The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

A reputation based on actions that had resulted in his being exiled to Midway, Drakon thought ruefully, along with Morgan and Malin, who had chosen to follow him here. “It hasn’t done much for my promotion potential in the past, but maybe that’s about to change.” Assuming he won, and survived, he would go from being a rather low-level military-specialist CEO within the sprawling bureaucracy of the Syndicate Worlds to being the seniormost military commander in an independent star system.

Tense from waiting, stuck waiting six more minutes for the new time line to run out and looking for something to distract part of his mind, Drakon seized on the idea of change. Iceni wanted to go back to calling mobile forces “warships.” Maybe some other changes were worth considering. “What do you two think about going back to the old rank structure? Dropping the CEO and civilian pay scale stuff and using military titles again?”

“We’ve been doing it this way for about a hundred and fifty years,” Malin said. “It’s what the troops and everyone are used to.”

Unsurprisingly, that made Morgan jump in on the other side. “I think it’d be a great idea to go back to the old ranks, General Drakon.”

He liked the sound of that. General Drakon. And uniforms for high-ranking military leaders again instead of corporate suits. Something besides an executive specialty and assignment code to indicate what he was. And not just what he was but, in a lot of ways, who he was. “We need to break with the past, and maybe the best way to do that is to go even farther into the past.” Just decide it and get it done. Don’t go through a hundred layers of corporate bureaucracy, then wait for years before a decision finally wends its way back down saying no, and why the hell are you thinking instead of doing what you’re told? Was it that bad in the Alliance? They hadn’t been able to beat the Syndicate Worlds in a century of fighting, not until Black Jack reappeared, so the Alliance probably didn’t offer any perfect world, either.

But he had never cared for identifying himself as CEO Drakon on those rare occasions when he sent transmissions to Alliance military leaders. They were generals and admirals, and wasn’t he, too? “I’m a soldier, dammit.”

“Yes, sir,” Malin agreed. “Maybe the new titles would help establish a new spirit in the troops.”

An alert chimed with deceptive gentleness and Drakon checked the incoming message. “CEO-level comms have been picked up between one of the mobile forces cruisers and the ISS headquarters.”

Morgan cursed. “That bitch is trying to roll us! She knows we can’t back out now!”

“We know Hardrad has received his orders,” Malin countered. “He’s probably questioning Iceni about it, too.”

“It doesn’t matter which of you is right. We have no choice now but to go in.” No choice but to face the potential for horrendous disaster. The ISS had nuclear weapons buried in the major population centers on this planet, but detonating those nukes required the use of codes held by Iceni. The snakes could blow the nukes anyway, but it would take a lot longer to trigger them without Iceni’s cooperation. If she was cooperating with the snakes, the ground forces attack might end in glowing craters rather than victory, but it was impossible to halt the attack at this point without surrendering to the snakes. “We go in.”

The timer on his heads-up display scrolled rapidly toward zero, meaning it was time to focus on that and forget the distractions. “All assault forces stand by. Jump-off at zero minute.” As the green “go” alert flashed, Drakon sent a command that was instantly relayed to transmitters that bounced the message out beyond the planet’s atmosphere, to every orbiting station and facility and every base on every moon where both ground forces and snakes were present. The order could only travel at light speed, meaning it would take minutes and sometimes hours to reach the farthest facilities, but any reports of his attacks on the planet would come in behind it. His people would get the order to attack seconds before the snakes at their locations knew anything had happened back on the planetary surface.

With the next motion, he switched his circuit to the frequency linking the portion of the attack force he was personally leading in. Half-terrified and half-exhilarated, he felt adrenaline surging, while visions of a hundred earlier battles and engagements flashed through his memory as he began yet another. “Assault Force One, fire and move!”

A one-hundred-meter-wide area free of obstacles or cover, grass- and marble- and stone-surfaced, separated the ISS complex from surrounding buildings. Against civilian rioters, that offered plenty of free-fire zone, and even a small number of regular troops trying to assault the ISS building faced formidable defenses. But no complex could be designed to withstand a massed assault by so many troops, so close to their target, armed with so many heavy weapons.