by Chad Huskins
Herodinsk adopted a whimsical look.
“The stimulus for the creature to grow is stress, you see. Discomfort.” A smile played on his face. “I hope to see an ocean someday.”
Lyokh nodded. He looked down at the holotab in his hand. He had been reviewing all final troop counts and matériel withdrawals. He looked over the final roster of the Crusade Fleet. It was a mix of what ships had been agreed to leave Second Fleet, ships Kalder had negotiated from the Brotherhood’s Repentant Designate, ships donated by the High Priestess, and two of the Tenth Fleet ships that had brought Kalder to Phanes:
TASK FORCE ONE
Lord Ishimoto (TF Leader)
Shatterstar
Ramlock
Sikorskiy
Miss Persephone
Voice of Reason
Tao of Piety
Divine Influence
No Forgiveness
Abandon the Ego
TASK FORCE TWO
Vaultimyr (TF Leader)
Korven Douglas
Silas D. Reginald
Bushido’s Culmination
Kneeling Penitent Man
Mercy’s Caress
Three Goddesses
Ark of the Redeemed
TASK FORCE THREE
Ecclesiastes (TF Leader)
Meringulf
Marie-Anne Wang
Graham H.B. Piper
Greater Redemption
Dawn
Navastophoeles
TASK FORCE MAHL
Prophet (TF Leader)
Malphos
Zanus den Uta
Twenty-eight ships. These weren’t all the ships that Kalder had asked for. Apparently, in the beginning, he and Pennick had agreed on more from Second Fleet, but after Kalder’s first report to the Committee on the Continued Crusade, there had been some kind of snag or other. Lyokh didn’t know the political details, but he knew that the thing had been renegotiated, and that General Quoden and the Visquain were remaining with Second, allowing Lord Ishimoto to be the Crusade’s flagship.
The word was that Kalder had also expected more from the Brotherhood, but their Repentant Designate had pointed to how much damage had come to their Itinerant Fleet already, how many lives had been lost, and she had made an appeal to the Committee on the Continued Crusade to be repaid for their efforts. Apparently, someone somewhere in the Republic had balked. Kalder had pulled some strings to get them the remuneration they requested, but the experience had soured the Repentant Designate to the whole affair, and so only eleven of the twenty ships she had initially promised remained.
In front of him was that assembled fleet, amassing for the first time. Shatterstar was connected by supercrane to the spacedock that orbited Widden. It hung in the crane’s grasp, all alone, like the last dying leaf of autumn.
The 2,000-foot-long space station appeared frozen, like an insect in amber. It was a long, jagged dagger with a pair of toroids circling around it like giant silvery donuts. All but the keenest eyes would fail to see the tiny dots of maintenance drones moving slowly about, alighting here and there like hummingbirds tasting the nectar of a flower. Even smaller were the five or six astronauts in spacesuits conducting EVAs, as nonchalantly as they would if they were walking in the park, not at all like they were moving at 18,000 miles an hour just to stay in orbit.
Just now, a swift sunrise was happening, one of sixteen sunrises that Lyokh got to see every day because of their orbit. The wide arc of the Widden’s horizon was at first dim, then there came a flash of fire as first Tupenda, then Reta exploded over the lip of the world. Windows all over the ship dimmed, or else were shuttered. Hard ebon shapes moved across the spacedock’s exterior, shadows cast by the crisscrossing gridwork of steel arms and compristeel cables.
“You heard about this business with the Hatfield?” asked Herodinsk.
Lyokh shook his head, only half listening as he paged through the final counts of artillery and troops. Eight thousand of IX Legion’s finest, fifty of them joining what remained of Gold Wing. Eight thousand soldiers were coming with him on the Crusade, along with seven hundred skyrakes, fifty-six Ravagers, thirty-two Mantises, fifty wyrms, and dozens of warhulk pilots, all soon to be renamed the Knights of Sol in a ceremony Lyokh was dreading. They also had fifty soldiers from something called the Vastill Privateer Marine Consortium, and almost four hundred contrite brothers, led by Brother Penitent Morkovikson.
