Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  Roger bounced off the wall as six hundred kilos of raging Dogzard brushed him aside with a blood-chilling snarl and charged into the room. He managed to catch himself without quite falling, and his head whipped around just in time to see the results.

  “Holy Allah!” Khalid gasped as a red-and-black thing knocked the armored man out of its way and charged. He tried to hit it with the one-shot, but it was too close, moving too fast. His arm swung, stabbing the weapon at the creature’s side, but a charging shoulder hit his forearm, sending the weapon flying out of his grasp. And then there was no time, no time at all.

  Roger pushed himself off the wall as Dogzard lifted her stained muzzle. Her powerful jaws had literally decapitated the other man, and the dog-lizard gave Roger a half-shamed glance, then grabbed the body and pulled it behind the couch. There was a crunch, and a ripping sound.

  Roger limped toward the bed, hobbling on his bead cannon and pulling off his helmet.

  “Mother,” he said, eyes blurred with tears. “Mother?”

  Alexandra stared up at him, and his heart twisted as the combat fugue release him and the Empress’ condition truly registered.

  His memories of his mother included all too few personal, informal moments. For him, she had always been a distant, almost god-like figure. An authoritarian deity whose approval he hungered for above all things . . . and had known he would never win. Cool, reserved, always immaculate and in command of herself. That was how he remembered his mother.

  But this woman was none of those things, and raw, red-fanged fury rose suddenly within him as he took in the scanty lingerie, the chains permanently affixed to her bed, and the bruises—the many, many bruises and welts—her clothing would have hidden . . . if she’d had any clothing on. He remembered what Catrone had said about the day they told him how Adoula had controlled her. Adoula . . . and his father.

  He looked into her eyes, and what he saw there shocked him almost more than her physical condition. There was anger in them, fury and defiance. But there was more than that. There was fear. And there was confusion. It was as if her stare was flickering in and out of focus. One breath he saw the furious anger, the sense of who she was and her hatred for the ones who had done this to her. And in the next breath, she was simply . . . gone. Someone else looked out of those same eyes at him. Someone quivering with terror. Someone uncertain of who she was, or why she was there. They wavered back and forth, those two people, and somewhere deep inside, behind the flickering, blurred interface, she knew. Knew that she was broken, helpless, reduced from the distant figure, the avatar of strength and authority who had always been the mother he knew now he had helplessly adored even as he tried futilely to somehow win her love in return.

  “Oh, Mother,” he whispered, his expression as clenched as his heart, and reached the bed towards her. “Oh, Mother.”

  “W-who are you?” the Empress demanded in a harsh, wavering whisper, and his jaw tightened. Of course. She couldn’t possibly recognize him behind the disguising body-mod of Augustus Chung.

  “It’s me, Mother,” he said. “It’s Roger.”

  “Who?” She blinked at him, as if she were fighting to focus on his face, not to find some sort of internal focus in the swirling chaos of her own mind.

  “Roger, Mother,” he said softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder at last. “I know I look different, but I’m Roger.”

  “Roger?” She blinked again. For an instant, a fleeting moment, her eyes were clear. But then the focus vanished, replaced by confusion and a sudden, dark whirlwind of fear.

  “Roger!” she repeated. “Roger?!”

  She twisted frantically, fighting her chains with all of their strength.

  “No! No! Stay away!”

  “Mother!” Roger flinched back physically from the revulsion and terror in his mother’s face.

  “I saw you!” she shouted at him. “I saw you kill John! And you killed my grandchildren! Butcher! Murderer!”

  “Mother, it wasn’t me!” he protested. “You know it wasn’t me! I wasn’t even here, Mother!”

  “Yes—yes you were! You look different now, but I saw you then!”

  Roger reached out to her again, only to stop, shocked, as she screamed and twisted away from him. Dogzard rose up, looking over the back of the couch, and growled at him.

  “Mother,” he said to the screaming woman. “Mother! Please!”

  She didn’t even hear him. He could tell that. But then, abruptly, the scream was cut short, and Alexandra froze. Her expression changed abruptly, and she looked at her son, cocked her head, and smiled. It was a terrible smile. A dark-eyed smile which mingled desire, invitation, and stark fear in equal measure.

