Penny

Via Stellarum

Ushkov shot her a final glare at her as Edwyn turned away. Kyra blew the scowling man a kiss that made his face turn blotchy as it mottled with rage. Several of the nearby troops snickered though Edwyn either didn’t hear or pretended he didn't. It probably wasn’t a smart move to antagonise someone who might be in a position to save her life, but then it wasn’t like the odds of any of them surviving the next few hours were anything anyone would bet on.

They moved through the forest of diseased trees in a loose knot. In theory they ought to have spread out into a skirmish line, but with their limited training the comfort of being close to other humans was more of a concern than the proper tactical deployment. Distant gunfire continued to boom, though the volume of anti-air fire seemed to be slackening, replaced instead by the distant booming of artillery striking something well over the horizon.

They reached a more or less intact lander beside which a stocky looking female sergeant was shoving men into a loose tactical column. The stenciled name across her back read ‘Reyes’. As their group emerged from the trees she spun to face them with a look that hovered somewhere between rage and relief.

“O’Byrne, glad you could be bothered to join us,” she snapped, arching an eyebrow to indicate her surprised that so few had returned with him. She must have been hoping for the extra bodies from the second dropship, and it clearly stung for her to see Edwyn returning with fewer troops than he had began with. The remaining soldiers in her column looked back and forth, muttering to each other in tones of concern.

The original plan, as it had been explained to Kyra anyway, was that two full platoon would be involved in their attack. It looked as though they had only half a platoon left, unless the other two dropships had been forced off course rather than destroyed. As the thoughts formed in Kyra’s mind a communications tech ran forward, a heavy comm array strapped to his back.

“Sergeant! Captain Brady says we are to continue as ordered, pick up stragglers as we go!” Kyra remembered seeing Brady, a fat an unhealthy looking officer, the sort of rich mans by-blow who was good for nothing else but shoving into a uniform and shipping far away from public embarrassment. She wondered if he was on the ground or if he was safe in one of the troop ships in orbit. Assuming the troop ships were safe of course. Intelligence hadn’t said anything about a Corporate Fleet in the area, but then Intelligence hadn’t said anything about their being enough soldiers on the ground to shoot the dropships to shit either.

Star Crossed: The Duke's Rebellion

“I know a command when I hear one,” Rene said with a ghost of a smile. He stood up and scooped Solae up in his arms carrying her like the newlywed she was to the small captain’s cabin they shared. Unfortunately, and probably much to Mia’s electronic disappointment, he couldn’t join her and settled instead for laying her down and sharing a lingering kiss with his betrothed. While she might not have been happy about being ordered to bed by her computer, Rene waited until she succumbed to what must have been exhaustion. All nobles possessed superior physiques but the athleticism favored by males was less pronounced in females who made concessions for the sake of an aesthetic of beauty that didn’t run to chiseled musculature. Rene wondered if one day the ruling classes might become a different species from the rest of humanity, biologically speaking. Geneticists claimed that this wouldn’t be the case, as nothing was actually added to the genome, merely that certain traits, which had already existed in the gene pool, were hyper emphasised. To Rene that sounded like every example of natural selection he had ever heard cited. In their minds the ruling aristocrats were a different species already, even those who professed to populist leanings made it clear who they thought ought to be leading those movements.

When Solae’s breathing had grown slow and regular, Rene reluctantly returned to the cockpit and began to review the sensor screens. In contrast to Panopontus and New Concordia, the space above Zatis was busy. With few natural resources the Zatis system might not even have been colonized, but what it lacked in material wealth it made up for with its stellar geography. The pale blue sun of the Zatis system had once been part of a binary pair, the elder of the two stars had gone supernova at some point in the distant past and collapsed to form a black hole. The young star continued to orbit it, trailing a tail of light and matter into the black hole like a long streamer circling the may pole. The supernova had sterilized the system, but the planets had been distant enough to survive destruction.

The combination of the black hole and the dense blue star meant that the gravity shadow of Zatis was both massive, and highly distinctive. This meant that the system boasted an inordinately large number of jump points, making it a hub for commerce and, more importantly information. Once upon a time the Imperial Fleet had maintained a base in the Zatis system, as a customs point and as a convenient place to base a rapid response force in the early, dangerous days of colonization. While the fleet had been based on a moon of one of the large gas giants, the inner planet, Zatis itself, had been left uninhabited. Over the years a community had grown up there as merchants serving the fleet had built their own facilities and eventually embarked on terraforming projects though typically under massive domes rather than a complete atmosphere creation project. Eventually civil wars had stripped the naval base away from the system, leaving behind the merchants and mercenaries who found that they did just as well without any Imperial overseers and the modern polity of Zatis was born.

