Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  The general was standing behind his desk, hands clasped behind his back, staring up at the portrait of his wife and son, both of them killed during a pirate attack while they’d been visiting her parents back on Nike. It had happened twenty-five years ago, when Constantine had been a young boy, but the man had never let them get too far from his thoughts. He’d never remarried, just plunged into his career and climbed every rung of the ladder.

  “Damned pirates,” General Drew murmured. “All this time and we still haven’t taken care of that problem, Nicolai. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “That’s a bit above my pay grade, sir,” Constantine admitted, impatience growling inside his chest. “We need to go, sir.”

  Drew glanced back at him, annoyance on his dog-jowled, deeply-lined face.

  “You’re an intelligent man and a military officer, Captain Constantine, give me your best opinion.”

  He hissed out a sigh.

  “Yes, sir. The pirate leadership is decentralized and their base camps are mobile and constantly changing. Committing enough forces to pin them down would leave us open to attack from Starkad.”

  “And just what do you think this coup is, young sir?” Drew cocked an eyebrow. “Or do you think Colonel Duncan Lambert came up with this all on his own? Lambert is many things, but a strategic mind is not one of them.”

  “We have to go, sir,” Constantine repeated, wondering if he was going to have to physically remove the man from the office. “The Insurrectionists are all over the base and my men are outside.”

  “The insurrection is all over this city, son. And with good reason. Our Guardian, tasked with protecting his people, has let pirates, and brigands, and bandits ravage our colonies, steal our treasure and murder our citizens because of his inaction and lack of imagination.”

  Constantine’s blood froze in his veins and his fingers tightened around the pistol grip of his carbine.

  “Sir, what are you saying?”

  The man’s dark eyes were filled with fire, with more passion and anger than he’d ever seen in them. A pistol had appeared in his hand from somewhere, as if produced by magic.

  “You have a chance here, son, more of a chance than my own wife and child. You have a chance to be on the winning team.”

  “No,” Constantine insisted, shaking his head. “No, it didn’t fucking happen like this! This is not what happened!”

  He clenched his teeth, raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired a burst into the chest of the man, the wraith, the phantom who wasn’t the General Alexander Drew he knew, the General Drew who’d been killed by the rebels that night. The muzzle flash from his carbine seemed to expand and consume everything in his vision in a soft, white glow and he couldn’t see the office, couldn’t see the base, couldn’t even see himself.

  Everything was fading, but through the haze he heard voices, distant and muffled.

  “His conditioning is deep. This is going to take a while.”

  “That’s all right.” He recognized that one, pictured her in a Starkad uniform, Intelligence. “We have the luxury of patience.”

  Darkness claimed him and he heard no more.

  Logan tried not to breathe too deeply. The air stank of death and decay, as if the rot had worked its way deep into the heart of the planet.

  “Why the hell did we have to meet this guy in the middle of a swamp?” he wondered, eyeing the surrounding jungle with suspicion, his hand not straying far from the pistol at his belt.

  The assault shuttle had landed on a finger of high ground stretching out into the wetlands, fringed by cypress trees. They grew on the land and in the water and everywhere in-between and it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began in the gathering dusk. He slapped at a mosquito, wondering how effective the sonic bug repellant at his belt actually was.

  “Be happy he met us at all,” Acosta told him. He didn’t seem bothered by the insect life, just by the waiting. He paced back and forth in front of the open ramp, a silhouette backlit by the interior lights. “I don’t care what Colonel Randell says, Shang wasn’t exactly thrilled about hearing from us. It took every single contact General Constantine had ever passed on to me to get us this face-to-face, and they weren’t about to do it somewhere Starkad might have an intelligence asset.” He waved around them at kilometer after kilometer of nothing. “Hell, they didn’t even want to have a ship sitting in space next to ours for a telescope to get a shot of. This shithole has maybe ten thousand people on the whole planet and I’m pretty sure they’re in some sort of exile prison.”

  “Perfect place for one,” Logan murmured.

  His eyes went back to the horizon, where he’d been searching for the last two hours, waiting. And there it was, finally.

