Insurrection Page 5

  “Senior.” Lady Xin nodded, in her fine turquoise and green robes and still with her black hair and pale skin that could make her any age from her thirties to late fifties. He greeted her formally, but in reality, he had always been a little scared of Lady Xin. She was inscrutable, and he didn’t like not knowing what his opponents were thinking.

  “What is this all about, Tomas?” Lord Carstan, the largest of the group (aside from Dane himself) said. He was a big man with a ruddy complexion and auburn hair. His worlds were known for the fertility of their soils, and his foodstuffs fed approximately thirty percent of the Imperial Coalition as a whole. Despite his tranquil, Near Space territory, he was also an overbearing, loud sort of a lord—and reminded Dane of his own father.

  And he had the gall to not even address me by my title! Me, who by rights is the most influential person here! Dane thought. “I am sure you of all people know what has happened at the Helion Generator?” He said. Lord Carstan’s world of Haversham was one of the nearest, after all.

  “You’re darn right I do!” Carstan exploded, waving a large, fleshy hand in the air. “My production is down forty percent. Forty! If you don’t get the generator back into Imperial hands…”

  “That is why I am here.” Dane nodded, turning at last to the final two nobles who had deigned to arrive. Lord Aster, almost as old as Selazar, but still with his own legs. He had long white hair and dressed in the old style—a brocade coat and breeches, and even with his military sabre still attached to his belt. Although all of the nobles here represented noble families going back thousands of years, some even founded in the early days of pre-space age Earth Prime, it was Aster and Selazar who were the old guard. The living links to the past, his father had called them.

  Living fossils more like. Dane bowed his head toward Aster.

  “Senior, my house intelligence, Voyager, has informed me that there has been a…disturbance at the Welwyn Habitat. What can you tell us of this?”

  “A disturbance?” Dane thought quickly. He hadn’t paid any attention to the conflict reports for several cycles now. “I really don’t think that this is the time to discuss domestic matters, my lord…” he started to gloss over his ignorance.

  “Welwyn went down,” Lord Aster said dryly. He was too well-bred to display annoyance. “Completely off-line. Reports of an attack by a pirate vessel disabled their gravity-inducer, the Dyson ring.”

  “Well, you will be pleased to know that just a few orbits ago, we took action against the Trader’s Belt,” Dane said. In fact, it had been an action to recover Alpha before the intelligence had escaped, but he had done a good job of advertising it as a ‘police procedure.’ “I am sure that any pirates that decided to attack the Coalition were just desperate individuals.”

  “My house intelligence informed me that it was one of your Armcore cruisers that came to clear up the mess,” Lord Aster said evenly. “Although he didn’t manage to get the identification of the vessel.”

  It was? A flicker of uncertainty across Dane’s face. Usually he would be aware of the movements of an entire war Cruiser—there weren’t that many of them. “Armcore provides not only military solutions, as you all know,” Dane demurred. “We have state of the art rescue and emergency response teams…”

  “Hmm,” Lord Aster said. He was getting at something, Dane thought. But what? It didn’t matter. He was here for a reason.

  “We cannot afford to disregard our domestic responsibilities, Senior,” said the last noble who stood beside Lord Aster: Lady Martin, in a green dress and tired hair that she had attempted to pull back into a bun, but with several strands escaping.

  Ah. The Martins, Dane soured. They had once been a very respectable family, one of the backbones of the Imperial Coalition and strong Armcore supporters, but ever since their son stole his father’s choice racer and went pirate, and then old Lord Martin himself died, it had seemed that all the fight had gone out of them. He didn’t even know why she was here.

  “Lady Martin, my sentiments exactly, but Alpha is a game-changer for all of us,” Dane said, gesturing to the table inside the middle of the platform, around which sat comfortable-looking couches. The rest of the nobles took a seat as he remained standing.

  “Your plan better be good, Tomas,” Lord Carstan said warningly.

