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  “No.” Marciane took his shot glass and sipped the Tantalos whiskey. It fired his throat. He grinned. “I’ve got a plan.”

  Storm sat back in his chair. He considered the privateer. “Can I listen without obligation?”

  “Yes. You’re not going anywhere unless we jettison you. But if you come with us, you can make some credits, and start getting some answers.”

  Gazes locked and then Storm said lowly, “What makes you think I want to ask questions?”

  “You have a planet blasted away under you, and you’re not curious as to why? You don’t want those renegades hauled up for doing it?” Marciane shook his head. “I know what kind of training the Knights went through. I don’t know if that’s your dad’s suit, or where you inherited it from, but I know you have certain kinds of beliefs, and what happened on Claron violated most of them. What if you find out those were Thrakian ships? Or union ships, softening up the sector.”

  “What if I do?”

  “Then you get the answers and you do what has to be done to stop them. Right? So here’s what we do—my sources tell me the strikers have taken over the port, and most of them don’t know anything about running it. So, in about three hours, they’re going to have a real emergency on their hands.”

  Storm watched as Marciane refilled both shot glasses. “What kind of an emergency?”

  “The Montreal is about to have a radiation spill, and we’ll be coming in hot, real hot. They’ll have to clear the docks and put on their rad suits and follow emergency procedures straight down the line. Most of them won’t know shit about what they’re doing, but they’ll be too scared to think about what it is I’m doing.”

  “And after we’ve docked?”

  “We come out firing. We’ll take out most of the strikers there, because that’s where they’re concentrated. They’ve had a stranglehold on shipments for over a month now.”

  A slow smile played over the edge of Storm’s mouth. “And I can guess who’s first off the ship, laying down a spray of laser fire.”

  “Can you now? Well, who’s better equipped to do it than you? And, you’ll be well paid in Dominion credits for doing it. Is it a deal?”

  Jack took a deep breath. It was, after all, what he’d been trained to do. He held up his corresponding shot glass. “For now.”

  Marciane had a good crew. The suit was fully charged by the time Jack climbed back into it and sealed it up. As he began to connect the sensors, he braced himself. The Montreal was already going down “hot,” spewing radioactivity as she went, skewing awkwardly through the sky. Marciane had an iron fist on the controls, walking a fine line between having a highly responsive ship, and a genuinely out of control vehicle. The radioactivity was genuine enough though, not enough to threaten anyone, just alert the scanning equipment at Washington Two’s spaceport.

  He sensed the suit come to life around him, embracing him, for one suffocating moment. Storm took a deep breath, pounding the fear out of himself. He’d made it this far, hadn’t he?

  And he wondered if he could find someone to strip the suit down and flush it out, because it held this stale, brackish scent that was really the smell of his own fear sweated out of his pores and into those of the armor. He felt the lasers come up to power. His wrist tingled, telling him he was now armed and ready.

  He’d patched in the Montreal’s frequency and now heard Marciane calmly telling Washington Two that he didn’t care if the spaceport was under restriction, he had an emergency and unless they wanted him to “spill” all over their main city structures, they’d better have an emergency dock opened for him, along with enough manpower to dampen him down once he landed. And he wanted the local hospitals notified to take him and his crew in for rad care once the ship had been shut down.

  He’d done his job well. On the open circuitry coming back from Washington Two, Storm recognized the voice of inexperience and raw terror, nearly overridden by the klaxon of the port sensors in the background, bellowing out the radiation crisis.

  Marciane didn’t have to ask twice. With a thin smile of satisfaction, he put his ship on automatic pilot, suited up, and pulled his own laser rifle out of storage. His men equipped themselves similarly and met him in the corridor near the main lock.

  “Now remember … we’ve got the element of surprise for split seconds, and then we’ve got to have made a big enough dent in their ranks to decimate and demoralize them. Got it?”

  The strikebusters nodded back.

  “All right. Let’s kick ass.”

  In the hangar, Storm heard him and thinned his lips. The ship rocked as it settled into a bay. There was a clangor as a “can-opener” popped the hangar doors.

