Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  I drifted along the curve of the column. A dead man in a green uniform floated to my right, heels spinning over his head, pinwheeling blood. Other droplets hung to the side of another pillar straight ahead. I jetted forward, skirting the ceiling, following the trail.

  Behind me, someone whispered my name. I pulled back on my control glove and the ball went silent. Droplets glittered ahead. From behind the next pillar I heard the rhythm of choked prayer.

  I pushed my hand into the glove. A green-clothed elbow twitched from behind the oncoming pillar. Noiselessly, I hovered directly above a uniformed soldier clutching a rifle to his chest, his back hunched against the curved white wall. I leveled my pistol at the top of his head.

  It puffed, thudding my back into the ceiling. I fired twice more. Pink matter spattered the floor, bits bouncing in all directions.

  “Clear,” I shouted.

  “You all right?” Baxter called.

  I stiffened my arm and let the ball push me back. Jia’s jaw clenched so tight it trembled, lips puckered in a pink oval.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Hondo?”

  Pete withdrew his hand from his floaterball and made a gesture like he was releasing a bird. I rolled my lip between my teeth. I had been floating, but the floor rose to meet my feet.

  “Sunspanner’s under way,” Fay said.

  “So do something about it,” Baxter said.

  “Like what? Blow you all to smithereens? Shoot out your engines? They know I can’t do anything while you’re onboard.”

  My feet sank against the floor, stuck there. Red spots speckled the flat white surface. Something landed with a squish.

  “Come on,” I said. “Every second puts us that much further from Titan.”

  I clipped my floaterball to my belt and bounded across the room to the stairwell to the bridge. I took the spiral stairs three at a time, floaterball jouncing against my hip, ascending past two more floors of pillars. At the top of the stairs, I was confronted by a broad and very locked door. The others piled into the cramped hexagonal vestibule with me. Jia swore. Pete leaned his face up to the entrypad and poked one of the buttons.

  “Have you tried knocking?” Baxter said.

  Jia rapped the butt of her pistol against the door with a flat polycarbon crack. We drew back, weapons raised.

  “Think we can shoot our way in?” I said.

  “For heaven’s sakes,” Fay said. “Someone plug an omni into that thing.”

  Pete glanced up at the ceiling—we all had a habit of doing that when Fay spoke—and docked his omni with the pad’s base. The pad’s square green screen strobed, then stamped “ACCEPTED” over the lightning-on-mountain OA logo. Jia lifted her knee and launched a kick at the door. Before she made contact, the door parted down the middle and retracted into the walls, leaving her stumbling forward.

  “Nobody move!” she yelled, righting herself.

  A half dozen crew members leapt from their chairs and raised their hands. Banks of monitors lined the walls; in the center, a holo showed Fay’s sleek dark form pursuing the circular Sunspanner like an angry missile. Pete and Aliss flanked the open doors at either side of the airy room, clearing them.

  “Get on your knees.” Jia swept the barrel of her gun from face to flinching face. “Get on your knees. Hands behind your heads.”

  She twitched the gun, herding them together, then paced forward until her pistol was an arm’s length from the pale face of a man just out of his teens. Her fingers flexed around the weapon’s grip. “You think that’s smart? Ambushing us? Why don’t I spray your brains over the wall and get a good look at how big they are?”

  “Don’t hurt me,” the kid said.

  Baxter’s face twitched with angry desire and hesitant anxiety. I stepped forward. “Don’t.”

  Jia didn’t turn. “They killed Hondo.”

  “Those soldiers killed Hondo,” I said. “And they’re both dead.”

  “What’s six more?”

  The kid shut his eyes, shuddering. My shoe squeaked on the smooth white floor. “What do you think happens when you pull the trigger, Jia? The bullets get sucked out of Hondo?”

  Jia’s sleepy brown eyes brightened with fury. “What the fuck do you care? They work for OA.”

  “They’re unarmed,” I said softly. “When we get the colonists on board, do you want their first experience in their new home to be scrubbing blood off the walls?”

  Jia’s cheeks ticked, drawing her mouth in a long thin line. She grabbed the kid’s cheeks, squishing them inward. “Remember this face when it’s standing over your body.”

