Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  “Believe me, Emmanuel,” Constantine told the admiral, “it’s more than enough. I was thinking we might set up a base here and maybe another closer to Sparta, and we could start with a refit of a couple of our ships and some new shuttles…”

  The two men were still talking and Logan knew he should have been paying attention, knew this was vital to their future, but his mind refused to focus. Everything seemed to be faded, washed out, the energy bleeding away from him as the fires guttered and flickered and died and darkness closed in. The discussion of the future, of moving on, was running headfirst into the unbreakable piece of the present he hadn’t dealt with, hadn’t let himself think about: life without Katy.

  Is it worth the living? Am I strong enough to face it?

  It would be easy to lose himself in work for the moment, but he’d have to face the reality of it soon enough.

  It would have been so much easier if I’d died in the battle. Even burning up inside a mech cockpit wouldn’t have hurt this bad.

  He could no longer see Buhari or Constantine, couldn’t make out the lines of their faces. Everything was distorted by tears he couldn’t remember crying. His breath was coming short and he reached out with a hand blindly, trying to find support against the side of the Mbeki vehicle. Its cold metal was a comfort, a support in the utter blackness. He hoped the darkness hid his tears. They were private, not for strangers, not even for Constantine.

  “Logan?” Constantine had called his name more than once; he could tell by the tone. “Are you all right? Do you need a medic?”

  He was about to ask if he could have some water, ready to blame the moment of weakness on dehydration, but the words died unspoken. Headlights were coming their way, dipping up and down with the ruts in the dirt road, driving fast, weaving between the carcasses of dead mecha. Not from the Mbeki ships or the aid station they’d set up, but from Revelation City.

  He wondered dully if it was yet another crisis, another death, another piece of the life he’d known slipping away.

  It was a small, flatbed cargo truck, the sort the locals used to deliver feed for the animals or trade goods from the settlements outside town. All other details were lost to the darkness and the glare of its headlights until it pulled up beside them. Mbeki soldiers, Buhari’s bodyguards, had piled out of the armored car and were covering the unknown vehicle with compact, wicked-looking rifles. When the driver’s side door opened, it wasn’t an enemy soldier who stepped out, or even a Spartan Ranger. It was David Carpenter, tall and grey, looking harried and dirty and somehow…hopeful?

  His teenage daughter, Chloe, had hopped out of the other side, ignoring the threatening glares of the Mbeki guards, running around to her father’s side and yanking at the rear door there. Carpenter seemed breathless, as if he’d run the whole way rather than driving, and he couldn’t quite seem to form a coherent sentence.

  “Logan,” he stuttered. “I mean, Colonel, umm…Brannigan, I…”

  “General Constantine, Admiral Buhari,” Logan spoke up, realizing he needed to introduce the man to put the officers’ minds at ease, “this is David Carpenter, elected governor of the Revelation colony.”

  “We were…,” Carpenter tried to explain. “That is, Chloe and her friends were patrolling outside the city, trying to make sure none of the Starkad Marines were trying to circle around the town that way, and…”

  “Someone give me a hand!” Chloe snapped, head popping back out of the back seat, her bobbed brown hair plastered down with sweat and hardened dust. “She’s heavy!”

  “They saw her ejection pod,” David Carpenter said. The words were drifting past Logan. He was focused like a sighting laser on the combat boot stretched out on the back seat of the truck and he moved forward, needing to see, needing to know. “We couldn’t get hold of anyone on the radio.”

  Chloe saw Logan coming and backed out of the way.

  “Be careful of her leg!” she cautioned, but he was already halfway inside the truck.

  Katy was lying across the back seat, her left leg wrapped in blood-stained bandages from the thigh down to the knee, wedged into a crude, wooden splint. Her flight suit was charred and blackened, and, in places, he could see where the heat had burned through to the skin beneath. Her hair was seared away on the left side of her head and a burn stretched across her face from temple to jaw, and she was the most beautiful sight Logan had ever laid eyes on.

  He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t manage to do anything but scramble across the seat and hold her in his arms, feel her breath, her warmth, just drink in the fact she was still alive.

  “Till death do us part,” Katy said into his ear, her voice rough and hoarse. “Didn’t think you were getting rid of me that easy, did you?”

  “What happened to your transponder?” he asked, shaking his head. It was an inane question, but all he could think to say. “We thought…”

  “The ejection pod took too much damage,” she explained. “It was disabled, along with just about everything else. I was hanging out the open side of the pod when it hit, and I was lucky the parachute shrouds didn’t get burned away with everything else.” She hissed, and he thought it was her leg or the burns, but the hurt in her face didn’t come from a physical injury. “Acosta…Francis didn’t make it. He just fell out of his seat when the straps burned away.”

  “Shit.” For all his abrasiveness, Acosta had been a good man.

  No, Patrick Bray. Patrick Bray was his real name, Francis Acosta was just his cover. I’ll make sure people remember that name, even if we never did.

