by Rachel Bach
“Sir Morris now,” he said, smiling. “Go back to Caldswell and tell him you are no longer his. We shall see you back in Kingston, Sir Knight, and all of civilization shall know of your deeds.”
I think I might have died of happiness at that moment, or maybe I was just in shock. I was vaguely aware of bowing to the king and stumbling out. I probably would have fallen on my face if Rupert hadn’t been there to keep me upright.
I did remember to look back one last time when we reached the door, because it wasn’t every day you met a living saint. When I looked back, though, King Stephen wasn’t watching me. He was standing at the huge window, staring up at the sea of phantoms as they drifted past on their way out of our universe, his eerie eyes casting a brighter blue tint to their snowy light.
This ghostly sight was the last I saw of my king before the doors cut me off.
The reality of what had just happened didn’t really sink in until we reached the docking tube. After that, it took everything I had not to bounce up and down squealing like a pig. After all, I was a knight now, and knights had to be dignified. But though I managed not to act like a complete idiot, I couldn’t help grabbing Rupert’s arm and tugging on it while I told him I was a knight over and over in a breathless voice until the words ran together into mush.
“Yes, you are,” he said indulgently, kissing my head. “You made it. I’m proud of you.”
But even though his words were warm, I couldn’t help noticing Rupert wasn’t quite as happy as I was. To be fair, I don’t think anyone could have been as happy as I was at that moment, but I’d expected a little more excitement.
To my great surprise, Caldswell seemed over the moon at the news. He congratulated me earnestly, slapping me on the back like we hadn’t been trying to kill each other a week ago. Actually, life without Maat seemed to be doing him very well. He looked ten years younger, so when he announced he was retiring, I couldn’t quite believe it.
“There’s no more need for us,” he said, grinning. “The daughters are being integrated into other programs and want nothing to do with us anyway. Maat’s gone, no more phantoms, there’s nothing for me to do.”
“There must be something,” I said.
Caldswell just shrugged. “Nothing I care about. I’ve done my time and then some, and I think I deserve a break from the endless grind of duty. I’m thinking of getting a new ship, actually, try my hand at real trading.”
I made a face. “Well, so long as you don’t have to make real money doing it, you should be fine.”
It was a sign of his good mood that Caldswell burst out laughing at that. He waved farewell to us and walked off down the hall, whistling as he went. Mabel fell into step behind him a few doors down, though I didn’t see where she’d come from. That should have unnerved me, but it’s hard to be afraid of a woman who was turning around to give me two big thumbs up. After that, I could only shake my head. Vicious, bloodthirsty killers one second, best friends the next. Damn crazy Eyes were as bad as mercs.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, glancing at Rupert as we walked back to my room. “You’re free, too.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been anything except an Eye.”
I shrugged. “Why don’t you come with me, then?”
He stopped midstep, head snapping up to stare at me. “But you just got made a knight.”
“So?” I said. “That just means I’ll be in Kingston all the time. The Devastators are part of the Home Guard. Commitment-wise, it’s actually easier than being a mercenary since you get to go home at night instead of spending your off hours stranded on some rock.”
Rupert cleared his throat, and though his expression was perfectly casual, I knew him too well now to be fooled into thinking the next words out of his mouth didn’t mean the world to him. “Are you sure you’d want me around? This is what you’ve always dreamed of. I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”
I slugged him in the arm, hard. “Of course I want you,” I said, scowling to hide my blush. “Didn’t you hear me before? I love you. Besides, you’re the one always talking about wanting a future. This is mine, and I want you along. It wouldn’t be any fun at all without you.”
Rupert stared at me for a long time after that, and then his casual expression vanished as he swooped in to hug me so hard I gasped. “Sorry,” he whispered, stepping back. “It’s just…” He trailed off with a boyish grin that he couldn’t seem to stop. “I’m just very happy.”
“Good,” I said. “You should be. Always.”
He slipped his arm around my waist. “So long as you’ll have me, I will be.”
“Like I’d ever let you escape,” I said, slipping my arm around his waist as well as we walked down the dull, efficient Terran hall toward the rest of our glorious and, with luck, exceedingly happy future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, none of this would be possible without the tireless work of the good people behind the scenes at Orbit Books. Thank you for all your hard work.
extras
www.orgitbooks.net
about the author
Rachel Bach grew up wanting to be an author and a supervillain. Unfortunately, supervillainy proved surprisingly difficult to break into, so she stuck to writing and everything worked out great. She currently lives in Athens, Georgia, with her perpetually energetic toddler, extremely understanding husband, overflowing library, and obese wiener dog. You can find out more about Rachel and all her books at rachelbach.net.
Rachel also writes fantasy under the name Rachel Aaron. Learn more about her first series, The Legend of Eli Monpress, and read sample chapters for yourself at rachelaaron.net!
Find out more about Rachel Bach and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.
if you enjoyed
HEAVEN’S QUEEN
look out for
DEFENDERS
by
Will McIntosh
Prologue
Lieutenant Enrique Quinto
June 26, 2029. Morris Run, Pennsylvania.
