by Blaze Ward
“You heard about yesterday?” Jessica asked.
“Legate Burdge covered it in his morning briefing,” the Cohort Centurion replied simply.
Again, the minimum number of words necessary. Jessica appreciated dealing with Kim.
“I’m going to have Fourth Saxon send someone after the bastard that did it,” Jessica said, trying to keep the hostility out of her voice. “I want at least a lance of your tanks to accompany them as heavy support. The locals have bigger guns than I was expecting.”
“Do we know who Burdge will send?” Kim asked, bouncing in the camera pickup as Freefall lurched over something big enough to rattle that much tonnage of tank.
Jessica was amused that the commander of LVIII Heavy was in the field on patrol, but that was one of the reasons Jessica had asked for this cohort, a willingness of everyone involved to get their hands dirty. Fourth Saxon was the same way.
“Arlo is currently attached to Scout Patrol, First Cohort,” Jessica said. “Since he’s my ground coordinator, probably them. They’ll still need someone from your team to back him up.”
“Arlo?” Kim asked. There was something in her voice that didn’t register.
“Centurion Vo Arlo,” Jessica reminded the woman. “You sat next to him at the big dinner, and earlier when we went to meet Fourth Saxon on the ground.”
“Right,” Kim said breezily. “Let me review rotations here. I think I have everyone assigned to duties that I can’t pull them off of. Might just send myself and 1–1–1 to do it.”
“Let me know,” Jessica said, cutting the line.
Enej and Marcelle both had grins on their faces.
Jessica considered the two of them before she spoke.
“Is there something going on between Kim and Arlo?” she asked.
Marcelle shrugged Gallicly.
“I don’t think she’s his type, based on some of what I’ve heard,” Enej offered diplomatically.
The way he said it was not particularly convincing.
Marcelle chuckled.
“You think she’d give him a choice, Flag Centurion?”
Chapter XXX
Imperial Founding: 174/05/18. Thuringwell Wilderness
Dieter scowled, insulted.
He had spent years on this planet, preparing. He had warned them, repeatedly, that this day might come, that they might wake up one morning and find an Aquitaine fleet in orbit overhead.
They had laughed.
Very few of them were laughing today.
Still, she had outraged his sensibilities, this woman, this Fleet Centurion.
Nowhere had he made plans sufficient to combat this latest threat. He had never imagined such a need.
That failure, of his own imagination, only made it worse.
Dieter lowered the binoculars and took a deep breath, crushing his teeth together so hard his neck hurt.
Around him, the rest of the patrol achieved perfect stillness, perfect quiet. There had been noise, so low as to be unconscious, obvious now only in its absence.
Dieter considered the nine men who had accompanied him here. He looked quickly around the little copse of trees on the morning hillside, glancing skyward once on habit. They were invisible from above and below, dropped down behind a small backslope where they could look over from their bellies and elbows, like he and Sergeant Stoltberg were doing now. The rest squatted nearby, wary and watchful.
Who knew what dangers might lurk here?
Stoltberg waited carefully.
“I would not have believed it possible,” Dieter hissed. “She might be good enough to challenge me. We shall have to do something about that.”
Stoltberg nodded slightly, more a placeholder than agreement. He was a big, stupid hound, an attack dog waiting to be turned loose. It took Dieter’s genius to make a man like Stoltberg more than just a bully waiting in an alley.
Dieter raised the glasses once more.
Down below, a snake of destruction half a kilometer wide slithered through the valley. Not much was clear from this distance, beyond the fact that Aquitaine was leveling ground, filling things in, bridging creeks.
Apparently, building an entirely new railroad system.
Running to his left, the destination was obvious. They were perhaps forty kilometers to the edge of Yonin from here.
What he did not grasp was the other end.
Railroads are fixed infrastructure connecting two important points. There was nothing north of Yonin.
Nothing.
And yet, Aquitaine was connecting to something.
It would not be enough to attack the camp below. Even from here, Dieter could make out platoons of armed troops and armored vehicles defending the workers and their equipment. And Aquitaine could quickly ferry troops from orbit or Yonin to box him in if he launched a frontal assault.
Damn her!
Dieter’s teeth clenched again.
I will not be beaten by a woman.
He stood slowly.
“It is a railroad,” he observed in a voice as sharp as a knife. “We must find out what is at the other end. And then we will destroy it. And her.”
Chapter XXXI
Imperial Founding: 174/05/12. Backcountry, Thuringwell
It was worse than Fraser imagined. More painful than it could possibly be.
He was damned.
If he did, if he didn’t. It no longer mattered.
Things had been ripped from his control. Not that he had ever had much to begin with.
Fraser sipped his warm, dark, instant coffee and glanced around the evening camp. Fires could be built out here, if they were small and sheltered from observation on all sides. Warm food went a long ways towards keeping the barbarism of the situation at bay, especially when the temperature faded in the late afternoon gloom.
Conrad had finished his story. He looked anxiously around the group of ten or so folks close by.
Nobody spoke.
Probably waiting for Fraser to make a decision. He was The Captain.
Horse shit.
