Brotherhood eyes. A few more, the ones that he could count on, were dressed as locals. If it came down to it, though, none of them were needed if the meeting went down hard. His telestraal training was another gift that his previous life had given him; the ancient martial art of gunfighting, of marksmanship, movement and timing, made him the equal of any half dozen non-adepts in a firefight. There was a dusting of other adepts scattered throughout the Brotherhoods, but only a handful had persevered to the third stage of mastery to match him. Nas' hard features turned momentarily even more predatory as he recalled the last ones to try to take him out with personal violence. Both men were still alive; both were well known among the Brotherhoods. Not too many people needed four artificial limbs apiece.

  Nas watched out of the corner of his eye as the contact stepped in. Not too bad; the man was dressed as a local, obviously armed, looking tough enough not to draw local street predators to himself. Nas had seen all too many "agents" whose soft looks drew more trouble to them than whatever business had sent them to try to hire a void-runner ship in the first place. This man was a cut better. He still stood out among the crowd at the Fortunate Landing; the patrons here were Brotherhood, or hangers-on and "fans" thereof. For every real raider and pirate, there were a dozen petty smugglers who hugged the very edge of the Brotherhoods; void-runners by courtesy. For every borderliner, there were a couple of enthusiasts wanting in, or just wanting into the pants of a real pirate. Nas regarded them all with an amused contempt. There were few ports of call where the Whisperknife could put in under her true name, but when she did, no one took her crew, or her captain, for mere smugglers.

  The man, the contact, unless Nas missed his guess, stood for a moment in the tiny open space just inside of the door, then noted the single uncrowded table, empty save for Nas, and began to make his way across the room. He moved with a spare efficiency, somehow getting through the crowd without pushing others aside or giving way. The contact was a tall man, nearly two meters, and an unmodified human by his looks. His great cloak concealed everything but a narrow ascetic face and the obvious bulge of a heavy sidearm. The man took the seat that Nas nodded to without comment. Black eyes met blue.

  "Well," said Nas, "you wanted to meet me; paid a fair bit to do it, too."

  "Indeed, Tel' Killick. You have the reputation of a busy man, so I'll get to the point."

  "Good." If there had been no point, Nas might have decided to kill this man, to keep his backers from wanting to waste Nas' time again.

  Well, on second thought, probably not. It was easy to get too bloodthirsty in this business, but not a good idea even so. But a good scare... that would be a fair exchange for having his time wasted.

  "I want to commission your ship for a raid," the tall man said. "A specific raid in a specific place, and at a specific time."

  "Hrrm," Nas nodded. Unusual to come right out and say it, but not unwelcome. The Brotherhoods had an elaborate cant for this sort of thing. It always annoyed Nas when outsiders tried to use it, or else tried to be vague with him, as if Nas might be a covert Inspectorate agent and they were trying to shy away from incriminating speech. "You want a specific cargo? Prisoners?"

  "Not at all, Tel' Killick. In fact you are welcome to any booty you obtain. I simply want the raid to happen at a given place and time. And for the target to be destroyed, Tel' Killick."

  "You're not making me your friend with those Hegemonic honorifics," Nas observed. In his mind he was already on to the next questions: who? why? Possible answers spread out like vector plots in Nas' mind. Rival shipping firms, local insurrections, insurance manipulations. Many possibilities. Of course, he wouldn't ask.

  "Beg pardon, Captain Killick. I meant no offense at all." The stranger seemed quick enough with the apology, but there was no fear behind it that Nas could detect. This man was no soft civilian; his bearing said "professional" of some sort. That in turn hinted at a serious client behind this man; serious trouble and maybe serious pay.

  "All right. A raid. Since we're being so up front, when, where, what target do you want hit…" Nas ticked the points off on the fingers of his left hand, "…and what are we paid for it?" His right hand was still out of sight, resting on the butt of his laser pistol.

  "Very well, Captain. The target is in the Yuro system, in particular the Jyu-Lau trans-shipping station. There is a ship there, the Ulia's Flower, a freight-liner in service of the Kerril Resource Recovery mining cartel. The ship is in bad shape, under emergency repairs, and will be at the station for at least the next few hundred hours. We want that ship destroyed. It is irrelevant to us, to me, if you take prisoners for ransom, or even leave survivors; I don't care either way. But the ship has to be destroyed."

  "If the ship's on station and defended, there's not mu
ch my swift-ship can do," said Nas.

  "In that case, I'd expect that your crew's impressive talent for infiltration raids would be put to use."