  “Are you here for Lazar? Did he send you?” she asked in a quieter voice, and arched her spine suggestively. “They told me someone would be coming, but I . . . forget the faces sometimes,” she continued, dropping her eyes. “But why are you wearing armor? I hope you’re not going to be rough. I’ll be good, really I will—I promise! Tell Lazar you don’t have to be rough, please. Please! Really, you don’t,” she continued on a rising note.

  Then her eyes came back up, and the screaming began again.

  “Penalosa!” Roger yelled, putting the helmet back on as his mother continued to scream and Dogzard rose from her kill menacingly. “Penalosa! Damn it! Get somebody else in here!”

  When the police had secured the scene and the firefighters could get to work—mostly keeping the fire from spreading; Siminov’s building and the two on either side of it were already a total loss—Subianto walked over to where Despreaux and Catrone were breathing something purple at the rear of a Fire Department medical vehicle.

  “You two need to get moving,” she said, bending down and speaking quietly into their ears. “There’s a problem at the Palace.”

  “What do you think he’s going to do, Sir?” Commander Talbert asked quietly.

  He sat beside Admiral Victor Gajelis on the admiral’s flagship, the Imperial Navy carrier HMS Trujillo, studying the tactical readouts. Carrier Squadron Fourteen had been under acceleration towards Old Earth for thirty-one minutes at the maximum hundred and sixty-four gravities its carriers could sustain. Their velocity was up to almost five thousand kilometers per second, and they’d traveled almost seven million kilometers, but they still had eighty-five million kilometers—and another three hours and thirty-eight minutes—to go. They could have made the entire voyage in less than two hours, but not if they wanted to decelerate into orbit around the planet when they reached it. On a least-time course, they would have gone scorching past the planet at over seventeen thousand kilometers per second, which would have left them in a piss-poor position to do anything about holding the planet for their admiral’s patron.

  At the moment, however, Talbert wasn’t much concerned with what his own squadron’s units were going to do. His attention was on the information relayed from General Gianetto about Carrier Squadron Twelve.

  “What the hell do you think he’s going to do?” Gajelis grunted. “If he planned on helping us out, there wouldn’t have been any reason for him to cut off communications with Gianetto in the first place, now would there?”

  “Maybe it was only temporary, Sir,” Talbert said diffidently. “You know some of our own units had problems with their Marine detachments, and Prokorouv’s squadron’s personnel weren’t anywhere near as handpicked as ours were. If his Marines tried to stop him and it took him a while to regain control . . .”

  “Be nice if that was what happened,” Gajelis growled. “But I doubt it did. Even if Prokourov wanted to take back control after he’d lost it, I don’t think it mattered. I never did trust him, whatever the Prince thought.”

  “Do you think he was part of whatever’s happening from the beginning, then, Sir?”

  “I doubt it,” Gajelis said grudgingly. “If he had been, he wouldn’t have just sat there for almost twenty minutes. He’d have been moving towards Old Earth as soon as those other four trait
ors started moving.”

  He glowered at the frozen secondary tactical plot where the information relayed by Terran Defense HQ’s near-space sensors showed the four carriers which had taken up positions around the planet. Those sensors were no longer reporting, thanks to the point defense systems which had systematically eliminated any platforms not hard-linked to Moonbase, but they’d lasted long enough to tell Gajelis exactly who was waiting for him.

  Talbert glanced sideways at his boss. The commander didn’t much care for the way this entire thing was shaping up. Like Gajelis, he knew who was in command over there, and he wasn’t especially happy about it. Nor did he expect to enjoy the orders he anticipated once Carrier Squadron Fourteen managed to secure the planetary orbitals. But he didn’t have much choice. He’d sold his soul to Adoula too long ago to entertain second thoughts now.

