She snorted at the thought as she forced herself to key her terminal to bring up the latest set of reports. There was no change, she noted wryly: an endless liturgy of shootings, bombings, gang rapes, robberies, and other horrors undreamed of on Tyre. But Ahura Mazda’s population had been kept under tight control for decades, centuries even. The sudden collapse of everything they’d once taken for granted had unleashed years of pent-up frustrations. She sometimes thought that the insurgency was really a civil war, with Commonwealth troops being engaged only when they got in the way. Ahura Mazda seemed to have gone completely mad.
Damn them, she thought. A final spread of makeshift rockets struck the forcefield outside, then faded away. And damn their dead leaders too.
She looked down at her hands, feeling as if she simply wanted to stay in bed. She’d had plans for the future, once. She was going to get married and see the universe, perhaps by purchasing a freighter and traveling from system to system, doing a little trading along the way. Instead, her fiancé was dead, and she was still in the navy, technically. She hadn’t stood on a command deck for nearly a year. Instead, she was chained to a desk on an occupied world, trying to govern a sector of forty inhabited star systems that had just been liberated from one of the worst tyrannies humanity had the misfortune to invent. The chaos was beyond belief. Ahura Mazda wasn’t the only world going through a nervous breakdown. She’d read reports of everything from mass slaughter to forced deportation of everyone who’d converted to the True Faith.
Years of pent-up frustrations, she reminded herself. She’d been lucky. She hadn’t grown up in a world where saying the wrong thing could get her beheaded. And they have all been released at once.
There was a sharp knock at the door. Kat glared at it, resisting the urge to order the visitor to go away. There was only one person who could come through that door. It opened a moment later, allowing Lucy Yangtze to step into the bedroom. The middle-aged woman studied Kat with a surprisingly maternal eye as she carried the breakfast tray over to the bedside table. Kat had to fight to keep from snapping at her to get out. Lucy was a steward. Looking after Kat was her job.
“Good morning, Admiral,” Lucy said. She managed to sound disapproving without making it obvious. “How are you today?”
Kat swallowed a number of remarks she knew would be petty and childish. “I didn’t sleep well,” she said as Lucy uncovered the tray. “And then they woke me up.”
“You need to go to bed earlier,” Lucy said, dryly.
“Hah,” Kat muttered. She forced herself to stand, heedless of her nakedness. “There are too many things to do here.”
“Then delegate some of them,” Lucy suggested gently. “You have an entire staff under you, do you not?”
Pat would have cracked a rude joke, Kat thought. It felt like a stab to the heart. And I would have elbowed him . . .
She pushed the thought aside with an effort. “We’ll see,” she said, vaguely. In truth, she didn’t want to delegate anything. Too much was riding on the occupation’s success for her to casually push authority down the chain. And yet, Lucy was right. Ahura Mazda wasn’t a starship. A single mind couldn’t hope to keep abreast of all the details, let alone make sure the planet ran smoothly. If that was her goal, she’d already failed. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“I’ll have lunch ready for 1300,” Lucy said. “You can make it a working lunch if you like.”
Kat had to smile, although she knew it wasn’t really funny. All her lunches were working lunches these days. She rarely got to eat in private with anyone. Even cramming a ration bar into her mouth between meetings wasn’t an option. She couldn’t help feeling, as she tucked into her scrambled eggs, that she was merely spinning her wheels in mud. She went to countless meetings, she made decisions, again and again and again, and yet . . . was she actually doing anything? She kicked herself, again, for allowing them to promote her off the command deck. The Admiralty probably would have let her take command of a heavy cruiser on deep-space patrol if she’d made enough of a fuss.
It has to be done, she thought as she keyed her console to bring up the latest news reports from home. And I’m the one the king tapped for the post.
