Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  “Casualty report?” he asked brusquely, not wanting to give in to the premature elation of a skirmish won.

  “Minor damage,” Kurtz told him. “This was a bunch of scrubs,” he added, echoing Logan’s earlier judgement. “They never expected a real attack here, the smug, overconfident shitheads.”

  “They only have so many troops,” Logan reminded him, “and they have them spread out way too thin. Bohardt,” he called. “What’s your situation?”

  He could see the man’s IFF transponder, knew he was in the hangar, but the smoke and dust clouds from the mech battle blocked his view of the building.

  “There were a few dismounts,” the mercenary captain replied, “but we cleared them out pretty quick.” He paused and Logan thought he could hear the grin in his voice. “It’s everything we thought it would be. You might want to come take a look yourself.”

  “Roger that.” He switched frequencies back to Kurtz. “Val, set up a defensive perimeter around the drop-ship, get Captain Grant and his Rangers out here to pull security, and send in the pilots and crews. I’m going to go see what all the fuss is about.”

  He took the Vindicator through the drifting smoke and past the unadorned concrete-block bunkhouses where the base personnel made their barracks. Heads popped out of the side doors, tiny figures carrying rifles. He swiveled his torso to the left and cut loose with the machine guns mounted in a niche of his chest armor, spraying the side of the barracks with 6mm rounds. Chips of concrete block fragmented and sprayed shrapnel and the heads and the rifles ducked back inside. He hoped they stayed there. Starkad was the enemy, but he didn’t want a massacre.

  The hangar lay beyond two featureless warehouses, each a good twenty meters high and probably two hundred meters on a side, and the hangar was at least as big as either of them. Behind it stood a beautiful sight, squatting in bulbous, utilitarian ugliness on the broad, unpaved landing field behind the hangar: half a dozen Starkad drop-ships, just waiting for flight crews to come and fire them up. It would take Starkad military activation codes, but luckily, Mira and Acosta had provided them, and they’d brought the pilots along with them from Revelation.

  Bohardt’s two platoons of mecha were spread around the front of the hangar, its broad doors gaping open now, though he imagined they could be shut tight against Farsund’s savage winters. A Reaper and a Golem moved aside to give his Vindicator space to pass and he stepped up behind Bohardt’s Valiant. The man had his canopy open and was leaning out onto the edge, staring as if he had to see with his own eyes to believe what was in front of him.

  Row upon row of mecha were lined up in the hangar, a full battalion worth of them. Arbalest missile carriers, Scorpion and Nomad strike mecha, Valiant and Agamemnon assault mecha and Peregrine scouts. It wasn’t quite the arsenal Logan had seen on Terminus, but these were far more useful since they didn’t need antimatter to power them.

  “Mithra’s bloody horns,” Logan murmured. “I don’t know if we have the space for all of them on the ship.”

  He hadn’t realized he still had the general frequency open, not until he heard the reply from Katy.

  “Well, then, Colonel Slaughter, sir,” she said, her tone light and teasing, “I think I have some good news for you. The Shakak just sent me a message to relay to you. You know those two destroyers we saw sitting in the repair docks in orbit? Well, Lyta just told us she checked them out on the other shuttle and one of them is just about fully operational and we can definitely sail it out of here.”

  He very nearly didn’t reply, the gears in his brain already turning. Getting the destroyer back would be a challenge. They couldn’t go through the more settled Starkad systems, but taking a Starkad destroyer through Modi space would take some bribes…

  “Tell Kammy to get a flight crew over to the destroyer,” he said. “The access codes Mira gave us should work on the ship, too. We can send at least two of the drop-ships to dock with it.”

  Below him, he saw the Ranger squad escorting in two dozen mech-jocks, his own people and the mercenaries, enough to load up a full company of the Starkad mecha at a time.

  “Holy shit, boss,” Bohardt said, a tinge of wonder in his voice. “This is really gonna work, isn’t it?”

