Chapter 6
“The woodsman offered trained eagles for sale, and the Little Princeling went to purchase these marvels. But no matter how the Little Princeling called out, the eagles would not come to him, and the woodsman spoke, saying, ‘There you can see and hear the eagles. They are yours, and when you have mastered the skill they will come to you.’
“The Little Princeling considered this, commanding his attendants to draw their swords and shake their full bags of coins in the face of the woodsman. The Princeling said to the woodsman, ‘There you can see and hear the coins of your payment, and when you have mastered the skill, you may take them.’”
—Bakri Basim, The Wise Little Princeling of Polo-Macao, excerpt from The Imperial Nursery Tale Collection of House Yung
Saef said nothing as Inga examined the brutal command spelled out within the QE comm set. She looked up at Saef, tilted her head quizzically, and turned back to read the message a second time. At last Inga said, “Well?”
Saef opened his mouth, paused, and looked vaguely upward. “Loki, we are not logged or monitored, correct?”
“Your conversation is not logged, Captain, and I detect no means of monitoring this chamber.” Loki replied.
Since Hightower’s original synthetic Intelligence fell to sabotage shortly after Saef assumed command of the vessel, Loki had secretly claimed all digital real estate within the ship, only revealing his true presence to Inga and Saef. The “malfunction” of Hightower’s proper intelligence, Gideon, should have resulted in their immediate recall for refitting, at least in normal times, but inexplicably the Admiralty Lords suddenly seemed blithely unconcerned with such a vital loss of capability. Still, with his componentry concealed within Inga’s personal shuttle, Onyx, Loki shielded Saef and Inga from any threat.
Saef nodded at Loki’s reassurance, looking to Inga. “This message leaves me in the sort of—of fix I dreaded when the Imperial sods first came knocking.”
Inga stared at him. “You don’t actually believe that order came from Winter Yung, do you?”
“I—” Saef began to speak and stopped, perplexed. “It is a QE comm message, Maru. You know as well as I, it cannot be intercepted or modified.”
Inga shook her head. “Wherever the other end of that comm lies, there must be operators between Winter and you. And clearly someone’s got their fingers in it.”
Saef felt the first tingles of burgeoning relief at Inga’s words. The presence of an agent provocateur in the heart of Imperial Security should have filled him with dismay, but instead he saw only a path out of an impasse devoid of any honorable solution.
“You—you are certain it is not her?”
Inga shrugged. “Certain enough. She has never signed her name to these orders before that I’ve seen. More than a little odd that she would now sign her name to an illegal order to execute a prisoner who has already given his parole. She would provide us with juicy material for blackmail, and Winter Yung never struck me as such an abject fool.”
Blackmail? Such a thought never even occurred to Saef, but Inga’s words cast a sharp light for him, and he suddenly felt sure Winter would never thrust her head so clearly within a noose.
Saef exhaled a breath he seemed to have held for the last hour, musing through the new possibilities. “So, we must consider the QE comm compromised.”
“Yes,” Inga said. “We are off the Imperial leash, at least for now.”
Saef felt the forcible impact of the implication. Finally he might take actions with only strategic goals to guide him, and the revelation freed him. Now only two masters to serve rather than three…
Saef’s mind turned from all the filthy machinations and his thoughts locked onto the path ahead. “You heard the report from the Legion troops on the surface? Enemy armor units hunting deserters or civilians?”
Inga shook her head. “It may be like Delta Three all over again down there.”
The idea sickened Saef. “Yes, perhaps. Only this can’t be cleaned up with a few thousand Marines. They’ll have us tied to this grind for months, only to find there’s no population left to save or subjugate planetside.” Saef clenched his jaw. “And then what? It may be too late to save anything from the greater conflict out there…the invasion.”
Inga stared into space, thinking, as she produced a shiny red fruit from the depths of her cloak. “It may be time we graduated from Hightower, although your service here was assuredly profitable.”
Inga took a bite from the fruit as Saef looked on, perplexed. “‘Graduate’? I don’t think Commodore Scarza or the Admiralty will be willing for me to command some other vessel. They seem happy to see me glued to this ridiculous ground assault to the bitter end.”
Inga shook her head, taking another bite. “Hightower was effectively disabled weeks ago. We’ve just been doing a fine job pretending otherwise. It’s time to reveal the truth, I think.”
