Judas Kiss Read online

  JUDAS KISS

  ©2019 RICK PARTLOW

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2019

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  1

  Colonel Gareth McKenzie ran.

  The chill of the early morning air gripped his lungs in a vise, and his legs were lead weights in Chronus’ heavier-than-standard gravity. Mud sucked at the bottom centimeter of his boot soles and yet he ran even faster. He dared a glance away from the slick, mud-covered path, looking at the grey dawn. It promised rain and things much less pleasant. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were coming. His sidearm slapped at his hip with each step, a reminder.

  The door to the hangar hung open, inviting him in out of the damp and cold, yet he hesitated when he reached it, his hand going to the butt of his service pistol. Despite the chill, sweat gathered at the small of his back and he looked for support but no one else was outside the walls. McKenzie tried to bring his breathing and his fear back under control, but calm brought with it an inescapable fatalism. He ducked through the door, half-expecting a bullet to greet him.

  Instead, there was silence and cold stares. The men and women were his subordinates, some of them his friends. He’d fought beside them against bandit trash, pirate raiders, and Starkad incursions into Spartan territory when the cold war heated up. Their mecha stood ready in maintenance harnesses up against the far wall of the massive hangar, metal sentinels on guard against any threat to the Guardianship of Sparta, or to the weapons depot here on Chronus near the Starkad border.

  The alert tone was still sounding, a muted yet insistent hooting in the background, but the pilots and the maintenance workers weren’t at their stations, weren’t prepping their mecha for battle. Instead, they waited near the door…for him.

  “Comms are out all over the base,” he said, as if that explained everything. “We’re being jammed, but the land-lines…”

  “They’ve been cut.” Captain Flynn Andersen’s words weren’t a question. His face was a rough-hewn block of wood at the best of times, and the stubborn set to his jaw only reinforced the image.

  “Look, you know what those alarms are for, right?” McKenzie shook his head, trying not to plead with them. “You know who’s coming…”

  The sonic booms shook the walls of the hangar, sending a light cloud of dust from the ceiling, sparkling in the overhead lights as it fell. Two, only a half-second apart, then two more, slower, wider spread. Assault shuttles flying cover for a pair of drop-ships. The roar of fusion-powered atmospheric jets echoed like distant thunder across the prairie turned to mud by the rainy season.

  “It’s Wholesale Slaughter,” Andersen answered the question, watching the front hangar doors as if he could see through them to the giant lifting-body drop-ships roaring their defiance of gravity to the universe.

  “They’ll be dropping now. You have to get in your mecha and get out there.” McKenzie pulled his sidearm but didn’t raise it, keeping it low by his leg. “I don’t want to have to do this.” Now he was pleading, not just for their lives but for his conscience.

  “Sir,” Andersen said, bracing to parade rest, apparently elected the spokesman for the others, “we mean you no disrespect, and we won’t resist you if you place us all under arrest.” His mouth flattened into a firm line. “But we’re not going to fight him.”

  “It’s not right, sir!” Lt. Kellerman blurted out, apparently forgetting Andersen was supposed to do the talking. The young man’s face reddened and he went to attention, staring straight ahead, unwilling to meet McKenzie’s eyes.

  The rest of the ready company did the same, all thirty of them, lined up in double ranks along the entry hallway to the mech bays. Not a single dissenter.

  Well, Major Carstairs isn’t here. None of the battalion staff were, and while there still might be some loyalists among them, they weren’t willing to stick their heads out of the bunkers dug beneath the base headquarters and fight for Rhianna Hale.

  Though that did leave…

  “What in the living hell is going on here?”

  The roar of the jets had concealed the man’s entrance, but nothing could drown out the braying arrogance of his voice. Major Harris looked intimidating in black Ranger armor, but the man was no more a Ranger than McKenzie was a starship engineer. All the real Rangers who weren’t rotting in prison cells had gone over to the other side. What Rhianna Hale had replaced them with was more a corps of secret police than a special operations unit. And every base got its own commissar.

  “Why aren’t all of you in your mecha?” Harris demanded. His service pistol was already drawn and he waved it around recklessly, like a laser pointer. “That’s the enemy out there, traitors to Sparta, and you’ve all taken oaths to serve and protect the Guardianship!”

  “Where’s the rest of your troops, Major?” McKenzie wondered. Harris’ squad of fanatics was the only thing that had kept someone from punching the man in the face at least a dozen times in the three months he’d been assigned to Chronus.

  “They’re taking positions to best defend this base,” Harris told him. “Just as the rest of you should be doing. Any man or woman who isn’t in their mech in the next ten seconds is going to be arrested, tried and executed for dereliction of duty and cowardice.” He raised the pistol, pointing it directly at McKenzie. “Starting with you, Colonel.”

