by Rick Partlow
"Mithra," Logan muttered. That invasion had taken place more than four centuries ago.
"...send this message on a continuous loop as long as the generators hold out. I'm directing it..." More static. "...human worlds farthest away from the Jeuta incursions in the hopes rebuilding will begin there." A long burst of static erased the next few words. "If anyone hears this...if there's anyone left who can, and who can reach us...this system…”
The static-filled transmission ended with a touch of Terrin’s finger on a control.
“It breaks up for a few minutes,” he explained, “then repeats again.”
Logan grabbed his brother by the shoulder and pulled him around to face him, his own pulse pounding in his ears.
“Tell me you have a location.” The words seemed to come from someone else, too intense and focused for his own voice.
“We do,” Kovalev answered for him, a tight smile breaking through his grey-shot beard.
He leaned over one of the control consoles and touched a button to activate the main monitor. It flickered to life with a star map, one Logan recognized immediately: it was a chart of all the known jump-points, the weak points in space time where the Kadish-Dean drive could penetrate through to the gravito-inertial pathways between stars. The jump roads were a cross-hatch of red on the map, a spider-web connecting the galaxy from one stepping stone to the next, and superimposed over the road map were the borders of the five Dominions.
Sparta was a blue globe running along the inner borders of the old Empire, toward the galactic center, encompassing dozens of stars and over a hundred habitable worlds, though there were only a half a dozen large enough to support more than a single city. Sparta was not at the exact center of the globe; instead, it hugged the far corner, only a few light years from Clan Modi. Modi sprawled in neon yellow, more jagged and irregular than the globular cluster of Spartan stars, sending rays of inhabited space into the gaps between the other Dominions, incursions not rich or important enough for the other governments to contest them militarily.
Off the shoulder of Modi’s smoothest border was an elongated saddle shape outlined in green, the size and scope of the Dominion indicative of its political power. There were no political labels on the map, but there didn’t need to be: the shape was iconic and every school-child knew it as the Imperium of Mbeki, the self-aggrandizing name their way of claiming to be the last remnants of the Old Empire. They weren’t, not in any meaningful way, but they kept the trappings, the names, the offices and the pompous self-importance. They were not to be taken lightly, for all that; they also kept what they considered Imperial discipline.
Across the outer flank of Mbeki and Sparta was an orange disc shape, smaller than its fellows, though he knew the size was deceptive and the real story was the tangled weave of red gravito-inertial pathways intersecting in the star systems of the disc. The Shang Directorate controlled key star systems with connections leading all over the Five Dominions and out of them to enemy-held territory. The tolls they collected from those possessions were the source of enough wealth to build them an impressive military. They didn’t use it for attempted conquest, happy to simply extend their commercial enterprises and shipping monopolies, but you didn’t enter Shang space without permission… not even if you were the looming, menacing magenta sphere butting up against them.
The Starkad Supremacy occupied nearly half the territory of the former Empire of Hellas, the strongholds of the Outer Reaches where civilization had held on with a brutal, iron hand in the face of civil war, revolt and invasion. Tens of billions had died in the decades after the fall, entire star systems had been sterilized in a paroxysm of mindless violence, and he supposed he couldn’t blame Lord Senator Starkad for seizing power and enforcing order to save what was left. At some point, though, the need for brutality and paranoia had passed and the practices had become tools to retain power.
Very effective tools, he admitted, with the sort of stark pragmatism he’d learned from General Constantine.
“The signal came from here,” Kovalev explained.
He traced a line with his finger from Sparta through the Shang Directorate… and straight on into the Supremacy, out the other side and into an area with no designators for the planets and only strings of numbers to label the stars.
“In the Shadow Zone,” Logan said, voice and mood suddenly swinging from hopeful to grim.
