Enemy in the Dark (5 page)

“Send word to Admiral Desaix. I want him to dispatch a
dozen ships at once.” Lucerne looked over toward Cross, pausing for a few seconds. “He is to find
Wolf's Claw
wherever it is and give Arkarin Blackhawk my request that he return to Celtiboria as quickly as possible.”

If anyone could figure out what the empire was up to, it was Blackhawk. The captain of
Wolf's Claw
knew more about the empire than any man in the sector.

And he
'
s the one man in the Far Stars I
'
m absolutely certain is not an imperial spy.

Astra Lucerne sat at her desk, shaking her head at the data she'd been reviewing. She was determined to make sense of it, but it had frustrated her so far.

Her office was in the great palace, at the end of the sprawling south wing. The massive structure was situated at the geographic center of Celtiboria City, and the vast metropolis extended out in concentric circles ten kilometers in every direction.

Astra lacked a clear title, but she was one of her father's key advisers nevertheless. Augustin Lucerne was well aware his daughter was far more than a pretty face, and he took her counsel to heart. Her concerns had proven to be right far more often than wrong.

The status of women varied enormously on the worlds of the Far Stars. Patriarchal societies were common, especially among the backwater worlds along the Rim. Even on a Prime world like Celtiboria, where there was a rough legal equality between the sexes, women rarely served in the armed forces. It was tradition more than law on Celtiboria, and there were indeed a few women in her father's armies. But they were a tiny minority, and cultural stereotypes remained strong among soldiers in the field.

Astra knew she'd have been more useful to her father if she'd been born a son, and she felt an irrational guilt that her gender complicated his succession plans. Celtiboria might accept a female ruler, but the less developed worlds would only do so under the guns of her soldiers. And she knew that was not the nation her father had struggled to create. Her feelings of guilt didn't make sense, but they were real nevertheless, and they drove her to work even harder, striving to help her father support his enormous burden any way she could.

She sighed and moved her hands to her face, rubbing her burning eyes. She'd worked all day and into the night, and now she could see the light again, dappled rays streaming through the two large windows behind her. It was dawn, and she was as stymied as she'd been the night before. The numbers simply didn't add up.

She had four screens on her workstation, each of them displaying columns of figures, her estimates of the economic cost of the weapons and ordnance her father's armies had faced on four of the planets they had invaded, worlds where the strength of the local resistance had far exceeded expectations. She'd been working on the data for weeks, ever since reports started coming in of surprisingly strong defenses on some of the first wave worlds.

Defenses that cost us too many friends.

She'd grown up around her father's soldiers, and the grizzled warriors had adopted her as one of their own. She'd marched alongside them, eaten with them, held their hands in the field hospitals as the surgeons raced to save their lives. She felt the loss of each of them keenly, and the thought of so many dying as they faced inexplicably strong enemy forces drove her to near madness. She was determined to try and find an answer.

She worked alone, as she usually did. The soldiers knew she was extremely intelligent—and tough as nails, too. But the bureaucrats and political parasites who had gathered since the final victory on Celtiboria viewed her as little more than her father's daughter. They saw her great beauty and imagined she would be bartered off in some marriage contract, destined to secure a crucial alliance, but to serve no other purpose than to bear her new husband children and cement a bond between Celtiboria and one of the other Prime worlds.

Astra didn't care what they thought, and she pitied any hypothetical lord married to her against her will. She detested the politicians and courtiers, and the first one to openly suggest she be traded away like some chattel would likely find an early grave. She was her father's daughter in more ways than one, and she would make her contributions on the battlefield or in the halls of government, not in some useful lord's bedchamber.

She looked up from her work, sliding her chair around to gaze out the window. The sun was rising in a perfect blue sky, but her thoughts were elsewhere.
Where is he?
Arkarin Blackhawk and his crew had left Celtiboria half a year before, and they hadn't been back since. Not that she expected to see Blackhawk again. Not for a long while.

