Kieran was in danger. That the council would find and kill him was a virtual certainty, and that would not do. If Kieran needed help, she would be there for him. He would understand why she’d tried to leave and would welcome her back with open arms.
Fine. We’ll talk, Ayumi said.
She terminated the connection and used the autocar’s terminal to select a flight to Esperance leaving in forty-five minutes.
It would be just enough time.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Da’adstri knew humans called it the “law of averages.” Artillery fire, even when executed perfectly by one side, could fail. Amazingly, humans understood the application of artillery on the battlefield. The third salvo managed to split the Grey forces, but her desired goal of weakening the eastern forces was not reached. The better fighting positions on the western edge of the strongpoint defense were left behind as she engaged her brigade with the Grey flank.
“Jenli! Evacuate now!” she roared into her command microphone as she brought up her plasma rifle and dispatched a Grey tank two hundred meters away. From her forward position, dismounted away from her vehicle and overseeing her soldiers directly, she could see all too well what the outcome would be. Her troops were being slaughtered in the armor attack from the sheer number of enemy vehicles remaining. Her thousand soldiers stood no chance against eight thousand vehicles with better weaponry. The remaining units converged on a slight spur off the high ground and brought concentrated fire into the advancing Greys. Behind them, personnel evacuated to the three angular lifting ships.
“We’re launching in thirty seconds,” Jenli called. “We’ll direct fire down.”
Don’t bother, Da’adstri thought. “Negative. Get away to the south and climb for orbit. Don’t give them a target. We’ll hold them for you.”
“You’ve done enough,” Jenli said. There was emotion in her voice that shouldn’t have been there. “Evacuate while you have a chance.”
“Go.” She fired again. Tears filled her eyes as she stood in her position and kept firing into the advancing Greys. “Now!”
Others around her stood and pressed their fire into the swirling cloud of dust and dirt from the Grey advance. Targeting cursors appeared, and she kept squeezing. A vibration in the ground told her the first of the lift ships had departed, and then the second. The third had been for her troops. It was time to go, but they would be exposed. A flash of light in the sky caught her eye. Aircraft dropped through the clouds and, as they descended, she could see they were Fleet Lancers.
“Styrahi Forward, this is Lancer One,” a female voice called. “We’re on station to cover your retreat.”
Gods! Lancer Squadron had been the pinnacle of human aviation for more than twenty years. The best of the best. She hadn’t known they were aboard the Stirling. If she had, it would have made her planning process easier. Da’adstri raised a fist in the air and screamed, “Fall back under fire by battalions. Flight crews to ready!”
As she watched from her command vehicle, the Lancers tore into the advancing Greys with strafing run after strafing run. Inexplicably, the Greys paused and turned their cannons to the skies as if searching for targets they could not hit. In their momentary paralysis, the Greys presented a still target to her second battalion and took heavy losses. At the final release point, Da’adstri halted the vehicle and overwatched her retreating forces. Her gunners fired into the Greys as the Lancers continued to wreak havoc on the remaining tanks.
“Styrahi forward, Lancer One. You’re clear to disengage. We’ll be with you all the way to Carantan.”
“Please relay my thanks to Stirling actual.”
There was a pause. “Ma’am, the Stirling jumped away ten minutes ago. The Moskva and Ticonderoga are on station to cover your retreat. The Jack has been destroyed.”
Her mind worked. Then why retreat? “What are you going to do, Lancer One?”
“Ma’am, I’m under orders to get you and your forces to Carantan, over.”
“And the Stirling? What about those cowards?” She seethed.
“Ma’am. Respectfully, get your ass aboard that ship and evacuate to Carantan. That’s your order.”
Da’adstri actually smiled. The young woman’s voice had an edge she’d not heard from a human in more than twenty years. Her curiosity piqued, the Styrahi commander ordered her crew to the last lifting ship. Carantan was outside of their normal operations areas, but it was a good place to structure a defense of Earth. They had a chance there. The Lancers dropped in again with an extraordinary barrage and climbed to orbit, save for two. One of them, no doubt, was the young woman who’d actually ordered her to retreat.
Da’adstri felt good as her ship lifted away. The Nexus had been evacuated, and her forces weren’t defenseless. Finally, it seemed that the humans weren’t, either.
My head throbbed in the darkness. For a long time, I lay there, trying to wish the pulsing ache away. Wishing turned to willing. I focused on breathing and lying still. One turned out to be easier than the other. As my senses started to push stimuli through the thick haze of pain in my head, I realized I was blind. My eyes refused to open, and my mouth was full of fuzz, leaving my tongue incapable of even wetting the inside of my mouth. The fuzz extended to my ears. The tickling sensation combined with the thick, muffled feeling made me wonder if I’d been gravely injured, but there was only a general soreness in my limbs and head, like a really bad hangover. The fuzz in my mouth tasted like cloth, which likely explained why I could not open my eyes either.
I tried to scratch, and instead, I felt a tug at my back. My wrists were bound together. My knees and ankles were tightly tied as well. Vibrations came up through the cold metal floor and agitated my already awful headache into a new level of hell. Straining against the bonds did nothing, so I settled my cheek to the floor, expecting to at least feel something there. Cloth covered my head as well. There was nothing I could do but wait.
