A House United Read online

  “Well…you know he was an information broker,” Fisher said hesitantly, growing visibly uncomfortable as he spoke. “Seems he hadn’t taken note of the separatists until he heard about my situation—which he deemed to be worthy of his personal attention. To hear my wife tell it…” he trailed off almost reverently, “the god of war himself broke into their hideout and threw down on those rebels, single-handedly tearing through all twenty of them in ten seconds flat. Guns, blades, fists, grenades…you name it, he used it, and when the dust settled he’d only taken a couple of glancing hits to his light body armor. She asked if he worked for the PDF and he just smiled—you know how he did,” Fisher said with a grin of his own that seemed oddly reminiscent of Lynch. “He told her ‘Y’all should just consider me your guardian angel—and you should thank your husband for doin’ what's needed. He’s a good man, and that’s a rare thing these days.’ And with that, he gathered them all up and took them to the hospital where I found them a few minutes later.”

  “You looked him up afterward?” McKnight asked. “He doesn’t seem like the type one can easily track down.”

  “He sure wasn’t,” Fisher snorted. “Took every favor I could pull—and then some—to wrangle enough info to find one of his still-active aliases. And honestly, I couldn’t have told you why I went to meet with him. Part of me wanted to thank him for what he did, and part of me wanted to look him in the eye to be sure—I mean really sure—that he hadn’t played a part in my family’s abduction. But I do think part of me, somewhere deep down, wanted to be convinced to help him do whatever it was he did. I owed him everything…and I’m not to type to turn my back on a debt.”

  “He obviously succeeded in convincing you.”

  “Nah,” Fisher scoffed introspectively, “I convinced myself.”

  “You must be anxious to get home to your family,” McKnight said, taking a moment to indulge in musings of what changes might come to her own life if she had children.

  “‘Anxious’ isn’t the word I’d use,” he chuckled, “but I wouldn’t have anything to go home to without Lynch. The separatists were planning to hop off-world the day after Lynch tracked ‘em down—and the government hadn’t figured out where they were. I don’t need to tell you that the survival rate for abductees that get taken off-planet is less than thirty percent. So no,” he shook his head firmly, “I’ll stay here as long as I’m needed. If that’s until my dying breath then that’s how it’s going to be. My kids are grown, anyway, and—between you, me, and the desk here—I think they like their mama more than me.”

  “You’re too modest,” McKnight said absently, though she meant it sincerely. Her thoughts had turned to mission-related subjects, and she knew she needed to get back to work. “I appreciate you finishing the story,” she said graciously, accepting the empty drinking glass and returning it to its miniature stand on the corner of her desk.

  “I’m not much for telling it,” he stood and shrugged, “but as far as I can see, you’re all good people—and if my read is right, we’re going to take another round of fire before too long. It’s good to know who’s in the bunker with you when the heat gets cranked up.”

  “Agreed,” McKnight nodded. “Thank you, Fish.”

  “Any time,” he flashed his radiant smile. “Oh, and Chester says he’s going to need to present his audit findings to the Purity Council soon. He says I’m not strictly needed for that presentation, so if you can give me any excuse to stay behind...”

  “I could use some help fine-tuning the defensive array,” McKnight said with a knowing look. “I don’t know any better gunner this side of the Conduit. Until further notice, you’re assigned to run diagnostics on the torpedo launchers.”

  His grin broadened, “Thanks, McKnight.”

  “Any time, Fish.”

  Chapter XXIII: A Deadly Trap

  “Confirmed, Senator,” the Sensor operator reported after verifying the sensor readings, “the Mode just point transferred into this system. Their ETA to the base’s surface is one hour, eight minutes.”

  “Excellent,” Senator Bellucci purred, leaning forward hungrily in her chair, “our moment approaches.”

