by Rick Partlow
“Well, that didn’t take too long,” Starkad mused. He waved at the small bar in the corner of the room. It was the only bit of personality the chamber had, except for him, and he was the one who’d insisted on its inclusion. “Get me a scotch, neat, please, if you’re going to trap me in here and beat me down with facts.”
Laurent scowled at him, crossing her arms across her chest.
“I am not your personal servant, my lord.”
Starkad sighed and held up a hand in surrender.
“Fine, get yourself one, too, while you’re at it.”
Laurent blew out an exasperated breath, but went ahead and poured him the drink, then another for herself, using, he noted, the most expensive bottle she could find in the bar. She set the glass down in front of him with perhaps a touch more force than she needed to, smacking the base against the polished wood.
She sipped at her own drink, hesitantly.
“Is there something wrong with my thirty-five-year-old scotch?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.
“I don’t usually drink on duty,” she told him.
“You’re always on duty, Ruth,” he countered, gulping down a swig with little respect for the age and provenance of the drink. “So, tell me, what’s the minimum we can get away with committing to this effort?”
Laurent shrugged and drained the glass in one gulp, setting it down next to his. Starkad mimed shock.
“Technically,” she said, “we don’t have to do a damned thing until and unless the Jeuta actually attack established Spartan territory, which they have not done, as yet.”
“I assume there’s some downside to doing nothing.”
If there weren’t, she wouldn’t be bothering me with this.
“The downside is, Mbeki formally recognized Revelation as a protected system. True, that was as a counter to us, not a more general treaty of protection, but if the Imperium decides to stick their noses in, it would strengthen the ties between them and Sparta and give Logan Brannigan more incentive to share the data from Terminus with their government.”
“Damn,” he acknowledged, a sour expression passing over his face. “That is quite the downside.” Scotch burned a smooth passage down his throat and he reveled in the pleasure mixed with pain. “What do you recommend, Colonel?”
“There are two choices, my lord,” she said, leaning against the table beside him, palms flat. “One, we do nothing and wait until the Jeuta destabilize Logan’s regime, which I believe is their ultimate objective with this move, and then move in and take over as much territory as possible.”
“Oh, I like the sound of that one,” he told her, laughing softly and settling back in his chair so he could look up at her more comfortably. “And the second choice?”
“We give help in good faith and try to build a mutual supportive relationship with Sparta.” She seemed to notice the look he gave her and she raised a hand placatingly. “I know, I know. You find the idea of doing the right thing for its own sake to be nauseatingly altruistic. But there’s no other viable alternative. Doing anything in-between will only result in a worse situation for everyone.”
“You’re always so honest, Ruth,” Starkad said, resting his head back against the cushion of the chair. “It must be exhausting.”
“Yes, sir.” She waited, and he knew what she was waiting for was a decision from him.
He rubbed at his eyes.
“This is not putting me in the right frame of mind for the liaison I have planned for this evening. I might even marry this one, you know? She’s intelligent, strong-willed, not afraid to stand up to me, and quite beautiful as the icing on the cake.” He grinned crookedly. “I’d consider marrying you, Ruth, if you weren’t such a dour stick-in-the-mud all the time.” Her eyebrows shot up in shock and he laughed. “It’s one thing to party with the vacuous courtiers who flit in and out of my bed with no thought other than the things I can buy them, but to have a partner on the throne, someone to teach our children how to rule…that requires an extraordinary person.”
“I fear you’d quickly tire of me as a partner, sir,” she told him, seeming slightly amused by the idea once she’d overcome the surprise. “Not least because, as you say, I’m always on duty.”
“Yes, there is that.” He stood, kicking his chair away from the table. “I’ll tell you what, Ruth. Get me a detailed plan of intervention and support with every step of what you would consider this altruistic alternative of yours would involve. I want it in my personal data network, flagged urgent by tomorrow morning. I’ll have an answer for you before tomorrow’s briefing.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
He threw an offhanded salute her way and headed for the exit, knowing there would still be ministers and secretaries and hangers-on waiting in the hallway to grab a word or two in his spare seconds before the elevator arrived for him and dreading it.
“Good luck, tonight, my lord,” she said before he passed through the door.
Starkad paused to look over his shoulder at the woman, wondering if the words had been meant sarcastically and deciding, to his surprise, that they were not. Laurent shrugged.
“I think it would be good for the whole Supremacy and more than that, for you personally, if you settled down.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “And, perhaps, if you didn’t need to keep up the pretense anymore. You’re a hard man, but not a bad one.”
He jabbed an accusatory finger in her direction as he backed out of the room, scowling in what he knew was not honest anger.
“You, Ruth Laurent,” he told her, “are a fucking bad influence on me.”
He was sure he saw the hint of a smile on her face as he turned away, and for some reason he couldn’t immediately quantify, he was pleased by the notion.
17
Kathren Margolis-Brannigan sat cross-legged on the floor of the nearly bare cell and picked at the stew in the plastic bowl with a plastic spoon, praying silently that the food was from the human stores the Jeuta had found. She didn’t know what Jeuta ate, but she had horrible, paranoid ideas of what it might be, given their attitude towards humans.
