The Emperor's Fist Read online

  She remembered years before, standing on the fringes as her father and his generals made their plans. Her childhood had been an odd one certainly, filled with a legion of adoptive uncles who had also been Augustin Lucerne’s trusted officers and retainers. Those days had been filled with tension and danger, and yet, somehow, she looked back on them fondly, as she did the years of her young adulthood, when her rashness and refusal to listen to anyone had put her in harm’s way more than once.

  By any objective measure, things in the Far Stars had never been better. Fully half of the worlds of the sector were members of the new confederation, either voluntarily or by total submission to her arms. Astra wasn’t entirely comfortable with the aggressive actions her unification efforts often required. She was truly dedicated to bringing a better life to the people of the Far Stars, as her father had been . . . but she would have been more comfortable about it if she hadn’t had to force it on so many.

  She had no doubt the others would follow in short order. They’d only become weaker compared to her own rapidly increasing resources. Yes, things were going well on that front.

  But it was a mountain of responsibility laid on her shoulders, and she mourned her father’s death, not just for the absence she felt like a coldness in her heart, but for the fact that it meant she was alone in dealing with this new venture that spanned multiple suns. It rankled, too, that his loss had not come on the battlefield as she might have expected, but at the hands of an imperial assassin. Augustin Lucerne had deserved a better end than being murdered in his quarters.

  And the Far Stars deserved better than her.

  Perhaps it would have been easier—and she less self-doubting—if his death wasn’t the only source of the emptiness she felt. But of course there was also Arkarin Blackhawk. She’d loved him for as long as she could remember. First, perhaps, through childish crushes, as the mysterious warrior appeared from time to time at her father’s headquarters, but later with more substantive emotions. Blackhawk had saved her life, twice at least, and the older she got, the more she’d longed to be with him . . . and the greater her frustration at the adventurer’s refusal to remain in one place for any length of time.

  She understood it all now, of course—Blackhawk’s tragic past, the crimes he’d committed under imperial conditioning, his long flight from what he’d been, what he still carried within him. He’d fought at her side during the wars, and he’d almost lost himself in doing it. She knew he couldn’t stay near the halls of power . . . and as much as she wanted to follow him into obscurity, she owed her father to see his legacy continued.

  To see the Far Stars strong and united.

  I love you, Father, always . . . but you left me such a burden.

  She turned and walked back into the room, moving toward the large antique table she used as a desk. She had an office, of course, in the far wing of the stronghold, but she did much of her real work, at least the parts of it that required somber and reasoned thought, in her quarters.

  A pile of tablets, and even paper envelopes and packages, lay on the corner of the desk, untouched, staring at her with an urgency she resisted. They were proposals and a few overly ambitious marriage contracts, offers from every planetary ruler and princely family in the Far Stars. She’d been courted by youngest sons, ten years her junior and sworn to serve her, and widowed old men, twice her age and more, bringing with them the allegiance of entire worlds, and vast wealth to swell her coffers. They were a selection of the most sought after marriage partners in the Far Stars, every one of them pursuing her with boundless energy and vigor . . . and she wanted nothing to do with any of them.

  Astra loved only one man alive, and though she knew she could never be with him, the very idea of marrying another repulsed her. And yet she knew she would have to do just that one day. She needed an heir, a legitimate child, born to rule the Far Stars when she was gone. If she failed to provide that succession, the sector would almost certainly fall back into disunity and barbarism. Everything her father had worked for, everything she had fought for, would be lost.

  She’d tried to imagine ways around it, told herself she didn’t need an heir, that she could make the Far Stars into a true republic, that elections could replace hereditary succession or rule by conquest. And that was true. Her father’s plan had always been to bring liberty to the Far Stars. But the sector had long been a frontier filled with pirates and petty rulers, of injustices so numerous and profound as to defy description. It would be years before that past could be expurgated, generations before true democracy could come. Until that time, there had to be strength, certainty of succession, and a leader that her father’s soldiers, the grim Celtiborian veterans who were in every way the main strength of her armed forces, would follow.

  And they would follow, to a man, Augustin Lucerne’s grandchild, even as they did his daughter.

  So yes, she would have to marry eventually. She knew it was inevitable, despite her attempts to put the thought out of her mind, to avoid facing the cold reality that the only man she wanted could never be hers. Blackhawk’s military brilliance had won the war that saved the Far Stars from the empire and put Astra herself on a course toward uniting the fractious and feuding worlds. She knew why he couldn’t be with her, and he understood why she couldn’t follow him into quasi exile. She realized he would be the first to understand what she had to do, that the Far Stars needed an heir. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt him. There was a limit to the pain one person could endure, and she struggled to imagine what fraying force held Blackhawk together after all he’d been through, and how he’d react to news of her with another.

  She stared at the pile for another few seconds. Her advisers, the diplomats she casually detested, would press her again in the morning, as they did almost every day, asking if she’d reviewed the proposals. Once again, she would tell them she hadn’t, that military operations and other matters of state had placed too great a strain on her time.

  Or I’ll just order them all shot.

