The Alliance Rises: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 3)

by Peter Nealen

  The houkh lumbered forward, managing to look slow and heavy even in the low gravity. It was an illusion, Scalas knew. The big, hairy, six-eyed beings could be frighteningly quick when roused.

  “You will come with us,” the houkh said, in smooth, erudite Trade Cant, without the slightest trace of an accent. “You will see the Boss. All visitors to Ktatra have to see the Boss, pay their respects, and learn the rules.”

  “I was under the impression that this place was a pirate rendezvous,” Rehenek commented.

  The houkh might have smiled, a fearsome expression that would have shown a double row of needle teeth, but his helmet obscured his face. “Yes,” he said, “it is. Which makes keeping the peace aboard that much more important. Ktatra is neutral ground. The Boss makes sure of it. If we were on a planet, then we wouldn’t care so much. Everyone could kill or rob each other as much as they wanted. But we’re on a space station. Too many chances for something to go wrong and kill everybody, do the do-gooders outside’s work for them. So, the Boss runs things tight. You come here, you buy and sell, you do business and make contacts. Violence is for other places.” He paused, and Scalas got the sudden impression that he was smiling, even wider. “So, you come pay your respects, or we kill you and take your ship. Your choice.”

  “You make that sound awfully simple,” Rehenek said. “You could get us, but we’d do a lot of damage first.”

  “You might,” the houkh replied easily. “But we’re hardly the only ones around here with guns. Try your luck.”

  Scalas was torn as his eyes flicked back and forth between the pirates from behind his visor, resisting the urge to flex his hands around his powergun. Kahane was utterly still beside him, a sure sign that the squad sergeant was ready to go. Ordinarily, the short, squat heavyworlder couldn’t keep still in what he thought of as “low” gravity. It made him restless.

  On the one hand, he didn’t like kowtowing to pirates. He’d seen too much of the devastation they wrought. Much of the action he’d seen before Valdek had been against pirates of one stripe or another.

  But the mission demanded it, and the mission had to come first. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t over the line, not yet.

  He just had to be very, very careful about keeping an eye on just where that line lay.

  “Fine,” Rehenek said. “Take us to the Boss.”

  Even through the visor of his helmet, the houkh seemed to leer. The yeheri were expressionless inside their tinted, translucent bubble helmets, and the human’s face was hidden behind a mostly solid metal visor that had been painted to look like a skull. The houkh lumbered aside, clearing the way to the lift hatch.

  “I knew you’d see reason,” he said. He waved toward the hatch, the other hand still on his shotgun. “After you.”

  Rehenek, every inch the monarch in exile, glided past, his head high. Major Zorek followed, with the Caractacans in trace.

  The Brothers kept their heads high and their shoulders squared as they walked past the armed pirates. They might be forgiven if they swaggered a little. Scalas himself loomed over the skull-faced human, not bothering to look directly at him, but watching him nonetheless. The man took a step back as he passed, his visor swiveling to follow. He might have been focused on the well-worn BR-18s. They weren’t particularly common weapons.

  The hatch led into a large elevator, easily big enough to transport a vehicle. Who knew what kind of cargo passed through Ktatra? Scalas feared that he had a good idea.

  The elevator wasn’t empty, either. A dozen more pirates, just as heavily armed and armored as the group outside, were waiting when the doors opened. Clearly, the pirates who ran Ktatra weren’t taking chances with unidentified newcomers.

  Once they were all in the elevator, the houkh and his enforcers coming in behind them, the hatch was sealed and the elevator began to descend into the ring.

  It took nearly a half hour to reach their destination. The interior of Ktatra was about what Scalas had expected; while the pirates might enforce a certain order there, they weren’t hugely invested in making it more than simply livable. Whoever had made the station in the first place, most of the surfaces were bare metal, dingy with dirt and oxidation. It seemed like half the lights were out, casting the interior of the station into an alternately bluish or orange gloom, depending on where they were.