  At least they didn’t need the destroyed sensor platforms to keep an eye on Prokourov. Ship-to-ship detection range for carriers under phase drive was almost thirty light-minutes, and Carrier Squadron Twelve was less than ten light-minutes from Trujillo. They wouldn’t be able to detect any of Prokorouv’s parasites at this range—maximum detection range against a cruiser was only eight light-minutes—but they could see exactly what Prokorouv’s carriers were doing.

  Still, he’d have felt a lot more confident it he’d been able to tell exactly what was happening in Old Earth orbit. Corvu Atilius was a wily old fox, and Senior Captain Gloria Demesne, Atilius’ cruiser commander, was even worse. Six-to-four odds or not, he wasn’t looking forward to tangling with them. Especially not if Prokourov was about to bring a fresh carrier squadron in on their asses.

  “Admiral,” a communications rating said, “we have an incoming message for you on your private channel.”

  Gajelis looked up, then grunted.

  “Earbud only,” he said, then sat back and listened stolidly for almost two minutes. Finally, he nodded to the com rating at the end of the message and looked at Talbert.

  “Well,” he said grimly, “at least we know what we’re going to be doing after we get there.”

  Francesco Prokourov leaned back in his command chair, considering his own tactical plot. The situation was getting . . . interesting. Not to his particular surprise, the other carriers of his squadron and his parasite skippers were more than willing to follow his orders. A few of them had opted to pretend they were doing so only out of fear of the squadron’s Marine detachments, which was a fairly silly (if human) attempt to cover themselves if worse came to worst. But while Prokourov might not be another Helmut, he’d always had a knack for inspiring loyalty—or at least trust—in his subordinates. Now those subordinates were prepared to follow his lead through the chaos looming before them, and he only hoped he was leading them to victory and not pointless destruction.

  Either way, though, he was leading them towards their duty, and that was just going to have to do.

  But he had every intention of combining duty and survival, and unlike Gajelis, he had access to all of Moonbase’s tactical information, which gave him a far tighter grasp on the details than Gajelis or the other Adoula loyalists in the system could possibly have. For example, he knew that Gajelis had not yet punched his cruisers (or had not as of ten minutes earlier), which made a fair amount of sense, and that Admiral La Paz’s Thirteenth Squadron—or what was left of it after the original Fatted Calf defections—was coming in from astern of him. But La Paz was going to be a nonissue, whatever happened. His lonely pair of carriers wasn’t going to make a great deal of difference after Gajelis’ six and the combined eight of Fatted Calf and CarRon 12 had chewed each other up. Besides, CarRon 13 was at least six hours behind CarRon 12.

  No, the really interesting question was what was going to happen when Gajelis crunched into Fatted Calf Squadron, and at the moment it was fairly obvious that Gajelis—who, despite his first name, was not a particularly imaginative commander—was hewing to a standard tactical approach.

  Each of his carriers carried twenty-four sublight parasite cruisers and one hundred and twenty-five fighters, which gave him a total of one hundred and forty-four cruisers and seven hundred and fifty fighters, but the carriers alone represented thirty-eight percent of his ship-to-ship missile launchers, thirty-two percent of his energy weapons, forty percent of his close-in laser point defense clusters, and forty-eight percent of his countermissile launchers. Not only that, but the carriers were immensely more heavily armored, their energy weapons were six times the size of a cruiser’s broadside energy mounts, and their shipkiller missiles were bigger, longer-ranged, and equipped with both more destructive warheads and far superior penetration aids and EW. And as one more minor consideration, carriers—whose hulls had two hundred times the volume of any parasite cruiser—had enormously more capable fire control systems and general computer support.

  Cruisers, with better than three and a half times the huge carriers’ acceleration rate, were the Imperial Navy’s chosen offensive platforms. They could get in more quickly, and no ponderous, unwieldy starship had the acceleration to avoid them inside the Tsukayama Limit of a star system. But they were also far more fragile, and their magazine capacities were much lower. And outside the antimissile basket of their carriers, they were far more vulnerable to long-ranged missile kills, even from other cruisers, far less starships. So although Gajelis was essentially a cruiser commander at heart, he was holding his parasites until his carriers could get close enough to support them when they went in against Fatted Calf.

  It was exactly what the Book called for, and given what Gajelis knew, it was also a smart, if cautious, move.

