by Peter Nealen
He had been simply gazing at the accretion disc and the nebula beyond it, letting his mind wander. But his thoughts kept coming back to old worries, old concerns.
A step clunked beside him, and he turned. A shorter man, his face pale and lined, his salt-and-pepper hair cropped short, stood next to him, gazing out at the breathtaking vista outside the viewport.
“I wondered if you were aboard somewhere,” Scalas said. “It’s good to see you again, Corporal Viloshen.”
The grizzled old spacer-turned-soldier grinned, his eyes crinkling. “Is ‘Captain’ Viloshen, now,” he said. “I am special member of General-Regent’s staff.”
“Congratulations,” Scalas said. He smiled faintly. “And what place on the staff do you fill?”
“Mascot, maybe?” Viloshen chuckled. “I do not really know. I do much translation. I prefer when I can do spacer chores, but is hard to do that when you are Captain. Enlisted spacers always try to rush to do job they think they should be doing, and will get in trouble if officer does them for them. I cannot tell them that I am bored and wish to do old job again.”
Scalas nodded, sharing the older man’s chuckle. Viloshen had been a spacer aboard the starship Iveniya before the Unity had attacked Valdek. Being home at the time, he had been recalled to the Valdekan Army and reactivated at his previous rank of Corporal. He probably would have died there when the last planetary defense fortress had fallen, if he had not been the one man in his sector of the defenses who spoke Trade Cant when the Caractacan Brothers had come looking for Rehenek.
He sobered. “How is he?” he asked. “Really?”
Viloshen peered at him with a faint squint. The old spacer was keenly perceptive, something that Scalas had gotten to know as they’d been fighting for their lives on Valdek. He was a simple man, but that didn’t mean he was dumb.
“He is driven, I think,” Viloshen said after a moment. “Haunted by what happened. He is careful to show only stoic leader to rest of us, but I think he mourns his mother and father more than anything else. I think he wants revenge for them. The Major General, Horvaset…I think she helps balance him.”
Scalas nodded. “I’ve noticed that, just in the last few hundred hours.”
“There are stories,” Viloshen murmured. “You gave him message from his mother. He tried to be cool, but they say he was shaken by that more than anything.”
“He was very close to his mother,” Horvaset said from behind them. Both men turned, Viloshen looking a little guilty and stepping away, ducking his head.
But Horvaset was looking at Scalas. There was no accusation in her eyes; only what might be defensiveness. Her chin was held high, her eyes bright, her dark hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. She stepped closer, joining the two men at the window. She had a drinking bulb of her own in her hand; she was clearly off-duty.
“I did not mean to pry, Major General,” Scalas said. “But you understand that I have not seen the General-Regent in some months. If we are to be close allies, I have to know what is in his mind.”
“Are you asking on behalf of Brother Legate Maruks, then?” Horvaset asked.
Scalas felt his face go stony, and fought to lighten his expression. He knew that his face looked rather grim on a regular basis anyway, but Horvaset had just touched a bit of a nerve.
Before he had been killed in action, Brother Legate Kranjick had appointed Scalas as Acting Legate of the Avar Sector Legio. And while he hadn’t been convinced that he was ready for that kind of leadership—he often wondered if he was truly ready to lead men like Cobb, whom he’d been a novice with—it had still stung when the Conclave had sent another Brother Legate to take over from him. Maruks had bent over backward to be worthy of Kranjick’s legacy, but he was not Kranjick, and the fact that the Conclave had actively taken steps to prevent Kranjick’s picked successor from taking command did not bode well in either man’s opinion.
Michael Kranjick had been one of the most stalwart upholders of the Code, particularly in the face of the growing “New School” of thought that considered the Code outdated and overly rigid. Those who wanted the rules of honor and courage to be more…flexible. It had, apparently, made him unpopular with a disturbing number of senior Brothers on Caerfon.
“No, Major General,” he said. “I was simply standing here contemplating the view when the subject came up in conversation.”