  Nas' face stayed expressionless, but his mind spun around to face the new data. This man knew about the raid on the surface of Salera II; a fine bit of work and a rich haul, but not common knowledge for anyone outside of the syndicate that supported them. Oh, the fact of the raid was well known, but very few knew it was the work of Nas and the Whisperknife; the bosses of the syndicate that had backed the raid knew, and a few others in the Brotherhoods… and apparently this man knew as well. Well, that made the whole business make more sense, perhaps.

  "That sort of thing," said Nas, "if it can be done at all, is very expensive. And you're not giving me much time. What pay?"

  "Payment in kind, if it suits you. I have a shipment of a dozen military grade anti-ship warheads. Agree to this task and they are yours."

  "Military grade?" asked Nas, and then frowned. It was silly to repeat what the man had said. But military grade warheads were not easy to come by. The word "warhead," Nas knew, was a bit of an ancient misnomer. In fact, they were complete missiles, though the launching ship, rather than an onboard engine, would provide most of their vector. That was why the weapons were called "warheads," as distinct from massive deep-space intercept missiles, DSIMs; those were almost ships in their own right, big anti-ship weapons with big fission drives of their own.

  But military grade warheads... that was something. Any planet or outpost with a decent technological infrastructure could make warheads; nukes were easy enough to make, and detonation lasers, though they required very precise engineering, were not beyond the reach of any place that could build a starship. Military grade weapons, though, meant superior sensors, superior counter-measures and superior targeting systems. And more importantly, it meant anti-matter triggers on the nukes. That made the weapons a lot more compact than the sort of warheads that currently sat in his ship's magazines. The Whisperknife could probably store a dozen military grade warheads in place of half a dozen of his older weapons, besides the fact that the military weapons were likely to be deadlier per weapon. A dozen military grade anti-ship warheads would almost double the fighting power of the Whisperknife.

  "I think we can do business," said Nas, slowly.

  ---

  The scanners were certain that no one had followed, as were the two commandos who had guard duty this night. More importantly, Labeck Pyer was certain himself. He trusted his instincts-- if not more than the hardware and eyes of his team, then deeper. Of course here, on Perihelas IV, he wasn't Labeck Pyer; it would be unlikely that anyone here would recognize a proper Coalition name, but not impossible. "Pyer Beck" was a name that was close enough to react naturally to, but one that would mean nothing to some too-educated listener.

  The meeting with the pirate had gone well. The man was adequate to the task, or else Deep Operations Oversight would never have allowed the meeting. More, he was adequately greedy, especially for the firepower that the payment represented. And if he scented something beyond mere criminal manipulations or cartel trade-wars, he was not likely to go to Hegemony authorities in any case. The price of a dozen warheads, all carefully drawn from stockpiles captured from Hegemony ships in the last war, was a very small price to pay for Pyer, and a very large payment for the pirate.

  That would see to the freight-liner. Its destruction would be the first half of closing the vulnerability that had opened in the operation plan. That the plan had been sloppy and ill-run did not overly bother Pyer. It was not his plan. He did, as a matter of professional pride, resent the fear that his current orders implied; someone among the political masters who had set the original plan in motion had gotten scared now that success seemed to be in reach.

  Pyer knew nothing of the details of the raiding force that the Coalition had sent into Hegemony space, save that the ships in it were a new technology, and untested, and that there were factions in the Coalition that had demanded that the new ships be "proven" with a raid into Hegemonic space.

  The rest, Pyer could deduce. The raid had gone well. And now the faction that had sent the new ships into harm's way wanted to keep the secret that they had done their best to throw away. The merchant ship whose destruction he had just purchased was rumored to have been attacked by large raiders of an unidentified sort. It must have survived meeting the new ships, thought Pyer. And now someone was worried that perhaps it had seen too much.

  In a way, that was good. It meant the new ships, whatever they were, were worth keeping secret. Pyer counted himself first and foremost a Coalition patriot, and the thought of an effective new weapon pleased him. On the other hand, the fact that some faction had put these new ships, secret ships, into such a situation was... frustrating.

  Still, the attack would make plausible the rumors that the systematic destruction of the freight-liners was a matter of a cartel war. And there would be other corroborating evidence of this cartel war as well; the Coalition's Deep Operations teams were good at that sort of work.

