A Pale Dawn Read online

  “Comms from Shadowfax,” Hoot, the comms officer said. “It’s Horde Actual requesting a private line with you, ma’am.”

  “Link it to me,” Alexis said, and opened a channel on her pinplants so they could talk without being overheard.

  “Alexis, I just heard,” Sansar said.

  “Yeah, I was afraid Peepo would go that route. I just didn’t think she’d wipe out an entire colony.”

  “I’m afraid it might not be the only one,” Sansar said. “There may be more coming…”

  It was the second time in as many minutes that Alexis was brought up short. “What do you know?”

  “What do I know?” Sansar asked. “Nothing. Blue Sky Above, though, I’ve been dreaming about it. This is going to sound crazy—trust me, I know—but precognition is a gift within our family.” She sounded uncomfortable talking about it, so when she paused, Alexis gave her a moment to gather her thoughts. “The women…” Sansar continued. “The women who have been in control of the Horde…we get dreams. All the way back to the founding of the Horde, this has happened. Prophetic dreams. They’re usually cryptic, and I don’t get them often; however, every time I get one—or nearly every time, anyway—it comes true.”

  “You know,” Alexis said, “that sounds completely crazy.” She suppressed a shudder, and she hadn’t even heard what the dream was, yet. “But after what we’ve been through the last few weeks—what we’ve seen, and what’s happening—I can’t ignore it. What did you see?” She asked the question timidly, not sure she wanted to know. If it had Sansar this upset…

  “I’ve had two dreams since we arrived at Golara…” Sansar replied. Her voice trickled off to nothing, but when she continued, it was stronger. “The first dream has already come true. The death of Katash and all of the Depik.” Her voice got soft, and Alexis was sure Sansar was fighting to hold back the tears. “Only those out on contract are still alive.”

  Alexis didn’t say anything, as she was pretty sure a galaxy without assassins was a good thing. After a moment’s reflection on her experience with the Grimm, she decided she was sure of it.

  “I tell you this,” Sansar continued, “because I saw it ahead of time. Not with enough time to do anything about it, even if we could have, but to lend credibility to what I’m about to tell you.” There was a sigh that was audible, even over the pinplants. “I believe that Peepo will do this again—wipe out another planet.”

  “Just one?” Alexis asked. “Or more than one?”

  “Blue Sky! I hope it is only one; I’d rather it was none.” She paused again. “The problem is, the dream I had was a space battle—a big one.”

  “The battle where we take back Earth?”

  “No. This battle occurred in a system that had been heavily fortified. There were missile stations on asteroids near the emergence point, battle stations with heavy—really heavy—lasers. And ships? Not as many as we brought here…but a lot of them. I got the feeling it was a ‘winner take all’ kind of battle. The kind where if you aren’t victorious, you will be destroyed. Like Scipio Aemilianus at Carthage, where he sowed salt in the fields…except there are no fields…there is just…Prime Base.”

  “What?” Alexis exclaimed. When everyone turned toward her, she realized she was so startled she must have said it out loud. She forced herself to keep the conversation through her pinplants. “What do you mean? You saw the destruction of Prime Base?”

  “No…not the destruction of Prime Base, but a battle at the emergence point.”

  “So you don’t know if I win or not? It isn’t a done deal?”

  “That’s just it,” Sansar replied. “You’re not there! Neither is Jim! It’s just Nigel and me! We’re the ones in charge of holding the orbitals! We’re the ones in charge of holding Prime Base! We’re the ones fighting the desperate battle against overwhelming odds…and I don’t know why!”

  Somehow, finding out that she wasn’t part of the defense of New Warsaw was comforting to Alexis. No matter what else she knew, if there was a battle to defend New Warsaw, Alexis was going to be part of it. The dream, therefore, couldn’t be true.

  “Easy…easy…” Alexis said. “You, yourself, said that the dreams don’t always come true.”

  “But this one was so real! So vivid! Even though I am awake, I can still see it. I haven’t experienced anything like this since the Tortantula invasion of Earth.”

  “Did that turn out the way you saw it?”

