“Captain Santani.” It was Caden’s voice. The least enormous of the three armoured figures motioned with his hand. “It’s good to see you alive. I’m so sorry that Hammer came down, and for your crew of course.”
Santani came to a halt. “She was a dependable ship, and they were a dedicated crew—”
“They were indeed,” Caden said.
“—But I would have given them all up if it meant never having to bring you here.”
“Oh.”
“Was it worth it?” She asked.
“I would say—”
“Spare me. You’re hardly going to say ‘no’, are you?”
— 02 —
Survivors
Occre Brant jolted awake, feeling as though he had just fallen from a great height. His face was pressed against someone else. Twisting his neck, he looked up into the overly satisfied eyes of Peras Tirrano.
“Welcome back, Sleepy.”
He sat upright slowly, as naturally as he could make it seem, pulling away from her shoulder. Her arm slid from around him reluctantly.
“What’s happening?” He asked groggily.
“Rescue ship just snagged us,” she said. “About frigging time too.”
“How long was I out?”
“Six hours, give or take. I wasn’t really counting. You seemed like you needed that, anyway.”
“You’re not wrong.”
Brant stretched off his limbs in an attempt to relieve the muscular fatigue that went with sleeping under straps in a weightless environment. The survival shelter which had ejected them from Fort Kosling had no artificial gravity of its own, but the borrowed force from whatever ship had just captured them was beginning to make his blood vessels tingle happily.
As his head cleared, he became aware of the others around them; the murmuring and the hushed conversations. Even after they had spent so many hours drifting in space, he could tell that some of the other survivors were still shocked at the sudden and unexpected demise of their fortress.
“Any idea how many made it off the station?” He asked.
“Rescue have been broadcasting updates. Last one said they had counted virtually all survival shelters as successful launches.”
“That’s great news.”
“Doesn’t mean all the people are on them though.”
“Yeah, I guess not. Still; let’s hope for the best, right?”
“That seems a bit naïve,” she said, flatly.
Brant didn’t reply. He knew what would happen next if he tried to argue with her: she would get louder and more difficult, until everyone aboard the cramped lifeboat was convinced that most of their friends and colleagues had been left behind to perish in fire or vacuum.
A muffled thumping sound travelled through the hull, and then nothing for a few moments more. Then the seal indicators around the circular egress hatch turned green all at once, and the hatch itself popped open with a reassuring puff of air exchange.
“How many we got in ‘ere then?”
A woman in full hazmat kit stood in the opening, peering into the survival shelter. She did a quick headcount, jabbing her finger in the air as she tallied the occupants, and then tapped regally at a holo before disappearing out of view.
“Charming welcome,” Brant said.
“They probably just forgot where they left their red carpet, but if you can wait I’ll go and help them find it.”
“Funny.”
“It’ll be a support vessel. Hauler, salvager; something like that.”
“Yeah, I figured. Come on, let’s find out what the deal is.”
They both released their safety harnesses, and climbed cautiously to their feet. Tirrano stumbled on the first step, and leaned against Brant.
“Careful,” he said.
They joined the short queue of survivors who clambered slowly from the lifeboat, and eventually found themselves on a scruffy deck that somehow seemed as though it were physically too small to contain such a large piece of cargo.
“You’re aboard the Pride of Jeddis,” a loud but slightly disinterested voice came from ahead of them, floating over the heads of the small crowd. “I am First Mate Akari. If you fine ladies and gentlemen would follow me to the mess, there’s food waiting.”
Tirrano grabbed Brant’s arm and pulled him in the direction of the voice. As the other people milled in the general direction of the passage connecting the cargo bay to the rest of the ship, she forced her way through until she found Akari.
“Wait just a second,” she said imperiously.
Akari was not quite what she had expected from the depth of his voice. He was a short man, shorter than her at any rate, and incredibly wiry. He had a full, black beard which was almost obsessively neat in contrast with his dangerously unkempt hair. He smiled faintly as he waited for her to speak.
“What do you mean, food? Surely you can have us on the ground in less than an hour?”
“We’re not putting down in the Kosling system,” Akari said. “We’re under orders, lady; all the ships taking part in the rescue effort.”
“What orders?”
“From Eyes and Ears, and Fleet Command. Collect as many staff from Fort Kosling as possible, and ferry them immediately to the emergency command post being set up at Fort Laeara.”
“We’re going to the Perseus arm?”
“Damned straight you are.”
“Well shit,” said Brant. “They’re sending us practically all the way to the front line.”
• • •
Despite the bitterness he carried in every fibre of his being, Maber Castigon had to admit a simple truth: the decadent, self-indulgent citizens of the Imperial Combine sure knew how to entertain themselves.
A swelling, jubilant roar from the spectator stands signalled that something incredible had happened in the arena below. He glanced down, curious to know exactly what kind of violence had people leaping from their seats on this occasion.
One of the players was laid out on the ground, face down in a small puddle of blood. He was just outside a scoring zone. The other four were chasing after the ball as it rolled away from him; two running it down separately, and the other pair struggling to follow even as they pummelled each other’s faces with their gloved fists.
