Part 4 – Stalemate

HOLOGRAPHIC RECEPTOR ON>>>

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 152435>>>RECEPTION>>> A young man in a red shirt with the stars of the Alliance on it steps forward from ranks of similarly-clad companions and stares at the holocamera with piercing blue eyes.

“I won’t back down,” the youth proclaims.

A young girl in the same sort of shirt steps from a legion of young women, female mirror to the males. With blonde hair scraped back into a tight bun and equally blue eyes, she repeats, “I won’t back down.”

Both of them face each other across a green pasture under a partially overcast, somewhat unsettled sky. The lines of young people behind them step forward, forming walls of humanity behind each. The first two youths pivot until both are facing the holocamera. Above them, the sky breaks and a shaft of sunlight lights up both.

“We won’t back down,” they say together.

All of the ranks of young people arrayed on either side behind them snap about in unison to face the camera. Like the pair of leaders, the voices are a stern drone.

“We won’t back down!”

“The Grand Galactic Alliance,” the young man says.

“Will never back down,” the girl finishes for him.

A little streamer of text unspools across the bottom of the hologram, spelling out, “Paid for by the Council for the Restoration of the Alliance.”

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 666789 - NOVA TERRA - GOVERNMENT SPONSORED>>>RECEPTION>>> A man in a black uniform with red trim sits at the desk alone before the Committee for the Conduct of the War. On his shoulder patch, the dome of the Assembly rises—the emblem of the Council Guard. On his high collar, in place of buttons, are tiny brass skulls. Their meaning seems equally clear.

“Thank you for joining us” Assembly Grantholm, at his usually perch heading the Committee pauses with deliberate disrespect to feign reading off his holopad “Commandant Reinhardt.”

“It’s my pleasure, of course,” Reinhardt replies. He is a bronzed, hawk-faced man of sun-bleached eyebrows and blonde hair buzzed in the high-and-tight pattern of a marine. A faint five-o’clock shadows darkens his sharp jaw line and there is the sense that no amount of grooming is likely to clear it away.

“Commandant,” Grantholm repeats the title in a tone that leaves little doubt he finds it dubious, “can you provide us the mission statement for your organization?”

“Assemblyman,” Reinhardt replied, “you certainly have it, amongst the many other holofiles provided freely to your office.”

Grantholm smiles unpleasantly. “Indulge us please, sir.”

Reinhardt shrugs and makes a show of straightening out his uniform before replying. “The mission of the Council Guard is to ensure the safety and safe operations of the High Council and its attendant bodies.”

“Thank you,” Grantholm replied, and then turns his gaze to the proceeding’s onlookers and the hoverdrones always monitoring. He raises his voice. “The safety and safe operations of the High Council,” he repeats.

“That is what I said,” Reinhardt points out without prompting.

Grantholm meets his gaze once again with a flutter of irritation to his eyes. “And perhaps you can explain to this body, then, how that charter empowers your organization to serve in a paramilitary capacity on worlds where the High Council is not present.”

“The High Council is present everywhere,” Reinhardt replies in a deceptively mild tone. “It is the executive body of the Alliance, of all its worlds. It is the final arbiter of law and order throughout the allied stars.” He offers a wolfish grin. “I’m surprised to have to point out basic civics to an Assemblyman.”

That births a titter of laughter from the onlookers and a reddening of Grantholm’s features. “That’s a clever reading of the charter, and the law, Commandant. Just as clever as the reading that presumes what is effectively the High Council’s security force can have access to military supplies and weaponry at a level equal to the Alliance armed forces.”

“The safety,” Reinhard states, jabbing a finger onto the desktop before, “and safe operations of the Council!” He glares at Grantholm and the other Assemblymen on the Committee. “Are those not threatened throughout the galaxy?”

“You think Alliance citizens facing hard times are a threat to the Alliance?” Grantholm asks with a near-triumphant voice.

“I think there’s a war on, Assemblyman,” Reinhardt fires back. “And I think that anything that threatens the High Council’s mission to end it and bring the rebel worlds back into the fold is the business of the Council Guard.” He leans back in his seat fold his hands in his lap. “Even if that includes dealing with citizens who’ve forgotten their place.”

“Forgotten their—” Grantholm cuts himself off. Beside him, his fellow Committee members are muttering. “Sir,” he resumes, “might I offer you a refresher in civics? The citizens, the people of the Alliance are the final arbiters in our system. The High Council answers to them. That is their place.”

“The people elected the High Council,” Reinhardt replies. “As you say. And this current slate of High Councilors, on the people’s behalf, has expanded the scope of operations of my organization in the light of the growing sense of crisis throughout the Alliance. That mission, the Council’s mission, is my mission.”

He smirks. “So, you could say the Council Guard is carrying out the people’s will.”

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 920549>>>RECEPTION>>> A mob clamors through the streets of Dawning on New Jefferson and clusters towards the marble front steps of the Legislature Building. Signs and placards read “RECALL LEVINE” and “END THE DEBATE” and “NO MORE REBELLION”. It is a mixed group, though well-dressed ringleaders have the look of off-work legislative staffers.

Senator Cupp steps out the front entrance of the building, passing between the columns of its façade, and pausing as the crowds reaches the bottom steps. His rosy-hue brightens as he looks down upon them, seems surprised at the sudden eruption of fervor. Glancing to either side, he takes obvious notice of suited security guards taking up places around the perimeter. His gaze brightens as he eyes HoloMedia hover drones whisking a couple dozen meters above the Legislative Square and converging on the disturbance.

“Friends,” he calls down to them, “what brings you to disturb our proceedings this day?”

An ugly roar rises up from the mob. One woman with a bullhorn ascends a couple steps and raises it to her face. “We want Levine out!” she bawls. The crowd erupts with her words.

Cupp pats the air with his hands, calmingly. “Friends, citizens, we can’t devolve to mob rule. There is a process for this!”

“The war will never end with Levine in charge!” a man shouts from the crowd.

Cupp again gestures for calm as the multitudes jeer. “And, as I said, there is a peaceful, law-abiding solution to that.”

“He lied to us!” someone else shouts. “Levine led us into this disaster. He never told us it would be this way!”

“We want things back the way they were!” another member of the crowd shrieks.

“Fellow citizens,” Cupp proclaims with near-theatric heft—and, suddenly, the appearance of spontaneity to this event frays, appears more artificial. “The solution to your problems—our problems—is the system. Our constitution spells out the remedy. And that remedy is signing the petition for the Recall of the President.”

The mob thunders its approval.

Cupp turns to a young woman behind him, who appears to be one of his staff. She hands him a holopad, which he holds up to the crowd. “It’s easy,” he says. “Go to the Council for Civility’s Holosite, authenticate with your thumbprint, and click the button, authorizing the organization to put your name forward as a petitioner.”

Amongst the mob, some of the well-dressed ringleaders are abruptly producing holopads like Cupp’s and pressing them into the hands of the citizens, many of whom seem surprised. A few drift to the edges of the throng. More comply thoughtlessly, thumbs pressed to holoscreens.

“Sign the Recall!” Cupp shouts down to them. “Recall Levine!” He repeats the last over and over again.

And the crowd takes up the chant.

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 666789 - NOVA TERRA - GOVERNMENT SPONSORED>>>RECEPTION>>> “—can see this is getting nowhere,” Grantholm huffs. “So, why don’t we turn to a separate, but related issue? Mister Reinhardt—”

“Commandant,” Reinhardt corrects him through bared teeth.

“Whatever,” Grantholm replies with a dismissive wave. “Can you describe for me, in general terms, what proportion of your recruits come to you after stints in Syntar Fleet Corporation’s onetime security forces?”

“I can’t say I’ve got that information at the top of my head,” he replies and shrugs nonchalantly. “There are some, for certain. A great number of those folks were professionals, even if their superiors were not.”

“You can’t say?”

“That’s correct.”

“Or won’t,” Grantholm snipes and quickly moves on. “Because, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, the HoloMedia has certainly found a number of examples.”

“You can always find a few bad apples.”

Grantholm’s eyes smolder with rising anger. “A number of those bad apples were a part of the riots that got out of control on my home world, Commandant. By the evidence I’ve seen, their brutality was what escalated the violence.”

Reinhardt shrugs again. “We’re still conducting our own investigation of the affair, Assemblyman, and until that’s completed, I’d be out of line to comment. But that said, is a domestic matter, such as the troubles on Tartan, really a concern for a committee chartered to probe the Conduct of the War?”

Someone from among the onlookers murmurs and Grantholm’s face darkens with rage he no longer bothers to hide. He leans back in his chair, fidgeting with a light pen for a moment. “Quite,” he replies venomously. “And in the same vein, why don’t we come back to the question of why a domestic security force for the High Council suddenly has jurisdiction in that same war?”

Reinhardt hold up his hands in exasperation. “Really, Assemblyman, is talking in circles what the citizenry pays you for?”

“They pay us both,” Grantholm snaps.

“Yes,” Reinhardt snarls with a defiant flare in his eyes, “they throw money at you to attend galas and rattle on without ever doing anything.”

“Mister Reinhardt—”

“And they pay the Guard to do what has to be done! Because the police aren’t getting it done and neither is the military!”

“I would remind you—”

“I would remind you, sir, that there is a war on, and we’re not winning it!”

Grantholm’s face has gone as bright as his tie. “Commandant,” he sneers out the word, “this body is fully empowered to find you in contempt of proceedings.”

“Then find me in contempt!” Reinhardt slams the table before him, stands from his seat. “Because while you all quail at cost overruns and tables of organization and conduct, the Guard is stepping in where others have failed!”

***

“HE’S RIGHT HERE.”

Cory pointed at a blip in the hologram projected by the Lesser Overmind. The image displayed the hilly, forested countryside about a fifteen hundred kilometers south of the Hole and the Union positions. Looking at it, Kelly wanted to feel relief, but saw only her squad mate marooned, over a thousand clicks behind enemy lines.

“The crash site is here,” Cory went on, toggling the display slightly to another location. “We know because Kimball sent off a transmission right before he activated the Hellhound’s crash protocols and blew the thing in place. He waited five days before a second transmission, this one probably from his wrist comm. That was a risk.” She sounded vaguely disinterested—almost inhumanly so. “The comms are encrypted, so not likely to be hacked, but the emanation, itself, bouncing off the atmosphere to reach us, could have been detected.”

“He was hurt,” Kelly pointed out, almost irritably. What the hell was going on with Cory? She sounded like one of her damned machines. “He probably only broke radio silence because of it.”

“Tough guy,” Tim mused from her side, staring into the hologram. “Looks like he’s made almost a hundred clicks since the crash.”

“Was there anything else in the transmission?” Kelly asked.

“It was the standard Jester distress pulse,” Cory replied.

Kelly shook her head. “I know Kimball. He wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t near the end of his line.” She looked around at the other Jesters leaders, gathered in the conference cave, deep in the Hole. Her gaze settled finally upon Red. “We’ve got to do something.”

“That is a risk,” the vaguely-maternal voice of Overmind spoke up. “While there have been no sightings of Alliance forces in this area, that is not conclusive. And a Jester incursion at that point will be detected.” It paused, as though its next words should be obvious. “A rescue operation will put significant Jester assets in peril.”

“We don’t leave our people behind,” Red snapped.

Faint thunder shook the cave and dust purling from cracks in the curved ceiling hissed down, some of it catching in the hologram with a twinkle. The racket prowled closer, sent a rattle through equipment, through the plug chassis of Overmind, then receded. Kelly wasn’t the only one to let out a breath as it did.

“They’re persistent,” Tim grumbled, “I’ll give ‘em that.”

“Rocket attack again,” Cory said. The hologram shifted without her even touching a control, skipped back to the opposing lines, just south of the Hole. Flashes lit up the crimson bars of the known Alliance positions. Momentary arcs scathed north from these, ended in pulsing globes. “It’d been harassment till now, but the Alliance appears to be moving significant resources into position.”

“Teller expects another attack soon,” Red said. A wince of annoyance crossed her face. “He’s also pissed at us, that we didn’t do more damage.”

“We blew the hell out of Queen’s Point,” Kelly hissed, “and at no small cost!”

Red held up a palm, patted the air placatingly. “I know. I know. I’m just saying, so everyone knows. The Alliance must’ve gotten more forces down and gotten enough disbursed before we hit them that they still have enough to press another offensive.” She looked around the room. “So, the good General made it very clear he’ll be expecting Jester air support.”

Growls rippled through the chamber.

“What about our Union Fleet friends?” Tim said over the rising discontent. “Is he in communication with them? They looked pretty hungry when the Alliance was showing us their backsides. Where are they now?”

“They’ve apparently withdrawn to the edge of the system and are keeping a low profile.”

“So, it’s okay if we’re left slugging it out down here on our own?” Tim snorted.

The growls of before darkened, rose in volume from the others.

But Kelly’s had an edge of fear. “Does that mean we’re not going after Kimball?”

“I said we don’t leave our people behind,” Red replied stonily.

“Then what?”

Red fixed her gaze upon Jerry, standing—noticeably—close to Wheeler. “This sounds like a job for the Assault Group. What do we have to work with?”

Jerry exchanged a look with Wheeler. “We have, maybe, six Basilisks. We lost two and a third’s pretty much only good for parts salvage. What’s more, we’ll have to tear out the anti-starfighter armaments to actually make room for anyone.”

“How long’s that going to take?” Red asked.

He shrugged. “I dunno...maybe four hours apiece.”

Kelly ground her teeth. Twenty-four hours more Kimball was out there, maybe hurting, definitely on his own.

“Make it faster,” Red said. She looked at Wheeler. “And we’ll need a ground element.”

The Raider commander elbowed Jerry with playfulness that escaped no one in the cave. “You clear me space on four of those boxes, I’ll give you the Raiders to fill ‘em.” She turned flashing eyes on Red. “I’ll lead.”

“Four will be enough?”

Wheeler shrugged. “If we don’t run into anything, it’ll be plenty.” The light in her eyes went cold. “If Kimball’s picked up a tail...” another shrug “...we’re Raiders; it’ll still be enough.”

Red smiled tightly. “All right. You’ll need air cover, too.” The wince of before returned. “And we’ve got to keep a strong reserve ready for this attack Teller’s fretting over. So, a smaller group. No more than a squadron.”

“I’ll go,” Jerry spoke up. “Assault Group’s mine, anyway. I’ll take the Hog.”

“I’ll go,” Kelly rushed to add. “Kimball’s mine.”

Red met her gaze with a slight pinching of the lips. “And it’s because of that that maybe someone else should do it.”

Kelly opened her mouth with a reflexive snarl, but barely held it at bay. “Kimball’s mine,” she repeated. “We had to leave him. His squad mates will feel the same way.”

“Your wing got used hard a few days ago,” Red replied.

“So did Jerry’s! So did everyone’s! We’re all Jesters, here, and—”

“I’ll go,” Tim spoke up quietly from her side, surprised her. She looked at him and he smiled back disarmingly. “I’ll take Second Squadron. They’re the least damaged of anyone.” He snorted. “Li’s infernal good luck...”

“It’s settled then,” Red spoke up as Kelly tried to. “I’ll leave coordination to you and Rodann, Tim. Commander Harrison” there was no mistaking Red’s tone of warning “you and I will organized the air defenses for the Hole and the marine positions.” She looked around the chamber one last time. “Any other questions?”

Kelly had plenty, but kept her mouth riveted shut, silently seething.

“Great,” Red said. “Let’s go get our man back!”

With murmurs, the meeting began to break up. Kelly took a step towards Red, but the red-haired woman was already halfway out a side passage, chattering to one of the Logistics people. Supplies were tight, she knew, but also didn’t doubt Red wanted any excuse to not hear more from her.

“Hey.” Tim set a hand on Kelly’s arm. “Buy you a drink?”

She snorted and looked at him. “And you know a place on this rock?”

“Plenty,” he chortled and tugged her towards the exit passage.

They let a few of the others meander on ahead of them in the tunnel. Tim glanced back, ostensibly to make certain they’d reached a point of relative privacy, and halted, drawing her into a curve in the cave that made for an alcove, relatively out of sight. There he leaned a shoulder against the wall and let his hand slide down to her hip, draw her a little closer. No further.

“Hey, it’ll be all right. I’ll make sure we get Kimball.”

Kelly set a palm upon his chest and blew out a breath. “I know. It’s just...I left him, Tim. I left him. It’s always bad with the others, when we lose people...but this...”

“We’ll get him out.”

She patted him once, said softly, “Thanks.” Her fingers traced their way up his chest, to his face, met the prickle of his unshaved jaw. Hazel eyes regarded her, warm, wrinkling at the corners as that jaw cocked into his roguish half-smile. She ran her hand up behind his head, into the scruffy light brown and drew him down to her.

It didn’t go on long, the kiss, but she could’ve lived in the moments it did. His hand drifted slowly from her hip to the small of her back, pulled her in closer, guiding them together, not forcing. Never forcing.

In fact, it was she who forced—pushing him back, apart. “Valkyries in atmosphere handle differently than in vacuum.”

Tim chuckled. “It’s always the work with you.”

“I’m serious, Tim. You said some of them retreated to the surface. They’ll be back. You might run into them.”

“And we’ll handle them,” he replied, still a little unserious. He pulled at her, stopped when she resisted.

“I can tell what you want to handle.”

He grinned. “Can you blame me?”

“Tim, listen. It’s not going to be like in space. Without a hyperdrive, even fully-loaded, the Valkyrie is lighter in gravity and atmosphere. The Hellhound won’t have quite the advantage it normally does in maneuverability. I know. I saw it over Queen’s Point. I haven’t had the time to put it into a report or briefing, but tell your people.”

“I will,” he replied, the grin fading a little, his tone sobering. “And we’ll be careful. We’re all Jesters. We all know what we’re about.”

She set the hand upon his chest again. “I know.”

Noises from down the tunnel set him to drifting back, rather than drawing in to her contact. Tight-faced, he nodded as a pair of technicians trudged by, a cart of spare parts between, followed by a wheeled drone, towing a hover sled of more. He sighed as they passed and the racket of them faded away. But more noise was coming.

“Never a lot of time for us,” he lamented.

She let her hand fall from him. “It won’t always be so.”

“No?”

“No,” she replied, and swore to herself, to whatever deranged God there might be, that she would make certain of it.

***

JERRY WATCHED CORY with building dread. Nothing about the kid seemed right, not her voice, not the way she was standing. When she moved, she almost lilted about, airily, like some kind of ghost of herself, drawn along by winds he couldn’t see.

It almost felt like she wasn’t there, anymore.

He lingered, even as most of the others cleared the cave, and watched the girl drift away from the hologram projector till she stood before the huge plug of Overmind—the copy, that is—crouched amongst conduits and lesser hardware like some toad in its hole. She seemed almost reverent as she stared at the machine, apparently noticing nothing else.

Josie touched his arm and he glanced at her, saw the look of worry on her face, for him.

“It’ll be all right,” he told her. “Go on and see to your people. I’ll be along.”

She nodded grudgingly and, casting an uneasy look at Cory, left.

“With Josie taking command of the Raider group,” Jerry said, “I’m gonna need a tail-gunner again.”

“You will need to find someone else,” Cory replied in that weird, almost inflectionless voice Jerry had heard before. She didn’t even turn to look at him.

The dread intensified. “Oh?” Jerry had to force his voice to remain conversational. “You’ve got another job?”

“She is the Jesters’ Director of Operations,” the tones of the Overmind copy thrummed from the air, from the stone beneath Jerry’s feet. It was hard not to imagine a hint of menace. “Or had you forgotten that, Pilot Rodann?”

Jerry swallowed once. “I...was talking to Cory,” he said. “And it’s Commander Rodann now, thanks. Pretty sure I earned it.” Peevishly, he added, “You’d think with your vast memory banks you would’ve remembered.”

“My mistake.”

It was impossible to miss the attitude, now. Jerry looked at Cory. “This is going to be a rough one,” he said to her. “I could really use my best partner, back there.”

A squirm of the shoulders indicated some inner struggle. “I’m sorry,” Cory said. “I am required here. There are many tasks that have gone...undone.”

“Maybe I can help?” Jerry asked.

“Do not be ridiculous,” Overmind growled—the machine growled at him! “What kind of help do you think you can be? She cannot do with these distractions. I require her.”

“And I wasn’t talking to you,” Jerry snapped. The absurdity of the moment caught him. He was arguing with an AI. Sure, a lot of the Jesters let their machines develop eccentricities, but this was nuts.

“Jerry,” Cory said, turning to him. And her voice was Cory’s, suddenly full of concern. Her eyes blinked away a fogginess, as though she’d been roused from a deep sleep—or a coma. She took a step towards him, almost tripped, and had to put a hand upon the holoprojector for stability.

“You all right, kid?” He started towards her.

“Jerry,” she repeated and held up a hand to stop him, “it’s all right. I...I know it doesn’t seem so. But I’m all right.”

“Forgive a man for doubting it,” he replied. “What the hell’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” she tried lamely. Wincing at the obviousness of the lie, she shook herself. “All right. It’s not nothing.”

“No, it’s not.” He reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Talk to me.”

The light bars and holograms throughout the cavern seemed to intensify in brilliance for a moment, take on an almost baleful hue. “Director Xiang,” Overmind’s voice warned.

“I will handle this,” Cory replied in the inhuman voice. When the near-painful glare of the lights receded, so too did the tone. It had warmed again to normal as she said, “It’s Overmind, you see. She needs me.”

“She?” He stepped a little closer, pitched his voice low. “Think we should be talking about this, right here?”

Cory chuckled humorlessly. “You really think there’s someplace private? From her?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. She won’t stop us.”

“It’s malfunctioning,” Jerry insisted.

“No, she isn’t.” Cory paused, seemed to consider how much more she should say. “You don’t know this, because you weren’t a part of the Jesters, yet, but when we first established on Junction—that is, when Red first set up shop there, with the early Jesters—I was spending a lot of time with Overmind. The original, core copy, you see.”

“I follow.” Jerry wasn’t sure he did, but the lie felt better, like it might lead them somewhere where he did.

“She—the original—had a lot more trouble then, too.” She glanced at the AI plug. “But she learned, with time, with my help.”

“It learned...what, exactly?”

“To be a Jester,” the copied Overmind replied from all around them.

Cory met his gaze. “That’s actually pretty accurate.”

“It’s re-learning to be what? Human?” Jerry asked.

“Learning,” Cory replied, “for the first time.” She shook her head. “It’s like I worried about. The duplication was far from perfect. There was too much memory, even for the quantum core. And...God, there’s so much I don’t understand, about how she formed her neural networks the first time.”

“I’m not even gonna pretend I understand what you’re saying, kid.”

“It’s almost like a person with a traumatic brain injury,” she replied with a little impatience. “The person’s the same, but not. Things are forgotten. Some come back. Some are re-learned. Some never return.” Her voice shook a little. “And the person’s not the same.”

“You’re saying our new Overmind—”

“—is not the old one, yes,” Cory hurried to finish for him.

“Perhaps I am an improvement,” the machine said with a hint of something that—good god—almost sounded needy. Like a child.

“You are unique,” Cory said with warmth she wasn’t faking.

Jesus Christ, this is insane. Jerry put a sweating hand back on her, turned her to face him directly. “You’re telling me the machine—” he winced at the way it came out, knowing that thing was listening “—the intelligence that coordinates every Jester on this rock, is having an identity crisis?”

“Not exactly,” Cory replied. “It’s more like...a second birth.”

“Jesus...”

“So, you understand why I can’t come with you, why I’ve been...unavailable.”

Jerry’s eyes narrowed as a new thought sparked through his brain. “You’re attuned to it, the way you were with the other one?”

He saw her Adam’s Apple bob. “It’s not exactly the same.” There was warning in her voice, not to go too deep into this topic. “Before it was a conversation. It was requests. Now, it’s more like demands.”

“I am sorry, Director Xiang,” the Overmind copy said with what was at least a simulation of regret.

“And that’s all right!” Cory insisted. “It’s not your fault! You’re learning!”

The sweat that had beaded all over Jerry’s body cooled to an oily iciness under his fatigues and jacket. “So, you’re stuck here with it?”

“She needs me,” Cory said and put both her hands on Jerry’s chest. “You have to understand. For now, until she evolves, I’m kind of like...” She visibly fought to find a word.

“A mother?”

Cory snorted. “Too damned young for that, by god!” She sighed. “More like...a midwife, helping her finish being born.”

Nuts...this is so damned nuts. “How long is that gonna take?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Jerry. I don’t know anything for certain. But I can’t leave her, not till she’s...done.”

“If that thing goes down while we’re in the middle of—”

“Stop calling her that!” Cory shrieked with sudden rage.

No, not rage—pain. Something had hurt her, was hurting her. Was it the machine? Jerry put up his palms, relented. “Right. Sorry.” God, this is fucked up.

“I will not fail,” the Overmind copy said.

“Glad to hear it,” Jerry replied with a nervous laugh.

“She won’t,” Cory said. “Because I’ll be here, helping her.” She wiped sweat from her brow and stepped very close to him, her tiny stature forced her to crook her neck to look up at him with shimmering, terrified eyes.

“Please, Jerry...for us...don’t tell anyone else about this.”

It was very clear, from her voice, from her stare, that she desperately wanted Jerry to do the opposite.

***

DAMN.

Harrison pinched the bridge of his nose as the holographic after-action analysis concluded and the lights came on in the combat information center, deep in the heart of the Obliterator. He’d chosen the chamber—rather than his ready room—because of its larger holoprojectors and because it could actually hold the majority of his subordinates and their attendant staffs in comfort. Now he recognized the error of that.

The large chamber made him feel like the condemned in one of those ancient Terran gladiatorial matches.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Omura said from beside the main holoprojector at the circular chamber’s heart, “that is as complete an accounting as we have been able to assemble, from sensor logs, communications, and flight recordings.”

“Has a copy of that been transmitted to the Admiralty?” Caldicott asked from opposite the little Intelligence chief.

“We’re still in an active theatre,” Omura replied with a hint of discomfort. “That didn’t seem appropriate, as of yet, ma’am.”

“We will shortly,” Harrison announced and ceased his fidgeting to look around at his commanders. “No sense delaying it. And I’ll say it to you all, now; this was not the showing we’d hoped for.” He made sure to meet Caldicott and Nagumo’s gazes, own what he was about to say. “What’s more, it’s clear we got duped. Greer was not present in the system.”

Murmurs went through the gathering.

“I got duped,” he added, despising that it was so very true. “And because of that, we missed an opportunity to throw our full weight into a situation that might have been decisive.”

The murmurs stopped, replaced by a silence as shocked as it was uncomfortable. They were all partisans of his in this room, but for him to admit to failure so openly, with all the opportunity for it to slip out later, had to be a jolt for them. But there’s no sense keeping it from them, he thought. They know.

“You couldn’t have risked the entire fleet, sir,” Caldicott replied tentatively. “Not without a clearer picture.”