  He grinned at the obvious disbelief on the man’s face, visible clearly as he leaned out of his canopy, helmet off.

  “David, we’re Wholesale Slaughter,” he told the man. “This is what we do.”

  13

  They’re looking better,” Kurtz said a bit grudgingly. “Maybe having the new machines is making them think more about what the hell they’re doing with them.”

  Logan tapped his fingers on the desk, watching the recording of the tactical exercise with half his attention while the rest shifted platoons and companies and wondered if he could get away with deploying mech-jocks from one mercenary unit into one of the others without everyone screaming their head off.

  “Look there, though,” Hernandez said, scowling as she pointed at the two-meter wide screen they’d set up in the Security center, which Logan had taken over to use as his operations headquarters. The display was currently divided into multiple sections and Hernandez was indicating the view stretching from the mouth of the Run to the first curve, where three of the four mecha in the picture were within about thirty meters of each other. “Third Platoon of Bulwark Universal is still sloppy as shit with their interval.”

  “Yeah,” Logan agreed. “I’ve been thinking about splitting them between Bohardt’s platoons and replacing them, if I can get everyone to agree. They need better leadership.”

  “You’re the boss, boss,” Kurtz reminded him. “They all agreed to that and they’ll do what you tell them.”

  Logan grinned at Kurtz’s naïve faith but said nothing. Lyta wasn’t so reserved about it, but then, she never was.

  “He’s the boss,” she told Kurtz, snorting derisively, “but he’s also smart enough to know that just because you can get away with ordering your people to do something doesn’t mean they’ll understand your reasons or believe in them.” She leaned back against the wall behind what had once been the desk of the town constable. “You can get away with that shit in a battle, when everyone is worried about living through the next minute and most of them want someone to tell them what to do. But when you give boys and girls time to think, time to complain to each other and stew in their juices, well…”

  “We’re not a Spartan line unit here, Val,” he told Kurtz, trying to be gentle about it. The man was the most loyal officer he had. “Right now, we can’t just ship a problem soldier out to some unit in a backwater outpost and forget about them. We need every man and woman who can pilot a mech out there fighting for us.”

  Kurtz rubbed at his eyes, suddenly looking exhausted.

  “I know you’re right,” he admitted. “It’s just not what I’m used to.” He gave a sideways glance at Logan. “Okay, since we’re being all open and sensitive and shit, and explaining everything to the troops, maybe you can explain something to me. We’re training all these guys pretty damn hard these last few weeks, but who are we training them to fight?”

  Logan frowned in confusion and Kurtz raised a hand to forestall his objections. “I mean, it’s all well and good to raid some convenient Starkad base for weapons, but Rhianna Hale is just tightening her grip on Sparta while we sit here training. What’s our objective here? Are we fighting Starkad or are we fighting Hale?”

  “The real enemy is Starkad,” Lyta declared before Logan could answer. “This whole coup was their doing, especially that new intelligence chief Laurent, and I’m all for making them pay for it.”

  “Speaking of intelligence,” Hernandez said, hiding a yawn behind her hand, “wasn’t that weird chick supposed to be briefing us tonight?”

  Logan had to tighten his jaws against his own yawn. The damn things were always contagious. They’d been working sixteen-hour days for so long, he couldn’t even remember a time when he’d gotten to sleep before midnight.
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  “Katy’s bringing her down from the Shakak,” he said. “She had to make a covert run back to Gateway station.”

  “I’m not comfortable loaning out our most advanced weapon to her,” Lyta said with an expression like she’d just bitten into something sour.

  “We wouldn’t have most of our weapons without intelligence she provided,” Logan reminded her. “Sometimes, you just have to trust.”

  “General Constantine never was big on trust.”

  The door from the outside wasn’t locked, and Katy didn’t bother knocking, just pushed through, emerging from the outer darkness looking maddeningly fresh compared to the rest of them.

  She got to sleep between jump-gates.

  “Welcome back,” he told her, offering a genuine smile despite his exhaustion. “How was the trip?”

