The Lost Stars 01-Tarnished Knight

by Jack Campbell

  “We’re tougher. And every soldier with us hates them. Who doesn’t know someone who got hauled off to a labor camp or worse by vipers or other snakes?”

  Drakon nodded to himself, thinking of the worries he had lived with for decades, wondering day by day no matter where he was if a door would come crashing open, followed by a squad of vipers with orders from Internal Security to take him off for interrogation about crimes he might or might not have contemplated but would surely confess to after enough physical and mental duress. He wondered if anyone in the Syndicate Worlds had ever been safe from that worry. Snakes. The common nickname for ISS personnel spoke to the general attitude toward them, but the ISS had been vicious and efficient enough to keep dissent down nonetheless.

  Until now.

  Morgan spoke again, sounding annoyed. “The unit leaders want to know what the policy is on prisoners. Do we take any vipers alive?”

  That one was easy. “They won’t know anything worth sweating out of them, assuming they aren’t conditioned to suicide once captured. It doesn’t matter anyway. Do you think any vipers will try to surrender, knowing how the soldiers feel about them?”

  Morgan chuckled, her voice delighted this time. “No. They’ll fight to the death because they know what’ll happen if they’re captured alive. I hope we do capture a few.”

  About a minute later, Malin reported in. “Assault Force Two ready.”

  “How do your people look?” Drakon asked him. “Any signs of wavering?”

  “No, sir. These are the cream of our forces. They’ve been waiting for this day. And you’re not just another CEO. You’re the only CEO who ever showed any concern for their personal welfare. They’re loyal to you. You’re going into battle with them, and how many CEOs do that? It may take time to get all the rest of the planetary troops behind you, but you’ve got a good reputation among them.”

  A reputation based on actions that had resulted in his being exiled to Midway, Drakon thought ruefully, along with Morgan and Malin, who had chosen to follow him here. “It hasn’t done much for my promotion potential in the past, but maybe that’s about to change.” Assuming he won, and survived, he would go from being a rather low-level military-specialist CEO within the sprawling bureaucracy of the Syndicate Worlds to being the seniormost military commander in an independent star system.

  Tense from waiting, stuck waiting six more minutes for the new time line to run out and looking for something to distract part of his mind, Drakon seized on the idea of change. Iceni wanted to go back to calling mobile forces “warships.” Maybe some other changes were worth considering. “What do you two think about going back to the old rank structure? Dropping the CEO and civilian pay scale stuff and using military titles again?”

  “We’ve been doing it this way for about a hundred and fifty years,” Malin said. “It’s what the troops and everyone are used to.”

  Unsurprisingly, that made Morgan jump in on the other side. “I think it’d be a great idea to go back to the old ranks, General Drakon.”

  He liked the sound of that. General Drakon. And uniforms for high-ranking military leaders again instead of corporate suits. Something besides an executive specialty and assignment code to indicate what he was. And not just what he was but, in a lot of ways, who he was. “We need to break with the past, and maybe the best way to do that is to go even farther into the past.” Just decide it and get it done. Don’t go through a hundred layers of corporate bureaucracy, then wait for years before a decision finally wends its way back down saying no, and why the hell are you thinking instead of doing what you’re told? Was it that bad in the Alliance? They hadn’t been able to beat the Syndicate Worlds in a century of fighting, not until Black Jack reappeared, so the Alliance probably didn’t offer any perfect world, either.

  But he had never cared for identifying himself as CEO Drakon on those rare occasions when he sent transmissions to Alliance military leaders. They were generals and admirals, and wasn’t he, too? “I’m a soldier, dammit.”

  “Yes, sir,” Malin agreed. “Maybe the new titles would help establish a new spirit in the troops.”

  An alert chimed with deceptive gentleness and Drakon checked the incoming message. “CEO-level comms have been picked up between one of the mobile forces cruisers and the ISS headquarters.”