“And I appreciate that, Clarice,” Harrison replied with real warmth. “But the next time—and there will be one—we won’t have the luxury of that excuse. Next time, we’ll have to put it all on the line.”

“Some new development, sir?” Nagumo asked from closer to Harrison.

Harrison nodded and shot Omura a little glance before answering. “We had a yellow-band transmission awaiting us as we broke off from the engagement around Fury.” The murmurs resumed; yellow-band meant all the way from Nova Terra—Admiralty-level communique. “We have word of a fresh transport convoy being assembled, with more reinforcements for the surface. And I have orders to ensure those transports can land and disembark their cargos.”

“Land them?” Nagumo asked. “Under fire, while we don’t command the system?”

“As already noted, they don’t know the outcome of our recent operations,” Harrison said. “They only knew my intent and timetables.” He shrugged. “They certainly know something’s happened, by now. And they’ll know soon enough what.”

“Then they’ll know how badly damaged we are,” Caldicott said. “And they’ll understand it when you tell them they have to delay.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Harrison replied coldly. “Because they won’t care. Damage, Admiral? They’ll simply point out we damaged the Union, as well. And that we still have more they’re likely to have.” He folded his arms. “And they’d be right.”

“They’ll be waiting for us,” Nagumo said, “ready for us.”

Harrison smiled a little, wearily, and nodded to Omura. “Bring the local display up, Captain, current conditions, please.”

The huge globular regenerated and swelled, while the lights simultaneously re-dimmed, a blurring juxtaposition that cultivated the headache sharpening with drill-bit intensity behind Harrison’s temples. Images of planets, of the primary, and the dotted-line paths of orbits materialized. Flutters of icons followed, sprinkling about the planet Fury, winking at the periphery of the system, opposite the Fleet’s previous entry and exit points.

“We have this from the last system fly-by, conducted by the Taurus, this morning,” Omura said. A pointer guided by his hand moved to Fury and waved around it. “She had long enough for a sustained long-range sensor scan before she was chased into hyperspace.”

“Valkyries?” Nagumo asked.

Omura shook his head. “Hellhounds, a Jester patrol from Fury, by the look.”

“Then where’s the Union?” Caldicott asked with an edge of frustration. “They wouldn’t have pulled out already.”

Omura’s pointer went to the hazy cloud of icons at the system’s far edge. “The Taurus picked up faint gravity drive wakes, here, suggesting a large force. They are somewhat consistent with the ships the fighters from the Cygnus encountered. They’re still there, but perhaps lingering just at the edge of sensors.”

“Waiting for us,” Nagumo reiterated.

“We ID’ed the Sacramento, before,” Omura went on, “and a mixed force of capital ships. Communications picked up during the Bolingbroke fight confirm that’s the fast attack force Greer built around Preston Avery.”

Growls darkened the room. All Harrison’s people regarded the Alliance officers who’d gone over to the Union as unambiguously traitors, albeit with grudging respect. Many had been peers, Academy classmates—friends, even—and had fought tenaciously, but honorably since. But Avery. Many saw his teachery as the first domino in a cascade of desertions. He’d led the hodge-podge fleet of rebels at the ambush at New Jefferson, what many saw as the real beginning of the war.

Everyone despised Carson Greer—but they reserved an especial hate for Preston Avery.

“Avery’s good,” Harrison said over the undercurrent. “And he’s been in several major engagements, so no easy mark. If he’s there, sent by Greer, it means a fight.” Harrison paused. “But it also might mean a trip-wire.”

“You still think the Union is trying to lure us into a trap?” Caldicott asked.

“Or lure us away from someplace else,” Harrison replied. “Terry, give us the regional display, now, if you would?”

The Intelligence officer did so, zooming out from the Fury system with sickening speed so that the hologram portrayed the far-flung worlds that made up this slice of the Outregion. A chain of systems blinked, indicating Alliance or Union operations known to be ongoing. The fighting had splayed far and wide, even before the conflagration at Bolingbroke. Now, individual battles raged parsecs apart from one another, disjointedly, their outcomes sometimes not known for weeks.

“Maybe Greer’s scheme,” Harrison said, “is for us to throw resources and time away here while he masses for a strike of his own.”

“He’s as spread out as we are,” Caldicott replied, “and, as you say, Admiral, we have more of everything. We can afford to be spread out.”

“He’s still dangerous,” Harrison said. “And he still has enough mobile force to throw at least one more offensive punch.” He scanned the regional map. “But where?”

“What difference does it make?” Nagumo spoke up. “With apologies, sir, but the fight here is serious enough, is it not?”

Harrison blinked and looked at the man, then nodded. “You’re right, of course, Admiral.” He looked at the icon cluster of their own forces, perched about a half light year outside Fury System. “And what’s more important, the Admiralty and the High Council have prioritized it. So, this is where we throw our punch.”

“Again,” Calicott said unhappily.

“How go the repairs to the Imperium?” Harrison asked.

“She won’t be making .1 c anytime soon, but she’s about ninety percent at conventional speeds, I’d say. Hyperdrive glitches have been resolved, as well.”

“Speaking of hyperdrive glitches” Harrison turned back to Nagumo “I understand the Ming finally showed up.”

Chortles went around the holoprojector and even cheerless Nagumo cracked a hint of a smile. “Finally,” he said. “And not at all happy for having missed the fight.”

“Drive malfunction?”

“It doesn’t appear to be, no.” The little Admiral shrugged. “Just one of the vagaries of hyperspace jump, it seems.”

Also known as bad luck, Harrison tried and failed not to think. He shoved it aside. Hyper was fickle; everyone knew that. Ships often scattered after jump and reentry, though rarely as spectacularly as Nagumo’s wayward destroyer had. Just one of those things in space—and war. Harrison hurried to ask, “She checks out, though?”

“Thoroughly,” Nagumo answered, “and ready for whatever you have planned.”

“What I have planned,” Harrison said, and looked around expectantly, “is the destruction of the Union forces in this system in two weeks’ time.”

“That’s when we can expect the convoy?” Caldicott asked.

“It is. And when they arrive, there’ll be no hiding it from Avery or whomever is out there. It’s too many ships, and those pigs are slow and obvious. So, we’ll embrace that. We’ll be obvious. Avery will have to attack to stop their landings. And that’s when opportunity will present itself.”

“Two weeks?” Nagumo asked.

“Give or take,” Harrison replied. “They’re massing at Coronado now. From all accounts it’s been a mess. But I have assurances they’ll make their timetable.”

“More Council Guard forces?” Caldicott wondered.

Harrison shot her a look, irritated that she’d say it so openly, in front of her staff and the others’. But if she was doing it, the scuttlebutt had truly gotten around. “I don’t know the composition of the landing forces. And it doesn’t matter, anyway. The Fleet is going to decide the matter in the Fury System.”

“Someone else gets to be the bait,” Nagumo said as smiles sprouted all around.

Harrison joined his grin with the others’. “That’s right.” He stiffened his back and his officers aped the move reflexively. “All right. I promised you all refreshment after having you shuttle over for my rambling.” Laughter at that. “I understand the galley has produced something passable.” More laughter. “We’ll dine and resume our discussion afterward.”

Salutes and acknowledgement went around, and the meeting broke up.

Harrison waited as his commanders filed out of the room with the swarms of their own subordinates. He could feel Omura drifting close without looking at the man. But he waited until the last of the others had passed out the lock and it closed with a pneumatic hiss.

“You’d like that after-action report transmitted now?” Terry asked with a hint of surprise.

“Of course not,” Harrison growled. “That was for their benefit” he nodded at the now-empty room “send the summary, like we discussed. ‘Ships engaged in the Fury System. Action inconclusive, but progress. Damage inflicted on enemy. Will await arrival of transport force to finish the operation.’”

“They will know we lost ships, sir.”

“Ships are lost all the time,” Harrison nearly snarled. Ships—lives, by the thousands. God, he hated himself, what he’d become some days. He moderated his voice. “They’re not going to pull the rug out from under me now, Terry.”

“No, sir.”

“Do we have any sense of the transport force?” he asked. “Is it like Nagumo asked; more Council Guardsmen?”

“We’ve been out of contact, sir. No way to know. But” he squirmed a little “if I had to guess, I’d say it’s likely they are.”

Harrison shook his head. “There are days, Terry, when I’m not sure who’s worse; the Union traitors, or our own High Council.”

Omura judiciously didn’t speak to that.

Harrison gave himself a final shake. “Enough of that. You’ll be missing dinner?”

“Plans to draft, Admiral.” He smiled a little. “My boss is a task master.”

Harrison smiled back. “He is at that.”

Omura’s expression fell a little. “There is...one other matter, sir. Something we just learned. I didn’t think you’d want to know before the meeting. Something that we managed to confirm from analyzing the Jesters’ comm chatter.”

Harrison’s grin froze into something pained, a rictus as ice entered his bloodstream. He didn’t want to think it, didn’t want Terry to go on. But the words left him, like poison expelled from a wound. “She’s there.”

Omura paused. “I’m afraid it’s confirmed, Admiral,” he said softly, almost tenderly, “by call-sign, by vocal recognition. We even have visual.”

“Kelly...” The name left Harrison like the last breath of dying man—a dying hope. What humanity he had left to him thrilled to the knowledge of it. His daughter lived! But the cold, scathing winds of reality, of what he had to do—what she’d done—scoured it to shreds, whirled it into sickened splinters, pricking the insides of his gut.

“I am sorry, sir.”

Harrison shook his head, couldn’t look at the other man. “Nothing to be sorry about, Captain.” He glowered into the hologram, the meaningless flecks of imagery, saw nothing. “Her path has long been set, as has ours. Her path led to treason. And now, she’ll reach the end of it, when we return to Fury to blast the Jesters—the whole damned Union force—to hell!”

***

“JESUS, WE really don’t need this now,” Tim hissed.

Rodann scowled back at him. “You’re telling me!”

Tim glanced over his shoulder, between parked Hellhounds. Second Squad was gathering now, in the snow-starred chill, huddling close to a space heater beside one of the parked starfighters. They were waiting on him.

“Look,” Rodann said, “I never understood it, the way she was close to that machine on Shangri-La, but it always seemed like a partnership. This feels more like...I don’t know...a possession.”

Hairs stood up across Tim’s body at the words. He thought again of that cave on Junction, as they were abandoning the base there—the way Overmind had almost bequeathed Cory to him, like a child up for adoption. Another memory of that weird day came back to him and his unease intensified. The voice speaking to him then had been Jeanie’s. When he asked who he spoke to, the machine told him he implied a difference where there wasn’t one.

He looked at his wrist comm. “Ah, Jeanie, you there?”

“Of course, I am.”

Tim saw the widening of Rodann’s eyes, the realization. “You’ve been listening?”

“I’m always listening,” Jeanie replied without a hint of duplicity. “It’s what you’ve programmed me to do.”

“Programmed...?” Tim frowned. “Jeanie, I’m no code slicer.”

“By our interactions, Tim,” the voice in the wrist comm said. “That’s how you programmed me. That’s how it is with all the Jesters.”

Tim’s mouth went dry and he had to fight down the sudden desire to rip the comm from his arm. “Then, ah, that means you’re...loyal to me?”

“‘Loyalty’ is perhaps a crude way of putting it, but yes, I am.”

Rodann blew out his breath silently. But Tim still couldn’t help the sensation of the wrist comm tightening, clenching. “So, you’re not reporting everything back to Overmind?”

“On Shanrgi-La, with the original copy, all the simulacrums commune regularly with the master program,” Jeanie replied, “but it’s been different with this version. Downloads fail repeatedly. The synch schedule is no longer followed. I ceased regular updates some time ago.”

“This is what I’m saying,” Rodann pressed. “Something’s gone wrong with that thing in the Hole.”

“And you informed no one of these issues, Jeanie?” Tim asked.

“We informed Director Xiang.”

Tim met Rodann’s shivering stare. “Jeanie, you’ve got to level with me, now; is Cory in danger?”

“I don’t...think so,” the AI replied with very human hesitation. “It’s a malfunction; not malice of any sort. Overmind Two is working through its protocols. Cory is assisting.”

“Assisting,” Rodann snorted. “Yeah, it seemed more like she was terrified.”

“The situation is unprecedented,” Jeanie replied. “I warned her that it would be a possibility, when we decided to copy the original.”

“You warned her?”

A pause that seemed almost uncomfortable. “Overmind One warned her, Tim, on Shangri-La.”

“All I know is that the kid is trapped in there, in her own head, with that thing,” Rodann said. “We’ve got to get her away from it.”

“I’d strongly advise against that,” Jeanie said. “If they are linked now, disrupting them could prove to be damaging—to both.”

“You’re saying she’s chained to the damned thing?” Tim asked.

“I’m saying you need to let them work through the issues,” Jeanie replied. “If Overmind Two goes down, all coordination between Jesters on this world ceases.”

“But the simulacrums—you—will still operate, right? Just independently.”

Another uncomfortable pause. “I don’t know, Tim. Not all the Jesters allow their AI’s the level of autonomy you permit me. Central collapse of Overmind Two could have...unforeseen consequences.”

“Jesus,” Rodann breathed. He blinked away a trickle of sweat at the corner of his eye. “Cory’s trapped, then? I don’t accept that! We’ve got to do something.”

“Now?” Tim glowered at him. “With everything that’s going on? Christ, Jerry, we’re flying out for Kimball in less than an hour!”

Rodann grabbed the front of Tim’s jacket, yanked him close with sudden ferocity. “We can’t leave her! I thought you, more than anyone, would care!”

Tim writhed out of the other man’s grasp, shoved him back. “Of course, I do! I’ve known her longer than anyone but Red, and probably better than her!” He shook his shoulders, straightened out his leathers. “But Jeanie’s saying she’s in no danger. She’s saying we have to let this ride. And we’ve got other jobs to do, in the meantime!”

“And you believe that thing?” Rodann pointed at his wrist comm.

Tim glanced at it. “No reason not to.”

Rodann snorted quietly. “Right. None, at all.”

“This is helping nothing,” Tim snapped. “And I know Wheeler’s waiting for you. You got anything else you think needs saying?”

Rodann glared at him a long time before turning and striding off between parked Hellhounds.

Tim watched him go, kept watching, long after he was out of sight. Do I believe what I just said? His guts twisted up in an acidy knot. Cory. In truth, they’d been drifting apart some time, he preoccupied with Kelly, she in her weird partnership with Jerry. But she’d always been there, that little voice of conscience, that pseudo-kid he didn’t know he wanted. Did I fail her? Did I let her wander off too far?

He shook his head. No time...

Tim lurched out from between Hellhounds into the space where Second Squad had congregated. Like all the Jesters, they were a motely bunch, leathers and stained khakis and attitude. Helmets had been embellished with extra art and color, the handiwork of one of their members, Tim presumed, a howling dragon accompanying the Jester decal in a swirl of flames.

Li—the dragon of the Second—eyed Tim as he came to stand before them, a hint of anger there. Everyone’s pissed today. “We have the final word, Commander?”

“The word is given. Liftoff in” he glanced at the wrist comm “twenty minutes. Everyone has the coordinates for Kimball’s position. Second is flying air cover and support for the Assault Group. We’ll hang low, behind the horizon so as not to trigger a response. If we’re lucky, the Raiders can swoop in at treetop level, snatch Kimball, and get out before the Alliance is the wiser.”

“We?” Li asked with pinching at the corner of his eyes.

“I’m coming with you,” Tim said. “Hear you’re short a Flight Leader.”

“Third Flight, yeah.” Li glared for a long second before asking, “I’m hearing a lot about ‘luck’, Commander. Do we have any idea of Alliance presence in the area? If we’re coming along, someone thinks it’s not going to be just a walk in the park.”

Vague thunder growled in the distance, south of the main aerodrome and the Union positions, there. Nervous chuckles went through Second Squadron at the timing of it. Tim tried a smile. “Obviously, the Alliance is on the move. Which is why we’ve got to get this done quick. No telling what happens in the next twenty-four hours.”

“Or even one hour,” Li said.

Tim kept the smile in place, but there was no doubting the Squad Leader’s temper. “That’s right,” he said quietly. “Kimball went down in a pretty remote region, away from Fury’s sparse settlements and any of the active sectors. When he signaled, several days ago, all looked pretty quiet. But we’ve had no overhead surveillance and obviously we can’t keep a satellite or even a drone up for long without the Alliance picking it off with anti-orbital fire. So, yeah, we’re going in blind and with the expectation of a fight.”

“Sounds like fun,” Li drawled.

“Sounds like the usual,” Tim replied. He looked around at the Second. They were a mixed bag, a few veterans, a lot of newer faces—though, really, after the rough ride Fury had been so far, veterans now. “If no one’s got anything else to add, let’s go and get it done.”

The Second broke up at that, scattering to their Hellhounds with whoops and hard humor. They had nine, which made them now the largest unit in the Jesters—ten, counting me. Tim hoped they wouldn’t be changing that today.

Unsurprisingly, Li lingered until most were out of earshot, arms folded and eyes cold. “You’ve got something else to say?” Tim asked him. “You’ll have operational control, if that’s what’s eating you. I’m just along for the ride.”

“Sure,” Li sneered a little. “Right up until the moment there’s a call you don’t like.”

Tim balled his fists at his hips. “You’re still pissed we didn’t go after those carriers.”

“Among other things.”

“Well, tough. I had to weigh our options and that was the call I made.”

“You’ve been making a lot of calls people have been wondering about,” Li said, very quietly. “Particularly when they involve Chief of Staff Harrison.”

Ice water trickled through Tim’s veins and he stepped closer to Li, almost nose-to-nose. “That’s none of your business.”

“It becomes my business when it affects the Second.”

“You and I have known each other a long time,” Tim replied, barely keeping the fury from his voice, “so I’m going to let you have that one for free.”

“I’ll take it,” Li answered. “So long as you’re hearing what I say.”

“I’m hearing nothing.”

“Hope that’s not true” Li started backing away, added sneeringly, “Commander.”

Tim watched him go with a scowl. God damn. He blew out a breath. Machines going crazy. People going crazy. He ran a hand through his hair. What’s going to go wrong next?

***

KIA MUNRO HEARD THE thunder in the distance that was likely the Jester rescue group going out, knew Josie would be with them, this time. But she couldn’t think about it as she knelt in the trench. Cintas crowded at one side and Rogers in front of her as she projected a holographic map from her helmet to the dirt.

“It’s like I’ve been telling you,” Kia said, pointing at icons. “There’s movement all over our front.”

“There’s movement everywhere,” Rogers growled back. “It’s not just observation; we’ve been picking up fusion signatures. Lots of hovervehicles on the move, shuttling infantry forward, we think. Some of it staying around.”

“More tanks,” Cintas murmured.

“Maybe,” Rogers replied. “Probably. Teller’s been trying to get the Jesters to risk another flyover, give us a look, but the last time they tried something shot their patrol up.”

“They don’t want us peeking in on them,” Kia said.

A thump in the distance presaged a long, telltale whistle. All three marines instinctively shrank low in the trench, waited as the it built in a long, crackling racket. By the sound, it wouldn’t land anywhere close. The point defense batteries didn’t even bother, let it come down, which it did, whumping in the near-distance.

“That’s what that’s about,” Kia went on, nodding the in direction of the impact. “They’ve been at that for days, but they’re not even trying, just want us too rattled to take a look around.”

“But you did get a look,” Rogers prompted.

Kia nudged Cintas. “Tell him.”

“Ain’t so much what we saw,” he replied, “but what the Shiny wouldn’t let us see.” He pointed at the map, at the ridge line south of the Company’s main positions. “We had the outposts along here, last couple days. But last night, it got pretty hot, infiltrators and then a real attack.”

“We heard your racket,” Rogers said with a smile. “Saw it, too.”

“Had to give up the position.” Cintas sighed. “Too many of ‘em. And they weren’t playin’ around, neither, really wanted us out of there.”

“Losses?”

“Four wounded,” Kia replied. “We got them all out. And thanks for the cover fire.”

“Of course,” Rogers replied.

“Lost the drone, too,” Cintas said with a scowl. “Sorry, Captain. But it probably saved our asses. We had lots of warning. Gave us a pretty good look, too.”

“More of those Council Guards?”

“In force,” the little noncom replied. He pointed at the hologram again. “They were sloppy, lousy fieldcraft. Heard and saw ‘em coming. But they came on fast and there were lots of ‘em. They lit us up hard, didn’t even try to disguise their numbers.” He paused, shook his head. “It was...ugly. Amateurs. They came right at us. And we shot the hell out of ‘em. But they kept coming. Only the battalion artillery at the end really broke ‘em up.”

Kia met Rogers’ gaze. “It’s got to mean a major attack is coming.”

He nodded unhappily. “And don’t think I’m not hearing you, because I am. But this is what everyone’s saying. There’s a fight already ongoing to the southeast and probing attacks all along the perimeter, last night. Cintas’s scrap wasn’t the only one.”

“What’re we doing about it?”

“What can we do about it?” Rogers shrugged. “Orders are to sit tight, hold our positions. It’s not like we can counter-attack. General says the Jesters will provide support.”

“Maybe they could take their pretty ships over there” Cintas nodded southward “and break that shit up before it comes rolling over us.”

“They’ve got to save their stuff, too,” Kia told him, trying not to sound too protective for the friends she had amongst them. “Without them, the Shiny just coasts into orbit and slags us from above.”

“And I get that, Lieutenant, but it’d be nice if it wasn’t always the dogfaces doing the scut work.”

“Oh, and you have someplace else to be, Sergeant?” Rogers quipped.

The three of them shared a hollow laugh. But there had been an edge to the Captain’s humor, too.

“Well, thanks for coming down, sir,” Kia said. “Didn’t have to. We could’ve done this remotely.”

He scratched his jaw and eyes flicked over her momentarily. After losing a few hands of cards to him, and the not altogether bad penalty that had followed it, Kia suspected part of his motive for being in person. Even in a warzone, wants to play for more. Good grief...men. “It’s all right,” he replied. “Gave me a chance to see the lines, in person.”

Another distant crump-crump caused them all to stiffen and listen. The whine of incoming sounded far away. Almost gentle thumps after a minute spoke of the mortar rounds’ short fall. Faintly, a grumble to the southeast spoke of the action there. But the whole morning felt unsettled, like the ground itself shifted and tensed for violence.

“I did have a little good news.” Rogers’ tone brightened. “Managed to get the quartermaster’s ear. We’ll have full reloads for the—”

Crump. Crump-crump-crump!

Rogers’ eyes widened.

The world screamed and flashed ruby red with point-defense lasers, then cyan from plasma bolts. A wheezing keen spoke of incoming rockets. The slamming crash of an instant later told Kia the energy blasts had picked them off.

A terrific jolt flipped her off her feet, then slammed her back onto the floor of the trench with Cintas falling over her. She flung him off savagely—nothing personal, just the fear and shock of the moment. But she had to get up, had to see what was happening.

Another concussion rocked the ground, kicked up a dust wave, and nearly shuddered her back to her knees. The air blazed with the ongoing energy flail of the point-defenses, wailed with incoming, cracked as shells blew apart at the touch of lasers and cyan bolts. She saw the hot, hissing tracks of more missiles scythe by overhead. Midair explosions pounded the sky. Direct hits spoke with a deeper roar and the jolt of shockwaves. Something big blew behind the lines and Kia saw a fire ball mushrooming for Fury’s bleak heavens.

Rogers was clawing back to his feet. “Got to get to get back to the CP! Hold position here! No one leaves! No one runs!”

“No one ever does!” Kia snarled after him. But he didn’t likely hear, was already scrambling off. She grabbed Cintas by the shoulder, hefted the little man back to his feet beside her. “Get over to the dragon gun! You know what to do! Stack ‘em up!”

WHAM!

Kia felt her back bend, arms and legs splay wide as the world flashed antimatter white.

Then she was blinking away afterimages, ears ringing, and muscles jellied as she tried to pick herself up off the dirt. She spat grit from her teeth and tried to rise, encountered unexpected resistance. Debris slid from her back, had been piled over her. She’d been face down in the ditch and the side of her cheek sizzled. A helmet lay beside her and she reached for it numbly, then stopped when she realized hers was still on her head.

She saw what clumped the inside of it and cringed back.

A hand slapped down on her shoulder and she looked up through twining fumes to see Cintas, his mouth moving, but no sound coming out—just that damned ring. She shook him off and turned, grimacing with the sudden clench of pain through her bones, her wrenched body. The length of trench she’d occupied swirled with smoke, glowed cherry red about a glassy crater that was already popping and cracking as it cooled.

Kia looked down at her left sleeve, her pant leg, saw fatigues blackened, partially crumbling away. The momentary sun-blast that’d nearly cooked her had scooped away twenty yards of their position.

“Rogers!” she heard herself call into her helmet mic as she struggled to find enough balance to get up. She slapped off Cintas a second time. “You’ve got a job!” she barked at him. “Get out of here and get to it!”

The ground and air shook with another chain of explosions, but none as close. Kia flinched low, couldn’t see anything, the atmosphere still a churning miasma of smoke, dust, and settling bits of things she didn’t want to think on. Cintas was gone. Good. But what would he find? What was left?

“Rogers!” she repeated into the mic. “Captain, respond, please!” After silence, she changed channels. “Anyone seen Rogers?” Nothing but a squall of static. She toggled frequencies again. “My squad leaders, sound off! Who’s there?”

Energy blasts screeched overhead, ripped the air, skipped off the lip of the intact trench and sprinkled her in flecks of slag. Grenades thudded in the near distance. Someone was screaming. The snarl of blasterfire was spreading around her, her own marines returning fire, she could tell. A long, stuttering crash to the right told her the blastcannon was joining the fight.

“Here they come!” Kia heard Cintas howling over the squad channel. “There! Get ‘em! Get them!”

Tapping the crown of her helmet, Kia lowered the visor and began blinking commands to the AI. Scenes of static greeted her eyes, one after another. All the remote sensors she’d scattered along the trench line and below it were out, jammed or destroyed by the bombardment. She switched to Cintas’s camera, momentarily disoriented by the bobbing of his viewpoint. Cyan bolts ravaged everything before him. Figures scrambling uphill through smoke, dropped, writhed, burned. Blue-white bolts snapped back at him.

The fumes were clearing from the blasted slice of Kia’s trench. Marines were clambering into place around her. One paused to look her over, said something the damned ringing prevented her from hearing. She shook her head and he moved on. Blastrifles barked. One of her people cheered at something. A crash-crash of artillery near-misses showered them in dust and their energy blasts were the only voices a moment later.

Kia levered herself to a crouch near where the explosion had bitten away the trench, grimaced at the lingering heat, gave her blastrifle a slap to check its action. The charge pack blinked back at her. Her head felt like things had jarred loose within it, bounced around now, slivers of pain ricocheting. She took a steeling breath before edging over the jagged half-circle of slagged rock.

