“Early day?” Jessica frowned. “Have you at least eaten something?”
Raul glanced guiltily at the container of food. “I’m taking a meeting this afternoon where there will be food provided. I’ll eat. Honest.” He even sounded guilty, and there was no reason to.
She nodded, skeptical. Likely remembering the last time she had come after him with an offer of dinner and found a half-eaten doughnut. “Are you being careful?” she asked suddenly.
Now that was a loaded question. “As careful as I can be, Jess.”
He couldn’t think of anything else to say, especially after their argument on the phone. Raul knew that his fiancée worried for him. This was not the kind of life Jessica had in mind to lead. He saw his replacement walking over, took Jessica’s arm and pulled her aside.
“Look, I know this is hard. I trained for this, once, and it’s hard on me too.” Raul had tried to tell her about his misgivings on the battlefield, that first day, but it was like they spoke different languages. “Help is on the way, Jess. There’s a Knight-Errant coming over from Ronel to survey the situation and call up additional support as needed. That’s the advantage of having a working HPG station.”
Jessica nodded perfunctorily. “A Knight. That’s great.” She certainly didn’t sound very enthused, although she made an effort to smile. “So maybe this will all be over soon and you’ll be home.”
“I hope so,” Raul said, shifting from one foot to the other. The shuttle bus honked, warning him that it was about to leave. Raul waved his replacement aside for a moment, then embraced his fiancée. “Look, I have—”
“To run,” she finished for him. “Duty calls.” She glanced around. “If you take another off-day to come out here, or anywhere, let me know. I’ll be there.” She exhaled a long sigh. “Or I’ll come out to the base to see you. If they’ll allow that.”
“They will,” he promised, greatly relieved. “Just call first and make certain I’m there. Love you.”
“I love you too.” Jessica shook her head. “Damned if I know why sometimes.”
Raul grinned at her sudden start, Jessica realizing the opening she had given him again. “Because you have wisdom beyond your years,” he teased. The base shuttle blared its horn again. “That’s for me!” He dodged over to the replacement driver, gave him a sketchy outline of the work he had managed to get done, and then sprinted for the shuttle. He was seated, belted and in the middle of catching his breath before he remembered that he had never looked back, or waved once, to Jessica.
Jessica Searcy watched her man dodge up the shuttle bus steps. For all his energy there at the end, she had seen the deep-rooted exhaustion beginning to pile up behind Raul’s dark brown eyes.
The medical doctor in her couldn’t help looking for symptoms and trying to diagnose people. Raul suffered from wounded beliefs. He seemed lost to her—trapped between what he had thought he wanted out of Republic citizenship and what he was getting. If he wasn’t careful, she worried that the Republic would chew Raul up and spit him aside. Always assuming, she shuddered, that the Steel Wolves didn’t first do the job in a physical sense.
“Over here,” someone shouted, dispelling the dark gloom blanketing her thoughts. “Hey, we have a live one!”
The call wasn’t for Jessica, but she responded to it out of a habit born from several years of medical internship and residency. She saw a large crane lifting an armored tank from a collapsed underground area—a basement or tunnel? Someone rode on top of the vehicle, waving frantically for attention. Jessica was one of several people who ran over, arriving just as the tank settled to the ground. Workers forced open a large hatch at the rear of the large metal juggernaut.
The waving man jumped down. “He crawled back into the ammunition storage locker trying to find a way out. Poor bastard’s been half-buried for two days.”
Half buried and half dead by the looks of him. Jessica shouldered her way in. “I’m a doctor,” she said, backing off several larger men with an air of authority. Pulse was thready but there. Aside from multiple contusions and an obviously broken clavicle, the only thing he had to worry about was internal bleeding. “Get a blanket on this man and call in for an emergency pick-up. He needs a chopper right away.”
“You’ll have one in ten minutes,” a man promised. He was one of the men she’d shouldered aside, and had a rough but competent look to him. “I’ll call it in myself.”
