The Tarakans were already commencing their investment of Ostwelt, the second planet, when the Deathstriders Company arrived.
"We should never have taken this job," Lieutenant Colonel Mariko Eszenyi grumbled, her lean, dark, high-cheeked face growing even longer than was its wont.
"We needed the work," her boss—the Deathstriders' commanding officer and principal stockholder—replied absently. He was studying the readouts of sensor data that swirled around the astronomical icons in the holo display. Seemingly satisfied, he rotated his chair to face his second in command. "You'll feel better when you've seen the money."
"If we see the money," she corrected, falling with long-practiced ease into the role of counterweight to his congenital optimism. "Which we won't unless the Empire decides to honor the contract Strauss-Gladius made with us via tachyon beam. And not even then, unless there's an Empire left to honor it. And unless we're still alive, which I doubt."
They both wore the Deathstriders' space service uniform of form-fitting nanoplastic, black and red with gold piping. There the resemblance came to a screeching halt. Colonel Garth Krona—his rank was, as per the guidelines laid down by His Late Imperial Majesty Armand, the highest a mercenary officer could hold—was an obviously heavy-planet man, with his thick, broad muscularity. Just as obviously, his ancestral world—of which he never spoke—was a cold one, where size was an advantage, for he was well over six feet tall. The overall effect helped account for his affability; nobody ever argued with him. His dark-brown hair shaded to reddish in the beard he affected. His trademark grin squeezed his hazel-green eyes into slits.
"Aw, come on, Mariko. Strauss-Gladius agreed to send warships out to escort us into the orbital forts' defensive envelope. And don't give me that look! It's in his own interest. He needs us if he expects to hold this system."
"Maybe you're right." Eszenyi's face looked only slightly less lugubrious than before.
"Of course I'm right. And now," Garth said, bass voice firming up from the tones of banter to those of command, "it's time for us to suit up and leave Commander Ying alone to do her job." He turned to the command station. "See you dirtside, Commander."
"Aye aye, sir." Free companies were allowed to operate their own transport, and the crews of those ships had Fleet-style rank titles. They cultivated naval customs of millennial antiquity to go with them.
Garth and Eszenyi went aft and donned their powered combat armor—not as up-to-date as the Marines' Mark 32-A's, but about as good as was available on the open market. Then they entered their drop capsules and, along with the rest of the Deathstriders, waited.
Mercenaries weren't allowed armed ships, and few of them opted for fat, comfortable orbit-to-orbit transports—you could never be sure there'd be some obliging soul to transpose you down at the destination. They wanted atmospheric capability, but not the sort conferred by gravs, for they weren't interested in wafting up and down in a leisurely way. The Deathstriders' ships were typical: overpowered lifting bodies, capable of fast, hard insertions. There were six of them, each carrying a platoon of power-armored troops and their supporting elements. Standard tactical doctrine called for them to drop the troops from the lowest practicable altitude, to secure the landing zone for them. That wasn't supposed to be necessary this time. But Garth hadn't lived this long (not that he was all that old, at thirty-seven standard years) by blindly trusting in his clients' ability to keep their promises.
Time crawled by, and Garth kept abreast of things through his command suit's HUD. He watched the vast silvery parasol that orbited Ostwelt crumple up under repeated attacks. "They've taken out the system's tachyon beam array," he informed Eszenyi over their private line.
"Typical." Cutting a target system off from outside contact was standard Tarakan procedure. 85 Pegasi was now unable to broadcast to the rest of the Empire. Next they'd be seeking out and targeting every receiver in the system.
As the Deathstriders entered Ostwelt's Chen limit, the promised escort showed up, engaging the swarming Tarakan ships en passant. But certain of the pursuers clung grimly on—mostly smaller vessels, for the battleships were staying further out, carrying on a missile duel with the orbital fortresses. Sweat broke out on Garth's brow despite the armor's cooling system, as he waited for one of those tenacious ships to get a shot past the escorts, for he knew he'd feel any hit on his unarmed ships as though it was piercing his own guts. But the volume of fire they were taking was less than expected given the number and tonnages of their tormentors. Then came the readouts identifying those ships by class. Assault transports, he thought. And he knew his decision to treat this as a combat drop hadn't been overcautious.
He passed his conclusions on to Eszenyi, who communicated them to her subordinates. And then they were screaming into the outer reaches of Ostwelt's atmosphere, and the ride became bumpy. Teeth-rattlingly so. The Tarakans were still with them—in large part, he knew, because the fortresses' fields of fire had been limited by the need to avoid hitting his own ships. He activated another private line and spoke to Ying.
"Go for the agreed landing zone," he concluded. "And contact Strauss-Gladius, or whoever's running things on the operational level. Tell them we're going to have to fight for the LZ, and that we can use whatever support they can give us."
"Including ground support, sir?"
Marines, he thought bleakly. They'll be insufferable if they really do pull our chestnuts out of the fire. "Everything."
"Aye aye, sir."
The Tarakan warships began to peel off, roaring back up to orbital space. They weren't intended for atmospheric combat. But the assault transports—essentially similar to the Deathstriders' ships—stayed with them, waiting for the mercs to make the first move. They didn't have long to wait.
"Commencing insertion . . . now." Ying switched to the private line. "Shall I download outboard visual sensor input, sir?"
"Affirmative." All at once, it was as though Garth was sitting on the outside of the ship, with the star-speckled blackness above shading through violet to the atmospheric blue below, looking down—there really was such a thing as "down" now—at the dry planetscape of Ostwelt. As he watched, the drop capsules began shooting outwards and curving toward the sere land in a pattern that would cover the prearranged landing zone. His other ships, he knew, would be deploying their own drop capsules. A computerized voice droned off numbers, giving each of the Deathstriders momentary warning of his or her own turn to be inserted.
