Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  The main lobby resembled a dozen different offices of its stripe Jean had seen. Benches full of men and women, each having taken a number and waiting to be called to one of the windows at the front of the room.

  Lieutenant Ravid Nibhanupudi had run the office for the UESF a year before. When the new Militia had started opening their new recruitment centers and taking over the old UESF facilities, he’d popped out of the woodwork and volunteered.

  The dark-haired and hooked-nosed officer was waiting for the Admiral just inside the door, a broad smile on his face. He’d had about three hours’ notice of this inspection, but he seemed confident in his tiny command.

  “Admiral Villeneuve!” he greeted Jean. “Welcome to the San Francisco recruiting office!”

  At the sound of Jean’s name, the crowd in the room began to murmur, the recruits turning in their seats to get a look at him. He recognized several of them and guessed that most were ex-UESF crew.

  “Lieutenant,” he greeted Nibhanupudi. “It’s good to see you again.” Stepping past the officer, he surveyed the crowd. The room had chairs and benches for about fifty people—and there were easily still thirty standing. A better turnout than he’d been hoping.

  “And it’s good to see all of you,” Jean said loudly to them, falling back in the old habits of decades of inspection tours. “I truly appreciate the trust needed for you to sign on for the Duchy’s new military.

  “That you are willing to extend that trust to the Duchess and I means a lot to us both. While our new status still leaves the A!Tol with primary duty for our defense, neither I nor the Duchess are prepared to leave Earth’s security entirely in the hands of aliens!”

  That got him chuckles and smiles, and he surveyed the room again. He recognized one of the young women from his Orbit One staff and was about to cross over to her when he heard Corsica shout.

  “Down! Everybody down!”

  The big man slammed into Jean from behind, throwing the old Admiral to the ground as two of the waiting officers opened fire with submachine guns Jean hadn’t seen them draw—but Corsica had.

  Raoul Corsica was many virtuous things: big-hearted, intelligent, deft-handed…but he was not fast. Knocking Jean out of the way only left him in the line of fire, and gunfire echoed in the tiny office.

  Corsica fell heavily, landing across Jean’s legs with a pained exhalation and visible blood.

  “Get them out,” he whispered. “Get them out.”

  The distinctive hiss-CRACK of a plasma weapon firing crashed through the room as Jean’s bodyguards returned fire, their energy weapons far deadlier than the attackers’ old Terran-built slugthrowers.

  Jean saw what Corsica had seen as he followed the line of fire. There was a big duffel bag at the feet of one of the men who’d opened fire. Several people had bags in, but if these guys were shooting…

  “Ravid!” Jean shouted, still covering behind a row of chairs that was proving surprisingly bulletproof. “Get them out!” he echoed Corsica loudly. “Get everyone out!”

  The two surviving shooters were between most of the people in the front room and the exit, but Ravid Nibhanupudi earned his promotion in the following seconds as he reacted instantly. Grabbing a chair, he flung it through the nearest window and shattered the glass.

  “Go!” he snapped at the closest recruits. An alarm started sounding in the background, an evacuation alarm in the back offices no one here could see.

  “Down!” one of Jean’s bodyguards shouted to the Admiral, moments before more bullets sliced through the air above his head.

  “The wall!” the bodyguard ordered, then opened fire with his plasma carbine. The overpowered weapon ripped gaping holes in the brick and plywood, blasting a two-meter-wide hole in the wall with a handful of bursts. “Go!”

  The shooters were moving, retreating toward the door while they tried to keep up fire on both Jean and his bodyguard. A scream and the smell of burnt flesh announced that at least one wasn’t making it out, but Jean wasn’t watching.

  He was dragging Corsica toward the hole in the wall. He’d known he was old, but he’d never felt every year of his age as badly as he did right that moment—and was prayerfully grateful when the woman he’d recognized before joined him, helping drag the big noncom to the gap in the wall.

  They didn’t, quite, get out before the bomb blew.

  #

  Chapter 12

  “What the hell happened?”

  Major James Wellesley winced as Bond’s voice echoed over his communicator.

  “I don’t know yet,” the Ducal Guard’s commander answered, checking the systems on his power armor as the shuttle shrieked across the sky.

  With an interface-drive shuttle, the trip from Hong Kong to San Francisco was a matter of minutes, but even that could be the difference between life and death. He should have had a power armor squad on standby in the area—he had, in fact, had such a squad until Bond had left.

  “What I do know is that three of the people in the line at the recruiting station pulled guns once they realized the Admiral was there, and opened fire,” he continued. “They also had a bomb, so I’m guessing their original plan was to leave that behind and blow the place to hell once they’d left.”

  “So, they changed their plans once they had Jean in their sights,” Bond replied grimly. “Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know,” James admitted. “We’ll be on the ground in twenty seconds, which puts us less than a minute behind local EMS.”

  “Keep me updated,” the Duchess ordered. “And James?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “If at all possible, get me a prisoner.”

  #

  McPhail put the shuttle on the ground with an actually gentle touch for once. James didn’t get a chance to appreciate it, though, as he was out of the shuttle door the moment they came to a stop, still five meters above ground.