It was a hodgepodge of different militaries, governments, and religions. Lyokh was already skeptical of the stability of such an amalgamation of groups flung together so quickly. Smells like a stew with conflicting ingredients.
“—saying it was bigger than a greatwyrm,” Herodinsk was saying. “Much bigger.”
“Mm,” was all Lyokh commented.
“I don’t know how much credence I give any of it. I haven’t seen the images myself, but people are saying it’s bigger than a moon.” Herodinsk laughed. “Probably just altered images.”
Lyokh looked up from his holotab. “What’s bigger than a moon?”
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying, have you?”
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “My mind was far afield.”
“I’ve got the cure for that. I hear a certain Tamer is aiming to toss you on your ass in the training room.”
Lyokh smirked. “Artemis of Artemis.”
“Why don’t you try out some of the steps we worked on today?”
“I just might.”
“Tell me how it works out.” He waved his hands in the air, checking the time on his lenses. “I have to go. Ares Wing’s captain is sending a dozen of his junior boys down to my basement for new certifications. The word has gotten out about your training with me,” he said with a wink. “I’m suddenly popular again.”
“Glad I could give you some work, sir.”
“And just when I was ready to retire. Damn you, Captain Lyokh.”
Lyokh smiled at the blademaster as he left. He turned back to face the amassing fleet, thinking about his teacher’s words. A constant state of becoming. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made.
The words followed him as he left the observation deck and went down to the training room. Artemis wasn’t there. Few people were. They were all helping to make ready for departure the next day. Lyokh took advantage of the solitude and trained, rehearsing the Forty-Seven Steps without the bother of an opponent. Just focusing on the steps themselves, getting them precise. He had seen almost all of them now, and was starting to see how the entire system flowed. The point was to make oneself a mobile weapons platform, so that the feet obeyed quickly and efficiently, carrying you where you needed to go, into or away from an attack. You wanted it to be as thoughtless as walking, so that the feet did the work automatically and left the hands, and the sword, to do their work.
After an hour of punishing stance work, and another hour of mobility drills, he took a quick shower and headed up to his office on Deck 2, where he would now work daily to organize and command the Crusade Army. While he was passing through operations, he overheard some chatter, which he might have ignored if not for the mention of one name.
“—hear Kalder and his people passed this Xeno Nonconformist thing?” one officer asked another.
“No, what’s it about?” asked another.
“Apparently, there’s going to be prison time for anybody caught having sex with a xeno, or married to a xeno, or even suspected of dating one, things like that.”
The second officer shook his head. “Leave it to people too old to use their cocks to tell us what we should do with ours.”
As he walked on, Lyokh wondered if that were true. He decided he would do a bit more looking into Holace Kalder and his political platforms.
As it turned out, he might get a chance to do so in person, because, just as he was coming down the next ladder, a service bot came right up to him with an invitation. “Captain Lyokh,” its happy female voice said, “your presence is requested by Sena
tor Holace Kalder in his stateroom aboard the Voice of Reason, at twenty hundred hours. You are invited to join him and the rest of the Crusade’s command structure for dinner provided by the Reason’s top chefs.”
Lyokh looked at the bot. It was sleek and silvery, definitely not one of Second Fleet’s. It had probably come over on one of the shuttles ferrying personnel back and forth between ships. There were a few good things about Kalder’s presence, he admitted, one of them being a lot of spare parts and materials, and since the Voice of Reason was meant to be for diplomatic missions, its elegance required a top-of-the-line fab room, and that fab room had certainly helped refit Lord Ishimoto and the rest of the ships.
But all that extra help came with a price.
Kalder.
Lyokh had only met him once, and instantly disliked him. The old man might have the bearing of a soldier, but he wore the garb of a senile old fool that had forgotten how to clean himself. Someone had told him it was because Kalder was a Zeroist. Lyokh only barely knew what that was, and didn’t care, the man ought to dress better.
