Challenge met, p.12
Challenge Met, page 12
What had been a personal quest for truth and friendship now became something more, a responsibility he was not sure he could shoulder, but knew he had to try.
The care unit door opened and a nurse came through, looking for Jack. He saw Amber drop back fluidly, one hand going to her opposite wrist, as she took up a lethal stance just behind the nurse’s shoulder. He had only a split second to wonder what she was doing when the frowning nurse spoke.
“Are you Commander Storm?”
“Yes.”
“Good. He’s conscious though not entirely lucid, but he refuses to rest until he’s spoken with you.” The technician hesitated. “Understand that the hemorrhaging has had strokelike aftereffects. He’s difficult to understand and he’s very weak.”
Amber had relaxed her stance. “But he is alive,” she asked softly.
“Oh, yes. Very much so.” The nurse blocked Amber as she started to follow after Jack. “I’m sorry. Just the commander right now. He’s too weak to have visitors.”
Amber made a wry face at Jack and let him pass.
The emperor looked like a crumpled up version of himself, the crèche and tubing obscuring all of his body except for his face and hair. When Jack bent near to speak to the man, he noticed for the first time streaks of gray among the fiery red, and that the electricity had gone, leaving the fine strands limp upon the pillow bracing his head. His face had gone slack, and the left side was drawn and twisted, letting drool escape from the corner of his mouth. Jack leaned close, feeling mixed emotions, as he came to the fallen emperor’s side.
Pepys’ eyes flew open. He stared for a moment, unseeing, then focused on Jack. “Storm,” he said, and his mouth and tongue seemed incapable of speaking. Then, with visible effort, he repeated Jack’s name.
“Yes.”
“What is happening. They won’t tell me.” Each word took a lifetime. Each breath was a pant.
Jack put his hand on Pepys’ shoulder to calm him. “The Thraks have pulled in.”
“Shit.” The emperor closed his eyes briefly. He seemed to drift, then he opened them and looked back at Jack. “You must remember who you are. Take command from K’rok. Use the Knights. Fight your way out. Fight the Thraks and find Colin.” Spent, the man lapsed into pants. Jack waited until his breathing eased.
He smiled briefly. “Is that an order?”
“It… is.”
“I owe you no allegiance, highness. I swore my oath elsewhere. But I will find Colin and then we’ll come to terms with who is to sit the Triad Throne.”
Pepys’ eyes widened, then he nodded wearily, and gave a shuffling laugh. “I… should have known,” he said.
“You should have.” Jack straightened. “And you never had to order me to fight Thraks.”
Amber was not waiting for him when he left the care unit. The halls of the palace had been cleared of the insurgents, but the obsidite walls showed the scarring of the battle as he made his way past them. Rawlins was waiting for him at the barracks.
He saluted him. “Captain. Emperor Pepys has reinstated me and given me orders that nothing, repeat, nothing is to stand in the way of completing our mission.”
The fair-haired officer snapped off a return salute. “I’m waiting for orders, sir.”
***
Amber found Vandover in the war room, surrounded by a com net not unlike the sophisticated one Pepys used. Nervously, she combed her hair away from the side of her face as she waited for his attention.
Finally, Vandover swung about in his chair to glare at her. “You failed,” he said flatly.
She had not known who her target had been until he’d said that final word from the dais, speaking an edict of death. But she could no more have halted her execution of the act than stopped breathing. Jack had thrown her off when he’d ordered her to get out of harm’s way, but by then she was certain the damage had been done to Pepys as she’d seen him collapse in Jack’s arms. She gave Baadluster a humorless laugh. “I did my best.”
“That I doubt. But the fact remains that it may be good enough. He is incapacitated. I sit where I wish to sit. And no one is the wiser that it was not a natural occurrence.”
Amber did not counter him. She’d overheard the technicians talking while Jack was in with Pepys. The aneurysm had not shown on the emperor’s scans during his annual physical and there was some suspicion. But nothing could be proved. She kept her silence.
