Chapter Ten

Day 1,530 of the War:

“So what do you think will happen, Rumis?”

The young man picked up one of the two small glasses of life-water on the Colonel’s desk and took a sip. He looked deeply unhappy.

“I think my sister will marry him and I’m not even there to vet her choice.”

It was after dinner and Cheloi and her adjutant had retired to her quarters for one of their occasional sessions of light drinking and heavy talking.

The Colonel smiled. “So you think the war has dragged on too long?”

“I think all wars drag on too long.” He sighed. “But yes, this one bites especially deep.”

“There are some who say,” Cheloi chose her words carefully, “the Empire should come to some diplomatic negotiation with the Menon. Maybe even change their status from vassal to semi-autonomous.”

Rumis laughed. “Is that a trick question, Colonel? If the Emperor does that, he might as well hold elections on every one of his planets. Or join the Fusion.” He laughed again. “That would be funny, wouldn’t it? The sops wouldn’t know what to do with us.”

She pinned a look of sceptical consideration on her face. “The Fusion is a big galactic body. I don’t think they could have grown so much, achieved so much, if they were a bunch of cowards.”

“Not cowards,” he corrected. “Hedonists. I wasn’t born into the Empire so I could see it crumble into the grasp of those selfish pleasure-seekers.”

She nodded slowly. “You’re probably right.”

Her door chimed and, after a quick flick at her console, Koul entered.

“Colonel,” Cheloi greeted, “what a surprise.”

“I brought some late despatches,” Koul explained with an incline of his head. His left hand held several flimsies.

“Bring them here. Would you care to share a drink with us?”

Koul looked from one officer to the other. “Why not?”

“Excellent.” Cheloi walked to the bureau to get another glass. “We were just talking about that perverted body called the Fusion.” She returned to her desk and poured a shot for her second-in-command, taking the opportunity to refill the other two stubby containers as well. “We’ve decided that they’re formidable but soft.”

Koul pulled the second chair in front of the desk towards him and sat down. Reaching for the glass, he sipped deeply of his drink, draining half of it in one swallow. He lifted an eyebrow in appreciation.

“That thinking, Colonel, if you forgive me for saying so, is a little too simplistic.”

Cheloi sat back, watching him. “Oh?”

Rumis grinned, deeply dimpling his cheeks. “Are you a Fusion sympathiser, Colonel Grakal-Ski?”

Koul didn’t rise to the bait. “I don’t have to be a sympathiser in order to respect them, Major. You may see the Fusion as soft and flabby, but they are also cunning and multi-tentacled. It doesn’t serve the Empire well to belittle our strongest foe.”

“But they haven’t made a single move against us,” Rumis argued, “beyond hurling sanctimonious sermons at our heads. Doesn’t that indicate they don’t have the stomach for a fight?”

“What it indicates,” Koul replied, enunciating each word clearly, “is beyond any of us in this office to speculate upon.”

Her door chirped again.

“Busy night,” she murmured.

Her aide entered and Cheloi had to hold herself still to stop from reacting. She looked into those hazel eyes and tried to convince herself again that, yes, she had done a good thing in terminating their brief relationship. No, not just good but necessary. Lith was easily as corrosive to her resolve as the strongest acid.

She watched as the Lieutenant looked from one face to another.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“That’s quite all right, Lieutenant,” Cheloi answered. “We’re just debating the finer points of interstellar politics. How may I help you?”

Thankfully she was far enough away that Cheloi couldn’t catch her intoxicating scent or she would have been over the desk, crushing the young officer against the wall, before anyone could draw a breath.

“You asked for a report from the field hospitals, Colonel.” Lith held up a e-pad. “I have it here.”

“Fine–”

For the third time, the door beeped, and Cheloi threw a hand up in exasperation. “Rumis, are you expecting anyone?”

“No, Colonel.”

“Koul?”

He shook his head but continued to sip the remainder of his life-water.

“Come in.”

It was one of the junior officers from Communications. With a startled glance, he looked from one face to another then hurriedly handed a note to Cheloi, saluted quickly and exited.

Cheloi looked down at the small sheet in front of her and frowned.

“Vanqill wants to meet me tomorrow. He says he has urgent business he needs to discuss.”

“Can’t he come here?” Koul asked.

“Seems not. And he says it’s too hot to even send encrypted. He emphasises that it’s of the utmost importance that he speak to me in person.” She scanned the short series of numbers that accompanied the message. “At a set of coordinates he supplied.”

She hesitated for a moment then looked up. “Lieutenant, sign out a skimmer for tomorrow morning. Make it one of the latest models. We’ll take it low and fast.”