Rene cycled through the screens, briefly checking dozens of small freighters as well as a number of suspicious ‘private yachts’ which certainly became pirates whenever and wherever it became convenient to be so. There were also a trio of large ‘anti pirate cruisers, functionally naval vessels in the employ of the sector duke orbiting the planet. The vessels didn’t appear to be actively interfering with traffic, though they held a high guard around the world. Rene instructed Mia to passively monitor the ships while he checked the Bonaventure’s log. Conveniently, but not unsurprisingly, the Bonaventure had visited Zatis several times in the past two years. On those occasions two of the orbiting cruisers had been present, though not at the same time. It made sense that given Zatis’ importance that Duke Tan would at least want to keep an eye on the place, though this didn’t make Rene feel any better.

With several hours of travel ahead of him Rene busied himself by going through the publically available data that he was able to access with laser or microwave links. To his lack of surprise there was no word of the Rebellion, though if one knew where to look, the ‘civil emergencies’ and ‘unexpected losses of communication’ were a little too frequent to be the result of the normal natural order of a chaotic galaxy. Nor was there anything to be found on the military nets Rene was able to detect. The Imperial Navy kept a database of sailing directions, to alert ships to local conditions, and while Rene couldn’t access the database without code authorization, he was able to determine that it hadn’t been updated in over a week. Theoretically any navy ship that jumped in system would update the database and a week was an unusually long stretch of time for a location like Zatis. Rene also knew that the Marines maintained an emergency net, mostly so that men on leave could be quickly recalled than for any really secure communication, but he didn’t dare attempt to patch into it, incase the Duke’s spies were monitoring access. It would have been a logical way to sweep up Imperial troops who missed the initial purges, as soldiers checked in to see what was going on, certainly something Rene would have done if he wasn’t aware a rebellion was breaking out.

“Incoming vessel Bonaventure, state your cargo and destination. Over.” an unfriendly voice crackled across the communications system. Rene jolted out of his research into the Zatis PEA, a topic that was surprisingly difficult using only public records, and glanced up at his communications screen. The computer identified the transmission as originating from one of the Duke’s cruisers, the thirty thousand ton City of Rheims.

“Mia is this a normal practice,” he asked quickly.

“They have interrogated each inbound ship in a similar manner Sir Rene,” Mia responded breathily. Rene felt some of the tightness of his chest relax.

“They are using a coded transmission but several of the captains of the other vessels are complaining about it,” Mia added unexpectedly. Rene frowned, it sounded almost as though Mia were bragging about how she had come by the information, an emotional response that ought to have been beyond her programming. Pushing the thought from his mind he opened the channel, wishing that Solae was here to handle the talking.

“We are inbound for Zatis, running empty,” Rene responded in what he hoped was a bored tone. He deliberately bit back the reflex to end the transmission with the word over, figuring that proper comm discipline had no place on a tramp freighter. Rene watched the range finders tick steadily downwards, uncomfortably aware that they were already within the outer limits of the warships guns.

“Running empty Bonaventure? That is no way to run a business,” the communications officer aboard the City of Rheims responded with slightly more than idle curiosity in his voice. Thinking very fast Rene pulled up the past few stops from the Bonaventure had made.

“Tell me about it Rhiemy,” Rene improvised, “We took some damage landing on Cromwell’s World, took everything we had just to get airborne again. We are going to take a real bath on this one.”

There was another pause that was probably longer in Rene’s mind than in the real universe.

“Roger that Boney, better luck next time. Rheims out.”

Rene let out a long breath of relief, they would be in orbit within the hour. So far, so good.

Dogs of War: Old World Mercenaries

Camilla felt a surge of despair that she couldn’t quite keep from her face. The elf seemed to sense this and bowed his head in acknowledgement. After everything they had been through not only had Cydric died for nothing, they had actually made things worse. Grimly she determined that she would stop playing soldiers and just leave this place, head south to Tilea or some other far port and live out whatever life she could. There was no point in pretending like she could make anything better. Let someone else hunt down necromancers, someone better suited to it than a courtesan from Tilea.

“What are they looking for?” she asked numbly, although truthfully she didn’t really care any longer. The elf made a gesture that meant nothing to her, his slender fingers spreading into a complicated pattern.

“When the Duke was last suppressed, his body was sundered and scattered. Part of him lived in the child whose spirit you released, part of him was sent over the waters. Part of him was hidden in some secret place here in this land. While part of his is free, it will search for the other parts to regain his full strength.”