For a moment, Lyokh considered turning down the invitation. The way Kalder had been so presumptive, and telling Lyokh exactly what he was and was not going to do, had been infuriating. But then he recalled, with some pain, Heeten, and her words about the senator. She said they had a saying about him: Kalder does not bend.
No, Lyokh didn’t think he did. Just the way he had behaved in that first meeting, it was clear to Lyokh the senator was not used to mincing words or not getting his way. And how would it be making an enemy out of such a powerful man, and so soon into their Crusade? If their journey lasted months, or even years, Lyokh could be trapped with an angry boss for a long time.
What hell that would be.
“Tell him I’ll be there,” Lyokh said.
“The senator also requests that you bring the scroll with you,” the bot said.
Lyokh was taken aback for a second. The scroll. He’d damn near forgotten all about it. It seemed ages ago when he had last looked at it.
“All right. Tell the senator I’ll bring it.”
It tilted its head in a way to let the listener know it was busy. Then, the bot said, “Message sent. Thank you. Interrogative: Do you know where I can find Deck Officer Swaggert? I have a private familygram for her.”
He gestured toward the ladder leading down to Deck 3. “Main hangar bay. She might still be there.”
“Thank you,” the bot said, and trotted off.
That night, Lyokh fell asleep in his office. He would never remember doing it. He had just been sitting there, staring at a file of slinkplasts that Abethik had dropped off for him, and reviewing final medical evals from Devastator Wing. Then, at some point, he closed his eyes.
And when he opened them, he was standing in a large field. It was familiar. As was the voice traveling on the wind. The same wind rustling through the tall red grass all around him. And he felt heat. The heat of an angry volcano erupting just behind him. He smelled sulfur. But he knew it was no volcano. It was the intervals of heat blasts that gave it away. Regular intervals, accompanied by a deep, deep thrumming, like the heartbeat of a titan.
When he turned, he found himself the focus of the greatwyrm’s gaze, its snout huffing, and pumping out the sulfurous breath.
It opened its mouth.
The heat from its throat charred the landscape, and melted the flesh off of Lyokh’s bones in sloppy sheets.
MOIRA STOOD WITH her left arm hanging to one side, her right hand reaching across to touch her left tricep, rubbing it. It was a stance she adopted any time she was nervous. Along with her slouching, it was something her mother had tried to train out of her. It makes you look meek, she would always say. But not even her stint in the military had eradicated the habit.
Moira listened to the recording played back again, this time with a filter that cut out all other ambient noise.
“Dredda’dress’dresda’dredda’dreth’dreya’dreddi…’
A long, bony finger reached forward to wave at the wall, and stopped the recording. Kalder looked over at her. “Well?”
Well, this is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, she thought, staring into the permanently gaping maw of the Champion.
“You’re sure this was recorded from Captain Lyokh’s helmet?” Moira said, forcing herself to stare at the image of the grim-faced mechanicae frozen in the grainy cam footage. “There’s not been some kind of mistake with the audio? Or…I don’t know…something?”
Kalder shook his head, and waved for Julian to refill his glass of his favorite wine, Old Staz’s Reserve. Desh, who was scratching at two-day-old stubble that never would have flown if he were a real naval man, held up his glass and smiled and winked at Julian. Julian gave the captain a dead stare as he refilled his glass.
“Primacy Intelligence has already studied the recording that Captain Lyokh’s Champion played at him,” Kalder said. “I sent them this two days ago, when I had time to read through Lyokh’s final report of the campaign. I admit, I wish I had discovered this sooner, but so much more has demanded my attention, and it was a minor point in Lyokh’s summary—he didn’t seem to think it warranted a lot of mention, so he buried it at the end of his report.”
“It’s a wonder it took Primacy Intel this long to look into it,” she said. “Considering how much the language matches the Zhirinovsky site recording.”
“They don’t understand its significance. Only you, Julian, myself, and now Captain Desh know everything that you found in the Zhirinovsky System. I’ve kept much of it secret. They have no idea that this gibberish is anything besides some new Ascendancy language.”
