by Terry Mixon
“There’s your fleet, you know,” the Phoenix said conversationally as icons populated the screen. “I figured you had a plan, clever tricks to try and even the odds. I wasn’t expecting you to show up on my ship.”
“Maybe you should have watched the security better.” Brad was watching the other man’s hand…and the desk. The desk held the hardware to activate the mutiny lockdown.
“Or maybe part of me knew you were coming,” Jack Mantruso said quietly. “A final chance. We’re all that’s left of our family—at least, until your wife gives birth.”
Brad stared at his brother in shock.
“Oh, I know about that,” the dictator told him. “I arranged for her to get the defective implant, Brad. I need an heir, but I’m sadly lacking in a partner these days. There are all sorts of games I could play, but, in all honesty, they all feel a bit too much like rape.”
He grimaced.
“I will be emperor of mankind,” he said flatly. “Many will call me evil. I can live with that…so long as I know that I am not.”
The line between directly raping someone or forcing them to bear a child and overriding someone’s contraceptive implant seemed fuzzy at best to Brad. It seemed pretty damn close to rape in his head, at least.
“Whereas you and Michelle, adorably happy and murderous, weren’t going to really mind if she ended up pregnant. Your child, my niece or nephew, would serve quite well as an heir.”
Mantruso shook his head.
“I really wish you’d convinced her to stay behind though,” he noted. “The order to spare Oath of Vengeance is probably going to get some of my people killed.” He shrugged again. “A sacrifice for the future. They may not understand, but their deaths will have meaning regardless.”
Anger rippled through Brad and he took a step closer to the desk. Despite his anger, he kept the blade between his feet.
He was expecting the perfect snap-to-deadly-aim reaction from the gun. It was a very large gun, he concluded, and the barrel looked like a gateway to hell.
“Last chance, Brad,” Jack Mantruso said very quietly. “A good chunk of that fleet out there will stand down if you order it. They’ll get to live if you do. If enough of them listen, well, quite possibly everybody gets to live. Isn’t that worth your pride? Your self-righteous honor?”
“I will never join you,” Brad told his brother. “How much blood is on your hands? How many innocents? Commissars and hostages and mass poisoning attempts…you are evil.”
“Everything I have done has been to purchase a better future for all mankind,” the older man said. “From the day I joined the Cadre as an adult, President Mills’s plan was already underway. That man was going to break the Commonwealth no matter what I did.
“Everything I did was to provide an alternative once that happened. Join me, Brad, and we can usher in a golden age. We can make all of this worth it.”
Brad’s brother was insane. Or self-deluded; he wasn’t sure which.
It didn’t matter.
“I think killing each other off appears to be the family tradition,” he told the Phoenix. “Why break it now?”
The emergency transmitter in his wrist-comp had a thousand intended uses. A jammer wasn’t one of them, but in a small space, sealed against electronic transmissions to guard the admiral’s security, it could serve.
Jack Mantruso’s eyepiece went mad, lights flickering across it that were visible to Brad as Mantruso dropped the gun to tear at it.
Brad kicked his mono-blade up off the floor and charged. The glowing blue blade activated as he leapt across the desk—and then bounced off another one as Mantruso grabbed the other weapon off the surface.
“Fine,” the Phoenix spat. “You killed our uncle, but you took him by surprise. I am not surprised, brother mine.”
Brad was surprised—when the Phoenix leapt over the desk with a sharp series of potentially deadly cuts. He parried each of them, years of practice and combat carrying him from defense to defense…but his brother was moving fast enough and skillfully enough to keep him on the defensive.
“Did you think Armand never taught me anything?” the older man asked as he drove Brad aback. “The Terror taught me everything: how to fight, how to lead, even how to torture. It took our treacherous other uncle thirty-six hours to die; did you know that?”
Brad snarled, focusing on staying alive.
“I only have one uncle,” he spat. “The man who saved me from becoming like you.”
Boris Mantruso might have arguably kidnapped Brad as a preteen, after his parents had been killed by the Mercenary Guild, but he’d seen Brad into a life where he wasn’t a criminal. A life where he got to choose who he got to be.
“You know, for most of those hours, you were all Armand wanted from Boris.”
Brad could tell that the other man was trying to distract him, to create a weakness in his defenses. He pinned the blades for a moment and then leapt backward, clearing a space to allow him to circle Jack Mantruso.
“I didn’t know I had a brother then, but Armand did,” the Phoenix told him as he circled in turn. They were just out of reach of each other; the office was large enough to let them dance out of the way of the careful testing swings both took.
The office was overkill in Brad’s opinion, but he supposed a battleship was a kilometer long.
“Thirty-six hours he tortured Boris to find out where you were, and Boris told him nothing.” Jack laughed.
“The funniest part is that if he’d just told Armand, it would have saved your life. We didn’t know who he’d kicked out of the spaceship. We’d have gone back for you if he’d told us! Sheer bloody Mantruso stubbornness almost killed you!”
“It also kept me alive,” Brad replied, testing his brother’s defenses while he stepped on his anger. “Through everything you and the Terror threw at me.”
