by Thomas Locke
Sean and the others returned to Aldwyn with another five dozen Cygnean troops. Cylian, Anyon, Carver, Dillon, and Sidra all helped with the transit. Brodwyn herself came over to survey Logan’s preparations. If the general was disconcerted by being shifted between planets in the space of half a heartbeat, she gave no sign. She flatly rejected Anyon’s request that Praetorian Guards be permitted to enter the conflict. The political implications, she insisted, would make this a council decision, and they did not have either the evidence or the time for such.
They ordered Logan to outline his strategy, and he drew Sean and Dillon into the mix. The general and Anyon both heard them out in silence. When they were done, and all Sean could see was the potential for deadly mistakes, Carver drew the twins aside and said, “You both have the makings of great leaders.”
Dillon’s only response was to go crimson from his collar to his hairline. Sean said, “Right now I’m filled with the prospect of total failure.”
“This, too, is part of leadership. But your plan is a good one.” Carver started to turn away, then said, “It is an honor to serve with you.” He drew himself up to rigid attention and threw them both a parade-ground salute.
When he had departed, Dillon said, “Talk about making my day.”
Sean pointed over to where the general was talking with Logan. “Not just us.”
They were too far away to hear what the general was telling Logan. But her words were clearly impacting him very deeply. She noticed them watching and said, “Join us.”
Up close, Sean thought Logan had never looked more the leader.
Brodwyn said, “I am making a battlefield promotion of Major Logan, subject to final approval once this sortie is concluded. I take it you have no objection.”
“None whatsoever,” Sean replied.
“It’s a great step,” Dillon said. “He deserves it.”
“You will be the youngest officer of this rank in Cygnean history,” Brodwyn said, and revealed her version of a smile, all taut edges and honed precision. “Keep this up and I will soon be saluting you.”
Logan said weakly, “Thank you, General.”
She seemed not to notice Logan’s struggle for control and waved over her adjutant. Sean’s first impression was that Gerrod was a snotty, conceited officer who liked using the general’s clout as though it belonged to him personally. Clearly Sean’s opinion was shared by Logan and his officers. Which might have been why the general made such a public display of saying, “I am hereby assigning Gerrod duty as Logan’s adjutant.”
Gerrod jerked as though he’d been zapped. “General—”
“You may thank me later,” she snapped. When she was certain his protest had been stifled, she continued in an even louder voice, “Unless Major Logan directs otherwise, you will be responsible for the newly arrived Cygnean troops. Major Logan’s end-of-battle report will have a direct and lasting impact on your own opportunities for advancement. Is that clear?”
Gerrod wilted to the point that Sean almost felt sorry for him. “Perfectly, General.”
“Excellent.” Brodwyn turned to where the troopers were rendered utterly dumbfounded by the shock of being transited to Aldwyn. “Major?”
Logan nodded to Vance, who shouted, “Attention!”
Brodwyn’s voice was made to carry far. “Obey Major Logan as you would me. Learn from the experience. I am certain his tactics will soon be adopted as a major component of our army’s battle strategy. Good hunting.” She saluted the room, then turned to Anyon and said, “Ambassador?”
When the pair had departed, Logan stepped in close to the twins and said, “I’m very glad indeed that I trusted you.”
While they were still absorbing that, Logan turned to his three officers and ordered half of the newly arrived troops to serve as backup to his own crew, and the other to patrol the market. He charged Nicolette and Gerrod with the patrols and sent two of his ghost-walkers with them. There was no telling, he warned, whether Havoc might try to outflank them by transiting in troops of their own. But Sean didn’t think that would happen, and Dillon shared his opinion. Senior Diplomats like Kaviti would consider it an insult to transit local troops under orders from an outpost world’s duke.
Dillon pulled Sean aside and said, “Want to see what I did on my summer vacation?”
“Absolutely.”
Dillon held out his hand. “Grab hold.”
They stepped together and wound up on top of a hill that should not have been there.