  Storm turned around, walking through a wall of non-rad foam, appearing out of the suds like a merciless monster, his laser laying down a spray of death that caught the radiation workers in total astonishment.

  Within eight minutes, one of the toughest all planet strikes in the history of the Dominion had been busted and shut down.

  Chapter 4

  Jack forgot to warn them about his sleeping light, and so he nearly killed Tubs when Tubs came to wake him.

  Smashed against the inner door of the sleeping bay’s wall, the privateer huffed and puffed under his forearm lock, his face turning a very pale gray, as he gulped for breath, his feet dangling a good six inches above the floor. Then, as Jack awakened and relaxed a little, the privateer slouched under his hold and caught his breath.

  “Holy sh-shit, Storm!” He coughed as Jack let him drop back to his feet, and he rubbed his crimson neck. “You coulda killed me.”

  “I think that was the idea.” Storm smiled apologetically. “I don’t sleep well.”

  “Right.” Tubs shrugged several times, and tried to recapture his air of bravado. Whatever confidence he’d developed in the fighter had just gone out the window. Marciane was right—this man was a killing weapon. He swallowed, hard.

  “What is it you wanted?”

  “Ah, th’ captain sent me down. He said you wanted to see the approach corridor for Malthen. And … the bulletin board’s got the latest on Claron. Over twenty-eight thousand dead, with no idea of who’s responsible.”

  That brought Storm abruptly from his half-sleeping state to wide awake. He remembered suddenly just who he was and where he’d come from, and what had been done to him to get him there. The battle armor shadowed his mind for a moment, like a tall soldier looming over him, and he broke off in mid-shudder. “I’m right behind you,” he said to Tubs, who hadn’t seemed to notice his break in character, and who moved away from him and through the sleeping curtain after giving a nervous jerk of his head.

  Barefoot, Storm padded after the man. He’d adjusted quickly to being back in space, back in action—one of the advantages of having a body twenty years younger than his mind. After his performance as a strikebreaker, though, the crew of the Montreal had left him strictly alone. They’d never seen anything like the awesome firepower of the battle armor. Only Marciane could talk to him without strain in the ensuing days while they returned to the Triad.

  Storm had never been to Malthen. One of the three dominating planets called the Triad that made up the Dominion, it was nearly legendary in its wealth and technology. The Emperor himself resided on Malthen, though it was axiomatic that no one person could actually rule a galactic empire. It was easier to set a few boundaries and spend most of the time deciding not to rule. Planets tended to take care of themselves. Running a continent took a fair amount of ability, let alone a planet or a series of them. Even the unions backed off on planetary government. It was enough to muster people.

  The Emperor mostly reviewed his computer findings and ruled now and then on whether a planet was free labor or union, and decided if there was an enemy worth fighting on an interplanetary level—the Thrakians had been a spectacular example, one the old Emperor’s biography would never live down. The Emperor as a ruler was inaccessible except through the layers and layers of bureaucracy co
mprising the banking and computer information systems of Malthen.

  Still and all, Jack knew that meeting the privateers had cut years off his search. The privateers worked for the level of government that did more than sift through information and requests; it acted, though its actions were not beyond review. But finding anybody on Malthen who could do more than channel information was fortune he did not dare turn down or ignore. He might never have such an opportunity again.

  He squeezed in beside Tubs in the com room. As the privateer sat down in front of his screens, there was room for the three of them again, Marciane and he standing shoulder to shoulder, though he was a good deal taller than the captain.

  The captain smiled. “Sleep well?”

  As Jack answered politely, he saw Tubs shiver, and he repressed a smile. “Yes, thank you. Tubs says we’re in the Malthen corridor.”

  “Yes. Bring up the bulletin board, Tubs.”

  “Yes, sir.” His thick fingers played the keys that he knew so well, he’d worn the texturized coating off half of their faces.

  Jack fought for composure before turning to read the com screen. There, squeezed in among elections, bounties, union warnings, draft notices, tax bulletins, was the brief blurb on Claron. It was now officially being declared off-limits because of the burn-off and an investigative committee was being formed to review the incident and make recommendations. He found his right hand clenched tightly as he thought of the verdant planet reduced to a char, and made an effort to relax his fist.

