Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  Maybe that’s me.

  “Governor,” she said, raising a finger to interrupt him as he went over the same figures for what had to be the third time, “might I be allowed to make a salient point?”

  There were a few dirty looks. Some of the Council members still hadn’t forgiven her for taking over the colony after she’d freed it from the brigands who’d set themselves up as the ruling class.

  Shitheads should have paid me on time, then. Girl’s got to make a living. Damn good thing for them Wholesale Slaughter came along and offered to cover my expenses or they’d be fighting off another bunch of bandits or pirates by now.

  “Of course, Captain Salvaggio,” Carpenter said with a polite nod. “You had a thought on the reconstruction budget?”

  Yeah, I got a thought, you officious coot. My fucking thought is you’ve been “reconstructing” this place for a year and you still ain’t built the important things.

  “The last communication I had with Colonel Slaughter was a few months ago,” she said, standing, palms flat on the table. It was cheap plastic and creaked beneath her weight. “In it, he stressed the importance of our finishing the mech fabrication plant above all other priorities.”

  Mithra’s bloody horns, I sound like one of them now! Spenta Mainyu save me from fucking bureaucrats!

  “We all appreciate everything Colonel Slaughter and Wholesale Slaughter have done for us,” Genevieve Gayou said, leaning forward, fingers clasped in front of her as if in prayer. “But he doesn’t live here, and our needs are many…”

  “He may not live here,” Salvaggio cut in, “but he paid for that fabrication plant and you’d better have a damn good reason not to have spent the funds he gave us for the project he thought he was paying for.”

  Several uncomfortable glances at each other sidelong and much silence met her statement.

  “That’s what I fuckin’ thought,” she murmured. A few eyes widened and she knew she’d said it too loud.

  She sighed, about to try to offer a compromise when the door to the council meeting room slammed open and Yuri stumbled in, out of breath, his wild mane of grey-streaked hair even more out of control than usual.

  “Momma!” he called to her. She winced at the old nickname. She’d tried to get her people to start calling her “Captain Salvaggio” to sound more professional and less like a crime boss, but it was an uphill battle. “We got…” he gasped for breath. “…incoming shuttles. They’ll be landing in ten minutes at this course and speed.”

  “What?” she blurted, shooting to her feet. “Why didn’t we pick up their mother ship before she reached orbit?”

  “The orbital sensors didn’t pick up any fusion drive flares,” Yuri said, hands resting on his thighs as he caught his breath. He must have run all the way there from the Security Station…what had used to be called the city jail. “I don’t know how they missed it!”

  The hall exploded into a gabble of confused voices, people springing to their feet without any idea of what they were going to do or where they were going to go. Not Salvaggio, though. What had begun as utter panic subsided into something less fearful but equally curious. She knew exactly who could sneak up on them like this, but not why he would be here.

  There was a chime on her ‘link, the notice of an incoming call. She saw from the address that it was a radio signal being relayed by satellite rather than another ‘link address in the city.

  “Salvaggio here,” she spoke into the external pickup rather than using her earbud, thinking this was probably something everyone needed to hear. The buzz of voices died down as they waited for the reply.

  “Josephine,” the voice was small and tinny over the external speaker, but they all recognized it nonetheless. “This is…” A hesitation. “…Colonel Slaughter. Sorry to drop in unannounced. Pick me up at the port. We need to talk.”

  “Sure thing, Colonel,” she said, shooting a stink-eye at David Carpenter, wondering what he’d have to say now about how they’d spent their money. “I bet there’s a lot to talk about.”

  “Holy shit.” Salvaggio looked like a cow ready for slaughter, right after the butcher had slammed it between the eyes with a maul. She sank back in the rickety, hand-made chair in what had been the constable’s office before someone had gotten the idea to start calling it the planetary security center. “So, you’re really the son of the Guardian.” She winced. “I mean, the late Guardian, God rest his soul.”

