The Colossus, page 17
part #12 of Blood on the Stars Series
She waited, longer probably than she had to, and then she peered around the corner, her eyes darting all over, scanning the street. Nothing. It looked clear.
She waited another ten minutes anyway. That put her past the official end of the curfew and, theoretically at least, she was now allowed to be walking down the street. She knew well enough that was no guarantee against being hassled by Kriegeri, especially with no place to hide in the brightening daylight. But it was better than being spotted in the middle of the night.
She stepped out into the street, hanging close to the buildings on one side, not hiding exactly, but not trying to stand out either. She looked around, down at the front walls of the buildings where they met the ground, and up into the eaves and other nooks around the rooflines…all the places most likely to contain surveillance devices. She didn’t see anything. That either meant the Kriegeri were behind in wiring the District for monitoring, perhaps focusing on other, more important sections of the city first…or it meant they were better than anyone she’d dealt with before, that the cameras and microphones were there, and she had simply not seen them.
She knew the quickest way to her rendezvous, including a couple cut throughs that could keep her mostly out of sight and shave a few minute’s travel time. But if she was spotted in a back alley, or cutting through a fenced off storage yard, she would draw far more suspicion. In the end, she just stayed in the street, trying to look like any local going about her morning business on Occupied Dannith.
She reached the meeting place about fifteen minutes early, and she could see one of Yantis’s men hiding in an alley across the street, looking out over the entrance to the building. That hadn’t been part of the deal, of course, but she’d have been surprised if the gangster hadn’t brought at least some muscle with him. Andi thought about bailing, but she knew that wasn’t an option. She had to get information, some kind of intel, something Tyler would find useful…and she didn’t have a lot of time to do it. The fleet was in deadly danger, and every hour that passed increased the risk of Pegasus being discovered and destroyed.
Besides, there are no two—or three—of Yantis’s people you can’t handle in a pinch. That sounded like bragging, even to her own sensibilities, but Andi Lafarge was the one who had killed the legendary Ricard Lille in a one on one fight, and once in a while, she let it go to her head.
Just a little.
She walked up to the door, looking around, her recon a lot more focused and effective that she made it look. She assumed there were more of Yantis’s gang around, but she couldn’t spot more than the first one. And standing around in the street any longer could only lead to trouble.
She stepped inside the tavern, a quick glance telling her it had been shut down since the invasion. There was dust everywhere, and chairs piled around and stacked on tables. It looked as though the place had been raided a couple times by scavengers, but nothing looked all that out of order.
It seemed empty, but Andi could feel that someone else was there. She tensed up, feeling uncomfortable at her lack of weaponry. She couldn’t remember ever walking into a seedy District bar, open or closed, without at least her pistol hanging down from her waist, and she didn’t like being unarmed. She didn’t like it at all.
“You’re early, Andi.” The voice was distant, coming from the back room, and it took her a few seconds to confirm to herself it was Yantis.
“Well, you know me. I hate people being late for meetings. Besides, I figured if I waited outside, your man across the street might get edgy. I wouldn’t want to have to kill him…even though he’s not supposed to be here. What the hell don’t you get about the word ‘alone,’ shithead?”
“Sorry, Andi, but be real. You show up outta nowhere, I ain’t seen you in what, seven, eight years? You think I’m out of line to be a little careful?”
Andi stared for a few seconds, the cold look on her face fading slightly. “No, I suppose not. That’s why I left your man alive. But that’s the only courtesy I’m giving. Now, I got the fifty thousand. You got what you promised?”
Yantis shuffled his feet nervously. “Show me.”
“Alright…but you heard me. I see one thing that looks like a setup here, and you’ll be dead before you hit the floor.” Andi could see the partially hidden shock, the controlled rage of her companion. Yantis was far more accustomed to threatening people than he was to being threatened. But Andi’s rep had been pretty heavy even back in the day. If so much as a whispered, scattered rumor about her encounter with Lille had reached the occupied planet, even the District’s old guard would think twice about picking a fight with her. Especially with their organizations in ruins, and only a few of their minions still at their sides.
Not to mention, any kind of fight was likely to attract Kriegeri, and that wouldn’t help either one of them.
She reached down into her pocket and pulled out a pile of shiny platinum coins. “You recognize hectocredit eagles when you see them, I’m sure.”
She could see a glint in Yantis’s eyes, and for an instant, she thought the gangster was going to try something. But then she realized, he was simply distracted by the money.
Wow…things have been lean around here. Fifty thousand credits had always been a sizable amount, especially in platinum, but not enough to almost hypnotize a high-level player like Yantis.
Not until now.
Don’t forget, Yantis, there’s a cool half million in this for you…if you give me what I want.” What I need…
“Alright, Andi…but you’ve got to understand, I don’t have access to the kind of information I used to.”
She frowned. “Are you wasting my damned time?”
“No, no…but you gotta realize…what I’ve got might not seem like much, but it’s all you’re going to get. Anywhere, from anybody.”
She stared at the gangster, her gaze withering. “I’m not going to ask again, Yantis. What do you have?”
“The Heggies…they’re having logistics problems, trouble getting enough supplies—and enough manpower—up here. Especially manpower.”