Camilla shrugged, not able to muster up much interest, having already made up her mind to leave Brettonia to whatever fate decreed.

“That sounds like a problem for a knight on some quest,” she responded, mentally plotting how long it would take her to reach Bordeaux and a ship that would take her back to Tilea.

“It is a problem for a Fey Enchantress,” the elf responded enigmatically. Camilla stiffened at those words, casting a suspicious glance at the way watcher. A slight smile tugged at the corner of the elfs inhuman eyes as he watched her.

“I’m not an Enchantress, a Fey one or any other kind,” she snapped. Aldaerion lifted a slender eyebrow at this, as though questioning the statement.

“And yet you are bound to a blade sacred to the old gods of the Asur? Those that call themselves the grail knights see you in their dreams? You can see in the dark as well as any of my folk… it makes one wonder.” Camilla shivered, since her abduction by the chaos warriors and their claims that she was destined to serve Slaanesh, she had secretly feared that her new found abilities might be the first manifestations of mutation, the feared mark of chaos. Was it possible it was something else? The sword perhaps? Her hand closed over the weapons hilt and she shivered slightly. The elf merely smiled.

“If you seek answers, I suggest that you take your men to the monastery as you had planned, if you prevail, perhaps you will find answers to your questions.”

Camilla opened her mouth to ask what questions the elf was referring to but the Waywatcher was gone, having vanished before her very eyes so quick and silent were his movements. Camilla sat for long moments, and then, grinding her teeth, turned and headed back for her camp.

They attacked at dawn. The ruined shell of the monastery clung to a rocky outcropping in the middle of the river. The morning mist swirled over the slow moving water concealing the approaching men from mortal eyes, though Camilla wouldn’t have bet it would have worked against the undead. The log rafts they had fashioned from fresh cut timber ground onto the muddy beach and the nervous peasants disembarked as quickly as they were able. Camilla, Matis and Sir Renard came ashore on the first boat. The other knights having been left for later rafts because of the noise they made in their armor. Renard, perhaps by virtue of his quest, moved as quietly as Camilla, despite being encased in steel.

The climbed the steep rise and into a scrubby abandoned field. Ancient and dilapidated beehives mouldered in a state of general decay and the long grass was tall enough to brush their calves as they snuck forward towards the crumbling wall topped with ancient rusted fleur de lys in wrought iron. A sudden movement stilled the creeping attackers as a pair of skeletal figures marched along the far side of the wall. The creaking articulated skeletons looked neither right of left, merely marching along their patrol route.

Camilla opened her mouth to order her men onwards but Renard’s gauntleted hand fell on her shoulder stilling her for a moment. The grail knight’s helmeted head tracked the direction the skeletons for a few moments longer, evidently blessed with some ability to pierce the mist. He lifted his hand silently.

“Come on,” Camilla hissed and the dozen peasants crept forward. From the river came the sound of clanking metal as the knights neared the shore. She ran forward and vaulted over the fence, landing on a floor of weed cracked flagstones. Before her stretched a long cloister that ended at an ancient shattered door. A greenish light flickers from the broken timbers. A scream tore from the throat of someone off in the fog and there was a ring of steel as weapons clashed.

“Charge!” someone roared and the mist was suddenly filled with the sounds of battle and a strange terrible laughter.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Junebug closed the medicomp around Taya’s body and bought it live with a few touches of the holographic pad. Ordinarily the autodoc would have been overkill for sunburn and dehydration but Taya was very fair and hadn’t been exposed to a lifetime of grueling physical activity the way Junebug had. The blond haired woman sighed immediately as salves and antiseptics were applied to her skin and intravenous hydration began to replace the fluids she had lost on the grueling march across the desert. Crossing to the pilot's seat she took a cup of water and downed it in single long pull thrilling to the feel of the cool water in her parched throat.

Neil had already gone to sleep but Taya was too burned and dehydrated to go quite yet. Sayeeda had opted to take the first watch, mostly because other than Saxon, she was the only person in any condition to do it. Lony confirmed that Saxon was in the hold, he seemed to be conducting some form of meditation, though from the way his nostrils and scales were flared, it had more to do with adapting to the new temperature than it did with finding inner peace.

