“I know plenty of politicians who love money.”
“Then you should remember that there is a thing that politicians love more than money. Power. And in some cases their people.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”
“I do not care whether you believe it. One day in your heart you may understand it. And even that does not matter to me all that much.”
“You are a strange man, Beecher.”
“No stranger than you, Stormtrooper 13.”
He turned and strode out. Monger’s eyes were on him as he departed. I could not tell whether they held respect or fear. I watched Beecher through the camera eyes of the surveillance drones until he got into his ground car and drove away.
“Did you enjoy your chat with the kaffir?” Doctor Olson asked.
“Your prejudice is your least attractive feature, Doctor,” I said.
“Do not be taken in by Beecher. He is a very smooth man, but he is also cunning.”
“I could tell he was wicked by the way he agreed to try and help.”
“He has his own reasons for that.”
“I am sure, just like everybody else.”
“I thought StarForce were selflessly laying down their lives for us poor primitives.”
“We get paid to do that. There are health benefits too. And pensions. For some of us.” I kept my voice flat. Her eyes were hard and cold and I could not quite figure out why. It was almost as if she expected me to take her side and was disappointed that I hadn’t.
“Is that why you fight, you and your friends?”
I looked at her hard and long and I could not think of anything to say. I was suddenly bone tired. There was no way to explain it to her. I had been fighting the Brood when she was a child. I had seen worlds burn and millions perish and there had been nothing I could do about it.
I had watched men like Ragequit die again and again to protect people like her. He had lost himself a bit at a time, fighting a war he could not hope to live to see the end of. He was still doing it, and he would keep doing it, if asked. He deserved better than her sneers.
But now did not seem like the time to bring that up. “Yep. That’s why I do it. I can’t speak for the rest of them.”
“You’re just a mercenary like the Weapon Smiths.”
I took a stab in the dark. “We’re nothing like them. We didn’t smuggle Raximander into the Jihad vault along with the rest of the weapons you bought. They did. They’re the ones ultimately responsible.”
She stared at me hard. “Are you sure about that?”
“I am.” I wasn’t, but I’ve never let that stop me when I am arguing with someone.
“Maybe your friend Monger had something to do with it.”
“What do you mean by that?” She was telling me the same thing as Beecher. Was it just prejudice against the head of the Loyalists or did they really know something? Locals always have access to knowledge that no outsider can have.
“He’s been doing deals with Ishtar. It looks like they might have a falling out though.”
I thought about the way the businessman and the serpent had been staring at each other. There certainly had been tension in the air there. Maybe Monger had got more than he bargained for. Or maybe less than he hoped. I was tempted to call him back and ask him some hard questions, but I figured there would be time enough for that after the evacuation had begun.
You’ll be astonished to learn that I was wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You’ll want to hear this,” the Colonel said over the Grid. I could tell by her tone that she meant exactly the opposite.
“Patch me in,” I said with all the enthusiasm of a man told he’ll be facing a firing squad in the morning. It had only been an hour since the conference, and I was supervising the new intake of drones as they fortified the spaceport. No rest for the wicked.
“I tell you, it’s treachery,” said Otis, Beecher’s right hand man. He had not been at the meeting. “Commander Beecher has not returned from your conference.”
“He certainly left,” I said. “I watched him go myself.”
I called up the footage and Orbital spliced it into the feed. You could see Beecher give a hand signal to his driver and the whole cavalcade roar out of the dropzone. The forcefield shimmered and parted before him and then he was roaring away across the city, the white truce flags fluttering from his vehicles pennants.
“That could easily be faked,” said Otis. “We all know what you Feds are capable of.”
I wished that just for once we were half as clever and as wicked as everybody thought. It would make life so much easier. Instead I said, “I talked with him. He was going to give the order to evacuate.”
“How convenient that his last wish was to fall in with your plans. Before he disappeared.”
“He was a sensible man,” I said.
“So you say.”
“We have nothing to do with Beecher’s disappearance,” said the Colonel. “Let us look into it and we’ll get back to you.”
She cut the line, which was not the most diplomatic thing to do but I could tell she was running out of patience. She immediately called up surveillance footage of the cavalcade roaring back into Sternheim.
Our drones had followed it for a while but then were called back to deal with an attack by Raximander along the boundaries of Loyalist territory. All we had after that were the pictures from Orbital. We could trace Beecher’s column by its heat signature but not much more. The Colonel accelerated the recording and we saw that the cavalcade suddenly came to a stop and did not start again.
“You’re going to need to investigate that,” she said.
“On it,” I said. I was already moving out of the bunker. My robogrunts fell into place around me as we headed for the takeoff field. A shuttle had already been assigned.
The refugee crowd parted all around us. They stared at the grunts as if they had never seen the like before. I was already getting updates from the feeds of the drones that were being redeployed into the area. Goliaths were on their way. Cybertanks to follow, just in case we needed them.
