The Lost Stars 01-Tarnished Knight

by Jack Campbell

  * * *

  WHEN he awoke the next morning she was gone, leading to a very brief flash of hope that the whole thing had been an exceptionally vivid, detailed, and extended dream. But then he spotted the torn sheets, felt some bruises and scratches that hadn’t been there the night before, and realized that he never could have imagined some of the things Morgan had done with him.

  It wasn’t the hangover that made him punch the wall hard enough to splinter the fine wood paneling.

  * * *

  DRAKON did not want to reenter the former CEO’s bedroom suite once he had cleaned up and dressed. The office next to that set of rooms, though, had an impressive set of security equipment and would do fine for any work he had to accomplish. And there was definitely something that he had to do. “Colonel Morgan, I need to speak with you privately.”

  She arrived a few minutes later, outwardly acting normally. Normally for Morgan, that was. But he probably wasn’t imagining the ghost of a smile that kept appearing whenever she looked at him. “Yes, General?”

  He stayed as unbending as he could manage. “I wanted to ensure that you understood that the events of last night would not be repeated.”

  “Last night?” Morgan did smile openly this time. “Wasn’t it worth repeating?”

  He hoped his reaction hadn’t shown. I’ve never had a night like that, and I want it again, and again, but I won’t. “You know how I feel about sleeping with subordinates. I’m disappointed that you didn’t respect that.”

  She looked puzzled. “Did I force you?”

  “No.” Arguing that she took advantage of his being drunk would sound silly as well as weak. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

  “That’s your decision, General.”

  “Do you mind telling me what you hoped to accomplish?”

  Morgan grinned once more. “I think it was pretty obvious what I was trying to accomplish last night. And I succeeded. More than once.”

  Memories of that night warred with his desire to remain angry. “And that was it? That was all you were after?”

  “Oh . . . yeah.” Morgan’s smile changed, and her voice grew serious. “General Drakon, everything I do is in your best interests.”

  “Then respect my wishes. I won’t speak of this again.”

  “I like a man who doesn’t boast about his conquests.” Morgan pretended to flinch at Drakon’s expression. “I understand, General. One-night stand. It’s over.”

  “That’s all.”

  Several minutes after Morgan left, Malin arrived. Was it just his imagination, or did Malin seem more formal than usual? Drakon had no illusions that no one else was aware that Morgan had spent a good, long time in his private quarters. Few besides Malin would fault him for that, and for some reason, that aggravated him even more. “What?” he asked Malin.

  Malin paused at Drakon’s tone of voice. “I have an update on the ‘wounded’ that Colonel Gaiene sent up to the orbital docks, General.”

  “Oh.” The world went on, despite his own failures and discomfort. “Have they completed interrogating and screening them?”

  “Yes, General. Full-scale interrogation, and none displayed signs of having been trained to mislead that.” Malin checked his reader. “Of the eighty-seven who surrendered to Colonel Gaiene’s brigade, six are confirmed as having actively participated in atrocities against citizens. Nineteen more witnessed such atrocities but did not participate themselves. The remainder belonged to subunits whose commanding officers evaded orders to carry out atrocities against Syndicate citizens. They neither witnessed nor participated in such actions.”

  Drakon sat back, trying to focus on those numbers. “Did any of those subunit commanding officers survive and surrender to us?”

  “Two, General. One executive and one subexecutive are among the eighty-seven.”

  “Offer them comparable positions in our forces. I want the nineteen soldiers who witnessed atrocities rescreened. Make sure they didn’t participate in doing things like that to our own citizens because they wouldn’t, not because they just weren’t personally asked. I want to know what soldiers in my command will do instead of wondering what they’ll do. Offer positions in our forces to the soldiers who didn’t commit or witness atrocities, but spread them around through the brigades, and if they accept, I want their service records altered to indicate they belonged to one of the units the Free Taroans said didn’t commit atrocities.” He didn’t bother adding that such alterations should be undetectable. Malin was very good at such things and would make sure that no one could tell that the service records had been changed.

  Malin nodded, making notes. “And the six?”

  Turning them back over to the Taroans would be an admission that he had pulled loyalist soldiers up to the orbital docks, as well as risking the six soldiers’ telling the Taroans that others from their units were still in Drakon’s custody.

  Besides, he had a responsibility to deal with this.

  “Firing squads. Get it done, and get rid of the bodies. They died on the planet. Understand?”

  “Yes, General.” Malin turned to go.

  “Colonel Malin.” Drakon waited while he halted. “Is there anything else you want to say?” The invitation would give Malin a chance to talk, and for some reason Drakon wanted to know what Malin would say.

  Malin took a moment to reply, then faced Drakon squarely. “I request clarification as to Colonel Morgan’s future status, General.”

  “Unchanged.”

  Was that relief that flickered across Malin’s features?

  Another pause, then Malin spoke with extreme care. “General, I realize that I have no right to ask this—”

  “It won’t happen again,” Drakon said. He definitely saw relief this time. And he had to tell someone. “I got drunk. I wasn’t thinking. It’s not going to happen again.”