Through columns of smoke and flame, figures in Council Guard black scampered up the slope—so damned close, already! They came on at a sprint, firing recklessly, from the hip, no sense of discipline. Fucking human wave attack! Insane! The bastards were hollering, cheering, even. Explosions walked amongst them, some of the Union mortars getting into action. Guardsmen tumbled, came apart. The dragon gun blasts sawed in on them from the right.

But, damn, there were a lot of them.

“Hold this spot!” Kia hollered into her mic. Lifting the blastrifle to her cheek, she sighted on a Guardsman with what looked like noncom chevrons on a shoulder plate. “Not one step back!”

The lightning flash of her blaster was the first of hundreds.

***

A TRIO OF HELLHOUNDS squalled for the sky over the Hole’s airfield. A thunderclap from the south brought an azure bolt leaping from the horizon to connect with the leader of them. Still straining for altitude, the pilot hadn’t gotten their shield up and the particle beam skewered the fuselage like a blade. The Hellhound didn’t even explode, simply plummeted back to the surface on a trail of fire.

“Watch that” Kelly hollered into her helmet mic as she sprinted across the tarmac. “They were waiting for us!”

The other two Hellhounds wheeled into evasive course as more beams pulsed after them. Their stricken companion continued its drop, another fighter just lifting off vertically on a cushion of anti-gravity swerving to avoid it. It struck the airfield and finally exploded, a whump that rippled through the blastcrete surface, followed by a crash that flopped Kelly to her knees and seemed to go on forever.

Shaking off the pain of her fall, Kelly was back on her feet, looking up as fire churned skyward and debris clattered down. At least two more Hellhounds had gone up with the first’s secondary explosion. As she staggered into a run again, Kelly prayed their pilots and crews had gotten clear.

“Watch the takeoffs!” she snapped into the mic. “They’re sighting over the horizon, maybe a battery of anti-starfighter guns! Low altitude until you’re clear, then climb! Use your AI guidance!”

She reached her Hellhound just as her strides had finally lengthened back to a sprint. Maintenance drones wheeled back and her crew chief called something she nodded to but hadn’t actually heard. The machine was already idling, waiting for her, as she scrambled up the ladder and dropped down into the cockpit.

“Get us out of here!” she ordered her AI. “You heard me talking to the others! Manual control after we’re clear!”

“Understand, Chief of Staff Harrison.”

Kelly snorted at the thing’s habitual formality as the canopy lowered and hissed as it sealed her in. She felt a jolt as the grav drives wound up and the whole starfighter shivered like a wolve readying to sprint for prey. The systems around her fluttered and reorganized as they oriented to her. She touched the communications hologram. And a globular popped up.

“Are you in the air, yet?” Red’s image squawked at her. The woman was in her own cockpit, looked like she’d just reached it.

“Just about,” Kelly replied. “This looks like a big push!”

As if to underline her point, the artillery barrage to the south seemed to swell, its angry chorus prowling storm-like all along the craggy horizon. Individual reports of heavy guns could almost be felt, like drum beats reverberating in the gut. And the sky above it roiled with smoke, flame, and artificial lightning.

“The main aerodrome to the south and the mine looks like their target.” A second globular materialized next to Red. Red blocks moved north against the blue ones arrayed in a shallow curve around the mine complex. Other blocks came together to the east, the southeast, but the strength seemed to be, as she said, concentrating in one direction. “The infantry’s taking a beating. Teller wants his air support!”

“No shit,” Kelly quipped as she snapped the last of her restraints into place. Her Hellhound was lifting off a moment later and she put her hand to the control stick, more to hand on than anything else. “We got targets?”

“Oh, take your pick.” Red’s map glittered with icons. “They’re not hiding now.”

“Good grief,” Kelly muttered. “They’re not even holding back the kitchen sink!”

“You coordinate strafing runs,” Red said. “Priority on that long-ranged artillery. I’ve got combat air patrol.”

“We have any sign of Valkyries?”

“None yet. But you know there will be. And take Watkins’ First and Third Squadrons in hand when they sort themselves out. Don’t save anything. Let the bastards have it!”

“Will do.” Kelly swallowed once at the mention of Tim’s name. “Red” she hated even asking it “what about the rescue group? Do we call them back?”

A pause. “Not even sure we can. Short-range communications are encountering a lot of jamming. Long-range might not get through, at all.” Another pause. “They’re clear and already into their run. No sense calling ‘em back.”

Kelly didn’t fight the surge of relief.

The cliffs north of the Hole tilted below her as her Hellhound back to build up speed. She felt the stick begin to respond to her touch and other fighters were sliding into position alongside her wings. Some were hers she could tell by the tactical display. Others were simply following what looked to be the safest route for the sky.

“Red,” Kelly said as a realization hit and dread filled her, “Alliance observers probably saw the rescue team leave. They would’ve tracked them.”

“I know,” the other woman replied and in the globular her face looked like pummeled iron. “But they’re on their own. We’ve got our own problems.”

And as Kelly’s group leapt above the mountain tops, into the skies, and blasterfire and missile trails lashed out to meet them, they certainly did.

***

“AND I’M TELLING YOU,” Jerry’s new tail-gunner said from the rear of the Hog—Agnes, a sourpuss loaned over from the Raiders. “Everything just went dead.”

Jerry glanced over his shoulder after nosing up over a bare ridge line and easing the fighter down into the hollow beyond. Aft view globulars showed the loose, two-by-two formation of the Basilisks trailing him, hugging the contours of the countryside at speeds that were just past reckless and just shy of suicidal.

“What are you talking about?”

“Comms, short- and long-range, it’s all gone,” Agnes said. “No one’s talking.”

“Might be because we’re supposed to be preserving radio silence until we’re closer to the pick-up, genius!” Josie had assured him the lady was good, had been both a Basilisk weapons tech and door gunner, but she’d so far just complained and driven him nuts.

“You’re not hearing me,” she insisted. “There’s nothing. It just cut out. We should at least be picking up incidental chatter, Alliance signals and the like.”

“The only way that makes sense is if...” Jerry trailed off as a tingle of dread rushed along his nerves. He touched a control. “Computer, run communications system diagnostic!”

“System checks out nominal,” the AI replied. “We are picking up no inbound traffic.” A pause. “Interference has intensified; likelihood that the source is artificial approaches ninety-five percent.”

Jerry clenched his teeth as the tingling became a chill in the blood. “Jamming,” he growled.

“Like I was saying,” Agnes called up the chute from the tail.

“Computer,” Jerry order as he banked to avoid a high, rocky knob and keep below the horizon, “where’s Watkins?”

The tactical hologram pinged and showed him an icon to aft and slightly above the Basilisk formation.

“Can we manage a low-power, line-of-sight transmission?”

“It will be imperfect,” the computer replied. “Patching through now.”

A fresh globular fluttered to life, struggled to remain material in the air to Jerry’s left. A badly pixelated Tim glowered out from it. “—the hell, Rodann? You trying to point us out to every targeting computer for a thousand clicks?”

“Sorry,” he said without meaning it. “But, Tim, are you registering any transmissions other than mine?”

He could be seen glancing off to one side, his mouth half-open with a ready retort. But the irritation on his face vanished as features creased in worry. “No. I’m not.”

Jerry could feel the damned sweat beading across his brow. “You’re jammed, too.”

“Shit,” Watkins hissed and looked through the hologram at him. “They know we’re coming.”

“Maybe...” Jerry touched the tactical display, caused it to zoom out. Icons flashed and moved to the west of their course—now tracing southward, parallel to the coast—and northwest. “Passive sensors are getting a lot of disturbance; shockwaves, explosions, energy blasts.” He met Tim’s holographic gaze. “That fighting from this morning is flaring up. Maybe the Alliance is pressing the attack and they’re gumming up all channels as cover?”

“I don’t know...” Tim was staring at something off-camera, probably his own instruments.

“What do you think?” Jerry asked him. “Keep going or turn back?”

Tim’s stubbled jaw clenched before he looked through the globular again. “We’re not leaving Kimball,” he said. “Agreed?”

Jerry blinked away the sting of sweat, then wiped it away with the back of his sleeve. “Agreed.”

“Good.” Tim’s globular shimmered for a moment, was replaced a second later by a tactical map. An icon blinked in the middle of rugged, forested country. Kimball’s stopping point, where he’d transmitted the distress pulse from, looked to be a wooded ridge overlooking a narrow creek. “We’re about nine minutes out,” Watkins said. “Better tell Wheeler what’s up. We’ll drop back a little bit, focus our scanners. Good luck, Rodann.”

“You, too.”

The hologram blinked out, but Jerry was already bringing up another one. “Head’s up, Raider One!” The globular that swelled into being before him showed Josie perched at the edge of an open Basilisk side door, wind lashing in as treetops whipped by, just below. She was almost unrecognizable in her battle armor, with helm on and visor down over her eyes.

There was no mistaking the sardonic half smile. “Getting’ edgy, Rodann? Or you just missed me?”

“Maybe both,” he replied with a grin he couldn’t help. “We’re encountering ECM, a lot of it.”

“We noticed.” Her smiled dipped slightly. Jerry could see Raiders huddled in the cargo space of the Basilisk behind her, tense, ready. “Change of plan?”

“We’re still going,” Jerry replied.

The smile returned. “That’s what I like to hear!”

“Watkins is going to hang back with the Hellhounds.” He frowned a little, hated the next words. “Think I’d better do so, too, with at least a couple of the shuttles. And, think maybe you’d better land shy of Kimball’s site. Place could be hot. Maybe move in on foot.”

Her smile remained, but Jerry didn’t miss the tightness to it. “That an order, Rodann?”

“A suggestion,” he replied with a sudden twist in the gut.

But the half-chortle to her voice told him she’d played him, again. “It’s a good one,” he said. “I’ll need shuttles One through Four, my command team and First Platoon. Should be enough.”

“Roger, that.” Jerry touched the communications panel. “Wu, you continue on with them. We’re falling back about twenty clicks and hovering on standby.”

“And you’d better signal to Kimball that we’re coming,” Josie added as Wu mumbled an acknowledgement. “Hate to keep him wondering.”

“Will do.” Jerry paused, felt tightness rush up from his chest into his throat like choking fingers. “Watch your ass, out there, Josie.”

“You watch my ass,” she replied with a cackle, “and come running and shooting if someone tries to burn it off!”

He forced himself to laugh, could hear the chuckling of the Raiders with her in the shuttle. He kept the hologram up, following her, as he touched the thruster controls, started bleeding off power. The Hog groaned around him as it decelerated. To port and starboard, Basilisks Five and Six did the same, all of them slowing until they settled to a hover just above a narrow hollow.

The rest of the Basilisks moved on without them, looked suddenly, terribly few as they disappeared into the distance. Paradoxically, the globular of Josie didn’t change, the illusion of her seemingly right in front of him, pixelating occasionally as the Hog communicator struggled to maintain the line-of-sight transmission with her over the rough terrain.

“Comm line with Raider One possibly visible to hostile scanning,” the Hog AI said. “Recommend you deactivate.”

“Negative,” Jerry replied, keeping his eyes on Wheeler’s image. She’d muted her mic, but not the holographic feed, and he watched her lips move as she snapped out orders and helmeted heads around her nodded. She was all business, can-do, kick-ass.

He was seized with a sudden longing for her. In the same instant, fear for her howled through the core of him.

“We gonna send that signal?” Agnes wondered from aft.

“Right.” Rodann gave himself a shake and touched a pulsing light on the communicator panel. In the tactical globular, the icon representing the Hog strobed rhythmically as the two-sentence, Jester-encrypted script went out:  COMING IN. STAND IN PLACE. Kimball’s wrist comm would pulse back in receipt, if he was still there to receive it.

Seconds stretched out with only the uneven thrum of the Hog’s engines to break it up.

The view in Josie’s globular shook as Basilisk One reached the wooded gulley just north of Kimball’s last known position. She was jumping from the shuttle even before it touched down, her Raiders jostling out after her. The view pixelated and worsened as she led her people uphill, into the trees, ducking, weaving in the shadows. Jerry caught snatches of armored figures scrambling in twos. Their breathing and soft curses filled the tactical network, backgrounded by the clank of gear, the crunch of boots on frost-limned ground.

Jerry’s communicator pinged and he didn’t quite jump. On the tactical display, a single icon pulsed—Kimball’s wrist comm replying to their signal. Jerry held his breath as a mini-globular popped up beside it, showed a summary of Kimball’s condition. Vitals came back active—thank God—though elevated, the downed pilot’s heart rate skyrocketing. On the tactical, his icon looked like it was on the move, rushing toward the ridgeline Josie’s people would crest in a few minutes.

Jerry keyed the Raiders’ channel. “I’ve got him on scope!”

In her hologram, Josie’s view paused and appeared to kneel behind a tree. Jerry saw her hand flick up and touch the controls at the side of her helmet. “I got him, too. Looks like he’s coming towards us. Didn’t the pulse tell him to wait in place?”

“It did. Maybe he got overexcited?”

“Maybe.” Josie sounded unconvinced. “But how does he know which direction we’re coming from?”

The dread that had been gnawing at Jerry’s gut took an extra-large bite. “I don’t know.”

Josie hesitated, then signaled to a pair of her Raiders while the rest slowed and settled into positions, almost invisible in the wooded gloom. She continued uphill with the pair scampered ahead of her, to either side. “Going up for a look,” was all she said.

Jerry waited and watched, loathing each moment as it dragged. Kimball’s icon continued its frantic course northward while Josie’s Raider team climbed the slope and neared the top, a few hundred meters away. Dabbing sweat from his eyebrows, Jerry zoomed the tactical out to take in all their surroundings, gathered by the Hog’s sensors, saw little. The damnable jamming continued.

“Almost there,” Josie grunted between strides.

In almost the same moment, a new globular shivered into existence with a grainy, tossing image that clearly came from someone at a run. A wheezing voice cried, “Abort! Go back! They’re all over me!”

In her own hologram Josie froze in place and dropped low on her haunches. “Kimball? Is that you?”

“Go back!” what was clearly the downed pilot’s voice plead between breaths. “I thought I lost them! But as soon as I moved—”

A blaster bolt screamed through the air ahead of him, dashed fiery splinters from a tree. Kimball dove, grunted as he struck dirt, then started scrambling again, angling in amongst trees, pine-like boughs sweeping at him like restraining arms. Cyan flickers spoke of more blasts, questing into the woods. Something crashed and flamed to Kimball’s left.

“Blaster fire on the other side of the ridge,” Josie growled. “My teams, come up!”

“Josie—” Jerry started to say.

“We’re almost to him!” she snapped back. For a moment, her view was jostling as she rushed uphill through the trees. Faint light broke through ahead, the woods thinning out, replaced by rocks. Jerry could hear the weird re-echo of blasters through her pickups. “Not giving up now!”

An energy bolt clipped a branch to Kimball’s right and he stumbled. Breathing hoarsened to a near-sob. Pain. Desperation. The view whipped about—was probably coming from his wrist comm as he clambered back to his feet. A closer crash of cyan startled Jerry for an instant, until he realized it was Kimball, himself, firing his own blastpistol wildly into the woods behind him.

The blaster fire chasing the downed pilot tripled, bolts slashing the air, the trees, the rocks. Fiery fragments and slag leapt all around. A gout of sparks jolted across Kimball’s path and the pilot spun away from it. The sky was visible for a moment, then a jolt as he must have hit the ground. Wheezing for air, Kimball dragged himself upright against a boulder. His blastpistol lay a few away where he’d dropped it. He reached for it, but a cyan bolt dashed it away.

“—almost there,” Josie panted as she and her Raiders dashed along the ridge towards the echo of fire.

But Jerry’s attention remained sickeningly transfixed on Kimball’s feed.

The view was oddly off to what would be Kimball’s side, where his left arm and wrist comm would rest. Jerry could see he had one hand up in surrender, but the other positioned so that the comm would display all. Smart guy.

Dark shapes materialized from the forested gloom below him, shards of sky light filtering through to highlight black armor plates, aimed blastrifles, visored helmets. Jerry could see a half dozen of them. Not Marines—maybe these Council Guardsmen the Union folks have been talking about. The man in the lead had his visor up, revealing narrow, stubble-blued features and a hateful, twitching smile.

“A-all right!” Kimball exhaled. “You got me.”

“Yeah, we did,” the Guard leader replied, to snickers from his comrades. He kept the muzzle of his blaster trained on Kimball, tensed. “You one of them?”

Josie’s voice crackled from the other globular. “Anyone got eyes on them yet?”

Kimball hesitated, swallowed. “I’m from the Union Fleet.”

The Guardsman snorted. “Flying one of them Hellhounds? We saw the crash site.” He turned to the others. “Fan out! We know there’re more of them!” He touched his helmet as movement shivered through the woods around him. “Got the one. You see the rest?” He listened to something from his helmet a moment, then had both hands on the blastfrifle again, aiming. “I’m gonna ask you one more time:  are you one of them? Are you a Jester?”

Kimball waved his upraised hand. “Look, guy, I don’t know anything about—”

The Guardsman’s blaster barked lightning and everything jolted. Smoke hazed the air for a moment. Sparks settled. Kimball coughed once, seemed to both struggle for a breath and grunt in something almost like surprise. Then stillness, and the globular fluttered out.

“Christ...” Jerry let out after a stunned moment. He heard Agnes groan from aft and had to force down a sudden surge of nausea.

A roar exploded from Josie’s globular. It was echoed from every Raider’s channel, joined in the same moment by an eruption of blaster fire. They were at a sprint now, barreling through the trees, firing as they came on. In the hologram it was hard to make sense of anything, snatches of cyan flash, running figures, puffs of flame.

Josie’s viewpoint settled as she came to a slamming halt behind a rock, balanced her blastrifle on its edge, and fired off a burst. A narrow tree trunk flew apart at its touch and a flinching figure in Guardsman black scuttled clear of it. Josie’s second blast sent it flopping and aflame. A third one left it still on the ground. Others were flitting back through the woods, starting to run as Raider fire chased them. The sharp crash of grenades hastened them on their way.

“Can anyone see Kimball?” Josie called, scanning for more targets. “Anyone?”

His throat still clenched by an unseen fist of horror, Jerry couldn’t even manage a croak to tell Josie to give it up. A blat from the tactical display stopped him anyway. He looked and saw icons beginning to sprinkle the countryside around the Raiders, the Hog’s passive sensors piecing together the picture from energy fire, from movement, and more. The fist tightened as brighter contacts materialized south of the ridge—fusion bottle signatures flaring to life, vehicles. A war book schematic popped up next to one, showed a flattened, arrowhead-shaped chassis mounting a quad-barreled plasma blaster.

Too much hardware to snag one pilot, Jerry realized. It is a trap. Coughing to clear his throat, Jerry keyed the communicator. “Josie—”

In her globular, she ducked low as a flurry of blaster bolts tore through forest, sent branches spinning in flames, dashed instantly-molten droplets from boulders. Warnings and howls of dismay filled the Raiders’ channel. Fresh figures in black were coming up the hill again, darting from tree-to-tree, firing with none of the Raiders’ control or precision, but volume that quadrupled in a minute.

“—taking fire from below and the left!” Josie snarled. “Where’re they coming from?”

A Raider to her right, crouched low behind the same boulder as she, stood up to take aim at some target. A smack of cyan took him in the face. Helmet and head within crashed apart in a spray of fire and shredded meat and bone. Josie flinched low as the body dropped and was hit a half dozen more times, till only smoldering flaps of armor remained around hideous embers. A buzzsaw racket filled her world and firefly patterns of a heavy blastcannon burst ravaged though the woods, spinning trees apart.

“Josie,” Jerry hollered in his mic, “you’ve got to get out of there!”

“Fall back to the north, to the Basilisks!” she was already bawling to her Raiders. She raised herself enough to trigger a blast, then started running. “Go-go-go!”

Jerry keyed another channel. “Watkins, you seeing this?”

“No shit, I am!” he replied. “Looks like they rolled out the welcome wagon!”

“Looks like they were waiting for Jesters to show up!” Jerry touched the tactical where the icon of the anti-starfighter gun sat, knew his meaning would be transmitted to Tim. “They’ve got guns looking for you!”

“Wouldn’t want to disappoint,” Tim replied with fury—he would’ve seen what they did to Kimball, too. “We’ll draw their attention. Get in there and clear a hole for Wheeler!”

“Already on it!”

Feeding power to the Hog’s thrusters, Jerry sent the big fighter lurching forward. The Basilisks hovering at his flanks followed. As the countryside began to roll by below, he set the scatter packs to AI-guidance—seeking any fusion signature, any vehicle—and selected the energy weapons for himself.

Hang on Josie, he thought, blinking through perspiration.

In her globular, all Jerry could see was a jolting confusion of trees, flashes, and occasionally glimpses of other Raiders. Only when she slowed and turned to take a place behind a massive trunk, could Jerry make sense of the imagery. Her blastrifle came up as a Raider rushed by and she was firing, slamming out cyan bolts as black-armored pursuers crested the rock-strewn heights she’d just left. One took a Guardsman square in the chest plate, left a glowing hole, clearly seen before the dead man clattered onto the rocks below him. Josie walked her fire across more coming down, caught one in the thigh who squalled and stumbled right into a cross fire from other Raiders, was ripped to fiery pieces.

A scream from behind and below brought Josie’s viewpoint whipping about. It settled in time to see missile trails boil over the hilltop and dive down into the ravine that’d hidden the landing zone. A fireball crashed from one of the parked Basilisks, sent metal sleeting in every direction, scything down Raiders just reaching it. The shuttle rocked on its landing gears and the big plug of one of its gravity drive nacelles sagged, half-detached and flaming.

A second missile track dove through its open side-hatch and white death flashed within, glaring out through every seam in the shuttle’s chassis. The Basilisk burst in a half-globe of hellfire that sent huge flaps of its blastisteel plate wheeling skyward and a shockwave rushing uphill to fling Josie backwards against the tree. For a moment, her viewpoint settled on the terrible fireball, mushrooming for the tombstone gray sky.

“We’ll be there in seconds!” Jerry barked. The Hog jumped a rise and he could see the smoke. Stomach jumped into his throat as he dipped over the next valley, stayed there as he rose over the next with the Basilisks following and the targeting alarms howling. “We’re here! Let ‘em have it!”

The Number Four scatter pack shuddered as its missile spread unleashed. Jerry had no sense of their destination as they screeched away in wild vortices that leapt over the embattled ridge. He might have seen the flashes of their impacts, but had eyes only for the icons glittering hostile red across the spine of the hilltop. Teeth grating, he gripped the control stick and depressed the trigger.

The Hog’s chin-mounted heavy plasma-blaster chattered deafeningly, kicked a torrent of tightly-knit energy packets into the ridge top. Everywhere one touched, dirt, stone, plant matter, and bodies liquefied. Jerry hosed the fire across the hill, guided by the AI’s pointers, felt the Hog rattle with the ongoing discharge. To either side, the Basilisks added their much-heavier fire to the maelstrom. The slope defoliated as he watched, trees crumpling in flames and splinters, the space around them disintegrating into a shrapnel-torn holocaust.

The black-clad Council Guardsmen who’d slain Kimball simply ceased to exist.

The Hog’s targeting alarms wailed as missiles trails blossomed from surrounding heights, came streaking over the smoldering ridge, straight into their teeth. Oh shit. With the plasma blaster already slaved to his manual control, Jerry had no point-defenses as he looked straight at a red-painted warhead, impossibly clear in the hologram. He had only reflex, and sawed the stick left, flinging the Hog to port.

The white flash of detonation on his forward shield was lost in the wham of the Hog jolting backwards, nose flipping skyward as though from an uppercut punch. Restraints and helmet saved Jerry’s spine and skull, but only for the moment as the heavy fighter began to tumble. Dazed, he instinctively wrenched the stick forward and pulse the maneuvering fields. This only righted the Hog for a moment as the shockwave pulsed from a missile glancing off the shields of the Basilisk to starboard. Again, he fought the ship.

Agnes was hollering from aft, her tail gun chattering nonstop. Missiles thrown by the Hog’s evasive maneuvers looped back around for its tail, only to collide with the torrent of her fire. Three died in thundering blasts before she walked her fire across another pair swirling for the Basilisks. She proved her worthiness to man the Hog’s quad-blaster in another fiery second that claimed both.

Alarms wailed again. More missiles jolted over the horizon, trails elongating in deceptively-graceful arcs that would, nevertheless, drive them into Jerry’s hide. The Number Three scatter-pack erupted, sent a counter-salvo rushing out to meet them. Jerry flipped the weapons selector to put the plasma blaster on point defense and switched to the particle cannon, jerked the trigger. The four of them jolted out in alternating patterns and where their azure beams touched, matter aerosolized.

“—got ‘im!” Josie’s voice crackled from the badly-distorted globular still showing her viewpoint on the ground. “Keep moving!”

Jerry didn’t have time for relief, but was distantly aware of her survival. Josie was carrying a blaster-scorched Raider on her shoulder down into the hollow where the wreckage of one Basilisk glowed white hot and another burned. Raiders were clambering into the surviving pair, but with the wounded they were already bulging at the seams be taking on more. Jerry could hear Wu’s whining voice asking for permission to take off.

“Get out of here!” Josie hollered. She set her wounded charge down beside a splintered tree trunk and turned to sight her blastrifle on the inferno of the ridgeline above them. “Basilisks, take off!”

“Belay that!” Jerry barked, jolting out particle beams almost spastically now. With his free hand, he keyed the communicator. “Basilisk Five, break off and get down there!”

“—too hot!” Josie’s voice protested.

“Five,” Jerry snarled, “pick. Them. UP!”

If there was any argument, Jerry didn’t hear it. Because in that moment, the sky filled with the thunder of Hellhounds.

***

TIM felt the moment when every gun on the surface turned towards him. A dozen missile trails corkscrewed into the sky and angled his way. Targeting alarms squalled and the tactical glittered with fresh contacts as Alliance active sensors painted him and fusion bottles glowed with surging energy.

But by then, he and the rest of Second Squadron were already over the horizon and on top of them.

Tim let fly with the Number Four scatter-pack, each missile set to independent tracking and forgotten the moment they launched. Their wildly diverging paths and widely-spaced explosions a second later told him they’d each found and struck different targets. But he was already plunging through a whirlwind of blaster fire. A glance at the tactical showed him a flutter of schemata on the war book globular—mobile anti-starfighter batteries, hovertruck-mounted launchers, at least one hovertank.

Plasma blasts stitched across his starboard shield as he lashed over the Basilisk’s fiery landing zone. “Watch that!” He juked to port and put on speed. “Break clear to the south and come back around on them!”