It was not exactly reassuring. I strapped in and watched the city blur by below me. I already had an idea of what I was going to see on the ground. The drones were showing me the wreckage of the cavalcade, white flags fluttering over the burned-out shells of armored groundcars, corpses in the uniforms of the Legion sprawled all across the broken paving. I could not see any sign of Beecher’s corpse.
“Not looking good,” I said into my helmet microphone.
The shuttle set us down near where the ambush had happened. The vehicles had been hit from both sides by men using blasters. The impact on the armor was clear.
“Looks like the Weapon Ships have done everybody a real favor this time,” I said into the Grid. “The increased firepower they provided Raximander with is really making a difference.”
“Hush,” said the Colonel. “Let’s hope nobody has hacked our lines.”
“I’m starting to think Raximander has,” I said. “He hit Beecher’s convoy on his way home.”
“Might just have been an opportunistic attack.”
I picked my way through the corpses, turning them over with the barrel of my reaper. So far I had not found any sign of the Temperance Legion commander. I did not have any hopes he had survived. The way things were going he was probably either Rax’s hostage or his host body. I could not decide which would be worse.
“He might just have got lucky,” the Colonel said. I could tell from her tone that she no more believed this than me. She was just playing devil’s advocate.
“Funny that,” I said, thinking about what Otis had said to me. “He gets hit coming back from a conference with us.”
“The militia can’t possibly believe we are behind this,” said the Colonel.
“I think they can believe anything they want to. You’ve seen what they are like.”
There were a lot of dead
bodies. I asked Orbital for a count, comparing the number of corpses in Legion uniforms with the number we knew had set out from our base. It was an easy enough comparison to make. It looked like there was at least one body missing. I was totally unsurprised to discover it was Beecher’s.
“What are you up to, Raximander?” I asked of nothing in particular.
“Who are you talking to?” said a voice I recognized as belonging to Otis. Surveillance drones had flashed a warning on my HUD of his approach minutes back. Robogrunts were watching him in case he got any ideas about avenging his fallen boss.
“Myself,” I said. “Can’t a man have a simple conversation with his invisible evil twin without being asked dumb questions?”
“You suffer from Blitz syndrome?” Otis asked.
“You’re just one of the surprisingly large number of people who have asked me that recently.”
“I notice you haven’t answered.” Beecher’s henchman was quick and he was sharp. I would have expected nothing less under the circumstances. He had that grim, hollow-eyed look of a man who has lost loved ones. I know it all too well.
“I don’t suffer from it,” I said. “But according to my psych assessments I am borderline psychotic. Does that answer your question?”
“Yes,” said Otis. He came over to stand beside me. A bunch of his bodyguards came with him. If they were disturbed by the blank-eyed stare of my robogrunts they gave no sign of it.
“You got any more loaded questions?”
“Where’s Beecher?”
“You’re not going to find him here. He’s been taken.”
“By who? The Orthodox? The Jihad? Or . . .”
“The or I think. Raximander was the one behind this attack.”
“How’d he know?”
“Watched the exit from our base would be my guess,” I said as blandly as I could manage. It was as good an explanation as any.
Otis glared at me. “I do not believe you.”
“I did not think you would but that doesn’t really matter, does it? Look at these bodies. There are corpse warriors and elites as well as some dead Jihadi.”
“Those burns come from energy weapons such as your forces use.”
“And the Ishtarian blasters that Raximander has.”
“I will have vengeance if you are behind this.” It came to me that he was not bluffing or posing. He had a genuine affection for Beecher and a respect too. He was acting out of his own raw emotions and simply blaming the nearest thing at hand.
“Where have they taken him, I wonder,” I said.
“You think he’s still alive?”
“It’s possible but I don’t believe it. Beecher is exactly the sort of man Raximander needs to absorb. He would know everything we discussed in our strategy meeting, and all of your plans and secrets.”
Otis went pale at the thought. He had been so busy being angry that he had not taken any of this into account. I was thinking such an action would have been remarkably selective of Raximander. Normally he would just devour anything that came into his net.
Once more my mind drifted back to what he had told me during our first meeting. It looked like he really was trying to keep the number of people he assimilated below a certain threshold. I found myself contemplating the mad idea that perhaps Raximander had been telling the truth. If so, that meant a number of things needed to be considered.
What if he really was not a spearhead of a new Assimilator Brood but something else entirely, some sort of splintered sub-entity that made use of the Brood’s powers for its own ends?
If so, how long could he keep this up? He was playing a dangerous game if his progenitor might reemerge, but what of it? What punishment would be inflicted on him worse than being assimilated?
Could a progenitor punish an entity that was part of itself anyway? It would be like me trying to punish my own hand. Presumably it would hurt just the inflictor just as much as the inflicted. Or would it? What did I really know of the way the Brood mind worked?
