The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword (31 page)

“President Iceni sent us on after you when she received information that Ulindi might be a trap,” Mercia said.

“She did?” He couldn’t wait to talk to Iceni about that. “And your weapons are working?”

“As that Syndicate battleship discovered to its sorrow. Would you like us to demonstrate on the Syndicate ground forces encircling you?”

Drakon checked his views of the Syndicate positions again, where all-out warfare was apparently raging. “Not yet. I think your appearance, on top of being pushed beyond their limits, has caused substantial portions of the Syndicate ground forces to rethink their allegiance to the Syndicate.”

She gave him a curious look. “Still, any that remain would be a threat.”

“Possibly. Or any that remain could form the nucleus for the ground forces of an independent Ulindi. Everybody down here used to be Syndicate, Kapitan.”

“Everybody up here, too. This mercy to the enemy thing is a little hard to get used to.”

“There’s still one set of enemies that we can’t afford to offer mercy. Do you have a location on the snake alternate command center?” Drakon asked.

“If the information we were provided is accurate, we do,” Mercia said.

“We need to make sure it is eliminated. Colonel— Our agent was supposed to disable the snakes’ ability to detonate their buried nukes from the alternate command center, but we haven’t heard from her and don’t know if she succeeded.”

“In a few minutes, you won’t have to worry, General.” Mercia turned to give the commands.

Malin was staring at Drakon. “General, if Colonel Morgan is still in or near that snake complex—”

“I know. Bran, I know.” Drakon met Malin’s gaze with his own. “But we can’t risk everyone else on the possibility that Roh Morgan is still alive and still in or close to the snake alternate command center. If the Syndicate ground forces are falling apart, the snakes could decide to set off those nukes at any moment, or at least the nukes under this city.”

Malin closed down, emotion vanishing from his face. He nodded. “That is true, General. We have no choice. It must be done as soon as possible. I know that if we did have a choice, you would act on it.”

“I would.” Despite everything that Morgan had done, and everything that she might yet do if still alive, she deserved that much for the services she had rendered him in the past.

—

SUPREME
CEO Haris walked rapidly through the halls of the Internal Security Service alternate command center, moving toward the entrance of the secret bolt-hole that would let him escape to a concealed hangar where a shuttle awaited, a shuttle equipped with the latest stealth gear available to the Syndicate. Several heavily armed bodyguards walked three meters ahead of him and several more three meters behind him.

Haris wiped sweat from his brow, trying to keep from breaking into a run, trying to figure out what had happened and how it had happened. After a career spent focused on promotion, on sucking up to his superiors and frequent transfers to punch as many tickets as possible, he hadn’t actually managed to acquire all that many concrete job skills. Doing the job hadn’t been the point. Not for him. Doing the job got in the way of maneuvering for that next promotion.

It was a career pattern that had produced some unexpected problems when he was secretly told to proclaim himself Supreme CEO of this star system. The biggest problem, to CEO Haris’s way of thinking, was that being diverted off the main ISS track meant he no longer had any promotions to vie for. That robbed him of purpose. The other problem, which Haris found annoying, was his lack of experience with the kind of day-to-day work that needed to be done when he could no longer count on someone else’s doing it. His current crop of subordinates had shown a growing tendency to fall down on doing his job, despite Haris’s attempts to motivate them by such measures as random arrests and executions.

In fact, he had started wondering if his superiors had chosen him for this job specifically because of his lack of effective skills other than those focused on promotion. Had they expected him to be unable to spot the ultrasecret preparations for the trap intended for Midway’s forces at Ulindi?

He
had
missed them—he had known only what he was told—but how could that be his fault? Hadn’t he simply been what his superiors wanted? That had always worked in the past.

Nothing had worked this time, though. The rebel ground forces had not only survived, they had wiped out Haris’s own brigade and taken his ground forces base. The Syndicate division had slaughtered itself attacking the base and, according to the reports he was receiving, was now disintegrating as the workers and some of the executives mutinied. CEO Boucher’s flotilla had been smashed by a battleship that the rebels weren’t even supposed to have in working condition, and now that rebel battleship was in orbit and turning what was left of the visible Internal Security Service infrastructure on the planet into tangled junk.

Fine. His superiors had left him without guidance, and his subordinates had failed. He was leaving, and the subordinates and workers could have the mess created by their own failure to support him properly. Not for long, though. Once Haris reached the entrance to the bolt-hole, he would enter the detonation codes to begin the countdowns for the nuclear weapons buried under every city on this planet. He would be well clear of the surface before nuclear fires terminated every incompetent on the planet along with every enemy on the surface.