  “Boring, thankfully,” she said, kissing him briefly but without embarrassment. There’d been a time when they had both been too sensitive about discipline and the idea of fraternization between officers to even hold hands in public. “The fake registration we copied from Bulwark Universal’s freighter worked like a charm.”

  “How about you, Mira?” Logan asked the woman. She’d stepped in behind Katy, silent and enigmatic as always, closing the door behind her before she said a word. “Was the trip worth it?”

  “You tell me,” she replied. She sat in the vacant chair beside the desk, folding her hands in front of her like a poker player who’d just been dealt a royal flush. “I was able to call in a favor with a woman of my acquaintance who is an operative for Clan Modi. She has sources within Starkad Intelligence, and she is fairly certain she’s discovered where they are holding General Constantine.”

  “He’s alive?” Logan asked, gaping at her in disbelief. “Why the hell would they keep him alive?”

  He winced, not realizing how it had sounded until after he’d said it. But Lyta was nodding.

  “That’s a damned good question,” she said. “He’s incredibly dangerous and they have to know that. But they also know he’s carrying a lot of secrets around in his head that aren’t recorded on any database, secrets too dangerous to write down. This Colonel Laurent might consider them valuable enough to keep him alive.” She nodded to Mira. “Is he on Stavanger? The dungeons under the palace?”

  “No. According to my source, it was considered too dangerous to keep him anywhere he might have contacts, unknown allies.”

  “Does it even matter by now?” Kurtz wondered. “It’s been months now. No one could hold out that long under chemical interrogation and all the other high-tech shit Starkad has. He’s probably told them everything.”

  “Nicolai Constantine has been Sparta’s chief of intelligence for twenty years,” Lyta said, glaring at him balefully. “You don’t think he has conditioned barriers in place to prevent that? No, he’ll die before he reveals anything.” The wince was just a barely perceptible flicker around her eyes, one Logan was sure no one else would have noticed. “The question is, where is he being held, and can we get him out before it comes to that?”

  “I can only answer the first part of that,” Mira said. “Do you have a star map of the Starkad Supremacy in there?” She nodded toward the main display screen.

  Logan began scrolling through the control screens for the office’s systems, upgraded by Franny to include all the data from the Shakak.

  “Where’s Terrin?” he asked Katy as he pulled up the correct map for Mira. “Still on the ship?”

  “Sleeping, I guess,” Katy said. She chuckled. “Or well, whatever. He went back to that loft he and Franny are renting above the spice shop. He was dead tired, but he hasn’t seen her more than a couple days in the last two months, so…”

  “Shouldn’t Acosta be here for this?” Hernandez wondered, glancing around as if she expected the man to come through the door, sensing someone was having an important conversation and he hadn’t been invited.

  “Your intelligence agent already knows,” Mira said. “I told him along the way.”

  “He’s still on the Shakak,” Katy supplied. “There were some modifications to the ID codes he wanted made to the captured destroyer.”

  “Here it is,” he said, casting the map to the big screen.

  Starkad was a jagged, misshapen thing, huge and jutting into everyone else’s territory, a reflection in hyperspatial dynamics of the way they’d dealt with their neighbors over the centuries. The Dominions had all coped with the chaos of the Empire’s fall, the Jeuta incursions and the Reconstruction Wars in their own way. Sparta had tried to make up for in strength what they lacked in size, building up their defenses, tried to make themselves so fortified that no one would dare to attack them. Mbeki had emulated the empire, expanding quickly while the taking was good, before things had solidified. They’d made themselves large and decentralized, not leaving a central hub where an enemy could strike and decapitate their government or military. Shang had made it their business to know everyone else’s business, to keep track of every nuance of Dominion politics and use it to their advantage in trade and foreign policy, made their economic connections indispensable, made it too costly to disrupt. Modi had clambered desperately for any handhold to let them stay independent, had tried to ally themselves with anyone who would have them to keep from being swallowed up.

