by J. L. Lyon
She opened her mouth to object, but Sullivan cut across her, “You will implement Gavin’s plan to take Rio. You will occupy Division Seventeen, and then employ this same tactic on all of the remaining System cities that will not yield. You will also train Imperial Specters in accordance with our original agreement, to combat the rise of Alexander’s Spectral Army.”
Liz shook her head in frustration. She had not yet faced the Spectral Army, but some of her generals had. Two of her former comrades had survived 301-14-A’s defection in the Central Square a year ago, the two she cared for the least: Blaine, and his Specter General Tony Marcus. Together they had rebuilt Specter to a force nearly a thousand strong, in addition to raising up a smaller band of elite warriors that made up Blaine’s special rebel-hunting corp.: the Spectorium. Sullivan had called them Alexander’s army, but in truth they were Derek Blaine’s, and they had never lost a battle. It was said they knew no fear.
“Thank you, Emperor,” she said. “But I am afraid I must decline.”
Shocked whispers rose up around the chamber, and Sullivan’s voice lowered into a tone of challenge, “You understand, then, that I will have no choice but to confine you here until such a time as your loyalty can be proved.”
“But you’re right, Emperor,” she said. “I am in this for myself. You should know that from our original deal. Shall I enumerate the details of that arrangement to the Citadel?”
Sullivan’s mouth snapped shut and his face paled. She had him. For the past year he had kept a tight lid on the fact that Elijah Charity had nearly been chosen Chief of Command instead of her. No one knew the reason for Specter Captain 301-14-A’s betrayal in the Central Square, though his story was quickly becoming legend. She could only imagine the explosion if his true identity ever became known. On that point, at least, Sullivan and Napoleon Alexander seemed to agree.
Caught in his own web of deceit, Sullivan beckoned her, “Approach, Chief.”
She closed the remainder of the distance, and Sullivan came down on level with the other members of the High Council. Even so, he had to lean down to whisper, “What do you want?”
“Give me a ship, and let me go.”
Sullivan paused as though to think it over, but she could see in his eyes that he had no intention of releasing her.
“Was any of it true?” she asked. “What you said of my family.”
The emperor nodded, “Every word.”
“You once told me that the Capital Orphanage’s Discipliner might have modified my memory to conceal 301’s true identity. You were right. He erased my memory of 301’s arrival. But now I remember, and something else happened that night. My mother came to see me.”
Sullivan’s eyes went wide, “Your mother?”
“Dressed in the garb of a palace aide, fleeing to the Wilderness and leaving me behind. I can only assume, then, that you knew of her, and—given the fact that Domination Crisis Eleven was already sealed away at the time—that you lied.”
“I did not lie to you, Elizabeth. You had family on Domination Crisis Eleven when it was sealed away. But your mother was not one of them. I know how that night ended for her.”
“Did she make it?”
“No,” Sullivan said. “She was caught before even leaving the city and executed as a traitor.”
Liz couldn’t help but feel a stab of sorrow. Despite how horrible the woman had been to her, she only had one mother. It made her want to reach the others as soon as possible, lest she lose her chance with them as well.
“Please,” she looked Sullivan in the eye and—just for a moment—let her heart show, “Just let me go.”
He shook his head, “I can’t. You have the right of it. The generals are fools. I need you here. The Conglomerate needs you. What will it take? Name your price, and it is yours.”
I have named my price, she thought bitterly, and you have denied me twice over. She could not allow him to string her along for even another day, let alone a year. “You have nothing more I want, Emperor. We’re finished here.”
Liz turned from the platform and strode back the way she came, but paused when Sullivan’s cry echoed throughout the chamber, “The Chief of Command has left me no choice but to see her brought to trial on the charge of treason. Guardsmen, take her into custody and confine her in the catacomb cells.”
Over my dead body. Liz took off toward the exit as guardsmen emerged from the shadows, and a surge of noise from the alarmed Citadel drowned out Sullivan’s shouts. Four soldiers intercepted her at the door, their shoulders relaxed and their faces calm. She was easy prey in their eyes, unarmed and ensnared by their trap. They have forgotten who I am, but after today they will remember forever.
