by Rick Partlow
But then she’d offered him the one chance he couldn’t refuse, the opportunity to still fight for Sparta against her enemies, against the Jeuta and their incursions on the border. He’d taken to the task with gusto, happy to be back in a mech after nearly a year as a general, piloting a desk. He’d been given a battalion of troops of questionable loyalty, whom Hale couldn’t trust to fight against Logan. He’d known by agreeing to do it, he was freeing up more trustworthy soldiers to be sent up against Logan and Wholesale Slaughter, but the people on the borders were being butchered and he couldn’t sit back and do nothing.
Somehow, in those months spent chasing Jeuta raiders off one colony after another, he’d come to realize his oaths and his fealty had been given not to Jaimie Brannigan or his son, but to the Guardianship of Sparta. He didn’t consider Rhianna Hale the best person to lead the Dominion, but he’d finally understood it wasn’t his call to make. When he’d been offered the chance to bring Logan into their plan to kill Lord Aaron Starkad, the Overseer of their historic rival, the Starkad Supremacy, he’d thought he could guide this all to the best possible close, with Logan alive, given a chance to raise a family somewhere away from the political backstabbing, and with Sparta spared the bloody and divisive civil war that would otherwise have been inevitable.
Then Logan had done the unthinkable and cut a deal with Starkad, made peace with them to bring down Rhianna Hale, and Anders’ world had come crashing in around his ears. He’d been in shock, filled with disbelief that Jaimie Brannigan’s son would ever ally himself with Starkad after the two nations had spent most of the last four centuries fighting on one front or another. When Logan had offered him a chance to join his new government, he’d exploded at the younger man, accused him of putting himself and his own glory over the needs of Sparta. He’d told Logan he should lock him up and throw away the key.
So here he was, and here he’d remained for the entire voyage back to Sparta, with just one, final jump to go, his solitude only interrupted by his guards at mealtimes.
There was a knock on the hatch and he checked the time on his ‘link, confirming it wasn’t yet dinner. Which meant he knew who would be knocking. He didn’t get up, knowing the hatch was locked from the outside and no invitation to enter was needed or expected.
Logan Brannigan stepped through the hatchway, looking as lost and hopeless as anyone Donnell Anders had ever seen. Normally, the younger man had a rakish look to him, particularly since he’d taken on the leadership of Wholesale Slaughter and let his blond hair grow longer. He’d always had a confident, almost cocky air to him, all the way back to his teenage years, accompanying his father to conferences and affairs of state. It had been replaced by a vacant, haunted stare, his face little more than skin stretched over a skull.
“They said you wanted to see me,” Logan slurred the words, slamming the hatch shut behind him. Anders smelled alcohol on his breath.
“I heard about the Jeuta,” Anders began, realizing his mistake with the flare of anger behind Logan’s eyes.
“And you thought you’d bring me down to gloat? To tell me how you were right and killing Rhianna Hale somehow made Sparta more vulnerable?” Logan took a step closer, the fingers of his left hand curling in the fold of Anders’ fatigue jacket. “Because if you’ve gotten tired of your compartment and wanted to see what the ship’s medical bay looks like, that’s a damned good way to find out.”
Anders sucked in a deep breath, trying to control his natural reaction to being manhandled. If it had been anyone else…
“I asked you to come,” he said, keeping his voice calm, even and solicitous, “because I wanted to let you know how sorry I was. Katy was an incredible person. I understand you two had been married…”
“She was pregnant.” Logan spat the words out, pushing the older man away, spinning with an inarticulate cry of rage and slamming his fist into the bulkhead. The metal rang with the impact and he left a smear of red behind from cracked skin over his knuckles.
The breath left Anders in a moan and he rubbed a hand over his eyes.
“Great Mithra,” he hissed.
“The hell with Mithra.” Logan shook his fingers out, ignoring the blood trickling away from them. “The hell with all the gods and all the devils that all men worship. Mithra never did a damned thing for my parents and he’s done even less for me. Katy prayed to Jesus, but He didn’t save her…or our child. So to hell with all of them.”
