War Against the White Knights (8 page)

“They’re our past and our future,” Arun said. “This is what we fight for.”

Barney swapped the images again without Arun’s instruction. They showed Jana, Xin, and Remus.

“Do you think they worry about us half as much as we fret over them?” Arun asked.

Romulus smiled. “Of course they do, sir. The only difference is that they’re too tough to let us see it.”

It’s so easy to be certain about people when you’re young
. “Perhaps.”

Arun plastered a smile of his own over his unsettled feelings, slapped the younger man on the back and then ushered him out. He really did have to get to Deck Eleven. He waited, watching until his visitor had disappeared around the turn in the passageway.

There was something odd about Romulus that he hadn’t figured out yet. He shook his head. Maybe he’d look into the boy, but only after the battle. There were far more important things to occupy his mind right now.

Tallerman-3 was a jungle world. Its native, monkey-like inhabitants had long ago fought out a working relationship with a Trog expedition that had established a colony there at a time when on Earth
Homo sapiens
was still sharing their world with rival hominid species. The Emperor might not have been feigning his ignorance of Tallerman-3 because the Imperial interest was in its neighbor, Tallerman-4. A desolate, airless world, life on Tallerman-4 was one of pressure seals, underground tunnels, and the constant battle to create and distribute air and water. Arun had lived on such worlds, where the recycling and air scrubbing wasn’t as sophisticated as on a starship. They stank of mold and rot. The surface was frigid, but sealed away underground the constant engineering challenge was how to safely bleed the heat away. The result was you breathed hot air made humid by the sweat of millions.

Tallerman-4 was a resource rather than a home. With all the complexities of working a barren world combined with mining in the bottom of a planetary gravity well, it rarely made economic sense to work such planets. The concentration of heavy elements was freakishly high, though, and they were needed in hull plating and zero-point engines, used to power both starships and aerial defense. Those resources meant the system was of vital strategic importance if the shipyards of Shepherd Nurture and Khallini were to keep working at full capacity. One more reason why Arun was convinced he had been right to return.

Now Arun faced the hardest part of the re-conquest. In the whirlwind advance through the sector, forever keeping the enemy off balance, he had not only defeated the New Empire enemy, he’d won a reputation as a great commander. Pedro had even compared him with Napoleon, which wasn’t an evaluation Arun felt comfortable with, because Napoleon had been a great tactical commander in the field as well as a strategist.

Arun left tactical control to his field commanders, who excelled in that role far more than he did. His part was to banish himself to self-imposed exile in his cabin. His reaction times were getting too slow for the kind of fighter pilot stunt he’d pulled off in the Second Battle of Khallini. That was for younger men such as Romulus and Remus, and – he smiled at the thought – the old geezer, Wing Commander Dock who could still outfly pilots a fraction of his age.

Exile wasn’t easy. To sit here alone and watch good people fight and die took its own form of courage.

One of his senior commanders used her high priority comm status to take over one of screens on his bulkhead. “My team wish to report they are ready,” said Tremayne.

“I am not in tactical command, Deputy Ambassador. Why do you wish to tell me this?”

Tremayne tried to convey an expression of disinterest. “I don’t wish to tell you anything, General. It’s the Khallene cyber-ops team. They wanted me to tell you personally of their status. You’re a totem to them, you see, a talisman of good fortune. And talismans only work if they are invoked. I don’t entirely understand why they think this is so important, but then the Khallenes are the most inscrutable alien race I’ve dealt with, and my understanding is not important. They have to get their minds into a precise mental state to do what they do. That’s all that matters. Otherwise we’ll lose Tallerman-3 and everyone on it.”

Arun hated talking to the woman who had once been his lover. She was Tremayne to him now; he hadn’t been able to think of her as Springer since her trial. The feeling seemed mutual, because, however hard she tried to pretend otherwise, whenever she talked to him it sounded as if she had a mouthful of acid.

“They’re leaving it a little late to include me in their preparation,” he snapped. “We launch in two minutes.”

