“We were on track for a zero fatal accident fiscal year,” Rickard continued quietly. “On the scale we operate, that is something to be
damned
proud of. And then these idiots killed two hundred and fifty-six of my people.”
“There was an investigation. Their conclusion was that our neighbors, an Ardennes native corporation, had failed to comply with basic safety standards for the processes they were following.”
He held up a hand before Alaura or Damien could speak, taking a moment to breathe deeply.
“We were
then
informed by Ardennes’ court system that the corporation in question had been granted an exemption from the legal safety code to ‘encourage their investment’. Therefore, under Ardennes law, they were
not
legally liable for death benefits to their
own
people’s families, let alone
my
people.”
“We will be paying for the benefits ourselves, obviously,” he concluded. “But I have already told my Board that we will
not
be rebuilding on Ardennes.”
“They gave an exemption to the
safety codes
?” Damien asked incredulously.
“When we move into a system, we ask for a lot of exemptions and special cases,” Rickard admitted. “Usually, it’s to try to make sure our operations only have to meet Protectorate-wide standards instead of more stringent local ones, and we rarely get many of them. In this case, my understanding is that several of the major shareholders are friends of the Governor.”
“I see,” Alaura said slowly. “You can prove this?”
“The details of the court files my local president was provided weren’t supposed to leave the Ardennes system,” Rickard told them. “They’ve been forwarded to your ship, along with all of our local research and information.”
“That… could be immensely valuable,” Alaura replied. “Thank you.”
“It’s worse than you think, my Lady Hand,” Rickard warned her. “However bad you think it is, its worse.
“Vaughn has been determined to drive a major industrial revolution on Ardennes, at any cost. A lot of the money from that has poured into the hands of his friends and allies - and more has gone into funding the security service to keep a lid on protest.”
“If it was really that bad, he’d have been voted out,” Damien pointed out. “Everything I see shows his party continuing to dominate the planetary legislature.”
Rickard sighed, looking embarrassed for the first time since they’d arrived.
“I
know
, for a fact, that Vaughn has fixed at least the last two Governor elections, and has been heavily restricting who can run for the Legislature,” he admitted. “I know we have an obligation to report that,” he continued, “but I only had two facilities of the size of the one on Ardennes. I couldn’t risk him shutting us down.”
“Now,” he shrugged. “I’ve paid for every surviving one of my people, and their families and the families of the dead, to be relocated to Sherwood. I’d rather start again from bare rock than touch Ardennes again.”
#
Damien and Alaura were barely out of the shuttle when Mage-Commander Harmon intercepted them.
“You need to come with me,” the
Tides of Justice
‘s commanding officer told them. “I’ve ordered the ship prepared to travel ASAP, but the decision is yours and you need to be fully informed.”
Alaura wordlessly gestured for the Commander to lead the way, and Damien followed the pair deeper into the ship.
Harmon didn’t say anything further as he led them to a chamber in the ship that the Envoy hadn’t seen on either of two his times aboard.
“Where is this?” he asked aloud.
“Communications Central,” Harmon replied. “We get a lot of transmissions directed at us on a day-to-day basis and, well,” he shrugged, “we also eavesdrop on everything going on around us. It’s the job of the folks down here to sort it all and let myself and you two know what’s important.”
The Mage officer led his way into the room. Despite the impression Damien had got from Harmon’s description, the room was empty. Viewscreens covered the walls, surrounding the half-dozen empty consoles to provide an ability to view dozens of streams simultaneously.
“It’s also, for a variety of reasons, one of the most secure rooms on the ship,” Harmon continued. “Take a seat, both of you.”
Without waiting to see if the Hand or the Envoy obeyed, he fiddled with the controls and brought up a recording.
“This was forwarded us to by the Tau Ceti Runic Transceiver Array while you were meeting Rickard,” he said quietly. “The recording is audio only, obviously.”
The Runic Transceiver Arrays were massive constructs, networks of runes that filled
large
domes with a complexity that rivaled the core sections of a jump or amplifier matrix. All of that focus and energy, however, was targeted on a single room slightly less than three meters square.
From that room, a Mage could throw his voice to a single, specific, other RTA anywhere in the galaxy. He had to know where the other RTA was to within a few planetary diameters, so an RTA station also included a giant array of computers, and the message was audio only, so everything in that room was recorded.
The recording started playing.
“Tau Ceti RTA, this message is for Hand Alaura Stealey, Priority One.”
The audio was distorted, static and other noises running under it. The inability to provide a clear audio signal prevented the RTAs being used for any kind of data transmission - only voice was useful, which also prevented any security except locking down the RTA itself. Despite the distortion, Damien recognized the voice instantly: it was Desmond Alexander himself.
“We have received further updates from Mage-Governor Vaughn on Ardennes,” the recording continued. “He has requested that we accelerate your arrival, as the situation has drastically escalated.
