To the Victor

by R Coots

  The woman obeyed, and light blue strands of light blinked into existence. Thin and pale compared to the purple, the net effect still looked like someone had tipped a basket of knitting over and let a bunch of cats play with it. Quinn shot his lord a look as Syrus coughed on a laugh, but Kizen straightened and scowled. “This amuses you? It tells you nothing! Except where to hunt later, when we are done with the planet-bound Imperials and their sniveling excuses for armies.”

  Syrus swallowed another dry laugh and shook his head. “Look.” He stabbed the yellow light with a finger. “Remember where the Fleet got their masking tech in the first place? All those fun toys you have that let you sneak up on a planet.” He tapped the wall. “Gravity doesn’t lie. There’s something there. And it’s going to get us all killed. The whole fucking Fleet.”

  Now he had everyone’s attention. Kizen glared. Quinn’s eyebrows climbed up his head. Iira scowled and went back to patching up the women. Ok, not everyone’s attention. Jossa was still staring into space. One hand clutched a flare of her crown. The other was laced with her that of her sousi, chalky brown to pale white. Whiter, because the redhead had a grip on her counterpart strong enough to cut circulation.

  Syrus yanked his attention back to Kizen as the heat levels in the room climbed.

  “You’re telling us what?” the man ground out. “That there’s an installation there? Some secret army is going to try and wipe us out? Try, I say, because if there’s anything the puling Imperials can’t do, it’s fight a proper battle.”

  Syrus stepped on the impulse to clap like the audience at a stage play and tried to think of where to start.

  “When you found us, how many keys did your originating Barbican have?” he asked. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was just a fluke. The local lord getting clever.

  “Two,” Kizen said. “The one we found you in, and another empty system. We hadn’t sent more than a dummy-sat through before you called us through your Barb.”

  “No other keys in that Barb? No signs of previous use?”

  “It was in regular use by the outFleet curs before we conquered the system. No other keys though. We blockaded it early. No one escaped from the system as we took it.” Scorn practically dripped off his voice, sizzling like acid in the air and burning imaginary holes in the floor.

  “Our techs checked the Barb as we came through to this system. The only key out leads to the same coordinates as your other, empty, system. The one you didn’t come through.” Syrus looked at Quinn. “We hit Hadra’s Net.”

  “Hadra’s Net?”

  “What fucking net?”

  The two Fleet men spoke over each other. Syrus ignored them, doing calculations in his head as he ran a finger along one of the purple travel lines, following it from the trading post near the Barb, past the fourth planet, behind its moon, and down past an orbital station siphoning gas off one of the giant planets. He would have bet money on the ship that left this trail being one of the first off the base when the Fleet attacked. Other lines went for planets, or the solar collector, or the asteroid belt. But this one . . .

  He eyed the flickering yellow light of the phantom base down at the lower end of the y-axis and then laid his palm over the large wobble in the gravitational field almost a hand span below it. Then he put his other hand over the Barbican they’d come through.

  Same size. The lower one was bigger, maybe. Which made an even worse kind of sense, when he thought on it.

  “The fucking hell are you doing?” Kizen snapped. “You gonna hump the wall now, is that it? Not getting enough—”

  “Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you,” Syrus told the warlord. “This is more important than our egos.”

  Kizen drew himself up and opened his mouth.

  Syrus didn’t wait to hear what the bastard had to say. He turned, hooked a foot around Kizen’s ankle, and clapped his hand over the man’s mouth. A slide of the hip, a push of the hand, and the other warlord fell flat on his back. Syrus followed him down and pinned him with the hand still over his face and a knee to the chest.

  Kizen grunted and gasped for air, scrabbling for a pressure point on Syrus’s wrist as Syrus pinched the man’s nostrils shut. Before Kizen could lash out, Syrus wrestled one of Kizen’s arms down and pinned it. His weight balanced now, he leaned in.

  Kizen croaked and gasped for breath as Syrus forced the air out of his lungs. Syrus’s hand on the man’s skin was scalding. Syrus snarled and leaned a little harder on Kizen’s chest. The monster, that caustic mix of things he couldn’t name, wanted fear. Not rage. Kizen flailed with his free hand, scrabbling for a knife.