Indra watched from the corner of the room. She was clearly tense, no doubt worried that the Highlanders might simply turn around and sell her to Sven. The woman’s body was too perfect to be the result of natural processes, Junebug suspected genetic engineering rather than surgery but she wasn’t an expert in such things. Few worlds that could afford such high tech luxuries were ever in the market for mercenary soldiers or at least they tended to the hiring for service on some much less well off colony worlds. If Sven was indeed after her, it was a miracle she was still free, coming to the Highlander was probably the one move the Cyborg wouldn’t have predicted. That made her either extremely lucky or extremely smart and Junebug wasn’t sure which one to go with just yet.

“You won’t turn me over to him will you?” Indra asked as Junebug refilled her cup from the dispensing nozzle. Her voice had a vulnerable quaver that made even Junebug’s pulse climb a few beats. She glanced sidelong at Indra trying to determine if this was a conscious effort to manipulate her, but she saw no guile in the woman’s worried face.

“Look,” Junebug began, searching for a way to make herself understood without making herself look like a monster.

“I’m a mercenary, but I’m a good one, if you contract my crew to get you off this dustball, than that is what we will do,” she explained. It was unlikely that the woman really appreciated how seriously Junebug took her contracts but it was enough reassurance for Indra to break into a nervous smile.

“Do we need to sign paperwork or anything?” she asked in what Junebug thought might be a weak attempt at a joke. Instead of responding she reached out her hand.

“Let's make it a full repair of my ship and a million credits and you have yourself an extraction team,” Junebug offered. As expected Indra grasped her hand and shook it firmly.

“So what does Sven want with you?” Taya asked unexpectedly. Junebug had forgotten the young aristocrat was in the room until the moment she spoke.

“I mean I can see what the old Pasha wanted but Sven… I didn’t get the impression he was that interested in… in the normal human stuff.” If Indra was ashamed of her previous slavery to the Pasha she didn’t show it.

“I don’t know what he wants, perhaps to ransom me to my father?” Indra supposed. Junebug shook her head. Whatever else Sven was, he was certainly ambitious, she doubted he would be happy being the tin pot dictator of one city on an insignificant dustball for long. Whatever he had in mind for Indra it would be a bigger play than a simple ransom.

“How will you get in touch with my father, if your ship cant fly?” she asked, more at ease now that the deal had been struck.

“She can fly,” Junebug snapped, a little defensive at the idea that the Highlander was in that bad shape.

“Sorry, it's been a long couple of days,” she apologised, draining another glass of water and refilling it.

“What I meant to say is that she can fly, it's just we can't inset into the RIP without some serious repairs. As for how we will get in touch with your father… “ It was a fair question, there was no way to communicate between systems across interstellar distances. The usual protocol was to send message capsules, miniature spacecraft, or to have freighters and merchantmen carry news packets with them. As all systems paid a small fee to any ship transmitting a packet, most merchant ships did so as a matter of course, often allowing an automated system to handle the whole thing start to finish. There were rumors that the Terran had constructed a few array of quantum binaries, theoretical pairs of electrons, carefully separated so that they could use quantum entanglement to instantaneously transport data from one place to another, but that seemed more like campfire stories than anything Junebug was willing to put stock in.

“Neil really is the engineer on this boat,” she admitted grudgingly. While she could work on most systems with the aid of her helmet, she just wasn't the same sort of tinkerer that Neil was.

Via Stellarum

Political Entities

The League- ?

Corporate Quadrant Authority - An alliance of mega corporations that oversee several dozen worlds.

Via Stellarum

Kyra came to a stop beside an ancient and rotting tree. The bark was covered with a patchy fungus that phosporessed very slightly. A few of the trees still sprouted sickly looking leaves, hard curled things which looked distinctly unhealthy, but these were in the definite minority. In the distance the rumble of heavy guns could still be heard and the sky flashed blue white as with distant lightning. Each time the sky flashed there was a soft hissing sound in the communication beads they wore as the RF squelch of plasma discharge cut across the spectrum.

From what little briefing anyone had bothered to give her, she had gathered that this operation was supposed to be a surprise landing against minimal opposition. If that had been the case, then the element of surprise had been well and truly lost. Alekhine IV was deep inside Corporate space, it wasn't some frontier world that needed an extensive garrison to protect it. That meant that the Corporates had the jump not just tactically but strategically, none of which boded well for the surprise assault that the League had planned.

“My rifle…” Kyra began but before she could finish the sentence one of the other soldiers pressed one of the cheap electromotive slug throwers into her hands. The telltale glowed green indicating that the weapon was live. Kyra opened her mouth to ask where it had come from before realising that it must have been taken from one of the fallen troops from O’Byrne’s dropship.

