The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

SUB-CEO Marphissa seemed happy to see her, but then Iceni couldn’t remember the last time one of her subordinates had been foolish enough to look unhappy at her appearance. Yes, I do. It was that executive who was skimming funds. He looked very unhappy. Not as unhappy then as he did when he was punished by being given a uniform and sent off to help in the hopeless defense of that star system near Alliance territory. Where was that again? It doesn’t matter now. All the defenders died, the Syndicate Worlds recaptured the star system eventually, and in the end the Syndicate Worlds lost the war, so it meant nothing. Something worth dying for, Drakon said. Yes. We all need that.

“You said we’d be conducting exercises, Madam President?” Marphissa asked.

“That’s correct. Are all of the ground forces soldiers aboard?”

“Yes. One squad on each of the three heavy cruisers, and the three shuttles are stowed on the exteriors of the cruisers as well. They brought a lot of equipment and supplies with them.”

“Good. We’ll head out toward one of the jump points and put the warships and soldiers through their paces to make sure everyone is still sharp and practice coordinated actions.” That was the sort of thing CEOs routinely did, making people run in circles to show they could, so no one would question it.

“Which jump point?”

Iceni settled herself in her seat on the cruiser’s bridge. Midway had a lot of jump points for other stars, eight to be exact. It was that and not population or wealth or industrial capability that gave Midway its name and made Midway a valuable and important star system. It had also earned the star system a hypernet gate, which in turn made the system even more valuable.

One of those jump points led to a star named Pele. That was the jump point the Alliance fleet had used not too long ago on its way to learn more about the alien enigma race. Except for occasional futile attempts to gain information about the enigmas, no Syndicate Worlds’ ships had made that jump for more than half a century. When the enigmas had attacked the Midway Star System, they had appeared at that jump point.

As she looked at the representation on her display of the jump point for Pele, Iceni remembered what Togo had told her concerning Colonel Morgan. Which star system had it been, she wondered, where Morgan had almost died? It struck Iceni then that Morgan’s life had been shadowed by terrible events, yet at the same time Morgan had repeatedly been so fortunate that luck alone didn’t seem enough to explain her survival until now, let alone her status with Drakon.

Have the living stars looked out for you, Colonel Morgan? But, then, why have they also been so cruel to you?

There were no answers to those questions—there were never any answers to questions like that—and Sub-CEO Marphissa was awaiting instructions. Iceni pretended to study her display for a moment, then waved in the general direction of two of the jump points, one of which led to Taroa and the other to Kane. “Head that way.”

The closest of those two jump points, that for Kane, was out past the orbit of the last planet in the star system, a frozen ball of gas and rock mockingly nicknamed Hotel for the abandoned research facility sitting vacant on it. That put it almost six and a half light-hours distant from where Iceni’s flotilla sat. At point one light, they could cover that distance in sixty-five hours, or almost three days. But charging toward the jump point at that velocity would attract attention. Was it riskier to attract that attention or to spend twice as long getting there at a more routine point zero five speed? Put that way, it didn’t seem wise to loiter on the way to the jump point. Every minute might count.

“All warships are at maximum fuel state?” Iceni asked. Her flotilla status readout showed that they were, but no one could trust those figures. Unit commanders routinely gun-decked the real numbers in order to look better. A good flotilla commander found ways to keep track of the actual data despite that.

“Yes. Ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent fuel status for all units,” Marphissa replied immediately.

“Then let’s see how well these units can sustain acceleration,” Iceni announced. “Bring formation velocity to point one light and hold it there.”