The Lost Stars 01-Tarnished Knight (4 page)

“I would think so, Madam CEO. Should I contact the CEO with responsibilities for that area?”

Which would be Drakon, of course. “No. Not yet. I’m shocked to hear of this, but I can’t confront anyone else when I know so little. Contact CEO Hardrad and tell him that I need to know what this is about so I can take any necessary action.”

The screen blanked and Iceni glanced at Akiri. “Have you seen those orders?”

He nodded. “CEO Kolani forwarded them to all ships. We received our copy a few minutes ago. All mobile forces in this star system are to proceed to Prime Star System to operate under direct control of the supreme council of the Syndicate Worlds. I’m surprised that you were able to hold up a command directive like that in the communications system without alerting anyone.”

“It’s not easy.” Had someone in Drakon’s camp let the message out? Had Drakon done it? If he planned on betraying her, he would regret it. She hadn’t been bluffing about that. “Did CEO Kolani also give you movement orders when she forwarded the message to you?”

“No, Madam CEO. We’re supposed to prepare for departure, but that’s all we’ve been told.”

Iceni smiled, willing herself into calmness. “CEO Kolani doubtless wants to hang around here to watch me get hauled into ISS headquarters and torn into very little pieces.” She checked the time. “In a few minutes things will begin happening on the surface.”

Another chime on her private channel, the notes different this time, and given an ominous aspect from knowing whose call they announced. Iceni took an extra moment to compose herself, then answered again, this time seeing the deceptively bland features of the head of the Internal Security Service forces in this star system. “CEO Hardrad, I’m glad you called. What’s this about some orders being held up?”

Iceni had never thought that Hardrad looked the part of a snake, which might have helped his rise through their ranks. Bland-featured, his hair, skin, and clothing all shades of beige, Hardrad seemed even after detailed study to be a perfect colorless bureaucrat. Even his eyes rarely revealed anything but mild disinterest. Iceni, who had studied not only Hardrad’s looks but also his career, had not been fooled by the outer ordinariness of the man. Judging by his actions, inside he was a very ruthless snake indeed. Now Hardrad pursed his lips in the mildest of reactions to Iceni’s question. “A command directive from Prime, Gwen,” he said.

“I should have seen that,” Iceni protested. “I am responsible for the overall defense of this star system. Why didn’t I see it?”

“It was directed to CEO Kolani.” Iceni hadn’t expected Hardrad to appear tense, but it was still unnerving to see him regard her as if she were a piece in a game with an ending that was foreordained. “Why are you in orbit?” he asked her.

“As senior CEO in this star system, I’m responsible for all Syndicate Worlds’ assets.” Iceni waved one negligent hand around to indicate the ship. “I’m conducting an inspection.”

“No inspection was on your schedule.”

“I prefer surprises,” Iceni said. “You accomplish more that way.”

“That is true,” Hardrad agreed. A lesser man would have betrayed some feeling then, some darkly humorous acknowledgment that they were both speaking primarily about the ISS and its tactics. But not Hardrad. His expression didn’t even flicker. “However, your inspection will have to take place on another day. I need to see you in person. Right away.”

She put on her best expression of affronted dignity. “Because CEO Kolani, who commands the most deadly forces in this star system, is accusing
me
of doing something which is probably the fault of her own communications staff? I don’t control military communications.”

“No. You don’t. We need to talk about who does. You understand?”

So Hardrad suspected Drakon? That was reasonable under these circumstances, and yet . . .
If he’s also finally received his own orders, Hardrad wants me in his headquarters so he can find out every disloyal thought I’ve ever had. What better way to get me into that building than by implying that we’re going to act jointly against Drakon?

Assuming that Drakon hasn’t really betrayed me.

“We should discuss this right away, Gwen,” Hardrad continued. She had never liked the way he used her first name in conversations like this, implying not only familiarity but also inferiority compared to him. “I’ve notified the ISS representatives on C-448. Some of them will escort you back down to the planet.”

Iceni spent a long moment looking at the blank screen after Hardrad’s image had vanished. For all his power, Hardrad knew that he had to at least feign respect for senior CEOs. He was acting far too confident by making such an open move against her now.
What does he know?
She checked the time, and her breath caught. Drakon’s attack should have started two minutes ago.

“Your orders?” Akiri asked softly.

