by Blaze Ward
Retain the Empire itself when someone came along and demanded that a woman stand aside. That they return to a past that had already failed, rather than move forward into a future where the Peace with Aquitaine could hold, while she fought the war with Buran.
Centurion Kasimira zu Wiegand. Emperor Karl VIII of Fribourg, by Grace of God.
Casey was willing to live within the corset of responsibility that came with that mantle because it came with power. But she could dream of a better world, if she could just hold the locals together for a decade. If she could bring her father’s dream to fruition. Win the Peace. Save the galaxy.
All that in a flash of insight. Casey hadn’t been able to articulate it, even to herself, until now. She needed Arlo. Needed his strength. Em didn’t understand the power of Vo’s words, the spell Casey was sure had been woven around the people fighting to save the world around them. As it had her.
On the screen, they were coming in to land. She had lost track of it consciously, but tracked it in the back of her mind.
The 189th had cleared a chunk of the landing field of starships, and filled the space with tanks and ground craft instead. Casey could see a lone bulk freighter, the kind that hauled grain between worlds, unloading into a line of trucks, over in another corner of the starport.
The shuttle came to earth with a soft lurch. Casey was used to hard landing decks on ships, or concrete runways, so the ground underneath the ship compacting under the shuttle’s weight threw her mentally off balance just a little. Reminded her that she was on the surface of a planet again, for the first time in over a year.
She was an alien in this place. Princess Kasimira had gone off on her adventure to Aquitaine two years ago. A stranger had returned wearing her flesh.
Around her, the shuttle began its shutdown sequence, engines falling silent, unneeded. It had served its purpose, a steed bringing her to the field of a new battle.
Casey unbuckled her harness and rose, stretching shoulders and back that had gone rigid with the tension of the last few hours. Moirrey joined her a moment later, as did Em and the several men that had accompanied the flight. Torsten Wald had remained so silent on the flight, wrapped up in his reports and notes in a corner behind her, that him standing and smiling grimly at her was a surprise, like a ghost had just materialized on the deck.
Casey drew a breath and brought herself back from squirreling in on herself. That hadn’t been acceptable before. It had even less place in her life now.
“Em, Moirrey, Torsten. Thank you,” she said.
There were so many other things to say. She needed to remember to say them.
On the viewscreen, a swarm of vehicles moved closer. Skiffs and tanks coming in to protect her.
Men placing themselves between her and any danger. She would never again be alone, for good or ill. Casey pulled her cloak a little tighter around her shoulders and turned to the hatch.
Em was there already, along with Moirrey and several marines from Indianapolis. Casey moved to join them on silent feet.
She had put her foot down against a big, formal production here. These men needed to be doing their jobs, not spending a week welcoming her home with bands and banquets.
Em watched a small screen by the airlock for a few seconds, grunted to himself, and then triggered the switch. Both doors opened and a small ramp extended.
Grand Admiral zu Wachturm went down first, his black day uniform and matching overcoat a stark contrast to the snow everywhere.
Moirrey zu Kermode followed, her maroon cloak billowing out as her feet churned. She looked like blood had pooled, when she came to rest next to Em, turned sideways for Casey to walk past.
Torsten completed the set in a blue and gray civilian suit, three less likely cohorts she could barely imagine, but they stood in front of a line of troops drawn up in cold weather gear.
Casey sniffed once. The cold, bitter air had almost no smell, but it was home. Her home. The place she had come from. The world she was returning to.
She stepped into the small vestibule of the airlock and then out onto the ramp. The men drawn up on both sides were at attention. Not many, as she had demanded. Just enough that they could see her and report back to their friends. Not so many that work wasn’t getting done.
Arlo was there. General Vojciech zu Arlo, Commander, 189th Legion, Expeditionary.
Standing 181cm tall, Casey was used to being as tall as most men who weren’t immediate blood relatives. Em was taller, her father’s size at 186cm, but Arlo was a giant. Two meters even. And he massed easily twice what she did, even with the muscles she had developed from acrobatics and dancing with sabers.
