3

Capital Spaceport

Merrick City, New Canton

Prefecture VI, The Republic

9 October 3134

The limousine spent five agonizing minutes at the spaceport gate, while a pair of scowling, black-uniformed security guards with automatic rifles scrutinized their paperwork. Crosstown traffic had been heavy, as expected, and time was short. It galled Aaron to run like a scared rabbit, but he’d be a fool to put himself in danger over false pride. He sensed the Prefect was up to something, and Aaron didn’t want to give those intentions even a hint of legitimacy by overstaying his welcome.

Ulysses Paxton was listening to his headphone. He turned to Aaron. “They just had somebody do a last-second swap-out of a balky guidance module, but they’re fueled, preflighted, and ready to lift off as soon as we’re aboard.”

One of the guards finally passed back their clearances. “This looks to be in order. Have a nice trip.”

Paxton nearly growled as he snatched the papers back and signaled the driver to move on. The tires squealed as they headed across the apron toward their waiting DropShip. It was a Union–class, an eighty-meter-plus sphere sitting on four massive landing legs. She wasn’t a luxury craft—her quarters small and unpleasant for such an important passenger—but her hull was heavily armored, and weapons bristled from turrets around her waist and on her nose. Huge sliding doors covered two loaded ’Mech bays, including the Duke’s personal ’Mech, and a third bay that could hold a pair of escort fighters.

Once aboard, they would be well protected, which was why the last kilometer seemed to take forever. At the base of the ship, a squad of Davion Guards in winged Kage battle armor covered their approach. The car slid to a stop, and the troops surrounded the door. Paxton pushed Aaron and Deena out of the car and into the protective circle, then into the elevator that lifted them into the belly of the ship.

The driver of the car, one of Paxton’s men, followed, climbing into the lift with them. The car was abandoned on the vast concrete blast-deflector beneath the ship’s immense fusion thrusters. That made Aaron grin. The car had been provided for them by the New Canton government. Knowing it would be blasted into wreckage didn’t do much to balance the scales, but it made him feel better.

He lost sight of the car as the lift ascended into the ship and continued up another forty meters. It passed through the smaller ’Mech bay where his personal gold-and-white Black Hawk was stored. It quickly passed through the roof of the bay and stopped on the crew deck above. Paxton pushed them out of the car and into a nearby emergency crash-couch. There would be no time to get to the Duke’s quarters.

Paxton didn’t seat himself. He simply locked his legs, feet apart, and held onto an overhead support with one muscular arm. He lifted his other arm and barked into his sleeve. “The Duke is secure.”

The captain’s answering voice came from an overhead speaker, as well as Paxton’s hidden earphone. “Davion Guards are aboard and secure. Hatches sealed. Core preheat cycle is complete. Ready to lift off.”

“Lift off,” said Paxton.

The deck under their feet shuddered and began to vibrate. There was the whine of turbo-pumps spooling up, followed by a rumble, like a vast waterfall, then a clap of thunder as the huge engines reached temperatures as hot as hellfire. Plasma erupted from the engine bells, and the huge craft began to move.

Aaron wondered about the car. Did it melt? Was it vaporized? Pulverized? Or just tossed away like a leaf in a gale? He wished he could have seen it.

Acceleration pushed them gently into their seats as the ship lifted off. Paxton’s knees flexed slightly with the G-forces, and he seemed intently focused on the sounds of the launch.

The engines dulled to a roar as they gained altitude, the sound no longer echoing back from the ground to pound against their armored hull. After a few seconds, the deck groaned again, then shuddered as the landing legs retracted into the ship’s lower skirt.

Thirty meters below them and fifty meters over in the direction of the number two landing leg, an accelerometer in the detonator of Clete Wyoming’s “retirement-fund” triggered a solid-state relay. A timer began, its settings based on the typical launch profile of a Union–class DropShip and the designated departure pattern of the Capital Spaceport.

The ship climbed out at 1.5 gravities, moving eastward over the snow-white dunes of the shoreline and the Gulf of Emeralds beyond. By now, its course would have taken it five kilometers out to sea, to an altitude of six thousand feet.

That was far enough. That was high enough.

