Maelstrom Strand Read online

  Where the hell am I?

  The bolt scraped open and Constantine took a step backward, the damp finality of the far wall slapping against his shoulders quicker than he’d expected. Rusty hinges shrieked in protest as the door swung open and the harsh glare of naked, white light flooded in from the hallway, stretching a long, human-shaped shadow in its wake.

  The woman was not tall, nor large, nor imposing, and yet Constantine did not underestimate her for all that. He didn’t recognize her, but he recognized her uniform and the insignia on her left breast pocket and her right sleeve. She was Starkad Intelligence, a full colonel. Behind her, a pair of Supremacy Marines loomed, weapons ready should he become troublesome.

  “I have a feeling,” he said, “that I’m not on Sparta anymore.”

  “Good evening, General Constantine,” the woman said without malice. “I’m Colonel Laurent.” The corner of her mouth quirked up. “You can consider me your counterpart in our government, though of course, without your experience or accomplishments.”

  “I don’t know about that. Getting me here was quite the accomplishment.” His brain was working now, clawing its way out of whatever anesthetized stupor he’d been kept in for the flight to wherever he was. “You wouldn’t have risked this if it hadn’t been part of something bigger. And as big a fool as Martens is, he still wouldn’t have worked with Starkad unless he was sure there’d be no recriminations for him and his family. This is a coup.”

  “It was a coup,” she corrected him, hands clasped in front of her. “Now, it is a regime change, and a fait accompli. Jaimie Brannigan is dead and Rhianna Hale is the new Guardian of Sparta.”

  The wall had been a barrier behind him. Now, it became a support because his legs had no strength. She could be lying, playing an elaborate mind game with him, but it fit with the facts he knew. It meant there would be no negotiations for his release, no rescue mission. He would be here for the rest of his life.

  However long that ended up being.

  “General Constantine,” she went on, not seeming to take any pleasure in the words or in the announcement of the coup, “I have been ordered to use chemical interrogation on you, to strip your psyche bare and mine every piece of valuable information you’ve collected over the last twenty years. Before I am forced to carry out this order, I felt I had to give you the chance to talk voluntarily, because I respect you and the job you’ve done.”

  Interesting. Perhaps I could pretend to play along, buy time… But no, she’s far too intelligent for that.

  “If you respect me, Colonel Laurent,” he said, standing straight, moving away from the wall, “then you already know what I’ll say.”

  She nodded, what seemed like genuine regret passing over her face.

  “I do.”

  She motioned to the Marines and they moved past her, coming into the cell to grab him by the arms and pull him toward the open door.

  “Welcome to Maelstrom Strand, General,” she said, her voice falling behind him as he was marched down the narrow hallway. “I’m afraid it’s your last stop.”

  The ice giant hung in a dull torpor, barely visible in the distant light of the red dwarf at the system’s center. Even in the enhanced optics of the cabin’s holographic viewport, it was grey and featureless, lifeless.

  The perfect backdrop for this meeting.

  Lyta Randell hugged her knees to her chest, curled into a ball on a sofa way too comfortable to be furniture on a starship. Kammy had gotten carried away during the refit, not that she could blame him. He was working on a cost-plus contract from a Dominion government, why not splurge?

  No more contract now. No more government support, no more government. At least not one they’d recognize if they were ever able to go back.

  Logan still looked shell-shocked days later and a dozen light-years away. He was slumped across the conference table of what Kammy had jokingly referred to as the Shakak’s “flag cabin.” The actual sleeping compartment was through another hatchway, and this was more of a VIP reception and planning area, but she thought it made Kammy feel more important.

  Katy sat next to Logan, hands massaging gently at his shoulders, her face still stricken. It seemed to Lyta as if Katy hadn’t been more than a meter away from the man since they’d returned from Sparta, and she wasn’t sure if it was because he needed the support, or she needed the comfort. Not that Lyta blamed her. She could have used the support herself.