She stopped at the bottom of the ramp and turned to face him and the men he had arrayed behind him. Faces she recognized from the Color Guard of the old 189th Division. The men who had helped Vo save the Empire the first time.
His face might have been carved into the stone of a mountain by an ancient team of artisans. He was not a pretty man. Not even ruggedly, compellingly handsome, in the way her father had been and her uncle remained. He wasn’t a troll, either, though, as much as he might call himself one, but perhaps a mountain man, come down to the valley in the spring for supplies and to have his beard shaved off, before returning to the wilderness for another year.
Cast in bronze. But she knew that. A force of utter nature that would not be brooked nor denied. Nothing less stubborn than him would have managed as much as the reports she had spent a day reading suggested. And he was a poet underneath, which she had never even guessed about the man. His written words gave him away, so she had gone back and listened to the welcoming speech he had given to the 189th when those men volunteered to serve with him nearly a year ago.
Truly, a leader.
He had brown hair, cropped shorter than would be comfortable in this weather. Brown eyes almost light enough to be called hazel. Lines that might have been etched by those same stone masons as could have immortalized him into a mountain.
“zu Arlo,” she said with a welcoming nod, speaking louder than necessary over the soft wind, and enough that the men behind him would hear.
“Your Majesty,” he rumbled back at her.
Casey looked at the others here to welcome her. Blinked in mild shock when she realized that one of those men was wearing the rank tabs of an Army Field Marshal. Then she recognized Arald Rohm’s grim face, and wondered how that particular man had come to be here. Em had probably not gotten through that story well enough to send it on to her.
She made a note to ask, later.
A bigger shock was clear down at the far end of the first row, at the opposite end from Rohm.
There was a girl in uniform. Standing at attention with the men. As if nothing was wrong with the world at all.
Such women were common in Aquitaine, where they were encouraged to serve. Casey had had to take the Imperial Throne itself in order to be allowed so simple a thing. She made a note to ask there, as well.
That story intrigued her far more than Arald Rohm.
“It’s cold and nasty out here, General,” Casey brought her eyes back to Arlo, towering over her like a fortress. “Let’s get inside so you can brief me on what I need to know. And the men can get warm.”
Vo nodded to her and stepped out of line. She felt like she was standing next to an oak tree as he glanced down and back at her, and then walked down the two lines of troops escorting her.
Looking back, Casey saw Em, Torsten, and Moirrey, joined by Rohm and two other men she didn’t know on sight. A transport skiff had been parked close by.
Arlo went in immediately and stepped to one side, so Casey followed. The interior had the feel of a staff car rather than something that soldiers rode into battle. The Navy didn’t waste much time or money on comfort in jumpseats, so she presumed that the Army would be the same way. Instead, these were leather seats with good padding to ride comfortably. A ceiling high enough that even Arlo was able to stand upright as he had walked to a nearby
seat.
Quickly, everyone was in and buckled.
“All set, pilot,” Vo said aloud.
The skiff moved to hover, and then transitioned to flight in a smooth curve. How one was supposed to transport an Emperor, she supposed, rather than how the Army did it.
Vo pointed out the others.
“Field Marshal Arald Rohm, on detached duty,” Vo said ambiguously. “Alan Katche, Primus Pilus of the 189th. Reese Borel, Command Decurion of the 189th.”
Casey smiled at them. Rohm’s story she would get soon enough. Katche and Borel were Vo’s right and left hands, from the reports she had consumed. It was Vo, that she was gambling on.
“Grand Admiral zu Wachturm,” Casey stressed the new honorific, granting her uncle the right to truly speak for the throne, rather than the assumption that decisions made in haste and emergency would be acceptable later.
“Torsten Wald, Chief of Deputies,” Casey continued. Civilian head of Karl VIII’s government. Her only voice, until the House of Dukes could be reconstituted, and the House of the People re-elected.