Sean took a slow look around. “You’ve been busy.”
While he was away, Sean’s plan had been turned into a dusty fortress. He had figured the Havoc crew assumed they held the element of a double surprise. They possessed a secret weapon, and they were allied to the off-world ghost-walkers. Not to mention the size of the Havoc army.
Odds were overwhelmingly in their favor. The Havoc crew probably assumed they would waltz in and take over.
Sean hoped it might be possible to shock Tiko’s forces into the Aldwyn equivalent of next week.
With the help of Logan’s team, Dillon had cleared away the first three rows of market stalls fronting the Havoc tunnel. Actually, the local crew had mostly watched, at least at first. Dillon had used the hill’s construction as a means of both testing and training Logan’s crew. They had showed an uncommon ability to lift and grind and transport. By the time the conical hill was completed, Logan’s ghost-walkers had honed a new tactic.
Sean now found the tunnel mouth facing a semicircle of utterly bare stone. The open space extended back about two hundred feet. And it was now rimmed by a semicircular hill.
Dillon had fashioned a killing ground.
40
Their rooftop aerie offered a clear view of the entire free-fire zone. The empty space surrounding the tunnel opening was a full one hundred paces wide. The semicircular hill was fifteen paces high and gently sloped. A flat space had been pounded along its top to form a guard’s walk. Twenty-five troops in militia uniforms knelt on the opposite side, their shoulders and weapons partly visible from the tunnel mouth. Kneeling there in silent warning.
Every time he glanced over the rooftop wall and surveyed the perimeter defenses and the paltry number of troops on guard, Sean’s gut crawled with fear. He tasted their vulnerability and all the unanswered questions with every breath. Doom had never felt closer.
Dillon handled the waiting with irritating ease. Unlike his brother, for whom every sound carried the threat of an invading force. Finally Sean demanded, “How can you stay so calm?”
Dillon was stretched out on a pallet with his back against the wall supporting the interior stairwell, his eyes half closed. He pointed with his chin toward the faces peering over the militia headquarters’ rooftop, which towered above every other structure in the market. “The scouts will see any movement. Your job is to chill.”
Sean threw himself down beside his brother. They were stationed on the roof of the second highest structure, which had been fashioned into an outdoor living area. “I hate this waiting.”
Dillon stretched out his legs. “You ever wonder where we’d be if, you know, none of this had happened? Transit, Academy, aliens, worlds, all that.”
“No. You?”
“Lately. Yeah. Some.” Dillon gave that a long beat, then confessed, “I wonder if Carey and I could have made a go of it.”
“You’d give this up for her?”
“I thought about it. For about five minutes.”
“You mean, what life would have been like if we’d never known this existed.” Sean was tracking with his brother now. “If you had them wipe your memory. Like that.”
Dillon did not respond.
This was a less-than-ideal moment to go all personal with his brother. But Sean wanted it said. Just in case. “I need to tell you something. About Carey.”
“Go on, then.”
“You were right to break it off.”
There was no change that anybody else would have noticed. But Sean kne
w his brother, and he could see how much it cost Dillon to keep the mask in place.
“In case you missed the point,” Dillon replied, “Carey was the one who did all the breakage.”
“She might have wielded the hammer. But you knew what was coming down.” Sean gave him a chance to object, then went on, “And you let it happen. Because you knew it was the right move.”
Dillon’s gaze swiveled back to the empty space rimming the tunnel. “If only.”
“You knew then, you know now,” Sean insisted. “Carey loved the guy you were. Not the man you’re becoming.”
Dillon clenched his jaw so tight the muscles in his neck stood out. He did not reply.
“You know who you want to be,” Sean said. “It’s your basic nature. You’ve been aiming for this all your life.”
Dillon’s voice sounded strangled. “Carey blames it all on transiting.”
“It gave you the chance to spread your wings, sure. But this is who you are.”
Dillon was quiet. Finally he said, “She told me I was too busy killing the best part of me to save us.”
