by Jay Allan
The imperial troops cut through Galvanus’s levies like a hot knife through butter, and entire battalions had thrown down their arms and fled. His Celtiborians had done better, falling back slowly, and for the most part, in good order. They were outmatched, too, but they were veterans, and they had pride they weren’t ready to surrender, not yet.
His people were still fighting, and they were extracting a price from the invaders, but Halvert knew they were losing. At least thirty thousand imperials were on the ground already, and more landers coming down in wave after wave. He’d had a total force of over one hundred thousand, but most of those had been raw recruits from Galvanus in the proto planetary defense force his people had been training for the past few months. Most of them were gone now. They had either fled, or they’d been eradicated almost immediately by the imperial forces. All Halvert had now was his group of ten thousand Celtiborians, and even that meager army comprised of less than one-half experienced troops.
He figured to have much less by the end of the day.
“Captain, I suggest you tell me what I want to know. Rather, you will tell me. The only question is how unpleasant this will have to be for you.”
Ignes Inferni stood before the terrified freighter captain, tall and clad in the full panoply of his imperial garb. He wore a breastplate under his great, flowing cape, both of the deepest black. Weapons hung from his side, a large pistol with dual barrels, and a long, curved sword. His eyes were as cold as space, with not the slightest hint of mercy or compassion in them.
“I . . . I . . . don’t . . .”
“Blackhawk, Captain. Arkarin Blackhawk, on the Wolf’s Claw. I am seeking him, and if you can help me find him, I will spare your pointless life.” That was a lie, of course. Inferni wasn’t about to leave a trail of information behind him. But people were fools, and they accepted all manner of promises, especially those they really wanted to believe.
“I have . . . heard of . . . Captain Blackhawk. Everybody has. I don’t know . . . where he . . . is . . . though.”
Inferni leaned forward, the shadow from his great bulk covering the prisoner in near darkness.
“You will have to do better than that.”
Inferni took hold of the man’s arm and twisted it until it snapped with a sickening crunch. The prisoner screamed, a primal shout, and he slipped down to his knees, slumping in front of his tormentor.
“If you do not know how to find Arkarin Blackhawk, tell me how I can find him.”
“No one finds Blackhawk if he doesn’t want to be found . . .” The captive blurted out the response, his pathetic tone itself a plea for mercy. Inferni wasn’t going to let the fool live anyway, but he detested weakness and fear. He’d been prepared to give his prisoner a quick death, especially if he provided useful information, but now he considered other, more amusing options.
Inferni had studied all the data in the imperial archives on the Far Stars, and particularly the sparse information on the recent rebellion that had eliminated the empire’s tenuous grasp on the sector. He’d come across a number of names, Augustin Lucerne, and his daughter, Astra, Rafaelus DeMark . . . and Arkarin Blackhawk. They were all enemies of the empire, instigators of the rising that had driven the empire from its long-held foothold, but only one was his concern.
Augustin Lucerne was already dead, by all accounts, and his daughter and General DeMark would almost certainly die when Celtiboria was destroyed. They weren’t his problem. Arkarin Blackhawk was. The descriptions of the general, who, according to all reports, had been a sort of mercenary and adventurer before the war, seemed strangely familiar. There was something about him, physical descriptions, yes, but even more from the impressions people seemed to have of him, the effect he had on others.
He reminds me of me, a thought that chafed a bit, as Inferni had always seen himself as a singular being.
One thing seemed beyond doubt, though. After the death of Augustin Lucerne, it had been Blackhawk more than anyone else who’d been the driving force of the war to expel the empire from the Far Stars, and to begin the unification of the sector. This “Captain” Blackhawk had proven to be a skilled military leader, and he’d apparently carried a rank of general in the Celtiborian forces, before he’d suddenly vanished, resigned all his ranks and posts, and boarded his ship for a trip back to obscurity.
The whole story was strange to Inferni, and it jarred something in his mind, events of long ago, something eerily similar to the stories about Blackhawk.
He leaned forward, his hand grabbing the captive’s broken arm, twisting as he forced the screaming, crying man to the ground. His victim was begging for mercy, pleading with him to stop, but such things only encouraged Inferni.
“You have one final chance to give me useful information . . . before I introduce you to the burrowers. You probably aren’t familiar with the burrowers of Anticles II. I have heard the people of the Far Stars are quite ignorant about the rest of the galaxy. The burrowers are worms of a sort, carnivorous ones . . . and they enjoy no host more than a human body.” He waited a few seconds, but the prisoner just lay before him crying. He’d wasted enough time on the fool.
“Guards, take this one back to his cell . . . and give him six burrowers to keep him company.”
“No! Please . . . no!”
Inferni ignored the screams. They had long been an occupational hazard. The worms were a slow and painful way to die. The captain would linger a week or more, in excruciating pain. And, Inferni realized, his usefulness was perhaps not entirely exhausted. Inferni would make sure each of his crew had a chance to watch their captain, to see his fate.
Inferni was a big believer in encouragement.