“Moirrey zu Kermode of Ramsey,” the Emperor concluded.
Jessica’s Evil Engineering Gnome needed no more introduction to these men, but they needed to remember that she could also speak for the throne.
Like Vo could. The galaxy had turned into the strangest place Casey could have imagined, once upon a time.
Now she just had to take ownership of that future, and shape it into the place she needed it to be.
Part 4
Expedition
Chapter XXXIII
Date of the Republic Jan 11, 402 GSC Ballard, Stanovoy
The bridge of the Galactic Survey Cruiser (GSC) Ballard was quiet, this evening. Watching from the darkness, as they did.
Hide with pride.
Normally, Kanda would have happily sent one of the smaller escorts, like CP-406 or even CS-405 into the breach here. GSC Ballard was not a warship, even if she had guns. She was too valuable to risk in front-line confrontations with hostile navies, except in the worst emergencies.
Like holding an entire flank for Jessica at Thuringwell.
However, GSC Ballard had something neither Glenn nor Kosnett had: the best Science Officer in the fleet, bar none. Senior Centurion Elzbet Aukley.
This was not a mission to locate stations and defenses around a hostile planet, prior to a simple raid. Almost any of the corvettes could have handled that task just as easily.
No, this required an artisté.
They weren’t here to merely locate every ship that might shoot back. Jessica wanted to kill things. To unleash the merciless wrath of Tom Kigali and Alber’ d’Maine. To have the metaphorical gutters running red with freshly-spilled blood in Stanovoy’s orbit.
To do that, Jessica needed to know where every single vessel in orbit was located, where it was headed, and how quickly it could escape the devastation First Expeditionary was about to wreak on them, including a simple survey cruiser. Kanda and her crew owed Buran a debt of pain as well. Being explorers and not berserkers didn’t lessen the fury they felt at what those people had done to St. Legier.
It just made it that much more important that the rage be tempered for now. Held at bay while scanners listened and Elzbet marked vectors. A fox, waiting at the edge of the barnyard as the chickens settled into their coops.
Ballard was about four light hours out from Stanovoy. They would miss some targets, just because the signals intelligence they gathered was that far out of date. However, there was nothing down in closer that suggested any sort of military awareness.
This was a civilian system in all the ways that mattered. There was a rich asteroid belt, thicker than the one once reputed to share the home system. A couple of planets down in the habitable zone. A few lesser gas giants farther out in the cold.
Seventeen stations in orbit, most of them commercial ones of one sort or another. Truck stops. Foundries. Chandleries for small ships that mined the rocks left here during planetary formation.
One hundred and ninety-three signals indicating a ship big enough to make it to orbit, or to move around in deep space. Those tended to be clustered around the stations. Picking up. Dropping off. Hanging around waiting their turn for docking.
Chickens settling to roost.
“Time?” Kanda called.
Elzbet checked her boards and looked up. Every sensor was quietly drinking as fast as it could, feeding everything to the woman seated at the sciences station, a warrior no less fierce than one of d’Maine’s Goddesses.
“Two minutes,” Elzbet replied.
“All hands, stand by for maneuver orders,” Kanda called over the comm.
They were already at battle stations. Had been since they dropped out of JumpSpace three hours ago. Waiting.
In two minutes, the rest of the battle squadron would join them, led by Vanguard. At this point, every minute of delay meant that someone farther out might have noticed Ballard, hiding in the darkness, figured out what she was doing, and run down to the authorities at Stanovoy to warn people there was a wolf in the hills.
Jessica wasn’t even waiting to review the targeting plan as laid out by Elzbet. That was how much the Fleet Centurion trusted them. Trusted her.
And First Expeditionary wasn’t going in as a formation. Elzbet was routing every warship onto a different vector and orbit, one that maximized the amount of targets they could hit, with the minimum amount of maneuver. As long as no new Buran warships suddenly cropped up, and none had been seen, this would be a mob action.
A chime drew Kanda’s attention.