  She shoved him away, jammed her pistol in its holster, and glared at me. “Happy, you son of a bitch?”

  “You made the right decision.” I drew my stunner and shot the six crew members as fast as I could pull the trigger, leaving them stiff across the floor. “Get these guys stacked in a corner. Hey Fay, how do we turn this thing around?”

  “Confirm termination,” the policeman said.

  “Huh?” Baxter said, glancing between Arthur and the cop.

  “Attention Officer Mayes.” Arthur’s voice rang in the small room. “I, too, am an artificial intelligence. I have a small bomb inside my casing. Any attempt to capture or disable—”

  The gun crashed. Arthur spun off the table and bounced against the wall, splinters of plastic bursting into the air, peppering the side of Baxter’s face. His earbud went dead. He screamed and lurched forward.

  His ears roared with a second crash. His head yanked back and his left eye went blank. He stumbled around the table as the officer froze—he’d put one clean through the AI’s head—then Baxter grasped the end of the pistol with one hand and the cop’s throat with the other and squeezed until he felt one pull free and the other collapse. The man’s legs went out, his limp weight dangling from Baxter’s arm.

  “Arthur?” he said out loud. “Arthur?”

  22

  “Eight down, 643 to go.” I rubbed my hands together against the freezing cold, voice raised over the cheering throngs of colonists. The matte black arrowhead of Fay’s shuttle detached from the dome wall umbilical, tipped back on its tail, and streaked into the yellow sky, rippling the murky atmosphere like a stone in a lake. “The Sunspanner’s shuttle holds twenty?”

  “Yep,” Fay said in my ear.

  “651 citizens, divided by 28, multiplied by, what, forty minutes per round trip—”

  “Sixteen hours on the nose,” it interrupted.

  I snorted, steam jetting from my nose. “Is that supposed to impress me? You’re a giant computer.”

  “A little.”

  I grinned at the sky. So Fay was feeling cocky. Well, I was, too.

  After escorting the Sunspanner to Titan’s orbit, swatting down a few stray missiles, and installing the umbilical in the side of the dome, we still had eighteen hours until the NightVision fleet rolled in. When the HemiCo armada and Olympian Atomics’ troop transport showed up minutes after that, they would find that not only had we evacuated every rebel citizen in Shangri-la to the hijacked colony ship, but that we’d lit out two hours before they arrived.

  With their pursuit blocked by our fleet, and the threat of orbital bombardment if they took reprisals on the remaining citizens of Shangri-la, Fay could escort the Sunspanner on the first leg of its trip to Centauri, then turn around and distribute us—me, Baxter, Pete, Shelby and her team, Jia and any other rebel soldiers who weren’t ready to pitch a tent outside the Solar System—to Mars, Earth, Hidey-Hole, Luna, or anywhere else we cared to go.

  Not that this was ironclad. HemiCo could choose to fight through our ships; Fay gauged their chances of victory right around 25%. If they then sent the battered remnants of their fleet after us—assuming they could catch up to the Sunspanner, which, judging from the speed they’d shown getting to Titan, would take them several months—Fay gave them somewhere between a 5-10% shot of taking us out.

  Which was to say attacking us would result in a 90-95% chance
of suicide. Logically, they should negotiate a ceasefire, head back to Mars, and leave OA to restore their city and their highly profitable fusion isotope business.

  “Logically?” Baxter had snorted. “HemiCo is as logical as a bludgeoned rattlesnake. I offer a preemptive naysaying to any plans built on the assumption they’ll react within the already-blurry lines of human reason.”

  “They’re powerful, not invincible,” I said. “HemiCo’s not going to throw billions of dollars of starships away to rescue OA’s pet project.”

  “Willing to bet your inexplicably long life on that?”

  “No,” I said. “Speaking of which, Fay...”

  “I have no new information on that subject,” it said. “All I can tell you is if you were designed, there should be evidence of your designers out there somewhere. Fortunately, once this is over, the two of us will have a very long time to search it out.”

  I frowned up at the sky. “What about the other AI? Aren’t you supposed to be protecting them?”