  “Well…no. Some of the things were the same, but other things—defenses mostly—were put in place after I had the dreams. When it actually happened, we were able to better manage the fight.”

  “See? So knowing this—you having the dream—means that even if a battle were to happen, we can change the outcome. Maybe we can keep Peepo from ever finding out about New Warsaw’s location. Perhaps the dream was intended to warn us we needed to strengthen our security procedures even more to keep Peepo from finding us.”

  “Maybe…” Sansar said. Her voice indicated she wanted to believe Alexis…but couldn’t quite force herself to do so.

  “Are you even sure it was New Warsaw?”

  “Well, no…no, I’m not,” Sansar replied. “But it was a Human fleet waiting for the arrival of the Merc Guild in a system that was heavily defended. Where else could it have been?”

  “I don’t know,” Alexis replied, “but let’s look at the facts. First, we’re the aggressors. We’re the ones going after Peepo’s fleets in the Human colony systems. That’s a fact, so the dream—if it is at all prophetic—isn’t any time soon. Second, the defense occurs without me present. Do you think there is any way I’d miss out on the defense of New Warsaw?”

  “No…”

  “Good. See? What happened in the dream is obviously not happening soon, and it’s not about New Warsaw. Wherever and whenever you end up defending a system—and maybe it’s decades from now—you’ll know it when you get there, and you can use whatever you’ve seen to help with your defense.”

  “True,” Sansar replied. She sounded like she believed it, for the most part. “Just do me a favor?”

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t get yourself killed,” Sansar said. “As long as you’re alive, I know that the dream isn’t possible.”

  A chill went down Alexis’ spine. She’d been fine, until then.

  “I’m not planning on dying anytime soon,” Alexis replied, a touch of anger in her voice at having been made aware of her own mortality.

  “I’m sure you’re not,” Sansar said, with a new tone in her voice. “Not while you have so much to live for.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing…” Sansar was quiet for a moment. “It’s just that you and Nigel have gotten pretty close lately.”

  Fuck, Alexis thought, so much for keeping it quiet. “Maybe a little,” she replied, not wanting to discuss it with the other merc leader. For that matter, she still had problems discussing it with herself.

  “Damn it, Alexis,” Sansar said when Alexis didn’t say anything else. “Why him? Why now?”

  “Funny, I thought you were a woman, too.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Sansar said, sighing. “It’s just…it’s just really bad timing.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Alexis snapped. “I haven’t exactly let a squadron of men share my bed.” About as far from it as possible. “There was just something about him. I can’t explain it. One of my problems has always been approachability. Do you know how many employees I have? Some of my people joke they should call me Empress Cromwell, the Ice Queen.”

  “I guess your position does make dating more difficult.”

  “That’s an understatement. Most of my partners have been men who didn’t know who I was.”

  “How’d you pull that off?” Sansar asked. “You are a very beautiful and rather distinctive-looking woman.”

  “A wig and far from home.”

  “Ah,” Sansar said.

&n
bsp; “We’ve been discreet,” Alexis offered.

  “That’s good,” Sansar said. “It’s hard to say how your units would react to such an affair.”

  “My Hussars would probably hold a party,” Alexis said and chuckled, then she sobered. “The rank and file merc units might be suspicious that favoritism is a factor with target selections. We’ll continue to be discreet.” At least until we can’t, I guess.

  “I’ll call Jim Cartwright,” Sansar said, “and try to explain it to him.”

  * * *

  EMS Bucephalus, Standing off Stargate, Golara System

  Jim floated in his quarters for several minutes after his conversation with Sansar Enkh was done, just staring vacantly at the wall. Splunk was quietly working on something in her corner of the room, which was originally a storage locker, and hadn’t so much as looked up.

  First, the aliens killed all of the Humans on New Persia. The wanton slaughter made little sense if Peepo wanted to conquer humanity. You can’t conquer corpses. Just another unanswered question, he guessed. Then Sansar Enkh said she was having prophetic dreams. If he’d learned that even a year ago, he’d have thought she was barking mad.

