The Others Read online

  Funding…where did Ciara get the money she used?

  Villieneuve knew all his people, certainly those at Ciara’s level, had slush funds, corrupt stashes of money used for a variety of purposes. But that didn’t explain the sheer volume of coin she’d clearly distributed in the thwarted coup. His first suspicion had been Kerevsky. The Confed ambassador didn’t seem the type to get involved in anything like a coup attempt…but then, Ciara had been playing him, working him for information, using, among other things, her considerable sexual charms. Perhaps the Confederation ambassador had provided funding for her abortive revolution. He’d already ordered Kerevsky’s ship searched, and he’d been surprised when the Confeds had quickly assented, allowing Sector Nine teams to scour their vessel’s every deck and compartment.

  There had been nothing suspicious.

  He hadn’t demanded access to the embassy yet. The Confederation was, and always would be, his enemy, but he wasn’t ready to commit an act of war, not yet. Not when it appeared very much like the Hegemony had withdrawn from the Rim, leaving the Confed navy entirely uncommitted. Besides, the building was already riddled with surveillance devices, more than a few of which had long escaped detection efforts.

  Still, he hadn’t come up with any other ideas on where Ciara had obtained the funds to launch her coup. He’d recouped large sums from those she’d bribed—and he’d been amused at how many of the captured revolutionaries gave up their comrades far more quickly under torture than they had their stashed funds. There had been no electronic transfers, nothing but untraceable platinum coins. Union currency. But where had she gotten so much?

  He shook his head. Villieneuve was an intelligent man, one accustomed to figuring things out. But he was getting more and more frustrated with each passing hour. He needed Ciara. He needed her to ensure there was no renewed attempt to depose or assassinate him…and he needed her to determine if there had been any Confederation involvement. Ciara was tough. She wouldn’t fold quickly or easily.

  But she would fold. Everyone could be broken, and Sector Nine had spent two centuries mastering the art.

  * * *

  “Why did you help me?” Ciara sat at the small table, a rickety wooden thing that looked more like garbage than furniture. There was a small plate in front of her, full of food she hadn’t touched. Her mood had shifted over the past hour from despondent to angry, and then back again.

  The room was a mess, half a dozen holes in the walls, and chipped and peeling paint everywhere else. The Confederation Intelligence safe house was tucked away in one of the poorest industrial neighborhoods surrounding Troyus City, and it looked every bit the part. It wasn’t comfortable, not by any measure, but it was one of thousands, almost indistinguishable from each other in their sameness, and far less conspicuous than anything more luxurious would have been.

  “Sometimes, it’s best to simply accept help, Sandrine. Does the ‘why’ matter that much? You’re here, and not dead in the street, or in a Sector Nine cell somewhere. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Of course, but how long will that last? Gaston Villieneuve will never stop looking, and if you are caught helping me…”

  “The First Citizen is a formidable individual, there is no question of that, but he is not omniscient. I authorized his people to search my ship in orbit, and I have taken steps to ensure there is no incriminating evidence in the embassy. My people are aware of a number of the surveillance devices Villieneuve’s people have planted in the compound, though no doubt there are others we have not found. That is why you are here, in this rather disreputable neighborhood. I am confident, as much as I can be about anything, that Confederation Intelligence’s acquisition of this property is untraceable.”

  “I am relieved, of course…and grateful. But where do we go from here? I have no real data, but I suspect many of my co-conspirators have been killed or captured.”

  “Most of them, unfortunately. Many were killed in the initial raids, but at least fourteen have been taken to Sector Nine interrogation facilities. As far as my information goes, it appears everyone with any knowledge of my support for your operation, save of course, the two of us and a few of my top agents, has been killed. That’s a lucky break for us.” Kerevsky paused for a few seconds. Ciara understood what he’d meant by ‘lucky,’ and she also realized why he’d felt uncomfortable about his words. Her people had died, or they soon would die, quickly in the street, or in torment in Sector Nine’s cellar, but the fact that no one with truly vital knowledge had survived to be the subject to such interrogations, was, in its way, a good thing.

  “So, we remain hidden for a while. What good does that do? What hope is there? The coup lies in ruins, those we so carefully lined up to participate dead or telling Villieneuve’s inquisitors everything they know. There is no way to put the thing back together, and in the aftermath of Villieneuve’s inevitable crackdown, no way to recruit new participants. It is not possible to mount a serious effort to gain control of the government, nor will it be for years to come.”

  “I believe you are correct, Sandrine, at least in a direct sense. However, if there is a way to cause a sufficient level of confusion and discord, perhaps a more modest operation, one simpler to plan and organize, could serve that purpose.”

  “And, how do you propose we achieve that, what did you say, confusion and discord?”

  Kerevsky stared right at her, his face as impassive as stone. “By ignoring the effort to seize government installations, to secure the support of generals and other powerful functionaries, at least at first. By focusing on a single, difficult but attainable goal.” He was silent for ten seconds, perhaps twenty before he finished, before he spoke the words that made Ciara’s insides spasm.

