by Rick Partlow
But they were out, thank Mithra, and being clear of the place gave her a surge of adrenalin, though she couldn’t know how far away would be far away enough. She shielded her eyes against airborne dust with a bladed palm and tried to see which direction would be the quickest descent back down into the canyon. She looked over to Grieg to see if he had a better idea of where exactly they were.
“Which way should we…”
The world shifted beneath her and suddenly she was flat on her stomach, the vibration coursing up through her body and into the air, her teeth clattering so hard she bit her tongue and tasted blood. She wanted to close her eyes but she had to see, had to know if death was coming this time, if she’d finally used up all of her luck. Fissures opened up further down the gentle slope, gaping black wounds in the rock, spewing geysers of dirt and sand and steam.
Below them, she knew, the treasures of the Empire, weapons and technology worth more than a planet, were being vaporized in nuclear fire or buried under mountains of rock. She felt the loss even as she still feared for her life, felt the opportunity slipping away. Sparta had slipped in under their noses, a thief in the night; and now, caught in the act, they were throwing it all on the fire rather than let their enemies have it.
She should have felt rage. It would have been the proper reaction as a loyal officer of the Supremacy. But a sense of loss weighed her down instead, at the waste of it all, of yet another remnant of the Empire slipping from their hands and leaving them all the less for it.
The quaking died away to a few tremulous aftershocks, fading in intensity with each second, and she carefully pushed herself back to her feet. Grieg was dusting off his uniform, all the anger and frustration she hadn’t succumbed to apparently drifting over to wash against his shores.
“Sir,” Captain Gerhardt said, coming up to a knee, a hand against the side of her helmet as if she could shut out the external sound and hear the radio more clearly, “it’s Lt. Gustaf. He reports there was a major landslide down in the Cut.” She hesitated. “He says the drop-ship is intact and flyable, but six of our mecha are damaged, two of them buried. We have two KIA and three wounded who should make it if we get them back to the Sleipner quickly.”
A longer pause and even though Lautner couldn’t see Gerhardt’s face, she was fairly certain the woman was scared to relay the next pronouncement.
“Gustaf also says he heard from the Sleipner and they weren’t able to intercept the enemy starship before she jumped. Captain Dennison is decelerating at maximum gees and should be heading back to Terminus orbit soon.”
Grieg didn’t answer the Marine officer, didn’t even look at her. With long, determined strides, he stepped over to the prisoner, still prone in the dirt while the Marines who’d been carrying him regained their footing and secured their weapons. Leaning down, Colonel Grieg grabbed the Spartan by the front of his tactical vest and yanked him to his feet, a hiss of expelled breath the only hint it had taken any effort at all.
“You think this is funny, Spartan?” he yelled into the soldier’s face. The Spartan was grinning tautly, through a mask of pain from the bruise already forming on his cheek where one of the Marines had slugged him during the struggle. “You think you outsmarted us?”
Grieg’s right fist flashed in a short, brutal jab, catching the enemy soldier square in the face with a flat, sickening smack. The Spartan toppled backwards, blood pouring from his nose, eyes glazed over, and Grieg let him fall then followed the punch with two vicious kicks to the ribs. Laurent jerked backwards with each kick, almost as if Grieg were striking her instead. The prisoner wheezed and coughed, features screwed up in agony, a river of red flowing across his cheeks from his smashed nose, but said nothing.
“Get him up,” Grieg snapped at the Marines. “Captain Gerhardt, tell Gustaf to have the mecha that are still mobile load immediately, then have him land here and pick us up. We’re a good forty-five-minute hike down the cliff from the landing zone and I don’t trust this one…” He indicated the prisoner by spitting in his general direction. “…not to try killing himself on the way down.”
Two of Gerhardt’s troops grabbed the enemy soldier and hauled him back to his feet. Grieg tensed as if he wanted to hit the man again and Laurent flinched in anticipation. Her superior controlled himself this time, visibly and with apparent difficulty.