She rushed them and launched an uppercut on the largest man’s chin, simultaneously raising a knee to his groin. He blocked the fist but not the knee, and went down like a brick. Before he even crumpled she chopped the man next to him square in the throat, and he fell to the floor choking for breath.
The remaining two moved to grab her, and she saw twenty more—perhaps forty, she couldn’t be sure—approaching from behind. She wouldn’t have time to deal with the other two before the full force reached her, and then she really would be helpless.
Ignis, she thought, I need to get to Ignis.
She slid lithely through the narrow aisle made by the fallen guardsmen, evading the grips of her remaining foes long enough to squeeze through the door and shut it back behind her. Strangely enough, there was a lock on the outside, which she slid in place just as the guardsmen began pounding. She breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever the reason for the lock, it had saved her.
She turned, and her breath caught in her throat. An arc of assault rifles stared her down, leaving her no choice but to raise her hands in surrender. She had completely forgotten about the squad already in the antechamber.
Magistrate Costa’s cackle sounded out from behind the guardsmen, and then the man himself emerged from the arc. She felt a stab of fury as he held Ignis out tauntingly before her eyes, “Looking for this?”
“I warned you what would happen if you touched that, Costa.”
“You’re not exactly in a position to make threats, Aurora.” He made a show of studying the ruby hilt. “I think I’ll add this trophy to my collection. And who knows? Perhaps the emperor will allow me to collect you as well.”
Beauty is a weapon, more powerful than any sword, the Matron’s voice seemed to whisper in her ear. Enslave a man through his eyes, and the rest of him is yours for the taking.
“You’ll never have me, Costa,” she challenged. “The thought makes me sick.”
Costa stepped forward, grinning from ear to ear, “Do you really think you can deny me? The Magistrate of Rome?”
“The dog of Rome,” she mocked. “Apparently you can’t get it through your head.”
He stepped forward again and ran his eyes over her lustfully. One more, just one step closer…
But Costa never got to take that step, for at that moment the entire left wall exploded. Stone and ash and men went flying across the antechamber, and the shockwave threw her sideways. Keep your balance, her training warned. A fallen soldier is a dead soldier. She managed it barely, though the men around her were not so lucky.
A Halo-4 swooped in through the hole and the door opened to reveal her loyal major, “Come on, Chief! There’s not much time!”
The guardsmen were beginning to recover from the blast all the more quickly now that they realized its cause, but she had one more item of business to attend to. Costa lay on the floor in front of her, just out of reach of the ruby cylinder. She bent to pick it up, and when the cool red stone touched her skin she felt a wave of fire spread straight through her…the fire of power; of strength; of invincibility. Ignis, Gladius of Fire. She couldn’t have chosen a better name.
Liz made to leave, but something grabbed at her. Instinctively, she swung Ignis around and brought the blade to life just in time to slice straight through Magistrate Costa�
�s wrist. He fell back from her, screaming out in pain and holding his stump. “I did warn you, you know.”
The guardsmen shrunk from the sight of the Spectral Gladius as she bounded past them and jumped into the Halo. Through Costa’s pained screams she heard him cry out, “Stop them you cowards! Shoot that thing down!”
Liz barely made it to her seat before the Halo blasted out of the antechamber and ascended rapidly into the sky. Breathless, she turned to the major, “Thank you. And you were right…I should never have gone in there. I just didn’t think…”
“That the emperor would go that far?” the major asked.
“No,” she shook her head. “I thought he would be different than Napoleon Alexander. But I was wrong. He put a lock on the door to the Chamber.”
The major’s eyes narrowed, “So?”
“He’s already thinking ahead,” she replied. “One day he is going to lock the Citadel in that room, and none of them will get out alive.”
“Perhaps all those who war against tyrants are doomed to become tyrants themselves.”