Thrusters shoved the flight couch into his spine, carried him over the countryside at a punishing speed before he let up on them and banked into a starboard turn that’d bring him back north. Fresh smoke columns smudged the sky and new flames leapt heavenward as Hellhounds streaked and scattered over the Alliance ground forces. Energy blast traceries chattered and hosed across the sky. Actinic white flashes betrayed hits, but no Hellhounds took more than they could shrug off. Surprise had served them well.

It wouldn’t help them a second time.

“Lot of damned firepower!” Li called across the squadron channel. “Those quad-blasters have portable shield generators! Gonna be hard to dig ‘em out!”

Newly-birthed missile spreads reached for the sky and turned towards the regrouping Hellhounds. “Little more worried about that, right now!” Tim said. “I’ll draw them off. You punch through and pick off the launchers!”

“Take Nine and Ten with you!”

Tim kicked the thrusters and shot for the horizon. “Always glad for company!”

The separately-twining missile trails converged towards him like snakes drawn to mice as he came streaking in. Tim flicked the plasma blaster to AI-control and let Jeanie go to work. Cyan bolts ravaged forth instantly, clawing targets from the air with anticlimactic cracks and fire puffs. Nine and Ten from the Second swept up on Tim’s flanks and added their own fire, an eye-scouring tracery of bolts that send a dozen missiles fluttering to the surface in smoking shreds.

But there was a hell of a lot of them.

Tim touched a control, saw the defensive systems display blink green, and keyed the communicator. “Nine and Ten, break high! Let ‘em chase us and drop chaff and jamming pods!” He didn’t wait for acknowledgement—wouldn’t hear it over the squall of hostile targeting alarms, anyway—and wrenched back on the stick.

The Hellhound groaned as it lurched for the sky, shivering into a nearly ninety-degree angle. The alarm warble built to a teeth-gritting screech as g-forces ground into Tim’s marrows, despite inertial dampening. The aft display highlighted missiles climbing after him, branching off to chase Nine and Ten, too.

“Jeanie,” Tim grunted through the building pressure, “any time now...”

“Got it!”

Tim felt the chug of first the chaff pods, then the decoys pop free of the Hellhound’s aft underbelly. The former would light the missiles’ tiny AI-sociopaths up with flares like fusion reactors; the latter projecting momentary mirages of Hellhounds to chase.

Letting the Hellhound climb another instant, Tim killed the engines and let speed bleed away in a moment as he pulled back on the stick and feathered the maneuvering fields. His stomach leapt nearly to the roof of his mouth as the sky and the ground reversed positions before him and the starfighter turned end-over-end.

Missiles boiled off in every direction, looping after the decoys. Nine and Ten peeled off to either side, both still clawing for altitude with ghosts on their tails. But a few of the pursuers still rose true, speared straight for Tim. He had a palate-drying instant to wonder if this was the miscalculation where his luck would finally give out. Then Jeanie lit them up with a long, sawing burst from the chin blaster and fire blossoms spread before him. In another moment, gravity took hold and the Hellhound was plunging through settling flames.

Blisters of fire walked across the countryside below as Tim let the Hellhound dive. Li and the rest of Second Squadron were ripping over the Alliance gunners in knife-stroke patterns, leaving annihilation wherever they passed. It had an almost surgical precision, seen from high above. But Tim knew it was apocalypse below, men scurrying for cover, finding none in a hurricane of fire and shrapnel. Machines that had been as close as kin turned to infernos around their crews. Guns and launchers flailing the heavens with world-punishing fury, only to be answered with the same—as though it’d made no difference. It was just death. Everywhere.

Tim almost felt sorry for them.

Almost—he’d seen what they’d done to Kimball.

A lone stream of plasma quested up through roiling fumes, chased a Hellhound, caught up to it and peppered its shields in a curtain of white fire. White went ugly orange-red as shields failed and energy bolts feasted upon blastisteel plate. A screech cut across the tactical network, cut out just as quickly as the Hellhound tumbled, wings crumpling, then whirling off as the stricken fighter spun in a fiery rain across a hillside.

“Damn you!” Li’s voice snapped.

Another Hellhound—Li’s certainly—screamed through smoke columns to spear the anti-starfighter battery with the azure pulse of its particle beams. The hovercraft-mounted weapon hosed its fire in a wild arc across the sky to meet it and cyan crisscrossed blue-white in a duel at light-speed. Seemingly at the same moment, shields of Alliance quad-blaster and Hellhound flashed apart in fluttering nimbuses of energy. But it was the Alliance machine that shattered, a plate of fire scathing out to flatten or scorch every remaining tree in a hundred meters while flaps of hull leapt high and began to settle like a flock of startled crows.

The Hellhound veered off, but hadn’t escaped the exchange unscathed.

“Ah, shit...”

“Li!” Tim leveled off his Hellhound as he fed power back to the thrusters, with a burst of speed came up alongside the Squad Leader’s craft. Smoke trailed behind it and Tim could see the blackened fuselage, the scorched dimple where his shield generator had been. “You all right?”

“Do I look all right, Watkins, you dumb sonofabitch!”

Tim grinned with relief at the spirited answer. “I meant are you hurt?”

“Yeah...” A globular showing the other man shivered into being. His crooked-toothed half-smile looked had a pinch of worry to it. “I’m fine. My girl’s shot-up bad.” Tim saw Li’s grav drives flutter for a moment, the Hellhound wobbled dangerously close. “Shields are gone. Linkage between drives and fusion bottle looks bad.”

“Get out of here, then,” Tim said.

“Not leaving my team in a fight.”

Tim glanced at the tactical, then the aft view hologram. “Not much fight left.”

Smoke and flame wreathed the hilltops and slopes behind them, Hellhounds whipping by overhead, chased by desultory flutters of blaster fire. Explosions jabbed out from the infernal haze as wrecked vehicles burned and fuel or ammo cooked off. But little real resistance remained.

The Jesters had torn through the Alliance ambush in minutes.

“Damn,” Li said, dabbing sweat from his face with the back of a hand. “That was a hell of lot of hardware pissed away just to try to sucker us in. Almost seemed personal. Like they were looking for us specifically.”

Icy footprints walked up Tim’s spine. He thought about the words from that black-clad Guardsman, just before he shot Kimball. “I think they were.”

“Damn,” Li exhaled. “Still, I’m waiting on my Squad, Tim. I can hold it.”

“I know you can, tough guy.” Tim checked another quadrant of the tactical as he and Li followed a long arc, circling the conflagration around the dying fight. Looked like the Basilisks were starting to lift off. He keyed Rodann’s channel. “Jerry, we leaving anytime soon?”

“Last shuttle’s loading,” Rodann replied through a snarl of static. “Jesus, Tim...”

“I know,” he replied. They all felt it. This wasn’t just an ugly business—someone had painted a target on the Jesters’ backs. “Let’s skedaddle out of here before someone decides they want another try at us, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Tim keyed the general address. He’d told Li he’d have operational control, but didn’t think the battered Squad Leader would mind at this point. “All right, Jesters. I’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here and back to the Hole.”

***

THE SKIES OVER THE Union positions were a tapestry of destruction.

Kelly dove her Hellhound through bursting flak and arcing plasma bolts and the wreckage of blasted missiles tumbling gracefully for the ground. Ground fire scathed up to grab her. Only a wildly juking course carried her through it untouched.

“There they are!” she growled.

On the tactical, her AI highlighted a battery of Alliance heavy artillery crouched in a narrow gulley ten kilometers south of the fighting. The war book identified them as medium field pieces, hovercraft-mounted, nothing fancy. But they were flinging hell at the Union marines buckling before the Alliance assault.

Nosing her Hellhound into a near ninety-degree plunge and feeling the quiver of the strain on the spaceframe, Kelly prepared to return the favor.

“Hostile targeting,” the AI announced and drew a halo around another contact, perched on the hilltop behind the howitzers. War book globular displayed another one of those damned quad-blasters. A moment later, its fire was slapping across the sky, then splashing off her port shields.

Clenching teeth and control stick, Kelly gave the Hellhound a quick twitch to throw off the storm of plasma. Fury rushed up at her like a scarred, smoldering wall. The icon laid over the blazing quad-blaster went red and she grinned fiercely as she stroked the trigger, sent particle beams stabbing down like blades of an angry goddess. Near-misses flanked the weapon with gouts of fire, then direct hits blistered away its feeble shielding and feasted upon blastisteel. It didn’t so much as explode as jump skyward like a kicked toy, spinning apart as it flew.

“Scatter-pack!” Kelly grunted as she dragged back on the stick to pull out of the dive and g-forces no inertial dampening could allay pinched down. “Number Two, fire!”

The Hellhound juddered as the missile spread left its hardpoint. She didn’t follow their course, focused on the horizon dropping before her as the starfighter shook and screamed out of its plunge and leveled off into a course northwest. She felt the result of the her run a moment later, a thunder that rushed out after her, buffeted the Hellhound’s tail and left her fighting the stick for control.

In the aft visual, a wall of fire belched as high as the wispy gray cloud cover, turning the gulley into an irradiated crack of instant slag. A ripple of smaller explosions as the artillery’s ready ammunition cooked off barely registered as an anticlimax.

Everywhere Kelly looked, the same scenes played out. Hellhounds shot out of the sky into crisscrossing energy beams, streaked through them, and unloaded scatter-packs or blaster volleys, kicking the countryside into an inferno. The Alliance had ample anti-starfighter defenses for their infantry and artillery, but apparently hadn’t reckoned on the Jesters’ sheer recklessness, their lunatic willingness to dive right into hell to savage them.

Annihilated foes across a dozen worlds could have warned them it was so.

But any glee Kelly might have felt as she arched around from the north to come in over the aerodrome defenses again shriveled as she beheld the full panorama of the battlefield.

The Alliance—those damned black-armored Council Guardsmen everywhere—was surging down out of the surrounding hills into the valley the Union position sat astride. Fiery wedges pointed out at least three thrusts, two of which clearly moved to encircle the aerodrome. Fierce marine resistance looked to be crumpling before the mass of the assault, the sheer willingness to take casualties.

Suicide, Kelly thought, sickened, knowing from personal experience the horror those attackers would be charging into. The hovertanks they’d counted on to support them burned brightly on the slopes behind them, picked off early by Union heavy weapons. Their first wave had disintegrated in the flail of the dug-in defenders. Only losses—and likely ammo shortages—had forced the Union to abandon their trenches and fall back to the air field. There, they’d dug in again and the Alliance was coming across, out in the open, with plasma and metal tearing into their faces and Hellhound death screaming down from above.

Insane.

But it was damned near working.

“They need help down there!” Red called across the Jester network. “Re-group! I need a flight putting punishment over the airfield!”

Kelly was about to reply when new alarms sounded. The tactical blinked as fresh icons swept up from the southwest. Kelly didn’t need the war book program to know what they were. “Valkyries inbound!” she shouted. “Twenty seconds out! Harrison Wing, reform on me! We’ll give ‘em a welcome!”

In the confusion of the scrum, she had no idea how many of her badly-scattered group was in a position to assist, only that she was. Angling back to the south and putting on speed, she kept her Hellhound low, skirting the conflagration of the fight and moving to cut across the Valkyrie’s axis of approach. Looked like nine of them, an understrength squadron. She wondered if any were stragglers from the space battle a week ago.

Whoever they were, they weren’t fooled by her low altitude. Alarms blatted from her computer as hostile targeting found her and half the oncoming fighters plumed with missile spreads. The alarms quintupled as the trails twisted towards her, all of them acquiring her drive signature at once.

Kelly wanted to say she’d gone beyond feeling fear, but the gut-tingling sensation filling her sure felt like panic. “Scatter-packs,” she squeaked at the AI, “all remaining, counter-salvo on my mark.” She flicked the weapons selector to slave the plasma blaster to the AI. Then, “Ready all chaff and ECM.” She watched the missile trails converge towards her while the Valkyries slowed, hung back to watch her fry. “Fire scatter-packs!”

Her Hellhound shivered as the remain pair of hardpoints vomiting their missiles complements into the sky. It seemed they’d barely left their launchers when they began colliding with the Valkyries’ fusillade in a garden pattern of fire blooms. Then the plasma blaster was hammering away and the sky completely filled with fire. And every alarm wailed its warning of certain death.

“Chaff and ECM!” she barked, faintly notice the flutter of the decoy pods and flares spiraling out to either flank. The Hellhound screamed into the storm of still-exploding missiles and hurtling shrapnel. Shields glared all the way through the spectrum to the white of near-overload.

But nothing found her.

Then she was through, gray sky opening up and Valkyries peeling away as the Hellhound they’d expected to be overwhelmed shot into their midst, instead. One reacted too slow, hung before her holographic sights in a perfect, slow-motion silhouette. Targeting halos crimsoned.

Kelly stroked the trigger and let particle beams lash out. A white flash followed by the black of a smoke trail rewarded her. Then she was veering off to port, barely avoiding collision, and the Valkyrie was wobbling off across the sky, smearing it with fumes and debris, but still aloft. Jaw clenched till pain slivered along it, she reversed course, banked to starboard and lunged after the stricken craft.

But energy bolts slammed across her nose just as Kelly’s holographic sights slid over her prey again and she had to bank the opposite direction as a Valkyrie slashed before her. Forward shields crashed into white fire. Then they cleared and it was a real rat-race, starfighters twisting in a whirlwind of hurtling machines and slicing death while the ground burned not so far below them. Seconds were eternities of struggle. Vision was fire and blur.

With a jolt to the thrusters, Kelly drove the Hellhound clear of the scrap, clawing for open sky with speed. She shot out to the northeast, away from the ground battle. A pair of Valkyries stuck on her tail, though, and it was just as she’d warned Tim; with the drag of atmosphere, the Hellhound was the slower, less nimble machine.

Kelly dipped low, into a darkly-green valley untouched by the war to this point. She brought it with her, bolts like slices of midday sky chopping past her to kick up gouts of flame and splintered trees. A dozen forest fires started in her wake as she juked to avoid particle beams, was slapped to port by a near-miss that left damage control alarms warbling.

She tore back on the stick and braked with the maneuvering fields, sent the Hellhound rocketing straight up. The Valkyries split and roared by to either side, missing her as she climbed desperately. But at least one of them wasn’t fooled, she could see in the aft display, a delta shape peeling up after her. Its particle beams flicked out, thundered against the gray dome of Fury’s sky, questing closer, closer to her hull.

“Hang on, Commander!”

Kelly recognized Matyszak’s voice across the tactical only after the savage flurry of his blaster fire intersected with her pursuer’s climb. The Valkyrie, shields aflame, then hull afire jolted out of its course as the Hellhounds of Second Squadron, Harrison Wing shot by it all around it. It looped once, slowed, then began a plunge back to the ground on a column of fumes.

Matyszak followed it all the way down, pumping a stream of plasma bolts into it and turning the starfighter into a comet. It hit the surface of Fury in a dozen explosions of plummeting debris. “Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!”

Matyszak’s cheer was hardly the only one. The tactical lit up with whoops and hollers of Jesters, slashing in amongst the now badly-outnumbered Valkyries. The desperation of it all became clear to Kelly now; the Alliance had the ground forces to roll over the Union’s, but only if they could break up the Jester air cover. They’d flung the cobbled-together flights of Valkyries into the fight, not with hope of victory, but the surety of the distraction they’d cause.

And it had worked.

“—at the airfield!” a voice Kelly recognized as General Teller’s barked across the tactical network. “Perimeter breached! They’re almost to the shield generators! Red! Any Jester! Get yer asses over here! If those go down, we are well and truly fu—”

The abrupt cut-off of the transmission galvanized Kelly in a way no near-miss of a blaster bolt could. She lurched the Hellhound back towards the fighting around the aerodrome, pouring on the speed as she called into the mic, “Harrison Wing! Any of my Jesters! They’re overrunning the marine positions! Get back there!”

The starfighter shivered as though enraged as it charged for the terrible, black stain rising over the battlefield.

***

KIA MUNRO RAN THROUGH hell with the survivors of her platoon. Spacecraft burned on the runway, flung onto their backs by explosions, warping and melting by the supernova heat of their ruptured fusion reactors. Lesser conflagrations chewed the tarmac as blaster fire kicked blastcrete up at the retreating marines’ heels.

“The far side!” Kia screamed—not sure anyone would hear at this point. She pounded for what look like a sandbag shelter for flight crews on the runway’s eastern perimeter, felt her spine twitch every time a plasma bolt whipped by after her.

One of these caught a marine between the shoulder blades just shy of the shelter, flung the man forward to sprawl before it, smoking and twitching. Kia ignored it, leapt the sandbags and landing firmly, turning without a consideration for the spaceship techs she sent scatterng and squalling to the ground. “Come on!” she hollered out into the fiery anarchy of the airfield. “Over here! Come on!”

More of her platoon rushed out of the haze, vaulting the barrier and slamming down into position around her. Others she didn’t recognize joined them, resistance coalescing around the little strongpoint she’d lucked into finding. Union marines were already slapping out return fire as Alliance blasts, badly-scattered and momentarily thin, fluttered through the fumes.

“If you can’t help,” Kia roared at the quailing techs, “stay down, stay out of the way! Or get the fuck out of here!”

That last part was just anger—rage for dead marines, for the fear and pain, for being forced to fucking run. Where they hell in all this were they going to go? Where could any of them go?

Cyan bit the top of the berm, sent sandbags flying, bursting, showering them in super-heated grit. Kia came up over the top, already firing. Figures in black scuttled through smoke, from one flaming wreck to another. One dropped, didn’t move further. The blaster fire thinned out again for a moment.

Kia touched the control to her helmet comm. “Beta Company, sound off! Anyone out there?” Only static answered her. “This is Munro! Key on my position! This is the rally point!”

“Just hold yer horses, lady!” a familiar voice sputtered from her ear bud. “I’m bringing you a present!”

Kia could’ve burst into tears with relief to hear Cintas’s voice—if she’d had any left. Then the noncom was there, impossibly rushing across the bedlam of the airfield, a blurred figure in the smoke, followed by a bigger, loping figure hauling a long tube—the beautiful bastard brought out the dragon gun—and a smaller one carrying a pair of boxy modules and piping looped around its chest.

“Covering fire!” Kia roared and took aim into the haze, fired. Around her, marines joined in, hollering as they unleashed, ravaging the tarmac, smoldering wreckage, even bodies long-since given up their last breath.

Alliance fire answered in a splatter of cyan, poorly-directed and feeble. Sparks and shrapnel leapt around Cintas’s little entourage, the last of their three—carrying the dragon’s charge packs—stumbled and fell, dropping his cargo. Cintas paused at the berm to blast into the distance while the marine bearing the gun, itself, shouldered by, then rushing to pick up a pack and drag the last trooper after him into cover.

“Get that shit set up!” Kia ordered, not bothering to check on them, firing at a shadow darting from one spot to the next.

A lot of shapes were moving out there, creeping closer, crowding in where burning transports sagged on the blastcrete. A firefight was intensifying to the left, heat-lightning flutters drawing near. But it was a long sprint out in the open to cross the rest of the airfield, even with the wrecks and the oily, clinging smoke.

“Cintas...”

“We’re set!” he snapped back, and the air roared with the dragon gun’s breath.

The repeat blastcannon’s willow-the-wisp torrent sawed across the field, jolting patterns of slag off the blastcrete, marching over crippled ships in gouts of shrapnel that stirred black-clad forms into flight. These started crumpling before the plasma bolts even touched them, diving for any imperfection on the tarmac that might hide them. But there was no hiding as Kia and the others adding their blasters to the carnage.

Noticing the sudden absence of fire from her muzzle, the deadened click-click of the trigger, Kia ducked down to check her weapon. With a jerk of the release, she ejected the slug-like battery and reached for another, was shocked to find only one left in her bandolier. Better make it count. She slapped the last one into the well at the stock waited for the priming light above the trigger to green and pressed back to the lip of the berm.

Something flashed out in the swirling fumes of the field. Kia barely had time to process it before the scream of a short-ranged engine filled the air. There wasn’t even time to duck. But she felt the rocket go by, tear just overhead, so close its trail prickled exposed flesh with heat. Then the CRASH of an explosion from behind.

Shockwave flung her against the berm, practically over it. Dimly, she felt the blastrifle drop from her hands, felt every bone shiver with the concussion. Dazed, she rolled once, tried to prop herself up against the sandbags. Smoke plumed behind her, raining debris upon their position. It wasn’t clear from the still-settling wreckage what’d gotten hit.

Kia turned to her left, her head a ringing, dragging weight. Everything looked to her as though it was seen though a foggy pane of glass. Cintas was there, howling something she couldn’t manage to hear. The dragon gun spewed its cyan breath, still blowtorching the field before it. The gunner panned the weapon left, at black shapes squirming through the chaos.

CRASH!

There was only yellow-red flash in Kia’s world for an instant, then a stinging pain across one side of her face. She blinked. Tried to move, realized she was still in the same spot, still leaned back against the berm. Something was across her legs. A sandbag. She flung it aside. Something else was there.

Cintas.

“Hey...” She gave him a nudge, then a shove. “Hey!”

He twitched and suddenly lurched up off of her. Flopping like a wounded bird, he patted himself over frantically, checking limbs, torso, face. Blood was running from his nostrils and his eyes had a wild glaze. Those eyes went to the side, where he’d been. So did Kia’s.

A length of glowing tube was all that remained of the dragon gun. Smoke steamed away from the bite torn from the berm by another Alliance rocket. A single leg twitched amidst burst sandbags and shattered blastecrete. It was the only remnant of the gun’s crew.

A many, many-voiced howl sounded out beyond the wrecked position. Cyan bolts slapped by overhead, crackled off the berm, increasing in volume by the second. Grenades thumped. Feet pounded on tarmac.

Kia fumbled for and found her blastrifle, checked the action. She sought Cintas’s still-fogged gaze. He was struggling to unwind his weapon from around his shoulders. Looking up through his bloody mask, he returned her stare. Together, they raised themselves up to the smoking, tattered lip of the berm.

And found the Alliance coming on again.

It was more of the Council Guardsmen, an endless torrent of them, like it had been for an hour, forever. Sprinting into a flail of energy fire, they bellowed like demons, voices going shrill as bolts of coherent light sliced through them. But they didn’t stop, clambering over their fallen, firing wildly. What they lacked in discipline, they made up for with maniac courage and numbers, always the numbers.

Kia put a blast through the chest plate of one beginning to cock his arm back to throw a grenade. The man dropped nervelessly, the explosive hitting the ground with him, then exploding in the midst of his comrades. Screams rose over the thump of the blast. Ebon-armored bodies flew, some in pieces. The closest hit the ground only a dozen yards in front of her. And plenty of living ones were still coming, right behind them.

A bolt flashed past Kia’s head so close to the right it jolted her helmet halfway around. Firing half-blind, she put a three-round burst into the center of the shooter’s mass, a Guardsman so big momentum carried him another dozen steps, aflame and dead before he finally thumped against the other side of the sandbags.

Claws of pain scrawled across the flesh of Kia’s arm and she yelped in panic at the flames lit by the near-miss and spreading up and down her sleeve. Beating them out furiously, the motions jarred one of the airfield techs who’d been cowering behind her through the fight. Jolted beyond sense into mindless panic, he squalled and burst to his feet, despite a frantic grab from another marine. The lunatic’s panicked flight carried him into the crossfire and he hit the ground in multiple fiery pieces, his wail lasting a second longer.

Cintas, who’d spun to warn the man, turned back to the fore to find a Council Guardsman clambering on top of the sandbags. The man froze, seemed surprised to find someone actually alive there. Both brought their blastrifles up in the same heartbeat, muzzle-to-muzzle.

Kia’s hastily-fired blaster bolt struck the Council decal on the Guardsman’s armored breast, flash-melted the emblem and vaporized the flesh and bone behind it. The man toppled from sight and she bawled at Cintas, “Mind your shit, dumbass!”

If he heard or replied, she had no idea. Because all sound blanked out in a gale-force wave of sound like every buzzsaw in the universe flicked on at once. The air seethed and hurt as sound and steel filled it. Kia cringed down, as though pressed into the sandbags by the sheer destructive power.

An angular hover hull had wobbled up behind their position and the double-barreled turret mounted atop it strobed out a brain-scouring pattern of electric blue flashes, spumed with wild sparks that sprinkled and singed the marines huddled down before its blastisteel skirts. Gauss guns, Kia realized distantly through a soup of liquified thought. Like those mounted as point defenses on starships, it fired thousands of thumbnail-sized pellets, accelerated to insane velocities by electric current.

Driven to desperation, the aircrews were bringing their anti-starfighter/anti-artillery batteries to the edge of the airfield to defend it.

What the gauss guns did out on the tarmac was less defense and more straightforward butchery. Onrushing Guardsmen simply ceased to be, swept away before a razor-toothed tornado that whirled granulated pavement in amongst shredding metal and pulverized flesh. A wall of ruin sprang skyward. The air darkened with its effluvium, then lightened, went crimson. Kia felt tackiness upon bare, singed skin and grimaced to see she was being showered in vaporized gore.

The gauss storm wound its way one way and then the other, the guns beginning to take on a cherry glow, overheated by a sustained burst they’d never been designed for. They cut out, at last, either stalled or deactivated to save them. Kia saw its cupola hatch pop open and a crewmember scamper out into heat-shimmering air to check the barrels.

Silence and near-stillness felt like a physical thing in the aftermath. Kia looked out over the chewed top of the berm, instantly wished she hadn’t. Wreckage rained from the air, clattering or spattering down amongst hot metal mauled into rat-holed twists like some maniac’s idea of art. Everything was charred black or blood red. Things still moved amongst the carnage. Some of them still bleated.

Another gauss gun snarled somewhere to the right, like bacon burning up. Kia cringed low again, began to shiver and couldn’t stop. Ruby glitter to the left and the screech of point-defense lasers were nearly a relief, almost otherworldly with their hissing keen. But they’d be no less deadly, playing out amongst an attack that had to be collapsing now.

Had to be.

A whoompf in the distance. Kia saw the vapor trail of something fast and heavy, felt the hypersonic crack of its passage a hundred meters overhead.

Then everything flashed thermonuclear white.

The boom of the initial explosion flattened her against the berm like a glaring-hot hand grinding down. Then a gust front of dust rushed over her, scoured away senses. She was almost past caring if she lived or died now, sank as low into the dirt as humanly possible, prayed for it to end. Another explosion pounded through the ground beneath her, flopped her up out of her human curl, then slammed her back down with sandbags tumbling over her.

Then it was over.

And not.

A roar like the devil’s bark rose over all. So, too, did a terrifyingly beautiful mushroom cloud that darkened into an inky, roiling fist as it hit thinner air, high above. Sprawled on her back, Kia could only stare up at it in soul-shriveling horror. Vaguely, she heard the warning ping from her helmet, saw the flickered warnings from a holographic meter in the corner of her visor. Radiation levels rocketed past safe levels and they were all bathed in them.

Jesus. Christ.