“Oh, they’re ready, but only because I promised them I’d talk to you on their behalf. They trust me, you see.”

Arun swallowed hard. “Tell your team when this is over that I and the Legion are proud of them. You too, Deputy Ambassador. You’re a hero.”

Tremayne’s eyes glowed violet with fury.

“Good luck,” Arun said hurriedly. “McEwan out.”

Arun slumped into his seat and balled his fists. Why did he let her push him so far into anger? All she had to do was prime him with a little guilt and he lit up with rage. Why the hell should
he
feel guilty?

He set the bulkhead screens to display pictures of Xin and Tremayne.

If she hadn’t pushed him away then it would have been Tremayne whose embrace he would seek after the battle. No, not Tremayne, Springer. But Springer was dead.

“Do you still love Springer?”

Xin had come right out and asked him that when he’d insisted the ambassador to the Khallenes brought a mudsucker team with her to work their cyber magic on the front line.

“Yes,” he’d replied. “But Springer’s dead. Deputy Ambassador Tremayne is like a cancerous sore that drains the life from me whenever she comes within ten light years. I am sure she feels the exact same way.”

Xin had accepted the truth of his words, but had held him for a long while in a warning glare.

‘
It’s time
,’ announced Barney, wiping the pictures from the bulkhead and replacing them with a near real-time update on the battle’s progress.

——

The enemy fleet that had taken Tallerman was long gone. Analysts confirmed that they had been Hardits, part of a pre-emptive strike that sought to destroy Legion forces in the field but not to conquer and invade. That task had been left to their New Empire allies.

The liberating Legion fleet under McEwan’s command had swept away the modest Imperial naval forces with ease, but then came the classic invader’s dilemma. The Imperial defenders had yielded void space to the Legion, but Tallerman-3 was strongly defended by orbital defense platforms, some in fixed positions and others fast-deployable from the ground. There were enough bombs secreted in, above, and under the surface of the planet to transform it to a lifeless hell for millions of years.

The mining world of Tallerman-4 had its own apocalypse bombs, but with the planet lifeless anyway, they had been fewer in number and lower yield. They had been disarmed by a stealthed Legion commando raid while it had been on the far side of the sun from the jungle world.

Now the third planet with its faster orbit around the sun had caught up with the fourth planet. With the two planets at their closest approach, nervous defenders would have their fingers on the nuclear trigger.

Go on
, the imperials seemed to be saying,
dare us to press the button. Make a move on us and everyone on the planet will die.

Would they do it? If Tremayne’s cyber-ops team followed Arun’s plan then the answer wouldn’t matter. Get this wrong and not only would the Legion lose the infrastructure needed to supply his military with the raw materials they needed, but billions of the Tallermanians would die.

The bulkhead screens showed pinpricks of light erupt over the airless surface of Tallerman-3 as three divisions of dropship infantry burst from hidden underground silos and began to close the distance between the two planets.

Dropships were normally launched from orbit. To cross the interplanetary distance, half the troop-carrying capacity had been replaced with auxiliary fuel tanks. But there were still enough Legionaries to establish beachheads for the second wave of transports to reinforce and break out.

All the defenders’ eyes would be on the armada of dropships. The enemy launched orbital defense pods from high-altitude aircraft, really little more than gun drones attached to balloons that could reach the stratosphere and beyond. For the moment, the defenders were confident they could fend off the wave of dropships. There were another twenty minutes until these attackers would reach Tallerman-3’s atmosphere. Plenty of time. And the Legion’s naval forces were keeping station several light minutes away. No need for the defenders to panic or make any hasty decisions.

Their commanders would be wondering why such a weak initial force had been dispatched. Were the Legion wearing down their defenses? Probing? Was it a diversion?

Anyone who guessed at diversion would win the prize, but it wouldn’t help them unless they also knew where their attention was being diverted away from.

The critical dropship launches had actually landed undetected on Tallerman-3 several days ago, their uprated stealth systems defeating enemy air defense sensors. Via FTL comm links that could not be intercepted, the Force Recon Marines who had faded away from those dropships reported themselves and their equipment in position. If they hadn’t, then Arun would not have risked the launch of the next wave of non-stealthed dropships.

