At the bottom of the stairs, they passed through a security arch guarded by two local police officers. Tremon offered a smile and a nod to each of the guards as he and Yakob passed by.
“You’re so damn polite,” Yakob grunted.
“Habit,” Tremon replied with a shrug.
“You know they’re not your friends,” Yakob pressed.
A groan slipped past Tremon’s lips. “Yeah, I’m all too aware of that. But a kindness may buy us consideration later.”
Yakob didn’t answer as they stood on the underground platform, waiting for the train destined for the Rileside District.
The board indicated that the next Rileside train was five minutes out, and Tremon gave Yakob a look that said ‘see, plenty of time’, which the other man ignored.
Their destination was across the river, in the commercial district near the spaceport. That was where Gloria lived always keeping her ear to the ground, talking with crews and learning about what was going on outside the Iberia System.
Gloria was a partial mech, one of the early prototypes who only had one arm removed. He’d never seen her ‘gun arm’, but he imagined she still had it, even after all these years.
He supposed a normal-ish arm was better for all the skulking she did. A meter-long barrel on the end of one’s arm probably drew more attention than a person wanted.
Gloria already does enough of that on her own.
When the train arrived, they stepped onto the car and found seats close to the door—which was simple enough, given that there were only five other passengers. Three appeared as one would expect of Chusa’s denizens, which is to say, rough. The other pair, a man and a woman sitting at the back of the car, were dressed too nicely, and probably lived in Cartegena, or outside the city altogether.
“Gloria’s scouting the location,” Yakob said as the car began to move, picking up speed as it raced down the maglev track.
“Good,” Tremon replied, wishing that all of this wasn’t still necessary.
He was nobody, none of this mattered. He shouldn’t have any of Yakob’s or Gloria’s loyalty, let alone their continued efforts on his behalf.
When the train finally reached their stop, ten minutes had passed, and the others from Chusa had long since departed, replaced by other passengers who lived in Rileside.
Yakob was first off the train, and Tremon followed close behind into the much cleaner station.
Here, even more police patrolled the platform, keeping an eye on everything and paying extra attention to the train that had come from Chusa district.
Yakob and Tremon were dressed casually in the loose slacks and long tunics that were the style on Malta. Neither carried any weapons, and so the police didn’t have cause to give them more than a cursory look as they passed under the scanners.
The pair or men were the very definition of nondescript.
Having avoided any entanglements, they rode the—pleasantly functional—moving steps up to street level and out into the bright sunshine that reached down to them, filtered through the hundreds of aircars that flitted overhead.
All around stood low buildings, the tallest no more than ten stories. Their windows showed wares of every type imaginable, though most catered to clothing.
He felt a momentary pang of guilt that most people in Chusa district could only dream of shopping in any of these stores. Granted, he was in the same situation at present. It wasn’t as though he was drawing a salary anymore. Yakob’s connections were the source of most of their money.
“She’s in a café in that building,” Yakob said, gesturing to a bright red structure that housed several restaurants, as well as a store that sold a variety of home goods, including basic servitors—though Tremon suspected that they were all refurbished.
Tremon nodded and followed his protector across the plaza, deftly avoiding the hawkers and police until they came to the red building and walked through its main entrance.
Inside, the structure featured ruddy basalt walls, each block carved with intricate patterns. He gave them an appreciative look as Yakob took the first right and entered the café.
Gloria was easy to pick out, her towering height putting her half a head above any other patron. She didn’t wave, but her steely grey eyes fixed on the two men and followed them as they walked to the counter. Tremon ordered a coffee and an ‘everything’ bagel, while Yakob opted for a cup of tea.
“Don’t think you can have some of this,” Tremon said to Yakob as he picked up his bagel.
“Wouldn’t dream of it. You took so long to get ready today that I had a full lunch back at the apartment.
“Har har.”
Coffee and food in hand, they made their way to Gloria’s table and sat down across from her.
“You look good, Gloria,” Tremon said, while Yakob gave the woman a curt nod before he returned to his natural state: watching everything all at once.
“As do you, Tremon. I’m glad that Malta’s climate agrees with you.”
Tremon snorted. “The climate does, though I don’t get much firsthand exposure to it over over in Chusa.”
Gloria shook her head, and her lips twitched in annoyance, but she didn’t strike up their age-old argument over location—or the fact that he was hiding on Malta to begin with.
The woman across from him may have looked like a steely-eyed menace, but he’d faced worse in his day and never backed down.
A connection request for a private network came to him with Gloria’s tokens. He validated them, and then accepted the request.
While doing that, he’d maintained light banter with her between sips of his coffee, growing more and more curious about what the woman could have to say.
She didn’t look quite as dour as usual, so either it was good news, or she was drunk—though he’d only seen her drunk once—but good news was about as rare.
<OK, Gloria, what brings us here to Rileside?>
<I’m not reason enough?> she asked with a small smile.
Tremon and Yakob exchanged surprised looks; in addition to never drinking, the woman almost never joked. In fact, Tremon could barely recall her smiling.
<Under better circumstances, you certainly would be,> he said, gently encouraging her to share whatever was so interesting.