Strike now at the ISS representatives on this warship and the other warships as well?
But if Drakon’s move had just been delayed, if he hadn’t outright betrayed her to the snakes, then starting her own move now would betray Drakon’s impending assault which
had
to succeed. Hardrad would know almost immediately if the status feed from his representatives aboard C-448 was broken. At that point, Iceni might as well broadcast the news that she would be assuming command of all of the mobile forces and her demand that Kolani submit to Iceni’s authority. Without Drakon’s actions on the surface triggering her agents on other ships she would have to do that, before the snakes on those other ships could strike at the regular unit officers or activate disabling worms that Internal Security was known to plant in every critical system.

Akiri took a message on his own comm unit, then faced Iceni. “The ISS representatives aboard this unit will arrive in five minutes to escort you back to the surface.”

What the hell is Drakon up to? How much longer does he need? Or has he already backstabbed me? In which case, I need to act now to try to save my own skin.

“Your orders?” Akiri repeated, his own tone growing not just urgent but also anxious.

CHAPTER TWO

TIME
crawled for Drakon as the assault troops made minor changes to their prepositioning, every movement careful as they worked to always remain concealed from the ISS headquarters. Drakon kept his eyes on the ISS complex, seeing nothing at all out of the ordinary across all passive visual spectrums and comm frequencies, but now viewing the ordinary as menacing.

“Assault Force Three is ready,” Morgan reported.

“Good. Watch out for those vipers when we go in, Roh. They’re tough.”

“We’re tougher. And every soldier with us hates them. Who doesn’t know someone who got hauled off to a labor camp or worse by vipers or other snakes?”

Drakon nodded to himself, thinking of the worries he had lived with for decades, wondering day by day no matter where he was if a door would come crashing open, followed by a squad of vipers with orders from Internal Security to take him off for interrogation about crimes he might or might not have contemplated but would surely confess to after enough physical and mental duress. He wondered if anyone in the Syndicate Worlds had ever been safe from that worry. Snakes. The common nickname for ISS personnel spoke to the general attitude toward them, but the ISS had been vicious and efficient enough to keep dissent down nonetheless.

Until now.

Morgan spoke again, sounding annoyed. “The unit leaders want to know what the policy is on prisoners. Do we take any vipers alive?”

That one was easy. “They won’t know anything worth sweating out of them, assuming they aren’t conditioned to suicide once captured. It doesn’t matter anyway. Do you think any vipers will try to surrender, knowing how the soldiers feel about them?”

Morgan chuckled, her voice delighted this time. “No. They’ll fight to the death because they know what’ll happen if they’re captured alive. I hope we do capture a few.”

About a minute later, Malin reported in. “Assault Force Two ready.”

“How do your people look?” Drakon asked him. “Any signs of wavering?”

“No, sir. These are the cream of our forces. They’ve been waiting for this day. And you’re not just another CEO. You’re the only CEO who ever showed any concern for their personal welfare. They’re loyal to you. You’re going into battle with them, and how many CEOs do that? It may take time to get all the rest of the planetary troops behind you, but you’ve got a good reputation among them.”

A reputation based on actions that had resulted in his being exiled to Midway, Drakon thought ruefully, along with Morgan and Malin, who had chosen to follow him here. “It hasn’t done much for my promotion potential in the past, but maybe that’s about to change.” Assuming he won, and survived, he would go from being a rather low-level military-specialist CEO within the sprawling bureaucracy of the Syndicate Worlds to being the seniormost military commander in an independent star system.

Tense from waiting, stuck waiting six more minutes for the new time line to run out and looking for something to distract part of his mind, Drakon seized on the idea of change. Iceni wanted to go back to calling mobile forces “warships.” Maybe some other changes were worth considering. “What do you two think about going back to the old rank structure? Dropping the CEO and civilian pay scale stuff and using military titles again?”

“We’ve been doing it this way for about a hundred and fifty years,” Malin said. “It’s what the troops and everyone are used to.”

Unsurprisingly, that made Morgan jump in on the other side. “I think it’d be a great idea to go back to the old ranks,
General
Drakon.”

