Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  “We liberated it from some pirates who’d raided a Spartan military cargo transport,” he admitted. “They’d taken the haul back to their base and wound up selling off most of it, but their captain kept this one for himself.” He snorted. “Not that he knew how to even use it. Couldn’t get past the military lock-out codes.”

  “But you could?” Logan asked, eyeing him sidelong.

  “Hey, we weren’t always mercs.” The man spread his hands. “Some of us were in the Spartan Mobile Armored Corps back in the day. Anyway, we had intended to return this to the Spartan military…until we heard what was happening on Sparta. That’s when I thought a mech like this would be better off with you.”

  Logan blinked at the statement, wondering if he’d heard the man right. The canopy had popped open and the pilot who’d walked the Vindicator down the ramp was climbing down the ladder rungs built into the side of the machine.

  “I…uhh…,” Logan stumbled over his words, glancing back and forth between the Vindicator and Bohardt. “I’m deeply grateful, Captain, and it couldn’t come at a better time, but why wouldn’t you just keep it for yourself?”

  “Honest and truthful, sir,” the mercenary said with a shrug, “if it were just Colonel Jonathan Slaughter I was dealing with, I definitely would. But since it’s Logan Brannigan, the rightful heir to the Guardianship of Sparta, it only seems right to give it to you.”

  He’d been stunned before, but now the overwhelmed feeling of gratitude was replaced by a gut-deep fear. They’d done everything they could to keep this operation off the radar, not springing the truth on any of the PMC’s they’d contacted until after they arrived. And he hadn’t had the chance to tell Bohardt yet. If anyone knew who he was and where he was…

  “Bohardt, how the hell did you know that?”

  He hadn’t meant the words to sound as harsh and accusatory as they did, particularly after the gesture of gifting him the Vindicator, but he had to know. Bohardt didn’t seem offended. Instead, he laughed, as if this was the reaction he’d expected.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured Logan, “your meet-up here is still a secret. But one of the reasons we took so long to get here was, we ran into someone who wanted a ride out here and it took a while to vet their credentials.”

  Logan had been too wrapped up in his conversation with the mercenary officer to notice the woman walking down the ramp behind the Vindicator until she was almost on top of them. She was an unassuming figure in dark, homespun robes and a hood half-covering her face, neither short nor tall, the sort of figure who could blend into a crowd. When she threw back the hood, the face it revealed was young, the dark brown hair pulled back into a simple bun over dark eyes.

  “Mira!” Logan’s mouth dropped open. Of all the people he might have expected to see, she had been close to the last. “What are you doing back here? The last time I saw you, you made it pretty clear you never wanted to see this place again.”

  Her mouth twisted in a wry smile so much older than the years of her appearance.

  “I have discovered over the last few years, Colonel Brannigan,” she said, her voice sounding somehow deeper and rougher than the last time he’d spoken with her, “that fate does not give a damn about what we want. I’m sure you’ve found the same thing as of late.”

  “How did you find out about me?” he asked her. “How many people know?”

  “It’s my job now to find things out. And in the process of my job, I’ve found some things you might like to know.”

  “Such as?” he invited, waving a hand in a prompting gesture.

  “I have been on spaceships and space stations for the last two years,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “What I have to tell you, I will say sitting at a real wood table on a comfortable chair, eating a steak not made from soy and drinking water not recycled from my own piss.”

  “You know the place better than me,” Logan said. “Lead on.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Terrin said, arms folded as he sat and watched Mira eat, “but who are you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Katy said, elbows on the table, hands encircling the beer she’d ordered. “You never did get to meet Mira.”

  Mira hadn’t stopped eating her steak, but she’d looked up at the mention of her name, taken a sip of water and then gone back to chewing.

  “Mira worked for Lana Kane,” Katy explained, pitching her voice to carry to all the people gathered at the longest table the largest restaurant in Revelation City had to offer. It was hand-polished wood and would have fetched a pretty penny even back on Sparta. She looked down the table at the gathered Ranger and mech officers and the mercenary commanders. “Kane was a facilitator on Trinity back when we passed through there looking for Terrin and Franny,” she explained, nodding to the two of them, seated next to each other.