“I’m Kyra, Kyra Sloane,” she said with a sweep of her head to take in the small group of soldiers. All of them were equipped as she was, simple grey green fatigues with plastic/ceramic body armor stenciled with the unit number. She thought she recognised some of them from their abbreviated basic training but couldn’t be sure.

“Sloane?” the soldier who had passed her the rifle asked cocking an eyebrow.

“You aren’t that fucking Jayser we heard about are you?” before she could respond he grabbed her head and wrenched it sideways, revealing a small metallic implant just behind her left ear. Jayser was a slang term for a small minority of people born with a genetic abnormality that affected their pineal gland. Janikov’s Sarcoma , or J syndrome, had been unknown before humans were exposed to the hostile environment of jump space, the interstitial void between the infinite bubbles of the multiverse. Most fetus that developed J syndrome spontaneously aborted early on in their development, but those that survived exhibited a number of strange mental abilities, low level telepathy and minor telekinesis as well as debilitating migraines. Most major world in the League required prenatal screening and abortions when the markers for the conditions were found. Those that made it to adulthood with the condition were implanted with damping chips to suppress their abilities and, more often than not, ‘enlisted’ into volunteer units. Although the kind of things a Jayser could do were very limited, wild stories circulated among the gullible ensuring that prejudice ran high,

Kyra drove her knee up into the soldiers groin sending him staggering back. He cried out in shock and began to lift his weapon, but before he could bring it to bear, she drove the stock of her newly unlocked rifle into the side of his helmet sending him staggering back against a tree trunk. She swung the weapon to her shoulder and sighted down the barrel at his chest. The electromagnetic accelerators whined slightly as the weapon came to its read status.

“Yes I’m the one you heard about,” she growled through clenched teeth. The metallic implant buzzed slightly at her hig

“And if that is a problem for you, I can make sure that you don’t have any problems to worry about every again.”

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Despite the insistance of of her helmet chronometer that it had only been four days, Junebug was certain it had been a hundred years when they finally stumbled in to the upper reaches of a canyon whose covering of scrubby vegetation marked the passage of an underground river. Junebug’s skin was burnt to a shade of bronze that would have done her desert dwelling Terran ancestors proud. Neil and Taya, fairer and having spent less time out in the elements, were not faring so well, both were badly sunburned despite their efforts to keep covered. Saxon, surprisingly, had fared the best of them all. Sayeeda had always associated the Hex with jungles in her mind, but the way his scales had grown dull suggested that their native habitat might as likely be desert as wetland. He didn’t complain of thirst or speak much other than level the occasional threat at Neil but with the exception of a slight sluggishness to the nictitating membranes which served as his eyelids, did not seem much the worse for wear.
They had travelled at night seeking shelter and sleep during the day, following a steady course south easterly to the nearest chartered settlement. The protein rations Sayeeda had been carrying had kept them from starving though all, save perhaps Saxon, were suffering from hunger pains from the meager rations. The concentrated protein was enough to keep them moving but they were neither filling nor satisfying. Water was a much more pressing concern, Junebug’s armor held a reclaimer unit which was able to process her sweat and what little moisture there was in the aird air into potable water but it was still little more than a cup a day and their bodies were beginning to suffer from the dehydration.

As they stumbled down the side of the canyon the air cooled and moistened significantly and they humidity counter displayed in Junebugs helmet climbed from <1% up to a modest 15 percent. The reclaimer clicked quietly as its workload increased. Fortunately the salvagers had either believed them dead or lost their trail as no pursuit had followed them. Junebug suspected that the answer to that lay in the strange method of their escape, the temporal distortion that had carried them out of the alien vessel had left her clock unaltered, but she suspected that they had traveled some time, perhaps a day or two into the future and that attempts to find them had already failed.

They moved down the canyon at a shuffling walk until, rounding a corner, they found themselves confronted by a group of houses built into the canyon wall and a sprawl of greenery surrounding a metal capped wellhead. Men in desert garb started at the sight of them and several disappeared into their houses to return a moment later carrying antiquated looking long arms. Sayeeda held her hand up in a gesture of friendship, though her other hand held the receiver of her stolen rifle. Despite the weight of the weapon she had clung to it throughout the arduous trek. A soldier didn’t give up her weapon any more than she threw away her rations or took of her helmet in vacuum.

“We need to passage to the spaceport,” she croaked in response to a demand to know who she was.

It cost them their remaining rations and both Sayeeda and Taya’s side arms, but two hours later they were arriving on the outskirts of the city, all of them riding in the back of a large air cushion truck that served as the villages primary conveyance. It was nearly nightfall and the city was already falling into it’s strangely divided routine. The locals were returning to their homes while the spacers and traders were heading out to the various bars and dives that ringed the spaceport.

