“Your name, soldier?” the leader asked as she stood up.
“Stacia X-79.”
“Your real name. No need to use bullshit designations anymore.”
“That is my real name.”
Unlike the guards on the ship, this one immediately knew what that meant. Stacia winced as he gave a low whistle.
“My, that is quite unexpected.”
“You must be relatively new to the planet, if you’ve heard of me,” Stacia said.
“A year and a half, as we measure things locally. I’m Maxwell Faust.”
Stacia nodded. She actually knew that name. Roughly three years ago in Earth time, there had been quite the scandal involving a number of Galactic Marines and a significant number of vanished weaponry. Although most of the trial had been conducted in secret, Stacia’s connections had at least allowed her to learn the names of many of the people involved. Faust was one of those names.
Although those involved had been convicted, rumors were that the weapons had never been recovered.
Stacia looked at the armaments around her with renewed interest.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing here?” Faust asked. He must have given some subtle signal that Stacia hadn’t seen, because several of the soldiers again brought up their weapons.
“Same thing as you, I’m assuming. Life sentence.”
“But I know who you are. I’ve heard of your record. I know who your mothers are.”
Stacia took several steps toward Faust, completely ignoring the weapons that tracked her and the trigger fingers that got tighter the closer she got to him. “Let’s get one thing very clear. Our association may be brief or it may be long. But at no point do you ever mention my mothers again. Do you understand?”
Faust made a shrug designed to show disinterest, but Stacia could tell from the look in his eyes that he was impressed with her confidence. “Fine enough. But the point stands. The Two Who Must Not Be Named have influence. It’s difficult to imagine you doing anything that would get you sent here before they were able to sweep it under the rug.”
“I unloaded a whole 808 into General Borealis.”
No hiding his true emotions this time. Faust made an audible choking sound. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“Not possible.”
“And yet I did it.”
“No one gets the drop on Borealis.”
“That’s her reputation. And yet I did it.”
“You’re serious? You actually killed Borealis?”
“I didn’t say I killed her. I said I filled her with bullets.”
“You must be a terrible shot.”
“I’m not. Every single bullet hit its mark.”
“And she survived?”
“Trust me, no one is more pissed about that than me.”
“But why? You just decided to turn around one day, forget about a lifetime of duty, and just use a commanding officer for target practice?”
“She was asking for it, after everything she did to me.”
“And what exactly did she do to you?”
“None of your business.”
“So what now? You’ve got some delusion that you can get off the planet and finish the job?”
“I know that nobody leaves Leviathan. Not for any reason. So I intend to make sure that’s one hundred percent true.”
He seemed confused by this for several seconds before it dawned on him. “Stanton Borealis.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t kill the general, so you’re going to kill her son?”
“Yes.”
“That’s cold, even for Leviathan. And trust me, you haven’t even begun to see what there is to see on Leviathan.”
“Does that mean you’re going to try to stop me?”
“I said nothing of the sort. In fact, I’m pretty sure the Lord Commander would be more than happy to help you out. After you pledge fealty to her.”
Stacia grunted something that wasn’t quite agreement and yet not quite a refusal. Faust seemed to be satisfied with that. He gestured at the soldiers, who immediately took up a guarding pattern around Stacia.
“Let’s go, then,” Faust said, starting a march in a general easterly direction. “We actually came here to salvage your pod, but since you’re alive, I suppose we should get you back to the city, first.”
“You sound like you didn’t expect me to live.”
“It all depends on where the drop pods land. You landed right in dominatrix territory.”
“Dominatrix?”
“That thing you killed.”
“Why do you call those things dominatrixes?”
“Because of those whips that they can bind you with in their fifth leg.”
“I take it that taking one down is uncommon?”
“No, not at all. When you have a gun. When you’re only armed with the knife you’re given at sentencing? Let’s just say that any time we inspect a drop site in the barnacles, there aren’t any people there anymore.”
“The barnacles?”
Faust indicated the tree-like structures. Stacia noticed that they had taken up a path that led them right along the line between the trees and a wide-open prairie. The “grass” was abundant here, although the further away it was from the trees, the patchier it got.
“So you’re not going to find a dominatrix outside of the, uh, barnacles?”
“They’re the top predator among the barnacles, specially evolved as far as we can tell to live among them. Their height protects them from the side effects.”
“Side effects?”
Faust stopped just long enough to indicate dominatrix blood and fluid covering her armor. “Notice anything there?”
It took Stacia several seconds to even realize what she was looking for, but when she did, some things suddenly made sense. Most of the gore was still wet from her fresh kill. In some places, however, it had dried far faster than it had any right to. And those places all happened to be where she had touched the barnacle on her way down from the corpse. The barnacles must absorb moisture. That was why she felt strangely thirsty.
“You didn’t seem too concerned about walking among them,” Stacia said.
“For brief periods of time, it’s okay. Don’t get too close to them, and avoid the denser clumps, and you can forage among the barnacles just fine. Stay too long, though, and you might as well be in a desert. If you’re feeling dehydrated, we can fix that in Hobbes. After you’ve—”
“Sworn my fealty,” Stacia said. “Yeah, I’ve got it.”
By Stacia’s best guess, it took them about an hour to reach their destination. That seemed kind of odd, considering how quickly Faust and his stooges had shown up at her drop site, but it made more sense the longer Stacia paid attention to her environment. They had probably reached her by going a straight line through the barnacles. Now, though, they followed the wandering and meandering line between the barnacles and the prairie. Although she wanted to ask why they didn’t just go further out into the prairie if they wanted to avoid the barnacles and another dominatrix, she kept her mouth shut. She’d already asked more questions than she felt comfortable with. Stacia had known from the moment she’d been sentenced that it would be a horrible mistake to trust anyone on Leviathan, and Faust had already gleaned more information about Stacia than she was comfortable with. Anything she said or asked could only give him more information.
“There,” Faust finally said, pointing at something slightly further out on the prairie. “Welcome to Hobbes, the capitol city of Leviathan.”
The “city” didn’t have any true right to that word, but it was the first sign of anything like civilization that she had seen so far. It was more like a village with all its buildings of poor construction and random size. The closer they got, the better she could see that it had been constructed mostly out of repurposed drop pod pieces, along with the occasional organic wall that looked like it had started out as the leg armor of a dominatrix.