  “By assassinating Gaston Villieneuve.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  CFS Dauntless

  Two Transits into the Badlands

  Year 322 AC

  Tyler Barron sat behind the large desk, staring at the display on the wall, but seeing nothing except his own thoughts. He’d bumped Atara from her rightful place yet again. Travis finally wore the admiral’s stars she’d long deserved, and she was technically the commander of the task force even then blasting through the Badlands toward Hegemony space. He was there as the Confederation’s representative, an amorphous position that made him part lofty military officer, part diplomat, and part something else. He expected he’d fill in that blank before too long. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that whatever lay ahead, it would be full of the unexpected and difficult to handle.

  He leaned back in the chair, the admiral’s chair. Atara’s chair, he reminded himself. Dauntless, the most recent ship to carry the name at least, had been built from the start as a flagship. And that flag is Atara’s, and yet here you are, in her seat.

  Dauntless had VIP quarters, of course, facilities ready for any dignitaries the ship had cause to carry from one place to another, but only the two offices, one for the ship’s captain and the other for the fleet’s admiral, were fully linked into the tactical suite. Atara still served as Dauntless’s skipper, of course, and she’d merely yielded the larger room and set up shop in the captain’s office, but Barron still wondered how she dealt so well with constantly living under his shadow. She’d been his first officer, the captain of his flagship, and now she held an admiral’s post that could never be truly real as long as the navy’s fighting commander was there. He’d often thought about how fortunate he’d been to have a comrade with Atara’s intelligence, her tactical cunning, her courage. Now, he added another attribute to that list, the somewhat freeform concept that she seemed to excel working at his side, and never showed the slightest signs of resentment at how he soaked up all the light and air in the room.

  Still, for all the displays and scanner feeds, the AI relays and tactical assessment assets at his disposal, Tyler Barron’s mind was hundreds of lightyears away, back on Megara.

  He’d expected a fight from Andi, a bared teeth brawl over coming with hi
m to Hegemony space. But after a weak effort to convince him not to go at all, there had been nothing. Nothing save acquiescence. That was what nagged at him the most. In ten years, he’d seen Andi argue with desperate passion, fight like a Quillian deathfang, stand firm against every bit of pressure the universe could throw at her.

  But he’d never seen her give up meekly. And that scared the hell out of him.

  He was edgy about the mission, too, caught between mistrust of the Hegemony and the growing confidence there was, in fact, something dangerous out there. Something that scared the hell out of the Masters and their forces that had almost conquered the Rim—that would have conquered the Rim if they hadn’t pulled back. He’d tried to get off Megara with as few restrictions from the Senate as possible, but Flandry had proven to be as frustrating a rival as he’d been useful as an ally. Barron’s mandate was broad in terms of gathering information, but he didn’t have the power to agree to any alliances with the Hegemony or any other power, and he was forbidden to engage in combat unless his own forces were expressly targeted and fired upon.

  Barron had always tried to maintain a calm focus on duty. His steadiness in desperate situations had been the rock on which his career had been built. But that strength was failing him. Dauntless and the rest of the task force were still more than twenty transits from Hegemony space, and he felt almost as though the next jump would plunge his fleet into a hopeless battle. He was edgy, uncomfortable, having trouble holding his focus.

  He was scared.

  The uncertainty of what lay ahead came at him from one direction, and his concerns about Andi, the questions about what he’d left behind, hit him from another. He had to regain his focus, to stay sharp when Dauntless reached Hegemony space. He would have to rely on his judgment, probably on the fly, without the data he needed to make proper decisions.

  “Admiral Travis is at the door, sir.” The AI’s voice startled him, as it had half a dozen times on the trip. He hadn’t reprogrammed Atara’s parameters. That just seemed like too much on top of taking her workspace. But he’d had the same voice on his AIs for more than a decade, and the one Travis had chosen was considerably different in tone and volume.

  “Show her in.”

  The door slid to the side, and Atara Travis walked into the room. “I just wanted to check on you, Ty.” Greeting a superior, and especially the Confederation’s naval C in C and chief envoy to the Hegemony by his first name, not to mention a shortening of that name, was extremely inappropriate, at least by normal standards of the service. But Atara Travis was as close to Barron as any sister could have been, closer even, since they’d shared crises and dangers together so many times.

  “I think you just miss your office.” Barron glanced up, grateful for the distraction. “Like I said before, you should work out of here. The captain’s setup is more than I need.”

  “Yeah, you don’t think I know part of you wishes you were still Dauntless’s captain? The old Dauntless, of course. Though as much as I loved and miss her, she was a bucket of bolts compared to her replacement.”

  Barron ignored the comment about his old ship. It was a hundred percent accurate, but it just wasn’t in him to remember anything but a romanticized version of his first battleship command. “I guess we all remember certain times, but our lives pay no mind to them. Duty is a fierce mistress, and when she calls, how can we say no?”

  “We can’t.” A pause. “But don’t worry about the office, at least. The captain’s suite is more than enough for me, and if you end up having to meet any Hegemony big shots in here, I think the plusher room will be useful. They all think they’re genetically superior already. Let’s not do them the favor of inflating those outsized egos anymore.”

  Barron nodded. “You should be the diplomat.”