Barney informed him that the Force Recon Teams had deployed their cyber weapons around the military communication hubs of the defenders. The weapons were developments of the cyber grapples used to disable the Hardit planet killers at Khallini. Somewhere on the ship, Tremayne’s team of Khallene mudsuckers would be hard at work.

Barney relayed a report from the cyber-ops team. Success! Enemy communications on Tallerman-3 were under Legion control. The Armageddon bombs were about to get a bad case of the gremlins.

Some of the orbital defense platforms must have stayed isolated from the planetary comms network. They began firing at the incoming Legion dropships. The distance was still long range, and the dropship countermeasures deflected most of the fire, but the orbital defenses would soon be taking a much heavier toll as the range narrowed.

The next phase of the Legion plan swung into action.

More concealed assets on the surface of Tallerman-4 threw off their coverings and powered up. They were long-range missile and x-ray laser batteries that had been dismounted from Legion naval vessels and dug into the captured planet. They blasted away at the Imperial orbital defense network, winning void superiority for the dropships to cross in relative safety to the atmosphere of Tallerman-3 where they began their descent.

A second wave of transports set off from orbit on the far side of Tallerman-4, carrying infantry, armor and artillery, escorted by warboats with combined void and atmospheric capability. A third wave was getting ready.

The dropship landings would be fiercely opposed by the still-formidable conventional defenses of the enemy, but the opposition would not be enough. The Legion conquest of Tallerman-3 was assured. The only question was how many good people would die before the defenders accepted that fact.

Winning a battle was infinitely preferable to losing, but brought its own responsibilities. The victorious Legion forces had prisoners to interrogate, free, or execute; bodies to bury, disease outbreaks to stifle, infrastructure to rebuild… the aftermath of war was messy and hard.

In the case of the Tallerman system, Arun’s mind was elsewhere. Content to play the role of figurehead while his subordinates rebuilt the planet, he concentrated instead on planning the final push to liberate the White Knight Emperor. And more importantly, what would happen after that. He couldn’t afford distractions.

So, when his adjutant, a Littorane called Major Spreese, pinged Arun’s private channel one day, he was not exactly in a receptive frame of mind.

“There’s an individual requesting an audience, General.”

“Has your brain gone dry, Spreese? In the first place, I am not a frakking king. People make appointments to see me, they don’t request an audience. Secondly, it’s your job to screen people so I see as few as possible. I trust you to decide whom I need to meet so that–”

Arun’s brain caught up with his mouth. Spreese was superb at her job, and there was someone who used to joke about requesting an audience. Someone who went missing when the Hardits took this system. “It’s him, isn’t it, Spreese?”

“Yes, General. Shall I send him in?”

Arun hadn’t grinned so much in years. “If you need to ask, you’re out of a job.”

The doors to his human-climate controlled office opened and Spreese showed in a tattered human in his late fifties, a graying beard half-covering a weather-worn face.

“Good to see you, General,” said Ambassador Del-Marie Sandure, grinning broadly.

The sight of his old friend awoke dark memories, and Arun could only stare in response.

Del was clearly confused by Arun’s reaction. “You ordered me to stay alive,” he said, defensively. “I did as you asked. I took a long fishing holiday, hopping from one sub-Polar island to another, always managing to evade the Imperial patrols. I don’t think I could have kept out of their clutches much longer…”

Arun managed an inchoate grunt in reply.

“Arun, what’s the matter?” Del seemed genuinely concerned now. “Why are you staring at my beard? Come on, man, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Arun got a grip and forced himself to relax. He was determined not to reveal what had rattled him. “I feel like it, Del. It’s all the talk of destiny and foreseeing the future. It freaks me out, especially when we’re all aging at different rates.” There was enough truth in Arun’s words that Del seemed to believe them. “Tremayne… Springer is nearly your age now. Xin is younger than me. Sometimes I feel as if I’m living my life out of chronological order.”