The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (34 page)

He watched as the first missile came achingly close but slammed into the doors just to the left of the hangar. An audible groan went up from the command center when the second missile hit in about the same spot.

The third missile didn’t miss. It zoomed into the massive hangar of the Unity carrier. Then the picture went suddenly dead. For a moment, a faraway shot of the
Liaoning
showed nothing. Then the white blossoming cloud of superheated gasses erupted from the side of the vessel.

A huge cheer went up from the control center. Jonas found himself joining in without reservation. Looking through a camera lens designed to filter out as much light from the weapon as possible, Jonas could see that much of the
Liaoning
no longer existed—turned to gas by the fusion missile. The remains drifted in pieces.

It was Brennen who brought things back to reality. “Stations, please! We are in the battlefield. Stay sharp. They’ll want revenge.”

With the destruction of the
Liaoning
, the battle and the morale of the sailors on the
Ares
seemed to shift. What had looked a few minutes before like it might become a serious back and forth now changed into a rout. The Unity dreadnoughts, battleships, and other large targets slowly climbed up the board as other targets were either destroyed or disabled.

Without the use of their cyber-weapons, the Unity fleet seemed at a loss as to what strategies to use. They hadn’t yet had to slog it out with a determined enemy on a fair playing field.

Jonas could sense the palpable change in the morale on the bridge of the
Ares
. There was a huge pent-up well of schadenfreude which burst out and flooded the compartment each time an enemy capital ship took a pounding. He and Admiral Brennen shared it with the sailors—wholeheartedly, unabashedly. The last year had been so disheartening for the Allied forces, it was a blessed relief to finally feel like the Allied military advantages had been restored.

In about two hours, the whole thing was over.

In a ceremony broadcast over the holi to both fleets, the Unity commander surrendered.

As he spoke, Jonas thought the eyes of the pale Admiral could have belonged to a dead man. “On behalf of my troops, I hereby formally surrender my vessels to your control, Admiral Brennen.”

“I accept your surrender, Admiral Beaumont. You will have your troops strike your colors and meet my officers on the hangar deck of your vessels. We will be taking control of your vessels and arranging for your transportation to camps, where you will be given proper care.”

The surviving Unity vessels were soon boarded, and their crews surrendered to Allied custody. The Marine commander in charge of the surrendered troops said that many of them appeared terrified, and no amount of assurances that they would be treated fairly seemed to calm their fears. They were convinced they would be tortured and starved. Brennen, however, proved true to her word, and they were all given a hot meal, and reasonable, if tight quarters, on a transport. Brennen then turned her attention to salvaging as many of the Unity ships as possible and to her own fleet.

An hour after the Unity fleet had been boarded, Jonas found himself sitting in the corner of Admiral Brennen’s state room, sharing a glass of champagne with a good number of the officers from the
Ares
. Most of the other officers stood. Brennen sat at her desk working on her reports, even as she joined in the revelry. Jonas perched on a chair in the corner, feeling completely out of place and useless, like a sports team mascot after the game was over.

A young, male deck officer walked in, handing the Admiral a data pad. “Admiral, here is the damage report from both fleets.”

Brennen took a few minutes to look over the report. Without taking her eyes off the data pad, she picked up a fork and gently tapped it on the crystal glass holding her champagne.

The room went silent. Brennen never looked up. She just continued to thumb through her data pad. “Of the three hundred and fifty Unity vessels which started the battle, only sixty-seven remain battle-worthy.”

Brennen paused for a second, flipped through the data pad, and went on. “On our side, seven vessels were destroyed: the
Orion
, the
Bradbury
, the
Heartland
, the
Solace
, the
Poltergeist
, the
Jupiter
, and the
Catan
. Only thirty-two others were significantly damaged. Of those, only the
Aurora
and the
Blake
are unable to get underway at this time.”

Brennen put down the data pad and looked up at her crew. “Gentlemen and Gentlewomen, this battle will go down as one of the most lopsided victories in the history of space warfare. It is a truly remarkable achievement.”

Brennen stood.

Jonas followed her lead.

