Knights of the Wandering Star

Benjamin Karcher

August 14, 2026

Cover image: “Die Motib. Stellæ Martis”, Johannes Kepler, 1609 CE.

Dedication

To the stalwarts of the grindstone: Angelique, Chris, Daniel, and Jo. And to Jeff and Jamie, to whom Lieutenant Highwell and Captain Roche are owed among many other things.

Ill Fit

1100 26 April 1021 EH

Volga Upper Atmosphere

“This is Sam. I read you five-by-five.”

The King-class SSTO gave a bang and a groan as the building heat of reentry caused its metal frame to flex. Someone sitting by Samantha snickered. She turned to face him—PFC Ethan. Under the standard-issue OI helmet and its mirrored visor, his stubble and pointed chin were twisted in a smirk.

“Is that not procedure here? No radio check?” Sam asked, looking down at him.

“Is it for you, Dominioner?” Ethan replied.

Sam faced back forward. Eight men and women, strapped into jump seats across from her, looked idly on, a gallery of chins and lips under a set of visored helmets. The six to either side of Sam and Ethan were watching, too, she was sure. Even absent a show, they would be watching Sam. It would be hard for them not to, frankly. She stood a good half-foot taller than many of them, even without combat boots on.

“Diligence is half the job,” she said to him, ignoring the jab.

“The radios work. Chill out.”

Sam said nothing.

A minute later, a gentle pop in her ear opened up the buzz of the radio channel. A thin, modulated voice came on. “Alright, lads and lasses. Twenty minutes to touchdown. That so-called Kaiser guy is a cornered rat in a hole down there. Bring him in.”

As the SSTO plunged through the upper atmosphere, the roar of the winds against the hull pressed into their ears, even covered as they were with their headsets and helmets. Heads and bodies began to rumble and jostle in a rough unison with the movements of the craft.

Ten minutes later, the wind relented, easing down into a benign whistle. The King had entered the final glide phase. The irregulars checked their gear and grabbed their straps, getting ready to lift their harnesses and dismount. Sam tapped her most important bits of gear in a well-rehearsed sequence: plastic medkit on the right thigh, radio receiver on the left hip, radio earpiece on the left ear, heavy battle rifle strapped down at an angle beneath the seat. And one extra, for this mission profile: a pair of cold, carbon steel handcuffs, secured in her left velcro pocket.

Sam checked one more thing. She reached to the control on her hip and flipped the dial past its first threshold. A high, evil whine arced between her ears. Sam’s jaw tightened.

Have they noticed? She thought. No doubt; that’s an active sensor signal. We’re marked.

She flipped the dial back, silencing the whine. Just as she did, her CO came back on. “Time zero. Move to waypoint Alpha. Good luck.”

Sam thought to announce her observation on the channel, but why? The infantry squads had two designated radio operators, and the SSTO had a signals specialist. Between them and the pilot, there were three or four people whose job it was to monitor the frequencies and identify whether something really did represent a threat. And none of those people were her. So she stowed the thought, and she joined the chorus of infantry throwing up their jump seat harnesses and pounding boots on steel in a coordinated scramble to the rising bay door.

Outside, down on the largest of the Resmond islands on the planet Volga, it was a cloudy, gray day. The SSTO had touched down in a wide, tall alluvial plain, a blanket of green overgrowth incised deeply by a haphazard network of rivers and basins. The blocky winged vehicle sat on its landing struts, its bottom drive engine wash singeing the grasses, about a dozen meters from the lip of a huge gray-brown gash in the terrain. Nestled in that gash was an abandoned titanium mine, 40 meters from top to bottom, the descent terraced by packed roads that wound around the side for heavy equipment to lumber up and down.

The first six Dread Fist Company infantrymen spilled out of the SSTO’s main bay and hustled to the lip. Sam followed close behind, rifle ready.

A crack split the air just as Sam’s right foot hit the ground. There was some other noise hard on her right ear. The mercenaries ahead of her dove to the ground, and she slid to a halt, joining them.

A glance back: PFC Ethan, a dark scuff in the center of his fatigues, being dragged back into the bay by his arms.

Lieutenant Fae’s voice buzzed in her ears, thin and modulated but urgent. “Anybody see it?”

“Negative.” “No.” “Not me.”

Sam found a tiny embankment at the edge of the slope and crawled up to it, planting her shoulders and the back of her neck against it. She raised her head to peek for a half-second, then hid again.

“There’s a small concrete building, bottom of the west slope, bearing three-four-zero. Probably that.”

Lieutenant Fae, prone a few yards away, nodded. “Olsen, get your SAW on that, bearing three-four-zero. On my mark, Bravo squad left; Charlie squad right. Squad leaders switch over to command channel.”

That was plan A that had been discarded, then. When the Dread Fist had been told that Johan “Kaiser” Hect was hiding in a remote mine, little more than a dug-out cave in the temperate swamps of Resmond, it was assumed that their OpFor would be, at most, disgruntled miners with intermediate caliber rifles and diamond tipped rock cutters. Perhaps he would have the remnant of his fellow defectors with him. Marginal people, a few of them probably outlaws themselves, finding common cause with a desperate man on the run. That assessment wasn’t off the table, but at least one of those disgruntled miners was a mean shot with their rifle.

So they were on to plan B. Rather than walking up to the front door and kicking it in, they’d just have to do things the hard way. Sam smiled.

There was a gentle steel click, cloaked under the nearby whine of the King’s engine, and then Olsen opened up with the SAW, filling the air with a percussive, rhythmic roar.

“Mark.”

Bravo squad (down Ethan) leapt to their feet and tore down the slope of the hill. Sam gripped her rifle by the barrel shroud, holding it vertical along the plane of her body and pushing it tight against the sling over her shoulder. She held her left hand and forearm on the rocky sloped wall of the strip mine to steady her descent. It stung, the loose and jagged rocks raking along her side and arm, but it was better than being slow. Even with tracer rounds streaking down onto the concrete building, peppering the walls and doors with lead and warding any would-be sharpshooters from the windows, Bravo squad was exposed out here. Each of them was alone with the malign thrill of the death that could take them at any moment.

But Alpha squad’s suppressive fire did its job, keeping death down for a time.

Sam and her four squadmates hit the floor of the mine and ran toward the structure.

Her squad lead, Sgt. Stimwell, belted a command into their ears. “Olsen will stop soon. Sam, cover left window. Al, right window. Chen and I have the door.”

The machine gun fire ceased, the last three shots echoing into the sky. Sam raised her battle rifle and trained it on the left window. She slowed from a run to a creeping walk, her eyes fighting to pierce the dark void of the window. Daring the sharpshooter to show himself. Fearing that he needn’t in order to bring death. It was dark in that room…

There was a glint of glass. A muzzle brake and then the front lens on an optic thrust out of the shadows. Sam jerked her own sights onto it and squeezed off a burst. She wrestled the sights back onto the window. It was an empty black void again.

“Contact.”

Sam’s heart was pounding. She had been lucky. Too lucky.

“Roger, Sam. Brave bastard.” Stimwell and Chen were lined up at the door. “Once we’re in, you’re after us. Charlie will come in behind us. Ready?”

“Yes,” “Yep,” “Affirmative.”

“Go.”

Chen swung the butt of his rifle against the door handle, breaking something, and then he pivoted square with the door and kicked it in with the thrust of his leg. He and Stimwell hustled in, pieing off corners within the darkened interior.

Sam and Al hurried up to join them as the building—a squat little gray brick about 20 meters to a side and half as much tall—flashed and pounded with gunfire.

Sam was the next inside, and she swung her rifle around at low ready as she examined the scene. She stood at the top of a steel catwalk platform; the only way off was a set of stairs down to a concrete floor eight meters down on her right. At the bottom of those stairs, Chen sat, clutching his side with one hand. Stimwell stood above him, his rifle swinging about much like Sam’s, searching for targets.

On the left, an aluminum ladder was propped up against the wall. At its top was the window that Sam had fired into. There was just enough of a concrete shelf at the window to provide a firing platform. A man in muted goldenrod battledress lay dead—his neck torn to bloody ruin by a bullet—beside his scoped rifle at the foot of the ladder.

“Clear,” Stimwell barked. “Sam, come on in. Al, keep an eye on that.” He gestured at a wide, ten-meter-by-ten-meter steel platform flush with the concrete floor of the bare little building, ringed by a railing. At one corner was a rectangular gap showing the two semicircular round-offs of the top of a ladder, smeared with blood. By the looks of it, it was a cargo elevator with a service ladder running down alongside it.

Sam jogged down the stairs and ripped open her medkit as Al paced down behind her, covering the service ladder with his rifle. Chen leaned back against the concrete wall with a wince, and he pulled off his helmet.

Sam knelt down and felt at the left side of his torso. “Keep your bucket on, soldier. We’re in a hot zone.”

“Can’t a man take a breather?” Chen rasped with a smirk.

Sam decided to let it slide as she cut away some of his battledress. His ballistic plate had stopped two rounds, but a third round had come in around it. It was a nasty-looking wound, but not a truly bad one. A rifle round had caught him in the ribs, probably cracked one, but had glided along the side of them and out the back of his pack. The wound surely burned fiercely, and it was bleeding badly, but as long as they took the time to dress it, Chen would make it back. Sam set to work with the gauze and bandages after reporting as much.

“Roger,” Stimwell replied. Charlie squad was filing into the building now. “We tagged the guy who got Chen, but he got down that rat-hole. Our man must be down there.”

Lieutenant Fae and Alpha squad arrived a few minutes after them. “What’s this?” she asked. “Why’s there a building at the bottom of a strip mine?”

There was silence in the room.

“Armor bay,” Sam offered.

Fae’s head spun about. “A tank bunker with no exits?”

“Sealed or poured over, ma’am. Or hidden. But this elevator is here for a reason, and we don’t see any doors large enough to justify an elevator this size. Which means the doors were hidden or closed up permanently.”

“Roger. So we think Kaiser might be in an armory down there.”

Sam put some pieces together.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s dangerous, but we should go right now or not at all.”

“Elaborate?”

“The two shooters they posted here were a delaying action. They have something in that armory they began preparing when they marked us inbound on the lander.”

If Fae recognized what Sam was implying about the OpFor’s ability to track their drop, she didn’t show it. “Roger, but we won’t rush this. Bravo squad, evac Chen. Regroup and we’ll begin the assault.”

No. Now or not at all. “Ma’am…”

“You have your orders, Private. Get to it.”

Fifteen excruciating minutes later, Lieutenant Fae finished reorganizing the slightly depleted infantry platoon for an assault on the elevator shaft. Simple, by the book work: they’d drop a few fragmentation grenades down there, followed by a smoke grenade, and then they’d drop down into it with their thermal scan displays active on their visors. They’d have a clear view of any remaining defenders, and those defenders would struggle to acquire targets in return.

Sam knew she ought to be feeling some sort of awful, sinking pit in her stomach. She knew, in the forefront of her mind, that these old tactics, these millennia-old breaching drills, were poorly suited to anything but, frankly, police actions. She looked over at their kill, the shot and broken body wearing the dull gold fatigues. Outfitted for war. Just a disgruntled miner, sucked into Kaiser’s orbit by his radiating charisma? Just a flunky left over from the original defector company?

Or something more?

“Lieutenant, permission to speak?”

“Quickly.”

“We missed our window of opportunity. We should expect an ambush at the bottom. We should prepare heavier equipment.”

“Can it. We’re not missing our payday.”

“… Understood. Let me go first, Lieutenant.”

Sam couldn’t see most of Fae’s face under the visor, but she could easily imagine her eyes hardening and narrowing. “I told you to can it. Is this a knight’s honor thing?”

“No, ma’am. I believe this to be a dangerous duty I am well fit for, ma’am.”

Lieutenant Fae looked up at Sam. There was no denying that she was well fit for this duty. Her size alone—“they don’t make ‘em 6’3’’ in New Hope,” Al had quipped once—marked her instantly for one of the Knights of the Compact of Aquila, one of the elite rulers of the Dominion of the Compact, an heir to a long and storied lineage of warriors, the product of generations of carefully brokered genetic matches, and a woman terribly out of place in a mercenary company operating four planets outward from the Dominion’s home world of Bosporus. They all shared a vague suspicion that she couldn’t be a real knight, or else she’d be busy leading a division of the Dominion’s soldiers. But what that made her, besides Dominioner, nobody had figured out, and nobody had bothered to ask.

“Fine, if you’ll quit being a pain in the ass about everything,” Fae replied. “Bravo squad does breach. Al and Stimwell do the grenades; Sam hits the hole. Ray and Dan,” she continued, pointing at two of the riflemen from her Alpha squad, “are in after Sam. The three of you tell us what you see, and I’ll dispatch Bravo and Charlie.”

A few minutes later, two bangs ornamented by an aural lattice of ping-ping-ping shrapnel impacts echoed up the elevator. A half-heartbeat later, Sam swung herself over the edge and slid down the ladder poles into the hiss of the smoke grenade.

Her boots hit the tread plate with a hollow thump, and she lifted her rifle up to ready and turned to get her bearings. Orange blotches and little yellow flecks on the thermal scan showed where the grenades had exploded and the shrapnel had heated the metal surfaces of the corridor as they struck at deadly speeds. Nothing else was hot down here—so, no human bodies. The pattern left behind by the grenades was enough to help make out the outlines of the corridor. A single wide and tall set of open bay doors faced this platform, and the corridor beyond was straight for a short distance before disappearing into the deep purple darkness that lay beyond the thermal scanner’s effective range. The corridor seemed to support two levels of catwalks partway up its height, one about two meters over Sam’s head.

Sam noted the little red pips at the corner of her visor for the visual and magnetic scan modes, indicating those the scanners’ filter readings were too homogeneous: that is to say, it was too dark in there for visual light and too uniformly metallic for a useful magscan, so thermal was probably the most useful scan. On a hunch, however, she flipped to magscan.

And then she threw herself desperately against the left wall of the corridor, taking cover behind a support column for the catwalk above.

“Sam to Alpha lead,” she shouted, as a menacing hum emitted from further down the corridor. “Delay assault!”

“You’d better not be fucking with me, Private,” Fae replied over the radio.

Metal pounded on metal down the corridor.

“In no way, ma’am,” Sam snarled, unable to contain herself in the urgency. “Contact, one full squad of battle armor, dead ahead on the hallway.”

“What the—” Fae’s reply was cut off by the roar of fire as four huge guns let loose in the corridor. Sparks rained down as the big bullets slammed into the column and then ricocheted haphazardly about the corridor. The rush of expelled gases and a heavy sliding noise at the back end of each booming report gave away these guns as large, armor-mounted recoilless rifles, stabilized by the ejection of gaseous countermass and cycled by ponderous electrical autoloaders. “—ack up here, NOW!”

“Negative, Lieutenant,” Sam said. “If I get on that ladder I’m dead.” She lowered herself to one knee, altering her target profile behind column in case a round got through it. One, two, three, four, five…

The hallway filled with noise and sparks and death. They had failed to hit Sam again. She had been lucky—and she was getting sick of having to be lucky.

Seven or so seconds to make a move. Sam looked up. The catwalk? A beam had been left dangling by the last assault. That was it. But she was running low on time…

She had an idea, but she had to get lucky one more time. Judging from the way the thudding footsteps were getting closer, there was only one more time to get lucky.

She ripped a grenade off of her belt and hooked a finger through the pin. Three, two, one…

BANG. Metal slugs danced about the hallway, but, for one last time, none slammed into Sam. But the column shattered, spraying shards of brittle steel toward the service elevator, and metal groaned above her.

Sam hurled the grenade down the hall at the hulking yellow-orange blobs in her scanner, subtle irregularities in the neon-yellow magscan rendering of the corridor. It landed at their feet, and she crouched behind the stump of the column as the catwalk sagged lower toward her.

One… two… three!

With four seconds left before the next volley, she swung herself up onto the sagging catwalk and scrambled further up. Then, right before the volley was supposed to go off, she flattened herself, and the grenade exploded in a gout of heat and flames. It would singe the paint on the armor, or, at best, maybe knock one on its ass. But the heat of the grenade’s explosion, right in their faces, would overwhelm their thermal scanners, if only for just a moment, and by the time they could see again…

Sam was two meters above them and ten meters behind them, pounding farther down the corridor and around a corner.

Fae’s voice came in weakly, struggling to tread water over a great ocean of static.

“Like I’m saying, Sam, I can’t come down there and get you.”

“I understand, Lieutenant. I’m not asking you to come get me. I’m advising to make an assault in order to fulfill the contract, or else evacuate and leave me behind.”

“Think past your damn bravado for a second, Dominioner. Just sit tight. They need to surface at some point. You evade them, or surrender if you need to, and we’ll bait them out to attack.”

Sam shook her head in the darkness of this forgotten service corridor, barely more than a duct between two corridors accessible from the uppermost catwalks. “Negative. Our enemy is military. We do not benefit from ceding to them the tactical initiative.”

“But you want to assault them? Against battle armor?”

Sam sighed. “Don’t we have naval lasers aboard the SSTO? If I can activate the elevator…”

“Out of the question.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so. I’m not taking a risk like that. With you or with your platoon mates.”

“We’re taking a greater risk by sitting on our haunches,” Sam said, as evenly as she could. Her hands trembled with the effort of restraining her frustration. Or maybe that was just adrenaline.

There was a brief silence. Then, Fae said, “Sam, evade them. We’ll get them topside and cut them up. Fae out.”

Sam resisted the urge to slam her fist into the corridor wall—her enemies could be listening—and instead shook her empty hands lamely as if that would whisk the anger off into the stale air.

She looked left, looked right, sighed, raised her rifle, and tiptoed down to the left.

Sam crept low along the upper catwalk. As tempting as it was to peek over and get eyes on the ground, her ears would do a fine job, and they wouldn’t risk giving her away.

She followed this corridor—perpendicular to the one that led to the service elevator—to take her deeper into the complex, away from her searching enemies. It went for a fair distance (100 meters, Sam guessed) before the catwalks terminated in rails. The walls of the corridor near its end were lined with flat lifts: three on the left, three on the right, and three at the terminal wall of the corridor. The lifts had been summoned to different levels, seemingly at random.

The nearest lift was on the level of the catwalk below. Sam stopped and listened to the silence for a beat before peeking over the side. With all clear and quiet, she mounted the nearest ladder and crept down to the lower catwalk.

The lift surface was dusty—these lifts hadn’t moved in untold years. But the doors that the lift had risen to all those years ago were open. Sam peeked inside.

She pulled back and froze.

A few seconds later, when she was satisfied that fire and death were not forthcoming, she peeked back in again and then stepped inside.

Two steely humanoid forms, two-and-a-half meters tall from heel to helm, were harnessed to the wall. They were ugly things, all boxy volume, welded plates, and sharp corners. EAP conduits—Electro-Active Polymers, artificial muscles—ran in bundles at the calves and down the upper arms. Huge squarish gauntlets were painted with danger stripe and terminated in beefy-looking steel hands with stubby but fully-articulated digits. The integrated helmets had dual, bug-eyed lenses, shielded from a high-power forehead lamp by a brim.

Sam marked them for industrial exoskeletons. Probably mining suits, old, ugly, and long forgotten in this strange underground complex.

But a half-ton of steel was a half-ton of steel.

Sam checked the corridor one more time, and then she ducked back into the exoskeleton bay.

She removed her plate carrier and dumped it on the ground, most of the bits and bobs of her kit going with it. Her gray-green battledress jacket went down next, and then, wearing her cool cotton-blend combat shirt, Sam stepped up to the first of the exoskeletons. She felt around the back for the integral power pack and found it, housed in a tall half-cylinder running up the back, looking something like an oversized oxygen tank. She turned a dial and felt the hum of systems coming to life.

And with it, a tiny thrill.

After giving it a moment to allow the power pack to reach operating output levels, Sam ran her hand along the flanks of the exoskeleton until she found a steel lip on its right side, and she pulled. The chest cavity swung open on a hinge on the left flank, a bundle of tensed EAPs wrapped around a thick steel pin now supporting the huge weight of the front shell.

She backed in, feeding her legs down into the exoskeleton’s legs and pressing her back into the polymer liner. She found the belt of a harness on her left and drew it across her waist just above her hips, feeding it into a receiver in the liner on her right. The harness was a segmented framework of steel, and with a hiss and a click, it pulled tight at the waist.

Sam fed her arms into the suit’s arms, through the banded loops at the upper and lower arms, and found the hand grips in the gauntlets. She gripped them tight and brought them up, feeling the EAP bundles in the arms respond to the movements of her arms, moving dozens of kilograms of steel in each arm as effortlessly as if it were her own skin.

With the right arm, she reached across and pulled the front shell closed, and then she pulled the helmet down over her head.

“Sam to Alpha lead.”

“Alpha lead here. What is it?”

“I found an old mining exoskeleton in here. I have it powered up. Moving to rendezvous.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m very serious, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Fae sighed. The exoskeleton’s sensitive radio receivers and excellent signal correction systems relayed it to Sam’s ears with admirable clarity.

“Evade, damnit. Don’t go picking a fight. We want to draw them up and out into the trap.”

“I read you loud and clear. Sam out.”

Sam pounded down the corridor, her exoskeleton’s steel soles screeching, grinding, and slamming against the tread-plated floor. She tracked along the right-hand wall, watching branching corridors to the left swing slowly into and out of view, then snapping her head to the right as she tore out into the intersections.

With the unholy sound this thing made at running speed, there was no doubt that her foes had noticed her. The only question was whether her titanic footfalls would give away her exact position or echo deceptively throughout this cavernous complex.

It was getting warm in the suit: the integral power pack felt hot like bricks in the summer sun through the plate on her back, and the EAPs driving the exoskeleton’s arms and legs were likewise warming up to the power coursing through them. Sam felt thankful that the helmet lining had been thoughtfully designed to absorb the sweat on her brow. That would be small comfort, though, if she couldn’t break through quickly to the elevator and had to play cat-and-mouse with the four armored foes. She’d be lit up like a Christmas tree on the thermal scanner.

And then she had another thought: the team of battle armor that had nearly killed her at the service elevator hadn’t appeared on her thermal scan. They must have planned to hide in the darkness of the corridor, powered down to avoid running hot and being seen. A clever little play, made possible by fifteen minutes of prep time. She thought back to the marksman who had nearly killed her. He had set up a firing position on that narrow sill at the top of the ladder, and he had taken Ethan full in the chest at at least 300 meters.

These weren’t a bunch of idiot yahoos with a bone to pick. This was a fighting force. Better than outland pirates; better, even, than most principality garrisons…

She was yanked from her ruminations by an irregularity on her thermal scan. Down the corridor to her right, down a turn she intended to take, she saw a red blur cross the hallway. She cursed: she didn’t want to take this fight, but she needed to. If she let this one find backup, this close to her exit, she was doomed.

She pounded down the hall as fast as she could, and then she whipped around the corner. Still at a full sprint, she brought her rifle up to level and held down the trigger.

About two thirds of her shots plinked uselessly against walls and the other third plinked uselessly against the armor under the red blur. But what mattered was the threat: that one stupid shot could penetrate the soft rear face of a joint and cut a power cable or cooling tube. Her foe turned to take the bullets on their front plates.

Sam charged.

Her lone adversary had time to lift and fire one gigantic slug from their recoilless rifle. As the bore swung up to face her, a void with death at its bottom, Sam said a prayer and lifted her left hand, bracing it against her chest and helmet like a boxer’s high guard.

The concussive bang of the rifle was dulled considerably by the environment seal of the exoskeleton, but a horrid clang and squeal shot through the metal bones of the suit as the slug impacted and skidded along the oversized steel-plated gauntlet. The thick hunk of metal was originally meant to serve as a shield against ejected rock and ore while operating heavy drilling equipment or explosives up close. But in a pinch…

The faceless enemy held the rifle level for a beat as the next round began clanging into the chamber on the automatic feed belt, but they realized that Sam would be on them too quickly. They held the huge barrel point-forward to try to spear Sam like it was a lance—or at least blunt the momentum of her charge—but that was a fatal mistake. Sam jammed her right foot into the ground just to the right of the barrel, near the breech, in what would have been an athletic slide, but the sheer weight, angle, and steel-on-steel impact against the corridor floor simply brought her entire augmented mass to a halt.

Then she grabbed the barrel and wrenched it forward.

This was something her enemy wasn’t prepared for. Whoever they were, they weren’t used to CQB in this battle armor—it wasn’t made for that anyway. So, clutching the huge recoilless rifle, they fell forward with it.

Face down on the floor, there was only one way to end it.

Sam balled up the oversized mining gauntlets together and crushed down on the back of the armor’s neck.

“I’m at the elevator. The control panel here is either broken, powered down, or locked.”

“Roger. Control station further down, you think?”

“Affirmative.”

“Dismount and come on up the ladder.”

Sam muted her microphone to sigh within the safe confines of the sealed exoskeleton. She switched it back on.

“We can’t abandon this equipment to them. This is our chance to make good on the capture. Our only chance. You want the payday?”

“God damnit Sam.”

“Let me take the opportunity to recon. They’re pulling back; I can take advantage of that. And if they do take a shot, I might survive in this armor. Besides, even if they take the bait on the trap up there, we’ll need to get in to find Kaiser himself.”

“FINE. Don’t come up here, then. I’d rather you not get killed; I don’t want to have to do the goddamn paperwork. But apparently I can’t do anything to stop you. Do your damn recon. Report back.”

“Yes ma’am. Sam out.”

The next half-hour of plodding through the complex proved uneventful but enlightening. This side of the complex was a grid network of four north-south corridors and four east-west corridors, each ending in a roughly square chamber. The northmost chamber in the east was the elevator; most of the rest of the chambers were wide, tall, and bare, but for catwalks and cables slopping about from the ceiling: Empty armored vehicle bays. The ones that weren’t vehicle bays were multi-tiered armor bays, similar to the one where Sam had found the exoskeletons. These, however, were empty. With the addition of the interior chambers between the corridors, this armory could have stored and staged enough equipment for a full armored cavalry battalion with infantry support. Just two of the bays were closed and locked; the rest were open and empty.

The Kaiser hadn’t holed up here by accident, Sam thought.

The corridor second-from-the-bottom on the west end stretched further into the complex, into darkness.

Sam toggled back on her thermal scanner as she crept down the hallway, doing her best to suppress the footfalls of her suit from “hideous clanging and screeching” to “heavy thumping.”

The corridor terminated at an airtight personnel door in the wall, dwarfed by the size of the steel wall it was set in. Sam flipped her radio to her squad channel.

“Sam to Alpha lead.”

Static.

It was as she had figured; she was too deep for the signal to reach. Sam listened for another moment before flipping the radio off, wrenching with one armored hand on the hatch-wheel until it spun loose, and pulling the door open.

This interior hallway was empty, and, as Sam discovered when she flipped to visual light on her visor, wood-paneled and lit by florescent lights set in a drop ceiling. Twenty meters away, there was another hatch-style door, and halfway down the hall on the right-hand wall, a wooden door. The matted carpet was once, as near as Sam could tell, a lively and practical naval blue, but now it was visibly moldy, packed down by decades of foot traffic, and tracked over with grime.

Training her seized recoilless rifle at the opposite door, Sam stalked down the hall to the wooden door at the halfway mark. She pushed it open.

Sam’s heart skipped a beat.

This control center was as wide as the hallway was long. Two rows of instruments and operations terminals, dead and still, ran from the left wall to the right wall, parted by a central walkway of decrepit blue carpet running from the door to the opposite wall. The opposite wall was a wide glass pane, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, offering a commanding view of a spaceport launch zone.

There, a Neptune-class assault lander towered 100 meters into the open sky from atop its launching struts. Clouds of vented H2 gas billowed about beneath it as it prepared for launch.

One gangway was still attached to an open hatch on the dorsal side of the oblong, stubby-winged monster, just off-center from where Sam was facing. At its base, through a momentary part in the clouds of H2, Sam caught a familiar glint of steel. She switched to thermal scan. Not far from the liquid fuel engine nozzles beneath the craft, shrouded in a shifting cool blue haze, there stood three orange blurs, holding steely recoilless rifles.

Of course! Why hadn’t she thought of it? All of their operations screamed delaying action, but Sam had never considered what they might be delaying for. How close were they to liftoff if they were buying time in ten minute increments with snipers and rear-guard ambushes?

Sam glanced back up at the Neptune. Four shallow-domed turrets clung to this side of the ship, spouting paired barrels of various shapes and sizes. That was probably six laser weapons and two naval-grade autocannons that could be trained on Sam if she gave herself away here. This exoskeleton might—might—withstand a brief flash of energy from one of the mounted lasers. But the autocannons were certain death… and a closed casket at the funeral.

The defensive armament on the vessel alone outgunned the entire Dread Fist Company at full strength, to say nothing of whatever might be inside. Kaiser was no cornered rat. He was a power unto himself, and wherever he was preparing to go now…

… Didn’t matter as much as the fact that he was getting away. There was only one thing to do. Report.

Sam crept forward, keeping low and as quiet as she could in this clumsy metallic second skin. She found a terminal that had a familiar, friendly layout of dials and and spectrometers: the communication operator’s desk. She felt around for a switch or a power indicator to try to get it enabled on primary or backup power. If this fed into a transmitter/receiver somewhere up high, maybe it could reach Alpha lead…

Sam saw an evil glint out of the corner of her eye, and she ducked.

A glassy crack rang out into the room as a large-caliber slug punched a hole in the reinforced windows of the control room.

Sam lay flat for a second, holding her own huge rifle close. She wasn’t dead yet.

She rolled the cumbersome suit over until she lay supine in the central walking path, her steel feet framing the Neptune. She clutched the recoilless rifle. When she had stolen it from her fallen foe in the armory, she had been relieved to see that it was only partially integrated with the battle armor. It had its own trigger, handle, and receiver; the only thing that was truly integral to the battle armor was the power for the round-cycling system and the ammunition storage.

And so she had taken it, knowing that she could operate it, but with one severe drawback. Every shot would count, and after every shot…

She contracted with her EAP abdominals until she was sitting up in a half-seated position, aiming down the sights of the rifle, an optic tube fixed to the receiver at an angle. She snapped to a target, finding a blocky, menacing steel helm under the crosshairs. She squeezed the trigger and heard the boom fill the room behind her. There was another flash and movement of steel as the figure dropped out of her sights.

Without looking to see what had become of her target, she rolled back to prone, just to be in a different place, and she reached for another round in the exoskeleton’s upper arm storage block. Without the benefit of her foes’ battle armor ammunition feed systems, she was forced to manually breech load every shot she wanted to take, like an early modern Terran line infantryman.

A line of one, Sam thought bitterly.

She held the breech open with the stiff, augmented strength of her metal arm, she fed the round in with her other hand, and she released the action, which snapped itself shut like a slamming truck door.

She rose to one knee behind one of the instrument consoles and brought her rifle to ready over the top, searching for a target at the foot of the Neptune.

There were none. The launch pad was clear. The Neptune hatches were closed, and the gangway was separating.

Uh oh.

The swirling, vented gases on the launchpad puffed outward suddenly, and an eighth-second later, a deep, oppressive bass thrum filled the air.

A second later, the pressure wave blew out the compromised window of the control center.

Sam switched off the exoskeleton’s external audio channels and braced flat on the floor moments before the building came crashing down on her.

The gauntlet felt no further resistance as it reached open air.

Sam dragged herself out of the rubble carefully, trying to avoid emerging immediately into a four-story tumble. The mining exoskeleton, having been pressed into service as light battle armor, was finally getting a chance to excel at its original purpose: protecting its operator in the case of an unanticipated tunnel collapse.

The Neptune had taken off. Kaiser had gotten away. Sam had been spared being crushed by tons of concrete and rebar, but nothing could spare her the feeling of defeat pressing on her chest instead. Good merc companies weren’t supposed to botch contracts like this. Good mercs delivered.

Sam hadn’t delivered.

When she could finally see daylight out of her visor—after several minutes of waiting and then digging and crawling—the Neptune was long gone from visual range. The smoke was dense, so she flipped over to magscan to get the lay of the land. The launch gantries and umbilical structures looked worse for the wear: some of the parts had been blasted away where decades of neglect had weakened their connections. Near a lump of struts and conduits, there was a smaller, shinier metallic heap: a fallen battle armor, disabled by Sam’s single shot from the control center. If the operator had survived the rifle fire, they had been crushed and incinerated by the energy of the launch.

Sam half-scrambled, half-climbed down the ruined face of the building. It, too, had been ill-maintained over the years, and the breach in the control center window had been the final insult to its integrity. The launch had devastated the entire wing of the complex. As Sam put her steel feet down on the concrete launch pad, she began to wonder how she could get back into the armory wing, which seemed like the surest way to rendezvous and report.