“Twelve hours prior to the transmission of this message, unknown terrorists managed to drop a crude kinetic weapon on the town of Karlsberg. Shortly thereafter, a military relief column intended to deliver medical supplies and desperately needed heavy machinery was destroyed in an ambush using heavy anti-tank weapons.”
“You are directed to proceed as soon as reasonably possible to the Ardennes system,” Alexander continued. “Beyond that, I leave to your discretion - but the son of a bitch who just blew away fifty thousand people
must
be brought to justice.
“Olympus Mons, ending transmission.”
The room was silent for a long moment.
“The
Tides of Justice
is prepared to move on your order, Lady Hand,” Harmon said quietly.
“Make it so, Mage-Commander,” Alaura replied flatly. “You can let your communication team have their center back, too.”
Damien glanced over at her. A few things in what he was hearing didn’t add up, and from Alaura’s sour expression, she was thinking much the same.
“Your office?” he queried aloud.
#
Alaura threw herself into the chair in her office, turning back to face Damien with a determined expression on her face. A gesture snapped up a holographic screen from the personal computer wrapped around her arm, and she studied for a long moment before sighing.
“We have the data from Rickard,” she told him. “I’m less convinced of its value now, though.”
Damien leaned back against the wall next to the door, considering the situation.
“We still need to deal with the Governor if he’s fixing elections,” he pointed out. “We can’t let that stand.”
Alaura made a throw away gesture, shutting down her PC screen.
“Yes, but that just dropped off the priority list,” she admitted. “From my own research and Rickard’s information, I’m reasonably sure Vaughn is a good chunk of the
problem
on Ardennes. If things had stayed at the urban guerilla level, we had options.
“But,” she said grimly, “someone just blew up a town.
Fifty thousand people
, Damien.”
He’d been trying not to think about it.
“What use is His Protectorate if we do not protect people?” he whispered, and she nodded.
“Regardless of what Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn may or may not have done to provoke it, we cannot - we
will not
- permit that to stand unchallenged and unavenged.”
A shiver ran through the ship as the engines engaged. The runes on the floor flared slightly to Damien’s eyes, their magic counter-acting the acceleration to provide a consistent gravity.
Silently, he opened his own PC and pulled up the data on Karlsberg. A mining town with a population of fifty thousand, one hundred and sixty-two as per the last census. What little information he had hardly suggested a stronghold of the planetary government or a strategic target.
“I don’t trust Vaughn,” he said quietly, looking at an image of a rundown town with some kind of military barracks on the outskirts.
“You shouldn’t,” the Hand replied. “Everything I’ve seen suggests he’s slime, the worst kind of Governor we have. If it wasn’t for the Karlsberg attack, I’d happily roll in and remove him. That has to wait, now, until we deal with whatever bastard killed a town.”
“Fifteen destroyers,” Damien murmured, reviewing the stats on the Ardennes’ Self Defense Force. “Looks like they’re mostly in orbit.”
Alaura stopped glaring at her desk and looked at him. “What are you getting at, Damien?”
“The ASDF should have spotted anyone getting into position to drop an improvised kinetic,” he said quietly. “And if I was going to risk that, I’d have gone for a more important target than a back-country mining town.
“If I shouldn’t trust Vaughn on anything else, why are we trusting him when he says his enemies blew up a town?”
#
Julia Amiri studied the device sitting on her tiny writing desk with a sigh. Technically, there was nothing illegal about a civilian on Ardennes owning even the frequency hopping high-powered communicator, though the military-grade encryption programming was certainly questionable.
In practice, if the Ardennes Special Security Service learned that one of the many immigrants sharing apartments in Nouveau Versailles south-eastern quarter possessed the communicator, she’d be lucky if she lived long enough to be disappeared. They would assume, correctly, that the ex-bounty hunter was an offworld spy.
So the real question was whether carrying the device was more likely to get her in trouble than leaving it in her room.
The room in question was tiny, less than eight feet on a side and one of five single bedrooms around a central kitchen. The entire building was like that - shared tiny spaces for people living on the pittance that the Ardennes government required people to work for instead of receiving welfare.
The tall, black-haired woman smiled grimly. There was no official reward for turning in offworld spies - after all, Ardennes’ government would insist they had nothing to hide from the Protectorate! - but that didn’t mean her roommates wouldn’t figure they would be paid for turning her in.
They would be right, after all. She couldn’t risk it. She scooped the communicator into her purse with the small high velocity pistol. Unlike the communicator, the pistol
was
illegal, but would get her in much less trouble if found.
Leaving the tiny room, Amiri quickly descended the fourteen flights of stairs to the ground - she wasn’t sure if the elevator had
ever
worked in this building. Certainly no-one was fixing it, and the stairs were hardly a burden for her.