  “Tellaki, take your troopers, cover the rooftops,” he snapped to his senior Rekiki Guardsman. The big aliens looked like a crocodilian centaur, but they also wore even heavier powered armor than the rest of his people and packed heavier weapons.

  The pack that had attached themselves to Bond were also entirely, unquestionably reliable. Something to do with their culture and genetics requiring the “vassal” caste—closer to a subspecies, even—to follow a noble they’d sworn fealty to.

  He didn’t want them as the face of the operation—that would fall to him and the dozen former Special Space Service troopers he’d brought—but their firepower could make a lot of difference if the Weber Network wasn’t done playing.

  “Sherman, perimeter close around the office,” he snapped to the Troop Captain leading the team with him. “Locate Admiral Villeneuve, clear the EMS through to him and the other wounded.

  “If any of our ex-comrade fuckheads are still breathing, I want them alive,” Wellesley told his people calmly, letting his anger slip through only in his description of the Weber Network as he strode toward the wreckage that had been the recruiting office.

  There were still sirens approaching, but four police cars had pulled in to block the streets and cover the ambulances that had already made it. The officers had broken out the shotguns and rifles they presumably kept in their storage compartments, and formed a preliminary perimeter to keep the wounded safe.

  “I am Major Wellesley,” he greeted the cops. “Ducal Guard. We’ll take over security from here, but I won’t forget this. The Duchess won’t forget this. Thank you.”

  “It’s bad,” the senior cop told him. “Two ambulances here, another half-dozen on their way.”

  “We have medical evac dropping from Tornado and Defense One,” James promised him. “Everyone will get the best treatment available—I don’t care if they were ours, were waiting to talk to a recruiting officer, or were just walking down the street. Everyone.”

  “We found the Admiral, sir,” Annabelle Sherman told him over the radio. “He’s alive but unconscious and injured. Looks li
ke he caught the fringes of the explosion; his bodyguards have done first aid and are waiting for the ambulance.”

  “Good,” James said with relief. The consequences of Villeneuve dying at the Weber Network’s hands would have been…dire.

  “How bad is it looking, officer?”

  “It could be worse,” the cop admitted. “Your people busted open the windows and the walls and evaced hard. We’ve concentrated on securing the perimeter, but I think we got lucky.”

  The policeman’s face twisted.

  “‘Lucky’ being relative, of course.”

  #

  The evacuation shuttles started landing shortly afterward as James was making his circuit through the wreckage of the building. He ran the security footage as he carefully stepped through the debris, confirming what he’d suspected to be true from the moment he landed.

  Two of the three shooters had been killed, shot by Villeneuve’s bodyguards. The third had retreated through the door before triggering the explosive. The recruiting office’s security footage didn’t show where he’d gone.

  “Sherman, get your electronics people on the cameras around the building,” he ordered. “Someone got away. I want him.”

  There was a pause.

  “Hells yes, sir. We’ll track him. Medics have the wounded; we’re starting to sweep the building for the dead.” Sherman paused again. “I knew some of these people, sir.”

  “We all did,” James said sadly. “Maybe not this batch of recruits, but we know somebody like them, willing to give the Duchess a chance because they knew us.

  “And then these bastards blew them up.”

  There was going to be hell to pay for this mess, one way or another.

  #

  Jean woke up feeling like he’d been run over by a truck, and then tried to sit upright when memory caught up with him.

  “Easy, sir,” a smooth voice with an educated South African accent told him. “You weren’t as badly hurt as others, but you did get tossed several meters.”

  The Admiral coughed, rising more slowly as he glanced over at the Doctor. “Where am I?”

  “Tornado. I am Doctor Jelani,” the black man told him. “My staff and I have been helping deal with the aftermath of the San Francisco attack.”

  “How bad?”

  “Could have been worse,” Jelani answered. “I don’t think I’m supposed to brief you; Major Wellesley came aboard a few minutes ago.”

  “What about Chief Corsica and Lieutenant Commander French?” Jean asked. French was the young woman who’d been helping him pull Corsica to safety.

  “Lieutenant Commander French didn’t make it,” Jelani said sadly. “She was hit in the throat by debris and bled out before rescue teams arrived.

  “Chief Corsica is alive, though he’s probably the most badly injured of the survivors. The gunfire severed his spine and punctured his intestines, and then both of his legs were shattered in the explosion.

  “We had to amputate both of his legs,” the doctor continued. “With the damage to his spine, I’m not certain we will be able to regenerate or even hook up cybernetics.”

  He sighed.

  “Of course, the advanced state of his cancer isn’t helping,” Jelani noted. “We’re having to fix that to enable proper oxygenation as we work on his gut. He’ll live. I don’t know if he’ll walk.”

  “Thank you. His warning probably saved everyone—he saw both the shooters and the bomb before anyone else.”

  “I saw the footage,” another voice interrupted, this one with a perfectly educated English accent. “If Corsica hadn’t been paying attention, they would have shot you dead and probably blown the whole place to hell.”

  “Did we get them?” Jean asked Wellesley as the Guard commander stepped in and took a seat.