As for him, he would just consider this another transfer, an opportunity to identify new positions to vie for in other star systems. It would take some creative wording to make the events here seem like a success justifying another promotion, but that was the one job skill Haris knew very well.

The end of the corridor came into sight as Haris and his bodyguards turned a corner and passed a security checkpoint whose occupants didn’t realize they would soon have the honor of sacrificing themselves to cover his escape. Another few hundred meters and—

The ceiling ahead suddenly erupted as a rectangular patch going all the way across the hall and perhaps four meters wide was outlined by a strip of fire. Haris stared, not recognizing that the cut-through represented breaching tape laid on the floor of the level above this one, breaching tape powerful enough to cut instantly through the armor in the ceiling. If he had been able to think quickly enough, he would have wondered what had happened to the guards and security sensors covering that section of the complex above him.

The section of ceiling outlined by the explosion dropped onto the bodyguards who had been walking just in front of Haris. There must have been a pinhole camera watching this corridor from above, to ensure the explosion was triggered at just the right moment.

Haris hadn’t really noticed the woman standing on the segment of ceiling as it fell, riding down on the broken fragment as if it were the floor of an elevator. He hadn’t noticed her wild smile, or the weapon in her hand as it fired three times, and never realized that three shots had slammed into his head before the falling portion of the armored ceiling had time to crush the leading set of bodyguards.

As his lifeless body dropped limply, Haris was also unaware of the corridor’s exploding into a storm of gunfire as his surviving bodyguards at the rear poured an avalanche of fire at the assassin.

—

THE
bombardment that
Midway
aimed at the concealed snake alternate command center fell through the sky as frightened citizens huddled and watched the fiery tracks. But the rocks did not fall on any of them. Instead, the buildings and parking lots of a drab industrial park were turned into a mass of rubble occupying the bottom of a crater. Anyone examining the crater would have found among the rubble the remnants of many things that had no place in an industrial park and would have noted that its depth implied quite a few layers of floors underground, but the people of Ulindi had a lot of other things to worry about at the moment. They couldn’t spare time for yet another pile of wreckage, or for wondering who might have died in it.

“THE
fighting in the Syndicate lines is dying down,” Colonel Safir reported.

Malin nodded to Drakon. “Yes, sir. We’re seeing indications that at most spots, the fighting is ending.”

“Are we seeing any indications as to who won?” Drakon asked pointedly.

“No, sir. There’s still fighting going on opposite sector two, and we’re spotting movement of soldiers from sectors one and three converging on the areas where combat is still under way.”

“That sounds like someone is in command.” Drakon pointed to the comm specialist. “Try to punch a message through to the Syndicate soldiers. Use the standard frequencies and codes from before we revolted. They should be able to read those.”

“What do you intend doing, General?” Safir asked.

“I intend finding out what’s going on before I decide what else to do. There are times to be bold, but this isn’t one of them. We’re still just two brigades, and even though we’ve done a lot of damage to the Syndicate forces out there, we’ve taken plenty of damage ourselves, and we still don’t know how many soldiers they had to start with. They could still outnumber us, they could still have reserves that are heading this way right now, and for all we know, the loyalists out there finished off the soldiers who revolted.”

“Our position is still tenuous,” Colonel Kai agreed.

Drakon saw Malin smile at that. Kai would have felt their position was tenuous if they had ten times the numbers of the enemy and were dug into the best fortifications humanity had ever constructed.

But all Malin said was, “That could well be so.”

It took the comm specialist several minutes before he turned to Drakon. “General, I’ve established contact with an executive third class who is willing to talk with you.”

“Well, isn’t that nice of the executive,” Drakon grumbled. He knew he looked like someone who had been in his battle armor way too long through desperate fighting, but that was fine. Anyone whose appearance was perfect after supposedly leading troops under these conditions would very likely be a fake who wouldn’t be worth talking to.

The executive third class didn’t look as bad as Drakon, but she didn’t look anything like fresh and perky, either. “What’s a general?” she asked as her face’s image appeared before Drakon.

“CEO-equivalent,” Drakon said.

“Are you a CEO?”

The question came with enough heat behind it to cause Drakon to shade his reply. “I’m a general. My brigade commanders aren’t sub-CEOs. They’re colonels. We stopped being Syndicate a while back. We stopped acting like Syndicate a while back.”

“You don’t look like a CEO,” the executive admitted. “Are there any snakes in there with you?”

“None that are still alive that we know of. We’re still screening prisoners to see if we can spot any snake agents hidden among them.”