Vandover gestured. “Jack is giving orders. I’m anticipating that the search for St. Colin will still be launched. You, my dear, are among the volunteers. Hadn’t you better ready yourself?”
Her nerve broke and she quailed inwardly. She could feel her skin go pale. “Don’t make me go with him.”
Vandover’s lips tightened. “Milady, you promised him. And me.”
The minister would trigger her against Jack. She knew it. She shut her eyes tightly. “I’ll do anything,” she said. The words stuck in her throat. Vandover made no response and she wondered if he had heard, so she repeated herself. “Anything. But don’t make me go with Jack.”
The lank and ugly man threw his head back to laugh. When he finished, he smiled coldly at her. “Amber, you keep underestimating yourself. You have a great deal of work yet to do for me. I need Jack alive and you’re the best way I have of keeping him safe. Now go get ready.”
Almost out of reach of the man, she turned to flee. He caught her wrist at the last second and pulled her roughly to him. The wires and cables of the com net twisted about her, biting at her bare arms.
“And you should remember that I enjoy what I take much more than what I am given,” he told her as he felt himself growing hard.
She tried not to struggle, but could not help it as he began to punish her flesh for her disobedience.
Chapter 21
And those are the options as I see it,” Jack said quietly to the people assembled before him. The barracks fell silent. He put a hand to his forehead and wiped the sweat off. The Malthen season was blazingly hot. The air conditioners were failing, as warfare affected all of the utility services where guerrilla action took its toll. The central wings of the palace had backup solars and generators, of course, but the barracks lay on the outer grounds. He had recircuited some of his available power to create white noise barriers and sound buffers to override the emperor’s security equipment. Even as he wiped his hand on his trousers to dry it, the machinery sputtered and the lukewarm air circulating shut off.
“Jeez-a-mighty,” Lassaday said, getting to his feet. “I’m going to have’t‘kick a door open, Commander.”
“Not just yet, Sergeant,” Jack told him. His mind wavered. Was he going to lose it again, just when he needed to be most steady? He could still achieve what he had to, but this one step forward, two steps backward progress would hinder dangerously what he had to attend to now. “Are we agreed on this? There’ll be no coming back if we don’t succeed in what we set out to do.” He did not need to add that there might be nothing to come back to. If the Thraks broke the backs of the remaining Knights and Pepys’ troops, Malthen might well become sand. If not, the resultant destruction would bring the world shields down, leaving them vulnerable to the Ash-Farel.
“What about Pepys?” Rawlins said, a glint deep in his blue eyes.
“Stabilized. Baadluster has taken over for him. There’s no knowing which way the wind lies with that one yet.” Jack felt sweat trickling through his scalp and down the back of his neck. The room was becoming stifling.
Lassaday leaned against the wall. “We’re agreed, sir.”
“Whatever it takes,” Rawlins seconded.
Jack took a deep breath. He did not like pitting Walker against Walker, but it was the only way he could gain access to the port berths. The militant faction remained firmly entrenched. Only their brethren could safely approach though it was unlikely they could talk their brothers in arms into relinquishing the port. But he didn’t need that. All he needed was a shield to get them that far.
From there, he had his own methods of persuasion. There was only one Walker he knew who could face a battle suit, and he was daring Jack to come get him… off-planet.
“All right, then. Sarge, get some air in here.”
Lassaday, his bronzed pate gleaming with sweat, keyed the door open. It began to slide, then ground to a halt with a dull whine. A huge, shaggy booted leg kicked it off its tracks.
K’rok leaned in. He grinned hugely. “I be left out of the meeting, eh, Jack?” A detail of Thraks filled the background behind him.
K’rok had gotten cool air piped in. He sat, massively conquering one of Jack’s chairs, clad in Enduro bracers and a modified jumpsuit for modesty’s sake, his hair and bulk armoring him effectively. The musky and rancid oil smell of him filled Jack’s quarters.