  “We have NightVision for that now,” it said. “Besides, a deal’s a deal.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t certain that was what I wanted, but I didn’t have to make that decision just yet.

  After Fay’s shuttle blasted off with the first payload of passengers, the Sunspanner’s transport touched down a few minutes later. It was a squat vessel, like a flying tugboat, but not as cute. Twenty colonists filed into the umbilical. The shuttle crew deplaned and sealed the tube to their entry hatch. The moment the colonists were secured, the shuttle lumbered upward, angling from the dome as it prepared to kick in its boosters.

  Bright red tracers seared a path from ground to sky. The shuttle wobbled, shedding debris from its fat body.

  “Oh no.” My breath curled in the freezing air. “No no no.”

  The crowd inside the dome gasped and moaned. The shuttle sagged like an old balloon, left wing dipping. Outside the dome, a battlewagon lurched forward and unleashed a second volley from its multigun. The shots shredded the shuttle’s rear. It exploded with a weak flare. As pieces of it and its passengers rained from the cloud of smoke, the crowd began to scream.

  “What just happened?” Fay said.

  “They rolled out a battlewagon,” I said, numb. “They shot down the shuttle.”

  “Rob, acknowledge,” Jia said in my ear. “Something’s going down across Thermopylae.”

  Someone grabbed my shoulder. A short-haired man gaped through the dome at the smoke curling from the crash.

  “Rob?” Fay said. “What do we do?”

  “OA’s figured us out. They’re making their move.” I pulled from the man’s grip and sprinted to a cart parked outside a shop Hermalina’s people had converted into a distribution center for blankets, clothes, soap, omnis, and all the small necessities anyone might want to take up to the Sunspanner. “We need to get everyone who can shoot a rifle down in Thermopylae. Fay, are your gun platforms any good in atmosphere?”

  “Titan isn’t their ideal operating environment, but they should work.”

  “Get one down here to defend your shuttle. Now.”

  “You want to keep going?” Fay’s voice dripped with anguish, the smallest I’d ever heard it. “My shuttle can only get a third of the colonists on board before HemiCo’s fleet gets here.”

  “This is how we beat Persia, Fay.” I gunned the cart, showering the storefront with yellow grit. “We keep their army at bay in Thermopylae while you tie their ships up in Artemisium. Meanwhile, we evacuate Athens. If they break through, there won’t be any colonists left to capture.”

  “But everyone died at Thermopylae!”

  “Don’t you think I fucking know that?”

  “I could send the shuttle one last time,” it wheedled with icicle-bright clarity. “Just four passengers: you, Baxter, Pete, and Shelby.”

  “We can do this! But we need your help, Fay. Get that platform and take out that wagon. Please!”

  It was silent for several seconds. “Affirmative. Good luck, Rob.”

  Cold air streamed past my face, freezing the hair in my nostrils. The road dipped for a tunnel and the cart’s wheels left the ground. I flattened my body, the tunnel roof ripping inches above my head. The cart jarred hard, bouncing me from the seat as I clung to the steering handles.

  “Where are you, Rob?” Baxter asked through my earbud.

  “Almost there. Fay?”

  “Platform en route,” it said.

  I tore across the dome, weaving around stray pedestrians and the frozen piles of garbage the citizens had dumped in the streets since their recyclers shut down. I popped out of the next tunnel into warm air—relatively speaking; the wind felt sharp enough to shave my cheeks, but my nostrils no longer pinched with every breath—and straight into a flock of backpack-toting locals surging for the tube I’d just left. I swore, swerving and bleeding speed.

  “Battlewagon destroyed,” Fay said. “I’m going to deploy a second platform. If we lose my shuttle now, it’s over.”

  I blew a jet of steam between my teeth. “If you’re spending this much juice on the ground, are you going to be able to defend yourself when their fleet shows up?”

  “The odds just got longer.”

  I cut down a side street to detour around the snarl of outgoing pedestrians, furious at Fay, my team, myself. How had we not seen this? Had we really believed Olympian Atomics would let us hijack their ship, kidnap their colonists, and blast off for their planet without raising a hand against us? That they’d just sit tight on the other side of Thermopylae, stymied by a handful of citizens-turned-soldiers armed with stolen weapons, trained on the fly (and under-ammoed as we were, most of this had been done virtually, using Fay-authored software), exhausted from weeks huddled in a cold, drafty, dark tunnel?