The Shadow Zone was a colloquialism, a sensationalistic label his Academy professors would have chewed him out for using. The technical designation for the area was long, boring, and academic, the Unrecovered Imperial Possessions. It wasn’t adequate to describe the wasted, irradiated worlds littered with the wreckage of what had been a thriving galactic civilization, but military history professors weren’t trying to write poetry.
“And the only way in,” Terrin added, “is through Starkad-controlled space.” He shouldered past Kovalev and pointed out the jump-points between Sparta and the projected source of the transmission. “But if it’s really Terminus…”
Logan hissed out a breath, leaning back against a console behind him. One of Kovalev’s assistants, a pinch-faced woman he’d never met before, shot him a dirty look, probably because he was sitting on something important, but he didn’t get up. He couldn’t. This was Terminus Cut. This was a bed-time story his mother had told him, a legend of a lost Imperial Navy research station, supposedly filled with advanced weapons and technology, things even the Empire had considered cutting-edge.
“If we can salvage anything,” he mused, mostly to himself, “if anything’s left…”
“I am not a weapons designer,” Kovalev said softly, as if he were embarrassed to speculate, pressing his palms together, “nor have I ever been in the military, but as I understand it, the technology available in a place such as Terminus Cut would revolutionize the current military and technological relationship between Sparta and the other Dominions.”
“You could say that, Doc,” he agreed, running his hands through his hair. It was even longer now; he’d meant to have it trimmed when they’d returned from the patrol and the battle at Ramman, but Katy had told him she liked it longer. He speared Terrin with a glare. “We have to take this to Dad. I need you to go with me.”
“You should bring Dr. Kovalev,” Terrin told him, turning away but not quickly enough to hide the sullen expression on his face. “Dad would take him seriously.”
Logan blinked, straightening up, noting out of the corner of his eye the relieved look on the assistant’s face as he got his ass off of whatever instruments and controls he’d been sitting on.
“Where the hell is that coming from?” he wondered. “Of course Dad takes you seriously! He’s always been proud of you.” He shook his head, waving the subject away before Terrin could blather on about it anymore. “That’s not important now, we have to take this to Dad and General Constantine.”
He rounded on the two assistants present in the observatory control room. The woman still seemed irked with him, while the younger one, a man, seemed disinterested in the whole conversation. They both looked up at his stare.
“And only to them,” he added. He turned to Kovalev. “All three of you need to keep your damn mouths shut about this.” He’d seen the face Colonel Anders made when the man was dressing down a junior officer and he did his best to channel it as his eyes went back and forth from the two grad assistants to the astrophysicist. “If any word of this gets out, any chatter from our enemies, a rumor floating around the faculty lounges, a fucking drunken slip in the local bar, I will find out. The Guard Intelligence keeps an ear open for this kind of thing.”
Which might or might not be true; he hadn’t the slightest damned idea.
“And if any of it gets out, even a hint,” and the Colonel’s admonishing expression was exchanged for his own, more directly threatening one, “you’re going to get an unpleasant personal visit from an Internal Security team, and you will never climb out of the hole they throw you into.” A pause a
nd he saw the two students blanche, although Kovalev didn’t seem as alarmed by his words. “Am I clear?”
The assistants looked uncertainly at Kovalev and each other, but the astrophysicist nodded firmly.
“I understand completely, Lord Guardian,” he said without hesitation. “Not a word will come from anyone here. I will make sure of it.”
Logan nodded, his instincts telling him he could trust the man. He gestured at the control panel where they’d run the recording.
“Get me a copy of that message on a data crystal now,” he directed Kovalev, “and an analysis of its source.”
The astrophysicist gestured to the male assistant and the man nodded quickly, grabbing a blank crystal from a small cabinet mounted on the wall, then inserting the tiny, quartz-like spike into a socket in the control panel. The information was stored with a couple of strokes across a touch-screen and the young man pulled the storage spike free and handed it over to Logan with exaggerated care. He weighed the data crystal in his palm for a moment, gazing into the faceted depths of it, as if the secrets of Terminus Cut were visible there, then he stuffed it into his jacket pocket.