  “We should inform the Fleet immediately, Senator,” said Clyde, the longtime associate of House Bellucci’s heir. “Current intel places the nearest battle group sixteen hours from here—more than enough time for the rubes to begin the work of extracting the hallowed Core Fragment from its shell, but not enough for them to complete the task.”

  Bellucci made a show of considering his suggestion before shaking her head fractionally, “We need confirmation that they have indeed unlocked the outer shell before we alert the fleet.”

  “Begging your pardon, Senator,” Clyde said with an inclination of his head—though his rat-like eyes never wavered from hers as he continued, “but if they are incapable of cracking the outer shell within sixteen hours, they are too incompetent to crack it at all. If they do manage to unlock it during that interval, and the Fleet is not here to secure the site for the glory of House Bellucci, the opportunity of the century may slip through our grasp. As Acting Commander of the Constans Vigilantia, which is tasked with the recovery of this Core Fragment, all Imperial vessels that enter this star system will immediately be placed under your direct authority. Not even the authority of an Admiral—or that of a Triumvir herself—would supersede yours for the duration of the operation,” he added with a knowing look.

  “And what of the risk that they fail?” she countered, knowing that this particular phase of her long, deadly game was nearing its conclusion. The next few minutes would decide much of what followed—she only hoped her preparations were sufficient to ensure the optimal outcome.

  “That risk is not insignificant,” Clyde allowed, “but it pales in comparison to what might occur if the details of our plot see the light of day. Entire Houses have been cast into black holes for less than you would stand accused of if, by some miracle, the rubes did manage to harm the Core Fragment after opening its outer shell—let alone if they, unthinkably, managed to destroy it.”

  Clyde is good, Bellucci mused silently as the tension of the approaching moment caused her throat to tighten, the best, in fact.

  “I agree with Clyde,” Styles, her Acting XO interjected, and she felt a pang of regret as the capable young man stepped forward and dictated her course of action to her. “There is simply too much risk here—not only for House Bellucci, but for the Empire as a whole.”

  To someone not intimately familiar with Clyde—and, yes, Bellucci had once crossed that particular threshold with her longtime associate and mentor some years earlier—the shift in his visage would have been imperceptible. But to the Senator, that change was unmistakable.

  Bellucci turned measuredly toward Styles, the XO. “Is that a note of fear I hear threaded through your voice?”

  Styles’ visage hardened as his hand went to his hip, where a sonic pistol was holstered, “You truly accuse me of cowardice?”

  With her back to Clyde, she leaned forward in the chair toward the XO—who she had hand-picked for this particular mission—and said in a low, dangerous voice, “Do you recall what became of this seat’s former occupant?”

  In that instant, her deepest concerns regarding Clyde were validated. The lights on the Constans Vigilantia’s bridge cut out, along with all of the instrumentation, and the sound of sonic weapons fire filled the bridge a fraction of a second after she dove for cover behind the command chair. Her heavily-augmented eyes adjusted to the pitch black surroundings just under a second after she hit the floor, and they quickly locked onto the whirling dervish that was Clyde as he tore through the Constans Vigilantia’s crew with a slender, locsium needle.

  Sonic rounds went off all around him, but only one of them impacted on his wire-thin frame before he had killed all of the bridge crew except Lieutenant Styles.

  Styles clearly knew he was overmatched, and had begun to beat a hasty retreat toward the bridge’s lone exit. Activating h
er hardened wrist-link’s emergency feature, she managed to close the door before he could pass through it—and in the impenetrable dark of the bridge, Styles ran face-first into the close portal and went to the ground in a heap.

  Clyde slid past her position, moving with the grace and silence of a ghost as he drew back his needle-sharp weapon and prepared to deliver the killing blow to the staunch naval officer.

  As he did so, Bellucci sank the razor-sharp nail of her left index finger into the flesh of her own right forearm. She found precisely what she was looking for and drew it out of her own flesh even as Clyde silently dispatched the young Styles with a clean, lethal strike to his brain stem

  But before Clyde withdrew the assassin’s tool from Styles’ skull, Bellucci leveled her previously concealed, spring-loaded weapon and fired, knowing full-well that if she missed then she would be the next victim of Clyde’s graceful dance of death.