And wait.
Lily?
There was no response. I tried to work my eyelids enough to bring the retinal connections online, but there was nothing. I couldn’t speak any type of command. Without Lily, my ability to think a command to spur any type of action was gone as well. I was alone for the first time since I’d woken up on the shore of Circular Quay eighteen months before. There were no voices in my head, no immediate wonderful volumes of data at my command—I heard nothing but the muffled silence of whatever filled my ears and the vibration of some type of vehicle around me. The ejection hadn’t killed me after all.
The elation was tempered by my inability to move, but my momentary panic faded before it could rise. Exercise. This is an exercise.
Even the Styrahi military police had to practice. That had to be the reason for my bindings. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was. I’d ejected right over their lines, so being confined by them for the exercise was logical. Relaxation was not an easy proposition, but at least I was lying flat on my face with my legs straight. Bending my knees even a little kept the blood flowing, as did the occasional flexing of my fingers.
After a while, I rolled, wincing at the pain in my temples, and tried to find something, anything, to lean against. There was nothing, save for the droning vibration through the floor and my own growing need to piss. I lost track of time while I lay there, waiting for the vehicle or whatever it was to stop so I could smile at the guards and ask them to untie me, no hard feelings, so I could relieve myself.
They never came.
I held it as long as I could before letting go. Shame faded to a little sarcastic choke of laughter as I thought about Alan Shepard back in the Mercury days. The idea of being “Spam in a can” had never occurred to me until that point. Somewhere in the discomfort of my wet pants and the inability to move more than flexing my extremities, I managed to relax a little and decided I could wait as long as necessary, provided I didn’t die of thirs
t.
Content with my state, I even managed to do what good soldiers do whenever possible: I slept. Dozing in a state of semiwakefulness, I felt as if I was floating above the edge of sleep, trying to dive for it again and again. This went on forever until finally, gracefully, I fell into the blackness at the edge of my vision. Sleep.
Almost immediately, I woke up again. The vibrations rose sharply and then stopped. There were quick, sharp thuds from somewhere to my right. More followed to my left. Hands on my legs yanked me out and away from wherever I had been. I tried grunting through the straps to no avail. They shifted me around, lifted me up, and based on my body position and the way it felt, they threw me over a shoulder and carried me like a sack of grain.
Then they threw me to the ground. My headache came back with a vengeance, along with a few new bruises. Hands worked at the bindings on my legs first, then my hands. The hood and my ear coverings came off, and I blinked at the blinding white light. I could finally make out shapes. There were two Styrahi looking at me from behind visored helmets. They wore dull red-orange soft suits with armored plates strapped to a type of exoskeleton, like modern infantrymen dressed up in spacesuits on Mars. Large rifles were slung over their shoulders, and both carried something like hatchets strapped to their left hips. I rubbed my wrists and then my eyes.
“You pissed yourself,” one of them said in heavily accented Standard. She—well, that was the best approximation I could make at the time—had dark hair hanging out from the rear of her combat helmet.
I shrugged. “You could have stopped a while ago.”
The other one had hair more ginger than any I’d ever seen. “We’ve been driving sixteen hours. Can you be more specific?” I could see a small smile through her faceplate, and I blushed in sudden embarrassment.
They chuckled while I blinked and tried to make sense of things. My tongue felt like sandpaper. “Sixteen hours? Can I get some water?”
They pushed a bottle at me, followed by a ration pack. I’d never torn into one faster. Two bites into my pesto cheese tortellini, they walked away from the table in front of me and closed the door. I looked around, half expecting to see one of those big, two-way mirrors from all of the police procedural shows of my youth, and instead saw only a small bunk built out of the wall, a stainless-steel toilet, and a matching sink.
A jail. Son of a bitch. Either they were taking this exercise very seriously, or I was somehow in a load of trouble.
I ate and drank in silence. At least I would be able to take better care of myself. I looked again at the bunk and noticed two drawers built into the wall under it. Curious, I stepped over to the bunk and opened the drawers. Inside one was a change of clothes, including the exact same type of khaki jumpsuit I’d worn out of the Integration Center. Inside the other was a collection of books, actual printed volumes that seemed very ancient and out of place. I picked up the one on the top with a picture of a dragon on the cover and saw the name of a familiar author—Stephen King. There were others from my time—Elmore Leonard, John Grisham, Neil Gaiman.
“What in the hell is going on? What happened to Lieutenant Peck? Did he make it?”
There was no answer to my questions. I changed my clothes, not caring one bit that the Styrahi were undoubtedly watching every move I made. I had to give them credit, though. I’d seen a lot of exercises in my prior life. In every single one of them was the immediate sense of “this ain’t real.” Most of the time, it was subtle. But I’d spent time overseas and had officers from other countries buy me beer, wine, or sake during exercises before. I’d walked to and from exercise sites with the guys playing the enemy, the opposing forces, talking about miscellaneous things and life in general. There was never a serious sense that we were in a war situation. The Styrahi, in contrast, played their roles to the hilt.