  Oh, it is, you insufferable bore, it is! Dane waited as Lord Selazar, with the assistance of a series of complicated motors and servos, managed to slide himself down into one of the seats before he began, by clicking one of the subtle buttons on the sleeve of his encounter suit jacket, which sent a signal to start playing the captured footage, in holographic mode, over the low table.

  This was not the same footage that Captain Farlow had shown him. This was a scene of somewhere very different in space entirely. It was a world. A world of pleasant green and rolling hills.

  One of the lords around the table frowned, then recognized the world quickly. “That’s Haversham! She’s one of mine,” he said, looking up at Dane accusingly.

  “What you are about to see, my lords and ladies, may shock you,” Dane said in the manner of a data-space evangelist.

  The green and rolling hills stretched long, cut by picturesque rivers and large lakes, and tiny hamlets of stylish, metal and stone buildings. Haversham was Near Space at its finest—a retreat for the wealthier merchant and guild trader, and a place to settle down.

  Something happened to the sky. The light flickered as if the camera of this spydrone, or whatever surveillance device this was, malfunctioned. But it hadn’t, not yet, anyway. For a moment, the sky returned to its normal pinkish hues, before it started to grow brighter and brighter, until an incandescent glow appeared over the idyllic world.

  “What is that?” Lord Carstan was saying, his hands dropping the edge of the table and sinking through the hologram as if he could reach across time and space and pull the world out of there.

  “What you are looking at, ladies in gentlemen, has no natural designation,” Dane said. “Our analysts have classified it as some kind of low-orbit neutron weapon.”

  The glare intensified, and then, in perverse anticipation of the destruction that was to come, the group saw the small wavering of the grass over the hills.

  And then, the light started to fade from the sky, as if nothing more serious was about to happen. But everyone sitting on the platform knew better. They watched as the normally pinkish skies had taken on a deep, ugly crimson color, and underneath them, they could see that something strange was happening to the surface of Haversham.

  There was no explosion. There was no detonation of a bomb or a beam of light, instead it appeared as though a mighty gale was roaring over the hills. The trees started to shake, and their branches whipped back and forth. Then they started to discard their leaves, as if autumn had come early.

  Something strange was happening to the hillsides of grass, as well. There appeared to be a stain spreading across them, as the grass started to shake and curl, bending in on themselves as if subject to a fierce heat.

  “What is happening?” Lord Carstan said in shock.

  “As I said, my lord, Armcore has no designation for this type of weapon, and we do not even know how it was delivered, but our scans of what is left of Haversham have indicated that the top layers of atmosphere have suffered a cataclysmic collapse. As if they have been stripped from the world itself.”

  Dane took a breath, to let that message sink in. “Haversham was attacked, and if it wasn’t for what we also know about the situation—that Haversham dispatched its defense fleet to try and assault the Alpha-vessel, in retaliation for its seizing the Helion Generator—we might even presume that this was a natural event. A solar flare, maybe.” Dane let the holographic replay continue for a few moments. The world between them still had gravity, it still had buildings, but every living thing as far as the eye could see was blackened and curled as if a firestorm had passed overhead. They watched as ancient trees fell to the ground, brittle and in splinters. />
  “Alpha retaliated against the world that had dared to attack it, by doing this,” Dane finished, clicking off the image and looking at their shocked faces.

  Lord Carstan was already attempting to stand up, his legs shaking. “When did this happen? I have to go. I have to see what’s left…”

  “Nothing is left, my lord,” Dane said. “Not in the northern hemisphere, anyway, and this attack happened only a matter of hours ago.”

  “But–but I have to…?” Lord Carstan blinked and sat back down. That is probably the best answer. Dane tried not to smile.

  “What do you advise we do, Senior?” Lord Selazar hissed. “Alpha has killed Armcore staff, disrupted Imperial business, and now it appears clear that Alpha has made a direct act of war against the Imperial Coalition. As our de-facto military wing, what do you suggest?” Lord Selazar said in his ageing, wheezing voice, cutting straight to basics in a way that Dane liked to hear.

