by Rick Partlow
“It’s called Maelstrom Strand.”
How long has it been?
Nicolai Constantine rocked back and forth, arms clasped around his legs, pulling them closer to his chest, trying to conserve warmth. It didn’t seem to help. He couldn’t stop shivering. He kept hoping he’d succumb to hypothermia and slip away in the night, quietly, painlessly, but they wouldn’t let him. They had to be monitoring him, checking his core temperature. Whenever it dropped below a certain threshold, he’d feel a warmth from beneath what looked like stone floor. There were heating coils beneath the floor, medical sensors built into the walls, security monitors concealed somewhere he couldn’t see. The cell wasn’t what it seemed. Nothing here was. The appearance was medieval dungeon, but that was just a mind game.
Unfortunately, it was a very well-designed, very effective mind game, one he was losing.
He was scared, terrified every waking moment. And every moment was waking. He hadn’t slept in days.
How long has it been? How long since I slept?
He’d fool himself into thinking he’d nodded off without realizing it, but he knew it wasn’t true. They were keeping him awake somehow, keeping him scared and confused, trying to break him down.
Subsonics, maybe. It’s what I’d use.
“You deserve this, Nicolai.”
He blinked, raising his head, trying to open his eyes against the salt and rheum built up in them. It was her again. She seemed so real, as beautiful, bold, and brave as she’d been over twenty years ago, her long, auburn hair flowing down across her shoulders, her eyes green and piercing.
“Maggie,” he tried to shout the name, but it came out as a whisper through cracked and bleeding lips. “You can’t be here.”
“Why?” she asked, a scorn to her tone she’d never had when she’d been alive. “Because it’s too dangerous? You already let me die once.”
A spear of pain stabbed through his chest, as surely as if Maggie Conner had thrust the blade into him herself.
“I couldn’t be there,” he insisted, the protests sounding weak in his own ears. “I had orders to secure the armory at Laconia!”
“Orders from my husband?” She cocked an eyebrow at him, skeptical, accusing. “Do you think he knew, Nicolai? Do you think that’s why he sent you away instead of keeping you at the palace to protect me?”
“No.” Constantine shook his head. It was a violent motion, so harsh and abrupt it rattled his teeth. “No, Jaimie couldn’t have known. I never told anyone…and we were never alone again. It was just the one time…”
“You said you loved me, Nicolai. But you let me die. You let them kill me when you could have been there to save me.” Her perfect lips twisted in a snarl. “You deserve this. You deserve to be punished. You should die here alone, forgotten, despised.”
“I’ve tried to protect your sons,” he pleaded with her. “I’ve done the best I can.”
“You’ve failed them too.” Her words were as cold as the storm-wind off the ocean, as cold as the slick dampness of the floor. “You let everyone you love die.”
Constantine wept, praying to whatever gods might be listening to let him die and knowing they would never be so merciful.
“I don’t know how much longer he can take this, physically.”
The man was short and soft, and Laurent would have called him despicable if she were indulgent enough to allow her personal feelings to interfere with her job. He was technically a doctor, but “interrogation specialist” was probably a better description of his field of expertise.
“It’s your job to make sure he lasts as long as is necessary, Dr. Whitmore,” Laurent told him. She didn’t meet his disapproving glare, simply stared at the monitors, watching Nicolai Constantine slowly crack to pieces in front of her in infrared and thermal. “We’re dealing with an exceptional mind and we’ll have to bring it right up to the edge to get what we need from it.”
“I must say, I still don’t understand what he could tell you that you couldn’t just get from the files Hale seized on Sparta.”
“Nicolai Constantine is legendary for his personal approach to spying,” she told him. Her predecessors in this job wouldn’t have bothered to explain their actions to underlings and functionaries, but she was of the opinion that people could do their jobs more efficiently if they knew the why as well as the what. “He has connections, contacts…friends he calls them, from Modi to Shang. People who’d be executed if any official record of contact with him existed. Exposing them could cripple entire governments. The threat of exposure could put them under our control.” She traced a line down the monitor with a fingertip, wondering how long she could have endured the privation, the subsonics, the cold. “The end goal of this is to reunite the Empire, Doctor. With as little violence as possible.”
