by Blaze Ward
Inside his suite, the hatch closed with a snap.
Torsten took Jessica’s hands in his and faced her from close enough to kiss.
She waited for him to speak. She always had. Jessica Keller was like that. Torsten Wald would have to cross the chasm. He had created it in the first place.
“Circumstances have conspired against my carefully laid plans,” he said quietly.
She watched him with a twinkle in her eyes. It was an inside joke between them that he always spoke as if addressing an academic conference. Inside the Palace, most audiences were, to some extent.
But the grin was there. The support. The rapport. The love.
“Given the impossibilities of my task, this is the only way left for me to ask,” he continued.
Having a left leg that ended mid-femur with a titanium implant that in turn connected to a hinged knee joint meant that Torsten could walk without a hitch, and stand without the shifting balance issues he had faced when he wore a sleeve over his stump.
It made kneeling, however, a carefully choreographed event.
Pitch the hips to clear the artificial foot’s friction on the carpet. Draw the leg back so he could lower himself with his good leg onto the artificial ball of a knee that zu Kermode had designed for him. Settle his weight on the implant and push his good leg forward.
Never once lose his hold on her hands.
Torsten looked up from the floor to see that Jessica had gone white. She had done a masterful job of containing her emotions earlier, when Casey, when the Empire, had needed her the most. But they were alone now.
Torsten had still managed to surprise her. It was good that he could do that, especially with this woman.
“Wildgraf Keller of Corynthe,” he began in a ritual tone he had practiced dozens of times in his head. “Will you do me the honor of joining your life with mine? Of becoming my wife, and I your husband, to the end of our days?”
The little gasp told him all he needed to know. The tears clouding her eyes. The smile.
“I will,” she managed, dropping to her own knees and wrapping her arms around him.
Torsten could taste the tears as he kissed her, unsure if they were hers or his. It didn’t really matter.
After a time, they settled.
“So,” she began lightly, grinning. “You had not expected this timing. Does that mean you do not have a promise ring for me to wear, to warn other men off?”
Torsten shared her smile.
“I have not, milady,” he answered with whatever grand dignity he could manage, given their place on the floor of his cabin. “And I could not, because the number of conspirators required would be too great.”
“Conspirators?” Jessica asked.
“I have it in my head that the person I should ask to make our rings would be Michelle Ali al-Inverness,” he offered.
“Fourth Saxon’s Armorer?” Jessica laughed.
She had a lovely laugh.
“But for Fourth Saxon, and Vo Arlo, we would not be here, Jessica.”
She sobered at that.
“We would not,” she observed before grinning again. “Will the new Emperor give her blessing to this union?”
“If she will not, then I will petition Aquitaine’s Senate personally, as a matter of state.”
“Oh, Torsten,” she sighed and leaned into him. “You have no idea how much you delight me. I look forward to dragging you off to Corynthe one of these days and forcing you to teach economics to a group of semi-reformed space pirates.”
He smiled and kissed her, forcing himself upright on his good leg and drawing her up as well so they could simply embrace.
He faced an impossible task. With her love, he could prevail.
Chapter XXIII
Date of the Republic Dec 7, 401 Forward Base Delta
Yan held his peace as the others loaded onto the shuttle across the landing bay. It was a dignified effort, if a bit weird to watch. When was the last time an Emperor carried her own duffel bag, snarling at the poor marine who had expected to carry it for her?
Wachturm emerged, once they got Casey and Moirrey aboard, and walked over to where he and Ainsley had stationed themselves, well off to one side by the airlock hatch. Best ticket in town.
“You’re sure you wish to remain here, Bedrov?” the Grand Admiral asked, coming to rest like an avalanche at the bottom of the hill. “There will be few new ships for the war effort at this point, while I work out what St. Legier needs and how we address things.”
“I can always hitch a lift with the Mailman, Grand Admiral,” Yan replied. “With my office and staff annihilated, there is no place other than Penmerth that would be a better place to work. Plus, I need to drop another revolution on that bastard.”