  “We defend our borders, of course,” Dane said forcefully. “This is only one ship. Alpha might be powerfully advanced, but that is all that it is at the end of the day.” Dane cleared his throat, ready for his prepared speech. “We have to assemble the largest naval taskforce ever seen. Both Armcore and the ships of the noble houses, acting as one, to face this joint threat,” he said proudly, holding a fist in the air.

  “Agreed,” Lady Xin said.

  “I suppose so,” Lady Martin said, and of course Lord Selazar and Lord Carstan were already sold on the idea, eagerly swearing their best fighters and warships—almost all of them Armcore-made, Dane had to realize, a little ironically—to the fight.

  Which left Lord Aster, as all eyes turned to him.

  The white-haired lord looked seriously at the bare table where the destruction of Haversham had so recently played out. “And what is your plan to defeat this Alpha, Senior?” Aster said seriously. “I find myself unwilling to commit my house defenses when I do not even know the battle-plan,”

  Dane saw the old noble’s reticence spread through the others, Lady Martin turning her head to look up at him next, the question plain on her brow. Before their suspicion could spread any further, Dane cleared his throat and sought to quell it.

  “It is a simple plan, my lords, and one that I know my father would approve of. Alpha is a machine intelligence, growing exponentially every hour, every cycle, and every orbit. In just a little while, it may be so developed that our weapons cannot even scratch its armor,” he insisted passionately. “Which is why we must strike now, this is our window of opportunity. An overwhelming tide of force, in several flights, pinning the vessel down and overcoming it. I know that it might sound grandiose—”

  “Reckless, more like,” Aster murmured.

  “But I feel that now is the time for reckless!” Dane finished emphatically. “The longer we wait, the stronger we are making our enemy, and I for one do not want to do that. We will fill whatever quadrant this Alpha-vessel is hiding in with fire and fury. Together.” Dane looked at them, using his best authoritative voice—the same one that had sent Captain Farlow to his doom—to this time try and inspire something within them.

  He looked from face to face. It had worked.

  “You have my sword, and my fleet,” Lord Selazar said.

  “My forces will be at your disposal,” Lady Xin said.

  All that was left was deciding the time and the place, which, luckily, the senior had already figured. Another tap on the hem of his sleeve, and he sent them the prepared packet of information, featuring ship specifications, troop numbers, and departure times.

  “You will find here that my best analysts have already studied your home fleets and have drawn up the most efficient schedule for the offensive. Please study these documents, and respond if there is an issue,” Dane said. Of which there will probably be many, especially from Lord Aster, he sighed. But still, he thought that he had done it. He thought he had convinced them to try something that no one had ever tried before—a marriage of the entire Imperial Coalition forces and Armcore, acting as one.

  With Armcore in charge of the battlefield, of course. Dane had to suppress a smile.

  “And what of your forces, Senior?” Lord Aster said perceptively. “We seem to have had a meeting about our own forces, but very little about what Armcore is doing to meet this threat.”

  That meddling old fool. Dane held his breath for a moment. “We are dispatching over thirty battle groups. Every regiment from five through to one hundred and fifty, all aiming to rendezvous with your forces there at the battle-site.” Dane nodded.

  “Very good.” That seemed to satisfy Lord Aster. Just.

  “Then if you will excuse me, all that is left for me to do is to give my condolences to the Lord Carstan here,” Dane said, “before I must be getting on with the logistics of this plan.”

  The other assembled lords and ladies nodded and even thanked him for his plan and his information. After a few moments of platitudes and shaking hands, Senior Dane Tomas was once again being flanked by his guard and back on the bridge, leaving the platform of shell-shocked delegates behind. He didn’t speak at all until he got to the shadows of the far end of the bridge, where it met the hall and the docking port to his own transport.

  “It is done?” Captain Farlow murmured from the shadows.

  “Yes.” Dane nodded. “They believed every word that I said.”

  5

  The Arena

  “Captain, wake up. Wake up!” Eliard could hear Irie’s voice hissing at him, but he didn’t want to wake up just yet. For one, he had a stinker of a hangover.

