by Rick Partlow
Fool.
He was surprised at the harshness of the thought. He hadn’t believed that the war still haunted him; yet here, with Vala-Kel, he knew it did. His old comrade sat on the other side of the cab, staring out the window into the absolute darkness of the high desert, silent for long kilometers now. Up ahead of them perhaps a hundred meters on the hard-packed dirt road, Kan-Ten could see the lights of the rover, the Matriarch’s private vehicle, leading them into the unknown.
“Will there be time to train?”
It felt blasphemous to break this almost worshipful silence, but the question had to be asked, both for appearance’s sake and because it mattered to him. Vala-Kel turned away from the window and peered at him in confusion.
“With the weapons,” Kan-Ten elaborated. He indicated the driver. “Many of our males have never fired military weapons before, or had limited experience in the war. Will there be time for them to train before we move?”
“Not much,” Vala-Kel admitted, indicating apology and regret with a gesture. “Our enemies will have no military weapons, and little training as well. We will overwhelm them with firepower and they will break before us.” He took hold of Kan-Ten’s shoulder and touched foreheads with him briefly in a gesture of comradeship and comfort. “Do not worry, brother. The Spirit of the True Emperor has ordained this to be.”
“You are so sure of this,” Kan-Ten mused. “Are you the True Emperor, brother? Are you his physical form with us? Do you believe this to be so?”
Vala-Kel didn’t respond immediately, and Kan-Ten wondered if he was pretending to be considering the question, but he knew his old friend’s face better than that. He did believe it, and he had for some time.
“Who can say?” the warrior finally answered the question with a question. “Would I know if I were? This is a mystery that can only be solved by action. We must hold onto faith, do as the Spirit Emperor would wish, and wait for him to manifest himself.”
“You sound as if you harangue the crowds at a war rally.” There was more scorn in the set of Kan-Ten’s shoulders and feet than he intended, and he hoped that the darkness concealed it.
Vala-Kel looked as if he were about to give in to anger, but controlled himself with a visible effort.
“Brother, I understand why you worry. Believe me, I do not intend to throw our males into a fire and hope that fate smiles upon us, the way our commanders did in the war. We are going to hit the Constabulary building, take them by surprise and take control of the fortifications there. Once we have an unassailable position inside their fortress, we can send probes out to seize control of the fusion reactor, the water treatment plant and the data and communications center.” He interlaced his fingers, clenching his hands together in a motion of strength and unity. “Once we have control of this city, the work is done; the other towns lack the troops and the firepower to oppose us. When Jordi Abdullah puts his people into position in the planetary government, the other humans won’t have any choice but to fall in line.”
“I will trust you, brother,” Kan-Ten told him, making signs of apology. “I pray you do not give me cause to regret it.”
“She is stopping.” That was the youth, their driver, and at his words, Kan-Ten’s eyes went to the distant running lights of the rover, saw them drawing closer as the vehicle slowed.
They’d followed the road into a box canyon, its red-tinted sandstone walls bleached white by the headlights of the vehicles, and now they were nearly at the end of it, and the end of the dirt track. Only a few car-lengths ahead, the headlights splashed into a steep rock face that climbed upward for twenty or thirty meters before merging into the edge of a plateau. Shadowed crevices in the rutted wall promised hidden mysteries, and it was to one of the recessed pools of darkness that the Matriarch went.
The middle-aged protégé exited the rover first, lithe and graceful, her twin braids swinging back and forth like pendulums across her back. Kan-Ten found it hard to keep his eyes off of her as she leaned back inside to offer a hand to her mistress. He shook himself, trying not to let the need control his thoughts. It had been years since he had mated and the idea of it was becoming hard to suppress, even when his mind should have been occupied with so much else more important.
The Matriarch seemed unsteady on her feet after so long in the car, and she leaned heavily on the shoulder of the younger female while another of her followers shut the door behind them. The car stayed in place, its headlights still illuminating the rock wall ahead for them as they walked.
Kan-Ten thought for a moment that Vala-Kel was going to remain in the cab of the truck and watch them, but he merely waited until the two females were a respectful distance ahead before he threw open the door and dropped to the rust-colored dirt below. He still had the pistol, tucked into a sash at his waist, and his hand strayed toward it, head darting around as if he expected an ambush. Kan-Ten climbed down behind him, still watching the females.
The Matriarch was feeling her way along the stones of the rock face, fingers dancing across them as if she were searching for a certain shape, remembered only by touch. Kan-Ten found himself feeling impatient with her, growing increasingly uncomfortable in the dead-end canyon. The walls seemed too close, the darkness too oppressive. Even the sky was overcast this night, as if it wished to slam shut the door of a trap and pen them inside, and his hands longed for a weapon.
“I have found it.”
The Matriarch’s voice drew his eyes back to the rock face, except it was different now, the shadows deepening in a section four meters tall and nearly as wide. He could hear the scraping of metal over rock and suddenly his perspective shifted and he perceived that part of the wall was fake, a camouflaged door that was swinging back into its dark recesses. The opening was like a black outline drawn on the rock, the headlights unable to penetrate more than a meter or so into its depths, and the utter darkness of it drew his gaze against his will.