“Pardon?” Wachturm asked.
“Buran,” Yan clarified. “He’s starting to react to Jessica and you. Eventually, he would figure out how to counter all the current changes, if I let him. I need to make the music faster and faster, until he trips and breaks a leg. This is as good a place as any to work. I’ll send requisitions in if I need things more than Whughy already has stashed here.”
“Good enough, Bedrov, Barret,” Wachturm said. “I’ll have II Augusta back with her new flight wing, soon enough.”
Yan watched the giant turn on his heel with the grace of a much smaller man and stride off towards the shuttle. Yan didn’t envy the task they faced. And there was little he could do to help, other than to be another mouth to feed, or another expert with an unwanted opinion.
Instead, he turned to Ainsley. The woman who had defined herself for so long as da Vinci, pilot extraordinaire, before becoming his partner in crime.
“Planning to keep you kinda isolated from Merman and his crew of lunatics,” Yan said, referring to the Senior Flight Centurion in charge of II Augusta’s Wing. All but two of the man’s pilots had volunteered for the new flight craziness Yan was about to unleash. With folks stepping up from Auberon, Merman had managed to fill the thirty-six crew slots for his twelve fast bombers.
She answered him by way of a single, arched eyebrow, but the amount of sarcasm she could contain was simply unmatchable by any other woman he had ever met.
“We need to go completely crazy,” Yan continued. “Back of the notebook weirdness like nothing we’ve ever come up with before.”
She grinned.
“Us?” she even managed to sound blameless, rather than his unindicted co-conspirator. “Innocent as the driven snow here, bubbles. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Three steps ahead of where that bastard thinks we’re going to be tomorrow,” Yan replied as the shuttle lifted in a whine and backed carefully through the lock seal into deep space. “Three steps.”
Chapter XXIV
Date of the Republic Dec 9, 401 Forward Base Delta
Arott waited patiently for Oz to finish reviewing the executive summary at the front and some of the wiring diagrams at the back of the report. He had learned the lesson of paper originally from Jessica, and it had been reinforced by Admiral Wald and Fribourg’s fascination with the printed word. And it added a weird smell to his office to have stacks of paper, both printed and just waiting blank, stored here.
Oz had been greedily consuming the document for nearly fifteen minutes while Arott watched, sipping at his lemonade and trying to project the sort of personal professionalism that had always been his hallmark.
Arott was way outside his comfort zone today.
Finally, Oz arranged the pages into perfect alignment and placed them on the desk between the two men. He had a wry, knowing smile that Arott found extremely disquieting.
“Will it work, Oz?” Arott blurted.
Command Engineering Centurion Vilis Ozolinsh, universally known at Oz these days, affected a dry, withering look. He did that well, related to three of the wealthiest, most elite families in the Republic. Oz had been born with a platinum spoon in his mouth. And fallen in love with engineering, to the chagrin and
dismay of his family. And turned into a goofball, somewhere along the way.
“You could ask her yourself, Arott,” Oz observed with a grin Arott could only classify as evil. “She won’t bite.”
Arott harrumphed sourly.
“I have a reputation to maintain, I’ll have you know,” Arott replied. He and Oz had never been close, but they had run in many of the same circles twenty-five years ago, before the Navy claimed both of their souls. “Dry, stodgy, and academic.”
“And yet,” Oz’s grin grew even wider. “You could have been a pretty good engineer if you hadn’t had your heart set on ultimate command. What’s wrong with Moirrey knowing you designed this system, Arott?”
“Flights of fancy, Oz,” Arott countered. “Not my signature at all. And I wasn’t even sure it would work. That’s why I need someone like Moirrey to investigate.”
