Cauldron of Fire (Blood on the Stars Book 5) Read online

  A weapon. One that can be used against the Confederation fleet. Against Dauntless.

  Against Tyler.

  Unknown World

  Uncharted System

  Deep in the Badlands

  Year 311 AC

  “Right here. The readings center on this spot here.” Andi Lafarge was standing in the stark, harsh sun of the small planet that lay at the end of her quest. She’d ID’d the system correctly, she was sure enough about that. She was where she was supposed to be, so now the only question was if her intel was worth the coin she’d paid for it. And the scanner readings suggested a big “yes” as the answer to that question.

  “You’re right…my scanner says the same thing. There is something.” Merrick was about ten feet away, squinting in the brightness as he looked back at her. “We should dig here.”

  “Ross,” Andi shouted, looking in the direction where the rest of her crew was gathered. Ross Tarren was closest, and since she’d rushed out of Pegasus without any comm gear, he was her default contact. “Start unloading the excavation gear, and get it over here.”

  “Will do, Andi.” Tarren waved an acknowledgement to accompany his shouted reply, and then he turned and jogged back toward Pegasus, waving and yelling to the other crew members as he did.

  Lafarge didn’t like landing her ship, not on barely-explored planets where her data on such things like gravitation, weather, and atmospheric consistency was all rough and hastily-assembled. Bringing a ship down was always a rugged ride, one where many problems that never showed up in spaceflight tended to appear. Nevertheless, it was an occupational hazard. Pegasus had a lifeboat of sorts, a small gig that was capable of planetary landings, but it was far from large enough to carry any meaningful amount of equipment, and the items Andi and her crew sought tended to be buried under tons of dirt and rocks.

  “I’m getting more than the materials readings, Vig. Some kind of background energy or something too.”

  “We did a very quick planetary scan, Andi. Our information is spotty at best. This could be anything, radioactives in the crust, the effect of the primary in this atmosphere…”

  “True enough, except it’s localized. Right where we’re about to dig.”

  Merrick adjusted his scanner, directing it to the spot Andi mentioned. Then he looked up at her. “You don’t think this thing could be operational, do you? Is that even possible?”

  She shook her head. “I seriously doubt that.” She paused, staring at the ground. “But you know what it could be? Antimatter decay. Maybe this thing’s got one of those canisters to power it.”

  “If there was an antimatter leak, this entire valley would be a crater.”

  “Not a leak. But even those storage containers on the planet killer lost a tiny amount of antimatter each year. Not enough to cause a rupture or other damage, but something detectable, a few atoms here and there.”

  “If you’re right, we’d better…”

  “Be damned careful where we dig. If we rupture an antimatter storage unit, we’ll be blasted to subatomic particles before we realize we’ve done anything.” She looked at Vig, and then behind her, where the others were approaching with a fully loaded grav sled.

  “Damned careful is right, Andi.”

  * * *

  “We’re clear, Andi.”

  Lafarge let out a deep breath. She felt like she’d been sweating bullets for the last two days, going through each moment as if cataclysm might accompany the next.

  “Let’s establish orbit, Vig.” She wanted nothing more than to blast away at full for home, but she felt she had to wait…and make sure her charges went off.

  The readings she’d detected had been a canister of antimatter, the primary fuel for old tech devices. She’d been wildly excited when she first saw it…until she realized it was damaged. The leakage had been minimal so far, but she realized that could change at any moment. She’d asked Lex Righter to take a look, and his ashen face gave her the answer before he spoke a word.

  She’d considered taking a chance, loading the canister aboard Pegasus and blasting for the Confederation. This find she would keep, parceling off the precious antimatter on the black market, a source of massive wealth for her and her people. She would be as rich as Hephaeseus’s most powerful magnates, richer even. But then reality hit her.

  “I wouldn’t move it,” Righter had said. “In fact—and this is assuming we don’t just turn and get the hell out of here right now—I would dig around the other side of the device and pull it out that way. I would give the canister as much room as possible. I can only guess, but if we move this thing, put it in the hold, I doubt we’ve got one chance in four of making it home.”

  She’d heeded his advice—what she also knew to be the right choice—but it had taken her a while. Finding one cache of antimatter was extraordinary enough, and losing it had been painful. But a second time? She’d tried to convince herself they could do it. They could extract it slowly, pack it carefully, but in the end, she realized that would be a wild gamble with her crew’s lives, and worst of all, a bad bet. She was no coward, but the chances she took were measured, calculated.

  “How long, Vig?”

  “About half a minute, Andi.”

  She just nodded. The charges had been her idea. If she couldn’t take the antimatter, she couldn’t leave it behind either, not with Union ships prowling around. No, if she couldn’t bring it back—and she couldn’t even disturb it or bury it again—there was only one choice. She had to destroy it.

  That was easy enough. All she had to do was rupture a container that was barely still holding together. The first significant quantity of antimatter that escaped would vaporize the canister, and in microseconds, the entire thing would go. The explosion would be titanic, though she knew for all her ability to calculate the gigatons of energy released, she couldn’t really imagine what something like that would look like…or what it would do to the planet.