“Finding Colin be one of the critical factors of our fate, Jack,” the Milot said solemnly. “We cannot turn away from it. I am being here because of my masters—and also because I want to be.” He leaned across the table separating the two of them. “Milos is losing sand.”
“What?”
K’rok leaned back cagily. “I will not say it a second time. You be hearing me, my friend.”
“It’s failing?”
“Yes. My homeland is too tough to be defeated. I am too tough to be defeated.”
Jack sat back in his chair eyeing his fellow commander. He knew that K’rok was only the most visible of a small community of Milots who had survived the desecration of their homeworld. He also knew that K’rok had grown sons and daughters—and dreams of someday going back. Now that someday was a concrete possibility. If sand failed, the Thraks would leave. Milos could be terraformed. K’rok might never live to see the day, but his children could. An officer of the Thrakian League would never never hope to see such a day, but he knew K’rok survived for it. The Milot was the same as telling him of his divided loyalties.
But that meant Jack couldn’t trust him completely either and K’rok seemed unaware of the paradox he presented Storm.
K’rok’s headset was down around his neck, but he wore an abstracted look as if listening to it now and again. He clenched his bulky hand now. “We are out of time, friend Jack.” He got to his feet and signaled the Thrakian officers waiting just outside the sound curtain shielding Jack’s doorway. “A massive attack is being launched. It appears that the insurgents are calling for Pepys’ head.”
Jack got up hastily. He reached for the pack he intended to take off world with him. “We’d better suit up,” he said. “And it’s time to decide who the real enemy is.”
K’rok responded with a growling laugh. As he passed through the brace of guards, he moved with a speed that belied his bulk and laid the two Thraks out. Jack dealt a mercy blow to one while K’rok handled the second. Then he stood.
“Casualties of the rebellion, eh?”
“Looks like. How many Thraks are in the barracks?”
“Close to a hundred.”
“May I suggest, Commander, that you put them to the fore of our defense against the assault coming in?”
“Good idea.”
Jack reshouldered his pack. “We will take the shop and secure it, and work our way back to the palace. Then we work our way out until we meet the front.”
***
With stiff, jerky movements, Amber gathered up her belongings and packed them. Her arms felt as though they had been pulled from their sockets and her ribs protested the new bruises laid over the old. But he had not taken her again—she’d struggled vigorously enough that he’d been forced to let her go, or risk damaging his communication equipment. Vandover had not seemed to mind it as she fled from him. He took more joy from the pain than from the sex.
But she could no longer flee his thoughts. They followed her, smoldering, like the guttering flame of a trash dump fire, rancid and smutty, choking her own thoughts down. As if he’d realized that she was aware of his invasion, there was an echoing, guttural laugh and he was gone.
Amber staggered to a chair. She sat, holding her face in her hands, trying to breathe. Clean air, clean lungs, clean thought. With a shudder, she looked up. He would make her kill Jack, she had no doubt of that. But when? When would he be done with the two of them? Could she break Vandover’s hold over her? She wouldn’t even hear the words when he whispered them in her ear—how could she turn them away?
She dashed away the tears that threatened to spill. Tears would not help. She had asked for this, in a way. She had wanted to be deadly, to be lethal again. Now she was. How could she face Jack this way? How could she reach out to him? He would never be able to love her again.
She clenched her fist. The sinews on her thin but powerful wrist stood out. She stared at it. The delicate skin on the inside of her wrist was bare where most denizens of Malthen wore a micro-chip just under the surface. She did not carry a computer ident and never would. She had fought to stay free of that chain. She raised her fist higher.
The first thing she had to do was keep Jack alive. Then she would worry about the rest.
A klaxon broke the stream of her thoughts. In the corner of her tiny room, the com came on. “General alert. Repeat, this is a general alert. We are under attack.”
Muttering a street slang curse from the roughest part of under-Malthen, Amber grabbed her kit and ran.