  “I am,” Logan said, pacing from the desk to the window. He’d tried to sit down, but he couldn’t manage to shake the restless feeling in his gut that he’d wasted too much time. “I was born Logan Brannigan, but I’ve been calling myself Logan Conner since I entered the Academy to avoid anyone knowing who I was and treating me different.”

  “You might want to consider going back to Brannigan,” Terrin suggested. He sat on a corner of the office’s desk, which the town constable might have objected to if he’d been invited to the meeting. “Not many people who don’t know you are going to get worked up about following Logan Conner.”

  “Wait a second,” Salvaggio interrupted, pointing an accusatory finger at Terrin. “That means you’re the Guardian’s son, too!”

  Terrin nodded, grinning. “Younger. Not interested in being a soldier or a Guardian though. I’m a scientist.”

  “I was holding the son of the Guardian of Sparta prisoner,” Salvaggio muttered, eyes glazing over. “Goddammit, I could have asked for such a ransom…”

  “I often wonder why I broke you out of jail,” Lyta commented from where she leaned against the wall by the door. She wasn’t in combat armor, but she still carried a carbine slung across her back, as if she expected the enemy to land at any second.

  “Okay,” Salvaggio said, shaking her shoulders as if she were trying to get rid of regrets over lost opportunities. “Your dad got killed, you’ve got a traitor on your throne. I understand all that. But why did you come here? To hide until the heat dies down?”

  “No.” Logan felt his shoulders tightening at the insinuation he’d hide out and he forced himself to loosen up. Salvaggio was probably going off what she would do in his circumstances. “I came here to find a place to build up our forces and start preparing to take back Sparta.”

  “Build up what forces?” She waved a hand expressively. “You told me you weren’t able to contact the rest of your fleet.”

  Logan shared a look with Lyta and she rolled her eyes. He knew she still thought this was a crazy idea.

  “Wholesale Slaughter,” he explained. Salvaggio blinked in obvious confusion and he went on. “We can’t reach the other Spartan forces and we wouldn’t know who to trust if we could. We can’t trust the other Dominions not to turn us over to Starkad to try to curry favor with them. But we do have all the mercenary units we brought under the Wholesale Slaughter umbrella. And I want to bring them all here.”

  “Whoa!” David Carpenter had been sitting in the constable’s swivel chair, which was a good deal more comfortable than the other chairs in the office, but now he popped to his feet, face like a prairie dog alerting on a hawk. “Here? Are you nuts? We don’t have any real defenses here, no spacecraft besides a couple cargo shuttles!”

  “We can help with that,” Lyta told the governor. “Once we get enough forces, we’re going to go out and…appropriate what we need from the enemy.”

  “Steal it, you mean.” Salvaggio’s tone was dry, a small smirk passing across her face.

  “In wartime,” Logan corrected her, “you aren’t stealing, you’re appropriating. And we can get what we need to set up defenses for this world.”

  “You’re talking about turning our home into a battlefield again,” Carpenter accused. “We haven’t even finished rebuilding from the last time we had to fight for our independence.”

  He seemed shaky on his feet, steadying himself against the desk, and Logan felt suddenly guilty.

  “I won’t lie to you,” he told the older man, “it might come to that. I can only
tell you if Starkad gets their way, no one is going to be independent for long. Leaving loose ends isn’t Aaron Starkad’s way.” Logan shrugged. “If you don’t want us here, if you want us to leave, we’ll go.”

  Where, he had no idea, and he was praying very hard Carpenter wouldn’t take the chance he was giving him.

  David Carpenter rubbed his palms across his eyes as if the light from the overhead lamp was hurting them, turned away and stepped around the desk. He pulled the window shade aside and stared out into the street. Logan wondered if he was imagining the town on fire, the streets filled with the dead and dying, the way it had looked after the battle with Starkad.

  “No,” he said, his voice a sigh of regret, and Logan’s gut went cold at the thought the man was about to kick them out. “No, I won’t ask you to leave,” he clarified. “If it weren’t for you and your people, we would have nothing. We’d either be under Starkad’s thumb, or dead.” He laughed, a harsh sound totally devoid of humor. “And if it does come down to Starkad or your own government’s traitors coming here to dig you out, we can always hide in the canyons again and wait them out. No one wants to stay here forever. No one who has anywhere else to go.”