The Highlander sat where they had left it, though there were a few disappointed vendors who had clearly noticed that it had been several days since anyone approached the ship and perhaps had been hoping that they might pick the vessel over if its owners were dead. Sayeeda stepped up to the ramp and put in her code, lowing the access ramp to the sandstone floor. They marched up the stairs and into the cool interior of the ship intent on food, water and, at least in Junebug’s case, a shower. After that they would have to discuss how they were planning to get off this rock but Junebug couldn’t force her tired brain to grapple with that right at the moment.

“Lonny?” Neil asked, and it wasn’t until after he spoke that a vague sense of unease crystalized in Junebugs mind. Behind her she heard the soft click of a weapon being unsafed. Instinctively her own hand slid down to her rifle but before she could react a feminine voice spoke from behind her.

“Please, I don’t mean you any harm.” Junebug turned slowly. Stepping out from behind a bulkhead was a beautiful woman. Though she was dressed in a set of Neil’s coveralls her body still managed to look lush and inviting, her face might have been a computer generated picture of beauty with full pouting lips and blond hair with natural curls that many women would have spent a weeks salary at a salon to acquire. In her hand was four barreled flechette pistol, a weapon intended for use inside the ship where heavier weapons might smash systems and damage electronics. The energized darts were still plenty deadly however.

“Your the woman from the palace,” Junebug said, her mouth voicing the thought before her exhausted mind was truly aware of it. She remembered the woman the Pasha had held at gunpoint, though she couldn’t for the life of her think of a reason she had come here.

“Please dont,” the woman implored desperately. Junebug realised that her hands had continued their migration to her weapon and she deliberately lifted them away from the slung rifle.

“I came here for help,” she confessed, the pistol wavering in her hands.

“Maybe put the gun down then?” Junebug suggested, and to her considerable relief the woman lowered the pistol.

“Who are you?” Taya asked, irritably.

“My name is Indra Hawkwood. I am the daughter of the Primate of Cylonieka,” she said, the tone clearly suggesting that the information should mean something to the group. Sayeeda glanced sideways at Neil who shrugged.

“Ok Miss Hawkwood,” Junebug said with all the civility she could manage.

“Why did you break into our ship and point a gun at us if you need our help. I dont know how things are done on Cylon… wherever…”

The woman was already shaking her head, her beautiful face a mask of fear and dispair.

“You don’t understand,” she blurted, “the pasha and his men are looking for me, I thought you might be them!”

Neil snorted and Junebug smiled.

“Trust me lady, the Pasha isn’t looking for anyone unless he is doing it from beyond the grave,” Junebug told her with a tired smile but the woman shook her head emphatically.

“Not the old Pasha, the new one. Sven or whatever he calls himself, he wants to keep me as a hostage! I’ve been hiding here for days hoping you would come back.”

Sayeeda’s face blanked and Neil swore quietly. Taya reached out and touched the ramp control. It began to retract, sealing off the noise of the starport outside.

“Well shit,” Neil observed.

Star Crossed: The Duke's Rebellion

Stars formed and broke apart in Rene’s mind. Psychologists claimed that jumps had no effect on the minds of those who undertook them but spacers knew better. Some people enjoyed a deep dreamless while in the jump, others, less fortunate, suffered vivid nightmares. Rene’s mind spun queasily through a series of disconnected thoughts and images. The Crystal Palace on Cappela grew out of the void like an organic thing before morphing into flare bursting over a training ground on Kappa Virgio. The muzzle flashes of distant machine guns spun into the brilliant blonde of Solae’s hair as she rose, nymphlike from a pool of water as black as night. At some level he realised he was sleeping but days of operating at a hundred and fifty percent combined with the linger effect of the stun needles conspired to prevent him from waking.

The jump phantoms spun outwards in a web mapping the stars in an outward spiral spreading into the Eastern Cross. The Bonaventure sailed between the stars as a dark figure in the regalia of an Imperial Duke reached out towards vessel, snatching at it with fingers the size of starships. Rene swatted at the fingers furiously trying his best to keep the hand from closing around Solae. No matter how quickly he smote them down another finger was always there closing off their means of escape. In the background his father glowered at him, judging his performance with grim disapproval as Gisella Chastain stood behind him sharpening a long knife. Mercedez Vilatre sat atop her throne, Ameilia’s mutilated body lay before her as she arched an inquiring eyebrow at Rene, he couldn’t see it but he felt the sword of damocles hanging over his neck. Solae stood by the shoulder of the Empress, her face vaguely disappointed.