  She didn’t have to explain what Trinity was. The space station was notorious as a meeting place for bandits, pirates, smugglers and mercenaries, and Momma Salvaggio had, until recently, provided a cheap workforce to the station from the younger adults of Revelation as a way for them to repay the debt they owed to her. Lana Kane had been one of those young adults, but she’d built herself a thriving business of her own as someone who brokered meetings, introductions and exchanges of information. She’d been entrusted with the data crystals from Terminus and then held them hostage as a way to get Logan to liberate Revelation from both Salvaggio and Starkad.

  “She died in the battle to retake this place,” Katy added quietly.

  Mira did stop eating at that pronouncement, not in surprise but in what might have been a pang of grief for her friend.

  “Mira led us here from Trinity when we were trying to find you,” Katy finished, speaking to Terrin and Franny this time.

  Acosta sat silently to her right, waiting with hands folded, ignoring the drink he’d ordered and glancing back at the waiters as if considering whether or not they should be chased out of here so they wouldn’t hear anything top secret. On her left, Logan sipped at his drink and waited patiently. She knew him well enough to know he was worried. He got quiet when he was worried and the first few hundred times she’d tried to get him to open up about it had convinced her to let him stew in his own juices for a while until it passed.

  She wasn’t sure this one was going to pass.

  “Now that we’re all caught up,” Logan finally said, once Mira’s steak was down to the T-bone, “let’s have it, Mira. Why did you come here and what did you want to tell us?”

  “I’ve been working on Gateway,” Mira said, wiping the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “Trying to set myself up with the same sort of business Ms. Kane had, but with a higher class of clientele.”

  Katy nodded understanding. Gateway was a larger, grander version of Trinity, a place for making deals and meeting clients, though the market there was grayer than it was black. Under-the-table arrangements were made on Gateway, but they more often involved corporations and politicians than they did pirates and mercenaries. Gateway was where they had gone to hire Donner Osceola and his starship, the original Shakak when all this had begun.

  “Ms. Kane had contacts, leverage,” Mira went on, “and I used those to establish myself. I began to do business with intelligence assets from Clan Modi and the Mbeki Imperium, passing information and payments back and forth between people who would rather not have been seen together. It was from one of my contacts in Mbeki that I discovered who you really are, Colonel Brannigan.”

  Katy frowned at that. People kept calling him Brannigan, assuming he had the same last name as his father, and it bothered her, though she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it bothered her because it didn’t seem to bother him. And maybe it was because she knew Logan Conner so well, but knew nothing of Logan Brannigan.

  “How did they know?” Logan asked her, his voice calm but his eyes intense. “Were you able to find that out?”

  “They learned it from agents in Starkad. Apparently, their new Intelligence chief, a woman named Laurent, kne
w your real identity and knew Wholesale Slaughter was a cover for a Spartan deep-cover operation.”

  “Did you say Laurent?” Lyta Randell asked, leaning forward in her chair, as if she might spring right out of it.

  “That’s the name I read in the files I stole,” Mira confirmed.

  “Shit.” Lyta sat back in her chair, eyes glazed over as if she were in shock, and Katy wanted to ask her what was wrong, but Mira was still talking.

  “So far,” she said, “I have received no indication any of them know about Revelation. That is, Starkad knows you were here once, but they don’t know you’ve returned or turned it into a base. They also don’t seem to be aware of your extended Wholesale Slaughter project, bringing in other mercenaries under your company banner.”

  “We haven’t exactly been keeping that a huge secret,” Katy said, frowning.

  “They’ve been preoccupied with other things, I’m sure,” Mira pointed out, arching an eyebrow. “As a matter of fact, their preoccupation is the reason I’m here.”

  “She found us on Gateway,” Bohardt explained around a mouthful of his own steak. The man could polish off a meal, Katy judged. “One of our guys was talking up Wholesale Slaughter, trying to drum up some recruiting for you, the way you said, and she collared me in a bar and told me we needed to keep our damn mouths shut.”