Chapter 14
Blackhawk stared at the screen. He’d lost count of how many times he’d watched the short, grainy, low-quality scanner clip the freighter captain had given him.
Thirty-four times, including the current viewing.
“Shut up.”
The image was poor, there was no question about that. The freighter’s scanner suite was clearly an old one, older than he was, probably, or even the gray-haired freighter captain, but there was something more messing with the image, some kind of jamming.
Definitely jamming, and what really bothered him was . . . the pattern looked strangely familiar.
His eyes locked on the image. The ship was huge, that was clear even with a fleeting glance. He’d run the calculations on the tonnage readings a dozen times.
Fourteen.
The result was the same every time. The ship on his screen had a total mass of almost six billion tons. Billion. That was a size that had to seem impossible to anyone from the Far Stars. They’d never seen anything remotely close to that size. But Blackhawk wasn’t a native of the remote sector. He’d been born, such that he was, in the empire . . . and he had seen ships very much like what he thought he was looking at. He knew them well. He had commanded fleets of them.
Imperial Galaxicon-class battleships.
The most powerful warships ever built, and by a vast margin.
What the hell could a fleet of those be doing out here?
And how the hell did they get through the Void?
Yet there it was. Blackhawk was a realist, and when he saw something that made the impossible possible, he moved on to trying to understand. He wondered if the scan could be a fake, if it was some kind of trap or scam. Or, perhaps, he was mistaken. Maybe the jamming was creating some kind of scanner echo that massively overstated the mass readings. The ship looked like a Galaxicon, too, but that could be purely coincidence.
That all seemed possible enough. In fact, in some ways it was easier to accept that than the darker thought beginning to take hold in Blackhawk’s mind. But Blackhawk didn’t believe in coincidence, and he knew what he knew. He was sure, somehow, deep down inside, what he was seeing.
There are imperial battleships in the Far Stars.
His immediate reaction was worry for Astra and for all the people of the
sector. He knew better than anyone the threat those ships posed . . . and just what an imperial commander would do in response to what the Far Stars Confederation called the “liberation” of the demesne. Astra would fight, and they would lose. He could see no other way around it. There was only one man in the Far Stars who knew enough about imperial tactics and technology to offer even a remote chance of victory, and that was him. Which meant, whatever happened, he would be at the forefront.
He’d already made that decision after his first viewing of the scan.
What bothered him was that he wasn’t sure which forefront he should be at. He could feel Frigus Umbra even then, the secret part of him growing excited in his subconscious at the sight of imperial forces, thoughts calling on him to return to his old allegiance. Words shouting out in the depths of his mind, telling him the emperor would forgive him if he delivered the Far Stars. He could return to the empire a hero, and power unimaginable would be his.
A resurgent Frigus Umbra might even return to the capital in triumph, with massive forces at his back . . . and make himself emperor. He’d long fought those kinds of thoughts and urges, but the prospect of an imperial invasion poured strength into them and tried his resilience.
Blackhawk was disgusted with such thoughts, and at his weakness as he pushed them back. No matter how hard he tried, though, they were still there, working on him, digging slowly at his resolve, the same as they always had, but empowered now as they had not been in decades. There was an imperial fleet in the sector.
A fleet a very real part of him knew he should command.
“Those are imperial ships, aren’t they, Ark?” Ace walked slowly onto the bridge. Blackhawk had heard the sounds of his people making their ways back into the ship, but he’d been too focused on the video to pay attention.
He heard Ace’s words, and he felt a sudden impulse to lie. Was it concern over the fear his people would feel toward an imperial invasion? Or something darker? Was he harboring some plan, deep below his conscious mind, to do something other than find a way to defeat those ships?
No. These are my friends. Frigus didn’t have friends.
“Yes, Ace. They’re frontline battleships, twenty kilometers in length and five point seven billion tons displacement. Each one of them carries a thousand attack ships and an entire legion with landing craft. They’re armed with spinal mount megapulse cannons and over three hundred heavy batteries. Every one of them is a match for all the spacefaring forces in the Far Stars combined, and according to Captain Corellia, there are ten of them at Galvanus.”
Ace stood there, quiet for a second. Then he said, “So what are we going to do? Is there any way to beat them? Or should we be thinking about escaping.”
“We’re going to fight, of course.”
It was a reflexive response, though. Defiance was easy in words, harder in deeds. “I don’t know how . . . but I have more knowledge about those ships than anyone else in the Far Stars. More, even, I’d bet, than anyone on them.” He paused and looked up at Ace. “They’re as tough as you’re thinking, Ace . . . even tougher. They were built to strike terror into the hearts of those they were sent against, and that is just what they do. There are almost a hundred thousand spacers, pilots, and soldiers on each one of them, and everything, from the arms and armor of the troops to the weapons system on the ships, is state of the art.”
Ace was silent. He was a cocky sort, prone to periodic displays of arrogance, but now, he was somber . . . and Blackhawk hated seeing him like this. Finally, Ace looked back at Blackhawk and said, “I think everybody’s back, Ark. Where are we going? Celtiboria?”