  “Shouldn’t we have some sort of ceremony?” Terrin wondered. He had a bottle of water he’d brought with him from the galley when they’d left dinner to reconvene here, but he seemed to be using it more as a stress-relief device than for drinking, squeezing it and twisting it until she wanted to smack it out of his hands. He seemed uncomfortable sitting in on the planning session, or perhaps he was uncomfortable that Franny hadn’t been invited. “I mean, for everyone we lost?”

  “You need to talk to them, too, man,” Kammy said to Logan. Lyta blinked at the grim sobriety of the words. That wasn’t like Kammy at all. “Everyone’s kind of walking around in a haze. They gotta know we have some sort of idea what’s going on.”

  “I do,” Logan admitted. He nodded to Terrin as well. “And we do need a ceremony. But before we can tell the crew what’s going on, we have to figure it out first.” He shook his head slowly, his eyes fixed on something light years beyond the bulkhead of the cabin. “I have no fucking idea what to do next. We have four mecha in the cargo bay, no drop-ships, nowhere safe to go to get more within twenty light-years and I don’t even know if our credit accounts work anymore.”

  “We have a company of Rangers,” Lyta added, then winced and corrected herself. “Most of a company of Rangers. We might be able to steal what we need.”

  “Maybe,” Logan admitted. “But what are we going to do with it if we get it?”

  “What about the other fleets?” Terrin wanted to know. “Lyta said something about how Starkad made Dad deploy them away from Sparta so Hale could pull off the coup. Couldn’t we go hook up with them and get them to back us?”

  Logan met her eyes with an expression of guilt, and she shared the feeling.

  “There’s something we haven’t told the crew,” Lyta said. “Another message Hale sent out broadband back home and probably to every Spartan-held system, too.” She shrugged. “It’s mostly rah-rah bullshit about how we’re just one big, happy Dominion no matter who the Guardian is, and how it’s their duty to support whoever the Council chooses as Guardian, blah, blah, blah.”

  “But at the end of it,” Logan interjected, “she pretty much warns all the Navy forces deployed at the lines that they left their families back home and she knows where they live. She invites anyone who can’t bring themselves to do their duty to Sparta to resign immediately with no recriminations.”

  “But they won’t do that, will they?” Terrin asked, face screwed up in an expression of disbelief. “They wouldn’t just abandon Dad like that!”

  “Dad’s dead,” Logan reminded him quietly, pain still tugging at the corners of his eyes as he said the words. “But no, you’re right, not all of them would abandon his memory like that. But enough will. Enough we can’t take the chance of trusting them, of putting everything we have left in their hands.”

  “Maybe once we figure things out,” Katy suggested, her voice rough and hoarse, as if she hadn’t been sleeping. “Maybe if we can get a good base of operations and a network of some kind, we can get ahold of them, try to pull them in.”

  “Pull them into what, though?” Kammy asked. He was staring at Logan, not in anger but as if he kept expecting him to say something to make sense of it all. “What’s the goal here, boss?”

  Lyta frowned at the big man.

  “What do you mean? We have to take down Hale. She’s nothing but a Starkad puppet. If she stays in power, we’re handing over our government, our homes to our enemy.”

  “That’s part of it,” Kammy admitted. “But people ain’t gonna risk their lives and their
families without a clear goal.”

  The ship’s captain pulled a chair out from the conference table and sat down opposite Logan. It still struck her as odd, having normal planet-side furniture in a starship, but this ship didn’t maneuver with reaction engines, which meant no worries about sudden acceleration. The only thing that would shake them up was if something big hit them, and at that point, they’d have more to worry about than loose furniture in the cabins.

  “Boss,” Kammy went on, “the crew of the Shakak, the ones who were here with Captain Osceola, do you know why we all stayed on after he was gone?”