  Logan controlled the sigh of relief he couldn’t quite suppress, releasing it slowly and almost silently. He didn’t want to seem desperate.

  “Thank you, Governor Carpenter,” he began, but the older man cut him off.

  “I don’t want your thanks,” he said, rounding on Logan, “I want you to make me a promise. If you win this, if you wind up ruling Sparta again when all this is over, I want your word you’ll come back here and take us somewhere fit to live. Somewhere we won’t be squeezed into a small slice of the planet because the rest isn’t livable, somewhere we won’t have to be constantly on guard for pirates and raiders who want to take what’s ours.”

  Terrin chuckled softly and Logan stared at him as if he’d lost his mind, but his brother shrugged and pushed ahead.

  “You know, the thing about nice, safe places, sir,” he told Carpenter, “is there are already people there running things. I believe I heard a lot of people complaining about her…” He jabbed a finger toward Salvaggio. “…being in control, taking away your self-determination. Are you going to be willing to live by someone else’s rules, pay their taxes, work where they say you work?”

  “He won’t have to,” Logan declared. “Mr. Carpenter,” he said with grim resolution, “if I can win this, if I live through it and I am the Guardian of Sparta at the end, I’ll find you a home wherever you want to go. And I’ll make sure you govern yourselves when you get there.”

  Carpenter peered at him through narrowed eyes with an air of suspicion and paranoia earned through long and difficult experience. Finally, though, he offered a hand in bargain and Logan shook it.

  “What now?” Salvaggio asked him.

  “Now, we send out the word,” Logan told her. “The Shakak will hit the closest systems and use their communications networks to get on the mercenary job net and contact every mercenary unit we’ve contracted out as part of Wholesale Slaughter and bring them here.”

  “What if they don’t want to be revolutionaries?” Salvaggio wondered. “We’re talking about mercenaries, you know. Real ones, the kind who fight for money, not patriotism. What makes you think they’ll fight for you?”

  “Will you?” Lyta demanded, stepping over to the woman, almost nose to nose with her. “Will you fight for us?”

  “For you? No.” She grinned lopsidedly. “for the prospect of a piece of the action if you win…sure. I didn’t get where I am by avoiding risks.”

  “There you go, then.” Lyta patted Salvaggio on the shoulder with awkward comradery. “We just have to hope the rest of them are as bad at calculating the odds as you are.”

  10

  Come on, you sorry sons of bitches!” Valentine Kurtz yelled into the general communications net loud enough to cause a burst of feedback in Logan’s headphones. “You think you’re gonna beat Starkad armor or worse, Spartan mecha with that kind of sloppy piloting? Hundred-meter separation in open ground, fifty meters when you’re in tight like here in the canyons! Creighton, if you like D’Agostino so much, you should get with him after the war and make some beautiful babies, but right now you need to back the hell off!”

  Logan laughed softly in the privacy of his mech cockpit. Kurtz had missed his calling; he should have been a trainer at the Academy. The two platoon mates from the imaginatively-named Bulwark Universal Private Military Company mumbled apologies and the lead mech, D’Agostino in a patched and pieced-together Reaper, picked up its pace, moving further down the broad canyon the locals called the Run. The afternoon sun beat down straight into them and he didn’t envy the ground troops being trained by Lyta and her Rangers.

  “Aren’t you being a little hard on them, Val?” Logan asked, shuffling his own Scorpion closer to Kurtz’s Golem. The two mecha represented half of all they had left, and they’d only managed to get them down from the Shakak by borrowing a cargo shuttle from one of the mercenary companies who had answered the call. “Not like they’ve had to fight anything but half-trained pirates before.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d be yelling at you, too, boss,” Kurtz told him, “if you weren’t my boss. You’re driving that thing like it’s a freaking cargo truck.”