It would be a darned shame about the fish, though.

The bomb exploded.

The explosion tossed Aaron painfully against his harness. The whole compartment seemed to buckle around them, decking and bulkheads rippling like cardboard.

Paxton was tossed off his feet and, for a moment, hung by his hands from the overhead support. Aaron watched with horror as the angle of Paxton’s body shifted dramatically, a human plumb bob defining a “down” that changed moment by moment.

It was like being in a building that was slowly falling over on its side.

There was another explosion, louder than the first, and something ripped through their compartment. Aaron looked over to see the car driver slump over in his seat. His upper harness was severed by a wrist-thick shaft of steel that had been driven through the back of his seat and straight through his chest. Aaron watched the light of life fade from his eyes, his expression not one of pain or fear, but surprise.

Aaron felt …nothing. Or perhaps a perverse kind of relief, releasing the tension that had been building since his confrontation with Sebhat back at the palace. There was no more waiting. Now what happened would happen.

“All hands to crash stations,” the captain’s voice came, muted, from down the corridor, the speaker over their head having been silenced. “We’ve lost the turbopumps on the number six thruster. Number five has shut down from secondary damage!”

The sound of the motors changed. Aaron’s stomach lurched as though he were in a falling elevator.

“Shutting down two and three to balance thrust!” The falling slowed, and the floor seemed to pitch back toward level.

Aaron barely was aware, lost in a fugue state. It was the same feeling he’d had when he committed himself to battle, when the cockpit of his ’Mech sealed and the warrior took over for the diplomat.

He saw Deena’s face, white with fear. He’d seen her confront mortal danger before without flinching, but the circumstances had been different, more under her control. This was different.

He smiled at her. How could he make her understand? In danger there was clarity. These were the moments when one was most alive, facing death, fighting fate for every moment of life.

He glanced over at Paxton, thinking he at least would understand, but Paxton was looking around like a caged animal. This was not the kind of threat he could fight. He could protect his Duke against bullets, but not gravity. He looked like a man who had just realized he was about to fail.

Deena looked at Paxton desperately. “Escape pods?”

Aaron answered for him. “They’re unreliable in the atmosphere, and we’re not going up anymore. Lifeboats would work, but a Union doesn’t carry any.”

“Can we land?”

The captain’s voice came from the speaker again, sounding almost as desperate as Deena’s, as defeated as Paxton’s expression. “Number two landing leg is jammed. Negative deployment on two. We’re going to come down hard.”

Paxton looked at Deena and shook his head sadly.

Aaron blinked and looked at the elevator, which now stood with doors ajar. The elevator car was visible, jammed halfway down to the lower deck. Next to it was an open shaft with a ladder in it. He reached up to his chest and twisted the buckle to release his harness. “If you want to live,” he said, “follow me.”

He ran to the shaft, glanced in to make sure it was clear, then started climbing down as fast as he could. He looked up to see Deena, then Paxton, following him. He counted steps and calculated. Forty meters give or take. Maybe two rungs per meter.

Half a dozen steps and they emerged through the roof of the ’Mech bay. The far end of the bay was a shambles, the bulkhead blasted open to expose twisted metal trusses that were probably part of the crippled landing leg. The farthest ’Mech was twisted and melted almost beyond recognition. The next, a Centurion, was heavily damaged, a ceiling crane having fallen and wrapped itself around the ’Mech’s shoulders.

But the two ’Mechs on their end were intact, including his Black Hawk.

He glanced down. Just below them, the ladder passed through a maintenance catwalk and ran next to the Black Hawk at shoulder height. Good. They wouldn’t have to go all the way to the bay floor and climb back up.

He dropped to the grating of the catwalk. He smelled hot metal and burning plastic. A stream of smoke came from somewhere in the wreckage and whistled out through a breach in the bay door. He reached up to help Deena down as Paxton dropped the last two meters and landed lightly on his feet.

Aaron glanced at the ’Mech and considered his options. A ’Mech was a one-person vehicle. He should be able to squeeze Deena into the cramped cockpit in the space behind his command couch, but there’d be no room for Paxton. The Black Hawk had been left in midservice, cockpit hatch open, missile bays empty, the missile loading hatch on the right arm open. Down the catwalk, the crate for a replacement gyro sat open and empty, having been hastily tied down to the metal grating before liftoff. Draped over the edge of the crate were blue padded packing blankets.