Sean winced with the shared pain. “Dillon, you’re becoming the man you were meant to be. Either she loves this facet of you—”
“She doesn’t. She won’t.”
“Then hard as it is,” Sean said, “you did the right thing. At the right time. Before your relationship went any further.”
Dillon responded with a move from their earliest days, ducking his head and hiding behind hair that had been lost to his military crew cut.
His struggle for control was enough to push Sean to speak words he had been thinking about for almost a year. Only now he wished he had spoken them a lot earlier. “I’m really proud of you.”
41
Two seconds later, everything shifted from tense boredom and secret discussions to bedlam. And it all started with a whistle.
Sean rose with his brother and saw Vance personally flashing the signal from the headquarters’ rooftop.
“Showtime,” Dillon said. “Finally.”
Sean started to tell Dillon exactly how much he was not looking forward to this, when he heard shouts and running feet from inside the tunnel.
The Havoc troops invaded in force. Two officers in glittering uniforms stepped out and flanked either side of the tunnel as hundreds of soldiers raced forward. Even from this distance, Sean could see their disdain for the hill and the paltry number of militia kneeling behind it.
Dillon muttered, “Looks like they brought a full brigade.”
The officers rapped out orders in a language Sean did not understand, but the effect was clear enough. The front positions were given over to shoulder-mounted weapons that looked like miniature cannons, except the nozzles ended in polished cones.
“Blasters of some sort,” Dillon said.
The officers stepped closer together and talked tactics as the ground forces formed two tight lines, the front kneeling, the second row standing. They took aim.
One of the officers then shouted in the language Sean understood, “Surrender or die!”
Dillon scooted down and pulled Sean back from the wall. “Not the most original warning I’ve ever heard.”
Two officers shouted something else. And the cavern was rocked by incoming fire.
Which was exactly what they had hoped would happen.
Ruse within a ruse.
The plan had never been about defending the hill. The intent was to force the Havoc troops to reveal their hand. Which they did in spectacular fashion.
The top of the hill erupted into a massive cloud of dust and debris. Each round gouged a deep crevice in Dillon’s creation. Sean had been worried about Havoc troops shooting holes in the cavern roof, but clearly these soldiers were well accustomed to the danger of death by vacuum, and aimed low. Which made the damage they wreaked on the hill even more severe.
But none of it mattered. At least, not to Logan’s troops.
Because they were all gone.
Two of the militia had been assigned to each of Logan’s ghost-walkers. As soon as the first Havoc command was yelled, they dropped down and grabbed hold of the nearest ghost-walker, and together they all took a giant step back.
Before the first shot blasted the hill, they were all safely on the rooftops that made up their secondary positions. A distant rim of protection, well removed from the line of fire.
Sean’s view of the Havoc tunnel was lost to the blanket of dust and debris. His forward vision was limited to glimpses of the obliterated hill. Dillon’s perimeter defense was reduced now by half.
Just as they had wanted.
From somewhere beyond Sean’s field of vision, there came another shouted command. The attack halted. The silence was deafening. Sean could see very little, the dust was so thick.
One of Logan’s crew moaned loudly. Which was part of their ruse. Another cried he was hit. When a third wailed in helpless terror, several of the attackers laughed.
Dillon said softly, “So far so good.”
Sean’s second foray into conflict was different from the first in every way imaginable.
The first time, he had been fighting aliens. He had known what to do because he had been granted a single brief glimpse into the cloud of knowing—a sort of bodiless library set in place by an unknown group called the Ancients.
This time, he had to figure things out for himself.
All his planning had one goal. To avoid costing lives. On both sides.
The comm link Logan had supplied them was a black band attached to Sean’s left wrist with a strap that slipped around his thumb. The strap had five buttons, intended to grant the wearer five different channels through which to communicate. All five of Sean’s connected him to Logan’s team.
Sean pressed the only button that worked, and the earpiece responded with Vance saying, “Go.”
“Time to start round two.”
