Tarnished Knight

by Jack Campbell

  Iceni’s own answering nod was sharp. Why hadn’t she heard from Drakon on how things were going? She couldn’t—

  It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing. The symbol for the ISS facility that Iceni had been watching had altered in the last few seconds. Instead of beaconing an ISS identification, it now glowed with an indicator saying that it belonged to the ground forces.

  Other ISS facilities were changing as she watched, changing from poisonous yellow to bold green. “Try to get comms to CEO Drakon,” she ordered. “He—”

  At that point, Iceni abruptly remembered her last thoughts before the line worker had interrupted them. She stared at those symbols for a second, then two. Was I answered? It’s probably just coincidence. Surely just . . .

  “Madam CEO?” Marphissa asked.

  “Drakon should be at the main ISS headquarters. Try to get in touch with him there,” Iceni ordered, putting extra snap in her command to cover up her momentary loss of self-possession.

  Two minutes passed, while Iceni’s glower deepened and Akiri began looking desperate again, himself glaring at the comm line worker.

  Fortunately for the line worker, another message came in.

  CEO Kolani hadn’t looked so unhappy since the Alliance fleet had last waltzed unhindered through this star system. She stared at Iceni so viciously that it was as if she were actually seeing Iceni before her. It took Iceni a moment to recall that this message had been sent ten minutes ago. “Former CEO Iceni, you are hereby relieved of all authority and ordered to surrender yourself to loyal representatives of the Syndicate Worlds. I am assuming full authority in this star system until the unlawful actions of the ground forces have been halted and their leaders, including former CEO Drakon, have been dealt with.”

  “She sent this five minutes after the ISS facilities on the surface were attacked?” Iceni asked.

  “Yes, Madam CEO.”

  For some reason that made Iceni want to laugh, so she did. “CEO Kolani didn’t even give me a chance to rebel before she tried to take over.” But then Kolani had been talking to Hardrad about that delayed order and implicating Iceni in that matter, if Hardrad could be trusted on that count. Hardrad can’t be trusted on any count, but in this case telling me the truth about Kolani’s suspicions would have served his purposes, and I already knew how Kolani feels about me.

  She looked at Akiri. “Tell the mobile forces with us to bring themselves to full combat alert, and make sure their true readiness status is sent onward to Kolani’s group.”

  An alarm sounded, followed by a rippling of Iceni’s display before the virtual images solidified again. “What happened?”

  “A virus,” Marphissa reported. “Delivered in the net connecting us to the rest of the flotilla. It tried to activate the worms planted by the snakes, but we’d already purged them.”

  Damn. “Can we put filters between us and the mobile forces loyal to Kolani?”

  “That’s what stopped the virus, Madam CEO. I can’t guarantee that the filters will stop the next one.”

  Double damn. “Break the net connections to Kolani’s warships.”

  “War—?” Marphissa started to ask, then caught herself. “Yes, Madam CEO. What about the . . . warships at the main facility? Anything they tried to send would take an hour and a half to get here, and anything CEO Kolani tried to relay through them would take more than three hours.”

  “Keep them in the link for now.” Iceni gave her display an irate look. Instead of getting accurate updates from those other warships, she would now have to depend on the sensors on the cruisers to know what was really happening.

  Accurate updates? “They were already falsifying their data feeds to us, weren’t they?” Iceni asked.

  The operations line worker nodded. “The movements we’re seeing don’t match what their updates were telling us. It was . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Say it.” Iceni’s own voice wasn’t loud, but it carried very well to the line worker and everyone else on the bridge.

  “Yes, Madam CEO. It was clumsy.” Now that he had voiced a criticism of superiors, even though they were on other units, the line worker seemed defiantly eager to keep talking. “They could have matched their false feeds to their actual maneuvers, knowing that we would see any discrepancy; instead, they just kept sending us data saying nothing had changed.”