Still, she forced herself to eat, shoveling the thick, congealing, lukewarm mess down despite the overwhelming urge to puke it back out. It wasn’t the morning sickness, not anymore. She was past three months now, as evidenced by the just-noticeable bulge at her waistline, and the nausea had abated. No, it was the smell of the food and of herself. She hadn’t managed anything but irregular and inadequate sponge baths in weeks and hadn’t had a chance to change clothes in days.
She wondered if they’d stolen any clothes when they’d taken the food and the blankets on the bunk which doubled as her acceleration couch. The blankets were the only comfort they’d offered her, along with three meals and three trips per day to the head. At least the toilets were of human design, left over from the previous owners. She supposed the setup must be close enough to what the Jeuta used at home, since they hadn’t bothered to change it.
There was no entertainment, no conversation, nothing at all to distract her from her situation, nothing to keep her from sitting around and imaging new and more horrible ways the Jeuta could kill her. Except prayer. She’d been praying a lot, and not simply the rote prayers she’d learned as a little girl in her mother’s church.
It’s me, Katy. She winced. Sorry, You already know who I am. And You know where I am and what’s going on, so I won’t bore you with the details. You know what I’ve done wrong and I’m sorry for all of it. I’m trying to do better. I’m trying to be a better example so people know that You can change anyone, even someone like me.
She felt a sob welling up inside her, but she wouldn’t let it out. She knew they’d be watching her, probably recording everything she did or said. She wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.
If this is what You want for me, to die here, then I can accept it. I’d rather not, but that’s not my call. I really would have liked to meet my son or daughter, to see what they were like, but w
e can’t always get what we want in life. I know that as well as anyone. I don’t blame You for this. This life was my choice, and maybe it was the wrong one. Only You can judge that.
But please take care of Logan. He’s going to take this hard, and I don’t want him to turn into someone he wouldn’t like. He’s a good man, the best I’ve ever known, and I know he’s ready to follow You if You give him the chance. Don’t let this break him, no matter what happens to me…
Praying silently made sense. God didn’t need to hear your voice when He knew your thoughts. But it felt less satisfying somehow, and maybe part of that was a craving for the comfort of praying aloud as a family when she was a little girl.
“Our father, who art in heaven,” she murmured, almost under her breath, “hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
The door to the cell hissed open before the echo of “amen” had died down and Katy edged backward away from it. The guards hadn’t harmed her, but they hadn’t been overly gentle, either, and she didn’t want to anger them by getting too close.
But it wasn’t the guards. She could tell by the height and the uniform. This one was the officer who had taken her prisoner back on Revelation, she was sure of it. It was hard to tell the Jeuta apart, hard to tell the males from the females except for the difference in height, but there was something distinctive about the curve of this one’s brow ridges, the width of his jaw, the deliberate nature of his gait that had stuck with her from the trip back to the Jeuta shuttle, burned into her soul along with the terror and the anger and devastation.
He stood in the open doorway, regarding her silently for a moment, his face unreadable.
“Know your enemy and know yourself,” he said in Basic. “That is what the Purpose says, and I have made a life of knowing you humans. It is why I speak your language so well.”
His voice was deep but not unpleasant, not so different from a baritone opera singer, and it lent an even more alien incongruence to his presence. She wanted to tell him she’d heard the saying before, but God alone knew how he would react to it. She thought she remembered that the Purpose was their version of a religion and arguing religion with a Jeuta was fairly high on her list of stupid ideas. She said nothing.
“What you said was a prayer, no?” he asked, surprising her.
“Yes,” she admitted. “This seems like a very good time to ask God for help.”
“You do not pray as the other humans I’ve observed. Why is that?”
This one was sharp, she thought, and she would do well not to underestimate him. She doubted she could have told him anything about the Jeuta she’d seen since she arrived on this ship, other than that they scared her shitless.
“I worship a different God than they do. Most of the human Dominions pray to a god named Mithra, in a religion called Zoroastrianism. But before that, before the Empire, many of us used to follow the Old Religion, Christianity. Some still do.”
The Jeuta moved closer, and she flinched back, but he simply squatted down on the floor to put his face on a level with hers.
“Why are the Empire’s gods not good enough for you?”
She considered whether she should feign ignorance, or just give a simple answer, such as the truth, that it was her parents’ religion. But this Jeuta was curious and maybe, the more he knew about her, the less likely he would be to kill her.
Not that I really believe that, but it isn’t as if I’m giving away military secrets.
“The Empire of Hellas invented their god,” she told him, “as a way of justifying the evil they did, that they wanted to do in the future. My God existed before the Empire. Christianity was founded thousands of years ago under another empire that many people thought was evil.”
“Would your god have approved of the Empire creating us as slaves?”
She wasn’t sure if the question was bitter or scornful or even honestly curious. She didn’t know the Jeuta well enough to tell. She answered it anyway.
“My God was the God of the slaves, of the oppressed, of the helpless. He sent his son to die for the sins of others. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to be enslaved, not by others and not by their own hatred and anger.”