The sudden burst of deceleration jolted Rene awake. He came to his feet unsteadily his hand grasping for a weapon for a moment before the disorientation passed. The deck of the Bonaventure vibrated as the engines began the long burn to bleed off the excess velocity of the jump. A tingling shimmer ran through Rene’s body as the subatomic particles resumed their normal configurations. The jump drives whined quietly as they finished their work. Rene grabbed the hatch coming to steady himself and looked around the hold. The results of Solae’s work loomed before him, his eyes flicked over the pictures, articles and holograms. For a moment he hesitated wanting to try and take in what, if anything, she had discovered but there were other more pressing concerns.

Rene pushed his way forward into the cockpit where Solae sat, he squeezed her shoulder and leaned forward to kiss her before sliding into his chair beside her. She glanced up him with concern in her eyes and he tried to smile comfortingly, his fingers brushing the dressing on his shoulder. It occurred to him that she had removed his shirt to treat his wounds, and that it wasn’t exactly professional attire. The thought of being professional aboard a stolen ship as they flew towards a contested planet filled with people who would turn them over to their enemies in a heartbeat made his smile even broader.

“I’m ok,” he told the woman he loved.

“Thanks to you,” he expanded as he turned his eyes to the sensor readouts for his first look at Zatis.

“What have we got?”

Star Crossed: The Duke's Rebellion

Rene seized Solae’s hand and squeezed grateful for the comfort implicit in the offer. His mind raced with the potential implications of what they had just learned. Had someone in the Chastain family arranged his disgrace to forge a marriage alliance with his father. On the face of it, this seemed an insane risk as unless it were pulled off perfectly, the vengeance of the Empress would be swift and terrible. Young Mercedez Vilantre was, but having grown up watching people endure the mad whims of her father, she made rather a point of dealing out justice with a firm hand. If it came out that a noble family had conspired in the murder of a handmaiden, they might be stripped of titles, their property seized and the ring leaders imprisoned and executed.

A failing noble family would gain much from an alliance with the Du Quentains, whose holdings, Rene knew, were vast. Though neither Alric nor his father had been particularly focused on the acquisition of wealth, the Du Quentains enjoyed hundreds of lucrative imperial monopolies, held tax rights on several of the core worlds of the Empire and even had their own colonies on the Western Marches, many of which were already high profitable. That kind of old money, focused as it was in a single bloodline was beyond that even most nobles could imagine. Rene’s father and grandfather were taciturn men, with no interest in showing off their wealth and power as many of their peers did, but it wasn’t exactly a secret either.

“It makes sense that the Chastains would want a marriage connection,” Rene said slowly, realising only after he spoke that he had been silent for long minutes.

“But why would my father agree to it and why so soon after my arrest? He would have had to have..” Rene trailed off, the kernel of an idea growing in his mind, though not yet developed to a point he could articulate it. The Empress’s Justice. Rene had always assumed that his father had played a role in allowing him to escape custody long enough to enlist in the marines, banking on his status and connection with the Empress to shield him from harm, but what if that wasn’t what happened. What if his father had made a deal to save him, a deal that included taking another wife and producing an heir who would in turn, destroy Rene’s claim to his father's titles. Such an agreement would leave him disinherited but alive and it would account for the unseemly speed of the union. That didn’t necessarily mean that the Chastains had been behind it of course, but they were an unusual choice for such a match, politically there were better candidates, one of the Hesperii or even one of the cadet branches of the the Vilantre family, someone who would bind the wealth and power of the Du Quentains to the Imperial family and preventing them from becoming the focus of a rival power block.

It didn’t mean they were behind it, but someone had killed Amelia and framed Rene for it as so far the Chastains were the clear winners, they had been in position to make the match at the right time and they had had the political backing they needed to make it happen, that was even more suspicious if they were in the kind of financial trouble Solae indicated. They had to at least be involved. Something he couldn’t have known if he hadn’t met Solae, he realised. Their meeting and her knowledge were something the conspirators could never have counted on, it was a minor miracle he had ever even seen another noble much less one with the family connections to give him this intelligence. Ordinarily he would have been horrified to realize that this put her in more danger, or would if anyone involved found out about thier relationship, but given the events in the Eastern Cross at the moment, a threat from a cabal on Capella was a problem for another day.