Maulball Mini-League. Five players, one goal, virtually anything goes. If only people realised how closely this game is modelled on life itself, he thought.
The one on the ground moved his arms, gradually propped himself up, and seemed to shake off whatever brain injury had knocked him out. Just as well, since nobody would be coming to help him. Not that Castigon gave a damn about a random maulball player’s health.
He tore himself away from the oddly engrossing action. Whatever happened down there in the arena, it was not his concern. He had come here to deal with his next target, not to get swept up in tournament fever. And he had come too far now to blow it all by allowing himself to be distracted.
Even if the distractions were attractively violent.
A long, long time ago he had been an ardent fan. He followed his local league with zeal, obsessing over team stacking and iconic plays and injury bonuses, from his teens far into his twenties. He had even found time to keep abreast of the majors while at the Imperial War College, where personal time was horribly short and communication links infamously expensive.
But that was all before Urx and its subterranean prison. Long before! Worlds, it felt as though it had been in a different lifetime. Only a decade had passed — ten Solars — but his recollection of prison was more like an actual reality than any of the memories preceding it.
Except the ones pertaining to the fallout from Ottomas, of course. Those were emblazoned in his mind, his heart, and whatever that ragged, threadbare thing was that people insisted he should call his soul.
He had done his level best, he told himself once more. He had done his best to bring the Trinity Crisis to a swift conclusion, and everyone he had trusted to have his back — every singl
e one of them — had stuck a knife in it, and then twisted the blade.
The two runners lunged for the ball together, and it was knocked away as they landed heavily and fought to launch themselves back after it. Neither would let the other rise from the ground, now that they were down, and the crowds encouraged them boisterously.
He made his way along the sweaty corridor that ran behind the stands, ignoring the elevators, moving swiftly towards one of many staircases which could take him up to the next tier. Only three more levels, and he would be within spitting distance of his quarry.
Down below, in the arena, a bone snapped. The sound managed somehow to reach every part of the stadium, but the roar of the crowd drowned whatever scream surely followed.
Castigon kept his head down as he passed under the cameras. Admittedly they were fairly primitive models, and probably not even working given the dilapidated state of the stadium’s back areas. And he was wearing a disruptor prosthetic, which in theory would shift his features and stop recogniser holos from identifying him. But he was not one for taking big risks. He still remembered some of the lessons he had learned in his time baby-sitting Shards, and ‘leave nothing important to chance’ was a firm favourite.
Up, up, up the stairs, two at a time.
Castigon had found over the past few days that he really liked stairs, and it had taken him a while to realise why such a small thing should give him any enjoyment at all. In all those Solars he spent at the Empress’s pleasure in Correctional Compound One, he had never gone up or down. Everything he did, everywhere he went, it was all contained on a single level. Forwards, backwards, left and right. Beneath the surface of Urx there were no steps, and no ledges. Not even ramps.
Stairs, it seemed, were a privilege to be savoured only by the free. As weird as it might have sounded to anyone else, he was happy for any opportunity to steal enjoyment from the Imperial Combine, even if it was something as trivial as ascending a flight of stairs while unlawfully at large.
So fuck the elevators. He would only get trapped in them anyway, if something went wrong.
One of the players was slammed heavily into the arena wall, still holding the ball over his head. The ball glowed brightly, signalling that he had his thumb placed correctly in its single hole. As long as he had custody in a scoring zone, he was accumulating points with every passing second. He stretched his arm as far and as high as he could while flailing with the other at the two players who punched his body eagerly. A fourth limped towards them. The fifth was noticeable only by his absence; the broken bone must have been one he could not manage without.
A vicious gut-punch folded the player with custody in half, and the ball was snatched away from him, flung hard across the ground towards the central goal, and immediately chased by the small rabble of players.
Castigon had almost reached the stairway up to the next tier, and despite his earlier caution he found himself pausing to watch this new development.
It really is a compressed version of life, he thought. Take what they’ve got, and try to keep it for as long as possible, to stop anyone else from taking it until you’ve turned it into something that can’t be stolen away. Every man for himself.
He flattered himself that he could have, no… should have, been a philosopher.
• • •
Gordl Branathes was the last person Brant would have expected to welcome them to the Laeara system. But, as it so happened, there he was.
Brant and Tirrano had passed through Arrivals without incident, and walked out of the debarkation area with no real clue as to where they should go next. Although Fort Laeara was almost certainly laid out in exactly the same way as Fort Kosling, neither of them had the faintest idea what they were supposed to be doing there.
“Thank goodness you both made it!”
Branathes pushed his way through the other refugees until he reached them.
“I don’t think your particular manifest was actually passed to Life and Rescue. There was some debate as to whether we should show you as missing in action, or killed.”
“Oh,” said Brant. “I honestly don’t know how to respond to that.”
“Which was it?” Tirrano asked.
“MIA, of course. I won.”
Tirrano looked at Brant and smiled with the very corners of her mouth. “At least someone thinks I got action.”