  Of course, Gajelis didn’t know everything, now did he?

  “Find New Madrid,” Roger said coldly.

  He was out of his armor, but still wore the skin-tight cat-suit normally worn under it. The combination of the cat-suit’s built in tourniquet and his own highly capable nanite pack had sealed the stump of his left leg, suppressed the pain, and pulled his body forcibly out of shock. None of which had done anything at all for the white-hot fury which filled him.

  “Find him,” he said softly. “Find him now.”

  He looked around at the human and Mardukan faces gathered about him in the Empress’ private audience room. Their owners’ smoke- and bloodstained uniforms and gouged and seared battle armor were as out of place against their elegant surroundings as his own smoke- and sweat-stinking cat-suit, but the bizarre contrast didn’t interest him at all at the moment. His mind was too full of the woman, three doors down the hall, who screamed whenever she saw a man’s face.

  “Where’s Rastar?” he asked.

  “Dead, Your Highness,” one of the Vasin said with a salute. “He fell taking the gate.”

  “Oh, God damn it.” Roger closed his eyes and felt his jaw muscles ridge at the sudden spasm of pain he hadn’t felt when he lost his leg. A spasm he knew was going to be repeated again and again when the casualty totals were finally added up.

  “Catrone? Nimashet?” he asked, his voice harsh and flat with a fear he was unprepared to admit even to himself.

  “They’ve got them,” a master sergeant from the Empress’ Own—the real Empress’ Own—replied. “They’re on their way. So are Ms. O’Casey and Sergeant Major Kosutic.”

  “Good,” Roger said. “Good.”

  He stood a moment, nostrils flaring, then shook himself and looked back at his companions again.

  “Find New Madrid,” he repeated in an icy voice. “That slimy bastard will be skulking around somewhere. Look for an overdressed servant. And tell Kosutic, when she gets here—go to the Empress. My mother’s safety is Kosutic’s charge for now.”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” the master sergeant said, and began whispering into his communicator.

  “You know,” Kjerulf commented to the command room in general, “I’ve decided I’m rather glad Admiral Prokourov is on our side.”

  “Amen to that, Sir,” the senior Tactical rating said fervently, smiling admi
ringly at his readouts. Prokourov had punched his cruisers—and his fighters—twenty minutes after he got his squadron moving. For a cold-start launch with no previous warning, that was very respectable timing, and it spoke well of his people’s readiness to accept his orders. Now those cruisers and fighters were boring ahead at four hundred and fifty gravities, better than two and a half times his carriers’ acceleration, but barely three-quarters of their own maximum. At that rate, and employing strict emissions control discipline, shipboard detection range against them dropped to barely four light-minutes. But it meant that they would still reach Old Earth orbit in just over two hours, while CarRon 14 was still better than three hours out on its current flight profile. They’d get there far in advance of their own carriers, but they would double Fatted Calf’s parasite strength, which would more than offset Gajelis’ numerical advantage, especially with the Fatted Calf carriers to support them.

  Of course, it was extremely probable that Gajelis would still pick them up before they got clear to Old Earth, but nothing he could do could get his carriers there any sooner, and knowing Gajelis . . .

  “They’ve got the Palace,” Larry Gianetto said bleakly from Admiral Gajelis’ com display. His voice was inaudible to anyone else on Trujillo’s flag deck, but it came clearly over the admiral’s earbud.

  “Yes, Sir,” Gajelis said aloud. He was aware of the need to pick his words carefully, lest one of his weaker-kneed subordinates waver in his duty, especially if he had time to stew over it.

  “They’re still playing it carefully. They haven’t claimed or confirmed—or denied—that that little bastard Roger is back, but the rumors are spreading like wildfire, anyway. And they have sent out light armored vehicles and assault shuttles to bring in the Prime Minister, the other Cabinet ministers, and the leaders of the major parties in both the Lords and the Commons, as well as at least a dozen major journalists,” Gianetto continued. “Once they’ve had a chance to get the Empress independently examined, we’re all screwed. Unless, of course, we make sure that the results of that examination never become known.”