Astra Lucerne was many things, but a whiny princess, sobbing over a lost love, wasn't one of them. She had her own duty, and she would see it done, whatever the cost. But she was human too, and she carried a deep sadness with her. She loved Blackhawk, and she was sure he returned her feelings. But she also knew that hadn't been enough to keep him on Celtiboria—or convince him to take her with him on
Wolf
'
s Claw
.

She knew he hid a painful past, one that haunted him every day, and she was sure that was a major reason he had fled from
her embrace. But she'd never been able to find out just what it was that burdened him so. She suspected her father knew the truth, but it was one of the few things she'd never been able to talk out of him. Despite her best efforts, Augustin Lucerne was like a block of granite when Blackhawk's past came up.

She couldn't imagine anything that would change how she felt about Blackhawk, no darkness from his past that could diminish her love for him. She'd tried to convince him, but he was infuriatingly stubborn, and she found herself wanting to strangle him more than once. Deep down, she knew she was his mirror image, and she matched him measure for measure in pigheadedness. But he still made her want to scream.

And maybe that's why we're perfect for each other.

Sighing ruefully, Astra drew her mind back to the work at hand. There would be time for personal pain later. Now, Celtiborian troops were fighting on eleven planets, and that was more important than tormenting herself over Blackhawk.

She leaned over and pressed the small comm button on the desk. It was hours before the start of the workday, and the outer offices would be quiet, with only the evening skeleton crew on duty. But Lys was an early riser, and Astra half expected she'd be at her desk by now.

“Lys, you out there yet?”

The response was almost immediate. “I'm here, Astra.”

Astra smiled at her friend's alert voice. “Can you come in for a minute?”

“Be right there.”

A few seconds later, the door opened and a young woman in a crisp suit walked in. Allysa Dracon was more than Astra's assistant—more, even, than a friend. Her father had been one of Lucerne's officers, killed at the Battle of Mauritania almost
two decades before. Allysa's mother had died in childbirth, and the marshal practically adopted the orphaned eight-year-old girl. She and Astra were the same age, and they grew up almost like sisters.

“You've been here all night, haven't you?” Allysa was looking at Astra with a concerned expression.

Astra glanced down at herself and frowned. “It's that obvious, eh?” She took a deep breath. “I've been looking at these figures, Lys, trying to convince myself we don't have an unseen enemy out there. In the dark somewhere, conspiring against us.”

Allysa walked up toward the desk and slid into one of the leather chairs. “You mean on Rykara.” She paused, and a frown crept onto her face. “And Megara, Nordlingen, and Etruria.” Another pause. “You know, I've been suspecting something for some time now myself. I could never put my finger on what was bothering me, though. I just know that our troops should have cut through those locals like a knife through butter. Those planets should have fallen by now, but instead we've been rushing reinforcements to them all.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“So did you come to any conclusions?”

Astra shook her head slowly. “Nothing definitive. Whoever it is has resources. One of the Primes, possibly. Or the guilds. Maybe even the Far Stars Bank. They all stand to lose influence if the confederation really takes hold.”

“The marshal has been careful to preserve all their perquisites in the Confederation Treaty. For just this reason.” Despite Astra's—and Lucerne's—protestations, Lys insisted on always using his rank, and Astra had long given up trying to convince her friend to do otherwise.

“Yes, he has. And he has reached out individually to every major power in the sector, but that doesn't change the fact that they will still lose power, at least relatively. The Far Stars Bank and the guilds are enormously influential because they operate sectorwide, virtually the only entities that do so. Their strength, and their ability to exert influence, derives from that exclusivity as much as anything else. If the confederation comes to encompass all or most of the Far Stars, it will create a framework for other institutions to compete on an interplanetary level. That will erode their positions.”