“Not me,” she said. “I am done with this war. How long until the Golden Queen?”
The major made to answer, but the pilot interrupted, “Chief! We have company!”
“Report.”
“Three Halos coming in fast on our six. They’ve launched missiles! Taking evasive maneuvers!”
“No!” Liz cried, taking a look at the targeting screen. “We’ve armed all our Halos with the new smart missiles. You’ll never shake them.”
“Then what can we do?”
“Take us up into the atmosphere,” she ordered. “Maximum speed.”
“Chief,” the major said. “Those missiles will lose propulsion in space, but so will we. Not to mention decompression and—”
“We have no choice, Major. Let’s just hope this bird can outrun them.” She held on tight to the armrest as the Halo ascended rapidly, and wondered if it would all come down to this. All that she had sacrificed to find her family, and she would die here before ever getting close. Better than dying on Sullivan’s leash.
“It’s no use, Chief,” the pilot said. “We aren’t rising fast enough. Impact in five, four, three…”
Liz closed her eyes and braced for death.
3
LIZ WAS AWARE OF the gentle vibrations of a Halo in flight beneath her before she even regained consciousness. Relief washed over her as she struggled to make her way back to the world. We made it. We survived. Her ploy had worked, and now they must be on their way to the Indian Ocean and the Golden Queen. Still, her body felt strange, as though days had passed rather than just minutes or hours. Perhaps that was an effect of oxygen deprivation.
“General,” a voice called, distorted to her confused senses. “She’s coming to.”
“Right on time,” came the reply.
General? Liz thought with a great degree of concern. There is no general on this Halo.
With great difficulty she forced her eyes open to a blurred canvas of blues and grays. Her head exploded with pain, eyes strained as though they hadn’t seen light in days, and her breath came in short rasps—almost as though she were coming out of some drug-induced stupor.
As the blurs sharpened into human-shaped silhouettes, she watched one sit across from her—that meant she had to have been in the cabin, rather than in the cockpit as she last remembered.
“Welcome back to the world, Aurora,” the man said, his voice returning to normalcy as her senses adjusted. “How do you feel?”
She registered with alarm that the man did not apply her title—something none of the men who left with her on that Halo from Rome would have neglected to do. Liz trained her eyes on him, willing them to focus and tell her what she desperately needed to know. They obeyed, and she found herself staring into the face of one of her greatest rivals: General Bryan Gavin.
She tried to rise—to attack him, anything—but that was when she felt the restraints. They pinned her to the bulkhead and kept her from moving even an inch forward in her seat. Regardless, she continued to strain against them, all the while wondering what could possibly have happened to land her here with this man, of all people. How long had she been out?
Gavin anticipated her question, “It’s been three days since your little stunt before the Citadel. Quite a mess. Your flight has our precious legislature wondering if there are traitors around every corner, now.”
“I’m no traitor,” Liz snapped. “I just want what’s mine.”
“An opportunist, then,” Gavin smiled. “Something I’m glad to hear. I know you and I have never quite seen eye-to-eye, my dear—”
“Because you wanted my job.”
Gavin’s boyish grin soured, but only long enough to let her know she had struck a nerve, “I did wonder at the emperor’s decision to place a little girl at the reins of what would become the greatest war ever fought on this planet, but even I have to admit: you held your own, for a time. Still, in the end you confirmed my fears about your selection. Now that the price of victory has risen beyond the reaches of your conscience, you no longer have the fortitude to do what is necessary.”
“Fortitude is not the word I would use to describe the willingness to murder a hundred thousand people…not even to see Napoleon Alexander fall.”
“And while you wallow in sanctimonious pride, the Imperial cities will starve and the Great Army will finally stir from behind their walls. What do you imagine will happen then? Will Blaine and Alexander show the same kind of mercy to our people?”
“Derek Blaine is your creation, General. You tell me.”
“It will be worse than Grand Admiral Donalson’s purge of Rome,” Gavin said. “Much worse. If they leave even a quarter of the population alive, we should consider ourselves lucky. But…it is not your sensibilities on this matter that make you a traitor, my dear.”