Brennen raised her glass. “To the Seventh.”

The officers responded, “The Seventh.”

Jonas noticed that the corners of Brennen’s eyes teared up a little as she continued. “And those we lost today.”

The toast had just ended when a notice buried in the screen of Brennen’s desk started to flash in bright red with white lettering, “Urgent.”

As the officers went back to their conversation, Brennen looked at Jonas. “That will be the Admiralty.”

While the fleet was designed to remain intraspace dark, there was a direct EP connection to the Admiralty. Brennen drew the screen out of the desk and projected it into thin air, tipped up so she could look at it straight on. Then she answered.

It was Admiral Hansen. It took Jonas only an instant to recognize that something was terribly wrong. He looked haggard, like a ship whose keel had been broken and was only held together by its skin.

Brennen put down her glass.

Seeing them, Hansen said, “Thank God! We feared you were all lost.”

Brennen relaxed a little and smiled. “No, sir! We’re all here. We’ve won a huge victory today. The enemy…”

Hansen interrupted. “Admiral Brennen, the attack on Apollos was a trap. They knew exactly when and where to expect us. We lost almost everything. The homeland is defenseless.”

Jonas felt the ever-present knot in his stomach, which had only begun to ease in the last hour, return. He looked at the glass of champagne in his hand. What had one minute before seemed an appropriate and well-earned symbol of victory now seemed to be just another capricious joke on the way to defeat.

Brennen turned white. “I understand, Admiral. We’ll be underway within an hour.”

Three weeks later, Jonas found himself dressed again in his captain’s uniform as he stood by his brother Stephen outside the back of the palace on the lawn below Grandfather’s terrace. While cameras puttered overhead, they smiled. The noise of their motors as they maneuvered sounded like the tacking sound of a giant millipede as it ran across a tile floor. Jonas despised that sound.

Even as they smiled, there was a bit of a scrum behind the red velvet ropes, as reporters fought for the best spots from which to yell their questions.

The press had been told King Stephen and his war hero brother were meeting to discuss their preparations for the defense of their homeland. The meeting had attracted attention from every remaining free nation and even some that now only existed on paper behind enemy lines.

“Prince Athena, do you think the kingdom can be saved?”

Neither Jonas nor his brother felt like answering questions, so they stood and waved as the cameras whirred.

As the press shouted their mostly unintelligible queries, Jonas found his thoughts wandering back to a singular moment in time when his family—he and his brother, along with their mother and father—lay by one of the ponds in the garden, watching the clouds roll by. He had been quite young. For the House of Athena, the quaint niceties of family life had always proved as ephemeral as the clouds they had watched that day. It felt like a recurring shock to once again recognize that both his parents were dead, murdered by the writhing sea of attention and fame represented by the impatient, jostling reporters in front of him.

Jonas wondered if that too would be his fate. If the attention of the galaxy on him and his brother would kill both of them as well.

“Prince Athena, why have you brought victory when no one else has?”

In that moment, Jonas wished with all his might, as he had for all his life, that he could have grown up by himself without all of this attention. He fantasized about taking Stephen’s arm and guiding him through the barrier to stand on the other side of the velvet ropes, allowing someone else to bear the burden while they watched him.

“Some are saying that your brother should abdicate and let you take the throne. What do you think?”

Stephen had aged. Standing next to him, he seemed somehow fragile, defeated. As Jonas brushed against him, it felt as if he could have been knocked over easily, like an old man. He trembled.

“Your Majesty, in light of the latest defeat, do you plan any changes at the Admiralty?”

That was enough for Jonas. He smiled for a few seconds longer, then looked at his brother and said, “Shall we go?”

Stephen nodded his agreement, and they both turned and walked away across the lawn into the garden which had so often provided the only refuge for the brothers against the ever-present onslaught of palace life.

At the far end, just inside the entrance to the garden, stood a fenced-in Athenian tree. When they were boys, the brothers had called it “the fighting tree.” Toward the end of her life, when their mother had become ill, she and their father used to argue there—he pushing her onward back into the public eye, she resisting.

