The Eve of War

by Christopher Hopper

  • • •

  Awen followed behind Ezo and TO-96, making sure to keep her face hidden within the cloak’s hood. Even the bot donned a cloak to keep wayward eyes from resting on his gleaming metal parts. At least she wouldn’t be the only one kidnapped.

  The concrete labyrinth of Gangil, the largest of Ki Nar Four’s floating cities, writhed in dark-green light, busy with all manner of life, both sentient and pest. The sulfur from the planet’s surface, mixed with decaying life from the pavement, formed a stench Awen had never experienced before and hoped never to encounter again.

  The three guests crisscrossed through the grim city streets, boots splashing through black puddles and sidestepping bodies that were sleeping or dead—Awen couldn’t determine which. She wished for a flashlight to help pick her way through the refuse but then thought better of it. Sometimes, it was best not to know.

  Awen noticed the population increase as they moved farther from the starport and toward the city’s center. Beings of every species jostled against her, many marring her cloak with their wet exterior biology. She was suddenly very thankful that Ezo had insisted she wear it.

  They passed by eateries that Awen couldn’t believe remained in business and walked under red lights that invited pedestrians to gaze through glass windows at things Awen was embarrassed to admit she’d glimpsed. She wiped the sweat from her forehead, noting just how hot the air was even so far above the surface. Several aliens whistled at Ezo, some even calling him by name.

  Awen glanced at the scantily clad humanoids then back at Ezo. Really?

  Ezo wasn’t the easiest person for her to like as it was, but seeing how he confidently moved on what was easily the seediest planet she’d ever seen made her question his moral compass even more. She realized—much to her shame—that she’d placed her trust in Ezo because Abimbola had arranged their meeting. Abimbola, a warlord from the Dregs of Oorajee.

  All at once, Awen wondered if she wasn’t a total idiot for opening the stardrive in front of Ezo and agreeing to let him help her. But she’d convinced him to help her. She’d practically bribed him with a payout!

  Oh, how she wanted to gag her inner monologue. But what else should she expect when moving from the halls of Plumeria to the stalls of Gangil?

  Finding Sootriman’s den wasn’t difficult. It sat in the very center of the floating city like a massive bronze cooking pot complete with rounded lid and torrents of steam. It took up at least ten city blocks, by Awen’s estimate, and was detailed with all manner of suspended walkways, grates, circular tube vents, and hatches. The green residue she’d seen everywhere else in the city bled from its rusted holes and exhaust ports. Tattered rags spanned oddly placed decks, and ladders climbed the twenty-story building like skeletons standing on one another’s shoulders, each hoping in vain to make it to the summit and achieve some fabled resurrection.

  “Let me do all the talking,” Ezo said as they approached two massive metal doors. He used the butt of his pistol to pound on the right door. Awen expected the strikes to produce a resounding echo. Instead, the sound was a dull thud, thud, thud, betraying just how thick the doors were.

  A metal plate slid open above their heads, and a single reptilian eye appeared. It darted around and then looked down, settling on Ezo, then TO-96, then Awen. She winced and lowered her head under the hood.

  “Ezo to see Sootriman.”

  “You’re not expected,” a lizard-like voice said.

  Awen felt a chill travel up her spine. Maybe staying with the ship would have been a better idea after all. But she’d wanted this, and now she had it and would have to deal with it.

  “That’s true,” Ezo agreed. “But when does anyone ever expect their debt holders to come knocking?”

  The lizard hissed, moved the eye to all three figures again, then slid the panel shut.

  “We’re in,” Ezo said. The right door unlatched with a clank and began a mechanically driven move inward. Ezo turned to Awen. “Don’t look around, and don’t let anything touch you.”

  “Understood.” She followed TO-96 into the darkness with Ezo leading the way.

  Inside the den, light was emitted from small ports on either side of the floor every five meters. It was barely enough for Awen to see her steps by and not nearly enough to make out anything at head level. She wondered where the gatekeeper had gone and almost chanced a look behind her. She thought better of it, however, given Ezo’s advice, and reined in her impulses.