  There appeared to be a certain number of wider passages running in parallel around the ring, with smaller, much more cramped corridors running between them. The passages were swarming with humans, houkh, yeheri, velk, tehud, ekuz, a few sefkhit, and even some more exotic races who were rare in the Avar sector. Scalas saw some of the amphibious utesh, leonine shsishii, a few diminutive pegeth, sinuous, sleek-furred quaavns moving through a wider corridor in a frightened-looking, chattering pack, and some he had no names for. People like small, red-furred monkeys clambered along the overhead girders where they could, and a group of many-tentacled pseudo-cephalopods festooned with cybernetics wriggled and writhed across his view, scuttling quickly from narrow corridor to narrow corridor. They didn’t look like they were comfortable in the wider spaces.

  They had to stop as a towering, fifteen-foot arthropod clattered past. He couldn’t tell where the being’s exoskeleton stopped and its clothing or spacesuit began.

  Finally, the houkh stopped in front of a massive door flanked by blue-glowing light bars twisted into an intertwining pattern. “In here,” he said. “The Boss is waiting.”

  The door hissed up into the overhead, opening on a dive of a bar, lit luridly by neon lights and flashing strobes. Pulsing, dissonant music thudded through the opening. The fact that the corridor outside had been silent a moment before told Scalas just how heavily fortified the establishment was, and he was pretty sure that detail wasn’t lost on Rehenek either.

  When Rehenek stepped forward, he paused and glanced down at his sidearm. The houkh just grunted rhythmically in his people’s version of laughter. “You can keep your weapons,” he said, amusement clear in his voice. “Trust me, if you try to use them, you’re going to regret it. But only for about a second.”

  Scalas couldn’t say he thought much of the houkh’s sense of humor.

  Rehenek led the way in, though Scalas and Kahane were flanking him. If they were going to play the role of the General-Regent’s bodyguards, they’d play it. And there wasn’t a Brother present in that room who wasn’t ready and willing to start stacking dead pirates if the situation called for it. They were in the lion’s den, and they knew it.

  The houkh led them between the tables and past the dance floor. The mingling between races was a little less pronounced there than elsewhere on the station; the odds of a yeheri finding an ekuz an attractive mate were slim to none, and that was a pretty universal rule. The races of the galaxy could relate through thought and reason, not physical compatibility.

  Predictably, the houkh led them to another door in the back. It was guarded by two more armored houkhs, who exchanged murmured speech in their own grumble-hum language, before stepping aside and opening the door.

  The Boss’s inner sanctum was just as weirdly lit and crowded as the bar outside, though it was considerably quieter. Apparently, real business took place here, and the Boss didn’t like a lot of loud music while it was happening.

  Of course, when he saw the Boss, Scalas realized a good part of the reason why.

  Sitting in state at a table at the center of the room, flanked by two more armed and armored houkhs, was a pegeth. Barely a meter tall, with tiny, beady black eyes set in a round, furred face, the pegeth had dish-shaped ears nearly as large as her head. Pegeth in general didn’t like loud noises for just that reason.

  “Who have we here?” the Boss asked. While she looked rather like a fluffy rodent, the pegeth had a surprisingly husky, melodious voice when she spoke Trade Cant.

  “I am General-Regent Amra Rehenek, leader in exile of the planet Valdek,” Rehenek said. “I take it you are the Boss.”

  “That’s me
,” the pegeth said. She leaned back in her chair. “Did Coref tell you what the terms of doing business on Ktatra are?”

  Rehenek glanced at the houkh who was now standing off to the side of the Boss’s table. “He gave us the quick version.”

  “It’s simple,” the Boss said. “You got a feud with somebody here, you take it off the station. Ktatra gets a ten percent cut of any profits from selling loot or slaves. The docking fee is ten percent of your cargo. You don’t like it, we take your ship. If they’re lucky, your crew gets sold to a reasonable owner after that. Bounty hunters and spies get spaced. If you’re hunting a bounty or spying for a military brotherhood or planetary government, you’d best keep your head down and get out before somebody figures it out. As soon as somebody does figure it out, my enforcers will deal with you. If you spot a bounty hunter or a spy, you bring ’em to me. Try and take ’em out yourself, and we space you along with them.