<OK, I’ll not keep you balanced on a laser’s beam any longer.>
<I think the saying is just ‘balanced on a beam’,> Yakob corrected. <As in up in the air, on a metal beam or something.>
Gloria cast Yakob a look that said he’d just uttered the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. <Uh…no, it’s laserbeam. I’m not going to argue the obvious with you.>
Yakob only shrugged and lapsed back into silence.
<Anyway, before I was interrupted,> she paused to give Yakob one final dark look. <I’ve picked up some chatter from some traders up on the Falcon. They came straight from Dityha on a freight run. Made good speed, too, did it in only fifty days. Which is why they’re some of the first to come this far in with the news—news that the Niets want kept hush-hush.>
<Spit it out already,> Yakob growled.
<The Nietzscheans attacked Thebes again. They tried to hit two systems at once, both Hercules and Albany. They lost in both systems.>
Tremon’s eyes widened as he sat back in his seat. <Twice?! They were defeated twice in Thebes? Those people have, what…five, maybe six well-settled systems?>
<Give or take a bit, depending on your definition of ‘well-settled’,> Gloria nodded as she paused to speak aloud about the weather, and how dry the summer would be.
<Niets don’t like to lose. After failing to take Thebes a year ago, they must have gone in full-force,> Yakob said, and Tremon nodded in agreement.
<I think that’s why they pulled all but a token force out of Iberia—to hit Thebes with everything they had. But remember that I’m hearing all this third or fourth hand at this point, though there’s vid and scan data to support it—>
<That can all be faked,> Tremon said.
<Would you two stop interrupting me?> Gloria placed her hands on the table. <At some point, I’d like to get this out so I can go refill my java-berry-juice.>
<OK, OK,> Tremon gave her a disarming smile. <Sorry. Carry on.>
Gloria gave him a measuring look, and then directed it at Yakob as well. <Right. So the fleet they sent into the Albany System was somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy thousand ships; pretty much their entire coreward border fleet, from the sounds of it. They swept in and took the Albany System, as you’d expect with a force that size. Rumor has it that they were trying to capture someone, a leader from a group that goes by ‘The Scipio Alliance’.>
<Scipio?> Tremon blurted out. <Allying with someone? That seems unlikely.>
Gloria didn’t reply, only gave him a level stare for a minute before continuing.
<The rumors are all over the map. Some people say Scipio is making a play for the whole Sol region, some say they’ve found new allies from further coreward. The scan data I have seems to support the latter, as only a fraction of the ships that showed up were Scipian.>
She paused and looked at her empty cup. “Yakob, would you be a dear and get me a refill on my java-berry-juice? I’m mighty parched.”
Yakob lifted an eyebrow and groaned, but stood and grabbed her cup without further objection.
<OK, so a week goes by, and then this weird thing happens. This big ship—and I mean big, like nearly forty kilometers long—comes in from the edge of the system with a small escort fleet. It proceeds to swat any of the Nietzschean pickets that try to take a shot at it, and then comes right up against the Niets’ main battle group. Now, at this point, the Niets have formed up into a sort of hollow half-sphere, and open fire with everything they have on this ship.>
<What a way to go out in a blaze of glory,> Yakob muttered from the counter.
<That’s just the thing. The ship survived. The fuckin’ Niets pissed at it for all they were worth, and that big ol’ thing just sat there and took it.>
<Are you kidding me?> Tremon breathed.
<And that’s not the best part. All of a sudden, this fleet appears. It’s smaller than the Niets’, but it catches them totally off guard because the ships just appeared out of nowhere all around the Nietzschean fleet—and this is deep in the inner system.>
Gloria had become a touch too animated for someone discussing the summer’s crop yields, and took a deep breath while Tremon fought the urge to lean over and shake every detail out of her.
<OK, easy now, Gloria,> she gave a small smile again. <So that new fleet shows up, and just obliterates the Nietzscheans. Badly enough that nearly half the enemy surrendered. A few got away, but we’re only talking hundreds. So far as I can tell, the Nietzscheans suffered an unprecedented loss.>
Tremon felt lightheaded as he absorbed the news, like he’d just been through a centrifugal sync process on a rotating station. If he didn’t trust Gloria implicitly, he would have dismissed the news out of hand, but she wasn’t prone to spreading baseless rumor—typically quite the opposite.
<And Hercules?> Yakob asked as he sat back down and set Gloria’s drink in front of her.
<Right,> Gloria nodded as she took a sip and proclaimed it to be the best cup of java-berry-juice she’d ever had. <The Niets had sent a much smaller force there. I get the impression that it was an unconnected op—I can’t see why you’d send a dozen ships into a system five light years from where you send seventy thousand. Maybe one of the operations went down before it was originally planned. Anyway, a group of mechs from a mercenary company stopped that attack. Rumors out of that system say they took the enemy ships while they were hiding in a gas giant’s clouds.>
<Ballsy,> Yakob commented. <Anyone we know?>
<The Marauders, under General Mill,> Gloria supplied. <Though I didn’t know he had mechs—at least not that many. There are some rumors that when Mill’s Marauders took the Politica a few months back, they found a bunch of mechs there. Maybe they signed on or something.>
Tremon felt a pang of guilt stab through him at the mention of mechs. He wished he could have done something to stem the program once he’d realized that most of the ‘conscripts’ were less criminals, and more victims of both poor circumstances and a bankrupt justice system.