“When I get you in the interrogation room on my ship,” Grieg told the prisoner, the words each filled with more violence than any kick to the ribs, “you’re going to wish you’d saved a bullet for yourself.”
4
“I wish every day could be like this,” Logan Conner mused, fingers tracing a line down Katy Margolis’ bare shoulder.
Nearly two weeks of sunshine had turned her skin to a soft brown and brought out the highlights in her hair. She’d let it grow longer and between the tan and the hair and the swimsuit, she might have passed as a native of these islands, the heir to the fortune of some interstellar shipping firm who passed her days sipping tropical drinks on a sailboat.
It was a fair assumption, given they were lying on the fore-deck of a sailboat, sipping tropical drinks. But the truth was, Katy had been born on one of the rougher colony worlds to a doctor and a priest of the Old Religion and had wound up as an assault shuttle pilot in the Spartan Navy. How she’d wound up with Logan was a much more convoluted story.
“If every day were like this,” she countered, draining the dregs of her drink from among the ice cubes, “we’d both get bored pretty damn quick.”
He shrugged, resting his head back against the towel and staring out at the sea stacks off Golden Beach, backlit by the setting sun, a ball of fire sinking into the sea. Two other sailboats were visible in the distance, rocking in the waves at the mouth of the inlet, sails down, anchored like them. Maybe diving for lobsters, or maybe just enjoying the sunset as the two of them were.
“I’d be willing to give it a shot,” he allowed.
“What?” She chuckled and the rich throatiness of the sound tickled at his stomach. “You’re going to give up being a mech-jock, give up being the son of a Guardian, groomed to be the next ruler of Sparta, to become a beach bum?”
“There’s no law that says the Council has to choose from among the family of the Guardian,” he reminded her. “They could just as easily pick one of their own to follow my father.”
“No rule,” she agreed, rolling over off the towel onto his chest and looking him in the eyes over the top of her sunglasses, “but a shitload of tradition.” The warmth and the slick softness of her skin pressed against his own threatened to break his concentration on what she was saying and he had to force himself to stay focussed.
“Let’s say you gave up on being Guardian,” she proposed, “what then? Could you sit back and watch someone else take over from your father after he retires or, God forbid, passes away?”
She crossed herself reflexively as she said it and he tried not to frown. He knew she’d been raised the Old Religion, what had been called Christianity back before the Empire had instituted Zoroastrianism as the state religion, but she’d been trying to convert when he met her. Since their experiences hunting for Terminus, though, she seemed to have begun falling back to the path of her youth. He didn’t know why it bothered him, but it did.
“What if it’s someone who’s unqualified?” she kept prodding. “What if you think you’d do better? Could you just stand by and watch them run all of the Guardianship of Sparta aground just so you could stay out of politics?”
“I don’t know.” He was honest with her because he was always honest with her. “All I ever wanted to be was a soldier, but sometimes I feel like I’ve done enough fighting for two lifetimes.”
“I heard someone say once that the average person only sees like fifteen seconds of real danger in their whole life,” Katy said. Her fingers teased at his chest hairs, a playful gesture but belied by the troubled expression passing over her face. “I think the two of us are making up for a planet-full
of cloistered librarians and priests.”
“So, let’s give it all up,” he said, raising his head off the towel.
The boat tossed back and forth fitfully on the gentle bobbing of the waves, but their eyes remained locked on each other. She pulled her sunglasses off and dropped them to the deck with a clatter of plastic, peering at him carefully, as if she were trying to make sure she wasn’t misunderstanding him.
“Let’s give it all up,” he repeated. The words fell off him like a weight, one he’d been carrying around for weeks. “I can ask for a training position here on Sparta.” He sucked in a deep breath, swallowed hard. “We could get married, start a family.”
“I love you, Logan,” she assured him, punctuating it with a quick kiss, leaning into him in time with the motion of the waves, then darting back out again, “but I don’t know if I’m ready for a family yet. I’m definitely not ready to give up being a pilot.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” he insisted, hands going to her shoulders, sliding down to her upper arms. “Maybe not go on any secret missions where you get shot down and almost killed…” He shrugged.
