Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Brother Soreniz smiled humbly. “We make do,” he said.

  “How many ships do you have, exactly?”

  “Well, I’m not an accountant, nor am I in charge of the Itinerant Fleet, so I don’t have an exact—”

  “Best guess.”

  Brother Soreniz cleared his throat. “Twenty frigates? Maybe thirty destroyers? And a hundred or so smaller skiffs, cargo haulers, et cetera. And, of course, not all of them could be sent at once, for a few of them are already on loan to small mining colonies on moons that requested our protection against pirates. And, as I’m sure you’re aware, historically volunteer armies always break down in economic downturns. It is so with us, so we are shorthanded, as you might imagine. And some brothers…forget their vows.”

  Soreniz leaned forward.

  “But if you could promise recompense, I might be able to persuade the Repentant Designate, as well as the Remorseful Council, who would vote on this. Where would we be going?”

  “To the Phanes System,” said Kalder.

  Brother Soreniz nodded slowly. “To fight the Machinist Ascendancy.”

  “Yes.”

  The contrite brother sighed, and rubbed at his belly, which Kalder just now heard grumbling. “Give me some time to confer with the Repentant Designate?”

  “You have until the end of tomorrow.”

  They rose together, and the brother offered his hand to shake. Kalder did not take it.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Soreniz. “I’d forgotten you are a Zeroist. A most admirable order. A pity their light has all but gone out in the galaxy. But you remain a stalwart monument to their beliefs.”

  “A flattering way of saying I’m stubborn.”

  Brother Soreniz’s face went slack, and he stammered out an apology.

  “It’s true, I am stubborn. No need to apologize. Now, Julian will see you out.”

  After the contrite brother had left, Julian joined his mentor. “Do you think it’s even worth bringing them? They’re not professional soldiers or naval officers, and their numbers are so few.”

  “Every little bit helps, Julian.” Kalder steepled his fingers beneath his chin, and his mind carried to other matters. “Has there been any word from Second Fleet’s Visquain about the Scroll found at Kennit?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What about the soldier who found it? Lyokh, wasn’t it? Sergeant Lyokh?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Julian. “But it’s Captain Lyokh now. I looked into him, as you requested. Apparently he was elevated to Gold Wing leader for bravery in the field. He’s received some small celebrity for it. Everyone in Second Fleet honors him with the title doyen, including his superiors. Some of the vids from his HUD have been making the rounds.”

  “He must have been one hell of a shot and grenadier.”

  “Actually, he seems to have used only a sword.”

  Kalder had just taken a sip of his tea, and now looked over at Julian. “A doyen swordsman?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You mean to say, a man went into battle—into battle against the Brood—armed only with a sword and made it out of Kennit alive?”

  “It would appear so, sir. He’s also to receive the Imperator’s Medal of Valor.”

  “Really?” Kalder drew out the word, ruminating deeply on a thought that had just occurred to him…

  Just then, the door opened, and in trudged Trix. The tall bot’s feet thumped across the stone floor, its face as unreadable as a Zeroist’s, its single orange eye glowing bright, rotating around its head and penetrating all that it saw. “I have finished a patrol of the corridors, Master. There is no one besides the sentry bots posted outside, and a lobbyist who says he comes in the name of d’Arhagen.”

  “Excellent. Stay inside for now. Never stray further than ten feet from me.”

  “Of course,” the bot said, and assumed a position just beside him.

  “Julian, do you have any of the HUD footage from Lyokh taken from Kennit?”

  “No, sir. PI hasn’t released it publicly yet.”

  “Do you think you could get your hands on it?” Kalder asked. “Perhaps…using the excuse that the Senate needs to see what the war looks like on the ground?”

  Julian nodded. “I think I could probably do that. I could speak with McQualls, she’s an old friend of mine in Primacy Intel.”