“Do you need me along?” Rumis asked, his body tensed as if it was about to vault out of the chair.

Cheloi shook her head. “I can handle him.” She lifted her glass with her free hand. “Let’s find out what Sub-Colonel Vanqill has to say that can’t be trusted to our regular despatches.”

Day 1,531 of the War:

Cheloi referred to the navigation e-pad on her lap and frowned. She raised her head and pointed to the left.

“Maybe he’s waiting further west. Damn this dust!”

They were travelling through one of the driest border areas of the Nineteen. The skimmer, speeding fast and low, kept throwing up clouds of fine desiccated brown soil that obscured everything but the way directly in front of them, kept clear by jets of compressed air.

“I’m going to have Vanqill’s balls for this,” she muttered, “asking for a meeting this far out. What could be going through that man’s head?”

Lith let the Colonel’s words wash over her, hoping the white noise would soothe her jangled nerves and fill the rip inside her. It wasn’t working. She poured as much concentration as she could into piloting the skimmer, leveraging what flat ground she could to maximise their speed, before moving to the more shielded rocky terrain. Under any other circumstances, without the tension tagging along for the ride and squeezing her head whenever it had the chance, she might have even enjoyed the irregular manoeuvring between tors.

In the end, it was all for the best, she kept telling herself. What was she thinking getting intimately involved with the woman she had sworn to kill? There would be other people in her life, other men or women to fall in love with. Ones that she might even consider as a life partner, rather than a hurried screw in a fucking war zone!

Her knuckles tightened on the controls. She was so filled with anger, she wondered how her body could contain it. She wanted to hit the controls with the heel of her palm but knew that would start a discussion for which she was ill prepared. She had been so proud of her strength and sense of conviction. Yet, at a critical point, she had let her own desires rule over her head. And, worse still, it had taken the self-restraint of a mass murderer—not a rational and moral being like herself, but a fucking mass murderer!—to put a stop to it. Lith didn’t know who she despised more, the Colonel or herself.

The sun was arcing through the sky and the temperature was rising steadily outside the skimmer’s air-conditioned bubble, adding to her unease. Her mind segued back to the strangely-intimate meeting in the Colonel’s quarters the night before: the concentration of senior officers and the look on Grakal-Ski’s face when the courier interrupted them. Even though the message from Vanqill in Green sector seemed to arrive as a surprise to all, she wondered about the glint she saw in his eye. Was this the opportunity he had alluded to in their previous meeting? Was she actually leading Cheloi into a trap?

And if she was, what could she do about it? As the sub-Colonel had pointed out, capture by rebels was an elegant solution to both their problems. She would be set free the moment her Fusion credentials had been confirmed. Perhaps she could even negotiate a quiet exit off the planet with the rebels as a reward for delivering Sie into their hands. Grakal-Ski would gain command of the Nineteen and the Colonel….

It had to be done. She had promised Nils and the rest of the faction.

“I’ll give it ten more minutes,” Cheloi was saying, “then we’re turning back. We’re too close to the boundary of secured territory as it is.”

Lith opened her mouth to confirm the order…and their world blew apart.

The dust obscured the source of the missile but Lith felt the hard shock of impact on the underside of the skimmer’s right side that sent the vehicle spinning through the air. She could only clench her fists, holding onto the controls with white knuckles, while scenery flashed chaotically before her eyes. They were airborne, she could make no sense of the blurry colours flying past, then they impacted the earth with a crunch that shattered part of the skimmer’s clear bubble.

The blast echoes died down to an eerie silence and Lith thought she had lost her hearing completely. Then, as if coming back from a distant place, she heard the sounds of small stones rolling off the underside of their vehicle. An underside now baking in the hot sun. A large arc of the passenger bubble kept the skimmer at a precarious lean, stopping them from being buried completely under the immense weight of metal but, as she blinked her eyes clear of dust, Lith saw small cracks appear where the ballistic glass met the ground. It would only be a matter of time before several tonnes of metal came crashing down on them.

While she was still thinking that, someone was working at her harness, fingers deftly releasing the lock points. Still stunned, she looked over and focused on the Colonel’s face, grim and forbidding as she freed the clasps. The world had morphed into some kind of hyper-clear scene where Lith could even trace individual, glinting motes of dust dancing in the air between them. At the same time, every action seemed mired in some kind of clear gel, slowed down to a fraction of normal speed. Lith had time to look down as she heard the clack of her harness fall free, wondering why it was taking so long for the straps to separate from the central locking mechanism. She wanted to tell the Colonel that it was all right, she could do it herself but her mouth refused to cooperate.