  The hubris! Our punishment would be divine.

  I braked hard outside Thermopylae, fishtailing, spewing dirt over the conscripts scrambling to erect a tent around the sheets and pillows masquerading as our med center. I leapt off the still-rocking cart and ran to the arms shed. Out of body armor. To hell with it; the stuff had nearly drowned me once before. The targeting goggles and correctional bracers were long gone too. I shouldered a rifle, filled my pockets with spare clips, and tied a paring knife around my left calf.

  “What’s so funny?” the quartermaster asked me.

  I nodded to the hundreds of green-suited soldiers kicking up dust in the other dome some hundred yards away. “Think this knife will save me? You got any rocks I can throw?”

  The man drew back his chin. “This is all we have.”

  “I’ve got more practice with these anyway.” Sweat slimed my sides as I descended into the warm and ceaseless exhalation of the tunnel. I put my finger to my earbud. “Where are you, Baxter?”

  “Past the wagon.”

  I weaved among our walls of trash, furniture, and dirt. They lights they’d rigged along the tube were as bright and yellow as the daylit domes. Pete waved from a line of troops kneeling to my right. I squeezed past the battlewagon. In the trench beyond, Baxter crouched behind his rifle, perfectly still, as if he were a replica of himself in a museum that, centuries later, would recreate this scene for giggling tourists.

  He fixed me with his green fractal eyes, the scar beneath his left glossy in the yellow light. “Thoughtful of you to show up.”

  “Why in the world did you have to put us up front?” I said. “Where’s Jia?”

  “Inside the wagon. And we’re in the front because the front is the best place to kill these vermin you share a species with.”

  I frowned down the tunnel. “Most of the people we’re about to kill, or get killed by, are men and women who needed a job.”

  He snorted. “They’re mercenaries paid to enforce the will of entities like HemiCo. Yes, sure, a hammer’s just a tool. A tool can be used for good or evil. But the difference between these people and a hammer is that a hammer can’t walk away.”

  “Walking away wouldn’t do any good. They
know they’d just be replaced by someone else.”

  “Ah. So you think we should invade Earth next.” He tugged his lower lip. “I’ll bring it up with Fay.”

  We talked more, I’m sure, but I don’t remember what about. The tunnel yawned on, a dark-sided mouth striped by a long tongue of yellow pavement.

  “Movement up top,” Jia announced from the wagon, the third time she’d done so in the hour-plus since I’d settled in beside Baxter. Well familiar with the delays and frustrations of any campaign, even one as small and centralized as ours, I expected another false alarm, dubious OA would be ready to march so quick.

  A small metal can clanked down the far side of the tube. Three more followed.

  “Grenades!” someone yelled. I hunkered down, arms over my head.

  “Those aren’t grenades,” Jia said slowly, voice booming from the wagon’s speakers. “Oh, shit.”

  Opaque white gas hissed from the canisters, flooding the tunnel. The gas grenades were a good twenty yards away, but the steady warm breeze would engulf us in seconds. Men shouted orders. Baxter sprang from the trench and ran back down the tunnel.

  I gaped. “You coward!”

  The gas swirled forward. Already it smelled strangely sweet, like artificial sugar heated and dried, evoking memories of a riot outside Central Park when the USA had gone temporarily insane at the start of the 21st century. Pepper spray, or something like it. When the first tendrils tickled my nose, I broke and leapt from the trench.

  Baxter stood atop the wagon. He shoved aside the wide-eyed gunner and contorted his body into the multigun’s turret.

  The quartermaster’s crew passed transparent masks to the back lines of troops. I tripped toward them. Shots puffed through the roiling clouds, whining off the roof, paffing dust from the upslope at the tunnel rear. I dropped behind a dirt wall. Bullets thudded into the heaped-up soil.

  “Get us more masks!” Jia shouted. “Check the emergency cache!”

  “You wanted me?” Baxter screamed from the wagon turret. “Here I am!”