“So, you’d play stay-at-home Dad, working as a training officer here,” Katy summarized, cocking a skeptical eyebrow. “while I go gallivanting around on maneuvers as an assault shuttle pilot?”
“Sure!” He laughed. “I know my dad would spoil the hell out of any grandchildren he had.”
“Oh, God, Logan,” she sighed, resting her chin on his chest. Her hair tickled at his neck. “You would spring this on me after we’ve been spending most of the last two weeks out here in paradise, after you’ve plied me with strong drink and first-class food.”
“And great sex,” he reminded her, grinning with a bit of smugness he was happy to acknowledge.
“That goes without saying.” She made a “pshaw” sound. “I was here.”
“Ooh,” Logan made a checkmark in the air, acknowledging the damage. “That’s a low blow. Are you saying I wouldn’t be able to perform satisfactorily without your help? Do I need to provide references now?”
Katy glared at him, though the half-upturn at the corner of her mouth told him it wasn’t entirely serious. “Perhaps the moment when you’re trying to convince me to marry you and have children isn’t the right time to be mentioning all the other women you’ve slept with.”
“Hey!” He put his hands up, palm-out, defensively. “I never said there were that many.”
“I’m sure,” she said, skepticism rich in her voice. “Handsome, dashing, son of a king, mech-jock…you probably had all sorts of problems getting girls.”
“He’s not technically a king…” He trailed off, frowning at the far-off rumble of jet engines. “What’s that?” He sat up, bringing her up with him and scanned the sky, the blues already turning purple as the primary star sank deeper below the horizon.
“There.” Katy spotted it first, used to looking for aircraft.
It was a glint of reflected light coming in opposite the sunset, from the mainland, only a few hundred meters off the water.
“Well, that’s illegal as all hell,” Logan grumbled.
Of the many things he loved about Golden Beach, one was the lengths the island and the surrounding shoreline communities had gone to in order to preserve the isolation and beauty of the place. And chief among those was outlawing aircraft overflights. If you wanted to get to Golden Beach, you came by sea, either in your own boat or the hovercraft ferry from the mainland. No exceptions, other than emergencies...
A chill went down his back, and he was fairly sure it wasn’t from the onset of night.
“That’s a government bird,” Katy declared as it came even lower and slower, a silvery dart with military markings on the side.
Logan grabbed a t-shirt off the deck and slipped it on before getting to his feet to watch the approach. In a moment, Katy was beside him, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, slipping an arm around his waist and leaning into him. A light shudder ran through her shoulders and into his side and he knew she was feeling the same sense of dread he was.
The VTOL aircraft lowered itself on vectored-thrust nozzles, throwing up a spray of water as it skimmed the flat water of the inlet only a hundred meters away, settling down onto pontoons extending from struts on the lower fuselage. The jets sputtered again, slowly pushing the bird across the waves until it came to a gliding stop off the starboard bow of their sailboat. The hatch cracked open two meters to the rear of the cockpit, lowering a set of steps downward, and onto them emerged a short, dark-complexioned, round-faced man in the dress blacks of Spartan Military Intelligence.
“Acosta!” Katy exclaimed as if he were the last person on Earth she expected to see.
And perhaps he was. She—and Logan—had known the man as Lt. Francis Acosta, assigned as her co-pilot on the mission to find Terminus. They hadn’t discovered until they’d arrived on the lost Imperial base that he wasn’t actually Francis Acosta and he wasn’t even in the Navy. He was with Military Intelligence under General Nicolai Constantine, and…
“My name is Patrick Bray,” the man reminded Katy a bit truculently. “Major Bray, if you’re of a mind to observe military courtesies, Commander Margolis.” He shook his head as if realizing the pettiness of what he was saying. “Forget it. You two need to come with me immediately.”
“What’s wrong, Bray?” Logan demanded. He’d been promoted to Lt. Colonel himself—though secretly—so he didn’t feel bad about not being particularly deferential. “Why are you here?”