Jessica spitted him with an exasperated glare. “Call it in to the spaceport and we can have it in five,” she said, nodding at the distant terminal on the far side of the tarmac. “They’ll have a helicopter somewhere over there.”
The foreman nodded and made it happen. Water and blankets were brought, and a VTOL emergency transport thundered across the landing field to set down only a few minutes later. Jessica helped two corpsmen get the patient aboard, gave them her evaluation, and then ducked clear as the fast-copter leapt back into the sky and made a beeline for River’s End.
As was common after any emergency situation, the fading adrenaline rush left Jessica empty and lost for a moment. She wandered back toward where Raul had left her. The foreman caught up with her there.
“Hey. I wanted to thank you for your help.” He sounded frustrated, having to make that admission, but manners won out over pride. “No one thought to have paramedics out here two days later.” He took in Jessica’s civilian clothes with a quick glance, measured her, and then made a guess. “You need a ride back to River’s End?”
“I have a car,” she said haltingly. Then, “But I’m here, and already filthy. What can I do?” It wasn’t in her to simply turn her back on work, even physical work, now that she was here. Not to mention her recent emotional investment.
“I don’t know,” the foreman said. He had tangled blond hair and a scar at the edge of his left eye. His voice was respectful, especially after her earlier help, but held no time for games. “What can you do?” he asked.
“Besides be on hand for injuries?” Jessica smiled thinly. “I can drive simple vehicles, organize shift schedules, and apply bandages as necessary to bruised egos.” She remembered her cooler, found it where Raul had set it down. “I have a cooler full of sandwiches and apples, and I know where I can get more.”
The foreman laughed, then nodded. “You’re hired. Pull anything you need from the spaceport and I’ll sign my name to it. And thanks again for coming out.” He glanced with a readable amount of disdain toward the distant capital of River’s End. “Most people don’t want to get involved.”
Including her. Jessica did not tell him that, though. As she’d said, she was here and there was work to be done, and it wasn’t in her to turn her back on people who needed help.
Not so different from Raul after all, she decided.
Perhaps.
Officer’s Club, Achernar Militia Command
Achernar
The militia’s base facilities were limited but had all the basics, including an officer’s club.
After checking back in with the duty officer, Raul barely had time for a shower before he met Tassa Kay coming off a work shift. His dark curly hair was still damp, and he had grabbed nothing more casual than the utility fatigues all militia members preferred for everyday routine. His one concession to comfort, and maybe to Tassa’s presence as well, was to roll his sleeves up to the elbow. Raul had strong arms, and his tawny coloring shone with a burnished hue under Achernar’s bright sun.
The two placed an order at the bar for food and drinks, then chose an outside table. A late afternoon breeze worked its way over the low wall that protected the club, stirring the edges of the tablecloths. Raul nodded toward a table with an umbrella awning well away from other dining groups. Most others sat alone, or in subdued pairs talking about the hard press being dealt out by the Steel Wolves, and Raul did not need their dark moods coloring his talk with Tassa.
Taking his seat, Raul spread his hands on the table, suddenly nervous and still feeling a little guilty
that he’d left Jessica at the spaceport. He hadn’t lied to her. Not exactly. Relieved by the new driver, his standing orders required him to report back to the base. And this wasn’t a dinner date. It was dinner, and the chance to finally learn something more about Tassa Kay.
Okay, so Tassa was attractive. Raul didn’t see any reason why that should make him feel guilty. Except that it did.
“You look bothered by something,” Tassa noticed. She pulled the sweatband off her head and used it to tangle her hair back in a makeshift ponytail. Tassa wore dark leathers and looked perfectly at ease, an attitude Raul wished he could adopt as easily. “I hope it’s me,” she said with a sly grin.
Digging some money out of a pocket, Raul threw it on the tray as a server brought their drinks. “I had to rush away from the spaceport to make it here. I may have left… a bit of a mess behind me.”
“I have noticed that about you, Ortega.”