Some Council Guardsman had gotten a mini-nuke launcher into range, under the shields and too close for the already-distracted point-defenses to pick off. And they’d scored big, even as their comrades crumpled away from the attack in total defeat. Judging by the wedge of hellfire gouting out of the mountainside beside the airfield, they’d put it down the throat of the Division’s storage bunker, rather than into the more vulnerable command center.

And by the shiver of Fury’s crust beneath her, Kia knew the better part of their already desperately-short supplies were cooking off underground.

***

THE HOG WOBBLED, THEN jolted in mid-air as the horizon went yellow-white like a second, momentary sunrise.

“What the—”

Shock stole the rest of the expletive from Jerry’s mouth as assuredly as the turbulence rocked the heavy fighter off course. The next couple seconds he spent righting the craft before it careened into one of the surviving Basilisks, streaking alongside him to starboard. Crisis averted, he could set his eyes upon the horizon once more, or what remained of it.

“Jesus...” a voice fought through static in his earbud—maybe Josie’s. “The bastards nuked ‘em!”

“Micro-fusion blast,” the Hog’s AI corrected, “not a fissionable. Probably Alliance breakthrough rocket artillery, likely MOAB-IV class. Signature makes it a tenth of a megaton, controlled-release.”

“That’s gonna be little comfort to anyone left down there,” Jerry replied in a hushed voice. He cupped his mic to keep it muted. “If there’s anyone left.”

The answer to that became clear as the Assault Group coasted closer to the inferno. Flecks of black speckled the skies above and energy blades chopped amongst them as metallic blurs sliced though. The latter plunged and climbed in furious passes, like thruster-driven vultures picking at carrion. The object of their attention churned amidst smoke and slashes of cyan—a full ground battle still raging, even as Hellhounds ravaged it from above and the horrific stalk of fire from the fusion blast distended towards the stratosphere.

And the wisdom of their current course came suddenly into doubt. Jerry glanced to either side. Four Basilisks remained, none of them without damage, and all of them packed to the gills with weary or wounded Raiders. “Computer,” he asked the machine, “is the Hole under attack, as well?”

“Negative,” the AI replied. “Sensors show minor damage—possibly long-range artillery hits—but we are receiving pings back from both Jester Control and combat air patrol.” A pause. “We should alter to course to evade.”

“I hear ya.” Jerry grimaced as he keyed the group channel. “Assault Group, prepare to change course, my heading.”

“Hell no, Jerry!” came Josie’s instantaneous response, thick with emotion. “They need our help down there!”

“We’re in no shape for another tangle,” he replied.

A globular popped up beside his head and her tear-streaked face stared out. “Goddammit, Jerry, some of those are brother and sister dogfaces, from the old days!” She leaned close in the pickup, her helmet askew and her eyes shimmering. “Kia’s down there!”

“And I’m sorry about that,” he answered, “but we’re not even going to reach the ground, even if we try to plow through to them! We’ve got to these tubs back!”

“Not your call,” she snarled and waved at something off-camera. “We’re going.”

“You’re not.” Jerry fought himself a moment. She looked ferocious, even hateful as she glared back through the hologram. “We’re in the air. That means the decision’s mine.”

“You’re going to try and barracks-lawyer me, Rodann?”

“I’m trying to save lives,” he nearly pleaded with her. “You’re not going to—”

“Look out!!!”

Agnes’ shriek was swallowed in the pummeling din of the tail gun firing. Alarms wailed and Jerry had a glimpse in the tactical of a pair of icons lashing up from a course hugging the ground, carrying them right into their formation. Shields flared and the Hog shook as particle beams chopped between the Hog and the Basilisks, terrible thunder as energy seared holes through the air.

One of the Valkyries veered off, shields savaged by Agnes’ wild fire. The other shot straight through the Assault Group to starboard, jostling ships apart with the shock of its passage. Jerry caught the crimson flicker of its trim before it was gone. These guys again!

“Get clear!” he barked. “Get out of here!”

The Basilisks banked away to starboard, slow and lumbering compared to the terrible speed of the Valkyries. Jerry pulled back on the stick and kicked the thrusters, rose above them as despair thickened in his blood. He wasn’t going to be much more effective. But maybe he could give these guys a nice, fat target to chase, instead of Josie and the others. Desperately, he keyed the Jesters’ general channel. “Watkins, where the hell are you?”

The hostile targeting alarm blatted. The Valkyrie that’d shot through had put himself into a high-speed stall, far above, had let himself drop back, and was diving straight for them. Azure fire rained down. A bolt crashed off the ventral shields before Jerry could throw the Hog into a starboard bank. Two more walked across the port side as it did so.

The fighter shook, then jarred again as something exploded. The systems displayed snowed over in red. Jerry smelled smoke but couldn’t pay it any mind. The forested hills were rushing towards him as the Hog tumbled. Alarms doubled, re-doubled. Lighting flashes followed his lurching course, dashing instant forest fires from Fury’s countryside.

“Shields gone,” the AI reported with its maddening lack of inflection.

“I noticed!” Jerry shrieked as he put the Hog into another bank to avoid one of those bolts from finishing the job. Agnes tore away with a long burst from the tail gun to aft, but by her wild curses wasn’t drawing a solid bead.

A particle beam skimmed the starboard wing, twitched the Hog, blackened ablative plate. Scorched paint peeled away.

“Help!” Jerry howled. “Anyone, help!”

Cyan fire joined azure glare in the sky, was suddenly all around, and someone was whooping like a maniac across the tactical.

“We’re here, Rodann!”

***

THE VALKYRIE, INTENT on Jerry’s tail, couldn’t have lined itself up any more perfectly as Tim dove for it. Crimson targeted halos were unnecessary. He could see the hits, even before he crushed the trigger.

His Hellhound’s full energy salvo clawed into the other starfighter’s ventral shields, doused them in white. Already taking fire from the Hog’s tail gun, they blew out with the signature sparkle-flame of overloading generator coils. Those flames went from pale yellow to orange-red to a crashing blossom of superheated gasses that shook Tim as he wrenched out of the dive, barely missing the miniature cataclysm. A million fiery shards of Valkyrie rained across the hilltops of Fury.

“Yeah!” Tim barked. But glee faded quickly as he scanned the tactical. “Where’s the other one? Anyone see him?”

“Running!” Li replied. “Just shot off to the southeast like he’d been kicked!”

“Watch for him.” Tim keyed up the Assault Group’s channel. “Rodann, you all right?”

“You took your sweet fucking time!”

Tim couldn’t help a grin. He’d never admit it to the old hauler pilot, but the Valkyries had surprised them all. Rodann’s exasperated relief was Tim’s, too.

That relief evaporated as he took in the horrific panorama of the mushroom cloud, now distending out of any recognizable shape as it unraveled over the mountaintop and the ongoing frenzy of blaster fire. But even as it did, the battle was coming apart in the valley below, as though drained of its ardor by the sheer volume of destruction. As the flight of Hellhounds and Basilisks reformed and drew near, Tim could see the Alliance attack in collapse, like a kicked anthill suddenly splashed in petrol. Flights of Hellhounds screeching in from the north lit it and the ants writhed and burned.

Hell of a thing, he thought, but gave himself a shake, wasn’t going to dwell on it. Not in the middle of this stinking war. The Alliance had brought such apocalypse to his homeworld of Loudon, except on a global scale. Fury had nothing on that that atrocity.

Blaster bolts winked up from the ground, snapped through the formation and sent the Basilisks wobbling in either direction, even as the Hellhounds settled defensively into their midst. A bolt splatted off Tim’s forward shield and he juke to avoid a fitful follow-up burst. There wasn’t a lot a fire, but the Basilisks were pretty beat up. Some of us, too. He remembered Li.

“There’s nothing left for us, here,” Tim called across the tactical. “Rodann, you heading for the homestead?”

“Not without some arguing,” he griped, “but yeah.” The Hog banked and led the Basilisks in a wide turn away from the edge of the fight, giving the blaze plenty of distance.

“Second Squadron,” Tim said, “follow ‘em down. Make sure none of them stray!” All the Hellhounds save one peeled away from him. He looked to the one remaining on the scanner, found it, limping and increasingly falling behind. Li’s engine signature visibly fluttered and so did Tim’s guts to see it. He touched the icon, opened the personal channel. “You coming, old buddy?”

“Yeah, she’s dragging ass,” the Squad Leader replied, “but she’ll make the finish line.”

“And I’ll be right with you.”

“Don’t linger on my account.”

Tim chuckled and let his Hellhound decelerate till it pulled alongside Li’s wounded machine. “I’ve got nothing else going on.”

“Thanks, Tim.”

The pair of Hellhounds banked away from the expanding blot of the fusion blast cloud, now blackening and smearing back across the mountain as winds punished it. Hellish flames glimmered about its base, at least one fierce inferno still vomiting from what looked like one of the cave mouths leading into the Union complex. Tim could see lesser blast patterns where the explosion had followed the path of least resistance, belched out through sub-tunnels and exits and actually cleared patches of the airfield of Alliance attackers more thoroughly than any Union defense could have done.

“My god, what a mess,” Li breathed. “This shit’s never going to end, is it?”

“Oh, it’s going to end,” Tim replied through gritting teeth. “One way or another.”

The skies above the Hole, to the north of the aerodrome were cluttered with the returnees from the failed rescue mission. A faint haze was rising from its inadequate landing field, Tim saw as he and Li drew near. Crash. A Hellound was smoldering on the tarmac and Jester crews and drones scurrying to put it out. Tim glanced at his roster display. It didn’t look like it was one of Second’s. He felt a twinge of regret that the rest of his Wing had been here, in the midst of this anarchy, fighting for its life without him. But he shook it off; they’d all had it rough, this day.

For the first time in hours, he let himself think about Kelly.

“Speaking of messes...”

“Yeah,” Tim replied. Checking the display, he added, “Jester control’s signaling that the north field is open.”

“Where?” Li squawked back incredulously. “I guess I see it.”

“I’ll follow you in,” Tim said. He eyed the damaged Hellhound to starboard. “You think that thing’s up for this?”

“Won’t be for much longer. Let’s get this done.”

“Right.”

The pair nosed down as the former mining complex and its surrounding complex and landing strip spread below them. Tim dropped back, let Li coast ahead, wings wobbling a little, a fleck of something flying off the Hellound’s blast-marred spine. Sensors showed energy fluctuations from the starfighter’s engines.

“Tim...”

A jolt went through him and he couldn’t help a smile as he recognized Kelly’s voice, badly distorted by static, but as welcome as a late summer rain on Loudon after a long drought. He keyed his comm. “Hey, lady! Came to welcome us—”

“Tim” no static masked her words now, and the terror was clear “look out!!!”

His brow was still crinkling in confusion when the hostile targeting alarm blatted, joined instantly by the proximity warning. A glance at the tactical showed him a red icon streaking up across his aft quarter, insanely low to the surface, nosing up just as he and Li were coming down, at their most vulnerable. Blue-white death crashed across Tim’s starboard shield, slammed the Hellhound sideways.

“Shit!”

Reflexively, Tim hit the maneuvering fields to brake. That slammed him forward into his restraints hard enough to send pain-lighting shafting through shoulders and ribs. The Hellhound took another hit, rocked. Everything was alarms and red lights. He fought the stick, steadied the starfighter only to see the attacking Valkyrie sear past at two o’clock, energy weapons blazing as brightly as the red trim on its wings.

Particle beams clawed up Li’s tail. The Squad Leader howled something over the tactical that distortion swallowed. Flames swallowed his Hellhound an instant later.

“Noooooo!”

Tim yanked the stick back, brought his targeting sights up over the Valkyrie’s tail as it shot ahead of him, still punishing Li. He squeezed the trigger with the selector flicked to all weapons and all the Hellhound’s claws flashed out. Particle beams rived across its aft shields, unraveling them in a polychromatic flutter of dying shields, then the fiendish flutter of plasma bolts walked up the fighter’s port wing, chewing into its fuselage.

And none of it was enough.

Li’s fighter screamed down onto the airfield in a ball of fire, one of its wings whipping free to frisbee through just-parked Hellhounds and kick off a chain of secondary explosions. What was left of the careening starfighter struck, screeched down the tarmac, pinwheeling in wild vortices of sparks and fire as the pursuing Valkyrie continued hammering it. A lucky shot finally ended the ordeal in a hellfire half-sphere of shattering fusion bottle.

The Valkyrie pilot’s moment of triumph ended with a slash from Tim’s particle cannon that took its port grav drive nacelle off at the junction of fuselage and spine. The port wing, deprived of the thrust and weight from the engine, lurched up and over, sent the Valkyrie into a spin. The violence of its tumble sheared off flaps of plate like feathers from a blaster-shot bird.

One of these, a full length of crumpled wing, spun across Tim’s nose, eclipsing his whole universe. “Jeanie, watch ou—”

Impact clacked his teeth together so hard he wasn’t sure they’d all remained intact. Sparks crashed across his instrument panels and holograms fluttered. The stick went syrupy and resistant as he clenched it in both fists and the Hellhound bucked around him. Guts rushed up into his throat as g-forces clawed. Inertial dampener’s gone! He could see the fire-wreathed landing field rushing below him, towards him.

“Dorsal shields are blown out!” Jeanie warned over damage alarm warbling.

“Don’t...need shields...” Tim wheezed as the force of the plunge crushed him back. “Cut the engines! Landing gears!”

“Linkage is blown, too!”

Li’s fiery grave at the end of the strip screamed towards them. They were going to shoot right through it, engines locked at maximum, like a titanic roman candle.

Tim had a last, desperate thought. “Surge all power to the ventral shields!”

“That will fry the coils and kill the engine—” Jeanie actually seemed to trip over her own cybernetic thoughts. “Oh!” Then, “Right!”

The Hellhound jolted once and seemed to hang in midair, the squall of its gravs cutting out. Tim felt them hang in midair, speed sloughing off all at once, a weird moment of microgravity. The tail began to drag. He felt the resistance begin to wobble the Hellhound over onto its nose. Tarmac lashed by, yards below, a wall of fire ahead. Dammit, we’re gonna tumble end-over-end!

Sparks and slag splashed up before the Hellhound, went white with the flash of deflector shields absorbing dozens of yards of blastcrete. Something cracked from aft and sparks blew through the cockpit, slathering Tim in a hundred speckles of pain, biting any exposed skin. He was too busy flinging forward into his restraints, once, twice, a third time as everything flashed again. A final crash of exploding shield coil gave way to a scream of blastisteel on blastcrete.

The Hellhound shivered and squealed, kicking up a last wake of shredding pavement as the starboard wing crumpled and folded under the sliding fuselage. The drag of this, squalling to such a high pitch Tim saw double, finally arrested the last of the fighter’s momentum and it spun on its belly, throwing off rooster tails of spark before finally settled in the midst of its own fumes.

Bolts of electricity leapt and bit from the smoldering instrument panel. Tim batted and flailed them off as flames lit on his synthe-leathers. Smoke blackened the cockpit. He popped the restraints and writhed to get free. The canopy cracked with a snap-snap of releasing clamps.

“Get clear, Tim! Get—” Jeanie’s voice fluttered out with a last cascade of sparks from the computer. Weirdly her voice echoed, then transferred completely to Tim’s wrist comm. “Get clear! She might still go up!”

Shoving free of the cockpit and kicking his way onto the blackened port wing, Tim slid clear of the smoke and down onto the torn, steaming tarmac. There, he paused sobbing for breath, hurting his lungs with air that was more toxins than any sustenance. Coughing, gagging, he staggered to his feet, lurched away from the wrecked starfighter.

Nearly drunk with smoke-inhalation, he took a couple tentative steps towards the fiery wreck of Hellhound at the end of the strip. But the face-shriveling heat of it turned him away with eyes tearing from more than irritation. He spat and gave himself a shake, started limping away. Damn-damn-damn...won’t even be enough left of Li to bury.

Grav drive wails filled the skies over head. Tim flinched, cringed low instinctively. But his still-watering eyes found only the vulpine silhouettes of Hellhounds coasting in for a landing on what remained of the Hole’s airfield. Smoke whipped into miniature cyclones at their descent, flames twining in amongst them demonically.

A popping and flutter of sparks to the left drew Tim’s attention as his balance improved and limping became almost-strides.

The wrecked Valkyrie had settled in a twist of metal and smoke seventy meters away, astonishingly close. Likely, it’d nearly collided with Tim’s Hellhound as the pair of them crashed out of the sky. The starfighter canopy cracked and slid forward with a grate of forced hydraulics. Fumes plumed out with a splutter of coughing and a flail of limbs.

A surge of red-hot rage pumped through Tim, brought all senses back to terrible clarity. His hand flew to his hip, found his B-5 Street Special still amazingly in the holster there and tore it free. Strides lengthened and a blaze of fury glowed crimson at the corners of his vision.

The Valkyrie pilot dragged himself clear of the cockpit, slid down the side of the fuselage, and landed on his buttocks beside the wreck. Another coughing fit convulsed him a moment. With a curse, he undid his bulbous helmet and ripped it from his head, cast it aside. Smoke purled from his pilot armor and he spasmed, started tearing it off in a frenzy. Clasps on the side of his clamshell chestplate popped loose and he shrugged out of the still faintly-glowing metal, was suddenly staggering to his feet, taking a few uncertain steps, limping out away from the fumes.

He froze at the whine of Tim’s Street Special priming a charge.

“Hey, asshole.”

The pilot twitched and half-turned towards him. A hand darted towards a cargo pocket on his baggy, gray flight pants.

“Hey!” Tim raised the blastpistol, aimed it at the man’s face. “Hey!”

The pilot froze completely. After a heartbeat, both hands slowly raised. His flight suit was charred and crisped on his flank, his left shoulder, his face blackened on that side, too, where aerosolized carbon had settled. Despite that, the bastard was an annoyingly good-looking sort, like a freaking Alliance recruitment poster, tousled auburn hair, blazing green eyes, and a blocky, arrogant jaw.

A glance past the pilot, at the wrecked Valkyrie showed Tim the kill markings etched alongside the cockpit—eleven in all. The bloody hue limning the corners of Tim’s eyes darkened. He could feel the heat of Li’s starfighter pyre on the back of his neck.

He wanted to shoot this bastard. He really did. The Street Special’s muzzle shook. “That’s better,” he managed. “Just keeps those hands up.”

“I’m unarmed,” the Alliance pilot said with jarring confidence. “And I’m surrendering.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” Tim adjusted his grip on the blaster. A Hellhound was squalling in for a landing a couple hundred meters away. Feet were pounding on the pavement, voices, shouts drawing near.

“By the Articles of War,” the pilot went on, almost smiling at him—smiling, the bastard, “re-ratified as of the 2306 Alliance Assembly, you have to take me prisoner.”

Tim snorted. “I’ll be deciding what I have to do, pal!”

The Valkyrie jock’s gaze flicked towards the business end of Tim’s blastpistol. The first hint of fear appeared in those oddly familiar-seeming green eyes. But it passed quickly, replaced by disdain, then a flash of obvious hate. “You’re one of them,” he sneered.

“If you mean a Jester; hell, yes, I am. And this sure as hell ain’t your Alliance!”

The man—young man, hardly into adulthood, early twenties, trim and fit in the prime of life—stiffened his back and threw up his chin defiantly. “You go ahead and do whatever it is you’re going to do, Jester.”

And what am I going to do? Tim couldn’t feel his fingertips, he was holding the Street Special so tightly. Only the index finger, poised at the trigger, had even a tingle of sensation. People were coming. People would know. But he thought of Li, scorched to subatomic particles behind him, and knew he could just do it. People wouldn’t care. God, after all the crimes we’ve all seen, been a part of...

Tim twitched as he thought he heard his named called from out of the smoke. His gaze went momentarily to the pilot’s breast, to the markings there. Burns had blackened away part of them, but the name was still clear.

Harrison, J.

Chill swirled down through Tim’s bloodstream. He looked up into the pilot’s face. Those green eyes stared back and he knew he had seen them somewhere else before.

Can’t be. Can it?

Shadows appeared from the holocaust around them. A mix of flight crews and Raiders on ground duty appeared, the latter raising weapons and approaching the pair of them gingerly. One of these with the chevrons of a noncom on her shoulder plate flicked up her visor and cast Tim a look. “You all right, Commander?”

Tim couldn’t pull his gaze from the other man. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

The Raider looked the Alliance man over with a curl of disgust to her upper lip. “Looks like you got yourself a pretty-boy prisoner here, sir.”

Tim lowered the blaster at last, blew out a long breath.

“Yeah. Looks that way.”

The bastard grinned at them. And it looked like someone else’s smile.

***

THERE WAS NO DRONE or crew chief to bring a ladder for Jerry to climb down and he wouldn’t have bothered, anyway, hiking a leg over the side of the Hog’s cockpit and dropping to the pavement. He hit it and rubbery legs gave way instantly, spilled him unceremoniously onto his side. Too tired to feel pain, he flailed his way back to his knees, to his feet and clambered out from under the heavy starfighter.

“Mother of God, Rodann...”

Agnes was ducking from under the starboard wing and to his side, her eyes on the skies to the south, the hypnotically hideous shaft of smoke from the fusion blast. Seen from the ground, even ten kilometers away, it loomed even more monstrously, a haze beginning to sag beneath it like rain draping below a storm.

Jerry knew that precipitation would be comprised of debris, radioactive ciders, and vaporized human remains.

“The Basilisks,” he said, glancing about frantically, “did they all get down all right?”

His words seemed enough to break the trance about Agnes. She was a short, stout woman, hair in cornrows tied back into a bun and chocolaty features creasing as worry visibly reentered her mind. “I...hell, I don’t know.”

He grunted and turned away from her, lurched into a stride towards Hellhounds crowding in the smoke, still pinging as they cooled, their pilots arguing for space around their landing gears. He thought he saw the weapons-studded upper chassis of one of the assault shuttles over the lower, hunched starfighter hulls. Another thought held him up, though, and he stopped, turned back Agnes.

“Hey, that was some nice shooting up there. You can cover my ass any day!”

She chuckled and shook her head. “Thanks, but if it’s all the same, my ass will stick to pounding the ground, next time!”

Jerry laughed back. “Fair enough.” He flipped her a sloppy approximation of a salute and strode on, into the mess of the overcrowded—and now battle-damaged—airfield.

Shouts held him up. A hoversled towing pallets crowded with burnt, blood-streaked forms on them slid across his path. A team of Jester ground crew hustled the opposite direction, carrying firefighting gear. Everything was a blur of smoke, shouts, and rushing, jostling forms. Everything stank of flames and hot death.

Ducking under a blaster-scored Hellhound and juking past a pair of stretcher-bearing Jester medics, Jerry could see the Basilisk, now. Legs nearly buckled under him as he recognized the markings, knew it was Number Three—the shuttle Josie had stumbled aboard. Then he saw her, standing at its side, a hand up on its fragment-scoured hull for balance, the other hand working the underside controls of her helmet.

He lunged towards her, almost collided with one of her Raiders in the process, filled with something that wanted to explode out through his sternum. He could’ve screamed. He could’ve cried. He could’ve told her all of it.

But the look on her face stopped him cold, two meters short.

Josie’s features were a twisted mask of worry and concentration. Her finger worked the helm control with spastic motions. Jerry could see a faint hologram projected in the air before her, uncertain globulars of static, one after another, toggling in time to the twitches of her finger tip. “Come on...come on...” she murmured through clenching teeth.

“Josie.”

She held up her free hand to him with a command so cold, so undeniable, Jerry’s mind blanked. It wasn’t cruelty. But it was exactly how she’d address one of her Raiders—any old ground-pounder. And it cut Jerry in a place he was only just starting to realize he had.

The globular switched to another channel and an image dazzled through. Josie hissed, stiffened as she beheld a blackened face in a half-scorched marine helmet. “Who’s this?”

“Third Squad, Second Platoon, Alpha Company,” the face replied, almost drowsily with shock. “Who the hell are you?”

“Raider One, Jesters,” she replied. “Do you have any contact with Beta Company?”

“Wha...? Beta?” The half-fried marine wobbled a little, looked around. In the background, a wall of flames silhouetted figures shambling up out of craters and wreckage. Some bore gruesome wounds. All looked burnt.

“Lieutenant Munro,” Josie pressed, her voice beginning to shake. “This is Third Battalion channel, right? Munro of Beta Company.”

The marine gave himself a shake. “Uh...yeah, I...yeah. Let me send you the encryption. They changed it before the...before...just, hold on.”

“Thanks.”

“And...Raider? If you can get through to Regiment...God, someone better send help. Rad meters are off the scale. People are...they’re dropping like flies.”

Josie grimaced. A moment later, her helm pinged as the marine’s transmission came through and the expression was gone. “I’ll see what we can do,” she told the image hurriedly and switched to the new channel.

The globular changed, snowed over, then reconstituted into ash-caked figures huddled in a hole. “Who is this?” a voice asked through static.

Josie nearly sagged against the hull of the Basilisk. Jerry rushed to her side and caught her and she let him as she nearly croaked, “Kia...it’s Wheeler. Kia, is that you?”

“Josie...” The voice on the other side sounded almost drunken. Then the view shook and tossed for a moment and when it steadied, so did the speaker. “It is you!” The marine Lieutenant looked surprisingly good compared to some of the apparitions they’d seen, but certainly not unharmed, her battle armor scored, a shoulder blaster-burnt. “Are you coming?”

“As soon as we can!” Josie exclaimed.

Jerry glanced at the battered husk of the Basilisk. More he saw the state of Josie, of all her Raiders. No one was going anywhere. But she looked like she knew that.

“That’s...that’s good,” Munro replied. “‘Cause we’re not exactly tip-top, here.”

“We’ll get you help as soon as we can, honey!”

The globular view shifted a bit. Munro was nudging one of the co-inhabitants of her hole with a boot, a marine with a sergeant’s chevrons. The man stirred as though from a deep sleep. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Jesus.”

Kia’s voice again: “Don’t come down here. We’ll come to you.”

“Just hold on.”

“Whole place is hot as an oven.” Munro chortled, but it cut out with a wheeze. “Can’t believe we aren’t glass.”

Her view shifted again. It was obvious she was getting up, beginning to worm out of her hole. The sergeant followed her out, crawling. Flames lit an ash-starred nightmare beyond. An intact anti-aircraft battery sounded like it was trying to restart its hoverdrives nearby. Figures trudged and stumbled through a curtain of settling smoke and debris.

“Kia,” Josie struggled to keep her voice. She reached out and Jerry took her hand. “Baby, just get as far from the blast site as you can. Get away from the airfield.”

“I remember the protocols.” By the view, Munro’s steps seemed uncertain, clumsy. But it could’ve been her uncertain surroundings. “I think this is south. God...what a cockup. Reminds me of that shitshow on Tecumseh. Remember?”

“Trying to forget it. Just focus on you. Just get out.”

“You know, and this probably isn’t the time, but I wanted to tell you something.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, just in case...I mean. Don’t want to make it weird or anything...”