“Oh, it will work just fine, Fleet Centurion,” Oz replied. His smile had not lost a lumen of power. “I’m not sure I understand the tactical implications, but this sort of thing is purely an engineering problem, and you’ve done a very credible job of laying out your needs and your proposed solution. Someone on her team could take it to the next step, and then she or maybe Yan Bedrov could design and build a test system for you. You still haven’t answered my question.”
Arott paused to find the right words. He was pretty sure he could ask Oz to take credit for the design and not let the truth out. He just had to convince the man that it was a task worth doing.
“Arott Whughy is a by-the-numbers, stick-up-his-ass perfectionist, Oz,” Arott finally offered.
“Who has managed to build the strangest, most-unnaval vessel I have ever encountered, and run it effectively,” Oz fired back. “With no blueprints, no backstop, and only the vaguest suggestions of direction from Jessica. I’m familiar with the concept, Arott. Something like this will seal your fate with the Engineering Corps when you finally take over for Petia, one of these days.”
And it would. They both knew it, but that wasn’t the point of this conversation.
Arott sighed. He would have to tell Oz the truth. Bastard.
“Oz, if this comes from me, they’ll think I miss line command and want to get back into the saddle again,” Arott admitted, to himself as well as to the engineer. “My little secret? I’m past command, mentally. Running a base is an order of magnitude more complicated than a warship, even Auberon, and I’ve never been happier in my life.”
He paused as he reflected on those words. They were God’s honest truth, and he had never even whispered them aloud.
“Robbie, Alber’, and the rest of the fire-breathers can have the glory of close combat,” he continued. “I’m preparing to take over Fleet Headquarters at Ladaux, for my next command, if Petia will let me. And then her job as First Lord of the Fleet in five or eight years.”
“Oh, shit, you’re serious!” Oz was finally, genuinely surprised.
It felt good to surprise the man. Nothing Arott Whughy ever did was supposed to surprise people.
“Deadly serious, Oz,” Arott said. “And we need to win this war, and do it fast, because Buran is bigger than Aquitaine and Fribourg combined. Given enough time, they’ll grind us down and win.”
“Okay,” Oz shifted in his seat and flipped the document back open to the executive summary’s design diagram. “So what does this type of weapon gain us?”
“A Type-2 beam is good for engaging fighters, and escorts if you get close enough for a crazed, jousting run, like Jessica’s people are known for,” Arott explained. “With the new Type-1-Pulse, it has fallen out of favor. Similarly, with the redesign of the Type-3 into a tunable model, you can either have point-blank firepower or extreme range.”
“And sequencing a Type-2 rapidly?” Oz asked. “Why not a single, hard pulse of a beam, like the others?”
“Those Power Absorbers they use leak, Oz,” Arott said. “I’ve spent a lot of time studying scan logs and video. And they aren’t monolithic. It isn’t a hemisphere they cover, although it looks like it. Each is a separate channel, covering a very specific zone of the ship. It’s there in the notes of Appendix F. If I’m right, we can spike a single panel hard with the modified Type-2. While the target panel and its neighbors will catch it, a little bit of the energy should bleed through and hit the hull, instead of splashing up to be captured by the neighboring panels like our other beams do. Icepick him, instead of a shiv. Not much difference, but maybe enough.”
“Kigali?” Oz asked, leaping beyond what they needed, and landing on who should test it.
“Honestly?” Arott countered.
Oz nodded.
“Kosnett on CS-405 or Glenn on CP-406. Kigali won’t give up his guns, even for a little while. Plus, the other two will approach this like artists, instead of berserkers.”
“Point taken,” Oz said. “But if this works out and upends warfare again, you’re getting all the blame.”
He smiled. Arott returned the smile. He could live with being associated with it, at that point. By then, it would be too late to move him back to line command, even to a Heavy Dreadnaught. He could settle into station command. And eventually, First Lord of the Fleet.
It was obvious, at least to Arott, that Jessica Keller was never returning to the RAN.