“Naval spokespeople today confirmed that the search for MV Supreme has been finally called off,” the talking head said. He was a man so grave that Kat rather suspected he was nothing more than a computer-generated image. “The cruise liner, which went missing in hyperspace six months ago, has been declared lost with all hands. Duke Cavendish issued a statement reassuring investors that the Cavendish Corporation will meet its commitments, but independent analysts are questioning their finances . . .”
Kat sighed. Trust the media to put a lost cruise liner ahead of anything important. “Next.”
“Infighting among refugees on Tarsus has led to a declaration of martial law,” the talking head told her. “President Theca has taken personal control of the situation and informed the refugees that any further misbehavior, regardless of the cause, will result in immediate arrest and deportation. The Commonwealth Refugee Commission has blamed the disorder on poor supply lines and has called on Tarsus to make more supplies available to the refugees. However, local protests against refugees have grown . . .”
“And it could be worse, like it is here,” Kat muttered. “Next!”
“Sharon Mackintosh has become the latest starlet to join the Aaron Group Marriage,” the talking head said. “She will join fifty-seven other starlets in matrimonial bliss . . .”
“Off,” Kat snapped.
She shook her head in annoyance. The occupied zone was turning into a nightmare, no matter how many meetings she attended, and the news back home was largely trivial. The end of the war had brought confusion in its wake—she knew that better than anyone—but there were times when she thought that the king was the only one trying to hold everything together. The Commonwealth hadn’t been designed for a war, and everyone knew it. And now all the tensions that had been put on the back burner while the Commonwealth fought for its very survival were starting to tear it apart.
Standing, she walked over to the window and peered out. Tabernacle City had been a ramshackle mess even before the occupation, but now it was a nightmare. Smoke was rising from a dozen places, marking the latest bombings; below, she could see marines and soldiers heading out on patrol. The civilians seemed to trust the occupiers more than they trusted the warring factions, but they were scared to come into the open and say so. They were afraid, deep inside, that the occupation wouldn’t last. Her eyes picked out Government House, standing a short distance from Commonwealth House. Admiral Junayd and his people were trying to put together a provisional government, but it was a slow job. Their authority was weaker than most of the insurgent factions. She didn’t envy them.
Her wristcom bleeped from the table. She stalked back to the bed and picked it up. “Go ahead.”
“Admiral,” Lieutenant Kitty Patterson’s voice said. “You have a meeting in thirty minutes.”
“Understood,” Kat said. She allowed herself a moment of gratitude. Thirty minutes was more than long enough to shower and get dressed. “I’ll be there.”
She turned and walked into the shower, silently grateful that Commonwealth House had its own water supply. The local water distribution network had been on the verge of failing even before the occupation; now, with pipes smashed by the insurgents and entire pumping stations looted and destroyed, there were overpopulated districts that barely had enough water to keep the population from dying of thirst. Kat didn’t understand how anyone could live in such an environment. She thought she would sooner have risked her life in revolt than waste away and die.
But it was never that easy, she thought. This is how too many people here believe it should be.
She washed and dressed quickly, inspecting her appearance in the reflector field before she left the suite. Her white uniform was neatly pressed, her medals and her golden hair shone in the light . . . but there was a
tired look in her eyes she knew she should lose. She was depressed and she knew it, and she really should talk to the shrinks, but training and experience told her that the psychologists were not to be trusted. None of them had commanded ships in battle, or made life-or-death decisions, or done anything that might qualify them to pass judgment on a spacer’s life.
She took a long breath, gathering herself as she strapped a pistol to her belt, then walked through the door and down the corridor. The two marine guards at the far end of the corridor saluted her. She returned the gesture as the hatch opened in front of her.
They built the place to resemble a starship, she thought dourly. It had been amusing, once, to contemplate the mind-set of whoever had thought it was a good idea. Were they trying to remind everyone that, one day, the Commonwealth would leave Ahura Mazda? Or did they just want to pretend, for a few hours, that they were designing starships? But they forgot to include a command deck.