Ying's voice, still on private line, overrode the robot. "Sir, would you like a three-count?"
"Negative. I know my number as well as everybody else." My, how noble, he gibed at himself. But it was one of the things that made the Deathstriders something special. Most of the time, RHIP held as true with this outfit as did the laws of the ancient sages Murphy and Parkinson, and all the other immutable rules that governed human organizations. But when the time came for a combat insertion, the C.O. dropped exactly like the lowliest private. And every Deathstrider knew it.
Nevertheless, Ying managed to give him a little extra warning by killing his shipboard sensor input. For an instant he was alone in darkness with his neurally-fed readouts and he braced himself against the impact that came when his number was called.
Drop capsules were nothing but rigid ablative sacks; fripperies like artificial gravity were out of the question. The G forces seemed worse than usual this time, even for a heavy-planet man. Can't be old age, Garth told himself, to help ward off the black wings that beat around the edges of his consciousness. I'm young for this job. Then his powered armor's visuals engaged just in time for him to see the last of the capsule burn away from atmospheric friction. Then it was gone, and he was falling naked (if one didn't count the powered armor that his neurally-linked brain perceived as his own body) through Ostwelt's lower atmosphere toward the tawny surface far below.
Of course, none of the other Deathstriders were close enough to be visible. Still less so were the Tarakans he knew had been fired off by the assault transports that had stuck to his ships like leeches on the approach. The commencement of the Deathstriders' insertion had been their own signal to begin their own, and the computer-projected destination of the mercenaries' drop capsules had given them their target. But it couldn't be helped. Garth couldn't have worried about it even if he hadn't been otherwise occupied righting himself in midair and getting ready to deploy his gravchute.
Full-blown grav units compact enough for personal armor were still only a theoretical possibility. But the unit on Garth's armored back counteracted Ostwelt's gravity sufficiently to greatly enhance the performance of a parawing of immemorially ancient design. As he descended, he took in the landing zone and its environs. To the west lay the capital city of Karnthnerton and its adjacent Fleet base, the latter under a shimmering dome of spatial distortion that was its deflector screen. Beyond that was one of this world's salty, landlocked seas. To the east, the terminator was creeping up; night would fall on the LZ soon. Whether that would be an advantage for him or the Tarakans depended on who made the best use of it.
The arid, starkly beautiful landscape was rushing up. Won't have the leisure to appreciate sunset over the desert, he thought as he detached the gravchute and landed on the downthrust of his suit's integral impeller. He couldn't see other Deathstriders descending—their camouflage circuits, like his, would be activated, preventing their skins from reflecting the setting sun. But his virtual "sight" displayed them as icons. And the Tarakans who were following them down also appeared whenever sensors could provide any meaningful data. Garth noted one such return, and activated telescopic visuals in that direction.
Yes! What was landing over there was impossible to conceal, so the Tarakans didn't try. It looked like a blunt, ugly aircraft, coming in on vectored impellers. Then it was on the ground, and it began to change. Stubby wings folded up and retracted, and the fuselage rose slowly as a pair of mechanical legs unlimbered from its underside. Two arms deployed, terminating in "hands" that had been the aircraft's pod-mounted weapons.
A Shapeshifter Delta, he thought, recognizing the identifying details from intelligence briefings.
The Empire had never gone in for powered armor larger than the form-fitting sort that Garth wore, even though direct neural interfacing made it workable. It had too many disadvantages, of which high target profile was only the most obvious. But the Tarakans had decided it had its uses as heavy-weapons support for combat insertions. Garth had heard arguments both pro and con, from a cost/benefit standpoint. He wasn't sure which was right. He was sure that none of those armchair theoreticians had ever stared across a battlefield at a Tarakan Shapeshifter in bipedal mode.
And his readout was indicating more of the things coming down, like sheep dogs among the flocks of ordinary Tarakan powered armor. And he began to see the large-scale tactical projections, constructed from Ying's sensors and downloaded to his armor and thence to him. And he began to worry.
He and Eszenyi had a quick colloquy while he watched the last members of his headquarters unit—a very small one, given that his suit handled most command-and-control functions—descend and form up around him. "Get everybody into formation as per operational plan C," he concluded, "and get to the city fast."
"Affirmative." The Deathstriders began to coalesce into a preplanned pattern. Garth had little to do at this stage other than give general operational direction. If he had, the Deathstriders would have been an outfit in trouble. Everyone knew the drill, and most of the detailed work of tactical coordination fell on Eszenyi—a fact which she was not above reminding him.
Civilians sometimes wondered how ground-combat forces could survive long enough to fight each other, under the eyes and weapons of orbiting spacecraft. To the professionals, the reasons were so obvious they could hardly even be put into words. The cataclysmic weapons of mass destruction were ruled out not just by tradition but by practicality; it was difficult for a conqueror to get much value out of an expanding cloud of glowing radioactive particles that used to be an Earthlike world. Precision kinetic-kill weapons were another matter. But the countermeasures that pervaded the surface battlefield seldom allowed the targeting of such weapons, even if the spaceborne forces didn't have other things on their minds—as, in the present instance, the Tarakans were trying to fight their way in past the Imperial orbital forts and the latter were trying to prevent it. No, as a general rule the only answer to powered combat armor was other powered combat armor, close enough to see it. . . .
As Garth now found himself close enough to see the Shapeshifter Delta that strode in through the twilight, spearheading one of the pincers that sought to cut his people off from Karnthnerton.