Dealing with an enemy prisoner of war meant several things, as far as I remembered: getting them off the battlefield, keeping them silent, limiting communications, and guarding the hell out of them. The Styrahi military police—I assumed that was what they were—had done just that. If the act continued, I’d undoubtedly be questioned within a few hours, maybe a day at most. At some point, my side would arrange a “prisoner exchange,” and we’d all go have a beer.
But nothing happened. I either slept or read the offered books. Meals came on a regular schedule, all rations with only water, and there was no interaction from any of the Styrahi guards. All in all, I felt better over time. My soreness evaporated, and my lingering headache became a mere nuisance and then nothing at all. I wished I could have said the same for my attitude. Frustrated that I could basically do nothing, I delved into reading to distract my rising anger.
I read the Stephen King book, one he’d written as a bedtime story for his kids, and put it down with tears in my eyes. So damned beautiful. Elmore Leonard had me laughing and shaking my head about life in the Hollywood of my time when the door opened, and a Styrahi without body armor walked in and sat down at my table, turning the chair to face me as I sat on the bunk.
“Lieutenant Commander Roark?”
She was stunningly beautiful to the point where I barely noticed the slight point of her ears and her pronounced cheekbones. Her dark-blue clothing seemed a mix of familiar and alien styles. From the waist down, it was a gown not unlike their traditional garb. The top of the outfit was an almost human-style jacket with an open collar. I realized she had spoken my rank, the one Crawley promised upon graduation, as if it were nothing.
“I’m merely a trainee, ma’am.”
“You are hardly that. Any man who died nearly three hundred years before and walks this planet, or any other, is not a trainee no matter how well disguised. My name is Thirenalla.”
General Faraa had to have briefed her key staff—that was the only explanation. For the better part of a year, I’d worked tirelessly to conceal my identity, though General Crawley and his friends not only knew who I was but why I’d been brought back. “Is the exercise over?”
“It has been over for three days.”
Three days! “Did we win?”
The woman sat back and stared at me for a moment.
I decided against pushing the issue and changed tactics. “Are you planning to transport me back to Elysium?”
“You are currently in transit but not to Elysium. You are going someplace else for debriefing.”
There was a part of me that completely accepted that. Debriefing was the most common form of questioning in the military. Do something and then spend twice the amount of time the mission took telling others what precisely had been done at every turn. “May I ask where?”
“No. Your situation is too delicate to give you any more information than that.”
“My situation is delicate?” I asked with a smile on my face. “I ejected from a Falcon at high speed over your territory after an accident. My situation—”
“It was no accident.” Thirenalla began to walk away then turned back to me, her green eyes blazing. “Your ejection sequence was programmed to fail, and Lieutenant Peck produced an altered neural data record that deviates from yours. Specifically, he blamed you for poor communication, when in fact he acted deliberately.”
My fists clenched. “That little son of a bitch. Where is he?”
“That is not your concern.” Her face darkened, making the brightness in her eyes more piercing and sharp. “For the record, Lieutenant Commander Roark, according to the Fleet personnel command, you are dead. Your records have been sealed as part of the notice of death. Notification procedures have run their course. You are a dead man. It is our job to see that you stay that way.”
Just after 0300, the secure landline in her home office rang five times before Penelope Neige picked it up. She wanted to ensure that whoever it was on the other end of her phone thought that they’d woken her from a deep, pleasant sleep. Appearances were everything. It would never do for
her staff to know that she’d been awake all night, watching the news feeds from Australia and the inner solar system like a nervous child anticipating the arrival of Père Noël.
She stubbed out her cigarette and keyed the connection to life. “Yes?”
“Madame Chairman.” The smooth voice of her chief of staff came through the line. “This is Charles. I apologize for waking you, but there are some developments that will require your attention this morning.”
Neige almost smiled. Charles Benoit had been a fixture of her staff for more than twenty years. He knew the game as well as any and likely had her staff stirred up in fear at the thought of having to call her in the wee hours of the morning. Such calls were a matter of public record and would find their way to her private library one day. She had to remember to put on the proper voice. “Then get to it, please.”
“Certainly, Madame Chairman.” Charles took a breath and began the charade of official reporting for the council’s archives. She’d known the details for hours, but having the council members fear her was not enough. They could not know the advantages she maintained. “The Terran Defense Force’s joint exercise with the Styrahi on Mars has ended prematurely. There was a tragic accident involving two aircraft over the Styrahi headquarters compound. The TDF has given no specific information about the particular mission parameters involved, but the two single-seat Falcons collided at the end of an attack run. One of the pilots was killed. The Terran Defense Force have identified him as a trainee by the name of Kieran Roark.”
Neige tried to sound concerned. “I see. What is the status of the other pilot?”
“His name is John Peck, also a trainee.” Charles paused.
And a fine young agent who will move up nicely in the TDF because of his cooperation. She almost grinned at the thought. Between her and the commanding general of materiel and equipment, who was a frequent bedfellow, it would be easy to arrange a place for Peck’s special talents to shine brighter.
Vendetta Protocol Page 27