“He did it for me,” Rene breathed, realizing that Solae had been patiently silent while his mind wheeled through rings of conspiracy. In hindsight the conclusion was an obvious one. He had been escaped the custody of the Imperial Guard in the most secure area of the most secure world in the Empire. What were the odds that he could have made his way to a recruiting station without people deliberately turning a blind eye. Rene shivered and sweated as his body roiled with unfamiliar combinations of thoughts and feelings. Grimly he tried to lock down his emotions and regain his ordinary equilibrium.

“He must have done it in exchange for letting me enlist, and so that I didn’t have an ‘accident’ during training. That is the only explanation I can see,” he murmured.

“They had to have at least known it was going to happen…” he told Solae. The veins in his temple throbbed with anger even though he kept his face in a calm disciplined mask.

“Sir Rene, you heart level is elevated,” Mia commented in the tone of a hopeful flirt. Renes head swam as he stood up unsteadily. Thick walls of glass appeared to be closing around his mind and his vision narrowed.

“We will know more once Mia has a chance to dig,” Rene said haltingly.

“Lady Solae, Sir Rene may be going into shock as a result of a combination of emotional trauma and the wounds he …” Blackness stole over Rene, cutting off the end of the sentence as he slumped into unconsciousness.

Damned to the Depths

Levitation was a difficult spell to employ at the best of times. Unlike most spells that were complete once incanted a levitation spell had to be maintained for as long as you wanted the object in question to float. Calliope’s eyes followed the snaking rope that fell from above. The crew had climbed to the firing position and lowered it down. It was a thick hawser cable, braided together until it split five feet above the cannon, a noose like knot encircling the breech and the muzzle. She climbed onto the cannon and sat down upon the cold metal clearing her mind.

“Haul!” she yelled, and the rope went taught. The words of the spell slid off her tongue like rain dancing into a still pool, her mind focused taking in every detail of the cannon visualizing it floating upon a gentle zephyr of magical energy. The cannon began to rise as its weight decreased. Even for the mighiest wizard lifting several hundred pounds of metal hundred of feet in the air would have been nearly impossible, but she was able to make just light enough that the muscle power of the crew could do the job. The cannon rose steadily. Calliope not only had to keep her concentration but she also had to kick out with her feet, fending the cannon away from the cliffside as she rose.

“I heard, I heard an old man say… haul!...” the shanty rumbled as the men hauled at the ropes. Calliope looked out behind her has she rose. The sea was calm and the wind low, which was a mercy because keeping staton in high waters would have been all but impossible. This island was one of the outer barrier islands that protected the Bloodaxe harbor, to the left and right she could see the green shrubby forest that covered the front of the island, catching enough water from rains and sea spray which filtered through the rock to counteract even the desert winds which blew in of Arad Lind. Fortunately the rocky spire was high enough that they should have a clear line of sight from the peak.

By the time she neared the top Calliope was sweating and shaking from the effort of maintaining the spell. It was longer than she had ever tried to hold an incantation before but there was no choice now, the sudden failure of the spell at best would lead to her plunging back down the cliff as the men tried desperately to slow the rope, at worst the shock of a hundred extra pounds that hadn’t been there a moment before would part the rope and she would fall to her death. Despite the danger she felt exhilarated to be so high, the urge to spread her wings and … Suddenly there were hands reaching down to grip the cannon and swing it onto the top of the peak. She held the spell until they settled the long barrel into the wooden gun carriage and then released the spell. The wood creaked as the gun settled and she let out a long breath.

The view from the top of the island was spectacular. The broad bay below had been formed from the remains of an ancient volcano, each of the barrier islands a fragment of the caldera wall that the sea had battered its way through to form the four channels that led into the calm lagoon below. The Arad shore was green where water from a spring spilled down from a line of rocky hills to a broad beach. A makeshift pier ran out into the ocean where three ships, the long blood axe galleys, swung at anchor. A fourth was run up on the beach, smoke coiling from underneath it where breening fires were being set to burn away seaweed and barnacles that ships developed during long service. The copper plated bottoms of modern ships made the chore less frequent, but even the greatest warships occasionally needed to remove the trails of material that would otherwise slow their speed through the water. A fifth ship was winding its way through one of the channels. This was no galley or pirate vessel but a square rigged brig of northern design. Judging by the fact that the pirates did not seem agitated by its arrival, it must have been a trading partner. Markus was already studying it through his brass telescope. It made sense that the pirates sold what they didn’t use themselves, though Calliope hadn’t imagined that would be a factor in their raid. The extra guns and men might be a problem if the brig were inclined to fight, the Weather Witch’s main advantage was that she could out run the galleys in anything like a wind, with another square rigger dogging her, that might be a problem.