He squinted back over his shoulder at Anders.
“And that’s it?” he wondered. “You just called me to express your condolences?”
“There was one other thing,” Anders confessed. “The Jeuta. I wondered what your intentions were with regard to the Jeuta.”
He expected Logan to get angry again at the question, to fly off the handle and tell him it was none of his concern. It would have been understandable, forgivable even. The younger man surprised him.
“The first thing I have to do is find out if there’s going to be a fight when I land on Sparta. After that…” He shrugged, the anger gone in a return of his earlier apathy. “I suppose I should meet with the various ambassadors and make sure no one’s going to try to invade us. And then…well, once I get the military reorganized with people I can trust, I’m going to find those fucking Jeuta and kill every last one of them.” He snorted and pulled the compartment hatch open. “Is that the answer you were looking for, Donnell?”
Anders watched the hatch slam shut again and nodded slowly, sadly.
“Yes,” he murmured to himself. “I suppose it was.”
“Unidentified starship, you are approaching Spartan orbit. Heave to now or you will be destroyed by our defense station.”
Logan didn’t wait for the Shakak’s Communications Officer to respond. Instead, he leaned over Lt. Braham’s shoulder and touched the control to transmit a reply.
“This is the Shakak, and I am Logan Brannigan, the rightful Guardian of Sparta. Rhianna Hale is dead, and I intend to land at Argos and meet with the Council. If you try to stop me, I sincerely hope you’re prepared to join her in the afterlife.”
He could feel the captain’s eyes on him, but he didn’t look back at the big man. Kamehameha-Nui Johansen didn’t care for anyone else getting his ship into fights without his leave, even his commander. Not that he’d fight any less hard, but it was the principle of the thing.
“This is General Adler.” It was a different voice, not the line officer on the defense station crew. Probably being relayed from the planet. “Whether or not you are who you say you are, and whether or not Rhianna Hale is dead, you still face the defenses of the capital of the Guardianship of Sparta. Even if your ship is Imperial tech, she can’t fight all of us at once. Even now, there are three star cruisers heading for your position.”
Logan nodded to himself, watching the red-tinged avatars heading their way from beyond the orbit of Sparta’s moon.
“I can see that, General,” he replied. “But you might want to check your scanners before making any threats.”
Logan was still watching the tactical display projected in the forward screens, so he saw immediately when the lidar returns popped into existence at the in-system jump-point. There were five of them, each one a Wholesale Slaughter cruiser, each beginning a four-gravity fusion burn toward the planet.
“I’m going to be launching my landing force in exactly one hour, General,” Logan went on, his tone flat and brooking no argument. “If you think your defenses can take five cruisers plus the Shakak, then feel free to try to oppose us.” He nodded toward Braham. “Cut it off now.”
“Bit melodramatic,” Terrin commented from the Engineering station. The comment was just the sort of brotherly jibe he’d expect from his younger sibling, complete with a teasing grin, but the smile didn’t reach all the way to his eyes. He was, Logan knew, trying to be strong for him, trying to pretend that things were normal when they most certainly were not.
“It was,” he agreed with a shrug. “But now
is exactly the time for dramatic. Something Nicolai once told me. Always assume the sale. When we head down in the drop-ships, not one of those officious, cowardly bastards is going to have the guts to fire on us. They’re going to be just as worried about starting a bloody civil war as Anders is.”
“What about you, brother?” Terrin wondered. “Are you worried about it?”
Logan sniffed, turning away from the bridge and his brother as he headed out the hatchway.
“I have nothing to worry about.”
Heat still rolled off the landing pad in shimmering waves and the nozzles of the landing jets pinged with the off-key song of cooling metal as Logan stepped from the belly ramp of the shuttle, setting foot on Spartan soil for the first time in a year.
“I’ve thought about this day so many times,” he confided to Terrin as his brother came up beside him, Franny trailing a step behind. “And I always pictured Katy with me, holding my hand as we walked into the palace.”