  Iceni watched the line worker, who had flushed as he returned her gaze with worried eyes. She wondered if any line workers on Kolani’s units had realized the need to tailor the false data feeds but hesitated to appear to question or contradict superiors. “That’s a good assessment,” she finally said, drawing a hastily concealed look of disbelief from the line worker. “We need to think of things like that before we give away any information to CEO Kolani. What is your rating?”

  “Senior line worker class two, Madam CEO.”

  “You’re now a senior line worker class one. Keep thinking, and tell me what I need to know.” Iceni turned back to face Akiri. “Make that promotion happen. I am pleased to see that your crew is well trained and knowledgeable.”

  Akiri, who had been on the verge of scowling, perked up and bestowed an approving look on the line worker.

  “I . . . I have a connection with CEO Drakon,” the comm line worker cried with relief.

  The window that opened before Iceni showed Drakon in combat armor, smoking wreckage in the background. It took her a moment to realize that the wreckage had once been the ISS command center. She had toured that facility once, but only once, feeling half a prisoner already until safely outside the ISS headquarters again.

  Drakon’s eyes seemed to hold more weariness than triumph, but he waved around in a casual gesture. “We’ve got it. There are individual snakes still running loose, but the heads are all dead, and we’ll catch the rest pretty quick.”

  “Where’s Hardrad?”

  “That’s sort of a metaphysical question now.”

  Iceni had to pause to realize what that meant. “I didn’t know you had such a dark sense of humor, CEO Drakon.”

  “It’s now General Drakon. Like you said, we need to cast off Syndicate ways of doing things.”

  “I see.” A unilateral decision on Drakon’s part. Not a decision she could protest, but still a worrisome move. “Make sure you examine whatever remains of Hardrad carefully before disposing of it. There may be tiny data-storage devices hidden within him.”

  “There were,” Drakon said. “But they were all dead-manned to his metabolism. When he died, they autowiped.”

  “Pity. Since I now know that you have the planetary surface under control, I must focus on my own task. There’s a battle to fight up here.”

  “Maybe Kolani will rethink that once she learns the snakes on the planet have been wiped out.”

  “I’ll make sure that she knows,” Iceni said. “I will contact you again once the battle is over.”

  But Drakon shook his head. “What’s to keep Kolani from dropping rocks on us during your fight?”

  “She’ll want an intact planet to offer to her masters,” Iceni replied. “Restoring a battered ruin to their control will not impress them. If she did that, she would be blamed for the losses far more than she’d get credit for any success. I am certain of that.”

  “I’m glad that you’re certain of it,” Drakon replied, “seeing as how you don’t have to worry about any of those rocks hitting you on the head. Have a nice battle.”

  “Thank you.” The window closed, and Iceni gazed morosely at the place where Drakon’s image had been. Working with him was going to be challenging, but positioning herself to eliminate him would be a very long-term project.

  Assuming that she wanted to eliminate him. She had noticed that CEOs who concentrated on getting rid of anyone who could be competition ended up getting rid of th
ose who could do their jobs well, and that always produced long-term disaster.

  Iceni’s eyes moved slightly to her display, where the representations of Kolani’s forces were steadying out on a direct intercept with the path of the units with Iceni. “She’s coming straight at us.”

  Akiri nodded morosely. “CEO Kolani will focus her fire on this cruiser. She will want to kill you, thinking that will cause the other units to surrender.”

  “Just as I need to kill her, so I won’t have to destroy all of the units following her.” Iceni scowled at the display, where automated calculations were summing up projections for an engagement. She had three heavy cruisers to Kolani’s two, but Kolani had more smaller warships. In a straight head-to-head exchange of blows, the firepower ratios would be very nearly equal. Victory or defeat would rest on chance, on how many hits went home on the primary targets, on where those hits struck, on which vital systems got knocked out.

  She hated depending on chance. “How can we knock out the heavy cruiser carrying CEO Kolani without facing an equal chance of losing this one?” she asked Akiri and Marphissa.

  Both looked back at her with puzzled expressions. “We go in hard and fast,” Marphissa finally said. “A clean, straight-on firing run. That will give us the best chance.”