“Your father sent me. I’m afraid your vacation’s over. Wholesale Slaughter has another job.”
“Show me,” Logan said curtly. Katy’s eyes grew wide at his tone, but she didn’t say a word, shrinking into her chair. At least it was a comfortable chair, as well as antique and probably worth more than the whole house where she’d been born and raised. But what else would she expect from the Palace of the Guardian?
If General Nicolai Constantine noticed the insubordination in Logan’s voice, he gave no indication. He tapped a command into the control panel built into the hand-polished oak of the Situation Room’s ornate central table. Constantine was everything she’d imagined from the legends floating around him and the stories Logan had told her, a razor-sharp sword sheathed in an elegantly-tailored dress uniform, probably the most dangerous man in the whole Guardianship of Sparta if you counted up the men and women who’d died by his hand or at his command. And yet he was not nearly as intimidating as Logan’s father, the Guardian himself, Jaimie Brannigan.
He towered above her, above Logan, even above the slender height of General Constantine, and yet he still seemed stocky and massive across the chest and shoulders. He could have been a barbarian of ancient days, with a flowing mane of hair and a wild beard to go with it, but his red-blond hair was cut to nearly regulation length and his mustache and beard were neatly trimmed as befitted a former military officer and mech pilot. And if his uniform wasn’t exactly what he’d worn in the Spartan Guard, it was close enough to seem a natural fit.
Jaimie Brannigan stood at the rear of the room, arms folded, eyes fixed in a glare at General Constantine. She knew from what Logan had told her that the Guardian blamed Constantine for not aborting the mission to Terminus once he’d found out Terrin was on board the Shakak, and apparently, that anger had resurfaced once the news of the Starkad attack on the base had come in.
A star map appeared in the holographic display projected into a tank nearly the size of the far wall, an extravagance she hadn’t seen outside the theaters and museums in downtown Argos. Holo-tanks were damned expensive. The three-dimensional map rotated as Constantine traced a finger along a touch-pad and the view zoomed into a single system highlighted in red, down to the rocky, nearly-lifeless world orbiting the star. The word “Terminus” floated in space beside it, glowing green.
“This is what we know now. It was passed along to us by a system of undercover Military Intelligence relay ships set up in every system betwe
en here and Starkad. A ship receives the coded transmission, moves immediately to the jump-point, crosses through and transmits to the next ship, etc.… It still took days to get back to us, so bear in mind we are dealing with old intelligence here.”
“Just get on with it, Nicolai,” Jaimie Brannigan growled.
“The attack came without warning from any of our sources in Starkad, so we aren’t sure how they found out about Terminus, but they came with one of their newer heavy cruisers, possibly the Sleipner or the Tyr. Two of our three landers were able to make it to the escape ship in time, but the third was caught by one of their assault shuttles and destroyed on the ground…and Terrin was trapped.”
Katy could have cut the tension in the air with a butter knife and while she knew Logan’s father blamed Constantine, she also knew Logan was blaming himself for leaving Terrin on Terminus in the first place. She brushed the edge of his hand with hers, a reminder she was still there, and she thought she saw him let out part of the breath he’d been holding.
“We don’t know the details of what happened next. The Acrotiri received a single transmission, lasting just a few seconds, from a ship their sensors clocked at over half light-speed.”
“It’s a stardrive-powered ship,” Katy murmured, then blanched when Constantine glanced her way. Maybe Logan was used to dealing with the movers and shakers of the Guardianship, but she didn’t like being around this much polished brass.
“Indeed,” Constantine said with a nod. He touched another control and Terrin’s voice came over the room’s hidden speakers, as loud and clear as if he were standing beside her.
“This is Terrin. I’m on an experimental ship with limited fuel and I have the downloaded database from Terminus on data crystals with me. I’m heading to Trinity. Will be waiting there.”
“The Acrotiri received this less than ten seconds before they jumped,” Constantine added as a postscript.