War Against the White Knights (41 page)

Arun came back to himself. Maybe it was his body’s insistence that, even in his blackest despair, he still needed to quench the thirst which sprang at him like a beast, impossible to ignore. Sneaking up behind his thirst, he was hit with the realization that a fragile seedling of hope had grown in the wilderness of his heart, nourished by the same sense of absolute loss that had consumed him these past hours. The most intense pangs of loss were not for the Xin he had known, but the loss of his future with her. And his family to be.

During this war, all of his hopes and ambitions and pleasures had been deferred. Everything he had done had been in the expectation that there would come a time when he would no longer lead an army, would no longer war on the galaxy, and that time would be his ultimate reward: a time to be shared with Xin.

Frakk it! He deserved happiness. But his parting with her had been so final. He had no way back to her. In securing the peace, he had lost his prize. He’d spent his future.

And without his family around him, there was no future worth a damn. And that, in its perverse way, was what rekindled his hope. No matter the risk, he had to trust Xin. He had to be with her.

He sped back to Xin’s quarters, pushing his chair to its maximum velocity, careering off the turns in the passageways to send jolts of pain along his still-healing body. But he didn’t care, because the critical wound was to his heart, and that wound he knew how to heal.

Just one word. That’s all it would take.

One word, and a last draw from Xin’s deep well of trust.

One word: ‘Wolves’.

As he approached Xin’s quarters, he barely noticed the absence of her Marine guard outside, or that her hatch was already open.

But those facts screamed their significance when he found her quarters to be empty. An itching fear insisted that this cabin wasn’t merely empty, it had been abandoned.

He placed a hand on her bed. It was standard issue, cramped, and not particularly comfortable, but it held powerful memories – not just of passion, but of contentment, of belonging, and of dreaming a shared future. The covers were neatly made up and secured so they didn’t float away; the bed was cold to the touch.
Xin was not coming back.

What the hell was going on?

He shouted for his guard commander. “Cortez!”

His Marines had enhanced hearing, enough to hear him from afar, but there was no reply.

“Cortez, respond!”

When he was met again by silence, cold fear gripped him in a tight embrace. He wanted to reach for his gun, for Barney, to cry for help… but the fear froze his muscles.

Had the Hardits come again, slipping through Legion sensors despite all the upgrades they had implemented since the last time?

The last time…

Groaning, his mind flashed with visions of Tawfiq torturing his Xin.

Get a grip of yourself, Marine!

The horror of what they would do to Xin and his daughter unfroze Arun. He reached for Barney, deftly reinserting his AI into the slot behind his ear.

She’s gone, Arun
.

I can tell that.

No, really gone. Arun, the Legion is breaking up. Standby… patching you into the comm network.

“Arun?” It was Indiya. “Are you fit to make command decisions?”

Was he? If Xin was in any danger, then damn right he was. “Yes. Go ahead, Admiral.”

“Good. I have approximately sixty ships refusing to obey orders. I suspect more will join them. Many more, maybe as much as a third of the fleet will split away if we let them. I have firing solutions. We can win this fight, but the tactical advantage is evaporating by the second. Do I fire upon the mutineers?”

“Have they declared their intentions?”

“Damn right they have. They’re broadcasting throughout the fleet, inviting all who will not accept the Cull to join them.”

“I don’t understand. Where can they go?”

“Mader zagh, Arun! It’s a chodding mutiny for frakk’s sake, we don’t have time for speculation. Do we enforce discipline, or do we do nothing and watch the Human Legion disintegrate before our eyes?”

A new voice interrupted, sourced by Barney as coming from
Vengeance of Saesh
. “We’re going to carve out a new freedom for ourselves. A true freedom, without the Cull.”

In spite of the circumstances, Arun’s heart lifted to be hearing Xin’s voice. “But Xin… you will be hunted down and killed.”

“By you?”

“No. Never. But you will die all the same. If not you, then your descendants.
Our
descendants.”