Vala-Kel switched on the flashlight he’d taken with him from the cab of the truck, shining it into the blackness and revealing a matte grey door that stretched the whole length of the opening. Kan-Ten took a step closer, running a palm over the surface of the barrier; it was cool and smooth, with the feel of massive solidity to it, and he was sure it would stand up to anything short of a proton cannon.
The Matriarch slid her shoulder along the cold metal of the door until she reached the far-right side of it, then felt again with her fingertips, tracing a line downward until sections of the wall lit up in multicolored patterns. He thought he saw her face brighten at the display, but it might have just been a trick of the light. She weaved a complex pattern with her fingers along the lights, one he couldn’t follow or ever hope to duplicate, and he marveled that she’d been able to recall it after all these years. There was a tone that issued from the door or from the rock around it, rising and falling like the call of a night-flyer, and the lights flashed eight times before the heavy door began to rumble aside.
The driver was standing beside him, Kan-Ten realized, and more young males were moving up behind them from the second truck, an almost worshipful awe on their faces, but they stayed back and let him and Vala-Kel cross over the threshold first. Lights flickered on automatically with their passage, and walls too far away to see in the dark solidified into mosaics of green and white tile, inscribed with warnings about unauthorized access and stored explosives.
The sight brought back memories, most of them unwelcome, of endless days huddled in underground shelters on one planet or another, waiting out orbital bombardments for the landings that would, inevitably, come. He could imagine dust showering from the ceiling as Gauss cannon rounds and proton beams smashed down at them, imagined the fearful eyes of young recruits watching the support columns shake, and praying for them to hold up, and then fighting and running and endless retreating to the next world, to do the same thing over again.
Here, the only dust was collected on the surface of the packing crates stacked in cylindrical shapes in order
ed, even lines across a section of flat, unfinished concrete. There were sixteen crates in a cylinder, sixteen cylinders in all. He walked over to one and flipped the top; it was stacked with KE rifles, “needlers” the humans called them. They were fed from a drum filled with tantalum slivers, powered by a bank of capacitors in the stock, fired fully automatic from superconductive coils of electromagnets. Liquid hydrogen stored in a fat cooling jacket around the barrel kept the superconductors at a workable temperature.
He reached in and pulled out one of them; it had the familiar feel of an old and well-used tool and a quick check revealed that the capacitors were still charged after all this time. Vala-Kel checked another stack and held up a spare ammo drum, excitement and satisfaction writ large in his stance and his expression. Vala-Kel tossed the drum underhand to Kan-Ten and he caught it easily despite the weight, slipping it into a pocket of his shoulder bag.
“With these, brother,” Vala-Kel motioned, “we are unstoppable.”
Kan-Ten’s gaze went slowly past the rows of stacked crates, past a cluster of eight support columns, and into the dimmer lighting of the next chamber over and a feeling of elation welled within him, mixed only a heartbeat later with a cold, shuddering dread.
“No, my brother,” he corrected his old friend, pointing behind him, into the shadows. “With those, we are unstoppable.”
Vala-Kel turned and saw what Kan-Ten had seen, but his reaction was unreserved, almost maniacal glee.
Hunched over like ancient stone guardians, they loomed in the shadows, their dull grey camouflage blending with the slate-grey walls. Four meters tall and three wide, their humanoid shapes distorted by centimeters of layered honeycomb boron armor, the two High Guard battlesuits watched them with dead eyes, arms hanging at their sides. Yet it seemed to Kan-Ten that they beckoned to him, that they’d been waiting for him for all these years.
He’d come so close to dying inside that metal box so many times, had felt as if he’d cheated the Will of the Emperor when he’d emerged that last time alive.
I should have known…no one cheats death forever.
Chapter Nine
“You want to do what?”
The holographic image of Trisha Nassir’s face was screwed up in disbelief, her long, drawn, low-gravity features looking like a funhouse mirror version of a real person. The lightspeed delay only added to the absurdity of the image, since her reaction was seconds later than the words that had precipitated it.
“It’s a sound plan,” Captain Alcala insisted, arms crossed over his chest, feet anchored to the deck of the Savage/Slaughter lighter’s bridge by the magnetic soles of his ship boots. “And Captain Carpenter’s reasoning is air-tight.”
Michael Alcala was the mission commander as well as the captain of the Warlock, and Sandi had to admit she was impressed by the ship. Most lighters were slapped-together pieces of shit, with bypassed power routing cables hanging everywhere, and maintenance panels left off or thrown away because the weapons systems they’d jury-rigged onto what had been a light freighter were always shorting out. The Warlock was neat and tightly-run, and the crew were professionals, even if Jacobson was a bit of a douchebag. The bridge was quieter and more squared away than many of the Fleet cruisers she’d had the chance to visit during the war.
Alcala himself was a spare, short, unassuming man with wavy, dark hair that was barely regulation for a paramilitary organization like Savage/Slaughter, and a dark, unlined face that probably would have been ageless even without the nanite treatments. She thought he’d been Fleet during the war, but he was wearing a sidearm in a hip holster even here in deep space, which was the sort of deep-seated paranoia you usually found in Marines.