  “They’re your people,” Logan attempted. “They knew you’d have been his choice…”

  “And the money’s good,” Kammy allowed, waving them both away. “That wouldn’t be enough. Not when we’re risking our life every time we go out. There’re no milk runs with Wholesale Slaughter. No, man, we all stay on because we believe in what we’re doing, because we believe in your mission. We believe in you, because you’ve put your ass on the line right beside us. If you want to take down this bitch Hale and save your home and all that shit, you’d better be laying yourself out there as the one to lead the charge and be the one who’s going to take your dad’s place.”

  Logan rubbed at his eyes, unwilling to meet Kammy’s. “I don’t know I’m ready to do that right now. It feels like there’s a million years between where we are now and even the idea of me taking Dad’s place. I think right now, we need to concentrate on finding somewhere to hang our head, getting some support.” He looked over to Lyta. “What about Clan Modi? They sure as hell have the most to lose if Starkad doesn’t have to worry about Sparta anymore. The Supremacy will roll right through them the first chance they get.”

  “That’s the problem,” Lyta said, shrugging. “Starkad will roll right through them, and take us with them. There’s no point in trying to get help from someone unless they can actually help. If we set up on a Modi world, the odds are we’ll be pulling up stakes and running within months.”

  She unfolded from the couch and stood, touching a control on the table and bringing up a holographic map of the Dominions. Sparta and Starkad were the largest, but next to them, outlined in red was… “The Shang Concord,” she declared. “They’ve been rivals of Starkad for centuries, economically, militarily…they might be very interested to learn how involved Starkad was in the coup and what it might do to the balance of power.”

  “Why not the Imperium then?” Katy asked her. “Mbeki isn’t any fonder of Starkad than Shang, and they’re even stronger.”

  “Mbeki’s had an official truce in place with Starkad since the end of the last Border War. They’re not going to break it without some sort of unprovoked aggression against them.”

  “I don’t like it,” Kammy said, mouth twisting as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Cap’n Osceola and me dealt with those Shang bastards more than once and I’ll be damned if they didn’t try to swindle us every time. I wouldn’t trust them to give me a straight answer if I asked them for the speed of light in a vacuum.”

  “General Constantine never cared much for them, either,” Lyta admitted. “But it’s them or nothing.” She ran a hand through her hair. It was greasy and knotted; she needed a shower. “At least, there’s nothing else I can think of.”

  Logan nodded slowly.

  “We’ll contact them,” he decided. “The worst they can do is say no.”

  “Shit,” Kammy said, snorting in disdain. “You wish that’s the worst they could do.”

  8

  Nicolai Constantine’s breath was a deafening rasp in his own ears, drowning out the echoing tap-tap-tap of his boot soles on the marble floor of the great hall at Laconia. The carbine seemed at once impossibly heavy in his hands, weighted down with the judgement of God, and yet pitifully light and inadequate to the task at hand.

  He needed grenades, armored vehicles, mortars, missile launchers and a host of other equipment he wasn’t going to get. The insurrectionists had made sure of that when they’d seized the North-side Armory and destroyed the others. The smoke from the demo charges still rose into the darkening sky, an obscene tombstone hanging over the men and women killed in the blast. So many had died…and so many more would.

  Constantine ducked into a nook in the wall, kicking a stand with a potted plant out into the middle of the concourse to make room for him to shelter. He’d taken cover by instinct, by the internal clock telling him he’d been out in the open for too long, and it proved itself right yet again. A stream of fully automatic fire hammered into the wall only centimeters from his head, shattering ceramic tile into grenade fragments, peppering his left cheek with half a dozen stinging wounds.

  “Action front!” he yelled back to the Rangers following him, leaning out and throwing the carbine up to his shoulder.

  The shooters were thirty meters down the corridor, streaming out of a T-junction, a full squad of troops in the grey-camouflage armor and full-face helmets of the Home Guard. None of his Rangers had joined the Insurrectionist forces, thanks be to Mithra; it wasn’t too difficult to figure out who to shoot. He put a three-round burst into the lead trooper, catching the man in the mirrored visor of his helmet and shattering it and the skull beneath in a spray of red. He collapsed forward, tumbling as he hit, leaving a trail of blood across the marble floor, and the next trooper spun down just behind him, catching a shot to center mass from one of the Rangers following Constantine.