“Vanguard and VI Victrix,” Elzbet announced. “Transmitting now.”
In seconds, the rest arrived. VI Ferrata. CA-264. CE-401. CE-402. CE-403. CM-404. CS-405. CP-406. II Augusta. Each got a file, acknowledged it, and blinked out of existence.
“We’re last,” Elzbet said quietly.
“You have Tactical,” Kanda said.
She watched Elzbet turn to Centurion Lazlo Moushian across the gap.
“Pilot, your course has been laid in,” Elzbet growled. “Take us into Jump.”
Chapter XXXIV
Date of the Republic Jan 11, 402 IFV Vanguard, Stanovoy
Jessica almost felt bereft, sitting on the flag bridge of the Heavy Dreadnaught Vanguard. This wouldn’t be a fleet action. She wasn’t sending well-constructed maneuver plans and firing solutions to the ships around her, guiding them in. Ballard had handled that. And done it well, from what she had reviewed.
No, today she was seated in her flag bridge with Enej still off to her right, rather than directly across the table from her, as if Casey would join them at any moment and take her space with a warm smile. Around the two of them sat the rest of Enej’s flag team, men and women watching their boards but mostly silent.
Vanguard was going in alone. First. Warlord of Battle.
She knew Denis and Nina had been looking forward to today with something approaching glee. Aukley had spotted two Hammerheads in orbit, escorts roughly the size of the old destroyer class Jessica had commanded a lifetime ago. Rubicon or Vigilant. Smaller than Brightoak, but not by much. Still, more than enough to take on one of the corvettes.
Completely out of their league against an Expeditionary Cruiser, to say nothing of a Heavy Dreadnaught coming out of JumpSpace.
The countdown clock ticked to zero. Nina’s targeting channel was routed down to the flag bridge, not because Jessica would get involved but so she could listen. Nina was in charge until something happened that required a bigger decision.
“Gunnery, we’ll be bringing him down our centerline,” Nina called. “I want him hammered with the Bubble Gun as soon as you have a lock. Follow that with the Type-3’s into his bow and then the second targeting location designated. You have your other targets for the Type-4’s in firing sequence, with Anna and Laura turrets targeting the station itself. I want the platform knocked down hard before he can get off any missiles. Rachel and Zebra to go af
ter that pair of what look like big bulk freighters waiting in close orbit to dock.”
“Roger that,” Centurion Afolayan replied.
He had been with them since the early days and knew how to lay the guns the way Nina demanded.
Jessica gritted her teeth rather than override. She knew what Denis and Nina were up to. Had even approved it in the general planning sessions. But it made her nervous to actually try.
However, if they could succeed…
“Emergency Bridge, you have control of the waist and aft Type-3’s until I override,” Nina continued. “Same rules. I have laid in the targeting sequence I want pursued, but the Gunner is going to be facing forward and doing brain surgery. I want you splattering things. You’re good at that.”
“Acknowledged, Tactical.”
Jessica could hear the blush in Tobias Brewster’s voice as he replied. She flashed back nearly a decade to the time she had chewed that kid’s ass after that first, disastrous training run at Simeon. The young man had redeemed himself at Qui-Ping. Turned into a pretty damned good officer along the way.
As well as being an artist with big guns who still held the training sim record for accuracy while tumbling in a cruiser-sized vessel, even if he had done it for real.
He had chosen to stay here, with them, when offered the chance to be promoted to a true First Officer slot somewhere else.
Somewhere likely to be far more boring.
“Stand by,” a new voice came over the channel. “Ten seconds.”
Nada Zupan. Pilot Extraordinaire. Jessica could imagine her pony-tail bobbing to some internal beat as her hands flashed back and forth across her control board.
A pianist intent on defeating Rachmaninoff.
Jessica drew one last breath. It was all out of her hands now.
She had trained this team. Forged them. Pushed them. Washed out very few. Said goodbye to a few more who had wanted to retire rather than have another adventure. Amazingly few.