Trying not to openly show her disgust for the situation around her, Amiri joined the crowd outside. There were no vehicles on the streets here - the immigrants and other poor bastards swept up in the euphemistically named ‘Work Placement Program’ barely earned enough at their government set wage to pay their government set rent.
The only people who benefited from Ardennes’ ‘social safety net’ were the corporations who played nicely with the government.
With so many people moving on foot, even a tall woman with dark hair and spacer-pale skin didn’t attract much notice. Amiri reached her destination without interruption and silently slipped through the side door of the rundown bar.
She trusted the kitchen in the bar to be cleaner than the one she shared. The beer, on the other hand, would have been happier poured back into the horse.
Amiri ordered it anyway as she took a seat at a side table, her eye on the dais used for various performances - sometimes comedians, sometimes strippers. Tonight, the dais held a simple podium and microphone. No fancy banners, no dancing pole, just a completely anonymous speaker.
The room was rapidly filling. The grapevine had carried the buzz about tonight’s speaker to a lot of ears. No details of
who
he was - but the rumor was that he had news about the Karslberg Massacre.
She was halfway through the sandwich of tofu pretending to be steak when the growing noise level of the bar suddenly cut off. A man had emerged from the shadows to stand in front of the microphone. He was a blandly dressed, mousy man with faded brown hair and eyes.
“I ain’t giving a name,” he said bluntly into the microphone, his amplified voice reaching across the room. “I ain’t asking for ‘em, either. I’m from the Freedom Wing, and I’m here to bring you The Truth!”
Amiri could
hear
the capitals and classified the speaker as a shill. He was an ancillary member of the Wing - the main rebel group, so far as she had learned in six months - and hugely enthused with the risk and drama of his position.
“The news tells you
we
blew up Karslberg,” the speaker said bluntly. “That, somehow, we dropped a rock from a sky the government owns to kill a town full of our friends and allies.”
From the muttering around the room, Amiri hadn’t been the only one to disbelieve that. She’d once been a bounty hunter and seen some of the worst humanity had to offer - but people stupid enough to try stunts like that tended not to succeed at them.
“My brothers, my sisters,” he gestured around the room. “Karlsberg
revolted
. The miners, driven by one demand too many, rose up in righteous fury and drove out the Scorpions! Standing shoulder to shoulder, they showed that we will
not
be slaves!”
The muttering was a rumble now - an angry rumble, but one in support of the speaker.
“Freedom Wing Alpha was heading there to raise the banner of planetwide rebellion when Vaughn struck.” The speaker’s voice was soft now, and Amiri strained with the rest of the room to hear. “Never forget, my brothers - Vaughn and his cronies own our skies.
“His minions cast down fire from on high, and Karlsberg burned. Alpha was saved only because they were delayed by Vaughn’s attempt to use the Army to suppress the rebellion.
“Mage-Governor Vaughn destroyed Karlsberg,” the Freedom Wing member suddenly bellowed, his words echoing around the bar as its occupants quailed. To outright accuse the governor of mass murder was a line even this friendly crowd were uncomfortable with.
“He
murdered
fifty thousand of our brothers and sisters - and the Martian ships stood by and did
nothing
!”
Now the crowd was turning ugly, and it
wasn’t
directed at the speaker. It was directed at the government. If they weren’t careful, there was going to be a riot here - and Amiri doubted that was what the Freedom Wing wanted. Seizing a small mining town with a surprise revolt was one thing - Nouveau Versailles wouldn’t fall to anything impromptu.
“Alpha has a plan,” the speaker told them. “We
will
bring Vaughn down - in the time of our choosing. We know, now, that we can’t expect
Mars
to save us - we must save
ourselves
!”
That, of course, was when the Scorpions kicked the door down.
#
The bouncer at the door reeled back - first from the shock of the door bursting open, and then from the stun batons the first red and black uniformed thugs employed gleefully. Amiri slid her chair away from the table, right up against the wall to both keep her out of view and clear her to move.
Six Scorpions with stun batons cleared a space around the door, followed by six more carrying the familiar shape of modern stunguns. Equipped with advanced SmartDarts, the stunguns were
much
less likely to do permanent injury than the batons.
Which, of course, said everything one needed to know about the Ardennes Special Security Service.
The crowd was still angry, and Amiri doubted she was the only one in the bar with a weapon. Unlike most people, however, she was still paying just as much attention to the speaker from the Freedom Wing.
He
was trying to slip off the stage towards the back door - but didn’t make it before the last Scorpion entered.
The officer was a blonde woman who approached Amiri’s own intimidating height, and she surveyed the room with eagle eyes. The Scorpion knew
exactly
who she was looking for, and her gaze settled on the Freedom speaker.
“Mikael Riordan, you are under arrest for treason,” she snapped. “The rest of you will disperse.”