“Come on,” the Colonel directed tersely. At the sound of her voice, everything jerked back to normal. The colours faded, the action sped up and the sound in Lith’s ears was her own laboured breathing. They both dropped unceremoniously to the concave arc of the bubble and, feeling herself pushed, Lith crawled out from under the skimmer through a large jagged hole in the canopy, her body scraping against the uneven edges of the glass. She scrambled away on all fours, only rising to her feet when she was free of the vehicle.

Both women looked back at the upturned vehicle when they were a few metres away. Not even a tremor rocked the metal shell. Cheloi narrowed her eyes.

“I wonder if I can work the radio free before–”

A sharp snapping filled the air. With another crash, the skimmer collapsed to the ground. Scuds of fine dirt engulfed them.

“Maybe not.” The Colonel’s laconic voice penetrated the clouds of dust.

“We could have been killed,” Lith choked out, holding her throat while she coughed. She waved her hand around her face until the air started to clear.

The Colonel shook her head. “That was a tipper missile, not an incendiary. And a low-impact one at that. Whoever fired that,” she looked around at the surrounding boulders and up into the sky, “wanted survivors.”

“What do we do now?”

“We head back to the nearest outpost as fast as we can. Try to find our people before our attackers find us.” She knocked the dust from her clothes. “Come on.”

Lith wasn’t sure how the Colonel was going to negotiate their way back without any equipment. Equipment? They didn’t even have any hats to shield them from the early afternoon heat. Or food. Or water. The sun was so bright, it eclipsed the telltale signs of the ever-present ionic storms, bleaching the sky to the palest blue.

She dropped her gaze, watching the air shimmer hotly above the large rocks, and grimaced. The Colonel led the way in front of her. The woman was unstoppable. Their vehicle had just been attacked, overturned and transformed into a brick of high-value scrap, and she hadn’t even paused for more than a few bracing breaths.

They had been walking steadily for twenty minutes when she heard a sound behind her. She spun around and almost collided with the barrels of several weapons aimed right at her. Her eyes widened. She was about to give a shout when something caught her just behind her ear and everything was enveloped in a quick blackness.

Cheloi felt the coolness before anything else and knew she was underground. There was no other environment that combined chill and moisture the way a subterranean room did. The right side of her head ached and it was only when she tried to touch it that she discovered that her hands were tied behind her back. She was on her side.

She blinked open her eyes. Thankfully, it was dark. The only illumination came from outside the room, diffuse lighting that slanted yellow beams through an open doorway. She tipped herself onto her back and took a few deep agonising breaths, moving her elbows apart so the small of her back rested on her clenched hands. It wasn’t a comfortable position but afforded her a better view of her surroundings. She appeared to be in a storeroom, surrounded by columns of roughly-stacked boxes that towered over her.

Wouldn’t it be ironic, she thought, if after all she had gone through all these years, she got crushed by a box of rebel supplies? She recognised the scraps of Menon writing visible on the sides. Years of Fusion training, the most fiendish and underhanded plot against the Perlim Empire, all destroyed by a crate of bearings. She would have laughed if her face didn’t hurt so much. As it was, only a few coughs emerged from her dry and raspy throat.

There must have been someone outside waiting for sounds of life, because two hulking figures shuffled into the room soon after. With the light behind them, she couldn’t make out any features, only their tall broad forms. They grabbed her by each conveniently placed elbow and levered her upright then dropped a small thick bag over her head.

The feeling was instantly claustrophobic and Cheloi fought it, shaking her head from side to side, but the movement, on top of the pain, was disorienting, and she only succeeded in stumbling to her knees. Her feet pinched at the floor and throbbed in protest. Her bare feet. The bastards had taken her boots too.

Her guards were not patient. They dragged her along a quiet corridor and she had to take a series of half-jumps to finally get ground under her soles again. The fine gravel felt like the same kind of soil as HQ’s. Or perhaps she was jumping to conclusions. How long had she been unconscious? Was she still within the Nineteen’s boundaries?

In any case, that was balance solved. Next on the list was self-control. Ruthlessly, she tamped down the overriding waves of anger and the desperate urge to escape. She needed a clear head now more than ever before. When her breathing calmed, she heard faint conversations emerging from doorways she passed. Not just one or two conversations, but at least half a dozen. She wondered if she was in the rebel equivalent to her own headquarters at the Nineteen. The guards descended stairs, causing Cheloi to stumble again, her feet jarring against the rough stone.

Where the hell was Lith?