She was telling him, but she knew she was trying to convince herself.
It wasn’t working.
“Are you worried about the heir?”
Laurent glanced up sharply at the question. It wasn’t pertinent to the task or Whitmore’s part in it. Just blatant curiosity and she was tempted to tell him it wasn’t his place. She didn’t. It helped, sometimes, to talk through her own thought processes and he was someone she was fairly sure wouldn’t be able to use it against her.
“Logan Brannigan,” Whitmore clarified, as if she might have thought he meant the scientist, Terrin.
“He’s resourceful,” she conceded. “Almost recklessly brave. But he has at most one real warship and no more than a company of mecha. He’s an annoyance, nothing more. I know where he is and, more importantly, he doesn’t know I know. Once I’ve dealt with General Constantine, once you’ve wrung everything useful from him, we’ll take care of the young Brannigan.” She sighed with honest regret. “It’s a shame. There are so few good men out there and we’re going to have to kill so many of them.”
14
I still don’t understand why we had to come on the destroyer,” Corporal Glover said, tapping his gloved fist against the hard, plastic arm of the narrow acceleration couch.
Lyta glared at the enlisted man and he stopped the tapping. There were too many of them squeezed into too small a compartment, hanging in seats oriented the wrong way for the sense of down the ship’s thrust was giving them, and her nerves were as frayed as any of them.
“Because,” Francesca Hayden said, more patiently than Lyta would have, “the Shakak propels itself by expanding and contracting spacetime. It doesn’t actually accelerate. The freighter is accelerating at one gravity. If we launched from the Shakak in this transfer pod, we wouldn’t be able to match velocities with the freighter because we’d be motionless in space relative to it. We had to launch from a ship accelerating at the same rate.”
“Shit’s complicated,” Glover lamented. “And it took forever to get out here.”
He was right about that, at least. Even pushing it and accelerating between gates at a punishing three gravities, the trip to the intercept had taken nearly two weeks, days of it spent sweating whether their cover registry would be accepted by Starkad traffic control. She’d made the argument during the planning session back on Revelation, suggesting they could use the fusion thruster they’d installed on the Shakak for maskirovka, to conceal her true nature from casual observers. Kammy had explained they couldn’t carry enough fuel for the drive to actually match velocities for the freighter. And this was her plan, so…
“Launching in ten. A woman’s voice came over the transfer pod’s speakers, sounding distant and tinny. She nearly wouldn’t have recognized it as Commander Shelly Nance’s. That’s Captain Nance now. Master of the newly-christened Wholesale Slaughter destroyer Avenger. “Five, four, three, two, good luck Rangers. Launching.”
Quick-burnout, solid-fuel boosters roared in feral rage and suddenly, what had been “back” was now “down.” She couldn’t see out of the pod because the pilot’s station had been removed to modify it to carry a platoon of Rangers and a technical crew, including F
ranny. Its flight was completely automated, which made Lyta nervous as hell. She didn’t trust computers. Which was funny, since the uncrewed freighter they were about to board was run entirely by computers.
“You’re right on course,” Nance announced. “You should be docking with the freighter in thirty seconds.”
That was dangerously close in astronautical terms, especially for two ships accelerating under fusion drive in deep space, but it had been necessary. The whole mission was insanely dangerous, but absolutely necessary. Even if Logan and I are the only ones who understand that.
Terrin certainly hadn’t. The blow-out between him and Franny when he found out she was going to be going along with the platoon of Rangers in the infiltration team had been epic to behold. The highlights of it still reverberated in her head, echoing her own doubts.
