CHAPTER SIX
The young woman hurried down an alley, a shawl over her blond hair and a basket clutched in her hands. She passed a dumpster that reeked of rotting food and urine before she peeked around the corner into a street that was mostly empty in the early morning hours.
Inverness wasn’t a bad world, so far as the Federation’s Fringe went, but it wasn’t known for its safety or friendliness. Or its warmth. Scotia, the system’s red dwarf primary, had just crossed the horizon. It would take up nearly a third of the sky once it had fully risen, but even with it dominating the heavens, its weak light barely managed to keep the air frigid.
The young woman pulled her threadbare coat tighter and moved over a frost-covered sidewalk to a bakery window. The smell of fresh bread was a welcome improvement over the alley, and her mouth watered and her stomach rumbled as she waited, huddled next to a steam vent in the ground. A bit of warmth crept into her toes, and she wiggled them.
The window slid open, and a man with flour coating his hands and lower arms bent over.
“We don’t open for another half hour, Eira,” he said.
“But the fresh ones taste the best, Mr. Franco.” Warmer air wafted over her from the window, and she smiled as her teeth chattered.
“Kills me to see you out here.” He glanced back into the bakery. “Boss doesn’t like you. You know that.”
“He’s not here yet,” she said.
“No, he’s…You want fresh, or day-olds? Hurry.”
Eira placed a hand on the windowsill and had to pry its frozen fingers open with her other hand. Silver coins rattled onto the metal.
“Nine…twelve marks,” Franco counted. “I can do four day-old or two fresh.”
“I thought that was enough for five,” she said.
“Governor raised the sales tax. Sorry. Four?”
“Four. Thank you.”
The window shut, and Eira felt the last gust of warm air on her face. She turned away as a ground car rumbled past on the packed snow of the street. She bent over to stick her fingers into the steam grate and winced as the cold left her joints.
The window opened again and a white paper bag landed next to her. She snatched it to her chest and felt a hint of warmth within. Franco must have slipped her a bun fresh from the oven. She went back through the stinking alleyway, debating whether she should eat the warm one or keep going.
“But it’ll be cold by the time I’m home.” She put her back to the wall and took a bite from a golden-brown pastry. The taste of curried meat made her stomach rumble even harder, and she smiled as she watched steam rise from the half moon she’d taken out.
A flash of white struck her hands and exploded into slush. She gasped in shock as pain lanced through her left hand. The pastry lay on the ground, jumbled up with the remains of a snowball and a small rock.
“Hey, Leaguie!” a boy shouted. “You steal that?”
Another snowball burst against the wall next to her head, and Eira ducked down, clutching the white bag to her chest. Laughter rose from a bunch of teenagers as another snowball struck her thigh.
Eira reached down and snatched the rock out of the remains of her meal.
She whirled and flung it at a pack of boys too old for Inverness’s schools and too young for military service. The rock struck one of them just above the knee, where his winter wear was thinnest.
He screamed in pain and went down. While his friends tried to help him up, Eira ducked into a park and ran as fast as she could over the icy ground.
She stopped next to a hedge, panting, her breath coming out in puffs of steam. She shook out her left hand. It hurt, but at least the cold numbed the pain of the scratches the rock had left on it.
“Little bastards.”
She opened the rickety door of a crumbling building and went up the staircase two stairs at a time. She stepped over a drunk and went into her apartment. The place was a single room with a mattress in the corner, with a pile of blankets and a weak heater next to it.
“Eira, that you?” a man asked from the pile.
“Of course it is, Sam,” she said. “Got some breakfast.”
Sam sat up. He was a bit younger than she, with skin lesions on his neck and upper chest. A brand of cursive text had been seared onto his stomach.
“What did you…have to do for this?” he asked as she passed him a bun so cold the filling had ice flakes in it.
“I did laundry for some of the soldiers of the garrison,” she said. “Shined boots. Straightened up their barracks. Got coin.”
“That one still after you?” Sam wiped sauce from his mouth. “You know. Tried to hurt you.”
“I think he’s still in the hospital,” Eira said. “The sergeant said no court-martial. So he comes back, and…”
“You don’t have to feed me so much,” Sam said. “It’s not like I’m moving around a lot.”
“Get healthy and then you can start working, too.” She tore off a third of her bun and pressed it into Sam’s hands. “Now shut up and finish eating. And then I need to look at that leg of yours again.”