  But dealing with the freight-liner was just half the job. He also had to deal with two Hegemonic Fleet swift-ships. That would be harder. Pyer didn't bother to speculate on how or why two Hegemonic swift-ships had gotten involved. It was given to him as fact, and that was enough. But where a simple pirate raid could take care of a civilian ship, dealing with two Fleet ships would be much more complicated and expensive.

  Still, there were assets he could use. Again he felt frustration; there were assets that he would have to use up, assets that had been put in place with serious effort and danger and toil, that would be gone after this was done. But the people who sent him his orders knew that, and sent the orders anyway. So be it. Whatever was behind all this, it had to be important. The asset that Pyer planned to use was one of the best that the Coalition had in this part of the Hegemony. And just maybe, if the job was done right, he might manage to use the asset without using him up. Maybe.

  10

  Freya Tralk, captain of the Hegemonic swift-ship Ice Knife, sat on the neon blue couch in a transit-hotel room, buried in the middle of Spin-Gravity Ring B of Yuro-IV's massive Orbital Anchorage Station. She idly sipped from a hot cup of kafae, and let her mind scan along the News List of the hotel's complimentary data feed. This room was the local system defense authorities' idea of a comfortable place for her to wait till they were ready to debrief her. It was rather comfortable at that, though she would have preferred her cramped quarters aboard Ice Knife. Still, there was no reason to turn down the hospitality. It was nice to be in her biosim avatar. It was even nicer to be getting back to the idea of the humanoid avatar as her. She had spent more time than was comfortable in the command neural net of her ship.

  This room was made for humans, Freya thought, or for people who spent almost all of their time in humanoid avatars. There was a low-level wireless data feed that could control the room's climate and lighting, but there was a glossy physical control panel as well. The rest of the room was the same, set with items intended for guests who couldn't or didn't want to use a direct interface data feed.

  For a moment she let herself replay, one more time, the events of the battle in the waypoint system. It was a futile train of thought, she knew, but that knowledge wasn't enough to stop her.

  If the swift-ships had stayed close to the enemy, hadn't dropped back to a safer range? Could that have made the difference? Could she have saved the Conquering Sun from destruction? Probably not, she decided, wishing she was sure the thought wasn't just her guilt telling her that it wasn't her fault.

  But no, the reasons for standing off to longer range had been valid. And even if she had stayed at closer range, the enemy ships could have fired a small salvo of interceptors in her direction easily enough. Just a couple of interceptors would have been enough to force her ships to evade and back off... and the enemy had carried interceptor firepower to spare. Trying to look at the situation as soberly as she could,
Freya couldn't come up with a way that her being closer would have made a difference. And even if she was wrong, it didn't matter now. The battle was over, the Conquering Sun was dead, and this whole train of what-ifs was futile.

  The chime of her clock roused her from her thoughts. It was time to head to the Orbital Anchorage's shuttle concourse; her flight to the surface, to a meeting with the local System Defense Fleet commander, was standing by. Freya managed a smile of faint amusement; the powers that be thought there was enough time for her to relax in on-station guest quarters, but now grudged the time an orbital elevator ride down to the planetary surface would take. Typical.

  ---

  "Acro-telestos-Representative Irular," said Demi-Captain Freya Tralk, and bowed low.

  "Rise, Telestos-Demi-Captain Tralk, please," answered Acro-telestos Lyonidos Irular, smiling with a warmth that only genuine friendship, or the decades of training and the perfect control of a top-of-the-line custom bio-avatar could produce. The acro-telestos' face was lovely in a way that threatened to steal Freya's breath. Every line, every feature of his face was literal art. The delicate symbols and traceries applied to his cheekbones perfectly emphasized vivid violet eyes; guided the onlooker's glance to the perfectly swept, delicate ears. Mouth and chin were likewise perfect; firm and elegant like a sculpture. Even among the high-end custom bio-avatars of the high aristokratai, Lyonidos Irular was stunning. The deep blue of his facial art and almost metallic gold of his skin were set off by the pearlescent silver of his robe, unadorned except for a single blue tracery of rank and lineage glyphs flowing down the front.

  "Captain Tralk," the perfect voice went on, "I, and the authorities of this world, have indeed reviewed the grave information your ships have brought us."

  The acro-telestos was himself a high authority, but not directly part of the Yuro government; she had given her report to an officer of the System Defense Fleet who reported to the equeta system archon, in direct charge of the entire Yuro system. But acro-telestos Irular was a representative of the Central Throne, a messenger and servant of the Hegemon. Freya's own service was to the Central Throne, through the Fleet, and the chance to report to an agent of the Central Throne was an extra reassurance.