Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  They worked in silence until his mother poured the egg into the oatmeal coming to a boil on the stove. “You givin what he asked any kind of thought?”

  Moses nodded and she wiped her hands on her apron to squat and look at him. “And?” She asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Well just you remember what I told you.” She said waving a finger at him. “Didn’t come all this way just so you could go squanderin what we gave you. I gave birth to ya. You’ve got a responsibility to me now.”

  On the sun warmed stone over the waterfall and its swimming hole a few days later the thought came back again, rumbling like thunder after the storm that clouded his mind. “Really I shouldn’t ask how I want to live my life.” Want was a dangerous word. A few years ago he’d wanted to run away, before that he’d only wanted to sleep in late, or sneak an extra helping of sweet sauce or steal the good pillow from Gerard. Desire was not a foundation on which to live. It was the best way to squander a life since, eventually, all desires died. “I ought to be asking how I want to die.” Only that desire could last a lifetime.

  A few days later he watched with the rest of his family as the cube reported the destruction of the four evangelists. Each ship was shown in its final moments, surrounded by chaff and zipping automata the newscaster called “angels” and “archangels”. Large as those machines were, they looked like bugs beside the huge evangelists. Their deaths were spectacular. Huge blooms of fire and sprays of debris. Most spectacular of all was the death of the last of the four ships, the St. John, as it blew apart the planet they had been trying to defend, an action the newscasters called “scuttling” of the factories stationed there.

  Both corporate and religious channels were covering the event. The Church channels showed the Papal Vicar for Marain leading a prayer service for the four captains, calls for peace negotiations on the part of the Corporate leadership, discussions of the earlier Kamele delegations ultimatum and their meetings with Church and Corporate leaders. The corporate station showed interviews with low ranking corporate officers, speculation on what the Kamele would do next, where they might attack, and how unlikely a kamele victory was on the ground. “If they come, they’ll regret it.” One of the officers said after enumerating the thousands of combat automata ready to meet the Kamele threat once they broke the atmosphere.

  The Church station did a piece on the lives of the four captains who’d died in space, the families and friends they’d left behind to take the ships out into the void. “One thing is certain.” The newscaster said as the program ended. “These were men who died defeding a planet and a way of life that they loved.”

  Moses was one of the few people to go outside to do the chores that day. He let out the Porqine but didn’t bother retethering the chickens as he went on a one man patrol around their pasturing jungle. The captain of the St. Matthew had sent a message when he went down, a final broadcast that echoed in Moses’ mind as he walked the old patrol paths and watched for sign of any porqine that tried to wander beyond the range they could be recovered from. “Give them hell.” It was like he’d been talking specifically to Moses.

  “That’s the way to go.” He thought as his pulse quickened. “That’s a way worth dying for.”

  Chapter 2: Charles // Corporate Combatants

  “No.” Such a small word, and yet, so large. Two letters, one syllable, and his whole world rocked. No to him, no to hope, no to dreams. Now even in his dreams he heard that word repeated over and over in her quiet voice. “No”.

  Charles Quinn watched the satellite coverage of Marain fall one satellite at a time. On his lenses, synched up with the implant in his neck, it looked like a blanket being pulled over the stars. Above the disintegrating coverage thousands of other icons danced as a pictorial representation of their defensive fleet of machines, still dueling with the annihilating swarm on descent across the planet’s atmosphere. That swarm had been descending for the last three days, squeezing the ever shrinking bubble of space still defended by their automata until, now, the war finally touched Marain’s own atmosphere, bringing darkness with it.

  The buzz of polite conversation surrounded Charles as he stood with his back to the conference room. His face was turned to a window that gave a spectacular view of the Mighty River gorge, a huge valley that cut through the southern half of the Marain’s single enormous continent, dividing the Pampas continent to the east from the western plains while the sunset river to the north, a river of equal size, divided the pampas it from the tidal continent. Huge mountain ranges shot up to either side of both rivers, taking their names from the side of the shore they occupied.

  Far below him, along that river, he might have seen Marain’s capitol, Quinn city, ranged along that river’s banks. If he’d cared to look. The view and its spectacular drop no longer called to him as it had in those first weeks after she’d said the word, or the first weeks after she’d married, but neither did it give him any pleasure. If anything it made him tired. Tired of this long battle just to go on. “No.” He whispered to the view, eyes still closed. No to you too. He had other things to do today.

  War was a strange place to look for peace, but for Charles Quinn it had been his only distraction from the knot in his belly these last two years. A long process of building a plan, building up resources and preparing a defense of the planet after the Kamele Ambassadors left. The Kamele had once been a powerful corporation on several worlds, in the aftermath of their fall to internal revolt he, the AI calculators, and the sub dynasty leaders in the conference room behind him, all expected this new breed of Kamele to show up in force if they showed up at all, as the ambassadors promised. They had not disappointed.