Fraser had been expecting threats from Aquitaine. Possibly they would simply arrest Conrad and disappear him into a camp somewhere, never to be seen again. Maybe they would drive their tanks into the forests and try to run him down like a deer.
But no.
They wanted him to surrender? Politely?
Was she nuts?
No. She was playing chess, and everyone else was playing jacks. She could see that. He could as well. Conrad might have an inkling. Eli had leapt at the chance to escape, but that was Eli. He couldn’t begrudge her the move. Anything would be an improvement after Thuringwell for a woman like her.
“We’ll sleep on it,” Fraser announced gruffly. “We have time. She won’t catch Haussmann soon.”
That got a chuckle. Everyone there had dealt with Imperial Security personally. A few still bore scars the man himself had left, like Conrad.
Fraser leveled himself upright.
“It’s good to have you back, Conrad,” he said as he lurched off to his tent.
Behind him, he heard the rest settling in. Some would stay up for a while. Most would be asleep shortly. Darkness came fast and the sun rose early at this elevation.
The little green and brown tent was small, no bigger than any of the others, and smaller than most, since he didn’t want one big enough to share with anyone. Fraser loosened his boots and hung them upside down on a little wooden contraption he had made, just for the purpose.
He crawled under his blanket and let his thoughts wander. This was the time of day when he was his most creative, fading down into darkness and sleep. His mind could disassemble any question and spend hours while he slept, randomly putting pieces together until it found a connection that worked.
That had kept them alive.
And now he was dancing with a new partner. Colonel Haussmann was a predictable–enough opponent. Crazy and paranoid, but largely given to thinking on rails.
This woman, this A
dmiral Keller, no, Fleet Centurion Keller, get it right. She has already blown the rails entirely away and left everyone with an empty, green field upon which to play.
How do we survive her?
Fraser closed his eyes and let go of the day, hoping the darkness would drag him all the way to the bottom of the well and let him sleep untroubled.
It did that, occasionally.
Not tonight.
Jeannine was there, as he knew she would be.
One of the advantages to being dead was that you would always be as beautiful as you had ever been, at least in the eyes of your widowed husband. Her hair would always be that short, brunette, pixie cut she had tried out just before they had shot her. Her legs still had that long, slender silhouette in the afternoon sun, distracting every man on the street because they knew they couldn’t have her.
“Hello, my love,” she whispered as he faded into being in her little park hollow.
It looked remarkably like the one where he had gotten down on one knee and proposed to her, twenty–seven years before.
Fraser wanted to flee this dream, to find someplace safe, but there wasn’t anywhere safer for his sanity than in her arms. The last waking part of his mind wondered if that made him less crazy, or more.
She held out a hand that drew him towards her like the pull of gravity.
“You could let go, you know,” she continued in that slight voice normally reserved for murmurs in a sweaty bed. “Walk away like Eli did. Find happiness. It is never too late.”
“And lose you?”
Fraser couldn’t help his voice breaking, even in a dream.
She smiled ruefully and clenched his hand tighter. She pulled him in close and suddenly they were dancing, slow and warm, like that first night he ever laid eyes on this beautiful creature and knew no other would ever do.
“You will never lose me, Fraser,” she whispered into his chest, letting his arms enfold her. “I will always be no farther away than your memory, than your dreams. I will be here every night when you want to dream.”
“He killed you,” Fraser agonized quietly.
“And he lost,” her voice suddenly became a cold blade, a broadsword. “Now he can never have me. And you will have me forever. He did not defeat me. He suffered the ultimate defeat. He could only kill me.”
“And me? What do I do? How do I win?”
“Oh, my love,” she whispered, caressing his cheek with her right hand. “Every day you are alive you defeat him. Every one of your people who are alive with you are burning splinters under his fingernails, an itch he cannot reach. Every breath you draw diminishes him that much more.”
“I swore I would see him dead.” Fraser let the warmth of her hand embrace his raw soul.
“He is fallen, Fraser Cydelmynster. Let it go.”
She began to fade, even as he clasped harder. Her spirit ran through his hands like water, like mist, like the morning fog in the hollows melting under the rising sun.
Finally, even the scent of her perfume was gone.
Fraser awoke in darkness, flat on his back. Something had thumped his foot hard enough to break him out of a dream.
“You awake?” Conrad called quietly from the tent’s doorway.
Fraser laid there for a moment, finding gravity and place in the darkness, so different from where he had just been.
He felt a wet burn down both sides of his face, where the tears had drained back and run across the tops of his ears.
“Fraser?”
“Yeah,” he sat up and wiped his face, glad that nobody could see him in the utter darkness of his tent.
Conrad knew, but Conrad knew most of it anyway.
“You were growling and moaning in your sleep. Roald had the watch and came and got me.”
“Thanks.”
Fraser jammed his boots on his feet and hooked them shut. He stood up out of his tent as Conrad stepped back. There was a rifle in a small storage crate to keep it dry. He grabbed it and checked the round in the chamber before turning around.
Maybe he had it together enough to talk to the living.
“You okay?” Conrad asked carefully.
“Yeah.”