Horvaset’s expression softened a little. “Forgive me, Centurion,” she said. She sighed, taking a sip from her own drinking bulb. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just…it has been hard, the last few months. There are always those who question his motives, his objectives. They are always looking for the secret agenda, the political advantage. He has no such agenda. He simply wants to see our world liberated, and the so-called ‘Unity’ crushed. That is all.”
“You really are devoted to him, aren’t you?” Scalas asked.
She lifted her chin again and stared into his eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I am. Until death.” There was more subtext to that than simply the loyalty between a commander and her sovereign, and the look in her eye suggested that she knew that Scalas knew it, and didn’t care.
“Do you know what it is like to lose everything like he has, Centurion?” she asked. “Home, family?”
There was a stir nearby, and Scalas glanced over to see Rehenek himself coming toward them, Major Zorek not far behind, but not quite joining them either. “Kateryna,” he said reprovingly. “Erekan is a friend. You need not get defensive with him.”
“It’s all right,” Scalas said. He looked Horvaset in the eye. “As a matter of fact, Major General, I do know. While I can return to Vitor whenever I wish, there is no longer anything there for me.”
“Your family?” Rehenek asked, joining them. Viloshen was starting to edge away, his moment of camaraderie with Scalas now overshadowed by his commanders. But Rehenek waved at him to stay.
“Gone,” Scalas said quietly, slightly proud that his voice was as steady as it was. It had been a long time, but the memory was still fresh. “Just before my novitiate ended.”
“What happened?” Horvaset asked. Her confrontational attitude of a moment before had vanished.
“My mother and my sister were in a suborbital crash,” Scalas said. “The retrorockets failed at two thousand meters. There were no survivors.” He looked out at the accretion disc and the infant star, and took a sip from his own drinking bulb. The coffee was still scalding, and he welcomed the pain for a moment. “My father did not last long after that happened. He died of a stroke.”
“What did your father do?” Rehenek asked. “What did he think when you joined the Brotherhood?”
“I think it was the proudest day of his life and at the same time that he was disappointed,” Scalas said. “He was my first commanding officer, you see.”
Rehenek’s eyebrows lifted. “He was a Caractacan Brother?”
But Scalas shook his head. “He was a Vitorian Commando. He commanded the 2nd Commando Regiment. I still think that he pulled strings to get me assigned to the 2nd, though he would never admit it, and I could never find proof.”
As Rehenek’s eyes went blank, just for a moment, Scalas chuckled, almost a little bitterly. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” he said. “He did not give me any kind of special treatment. Well,” he shrugged, “I suppose, in a sense, he did. I had to work twice as hard to prove myself there. I think that whenever he had a chance, he told my superiors to be a little bit harder on me. He wanted me to be the best, and he wanted me to earn it.”
“And you joined the Brotherhood to escape his shadow?” Horvaset asked. She seemed genuinely interested, even as she and Rehenek had drifted together; they were not quite touching, but they stood close enough that a hair could not have passed between their shoulders.
“In a way, I suppose,” Scalas answered. “As hard as he was on me, I still could never shake the nagging doubt that he was still bringing me along because I was his son. I had to prove myself, by my
self.”
And that had led him to a life among the stars, dedicated to a Code that not all his Brothers took entirely seriously anymore. And now he was fighting a war that he knew could break the Brotherhood permanently. There are always those who will turn away from honor and what is right when desperate enough.
Rehenek’s hand gripped his shoulder. “I said before that we are both orphans,” he said. “I did not know how true that was.” His grip tightened briefly, and he turned to Horvaset. “You see, Kateryna?” he said. “If anyone in this Alliance understands us, it is Erekan.”
He was interrupted by a comms chime. He pulled out his own unit and looked at it. His face hardened. “Duty calls.” He looked up at Scalas, his eyes bitter. “You had probably better come too. And bring your Legate.”
They could hear the ekuz protesting from down the corridor.
“I’m telling you, I’ve done all that I can!” he was all but screaming. “A quantum computer couldn’t crack that without the key! I’m not holding out, please! Please don’t hurt me!”
Scalas and Costigan were the first ones in the room, propelling themselves through the hatch and coming to sharp halts as they each reached out and grabbed a handhold. Rehenek, Maruks, and Horvaset weren’t far behind.