His mental command activated his suit's impeller, and he jumped in time to avoid a rapid-fire stream of plasma bolts. His suit couldn't really fly, but it could do a long leap. He prolonged that leap as much as possible, stabbing with an integral laser weapon at a joint of the giant arm that was bringing to bear a weapon that could have incinerated him in his armor. Something happened in that arm, and the plasma cannon ceased to track. I'll let myself think about all this later, and have a good case of the shakes and then get good and drunk, he told himself as he impacted with the ground near the enemy behemoth's feet. His deflector screen kept the fall from being fatal or even incapacitating, and he struggled to keep the laser targeted on what ought to be the leg's vulnerable points. But then Tarakan infantry in powered-armor suits not too dissimilar to his own began to loom in the dusk, coming up to kill him if the oncoming Shapeshifter didn't crush him underfoot first. . . .
With a sound which would have deafened him had his aural pickup not automatically damped it, the Shapeshifter's fuselage/torso took a hit that rocked the techno-titan back, swaying on its legs for a moment before toppling over. Marine squad-support missile launcher, Garth thought automatically as he clung to the ground against the shock wave. When he looked up, the Tarakan infantry were redeploying to face a skirmish line of Mark 32-A's. He staggered to his knees, adding his own fire to the Marines'. They didn't need it. They had carried plasma weapons, while the Tarakans, like Garth's people, had landed with nothing but their suits' integral weapons. After a short interval of hell, it was over.
A Mark 32-A strode toward Garth, ghostlike in its camouflage, and a female voice came over the prearranged frequency. "Get moving! Most of your people are through, but there are more to come and we can't waste time with you." The speaker cut her camouflage circuits, and he saw a warrant officer's insignia on the suit. He wasn't about to stand on seniority, especially given the Marines' well-known disinclination to recognize mercenaries' ranks. He moved.
Night had fallen, and they passed through more than one nightmarish firefight in the flame-shot dark before the last of the Deathstriders were inside a field deflector screen in the outskirts of Karnthnerton. Garth was out of his suit and listening to Eszenyi report that Ying had brought all the transports in, when he noticed the warrant officer's suit—he was sure it was the same one—clamshelling open, and an auburn-haired woman clambering out. He walked toward her and extended his hand.
"Gunner, I'm Colonel Krona, and I owe you one big one. Thanks for—"
Heedless of his rank and size, she struck his hand away. "Don't thank me, Colonel." Her tone left no doubt as to what she thought of mercenary titles. "I was just carrying out orders—and losing some good people doing it. And it was by sticking to your ships like glue that the Tarakans were able to get past the fortresses and gain a foothold here on the surface. We'll see if you and your outfit are worth it . . . Colonel." Then she turned on her heel and strode off, exchanging ribald greetings with various Marines as they emerged from their armor.
Garth heard Eszenyi's chuckle. "I didn't have time to warn you. On second thought, maybe I wouldn't have anyway."
"Who the hell is she?"
"Name's Sonja—that's all any of the Marines I've had a chance to talk to know about her. Obvious ex-Marine officer, but not talking about it. Vogel-Sabre, the local Marine CO, recruited her a while back, before the Tarakans arrived. He can't hand out commissions, not even these days, so he's made her a warrant officer."
"Why? I mean, are the two of them . . . ?"
"No. Everybody's certain that's not it. He just can't afford to waste her. As I said, it's pretty clear she used to be an officer. It's probably why she despises mercs so much—to her, we represent the sewer she's fallen into." Eszenyi shrugged. "Oh, well, that's her problem. Let's get some rest. It'll probably be the last we get in a while." She gestured in the direction of the landing zone, to the east beyond the deflector screen. Far above, a firefly-like winking of lights told of the ongoing battle in orbital space. And descending fire trails revealed that the Tarakans were taking advantage of it to get reinforcements down to their beachhead.
No, we won't be getting much rest any time soon, he thought.
But, although he knew it ought to be the last thing on his mind, he couldn't dismiss the image of the Marine with the temper as fiery as her hair.
The last of the system's tachyon receivers died under the relentless Tarakan hunt. 85 Pegasi was as isolated from the rest of the Empire as if it had been in another galaxy. And the storm that now broke on it reduced all it had endured before to mere prologue.
Strauss-Gladius soon withdrew what was left of his mobile space forces from the unequal battle to the relative security of the screened planetside base. 85 Pegasi had to retain a mobile force in being, lest the Tarakans feel able to simply bypass the system and continue on. He kept this reasoning largely to himself, knowing that Ostwelt's civilian population—and not a few of his own officers—would have welcomed such a bypassing. But he would fight a delaying action for as long as might be. It was not in him to do otherwise.
So the orbital fortresses stood unsupported under the relentless pounding that gradually reduced them to titanic junk sculptures. They held grimly on, plying what weapons remained to them, as the standard year 4327 dawned unnoticed. But the defenders were less and less able to hinder the Tarakans from reinforcing their enclave on Ostwelt's surface.
That surface was spared the ultimate horror of unrestricted nuclear bombardment. The Tarakans' own landing forces were, in a sense, hostages against that; and besides, the enemy was seeking conquest, not obliteration. But the beamed energies that raved against the base's screen, and the tactical nukes that both sides used whenever they could do so to advantage, soon reduced Karnthnerton to ruins. Strauss-Gladius' firefighting teams, darting to trouble spots with the mobility of gravitics, held the threat of firestorm at bay. But when the Tarakan ground offensive finally came, it swept over a ruined cityscape under soot-blackened skies riven by the occasional solid bars of fire that were orbit-to-surface kinetic-kill weapons descending whenever one side or the other was in a position to launch one and thought it could achieve a targeting solution in the electronic chaos below.