Blackhawk held his friend’s gaze. Celtiboria made sense. It would almost certainly be the next target of the imperial fleet, and it was the logical place to gather what defenses the Far Stars would be able to assemble.
And Astra is there.
His mind was fixed on saving her, somehow, but the thought of seeing her again was equally irresistible. Blackhawk wasn’t the sort to accept defeat, but he knew if he didn’t come up with some way to challenge the imperials, any chance he had to see Astra might very well be the last. So Celtiboria made sense.
But he had something else in mind, something riskier, but perhaps, more useful.
“Galvanus, Ace. We’re going to Galvanus. There’s a good chance the distortion field will keep us hidden, at least as long as they don’t know where to look for us.” Blackhawk sounded more confident than he felt. The field was the one piece of experimental imperial tech he had managed to bring with him to the Far Stars. It had been experimental two decades before, though, and he had no idea how far the empire had come since then, whether the device was standard equipment by now, or sitting dust covered in some lab somewhere. Or even if the empire had developed effective countermeasures against the functional invisibility the field created. Either way, it was their best shot.
Ace looked a little pale. Probably the last thing he had expected was to head right for the overwhelmingly powerful imperial fleet. Blackhawk understood the impulse to stay as far away as possible, but he needed more information, and a much better scan of those ships. If he was going to plumb his long-submerged memories, find some kind of chance, even a long shot, he needed to know exactly what he was up against.
And that meant going to Galvanus. As quickly as the Claw’s engines could get him there.
“The inquisitors have returned, General, all save for Deridias. They await you in your sanctum.”
“Very well, Captain,” Inferni said. “Proceed on our current course, pending any changes after I hear the reports of the inquisitors.” Imperial inquisitors were very highly ranked operatives, who often served as judges and executioners, bringing the emperor’s power wherever it was needed. They usually operated alone, with their own subordinates, and their arrogance and brutality were legendary. Yet even they meekly served the empire’s most terrible general.
Inferni walked from the battleship’s bridge, down the corridor that led to his private sanctum. His black-and-red robes flowed behind him as he strode purposefully to the door and then into the room.
There were five inquisitors sitting at the conference table inside, and as Inferni walked in, they all rose, standing at rigid attention, their eyes fixed on the hulking mass of the general.
“Sit,” Inferni said . . . after allowing the operatives to stand for a few seconds. “I dispatched each of you to locations our, admittedly meager, intelligence suggests Arkarin Blackhawk and the Wolf’s Claw have been recently. As you have all returned, I presume each of you has some information to add to our database, if not an actual report on the current location of our target.”
The operatives were silent for a moment. Finally, one spoke. “I have concluded that the Wolf’s Claw did, indeed, visit Oltharon approximately three imperial months ago. They were involved in some kind of operation, one unsanctioned by the local government, which still resists inclusion into this nascent Far Stars Confederation we have heard so much about. Apparently, the crew of the Wolf’s Claw caused a number of fatalities, as well as several abductions. Or rescues. That was unclear from my interrogations and likely relies heavily on the context of the individual being questioned.”
Inferni glared out across the table. “Admittedly, specific information on the previous whereabouts of the Wolf’s Claw is superior to a lack of same . . . however, it is of limited utility in our search for that vessel.”
“Apologies, General. I pursued all leads; however, there was simply no information as to the vessel’s destination when it left the planet.”
“Apologies are no more useful to me than months’ old information, Inquisitor . . . nor do I think his imperial highness will be impressed with such pointless and ineffectual data. I was sent here for a single reason, to find one man . . . and you are all here to aid me in that pursuit, not to waste my time with your failure and useless information.” He didn’t raise his voice, not a decibel, and that made him all the more terrifying. “I tr
ust you all understand my meaning, and that I will not be forced to undertake more . . . direct . . . measures to demonstrate the importance of this mission, or my impatience with your failure.”
The robed figures in the room shuffled nervously in their seats as his words settled over the room. Inquisitors were high-ranking officials in the imperial forces, and the appointment came with its own patent of nobility. As such, they carried weight with those even Inferni wasn’t likely to tangle with lightly. Because of that, he was unlikely to actually kill one of them, let alone all of them, for nothing more than delivering information he considered inadequate after their first investigations.
But he did consider it for a moment, wondering if making an example out of one of them might encourage the others to greater effort. However, even as he thought about that option, the comm unit buzzed.
“Yes,” he said curtly.
“General, we are receiving a comm signal from Inquisitor Deridias. His ship just jumped into the system, and he is requesting an immediate audience.”
“Very well, Commander. Connect him to my private channel at once.” Without looking at the inquisitors, he said, “You may go.” The robed operatives stood up and swiftly moved toward the door, walking out into the hall as the door closed behind them.
“Speak, Deridias.”
“General Inferni . . . I have jumped in from the planet the locals call Athella. It is located in a fringe system, but the intelligence I was able to gather suggested it was worth inspecting. I was able to find a freighter captain, whose ship was apparently in the Galvanus system when our fleet arrived. He was speaking of our forces in vague and confused terms. I liquidated him along with his crew, and I erased the scanner records he had of our vessels.”