  Logan winced, partly because Kurtz wasn’t wrong. “I’m not used to the feel of this thing. I thought the Sentinel took some adjusting, but this Scorpion’s even worse with the digitigrade knee joints. I don’t know how the hell Paskowski did it.”

  He was almost able to say the man’s name without the excruciating tightness in his chest now, over three months later.

  “I still keep expecting him to saunter into the ready room every morning,” Kurtz mused as if he were reading Logan’s mind, “just a couple seconds before the morning meeting, and then Ford would roll her eyes and tell him if he wasn’t five minutes early, he’s late.”

  “And Paskowski would say ‘if he wants me to be here five minutes early, he should schedule the meeting for five minutes earlier.’ That always drove her nuts.” He sighed. The pain was still there. He wondered how long it would last. “Come on, Val, we got four more companies to run through the tactical lanes, let’s get moving.”

  “Companies,” Kurtz scoffed, following along behind the Scorpion’s slow shuffle with the stiff gate of the Golem. “They’re a bunch of damned scout mecha and a few beat-up old Reapers or Agamemnons at best. I don’t know how we’re gonna take on line units with this kind of shit, Logan.”

  “We’ll get them better machines,” Logan assured him. “We just need the men trained.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Colonel Brannigan, sir, this is Lewis at the Security office.” The voice intruding on Logan’s headphones was young and hesitant, one of the locals they’d been training to help monitor communications and orbital sensors. “We have another ship making orbit. The Shakak says it’s got clearance and it’s landing a couple of heavy-lift shuttles in a few minutes down at the spaceport. They wanted me to let you know it was a Captain Bohardt and that he wanted to meet you there at the port. He says he has something for you.”

  “Roger that, Security,” Logan replied crisply. “For the record, a ship is a she, not an it.”

  He didn’t bother correcting the kid for calling him “Brannigan” instead of “Conner.” It had been happening with the mercenaries and the locals so much lately, he’d just started to accept it.

  “Sorry, Val.” Logan pulled the Scorpion up short, scraping its giant, oval footpads against the sandstone of the canyon floor and awkwardly swiveling the massive strike mech back the other direction. “Guess you’ll have to run this bunch through without me. Bohardt’s people are here, finally.”

  “I didn’t expect them to show,” Kurtz admitted. “It’s been what? Almost two months now since you sent the word out?”

  “Yeah, but from what Kammy said, it’s getting harder to
make it through Starkad and Spartan space. I imagine Modi’s pretty paranoid now, too. Not everyone has a starship that can bend space.”

  We could have had a couple more, if they’d waited just a few months. He shook the thought off. Or Starkad could have them.

  Probably best to leave what-ifs in Mithra’s hands.

  He thought of Ford and Paskowski and his father and had the unworthy thought that perhaps Mithra was no longer on their side.

  “Holy shit,” Logan breathed the words, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun so he could stare up at the mech coming down the cargo shuttle’s ramp with heavy, clomping steps.

  It was sleek and deadly, plastrons extending up from its shoulders to give extra shielding to the missile launch pod on the left shoulder and the 30mm Vulcan cannon on the right. Its left hand was articulated, while the right ended in a plasma gun. It was a Vindicator, right down to the Spartan Mobile Armored Corps markings on the chest plastrons.

  “You like it?” David Bohardt asked him, grinning broadly.

  The man had given him a perfunctory handshake and greeting when he’d disembarked the Bastards’ makeshift drop-ship, a converted heavy-lift cargo shuttle, but he’d been occupied with staging the unloading of their mecha and people for the last half an hour, leaving Logan waiting and wondering why the man had insisted he meet him at the landing field. And then the Vindicator had come down, last of all the Bohardt’s Bastards machines. It stopped at the foot of the ramp as if posing for them.

  “It’s a beauty,” Logan admitted, circling around the assault mech. It looked like thirty-five tons of pure death and part of him ached for a chance to pilot it. “Where the hell did you get it, though?”

  Bohardt was still smiling but with a bit of an evil glint to his eye.