* * *
“They’re coming up on the Powell Limit, Sir.”
Captain Yance Drebin nodded tautly and looked around TFNS Burgoyne’s bridge. The battleship, along with her sisters MacMahon and Moltke and their light cruiser escorts, rode the racks of TFNS Ophion, under strict emissions control, 39,286,000 kilometers from the planet Inverness and just under halfway between the M4 system primary and its 7.2-LM Powell Limit.
Drebin hadn’t known what the incoming FTL footprint was when it was first detected, but he’d been pretty sure what it wasn’t, because Scotia wasn’t exactly a crossroads of interstellar travel. None of the Level E star systems were, which was why they got pickets like his: just three battleships and half a dozen cruisers. No more than could be lifted by a single FTLC. In fact, the carrier which had delivered Drebin’s command to Inverness had made the trip—minus the units under maintenance in New Dublin—with a third of her parasite racks running empty. And aside from the regularly scheduled, twice-a-year supply runs, he hadn’t seen another Navy carrier in the entire three-plus years he’d been here.
The system was serviced by a single civilian FTL pod-carrier a bit more frequently than that—once every four months, not every six—to collect the products of the planet Inverness’s orbital refineries. That was the only reason the system had ever been colonized in the first place. The system was metal-poor, but Kirkcudbright and Dunkeld, Scotia-II and III, were gas giants, almost as massive as their primary, and their atmospheres were a rich source of both hydrogen and much rarer gases.
The governorship of a system like Scotia was no great prize, or it wouldn’t have been left for someone like Drebin, who lacked patronage or contacts. But it could still be lucrative, if it was squeezed the right way, and a few years as a system governor wouldn’t hurt his résumé any.
That was how he had thought of the assignment, anyway. At the moment, he was having rather pointed second thoughts, because this incoming footprint had been neither his regular supply drop nor a scheduled tanker visit. That had meant it was almost certainly the Terran League Navy, and it was unlikely the RLH would have come calling without pretty damned good intelligence on Scotia’s defenses.
And on what it would take to break them.
That was the bad news, and it was likely to be very bad. The good news had been that the reason he knew it wasn’t his supply drop, which had in fact been scheduled to arrive today, was that the supply drop in question had arrived early. Even better, TFNS Calcutta, the trash hauler assigned to the Navy’s Scotia cargo run, had blown a fan quadrant decelerating back to Jalal Station. Hardly surprising. Calcutta might have been a cutting-edge carrier once; now she was an ancient piece of junk working out her final days humping supplies on the ass-side of nowhere. But her misfortune—her most recent misfortune—was how TFNS Ophion had ended up pressed into service in her place. Not only that, Ophion had been ordered to pick up the current supply of refined gases while she was at it, which must have really pissed off Jefferson Locklin, her skipper. Ophion was a Titan-class FTLC, with sixteen-hundred-meter parasite racks. Her class was always in high demand for fleet movements, not for the ignominious task of hauling the trash.
Drebin’s sensors had picked up the second incoming Fasset signature shortly after Ophion had mated with the cargo pods she’d come to collect. Its proximity to his supply shipment’s scheduled arrival gave added point to his assumption that the League did indeed have excellent intel on Scotia. Intel good enough for them to schedule their attack when he should have been anticipating a friendly FTL visitation. He hadn’t been about to let Ophion disappear again with that coming toward him, so he’d exercised his authority as a system governor—even if it was a piddling little system like Scotia—to hold the carrier “until the situation clarified.”
Of course, a ship like Ophion was much too valuable a strategic resource to expose to unnecessary risk, so he’d ordered Locklin to this position, halfway to the Powell Limit, where the carrier would be safely out of the way. And he’d docked his parasites on Ophion’s racks so they’d be in a position to protect such a vital asset just in case the Leaguies—assuming that was who it was, of course—came in on an unexpected heading. From his current position, it would have taken him just over twenty-two hours to reach Inverness under fusion drive, with a nineteen-hour ballistic phase in the middle of it. But he wasn’t too worried about that. After all, Ophion could return him to his station in little more than an hour, even this deep inside Scotia’s Powell Limit.
Or not, depending on what the Leaguies did in the next ten or fifteen minutes.
The incoming ship had gone sublight 2,606,400,000 kilometers from Scotia—and 2,476,800,000 kilometers from the Powell Limit—just over four and a half hours earlier. Decelerating at a steady 1,800 gravities, its velocity was down to just under 2,000 KPS and it was about two light-minutes from the limit.