Moira looked at him. She thought this was odd. “Don’t you think they should know about the coincidence?”
Kalder accepted his glass back from Julian, took a sip, and shook his head again. “No, I shouldn’t think so. After all, we are the Crusade, Miss Holdengard. Us. Not them. And the Crusade is after answers concerning the Strangers, and what secrets they knew. Zhirinovsky’s secrets, therefore, remain ours.” Another sip. “But I can hold it as leverage for later. Should interest in the Crusade begin to wane, I can always pull this out, as if it’s some new discovery you and I made about Zhirinovsky. That will help rekindle the Committee’s interest in keeping us going.”
Moira nodded. She certainly saw the maneuvering. He was saving Zhirinovsky’s recording as a secret bullet, only to be fired at the right time. He’s killed people, she thought. The reminder came back to her often, and at random times, especially when she was listening to him explain his maneuvers. He’s killed at least one person and he probably killed colleagues of mine. It was simultaneously terrifying and benign, for what could she hope to do with her suspicions? He was Kalder the Dreaded, and she was a stellarpath. Should he deign to silence her forever…
She had decided to be like Desh, and keep her suspicions about the man to herself. However, that didn’t mean she couldn’t keep investigating in her own time.
Just don’t let him catch you doing it, she reminded herself, even as she took a seat across from Kalder, and accepted a glass of Old Staz’s Reserve from Julian.
“So, what do you make of it?” the old man asked her. He was talking to her while he waved at holographic screens emanating from his tab, reports and figures from who knew how many fleet commanders.
“I think it’s interesting,” Moira said. She pressed the glass between her two palms, staring into the amber liquid. “The Ascendancy Champion was out there blasting a recording of a message only you and I have heard.”
“And you’re positive that the Zhirinovsky site was completely unmolested when you got there?”
“Believe me, nobody had been there in at least a few hundred years.”
“So then, there’s another recording out there that’s exactly like the one on Zhirinovsky 373b. And they found it.”
“Looks that way.”
“And they came all the way to Phanes to start a
war,” Kalder said, still scrolling through countless documents. “And, after coming face-to-face with whatever weapon the High Priestess used against them, they fled like mice in a sinking ship, collided with Lyokh’s ground forces, and were pushed back to the Dexannonhold, where they sent out the Champion to speak to Lyokh.”
Desh leaned forward, scratching his stubble. “I’ve reviewed the footage, and read Lyokh’s report. The dead mechanicae only started to resurrect after the Champion played his message. Think maybe the Champion was waiting to see if he got a reply from Lyokh? And when he didn’t get what he wanted, maybe he decided to go ahead with the attack?”
Moira nodded. “Possibly. But that would suggest they’re on a crusade of their own.” She looked at Kalder. “Maybe they didn’t come to Phanes just for resources, after all. Maybe they came for something specific, something they thought the High Priestess or her government could provide, some knowledge about the Strangers. Or the weapon she used against them.” She shrugged. “It’s a theory, anyway.”
Desh downed his drink, and nodded confidently. “And after days of getting their asses kicked, one of their top brass said, ‘Hey, let’s see if these Republic jerks recognize the recording we made at a Stranger site.’ They figured it couldn’t hurt to ask at that point, they were already getting slaughtered.”
“If that’s the case,” Moira said, “then we’re talking about an awfully big coincidence.”
Kalder looked at her. “Coincidence?”
“Well, yeah. Don’t you see it? I mean…we’re just now setting out to find out who the Strangers were and what they knew, in part because of that exact recording I made at the Zhirinovsky site. And now, here we are, at our first stop, and we just so happen to collide with the Ascendancy as they begin the same endeavor?”
Kalder shook his head. “You’re assuming they only just began. They might have been searching for the truth of the Strangers for centuries, and this was just one of a thousand attempts to try and find out what others might know. Or they might have spy satellites lurking near any number of Aligned Worlds, and they picked up on our news sites, media traffic, and knew that the Republic was beginning this Crusade.”