  “Black Jack never uses clean, straight-on firing runs,” Iceni said.

  Akiri spoke cautiously. “The actions of Geary and the results of his engagements with Syndicate Worlds forces have been classified. We have not seen any official reports on those matters.”

  Of course not. Stupid, mindless Syndicate Worlds security classification, keeping essential information from its own personnel rather than from the enemy. “To put it bluntly, Black Jack repeatedly inflicted horrendous losses on Syndicate Worlds flotillas, while suffering much smaller losses in exchange. He used tactics that we’re still trying to analyze but which seemed to me to vary by situation.”

  “The rumors were true?” Marphissa asked, appalled.

  “Yes. The mobile forces of the Syndicate Worlds have been decimated. There’s very little left. You’ve seen what the Alliance still has.”

  “Can you also—?”

  “No.” I’m not Black Jack. I’ve studied what we know about those engagements, and I still don’t understand why he did things the way he did, how he timed his movements, how . . .

  Can I pretend to be Black Jack? What would he do? Not slam straight into the opposing force with the odds so even. He would . . . change the odds. “But I do have an idea.” She called up a maneuvering recommendation for intercepting Kolani’s force, a simple maneuver since Kolani was coming right at them, aiming to intercept the spot where they would be if Iceni’s force remained in orbit about this planet as it continued along its own track around the star. “All units, accelerate to point one light speed, alter course to port three two degrees at time one four.”

  “CEO Kolani’s force has also steadied out at point one light speed,” Marphissa said. “Forty-seven minutes to contact if she adjusts vectors when she sees our own maneuver.”

  “We are to concentrate fire on Cruiser 990?” Akiri asked, his hands already moving to set that priority in the targeting systems.

  “You will await my command on targeting priority.” Everyone was eyeing her with surprise. “I will enter targeting priority at the last moment to ensure that there is no way the information can somehow be provided to CEO Kolani’s force.” The extra strength in her voice this time made it clear that no one was to question her decision, and they all obediently turned back to their tasks. CEOs were arbitrary, they were doubtless telling themselves, and CEOs loved to micromanage. Let her enter the order herself when she wants if that is her desire. Oh, but it’s not that simple. I may not be Black Jack, but I can try something unexpected.

  Forty-seven minutes. Forty-six, now. She had done this before, the long lead-in to a fight, charging an opponent who could be seen many minutes, or hours, or even days before you could actually exchange fire. Iceni had always thought that it felt like one of those falling dreams, the drop prolonged beyond all reason, watching death come closer and closer. But unlike those dreams, which ended before the impact, battles always brought the crash of contact.

  How can I do what Black Jack has done? I don’t know enough. All I can do is a crude approximation. But that may be all I need against Kolani, who will be expecting me to follow doctrine since my experience is limited and not recent.

  “CEO Iceni,” Akiri said, breaking into her thoughts. His own worries were clear enough to see. “I’ve fought in engagements like this. Fairly evenly matched. There’s not much left when the fighting ends.”

  Iceni nodded. “Are you advising some other course of action, Sub-CEO Akiri?”

  Akiri hesitated before speaking. “Let them go. Instead of trying to defeat them, just let them head to Prime.”

  “And come back with reinforcements?” Marphissa asked.

  “We have been told that there aren’t any reinforcements!” Akiri insisted, flushing with anger. “CEO Iceni told us there is nothing left!”

  Iceni raised one finger, which was sufficient to halt the debate. Executives who didn’t learn to watch for and obey the smallest gestures from CEOs didn’t last very long. “I understand your concerns, Sub-CEO Akiri. However, we will not have an option on whether or not to fight. CEO Kolani must fight and win. I am certain that she will not flee for Prime to seek assistance because that would be an admission of failure on her part. She would be reporting the loss of this star system despite her own presence here, and the loss of more than half her own flotilla. I doubt that the new government of the Syndicate Worlds is much more merciful than the one it replaced when it comes to CEOs who fail. No. CEO Kolani will not simply leave this star system even if we promise her a free path. She will fight to reestablish Syndicate control here, or die trying, because she will see that as preferable to her likely fate if she fails.”