For Janille, that landscape out of hell had become all the universe there was, and her life had narrowed to the wielding of her weapons. Her Mark 32-A received and expelled her waste products, and was supposed to keep her at a comfortable temperature at all times; nevertheless, she stank.
"Gunner!" Corporal Kim's urgent voice penetrated her fatigue-deadened mind. "We've got three Shapeshifters approaching from the north-northwest, spearheading an unknown number of regular powered-armor troops." Janille thought a command, and the new hostiles appeared in scarlet on the little map that seemed to hover in midair on the fringes of her vision. She didn't even bother consulting with the Mark 32-A's brain; it didn't take the suit's tactical analysis program to tell her they were in danger of being cut off.
"Inform Lieutenant Maslov," she ordered Kim.
"Lieutenant Maslov just bought it, Gunner."
She stared at Kim, and the others who were within "sight" of the visual sensors linked to her brain. Their faces were as invisible to her as hers was to them. But she didn't need to see them.
"Get the word out to all elements of the platoon, Corporal," she said quietly. "We're pulling back to the fallback position." She didn't bother giving its alpha-numeric designation. They all knew where they were due to take their next stand.
"Aye aye, sir," Kim acknowledged in a voice that breathed relief. She had a series of brief colloquies with the squad leaders, then addressed Janille. "They report that there may be some confusion. We're not the only unit withdrawing, and we may get some stragglers."
"Can't be helped. Now, move out!"
They conducted a fighting retreat through that battlefield of surreal devastation, pausing occasionally to shoot back at the Tarakans who dogged their heels. The Tarakans were all standard powered armor, and the troops began to hope that they'd get to the prepared fallback position before the Shapeshifters made contact. Janille knew better from the sensor readouts she periodically had Kim download to her suit, but she kept it to herself.
At least, she told herself, the position itself was all right. It was being threatened from another direction, but—she fought down her automatic reaction—the mercenaries were holding firm on that front.
They were nearly there, and Janille had begun to entertain hope for a miracle . . . when Kim's final download crushed that hope. "Heads up, everybody," Janille called out—just before the first Shapeshifter came crashing through what was left of a building at four o'clock. One of its plasma bolts caught Kim and overloaded her screen. Luckily the corporal's communicator went at once, cutting off her screaming almost before it began.
No camouflage circuitry in that thing's skin, Janille reflected in a calm sector of her mind. Trying to conceal something that size would have been pointless—and counterproductive as well, because the terror the sight of the things produced was one of the reasons for using them. And it's working, she admitted to herself as she snapped out commands and brought her plasma gun around.
Two figures in Mark 32-A's, unknown to her, rushed up with one of the particle beamers that took two people in powered armor to carry. They slammed the monstrosity down on its squat tripod of a mount, in the path of the onrushing Shapeshifter. A bolt of coherent lightning almost overloaded the dimming capacity of Janille's visual feeds, and one of the Shapeshifter's arm-mounted plasma weapons sparked and crackled with electrical discharges from a hit, and that arm flopped uselessly as the driver deactivated it to halt the spread of disruption through electrical systems.
Janille, who'd been frantically trying to contact the weapons squad the two had come from, started to open her mouth—but her cheer died aborning as the maimed titan came on, smashing a multi-ton foot down on the support weapon and one of its operators. A blast from the remaining plasma weapon caught the other Marine a glancing blow, and he collapsed.
Then her neural interface was bringing the voice of the weapons squad's sergeant into her head. "We've got the bastard, Gunner. Wait just a—there! Heads up!"
Janille was already down when the missile impacted at the Shapeshifter's hip, bringing it toppling over and crashing down across the lower half of the Marine it had—Janille assured herself—surely killed already with its plasma weapon. A hatch opened in the fallen giant, and a Tarakan in light skin-tight nanoplastic armor staggered out. With emotions she knew would disturb her later when she had the leisure to examine them, she took him in the chest with her plasma gun. In this gloom there was no daylight to let through him, but the expression still came to mind.
Her troops were securing the immediate area against the Tarakans who'd come after the Shapeshifter—and who apparently had been shaken up by its fall. She moved forward to the Mark 32-A whose head and torso extended from under the Shapeshifter's body. "Sergeant," she said, "two of your troops with a particle beamer fell in with us. I'm going to recommend them for the—" She stopped, for she was looking down at the stenciled name that the Mark 32-A's dead camouflage circuits no longer concealed.
Jax. And she had a feeling that the other Marine, now an obscene mass of crushed flesh and bone inside his flattened armor, was Tomo. She recalled hearing that Vogel-Sabre had returned them to duty because he couldn't afford to have anybody pulling brig time.
"Yes, Gunner?" the weapons squad's sergeant prompted after a heartbeat or two of silence.
"I said I'm going to posthumously recommend them both for the Silver Nebula. And now, let's get where we're going."
They made it inside the perimeter without further incident. Vogel-Sabre was there. "It doesn't look good, Sonja," he said after taking her report. His voice held a haggardness that must mark the face she couldn't see. She had no idea how long it had been since he'd slept. "What little data we're still getting from orbit suggests that their big push hasn't even come yet. But it'll be any time now. Get your people positioned."
They didn't have long to wait. All that had gone before paled beside what broke on the perimeter with a drumroll of heavy ordnance. They didn't have to deal with orbital strikes; in response to Vogel-Sabre's entreaties, the admiral released his mobile space forces, and they kept the Tarakans occupied beyond the atmosphere. But what screamed in from the ground and from Shapeshifters in aircraft configuration was bad enough. Night had fallen, and the glare of the explosions would have dazzled unprotected eyes had any been present. Those glares revealed the approaching Tarakan armor, ghostly in its camouflage, and the looming Shapeshifters.