  “As I understand your situation from Captain Bohardt,” Mira said, “you have plenty of mech pilots and infantry, but you lack machines.”

  “It’s worse now,” Logan admitted, a spasm of pain flickering across his face so briefly she wasn’t sure anyone else could have caught it. Maybe Lyta and Terrin. “We had to abandon almost all our mecha on Sparta when…” He swallowed hard. “…when my father was killed. We have the four mecha that were on the Shakak being repaired at the time and now the Vindicator David picked up for me, and that’s it.”

  “And most of the machines our subcontractors brought with them,” Kurtz pointed out, a bit sourly, as if it were a sore spot for him, “are older and lighter.”

  “Starkad is heavily involved with the Spartan coup,” Mira said, steepling her fingers in front of her. “Not just with supplying and supporting Rhianna Hale’s forces, but also with keeping their forces deployed at the borders to avoid letting any rogue Spartan vessels escape. And their Intelligence network is spread as thin as their fleet, sniffing out opposition in the Spartan military and on colony worlds. It’s left them stretched thin, drawn troops away from key areas that are now vulnerable.”

  “Key areas like what?” Acosta asked, speaking for the first time since she’d begun. The Intelligence officer didn’t seem inclined to trust her. Katy wondered if he were right to be suspicious, wondered if she wasn’t so accepting because she wanted Mira to be a friend, because they so desperately needed one.

  “Have you ever heard of Farsund?” Mira asked, directing the question to Acosta.

  “I think so,” he said, nodding slowly as if trying to jog the memory into the front of his brain. “I think I read a report on it a couple years ago. Isn’t it an arms depot?”

  “Farsund is the planet,” she corrected him. “The arms depot is technically called Eitri Base. It’s the depot for Starkad’s frontier with Clan Modi, so it’s heavily stocked for the inevitable attempt to take back the Disputed Systems from Modi. Mecha, ammunition, weapons, spare parts, drop-ships. And it is currently guarded by one Supremacy Navy cruiser.”

  She smiled broadly and Katy found herself mirroring the expression.

  Logan sat back in his chair, arms folded, expression sober and thoughtful, ignoring the chatter and cross-talk among the others. Katy was silent, watching his reaction. She had her own thoughts, but she was waiting to see what he would do, if he was ready to take the next step. She wondered if she wanted him to. It was necessary, it was what was right for his people, for Sparta. But what was it going to do to Logan Conner? Would he even exist anymore?

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, finally, not raising his voice but cutting through the buzz of conversation just the same. “I brought you all together for a purpose. It was my government’s, as you know now, but it was also my own. For a long time, I have made it my own, personal mission to rid the Dominions of pirates and bandits and hijackers.” He reached out a hand and took hers, squeezing it tightly. It was, she knew, his own little way of letting her know he would never forget Ramman, that he knew she would never forget it, either. It was one of the reasons she loved him.

  “And I’m still committed to that goal. But for now, I have a greater responsibility, to my crew, to the nation and people of Sparta, and to the Five Dominions as a whole. We have to depose the traitor Rhianna Hale and reclaim the Guardianship, not because I want revenge for my father, although I do admit I burn to avenge his death. Not because I want the throne…” He shook his head, lip curling in distaste. “No. If I’m being frank with you, speaking soldier to soldier, I have no desire to rule. I’ve accomplished more in the last two years as a mercenary than I ever did as the son of a Guardian. Nor is it because I want a Brannigan on the throne, contrary to the propaganda Hale is spreading.”

  He stood, pacing back and forth along the line of the table, hands clasped behind him. “No, the reason Hale must be overthrown and Sparta retaken is that Starkad can’t be allowed to control Sparta, can’t be left unchecked. If they are, the entire Five Dominions is going to be thrown into a war that will destroy everything left of the Empire, destroy everything we’ve managed to rebuild since then.” He paused, running his eyes over the mercenary captains he’d invited to the meeting. Salvaggio, Bohardt, Chen, Russell, Franco and Solana. “Some of you may be wondering if this is what you signed up for, if we’re not in over our heads. Others may be thinking of the endgame, of the reward if you take down a Dominion, put a king in place. And there will be rewards for those who survive, trust me. But to do this, to pull it off…” He shook his head, laughing softly, without humor. “It’s going to take everything we have.