  The world was uninhabited, though. People had lived there once, but they’d failed to survive the strife known now as the Cataclysm. Whether they’d been blasted from space or wiped out by chemical weapons, they were long gone. Still, it felt strange to unleash such hell on a habitable planet.

  “Three, two, one…” Vig’s tone suggested he felt similarly. Not regretful, exactly, but there was something eerie about it. Haunted.

  She watched as the scanners went wild, the energy readings soaring, the gauges all maxing out. It was done. The peaceful valley where she and her people had landed, where they had dug up their cargo…it was gone now, turned into a radioactive nightmare.

  All so there’s no chance the Union ends up with that antimatter…

  Lafarge felt a pang of regret that she hadn’t decided to risk the transport. But it only lasted a moment. She knew she’d made the right decision. Besides, she wasn’t going home empty handed, not even close. She’d found what she’d originally come for, and to her cursory inspection, while not operable, it didn’t seem to be in bad shape. It was a massive find, a discovery of immense importance and value.

  She felt another impulse, a shadowy one from deep inside, an urge to hide it, to keep it until she could find the highest bidder. But she knew she couldn’t do that, not with the Confederation at war, and worse, in serious danger of defeat. Not with the Union out there, possibly with a find of their own, one that, from the looks of their expedition, was vastly larger than what her people had found.

  No, there was no choice. She would demand a much higher price than her people had gotten last time, but she would bring the thing to Admiral Striker.

  “All right, Vig, we did what we had to do here. Take us to Grimaldi, and I do mean with every bit of speed you can coax from the old girl. I have a feeling this thing is important, and we could still very well run into Union ships out here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Fortress Sentinel-2

  Orbiting Planet Varena, Cilian System

  Year 62 (311 AC)


  “I consider myself a good judge of character, and in your case, I am not blinded by long friendship and shared memories. You detested me until a few weeks ago, and you took every chance to let me know that. Before we found our common ground, I considered you a pompous ass.” Barron sat on a small metal chair in the cell, looking across the meter and a half to where Tulus was perched on his spare-looking bed.

  “That may be the worst job of cheering up a prisoner I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’m not trying to cheer you up. I’m trying to find out why you won’t save yourself. Because, I’d bet my left arm you’re not the traitor.”

  “I am not,” Tulus said, matter-of-factly.

  “So, why won’t you explain what you were doing with the transmission? You have to understand how damning that looks.”

  Tulus didn’t answer. He just sat and looked back at Barron.

  “Vian, this is insane. If there is an explanation, you have to give it to Vennius.”

  “I cannot.”

  Barron was frustrated. “For God’s sake, why not?”

  No response.

  “Vian, I swear I am not leaving this cell until you tell me what you’re hiding.” That was a bluff. Vennius had agreed to let him see Tulus, but only for thirty minutes. And he was running out of time.

  “Just go, Tyler. You have much to do to prepare for what is to come. Your people need you. Forget about me.”

  “You dishonor me, Vian.” Barron countered with an Alliance-type attack.

  “No, my friend. I respect you and all your people. I was wrong before, and I wish you only the best.”

  “Words are easy. But you do not trust me with your secret. You will not tell me who you were contacting or why.”

  “It is a personal matter…” Tulus paused. “I cannot elaborate. It is…it would bring shame on my family.”

  “More shame than you being wrongfully branded a traitor and executed?”

  Tulus shifted uncomfortably. “It is difficult to speak of…”

  “There is no one else here but us, Vian. The Imperator swore to me that nothing we discussed would be recorded.”

  “I was sending a message to…a woman.”

  “A lover? Trapped on Palatia?” Barron hadn’t known what to expect, but this definitely wasn’t it.

  Tulus was silent for a moment. “A lover yes, but more.” He hesitated again. “She is the mother of my children.”

  “You have children? I was told…”

  “As far as anyone knows, I do not. Many years ago, my father bade me to engage in matches he arranged, noble mates worthy of the Tullii. But I was in love with a woman…” He paused again. “A Pleb woman.” He said the words as if admitting a mortal sin. “I refused other matches and saw her in secret. In time, she became pregnant. Then, several years later, we had a second child. I have a secret family, one no one can know of. My father demanded I have children, a new generation to carry on the traditions of the Tullii…and I could never tell him he already had grandchildren.” He paused. “I know it was foolish to contact Palatia, but I was fearful. I had not heard any news of them since the civil war began. I just…had to know that they were alive, that no one had discovered who they were.”

  “So, you had children with a woman of lower rank. It’s not the worst thing anyone has ever done.” Barron still had trouble getting used to Alliance courtship rituals. He wasn’t aware of another human society that had done away with concepts like marriage entirely, replacing them with a slavish devotion to matching bloodlines and genetic profiles.

  “You know many of our ways, Tyler, but not all. You cannot grasp what it is to be a Palatian Patrician of the highest rank. The obligation, the demands. What I did shamed my family. If I had been discovered, my career would have been destroyed. While my father still lived, he would have disowned me, cast me from the Tullii.”

  “So, you kept it a secret. All these years.”