He liked the sound of that. General Drakon. And uniforms for high-ranking military leaders again instead of corporate suits. Something besides an executive specialty and assignment code to indicate what he was. And not just
what
he was but, in a lot of ways,
who
he was. “We need to break with the past, and maybe the best way to do that is to go even farther into the past.” Just decide it and get it done. Don’t go through a hundred layers of corporate bureaucracy, then wait for years before a decision finally wends its way back down saying no, and why the hell are you thinking instead of doing what you’re told? Was it that bad in the Alliance? They hadn’t been able to beat the Syndicate Worlds in a century of fighting, not until Black Jack reappeared, so the Alliance probably didn’t offer any perfect world, either.

But he had never cared for identifying himself as CEO Drakon on those rare occasions when he sent transmissions to Alliance military leaders. They were generals and admirals, and wasn’t he, too? “I’m a soldier, dammit.”

“Yes, sir,” Malin agreed. “Maybe the new titles would help establish a new spirit in the troops.”

An alert chimed with deceptive gentleness and Drakon checked the incoming message. “CEO-level comms have been picked up between one of the mobile forces cruisers and the ISS headquarters.”

Morgan cursed. “That bitch is trying to roll us! She knows we can’t back out now!”

“We know Hardrad has received his orders,” Malin countered. “He’s probably questioning Iceni about it, too.”

“It doesn’t matter which of you is right. We have no choice now but to go in.” No choice but to face the potential for horrendous disaster. The ISS had nuclear weapons buried in the major population centers on this planet, but detonating those nukes required the use of codes held by Iceni. The snakes could blow the nukes anyway, but it would take a lot longer to trigger them without Iceni’s cooperation. If she was cooperating with the snakes, the ground forces attack might end in glowing craters rather than victory, but it was impossible to halt the attack at this point without surrendering to the snakes. “We go in.”

The timer on his heads-up display scrolled rapidly toward zero, meaning it was time to focus on that and forget the distractions. “All assault forces stand by. Jump-off at zero minute.” As the green “go” alert flashed, Drakon sent a command that was instantly relayed to transmitters that bounced the message out beyond the planet’s atmosphere, to every orbiting station and facility and every base on every moon where both ground forces and snakes were present. The order could only travel at light speed, meaning it would take minutes and sometimes hours to reach the farthest facilities, but any reports of his attacks on the planet would come in behind it. His people would get the order to attack seconds before the snakes at their locations knew anything had happened back on the planetary surface.

With the next motion, he switched his circuit to the frequency linking the portion of the attack force he was personally leading in. Half-terrified and half-exhilarated, he felt adrenaline surging, while visions of a hundred earlier battles and engagements flashed through his memory as he began yet another. “Assault Force One, fire and move!”

A one-hundred-meter-wide area free of obstacles or cover, grass- and marble- and stone-surfaced, separated the ISS complex from surrounding buildings. Against civilian rioters, that offered plenty of free-fire zone, and even a small number of regular troops trying to assault the ISS building faced formidable defenses. But no complex could be designed to withstand a massed assault by so many troops, so close to their target, armed with so many heavy weapons.

Drakon heard a roar of mingled rage and defiance surge across the comm circuit as his soldiers opened fire on the hated snakes. The breaching teams fired clearing rounds into the double-layered fence around the complex, blowing huge holes in the fences, detonating the mines placed between the fences and destroying the sensors. Other teams fired antiarmor rounds straight into the security towers set at intervals around the complex, most of the towers automated but some occupied by ISS snakes who never knew what hit them.

As the outer rings of defenses were simultaneously blown apart, other weapons teams dropped screening rounds nearer the walls of the ISS complex, generating dense clouds of smoke mixed with floating infrared decoys and radar-defeating chaff.

In every attack he had participated in, Drakon never remembered actually starting to move. This time, like every other time, he went from crouched under cover to realizing that he was charging forward across the open area toward the complex, moving in the low, fast leaps that the power assists in combat armor made easy. His soldiers followed, dim shapes to either side of him. Despite Malin’s reassurance, he had wondered if his soldiers would obey him when it came to this. But on the heads-up display of his helmet Drakon could see every soldier moving to the attack.

Fire flashed by, the complex’s defenses firing blind in hopes of scoring hits. Electromagnetic pulse charges went off all over the area, but the EMPs which would have fried electronic circuits in civilian gear or standard survival suits couldn’t harm the shielded combat-armor circuitry. Drakon’s soldiers paused to return fire, their armor’s combat systems pinpointing origins for the defensive shots, then rushed onward as the building’s outer defenses were rapidly silenced under an avalanche of attacks.

