Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (22 page)

The lines in her forehead deepened when Kastor came into view. “What the
fuck
are you doing, Kastor? I just destroyed six royal gunships and got banged the hell up in the process.”

Commodore Vanora received ample training in space naval strategy and tactics but none in the manners of urbane society. Naturally, Kastor liked her—except when his plans differed from hers.

“Six?” Kastor repeated. “Good. Any more in orbit?”

Vanora recoiled in shock. “Did you hear what I just said? I want to know what’s going on, dammit! This
wasn’t
the plan.”

“Plan A didn’t work,” Kastor said, pausing at a fork in the tunnel to consult the map projected from his cuff. Two large cruiser yachts were already pulling out of the palace marina, escorted by a swarm of drones. “We’re going to depose Radovan. He refused to swear loyalty to the Grand Lumis. Are the drop pods on their way down?”

“Yes,” she spat. “Why are you ousting Radovan? You were supposed to sway him.”

“He couldn’t be swayed,” Kastor retorted. “Where are the drop teams landing?”

“Palace’s main landing platform,” Vanora replied. “Who’s going to replace Radovan? Doesn’t he have an heir?”

Kastor glanced at the rifle-carrying commoners to his right and left. “His heir is a commoner named Abelard.” Embedded in the statement was a death sentence for all Radovan’s genetic offspring. Kastor banished the thought. “We’ve allied with the rebellion.”

“
What
? Are you out of your damn mi—”

“Shut up and listen, Commodore. I want you to redirect one team to the riverside below the landing platform. Tell the other to start shooting down drones.”

Vanora turned from grouchy to enraged. “Radovan’s drones? Kastor, this is insane.
You
are insane. Those are military-grade drones. Not to mention whatever firepower he’s got on—”

“Just do it!” It grew tiresome having an officer around with the ranking to speak to him like that.

Kastor switched off the comm link and handed it back to Trajan. He led the war party into a corridor with a sign hanging from the ceiling which read “River Front.” Crimson light dyed the stony steps leading downward. Sounds of zipping drones and ripping gunfire and bellowing engines hummed in the air. The weight of Kastor’s task set in. This wouldn’t be easy.

* * *

Triangular drones screeched in a patternless swarm overhead as Kastor and his entourage crouched in the shadow of the landing platform.

Muzzle flashes of gunfire sparkled in windows or on platforms across the river, and every time, they were met with a spray of counter fire from the elusive drones, pummeling craters into the cliffside. The two hulking cruiser yachts, probably fifty meters long and twenty meters wide, powered down the river through the canyon, and the drones held their position directly above them.

In the sky, a pair of dropships squealed like ripping sheets of plastic until, a few hundred meters above the riverside, their brake thrusters kicked on with sudden force, slowing their descent. One impacted with a ground-shaking thump on the main palace landing platform. The other growled further into the canyon, blowing blue fire from its thrusters as it came to a soft but sudden touchdown in the soil beside the river.

Commoners stirred as they investigated the bullet-shaped lander. Mere seconds passed before its outer armor paneling blasted itself off. Nanoflex-clad soldiers lined the central spine of the interior like jewels on a crown. Beautiful, noble-built suits. Kastor grinned as they detached themselves and formed a perimeter beside the commoner war party. The groups sized each other up with distrust, but neither fired, and Kastor rushed between them to keep it that way.

“Hold your fire!” he shouted at his drop team, voice muffled behind his breather. The twelve of them remained in ready positions, assault rifles up and faceplates closed. Each of them wore identical armor covering every square inch of skin.

One drop trooper stepped forward, lowered his aim, and twisted a knob on the side of his helmet to slide back the reflective black faceplate. Hendrik—lieutenant of team two. His synthetic lungs could withstand the toxic air for a few minutes at a time.

“You want to take down Radovan?” he asked, face blank, his weapon poised between himself and Kastor. Regicide went against every moral fiber in a nobleman’s body.

Kastor squared his eyes with Hendrik’s. “He remains in defiance of the Grand Lumis. If we strike him now, while he’s on the run, we can tear the head off the snake before he has a chance to strike back.”

Hendrik’s expression didn’t change. His dark eyes stayed on the Royal Champion as Kastor’s blood blazed in his veins. Then Hendrik’s gaze moved to the side, past Kastor and to the superyachts receding into the distance.