Whose doing was the tipper strike? Was it a lucky hit or had she been lured into a trap? She instantly dismissed Vanqill as a suspect. She had more or less turned the Nineteen into his personal playground and he was having far too much fun to betray her now.

Koul. The obvious choice but, again, she had no evidence to back up that supposition. Still literally in the dark, all she could do was wait and see how the situation was going to play out.

They kept going down. How deep was this place anyway? She was thirsty, disoriented and hurting.

She could have coped admirably with all three afflictions. After all, she’d been in several situations similar to this during her career. But the addition of Lith to the equation threw her equilibrium completely. Where were they keeping her? What had they done with her? What were the chances of her being set free? Theoretically at least, a release shouldn’t be out of the question. Cheloi started assembling the plausible excuses in her mind.

She’s only a junior officer. No, she’s not my regular driver, merely a temporary replacement from the canteen crew. I can’t even (laugh) remember her name.

But a thick tendril of fear wrapped itself around her spine. She didn’t know what she would do if anything happened to Lith.

Finally, they approached their destination. She stumbled up one step, a heavy door was flung open (Flung? Not sliding? Primitive, no electronics, an ancient warren of converted irrigation tunnels perhaps?) and she was thrown to the floor. Unlike the storeroom, this floor was smooth and she slid along it on her side until something hard and boot-shaped stopped her. She grunted and her hood was removed by another set of hands.

Tiles. The smoothness she had traversed was glazed tiles. They even covered the lower half of the walls. That was not good. Cheloi knew what tiled rooms meant. When she looked around, taking in the row of naked lights above her and the drainage hole in the centre of the floor, her worst fears were confirmed.

Fuck irrigation tunnels. Welcome to the interrogation room.

The man standing in front of her was of medium height and stocky build. Even the loose clothing he wore, covered by a sleeveless cowled cloak, couldn’t hide his impressive musculature. His skin was the colour of stained weathered timber, almost as dark as his hair and eyes. He had thick lips, the lower one protruding, and asymmetrically placed eyes. One of them was also significantly larger than the other, both of them staring balefully at her.

Cheloi, her hands still tied behind her back, struggled to her feet. She was taller than the man in front of her but that meant nothing. It was plain from the way he stood, motionless yet brimming with leashed energy, that she was facing a person every bit as professional as she was. Her private odds of surviving this particular adventure plummeted.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked. His voice sounded like gravel churning in a barrel.

She shook her head, although she had a fair idea.

“I’m Drel. I’m Menon leader of this part of the continent.”

Short and ugly, Rumis had told her. Well, he certainly was that. She remained silent, although her internal eyebrows rose at his words. She thought that Drel only commanded the rebel territory within the Nineteen, yet here was the man himself, claiming a significantly larger jurisdiction. Either he was lying or her own data were sorely out of date.

“Our Intelligence says you’re the Butcher of Sab-Iqur and commander of Territory Nineteen. Senior Colonel Cheloi Sie of the Perlim Ground Forces. Is this correct?”

“Our Intelligence”? Not “informants” or “friends”?

“Yes, I’m Cheloi Sie.” The information was so easy to verify, it wasn’t worth the breath spent on a futile denial.

His expression didn’t change but she heard the shuffling of the guards’ feet behind her, smooth scrapes along the glazing.

“Thank you. I hadn’t expected such quick confirmation.”

“Where’s my driver?” Cheloi demanded, moving straight to the attack.

“You mean the other young woman? She is being held somewhere else, not far from here.”

“If you harm her, Drel,” the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

An unholy gleam lit his eyes.

“You’re in no position to make threats, Senior Colonel,” he remarked. “However that doesn’t mean I’m not amenable to negotiation.”

She stared at him balefully. “What kind of negotiation?”

Drel laughed, a sudden explosive sound that echoed off the shiny tiled walls. “The Butcher, negotiating in my work room?” He opened his arms in a sweeping gesture. “And they told me you were ruthless, Senior Colonel. Impervious to blandishments of any kind.” He sobered, the grin disappearing from his face in a flash. “If you give me the information I want and you can convince me that your driver is merely that—a driver—then I may just let her go in a prisoner exchange and kill you quickly.” He paused. “Believe me, it’s much more than you deserve.”

“And what information might that be?” she asked.

He smiled slightly, stretching a small cut on his bottom lip. “Troop movements. Strategic plans. The usual.”

There was only one answer to that and, despite her personal feelings, Cheloi had to make it. She smiled back at him, showing her teeth. “Throw yourself into the abyss, Drel.”

His mouth widened once more into a grin. “You first, Senior Colonel.”