“Okay,” Nassir admitted after the obligatory signal delay, “I’ll admit that it’s likely that the raiders have a base in the system. There’s nothing else close enough for the turnaround times they’ve been pulling. But we need the Warlock and the Acheron on convoy duty! What happens if you go off on this wild goose chase and they come back and finish off the barge before you return?”
“We did some serious damage on this last attack, Ms. Nassir,” Ash told her. He looked uncomfortable there on the bridge of the lighter, and Sandi knew it was impatience; he thought it was a waste of time docking with the Warlock and speaking in person. He was itching to go hunt down the raiders and finish them off. “They’ll need forty or fifty hours for repairs, minimum, not counting downtime. We have a chance to root them out and put an end to this now.”
“Listen, lady,” Sandi interrupted, getting tired of the back and forth, “Ash and I have about exhausted every fucking trick we ever heard of keeping this barge in one piece, and it’s only been two engagements! The bottom line is, either we go find their base and kill the shit out of them, or your barge is toast.” She shrugged. “I get paid either way, I’m just letting you know.”
Ash shot her a reproving look, but she could tell he was smothering a grin. Alcala seemed amused as well, and wasn’t trying to hide it, but the rest of the bridge crew was studiously paying attention to their stations, and Sandi had the sense that it was because they didn’t want to piss off their captain.
Nassir sighed in resignation, scratching the back of her head in what seemed like a nervous tic.
“All right, where do you think they’re hiding?”
“We’ve been going over the data from your intelligence files,” Alcala told her, touching a control on his ‘link and calling up a map of the system that was projected beside Nassir’s image. “Anywhere in the asteroid belt is out of the question, of course; with all the mining activity there, someone would have noticed. Same goes for the primary gas giant and its moons; even though you don’t have any major mining operations there, you have the test facilities, and again, that sort of activity would be noticed.”
“It’s out at the ice giant,” Sandi cut in, earning a dirty look from Alcala. She didn’t care; he’d been milking the whole thing for dramatic effect. “The larger of its two moons has solid land mass, and water ice, and a thick enough atmosphere to hide their thermal signature from long-range telescopic scans.”
Alcala adjusted the projection and it zoomed outward, past the belt, past the system’s lone gas giant to the ice giant out near the cometary halo. It wasn’t much, as planets went, not as large as either Uranus or Neptune back in the Solar System, and it had only two moons worthy of the designation unless you counted a few small captured asteroids.
“We’re betting it’s in this area,” Alcala brought up a land mass near the moon’s north pole. “There’s water ice there, and some thermal activity that would keep the heat up enough that you could be outside in a regular vacc suit for a few hours without worrying about frostbite.”
“I’ll take the Acheron in on the opposite side of the ice giant,” Ash said. “Keep the drives cold until I can orbit around and get a good scan of the place, then transmit back to the Warlock. Then I’ll run air cover while the Warlock Transitions in and Sandi…Commander Hollande…flies a Savage/Slaughter trooper lander down with an assault team.”
“Don’t you have your own lander pilots?” Nassir wondered, frowning.
“I do,” Alcala acknowledged, “and they’re both very talented, but neither has the sort of real-world combat experience that Commander Hollande does. Since we have her, we may as well put her to work.”
“Ash volunteered me,” Sandi accused, making a face at him, “just so he could get more stick time on the Acheron.”
She was lying, of course; Ash would be worried sick about her taking the troops in. But she’d known if she hadn’t volunteered, that he would have, especially since it was her turn to fly the cutter.
He’s too damned noble for his own good.
Ash didn’t respond, and she was fairly sure he knew exactly what she was doing and wasn’t happy about it. But he wouldn’t say anything, because he also didn’t want her to think he was being overprotective.
We have such a good relationship.
Sandi wanted to feel sympathy for the harried woman, but couldn’t muster any. If Nassir wound up resigning, that would very likely mean they were all dead.
***
The door exploded inward from the impact of the sole of her boot and Korri Fontenot launched through the opening, throwing herself down into a shoulder roll and coming up to a knee, Gauss pistol outstretched.
Nothing. The room was dark and unoccupied, and no alarm sounded. It held no furniture, only stacks of plastic storage bins up against a wall, covered in layers of dust and discolored with age. Just what you’d expect for a utility room connected to a roof access door.
She stood, ducking back through the door and waving for Singh to enter. He was crouched on the ledge, looking down off the third floor of what had been a fabrication center before the economic collapse. The alleyway below was clear; no one had seen them climb the wall, and she hadn’t seen any sentries posted. She wouldn’t have expected Jordi to be so sloppy.
Singh was inside the room in a single, bounding step, pushing the door shut behind him, not looking the least bit inconvenienced by the pitch blackness inside despite the fact he wasn’t wearing any night vision gear.
More implants, she thought. Unless the eyes are still bionic. She perversely hoped they were. It didn’t seem fair that he could do most everything she could do without the prosthetics. She idly wondered how much it had cost him.
“Down,” he said softly, motioning with the barrel of his Gauss machine pistol toward the next door over.