Saef’s brow wrinkled. “‘Disabled’? What truth—Oh.” Saef nodded, his brow clearing. “I see,” he said slowly, thinking through the new minefield they must now thread. The taste of deception, of half-truths felt bitter on his tongue, but it seemed to offend his sensibilities much less than it would have only a few weeks earlier. That awareness brought a cold feeling to the pit of Saef’s stomach.
The constant deception, the political filthiness of Fleet, and their incessant manipulations…these all seemed bent on changing Saef, forcing him to adapt. He clenched his teeth, internally refusing to be corrupted by it all, even in the midst of plotting a fresh deception of their own.
* * *
Hightower trailed Sabre, closing slowly with their planetary target, momentarily without any acceleration inputs. These cumbersome attack runs comprised the worst sort of duty: tedious, repetitive, and yet very dangerous as they closed with planetary defense that still possessed a lethal bite.
Saef knew that in only a few moments this individual run would become anything but routine, and he internally grasped the still pool of the Deep Man, his clenched muscles loosening seconds before he felt the nauseating ripple of fluctuating gravity…right on schedule.
Startled sounds issued from the bridge around Saef, and he turned to Deckchief Furst, who manned Ops, hating himself for the need to pretend surprise.
“Ops?”
Furst scanned his instruments wildly, his professional calm suddenly overset. “I don’t know…we’re losing artificial gravity for some reason.”
“Go to manual, Deckchief,” Saef ordered. “Nav, give us point-five gee and hold.”
Saef turned to Comm. “Tight beam to Sabre and to Flag: Artificial gravity failure. Hightower must withdraw.”
Before any possible reply could return from his superiors, Saef directed a question to Lieutenant Tonaga, who filled the Tech position. “Why are we losing our artificial gravity?”
Tonaga shrugged helplessly. “How have we even maintained gravity compensation these many days since Gideon was…uh…sabotaged? I never understood how it could possibly be functioning.” While the Thinking Machine Protocols strictly limited what mechanisms a synthetic Intelligence could operate, on a warship artificial gravity remained one key function.
Orders came swiftly from Commodore Scarza’s flagship. No matter their agenda, they could not ignore such a dire malfunction, despite their desires to the contrary. A warship without dynamic control of artificial gravity became a career-ending liability in any sort of real combat.
Hightower peeled off the attack run, easing onto a departure vector, the artificial gravity manually tuned by human hands as they slowly applied accelerating power, Sabre trailing them, screening Hightower from any threat as they regained the standoff orbit held by the blockade squadron.
Saef observed more than a few members of his bridge crew drawing relieved breaths when Hightower settled safely in with the squadron, but their relief seemed a trifle premature.
“Um, message from Flag, Captain,” Pim said from the Comm chair. “They’re sending over an engineering team to survey our damaged systems.”
“Very well, Comm,” Saef said. “Acknowledge.” So Scarza would cling a little longer and micromanage even down to such a clear technological issue. He sighed, contemplating what other indignities might be envisioned for them.
Would Scarza attempt to appropriate Hightower’s Marines? Her Mangusta interface fighters? And keep them in this pointless meat grinder?
Saef thought for a moment before saying, “Ops, assemble guides from Engineering and Tech for Scarza’s people, if you would, please. Have them met at the main shuttle catch.”
“Yes, Captain,” Furst said.
While Scarza’s needless sifting could be little more than a formality, Saef felt a persistent uneasiness tickling his spine. A quick check confirmed that Hightower’s official visitors couldn’t arrive for an hour or more, and Saef wouldn’t remain idle, waiting.
“Commander Attic,” Saef said, standing. “You have the bridge.”
“I have the bridge, Captain,” Attic affirmed.
* * *
Colonel Galen Krenner remembered one of his senior Marine officers leaning over him, explaining that he’d been shot in the face during the attack. Had it been Major Vigo? Yes…Vigo. It remained the first clear memory Krenner formed since he led that surface assault on…which planet was that? Not important. He just remembered Vigo trying to explain why a Marine colonel lay on some kind of medical bed with all sorts of tubes and wires sticking out of his body.
When Vigo said he’d been shot in the face, Krenner must have grimaced, and Vigo misunderstood. “Don’t worry, Colonel,” Vigo had assured, “you’re no uglier than you were before. It’s healing fine, sir. Missed your moustache entirely.”
Krenner would have smiled at Vigo’s irreverent wit, but he just weakly shook his head, trying to speak despite the tubes threaded through his esophagus. “No,” he gasped. “Win?”