“I’m leaving my bike here,” he said to Terrin, grabbing his brother by the arm, tugging him along. “We’re taking your flyer back to the palace right now; I’ll call ahead to have Dad and General Constantine there to meet us.”
“This time of night?” Terrin objected, trying to pull away. Logan didn’t let go; he didn’t squeeze any tighter but he made it clear the course of action wasn’t optional. “Dad is dead asleep right now!”
“And I would be, too,” Logan reminded him, “if you hadn’t thought this was important enough to get me up here in person.” He held up a hand, palm-out to stop his brother’s next objection. “And you were right. It was. And now it’s important enough to wake up Dad.”
Terrin was still squawking the whole time Logan pulled him down the stairs and out into the chill of the high-mountain night, but his voice seemed distant, his words indistinct. All Logan could think of was the balance of power tying the hands of the military, protecting bandits, pirates, and Jeuta raiding parties from retaliation just because they crossed an imaginary line in space, through a jump-point where Starkad or Shang let them pass because it suited their interests.
At its height, just before the fall, the Empire had perfected the star-drive, at least if the old histories were to be believed. No one now alive knew how it had worked, not a single record had survived in the worlds of man, but it had allowed them to travel faster than the speed of light through normal space, not restricted by the jump-points. If the Spartan Navy had the star-drive, their ships could bypass the central jump-points and the defenses clustered around them, could hunt bandits down wherever they tried to hide.
He thought of Katy and made her a silent promise. If Terminus still existed, he would be the one to find it.
“If this is real,” Donnell Anders declared, “we have to find it, and as quickly as possible.” He rubbed at the back of his head in what Logan recognized as a tic to hide his exhaustion. “Someone else is going to discover this message, Starkad or Shang or even the Jeuta. Right now, we might have a head-start, but eventually…”
Jaimie Brannigan nodded, pacing back and forth across his office, hands clasped behind his back. He was dressed in casual, civilian clothes, as were the others, adding to the surreal atmosphere in the room. In all the years he’d known General Constantine, Logan had never once seen him with one hair out of place, one stray wrinkle or misplaced crease even in his impeccable civilian clothes. Tonight—this morning, he corrected himself—Constantine was in what seemed very much like the T-shirt and sweatpants the man had worn to bed, and his hair was tousled and nearly as spiky as Lyta Randell’s.
She was there too, arms crossed, back to the wall, watching the others silently. He didn’t think she’d said a word since he and Terrin had arrived, leaving the questions and commentary to the senior officers.
“You’re right, of course,” Constantine said to Anders. “But need I remind you all of the elephant in the room here? Even if this is real, even if it is the Terminus Cut of legend, it’s on the other side of the Supremacy. There’s no way in hell we’re going to sneak a military force through their lines, and I sure as hell wouldn’t go into the Shadow Zone without some sort of warship.”
“What about a Q ship?” Logan asked, daring to venture a suggestion, emboldened by the presence of his father, since it made his own involvement seem more in the execution of his duties as the possible heir to the office, rather than as a lowly Mobile Armor platoon leader. “You know, like the bait ships we send after pirates? Armed but with an exterior like a freighter or a passenger transport?”
“Not a bad thought,” Jaimie Brannigan said, then dismissed it with a wave of his hand, “but even a Q ship wouldn’t make it through the interior systems of the Supremacy.”
“You need a backstoppable cover for that,” Lyta Randell put in, and he was surprised she’d broken her silence. She was still leaning against the wall, her eyes alert but weariness seeming to drag her down like heavy gravity. “You need to have a legitimate reason for taking arms across the borders.”
“You sound like you have something in mind, Captain,” General Constantine said, managing to eye her shrewdly while simultaneously trying in vain to pat down the wild hairs standing up on the side of his head.
“I do, sir,” she admitted, straightening and pushing away from the wall. “Something like this, if we want to do it right, it’s going to take a long con. Weeks, maybe even months.”