Scalas recognized the Valdekan officer looming over the ekuz coder. Major Stojanek had been one of the Valdekan First Commandos who had accompanied the Caractacan Brothers on the jump over the shield volcano Gorakovati, on their final gambit to locate Rehenek and get him off Valdek. He was a dead-eyed, icy cold killer, and Scalas had seen it the first time he’d met him. The hand resting on the pistol at his side was no idle threat.
The ekuz looked even more sickly than before, backed into a corner where he floated, his hands skidding on the bulkheads as he tried to dig himself farther into the tiny space. It wasn’t working.
Scalas already had his own hand on his sidearm, and so did Costigan. He had no love for the outlaw coder, especially knowing some of what he’d done, justifying it by being only remotely involved, but he wasn’t going to let Stojanek murder him. As soon as the coder had surrendered, he had become one of the “weak and defenseless” that the Code commanded them to defend.
Rehenek rapped out an order in Eastern Satevic. Stojanek hesitated for just long enough to make it clear that he was considering disobeying and shooting the ekuz, but he took his hand away from his pistol.
Rehenek stared daggers at the ekuz. “Explain,” he said flatly.
The ekuz rolled all three eyes at him and pointed two trembling limbs at the computer terminal. “They used an X-quant photon key,” he explained. “There’s no way to decode it without that key. It depends on the patterns of photonic quantum waveforms that can’t be duplicated.”
Rehenek frowned and looked around the room. “Did that make sense to anyone else?” he asked.
“The technobabble doesn’t matter that much,” Costigan said, “though I know enough about it to know that if they did use a quantum key, he’s telling the truth. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no way to decrypt a quantum code without the key.”
Rehenek grimaced. “So, we are right back where we began.”
“Unless that pegeth knows more than she let on, yes, it would appear so,” Maruks said heavily.
“Do you still think that she does?” Rehenek asked.
“I’d stake my red tunic on it,” Maruks replied bluntly. “No kingpin in a position like hers doesn’t know everything there is to know around them.”
Rehenek nodded. “Then she’ll tell us, or I’ll space her myself,” he snarled. “I haven’t come this far just to come up empty-handed.” He stared at the ekuz, who tried to shrink into a ball under his scrutiny. “You, coder,” he said. “Tell me why I shouldn’t turn you over to the Caractacan Brothers. You failed this task. What can you do?”
The ekuz looked up at him, then glanced fearfully around at the rest of the grim faces in the room. “I can crack any database short of quantum encryption,” he said. “I can get into any system you want.” Sensing an out, he got more enthusiastic. “There’s no standard information security that can keep me out.”
Rehenek glanced sideways at Maruks, then said, “We will talk later. Major Stojanek, take him back to his cell for now.”
He turned to Maruks. “He could be useful,” he said defensively, though the Brother Legate had not said anything. “Perhaps he can make recompense for his crimes as a part of the war effort. In the meantime, let us go talk to our other guest.”
The pegeth might not have been able to distinguish human facial features very well, but she could clearly smell trouble coming into her cell. She shrank back into the corner as Rehenek and Maruks entered, Major Zorek, Scalas, and Costigan waiting outside.
“We didn’t finish our discussion before,” Rehenek said, folding his arms. “The discussion about your intelligence information that I still have no doubt you collected on the Sparatans.”
“I told you, I don’t know anything,” the Boss insisted. Her voice sounded hoarse and had a bit of a squeak to it. “They were very careful.” But the lie was evident, even with her alien features.
“Then you are of no further use, and by all rights I should have you spaced,” Rehenek said.
Maruks cleared his throat, and the tension in the room suddenly ratcheted up a notch. Rehenek stiffened slightly, and turned partway toward the Brother Legate, before composing himself and looking back at the pegeth, who was somehow looking more hopeful.
“She is my prisoner, Legate,” he said quietly.
“Which is true,” Maruks replied. “But our Code is strict. She is a prisoner. She cannot defend herself. To execute her out of hand would be murder. Even pirates are given a trial; that has been tradition since before the Diaspora.”