“Katy was my friend,” Franny said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I know she would have wanted you to finish this, to do the right thing.”
Logan felt like screaming at her, felt like turning and yelling into her face that what Katy had wanted was to live out her life, to raise her child. He wanted to rage and curse the gods.
“You’re probably right, Franny,” he said instead, tilting his head back toward the afternoon sun, letting it warm him against the cooling breeze. It was the height of summer in Argos and it still felt chill compared to Revelation. Would he ever get used to this place again?
The ground shook beneath their feet at the thunderous beat of a full battalion of mecha disembarking from the dropships fanned out behind them, the drumroll rhythm nudging him out of his thoughts and back into his surroundings. At the inward edge of the field, Rangers were deploying into a security perimeter, but there didn’t seem to be anything to secure against. The field was deserted, bereft of any other military shuttles, without so much as a single worker or security guard.
“They made sure there was nothing out here that could be seen as a threat,” Colonel Lee mused, motioning for the groundcar to pull up beside them.
They’d brought half a dozen of the assault vehicles with them on the drop-ships, at Lee’s insistence. Logan had been quite willing to stomp up to the palace inside his Vindicator, but Terrin and Franny had thought it might send the wrong message and Lee had worried about snipers if they’d gone in on foot. Logan wasn’t concerned with the wrong message. It would have been perfectly fine with him if the spineless cowards who’d gone along with Rhianna Hale’s power-grab saw him as an avenging angel coming in to separate the wheat from the chaff. But he had to admit, if only to himself, that he might not be in the best mindset to make those sorts of decisions.
“They’re being cautious,” Logan agreed, climbing into the second row of seats in the Ranger vehicle. He tried to make himself sound stable and thoughtful because it sounded better than what he was really feeling. “Let’s just hope they’re not trying to sucker us in. It just takes one fanatic to turn all this into a bloodbath.”
The palace hadn’t changed in the year since he’d left. The gardens were in full bloom across the road from the main entrance, their flowers almost glowing in the bright sunlight, yellow and red, blue and violet. His mother had loved the gardens. She’d taken Logan and his brother for walks there when their father was meeting with the Guardian on official matters. She’d told them the names of every flower, though Logan couldn’t remember a single one anymore. The realization brought with it a deep sadness. It was something that had been important to his mother and he had the sense he was failing her by forgetting.
“Hold up, Connaver,” Lee said to the driver and the brakes rasped, throwing Logan and the others up against the seat in front of them. Lee twisted around, pushing the visor up on his helmet. “That’s where they all went.”
Gathered in the broad, paved courtyard to the side of the palace’s public entrance were dozens of mecha, lined up in neat rows as if on a parade ground. Scouts in front, crouching on ostrich legs like runners at the blocks, waiting for the start of a race. Behind them the assault mecha, square-shouldered and alert, and in the last rank the gigantic strike mecha, hunched over with their own mass, weighed down with weapons and armor.
None of them moved, and at their feet was a company of men and women in infantry armor, a single man in dress uniform at the front of them.
“Take us up there, Colonel,” Logan said to Lee. “I don’t think this is an ambush.” As the car lurched forward, Logan touched a control on his ‘link, calling back to Kurtz, his brigade commander. “Val, keep your eyes open here, but make sure no one is too quick on the trigger. No one fires unless fired upon, understand?”
“I gotcha, Boss,” Kurtz drawled acknowledgement. “Be careful.”
Oh yeah. I’ll be careful. Because I just have so fucking much to live for.
“Roger that.”
The Ranger driver pulled up within a few meters of the infantry formation and despite his fearless apathy, Logan couldn’t help an instinctive apprehension under the guns of nearly a hundred mecha. Then he looked upward. This close, he could see the canopies cracked open, the pilots leaning out, their helmets off. They were watching the approaching battalion of Wholesale Slaughter mecha expectantly with fear of their own plain on their faces.
Logan grunted a harsh laugh, earning a sidelong stare from Terrin, and pushed open the car door. Lee glanced back like he was about to object, but then shook his head and gave up on it.