“We are risking just about everything on this!” He’d yelled, throwing his hands up in the air, angrier with her and Logan than he was with Franny. “How the hell can it be worth it to send our only two ships that are worth a damn and all our senior leadership after just one man?”
She guessed they’d patched things up before they’d departed for their ships, Terrin for the Shakak and Franny to the Avenger. She hoped they had. This wasn’t a time to be holding grudges. Not against each other, anyway.
“Hold on,” Nance warned. “It’s going to be a rough docking.”
Metal struck metal like a gong sounding at the temple in Argos, and she jerked against her restraints, feeling as if she’d been ground under a giant boot. Breath gushed out of her explosively, and no sooner had she been tossed forward than she recoiled back into her seat, left without even the air in her lungs to grunt at the pain. It took her a moment to realize that “down” was now toward her feet, due to the way the pod was oriented to the freighter’s thrust.
“Mithra’s bloody horns!” Glover wheezed. “You can say that again!”
Franny was unstrapping already and Lyta envied her the resilience of youth, or perhaps it was the desperation of knowing how little time they actually had. The young CPO lunged for the pod’s airlock, unlatching it with strength Lyta wouldn’t have expected from someone so skinny, throwing it aside and heading straight for the security pad on the freighter’s inner lock.
Lyta pulled the quick-release on her harness, and stumbled to her feet, feeling a twinge of pain in her left knee from an old injury she’d aggravated during the docking. She felt as if she should be in as great of a hurry as Franny, but knew there was no good reason for it. The freighter had no crew Lyta needed to subdue, just a security system the techs would have to worm their way into and erase any sensor records of their boarding.
“Lyta, it’s me.” She heard Logan’s voice in the ear bud of her ‘link, relayed from the pod’s internal communications system. The Shakak had been shadowing the Avenger, guarding their backs in case this system wasn’t as deserted as they thought. “The Avenger is heading back to Revelation.” That was no surprise. The destroyer would have no excuse for showing up in the Leucothea system and wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the Shakak at any rate. “We’re falling back now. We’ll jump into Leucothea seventy-two hours after you and head straight for Nereus. Once we reach orbit, Starkad is going to detect us and go on alert, so you have to get Constantine secured by then.”
“Roger that,” she replied. “It’ll get done.”
“Lyta.” A different voice. Terrin’s. “I know Franny’s busy right now, so could you give her a message from me when you get a chance?”
She felt like snapping at him, something officious about how a mission was no time to be getting emotional. Then she remembered how badly she wished she could have said goodbye to Donner Osceola one last time.
“Sure, Terrin.”
“Just tell her…I’m sorry, and I love her.”
“I’m sure she already knows both of those,” Lyta said, bemused at the idea that little Terrin Brannigan, the precocious eight-year-old she’d met almost twenty years ago had, somewhere along the line, become a man. “But I’ll tell her anyway.”
“Good luck, ho’onani,” Kammy said, the last voice she’d hear before the Shakak went out of range. “See you on the other side.”
Watching Nicolai Constantine eat was making Ruth Laurent hungry. Her stomach growled but Dr. Whitmore pretended not to notice, so she didn’t bother to apologize. On the monitor, Constantine sat cross-legged in his cell, the plate in his lap, shoveling the food down as if he hadn’t eaten in days.
Which he hasn’t.
“How long of a break do you want to give him?” Whitmore asked her. “Medically, I would say he needs two nights of rest, minimum, before we start again. Anything less and he’ll go catatonic.”
“I might give him three,” she mused. “Make it nice and long and comfortable. Even give him a blanket, or a cot, make him think we’ve given up. Then start it over again, even worse. Revolutions happen in times of rising expectations, so my history instructors said, and so do interrogation breakthroughs. If he’s convinced himself it’s hopeless, that there’s only misery and death in his future, he’ll simply accept it. Giving him comfort makes him remember things can be better, if he cooperates.”
Whitmore eyed her carefully, as if trying to control his expression.