“Prisoners?” The executive said the word as if it were totally foreign and incomprehensible to her. “You took prisoners? What, from the brigade that was supposed to hold that base?”

“A lot of them, yeah,” Drakon said. “Others from one of the attacks you people launched on us. We sent out a counterattack and brought in a couple hundred, plus about forty wounded.”

“You— Who are you? We were told that you were traitors trying to set up some warlord arrangement, working for a rogue CEO.”

Drakon grinned. “That’s what your CEO and the snakes told you? Did you believe them?”

“No.” The executive grinned back, a baring of teeth that was only partly about humor. “But all that tells me is that they lied, which I already knew. It doesn’t tell me who you really are.”

“Fair enough,” Drakon said. “We fight for the free and independent star system of Midway. The Syndicate no longer rules there. There are no snakes there.”

“Then who is in charge there?”

“President Iceni. Me.” Drakon felt ridiculous saying the next words, but they were increasingly true. “And the people.”

“The people?” The executive laughed. “Do you think I’m that stupid?”

“No,” Drakon said. “Actually, you’re impressing me. What’s your name?”

“Executive Third Class Gozen,” the woman said, both face and voice defiant.

“Well, Executive Third Class Gozen, who’s in charge out there? You?”

“I’m in charge of what’s left in this part of the line.”

“What about the snakes with you?”

“As of three minutes ago, there aren’t any snakes with us. Except for dead ones.”

Drakon nodded, smiling. “It looks like we have something in common.”

“You and I might, but not the units opposite me,” Gozen said. “The snakes won there. We just wiped out a last pocket of them over here and are setting up defenses on each side facing out.”

“Do you want any help dealing with those units opposite you?”

Executive Gozen gazed at Drakon with a flat expression. “Look . . . General . . . I may not want any snakes shooting me for not being happy at charging into another senseless attack, but that doesn’t mean I want to help you kill people in units that are part of my division. They’re stuck over there, maybe some of them helped the snakes, I don’t know, but others literally have guns to their heads forcing them to keep fighting. So, no, I don’t want your help killing more of my comrades.”

Drakon nodded again. “You seem to have quite an attitude problem, Executive Gozen.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

“All right. You’ve been straightforward with me, I’ll be straightforward with you. We came to Ulindi to get rid of Supreme CEO Haris. We thought he had rebelled against the Syndicate, but apparently that was part of a plan to lure us here.”

Gozen shook her head. “I don’t know anything about that. I haven’t heard of any Haris. My unit only landed three days ago. What’s a Supreme CEO?”

“Beats me,” Drakon said. “Anyway, we didn’t come here to conquer the place, or to die. We came here to get rid of the snakes and let the locals decide how they should run things.”

“Wow. You
do
think I’m stupid.”

“Executive Gozen, I don’t have forever to talk to you before I make up my mind what to do. I’d advise you to listen,” Drakon said. “Midway doesn’t have enough ground forces and firepower to conquer and control other star systems. We can help other star systems get rid of the Syndicate and the snakes, but we can’t impose our own rule. Trying to occupy and garrison Ulindi is beyond our means, but in any case, we don’t want to. We had too much of that under the Syndicate. Taking out the Syndicate here at Ulindi was a defensive move by us to remove a nearby threat. Give us credit for being able to recognize that action was in our self-interest. If you’re going to stop fighting us, if you’re going to stop trying to support the Syndicate, I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t try to set yourself up as a warlord who’s a danger to nearby star systems that Midway has pledged to help defend. But I cannot allow functional, loyal Syndicate ground forces to remain active on this planet and in this star system.”

Executive Gozen looked back at Drakon for a few moments before replying. “You don’t have the firepower? You do know there’s a battleship in orbit, right?”

“Yeah. That’s ours. It’s new. It wasn’t supposed to be operational yet.”

“It’s operational.”

“So I understand. It could bombard this planet until there was nothing left, but it can’t control the planet or the people on it. And it’s not going to stay here. It’s going home with us because we need that battleship to defend Midway. So tell me, what are you going to do, Executive Gozen?”

“You’re using Syndicate equipment. Have you got any good code monkeys . . . General?”

“As a matter of fact,” Drakon said, “I have some of the best damned code monkeys in human-occupied space.”

“Really?” Gozen grinned for real this time. “How do you know that?”

“They’ve told me that more times than I can count.”

“I can send you a virus,” Gozen said, suddenly all business. “We’ve been blocked from linking with anybody on the other side where the snakes are still in charge. If you can figure out how to get this virus into their network, it will identify snakes for you with a distinctive symbol on battle armor targeting displays.”