“Do we have that kind of time?” Jaimie Brannigan wondered, glancing over to Terrin.
Terrin seemed shocked that his father would bother to ask his opinion on the matter and it took him a moment to formulate an answer.
“I think we might have a few months,” the young man said. “Someone might pick up the raw transmission, but it’s broken and corrupted, and the only way we were able to decode it was with an algorithm Dr. Sandhurst came up with over at the University for cleaning up the data from deep imaging pictures from the radio telescopes. No one else has it yet outside the school.”
“Nicolai,” Jaimie said, jabbing a finger at the General, “get with the University President this morning and get that algorithm classified ASAP. I don’t need it carrying off on some inter-school announcement web and spreading all the way to Starkad.”
“I will do it now,” Constantine said, pulling out his datalink and typing in a message.
“So,” Colonel Anders interjected, bringing the conversation back to Lyta Randell, “say we have months. What’s your idea?”
“We need a way to get armed troops and at least one, armed ship through Shang and into Starkad space without anyone twigging to our involvement,” the Ranger officer outlined. “There’s only one way to do that as far as I know.” She cocked an eyebrow and Anders nodded slowly as he finally understood.
“Mercenaries.” He nearly spat the word out, face screwed up in distaste.
“They’re all over the Periphery, the non-aligned systems, the border systems with the Jeuta,” she ticked them off on her fingers. “Anywhere not important enough to warrant the Dominions sending troops, anywhere they can’t send troops because it’s too close to a border and would destabilize relations with the other states.” She smirked. “They tend to have colorful names and even more colorful personalities in charge of them. Goddard’s Goddamned Cowboys, Mehta’s Maulers, the Metal Fist of Vishnu…” She spread her hands. “They’re mostly nuts, but with a legitimate commission from a local system, they can get through borders.”
“It’ll be tricky,” Constantine warned, eyes still on his ‘link, still tapping out a message. “You’ll need someone we can trust, someone who can think on their feet.”
“Donnell,” Logan’s father decided, snapping his fingers and pointing at Colonel Anders. “You can do this.”
“No, he can’t,” Constantine corrected him, not ev
en looking up at his ruler’s annoyed glare. “Starkad Intelligence has files on our senior officers, and Shang’s spies are even better, and we don’t have time for reconstructive surgery.” He finally glanced up. “Captain Randell could go, but we’ll need a Mobile Armor contingent.” He shrugged. “The mecha are the selling point for these hired guns. Usually the mech commander is the overall commander, simply for status.”
“Then who the hell…” Jaimie Brannigan began, but Colonel Anders interrupted him, which surprised Logan nearly as much as what the officer said.
“I think you should send Lt. Conner.”
“Me?” Logan blurted, wincing at the inanity of it.
“What the hell are you on about, Donnell?” Jaimie demanded, stopping his pacing, arms hanging at his sides as if he were about to leap across the room. He glanced between his son and the Colonel. “Why the hell would I send my son, a platoon leader, a Goddamned Lieutenant, on what could very well be a suicide mission?”
If Anders was intimidated, it didn’t show on the straight, classic features of his recruiting-poster face. He clasped his hands behind his back in an at-ease stance, respectful but not backing down a centimeter. His words were clipped-off, precise.
“Sir, we have a dilemma: we need an officer we can trust implicitly, yet we can’t send any senior officers because they’ll be too well-known. We have to send someone the rank of Captain or below. Who else of that rank, of that age, would you be able to say you’re sure is completely loyal to Sparta and to you?”
“And we need them now,” Constantine interjected, finally looking up from his datalink, shoving it back into a pocket. “This is going to take months and we don’t have months as it is, even if this,” he gestured at where his ‘link had been, “manages to shut down that algorithm before Shang or Starkad can get their hands on it. We sure as hell don’t have weeks or months to pick someone for the job.”