  “Your guards nailed two. The other fled. We traced his movements across half the city, but we lost him in the end.”

  “We got an ID, though,” he continued, looking furious. “Troop Captain Yuval Hrabe. American of Czech extraction, joined the Special Space Service twelve years ago. Almost certainly the team lead, definitely one of ours.”

  “Weber Network,” Jean concluded.

  “That was my assumption from the beginning, but confirmation hurts. Hrabe trained with me,” Wellesley noted. “I knew the man, never thought he’d go in for a terror bombing.”

  “How bad?”

  “We lost eight staff members and fourteen recruits,” the Major said with admirable calm. “Three innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time were killed as well, and we have a hundred and fourteen people in hospitals on ship, station or in San Francisco.

  “Corsica’s warning preventing it from being much, much worse,” he continued. “I’m glad he lived.

  “We need to do something about the Network, Admiral.”

  “That’s Bond’s call,” Jean admitted to the other man. “I was intentionally never briefed on the details of the resistance plans. She knows more than I do, and so far, she’s wanted to soft-touch them to try and bring them in.”

  “It seems they didn’t see the same plan.”

  #

  At some point, Annette would get around to establishing an official residence for the Duchess of Earth somewhere in Hong Kong. So far, however, it hadn’t even made her radar, which meant she continued staying in the penthouse suite of the Lucky Dragon.

  She couldn’t really describe what she was doing as living there. She was barely in the room for longer than it took her to sleep as she ran from one meeting to another across the planet.

  Running a world would have been time-consuming enough without trying to upgrade that world’s industrial, medical and military technology at the same time. It was challenging, draining, and exhilarating all at the same time.

  If people would stop trying to kill those who entered her service, she might even start enjoying herself.

  Three attacks in twenty-four hours, starting with the attack in San Francisco. The other two had gone off simultaneously, but warning from the first incident had kept casualties down.

  She suspected the San Francisco team hadn’t been able to resist the opportunity to try and take out Villeneuve and had wrecked the plan. That hadn’t stopped the Weber Network from killing sixty people and injuring hundreds—the vast majority of them the ex-UESF personnel her Militia desperately needed.

  Once again, Annette pulled out her old UESF communicator and navigated to the hidden menus, linking to a different drop site this time.

  “Weber Network…idiots,” she said slowly into the camera. “From the fact I even have this drop site, you should be beginning to realize I know a lot more about the Protocols and the Network than you think I do.

  “I was prepared to let you disappear, but you’re straining my patience. If you don’t want to help me, fine, but this is your final warning:

  “Kill any more of my people and I will turn this planet inside out to find you. I will dig you out of your holes and drag your crimes before the whole world to see—if you survive the process.

  “No more warnings. Join me, disappear, or die.”

  Uploading the message was probably a waste of her time, she knew. If the Network had decided to make her their enemy, she was going to have to burn them out—and that was going to require Imperial resources.

  Her Militia ground forces remained limited. She could lean on local police for a lot, but if she wanted to take on a global resistance movement, she was going to need to bring in A!Tol Imperial Marines.

  She was considering how to phrase the request to Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh to borrow a battalion of his Marines when her old UESF communicator chimed, the tinkling friendly noise of wind chimes that she’d set as her ring tone when she’d received the device over a year earlier.

  “Bond,” she answered it after a long moment.

  “Annette, this is James Mandela,” a familiar-sounding voice said in her ear. “We last spoke when the A!Tol were attacking Earth.”

&nbs
p; “Rear Admiral,” she greeted the man after a moment’s thought. Rear Admiral James Mandela had been the shift commander at the Orbit One Command Center during the invasion.

  “I take it the Weber Network got my warning.”

  “Your first one, yes,” Mandela said calmly. “I’m guessing from your tone there was a new one in response to today’s stupidity.”

  “You…have my attention, Admiral,” Annette told him. “Stupidity” wasn’t how she’d expected a man she presumed to be high up in the Network to describe the attacks they’d carried out.

  “This line is secret but not secure,” he replied. “Certain people can’t realize we’ve spoken, and I’m not yet prepared to place myself in your hands, Annette.

  “You’re supposed to be in Pretoria tomorrow, seeing my cousin. Meet me in ten hours, exactly, in front of the statue of Nelson Mandela there. Bring whatever security you feel is necessary, but be quiet. Lives are counting on it.”

  “Very well, Admiral,” Annette agreed. “If this is a trap, don’t expect to survive.”

  “Annette, my survival is no longer my top priority.”

  #

  Chapter 13

  “Are you in communication with your cousin at all?” Annette asked Hope Mandela as the South African Councilor’s aide poured their coffees and bowed himself out.

  Mandela had an office in an older tower on the south side of Pretoria’s downtown core, built in the mid twenty-first century. It had been carefully decorated with subdued taste and had a fantastic view of the Nelson Mandela Memorial Park named for her ancestor, a chunk of greenery and older buildings intentionally preserved as the South African administrative capital had expanded.

  “I have, at last count, seventy-two people, ranging from age seven to seventy-three, who could be considered first or second cousins,” Mandela pointed out with a sigh. “But I know who you mean, and I doubt you’re asking without reason.