And during that time, Drebin’s drone and the orbital sensor platforms in Inverness orbit had had plenty of time to identify it: a Sun Tzu-class FTLC of the Terran League Navy, whose parasite racks could potentially carry up to twelve capital ships.
At the moment, it was also just over eight light-minutes from Burgoyne, which was precisely why Drebin’s command was in its present position. If this was an attack, Inverness was the only logical target, and Burgoyne and her consorts were well outside any direct vector to the planet. In fact, the Sun Tzu’s vector had been almost exactly perpendicular to Drebin’s least-time vector to Inverness.
“Captain, they’ll hit the limit in another two minutes,” the tracking officer said. “After that—”
“Incoming transmission, Sir,” the comm officer interrupted her.
“To us?” Drebin asked sharply. If the Leaguies had spotted them after all—
“No, Sir. To Inverness.”
The comm officer tapped his screens, and the holo image of an arrogantly smiling woman appeared. Braided black hair was piled atop her head in a coronet that probably made problems inside a vac helmet, and her lip curled.
“People of Inverness, my name is Admiral Xing Xuefeng,” she said coldly. “Remember it.”
That was all she said. The display went blank once more and silence filled Burgoyne. Then the tracking officer inhaled.
“Sir, she’s flushed her racks. It looks like four capital ships, probably Hou Yi battlecruisers, and three Shui-Shen heavy cruisers. Their vector is directly toward Inverness at one-eight-eight-two KPS. Range to the planet seven-point-two light-minutes. Time-of-flight at current velocity is eleven hours, nine minutes. Assuming a ten-gee deceleration burn for a zero-zero with Inverness, time-of-flight is thirteen-point-eight hours.”
Drebin watched the master plot update. Commander Carson stirred beside him, and he turned to raise an eyebrow at her.
“Something on your mind, XO?”
“Sir,” she waved at the master display, “these bastards are headed straight for Inverness, and there’s only eight of them. We’ve got three battleships and the cruisers, and a Conqueror’s a lot tougher than a Hou Yi any day of the week.”
“You’re saying we should engage them.” Drebin’s distinctively nasal, gravelly voice was harder than usual.
“Well, Sir, if we fired up Ophion’s Fasset drive, we could be back to Inverness and drop the parasites in under seventy minutes.”
“Are you out of your frigging mind?” Drebin stared at her. “Risk a Titan to cover a Level E planet?”
Lauren Carson’s green eyes cored with something remarkably like contempt, and Drebin’s stare hardened into a glare. He hadn’t asked for Carson, and she hadn’t asked for Burgoyne, but they were stuck with each other. It was just a pity she was such a pain in his ass. For such a physically attractive woman, the blond-haired, dark-skinned commander was remarkably cold. All he’d suggested was that they were going to be stuck in Scotia for at least a couple of years, and she’d hammered him in the teeth with the Articles of War’s prohibition against physical relationships between officers and their direct subordinates. It had only been a suggestion, for God’s sake—not a barroom proposition! But it had cast an undeniable pall over their relationship.
“Sir,” she said now, “Ophion could drop us off in Inverness orbit and be well clear over twelve hours before they got there.”
“And their carrier could do exactly the same thing for them!” Drebin pointed out.
“They’d have to redock all of them first, Sir, and that would burn a good two hours. Then they’d have to accelerate and decelerate, from a starting point thirty-six million kilometers farther out than we are. There’s no way they could catch Ophion.”
“Assuming this is their entire parasite force,” Drebin shot back almost spitefully. “That’s a Sun Tzu out there, Commander, and that’s barely half a complete parasite loadout for a Sun Tzu! She could have four more goddamned Hou Yis on the racks!”
“Sir, why would they send in a force this light if they had that kind of backup?” Carson asked in a deliberately calm tone.
“How the hell do I know?” Drebin demanded. “But what I do know is that there’s no way I’m taking Ophion into that kind of potential clusterfuck.”
“Of course not, Sir. I see that now,” she said, and the cold contempt had migrated from her eyes to her voice. She unhooked the tether that kept her stabilized in Burgoyne’s microgravity. “Excuse me, Captain, but I think they need me in Tactical.”
She pushed off—hard—from the back of her command couch to glide gracefully and swiftly for the hatch, and he watched her go.