  “Would there be any reinforcements at Prime?” Marphissa asked. “That might change her calculations.”

  “Your commander is essentially correct,” Iceni said, giving Akiri acknowledgment of a small victory in the debate. “There might be more mobile units there, but probably very few that can be spared on short notice. Our knowledge of what mobile forces remain in the hands of the central government is very limited. They have some new construction, surely, but how much we don’t know. And they need to keep much of what they do have on hand, able to react and serve as a threat against the star systems near to Prime that they still control.”

  Akiri was watching her. “The Reserve Flotilla? Do we know . . . ?”

  “Those rumors are true as well.” Iceni said it bluntly, knowing how those around her would take the confirmation of their worst fears. “The Reserve Flotilla encountered Black Jack. It’s gone. It won’t be coming back here.”

  Seeing how Akiri’s face fell, Iceni wondered how many close friends he’d once had in that flotilla. He was far from being alone in that.

  “Another message from CEO Kolani,” the comm line worker announced.

  “Let me see it.” A window popped open before Iceni, revealing a Kolani whose earlier anger had morphed into cold contempt.

  “You will surrender, or you will die. Any fools following your commands will die with you. They should know that you have no talent for command of mobile forces and that your thin experience was long ago. For the sake of the safety of the citizens of the Syndicate Worlds, I am willing to guarantee your life if you transmit your surrender prior to firing upon any mobile unit. Those who followed you, doubtless out of mistaken belief in your authority to command such actions, will not be punished. You have fifteen minutes to reply. For the people, Kolani, out.”

  Iceni leaned back and glanced at Akiri. “I suppose every supervisor and line worker in these mobile units is already aware of Kolani’
s offer even though this was sent directly to me?”

  Akiri and Marphissa exchanged looks, then Marphissa shrugged. “That is certainly correct, Madam CEO. The offer was plainly intended for their ears.”

  “Then it’s past time I sent a message. Set up a broadcast.” Iceni waited impatiently for the few seconds required before the line worker responsible gave a thumbs-up. “Citizens of the Midway Star System, those on the planet nearest to mobile forces loyal to me, those elsewhere, those on my mobile forces or in the ground forces of . . . General Drakon, this is CEO Iceni.”

  For a few months, she had been practicing for this, going over the wording countless times in her head because she dared not create any written record of it in any device or even using archaic pen and paper. Such a document would have ensured her quick death had it been found by the ISS, and Iceni hadn’t survived as long as she had by underestimating the snakes.

  “You have lived long enough under the control of the government on Prime. The Syndicate Worlds has asked much from us and given little in return. The one thing they offered was security, and the Syndicate Worlds failed in that. The Syndicate Worlds government took the flotilla that long guarded us and left us defenseless when we were threatened by the alien race that lives beyond the frontier. Yes, I now officially confirm the existence of a species about which we know little except that they have posed a threat to us. We must be able to defend ourselves, and yet now the new and illegitimate government on Prime seeks to take the small flotilla of mobile forces I have managed to accumulate for the defense of this star system.

  “The Syndicate Worlds government has long boasted of its superiority. Only it could keep us safe, that government claimed. Yet it lost the war with the Alliance. The Alliance fleet came here, flaunting the failure of the Syndicate system.

  “I will be candid with you. Fear has kept us loyal to Prime. Fear of the Alliance and fear of the ISS. The snakes.” She paused for a moment, knowing how shocking it would be for citizens to hear a CEO openly using that term of contempt for the ISS. “But the snakes in Midway Star System are dead, except upon those mobile forces still following the command of CEO Kolani. The Syndicate Worlds is crumbling. The authority of the central government is falling apart, and many star systems have descended into chaos and civil war. I will prevent that from happening here. I have negotiated an understanding with the Alliance, with Black Jack Geary personally, to recognize and support the actions I am now taking.”