It was a quaint Pennsylvania town, many of the buildings well over fifty years old, with green canopies shading narrow doorways. Even the town’s name was quaint: Morris Run. If not for the abandoned vehicles, filthy and faded by two years of exposure to the elements, and the trash stacked along the sidewalk, Quinto might have expected someone to step out of the Bullfrog Brewhouse and wave hello.
“Lieutenant Lucky?” Quinto turned to see Macalena, his platoon sergeant, making his way to the front of the carrier. Quinto wished he’d said something the first time someone called him Lucky, but it was far too late now. Most of the troops he was leading today probably didn’t know his real name.
“One of the new guys shit his pants,” Macalena said when he drew close, his voice low, giving Quinto a whiff of his sour breath.
Quinto sighed heavily. “Oh, hell.”
“The kid’s scared to death. He hasn’t been out of Philadelphia since this started.”
“No, I don’t blame him.” Quinto looked over Macalena’s shoulder, saw the kid perched on the side of the carrier, head down. He was about fourteen. The poor kid didn’t belong out here. Not that Quinto couldn’t use him; they called raw recruits “fish food,” but sometimes they were surprisingly effective in a firefight, because they were too scared to think. The starfish could get less of a read on what they were going to do, which way they were going to point their rifles. Usually the newbies didn’t shit their pants until the shooting started, though. “Does he have a spare pair?”
Macalena shook his head. “That’s the only pair he owns.”
Quinto reached into his pack, pulled out a pair of fatigue pants, and handed them to Macalena. “I hope he’s got a belt.”
Macalena laughed, stuck the pants under his armpit, and headed toward the kid.
What an awful thing, to be out here at fourteen, fifteen. When Quinto was fourteen, he’d spent his days playing
video games, shooting bad guys in his room while Mom fetched fruit juice and chocolate chip cookies and told him when to go to bed.
They reached the end of the little downtown, which was composed of that single road, and the landscape opened up, revealing pine forest, the occasional house, mountains rising up on all horizons. There was little reason for any Luyten to be within eight miles of this abandoned backwater town, but they were all out there somewhere, so there was always a chance they’d be detected.
Quinto tried to access his helmet’s topographical maps, but the signal still wasn’t coming through. He pulled the old hard copy from his pack, unfolded it.
The carrier slowed; Quinto looked up from the map to see what was going on. There was a visual-recognition drone stuck in a drainage ditch along the side of the road. As they approached, the VRA drone—little more than a machine gun on treads—spun and trained its gun on each of the soldiers in turn. When it got to Quinto, it paused.
“Human. Human!” Quinto shouted, engaging the thing’s vocal-recognition failsafe. It went on to the next soldier.
It was always an uncomfortable moment, having a VRA drone point a weapon at you. You’d think it would be hard to mistake a human for a Luyten.
Failing to identify anything that resembled a starfish, the gun spun away.
“Get a few guys to pull it out of the ditch,” Quinto said. Four troops hopped out of the transport and wrestled the thing back onto the road. It headed off down the road, continuing on its randomly determined route.
Pleasant Street dead-ended close to the mouth of the mine, about half a mile past an old hotel that should be coming up on their left. When they got to the mine they’d have to unseal it using the critical blast points indicated on the topo map, then a 2.5-mile ride on the maglev flats into the mine, to the storage facility.
If someone had told Quinto two years ago that he’d be going into an abandoned mine to retrieve seventy-year-old weapons and ammo, he would have laughed out loud.
It wasn’t funny now.
The locomotive and five boxcars were parked right where they were supposed to be—as close to the mouth of the mine as the track would allow. They were late-twentieth-century vintage, the locomotive orange and shaped like a stretched Mack truck. Quinto called Macalena and his squad leaders, instructed them to set the big recognition-targeting gun they’d brought along in the weeds on the far side of the road, and place two gunners near the entrance with interlocking fire. When that was done, they got the rest of the squads moving down the tunnel. The quicker they moved, the sooner they’d be out of hostile territory and back in Philly.
Quinto took up the rear of the last carrier for the ride down into the mine. He was not a fan of deep holes with black walls, and when his CO had first laid out the mission Quinto had nearly crapped his own pants.
Macalena climbed in and took the seat beside him.
“So what are we looking for? I cannot for the life of me guess what we’re doing in here.”
Quinto smiled. It must seem an odd destination to the rest of the men, but they were used to being kept in the dark about missions. The fewer people who knew, the less likely the starfish were to get the information. Or so the logic went.
“The feds have been sealing huge caches of weapons in old mines for the past two centuries, waiting for the day when Argentina or India or whoever took out our more visible weapons depots. They coat them in Cosmoline and pretty much forget about them.”
Macalena frowned, sticking out his big lower lip. “You mean, old hand grenades and machine guns and shit?”
“More or less. Flamethrowers with a pathetically limited effectiveness range, eighty-one-millimeter mortars, LAW rockets, fifty-cal MGs.” Most were outdated weapons, but simple, easy to operate.
Macalena shook his head. “So we’re that desperate.”
In the seat in front of them a private who was at least seventy was clinging to the bar in front of her seat. She was tall—at least six feet. The slight jostling of the carrier was clearly causing her old body discomfort. It was true what they said: There were no civilians anymore, only soldiers and children.