  She was kidding, of course, indulging in the sort of dark humor that so often accompanied a combination of stress and fatigue. Or am I?

  She flopped down hard in her chair and turned her gaze from the stack of would-be suitors. There was other work, enough of it to last a lifetime, and right at the top was Rafaelus DeMark’s weekly summary of operations under way. Her soldiers were conducting combat ops on seven planets, mostly mopping up the remnants of deposed governments. Astra had known the Far Stars suffered from a plague of vile and twisted despots, but the foul and sordid regimes her people had discovered—and destroyed—sickened her. She’d despised the empire as long as she’d had conscious knowledge of its existence, but she couldn’t imagine it was any worse than some of the governments she’d toppled over the past three years.

  A thought crossed her mind: DeMark. If she had to marry someone, why not her father’s most loyal general, a soldier who had stood by her unflinchingly, and without whom she doubted she could have gotten through the last three years?

  Answers flooded into her mind. For one thing, she’d known the officer since she was a child, and she’d always thought of him as more of an informal uncle than anything else. He was significantly older than she was, but of course, Ark was nearly as old, whether he looked it or not.

  More of a concern, though, was that DeMark was already completely in her camp, of course, and such a marriage would do little to cement diplomacy where it would aid her cause. But she could trust him utterly, and that was more than she could say of some random potentate or petty sovereign’s son.

  But he’s Ark’s friend . . . and that would make it even harder. For him.

  And for me, too.

  She sighed and tapped the front of the tablet with DeMark’s report and slid her fingers to the side, moving right to the casualty reports. She hated reading about her soldiers being killed and maimed, but it matched her mood just then.

  Besides, if they could fight and die for her, the lea
st she could do was read the reports that told her what she had traded their lives for.

  It wasn’t like she could sleep anyway.

  Chapter 7

  Blackhawk’s fingers slipped into a crack in the masonry wall, and he hauled himself up another half meter toward the row of windows just above his head. He didn’t know Rajit Durienne’s bedchamber was the one he was heading toward, but he’d long ago learned to trust his instincts.

  The sounds of fighting were everywhere. His people knew how to take care of themselves, but that didn’t mean a random shot from a rookie guard couldn’t take one of them down. He was proud of each of them for their abilities, but they were damned sure outnumbered.

  Which made him worried.

  They can handle it.

  He forced himself to believe that, as he had so many times before.

  Not that he was invulnerable himself, and even though he kept hidden in the shadows as he climbed, one stroke of bad luck was all it would take, a guard looking up, catching a hint of movement in the faint reflected glow from the spotlights. Blackhawk knew time wasn’t on his side, but even with his extraordinary physical attributes, climbing up an almost sheer face of smooth-faced stone was a difficult endeavor.

  He glanced quickly down, a pointless effort to catch a glimpse of his people. All he saw was a pair of guards, racing into the château, another stroke of luck as neither of them looked up toward him. For all his efforts to push down his worry, he found he was now fighting back doubts, and that worried him most of all.

  Because it was his decision that had allowed his crew to become involved in his endeavors. It had been different when they’d been adventurers out to make their fortunes, and even later, when they all had good-size troves of coin stashed around the Far Stars. But they had fought a war since then, and the poorest members of his crew could live like kings. And while he’d been selfishly grateful when they’d all come back to the Claw, he was becoming more and more concerned about putting them all at risk, especially under the pretense of simply amassing more riches when they all had more than they could ever spend.

  So finish this, and get them back to safety. And maybe after we’re done, I can finally let them go.

  Maybe . . .

  He hoisted himself up onto the small ledge, and he looked inside the window. There were bars behind the glass, solid-looking ones, and beyond, a shadowy image of a room plush enough to be Rajit Durienne’s chamber. The gangster hadn’t been anything special, just a midlevel cog in the Kilian brotherhood, itself an unspectacular organization dealing mostly in extortion and loan-sharking. The Kilians had benefited enormously from the job Astra Lucerne’s forces had done in clearing away their larger rivals. They’d been just small enough to escape the heaviest sweeps, but large enough to expand rapidly and fill much of the void. That had allowed local thugs like Durienne to accumulate more wealth and power—and a higher body count—in three years than they’d amassed in decades-long careers before.

  Blackhawk hadn’t come to put Durienne out of his illegal businesses, but he’d shaken down a few of the crime lord’s cronies—using methods uncomfortably close to those he’d learned in the empire—and he’d picked up a disturbing bit of information. The Kilians were planning a major move to dominate the underworld of the Far Stars . . . and job one in that effort was to be the assassination of Astra Lucerne.

  Blackhawk wasn’t sure he believed they could pull it off. Astra was surrounded by fanatically loyal soldiers. But he wasn’t about to take the chance, and that meant taking out the prime mover behind the plan. Rajit Durienne. The gangster and loan shark had to die, before he had the chance to add political assassination to his list of accomplishments.

  Before he had the chance to hurt Astra.

  Blackhawk couldn’t tell if his target was in the room, but he knew just how to deal with the security bars. He reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out a small blob of plastic explosive and affixed it to the window. Then he shoved a small detonator into it, and he shuffled to the side, trying to put enough distance between him and the bomb.

