But the marshal was gurgling. Not an answer. A prayer, maybe. Then his forearm caught my eye—a tattoo, the mirrored-S of the SSR. So they had marshals in their ranks too.
His gurgling stopped. His eyes flattened.
“Go take care of your partner, Marshal. He’ll probably need you over there, too.”
I stood and looked around the bay. The locals were still hiding. The deck looked like a war zone for alcoholics with exquisite taste. I should probably explain to Adriana, but I could do that from the Hearse.
She called to me from Slip Three, sitting over there all sleek and sexy and unpretentious.
I’m comin’, doll. Just you’n’me for the better part of a week. It’ll be like a second honeymoon.
• • •
Regency Station cleared me without further trouble. Once I was away and on autopilot, I pulled up the message from Tony. Only it wasn’t from Tony. It was from Ruben Qinlao. It was encrypted with Tony’s black star, though.
“SCHQ is lost,” Qinlao said. In the background I could see Tony slumped over in one of the foam chairs of a small ship. His face was pale. Some big mook I’d never seen before was moving around him, trying to make him more comfortable. “Get back to the inner system as quickly as you can.”
After all that buildup, the message was a little anticlimactic. I reached to switch it off.
“Oh, one more thing, Fischer. Tony says I should tell you: ‘Bravo, Stacks! Bravo!’ He says you’ll know what that means.”
I froze the vid message and stared over Ruben’s shoulder again. I had no idea what that meant. Maybe Tony had heard about our rooting out the pirates from Pallas. But that had been Daisy’s operation inside and Admiral Galatz’s outside. Tony might not even know I’d been there. Well, I had six days of flight time to the inner system to open that particular puzzle box.
I transmitted a quick, encrypted acknowledgment that included the name of a Doctor Brackin in Darkside, the Moon’s backwater barrio. The people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else lived there. I did collection work for Brackin on occasion. I told them to mention my name. Maybe he’d give Tony a discount. They could trust Brackin to be discrete.
I settled back and let my mind relax. The Hearse would shadow the Frater Lanes on autopilot. I had no tracker aboard thanks to being the right-hand fixer of the most powerful man in the solar system—until recently, anyway—so I was fairly confident my trip would be uneventful. I’d just gotten comfortable when the world went to shit.
Ain’t that always the way?
Ever hear of the Hitler paradox? It goes something like—if you could travel back in time and stand beside Hitler’s crib in the hospital, would you smother Baby Adolf? Most people say of course they would. Imagine the tragedy and carnage avoided. Imagine all those tens of millions of lives saved. Then again, how do you know for sure killing Der Little Fuehrer would really bring on a better future? Hell, it might even keep you from being born, in which case you couldn’t go back, in which case … and that’s where my brain starts to ache. The point is this: the thousand-million ripples that happened because Hitler walked the world stage would never happen because that one pebble isn’t dropped. Also, moustache styles? Totally improved.
I was settling in, comfy in the Hearse’s embrace, when a forced message sprang up on CorpNet. If it was slaving the Hearse’s comms, the broadcast via the subspace network must’ve been slaving every comms system in range. Someone had engaged the emergency transmission system, supposedly reserved for systemwide disasters.
I was looking at the former UN building in old New York City, where Elise Kisaan made her regency headquarters. The eye of the camerabot moved up the side of the building until it reached the penthouse, Kisaan’s seat of power.
So, here we go. This is where Elise Kisaan declared victory over Tony Taulke. I wondered if she knew one of her lookalike assassin-daughters was dead yet.
The camera flew in through an open window. A feminine figure with long, flowing black hair rose from behind Elise Kisaan’s desk. She moved from the shadows and into the light with an easy grace, movement born of confidence and victory. Her face was still in shadow. In her right hand she held what looked like a bowling ball suspended by straps.
The camera zoomed in on the object. The woman raised her hand for the camera.
It wasn’t a bowling ball. It was another woman’s decapitated head. Silver-streaked, black locks. Viscera hung from the neck, ragged with saw marks. Someone had taken their time in relieving the dead woman of her noggin’. The wordless mouth gaped open. Her eyes, brown with pupils dilated in death, stared out at the solar system.
It was the head of Elise Kisaan.
“The Syndicate Corporation is at an end,” said the woman holding Elise by the hair. The camera eye stayed focused on the former Regent of Earth. “The Soldiers of the Solar Revolution will free those enslaved by SynCorp’s shackles. Ruben Qinlao. Tony Taulke. Gregor Erkennen. Adriana Rabh. Every head of the snake will be severed—as I have severed the head of my own mother.”
The camera panned up. She looked so much like Elise. Except for the eyes. The golden eyes.
Cassandra, the cyborg child I’d failed to kill thirty years before. Cassandra, returned to take whatever revenge she thought herself due. And she’d started with her own mother, Elise Kisaan. My own personal Hitler paradox made flesh.
Cassandra Kisaan smiled at her audience. “Freedom is worth any price that must be paid.”
I should’ve killed the squealing little shit when I had the chance.
Best enjoy the next six days of flight time, Fischer. After that, it’s gonna be a hell of a ride.
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Discover How the Syndicate Corporation Began…
Thirty years before the events in Valhalla Station—Earth’s governments are struggling with chaotic climate change while humanity suffers monster hurricanes, freak sandstorms, and roasting wildfires. The New Earth Order, a mysterious league of reactionary activists with sleeper agents around the world, pursues its own agenda: the subjugation of mankind to nature itself.
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About the Authors
Chris Pourteau and David Bruns
David Bruns is a former officer on a nuclear-powered submarine turned high-tech executive turned speculative-fiction writer. He mostly writes sci-fi/fantasy and military thrillers. Find out more at davidbruns.com.
Chris Pourteau is a technical writer and editor by day, a writer of original fiction and editor of short story collections by night (or whenever else he can find the time). Want to know more about him? Sign up for Chris’s newsletter and get free stuff at https://chrispourteau.com/newsletter and join Chris’s
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