  “Final rule,” she said. “Do not cross me. The last kingpin who tried that ended up over there.” She pointed to the wall off to her right. All eyes turned to look where she was pointing.

  Yellow lights framed a taxidermist mount. At first, it might have looked like an animal’s head mounted there, but after a moment, it became clear to Scalas that the Boss had had a dead gordok’s head mounted on her wall. And given how formidable the ursine gordok tended to be, that made her threat all the more potent.

  “We do not have any cargo,” Rehenek ventured, keeping his tone respectful. Not fearful; that would never do, either for a General-Regent, or any other man facing a pirate kingpin as obviously formidable as this bloodthirsty little pegeth. “We have come to recruit mercenaries.”

  “Then you have something to pay them with, don’t you?” the Boss demanded, tilting her head slightly to one side. “We’ll take ten percent of that.”

  Scalas wondered if Rehenek was going to try to argue. It probably wouldn’t work, but at the same time, he guessed that folding too quickly would mean losing face as much as showing fear.

  He was keeping his cool, but behind the blank mask of his face, obscured by his helmet, Scalas was seething. He didn’t like tiptoeing around this scum. He was sure that the gordok had probably been nearly as much of a monster as the pegeth; if he’d been a bounty hunter, he was sure that the Boss would have said so. But the casual talk of murder, slavery, and extortion had his blood boiling.

  The Code meant that a man had to guard his soul and his honor as much or more than his life. But the Brotherhood had carved its way through more than one den of savages like this one. To have to stand there quietly, knowing what they had done and what they would go on to do, without being able to act to stop it, was galling.

  “I don’t suppose that sum is negotiable,” Rehenek sighed.

  “No,” the Boss said. “It is not. Ten percent, or suffer the consequences.”

  “So be it,” Rehenek said, tight-lipped. He turned to Major Zorek and spoke briefly in Eastern Satevic. Scalas had picked up a few words of the language during their time on Valdek, but not enough to understand what was said. Zorek, however, saluted, turned on his heel, and started to leave.

  The pirates didn’t try to stop him. But the big houkh, who had come in with them, Coref, fell in beside Zorek. The message was clear. None of them were going to be allowed to wander far until the correct bribes were paid.

  “While we wait,” Rehenek said casually, “perhaps you can fill me in on where to find some recruits.”

  The Boss leaned back in her chair, steepling her paws in front of her. “That sort of information costs money, friend,” she said. “Depending on the quality of the recruits, a lot of money.”

  Rehenek smiled. There was little warmth in the expression. “Which is why I instructed Major Zorek to bring an additional cut of our funds,” he said. “Shall we stop wasting time?”

  The Boss studied him. Her beady eyes crinkled a little, the fur around them standing out in amusement. “I think I like you, General-Regent,” she said. She leaned forward and put her elbows on the table in front of her. “By all means, let’s do business.”

  Chapter Ten

  It was hard to tell time on Ktatra; the station wasn’t set up with a day/night cycle to its lighting. It was always the same dim, dingy twilight wherever they went, regardless of the time. It was going to play hell with their internal clocks, but there was no helping it.

  Rehenek had actually had some luck, such as it was. Many of the mercenaries aboard the station weren’t interested in straight-up military work; they wanted easy pickings. Most of them were little more than pirates themselves. But there were a few who seemed slightly out of place among the cutthroats and slavers running through the station, those who seemed to have once been respectable outfits, forced into the galactic underworld through desperation. Several of those had signed on. Some names Scalas even recognized; he’d been surprised to see representatives from Stirling’s Regiment there. That unit had been a distinguished band of warriors once upon a time. But Captain Randle had just looked tired and worn down, muttering something about setbacks and being hunted by the Qerese.