  Syrus settled all his weight on the man’s chest. Kizen’s trapped arm came free, a wild strike catching his attacker along the inner thigh. Syrus barely felt it. The fucker’s face was finally turning purple. His teeth gnashed, but he couldn’t do any real damage.

  “Milord!”

  Syrus rammed his elbow up towards the source of the voice and the owner of the hand on his shoulder. He followed through as he stood, bringing his other fist around to pulverize the fucking moron who dared—

  Something caught his wrist and twisted just enough to shift the momentum of the swing in a lateral direction. Syrus staggered, nearly tripped over Kizen’s legs, and caught himself. Nothingness flooded up his arm, driving the monster back. His vision cleared of the red haze and he could see clearly again.

  “Milord,” Quinn said in a flat voice. “This gets us nowhere.”

  Twice. Twice in less than an hour, he’d nearly lost his shit. Not just the little bit he let himself have during battle. He’d nearly gone completely bug-fuck twice after how many years?

  Months, his imaginary conscience reminded him. You’re not that much in control.

  You shut up, he told the voice.

  “You.” Kizen surged to his feet. “I’m going to kill you!”

  Somehow Syrus found himself standing on the other side of Quinn as his second put his hands on the other warlord’s shoulders and moved. Kizen ended up three feet away, on his feet, perfectly steady. “Milord,” Quinn said in that same voice. “I believe Warlord Syrus said we are all about to die. If we may put off the Challenge until we ascertain the validity of that statement?”

  Over in the corner, Syrus heard Iira snort softly. Quinn was watching him though, so he found the edge of the table again, hitched a hip up, and laced his fingers across his leg. See. Nice and safe. He could be semi-civilized when he wanted to be. “The Net is a last line of defense and a first line, depending on how you look at it. And depending on what sector you come in on. Long and short, it’s a tripwire. Way I learned it, about the time the Navlad Empire realized you lot were serious about this whole ‘conquer the Galaxy’ business—”

  Kizen growled. Syrus ignored him. “’Bout that time, they decided they needed some sort of defense. Something that would tell them it was time to scramble troops, aim them one direction, and pull the triggers on their heavy artillery. And just in case the islosog fail and the battlegroups get pounded into so many pieces of scrap, they built a failsafe.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, caught the tie that kept it all back and yanked the thing out. Scraping the loose strands back into their queue, he started to wrap the tie back around his hair. It snapped in his fingers. Growling, Syrus chucked it at the door. “Don’t matter if we sit here and wait for the battlegroup to land on our head. Don’t matter if we fight them and win. There’s an outpost sunward of the Barb.” He pointed at the map on the wall, where a slight wobble showed in the gravity lines above the blob of the Barbican. “They want to control traffic to the rest of the Empire. Best way to do that is to make it impossible to open the Barb to start with. Which means keys. We don’t get those keys, the correct keys, to the Barb they got sitting at the bottom of this system, we die. If not here, then in the next set of planets. They’ll drag a solar collector through the gate and we’ll be so much matter in an accretion disc.”

  He stopped trying to
get his hair out of his eyes and looked at the two Fleet men. Kizen stood still, face a black cloud. Quinn still blocked the way between the two warlords, but he had his hands hooked into his belt and an almost thoughtful look on his face. Well. At least they weren’t laughing.

  “How do you know this?” Kizen finally asked. For a wonder, he didn’t shout. “Nothing my people retrieved from any database has mentioned a trap.” He stopped and snorted. “Beyond the usual shit the Impie pukes try to pull.”

  “Well they wouldn’t, would they? Not if they didn’t know.” Syrus shrugged. “Who’s going to settle in a system set to blow when the wrong person trips over a line of code? Who wants to live outside the bounds of that line and risk being cut off from the Core of the Empire?”

  “That leaves the question of who told you,” Quinn said quietly.

  Syrus looked at his second and wondered how much to say. What had the man guessed, in the three years or so he’d had Syrus on board? How much had he guessed just in the past couple weeks?