  “Do it. Once you have it, disperse it on LOG, make it publicly available for anyone to see. Don’t give me that look, I know the Senate may not like it—they’ll fear that it will give people only more reason to despair. But if we play this right, it should have the opposite effect.”

  Julian sighed, “I’ll do as you ask, sir.”

  “Good. And after that, look up the entire military record of Captain Lyokh. Forward it to me immediately.”

  “Yes, sir.” Julian waved his hands in the air, accessing LOG. “May I ask, sir, why you’ve taken an interest in this Gold Winger?”

  “We have to take the long view, Julian,” he said. “We may have manipulated the three Arms of the Senate to give us what we want for now, but it can quickly be stripped from us once we’re away. Pennick all but said it when describing the three conditions the Senate laid out. I won’t be here to keep an eye on my adversaries, and all sorts of alliances will form in the shadows while I’m away. New bonds, new gossip, new allegiances, and me left out of the loop.” He nodded. “It’s imperative that we give the Senate, the Primacy, High Command, and the Visquain a reason to never renege on their promise to me.”

  “How do we do that, sir?”

  “By giving the Republic something it has not seen in an age,” Kalder said. “Something to rally around. Something besides a politician to pin our Crusade on, or a failing military campaign against too numerous enemies. Something to stir their emotions.” He looked at Julian. “We’ll give them a hero.”

  : SDFA Lord Ishimoto

  For three weeks, they had not relented. They had pushed themselves to their limit, because that was what the doyen required of them. Some of them needed a little encouragement, there might have even been a little pushback from one or two, but the spirit of the others soon swept up all doubters, and the training began to take shape.

  They used the corridors of Lord Ishimoto herself to train. Lyokh directed them through the narrow passageways, refining their squad tactics. A few of the new Gold Wingers had been rushed through boot camp less than a year ago, and had not been thoroughly trained in how to function in such tight spaces.

  “You want maximum firepower downrange,” Lyokh explained to them during one evening of intense training. “But in a corridor only big enough for one man at a time, you have to get creative with how you shoot. You move in groups of three, single file. As soon as the man out front shouts ‘Contact,’ he drops to the floor, goes flat on his belly with his rifle aimed straight ahead. The man behind him assumes a kneeling position. The man at the back remains standing. That way, you have three men, all firing downrange in a narrow corridor, over each other’s heads. Let’s practice it until you’re sick of hearing my voice!”

  They did. Over and over, they pushed through the narrow corridors of Lord Ishimoto, using training bots as hostiles. Some of the guys were slow at first, unsure of the maneuver.

  “Again!”

  They did as he said, getting tighter each time.

  They reviewed movement through larger areas, using hangar bays to transition between the three main squad movements: squad-column, squad-line, and squad-file. Whenever their ammo was spent and they were forced into melee, they drew swords and formed phalanxes behind specialized shieldmen. For training, Lyokh had them break apart under mock fire, change formation, deal with the threat, and reform.

  “Again!” he told them after each repetition.

  A few of them had trouble recovering from squad-file movement when attacked from the rear.

  “You need to be able to change profile quickly,” Lyokh told them. “Each formation has its strength and its weakness
es. While squad-file provides maximum firepower to its flanks, for example, it gives the unit overall less security. So it’s situational, just like all movements. Watch your team leaders at all times, watch for hand signals to go up, and listen for chimes in your ear.

  “Hoy up! Let’s do it again!”

  “A-HOO!” they shouted.

  Lyokh checked in regularly on Heeten and the mech pilots she was training. She had them running through cover fire for ground troops. It was a sight that terrified a few of the naval rookies who had not yet seen much action. Seeing those warhulks roar across the hangar bay of Deck 3, their massive bodies responding fluidly to the quick-twitch reactions of the pilots inside them, was a thing of beauty in Lyokh’s eyes. Heeten, it turned out, was a real hard ass when it came to teaching. She conducted wrestling matches between the Dagonites and Untamaks, watching how her pilots used their different-sized mechs to wrest control over enemies stronger or more agile than themselves. She trained them how to work together to overturn huge obstacles, using the massive Ravager battle tanks to practice lifting as one.