  Morgan cursed. “That bitch is trying to roll us! She knows we can’t back out now!”

  “We know Hardrad has received his orders,” Malin countered. “He’s probably questioning Iceni about it, too.”

  “It doesn’t matter which of you is right. We have no choice now but to go in.” No choice but to face the potential for horrendous disaster. The ISS had nuclear weapons buried in the major population centers on this planet, but detonating those nukes required the use of codes held by Iceni. The snakes could blow the nukes anyway, but it would take a lot longer to trigger them without Iceni’s cooperation. If she was cooperating with the snakes, the ground forces attack might end in glowing craters rather than victory, but it was impossible to halt the attack at this point without surrendering to the snakes. “We go in.”

  The timer on his heads-up display scrolled rapidly toward zero, meaning it was time to focus on that and forget the distractions. “All assault forces stand by. Jump-off at zero minute.” As the green “go” alert flashed, Drakon sent a command that was instantly relayed to transmitters that bounced the message out beyond the planet’s atmosphere, to every orbiting station and facility and every base on every moon where both ground forces and snakes were present. The order could only travel at light speed, meaning it would take minutes and sometimes hours to reach the farthest facilities, but any reports of his attacks on the planet would come in behind it. His people would get the order to attack seconds before the snakes at their locations knew anything had happened back on the planetary surface.

  With the next motion, he switched his circuit to the frequency linking the portion of the attack force he was personally leading in. Half-terrified and half-exhilarated, he felt adrenaline surging, while visions of a hundred earlier battles and engagements flashed through his memory as he began yet another. “Assault Force One, fire and move!”

  A one-hundred-meter-wide area free of obstacles or cover, grass- and marble- and stone-surfaced, separated the ISS complex from surrounding buildings. Against civilian rioters, that offered plenty of free-fire zone, and even a small number of regular troops trying to assault the ISS building faced formidable defenses. But no complex could be designed to withstand a massed assault by so many troops, so close to their target, armed with so many heavy weapons.

  Drakon heard a roar of mingled rage and defiance surge across the comm circuit as his soldiers opened fire on the hated snakes. The breaching teams fired clearing rounds into the double-layered fence around the complex, blowing huge holes in the fences, detonating the mines placed between the fences and destroying the sensors. Other teams fired antiarmor rounds straight into the security towers set at intervals around the complex, most of the towers automated but some occupied by ISS snakes who never knew what hit them.

  As the outer rings of defenses were simultaneously blown apart, other weapons teams dropped screening rounds nearer the walls of the ISS complex, generating dense clouds of smoke mixed with floating infrared decoys and radar-defeating chaff.

  In every attack he had participated in, Drakon never remembered actually starting to move. This time, like every other time, he went from crouched under cover to realizing that he was charging forward across the open area toward the complex, moving in the low, fast leaps that the power assists in combat armor made easy. His soldiers followed, dim shapes to either side of him. Despite Malin’s reassurance, he had wondered if his soldiers would obey him when it came to this. But on the heads-up display of his helmet Drakon could see every soldier moving to the attack.

  Fire flashed by, the complex’s def
enses firing blind in hopes of scoring hits. Electromagnetic pulse charges went off all over the area, but the EMPs which would have fried electronic circuits in civilian gear or standard survival suits couldn’t harm the shielded combat-armor circuitry. Drakon’s soldiers paused to return fire, their armor’s combat systems pinpointing origins for the defensive shots, then rushed onward as the building’s outer defenses were rapidly silenced under an avalanche of attacks.

  Drakon reached a stout wall, knowing that it had layers of dead space and synthetic armor beneath the stone exterior. Schematics for the ISS complex had been highly classified, but that hadn’t prevented Malin from acquiring copies through some inspired hacking. Now more of Drakon’s troops reached the wall to place breaching charges specially formulated to blow through that armor. “Take cover!”