Raul tasted his drink, grimaced. The iodine taste burned all the way down his throat. The bar whiskey was not Glengarry Reserve. “Then why are we here?”
Tassa stirred her drink by sloshing the ice around in a quick circle. “I didn’t say that was a bad thing.” She took a healthy sip. “I came along to see who you were going to upset today.”
“No one. Unless you don’t like questions.”
“Still trying to get something out of me?” she asked, giving him a dark smile.
He coughed into his glass. The alcohol burned up into his sinuses. “Maybe,” he said, trying to recover. “You did say that you owed me. Twice.”
Tassa Kay regarded him long and cold over the rim of her glass. Her green eyes narrowed to razor slits. “I think I paid one of those debts out on the flatlands. Gimped Legionnaire. Persistent Jagatai. Any of that ring a bell?”
“Fair enough,” Raul agreed.
In fact, without Tassa in the field, the Republic militia would have been hurt badly that first day. Since then she had gone out twice more to push back Steel Wolf probes, but never again with Raul who always seemed to draw alternate duty as the ready-alert. He missed her, truth be told. Tassa lived the life he’d dreamt of for so long, and never once seemed bothered by the same moral qualms that pricked at Raul’s conscience. When he was with her, he could set aside some of those problems. Unfortunately, Tassa did not always share his sense of camaraderie.
Though she relented, slightly, when Raul didn’t press. “All right. I still owe you and that is why I am here,” she admitted. “You backed me up twice off the field, and I appreciate your timely arrival that first day.” She downed a slug of whiskey. The alcohol fed a warm blush to her cheeks.
“You’re welcome,” Raul told her, guessing that it was as close to a thank-you as she was likely to offer. Tassa glanced over sharply, as if suspecting sarcasm, but then relaxed. The woman seemed to have a gift for switching between states of readiness in the blink of an eye. The security officer in Raul wondered where she had needed to develop such a hair-trigger defense mechanism. One more mystery concerning Tassa Kay.
“And you want to know about Dieron?” she asked.
Feigning casual interest, Raul shrugged. “That’s your choice, Tassa. You’ll give it up, or you won’t.” Throwing innuendos back at her for a change felt good.
Tassa Kay gave him an appraising stare, so long that he began to feel warm and uncomfortable. Finally she set her glass down and said, “All right, then, here it is. I have no idea what really happened on Dieron. How it started, or how it ended. I arrived in the middle of a firestorm. The DropShip was blindsided by fighters from two factions, but we made a safe landing in the middle of a swamp. I slogged out of there and discovered that everyone seemed to be shooting at everyone else. Dracs, Fists, Foxes, pro-Republic and anarchists—I spent the first week fighting for my life and the lives of a patched-together mercenary company.”
The names blurred through Raul’s mind. Even after the chaos here on Achernar, he had trouble picturing the kind of confused warfare Tassa described. Combine supporters and Commonwealth troops? The Sea Fox merchants?
“By luck more than anything I hooked up with your Exarch. He never told me why he was there, though I am sure it was an attempt at damage control at first. He made me an offer, asked me to help him regain possession of the local spaceport, and I accepted. Then I left.”
Raul shook his head, as if trying to clear away a thought he couldn’t understand. “You left?” He’d been sitting on the edge of his chair, waiting for some kind of glorious finale. Their food arrived, but Raul suddenly wasn’t hungry. “You abandoned the Exarch?”
“He is not my Exarch. Anyway, he seemed competent.” High praise indeed. “By the time I shipped through Northwind, I heard that he had made it safely back to Terra.” She looked at him askance. “What? Dieron wasn’t my fight, what reason did I have to stay?”
Rocking back into his chair, Raul tried to reason it out. Failed. “And Achernar?” he asked. “Is this your fight?”
“It’s closer,” Tassa admitted, her brow creasing in a light scowl.
“Closer to what?”
“To what I am looking for.”
Raul leaned forward again, the security agent in him defaulting into interrogation mode. She was holding something back, something big, and he wanted it. “And what are you looking for?”
