by Blaze Ward
Casey listened to tones as Moirrey leaned in and centered the man in her gunsights. Bad cop, perhaps?
“I was given to understand that he assigned you to take command of Strasbourg’s infrastructure tasks and had Admiral Provst eventually drop nearly a regiment of marines for the task.”
“That was later, Lady Moirrey,” Rohm replied simply, quietly. “On my second day here, serving under his authority, I was out in the field with Cutlass Ten. That was the day we recruited Trooper Ames, and I began to realize how far I had fallen from the man I was supposed to be.”
Casey marveled at the choice of words. Recruited. She would have expected Rohm to say rescued, or something similarly dismissive of a woman living rough. And he called Victoria Ames Trooper.
“But that wasn’t the day I realized the true depths of my error, Lady Moirrey,” Rohm continued. “Roughly a week later, we found…”
Casey watched the hardened soldier stop dead and clamp his mouth shut, eye dilating, as if he was holding back tears.
Arald Rohm?
“What did you find, Field Marshal?” Casey finally broke her silence.
This was not the Arald Rohm she had been expecting. Leopards and spots, but something had changed about the man. Something significant enough to alter his very trajectory.
Casey wondered if it had been for the better.
“We found…” he paused again, drawing a heavy breath in and releasing it before he matched her gaze.
“We found an elementary school, Your Majesty,” Rohm finally said. “The bomb had knocked the entire building over. Most of the children and teachers had been killed by walls falling in and other debris, but a few had survived, at least long enough to die of exposure a few days later. Burying those children was the single hardest task I have ever faced. And I did it myself, ordering the others away. I finally understood then the magnitude of what zu Arlo goes through every day. Went through, creating the order we have from the shattered chaos left behind.”
“I see,” Casey said, watching the anguish carve new lines in Arald Rohm’s face as he relived that day.
“Afterwards, Daffidd de Bruyne and Thaddeus Gunderson, two of the men of Cutlass Ten, took me back to base and stayed up with me, getting me very drunk, and then making sure someone was with me all night, and in the morning,” Rohm said. “That was point when Vo sent me off to Strasbourg. He knew the truth.”
Casey leaned back and sucked a quiet breath. The man seated across from her suddenly sounded more like Em or Tom Provst than the peacock he had always been before. That had been a reason he had been assigned to Santiago, rather than High Command in Werder. Grand Marshal Jenker hadn’t liked the man at all, but found him to be a competent general, an assessment Em had echoed.
Vo had spoken of Rohm in better terms, but had also been there that next morning, obviously.
He knew the truth.
Torsten glanced over at Casey. She nodded.
“What is the status of your command at Strasbourg, Field Marshal Rohm?” Torsten asked as the emotional energy bled out of the man.
Rohm stared at the Navy man for a long second.
“Commander Withers is prepared to take over for me immediately,” he replied, deadly serious. Resigned, if not relaxed. “In case I needed to be removed from command today.”
So, an intelligent man, after all.
Casey had wondered at the thought processes that might accompany an order to attend the Emperor privately, and alone. Especially when she might have an axe to grind with the man. He could have been tried for mutiny. Possibly still could technically, if someone had determined that Rohm should become an example for the rest.
Certainly, Karl V would have carried through Vo’s threat to have Rohm’s head on a stake. But her great-grandfather had been an ass, to read even the official, laudatory histories.
“Do you think you should be relieved, Field Marshal?” Torsten continued.
Casey had never appreciated just how implacable a voice that Torsten Wald had when he wanted to use it. But she supposed she had never been in a position where he needed to use it on her. Only for her.
“I serve at the will of the government and Her Majesty,” he said, carefully enunciating the legalism involved in a voice bereft of any emotions whatsoever.
“And if we determine that you should be transferred to another command?” Torsten ground on.