He pointed. “Paxton, grab those and get down to that missile hatch. Climb inside, slam the hatch, and try to wrap yourself in padding. It’s going to be a rough ride. Deena, you come with me.”

Her eyes went wide. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to jump,” he said calmly.

“You’re insane!”

“Then stay here and die.” He climbed over the railing and dropped down next to the open hatch. “I’ll miss you. You’re the best valet I’ve ever had.”

She hesitated only a moment before climbing down after him. He was already in the cockpit, strapping himself in. He fitted the neurohelmet over his head with one hand, flipping switches to initiate an emergency startup sequence with the other. It was a risk, cold-starting the ’Mech’s fusion reactor like this, but there was no choice. If it didn’t work, they’d only be as dead as if he hadn’t tried.

He glanced over to see Paxton, a huge bundle of blankets under one arm, climbing into the missile hatch. He reached down into a compartment next to his seat and pulled out one of the headsets sometimes used to communicate with ground crew in the field.

“Deena, throw this down to Ulysses.” He tossed the headset over his shoulder and heard Deena grab it, then throw it down. Ulysses caught it one-handed, then ducked down and shut himself inside the ’Mech’s arm.

Deena squeezed in behind Aaron.

“Dog that for me,” he snapped, then heard the door cycle shut, and Deena grunt in the tight space.

The ’Mech started to come alive around them. The computer lit up. “Voice authorization required.”

“Duke Aaron Sandoval,” he said, followed by his code-phrase, “The hand is the sword; the sword is the hand.”

“Authorization recognized. ’Mech systems on-line.”

The ’Mech shifted around them, hard-points clunking against the restraining clamps. There was no ground crew to release them. He pushed the throttle forward and wiggled the stick. There was a whine, followed by a series of reports as the clamps snapped one by one.

“Captain, this is Duke Sandoval. Open ’Mech launch chute one.”

“Damn,” was the only reply, except for another muttered curse he couldn’t understand. The bay lurched around them, and he could feel the DropShip descending again, more rapidly this time.

“Captain, this is the Duke! Open that launch chute!”

“We’re… busy up here.”

“Open the chute!”

No answer.

He jockeyed the ’Mech’s controls to move them forward. He could see cracks in the main bay door in front of them, sunlight streaming through some of them. Meters above, he could see the main door actuators, one broken loose and waving as the ship rocked.

He activated the twin lasers on either side of the cockpit. He aimed manually and fired. The actuators began to glow red, then white.

They snapped, and abruptly the entire bay door peeled away, leaving them standing in front of a gaping hole in the hull. Hurricane-force winds ripped around them, sucking out anything that wasn’t tied down, with the exception of the fifty-ton Black Hawk.

He could see the gulf below them, the shallows dappled with patches of pale green, the deeper water in blues ranging from pale to indigo. The water looked perilously close.

He hated to land in the water. The ’Mech would survive, if he could land softly enough, but he wasn’t sure Paxton’s compartment would be watertight under the circumstances. He doubted it. The bodyguard could drown before they reached land, and that would be a regrettable loss.

The ship rolled on its axis, and on the horizon Aaron could see a large island, one shore ringed with high-rises, the other with warehouses and docks. In the middle, another spaceport sprawled, dotted with huge freighter ships.

Aaron tried to remember the maps he’d seen of New Canton. What was that island called? Barosa? It was the planet’s major transfer point for bulk space freight, as cargo was transferred to and from oceangoing ships and barges that serviced the rest of the planet. The island looked far away. Then Aaron noticed a light-colored finger extending out from the island in their direction.

A reef.

“Ulysses, we’re going wading. I’ll do my best to keep you dry, but this is going to be a hard ride.”

“Do it,” was the unhesitating reply.

There was another explosion below them, and the ship started to roll over. The hatch in front of them turned downward to face the whitecaps on the waves below. Instinctively, Aaron stepped the ’Mech forward and they dropped into open air.