  Malin looked down, nodding. “General, she has an agenda. I don’t know what it is, but Morgan is after more than . . . sharing your bed for one night.”

  “And what is it that you’re after, Colonel Malin?”

  Malin paused. “What I do, General, is always in your best interests.”

  Drakon stared at the door after he had left, wondering why Malin and Morgan had used almost identical language to describe their intentions toward him.

  That afternoon, he took a shuttle up to the orbital docks, wanting to be quit of the soil of Taroa. He was tired of dealing with people who couldn’t be told to do what needed to be done but had to be convinced. A single, strong leader could get things done.

  But they didn’t have that at Midway, either. He had to get Iceni’s approval for things like this. What if she had objected? How could anything with two heads function properly? And what if she heard about Morgan? He shouldn’t care if Iceni heard, shouldn’t care how she reacted to it if she heard, but all of those questions bothered him, further souring his mood.

  Even a tour of the battleship hull didn’t help. Going through it only emphasized how much remained to be done, how empty and incomplete the hull was compared to the one that Iceni had brought back from Kane.

  It took a while to get all of the soldiers of the three brigades and their equipment as well back up to the docks and the modified freighters. The Interim Congress of Free Taroa dithered and debated, but thanks to copious bribes doled out by Colonel Malin and the efforts of agents working for him, the congress eventually approved the two temporary agreements on self-defense and trade, to last until a government was seated and voted them up or down.

  “Major Lyr.” Drakon waved Colonel Gaiene’s second-in-command to a seat. “How’d you like to be a colonel?”

  Lyr regarded Drakon with the wariness of a veteran. “What’s the catch, sir?”

  “Independent command.”

  It only too
k a moment for Lyr to figure that out. “Here, sir?”

  “Right.” Drakon leaned forward, resting his forearms on his desk. “You’re a good soldier, a good administrator, and I know how much you’ve done to keep your brigade in top condition.” He didn’t add how important that had been in light of Colonel Gaiene’s more-than-occasional lapses in periods without combat. Lyr knew that Drakon knew, and Drakon never bad-mouthed officers in front of their subordinates. “You’ll keep two companies from Gaiene’s brigade plus one company made up of regulars from Taroa who’ve been judged most reliable. This job will require someone who can operate on their own and also work with the Free Taroans. That part will be tough. You have to avoid being too overbearing with them because we want them thinking of us as partners, but you can’t let the Free Taroans think they can tell us what to do. I think you can handle that.”

  Lyr nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “There’ll be a civilian left here, too. One of President Iceni’s representatives whose job is to handle all of the trade and diplomatic stuff that doesn’t involve military or security matters. Freighters should be making fairly frequent runs between here and Midway, so there shouldn’t be any problem keeping me informed. Handle the little problems and try to spot big problems in time for me to act.”

  “So,” Lyr said, “nothing too difficult or demanding.”

  Drakon smiled, knowing that Lyr meant the opposite. “Exactly.”

  “I’ll do my best, General.”

  “I know, Colonel. That’s why you got the job and the promotion.” As hard as Lyr’s job would be, Drakon thought, it probably wouldn’t be as difficult as finding a replacement for Lyr as Gaiene’s second-in-command. But, what the hell, I need to grow more senior officers. Nobody ever claimed my job was easy, either.

  A week after Drakon had taken the shuttle up, his brigades were fully embarked, the agreements were in hand, and the freighters and warships broke orbit en route to the jump point for Midway. Having been moody for most of that week, Drakon wondered who would be happier to get back to Midway, himself or Kommodor Marphissa and the crew of the heavy cruiser, who would be able to bid farewell to him there.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  DRAKON’S mood didn’t match his information.

  “You seem to have succeeded in everything we agreed you should go to Taroa to do,” Iceni said.

  “Not everything,” Drakon replied. “There wasn’t even the beginnings of a stable government when we left.”

  “You could scarcely wait around until there was one. From what my representatives reported, Taroa is already leaning toward a formal alliance with us. That will be a start, and an incentive for other star systems near us to consider the same.” Iceni rubbed her eyes with one hand. “In less positive news, I assume that you’ve heard from Colonel Rogero.”

  “And I assume that you’ve had no success in tracking down whoever tried to kill him.”

  She lowered her hand to lock eyes with him. “I gave orders that Colonel Rogero not be harmed. If anyone connected with me attempted it, they did so against my orders, and I will ensure that they regret it.”

  Drakon watched her for a moment before replying. “Are you implying that somebody connected with me tried to kill Colonel Rogero?”

  “I have no information on it, General, so, no, I’m not implying that.” She wondered why Drakon had jumped on that possibility so quickly. Was he worried about someone close to him? Was her own source in danger of being compromised?

  He shook his head. “I find it hard to believe that some citizen took a shot at him. But more hidden snakes . . .”

  “Could be involved,” Iceni agreed. “Everyone is looking for such a nest.”