  “And the first thing it might take is our honor. We’ve spent the last two years fighting, hunting down, killing pirates and bandits and hijackers. But if we’re going to get the weapons and ships and supplies we need, pirates and bandits and hijackers are exactly what we’re going to have to become.” He let out a breath in a sigh of regret. “And may Mithra have mercy on us all.”

  11

  You know, you didn’t have to come, dude,” Kammy said quietly, giving him a sidelong glance from the captain’s station.

  Terrin Brannigan tried to swallow the frog in his throat and affect a smile, though he couldn’t take his eyes off the main screen and the countdown to the jump.

  “Is it that obvious?” he wondered. “I shouldn’t really be nervous after everything, right? I mean, it’s not the first space battle I’ve been in. Besides, if I’m not your engineering officer, who else you got who actually knows anything about how the drive works?”

  He wiped sweaty palms on the shirt of his Wholesale Slaughter utility fatigues. Theoretically, they all should have been wearing Spartan Navy uniforms, but they simply didn’t have enough and somehow, the Wholesale Slaughter gear seemed more appropriate to the task at hand. He’d gotten used to the crossed swords and laughing skull, as gaudy and cliched as it had seemed to him at first.

  “Don’t let Kammy scare you, kid,” Tara Gerard told him, sprawled casually at her station. He was fairly certain she enjoyed the artificial gravity more than any of them. It was hard to look intentionally casual in free fall. “We’re happy as hell to have you along. You’re like our good luck charm.”

  “It’s true,” Nance said from the communications console, though Terrin thought her tongue was planted firmly in her cheek. “We’ve never lost a space battle when you were along.”

  “Yeah, but you’re like, second in line to the throne behind your brother,” Kammy objected, forehead creasing as he seemed to be thinking about the mechanics of that. “That makes you like a spare heir, right? And since Jonatha
n…” He scowled. “Dammit. Since Logan is like, always on the front lines trying to get himself killed, shouldn’t we keep you someplace safe, just in case?”

  “Oh, sweet Mithra, you do not want me as a Guardian,” Terrin insisted, eyes going wide. “It took Starkad twenty years to figure out how to depose my father. I probably wouldn’t last five minutes.” He paused and took a breath, still feeling an emptiness inside his chest whenever he thought of his father’s death. “I’m a scientist, not a soldier or a politician. I don’t want to be anything more than a scientist, and as soon as all this is over, I’m going right back to just being a scientist.”

  “Ten seconds to jump,” Kammy announced, touching a button to transmit the announcement over the ship’s public address system. “Everyone to battle stations and prepare for immediate enemy action.”

  The jump made Terrin’s skin crawl. He knew it affected everyone differently and some it didn’t affect at all, like his brother. It gave him a feeling like he’d been stretched out too far and hadn’t quite rebounded back all the way, not something he could adequately explain in words. He didn’t have the time to think about it, since general quarters sounded with a nerve-jangling klaxon the second they were through.

  “Enemy vessel at L5 position between Farsund and its primary moon,” Tara reported immediately before Terrin could even make sense of the data on the main screen.

  “Full power to the drives,” Kammy said, his voice flat and businesslike, so unlike his normal cadence. He had really stepped into the captain’s role. “Helm, set an intercept course for the Starkad cruiser.”

  “Engaging,” Lt. Commander Bergh confirmed from the helm position. He was Spartan Navy, signed on after the battle at Terminus to take Kammy’s old position at the ship’s virtual wheel, while Tara had moved into the XO spot. Terrin hadn’t spent much time with the spare, soft-chinned man, but he seemed affable enough and competent at his job. “Acceleration analog of thirty-five gravities. Forty. Fifty. We’re at full output.”