Tassa Kay settled back calmly, cradling her drink in one hand. She offered him half a shrug. “Whatever that is,” she said, “I think it left this table. You and I are done talking for a while, Lieutenant.” She rose to leave.
Raul couldn’t help asking, “Are you going to walk away from Achernar too, Tassa?”
Staring down at him, something closer to a predator’s grin than any true smile crept over her mouth. “Lieutenant. Don’t you trust me anymore?”
“I don’t know you.” He had never really known her, which was part of the damnable attraction he felt, and what she was capitalizing on.
Tassa bent forward at the waist, leaning down until her face was only inches from his. For a moment, Raul thought she meant to kiss him. “You know me,” she said. With a slight smirk, she straightened and then brushed by him. Back over her shoulder she said, “I’m just like you.”
9
Desperate Alliances
Taibek Mining
Achernar
24 February 3133
The Taibek Hills stared up at Erik Sandoval-Groell with vacant eye sockets as his personal VTOL thundered low over the eastern mines. Ore carts trundled out of dark tunnels, pushed or pulled by small, overworked tractors now that the MiningMechs from this site were all downchecked for military conversion. His labor force milled about the three active tunnels or worked the loading area where ore was transferred from carts to open-box rail cars. To a man they avoided the northwest quarry where rifle-toting infantry guarded Erik’s local staging ground and his primary maintenance facility.
Gray wisps of rock dust bled from the mine entrances and hung over the loading platform in a large cloud. As Erik’s military-class Warrior H-9 banked across the complex, the downdraft of its rotors swept the air clean. For the moment. The thirty-ton craft extended landing gear and settled to the ground next to a smaller Ferret light scout copter. Erik jumped out as soon as the skids touched earth and met the elder man waiting for him with an outstretched hand.
“Legate Stempres,” Erik smiled a mostly-sincere greeting. “Always a pleasure to see you.”
“Truly? That is why you are nearly an hour late for our meeting?”
At forty-eight and wearing a conservative gray suit, Brion Stempres still looked the part of a warrior. He kept his silver hair cut short in a flattop and his face had a younger man’s blue steel shadow where his thick beard kept trying to grow in. He had served a distinguished career with the Standing Republic Guard on Caselton, coming to the attention of Duke Aaron’s father and then later to Aaron Sandoval himself. His transfer to Achernar and into semiretirement had come four years before after the death of his wife. Blin
d fortune for Erik that the man was available when it came time to shop for a new military leader of Achernar.
Erik did not take the man’s gruff nature personally. “I received a report that the Steel Wolves had launched a major strike toward River’s End. I had my pilot swing out over the Agave Dales to check it out.”
A slender eyebrow rose over one of Stempres’ muddy-brown eyes. “You take chances, Lord Sandoval.”
“To endeavor without risk is to win without victory,” Eric quoted, calling on his studies in martial history. “General Gregory Cox.” Not that Erik worried. Star Colonel Torrent had held off his OmniFighters for the better part of a week, now, relying on conventional aircraft. Erik’s VTOL had likely been in little danger.
“And what did you see?”
“Another probing attack,” Erik told the old general. “Perhaps a bit stronger than recent assaults, but hardly a threat to River’s End. The Republic Guard called out reinforcements, just to be safe.” He shook his head. “Someone needs to convince that sheep in wolf’s skin to make a real push one of these days.”
Legate Stempres assumed an air of innocence. “Someone does, eh? Well, until that happens, might be you should think about this.” He pulled a digital verifax from his jacket pocket, thumbed his own DNA imprint over the security device, and then passed it over to Erik.
The young noble paged through the document quickly, skipping over most of the introduction. It notified Stempres that Knight-Errant Kyle Powers would arrive in a few days, a fact Erik already knew through his network of supporters and spies among the regular militia, and the list of briefings he requested. Then Erik hit the meat of the verifax, skipped back to the top and read through it all again. Carefully.
“This is a serious offer?” he asked Stempres, looking up from the reader when finished.
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