  The assault troops nearest the wall huddled back as the charges detonated, directing a series of blasts against the fortified exterior to tear two-meter-wide and -high holes in the walls. On the heels of the detonations, the assault troops poured through the gap, knowing that any defenses right behind the wall would have been taken out along with the wall itself.

  Drakon went with the troops, knowing that if he were alone he might have trouble nerving himself to leap into the face of the enemy defenses, but he was able to overcome his dread by staying in a group. Once through the hole, Drakon hurled himself to one side as a volley of high-intensity fire ripped down the hallway the gap opened into. That’s not any internal automated defense. We must have run into a viper strongpoint. Fear forgotten for the moment under the demands of decision-making, Drakon checked the IDs of the soldiers closest to him. The symbols representing those soldiers glowed on the display that projected information onto the faceplate of his armor, showing exactly where they were on a schematic of this floor of the ISS complex. “Second squad, take cover and return fire to keep those vipers busy. Everyone else, head north with me.”

  There wasn’t time to worry now. Drakon had attention only for the map on his helmet display and the glimpses he could catch of the actual building around him through the dust and smoke thrown up by the breaching charges and the fighting. He and the soldiers with him had barely entered the next passage when barrages of defensive fire began raking it as well. Drakon hit the floor, fuming with anger at the holdup, then checked the floor plan on his helmet display again before calling out orders. “Fire some concealment rounds and EMP charges toward those defenders. Combat engineer team sigma, blow a hole in the floor just around the corner.”

  The concealment charges turned the area between Drakon and the vipers into a fog impenetrable by sensors, and a few moments later that area of the building shook as the combat engineers blasted the hole. Drakon and the troops with him crawled back and around the corner, then as the vipers continued to pour fire down the now-empty corridor, he and the others dropped through the new access to the next lower level.

  That level felt oddly quiet, even though the building was shuddering as firefights raged throughout other sections. Doctrine called for Drakon to pause now and evaluate his entire force posture before ordering coordinated attacks, but he had trained his soldiers to operate without detailed orders even though such an approach was discouraged by a Syndicate hierarchy which rightly feared independent thinking. Drakon’s approach to training paid off, as individual platoons and squads from the attacking force spread through the building along every open path, like water flooding an area without adequate protection.

  The snakes seemed to be reacting slowly, though, waiting for orders before they shifted position. The delays were often fatal, as soldiers surrounded and wiped out pockets of defenders.

  Drakon’s helmet display kept fuzzing and sputtering as the jamming systems inside the ISS building as well as the building’s structure blocked signals. But so many soldiers were inside the building, each of the combat armor suits relaying signals to every other suit of armor within range, that Drakon still got a halfway-decent picture of events. “This way,” he ordered the soldiers with him, diverting to the south along a short corridor as the roar of battle grew in intensity again. Fear had become a distant thing, lost in the need to concentrate on developments and keep moving fast.

  A sudden alert pierced the pounding of the gunfire. Drakon paused to eye the symbol, which told him that this message had to be from one of two people in this star system. He ordered the soldiers with him to halt movement and accepted the transmission.

  The image of CEO Hardrad was fuzzy, breaking up into pixilated static before partially re-forming. “Drakon, break off your attack now, or I will detonate the nuclear charges under every major city on this planet.”

  “You don’t have the codes.”

  “Yes, I do.” The interference made it impossible to read Hardrad’s expression or get any feel for emotion in the other CEO’s voice, not that Hardrad ever showed much feeling in either face or tone. “Iceni betrayed you in exchange for limited immunity. I have the codes, and I will destroy this world before I let you overthrow lawful authority. But, if you stop now, we can reach an agreement. Iceni got some immunity. So can you. The alternative is to die along with everyone else.”

  In the middle of a battle, and despite his long experience with the cold-bloodedness that often characterized Internal Security, it felt odd to hear Hardrad making such an apocalyptic threat in the same manner as if he were suggesting that forms had been filled out improperly.