  Instead of exploring the world around her, Awen moved inward to her spirit, finding herself centered in the Unity. She took several deep breaths to calm her nerves. Then, slowly, she pressed her senses outward, seeing first her body, then TO-96’s energy, then Ezo’s body. She moved with the ripples of energy that reverberated off every element in the hallway—the floor, the domed ceiling, and the side corridors. Then she felt bodies that lay slumped in passages, rodents that scurried through refuse drains, and several guards who absentmindedly monitored the progress of three unexpected guests through drug-laden eyes. She also sensed something growing along the walls—something with a soul. Something aggressive. Something reaching for her.

  In the Unity, everything could become more vivid if enough concentration was employed, including smells. Alien blood mixed with excrement and bodily fluids that she couldn’t place. Rotting flesh signaled someone’s fate and someone else’s meal. And permeating it all was the horrendous stench of sulfur, which was somehow concentrated in these hallways. But at least in the Unity, she could purposely dim certain elements of her surroundings—smells being her first choice here.

  Ezo led them up a wide staircase, across some sort of courtyard, and down another hallway. More and more manner of life-forms appeared the deeper they moved, and Awen felt content to remain in the Unity as long as she could. It was safer there.

  Finally, Ezo stopped at a second set of doors, this set even taller and wider than the first. Several guards stood up as the trio approached. Awen examined them from within the Unity. They were a form of reptilian sentient she’d never encountered, standing on their hind legs head and shoulders above Ezo. Their tails slapped back and forth on the wet concrete, apparently excited for the newcomers. Black metal plates covered any exposed flesh not already protected by the lizards’ thick scales, and they clasped long energy rods in their claws.

  As she examined them, Awen picked up a rather forbidding detail: bits of rotting flesh between their teeth. At least she knew what happened to guests who Sootriman didn’t care to see again.

  The foremost lizard flicked its forked tongue and let out a blast of air from its nostrils. “What’s this doing back here?” it hissed to no one in particular. “Idris Ezo.”

  “I’ve come to settle a debt with Sootriman,” Ezo replied.

  “Sootriman owes Ezo no debts,” replied the guard.

  “I beg to differ,” Ezo said with easy confidence. Awen honestly couldn’t tell if the man was lying or telling the truth.

  “How about we just taste you instead.” The other lizards started flicking their tongues too, an action that fluttered the realm of the Unity with small vibrations of energy. The beasts were more powerful than Awen had imagined. She sensed the strength of their long, lean, muscled bodies.

  “You could,” Ezo said, “and I’d wager I’m not that bad on the palate. Throw in a little wantim glaze, and you’d each be in lizard ecstasy, I’m quite sure.” Ezo’s words produced a dramatic hissing response from the guards, so much so that Awen was worried they’d leap on him that instant.

  “However,” Ezo added, raising his index finger, “if word gets out that Sootriman didn’t make good on a debt, all because you ate the claimant, I can’t imagine what that might do to the reputation of this house. Imagine how upset Sootriman would be.” Ezo shook his head in mock wonderment.

  “Silence, human!” the main guard said. “You speak simply to tempt us to our own graves.” The flicking of their tongues slowed down. “We are not so easily led as
tray.”

  “I can see now that you are both clever and cunning,” Ezo said with a sigh, his words dripping with disappointment. “And here I thought I’d get you to bite me.”

  “We may later, if our master decides your claim is not legitimate.”

  “I look forward to that.”

  “As do we,” hissed the guard. Then it turned and snapped an order to its underlings. The doors began an arduous sweep toward them, pushing aside small carcasses. Ezo stepped back, along with TO-96 and Awen.

  “That was fairly impressive,” Awen whispered to him.

  “Eh, fight-or-flight instinct is pretty easy to sideline, if you know what you’re doing,” Ezo whispered back.

  “And if you don’t know what you’re doing?” Awen asked.

  “When you’re dealing with Reptalons? Well, you never live to tell about it, so I guess it all works out in the end. The bright side is you don’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “Right,” Awen said. “That’s a great bright side.”

  “You ready to meet Sootriman?”