She flipped open the box on her flank and fiddled with her radio controls. Maybe with the Neptune airborne, the rest of the company might have changed their plans. If they had taken the King up, maybe she could reach them, and finally, report.

What would she say? What should she have done better? Could she have presented a more attractive target, to bait the Kaiser to retain more forces and keep the Neptune grounded? Or would that have freed up the Neptune’s weapons, which had been locked during the final launch sequence? Could she have pressed Fae harder to begin the assault fifteen minutes earlier, to defeat the armor squad before they were ready and seize the launch pad?

Was this on Dread Fist Company leadership? Their intel was sparse and they had completely failed to pursue more, before and during the operation. And their tactics were archaic. Breaching with rifles and grenades might have bagged them their marks back during the Jan-10 War, but it wouldn’t work now. The Knights of Aquila had changed the face of infantry combat with their power armor, and the company needed to catch up or perish.

But wasn’t that too easy, just to blame them? Sam had been heedless, perhaps; reckless in her rush to prove to her leaders that aggression and initiative would win the day. Had her mistakes ultimately brought them failure?

As she thought ahead to the bitter work of the after-action report, she rotated the radio channel dial one tick at a time. A procession of differently-textured whines and static blankets cycled through her ears, until, suddenly, a crystal clear signal came through.

“… We lay down our lives for Volga. Will we go silently?” A chorus of voices could be heard shouting “No!” in the background. “No. Our hand has been forced. Our hand has been forced. We’ve done all we can, for so long, but the powers that be would not tolerate it. Would keep us down in this anguish, for years, for centuries. You understand what I’m saying. But now I will not tolerate it. I will not give up my dignity, and neither will you. I know you won’t.”

Sam frowned. She considered what she knew about Kaiser. In the company briefing, back in the wood-paneled meeting room at HQ that smelled like sour cigarette smoke, they had put up a slide with Johan Hect’s New Hope contract-passport on the left and some terse bullet points on the right. His ID listed him as tall and heavy, 191 cm and 95kg. His face was round and slightly flabby, but with an oddly prominent, taut chin. His eyes seemed to smile, even twinkle. It was an odd image to try to comport with the thin, sandy voice—it must be his, right?—being broadcast now.

He was supposed to be given to narcissism and ambition, having defected from the Salemo principality militia with a modest fraction of his company to set up a half-mercenary, half-bandit gang headquartered half the world away, on this remote island of Resmond. Was that what she was hearing now? Narcissism and ambition? The ideas all fit, but awkwardly, smashed in a bit at the edges, in a way Sam struggled to understand.

But what she could certainly understand was a Neptune-class orbital assault ship, crewed by at least three dozen and capable of transporting a full-strength armored battalion.

Her contemplations were cut short, however, by the squealing of metal bearings and springs. A large metal door was sliding open, revealing a bay in the wall to her right, about 300 meters across the expanse of concrete and debris.

Worse, the squealing wasn’t actually caused by deteriorating ball bearings or hinges. It was too clean, too even, too keen.

It was the scream of a fusion engine coming online.

“This won’t be our legacy, no. But it is a step—a step toward that legacy. One foot in front of the other, on the path of…”

Sam slapped the radio receiver off and sprinted for the nearest cover, a crumpled gangway. As she neared it, the walker stepped out of the bay. Once it had cleared wide of the metal doors, she could make out its magscanned form in oranges and reds against the green backdrop: eight and a half meters tall, a lean, wide, beak-like torso mounted atop a pair of reverse-jointed legs. A Fusilier, Sam knew immediately. Two boxy appendages bracketed the torso, giving this machine away as one of the variants that mounted a pair of ordnance launch pods. A barrel spouted from under the metal beast’s chin, probably a laser weapon or a machine gun for secondary armament.

Why did they leave it and its pilot behind? Had they run out of room? Did they intend to hold this complex with a garrison? Did they just want to bloody the mercs on their tail?

With the analysis and calculation run as far as they could, Sam had a moment to feel the surge of terror and adrenaline. Right now, she had a battle to fight. Just her against 30 tons of high-tech weapons and malice.

Then, with her heart pounding against her armored chest, she left her cover and sprinted for the next lump of scrap, ten meters to her right, ten meters away from the center of the expansive launch pad.

The walker seemed to snap to attention, its torso tracking Sam’s movement for the two seconds she spent exposed. Sam noticed a strange, intense rippling pattern in the magscan and a violent hiss by her feet.

She threw herself down behind the heap of fallen trusses, slamming her steel back against it and breathing hard. That’s when she realized what the magscan pattern and noise were: the Fusilier had taken a shot at her! That barrel on the chin was a laser weapon, which had melted steel and pavement not a full meter behind Sam and to her left as she ran.

Lucky, again. Just a few moments of angle closer and that laser could have bored into her chest and cooked her in her armor. Or taken a leg off below the hip. Or…

Sam shook her head. What was important is that she knew now: one anti-infantry laser. Now, were those guided missiles or dumb rocket pods on its flanks?

She turned around, searched the fallen trusses, and found an angle to peek through the tangle of steel without exposing herself too much. The Fusilier was thumping around, circling, forcing her to move soon. She couldn’t quite make out the magscan silhouette well enough, but she had a guess…

Sam sidled around, keeping the mass of metal between herself and the stalking battle walker. One, two minutes crept on, as she kept herself out of the line of fire. The Fusilier drew closer, hesitantly. The pilot was probably taking care not to let Sam surprise them and claw her way onto the walker’s frame: a risky pain in the ass for the Fusilier, even if it would win an engagement like that nine times out of ten.

Sam stopped and flipped the visor to visual light, peeking through the trusses.

The pods on the side… three tubes each, meant for narrow, long missiles.

Long-ranged missiles! Meant for indirect fire, but could be guided by the walker’s own sensors in a pinch…

She ducked back down. One infantry laser and two guided missile launch systems. If she stayed in close, she’d have a hole burned through her body sooner rather than later. But if she ran out of the laser’s effective range, all it would take is one guided missile out of six to cripple her exoskeleton or kill her outright.

Unless…

She slid open the breech of the rifle a few centimeters. The brassy round with its perforated cartridge lay menacingly in the chamber. She let it clack shut.

Sam wheeled out around the truss, aimed, and fired, like an action hero with no regard for her personal safety.

The Fusilier winced as the round ricocheted off its canopy. A glancing shot. A scuff—not even a puncture or a crack—was all that marked the round’s passage across the armored viewport.

But by the time the pilot had recovered from their own reflexes and brought the machine’s weapons back to bear, Sam had already pounded tens of meters worth of pavement away from it. She was safely behind an upturned service vehicle before the walker could trigger another salvo of deadly heat and light from the laser cannon. She had reset the distance between herself and the bird-legged beast.

The Fusilier began its slow spiral in toward the service truck, again, circling to force Sam to scramble awkwardly around it, closing to ensure that she could not do so forever. One foot in front of the other, it closed in, laser cannon trained on the vehicle, ready to snap to one side and terminate its target.

Seventy seconds later, it stood directly over the service truck. Its quarry was no longer there. It stared hard at the ruined vehicle beneath it for a second. Then, the pilot probably switched from magscan to thermal imaging, then from thermal to visual light. At some point they would have noticed the discarded exoskeleton lying in a heap of parts by the truck’s cab.

Sam, meanwhile, was two hundred meters away, the distance growing with her every stride.

It was a long shot to hit such a small target with a laser, but not for a guided missile salvo. But by the time the pilot had primed a missile to fire, they had realized their error: now that their target was dismounted, its signature was far too weak for a lock.

Sam made it the last hundred meters to the walker bay and the tunnels within, and the Fusilier watched her go.

Knights and Lieges

2120 26 April 1021 EH

Lars Bruun Station, Low Volga Orbit

“And from the launch zone you were able to find your way back into the armory wing of the complex. Which you say was a…”

“Eridani Federation Armory, sir.”

The heavyset man rubbed his temples, which disturbed his cap. He looked, every centimeter of him, a major: the stocky, strong body of a lifelong athlete, the short, pale fuzz atop his head, a wide chin and faint jowls of authority. But his uniform was always ruffled, pushed a few degrees and a few centimeters out of place by his restless mannerisms.

He opened his eyes again and rested his arms on his desk, covering the report.

In the beat of silence, Sam became aware of the way one of the recessed lights in this tiny office was installed above the ceiling fan, so that the fan’s shadow spun distractingly around everything.

“I doubt it. Volga has seen some damn fighting over the years. I could hardly believe that the Federation would abandon a treasure trove like that down there.”

“If you say so, sir. But it would explain where Kaiser was able to find a Neptune.”

Major Inman waved a meaty hand to banish the thought. “Who knows how long he’s had that beast. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Xīn Guójiā had something to do with that, arming dissidents all over the system like they are.”

“But is that not the problem, sir? How long has he had that thing?”

The major sighed. Sam barreled on.

“Kaiser has armor. He has cavalry. He might have a whole battalion of both. Why did he leave that Fusilier behind? The worst case scenario is that the assault ship was full up of even nastier surprises.”

“We can’t go focusing on the worst case, now, Arif.”

“But my point is we don’t know. We don’t have the intel. We need to press our employer for more, or we need to do more extensive reconnaissance…”

“Don’t worry about it. We won’t be doing all that.”

Sam drew up short. “… We won’t?”

“No. We’re going to cut bait on this one.”

“You can’t… we can’t. We couldn’t. Right?”

“We can and will. We’ll send a quick message to our liaison with Her Highness as a courtesy, but it doesn’t really matter. No proof of capture; no payday. They know how to handle this. I’m sure they’ve contracted mercs before who just haven’t come back or have ghosted them anyway.”

Sam snapped her mouth shut, dumbfounded. After sorting through and filtering out some of her more straightforward thoughts—How could we? Just give up, like cowards? Don’t we have any pride at all? Aren’t we professionals?—she found one that might have purchase.

“It isn’t over yet. A Neptune isn’t exactly hard to find in orbit.”

“And what, do you propose, we do about a Neptune, with God knows what aboard?”

“We figure it out! We have resources and room to maneuver…”

“But we don’t have the firepower for this, Private. The juice is not worth the squeeze.”

“Then we—”

“No we don’t, Sam. This one isn’t worth the money. Dismissed.”

Sam slammed her mouth shut again. She realized she was leaning with both hands on the major’s desk. Looming, really. The major leaned back in his chair, everything about him just slightly askew, his mouth slanted and lips pursed in annoyance.

She drew herself up, saluted, and withdrew.

An hour later, there was a knock at the door of Sam’s quarters: three businesslike thunks on the hollow metal.

Sam sat up, set her book down on the nightstand, and swung her feet out off the bunk and onto the ground. In just two steps she was at the door, flicking the switch to slide it open.

Out in the quiet hallway stood Lieutenant Fae, still wearing her battledress and cover. With her full combat helmet discarded, Sam could see faint bags under her dark eyes, and that she looked like she was chewing on the inside of her cheek. She held a manila folder.

“Ma’am,” Sam said. This didn’t look good.

“At ease, Sam.”

Sam eyed the folder.

“No, you’re not getting drummed out. You have a chair in here? Want to sit?”

Sam looked back and chuckled. There was a rack—a narrow bed just barely long enough for Sam’s comfort—made up with standard navy blue sheets, bracketed by storage compartments above and below. There was a cheap aluminum bedstand by the head, a little LED reading lamp, and the waiting book. There were a pair of locked trunks and a swivel chair pushed up against the wall where a desk was folded up. “Just the one. You want it or the bed?”

“That’s alright then. Here.” Fae handed the folder over. Sam took it and flipped it open. It was thick with printouts. The first few pages looked like dossiers, with black-and-white headshots at the top and blurbed descriptions stretching below. Dozens of the pages after that were dense with words, top-to-bottom. The last thing in the bundle was a little passport booklet. Inside was a travel visa: Salemo, Volga.

“It sure looks like I’m getting drummed out.”

“No, I promise. Sam, you’re a good soldier; we wouldn’t do that to you. The major said when he debriefed you, you seemed upset that we’d abandon the contract.”

“Upset sounds so pathetic. I did object, though.”

“Sure,” Fae replied. “So, he had a talk with the Colonel. The Colonel decided that maybe there’s a way forward here.”

Sam took the visa out of the passport booklet. Her own steel gray eyes looked back at her from the first page. “Salemo. Princess De Myrre holds our contract, right? I’m being sent to apologize?”

Fae kept chewing on the inside of her cheek.

“Officially you’re being sent to liaise. So… yes. But the Colonel told me that he wants you to take this one further. You told them we should gather more intel, right? You might be just the person to do it.”

Sam kept her expression carefully neutral. I’m a soldier, not a spy. But… I am a professional, aren’t I? “All right. So question one is why Her Highness sent us to collect the head of a man who just so happens to have come across enough materiel to outfit an EF marine battalion for a planetary assault. So I go ask her. Or someone close to her; I suppose that might be smarter.” She tucked the papers back into the folder and tried on a smile. “I think I can do this.”

Fae fidgeted.

“Ma’am?” Sam asked.

“Sam, I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s… unusual.”

Sam had to laugh at that. “Well, apparently innovation is in my wheelhouse.”

“But it’s not in command’s. You know? You know how they work. The kind of orders they give. I don’t know what they’re thinking here, but it doesn’t smell right.”

Sam tapped the manila folder to her chin and thought, staring vaguely in the direction of Fae’s neck. “The major told me the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, so the move we’d expect from them is to abandon the contract. They’re sending me along with implicit permission to not do that.”

“Right. Why?”

“Because I won them over with my appeal to their professional pride?”

Fae rolled her eyes.

“Okay, okay,” Sam said. “Unlikely. How about because they have such a willing volunteer in me?”

“Doesn’t change the math. You gotta figure that wherever this path takes you, there’s several hundred tons of frontline-grade armor and guns waiting for you at the end of it. Just because you’re hopping at the chance to get at them doesn’t mean that suddenly we can take that fight.”

“It’s our job to figure out a way,” Sam mused.

“Sam, you are such a good soldier, but come on. You know the Colonel made a reasonable call to forfeit the contract. And you know it’s weird that he’s backtracked, and now he’s going to let you go down alone to sort it out. I think this is dangerous. I don’t want you to do this.”

Sam looked at the ground, realizing now how Fae had been trying to lead to that point. She really did care. She really did want Sam to stay safe. And she really was doing her utmost to make her case carefully, plying at just the right angle that Sam might find agreeable.

And she was right, wasn’t she? This would be a solo run into uncertain territory, dealing with an employer who had possibly been withholding important information about an adversary. An adversary with considerable resources and connections. It was, at the best, dangerous. At the worst it was suicidal.

But it was her job, wasn’t it?

“I’ll be careful, ma’am.”

Sam sat toward the end of the row of seats facing the wide rectangular viewport. Right out the center of it, thirty thousand kilometers below, the huge blue-green-white orb of Volga swirled.

Since the rest of the gate was outfitted in an impossibly drab shade of gray-blue, the viewport was a popular view, and this whole row of sixteen seats was occupied by an assortment of Sam’s anonymous fellow travelers. There were a few dozen other people sitting and standing around: mostly, it seemed, business travelers, although probably not the young couple in the corner, and the priest in the cassock and collar was likely on a somewhat different sort of business.

Behind Sam, the long starboard concourse of Lars Bruun station hummed with activity. Spacecraft from throughout the Eridani system—three of the four terrestrial planets, as well as some from a few of the moons of the two gas giants, Nile and Yangtze—berthed regularly at the port concourse, carrying with them a steady stream of travelers, almost all of them continuing down to Volga’s surface on one of the SSTOs here. Many were citizens of the interplanetary Eridani Federation, come to do a few months (or, sometimes, a few years) of work with its massive chartered Volga Enterprises Company. Others were coming in from the moons of Yangtze for a temperate vacation, to admire the wide oceans or primeval forests here, or on business of their own. Still others were refugees from Indus, its densely populated northern continent reeling from another bloody change of governance.

No craft came in from Bosporus. The peace between the Dominion of the Compact and the Eridani Federation was icy and fragile, and while the Federation was not sovereign over the whole or even the majority of Volga, it commanded enough influence to freeze the Dominion out of the ports here. That was just as well, for Sam. It had been years since she’d crossed paths with another Dominioner, and she wasn’t looking forward to the day it happened.

A short woman with a huge belly appeared at the corner of Sam’s vision, piercing her ruminations. Sam stood, her duffel rising with her, already slung over her shoulder.

“Here, ma’am.”

The woman seemed shocked to see Sam rise, then collected herself. “Thank you,” she replied, stepping over and setting herself gingerly down in the seat.

“Happy to.”

“Are you with the militia, by chance?”

Sam sighed inwardly. All this work to pick out a nice subdued coat and slacks to travel with and it was still, apparently, blindingly obvious that she was a soldier. Or maybe it was just her height? That would explain the way the woman’s eyes momentarily widened when she first saw her.

Sam shook her head. “No, but Volga doesn’t have just one planetary militia. Unless you mean New Hope’s Marshals.”

The woman sighed. “I was told it would be complicated, but I’m still not sure I get it.”

Couldn’t blame her. “Right. Coming in from somewhere else?”

“Jī. Yangtze ten.”

“You have great English!” Chinese speakers were 80% or so majorities on most of the moons of the giant Yangtze. It seemed like a fair guess that she was speaking a second language here.

“Thank you. My family is in shipbuilding; English is very handy.”

“Well, in Yangtze there’s the major system government and a heap of smaller republics on some of the outer moons, right? Volga is a little bit like that, but it’s all on one world, and without the major government.”

“That must’ve been what my husband was trying to describe to me. But there’s no… ah… alliance, or confederation? If there were an invasion, who would fight it?”

Sam shrugged. “I mentioned the Marshals. New Hope is the biggest population center on the planet and the Marshals are its largest force under arms. But the real top dog is actually the Eridani Federation; its Volga Enterprises Company here has a ‘Home Guard’ that’s a full sized army, and then all of the other squabbling governments and almost-governments would just have to figure out how to protect themselves or hide under the EF-VEC umbrella.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not always pretty. Anyway, I’m with the local mercenary group headquartered here on Lars Bruun station.”

“Can I ask you a question, then?”

“Sure.”

“Is New Hope… safe?”

Sam rubbed her chin. “I thought it had a good reputation off-world.”

“I’m told there’s a lot of organized crime.”

“Ah, don’t let that deter you.”

The woman bit her lip. Sam waved a hand.

“It’s not quite like that. You don’t step in it unless you really mean it.”

“If you say so…”

“Is New Hope where you’re headed?”

“Well, no, I’m on a shuttle down to Daolan. But my husband says he’ll have work in New Hope. And I might, too, after the baby.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Shipbuilding, right? I assume you’re with a company. Their security people will be on it.”

“Oh. Thank you. I hope so. Where are y…”

At that moment, a chime called attention to the gate PA.

“Boarding is beginning for descent Delta Nineteen en route to Salemo. Please line up at the gate for check-in.”

Sam smiled. “Salemo. Zài jiàn.”

The woman returned her smile. “Safe travels.”

Sam stepped up to the end of the line, only nine travelers long, as the gate attendant fussed at the computer screen trying to prepare to check tickets. He looked up suddenly, his face a drama mask of condolence.

“I’m sorry, folks, but I have a last minute change of plans. Our planned touchdown at SLSA has been squeezed out of the schedule by today’s storms. But the royal port has offered us a gate. That’s SRQX. They’re offering quick connections to SLSA once the storms are out of the system.”

There was a hubbub, then, and Sam caught only one of the things said to the man at the computer:

“Well, damn, must be someone important on this descent.”

The gate attendant made a show of covering his PA mic and leaned forward, saying, “well, I wasn’t going to say it!”

In the end, one man stalked off to the transportation desk to book a new trip, but Sam and the other eight passengers lined back up for boarding.

Well, I knew they’d be expecting me, she thought to herself.

As she presented her ticket and prepared to disappear into the boarding bridge, she looked around and caught the eye of the woman from Jī. She gave a little wave and walked on, realizing too late that she had never gotten the woman’s name.

1420 27 April 1021 EH

Salemo Royal Palace, Volga

The skies above Salemo were clear but windy in anticipation of the storm that had so stopped up the major spaceport just to the west. After a bumpy descent, Sam and her fellow passengers stepped out onto the tarmac of a little private airfield, ringed by trees and chain link fencing.

A little retinue of civil servants (or, perhaps, household servants?) was waiting a polite distance from the bottom of the egress ramp of the Tonbo-class SSTO. They were wearing gray suits… with livery. Red and gold. Sam blinked.

The line of travelers trailed off in the direction of the staff, and Sam followed. There was a flurry of activity when they met as the household staff of the palace offered to take luggage. Sam was in the middle of protecting her duffel from one of the grasping attendants when a tall, thin, bespectacled man caught her eye. It was easy enough for him to do so—he was as tall as she was.

“Ms. Samantha Arif?” His voice was flat, disinterested, worn into that groove as if by long habit.

“Sir?” Sam replied.

“This way, please.”

While most of the entourage of travelers was channeled over to a staircase into one of the palace annexes, Sam followed the tall man across to a gate in the chain link fence, through it, and then into a waiting car (a classic affair in black, trimmed with chrome) under the eyes of a pair of security personnel (both sporting the crew cut-sunglasses-earpiece trio).

A short, wordless car ride later, another security guy opened her door, and she joined the tall man in a climb down a short flight of steps into a side door.

This was, apparently, the palace proper. Even this little back hall of the complex was outfitted ostentatiously, lined with alcoves flanked by painted columns holding up elaborately inlaid arch-work in a riot of colors, seemingly every corner studded with golden beads. It made for an odd contrast to the tall man walking ahead of Sam, he with the dark suit, simple velvet livery, and bored demeanor. The forest beyond the windows was dense with evergreen, over the tops of which could be seen a rolling landscape of grassy fields, tall groves, and little villages.

The tall man led Sam around a corner and held the door for her to step into a room. This was strikingly different. It was a conference room, with a wood-paneled wall, inoffensive gray carpet floor, and canister lighting in a drop ceiling. A woman sat at the table across from the door with a cup of coffee in front of her. A fresh pot sat on the maker over on a side table.

“Thanks, Henry,” the woman said. She was petite, wearing gray slacks, a pristine white shirt with the crispest collar Sam had ever seen, and a thin black belt to divide the two across her waist. Her face was neatly proportioned, with a flat chin and a short forehead, framed elegantly with sandy blonde curls.

“Yes, Your Highness,” he replied. The door was closed and the tall man was gone, as suddenly as he had appeared.

So this would be Princess De Myrre of Salemo.

“Sit, Private Arif.”

A lot of thoughts crossed Sam’s mind very quickly. Would “Sam, please, thank you” be a rude thing to say to a princess? Also, there had been a lot of security in the rest of the palace; why was there none by her person? Were you supposed to bow or shake hands? Or kiss her hand? What should Sam do about her duffel?

The last one, at least, was fairly easy to make sense of. Sam dumped her luggage on a chair near the door and pulled herself out a chair.

“Your Highness,” she said, simply.

“The pleasure is mine,” De Myrre replied. “I hope you found the reception comforting.”

“Well, it was nice not having to take a cab in. I’m surprised they found me on the tarmac, though.”

“How could they not?”

“I mean that they came and fetched me right away.”

De Myrre smiled. “That’s what I have people for, don’t I? Colonel Magnussen told me he was sending a representative, so I made sure Henry would know how to find you.”

Sam cocked an eyebrow. It had finally caught up to her what she found so strange about this scene: she had expected to wait in line, so to speak; to wait for the Princess of Salemo to find time in a very busy schedule to see a PFC in an orbital mercenary company about a scuffed contract. But here she was in the conference room, prepared with notes, all other appointments postponed, within 15 minutes of Sam’s touchdown planetside.

“So what did the Colonel tell you we were going to meet about?” Sam asked as she stood up to get some coffee from the pot.

“The word he used was liaise.”

“Sounds right. I’m surprised you’re so eager to meet me. That’s code language for ‘say we’re oh-so-sorry’.”

“The Kaiser matter is near to me,” the princess replied, with a little ironic emphasis on the assumed title.

“I’m hoping we can still nail him.”

De Myrre steepled her fingers and gazed out at Sam over them for a second. Then she smiled.

“Ballsy. You have plans to deal with an orbiting Neptune? I’m no general but I have enough education to know that’s a tough nut to crack.”

“Not yet,” Sam said, sitting down with the coffee. It was thin and bitter, cheap, like hotel coffee. “But even assault landers have weaknesses. They just usually have something to do with crew or logistics rather than armaments.”

“So what did you have in mind?”

“Intel. How’d he come by a Neptune? The Federation doesn’t just leave those things lying around. How does he plan to supply it? How does he intend to use it?”

“Are you concerned that he has the backing of the Federation?”

Sam thought. “It’s the obvious inference, but I wasn’t aware that the Federation had any bad blood with Salemo. It would be pretty stupid of them to try to give clandestine support to a coup with a huge, signature piece of military equipment like that.”

“What if the goal isn’t a coup?”

“Sure. But that’s what I’m here to ask about. What do you know? Did you have any idea about the Neptune? Not that you knew precisely about it, but did you have any inkling that he had outside connections or resources to draw on?”

“We were afraid he might’ve had pull with certain units he served with or the security services.” Sam’s ears perked. “But this is beyond what they could provide,” De Myrre continued, “and we figured that anybody who would’ve wanted to aid him just went with him in the first place. What, something interest you about that?”

“No, sorry, nothing. Continue, please,” Sam replied. But while the security connection couldn’t explain planetary assault gear, she thought, it suggested something about this meeting worth considering.

“At any rate, no, I don’t have more in the way of intel… that I can share freely, here. What we know about Kaiser since his defection is mostly furnished through an outside party. And…” De Myrre trailed off, eyes narrowed, searching for the words.

“They urged you to be discreet,” Sam said, filling in the blanks. “They don’t want it getting out that they know about the Kaiser or that they’re working with you.”

“They didn’t urge, they demanded.”

“Oh. I don’t imagine royalty much enjoys being demanded of.”

De Myrre tapped the table impatiently. “It’s all demands. ‘I demand your attention’ or ‘I demand recompense,’ I demand this, I demand that.” Then she smiled. “But you’re right. I didn’t much enjoy being demanded of my silence.”

“Well, what can we get? Sounds like they have what I need to get him. I need to know what he’s after, who is friends are, or where he’s getting his goods.”

The Princess paused again. Sam began to get the impression that this was a well-rehearsed maneuver.

“A meeting.”

“A meeting?”

“I can connect you with a trusted intermediary. They’ll interview you, see that your interests are aligned with theirs, and they’ll pass along what they know. I’m sure they have the knowledge you need.”

“And you’ll vouch for me?”

De Myrre sighed. “I already am.”

Sam wasn’t sure how to take that, so she chose to smile faintly and move on. “Right. Where and when?”

“It hasn’t been set up just yet but it will. I’ll demand it of them.” De Myrre smiled, flashing her teeth. “It’ll be New Hope, at the Sato hotel up in the Kai-A Prefecture. Tomorrow morning, provided you’re not too tired to travel tonight.”

“Of course not, ma’am.”

“Excellent. You’ll take a jet to the city’s port in an hour. From there you’ll need to find a cab or a bus, but Kai-A prefecture is easy to get to and around. A hotel room will be booked in your name. Give Henry your local or system net address and I’ll have him send you final details about the meeting.”

“I’ll be ready.”

The Princess stood, and Sam with her.

“A pleasure,” the Princess said. “Best of luck, but I dare say you won’t need it.”

Sam smirked. It was a good line, but she rather suspected that De Myrre used it on everyone. “I won’t turn down good luck if I see it.”

2015 27 April 1021 EH

Kai-A Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Flying on a private jet was a strange experience. Sam was used to flying on transport jets or SSTOs full to the gills with people and their smells and their luggage, landing with a stiff back and shoulders and a slight ringing in her ears. Never once had she contemplated the possibility of having a plush sectional on an aircraft or a coffee table arranged tastefully with magazines and a little potted plant (wouldn’t that be a hazard in an incident?) across from a wide panel display. There were jump seats in the back for the attendants, but only one was present on the flight and they seemed to have invisibly determined that Sam would rather be left alone, much to her relief, and so they disappeared into the rear galley for the duration of the cruise. Sam spent the trip reading.

She gave a brief salute to the two-man crew of the little jet as she deplaned onto the tarmac for the second time today, now under the bright flood lights that illuminated the port in the deepening night. A little steel-colored annex to the general aviation building stood off to the right, marked CUSTOMS. She headed over and stepped through the automatic sliding doors.

A few empty stainless steel tables stood under the harsh florescent lighting, along with one man and one woman both wearing immaculate navy blue suits, black ties, and silver-stitched black shoulder marks.

“Welcome to New Hope, ma’am,” the woman said. “Your passport and visa, please.”

Sam handed it over. The woman, through silver-framed spectacles, glanced at the visa before passing it on to her partner. She turned back to Sam. “Anything foreign to declare?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Anything I should know about?”

“Handgun in a locked case in this duffel. On top.”

“Leave the baggage on this table and hand me the key.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As Sam did so, the man was running the passport and visa through a scanning device. As she was watching him, the machine gave a unpleasant warning blap.

Henry had explained, in his flat, workmanlike voice, that this might happen. The moment De Myrre dismissed Sam from the conference room, Henry had contacted the New Hope National Affairs Office to establish Sam’s right to visit New Hope. But bureaucracies like New Hope were slow to move, and it was unlikely that customs would see the visit reflected in their records.

The whole thing was a little odd, Sam thought. Since she was a member of the Dread Fist, and therefore, technically a citizen of Volga, it ought to have been the Dread Fist sponsoring her travel to New Hope. But what Henry had said had the ring of truth—it was going to take royal pull to get the visit greenlit in the span of six hours.

But then it got a little odder. “Come with me,” the woman said from behind Sam, grabbing her wrists and pinning them behind her. Sam was startled from her reverie and almost—almost—did something very stupid. Instead, she suffered the indignity, lurched upright, and allowed the woman to frog-march her back into an interview room, just past the scanner.

She deposited Sam in a chair facing away from the door and withdrew. The woman slipped out through the door as an officer wearing a plate carrier and holding a carbine stepped in, wordlessly.

Well, Sam thought. He really ought to wait outside the room. If I get the jump on him in here, I should be able to win the fight. But it shouldn’t come to that, should it?.

In about five minutes the first two customs officers came back in and sat across from her. It was the woman who did the talking.

“You are Private First Class Samantha Arif, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why has the Kingdom of Salemo sponsored your visit to New Hope?”

“I’m on urgent business for Princess De Myrre and she offered to sponsor it in order to facilitate it. Quickly.”

The two officers at the table shared a look.

“Who are you here to meet?”

“Mr. Jin Yecheng.”

“And he is?”

“A Chinese interpreter for the Xīn Guójiā. Salemo would like to hire him, discreetly,” Sam said, as Henry had instructed for this situation. It seemed like a dangerous idea to dangle in front of law enforcement officers—was this discreet business above-board?—but Sam just had to trust Henry on this.

There was a beat of silence. Whatever it was about what Sam had said, they didn’t much like it, or maybe hadn’t expected it.

“Where?”

Sam began to worry but refused to let it show. It was a good thing, she thought, that Mr. Yecheng was a “trusted intermediary” and not the skittish source of the intelligence.

“Kai-A prefecture. The Sato Hotel, which is where I’ll be staying.”

The man and the woman paused.

“Will you be going anywhere else in New Hope?”

“No. I haven’t been instructed to, anyway.”

“Do you intend to meet with any other persons in Kai-A prefecture?”

“Nobody specifically. Whoever I need to get cabs and food.”

“Has this business been coordinated with the VEC Home Guard or any representatives thereof?”

“No. Should it have been?”

The woman gave her a long look. She looked to the man sitting next to her, who shook his head. She waved off the man at the door.

“Everything’s in order,” she said. “You may go.”

Sam sighed. Back in New Hope. The first thing that always struck Sam about New Hope was its alluring, garish charm, followed quickly by its complete incomprehensibility.

The city defied the deepening evening with a sally of neon color. Lighted signs clung to or swung from the wall of every building for the first two stories, and many more adorned upper stories, too, on the buildings whose facades were not full glass matrices of lit and unlit windows. But once the gaze could be peeled away from the loud, clamoring lights, it settled on the roadways. The roadways which seemed to refuse to stay straight for longer than a quarter mile. The roadways which buildings loomed, frequently even cantilevered, over. The roadways that kinked and juked with odd intersections and thickly populated crosswalks.

Everyone on the street seemed to walk like they knew where they were going. The streets had no discernible direction or purpose, but the people on them had plenty, anyhow.