* * *
“Better,” Eira said as she finished checking the self-cleaning dressing on his left thigh. At least the medical treatment he’d gotten from the clinic had held up, she thought. One of the few perks of living in a nation at war for decades was that decent first-aid supplies managed to work their way down the economic ladder with ease.
“I think your leg’s really making some progress,” she told him. “How’s it feel?”
“Better. I think I can put some weight on it today. Maybe we can go to the garage and see if Tommy will help me out. It’s his fault I got hurt.”
“I ran into his little cousin.” Eira’s lips pressed into a thin line.
“Ah…not again.” Sam shook his head.
“They came after me. What was I supposed to do?”
“How bad did you mess him up?”
“A bruise. If I’m lucky. Not enough for him to go to the law about it, I don’t think,” she said.
“Fuck that Tommy,” Sam said. “He hadn’t dropped an engine block on me, and I’d be able to take care of my sister. He needs to pay up.”
A door slammed elsewhere in the building, and Eira tensed.
“Baker said taxes went up,” she said.
“What else is new? Governor needs a new wing to his mansion? He stops funding our orphanage. Girlfriend wants a dress made of Rishathan silk? Taxes go up. He’s a dickhead. If he spent half as much time doing his job as he does on the public screens telling us how frigging wonderful he is—” Sam cut himself off with a grimace. “Oh, the hell with it! Let’s go to the shop. We get there before Tommy starts drinking and he might be a bit more generous.”
She helped him up and he stuck an aluminum crutch with an old towel wrapped around the top under his arm.
Eira bundled her brother up and helped him down the stairs. He managed to stump along at a surprisingly brisk pace, but their trip to the garage—a mile away in the industrial section of town—still took the better part of an hour.
“Almost there,” Sam said as he stepped off the curb.
“Watch it!” Eira pulled him back just as a police car roared by, battering them with the icy wind of its passage.
“What the hell?” Sam thrust a gloved hand into the air in a rude gesture. “Why was he going so damn fast without a siren on? Could’ve killed somebody!”
“That’s odd.” Eira looked up at a three-tiered light above the security camera overlooking an intersection. Each light was cold and dark. “Civil defense network is quiet.”
“All the fighting’s in Beta Cygni,” Sam said impatiently. “Now let’s talk to Tommy. Ramen will be on me.”
A spattering of yellow light flashed across the sky, doubling their shadows against the snow.
A fireball expanded over the horizon, hanging in the sky but silent in the distance as a brief, bright star joined the red dwarf.
“Marauders?” Sam asked. “They found us—”
“It’s not them. Look!” Eira’s heart went cold as she pointed at the incandescent lines overhead. She’d never seen a kinetic energy weapon before—not with her own eyes—but that was all they could be: kinetic energy weapons. High-velocity, high-mass slugs that hit hard as nukes. They glared against the winter sky like curses, each tipped by a fiery nail, scarring its path across the sky, and she grabbed Sam by the wrist and pulled him toward a three-story building with broken windows.
“No, no.” Sam refused to budge as he gaped skyward. “It’s not fair! Why’s this happening to us?”
A siren woke and wailed across the city in a hundred voices, echoes from megaphones joining into a single cry that sent Eira’s heart racing.
“Come on! Bunker!” She jerked Sam’s hand and he fell, his crutch clattering across the street. She tried to haul him up, then stopped as a falling nail dipped behind the tallest buildings at the heart of the city.
A burst of light seared her face and she went down, screaming.
Sam used his body to shield his sister as a blast wave of snow smashed into them. Eira’s world went spinning as the explosion threw her sideways until she slammed against something hard. She stared up at a white sky, feeling hunks of ice land around her as they slid free of the roof of the building she’d hit.
She pulled herself out of the snowbank. Roofs had collapsed on the smaller buildings around her and people struggled out of them into the street.
“Sam!” she shouted. The name sounded muffled through her painfully abused ears. She looked around frantically and spotted a bit of his jacket sticking out of the snow. She threw herself toward it and called out to him again as she started digging.
The explosion of a more distant strike nudged her off balance, but she kept digging. She wiped snow from Sam’s face and he blinked at her.
“Up, up!” Adrenaline lent her strength and she dragged him up by the arms and then into the building. Shattered glass was strewn across the bare concrete floor and she panted as she looked around the room frantically.