He did not say as much, but the implication was clear; if Rehenek wanted to maintain his alliance with the Caractacan Brotherhood, he should think very carefully about his course of action over the next few moments.
Rehenek clearly understood it too. But instead of a flash of temper, his eyes simply narrowed in thought. “Of course,” he said. “You are right.” He looked over his shoulder. “I am certain that we have enough officers present for a tribunal. There was enough evidence aboard her ship to convict her easily of piracy, slaving, and aiding and abetting terrorists. Will you and your Centurions participate?”
“In the interests of justice and an amicable alliance, of course,” Maruks said formally.
Rehenek turned eyes like daggers on the pegeth, who shrank back even more from his icy stare. “Now do you have anything to tell us that might earn you some leniency, pirate?”
She talked for a long time.
“That is our target list,” Rehenek said. He was standing in his quarters with Maruks and Scalas. He had requested both their presence specifically. Horvaset had also been waiting when the two Caractacans, in armor except for their helmets, had arrived. Scalas had taken in the scene in a glance; Horvaset looked composed, but her eyes were hooded, her thoughts carefully concealed. Rehenek was noticeably stiff, a tightness around his eyes that Scalas had seen before, usually when preparing for battle.
This should be interesting.
The holo display on his desk displayed a detailed view of the Carina Arm of the galaxy. The major powerhouse systems were marked in blue, green, and amber. Several notable trade hubs were purple. Valdek, Sparat, and a distressing number of other nearby systems were blood red.
Another dozen bright orange points were scattered across the galactic arm. Some were pinpoints, others were hazy globes of probability zones, some nearly ten light-years across.
“We have actual coordinates for seven cells,” Rehenek said. “At least, we know the systems they are reportedly based out of. The pegeth extracted the information by spying on the Unity cell’s communications and tracing the trajectories of their courier missiles. The others are extrapolations.” He rubbed his jaw. Scalas could understand the frustration there
.
In truth, they were all extrapolations. While what they had seen of the Galactic Unity’s operations had been rather blunt-force in nature, he doubted that the operatives working far from their homeworld would be so amateurish to allow even the nosy pegeth crimelord to find concrete coordinates for their adjacent units. He fully expected that the pegeth had embellished the extent of her knowledge as much as she thought she could get away with.
And finding a single ship’s worth of spies and special operations soldiers in a ten-light-year bubble was going to be next to impossible.
“It will be a long campaign,” he said into the lingering silence.
Rehenek looked up at him. “And it is one that we cannot complete,” he said bitterly. “Not with the Alliance forces as small as they are.”
“Is this your only strike force?” Maruks asked, frowning.
“Damned near,” Rehenek replied. “There are more ships coming in from Vukh-Rutii, Fortunia, the Dahuan Combine, and several other worlds, but in little more than a trickle. And the ships and men that I do have are on a probationary basis. Even a few of these are here with us without the permission of their governments. Many of the leaders I’ve spoken to are downright skeptical of the magnitude of the threat, even after the recordings I’ve showed them. Others are less than convinced that I’m suited to lead the Alliance. You should have seen the arguments between the First of Kabora and the Prime Minister of the Combine.”
“Then we approach it as we do any other lengthy campaign,” Maruks said matter-of-factly. “One step at a time.” He studied the plot. “I would suggest we start with the Entirol system. It’s the closest to Ktatra, allowing some consolidation, and it’s one of the more precisely located targets.”
But Rehenek put his hands on the table and bowed his head. If they hadn’t been in zero gravity, he would have been leaning heavily. As it was, he was simply still, until he shook his head.
“It won’t be enough,” he said. “The Alliance I’ve built is hanging together by a thread. Let most of the worlds see that plot, and they’ll withdraw their forces to deal with their own local cell. Why commit to a long campaign to help other systems far away, when they have a local threat trying to stir up war in their own backyard?” He clenched his fist. “Vakolo will get exactly what he wanted. The entire Carina Arm, divided, distracted, worried about their own minor brushfires, right up until the time when his vrykolok descend out of the skies.”