“Yup. We’re that desperate,” Quinto said. “They’ve destroyed or seized so much of our hardware that we have more soldiers than guns.”
“What’s Cosmoline?” Macalena asked.
“I didn’t know, either; I had to look it up. It’s a grease they used back in the day to preserve weapons. Once you chip away the hardened Cosmoline, the weapons are supposed to be like new.”
Macalena grunted, spit off the side. “Dusty as hell in here. And cold.”
“Let’s be glad we’re not staying.”
Macalena’s comm erupted, a panicked voice calling his name.
“What have we got?” Macalena asked.
“Vance is dead. Lightning shot, from the trees to the left of the mine.”
“All stop!” Macalena shouted. The carrier slowed as Quinto dropped his head, covered his mouth as the implications sunk in.
Lucky no more.
“Where are you now?” Macalena asked the private.
“Inside the mine, about a hundred yards.”
“Stay there.”
Quinto looked up at Macalena, who raised his eyebrows. “What do you want to do?”
He wanted to get as deep in the mine as he could, and stay there, their backs against the wall, weapons raised until the starfish came to get them. Of course the Luyten would never come down, because they were reading his thoughts right now. Plus it was far easier to blow the mouth of the mine and leave them to suffocate.
Quinto ordered the small caravan to turn around and head toward the mouth.
They barely got moving before they heard the flash-boom of a Luyten explosive. The cave shook; bits of dirt and debris spewed at them, then everything settled into silence, the cave now truly pitch-black, save for the carriers’ headlights.
They climbed out of the carriers. Some of the troops cried, and there was no shame in that. One woman went off to the side of the tunnel and knelt in the rubble to pray. Quinto didn’t know their names, because he hadn’t served with them long. Troops came, and died, and new troops came. Only Lieutenant Lucky went on, mission after mission. Quinto realized he’d begun to believe he really was lucky, or special. Destined to see the war to its end.
It killed him, to think he wouldn’t get to see how things turned out, whether the bad guys won, or the good guys pulled something out of their asses at the eleventh hour.
Quinto used the walkie to apprise HQ of their situation, so HQ wouldn’t wonder when Quinto’s platoon never returned.
“Lieutenant?” Macalena said. He was studying the topo map he’d borrowed from Quinto. “Did you see these?” A few of the enlisted came over to look at the map over Macalena’s shoulder as he ran his finger along black lines set perpendicular to the mine. “There are five vertical shafts sunk along the length of the mine. I’m guessing they were escape routes in case of collapse, or ventilation, or both.”
Quinto looked up from the map, impotent rage rising in him. “Jesus, Mac, couldn’t you have waited a half hour to notice this?”
It took Macalena a second to understand. When he did, he grimaced, curled his hand into a fist, crumpling a section of the map. He turned and walked a dozen paces down the shaft, cursing quietly, viciously.
Even Macalena was too green for this war. He’d been in the infantry for only four months; before that he’d been writing military technical manuals. The army needed fighters more than writers these days.
If Macalena had waited even fifteen, twenty minutes before examining the old map, chances were the Luyten would have been out of range, and they could have climbed out of this hole and gone home.
“We need to move,” Quinto said. “The fish are going to find those exits and seal them up. Spread out, find the exits. When I get to the surface I’m going to set off a Tasmanian devil, give us some breathing room. As soon as it’s spent, get out there. Understoo
d? Let’s move.”
“Couldn’t we just stay down here? Dig our way out when they’re gone?” It was the kid who’d crapped himself, looking absurd in Quinto’s big pants. “If we go up there now, they’ll kill us. I mean, maybe they’ll get distracted by something and leave…” He trailed off.
Everyone stared at the ground, except for the soldier who was praying.
“Let’s go,” Quinto said.
Quinto grasped the cold rung of the ladder that had dropped down when they unsealed the iron hatch.
“Good luck to you, Lieutenant,” one of the troops waiting to follow him called. It was Benneton, the old woman. The kid who’d crapped his pants was there as well, along with four others.
Quinto looked up into darkness. “Here we go.” He headed up the ladder. A lot of people who’d been as lucky as Quinto might have been tempted to believe the streak would hold, but Quinto knew his past held no hint of his future. More to the point, he knew he had no future.
It was a forty-foot climb according to the map, but adrenaline made it effortless. When he reached the top, he twisted the seal on the hatch, then pushed with his back and shoulders to force the hatch open. Daylight flooded into the dusty shaft as dirt and moldy leaves rained down on him.
The kid, who was just below him, passed up the Tasmanian devil. Reaching among the big spines jutting from the central carbon-fiber sphere, Quinto activated it, tossed it outside, and pulled the hatch closed.
The buzzing of razor-sharp shrapnel hitting, and then burrowing around inside everything within five hundred yards, would have been reassuring if Quinto weren’t absolutely certain the starfish had retreated outside the Tasmanian devil’s range as soon as Quinto thought about using it. At least it would back the fish up so they wouldn’t be able to pick off Quinto and his troops as they climbed out of their holes.