In that moment the realization dawned on her: if she was here on a Halo with Gavin, that meant her men had been either killed or captured.
“Yes,” Gavin said calmly. “We know all about the Golden Queen. Did you really think the emperor would allow you to not only leave the Imperial Guard, but to take a detachment of men, a destroyer, and her crew along with you? In attempting to do so you committed a supreme act of sedition against the Imperial Conglomerate, a crime whose retribution can only be paid with death.”
“Then why haven’t you finished the job? You’ve had ample time, it seems.”
“As far as the Citadel and the High Council are concerned, you are dead, killed when your Halo crashed into the Mediterranean Sea. Those of your men who survived the crash were executed before the very eyes of the Citadel, and they all watched via satellite as a detachment from the fleet at Perth closed in on the Golden Queen and made certain she met a swift and violent end.”
Liz closed her eyes briefly, the weight of every death falling upon her shoulders. Those men had risked everything in loyalty to her. Now they were dead, while she still lived.
What a difference three days made.
“And the emperor?” she asked quietly.
“Aside from the men on this Halo, he alone knows the truth,” Gavin replied. “I was able to persuade him that keeping you alive could serve our interests better than seeing you dead. It took some careful convincing, I assure you. He did not take kindly to your conspiracy.”
I suspect not, she thought wryly. He has begun to see enemies all around him. “So what is it you want of me?”
“I’m sure you are aware what the men say about the Wilderness east of the Corridor.”
Her eyes narrowed, “I am.” The Imperial Conglomerate’s presence in the Western Hemisphere had created an interesting side-effect. With the Great Army holed up within the cities, Silent Thunder was free to move through the Wilderness without fear of reprisal. Liz had tried to turn that to their advantage, believing two sides with a common foe should be able to reach some kind of agreement—even if only temporarily. But all her attempts to conta
ct the rebels—much less negotiate a truce—had failed.
“‘Napoleon Alexander may control the cities,’ they say,” Gavin intoned. “‘But Shadow Heart rules the Wilderness.’”
“I know where this is headed, General. And it is foolishness. I sent countless sentries to find her, and none ever returned alive with word of her. Her people are like ghosts.”
“I once knew a man who said that to find a ghost, you must send another after it.”
Liz felt a pang of remorse. The words brought back the memory of the man who spoke them—the man who trained her, who she had never suspected as false. But once his true allegiances had been revealed, it forced her to question whether she truly knew McCall at all. It had taken time for her to decide that there was no reason for her to have felt betrayed. He had done what he thought was right, just as she had. In the end it had cost the old man his life.
“You have a wealth of soldiers at your disposal. Why me?”
Gavin smiled, “Oh, I think you know.”
“I don’t actually.”
“Put aside the fact that—as a Spectral-adept and a former high-ranking member of both great powers—you have knowledge that they can use. Put aside your brilliant powers of seduction and your virtually unsurpassed abilities as an intelligence officer, which make you keenly suited to this mission. Instead, think of something more base, more primitive—something that will get you access to Shadow Heart herself.”
“And what is that, General?”
“Shared loss,” Gavin replied callously. “Rumor is that the…event…which transformed Grace Sawyer from the dewy-eyed daughter of a notorious rebel into the Queen of the Wilderness we have today, was the death of a certain man. A man she loved dearly, and who supposedly—pure myth, I’m sure—took her heart with him into the grave. I happen to know that this man was none other than the Specter Captain, 301-14-A…a man you also knew, I believe.”
That pang of remorse twisted into a gut-wrenching throb. For the past year she had tucked thoughts of 301’s death away, not permitting herself time to mourn and give Sullivan another reason to suspect her loyalty. She tried to think of him as the enemy, as a combatant whose death served her interests. But she could not find it within her to be so cold, not about him. Whenever he came to mind she couldn’t see anything but her friend, the boy who had stuck with her through thick and thin.