The rebels broke through before they could establish a line. Jack felt good in his suit, despite its bulk and the room he had inside of it, a good soldier wore his armor like a second skin. Point a gauntlet and fire. Or shoulder the field pack and laser cannon. He was a human tank, damn near invincible—but not quite invincible enough.
For the first time in his fighting life, he looked out across a field of enemy who were not the enemy, though they had brought the battle to him. They were flesh he did not want to see burned or blasted. They were fighting for something he might well be fighting for himself, except that he had been trapped on this side.
K’rok bellowed over the com, “Keep it defensive!” He strode over the outer perimeter like some massive mountain come to the aid of the emperor. “Link together and hold the front!”
There would be no holding of this front without killing. Jack swung about. “Rawlins!”
“Yessir.”
“Is the shop clear?”
“Shut down and shielded, sir.”
The equipment not in use would remain safe—and out of insurgent hands. Jack shrugged into his shoulder pads, feeling the leads and wires clipped to his bare torso pinch more tightly in reaction. If necessary, they could all fall back to the main wing of the palace and shield there as well—but it would only be a matter of time before they would have to come out for supplies. It was not a strategic position one wanted to be in.
He had no time for further thought as his front cameras and grid showed him incoming rebels. With screams that broke into static over his sensors, the enemy charged. He fired over their heads. He brought down trees in their path, exploded ditches before their feet… and, in the end, he shot a few.
The numbers were overwhelming. He caught sight of K’rok’s suit. “We’re going to be up to our helmets in bodies,” he said.
A heavy grunt answered. Then K’rok said, “There is always being plan two, Jack.”
Plan two might well prove to be the lesser of two evils. “All right,” Jack told him.
“Good. Listen up, this is being Commander K’rok. Fall back!”
Pepys slowly became aware that someone sat on the edge of his medical crèche. His head ached, and one eye seemed out of focus—the barely seen visitor took a damp cloth and wiped it for him.
“Thank you,” he said, and found his voice in a hot, hoarse whisper, barely audible.
“Don’t mention it.”
The emperor smiled. “I cannot see you well, Amber, but my hearing is fine.”
“Yeah, well, it’s about all you’ve got going for you. Take your ice chips.”
Pepys took a cup being folded into his hand—weak, he was so incredibly weak—and the crèche shifted so that he could sit up. He tapped a few chips into his mouth, felt a couple skid off his chin, and tried to suck on the remaining cold miracles. Their refreshing strength trickled down his throat. His eye cleared a little, as well.
Amber was watching the corridor outside the care unit.
“What’s happening?”
“Someone started a civil war. I think it was a religious fanatic and a half-assed emperor.”
Pepys started to laugh, found himself choking and at her mercy as she helped him to spit up the dust clogging his throat. He sat back, hands shaking as he feebly tried to straighten his covers. “I know that,” he said, a little peevishly. “What’s happening now?”
“The hospital wing is the most secure part of the palace. We’re about to be up to our neck in WP and battle armor.”
He tried to think. It eluded him for a moment, then he grasped that they were mounting a last ditch stand and hold effort. “My God.” He gasped. “Has it come to that?”
“For the moment.” Amber faced him. He thought she looked both tough and beautiful. “Got any ideas?”
“None.” He lay back and took a deep breath. He hurt all over, and was strangely numb in places he shouldn’t be. “Where are the nurses?”
“Most of your palace staff fled along with your psychics, valets, cooks and maids, and medical staff. But you still have your Knights.” She gave him a crooked grin.
“Yes. I would, wouldn’t I.” No matter what he had done to Storm, the man had stayed with him, kept there by his own brand of ethics. “Where’s Vandover?”
“He’s deploying the WP officers. He’s been running your show, you know.”
“I know, my dear. I know.” Pepys coughed again. She got up and held his head until he’d finished, then wiped his mouth with a cold cloth, and gave him a tiny sip of water.
