The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

For some reason that made Iceni want to laugh, so she did. “CEO Kolani didn’t even give me a chance to rebel before she tried to take over.” But then Kolani had been talking to Hardrad about that delayed order and implicating Iceni in that matter, if Hardrad could be trusted on that count. Hardrad can’t be trusted on any count, but in this case telling me the truth about Kolani’s suspicions would have served his purposes, and I already knew how Kolani feels about me.

She looked at Akiri. “Tell the mobile forces with us to bring themselves to full combat alert, and make sure their true readiness status is sent onward to Kolani’s group.”

An alarm sounded, followed by a rippling of Iceni’s display before the virtual images solidified again. “What happened?”

“A virus,” Marphissa reported. “Delivered in the net connecting us to the rest of the flotilla. It tried to activate the worms planted by the snakes, but we’d already purged them.”

Damn. “Can we put filters between us and the mobile forces loyal to Kolani?”

“That’s what stopped the virus, Madam CEO. I can’t guarantee that the filters will stop the next one.”

Double damn. “Break the net connections to Kolani’s warships.”

“War—?” Marphissa started to ask, then caught herself. “Yes, Madam CEO. What about the . . . warships at the main facility? Anything they tried to send would take an hour and a half to get here, and anything CEO Kolani tried to relay through them would take more than three hours.”

“Keep them in the link for now.” Iceni gave her display an irate look. Instead of getting accurate updates from those other warships, she would now have to depend on the sensors on the cruisers to know what was really happening.

Accurate updates? “They were already falsifying their data feeds to us, weren’t they?” Iceni asked.

The operations line worker nodded. “The movements we’re seeing don’t match what their updates were telling us. It was . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Say it.” Iceni’s own voice wasn’t loud, but it carried very well to the line worker and everyone else on the bridge.

“Yes, Madam CEO. It was clumsy.” Now that he had voiced a criticism of superiors, even though they were on other units, the line worker seemed defiantly eager to keep talking. “They could have matched their false feeds to their actual maneuvers, knowing that we would see any discrepancy; instead, they just kept sending us data saying nothing had changed.”

Iceni watched the line worker, who had flushed as he returned her gaze with worried eyes. She wondered if any line workers on Kolani’s units had realized the need to tailor the false data feeds but hesitated to appear to question or contradict superiors. “That’s a good assessment,” she finally said, drawing a hastily concealed look of disbelief from the line worker. “We need to think of things like that before we give away any information to CEO Kolani. What is your rating?”

“Senior line worker class two, Madam CEO.”

“You’re now a senior line worker class one. Keep thinking, and tell me what I need to know.” Iceni turned back to face Akiri. “Make that promotion happen. I am pleased to see that your crew is well trained and knowledgeable.”

Akiri, who had been on the verge of scowling, perked up and bestowed an approving look on the line worker.

“I . . . I have a connection with CEO Drakon,” the comm line worker cried with relief.

The window that opened before Iceni showed Drakon in combat armor, smoking wreckage in the background. It took her a moment to realize that the wreckage had once been the ISS command center. She had toured that facility once, but only once, feeling half a prisoner already until safely outside the ISS headquarters again.

Drakon’s eyes seemed to hold more weariness than triumph, but he waved around in a casual gesture. “We’ve got it. There are individual snakes still running loose, but the heads are all dead, and we’ll catch the rest pretty quick.”

“Where’s Hardrad?”

“That’s sort of a metaphysical question now.”

Iceni had to pause to realize what that meant. “I didn’t know you had such a dark sense of humor, CEO Drakon.”

“It’s now General Drakon. Like you said, we need to cast off Syndicate ways of doing things.”

“I see.” A unilateral decision on Drakon’s part. Not a decision she could protest, but still a worrisome move. “Make sure you examine whatever remains of Hardrad carefully before disposing of it. There may be tiny data-storage devices hidden within him.”

“There were,” Drakon said. “But they were all dead-manned to his metabolism. When he died, they autowiped.”

“Pity. Since I now know that you have the planetary surface under control, I must focus on my own task. There’s a battle to fight up here.”

“Maybe Kolani will rethink that once she learns the snakes on the planet have been wiped out.”