  As weaponmaster, Takirovanen seemed to have found his calling. He did not abide messy gun handling, and for him a ninety-eight percent accuracy score was not good enough. “Always room for improvement,” he said. And when one of the boys from White Wing muttered something like “Let’s see you do better,” Takirovanen had whipped out his pulser and fired, one-handed, with the auto-targeting switched off and without pausing to aim. All his bullets hit center mass on the targets, and a few of the bullets went through the same hole. After that, nobody complained much.

  Meiks put them all through an hour of PT each morning. He was cruel at times, but always ready with a joke to relieve the tension. The group seemed to appreciate that, and it was the antidote they needed to Takirovanen’s rigidity. God knows they need it, Lyokh thought.

  But even Meiks pushed them all to their limits, and whenever a man fell down during a run, or was struggling to finish a set of push-ups, the others would yell “The wall!” and it seemed to lend the man the strength to finish.

  While it was true none of them had been with Lyokh at the wall, he let them have it. For whenever they were starting to fail, the men seemed to draw on the reservoir of “the wall.” It was nonsensical. It meant nothing, yet it meant everything. It was a mantra and a call to arms, a two-word platitude to which they had attached profound significance.

  In his own time, Lyokh trained up to forty-two of Herodinsk’s Forty-Seven Steps, and had learned to translate some of them into training drills for his new emerging Gold Wing. For instance, there was a step called the “kneeling step”, which he had never used much before. He knelt on one knee, then dropped the upward knee to the ground, and brought the other knee up. To go backwards while kneeling, he simply reversed this motion. Lyokh found it helpful when changing levels in swordplay, but also when his people had to move through tight corridors.

  “So for three men to advance in a hallway only big enough for single file lines,” he told his people one morning, “you do the same maneuver we trained before. The man in front drops on his belly, the man behind him goes to kneeling position, and the third man remains standing. But in order to move, the first man crawls, the second man does the kneeling step, and the third man moves in a low crouch with soft knees. All right, let me see it, guys!”

  They practiced harder than any other group aboard the ship. Others commented on this, and Lyokh was glad that people were taking notice. They needed to see Gold Wing emergent, reborn as something fresh and new. They needed to see that it was not dead.

  Though his head is cut off, he thought, remembering the quote of the samurai, he should not die.

  They spent hours going through drills of transitioning. They had to fire simunitions at a target until their rifle was spent, then let the rifle hang by their side while they transitioned to their pulser. Once the pulser was spent, they reholstered the pulser and transitioned to the field sword on their back and deflected five or six blows from a training bot. They forced their opening, teep-kicked the bots backward, resheathed their field sword and transitioned back to the empty pulser, reloaded it, and fired into the bot’s center mass.

  They did this while walking forward, while standing still, while kneeling, while lying down, while moving across the floor using the kneeling step.

  “Again!” Lyokh shouted repeatedly. “Ziir, you’re too stiff. You’re trying to move too fast. Remember, you learn better when you rehearse slowly. It gets smoother, and smoothness breeds speed. Remember, slow is smooth—”

  “And smooth is fast,” they said in unison.

  “That’s right. So let’s run it again. Remember to breathe, move slow, and get it smooth.”

  Close-quarters combat took two hours out of each day. They trained their barrel sweeps, pressing the barrels of their Fell rifles into the barrels of their opponents, pushing them up or down, aiming them away from a kill shot, then ramming with their shoulders or head-butting. They did the same with their field swords, and learned how to keep melee attacks off centerline.

  After that, it was more hallways, more room clearing. When the mess hall was closed, they used the kitchen to practice moving through rooms and around obstacles, up ladders and down portholes. For zero-gravity, they used Lord Ishimoto’s lower airlocks, where the paragravity fields could be switched off. They grappled in zero-gravity using the ancient Earth art of jiu-jitsu—some things just never became obsolete.