As the crowd grumbled and started to shuffle, Amiri cursed silently. Apparently the speaker
hadn’t
just been a shill - Riordan was on the list of potential contacts she’d scraped from Ardennes’ planetary databases when she’d arrived. Her research suggested he reported directly to Alpha - the mysterious leader of the Wing - himself.
The crowd clearly didn’t move fast enough for the Scorpions, who started pushing their way forward. Amiri watched in fascination as the workers responded by being less and less willing to move, the very effort by the Scorpions to force their way through making their progress harder.
Riordan took advantage of the confusion to dash for the back door - but the Scorpion officer had been expecting something. The rebel made it four steps before the
crack
of a stungun echoed across the bar, and the Freedom Wing speaker collapsed to the ground twitching.
“Clear the room!” the officer snapped to her men. “Use whatever force is necessary!”
The men with the stun batons grinned evilly and stepped forward, the ‘less-than-lethal’ weapons swinging freely.
Amiri didn’t see who threw the first beer bottle. She did, from her hiding spot on the edge of the room, get a very clear view of one of the Scorpions being disarmed by a five-foot-nothing redheaded girl who proceeded to feed the thug his own weapon - on full power.
It went downhill from there.
The bounty hunter had no illusions how the brawl was going to end. The dozen Scorpions were outnumbered four to one, but had support outside and firearms. It would rapidly degrade to bullets, but many of the workers were armed and it wouldn’t be a clean win for the Scorpions.
Riordan, on the other hand, was already down, disabled by the automatically tailored electronic charge of the smartdart.
The situation was a nightmare - and her best chance to make contact with the resistance.
A second wave of troopers - this bunch with more stunguns - charged through the door, and Amiri made up her mind. Hiding behind the chaos, she slipped along the wall to the door Riordan had
almost
reached.
The rebel was heavier than he looked, but still light enough for the tall and muscular woman to easily drag him out the unlocked door into the alley. Practice in bringing in bounties unobtrusively helped her do so without attracting notice from anyone who’d care.
“Stop right there!”
Of course, there were Scorpions in the alley.
She let Riordan fall to the dirty floor as she faced the pair of red and black uniformed men. They held stunguns and had uneasy looks in their eyes - probably the ones in the platoon the officer didn’t trust to really get it ‘stuck in.’
“Please, sirs,” she simpered. “I’m just trying to get my husband home - we weren’t involved in any of this, we were just out for dinner!”
The two ‘cops’ approached, eyeing her carefully. She was taller than either of them, though her current pose was ‘non-threatening and terrified.’
“Sorry, miss,” one of them said gently. “New orders, no-one is allowed to leave the area until they’ve been questioned. If all’s as you say, you’ll be fine.”
“Wait,” the other interrupted as he saw Riordan, “that’s…”
Amiri moved. The Scorpion who’d recognized the rebel didn’t finish his sentence, a perfectly delivered jab to the throat half-crushing his larynx. He collapsed backwards in a struggle for breath that would kill him without medical aid.
The other Scorpion had barely begun to react when she turned to him. She smashed her hand into the side of his head, throwing him off balance and hopefully breaking the sensitive electronics of his helmet. As he recoiled back, she hooked an ankle behind him and sent him crashing to the floor.
She was on the ground next to him before he could rise, pinning him to the ground with a hand in the hollow of his throat while her other hand plunged home a tiny needle ejected from the bracelet she was wearing.
For a moment, Amiri didn’t think the drug was going to work, then the man relaxed into unconsciousness. The other man was unconscious, the damage to his larynx likely to kill him in minutes.
Sighing, Amiri knelt by his side. She’d hit him harder than she’d meant to. Twenty seconds of quick and dirty first aid rectified the worst of it, enough that he’d live long enough for his team to find him.
Twenty seconds it looked like she’d had to spare. She hoisted the still unconscious Riordan into a fireman’s carry and took off down the alley at a fast lope.
He’d
better
be useful. Unconscious or not, at least one of the Scorpions’ helmets would have uploaded video of her to its backup.
#
It took Riordan an unusually long time to sleep off the effects of the stun-darts. The smart weapons delivered an electric shock designed to disable; they weren’t generally very effective at knocking someone unconscious. Extended periods of unconsciousness usually meant the darts had missed a pre-existing condition.
By the time the rebel awoke, Amiri had booked them into a small and dirty room in a rundown motel and stretched him out on the bed. She was about to boot up the medical routines on her personal computer - far too expensive a program for a ‘poor immigrant’ to own - when Riordan finally woke up.
He jerked upright, cursing and looking around wildly.
“Where am I?” he demanded.
“Motel, about twenty blocks from where you were speaking,” Amiri replied. “You were out for a long time after they stunned you!”
The Freedom Wing speaker looked at her in confusion.