She paid the cabbie at the curb of the Sato and he nearly peeled out (huh) as she turned to size up the hotel. It was a freestanding building, moated by a few dark, narrow streets. The facade at street level was a glossy, metallic pine color framed around wide windows that looked into a moodily dim lobby. It was quiet here; she had passed by the noisier nightlife neighborhoods a few streets back on the cab ride.

Sam hefted her duffel up onto her shoulder and walked through the automatic sliding doors into the lobby. She strode across a blaze of red-orange carpet running along the hardwood floor, sparing a glance to her right to the lounge. It was empty but for the bartender mopping one of the tables.

The white-shirted woman at the desk bowed primly for Sam. “Good evening.”

“Evening. Samantha Arif, room for the night.”

A brief tap-tapping at the keyboard, a nod of the head, the scribbling of a pen. “One adult. Here are your keys.” She slid them over across the desk.

“Is there anything else I can help with?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

“Have a pleasant night.”

Sam headed back toward the elevators, pulling the keycard out of its little paper fold. A note came out. Neatly slanted on it were the words:

Accelerated timeline. Meet tonight in listed room.

Listed room, then, would be 1242, whose numerals were written on the paper fold itself in a different hand (which would be the receptionist’s). Sam’s brow immediately furrowed. She did not like the idea of answering the door of a little hotel room in the dead of night, at an unspecified time, for a mysterious asset. Or, worse, an operative.

The elevator door slid open for floor twelve, and Sam stepped out into a typical quiet hotel hallway lined with doors. She could work with this, but it was bad news if the secretive contact was getting anxious and trying to force things ahead in the schedule. Contingencies and ideas began to crowd her mind. Was the contact afraid of getting chased down by an enemy? Would that enemy be affiliated with the Kaiser somehow? Would they try to nab the contact on the way out of the Sato, or would they try to force an entry? Or was the contact afraid of Sam, an unknown factor who claims to be on a solo mission to take down a Neptune? Did they mistrust that explanation, and seek to put her off her footing? Or…

She opened the door to her room and stepped inside. As she pulled the door shut, she heard the clack of a door further down the hall coming open.

… Or should Sam mistrust the contact? She threw the duffel to the ground and grabbed her handgun from it, shoving it barrel down into her coat pocket. It made for shoddy, dangerous concealment and an even shoddier, more dangerous draw, but she hadn’t had the time or privacy to get her holster on her belt after customs. She kicked the duffel into the nearby closet just in time for a loud rapping on the door, right behind her.

She waited two beats and checked the eyehole. Black.

“This is Sam,” she said. Tried not to shout.

“Here to talk, Sam.”

“Who is it?”

There was a pause. Too long.

“Your contact. Meeting was originally tomorrow, right? Here to talk now.”

The eyehole was still obscured. Sam quietly closed the privacy latch and backed away from the door. This would’ve been so much easier if the doors swung outward so she could barrel out through the hallway. Then she reconsidered. Assuming there were at least two of them out there—why else cover the eyehole?—barreling out was probably doomed. But that was the only way out. The only good way out, anyway. The window behind her, on the other side of the bed, opened to a twelve story drop.

“Sam?” the voice said from the other side of the door.

Sam put her right hand on her handgun grip and stepped back to the door. Doomed, maybe, but still: the only way out was through.

She undid the privacy latch and turned the doorknob.

The door swung open slowly, almost as if it were drifting, and a giant of a man stepped through through, kicking the door shut and denying Sam a view of the hall. He had a smooth, tanned complexion, dressed in a spacer’s black nylon jacket and baggy trousers, his blonde hair buzzed recently. His broad jaw and bushy mustache brought to mind a boar, or a bear.

Sam carefully masked her reaction. One look at the man and she knew.

“I am Sir Paven Roth, and I am here to extend an offer, Samantha,” he declared, his arms spread. His voice had an imperious marching beat to it that didn’t match the voice Sam had heard from the other side of the door.

“Are you now?” Sam replied. She reached over his shoulder and engaged the privacy latch for the door. Sir Roth snickered.

“I will be pleased to negotiate your offer,” Sam continued with a pointed smile, as if none of that had happened and she had the manners of an imperial liaison. “Please.” She gestured to the office chair at the little desk in the room.

The knight flashed a cocky smirk and lowered himself into the chair as if it were his throne.

“Samantha Arif. I want to erase your debt and let you come home.”

Sam stood—loomed—over by the bed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The Knights of Aquila wish to repatriate their lost brothers and sisters.”

Sam’s stomach twisted. She said nothing.

“I have it right, no? Candidate Samantha Arif. In the waning hours of the 1016 Indus North War, you were aboard the assault ship Valkyrie IV when its acting captain surrendered to the Federation ship Wolnas.”

“That’s true. Then the Dominion refused to exchange prisoners with the Federation as part of the peace accords. They kept their booty and cut us loose. Then the Federation decided to try to work the reparations out of us. That’s changed?”

Roth crossed his legs and rolled his shoulder. “Yes. That’s changed.”

Sam felt a twinge… of what, she wasn’t sure. A little pulse of adrenaline, pushing at a place in her chest she could feel but not quite name.

“All that big talk about the shame of surrender was… what, then?” she said.

Roth shook his head. “The Macedon sees it differently.”

“The Macedon?” Sam’s right eyebrow arched. “Are you serious?” The great general-warlords of the Knights of the Compact of Aquila had a tradition of self-selecting epithets, almost like regnal names for their command. Some were considerably more arrogant than others. This one was an all-timer.

“After Phillip, not Alexander,” Roth replied with a fine, sandy dryness which suggested that he agreed it was still a bit gauche.

“Is he mustering soon?” she asked, quietly.

“Yes. He’s gathered his kith and kin already. The Albion Corps has promised him two full regiments. More have sent initial delegations. His household… they’re enthusiastic. Their blood is rising. When was the last time you heard battle-songs in a locker room?”

Sam was silent. It had been a long, long time. Since hearing battle-songs in a locker room, but also since talking to someone who got it. Who knew what it was like to pledge oneself to a warrior-king, to soar on the wings of war.

She almost—almost—asked him if he was part of the muster. If he knew how it felt. Where to go to feel it again herself.

But then she remembered the covered eyehole. The forced urgency. The surprise. The deception: was this the contact she was supposed to meet with about intel on the Kaiser? If this offer for her old life back was on the level, none of that was necessary.

So instead, she asked: “Have you heard of Johan ‘Kaiser’ Hect?”

Roth’s broad brow furrowed: confusion, frustration at the turn in conversation. He crossed his arms, and began to open his mouth to speak.

But by then Sam had her handgun in both hands, pointed at his chest. Oldest trick in the book: a tiny verbal inkcloud is all the distraction you need for a clean draw.

“Walk back out there and tell your goons to back off. Now,” she hissed.

Roth slowly stood, arms spread. “Last chance,” he said. She tightened her grip on her handgun.

“No. Get out. Sir.”

Roth shoved both his hands into his jacket pockets, the motion sudden, a black blur in the dim room. He was calling Sam’s bluff, and he was right. She couldn’t shoot him yet. This was between him and her; she needed law enforcement involved in this like she needed an anvil to fall on her head.

Sam stepped forward and thrust her arm under his left armpit—hoping against the odds that it was his dominant arm—and hooked violently against his right leg with her instep. The big man grunted and went down hard, his right arm coming up out of his pocket with a knife in hand.

There was a crack and a bang as the door broke through the privacy latch.

Sam got a hold and pulled Roth up by his right arm—he was awfully heavy—and wrenched it as hard as she could until the knife pattered to the ground and she was holding him facing the door.

Two more huge men wearing black spacer jackets and buzz cuts were thundering into the room. The one in front stretched a garrote between his hands.

Sam dragged Roth back a step into the space between the bed and the desk. It bought her just a second: there wasn’t room to get around her without navigating the bed, and going through her was a problem with their man being held up like he was.

The man in front hesitated. “Sister, put him down,” he growled.

That was the opening Sam needed. She threw Roth to the floor between them, raised her gun (forget discretion, it was past time to start shooting), and yanked the trigger twice. She knew immediately that the shots were terrible, but there was no time for that. She was already backpedaling, grabbing the spindly office chair and slamming it through the back window.

There was groaning, shouting, and shuffling behind her as the assailants tried to pile through the hotel room after her.

She hopped up onto the windowsill and looked down—a life or death die roll, now.

And it came up heads.

But just then, she was yanked back into the room by her jacket collar with dizzying force. She rolled to avoid being clotheslined by an arm hurtling toward her, and then she hit the ground and rolled again out of the way of a nasty stomp. She looked up: two men, on either side of this little walkway, penning her in at the foot of the bed. The one between her and the window was bleeding from a bullet wound in the leg, so that was nice. But he was the one who had just pulled her back into the room, so he still had his strength. And Roth was standing again.

Rather than trying to come to her feet, she sprang for the legs of the man between her and the window, directly for the wound in his thigh. He buckled with a hacking, pained grunt, twisting and coming down on his side right by her ass.

That’s when the garrote whipped across her neck.

That was bad.

Sam’s left hand involuntarily rose to her neck, digging frantically to part the fabric from the flesh of her throat. But then a boot came down on her spine and an ungodly strength wrenched her neck up and back. Fear and pain seized her from heel to shoulders. Her vision began to tunnel with the deadly pressure.

“Disappointing, Samantha. A shameful resignation,” Roth was intoning from his post at the door.

She kicked and elbowed back, trying to find something soft in the man’s groin or gut, but failed. Then she remembered…

She stuck her handgun under her left armpit and yanked the trigger until it stopped roaring and clicked.

Somewhere in that span she had become able to breathe again. The other man was grasping again, but she smacked him hard in the chin with her gun. She scrambled to her feet, gasping, running, swinging over the windowsill…

There was just enough of a protrusion on the facade, about three feet down, to navigate. She lowered herself down and began sidling along, away from the window. A second later, Roth’s buzzed head popped out of the window and he turned his glowering eyes on her. Holding onto the concrete with one hand, she aimed her handgun—gestured, really—and Roth vanished again.

She was alone for the moment in the night, the wind thrumming between the high-rises, surrounded by the gaudy neon of the city. Below, the lights grew in intensity toward the street level, as if Sam could fall into a cushion of warmth and brilliance. But, of course, she could not.

So instead, Sam made her way across and down the gutters and ledges, and when she was sure she couldn’t be seen or heard by the knights, broke back in through another window on the tenth floor.

When Sam emerged from the Sato at street level, her aching muscles passed the baton back to her mind, which began racing again.

Where now? Surely not back into the hotel. She let her feet carry her across the street and down a perpendicular street, practically a tunnel between two deep buildings, for about a quarter mile, and then ducked into a through-alley to think.

So there, between the garbage bins, she thought.

The Macedon (seriously?) was offering to “repatriate” her. Probably not just her—there was nothing special about her—probably dozens or hundreds of former Dominioners who had been prisoners of war during Indus North. But he was going about it circumspectly. And sending men with garrotes. Why? One idea presented itself: the offer was really muster with me or die. They hadn’t brought—or at least hadn’t drawn—any guns, which meant they were trying to take care of it quietly if possible. Probably because they didn’t want to have to bug out immediately after finishing up with her. Maybe they were stationed here, long-term, on behalf of the Knights of Aquila. She might be seeing them again.

But one major question remained: how’d they find her? Were they the “contact” she had been sent to meet? Had Her Highness De Myrre sold her out? It was the only thing that made sense…

A shadow passed across the mouth of the alley Sam had come through. A big one. Maybe local law enforcement here in a patrol vehicle to see about a disturbance. Sam started hoofing it the other way, south.

A few neon-lit streets later, when she felt confident that she had put some space between herself and trouble, she flagged down a cab and took it straight to the other side of town. “Winton Street,” she said, and when the gruff cabbie shot her a skeptical look, she added “anywhere. Come on,” and she flashed some cash.

Which brought to mind: her duffel, passport, and tab were still back there in the hotel room.

0010 28 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

A nice, long, expensive cab ride later, Sam stepped out into the dense night in Galway Prefecture, and she started walking.

Here, the neon signs clung to street level, and the mid-rises loomed in unadorned darkness above. The streets were a little wider, the traffic much thinner. As a practical matter, it did make it easier for Sam to watch her surroundings; she’d see any oversized Dominion goons coming from dozens of yards away. But it gave her too much to watch, and it mad her antsy to have to watch it.

Sam’s mind muttered its annoyances at her for a while as she passed through the sleepy neighborhood along Winton Street. Finally, it muttered something useful: home. Sam smiled to herself. She was home, for better and for worse, and it was time to stop acting like a fish out of water.

Earlier today—or yesterday, technically—Sam had been trying to explain the fractured governance of New Hope to that woman waiting at the gate up on the space station. Well, now it was time to live it again. Kai-A Prefecture, where Sam had been jumped, was run by the VEC Home Guard. The Home Guard had a lot of bad blood with the Dominion, so it seemed unlikely that they had a lot to do with the ambush. It was just as well that Sam hadn’t bothered to ask them for help, though, being so obviously a Dominioner herself. The Marshals were an option, but her frosty reception at customs and her missing passport (sponsored by someone she didn’t trust) complicated things, as well as not knowing why the customs officers where interested in Home Guard connections. On the other hand, she wasn’t very familiar with Galway. She only knew Winton Street’s name because it ran near the port on the south side of the city. Looking at it now, it was a dense street, the kind of street that kept its people close. Few people here commuted up or down the city; most lived and worked here. That seemed promising for finding a fixer quickly; a townie in a dive bar would know best.

The question was what the local syndicate was like. Friend or foe? One way to find out.

She found a corner with a bar on it. A Latin bar, its orange-red sign announcing Los Cabellos from the window above the corner door. She stepped inside.

It was a clean little bar on the inside, well-lit and smelling of limes. The clientele looked a little dingy, though: just four guys left hunched over the bar. One on the end spared a glance for Sam as she stepped in, but otherwise none of them paid her any mind. Sam pulled up a seat and waited. In a minute the bartender was out to see her.

“Need anything?”

“Water and some help. Do you pay anyone keep?” A bit of a verbal balancing act, there: Sam wanted to know who they paid protection money to, and she wanted to know right away. But if she put the question wrong, she’d look suspiciously like an enforcer trying to elbow in on new territory.

Apparently she struck the balance correctly, because the bartender eyed her placidly through his round lenses for a moment, before saying, “it’s Theta, here. Best I don’t ask about your trouble, you’ll want to… oh, hm.”

The bell above the door tinkled and Sam turned to see who it was. It was a woman in a shirt, tie, and dark blue coat, collar pulled up against the midnight chill. Her hair was blonde tinged with orange, held down by a black hairband, just slightly wild. Sam had a surprisingly hard time placing her: the outfit, in form, seemed to suggest a place of employment somewhere upscale, not in the humble industrial quarter of Galway down on Winton Street. But she walked and wore it like it were the only thing you’d dream of wearing in a quiet bar in this corner of the city.

“Sergeant Lin,” the bartender said. Sergeant?

“Damn, Jeff, can’t a woman keep an air of mystery?” Sergeant Lin said with an easy smile. “Tequila, for me and her. You drink?”

Sam kept her face level. “Not tonight.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Suit yourself. Just me, then.”

A tequila and a glass of water appeared as the sergeant took a seat.

“Ma’am?” Sam said. It seemed safest.

“Well, aren’t you the soldier. But you’re not one of mine, so call me Phira.”

“Sure. Phira. You don’t happen to be with Theta, do you?”

“Sergeant Phira Lin, Theta Group.”

“I suppose that’s not just my splendid luck. You’ve been keeping tabs on me.” She’d arrived moments after Sam had made it clear she was looking for someone just like her. That—combined with the fact that this local outfit styled themselves with military ranks—made Sam a bit uneasy, but there was no sense in losing her cool over it.

“Well, not a lot of new people come down here to Winton Street. What brought you here?”

The reality is that it was farthest street from the Sato that Sam had a name for. That seemed like a fact that could be divulged later. “Looking for you, actually. Your ears only?”

Phira leaned back to scan the bar. She must have decided that these other patrons didn’t need to hear it. “Yeah. Step outside?”

Outside was, admittedly, probably a good place not to be overheard; there was enough road noise even at this time of night to blanket a conversation. But Sam would be back to watching the shadows out there. Or she would have to trust this Sergeant Lin to know her neighborhood. Maybe that was a clever move on the part of this Sergeant Lin. “Alright,” Sam said.

Out front of Los Cabellos, Phira turned an inquisitive look on Sam as Sam glanced about at empty street.

After Sam was satisfied that they were alone and far enough away from the door to the bar, she began. “I ran into some trouble in Kai-A. I was jumped in my hotel room… I think I might’ve been set up. What I need first is a place to stay where I don’t need to hand over ID or a standard payment card. Then…”

“Whoa, there. I was hoping I could get your name, first.”

Sam shrugged. “Sorry. It hadn’t seemed important at the time. I’m Sam.”

“Great. You, um.” Phira gestured at Sam’s height.

“Yeah. And?”

“Well.”

“Some people,” Sam grumbled.

“Well you’re bloody obviously from Bosporus. Come on, now.” Sergeant Lin grinned. “I like to think of myself as a helping sort. But I know what kind of trouble follows Dominioners, and you know that I know that, and there’s no need to be cagey about it.”

Well, she was right, though Sam felt like it was only fair to resent that a little bit. “You’re right. I’m a born Dominioner, but not one any more. I’ve been on Volga for a few years now.”

“You and I are well on our way to becoming good friends. Who are you with now?”

“I’m a private with the Dread Fist Company.” This was beginning to get to be more than Sam would prefer to share. But she needed the help badly. It would not do to put off her gracious new host.

Phira paused, eyes searching Sam’s face with interest bordering on suspicion. Sam was worried for a moment. “Up on Lars Bruun station, right? But you know New Hope well enough to get around and ask the right questions.”

“You could say that.”

“And the trouble?”

“The Knights of Aquila,” Sam said.

Phira whistled. “Big trouble. Like I said, eh? Deserter?”

Sam felt the urge to grit her teeth and clench her fists. It was absolutely a fair guess, but: “No.”

“Long story?”

“I’ll tell you over a drink later. Can you help?”

“Oh yeah. I can help.”

Sam did her best not to wince at the enthusiasm. Enthusiasm was suspicious coming from a New Hope gangster. “What do you need from me?”

Phira crossed her arms and thought for a moment. “Oh, nothing. Walk with me. We’ll talk.”

The Bonds of Exile

0800 28 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Sam woke up in a rack to her wristwatch vibrating for 0800 local. This she was used to, though 0800 was a touch late. The barracks smelled like hazelnut coffee. This she was not used to.

She sat up and took a look around to remind herself of where she was. The narrow barracks room was encircled by bright, warm sunlight glowing in the tall windows along every wall. The other racks were all made and empty.

And there was another thing Sam wasn’t used to: waking up in an empty barracks. Waking up in an empty barracks was something to be feared. Back on Bosporus, cadets got a few weeks of being screamed at, dragged, or driven out of bed by blaring sirens at 0430, but after those first few weeks, a cadet who overslept would be left in their rack, left to show up late to formation, left to wander the grounds conspicuously out of place, left to wear their shame like a great waving flag.

But Sam had not overslept. After hearing more of Sam’s story, from Salemo to Winton Street, Phira had offered her the Theta Group Second Company recruit quarters as a place to lie low, and Sam had accepted, considering that it seemed to be the best option to avoid the knights.

There had been some conditions attached. They mostly involved Sam going directly to sleep and not trying to solve her many mysteries at the pitch-dark hour of 0200, after two flights, a firefight, and an escape south across the length of the city. Sam could borrow a tab and make a call to Lars Bruun after she got some sleep. Phira insisted she was looking out for Sam’s health. Sam suspected Phira wanted firm control over the situation.

It had been Sam’s turn to make a counter-offer. If she was going to be stuck sleeping for six hours, she wanted someone to be making some progress on her problems. She wanted to know how the knights had known to wait for her at the Sato. Who had arranged the rooms?

Much to Sam’s surprise, Phira had said, “oh, that’s easy. We’ll know who set you up by morning.”

Sam, sitting on her rack, didn’t believe that was possible. And she couldn’t understand why this Sergeant Lin would say something so obviously untrue. But it hadn’t been the right time to be pointing that out. Sam had simply nodded and then requested that she be able to lock the room from the inside for the night, and Phira had taken no issue with it.

The friendly coffee aroma was wafting out from the little kitchen through a door in the south end of the bunk room.

Sam swung her legs out of the rack, re-laced her boots, and headed over to the kitchen. There, under a gently buzzing florescent light, Phira stood by the coffee pot. She looked like she had just gotten up too—shirt, trousers, and boots, minimal but neat.

“Morning. Rest of the pot’s for you, if you want it,” she said, gesturing with her mug.

“Thanks,” Sam said, finding a mug in one of the cabinets and pouring. “So. Now I need to figure out who set me up, and I need to know what I’m getting into here.” An awkward euphemism for what sort of favor do I owe?

“Easy there, tiger,” Phira snickered. “You haven’t had your coffee. You haven’t showered. You haven’t let me introduce you to your hosts. Briefing after all that; I promise.”

“Shower? I don’t have…”

That’s when Sam discovered her duffel sitting at Sergeant Lin’s feet.

“Huh,” Sam said.

“Go take a shower, soldier. You’re in civilization, not out on four day ruck.”

So it was that Sam had her coffee, showered, and met Phira back in the bunk room. Phira had completed her outfit with the shirt, tie, and coat, looking oddly, in the daylight, like a conventional military blues but absent any ornamentation whatsoever—not even shoulder marks for rank or chevrons on the arm. Sam raised an eyebrow—what was with these people? Military wannabes or not?

If Phira noticed, she didn’t let on. “Walk with me.”

They left the kitchen out the back door and walked on a sidewalk along the edge of a wide, green yard. It was ringed by other small buildings of several shapes and sizes, built out of the native granite, themselves huddled in the midst of a dense thicket of glass and steel skyscrapers.

They walked along the side of this yard on the way to the largest building on this campus, a strange trifrucated building of three interlocking masses, all angles and lines, its windows glinting in the morning sun.

“This is Theta Group H.Q.,” Phira said. “You’re new here in Galway,” she asked, by way of stating it.

“More or less,” Sam said. “That important?”

“Yes and no. You know New Hope well enough; you know the way the streets are kept.”

“Of course.”

“You know why it’s like this?”

“Not really. I always assumed it was like Bosporus. Big-headed warlords fighting over every rock since the planet was first settled.”

“A bit like that, but a bit different. New Hope is an odd place. It was the first place that the Settler Corps put down their prefabs after waking up from their 200 year cruise from Earth. Because of that, I think, the Corps wanted to do it right. They sent their biggest weirdo—I mean, greatest visionary—down as governor. Charles Aitras.”

“Wait. What’s with the ancient history lesson?”

“‘Ancient’ history is a thing, you know. This isn’t ancient, this is voyage era. And besides, it’s important. The prefabs only lasted a couple dozen years, but the idea that Aitras laid out persists.”

“And that idea is…?”

“The Great Striving, he called it. But what it really was was a little town with a tiny little pip of a government called Beacon Prefecture. It had an office—not even a whole prefab, they rented out the back office in a warehouse—with a few computers, a few newly-fabricated motorcycles, and about ten men and women whose sole job was to make sure nobody was murdered in the prefecture. That’s it. No post office. No zoning, no ordinances. A minimum of laws.”

“I think I have an idea of where this is going,” Sam said, as they mounted the steps up into the shade of the HQ building.

“Yeah. A lot of people are into it: No Gods, No Masters and all that. But they’ve missed the point. Aitras never believed in that shit. Maybe no Gods, but there certainly were, and are, Masters. They’re the ones with the money. The way he saw it, humans were made to band together into tribes, those tribes were meant to have chiefs, and those tribes were meant to fight. Only difference is that he thought that killing was an unproductive way to compete, so it was forbidden.”

“So you do get big-headed warlords fighting over every rock. Just, they can’t shoot each other, so they’re not so much warlords.”

“Right. And it’s a big city now, with big money, and big neighbors with big interests. It’s the biggest financial hub in the system. Which means eventually the big boys win out, and they make the rules.”

“And who is that?”

“… You first,” Phira said, holding open the door.

Sam stepped through, and the quiet of the yard was replaced by the companionable hubbub of a busy building, voices echoing off of marble floors, clad columns, and steel working surfaces.

“Steph,” Phira called out, approaching a centrally located reception desk. Behind it was stationed a lone woman in a dark blazer. “You seen Ash’s lazy ass in here today?”

“Yes,” Steph replied, seeming amused. “He came in about an hour and a half ago. You lit a fire under him, I presume?”

“You know it. Here’s my guest. Samantha Arif…”

“Private First Class, Dread Fist Company,” Sam finished, feeling like it was somehow proper.

“We’ll see about that,” Phira chirped.

“Wait, what?” Sam looked back and forth between the two of them, sensing, if not danger, then at least some sort of unpleasant surprise. Steph remained impassive. Phira merely shrugged. “I have some suspicions.”

“I told you I’m not a deserter,” Sam shot back.

“No, of course not,” Phira replied. “Come this way; Ash has that briefing you’ve been dying for.”

The north wing of the building was a dense network of offices, gently alive with ringing phones and conversation. At the heart of it was a wide room laid out like a newsroom, strewn with desks, monitors, notepads, and swiveling chairs. Finally, Sam sat down in one of those chairs, pulling it up across a desk from Ash, whom Phira had to locate and drag with his coffee out of the breakroom. Phira leaned on a nearby divider, looking like leaning was her default state of being. The sergeants on Bosporus would’ve been horrified.

Lieutenant Ash Highwell was a short, slight, and astonishingly young-looking man with dark eyes, a steady gaze, and a great mane of brown hair pulled back into a single long braid halfway down his back. He pulled a thick binder of papers out of his desk and slapped it down on the table in front of Sam. “You’ve been sold out,” he said.

“That was years ago,” Sam said.

“You were sold out last night,” he clarified.

“Hope it wasn’t by you.” She pulled the binder toward her and lifted the cover. It was a printout of some sort of computer interface.

“You’re new in New Hope, I take it?”

“No,” Sam said. “I already gave her the rundown,” Phira interjected.

“Well, good, saves me some trouble. So, we’ve been watching these Dominion losers for a few weeks now. They keep good security and it hasn’t been obvious who they’ve been communicating with. Unfortunately for them, the Sato does not keep good security, and anyway, they complied with our request for records. Flip to yesterday.”

Sam took a closer look at the printout. It was a line-by-line record of some sort, with two prominent dates on each line. It was sorted by the second date, so she leafed through until she saw a page full of APR 27. She looked back up at Ash, who gestured back down at the binder. She looked more thoroughly this time, and her eyes naturally settled on:

58442948608 | 1021-04-26 22:52:02 | 27 APR 1021 | Samantha Arif | 1 | 1242 req

“Okay, so that’s my hotel reservation.”

“Previous line,” Ash said.

58442948607 | 1021-04-26 22:51:58 | 27 APR 1021 | Beck Ishaladon | 1 | 1241 req

“The name doesn’t mean anything to me,” Sam said. “But the machine timestamp is just four seconds earlier. If 27 April is the date of the stay, then the other time is the time that the reservation was booked?”

“And the room numbers,” Ash prompted.

“Right next to each other.”

“The Sato usually assigns rooms like any other hotel; at the time of check-in. ‘Req’ marks these as specifically requested ahead of time.”

“So assuming four seconds is not a coincidence, Salemo set up two reservations, one for me, and one for the Dominioners to stage their ambush in, right next to each other.”

“You got it. Anything else you need?”

“Yeah. What do you mean, ‘the Sato complied with your request for records?’ They’re not on your turf, are they?”

“I thought you said you gave her the rundown,” Ash said to Phira, who shrugged.

“So, what is it?” Sam asked.

“The New Hope Marshals are officially the only government-level law enforcement in the city,” Ash recited with a roll of the eyes. “They don’t do much. Borders, embassies, courts, that stuff. The rest of it is handled by the major companies here. The EF-VEC, Eridani Federation Volga Enterprises Company, is the biggest dog, followed by Killkenny Corporation and Sedoka Zaibatsu. They all have their turf, their security forces, their rules.”

“And a bunch of smaller ones here and there, and sometimes subordinate. Like Theta Group?”

“Similar,” Phira answered, “but we have a certain je ne sais quoi.”

“We’re officially a contract security company,” Ash said. “Main contract is with the New Hope government for city-wide public safety. We get our noses in the smelliest shit around town, because we’re just better at it. But we also have a few thousand ‘civilian’ employees and a little block of the city to ourselves. It’s a hedge to be sure we don’t just get sucked into the Marshals. Nobody wants to be a customs officer.”

“Surely someone does,” Sam said.

“Ash certainly doesn’t want to be a customs officer,” Phira said. “I don’t either.”

Sam leaned back, watching Ash and Phira watch her. So this New Hope street gang was a little bit different. They had a pretense to officialdom. One that the Sato would respect, anyway.

Ash rapped his fingers on the desk. “So you’ve been sold out. What are you going to do about it?”

“Well, report back…”

“You dumbshit,” Ash said, sighing.

Sam arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

Phira cut in as Ash was opening his mouth. “Sam, take a look at those times.”

“Twenty-two fifty-two, day before yesterday.”

“Where were you at that time?”

Sam thought. “I was still on Lars Bruun station. That was right around when my major had told me that the matter was settled.”

“Right, that’s what you told me last night. Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure… wait.”

Phira nodded. Sam continued.

“And then the Colonel had a change of heart. Probably right about the time you got betrayed.”

“You’re saying the Dread Fist are the ones who sent me up?”

(“God, what a terrible fucking tryhard name for a mercenary company,” Ash said.)

“Them and Salemo. Look, those times. It could absolutely have been decided on a call between your Colonel and Salemo. She immediately turned around and booked those rooms for the Dominioners. You can’t go back to the mercs.”

“They couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have.”

“You think they wouldn’t have sold you out?”

“I… no, I don’t think so.”

“Why? You’re too good a soldier?”

“No, because… they wouldn’t, would they?” she said, thinking of Stimwell and Fae. But then…

“Who would’ve made the decision?” Phira pressed.

“Colonel Magnussen,” Sam said sourly.

“Would he have done it?”

Sam paused briefly, staring at the binder. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

The three sat in silence, against the gentle backdrop of office conversation, indistinct phone calls, and typing.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Ash asked again.

Another silence.

Then, Sam said, “continue with the mission.” Ash groaned, and Phira rolled her eyes.

“Sam, your sense of duty is admirable,” Phira began (“such a dumbshit,” Ash was muttering), “but not only do you not have support, you might have the very opposite of it.”

“Am I supposed to, what, give up and desert?” Sam retorted.

“No,” said a voice. A tall, sharp-eyed, and dark-haired man dressed in a tight, clean black dress uniform—buttoned up to the top—had appeared over Sam’s left shoulder.

“No, then,” he continued, nodding to Phira and Ash. “Consider it part of the mission parameters. You are outnumbered and unsupported and new threats have emerged. Let’s assume that the mission is to continue; abandonment is not an option. Contact with command is cut off; someone in the chain of communication can’t be trusted. Congratulations, PFC Arif, you’re acting command. What are your orders?”

Sam’s mind blanked for a moment, but the pressure of being asked a question forced it into action.

“Assess the situation. Who are you?”

The man smiled. “Captain Theodore Roche. Pleasure to meet you,” he said, offering his hand. Sam stood and shook it firmly… but cautiously.

“PFC Samantha Arif, Dread Fist Company. What brings you here?”

(“Jesus, Dread Fist, seriously,” Ash said.)

“You, actually. Phira read me in. She needed my sign-off before giving you a bed in the barracks, anyway.”

“My thanks, then. It was a tough night.”

“Happy to help. Now, PFC—acting XO—Arif, what will you do now?”

“Still assessing,” she said. “You’re a captain, are you? It occurs to me that I don’t understand Theta Group perhaps like I could. Ash and Phira told me you were a security group but I’m not sure if you’re police or soldiers.”

“Ah,” Theo said. Phira was smiling. “Phira gave you one of her history speeches, then. Well, everything she said is right and useful, but I’ll cut to the chase. Theta Group is the most experienced and effective military organization local to Volga. Everything else—contract security—is second to that.”

“And Phira and Ash are your unit?”

“That’s right. First company.”

“What do I owe you for the help?”

Theo looked to Phira, but Ash cut in.

“Phira can’t help but pick up little lost birds on the street.” A strange non-sequitur.

“Oh, shut up,” Phira replied. “Look, helping you helps us. A bunch of Dominioners down here causing trouble in town? We’ll be hearing more about them sooner rather than later. Nice to hear more of it from someone who might know.”