  Some of the guys went through their first certifications for squad-based tactics in zero-grav. They learned that the point-man curled himself into a fetal position, rifle aimed through the porthole he was infiltrating, while behind him soldiers kept their bodies straight as an arrow, hiding behind him until they were through the porthole, then fanning out and looping their heels around one another in a star formation.

  “Again!” Lyokh shouted. It became their mantra. “Again!” The team usually restarted each drill without even having to be told, so used to his grueling regimen were they.

  A couple of highly skilled soldiers emerged as stars. One of them, a sergeant named Paupau, was a massive black man from a planet called Ydiven, where the gravity was 2.1 g and produced people with strong bones and tight muscles. Paupau liked to lift weights, challenge others to arm wrestling, and grapple at any chance he got. He was also a hardy spirit, who discouraged the weakest soldiers from quitting, and, strangely, shouted his own name and thumped his chest whenever he was feeling particularly feisty.

  “Come on, you twinkly fairies!” was his favorite insult to cast at them when he saw sweating, panting men ready to give up. “Come on, now! Paupau!”

  They met up with Reyes a few times, and practiced with the Wyrm Tamers, focusing on deploying from the backs of the wyrms. There wasn’t enough room in the hangar for a wyrm to take flight, but they could rehearse repelling from the back of one. Some of the men were so fresh to the Army that they hadn’t had much time to get a close look at the wyrms. Wyrm biology was unusual in the cosmos, they were the only known animals that could live in vacuum, and could hibernate for long stretches while subsisting off of the energy they got from sunlamps. They derived energy directly from sunlight, but could not grow very large unless they had a large food supply. Hatchlings as small as the one Reyes tamed would probably always remain about a hundred feet in length, head to tail, and no bigger.

  Still, the hatchlings could provide great cover with their armored wings, and Lyokh made sure his less senior people got a chance to perform ground maneuvers with them. And Artemis of Artemis, who was in Reyes’s Tamer flock, was glad to have the attention, since it trained his wyrm Thrallyin to better coordinate with troops and warhulks. It also gave Artemis an opportunity to request a rematch with Lyokh.

  “I’ll see you in the training room,” Lyokh told him.

  IT DID NOT slip past Lyokh’s notice that he and his team were getting looks from other groups, who practiced only three or four days a week, and s
pent the rest of their downtime doing who knew what behind closed doors. I assume praying, lamenting the Fall of Man, prepping themselves for annihilation at Phanes, Lyokh thought.

  A lot of other wings had seen juniors recently promoted, and none of them appeared as focused on staying alive as the new Gold Wing did.

  The final days were spent blending all they had learned. Transitioning weapons in zero-grav while keeping formation. Grappling multiple opponents while fighting to get back to one’s feet. Moving down narrow passageways and laying down constant fire while transitioning from one weapon to another. Switching between a relaxed squad-column movement to squad-line and then back again. And finally, doing all of this while warhulks moved around them, laying down suppression fire or building a wall of protection.

  And all the while, there was Paupau, screaming at them, “Come on, you twinkly fairies! Paupau!”

  The general rapport of the group was good. Meiks and Takirovanen reported lots of energy in the soldiers, good camaraderie and laughter, and a few utterances of how great it was to be in the unit of a doyen and Medal of Valor recipient.

  It was working. The guys were starting to strut a little in the hallways, perhaps even engaging in trash talk with other units of IX Legion, talking about how much more solid their training was. But at least there was unit cohesion. No Gold Wingers were arguing, or reporting Lyokh for cruelty. Indeed, they started healthy competitions with other groups.

  Also, none of them could match him in field sword training. None even came close to his skill. He was admired for it, and the others considered it an honor to have their asses kicked in training by him. It became a badge of honor, a rite of passage for all Gold Wingers.