“No one. Unless you don’t like questions.”
“Still trying to get something out of me?” she asked, giving him a dark smile.
He coughed into his glass. The alcohol burned up into his sinuses. “Maybe,” he said, trying to recover. “You did say that you owed me. Twice.”
Tassa Kay regarded him long and cold over the rim of her glass. Her green eyes narrowed to razor slits. “I think I paid one of those debts out on the flatlands. Gimped Legionnaire. Persistent Jagatai. Any of that ring a bell?”
“Fair enough,” Raul agreed.
In fact, without Tassa in the field, the Republic militia would have been hurt badly that first day. Since then she had gone out twice more to push back Steel Wolf probes, but never again with Raul who always seemed to draw alternate duty as the ready-alert. He missed her, truth be told. Tassa lived the life he’d dreamt of for so long, and never once seemed bothered by the same moral qualms that pricked at Raul’s conscience. When he was with her, he could set aside some of those problems. Unfortunately, Tassa did not always share his sense of camaraderie.
Though she relented, slightly, when Raul didn’t press. “All right. I still owe you and that is why I am here,” she admitted. “You backed me up twice off the field, and I appreciate your timely arrival that first day.” She downed a slug of whiskey. The alcohol fed a warm blush to her cheeks.
“You’re welcome,” Raul told her, guessing that it was as close to a thank-you as she was likely to offer. Tassa glanced over sharply, as if suspecting sarcasm, but then relaxed. The woman seemed to have a gift for switching between states of readiness in the blink of an eye. The security officer in Raul wondered where she had needed to develop such a hair-trigger defense mechanism. One more mystery concerning Tassa Kay.
“And you want to know about Dieron?” she asked.
Feigning casual interest, Raul shrugged. “That’s your choice, Tassa. You’ll give it up, or you won’t.” Throwing innuendos back at her for a change felt good.
Tassa Kay gave him an appraising stare, so long that he began to feel warm and uncomfortable. Finally she set her glass down and said, “All right, then, here it is. I have no idea what really happened on Dieron. How it started, or how it ended. I arrived in the middle of a firestorm. The DropShip was blindsided by fighters from two factions, but we made a safe landing in the middle of a swamp. I slogged out of there and discovered that everyone seemed to be shooting at everyone else. Dracs, Fists, Foxes, pro-Republic and anarchists—I spent the first week fighting for my life and the lives of a patched-together mercenary company.”
The names blurred through Raul’s mind. Even after the chaos here on Achernar, he had trouble picturing the kind of confused warfare Tassa described. Combine supporters and Commonwealth troops? The Sea Fox merchants?
“By luck more than anything I hooked up with your Exarch. He never told me why he was there, though I am sure it was an attempt at damage control at first. He made me an offer, asked me to help him regain possession of the local spaceport, and I accepted. Then I left.”
Raul shook his head, as if trying to clear away a thought he couldn’t understand. “You left?” He’d been sitting on the edge of his chair, waiting for some kind of glorious finale. Their food arrived, but Raul suddenly wasn’t hungry. “You abandoned the Exarch?”
“He is not my Exarch. Anyway, he seemed competent.” High praise indeed. “By the time I shipped through Northwind, I heard that he had made it safely back to Terra.” She looked at him askance. “What? Dieron wasn’t my fight, what reason did I have to stay?”
Rocking back into his chair, Raul tried to reason it out. Failed. “And Achernar?” he asked. “Is this your fight?”
“It’s closer,” Tassa admitted, her brow creasing in a light scowl.
“Closer to what?”
“To what I am looking for.”
Raul leaned forward again, the security agent in him defaulting into interrogation mode. She was holding something back, something big, and he wanted it. “And what are you looking for?”
Tassa Kay settled back calmly, cradling her drink in one hand. She offered him half a shrug. “Whatever that is,” she said, “I think it left this table. You and I are done talking for a while, Lieutenant.” She rose to leave.
Raul couldn’t help asking, “Are you going to walk away from Achernar too, Tassa?”
Staring down at him, something closer to a predator’s grin than any true smile crept over her mouth. “Lieutenant. Don’t you trust me anymore?”
“I don’t know you.” He had never really known her, which was part of the damnable attraction he felt, and what she was capitalizing on.
Tassa bent forward at the waist, leaning down until her face was only inches from his. For a moment, Raul thought she meant to kiss him. “You know me,” she said. With a slight smirk, she straightened and then brushed by him. Back over her shoulder she said, “I’m just like you.”
9
Desperate Alliances
Taibek Mining
Achernar
24 February 3133
The Taibek Hills stared up at Erik Sandoval-Groell with vacant eye sockets as his personal VTOL thundered low over the eastern mines. Ore carts trundled out of dark tunnels, pushed or pulled by small, overworked tractors now that the MiningMechs from this site were all downchecked for military conversion. His labor force milled about the three active tunnels or worked the loading area where ore was transferred from carts to open-box rail cars. To a man they avoided the northwest quarry where rifle-toting infantry guarded Erik’s local staging ground and his primary maintenance facility.
Gray wisps of rock dust bled from the mine entrances and hung over the loading platform in a large cloud. As Erik’s military-class Warrior H-9 banked across the complex, the downdraft of its rotors swept the air clean. For the moment. The thirty-ton craft extended landing gear and settled to the ground next to a smaller Ferret light scout copter. Erik jumped out as soon as the skids touched earth and met the elder man waiting for him with an outstretched hand.
“Legate Stempres,” Erik smiled a mostly-sincere greeting. “Always a pleasure to see you.”
“Truly? That is why you are nearly an hour late for our meeting?”
At forty-eight and wearing a conservative gray suit, Brion Stempres still looked the part of a warrior. He kept his silver hair cut short in a flattop and his face had a younger man’s blue steel shadow where his thick beard kept trying to grow in. He had served a distinguished career with the Standing Republic Guard on Caselton, coming to the attention of Duke Aaron’s father and then later to Aaron Sandoval himself. His transfer to Achernar and into semiretirement had come four years before after the death of his wife. Blind fortune for Erik that the man was available when it came time to shop for a new military leader of Achernar.
Erik did not take the man’s gruff nature personally. “I received a report that the Steel Wolves had launched a major strike toward River’s End. I had my pilot swing out over the Agave Dales to check it out.”
A slender eyebrow rose over one of Stempres’ muddy-brown eyes. “You take chances, Lord Sandoval.”
“To endeavor without risk is to win without victory,” Eric quoted, calling on his studies in martial history. “General Gregory Cox.” Not that Erik worried. Star Colonel Torrent had held off his OmniFighters for the better part of a week, now, relying on conventional aircraft. Erik’s VTOL had likely been in little danger.
“And what did you see?”
“Another probing attack,” Erik told the old general. “Perhaps a bit stronger than recent assaults, but hardly a threat to River’s End. The Republic Guard called out reinforcements, just to be safe.” He shook his head. “Someone needs to convince that sheep in wolf’s skin to make a real push one of these days.”