  “Can you get out?” he asked her. “I can bring the medics here if you need…”

  “My leg’s broken,” she said, wincing as if speaking the words made the pain worse. “And I could really use some good drugs. But I’ll meet them on my feet.”

  Between Logan and Chloe, they managed to slide Katy gently and slowly out of the truck, and she slipped her arm around his shoulder and put her weight against him as he helped her step away from the cargo truck. There had been a medic on the Mbeki armored car and the woman was already rushing toward them, kit in her hand and a concerned look in her large, dark eyes.

  “Admiral Buhari,” Logan said as the medic helped Katy to a seat on the ground, leaning her up against the side of the truck, “this is Commander Kathren Margolis-Brannigan, our assault squadron leader…and my wife.”

  “When the hell did that happen?” Constantine blurted.

  “It is an honor to meet you, Commander,” Buhari said, nodding to her politely, as if this were a state dinner and she wasn’t burned and broken at his feet. “May Mithra grant you both a long life and a large family.”

  “May Mithra grant us victory,” Logan corrected him, his thoughts beginning to firm up.

  “This was as close to a victory as we’re going to get against Starkad,” Constantine warned him. “If we’re lucky, we won’t have to fight them again.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” Katy murmured, still listening in despite the occasional pained grunt from the prodding of the medic.

  “Today might have been the last shot in the fight against Starkad,” Logan conceded, “but it’s the first day of the battle to bring down Rhianna Hale. She’s been letting Starkad do her dirty work, but starting now, she’s going to have to face me herself.”

  “She’s had months now to consolidate her hold,” Buhari warned him. “Are you certain you can take her on with what you have?”

  Katy answered for him, laughing with the groggy bliss of the painkillers finally kicking in.

  “We’re Wholesale Slaughter, Admiral,” she told the Mbeki commander. “It’s what we do.”

  Epilogue

  I suppose I can’t blame you for this one,” Aaron Starkad admitted.

  Ruth Laurent found it amusing to watch the man walk in magnetic boots, as if his natural grace were somehow being mocked by the lack of gravity. The tap-scrape of their passage nearly drowned out his words. He’d seemed oddly reserv
ed since her return from Revelation with the news of Mbeki’s intervention. She’d been shocked when he had radioed that he would meet her at the military space station rather than requiring her to shuttle down to the capital or to one of his many family estates. Despite his assurances of his reputation as a moody butcher being nothing but a persona he encouraged, she couldn’t dispel the paranoid fear he might just have her spaced without a suit.

  Instead, he had brought her down from the main docking bay to a military research lab in a restricted level of the station, far down the hub of the massive, spinning can shape, armored by the skin of a massive asteroid against enemy weapons.

  “I knew we were taking a chance Shang or Mbeki might get spooked by the coup,” he went on, fingers tracing a course along the handrail overlooking pressurized drydocks, each of them huge, large enough to house a full-sized cruiser.

  The drydocks stretched over three kilometers of the length of the broad docking hub, taking up nearly as much space as the occupied sections of the station. She’d never had the opportunity to visit, but she found it suitably impressive and intimidating and she wondered if that was the intent.

  “Shang won’t get involved,” she said. “They have too much to lose. It’s your decision, my lord, but I would suggest offering them a deal. They’d be likely to take anything that would expand their territory with minimal military effort, and it would keep them from getting involved covertly.”

  “I already have,” he said, smirking in obvious self-satisfaction. “But yes, it was the smart thing to do.”

  “If I may say, my lord,” she ventured cautiously, “you don’t seem overly upset by this.”

  “I should be,” he admitted. “We lost three cruisers, most of three companies of mecha, all our assault shuttles…but things change, Ruth. Things progress. Those were the tools of the old way, and I am determined the Starkad Supremacy will never be caught fighting a war with yesterday’s weapons.”

  They’d made it past the hollow bones of a cruiser, stripped down to its spine and drive mountings, and once they were clear of it, another ship came into view. It was lozenge-shaped, somehow sleeker than a normal cruiser, though nearly as large. Its weapons pods were angular and threatening, but there seemed to be something missing from the design, though it took her a moment to understand what it was.

  “There’s no fusion drive bell,” she said softly. Then the words caught in her throat as she realized what that meant. Her eyes widened and she looked over at Aaron Starkad, who was grinning broadly. “Is that…?”

  “That is the product of the courier you and Colonel Grieg brought us over a year ago,” the man confirmed. “That and some recent information gleaned from servers Rhianna Hale discovered at the Nike Technological Institute.”

  He made a sweeping gesture toward the ship, a showman introducing the next act.

  “Colonel Laurent, I would like to present to you the Starkad Supremacy Naval Vessel Kraken. The first Supremacy military ship to be built with the Imperial stardrive.”

  His hand closed into a fist and the smile on his face hardened into a dark determination.

  “But not the last.”

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Thank you for reading Maelstrom Strand, book four in Wholesale Slaughter.

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