“Thirty seconds,” Vance confirmed, and clicked off.
The Havoc officers shouted something that Sean assumed was their version of “Charge!” Their troops raced across the empty stone floor—or tried to. But nothing could have prepared them for the pounding that commenced.
Shield and attack. Shield and attack. The challenge had formed the third and most boring lesson in Sean and Dillon’s early training. Of course, that particular exercise had taken place in the safety of their backyard. This was something else entirely.
Dillon’s work on the hill had resulted in all of the local transiters strengthening those same two abilities. From the safety of their rear positions, Logan’s ghost-walkers hefted the hill’s rubble and flung it at the Havoc invaders.
The lieutenant stood his ground and ordered his troopers to form lines and take aim. Which was when Dillon started adding his own signature to the tempest. But it was not in the form of more rocks, as Sean had expected. Instead, he started making little finger motions, tight gestures that matched his focused expression. Gradually the billowing dust condensed until it formed a single impenetrable mass.
Dillon then directed the cloud down onto the Havoc troops. It choked off any hope they had of breathing.
The Havoc troops had no choice but to retreat back into their tunnel.
The stone plaza was empty now. The tunnel opening was being pelted by stones and blocks of cement and bits of wood. The only sound was the yells of victory from Logan’s troops.
Dillon turned to Sean and said, “Time for round three.”
The plan was for Sean to transit with Logan and his officers to the palace forecourt. Dillon would stay with them only so long as was required to find a niche from which he might serve as backup. Then Logan would offer Tiko the chance to surrender.
No one expected Tiko to fold. The aim was to show that Havoc was vulnerable to attack from within. That it was in their best interest to withdraw and make peace. A lasting arrangement between two sworn enemies, was how Dillon put it. Sometimes that was the best that could be hoped for.
&nb
sp; In the meantime, Sean intended to ask Tiko to pass on a message to Kaviti—that he and Dillon were there under orders from the Human Assembly. Kaviti was hereby commanded to give himself up. Then the twins Kaviti had falsely arrested would happily escort him back to Serena and stick him in the same cage where he had tried to trap them. Let Kaviti experience real Assembly justice. From the receiving end.
Of course, Kaviti would have already scampered away by that point. All Sean needed to do was speak the guy’s name and Kaviti would be off to some shadowy corner of a forgotten outpost world, where he’d spend the rest of his life fearing the next knock on the door. The message was for Tiko’s benefit. Let him know the game was up.
Once Tiko realized his off-world team had scampered, Sean figured the duke would fold like a bad tent.
Their arrival on the militia headquarters’ rooftop was greeted by utter silence, which Sean took as a very good sign. Logan surveyed the rubble-strewn space between them and the tunnel. Gerrod stood beside him, rendered silent by the shock of what he had just witnessed.
Sean said, “It’s time.”
Logan yelled, “Cease firing!”
Vance passed the order through his comm link. Hundreds of rocks plunked heavily down to earth. A few yells resonated through the empty air, then silence. The dust drifted slowly to earth. From somewhere far down the tunnel emerged the faint sounds of hacking coughs and cries and running feet.
Sean reached for his brother and asked, “Ready?”
Logan walked over and gripped Sean’s other arm. “Nicolette, you are in command. Sidra, Vance, Gerrod, join us.”
The general’s adjutant was clearly terrified of enduring another transit. It required several seconds and sheer force of will for Gerrod to reach over and grip Vance’s arm.
Sean said, “Step with me. On three. One, two . . .”
That was the moment everything fell apart.
42
The lone attacker was dressed exactly as their turncoat had described. Sean thought it looked like a track suit, hood and all. The grey material was a shade or two lighter than slate and revealed a very fine grey mesh that glinted as he moved. The blade he carried was the exact same color. The weapon was far too long to be called a knife. It was a more like a short sword, rapier thin and curved slightly. The blade and the man’s clothing seemed to absorb all light, as though man and blade together formed an implement that was meant to suck out their prey’s life.