“And you took pity on her,” Ash mumbled.

“Jesus, Ash. So I like her. Fuck off. Sir.”

“Fine,” he said, getting to his feet and stalking off.

Sam looked from Phira to Theo, bemused.

“Don’t mind him,” Theo declared, finally. “Now, where were we? Acting commander Arif?”

“Right… right. What’s next for me. If I can’t rely on the Dread Fist for support, I don’t stand much of a chance against a Neptune. And a Dominion bounty team. And the principality that gave me up to them. I need to find some support, urgently. That’s what you’re leading me to.”

“Damn straight,” Phira said. “How would you like a job?”

1300 28 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Sam said no, of course. Sam was no deserter. She and Phira and Captain Roche argued in circles for a good half an hour about ways Sam could be convinced to take the offer, but Sam proved too stubborn.

It was an open question whether what the Dread Fist had done was a mistake—did they know trip to Salemo was just a stopover on the way to an ambush? Phira’s point was that this didn’t—or shouldn’t—matter. “A merc group that is going to get you killed negligently is not more worthy of you than one that is going to get you killed intentionally,” she said. But Sam couldn’t bring herself to agree. People screw up. If soldiers abandoned their commanders at the first screw-up, there’d be no more soldiers.

What the three did agree on was that the Dread Fist couldn’t be relied on and that establishing contact while the team of knights was still at large involved great risk. Sam wanted to do it anyway, so Roche insisted on mitigating that risk.

And that’s how Sam and Phira found themselves sitting on an eighth story rooftop in Galway Prefecture with a spotting scope, watching traffic below like a colossal ant farm stretched out beneath them. They were watching, specifically, the rear yard of a large silicon fab, mostly empty for the weekend. An electrical shack stood at the back, secluded from the main road by the concrete wall of the yard, with a hatch out the top to provide maintenance access to the HVAC equipment on top. The roof of the maintenance shack was a short hop away from the fence, which all together meant that the shack was a good hiding place with a convenient getaway if one were to be surprised. Just the kind of place where Sam might be expected to send a distress signal from.

“So, what’s the deal with the ‘Macedon’ guy?” Phira asked. “Got an ego the size of one of Yangtze’s moon’s, I bet.”

“Probably,” Sam sighed, looking down the scope at the street. “Though I have been assured that it’s after Philip, not Alexander.”

“You know what that means, right?”

“Ego’s even bigger, probably,” Sam muttered.

“Yeah. Hotshot thinks he knows more about history than you. Thinks you don’t know about Philip’s military reforms, so you think he’s being humble by choosing the name, so you won’t see his true, farsighted intentions. But who’s that going to fool, really?”

“Plenty of people.”

“You think?”

“The Dominion says it brings up its cadets on military history, but that’s not quite it. They’re brought up on stories of kingship and glory. So, Alexander.”

“You haven’t been gone that long from the Dominion, have you? You soured on them pretty quickly.”

“Well? My acting captain surrendered our doomed ship so we wouldn’t have to suffocate in the void, and high command treated that as an irredeemable stain and exiled us. That has a way of changing one’s perspective,” she said, staring down the scope.

“Where’s that leave you, then? You must’ve grown up thinking everything of the Dominion. Regnum sine fine and all that? So you don’t think that any more; what do you think? What could you?”

“What are you, my chaplain?”

“I could be.”

“That wasn’t a yes.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

“I don’t. No hard feelings.”

“Fine. No hard feelings. You know what is going to cause hard feelings, though?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s been twelve hours since you sent that distress signal.”

“We agreed, didn’t we?” Sam said, at length.

“We agreed. It’s time to go. The Dread Fist isn’t coming. Roche would’ve called us if we spotted them sortieing anyone from Lars Bruun. We’ve received no word on your frequency. Do I need to spell it out for you?”

“They gave up on me.”

“You don’t owe them anything, Sam.”

“That’s technically not true,” Sam sighed, looking up from the scope.

“What’s that mean?”

“Technically they own a great deal of debt that I owe. When the Federation learned that they wouldn’t be repatriating us POWs at the end of the war, they assigned war reparations to us.”

Phira stared at her in stunned silence.

“The Dread Fist bought that debt,” Sam continued.

“Do they not pay you?”

“They garnish a bit.”

“I’m not going to ask how much. I am going to ask: are you fucking mad?”

“What else am I supposed to do?” Sam asked, taking one last glance at the shack through the spotting scope.

“Fine, whatever, do your soldiering thing; that I get. But have you noticed how far out of your way you’re going to try to forgive these chucklefucks who tried to buy you as a slave? You can’t be…”

“Wait,” Sam said, her heart rate spiking. “I see…”

Phira stopped immediately, listening.

Through the scope, Sam saw three men navigating through the sidewalk traffic, walking along the concrete wall of the silicon fab property. Suddenly, they broke off. One—an exceptionally tall man—turned the corner away from Sam, and two others climbed the steps to the front door of the plant.

They were wearing familiar black nylon jackets.

“… It’s the Dominioners.”

“God damn,” Phira breathed.

“Yeah. Yeah. You’re right, Phira,” Sam said, breathing a little more quickly. “Even worse than abandoning me. They sold me out.”

“Yep. First thing’s first, Sam. Time to get the hell out of here before they notice you’re not in there.”

As Sam was tucking the spotting scope back in her bag, the roof access door opened behind them. A huge figure filled the doorway.

It happened faster than Sam could think to stop it. Her hand was on the handle of her gun. The barrel was level. The sights aligned on the target—too big to be anything but a Knight of Aquila—her finger squeezed the trigger. One, two, three.

Three gunshots cracked into the sky.

The bullets plinked uselessly off the Ragnarsson-class power armor. The Ragnarsson-class was a blocky suit, an imposing humanoid mass, a titan of steel, wide and strong at the shoulders, ribs, and thighs. The knight paced forward, each steel step rattling down in the joists holding up the roof. It stopped. It regarded Sam and Phira.

“You stopped shooting,” Phira observed.

“Yeah,” Sam said. Her heart was racing. Even that one syllable felt shaky.

“Why?”

“Won’t help.”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

“He wants to talk first,” Sam said.

Sam saw the armor make a small gesture with its fingers and thumb—a control gesture for the armor’s systems, engaging external speakers. Then, the knight spoke.

“Samantha Arif.” Sam didn’t recognize this voice; it was low and breathy, not resonant.

“Here I am.”

Phira started. “Sam, should—”

But Sam cut her off right away. “Trust me on this one, Sergeant.”

Phira nodded.

“I am Knight-Justicar Ilyich, charged with custody of the Compact’s justice on this planet. You know, I assume, what it means that you behold me in panoply.”

This was unexpected, but Sam did know what it meant. She swallowed. “Charge me, then.”

“You are charged with abandonment of your ship, the Valkyrie IV. You are charged with defection from the Dominion of the Compact. You are charged with defection from your employer, the Dread Fist Company of Volga.”

“So much for repatriation, then.”

Ilyich, unmoving in his armor about twenty yards across the roof, paused only briefly before replying.

“Repatriation,” he mocked. “The Compact does not repatriate. The Compact takes what is worthy of it and leaves what is not.”

Even through the heat of mortal fear, Sam could sense that something didn’t add up. “So why offer it in the first place?”

Ilyich finally moved, just to shake his head. “Sir Paven Roth made that offer. Not me. I am charged with the custody of the Compact’s justice on this planet. You stain it. You disgust me.”

Sam took a deep breath. It seemed futile in the face of her hammering heart. “Glad to have that cleared up. I claim the privileges of a scion of House Arif.”

“You?” Ilyich scoffed, deeply offended. “You abandoned your house.”

“Blood is blood. I am the blood of Arif,” Sam said. He was right; this was a nasty and hypocritical abuse of the Dominion’s law, but it was the only thing that could keep her from getting shot—or maybe strangled, or beheaded, or… well, best not to dwell on it—on this rooftop. The chains of the law were her last lifeline right now.

The knight-justicar paused again, and then his hand moved to his head. He depressed a switch on the integrated armored helmet behind one of his ears. His visor hissed open, and then he lifted the whole helmet off. He was an old warrior, with a broad jaw, sandy, leathery skin, heavy, bushy eyebrows, and cold gray eyes.

“So be it,” he said. “Name your form, Arif. It will be your doom.”

“Handguns. Unless you have matching bare steel.”

Ilyich smiled hideously.

“Of course I have bare steel, Arif.” From the pack on his back, he withdrew one gray arming sword, polished to a shine, and then a second.

Of course he would. Sam approached. Phira looked like she was about to say something, but Sam shot her a look back as she stepped forward. “Then I have named my form. Name the terms.”

As she laid her hand on the offered hilt of one of the swords, Ilyich said, “Death and justice.”

“Death and justice,” Sam repeated. “Sergeant Lin, you follow what’s going on, right?”

Phira had taken the spotting scope back out of the bag and was looking down over the side of the building. “I have an idea, yeah.”

“Don’t interrupt this.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said absently.

Sam and Ilyich were standing about fifteen paces apart now. Sam tested the weight of the sword in her right hand. It had been years. She was rusty. Ilyich probably drilled weekly, maybe even daily, just for cases like this. As a knight-justicar, he was judge, jury, and executioner. But the oldest traditions of the Knights of Aquila gave the great houses that contributed new knights the right to transmute his judgments into matters of personal honor. To turn an execution into a duel, as Sam just had. It was a sacred right; Ilyich wouldn’t dare disrespect it. For that matter, he had probably done this dozens of times before, each time cutting down some snotty scion who thought they could get away from justice if only they won just one more duel like the ones they had fought in their academy days. He probably greatly enjoyed crushing their final delusions.

Worst of all, he was armored, and Sam was not. The rules of the duel required matched weapons, but not matched armor; it only required that heads and necks be bare for mortal blows. It would be a simple thing for him to protect his head with his armored off-arm or the length of his sword, threatening an offense with the other. Her only hope was that she could draw a terrible error from him.

They were at each other. There was no prelude, and there was no sense hesitating or backing up. There was nowhere to run. She dodged left, right, forward and around to buy some room, and then could backstep. He came at her with vicious overhand strikes, his left hand flared out to the side for balance. A sloppy guard, befitting unrestrained aggression. That was her opening, her ever-so-slim slim opening…

Sam couldn’t well parry the strikes—his EAP-augmented strength would power through anything unless she found the perfect point of leverage. And she certainly couldn’t just block them. How, she thought, as she ducked left again, could she get him to expose his left side? He barreled down at her, his face twisted with that sadistic grin.

“SAMANTHA ARIF,” bellowed a voice. Paven Roth’s voice.

Ilyich pivoted. His left arm held a winged guard, protecting him from Sam (what a snake; now he’s taking it seriously), and he leveled the point of his sword at Paven, who filed out of the doorway trailed by his two men. “Sir Paven,” he growled in warning.

“Sir Ilyich,” Paven replied with a menacing pomposity. He wasn’t wearing armor, but he was holding a rifle. “Stand down.”

“No. I am charged with…”

“SHUT UP, WALLACE. That was not a request.”

“No.”

As Roth opened his mouth to shout his indignation, there was a white flash and intense pain vicing into Sam’s skull through her ears, and then she couldn’t hear anything but ringing. The flash had come from between Paven and Ilyich—Paven was a burned-in silhouette of an afterimage in the left corner of Sam’s vision. She caught a glimpse of Ilyich, his eyes shut tight against the pain.

Someone was under her arm; she started and craned to look as she stumbled under the insistent pull. Phira. Two fingers pointed to the edge, toward a fire escape.

Sam and Phira practically dove down each flight of the wobbly metal stairs all the way down to street level, never once looking up to see if any of the knights were in pursuit.

1900 28 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Sam asked for a moment by herself back at Theta HQ. The Second Company was back from the field, so their recruit quarters were in use. The best Phira could find was an interview room in the back of the north wing of that tripartite building. Phira apologized, but Sam didn’t mind.

So she sat with a paper cup of coffee, gently steaming into the silence—a little bit like her head, she thought. There was lot to think about, but she found her mind to be reluctant to think. It only seemed to steam. Argh, it seemed to say. Fahhhhh. No words, only a steady hiss of frustration.

Finally, though, it found some purchase as her eyes fell on the coffee cup. Killkenny Roast, it read. That’s right, these weird New Hope megacompanies with their sprawling domains. Captain Roche had said that subordination to Killkenny Corporation had been an option for the young Theta Group many years ago. Presumably Killkenny was some big outfit with its own private security forces and heavy industry portfolio. And apparently at least one coffee shop.

So that was the Great Striving of New Hope, then. A giant hive of turf warring organizations, steel towers, and hodgepodge roads all enmeshed with each other in a fathomless modern chaos.

And the Dread Fist company had contacts down here? They were part of the mesh? That was what Phira had said, anyway. They were natives here, but they had sent Sam down alone to navigate it starting with nothing. No, wait. They hadn’t just sent her. It wasn’t just an oversight. They had fed her into the hive. They had offered her up to the hungry jackals, among them a visiting Dominion hunt team… why? What did they get out of it?

Or, wait. Salemo had set up the booby trap of the hotel. Henry… and De Myrre. What did they get out of it? Why did Dread Fist agree with it? When she sent a distress message to the station with coordinates for that electrical shack, why did they pass them along to the Dominion hunt team?

And why had a knight-justicar shown up? One who wasn’t working with the other knights? How had he even gotten that power armor up to that rooftop without half the armed factions in the city noticing? He must’ve come in a vehicle, then; did he have a driver? An intel team?

And somewhere up there, in the night sky, there was a 5000-ton assault lander preparing for a drop. Because what else would an assault lander, operated by a man calling himself Kaiser, be doing?

There was a gentle knock, and a beat later the door in front of Sam opened. Captain Roche stepped in to the room.

“Evening. Doing alright? Now a good time?”

“Evening. Yes and yes, sir.”

Roche laughed at that as he pulled up a chair. “You can’t be doing that well. No need to paper over it.”

Sam shrugged. “No injuries. Ears stopped ringing from the stun grenade a while ago. Not in the brig. Could be worse.”

“It could,” Roche agreed, “but I can tell that everything else is bothering you. You’ve been betrayed. You don’t have anywhere to go.”

“I have a mission,” Sam said, deflecting. It just felt, somehow, rude to be whining about how bad things were, even as bad as they were.

“You don’t, though, do you? Every mission has a why. For a soldier it’s often just as simple as ‘those’re my orders.’ But you need to face that you’re not taking orders from Lars Bruun any more.”

Sam rapped her fingers on the desk, thinking. “Okay. So kill or capture Johan Hect isn’t my mission any more. But I want to figure out what’s going on. And I need to keep my head on a swivel while that Dominion hunt team is running around.”

Theo steepled his fingers, gazing out at Sam over them.

“Let us help,” he said, finally. “I think you know how.”

Sam stopped rapping. Then she nodded. “Okay. Let’s talk details.”

“Enlist in Theta Group, First Company. Corporal pay grade. We’ll have room to promote you to sergeant in a year or two. Or you can move laterally into specialist ranks or out into one of the Group’s businesses if it’s not for you.”

“Take me on as a PFC. I don’t need the rank as a carrot.”

“Don’t be silly,” Roche said, waving his hand dismissively. “You’re NCO material. That’s my final word. The part I think you’ll be more interested in, though, is the matter of the mission.”

“Oh, I’m listening,” Sam said, as brightly as she could manage.

“Sergeant Lin is already on the case of the Dominioners, among other things. We’ll bring Salemo and Kaiser into the scope. There’s a lot of fog of war here, but there’s a fair chance they’re all related. You’ll be assigned to it with her. That’ll be your day-to-day for the next days. First Company’s going to conduct some field exercises in early May, the same ones Second Company just got back from, and you’ll be going, of course. We’ll make sure you’re comfortable and up to speed before then.”

Sam sat in silence through this, and even after the captain had finished.

“What’s on your mind?” Roche asked.

“It’s hard,” Sam began, slowly.

“You haven’t resigned from the Dread Fist.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry. They’ve struck you from the rolls.”

“We assume…”

“No, really. I mean. I talked with our liaison office. The Prince of Ingstadt was happy to do us a favor and send some feelers out to the Dread Fist. He was able to buy an option on your debt as part of a contract negotiation—apparently Colonel Magnussen was happy to unload it, presuming you to be dead and in default. We’ll give the prince the word and he’ll exercise the option, transfer us the debt.”

“But…”

“And then we’ll tear up the goddamned note. What are we, barbarians? You don’t owe the Eridani Federation. You don’t owe the Dread Fist. You don’t owe us any money. Just the decency we owe each other as comrades. Right?”

He stuck out his hand over the table.

Sam took a deep breath, and then shook. “Right.”

Handpicked Men

1025 29 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

“First thing’s first, Sam,” Phira began. We have to get you used to the civilian life.”

“Wait,” Sam said, literally stopping. Fortunately, nobody was directly behind her on the sidewalk, which hugged the side of a six story building lined with busy storefronts. “I’m a corporal. You’re a sergeant. What do you mean, civilian life?”

“I’m right, then,” Phira said, smiling, “you haven’t done this in a long time. Or have you ever?”

“Done what? Care to explain?”

“Clothes shopping,” Phira said, continuing on, as if that was sufficient explanation. Sam caught up as she turned the corner and then turned again into a store. Sam followed in to the soft ding of a bell being struck by the door. How old-fashioned.

The interior of the store was everything but old-fashioned, however. Racks lined the walls, full of suits and dresses trimmed so fashionably that even Sam thought she could recognize the trends of the… season, or however it went. White seemed to be this year’s color, or, at least, about half of it. Cream, bone, off-white, paper, all trimmed and sashed with riotously bright reds and greens and oranges at their breasts and cuffs.

Phira strode on, seeming to outrun Sam’s rolling ball of anxious questions, through the racks on the right side to a little desk at the back, at which sat an old woman wearing a green silk shirt, mending some women’s garment with deft fingers.

“Good morning, Lin,” the woman said. “And?”

“Good to see you, Xiang. This is Sam.”

“Corpor…” Sam began. Before Phira interrupted with a “Shhhhhhh.”

“But…”

“Shhhh. That’s an order.”

Xiang chuckled. “What can I do for you?”

Sam followed orders and stayed quiet. Phira smiled. “You know,” she said. “The usual. Something just the right eminence for the beat.”

Eminence? What?

Xiang nodded. “Measurements?” Then she looked Sam over and frowned. “No, no; you need new measurements.”

“Hey,” Sam said, sensing the jibe. “My clothes fit fine!”

“Shhhh,” Phira said.

Xiang had already put her project aside and was descending on Sam with a faded red measuring tape. “Now, dear,” she said, “just because it fits fine across the shoulders doesn’t mean we can’t do better at the waist.” Her jacket vanished from her shoulders. “Arm, please…”

“I… okay,” Sam said, raising her arm.

“So, you’re one of the new Theta boys?”

“Figuratively speaking.”

“Figuratively how?” Xiang asked, pulling the tape down alongside one of Sam’s legs.

“Because I’m not a boy.”

Xiang shrugged, pushing her glasses up and making a note with her pencil. “Manner of speaking. They’re the boys,” she said, gesturing at Phira. “You know how it is.”

Sam glanced over at Phira, who was looking pretty smug and inscrutable and giving no sign that she would stop that any time soon.

“Sure,” Sam said, facing back to the front and lifting her arms for Xiang to take various torso measurements. “You know them well?”

“I’m sure Lin will tell you all about it. Tell me about you. New in town?”

Mysterious change of subject, Sam thought. She made a note to think more about that later. “Yes,” she said, rather than the more complicated “no, but…”

“How long?”

“Um. A day and a half?”

“Oh, heavens!” Xiang said. Something about her tone reminded Sam of the way aunts talked to their three-year-old nephews. “You’ll like it here, I think. You young hot-blooded folk always do.”

“Um,” Sam said. “I hope so?” She had no idea what to say about that.

“Do you like feijoada?”

“Never had it.”

“The Gorduco family down the street makes it. I think their storefront is called, oh…”

“Rio,” Phira offered.

“Rio! Right. Go have some. Tell them Xiang sent you.”

“Sure, I’ll do that.”

Xiang rolled up her tape. “There you have it. Have some real numbers on you, dear. Let’s go see about a cut with eminence, then,” she said, leading Sam out into the racks.

Sam emerged from the shop ahead of Phira, holding a receipt.

“Great,” Phira said, brightly. “Now, coffee?”

“We already had coffee this morning back at HQ and won’t you explain anything? Please?”

“That’s not a no,” Phira said, leading on. “I’ll explain. Over the coffee.”

Phira led the way and within a few minutes the two of them were propped up at a table outside the tiniest, most colorful bodega Sam had ever seen. A man was busking across the street with a horn and a stand cymbal, an unusually bright sonic texture that seemed to somehow, nonetheless, work.

The owner of the bodega—or, a barrel-chested bearded man wearing an apron who Sam took to be the owner—brought out Phira’s coffee (Sam had ordered drip, which he had provided at the counter) and sat right down with them.

“So,” he said. He had a moderate accent of some kind, English as a second language but well-mastered. “New face. Name’s Dorian. Yours?”

Sam paused. She had to recalculate a proper greeting without ranks or titles. “Sam.”

“Right. Pleasure to meet you, Sam. Phira, where you find women like this? Sheesh.”

“Be nice, Dorian,” Phira said, laughing. “She’s new in Galway.”

“And got a nod so quickly. Must be a real firecracker.”

“She’s good.”

Sam fidgeted. What did Dorian care about how good a soldier Sam was? Something about the contours of this conversation was invisible to Sam. The foundation, she decided. The contours of the foundation were what was invisible, which made it quite difficult to know where she stood.

She shrugged as if humbly taking the compliment, hoping that would do.

“We’re getting her settled. I’m sure you’ll be seeing her around,” Phira was saying.

Dorian looked Sam directly, intensely in the eyes, as if trying to see something in them, or behind them. Then he leaned back, looking between the two of them. “Hope so. She does look like one of the good ones. Anything else?”

“Nope, thanks,” Phira said.

“Sergeant,” he said, standing and shuffling off to the next thing in the busy life of a street shop operator.

Sam watched him disappear into the shop, then turned back to Phira. “Every moment I get just a little more confused. Is he Theta Group?”

“No,” she replied.

“So why ‘sergeant?’ and if you say because that’s what I am…”

Phira laughed. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop. Sam, here’s what this is about. Have you ever been a civilian before?”

Sam thought. “Technically, yes, but…”

“But, right? Dominion. I can’t say I’ve been in the Dominion, but I’ve read enough to put a few pieces together. You were raised to be a knight. From birth. Trained since the age of…?”

“Formal training begins at six,” Sam said.

“Real agoge stuff, huh. Anyway, Theo emphasized that we’re military, but… it’s different. We’re not police, either; we don’t pull people over for speeding, and Colonel Tholas isn’t a sheriff that can be voted out or kicked out of office. There isn’t any office.”

“The more you tell me the less I understand,” Sam complained.

“I’m getting there, okay? Let me put it this way: you look around and you see a huge, postmodern society, right?”

Sam couldn’t deny it. Beautiful skyscrapers, their neon signs dim but steel and glass facades gleaming in the bright sunlight, surrounded them, and all manner of people walked past on the street, carrying on all manner of conversations in all manner of languages. She nodded.

“But that’s an illusion. The Headwaters left Earth 1200 or so years ago with 4000 people in cryo-sleep who had all grown up in huge, postmodern societies. They thought they were still in one, just a smaller one, but they were wrong. They woke up 200 years after leaving, landed on Volga, and made something entirely new, even if they didn’t realize that’s what they were doing.”

“So this isn’t a huge, postmodern society, then?”

“It’s smaller and younger. And with shades of the pre-modern. Because it’s so small and young, I think, power goes through people rather than the people.”

“Like… Colonel Tholas?” Sam asked. She was struggling to really situate what Phira was saying and was hoping she had something.

“Like Colonel Rogier Tholas.”

“So…”

“So our Colonel is a powerful person, owning land and business—or, we might say, controlling a small territory—and supported by a group of loyal soldiers. He has been entrusted with some duties and bestowed some authority, complementing the authority he has on his own, by the chief magistrate of the city. What is this all beginning to sound like, Sam?”

“He sounds like… this sounds suspiciously like… a warlord. Loyal to a liege. A duke… Duke Wellington?” The Iron Duke had been one of the grand generals somewhere in her family history. Clever allusions to Arthur Wellesley’s tactical acumen had studded the conversations in their household like the medals on his breast.

Phira grinned. “I knew you’d get it. You see? We’re not a police force. We’re mostly military, but above all, we’re like the duke’s handpicked men.”

“And women.”

“And women and so on,” she agreed. “Not everything about it is so old-fashioned.”

“So,” Sam said, eyeing her coffee. “That means this whole morning is about being the duke’s handpicked man.”

“Exactly. I don’t need to teach you shit about being a soldier; you’re already better than I’ve ever been. But you heard Xiang. You’re one of us Theta boys now.”

“So what do I make of Xiang and Dorian?”

“They know who we are. We’re the duke’s men, right? If they know what’s good for them they have to treat us with respect.”

Sam frowned.

“Oh, don’t look at it like that,” Phira said. “They’re not just sucking up to us because we’re big shots. We make friends here. They know I can get what I want one way or another; I don’t have to be good to them. But I’m good to them anyway. See?”

“I think I do. But would all the good feelings come back around if you found yourself in a bad spot and not a part of Theta any more?”

“I don’t make friends with people who would dump me like that.”

“Uh huh.”

“You’ll see. Anyway, that’s what this is about. You’re one of the boys now. That’s different than just being a soldier. A lot of it is going to be new to you, I think.”

“You need me to act, uh, more normal?”

“Well, you’re not doing too bad at that.”

Sam remembered the conversation she had attempted to participate in with Xiang. “If you say so.”

“Psh. I do. But anyway, normal is a good start. But we need to get you comfortable. You clearly don’t feel like you belong in the Dominion any more. Maybe we can get you feeling like you belong here.”

Sam sighed. “I see where this is going.”

“Do you?”

“You’re going to kick me out of the barracks, aren’t you.”

“Hell yeah I am. We’re getting you an apartment.”

0630 30 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Sam got up, showered, brushed her teeth, did her stretches, made her bed, and put on her new outfit: black shoes, black slacks, black belt, white shirt, dark gray longcoat: single-breasted, knee-length, band-collared; cut carefully to hang comfortably closed without being buttoned, better to provide access to a shoulder holster. She’d never practiced drawing from a shoulder holster before and told Phira that she was interested in trying, but for now the waistband holster would do.

She did all this without taking more than twenty steps. Her new apartment was tiny, just like she liked it. The entire time they were finalizing the arrangement with the building manager (it was a Theta Group building, which made the paperwork easy) Phira had shaken her head and incessantly poked fun at her and insisted that she ought to get herself some space like a normal human being. But, ultimately, she hadn’t really stood in the way of Sam getting the dinky studio she had wanted, with just enough room in the living space for a bed, a kitchenette, a nice comfy chair, a foldable desk, and a two-and-a-half meter square in the center to do some exercises.

Sam’s phone rang. She answered.

It was just six more steps to leave, and then a dozen more to the elevator.

0745 30 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Ash was leaning by the last door on the left side of this apartment interior hall. He was wearing a sharp black coat and black sunglasses, which seemed somehow to enhance the aura scornful disinterest he projected.

“Damn, you’re tall,” he said, by way of greeting.

“Always have been, Lieutenant.” Sam replied. “Sergeant Lin is in there?”

“Phira is in there, you weirdo.”

“Alright.”

Ash held open the door for Sam to step inside, and he shut it behind her.

Inside was a glitzy flat: wide, dominated by clean stainless steel surfaces and a spectacular view of a green yard, overseen by a certain tripartite building, surrounded by its skyscrapers, at the heart of Galway Prefecture.

Phira stood, hands in pockets, over a man-shaped heap on the floor in the dead center of the room.

Sam strode over toward her and stopped, staring. The body, sprawled prone with the neck bent for its head to rest wretchedly on its right cheek, had belonged to a portly, middle-aged man with thinning gray hair and sagging jowls. It was wearing a white shirt and tan slacks, both soaked through with blood. The sticky iron smell hung densely in the air.

“What happened?” Sam asked.

Phira gave an expressive shrug. “Don’t know yet. You’re the first here.”

“Ash?”

“Well, you know.”

“Why’d you call me, then?”

“I have a hunch. Let’s get started, shall we?”

Phira donned some fashionable-looking spectacles and tapped the rim. A red recording indicator flashed and then dimmed. She took in the scene and started narrating what she knew: gunshots had been heard in this apartment, reported by the neighbors. Phira and Ash had arrived to this scene. Ash closed off the scene while Phira questioned some of the neighbors. None had witnessed the crime or anyone leaving the apartments (they had all woken up to the gunshots and, understandably, none had rushed into the hallway to go see). One had volunteered to go in with Phira and identified the body as Daniel Morinae, the man who lived there. He was a quiet man who seemed to work odd hours—that was the only info they could get.

They turned over the body, and, sure enough, he had been shot three times in the chest. The bleeding was spectacular: blood soaked the front of his shirt, from hem to neck, and the entire sleeve of the arm that he crumpled onto. A sticky puddle had spread out onto the floor where the blood could no longer find purchase in the shirt.

“Well, whoever did it did it in a rush,” Sam said.

“Walk me through it,” Phira said.

“Well, the body hasn’t been moved since he died; the blood’s only here. Shot in the front through the center of mass, right in view of the front door… seems like someone threw open the door, caught him by surprise, mowed him down, and left.”

“Sure,” Phira said, arms crossed, staring at the body, then at the door. “All evidence consistent with that. But the only thing we know for sure is that the body wasn’t moved. Could have been a guest in his flat that turned and shot him in the chest. They could’ve even stayed for a bit. No telling how long they could’ve lounged around, given that nobody else came into the flat or the hall to see them.”

“But what’s likely?”

“Point taken, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.”

“They also didn’t miss,” Sam remarked, looking around.

“No other gunshot impacts. Three shots, three wounds here. No, um…” Sam flipped over the body, anticipating Phira’s thoughts. “Damn, put on some gloves, will you? Here, I have some… anyway, no exit wounds either.”

“Probably a handgun.”

“Probably,” Phira concurred. “We’ll get him to the morgue and have a look at the bullets later.”

“Hey, what?” Sam said, stopping suddenly.

Phira turned to look her right in the eye. It was the first time she had done that in the last few minutes; she’d been studiously leveling and sweeping her gaze this way and that to direct the video recording being taken by her eyewear. Sam felt suddenly exposed.

“Well?” Phira said, smirking at her discomfort.

“That’s… no… I mean, look.” Sam drew her tab from her pocket and jabbed and swiped a few times. Then she presented it to Phira.

Phira squinted at the screen, frowning. “I see what you mean, but I’m not sure.”

“It can’t be, right?”

“It could,” Phira mused.

“But Sergeant…”

“Call me Phira, will you? I thought we had gone over this.”

“Phira, Johan Hect is supposed to be in low Volga orbit on a Neptune. How could this be him?”

1045 30 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

“Let me guess. Drip, 500ml, black?”

“Good guess, Dorian.”

“This one’s on me.”

“Oh come on, no,” Sam replied, hastily tapping her tab on the payment ring and receiving the coffee. Dorian smirked. “You’ll come around,” he said.

“To what?”

“To taking free coffee from friends.”

“I don’t mean to… you know what, let’s talk about that later,” Sam said, realizing the first three beginnings of sentences that occurred to her were unsuitable and giving up. Later, she would find the word she was missing was “impose;” at the time she kept stumbling over ways to imply that she didn’t welcome a friendship. “I do have a favor to ask, though.”

“Sure,” Dorian said, easily.

“You hear anything about the morning’s news?”

“I don’t guess you mean that,” Dorian said, gesturing with his bearded chin at a tab he had propped up in the corner of his prep area, playing highlights from last night’s football match.

“No. Around here.”

“I heard Phira got into something. Someone shot on Dublin Street. That’s all I know, though.”

“Right. I’m on that case now; Phira’s back at HQ doing the paperwork. Let me know if you hear anything, yeah?”

“I will. You want me to opine? Free of charge.”

“Sure.” Sam glanced around. The shop was empty; the few other patrons were outside, separated from Sam and Dorian by a door with a little tinkling bell on it.

“Relax.”

Sam’s eyebrows rose.

“See? Feel better already?”

“No?” Sam ventured.

“Bah,” Dorian said. “Listen. New Hope,” he said, gesturing and nodding, as if that explained it.

“New Hope?” Sam prompted.