Andi felt a rush of anger. “That’s what you’ve got? Bullshit about the enemy supply lines? About troop shortages?” He voice was sharp, edgy, her anger on display. But she was interested. Data on enemy logistics could be useful, assuming Yantis had something besides gossip and hearsay. And the idea of manpower shortages was backed up by the seeming sparseness of Kriegeri patrols.
“It’s not bullshit, Andi. I’ve got backup. The patrols out there…a year ago, you wouldn’t have made it to whatever hideaway you found and then back here. The Kriegeri were all over the place, checking IDs, enforcing curfews. But they’ve cut back everywhere, patrol sizes, frequency, even the staffs in the operations centers. About a year ago, they started replacing some of their people with drafted locals. I’m telling you, Andi…I don’t know whether it’s the war—we don’t get much on that here, just rumors about heavy losses on Megara—or what, but they’re really feeling the pinch on personnel.”
Andi frowned, as much for Yantis’s benefit as anything. Keeping the gangster on edge—and hungry for the platinum she had offered—could only help her get what she needed.
Still, she was partially satisfied. If she could determine that the Hegemony forces were indeed seriously struggling to replace losses, at least on the Rim, it might be valuable.
Especially if such shortages reached all the way to the fleet, even to Colossus. Was it possible that monstrous warship was on a skeleton crew? Could that be a tactical advantage?
“What do you know about a huge new battleship?” She’d almost kept silent about that, but there was no point, and no time, for subtlety. She had to find out what she could, and send Pegasus back before some malfunction, or some overzealous Hegemony scanner tech, gave away her ship’s location. She pushed back a shiver, trying to ignore the looming thought of just how it would feel when Pegasus was gone. When she was truly trapped on Dannith. Alone. Part of her mind drifted back to Megara, to Tyler’s clear desire to convince her not to go. She wished she was back there, or wherever else he was…but she knew she had to do what she’d come to do. Without a way to face Colossus, being with Tyler would only ensure that she saw him die. And she couldn’t bear that, especially if she hadn’t done all she could to save him.
Yantis looked around, as much a nervous reaction, Andi guessed, as a deliberate effort to check the room. “Colossus…” He whispered the word, repeating his early gesture and looking around again almost immediately.
“Yes, Colossus. What do you know?” She waited a few seconds, but Yantis remained silent. “It’s worth another hundred thousand if you do know something. But don’t even think about bullshitting me.” Her last words dripped with pure malice.
“You have to understand, Andi…what I’ve got is spotty, things people overheard, a few comm intercepts my people managed to pick up.”
“Yeah, yeah…I get it. Can we stick to the details and forget the lawyer talk?”
“Well, first, it’s something they’ve been working on for a long time, an artifact from imperial times. I don’t know when they found the old imperial hull, but I heard twenty years as the time they’ve been working on it.”
Andi’s face hardened. That wasn’t exactly the tactical secret to facing the thing. “I could have guessed that myself. Seriously, if that’s all you’ve got, I’m wasting my time.” Though she realized that was valuable information, to a point. She’d only suspected Colossus was partially imperial in origins. With Yantis’s references, she bumped that up to a solid ‘likely.’
“There’s something else, not about the ship itself, but…” Yantis hesitated for a few seconds. “There’s some kind of dissension, disagreement. Among their high command.” Another pause. “I’ve got a few contacts among those drafted to work for the occupying forces. Hegemony security is pretty tight, but when someone works there all day, well, you know. They hear things.”
“Hear what?” Andi was getting impatient again.
“I don’t know much about Colossus or its capabilities, but I do know there is disagreement among the Hegemony leadership over deploying it here, on the Rim.”
“Disagreement? Why would there be disagreement?”
“I don’t know. You said you wanted intelligence, Andi, information about the enemy. That’s what I promised you. Figuring out what it means is your problem.” There was almost a touch of empathy in the hardened gangster’s tone. She didn’t imagine he particularly cared about her, or any of the millions of warriors fighting and dying, but she’d have made a pretty large bet Yantis would be far from heartbroken to be rid of the Hegemony, and back to the lackluster and inefficient enforcement efforts of the Port Royal City authorities.
She considered what he had told her. The thought that the Hegemony’s commitment to the war had been less than total was a sobering one in light of the vast fleets and millions of Kriegeri soldiers they had deployed. Did they push us to the edge of ruin with one hand tied behind their backs?
And if they held back, why? Is it possible they have some other enemy out there? The whole thing seemed inconceivable to her, but then she imagined what she’d have thought if someone had described the Hegemony to her eight years earlier.
We thought we were alone, the only survivors. Are there more? Something out there that can challenge the Hegemony?
“Alright, Yantis…you bring me the backup for this, and I mean something that proves all of it to me without my having to take your questionable word for it, and the cash is yours.” She looked around the room. She didn’t like dealing with someone like Yantis alone, without backup. There was too much chance the gangster would try to pull something. If he didn’t think he had what she wanted, it was a dead level certainty he’d try to grab the coins from her anyway.