“That could come in handy.” Drakon said. “What’s the deal? What do you want in exchange for it?”

“If you go in against them, you kill the snakes. No one else.”

“What if someone else is shooting at us?”

“Look . . . just do your best. Say you’ll do your best. I’ll take that.”

“Why?” Drakon asked.

“Because . . .” Gozen made a face. “Because you’ve listened to me and explained things, when the sort of commanders I’ve been dealing with would have long since told me to shut up and comply. And because the soldiers I’ve got over here are good, they’re good men and women and they know their jobs and they are brave, but a lot of their friends have died, and they have been pushed past all limits, they’re disorganized, exhausted, and burnt-out right now. I can’t get at the snakes holding the rest of what’s left of our division hostage, and I don’t think I can stop them, or you, if an attack comes. That’s why.”

“You’ve been bluffing this whole time?” Drakon asked. “Seriously?”

“Yes, sir, honored CEO,” Gozen said.

“Executive, I don’t know what you want to do when this is all over, but if you’re looking for a job and pass the security screening, I would really like to have an officer of your caliber. Now, I’ll have my comm specialist bounce you a link to send that virus over, and we’ll see if my people can make those snakes light up.”

“You just offered me a job?” Gozen laughed. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”

“You’re not the first person to tell
me
that.”

“All right, General. I’ll tell you one other thing I’ll do for you. I’ll try to get word across to the soldiers still under snake control that you guys take prisoners. That ought to help both of us, right? They won’t fight as hard, and more of the ones who are still alive will stay that way. Let me know before you go on the attack, so I can make sure you know where my lines are.”

“Do you know where your former CEO and his command staff are?” Drakon asked.

“That I don’t mind giving you,” Gozen said. A coordinate appeared on Drakon’s display. “That is where the exalted CEO Nassiri and his staff was in place. You will note that it is in a comfortable building a ways back from the front lines.”

“And there’s a bar nearby,” Drakon said as his display located the building on the city map that matched the coordinates.

“Yes, sir. Convenient for the CEO, huh?” Gozen looked to one side, listening. “Got to go, General. Give me that link and remember what I asked in exchange for it.”

“I don’t forget that sort of thing,” Drakon said just before Gozen’s image disappeared.

Drakon pointed a finger at his comm specialist. “We need a link passed to that executive which can be used to download a file that will be quarantined and sent to the code apes.”

“I’m on it, General.”

“Sir,” Malin said, a frown uncharacteristically making his feelings clear, “we should treat everything regarding any alleged Syndicate rebels with extreme caution.”

“I’m aware of that,” Drakon said. “Is there something in particular about Executive Gozen that concerns you?”

“She clearly impressed you, General, just as Executive Ito impressed Colonel Rogero.”

“She wasn’t trying to impress me,” Drakon pointed out, “unlike Executive Ito, who acted like a puppy happy to find a new owner. Don’t worry, Bran. If Gozen wants to join us, she’ll get a full security screening. For now, I want you to contact the guards for our prisoners. Have them ask if anyone knows Executive Gozen.”

Malin frowned again, this time in thought. “To confirm that Gozen is not a snake agent?”

“No. If she’s that good, they wouldn’t know. If we find any, I want to release one or two of them and send them back to Gozen so she’ll know we really took prisoners. If we can get the former Syndicate soldiers with her to submit to us, it could save some of our own people’s lives, and from what I saw of her, Gozen will be able to convince them to do what she says.”

“But, General,” Malin tried again, “someone with that kind of behavior toward her superiors could not possibly have survived in the Syndicate system. Unless she was a snake.”

“That’s a good point, and I’ll want to know what kept her from being shipped off to a labor camp. Now call those guards.”

“Yes, sir.”

It took ten minutes for the code apes to call back. “Can you do it, Sergeant Broom?” Drakon asked.

“Yes, General. It’s a nice worm. It’s a beautiful worm. We just have to use a horse to get it into the Syndicate network.”

“A horse?”

“A Trojan horse,” Broom explained. “I hear there’s a prisoner going to be released? Sent back to the ones that killed all of their snakes?”

“How did you— Never mind. Stop hacking the private command circuits.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Broom said. “I mean, no, sir, that would be improper spying on my superiors.”

“Which is exactly the sort of thing the Syndicate liked to order you to do when we were under Syndicate command. I mean it. Mess around with other systems to find vulnerabilities all you want, but if you find any more back doors into my private command circuits, I want them shut and locked. But what does releasing a prisoner to Executive Gozen’s group have to do with—” Drakon smiled with sudden understanding. “We send back another prisoner?”