Drakon reached a stout wall, knowing that it had layers of dead space and synthetic armor beneath the stone exterior. Schematics for the ISS complex had been highly classified, but that hadn’t prevented Malin from acquiring copies through some inspired hacking. Now more of Drakon’s troops reached the wall to place breaching charges specially formulated to blow through that armor. “Take cover!”

The assault troops nearest the wall huddled back as the charges detonated, directing a series of blasts against the fortified exterior to tear two-meter-wide and -high holes in the walls. On the heels of the detonations, the assault troops poured through the gap, knowing that any defenses right behind the wall would have been taken out along with the wall itself.

Drakon went with the troops, knowing that if he were alone he might have trouble nerving himself to leap into the face of the enemy defenses, but he was able to overcome his dread by staying in a group. Once through the hole, Drakon hurled himself to one side as a volley of high-intensity fire ripped down the hallway the gap opened into.
That’s not any internal automated defense. We must have run into a viper strongpoint.
Fear forgotten for the moment under the demands of decision-making, Drakon checked the IDs of the soldiers closest to him. The symbols representing those soldiers glowed on the display that projected information onto the faceplate of his armor, showing exactly where they were on a schematic of this floor of the ISS complex. “Second squad, take cover and return fire to keep those vipers busy. Everyone else, head north with me.”

There wasn’t time to worry now. Drakon had attention only for the map on his helmet display and the glimpses he could catch of the actual building around him through the dust and smoke thrown up by the breaching charges and the fighting. He and the soldiers with him had barely entered the next passage when barrages of defensive fire began raking it as well. Drakon hit the floor, fuming with anger at the holdup, then checked the floor plan on his helmet display again before calling out orders. “Fire some concealment rounds and EMP charges toward those defenders. Combat engineer team sigma, blow a hole in the floor just around the corner.”

The concealment charges turned the area between Drakon and the vipers into a fog impenetrable by sensors, and a few moments later that area of the building shook as the combat engineers blasted the hole. Drakon and the troops with him crawled back and around the corner, then as the vipers continued to pour fire down the now-empty corridor, he and the others dropped through the new access to the next lower level.

That level felt oddly quiet, even though the building was shuddering as firefights raged throughout other sections. Doctrine called for Drakon to pause now and evaluate his entire force posture before ordering coordinated attacks, but he had trained his soldiers to operate without detailed orders even though such an approach was discouraged by a Syndicate hierarchy which rightly feared independent thinking. Drakon’s approach to training paid off, as individual platoons and squads from the attacking force spread through the building along every open path, like water flooding an area without adequate protection.

The snakes seemed to be reacting slowly, though, waiting for orders before they shifted position. The delays were often fatal, as soldiers surrounded and wiped out pockets of defenders.

Drakon’s helmet display kept fuzzing and sputtering as the jamming systems inside the ISS building as well as the building’s structure blocked signals. But so many soldiers were inside the building, each of the combat armor suits relaying signals to every other suit of armor within range, that Drakon still got a halfway-decent picture of events. “This way,” he ordered the soldiers with him, diverting to the south along a short corridor as the roar of battle grew in intensity again. Fear had become a distant thing, lost in the need to concentrate on developments and keep moving fast.

A sudden alert pierced the pounding of the gunfire. Drakon paused to eye the symbol, which told him that this message had to be from one of two people in this star system. He ordered the soldiers with him to halt movement and accepted the transmission.

The image of CEO Hardrad was fuzzy, breaking up into pixilated static before partially re-forming. “Drakon, break off your attack now, or I will detonate the nuclear charges under every major city on this planet.”

“You don’t have the codes.”

“Yes, I do.” The interference made it impossible to read Hardrad’s expression or get any feel for emotion in the other CEO’s voice, not that Hardrad ever showed much feeling in either face or tone. “Iceni betrayed you in exchange for limited immunity. I have the codes, and I will destroy this world before I let you overthrow lawful authority. But, if you stop now, we can reach an agreement. Iceni got some immunity. So can you. The alternative is to die along with everyone else.”

In the middle of a battle, and despite his long experience with the cold-bloodedness that often characterized Internal Security, it felt odd to hear Hardrad making such an apocalyptic threat in the same manner as if he were suggesting that forms had been filled out improperly.