  “You hear things,” Syrus said finally. “Scraping along the edges of society. Especially high society. They think the help doesn’t have ears and a brain to listen with.”

  Something shifted in Quinn’s eyes. Before he could say anything, Kizen spoke up. “Say we accept that the system is rigged. Say there is a Net and this other Barbican needs to be accessed. We can deal with it once we’ve finished Conquering this system. I don’t see a need to worry about it until we’re much closer to the outer satellites.”

  “By then we’ll be even further away from the Barb and its guard post,” Syrus said. “They’ll have even more time to get ready for us, if we’re lucky. If we’re not lucky.” He shrugged. “Remember what I said about vamalkuog and battlegroups and heavy artillery? They’re not going to wait for us to come through the Barb if they can help it. They might wait for us to waste time and resources here. Wait till we’re weaker.” He held up a hand before Kizen could do more than bark a negative to that. “Think, you bastard,” Syrus growled. “Think. What would you do? What do we do? Attack a strong position? A strong force? Or hammer the shit out of them from orbit and then drop a battalion of soldiers on their heads?”

  Kizen opened his mouth again, shut it, and looked at the display on the wall. Syrus waited. The man was a fucking hot head. A half-operable impact weapon just waiting for someone to jiggle it wrong and explode it in someone’s face. But he had to have some brain in there, to keep his section of the Fleet moving forward through the Barbicans. Hell, he’d been trying to force Syrus himself into a Challenge fight for how long now?

  Quinn sidled closer to his warlord as Kizen ran his fingers over the system map, muttering calculations to himself. Syrus raised an eyebrow at his second. “You see it yet?” he asked quietly.

  A bubble of faint amusement surfaced in Quinn and threaded through the air between them. It was gone as quickly as it had come. “Milord, the only question is who? And how?”

  Syrus snorted and looked back at Kizen. The other man had told the still invisible tech to expand the map again. He had one hand on the hidden Barbican and the other running flight patterns from the various satellites around the system’s star. “Think you know the answer to that too.”

  “And if you’re wrong, milord? If it’s just a smuggler’s base? Or a shipyard or other military installation? We have two Fleets here now. More than might be expected otherwise.”

  Syrus looked over at the corner with the two captive women. Iira was done patching up Jossa and had started in on the redhead. The young woman growled and hissed as the med-tech poked and prodded and wiped at blood tracks, but her sousi had a death grip on her hands, so she couldn’t lash out. He looked away before Kizen could notice his counterpart’s attention was wandering. Jossa wouldn’t have anything new to offer. Her sousi would likely try to gut anyone who came near with her bare hands.

  “Is it safe to assume I’m wrong?” he asked Quinn. “Or should we act like it is a threat and deal with it?”

  “The Fleet is strong,” Kizen said. He stepped away from the wall and crossed his arms. “We take the place. With two Fleets here instead of the one you’d have if I hadn’t come along, we can send a strike force and enough Seed to deal with the Barbican and its outpost easily.” He looked over at the captives. “Even after what your pets have done to your forces.”

  The redhead chose that moment to slap Iira’s hand away from her legs and shrink back against her sousi. Jossa roused a bit, leaning forward to lay a hand on Iira’s shoulder. Her lips moved, but the translators issued by the Fleet weren’t set up for High Imperial, so only Syrus knew that she was warning the med-tech what would happen if she went poking in places she wasn’t equipped to handle.

  “You send a strike force,” Syrus said, pulling the men’s attention away from the scuffle among the women as Iira reminded the strays who was in charge. “And you could take the outpost. Maybe. But were you listening when I said you’d need the right codes? Hammering your way past the security protocols leaves tracks in the system. In this case, you’ll probably set off alarms from here to the Core if you try. You’ll blow us all up anyway, you do that.” He leaned forward to get in Kizen’s face. The heat in the air around the man ratcheted up a notch or two. “We need to make it think it gave us those keys. Like it’s supposed to. Even if you take out the guards and Seed that outpost, how are you going to manage that?”