“Well, let’s not stand about. Lots to be done!” Branathes waved them both towards one of many passageways, oblivious to Brant’s prickling and Tirrano’s mischievous grin.
Brant tried to ignore his colleague. “What exactly are we here for, Sir?”
“Information scraping,” Branathes said. “Assisting the war effort. Operation Seawall is not going well. Fleet appear to have really riled the Viskr Junta, and they’re hitting us back just as hard as we’re hitting them, if not harder.”
“How bad has it got?”
“At the moment it’s entirely restricted to fleet warfare, but Commander Operations agrees with Eyes and Ears: it’s only a matter of time before some damned idiot nukes a colony.”
“The Perseus conflict, all over again.”
“Exactly. Our job, as ever, is to collect, collate, and coordinate information. That will go a lot faster and smoother if we’re closer to the front lines. Hence, here we are at Laeara.”
“If I can be honest, Sir, I’m not really happy about being so close to the fighting.”
“Nonsense Occre. Fort Laeara is the safest place on the Perseus arm. Last time the Viskr attacked this system, it damned near cost them their entire armada.”
Brant knew at the intellectual level that his senior was correct: the Viskr had indeed been turned away from Laeara robustly, when their siege engine broke so spectacularly against the Imperial defences. Somehow that information failed to make him feel any safer. The primitive part of his brain wanted him to turn tail and run.
“Do we know exactly what happened yet?” Tirrano asked. “At Fort Kosling, I mean.”
Branathes was now walking between them, and Brant assumed that Tirrano had grown bored with trying to get a rise from him.
“You don’t know? It’s been all over the E&E channels. It’s all anyone has been speaking about for half a day.”
“Sorry Sir, we were a little preoccupied floating about the Kosling system in a raft.”
“That Rasa of yours escaped. She sabotaged the environmental control systems, set fires, then shot her way out of the station in a stolen ship.”
“No shit? Told you so, Brant.”
“Indeed. ‘No shit’, as you say. We don’t know where she went, or why she chose that moment to leave, and — thanks to her handiwork — we’ve lost all the data Doctor Laekan collected on her condition.”
“Laekan,” Brant said. “Has she come aboard yet?”
“Not as far as I’m aware. I have her marked down as KIA for the moment.”
“Why not MIA?” Tirrano asked.
“Because she’s probably dead. I doubt that Rasa left Laekan alone to stand and watch while she sabotaged the station.”
“Huh. That would be a dreadful shame. I liked her.”
Tirrano glared at Brant behind Branathes’ back. “You only knew her for five minutes.”
“Still wouldn’t want her to be dead, Peras. And in any case, she was the only person who got to examine Amarist Naeb in detail. We could have done with that information.”
“Maybe when you get around to extracting Doctor Bel-Ures, you’ll take better care of that one. You know; now you’ve had a practice run.”
“Bel-Ures?” Branathes stopped dead, and they both took a couple of steps farther before they too halted and turned back toward him. “Doctor Danil Bel-Ures?”
“That’s the one,” Brant said slowly. “You know her?”
“Well not personally, of course, but she was — if I am not mistaken — one of the people working on Herros.”
“The very same,” said Tirrano.
“And you say she
needs extraction?”
“Yeah. According to transit records, she went home to the Meccrace system shortly before Gemen Station was breached.”
“We’re hoping she will know how we can best defend against the weapons that were stolen,” Brant added. “Not to mention the fact that she might have an idea what happened there.”
“Of course, of course. Yes… it’s absolutely vital that she is located immediately.”
“Do you want us to sort that out before we get swept up in all the heady excitement of information scraping?”
“No Occre, that’s fine, thank you. I’ll get you inducted here, then I will go and see to it personally. It’s simply too important to let anything go wrong. Not that I think you’d mess it up.”
“Right,” Brant said.
“Even though you definitely would,” Tirrano whispered behind his back.
• • •
Castigon had long ago come to believe that one could always rely on the sloppiness of others, and he was rarely disappointed. It still amazed him though that the rule seemed to be as true for Imperial Shards as it was for everyone else.
The Shard who was guarding the proconsul’s private box, and the counterpart who was guarding the Shard, were themselves inside the box. There was only the one entrance.
What a pair of complacent morons.
With the door being closed, there was for the moment no prospect of anyone inside the box spotting him. The proconsul and his guests would be watching the match, and the Shard and counterpart were unlikely to look in Castigon’s direction long enough to recognise him, especially with all the obstructions between them.
He took a moment to ensure that he had his bearings, that he knew which was the best route out of the stadium. Once he had done what he came here to do, he would need to make a quick exit. But he would still need to avoid the cameras if he wanted to make it off this planet again. And his timing would be critical.
Another roar erupted from the endless ranks of spectators, and the commentator announced a perfect delivery. One of the players must have caught the ball as it re-entered play, and kept custody of it until they could slam it back into the goal. Castigon almost regretted the fact that he had missed how that had been done, given how violent these players had been so far.
Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 29