“I serve,” Rohm repeated. “Life with the 189th has taught me something about the uniform I wear. Reminded me. For them, the simple words We stood are enough. Because they did. They stood firm and unbending, and continue to do so. I serve an oath. It was only in field with them that I came to recall, to appreciate what that oath meant. The costs to the men, and women, that I serve with. If you have a place other than Strasbourg where I should do my job, you have but to order. What is your will?”
Mentally, Casey revamped her list of prospective bridal options. Wiley stayed on it, but Casey could see moving this man closer to the heart of power with a good alliance. Not that she would ever consider him, but he had done something to redeem himself for the last ten years. Perhaps it would be enough.
Torsten turned to look at her. Casey nodded again. She had been apprehensive before, knowing how much that she needed this man. His rank, his birth, and his place in the Army made him a potentially powerful ally, or a terrible enemy, should she have to excise him.
But he had apparently gone into the fires and come out purified. Vo had seen it. Recommended him. Others had agreed.
He knew the truth.
Casey had still needed this. To know the man’s soul.
“Our will?” Torsten announced. “It is to have you take Anthohn Jenker’s place as Grand Marshal of Imperial Land Forces, for the purposes of rebuilding the Army.”
Casey felt bad, but only internally, watching the man recoil in surprise, even just a little bit.
“But I thought Arlo…” he trailed off before completing the thought.
“We will have other tasks for zu Arlo,” Casey proclaimed. “As Grand Marshal, you will be required to assist him.”
Rohm nodded, sharp and short.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” he replied quickly as his voice turned wistful. “I had just hoped to be there with Cutlass Ten, when they first hit alien dirt.”
That caught her off-guard. Casey had been thinking about Vo in the present tense, not that future where he had gone off to wreak his terrible vengeance for the deaths of Annette Fuchs and Annette’s father, Walter. When he left, and she remained behind to hold together an empire with men like Torsten Wald, Emmerich zu Wachturm, and Tom Provst.
And Arald Rohm.
Could they succeed?
Would it be enough?
Chapter L
Date of the Republic Mar 15, 402 IFV Vanguard, The Ruins of Yenisei
Jessica was reminded of the planet Bunala, far away home in Corynthe, looking at the devastation around them on the screens of the flag bridge. The planet known on the rims as The Boneyard, with hundreds of ancient starships, both warships and freighters, abandoned on the surface in one, long rift valley on the southern continent. All of them had been methodically stripped in ancient times of every bit of valuable kit, leaving only the metal skeletons behind, rusting and crumbling slowly in the sand and dust.
Yenisei looked like that today on all screens, every direction. With the added benefit of the pieces tumbling in three dimensions as the gravity and atmosphere of the world below dragged at them with inexorable fingers. And ships dying in real time. Another quiet system, slightly off the beaten path and more of a regional hub for trade than Stanovoy had been. At least until yesterday.
There had been a Mako in orbit. Past tense. Deep enough down that he might have had a chance to escape, given the edge of the gravity well above him as a tidewater mark for Expeditionary vessels. Even for Alber’ or Kigali.
He should have been safe.
Ballard had taken the lead for the team this time, dropping do
wn on a hard, slingshot orbital path that brought her onto the Mako’s rear flank at high speed. A cannon firing from that range might have warned the Sentience of the Mako that something was amiss, but two sudden searchlights of ECM: hard, electronic static from Ballard, had blinded and confused him for just long enough, drawing his eyes down and back in confusion, away from the threats coming from other directions.
Jessica had let Robbie and Alber’ have that enemy ship as a joint effort, coming out of JumpSpace and crossing the Mako at high speed, headed in opposite directions at full tilt. Between them, they had shattered their smaller cousin with four Type-4 beams and their full Type-3 arrays, all at once, followed a moment later by the Bubble Guns, fired earlier but arriving as holes had been punched in Absorption Panels and the hull underneath. Kigali, on CA-264, had come in a few moments later and finished the bastard off, leaving the three men and their crews free to go after every freighter and country ship in range.
Those folks still hadn’t learned the necessity of having an emergency jump programmed, but they also didn’t have the money to keep their JumpDrives charged at all times, just in case there was an Imperial raid.