  After consolidating their so called “victory” around the remains of Themis’s moon, the Kamele had taken their time approaching Marain. It began with probes, then strikes against the orbital platform, where the defending fleet of angels and archangels were stationed, and now this.The wholesale destruction of the survey and communication satellites that had been in orbit since the colony was founded even as the Seraphim swirled in low orbit to intercept anything that ventured within the atmosphere.

  War had come. A war they’d expected three years ago and dumped resources into preparing for. They were resources that might have gone to moving the planetary corporation into its next stage of development. Watching the cloud of enemy machines descend upon the planet, there was no doubt in his mind that he and the Quinn corporation could win this war, not after their preparations. What doubts he harbored surrounded the men and women gathered behind him.

  Charles turned from the window to survey the room.It was cozy and well lit, the size of a small ball room on the family manor, the better to accomodate all of the sub-dynasty heads without crowding them, leaving room for a buffet table and a comfortable gap between the small groups high society naturally formed around their leaders. None of the men and women in the room had the power to help Charles or the Quinns win the war, but each of them, as individual sub-dynasties, had the power to prevent them from ousting the invaders. Three years of preparations had made victory inevitable, if everyone cooperated. He wondered who was the most likely to be a problem.

  The Kidawas were an obvious possibility. The Kidawas were the survivors of the only war to be fought in the Marain star system up until that point, minus a few scuffles in the early days over who would really rule the planet, paltry things by comparison. The Kidawas brought automata to Marain a hundred years ago only to find the Quinn’s firmly dominating the single landmass. When they tried to set up shop on Themis’s moon Charles’ grandfather decided it was too close to home which meant all out automated warfare. The Kidawa corporate colony never had a chance, but their infrastructure and designs, now dust floating in the aftermath of the evangelists defense of the planet, had been worth preserving, at the cost of adopting the Kidawas as a sub-dynasty.

  Though they were of an age Charles remembered little of the dusky girl from his youth. Her family had been
newcomers to the circles of high society then and that meant they were unintentionally excluded from much of Charles’ life there growing up. A war from a hundred years ago was not reason enough to suspect her though. No one living could remember the war anymore. Old wounds should be behind them, and there were others besides. Edward Avakoff liked to play himself as a callow man of “simple tastes” in his own words, but Charles remembered him as a cunning and ambitious boy, son of a cunning and ambitious father, then there was the Knopfs, a young dynasty with an aging patriarch who’s eyebrows stood off of his forehead like toothbrushes. Once little more than boat tycoon, Charles’ father saw his fleet as an opportunity to free up corporate transportation resources from duties along the Mighty river and brought the family into the fold of corporation shareholders and sub-dynasties. If the Knopfs were small now, it was only for lack of time, not effort. Their newness to the game they played in the high echelons of Marain society meant that it could be easy for them to step over a line somewhere between now and the end of the war which could force the corporation’s hand.

  Power is such a tenuous thing, Charles reflected as he watched the dynastic heads chat. It depended so much upon the cooperation of everyone on the planet, bowing to the supposed authority of a corporation whose only claim to the world rested upon their ability to completely destroy anyone who attempted to rival them, and a demonstrated willingness to do so. It was a cooperation that Bairn insisted could not be depended upon. Charles knew he was right. Unity was what would be needed, and unity would need to be won. The proverbial stick worked, so far as it went, but rewards would need to be offered for loyalty to the Quinns. Offers would have to be made, requests granted without caving to to leaders more aggressive than smart, and one or two old and venerable lines might have to be smashed to make a point. Unity must be preserved, and unity started here.

  Charles snapped his fingers in the control form his implant would pick up and the feed of the attack on Marain materialized above the central table. Conversation throughout the room fell away almost immediately and the group in a corner near the door drifted towards the display.

  “As I’m sure you’re all aware.” Charles said in a low voice intended to control the room. “The invasion of Marain proper is underway. If you would all take your seats.” The dynasty heads filed into the places marked out for them under the glowing hologram while Charles moved to the head of the table and remained standing. “I want to thank you all for joining us for this luncheon. I know that the headquarters is not the usual sort of place for a social gathering, but I thought it appropriate for the task ahead of us.” It was also convenient. He didn’t leave the Quinn building much anymore unless it was on business.

  “You want something from us.” The old woman at the end of the table said. “Go on and tell us then. You’ve already had my nephew, now you want more, so go on. We’ve all seen how you’re handling this war.” Sharis Karamaz spoke from grief, if Charles was any judge. Her nephew had been one of the captains of the four evangelists martyred beyond the atmosphere in a bid to damage the invader’s fleet and oversee the scuttling of the moon around Themis. Both goals had been met, though at the cost of her nephews life.

  Charles didn’t feel bad about that. The idea had been hers. When a patriarch or Matriarch died they left the dynasty in a son or daughter’s hands, but there was always a mess of dependents and as generations passed most families were forced to prune away the hangers on, cousins and second cousins more distant uncles and aunts. The Coleburns had not done so to the detriment of their dynasty’s financial situation. When the plans for the four evangelists had first been put in motion Sharis had practically sold her nephew to Charles. The bump in their family share in corporate wealth meant they wouldn’t have to sell anymore troublesome nephews for a while, but his death seemed to have left a mark on the old woman’s soul that made her bitter and resentfull.