“Shut up, Arun. I’ve heard all before about the Trans-Species Union coming after us, but we are taking another road where they won’t follow. The option you never considered. One that can only work if the Legion splits. We’re going to leave the Trans-Species Union altogether and win ourselves a new territory, carved out of the Muryani Accord – out beyond the frontier. Hey, maybe we’ll bump into the Amilx. I’ve a suspicion they are in my future, but not yours, Arun. You will be dust years before we reach our destination.”

“But… Our daughter…”

Xin groaned, and Arun realized her words were cutting both ways. “I will tell her your name, Arun McEwan. I will speak well of you, and I will tell the truth – that her father died long before she was born.”

All this… he could have prevented all of this with a single word, even a hint that a freakish intervention by a mother ginquin to give succor to helpless human babies would have even further-reaching implications than anyone realized. But when the moment came to place his trust in Xin, he had failed her. And now it was too late.

Or was it?

“Indiya, where is Ambassador Sandure?”

Indiya hesitated, but her mind was sharp. She would figure it out. “He’s still loyal. On board
Holy Retribution
with me, and despite Kreippil’s jaw-snapping frustration, my senior subordinate remains loyal too. My flagship isn’t going anywhere without my say-so.”

Xin laughed. “I’ve known a lot of people with their head stuck up their ass, Arun.” Xin sounded almost cheerful. Dammit, she was
reminiscing
. Already! “You weren’t like them, Twinkle Eyes. Your head was always stuck in your dreams. I always loved that about you. I have no idea what the
Bonaventure
signifies, nor what it means for you to have seen an alternate version of Sandure, but don’t use those enigmas to kid yourself that I’m ever coming back. I hope your mystery ship gives you such intoxicating dreams that you can lose yourself within them. Goodbye, Arun.”

She severed her connection to him.

“Troop transports are lifting off from Athena’s surface,” said Indiya. “Whole divisions are declaring for Xin. Make your call, General McEwan. Do we fire on the mutineers or not?”

With the crystal clarity that came from his brain augmentations, that allowed him to record sensory data for future reference, Arun remembered another crunch meeting with Indiya and Xin 135 years ago in 2566, when the fledgling Legion had fled Tranquility in
Beowulf
. They had been so ignorant of interstellar politics, of the long laid-plans of the Hummers, but the Reserve Captain had seen deeper than anyone.

He could hear her words with piercing clarity, from all those years before. Xin was to be the leader, she had told them, the inspiration that many would follow. Decades had passed since then in which Xin had inspired the Legion’s armies, but it wasn’t until today that the old Jotun’s words had born their bitterest fruit. As for Indiya, she was to be the great captain, a master strategist and tactician in the art of war.

And his role? The Reserve Captain named him Decision Maker, telling him: “History will admire Xin Lee, study Indiya, and blame you.”

Arun slammed his fist down onto the curved upper surface of his chair. Everything he did… every agonizing decision, every battle fought and the friends who had died in them – was any of that even real? It felt as if he were following a frakking script.

The Reserve Captain had been right. History
would
blame him. His name would be reviled, just as he had cursed President Horden’s name when growing up, and billions of people across the galaxy still did. Horden had sold the human race into subservience and slavery by signing the Vancouver Accords. Centuries later, history would judge that Arun McEwan had repeated that betrayal in the Treaty of Athena.

The accusation against him wasn’t fair, wasn’t even true, but since when had history ever cared for the truth? To be blamed by humanity was his inescapable fate.

And he would embrace that fate, because doing so would help to conceal his great secret. If becoming the most hated man in history was the price to protect innocent people, then that was a price he was prepared to pay.

He shook a tear free from his eye. All he wanted was to be with Xin. Just a few years of happiness. Was that too much to ask?

“Arun!” shouted Indiya.

He took a deep breath, but his lungs didn’t seem to be working because he couldn’t get enough air. He gulped down another breath, and another, before he could finally speak. “Let them go.”

“Say again.”

“We’ve already lost them,” he snapped. “Let them at least depart in peace.”

Arun felt the familiar sense of cogs whirring in his mind, his organic planning computer spooling up to recalibrate itself in a cold, new universe from which Xin was absent, one in which they still had to retake the Earth and the other Terran Worlds in the name of the Emperor. Arun could smell the hot metal and knew that with such a huge change to its assumptions, when his planner computer seized control of his mind he would be nothing more than an organic support environment while it operated at full capacity. That could take days.