  He pulled his shirt up and reached along his ample gut to squeeze the little control embedded under his skin. His Raknar in excellent detail, appeared next to his bellybutton. Everything was accurate down to the Cartwright’s logo on the right chest and a smallish rainbow on the left. He had added the latter just before leaving New Warsaw, weeks after getting the tattoo.

  There’s more going on here than we understand, Jim thought. He didn’t want to think about the person who’d pretended to be his girlfriend, and he also couldn’t avoid it. He’d known her as Adayn Christopher, technical sergeant with the Cavaliers, hired to work on CASPers. He’d been taken with her from the beginning. She wasn’t model beautiful, though she was good looking and liked him. Later, after he’d begun using the Raknar, she had allowed it to become intimate.

  He found out afterwards that she had been ordered to become intimate with him to obtain intelligence on the Cavaliers and the Raknar. The Golden Horde’s intel operation uncovered the truth—Adayn Christopher was Captain Adrianne McKenzie of Earth Defense Intelligence, acting on orders.

  He glanced over at Splunk, who was busy working. Nothing she did surprised him anymore. Not since she’d turned up with her own home-made spacesuit, customized guns, the ability to get him out of seemingly impossible ambushes halfway across the galaxy, and, then, a bunch of friends.

  They’d first met when she’d rescued him on the planet of Kash-kah after a battle that went every way except correct. He knew back then there was no way she’d pulled him out of that underground lake by herself. The little Fae weighed maybe 10 kilos, probably less. He’d known there were more of her kind down there, maybe a lot more. He’d even glimpsed several, though never close enough to see them clearly. Then, a few weeks ago, he’d discovered there were not only more of them, but they’d found their way to Upsilon 4, his asteroid base.

  Thinking back, after witnessing what Splunk was capable of doing on his months’-long trip around the galaxy searching for Raknar lore, he should not have been surprised when they’d made their appearance. Of course, he couldn’t help being shocked when during the evacuation of imprisoned Human mercs from Karma, the group of Fae on Upsilon 4 had done the impossible—they had moved the whole fucking asteroid through hyperspace to New Warsaw!

  Anyone who knew the basics of hyperspatial physics was aware that it worked via an inverse law. The smaller a ship was, the more power it took to stay in hyperspace. At around 3,000 tons, a ship can’t make enough power to stay in hyperspace. Ships that small or smaller, referred to as jump-riders, would catch rides on bigger ships. Huge ships took amazingly little power, and clamping smaller ships onto your big ship actually made it cheaper to fly through hyperspace! With all that in mind, he guessed it must have taken very little power to move Upsilon 4. A five-kilometer-long asteroid, the damn thing probably weighed trillions of tons.

  Here he was, months later and in the middle of a war against the very guild which was responsible for his family’s fortunes, and once again, he had to admit he didn’t know shit. All those months searching for info on the Raknar and how the Fae factored into it, and it was a rescue mission to Capital Planet to save Sansar Enkh from execution that had handed him the biggest clue.

  Jim fished out a box from the side of his cabin and opened it. A token floated out as he removed the biggest clues he’d found. The first were the data chips Splunk found at the Valley of Loss. She was still working on decoding them, though not as vigorously since the war had started. Next was the slate with his notes about the Machine Empire—the asteroid in the middle of nowhere which held a cult centered on chopping off body parts to prove you weren’t mortal. That one had been a bit of a dead end. Then there was the broken computer module from his crazy visit to the Science Guild headquarters on Occul. He still wasn’t sure, but he thought they might have tried to kill him and set those assassins on his tail which chased him all the way back to his rendezvous with the Cavaliers. Maybe they didn’t like him messing with Raknar? Who knew? The Science Guild had turned out to be nothing like he’d expected. Finally, there was a Tri-V recording given to him by Lt. Colonel Walker from inside a strange four-legged Raknar they’d found on Capital Planet. The Raknar was the most complete and pristine model he’d ever seen, and the Tri-V just as amazing.