Lys nodded slowly. “That makes sense. The Far Stars Bank would lose its monopoly power as the financier of interplanetary trade. And commerce between planets joined by the Confederation Treaty will not require guild-bonded ships. Existing grants of landing privileges and mercantile treaties will be voided by the confederation's free trade provisions.” She took a deep breath, staring down at the floor for a few seconds before she looked back at Astra. “But the marshal has assured the bank and the guilds of preferential treatment within the Far Stars Confederation. He didn't like it, but he recognized the need, and he held his nose and wrote it into the treaty.”

“Yes,” Astra said softly. “But don't forget that he had to do that, because they have real power now, unassailable, secured by the fragmentation of the sector. Father's assurances are just that, though: the promises of
one
man. Even if they trusted him completely, which I doubt, he is mortal. One day he will be succeeded, and his promises will die with him. Documents like the Confederation Treaty can be changed. They can be ignored, their meaning twisted. It wouldn't be the first time a governing document was twisted to serve the needs of those in power.”

“But the treaty . . .” Lys's voice drifted off to silence. “Right. In the end, the treaty is just words.”

“Exactly. Would it shock you if the bank or the guilds—or even one or more of the Primes—decided this was all too big a risk? That Father's fear of the empire one day controlling the Far Stars is less a threat to their positions than a sectorwide governing body?”

“No, I suppose not.”

Astra nodded. “We speak of the Far Stars as if it is a single entity. But the truth is, the only trait the different worlds share is they are not part of the empire. Beyond that, what do we have in common? Some planets are united, others fragmented. Some are republics—or at least reasonable facsimiles of electoral governments—others are dictatorships. There are what, a dozen major religions in the Far Stars? Perhaps more. And hundreds of local customs.

“The fear of the empire creates a bond between us, but it has been almost two centuries since the last imperial attempt at conquest, and it has become a theoretical worry for most people of the sector. But a Far Stars Confederation will be real. Even though the treaty goes a long way to preserve autonomy, Father couldn't allow total freedom to local authorities. There are over one hundred planets in the sector with sizable populations, right? At least twenty have legal slavery or serfdom. Half a dozen have officially sanctioned gladiatorial combat, and at least twice that many tacitly allow such practices. Two have subcultures that engage in human sacrifice. There is no escaping the fact that the confederation must—and will—impose real laws on them and force them to abandon some of their ways of life. And they will bear their share of the costs of the fleets and armies protecting the sector, armed forces that exist solely to
enforce the laws the confederation imposes on them and protect them from an empire they no longer fear.”

“Everything you say may be true, Astra,” Lys said, “but it is still folly. The empire is a danger to them all, despite the lack of aggression in recent years. And the consequences of imperial domination are far more terrible than any burdens imposed by the confederation.”

“That's easy for us to say, Lys. We grew up with my father's armies. How many times did we listen to him go on about it, how the empire was dangerous? But do you think anyone really fears the empire anymore, Lys? Enough to overlook their own petty positions and make real sacrifices?”

“No, I suppose not too many. Not anymore, at least.”

“It's just been too long. Two centuries is a long time, and there's no one alive who remembers the last imperial atrocities. Chrono—no one alive today even knew anyone who
lived
during that time! Sure, everybody pays lip service to the old fears handed down from their great-grandparents, but they aren't
really
afraid anymore, are they?”

Astra sat back and shook her head.

Alyssa wore a troubled expression.

“What is it, Lys?”

“I'm just wondering . . . nobody's afraid of the empire anymore, except the marshal, of course. But people are usually wrong about such things. Do you think . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Do I think what, Lys?”

“Maybe
we
should be worried about the empire. Not in a generation, or a hundred years, as the marshal does, but
right now
.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe they're involved in all this. Perhaps the danger is far closer than we imagine.”

Astra didn't answer. She'd been thinking the same thing, but she hadn't wanted to say it, to admit the possibility. She felt a shiver move through her body. If the empire was working against them already, the Far Stars just got more dangerous. A lot more dangerous.