  The dart sailed on a gentle arc toward Clyde as the skilled assassin spun, and for an instant she thought she had missed. Then she received the telltale feedback from her wrist-link which indicated the tiny projectile had stuck itself in the paper-thin flesh of Clyde's neck. She immediately dropped the dart-launcher and placed her hand over the wrist-link’s manual input pad, knowing the short-lived fight was over—and that she, not him, had emerged victorious.

  The lights flickered back on, and when Clyde turned to face her he had an unexpectedly serene expression on his face. “So…” he sighed, allowing his shoulders to sag and the deadly locsium needle to slip from his fingers and fall almost silently to the deck, “the student becomes the master, after all.”

  “I learned from the best,” she said measuredly, standing and maintaining absolute poise and focus as she did so. She tilted her chin toward the dart, which was now barely visible just above his collar where it was sunk deep into his neck, “You are slower than I remember.”

  “And you quicker,” he smirked, but she saw not a trace of rancor in his visage, “as it should be.”

  “When did Cornwallis get to you, Clyde?” she asked levelly as emotions seemed to war within every cell of her body.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I know it shouldn’t,” she said, feeling an unexpected tear form in her right eye, “but I would be lying if I said it didn’t. Why would you turn on me?”

  He chuckled and shook his head, “Little one…as my best student, you should know better than most that no one ever ‘turns’ on anyone else.”

  “You’re right,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady as the magnitude of the moment hit her full-force. “I guess I never did understand you as well as I thought—or hoped—that I would.”

  “Nor I you,” he cracked a grin, “which means we are both precisely what we have striven to be. ‘How happy are we who finally achieve that for which we have long since dreamt’?” he asked, invoking an obscure sonnet which they had discovered on a job during her more rebellious and carefree youth.

  “‘Not so happy as those whose eyes never beheld creation in all its naked truth, horror, and beauty’,” she replied, reciting the rest of that particularly meaningful passage—one which brought with it a barrage of passionate memories that she pushed from her mind.

  “Then that, it seems, is our curse,” he nodded approvingly, and for the first time since she had known him she saw regret in his eyes.

  She hesitated, knowing what needed to be done but finding her nerve faltering now that the moment had finally arrived. “I…” she began, briefly choking up and forcing herself to push on, “I did not want it to end this way, Clyde.”

  “Nonsense,” he said disapprovingly, “we each knew the stakes, and both of us played our parts in this game to the best of our abilities. Your victory today was well-earned, and that will be your burden to bear—much as it has been my own since I stood where you are now. You are now truly as you wished to be. How does it feel?”

  “You tell me,” she said coolly.

  “Cold, empty, and unmistakably right,” he said, fixing her with an iron-hard look that would have made her wilt just a few years earlier. “Oh,” he said, as if in afterthought, “your mother sends her regards, along with a message which I was only to relay if our present situation came to pass.”

  Of everything that had happened since Clyde had boarded the Constans Vigilantia, only that last comment had come as a surprise to the Senator. Still, she knew it could be a ploy of her old master’s and so she kept her guard and wits about her as she asked, “What would she have you say?”

  “She said to tell you, ‘You are now, finally, what is needed’,” he replied.

  If the fact that he carried a message from her mother had been a surprise, the message itself—assuming it was not some kind of ploy—was a complete shock. Everything she had done since embarking on the Constans Vigilantia had been in direct contravention of her mother’s will…or so she had thought.

  It seemed her mother had been secretly supportive of the Core Fragment's destruction, which sent a chill down the younger Bellucci's spine as she realized just how far down the game board her mother had been able to see. The rift which had grown between them in recent years had been the central development of the younger Bellucci's existence, but it now seemed that much of that rift had been the result of careful manipulation by her mother. Everything she had done in pursuit of the Core Fragment's destruction had been to prove to her mother that she was more than capable of taking control of House Bellucci's interests when the time came—but now it seemed that her every move had been anticipated, and covertly supported, by the matron of her Great House.