If Raximander had not lied about being independent, could he have been telling the truth about other things?
It seemed as if he was working according to some plan, but it might not be his plan. It might be devised by someone else. The question then was who? My money was on the Weapon Ship. It was either them or us, and I was pretty sure it was not us. I would have noticed if Raximander had been present on Orbital.
Then I thought about all of the other deceptions that Carla had worked and realized that I could not be as certain of that as I would have liked.
Marginally, my money was still on the Weapon Ships. It was also possible Raximander had hitched a ride with some unknown smuggler or had been left here dormant. It had happened on other worlds.
I wondered if all the waking Brood infiltrators went through the same stage as Raximander. Perhaps they all believed they were independent until the moment came when the Overmind emerged in all of its evil glory. I had never had a chance to enquire, or, to tell the truth, the motivation.
Otis stalked around surrounded now by his troopers. He stared at the dead bodies, many of whom must have belonged to people he knew. He was clearly wondering whether they would spring to life. “We should burn them,” he said. “To be sure.”
I gave the order. The robogrunts used their reapers. The oily smoke from burning flesh rose into the sky.
I returned to the shuttle and then to the spaceport, wondering what else was going to go wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I was back in the bunker by the time Monger called in. “We are ready to begin moving but we can’t. The Legion won’t let us out. They’ve grabbed most of the Jihad territory on our border including the arms factories.”
It seemed Otis was already looking toward a post-Rax future. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure his people were well-provided for with weapons.
The Colonel called up a new map. We studied it. The great circular outline of Sternheim resembled a red donut showing all the places Rax had hit. The Loyalist core was the hole in the middle.
“You were right. He’ll probably strike there next,” the Colonel said, “which makes getting the Loyalists out all the more urgent.”
“How are we going to do that? The Legion won’t let them pass through now that Otis in charge. And now, Aryan territory is mostly controlled by Raximander if surveillance is right.”
“We could airlift them.” She pursed her lips then shook her head. “We can’t spare the transport and there are too many of them anyway.”
“We could drive a new corridor through the Legion position,” Ragequit bellowed.
“And start another brawl with them?” the Colonel said. “We’d be doing Raximander’s work for him.”
“We need to put pressure on Otis,” I said. “Get him to agree with the evacuation. Beecher already had. He could see the sense of it.”
“Otis is not Beecher,” the Colonel said.
“More’s the pity.”
“We’ll just need to get somebody to agree to the passthrough,” I said. “We can always route the transport cars round the edge of the city once that is done.”
The Colonel nodded. “I’ll get Carla to work on that. We need to work out some way of neutralizing Raximander that does not involve nukes.”
“That’s going to be tricky. We’ll need to sterilize the whole city inch by inch and keep doing it while we clear the tunnels down below.”
“You’ll be the man to spearhead that,” the Colonel said. “Raid his territory, find his production nodes. It will at least put some pressure on him.” She raised her hand and spoke swiftly onto the Grid.
“I think we’ve got it,” she said after a few moments’ conversation. “We can bring the Loyalists in through the corridor in Jihad territory. Doctor Olsen has agreed to it but she says she can’t guarantee support from all the Jihadis who are still out there. They don’t recognize her authority or the authority of anybody who’s already at the spaceport.”
&nb
sp; “Still sore about what I did to them the other day,” I said.
“It’s not always about you. Think about it. Those guys who are still out there are the hardcore. They don’t believe in cooperating with the Feds. They’d rather take their chances fighting with Raximander on their own.”
“It’s kind of admirable,” I said. “Admirable but stupid. They have no chance against Raximander. He’ll eat them alive and use them as cannon fodder.”
“They die fighting,” said the Colonel.
“We can inscribe that on their tomb stones. Or maybe tattoo it on their flesh once Raximander has assimilated them.”
“You’re a nasty man,” said the Colonel.
“Yeah, but I’m right about this.”
“We’re going to have to create a secure corridor through Jihadi territory. They’re weaker than the Legion and disobeying their recognized leader. We’ll bring the Loyalists out through that. We can then start pulling the others in through Jihadi territory.”
“If they still want to come. They might think they’re all going to get what Beecher got.”
“That bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“And it doesn’t bother you? He might have become our biggest ally down here if Raximander had not got him.”
“Might,” she said. “And he’s not here now, so the question is academic.”
“Probably not to him.”
“You liked him, didn’t you? That’s what this is about.”
“I think we could use all the allies we can get, and they’re getting thinner on the ground every day.”
“Can’t disagree with that.”
“Raximander is probably making more and more friends too.”
“You could always ask him what he did with Beecher the next time you see him. Which is going to be soon. I am assigning you half the grunts. Go down below and make him sweat. It will at least distract him while we evacuate.”
“I doubt he’ll give me any straight answers.”
“Get going,” she said.
The Colonel’s call came in just as I finished assembling my force at the entrance to the tunnels.