  Drakon nodded this time, rousing from his moodiness. “I wanted to make a point to mention how well Kommodor Marphissa did. We had zero problems with coordination and support. I’ve never worked with a better mobile forces commander.”

  “That’s very good to hear. I was going to give her command of the battleship when it becomes operational.”

  “She should handle that easily,” Drakon said. “But I hope she retains command of more than that. She handled formations and multiple units well.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Why was Drakon making such a point to praise Marphissa? They had both been on that heavy cruiser for a while. Drakon’s staff thought that Marphissa was their agent already. Had he actually turned Marphissa against Iceni or made enough progress toward that to want her somewhere with greater authority in the mobile forces? “You brought back a lot of good shipyard workers. They’ll enable us to get the battleship here operational much faster than anticipated.”

  “How soon?”

  “Two months.”

  “That’s still one hell of a big threat window,” Drakon muttered, then, as if sensing that she might take that as criticism, glanced at her. “I appreciate that there’s little else either of us can do to get it ready faster. But we’ll want to get a lot of those workers back to Taroa as soon as we can to work on that second hull.”

  Iceni sighed. “A year to finish that one. Let’s hope we’re granted that much time.”

  “A year on the outside. Maybe we can push that, get more out of the workers now by offering real rewards.” Drakon eyed her defiantly. “Maybe bonuses for workers instead of executives.”

  She raised both eyebrows at him. “I didn’t know you were such a radical. We need the executives and subexecutives on our side, too. Perhaps bonuses for all based on actual results?”

  That brought a brief, sardonic smile from Drakon. “Basing bonuses on results? And you’re calling me a radical?”

  “If you don’t object, we can see how such a system might work, knowing that our people have been taught by the Syndicate system to game any method of evaluation. There might be ways to keep them focused on producing the results we want. Is there anything else?” Iceni asked. His odd edginess was making her jittery, too. Something had happened. But what? Togo hadn’t reported discovering anything, but his sources weren’t that close to Drakon. “It’s good to have you back, General Drakon.”

  He nodded heavily, then got up to go.

  She would have to check with her best source. And not by message. Something about this required a face-to-face meeting despite all the risks that involved.

  * * *

  BACK inside her own offices, the door sealed and alarms activated, Iceni sat down. Why was Drakon acting guilty? The most likely explanation, and the most frightening one, was that he had decided to move against her but felt unhappy about that for some reason.

  She sat down, swiveling in her chair to face part of the virtual window wall located behind her desk. It currently displayed the city at night, as seen from some location high up, as if her offices rested in some high-rise with a perfect view instead of being safely located belowground. The lights of the city swept down the slope to the waterfront, where restless waves foamed with phosphorescence against natural rock and human-built walls. Her hand rested on one building glowing against the darkness, flattened so that the patterns on her palm and fingers could be scanned, and a patch of the virtual window vanished, to be replaced by a square of nothingness. After working through a half-dozen more access methods and verifications, a small armored door popped open.

  Iceni pulled out the document within, an actual printout of a written work. Thumbing it open to a random page, she began finding the letters she needed to spell out a message. Forming messages using a book code was a tedious process, but still the only absolutely unbreakable code known to humanity. Her contact would only respond to a request for a personal meeting using that code.

  Finally, she drew a mobile designed to be untraceable out of the same safe, punching in a number, then waiting until an anonymous voice-mail box announced its readiness. “One One Five,” Iceni recited the page number, then, “six,
ten, seventeen . . .” She went through every number matching the order of each word on the page, then hung up and tossed the mobile back into the safe.

  Iceni paused as she was about to return the document to the safe. Countless things had been written by humanity in thousands of years, the vast majority kept preserved in virtual form, buried among a universe of preserved human thought, but bound printouts had never lost their grip on readers. That helped keep the use of a book code unbreakable no matter how fast systems could scan material in an attempt to break the code, since no two printouts had to use the same margins and page counts. All you needed were two that did match such things but didn’t match any other printout of the same work.

  Now she stared at the document, which she had chosen because of its great age, wondering what its creator would say if he knew his work was still being read by someone this long after it had been written on ancient Earth itself, in Sol Star System, home of humanity, the place the citizens still revered as the home of their ancestors. “Incredible Victory,” she said softly, one finger tracing the words of the title. The name “Midway” on the book had caught her attention when she was seeking a document to use for this purpose, a reference to some other embattled place long ago with the same name as this star system. She didn’t think of herself as a superstitious woman, but perhaps the title would prove to be a good omen.

  * * *

  ANY CEO with brains had at least one bolt-hole, a means to get out of their offices or living quarters without being spotted, an escape route known to no one but the CEO. Even Togo didn’t know about the one that Iceni had used this time, because even Togo could not be totally trusted.

  No one could be totally trusted. You learned that, or you didn’t survive as a CEO.

  Muffled in a coat against the evening breeze, her face half-buried in the raised collar, she walked through streets sparsely populated at that hour. Iceni felt naked without her bodyguards even though her clothing carried an impressive array of defenses. Any citizen who made the mistake of trying to rob or assault her would quickly learn just how big an error it was.