Vigo had strained for moment to understand, then awareness had dawned. “Oh! Yes, Colonel.” Vigo had stepped to one side and tapped the small gold-and-black circle adorning Vigo’s row of medals: the Vicci Mund. “I give you joy of the victory, Colonel. The planet was invested in the name of Emperor Yung, and the surviving population has yielded.”
From the moment Major Vigo had shared the news, Krenner felt both the glow of pure satisfaction and the fire of burning impatience. He had achieved this victory as the initial great proof of the Emperor’s reborn First Marines. No Marine unit had ever entirely seized a hostile planet before, merely supporting the Legions in prior conflicts in earlier centuries. And now Krenner must be up and active, harvesting the political, institutional fruit that accompanied such a victory. Surely the Krenner Family did what they could to capitalize, but…
To re-create the old unit, complete with its forgotten customs and traditions, had been a near-impossible task for Galen Krenner, requiring vast expenditures of Krenner Family resources and political favors, and only now could he recoup some of that expended capital and cement the status of the Emperor’s First where it belonged.
But…Krenner’s body and the damned medicos both seemed bent on keeping him horizontal, going mad with inactivity. The only interesting event to distract from his frustration appeared with a cluster of badly wounded enemy personnel who arrived in Hightower’s medical ward, shackled and carefully guarded by Marine security until they either recovered or succumbed to their wounds. The former disappeared into confinement; the latter, at least momentarily, filled the cooled morgue drawers lining the med bay. Before long, Colonel Krenner found himself the lone resident once again. Or rather, he was the lone live resident, not certain how many deceased rebels filled the nearby drawers.
Krenner began thinking through each step he must take to capitalize on their ground assault victory, and which steps his Family had surely initiated upon hearing the victorious tidings. As he lay pondering, his thoughts suffered at first from the drugs still flowing thickly through his veins, and then from a muffled thumping sound that slowly increased in volume until Krenner attempted to snarl at whoever created the annoyance, his voice emerging as a strangled whisper. “Who the fuck is making that racket?”
The steady, thumping reports continued, and no medico or attendant emerged to investigate, driving Krenner to weakly shift his body, straining to look over along the bulkhead, the tubes in his nose and throat tugging painfully. Through tear-blurred eyes, Krenner scanned for the source of the steady hammer blows, at first seeing only the bulkhead and smooth handles of the morgue drawers.
Krenner blinked away tears, his head trembling, about to give up the effort when one of the drawers popped outward a handsbreadth from its pocket in the bulkhead. He stared, his breath rasping in his throat, as a blunt hand reached out, forcing the drawer slowly open.
How had the medicos missed the spark of life in that enemy, the poor devil awakening on the slab, tucked away?
Krenner sank back to gulp a few easier breaths, struggling to stretch up again, seeing the drawer fully opened, a blue-tinged heavyworlder sitting up, his face a mask of burst blood vessels. The heavyworlder looked straight at Krenner with blood-darkened eyes, a fixed smile on his blue lips.
Krenner sank back, gasping, flashes of memory from Delta Three recalling that same peculiar smile. He remembered…and the recollection set a burst of adrenaline rolling through his body. While the secret biotech of the Krenner Family involved adrenal augmentation through cultivated anger energies, his resources remained too depleted, his calls to that well of power unanswered. Gathering his minimal strength, he exerted himself to the full, shouting…but his voice rose scarcely above a choked murmur. The effort caused Krenner to retch and gag on the obtruding lines in his esophagus, but he forced his head up again, and the heavyworlder now stood shockingly near, grinning down at him, a crude chunk of sharp metal in his thick-fingered fist. The heavyworlder kept smiling as he reached out, grasping Krenner’s head with his left hand, forcing it back as his right hand brought the shank toward Krenner’s exposed throat. Krenner’s arms weakly flailed, his fingers slipping from the heavyworlder’s burly wrist. Krenner writhed impotently, growling in his chest, staring at his assassin even as a sword blade suddenly pierced the heavyworlder through, clearly severing the spinal column, the assassin collapsing a nerveless heap.
Inga Maru stood with her blooded sword in hand, her eyes flashing as she slashed down once more with the blade, making sure the assassin remained dead this time.
Krenner trembled, gasping for breath, staring wordlessly up at Inga for a long moment before a medical attendant stumbled into the med bay, looking from Inga, to her sword, to the fallen, bloodied corpse at her feet.
Inga turned to regard the attendant, and in a low voice said, “I want to speak to whichever medico signed this one’s death certificate—now.”
The medico stammered, nodding as she backed away, and Inga turned back to Krenner. “A near thing, Colonel,” she said. “But I wonder…was this sod able to play dead so well he fooled the sawbones? Or is one of the medicos playing for the other team?”