“You don’t need to be so pent up about it.” Dorian started rolling his shoulders animatedly. “Try it, eh?”

Sam tried it. She felt a little stupid, but that was mostly her inability to grasp the threads at this conversation.

“Good, good. Now, look. New Hope. Even Galway. People get shot here. It’s always the gangs. Always. Don’t care that it’s your beat, that it’s your case. They got into the muck in the first place; someone’s taking them out of the muck for good. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Yeah.” It was appeasement-agreement she was offering, not real agreement. That was too cavalier for her just yet. That must be how Sergeant Lin and Dorian saw it; they were trying to teach her to learn it. She wasn’t sure she could. But Dorian was right about one thing, she knew: violence mostly came to those looking for it, here. This mysterious Hect-alike… “the gangs. If you had to guess, which ones?”

“Oh, could be any of them,” Dorian said, waving a big hand around. “So many of them. You want wild guess, though? I can give you that. Try out the Home Guard guys.”

“Hmm,” Sam began. A strange connection. The Volga Enterprises Company Home Guard administered Kai-A, where she first ran into Roth and his squires. The Home Guard was also going to be the force First Company would be doing exercises with next week. “What would they have to do with this, do you think?”

“Beats me. But they’re the rowdy ones this last month. Home Guard guys keep getting in fights with each other down here. Bunch of them like to hang out at the Golden Moon joint on Greene Street, just over on their side of the street, Lioto Prefecture. Sergeant Seabern is always down on our side of that street cleaning up some mess or another they started.”

The little bell on the door tinkled.

“Thanks, Dorian,” Sam said. “I’d better get to my beat.”

“Don’t forget, Sam,” Dorian said, rolling his shoulders. “Good for the body, good for the mind.”

2110 30 April 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

“So you just walked into there?”

“Well, yes, ma’am.”

Phira resisted burying her face in her palms with great effort, instead finding a pen to twirl. “Well. It must have turned out alright. What’d you get?”

“Golden Moon is a dingy place for slots and video poker. Strange building. Airgapped from the buildings around it, big concrete box. Kept dark inside, like gambling places are. About a six men—all men—lounging around. Little bar at the far end. There was a little radio receiver playing something that they turned off when I came in. I sat down. Guy sat next to me, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘you’re here for the next round, right? May seventh.’ He smelled like he’d been drinking. I said, ‘yeah, I heard. Where?’ and he told me it’d be there at the Golden Moon.”

“Alright. Do you make of that what I make of it?”

“Probably. Those guys were active duty Home Guard guys. Haircuts and boots gave it away. They’re meeting and talking face-to-face. With a hangout like that? I think they’re trying to splinter off. Start up a new PF… a new gang. May seventh is probably a recruitment round; they must coordinate getting guys into or out of the city without the VEC noticing.”

“And in walks a born Dominioner and they hardly even blink.”

“Well, I turned heads,” Sam said. “No, don’t look at me like that, you know what I mean. But yeah, they must not have much of that patriotic Federation spirit; if they did they’d have gone for their guns. In fact, maybe that’s what got me an invite right away. They think I’m a natural ally to their cause.”

Phira caught her pen and slapped it down on the desk, shaking her head and smiling. “I ought to be mad at you for trying to get yourself killed on your first case. But only you could’ve walked in there and come out with a clean lead. We’ll keep an eye on them. We’ve got work to do between now and the seventh anyway.”

“Yes ma’am. What’d you come up with?”

Phira sighed. “Daniel Morinae was a nobody. But that dead body we found was somebody, or else nobody would’ve bothered shooting him with such professional rigor. Anyway, you and I are going to go see a guy about that.”

Callsigns

1325 3 May 1021 EH

Tartar Plains, Volga

Theo’s voice split the crackle of radio static like a knife: “Time to call it. Delta squad, you’re on rearguard. We need 30 minutes. Alpha, Charlie, Echo, fall back.”

“Roger, Captain. We’ll hold,” Phira replied on the line. “Alright, boys and girls, this is going to get nasty.”

This hadn’t been part of the exercise script, per se, but it didn’t surprise Sam in the least. The mock battle had been fought down on a five-mile-wide stretch of grassy field, hemmed in on one side by a dense treeline and on the other side by a series of difficult, verdant hills. Control of the field, an important vehicle corridor near New Hope, was the objective; the EF-VEC was sending in a full four-platoon armor company augmented with supporting infantry to seize it from Theta, which was playing a small but determined OpFor at diminished single-company strength with only one full armor platoon. Whatever hypothetical adversary Theta was standing in for, they needed this corridor badly but couldn’t afford to lose the entire company in its defense. Sam thought that part of the briefing had made it sort of obvious that they’d end up retreating.

From their vantage up in the hills, the First Company fire support teams had a good view of the unfolding armor engagement. It had gone well in the early morning; the EF-VEC had sent a few tanks and a walker to probe the defenses, and Theta had picked them off rather than letting them escape, which seemed like an important win. But an hour later the EF-VEC came in with everything, hard. Theta’s four black-liveried main battle tanks were strewn about the field, all now knocked out of the fight, their crews lounging on their “destroyed” tanks watching the rest of the exercise swirl around them.

That left Theta in control of the hills with just Ash’s Doru-class walker and three four-man fireteams. The VEC losing their only walker had bought them some time, but with the entire armored unit showering them with high explosive rounds from below and infantry teams preparing to scale the feet of the hills, Theo had made the inevitable call. Alpha, Charlie, and Echo (Alpha being composed only of Ash now) would be getting out of there; Delta would fight to buy them time. Thirty minutes.

“Good luck. Theo out.” The command line closed with a pip.

A great rumbling through the dirt embankment under Sam’s armored elbows told her that Ash’s Doru was on the move. The next thing that told her that Ash’s Doru was on the move was a simulated thump fed into her earpiece, then Ash on the company line: “Ow ow ow, fuck.”

“Cassock, status? And keep the line clean, will you?”

Sam pivoted over to watch the walker—an odd, bulky contraption that brought to mind the shoulders of a gorilla (one adorned with a 100mm autoloading smoothbore cannon) atop the tubby torso and digitigrade legs of an ostrich—squat down hurriedly behind a ridge. Ash, formally Alpha Two but informally Cassock by the old tradition of personal radio callsigns, sat within a little faceted canopy in the front-center of the beast, invisible under the glare.

“Fine fine, shit. They marked me pretty quick; I just took one to the front armor skirt.”

“Roger,” Phira replied. “Still peachy keen?”

“I’m fine, thank you, but I need the fuck out of here.”

“You got it, Cassock. Delta team, let’s give them a show. Yu, Sylva, take the ATWs over to the ridge to the north, where Echo just was. Sam, you and I will hang tight here while they get over.”

Yu and Sylva—who Sam had just met at the morning briefing—hustled low through the embankments, worming their way over to the ridge without exposing themselves to too much fire from down on the plains. The squad’s last two tube-shaped anti-tank weapons flopped vertically along the packs on their backs. No simulated gunfire was forthcoming.

But then there was another thump. Cassock sighed over the line. “Can I shoot that guy? He’s annoying me. And wasting ammo.”

“He wants you to try, so you shouldn’t,” Sam said. She toggled magnification on her visor. “There’s another tank down there about 100 meters north of him with a slightly better angle on you. If you pop out to take a shot…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“Lines clean, please,” Phira interjected.

A few seconds later, Yu reported their arrival. “We’re here, Lin.”

“Alright. Hey, Sam, would you do the honors?”

“My pleasure.”

Sam had already figured her part in this, from the moment Phira had sensibly ordered both ATWs over to the far ridge, with a better but riskier view of the field.

She shot to her feet quickly, a mass of metal powered by EAPs, and gave the EF-VEC company a full view of her Troya-class power armor. She brought with her a heavy machine gun—the kind a normal foot soldier would only ever use on a wide, sturdy mount, but which her armor would stabilize handily—and leveled it on the company, squeezing the trigger.

(At this point, a sad little simulated takkatakkatakkatakka filled Sam’s headset. Loud though it might’ve been, it didn’t compare to feeling it fill the air around you and hum in through your hands and chest.)

A few of the tankers who were idling at the pintle mounts scrambled down into their hatches to avoid getting sprayed. Sam held down the trigger and watched. There was a beat, and then, under the simulated hail of annoying 12mm bullets, the tanks lumbered into action. One of the tanks turned its turret toward her…

“Hahaha, you dumb asshole,” Phira said. “Yu!”

There was simulated phoomph-hisssssss from Sam’s right. Sam threw herself down. Bang!

Phira’s voice was next on the line. “Got him. Good shit. Cassock, Sylva, get ready. Sam?”

“Ten seconds, reloading.”

“You heard the lady, Sylva. Ten seconds.”

Sam shot to her feet about ten meters away from where she stood the last time, and she held down the trigger. Takkatakkatakkatakka. There was nothing to hit this time; the pintle mounts were all abandoned, the gunners all closed up in their turrets. Still, Sam had to make her point. She kept firing for about two seconds, then hit the dirt before any of the beasts could level their main cannons on her.

The Phoomph-hisssss was repeated, but this time, there was an “aw, shit,” and then the bang from below, and then the rapid hammering of rifle fire, close.

Meanwhile, the landscape seemed to be coming alive behind them as Ash backed the Doru hastily up the hill, tossing off cannon fire as he went.

“Shit. Yu, report,” Phira spat. “Yu? Shit. They made friends, Sam. At least we got those ATWs off.”

“We need to intercept, Sergeant. What if they have ATWs?” Cassock and his Doru could be in trouble.

“Hell. What if they have ATWs?” Phira asked mischievously.

“I like the way you think,” Sam said, crawling back around the corner toward where Phira had been crouching with her binoculars. “But we need to go quickly…”

Bang.

“Sergeant?”

Sam rounded the corner a few seconds later. Phira was reclining on the rocks with her helmet doffed, running her hands through her hair. She met Sam’s eyes, smirked, and shrugged, then gestured toward a blank grenade that lay on its side a few meters from her feet.

Sam leapt back to her feet with the heavy machine gun and surged forward to the other end of this rocky dip in the hill that Phira had been using for shelter. As her field of view cleared the far bank, a three-man squad of Home Guard infantry came into view. They turned their rifles onto her in a mad panic, but it was no use. Their simulated shots must’ve pinged off of Sam’s armor at least a dozen times but registered no damage. In that time, Sam had mowed down all of them with the heavy machine gun.

“Damn, if I weren’t dead, I’d be deaf, now,” Phira said out loud, her radio switched off. Her nose was about ten inches from the barrel of Sam’s gun.

“You’d rather be deaf, though, I imagine,” Sam said, craning her head to see if any other VEC soldiers were behind the ones that were grumbling and finding seats among the rocks.

“Idunno. I hear tinnitus is a real bitch,” Phira said.

“You’re telling me,” one of the Home Guard soldiers said. He looked terribly young. “These sims are really nice. When we’re not doing this we’re doing live fire exercises with the tanks. That sucks ass.” That earned him a slap on the back of his head from one of his mates, who wore sergeant’s chevrons.

Sam hurried past. The ridge would provide her cover for a little bit, but she couldn’t just hunker down. Waiting in safety was just waiting to die. Move; never be found where you just were the last time they saw you; fall upon your enemy before they are prepared; seize the initiative at your foe’s throat…

Sam scrambled up a steep cliff. Over strong, stable terrain, like this granite, the heavy armor with its disproportionately strong EAPs made traversal lightning fast, a welcome advantage…

… and a critical one. As Sam’s visor crested the ridge, she spotted a diminished-strength squad of VEC infantry, all three of them lying prone in defilade on the slope of the hill, readying ATWs. So Cassock was somewhere below…

Boom.

A simulated blast erupted just to Sam’s left.

One of the infantrymen turned around, pointed, and yelled.

Sam heaved herself up on the ridge and threw her HMG out in front of her, pulling the trigger back the moment she had it in something even resembling a firing position. She held the thing down for as long as she dared—what was it, three seconds? Four? And then she scrambled forward on adrenaline.

Boom.

Another blast like the one before. It must have been a tank round, fired from below, a near miss. Her visor hadn’t registered any hits.

But in a real battle, would the cliff have held? Would the tank shell had shattered her handholds, sending her tumbling down the cliff in her half-ton metal shell?

She was on her feet and running now. The infantry weren’t firing back and were instead removing their helmets. She had nailed all three of them.

And there were two unspent ATW tubes among them.

“Don’t mind if I do, fellas,” she said, when she finally reached them. She slung one of the tubes over her shoulder on its strap and held onto the other one in her left hand, her HMG in the right, and she took a position a dozen meters or so to the right along the ridge and peered down.

There was a densely forested defile below, dividing this ridge and the next. The south end, to Sam’s right, bent around to the west and connected back to the main plain. Down just at the foot of the far ridge, having navigated the creek and the trees on either side, was Cassock in his Doru. He had begun the climb. Just ahead of him were the eight soldiers of Charlie and Echo squads. Just a little longer, to the far ridge, to freedom…

But they were hideously vulnerable if the Federation armor could make it into this defile. Now that they controlled the plains, it would only be a matter of time until they did.

Sam tromped to the south on the ridge to find a more prominent point. She laid her HMG beside her—here’s to hoping there weren’t any more foot soldiers in the ridge behind her—shouldered one of the ATW tubes, and waited.

Five minutes later, she saw movement, a blur of gray against the green grasses and reddish granite. She lifted her visor and pressed her eye as close to the ATW eyepiece as it would go—which was not very close, the ATW was designed for a standard ballistic helmet, not a whole armored head unit. It was deeply annoying, but fortunately, it didn’t matter that much. She got close enough on target, and then there was a beep!. She threw the safety latch and pressed down the firing button.

There was an extremely pleasing thump from down at the mouth of the defile.

Sam threw the spent ATW aside and turned on her visor magnification, then frowned. The tank had just started lumbering forward…

The ATW had scored a hit, but it hadn’t killed the lead tank. It looked like a hit on top; the simulator command software had instructed the tank to immobilize its turret.

Bang.

Sam ducked. Simulator command hadn’t told her she was dead, at least. But it would do that, soon, if Sam didn’t move. She shimmied back away from the most prominent part of her ridge and took a second to think.

The tank turret was frozen, leaving only the mounted machine gun; the whole thing was about as dangerous as a two men with rifles in a minivan. But it was still thundering toward Cassock. That must be because the defile was only letting one tank through at a time—the company commander was urging the crippled lead tank through so the others could come in behind it without delay and lay down fire. Which they sure could, judging by the one that had tried to put a round through her at 400 meters.

Sam pulled the second ATW off her back and relocated about thirty yards to her right. She wanted to be farther, but she was out of time; any second they’d be putting rounds downrange against Cassock.

She stood, threw the safety latch, and brought the ATW to bear. Three tanks were in view now, two turrets swinging around to level with her… where’s the beep?

BANG.

Sam slammed the switch… BANG. and hit the deck. The ATW never beeped. There was no fwoosh. Damaged equipment? “Argh!” she shouted into her visor. She threw the ATW aside.

Now what?

Well, she had some grenades on her belt…

It would have to do, wouldn’t it?

Sam scooped up her HMG and fell back to a point in the ridge where she’d be out of the tank column’s line of sight. She threw herself down to the floor of the defile as fast as she dared. Just a minute’s worth of work. Then she darted to the treeline, through the trees, into the creek, and pounded down (up? What direction did it flow? That didn’t matter much, did it?) as fast as she could.

She emerged from the trees a hundred yards before the front tank, its turret angled way up and over her right shoulder. The commander was halfway out of the hatch with his binoculars raised to his eyes, scanning the ridge.

She couldn’t see the two or three tanks behind it… and they couldn’t see her.

Sam grinned like a maniac as she charged up to the rumbling tank, shot the commander (who nearly jumped out of his skin when the simulated takkatakkatakkatakka in his headpiece heralded his simulated death) and bounded up onto the front skirt of its armor.

The “dead” commander watched sourly as she ripped a grenade off her belt, unpinned it, and tossed it into his lap.

Bang.

Sam leapt off the front skirt and made to disappear back into the forest…

BANG.

Beep beep.

“Corporal Arif, this is simulation command; you’re out. Please switch off your squad and command radio channels. Take off your helmet and have a seat somewhere safe and out of the way. Await further instruction.”

Sam sighed. “Roger wilco.” She turned back to face the tanks. The second and third had been able to fan out from behind the first… a little bit. She was staring right into the barrel of tank number three.

And tank number two had a line on Cassock.

Sam didn’t talk the whole way back to base, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a VTOL bird with Phira and the rest of Charlie, Delta, and Echo. Those things were cacophonous anyway, and nobody really likes talking over the headsets if they don’t have to. And, having a glance around, everyone looked spent. That was all good. Sam really didn’t want to talk.

When the bird touched down and the rear ramp folded out, though, Phira glanced out and back and smirked, clapping Sam on the shoulder as she hauled herself and her kit up to disembark.

Sam soon saw why. The squads were disembarking onto the asphalt into a little rank and file facing a lone, broad-shouldered man, standing with his hands clasped behind his back in a cap and a night-black uniform with a standing collar. As Sam fell in beside Phira, she got a better look at the man’s face: long, high, slightly gaunt, bones tight around a pair of hard gray eyes, deep set.

That would be Colonel Rogier Tholas, commanding officer and owner of Theta Group, by the single vertical silver stripe on his shoulder tab. He wore no other medals or adornments, his uniform a vast, dark expanse.

Captain Roche stepped up, saluted, and said something to him, lost in the warbling whine of the VTOL as it powered down and the ground crews hauled their gear over to it. In the moment of perfect silence that followed, the Colonel simply said, “at ease. Carry on.”

Roche slung his pack back over his shoulder and motioned with his head, and the squads began to follow him back toward the base.

A few seconds later, Phira and Sam were pulled aside: “Sergeant Lin. Corporal Arif.”

“Sir,” Phira replied, halting. The Colonel had appeared before them with an eerie suddenness, as if the fog had parted from around a mountain.

As the squad flowed on past them, he seemed to be watching them intensely. He didn’t look like a man who did anything less than intensely. Sam found the silence deeply uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t articulate.

When, finally, the squad was mostly out of eavesdropping distance, the Colonel continued. His voice was deep, even, and unmarked, like gray polished slate. “Corporal Arif, I’m told you are from the Dominion. You seem to have been trained in their armored infantry tactics. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Lin, please see to it that when she teaches the others listen. I will tell Roche the same.”

“Yes, sir,” Phira replied.

“One more thing, Corporal.” He was smiling now. It seemed to come from somewhere dark and far away. “Do you fear death?”

“Sir, that’s a wei—” Phira began, but Sam was already answering. “That’s part of the creed of the Knights of Aquila, sir, but I was never knighted.”

“So do you?”

“I’ve trained for decades not to, sir.”

The Colonel said nothing for a beat. “Hmm. That is a very useful thing in a soldier. A very dangerous thing in a person. Carry on. I think Roche will be looking for you two.”

As Sam and Phira headed after Roche and the Colonel went to go speak to the VTOL crews, Sam realized that her shoulders were tensed and her hair had been raised.

“Captain, I’m sor—”

“Phira told me you’d say that. I’m not going to let you.” He nodded to someone behind Sam.

PFC Sylva—his first name was Damien, Sam was pretty sure, but he really didn’t seem to like it much—had just entered the room, and he appeared at her elbow with a beer.

“Sam! Once the captain is done with you, find us downstairs. Have this; don’t want you to have to catch up too much.”

He had vanished, leaving her with the cold can, before Sam could get a word back in.

“Anyway,” Theo was saying, “Simulation command sent me the playback to study on the flight back. I’ll be getting a proper report from Lin later—the playback can’t tell me everything—but I’ve seen enough to know that you have nothing to apologize for. Nobody’s perfect, and we’ll have adjustments to make for the whole squad and we’ll find little execution errors everywhere; we always do. But for now, don’t keep them waiting. Dismissed.”

“…Sir,” Sam said, retreating.

Sam thumped down the narrow stairway and into the hall. It was a quaint little building they had been billeted in: the forward operating base was, centuries ago, a village built to staff a nearby lithium mine, which, when the mine had been exhausted, had been bought by the Prince of Agunda and turned into a Tuscan-style family retreat. The Prince of Agunda was, apparently, another figure with whom Colonel Tholas was able to exchange favors, and so it became a seasonal home to the varied companies of Theta Group when they did exercises on the plains.

She pushed open the door, and then Sylva was pushing another beer into her hands.

“The woman of the hour!” His face scrunched up at her other beer. “I told you that you need to catch up.”

“I… what?”

“Beer. You need to drink your beer,” Sylva said, stepping back at letting Sam into the room. It was a long living room (screen, coffee table, sofa, armchair, ridiculously large neoclassical painting) across a counter from a small kitchen glowing with fluorescent light. Delta was here—Phira, Sylva, and Yu (her first name was Olivia, Sam was pretty sure)—as well as Ash and some others from the other squads Sam hadn’t met. A deck of cards and poker chips had spilled out onto the tables between the beers. Ash was perched on the back of the armchair.

Everyone turned to look at Sam.

A cheer erupted.

“Um,” she said, holding two beers.

Most of the gang was back to their game or their conversations, but a few pushed up to greet Sam. “Damn,” Olivia said. “What’s wrong? You don’t look like the lady who stopped a tank column earlier.”

“She does too,” Ash said from over on the chair. “She had to stoop in under the door frame.”

“Yeah, yeah, but she ought to look, Idunno, happy about it. Seeing your enemy driven before you, right? Best thing in life?”

“Lamentations of their women,” Ash added.

“That too. Come on, Sam, what’s wrong?”

Phira was visible over her shoulder, enjoying this.

“It didn’t go that well,” Sam mumbled.

“It did too!” Olivia shouted over the din. “Damn, Phira was right.”

“About what?”

“That you’re used to taking blame.”

Sam, feeling put the back foot, bought time with a sip of beer. It wasn’t good beer but it was beer enough. “They still got Cassock, didn’t they?”

“You could’ve warned me I was about to be shot in the ass,” Ash said.

“Oh, shut up,” Olivia said. “Sam, Ash always gets shot in the ass.”

“It’s not really a maneuver warfare thing for the VEC,” Phira said. “It’s a counterinsurgency drill we run every year or so. They outnumber us four-to-one in armor and winning the engagement is important for them but it’s more important that they inflict disproportionate casualties on us. We’ve never escaped that scenario with any armor at all.

“We didn’t this time, either, but Charlie and Echo got out, and you really fucked them up trying to get Ash,” she finished.

“Well,” Sam said, “this is the first time you had some power armor, right?”

Ash rolled his eyes so hard he almost fell off the top of the chair. “Which has a radio. You really could’ve warned me.”

“Oh shut the fuck up you baby,” Phira said, snorting. “Sam, this isn’t the first time we’ve had power armor. It is the first time we’ve had a former knight candidate with extensive training in the armor, but I don’t care about that. You took out two squads of infantry and killed a tank unsupported. And it wasn’t some sort of pointless heroics, either. You did your damn job.”

“I… thanks, Sergeant.”

“Oh my God. Drink your beer, will you?”

“What?”

“Just… drink the damn beer. Have a seat. Wanna be dealt in?”

“Ah. Uh. Sure.”

They all crammed around the table. Phira was about to make Ash climb down off the chair, but Sam signaled that she’d just sit on the floor. Sylva appeared—how did he keep doing that?—and Sam found herself setting to Olivia’s left.

“So what do you do when you’re not super-soldiering?” Olivia asked.

“Um,” Sam said, peering at her cards. “Please, I’m not a supe…”

“Okay, okay. But what do you do, then?”

“Um.”

“Yu,” Phira said.

“What?”

“Play is on you.”

“Oh.” She shoved some chips into the center of the table. Sam matched the amount. “I’m new in town,” she finally said.

Olivia smiled. Her smile seemed naturally sly, somehow. “Phira told me as much. I had to ask anyway, though. You’ll like it here. Or, there, anyway. This base is comfy but not as much fun.”

“Oh, is our illuminating company not to your satisfaction?” Phira asked, calling and laying down the flop.

“No, you all smell like unwashed socks. And Ash hates jazz.”

“I told you,” he complained, “the so-called hard stuff is just wankery. Go listen to some fu—”

“Nobody asked you.”

“Nobody ever asks me,” he grumbled. He folded, flinging his cards like frisbees, where they landed face-down on the table.

Sylva folded, too; Olivia raised and Sam called. “What about you?” she asked. “If I’m the weirdo who doesn’t do much other than soldiering.”

“Yeah you’re the weirdo,” Olivia said pleasantly while Phira called and laid down the turn. “I play jazz,” she said.

Sam laughed.

“You’ll have to come to the square at the end of Jean Street one of these afternoons. I’ll tell you next time I’m going if you want.”

“You busk?”

“Oh, no. It’s more of a jamming thing. I’m not turning anybody who wants to just give me money, but I’m not asking for any either.”

Phira called, and then she laid down the river. Olivia raised ostentatiously; Sam rolled her eyes and folded. But she said, “sure, next time you’re down there.”

“I’ll let you know,” Olivia said, as Phira called and she and Olivia showed their hands. Phira had won with a flush.

“Cheers,” Olivia said, pounding her beer.

“So,” Sylva said as Olivia was otherwise occupied and he was dealing the next hand. “Good show out there today and all, but, Sam, it occurs to me…”

“What’s that?” she asked, peering at her new hand.

“You’re an armor specialist, right? You need a callsign.”

“Oh no,” Sam groaned. “No I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

“I’m infantry. We don’t do that.”

“Maybe in the Dominion. But we’re considered combined arms here. Our armor elements have callsigns, right Cassock?”

Ash smirked. “Just right.”

Sam was staring hard at her cards.

“You already have one, don’t you?” Ash shouted, bordering on genuine glee for the first time Sam had ever seen. Callsigns were always embarrassing; that was nearly the whole point. It must be especially true for Ash; she had asked once: “Cassock? Don’t you mean Cossack?” “No, it’s Cassock,” he had replied, in a tone that indicated he would not elaborate.

“… I already have one,” she mumbled.

Recognition dawned on Sylva’s face. “Dread Fist, that was the name for your company, right?” (“Hahahahahaha,” Ash said.) “They give everyone callsigns? I hear merc companies do that.” (“Fucking dorks,” Ash added).

“… yes,” Sam said, steeling herself.

“Okay. Own up,” Sylva demanded.

“Condor,” Sam said.

“Oh, that can’t be that bad. How’d you get it?”

Sam sighed. “The first time I showed up in the locker room. I could hear the voices on the other side of the door talking about the new ‘Dominioner bird’ in the company, and that’s when I walked in with my duffel full of stuff to throw in my locker. One of my new squadmates, Al, turns to look at me, looks up, and says, ‘that’s a damn big bird’.”

Turncoats

0900 6 May 1021 EH

Beacon Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

“Sergeant Lin? The Ambassador will see you now.”

Phira and Sam stood. Sam realized, now, how these clothes worked. This longcoat and shirt worked just as well over coffee on a street corner as it did in a Federation embassy (a tall building spiraling a massive atrium, sunlit at almost all hours of the day by giant vertical faces of windows running dozens of stories up) on business. Phira, in her navy blue, was just as ready to affably chat up a bodega owner as she was to go eye-to-eye with one of the most powerful officials in the entire city.

The Ambassador was a man with a permanently severe expression on his face and a crown of gray hair wrapped around his temples, above which he was bald with perfect dignity. His hands were folded neatly on his desk (where papers, pen, and phone were also folded neatly) as Sam and Phira filed into the room. The room had a beautiful view down First Street to the left, and to the right it had a command of the atrium and its slow hum of traffic.

“Good morning, Sergeant Lin. I appreciate your promptness in the matter.”

“Morning, Ambassador Stukov. So,” Phira said, taking a seat. Sam remained standing. “Let me introduce you to Corporal Samantha Arif.”

“Corporal,” he said, nodding at Sam’s outstretched hand and pointedly not shaking it. “I hope you are finding New Hope more hospitable than your last stay with the Federation.”

“Go fuck yourself, Ambassador,” Phira spat immediately. Sam felt her eyebrows rise and her heart thump suddenly. The Ambassador had meant to rattle her but failed, but Phira had sure startled her. Phira continued: “we’re meeting at oh-nine-hundred because this is urgent and we both need each other very badly. You will give my people the respect they are owed or so help me God I will take my ball and go home. And you will get to explain to your Foreign Affairs guys why your precious asset bled to death in Galway and you have no fucking idea why.”

The Ambassador’s flat, sunken eyes leveled on Phira. Then Sam. Then Phira. His body did not move. “Your people?”

“She’s Theta Company. No other allegiances, period.”

There was another thick pause.

“Very well. Please sit and be welcome, Corporal Arif.”

“I thought she’d stand,” Phira said, both sweetly and acidly.

“I won’t play games with you and you won’t play games with me, Sergeant. Deal?”

Phira smiled, motioning to Sam to sit. “Deal. So. Daniel Morinae.”

“You reported his death directly to me rather than calling the main ambassadorial office. That was an action with a very clear meaning, although it did have the pleasant side effect of bringing the matter to my attention without it having to bubble up through a few layers of junior officials.”

Phira crossed her arms and legs and leaned back. “We did some digging on his identity, because Sam was nearly convinced that he was Johan Hect. We couldn’t confirm him to be Johan Hect. But we also couldn’t find any real record of employment anywhere in Galway Prefecture. The paystubs he had submitted with his lease application to the apartment complex were for the Volga Enterprises Company, but the managers at VEC couldn’t verify his employment. The VEC is normally pretty meticulous about employment and citizenship. You really ought to get them to help you out with your cover stories.”

“Noted,” Stukov replied dryly.

“So he was your spy. What was he doing in Galway Prefecture, with a beautiful view of Theta HQ?”

“Happenstance.”

“Oh. Yes, I do believe that.”

“You don’t have to, but that’s what it is.”

“You didn’t invite us to your office to stonewall us, though.”

“No, I did not. Permit me a question, first. What was the cause of death?”

“Three gunshot wounds, center mass,” Sam said.

“You suppose it was someone with military or police training,” Stukov surmised from her choice of words.

“Yes, sir. They were good shots and must have been fired quickly before he hit the floor face-down. Nothing else was damaged and there was no obvious sign of struggle.”

Stukov eyed the two of them dispassionately for a moment.

“Makes sense, though. That’s sort of how you’d expect a spy to go,” Phira said.

“Indeed,” Stukov said. “Anyway, lucky you.”

“Why’s that?” Phira said.

“You have been pursuing the Johan Hect matter. Daniel Morinae was Gunter Hect, Johan Hect’s younger brother. They served in the Armed Forces of Salemo together in a combined arms battalion. Johan—alias Kaiser—defected with most of one of the companies. He did not include Gunter in this scheme, but nevertheless Gunter’s superiors became greatly suspicious of him, dead-ending Gunter’s military career immediately. We made contact as soon as we could and came to an arrangement.”

“Which was?” Phira prompted.

“Johan Hect was, immediately following his departure, incommunicado in Resmond. We were able to make contact with Gunter after the defection, after his dismissal, but before he had any contact with Johan. Thus we might be able to suggest to Gunter how he might represent himself to Johan.”

“Aha. Gunter has every reason to be pissed at Johan, but Johan might be fooled into thinking they’re cool. If Johan ever surfaced again, Gunter’s happy to take your money to suck up to him and get him to leak info.”

“Just so.”

“You moved quickly,” Sam pointed out. “So you were already on the case. Why?”

Stukov glowered at her for a moment, thinking. “It seems permissible to me to admit that the Federation is greatly incensed to find that a minor insurgent has appeared operating signature Federation military equipment.”

“So he didn’t get the Neptune from you, then.”

“Of course not.”

“What about the VEC?” Phira asked.

“Not in an official capacity,” Stukov droned. “That would be grounds for an instant revocation of their charter.”

“You would never revoke the VEC charter.”

“No. But heads would roll on the governing board and in the executive suite.”

“Literally?”

“Possibly. But that is beside the point, Sergeant.”

“It’s only beside the point if they didn’t do it.”

“They didn’t do it at a high level,” Stukov said, with a flat shake of his head. “Perhaps a rogue element in the security services. That would be an egg on the face of the board, but not a presumptive death sentence for any of them.”

“But anyway, you have no real idea.”

“We were hoping that the man who was murdered in your jurisdiction would shine some light on the matter.”

“Don’t make me bring up the Sixth Street shitshow from a few years back. Besides, he still could.”

“And how would that be, Sergeant?”

“We figure out who shot him three times in the chest.”

“I am eager to learn if you will have the capacity to tell me.”

“In the fullness of time, Ambassador. You’ve given us one of the clues we need—someone planetside is running a screen for Johan, whacking people who might cause him problems. Someone clever enough to see through an identity forged by the Federation and identify Gunter as a problem.”