  “Aircraft,” he said, nodding toward the south. “Not even a shuttle.”

  “Harder to trace back to them,” Acosta judged. “Like I said.”

  “You going to keep being all passive-aggressive, Francis?” Katy asked, coming down the ramp behind him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Commander Margolis.” Logan could almost hear the scowl in his voice even without looking at him.

  “I’m sorry no one thought to invite you to the strategy session,” Katy said, sighing like a patient parent. “But we were all pretty rattled. We value your contacts and your knowledge, honest we do.”

  “Game face on, Acosta,” Logan told him, still watching the approaching lights. He judged by the speed it was a ducted-fan helicopter. Probably flew it out from the prison colony. That way they could say they were running a maintenance inspection or something. Plausible deniability.

  He was proven right a moment later when the vaguely disc-shaped aircraft began an almost straight-down descent, the belly fans kicking up a fountain of grass and stray water droplets. The landing lights blinked dutifully, flashes of red and yellow blowing out the details of the night sky, and he squinted against the glare and the dust and debris, refusing to raise a hand to shield his eyes out of what he admitted to himself was likely stubborn pride.

  Logan tried not to let his hand rest on his gun butt, though the temptation was strong. The Shang Concord hadn’t been a direct military threat to Sparta in over a century, but neither had they been a friend. He suspected, but couldn’t prove, that they funded some of the pirates he’d taken down in the last year. It was an open secret Starkad funded a few of the bandit gangs, both as a source of intelligence and a distraction for their enemies, but they weren’t the only ones, just the most obvious.

  If there was anything Shang excelled at, it was keeping secrets.

  The canopy of the flitter popped open and a long, slender figure exited the cockpit with machine-like efficiency, not a motion wasted. The lights of the aircraft’s control board teased at his features, revealing a hint of a high cheekbone, the perfect curve of an aquiline nose, a few stray, midnight-colored curls slipping out the sides of the dark skullcap men of rank in the Concord wore. His clothes matched the cap, trim and conservative down to the flat, black gloves.

  Dark eyes gleamed in the light from the shuttle, regarding them one at a time, judging and assessing. He wasn’t visibly armed, and neither was the flitter, but Logan didn’t make any assumptions he wouldn’t have armed support nearby if he needed it.

  “You may call me Mr. Salonga,” he said. He speared Logan with a glare. “Are you the heir?”

  “I’m Logan Conner, son of Jaimie Brannigan. Thank you for meeting us, Mr. Salonga.” Logan paused, waiting for the Shang representative to respond, but the man remained silent, still focused on him. “There’s been a coup on Sparta,” he went on, the words feeling awkward and strained. “Rhianna Hale, the niece of…”

  “My government knows of the happenings on your homeworld,” Salonga interrupted. “There is little that occurs in any of the Five Dominions that escapes the eye of the Concord. You have asked for this meeting and someone has agreed and sent me to listen to what you have to say. Endeavor to tell me something
I do not already know.”

  Asshole. Logan bit down on his instinctive response, sensing it might have been impolitic. Okay, he wants brass tacks, I’ll give it to him.

  “Starkad’s behind this. Hale is their puppet. Once they finish off Clan Modi, Shang is likely next. If you back me, supply me, give me weapons and funding, I’ll take Hale down and remove the Starkad influence from Sparta. Even if I lose, it will distract Starkad enough to keep them out of your hair for a while.”

  Salonga nodded, the straight line of his mouth bending just slightly, as if he appreciated the brevity and efficiency of Logan’s statement.

  “Do you know why the Concord has seen far fewer wars than any of the other Dominions?” the Shang representative asked.

  Logan blinked. It seemed a sharp left turn in the conversation and it took him a moment to bring together an answer. Acosta was quicker.

  “Astrographic isolation,” the Intelligence agent said. “You had us between you and Starkad, Modi between you and the Mbeki Imperium. We were concentrating on Starkad and Modi isn’t strong enough to threaten you.”