“Indiya, are you still there?”

“Here, General.”

“Secure our assets.”

“Already in hand. There’s a thousand games of chicken going on right now as each side dares the other to fight as we divide up our assets. But we got there first, mostly, and Xin’s faction are as reluctant to fight as you.”

“Good. Indiya, I can smell the hot oil in my head, and don’t know how long I’ve got before I lose consciousness. I’ll need you to unstick my brain, but deal with the separation first.”

“Roger that. Good luck, General. Indiya out.”

Arun could feel his eyes rolling back into his head, as if they were connected by chains to the imaginary brass drive wheels turning in his head. Arun fought back, and with a cry of rage, hauled himself back into the here and now.

“Not yet!” he yelled at the empty passageway.

There was one thing he had to do first.

With Arun’s eyes still open, Barney replaced the input to his optic nerve with the feed from a security camera in one of the nearby troopships, one that thankfully had remained loyal to the Legion, even though it carried part of Xin’s Army Group Sky Strike. The camera was hovering through an infirmary used by the 7th Armored Claw. A Wolf soldier was undergoing a medical checkup, her bare torso covered in crazy whorls of violet and black, and with concentric circles around her eyes that made her look surprised, or perhaps farseeing. The checkup was routine for someone newly transferred to that unit, and the medic – a Wolf herself – was performing a thorough check. Nonetheless, her attention was clearly distracted by the dramatic events going on outside the ship, and not on this unremarkable soldier sitting on the infirmary bed. It was becoming the fashion for Wolves to go around as naked as their officers would permit. Going sky clad, they called it. Actually, it was more than fashion, Arun corrected himself; it was a symbol of belonging, the distinction that bound them together. The alien skin parasite that a mother ginquin had transmitted to Romulus and Remus, and was now not merely embedding itself into their epidermis, but was restructuring them at a cellular level, a development which had fascinated the Khallenes. And with their DNA constantly changing, the Wolves played havoc with the usual bio security systems the Legion relied upon to identify individuals.

It was just as well the medic was distracted, because she didn’t notice one thing that made this particular Wolf unusual. Scars and prosthetics were openly displayed by Wolves as badges of honor, but this particular Wolf wore long and rugged pants that concealed her legs down to her feet. Arun didn’t need her to fully remove her clothing to know that this Wolf had long ago lost her left leg from just above the knee.

Arun kept the Wolf in sight until he could resist no longer, and he was finally captured by the great machinery in his head as it sought to answer the critical question.

What next?

“Banished, you say.” The Emperor’s face maintained its serene beauty. “A third of your armed forces has vacated this system because you have banished those individuals whom you felt displayed inadequate affection for my Imperial Person? Not executed. Not put to death.
Banished
. You do realize, General, that these disloyal elements took a significant portion of your military hardware as they fled to their… banishment?”

“That is correct, Your Elevance.”

When the Emperor summoned Arun back to the Citadel, seeking an explanation for why so many Legion ships had left Athena’s orbit, the White Knight probably intended to intimidate him. If so, it wasn’t working. Arun’s youth had been spent catching it in the ear from his superiors. This was a vacation in comparison with managing the fallout of Xin’s split.

“It is as good a story as any available to us,” said the Emperor. His Elevance’s attitude had cooled considerably since the ‘tour’. Arun had little doubt which of the two aspects was the more honest. “Henceforth I shall officially refer to the faction led by your former mate as criminals banished according to your local laws,” the Emperor continued. “Truth has no relevance in interstellar politics, McEwan. Perception is all, something you have demonstrated an understanding of over many years. With the newly elevated status of your Legion rabble, the eyes of the galaxy watch you more closely than ever. Others will strive constantly to paint their own truth over your actions. I tell you this now because it is clear to me that there is one power in particular who watches you like a cunning predator. They have sent me a message to pass on to you. “Following your ‘banishment’ so closely, this is not a coincidence; the timing is a message in itself.”