  It was something that Scalas could understand. He could understand the desperation to keep the unit alive, even as they were forced away from their usual working sector, decimated and on the run. He couldn’t necessarily countenance it; there were too many worlds, too many places to go and start a new life, to justify stooping to grubbing for mercenary work among the sorts of marauders who inhabited Ktatra.

  He was a warrior by trade and vocation. Had been his whole life. But even he knew that every man had a choice to walk away. Especially when he fought for pay, not for a Code or an Oath.

  But while they might have found some new supporters for what Rehenek was now calling the Galactic Alliance, as opposed to the Galactic Unity, they were no closer to finding their quarry. Ktatra was huge, and simply navigating the warren of passageways that honeycombed the ring took time. According to Scalas’s watch, they had already been aboard the station for nearly fifty hours, without locating any sign of the Unity’s presence. Whoever Vakolo had sent on his errand of chaos, they were keeping a low profile.

  They knew roughly where the Unity ship was docked, but the Boss kept a lot of her security, mostly houkhs and a few yeheri, clustered near the access points to the docking pads. Clearly, the ships presented a prominent target, and the Boss was intent on maintaining the peace on the station. Anyone trying to get to a ship not their own was presumed to be up to no good.

  “We’re running out of time,” Rehenek grumbled, back aboard the Nemesis. “Who knows what they’ve been up to while we’ve been casting about in the bowels of this station, looking for them?”

  “Why keep looking?” Scalas asked. “We know that they’re here, and now we know where Ktatra is. You’ve recruited enough mercenaries to cover our presence here. Why not leave, rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, and return in force?”

  He was only partially suggesting it because it was a reasonable course of action, and would allow the Caractacans to deal with the problem more directly. He wanted off Ktatra. The longer he spent in that den of marauders, the more uncomfortable he got. He felt dirty just walking the corridors.

  He’d been in some pretty awful places, first as a Vitorian commando and later as a Caractacan Brother. But even most of them had had people who might be down on their luck, but were still decent.

  Such people were all but nonexistent on Ktatra. The slaves were the only ones who were not there out of some malicious intent.

  It had been obvious with every step they took through the ring. None of the looks they got were friendly; they were the stares of predators sizing up possible prey. No one came to Ktatra for good reasons.

  “I’d like to capture at least one of them,” Rehenek muttered. “Simply killing them or driving them away might hinder their plans, but wouldn’t necessarily end them, and we’d end up right where we are now, trying to hunt down another team that could be hiding any
where.”

  “All true,” Scalas pointed out. “But shutting down this hub would be a victory all by itself. Furthermore, we would have a much greater chance of success with four Centuries of Caractacan Brothers, not to mention the additional forces your Alliance can bring to bear. As it is, we stand a much better chance of being cut off and killed if we try to do it ourselves, without calling in the rest.”

  Rehenek scowled. “Have you looked at this place?” he asked, waving a hand to take in the entire station. He snorted. “I was proud of gathering the strike force that I have, from across half a dozen worlds. But this station is the size of a large asteroid, and there are almost ten times as many ships here as we have.” He shook his head. “I understand your reasoning, Erekan, but I think that a frontal assault is just as doomed to failure.”

  Scalas chuckled. “A frontal assault is not necessarily the way to go, no,” he agreed. “And it is not what I was suggesting, either. We Caractacans are used to being outnumbered, remember? If we espoused ‘honorable stupid’ tactics, we’d have been wiped out centuries ago.” He shook his head. “No, it would be complicated, and difficult, but maneuver and surprise can make up for considerable disadvantages.” He raised an eyebrow. “Especially when those Fortunian maulers come into play.”

  Rehenek smiled tightly. The Fortunians were an isolationist lot, for the most part, and enforced their isolation with one of the strongest militaries in the spinward verge of the Carina Arm. Getting them to join the Alliance had been a coup, and no mistake.

  “As for the station itself,” Scalas continued, “we don’t have to try to destroy it ourselves.”