  Andersen made a lunge toward Harris, but he was a step too far away. The Ranger officer swung his pistol around toward the mech company commander, firing before he’d even lined the weapon up. Three shots merged into an echoing roll and Flynn Andersen collapsed, fingers grazing off Harris’s arm as he fell, life draining out of him in gouts of red.

  McKenzie’s own shots were muffled and distant over the ringing in his ears. He’d fired without thought, without intent, as if he’d stepped back and watched someone else raise the gun, some other man pull the trigger. Harris had been wearing armor and McKenzie had aimed for the head. What was left of the Ranger officer slumped to the floor not too far from Flynn Andersen, their blood mingling in the dust.

  As if released from some spell, the others surged forward and someone tu
rned Andersen over. McKenzie took a step toward the man, but stopped, teeth clenched in anger and futility. The company commander was very clearly dead, eyes frozen open, mouth in a rictus.

  “Mithra’s balls,” McKenzie swore, staring down at the man.

  Lt. Kellerman was cradling Andersen’s head, sobbing, while the rest of the company looked on in shock and disbelief. Flynn Andersen had a family. McKenzie remembered seeing their pictures in the man’s bunk room, playing across an active frame on the wall. His wife was a shipping coordinator for Trans-Dominion Transport, and lived on Nike with their two children, a boy and a girl.

  And how the hell am I going to tell them about this? How do I write that letter?

  The ground shook with the steps of titans and McKenzie reflected he might not have to worry about it, after all. He shoved his handgun back into its holster and stepped over to the control for the hangar doors. He hesitated, his hand hovering above the oversized red button, wondering if he were committing treason. He shot a glance at Harris and reflected that ship had sailed. He slapped the control.

  The motors were old and the door rollers needed new bearings from exposure to the constant rain, mud, and grit. The aluminum door shook, rattled, and squealed in counterpoint to the grinding of the rollers and the grumbling of the motors. The grey light of dawn penetrated the dim glow of the overhead panels and threw long shadows behind the towering mecha.

  Standing only thirty meters away from the door was a Vindicator assault mech, sleek and graceful, a humanoid shape ten meters tall, its forty tons sinking oval footpads centimeters deep in the mud. Steam wisped off hot metal, and the very edges of the mech seemed to shimmer with heat mirages, but the lines of the Wholesale Slaughter crest were crisp and clear on the chest plastrons. McKenzie stared down the emitter of the mech’s plasma gun, its superconducting electromagnets an inverted nautilus shell held like an absurdly outsized pistol in the machine’s right hand. It seemed to be pointed directly at him.

  McKenzie was so absorbed by the Vindicator—and by who he knew piloted the thing— that it took him another few seconds to notice the dozen other mecha lumbering through the fog to either side of it, Golems and Agamemnons, Scorpions and Sentinels, all emblazoned with the same Wholesale Slaughter logo. It had begun as a mercenary company, he knew, but now it was so much more, the face of the rebellion, the symbol of the Brannigans.

  Gradually, he realized the others were lined up beside him in the door, watching.

  Watching the mecha or watching me?

  The canopy of the Vindicator popped open, swinging upward on its hydraulic pistons. The man inside was tall but not imposingly so, broad-shouldered but not massive, handsome but not strikingly. He was an average-looking soldier except for the long, blond hair peeking out beneath his neural helmet. When he pulled the helmet off and shook the hair loose, it fell just past his neck.

  “Holy shit, it’s him.”

  McKenzie wasn’t sure who’d said it, but the words were almost reverent. He could understand it. Apart from the actual participants, no one had been too happy about Rhianna Hale’s coup or the assassination of the old Guardian, Jaimie Brannigan. But these things happened. It was the second coup and the second regicide in the last twenty years, after all. What had made this time different was Logan Brannigan.

  Logan stood up in the cockpit, leaning out to peer at them with a calm, level gaze.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he called down.

  McKenzie cleared his throat and took a step forward, past the open doors.

  “I’m Colonel Gareth McKenzie,” he said, carefully keeping his hand away from his sidearm. “Commander of this base.”

  Whatever Logan Brannigan had been about to say in reply was lost in a stuttering volley of automatic weapons fire and a flashing, sparking series of ricochets off the side of the Vindicator’s chest plastron. McKenzie fell into a crouch from instinct, and all around him, the other mech pilots threw themselves flat, hands covering their heads. They were all armor troopers, not infantry, and McKenzie didn’t even think to draw his gun. But he was watching, eyes still upward.

  Logan didn’t seem panicked, didn’t seem fazed. He simply stepped back into his cockpit and twisted a control. The coaxial machine guns mounted at the edges of the Vindicator’s chest swiveled downward and spat out a blistering fusillade of 6mm slugs off to the right of the hangar entrance. After the long burst, there was another shorter one, then a third before the machine guns fell silent.