Pity.
Vanguard had taken on the only other warship in orbit, a single, lonely Hammerhead with its snout tucked into the biggest orbital platform. Unlike the berserkers, Denis had come in at low speed from behind, almost at rest delta-v to the station. Two salvoes had put paid to both targets, shattering the assembly into pieces with enough drag that they would have to be towed to a higher orbit soon, in order to be kept from falling to earth.
And then the hunting had begun.
At short range, a Type-1 beam or two was sufficient to seriously damage most small freighters, if not disable them, given the tiny number of defensive panels those vessels carried. At longer ranges, a Type-3-Tuned set for distance hit like a Type-2 beam, which could shatter delicate systems and trap a ship in range of a carnivore. Most of the corvettes with Type-3 beams had opted for splitting them short and long, retaining the ability to hit even harder, so they could work their way up to the big, bulk jobs, the kind that hauled thousands of shipping containers, or megatons of grain between worlds.
And they had.
Buran freighters were not armed. No civilian vessel, those piloted by a human, was allowed a beam weapon of any kind, and piracy was unheard of, there being no place to sell looted cargo in a nation where a single, Sentient system ruled everything and counted every Lev. Even Fribourg’s most ambitious raids had never penetrated this deep into the interior of The Holding, at least not in records accessible to Jessica.
Nobody knew what might lie on the far side of Buran, another thousand or six light years away. Whoever might be over there, if there was anyone still free. After this war, perhaps she could take Ballard on a grand tour and find out.
Jessica checked one last time, but there was absolutely no resistance. Instead of a large number of small stations, Yenisei had orbited only four large ones. Two had exploded outright under the withering barrage of inbound vengeance. The others had been dismembered with blowtorches.
“Enej, are we ready?” she asked in a companionable voice.
He had gotten mostly over this sort of thing, hardening up after watching the chickens be culled at Stanovoy.
“Affirmative, Fleet Centurion Admiral,” he said, commenting subtly on her choice of red day uniform instead of white.
It was an Imperial effort, but most of them, her and Denis excluded, were still exclusively Republic. Only Denis was also wearing white today, forward on his bridge.
“Put me on squadron channel first,” she ordered, waiting for his nod. “Task Force, this is Keller, aboard Vanguard. I have the flag.”
Translation: piracy time was over and you need to start acting like a unit again.
“All vessels move to Point Nineteen,” she continued. “Repeat: Point Nineteen for rendezvous and next phase. Vanguard, stand by for Phase Eight.”
“Roger that,” Nina Vanek replied a moment later. “Phase Eight ready, Flag.”
“Launch Phase Eight, Vanguard,” Jessica ordered.
Unlike Trusski, she didn’t feel the need to make any formal announcements about legalisms and niceties here. The Eldest had conducted an orbital bombardment of a civilized world without provocation. She was merely reciprocating, even if she still observed her own code.
Seeker, the man who was once the Khan of Trusski, might have been able to enlighten the locals about the finer details, but he had defected wholeheartedly and instead explained everything he knew to anyone in the Empire who would listen.
Ethnographers were having a field day as a result, but Jessica already understood the psychology of fear as a weapon. It translated nicely into all languages without much vocabulary or syntax. The Long Raid had been one dramatic example of the maxim that you could drive experimental rats crazier, faster, with a random diet of punishments and rewards, than you could with straight punishment.
The Expedition was just the same, on a larger scale, with the added costs of the number of people she was going to have to kill, to get their attention rooted more on her than their immortal overlord.
Around her, the hull of Vanguard chucked once with a hollow thump as Phase Eight went downrange. Moirrey might be gone, for now, but Saana Robles was still down there with what had been Auberon’s Art Department, committing glitter and unicorns.
Because glitter. And unicorns…
It was First 2218 Svati Prime all over again, except this bomb was going to go lower into the atmosphere before detonating politely and scattering its payload into the prevailing winds, up-range of the capital city and larger population centers.