Instinctively, they knew that they would be both out of range of the microphones and out of sight when they got to that tree. They would be alone.

As they walked across the lawn, Jonas heard Stephen stifle a sob.

Jonas whispered, “Come, Brother, we’re almost there. Just a few more feet.”

They weren’t far beyond the tree when Stephen broke down completely.

Jonas watched him sit down heavily on a nearby bench, crushed under the weight of his responsibilities.

Sitting next to him, he watched helplessly as Stephen, the King of Athena, stifled his cries. His mouth opened in silent screams as his shoulders convulsed. Tears flowed down reddened cheeks.

Unsure of what to do, Jonas finally put his arm around his brother. Stephen put his head in his hands and sobbed like a small boy.

For a while, Jonas just sat next to him.

Then Stephen began to speak, whispering at first. “Oh, Jonas, I am all alone.”

He cried again for a few minutes more.

Jonas swallowed, trying to clear the lump in his throat before he answered his brother. Some part of him understood the truth in Stephen’s statement, but he still felt compelled to lie to him. He tried to speak as he remembered his nurse speaking to him after his mother’s death. “No, you’re not, Brother. I’m here, and you have Dora and Dmitri. We won’t leave you.”

Stephen sat up, pulling back from Jonas, and looked at him with tears on his face. He took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his uniform and blew his nose.

For Jonas, the desperation on Stephen’s face did more to embody his utter brokenness than any amount of tears could. “Jonas, please. You of all people have to understand. I need you to understand. I need someone. I am alone in the universe, abandoned by God and by humanity. It’s me they blame. I am the King. When we surrender, I will bear the punishment of this failure.”

Jonas opened his mouth to argue. He breathed in, ready to tell Stephen all the ways in which he was wrong, but the pleading look on Stephen’s face, and truth in his own heart, betrayed all his arguments. All the same, Jonas couldn’t yet think about what a possible surrender might mean for him and Stephen. The horror of what happened to the Imperial family on Apollos still felt too fresh.

Jonas conceded the point and tried to temper Stephen’s ache. “I think our defeat was inevitable from the start.”

Fury lit Stephen’s eyes, and he responded without hesitation. “The people don’t think so, Jonas! They hate me. I bear their scorn, but they love you. The people think that we would have won if you had been leading the war.”

Stephen looked down at his hands again, shrugged, and concluded quietly, “Maybe they’re right.”

Jonas shook his head, in his turn feeling desperate for his brother to understand. “But you know that isn’t true. I haven’t done anything, Stephen. I’m not the one making the strategies. I don’t make the decisions.”

Stephen sighed in his misery and looked up at the plump, ephemeral clouds overhead. “Of course not, Jonas, but it really doesn’t matter that much what you or I think, does it?”

“I guess not.”

“What matters more than anything is what people believe. To start, I don’t think anyone—most of all my father—thought the war would ever come—not in the deep, dark corners of their soul. They were fat and happy—content in their prosperity.”

Stephen became agitated as he unburdened his heart to his brother. His gaunt and distressingly lean body tightened as if his entire being poured itself out in his words. “Even now, our people refuse to understand the enemy. The Unity wants to blot out every corner of this galaxy that doesn’t reflect their way of life, and my people demand—even at this moment—that I negotiate peace. I get questions from the press on the topic every day. Opinion polls show that seventy percent of the people want me to negotiate. They’re sheep, Jonas—fat sheep, ripe for plunder. Their doom is upon them and still they graze.”

When Stephen turned toward him, Jonas was shocked to see the inspired look in his eye—part desperation, part mania, and part pride. The dark circles of fatigue only added to the desperation there. “But I have to believe that underneath all of this soft exterior, our people—all the free peoples of this galaxy—are strong. They have been caught flat-footed and overrun. They live in denial of the truth, but they won’t accept their slavery, Jonas. Soon they will rebel, and you must give them that chance when the time comes.”

Jonas wasn’t sure what Stephen was talking about, but he didn’t like the direction this was going at all. “Stephen, we can still draw a line at the borders of our territory. We can still defend ourselves. There must be a way. Why all this talk of defeat and surrender?”