Time lost all meaning for Janille. A robot with her voice directed her platoon's desperate defense of its sector as her innermost self crouched within some storm center of the mind and contemplated the fact that only her Mark 32-A separated her flesh from forces no unarmored human organism could have survived for an instant. It was a combat environment that made the most lurid visualizations of hell seem insipid.
She grew aware that Vogel-Sabre was nearby. "Sonja, the mercs have things under control in their part of the perimeter. Krona is launching a counterattack to take some of the heat off us. It's our only—"
The two Tarakan jumpers appeared in the undramatic way of all teleportation phenomena: they were simply there, where they hadn't been the previous instant. Janille didn't have time to wonder how they managed to get the kind of visual fix required for safe psionic teleportation—probably some kind of imaging sensor using passive IR, downloaded to their brains via their suits' neural interfaces. She just screamed a warning to Vogel-Sabre, behind whom they'd materialized.
The colonel whirled to face the nearer jumper. This one was good—better than jumpers usually were, for teleporters were so rare they simply couldn't be held to the usual standards of Marine recruitment. He regained his equilibrium more quickly than Janille would have thought humanly possible, and lunged for Vogel-Sabre with a weapon which didn't register on Janille at first, because there are levels of horror the mind will not immediately accept.
Deflector screens were ineffective against slow-moving solid objects. The macelike implement in the jumper's hand pushed through the screen and came into contact with Vogel-Sabre's physical armor. At that instant it released a cloud of aerosol.
Dis, Janille thought with horror.
Vogel-Sabre recognized it too. He started screaming even before the swarm of nanomachines had eaten their way through his armor and reached his body, reducing both to an obscene gray goo, neither organic nor inorganic.
Janille dropped her unwieldy plasma gun and pointed her left hand. That forearm of the Mark 32-A was still in ranged-weapon configuration. But there was no need to worry about hitting Vogel-Sabre—at this point, a quick death would be a mercy. Ionized air crackled along the path of the laser that drilled through the Tarakan's helmet. He dropped.
The other jumper was laying about him, and conventional Tarakan troops were swarming the position. Moving through a region beyond despair, Janille advanced, spraying one Tarakan with monofilament segments from her right forearm as she stumbled toward the second jumper. Just then the violence reached a crescendo with a volley of plasma bolts, and the camouflage-shimmering shapes of the Deathstriders appeared through the murk. One of them rushed up to the jumper with one arm upraised, and brought it sweeping down on his shoulder. The blade, glowing with the intensity of its molecular-level vibration, sliced through the shoulder and diagonally down through the chest. Blood exploded outward from the rent.
Janille knelt beside that which had been Vogel-Sabre. She'd grown used to the screaming, as inhuman as the body which produced it. That body was now melded into its armor in a ghastly fusion as the disassembler nanoids deactivated and the gray residue hardened. She didn't pause for anything as melodramatic as a last salute. She just put her laser in contact with the thankfully featureless helmet and thought the firing command. The form convulsed and the screaming stopped.
After a while she became aware of a silence that seemed unnatural, and of the combat-armored figure that was standing over her, its vibro-weapon dripping gore.
"Good man?" asked Garth Krona.
"The best."
"He shouldn't have gone that way." The bass rumble was unsteady.
"Nobody should." Janille looked around her. "Is it . . . ?"
"Yes. It's over for now. Damned near thing, but we held."
"We won't next time." She stood up and started to leave. "I've got to check on my platoon."
He restrained her. "Everything's being taken care of, Gunner. Come on. You've got to get some rest."
"The name's Sonja," she muttered automatically as she obeyed.
They moved through a series of semisubterranean bunkers under what had been a large building of Karnthnerton's outskirts, past chambers where Marines and Deathstriders, with a fine lack of distinction, were emerging from their armor. Finally, by unspoken common consent, Garth and Janille came to an unoccupied area. They emerged as though from steel chrysalises, and Janille stretched like a cat.
Garth fumbled in a pocket of his nanoplastic body stocking. Small objects could be carried in powered combat armor. He handed her a flask. "Vodka. From Lambda Serpenti. Best there is, except maybe what was made on Old Earth, before . . . Well, the best you or I can afford, anyway."
She snatched the flask and gulped recklessly. It seemed strangely powerless to affect her. "Look . . . I'm sorry for what I said before about you and your people. You saved our asses tonight."
"Don't worry about it." He retrieved the flask and took a swig. "I think I know what you went through tonight, with Colonel Vogel-Sabre."
"Do you?" Unbidden, the demons she'd been holding at bay for who knew how many hours crowded in past the defenses she'd finally let slip, and she lashed out at him for no reason other than his availability. "Do you really? Just how the fuck do you know? How do you know anything of what I've gone through? You mother-fucking—" She shuddered to a halt as a lifetime's self-discipline reasserted itself. He waited stolidly for silence before speaking quietly.
"I think I have some idea. I lost my second in command, Mariko Eszenyi, tonight. It wasn't dis . . . but it was bad enough."
Janille's features dissolved. "Oh, Garth, I'm so sorry! I'm such an ass." She reached half-blindly for him. His massive hands found hers. Then, by no one's plan, they were embracing tightly. And, with just a few yards of earth separating them from the techno-death above, they moved by an instinct as old as time into the act that was the ultimate affirmation of life.
Afterwards, they lay side by side on their improvised bed and she told him more than she'd ever expected to reveal to anyone.
