Gozen grinned. “Is that going to make me some kind of high-ranking government official who can take her pick of any guy who catches her eye?”
“No, it’s going to make you a colonel with a smart mouth, which is what you already are,” Drakon added. “Let me know what we get from the software scans of our systems.”
One of the things that Drakon had vowed never to do if somehow he ended up in charge of everything was to rush through preparations for an operation in the name of sticking to a timeline, even when critical questions remained unanswered. Critical questions such as just how his ground forces would take an installation very deep beneath the surface of a planet and defended by fanatical paranoids willing to die in massive explosions rather than permit a glimpse of themselves.
But this operation was being driven as much by the need to lure Imallye into an attack at Iwa as it was by the need to cut off at the roots the attempt by the enigmas to establish a base inside human-occupied space.
So it was that Drakon found himself riding in an armored VIP limo toward the spaceport. Gwen Iceni, who had always sat on the opposite side of the vehicle, now sat with him. On the virtual windows on both sides of the limo, crowds of citizens could be seen lining the streets.
“They look worried,” Drakon said.
“I noticed.” She tapped the control to talk to the driver. “Stop the vehicle. The general and I will be walking from here.”
“Walking?” Drakon said.
“Yes. The people have to see me confident as I go off to fight the ogre. Or the dragon. Or whatever we want to characterize Imallye and the enigmas as. And we want to be absolutely certain that Imallye knows that I am going to Iwa. The best way to do that is to make a big event out of it and announce our intentions to everyone, as if we were totally confident of the outcome. So you and I will walk and wave and look completely certain of victory as we proceed on foot the rest of the way to the spaceport.” She gave him a sad look. “This will be our last private moment. Before I return. Take care of yourself, Artur.”
“You, too.” He found himself tongue-tied again, so Drakon just held her very tightly for a long moment before Iceni sighed, broke away, and released the locks on the armored doors to the limo’s passenger compartment.
The people cheered when Iceni stepped into sight. She smiled and waved, offered her hand to Drakon as he also left the limo, and the cheers redoubled.
Bodyguards got out of the armored escort vehicles ahead and behind them on the road, but Iceni gestured to them all to maintain their current distance rather than closing in tightly around her and Drakon as the bodyguards normally would have done.
The several blocks left to be walked to the spaceport were nothing in terms of physical exertion, but Drakon found them stressful all the same. The need to conceal his worries for Gwen, and the need to constantly scan the masses of citizens for anyone who looked dangerous, wore at him.
But it was heartening to see that Gwen had been right about how much the people had taken her to heart as their leader. Mixed in with the approval was clear concern for her welfare.
At the entrance to the spaceport, where security loomed to block the crowds from entering, Iceni stepped up onto a security barrier and turned to face the crowd that filled the entire street behind them. “Thank you!” she cried loudly. “I am going to Iwa to personally deal with threats to this star system. To deal with threats to you. Our warships will depart within a few weeks, with me leading them. I will leave this star system in the capable and dependable hands of my partner, General Artur Drakon, who has always been my close coworker in liberating this star system from the greedy grasp of the Syndicate and in making it a place that is for the people!”
The cheers echoed and reechoed from the surrounding buildings. Drakon, still accustomed to the staged enthusiasm of Syndicate mandatory celebrations, felt his breath catch at experiencing the real thing at such an intensity. “The people of Midway really do love you. You’re their champion.”
“That’s the problem, Artur.” Iceni waved again, her smile remaining fixed in place, as she spoke in a voice just barely audible to Drakon. “I know how to deal with being hated, with being feared. I know how to make people do things that they don’t want to do. The Syndicate taught us how to do that. But these citizens… they believe in me!”
“So do I,” Drakon said.
“It’s not quite the same thing. I didn’t worry about letting down the citizens when we were all still Syndicate. I was expected to let them down. But now I have this awful power and responsibility.”
“Gwen,” he said, turning to face her fully. “You always cared about them. You always worried about them. You just pretended not to. The only thing that has changed is that now they know it. Just keep being who you always were.”
“Damn.” She searched his eyes, her smile becoming genuine again. “You are good. I want them to know that, too.” She bent down and leaned in close, her kiss lingering to show real affection and not just duty, and the crowd responded with another roar of approval.
After her shuttle had left, leaping upward to meet the battleship Midway which had come into orbit about this world, Drakon watched the dwindling shape of the shuttle until it vanished. He had long since lost track of how many times he had vowed to stop caring about people, because he didn’t want to keep feeling the pain that followed when something bad happened to them. Maybe it was time to stop pretending that he could ever stop caring.
General Artur Drakon walked out of the spaceport to where the vast crowd of Iceni’s people, who were his people as well, awaited him.
Like anyone else, high-ranking or not, Drakon had a hierarchy of callers loaded into his private comm. The tones assigned to the different groups told him instantly whether a call was from a watch center, or one of his brigade commanders, one of his aides, or Gwen Iceni. Once, there had been a special tone to alert him to a call from whoever was the local snake CEO, but he had with great pleasure deleted that after snake CEO Hardrad had his brains blown out by Colonel Roh Morgan just before Hardrad was able to detonate the nuclear weapons once buried under the cities on this world.
He had kept some tones even after the people they were assigned to had died or apparently died, though. Drakon would never delete the tone he had assigned to calls from Colonel Conner Gaiene. Nor had he deleted the tone assigned to Morgan despite all of the evidence pointing to her death on Ulindi.
So when his private comm suddenly shrilled in the hours before dawn, Drakon woke instantly, recognizing Morgan’s call. He had the comm in his hand, responding, within seconds, but the call had already terminated. As was to be expected from Morgan, she had hacked her own comm so there was no hint on Drakon’s comm of exactly where the call had originated from.
That seemed to settle decisively the question of whether Morgan was still alive. But why would she have called him at such an hour and then hung up the instant he answered it?
To wake him up.
To warn him.
Drakon lunged out of his bed, weapon in hand. He took up a position that allowed him to cover most of his outer office, waiting for some sign of whatever Morgan had intended warning him about.
The sign came from an unexpected source. His comm chirped, indicating that its sensors had picked up traces of something bad in the air.
Drakon didn’t think he would have time to don battle armor, so instead he yanked out the survival suit kept in a special hidden alcove and shoved himself into it, activating the seals. His comm chirped again, more urgently as the canary app warned of dangerous gas, until he silenced it.