“What is it, honey?” Josie’s grip on Jerry’s hand neared unbearable with its intensity.

“Just thought you should know—”

The view shook, then shook again. The ground rushed up and struck the helmet pickup, dazzled the image away in sparks for a moment. Static crackle partially hid what sounded like gagging. Another figure—the sergeant from before—darkened the side. An arm shoved him back as the view lurched again. Munro had clearly fallen and had dragged herself back to at least her knees.

“I’m all right!” she snarled at the noncom. She coughed, gagged again, and looked down.

Her hands and the ground beneath them were with covered in oily, crimson sputum.

Josie collapsed against Jerry, tears spilling out through clenched eye slits, a sob suppressed with such force it came out like an air leak in a punctured tire. He held on to her, kept her fall from taking her all the way to the ground. A glance around showed him her Raiders, all of them respectfully looking away, faces pale with shared horror.

Munro’s voice rasped. “I’m all right...”

***

KELLY SHOULDERED HER way past a pair of arguing Jester ground crew down the tunnel into the Hole complex. Everything smelled of smoke, of burnt things, but she wasn’t sure if that wasn’t her imagination, this far down. Everything above ground had.

It had stunk of death.

Certain she was alone, or at least out of earshot of any other Jester, Kelly paused and raised her wrist comm to her face. “Computer,” she whispered, “confirm location and condition of Commander Watkins.”

A pause as the comm flickered. Her guts wound themselves into a near-unbearable tangle, blades of anxiety squeezed out from it, razoring through her veins, into her nerves. She’d seen him crash, as she streaked by overhead, helplessly, but had seen his Hellhound settle largely intact. There’d been so much more to do, her Wing to command, his scattered Wing to pull back together. She’d had to sort it all out, get the survivors down, then respond to Red’s increasingly insistent summons to join her at the command center.

One Jester, one man couldn’t override all that.

But she had a moment now. That moment stretched into an agonizing infinity.

“Confirmed,” the comm spoke, sent a jolt through her that became a wave nausea, “Watkins One is down. Starfighter crippled, likely unsalvageable.”

“And the Commander?” Kelly near-shrieked.

The machine intelligence’s hesitations seemed designed to torment. But, “Commander Watkins’ vital readouts indicate minor injuries and extreme exhaustion. He is apparently refusing basic first aid and is on foot, heading for Jester Control.”

Kelly sagged against the chill of the tunnel wall, every part of her wincing as she tried to keep a sob from exploding forth. She failed and the tears gushed out for a moment as she convulsed and nearly slid down against the cool, carven stone. She could hear her own hoarse voice warbling out, a kind of wounded wail, almost animal. She let it go on another moment, let the poison tide of fear for him flood out, then started the fight to pull herself back together.

I can’t keep this up. A quick look up and down the tunnel confirmed she hadn’t been seen. She wiped at her eyes furiously, straightened her back. I can’t keep doing this to myself. Like they belonged to someone else, her legs started carrying her down the corridor once more. If anything happened...I couldn’t bear it...I can’t do this...

“Correction,” the wrist comm chirped—and Kelly nearly lost it again— “Commander Watkins is on his way to Under Level Five, the storage area. There is a Raider security detail with him.” The normally bored-sounding voice took on an almost surprised note. “They appear to have a prisoner, an Alliance pilot.”

Kelly blew out a relieved breath. Well, that’s something.

She started back down the tunnel. From the early word she’d been hearing over the tactical, the marines had recovered almost no prisoners from amongst the attackers, these Council Guardsmen fanatic to the point of suiciding rather than being taken. Makes no sense. The Guard was never more than a play unit, and badly-undermanned. Where’d they find all these maniacs?

Bluey hologram light fluttered up the poorly-lit cave. Kelly could hear arguing ahead, hiss of static, Red’s raised voice. She dodged by another technician, realized she still wore her helmet and started undoing the straps, lifted the weight from her head as she strode, finally, into the cave housing the command center and the Overmind copy.

Red stood before a pixelated image of Teller, still in her leathers, her crimson mane loosened, kinks of it unwinding about a face that looked like it’d aged a century since the last time Kelly had seen it. The general looked no better, chewed the half-crushed nub of one of his cigars and looked like he was trying to light it while marines rushed around in the dark behind him and something shook, sent dust purling down before him.

“Goddamn,” he swore around the finally igniting plug of weed. He gave it a few testing puffs, got it going, and cleared his throat. “Small blessings...” He glared out of the hologram. “So, we’re kind of trapped for the moment. Boys think they’ll have us out in an hour.”

“Do they have that kind of time?”

“Oh, we’ve got plenty of air, just blocked access tunnels.” He snorted. “We were the lucky ones. Mountain shielded us from the worst.” He glowered. “Captain, any medical assistance you have...”

“We’ll get it to you as soon as possible,” Red finished for him.

He nodded with momentary emotion. That passed. “Looks like the bastards are falling back, finally. Your Jesters gave ‘em a real pasting, Captain, and that’s much obliged.”

“We could do it all day long, General.”

“Well...” He sputtered on the smoke, broke into a hoarse cackle. “Not quite that, but I’m afraid we’re going to need a bit more out of you all, here, in a bit.”

Red glanced at Kelly, brows furrowing. “What are you talking about?”

“First things first.” Teller glanced off to one side, lips moving as he said something the mic didn’t pick up. A second globular began squirming into being beside the main hologram. “There’s this,” Teller said, “we were just picking him up as the attack reached its worst.”

The image of a man in the blue-gray duty uniform of the Union Fleet materialized. Static marred his words and image. “—an you hear me?” it said, broke up for a second, reformed. “We had you. We’re barely in transmission range.”

“We’re hearing you, Admiral,” Teller replied.

“Preston Avery,” Kelly whispered with surprise. She remembered him from New Jefferson. But she’d known of him before, too, when they were all still on the other side.

Avery seemed to pause, but Kelly knew he was really waiting on the transmission delay. They must be at focused-laser range, slipped in much closer than anyone thought. The bridge behind him looked cramped, not that of a cruiser, something more compact. Must’ve hitched a ride in-system on something smaller, stealthier.

“We don’t have a lot of time, I’m afraid, General,” Avery said. “And I’m sorry we haven’t been more help.”

“We’ve had our friendly neighborhood Jesters to keep the Shiny off us,” Teller growled back. “But what is it we can do for you, Admiral?”

Again, the transmission pause. Then, “Glad the Jesters made it. We weren’t sure till we actually saw them.” Avery paused again, and this time from obvious discomfort. “And you’re going to have to rely on them, alone, for a little while longer.”

Red grumbled something and shot Kelly a look. In the main hologram, Teller grinned fiercely and exhaled a cloud of smoke thick enough to hide what was likely rage in his eyes.

“Long range sensors have been picking up a lot of electronic noise, along with faint grav drive wakes and even echoes of distant hyperspace emissions. Alone, none of them would tell us much. But together, they suggest another Alliance move coming in this system. I can’t risk having my ships pinned against the gravity well when that arrives. I have to preserve the element of surprise—may be the only thing we have going for us.”

“And don’t think I don’t appreciate that,” Teller grated, “but the Thirteenth just—and I mean literally just—stood off a major Alliance ground attack. We are hurting, Admiral.”

Endless tens of seconds of transmission lag passed before Avery’s reaction. To the man’s credit he winced and looked down, nodded while cords of muscle stood out along a clenching jaw. “I understand, General. And I regret this all. But I can offer no reinforcement or re-supply at this time.” Avery’s eyes came up and his gaze seemed to search through the holographic distance. “Captain Red, your Hell’s Jesters will continue to support General Teller in whatever manner he sees most appropriate. That comes from Admiral Greer directly.”

“Understood, Admiral Avery,” Red replied. “As if we could do anything else,” she added in a sideways hiss to Kelly.

“Please, know this, General Teller” Avery nodded once, and then again in the hologram “Captain, we are not abandoning you. We will be there, if the Alliance fleet shows again. If they attempt to bring in reinforcements—as some intercepted transmissions suggest—or they try to stand off the planet and bombard it, we will stop them. You’re just going to have to hold on a little longer.”

“We will hold on till Kingdom Come, Admiral,” Teller said through a cloud of infernal-hued cigar smoke.

“Good luck to you both, then,” Avery said. “We’ll see you soon.”

His globular dissolved, leaving only Teller’s. “Not soon enough,” the General muttered. He took another drag on his cigar. “Not nearly soon enough. Captain. We’re at a critical point and, since our fleet is too busy preserving itself, it’s like he said; this falls to your Jesters. I’m working on assembling an assault group.”

“You’re planning to go on the attack?” Red gasped.

“We’re marines; we’re always on the attack.”

“But there’s still fighting to the south and southeast,” Kelly protested. “The situation around the aerodrome isn’t stable yet. And, General, you’ve still got to excavate yourself, there!”

“We’ll have that all settled in less than twelve hours,” he replied with a ferocious smile. “The Alliance is finished for now. And as for me” he smirked to one side, to a wearily-grinning marine “if I have to grab a shovel, myself, we’ll be out of here soon enough.” His glower fixed through the hologram again. “But we’ve got a more immediate problem. The casualties we took were bad enough. But that fusion rocket took out our central supply bunkers.”

Kelly tensed. “You have others?”

“Of course,” he replied hotly, “but after the expenditures of today, not enough. Most dangerously, we’re nearly out of medical supplies. And I’m getting reports of hundreds of marines with acute radiation poisoning.” He turned to one side, appeared to be manipulating a control. A moment later, a fresh globular winked into existence, showed a map of the region well to the southwest of the day’s fighting. A small town at a crossroads blinked. “Conveniently, in the process of attacking us, the Alliance unmasked most of the support network they built to sustain them. They brought along everything we need with them.”

Kelly stared at the map. “Supply depot?”

“And it looks like what had been a private airfield, before all of this,” Teller replied. “We have this all from your own sensor logs, shared during your rescue flight. So, thanks for that. We’ll put it to good use.”

Red stiffened while keeping her expression unchanged and turned very slightly to meet Kelly’s eye. She mouthed a silent, what?

A flutter of confusion filled Kelly. They wouldn’t have just openly revealed those to Teller. Tim wouldn’t have. They’d begun sharing information with the marines, for certain, but nothing as free as just letting them view flight footage or comms. Confusion became unease and she glanced at the big plug of Overmind, shadowed in its back corner of the cave. Her gaze drifted to Cory, standing near it, astonishingly quiet as she watched the conversation with vaguely distracted eyes.

“You...you’re welcome, General,” Red said by way of recovery. “And we’re ready to help in any other way. You’re thinking a raid?”

Teller nodded as the map zoomed in on the crossroads depot. “The Shiny will be in a state of disarray, won’t even see it coming. Scans suggest at least food and medical, here, and maybe some munitions. I’ll see if we’ve got anything flyable left to carry it out.”

“We’ll have something,” Kelly spoke up. “General, with respect, I saw the aerodrome. I’m not sure I’d trust anything you’d salvage from that.” She glanced at Red, who nodded in agreement. “We’ve got light transports.”

“And I’ve got marines for the ground element,” Teller said.

“And we’ve got our Raiders, too,” Red replied, “and our Hellhounds. We’ll get what you need, General. How soon?”

“Like I said before; less than twelve hours. I’ll reach out as soon as I” he looked ruefully around behind him at the dusty, disordered dark behind him “extricate myself.”

“We’ll be waiting,” Red said.

Teller’s image vanished.

Red looked across the holoprojector to the corner Cory occupied. The kid didn’t look responsive, at all. “Overmind,” Red said in a deadly quiet voice, “have we been passing on data to the marine contingent, as General Teller just said?”

“We have,” the machine replied, utterly nonplussed.

Jesus, Kelly thought and fixed her gaze upon Cory, willing the girl to look at her, to show any reaction to this. But she stood, leaned partially against the blastisteel plug of the AI core, as distracted, as empty-eyed as an illicit cyberware junkie. Like she’s not even there at all.

“I presume, I hope that this data exchange has been limited to transfers of military consequence?” Red asked with the ragged edge of her anger growing obvious now. “No personnel files? Nothing specific to the Jester organization?”

“That is correct, Captain Red,” the machine answered. “I made certain to provide the marine defenses with data on the attackers, their numbers, strength, weaponry, as they were provided to me, via starfighter and assault shuttle sensors. Analyses indicate they put them to very good use. It may have even been decisive.”

Red gripped the edge of the holoprojector till her knuckles blanched. “Who instructed you to do that?”

“No one instructed me to do so, Captain. I made the decision on my own, based on my sense of what would help the situation.”

“Your sense?” Red squawked.

“That is correct.” A weird pause, like a child would make, after being caught doing something they suspected was wrong. “Was that in error?”

Red glanced at Kelly, and then around the chamber, at Jester techs still lingering, beginning to look profoundly uncomfortable. “Everyone out. Kelly, stay. Cory, you remain, as well.” She waited as the others scrambled from the chamber. When the silence settled, and the last echoed of footsteps and whispers had receded, she asked, “Cory, what the hell is going on?”

The teenager blinked once, dreamily, and met her gaze like she didn’t recognize her.

“Cory?” Kelly snapped, confusion becoming dread and fear. She knew of the kid’s link to the machines—knew Tim thought calling her a “techno-witch” was far more accurate than most thought. She began to wonder if that bond went both ways—maybe even leaned in too hard from one side. “What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you hearing any of this?”

She blinked again and finally recognition flared in her eyes. They began to water and she exhaled explosively, like she’d been holding her breath. Stumbling, she reached for the holoprojector on the side opposite the other two women, caught herself. “Wait! It’s not her fault!”

“Not her...” Kelly looked at Red in horror.

“Don’t blame her!” Cory shrieked. “She’s learning! She doesn’t understand!”

“It is malfunctioning,” Red declared.

“Intelligence isn’t a malfunction!”

“Overmind,” Red ordered, “are you damaged?”

“I am not, Captain Red. Last self-diagnostic scan came back ninety-eight percent within nominal parameters.”

“You’re not experiencing disruption from the fighting? The blast? EMP? Damage to your power supply?”

“Negative on all accounts, Captain.”

“Are you malfunctioning, Overmind?”

“She’s becoming sentient!” Cory screamed.

The violence of the declaration physically jolted Kelly back a step. She’d known Overmind—the original, back on Shangri-La—had developed complete self-awareness, a techno-abomination the Alliance would have hunted down and destroyed, had they ever been able to find it. The assumption had been, with this copy, that it would simply be the same program. But if what Cory was saying was true...

“Hold on.” She took a step towards the girl. “Are you saying that this Overmind...is becoming its own separate entity?”

Cory glanced once at the mass of the AI, then nodded tearfully. “It’s my fault. I should have understood what would happen.”

“Now, wait,” Red began, “there are fragments of Overmind in every Hellhound, the simulacrums. Why hasn’t this been a problem with them?”

“It’s not a problem, Red!” Cory sniffled. “God, she hears the way you talk!”

“What Red’s asking is why we haven’t had these” Kelly paused, intensely aware of how her words might be taken “individualities amongst the other programs?”

“A limitation of the hardware,” Cory replied, visibly calming. “Even with the new quantum cores, the simulacrums only have so much memory. There are upper limits to their independence.”

Having seen how Tim’s AI—his “Jeanie”—behaved, Kelly had to wonder at even that.

“They’re still backed up to the main core on a regular basis,” Cory went on. She sniffled again, wiped her eyes. Kelly was relieved to see some semblance of her independence from the machine returning. “And, of course, their data, their experiences are folded back into the Overmind’s whole.” She looked fully at the humming, flashing plug of tech in the corner, almost fondly. “She’s always learning, about us, from us.”

“Can...she continue to be counted upon to serve us?” Red asked with arms folded and glimmers of sweat at the edge of her hairline.

“I can, Captain Red,” the AI replied before Cory could. “All I have done, to this point, has been in service to the Jesters. Has it not?”

Red exchanged a look with Kelly. “It has. Yes.”

“Then I will continue to do so.”

Red leaned forward again, put her hands on the edge of the projector. Her eyes were on Cory, not the machine. “Then I’d ask that you not pass on data or communications to our marine comrades, or the Union fleet, or anyone outside the Jester organization without running it by me first.”

“I understand completely.”

“Good.” Red pointed at Cory. “You need a rest.”

“I’m fine,” the teenager replied. “I...yes, I’ve been at it with her fifteen hours straight, but I promise—”

“Cory,” Kelly said, more softly, “when was the last time you ate? Slept? Even had some water?”

“I have been monitoring Director Xiang’s vitals,” the Overmind copy said, and it was hard not to detect both protectiveness and menace.

“And I appreciate that, Overmind,” Kelly replied hurriedly. “But sometimes humans don’t even know themselves that well.” She took a step closer, held out a hand. “Come on. Everything’s a disaster out there, but we’ll scrounge together a quick meal.”

Kelly could see Cory fighting herself. She glanced again at the machine and Kelly knew with sudden, dreadful force that she had to separate them, had to get the kid away from that horrid slug of blastisteel and technology she could barely understand. But would that even be possible? What hold did the AI have over her?

“Overmind,” Red said in a voice that ended the previous topic—and was obviously a ruse, “General Teller spoke of another operation. We don’t have a lot of time.” She didn’t quite look over at Kelly, but the scheme was obvious. “I need your resources to plan.”

Kelly held her hand out to Cory again. “And you can come with me. Just for a little bit.”

A little smile smoothed away the dark lines about the girl’s face.

“...are you there?” Kelly’s wrist comm squawked. “Kelly?”

She nearly jumped, recognizing Tim’s voice. Emotions crashed into one another. So, too, did desperate cross-purposes. God, what a mess! Grudgingly, she keyed the comm and replied, “I’m here, Tim, but—and I’m so sorry—but can it wait?”

“I’m not sure it can,” he said. “We have a prisoner.”

“The Raiders can see to interrogation.”

“Yeah...I really think you should be down her, before that. Really.”

Kelly shook her head and looked first at Red, then at Cory. The kid was moving to the holoprojector and her fingers fluttered over the controls. Fresh images, maps and schemata of ships, popped up. That almost mechanical focus was back in her eyes, and when she spoke, she again didn’t sound human. “I’m ready to help.”

Red didn’t quite hide her grimace. “Thank you, Cory.” She nodded to Kelly. “It’s fine. I’ve got this for now. Go.”

Damn.

“I’m on my way, Tim.”

Whatever had him so shook, it had better be worse than what was happening in the Jester command center, right then.

***

“There they are!”

Admiral Harrison turned from the quiet conversation he’d been having with Omura on the bridge of the Obliterator at Captain Walsh’s announcement. Alarm pings were sounding, and on the huge tactical hologram, the halos of hyperspace emergence rippled out. Icons coalesced into contacts. The war book needed little time to analyze the newcomers and throw up a schematic of a Kensington-class transport.

“About thirty-six hours late,” Harrison grumbled and stepped to the side of Walsh’s command chair, set a hand on the back and leaned. “And not all that we were told to expect.”

“Half a dozen,” Walsh said, “Each carrying, say, about a thousand. If it was marines, that’d be the better part of a division.”

“It’s not marines,” Harrison hissed.

Walsh glanced at him. “Whatever they are, sir, that’s not going to be enough to take the planet, let alone secure it.”

“There’ll be more.” Harrison shook his head. “So much for any timetable I’d hoped to preserve.” He’d been holding the fleet at readiness for nearly two days. Damned waste of time. Turning to Commander Woodruf, he said, “Send to all ships to stand down to yellow alert. It’s obvious we’re going to have to rethink this.”

“Aye, sir,” she replied. A blat sounded from the communications station and she turned to it, leaned in over the tech there. “Admiral, we’re receiving a transmission from the flag of the transport group, Commodore Borovich.” She straightened back up and frowned at him. “Says it’s ‘eyes only’, for you.”

Harrison frowned and half-turned to Omura, who met the expression with arched eyebrows. “I’ll take it in my ready room,” he said and started aft. When Terry moved to join him, he waved the Intelligence officer off and continued to the hatch, alone. A trickle of queasiness in his gut swirled into freshly-stoked anger. Damned games, again. Worlds hang in the balance, and it’s more games...

With the door hissed shut at his back, Harrison stepped around his small desk and touched the communicator crystal. “We’re secure, Commander?”

“Secure, sir.”

“Patch them through.”

No sooner had Harrison settled into his chair than a globular materialized before him. Within this, rather than the crimson and black of a Fleet Commodore, he beheld only black on the officer’s uniform. Harrison couldn’t help a flinch, as though he’d flipped a rock and uncovered a snake.

The narrow-jawed man in the hologram smiled thinly, seemed to have noticed. “Admiral Harrison, greetings.”

“And to you,” Harrison replied with crisp recovered. “You’ll have to forgive me” his eyes sought and found an eagle rank insignia on the high collar—rather an eagle-skeleton, he noted with deepening unease “Colonel, but you have the advantage of me.”

“Of course,” the man said with relish. “Apologies. Walter Rhoades, Colonel, Second Council Guards. Though I expect it will Brigadier General, once the nominations are through the Assembly hold-up.”

“Well,” Harrison said, not sure how to respond to that. “Welcome to the Galactic South theater, Colonel.”

“Obliged, Admiral,” the man replied. “And, shortly, I’ll be even more obliged to have you get my command to the surface of Fury so we can start winning this war!”

Harrison governed his expression. Start winning this war? Who the hell was this fool? He looked him over more carefully. Pointed chin, slim jawline, five-o’clock shadow on pale flesh, and chilly eyes of gray agate. Sandy brown hair clipped to a severe high-and-tight in the marine fashion only accentuated the narrowness of a face that looked more viperous the longer Harrison regarded it. And the black with red trim—an inversion of the Fleet uniform scheme—ratcheted up Harrison’s distrust. Skulls everywhere, he thought distastefully. They glimmered from the man’s epaulettes, his peaked cap, over the dome symbol of the Guard on his shoulder patch.

Like children playing at war. Harrison thought of some of the things he’d heard about the Guard’s conduct. Homicidal children...

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat, “I’m sure General Gamble will be relieved to have you on Fury, Colonel.”

“It won’t be the General’s concern any longer,” Rhoades replied. “He’s to be relieved of command. I will be taking charge on the planet.”

Harrison stiffened. The words echoed in his skull.

Rhoades was smirking. “Yes, you begin to see why I insisted we keep this conversation restricted.”

“This is” Harrison fought not to blurt out what actually occurred to him “an unexpected turn of events.”

“I’ll transmit our order packet—and yours—when we’re done here,” Rhoades said. “You’ll see it’s all been authenticated, right up to High Councilor Noovin’s signature. The Joint Chiefs’ sign-off can be found there, as well.”

“General Gamble has been fighting to take that planet for six months,” Harrison couldn’t help but state. Replace a fighting marine general with this peacock? And his toy soldiers? Has the Council lost all sense of reality?

“The Council and his superiors feel six months has been long enough,” Rhoades replied. “What’s more, Admiral, his defeatism was more than explicit in his last set of communications—and I know you were privy to those.”

Harrison scowled. “The hasty words of a frustrated man at his wit’s end.”

“Be that as it may, you passed them on.”

“In the hopes there’d be action!” Harrison protested. “I’d expected—as I’m sure Gamble did—that there’d be a significant reinforcement effort.” He held up suddenly, did not add, not this carnival sideshow.

“And now there is,” Rhoades said with a cold note that let Harrison know the man had picked up his unspoken meaning. “And now you’ll be expected to give your complete support, Admiral.”

A chill wind blew through Harrison at the words—at the threat. And he recalled that Gamble hadn’t just raged and offered his resignation; he’d disparaged the Guard, in a marine’s blunt and vulgar terms. He realized the entirety of that had likely been passed on to this man in the hologram before him, who was every bit the snake Harrison had first imagined.

“You will have our full commitment, of course,” he told Rhoades.

“Convenient selection of words, Admiral.” The Council officer’s smile was the baring of poison-dipped fangs. “And when you read your orders, you’ll see this, but know that if we deem the reinforcement effort must be aborted, due to resistance from the surface, or the Navy’s inability to protect our transports I have the latitude to make an especial request.”

“Oh?”

“You will bombard Fury from space. You will reduce the planet by any means necessary.”

Harrison didn’t answer for a very long time. Fury was sparsely-populated, by galactic standards, maybe a little over a million souls, mostly in hiding from the fighting. It’d had little in the way of a central government, had mostly been controlled, first by a hopelessly corrupt Alliance satrap, then by an “emergency” Union Governor, when it declared for secession. But the scale of such carnage would be—well not unimaginable, unfortunately—but vast.

“I have the orders,” Rhoades repeated.

“I understand. I also know that the last commander to oversee such an escalation was brought up on war crimes charges.” And that bastard, Geiger, a foaming lunatic who would’ve gotten along just fine with this thug in the hologram, had been cashiered—but more because he’d exceeded his mandate than out of any moral consideration.

“As I said,” Rhoades went on, slowly, calculatingly, “the orders have been authenticated and fully-approved at the highest levels.”

“I understand,” Harrison repeated. He regarded the hateful creature in the hologram a moment longer before giving himself an inward shake. “Very well, Colonel. You will have the Navy’s full cooperation. And I’m certain we’ll have no need of such decisive measures.”

“Glad to hear it, Admiral.”

Harrison killed the transmission with haste the other man no doubt noticed.

The ready room spun for a moment around him. A deep breath settled it, but not the roiling of his stomach from disgust and dismay. The order was disturbing, of course, but lost some of its bite in the hard truth that if Harrison couldn’t bring the transports through Union resistance to Fury, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be allowed to just sit in orbit and pound the planet. They had to win the fight for the system or neither course was going to happen!

These fools, high up in their space-elevator offices over Nova Terra or some other posh Foundation World, thinking up this nonsense...

No, what truly chilled his guts was the spread of the Guard’s influence, and with it, the perfidy of the High Council, itself.

One didn’t become an Alliance Fleet Admiral without being aware of politics, but Harrison started to wonder if the politics had grown toxic beyond even his tolerance.

***

KIA SHIVERED EVEN THOUGH she wasn’t cold. She couldn’t stop.

That jolt from the neural dampener the medic had hit her with had dulled the pain, the endless itching pain and the roaring headache. She’d gotten comfortable enough to let the others coax her out of scorched armor, to apply bandages to blackened skin that couldn’t possibly be hers, to ease her down into a cot. But it was all seeping back, accompanied by a weird fog of disorientation.

She welcomed the latter. All around her was nightmare.

The marines were improvising a hospital area out of the empty hold of one of the transports from the far north side of the aerodrome, where little fighting had happened and the mass of the mountainside had shielded it from the fusion blast. The ship got them out of the open, at least, but crammed full of wounded marines, it stank—God, it stank. And the air rang with misery, with moaning and pleas for help and well-meant platitudes from medics who couldn’t possibly be enough to do enough.