  “Not inaccurate,” Salonga admitted. “But incomplete. The reason we do not become embroiled in your wars is that we mind our own affairs. This matter between you and the Starkad Supremacy is not our concern, and will not be unless and until the Supremacy makes the mistake of thinking we are vulnerable simply because we are reluctant to interfere in the dealings of others.”

  “Won’t your superiors want the chance to assess the situation themselves before they make a decision?” Logan’s chest was tight with frustration, with the inescapable feeling of things slipping away from him, but he tried to keep it out of his tone. There was always the chance he was misreading things, or maybe the man was testing their resolve…

  “My orders were clear before I was ever allowed to meet with you,” Salonga told him.

  “Then why come at all?” Logan snapped, finally losing patience with the man. “Why drag us out here if you already knew the answer?”

  “Just because we are unwilling to become embroiled in your war does not mean we have no counter-offer.” Salonga spread gloved hands, smiling thinly. “We would be more than willing to offer sanctuary to you and those with you for as long as you might require it. For a price.”

  “Three guesses what the price is.” Katy had taken a step back up onto the shuttle’s belly ramp, as if she were getting ready to run.

  “Your discovery of the Imperial research lab at Terminus did not go unnoticed by our intelligence corps,” the Shang operative confirmed. “We want whatever you discovered.”

  “And of course,” Acosta said, “with the Imperial technology, you won’t have to worry about Starkad trying to expand into your territory.” He shook his head, the expression on his face perhaps denoting disgust or perhaps professional admiration.

  Shit. Logan wished he’d been able to convince Lyta to do the talking. He was a mech-jock, not a diplomat. It would be so damned easy for him to screw this up…

  “I’d be willing to share the data we extracted,” he countered, the words tasting sour on the way out, “in exchange for a base of operations and financial and material support. Failing that, I have no interest in running and hiding from this fight and the data will be going to whoever is willing to fight beside me.”

  Salonga did something Logan hadn’t thought him capable of. He laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.

  “Colonel Conner,” he said, still chuckling, “were you under the misapprehension we were going to give you a choice?” He gestured out into the tall grass waving in the warm, fetid wind. “You are, right now, being covered by a platoon of Shang infantry. If you attempt to move back toward your shuttle, you’ll be disabled and your pilots will be killed. Once your comrades on your ship hear of your predicament, I’m fairly certain they’ll turn over the data to preserve your life.”

  Logan blew out a heavy sigh. It was always a relief when the other shoe dropped. He tapped a control on his ‘link surreptitiously, as if hitching up his belt.

  “Now,” he said.

  The stuttering wasn’t loud, more of a hammer-on-a-board sound, but the cadence was clearly gunfire run through an integrally suppressed Ranger weapon loaded with special, subsonic ammo to avoid the snap of a conventional round breaking the sound barrier. It was the sound of short bursts, but a lot of short bursts all firing at once. The tall grass moved, thrashed, exploded, and somewhere a single unsuppressed gunshot rang out, solitary and desperate.

  Then silence.

  “Clear,” Lyta reported into Logan’s earbud.

  “Get the Rangers back to the shuttle,” he told her, eyes still locked on Salonga. Those eyes didn’t seem nearly as arrogant and in-control anymore. He could have sworn he saw the reflection from a thin sheen of sweat on that perfect brow. “Lyta, get the shuttle ready to go and tell Kammy to plot a direct burn to the jump-point.”

  Salonga made a break for it. Logan had sensed it coming and had a step on the man, grabbing him by the back of his jacket collar and slamming him to the ground. The Shang operative was taller than him by nearly a head, but Logan had him by ten kilograms, all of it muscle. He knelt into the man’s chest, drew his handgun and put the muzzle under his chin.

  “Logan…,” Acosta blurted, but stopped himself from finishing the admonishment.

  Smart. Keep your damn mouth shut, Francis.

  Salonga’s skullcap had fallen off, letting loose a mass of dark curls, but the man hadn’t seemed to have noticed. His entire concentration was on the gun digging into the flesh of his neck and the eyes of the man whose finger was on the trigger.