  McKenzie didn’t rise from his crouch, expecting the other mecha to open fire on his troops in the hangar, but only the echoes of the machine guns broke the silence…and somewhere, the last, fading moan of a dying man. One of Harris’ Rangers, no doubt, trying to go out a hero.

  “We surrender!” McKenzie yelled, coming to his feet, waving his hands over his head. “Don’t shoot, we surrender!”

  Logan Brannigan, son of the murdered Guardian of Sparta, leader of the resistance, commander of Wholesale Slaughter, swung back out of his cockpit. His face was impassive, as if he hadn’t nearly died, as if he hadn’t just gunned down a squad’s worth of infantry. It was the face of a hero, a legend…or perhaps a madman.

  Could be all three.

  “Put your hands down, Colonel,” Logan snapped. “I don’t accept your surrender.”

  A sinking feeling in McKenzie’s stomach told him it was all three. He slowly lowered his arms, shaking his head without comprehension.

  “What? Why not?”

  “If you’re loyal to Hale, fight us,” Logan Brannigan urged him. “If you’re loyal to Sparta…” A smile slowly spread across the man’s face. “…then join us.”

  He clambered down the maintenance steps built into the side of his mech’s torso and legs, agile as a monkey, boots squelching loudly in the mud. He moved with the lithe grace of a martial artist and the self-assurance of a man who knew his place in the universe and had made peace with it. He stopped a meter from McKenzie and stripped his gloves off, offering the colonel his right hand.

  “Join us and help me take back our world…all our worlds.”

  McKenzie eyed the hand for just a moment. Maybe the man was crazy. And maybe he was, too.

  “Lord Guardian,” McKenzie said nodding his head as he shook Logan’s hand. “You’ve got yourself a mech company.”

  2

  A crystal decanter dating back to the Empire shattered against the brick of the fireplace in a dark spray of red wine and shards of glass, each splinter catching a glint of firelight on its arcing descent to the stone floor.

  Colonel Eric Vogt very deliberately did not flinch away from the explosion of glass and liquid, just regarded the whole scene with cool equanimity, hands clasped behind his back.

  “Damn it!” Rhianna Hale roared, hands clenching into fists. She was attractive in a cold, harsh sort of way, but now her face was stretched into a mask of rage and she reminded Vogt of the ancient myths of the Furies. “That Goddamned traitorous piece of shit!”

  “I am tempted toward commentary on the nature of irony,” Vogt said, lip twisting in a wry smile, “but given your mood, I shall refrain.”

  Hale scowled at him, not a hint of appreciation for his humor in her florid expression.

  “As I recall,” she said, “you were one of the advisors who swore to me that the troops in the field would stay loyal to Sparta no matter who the Guardian was.”

  “And they probably would have,” he argued, “if we hadn’t left the heir alive and in charge of a military force personally loyal to him, and with the only stardrive-equipped warship in all the Dominions.”

  He wouldn’t have thought it possible to scowl any deeper than she had been, yet somehow, she managed it.

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t have done any of that if my chief intelligence officer had been able to provide me with any…oh, I don’t know, intelligence!”

  “Nicolai Constantine wasn’t exactly in a sharing mood,” Vogt reminded her. “He and Jaimie Brannigan were doing thei
r best to keep the Wholesale Slaughter operation compartmentalized, and I, a major whose family had ties to Duncan Lambert and his allies, was definitely not included in that compartment.” He sniffed in disdain. “Starkad knew. I think the bigger question is why they chose not to share the information with you.”

  “And I suppose this would be a grand opportunity to ask them.” Hale said. She sucked in a breath, visibly controlling herself, straightening her uniform jacket. “If I wasn’t being forced to grovel in front of them and beg for help I shouldn’t need.”

  “She’s been waiting in your office for ten minutes,” Vogt reminded her. “Do you want me to bring her in here?” He gestured around them at the private study. “Because I can have one of the servants in to clean up the wine…”

  “No.” She cut him off with a slash of her hand in the air. “Let’s go.”

  Vogt shrugged, opening the door then following her out of the dim glow of the fire and into the glaring light of the hallway. It was narrow and private, unused by anyone except Hale, her staff and the servants, and it nearly drove Vogt to claustrophobia. He was broad across the shoulders and he barely cleared the walls by a centimeter on either side.

  The private door to the office was even worse, crammed into a corner and Vogt was forced to exhale the air from his chest and angle through it.

  How the hell did Jaimie Brannigan ever make it through here? The Guardian had been nearly as big a man as Vogt and it was hard to imagine him squeezing through the tiny door.

  He sucked in a relieved breath and shut the door behind him. The inner office had been sparsely decorated under Brannigan and Hale hadn’t added much aside from a portrait of her uncle, Duncan Lambert, who’d died in the abortive coup attempt twenty-some years ago. Hale gave a nod to the painting before she fell into her chair and pushed the intercom button to her secretary in the outer office.