  Jim triggered the Tri-V and the image which came alive was of a Lumar, a huge, four-armed humanoid alien merc, standing in the cockpit of a Raknar with a Fae on its shoulder. Both looked tired and dirty, but both were smiling. He’d been puzzling over the image for days. He glanced over and saw Splunk had paused in her work and was also looking at the image.

  “Are those the Dusman?” he asked his friend and pointed at the Lumar. Splunk looked at the Tri-V for a second then returned to her project, apparently bored with the subject. Were you guys the Dusman’s secret weapon? Jim silently wondered.

  The Fae were well beyond savants when it came to technology. Adayn had called Splunk “Watchmaker,” comparing her to the little creatures in the novel The Mote in God’s Eye who could improve any technology. Those aliens weren’t themselves advanced or technological; they did their magic through instinct.

  What would Splunk and her people know about the Dusman, even if they were partners? That was 20,000 years ago. He looked back at the image. Lumar. The aliens weren’t known for their intelligence. Far from it, actually. They often found work as grunt labor, armed guards, or doing simple security duty. They were a merc race, though the most common contracts they claimed were garrison or basic defense. Jim knew Nigel had taken a group on with Asbaran. For a guy who hated aliens, and whose ancestors had invented the slogan, “Kill aliens, get paid,” he was finding himself with more than a few non-Human employees. Jim hadn’t found the time before they’d left to talk with a Lumar about the Fae. That would have to wait.

  Jim packed away the items in their safe place, then remembered the token that had floated out and looked for it. Splunk had caught the token and was examining it.

  “What is this, ”

  “I don’t know,” Jim admitted. Splunk let it float back to him, and Jim caught it. It was a simple golden token with an alien design on one side and what looked like a pawprint outlined in black on the other. “My father kept it in a display case in his office. He used to carry it on missions. He said he’d explain it when I was old enough to serve.” Jim frowned. “He never got the chance.” He stuffed the token into the same storage compartment as the other artifacts, closed it, and went to visit the CIC.

  “Colonel Cartwright,” the older woman said with a nod as Jim entered the Combat Information Center.

  “Captain Su,” Jim replied with his own nod. While he outranked Bucephalus’ captain, they were more like equals in command of their individual aspects of the Cavaliers. Jim could tell her where to go, but he’d never dar
e override her in space. He’d learned such from Traveler’s commander, Captain Winslow. He’d lost the man and the ship at Chimsa. “ETA to transition?”

  She looked up at the Tri-V displaying the mercenary cruiser’s miscellaneous systems before replying. “Just under two minutes.” Jim floated down and took his chair, directly next to Captain Su, and buckled in.

  The Tri-V central element showed the stargate ahead of their task force. Jim had seen large groups of ships before, though never on his side. Fifteen Winged Hussars warships were arrayed around Bucephalus and the other six merc unit ships, including one of the legendary Egleesius-class ships, Phaeton, and one of the new battleships, Lubieszów. Alexis even sent two of her carriers along. Talus was expected to be the biggest combined battle, though not the biggest space battle, of the campaign.

  The countdown hit under one minute.

  “All hands, prepare for acceleration.”

  Moments later they all felt themselves float downward, opposite to the acceleration, as Bucephalus fired her two powerful fusion torches. The fleet’s three escort frigates and four regular frigates pulled ahead as the rest approached the stargate. Just to Bucephalus’ starboard and aft was the huge spherical bulk of Lubieszów, accelerating the slowest of them all.

  “Hyperspace in ten seconds,” the computer announced. The stargate came alive and space swirled in discontinuity. Bucephalus’ thrust increased to her maximum of four Gs. The frigates all disappeared in a wave.

  “Next stop Talus,” Jim said.

  An instant later he was unmade into hyperspace.

  * * *

  Gray Wolves’ Hideout, Houston, Texas, Earth

  “Did we get anything from Peepo’s morning conference?” Major Good asked.

  “No,” Corporal Bolormaa Enkh replied. “If Peepo had a morning conference this morning, we either missed it or she did it somewhere else. I had the bug there in time. She went out several times, but no one else came in all morning, except for the new MinSha who is her aide and security director.”