  When he was as far away as he could get, he pressed the small button on the remote hanging from his belt.

  The blast was almost deafening, and the wall shook all around him. His fingers ached, struggling to hang on to his tenuous perch. He swung around, hard, almost immediately, coming perilously close to losing his grip as he vaulted through the shattered window, just scraping his arm on the twisted remnants of one of the bars.

  He landed with a combat roll, and he came up with his rifle in his hands. His eyes darted around the room, checking for Durienne, for guards, for danger.

  The room was empty.

  He ran over to the desk along the far wall and scanned it closely. This was Durienne’s chamber, he was almost sure of it. The richness of the furnishings, the look of the items lying on the workspace. There was a small lamp on the desk, shining a bright, focused light down over a pair of tablets in the center of the workspace. Blackhawk had been pretty sure his raid had taken the target by surprise, but now he was sure. Durienne had been in his quarters working. It was late, very late, and that probably meant those tablets had useful information on them.

  He reached down and scooped them up, slipping them into the bag slung across his back. He’d see what they contained later. He had something more important to do just then.

  He had a man to find.

  And kill.

  Shira crept down the hall, pistol in her hand. She’d tossed away the assault rifle after she’d gone through her last magazine. The firefight at the main entrance had been intense, and she and Sarge had been bogged down behind a pile of crates halfway in the front yard before Ace had turned up and given them enough firepower to clear out the defenders. The whole thing had taken eleven minutes, and while that wasn’t all that long—or anywhere near as extended a time as it had seemed—it was enough to throw the whole operational plan into the latrine. The intel had been light on the op, and that meant they had no real idea how many guards were on the premises, or what help they could call on. Shira didn’t know how tight a grip Durienne had on the local law enforcement, but she’d seen gangsters who’d utterly controlled the police forces in their areas. If Durienne was one of those, she figured they’d be seeing convoys of vehicles coming any minute, maybe even a few airships.

  That would throw everything into the dumper.

  She’d caught a glimpse of Blackhawk climbing up the outside of the château. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but then the captain had always kept things close to the vest, especially when he was sticking his neck out a bit farther than he wanted his crew to emulate. She didn’t know if Blackhawk had intended to scale the exterior all along, or if it had been an opportunity he’d seen once the action had started, but she’d learned long before that the worst thing she could do was to interrupt him. She’d seen Arkarin Blackhawk in the middle of combat before, and it was just about the only thing in her collection of nightmarish memories that truly scared her. She had Blackhawk’s back, always.

  But she also knew when to stay out of his way.

  She spun around the corner, pistol ready, eyes scanning all around. Nothing. There had been a lot of guards in the firefight at the front of the building, but Shira had never had a thought in her life optimistic enough to suggest that she and her comrades had taken out all their adversaries. Things could get better, or they could get worse.

  They usually got worse.

  She walked down the hallway out into a large open area with a staircase. It was large, but not as grand as the main one just inside the front entry. Servants’ stairs.

  She crept up the first few steps, feeling exposed as she continued up. Her main focus was at the top of the stairs, where three hallways opened onto the landing. She could almost sense the guards up there, crouched down, waiting for her to come close to the top before they opened fire.

  She stopped, listening, trying to get any sense of enemies moving around at
the top . . . but there was nothing. Either her imagination was running wild with her, or the guards lying in wait were very cool customers. She took another few steps, stopping again to listen.

  This time she heard something. A loud blast, from the second level. An explosion.

  Her analysis of the risks changed instantly. She’d been worried about guards hiding at the top, but whatever she’d just heard was more important. Her friends might be in trouble.

  If any of them were where that thing went off . . .

  She raced up the stairs, gripping the pistol tightly, ready to drop anything that moved or breathed. But there was nothing. Nothing but the massive explosion echoing in her head.

  Somehow that worried her even more.

  Blackhawk was on his back, lying against the wall. He wasn’t unconscious, but he was stunned. His helmet was gone, and he could feel the wetness on the back of his head, blood from where he’d slammed into the wall.

  Danger, Blackhawk. Pull it together, now. Enemies approaching.

  He could hear the AI, but the words were meaningless. He was struggling to remember where he was, to regain his focus. Then he felt the hands grabbing him, pulling him roughly to his feet.

  “Who are you?” The voice was scratchy, menacing. “Who sent you?”

  Blackhawk didn’t answer, mostly because he was still trying to regain his senses.

  “Encourage him to cooperate.” The threat in the tone was unmistakable, even as Blackhawk still struggled to gain full control of himself. A few seconds later he felt something. He was unsure what it was for a few seconds.

  Then: pain!

  It was a blade of some kind, cutting into his side, slicing into the flesh. He shook himself hard and tried to get away from his tormentors. He sent the man with the knife to the floor, hard, but not as hard as he’d intended. He fell back into the wall, also knocking down the two who’d been holding him in place. But he realized they had already gotten his hands in shackles. He pulled his arms hard, trying to break free, ignoring the pain in his hands and wrists, but the metal was too strong.