“It would be much better to have this sorted before the fullness of time permits Mr. Hect to choose his target and make his landing, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, yeah. You got anything else for me?”

Stukov gazed out the huge single-paned window, onto First Street. “No, Sergeant Lin. My people are pursuing this matter as well, but in my long years of experience I have found that it is wise to embrace multilateral efforts. I wish you the best of luck and skill in this matter.”

The moment the doors pressed shut on the elevator, Sam said, “you didn’t have to do that.”

Phira, still facing forward, smiled. “But I did do it.”

“But you don’t have to.”

“You’re welcome.”

“But don’t! It’s not necessary!”

“Don’t worry so much about it. The thing to know about the Ambassador is that he’s not a diplomat, really.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s the Ambassador, which means he’s nominally here as the representative of the Eridani Federation to the government and people of New Hope. But the government of New Hope is a small fry. Nobody cares what they think of the Federation.” The doors opened on the atrium; Sam and Phira stepped out and made their way toward the Second Street entrance, their boots counting off a pleasing dop dop dop on the marble floor.

“Practically, he’s here as the chief of the Eridani Federation’s employees and agents operating in New Hope,” Phira continued. “Not so much a diplomat. More of a manager. A boss man.”

“Okay. So you’re saying he’s not really a fancy-dinners-and-cocktails ambassador, so you’re not going to waste pretty words on him?”

“Ha! I like that way of putting it. Yeah. We don’t need to dance and have tea with him. But also, he understands people and loyalty. That’s his real job. It’s best if I talk in that language to him.”

No other allegiances, period. “Is ‘go fuck yourself’ the language of loyalty?”

“You know it.”

They walked past the main reception desk, and then were hurled the floor with a crash.

Sam scrambled to her feet out of reflex, beginning to process what had happened. Her ears were ringing—it had been an earth-shaking bang, followed by flying glass and shards of tile. It had come from somewhere to their left, in a set of offices separated from the main atrium by a glass wall, and the force of the blast had knocked her to the ground. Her face stung from shards of glass, but the rest of her body was intact.

Phira was pushing to her feet, too. Fire alarms were ringing, and the sprinklers were dousing them in stale water. “Shit,” she said, strained through her short breath. “We’d better get to the door before something falls on us.”

Sam moved to comply but froze. Her hand went to her hip… where no handgun was holstered. She had left it at home knowing she’d be coming to an embassy.

“Sam, no,” Phira said. “Let’s go.”

Sam was staring at the ruin of the offices. It looked like several floors had caved in above and below, creating an undifferentiated mass of bent structural steel, cubicle dividers, and tile.

The followup. Where was the followup?

“Not to the front entrance,” Sam said, casting around. Bystanders were clearing the atrium in a terror. “Someone could be expecting us there.” Gunners? More bombs? Electrical sabotage?

Phira looked like she was going to say something, then bit it back. “I’m going to come back as a ghost and haunt your ass if this building falls on us.”

“It won’t,” Sam said, realizing (absurdly, even through rushing adrenaline) that it was poor banter. “Here,” she said, gesturing at the reception desk. It was large oval-shaped counter with a tall wood-paneled partition standing lengthwise in the middle, forming two desks, one facing each of the First and Second Street entrances.

“We can hold here a few,” Sam said. “Let the Feds clear things out.” She whipped her head back and forth, from entrances to balconies to windows. Another shoe was going to fall…

“Right,” Phira said, vaulting the counter behind the west desk. Sam ducked behind the east desk.

Sam felt her heart thrashing against her ribs as she watched the building entrances. Every second that crept by, underneath the cascading water and bleating alarms, seemed to stretch tighter, like elastic that would snap into violent motion at any moment. Then, a team of a dozen black-clad, face-shielded troopers came crunching through the glass remains of the east facade, weapons at high ready as they fanned out. The Feds. Right?

Sam slowly raised her hands and stood. A few of the troopers exchanged hand signs, and three of them approached her. Their weapons weren’t exactly trained on her, but they were worryingly close to it.

“What are you doing here?” one shouted above the alarm. What are you doing? Sam thought to herself; we’re going to die any minute now.

“Getting wet,” Phira whined from the other side of the divider. Sam was pretty sure the trooper couldn’t hear that, fortunately. “Decided to stay put for safety,” she said.

“You need to evacuate,” he replied, motioning with his weapon. “Go!”

And just in that moment, Sam saw the other shoe falling.

“GET DOWN,” she shouted. In a flash, she grabbed the likeliest nearest weapon, an elongated shard of marble off the counter in front of her, and she hurled it like a javelin over the trooper’s head. Then she ducked, and prayed desperately that these Feds were professionals.

“MARK, UP,” one of them shouted, all battle bravado. Roaring gunfire filled the atrium. “CLEAR,” another shouted, and then Sam was being hauled up from her hiding place and thrown out onto the cold, wet marble floor, a knee on her spine.

She was able to get her left cheek on the ground as she was being restrained so she could look over and see the grenade-carrying drone she had decapitated with her marble spear.

1420 6 May 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Captain Roche rapped his fingers on his desk as he studied Sam and Phira.

Finally, he said, “At ease. Have a seat.”

Sam and Phira took their seats.

“Good news and bad news,” he said. “Which would you like first?”

“Chronological order,” Sam said.

Theo laughed. “Alright. The good news is that Ambassador Stukov has extended to you his thanks for, quote, ‘remaining alert to the situation and materially aiding in the security efforts of the Federation Marine Sentinels.’”

“Thank Sam for that,” Phira said.

“The bad news is that he added, ‘you may rest assured, however, that Federation personnel take security and secrecy very seriously even in times of crisis.’”

“He thinks we wanted to take advantage of the chaos to spy on him,” Phira said.

“Blame me for that,” Sam said.

Theo shrugged. “Next time, get out of there.”

“But…”

“I know. You’re the kind of soldier who runs toward danger instead of away from it. You thought there would be a followup and that taking it head-on might defeat it. I understand that. This isn’t a reprimand. But you have a mission you need to stay alive for, and I need you to evaluate carefully whether running toward a particular danger furthers that mission.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said, at the same time as Phira was laughing: “evaluate! Sir, the building was on fire.”

“Noted, Sergeant. It’s tough to keep a cool head, but I have a feeling Sam will be good at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, something you might find interesting. The Federation thinks they already have their man.”

“Stukov told you? Really?” Phira asked.

“Oh, no, he didn’t.” Roche said, leaving it at that. “Anyway, they got him by triangulating the drone signal. That’s something the Feds are really damn good at—signals intel. The Marine Sentinels came down on the asshole like a sack of bricks.”

“You gonna tell us who?”

“We don’t have a name. But apparently the guy is from Salemo.”

“That can’t be right,” Sam said suddenly.

“Why’s that? Our source with the Feds is good,” Theo said, brow knitting and hands clasping over his desk.

“There’s no way it could be Salemo, right? They have a depleted militia with not a lot of operating experience. Where’d they get a guy who knows how to do a one-two shock bombing like that?”

“Their intelligence services could have a lot of expertise,” Theo proposed.

“No,” Sam said, thinking. “I don’t think so. They haven’t been able to pin down anything on Kaiser. If they had these slick operators all along, where have they been?”

“And besides, wouldn’t it be dumb to try to court an intervention by the Federation?” Phira added.

Theo nodded. “Point taken. I’ll raise the idea with our analysts. Our source said what they said, though.”

By the time he had finished his sentence, Sam had finished thinking.

“Sir, it has to be the Dominion, hasn’t it?”

Theo and Phira stared at her in silence.

“They’re the other actor in New Hope. The outside actor. With commando experience, and commandos we’ve seen on the ground. And they do just this kind of shock bombing tactic.”

“An initial strike to cause casualties, and a followup to exploit chaos and ensure high-value targets are hit,” Phira said. “Not gonna work well against everyone, but a nasty tool to have in the kit.”

“Exactly,” Sam said. “This looks like a Knights of Aquila commando op. And they certainly aren’t afraid to make a stir. What’s the Federation going to do, invade them? Blockade them? The Feds were plenty able to draw blood in the Indus North War, but they had no hope of taking the fight to the Dominion’s home turf. So the knights can get up to a lot of nasty business before it’ll cost them anything, except for the guys who get caught.”

“So why’s it a Salemo guy the Feds brought in?” Theo asked.

“They’re cooperating with the Dominion—we have evidence of that, too: the way I got sold up. It fits!”

“It fits,” Phira said, a shrug in her tone.

“So what was their goal?”

“Disrupt the intelligence office. They think the Feds are onto them about something.”

Phira’s eyes widened the barest span. “About Kaiser.”

“About Kaiser,” Sam exclaimed, picking up the thread. “The Dominion were the ones who got a hold of that Neptune, somehow, and they gave it to Kaiser,” Sam said. “They’re trying to start a proxy war on Volga. The Feds are on their trail, and…”

“Shhhhhh,” Theo said. “This is all very exciting, but it is a lot of conjecture, and it’s a sensitive thing to be yelling about.”

“Sorry, sir,” Sam said, sitting back down.

“Forgiven. I’m not convinced, but you have something. We need to chase it down.”

Sam was thinking faster than the conversation now. “Easy. All we have to do is get to one of those commandos. They must be communicating with Kaiser. We just need to get a hold of their hardware, or their encryption secrets. And I think I know how…”

Theo sighed. “You’re not going to suggest…”

“Of course I am. I’ll be the bait.”

2255 7 May 1021 EH

Lioto Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

“You have to admit, it is a better idea,” Phira said, turning the corner onto Greene Street.

Sam, keeping pace, sighed. “If you say so.”

“No, really. Theo is right that just because we can run directly at the threat doesn’t mean we should.”

“If you say so! I meant that. I just…” Sam huffed. “I just don’t like waiting.”

“Which is why we’re here,” Phira said.

“What? I thought… huh.”

“Yeah. I’m not actually sure it’s a good idea to follow up on the Golden Moon thing. But it’s a better idea than launching for that damn Neptune right away.”

They reached the Golden Moon. From outside on Greene Street, it was little more than a blacked-out swinging glass door set in a blank gray wall, set apart from the other buildings on the street, which was already completely devoid of traffic and had been for several hours. The door was ajar, and a droning, radio-distorted voice issued from the crack. Sam and Phira stared at it, agreeing, wordlessly, that something was off.

Sam pulled the door open, right hand on her handgun.

The dark little place was dominated by the three rows of slots and related video gambling kiosks running down the length of the single room, glowing garishly at each other. The bar at the far end hosted a few other gambling consoles and a few bare spots for patrons to pull up stools and drink at.

The would-be patrons, fourteen of them, were sprawled, unmoving, in the gutters between the slots, before the bar, behind the bar, and by the door. The air smelled thickly of blood-iron, brass casings, and dry sulfur.

Phira sighed. “Shit.”

Sam finished checking the corners. It was nice at least that there were basically just the four, and behind the bar. “Half of them were armed, too.”

It certainly wasn’t the first time Sam had seen dead bodies. But had she ever seen an aftermath quite like this? Terrible violence had been wrought here. The once-musty carpet was now completely soaked in human blood; gory wounds showed on every body, every body a man who was alive just a few hours ago. Nobody had stopped to clean up or claim the bodies. They had shown up, murdered more than a dozen men, and left. It seemed to Sam a sort of remorseless, spasmodic evil that was alien even to a soldier.

Phira had donned and tapped her recording glasses and was surveying with a flashlight. “Okay,” she said, taking a breath and seeming to regret it. “Those are rifle wounds. Well, rifle-caliber anyway.”

“Yeah, but… whoever came in, shot the place up, and left.”

“You don’t think they’re here on the floor?” Phira asked, searching faces and bodies.

“Probably not. These all look like Home Guard guys.”

“Who says it couldn’t be blue-on-blue?”

There was silence between the two of them. Then, finally, they noticed the radio.

“… our time is nigh! Promise is eternal, but action! Action will take place on human timelines!”

Sam and Phira stared at it. “Hect?” Sam said. “That’s Hect. Kaiser.”

“The loyal men of Volga are preparing day and night to reclaim the dignity of their world,” Kaiser replied.

“Rambling as usual, I guess,” Phira said. “So… who put this on?”

Sam thought. “The Home Guard guys must’ve been into it. They weren’t starting their own PF. They were trying to join up with the Kaiser’s guys.”

(“I turn your attention now to those who would stand in our way. They will be cast aside, trashed before our strength…”)

“Or maybe the guy who ran through them put his channel on as a message?”

“Idunno, Sergeant… Oh. Sergeant,” Sam said, standing over the body at the door. “This one wasn’t shot.”

Phira swung her flashlight and gaze over, then flipped it off and stowed her recording glasses. “Right. We know what that means. Time to go.”

The body they stepped over as they hurried out had been gashed and crushed in a long, hideous line up the abdomen and chest, as if by a long, sharp length of steel, swung with great force.

0030 8 May 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

“Lucky you, Sam, you don’t have to wait much longer,” Roche began, patting a stack of three-ring binders, as Sam and Phira pulled up their chairs. Ash, Olivia, and Sylva were already sitting around the table, as well as another man Sam had only met a few times—an aerospace pilot, Captain Kevin “Tempo” Lun, a thin man with nervous eyes who always seemed to sit with his hands folded primly in his lap. Ash was wearing his black coat but the others were wearing whatever they had thrown on to answer the captain’s call just past midnight. Sam and Phira had received the call on the way back to HQ from the Golden Moon: something was up.

“Sir,” Sam said. “We need to report, badly.”

Roche winced. “This can’t wait? We’ve got a situation in progress.”

“Executive summary, Captain,” Phira said.

“Proceed,” Roche said, having weighed the urgencies and swallowed his frustration admirably.

Phira looked to Sam. “Fourteen dead at the Golden Moon. Must’ve been a man in power armor with a steel-core sword. A knight, sir,” Sam said.

Roche chewed on that for a second. “Why?”

“No idea,” Sam said. “We think the HG guys were trying to line up with Kaiser. We thought the Dominion was aiding and abetting Kaiser. Not sure how it squares up.”

Roche paused again, and then he said, “thank you, Sergeant, Corporal. Tabled for now. I’ve got something urgent for us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I got a call twenty minutes ago,” Roche began, as he started passing around the binders. We have an undercover agent in a hot zone, and he needs help.”

Sam flipped through the binder. It was full of photographs and maps of the Salemo Royal Palace.

“Kinetic help,” Phira guessed.

“Right. As you are all aware, at about 0930 yesterday there was a bombing at the Eridani Federation Embassy downtown in Beacon. The Federation has not made any formal accusations, but their analysts began blabbing to the media almost immediately about Salemo being behind it, which is the next best thing. At a press conference at 1500, the Princess De Myrre of Salemo announced…”

Sam flipped to a photograph of De Myrre at a podium set against the classic red-and-gold curtain backdrop of a palace media room. An unostentatious silver tiara glittered atop her head under the can lights, and her expression seemed fiery in a careful, practiced way.

“… that she had been framed by the Dread Fist mercenary group at the direction of their command staff.”

All eyes were on Sam. “What?” she said.

“This is where it gets interesting. Nobody in the briefing room noticed, or thought to ask, but De Myrre has a whole company from the Dread Fist on retainer. Our informant noted that they have remained planetside, in her employ.”

“That makes even less sense. Every company trades on its reputation; there’s no way the Colonel would just let her say things about him like that and keep carrying on like nothing’s happening.”

“Oh, Colonel Magnussen is none too pleased. This doesn’t seem to have been his idea.”

“You mean… the company planetside mutinied?”

“Mutinied is one word for it,” Phira mused (“a damn good one,” Sylva added). “I suspect the parties involved might go with ‘electively nationalized.’”

“Let’s go by your theory, Sam, that Salemo and the Dominion are cooperating,” Roche said. “Salemo needs someone to blame, and the someone on hand is the Dread Fist. She accuses the Colonel of duplicity and perhaps dangles some carrots to the captains on the ground…”

“And she kills two birds with one stone,” Sam said. “Well, maybe just the one bird. The Federation will never buy this framing thing, but she gets to peel away some soldiers for her own use, and then… and then what?”

“Start a coup,” Phira said.

“Oh,” Sam said.

“Right,” Roche continued. “So here’s what our informant told us. Shots fired at the palace at about 1800. Command broke down in the security forces and their loyalties split. Dread Fist boots are of course with De Myrre. She’s taken effective control of most of the palace, which gives her a physical stronghold as well as good access to the organs of administration for the kingdom. However, check your map on page three. The building has an annex in the east wing with staff living spaces and a sort of redundant security HQ. The remaining security members loyal to minister Reyna are holed up in there. As is our informant.”

“He picked the wrong team, didn’t he,” Ash said.

“Right. When fighting broke out he did what he could to remain safe. As a result of the decisions he made, he hasn’t been outed, but he’s trapped in the east wing. We don’t know when De Myrre will order that annex cleared, but we’re not going to leave our guy hanging. Page six.”

Sam flipped to page six. At the top, there was a picture of a portly man in an immaculate white dress shirt and a mop of hair that gave the impression that it was tamed only with great effort. His name, listed below the picture, was Jack Carraro.

“We’re going to make an enemy out of De Myrre?” Ash asked.

“You’re not going to tell them you’re Theta Group, are you?”

Ash’s mouth worked noiselessly for a moment then shut.

“We’re not going to leave our guy for dead,” Roche repeated. “Besides, he’s going to make himself useful by exfiltrating a datastore with himself. He’ll have it on a tab on his person. If the Dominion is up to something big, Salemo might have the clues we need to find out what.”

“Okay, Captain,” Phira said. “What’s the op look like?”

0330 8 May 1021 EH

Salemo Controlled Airspace, Volga

Captain Lun, a taciturn man on the ground, was free and frequent with information flow from the flight deck of the Corona-class VTOL, which was apparently named Featherlight.

“Thirty minutes to arrival,” he said, his already reedy voice electrically sifted through the headset. “Weather is good and clear; Featherlight is operating well. No updates from HQ; the standoff is assumed to still be ongoing. Drop will go as planned. Ready, boys and girls?”

It was all so professional, Sam thought, except the last bit, which stuck out like an aileron tweaked all the way out to max deflection at the end of a smooth wing.

“Hell yeah,” Phira said, who herself was always at max deflection. She motioned to the squad to check gear. “Read me?”

“Aye.” “Yes.”Yep.” “Five-by-five.”

“Good good. Stay cool, everyone.”

A few minutes later, the airframe twitched as a weight under one of the wings came away: a drone with a fake transponder. If anyone in Salemo was playing very close attention to their air traffic control, it would not do for them to notice a planned private flight disappear suddenly within a few dozen kilometers of the palace. Lun came back over the channel. “Time to set down; get strapped in.”

Descent passed in a blink, and then Lun slapped the engines into the vertical configuration and put the bird down.

“Door control is yours, Ash,” Lun said.

Ash clambered out from the flight deck into the main bay, handle of a rifle in his right hand. His left darted over to a switch handle. “Squad ready?”

“Ready,” reported Phira.

“Go,” Ash said, as he flipped the switch down.

Sam was the first out the door, followed by Phira, Sylva, and Olivia.

They had set down in a narrow meadow, hidden from view of the palace to the west by a towering mountain and hemmed in on all other sides by a ring of fir trees.

Sam scanned the surroundings, rifle at low ready. She hadn’t been shot, which was always good. That was the plan, wasn’t it?

“All clear,” she said.

“Well, that was the plan, wasn’t it?” Phira said.

“No harm in being vigilant,” Olivia said.

“Of course,” Phira said. “Anyway, we’re good here. Ash and Tempo will keep the bird warm for exfil.”

“Ouch. Tempo gets his callsign and Ash doesn’t?” Sam said.

“That’s how it works; they’re radio callsigns. You get them if you’re in charge of your vehicle. If Ash wanted his callsign he should’ve asked us to bring out the Doru.”

“Roche would’ve said no, though.”

“Yeah. Sucks for him. Anyway, we’re off to some hiking.”

Cicadas droned, and the breeze sifted through the trees, and four pairs of boots tromped over the dirt and pine straw as they descended toward the palace. From this angle and distance, the palace seemed gray, wide, squat, and eerily quiet.

As they reached the last good view of the palace before descending to a band of trees level with it, Phira called the halt and pulled out her night-vision binoculars. Her three soldiers milled about, breathing in the cool alpine air.

“Well,” she said at length. “Everyone’s inside or in the trees.”

“Oh,” Sylva said. “So, no more intel, then.”

“It’s always good to try!” Sam said.

“No more intel. Plan A it is,” Phira said.

“All right,” Sam said. “Let’s go.”

While Phira dropped her pack and started setting up her nest at the top of the hill, Sam led Sylva and Olivia down the hill and into the trees. Soon, the rocks and dirt gave way to grass, pine straw, and pleasant, flowering little bushes: the palace was on a huge property, immaculately landscaped and obsessively manicured. Sam could almost forget that she was wearing a suit of steel and EAP.

But the pleasant little bushes were how she knew she should be on alert. “We’re close to the palace. Eyes up,” she said.

They started creeping forward, rifles at ready, until they came to the fence. A pair of bolt cutters and a few minutes of work got them through.

Finally, Sam called the halt. “10 o’clock,” she whispered, kneeling behind a tree. Maybe 80 meters away, a pair of soldiers stood, talking, holding rifles. They were standing watch over the east annex (barely visible in snatches through the trees), maintaining the full investment of the loyalist security forces therein.

Sam couldn’t make out their uniforms.

“Roger,” Olivia replied. She lowered herself down to a prone shooting position. Sylva took a position about 10 meters to their right and did the same.

“Sam to Sergeant Lin,” Sam said. “Off the phone yet?”

“Affirmative, Condor,” came Phira’s tinny reply over her headset. “VIP says the man in charge of the annex is desperate and happy for our help. They’ll be ready.”

“We’ll give you the word,” Sam said.

“Roger.”

“Over and out.”

“Alright,” Sam said. “Weapons free. Olivia?”

“Three… two… one… bang,” Olivia said, squeezing the trigger. Two rifles cracked against the trees and the sky, and the two soldiers went down.

The three of them shot to their feet and started running. In just a few seconds they were passing the bodies of the soldiers they had shot. Sam waved Sylva and Olivia forward and knelt down to have a look.

They were Dread Fist.

Sam’s heart sank. She hesitated. Who were they? Who was that under the helmet? Was that Al? Whoever it was, their bloodied mouth and chin were hanging down at a grotesque angle, hardly recognizable as human… not now. Anybody nearby would’ve heard those shots. The longer the three of them took to carry out their mission, the more chance there was that the entire rest of the fighting world would collapse in on them before they could get out.

Sam forced herself to leave the bodies behind and rush after Sylva and Olivia.

It took less than a minute to get to the wall of the palace. It was clad with white granite and framed with ornamental columns, arches, and little windows befitting a palace. Underneath would be concrete, though, which meant that the explosives Sam had to pack were very large indeed.

They picked a window and set up. Olivia held back at the treeline, eyes on the south, and Sylva knelt near Sam, eyes north. Sam unfurled the pack of explosives and piled them up beneath one of the windows: the natural weak point. The window was too small for the VIP to escape through… for now.

“Condor to Lin.” “I hear you, Condor.” “Time to go.” “Roger. You’re green.”

Sam motioned to Sylva and they sprinted back out to the treeline. Then, Sam flipped the little plastic cap on the detonator (breaking it off its hinge with her armor-augmented thumb) and pressed down the little red button.

“Lin to Condo—!”

The air was cleaved by a tremendous, full-throated crack-roar (thankfully, or maybe sadly, muffled by the armored helmet’s ear protection) and stones and masonry dust billowed outward, concealing the orange-red-white flash. In a few seconds, the scattering dust revealed a ragged little hole into an interior hallway.

“Condor to Lin. Come in.”

“All hell broke loose about two seconds before your breach. West side of the complex lit up, smoke and small arms fire. Nobody coming around to you, though.”

“Lin, nobody’s coming out through the breach.”

“Damn. Did they panic? They can’t be cut off from the egress already, can they?”

“I’ll recon-in-force.”

“Roger, Condor. I’ll try to get the VIP on the line again. Stay safe. Sylva, Yu, hold positions. Lin out.”

Sam rushed into the smoky haze and into the hall. She swung her rifle up and looked over it: just a hallway with hardwood flooring and a gently arched plaster ceiling. Doors studded both walls for the length, spaced widely: large rooms. The walls were textured with richly dyed hangings and ridiculous gilded metalwork. It ended in a T-junction; the far wall was an elegant, dark wood panel with a display case holding some jeweled treasure.

Gunshots echoed distantly through the halls, thudding through the air and the floor.

Sam crept down the hall. Where in that chaos could the VIP and his allies be? If they’d been following Phira’s instructions, they’d have been in one of these rooms right here, waiting to escape through the breach…

As she reached the first of the doors on her right, the wood panels and the display case at the end of the hall exploded in a hail of splinters, ejected gemstones, and a flash of steel.

Before Sam’s finer mental processes had attached words and meaning to the target, her reflexes and her limbic system had supplied her body with action. She held back the trigger, emptying an entire magazine in a continuous scream of gunfire, and then she dropped the rifle on its sling and braced for impact.

The Ragnarsson-class battle armor smashed into her with full force, and she tumbled backward with it atop her, crashing halfway through the hardwood floor and cracking several of the joists beneath. Her reflexes fired again, and she rolled to the side.

Ragnarsson-class armor. Dominion armor. Issued exclusively to the Knights of Aquila, and preferred by knight-justicars.

The hulking steel man charged and swung with heedless violence, as though the physical world around him were beneath his notice, not a constraint nor even a passing influence on his movements. Suddenly, Sam realized she was pretty sure she knew what had happened to the Home Guard splinter group back at the Golden Moon. I am charged with the custody of the Compact’s justice, he had said. He had brought his wrath crashing down upon them merely for their one-time acquaintance with Sam—though the fact that they were defectors themselves surely did nothing to stay the knight-justicar’s vengeful hand.

Sam pushed forward, away from the knight-justicar, and then turned to face him as he pulled his steel-core sword out from the joists.

“Condor to Lin,” Sam said, as her foe brought his blade back to ready. “Dominion’s here. One knight in power armor… Lin?”

The line was a dead buzz. The armored foe wagged his finger at Sam.

Sam’s heart rate spiked in rage. The Knights of Aquila. This Knight-Justicar Ilyich again. Charged with the justice on this planet, but still a preening blowhard who spends half his time gloating and strutting about for the glory of his order. He and all the rest of them: they don’t take their business—war—seriously.

No way she could let one of these boneheads kill her.

The steel-core sword, though, was a problem. As much as it seemed like a stupid sop to their knightly egos, the steel-core swords served an important purpose: they were heavy (the steel core), edged with whatever the latest advance was in metallurgy or polymer science, and with an EAP arm at their haft they could defeat power armor much more reliably than an intermediate-caliber rifle. If you were one-on-one against a power armored enemy, you wanted to be 100 meters away from them and pointing an anti-tank weapon at them. But if you were one-on-one against a power armored enemy in a ten meter hallway, you wanted a steel-core sword.

Here Sam was, in a ten meter hallway, And all she had was a intermediate-caliber rifle and a few grenades.

She’d survived worse odds, she thought, as she raised her fists to a high guard.

That was when—of all the galling insolence—Sir Ilyich flipped up his visor. This time, there was a thin smile on his leathery face.

“Samantha Arif,” he said, while gunfire kept rattling off in the background. “Armored like a gallant! But without a sword. You have escaped justice for long enough. It is time for you to die.”

“Come make me,” Sam shouted, reaching for her rifle.

He wasn’t an idiot, so he flipped his visor down and charged. Sam wasn’t an idiot, so she didn’t even finish reaching for her rifle before returning to her ready stance.

He rushed in, a wall of steel holding a blade aloft, parting the ceiling plaster as he did so. Sam stepped up and forward, swatting at his armpit as she did to help redirect him as he tried to bring it down on her. There was a crash and a rumble and many cracks as he blew partly through the wall over her left shoulder.

He doesn’t even have to stop doing stupid flourishes, Sam complained to herself. He doesn’t have to fear any of my weapons.

Any of my weapons.

He pivoted on his back foot and swung horizontally, forcing Sam to jump back through the door… well, halfway through the door and half through the doorframe, bringing it down in another shower of splinters and plaster. She was backing up through a narrow but tall room strewn with furniture: a smoking room, probably adjoining some common area. Sam stumbled backward through a couch before righting herself, then threw it at the knight for all the good it would do. He stepped forward and sliced through it in a single clean, kata-like motion.

Sam looked around. Where is the VIP, anyway? There was a kitchen through a doorway to her right, and windows to the outside to her left. Sylva and Yu… If they got tangled up in this fight… Sam bolted for the kitchen, frantically staying out of reach of the deadly sword.

The kitchen was cramped with equipment. Mostly stainless steel—stoves, grills, refrigerators, ovens—all useless against a steel-core sword, sharp as a tiger’s claw and swung with the force of a jackhammer. Here, a hood vent was sheared off, its pieces noisily clattering down onto the grill; there, a dishwasher was rent open, as Sam backpedaled from the approaching Knight of Aquila.

Sam planted her back foot near another grill and aimed a roundhouse kick at his mid-torso. She didn’t know why, she just knew, the thought a lighted buoy bobbing in a sea of adrenaline and fear, she had an opportunity and wanted to shove a steel foot in it.

Crash! the steel suits slammed against each other and the surfaces screamed as her armored instep dragged across his metal chest. His stupid, reckless overhead swing was interrupted, and he careened sideways into a set of metal shelves, spilling shattered ceramic across the kitchen.

And then he sprung to his feet and dove at Sam.

Trained reflexes kicked in. Sam dove to the side herself—through a wall, because when you’re in power armor, walls don’t tend to matter; what matters is going in the best direction to not get skewered. She scrambled to her feet, shrugging plaster and CMU block and shattered metalwork off of her back. This room was… soft wooden furniture and plush rugs, nothing help—

FWOOSH.

A wave of flame rushed over Sam’s back. Her helmet gave a cranky-sounding warning beep for dangerous external temperatures. She stepped aside and turned around—Sir Ilyich was now a black char, running at her out of a gout of yellow-red flame. Gas line—he must have severed the gas line on a grill, and now the building was going to burn down around them. A problem for later.

Sam ducked as he thrust again. She stepped, he tracked, she made it whiff and punched, he slapped it aside with a teeth-rattling crash.

Sam grinned, invisible under the helmet. He was taking her seriously now.

She stepped back out, circling, putting the billowing flames to her right (now a fire alarm was wailing, and the sprinklers were spraying) and the room to her left. Her opponent watched, circled, blade at the ready.

A trick she learned a long time ago, as a cadet—she snapped a foot down and in. A feint; he bought it: she put her weight on the foot and snapped back out, outside of the sweeping defensive slash, and then bounded off her back foot and crashed into him, arms first.

The gambit could have worked better—she didn’t catch him on his backswing, which could have ended up with her pinning him from the outside of his arms, seriously compromising his control of the sword—but she had taken one step toward winning the fight; her left hand on his right wrist, controlling his blade, and her right shoulder trying to box out his left.

But he was pretty good, when he was taking it dead seriously. He tried to hook her right foot, she stepped out to avoid going down (and immediately being run through with the blade; she could envision it so clearly), but that gave up control of his left arm, and he swung the fist across her face hard. Sam twisted with the blow, but it still hurt hard and she reeled, hanging on to his right wrist. Her life depended on it.

He tried to pivot his body entirely, threatening to pull Sam over his shoulder if she tried to keep a grip on the sword. She jabbed at his chest with her right hand, but it didn’t hurt him enough. He kept going and Sam had to jump and tumble and let go, hitting the ground (falling through a high-backed chair, first) and springing to her feet, then backward out of his range. He had his blade back; they were reset, he was bearing down on her again…

THUD.

Instead of sweeping the sword, the knight tumbled forward, hitting the ground hard on his left hand and his knees. Sam shook her head—some sort of explosion…

She saw it. Through the room’s other entrance, opposite the kitchen, Yu knelt in the doorway, aiming a rifle at the downed knight. She squeezed off a burst of rounds—worth a try, but none of them found any of the joints; each round pinged off of some face in the armor.

Sir Ilyich whipped his head around to face Yu as he worked up to his feet.

Sam felt a wild thrill.

She bounded forward and threw herself, a half ton steel missile, at the knight—at his sword. She landed on his arm.

It made a hideous sound as it broke.

Actual injuries sustained in hand-to-hand power armor combat bear closer resemblance to industrial accidents than to wrestling injuries (these delusional numskulls; why do they look for fights like this?). The armor was partially severed and hung limply at his side as he rose unsteadily above Sam, showing the gap where it had broken. What could be seen of his human arm within was a repulsive, crushed gory mass.