Chapter XXV
Imperial Founding: 179/12/19. The Death Zone, St. Legier
Maybe it was that year of living and training and fighting with Fourth Saxon, Vo decided as the blizzard outside his window seemed to step up another screaming notch. Very little in this world bothered him anymore, at least when it came to weather.
The Death Zone, what they had taken to calling the area that had been the capital region of St. Legier centered on Werder and the Imperial Palace, had decided to have an unseasonably cold and wet winter. With the amount of damage done to the planet, Vo wasn’t surprised.
Back home, tectonically-active planets occasionally got tremblers all the way up to Nine on the ancient Richter scale, a logarithmic method of measuring energy release that dated back to the lost homeworld.
Logarithm. Vo wasn’t a scientist or a mathematician, but he had dated both in his time. He had learned enough to know that a Nine was ten times was powerful as an Eight. A hundred times more powerful than a Seven, which were the ones that significantly damaged badly-engineered cities.
The ground effect of that bomb, according to a planetologist they had located, was somewhere around Eleven and a half, maybe, centralized. The shields had held just long enough to absorb some of it. Plus it was directed down, instead of up. A massive shaped charge impacting the planet.
It had still annihilated the city and the surrounding region.
Had it been an asteroid striking ground, the heat alone would have killed everyone over a much larger area, perhaps a thousand kilometers. And then kicked up enough dust and molten rock to darken the skies and block the sun for years.
Weather patterns all over the planet were reacting in bad ways. But it also wasn’t even the earliest storm to drop nearly a meter of snow in the area in the last generation.
It still complicated his work to find survivors, get them to safety, and keep food and supplies flowing in.
It was an Extinction-level event for a bronze-age civilization, and it might still overwhelm them here.
How do you explain to someone that two hundred million people might starve, on the capital world of an interstellar empire?
“Reese,” Vo called over his shoulder, bringing himself back to the place where he was supposed to be, in charge of the men leading the effort. “What’s the latest from orbit?”
There was a pause. Vo wondered if he still occasionally startled his men. He would sit silently, meditating on his sins for long stretches, before speaking. They might think he had turned into a rock.
“According to Admiral Provst, we should be getting two big freighters of foodstuffs in the next eighteen hours, at drop points six and fourteen, plus he managed to swap out another squa
dron of ships, so he’s scraped us up another six hundred or so marines as a labor force soon.”
Vo called up the map in his head and studied it. After the coup, he had taken the time to memorize maps of St. Legier in much greater detail. Most of them were no longer relevant, describing streets and neighborhoods that were only memories now, but the regional terrain was still more or less intact in many places.
“Drop them on the southwest side,” he decided. “Put them down on the lake shore itself with orders to build up docks and wharfing facilities. The Emperor might decide to put her new capital down there, given that it mostly survived, and we can use the water to transport heavier cargoes from a longer distance without roads. Add a note to have someone locate me the furthest distance we can easily move a barge and figure out where to build or expand a starport to service it.”
“Roger that, sir,” the man replied.
Vo went back to the snow. It was probably a metaphor, blanketing everything in cold, malevolent death, but he’d be damned if it would stop him. He’d be damned if anything would defeat him.
“Sir, you need to see this,” another voice, a grim one, chimed in.
Curator Stolz. Reese Borel’s right hand, as Reese was his. The tone guaranteed Vo’s attention even faster than the words. The whole point of the team he had assembled was that they could handle most tasks, needing him only to approve decisions and step in when things got delicate.
Or messy.
Vo turned from the window and located Stolz across the command room they had assembled. It was warmer in here, but all the assault skiffs were parked right outside the door where Vo’s pistol belt hung if he needed to be in the field quickly.
The room had fallen almost to silence around them, with only the sound of the furnace blowing hot air in a corner.
Stolz tapped the screen in front of him as his general approached. Vo followed the finger and read the note without emotion. It was a message from Admiral Provst’s staff about someone suddenly requisitioning a vast number of civilian airliners and heavy lift aircraft.