  “Let me tell you what’s happening here, Mr. Salonga. Your platoon of soldiers is dead.” Behind him, he could hear the bootsteps of the Rangers as they trotted across the clearing, heading for the ramp. “We’re going to get on the shuttle and take off. If anything on or around this planet tries to stop us, the Shakak is going to blow them out of orbit.” He cocked his head to the side, curious. “Did your intelligence sources happen to mention that it’s the only fucking ship in the Dominions with a stardrive and Imperial weapons systems? Because it is. You might want to warn your people to stay out of its way. Nod if you understand me.”

  Salonga’s head moved up and down just slightly, constrained by the gun barrel.

  “Good. That’s short term. Long term, I am going to take down Rhianna Hale and I am going to be the Guardian of Sparta when it’s all over. So, your Concord bosses have three choices, as I see it. Stay out of this fight, which is what they want to do anyway. When it’s over, things will be just like they were. Or, the wrong decision, come in on Starkad’s side. In that case, when I get done taking back my home and my fleets and my military, you can consider Sparta and Shang at war.” Logan withdrew the muzzle just slightly, just enough for Salonga’s head to tilt downward and meet his eyes. “Or, they can be smart. They can back the winner, come in on my side. Then, once things are over, you’ll have an ally in Sparta, not just a neutral rival.” He suppressed a feral grin. This was his idea of diplomacy.

  He could hear the shuttle’s turbines screaming now, enough to drown out any more words. He slowly and carefully stood, letting the pressure off the Shang operative. The man didn’t move, still eyeing Logan uncertainly.

  “Think about it,” Logan shouted over the jets, backing toward the belly ramp.

  When his heels touched metal, he turned and jogged upward into the aerospacecraft, the ramp rising beneath him before he’d even stepped off of it. Lyta was making sure her Ranger platoon was strapped into the passenger seats behind the cockpit, but she looked up at his approach.

  “No casualties,” she reported. “For us.”

  The shuttle lifted off the ground and Logan grabbed the back of a seat and fell into an acceleration couch beside hers, strapping in as they roared away from the swamp.

  “I’m sorry,” Lyta told him, leaning in close. “This was my idea.”

  He shrugged. “I
t didn’t go as bad as it could have.”

  “We still don’t have a base,” she lamented, head falling back against the neck cushion of the seat. “We don’t have anywhere to go for support.”

  Logan grunted softly, eyes hazing over in thought.

  “You know,” he finally said, “I think we just might.”

  9

  Josephine Salvaggio clamped her jaws together against the yawn trying to fight its way free. She remembered a time when she would have let it loose, not cared what anyone thought of her for it, but those days were gone. She wasn’t the “interim military commander” of Revelation anymore, she was just the “minister of defense,” which was a damned aggrandized title for the commander of a company of mostly scout mecha and a few lightly-equipped infantry.

  But everything about Revelation was overblown, including their “planetary government.” “Planetary.” Yeah, if one small, seaport town hooked up by railway to a few farming outposts constitutes a planetary settlement. Their politicians sure loved to talk, and David Carpenter, the duly-elected Planetary Governor, was perhaps the worst of them. She didn’t check her ‘link readout, but she judged he’d been droning on for nearly an hour and she had to pretend to be interested if she was going to get the funding her people needed.

  Carpenter was a tall man, always seeming as if he were on the edge of malnutrition, his face gaunt and spare beneath the scraggly salt-and-pepper beard. His wife was just as thin though not quite as tall and, thanks be to Mithra, not nearly as talkative. She watched her husband with the sort of fond, almost worshipful look that made Salvaggio want to puke. The rest of the elected Council and cabinet ministers watched from the perimeter of the round conference table with varying degrees of interest and boredom, reminding Salvaggio of a picture of an ancient painting she’d seen once called The Last Supper. She didn’t remember whose supper it was or why it was their last one, but everyone in the painting had the same sense of “oh my God, this is so important” in their faces. Except this one weird looking dude who seemed like he wanted to start a fight.