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 damn 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?”
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 fuck up. If soldiers abandoned their commanders at the first fuck-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. Shit.”
“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 an asshole; 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.
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. 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 damnit do I want to figure out what the Hell is 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.”