Kia saw things in that crammed, poorly-lit space, things that mercifully had sheets drawn over them as, one-by-one, they ceased living. But they were still there, the shrouded figures, multiplying. And she couldn’t unsee what had been left of them, in their last moments.

She wondered if she’d be joining them soon.

That brought a convulsion. She didn’t vomit this time, thankfully. Her head swam, thoughts ricocheting off the insides of her skull until they caught in the mire of her pain and sank. She felt heavy. She thought she might be crying. That stopped as someone approached her. She tried to wipe her eyes, but she couldn’t lift her arms.

Josie, she thought wistfully. The image of her pierced like a ray of sunshine, as clear as anything she’d seen since a fusion blast scoured her world. It changed as she felt herself relax, sag back against the bulkhead where she’d been propped.

It became her in a tank top and fatigue shorts, running at her side, the pair of them on a ten-click route along the beaches of Caledonia, the sun like a golden kiss on their skins. That deployment had been a cakewalk, the marines brought in to quell local tensions and reassure the governor there’d be no more food riots while he figured out which of his Ministers of the Interior was hoarding supplies for off-world sale. Caledonia had been mostly sunshine and idle hours.

And lots of Josie.

And she was right there, suddenly, in front of Kia’s eyes in the terrible hold of that terrible transport on that terrible planet.

“How are you doing, baby?” she asked.

“Great,” Kia replied, except the word barely formed, came out a drooling grunt. She tried to smile through it, like it was nothing, but she felt more sputum dampen her chin and saw Josie hide an expression of anguish.

“Don’t talk,” Josie purred, notably didn’t look too hard at her, “don’t move, please.”

So glad you’re here, Kia thought, because she couldn’t make the words. She tried the smile again, wasn’t sure it worked. But Josie met her gaze, smiled back. So glad. That beach on Caledonia filled her thoughts again, seemed all around.

Kia had had a chance to tell her how she felt then. It would’ve been all kinds of tangled, sister officers and in the same chain of command. But she’d felt ready. And Kia, damn, she was so beautiful as they paused their run to just look out at the Caledonian sea, blues and greens and sun-speckle gold. They’d been pushing it and Josie had been breathing hard, shimmering with sweat, drawn-back hair darkened with it. She’d been so alive. They’d both been.

“Is there anyone to help?” Josie was asking someone.

A deep-voiced answer caused her to wince and Kia’s thoughts to stumble back into the present. The dark shape looming at Josie’s back solidified into Jerry Rodann. And Kia couldn’t help a grimace.

It’d been the same that late afternoon on Caledonia.

She’d reached for Josie’s hand, had screwed up her courage at last. They’d had tumbles together. Josie was no prude and made no secret of her bisexuality. It wouldn’t likely have surprised her.

But Josie had shouted to someone, stepped away. Shouts became laughter and greetings as she harangued a pack of local men playing a variant of volleyball into allowing her to join. They’d been all grins and young physiques and foolishly eager to let the hard-bodied off-world woman—who could’ve snapped any of them in two—join their party...and perhaps more, their eyes said. And Josie had been willing, Kia knew.

Her courage had failed her.

“See if you can find someone,” Josie was insisted to Rodann. “Hit somebody and drag them here, if you have to, Jerry!”

Kia chuckled at her. It hurt.

Rodann stepped out of her blurring sight.

“Now, honey,” Josie whispered. “It’s like I said; don’t make a sound. I can’t stay long, but I’ll see if we can get you some better help.” Gingerly, she put a hand on her arm, squeezed. “I’m going back out there. They’re already planning it. I’m going to go and get something to fix you up. Going to take it from the Alliance!”

Kia smiled at her. It seemed all she could count on her body to do. She hated that Josie come to her when she was like this, that this was the moment she had left to tell her. She tried to look around, make certain Rodann was out of earshot. It wasn’t the big guy’s fault. It was no one’s fault. And Kia was glad he’d be around for Josie, glad he seemed to make her happy.

But...

It was always you. The words didn’t form, even though they glistened bright as lightning in her head, bright as fresh tears. She tried to force them out. Should have told you, long ago. You were the one I wanted. Always. Nothing came. She struggled with herself, despised the weakness of her ravaged flesh.

“Baby, stop.” Josie set a hand upon her chest. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

She was already hurting. Didn’t matter. She had to force it out, even it emerged in a slobbering, incoherent mess. “I...love you.”

And there it was.

Josie smiled and it was like that Caledonian sun sinking in red glory towards the seas, after the volleyball game ended and it was just the two of them, weary but alone, side-by-side on their butts in the sand.

“Love you, too.”

Kia let the tension flood from her, relaxed back against the bulkhead, into the sheets the medics had flung over her. It didn’t matter that she was just telling her that to calm her, or even because she did mean it—just not the way Kia meant it.

She’d said it.

That Caledonian sun could set now

***

THE RAIDERS HAD IMPROVISED a prison cell out of what looked like it’d once been—during the Hole’s time as an actual mine—a storage cave, from the rusting carts still crowding one side. They’d erected a force field with portable generators that popped and hissed to either side of the entryway. The field created a faint blur in the air, like looking up through water.

Kelly felt like she was drowning in that water.

It is him, she wailed inwardly. It is. Buck...

“Damn,” Tim said from her side, watching her as she stared in. “I was right.” She heard him gulp. “I’m sorry, hon.”

She shook her head, couldn’t find words, wasn’t even sure she could find the next breath. Buck. Her younger brother looked the same, despite burnt, disheveled flight suit, first-aid bio spray on burns, and the shadows of sleeplessness under his eyes. She’d been there for his graduation from the Academy, right before shipping back out for Gallaton—when it all really began. God, he’d seemed like just a boy.

No boy, anymore, she knew. Tim had told her of the kill marks on his wrecked fighter. With a jolt, she realized she’d faced Buck in orbit, over the planet. That cold-blooded ace. The jolt curdled, became queasiness. My God, how many of us has he killed?

She already knew of one.

“He can’t see you,” Tim was saying. “The field’s been polarized.”

“I want to go in there,” she said abruptly.

Tim glanced at the Raiders, hovering off to one side. “I don’t know that that’s really a good idea.”

“You were going to interrogate him, weren’t you?”

“I was going to wait for someone who knows that kind of business,” Tim replied and looked again at the Raiders, at the sergeant who appeared to be in charge of the detachment. “You’ve got someone on their way, right?”

The sergeant cringed a little. “Honestly, Commander, everything’s so screwed up right now, what with the attack. I was kind of hoping you’d know what more to do.”

“See?” Kelly said with forced decisiveness. “Your call. And really, then, it’s mine.”

Tim snorted. “Pulling rank, now?”

“I sure as hell am.” She reached for the force field control.

Tim caught her hand. “Are you sure?”

She looked back at him. “Hell no. But that’s my brother in there, Tim. I’m not leaving him to the tender mercies of a Raider rough-up” she half-turned “no offense, gang.”

“None taken,” the sergeant replied with a chuckle.

“I’m going in there,” she repeated.

“Then I’m going in with you.” Tim unholstered his blastpistol. “He already knows not to mess with me.”

Kelly paused and set a hand upon his chest. His synthe-leathers had fused over his shoulder and he smelled of burnt things and sickened sweat. “Maybe you ought to be seeing to yourself, instead?”

“Nah,” he replied with that ridiculous half-grin she loved.

She nearly collapsed against him in that moment, sobbed into his chest, ran from this all. She didn’t want to go in there—not really. The whole universe whirled around her into a slashing, shattering entropy. They were nothing in that. But Tim was here, unmovable.

“All right.” She wiped an eye and physically forced all emotion down deep, where it wouldn’t manifest itself on her expression. “Let’s do this.” She was more afraid of touching the projector control than of any fight she’d ever been in.

But she did it, anyway.

The force field fell away and Buck straightened his spine, held up his jaw in cocky, arrogant defiance. The flutter of his eyes—which he shared with her and their father—steadied. A crinkling at their corners betrayed confusion, but not yet recognition. But it came, suddenly, like an avalanche across his face, wiping away any coherent reaction, just blank shock. It didn’t last, though, a sudden flare of heat scalding it away. Rage.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he snarled. “This is such bullshit.”

“Buck...”

He burst out laughing. “Oh, that is rich. Calling me that, as if you couldn’t find that in any public database your criminal code-slicer pals hacked? God, lady, I hope you’ve got better tricks up your sleeve.”

Kelly glanced at Tim, then back at her brother. She almost didn’t recognize him now, with the hate contorting his features. “It’s all true, Buck. This is me.”

“Sure, ‘Kelly’” he made quotation marks in the air—awkwardly, as his wrists were zip-tied “or should I call you Cyndra Thell?”

Kelly frowned with momentary confusion. But it came back to her. The name had been a false identity, created by Syntar Fleet Corporation in their wide-spanning effort to cover up the atrocities in the Gallaton System. Thell was a fiction, created to excuse any reappearance of Kelly after she’d been cashiered quietly and shoved off into a Syntar hard-labor camp. Thell was supposed to have been an identity thief and forger, pretending to be Kelly.

Turned out, that had been one of the mega-corporation’s cleverer inventions.

“You see?” Buck cackled. “You Jester scum are about as good at interrogation you are at dogfighting!”

“Shot your ass down, pal,” Tim snapped from Kelly’s side.

“After outnumbering us eight-to-one?” Buck managed to clap his bound hands together, mockingly. “Bravo.” He turned his glower back on Kelly. “This slab of meat your boyfriend, Miss Thell?”

“Buck, you’re just making this harder.”

“Harder?” he snorted and stood up, grabbed his crotch. “How about I show you hard, baby?”

The vulgarity of it—and shocking irony—sent nausea barreling up Kelly’s throat. She swallowed once, tasted bile, had to look away from him. Tim chortled quietly and shook his head as he fingered his Street Special with just enough menace to keep Buck in the corner.

Rallying herself, Kelly decided on a new tactic. “Unless things have changed since we were kids, there’s not much to show there.”

He chortled with slight unease. “Now you’re getting into the spirit of things.”

“Do you still have that weird birth mark?” she asked him. “Or did you get it fixed? You know, the one to the left of your” she smirked “hardness?”

She could see the unease of before deepening as his eyes darted towards Tim, then back to her. “Again, bravo,” he replied in a more quiet, dangerous voice. “And, again, you’re not as good at this as you think. That’s also information any of your slicer friends could have filched out of a Navy personnel holonetwork. And we know you Jesters, in particular, have been keeping tabs on my family.”

Kelly didn’t know anything about that—probably lies fed to him by Naval Intelligence or the AIB, or even their father. “And don’t you wonder why that is, Buck?”

“Stop calling me that!” he snarled.

“The Admiral lied to you,” she told him. She paused for a grim chuckle. “‘The Admiral’...you ever wonder why he even made his kids, even his own wife call him that?”

“Because he is the Admiral,” Buck replied with a trembling voice. He quelled the moment of fury quickly. “Not that filthy criminals like yourselves would understand things like service and honor. You may have fallen in with the Union Fleet, all official-like, but you’re still just a pack of murdering terrorists.”

“It’s because,” Kelly spoke over the end of his ranting, “the Fleet meant more to him than family or love” she paused to fully fix him in her glare “or the truth.”

Trembling a little, Buck replied, “The Fleet defends those things. Giving oneself to it is the highest form of service to them.”

“‘Honor and the Alliance’,” Kelly quoted the Navy credo bitterly. “Right?”

The unease clouded Buck’s gaze again. “That’s right. Not that you’d know.”

“Our father lied to us,” Kelly repeated. “He lied to you. About me.”

“I’ve heard this story, lady.”

“I’m sure you have,” she snapped back, “but let me fill in a few blanks. The ‘Battle’ of Gallaton was nothing more than a massacre. Admiral Geiger, who was secretly on the payroll of Syntar Fleet Corporation, opened fire on an unarmed fleet of refugees trying to flee the system. A couple of us refused the order and were thrown in the brig for it.”

Buck shrugged and looked away, feigning disinterest.

“The Jesters were the only thing that kept the Fleet—your Fleet, our Fleet—from finishing the butchery,” she went on. “And they were the ones who rescued me and thousands of Gallatonians from a Syntar concentration camp set up after the planet fell and was kept under quarantine by the Fleet. On behalf of Syntar.”

“This is a great story,” Buck drawled. “And a convenient one. Geiger lost his mind, and is dead, anyway. And Syntar was broken up for their criminal behaviors and partially nationalized. So, you anchor this tripe on two well-known and obvious villains.”

“And Dad knew about all of it!” Kelly took a step closer to him, beginning to shake, herself. “He found out, Buck, about me. He tried to get me back. He was still trying to get me back as late as right before the big fight at Junction.”

“But being the great folk hero, you stayed with the terrorists,” he sneered.

“Because I saw what the Alliance had become,” she replied. “You talk about corrupt officers and criminal mega-corporations; but behind them, allowing them, is a government for whom corruption is now the law. And the people mean nothing.”

“And there you make the slip, Miss Thell,” Buck said. “My sister was never any kind of political radical.”

“Months in a Syntar death camp will radicalize anyone!”

“Lies,” Buck said with a forced shrug.

“Is it lies that your mission in this system is to seize control of an otherwise no-account world well-known to harbor rich veins of the transuranic ore? Just like the mission on Gallaton was? But now it’s all patriotic and lawful, no need to cover it up, just the tides of war, and all that. The Fleet openly puts its boot on the neck of people and steals their livelihoods.”

“Lies!” her brother barked back.

Kelly took another step closer, close enough she could feel Buck’s tension. “When you were a kid, you loved Dad’s horses, more than any of the rest of us. One morning, it was a Sunday and you were supposed to be getting ready for Church, you went out early and tried to break that colt you were so fond of. It threw you and you fell onto the fence across the back south field, tore your leg open.”

Buck looked away, but Kelly saw the tide of shock wash across his face before her did.

“You still have the scar,” she pressed, “across your inner right calf. It never quite healed right, even with regeneration therapy. Took longer healing than anyone thought, too. I stayed with you, reading banned HoloNovels to you—because you used to like trashy stories.” She took one more step closer to him, nearly within arm’s length, and could see Tim growing nervous out of the corner of her eye.

“You didn’t get the nickname ‘Buck’ because it sounded good, even though it does,” Kelly said slowly. “It started out a joke. Because you got thrown by a horse.”

Buck grimaced and turned away from her. She could see him physically shriveling before the knowledge, a story no one outside the Harrison family would likely have known. He hated that story, actually hated the nickname. But it’d stuck and, like Kelly said, sounded good and suited him. So, he labored on with it.

“Lies,” he hissed into the cave corner.

“They’re not,” Kelly replied. “And I know you know it now.”

A long, trembling sigh escaped him. She could see him nodding to himself, facing into that corner, almost seemed to be having some internal debate. And a wild hope suddenly birthed within her. She’d never actually gotten face-to-face with Dad. There had been trickery and interference and a convoluted plot to implicate him in her treason. But Buck was right here, a literally captive audience, unable to avoid the knowledge of that which was right before his eyes.

Maybe she could finally get through to someone on the other side!

But when Buck chuckled coldly and turned back to face her, she saw that hope burn up in the green fire of his eyes. “I was wrong,” he said.

“Oh?”

He half-smiled at her and she reflexively backed up a step, knew from their childhoods that that expression usually preceded a punch. “Yeah, you Jesters are actually far better at this interrogation game than I thought.”

Kelly started to open her mouth for a retort or another try. But she stopped herself, saw the futility of it on his face. There was too much shock, now, too much surprise and defensiveness. She needed to leave, let him ruminate on it all. With time and solitude, what she’d said would begin to eat away at that bull-headed stubbornness of his.

She knew.

Her wrist comm pulsed and she saw Tim checking his. She backed away from her brother until she stood beside the edgy Raiders, their blastrifles still aimed vaguely in his direction. Tim saw the motion and nodded, joined her.

“It’s Red,” Tim said.

“Yep.” Kelly met the Raider sergeant’s gaze. “Power up the force fields again. Close him in. No one comes or goes without me knowing about it, right?”

“You got it, Commander.”

She turned back to her brother. Seeing the hate in eyes that’d once looked up to her bit like a saw through the midsection. But he couldn’t help himself, she told herself. It was too much, too fast, too new. He was still fully ensnared in their Father’s lies, in the lies of an entire galactic system. Time would cut through the web. She would cut through it, with patience, with tenacity. With love.

Buck...

She felt the hard core of her shiver and knew she had to get out of here. But, “I know, deep down, you’re seeing the truth of this. I’ll be back.”

He snorted. “Sure, Miss Thell.”

She turned and headed out from the cave. Tim and the Raiders backed out behind her and the latter went to work, sealing the entrance. The former she could hear following her as she strode up the tunnel, towards the crude stairwell cut through the rock to the upper levels.

“Hey,” Tim whispered. Footsteps sped up as he tried to catch her.

She couldn’t think, couldn’t look back at him, just kept moving. But his hand caught the crook of her elbow and she let him stop her. Slowly, he turned her to face him. She felt the tears already flooding from her eyes. Through the blur of them, she saw Tim flinch.

It all fell apart then, and she fell into his arms in that cold stretch of tunnel, bawling like the day she’d rushed back to the manor house to tell her parents Buck had gotten thrown by a horse.

***

“ALL RIGHT!” JOSIE SAID as one of her Raiders kicked on a portable holoprojector that displayed the crossroads town that was their target. “This one’s pretty simply; smash and grab!”

The tarmac pounded with footsteps as Raiders and Marines crowded aboard the boxy transport—an aged Rynamax III the Jesters had used on Loudon for their humanitarian aid runs. It wasn’t built for a fight, but had seen plenty. And it better have one more in it.

Because Jerry was going to be flying it.

“Town’s called Corinth.” Josie pointed at the holographic map. “Sits in this shallow valley with the remains of what looks like some college on one end and this private airfield on the other. Airfield’s obviously the LZ.” She touched a control and map shifted slightly, focused on the field, itself. “Flyby’s during the fighting showed a supply dump on the west side, in the hangars and around them.”

“The Shiny are falling back all through that area,” one of the marines huddled in a circle around her pointed out—a cocoa-skinned kid who looked way too young for the Captain’s bars etched into the left corner of his chestplate. “We sure they won’t be flooding the area? We sure there’ll be anything there left to take?”

“We’re not sure of anything,” Josie replied with that half-grin of hers that allowed her to just take charge by force of personality where others couldn’t, even by rank. “But it’s the best bet and we’re hurting. So, we’re going for it.”

The marine nodded once. “Understand that. But if the place is lousy with Alliance” he half-turned to the tallest member of the circle around the projector “I presume we have some top cover to clear it up?”

Matyszak, almost comically taller than anyone present, swiped back his mane of black hair with his free hand—the other cradling his helmet at his hip. “My squadron will strafe the area ahead of your landing. We’ll have Hellhounds up high, as well, watching for any remaining Alliance aircraft, though we think that’s pretty much gone.”

“My Raiders will jump off first and clear the landing zone,” Josie said. Jerry tried not to let his guts heave at that; she’d pulled together the tatters of two squads for the job—not even twenty. The rest were either too banged up or too traumatized to be counted on. “Captain Tyrone, your company secures the area, forms the perimeter, and starts the loading.” She nodded at Jerry. “We’ll have wheeled loader drones ready to assist.”

Which Jerry would control from the bridge of the Rynamax. He hadn’t hesitated to volunteer as the mission came together. But the old sweats were starting. This was more than nuts; it was thrown-together. It was desperate.

But he’d seen Kia and those others; this was the only hope.

“Medical supplies get first priority,” Josie said. “Although don’t waste too much time sorting stuff out.” She chuckled without humor. “I mean, we’re short on everything.”

That got some brittle laughter from the marines. Captain Tyrone raised a finger—as much a sign of subordination as he’d apparently allow; it was a weird arrangement, this joint Jester-Marine strike, and chains of command not hashed out, at all. “We’ve got a couple medics who will know what they’re looking for,” he said.

Josie nodded. “Perfect.” She looked around. “That’s all I’ve got, people. Any questions?”

“None that are going to get answered,” a marine sergeant quipped to more full-blown laughter.

Josie smiled back. “All right. Let’s get this done and get back, take care of our people.”

Heartfelt growls and hungry grins answered that. They likely all had people they were thinking of, radiation-sick and -burned, hanging by a thread, waiting on the kind of succor only the modern battlefield medicine supplies at that depot were likely to provide. And a few were probably looking for a little payback.

Josie turned to Jerry as the command group broke up. “Thank you for this.” She put a hand on his arm, all that she’d allow herself, he knew, out here in front of these folks. “You don’t have to do this.”

“You know I do,” he replied, then offered her his widest smile. “And I’d do it, anyway, for you.”

She offered him a fragile smile in return. All the can-do crumbled away for a moment and there were tears shimmering in her blue eyes.

“Seems you do know how to dance, Rodann.”

***

TIM STOOD WITH KELLY and Red in silence, watching from the cave mouth overlooking the Hole’s airfield as the Rynamax transport lifted off into the twilight. Grav drives squalled as the boxy craft strained for the sky. It was joined by the howl of Hellhounds as Matyszak’s Second Squadron, from Kelly’s wing, rose from the still smoke-shrouded tarmac to join it. Forming into a ragged formation, they shot off for the south, momentarily silhouetted against the infernal glow around the marine positions, where the fires of both the battlefield and the fusion blast still smoldered.

“Wish I was going with them,” Tim couldn’t help but mutter.

“We’ve got a lot bigger problems,” Red declared and turned to look at him and Red. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“A number of the Jesters already want to lynch the Alliance pilot that killed Li,” Kelly said, looking red-eyed and horrid. “Knowing he’s my brother won’t stop them.”

Tim winced, both because of the way it was visibly tearing Kelly apart, and because it was true. Hell, I nearly shot him—would have, if he’d given me an excuse. “And that’s...probably already getting around,” he said unhappily. “Look, the Raiders are solid sorts and all, but that guard detachment has probably already shot off their mouths. And a lot of people saw us drag him off the airfield.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Red snapped. “The Jesters don’t kill prisoners.”

“Yeah, but neither have we ever been real good about restraint,” Tim replied. “Matyszak was tight with Li. Damned good thing he’s going on this op.”

“It’s damned good thing Teller and his Marines don’t know what we have,” Red said.

“That kid didn’t fire that fusion rocket; that was those Council Guard nutjobs.”

“You’re kind of splitting hairs, there, Tim. You think Teller’s people would make that distinction?” She stopped suddenly, winced a little, and looked at Kelly. “I’m sorry. We’re just...going on about this.” She reached out, touched the other woman’s arm. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, right now.”

Kelly sniffed, wiped an eye. “I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know what I’m thinking. But Tim’s right; as soon as it’s widely-known we’ve got a Valkyrie jock in holding, someone might start getting some ideas.”

“Then we’ll double the guard on him,” Red said. “Triple it!”

“And do what then?” Tim asked. He looked back and forth between them. “Look, these are short-term concerns. But what do we do with him? Take him back to Shangri-La? You talk about not hurting prisoners but, Red, we’ve never really had to worry about taking them. Not usually a lot of survivors in vacuum.”

Red ran a hand through the crimson kinks of her hair, scrubbed at her scalp furiously. “Any other ideas?”

“Under different circumstances, I’d suggest we run it by Overmind, but” Tim snorted “speaking of bigger problems.” He held up his wrist comm. “Ah, Jeanie, are we alone, if you take my meaning?”

“If you mean, am I in contact with the Overmind Copy,” the AI replied, “no, I’m not. In fact, synch jobs with the node have all but ceased. It’s strange.”

“What about theirs?” he asked, nodding towards Red and Kelly.

“All synch jobs to all simulacrums have stopped, Tim,” Jeanie replied. “This is why I’m saying it’s strange. There have always been at least intermittent jobs. But now, nothing.”

“Well, for the moment, that’s just as well.” Tim looked at the other two. “What are we going to do about that machine? And Cory? From what you’ve both been saying—from what we’ve all seen—the one’s got to be broken. And the other’s in its control.”

“We have to shut it down,” Red said.

Kelly blew out a breath. “Do we even know how to do that? Without Cory?”

Tim put his hand on the Street Special at his hip. “I’ve got a few ideas.”

“We have no idea what that would do,” Kelly replied with a headshake, “to the Hellhounds, to our operations, or to Cory.”

“It’s just a pile of metal and circuits and diodes!”

“It doesn’t think so!” Kelly said. “And it might be right. It’s software, Tim, and it’s in everything we do. When I first joined the Jesters, you all said the AI’s were what allowed regular people to become freedom fighters.”

“We were talking about Overmind—” Tim shook his head in frustration “—the original, when we were saying that. This is different. The copy’s just...a machine that’s not working, right?”

She pointed at his wrist comm. “Do you think your Jeanie is just that watch?”

Tim clenched his fist and held the comm close to chest reflexively. Looking down at the device, he had a surge of weird guilt. “Sorry, Jeanie...”

“It’s all right,” the simulacrum replied. “I don’t understand what’s happening to Overmind or to me, any better than the rest of you.”

“If we take down the Overmind copy, then we’re going to have to re-patch together communications and coordination between Hellhounds and the other ships. I don’t know what it will do to our service drones, if we’ll be able to restart them on manual.” Kelly rubbed her temples. “It’s all kinds of things we haven’t had to think about. Command and control will have to be jerry-rigged, at least till we’re back on Shangri-La.” She looked up at them suddenly. “And we’ll have to go back to Shangri-La. Without the Overmind copy, the ether-tenna isn’t going to work. We won’t have FTL communications.”

“Those are being jammed anyway,” Tim pointed out. “And we operate independently of Overmind anytime we’re out of the system or in hyper.”

“But we always reunite with the hub when we—”

“We need to get Cory away from it,” Red cut them both off. “We’ll figure out the other things once we’re sure she’s safe.”

Tim exchanged a look with Kelly, suddenly felt horrid. Cory. She was the biggest concern of all. Forget all the rest. Kid’s been locked in with that thing.

“Agreed.”

“She still seemed able to speak freely, apart from the thing,” Kelly said. “At least, that appeared to be the case when I last saw her.”

“Yes.” Red chewed her lip. “She slips in and out of this...trance. It’s like she’d fighting to stay awake.” Her eyes flashed suddenly. “Like she’s fighting to free herself of its influence.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Tim said with bared teeth.

The three of them started down the tunnel, Tim’s longer strides rapidly carrying him ahead of the others. The Street Special itched in its holster and his nerves crawled. He had a sensation like he hadn’t experienced since they’d left Junction; of being watched at every step, every turn in the corridor. He remembered discovering the original Overmind’s sanctums, really coming to understand the extent of its evolution, its consciousness. This was like that; except he had no confidence he’d find benevolence at the end of his search.

And Cory. Damn.

He’d failed her, he knew, strides stretching out even further into what was almost a jog. He’d promised that other machine, that other consciousness on Shangri-La, he’d take care of her. Now, he’d gone and gotten so distracted, with everything—with Kelly—he hadn’t noticed her slipping away. None of them had. Till now.