  “Yes. She understands. She has understood all along…and I have been able to filter sufficient assets to ensure her and the children—and the rest of her family—a good life.” Tulus looked down at the floor, taking a deep breath. “You must understand, Tyler. If this became public, there would be repercussions beyond my shame. It is illegal for a Pleb to bear the children of a Patrician. Plebs can be mistresses, of course, but nothing more. She would be arrested, my children taken by the state, sent to a work facility.”

  Barron shook his head. He’d come to admire much about Alliance culture, but this was a reminder of the cost his warrior comrades paid to be what they were. It was terrible, and it repelled his Confederation sensibilities.

  “You will be condemned for treason to avoid exposing them? You will die at the executioner’s hand?”

  “I am a Palatian warrior, Tyler, or at least I was. I do not fear death.”

  “To die in the line of duty, in battle fighting for your people, this I understand. But this way?”

  “There is no choice, my friend.”

  “This is bullshit.” Barron shook his head. “Let me tell Vennius.”

  “No. I forbid it. You would be without honor to betray my confidence.”

  “You Alliance warriors are pigheaded. You cry on and on about the way, yet you never realize that ways change. Always. They must.”

  “No…”

  “Yes,” Barron snapped, cutting his friend off before he’d gotten out more than a word. “What in your ‘way’ explains what is happening now? Was it written in the sacred book of Alliance warriors that you’d fight each other, that thousands of you would believe false propaganda and swear faith to a usurper? That the Alliance you built over sixty years of struggle would face its destruction?”

  Tulus just stared back.

  “You owe me an honor debt…you have said so yourself. Very well, I now claim payment. I would have your permission to tell Vennius. He will pardon you, I am sure of this. I will tell no one else, but you must allow me to explain to the Imperator.”

  “Tyler…” Tulus’s voice drifted into silence.

  “You are at a crossroads, my friend. I ask for your trust with this secret of yours.”

  The two men sat silently for a while, several minutes at least. Finally, Tulus looked up, met Barron’s eyes. “I will trust you, Tyler. I will show you that my words and oaths on the trip back to Sentinel-2 were not empty.”

  Barron was about to respond, but Tulus continued, “But I would ask a promise of you.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “You must promise that you will do everything in your power…everything…to ensure that Attia and my children are not harmed. That you will even take them to the Confederation if you must, if that is what is needed.”

  Barron looked at the Palatian and nodded, slowly, somberly. “You have my word, Vian, sworn with all of my heart. I am certain Vennius will pardon Attia and your children…but even if he does not, on my honor as a Barron, I will see them taken to my family’s estates and cared for as long as they live.”

  “Thank you, my friend.” Then, a few seconds later: “The fates are indeed fickle, that at this stage of life I should meet a foreigner, a man from beyond my culture who has more honor than any Palatian I have stood beside in battle. You are a good man, Tyler Barron, and whatever happens, it has been my privilege to know you.”

  * * *

  “Come in, Tyler.”

  Barron walked into the room, noting immediately that there were no guards, only a pair of children and an old man sitting on a padded bench. “I want to thank you for seeing me.”

  “None of that. All that is ever required for you to gain admittance is to say you need to see me.”

  Barron had been struck from the beginning by Vennius’s lack of pretension. He’d avoided politics and statesmanship as much as possible, but when he’d had to interact with heads of state, or Senators back home, he’d always found them to be power mad, ego-driven…in essence, the very last people he would have chosen to wield political power. But V
ennius was different, and in time, Barron had come to realize the Gray Alliance Imperator had accepted the exalted post over his own deep and profound objections. Vennius was as unlike a typical politician or government administrator as he’d ever seen, and Barron now understood just what it had cost the man to accept the position.

  Though he’d done what he had to do, Vennius had not adopted the pomp and other nonsense so many others in his situation would have embraced. He was constantly banishing his guards from his chambers, and whenever possible, he conducted business in the most informal manner possible. Barron found it refreshing, but he was still getting used to it. Alliance culture was so dominated by ritual and custom, it was strange to see their Imperator so unassuming.

  “Sir, if I may…”

  “There are no other officers present, Tyler. Let us spare the pretense and foolishness. I am Tarkus when it is just the two of us.”

  Barron turned his head, glanced at the children and man sitting on the large sofa.

  “You may speak freely in front of them, Tyler. These are Commander Mellus’s children, Ila and Tia.” He looked over toward them. “Greet Commodore Barron, children. He is a friend and an ally.”

  “Hello, Commodore,” the two girls said, almost in unison. They were young, but they sat rigid and upright, their posture and behavior both beyond reproach, despite the fact that Barron suspected they had just learned of their mother’s death.

  “It is a pleasure,” he replied, not having any idea of the correct form of response to civilians, and children at that.

  “I have just made them my wards. They shall be raised on my estates, as members of the Vennii, and I shall see to their educations and their placements into suitable careers…assuming, that is, that we retake Palatia.” A pause. “It is the least I can do after getting their mother killed, wouldn’t you say?”

  Barron knew the question was not seeking an answer, but he almost gave one. Then he realized nothing he could say would ease Vennius’s guilt over Mellus’s death in trying to reach him. Not to mention the thousands of her crews who died with her.