  Kizen crossed his arms and glared over at the map on the wall. “Then we—”

  “No we.” Syrus moved around to block his view. “Me. I go. Take one of the ships we captured, run like a scared rabbit, and follow all those people looking for safety. Right into the outpost. One more refugee.” He tapped the blob of yellow. “I get in, get the keys, lock the Barb against any incoming traffic, and get the fuck back to the Fleet.”

  Assuming his security clearances still worked. Assuming whoever ran his blood test on the other end didn’t just execute him the minute they got the results. Assuming a lot of stuff, actually.

  But if he didn’t at least try, they were all fucked.

  “You?” Kizen snorted and bared his teeth. “We are to trust you? An Imperial outsider offering to save us from annihilation? That’s convenient.”

  “Offering to save himself,” Quinn said quietly.

  Syrus raised an eyebrow, but when his second didn’t add anything to the statement, he shrugged and let it go. “He’s got a point,” he said to Kizen. “Something doesn’t get done about this, we have to etaevatoj bekig.”

  All the Fleet natives, even Iira, turned to look at him. Half a second later, Syrus’s ears caught up with him and he realized what had happened. Growling, he looked for a new way to say what he meant. Fucking Fleet language and fucking Fleet mentality that went with it. They didn’t have a word for “go back” and either his translator or theirs must have fucked things up. What language was he speaking anyway?

  Something like razors skittered over his face and neck, slicing imaginary lines into the veins of his arms. He was pretty sure the derision came from Kizen, but for all he knew Iira was adding a dose of it as well. It was hard to tell where that feeling came from when it made his whole body burn with pain.

  Syrus sorted through what he’d said, focusing on the words instead of the mockery. Fleet, fleet, fleet . . . and he’d dropped into Imperial for the last bit without even thinking about it, filling in the gaps between words and meanings out of habit, trusting to the translators to parse things into something usable when he missed a word here and there.

  “Bekig,” he said again in Imperial, then went on in Fleet. “A place that isn’t here, the time that isn’t now, and neither in the future. Past place.”

  These fucking people, so obsessed with going forward that they didn’t have a way to say “reverse course” or “turn around” without fucking up the syntax. Syrus crossed his arms and glared at the wall, not really seeing the map on it, while he waited for the others to wrap their minds around what he
meant.

  “Absolutely not,” Kizen said in a flat voice. “There is nowhere in the past timeplaces to go. Not for—” He snarled wordlessly and waved his fists. “No. You would have us go all the way to the Root, out of cowardice and unconfirmed guesses.”

  “Very, very well-educated guesses,” Syrus reminded him. “Based on experience, observation, and the fact that there is a hidden Barbican in this system with an even better hidden satellite guarding it.” He stabbed a finger at the wall. “You ignore me, ignore that—” He waved his hand again. “Then it’s not just embarrassment. It’s death.” He leaned into Kizen’s personal space until he could smell the alcohol the man had been drinking at the banquet. “Is that a risk you want to run? I’ll be dead, sure. But you won’t get my Helm and you won’t get to gloat about how paranoid I am, because you’ll be dead too.”

  The other warlord drew back until they weren’t sharing the same breathing space, but the heat he gave off tightened the skin of Syrus’s face, stretching over muscle and bone. “Fuck you,” the man growled. “Fuck you, and the bitches who keep your balls, and the cunts who suck your cock. You go. Make a fool of yourself flying all over the system after imaginary threats. I will do as we have always done, those of us who are true Fleet. I will Conquer this system. Then, when I have done that, I will deal with those har izrumeor Imperials. And we will see who truly wears a Helm.” Still growling and muttering under his breath, Kizen turned on his heel and stalked out of the room, nearly ramming himself into the wall before the door finished melting open.

  Syrus watched him go, then looked over at Quinn. If he didn’t know better, he’d call the look on the man’s face amused. But Quinn was never amused, entertained, or even a little bit smug, not that Syrus had seen. “Well,” the second said. “Milord, I think you will have to make do on your own in this case.”

  Syrus snorted. Maybe Quinn really was enjoying this. “I didn’t need his help anyway. So long as I get this done fast, he won’t have a chance to send anyone down there and blow the thing to bits.”