  You still have much to learn, she thought acidly, silently translating the message which her mother had given to Clyde into its real meaning.

  “Are you prepared?” Clyde asked, breaking her from her stunned reverie.

  She steeled her nerves and nodded, “I am.”

  “Then let my last words be thus: it was my life’s greatest pleasure to play this game of ours at your side,” his eyes unflinchingly locked with hers as an almost sad smile crept across his lips, “and it is now my highest honor, and greatest pride, to have been bested at that same game by you.”

  The tears she had been fighting back suddenly welled up in her eyes and began to spill over her cheeks. To her credit, her expression never faltered—nor did her voice—as she said, “Thank you, Clyde.”

  She pressed the buttons on her wrist-link in a particular sequence, sending a lethal jolt of electricity through the dart buried in Clyde’s neck. He fell to the ground, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and lay there in a crumpled heap as the last breath he would ever draw rattled out past his lips.

  She stood there in silence for a moment, less for her deceased mentor than to collect her wits. When she snapped into action a few seconds later, she input a series of command codes into the sleek warship’s computer system. Firstly, she established a secure p2p com-link with the base on the moon below. While that connection was being made, she prepared a series of automated commands which, once triggered, would deactivate the Vigilantia’s robust stealth systems and render her naked for the sensors of the moon base to see.

  The connection went live, and she was greeted with the expected face of the officer on the other end.

  “Mr. Tremblay,” she said coolly, “it is time.”

  He showed no hesitation as he replied, “The landing pad is prepared to receive your escape pod.”

  “I should hope so…especially since the Key sequence your people have already loaded into the system will do worse than nothing if you should attempt to use it,” she said, taking great satisfaction in his stony expression—a dead giveaway that he did not appreciate this particular suggestion. “I, on the other hand, am prepared to provide the correct sequence—assuming I survive the destruction of this ship,” she said playfully.

  “I’ll have a shuttle collect your pod,” he said with reasonable self-restraint, but to a master of body language like the S
enator he might as well have been throwing a tantrum like some spoilt two year old who had been denied an extra helping of candy.

  “See that you do,” she purred before severing the connection and executing the time-delayed commands she had input into the Constans Vigilantia’s mainframe.

  It was a pity that she had been unable to fully overcome the robust, Pulsar-class warship’s hard-coded control systems. Had she been able to do so, the ship would have been a true asset in her coming efforts to assist House Bellucci from a more clandestine role than that of a Senator. But she knew only too well the danger of a well-placed mole—whether it was physical or virtual made little practical difference—and she could not risk the possibility of her movements being traced once the Constans Vigilantia was declared off-mission by the Imperial Navy.

  So, much as it pained her to destroy a potentially game-changing asset like the Vigilantia, she knew that destroying it was the right move. That doing so had the added benefit of providing another paper-thin layer of credibility to House Bellucci’s plausible deniability defense, which she expected would soon come into play, was also worthy of consideration in any final analysis.

  The command macro—which was essentially a self-destruct sequence—initiated, and after confirming it had done so she stepped over the fallen corpse of her old master. She deftly plucked the assassin’s needle from the deck as she did so, twisting her hair into a bun with one hand before sliding the needle through it with the other, never breaking stride en route to the ship’s escape pod.

  She entered the pod, secured herself within it, and ejected precisely on schedule just six seconds before the countdown completed. There was no viewing port on the pod, nor were their sensors capable of displaying the ship’s destruction, but she felt the tiny craft rock when the Constans Vigilantia was destroyed by fire from the base below.

  She waited for the second telltale shock-wave to splash against the pod’s surface, indicating that the ship had indeed been destroyed and its backup power plant had lost containment shortly thereafter.