  Starkad had reacted to the chaos by lashing out, by challenging everyone around them. They’d overreached, been driven back time and again, yet never overthrown. Logan remembered one of his military history professors at the Academy saying that Starkad figured as long as they were pushing outward, no one would have the time or energy to push back. And maybe they were right.

  Mira reached out to the control pad with a questioning look and he nodded for her to go ahead. She magnified one of the Starkad systems near the border with Mbeki, nearly as far from Sparta as possible and still remain in the Supremacy. It was a G-class star with no recorded name, just a string of letters and numbers floating in space beside it on the map and four planets orbiting it. She spread her fingers across the control pad and the rocky iceball at the edge of the system disappeared off the corner. The gas giant and its captured-asteroid moons drifted off after it, then the asteroid belt, while on the other side of the picture the star itself faded with its charred and brittle close companion. When her fingers left the pad, the picture was zoomed into the second planet out from the star, twisting, braided clouds rolling over what seemed like a solid ocean blue, twin moons orbiting it in a complex pattern.

  “This used to be an Imperial colony,” Mira explained. “It’s mostly water, with just a few archipelagos, but it was naturally habitable and didn’t require a terraforming investment, so they made an attempt to settle. It failed. The twin moons cause erratic weather patterns and periodic flooding that inundates all but one small section of one island, so it wasn’t economically viable, and they couldn’t find any colonists who wanted to live there. They left a military outpost, but it was abandoned when troops began to be recalled during the collapse.”

  She sneered.

  “Starkad found it and built a prison. Historically, it’s been used for political rivals of whichever house has been in power, but currently, it has only one guest. General Nicolai Constantine.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Lyta said, almost under her breath. She offered Mira a rueful grin. “I take back everything I ever said about you.”

  Logan was still leaning across the desk, staring at the star map, barely listening to their exchange.

  “That’s a damned long way across Starkad territory,” he said, half to himself.

  “The Shakak can make it,” Katy assured him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “They can’t catch her. Half the time they can’t even see her.”

  “It’s not as if we have any choice here, Logan,” Lyta pointed out. “Leaving aside the possibility that this Laurent woman might actually crack General Constantine, the fact is, we need him. Mira has provided some very useful intelligence so far, but Constant
ine knows where the bodies are buried, knows who buried them. He could make the difference between winning this thing and losing it.”

  “This won’t be like Farsund,” he warned, grim certainty weighing him down like a sandbag across his shoulders. “This isn’t some isolated supply depot. This is a prison, and if Constantine is there, he’s going to have high-ranking Supremacy Intelligence officers interrogating him. Which means at least one cruiser, assault shuttles, Marines, maybe a company of first-line mecha.”

  “I’m afraid my stock military access codes won’t break into their security systems, either,” Mira admitted. “This will be strictly a Supremacy Intelligence operation with constantly changing random computer codes.”

  “We’ll need Franny,” Logan decided. He ran a hand through his hair. It was getting long again. Should I cut it or let it grow, keep cultivating the rogue, outlaw image with the mercs?

  “We’re doing it,” he added, almost an afterthought. As if there’d really been any doubt. “Despite the fact they might be expecting us to. You were right, Val,” he told Kurtz. “We need an objective, but we need one that’s more about winning this war than getting revenge. We have weapons, we have troops. Now we need connections.” He let his eyes travel across theirs. “You saw what happened when we tried to get aid from Shang with no friends to smooth the way. They considered us an opportunity, nothing more. With Constantine, we have connections.”

  “You’re the boss, boss,” Kurtz repeated his earlier statement, though with less conviction.

  “There’s no names on any of the planets or the star,” Hernandez said, tracing a line around the world with her finger on the screen. “Just numbers. Don’t they have names?”

  “Not official ones,” Mira said. “I’m told among the locals, the star was known as Leucothea and the planet was named Nereus. But the island where the blacksite prison was built has an official name, both in the Imperial records and in the Starkad military maps.” She pointed to the one dot of black in the sea of blue.