There wasn’t much more coherence at this point. Fraser was slowly climbing up from the bottom of a very deep well and needed time to order his thoughts.
“You go back to sleep, Conrad,” he said. “I’m going to go sit with Roald for a while and then maybe I’ll be better.”
Conrad gave him a dubious look, but said nothing.
The two of them went way back as friends. Nothing much more needed to be said.
Roald had a look of concern. There was enough moonlight to see a ways, especially from the little rise just outside their main camp. Fog crept around below, poking cold fingers into nooks and sleeping bags.
Fraser found a comfortable tree across from Roald and leaned back.
He knew he should take Keller up on her offer. Knew it in his bones.
But he would never be happy until he had Haussmann’s skull on a pole in his front yard as a warning to future generations.
The galaxy had gotten as bad as it had because there were not enough men and women willing to stand up to men like Haussmann. And there were always men like Dieter Haussmann.
How many of his own people would Fraser lose when he offered them the chance to escape with Aquitaine?
It didn’t really matter. He would go after the man alone, naked, with a sharpened stick, if that was all he had left. Even Jeannine knew that.
Chapter XXXII
Date of the Republic May 22, 396 CAX Shivaji. Above Thuringwell
He did have to hand it to her.
The Fleet Centurion had managed to find possibly the most boring place Alber’ could think of in Imperial space to invade. What was the term she had used to describe the planet below them? Company town, or something like that.
Isolated.
Predictable.
Dreary.
Alber’ d’Maine sat in his command chair and scowled professionally at the universe.
Any other planet might have such a dynamic–enough economy that little tramp freighters would be running back and forth to nearby systems hauling goods.
But no. That idiot Duke had kept his greedy, iron fingers around everything. Even the asteroid belt was nearly virgin, under threat of Imperial imprisonment or a prison planet if anyone looked to develop it.
No, everything was on the planet below. One starport, one city. Nearly two–score open–pit mines sprawled like wounds visible from orbit on a clear–enough day. Rails connecting everything like a giant octopus or spiderweb.
Dull.
But on the brighter side, it also meant that he could pull Shivaji out of the defensive line and patrol near space, as long as he was careful. Ballard still frequently hopped out to the far edges of the system to look around, but that was a part of her job, the primary reason she was here in the first place.
Kigali would have been mutinous with boredom, by now.
Shivaji’s purpose today was to turn off all active arrays, go dark, and slide into the area outside the edge of the gravity well like a leopard seal hunting penguins.
RAN’s biggest stealth frigate.
Even aboard Rajput, Alber’ hadn’t been allowed this luxury. But his fierce, little heavy destroyer had still only been an escort. Nobody in their right mind would have believed she could kill a light cruiser. Let alone survive afterwards. With anybody else in command, she couldn’t have.
But they didn’t get it.
Shivaji was a very dangerous creature, all by herself. Heavy cruisers were designed to show the flag, frequently traveling on distant and potentially dangerous missions alone. They could generally outrun battleships and outfight anything smaller, at least long enough to slip into the safety of JumpSpace.
Alber’ smiled. It was a harsh, cruel smile, entirely out of place on the big, friendly bridge of his vessel. Shivaji as she was configured today might duel an
Imperial battleship on even terms, especially if one tried to stay right at the edge of the range for the big Primary beams, where they would expect an advantage against a mere cruiser.
And they would have one, right up until he turned away, slid outward beyond even that range, and opened fire with the two Type–4 beams on her dorsal fin.
Station–class firepower.
Shivaji didn’t have any missiles, but she could kill things from a very long ways off.
Around him, things were quiet.
Running dark meant that sensors were off. Shields were down to the bare minimum for navigation. Emissions of all kinds were strictly curtailed.
As a result, the crew were doing little things like maintenance that normally was saved up for spring cleaning day, while paying attention to all the passive feeds and a tight–beam, two–way communications–laser from CR–264, who had been tracking them for the rest of the squadron, just in case.
Ping.
Alber’ surfaced from his day–dreams. Most of the bridge crew came to a higher state of awareness with him.
“Commander,” his Science Officer called. “A vessel just emerged from JumpSpace. It is approaching the edge of the gravity well at a speed that suggests a warship rather than a freighter. Albedo suggests a smaller light cruiser.”
All that from three seconds staring at a screen. As well as years of preparation.
And the purifying fires of battle.
Alber’ had initially been concerned when Centurion Zoya Najafi came aboard his command. Fleet personnel files listed her as a quiet, almost mousy officer. Nerdy in the way of many ivory–tower intellectuals.
He had been prepared to see her stick out from his crew of dedicated warriors like a sore thumb. For her to discover that she didn’t belong here, and quickly request a transfer out to a quieter vessel. Many did.
Not everyone was cut out for war, not the way Alber’ d’Maine understood the term.
Alber’ was usually happy to send them off to greener fields.
Today, he wouldn’t trade her for Tomas Kigali on the sensor array. Warrior didn’t mean you had to hold a pistol or a knife to be dangerous. It was the vow of excellence you took every morning when you climbed out of your rack. It meant a dedication to your craft as an adjunct of war itself.