“Ow…Something got me,” Sam said. He lay on one side, a hand patting around his torso.
“Where is it?” Eira demanded. “Where is it? I know it’s— There!”
She ran to a pillar and found the metal hatch on the other side. She grabbed the handle and tried to lift it, but it resisted stubbornly. It took every straining muscle just to raise the edge a few centimeters.
White light flashed, and Eira fell to her knees a split second before the blast obliterated the last of the windows. She felt a tug against her face as the pressure wave rolled over her, then pushed herself up and went to her brother as the roar died away. Blood dripped onto his face when she leaned over to give him a shake. She blinked at it, then touched her cheek and felt a shard of glass. She pulled it out and tossed it away, then dug both hands into Sam’s jacket and dragged him to the bunker entrance.
“Just…go,” he said.
“No! We promised, amaren!” She grabbed the handle and lifted again, tears rolling down her face as her back and legs screamed with the effort. It was like lifting a planet, but somehow she got the lid high enough to wedge her shoulder under it and prop it there.
“Sam, I need you to crawl. Can you do that?” she gasped. The edge of the hatch bit through her clothes and her knees threatened to buckle.
Sam grabbed the edge of the entrance and pulled himself forward. He fell in and vanished into the dark. She heard him banging against the ladder and her heart froze. She had no idea how far he’d fallen.
“Ow…” came up out of the darkness.
Eira tried to push the heavy hatch higher, but she lacked the strength. All she could do was thrust it up as hard as she could and hope she could drop into the hole before it hit her. She hurled herself into the opening but hit the ladder hard and failed to get a firm hold on the rungs. She plummeted, but then one leg jammed into the gap between a ladder rung and the wall and stopped her with a painful jerk on her knee and ankle.
The hatch slammed down and she hung, suspended in total darkness. Pain radiated from her face and ears, and it felt like a knife had been wedged into the joint of her trapped knee.
“Sam?” she panted, and tried to curl upward at the waist to grab the ladder.
A flashlight snapped on, and Sam shone it at her from only a meter or so below her.
“Found this on the bottom rung,” he said. “Fall ain’t so bad.”
Eira managed to grip one of the ladder’s uprights and twisted her ankle free. She landed in a heap next to her brother while the thunder of nearby strikes reverberated through the bunker. The roof creaked with each passing wall of overpressure, and she took the flashlight and looked around. The walls were lined with dusty boxes and folded-up cots.
“Where are we?” Sam asked.
“This was an old school,” she said. “But before that, it was a militia training house. Some of the soldiers told me about it. Every military building has these shelters.”
“And how come…no one took…this ’tuff?” Sam sounded as if his lips were getting fat.
“Hatch is always mag locked unless the civil defense alarms—” Eira began, then broke off with an impatient headshake and limped over to a stack of boxes. “Where are the first-aid kits?” She swiped her hand down a stack, sweeping away dust until she uncovered a red cross on the bottommost.
Another K-strike shook dust from the ceiling.
“So cold,” Sam said.
“Is it?”
Eira managed to drag a box off the top of the stack and stopped to rest for a moment, then turned her head sharply as the flashlight Sam held fell from his grip. It rolled, sweeping the light around until it bounced off Sam’s outstretched hand…and the weak beam reflected from the pool of blood under her brother’s side.
“Sam? Sam!” Eira tried to run to him, but her twisted knee failed, and she fell hard. She crawled the rest of the way and rolled Sam onto his back. His breathing was quick and shallow, his eyes were glazed, and one side of his jacket was soaked through with blood, the tatters full of red chunks of ice.
“Hold on,” she told him. “I’ll get the med kit!”
Eira choked down a growing sense of panic and felt fury rise in its place as she limped back to the supplies. None of this was their fault. Their lives had been nothing but pain and desperation since they were children, and the only thing they’d ever had was each other. Now the League was destroying their home, and the Federation—which was supposed to be their salvation—had put the most important box of supplies at the bottom of the pile where they couldn’t be used in an emergency.
She grunted with effort as she heaved the next box aside, then went to work on the next, dragging up strength her exhausted and emaciated body didn’t have. The next box. And the next—
Barely a kilometer away, a K-strike obliterated the nearby barracks. The blast wave collapsed the training facility over the bunker and buried it in tons of debris.
The League attack ended minutes later, leaving Inverness’s largest city a graveyard of smoke and ice.