"So this Commander Marshak helped you get away from Iota Pegasi?"
Janille nodded. "Yeah. God knows what would have happened if he hadn't come through for me. I'll never forget him."
"I hate the son of a bitch," Garth stated earnestly.
She punched him in the ribs. "Look at it this way: if it hadn't been for him, you'd never have met me."
"All right—so maybe he's not all bad." He hitched himself up on his elbows and reached for the flask. He took a quick swig, shook it experimentally, then handed it to her. "Last swallow, Janille." She'd told him her name, too.
Instead of finishing the vodka, she looked at him slantwise. "You know, it suddenly occurs to me that I've spilled the entire story of my life to you, and you haven't told me shit."
"Well, you tell such a fascinating story that I hated to interrupt—oof!" He guarded his ribs against another punch. "No, seriously, you don't want to hear about me. I've led a very dull life. Nothing's ever happened to me."
"Right," she said archly. "That must be why you avoid talking about your past."
"I don't avoid talking about it. I just didn't want to bore you—and this is the thanks I get!" He stretched hugely. Actually, hugely was the only way he could do anything. He'd been gentler with her than he'd needed to be, as though caution to avoid inadvertently hurting a bed partner had become second nature to him.
"Come on! I've practically put my life in your hands. You owe it to me to tell me something about yourself. If you don't want to talk about your past, then tell me about your ambitions."
"Oh, sure. I can talk about that by the hour. Only . . ." His tone grew serious. "It isn't really an ambition. It's stronger than that. It's a . . . destiny."
She paused with the flask halfway to her lips. "Destiny?"
"Yes. Don't ask me how I know. But I do."
"All right. I'll bite. Tell me about this `destiny' of yours. But," she added, raising the flask again, "it sounds pretty heavy—I think I need to fortify myself."
"I'm going to be Emperor."
The vodka that was starting down her gullet sprayed outward as she choked.
"Hey! What a waste!" he said, aggrieved.
She attempted to speak a couple of times before managing a kind of wheezing audibility. "You're joking, of course. Aren't you?"
"No, think about it. The Empire's just been reunified in our lifetimes, and now it's falling apart again. People have gotten a taste of what it's like to have law and order and predictability in their lives. So they think an Empire that can enforce peace is a bargain at any price. The time is ripe for somebody to come along and halt the collapse—catch the Empire before it hits rock bottom and splatters. Why not me? I've got the 'Striders—a damned good outfit—to start with. Of course I need to get my hands on some space combat capability—Armand's rules are a dead letter now—and start out by allying myself with some breakaway admiral and making myself indispensable to him, then—"
Once again Janille found herself speechless, this time with gusts of manic, uncontrollable laughter. "You're fucking crazy!" she finally gasped.
"Maybe that's what it takes." He leaned forward, eyes alight, and his deep voice lent his words a vibrant intensity. "Maybe Armin the Great was crazy. But unlike the other rebel leaders, he realized that after they'd overthrown the Draconis Empire there was no going back to the good old days of divided sovereignties. That's why he was able to sweep aside all his rivals and found the Solarian Empire."
"So you're an historian, too?" Her intended sarcasm didn't quite come off, and a wistful smile awoke as she recalled Corin Marshak.
"Not likely! But I've read up on Armin. Born into another era, he might never have been anything more than a medium-high-ranking bureaucrat. Don't believe the bullshit in the official histories; he was no war leader, and every time he tried to take personal command he stepped on his dong. But he won anyway, because he recognized a unique opportunity and seized it with both hands. That's all it took—and that's all it'll take now!"
She looked at him wonderingly. He was crazy, of course . . . and yet his sheer vitality gave an undeniable force even to craziness. Still, she found herself lapsing back into laughter and gasping for breath. "You're never going to get off this damned planet, you fool!"
At that moment the alarm began to whoop.
For some small fraction of a second they made eye contact. Then, without a word, they were scrambling into their body stockings. Then they were out the door, pounding down the passageway through a maelstrom of other running figures.
Major Torrento, the senior surviving Marine, was in the command post, leaning over the improvised comm station with its exposed bundles of gang-plugged cables. "Has the next attack started, sir?" Janille asked.
"Negative, Gunner. Their ground forces are sitting tight. But something's going on in space. What's left of our orbital forts are downloading the data to us." Torrento indicated the rudimentary sensor display. Something was definitely going on in the Tarakan fleet. Like an agitated hive of bees, the icons swirled about as they ordered themselves into new patterns.
"Maybe they're getting ready to finish off the forts and land more ground troops," Garth speculated.
"Maybe. But it doesn't look much like the buildups before any of their previous attacks. Look, they're moving in one direction now. It's almost as though . . . No, this can't be right. . . ."
As the pattern in the display jelled and the Tarakans' withdrawal became unmistakable, everyone was too stunned to cheer.
The Tarakans left a task-group-sized force behind to keep an eye on the system and protect their dirtside foothold on Ostwelt. But there was no further activity, and for the first few days after that inexplicable retreat the defenders were content to rest and recuperate. Then the pressure of suspense began to build, for 85 Pegasi's ignorance of what was happening in the outside universe proved almost as difficult to live with as the daily proximity of death had been. Their inability to take any action—the Tarakan covering force was several times a match for Strauss-Gladius' surviving warcraft—didn't help.
"Maybe they think we've been too badly hurt to threaten their rear, and have decided not to waste any more time with us," Janille speculated.
"But in that case, why leave their ground force, and a task group to guard it, behind?" Garth argued, as they followed the endless loop of speculation that occupied everyone on Ostwelt.