She drew herself up as she stepped through the next hatch, into the meeting room. It was large and ornate, although she’d managed to clear out the worst of the luxury. She didn’t want people to get too comfortable in meeting rooms. Thankfully, most of her senior staff had genuine experience, either in combat or repairing and rejuvenating shattered planetary infrastructures. The war had created far too many opportunities to practice.
And I don’t have many chairwarmers, she reminded herself as her staff stood to welcome her. It could be worse.
“Thank you for coming,” she said once she’d taken her chair. “Be seated.”
She cast her eye around the table as her staffers sat down. General Timothy Winters, Commonwealth Marines; Colonel Christopher Whitehall, Royal Engineering Corps; Major Shawna Callable, Commonwealth Refugee Commission; Captain Janice Wilson, Office of Naval Intelligence; Lieutenant Kitty Patterson, Kat’s personal aide. It was a diverse group, she told herself firmly. And the absence of wallflowers, from junior staffers to senior staffers, allowed everyone to talk freely.
“I was woken this morning by a rocket attack,” she said as a server poured tea and coffee. “I assume there was no reason to be alarmed?”
“No, Admiral,” Winters said. He was a big, beefy man with a bald head and scarred cheekbones. “It was merely another random attack. The people behind it scarpered before we could catch them.”
Because we can’t fire shells back into the city, Kat reminded herself sharply. The insurgents would claim we’d killed civilians, even if we hadn’t.
She felt a flash of hatred deeper than anything she’d ever felt for enemy spacers. She’d never seen her opponents in space, not face-to-face. It had been easy to believe that they weren’t that different from her, that they weren’t monsters. But here, on the ground, she couldn’t avoid the simple fact that the insurgents were monsters. They killed anyone who supported the provisional government, raped and mutilated women they caught out of doors, sited heavy weapons emplacements in inhabited homes, used children to carry bombs towards the enemy . . . Kat wanted them all dead. Ahura Mazda would have no hope of becoming a decent place to live as long as those monsters stalked the streets. But tracking them all down was a long and difficult task.
“At least no one was killed,” Major Shawna Callable said. “Admiral, we need more resources for the women’s shelters. We’re running short of just about everything.”
“And they also need more guards,” Winters told her. “The last attack nearly broke the perimeter before it was beaten back.”
“Draw them from the reserves,” Kat ordered. She didn’t like deploying her reserves, not when she was all too aware of how badly her forces were overstretched, but she had no choice. The women in the shelters would be assaulted and murdered if one of their compounds was overrun. “And see what we can find in the way of additional supplies.”
If we can find anything, her thoughts added. Ahura Mazda produced nothing these days, as far as she could tell. The infrastructure had been literally torn to shreds. Putting the farms back into production was turning into a long, hard slog. Shawna had been right. We’re running short on just about everything.
She looked at Winters. “Is there anything we can do to make it harder for the insurgents to get to them?”
“Only moving the refugees a long way away,” Winters said. “Personally, I’d recommend one of the islands. We could set up a proper security net there and vaporize anything heading in without the right security codes.”
“We barely have the resources to keep the cities alive,” Colonel Christopher Whitehall said, curtly. He was short, with black skin and penetrating eyes. His record stated that he’d been a marine before he’d been wounded and transferred to the Royal Engineers. “Right now, Admiral, I’m honestly expecting a disaster at any moment.”
“So train up some locals and put them to work,” Winters snapped. He thumped the table to underline the suggestion. “It’s their bloody city. And their people who will die of thirst if we lose the pumping stations completely.”
“The training programs are going slowly,” Whitehall snapped back. The frustration in his voice was all too clear. “Half the idiots on this wretched ball of mud think that trying to fix a broken piece of machinery is sinful, while the other half can’t count to twenty-one without taking off their trousers. We’ve got a few women who might be good at it, if they were given a chance, but we can’t send them out on repair jobs.”
“It’s their schooling,” Shawna told them. “They weren’t encouraged to actually learn.”