  Marciane made a cynical noise as the bulletin board switched off. “They’ll be years on that one. All right, Tubs. Bring up the duplicate of your screen.”

  Tubs did nothing other than what he was ordered to, but as he did what the captain said, he felt a strange twist that this stranger, this piece of space junk they’d rescued, would be treated like royalty on board the Montreal. Maybe Short-Jump was right, and Marciane knew something they didn’t. The salt-and-pepper captain who ran a tight ship held something close to hero worship for this guy. Tubs felt bewildered, and a little betrayed. He knew Storm had been handsomely cut in on their strikebusting pay. He licked his lips. “Coming up now.”

  Storm took a moment to recognize anything on the circular gridmap coming up, then the blips fell slowly into place. He stabbed a finger at an unfamiliar shape moving at the edge of the template. “What’s that?”

  “Identify, Tubs.”

  The man squirmed in his chair to see what it was they were looking at, then looked back to his own screen. “That’s a warship, captain.”

  “One of ours?”

  “No, sir. Thrakian.”

  Storm tensed. Marciane couldn’t help but feel it, as they nearly rubbed shoulders. His gaze narrowed.

  The older man’s voice said smoothly, “They’re allowed to patrol the outer corridor … that’s been part of the treaty for the last fifteen years.”

  He knew then that Marciane had caught him on part of his background. The captain had been slyly questioning him and Storm had avoided most of it, but he couldn’t avoid this—the violent reaction to the presence of the Thraks. He said smoothly, “Old prejudices die hard,” and then caught the reflection of himself on the com screen—high cheekbones, smooth, tanned skin, a young face—a face which would never have had to consider fighting Thraks. He added, “My father hated Thraks,” and hoped he’d covered himself.

  “Most of us country boys did the fighting,” Marciane said. “Just to keep ‘em out of the corridor, and the bureaucrats sue for peace and hand ‘em the right. I can’t get used to it myself. Your father wasn’t wrong in his feelings. It’s still a jolt to see them there.” He looked at Tubs and cleared his throat. “All right, shut it down. I’m going forward for a drink, care to join me?” Tubs’ expression squeezed tight as he realized the offer was extended to Storm, not to him. He returned to hunching over his screens and well-worn keyboards.

  The galley was deserted. In the artificial day and night of the ship, Storm couldn’t tell if he should feel tired or fully rested. He just, simply, was. He eased himself into a chair, his knees too high and jutting into the table top. He still wore his ranger trousers and one of Marciane’s men had loaned him a spare jump-shirt. He watched as Marciane pulled out the Tantalos whiskey bottle from a sealed niche and splashed the liquid into a cracked but clean plastic mug. Courtesy dictated that he wait until the second mug was likewise filled before he hefted his.

  He watched Marciane over the rim of the cup, barely doing more than wetting his lips with the whiskey, though just inhaling the fumes affected him for a split second.

  The captain drank deeply and made a satisfied sound. He rocked back in the second chair, and put his boot heels up on a console.

  Jack was aware that he eyed the man with caution and flicked his gaze away, wondering what it was the captain was going to ask him.

  But when the captain spoke, it wasn’t to ask him anything, it was to tell him. “I washed out of the infantry,” he said, his voice deepened and mellowed by the whiskey. “I came this close to being approved to be an Elite Knight, then I lost it all … on account of my family. I’d been a farm boy, and had a certain regard for the cycle of things, and the psychotherapists thought I’d make a poor killing machine. So they washed me out, and the closest I got to battle armor was being seventeen and watching it march by me and the other recruits on the parade field, the Flexalinks shining brighter than a baby’s first tooth.” He laughed softly, a bitter laugh. “Then I learned later that you damned Knights lived by a code and that code was the same thing I’d been washed out for … only I’d had the code before I became a Knight instead of after, and that was the difference.”