Sam seized the sword, swept his legs with it, and then dove on top of him and drove it through his charred-black chest. He lay motionless.

She looked up at the doorway. Yu was gone, having wisely decided not to stick around to find out how the late Sir Ilyich might have retaliated to the grenade she had pelted him with. Sam followed through the doorway, looking left and right, and then remembering.

“Condor to Lin. Come in?”

“This is Lin, I read you.”

Thank God. Sam could not express how good it felt to hear Phira’s voice buzzing over the radio again. It was relief and electric excitement, almost as intense as when Sam had seen her opponent distracted, giving her an opening to steal his sword. So it had been Sir Ilyich who had been jamming the signal with equipment on his armor. With him gone, Sam was free again.

“Dominion is here. One power armor spotted, he’s down. We don’t know where the VIP is.”

“Copy; that matches what Yu just told me. Link back up with them if you can. Continue recon-in-force.”

“Roger. Will do. Con—.”

“Hey. Stay safe, Sam.”

“Roger wilco. Condor out.”

0715 8 May 1021 EH

Salemo, Volga

The hike back in the darkness was agonizingly slow. The VIP—Jack, Sam kept having to remind herself, you don’t just call the VIP the VIP—was a bit of a slow hiking partner, but he wasn’t in fighting shape, and anyway he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep lately and he was coming down off of the adrenaline high of a lifetime. The squad found it in them to forgive him, but it put them all on edge having to tread quietly and peer through the trees as best they could in the slowly growing morning light.

Finally, after hauling Jack up the hills, through the brambles, and over ankle-treacherous scree, they rounded the last corner to the meadow, where the air was filled with the whine of the Featherlight’s engines spinning at idle.

“Took you long enough,” Ash shouted from the top of the loading ramp.

“Shut up, sir” Phira replied automatically, helping Jack up the ramp. “Be a gracious host and make us some tea, will you? A girl could catch the chills out there.”

Ash shrugged and pounded the button to raise the ramp, and then he handed Jack a headset before disappearing up into the flight deck.

“Phew,” Jack began. His voice was gravelly, like a pack-a-day smoker, unmistakable even in the pinched band of the radio. “This thing on?”

“Loud and clear, Jack,” Phira said. “We can talk now, if you’re up for it.”

Jack sighed. “Yeah. When I get to bed I’m going to sleep for the next week, so I ought to tell you now. The tab I gave you has got everything I could weasel out of the palace network. I was in a hurry so it’s a lot of raw data and it’s not well organized. It’s all bucketed by technical data source rather than by any sort of intelligence hierarchy.” (Was that Ash audibly sighing from the flight deck?) “Whoever you have doing analysis should be able to figure it out.”

“Anything juicy?” Phira asked.

“Well, that was the next thing. The security guys—their chief was a guy everybody called ‘David G,’ he seemed like kind of a douche—had no idea what was going on under their noses. David G did suspect that the Dread Fist guys were trying to take his job, but he didn’t know they’d be happy to kill him to do it. The good news is that they chattered about it all over the network. The Dread Fist guys don’t run a tight info ship. Lots of personal tab usage, lots of stuff going over the palace network that trusted its security certs.”

“Meaning every time one of the goons blabbed you sniffed it up,” Ash said.

Goons, Sam thought. I would’ve been a goon, huh?

“All right there on the tab,” Jack said, pointing at the tiny black plastic square in Phira’s hands.

“You look at any of it?” she said, tucking it into her vest pocket and velcroing it tightly.

“Some. Really because I needed to know that I was collecting the right stuff. I didn’t learn much, mostly shit like David G insisting that they get a catering service and not eat from the cafeteria. But one of the Dread Fist guys, captain rank, kept talking about the Knights of Aquila. And the way he was talking, it was like they were up in orbit.”

“Oh,” Sam and Phira both said. “Shit,” Phira added.

“But that’s weird, right,” Jack continued. “That would start a war. No way a bunch of Dominion supersoldiers are just hanging out up there right now in orbits managed in cooperation with the Eridani Federation, right?”

“Thanks, Jack,” Phira said. “You get some sleep. Sylva, switch seats with him so he can lay down on these two. I need to make a phone call.”

1200 8 May 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Minister Zia Reyna looked like a short woman, even on camera, but every inch was stone, from the way her hands clasped in perfect stillness beneath her chin to her level, intense gaze that wavered from the camera for not a single second.

“I cannot say I am pleased by what I am learning,” she said to group huddled around Captain Roche’s desk—himself, with Phira and Sam over his shoulder—“but your professionalism and candor come appreciated nevertheless.”

Roche briefly nodded acknowledgment of the compliment. “Which brings us to the current situation. Our intel agrees with yours about the role of the Dread Fist in De Myrre’s coup attempt. Our additional insight, however, seems to be that it involved the cooperation of two outside parties: the Dominion of the Compact, and the defectors lead by Johan Hect, currently in an orbiting assault lander.”

Minister Reyna paused. “The Dominion? You’re sure?”

“We killed one in our intervention,” Sam said plainly. “Wearing Ragnarsson-class armor from the Dominion and trained in its manual of arms.” Plain seemed wisest with the minister, even though the infighting among the Dominioners complicated the story.

Reyna, unmoving, thought. Finally, she said, “I suppose they want to stir up proxy trouble for the Eridani Federation, and my empty-headed niece has been all too easily manipulated.”

“We believe, now, that they furnished Hect with the Neptune.”

“Yes, yes, and he provides convenient cover for their movements. This is all consistent with my understanding of the situation.”

“Do you have any remaining analysts to assist us with this intelligence? This business has already gotten people killed on our side of town, and we want to get out in front of it. We’ll pay for your help with the data,” Roche said.

“Forget it,” the minister said. “You don’t need my help. You’re angling for a job.”

Roche, to his credit, dropped the pretense immediately. “Will you consider?” He asked.

“I’ve already considered. Consider Theta Group engaged. I want you to apprehend De Myrre. Will you take her alive?”

“If possible,” Roche counter-offered.

“Good. You’ll receive a form contract from my office shortly. Do understand that the compensation will be strictly financial and time-bound; as a policy the Kingdom of Salemo does not privilege third-party armed forces in household employ.”

“We’d never dream of asking,” Roche replied.

“Good. Have a good day, Captain,” the minister said, before terminating the line.

“Well,” Roche said, taking a breath.

“Strong lady. Well put together in a crisis,” Phira observed.

“A little bit lucky, too; that she was on a junket in Agunda when this all happened. Or unlucky for De Myrre, rather, that her hand was forced at an inconvenient time,” Roche added. “At any rate, we’re on the job.”

At that moment, the door to the captain’s office swung open.

“Hey, you’re done with that call, right?” Ash said, poking his head into the room.

“Yes,” Roche replied. “What is it?”

“Jeong down in analysis says there was an SSTO liftoff from Salemo this morning. De Myrre is on it.”

“God damn it,” Roche said.

“Well, look, if you don’t want me to deliver bad news, all you have to do is ask.”

Roche sighed irritably. “No, no. Thanks Lieutenant. Tell Jeong we heard him. Any word on destination?”

“He said he was still working it out.”

“Thanks, Ash,” Roche said, swinging his chair around to face Phira and Sam, who had to back up to avoid being suddenly in his personal space. Ash vanished and the door clapped shut. “All right,” the captain continued. “If Jeong couldn’t make it out off the top of his head, they’re not headed to Lars Bruun or any of the major waypoint satellites. I’m dead certain the SSTO is outbound for the Neptune.”

“That’s bad,” Phira said, automatically.

“Not all that bad,” Sam said, thinking.

Roche paused, his gaze leveled onto Sam. He saw something in her facial expression, and he didn’t seem to like it.

“No, I know what you’re going to say, and—” he began.

“It’s time to use me as the bait,” Sam said.

“Come on. No.”

“Well,” Phira said.

“Not you, too!”

“Captain,” Sam said, “consider it, sir. We can go get De Myrre where she is, or wait for her to make landfall at the venue of her choosing.”

Roche sighed again. “You’re going to take the fight to her? In the teeth of her forces?”

“In their jaw,” Sam replied. “Assault landers are good at assault, not defense. They’re not exactly fortresses. They’re spacecraft.”

“Spacecraft filled with soldiers armed to the teeth,” Roche said. “And even if we had the capability to shoot it down, we want De Myrre alive.”

“Well,” Phira tried again. “Think about it. It’s Johan Hect and his flunky defectors from Salemo. Backed by the Dominion, sure, but how much training and organization could they really have gotten?”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. You’re going to plan for them to be idiots?”

“No, sir,” Sam said. “This is a calculation. We can go now and exploit their weaknesses, or we can wait, and risk that our next best chance is against a force on proper war footing. Will you hear the idea?”

“Fine,” Roche said. “Let’s hear it.”

Wayward Sister

2010 8 May 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Sam heard a thump against the locker above as she sat on the bench pulling up her socks. She looked up. Phira was leaning over her. “You’re in my personal space, Sergeant,” Sam reported.

“You have that far-off look.”

“Okay, but, personal space?”

“I’m pulling rank. My question first,” Phira said with a grin.

Sam shrugged. “We’re gearing up for a pretty risky op. I’m just trying to keep a nice, empty mind.”

Phira leaned a little closer, tilting her head with brash inquisition. She had coffee breath. And a faint scar running just under her right ear, down across the corner of her jaw. Interesting. “You’ve never had a hard time keeping an empty mind before, Corporal. Spill.”

Sam sighed. “Will you back up a bit?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Salemo palace. There were Dread Fist there.”

“We knew this,” Phira said, standing up straight and crossing her arms, relinquishing the personal space she had cruelly taken hostage.

“I still don’t know who we shot.”

“We knew that might happen going in and it didn’t bother you then, did it?”

“Wow, I expected a little more sympathy.”

“We’re getting there. Did it bother you going in?”

“No, not going in. But it’s one thing to know you’re going up against the old squad. It’s another to maybe have shot them.”

“Granted. That company is ass, though. Bastards dumped you and left you for dead.”

“But I turned on them.”

“No? You can’t be this stubborn and self-hating. Command sold you out and struck you from the rolls while you were still alive. You don’t owe them shit.”

“No, I mean, Fae and Olsen and Chen. I told those guys I had their backs. Just because Colonel Magnussen is a bastard, I can shoot my old sergeant?”

“I mean,” Phira said, sitting down next to Sam.

“Oh come on.”

“No, no, no, wait to hear what I have to say, will you?”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Don’t you have to get kitted up, though?”

“It can wait. Anyway: the answer is yes, because Magnussen is a bastard, you get to shoot his guys if it comes to it. But isn’t that fucking demented? You know the answer is yes, you shoot them, it’s just fucking demented.”

“… Yeah.”

“That’s good. It is fucked. You’re right to feel that.”

“All this time, though. I always thought I was doing it for the men and women beside me. I’m not in this line of work for the money or fame…” (“I know, I’ve seen your apartment”) “… but because I’m good at it, and I wanted to fight beside good people. Brothers and sisters in arms, right?”

“Well, just because it’s all fucked and you had to shoot some of them doesn’t mean you aren’t fighting beside good people.”

“Uh. Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it mean I’m doing that until something else comes along, then I’m not? Kind of a crummy approach to principles.”

“Nah,” Phira said, standing. “What, nobody’s allowed to compromise on their principles? Or realize they went about them wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“First, I’d like to reemphasize that you’re right and this is all fucked. But I think you need to expand a bit. You were in a shitty company with shitty brass and a shitty head honcho. Of course you didn’t live up to what you wanted to be. You couldn’t.”

“But…”

“We’re not going to solve this today,” she said, reaching into her locker. “But, you know, I think you’re doing alright. Next time you brood on it, remember that I think you’re doing alright, yeah?”

“… Yeah.”

That was when Olivia opened the door and peeked in. “Hey. Captain Lun sent Lieutenant Highwell to tell me to ask if ‘you two fluffheads were ready yet.’ I assume those are Ash’s words, not Lun’s.”

“Tell Lun we’re good for the departure time. And tell Ash you found us eating the last donuts in the rec room.”

0220 9 May 1021 EH

Low Volga Orbit

“This is Charger Three to the Redeemer, requesting permission inbound.”

Thanks to the analysts working overtime on the dataset Jack got out of Salemo, the Neptune-class assault lander finally had a name: the Redeemer.

Captain Lun sounded like his usual, preternaturally cool self from the flight deck of the cramped Pisces-class SSTO. Amazing, given what they were asking him to do.

There was a long, eerily long, wait for a reply. The SSTO engines eased off and weightlessness came to the crew compartment. Sam undid her straps (the armor was far too big for a seat and harness) and floated out. Phira stayed in her seat. “Don’t like being tied down?” she asked with a mischievous little twist.

“I feel like cattle on a train. You all got a hold of Troya-class power armor and didn’t bother getting a seat for it?”

“I think you mean we, not you all.”

“Yes ma’am. Still.”

“We’ll get there eventually. We’re still integrating it into our doctrine, you might say.”

“Still figuring it out.”

“Yeah. Faster with you here, now.”

Finally there was a reply on the radio.

“Redeemer to Charger Three. Transmit personal codes.”

“Got ’em,” Lun said out loud, line closed. He keyed in the codes Jeong had pulled out of the dataset.

“They suspect something, though,” Sam said.

“Yep,” Lun replied. “That silence was definitely an argument. Someone had to call in a superior officer to get it untangled.”

“The Dominion guys probably think their knight-justicar is alive, but Hect’s boys think it’s fishy.”

“Really?” Phira said. “I would have figured it the other way around. The Dominioners would be the ones with the good sense, not the flunkies.”

“Nah. Count on the Dominioners to get high on their own supply. They’re happy to believe that their brother knight is immortal. The fact that they’re feuding with him just makes it more believable; it’s less of a too-good-to-be-true thing.” And so the knights’ division would be, in part, their undoing.

The line came to life again, bearing a broad, imperious, familiar voice. “Brother. They think you are dead.”

“Of course not,” Lun said. His voice, cool and crisp, was being run through a transform, and would come out the other end as something that matched recordings of the voice of Sir Wallace Ilyich. And Lun had done a little bit of reading himself to complete the illusion. “And I come with spoils.”

“Spoils, brother?!” That caught Roth by surprise.

“Spoils. Arif was in Salemo. She submits to justice.”

“To justice?” His voice tightened with suspicion. “I thought you meant to execute Arif.”

“I did, brother. But the code compels me otherwise. We shall discuss aboard.” They were coming to the tricky part of the plan: figure out where De Myrre was and, ideally, separate her from Roth so they could nab her with a minimum of fuss and burn hard for the atmosphere.

Roth’s voice suddenly surged. “But first you must regale us!”

Lun flipped off the line and looked back at Sam. “Milk it,” she said. “He’s hogging their comms desk to flex on them. Let him.”

Lun smiled and thumbed the transmit button. “Theta Group was at Salemo, Paven! They have some feud or another. I jammed their communications and isolated them. Their sergeant gave in with their back against a wall and no backup to rescue them.” It all sounded genuinely so weird and wrong coming from Lun, who usually sounded for all the world like a vid-star stereotype of an Eridani Federation Ace. Sam just had to trust the transform, to trust Jeong’s data, to trust the operation. It was hard, but she had to hang on.

“You always make the impossible sound so routine, Wallace.”

“Is it not?”

“Not to everyone.” That sounded pointed. Someone in that Neptune, probably sitting down at the desk next to him, probably wearing a goldenrod uniform, would be getting very red-faced. “You’ll tell the tale again to our brothers in the locker room, no? See you soon.”

“Soon,” Lun said, hanging up the receiver. “Alright, Sergeant. I’ll bring her in and then you two are up.”

“Yes, sir. Five minutes, in and out. We don’t have any more time than that, anyway. Let’s listen in and see if we can figure out where our target is.”

Lun jabbed a few buttons on the radio receiver. “Jeong is on a hitting streak so far. Let’s see if his signals book is another one.”

The line came on again. “Belay that order,” Sir Paven Roth shouted, muffled slightly by range from the microphone picking him up. All three of the passengers of the SSTO jerked their heads over to the speaker like it was a live grenade bouncing at their feet.

“He doesn’t give you orders; I do!” another man screamed. There was a thump, like a fist—maybe something heavier—against a metal surface. “Shoot that ship!”

Lun’s hands shot to the throttle and stick. “Ten minutes inbound to dock; five minutes for them to get their weapons warmed up. We’ll have to…”

“Plan B!” Phira shouted. “Buckle up, Sam!”

Sam pushed off the ceiling, back down onto the hatch-floor of the SSTO, and grabbed onto the traps.

“I dislike plan B,” Lun said, as cool as it gets through gritted teeth. “It’s my ship, but it’s your show.” He slid the throttle forward, and Sam felt the weight on her body as it was slowly, inexorably pushed against the back of her armor as she lashed herself back down to the hatch, feet first.

“I don’t like it either. But Sam’s a big girl, she’ll handle herself in there, right?” Phira said. Her voice labored against the mounting Gs.

“Mff,” Sam managed.

Phira moved a hand over to the pad at her fingertips on her armrest. “EAP freeze?” she said.

“Aff,” Sam replied. Her armor, with its EAPs locked in place, gave her the strength to stand still on the floor of the SSTO, even in the Gs produced by the hard burn. It was impossible to reconcile the sensations of being so capable, so strong in the armor, but so weak inside, insignificant against the might of the laws of physics.

The SSTO’s radio simmered with chatter; Lun hadn’t had any time to shut it off. Over the chatter, unmistakably the Kaiser, Johan Hect: “Faithless! The offworlders, once so eager for their revenge, flee before the storm. We will weather it, we will…”

Lun shouted over him: “Executing the turn. T minus 40. Hold: no! Abort!”

The G-forces yanked, torqued, and lurched, all in one instant of wild yaw and roll.

“Maneuvering,” Lun said. “Ah.”

“Ah?!” Phira said.

“We took a bad hit. This bird isn’t going home. Sam, T minus 20. Sergeant, abandon ship with her.”

(“We will hold; we, an ever-fixed mark looking upon tempests…” Kaiser intoned.)

Just like that? This bird isn’t going home? Sam almost didn’t believe him, he seemed to have so little urgency about his imminent death.

“Fuck!” Phira said. Well, her sense of urgency was quite believable. “Alright, Sam, Plan fucking C, hold on tight. Don’t be afraid to hurt me.”

“Roger wilco!”

Phira slammed down her visor and stumbled off her seat. The Gs in the cabin were insistent and unpredictable, an ill-mannered stallion pulling them to and fro in the void of space as Captain Lun tried to maintain some blasted course of some sort. This bird isn’t going home. She clung to Sam’s armor, chest-to-chest. Sam locked her arms tight—maximum strength through the EAPs would kill her, but Phira had been pretty clear which side to err on—and braced her feet.

“Brace! Two, one, go!” Lun said, and then the floor hatch swung open, flinging the two of them into the void.

“That’s going to bruise like hell,” Phira said, as Sam put her head on a swivel. The swirling white-and-green planet lay beneath their feet, and the Pisces SSTO was drifting away from them overhead—or they were drifting away from it, having been propelled by the evacuating air in the cabin. The Pisces was, in fact, badly hit. One of its wings had been sheared off, and a tail of delicate, sparkling debris trailed it, elongating by the second. It might have caused damage to one of the rear engines, and whatever the case was, the craft would never survive re-entry with its thermal barrier so compromised.

Sam, Phira, and the Pisces were all approaching a rapidly enlarging gunmetal gray mass, shaped like a foreshortened whale with its fins set too far back, sporting pale gun domes and a coat of blue solar panels: the Neptune-class Redeemer, in its orbital configuration, fairings retracted.

“Reorienting,” Sam said, before twisting her self and Phira to put their feet down toward the Redeemer. As she was doing so, a flash caught her eye: the Pisces was firing its attitude thrusters again—and then a silver blur burst out from them, and the craft began to yaw lazily out of control.

“Confirm you are free and clear,” Lun said, tones of alpine breeze and aviators catching the sunlight just right. He was insane, right? “Confirm,” Sam replied. “Captain, you can’t…” Can’t control the craft. Can’t abandon ship. Can’t escape.

“Be advised that this craft will collide with the Redeemer. It won’t be pretty. Find their escape craft. See you on the other side. Captain Lun out.”

“Oh, shit,” Phira said. It was odd, hearing her crackling voice over the radio, even though her mouth was just six inches from Sam’s left ear.

“Plan D?” Sam said, watching the Redeemer draw inexorably closer.

“Something like that. Find De Myrre, find escape pods.”

“It has simplicity going for it.”

“We have to keep it that way or you grunts will fuck it up. No offense.”

“Hey,” Sam said. The Redeemer was really very large now. “We’re gonna hit a few seconds before the bird does. Looks like a gunhouse. It’s going to… I don’t know. Hang on tight.”

“Roger,” Phira said. “Good luck, Sam.”

“Good luck, Sergeant,” Sam said, staring at the approaching wall of steel.

Sam extended three fingers in a hand motion to activate her boot magnets, flared her feet and took the impact, a painful shock up her heel and shins. She almost bounced off again, but the magnets held, and she stuck to the side—and everything immediately lurched sideways as the Pisces crashed violently into the fore end of the Redeemer.

“Ow! Fuck!” Phira said.

“You okay?!”

“Yeah…” they had hung on for the moment of impact. Now, even though the stars and planet above were spinning wildly overhead like a time-lapse in a documentary vid, there was no more torque. “Captain, come in.” Sam lowered Phira gently onto the shroud of the gunhouse; there were ample handholds for Phira to secure herself to while she operated her suit radio. She flipped to another frequency. “Captain, come in,” Sam could see her lips saying, though not hear.

“Sergeant…” Sam began, tapping her shoulder. There was no way…

“Thank God,” Phira mouthed, shooing Sam. What? Sam dialed channels until she picked up Phira’s voice again. “…tion, Captain?”

Captain Lun was breathing hard and rapidly. “Bird’s done, obviously. I’m uh… aahhh,” he said, sucking in air. Sam winced—he sounded like a man with a wound. “Safer in the cockpit for now, can’t risk the corridors…”

“It’s better if you do,” Sam cut in. “Sitting ducks are easier targets. Can you move?”

“Zip it,” Phira said with unexpected venom. “Stay strapped in. We’ll get you, Captain. Lin out.” She turned up to Sam. “Get us in, Condor. Time’s wasting.”

Sam nodded, a little taken aback but thankful for the forward motion. She thumped over to where the barrel of the gun—a naval-grade autocannon, the pointy, leaden tip of the spear falling down on a hostile planet—found a seam and an angle for her steel fingers, and pried it off. The metal groaned, felt through her fingers rather than heard, and it popped as thick bolts gave way to her artificial strength, and there was a gust of wind and noise as the gun house gave up its air. It was little more than a metal chair with a peeling cushion, a console with a stick and a few too many black-and-amber screens, a viewport, currently rotated shut, and the gun bore, also latched shut. The hatch behind the chair…

A bang traveled through the hull of the ship as Sam led Phira into the gunhouse, and then the metal beneath them shuddered.

“Secondaries,” Phira said. “Those dumbshits. We’d better pick up the pace.”

“Right,” Sam said, grabbing the hatch wheel and throwing it open as fast as she could. Phira was right: ordering the guns to fire on the SSTO at such close range was a foolish move that had doomed the Redeemer, which was not gracefully tolerating the impact it had just suffered from the corpse of its kill. Apparently the crew was not competently executing damage control. “Nearby corridor, probably runs the length?”

“Hope it still does,” Phira said, unfolding the stock on her carbine.

The hatch flew open, sucking the air out of the next room—a bunk room, not a corridor, of course a nice empty corridor was too much to hope for—and sending bodies and loose tools hurtling about the room. A magnetic chessboard exploded into a hail of ivory pieces as a goldenrod-clad man careened into it, and some of the furniture was coming loose under the sudden depressurization and the violent trembling of the deck under stress.

“Where to?” Phira yelled into her radio.

“Hope she’s in the bridge and not the brig,” Sam replied. She took a second and tried the dial on her radio. She found something interesting, so she bridged the channels in her headpiece so she could hear the external chatter while communicating with Sergeant Lin.

“Your Highness,” Kaiser barked. “Your power is here, with the faithful and sturdy. The mercenaries are beneath you, physically and spiritually. You would abandon your strength here?” and then “God, you dumbass, what are you talking about?” was De Myrre’s reply.

“Forward,” Sam finished, gesturing to her left as the hull wheeled out from under them again.

“Not yet,” Phira yelled, bringing her carbine up and shooting a man across the room. It was a good spot; he had been holding a handgun, though who knows if he would’ve ever been able to put any rounds on target at the speed he was hurtling sideways. “Captain Lun! Location!”

“Uhhhh, ahhh,” Lun said. He sounded rattled. Sam could imagine his shaking hands punching keys on the SSTO console to see if it was in any shape to help him find out. “C-crashed amidships. F-f-firmly wedged. Maybe opp-opposite you? Help quickly,” he moaned.

Phira gestured with her carbine at the door opposite them, partially obscured by a floating trail of globbing blood, which probably led into some sort of operations room and maybe out the other side. “Sam, go!”

Sam pushed off and dove directly for the door, swatting shattered aluminum out of her way. She got lucky. The moment she put her hand on the grip beside the frame, and not a moment before, another secondary explosion from somewhere in the aft sent the craft lurching onto a new angular momentum. She clung, feeling sick while she listened to Kaiser and De Myrre bicker on the radio: “Men! Hearken to your officers! Damage control, faith, strength!” and “what the hell are you doing, Johan; give me that!” Once the wave of nausea had passed, she undid the latch (here, she heard, faintly, the report of Phira’s rifle again) and flung the door open, causing a rush of air and noise as this room began to void its atmosphere.

Sam belatedly realized: this bird isn’t going home, either.

She slid feet first into this new room, some sort of computer room with, happily, a hatch on the opposite wall, and then clung to the doorway to halt her momentum as the bulkhead to her right tore off. And there were the stars, and then swirling, bright Volga, and then the stars again, as this room was completely exposed to space, which spun by at a frightful rate. Sam tore her eyes from it before she could get sick.

“Lun!” Phira shouted.

“Help! Help, help, still here,” he choked out in reply.

“Thank fuck. Sam!”

“On it!”

Sam swung herself down at the opposite hatch and repeated her opening drill. For a moment it was almost like being a cadet during emergency naval action exercises above Bosporus. Then, the hatch opened, the entire corridor voided of air, sending a man hurtling out into space (Sam dodged just in time). That hadn’t happened in any of the training exercises. She looked up, checking Phira’s progress, and then swung herself down into the corridor.

(“You dare?” Kaiser was shouting over the radio. Sam couldn’t make out De Myrre’s reply.)

About ten meters to Sam’s left, toward the fore of the doomed Redeemer, the Pisces SSTO rested, having bisected the corridor with its nose. At first it looked like a meaningless tangle of metal, but then Sam recognized the pattern of the forward viewport panels. Lun’s lower body could be seen through one of them, a black nylon coated vacuum suit arranged in a tense, bracing pose in the captain’s chair.

“Visual on Lun,” Sam said. “SSTO hatch is outside, I think. No good there.”

“Get him out, Sam,” Phira replied, gripping the corridor frame above her. “How long?”

“I’ll have to pry off one of the ports. Just a few minutes.” As she said so, the corridor shuddered.

She flung herself to the SSTO window and tapped on it. Lun was in there, alive and well, but even through his visor, he was pale and hyperventilating.

“Keep it together, Captain,” Sam said, finding handholds and footholds. The EAPs would be plenty strong enough to get through the hull of the SSTO, but she still needed something to push and pull against.

“Hang tight, you two! Contact!” Phira shouted, as Sam find her spot and began to pry. The thoughts raced through Sam’s head. Contact with who? Who was insane enough to be trying to chase them down instead of abandoning ship?

Actually, she thought, as the bolts by her fingers began to fail, she’d be insane enough. And the others insane enough to think like her would be the Dominion guys. And then, on the radio: “We speak death; we say it with our bodies, with our lives!” Maybe Kaiser’s flunkies—urged on by the unraveling oratory that was surely crowding out useful orders from the ships officers—were insane enough too.

So the spaceship full of madmen continued to disintegrate. The only way out was a long, long way down.

“Phira, who’ve you got?” It was quiet back there, but Sam knew that was an illusion. Phira had probably fired dozens of rounds back through the computer room in the dead silence of the vacuum.

“Mad fucking sailors with las-carbines!”

The window came free.

“We need a way out!” Sam said, offering her hand to Lun within. Lun seized it with both hands and began to scramble, kicking and jerking. “Hey! Calm down!”

There was a flash of light. Sam turned as Lun clung to her shoulder.

“Back that way!”

“You brought a grenade?!” That stuck out from the old naval exercises: las-guns were preferred, to reduce damage to a ship; regular lead-and-powder guns were extremely dangerous but acceptable in some situations; explosives were only for suicidal madmen. Of course, when you’re boarding a ship in this state…

(“I will hold! My purpose cannot be extinguished! Take your strength from me! Wait. You: had your kind not abandoned ship?”)

“Three of them! And I’m glad I did! Give me Lun and go!”

Sam shoved the panicking Captain Lun at Phira and swung around her up into the computer room, readying her own carbine. Only two dead bodies were there to greet her; the one shot earlier and the other newly broken by a grenade concussion and skidding across the ceiling, trailing blood from a gruesome wound in its side.

Sam dragged herself along the near wall toward her right, toward the forward hatch. She was rewarded by another wretched torquing of the hull, another spasm from the dying Redeemer.

“How many more fucking secondaries can there be?!” Phira said.

“Plenty,” Lun whined. “Engines and tanks, redundant, s-stressed… more might fail.”

Sam pushed his bleating from her thoughts, reached the hatch at the fore of the room, gripped the handle over a thick smear of blood, and pulled it open, revealing another corridor. She led the trio up the corridor, past a few unmarked hatches, and to the one at the end of the hall.

This hatch opened straight into bedlam.

The bridge, rather. But within, every object seemed to be in action, around and against every other object. The wide windowpanes that spanned opposite the hatch showed the spinning stars and giant mass of Volga. Within, debris careened about: screens ripped off of consoles, chairs unmoored from the floor, stray tabs, severed steel handrails, and gobbets of blood and flesh. To Sam’s right, there was a raised semicircular platform surrounded by consoles, at its center a brass-plated binnacle. A figure in a white vacuum suit, face shielded by a dark visor, clung desperately to that binnacle, while another, wide-set in a goldenrod marine battledress, one hand on a piece of guardrail still affixed to the consoles, held a laser handgun at the white figure.

Held rather than aimed; Sam decided it looked like an amateur waving around a piece for show rather than a real intent to shoot someone.

“This is your doing! Your petty, myopic treachery will undo you,” Kaiser said over the radio. So here he was, in the final throes of his struggle with De Myrre.

But then he yanked the gun around… to the far side of the bridge, where amid the debris a knight (but who else could it be?) in Orléans-class armor was deftly rebounding off of the bulkhead and readying a steel-core sword. A body smashed into the gauges and panels near that section showed the gruesome work of that blade.

“Oh, fuck, Sa—” Phira said, as Sam catapulted herself at the sole true threat in the room. “SAM.”

“Contact!” Sam’s trajectory took her just clear of the ring of consoles around the dais. A spatter of blood plopped onto her visor as the knight noticed her arrival and whipped himself into a new orientation: rather than diving, sword-first, he swung his feet around toward the binnacle he was falling to, and he moved his sword into a one-handed grip, held slightly back but angled for a swing at Sam.

“SEE?! See the disloyal buckle and turn on each other before the weight of Providence?” Kaiser gasped.

“DISENGAGE, SAM,” Phira shouted into her radio.

Sam felt a twinge of panic and forced it down. She whipped herself around, swinging her left arm out wide for a handrail, grabbed it, and began careening away from the knight. She felt a sudden intense burning, and then a numbing heat, and she gripped the handrail. She tried to bring her right arm onto it, too…

Something whizzed past her face. Sam gripped the handrail with the force of animal fear.

There was a bright flash, a whoomph that could be heard even through the pathetically thin remaining atmosphere, a shriek over the radio, a horrible force torquing against her and her EAP-augmented left arm, and a blur of steel. Sam clung with her left arm; it hurt like being pinned by a wrestler three times her size. She couldn’t hook her right arm over the rail; it was numb and heavy, and she couldn’t feel the rifle she held in it; what was happening?

“Sam! Grab De Myrre!”