“I knew Colonel Kuryakin,” he said, “and Colonel Grieg, the men who came before you. When I heard of how quickly you ascended the ranks to get this job, I had concerns you might not be ready for it. That you might be too soft.”
“And now?” she wondered.
“Now, I think those men were amateurs.”
“Colonel Laurent, this is Captain Marshall in traffic control.” The voice came over the PA speakers in the control room’s ceiling. Laurent had left instructions for the staff here at the Strand to refrain from calling her on her ‘link unless it was an emergency, mostly because she disliked being tethered to it, unable to get away from the day-to-day minutiae. “You know the scheduled automated freight shipment that made orbit a couple hours ago, ma’am?”
“Yes,” she said, suppressing a sigh of frustration. Marshall was one of those officers who needed their hands held every five minutes. If their forces weren’t stretched so thin as it was, she would have had him replaced. “I am aware of the freighter. You reported on its arrival three times now, Captain Marshall.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the man went on hastily. “The thing is, though, they dropped a cargo shuttle a couple hours ago, once they hit orbit and it landed out by the north loading dock, like they all do, you know…”
“The point, Marshall,” she reminded him, grinding the words out.
“Yes, ma’am. Well, we sent out a crew to unload the shuttle about twenty minutes ago and you know how the crew chief usually sends up a lading report once they get inside, to make sure the shipment actually has everything it’s supposed to?’
Her eyes frosted over and she felt for her gun in its holster. Marshall couldn’t see it since the call was audio-only, but he must have sensed the silence was a bad thing, because he went on quickly.
“Well, that’s it, ma’am. The chief hasn’t sent the lading report and they’re not answering the comms down there. I tried to check in with the security monitors, but the security center says they’re just getting static.” She heard the shrug in his voice. “Lt. Scott in Security says they’ve had a lot of problems with moisture getting into the communications circuits and that he hasn’t detected any alarms. He says it’s probably nothing…”
“No, you were right to bring it to my attention,” she admitted reluctantly. He was only right because he was too damned stupid to do the correct thing on his own. “Send a security patrol to check it out. If it’s simply a bad circuit, they can call for a repair team.”
“Do you really think there is anything wrong?” Whitmore asked her, his tone striking her as curious, as if he’d welcome an interruption from the isolation and boredom of the Strand.
“Out here?” She shook h
er head. “But Colonel Kuryakin told me, always handle each situation the correct way and you’ll never be caught unaware when the unexpected occurs.”
“He was a smart man. How did he wind up getting killed?”
She regarded Whitmore sidelong, trying to determine if the question had been disrespectful. She needed him for now, so she decided it hadn’t been.
“Colonel Kuryakin forgot the most important rule of all,” Laurent said. “No matter how good you think you are, there’s always someone better. Or just luckier.”
Francesca Hayden tried not to look at the bodies. They were the enemy, of course, but they’d been simple loading dock workers, functionaries who never made a decision in their lives more crucial than which pallet to off-load first. It didn’t seem fair they had to die for the sins of men and women who would never set foot on a battlefield, never once get their hands dirty or put their lives at risk. It was the blood of the common soldier soaking into the cement of the loading dock floor, diluted by the puddles of rain blowing in through the open doors out to the landing pad.
Maybe rain, she corrected herself, maybe sea spray. You couldn’t get away from either of them in this place.
She shook the sight of the bodies and the smell of saltwater and salty blood out of her thoughts and kept searching through the facility’s database. The worm she and the other techs had developed from the freighter’s computer records had worked, but just getting into a system didn’t tell you how to use it or where to find the information you needed.
“Time, Hayden,” Lyta reminded her.
The Ranger colonel was anonymous under the hooded poncho she’d stolen off one of the bodies, her suppressed carbine held down by her side, out of sight as she watched the doors into the main building.
“Just another second, ma’am.”
George Easton looked up from the terminal he was tapping into with the worm module, his big eyes getting even bigger.