What’s done is done, Tremon, he said to himself, the words a mantra he found himself repeating far too often.
<This is…this is something else,> he finally said as he absorbed what the news meant and began thinking of the implications.
<Something else is exactly right.> Yakob’s expression was grim. <If Scipio is advancing toward Nietzschea….>
<If Scipio had crossed the Fringe and moved into ASN Coalition territory, we would have heard about that long ago,> Gloria said with a shake of her head. <Plus, like I said, there were comparatively few Scipian ships in the fleet.>
<So have you heard who the new players are?> Tremon asked. <If that freighter has scan data, there must have been idents.>
<There are. The two main components were ships with ISS and TSS tags. They had some other information that led me to believe that the ‘I’ stands for Intrepid, and the ‘T’ for Transcend. No idea who those people are, though…but if they can send a fleet all the way to Thebes….>
Gloria let the words hang, and the three fell silent for a moment.
“Wait a second,” Tremon whispered aloud. <Do you have an image of that first ship that flew insystem? The huge one?>
<Yeah, I do—two more of them appeared later, by the way.>
<Two more?> Tremon mused as Gloria sent the group an image of the ship.
He turned it around in his mind, wondering if it was possible. The ship looked different, but the main structure was the same…the pair of habitation cylinders made it hard to mistake for many other vessels.
<That’s an ancient colony ship,> he said at last. <The GSS Intrepid. It left Sol sometime back in the forty-second century.>
<There’s only one real question,> Tremon said, looking first at Gloria and then Yakob. <Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?>
TOWER ASSAULT
STELLAR DATE: 12.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Tarxien District, Cerulean, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
<Scarcliff!> Rika called out to N Company’s commander. <I need your people to take out those drones! We can’t get up the tower while they’re roving around up there.>
She hunkered down behind the rim-wall of the seven hundredth level of the Tarxien Tower alongside Q Company’s HQ element, feeding her drones up over the edge to survey the nighttime view of Cerulean, spread out far below. She spotted N Company’s positions in the Cerulean District to the north, hoping that M Company was faring better, hitting Sorna tower in the Naxxar District.
<Sorry, Colonel,> Lieutenant Crudge’s voice came into her mind. <CO took a railshot in the chin, tore off the bottom of his face—he’s out for the count.>
<Fuck!> Rika swore as she saw the update appear on the command net. <OK, Crudge, it’s on you, then. I need you to tag and hit those drones yesterday. They have the central shaft locked down, so we need to scale the struts on the outside.>
<Shit, really, Colonel? You gonna scamper up there like bugs?>
Rika didn’t like the idea very much either, but the seven hundredth level was a five-hundred-meter wide park that offered little in the way of cover—or access further up the fifteen-kilometer high tower. They couldn’t remain in place for long.
<Not a lot of options here, Lieutenant. They’ve got e-beams in the central shaft and aren’t afraid to use them.>
<OK, we’re setting up the SAM arrays, just give me a minute.>
Rika s
ent back an affirmation and looked over the four platoons of Q company. They were spread around the perimeter of the park level, engaging the drones coming in from the tower’s exterior—some flying and others crawling—all intent on wiping out the Marauders that were trying to take the structure.
The mechs were doing their best not to bunch up, but with most of the perimeter being little more than low railings—so as not to obstruct the view of the city—they were mostly situated around the columns that supported the rest of the tower above them.
Or, like Rika, crouched behind the few sections with higher perimeter walls, which were likely in place to manage the winds in case the light grav shielding that wrapped around the level went out.
<Huh, I think I have an idea,> Rika said to Niki. <Are you into the tower’s control systems yet?>
<Not yet. The bastard has some serious defenses set up.>
<What about this level? Can you access the perimeter grav shielding?>
Niki didn’t respond for a moment, then came back with, <Booyah, it’s part of one of the lower security maintenance systems. I’m in, what are you thinking?>
<Well, it’s a bit breezy out there. Think you can funnel winds through here to blow the bots out when they try to get in?>
<I guess that might work a bit, on the flyers, at least.>
Rika’s response was preempted by a group of crawlers that suddenly surged over the perimeter wall and landed in front of her. Q Company’s Captain Ron and Gunnery Sergeant Bookie were to her left, and both beat Rika to the punch, firing on the crawlers before she even raised her GNR.
The machines were too close for anything but her projectile rounds, and she fired a dozen shots into one of the centipede-like machines while unslinging her PR-109.
Captain Ron had his heavy repeater firing kinetic grapeshot, and the Ka-CHUG Ka-CHUG shook the ground beneath her as well as the wall at her back.
Bookie, an SMI-4 like Rika, pushed off the wall and leapt into the air, her whip-arm extending as she flew over the bots, slashing half the legs off one as she sailed overhead to land behind them—well to the right of where Captain Ron was firing—and cutting the tail end off another bot.