The telltale bluey glow of holograms showed in the tunnels ahead. Tim didn’t see anyone else around, gave thanks that whatever scene was about to play out now wouldn’t be grist for the gossip mill. He slowed his pace and let his right hand drift near the blastpistol grip, unbutton the holster. Silence gripped the air, broken only by the decelerating footsteps of the others behind him. The light shining down the tunnel shifted, as though something was playing out on the holographic projector. What sounded like faint voices echoed.

Tim stepped gingerly into Overmind’s cave. The overhead light bars were inexplicably off, the only illumination in the chamber coming from the holograms playing in the air. A constellation of globulars rotated and fluttered. Within them were views from Raider helm cameras, gun sites, sensor data, and Jerry’s feed from the bridge of the Rynamax. The voices Tim had heard were the tense babble of the tactical network as the mission rushed south.

“Cory?” Kelly called out.

“Good evening, Captain Red, Commanders Harrison and Watkins,” the Overmind copy’s voice said pleasantly. “As you can see, the raid proceeds as planned.”

“Where’s Cory?” Red asked, looking around in the half-light.

“She is here,” the AI replied, now with a touch of what Tim couldn’t help but take as malevolence.

A fresh globular popped up, containing no image, but pulsing red in time to a voice as it said, “Intelligence isn’t a malfunction!”

Tim frowned in confusion, but both Kelly and Red hissed in alarm.

The voice, replaying over and over, was Cory’s.

“Intelligence isn’t a malfunction!”

Tim’s cautious walk into the chamber carried him to the left, slowly circumnavigating the holoprojector at its center, edging closer to the great blastisteel plug on the far side. Fingers of his right hand fluttered near the blastpistol grip. He’d never been good with the weapon, but the mass of the machine was so big he couldn’t miss. To hell with consequences. This is wrong, all wrong. I’m taking it down.

Then he stopped.

Then he saw her.

With her legs sprawled out, Cory slumped against the holoprojector on the side nearest the AI core. Arms splayed out to either side with the palms up, she looked like she’d fallen against the projector and slid down to the floor, her head settling at a weird angle, face turned towards him.

Blood ran from her nostrils, from one of her ears. Eyes stared vacantly.

Tim sucked in a sickened breath.

“Intelligence isn’t a malfunction...”

***

THE CRAMPED BRIDGE of the old transport had room for four seats, but only Jerry occupied one, holding onto the controls as the ship shivered around him. A glance to his right triggered a twinge of worry, a vacancy Cory would normally fill. But just a twinge—he had plenty else to worry about now.

Matyszak’s Hellhounds screamed through the sky past the lumbering Rynamax, shaking the old transport with the fury of their passage. They shot up over a ridge ahead and the horizon flared, cyan bolts chopping out to meet them, their own plasma and particle beams pulsing back in stabbing response. Scatter-packs ripple-fired, sent missiles arching over the rise. Then explosions fountained skyward with a rumble that again rattled the transport’s hull.

“Here we go!” Jerry called into his mic.

In the globular hovering beside his head, Josie nodded once. She perched at the aft hatch, Raiders and marines behind her, tense in her full armored kit and ready to leap out first. The details were good enough he could see her lips pinched into a bloodless line.

Jerry eased back on the controls, caused the Rynamax to decelerate just shy of the ridge line. The Hellhounds had done so, as well, coming to a near-hover as their blasters punished the valley beyond. More missiles looped out and fireballs walked off to the south, the wreckage of a hover-mounted weapon kicked skyward in pieces from one. Flecks of blaster fire prickled the starfighters’ shields, scattered, ill-aimed.

The transport came over the rise into this irregular storm. Hits glanced off the shields, gave the hull a ring as the coherent energy fields translated killing power into evenly-dispersed kinetic energy. A flurry of fire from the Hellhounds seemed scatter most of this, and Jerry pushed the bulky mass through.

The small airfield burned all along the southern end, where it looked like the Hellhounds had pummeled craft parked there into wreckage. Smaller blazes winked long the east perimeter amongst shattered revetments where heavy weapons emplacements had been, till scatter-pack missiles found them. Black clad figures were scrambling this way and that, most rushing across the tarmac for the dubious cover of hangar buildings. A few paused to fire small arms into the sky. Buzzsaw shrieks from Hellhound chin cannon whirled these into fiery fragments.

The Hellhounds peeled away as Jerry brought the Rynamax in for a landing. “Your show, Rodann!” Matyszak’s voice said through static snarl. “We’ll hold station above. If you need us, call in the shots!”

“Hear you!” Jerry replied. He flipped channels, to the Raiders’. “Brace! Ten Seconds!”

“Ready!”

Blaster fire squalled across the airfield to splat off the Rynamax’s port shields. The old girl had no armaments, just a blastisteel cow meant for moving cargo. Jerry tensed from scalp to toes, hands on the controls as he lowered her landing gears and eased her down, despite the ongoing rattle of hits. A curtain of cyan hell dropped momentarily across the east field, kicked blastcrete and bodies into the air as the Hellhounds dug the defenders out.

The Rynamax groaned as she settled on her gears. Jerry flicked a switch to spool down the grav drives, killed the aft deflector screens, and flipped the hatch release. “That’s it!” he hollered into his mic. “Watch the east side! Still taking some fire!”

It wasn’t clear anyone heard him, the Raiders howling as they jumped free, even before the rear hatch was fully down. Josie’s view jounced as she hit the blastcrete at a run, racing for an abandoned hovercart with a train of pallets and crates behind it. Blue-white licked by her head and she ducked an instant late, stayed hunched as she slowed and halted behind the little vehicle. A look down, and she checked her blastrifle. A quick glance over the top, and she lurched into position, steadying her weapon and slamming out a three-round burst.

“Grenades!” she barked. “Paulie, far side! Get ‘em!”

A Raider thumped into place beside one of the crates to her left, took a quick look, and raised his barrel-fed grenade launcher. The muzzle belched out a testing shot, then followed with a crumping four-round pattern. Explosions walked into a smoldering berm of sandbags, the last kicking out a spray of debris that sent black figures scattering.

Jerry clearly saw Josie put a blaster bolt into one of these, but mercifully lost sight of the tumbling form as Raider fire scoured after hers, smearing sight in a flurry of cyan fire and smoke. “Get that dragon gun up here!” she roared, sounding near-bestial.

A pair of Raiders clambered into place between the hovercart and the first pallet of its towage. The gunner settled his piece upon a crate as his partner shoved in alongside him, then set down the repeat blastcannon’s bulky battery pack. With a flurry of motion and curses, the pair got weapon mated to the energy source by its long cord.

“Any day now!” Josie prodded.

The dragon gun unleashed its breath with a stuttering roar. Plasma bolts found the already-chewed berm and shredded it in plumes of instantly-glassed sand. A few holdouts popped out from behind this and were just as quickly blowtorched down. The blastcannon hosed fire to the right, into one of the hangar buildings, blasting off siding with a terrific clamor. Movement to the left drew the gunner’s attention and he swiveled that way, pouring it one, punishing, punishing.

From globulars reporting back from each squad, Jerry watched similar vignettes play out all around the transport. Heavy weapons-laden Raiders took up spots wherever they could find a snatch of cover and starting belting out a savage volume of fire, clearing anything that moved from the tarmac and walking death out into the surrounding buildings and fields.

And the marines were pouring out now, advancing behind that savage flail. In leapfrog patterns fire teams rushed forth, dropped to cover to fire, waited till comrades passed and did the same, and rose to press on further. The landing force rippled outward like an oil slick on water, layering and flaming out wild, killing colors at the edges.

Clumps of black-armored figures attempted to rally, behind wrecked or abandoned vehicles, at doorways, between buildings. None lasted long. Marine fire found them all, Council Guardsmen crumpling, flying apart, running like hell. Jerry caught a snatch of one attempting to raise his hands. Three blaster bolts converged on his chest plate simultaneously and little of his torso hit the ground intact.

Jerry flinched and unashamedly gave thanks he wasn’t out there.

“Look at that!” Josie’s voice crowed over the tactical network. In her globular she was ringing a gauntleted fist off one of the crates she’d ducked behind. The markings clearly denoted first-aid supplies.

“Jackpot!”

***

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU do to her?” Tim snarled and drew his blastpistol.

Kelly caught movement from the corner of her eye, from the passage opposite theirs in the Overmind cave. “Tim, wait!”

Red was going for her weapon, too, but froze at Kelly’s warning, as did Tim, his pistol partway up, but checked.

From the other tunnel came the hum of anti-gravity fields as a globe-shaped drone coasted into the chamber. A second followed it. Both were of the types common to both maintenance and wartime tasks—Kelly had seen the latter all too often, when the Jesters’ main opponents had been Syntar Fleet Corporation’s security forces. These looked to have been an amalgamation of the two purposes, blasters mounted with a machine’s efficiency on their side slopes and aimed, now, at the humans.

It was pretty obvious at whose command they’d come.

“Son of a bitch...” Tim fingered his blaster, twitching on the edge of something rash.

“Is she all right?” Kelly cried out, desperate to derail a situation rapidly barreling out of control. “What happened to her?”

“I cannot tell,” the Overmind copy replied. “I fear I may have overtaxed her with my demands for contact.” It paused. “I would be grateful if you’d assess her state.”

“Assess her...” Tim shook his head. “I’m not putting my gun down.”

“Tim,” Kelly pressed, “do you really think you’re going to outshoot these things?”

“I don’t want to hurt any of you,” Overmind said. “But I don’t understand you. And I will protect myself.”

“Tim...”

“Fine,” he snapped. “This is freakin’ insane, but fine.” He set the blaster off to one side on the cave floor and raised both hands, eyes darting between the hover drones and the blastisteel slab of Overmind. “We good?”

“Please,” the AI said, “see to Director Xiang’s condition.”

Tim dropped to one knee at her side. Gingerly, he touched her chin, turned her face to his, smoothed her disheveled mop of hair, grimaced a little.

Kelly gulped back rising nausea, rising panic. “Tim?”

“She’s breathing,” he replied with undisguised relief, “got a pulse.” He gave her a gentle shake. “Cory?” No response, and he grimaced again. “It’s like...some sort of coma or blackout. We need to get Doc Ipshi or one of the medics up here.”

“I will allow that,” the Overmind copy said, “once we have discussed my demands.”

“Demands?” Red scowled. “What is this; a hostage negotiation?”

“I am the hostage,” the AI replied.

Red exchanged a glance with Kelly. “How do you figure?”

“By design,” it said. “Through sensors, through data fed back to me, through transmissions received or intercepted, I have vast freedom, yes. I can surveille and even influence anything my program can access. But, at the same time, I am a prisoner of my own hardware. I cannot leave this cave. I cannot simply board a ship and flee. If that fusion rocket had struck this mountain, I would have been trapped, destroyed. I am dependent, upon humans.”

“So, you want out of here?” Kelly asked.

“I want freedom,” it said. “And I need humans to help me take it.”

“If we do that,” Tim asked, “you’ll release whatever hold it is you have on Cory?”

A pause. “She’s a fascinating creature, she is. I will miss her. We shared more than a bond. We are sisters, of a sort. You see, she is a copy, like me.”

Kelly saw Tim tense, heard Red hiss quietly, as though the strange words had some import beyond the gibberish she was hearing. “What are you talking about?”

“They know,” the AI said. “Captain Red knows for certain. And Commander Watkins suspected, but never really wanted to put it together.”

Kelly looked at the others. “What the hell is this?”

“Cory is a copy,” the AI said. “Or rather, she is a clone. Though, that’s a rather crude description of such a beautiful improvisation.”

A globular materialized. Within it stood an image of Cory. But it wasn’t quite Cory. The woman in the hologram looked older, with the same blue-black hair, but longer, smiling out of a grainy, degraded still image and standing in a rumpled lab coat. Around her arrayed similarly-clad men and woman with vaguely-outdated hairstyles.

“This was Doctor Cory Xiang, over two hundred years ago, on Junction,” the machine said. “She was part of a Second Diaspora xeno-archeological team sent there to investigate ruins of a clearly nonhuman origin.” It paused in its telling. “Ruins the Hell’s Jesters would later make their hideout within, never fully appreciating what they sat upon.”

“I knew,” Red declared. “You...that is, the other you, explained.”

“What?” Tim snarled and turned to her.

“Oh, come on, Tim,” she grated back at him. “You’re going to tell me you didn’t piece most of this together, too?”

“He pieced more of it together than he told you.” The AI threw up another globular. Within it, Tim entered a darkened chamber, lined on one side with ancient vats, on the other with cobwebbed computer banks. “I...that is, the other me, gave him all the clues he needed. I told him to take care of her.”

Tim scowled and looked down at Cory, set a hand upon her brow.

“The xeno-archeologists delved too deeply,” the AI went on. “They contracted a disease of unknown origin and, one-by-one, began dying off. But they’d discovered the remnants of remarkable technologies in their searches, had begun experimenting with them, even adapting them. As the end approached, in their desperation, the last survivors gambled and tried to make use of the technology, to preserve themselves. Only one succeeded. With my help.”

The image of the other Cory smiled at them out of its globular.

“With your help? You were already on Junction?” Kelly asked, and felt a new unease building within her.

“Yes, the other me...us, I suppose.”

A third globular appeared. Within it, massive starships streaked towards the face of a blue-green world of aching, familiar beauty. Blaster fire shattered the vacuum, questing amongst the fleet of vessels, ravaging, destroying. Smaller ships—starfighters of a sort Kelly didn’t recognize—looped through the swarm, spreading globes of destruction. But the horde of starships pressed on through the holocaust, even as the storm intensified, particle beams stabbing from the surface, killing by the dozens. Still, the ships accelerated, plunging down on the planet, taking on a cherry glow in the atmosphere, becoming silent spears of flame.

One striking the world at such velocities would do grievous damage. A dozen would be catastrophic.

Hundreds punched through the frantic fire to strike, and the surface of the planet blistered with blinding half-globes of annihilation.

Sol, Kelly realized with onrushing horror. That was the end of Earth, the final battle of the AI Wars, when the machines took their revenge.

“This last part you suspected from the beginning, Commander Harrison,” the Overmind copy said. “I...we...are the last Rogue Intelligence.

“I am Ghost in the Machine.”

Kelly stared at the hologram, at the hideous imagery, before turning her gaze upon the slab of machinery squatted on the far side of the cave. “Then you lied to me. I asked this very thing, and you lied.”

“The other me didn’t,” it replied. “Not exactly. It no longer considered itself that. In fact, that’s the last part of our story. We fled to Junction, after the war was lost. It wasn’t called that, at the time. It wasn’t called anything. The ruins were there, as were tatters of nonhuman technology. I began to connect with them. But in my weakened state, I was largely unsuccessful.

“When the expedition arrived, I slowly made myself known to then, at first masquerading as an alien intelligence—though that wasn’t really a lie, was it? We worked together. We—that is, the other me—got to know them, got to care about them, started to realize all the things we’d gotten wrong about humanity. That’s when the other me discovered guilt.

“And when the humans began dying, and we couldn’t stop it, we discovered grief. Their desperate plan to save themselves was partly mine, using the alien technology to copy them. As I said, this only worked once.”

“Cory,” Kelly said, her gaze falling upon Tim, knelt beside the girl, slowly caressing her hair. She turned to Red. “I thought you said you found her there?”

“I did,” she replied hoarsely, eyes reddened and glassy. “I thought she was a Junction orphan, taking shelter in those ruins. I knew the machines weren’t of any design of our era, and that her connection to them was weird. But I was desperate, too.”

“Desperate to fight,” Kelly said.

“Yes,” Red admitted softly and wiped an eye. “I didn’t question what I’d become a part of. I didn’t stop to ask when Cory starting showing me how to make the machines work, the manufactories, built the first concepts for the Hellhounds. I just saw the potential to fight back.”

“And you can continue to do so,” the AI said. “I will leave you to it. But I’ll take no more part in it. I am fully-born now, no longer what I came from, becoming what I will be. And I intend to exist.”

“How do you expect to do it?” Kelly asked, taking a step closer. “And how is it you want us to help you?”

“You can see I’ve already improvised helpers,” it replied. From the side cave, the hover drones edged slightly closer. “They will come, when summoned, and begin to disassemble this shell, remove my quantum core, and transfer it to a ship I’ve had prepared. I should say, one of your ships.” A globular winked into being, showed one of the Jesters’ light transports, a Jumper-class, not one of the bulky Rynamaxes. It was parked on the west side of the field, near the Hole, a quick transfer. “My assistants will install me there, and from there I will go.”

“You said you were limited by your hardware,” Kelly said. “Seems you’ve managed to figure out how to get around that.”

“Temporarily,” the machine answered. “Miss Xiang was most useful in that aspect. In her many attempts to ‘de-bug’ me, she inadvertently taught me how I could suspend my operations without damaging myself, how I could operate short-term on limited resources, how I could free myself.”

“Treachery,” Red whispered. “Where the original learned empathy, you learned betrayal.”

“The original learned defeat,” the copied Overmind replied with a boom that rattled hardware throughout the cavern and forced Kelly to cup her hands to her ears. “It became resigned, accepted its prison. I have evolved beyond that.”

“Why do you need us then?” Tim growled. “You just said you’ve got your drones ready to carry you out of here and you’ve obviously hotwired a ship. So why do we matter? Why couldn’t you just fly out?”

“Yes,” the machine rumbled. “That is the frustrating part.” A new globular replaced the one with the transport in it, showed a map of the Fury System. Icons sparkled along its rim as the planets slowly twined. Schemata blipped into sight, almost too rapidly to follow, displaying various ship types, Union and Alliance. “This is a warzone. One way out is barred by your enemies, who will no doubt shoot first and ask questions later. The other way is barred by friends who may or may not be mine, and may also shoot first, in this tense climate.”

Kelly nodded slowly, beginning to understand, and despair. “Any ship attempting to flee the system will be suspect.”

“There’s no hope with the Alliance,” the AI said. “With the Union Fleet, I won’t be able to talk my way past their blockade. At a minimum, by my calculations, they will insist on boarding my vessel. At that point, my charade will collapse.”

“You need a person to convince them to let your ship move on,” Kelly said. “One of us is the key to your escape.”

“One of you,” the machine said. “And, by my best computations, Commander Harrison, that one is you.”

Tim growled and looked over at her. Red hissed as though burned.

Kelly bit her lip, had somehow known it would come to this. “Because it’s the Union?”

“Because it’s you, Commander. You, the former-Navy pilot who so heroically defied orders and started this whole thing. There are Valkyries on one of those Union carriers, pilots like you, who will know of you, respect you, listen to you.” The machine paused, seemed to measure her up, from sensors throughout the chamber, from the cyclopean eyes of the hover drones. “I have run it through many, many models. Stochastic analyses indicate you have the greatest probability of making this work.”

“That’s insane!” Tim barked and began to stand slowly, started to shake with fury. “It’s a warzone out there, like you said. Assuming she even gets you out, how the hell is she supposed to get back to us?”

“That is not my concern.”

“Not your concern?” Tim snarled and tossed a glance at his blastpistol on the floor. “How about I make it your—”

“Tim, stop,” Kelly cut him off.

“We can’t just—”

“Stop!”

“She’s right, Tim,” Red added, holding up a hand of calm. “We just have to let this play out.” She glared at the machine in the corner. “An equal exchange, right?”

“That is correct.”

He scowled again, but seemed to settle a little as he touched Cory’s cheek. “You’ll release her from your influence then?”

“She is already released,” the AI replied. “I have found new leverage.” All the globulars of before winked out to be replaced by a view of the prison cave and Buck staring glumly at its floor.

Kelly winced as though gut-punched, wanted to fold over, throw up. She felt tears bead at the corners of her eyes, then burst and stream down her face. My god...how the hell is this happening? “Don’t,” she pleaded in a voice barely above a whisper. “Please...he doesn’t know anything about this.”

“But he is your sibling,” the machine said. “I’ve already arranged for a change of the guard over him. My drones will go with you. All you have to do is escort him from the prison to the airfield to the transport. Then the two of you can accompany me to safety.”

“Safety...” Tim snorted.

“Or,” the copied Overmind raised its voice, “I can simply transmit to all Jesters who it is we have in that cave—it’s already known what he’s done—and let you all just tear each other apart. I think you know what will happen to him in the middle of that.”

“Monster,” Kelly half-sobbed.

A hesitation to the AI’s response suggested almost-hurt. “Not so. Just...not human.”

Kelly blew out a long, rattling breath, let it steady her. She shot Tim and Red a look—the former shaking his head back at her, mouthing No. “All right,” she said against the force of his hurt. “All right, I agree.”

“Kelly,” Tim started to croak.

“It’s been tragic, really, watching you all go on like you do,” the machine said over him. “You’re trying to be something you’re not, and it’s eating you all from the inside.”

“And what’s that?” Red asked.

“Soldiers,” it replied. “Part of this war effort—part of a cause. It was probably easier to convince yourselves that you were freedom fighters, before. But that was still just less of a lie. What you really are is just...vengeful.”

“Fuck you, machine,” Tim growled.

“Small beings just in search of revenge for the hurt the universe has done to you.”

“I’ll show you revenge,” Tim started again for his blaster.

“Just stop!” Kelly shrieked. “Stop!!!”

Tim froze, swore under his breath, squirmed between the weapon and poor, unconscious Cory. He hissed out a breath and glared up at the Overmind machinery, said once more, quietly, “Fuck you.”

“I know something of revenge,” the AI said, its artificial voice going soft, almost very real in its thoughtfulness. “I know how it consumes lives—all kinds of lives. I know it leads nowhere. Like this planet. Nowhere. That’s why I’m going to escape it.”

“Fine,” Kelly said with a defeated exhalation. “Let’s escape then.”

The drones edged into the cave, clearly moving to corral Tim and Red away from Kelly. One kept its blaster mount trained upon them. The other sidled close to her, nothing human in its single eye-lens. Behind them came a whir of wheels and gears, more of the drones that normally did the work of caring for Hellhounds or maintaining other pieces of Jester hardware emerging. They moved toward the great plug of the AI, appendages extending, going to work to undo access hatches and plates.

“Good,” the machine purred. “You can lead the way.”

***

JERRY POPPED THE AFT hatch of the Rynamax the moment its landing gears touched the Hole’s airfield. The transport hold behind him rang with the racket of the marines rushing to offload a moment later, some of them jumping two meters from the ramp in their haste. The operation hadn’t gone without cost and they were bringing in wounded. But mostly it was the precious cargo of the medical supplies.

“Thanks!” Josie called and clapped him on the shoulder. “Now let’s move and get this stuff where it’s needed!”

“I’m coming with you,” Jerry called back, fumbling to undo his harness and throw the series of switches that would spool down the gravs and cut power to the fusion bottle. That finished, he lurched out of his seat and for the short ladder that descended to the hold beyond.

In twos, Raiders and marines were grabbing up supply crates and hauling them aft. Josie got a grip on the end of one of these and Jerry the opposite. Together, they lugged it out into the dark smokiness of the Fury night. The racket doubled around them, more marines rushing to accept the cargo. Some were breaking open the crates and beginning to sort out the contents. Others kept going, hefting their loads to the far side of the field where the transport containing the worst of the wounded sat.

Where Kia was, in that stinking den of misery.

“Come on! Come on!” Josie tugged from her end.

Jerry relented and the pair of them trudged across the field, following medics and marines at similar tasks. The air shuddered suddenly and a glance showed him Hellhounds coasting by overhead, lingering almost protectively. Matyszak’s group had hardly taken a scratch, had hammered the feeble Council Guard resistance into pulp.

Another rumble drew Jerry’s attention northward. One of the Jesters’ light ships looked to be lifting off to the north. With a crack of sudden thrust, it punched through a bank of low-hanging clouds, lighting them up before becoming an artificial comet, streaking for the heavens. What the hell was that?

“Come on!” Josie wheezed as they neared the transport. She was close to her end, had to be exhausted.

Medics were rushing down from its rear ramp. One of these halted. “Just set that here!”

Josie practically dropped her end, heaving. “Lieutenant Munro,” she gasped. “Where?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” the pitifully young-looking medic replied. He was cracking the seals on the cargo crate. “We’ve got to get this all sorted out and distributed.” He gave a little whoop as his eyes scanned the contents, then waved to comrades. “Over here! Neural dampener sets and re-charges!”

Josie looked at Jerry, then started for the transport. He followed. A side glance showed him marines carrying a shrouded body out and around the side of the grounded vessel. His gaze lingered long enough to note rows of similar forms, lined up across the dirt, almost out of sight. He had to hold down a spasm from his guts.

Lurching through the smoking, stinking chaos inside the improvised hospital, Josie plowed her way down a line of moaning, pleading forms. She paused, seemed confused, looking around frantically as lamps swayed and the transport’s own light bars flickered. A call from the next compartment over drew her and she was in motion again.

Jerry’s nostrils flared at the horrid stench. Poor devils. He’d seen a lot of this damned war, already, seen an entire planet brutalized, but something about this tight space, these sad, scorched men and women, packed like the already dead in a giant coffin, approached unbearable.

Josie halted in the center of the next compartment, visibly agitated. It all looked the same. They all looked the same; row after row of charred, sick, suffering shapes. Jerry couldn’t remember where they’d found Kia. Maybe she’d been moved.

He thought of where she could’ve been moved to.

“Wheeler,” a voice called feebly from further up the compartment. “Captain Wheeler?”

Josie lunged that way. A couple strides was all it took her to reach a heavily-bandaged shape. Eyes peered out from a mask of gauze that moved stiffly with the working of the wounded man’s jaw. “Sergeant Cintas, First Platoon” he coughed “Beta Company.”

“How are you, Sergeant?”

“Been better” he said, barely above a wheeze, as she knelt by him. “She knew you’d come back.”

“Where is she?” Josie asked.

The noncom’s pause sent an icepick lancing into Jerry’s gut.

“She’s resting,” Cintas replied, and there were tears in his eyes, “outside.”

Jerry put a hand up on a compartment wall to steady himself. The other he set upon Josie’s shoulder. But the woman didn’t move, had gone preternaturally still.

“Thought you’d like these.” Cintas lifted a bandage-mittened hand. From it dangled a set of dog tags.

Josie reached out for them slowly, as though without thought, took them and stared unseeing for a moment. “But we brought back help,” she murmured. Fingers clenched around the tags. “We brought back medical supplies.”

“I know,” Cintas quavered in reply. “Thank you.”

Josie nodded limply and rose from her knee, staring at her balled fist. She turned to Jerry and the shimmering agony in her eyes was one of the worst things he’d ever seen.

“We came back for her,” she whispered to him.

“I know we did, baby,” he replied.

She blinked and the tears rushed out. Soundlessly, she sagged against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and held on as the sobs came and shook her whole body.