  “The mission of the four evangelists was a success.” Charles replied. He didn’t care about the old crone’s guilt. Assuaging her grief was not the reason he’d called the leadership of Marain to the Quinn tower.

  “I was under the impression we built spaceships to defend our industrial bases. Yet, when I look, I don’t see any industrial bases, or spaceships. At least none that are ours.” This time it was Edward Avakoff who spoke, his voice dripping with amusement as though it were all some joke for his own pleasure, but his eyes glittered with something that was not amusement.

  The knot in Charles gut felt like an anchor as he looked at the dynasty leader. The pain of it made patience with the interruptions difficult. “How would you win this war?” He asked suddenly. “What purpose would you serve in defending the moon?”

  “Well it’s an investment, certainly.” Edward purred. “And it’s loss represents some serious mmm expense, I should say. Wouldn’t you?”

  “So you would defend it? Preserve it? Hope to reclaim it?” Charles looked around. “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you are not all under the impression that this is some territorial dispute in which each side hopes to steal some planetary claim from the other.”

  He would have gone on but he was interrupted again by Edward. “Mmm, of course. There will be losses, and, mmm, costs for everyone, some perhaps more than others.” The man steepled his fingers and gazed over them at Charles. “Some of us will even lose parts of their enterprise which have been with the family for generations, representing a significant, mmm, attachment, for parties involved.”

  Charles understood. The Avakoff’s were one of the old families, as old as the Quinns, might have even beaten the Quinns to corporate power if the Quinns hadn’t brought automata half a millennia ago. When the plans to scuttle the moon was put in motion Charles quietly offered to buy up the shares in that particular enterprise from the major share holders, in that case the Kidawa dynasty, swapping them for shares in other corporate enterprises on the planet less likely to be lost in the first blow of the war. The Avakoffs hadn’t lost much when the planet blew, but their dynasty had been responsible for, and as a result the major shareholders in, the planet’s satellite network. Rumors of the deal he’d made with Ginny Kidawa must have made their way into Avakoff’s ear, now he wanted a piece of the same action.

  Charles typed an IM behind his back, inviting Edward to visit him in his office the next morning and moved on. “Giving the Kamele the moon would have meant losing the war.” He said. “Give them the moon and they can use the industrial capacity of the planet to produce automata at a rate close to our own. Such a position gives them power, since they could determine when and how battles are fought while matching every one of our machines with one of theirs. It would only have been a matter of time till they dealt enough damage to our industry to cripple us, and eventually remove us from the game.”

  “So we destroyed a planet?” Sharis asked.

  Charles nodded. “It was the only planet in system capable of matching our output. The oort cloud is too thin to provide a manufacturing base, and Themis’s gravity well makes it unusable. We’re lucky in that regard. Most star systems have more planets. We only need to defend Marain.”

  Knopf grunted, his dense eyebrows furrowed. “You’ve forced them to come here.”

  “Marain is the only planet in system with the resources to support war time industry.” Charles said. On his lenses Charles called up the file he’d prepared to share with the gathered dynasty heads and sent it to their Implants. Those that had them blinked as they studied the charts of numbers while Knopf, to his shame, pulled a cheap com tablet from his pocket when it chimed and studied the chart there. Implants were standard among the wealthy, but, it seemed, not high on the budding dynasty’s list of priorities.

  “The Kamele arrived in system with nine ships.”Charles said. “Of those, four were destroyed by the four evangelists and a fifth crippled in the debris field left by the destruction of the industrial station. The surviving ships entered parking orbits over Marain three days ago and began hostilities against
the picket stationed above the planet. Based on those assaults,” He waved to indicate the swirling hologram of battle over the table. “We’ve been able to make a preliminary calculation of the level force they’ve brought with them, and thanks to the destruction of the moon, unless they’ve brought an industrial station that can work with debris fields, we can count on these numbers being the extent of any force we’ll see until they get reinforced.”

  The heavily wrinkled Coleburn patriarch blinked at Charles past his lenses.l“Is that likely?” He asked.

  Charles shook his head. “The distances are too great. It took a year for the ambassador to return to the nearest Kamele system, and it took them two years to arrive. They sent nine ships, well above any kind of numbers we might have been able to produce in the intervening time. That kind of overwhelming show of force says to me they won’t be sending anyone after them.”

  The dynasty heads examined the numbers in silence for a moment, then Ginny Kidawa cleared her throat. “In the wars between my family and the corporation, the Quinn’s employed crash factories to bolster their manufacturing capacity. This allowed them to far outstrip my family’s projections for their military power available on the moon. These projections do not seem to indicate how these numbers will change once they have established a strong hold on the planet’s surface.”