Kat nodded in grim understanding. The Theocracy’s educational system had been a joke. No, that wasn’t entirely true. It had done its job, after all. It had churned out millions of young men who knew nothing, least of all how to think. But rote recitals were useless when it came to repairing even a relatively simple machine. It was a mystery to her how the Theocratic Navy had managed to keep its fleet going long enough to actually start the war. Their shortage of trained engineers had to have been an utter nightmare.
They never picked on anyone their own size, she told herself. The Theocracy’s first targets had all been stage-one or stage-two worlds. Very few of them had any space-based defenses, let alone the ability to take the fight to the enemy. And the Theocrats certainly weren’t prepared for a long war.
Whitehall met her eyes. “We need more engineers, Admiral, and more protective troops. If we lose a couple more pumping stations . . .”
“I know,” Kat said. They’d come to the same conclusion time and time again, in pointless meeting after pointless meeting. “Right now, Tyre doesn’t seem to be interested in sending either.”
“We could try to hire civilian engineers,” Kitty suggested. She was the lowest-ranking person at the table, but that didn’t stop her from offering her opinions. “They could take up some of the slack.”
Whitehall snorted. “I doubt it,” he said. “There’s work in the Commonwealth for engineers, Lieutenant, and safer too. They won’t be in any danger on Tarsus or . . . well, anywhere. I don’t think we could get them out here.”
Kitty reddened. “I . . . sorry, Admiral.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kat said, briskly. She looked around the table. “Are there any other solutions?”
“Not in the short run,” Whitehall said. “We have water and power, Admiral. It’s getting both to their destination that is the real problem. We’ve tried setting up purification centers near the sewers and . . .”
The building shook, gently. Kat tensed, one hand dropping to the pistol at her belt. That hadn’t been a homemade rocket. A nuke? The Theocracy had supposedly thrown its entire nuclear arsenal at the navy, but she’d never been entirely sure they’d used all their nukes. Hell, the Theocrats themselves hadn’t been sure. Their record keeping had been appalling. A nuke wouldn’t break the forcefield but would do immense damage to the city.
Winters checked his wristcom, then swore. “Admiral,” he said, “there’s been an explosion.”
“Where?” Kat stood. T
he blast had been very close. If the insurgents had managed to open a pathway into Commonwealth House, the defenders might be in some trouble. “And what happened?”
“Government House.” Winters sounded stunned. “The building is in ruins. Admiral, Admiral Junayd is dead.”
“. . . Shit,” Kat said.
CHAPTER TWO
* * *
TYRE
Peter Falcone—Duke Peter Falcone, he reminded himself savagely—stared at the heavy wooden doors and tried not to let his impatience show on his face. He was no callow youth, although he’d grown up in the shadows of Duke Lucas Falcone; he was one of the single most wealthy and powerful people on Tyre. It hadn’t been easy to convince enough of the family to back him, even though he was Lucas’s oldest child, but he’d made it. The Falcone family was in his hands now. He had no intention of failing in his duty to his people.
Assuming I ever get through my investiture, he thought as he looked at the doors. They were firmly closed, awaiting the king’s pleasure. Who thought it was a good idea to come up with such . . . such pageantry?
He snorted at the thought. The planet’s founders, including his great-grandfather, had created a corporate state. There had been fourteen corporations, at the time, and they’d divided the world up between them. It had been simple enough, he’d thought, but, to give the whole enterprise a veneer of legitimacy, they’d turned the planet into a monarchy, with the most powerful CEO declared king. And it had grown from there into a tangled system that worked . . . mostly. But the founders had never imagined the Breakdown, or the Commonwealth, or, worst of all, the recently concluded war.
And they didn’t imagine one of the corporations collapsing either, Peter told himself. The Ducal Fourteen had always seemed too big to fail. But the Cavendish Corporation was on the verge of total collapse, and Peter had a nasty feeling that others might follow. His own corporation was barely treading water. We never imagined having to splash out so much money on everything from weapons development to force projection.
Debt of Honor (The Embers of War) Page 2