  “No way. I didn’t work my way out of the industrial pits to spend my time trading lies with a bunch of pompous fools. Duty led you to that terrible pass, my old friend, not me…and it made a discriminating choice. You hate it, but you can do it. I’d hate it too, but I think I’d make a wreck of the whole thing.”

  “You like to underestimate yourself, but don’t waste your time trying it with me. I’ve seen you in action, and in too many other tough spots. And, don’t forget, if anything happens to me, you’re next in line here. You’ll be the Confederation’s emissary to the Hegemony.”

  “That’s the best reason I’ve ever heard to keep you alive. Conveniently, that very task is the core of my own duty at present.” She smiled, but it only held for a few seconds. Then she sat quietly for a while before she continued, “Seriously, Ty, do you really think we can work with the Hegemony, be their allies? The whole idea makes my stomach clench like a fist…and I suspect it would be even harder on the spacers. How much blood did the Hegemony spill? How many of us held dying friends in our arms or spent months in infirmary beds?”

  “We had this conversation before, Atara…when Andrei Denisov showed up with his fleet. And, our hatred for the Union is a lot older than that for the Hegemony. How many people died fighting their forces? My grandfather was killed in the third war, his shuttle tracked down and blasted to atoms. But we fought alongside Denisov’s spacers, and I suspect they were the margin of survival more than once.”

  “This is different.”

  “I know you want to feel that way, I do too. But how is it really different?”

  “The Union is a despotism, and their leaders are evil, certainly. But the Hegemony Masters consider us all…inferiors. How do we treat with them as allies, as equals, knowing every minute they think we should all be their slaves?”

  “I have as much angst toward the Hegemony as anyone, you know that. But let’s not let ourselves wallow in self-indulgence. I find their society as repugnant as you do, but don’t tell me you don’t see the logic in it. They’re far coreward from the Rim. The worlds they encountered early in their recovery were far more damaged by the Cataclysm than those farther out. They dealt with severely degraded populations, with people whose scarred DNA threatened their very survival. The Kriegeri and Arbeiter are definitely second-class citizens compared to the Masters, but I don’t think it’s really accurate to call them ‘slaves.’”

  Atara looked over at Barron. “Maybe you are ready to deal with them.”

  “Stop that…you know I have the same feelings you do. But that doesn’t mean we should indulge in exaggeration. Look at Denisov’s people…do you still consider them enemies? How about the Union itself? This kind of thing is complicated, and if there is an enemy out there worse than the Hegemony—possibly much worse—what will you do? Let the Hegemony be destroyed out of spite…before we are right after them? Or join forces and try to stop whatever threatens us all?”

  A defiant look flashed across Atara’s face, but it quickly faded. “I know you’re right, Ty, but I’m still worried. I’m worried about how I’ll handle it, and I’m worried about the spacers, too.”

  Barron returned his friend’s gaze, silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “If you want to worry, worry about whether there really is something out there, something we can’t defeat, even alongside the Hegemony. We’re heading to meet with our old enemies, to see what they are facing. But what if we’re plunging toward a hopeless fight, one all the forces of the Hegemony and the Rim together can’t match. What if we’re heading to our doom?”

  * * *

  “Alright, let’s do one more sweep, and then we’ll head back to base.” Jake Stockton had always felt at home in the cockpit of a fighter. It was natural to him in many ways, as though that’s where he’d been born to be. But now he was edgy, distracted, and it came through in his flying. He’d have given himself a good dressing down if he’d been one of his pilots, and maybe even a few weeks’ grounding to give some time to think about paying attention. That was one challenge that plagued the top of the pyramid. There was no one to keep you on track, to slap you down when you got out of line.

  And Stockton didn’t doubt he needed that from t
ime to time, just like any other pilot.

  There were no enemies on the screen, no contacts at all. That wasn’t a surprise, though Stockton’s combat sensibilities treated it as one. There hadn’t been anything since the task force left Confederation space, not even a Badlands rogue trader or two flitting about.

  That was the result of the war, he knew. With Dannith in Hegemony hands for so long, and the Badlands enemy-occupied territory, the trade in old tech prospecting had pretty much dried up. It would return, he suspected, if any extended period of peace was maintained, but just then, that dead section of imperial space was even more haunted than it had been before.

  He brought his ship around, toward a nearby planet. He was close enough to see it with his eyes, and he sat for a few seconds and just stared. It was beautiful, vibrant blue with three hazy white rings around it. Stockton had been a warrior his entire adult life, and he’d come to see the universe as a battlefield, scarred by endless fighting and death. It was easy to forget the magnificence on display, the stunning beauty present out in the depths of space when one looked out past a screen, and directly into the hypnotic depths.

  That blue glow is pretty, but it’s just a bunch of toxic gasses, the atmosphere of a planet so cold it would be a race to see if it poisoned or froze you to death the fastest.

  Stockton had come to appreciate some things more than he had when he’d been younger, but he was still a cynic at heart. There was only one thing he knew with absolute certainty, something he believed as iron-hard fact. One day he would die in his fighter. He didn’t know when his end would come, but he’d always known how it would.