“Suit’s in the dropship.” Hendrik jerked his head toward a storage locker inside the steaming hunk of metal. “We need to go.”

Kastor nodded and hurried past them to suit up. “Guarin! Guerlain!” he called over his shoulder. “Get suited up.”

“Eh, Master,” Trajan replied from the crowd of commoners. “They’re not here.”

“What?” Kastor searched through the bodies, finding no gems among them, no noble faces. “What happened? Where’d they go?”

“I-I don’t know, Master,” Trajan said. “They were with us coming down, but now—”

Kastor ground his teeth as the realization hit him. “Never mind them.” He pulled a pair of nanoflex pants from their cushioned case and slid them on.

“But . . .” Trajan seemed lost. “Should I go back and search for them?”

“If they separated from us, they
meant
to separate from us. They aren’t with us anymore. We go on without them.”

Muscles clenched reflexively at Kastor’s core. Nothing infuriated him like disloyalty. Wherever Guarin and Guerlain had gone, they were not with him. That constituted betrayal.

“What of the commoners?” Hendrik asked. “They seem rather attached to you.”

Kastor glanced back. Indeed, the crowd of coarse faces looked to him as their only familiar nobleman, the only nobleman to have been accepted by their leader. They probably still wanted to kill him, but for now, they respected him. They followed him.

Kastor thrust himself into the suit, forcing his arms through the narrow cavities to the side, locking everything into place. Nanoflex armor gripped him like a metallic fist, hot and foreign at first, until the coolant spread through the dermal layer pressed against his skin. One last sparkle in the storage case caught his eye: a long sliver of polished boron nitride. A blazer katana scabbard. Kastor grinned, then fastened it to the utility slot at his hip.

Then he turned to the mass of tense lowborns watching the nobles. Past them, ash-gray drones flurried in the canyon gap above the escaping superyachts. He raised Sylvan’s cuff to his breather and held down the comm button. “Abelard, do you have any shuttles still air-worthy?”

The commoner leader’s response took a minute: “Some. What do you need?”

The question returned some of Kastor’s pride. The leader of the “New Upraad” was at his beck and call. “Scramble them. All of them. Anything with wings and cannons.”

“Explain.”

“Radovan’s drones are going to be a problem,” Kastor said. “They must be gone if I’m to kill Radovan. Make it so.”

He stepped closer to the commoner militiamen, who’d overheard him and eyed him with suspicion. “Do you want to be free of Radovan once and for all?” Kastor asked in a raised voice.

“
Yes
” came their scattered reply as they shuffled forward and gripped their stolen repeaters. This rabble had asserted themselves all the way to the throne room, and they didn’t appear inclined to stop now. They could’ve been Kastor’s most powerful tool.

He wasn’t about to waste them.

Dull-plated Upraadi shuttles and gleaming dropship flyers—wide-winged with indented slots along the body for troopers to hang on—soared through the rocky canyon in the direction Radovan’s ships had gone. The shuttlecraft came in various models and sizes, the larger carrying dozens of angry commoners with repeater rifles.

Upraad’s midnight sun still cast a reddish glow over the cliff faces and glassy water below.

Kastor, clutching the handlebars of a flyer with three other noblemen, glanced to the side as they rose high enough to see the horizon beyond the ragged top of the cliff. The Upraadi landscape stretched on and on in arid expanse, most of it useless, hardened dirt and stone, not suitable for mining or farming. Good only as a wasteland in which to wander and die. In the vast distance, boulders thinned to stones, and stones thinned to tawny, sulfuric dunes, where automated sand-sucker machines crawled and dipped in a long row.

On the river ahead, Radovan’s superyachts and drones pushed into a part of the canyon that narrowed to about fifty meters at the top, maybe a hundred and twenty meters in the middle.
Damn
. The drones would grind them to dust in there. Kastor’s few dozen shuttles and flyers needed space to dodge without ramming into each other. What’s more, a pair of anti-aircraft artillery guns mounted on a semi-circular building in the cliff swiveled toward them threateningly. This must’ve been a loyalist section of the canyon.