  Wait, I wasn’t drinking last night, his brain nudged him. No. He had been flying the Mercury Blade, on the way to the world of Dur, to try and make friends with Val’s father. Only it hadn’t gone very well, had it?

  “Boss! Get up!” This time, his mechanic resorted to pushing and shoving him, sending Eliard into a splutter of pain and curses as he opened his groggy eyes.

  It was thankfully dark, but there was still enough light to see, thanks to the bright floodlights that shone down on them. Eliard’s head rang like a bell, and he remembered the events in the war chief’s audience chamber from last night. But that was clearly where he and the others weren’t now. They were huddled on the dirt and sand of the amphitheater floor, looking at the many stone terraces around them, lined with cheering and jeering Duergar.

  “What the—” Eliard started to stand up, but his head pounded, and he sat back down once again.

  “It was Val’s father. He said that he wanted nothing to do with fighting Alpha, and that we had to pay for our impudence.” Irie quoted with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. She’s acting a lot tougher than she feels, Eliard thought. He had known her long enough to notice the sweat on her brow and the nervous twitch of her eyes.

  “Where’s Val?” Eliard asked. Irie pointed to a few yards away, where the large form of their gunner was currently sitting, hunched over on the sand a little while away. He looked as though he was drugged.

  “What have they done to him?” Eliard tried to stand up, just as the air was split by the harsh bray of a horn.

  “THRALLS! CITIZENS AND WARRIORS!” a hidden speaker announced from somewhere, and the crowd immediately jumped to their feet and started cheering and clapping.

  “TODAY WE TEST THE COURAGE OF NEW ARRIVALS AND OLD FACES TO DURIC!” the voice boomed.

  “But why? What are we accused of?” Eliard said. “Isn’t anyone here going to stand up for us?”

  “I’m not sure you have to be accused of anything,” Irie muttered, turning around to look first one way and then the next. “I get the idea that this is, like, a national sport…”

  “LET THE TESTS BEGIN!” the speaker called out, and in response, the crowd’s bloodthirsty cheers only increased, as on either side of Irie and Eliard, two metal gates swung open and something burst out of each.

  The creatures moved fast, their claws tearing up the sand of the arena floor in moments. Eliard tried to f
ollow them as they darted around. They looked a little like ostriches, only without feathers and instead with scales and powerful, sharp beaks.

  “What are those things?” Eliard gasped.

  “I don’t know, but whatever they are, they mean to kill us!” Irie said as both creatures suddenly darted on their path and sprinted straight toward them.

  “We haven’t got any weapons!” Irie screamed.

  “I do.” Eliard punched out with the Device on his arm, which in turn erupted into a blue-scale canon, firing a plasma fireball at the bird-like lizard coming for him.

  “Scrawk!” The thing was quick, jumping to one side in moments as the energy blast seared over its right shoulder, and hit the far wall of the amphitheater to burst into a pall of black smoke. The crowd of troll-like Duergar roared appreciatively.

  The lizard dove in, leaping on its strong back legs to turn its beak into a javelin at the captain. He tried to jump out of the way, but the thing was fast, goring a line of pain across his left calf.

  “Ach!”

  Irie Hanson, behind him, was faring little better. Her own lizard had not had to contend with any energy weapon and darted forward to stab at its prey as she batted it away ineffectually with her bare hands. The captain heard a shout of rage and pain as her blood was spilled on the sand, too.

  “Get up! They’re circling again.” Irie closed ranks behind him as Eliard struggled to stand on his injured foot. In front of them, the lizards were racing in a wide circle around the pair—seemingly ignoring the unconscious Val Pathok, for the moment—before once again darting toward them.

  “They’re too quick for the gun,” Eliard breathed, concentrating. I need this Device to do something different, I need it to—

  “Scrahk!” Eliard’s creature once again made that leaping, spear-like thrust toward him, and the captain swung the Device around in a wide arc in front of him. It morphed and changed as he concentrated, its Q’Lot architecture adapting to the needs of the moment, an evolutionary process happening in mere microseconds—