The male didn’t speak for nearly a minute and she thought she must have angered him, but when he finally replied, she was sure she detected no rancor in his voice.
“Your God sounds foolish and weak. The Purpose cares only for the future of the Jeuta.”
“If both sides go on thinking that way, how long do you suppose it will be before all of the Dominions band together to destroy the Jeuta once and for all?” She bit her lip, not wanting to anger the male, but needing to make the case while she had the chance. “Do you really think you can defeat the combined numbers of all the human systems together?”
The Jeuta commander made a sound, something that might have been a laugh or a cough or a snort.
“I know humans, female. They could never band together long enough to accomplish anything.”
“One thing could unite them,” she insisted. “An external threat. You. Trying to wipe out humanity will accomplish nothing except ensuring your own extinction.”
“Does your mate believe in your weakling god as well?”
“He was raised in the ways of Zoroastrianism,” she said, trying hard not to think of Logan because, at the moment, thinking of him wrung her out like an old dishrag. “But I think he might be ready to believe in Jesus.”
“Good. A weak god will make him weak as well…and easier to kill.”
“Faith in anything,” she told the Jeuta, “can make people stronger.”
The Jeuta was silent again, only his raspy breathing audible in the cell.
“I am Primus Pilus Alvar,” he said, finally. He stood and backed slowly toward the door. “We will speak again. Is there anything you require for sanitation or sustenance?”
“I would very much like to bathe,” she confessed. “And if you have any other human clothes, these are beginning to smell very bad.”
That sound again, the snort or laugh, just as he stepped out through the hatch and it began to slide shut behind him.
“Interesting. I wondered if that was just how you people smelled.”
“She’s alive,” Logan declared. “She’s alive, for now.”
“We don’t know that for sure, boss,” Valentine Kurtz warned, fingers working as if he wished he could be at the controls of a mech instead of trapped in a very uncomfortable meeting in the private offices of the Guardian. “We just know they didn’t leave her body on the planet. This could be them baiting us.”
“No.”
Logan paced the room. He hadn’t been able to stand still since the drop-ships and landers began arriving from orbit from the Shakak, bringing the survivors from Revelation down to Argos. He’d been there to greet them, seen the looks of awe and disbelief in the eyes of the civilians at the scope and grandeur of the city. Most of these people had never been out of the Periphery, never been to a Dominion world.
He’d already decided to settle them wherever they chose, to set them up so that they never had to worry again about whether their world would be attacked by raiders. Unless the whole Dominion were under attack…which he wouldn’t have thought possible not that long ago.
“No,” he repeated. “I made the mistake of thinking she was dead before and she always comes through. This is no different.”
“Perhaps, Lord Guardian,” Colonel Stone interjected, still standing with his hands clasped behind him, not turning to follow Logan’s restless track about the office. “But Colonel Kurtz is right in his assertion that this might be an attempt by the Jeuta to bait us out. It’s possible they want us to go after her.”
“Go after her where?” Logan
demanded. “We have no idea where the Jeuta are based. They could be in any one of a hundred systems.”
Stone was a professional, a loyal soldier, but Logan was beginning to find the man tiresome. He was a constant naysayer, always full of caution and lacking the killer instinct Nicolai Constantine had possessed. Pain clenched at his chest at the thought of the legendary intelligence officer dead, fallen to the Jeuta in a cave in the ass end of nowhere. The man had been, if not a father figure, then at least a cantankerous, ill-tempered uncle.
Maybe, he conceded, it wasn’t realistic to expect Stone, or anyone, to live up to Nicolai Constantine. The man had built up his skills, his connections, his reputation, over twenty-five years serving a single Guardian who allowed him complete latitude.
“We’re working on it,” Stone assured him, scowling the way he did when he was deep in concentration. “It’s not easy, obviously. It’s not as if we can infiltrate a Jeuta system with agents posing as free traders or mercenaries. We can only get indirect indications from where they execute their raids, and we can’t just send scout ships in blindly when the Jeuta might have pickets at their jump points.”
“We could send the Shakak,” Logan said. “She could infiltrate without being detected and get out before they could attack her.”
“We all want to find Commander Margolis,” Donnell Anders said, speaking for the first time since Kurtz had finished his briefing, “but the Shakak is still our best defense and currently the only Imperial-tech ship in the Dominions, and you’d be sending her away for months at a time when it seems the Jeuta may be on the brink of outright war.”
Logan very deliberately did not snap at Anders. The man was right about the Jeuta and about the ship, loath as Logan was to admit it. He also didn’t want to risk alienating the general, not when he was already short of advisors he could trust and most of them were in this room. Besides Kurtz, Stone and Anders, none of whom had taken his offer of a seat, and Colonel Lee, who was in the office chair across from Logan’s desk, still as a statue, David Bohardt and Josephine Salvaggio were sprawled out in the expensive, leather-upholstered sofa against the far wall. Neither of them seemed completely recovered from their experience on Revelation, either physically or emotionally, and there was still a gaunt, vacant look to their faces, but they’d insisted on being there to let him know what they’d seen. And to apologize.