He pressed in, pushing his own attack as Jack chose not to retreat. For a few moments, he pushed his brother back, blue blades glittering in the light of the office, but only for a few moments.
Then the Phoenix twisted the blades through a deadly riposte Brad couldn’t block. He dodged backward, reducing what could have been a deadly blow to a glancing strike that peeled away a layer of his body armor.
They’d both be in trouble if Immortal took a bad hit and lost atmosphere now, but that didn’t slow the older Mantruso. He turned the riposte into a series of strikes, and the balance shifted against Brad again.
This was nuts. Brad had trained with the mono-blade every day for years. He was an unquestioned blademaster with few equals—but his brother, who’d spent most of his life as a politician, was pushing him back.
Then the ship shivered underneath them, the big fifty-centimeter guns firing for the first time, and everything changed. Bloodily earned battle experience kept Brad on his feet through the tremors…but Jack Mantruso didn’t have that experience.
The other man was probably the best-trained blademaster Brad had ever faced, but he didn’t have the battle experience and the trail of dead bodies Brad and his mono-blade had left behind them.
Brad took advantage of the moment, driving inside the older Mantruso’s defenses. The Phoenix reeled, unable to regain his footing, struggling to defend himself.
And then a strike slipped past the older man’s defense. Jack was twenty years older than Brad, into his fifties, and age cost him a moment of balance, a moment of speed that changed everything.
The glowing blue blade went flying away—only active because Jack Mantruso’s hand was still attached to it.
“No!” Jack Mantruso shouted as he scrabbled backwards. “I’m your brother.”
“No. You’re the bastard who tried to poison two worlds,” Brad said calmly. “And it ends now.”
He didn’t even register that the Phoenix was grabbing the gun from the table as he struck. The weapon didn’t matter, would never matter…as Brad’s final strike removed Jack Mantruso’s head.
Chapter Forty-Two
The screen the Phoenix had pulled up told him the state of the battle. Bailey had concentrated all of her heavy ships on one side of her formation—the side away from Immortal. Javelin drones were diving into the chaos around the battleship, hammering torpedoes into the escorts even as the Commonwealth cruisers smashed their way through the OWA’s weaker flank.
It was a clever plan and might even be enough to balance the odds. If Bailey crushed the OWA’s cruisers and most of the lighter ships before she had to directly engage Immortal, she’d have a chance.
It was up to Brad, however, to make sure that wasn’t needed.
He crossed to the desk and found the concealed button he’d been told to look for. A part of the apparently wood surface popped up and slid aside, revealing a standard palm and DNA scanner.
Instead of putting his hand on it, however, he put his wrist-comp on it. A wireless override program provided by the Agency woke up, linking into the system.
A few seconds later, text popped up on his screen.
Palm scan overridden. DNA scan variability increased. DNA scan required.
The moment of truth…and Brad placed his hand on the scanner. There was a tiny pinprick of pain as it took its blood sample, and he held his breath.
The light above the panel flashed from amber to blood red. For a cold moment, Brad thought everything had failed.
Then he realized the vibration of the ship had stopped. Immortal’s engines had shut down. He checked the main screen displaying the battle and swallowed a cheer.
Immortal was dead in the water, the rest of her fleet leaving her behind as she stopped accelerating. Stopped firing. Stopped dodging.
The override had worked.
The panicked reaction was clear in the fleet around her. Escorts reversed their courses, attempting to match the velocity Immortal had frozen at. Long-range torpedo fire tore through them, but Brad saw that someone on his side was paying attention.
The Javelins were now tearing into the escorts. None of their torpedoes or mass-driver fire was being directed at Immortal.
A communicator icon beeped. Brad ignored it, watching as the battle unfolded. The communicator chimed again—and then someone overrode it.
“What in Everdark are you doing?” a panicked voice demanded. “Lord Protector, the ship is telling me you’ve shut us down. We’re going to lose the battle if Immortal doesn’t engage. Everlit, we still have boarders aboard.”
Brad considered things for a few seconds—seconds in which he watched a pair of OWA destroyers get blown apart by the Javelin drones. At least three hundred people had just died…they might be the enemy, but the dictator they had been enslaved by was dead.
“Bridge,” he said into the communicator. “This is Admiral Brad Madrid of the Commonwealth. Jack Mantruso is dead and I have assumed control of this ship.
“This war is over. It’s only a question of how many people are going to die today.”
“Turn that off!” a new voice barked. “It’s the boarders; we need to—”
A gunshot echoed on the communicator…and then silence.
“As a matter of fact, what I need is to stop listening to your bullshit,” the first voice said. “Admiral Madrid, this is Captain Karsten Solyom. I was Immortal’s executive officer, but these sons of bitches kidnapped my daughter.
“Can you save her?”
Brad swallowed.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s going to depend on what the OWA does in response to this. If you help me, Captain, we can save your fleet—and if we turn this fleet on the Cadre’s commissars, you might be able to save your daughter.”
There was a long silence.
“I swore an oath to Jack Mantruso. Rumor has it you’re his brother.”