“Tomorrow. Here. Same time. Bring it all with you, and come alone.” She glanced back toward the door, in the direction of Yantis’s thug. “You do know what alone means, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Alright. Tomorrow, alone. And you make sure you’ve got the coins.”
Now Andi returned the nod. “I’ll have it. I’ll have it all.” It was her turn to lie. She’d bring it, but she intended to stash it somewhere close by. She believed what she’d just heard, but she didn’t trust Yantis. She didn’t trust him at all. And she wasn’t going to walk into that meeting carrying a sack of kilocredit coins.
The whole thing was dangerous, nerve-wracking. But such wary and tense alliances sometimes made for the most productive partnerships, especially when they didn’t have to last too long.
She knew he’d be angry when she walked in without the coins, that he’d accuse her of a double-cross. There was a chance that things would go bad, that blood would be drawn. And if it came to that, she would be alone and unarmed. Against however many of Yantis’s crew the gangster worked into his massaged interpretation of ‘alone.’
It was a chance she’d have to take…and whatever happened, she doubted they would try to kill her, at least not until they had the money.
That was a fair bet, she figured. Which was good, since the stakes were her life…and maybe Tyler’s too, and the freedom of everyone else on the Rim.
Chapter Twenty-One
CFS Dauntless
150,000,000 Kilometers from Planet Danovar
Santara System
Year 321 AC
Tyler Barron sat stone still, watching the battle unfold before his eyes. He was a warrior by nature, practically born into the navy, and he was the veteran of dozens of vicious battles. But as he watched Stockton’s wings torn apart, the pride of the Rim navies blasted to atoms, it took everything he had to maintain the unyielding strength his people needed to see. He had to be a rock, cold, invincible, unbreakable. But inside, he was something very close to broken.
He’d been worried about Andi already, almost distraught over the danger he knew she was almost certainly in. He imagined her captured, tortured, killed. It had tormented him, at least until the impending destruction of the fleet, and with it everything else he cared about, pulled his thoughts away. He’d stopped checking the bomber losses when they’d reached three thousand, but he knew they’d gone up since then.
Three thousand…three thousand bombers, three thousand pilots, almost half of what we launched…
It all seemed unreal. Barron had fought his battles, and he’d been raised in the lore of those his grandfather had endured. But the scale of the killing in the past few years had gone beyond anything he’d ever imagined. He remembered when a dozen fighters lost had been a hard blow. Now, he was ignoring hundreds at a time, almost as though anything below a thousand was unworthy of note.
The cruisers and escorts were a bright spot. They had ravaged the enemy’s small ships, taken advantage of the heavier ordnance they still possessed, and the Hegemony did not. Hundreds of enemy escorts had been blown away, but some of them had gotten through to savage Stockton’s shattered and fleeing formations. Hundreds more bombers vanished as they were struck by the deadly fire, and the Hegemony ships maintained their attacks, even as the Rim cruisers and frigates closed behind them and renewed their own assault.
Every fiber in his body had screamed at him to order the battle line forward. But he’d held firm. He knew that was just what the enemy wanted. For Colossus to destroy the Rim’s battleships. Barron had no idea how he was going to face the monstrous enemy dreadnought, how he was going to avoid the total defeat and surrender that seemed so utterly inevitable. But losing his battleships would have turned desperation to utter hopelessness.
He’d given orders for the heavy ships to remain in the system long enough to recover whatever remnants of the strike force managed to return. Then he would issue the retreat order. The capital ships were close to the transit point. They would escape, he would make sure of that, even if it required the unfathomably painful need to leave behind some of the bombers that had escaped destruction.
The cruisers and frigates, the battered escorts and their exhausted crews, were on their own. They would have to escape the best they could. Some would make it, he knew, and others would not. It was a poor reward for the heroism they had shown, but Barron didn’t have the luxury to think about fairness or honor. The very survival of the Rim was his task now.
“Status on the incoming squadrons?” Barron had a basic idea, but he was fairly certain Atara Travis had calculated it down to the tenth decimal.
“We should begin landing ops in fifteen minutes, Admiral. All incoming bombers retaining full thrust potential should be aboard in forty minutes, assuming no foulups on the flight decks.” She paused for a few seconds. “All ships with thruster damage, or those low on fuel will…”
“They’ll die, Captain,” Barron said grimly, too exhausted to keep up pretenses. “We have no time to spare. The squadrons have forty-five minutes to get into the bays. Then the battle line will transit, and anyone not in the bays will be...” Barron let his voice trail off, but it took nothing from his meaning. He hated himself for effectively pronouncing a death sentence on what could be hundreds of the surviving pilots, but he couldn’t risk the heavy ships of the line. They were irreplaceable, requiring years to construct. He’d find more fighters, more pilots, even more escorts…somewhere, somehow. But if he lost the battleships, it was over.
“Understood, Admiral.” Atara didn’t argue, and her tone made it clear she agreed with him completely. It was just as evident she hated herself as much as he did himself.
Barron almost ordered the comm officer to get Stockton on his line. But the wings were still too far for any reasonable conversation. Besides, Stockton knew what to do, and he understood as well as any officer living, what the battleships would do. Had to do. He would get his people back, as many as he could, as quickly as possible.
