The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

He fell forward, rolling behind the nearest streetlamp base, weapon in hand as he searched the night for the assassin. The streetlights came on, triggered not by the oncoming night but by sensors that had detected the shot, and sirens hooted nearby. The police would be here soon, he would give a report, and they would search for the killer.

Rogero knew they wouldn’t find anyone. This felt too much like the work of a professional. He raised his free hand to touch the bleeding scrape across the back of his head. Someone had tried to kill him, but who that was mattered less than who had ordered the hit. Or had he escaped death? Could the shot have been aimed to miss, a warning? If so, from who? And would that warning have been intended for him or General Drakon?

But whoever had fired had known he would be meeting with President Iceni’s representatives and had known where that would be so they could predict what route Rogero would have to take back to his quarters.

* * *

“LAUNCH the bombardment,” Drakon ordered. He stood in the Free Taroan command center, eyes on the big map display, which had rotated and risen so that he could watch everything play out. Ideally, he would be out there, with the attack, but there was too much going on this time, too many widely dispersed things happening, and he needed to be somewhere he could watch it all with the fewest possible distractions near at hand.

The tracks of kinetic projectiles fired by the warships in orbit appeared on the display, curving downward like a precise sort of rainfall. All of the projectiles were timed to hit at the same moment, and instead of falling across the three targeted valleys, they were aimed in curtains that dropped toward the defenses on the rims of the mountains surrounding the valleys and along the narrow coastlines where the valleys met the sea.

Massed along the other sides of those valley rims were Drakon’s brigades, supported by some of the Free Taroan forces. Three brigades, three valleys, each valley held by an understrength battalion. Overwhelming force deployed against the most hard-core portions of the loyalist ranks. Victory wasn’t in doubt, but if they couldn’t time it just so, and the snakes blew everything to hell, then the victory would be a hollow one, as well as costing the lives of more of his soldiers.

Drakon’s eyes rested on one of the falling projectiles. Just a chunk of metal, aimed precisely, gaining energy with every meter it fell. There were a lot of meters between orbit and the surface, and the projectiles were already moving fast when they were launched. The seconds to impact vanished in a flurry of numbers spinning by too fast to read; then the rounds hit.

It was as if volcanoes had erupted in long lines along the ridges, rock and dust flying upward, the ground trembling, a sustained roar of noise rather than single crashes from impacts. The defenses along the ridges vanished, replaced by rubble.

He had been close to bombardments like that. Drakon could have closed his eyes and seen the rocks hitting, sometimes those fired by Syndicate warships to batter Alliance defenses before he sent his own soldiers in to attack and seize the ground, sometimes rocks launched by Alliance warships against him. Men and women as well as structures disappeared under those bombardments, not simply killed but their bodies blown into fragments, leaving battlefields empty and strangely devoid of the dead. That’s what hell really is. Not those places with fire and demons but just a place where death has been, and nothing remains because humans have wiped out all trace that humans or any other life had ever been there.

I know how Conor Gaiene feels. I’m tired of turning places into hell.

But I don’t know any other way to get this done that wouldn’t kill a lot more people.

* * *

THE sentry gaping at the violence erupting along the ridges died without even knowing Roh Morgan was nearby. A moment later, the antiair vehicle the sentry had been guarding rocked as a limpet mine tore out its insides and killed its operator. Under the distraction of the bombardment hitting, commandos in stealth suits who had carefully infiltrated over the last few days struck at the same time, carrying out pinpoint attacks to destroy mobile defenses which had parked among the populace to discourage bombardments aimed at them.