After gasping a few more breaths, Krenner managed to say, “I…don’t…care.” He gulped. “Just…get me a fucking weapon, will you?”
Inga considered for a moment, then shrugged, her left hand emerging from the depths of her cloak, a compact pistol in it. “Here. Just a loaner, Colonel. I’m rather attached to this piece. We’ve been through a great deal together.”
While Krenner had never cordially liked Inga Maru, as his weak, trembling hand grasped the concentrated weight of her small pistol, Krenner would gladly have kissed her.
* * *
Saef entered the med bay on the heels of four Marines and the Fleet officer in charge of Hightower’s medical apparatus, Lieutenant Lund. Saef heard an unfamiliar voice raised in an abrasive complaint ahead: “I am not answerable to you, Chief Maru, so kindly watch your tone!”
The Marines ignored the bickering Fleet personalities, two vigilantly sweeping the med bay, two swooping upon an obviously dead heavyworlder sprawled and leaking beneath Colonel Krenner’s supine form. They bound and searched the corpse as Lieutenant Lund thrust her way between Inga and the target of Inga’s ire, Specialist Sang.
“What seems to be the difficulty, Chief Maru?” Lund asked in an icy voice.
Inga pointed at the deck, her crooked smile spreading. “You’re standing in it, Lieutenant.” Lund jerked her foot back from the coagulating pool as Inga continued: “Sang signed a death certificate on this…creature here, some hours ago. Put him on a slab, all tucked away so neat.”
“He’s clearly dead now,” Lund said.
“He was very, very lively a moment ago,” Inga replied dryly. “Wasn’t he, Colonel?” she asked of Krenner, who merely glared from the forest of tubes and wires jutting from his mouth, nose, and torso. Inga looked back to Lund. “Your corpse here was rather bent on slitting the colonel’s throat.”
Lund and Sang shared a look, the lieutenant noticing Saef for the first time where he stood silently observing. “A regrettable situation,” Lund said, shifting uneasily.
Inga’s smile broadened. “Oh? ‘Regrettable’? Leaving an assassin in the perfect position to kill the hero of Delta Three? Do we call treason ‘regrettable’ now?”
“Treason?” Sang yelped, but Lund held up a hand.
“There’s no reason for such ridiculous accusations, Chief Maru.”
Inga’s lips twisted. “So you will take refuge in incompetence instead, Lieutenant? The crew of Hightower will be overjoyed to hear you can’t tell the living from the dead. That’s your defense? You must be kidding.”
Lund’s face paled, two spots of color contrasting on her cheeks. “You forget yourself, Chief. You are addressing an officer, and you have neither the right nor the authority—”
“I do,” Saef said. “So please tell me, one of you, what other option exists beyond unconscionable incompetence or treason?” As Saef spoke, a notice pinged in his UI: The shuttle from Flag had arrived with its engineers or whatever.
“I—I…” Specialist Sang stammered, looking from Saef to Inga.
Saef noticed Lieutenant Lund’s eyes flicker as she also received a UI message. Her mouth curved into a sudden triumphant smile. “Don’t answer that, Sang,” Lund said in a haughty manner. “These people have no authority here, now.”
Saef frowned and darted a look at Inga to see her nearly imperceptible nod.
“That’s right, Captain,” Lund said in a sneering tone. “Your acting captaincy here is over. Captain Mileus—our real captain—is back in command, so you can go tyrannize someone else.”
Saef turned his entire focus on Lund, staring hard into her eyes. “You know, it rather sounds as if you question the honor of my actions, Lieutenant,” Saef said in an even voice.
A new realization dawned for Lieutenant Lund. If Saef no longer served as her superior officer, the lethal duels of the Honor Code were back on the menu.
“N-no, Captain,” Lund said, the color fully absent from her face now. “A mis-misunderstanding. I do beg your pardon.”
Saef held her gaze for a moment before turning away. He loathed bullies nearly as much as he despised poor manners, and he would not push Lund’s lesson any further. “Very well, Lieutenant.” Saef entirely ignored Sang and Lund then.
“Colonel Krenner?” Saef said. “I suspect I am about to be handled very carelessly by the Admiralty. Is there anything we can do before the—er—axe falls?”
Krenner craned his head to see two of his hard-eyed Marines close at hand before looking up at Inga. “You have already done it,” he whispered. He turned his focus on Saef. “I will find you…before long…You can bet your life on it.”