He let the ’Mech free-fall to get clear of the DropShip. He glanced up through the canopy. Above them, he could see the ship starting to roll as another thruster sputtered. They had to get out from under it.

A Black Hawk was a powerful ’Mech, but if a thirty-five-hundredton DropShip landed on top of it, it would still splatter like a bug.

Whatever primal part of his brain the neurohelmet tapped into was ahead of his conscious mind. The gyros whined as the Black Hawk tumbled forward. He aimed his crosshairs in the direction of the reef, then hit the jump jets.

His stomach did a flip as the ’Mech went from free-fall to three Gs in an instant. It didn’t help that the angle of acceleration was nearly at a right angle to the surface of the gulf that was rapidly coming up to meet them. He realized he was looking down into a huge circular shadow on the water below, a reminder that, although he could no longer see the DropShip, it was very close behind him.

He watched the heat indicator climbing, and a cluster of yellow lights appeared on the jump jet status panel. It was fortunate, he thought, that he valued mobility on the battlefield so highly. He’d used much of his money and influence to have the Black Hawk fitted with experimental jets that increased power and firing duration by about sixty percent, but he was going to need to push them well past their limits today.

It helped that the ’Mech was running light, with no missiles in its ammo bays, but Aaron had no idea if that would be enough.

He heard Deena grunt and gasp as she tried to find a less painful position, and he reached up to swat her hand as it strayed too close to the yellow-and-black striped ejection handle over his head. It occurred to him he could probably survive by ejecting right now, but the ejection would kill Deena, and Paxton would fall to his death.

He reached over and flipped the command couch breaker toOFF . There would be no accidents.

She spoke. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“That remains to be seen.” Aaron glanced out at the water below. He saw his ’Mech’s shadow now, well separated from that of the DropShip.

Wind whistled past the cockpit. This would have to be far enough. If he waited any longer, they’d never survive the landing.

The Black Hawk rolled back again as he pushed the jump jets into overload. Red lights began to flash on his panel. Burning insulation stung his nose and eyes. The cockpit started to feel like a furnace, but that would be the least of their problems when they were in the water.

“Hold on,” he heard himself say.

Aaron had gone skydiving in his younger days, and his instructor had warned him not to trust his eyes when it came to opening his chute. “Your eyes will fool you until it’s much too late, and then I’ll have to pour your high-blood out of your boots.” He knew that things would look fine, and suddenly he’d realize how close the ground was, and it would come up to smack him.

That’s exactly what happened, except it was shallow water coming up far too fast. He moved the stick just a little, aiming for the deep water just past the reef. “Ulysses!” he yelled into the mike. “Hold your breath!”

Then they hit.

Deena yelped with pain as she was slammed down in her narrow refuge, metal digging into her body in a dozen places. There was a roar, like a waterfall turned inside out and backward. For a moment they were actually looking up at the sky from a hole they’d made in the water.

The gulf slammed in around them, and there was a grinding crunch as they slammed into the coral-covered bottom. The legs howled in protest, folding until every joint slammed against its stops.

Then they were still: green water surrounding the canopy, metal moaning and shrieking from the pressure and sudden cooling, bubbles from the heat sinks and red-hot jump jets making it impossible to see anything—even which way was up.

He didn’t need to see.

MechWarriors called it situational awareness. He’d oriented himself coming in. He knew where the reef was. He knew how far it was. He knew that Ulysses might have only seconds to live if he didn’t get up there.

He pushed the throttles and pulled the stick over hard. The legs moaned and hesitated. Then they were standing, moving, running across the bottom, up an underwater slope.

It grew brighter above his head, changing from green to wavering blue. His cockpit breached the surface, water streaming down the armorglass.

He raised the arm to where Paxton was hidden and opened the missile exhaust chutes loading hatch, hoping that any water that had gotten inside would quickly flow out. So much water was running off the ’Mech, it was impossible to tell how successful this was.

“Ulysses, are you with us?”

Nothing.

“Ulysses!”

There was a choking cough in his headset. “Still here, Lord Governor.”

The Black Hawk continued up the bank until they were on top of the reef. The water there was no more than a meter deep—barely enough to cover the ’Mech’s feet.