  “Uh, I guess?”

  “Just remember, I told you to stay with the ship.”

  Chapter 25

  Magnus crouched beneath a freight container with his index finger on his MAR30’s safety. He’d taken point, insisting that everyone else find defensive positions farther back. Dutch had armed everyone else with MX13 subcompact blasters, ideal for close-quarters combat and limited-range fire. When the ramp went down, if the boarding party was anything but fawning over them in friendliness, Magnus hoped to unleash enough hell that his crew could exfil and find additional cover. They’d regroup and improvise from there. It wasn’t a good plan. In fact, it was a terrible plan. But given their current resources, it was the best he had.

  Magnus waited, forcing himself to slow his heart rate. Adrenaline did stupid things to your judgment. Sure, it could help in certain situations, but those were few and far between. It was always best to stay cool and pace oneself.

  The crew had gone to ground three minutes before, and the ship had touched down inside the Bull Wraith five minutes before. The supposed enemy force had already passed the standard breach-and-entry time line that Republic Marines trained on. What were they waiting for?

  “Any movement, Lieutenant?” Nolan asked over comms. Magnus had coded the handheld comms into his helmet’s TACNET.

  “Negative, Cap. They haven’t so much as knocked on the front door.”

  “I know I’m only the pilot here, but doesn’t that seem off to you?”

  “Affirmative. Either these are the laziest pirates in the galaxy or—”

  Or what? Why would anyone capture a ship but not breach it?

  “Or they don’t care about the ships and they want the hostages alive,” Magnus said.

  “The senator,” Nolan offered.

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” Magnus looked over the container at the ramp. “Splick, these bogies aren’t coming in. They’re just as happy to keep us—” He felt his stomach lurch and a brief wave of vertigo. “We just jumped into subspace,” he said to Nolan.

  “I felt it too, sir.”

  “Dammit.” Magnus didn’t like this. The more known variables, the better, and one more just got knocked off his list. Now they didn’t know who had them, why they had them, or where they were headed. However, Magnus was not completely in the dark. As he began to shape the mental battlefield to his will, intel started to reveal itself, even if it was incomplete.

  Whoever had captured them was more brazen and calculated than he’d given them credit for. Magnus realized that every act had been highly intentional—swift arrival, no communication, no boarding. And that worried him. Someone was following strict orders. Their situation was growing more desperate by the minute, and a single plan—a desperate plan—started to take shape in Magnus’s head.

  “Have everyone assemble here in the cargo bay,” he ordered. “New strategy.”

  • • •

  The senator and Valerie stood beside a small container with Piper sitting on top of it. Their flight crew stood next to them. Nolan and his flight crew took up the middle, flanked by Dutch, Haney, and Gilder to form the rest of a half circle.

  “I’m not sure how much time we have,” Magnus said from the center, “so I’m going to make this quick. The most important thing is that none of us lose our cool. We stay calm, and we all have a better shot of making it out of this without getting our”—he hesitated, looking at the kid—“without a scratch. Copy?”

  Various affirmations went up from among the group. Magnus smiled at Piper. “That means you and Mr. Cuddles there—”

  “Talisman,” Piper corrected, squeezing the stuffed animal tighter.

  Kind of a creepy name for a kid to use, Magnus thought. “You and Talisman gotta do your best to help everyone stay calm too. You got it?”

  “We got it,” Piper replied.

  “Now, we could be in subspace for hours or even days,” he continued, looking around at everyone. “It means once you get to where I tell you, you stay there. You stay hydrated, but you don’t move. I don’t care if you have to piss your pants—no one moves. Copy?”

  The group in front of him nodded and gave their verbal assent.

  “Good. Now the hard part. Without eyes and ears on the enemy ship’s bridge, we won’t know our destination port. There are elements of risk with every plan, and this is probably our biggest. Chances are, however, that we’ll be within emergency-pod distance of a Republic relay or habitat planet.”

  “Emergency-pod distance?” the senator asked. “Wait, do you mean to tell me that your plan is—”

  “To jettison every last one of us in the Bull Wraith’s escape capsules, yes.”