"The landing force is stuck here," Janille rejoined. "And they couldn't leave it without spaceborne support."
Garth grunted acknowledgment of the point. A surface landing was almost a do-or-die proposition, for it was very hard to land, recover the ground troops, and take off, all under the fire of still-active defenders. The Tarakans had seized the opportunity to put a landing force onto Ostwelt because they'd been certain of their ability to carry the operation through to a triumphant conclusion. The question of what had changed their minds remained unanswered, and the two of them knew their latest circuit of the speculative merry-go-round had brought them no closer to the answer.
Garth was opening his mouth to say something further when the intercom spoke, in a voice whose quaver had nothing to do with the speaker's age. "Attention! This is Admiral Strauss-Gladius speaking. I am informed that an Imperial task group has been contacted, approaching from the direction of Iota Pegasi—"
His eyes sought hers, for he knew it was from Iota Pegasi that the past she'd fled would come in pursuit of her. Her expression was unreadable.
"—and the major elements of the Tarakan holding force are accelerating outward on an intercept course."
They pelted for the command post, for they didn't want to miss this. They were none too soon, for by the time they'd arrived and shouldered their way through the crowd around the sensor display the Tarakans were nearing Ostwelt's Chen Limit, where they could activate their drives. Then they reached it, and the scarlet icons ceased to crawl—they sped outward at a rate that seemed impossible. At the same moment, the display shifted to systemwide scale. The green icons of friendly units appeared at the outer edge of the display, arrowing inward at about the same apparent velocity as the red hostiles who sought them. With soul-shaking rapidity, the two forces flashed together.
The tension in the command post was as palpable as the aroma of unwashed bodies, for everyone present knew there'd be no observing the battle that was about to take place. Not from outside those ships' drive fields.
Janille visualized the scenes aboard the ships, inside the inner fields that slowed time down by the same factor that the drive fields speeded it up. The crews, to whom the ships seemed to be proceeding at the rate they would have been making without time-distortion drives, would be going unhurriedly to general quarters and putting their weapons through dry runs, while their officers studied the enemy formations the sensors revealed and pondered tactical options—all in the few seconds the silent crowd in the bunker watched the hurtling icons in the display. Then those icons came together, interpenetrating in a sudden, angry swirl of colored lights. Janille didn't have time to try to calculate how long the battle was lasting for its participants; before she could even attempt the mental arithmetic, it was over, and the result they'd had so little time to sweat out was apparent. A few fugitive red icons were returning systemward, pursued by small, swift green ones. Behind came the main Imperial body, arrayed in unshaken order.
A long-contained storm of cheers broke in the confines of the command center. Janille felt her own throat adding to it as she hugged Garth, all apprehensions momentarily forgotten.
She and Garth were still arm-in-arm when the leading elements of the Imperial task group entered Ostwelt's Chen Limit and could be communicated with. Torrento ordered the planet's hail and any response piped over the intercom.
The response wasn't long in coming. "Ostwelt Control, this is Task Group 17.1, out of Iota Pegasi," a voice replied with the instantaneousness of tachyon communications. "Let me patch you through to Commodore Marshak."
Janille heard no more. Nor did she see the look on Garth's face as he narrowly eyed the expression on hers. Nor did she feel it as he slid his arm from around her.
The Tarakan ground commander, not being a madman, had surrendered the instant it had become clear that the Imperials were in uncontested control of Ostwelt's skies. Now Janille and her two companions stood at the railing of the spaceport terminal's observation deck and watched the prisoners being herded past.
The officers among them all had the broad, high-cheekboned, prominently hawk-nosed faces of the original Tarakan ethnic type. The enlisted troops showed almost every cast of features Homo sapiens came in. But all had the same coloring—light green skin, greenish-black hair—for it was part of their uniform. The only exceptions were the minority who belonged to the crews of captured spacecraft, in whom blue took the place of green. It was a simple matter to nanotechnically rewrite the genetic code in as elementary a matter as pigmentation, and the Tarakans did so more readily than the Empire, with its ingrained aversion to genetic tampering. They likewise lacked the much stronger response—bordering on a phobia—to the cybernetic enhancements humans had once surgically implanted in their bodies, beginning in the early space age and culminating in the Draconis Empire's obscene melding of man and machine. They didn't take it that far, of course—if they had, the Empire's war with them would have become a jihad. Still, Janille's flesh-crawling knowledge that some of the shuffling prisoners below were almost certainly cyborgs should have made it easy for her to see them as inhuman, as she was already inclined to see people who used dis on personnel. And yet . . .
"I can't hate them," she remarked.
"I know what you mean," Corin nodded. "It's far from clear who's most at fault in this war. At a minimum, our meddling policies over the last few years have given them provocation." He turned toward her, and his grimace was a self-conscious ghost of his old cynical smile. "Anyway, it's not necessary to hate them now. They're no longer a danger—at least not for a while."
Garth cleared his throat in his seismic way. "I've been meaning to ask you about that, Commodore. I gather Admiral Brady-Schiavona's victory broke the back of their invasion and forced them to withdraw from this system, among others."