Aaron set the throttle at one quarter and started a slow trot toward the island, watching for dark water ahead that might require him to leap from one colony of coral to another. There was no telling what sort of environmental damage he was doing, but it couldn’t be helped.

Deena pushed her face close to the canopy.

“My Lord!”

He wasn’t sure if she was calling for his attention, or for her savior. He followed her gaze, just in time to see the crippled DropShip plunge into the gulf. White-hot metal met warm tropical water with explosive results. Fusion reactors detonated, spewing plasma, causing a rapid cascade of secondary explosions as the magazines went off.

The hull of the ship, what part they could still see of it, shattered like a dropped Christmas ball, and a ghostly hemisphere of shock wave moved out from the crash. It washed over them, shuddering the ’Mech with its force.

But that was only the beginning. Even as the broken bulk of the DropShip vanished into the gulf, a huge, white wall of water rose up, towering higher than the ’Mech’s cockpit. Aaron bit his lip. The jump jets were fried. The wave roared toward them, and there was no avoiding it.

And as it swallowed them, ripping the ’Mech off its feet like a toy, he remembered Deena’s question, and his answer:

That remains to be seen.

The entry bell on Erik’s cabin door rang, followed by an urgent pounding. He groaned, threw back the covers, and squinted at the holoclock display hovering over his bed. The floating green numbers told him he’d been asleep for two hours.

More pounding, followed by a woman’s muffled voice. “Commander! There’s been a flash-news report from New Canton, regarding the Duke!”

He considered ignoring the voice, but realized he was already awake. He reached over, clicked on the reading light, and pushed the hidden button that released the door’s security lock. “Come.”

The door slid open, and he recognized the uniformed woman standing there as Captain Malvern, the watch intelligence officer. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Commander, but we’ve just received a report that I knew you’d want to hear immediately.”

He asked skeptically, “A flash-news report? Do you people actually read that stuff?” Since the breakdown of the HPG, reliable news of distant events usually traveled no faster than a JumpShip could traverse the same distance, taking weeks or months to cross any substantial part of The Republic.

Even though jump travel was in itself instantaneous, logistics limited the speed of any physical object traveling between star systems. JumpShips had to recharge, people and cargo had to load and unload, DropShips had to undock from one JumpShip and transfer to another, or fly between jump points and the planets themselves.

In theory, information suffered no such limitations. The limiting factors for information travel were the speed of sound or data, in-system light-speed delays as the information was passed along from ship to ship, and the availability of the next charged ship which would leave the system to pass the information on to the next.

Occasionally, by random chance, a long chain of such rapid transfers would take place, information traveling rapidly from one arriving JumpShip to a departing one, and so on, system by system. By this method, news could travel across a Prefecture in days or hours instead of weeks, flashing over like an electric arc crossing a gap.

The problem was that information travel was completely unpredictable and notoriously unreliable. Information was almost certain to travel via an indirect and circuitous route, through an unknown number of relay stations of unknown reliability. Even in the best of times, the information tended to “drift” and change as it was passed along, and the potential for malicious manipulation was unlimited. Some in the communications and intelligence community had started calling the phenomenon of rapid information transfer “flash-news,” but still others called it the “new HPG,” which in this case stood for “Hyper-Pap Generator.”

Even if the random tidbit was of potential interest, Erik didn’t see how it could be trustworthy. Yet Captain Malvern seemed sincerely to believe that this flash-news was important. He couldn’t see her face clearly while she was back-lit from the hallway, but she looked grave.

He sat up in bed, suddenly feeling wide awake. “Out with it.”

“The report said that Duke Aaron Sandoval’s DropShip had an accidental thruster explosion and crashed into the Gulf of Emeralds shortly after takeoff from the Capital Spaceport.”

“Survivors?”

She lowered her head. “All hands were said to be lost.”

“It could just be a rumor,” he said, “even misinformation planted by the Cappies.” But even as he said it, he sensed there was at least some truth to the report.

Erik felt his body turn to ice. The Duke is dead? What should I do now?

He wasn’t sure what bothered him more: that the report might be true, or that grief was only the third or fourth emotion he felt upon hearing it.