  “That was before Rikor and Milos and Dorman’s Stand fell before the Thrakian swarm. If I knew then what I know now, I’d not have been such an unhappy kid. I’d have stayed in ballistics instead of deserting, knowing that the psychs had just kept me out of the worst war fought and lost by mankind in their history.” With a sigh, Marciane colored his confession with another gulp of amber Tantalos whiskey.

  Storm sipped gingerly at his again, feeling it reach down inside with its glow, knowing that Marciane was not the type of man to open up without reciprocation. He sat there, wondering what of his past he could trade the man, without endangering either of their lives. He’d never been presented as the last survivor of the Sand Wars on Milos … when he’d been found, he’d been shuffled quietly from emergency clinic to hospital to rehab center. And he knew that all the suits of battle armor on the transport had been destroyed, except for his, which the nurse had unknowingly smuggled to him. He had been allowed to live, but his life had never been celebrated. Jack could not shake the feeling that to know exactly who he was and where he came from would not be healthy for the general public. He caught up the thread of Marciane’s voice again, having missed the first word or two.

  “… but try telling that to a green kid. Even the odds of two out of seventy-six were better than no odds at all. Ballistics seemed unimaginative and unimportant after that. Push a button and a sector blows. What is there to that? Blowing up dirt, instead of facing the enemy. So I left.”

  “You’re a deserter?”

  “Was. Was. I took the general amnesty six years ago, when Emperor Pepys came in. But I’ve been a fighter all my life … just not in the Dominion forces. I fight in nasty, grimy little wars where you know who the enemy is and you see the look on his face just after you blow away his face plate and he knows you’ve got him. I like a war where you know who the winners are.” He eyed Jack, taking a drink, then asked abruptly. “What’s it like to kill a Thrak?”

  Without thinking, Jack answered, “Like squashing a bug.” Then became aware that a deadly silence had settled into the galley. He hesitated too long to recall his mistake.

  Marciane dropped his feet to the floor. Their gazes met and held. Then Jack said quietly, “You didn’t hear that. If you value your life, you didn’t hear that.”

  “M
aybe I did and maybe I didn’t!” the captain of the Montreal answered. “But it was worth it. I always wondered. They looked like they’d crack and squish real good.” He tossed back the last of his drink. “So if I asked you when and where you did it—not how—you got that goddamn suit hanging back there shows me how—you wouldn’t tell me. Because there’s supposed to be a treaty against stomping Thraks. So I won’t ask.”

  For a moment, Jack’s mind flipped back to when he was drifting and hallucinating about basic training, and thought, here’s a kid who never asked when the sarge said, “Don’t ask.” He felt an eyebrow arch up, and remained silent.

  Marciane put both elbows on the tiny plastic table and leaned forward, his weight making the table shift and the bottle of Tantalos whiskey shimmer. “What are your plans? Will you stay with me, Jack? We could use you.”

  Storm was careful not to let his emotions play across his face as he answered. “Thanks for the offer, Marciane. You’ve got a good crew here, but I think my interests lie elsewhere right now. What happened to Claron deserves answers, and I don’t feel like waiting around for subcommittees to decide if they should ask the questions.”

  The middle-aged man sank back a little, and forced a thin smile. “Worth a try, anyway. Guess you heard already that the Emperor’s reforming the Knights again. He’s starting them up as a personal guard.”

  The Tantalos whiskey kept Jack from going ice cold. The disbanded Knights being reformed? The shock ran through him. He held his gaze and his voice steady as he looked back to Marciane. “Can’t keep much from you, captain.”

  “No,” Marciane said with a sigh, as he poured himself a third helping. “And I appreciate the honesty. Good luck to you when you try for the guard.” He reached out and clicked the battered plastic mugs together. “Here’s to the Emperor, and Malthen!”

  The third drink reminded Jack that he’d been awakened in the middle of his sleep cycle, and so he left Marciane. As he walked away, he felt the captain’s shrewd gaze piercing the area between his shoulder blades, like an itch he couldn’t scratch, and he fell into the bunk wondering if he had somehow made a mortal enemy. He promised himself he’d be constantly on his guard on Malthen.