Kastor felt a rush of panic rise from his stomach to his chest, having no time to act before—

The artillery guns bellowed and blew smoke rings from their barrels. Bursts ripped the air between shuttles, warming Kastor’s side and emitting a shockwave strong enough to jerk their lightweight flyer away. Shuttle repeater cannons rumbled and spat fire in return, streaking the intervening area with smoke lines. Rounds peppered the entire area around the artillery, breaking the building’s windows, putting out its lights, collapsing a balcony into the river, pocking rocks above and to the sides, and some of it, presumably, hitting the artillery. But it wasn’t enough. The heavy guns bellowed again, and two more bursts erupted nearby. This time, one of them caught a shuttle wing, exploding the mounted engine in a spray of fiery debris and sending the craft, which held perhaps fifteen tightly packed commoners, on a downward spiral straight into the cliff. The shuttle blew up and stained the rocks with flames and wreckage.

Kastor winced and growled inside his breather mask. Those damn guns needed to go. He unclipped himself from the flyer’s safety anchor and released his grip on the handlebars. The pit of his stomach went weightless as he plunged toward the river, vision blurring until he’d dropped far enough from the line of fire to kick on his boot thrusters. He curled his toes to increase speed, pushing the miniature rockets attached to his ankles as hard as they would go.

His vision blurred and tunneled as he arced up from the water, around the side of the building—avoiding falling rocks from shuttle gunfire—and cut across the lead-pitted rooftop toward the slanted artillery barrels peeking through the smoke.

The blazer katana whipped out of its scabbard as if by its own accord. Closing in on the huge artillery machine, Kastor powered up the blazer’s internal heater from a pressure throttle on the handle, counting seconds as the atoms of the blade vibrated to life.
One, two, three, four
. White hot. Kastor rocked his heels to blast his reverse thrusters and slashed the sword into the thick barrel of the artillery gun. It lodged a few centimeters into the steel, sizzling as it burned deeper.

The control booth door snapped, open and a scrawny commoner thrust himself out, holding a repeater half his size. Before he could heft the heavy rifle, Kastor produced a pistol from his thigh holster and fired.
KAH, KAH
. Two quick shots, one cratering the commoner’s helmet, another blasting through his rib cage. The corpse slammed against the open door and flopped ten meters to the rooftop. Then a deep thump inside the machine signaled a round locking into place.

Kastor gave his blazer one last push into the solid steel, then yanked it out and jetted toward the backside of the artillery gun. He grabbed the open door and shoved himself past it just as a roaring, dust-lifting blast shook the building and emitted a resounding, metallic crack. The metal inside the barrel had melted inward just enough to prevent the round from escaping. Instead, it blew up inside the shaft and severed the barrel in a fiery explosion. The flames engulfed the control booth and knocked Kastor back against the cliffside.

His blazer escaped him and fell to the roof, which was made of much flimsier metal than the artillery guns. The blade started burning its way into the debris-coated rooftop, sinking deeper and deeper. Kastor leaped to grab the hilt before it disappeared.

Overhead, shuttles whirred past, and flyers zinged. The second artillery gun thundered and knocked up a cloud of dust. Debris sprinkled Kastor’s armor as he bounded toward the functional gun. In his peripheral vision, another shuttle whined and sputtered and plummeted down to the river, splashing in a huge eruption of water. More commoners met their fate, dying in a purge of fire and water.

Kastor leaped to the control booth and sliced off the door’s thick hinges, which fell away without any help. The helmets of two frail-bodied commoner women swiveled toward him before being snapped back by a pair of gunshots:
KAH, KAH
. Kastor put a handful of bullets into the faded control panel as well, in case the gun could be controlled remotely.

As he stood on the edge of the protruding building, a flyer swooped down, losing none of its speed as it arced to the edge of the building. Kastor took a few swift steps and vaulted through the air, grabbing hold of a drop trooper’s extended arm as the flyer whipped by. Once he hauled himself into a slot and hooked in, he glanced at the soldier who caught him and recognized Hendrik’s expressionless face before the faceplate closed.

The pilot trooper on top of the flyer’s body zoomed the machine forward and rushed past a handful of shuttles. Ahead, Radovan’s drones looped back and charged—a swarm of soulless vehicles, guns aimed directly at them, waiting for the opportune moment.

They fired. Muzzles flashed and rounds whizzed by before Kastor heard the rumble of gunfire. Mechanical crackles ricocheted off the walls of the canyon, trapped inside the narrow space. Shuttles returned fire and tried to swerve, but the foremost of them couldn’t avoid the streams of bullets. The first one took hundreds of rounds and lost a few dozen pieces of metal before its engine hawked black smoke. The shuttle exploded from the back and wobbled downward, twirling fumes before it smashed into the cliff.