Sam gritted her teeth and shook out the pain. “Roger!” De Myrre? Eliminating the knight and the marine, she must be the white vacuum suit. White Vacuum Suit had been flung away from the binnacle—that flash, it had been a grenade—and bounced like a ragdoll off of the aft bulkhead, not far from where goldenrod marine was doing the same. The knight had been catapulted by the burst of the grenade right out of one of the fore windows. Sam turned back to white vacuum suit, who was drifting just…

Just out of reach.

Sam couldn’t feel or move her right arm. The sinking feeling would have to wait. She scrambled her feet into a position to push off the little bit of distance to intercept the drifting vacuum suit, which was twisting in the air drunkenly, still conscious. Sam reached and seized the back of the suit by its pack with her left hand.

Sam felt a pull from behind her. “Secure!” Phira said. And then she was being pulled backward from the room, being tugged insistently at the waist by a tether whose other end was anchored to Phira’s vacuum suit. The devastated hell of the bridge disappeared through a hatch door. Sam pulled the body in the white vacuum suit closer. De Myrre wasn’t struggling.

Sam’s right arm began trailing into view. The armor was charred, blackened in a streak from the inner forearm up through the bicep. The continuity of the steel line had been broken, and at the elbow the blackened mass looked uneven. Lumpy. My arm, Sam thought with a wave of sick fear. Her carbine was gone; the right hand of her armor hung open, unresponsive.

Phira and Lun were shouting at each other over the radio, she was dimly aware. All she could think of was her operational left hand, holding on to De Myrre’s suit with a death grip, and the tug at her waist, carrying her backward. Or forward. Aftward, she decided. It was a ship, after all.

By the time she had decided that, she was being tugged up—distal, rather—through a hatch and into a cramped, pill shaped hold.

“Sit! Buckle up!” Phira was still belting orders into the radio. She’s not used to space operations; she doesn’t need to yell so much. Did well as an officer, though, Sam thought woozily. Phira was pushing her around. She tried to cooperate. “Let go!” Of? Oh. Sam let go of De Myrre; Phira began lashing her to a seat, just as a jolt struck the entire world sideways again.

Phira was done quick—maybe she does have space ops training?—and then began trying to slam Sam into a seat.

“Where’s Lun?” Sam managed, as Phira arranged her limbs and latched the harness over her shoulders. “Entry vehicle. Flight deck,” Phira replied. The edge had suddenly come off her voice.

“What?” Sam said, slowly. “He can’t…” her frustration began to rise through the pain and dizziness. “He’s in even worse shape than I am. And this whole thing is in a million pieces…”

“Shut up, Sam,” Phira said, backing herself into the seat across the little cylinder.

“You don’t ditch and burn from a ship this broken. The hazards, the reentry angles… nobody ever can. We need…”

“SAM. Lun is the fucking best. We’re going fucking home.”

There was a hum, felt through her seat, and a thunk. Separation.

They gave space evacuations as a pilot test at the academy on Bosporus. But it was also a test of their officers. Because sometimes they’d pick a test script from the list that was guaranteed death. They never told the officer cadets, of course, and the cadets always liked trying to figure out which ones were the impossible ones and which ones had some order, some decision, or some bar for execution that could get the crew home. The guessing game was kind of the point; you never knew. But the guessing game was also, in another way, not the point. You didn’t need to know whether survival was possible. You commanded.

Phira would’ve made a fine candidate for the knighthood.

But… “Lun?” The best? Frustration, nausea, and the numbing of acute disaster were all mixing like a stew in the front of Sam’s mind, swirling somewhere between her forehead, eyes, and mouth. “But…” But he was real cool when things were going well, but now he’s been kicked in the teeth. Now he’s in shock. Now he’s come apart. Now we’re on the simulation where the craft breaks up and everybody dies. But it’s not a simulation.

“Sam, shut the fuck up, that’s an order.”

And then the retrorockets roared, and the three of them were pinned back into their seats.

0310 8 May 1021 EH

Ten miles north of Kai-A Prefecture, Volga

Sam took long, deep breaths as she let Phira, kneeling over her, work the harness around her steel abdomen. De Myrre, face obscured by her visor, hung, not quite limply, but certainly defeated, from her seat, which was hanging overhead given the orientation of the landed entry vehicle.

Re-entry had taken just fifteen minutes. Sam’s memory, already strained and addled by pain, had smeared the first five minutes of pure fear and nausea across the entire fifteen. Forces had rocked, pulled, pushed, and smashed them as Lun had worked his savant’s magic on the spacecraft: main thrusters, reaction control thrusters, retrorockets, all employed in sequence and in harmony as he took the craft around and through the hull-shredding debris being flung from the disintegrating Redeemer. He even had had time to warn them of the impending reentry G forces as the craft slammed into Volga’s upper atmosphere: “One last maneuver and we’ll hit the air in tee minus five,” he incanted over the radio, like a bored civilian airliner announcing descent for the sixth time that day. Then the craft gave one last sickening pitch before Sam felt the onset of that familiar feeling of being crushed back into her seat.

By all rights the ten minutes following that must have been much calmer. Re-entry vehicles, even military-grade invasion craft like this one, don’t survive the fiery embrace of the upper atmosphere unless they accept it in a controlled fashion, with a cool hand at the tiller, so that’s the only thing that could’ve happened.

But they also don’t survive being violently ejected from their exploding parent craft, and that had certainly happened.

“Got anything to say?” Phira said, freeing the last cinch.

“You ordered me to shut the fuck up, ma’am,” Sam said, after sucking in one more deep breath.

Phira smirked. “I did. Order rescinded. Lun’s phoning home now. We’ll get you medivac. Stay awake for me, will you?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. She glanced at her limp, unfeeling arm. “I’m here.”

0300 9 May 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Theo burst into the room unannounced. Ash frowned and took his feet off the desk. It was Theo’s right as an officer to do that, he supposed, but it was really annoying having to always look like he was doing work, even on an overnight vigil, just in case the captain dropped in.

Theo didn’t wait for a salute or a “Captain” or any sort of acknowledgment. “Ash,” he said, nearly throwing a tab at him. “Do you see what I see?”

Ash turned over the tab. It was displaying, on a gray-on-black grid, an orbital trajectory chart. Ten bright trajectories traced themselves down toward the surface—kinking and slanting, which meant they must be spacecraft firing rockets—as well as dozens of dimmer traces, adrift. Ash pinched and rotated the chart around, orienting himself in the space.

Then he remembered what time it was. “Damn. Damnit. Is this that Neptune? Did it break up?” Dozens of dimmer traces, adrift: debris.

“They made it out,” Roche said. “I got word from them right before they hit the reentry blackout.”

“Hot damn! Lun always delivers,” Ash said, nodding to himself. “So, what’s got your panties in a twist?”

“Take another look,” Roche said, ignoring the hideous breach of decorum. Ash’s eyes narrowed. Theo let some shit slide, but not something like that, even when they were alone.

Ash glanced back down. Ten bright trajectories: entry craft, obviously.

The one that had departed last was the one that descended first.

The nine others bent toward it, chasing it to the surface.

“Shit. Shit, Theo. Shit. They’ve got company.”

“Yes. And?”

Ash stared at the trajectories. “And they’re good. Clean. Coordinated and well-calculated. Safe buffers but a tight pursuit. Shit. Captain, that can’t be just the bumblefucks from Salemo.”

“Damn it,” Theo said, visibly deflating. “You’re right.”

“The knights,” Ash said. He realized: Theo had already come to that conclusion, but he had been desperately hoping Ash might give him a reason to doubt it.

Ash leapt to his feet and pushed past the captain, toward the door. “Fucking shithead fucks…”

Theo clapped a hand on Ash’s shoulder. “Ash!”

“Sir?” Ash said, stiffening and wheeling around.

“They’re landing in the north wards.”

“And?”

“Ash, that’s Federation territory.”

0315 9 May 1021 EH

The North Wards, New Hope, Volga

“Sergeant Lin, you’ll want to come up here and see this,” Lun radioed on the channel.

Phira clambered over into the flight deck, leaving Sam alone to breathe. Only, not really alone: De Myrre was still strapped to her seat, hanging on the top side of the capsule, facing down. Sam looked up at her. She looked away. Not that they’d be able to talk much anyway—both were still wearing their helmets, vacuum-sealed against the atmosphere.

“Sam,” Phira said over the radio. She was climbing back into the little crew compartment in a hurry. “We’ve got a problem. Can you stand?”

“Yes, ma’am. What’s…?”

“We’ve got company.”

“How? I’m not even sure how we’re alive right now,” Sam said.

“The knights were on the ball and began evacuating their people as soon as rear admiral birdbrain insisted on firing on us. Most of them were off by the time our bird crashed into their ship. They waited around and then followed us here.”

“No chance that evac…?”

“No,” Phira said. “Not in time. Sam. We don’t have many good options here. So I have to ask. They want you, right?”

“Right.” Sam said. Her restraints had already been undone. She levered herself up to a seated position with her left arm, and she eyed Phira carefully.

“If we want to live, we’re gonna surrender to them. Maybe we’ll try giving them the princess and seeing if they’ll let us go. But…”

“But?”

“If they won’t, I need to know if you want me to give you to them or go down in a blaze of glory with you.”

0303 9 May 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Ash, standing practically at attention, bit back a few ill-advised replies before deciding on one.

“Fuck that, Captain, sir. I’m not asking permission from you or the Federation fucks. Court martial me later.” And then he turned on his heels and sprinted out the door, down the hall.

It was the fastest he’d ever reached the walker bays.

He stopped at the little office at the top corner of the bay, the one with the window panes overlooking the four bays, and smashed down the intercom button on the desk. “Clear bay two for immediate egress!”

Three techs looked up from their work to stare up at Ash in the office.

“This is Ash! Clear bay two for immediate egress you fucks!”

He didn’t stop to see how they reacted; he ran down the catwalk, unbuttoning his office shirt and stripping it off, leaving it in a heap at the top of the ladder. No time for proper kit; his undershirt, slacks, and brogues would have to do. He slid down the ladder and almost collided with the chief tech, Horace.

“The fuck’s going on, Ash?”

“You heard me! I’m fucking going!” Ash said, already hurrying to the console at the feet of the war machine.

“Dude, it’s not ready!”

“What do you mean? She’s got her two feet on!”

“I mean we’ve been servicing the armor and the rear torso bearings…”

“The engine runs, right?!” Ash jabbed a sequence of buttons on the console. Horace didn’t leap to yank his hands off. The beast gave a whine and a hum. The engine was running.

“The engine runs,” Horace admitted. “But, oh, fuck. Don’t get shot, man.”

A few more buttons on the console and the Doru class walker crouched down and the canopy swung open. Ash wheeled a ladder over and scrambled up and in.

“Get the door, Horace!” he yelled, pulling the canopy shut and strapping his helmet on.

His hands found the stick and throttle, his feet the pedals. The machine was already humming underneath him in the pre-start regime. The bay door was rising in front of him. He flipped open a cover on the right panel and turned the red switch underneath a quarter turn until it clicked into place. Systems behind and beneath Ash whirred and hummed as the start sequence began.

He ticked the toggle up for the machine’s external loudspeakers and began his pre-op list. Extreme rush or not, Ash was no amateur.

“Reactor power nominal. Sensors ready. Mobility ready. Weapons ready. All systems ready. Stand clear bay door number two.”

The bay door was open into the night. He slammed the throttle forward. The reactor surged; the beast heaved.

“Cassock is underway.”

0319 9 May 1021 EH

The North Wards, New Hope, Volga

“Samantha Arif! Our wayward sister.” Paven Roth, clad in Orléans-class armor, gestured broadly, standing on an unblemished stretch of grass not far from the scorched and mutilated center of the football pitch that Lun had put the escape craft down on. The Orléans-class was a sleek suit that seemed designed to project a sort of masculine athleticism, with prominent EAP bundles at the shoulders and calves and a brimmed helmet with a narrow visor: perfect for a peacock like Roth. He was flanked by a full platoon of standard infantry soldiers, armed, at ease, and spread out to create an imposing silhouette of casual, cocky lethality. Like meatheads shooting a vid, Sam thought.

Sam jumped down from the hatch, wincing as her right shoulder bore the painful twisting of the limp arm below it. There was no hiding it, but that was the risk.

Phira had raised HQ, but help was complicated by the Federation’s state of alert. ETA was twenty minutes. HQ was going to try to get through to Stukov—his Federation Marine Sentinel officers would pretty nearly shoot each other for the opportunity to let loose on a platoon of Dominioners—but you never knew with coalition efforts. So they had a goal: survive for twenty minutes.

“We’ll bargain with the princess, of course,” Phira had said. “And with you, if we have to. But…”

“Let me do it,” Sam replied.

Kevin nodded thoughtfully. Phira’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding.”

“No, ma’am. This one’s easy. I know how to talk to them.”

“But what are you going to talk to them about?”

Phira hadn’t really liked Sam’s idea for that, but Kevin agreed that beggars can’t be choosers.

Sam scanned the horizon. The pitch was bordered by a dark mass of trees on the right and a brick-and-concrete building on the left—some sort of civic building, lit by streetlights and outdoor flood lights at all hours. The pitch here had tall stadium-style lights, but they were off; Roth and his soldiers stood at the edge of the pool of light spreading out beneath the landing lights of the escape craft. If it came to a fight, it was the middle of the night and not too densely populated here, but any stray bullet was still a terrible failure of responsibility.

Not that the Knights of Aquila saw it that way.

Sam finally made her reply to Roth’s greeting: “Wasn’t my choice, really.”

“Then come home,” Roth replied, grand and magnanimous.

“No.”

“The Macedon raises his banner. Would you not raise yours?”

Sam rolled her eyes. “I never earned my cape, Paven. I never got the chance. I don’t care to have the chance any more. What is all this about, anyway?”

“I’ve been wondering that,” Phira chimed in over the radio. She and Kevin were listening from the flight deck.

“It is about,” Paven began, drumming each syllable with emphasis, “honor. Family. Glory. Your birthright, Arif. What is this scrabbling and dust? A mercenary private? It is beneath you. They are beneath you.”

“Christ.”

“Get a load of this guy,” Phira added.

“No, Arif. Glory unto ourselves. Yourself.”

“I still don’t get what you’ve come all this way for. Plenty of other POWs from the Valkyrie IV on this rock and others. Why me?”

Paven Roth paused. He swept his gaze about his soldiers. And he laughed. And they laughed.

“Samantha Arif. Do you not know? Are you so far from your heritage?”

“Know what, Roth?”

“The Macedon wants you, because wouldn’t any Grand General want to be sure of the loyalty of the closest of his kin?”

Sam’s heart gave a sick lurch. Could it be? “…Jair?”

“Jair Arif, the Macedon!”

“Oh, shit,” Phira said.

Sam sighed. No wonder it felt like she was being chased to the ends of the system. She was. And she would be, until she submitted or died.

“But I tire of this, Samantha,” Roth continued. He waved a hand in the air. Twenty or so rifles rose to level. “You are not impressed, I see. You have lost your taste for the finer things, and you prefer to squabble in the dirt. If that is so, then…”

Sam pressed the releases under the jawline of her helmet, one at a time, and she lifted it off. Phira said something over the radio, but it was lost as the earpiece came away. She was trying to give Sam an earful. This was the part of the plan she didn’t like.

“It is my right and duty to defend which is mine,” Sam began. Roth turned theatrically, his arm and palm shifting into something suggesting a question. The rifles immediately began sinking. “It is your right and duty to conquer what you wish and to yield what you cannot. What say you, Sir Paven Roth?”

Roth lifted his helmet off.

“So you do know your way, Samantha Arif. I accept the principle of your challenge. I shall take you to Bosporus, alive, and you will be presented to The Macedon.”

“I shall remain on Volga.”

“We shall decide within a circle of equals.”

“We shall decide within a circle of equals,” his men said, and Sam said, at once.

Sam and Roth approached each other as his soldiers fanned out into a wide circle, its perimeter completed on its eastern side by the cylindrical entry vehicle.

Sam eyed the two soldiers flanking it over her shoulder.

“The weapons for our wayward gallant,” Roth said, gesturing at Sam with his stupid faux-generous palm. A soldier near him knelt over a pack and drew from it a long, sleek steel-core sword and a blocky gray service pistol.

He walked them over to Sam—an eternity across thirty meters. Sam watched, listening to the crickets and the far off aural wash of late night traffic on the suburban streets.

Her heart pounded in her chest.

“Arif,” Roth called out, as he readied his own handgun. “Your valor is not in question. I hope you know that.”

He’s telling me to throw in the towel before I die. He really does want to take me back there. What a trophy I’d be.

“Of course,” Sam said, smoothly.

“Good. My men came here to do some shooting. It would be so easy to give them what they want.” He gave a meaningful glance at the exit craft.

This lout, Sam thought, her rage spiking. He thinks I don’t know. He thinks I don’t know what happens with a Dominion team goes planetside. He’s going to order them to shoot up the place anyway, and he thinks I don’t know. He thinks I’m fooled by this stupid farce. She was, irrationally, glad she didn’t have Phira in her ear. This red-hot hate felt like it was best stoked alone.

The man bearing her weapons stopped at her right side, holding out the sword for her mangled right hand.

She turned her head to look at him. A stupid grin on his stupid chin.

Sam whipped her EAP-augmented left leg around at his midsection and he buckled, ribs snapped and pulverized by the sudden force. She threw herself down onto him, knee first, crushing him like a bug beneath a thumb and wrenching the steel-core sword out of his hand with her left arm.

“ARIF,” Roth bellowed, charging forward.

Roth would be on her with his blade in three, four seconds. Would any of his soldiers dare take a shot at her in that time? Sam took off to her right, running, hooking her left elbow up over her ear. Exposing the power armor’s somewhat vulnerable armpit to small arms fire was much better than exposing her bare head to it.

She crashed through the next two soldiers on the perimeter sword-first, leaving gashed and crushed bodies in her wake, before Roth caught up to her.

“YOU SNAKE,” he roared, diving at her with a wild blade plunge. Sam dipped sideways, kicking a soldier down screaming as she went. The perimeter was beginning to come apart, now; soldiers scattered for the shadows, looking for cover from the duelists. Sam could see only a few targets left at the edge of the pool of light, and even those were vanishing fast. None dared shoot at her: Roth was there, too, unhelmed.

Sam grinned wickedly. She had baited the oaf into a fight and bloodied his dignity. Now there was nothing left to do but die trying to win.

Roth advanced, swinging at her with wild abandon, again and again. Sam kept backpedaling, dipping sideways—it was too easy. Roth was too mad.

And then the guns began roaring, and the earth began pitching.

About Forty Minutes Ago

0251 9 May 1021 EH

Beacon Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

Stukov pulled on the nearest shirt he could find beside his bed, threw his legs over the side, and flipped up the tab on his bedstand.

“Yes, General. Is it the Neptune?”

“Yes, sir,” replied General Idkowsky. She herself was wearing only a white collared shirt, no tie, no regalia, no hat. So she had also been woken up to take this information to him. Stukov frowned. “Colonel Jimor is at the operations room. It’s best if you hear it from him, sir.”

Stukov felt the sudden clarity of… oh, not fear. This ambassador was too old for fear. But a certain clarity accompanies fear. A sharpness to every new piece of information. The world becomes suddenly rich in its truth, and every detail becomes lethally important.

Stukov knew, and Idkowsky knew that he knew, that Jimor was excitable, prone to overstatement. He made an excellent Colonel because he had a unique ability to rally and drive men and women, though he was perennially a pain in the ass to his superiors. A trade made well and gladly, Idkowsky would say, commiserating with her staff over brandy. If Jimor was running a show on the ground, Stukov would bet his life that the Marine Sentinels were at their absolute best. But if Idkowsky was saying that Stukov needed to hear directly from him… well, that could only mean the situation was very dynamic indeed.

“Put him through, General. Who have you woken up?”

“You’re the first, sir. My staff is next.”

“Good. See to it, General.”

Idkowsky nodded, punched a button, and then winked off the screen. Colonel Jimor appeared, his dark complexion washed blue as he leaned over a console over the shoulder of some haggard-looking lieutenant. Stukov immediately recognized that he himself was one face upon one of the many screens Jimor was personally watching.

“Colonel,” Stukov said.

“Ambassador. The Neptune has begun its invasion procedure. The 10th Combat Aerospace Brigade and 5th division, 1st Combat Brigade are activating.”

“Sir…” the lieutenant below him began.

“Entry trajectories are for New Hope,” Jimor continued, oblivious. “Our marines are itching for them. It’s go time.”

“Sir!”

“We’re going to meet them with fire and steel, Ambassador. Force those rubes at Salemo have never known. Our defensive doctrine is fast reaction to deliver overwhelming aggression and numerical superiority to the point of incursion, and we are pleased to oblige.”

“Colonel,” Stukov said. “We are proud of the response of the Federation’s finest. Please do not allow me to delay receipt of your report from your lieutenant.”

Jimor looked down. The haggard lieutenant mumbled something to him, inaudible over the remote call. Jimor looked slightly concerned, then turned back to the call with Stukov. “Ambassador,” he began. “The Neptune is breaking up. All ten of its secondary invasion craft are away and appear to be operating. Signals is trying to make sense of this now, but Salemo is… silent.”

There was a noise, and Jimor turned to look somewhere to his left, off-screen. He visibly drew in breath, and his eyes widened.

There was a pickup in cross-talk and noise. The operations room that Jimor was in had burst into excitement, shouted reports, orders. Jimor shouted something. Part of it sounded suspiciously like “fist of an angry God.” There was an evil cheer, and the pace picked up even more.

He hunched back over the screen, looking Stukov dead in the eyes across the remote call. “Sir,” he said, “signals tells us there’s Dominion soldiers on those boats. I’m calling in another brigade. We’re going to grind every single one of those bastards to dust.”

0325 9 May 1021 EH

The North Wards, New Hope, Volga

The football pitch was churned in two great lines, black scorched gashes in the field illuminated by flames as the VTOL that had fired the rockets howled overhead. Sam scrambled to her feet. Roth stared around in disbelief as tracer rounds arced up into the blackness around them, men shouted, and engines screamed in the air.

And then he turned to face Sam again.

But Sam was gone.

Sam was running, laughing, one eye on Roth as she chased his soldiers across the pitch. They couldn’t escape, not from her EAP-augmented legs pounding the turf as hard as the turf could stand it. Two more Dominion soldiers fell under the crushing force of the steel-core sword, handled crudely but with gargantuan strength by Sam’s power-armored left arm.

A combat VTOL swept in for another strafing run, and Sam dove to the side as flames and noise blossomed on the grass, flinging chunks of earth skyward. Sam saw Phira leaning out of the hatch of the entry craft now, training her carbine on one target at a time. They saw each other. Phira waved frantically.

Sam turned around and barely ducked a swing by Roth that would have taken her head clean off her spine by the sheer force of it.

Roth was in with more and more furious attacks. Sam was backpedaling again. Even if she had been wielding the sword in her good hand, there was no deflecting his steel core sword with her own; one sword swung with the force of power armor behind it would crush another sword as readily as it crushed bone or steel armor. There was only dodging, getting clear.

Sam sidestepped one more time, and then her luck caught up with her. She was lifted from the ground by a rocket blast, and she tumbled. She lost her sword—her only offensive threat, no matter how pitiful—in her effort to bring her left arm up to protect her head from impact with the ground.

Roth was running toward her, sword in hand. She scrambled to get up off the ground, but the shredded earth was too soft, and she stumbled.

Roth was upon her, blood streaked across his suit and rage in his eyes.

There was a force against her head, and then there was darkness.

0325 9 May 1021 EH

The North Wards, New Hope, Volga

Three separate indicators were screaming at Ash as he swung the Doru around the last building—one for heat buildup, and two for unacknowledged urgent signals and sensors readings—and he had no damn time to silence them. He looked over the chaos on the football field. So here was ground zero. One entry craft lay on its side, hatch open, Phira half leaning out of it at her rifle. Of course she was. There were only two foot soldiers Ash knew suicidal enough to keep on the offense through a full aerial bombardment like this.

Ash thundered onto the pitch, toward the entry craft, scanning the field with his eyes and sensors as he went. His IFF transponder would keep the Fed VTOLs from shooting him, which meant the only threats were below him.

Assuming the Feds would play nice.

“Lin! Where are the other two now?” he asked over the radio.

“Lun’s inside. I don’t see Sam.”

“Get her here, now. My IFF can keep us safe if you can find her.”

“No comms, no contact.”

Another pod of rockets streaked across the field. Too close to the entry craft.

“Fuck!” Ash said. “They really hate these guys. Who are they…”

Ash flipped his sensors to see what the VTOL had been shooting at. Mag scan revealed two forms: one in Troya-class power armor, the other in Orléans, both appearing as headless men in his scan because they were missing their helmets.

The Troya was down, scrambling.

Ash wheeled the Doru’s torso around, lined up the crosshairs…

The thoughts crowded the milliseconds:

Too close to each other for the explosive shoulder cannon. But the hand lasguns might not stop him. Don’t. But if you don’t, she definitely dies.

Too close.

No choice.

…and pulled the trigger. His shoulder cannon roared. The headless Orléans armor in the magscan vanished into bits and dust.

He slammed open the radio.

“Cassock requesting immediate medical evac! Coordinates oh-ten-nine…!”

“Cassock,” Captain Roche replied. “This is First Company. We’re two minutes behind you. Hold position and hang on, help is on its way. What, did you think we were gonna sit it out?”

Facing the Music

0100 11 June 1021 EH

Galway Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

As Sam stared at the bar, a pinkish drink with a festive umbrella slid into view, settling directly under her nose. The ice tinkled as it came to rest.

Sam looked up. Phira, naturally, was the point of origin.

“But…” Sam began.

“It’s been thirty days and then some. And you were fine ten days in anyway, somehow.”

“And…” Sam continued, looking back down at the drink.

“Damn right, it’s something fruity and girly. It’s summer. Cheers,” Phira finished with a stupid grin, holding up one of her own.

The bar was much quieter now. Most of the patrons had filtered out not too long after the musicians finished their last number; it was late on a weekday night and the only holdouts were the grizzled veterans of the scene, including a few on the graveyard shift knocking one back before starting their day in the dead of night. Olivia was still trying to tame and pack the rat’s nest of cables and speakers hooked up to her keyboard on stage.

“Sam?”

“What? Oh, cheers.”

They clinked. Sam drank. It was not especially remarkable. It was sweet, and even someone as large as Sam could probably have a bit too much without noticing if she tried hard enough.

“Alright, admit it.”

“What?”

“You don’t like jazz. It’s okay. Nobody wants to be like Ash. But together we’ll get through it.”

Sam smiled. “No, no, the performance was great. I’m just…”

Sam picked up the glass with her right hand. The myoelectric fingers—tiny titanium articulated segments bound up and moved by EAP bundles—closed clumsily, but acceptably, on it. “… you know.”

“No,” Phira said, shaking her head. “You’re not thinking of rehab right now.”

“I’m thinking of rehab right now,” Sam admitted.

Phira sighed. “Tell me it’s because Olivia offered to teach you the saxophone or something.”

“No, I just want to get back in the rotation.”

“Damn it, Sam!” Phira said.

Sam shrugged.

“Listen,” Phira said. “You’re an unstoppable super soldier, I get it. But there’s someone underneath that. I worry you’re repressing that someone.”

Sam shrugged again, not knowing what to say.

“I thought,” Phira said, rolling her neck and thinking. “I thought when you went off on Paven and his guys… I mean, that was a pretty big deal, right?”

“… yeah. Dominioners don’t do that. Breaking honor in a duel like that is… suicide. Suicide to your honor, and usually also normal suicide.”

“Yeah. That was a tough twenty minutes. When Lun told me an entire air brigade was on our asses, too, I thought we were going to die. Then when we got you dusted off to the hospital and I finally got a really good look at your arm, I thought… well, you had erased any chance of going back to the Dominion, if that had ever been a thought, and you should’ve said goodbye to your days of fighting here on Volga.”

“You know prosthetics are pretty good these days. And you don’t even need prosthetics in power armor.”

“Yeah, but, seriously, Sam. Come on. That was the moment I was sure that we had to find the non-super-soldier Sam. Someone who does something other than train and fight all day.”

“I am blessed with a unity of purpose,” Sam said, drinking her sugary cocktail.

“Jesus,” Phira said. “Where’d you get that one?”

“My mother said that about me, once. It was meant to be patronizing. I was supposed to go to the academy to become be a staff officer, doing politics and building the family, not to chase frontline commands. Anyway, I liked the line.”

“Building the family, huh. Like Jair?”

“A little bit like Jair,” Sam said.

“Will he be a problem, anyway?”

“He won’t forget the snub. I’m a black mark against him; others will talk about it behind his back: his sister, the defector. But Volga is hard for him to get to, and everyone’s eyes are wide open to it now. So he gets to fume about it back on Bosporus.”

“Until he goes a-conquering.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

Phira sighed again. “Please. For me. Promise me you’ll do something other than just rehabbing for the next five years until he shows up with an invasion fleet?”

“I have some good books to listen to during rehab.”

Phira looked up, hurt. Sam snickered. “Sorry, sorry. Yes. I will. I’m not used to having a home that’s more than a bunk and a backpack.”

“You still have a home that’s basically just a bunk and a backpack,” Olivia said, sitting down next to Phira.

“That’s just the bunk and the backpack. Home is New Hope,” Sam replied.

“I’ll drink to that,” Olivia said, as the bartender slid something strong and neat her way.

“Cheers. Good show, by the way.”

“Thanks, Sam. You ever thought about jamming with us?”

“I’ve got no musical talent.”

“Everyone has something. All else fails you can play the bass.”

(“I heard that,” someone—the bassist, presumably—shouted from behind the stage.)

“If you insist, guess I’ll find something.”

“I insist,” Phira said.

“Wednesday nights?” Olivia said.

“Sure.”

Epilogue

0800 10 June 1021 EH

Beacon Prefecture, New Hope, Volga

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Ambassador Stukov?”

“You owe it to the twenty-one dead Federation citizens in the New Hope North Wards.”

“A terrible shame. And an awfully pointed thing to say, Ambassador. Are you implying I have failed the Federation in some way?”

“I mean to do more than imply. You are responsible for the Neptune. The evidence will bear it out.”

Executive Director Kent Raleigh folded his hands neatly over his end of the table. The blue sapphire set into the ring of the Fellowship of Navigators flashed from his left little finger. The movement was the tell. Not the new resting position, merely the movement.

Stukov did not need the tell, though his eyes collected and cataloged it all the same.

“Are you telling me,” Director Raleigh said, “that your vaunted signals intelligence corps has identified those soldiers as company men? You well know how preposterous that is, Ambassador. But perhaps you’re losing your touch. Do you really believe Salemo was behind the bombing, too?”

An invitation to divulge information. Stukov was in a giving mood.

“No. That was a fiction and you know that. The Dominion furnished the materiel and operational planning; Salemo supplied the patsy. We played that card face-down, the correct strategy. It seems that it has had the advantageous side effect of impeding our other adversary’s plans.”

“I’m sure I do not follow.” Kent was going to make him spell it all out. Just as well. That is what the meeting was for, anyway. Play some cards face-down; play others face-up. Some opponents should be forced to contend with uncertainty; others should be provoked and constrained by certainties.

“You are the adversary in question, sir. You mean to incite a reopening of hostilities with the Dominion. The Dominion is happy to tweak our noses and kill our men, but with Johan Hect you saw an opportunity for their adventurism to spiral out of their control. You leaked material information about the armory to Hect and ensured he would develop a connection with the knights. The knights thought they could arm, train, and create a proxy, but you knew that Hect would blunder them into an open war given half the chance.”

“I deny these allegations, Ambassador,” the executive director replied, smiling. “Besides. Open war is coming whether we like it or not. Our intelligence indicates mobilization on Bosporus. An alignment of major political actors and an amassing of resources.”

“As does ours, Director.”

“Then what’s the fuss?”

“Twenty-one dead Federation citizens in the New Hope North Wards.”

“I can hear you perfectly well, Ambassador. I’m sorry the business of war is upsetting to your delicate constitution.”

“Director, I fear that is a projection. Or perhaps simply a mistake. So I shall make very clear where we stand. My people, with whom I share an oath of adamant loyalty, are charged with bringing justice to our enemies and to those who would aid them. We and our allies are already uncovering evidence of treason against the citizens of the Federation. We will pursue these matters fully to their ends, and, the Federation Code of Justice willing, we will have the perpetrators apprehended and, each and every one of them, shot dead.”

Stukov punctuated each of the last two words with the thump of an index finger on the glossy surface of the table. Raleigh, his hands still clasped, allowed his gaze to follow the motion with distaste.

“A pretty speech. Is there any substance to the words, I wonder?”

“You shall find out.”