  The senator was clearly not excited about the plan. “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” he said, taking a step forward. “I don’t mean to discount your military experience here, but there has to be another way besides inadvertently flinging us into deep space or an uninhabitable planet. Plus, who’s to say that the enemy doesn’t circle back and pick us up?”

  “Senator, they’d more likely use us for target practice than pick us up.”

  The senator blanched. “Lieutenant, I’m not sure I’m following any of your logic here.”

  “Okay, first of all, they’re not going to shoot us down.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Under normal circumstances, yes, I said target practice. But whoever they want, their orders have been to take us alive.”

  “How can you be so sure?” the senator asked.

  “Because otherwise, they would have boarded us already. Someone wants at least one of us alive, and my credits are on you, Senator. But that’s beside the point. They won’t risk firing on any of the escape capsules for that very reason.”

  “So we’re back to them picking us up.”

  “Which they might do, but not all of us. They won’t have time.”

  “I don’t follow,” the senator said.

  “Assuming that this Bull Wraith was once a Republic heavy-armored transport, which it has to be since no other space dock in the galaxy that we know of is capable of making them, one of the very last things to get recoded are emergency pods.”

  “Their homing beacons are on proprietary Republic channels,” Dutch offered.

  “That’s right. And since every last one has to be recoded manually, they’re way down on the commander’s to-do list. As long as we all depart from the ship in different directions—”

  “The cavalry is bound to show up before most of us are recovered,” Nolan concluded.

  Magnus nodded. “And if we’re near a habitat planet, even better. They won’t risk an atmosphere reentry recovery. Far too dangerous.”

  “There’s only one problem, Lieutenant,” the senator said. “I’m not leaving my family.”

  Magnus had been afraid of that. Marines took orders and knew what it meant to sacrifice for the greater good. It was part of their warrior et
hos. But the family man, senator or not, was hard to reason with when it came to something he wasn’t willing to lose.

  That’s why you’ve never kept anything that close, isn’t it, Magnus?

  “Senator Stone, I understand that you—”

  “You understand nothing, Lieutenant, if you think for one second that I’m putting my wife and my daughter in two separate pods and placing ourselves at the mercy of the void.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Darin, my love,” Valerie said, approaching him from the side.

  “No!” the senator exclaimed, pulling away from her hands. “No, Valerie. This is not the best way. I can reason with whoever is helming this ship.”

  “You don’t know that,” Magnus replied.

  “I’m a member of the Galactic Senate, Lieutenant. And these people will listen to reason when the weight of the entire Republic is leveraged against them.”

  “Sir—”

  “Stop trying to reason with me, Lieutenant. There are other alternatives besides this foolhardy errand of yours. We reason with them, find a compromise, and no one gets hurt.”

  “Or everyone dies,” Magnus replied, “because you severely underestimated an enemy who is able to track down a disabled starship, get to it as fast as the nearest Repub rescue team, and then brazenly abduct the entire ship and its crew without so much as cracking a comm or breaching the ship. Whoever these people are, Mr. Senator, they are not going to reason with anyone, because they are playing by their own rules. They’re not afraid of you or me and certainly not afraid of the Republic.”

  He took a step toward the senator. He did not want to embarrass the man in front of his family or his staff, but he also didn’t want anyone to die needlessly, not on his watch. Magnus lowered his voice. “So trust me when I say, Senator, I’ve thought this through, and this is the best chance of survival that you and your family will ever have in a moment like this.”

  Senator Stone eyed Magnus hard. Magnus had the distinct impression that he was toe to toe with a man who’d stood up to the most pompous, sniveling bureaucrats in the galaxy and won. Stone was not a pushover. But neither was Magnus. Had the roles been reversed and they’d been in some political mess on Capriana Prime, Magnus felt he would back off and let the senator get them out of harm’s way. He only hoped the senator was thinking the same thing, because the alternative was knocking the man out cold and jettisoning him into the void against his will and without the ability to input course corrections. But Magnus would do it, if he had to, for the sake of everyone else’s lives.