“Long-lost and estranged as soon as we met,” Brad replied. “I can’t make you any promises, Captain.”
“But if we fire a few warning shots from Immortal at the OWA, they’ll panic,” Solyom replied grimly.
“That would require me to give you back control, Captain.”
“I have no way to disable that override, Admiral,” the Captain replied. “You can stop me anytime. I owe my daughter…” He swallowed. “I owe my daughter and my crew the chance to try.”
“You have thirty seconds, Captain,” Brad replied.
He disabled the override. Immortal leapt to life, her engines flaring to maximum power as she suddenly charged toward her own cruisers. The fifty-centimeter guns each targeted a cruiser or a carrier, then fired.
From the screens Brad had, they hadn’t missed…except that the targets were still there. Solyom had to have missed his targets by mere meters.
“All ships, this is Captain Solyom of Immortal,” the Captain’s voice echoed. “I have sworn allegiance to the new Lord Protector, Brad Mantruso—and his orders are for the Fleet to stand down and surrender.”
Brad stared in shock at the speaker. That was not the tack that he’d expected Solyom to take, and it spoke to future problems…problems that, right now, Brad had no choice but to leave to said future.
“Any ship that continues to resist will face Immortal’s guns. We are the flagship of the Outer Worlds Alliance and we are ordering your surrender!”
For a moment, everything froze—and then one of the cruisers swung about and charged Immortal, her guns opening fire at their full power.
As the battleship rang under the hits, Brad realized he hadn’t locked Solyom out—and Immortal’s fifty-centimeter guns spoke once again.
Six slugs hit the cruiser. She didn’t even manage to dodge, suggesting that there was more going on aboard her bridge than was seen from the outside. Each of those slugs was a weapon of mass destruction that could devastate continents.
Six of them obliterated a three-hundred-meter-long cruiser.
“This is your final warning,” Solyom barked. “Stand the fuck down.”
Engines began to cut out across the fleet, fireflies winking out across the night as OWA ship after OWA ship shut down their drives. Ship after ship went dark until only Immortal remained.
“Thank you,” Solyom said softly. “And one final order from our new Lord Protector.” There was a vicious glee in his tone. “All commissars are to be interned immediately. If the OWA survives this, it will be as our country…and without the Phoenix’s reign of terror.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Six weeks changed…well, everything.
Brad was still aboard Immortal, the crew of the battleship apparently having decided that he was the only thing keeping them safe from both sides. The news out of the OWA suggested that there was some serious confusion over who was in charge now—but everyone was damned certain it wasn’t the Cadre remnants who’d been acting as Jack Mantruso’s enforcers and commissars.
Enough governors were still intact that they’d managed to find a trio of representatives to send to the peace conference that Brad had demanded.
With the two largest fleets in the Solar System tentatively, if strangely, under his command, no one had argued when he’d told them they were going to make nice.
Jupiter’s delegation had arrived first, with Arbiter Blaze in the lead. They could have beaten everyone else by weeks, but Blaze clearly hadn’t seen the point.
The Commonwealth and OWA delegations were arriving within hours of each other—mostly because it had taken so long for the OWA to sort out who was coming!
If anyone was objecting to the peace conference being held aboard a battleship, well, no one was entirely sure who was going to claim the battleship. Captain Solyom had accepted that the ship was going back to the Commonwealth, but Brad had told him to keep his mouth shut on that.
Returning the battleship was a huge c
oncession, one the OWA was going to have to make but one that could also help buy a fair peace.
Brad didn’t want to have to do this all over again in a different uniform in ten years.
Michelle squeezed his hand to interrupt his distraction. Six weeks had changed things there, too. She was now into her second trimester and visibly pregnant.
Her anger over why she was pregnant hadn’t faded, but at least they’d decided they couldn’t hold that against their baby. The child to come wasn’t responsible for their monster of an uncle.
Blaming people for their uncles would end badly for Brad.
“Commonwealth delegation is two minutes out,” she told him. “Saburo is rolling the honor guard out now.”
That was perhaps a bit more on point than she’d intended. Brad looked over to the honor guard—Vikings, not troops from any of the three powers gathering today—and their wheelchair-bound commander.
He was quite sure there was something terrifying hidden under the blanket covering Saburo Kawa’s legs, but that didn’t change the fact that the mercenary couldn’t walk. Kate Falcone had saved his life, but one of the bullets had severed his spine. Neural regeneration, as Brad’s arm could attest, was a long and messy process.
It would be at least a year before Saburo could walk again. That didn’t seem to slow him down, though.
“Commonwealth, arriving,” Saburo’s voice bellowed across the bay as the shuttle slipped through the hangar doors and coasted to a gentle stop.
Brad was about to argue that that declaration should have been reserved for the President when the shuttle ramp dropped.
Someone had warned Saburo but the note hadn’t made it to Brad.
President Barnes led the way down the ramp with two Senators Brad didn’t know trailing him. The President returned the salutes of the honor guard and passed through them to reach Brad.
“Admiral Madrid, you’ve done us all proud,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”