  But does he have the codes? Did Iceni turn on me to protect herself? Can Hardrad carry out his threat right now? How much longer before my troops can get to Hardrad’s office in the heavily fortified command center?

  Drakon’s eyes rested on the display depicting his soldiers storming deeper into the ISS headquarters building. He could hear orders being passed, and other cries across the comm circuits as his soldiers exulted in finally striking back at an enemy they might have come to hate more than anything in the Alliance. And he wondered if, despite the brutal discipline exercised within Syndicate forces, it would be possible to get his troops to withdraw or if, no matter what he said, they would keep attacking until every snake was dead.

  Or until this city, and numerous others, saw nuclear blooms blossom in their centers.

  * * *

  ICENI stood perfectly still as her mind raced. Five minutes until the snakes on this cruiser got here. What if nothing had happened on the surface by then? Did she continue to trust Drakon?

  She called Togo, her signal this time having to weave its way around several blocks set up in the comm system, requiring minute after minute before a clear path was finally located. “Have you heard from the ISS?” Iceni asked.

  Togo nodded. “We have been told to freeze all systems and prepare for a security sweep. I can no longer make outgoing calls.”

  “What is the situation in the city?” The question was too blunt, too likely to tip off the snakes that something might be expected to happen, but she had no alternative.

  “Quiet.”

  “I want you to—” Iceni stopped speaking as the call connection broke. ISS must have spotted her penetration and sealed off the access her own systems had located.

  “Drakon.” Akiri made the name into a curse, his eyes reflecting growing uneasiness.

  Iceni could feel the unsteadiness in the man, as if he were a satellite in an increasingly unstable orbit. “Stay with me, or yours will be the first name I tell them,” Iceni warned Akiri in a low voice.

  Akiri glanced at the sole bodyguard who had followed Iceni through the tube and was standing well back but with his eyes watching everything. Akiri was smart enough to know his odds against that man and experienced enough to know that the snakes would roll up anyone even slightly suspected of disloyalty if Iceni called out that charge, so the cruiser commander licked his lips nervously, then nodded.

  Iceni looked down the passageway to see four snakes approaching
, their casual arrogance as unmistakable as their ISS suits. Five more minutes had passed, making it ten minutes since Drakon had promised his attack on the surface would begin.

  She had a source very close to Drakon, and she had heard nothing from that source. Was it because Drakon had discovered that person was feeding Iceni information? Or because any comms now would be impossible to send to her? Even Togo didn’t know that source existed, so he couldn’t have relayed any information.

  Behind the snakes came Executive Marphissa and several other crew, their paths apparently aimed at Akiri. Iceni could easily tell how nervous a couple of those crew members were, but fortunately the attention of the snakes was centered on her and not on those behind them. Despite what had happened in other star systems in the last few months, the snakes hadn’t really absorbed the idea that open revolt could occur. They had been the feared guardians of order for so long and so successfully that a group of them didn’t worry as much as they should have about citizens at their backs.

  Marphissa and Akiri were both watching Iceni, the executive calm, the sub-CEO visibly tense, questions in their eyes.

  The senior snake stopped before Iceni, smiling slightly. Iceni realized that she was effectively under arrest, but the snakes would pretend otherwise, acting as if they were simply escorting her to a meeting to coordinate action against Drakon. Until she was inside the walls of the ISS complex the snakes would follow polite form, treating her with respect. Paying no attention to Iceni’s bodyguard, the senior snake gestured toward the access tube. “If CEO Iceni would lead the way?”

  Iceni smiled back, deciding to stall for a few more minutes. If Drakon doesn’t do something before they order me onto that shuttle, I’ll have to act. “The shuttle operator hasn’t been informed of our departure. I was supposed to be aboard this unit much longer than this.”

  The senior snake turned to one of his subordinates. “Call the shuttle operator.” The call and response took perhaps another minute. “The shuttle is ready to depart. Honored CEO, please lead the way.”