"That's `Captain,'" Corin smiled. "I'm just a temporary commodore, while I'm in command of this task group. But to answer your question, yes. Brady-Schiavona smashed their main force just after the first of this standard year. He directed the operation, but the on-scene commander was his son, Commodore Roderick Brady-Schiavona—the one who fooled the Tarakans so beautifully year before last. The Tarakans' outlying elements, like the one here, then found themselves isolated. It was at that point that Admiral Tanzler-Yataghan, over at Iota Pegasi, decided it was practical to relieve this system." His eyes and Janille's made a sidelong contact at the mention of Tanzler-Yataghan's name, and he hastily pressed on. "I'd only been a captain a little while. But I was overdue for a command billet, given the policy of keeping people rotating between staff and line. So I got the job." His eyes met Janille's again, and he seemed about to say more, when his left hand twitched from a painless neural stimulus. Muttering an apology, he raised his wristcomp to his ear. It was a military model; an integral sonic screen kept the message inaudible to the other two. He listened a moment, acknowledged, then turned to them with an apologetic smile. "You'll have to excuse me. Seems a courier boat from Iota Pegasi has entered the outer system, and it's squirting a priority message for me. I'll be down in the comm center."
After he was gone, Janille and Garth passed an awkward moment. They'd been having quite a few of those lately, since Corin's landing on the planet and his thunderstruck recognition of her.
"Well," she finally broke the silence, "I suppose you'll be leaving soon."
"Yes. The Deathstriders' job here is done. And thanks to your friend, we're in pretty good shape." Corin had taken it upon himself to certify the mercenaries' contract with Admiral Strauss-Gladius as fulfilled. More importantly, he'd used his discretionary funds to pay them off. There'd been a time when currency in the traditional sense had seemed about to go the way of the dinosaurs, superseded by electronic credit transfers via the comm network that blanketed Old Earth's global village. But it had made a comeback in the form of bearer paper which circulated freely throughout the Empire's wide-flung, diverse civilizations. No computer could bleep the Deathstriders' payment out of existence. For all the ambivalence of his feelings about Corin, Garth was properly grateful. "So it's time for us to move on," he continued. "There ought to be work for us over toward—"
"Can I come with you?" Janille blurted.
He managed to speak in a steady voice. "Don't you want to stay with him?"
"I don't know what I want! All I know is that I've got to get out of here. Now that his forces have relieved this system, Tanzler-Yataghan will have a lot of clout here. And I've put myself on the records of the 34th."
"Under a false name."
"Yes—but with pictures, retinal pattern, genotype and all the rest. I have to get away, whatever my personal feelings—" She jarred to a halt, wilting with embarrassment under his level regard.
"Yes, I could tell what those `feelings' were the instant his name came over the comm. And I won't deny a certain degree of embitterment. But" —he grinned in his beard like sunshine breaking through a rift in clouds— "you're welcome in any capacity you want. If I can't have you as a lover, I'll take you as a damned outstanding soldier."
"Thanks, Garth," she whispered, but her smile was troubled.
Another awkward silence threatened to develop. A cheerful baritone voice broke it. Janille had never heard Corin speak in the precise tone his voice held as he trotted up the stairs onto the observation deck. It was a tone of release. "Sorry I had to run. But the courier brought orders for me from Admiral Tanzler-Yataghan. Secret orders."
"Uh . . . maybe you shouldn't be talking to us about them, if they're so secret," Garth suggested.
"Oh, it's all right. You see, I have no intention of obeying them." Corin smiled at their stupefaction. "It seems Admiral Tanzler-Yataghan has assumed `extraordinary emergency powers' in the Iota Pegasi Sector."
"He's gone into rebellion." There was no trace of a question in Janille's flat statement.
"Of course. Lot of that going around, these days. Anyway, he intends to `impose special security measures' here in 85 Pegasi to `assure the sector's loyalty to His Imperial Majesty.' I'm to implement these measures."
"And old Strauss-Gladius won't be able to do a thing about it, after having his Fleet component almost wiped out." She regarded him levelly. "So, have you decided what you're going to do?"
"Oh, I decided some time ago. I've been expecting this." Corin turned to Garth. "I've got a proposition for you, Mister Businessman. By shifting personnel around, I can get solidly reliable crews aboard my flagship and two cruisers. You could use some warships. How about it?"
The big mercenary recovered first. "You have been thinking about this for a while, haven't you? And quietly making preparations."
"Well, as I said, this development isn't entirely unexpected." Corin looked into Janille's still-thunderstruck face. "Remember that last night on Santaclara, and what I said about my oath to the Empire? Well, Tanzler-Yataghan no longer represents the Empire. And . . . I've had time to think this out." A note of hesitation, almost of awkwardness, entered his voice. "The Empire is going to be reunified, one way or another. The moment is right for somebody to step into the power vacuum. And that somebody will do a thorough housecleaning. Tanzler-Yataghan will be one of those to go. I'm not going to wait around and be purged with him."
Janille and Garth exchanged a quick glance. Corin knew nothing of the destiny the mercenary colonel believed to be his. But Corin had looked the same facts in the face and reached the same general conclusions.
"I'll be honest," Corin went on, addressing Garth. "My first choice would be to go to the Beta Cassiopeiae Sector and take service under Brady-Schiavona. But I know he wouldn't touch a deserter with a barge pole."
"And I'm your second choice?"
"I haven't had a chance to get to know you well. But I know what Janille thinks of you. Coming from her, any praise of a mercenary is high praise indeed!" Corin looked straight into the other man's eyes—they were the same height, although Garth was twice as broad and twice as thick—and held them. "Do we have a deal?"
"You'll have to give up those." Garth indicated the commodore's insignia on Corin's planetside undress uniform. "There's only one top man in the Deathstriders, and that's me. Acceptable?"
"Perfectly."
The mercenary's signature grin broke forth and he extended a hand. "I think we've got some details to work out, and some planning to do for a very abrupt and irregular departure from this system. But let's go to my quarters and settle our preliminary agreement over a drink. By the way, remember what you were saying about how somebody is going to take charge in this chaos and become the next real Emperor?"
"Yes."
"Well, I've got to tell you something. . . ."