Am I that far gone or does he just realize it wouldn’t be worth the argument?
The uniformed officer waited at attention, unmoving, eyes straight ahead. He was a middle-aged man, somewhere in his late seventies perhaps, yet he wore the rank of a lieutenant-colonel, which seemed incongruous to him after a career spent in the Armored Corps. Promotions came slower in the Home Guard, though. They were second-tier, the troops who didn’t rate an assignment on the sharp end, who couldn’t pass the assessments for the Armored Corps or the Rangers. They were stuck on Sparta, waiting for an invasion that never came. It had to be frustrating…which might be why they’d been intimately involved in two attempted coups in the last twenty-five years.
“Sir!” The Home Guard officer saluted. His face was jowly and loose, but the salute was tight and well-executed. And he was, Logan realized with a start, wearing a ceremonial sword at his belt. “I am Colonel Gavin Pistorius of the Home Guard. I’m here to surrender the Home Guard troops to your forces, and to let you know we are all prepared to pledge our loyalty to you as the new Guardian.”
Logan returned the salute, not out of any particular respect but mostly so he could get Pistorius to look him in the eye instead of staring straight ahead into nothing.
“A lieutenant-colonel is surrendering the entire Spartan Home Guard to me?” he asked, not attempting to conceal his skepticism. “What happened to that General Adler I was talking to earlier?”
“Sir, General Adler jumped a shuttle and departed for a destination unknown,” Pistorius told him, keeping his face and tone admirably neutral. “His adjutant, Colonel Caldwell hasn’t been seen for three days, and I’m next in the chain of command.”
Pistorius slowly and carefully drew his sword and paled slightly at the sound and sight of at least a dozen Rangers raising their carbines to aim at his head. Logan sighed and waved a hand behind him.
“Stand down,” he said, loud enough to be heard in the ranks of his foot soldiers. He wanted to ask them if they seriously thought a middle-aged Home Guard colonel could kill him with a blunt-edged short-sword, but he clamped his jaws shut on the words. They were just doing their jobs.
Pistorius held the sword down the length of his arm, supporting the hilt with his open hand, and went down on a knee, head bowed. Logan regarded the man for a moment, knowing the ramifications of what he was about to do. He didn’t have to accept the man’s formal surrender. He could simply have
him and all his troops arrested and then try those who he thought deserved it for treason. By taking his sword and accepting his surrender, he was absolving him of guilt for treason, acknowledging Pistorius and those in his command as legitimate combatants.
“Tell me something, Colonel Pistorius,” he said, taking a step closer to the man. “The Home Guard has been involved in the assassination of my grandfather and my father, and has taken the part of the Lambert family in both coups. Why shouldn’t I refuse to accept your surrender and simply disband the whole Home Guard and have all of you thrown in prison?”
“If I may, sir,” Pistorius said, head still bowed, but his face visibly firming up, “the rolls of the Home Guard were completely scrubbed between the death of your grandfather and the coup against your father. I believe the problem is that there seems to be no way out of the Home Guard for those assigned to it. This leaves anyone of any ambition very open to offers to ascend the ranks in some other, less honorable way.”
Logan nodded. It was a very well-reasoned and articulate argument, particularly from a man bowing with a sword draped across his arm. Perhaps this Colonel Pistorius would have some use other than swinging from the end of a rope, after all. He took the hilt of the sword in his right hand and raised it up, feeling the weight of the thing. He hadn’t held one since his graduation from the Academy and he’d forgotten how heavy they were. The blade shone bright in the mid-day sun, the reflection almost blinding.
“All right, Colonel,” he said. “I accept your surrender, and your advice. And I’m prepared to accept your oath of fealty.”
Pistorius didn’t give an order. He didn’t have to. Logan assumed taking the sword had been a signal to the others, because the company of armored infantry went down to a knee as one, the clack of their rifle butts against the pavement echoing across the square. The visors on their helmets were up and he could see a hundred eyes all locked on his. How many were being earnest and how many were simply desperate?