  There were two ways to handle that sort of kick in the teeth. His Rangers would have assaulted through it, taken out the opposition and then gone back to see to their wounded, but these weren’t Rangers. Home Guard soldiers were well equipped, but there was a reason Sparta went to war with its Mobile Armored Corps and Rangers and left the Home Guard at home. What was left of the squad scrambled backwards towards the cover of the intersecting hallway, one of them, to his credit, grabbing the wounded trooper and dragging him with them.

  “Move!” Constantine yelled to his platoon, waving them forward.

  He was a captain, he shouldn’t have been leading from the front, and he knew it. But this wasn’t an ordinary battle and he didn’t want to take the chance of an enlisted man hesitating because he thought he saw a friendly officer where he should have seen an Insurrectionist.

  And frankly, he was pissed and wanted to shoot some traitors. The Guardian had been assassinated by his own security forces and the only thing standing between Duncan Lambert and the throne of Sparta was Jaimie Brannigan and the men and women loyal to him. And he was betting one of those men was Alexander Drew, the Adjutant General of the military base at Laconia. He’d received the distress call from Drew’s private line fifteen minutes ago, saying he was trapped in his office by Insurrectionists and he didn’t know who to trust beside Constantine.

  Drew had too much sensitive intelligence in his head and his personal files to let the traitors get their hands on him…and the man had been a friend of Constantine’s father back when they’d attended the Academy together. He was a military officer and personal feelings shouldn’t have mattered, but they did. It was a fortunate turn of fate his feelings and his duty happened to align this time.

  Constantine jogged up to the T-junction and put his back against the left-hand wall, edging forward until he could take a quick glance around the corner. If he’d had time to equip himself with full combat gear, he could have just angled his rifle around the corner and scanned the other side with his combat optics, avoiding the possibility of getting his head blown off.

  And if “if’s and but’s” were fruits and nuts…

  He was lucky he had the carbine and a tactical vest full of loaded magazines—some of his Rangers hadn’t even had that much and had been forced to scrounge what they could off enemy casualties.

  No gunshots met his lightning-quick glance, and he hadn’t seen any startled enemy troops either. He took a knee and ducked around again, longer this time. The corridor was empty except for a couple of blood t
rails. They’d retreated.

  Up and moving again, coughing. There was a thin haze of smoke in the concourse, from what he didn’t know. The fire suppression systems should have put out anything the rebels had started.

  I don’t remember the smoke.

  He nearly stopped in his tracks at the oddness of the thought, but he forced himself to shake it off and keep running. He didn’t have time to stand around trying to figure out the mysteries of life. There was a mission to accomplish.

  What mission? Was I even at Laconia that night?

  He snarled at the voice; it wouldn’t get out of his head. He couldn’t afford distractions.

  There. There was the office, the outer doors sealed, their wooden façade chewed away by gunfire and explosives, revealing the thick metal beneath. He found the intercom and punched the button, hoping the gunfire hadn’t damaged it.

  “It’s Captain Constantine,” he said. “Are you still there, sir?”

  “Nicolai,” General Drew’s voice answered, incredibly clear for such a battered intercom speaker. “I am unlocking the doors. Come in, but only you. I do not trust anyone else.”

  Constantine waved at his platoon to stay back. He frowned. It was strange, the smoke had grown thicker. He couldn’t make out more than their silhouettes against the ruined, cracked walls of the concourse. He wasn’t coughing anymore, though. The smoke was more like a fog, a vapor…

  The door locked clicked as it released.

  “Come in. Quickly.”

  He didn’t remember the door opening, but suddenly, he was inside. The interior office seemed untouched, just as he remembered it, almost as if all hell wasn’t breaking loose outside. The hand-carved bust of the first Emperor, Hellenus. The bookshelves an anachronistic touch General Drew insisted on keeping around. Constantine had always wondered how many of the physical, paper books the man had read but he’d never had the nerve to ask.