The ancient term for what the bomb contained was a circular: a small newspaper or pamphlet with a single essay or treatise printed on it, to be handed around in the days before electronic communications. These were a more durable version, a vegetable plastic Arott’s team had found that would last for perhaps a year exposed to weather, and they were printed on both sides in four languages, picked for more psychological impact: Bulgarian, English, Mandarin, and Mongolian.
Anyone, Republic, Empire, or Holding, should be able to read them. To know the date and time that The Eldest had killed twenty-something million innocent people by dropping an anti-matter bomb on them from orbit. To understand that the ancient beast of terrible legend had returned, and made this a war for the future of humanity. To ask themselves why questioning the overlord was cause for death and not merely re-education.
And to know that the new Red Admiral, Keller Marie Jessica, was coming for them, as long as they continued to wage war on innocents and children.
Jessica wasn’t proud of the sentiment she and Enej had worked up, but she suspected that the poet in Casey would have approved of the words. It read like something she would have done, before she became an Emperor.
“Put me on a clear channel, Enej,” Jessica said into the silence.
He nodded a moment later.
Jessica studied the debris fields, spread out in all directions of the planet’s orbit. The only vessels left whole in the vicinity flew IFV flags.
“Yenisei, this is Red Admiral Keller of the Fribourg Fleet,” she announced in a voice that Kali-ma might have recognized. “I had a point to make at Stanovoy. And a mission. I do not have one today, except to continue to repay The Holding for bombing the Imperial Capital world of St. Legier with orbital weapons. The Eldest must be punished for his crimes. Until you convince him to behave like a civilized being, the destruction of your ships will continue and I will stalk your worlds without mercy. You have been warned.”
She cut the signal and nodded to Enej.
“You’re back on squadron channel,” he said.
“Squadron, this is Keller,” she said. “When you arrive at Point Nineteen, we will form up, and then move on to Act Two.”
Enej bowed his head, eyes hooded, as he contemplated their next raid. Second 2218 Svati Prime, all over again.<
br />
Only this time, she wasn’t playing a practical joke.
Chapter LI
Imperial Founding: 180/04/03. Mejico, St. Legier
Torsten always thought of the place as the lab of a mad scientist from a bad vidshow, even though he felt guilty at the comparison. It was merely the sanctum sanctorum of First-Rate Spacer Vibol Harmaajärvi, Master Tailor, currently on loan to the Imperial Household.
But only on loan.
Jessica would demand him back at some point. As would Amala Bhattacharya and a few others. Lady Moirrey was technically his chaperone, keeping him safe from poaching by Imperial families who thought that with enough money they could possibly entice the man. Nobody would dare cross Jessica though, doubly so as her fiancé was the head of government now.
It made for an interesting dynamic, watching people reduced to only calculating the angles they might pursue, in order to gain temporary entrée to the man. Grand Admiral zu Wachturm was possibly more accessible than the man responsible for dressing Casey and her Chief of Deputies. And even Torsten had to pass a full team of men from the 189th Legion to get inside this otherwise-empty warehouse.
The office up front, which had once apparently been the shipping department, had been gutted. Several work stations had been brought in instead, tables of increasing size, each with a different sewing machine installed. The smallest looked like a toy, compact and as precise as a silversmith’s tools. Larger one for everyday use. An industrial version that looked as though it could sew field armor. A long-arm device apparently used for quilting. Something called a serger that only made sense when he had watched the Master Tailor use it to do whatever it was called to fix the edge of a bolt of cloth. Serging, he supposed. Another machine with a small computer console was used for machine embroidery.
Lab of a mad scientist.
Lady Moirrey didn’t have so many different tools and workstations at hand, except when she went down to the garage she shared with her team of hawklings.
A new sewing manikin in a corner caught Torsten’s eyes as he entered, surprising Vibol in the middle of committing his esoteric magic at the everyday machine. Torsten recognized the pattern, though he was surprised to find something like that here, of all places.
